The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the lecture yesterday which dealt with Spengler's Decline of the West, I tried to bring home to you the significance of anthroposophical Spiritual Science by emphasising the difference between merely abstract concepts and that which also arises in the soul in the form of ideas and concepts but is, nevertheless, reality. Let us realise once for all that with his materialistic frame of mind, and his tendency to reject spiritual conceptions and occupy himself only with ideas concerning the natural world, man is making himself more and more akin to the material, is descending so deeply into the material world that he is no longer speaking falsely when he declares that it is the material substance of his body which thinks, that his brain actually does the thinking. Man is becoming a kind of automaton in the universe, and as the result of his denial of the soul and Spirit he is losing the soul and Spirit. I said before that this thought is by no means popular; people will not accept it because they cherish the belief that the soul-and-spirit will be saved to man for all eternity without any action being necessary an his part. By no means is it so. A man may give himself up to material life to such an extent that he severs himself from the soul-and-spirit altogether, sinks into the realm of the Ahrimanic Powers and passes with them into a cosmic stream which does not belong to our world. But thereby he loses his own Ego, for the Ego does not belong to the world of Ahriman and can only find its true path of development when a human being pursues the normal course of progressive evolution; that is to say, when he unites with the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha and when he realises that in the pr sent age he must find a link with all that spiritual research can contribute to the civilised life of mankind. Since the middle of the fifteenth century man has been living through the phase of evolution in which, as he looks out into his environment, he sees nothing but the material world. And as he looks into his own being he intellectualizes the inner experiences of his life of soul; these become abstract and shadowy. This has been the tendency since the middle of the fifteenth century.

The thoughts and concepts with which we build up our picture of the world to-day, drawn as they are from the dicta of orthodox science, have no connection with existence as it actually is. Neither can they lead to the heart of reality. It is merely a convention to imagine that man's life of soul is fundamentally involved in the forming of abstract thought. These abstract thoughts are quite remote from reality; they are nothing but a series of pictures. We may say, therefore, that externally man perceives the material world and inwardly a world of pictures having no essential connection with existence. This has been the lot of mankind since the middle of the fifteenth century and we shall presently see what effect it has upon a conception of the universe to see, externally, nothing but the material world and, inwardly, to have experiences that have become a mere series of pictures. We may ask: Why is it that since the middle of the fifteenth century man's life of soul has gradually come to the point of having no more reality than a picture? The reason is that only in this way is it possible for man to attain his real freedom.

In order to understand this let us consider the world as it lies before us to-day and our own place in the world. To begin with we will think of the world, leaving aside the human being altogether. Looking at clouds, mountains, rivers, at the minerals, plants and animals, we ask: What is there, in reality, in the whole wide world, when we leave the human being out of the picture? In other words, we think of all that surrounds us in the mineral and plant kingdoms, and to a certain extent also, in the animal kingdom, but apart altogether from man. In reality, of course, this is quite impossible, but we will assume hypothetically a Nature divested of the human being. In this Nature that is divested of the human being, there are no Gods. That is what we must bring home to ourselves. In this Nature that is divested of the human being there are no Gods, any more than an oyster is there within an empty oyster-shell or a snail in an empty snail-shell. This whole world which we assume hypothetically, a world without the human being, is something which the Gods have separated off from themselves in the course of evolution, just as the oyster sheds its shell. But the Gods—the spiritual Beings—are no longer within it. The world that surrounds us, is a world of the Past. When we look at Nature we are looking at something which represents the spiritual Past, we are looking at a residue of the Spiritual. And that is why religious consciousness in the real sense can never arise from contemplation of the external world alone. Let us not imagine for a moment that any element of the life of the divine-spiritual Beings who work creatively in mankind, is contained in this external world. Elementary beings, spiritual beings of a lower order, are there, of course; but the creative spiritual Beings who should live in our religious consciousness belong to this external world only inasmuch as represents their shell, being a residue of spiritual evolution in the Past.

Certain outstanding personalities have felt the truth of these things. In the spiritual life of the nineteenth century the man who felt most deeply of all that the Nature surrounding man is a residue of divine-spiritual evolution was Philip Mainländer whose philosophy of self-destruction was born from the gravity of this knowledge and who finally put an end to his own life. It is often the destiny of human beings to steep themselves in one-sided truths of this kind and the inevitable consequence is that this destiny itself becomes one-sided and difficult to bear. Philip Mainländer, the unfortunate German Philosopher, is an outstanding example of this.

Having realised what has been put forward hypothetically in connection with external Nature, you may ask: Where then, are the Gods; where are the creative spiritual Beings? If I were to make a drawing, I should have to draw the Gods within the human being. The truly creative Gods have their habitat in the realm that is bounded by the human skin, within the organs—if I may use this expression. The being of man is now the bearer of the Divine-Spiritual. The Divine-Spiritual, the truly creative principles is within the human being. Try to picture to ourselves external Nature as it is to-day, and then a future lying thousands of years ahead—in this future there will be no clouds, no minerals, no plants, even no animals. There will be nothing left of all that now lives in external Nature outside the bounds of the human skin. What will continue its evolution is the soul and Spirit permeating the inner organisation of man. This will constitute the future. The Nature by which man is now surrounded will pass away, and the Human-Divine principle now within his being will become his outer environment.

Insight into the truth that the Divine-Spiritual—the only truly creative principle in our time—lives inside the bounds of the human skin, must be taken in deepest seriousness, for it lays upon man a responsibility in regard to the whole universe. It enables him to understand the words of Christ: “Heaven and Earth”—the world of external Nature—“will pass away but my words will not pass away.” And when in the individual human being the saying of St. Paul, “Not I but Christ in me,” is fulfilled, then the words of Christ will live in the individual human being. “Heaven and Earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away” or My words in the individual human being, namely all that lies inside the human skin and is received into Christ, this will not pass away.

All this is an indication of the fact that since the middle of the fifteenth century, through his abstract, intellectual concepts, man has been making his inner being empty and void. And to what end has he been making himself empty? It is in order to receive the Christ Impulse, the Divine Spiritual, into his inner being. I said that as we look into the external world, we see only the material. It is the divine Past. (In this residue of a divine Past there are, of course, the Elemental Spirits who have remained at lower stages of evolution.) As we look into our inner being, we see, to begin with, nothing but abstract concepts which can only become concrete and real when we receive the impulse of the Spirit into our being through Spiritual Science and unite the impulse of the Spirit with our inner life. Man has the choice—a choice which has become a matter of greater and greater seriousness since the middle of the fifteenth century—either to remain at a standstill with his abstract intellectual concepts or to receive into himself the living substance of Spiritual Science. Abstract intellectuality enables him to evolve a brilliant science of Nature, for intellectual concepts are dead and by their means he can unfold an admirable understanding of dead Nature. But all this mummifies him, makes him akin to matter, and leads him ultimately into the clutches of the Ahrimanic world. To further the Progress of earthly existence and the whole evolution of the earth, he must receive the Spiritual into his being, and in our time the Spiritual does not draw near to man by way of atavistic instinct. It must be reached by his own efforts. The assimilation of Spiritual Science is not, therefore, the assimilation of a theory but the development of something absolutely real, an impulse that will fill the otherwise empty recesses of the soul with spiritual substance.

In the mass to-day, men prefer to have this emptiness inwardly and the Past outwardly manifest before them. They will only admit the validity of thought when it has been proved by experiment and they resist the quickening impulses of spiritual life. The danger confronting the world to-day is not so much the spread of false theories but the loss of the very Mission of the Earth.

Only those who have really thought through and perceived the task of the human race will realise how much depends upon the assimilation of Spiritual Science. These souls will never lose sight of the importance of knowledge of the being of man, but in modern natural science and in the ancient religious tradition this knowledge simply does not exist. What is the trend of ancient religious tradition? It directs the minds of men to unworldly abstractions and is silent an the subject of the Gods indwelling the being of man, indwelling his very organism. This thought would he condemned by religious tradition as out-and out heresy. If any attempt were made to bring home to the traditional religions in Europe and America to-day the truth of the ancient saying that “the Body of man is the Temple of the Gods,” they would indignantly refuse to countenance such heresy.

And an the other hand we have a materialistic natural science which precisely because it is materialistic has no real understanding of matter. What does science really know about the functioning of the human brain, of the human heart? I have often told you, and I have also said in public, that one of the views held by modern science is that the human heart is a kind of pump which drives the blood through the body. This dictum of academic science is universally accepted but it is simply a piece of nonsense—pure nonsense. We shall never understand the essential nature of the heart we imagine that it pumps the blood in every direction and then lets it flow back again. The circulating blood itself is the living force. The driving force in the human organisation is contained in the blood, in the circulating blood, and the heart is the outward expression of this; the movement reveals itself in the heart. To say in accordance with modern science that the heart drives the blood into the Body, is rather like saying: “At ten minutes to nine one hand of the clock pointed to nine, and the other a little past ten, and these hands, in conjunction with the mechanism of the clock, drove me to the speaker's desk and left a great many still outside (because in the Anthroposophical Society people have a habit of unpunctuality). In reality, it is not so at all. Obviously the clock is simply an expression of what is happening—it is the expression and nothing more. The heart is not the pumping machine by means of which the blood is driven through the body; the heart is inserted into and is the expression of this whole system of movement.

Natural Science, as it is to-day, never leads into the inner being of man. All that science does is to make the inner into the outer by the dissection of dead bodies. But dissection of the dead body merely takes the inner and transfers it to the outer world. I mention this in order to bring home to you that in the spiritual life of to-day there is no inclination whatever to penetrate into the inner being and inner nature of man, and it devolves upon Spiritual Science to bring that real knowledge of man's being which scares the great majority of our contemporaries. Why are they scared? It is because religious traditions through the centuries have utterly hood-winked mankind so far as striving for real knowledge is concerned. Just think of the way in which the traditional creeds mystify human beings with apocryphal utterances culminating in a warning that it is not meant for man to know the Supersensible, that he may only have faith in it and feel its existence darkly. This is all done with the object of playing upon man's pride and self-conceit and also upon his inherent laziness. He must be led to believe that it is not necessary for him to think about the Divine, that his conception of the Divine must be a matter of instinct and dim feeling. But ideas that arise from this region of man's being are merely emanations from the organs—emanations which become illusions, and these illusions are distorted into all kinds of nebulous ideas by theologians and others who know quite well how much they can count an man's inherent love of ease.

The instinct for knowledge which alone can promote the earthly evolution of man and also lead him to the path of spiritual development, has been stifled and suppressed for many long centuries. People to-day are frightened at the very thought of developing knowledgE of realities or of experiencing the spiritual world. But to the extent to which they are frightened—to that extent do they sever themselves from the Spirit and soul and make themselves akin to the material.

It is so indeed; people are scared when the gravity of these things dawns upon them, because everything to-day is regarded from the external point of view. And here, in parenthesis, let me repeat certain remarks made a short time ago. In Stuttgart we have the Waldorf School. The Waldorf School was founded out of the very spirit of anthroposophical Spiritual Science; that is to say, fundamental principles of education and of teaching were laid before those who were specially Chosen to work in the School. Everything is a question of the Spirit in this art of education. Yet we are finding to-day, a sensation, that people visit the school and actually think that in a couple of hours or so they can inform themselves about the essentials of education there given. But it is of course only through Spiritual Science that one can gain insight into the spirit of the Waldorf School; it cannot be done by short brief visits which only disturb the teaching.

To assimilate anthroposophical Spiritual Science, however, is much more difficult and much less sensational than visiting the School as an outsider. As I have often said, the education at the Waldorf School takes account of the existence of the spiritual world, and, above all, of the pre-earthly existence of the human being. What is there to be said about this pre-earthly existence? We may take the year of our birth and say that this is the time when we descended to physical life on the Earth. Children born later have been living in the spiritual world while we were already on the Earth. These children have just descended to the physical world, whereas we ourselves have been living through our earthly existence for a considerable length of time. And they bring with them something of what they were experiencing in the spiritual world while we were already living in the physical world.

One can realise this quite clearly among children who are taught according to the principles of Waldorf School education. To give this kind of education is to prepare for the application in everyday life of thoughts and ideas which are the natural outcome of Spiritual Science. But it is precisely here that people are kept back by traditional religions, for the last thing these religions want is the development of inner activity in human beings. Inner activity leads to a real knowledge of the being of man and brings home the truth that the dwelling place of the Gods is inside the bounds of the human skin.

Suppose we see a planet in the sky. There is nothing of the Divine-Spiritual in anything upon that planet except in Spiritual Beings whose nature in some way resembles the nature of man. From these Beings the Divine pours its radiance upon us. Why, then, should this radiance be any the less because it shines from the bodies of men? You will begin to feel at home with this thought if you dissociate it from earthly life and relate it to conditions as they are upon another planet. Living an the Earth as you do, you will find that there is something oppressive, something rather coercive in the thought that you and your fellow men are bearers of the Divine-Spiritual. But if you turn the gaze of your soul to one of the other planets it will be much easier for you to grasp the fact that the Beings who there constitute the highest kingdom of Nature are the point from which the Divine Spiritual shines down upon you.

In a certain respect the thought we have been considering to-day amplifies the thought which occupied our minds in the last lecture, namely that something is unfolding in the inner being of man upon which the future evolution of the Earth essentially depends, but also that it lies within the powers of the human will to hinder the Earth's evolution, to receive the stream of Ahrimanic forces only. And to-day we added the other thought, namely, that Nature around is transient and external, for it already represents nothing more than a residue of Divine Spiritual creation. The process of Divine-Spiritual creation which dominates the present and will dominate the future, lies inside the bounds of the human skin. Strange as it may seem, it is therefore quite true to say that everything our eyes can see and our ears hear will all pass away with the Earth. Only that which is contained in the regions enclosed by the human skin lives over to the Jupiter stage of evolution, bearing existence as it is an the Earth into future conditions of planetary evolution.

When it is once realised that a knowledge of the nature of man is a burning necessity, the urge to understand the connection of the human being with the universe will again make itself felt. You know that man really lives between two extremes, the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic as we are accustomed to call them. We can also understand the nature of these two extremes from a more elementary point of view. Philosophers have declared again and again that Being in itself eludes the grasp of thought. This is quite true, for whence comes the sense of being, the feeling of existence which there is in man? The human being exists before he enters earthly existence through conception and birth; he exists in super-sensible worlds. From super-sensible worlds he descends into his earthly, material existence. Here he experiences something quite new, something he did not experience in the super-sensible worlds. He is encompassed by it as soon as he has descended to earthly existence. It is the attractive force of the Earth, gravity, ‘to have weight,’ as we say, but only by way of illustration. As you know, the expression ‘to have weight’ is drawn from the most palpable phenomenon of all. The fatigue of which we become aware is similar to ‘having weight,’ and what we feel in our limbs when they move is also akin to this. But because the fact of ‘having weight’ is merely the representative phenomenon, we can say: The human being places himself within gravity. And in a hidden way man always enters, a little more into this element of gravity when he approaches a thing of Earth and calls it real.

It is exactly the reverse when the human being is passing through his life between death and rebirth. Just as here on the Earth he is allied with gravity, in the life between death and rebirth he is allied with light, for ‘light’ too is used in a representative sense. Because we receive most of our higher sense-perceptions through the eye, we speak of the light. But what lives as light in the sense-perception of the eye is the same element that sounds in the sense-perception of the ear and reveals itself in different tones, just as the light reveals itself in different colours. And it is the same with the other senses. fundamentally speaking, the element we speak of in a representative sense as the light, just as we speak of gravity in a representative sense, is the ‘tincture’ of all the senses. We are received into the extreme pole of gravity when we descend to the Earth. We are received into the extreme pole of light when we are living in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. are, in reality, always in the middle condition between light and gravity; and every sense-perception, as we experience it here on Earth, is half light and half gravity. When, as the result of some pathological condition, or in dream, we experience without the element of our own gravity, we are experiencing only the Spiritual, as for instance in a dream or in delirium. Psychologically, delirium is a state in which the human being has experience, but his own gravity is no factor in them. This state of balance between gravity and light into which we are placed, is something that is intimately connected with the riddle of the world, inasmuch as it is bound up with many of the experiences we have as beings of soul and Spirit in the world.

It will surely be obvious to you from what has been said that neither the traditional creeds nor the fantasies of natural science succeed in finding their way from merely abstract concepts into the light nor from sense perception down into gravity. People have become blind and deaf to these things. Man is bound to the Earth by gravity. He experiences gravity as the element which draws him to the Earth. Think of a crystal. A crystal gives itself its form. Within the crystal there is the same force which the human being feels drawing him downwards—the force which gives the whole Earth form. And now think of the oceans and seas. Here the Earth can give form, or rather the element of gravity gives the form. This very same force also gives the crystal its form but in this case it works from within. According to science, nobody knows what is behind matter or within matter. This is said to be a world-riddle. But inasmuch as we experience our own gravity, we experience what is behind the surface of matter; for in relation to the whole Earth we are placed within the same forces which are active in small bodies (as, for instance, the crystal) and by which the various parts are held together. We must reach the point of being able to recognise the small in the great, the great in the small and not to lose ourselves in speculation as to what presumably lies behind matter.

Knowledge of the Divine-Spiritual which transcends matter must be kindled by those forces in man's inner being which enable him to understand ideas such as that of the Temple represented in ancient tradition by the human being himself.

I have said many times that the sayings of ancient atavistic wisdom contain much that is worthy of deep veneration. In the present age it is our task once again to raise these truths from the depths of our being and to make them the guiding principles of life and action.

If we look back at what we discussed yesterday and the day before, a more intimate relationship between human beings and the surrounding cosmos must reveal itself to us. And we have been able to relate the physical body of the human being to the whole cosmos according to the organization of the head, the rhythmic organization, the metabolic organization; we have also been able to relate the human being in terms of soul and spirit to the whole cosmos. What appears to you there as the relationship of the human being to the cosmos, as the human being's complete integration into the world, had to be viewed differently in ancient times than it must be viewed now and than it will have to be viewed more and more as humanity strides towards the future. We have often mentioned how in ancient times an instinctive, primeval wisdom was spread over humanity; a wisdom that man did not work out inwardly, but that he, one might say, felt rising within him as if half in a dream. It was given to him, and he actually had nothing to do but open his soul's receptive organs and accept what came to him from the cosmos as a gift from the gods.

Since the human being is a threefold creature, this instinctive, primeval wisdom must also have presented the human being's entire relationship as a threefold one. By turning his attention more to that to which he belonged before his birth and which shone into the time between birth and death as a spiritual essence, which is essentially that which appears in the expanse of the cosmos, man spoke that what presented itself to him was beauty; the cosmos in beauty, and man, in terms of his brain organization, in terms of his organization of thinking, in terms of his being awake, born out of this world of beauty. Prehistoric man sensed that it was benevolent spiritual beings that revealed themselves around him; for prehistoric man did not see natural phenomena as dryly and soberly as we see them today when we merely indulge in ordinary consciousness. Prehistoric man saw spirituality and soulfulness revealing themselves everywhere. That revealed itself to him. And this cosmos, which was the revelation of the spiritual and soul and which revealed itself to his instinctive consciousness as in mighty dream images, that is what prehistoric man called the cosmos in beauty.

Then man felt, so to speak, standing on his planet. He felt connected to his planet. From it came his food, on it he had his location. He felt, as it were, his power, which permeated him physically, which revealed itself in the soul as will, which strengthened him out of the state of sleep. He felt this power, in turn, as the gift of benevolent divine spiritual beings and called it strength. The planet in strength permeates me - that is roughly how prehistoric man felt what he could not, however, express in sharply modulated words.

Thus he felt, as it were, standing in the midst of what was taking shape in his mind, taking form in his perceptions, and revealing itself in his awakening consciousness. And he felt himself standing on the planet in relation to the power that lived in his limbs, a power that he sensed as coming to him from the planet. He said to himself: “The same thing that works as a force in the stone when it falls to the ground, making a hole when the stone falls, lives in my legs when I walk. That connects me to the earth planet through my legs as my strength. That also lives in my arms when I work, that permeates my muscle strength. And he felt as if he were standing between beauty and strength, and felt that it was his task to bring about a balance in rhythm between the above, the beauty, and the below, the strength, in wisdom. And again he felt supported by the fact that he had to bring about this balance between beauty and strength, from the spiritual beings who were the bearers of wisdom, who illuminated him with wisdom.

Thus man felt what the cosmos gave him as beauty, wisdom and strength. Beauty, wisdom and strength were the things that made primitive man feel connected to the whole universe, that made him feel strengthened by them. In a sense, he felt the external world that surrounded him, the internal world that he sensed within himself, and the balance between the two, as beauty, wisdom and strength.

In the various secret societies, what remained were the keywords wisdom, beauty, strength, whereby it sometimes becomes quite clear how only the words remained, how the deeper understanding is missing. For a time has come for humanity when this feeling and this knowledge, even if it is instinctive knowledge, has been pushed more into the darkness by our connections with the cosmos. Man lived, as it were, in subordinate perceptions and subordinate feelings. He drove the impulses of his will out of subordinate elements of his own being. He forgot what he once sensed in beauty, wisdom and strength, for he was to become a free being. A central power had to emerge, as it were, from his inner chaos, to which was not revealed what revealed itself full of light and strength to the primeval man. But the newer humanity will not progress if it does not resurrect from within what once revealed itself from the cosmos as beauty, wisdom and strength. From the outside, the cosmos will not reveal itself again in beauty to humanity, as long as it is humanity on earth. These times are the times of the instinctive primal wisdom. These times are past times. These times are not those in which the free human being has developed, but rather those in which the human being could only develop who was driven, as it were, in bondage, in instincts. These times will not return, but out of his own inner being, man must resurrect what has come to him from outside in the way of wisdom, beauty and strength.

What has been absorbed, I would say, sucked in as power of beauty from the universe, man has, so to speak, taken in during old, very old earthly lives. In the middle earth-lives that followed, which we have gone through in the Egyptian, in the Greek, in the modern time, in these earth-lives, it was absorbed, but it did not come before human consciousness. Now mankind is ripe to bring it out of consciousness, and it will be brought out. What has been absorbed as the power of beauty will arise again from the inner being of man, and spiritual science is the instruction for this, how it is to arise from the human inner being. It will arise from out of the inner being through imagination. And all that is now consciously imparted through imagination in spiritual science is nothing other than the resurrected life of beauty, as it existed within the original wisdom. And all that man has experienced within himself in feeling the power of his planet, in which, however, was contained all the power of the cosmos, only that it was centered in the planet or is centered in the planet, all that must rise again, in that man grasps it from within through the realization of intuition. Beauty, drawn from the universe, becomes imagination for the future of humanity from the present on. Strength becomes intuition, grasped through one's own free human power, and wisdom becomes inspiration.

Thus man has left an age in which beauty, wisdom and strength were bestowed upon him from the outside. I would like to say that these buzzwords of wisdom, beauty and strength have been merely parroted in certain secret societies, in freemason orders and so on, without further cultivation of inner understanding. If one would understand the matter inwardly, one would know that these are ancient traditions that must revive as imagination, as inspiration, as intuition. It is therefore a rather inferior wisdom when all kinds of members of this or that order come and find a similarity between what occurs in spiritual science and what they have as their tradition, which they mostly do not understand. In spiritual science, the connection is lifted out of the spirit-knowledge itself.

Thus, people have left an ancient age in which the secrets of the universe were revealed to them in beauty, wisdom and strength. Humanity must now approach an age in which the secrets of the universe will be revealed to them through the imagination, inspiration and intuition of those who want to or are meant to come to these powers of knowledge and who can reach them in some way. Today, everyone can understand what is brought forth from inspiration, intuition and imagination, if only they want to.

But now the old age was exposed to a certain danger. And this danger, I would say, arose most strongly in the then civilized world, in Egypt, the Near East, India and so on, towards the end of the 2nd millennium BC. The danger was this: that people did not receive in the right way what revealed itself, as if by itself, out of the universe, I would say by grace, to the human being who only had to receive it in his cognitive instinct. One could succumb to this danger in the following way.

You have to imagine what it means that not only what appears to today's sober consciousness as nature and as natural laws is revealed in the nature surrounding man, but that grandiose beauty, that is, beautiful appearance in mighty, pictorial revelations of spiritual beings, which looked out from every source, from every cloud, from everything. It was particularly during this time, towards the end of the 2nd millennium before the Christian era, not as in even older times, when of course all this was also there; but it was, I would say, more naturally there. In those days, man had to partake of this grace by doing something himself. He did not have to do it in the way that we, now in full consciousness, seek higher spiritual development, but he could — and it was even a rather doubtful ability — develop a desire for this spiritual that revealed itself in nature; he could fire up his forces of need, his driving forces; then, as it were, the spiritual revealed itself to him out of nature. And in this kindling of the driving forces, of the forces of need, lay a strong satanic gift.

Most of you know, of course, how natural it was for man in the old Atlantean time to see the appearance of elemental beings. But this appearance still resonates for the clairvoyance of the post-Atlantean time. But it gradually faded away, and then man knew how to conjure it up in a certain way from natural phenomena through his powers of perception. That was the Luciferic danger that arose. Man could, so to speak, shake himself up, fire himself, in order to unite spiritual beings with himself. But this kind of arousal was something Luciferic in him. Therefore, the world of culture and civilization at that time was strongly contaminated by Lucifer at the end of the 2nd millennium BC. We have pointed out this Luciferic contamination from other points of view on other occasions; I have traced it back to its other causes; but now let us look at it from the point of view adopted in these three lectures.

This former Luciferic infestation of the world is now facing another, an Ahrimanic one. And this Ahrimanic infestation is currently on the march with a tremendously strong force. It is quite dreadful how the civilized man of the present day sleeps in the face of what is actually developing. Just consider how mechanical and machine power has developed in recent times. I have spoken of this before from other points of view. It is not so very long ago that people had to do everything with their own muscular strength, whereas today they can leave certain things to machines, which they only have to operate. The forces that man brings out of the earth by mining the coal underlie what takes place in the machines. The coal provides the power that then works in our machines.

When man now brings it about that a machine works alongside him, it is the case that he, so to speak, hands over to the machine what he used to have to do himself. The machine does it. The machine stands beside him and does the work that he used to have to do himself. One measures what the machine produces in horsepower, and if one wants to measure on a large scale, one measures what is produced within a certain territory in the horsepower that a horse can muster in a year when it does its daily work. Now take the following: in 1870 – we can calculate this from coal production – within Germany – I am deliberately choosing the war year – a total of six and seven-tenths million horsepower-years were worked by machines. That is, in addition to what people have worked, the machines have worked six and seven-tenths million horsepower-years. This is therefore a force that has been worked out of the machines themselves. In 1912, 79 million horsepower-years were worked by machine power in Germany alone!

Since Germany has a population of almost 79 million, this means that a horse works all year long next to every human being. And consider the increase from 6.7 million horsepower-years to 79 million horsepower-years within a few decades!

And now consider these conditions in relation to the outbreak of the terrible catastrophe of war. In the same year of 1912, France, Russia, and Belgium together could muster 35 million horsepower-years; Great Britain 98 million horsepower-years. Essentially, the war in 1870 was fought by people, because there was not much in the way of mechanical forces that could be mobilized. In Germany, there were only 6.7 million horsepower years available. In the few decades that followed, things changed. You know, in this war, it was essentially the machines that worked against each other. What confronted each other at the fronts came from the machines, so that actually the horsepower years of the mechanisms were led to the front.

Now the fact of the matter was that it took Great Britain a long time to mobilize its 98 million horsepower-years. But then, in terms of the mechanical power of these empires, 133 million horsepower-years stood against 79 million horsepower-years from Germany; about 92 million horsepower-years could be mustered if Austria were added. Now, this was initially offset by the fact that, as I said, Great Britain could not convert its horsepower years so quickly from land cultivation to the front. In this terrible war catastrophe, it was not the wisdom of the generals that was at issue – they did give certain directions, but the main thing that was at issue was the mechanical forces that collided at the fronts, and these did not depend on the generals, but on the inventions that man had previously made based on his natural science.

And what, then, had to happen as a matter of fate and destiny, as it were? Let us assume that the horsepower years of the United States of America, amounting to 139 million horsepower years, were still being sent to the front.

You see, the human race had produced so much machine power in just a few decades that the fate of the world was predetermined, quite apart from the genius of the generals. Nothing could be done about this fate of the world, about this necessity, where the results of the mechanical forces on the fronts simply collided.

So what exactly are we dealing with here? Man has constructed the mechanisms based on his thinking. By constructing them, he had placed his intellect, his scientific understanding, into the mechanisms. In a sense, reason had run away from his head and become the Horsepower Years in his environment. They now worked, having run away, themselves. The frantic speed with which this creation of a world, which is inhumanly-extra-human, has occurred in recent decades through humans, is not easily imagined by the sleeping civilized man of the present.

The person I referred to at the end of the 2nd millennium BC had the luciferic contamination around him; the spiritual beings for whom he developed his needs appeared to him from nature. When that is a natural object, the spiritual being appears in it (it is drawn). Now man lets his spirit flow into matter, into mechanisms. It becomes so in there that, for example, in Germany every person has created a horse alongside him out of the human mind, which now works alongside him, which was not a horse but machine power. This is separate from man, as these elemental beings were once separate from man, only in a different sense. They were so separate that man had to turn his Luciferic power to them. Now he turns his Ahrimanic power to them. Now he mechanizes them, materializes them. We live in the age of Ahrimanic contamination. Men do not even notice that they are actually withdrawing from the world, and that they are incorporating their intellect into the world and creating a world alongside them that is becoming independent. And the great, I might say, diabolical experiment has been carried out since 1914; that the one Ahrimanic entity against the other Ahrimanic entity has basically turned out to be the decisive factor. We have been dealing with an ahrimanic struggle over almost the whole earth. Man has accepted the ahrimanic character by creating a new ahrimanic world in the mechanism that surrounds him. And it is a new ahrimanic world. If you look at the figures: From 6.7 million to 79 million horsepower-years in just a few decades, the increase in non-human mechanical power – the ratio is the same in the other countries – how quickly Ahriman has grown in recent decades!

Should we not ask ourselves whether man should lose completely what is placed in his will, what is placed in his power of initiative? The question can be asked whether man should be led more and more towards the illusion that he is doing things, while in truth the Ahrimanic forces, which can be calculated in horsepower years, are working against each other? Those who have an overview of the world are only interested in Foch and Ludendorff and Haig from a moral point of view. From the point of view of full reality, they are interested in those forces that come from the coal and that clash on the fronts, that are led from the mechanical workshops to the fronts, depending on the inventive powers of previous years, and that turn into a simple mathematical calculation what must happen.

Thus, the Ahrimanization of the world is a simple mathematical calculation to know what must happen. And what is man's place in all this? He can stand by as the stupid one whose machines ultimately run towards when he finds somewhat more complicated combinations of forces.

This Ahrimanization is the modern counterpart to the Luciferization of the world of which I spoke earlier. That is what we must look at. For is this not perhaps the most eloquent illustration of the necessity for man to create from within? We will not stop this Ahrimanization, nor should we stop it, otherwise we would stand before every new mechanization like the Nuremberg Medical Council in 1839 or like the Berlin postmaster before the construction of the railroad, who said: People want to run a railroad from Berlin to Potsdam — I run post coaches out there twice a week, and there is no one inside! — One cannot stop mechanization, because culture must go in this direction. Culture demands the Ahrimanization. But it must be placed alongside what is now working from within the human being, what draws wisdom, beauty, power, and thus strength from within the human being, in the imagination, in the intuition, in the inspiration. For the worlds that will arise will be man's worlds, they will be those that stand before us in spirit and in soul, while without the forces of Ahriman are at work. And these powers that arise from imagination, from inspiration, from intuition, will have the power to direct what would otherwise overwhelm the human being around him, out of the frantic pace of Ahrimanization. What comes from the spiritual world, from imagination, inspiration and intuition, is stronger than all the horsepower years that can still spring from the mechanization of the world. But the mechanizing forces would overwhelm man if he did not find the counterweight for them in what he can find from the revelations of the spiritual world, which he must strive for.

It is not some invention, some abstract ideal, some slogan that appears with spiritual science and strives for the realization of imagination, inspiration and intuition, but it is something that can be clearly seen in its necessity from the course of human development. And it must be pointed out that man would be overwhelmed by the non-human, which he himself has created in a world Ahrimanized in calculable horse power. When man received from without that which gave him wisdom, beauty and strength, he had not yet the Ahrimanized world around him, he could receive it in grace or through grace, and on earth he had at most what he acquired through the power of fire or through the simplest mechanical tools, which did not add much to his own strength. And only since about the second half of the nineteenth century have we a new world, I might say, a mighty new geological layer covering the earth. To all the layers, diluvium, alluvium, is added the Ahrimanic layer of mechanized forces, which forms like a crust over the earth. So what overwhelms man rises up from the depths if man does not place himself in the outer world with that world that comes to him from the spirit, that is, from imagination, intuition and inspiration.

Truly strong impulses arise out of the knowledge of the course of the world, which point to the necessity of spiritual-scientific culture and civilization. These are necessities that can already be grasped today. For is it not terrible that alongside man, this, let us say, super-geological layer is emerging with such furious haste like a new earth crust, and that many people today still think as they have been taught, as for example in Germany only 6.7 million horsepower years were produced by mechanization? Do people think about what actually drives the course of the world? Do we have a clear picture of what is really happening? We do not, otherwise we would truly recognize from the knowledge of what is happening the necessity to find a new way of imbuing people with what past ages called beauty, wisdom, strength, and what we must call imagination, inspiration, intuition after the path that the human personality must take to attain it.

We are therefore looking into a world that is riddled with Ahriman. I have said before that I do not want to use the word “transition period” carelessly, because basically every period is a transition period; but a time in which something as special as Ahrimanism has developed so rapidly as it has since the last third of the 19th century is not always there. And the Biedermeier period, which immediately preceded it for a large part of Central Europe, truly cannot be compared with what has actually happened in reality in the last few decades. One must feel the full gravity of these modern events. And one must feel the following.

When you look at an event such as the war that took place in Central Europe in 1870/71, you can reflect on it and keep thinking about it. But just look at how people still try to visualize the events of the last few years in the same way! They still think the way they did when there were only 6.7 million horsepower years in Germany! They do not understand that you have to think differently when 79 million horsepower years are working outside of humans! This requires a completely different way of thinking. Without turning to spiritual science, the riddles that arise from these events will not be solved at all. If man mechanizes the world around him through external science, then he must all the more develop an inner science from within himself, which in turn is wisdom. This will have the power to direct what would otherwise overwhelm him.

Today we shall consider the differentiations in mankind from another viewpoint, namely that of history. With the express aim of promoting an understanding for the present time we shall look at human evolution starting at a point immediately following the catastrophe of Atlantis. If human evolution can be considered to encompass any evolution of civilization, then we shall find the first decisive period of development to be the culture epoch of ancient India. In my book Occult Science¹ you will find this culture of ancient India described from a particular viewpoint. Though the Vedas and Indian philosophy are rightly admired, they are actually only echoes of that ancient culture, of which there exist no written records. In the words of today we have to describe the culture of ancient India as a religious culture in the highest sense. To understand this properly we shall have to discuss it more thoroughly.

The religious element of ancient Indian culture included what we today would call science and art. The total spiritual life of the whole human being was encompassed by this culture for which the most pertinent description is that it was a religious culture. This religious culture generates the feeling in human beings that in the depths of their being they are linked with a divine, spiritual world. This feeling was developed so intensely that the whole of life was illumined by it. Their clearer states of consciousness, which were preparations for today's waking state, and also their dream consciousness, which became lost in our chaotic dream and sleep life as evolution progressed, were both states of consciousness filled with an instinctive awareness of the links between the human realm and the divine, spiritual realm.

But our idea of religion today is of something rather general. The concept of religion makes us think too strongly of something general, something abstract and rather detached from everyday life. For the people about whom we are speaking, however, religion and the content they associated with it gave them a knowledge expressed in pictures, a knowledge of the being of man and an extensive picture knowledge of the structure of the universe.

We have to imagine, though, that what lived in these people's view of the world, by way of a picture knowledge of the structure of the universe, in no way resembled our modern knowledge of astronomy or astrophysics. Our astronomy and astrophysics show us the mechanics of the universe. The ancient Indian people had a universe of picture images populated with divine, spiritual beings. There was as yet no question, in the present sense, of any external, merely mechanical rules governing the relationships between heavenly bodies or their relative movements. When those people looked up to the starry heavens they saw in the external constellations and movements of the stars only something perfectly familiar to them in their picture consciousness. It was something which may be described as follows.

Suppose we were to see a vivid, lively scene with bustling crowds and people going about all kinds of business, perhaps a public festival with much going on. Then we go home, and next morning the newspaper carries a report about the festival we ourselves attended. Our eyes fall on the dead letters of the printed page. We know what they mean and when we read the words they give us a weak, pale idea of all the lively bustle we experienced the day before. This can be compared with what the ancient Indian people saw in their instinctive vision and in relation to this what they saw in the constellations and movements of the stars. The constellations and movements of the stars were no more than written characters, indeed pale written characters. If they had copied down these characters on paper, they would have felt them to be no more than a written description of reality.

What these people saw behind the written characters was something which they not only came to know with their understanding but also to love with their feelings. They were unable merely to take into their ideas all that they grasped in pictures about the universe; they also developed lively feelings for these things. At the same time they developed a permanent feeling that whatever they did, even the most complicated actions, was an expression of the cosmos filled with divine spiritual weaving. They felt their limbs to be filled with this divine, spiritual cosmic weaving. They felt their understanding to be filled with this divine spiritual weaving, and likewise their courage and their will. Thus, speaking of their own deeds, they were able to say: Divine, spiritual beings are doing this. And since in those ancient times people knew very well that Lucifer and Ahriman are also to be found among those divine, spiritual beings, so were they aware that because divine, spiritual beings worked in them, they were therefore capable of committing evil as well as good deeds.

With this description I want to call up in you an idea of what this religion was like. It filled the whole human being, it brought the whole human being into a relationship with the abundance of the cosmos. It was cosmic wisdom and at the same time it was a wisdom which revealed man. But then progress in human evolution first caused the most intense religious feelings to pale. Of course, religion remained, in all later ages, but the intensity of religious life as it was in this first Indian age paled. First of all what paled was the feeling of standing within the realm of divine, spiritual beings with one's deeds and will impulses. In the ancient Persian age, the second post-Atlantean cultural epoch, people still had this feeling to some extent, but it had paled. In the first post-Atlantean epoch this feeling was a matter of course. In the second cultural blossoming, the ancient Persian time, the profoundest, most intense religious feelings paled, so human beings had to start developing something out of themselves in order to maintain their link with the cosmic, divine spiritual realm in a more active manner than had at first been the case. So we might say: The first post-Atlantean period was the most intensely religious of all. And in the second period religion faded somewhat, but human beings had to develop something by inner activity , something which would unite them once more with the cosmic beings of spirit and soul.

Of all the words we know, there is one we could use to describe this, although it was coined in a later age. It comes from an age which still possessed an awareness of what had once been a part of human evolution in ancient times. When an ancient Indian looked up to the heavens, he sensed the presence of individual beings everywhere, one divine spiritual being next to another—a whole population of divine spiritual beings. But this faded, so that what had been individualized, what had been individual, divine, spiritual beings faded into a general, homogeneous spiritual cosmos. Think of the following picture: Imagine a swarm of birds close by. You see each individual bird, but as the swarm flies further and further away it becomes a black blur, a homogeneous shape. In the same way the divine spiritual cosmos became a blurred image when human beings moved spiritually away from it.

The ancient Greeks still had an inkling of the fact that once, in the distant past, something like this had been at the foundation of what human beings saw in the spiritual world. Therefore they took into their language the word ‘sophia’. A divine, spiritual cosmos had once, as a matter of course, poured itself into human beings and had taken human beings into itself. But now man had to approach what he saw from a spiritual distance—a homogeneous cosmos—by his own inner activity. This the Greeks, who still had a feeling for these things, called by the expression: ‘I love’; that is: ‘philo’. So we can say that in the second post-Atlantean period, that of ancient Persia, the initiates had a twofold religion where earlier on religion had been onefold. Now they had philosophy and religion. Philosophy had been achieved. Religion had come down from the more ancient past, but it had paled.

Passing now to the third post-Atlantean period, we reach a further paling of religion. But we also come to a paling of philosophy. The actual, concrete process that took place must be imagined as follows. In ancient Persian times there existed this homogeneous shape made up of cosmic beings and this was felt to be the light that flooded through the universe, the primeval light, the primeval aura, Ahura Mazda. But now people retreated even further from this vision and began in a certain way to pay more attention to the movements of the stars and of the starry constellations. They now sensed less in regard to the divine, spiritual beings who existed in the background and more in regard to the written characters. From this arose something which we find in two different forms in the Chaldean wisdom and the Egyptian wisdom, something which comprised knowledge about the constellations and the movements of the stars. At the same time, the inner activity of human beings had become even more important. They not only had to unite their love with this divine Sophia who shone through the universe as the primeval light, but they had to unite their own destiny, their own position in the world, with what they saw within the universe in a cosmic script provided by the starry constellations and the starry movements. Their new achievement was thus a Cosmo-Sophia. This cosmosophy still contained an indication of the divine, spiritual beings, but what was seen tended to be merely a cosmic script expressing the deeds of these beings. Beside this there still existed philosophy and religion, which had both faded.

In order to understand this we must realize that what we today call philosophy is naturally only an extremely weak, pale shadow image of what was still felt to be more alive in the Mysteries of the third post-Atlantean period and what in an even paler form the Greeks later called philosophy. In the culture of the third post-Atlantean period we see everywhere expressions of these three aspects of the human spirit: a cosmosophy, a philosophy and a religion.² And we only gain proper pictures of these when we know we have to remind ourselves that right up to this time human beings lived in their soul life more outside the earthly realm than within it. Looking for instance at the Egyptian culture from this point of view—and it was even more pronounced in the Chaldean—we see it rightly only if we remind ourselves that those who had any part in this culture indeed took the most intimate interest in the constellations of the stars as evening approached. For example they awaited certain manifestations from Sirius, they observed the planetary constellations and applied what they saw there to the way the Nile gave them what they needed for their earthly life. But they did not speak in the first instance of the earthly realm. This earthly realm was one field of their work, but when they spoke of the field they were tilling they did so in a way which related it to the extraterrestrial realm. And they named the varying appearances of the patch of earth they inhabited in accordance with whatever the stars revealed as the seasons followed one upon another. They judged the earth in accordance with the heavens. From the soul point of view, daytime brought them darkness. Light came into this darkness when they could interpret what the day brought in terms of what the starry heavens of the night showed them.

What people in those times saw might be expressed thus: The face of the earth is dark when the sun obscures my vision with dazzling brightness; but light falls on the field of my daily work when my soul shines upon it through starry wisdom.

Writing down a sentence like this gives us a sense for what the realm of feeling in this third post-Atlantean period was like. From this in turn we sense how those who still stood in the after-echoes of such a realm of feeling could say to the Greeks, to those who belonged to the fourth post-Atlantean cultural period: Your view of the world, indeed your whole life, is childlike, for you have knowledge only of the earth. Your ancestors in ancient times knew how to illumine the earth with the light of the heavens, but you live in the darkness of earth.

The ancient Greeks experienced this darkness of earth as something light. Their inclination was gradually to overcome and transform the older cosmosophy. So, as everything that looked down from the broad heavens became paler still, they transformed the older cosmosophy into a geosophy. Cosmosophy was nothing more than a tradition for them, something they could learn about when they looked back to those who had passed it down to them from earlier times.

Pythagoras, for instance, stood at the threshold of the fourth post-Atlantean period when he journeyed to the Egyptians, to the Chaldean and even further into Asia in order to gather whatever those who lived there could give him of the wisdom of their forefathers in the Mysteries, whatever they could give him of what had been their cosmosophy, their philosophy and their religion. And what was still comprehensible for him was then just that: cosmosophy, philosophy, religion.

However, there is something we today take far too little into consideration: This geosophy of the ancient Greeks was a knowledge, a wisdom which, in relation to the earthly world, gave human beings a feeling of being truly connected with the earth, and this connection with the earth was something which had a quality of soul. The connection with the earth of a cultured Greek had a quality of soul. It was characteristic for the Greeks to populate springs with nymphs, to populate Olympus with gods. All this points, not to a geology, which envelops the earth in nothing but concepts, but to a geosophy in which spiritual beings are livingly recognized and knowingly experienced. This is something which mankind today knows only in the abstract. Yet right into the fourth century AD it was still something that was filled with life.

Right into the fourth century AD a geosophy of this kind still existed. And something of this geosophy, too, came to be preserved in tradition. For instance we can only understand what we find in the work of Scotus Erigena,³ who brought over from the island of Ireland what he later expressed in his De divisione naturae, if we take it as a tradition arising out of a geosophical view. For in the fifth post-Atlantean period, which was in preparation then and which began in the fifteenth century, geosophy, too, paled. There then began the era in which human beings lost their inner connection with, and experience of, the universe. Geosophy is transformed, we might say, into geology. This is meant in the widest possible sense and comprises not only what today's academic philosophy means by the term. Cosmosophy was transformed into cosmology. Philosophy was retained but given an abstract nature—which in reality ought to be called philology, had this term not already been taken to denote something even more atrocious than anything one might like to include in philosophy.

There remains religion, which is now totally removed from any real knowledge and basically assumed by people to be nothing more than tradition. People of a nature capable of being creatively religious are no longer a feature of civilized life in general in this fifth post Atlantean period. Look at those who have come and gone. None have been creatively religious in the true sense of the word. And this is only right and proper. In the preceding epochs, in the first, second third and fourth post-Atlantean periods, there were always those who were creatively religious, personalities who were creative in the realm of religion, for it was always possible to bring down something from the cosmos, or at least to bring something up out of the realm of the earth. So in the Greek Mysteries—those called the Chthonian Mysteries in contrast to the heavenly Mysteries—which brought up their inspiration out of the depths of the earth in various ways—in these Mysteries geosophy was chiefly brought into being.

By entering into the fifth post-Atlantean period and standing full within it, human beings were thrown back upon themselves. The now made manifest what came out of themselves, ‘-logy ‘, the lore the knowledge out of themselves. Thus knowledge of the universe becomes a world of abstractions, of logical concepts, of abstract ideas. Human beings have lived in this world of abstract ideas since the fifteenth century. And with this world of abstract ideas, which they summarize in the laws of nature, they now seek to grasp out of themselves what was revealed to human beings of earlier times. It is quite justified that this age no longer brings forth any religiously creative natures, for the Mystery of Golgotha falls in the fourth post-Atlantean period, and this Mystery of Golgotha is the final synthesis of religious life. It leads to a religion that ought to be the conclusion of earthly religious streams and strivings. With regard to religion, all subsequent ages can really only point back to this Mystery of Golgotha.

So the statement, that since the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period it is no longer possible for religiously productive individuals to appear, is not a criticism or a reprimand aimed at historical development. It is a statement of something positive because it can be justified by the occurrence of the Mystery of Golgotha.

In this way we conjure up before our eyes the course of human evolution with regard to spiritual streams and spiritual endeavours. In this way we can see how it has come about that we stand today in the midst of something that is, basically, no longer connected with the world about us but has come out of the human being, something in which the human being is productive and must become ever more productive. By further developing all these abstract things human beings will ascend once more through Imaginations to a kind of geosophy and cosmosophy. Through Inspiration they will deepen cosmosophy and ascend to a true philosophy, and through Intuition they will deepen philosophy until they can move towards a truly religious view of the world which will once more be able to unite with knowledge.

It is necessary to say that today we are only in the very first, most elementary beginnings of this progress. Since the final third of the nineteenth century there has shone into the earthly world from the spiritual world something which we can take to be a giving-back of spiritual revelations. But even with this we stand at the very beginning, a beginning which gives us a picture with which to characterize the attitude brought by external, abstract culture towards the first concrete statements that come from the spiritual world. When the representatives of current recognized knowledge hear what we have to say about the spiritual world, the understanding they bring to bear on what we say is of a kind that it can only be called a non-understanding. For it can be compared with the following: Suppose I were to write a sentence on this piece of paper, and suppose someone were to try to understand what I had written down by analysing the ink in which it is written. When our contemporaries write about Anthroposophy it is like somebody analysing the ink of a letter he has received. Again and again we have this impression. It is a picture very close to us, considering that we took our departure from a description of how, for human beings, in early post-Atlantean times even the starry constellations and starry movements were no more than a written expression for what they experienced as the spiritual population of the universe.

Such things are said today to a certain number of people in order to give them the feeling that Anthroposophy is not drawn from some sort of fantastic underworld but from real sources of knowledge, and that it is therefore capable of understanding the human beings of the earth to the very roots of their nature. Anthroposophy is capable of throwing light on today's differentiation of human beings into those of the West, of the middle realm and of the East, in the way mentioned yesterday. It is also capable of throwing light on differentiations which have existed in human evolution during the course of time. Only by connecting everything we can know about the differentiations according to regions of the earth with what we can know about how all this has come about can we gain an understanding of what kind of human beings inhabit our globe today.

Traditions of bygone ages have always been preserved, in some regions more, in others less. And according to those traditions the peoples of this globe are distinguished from one another. Looking eastwards we find that in later ages something was written down which during the first post-Atlantean period had existed unwritten, something which shines towards us out of the Vedas and their philosophy, something which touches us with its intimacy in the genuine philosophy of yoga. Letting all this work on us in our present-day consciousness, we begin to sense: If we immerse ourselves ever more deeply in these things, then we feel that even in the written works something lives of what existed in primeval times. But we have to add: Because the eastern world still echoes of its primeval times it is unsuited to receiving new impulses.

The western world has fewer traditions. At most, certain traditions stemming from the third post-Atlantean period, the age of cosmosophy, are contained in the writings of some secret orders. But they are traditions which are, no longer understood and are only brought before human beings in the form of incomprehensible symbols. But at the same time there is in the west an elemental strength capable of unfolding new impulses for development.

We might say that originally the primeval impulses existed. They developed by becoming ever weaker and weaker until, by about the fourth post-Atlantean period, they so to speak lost themselves in themselves, in what became Greek culture as such. Out of that, pointing towards the new, developed the abstract, prosaic sober culture of the Romans. (The lecturer draws on the blackboard). But this in turn must take spirituality into itself; it must, by becoming ever stronger and stronger, be filled with inner spirituality. Here, then, we have the symbol of the spiralling movement of humanity's impulses throughout the ages.

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This symbol has always stood for important matters in the universe. If we have to speak of an atomistic world, we should not imagine it in the abstract way common today. We should imagine it in the image of this spiral, and this has often indeed been done. But on the greatest scale, too, we have to see this spiralling movement. Today I consider that we have arrived at it in a perfectly elementary manner by way of a concrete consideration of the course of human spiritual evolution.

• 1 . Rudolf Steiner, Occult Science—An Outline. For the post-Atlantean cultural periods see the chapter ‘Man and the Evolution of the World’.
• 2 . See also Rudolf Steiner, Philosophy, Cosmology and Religion, Anthroposophic Press, New York 1984, and Rudolf Steiner's own reports of these lectures in Cosmology, Religion and Philosophy, Anthroposophic Press, New York 1984.
• 3 . Johannes Scotus Erigena c.810-877. Irish philosopher and theologian, one of the most notable thinkers of the Carolingian Middle Ages. His principal work De divisione naturae was burnt by Pope Honorius in Paris in 1225.

[ 1 ] The author would like to sketch several pictures—nothing other than that—and not about the spiritual thought-life of Austria but only from this life. No kind of completeness will be striven for, not even with respect to what the author himself has to say. Many other things might be much more important than what is to be brought here. But this time only a little bit will be indicated from the spiritual life of Austria that is more or less, directly or indirectly, connected in some way with spiritual streams in which the author himself has stood during his youth. Spiritual streams like those meant here can indeed also be characterized, not by presenting mental pictures one has formed of them, but by speaking of personalities, their way of thinking and inclinations of feeling, in whom one believes these streams to express themselves, as though symptomatically. I would like to depict what Austria reveals about itself through several such personalities. If I use the word “I” in several places, please consider that to be based on my point of view at that time.

[ 2 ] I would like first of all to speak about a personality in whom I believe in myself able to see the manifestation in a very noble sense of spiritual Austrianness in the second half of the nineteenth century: Karl Julius Schröer. When I entered the Vienna College of Technology in 1879, he was professor of German literary history there. He first became my teacher and then an older friend. For many years now he has not been among the living.

In the first lecture of his that I heard, he spoke about Goethe's Götz van Berlichingen. The whole age out of which this play grew, and also how Götz burst into this age became this play grew, and also how Götz burst into this age became alive in Schröer's words. A man was speaking who let flow into every one of his judgments what, out of the world view of German idealism, he had incorporated into all the feeling and willing of his entire spiritualized personality, His following lectures built up a living picture of German poetry since Goethe's appearance on the scene, They did so in such a way that through his depiction of poets and poems one always felt the living weaving of views, within the essential being of the German people, struggling to come into reality. Enthusiasm for the ideals of mankind carried Schröer's judgments along, and this enthusiasm implanted a living sense of self into the view of life that took its start in Goethe's age. A spirit spoke out of this man that wanted to communicate only what had become the deepest experience of his own soul during his observations of man's spiritual life.

[ 3 ] Many of the people who got to know this personality did not know him. When I was already living in Germany, I was once at a dinner party, a well-known literary historian was sitting beside me. He spoke of a German duchess, whom he praised highly, except that—according to him—she could sometimes err in her otherwise healthy judgment as, for example, when she “considered Schröer to be a significant person.” I can understand that many a person does not find in Schröer's books what many of his students found through the living influence of his personality; but I am convinced that one could also sense much of this in Schröer's writings if one were able to receive an impression not merely by so-called “rigorous methods” or even by such a method in the style of one or another school of literature, but rather by originality in judging, by the revelations of a view one has experienced oneself. Seen this way, a personality grown mature in the idealism of German world views does in fact speak forth from the much maligned book of Schröer, History of German Poetry in the Nineteenth Century and from others of his works. A certain manner of presentation, in his Faust commentaries, for example, could repel many a supposed free thinker. For there does work into Schröer's presentation something that a certain age believed to be inseparable from the character of what is scientific. Even strong-minded thinkers fell under the yoke of this belief; and one must seek these thinkers themselves in their true nature by penetrating through this husk of their creations that was forced upon them by this yoke.

[ 4 ] Karl Julius Schröer lived his boyhood and youth in the light of a man who, like himself, had his roots in spiritual German Austrianness, and who was one of its blossoms: his father, Tobias Gottfried Schröer.

It was not so long ago that in the widest circles certain books were known to which many people certainly owed the awakening of a feeling, supported by a view of life in accordance with the spirit, for history, poetry, and art. These books are Letters on Aesthetics' Chief Objects of Study, by Chr. Oeser, The Little Greeks, by Chr. Oeser, World History for Girls' Schools, and other works by the same author. Covering the most manifold areas of human spiritual life from the point of view of a writer for young people, a personality is speaking in these writings who grew up in the way of picturing things of the Goethean age of German spiritual development, and who sees the world with the eye of the soul educated in this way. The author of these books is Tobias Gottfried Schröer, who published them under the name Chr. Oeser. Now, nineteen years after the death of this man, in 1869, the German Schiller Foundation presented his widow with an honorary gift accompanied by a letter in which was stated: “The undersigned Board has heard with deepest regret that the wife of one of the most worthy German writers, of a man who always stood up for the national spirit with talent and with heart, is not living in circumstances appropriate to her status nor to the service tendered by her husband; and so this Board is only fulfilling the duty required of it by the spirit of its statutes when it makes every possible effort to mitigate somewhat the adversity of a hard destiny.” Moved by this decision of the Schiller Foundation, Karl Julius Schröer then wrote an article about his father in the Vienna New Free Press that made public what until then had been known only to a very small circle: that Tobias Gottfried Schröer was not only the author of the books of Chr. Oeser, but also a significant poet and writer of works that were true ornaments of Austrian spiritual life, and that he had remained unknown only because he could not use his own name due to the situation there regarding censorship. His comedy The Bear, for example, appeared in 1830. Karl von Holtei, the significant Silesian poet and actor speaks of it in a letter to the author right after its appearance: “As regards your comedy The Bear: it delighted me. If the conception, the disposition of characters, is entirely yours, then I wish you good luck with all my heart, for you will still write more beautiful plays.” The playwright took all his material from the life of Ivan (the Fourth) Wasiliewitsch and all the characters except Ivan himself are freely created. A later drama, The Life and Deeds of Emerick Tököly and his Comrades in Arms, received warm acclaim, without anyone knowing who the author was. One could read of it in “Magazine for Literary Conversation” (October 25, 1839): “An historical picture of remarkable freshness ... Works offering such a breath of fresh air and with such decisive characters are true rarities in our day ... Each grouping is full of great charm because it is full of great truth; ...The author's Tököly is a Hungarian Götz von Berlichingen and only with it can this drama be compared... From a spirit like this author we can expect anything, even the greatest.” This review is by W. v. Ludemann, who has written a History of Architecture, a History of Painting, Walks in Rome, stories and novellas, works that express sensitivity and great understanding for art.

[ 5 ] Through his father's spiritual approach the sun of idealism in German world views had already shone beforehand upon Karl Julius Schröer as he entered the universities of Leipzig, Halle, and Berlin at the end of the 1840s and there could still experience, through much that worked upon him, this idealism's way of picturing things. When he returned to his homeland in 1846, he became director of the Seminar for German Literary History and Language in the Pressburg secondary school for girls that his father had founded in this city. In this position he unfolded an activity that essentially took this form: Through his striving Schröer sought to solve the problem of how to work best in the spiritual life of Austria if one finds the direction of one's strivings already marked out by having received the motive forces of one's own soul from German culture. In a Text and Reading Book (that appeared in 1853 and presents a “History of German Literature”), he spoke of this striving: “Seniors, law students, students of theology ... came together there (in the secondary school) ... I made every effort to present to a circle of listeners like this, in large perspectives, the glory of the German people in its evolution, to stimulate respect for German art and science, and where possible to bring my listeners closer to the standpoint of modern science.” And Schröer describes how he understands his own Germanness like this: “From this standpoint there naturally disappeared from view the one-sided factional passions: one will listen to a Protestant or a Catholic, to a conservative or a subversive enthusiast, or to a zealot of German nationalism only insofar as through them humanity gains and the human race is elevated.” And I want to repeat these words, written almost seventy years ago, not in order to express what was right for a German in Austria at that time, nor even now. I only want to show the nature of one man in whom the German—Austrian spirit expressed itself in a particular way. To what extent this spirit endows the Austrian with the right kind of striving: on this question the adherents of the different parties and nations in Austria will also decide very differently. And in all this one must also remember that Schöer expressed himself in this as a young man still who had just returned from German universities. But the fact is significant that in the soul of this young man—and not for political purposes, but out of purely spiritual thoughts about how to view the world—a German Austrian consciousness formed for itself an ideal for the mission of Austria that Schröer expressed in these words: “If we pursue the comparison of Germany with ancient Greece, and of the Germanic with the Greek tribes, we find a great similarity between Austria and Macedonia. We see the beautiful task of Austria exemplified there: to cast the seeds of Western culture out over the East.”

[ 6 ] Schröer later became professor in the University of Budapest and then school director in Vienna; finally, he worked for many years as a professor of German literary history in the Vienna College of Technology. These positions were for him only an outer covering, so to speak, for his significant activity within Austrian spiritual life. This activity begins with an investigation into the soul and linguistic expressions of the German-Austrian folk life. He wants to know what is working and living in the people, not as a dry, prosaic researcher but rather as someone who wants to discover the riddle of the folk soul in order to see what forces of mankind are struggling to come into existence in these souls. Near the Pressburg region, among the farmers, there were living at that time some old Christmas plays. They are performed every year around Christmas time. In handwritten form they are passed down from generation to generation. They show how in the people the birth of Christ, and what is connected with it, lives dramatically in pictures with depth of heart. Schröer collects such plays in a little volume and writes an introduction to them in which he depicts this revelation of the folk soul with most loving devotion, such that his presentation allows the reader to immerse himself in the way the people feel and view things. Out of the same spirit he then undertakes to present the German dialects of the Hungarian mountain regions, of the West-Hungarian Germans, and of the Gottscheer area in Krain. His purpose there is always to solve the riddle of the organism of a people; his findings really give a picture of the life at work in the evolution of language and of the folk soul. And basically the thought is always hovering before him in all these endeavors of learning to know, from the motive forces of its peoples, what determines the life of Austria. A great deal, a very great deal, of the answer to the question, What weaves in the soul of Austria?, is to be found in Schröer's research into dialects.

But this spiritual work had yet another effect upon Schröer himself. It provided him with the basis for deep insights into the essential being of the human soul itself. These insights bore fruit when, as director of several schools, he could test how views about education and teaching take form in a thinker who has looked so deeply into the being of the heart of the people as he had through his research. And so he was able to publish a small work, Questions about Teaching, which in my view should be reckoned among the pearls of pedagogical literature. This little book deals brilliantly with the goals, methods, and nature of teaching. I believe that this little volume, completely unknown today, should be read by everyone who has anything to do with teaching within the German cultural realm. Although this book was written entirely for the situation in Austria. the indications there can apply to the whole German-speaking world. What one today might call outmoded about this book, published in 1876, is inconsiderable when compared with the way of picturing things that is alive in it. A way of picturing things like this, attained on the basis of a rich experience of life, remains ever fruitful even though someone living later must apply it to new conditions. In the last decades of his life Schröer's spiritual work was turned almost entirely to immersing itself in Goethe's life's work and way of picturing things. In the introduction to his book German Poetry of the Nineteenth Century, he stated: “We in Austria want to go hand in hand with the spiritual life of the German empire.” He regarded the world view of German idealism as the root of this spiritual life. And he expressed his adherence to this world view in the words: “The world-rejuvenating appearance of idealism in Germany, in an age of frivolity a hundred years ago, is the greatest phenomenon of modern history. Our intellect (Verstand)—focused only upon what is finite, not penetrating into the depths of essential being—and along with it the egoism focused upon satisfying sensual needs, suddenly retreated before the appearance of a spirit that rose above everything common.” (See the introduction to Schröer's edition of Faust). Schröer saw in Goethe's Faust “the hero of unconquerable idealism. He is the ideal hero of the age in which the play arose. His contest with Mephistopheles expresses the struggle of the new spirit as the innermost being of the age; and that is why this play is so great: it lifts us onto a higher level.”

[ 7 ] Schröer declares his unreserved allegiance to German idealism as a world view. In his History of German Poetry of the Nineteenth Century there stand the words with which he wants to characterize the thoughts in which the spirit of the German people expresses itself when it does this in the sense of its own primal being: “Within what is perceived experientially, determining factors are everywhere recognizable that are hidden behind what is finite, behind what can be known by experience. These factors must be called the ‘undetermined’ and must be felt everywhere to be what is constant in change, an eternal lawfulness, and as something infinite. The perceived infinite within the finite appears as idea; the ability to perceive the infinite appears as reason (Vernunft), in contrast to intellect, which remains stuck at what is surveyably finite and can perceive nothing beyond it.” At the same time, in the way Schröer declares his allegiance to this idealism, everything is also at work that is vibrating in his soul, which senses in its own being the Austrian spiritual stream. And this gives his world-view-idealism its particular coloring. When a thought is expressed, there is given it a certain coloring that does not allow it to enter right away the realm described by Hegel as the realm of philosophical knowledge when he said, “The task of philosophy is to grasp what is; for, what is reasonable is real, and what is real is reasonable. When philosophy paints its gray on gray then a form of life has become old; the owl of Minerva begins to fly only when dusk is descending.” (See my book Riddles of Philosophy, vol. I.) No, the Austrian, Schröer, does not want to see the world of thoughts gray on gray; ideas should shine in a color that ever refreshes and rejuvenates our deeper heart. And what would have mattered much more to Schröer in this connection than thinking about the bird of evening was to think about the deeper human heart struggling for light, seeking in the world of ideas the sun of that realm in which our intellect, focused upon the finite and upon the sense world, should be feeling the extinguishing of its light.

[ 8 ] Herman Grimm, the gifted art historian, had nothing but good to say about the Austrian culptor Heinrich Natter. In his essay on Natter, published in his Fragments (1900), one can also read what Grimm thought about Natter's relation to Austria. “When I meet Austrians, I am struck by their deep-rooted love for the soil of their particular fatherland and by their impulse to maintain spiritual community with all Germans. Let us think now of one such person, Ignaz Zingerles. Natter's statue of Walter von der Vogelweide owes its existence to the unceasing quiet work of Zingerles. He resembled the men of our earlier centuries through the fact that he was hardly conceivable outside the province of his immediate homeland. He was a figure with simple outlines, fashioned out of faithfulness and honesty as though out of blocks of stone. He was a Tyrolean, as though his mountains were the navel of the earth, an Austrian through and through, and at the same time one of the best and noblest Germans. And Natter was also all these: a good German, Austrian, and Tyrolean.” And about the monument to Walter von der Vogelweide in Bozen Herman Grimm says: “In Natter, inwardness of German feeling was united with formative imagination, His Walter von der Vogelweide stands in Bozen as a triumphant picture of German art, towering up in the crest of the Tyrolean mountains at the border country of the fatherland, A manly solid figure.”

I often had to think of these words of Hennan Grimm when the memory came alive in me of the splendid figure of the Austrian poet Fercher von Steinwand, who died in 1902. He was “all these: a good German, Austrian, and Carinthian,” although one could hardly say of him that he was “inconceivable outside the province of his immediate homeland.” I learned to know him at the end of the 1880's in Vienna and for a short time associated with him personally. He was sixty years old at the time: a true figure of light, even externally; an engaging warmth shone from his noble features, eloquent eyes, and expressive gestures; through tranquil clarity and self-possession, this soul of an older man still gave the effect of youthful freshness. And when one came to know this soul better, its particular nature and creations, one could see how a feeling life instilled by the Carinthian mountains united in this soul with a contemplative life in the power of the idealism in German world views. This contemplation (Sinnen) was already entirely native to his soul as a poetic world of pictures; this contemplation pointed with this world of pictures into the depths of existence; it confronted world riddles artistically, without the originality of artistic creation paling thereby into thought-poetry; one can observe this kind of contemplation in the following lines from Fercher von Steinwand's Chorus of Primal Dreams:

Out of all regions
Ever ascended,
Wanders an ether in far-radiant arches;
Travel the billows to
Depths ever silent.

There with our all-seeing
Will as their cargo,
Wending their way through the fog go our ferries;
Sail between wonderful
Banks new arising.

There before all-warming
Eyes of soft mildness
Winding and turning we fashion our patterns
Out all around dreaming
Regions of star-fields.

There to misfortune we
N'er are indebted,
There we constructed our fortresses hovering, And tribulations we
Joyfully shattered.

He who would paint you with
Most holy features,
Highest abode of our contemplative urgings:
Wait for the swiftest
Servants of love!

[ 9 ] The following verses seek to portray how the soul, in thinking-waking daydreams, lives in far-away starry worlds and in immediate reality; then the poet continues:

No matter what careful
Powers accomplish,
Only on dreaming's own wide-spreading pinions
Can what is mighty be
Gained now forever.

Every o'erpowering greatness of action,
All of the angels who guard what was planted
Are given counsel by
Dreams that inspire them.

[ 10 ] Fercher von Steinwand then sings further about the penetrating of thinking, spiritualized to the point of dreaming, into the depths of the world, and about the penetrating of that kind of dreaming which is an awakening out of our ordinary waking state into those depths where the life of what is spiritual in the world can make itself tangible to the soul:

Life that our pulsating
Hearts have perceived,
Life that our struggling hearts have ascended
To all the welcoming
Cries of the spirits:

[ 11 ] And then Fercher von Steinwand lets sound forth to the human spirit what the beings of the spirit realm speak to the soul that opens itself to them in inner contemplation:

Healed ones, now be here by
Loving encircled!
What you were seeking in uplifting hours,
Here, you selected ones,
Is it disclosed;
Here in the grandeur of
Halls of the Godhead,
Where to the heart other hearts are so pleasing,
Where buried voices are
Sounding forth newly

Where now the care-worn are
Royally striving,
Radiant souls now in smiles are all wreathed,
Round all the wrecks of the
Wheels of the ages—

Only the blinded ones,
Earth-bound and foolish,
Were for the gulf of destruction begotten,
Lost to the worlds of
Spirit perfection!
Weal to the sens'tive one
Round whom we hover,
Whom we enliven to bloss'ming existence,
All without weaving in
Fugitive shadows!

[ 12 ] In the literary works of Fercher von Steinwand there then follows upon this Chorus of Primal Dreams his Chorus of Primal Impulses:

In the distances unbounded
Of our ancient mother Night.
Hark—to be in inward conflict
Seems the deep mysterious might!
Do we hear present'ment striding?
Is our longing wide awake?
Was a spirit-lightning lit?
Are our dreams through spaces gliding?

How now are powers by powers enraptured,
Blessed exchanges!
Now sudden hastenings.
Then quiet lingerings,
Reveling listenings
Change into beckonings
Marveling fearings!
Charm of desiring
Mounts, and sinks down,
Sinks into hatred.
Faced with the pallid
Picture of embracing
Cannot clasp hatred.
Ramifications dim,
Inclinings burgeoning,
Send forth their tendrils.
Ponderous inklings
Dawn and go faltering
O'er the wide spaces,
Seem to give counsel
Or to give guidance.
What they're preparing
Is it the sowing
Of immense actions,
Of radiant ages?
Who felt the furrows
To be creative!
Who wandered through them
Blissfully savoring,
Or disentangling,
Grandeurs discovering!
Yonder the stir is like spirits embracing
We are enwarmed
And are receiving,
Seeking, and thinking,
See ourselves lifted,
Woven in joy with
Highest beginnings.
You wafting ‘round us,
In us arising:
“You are ideas!—”

[ 13 ] Reflecting in this way, the poet's soul enters into an experience of how the ideas of the world-spirit announce the secrets of existence to the spirit of man's soul and of how the spirit of man's soul beholds the shapers of sense-perceptible shapes.—After presenting the observations of the soul within the chorus of primal world impulses in brilliant, ringing pictures, the poet concludes:

May duration grow accustomed
To what urge has conjured up;
May adorning and appeasement
In creation's stream prevail.
Sweetest light! in noble ringing
Mounts my heart aloft to you:
Linger at your western gate;
Help to crown the deed of love!
Risen from all earthly bonds is our impulse Soul—resurrected!
But what is ripened
Ruling, and valid
Proves to be spirit!
All that is circling,
All earth foundations,
All heavenly kindlings are
Self-made in spirit,
Came forth from spirit,
Work through the spirit
–
Powerful freedom from chaos did fashion
Space for good fortune!
Cloaked, with the dew of its deep-breathing mildness, Forest and field!
Cared that the dew and the light be companions,
Forming the hem of deep transfiguration—
Cared that each droplet should float at the threshold
of Spiritual radiance!

In Fercher von Steinwand's Complete Works (published by Theodor Daberkow in Vienna), there are also several indications about his life given by the poet himself when pressed by friends on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, He wrote, “I began life on March 22, 1828 upon the heights of the Steinwand above the banks of the Möll in Carinthia (Kärten); that means, in the midst of a defiant congregation of mountains with their heads held high, beneath whose domineering grandeur burdened human beings seem continuously to grow poorer,”

Since, in his Chorus of Primal Impulses, we find the world view of German idealism cast in the form of a poetic creation, it is interesting to see how the poet, on his paths through Austrian spiritual life, receives impulses from this world view already in his youth. He describes how he enters the university in Graz: “With my credentials—which of course consisted only of my report cards—held tight against my chest, I presented myself to the dean. That was Professor Edlauer, a criminologist of high repute. He hoped to see me (he said) industriously present in his lecture course on natural law. Behind the curtain of this innocent title he presented us for the whole semester, in rousing lectures, with those German philosophers who, under the fatherly care of our well-meaning spiritual guardians were banned and kept from us: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and so on—heroes, therefore; that means men who founded and fructified all areas of pure thinking, who gave the language and created the concepts for all the other sciences, and who, consequently, are illustrious names shining from our street comers today and seeming almost strange there in their particular diamond clarity. This semester was my vita nuova!”

[ 16 ] Whoever learns to know Fercher von Steinwand's tragedy Dankmar, his Countess Seelenbrand, his German Tones from Austria, and other works of his will be able through this to feel many of the forces that were working in the Austrian spiritual life of the second half of the nineteenth century. And everything about Fercher von Steinwand testifies to the fact that one receives out of his soul a picture from this spiritual life in clarity, truth, and genuineness. The amiable Austrian poet in dialect Leopold Hormann felt rightly when he wrote the words:

Far from all baseness
All avarice and meanness;
Foe of publicity,
That loathesome false lady;
German in soul,
Strong yet with kindness
Great in his thinking,
No faltering and wavering,
Proof against all objections:—
Fercher von Steinwand!

[ 17 ] Out of the Austrian spiritual life of the second half of the nineteenth century, a thinker arose who brought to expression deeply significant characteristics of the content of modern world views: the moral philosopher of Darwinism, Bartholomaeus von Carneri. He was a thinker who experienced the public life of Austria as his own happiness or suffering; for many years, as a representative in the federal council, he took an active interest in this life with all the power of his spirit. Carneri could only appear at first to be an opponent of a world view in accordance with the spirit. For, all his efforts go to shaping a world picture from only those mental pictures which occur in the train of thought stimulated by Darwinism. But if one reads Carneri with a sense not only for the content of his views but also for what lay beneath the surface of his truth-seeking soul, one will discover a remarkable fact. An almost entirely materialistic world picture takes shape in this thinker, but with a clarity of thought that stems from the deep-lying, idealistic basic impulse of his being. For him as for many of his contemporaries the mental pictures growing from a world view rooted entirely in the soil of Darwinism burst into his thought-life with such overpowering force that he could do no other than incorporate all his consideration of man's spiritual life into this world view. To want to approach the spirit cognitively on any path other than those taken by Darwin seemed to him to rend the unified being that must extend out over all human striving in knowledge. In his view Darwinism had shown how a unified, lawful interrelationship of causes and effects encompasses the development of all the beings of nature up to man. Whoever understands the sense of this interrelationship must also see how the same lawfulness enhances and refines the natural forces and drives in man in such a way that they grow upward to the heights of moral ideals and views. Carneri believes that only man's blind arrogance and misled overestimation of himself can entice his striving for knowledge into wanting to approach the spiritual world by different cognitive means than in approaching nature.

Every page of Carneri's writings on the moral being of man, however, shows that he would have shaped his view of life in Hegel's way if, at a particular point of development in his life, Darwinism had not struck like lightning, with irresistible suggestive force, into his thought-world; this occurred in such a way that with great effort he silenced his predisposition toward an idealistically developed world view. As his writings also attest, this world view would definitely not have arisen through the pure thinking at work in Hegel, but rather through a thinking that resounded with a hearty, contemplative quality; but his thinking would have gone in Hegel's direction.

As though from hidden depths of Carneri's soul, Hegel's way of picturing things often arises in Carneri's writings, cautioning him as it were. On page 79 of his Fundamentals of Ethics one reads: “With Hegel ... a dialectical movement took the place of the law of causality: a gigantic thought, which, like the Titans all, could not escape the fate of arrogance. His monism wanted to storm Olympus but sank back down to earth; it remained a beacon for all future thought, however, illuminating the path and also the abyss.” On page 154 of the same book, Carneri speaks of the nature of the Greek way and says of it: “In this respect We do not remember the mythical heroic age, nor yet the times of Homer. ... We take ourselves back to the highlight of ages that Hegel depicted so aptly as the youthful age of mankind.” On page 189 Carneri characterizes the attempts that have been made to fathom the laws of thinking, and observes: “The most magnificent example of this kind is Hegel's attempt to let thoughts unfold, so to speak, without being determined by the thinker. The fact that he went too far in this does not prevent an unprejudiced person from acknowledging this attempt (to see one single law as underlying all physical and spiritual evolution) to be the most splendid one on the whole history of philosophy. The services he rendered to the development of German thinking are imperishable, and many an enthusiastic student who later became an embittered opponent of his has unintentionally raised a lasting monument to him in the perfection of expression he acquired through Hegel.” On page 421 one reads: “Hegel has told us, in an unsurpassable manner, how far one can go in philosophizing” with mere, so-called, healthy common sense.

Now one could assert that Carneri too has “raised a lasting monument to Hegel in the perfection of expression he acquired through Hegel,” even though he applied this way of expression to a world picture with which Hegel would certainly not have been in agreement. But Darwinism worked upon Carneri with such suggestive power that he included Hegel, along with Spinoza and Kant, among those thinkers of whom he said: “They would have acknowledged the sincerity of his (Carneri's) striving, which would never have dared to look beyond them if Darwin had not rent the curtain that hung like night over the whole creation as long as the theory of purpose remained irrefutable. We have this consciousness, but also the conviction that these men would have left many things unsaid or would have said them differently if it had been granted them to live in our age of liberated natural science...”

[ 18 ] Carneri has developed a variety of materialism in which mental sharpness often degenerates into naiveté, and insights about “liberated natural science” often degenerate into blindness toward the impossibility of one's own concepts. “We grasp substance as matter insofar as phenomena—resulting from the divisibility and movement of substance—work corporeally, i.e., as mass, upon our senses. If the divisions or differentiations go so far that the phenomena resulting from them are no longer sense-perceptible but are now only perceptible to thinking, then the effect of substance is a spiritual one” (Carneri's Fundamentals of Ethics, p. 30). That is as if someone were to explain reading by saying: As long as a person has not learned to read, he cannot say what stands upon the written page of a book. For, only the shapes of the letters reveal themselves to his gaze. As long as he can view only these letter shapes, into which the words are divisible, his observation of the letters cannot lead to reading. Only when he manages also to perceive the letter shapes in a yet more divided or differentiated form will the sense of these letters work upon his soul.

Of course, an unshakable believer in materialism would find an objection like this absurd. But the difficulty of putting materialism in the right light lies precisely in this necessity of expressing such simple thoughts in order to do so. One must express thoughts that one can scarcely believe the adherents of materialism do not form for themselves. And so the biased charge can easily be leveled against someone trying to clarify materialism that he is using meaningless phraseology to counter a view that rests upon the empirical knowledge of modern science and upon its rigorous principles.¹ Nevertheless, the great power of materialism to convince its adherents arises only through the fact that they are unable to feel the weight of the simple arguments that destroy their view. Like so many others, they are convinced not by the light of logical reasons which they have examined, but by the force of habitual thoughts which they have not examined, which, in fact, they feel no immediate need to examine at all. But Carneri does differ from the materialists who scarcely have any inkling of this need, through the fact that his idealism continuously brings this need to his consciousness; he must therefore silence this need, often by quite artificial means. He has scarcely finished professing that the spiritual is an effect of finely split-up substance when he adds: “This conception of the spirit will be unsatisfying to many people who make other claims about the spirit; still, in the further course of our investigations, the value of our view will prove to be significant and entirely able to show the materialism which wants to grasp the phenomena of the spirit corporeally that it cannot go beyond certain bounds” (Fundamentals of Ethics, p. 30). Yes, Carneri has a real aversion to being counted among the materialists; he defends himself against this with statements like the following: “Rigid materialism is just as one-sided as the old metaphysics: the former arrives at no meaning for its configurations; the latter arrives at no configurations for its meaning; with materialism there is a corpse; with metaphysics there is a ghost; and what they are both struggling for in vain is the creative heat of sentient life” (Fundamentals of Ethics, p. 68).

But Carneri does feel, in fact, how justified one is in calling him a materialist; for, no one with healthy senses, after all, even if he is an adherent of materialism, will declare that a moral ideal can be “grasped corporeally,” to use Carneri's expression. He will say only that a moral ideal manifests in connection with what is material through a material process. And that is also what Carneri states in his above assertion about the divisibility of substance. Out of this feeling he then says (in his book Sensation and Consciousness): “One will reproach us with materialism insofar as we deny all spirit and grant existence only to matter. But this reproach is no longer valid the moment one takes one's start from this ideal nature of one's picture of the world, for which matter itself is nothing but a concept a thinking person has.” But now take hold of your head and feel whether it is still all there after participating in this kind of a conceptual dance! Substance becomes matter when it is so coarsely split up that it works only “upon the senses as mass”; it becomes spirit when it is split up so finely that it is then “perceptible only to thinking.” And matter, i.e., coarsely split up substance, is after all only “a concept a thinking person has.” When split up coarsely, therefore, substance achieves nothing more than playing the—to a materialist!—dubious role of a human concept; but split up more finely, substance becomes spirit. But then the bare human concept would have to split up even finer. Now such a world view would make that hero, who pulled himself out of the water by his own hair, into the perfect model for reality.

One can understand why another Austrian thinker, F. von Feldegg (in the November 1894 edition of “German Words”), would reply to Carneri with these words: “The moment one takes one's start from the ideal nature of one's picture of the world! What an arbitrary supposition, in all the forced wrong-headedness of that thought! Does it indeed depend so entirely on our pleasure whether we take our start from the ideal nature of our picture of the world or, for example, from its opposite—from the reality of our picture of the world in fact? And matter, for this ideal nature, is supposed to be altogether nothing except a concept a thinking person has? This is actually the most absolute idealism—like that of a Hegel, for example—which is meant to render assistance here against the reproach of materialism; but it won't do to turn to someone in the moment of need whom one has persistently denied until then. And how is Carneri to reconcile this idealistic belief with everything else in his book? In fact, there is only one explanation for this state of affairs and that is: Even Carneri is afraid of, yet covets, the transcendental. But that is a half-measure which exacts a heavy toll. Carneri's ‘Monistic Misgivings’ fall in this way into two heterogeneous parts, into a crudely materialistic part and into a hiddenly idealistic part. In the one part, the author's head is correct in the end, because he is undeniably sunk over his head in materialism; but in the other part, the author's deeper heart (Gemüt) resists the clumsy demands of rationalism's modes and conceits; it resists them with all the power of that metaphysical magic from which, even in our crudely sense-bound age, nobler natures are not able to escape entirely.”

[ 18 ] And yet, in spite of all this, Carneri is a significant personality of whom one can say (as I indicated in my book Riddles of Philosophy: “This Austrian thinker sought, out of Darwinism, to open wide vistas in viewing the world and in shaping life. Eleven years after the appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species, Carneri came out with his book Morality and Darwinism, in which, in a most comprehensive manner, he turned this new world of ideas into the foundation of an ethical world view. After that he worked ceaselessly to elaborate a Darwinistic ethics. Carneri seeks to find elements in our picture of nature through which the self-conscious ‘I’ can fit into this picture. He wants to think this picture of nature so broadly and largely that it can also comprise the human soul.”

By their very character, Carneri's writings seem to me in fact everywhere to challenge us to root everything out of their content that their author had forced himself into by surrendering to the yoke of the materialistic world view; his writings challenge us to look only at that which—like an elemental inspiration of his deeper heart—appears in them as a revelation of a large-scale human being. Just read, from this point of view, what he thinks the task to be for an education toward true humanness: “It is the task of education ... to develop the human being in such a way that he must do the good, that human dignity not suffer from this, but that the harmonious development of a being who by his very nature is happy to do what is noble and great is an ethical phenomenon more beautiful than anything we could imagine. ... The accomplishment of this magnificent task is possible through man's striving for bliss, into which his drive for self-preservation purifies itself as soon as his intelligence develops fully. Thinking is based on sensation and is only the other side of feeling; which is why all thinking that does not attain maturity through the warmth of feeling—and also all feeling that does not illuminate itself with the light of thinking—is one-sided. It is the task of education, through the harmonious development of thinking and feeling, to purify man's striving for bliss in such a way that the ‘I’ will see in the ‘you’ its natural extension and in the ‘we’ its necessary consummation, and egoism will recognize altruism as its higher truth. ... Only from the standpoint of our drive to attain bliss is it comprehensible that a person would give his life for a loved one or to a noble end: he sees precisely in this his higher happiness. In seeking his true happiness, man attains morality, But he must be educated toward this, educated in such a way that he can absolutely do no other. In the blissful feeling of the nobility of his deed he finds his most beautiful recompense and demands nothing more.” (See Carneri's introduction to his book Modern Man.) One can see: Carneri considers our striving for bliss, as he sees it, to be a power of nature lying within true human nature; he considers it to be a power that, under the right conditions, must unfold, the way a seed must unfold when it has the appropriate conditions. In the same way that a magnet, through its own particular being, has the power to attract, so the animal has the drive of self-preservation and man the drive to attain bliss. One does not need to graft anything onto man's being in order to lead them to morality; one needs only to develop rightly their drive to attain bliss; then, through this drive, they will unfold themselves to true morality. Carneri observes in detail the various manifestations of human soul life: how sensation stimulates or dulls this life; how emotions and passions work: and how in all this the drive to attain bliss unfolds. He presupposes this drive in all these soul manifestations as their actual basic power. And through the fact that he endows this concept of bliss with a broad meaning, all the sours wishing, wanting, and doing falls—for him, in any case—into the realm of this concept. How a person is depends upon which picture of his own happiness is hovering before him: One person sees his happiness in satisfying his lower drives; another person sees it in deeds of devoted love and self-denial. If it were said of someone that he was not striving for happiness, that he was only selflessly doing his duty, Carneri would object: This is precisely what gives him the feeling of happiness—to chase after happiness but not consciously. But in broadening the concept of bliss in this way, Carneri reveals the absolutely idealistic basic tenor of his world view. For if happiness is something quite different for different people, then morality cannot lie in the striving for happiness; the fact is, rather, that man feels his ability to be moral as something that makes him happy. Through this, human striving is not brought down out of the realm of moral ideals into the mere craving for happiness; rather, one recognizes that it lies in the essential being of man to see his happiness in the achieving of his ideals. “We are convinced,” says Carneri, “that ethics has to make do with the argument that the path of man is the path to bliss, and that man, in traveling the path to bliss, matures into a moral being.” (Fundamentals of Ethics, p. 423)

Whoever believes now that through such views Carneri wants to make ethics Darwinistic is allowing himself to be misled by the way this thinker expresses himself. He is compelled to express himself like this by the overwhelming power of the predominant natural-scientific way of picturing things in his age. The truth is: Carneri does not want to make ethics Darwinistic; he wants to make Darwinism ethical. He wants to show that one need only know man in his true being—like the natural scientist seeks to know a being in nature—in order to find him to be not a nature being but rather a spirit being. Carneri's significance consists in the fact that he wants to let Darwinism flow into a world view in accordance with the spirit. And through this he is one of the significant spirits of the second half of the nineteenth century. One does not understand the demands placed on humanity by the natural-scientific insights of this age if one thinks like those people who want to let all striving for knowledge merge into natural science, if one thinks like those who toward the end of the nineteenth century called themselves adherents of materialism, or even if one thinks like those today who actually are not less materialistic but who assure us ever and again that materialism has “long ago been overcome” by science. Today, many people say they are not materialists only because they lack the ability to understand that they are in fact materialists. One can flatly state that nowadays many people stop worrying about their materialism by pretending to themselves that in their view it is no longer necessary to call themselves materialists. One must nevertheless label them so. One has not yet overcome materialism by rejecting the view of a series of thinkers from the second half of the nineteenth century who held all spiritual experiences to, be the mere working of substance; one overcomes it only by allowing oneself to think about the spiritual in a way that accords with the spirit, just as one thinks about nature in a way that accords with nature. What is meant by this is already clear from the preceding arguments of this book, but will become particularly apparent in the final considerations conceived of as “new perspectives” in our last chapter,

But one will also not do justice to the demands placed on humanity by the natural-scientific insights of our age if one sets up a world view against natural science, and only rejects the “raw” mental pictures of “materialism,” Since the achievement of the natural-scientific insights of the nineteenth century, any world view that is in accordance with the spirit and that wishes to be in harmony with its age must take up these insights as part of its thought-world. And Carneri grasped this powerfully and expressed it urgently in his writings. Carneri, who was only taking his first steps on the path of a genuine understanding of modern natural scientific mental pictures, could not yet fully see that such an understanding does not lead to a consolidating of materialism but rather to its true overcoming, Therefore he believed—to refer once more to the words of Brentano (see page 45 of this book)—that no success can be expected from modern science in “gaining certainty about the hopes of a Plato and Aristotle for the continued existence of our better part after the dissolution of the body,” But whoever goes deeply enough into Carneri's thoughts, not only to grasp their content but also to observe the path of knowledge on which this thinker could take only the first steps, will find that through him, in another direction, something similar has occurred for the elaboration of the world view of German idealism as occurred through Troxler, Immanuel Hermann Fichte, and others going in the direction characterized in this book. These spirits sought, with the powers of Hegelian thinking, to penetrate not merely into spirit that has become sense-perceptible but also into that realm of spirit which does not reveal itself in the sense world. Carneri strives, with a view of life in accordance with the spirit, to devote himself to the natural-scientific way of picturing things. The further pursuit of the path sensed by these thinkers can show that the cognitive powers to which they turned will not destroy the “hopes of a Plato and Aristotle for the continued existence of our better part after the dissolution of the body,” but rather will give these hopes a sound basis in knowledge. On the one hand, F.v. Feldegg, whom we have already mentioned (“German Words,” November 1894), is certainly justified when he says—in connection with the conflict in which Carneri was placed toward idealism and materialism:—“But the time is no longer far off in which this conflict will be settled, not merely as one might suppose within the single individual, but within our whole cultural consciousness. But Carneri's ‘Misgivings’ are perhaps an isolated forerunner of completely different and more powerful ‘Misgivings,’ which then, raging toward us like a storm, will sweep away everything about our ‘scientific’ creed that has not yet fallen prey to self-disintegration,” On the other hand, one can recognize that Carneri, by the work he did on Darwinism for ethics, became at the same time one of the first to overcome the Darwinian way of thinking.

[ 19 ] Carneri was a personality whose thinking about the questions of existence gave all his activity and work in life their particular stamp. He was not one of those who become “philosophers” by allowing the healthy roots of life reality to dry up within them. Rather, he was one of those who proved that a realistic study of life can create practical people better than that attitude which keeps itself fearfully, and yet comfortably, at a distance from all ideas and which obstinately harps on the theme that the “true” conduct of life must not be spoiled by any dreaming in concepts. Carneri was an Austrian representative in the Styrian provincial diet from 1861 on, and in the federal council from 1870 to 1891. Even now, I often have to think back on the heart-lifting impression he made on me when, from the gallery of the Viennese federal council, as a young man of twenty-five just beginning life, I heard Carneri speak. A man stood down there who had taken up deeply into his thoughts the determining factors of Austrian life and the situation arising from the evolution of Austrian culture and from the life forces of its peoples; this was a man who spoke what he had to express from that high vantage point upon which his world view had placed him. And in all this there was never a pale thought. always tones of heart's warmth, always ideas that were strong with reality, not the words of a merely thinking head; rather, the revelations of a whole man who felt Austria pulsing in his own soul and who had clarified this feeling through the idea: “Mankind will deserve its name wholly, and wholly travel the path of morality only when it knows no other battle than work. no other shield than right, no other weapon than intelligence, no other banner than civilization.” (Carneri, Morality and Darwinism, p. 508)

[ 20 ] I have tried to show how a thoughtful idealism constitutes the roots, solidly planted in reality, of Carneri's soul life; but also how—overwhelmed by the materialistic view of the time—this idealism goes its way accompanied by a thinking whose contradictions are indeed sensed but not fully resolved. I believe that this, in the form in which it manifests in Carneri, is based on a particular characteristic that the folk spirit (Volkstum) in Austria can easily impress upon the soul, a characteristic, it seems to me, that can be understood only with difficulty outside of Austria, even by Germans. One can experience it, perhaps, only if one has oneself grown up in the Austrian folk spirit (Volksart). This characteristic has been determined by the evolution of Austrian life during the last centuries. Through education there, one is brought into !:I. different relationship to the manifestations of the immediate folk spirit than in German areas outside Austria. In Austria, what one takes up through one's schooling bears traits that are not so directly a transformation of what one experiences from the folk spirit as is the case with the Germans in Germany. Even when Fichte unfolds his thoughts to their fullest extent, there lives something in them recognizable as a direct continuation of the folk element working in his Central German fatherland, in the house of Christian Fichte, the farmer and weaver. In Austria, what one develops in oneself through education and self-education often bears fewer of such directly indigenous characteristics. The indigenous element lives more indirectly, yet often no less powerfully thereby. One bears conflicting feelings in one's soul; this conflict, in its unconscious working, gives life there its particularly Austrian coloring.

As an example of an Austrian with this soul characteristic, let us look at Mission, one of the most significant Austrian poets in dialect.

[ 21 ] To be sure, poetry in dialect has also arisen in other Germans out of subterranean depths of the soul similar to those of Mission. But what is characteristic of him is that he became a poet in dialect through the above-mentioned trait existing in the soul life of many Austrians. Joseph Mission was born in 1803, in Mühlbach, in the Lower Austrian district, below Mannhardtsberg; he completed school in Krems and entered the Order of Pious Schools. He worked as a secondary school teacher in Horn, Krems, and Vienna. In 1850 there appeared a pearl of Austrian poetry in dialect written by him: “Ignaz, a Lower Austrian Farmer Boy, Goes Abroad.” It was published in an uncompleted form. The provost Karl Landsteiner, in a beautiful little book, later wrote about Mission and reprinted the uncompleted poem.)

Karl Julius Schröer said of it (1875), and quite aptly, in I my opinion: “As small as the poem is and as solitary as it has remained through the fact that Mission published nothing further, it nevertheless deserves special attention. It is of the first order among Austria's poems in dialect. The epic peacefulness that permeates the whole, and the masterful depiction in the details that enthralls us constantly, I astonishing and refreshing us through its truth—these are qualities in Mission that no one else has equaled.” The setting out on his travels of a Lower Austrian farmer boy is what Mission portrays. A direct, truth-sustained revelation of the Lower Austrian folk spirit (Volkstum) lives in this poem. Mission lived in the world of thoughts he had attained through his education and self-education. This life represented the one side of his soul. This was not a direct continuation of the life rooted in his Lower Austrianness. But precisely because of this and as though unconnected to this more personal side of his soul experiences, there arose in his heart (Gemüt) the truest picture of his folk spirit, as though from subterranean depths of the soul, and placed itself there I as the other side of his inner experience. The magic of the direct folk spirit quality of Mission's poem is an effect of the “two souls within his breast.” I will now quote a part of this poem here and then reproduce the Lower Austrian dialect in High German prose as truly and modestly as possible. (In this reproduction, my intentions are only that the sense of the poem emerge fully in a feeling way. If, in such a translation, one simply replaces the word in dialect with the corresponding word in High German, the matter becomes basically falsified. For, the word in dialect often corresponds to a completely different nuance of feeling than the corresponding word in High German.)

Lehr vo main Vodern auf d'Roas

Naaz, iazn loos, töös, wos a ta so, töös sockt ta tai Voda.
God, what's so good! and try tai luck ö da Waiden.
Muis a da sogn töös, wo a da so, töös los der aa gsackt sai.
I and tai Muida are old and tahoam, know as ee, looks nothing out.
What you look and work and plod and do not care
Do it for the children, what don't you do, don't leave the place!
I'm just a pressed person and a black woman,
Graif an s'am aa, ma fint töös pai ortlinga rechtschoffan Kinern,
Gladly under Orm, on taas mer d'Ergiibnus laichter daschwingan.
If you don't have any luck, you won't live all your life.
Just stay in the same place, in the middle of the golden mass, don't get bored.
Your luck is round as a ball, balls so lightly toni as touaha.
But if something happens and misfortune befalls you, don't let it go.
Don't let anything happen to you, don't let it happen to me, don't let it happen to you.
Klock's unsan Heagoot, pitt'en, iih so ders, er mochts wida pessa!
Mocka'r and hocka'r and pfnotten and trenzen with the kimt nix außa.
Head hanging, just as if amt' Heana had eaten her protest:
You don't like it bad, you don't like it bad, you don't like it bad! Look at your soul, what you have, think about the future!
If you give something, don't talk about it, take it and so for it: good luck!
Look Naaz, mirk ta dos fai: what little politeness iis no longer gstroft!
Get ti nea ritterla, Fremd zügelt t'Leud, ist a Sprichwoat, a Worwoat.
Let's go, don't wash your hands, don't get any more clay. Go on, don't open your eyes, you won't be lucky in Trambuich.
Go two weeks and tar oani is naich, so gee du en olden.
If you go to a place that is also often the case, you are a big one -
Look at tain Gsund, ta Gsund iis pai olIn no allwail tos Pessa.
So what do you have in the world if you are not healthy? - - - - -
Come back and you'll find our old friends in the parlor,
We often go to places where you and your friends are happy to meet us,
Finding our guittäter and our vastoabani friendschoft! Olli, sö kenan uns glai - und töös, Naaz, töös is dos Schöner!"

Advice from my Father for my Travels
(Translation of Rudolf Steiner's High German prose version.)

Ignaz, now listen well to what I say to you; I am your father.
In God's name, since it must be so that you are to seek your fortune in the wide world,
Therefore I must tell you this; and what I tell you take well to heart.
I and your mother are old and have stayed at home; you know that nothing comes from that.
One slaves away, takes pains, works hard, and weakens oneself in the care of work
One does this out of love for one's children; what would one not do just so they will not fall into bad ways.
If later one becomes weak and sick, and hard times come,
Even they spring upon us lovingly if, when they come, proper honest children
Are standing by to help, so that one can more easily do what the state and life demands.
If good fortune should find you, don't live like a cavalier.
Stay as you were, in the golden mean of the middle road; do not budge from the right path of life.
Good fortune is round like a ball; it rolls just as easily away from as toward us.
If some effort does not succeed, or if a misfortune befalls you, do not speak of it to people.
Remain calm; let nothing show; do not be faint-hearted;
Pour out your troubles to God alone; beg him; I tell you, He makes everything better again!
To act troubled, to withdraw, to pull a sour face, to be whiny: nothing is achieved by that.
To let your head hang as though the chickens had eaten your bread away from you:
That improves nothing bad, let alone making the good even better!
Guard the possessions you take with you; take a little care for the future.
If someone gives you something, just receive it, without affectation, and say: “God bless you!”
Listen, Ignaz, and remember this well: no one has ever been punished for being polite!
Don't act stubborn; new places make a person modest; this is a saying and a true word.
Don't be led astray into gambling; don't let the dance floor mean too much to you.
Don't let anyone read your future in the cards; and do not seek your destiny in the book of dreams.
If two paths lie before you and one of them is new, then you take the old one.
If one is crooked, which is often the case, then you take the straight one.
Protect your health; health is the best of all possessions.
Admit it to me, after all: What does one really possess in the world if one lacks health?
- - - - -
If you ever come back home and no longer find us old folk in this little room,
Then we are there where your grandfather and your grandmother await us with joy,
Where our benefactors and our dead relatives will find us!
They will all recognize us at once—and this, Ignaz, is something very—beautiful.

[ 22 ] In 1879 Karl Julius Schröer writes the following about this Austrian from whose educated soul there arose so magnificently the life of the peasants and also, as the above section of his poem shows so well, the native philosophy of the peasants: “His talent found no encouragement. Although he wrote much more than the above work, he burned his entire literary output ... and now lives as librarian for the Piaristic faculty of St. Thekla of the Fields in Vienna, isolated from all social intercourse, as he puts it, ‘without joy or sorrow.’” As in the case of Joseph Mission one must seek many personalities of Austrian spiritual life living in obscurity.

Mission cannot come into consideration as a thinker among the personalities portrayed in this book. Nevertheless, to picture his soul life gives one an understanding for the particular coloration of the ideas of Austrian thinkers. The thoughts of Schelling, Hegel, Fichte, and Planck shape themselves plastically out of each other like parts of a thought-organism. One thought grows forth from the other.

And in the physiognomy of this whole thought-organism one recognizes characteristics of a certain people. In the case of Austrian thinkers one thought stands more beside the other; and each one grows on its own—not so much out of the other—but out of a common soul ground. Therefore the total configuration does not bear the direct characteristics of the people; but, on the other hand, these characteristics are poured out over each individual thought like a kind of basic mood. This basic mood is held back by these thinkers within their heart (Gemüt) in the way natural to them; it sounds forth but faintly. It manifests in a personality like Mission as homesickness for what is elemental in his people. In Schröer, Fercher von Steinwand, Cameri, and even in Hamerling, this basic mood works along everywhere in the fundamental tone of their striving. Through this, their thinking takes on a contemplative character.

[ 23 ] In Robert Hamerling one of the greatest poets of modern times has arisen from the lower Austrian district. At the same time he is one of the bearers of the idealism in German world views. In this book I do not intend to speak about the nature and significance of Hamerling's literary works. I wish only to indicate something of the position he took within the evolution of world views in modern times. He did in fact give expression in the form of thoughts to his world view in his work The Atomism of Will. (The Styrlan poet and folk author Adolf Harpf published this book in 1891, after Hamerling's death.) The book bears the subtitle “Contribution to a Critique of Modern Knowledge.”

[ 24 ] Hamerling knew that many who called themselves philosophers would receive his “contribution” with—perhaps tolerant—bewonderment. Many might think: What could this idealistically inclined poet undertake to accomplish in a field that demands the strictly scientific approach? And the presentations in his book did not convince those who asked this; for their judgment of him was only a wave rising from the depths of their souls where (in an unconscious or subconscious way) this judgment issued from habits of thought. Such people can be very clever; scientifically they can be very important: and yet the struggles of a truly poetic nature are not comprehensible to them. Within the soul of such a poetic nature there live all the conflicts from which the riddles of the world present themselves to human beings. A truly poetic nature, therefore, has inner experience of these world riddles. When such a nature expresses itself poetically, there holds sway in the foundations of his soul the questioning world order that,without transforming itself in his consciousness into thoughts, manifests itself in elemental artistic creation. To be sure, no inkling of the real being of such true poetic natures is present even in those poets who recoil from a world view as from a fire that might singe their “life-filled originality.” A true poet might never shape thoughts in his consciousness for what actually lives powerfully in the roots of his soul life in the way of unconscious world thoughts: nevertheless, he stands with his inner experience in those depths of reality of which a person has no inkling if, in his comfortable wisdom, he regards as mere dreams the place where sense-perceptible reality is granted its existence from out of the spirit. If now, for once, a truly poetic nature like Robert Hamerling, without dulling his creative poetic power, is able to lift into his consciousness, as a thought-world, what often has remained unconscious in other poets, then, with respect to such a phenomenon, one can also hold the view that, through this, special light is shed from spiritual depths upon the riddles of the world. In the foreword of his Atomism of Will, Hamerling himself tells how he arrived at his thought-world. “I did not suddenly throw myself upon philosophy at some point out of a whim, for example, or because I wanted to by my hand at something different. Moved by the natural and inescapable urge that drives us, after all, to search out the truth and solve the riddles of existence, I have occupied myself since earliest youth with the great questions about human cognition. I have never been able to regard philosophy as a special department of science that one can study or not study—like statistics or forestry—but always as the investigation into what is most immediate important, and interesting to every person. ... For my own part, I could by no means keep myself from following the most primal, natural, and universal of all spiritual drives and from forming a judgment over the course of the years about the fundamental questions of existence and life.”

One of the people who valued Hamerling's thought-world highly was Vincenz Knauer, the learned and sensitive Benedictine priest living in Vienna. As guest lecturer at the university in Vienna, he held lectures in which he wanted to show how Hamerling stood in that evolutionary stream of world views that began with Thales in Greece and that manifested in the Austrian poet and thinker in its most significant form for the end of the nineteenth century. To be sure, Vincenz Knauer belonged to those researchers to whom narrow-heartedness is foreign. As a young philosopher he wrote a book on the moral philosophy in Shakespeare's works. (Knauer's lectures in Vienna were published under the title The Main Problems of Philosophy from Thales to Hamerling.)

[ 25 ] The basic idealistic mood underlying Hamerling's view of reality also lives in his literary work. The figures in his epic and dramatic creations are not a copy of what spirit-shy observation sees in outer life; they show everywhere how the human soul receives direction and impulses from a spiritual world. Adherents of spirit-shy observation are critical of such creations. They call them bloodless mental products lacking the juice of real life. They are often to be heard belaboring the catch phrase: The characters of this poet are not like the people who walk around in the world; they are schemata, born of abstractions. If the “men of reality” who speak like this could only have an inkling, in fact, how much they themselves are walking abstractions and their belief the abstraction of an abstraction! If they only knew how soulless their blood-filled characters are to someone having a sense not just for pulsing blood but also for the way soul pulses in the blood. From this kind of “reality standpoints” one has said that Hamerling's dramatic work Danton and Robespierre has enriched the shadow folk of bygone revolutionary heros with a number of new schemata.

[ 26 ] Hamerling defended himself against such criticisms in his “Epilogue to the Critics” which he appended to the later editions of his Ahasver in Rome. In this epilogue he writes: “... People say that Ahasver in Rome is an ‘allegorical’ work—a word that immediately makes many people break out in goose-bumps.—The poem is allegorical, to be sure, insofar as a mythical figure is woven in whose right to existence is always based only upon the fact that it represents something. For, every myth is an idea brought into picture form by the imagination of the people. But, people will say, Nero is also supposed to ‘represent’ something—the ‘lust for life’! All right, he does represent the lust for life; but no differently than Moliere's Miser represents miserliness and Shakespeare's Romeo love. There are, to be sure, poetic figures that are nothing more at all than allegorical schemata and consist only of their inner abstract significance—comparable to Heine's sick, skinny Kanonikus who finally was composed of nothing but ‘spirit and bandages.’ But, for a poetic figure filled with real life, its inherent significance is not some vampire that sucks out its blood. Does anything actually exist that ‘signifies’ nothing? I would like to know, after all, how a beggar would manage not to signify poverty and a Croesus wealth. ... I believe therefore that Nero, who is thirsting for life, sacrifices Just as little of his reality by ‘signifying’ lust for life when placed next to Ahasver, who is longing for death, as a rich merchant sacrifices of his blooming stoutness by happening to stand beside a beggar and necessarily making visible, in an allegorical group, the contrast between poverty and wealth,” This is how a poet, ensouled by an idealistic world view, repulses the attacks of those who shudder if they catch a scent anywhere of an idea rooted in true reality, in spiritual reality.

[ 27 ] When one begins a reading of Hamerling's Atomism of Will, one can at first have the definite feeling that he let himself be convinced by Kantianism that a knowledge of true reality, of the “thing-in-itself,” was impossible. Still, in the further course of the presentations in his book, one sees that what happened for Hamerling with Kantianism was like Carneri with Darwinism. He let himself be overcome by the suggestive power of certain Kantian thoughts; but then the view wins out in him that man—even though he cannot push through to true reality by looking outward with his senses—does nevertheless encounter true reality when he delves down through the surface of soul experience into the foundations of the soul.

[ 28 ] Hamerling begins in an entirely Kantian way; “Certain stimuli produce odors in our sense of smell. The rose, therefore, has no fragrance if no one smells it.—Certain oscillations of the air produce sound in our ear. Sound, therefore, does not exist without an ear. A rifle shot, therefore, would not ring out if no one heard it. ... Whoever holds onto this will understand what a naive mistake it is to believe that, besides the perception (Anschauung) or mental picture we call ‘horse,’ there exists yet another horse—and in fact only then the actual real one—of which our perception ‘horse’ is only a copy. Outside of myself there is—let me state this again—only the sum total of those determining factors which cause a perception to be produced in my senses which I call a ‘horse’.” These thoughts work with such suggestive power that Hamerling can add to them the words: “If that is not obvious to you, dear reader, and if your understanding shies away from this fact like a skittish horse, then read no further; leave this and every other book on philosophical matters unread; for you lack the necessary ability to grasp a fact without bias and to retain it in thought.” I would like to respond to Hamerling: “May there in fact be many people whose intellect does indeed shy away from the opening words of his book like a skittish horse but who also possess enough strength of ideas to value rightly the deeply penetrating later chapters; and I am happy that Hamerling did after all write these later chapters even though his intellect did not shy away from the assertion: There in me is the mental picture ‘horse’; but outside there does not exist any actual real horse but only the sum total of those determining factors which cause a perception to be produced in my senses which I call a ‘horse’.” For here again one has to do with an assertion—like that made by Carneri with respect to matter, substance, and spirit—that gains overwhelming power over a person because he just does not see at all the impossible thoughts into which he has spun himself. The whole train of Hamerling's thoughts is worth no more than this: Certain effects emanating from me onto the surface of a coated pane of glass produce my image in the mirror. Nothing occurs through the effects emanating from me if no mirror is there. Outside the mirror there is only the sum total of those determining factors which bring it about that in the mirror an image is produced that I refer to with my name.

In imagination I can hear all the declamations against a philosophical dilettantism—carried to the point of frivolity that would dare to dispose of the serious scientific thoughts of philosophers with this kind of a childish objection. I know, in fact, what all has been brought forward by philosophers since Kant in the way of such thoughts. When one speaks as I have just done, one is not understood by the chorus that propounds these thoughts. One must turn to unprejudiced reason, which understands that the way one conducts one's thinking is the same in each case: whether, when confronted by the mental picture of the horse in my soul, I decree the outer horse to be nonexistent, or, when confronted by the image in the mirror, I doubt my existence. One does not even need to enter into certain, supposedly epistemological refutations of this comparison. For, what would be presented there—as the entirely different relationship, after all, of the “mental picture to what is mentally pictured” than of the mirror image to what is mirroring itself—already stands there for certain epistemologists as established with absolute certainty; for other readers, however, the corresponding refutation of these thoughts could in fact be only a web of unfruitful abstractions.

Out of his healthy idealism, Hamerling feels that an idea, in order to be justified within a world view, must not only be correct but also in accordance with reality. (Here I must express myself in those thoughts which I introduced in the presentation on Karl Christian Planck in this book.). If Hamerling had been less suggestively influenced by the way of thinking described above, he would have noticed that there is nothing in accordance with reality in such thoughts as those which he feels to be necessary in spite of the fact that “one’s intellect shys away from them like a skittish horse.” Such thoughts arise in the human soul when the soul has been made ill by a mind for abstractions estranged from reality and gives itself over to a continuous spinning out of thoughts that are indeed logically coherent but in which no spiritual reality holds sway in a living way. It is precisely his healthy idealism, however, that guides Hamerling in the further thoughts of his Atomism of Will out of the web of thoughts he presented in the opening chapters. This becomes particularly clear where he speaks of the human “I” in connection with the life of the soul. Look at the way Hamerling relates to Descartes' “I think, therefore I am.” Fichte's way of picturing things (of which we have spoken in our considerations of Fichte in this book) works along like a softly sounding, consonant, basic tone in the beautiful words on page 223 of the first volume of The Atomism of Will: “In spite of all the conceptual hairsplitting that carps at it, Descartes' Cogito ergo sum remains the igniting flash of lightning for all modern speculation. But, strictly speaking, this ‘I think, therefore I am’ is not made certain through the fact that I think, but rather through the fact that I say that I think. My conclusion would have the same certainty even if I changed the premise into its reverse and said ‘I do not think, therefore I am.’ In order to be able to say this, I must exist.” In discussing Fichte's world view, we have said in this book that the statement “I think, therefore I am” cannot maintain itself in the face of man's sleeping state. One must grasp the certainty of the “I” in such a way that this certainty cannot appear to be exhausted in the inner perception “I think.” Hamerling feels this; therefore he says that “I do not think, therefore I am” is also valid. He says this because he feels: Within the human “I” something is experienced that does not receive the certainty of its existence from thinking, but on the contrary gives to thinking its certainty. Thinking is unfolded by the true “I” in certain states; the experiencing of the “I,” however, is of such a kind that through this experience the soul can feel itself immersed into a spiritual reality in which it knows its existence to be anchored even during other states than those for which Descartes' “I think, therefore I am” applies. But all this is based on the fact that Hamerling knows: When the “I” thinks, life-will is living in its thinking. Thinking is by no means mere thinking; it is willed thinking. As a thought, “I think” is a mere fantasy that is never and nowhere present. It is always the case that only the “I think, willing” is present. Whoever believes in the fantasy of “I think” can isolate himself thereby from the whole spiritual world; and then become either an adherent of materialism or a doubter in the reality of the outer world. He becomes a materialist if he lets himself be snared by the thought—fully justified within its own limits—that for the thinking Descartes had in mind the instruments of the nerves are necessary. He becomes a doubter in the reality of the outer world if he becomes entangled in the thought—again justified within certain limits—that all thinking about things is in fact experienced within the soul and that with his thinking, therefore, he can in fact never arrive at an outer world existing in and of itself, even if such an outer world existed. To be sure, whoever sees the will in all thinking can, if he inclines to abstraction, now isolate the will conceptually from thinking and speak in Schopenhauer's style of a will that supposedly holds sway in all world existence and that drives thinking like whitecaps to the surface of life's phenomena. But someone who sees that only the “I think, willing” has reality would no more picture will and thinking as separated in the human soul than he would picture a man's head and body as separated if he wished his thought to portray something real. But such a person also knows that, with his experience of a thinking that is carried by will and experienced, he goes outside the boundaries of his soul and enters into the experience of a world process (Weltgeschehen) that is also pulsing through his soul. And Hamerling is headed in the direction of just such a world view, in the direction of a world view whose adherent knows that with a real thought he has within himself an experience of world-will, not merely an experience of his own “I.” Hamerling is striving toward a world view that does not go astray into the chaos of a mysticism of will, but on the contrary wishes to experience the world-will within the clarity of ideas.

With this perspective of the world-will beheld through ideas, Hamerling knows that he now stands in the native soil of the idealism of German world views. His thoughts prove even to himself to have their roots in the German folk spirit (Volkstum) that in Jakob Böhme already was struggling for knowledge in an elemental way. On page 259f. of Hamerling's Atomism of Will one reads: “To make will the highest philosophical principle is what one seems to have overlooked until now—an eminently German thought, a core thought of the German spirit. From the German Naturphilosophen of the Middle Ages up to the classical thinkers of the age of German speculation, and even up to Schopenhauer and Hartmann, this thought runs through the philosophy of the German people, emerging sometimes more, sometimes less, often only at one moment, as it were, then disappearing again into the seething masses of our thinkers' ideas. And so it was also the philosophus teutonicus who was in truth the most German and the most profound of all modern philosophers, and who was the first, in his deeply thoughtful, original, and pictorial language, to grasp the will expressly as the absolute, as the unity. ...” And now, in order to point to yet another German thinker in this direction, Hamerling quotes Jacobi, Goethe's contemporary: “Experience and history teach us that man's action depends far less upon his thinking than his thinking depends upon his action, that his concepts direct themselves according to his actions and only copy them, as it were; that the path of knowledge, therefore, is a mysterious path, not a syllogistic one, nor a mechanical one.”

Because Hamerling, out of the prevailing tone of his soul, has a feeling for the fact that the accordance of an idea with reality must be added to its merely logical correctness, he also cannot regard those pessimistic philosophers' views of life as valid which wish to determine—by an abstract conceptual weighing—whether pleasure or pain predominates in life and therefore whether life must be regarded as a good or an evil. No, reflection become theory does not decide this; this is decided in much deeper foundations of life, in depths that have to judge this human reflection, but do not allow themselves to be judged by this reflection. Hamerling says about this: “The main thing is not whether people are correct in wanting to live, with very few exceptions, at any price, no matter whether things are going well or badly for them. The main thing is that they want it and this can by no means be denied. And yet the doctrinaire pessimists do not reckon with this decisive fact. Intellectually and in learned discussions, they always only weigh against each other the pleasure and pain life brings in particular situations; but since pleasure and pain belong to feeling, it is feeling and not intellect that ultimately and decisively draws up the balance between pleasure and pain. And, with respect to all mankind—indeed one can say with respect to everything living—the balance falls on the side of the pleasure of existence. That everything living wants to live, under any circumstances and at any price, this is the great fact; and in the face of this fact all doctrinaire talk is powerless:” In the same way as the thinkers from Fichte to Planck described in this book, Hamerling seeks the path into spiritual reality, except that his striving is to do justice to the natural-scientific picture of the world to a greater degree than Schelling or Hegel, for example, were able to do. Atomism of Will nowhere offends against the scientific picture of the world. But this book is everywhere permeated with the insight that this picture of the world represents only a part of reality. This book is based upon an acknowledgement of the thought that a person is submitting to belief in an unreal world if he refuses to take up the forces of a spiritual world into his thought-world. (I use the word “unreal” here in the sense employed in our discussion of Planck.)

[ 29 ] Hamerling's satiric poem “Homunculus” speaks forcibly for the high degree to which his thinking was in accordance with reality. In this work, with great poetic force, he depicts a man who himself becomes soulless because soul and spirit do not speak to his knowledge. What would become of people who really stemmed from a world order such as the natural-scientific way of picturing things sets up as creed when it rejects a world view in accordance with the spirit? What would a man be if the unreality of this way of picturing things were real? In somewhat this way one could formulate the question that finds its artistic answer in “Homunculus.” Homunculism would have to take possession of a mankind that believed only in a world fashioned according to mechanistic natural laws. One can also see in Hamerling how a person striving toward existence's ideas has a healthier sense for practical life than a person who, fearful of the spirit, shies away from the world of ideas and feels himself thereby to be a true “man of reality.” Hamerling's “Homunculus” could help those regain their health who, precisely in the present day, are allowing themselves to be led astray by the opinion that natural science is the only science of what is real. Such people, in their fear of the spirit, say that the idealism of our classical period—which, in their opinion, has been overcome today—brought knowing man (homo sapiens) too much into the foreground. “True science” must recognize that attention should be paid above all to economic man (homo oeconomus) within the world order and in human arrangements. For such people “true science” means solely the science stemming from the natural-scientific way of picturing things. Homunculism arises out of opinions like this. The proponents of these opinions have no inkling of how they are hurrying toward homunculism. With the prophetic eye of the knower, Hamerling has delineated this homunculism. Those who fear that a rightful estimation of homo sapiens in Hamerling's sense might lead to an overestimation of the literary approach will also be able to see from “Homunculus” that this does not occur.

• 1. NoteText

Anyone who knows the nature of the experiences that the human soul undergoes when it has opened the entrance gates to the spiritual world needs only to read a few pages of the “Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz Anno 1459” to recognize that the book's account refers to real spiritual experiences. Subjectively invented images reveal themselves as such to those who have insight into spiritual reality, because they cannot fully correspond to this reality either in their own form or in the way they are strung together. — This seems to provide the starting point from which the “Chymical Wedding” can be viewed. We can follow the experiences described from the soul's point of view, as it were, and explore what insight into spiritual realities has to say about them. Unconcerned about everything that has been written about this book, the point of view characterized by it is to be taken up here first. We will take from the book itself what it wants to say. Only then can we talk about questions that many observers ask before a sufficient basis for this is created.

The experiences of the wanderer in The Chemical Wedding are divided into seven mental days. The first day begins with the bearer of the experiences encountering imaginations before his soul that allow his decision to begin the journey to mature. The description is written in such a way that it reveals the particular care of the narrator in distinguishing between what the bearer of the experiences understands at the time he has a “vision” and what is still hidden from his insight. Likewise, a distinction is made between what comes to the seer from the spiritual world without his will being involved, and what is brought about by this will. The first experience is not one that is deliberately brought about and is not one that the seer fully understands. It brings him the opportunity to enter the spiritual world. However, he is not unprepared. Seven years ago, he was informed through a 'bodily face' that he would be called to participate in the 'Chymical Wedding'. The expression 'bodily face' cannot be misunderstood by anyone who grasps the entire spirit of the book. It is not a vision of the morbid or down-tuned soul life, but a perception that can be attained through spiritual vision, the content of which stands before the soul with the same character of reality as a perception of the bodily eye. That the bearer of the experiences could have such a “vision” presupposes a state of soul that is not that of ordinary human consciousness. The latter knows only the changing states of waking and sleeping and, between the two, the dream, the experiences of which are not related to anything real. The soul, which experiences itself through this ordinary consciousness, knows itself to be united with a reality through the senses; but when its connection with the senses ceases during sleep, it is not in a knowing relationship with any reality, not even with its own self and its inner experiences. And during the dream, she cannot see clearly what relationship she has to reality. At the time of the 'bodily vision' that he still remembers, the Wanderer in 'The Chemical Wedding' already had a consciousness that was different from the usual one. He has experienced that the soul can perceive even when it is in the same relationship to the senses as it is during sleep. The concept of the soul living separately from the body and knowing a reality in this life has become more valid for him. He knows that the soul can so strengthen its own being that in its separation from the body it can be united with a spiritual world as it is with nature through the bodily sense organs. That such a union can take place, that it lies before him, he has learned through the “bodily vision”. The experience itself of this union could not be given to him through this vision. He has waited for this. It presents itself in his conceptions as the participation in the “Chymical Wedding”. Thus he is prepared for a renewed experience in the spiritual world.

At a time of heightened spiritual mood, on the eve of Easter, this renewed experience occurs. The bearer of the experiences feels as if he is being buffeted by a storm. Thus it announces itself to him that he is experiencing a reality whose perception is not mediated through the physical body. He is lifted out of the state of equilibrium with respect to the forces of the world, into which the human being is placed by his physical body. His soul does not live the life of this physical body; it feels only connected with the (etheric) body of formative forces that permeates the physical one. This body of formative forces is not, however, part of the equilibrium of the cosmic forces, but of the mobility of the supersensible world, which is closest to the physical and which the human being perceives first when he has opened the gates of spiritual vision. Only in the physical world do the forces solidify into fixed forms that express themselves in states of equilibrium; in the spiritual world, perpetual mobility reigns. The person undergoing this mobility becomes aware of the raging storm as a result of this mobility. The revelation of a spiritual being emerges from the vagueness of this perception. This revelation takes place through a clearly shaped imagination. The spirit appears in a blue dress studded with stars. One must keep away from the description of this being everything that amateurish esotericists like to add to the “explanation” in the way of symbolic interpretations. One is dealing with a non-sensuous experience, which the person experiencing it expresses for himself and for others through an image. The blue dress studded with stars is no more a symbol of the blue night sky or anything similar than the idea of the rosebush is a symbol of the evening glow in ordinary consciousness. In supersensible perception there is a much more active, conscious activity of the soul than in the case of the senses. — In the case of the wanderer at the 'Chymical Wedding', this activity is exercised through the formative forces body, as in the case of physical seeing through the bodily senses by means of the eyes. This activity of the formative forces body can be compared to the arousal of radiating light. Such light falls on the spiritual being that is revealing itself. It is reflected back by it. Thus the beholder sees his own radiated light, and behind its boundary he becomes aware of the limiting being. The 'blue' comes about through this relationship of the spiritual being to the spiritual light of the body of formative forces; the stars are not reflected, but are absorbed by the being as parts of the spiritual light. The spiritual being has objective reality; the image through which it reveals itself is a modification, brought about by the being, in the radiance of the body of formative forces. This imagination must not be confused with a vision either. The subjective experience of the bearer of such an imagination is completely different from that of the visionary. The visionary lives in his vision through an inner compulsion; the bearer of the imagination adds it to the designated spiritual being or process with the same inner conscious freedom with which a word or a sentence is used as an expression for a sensual object. Someone who has no knowledge of the nature of the spiritual world may think that it is completely unnecessary to clothe this spiritual world, which reveals itself in imageless experiences, in imaginations that evoke the appearance of the visionary. In reply to this, it is true that imagination is not the essence that is perceived spiritually, but it is the means by which this essence must reveal itself in the soul. Just as one cannot perceive a sensual color without the definite activity of the eye, so too can one not experience something spiritual without encountering it from within with a definite imagination. This does not prevent the use of pure concepts, as they are common in natural science or philosophy, when presenting spiritual experiences that are made through imagination. The present remarks are based on such concepts in order to trace the content of the 'Chymical Wedding'. But in the seventeenth century, when J. V. Andreae wrote the book, it was not yet customary to make use of such concepts to such an extent; one directly presented the imaginations through which one had experienced the supersensible beings and processes.

In the spiritual form that reveals itself to him, the wanderer at the “Chemical Wedding” recognizes the being that can give him the right impulse for his journey. Through his encounter with this figure, he consciously feels that he is standing in the spiritual world. The way in which he stands in this world points to the particular direction of his path of knowledge. He does not walk in the direction of the mystic in the narrower sense, but in that of the alchemist. In order not to misunderstand the following exposition, one should keep away from the concept of “alchemy” everything that has been attached to it through superstition, fraud, adventurism and the like. Think of what the honest, unprejudiced seekers after truth who coined this term were striving for. They wanted to recognize the lawful connections between the things of nature that are not conditioned by the activity of nature itself, but by a spiritual essence that reveals itself through nature. They sought supersensible forces that are active in the sensual world but do not allow themselves to be recognized in a sensual way. The wanderer of the 'Chymical Wedding' sets out on the path of such researchers. In this sense, he is a representative of alchemical research. As such, he is convinced that the supersensible forces of nature hide themselves from ordinary consciousness. He has brought about experiences within himself which, through their effect, enable the soul to use the body of formative forces as an organ of perception. Through this organ of perception, he gains insight into the supersensible forces of nature. He first wants to recognize the extra-human, supersensible forces of nature in a spiritual form of existence, which is experienced outside the realm of sensory perception and ordinary mental activity. Equipped with the knowledge of these forces, he then wants to see through the true essence of the human body itself. He believes that through knowledge gained by the soul in conjunction with the body of formative forces, which is activated independently of the physical organism, one can see through the human body and thereby come close to the secret that the universe works through this being. For ordinary sensory perception, this secret is veiled; the human being lives in it; but he does not see through what he experiences. Starting from supersensible knowledge of nature, the wanderer in The Chymical Wedding finally aimed to arrive at beholding the supersensible essence of the human being. It is by this path of research that the alchemist, in contrast to the mystic in the narrower sense, strives. He too seeks to experience the human being differently from what is possible through ordinary consciousness. But he does not choose the path that leads to the use of the formative forces independent of the physical body. He starts from the vague feeling that a more intimate interpenetration of the physical body with the formative forces than is possible in ordinary waking life leads away from communion with the world of sense-perceptible beings and leads to communion with the spiritual world of human beings. The alchemist strives to withdraw himself with his conscious being from the ordinary context of the body and to enter into the world that lies behind the realm of sensory perception as the “spiritual nature” of the world. The mystic attempts to lead the conscious soul deeper into the context of the physical, in order to consciously immerse himself in that area of physicality that is hidden from self-awareness when it is filled with the perceptions of the senses. The mystic does not always seek to give a full account of this endeavor. He will only too often seek to characterize his path in a different way. But the mystic is in most cases a poor explainer of his own nature. This is connected with the fact that certain feelings become attached to the spiritual quest. Because the mystic's soul wants to overcome the kind of togetherness with the body that is experienced in ordinary consciousness, a kind of self-rapture takes hold of it, not only a certain contempt for this togetherness, but for the body itself. Therefore, she does not want to admit to herself that her mystical experience is based on an even more intimate connection with the body than that which produces ordinary consciousness. — Through this more intimate connection, the mystic perceives a change in his thinking, feeling and willing. He surrenders to this perception without developing any inclination to elucidate the reason for the change. This change reveals itself to him, despite having descended deeper into the physical, as a spiritualization of his inner life. And he has every right to see it as such. Sensuality is nothing other than the form of existence that the soul experiences when it is in the same connection with the body as that on which ordinary waking consciousness is based. When the soul unites more intimately with the body than is the case in this form of existence, then it experiences a relationship of the human being to the world that is more spiritual than that established through the senses. The perceptions that arise then are condensed into imaginations. These imaginations are revelations of the forces with which the formative body works on the physical body. They remain hidden from ordinary consciousness. The feeling is strengthened to such an extent that the etheric-spiritual forces, which radiate from the cosmos into the human being, are experienced as if through an inner touch. In the will, the soul knows itself to be dedicated to a spiritual work that integrates the human being into a supersensible world context, from which he separates himself through the subjective will of ordinary consciousness. True mysticism arises only when the human being carries his fully conscious soul being into the more intimate connection with the body that is characterized and is not driven by the constraints of the bodily organization to morbidly visionary or downcast consciousness. Genuine mysticism strives to experience the spiritual essence of man, which is too close to the human heart and which is covered by sense perception for ordinary consciousness. Genuine alchemy makes itself independent of sense perception in order to see the spiritual essence of the world that exists outside of man, which is covered by sense perception. Before entering into the inner life of man, the mystic must bring his soul into such a state that it does not expose its consciousness to fading or extinction in the face of the increased counter-pressure that it experiences through its closer union with the body. Before entering the spiritual world that lies beyond the sense realm, the alchemist needs to strengthen his soul so that it does not lose itself in the beings and processes of this world. The paths of research of the mystic and the alchemist lead in opposite directions. The mystic goes directly into the human being's own spiritual nature. His goal is what may be called the mystical marriage, the union of the conscious soul with one's own spiritual being. The alchemist wants to pass through the spiritual realm of nature in order to see the spiritual being of man with the powers of knowledge acquired in this realm after the successful journey. His goal is the “Chymical Wedding”, the union with the spiritual realm of nature. Only after this union does he want to experience the contemplation of the human being.

Both the mystic and the alchemist experience a mystery at the very beginning of their paths, which cannot be penetrated within the ordinary consciousness. It relates to the relationship between the human body and the human soul. As a spiritual being, the human being truly lives in the spiritual world; but at the present stage of development within the evolution of the world, he has no ability of his own to orient himself in the spiritual realm. Through the powers of his ordinary consciousness, he can only establish his relationship to himself and to the world outside of himself in the sense of truth if the body instructs him in the directions for soul activity. The body is so incorporated into the world that this incorporation corresponds to cosmic harmony. When the soul lives within the perception of the senses and the ordinary activity of the mind, it is given over to the body with just the strength by which the body can transmit its harmony with the universe to it. If the soul is lifted out of this experience according to the mystical or alchemical direction, it becomes necessary to take precautions so that it does not lose the harmony with the universe gained through the body. If he did not take such precautions, then on the mystical path he would be threatened with the loss of spiritual connection with the universe; on the alchemical path, the loss of the ability to distinguish between truth and error. Without this precaution, the mystic would, through the closer connection with the body, so intensify the power of self-consciousness that he would be overwhelmed by it and no longer be able to experience the life of the world in his own life. Thus he would enter with his consciousness into the region of a spiritual world other than that which corresponds to man. (In my spiritual scientific writings I have called this world the Luciferic.) The alchemist would, without the necessary precautions, come to a loss of discernment between truth and deception. In the great context of the universe, deception is a necessity. Man, however, cannot fall prey to it at his present stage of development because the realm of sense perception affords him protection. If deception were not in the background of human experience, man could not develop the various levels of consciousness. For deception is the driving force behind this development of consciousness. At the present stage of human consciousness, deception must indeed work towards the emergence of consciousness; but it must itself remain unconscious. For if it were to enter into consciousness, it would overwhelm the truth. As soon as the soul enters, by the alchemical path, into the spiritual realm that lies beyond sense perception, it enters into the vortices of deception. It can only preserve its nature in the right way within these vortices if it brings with it from its experience in the sense world a sufficiently developed power of distinguishing between truth and deception. If it failed to develop such a power of discrimination, the whirlpools of illusion would sweep it away into a world where it would have to lose itself. (In my spiritual writings I have called this world the Ahrimanic one.) — Before he begins his journey, the mystic needs to bring his soul into such a state that his own life cannot be overpowered; the alchemist must strengthen his sense of truth so that it will not be lost, even if he is not supported by sense perception and the mind that is bound to it.

The bearer of the experiences described in the “Chemical Wedding” is aware that, as an alchemist, he needs a strengthened ability to distinguish between truth and deception on his path. He seeks to gain his support from Christian truth according to the circumstances of life from which he begins his alchemical path. He knows that what connects him to Christ has already brought forth within his life in the sensual world a power in his soul that leads to the truth. This power does not need the basis of the senses and can therefore prove itself even when this basis of the senses is not there. With this attitude, his soul stands before the being in the blue dress, who points him to the path to the “Chemical Wedding”. At first this being could just as well belong to the world of deception and error as to that of truth. The wanderer on his way to the “Chemical Wedding” must distinguish. But his power of discrimination would be lost, error would have to overwhelm him, could he not recall in supersensible experience what binds him in the sense world to truth with an inner power. What has become in this soul through Christ arises out of it. And like its remaining light, the body of formative forces of this Christ-light radiates towards the revealing being. The right imagination is formed. The letter that points him to the path of the “Chemical Wedding” contains the sign of Christ and the words: in hoc signo vinces. The wanderer knows that he is connected to the appearing being through a power that points to the truth. If the power that had led him into the supersensible world had been one tending towards deception, he would have stood before an entity that would have paralyzed his memory for the Christ impulse living in him. He would then have followed only the seductive power that draws man to itself even when the supersensible world leads him forces that are pernicious to his nature and will.

The content of the letter, which is handed over to the wanderer after the “Chemical Wedding” by the being that appears to him, contains, in the language of the fifteenth century, a characterization of his relationship to the spiritual world, insofar as he has become aware of it at the beginning of the first day of his spiritual experiences. The symbol added to the words expresses how the mutual relationship between the physical body, the body of formative forces and the soul-spiritual has developed in him. It is significant for him to be able to say that this condition in his human existence is in harmony with the conditions in the universe. He has found, through “diligent recalculation and calculation” of his “annotated planets”, that this condition may occur in him at the point in time at which it is now taking place. Anyone who regards what is being considered here in the sense of the follies of some “astrologers” will misunderstand it, regardless of whether they are a believer in it or an “enlightened” person who smiles condescendingly at it. The author of The Chemical Wedding had good reason to add the date 1459 to the title of his book. He was aware that the soul-disposition of the one experiencing it must be in harmony with the state in which world-becoming has been attained at a certain point in time, if inner soul-disposition and outer world-content are not to result in disharmony. The outer supersensible world-content must meet the soul, which is independent of ordinary sense perception, in harmony, if the consonance of the two is to give rise to the state of consciousness that constitutes the “Chemical Wedding”. Anyone who believes that the constellation of the “annotated planets” contains a mysterious power that determines the state of experience of the person would be like someone who believed that the position of the hands on his watch had the power to cause him to undertake a journey that he had to take from his life circumstances at a certain hour.

The letter refers to three temples. What is meant by these is not yet understood by the bearer of the experiences at the time when he receives the hint. He who perceives in the spiritual world must know that he will occasionally receive imaginations, which he must first renounce in understanding. He must accept them as imaginations and allow them to mature in the soul as such. During this maturing, they bring forth in man's inner being the power that can effect understanding. If the observer were to explain them to himself at the moment they reveal themselves to him, he would do so with an unsuitable power of understanding and think inconsistently. In spiritual experience, much depends on having the patience to make observations, to accept them at face value at first, and to wait until the appropriate time to understand them. What the Wanderer experiences on the first day of his spiritual experiences at the “Chemical Wedding” is described by him as having been announced to him “seven years” before. During this time he was not allowed to form an intellectual opinion about his “vision” at the time, but had to wait until the “vision” had had such an effect on his soul that he was able to experience further things with understanding.

The appearance of the spirit being in the blue, star-studded dress and the presentation of the letter are experiences that the wanderer has at the “Chemical Wedding” without his soul's own free decision leading to it. He goes on to bring about experiences through such a free decision. He enters into a sleep-like state; one that brings him dream experiences whose content has a reality value. He can do this because, after the experiences he has had, he enters into a different relationship with the spiritual world than the ordinary one through the state of sleep. In the ordinary experience during the state of sleep, the human soul is not bound to the spiritual world by ties that can give its ideas a reality value. But the soul of the wanderer at the “Chemical Wedding” is transformed. It is so inwardly strengthened that it can take up in the dream experience what is connected with the spiritual world in which it finds itself. And through such an experience she first of all experiences her own newly won relationship to the sense body. She experiences this relationship through the imagination of the tower, in which the dreamer is locked up and from which he is freed. She consciously experiences what is unconsciously experienced in ordinary life when the soul, falling asleep, passes from the realm of sense experience into that of supersensible existence. The restrictions and hardships in the tower are an expression of the sensory experiences towards the soul's inner being when it frees itself from the realm of such experiences. What binds the soul to the body in such a way that the result of this bond is sensory experience, these are the life forces that promote growth. Consciousness could never arise under the sole influence of these forces. That which is merely alive remains unconscious. The forces that destroy life, in conjunction with illusion, lead to the emergence of consciousness. If man did not carry within him that which leads him towards physical death, he could live in the physical body but not develop consciousness in it. For ordinary consciousness, the connection between the death-bringing forces and this consciousness remains hidden. But for someone who, like the bearer of experiences in the “Chemical Wedding”, is to develop an awareness of the spiritual world, this connection must come before the “eye of the spirit”. He must experience that connected with his existence is the “hoary man”, the being who, by nature, carries within him the power of aging. Vision in the spiritual realm can only be granted to that soul which, while dwelling in this realm, beholds the power that in ordinary life lies behind aging. This power is capable of snatching the soul from the realm of sensory experience. The value of the dream experience lies in the fact that through it the wanderer to the “Chemical Wedding” is aware that he can now approach nature and the human world with a state of mind that allows him to see what is hidden in both of them from ordinary consciousness. This has matured him for the experiences of the next few days.

At the beginning of the description of the second day, it is immediately pointed out how nature appears to him in a new way. But he is not only to look into the background of nature; he is to look more deeply into the motives of human will and action than is possible in ordinary consciousness. The interpreter of The Chemical Wedding means to say that this ordinary consciousness only gets to know the outer side of the will and action, and that through this consciousness people are also only aware of their own will and action. The deeper spiritual impulses that pour out of the supersensible world into this volition and action, and that shape human social life, remain unknown to this consciousness. Man can live in the belief that a particular motive leads him to an action; in truth, this motive is only the conscious mask for one that remains unconscious. Insofar as human beings regulate their social life together according to ordinary consciousness, forces intervene in this life together that do not lie in the sense of evolution and are beneficial to humanity. These forces must be counteracted by others that are seen through supersensible consciousness and incorporated into social activity. The Wayfarer of the “Chymical Wedding” is to be led to the knowledge of such forces. To do this, he must see through people to the being that really lives in them, which is quite different from the one present in their belief or corresponds to the place they occupy in the social order determined by ordinary consciousness. The image of nature that reveals itself to ordinary consciousness is very different from that of a social human order. The supersensible natural forces, which spiritual consciousness gets to know, are related to the supersensible forces of this social order of man. The alchemist strives for a knowledge of nature that will become for him the basis of a true knowledge of human nature. It is the Way to such knowledge that the Wanderer to the “Chemical Wedding” must seek. But not one such Way, but several, are shown to him. The first leads into a region where the intellectual conceptions of ordinary consciousness, gained through sense perception, impinge upon the course of supersensible experience, so that insight into reality is killed through the interaction of the two experiential circles. The second holds out the prospect that the soul can lose its patience if it has to submit to long periods of waiting for spiritual revelations, in order to allow what must initially be accepted only as an incomprehensible revelation to mature fully. The third demands men who, through their already unconsciously attained maturity of development, are allowed to see in a short time what others must acquire in a long struggle. The fourth brings man to an encounter with all the forces from the supersensible world that cloud and frighten his consciousness when he wants to snatch himself from sensory experience. Which path is to be taken by the one or other human soul depends on the state into which the experiences of ordinary consciousness have brought it before it begins the spiritual journey. It cannot “choose” in the usual sense, because its choice would arise out of the sense consciousness, which is not entitled to decide in supersensible matters. The impossibility of such a choice is realized by the Wayfarer after the “Chemical Wedding.” But he also knows that his soul is sufficiently strong for behavior in a supersensible world to be led aright when such an inducement comes from the spiritual world itself. The Imagination of his deliverance “from the tower” gives him this knowledge. The imagination of the “black raven”, snatching the food given to the “white dove”, evokes a certain feeling in the soul of the wanderer; and this feeling, produced out of supersensible, imaginative perception, leads to the path whereon the choice of ordinary consciousness would not have dared to lead. On this path, the wanderer arrives where people and human relationships are to be revealed to his gaze in a light that is not accessible to experience in the sense body. He enters through a portal into a dwelling within which people behave in a way that corresponds to the super-sensible forces pouring into their souls. Through the experiences he has within this dwelling, he is to awaken to a new life, which he will be responsible for leading when a sufficiently large area of these experiences is covered by his super-sensible consciousness. Many critics have expressed the opinion that the “Chymical Wedding of Christiani Rosencreutz” is nothing more than a satirical novel about the doings of certain sectarians or adventurous alchemists or the like. But perhaps a truly correct view of the experiences that the author of the book has his wanderer undergo “before the gate” will show that the satirical mood that the work displays in its later parts can be traced back to soul experiences, the seriousness of which takes on a form that appears to be mere satire, which only wants to remain in the realm of sense experience. It would be well not to lose sight of this in considering the further experiences of the wanderer after the “Chemical Wedding”.

The second mental day's work brings the spiritual seeker, whose experiences Johann Valentin Andreae describes, to experiences through which it is decided whether he can attain the ability of true spiritual vision, or whether a world of spiritual error shall embrace his soul. For his perception, these experiences take the form of imaginations of entering a castle, in which the world of spiritual experience is administered. Not only the genuine, but also the fake spiritual seeker can have such imaginations. The soul reaches them when it follows certain lines of thought and modes of perception, through which it is able to imagine surroundings that are not conveyed to it through sensual impressions. From the way Andreae describes the society of unreal spiritual seekers, within which the “Brother of the Red Rose Cross” still finds himself on the “second day”, one recognizes that he is well aware of the secret of the difference between the real and the unreal spiritual seeker. Whoever has the opportunity to correctly judge such inner testimonies of the spiritual insight of the author of The Chemical Wedding will be in no doubt as to the true character of this writing and of Andreaes's intention. It is obviously written to provide enlightenment for people who are seriously striving for an understanding of the relationship between the world of the senses and the spiritual world, and of the forces that can arise for the human soul from the knowledge of the spiritual world for social and moral life. Andreae's unsentimental, humorous and satirical style of presentation does not speak against, but for, the deeply serious intention. Not only can one feel the seriousness within the seemingly light-hearted scenes, but one also has the feeling that Andreae is describing like someone who does not want to cloud the mind of his reader with sentimentality about the secrets of the spiritual world, but who wants to create in the reader a spiritually free, self-aware and rational attitude towards this world.

If someone, through the exercise of thought and feeling, has brought himself to imagine a supersensible world, such ability is by no means a guarantee that these imaginations will lead him to a real relationship with the spiritual world. In the field of imaginative experience, the Brother of the Rose Cross sees himself surrounded by numerous souls who, although they live in ideas about the spiritual world, cannot come into real contact with this world because of their inner condition. The possibility of this real contact depends on how the spiritual seeker attunes his soul to the world of the senses before approaching the threshold of the spiritual world. This attunement produces a state of mind in the soul that is carried across the threshold and reveals itself within the spiritual world in such a way that it either accepts or rejects the seeker. The right frame of mind can only be attained if the seeker is willing to discard everything at the threshold that determines his relationship to the world within the reality of the senses. In order to dwell in the spiritual world, those impulses of the mind through which man feels the character and validity – the weight – of his personality from his external circumstances and fate must become ineffective. If this necessity, by which man feels transported into a kind of psychic childhood, is difficult to fulfill, then the other necessity, to suppress the kind of judgment by which one orients oneself within the sense world, is even more contrary to ordinary feeling. One must come to the realization that this way of judging is gained in the sense world, that it can only have validity within it, and that one must be prepared to learn the way one has to judge in the spiritual world from the spiritual world itself. When the Brother of the Rose Cross enters the castle, he develops a mood of soul that arises from a sense of these necessities. He does not allow himself to be led into a chamber to spend the first night in the castle, but remains in the hall to which he has come through his participation in the events of the second day. In this way he protects himself from carrying his soul into a region of the spiritual world with which the forces at work within him are not yet able to unite worthily. The soul mood that prevents him from penetrating further into the spiritual realm than the second day has brought him is effective in his soul throughout the night and equips him with the capacity for perception and will that he needs the following day. Those intruders who have come with him without the ability of such a state of mind must be expelled from the spiritual world the following day, because they cannot develop the fruit of this mood. Without this fruit it is impossible for them to connect the soul with the world through real inner powers, of which they are, so to speak, only externally embraced.

The events at the gates, the encounter with the lion, the reading of the inscriptions on the two pillars at the entrance, and other happenings of the second day are so vividly described by the Rose Cross Brother that one can see his soul weaving in the described mood. He experiences all this in such a way that that part of it remains unknown to him which speaks to the ordinary mind bound to the sense world, and that he only absorbs that which enters into a spiritual pictorial relationship with the deeper powers of the mind. The encounter with the “cruel lion” at the second gate is a step in the self-knowledge of the spiritual seeker. The Brother of the Rose Cross experiences it in such a way that it acts as an imagination on his deeper powers of mind, but that it remains unknown to him what it means for his position within the spiritual world. This unknown judgment is passed by the “guardian” who is with the lion, who calms the lion and, according to the content of a letter that is also unknown to the person entering, speaks the words to the person entering: “Now welcome to me, God, the man I have long wished to see.” The spiritual vision of the “cruel lion” is the result of the spiritual state of the Brother of the Rosicrucians. This soul condition is reflected in the formative part of the spiritual world and gives the imagination of the lion. In this reflection, an image of the observer's own self is given. In the field of spiritual reality, the observer is a different being than in the realm of sensory existence. The forces at work in the realm of the sensory world shape him into a sensory human image. In the spiritual realm, he is not yet human; he is a being that allows itself to be expressed imaginatively through the animal form. Within this existence, the drives, affects, feelings and impulses of the will that live in the human being's sensory existence are held in chains by the life of perception and imagination bound to the sense body, which are themselves a result of the sense world. If man wishes to step out of the sense world, he must become conscious of what in him is no longer fettered by the gifts of the sense world and must be brought onto the right path by new gifts from the spiritual world. Man must see himself before the sensuous incarnation. This insight comes to the Rose Cross Brother through the encounter with the lion, the image of his own being before the incarnation. It should be noted here, just to avoid any misunderstanding, that the form of existence in which the underlying essence of man beholds itself in a spiritual way before becoming man has nothing to do with animality, with which popular Darwinism thinks the human species is linked by descent. For the animal form of the spiritual vision is one that, by its very nature, can only belong to the world of formative forces. Within the sense world, it can only exist as a subconscious element of human nature. The fact that the part of his being that is held in bondage by the sense body is still in the process of becoming human is expressed in the frame of mind in which the Brother of the Rose Cross finds himself upon entering the castle. He faces what he has to expect with an open mind, and does not cloud it with judgments that still come from the mind bound to the world of sense. Such clouding he must later notice in those who have not come with a rightful soul mood. They too have passed by and seen the “cruel lion”, for this depends only on their having received the corresponding currents of thought and modes of perception into their souls. But the effect of this spiritual vision could not be strong enough in their case to persuade them to abandon the way of judging to which they were accustomed in the sense world. Their way of judging appears to the spiritual eye of the Brother of the Rose Cross within the spiritual world as vain boasting. They want to see Plato's ideas, count Democritus' atoms, pretend to see the invisible, while in truth they see nothing. These things show that they cannot connect the inner soul powers with the world that has embraced them. They lack consciousness of the true demands which the spiritual world makes upon man when he would see it. The Brother of the Rose Cross can in the following days connect his soul-forces with the spiritual world because on the second day he admits to himself in accordance with the truth that he cannot see and do what the other intruders claim before themselves or others to see and do. The feeling of his powerlessness later becomes the power of spiritual experience for him. He must allow himself to be bound at the end of the second day because he is to feel the bonds of mental powerlessness in the face of the spiritual world until this powerlessness as such has been exposed to the light of consciousness for as long as it takes to transform itself into power.

Andreae wants to show how the seven “sciences and liberal arts”, into which knowledge gained within the sensory world was divided in the Middle Ages, are to serve as preparation for spiritual knowledge. The seven liberal arts were usually considered to be: grammar, dialectics, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. From the description in the “Chymische Hochzeit” one recognizes that Andreae thinks both the brother of the Rose Cross and his rightful companions as well as the unlawful intruders as being equipped with the knowledge that can be gained from these liberal arts. However, the newcomers possess this knowledge to a varying extent. The rightful ones, especially the Brother of the Rose Cross, whose experiences are described, have acquired this knowledge in such a way that through its possession they have developed the strength in their souls to receive from the spiritual world the unknown, which must still remain hidden for these “free arts”. Their soul is so prepared by these arts that it not only knows what can be known through them, but this knowledge gives it the weight by which it can gain experience in the spiritual world. The weight of these arts has not become the weight of the souls of the unlawful arrivals. They do not have in their souls the true world content of these “seven free arts”. On the third day the Brother of the Rose Cross participates in the weighing of souls. This is described by means of the imagination of a scale by which the souls are weighed in order to find out whether they have acquired, in addition to their own human weight, a weight equal to seven others. These seven weights are the imaginative representatives of the “seven liberal arts”.

The Brother of the Rose Cross has in his soul not only the substance that can match the seven weights, but also a surplus. This benefits another personality, which is not considered sufficient for itself, but which is protected from expulsion from the spiritual world by the true spiritual seeker. By describing this process, Andreae shows how familiar he is with the secrets of the spiritual world. Of all the powers of the soul that develop in the world of sense, love is the only one that can remain unchanged during the transition of the soul into the spiritual world. Helping weaker people according to the strength one possesses, that can happen within the world of sense, and it can also be done in the same way with the possessions that a person receives in the spiritual realm.

From the way in which Andreae describes the expulsion of the unlawful intruders from the spiritual world, it is evident that he wants to use his writing to make his contemporaries aware of how far far removed from the spiritual world and thus from true reality a person can be who, although he has familiarized himself with all kinds of descriptions of the path to this world, is still unaware of a real inner transformation of the soul. An unbiased reading of the “Chymical Wedding” reveals as one of the aims of its author to tell his contemporaries how pernicious for the true development of humanity are those who intervene in life with impulses that relate to the spiritual world in an unlawful way. Andreae expects right social, moral and other human community goals from a rightful recognition of the spiritual foundations of existence, especially for his time. Therefore, in his description, he sheds a clear light on everything that is harmful to human progress because it draws such goals from an unlawful relationship to the spiritual world.

On the third day after witnessing the expulsion of the illegitimate newcomers, the brother of the Rose Cross senses that the possibility is beginning for him to use the ability to reason in a way that is suitable for the spiritual world. The possession of this ability presents itself to the soul as the imagination of the unicorn, which bows down before a lion. The lion then calls forth a dove with his roar, which brings him an olive branch. He swallows it. If one were to treat such a picture as a symbol and not as a real imagination, one could say that it visualizes the process in the soul of the spirit-seeker, through which he feels able to think spiritually. But this abstract idea would not express the soul process that is actually at stake in its full essence. For this process is experienced in such a way that the periphery of personal experience, which for the sense being extends to the boundary of the body, is extended beyond this boundary. In the spiritual realm the seer experiences beings and processes outside his own nature just as man experiences the processes within his own body through the ordinary waking consciousness. When such an expanded consciousness occurs, then mere abstract conception ceases, and imagination presents itself as the necessary form of expression of what is experienced. If one nevertheless wishes to express such an experience in abstract ideas, which is necessary in particular in the present day for communicating spiritual-scientific knowledge on a large scale, then one must first bring the imaginations into the form of ideas in an appropriate manner. Andreae omits this in The Chymical Wedding because he wishes to present, without alteration, the experiences of a spiritual seeker from the middle of the fifteenth century; in those days one did not translate the experienced imaginations into ideas and concepts.

When imaginative knowledge has matured to the point reached by the Brother of the Rose Cross on the third day, then the soul itself with its inner life can enter into the region of reality from which the imaginations have come. Only through this ability does man arrive at a new way of seeing the entities and processes of the sense world from a point of view situated in the spiritual world. He sees to what extent these flow out of their true sources in the supersensible realm. Andreae remarks that the Brother of the Rosycross acquires this ability to a greater extent than his companions. He is able to see the library of the castle and the burials of the kings from the point of view of the spiritual world. That he is able to do this depends on his being able to exercise his own will to a high degree in the imaginative world. His comrades can only see what comes to them through the power of others, without such strong exercise of their own will. The brother of the Rose Cross learns more at the “burials of the kings” than is written in all the books. The vision of these burials is brought into direct connection with that of the glorious “Phoenix”. In these visions the secret of death and birth is revealed. These two borderline processes of life only take place in the material world. In the spiritual realm, birth and death are not followed by creation and decay, but by the transformation of one form of life into another. One can only recognize the essence of birth and death by looking at them from a point of view outside the material world, from a realm in which they themselves do not exist.

The fact that the Brother of the Rose Cross penetrates to the “burials of the kings” and beholds in the image of the Phoenix the arising of a young royal power from the dead body of the old kings is recorded by Andreae because he wants to describe the particular spiritual path of a seeker of knowledge from the middle of the fifteenth century. This is a turning point in time with regard to the spiritual experience of humanity. The forms in which the human soul could approach the spiritual world through the centuries were changing at this point into others. In the sphere of external human life, this change was manifested by the emerging scientific way of thinking of the new time and the other upheavals in the life of the peoples of the earth in this epoch. In the realm of the world in which the spiritual seekers search for the secrets of existence, the passing away of a particular direction of the human soul forces and the appearance of another reveal themselves at such turning points. Despite all the other revolutionary events in the historical development of humanity, the character of spiritual insight had remained essentially the same since the times of Greco-Roman life until the fifteenth century. The spiritual seeker had to carry the instinctive mind rooted in the mind, which was the essential soul power of this age, into the field of spiritual reality and transform it there into the power of spiritual insight. From the middle of the fifteenth century onwards, this soul power was replaced by the mind, which was operating in the light of full self-awareness and liberating itself from instinctive forces. To raise this to the level of intuitive consciousness is the task of the spiritual seeker.

In Christian Rosenkreuz, as the leading brother of the Rosicrucians, Andreae portrays a personality who has entered the spiritual world in the way that came to an end in the fifteenth century. The experiences of the “Chymical Wedding” present this ending and the emergence of a new way to his mind's eye. He must therefore penetrate into secrets which the rulers of the castle, who would like to continue to administer the spiritual life in the old way, want to conceal from him. Andreae wants to characterize for his contemporaries the greatest spiritual researcher of the end of an expired epoch, but who sees through the death of this epoch and the rise of a new one in the spiritual field. He found that they were content with the traditions of the old epoch, that they wanted to open up the spiritual world in the sense of these traditions. He wanted to tell them: your way is a fruitless one; the greatest who has walked it in the end has seen through its fruitlessness. Recognize what he has seen through, and you will acquire a feeling for a new way. Andreae wanted to place Christian Rosenkreutz's spiritual path as the legacy of the spiritual research of the fifteenth century in his time, in order to show that the initiative must be taken for a new kind of spiritual research. In the continuation of efforts, as they began with Johann Valentin Andreae, the spiritual researcher still stands in them, who understands the signs of his time. He encounters the strongest resistance from those spiritual seekers who want to pave the way into the supersensible world by renewing or reviving old spiritual traditions.

Andreae speaks in delicate terms of the insights that must arise from humanity's contemplative consciousness in the epoch that began in the mid-fifteenth century. Christian Rosenkreutz advances to a great globe, through which the dependence of earthly events on extraterrestrial, cosmic impulses penetrates his soul. This marks the first glimpse of a “cosmology” that has its beginning with the Copernican view of the world, but which sees in it only a beginning that can only give what is valid for the sensory world. In the spirit of this beginning, the more recent scientific conception continues to research to this day. In its world picture, it sees the earth surrounded by “heavenly processes”, which it only wants to grasp with intellectual concepts. In the terrestrial area itself, it seeks the forces for the essential processes of the earth event. When it examines the conditions under which the germ for a new being arises in a mother being, it looks only at the forces that can be found in the hereditary current of the earthly ancestors. She is not aware that in the formation of the germ the “heavenly surroundings” of the earth are at work in the earthly process, that in the mother being is only the place where the extraterrestrial cosmos develops the germ. This way of thinking seeks the causes of historical events exclusively in the facts that preceded these events in earthly life. It does not look up to the extraterrestrial impulses that fertilize earthly facts, so that the events of one epoch give rise to those of the next. In this way of thinking, only the inanimate earthly processes are influenced by the extraterrestrial. For Christian Rosenkreutz, the prospect of an organic, spiritual “celestial science” opens up, which can no longer have anything in common with the kind of ancient astrology that rests on the same foundations for the supersensible as Copernicanism does for the sensual.

One can see how Andreae treats imaginative life quite appropriately in the “Chymical Wedding”. Everything that comes to him from Christian Rosenkreutz as revealed knowledge, without the intervention of his own will, is brought to him by forces that find their representation in images of the feminine. The path that the spirit-seeker's own will paves for itself is illustrated by images of guiding boys, by the masculine. Whether man is a woman or a man in the sense of the senses, the masculine and the feminine are at work in him as polar opposites. It is from this point of view that Andreae characterizes. The relationship between the conceptual and the volitional is brought into the right relationship when this relationship is presented in images that recall the relationship of the masculine and the feminine in the sensory world. Again, to avoid misunderstandings, it should be noted that the imagination of the male and female should not be confused with the relationships of man and woman in the sensual world itself; just as little as the imagination of the animal form, which arises in the seeing consciousness, has to do with the animal nature to which popular Darwinism relates humanity. At present, many a person believes that they can penetrate the hidden secrets of existence through sexual physiology. A superficial acquaintance with genuine spiritual science could convince him that this endeavor does not lead to the secrets of existence, but away from them. And in any case, it is nonsense to bring the opinions of such personalities as Andreae into any kind of relationship with ideas that have something to do with sexual physiology.

Andreae clearly points out important things that he wants to include in his “Chymical Wedding” in his characterization of the “virgin”, to whom he brings the spiritual seeker into a particularly close relationship. This “Virgin” is the imaginative representation of a supersensible knowledge that, in contrast to the “seven liberal arts” acquired in the sensible field, must be taken from the spiritual realm. This “Virgin” gives, in a somewhat mysterious way, her name, which is “alchemy”. Andreae is thus saying that true alchemy is a different kind of science from those that arise from ordinary consciousness. In his opinion, the alchemist performs his operations with sensible substances and forces not because he wants to know the effect of these substances and forces in the realm of the senses, but because he wants to let a supersensible reality reveal itself through the sensual process. He wants to look through the sensual process to a supersensible one. What he does is different from the investigation of the ordinary natural scientist in the way he looks at the process.

One of the experiences of the “third day” is the complete overcoming of the belief that the way of judging to which man is accustomed in the sense world can also be a guiding force in the supersensible world in its unaltered form. In the society in which Christian Rosenkreutz dwells, questions are put which lead to a reluctance to decide on an answer. This is to draw attention to the limitations of ordinary judgment. Reality is richer than the possibility of decision, which lies in the mind trained on the sense world. After describing these experiences, Andreae introduces a “duchess”; he thus relates Christian Rosenkreutz to the supersensible kind of knowledge characterized by her, to theology. The effect of this knowledge on the human mind is characterized. It is of particular importance that after all these experiences, the spiritual seeker is still haunted by the dream in the following night, which shows him a door that he wants to open and which resists him for a long time. This image is reflected in his soul by the idea that he should not regard all his previous experiences as valuable for their immediate content, but only as a producer of a force that must submit to further efforts.

The “fourth day” is crucial for the spiritual seeker's position in the supersensible world. The spiritual seeker encounters the lion again. The old inscription that the lion presents to him essentially contains the challenge to approach the source from which inspiration flows from the spiritual world. The soul that wishes to remain in merely imaginative experience could, so to speak, only allow itself to be addressed by the spiritual world and use the strength of its own will to bring the revelations to its understanding. If the full power of the human 'I' is to enter the supersensible world, then this 'I' must carry its own consciousness into this world. The soul must rediscover the 'I' with its sensory experiences in the spiritual world. In the supersensible, so to speak, the memory of the way the sensory world is experienced must arise. Andreae presents this by placing a 'comedy' among the experiences of the 'fourth day', that is, an image of events in the sensory world. In beholding this image of the world of sense, which is gained within the supersensible realm, the “I” of the spiritual seeker is strengthened, so that he feels the close connection between the soul element that experiences in the supersensible and that which is active in the sense world through the body.

From this insight into Andreae's appropriate mode of presentation, it can be concluded that he seriously wanted to talk to his contemporaries about a path to the spiritual world that is appropriate to the epoch of human development that began in the sixteenth century, at the beginning of which the author of the “Chymische Hochzeit” (The Chemical Wedding) feels he is. The fact that the realization of what Andreae presented to his contemporaries as ideal demands initially faced severe obstacles is rooted in the devastating impact of the turmoil of the Thirty Years War and all that it brought to recent times. But progress in the evolution of mankind is only possible if personalities like Johann Valentin Andreae counter the inhibiting forces of a certain world current with truly progressive ones.

Whether Andreae succeeded in describing to Christian Rosenkreutz a spiritual seeker who, from the path he has taken from the spiritual experiences of a bygone era, can effectively point to the new one that corresponds to the new era, can only be asserted if it is possible to show that the last “days” of the “Chymical Wedding” report experiences that open up the perspective into this new period; if Christian Rosenkreutz can carry his “I” over into this period.

The most significant experience for Christian Rosenkreutz on the “fourth day” is his presentation before the kings and their subsequent beheading. The author of The Chemical Wedding interprets the nature of this experience through the symbols that stand on a small altar. In these symbols, the human soul can see its relationship to the universe and its becoming. In such symbols, the spiritual seekers have always sought to make the soul understand how its own essence lives in the essence of the cosmos. The book points to the thought content of the human being, which, in accordance with the human organization, is an influx of objective world-creative thoughts into the soul. In the “Little Light” it is indicated how the world-creative thoughts are effective in the universe as light ether and how they become knowledge-producing and enlightening in man. Cupid's intervention by blowing out the little light refers to the view of the spiritual seeker, who sees two opposing forces in the essentiality that underlies all existence and becoming: light and love. But this view can only be correctly understood if we see in physical light and in the love active within the physical world the materially effective revelations of the primal spiritual forces. Within the spiritual power of light, the creative thought element of the world lives out itself, and within love, the creative will element. A “sphere” is among the symbols to suggest how human experience is part of the all-experience. The clock speaks of the soul's interweaving with the passage of time in the cosmos, just as the sphere speaks of its interweaving with the cosmos's spatial existence. The Brünnlein, from which blood-red water flows, and the skull with the snake, point to the way in which birth and death are conceived by the spirit-recognizer in the universe. Valentin Andreae uses these symbols in his description in a similar way to how they have been used since time immemorial in the meeting places that served such societies, through which the people admitted to them were to be initiated into the secrets of life. By using them in this way, he shows that, in his opinion, they are imaginations that are truly based on the development of the human soul and that can inspire the soul to feel the secrets of life.

The question arises: What does the “King's Hall” represent, where Christian Rosenkreuz is led, and what does he experience through the presence of the kings and their decapitation? The symbols point to the answer. The spiritual seeker should see how he is grounded in the essence of the universe with his own being. He must see what is in him in the world, and what is in the world in himself. He can only do this if he recognizes in the things and processes of the world the images of that which is active and alive in him. He comes to see what is going on in him not only through images drawn from the soul, but he sees the experiences of this soul through images that represent the evolution of the universe. The kings present themselves before Christian Rosenkreutz to show him: thus live the powers of your soul within yourself; and the experiences of the kings reflect what must happen in the soul under certain conditions. Christian Rosenkreutz stands before the events in the “King's Hall” in such a way that his soul beholds itself in them. The beheading of the Magi is an event within the development of his own soul. He has come to the “King's Hall” with the powers of knowledge, which still only have the nature that the entity was able to acquire before entering the spiritual world. However, by becoming familiar with this world, these powers of knowledge gain experiences that also relate to the material world. Not only does the spiritual world shine before the soul, but the material world also reveals itself in forms that cannot be fully grasped by those who stop at the material level of observation. One of the things these experiences reveal is the ambivalence of the human condition. The forces that underlie physical growth also show themselves to be effective in phenomena that are usually described as psychological. The power of memory and the impulses that give rise to imagination prove to be based on physical conditions that are similar to those of growth. Only the forces of growth work in such a way that they are in an ascending development in human childhood and adolescence, that they then decline and, through their decay, cause death in themselves, while the forces that form memory and imagination assume the possibility of decaying within themselves from a very early point in life. In each waking period, these forces undergo the descending development that extends to decay, which the whole organism undergoes from the second half of life until death. In each sleep period, this decay is compensated for, and memory and imagination experience a resurrection. The soul organism is superimposed on the human total organism like a parasite on a host. The soul organism can provide the conditions for memory and imagination because, in the course of the day, it undergoes the path to death that the total organism takes in the course of life on earth. In this way, for the spiritual seeker, the soul organism becomes a metamorphosis of the total organism. The soul organism appears as that part of the whole organism which brings forth the forces that reveal life from birth to death in a more intense way, so that they provide the basis for the life of imagination. Into the daily decay of the soul organism's forces, the creative thought-being of the world pours in and thus becomes a life of imagination in the human being. The essential thing is that the spiritual seeker recognizes the material basis of the soul processes as the transformed general material processes of the whole organism. The paradoxical fact is that on the path to the spirit one first sees the material conditions of soul life. This fact can be the starting point for an attempt. One can stop at the discovery that the soul processes reveal themselves in their material form. Then, in seeking the spirit, one can be driven into a materialistic world view. But if one really sees through what is at hand, then the opposite occurs. One recognizes in the material basis of the soul life the effective spiritual powers that reveal themselves through the material formations, and thus prepares the possibility of also recognizing the underlying spirit in the entire organism and its course of life.

Christian Rosenkreutz is thus confronted with the important experience that an alchemy taking place in the natural process reveals to him. The material processes of the whole organism are transformed before his spiritual eye. They become such that the soul processes shine through them like the light that reveals itself in the external process of combustion. But these soul processes also show him their limits. They are processes that correspond to what leads to death in the whole organism. Christian Rosenkreuz is led before the “kings” of his own soul being, before his powers of knowledge. They appear to him as that which the whole organism metamorphoses out of itself. But the life forces of growth are only transformed into powers of knowledge by absorbing death into themselves. And therefore they can only carry the knowledge of what is dead within them. Death is integrated into all processes of nature in that the inanimate lives in everything. The ordinary process of knowledge is directed only towards this inanimate. This process grasps the inorganic because it is dead; but it only grasps the plant and every living thing to the extent that they are tinged with the inanimate. Every plant contains inorganic processes in addition to what it is as a living being. These grasp the powers of knowledge in the ordinary view; they do not grasp the living. This only becomes visible insofar as it presents itself in the inanimate. Christian Rosenkreutz observes the death of his “soul kings”, his powers of knowledge, as they arise from the metamorphosis of the material forces of the whole organism, without the human being passing from natural alchemy to artificial alchemy. This must consist in man's giving his powers of knowledge a character within the soul that they do not have through mere organic developmental processes. What is essential in the ascending growth, what death has not yet gnawed at, must be awakened in the powers of knowledge. The natural alchemy must be continued.

This continuation of natural alchemy forms the fifth day's work of the “Chymical Wedding”. The spiritual seeker must penetrate with insight into the processes that nature brings about in bringing forth growing life. And he must introduce this natural creation into the powers of knowledge, without allowing death to prevail in the transition from the processes of growth to the processes of the soul. He receives the powers of knowledge from nature as dead entities; he must give them life by giving them what nature has taken from them when she has carried out the alchemical transformation into powers of knowledge with them. When he sets out on such a project, temptation draws near to him. He must descend into the sphere in which Nature works, conjuring up life out of that which, by its very nature, strives towards death, through the power of love. In doing so, he exposes himself to the danger of his vision being seized by the instincts that prevail in the lower realm of matter. He must come to know how an element akin to love lives in matter, which is imprinted with death, and which underlies every renewal of life. This process of the soul, exposed to temptation, is meaningfully described by Andreae in that he lets Cupid drive Christian Rosenkreutz before Venus. And it is clearly indicated how the characterized spiritual seeker is not held back from his further path by temptation, not only through his own soul power, but through the rule of other powers. If Christian Rosenkreutz had only to walk his own path of knowledge, he could also conclude with temptation. That this is not the case points to what Andreae wants to describe. Christian Rosenkreutz is to point the way from a past epoch to a dawning one with his spiritual path. It is the forces at work in the course of time that help him to permeate his “I” with the powers of knowledge that correspond to the new era. In this way he can begin the ascent to the “Tower” by taking part in the alchemical process by which the dead powers of knowledge experience their resurrection. Thus on this ascent he has the strength to hear the siren song of love without falling prey to its temptations. He must allow himself to be influenced by the spiritual elemental force of love; he must not allow himself to be misled by its manifestation in the sensual realm. In the Tower of Olympi, the dead forces of knowledge are brought into line with the impulses that in the human organism only come into play in growth processes. It is pointed out how Christian Rosenkreutz is allowed to participate in this process because his soul development is to take place in the sense of the changing temporal forces. He goes out into the garden while he should be sleeping, looks up at the starry sky and says to himself: “Because I had a good opportunity to reflect more deeply on astronomy, I found that on this particular night such a conjunction of the planets is taking place, the like of which cannot soon be observed elsewhere.”

In the experiences of the sixth day, the imaginations are described in detail, which bring to life in the soul of Christian Rosenkreutz how the dead powers of knowledge, which the organism develops in the ordinary course of its life, are transformed into the powers of supersensible insight. Each of these imaginations corresponds to an experience that the soul undergoes in relation to its own powers when it experiences how that which previously could only penetrate into itself with the dead becomes capable of awakening living knowledge within itself. Another spiritual seeker would describe the individual images in a different way from Andreae. But what matters is not the content of the individual images, but the fact that the transformation of the soul forces takes place in the human being by having the process of such images as a reflection of this transformation in a sequence of imaginations.

In The Chymical Wedding Christian Rosenkreutz is portrayed as the spiritual seeker who senses the approach of the age in which humanity will direct its gaze at natural processes differently than in the one ending with the fifteenth century, in which humanity no longer, when observing nature, , in this observation itself the spiritual content of natural things and natural processes, in which it can come to a denial of the spiritual world if it does not consider a path of knowledge possible by which one can see through the material basis of the soul life and yet still absorb the essence of the spirit into knowledge. To be able to do this, one must be able to spread the spiritual light over this material basis. One must be able to see how nature proceeds by shaping her forces of activity into a soul organism through which the dead is revealed, in order then to divine from the nature of nature itself the secret of how spirit can be juxtaposed to spirit when nature's creative activity is directed towards the awakening of the dead powers of knowledge to a higher life. In this way, knowledge is developed that is placed in reality as spiritual knowledge. For such knowledge is a further sprout on the living being of the world; through it, the evolution of reality continues, which prevails from the very beginning of existence up to the life of man. Only that which is present in nature in a germinal state and is retained in the working of nature itself at the point where, in the metamorphosis of existence, the powers of cognition are to develop for the dead, is developed as higher powers of cognition. That such a continuation of natural activity beyond what it itself achieves in human organization leads out of reality and into the formless is not an objection that will be raised by anyone who understands the development of nature itself. For this consists everywhere in hindering the progress of the growth forces at certain points, in order to bring about the revelations of the infinite possibilities of form at certain stages of existence. In the same way, a formative potential is also held within the human organization. But just as such a potential is held within the green leaf of the plant, and yet the formative forces of plant growth then go beyond this form in order to bring forth the green leaf in the colored petal at a higher level, so too can the human being progress from the form of his powers of knowledge, which are directed towards the dead, to a higher level of these powers. He experiences the reality of this progression by becoming aware within himself of how he thereby takes up the soul organ in order to grasp the spirit in its supersensible revelation, just as the transformation of the green leaf into the colored floral organ of the plant prepares the ability that is realized in the formation of the fruit.

After the completion of the art-alchemical process, Christian Rosenkreutz was appointed “Knight of the Golden Stone”. One would have to go into great detail in a purely historical account if one wanted to point out the name “güldener Stein” and its use from the relevant serious and the far more fraudulent literature. That is not the intention of this essay. However, it is possible to point out what can be gained from a study of this literature as a result of this use. Those serious personalities who have used the name wanted to use it to point to something in which dead stone nature can be viewed in such a way that its connection with living becoming is recognized. The serious alchemist believed that artificial natural processes could be brought about, in which dead, stony matter is used, but in which, if they are properly observed, something of what happens when nature itself weaves the dead into the living becoming can be recognized. By observing very specific processes in the dead, the aim was to grasp the traces of creative natural activity and thus the essence of the spirit that prevails in the phenomena. The symbol for the dead, recognized as a manifestation of the spirit, is the “golden stone”. Anyone who examines a corpse in its immediate present essence becomes aware of how the dead is incorporated into the general process of nature. But the formation of the corpse contradicts this general process of nature. This formation could only be a result of spiritual life. The general process of nature must destroy what has been formed by spiritual life. The Alchemist is of the opinion that ordinary human knowledge of nature as a whole involves something of which it only grasps as much as is present in a corpse. A higher knowledge should be found for natural phenomena, which relates to them as spiritual life does to a corpse. This striving is for the “güldenen Stein” (the golden stone). Andreae speaks of this symbol in such a way that one can see that he believes that only someone who has gone through the experiences of the six days he describes can grasp how to proceed with the “güldenen Stein”. He wishes to intimate that anyone who speaks of this symbol without knowing the nature of the transformation of the powers of knowledge can only have a mirage in mind. He wishes to portray Christian Rosenkreuz as a personality who can legitimately speak about something that many speak about without authorization. He wishes to defend the truth against the false talk about the search for the spiritual world.

Christian Rosenkreuz and his comrades, after they have become the true workers with the “golden stone,” receive a symbol with the two sayings: “Art is the handmaid of nature” and “Nature is the daughter of time.” In the spirit of these guiding principles they are to work out of their spiritual knowledge. The experiences of the six days can be summarized in these sentences. Nature reveals her secrets to him who, through his art, is able to continue her work. But this continuation cannot succeed for anyone who, for his art, has not first eavesdropped on her in the sense of her will, who has not recognized how her revelations come about through her infinite possibilities of development being born out of the womb of time in finite forms.

The relationship in which Christian Rosenkreutz is installed as king on the seventh day characterizes how the spiritual seeker now stands in relation to his transformed cognitive abilities. Attention is drawn to the fact that he himself gave birth to them as the “Father”. And his relationship to the “first gatekeeper” also appears as such to a part of his own self, namely to the one who, before the transformation of his powers of knowledge as the “Astrologus”, was indeed in search of the laws but who was not equal to the temptation that arises when the spiritual seeker comes to a point such as that at which Christian Rosenkreutz found himself at the beginning of the fifth day when he stood before Venus. He who succumbs to this temptation cannot enter the spiritual world. He knows too much to be completely removed from it, but he cannot enter either. He must stand guard before the gate until another comes who succumbs to the same temptation. Christian Rosenkreutz initially believes that he has succumbed to it and is therefore condemned to take over the office of the guard. But this guardian is, after all, a part of his own self; and by surveying this part with his transformed self, he has the opportunity to overcome it. He becomes the guardian of his own soul life; but this office of guardian does not prevent him from establishing his free relationship with the spiritual world.

Christian Rosenkreutz has become a knower of the spirit through the experiences of the seven days, and he is allowed to work in the world through the power that has come to his soul from these experiences. What he and his companions accomplish in their outer life will flow from the spirit from which the works of nature itself flow. Through their work, they will bring harmony into human life, which will be a reflection of the harmony at work in nature, overcoming the opposing disharmonies. The presence of such people in the social order should be a continually active cause for maintaining the health of life in the social order itself. Valentin Andreae points to Christian Rosenkreuz and his companions as an answer to those who ask: What are the best laws for the coexistence of people on earth? Andreae answers: Not what one expresses in thoughts, that it should happen in one way or another, can regulate this coexistence, but what people can say who strive to live in the spirit that wants to express itself through existence.

In five sentences, what guides souls that want to work in the sense of Christian Rosenkreutz in human life is summarized. It should be far from them to think in a different spirit than the one that is revealed in the work of nature, and they should find the human work by becoming the continuers of the works of nature. They should not place their work in the service of human desires, but should make these desires mediators of the works of the spirit. They should serve people lovingly so that the active spirit may be revealed in the relationship between people. They should not be deterred in their pursuit of the value that the spirit can give to all human work by anything that the world can give them in terms of value. They should not fall into the error of mistaking the physical for the spiritual, like bad alchemists. Such people believe that a physical means of prolonging life or something similar is a supreme good, and forget that the physical has value only as long as it proves itself through its existence as the rightful revealer of the spiritual that underlies it.

At the end of his description of the “Chymical Wedding”, Andreae hints at how Christian Rosenkreutz “came home”. In all the externals of the world he is the same as he was before his experiences. His new situation in life differs from the old one only in that from now on he will carry his “higher self” within him as the ruler of his consciousness, and that what he will accomplish can become what this “higher self” may work through him. The transition from the last experiences of the seventh day to the finding of oneself in the familiar surroundings is no longer described. “Here about two quart of leaves are missing.” One might imagine that there are people who would be particularly curious about what should have been on these missing pages. Well, it is that which can only be experienced by those who know the nature of the transformation of the soul as their own individual experience. Such a person knows that everything that leads to this experience has a general human significance that is shared as one shares the experiences of a journey. The reception of the experience by the ordinary person, on the other hand, is something very personal, is also different for each person and cannot be understood by anyone in the same way as by the person who has experienced it. The fact that Valentin Andreae omitted the description of this transition to the familiar situation can be taken as further proof that the “Chymische Hochzeit” expresses true connoisseurship of what is to be described.

The preceding remarks are an attempt to characterize what is expressed in the “Chemical Wedding”, merely from such a consideration of its content as it arises from the author of this presentation. The judgment should be substantiated that the writing published by Andreae should point in the direction that one should follow if one wanted to know something about the true character of a higher kind of knowledge. And as a fact, these remarks would like to show that the special kind of spirit knowledge that has been demanded since the fifteenth century is described in the “Chymical Wedding”. For anyone who understands the content of this writing in the same way as the author of this exposition, it is an historical account of a spiritual current in Europe that goes back to the fifteenth century and is directed towards gaining knowledge about a context of things that lies behind the external phenomena of the world.

There is, however, a fairly extensive literature on the effectiveness of Johann Valentin Andreae, in which the question is discussed whether the writings published by him can be considered real proof of the existence of such a spiritual current. In these writings, this current is presented as the Rosicrucianism. Some investigators are of the opinion that Andreae was only indulging in a literary joke with his Rosicrucian writings, intended to ridicule the dreamers who show themselves wherever higher knowledge is spoken of in a secretive way. Rosicrucianism would then be a fantasy of Andreae's, intended to mock the ravings of giddy or fraudulent mystics. The author of these remarks does not believe that he should approach his readers with much of what has been said in this direction against the seriousness of Andreae's intentions, because he believes that a proper consideration of the content of the “Chymical Wedding” makes it possible to form a sufficiently well-founded view of what is intended by it. Certificates taken from a field outside this content cannot change this view. Those who believe that inner reasons can be recognized in their full weight hold that external documents should be evaluated according to these reasons, and not the inner according to the outer. If, therefore, these remarks are made outside of the purely historical literature on Rosicrucianism, this is not intended as a negative judgment of historical research itself. It is only meant to indicate that the point of view adopted here makes a detailed discussion of Rosicrucian literature unnecessary. Only a few more remarks should be added. It is well known that the manuscript of the “Chymische Hochzeit” was completed as early as 1603. It was not published until 1616, after Andreae had published the other Rosicrucian writing “Fama Fraternitatis R. C.” in 1614. This writing, above all, has given rise to the belief that Andreae only spoke in jest of the existence of a Rosicrucian society. This belief is supported by the fact that Andreae himself subsequently referred to Rosicrucianism as something he would not want to advocate. Some of his later writings and notes in letters, which he made, cannot be interpreted in any other way than that he only wanted to tell a tale about such a school of thought in order to “fool” the curious and enthusiastic. However, in the exploitation of such testimonies, it is usually disregarded what misunderstandings writings like those published by Andreae are subject to. What he himself later said about them can only be correctly judged when one considers that he was compelled to speak after opponents had appeared who heretically denounced the designated school of thought in the worst possible way, that “followers” had appeared who were visionaries or alchemist swindlers, and who distorted everything that was meant by Rosicrucianism. But even if one takes all this into account, if one wanted to assume that Andreae, who later showed himself to be a more than pietistic writer, soon after the appearance of the Rosicrucian writings had a certain shyness about being considered the confessor of what was expressed in these writings, one cannot gain a sufficiently well-founded view of this personality's relationship to Rosicrucianism through such considerations. Yes, even if one wanted to go so far as to deny Andreae's authorship of the “Fama”, one would not want to do so with respect to the “Chemical Wedding” for historical reasons.

The matter must also be considered from another historical point of view. The “Fama Fraternitatis” was published in 1614. Let us leave open for the moment whether Andreae intended this writing to address serious readers, in order to speak to them of the school of thought known as Rosicrucianism. But two years after the publication of the “Fama”, the “Chymical Wedding” was published, which had already been completed thirteen years earlier. In 1603, Andreae was still a very young man (seventeen years old). Did he, as such, already have the maturity of mind to play a prank on the starry-eyed enthusiasts of his time by mocking them with a construct of his imagination in the form of Rosicrucianism? And even if he was willing to speak of a Rosicrucianism that he seriously believed in in the “Fama,” which, incidentally, had already been read in manuscript form in Tyrol in 1610, how did he, as a very young man, come to write the “Chymische Hochzeit,” the document that he then published two years after the “Fama” as a message about the true Rosicrucianism? The questions regarding Andreae seem to become so entangled that it becomes difficult to find a purely historical solution. One could hardly object to a mere historical researcher who tried to make credible that Andreae had found the manuscript of the “Chymische Hochzeit” and the “Fama” - perhaps in the possession of his family - and had published them in his youth for some reason, but later wanted nothing to do with the school of thought expressed in them. But if this were a fact, why did Andreae not simply make it known?

From a spiritual scientific point of view, one can come to a completely different conclusion. From Andreae's own judgment and maturity at the time he wrote the “Chymical Wedding”, one does not need to deduce its content. In terms of content, this writing proves to be one that was written out of intuition. Such a work can be written by people who are predisposed to do so, even if their own judgment and life experience do not speak into what is written down. And yet what is written down can still be a message from a reality. The content of the “Chymical Wedding” demands to be understood as a message about a real spiritual current in the sense indicated here. The assumption that Valentine Andreae wrote it intuitively throws light on the position he later took up to Rosicrucianism. As a young man he was predisposed to give a picture of this spiritual current without his own mode of cognition playing a part in it. But this mode of cognition developed in the later pietistic theologian Andreae. The intuitive side of his nature receded in his soul. He himself later philosophized about what he wrote in his youth. He does this as early as 1619 in his writing 'Turris Babel'. The connection between the later Andreae and the intuitive writer of his youth did not come clearly before his soul. If Andreae's attitude towards the subject-matter of the “Chymical Wedding” is considered in the light just indicated, one is compelled to consider the contents of this writing without reference to what its author himself expressed at any time about his relation to Rosicrucianism. Whatever of this spiritual current could reveal itself at Andreae's time, revealed itself through a personality suited for the purpose. Those who are convinced from the outset that it is impossible for the spiritual life active in world phenomena to be revealed in this way will indeed have to reject what is said here. But there could also be people who, without starting from superstitious prejudices, come to the conviction of such a form of revelation precisely through calm consideration of the “Andreae case”.

The undeveloped person follows his instincts, the average person chooses between them, he refines and purifies them. This work is done by all of humanity. The I does this work on the astral body, which integrates itself into it as a higher one. The astral body consists of two parts: one that the human being had before humanity moved into him; the other he has transformed into the spiritual self. A man in whose soul nothing stirs any more that incites him to passions and desires has transformed his astral body into a spiritual self. From the middle of the Atlantean period until a distant future, man has to accomplish this work through his I.

The work of the I is the shaping of the spirit of the mind at the astral body,
the shaping of the spirit of life at the etheric body,
and the shaping of the spirit of the human being at the physical body, and this work is carried out systematically by the students of occultism.

The ennoblement of the astral body through the acquisition of intellectual abilities resembles the minute hand of the clock, the transformation of the etheric body through the ennoblement of the temperaments and moral abilities resembles the hour hand of the clock. The most powerful impulses for changing morals come from religions, they emanate from the great founders of religions, and also through genuine art, an art in which the divine passes through the sensual forms.

The etheric body also consists of two parts: one that the human being has inherited and one that he transforms into the spirit of life. This happens through conscious, systematic work in a spiritual way, which then takes firmer hold than the inherited part. The effect of such work can then be applied to the physical body. This task is not the lowest, but the highest; it requires the strongest forces.

The physical body is a structure full of wisdom, which is less understood by man than the astral body. We know more about our instincts, passions and desires than about how blood corpuscles move. What do we know about the functions of the spleen, liver, gall bladder, pineal gland? The latter was once used for clairvoyance and will be made capable of it again.

Man will not get to know his own body through anatomy, by cutting up corpses, but through inner observation, through mastery of the body. The first step in this direction will be the transformation of the breathing process. The breath is the breath that, as it were, breathes into itself, which is why “Atma” means “spiritual man”. This I with its bodies is at the same time an imprint of the universe. With each step that man takes, his penetration into the universe deepens.

It is dangerous and misleading to speak of theosophy as if the soul were absorbed in the universe. This absorption can only be achieved in stages through the deification of the human being.

The three fundamental aspects of the self:
the astral body, transformed into manas or spirit self;
the etheric body, transformed into budhi or life spirit;
the physical self, transformed into atma or spiritual man.

The I is not easy to understand, it arises through work on the lower limbs; for this it must be trained.

After the Atlantean time, people began to work on the Manas. In the Lemurian time, it entered the physical body. Before that, only the physical body, etheric body and astral body existed. There was an intermediate stage until the middle of the Atlantean period before work on the Manas could begin. Three stages were prepared for the ability to work out the I: the sentient soul, the mind soul and the consciousness soul. As far as the I is conscious, it works on the astral body in the mind soul. As the sword is in its sheath, so is the sentient soul in the soul body. The I first fertilizes the sentient, intellectual and consciousness soul in the astral body and works on the spirit self, life spirit and spiritual man in the etheric body.

In the Nordic Druid schools, there were nine members of the human being, in Egypt seven. The Nordic students distinguished between the astral body or Kama-Rupa, the sentient soul in the soul body and, in the higher Manas, the consciousness soul and spirit self.

According to the sevenfold division, five members are developed, two - Budhi and Atma - are still in the core.

When a person falls asleep, the physical and etheric bodies remain in bed; the astral body and the ego withdraw, along with everything that develops through the ego. The dream is an intermediate state when the astral body is still connected to the etheric body in a certain way. Actually, the astral body should also be out; but one must not imagine this out-of-being in a tangible way. The astral body is drawn out with its powers; this is to be understood dynamically, not spatially. As long as the astral body is in the body, the person thinks and feels; all consciousness takes place through the eye, ear and so on. All this sinks when the astral body withdraws, fatigue sets in, but in the morning it gives way to refreshment.

Where do the forces that strengthen and heal people come from? When people sleep, they lie in their physical and etheric bodies, which are in a plant-like state. Meanwhile, the soul returns to its radiant, better home in the astral plane. For those who have not yet been trained, all experiences sink into a higher world. More highly developed beings then find themselves in a surging world of flowing sound formations. At first there is silence, but spiritual ears hear a new world of sounds. It is possible to hear the connection between the planets and our sun. Those who look at the starry sky in terms of the Ptolemaic system see the stars moving. Divided into 360 degrees, each star moves one degree in relation to each other in one hundred years. Saturn moves one thousand two hundred times as fast, Jupiter two and a half times as fast; Jupiter moves five times as fast in relation to Mars, and Mars moves twice as fast as the Sun, Venus and Mercury - when viewed occultly. Mercury to Moon is like twelve to one.

According to the speed of movement, each world body has a different tone; the harmony is the music of the spheres or spherical harmony. These tones move and swim in astral substances and forces. Just as we do not see the stars during the day, the soul moves away from its home; at night, it returns to a blissful, comforting element. The soul plunges into the cosmic worlds that belong to the sun, and in its vibrations the soul renews its strength.

Paracelsus had the right concept for this state, he says: “A calm sleep must always bring health; insomnia, insufficient sleep shorten the physical life.

After death, only the physical body remains and [this is] left to the dissolution of its substances and forces. The etheric body no longer works against the dissolution. The state that the etheric body is united with the deceased without the physical body can last for two to three days; it can last about as long as a person could endure without sleep. During this time, everything he has experienced from birth until he loses consciousness in death passes in his memory. No pain or pleasure is associated with these memories, the images are objective, they pass by like in a panorama. This is because the etheric body has the ability to form memories through the ego; it is the carrier of memory. It is an experience that the etheric body is separated from the physical body after death.

In a finger, there are muscles and nerve ganglia. These ganglia are immersed in the substance of the etheric body as if in a hollow sphere. When a limb falls asleep, we feel a tingling sensation. This comes from a partial separation from the etheric body. Hypnotizing is therefore dangerous because a permanent tendency to push out the etheric body can arise. For a short time, the etheric body can leave the physical body through shock, falling and the like; if the person remains conscious, life appears as an image. This is proof that the etheric body conveys memory.

When a person is free from the physical body through death and in the etheric body, he takes an extract of life with him, which joins the others as a new leaf, like a link in a chain. In this way, the ego enriches itself, the carrier of all further wanderings.

Yesterday I described the astral world. To-day we shall deal with man's life after death in the astral world. This will give us a basis for an understanding of reincarnation and karma.

We have seen that when we die the following processes take place: The physical body remains behind as a corpse; whereas during sleep the etheric body remains connected with physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the Ego go out of the physical body at the moment of death. Immediately after death, the whole earthly life unfolds itself in every detail before the soul of the departed in the form of pictures. This process lasts for about three days, until the next separation, namely that of the etheric body from the astral body and the Ego. In the occult meaning we therefore speak of two corpses. After a while, the etheric body remains behind as a second corpse.

When the second separation has taken place, the capacity of memory ceases—but not for always—and a new condition begins for the human being. What is this new condition? Man now experiences himself in the world which he enters every night during sleep. But this after-death condition greatly differs from the sleeping condition. Theosophical books sometimes describe death as if it were a kind of sleep. But this is not the case; soon after death man grows conscious of the astral world. Nevertheless there exists in the proverb: Sleep is the brother of death. ... and this is justified. This new state of existence is called life in Kamaloca.

We have seen that during sleep the astral body works on the physical body and on the etheric body in order to renew their forces. This work suppresses consciousness during sleep and prevents us from having perceptions of the astral world. After death the astral body is dispensed from this work indeed no longer to restore fatigue, and for this reason it begins to grow conscious of the astral world. Upon the Earth, this force was used for the reconstruction of the physical body, but now it is free and exists in the form of consciousness. When the astral body is no longer obliged to restore anything, it perceives the images of the astral world. This also shows you why we should strive after a sound sleep.

Observe physical life here in this world, how everyone seeks to satisfy his senses. What a human being enjoys, is enjoyed by his soul, but the organ which enables him to enjoy is physical. If a person enjoys eating, the soul needs the palate for its enjoyment. After death the longing for these enjoyments continues to exist, whereas the organs no longer exist. The soul yearns for good food, but the organ enabling it to taste it is lacking. The longing can no longer be satisfied. The soul is like a wanderer suffering terrible thirst looking in vain for water, for a possibility to quench his thirst.

This state of existence does not last forever, little by little the longings cease. Many religions describe it as a life in purgatory. And old painter sometimes depicted in other pictures with flames of fire. In fact, the soul suffers a burning thirst.

The further courses is that the human being feels his last longings and lives through his whole life backwards, as far as his birth; when he had no passionate longings. Afterwards man enters Devachan. This is clearly indicated in the Gospel verse: unless ye become like little children, ye cannot enter the kingdom of God.—Little by little the human being must free himself from everything which linked him up with the physical world. Kamaloca is the condition in which he emancipates himself from everything which chains him to the world of the senses. It is influenced entirely by the sensory life in the physical world. If a person entirely submitted to his senses, his life in Kamaloca will be long and difficult. Ordinarily the Kamaloca-existence takes up about one third of the duration of earthly life. Past life rises up before the soul in the form of images and beings that torment us. In Kamaloca everything is reversed: what used to satisfy us, is now want. Hot passion calls up the feeling of horrible chilling Beings. And the burning thirst remains throughout. The more a human being freed himself from physical life before death and the easier his death, the more readily will he disaccustom himself to the world of the senses. In the case of suicides this will be most difficult of all, for they were the prey of an illusion: they do not consider that in violently severing themselves from the life of the senses, they will be seized by an unspeakable greed for their physical body, which would keep them in close proximity to the physical world. A similar fate—though in a weaker form awaits those who lost their life suddenly through some accident. Such a sudden death also brings with it an avidity for the physical world, for the physical body, but later on this will be compensated in Devachan. When the soul has laid aside its earthly desires, it enters the Devachan state of existence.

Spiritual science does not teach us to turn away from life. The spiritual scientist may use the following comparison: the soul resembles a bee that flies out to the meadows to seek honey and bring it back to the hive. Here on earth the soul gathers the honey of life which he brings to the altar of the Godhead after death. The soul could never do this without a life in the physical world.

When man incarnates and begins to see, he at first simply perceives through his eyes. Gradually spiritual enjoyment grows out of this. Physical pleasure changes into spiritual enjoyment. The savage with but a few incarnations enjoys the many colors and the simplest sense-impressions. With each incarnation his senses grow more refined.—If we had never enjoyed colours sensually, we could never attain spiritual enjoyment of colors. The sensually enjoyment is therefore a necessary deviation. We should enjoy the beauty of the physical world. Similarly, sensual love gradually leads to the highest, purest, spiritual love. The soul should transform every experience and carry it up to the altar of spirituality. Nothing, really nothing, is ever lost. Without the school of sensuality, we can never reach spirituality. The Earth is not a valley of tears, it is a gathering place and the human beings are—so the Bible says—messengers, Angels of God, sent out to gather honey.

The human being is passing through a process of transformation. Think of your childhood years! How many thoughts and concepts approached you and how much you took in! And how your thoughts and concepts changed from the 10th to the 20th year! Your temperament undergoes a far weaker change. A passionate child will still be passionate in old age. The temperament is engraved in the human body. A choleric person has quite a different expression, bearing and walk from a sanguine, melancholic or phlegmatic person. We should strive, above all, to change our temperament to a certain extent at least. This was a training Occult Schools. The whole trend of life was changed in Occult Schools. The essential thing there was to transform the will.

After death, our spiritual connections and ties reach us as far as Devachan. Two people are intimate friends and their friendship takes on more and more spiritual character. Yet the physical body constitutes a certain obstacle. In Devachan this friendship will find its full, pure expression.

Everything that we drew out of our earthly life becomes interwoven with the soul, with the spirit. This enables us to shape our next incarnation, as far as the body, and earthly life is the expression of what we worked out for ourselves. In the East there is a proverb which says: what you think to-day, you are tomorrow.

During each incarnation we thus work for the next one. In my next lecture I will describe man's experiences in Devachan. Life in Devachan is not a dream-condition, for the human being does not sleep through the spiritual world. There, his consciousness is a much higher one, it is more alive than here on Earth. In Devachan everything appears in a stronger light. We do not lose our friends in Devachan; our connections with them are simply of another kin—it is a far more intimate and spiritual union. Devachan is a far more real state of existence than earthly life.

We have followed the evolution of mankind back as far as Atlantis and will now proceed to the study of Lemuria and speak of the Lemurian human forms. These human beings are the first representatives of real men with bodies permeated by souls. Let us first consider the structure of the Lemurian continent and the type of human being who lived on it.

In the Lemurian age everything was filled with the kind of watery mass, out of which emerged islands which were all of a volcanic kind. Typical for Lemuria is the manifold change in Nature, in the forms and in life. The single forms and species underwent a rapid transformation. The Atlantean soul-characteristics were in the case of the Lemurians, still more strongly marked, especially the will, which also had the greatest influence on the form of the physical body. This consisted only of gelatinous, transparent substances, into which the present bones and muscles had still to be built in. An organ which plays a very great role to-day was then in its very first beginnings. This is very significant, for with the development of the lungs is connected the fact that man was endowed with a living soul.

This installment did not happen in a moment, but lasted throughout long epochs of time.—How was the human soul connected with the body, before giving life to this body which, according to present-day concepts was very misshapen? It was the same connection which now exists during sleep: the soul was outside the body, it soared above it and drew it with it to an earth which was at that time still permeated by powerful streams of life.

The Lemurian constantly lived in a sleep-like condition which may be compared with our dream-consciousness in which a living image-world appears. He could only perceive in this manner and he knew the meaning of the single images, thus recognizing the soul-aspect of things.

An important moment in evolution was when he first used his body for the purpose of perception. The human being moved about in swinging, soaring movements. For this purpose he had a special organ in his bodily cavity, a kind of swimming bladder. The lungs developed out of this bladder, under the influence of the soul that soared above the body. The soul entered the human body in the same measure in which man began to breathe through his lungs. He actually breathed in his soul, with the air he breathed. This process too is described with literal accuracy in Genesis, in the Six Days' Creation, with the words: And God breathed his breath into man and he became a living soul ...

At that time man had the outward appearance of a very soft-bodied dragon (the designation of snake does not quite correspond to the reality); his companions were toads, fish, frogs, etc., in short, a primeval world of reptiles and amphibians, though their present-day descendants can in no way be compared with them; for they are quite degenerate descendants. At that time there were no mammals. To-day no remains can be found either of these reptiles or of the human beings of that age.

How should the relation between animal and man be tought of? The theory of man's ascent from apes may be considered as obsolete, for it is based upon a false train of thought. Think of a morally degenerate and of a highly ethical man. The assertion that man is descended from apes is like saying that the perfect man descends from the imperfect one. They need not descend from one another at all, but they may have a common father and be brothers! The one developed upwards, the other became decadent. Also the relation between ape and man may be viewed in this light. On Atlantis, the human form was still ape-like. During the Lemurian age the sole possession of a body which was even less perfect. This body then took an upward course of development. But the ape-like forms have partly degenerated and have become the apes of to-day. The apes are therefore the degenerated bodily brothers of man.

In the Atlantean age the human race branched out; the one main stem to an ascending development and became the human being of to-day, whereas the other descended and became the ape of to-day. All animals which live among us are consequently human beings who were expelled and condemned to degeneration. The ascent of certain beings is only possible through the fact that others sacrifice themselves. The higher expels the lower, in order to rise still higher; later on there will be a compensation for those who were expelled.

In this connection we must speak of a cosmic event of greatest importance, without which the soul could never have incarnated. This is the exit of the moon from the earth. The moon severed itself from the earth and formed a secondary planet. Formally, moon and earth were one planet. Thus the evolution of the Earth and the evolution of man are closely connected. What the astronomer sees of the moon, is not the whole moon, for everything in the world also has a soul. So also the moon has its soul. The moon went out of the earth with all its forces, with its whole aura, or its astral part.

This event stands in closest connection with everything which one calls fecundation and procreation. The ancient Greek Mysteries still knew this. In the Lemurian age the sexes began to separate; before that time the human beings were hermaphrodites. There was no act of fecundation and conception; procreation took place in a manner which has been preserved in certain lower living beings. The separation of the sexes coincided with the separation of the moon. This applies to all living beings. At that time, certain forces were eliminated from the earth, which had given man the possibility to bring forth descendants without the aid of another being. These forces were eliminated through the exit of the moon. At that time earth plus moon circled round the sun. But the moon maintained the old movement of the earth-moon planet, for it does not turn around its own axis as does the earth. Even as the moon of to-day always turns the same side to the earth, its “sun” and never the back side, so at that time the earth-moon planet always turned the same side to the sun.

Sun, moon and planets are also inhabited by beings. In a still earlier time, sun, moon, and earth were one body, and everything which now exists in the form of human beings, animals and plants, still lived together with sun. At that time man still had a quite etheric form of a very fine substance and he lived a kind of plant-existence. Animal forms and human forms arose much later, for at that time everything still stood at one stage of planned-existence.

These sun-plants were of course entirely different from the plants of to-day. Nevertheless when they say with their blossom they strove towards the center of the planet, i.e. the sun, and that their roots stretched upwards. When the sun severed itself from the earth, the plants turned completely around and again turned their blossom to the sun. From that time onwards the blossom stretched upwards and the root downwards. the animals only made a right-angle turn, when the moon left the earth.¹ Man made a complete turn, so that he is a reversed plant, even as the plant is a reversed human being.

The life-soul passes through the three kingdoms of Nature. Plato therefore says that the world-soul is nailed on to the cross of the world. Also the human soul hangs on that cross, by passing through the three realms of Nature. This is the significance of the Cross in the ancient Mysteries.

From the world-historical aspect, the whole process of development exists for the sake of man. Life can only arise out of life, but life eliminates the lifeless. Everything lifeless has arisen out of life. The minerals are deposits of living substance. But life comes from the spirit. The spirit is consequently the first original source, from which everything descends. And man is the first-born of creation. He has thrown out animals, plants and minerals; the lower always comes from higher.

To-morrow we shall speak of the development of man towards higher stages of knowledge.

• 1. See in this connection: Rudolf Steiner: “Goetheanismus, ein Menschen-Umwandlungsimpuls und Auferstehungsgedanke” 1st Lecture: Die Antwort der Geistwissenschaft auf die wichtigsten Fragen der Zeit. (Philes.Anthrop.Publish. Company, Dornach)

My dear brothers and sisters! As we know, it's our duty at the beginning of each esoteric lesson to address the Spirit, the regent of the day who helps to direct the earth in world evolution. (Verse for Wednesday) Today we'll go into what one can look upon as the only right and true beginning of clairvoyance. The most important thing in all esoteric activity and inner development is to create calm, inner quiet and to keep it after the actual meditation. After we've meditated on the verses or have done the other things that the masters of wisdom and of the harmony of feelings have given us for our training, we should remain absolutely quiet for awhile. Nothing from everyday life, no memory of it and not even a feeling of our body should press in there. We must feel bodiless and as if empty; we must eliminate thoughts about our own existence and should only accept the fact of our existence. But one shouldn't fall asleep or get into a dream state.

Then one has a condition in which clairvoyance can begin. What arises before our inner gaze in such moments comes from the spiritual world. There are ways of telling whether the images that emerge there are purely spiritual or whether they're illusory.

What would happen if the etheric body would leave the physical body for even a moment? The physical body would contract, shrivel and become wrinkled; it tends to contract into a very small space and then to eventually dissolve into nothing. The etheric body tends to spread out into the widths of space; then it feels connected with all forces out in space. It fills the physical body and spreads it out to the size it has.

Old people get wrinkles through this tendency of the physical body to shrink. The physical body shrinks because the etheric body doesn't work in there anymore like it did when the man was young.

Something similar happens to our etheric body during meditation. The etheric body streams and spreads out in space and feels its way into everything. The same is true at the moment of death when the physical body releases the etheric body; this can also last for days.

It's a blissful sensation when the etheric body feels as if it's dissolved in space. And things would remain like this until rebirth if the astral body wasn't there to pull the etheric body back together again through its desires, drives and passions; thereby a man enters kamaloca.

During meditation one should try—and this can be done after years of effort—to get to the point where one's interior feels illuminated. A man becomes a light that illumines the objects in the spirit world that approach him. The things we perceive in such moments when the soul is very calm aren't like the ones in physical life where we see them from outside, like we see the sun rising on the horizon in the morning. Rather, to stick with the sun example, we feel as if we were in the sun that rises there on the horizon of our clairvoyant consciousness. We feel as if we were divided up in space. But illusory figures arise before us, then, if we bring personal feelings of sympathy and especially of antipathy, improper fondness for certain people, etc. into our meditation. In someone who lies and is dishonest in daily life, the lies stream into space with his etheric body. The dishonestly is rayed back by the things that a pupil sees there, just as a mirror reflects an image of our face and an echo throws back our voice. Then dissembling shapes such as beautiful angel figures appear there, caused by the dishonesty that streams out with the etheric body. Through the relation of these figures to our own dishonesty the latter is increasingly consolidated, and eventually we can't distinguish between truth and lies anymore.

Now some of you may think that there must be ways to protect oneself against these delusive images. But as truly as I'm speaking here and am advocating the esotericism behind which stand the masters of wisdom and of the harmony of feelings, so true it is that there's no way to immediately dispel these illusory images an to prevent them from appearing. Only through very patient, steady work on oneself, through the overcoming of dishonesty in oneself, can one gradually get to the point where these illusory things don't appear anymore and lies don't become reflected because they aren't there anymore.

Someone who is proud, who begins esoteric training with false ambition, who feel a wild desire to experience all truths of the spiritual world as fast as possible produces errors in himself, thereby. He becomes receptive for all gossip out in the world He likes to stick his nose into men's everyday affairs as he listens eagerly to all sensational comments and phenomena. Then he cannot distinguish between true and false things anymore.

That's how ambition and error are connected. Each of us must combat unhealthy cravings for the highest truths, pride, lies and dishonesty in himself. We must raise ourselves to the highest morality in daily life if we want to arrive at the right clairvoyance, which can only emerge from mediations that are done properly.

To do these correctly, one must not bring feelings and thoughts about everyday life into them, otherwise one would pollute the etheric substance that should radiate out there.

The longer and more intensively the meditations are done, the more intensive their effect is, but one must be a little cautious here. One who notices that he doesn't feel well, gets dizzy or the like, shouldn't mediate too long, and he should think seriously about what he did wrong. One should feel the same after a mediation as before it. We should think about our esoteric life very often. We should know our defects and make it quite clear to ourselves how bad we are. But this knowledge of our badness shouldn't depress us. That would be crass egotism, for through this depression we would show that we thought we were better than we really are, whereas we do have the defects that we acquired ourselves through our previous life and that thereby became our karma. See the defects quite clearly and then start to get rid of them.

We must learn to think objectively. Those who say that they're already thinking objectively, are often making a big mistake, for this assumption is only subjective, it's a delusion.

Pride or ambition leads to error and superstition; we must not succumb to this. We should confront everything that comes to meet us from whatever side, with an alert, open intellect, clear thinking and sharp logic. We shouldn't swear by what seems right to us at first; investigate it critically, don't give in blindly to something. That's also the way it should be in our esoteric life; no belief in authority is demanded.

And my dear sisters and brothers, the masters of wisdom and of the harmony of feelings let me tell you that you should always maintain and use all of your intellectual powers with respect to the wisdom that's given by them, with respect to what I'm justified in advocating here, and also with respect to me. One should approach what's said and advocated here with healthy human understanding, with sensibleness and with an open-minded thinking, if it is only opened far enough. You shouldn't swear by this or that but should judge for yourself.

And so we'll summarize everything that this class—which like all esoteric classes should be a sacred one for us—has brought us with the words:

In the spirit lay the germ of my body.
And the spirit has imprinted in my body
The eyes of sense,
That through them I may see
The lights of bodies.
And the spirit has imprinted in my body
Reason and sensation
And feeling and will,
That through them I may perceive bodies
And act upon them.
In the spirit lay the germ of my body.
In my body lies the germ of the spirit.
And I will incorporate into my spirit
The super-sensible eyes
That through them I may behold the light of spirits.
And I will imprint in my spirit
Wisdom and power and love,
So that through me the spirits may act
And I become a self-conscious organ
Of their deeds.
In my body lies the germ of the spirit.

(Extract from C:) Right after awakening in the morning if one tries to dive back down into the spiritual worlds one came from by emptying one's soul and immersing oneself in one's meditation, one can then attain a memory of one's experiences in spiritual worlds during the night.

[ 1 ] The group of people who began to propagate the idea of the threefolding of the social organism in the spring of 1919 wanted to work honestly on the improvement of human living conditions. Out of this honesty, they could not bring the working population the old slogans and catchphrases that had been used for decades in socialist agitation. These phrases and slogans could be used to criticize the existing social order, to tell the leading classes what they had failed to do, but they could not be used to build anything. They could be used to dream up utopias, but they could not add forces to social reality that would serve life in such a way that every human being could find a dignified existence in it.

[ 2 ] The proponents of the threefold idea did not start from such phrases and slogans. They based their will on the solid teachings that life itself provides. They spoke from the standpoint of these life teachings to the leading classes as well as to the proletarians. They have not yet been understood by either side. But they know, precisely because they have drawn their thoughts from real life, that there can be no question of an improvement in conditions until these teachings of life are understood. They can do nothing but repeat these teachings until they find a sympathetic ear.

[ 3 ] Why have the bearers of the Threefold Thought not been understood? The proletariat thought they spoke too complicatedly. It could not immediately see how their thoughts really showed not only a goal, but also a way out of the spiritual, national and economic impossibilities. They wanted them to speak more simply. But they did not realize that life itself is complicated. The bearer of the threefold idea is in the same position as a doctor. He has to give his advice. He will only be able to do this if he knows the whole complicated human organism. Can he be expected to speak to every human being about this organism in a way that can be understood, if he does not get involved in what needs to be learned about the life of the organism? This cannot be demanded, because in complying with this demand he would have to resort to catchwords and phrases. But these bearers could not do that. For they only wanted to say what was imbued with honesty in every sentence. What they have to say can be understood. But you first have to bring yourself to this understanding.

[ 4 ] The proletarian will say: So you want to speak all kinds of learned things to us, but we want to hear the simple language of the people. To this we must reply: No, we don't want to speak scholarly stuff, but the language of real life. We only want to speak of capital and labor from the point of view of expertise, like a doctor or expert in nature speaks of the human organism, and not like a curing physician. But if you want to speak in this way, you will only be understood if the other person also wants to follow the right path of understanding. This path will only be found if he wants to go through heart and soul to the mind. The writer of these lines is imbued with the conviction that the bearers of the Threefold Thought speak in such a way that one can see their understanding of the true situation of the proletariat if one wants to judge them from the heart and soul. Up to now the proletariat has not sufficiently sought this path through heart and soul. It has judged according to the doctrines of the mind which it has imbibed through popular socialism. It has demanded that the bearers of the Threefold Thought should also speak as it has been accustomed to speak according to these intellectual doctrines. They could not do so because they know that these teachings contradict life and therefore lead to nothing.

[ 5 ] The writer of these lines does not want to speak of a wild fantasy. He is therefore not saying that the mind should be set aside and that a path can only be sought through the heart and soul. Certainly, the intellect must be the safe guide, but in social matters there is no other way to the right use of the intellect than through the heart and soul. My "Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage" and my book "In Ausführung der Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus" count on such a path. I do not believe that in these books anyone misses the assessment of life from the point of view of the intellect, but I was nevertheless pleased, in the interest of the cause, when I recently read in a review of the first book from another source that in it the social question is grasped by the powers of the heart as well as the intellect.

[ 6 ] No more than from the proletarian side has the idea of threefolding been understood by personalities in the leading circles. Their thoughts have been so caught up in the economic routines of the past that from the outset they do not get involved in anything that does not run along their usual lines. Some of them realize that something has to happen, but if you come out with specific thoughts about what should happen, they shy away from it because they believe that they have reality and that it should be disturbed by fantasy. Most of them say they have no time to deal with such ideas. And if you don't want to be unfair from the outset, you even have to admit - they really don't have time. They are busy from morning till night in order to continue working in the old sense, they come out of the office in the evening with a tired head that doesn't want to take anything in, even if they sit down once with good will - to look at the thing. So they limit themselves to gluing together the fractures that arise in the traditional. They will not have time until they have to realize that the time they have spent was wasted and that the time they thought they were not allowed to spend would have been much better spent. I'm talking about those who have at least some good will. The others - alas, they are so numerous - cannot seriously be counted on.

[ 7 ] Whoever wants to understand the threefold idea must take the trouble to follow how stimulating thoughts for legal and economic life can only come from a spiritual life that is set on itself. He must allow himself to be instructed by life as to how an educational and teaching system administered by the legal and economic system loses that responsiveness which is necessary for the maintenance of the social organism. From there he will also come to an understanding of an associatively organized economic life and a truly democratic legal life. The writer of these lines has tried to show this path of understanding as best he could in the above-mentioned books.

[ 8 ] If one wishes to point to such a path, one must start from the social forces at work in the present age. Modern technology has reshaped life; modern science has penetrated the souls of the widest circles as a view of life through the developed school system. This has created new ideas of a humane existence. The promoters of the threefold structure reckon with these two very real forces of the present. You will understand their ideas when you feel what these forces mean. Many reckon with technology, but not with the lives of the people who are involved in this technology. Others reckon with the spirit of science. They want it - and rightly so - to be cultivated in schools. But they do not reckon with the moods of the soul that it creates. The idea of threefolding reckons with what they leave out of the equation.

[ 9 ] The proletarian has lost confidence because he feels that so many do not reckon with his life or his soul. Things will only get better when he finds his way through heart and soul to the social ideas that reckon with both, and which for this very reason can no longer offer him his cherished slogans, because they want a real path and not intoxication with utopian thoughts.