The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Reflections such as those we are considering this evening are meant to be an interlude in the otherwise continuous presentation of the humanities. In particular, I would like to try this evening to develop some of the ideas I touched on in my lecture last December on the intellectual and cultural situation in Austria. In our time, in which the concept of Central Europe, and also of Central European intellectual life, must increasingly develop as a result of difficult events and experiences, it seems justified to take a look at the lesser-known circumstances of Austrian intellectual life.

Hermann Bahr, who is known in the broadest circles as a witty man, as a man who cultivates the most diverse areas of literature, comes, I would say, from a typically Austrian region: from Upper Austria, and visited France, Spain and Russia at a relatively young age, and I know that at the time he was of the opinion that he could faithfully represent the essence of French and even Spanish and Russian intellectual culture to a certain extent. He even immersed himself so completely in Spanish politics that, as he assured us at the time, he wrote a fiery article in Spain against the Sultan of Morocco when he returned. Well, for decades now, after his world travels, he has been staying in Austria, working as a playwright, as an editor, as a general observer of art, and also as a biographer, for example of the much-misunderstood Max Burckhardt, and so on. Until recently, I tried to keep track of what Hermann Bahr was writing. In recent times, and actually for quite a while, one finds in his work an endeavor, which he often expressed himself, that he is searching, to discover Austria. Now imagine, the man who thought he knew French, even Spanish character, who wrote a book about Russian character, then goes back to his homeland, is such a member of his homeland that he only needs to speak five words and you immediately recognize the Austrian; the man seeks Austria! This may seem strange. But it is not so at all. This search originates from the quite justified feeling that, after all, for the Austrian, Austria, Austrian nature – I would say – Austrian national substance is not easy to find. I would like to describe some of this Austrian national character in a few typical personalities, insofar as it is expressed in Austrian intellectual life.

When I was young, many people were of the opinion, the then justified opinion, that when considering art, artistry, literature, and intellectual development, one looked too much to the past. In particular, much blame was attached to the scientific history of art and literature, for which a personality is only considered if they lived not just decades but centuries ago. At that time, considerations could hardly rise to the immediate perception of the present. I believe that today one could feel something opposite: in the way that considerations about art and artists are so commonplace, we now often experience that everyone more or less starts with themselves or with their immediate contemporaries. I do not wish to consider the present situation of Austrian intellectual life here, but rather a period of time that is not so far in the past. I do not wish to proceed in a descriptive manner. With descriptions, one is always right and always wrong at the same time. One touches on one or the other shade of this or that fact or personality, and both the person who agrees and the person who refutes will undoubtedly be right in the case of a general characteristic, in the case of general descriptions. I should like to give a symptomatic description. I should like to pick out individual personalities and in these personalities to show some of the many things that are alive in the Austrian intellectual world. You will excuse me if I start with a personality who is close to me. I believe, however, that in this case being close to someone does not prevent me from making an objective assessment of the personality in question. But on the other hand, I believe that in this person I have encountered a personality in life that is extraordinarily characteristic of Austrian intellectual life.

When I came to the Vienna Technical University in 1879, the subject, which was of course taught there as a minor subject, was the history of German literature, Karl Julius Schröer. He is little known and much misunderstood by those who have met him. I now believe that he is one of those personalities who deserve to live on in the intellectual history of Austria. However, an important literary historian once made some strange comments about Karl Julius Schröer in the presence of a party at which I was sitting next to him. There was talk of a German princess, and the literary historian in question wanted to say that this German princess, however talented she might otherwise be, sometimes, as he put it, “could be very wrong” in her literary judgments; and as an example, he cited the fact that she considers Karl Julius Schröer to be an important man. Schröer took up a position as a teacher of German literary history at a Protestant lyceum in Pressburg around the middle of the last century, at a momentous point in Austrian intellectual life. He later taught the same subject at the University of Budapest. Karl Julius Schröer was the son of Tobias Gottfried Schröer, who was mentioned in my previous lecture on Austrian identity. Tobias Gottfried Schröer was also an extraordinarily important figure for Austria. He had founded the Pressburg Lyceum and wanted to make it a center for the cultivation of German intellectual life. His aim was to help those Germans in Austria who were surrounded by other nationalities to become fully aware of their identity as part of the German intellectual world.

Tobias Gottfried Schröer is a personality who, from a historical-spiritual point of view, comes across in such a way that one would like to feel a certain emotion, because one always has the feeling: how is it possible in the world that an important mind can remain completely unknown due to the unfavorable conditions of the time, completely unknown in the sense that one calls “being known” that one knows that this or that personality has existed and has achieved this or that. However, the achievements of Tobias Gottfried Schröer are by no means unknown or unappreciated. I just want to emphasize that as early as 1830 Tobias Gottfried Schröer wrote a very interesting drama, “The Bear”, which has at its center the personality of Tsar Ivan IV, and that Karl von Holtei said of this drama that if the characters depicted were Schröer's creations, then he had achieved something extraordinarily significant. And they were Schröer's inventions except for Ivan IV. However, the level-headed man, the not at all somehow radically minded Tobias Gottfried Schröer, had a flaw. In those days, people could not be allowed to read what he wrote, so to speak, that is, this view was held by the censors. And so it came about that he had to have all his works printed abroad and that one could not get to know him as the important dramatic poet that he was. He wrote a drama in 1839 called “The Life and Deeds of Emmerich Tököly and His Fellow Rebels”. In this work, one encounters in a large historical painting all the intellectual currents that existed in Hungary at that time. And in the character of Tököly himself, one encounters what critics of the time rightly called a Hungarian Götz von Berlichingen, not so much because Tököly had to be called a Götz von Berlichingen, but because Schröer managed to depict Tököly in such a vivid way that the dramatic figure of Tököly could only be compared to Götz von Berlichingen. It was only by a strange mistake that Tobias Gottfried Schröer was sometimes recognized. For example, he wrote a paper “On Education and Teaching in Hungary”. This paper was regarded by many as something extraordinary. But it was also banned, and attention was drawn to the fact that this author - who was basically the calmest man in the world - was actually a dangerous person. But the Palatine of Hungary, Archduke Joseph, read this writing. Now the storm that had risen over this writing subsided. He inquired about the author. They did not know who he was. But they speculated that it was the rector of a Hungarian school. And Archduke Joseph, the Palatine of Hungary, immediately took the man - it was not the right one! - into the house to educate his son. What a tribute to a personality! Such things have happened many times, especially with regard to this personality. For this personality is the same one who, under the name Christian Oeser, has written all kinds of works that have been widely distributed: an “Aesthetics for virgins,” a “World history for girls' schools.” If you read this “World History for Girls' Schools” by a Protestant author, you will certainly find it quite remarkable, and yet it is true that it was once even introduced in a convent as the corresponding world history – truly, in a convent! The reason for this was that there is a picture of St. Elizabeth on the title page. I leave it to you to believe that the liberalness of the nuns might have contributed to the introduction of this “world history for girls' schools” in a convent.

After pronouncing such sentences, Karl Julius Schröer let his gaze wander over the times when the German essence was thoroughly misunderstood by other nations around it as a result of various events. He spoke about this as follows: “The German name was held in low esteem by the nations that owed it so much; at that time, the German was valued in France almost on a par with barbarians.” In 1846, he spoke to his audience at the German Lyceum in Pressburg! But in contrast to this, Karl Julius Schröer was full of enthusiasm for what one could say he saw as the German intellectual substance, not for what is merely called nationality in the ethnographic sense, but for the spiritual that permeates everything that holds the German essence together. I quote a few of Karl Julius Schröer's statements from this time, which now lies far behind us, for the reason of showing how peculiarly that which is called the confession of German nationality lives in the more outstanding minds. Basically, we have to keep in mind that the way the German stands by his nationality cannot be understood by the other nationalities of Europe, because it is fundamentally different from the way the other nationalities stand by what they call their nationality. If we look at the more outstanding and deeply feeling Germans, we find that they are German in the best sense of the word because they see Germanness in what is spiritually pulsating, but also as a force tinged with this spirituality, in what counts itself German; that Germanness is something like an ideal for them, something to which they look up, that they do not see merely as a national organism. And therein lie many of the difficulties why German character – even in our days, and especially in our days – is so misunderstood, so hated. Such Germans as Karl Julius Schröer want to achieve their Germanness through knowledge, by gaining insight into the possibilities of life and action that the living organism of a nation offers. And again and again Karl Julius Schröer's gaze wanders, not in arrogance, but in modesty, to the question: What world-historical mission in the development of the human race has that which, in this best sense of the word, can be called Germanness and German nature? And before world history it wants to be justified, what is built up in views on German nature. Much more could be said about the special position of such minds in relation to the German character. Thus Karl Julius Schröer, speaking from this attitude, says: “The world epoch that begins with Christianity is also called the Germanic world; for although the other nations also have a great share in history, almost all the states of Europe were founded by Germanic peoples... .” — this is a truth that, at least today, is not readily acknowledged outside of the German border posts. Of course, it is not heard, but it is not readily acknowledged. “... Spain, France, England, Germany, Austria, even Russia, Greece, Sweden and so on, were founded by Germans and imbued with the German spirit.”

And then Karl Julius Schröer cites for his listeners a saying of a German literary historian, Wackernagel: “Throughout Europe now flowed...” - namely after the migration of peoples - “A pure Germanic blood, or combining Roman-Celtic blood, now flowed a Germanic spirit of life, took the Christian faith... on its purer, stronger floods and carried it along.” There was no time in which the hatred of Europe would have prompted such views as today. They were views that arose in a thoroughly honest way from the contemplation of the German character by this mind. And so he expressed himself: “The civilized peoples of Europe are one great family, and it is a single great course of the nations of Europe that leads through all errors back to the source of truth and true art, on which all nations accompany the Germans, often overtaking them, but in the end one after the other falling behind them. The Romance peoples are usually the first in everything: the Italians, then the Spaniards, the French, then come the English and the Germans. One of these nations usually represents the culmination of a particular trend of the times. But lately, even the English have had their hour struck in art and science... “—said in 1846, though with reference to the development of intellectual life—”... and the time has come when German literature is visibly beginning to rule over Europe, as the Italian and French did before!"

Thus was the man rooted in his Austrian homeland. And since I later became very close to him, I know well that it meant nothing to him, absolutely nothing that could somehow be described in words: he would have wanted the domination of one nation over another—not even within Austria. If one wants to call an attitude like Karl Julius Schröer's national, then it is compatible with the acceptance of every nationality, insofar as this nationality wants to assert itself alongside others from the germ, from the source of its own being, and does not want to dominate these others. His concern was not to cultivate the supremacy of the German character over any other nationality or over any legitimate national aspiration, but to bring to full development within the German character what is inherent within that German character. And that is what is special about this man: that he felt himself intertwined with Austrian national character through his entire aesthetic sensibility, through his entire feeling, artistic feeling, popular feeling, but also through his scientific endeavors. He became, so to speak, an observer of this Austrian national character.

And so we see that as early as the 1950s, out of his deep love for the people, he collected those wonderful German Christmas plays that have been preserved among the German population of Hungary, and published “German Christmas Plays from Hungary”, those Christmas plays that are performed in the villages at Christmas time, at the time of the Epiphany. They are strange games! They were actually only printed for the first time in the mid-nineteenth century – and Schröer was one of the first to have such things printed. They have been preserved from generation to generation in the rural population. Since then, many such Christmas games have been collected in the most diverse areas, and much has been written about them. With such heartfelt love, with such intimate connection to folklore, as Kar! Julius Schröer wrote his introduction to the “German Christmas Plays from Hungary” at the time, hardly anything has been written in this field since. He shows us that manuscripts of the plays were always preserved from generation to generation, as they were a sacred ritual that people prepared for in the individual villages when Christmas season approached; and that those who were chosen to play, that is, to go around the village and the most diverse locales to play these games for the people, in which the creation of the world, the biblical history of the New Testament, the appearance of the three kings, and the like were depicted. Schröer describes how those who prepared for such plays not only prepared themselves for weeks by learning things by heart, by being drilled by some kind of director, but how they prepared themselves by following certain rules; how they did not drink wine for weeks, how they avoided other pleasures of life for weeks in order to have the right feelings, so to speak, to be allowed to perform in such plays. How Germanic character has absorbed Christianity can be seen, how this Christianity has flowed into these strange plays, which are sometimes crude, but always deeply moving and extraordinarily vivid. Later, as I said, others also collected these things; but none approached it with such devotion of his personality, with such a connection to what was being lived out, as Karl Julius Schröer, even if his representations, scientifically speaking, are long outdated.

Then he turned to the study of German folklore as it is spread throughout the vast territory of Austria-Hungary, of German folklore as it lives in the people. And there are numerous treatises by Karl Julius Schröer in which he presents this folklore in terms of its language and the intellectual life expressed through it. We have a dictionary, a description of the dialects of the Hungarian highlands, the area that was settled by German settlers on the southern slopes of the Carpathians, and still is today, although most of the area is Magyar. With tremendous love, through Karl Julius Schröer, I would say, every word was recorded that resonates with the dialect of this area; but we have always recorded it in such a way that one can see from his descriptions how his interest was directed towards seeking out what the cultural task was, what the particular way of life of the people who, coming from afar, had to push their way into the east at a certain time in order to temporarily cultivate their own culture in the midst of other peoples, later to remember it and then gradually to be absorbed into other cultures. What Schröer has achieved in this field will in many ways represent something for the future, like wonderful memories of the ferment that shaped German identity in the wide expanse of Austria.

Karl Julius Schröer later came to Vienna. He became director of the Protestant schools and later professor of German literary history at the Vienna Technical University. And I myself experienced how he knew how to influence those who were receptive to the presentation of directly felt intellectual life. Then he turned more and more to Goethe, delivered his “Faust” commentary, which appeared in several editions, and in 1875 wrote a history of German poetry that was met with much hostility. It became an example at the time after it was published, a “literary history from the wrist” called. However, Schröer's literary history is not a literary history written according to the methods that later became common in the Scherer school. But it is a literary history in which there is nothing but what the author experienced, experienced in the poetic works, in art, in the development of German intellectual life in the nineteenth century up to his time; because that is what he wanted to present at the time. Karl Julius Schröer's entire life and intellectual development can only be understood by considering the Austrian character of Schröer's entire personality, which brought the scientific and artistic into direct connection , and to experience it in direct connection with folklore, that folklore which, particularly in Austria, I would say, presents a problem at every point of its development, if one only knows how to experience and observe it. And one must often think, perhaps also abroad: Is this Austria a necessity? How does this Austria actually fit into the overall development of European culture?

Well, if you look at Austria in this way, it appears to be a great diversity. Many, many nations and ethnic groups live side by side, pushed together, and the life of the individual is often complicated by these underlying factors, even as a soul life and as a whole personality life. The things that now play from one nation into another, what comes to light through this lack of understanding and the desire to understand and the difficulties of life, it comes to one's attention at every turn in Austria, combined with other historical conditions of Austrian life. There is a poet who, with great but, I would say, modest genius, understood how to depict something of this Austrian essence. At the end of the 1880s and in the 1890s, he could occasionally be seen performing in Vienna when one came to the famous Café Griensteidl in Vienna and also in certain other literary circles. Yes, this Café Griensteidl basically belongs to Austrian literature; so much so that a writer, Karl Kraus, wrote a series of articles entitled “Demolished Literature” when it was demolished. Today, one still reads about Café Griensteidl as if it were a beautiful memory. Please excuse me for including this, but it is too interesting, because at Café Griensteidl, if you went there at certain times of the day, you could really see a cross-section of Austrian literature. But today, when you read about these things, you often read about the times of the waiter Heinrich, who later became famous, the famous Heinrich of Griensteidl, who knew what newspapers each person needed to have when they came in the door. But that was no longer the real time, the time of the somewhat jovial Heinrich, but the real time was that of Franz vom Griensteidl, who had lived through the days when Lenau and Grillparzer and Anastasius Grün gathered at the Café Griensteidl every day or twice a week, and who, with his infinitely dignified manner, would occasionally tell a story in his own way about one of these literary greats when you happened to be waiting for a newspaper. As I said, Jakob Julius David also occasionally appeared in the circle of people there. Actually, David only emerged in Austrian intellectual life at the end of the 1880s and beginning of the 1890s. When you sat with him, he spoke little; he listened even less when people spoke to him because he was severely hard of hearing. He was very severely short-sighted and usually spoke from a compressed soul, from a soul that had experienced how often in life what we call fate weighs heavily on the soul. When I spoke to the half-blind and half-deaf man, I often thought how strongly Austrian identity was expressed in this personality, who had gone through a difficult youth, a youth full of privation and poverty in the valley of the Hanna, in the valley through which the March flows, where German, Hungarian and Slavic populations border on each other and are mixed everywhere. If you drive down from this valley to Vienna, you will pass poor huts everywhere; this was especially the case when David was young. But these humble huts often have people as inhabitants, each of whom harbors in his soul the Austrian problem, that which, in all its broad specificity, contains the Austrian problem, the whole diversity of life that challenges the soul. This diversity, which wants to be experienced, which cannot be dismissed with a few concepts, with a few ideas, lives in these strange, in a certain way closed natures. If I wanted to characterize what these natures are like, which David has described as being particularly prevalent in Austrian life, I would have to say: they are natures that feel deeply the suffering of life, but they also have something in them that is not so common in the world: the ability to endure suffering to a certain extent. It is even difficult to find words for what is made of the often arduous experience, especially in these Austrian regions. There is no sentimentality, but a strong ability to experience the diversity of life, which of course brings about clashes, even among the lowest peasant classes. But this does not turn into a weariness of life, into some kind of world-weary mood. It transforms itself into something that is not defiance and yet has the strength of defiance. It transforms itself, if I may say so, weakness into strength. And this strength is realized in the area in which it finds itself through the necessities of life. And weakness, which in a sense had been transformed into strength, showed itself in David. This man was half blind and half deaf. But he once said to me: “Yes, my eyes cannot see much in the distance, but all the more so when using a microscope, I see close up.” That is to say, up close he observed everything exactly through his eyes as if through a microscope; but he looked at it so closely that one must say: In what he saw with his eyes, there was something great that intervened, explaining and illuminating what was behind it. And as a substitute for the wide-ranging view, this man had a deep gaze in the small field of vision that he overlooked with his microscopic eyes, an obsession with getting behind the reasons for things. And that was transferred to his entire mental life. This allowed him to see the people he wanted to describe, deep, deep into their hearts. And as a result, he was able to depict many, many types of Austrian life in poetry, drama, novellas, and even lyric poetry. How this entire Austrian mood can form in the soul, not into sentimentality, but into a certain inner strength, which is not defiance, but contains the strength of defiance, is particularly evident where Jakob Julius David speaks for himself. There he says:

Almighty! Thou hast taken much from me,
Thou alone knowest what I have lost;
My eye sees the beautiful world blurred,
And only muffled, muffled and quiet
Life's sounds come to my ailing ear.
Once it hurt me – and for my own good,
I thank you today that I previously criticized you
You have spared me much sorrow, many horrors
Saved me from hearing and seeing...

Indeed, the man was such that he did not have to see and hear many things in order to bring out of the depths of his soul many things that he wanted to embody poetically. As I said, I would like to show what is expressed in such Austrian sounds in individual symptoms. And one must not introduce a touch of sentimentality when Jakob Julius David speaks of his fate in this way:

In the west you see gray in the valley
The heaviest clouds hang –
That reminds me of the days,
Which have passed for me...

In the east, asleep in the light of the storm, That is my today...

But this “today” he uses up, he exhausts it, and for him it became the possibility of describing Austrian folklore in such a way that everywhere, quite remarkably, one sees individual destinies in his work – many of his novellas have only a few characters. These individual destinies make one say: The way in which the characters collide with each other because they are placed next to each other in the world by kinship or otherwise is extremely moving and takes us deep into realities. But what Jakob Julius David captures so, I would say, microscopically and yet movingly and vividly, very rarely occurs in such a way that a large painting of world history is not somehow behind it, with the individual event taking place against its backdrop.

This contextual thinking of the small, which does not become shadowy and blurred because it appears on such a background, that this letting the small happen is colored by the greatness of world-historical becoming, that is what we find to be the most characteristic of a well-known Austrian poet, but one who unfortunately is not well enough known. We are talking about the greatest poet of Austria in the second half of the nineteenth century, the poet whose home we find if we go just a little way west from the home of Jakob Julius David: we are talking about Robert Hamerling.

It is remarkable how the traits exhibited by individual personalities within Austrian intellectual life seem to clash, but when viewed from a certain higher perspective, they present themselves as qualities alongside other qualities, flowing together into a great harmony. It is remarkable: Karl Julius Schröer did not want to accept Robert Hamerling at all. To him he was a poet of secondary importance, a poet who, above all, is said to have destroyed his poetic power through his erudition. On the other hand, in Robert Hamerling there is the same attitude, the same noblest grasp of the German essence that I tried to describe in such a characteristic personality as Karl Julius Schröer. But that too is typical of Hamerling, and what I am describing to you here as typical personalities can be found in many, many others in Austrian life. I am trying to pick out only the characteristic traits that can really be presented as individual traits, but in such a way that they can stand for the whole. What is peculiar about Robert Hamerling is that he grows out of the smallest things. He comes from the Waldviertel in Lower Austria, from that poor region that bears its fruit only with difficulty because the soil is rocky and covered with forest, a region that is cozy and charming, and can be particularly enchanting in its hilly nature. Out of this peculiar nature and out of the limitations of the human character, Robert Hamerling's great spirit emerged. And he grew into a similar understanding of the German character to that of Karl Julius Schröer's spirit. We see this in one of Robert Hamerling's best poems, 'Germanenzug', where the way in which the German spirit lived in Robert Hamerling, the Austrian poet, is particularly clearly expressed. The ancient Germans move from Asia and camp on the Caucasus. Wonderfully, I would say, with magical vividness, it is described how evening falls, how the sun goes down, twilight reigns, the moon appears, how the entire army of Teutons camps, sleep spreads and only the one blond-haired , the spirit of Asia appears to him, releasing his people to Europe, and how the spirit of Asia permeates Teut with that which is in store for the Teutons up to their development in Germanness through history. There the great becomes great, but there also, with noble criticism, what is to be blamed is already expressed. There many a trait that especially people like Robert Hamerling see in Germanness is expressed by the goddess Asia. There the future is spoken of:

But however proudly you aspire, highly soaring, always still a blaze
you will keep the ancient sacred fire.
The dream-filled
drunkenness of God will live on in you...
You only strive because you love: your boldest thought
will be devotion that wants to sink into God.

Thus spoke Asia to the blonde Teut, the leader of the Germanic peoples to Europe, speaking in advance of the genius of Germanness, and continuing:

Do you know the highest path for your struggle
When you grow strong in certain unity in the future?
Do you know the beacons in the sea of time
Which, beckoning afar with the flame of purity,
Bring you to the last, most beautiful goal?
High above, they shine with an eternal radiance
The sacred ideals
Of humanity: freedom, justice, and light and love!
These are the last fully glowing flames
of the original light - to stir them up all together
into one glow in the quarrelling hustle and bustle
of the life of nations: that is your mission...

And Robert Hamerling could not help but consider the details that he presents, for example, as an epic poet or as a playwright, in the context of the great spiritual development of humanity. I would say that all these observers over there in Austria have something in common with microscopic vision, which, however, wants to reach beneath the surface of things; and Robert Hamerling shows it most beautifully. And they have something in common with western Austria, of which one can say: it has a certain right to place the individual within the greater whole. Because the way the valleys stand between the mountains in some areas of western Austria is expressed in turn in what lives in a poet like Robert Hamerling. We can see that a great variety of things are expressed in this Austrian intellectual life, in all its sides, which may perhaps repel each other, but which nevertheless represent a diversity that is unity in the whole picture of culture that one can draw.

And in this diversity, the sounds that come from other nationalities combine not in disharmony, but in a certain sense in harmony. It is of course not possible to say anything specific about what sounds from other nationalities into Austrian intellectual life as a whole. Only a few symptoms will be characterized. For example, within Czech literature – with regard to these descriptions, I must of course be cautious, since I do not speak Czech – we have a newer poet, a recently deceased poet, who, as someone who wrote about him put it, has become for his people something similar to what was said about a great Czech musician: that he was there like a whale in a carp pond. That is how Jaroslav Vrchlický is placed in the spiritual life of his people. In his works, the whole of world history comes to life: the oldest human life of the distant past, Egyptian, European life of the Middle Ages and modern times, Jewish intellectual life, the whole of world history comes to life in his lyric poetry, comes to life in his dramas, in his stories, and is alive everywhere. This Jaroslav Vrchlicky – his real name is Emil Frida – has an incredible productivity. And when you consider that this man has translated a large, large area of the literature of other nations for his nation, in addition to his own extremely widespread production, then you can appreciate what such a mind means for his nation. I have to read to you, because otherwise I might forget to mention some of the poets of world literature that Vrchlicky has translated for Czech literature: Ariosto, Tasso, Dante, Petrarca, Leopardi, Calderon, Camöens, Moliere, Baudelaire, Rostand, Victor Hugo, Byron, Shelley, Gorki, Schiller, Hamerling, Mickiewicz, Balzac, Dumas and others. It has been calculated that Vrchlicky alone translated 65,000 verses by Tasso, Dante and Ariosto. And yet this man was, I would say, the very embodiment of his nationality. When he emerged on the scene in the stormy 1870s – he was born in 1853 – it was a difficult time for his nation, with all the contradictions that had arisen; in relation to the Germans, all sorts of opposing factions had emerged within his own nation. At first he was much contested. There were people who said he could not write Czech; there were people who made fun of what Vrchlicky wrote. But that stopped very soon. He forced recognition. And in 1873 he was, one might say, like an angel of peace among the terribly feuding parties. He was recognized by all, and in his popular poetic works he resurrected entire paintings of world developments from all of them; just not – and this is striking – anything from Russian folklore! A man who wrote a short biography about him – before the war – expressly warned in this biography: one should see from this man in particular how little foundation there is for the fairy tale that the Czechs, or the western Slavs in general, have something to expect from the great Russian empire when they look within, as is often said.

We see this expansion in a different way, this: to see the individual experience against the background of the great interrelationships of humanity and the world — we see it in a different way in a poet whom I already referred to in my last lecture on Austrianness, the Hungarian poet Emmerich Madách. Madách was born in 1823. Madách wrote, one must say, truly imbued with a full Magyar spirit, among other things that cannot be mentioned here, The Tragedy of Man. This The Tragedy of Man is again something that does not tie in with the great events of humanity, but directly represents these events of humanity themselves. And one would like to say how Madách, the Magyar, the native of eastern Austria, presents this “tragedy of man”, which differs, for example, from the figures that Hamerling, in his own way, created out of the great painting of world history in “Ahasver”, “King of Sion”, “Aspasia”. They differ as the mountains of western Austria differ from the wide plains of eastern Austria, or rather – and I would like to be more precise here – as the soul, when it rises in the often so beautiful – especially when they are bathed in sunlight – valleys of western Austria and lets its gaze wander over the mountains that border these valleys, — how the soul, in this absorption, differs from that mood of going out into the wide open, but indefinite, that overcomes it when the Hungarian puszta, with its wide plain character, affects that soul. You know from Lenau's poetry, what this Hungarian puszta can become for the human soul.

A remarkable poem, this “Tragedy of Man”. We are placed directly at the beginning of creation. God appears alongside Lucifer. Adam dreams the future world history under Lucifer's influence. This happens in nine significant cultural images. In the beginning, we are introduced to the Lord and Lucifer; Lucifer, who wants to assert himself in his entire being towards the creator of this existence, into which the being of man is intertwined. And Lucifer admonishes the creator of the world that he is also there and that he is of the same age as the creator of the world himself. In a sense, the Creator must accept Lucifer as his helper. We hear the significant words in the poem: “If the negation” - namely Lucifer - “has even the slightest hold, your world will soon unhinge it.” With this, Lucifer threatens the creative spirit. The Lord hands Lucifer two trees, the tree of knowledge and the tree of immortality. But with these, Lucifer tempts man. And he tempts Adam, thereby causing Adam to lose paradise. And outside of paradise, Lucifer introduces Adam to what in the visions of Madách is the knowledge of the forces of nature, of the whole fabric of forces that can be gained through knowledge of man through the natural phenomena unfolding before the senses. It is the invisible cobweb of natural laws that Lucifer teaches Adam outside of paradise. And then we are shown how Lucifer makes Adam dream of the more distant fate of the world. There we see how Adam is re-embodied as a Pharaoh in ancient Egypt, and Eve, in her re-embodiment, meets him as the wife of a slave who is mistreated. Adam is seized by a deep melancholy; that is, he sees it in his dream, in which his later life, all his later embodiments, appear before the soul's eye. He sees it in such a way that he is seized by deep bitterness about what is to become of the world. And further, we are shown how Adam is re-embodied in Athens as Miltiades, how he must experience the ingratitude of the people; further, we are shown how he has to observe the declining culture and the penetration of Christianity in ancient Rome, in the imperial period. Among crusaders later in Constantinople, Adam comes to us in a new life. He is embodied again as Kepler at the court of Emperor Rudolf; as Danton during the French Revolutionary period. Then he is embodied again in London. There he becomes acquainted with that through which, according to the view of Madách, Lucifer has a characteristic effect on the present. The words must already be spoken that are written in it: “Everything is a market where everyone trades, buys, cheats, business is cheating, cheating is business.” It was not written under the influence of the war, because the poem was written in the 1860s. Then, in a later life, Adam is led to the end of time on Earth, to a landscape of ice, and so on. It is undoubtedly interesting, but one would also like to say that, like the Hungarian steppes, which extend into infinity and leave much incomprehensible and unsatisfactory – that is how this poem is. And only sporadically do we realize that the poet actually means that the whole thing is a dream that Lucifer inspires in Adam. And what the poet really wants to say is that this is how the world would be if only Lucifer were at work. But man also has an effect. Man has to seek his strength and counteract Lucifer. But this is hardly hinted at, only, I would like to say, hinted at at the end, but in such a way that what appears as positive in the face of the negative, in the face of sadness, in the face of suffering, must also be summarized, like suffering that develops into defiant strength. “Fight and trust” is what Adam is taught. But what man can fight for is not shown at all. What the world would become if it were left to nature alone is depicted. And this poem has grown out of a deep inner life and a difficult life experience.

Madách is also one of those natures who, in a different way, can be characterized by saying: Oh, this diversity of life, which is linked to the historical conditions of Austria, passed through his soul; but at the same time also the strength to transform weakness into strength.

Madách comes from old Hungarian nobility. He grew up in the Neögrader district. He lost his father very early. His mother was a spiritually strong woman. Madách became a dreamy, contemplative person. In 1849, after the revolution, he took in a refugee who was already gone when the police came looking for him; but the police still came to the conclusion that Madách had taken in this refugee. Madách was put on trial and sentenced to four years in prison. It was not so much the prison, which he accepted as an historical necessity, that had a severely distressing effect on Madách, but the fact that he had to separate from his wife, from his family, who was like his other self, whom he loved most tenderly, and that he not see her, not share in this life for four years, was devastating to him, that was the real hard blow of fate that made him doubt humanity, if it had not been for the fact that every hour he spent in prison was followed by the hope: you will see her again then. And so he wrote his poems, in which he imagined going through the door. Even after he was actually released, he wrote the last of these poems on the way home, in which he wonderfully describes the heaven that would now receive him. And he really did come home. The woman he loved so tenderly had meanwhile become unfaithful to him, she had left with another. And through the gate through which he wanted to enter in the sense of the poem he had written, he had to enter his treacherously abandoned home. In visions, the traitor and his betrayal often stood before his eyes. It was from such sources that his historical and human feelings, his feelings about the world, were formed. This must certainly be borne in mind if one is to appreciate this poetry, to which one might possibly have many objections.

For that is the point – and it would be interesting to develop this in detail – that the diversity that is in Austrian life and that is brought about by such things as I have mentioned can, again and again, broaden one's view and present one with tasks, so that one must directly link one's own experiences to the great experiences of humanity, yes, to the tasks of humanity. And just as with Hamerling, although he spent half his life on his sickbed, every poetic note he uttered was connected with the most direct experience, so too with Emmerich Madách on the other hand.

You see, this diversity – one can ask: did it have to be forged in the course of human development in Central Europe? Is there any necessity in this? If you look at the matter more closely, you do indeed get an insight into such a necessity, to find the most diverse human minds in a single area of space also united in shared destinies. And I would like to say that it always seemed to me like a symbol of what is present in the national community, in the diversity of the people, that nature, and strangely enough especially around Vienna, has already created something of a great diversity in the earth. Geologically, the so-called Vienna Basin is one of the most interesting areas on earth. As if in an earthly microcosm, as in a small Earth, everything that interacts with each other is brought together, but it also symbolizes what can explain to you that which is otherwise spread over the Earth's surface. And for those who have an interest in and an understanding of scientific observations, the contemplation of this Vienna Basin, with the numerous secrets of the Earth's formation that can be studied there, is deeply inspiring. One is tempted to say that the Earth itself develops a diversity that is bound into a unity in the center of Europe. And what is geologically present in the Earth is basically only reflected in what takes place above this Earth's surface in the minds of human beings.

I say all this not to make propaganda for Austria, but only to describe a characteristic feature. But this characteristic feature comes to the fore when one wants to describe Austria. And, I would like to say, when one goes into the field of exact science, of geology, one finds in Austria something that corresponds to what Austria's great poets claim as their most distinctive feature. If you observe Hamerling, if you observe Jakob Julius David, if you consider other great Austrian poets: the characteristic feature is that they all want to tie in with the great destiny of humanity. And that is also what gives them the most intimate and profound satisfaction. A man who was a friend of mine wrote a novel at the time, to Hamerling's great satisfaction, in which he attempted to express medieval knowledge in the form of individual figures in terms of cultural history. The novel is called “The Alchemist”. It is by Fritz Lemmermayer. And Fritz Lemmermayer is not an outstanding talent. He is even a talent who, after this novel, has hardly achieved anything significant again. But one can see that the essence that runs through the nation can take hold of the individual and find characteristic expression even in this untalented person, in all his volition.

As I said, even in the exact science of geology, something like this can come to the fore. It is probably a deep necessity that this is the case with the great Viennese geologist Eduard Sueß, perhaps one of the greatest geologists of all time, to whom we owe the study of the conditions of the Vienna Basin. Just the sight of this Vienna Basin, with its tremendous diversity, which in turn combines into a wonderful unity, could instinctively give rise to a great, powerful geological idea, which comes to light in this man and of which one must say that it could only have been developed from the Austrian character, for Eduard Sueß is an archetypally Austrian personality in his entire being: this unity in diversity, I would say, this microscopic imprint of the entire geology of the earth in the Vienna Basin. This is evident in the fact that Eduard Sueß, in our time, that is, in the last third of the nineteenth century, was able to make the decision to create a three-volume work, “The Face of the Earth,” a book in which everything that lives and works and has lived and worked in the earth in geological terms is pieced together into a significant, rounded image on a large scale, so that the earth becomes visible. Every aspect is treated with exactitude, but when one beholds the entire face of the Earth as Sueß has created it, the Earth appears as a living being, so that one immediately sees: Geology comes from the earth. If one followed Suess further, something would be created in which the planet would be directly connected to the whole cosmos. Suess takes the earth so far in this respect that, to a certain extent, the earth is alive and one only has the need to ask further: How does this earth live in the whole cosmos, now that it has been understood geologically?

Just as much in Austrian poetry is connected with the Austrian landscape and Austrian nature, so I believe that the geology of Austria in the narrower sense is connected with the fact that, perhaps, in the spiritual life of humanity: that from Vienna this book in the field of geology could arise, this book, which is just as exactly scientifically as ingeniously assessed and executed and in which really everything that geology has created up to Sueß is processed in an overall picture, but in such a way that one really believes at last that the whole earth is no longer the dead product of the usual geology, but as a living being. I believe that in this area, precisely what could come from Eduard Sueß's Austrian identity plays into the scientific achievements—by no means in any way into the objectivity of the sciences, which is certainly not endangered by this—what could come from Eduard Sueß's Austrian identity. And when you look into this Austrianness in so many different areas, you realize that figures like those created by Jakob Julius David really do exist, in whom a single trait of the soul often takes hold because the difficulties of life have pushed aside the others, and fills them so completely that the individual soul has its strength, but also its power and its reassurance and its consolation. These figures become particularly interesting when these souls mature into people of knowledge.

And there is a figure from the Upper Austrian countryside, from the Ischl area – I have already referred to the name in the previous lecture – there is the remarkable farmer and philosopher Conrad Deubler. If you imagine every figure that Jakob Julius David created from Austrian life to be a little younger, if you imagine the events of this life that shaped this life later to be absent and imagine them in the soul of Conrad Deubler, then any such figure could become Conrad Deubler. Because this Conrad Deubler is also extremely characteristic of the people of the Austrian Alpine countries. Born in Goisern in the Ischl region, he becomes a miller, later an innkeeper, a person who is deeply predisposed to be a person of insight. When I now speak about Conrad Deubler, I ask that it not be taken as discordant to point out that, of course, a world view such as Conrad Deubler's is not represented here; that it is always emphasized that one must go beyond what Conrad Deubler thought in order to achieve a spiritualization of the world view. But what matters is not clinging to certain dogmas, but being able to recognize the honesty and justification of every human striving for knowledge. And even if one cannot agree with anything that Conrad Deubler actually professed, the contemplation of this personality, especially in connection with characteristics of Austrian life, means something that is typical and significant in particular, in that it expresses how, from within those circumstances, there is a striving for wholeness that, in many respects, can be compared spiritually to being spatially enclosed by mountains. Conrad Deubler is an insightful person, despite not even having learned to write properly, despite having had very little schooling. Jakob Julius David calls the personalities he describes and sketches “musers.” In my home region of Lower Austria, the Waldviertel, they would have been called “simulators.” These are people who have to go through life musing, but who associate something sensitive with musing, who find much to criticize in life. In Austria, we call this “raunzing” about life. People grumble about life a lot. But this criticism is not dry criticism; this criticism is something that is immediately transformed into inner life, especially in figures like Conrad Deubler. He is a man of insight from the very beginning, even though he couldn't write properly. He is always going for books. In his youth, he starts with a good book, a book that aspires from the sensual to the spiritual: Grävell, “Der Mensch” (Man). Deubler reads this in 1830 (he was born in 1814), and Sintenis, “Der gestirnte Himmel” (The Starry Sky), Zschokke's “Stunden der Andacht” (Hours of Devotion). But he doesn't really feel at home with these things, he can't go along with these things. He is a contemplative by nature, and he is imbued with enthusiasm to find satisfaction for the soul not only for himself, but also for those who inhabit his village with him. Something in these people is striving out of the traditional worldview. Then Conrad Deubler becomes acquainted with the ideas that most deeply moved and stirred the times at that time – he becomes acquainted with writings that were written out of the spirit of Darwinism. He becomes acquainted with Ludwig Feuerbach, with David Friedrich Strauss. Later he becomes acquainted with the writings of Ernst Haeckel, but this is later. He reads all of this, devouring it. I will mention in passing that he was sentenced to several years in prison for dealing with such reading material and reading such things to his fellow villagers, and for founding a kind of library for his fellow villagers. It was from 1852 to 1856 – for religious disturbance, blasphemy and spreading blasphemous views! But as I said, I only mention this in passing, because Conrad Deubler bore the whole thing manfully. For him, it was a matter of penetrating to knowledge out of a fundamental urge of his soul. And so we see in this farmer what we may see in another spirit, I would say, on a higher plane of life, at the very end. We see in this spirit how attempts are made to reconcile the scientific way of thinking with the deepest needs of the soul. That Conrad Deubler could arrive at a purely naturalistic-materialistic view of life should, as I said, not concern us. For what matters is not that, but that in such people there lives the urge to see nature itself spiritualized. Even if they initially only accept it sensually, in them all lives the urge to accept nature spiritually. And from such a view of nature, a spiritualized view of life must nevertheless arise in the course of human evolution. So this simple farmer has gradually become a famous personality, especially among the most enlightened spirits of the materialistic epoch. He was an enthusiastic traveler and not only learned in his early youth in Vienna what he wanted to learn, he also traveled to Feuerbach in Nuremberg. But it is particularly interesting how his inn in Goisern became a place of residence for the most important people in the field of natural science and natural philosophy. Haeckel repeatedly stopped at Deubler's, staying there for weeks at a time. Feuerbach often stopped there. Deubler corresponded with David Friedrich Strauß, with the materialist Vogt, with the so-called fat Vogt, with all kinds of people, and we should not be disturbed by the unorthographic, the ungrammatical, but rather we should be struck by the unspoilt nature of the man of knowledge.

And I would like to say that this trait, which in Deubler appears in the rustic and coarse, appears in the man, whom I already referred to in the previous lecture, in a highly subtle way: Bartholomäus von Carneri, the real Austrian philosopher of the last third of the nineteenth century. Carneri is also the type of mind that is initially overwhelmed by Darwinism, but which shows all the more clearly how impossible it is for him to really accept science as it is accepted in Central Europe; how it is impossible for such a mind not to link science to the innermost striving of the human being, not to seek the path that leads from science to religious deepening and religious contemplation. Bartholomäus von Carneri is precisely one of those minds for whom it is true when Asia says to the blond Teut that the most serious thinking in the German spirit wants to arise out of love and come to the intimacy of God. Even if this intimacy with God comes to us, as it were, in atheistic clothing in Carneri, it still comes to us from the most intense and honest spiritual striving. Carneri, as a philosopher and as a man of world-view, stands entirely on the ground of the view that everything that is spirit can only appear to man in matter. And now Carneri is under the influence of a strange delusion. One could say that he is under the influence of the delusion that he now regards the world in terms of nothing but concepts and ideas, in terms of nothing but perceptions and sensations that are born of the spirit, with which he believes he can grasp and comprehend only material things, only the sensual. When someone looks at something sensual, says Carneri, this sensuality can be divided, but the division goes only so far that we can survey this limited thing with our senses. But when the division continues, when the differentiation becomes so fine that no sense can oversee it, then what lives in the differentiated material must be grasped by thinking, and then it is spirit, - spiritually out of the belief that actually only the natural is naturally understood. This is very characteristic, because Carneri's world view is really instinctive spiritualized materialism; one could even say purest spiritualism. And only through the trend of the times, through the effect of the times, did the deception arise that what Carneri speaks of can only be meant spiritually, when in fact it is fundamentally only expressions of the material. But what Carneri grasps so instinctively idealistically, consciously naturalistically, he must necessarily attach to ethics. And what man works out for himself in the way of morals becomes, for Carneri, because he strives for a certain monism of world view, only a sum of higher natural laws. And so Carneri, precisely because he is subject to the characterized deception, transfers the moral, the highest impulses of moral action, into the human soul like natural impulses. And there one sees particularly what is actually at work in minds like Carneri's. In their youth, they lived in a world view that made a fundamental distinction between spirit and nature. They could not reconcile this with the urge of their souls. What science has produced in three to four centuries, these minds had grasped instinctively: No, nature cannot be what it is or should be according to the old traditions; in many of its aspects, nature cannot simply be an abandoned child of the gods. What is the lawfulness of the world must live in nature.

And yet, although such people only wanted to be naturalists, it was basically the urge to give nature its spirit, which lived in them. This is what makes these men so extraordinarily characteristic. And if it can be shown, even in the case of Sueß, the geologist, how his nationality gave a special human colouring to his great work on geology, the same could be shown in the case of a philosopher like Carneri, if one were now to follow his inner life. Precisely what emerges from the observation with regard to the lawful connection between the most diverse nationally colored human minds, as they can be found in Austria, had the particular effect that there, in complicated form, in manifold form, human images stepped before the soul in such a way that riddle upon riddle arose. And in looking at human experiences, at people one has before one daily, one looked at something where the natural plays up into the moral and the moral plays down again into the natural. So it was that in Carneri a noble ethical world view of the historical course of humanity was intimately mixed with a certain naturalism, which, however, is basically only a transitional product, a transitional from which most of all that could be found as a later stage is represented here as a spiritual science, if one is only aware that everything in the world needs its historical development.

Thus, in Carneri's work, a certain view of the ethical, historical ethical life of humanity is combined with the natural life. For him, natural life and historical life merge into one. He sharpens his view of the natural phenomena he has observed so wonderfully, I might say so lovingly and intimately, for the phenomena of humanity, insofar as they take place between nation and nation. The one always clarifies the other. And Carneri had the opportunity, in particular, to be able to contribute to the development of Austria's destiny because he was a member of the Austrian Parliament for a long time and because he absorbed the basic conditions of Austria at that time in the most honest way into his soul. He was born in Trento in 1821, the son of a senior Austrian civil servant. It is remarkable that today I often have to describe personalities to you who were outwardly tormented by deep suffering. Carneri was a twin child. His twin sister developed quite well. But from the beginning he was afflicted with a curvature of the spine. He was ill all his life, paralyzed down one side. He also corresponded with Conrad Deubler. And although I have already been made aware from another source of what Carneri's external life was like, I would still like to present to you the words that Carneri wrote to Deubler on October 26, 1881, so that you can see what an extraordinarily physically tormented man Carneri was. “Do you know,” Carneri wrote to Deubler, ”that the description of your home has made my heart very heavy? It reminded me of the time when I was healthy. I have the forest just behind the house and I have not entered it for years because I can only walk on completely flat paths. I have long since renounced any higher enjoyment of nature, but also everything that is called social entertainment. Incidentally, I can't say that I feel any less happy as a result. Due to a muscle cramp in my neck (torticollis intermittens), which often extends across half of my body, my existence is an extraordinarily arduous one. But I don't mind, and that's what matters. In short, it will be difficult for me to visit you; but if it is feasible one day, I will. We are sticking together, even without knowing each other face to face, and that's the main thing."

And I have read here before how the Austrian poet Marie Eugenie delle Grazie, who knew Carneri well, described the exterior of Carneri from a moving scene. She describes it as follows: ”... “How could you bear it, all these years, and still keep that smile, that kindness and joy of life?” I cried out in agony when Carneri suffered such an attack in my presence. Slowly he raised his head, which had sunk low on his chest, wiped the sweat from his forehead and cheeks with his trembling left hand, breathed deeply and looked at me with a look that was once again all sun and willpower. “How so?” he smiled. ‘But don't you understand that in my daily struggle with such a beast, I wanted to remain a man, and become a man I had to? I —, he smiled again, ’just had my ambitions. That‘, he pointed to his still-twitching body, ’should be stronger than me? Should it be able to rob me of my days? To make me loathe all the joys and beauties of life? Would I be a man if I did not remain the stronger? So it began, and so it will end.

Thus speaks one who, due to the previously described deception, believes himself to be a naturalist, but who has absorbed a noble ethic from naturalism. But he also shows us a personality that, in a certain respect, contains within itself much that is genuinely Austrian: the ability to turn a strong soul into a strong soul and not to be able to bear weakness being taken as weakness, but rather acting — was particularly developed in this Carneri. And this sense is poured over his entire philosophy. And if you read his works, you will find this sense. But you will also find the infinitely loving response to the facts of life. Incidentally, it already emerges in his poems, in his various writings, which appeared as early as 1840. And the whole of Carneri – it was wonderful to look at him. He stands before me as I look down from the gallery of the Austrian House of Representatives. It was always an important day when one knew that Carneri would speak. Carneri, who was half paralyzed, who could only walk on flat paths, who could only speak in such a way that half of his tongue participated in the speaking, so to speak, that only half of his brain was only half thinking. This Carneri had conquered his physicality; that he now stood there and that his speech was imbued with the most tremendous acumen, with which he saw through everything that could be seen through, that could be condemned. And everywhere he found the right words, which shot like an arrow at those who were to be hit, and which could everywhere inspire those who wanted to be inspired. Carneri was far too much of an idealist for his speeches to always be followed by action. But his speeches were feared in a certain way. In a scholarly way, he presented to his parliament what he carried in his whole thinking – one might say: Austria. This lived and this spoke. And whether he spoke where he could agree with something or whether he spoke as an opponent – that which was discerning Austrian patriotism always spoke through Carneri; such a patriotism, which seeks the tasks of this Austrian national community in the whole historical development of mankind. And even when he spoke about individual matters, not in abstract terms but with all the color of his speech, a great historical trend came to life. And even when he had to reproach, when he had to reproach bitterly, I would say that in his thoughts the blood relationship between this thinker Carneri and Austrian-ness came to life. Therefore, anyone who is aware of this can never forget how the words of one of his last speeches must have sounded from Carneri's mouth, where he saw some things approaching that the opponents of Central Europe had overestimated, that were not as the opponents of Central Europe believed, but that could have been brought about by many out of lack of understanding. Carneri was one of those who saw it from afar, but who, above all, did not want to merely criticize it, so that Austria would remain truly strong. That is why his words of reproach had such an effect that they could remain in the soul. And those who heard such words of reproach, such words of reproach imbued with the deepest feeling, which he uttered in one of his last most brilliant speeches, where he said: “I document thereby express my conviction... which can be summarized in two words, two words which — and I have experienced many a serious moment in my sixty years — I utter for the first time in my life today: Poor Austria!” That such words could be spoken, that there were people who felt that way, is where the forces lie that today have their counter-image in the vilifications of Austria's opponents, outside of Austria, among the enemies of Austria. In Carneri, something of the spirit of those who, in all their diversity, strove to bring Austria powerfully into harmony, because they understood the necessity of the harmony of this diversity, lived.

In the end, he went blind. He celebrated his eightieth birthday in 1900 – by then he had gone blind. As a blind man, he wrote his Dante translation at the time. He dictated from memory, because he had Dante's Divine Comedy in his soul and was able to translate it from memory. At that time, his life was behind him. In many, it lives on, in more people than one might think. He had become blind, weak. As a blind man, he sat in a wheelchair; he had eighty years behind him, sixty years of work. “Realized” - I say this in parentheses - when this man was eighty years old and blind, the University of Vienna ‘recognized’ him by awarding him the doctorate as an eighty-year-old blind man and declaring that it understood something of his merits, with the words: ”We highly appreciate that you have been able to give your scientific ideas such a form that they are able to penetrate into further circles of the people, and that your honorable sir, in addition to the noblest devotion to Austria, has always represented those principles of freedom in your public activities, without whose unreserved recognition a successful advancement of knowledge and scientific work is not possible.” One must be glad that such things as Carneri has done for the benefit of his country and, dare I say it, for the benefit of humanity, are at least recognized; even if one can become eighty years old, blind and deaf before they are recognized. Well, that is the way things are going today.

Unfortunately, I have already taken up far too much of your time; but I could continue at length by attempting to describe, not by means of description, but by means of symptoms, in which, I believe - not always in such a refined way, of course - Austrian folklore lives, but which also shows what this Austrian folklore is when it can show itself in its noblest blossoms. I have mentioned these noblest blossoms because I believe that it is good if the population of Central Europe gets to know each other better in our difficult times, also in a spiritual sense. For time is forging a whole out of this Central Europe, and a unified spirit already prevails in this whole. And the better we get to know this unified spirit, the more alive it will appear to us, and the more we will be able to trust it. All the more will one be able to believe that, despite all misunderstanding, it cannot be overcome. In the German representatives of Central Europe there lives, in many cases, what I have already had to characterize as not simply an instinctive devotion to nationality, but an ideal to which one wants to develop, which consists in spirituality and in the development of strength, which one can only approach and which one can only truly appreciate when one regards it in connection with what leads to the salvation of all mankind. Indeed, there is something about the most German of Germans when they speak of their nationality that others cannot understand; for never does anything else live in the Germans but the duty: You must develop what wants to live through your nationality in the world! The duty to develop is, in a sense, to be national. Hence the constant urge to place one's own nationality within the context of the goals of all humanity. And so it was with Carneri, that in his soul-searching he found what, ethically, must be connected as the basic features of the development of all humanity with natural law. For him, this was one. But he regarded it with such love that for him the Germanic ideals were also part of the historical development of all mankind. And he could compare, and only because he really compared, he felt entitled to think about the Germanic as he did. I would have much more to say about it, but there is not enough time. A mind like Carneri's first looks at the essential nature of the various nations, and then he allows the value of his own nation to emerge before himself in the right image. He considers his own national substance in connection with other national substances. From this point of view, he says to himself: The freedom of all nations, the recognition of every nation, is compatible with everything German, because that lies in the whole German development. And this, for Carneri, is contradicted, for example, by the Pan-Slav ideal, which proceeds from the a priori view that supremacy must one day be granted to every nation; which works towards getting supremacy. In contrast to this, Carneri says: The leadership of the Germanic spirit, which dominates Europe and extends to the distant West, originates from the concept of morality, which, on the favorable soil that has made it flourish, bears beneficial fruits. It cannot, therefore, last any longer than this world is habitable. And precisely at the time when Carneri was a member of the Austrian parliament, the situation in Central Europe, particularly in the political sphere and in the field of political observation, was such that England and the English constitution were seen as a model. Many politicians wanted to model the constitution of all countries on the English model. And much else in England was seen as a model. Carneri was very much involved in such politics, where many of his comrades thought this way. But Carneri wanted to come to clarity. Carneri wanted to be objective in his view of humanity. But out of this objectivity arose his sense of belonging to the Germanic-Germanic essence and his objective assessment of a country like England. What I am going to share with you now, Carneri did not just write before the war – he died long before the war, after all – he wrote it in the 1860s. “England,” he says, ‘the country of continuous progress par excellence, will turn to general ideas if it is not to descend from the proud heights it has climbed. Nothing characterizes it better than the fact that it has become so ’practical' in the self-confident development of its greatness that it had to learn from the Germans that it had produced the greatest playwright in the world!” In a spirit like Carneri's, this is not just any kind of jingoism, it is a sense of belonging to the Germanic essence; a sense of belonging that arises from knowledge, that arises precisely from deep knowledge, and that does not want to allow itself to appear in the world and claim what it is entitled to claim before it can justify itself before the entire mission of humanity on earth. This is something that, whether it is spoken in Germany or in Austria, can find little understanding among the others, because it is basically the national conception of the specifically German.

With regard to Austria, however, I have, I believe, characterized something of Austrian-ness for you more than descriptive words can, by showing some of living people. And I hope that I have characterized Austrian character in these living people in such a way that, through the contemplation of these living people, the conviction can arise that this Austria is not just a motley collection, brought together by some arbitrary act, but that it corresponds to an inner necessity. The people I have tried to present to you prove this. And they prove this, I think, by the fact that one can say of them, as of deeply thinking souls, seeking a world view or an art out of a deep temperament, what has been said in another area and in another respect with reference to the Austrian Field Marshal Radetzky. The saying that was then repeated was once said with reference to the Austrian Field Marshal Radetzky: “In your camp is Austria!” I believe that one can expand on this saying and say of such people, as I have tried to interpret for you, that in their searching souls Austria lives, Austria lives as something that they feel is a necessity: “In their thoughts Austria lives!” And I believe that Austria lives in a very lively way.

Today and next time I am going to speak about the Gospel of St. John. I would mention that what I have to say will only really be comprehensible to those who are already somewhat familiar with spiritual science. It would, however, take us too far out of our way if we went into everything unfamiliar to non-theosophists. You are probably aware that latterly New Testament textual criticism has discredited the John Gospel as an historical source. It is said in theological circles—at least in advanced circles—that the first three gospels, the synoptic gospels, are the only documents relevant to the life of the founder of Christianity. They are called synoptic because they can be taken together to form a general picture of the life of Christ Jesus. On the other hand modern theologians try to interpret the John Gospel as a sort of poetic work, a confession of faith, the writings of a person portraying his feelings, his intimate religious life as it was born in him through the impact of Christianity. Thus the John Gospel could be considered as a devotional work, a deeply felt confession of faith, not as anything that could be taken as Christian historical facts.

But for everyone who immerses himself in the writings of the New Testament, one fact is indisputable: an immediate life flows from the John Gospel, and there is a conviction, a source of truth of a different nature to that proceeding from other religious writings. There is a certainty, which needs no outer confirmation. There is a feeling that comes over one when one meets the John Gospel if one is sensitive to inner soul life and spiritual devotion. Only with the help of spiritual science can one understand why this is so. Many a time have I told you how spiritual science helps towards a more intimate connection with religious documents.

You all know that when one first meets the scriptures one adopts the attitude of a simple person and takes the facts as they are described, without criticism; one takes the bread of religious life from these sources and is satisfied with it.

Many people of our day who had this naive outlook and then became “clever”, became “enlightened”, noticed the contradictions in the gospels. Then they rejected the gospels and lost faith. They said: We cannot reconcile remaining faithful to these writings and seeking wisdom in them with our conscience and our sense of truth. This is the stage of the “clever” ones, the second stage.

Then there is the third way that people approach religious documents. They begin to explain them symbolically. They begin to see symbols and allegories in them. This is the way of free-thinkers, especially in recent times.

Bruno Wille, the editor of the paper “Der Freidenker” (The Free Thinker), has now chosen this way. He has taken to explaining symbolically the Christ myth and the Bible in general. The really necessary way of development that man needs, an inner turning point, cannot follow from this. Those who are less ingenious will explain the scriptures less ingeniously. Others who are more ingenious will be better. Much will be read into it that springs from human ingenuity. The third way is thus a half believing, but arbitrary, attitude.

Then there is quite a different standpoint. One learns that there are realities pertaining to higher worlds, that besides our world of the senses, there are soul-spiritual things, and that religious revelations are not concerned with the sense world but present facts of a higher world. Those who have gotten to know the realities of the astral world which lies behind our sense world, and of the devachanic (or mental world) which lies even deeper, will come to a new and higher understanding of religious sources. It is impossible to understand the John Gospel without rising to such higher worlds. The John Gospel is not a poetic work, nor a writing arising from mere religious fervour, but sets forth revelations from higher worlds that the writer of the gospel has received. It is something like this—I will briefly describe it. The supporting evidence I will not deal with today; perhaps I can go into it next time. The writer of the John Gospel learned, through experience in higher worlds, what took place at “the beginning of our era“ that related to the life of the founder of Christianity, and his acts.

Let me give you an example of the difference between just knowing, and truly comprehending. We have recently mentioned here that someone can be next to us, we can see what he looks like, but we need not necessarily really know him for what he is. I have told the story of the singer who, at an evening party sat between Mendelsohn and someone else she did not know. She got on very well with Mendelsohn, but towards the other guest, though he was very courteous, she felt an aversion. Afterwards she asked, “Who was that bore on my left?” The answer was, “It was the famous philosopher Hegel”. If the lady had been told previously that the great philosopher Hegel would be present at a party, that alone would probably have been enough for her to have accepted the invitation. But because he sat beside her unknown, he was a bore. This is the difference between seeing and understanding, between just knowing and comprehending.

He who was the founder of Christianity could not readily be recognised if one only possessed the ordinary intellect employed in the sense world. It needed that which the Christian mystics so often expressed in profound and beautiful language. This was what Angelus Silesius meant when he said:

There is an inner experience of Christ—there is the possibility to realize inwardly what took place outwardly as events in Palestine between the years 1 and 33 A.D. He who came into this world from higher worlds must be understood from a higher world. And he who portrayed Him most deeply had to raise himself to the two higher worlds we have mentioned, the astral and the devachanic, or mental worlds. This elevation of John, if we so name him, was the elevation into these two higher worlds. His Gospel reveals this to us.

The first twelve chapters contain John's experiences in the astral world. From chapter thirteen onwards it is his experiences in the devachanic, or mental world. He who wrote it down says of Christ (the words are not to be taken literally): Here on this earth He lived, here has He worked with divine powers, with occult powers. He has healed the sick, he has gone through everything from death to resurrection. It is impossible to understand these things with the ordinary intellect. Here on earth there is no science or learning by which one could really understand what occurred. But there is the possibility of rising to the higher worlds. There one can find the wisdom to understand Him who walked here on earth among us. Thus did the writer of the John Gospel rise to the two higher worlds and become initiated. It was an initiation, and the writer describes his initiation into the astral world and the devachanic, or mental world.

In olden times, in regions where man's body was still suited to these things, such an initiation took place as follows. The person had to go through a sort of sleep-state. What now takes several years in a modern European initiation—because the modern European can no longer go through the process I will describe—what today is achieved through long exercises of meditation and concentration, was achieved in a short time by some individuals, after the appropriate exercises of meditation and concentration. I particularly emphasise that anyone who really wishes to receive initiation must, in some form or other, face the two important experiences about to be described—though in a somewhat different way. He must go through a sort of sleep condition. To understand the nature of sleep, let us remind ourselves what takes place when one sleeps. One's higher bodies are then separated from one's lower bodies. Man consists of a physical body, which one can see with one's eyes. The second member is the etheric body which surrounds the physical body and which is much finer than the physical body. Currents and organs of wonderful variety and splendour are active in it. The etheric body contains the same organs as the physical body. It has a brain, heart, eyes etc. They represent the forces which formed the corresponding organs. It is as if one cooled water in a vessel until it becomes ice. In this way you should picture the arising of the physical organs through the densifying of the etheric organs. The etheric body extends only a little beyond the physical body.

The third member is the astral body. It is the bearer of desires, wishes, passions, etc. It permeates the physical body in the form of a cloud. There are colours—violent passions appear as lightning flashes. The peculiarities of temperament glide through the body in glowing points of varying intensity.

The whole inner man is expressed in a luminous form. This is the real ego of man, the bearer of the higher centre of his being. In normal sleep the physical and etheric bodies are lying in bed. They are closely united. The astral body and all the rest is separated. As long as one does not do anything particular one is unconscious when the astral body is outside the physical body. One is as unconscious as one would be in the physical world without eyes or ears. One could live as long as one liked in the physical world; if one had no eyes there would be no colours, if one had no ears there would be no sound. So it is when the astral body is outside the physical body. It is spread out in the soul world, but one does not see this world or become aware of it because one has no astral sense organs. They must gradually be formed. If a person does not practice exercises he remains unconscious in higher worlds. But if he does practice then he can attain consciousness in these higher worlds. When his astral body acquires organs he begins to see the astral world around him. Those of you who have often attended these lectures will know that there are seven such organs. They are called wheels, chakrams or lotus flowers. The two-petalled lotus flower lies between the eyes—between the eye-brows, the sixteen-petalled lies in the region of the larynx, the twelve-petalled lies in the heart region. If these organs are gradually developed one becomes clairvoyant in the astral world.

This astral vision is something quite different from physical sight. You can get some idea of astral vision if you think of the flow of dream life. In dreams we have symbolic pictures—true symbols. One sees symbols. One loses consciousness of what takes place here in the physical world, but one can experience in symbolic pictures such events as the life of Christ Jesus as John describes it from his own experience in the astral world. Descriptions of this nature form the content of the first twelve chapters of the John Gospel. Don't misunderstand me. I know many will say: If all this is astral experience, then it is nothing real and what is told us of the founder of Christianity is not authentic. But this is not the case. It would be as if one denied that a man of flesh and blood could be a genius, because one cannot see genius. Although one learns the truth of Christ Jesus only on the astral plane, it is still a fact that he lived his life on the physical plane. We are dealing with symbols on the astral plane and outer reality on the physical plane. Nothing is taken away from the facts when we understand them more deeply in the sense of the John Gospel.

Initiation in the astral world is preceded by, and depends on what is called meditation. This means that the soul sinks into itself—I have often described it here. To reach a meditative experience one must make oneself blind and deaf to all sense impressions. Nothing must be able to disturb one. Cannons can go off without one being aware of it in one's inner life. One does not achieve this at once, but through constant practice one can attain this capacity. One must empty oneself also of all past experiences. Memory must be wiped out. The soul must be concerned only with itself and then out of its inner being there arise the eternal truths which are able—not only to awaken our understanding—but to release capacities which lie slumbering under a spell in our souls. These great eternal verities will rise up in man according to the maturity he has attained through his karma—the one, as Subba Row says, in seven incarnations, another in seventy years, another in seven years, others in seven months, seven days or seven hours.

John sets forth the means whereby his soul was led to perception on the astral plane. The formula he used for meditation stands at the beginning of his gospel. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was a God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him, and without this Word was not anything made that was made. In it was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.”

In these five sentences lie the eternal verities which loosed the spell in John's soul and brought forth the great visions. This is the form of the meditation. Those for whom the John Gospel is written should not read it like any other book. The first five sentences must be taken as a formula of meditation. Then one follows John on his way, and attempts to experience oneself what he experienced. This is the way to do it; so it is meant.

John says: Do what I have done. Let the great formula, “In the beginning was the Word” work in your souls and you will verify what is said in my first twelve chapters.

This alone can really help towards understanding the John Gospel. Thus is it intended and thus should it be used. I have often spoken of what the “Word” signifies. “In the beginning” is not a good translation. It should really read: Out of the primal forces emerged the Word. That is what it means: The Word came forth, came forth out of the primal forces. Thus “in the beginning” means: coming forth out of the primal forces.

When man is in this sleep condition he is no longer in the sense world. He moves into a soul world and in this soul world experiences what the sense world really is. The truth of the sense world is revealed. He starts out from these words derived from the sense world leading back to the primal forces, and rises up to the words of truth. Every truth has seven meanings. For the mystic, immersed in contemplation it has however this meaning: The knowledge, the Word which emerges, is not something that merely applies to yesterday and today, but this Word is eternal. This Word leads to God because it was ever with God, because it is the very essence that God has planted into all things.

There is however, still another way of understanding this, and one acquires it if one returns day after day to the momentous words: “In the beginning was the Word”. When one begins to understand, not with the intellect, but with the heart, so that the heart becomes one with these words, then the power begins to work, and there begins the state of mind of which John speaks. He says it with great clarity: “All things were made by Him and without the Word was not anything made that was made”.

What do we find in this Word? We find life. What do we perceive through this life—through this light? We must take these religious texts quite literally if we want to attain higher knowledge. Where does this light shine? In the darkness of night. It comes to those who sleep. It comes to everyone who sleeps. But the darkness comprehended it not—until the ability develops to perceive it on the astral plane. Thus is the fifth verse to be understood literally. The astral light shines into the darkness of night but man does not normally see it, he must first learn to see.

As all this became reality for the writer of the John Gospel, the light dawned and he saw who He was, He whose disciple and apostle he was. Here on earth he had seen Him. Now he had found Him again on the astral plane, and he knew that He who had walked the earth in the flesh only differed in one respect from what lived in his own deepest inner self. In every single man there lives a divine man. In the distant future this divine man will arise resurrected in every man. As man stands before us today he is, in his outward appearance, to a greater or lesser extent, an expression of the inner divine man, and this inner divine man works constantly on the outer man.

Last Thursday [Public Lecture, Berlin, 15 Feb, 1906. “Reincarnation and Karma”] I already pointed out how one can illustrate this by a simple comparison. Look at a child. One could be tempted to say that these innocent features came from the father or mother, an uncle or an ancestor. However, everything within the child expresses itself in the features, in the gestures of the hands and in all its movements. What slumbers in the child strives to come to expression. Finally the individual emerges and the physiognomy becomes an expression of the individual soul, while previously it showed more of a family type. In primitive man the individual soul is usually still slumbering and has but a meagre existence. In the course of many incarnations and efforts the individual emerges, the soul aquires more power over the physical body, and the physiognomy takes on the imprint, or the expression of the inner man. An immature person expresses little of the power of the soul. Gradually man matures, and full maturity is reached when the inner word has become flesh completely—when the outer has become an exact imprint of the inner, so that the spirit shines through the flesh. This however, John only understood once his higher self had appeared clearly before his astral eyes. It stood in front of his astral eyes and he knew: This is I. Today have I experienced it on the astral plane. However it will gradually descend as it did in Him, who I followed. This is the deep relationship between Christ Jesus and the divine man that exists in every man. This is the deep inner experience of John.

The inner soul lives unconscious in man and he only becomes aware of it through the processes we have described.

What does it mean to say: something becomes conscious. Can we become conscious of something which lives within us? As long as it only lives within us we are not aware of it. Man is not aware of what he carries within him, what is subjective. I will use a crude comparison to make clear what I mean. You all have a physical brain but you cannot see it. It would have to be taken out, and then you could see it. For the same reason, though there is a certain difference, you cannot see your higher self. It is the “I” within you. But it must come out if you are to see it, and this can only happen on the astral plane. When it is outside and confronts you, then spiritually, it is as if you had a physical brain on a platter and made it the object of your sense perception.

The writer of the John Gospel describes this process. His own higher ego appears before Him—his own higher ego, which in its fullness represents the Christ. When you know this you will be able to understand certain hints and truths in the John Gospel. You will be able to understand certain things quite well with the help of what I said up to now. In occult language one describes what this ego inhabits—the physical body, which it has built for itself to dwell in—as the temple. Thus one says: The soul dwells in the temple.

It is not altogether a painless procedure when for the first time the soul must leave the temple of the body so that it becomes visible outside of it. This leaving of the body is not without pain. All that forms this higher connection with the physical body are bands that are not so easy to loosen. Imagine that you are bound with fetters and you break loose. You would experience pain through this tearing apart. It is like a process of tearing apart when the astral body leaves the physical body when it leaves it, perceptibly. Leaving the body in sleep is different, one is not aware of it. If one leaves it consciously then one experiences pain.

When man begins to develop astral consciousness, things on the astral plane appear to him as in a mirror. The number 165 should not be read as 165 but as 561—as reflected writing. Everything appears reversed on the astral plane. Even time is reversed. When you follow someone on the astral plane you start, to begin with, from where he is. Then you go back to his birth. You can follow him on the physical plane forwards; on the astral plane backwards. Leaving the physical body is like this: It is as though we were leaving the temple of the physical body and were laid hold of from all sides. This is the occurrence which John wants to describe. He left his body in order to experience the Christ, his own higher divine self, confronting him. People around him have their astral bodies bound strongly to their physical bodies as if with fetters. Had John remained like them he would have continued to be fettered to his physical body. Now let us read how this occurrence is described pictorially and symbolically in the John Gospel, chapter 8, verses 58 and 59: “Jesus said unto them, verily, verily I say unto you: Before Abraham was, I am. Then took they up stones to cast at him: but Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple, going through the midst of them”, through the hindrances. With this ends the eighth chapter. This is the passing out of the astral body from the physical body. The final act, leading to the leaving of the physical body and to higher vision, usually lasts three days. When these three days are up, one attains a consciousness on the astral plane comparable to that previously experienced on the physical plane. Then one is united with the higher world.

In occult language this union with the higher world is called the marriage of the soul with the powers of the higher world. When one has left the physical body, this appears to one as a mother would appear to a new-born child, were the child able to be conscious at birth. Thus the physical body confronts one, and the astral body can very well say to the physical body: This is my mother. When one has celebrated this marriage one can say this. One can look back on the former union. This can happen after three days. This is the occult procedure on the astral plane. In chapter 2, verse 1, it is stated: “And the third day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee; and the mother of Jesus was there”. This is the pictorial expression for what I have just said. It happened on the third day.

When a person enters the astral world, he finds himself in a region from which he can rise a step further into a still higher world—the mental, or devachanic world. This entry into the devachanic world can only be gained at the expense of the complete extinction, the death of the lower nature. He must go through the three days of death and then be awakened. Once he has attained vision of the astral plane and the pictures of the astral plane have confronted him, he is mature and ready to receive knowledge on the mental or devachanic plane. It is possible then to describe the awakening on the devachanic plane. To find oneself on the higher plane with conscious clarity of thought, this is the awakening of Lazarus.

John describes the awakening of Lazarus. Previously he has shown that through this chain of events one can enter the higher worlds. In chapter 10, verse 9, it is said: “I am the door: by me if any man enter in he shall be saved and shall go in and out and find pasture”. This is the awakening of what was wrapped in sleep and is now awakened on the devachanic plane. John goes through it. John is Lazarus, and John means nothing more nor less than what is described in his first twelve chapters. He describes as an astral experience that he was awakened on the astral plane. Then followed the initiation for the devachanic plane. Three days he lay in the grave, and then he received the awakening. The raising of Lazarus is the awakening of John who wrote the gospel.

Read everything up to the chapter on the raising of Lazarus and you will find no mention of John anywhere. Consider Lazarus and John. It is said of John (John, ch. 13, v. 23): “Now there was leaning on Jesus' bosom one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved.” Regarding Lazarus, you find the same words—that He loved him. It is the same person. He is not mentioned previous to the awakening. He appears for the first time after he is “raised from the dead”. These are the enigmas hidden in the John Gospel. The disciple whom the Lord loved is he whom the Lord himself has initiated. The writer of the John Gospel was he whom the Lord loved. How was he able to say this? Because he had been initiated, first on the astral plane and then on the devachanic plane. If one is able in this way to find the deeper meaning of the John Gospel, then will one be able to understand it in its true profundity, and then it becomes one of the greatest texts ever written. It is the description of the initiation into the depths of the inner life of the soul. It has been written so that everyone who reads it can follow the same path. And this one can do. Sentence for sentence, word for word, one can find within oneself, by rising to the higher plane, what is described in the John Gospel. It is not a biography of Christ Jesus but a biography of the developing human soul. And what is described is eternal and can take place in the heart of every human being. This text is an example and a model. Hence it has this living and awakening power which not only makes people into Christians but enables them to awaken to a higher reality. The John Gospel is not a profession of faith, but a text which really gives strength, and a self-supporting, independent higher life. This springs forth from the John Gospel, and he who does not merely want to understand it, but to live it, has truly comprehended it.

With these few words I could only touch on the contents. Next time we will go into certain details. Then you will see how every single sentence confirms what we have said today in general terms. Step by step you will then see that the John Gospel is not addressed merely to the human intellect, but to man's entire soul forces, and that real soul experience springs from it.

Yesterday we concluded by outlining the three methods of occult development: the Eastern, the Christian and the Rosicrucian. Today we will begin by going more closely into the details which distinguish these three paths. But first I should say that no occult school sees in its teaching and requirements anything like a moral law valid for all mankind. The requirements apply only to those who deliberately choose to devote themselves to a particular occult training. You can, for instance, be a very good Christian and fulfil everything that the Christian religion prescribes for the laity without undergoing a Christian occult training. It goes without saying that you can be a good man and come to a form of the higher life without any occult training.

As I said earlier, the Eastern training calls for strict submission to the Guru.⁴² I will describe briefly the kind of instruction that an Eastern teacher gives. You will realise that the actual instructions cannot be given publicly; I can indicate only the stages of the path. The instructions can be divided into eight parts:

1. Yama includes all the abstentions required of anyone who wishes to undergo Yoga training: Do not lie, do not kill, do not steal, do not lead a dissolute life, desire nothing.

The injunction, Do not kill, is very stringent and applies to all creatures. No living creature may be killed or even injured, and the more strictly this rule is observed, the further will the pupil progress. Whether this rule can be observed in our civilisation is another matter. Every killing, even of a flea, impedes occult development. Whether someone is obliged to do it—that again is a different question.

You will understand the command, Do not lie, if you recall what I said about the astral plane, where to lie is to kill and every lie is a murder. Lying therefore comes into the same category as killing.

The precept, Do not steal, also has to be applied most strictly. A European might claim that he does not steal. But the Eastern Yogi does not look at it so simply. In the regions where these exercises were first promulgated by the great teachers of humanity, conditions were much simpler: stealing was easy to define. But a Yoga teacher would not agree that Europeans do not steal. For example, if I unjustifiably appropriate another man's labour, or if I procure for myself a profit which may be legally permissible but which involves the exploitation of another person—all this the Yoga teacher would call stealing. With us, social relations have become so complex that many people violate this commandment without the slightest awareness of doing so. Suppose you have money and deposit it in a bank. You do nothing with it; you exploit no-one. But suppose now the banker starts speculating and exploits other people with your money. In the occult sense you will be responsible for it, and the events will burden your karma. You can see that this precept requires deep consideration if you are entering on a path of occult development.

With regard to the injunction, Do not lead a dissolute life, take a person with private means whose capital is invested without his knowledge in a distillery; he is just as culpable as the producer of strong drinks. The fact that he knew nothing about it makes no difference to his karma. There is only one way of keeping to the right path with these abstentions: strive to need nothing. Even if you have great possessions, in so far as you strive to have no needs, you will injure no-one.

The injunction, Desire nothing, is especially hard to carry out. It means that the pupil must strive to have no needs, no desire for anything in the world, and to do only what the outer world demands of him. He must even suppress any feeling of pleasure at doing good to someone; he must be moved to help not by any such feeling but simply by the sight of suffering. And if he has to spend money, he must not think of his own wishes or desires but must say to himself: “I need this to maintain my body or to meet the needs of my spirit, as everyone else does. I do not desire it, but am considering only how best to live my life in the world.”

In Yoga training this concept of Yama is, as I have said, taken most strictly; it could not be transplanted to Europe as it stands.

2. Niyama. This means the observance of religious customs. In India, where these rules are chiefly applied, a problem is solved which causes many difficulties in European civilisation. For us it is very easy to say that we have passed beyond dogmas; we hold to the inner truth only and have no use for outer forms. The further a European has got away from religious observances, the more exalted does he imagine himself to be. The Hindu takes the opposite view; he holds firmly to the rites of his religion, and no-one may touch them, but anyone is free to form his own opinion of them. There are sacred rites which have come down from very ancient times and signify something very profound. An uneducated man will have very elementary ideas about them; a more highly cultured man will have different and better ideas, but no-one will say that anyone else's ideas are wrong. The wise and the unlearned observe the same customs. There are no dogmas, only rites. Hence these deeply religious customs can be observed by all, and in them the wise and the simple are brought together. Thus the rites are socially unifying. No-one is restricted in his opinions by conforming to a strict ritual.

The Christian religion has followed the opposite principle. Not customs, but opinions, have been imposed on people, and the consequence is that formlessness has become the rule in our social life. So begins a complete disregard of all observances that could draw human beings together; every form that expresses symbolically a higher truth is gradually rejected. This is a great loss for human development, especially for development in the Eastern sense.

In Europe today there are plenty of people who think they have learnt to do without dogmas, yet it is precisely the freethinkers and the materialists who are the worst fanatics for dogmas. The dogma of materialism is much more oppressive than any other. The infallibility of the Pope is no longer valid for many people, but instead we have the infallibility of the professor. Even the most liberal-minded, whatever they may say to the contrary, are victims of the dogmas of materialism. Think of the dogmas which burden lawyers, doctors and so on. Every university professor teaches his own dogma. Or think how people suffer from the dogma of the infallibility of public opinion, of the newspapers! The Eastern teacher of Yoga does not demand that the ceremonies which unite the learned and unlearned together should be abandoned: these sacred ancient rites are symbols of the highest wisdom. No culture is possible without such formal observances; to believe otherwise is an illusion. Suppose for instance a colony is founded with no forms or accepted customs. Clearly a colony such as that, with no church, no religious services or observances, could exist quite well for a time, because its people would continue to live in accordance with the rules and conventions they had brought with them. But as soon as these were lost, the colony would collapse, for every culture must embody a certain pattern which will give expression to its inner character. Modern civilisation must recover the forms it has lost; it must learn again how to give external expression to its inner life. In the long run social life is conditioned by its pattern, its formal customs. The ancient sages knew this, and hence they held firmly to religious practices.

3. Asanam means the adoption of a certain bodily posture in meditation. This is much more important for the Oriental than for the European, because the European body is no longer so sensitive to the flow of certain subtle currents. The body of the Oriental is even nowadays more delicately organised; it responds readily to the currents which pass from East to West, from North to South, from the Heights to the Depths. Spiritual currents flow through the universe, and it is for this reason that churches are built with a particular orientation. It is for this reason also that the Yoga teacher makes his pupil adopt a special posture; the pupil has to keep his hands and feet in a particular position, so that the currents may flow through his body in the right direction. If the Hindu did not bring his body into this harmony, he would risk losing all the benefits of his meditation.

4. Pranayama is breathing, yoga-breathing. It is an essential and detailed part of Eastern Yoga training. Christian training pays almost no attention to it, but in Rosicrucian training it has regained some importance.

What does breathing signify in occult development? You can find the answer in the injunctions not to kill and not to injure any living creature. The occult teacher says: “By breathing you are slowly, continually, killing your surroundings.” What does this mean? We breathe the air in, use it to furnish our blood with oxygen and then breathe it out again. What does this involve? We inhale the air with its oxygen; we combine the oxygen with carbon and we exhale carbon dioxide, in which no man or animal can live. We breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, which is a poison; and this means that with every breath we draw we are dealing death to other beings in our environment. Bit by bit we are killing our whole environment: we inhale the breath of life and exhale air which we can make no further use of. The occult teacher is concerned to alter this. If there were only men and animals in the world, all the oxygen would soon be used up and all living creatures would die. It is thanks to the plants that this does not happen, for in plants the breathing process is the reverse of ours. They assimilate carbon dioxide, separate the carbon from the oxygen, and use the carbon to build up their bodies. They liberate oxygen, and men and animals breathe it in again. So do the plants renew the life-giving air; otherwise all life would long ago have been destroyed. We owe our life to the plants, and in this way plants, animals and men are complementary.

But this process will change in the future, and since anyone who is undergoing occult training must begin to do what others will achieve at some time in the future, he must learn not to kill with his breath. That is Pranayama, the science of the breath. Our modern materialistic age places health under the sign of fresh air; but our modern way of achieving health through fresh air is one that terminates in death. A Yogi, on the other hand, will retire into a cave and as far as possible will breathe the air he has himself exhaled—unlike the European, who is always wanting to open windows. A Yogi has learnt the art of contaminating the air as little as possible because he has learnt how to use it up. How does he do it? The secret has always been known to the European occult schools, where it was called the finding of the Stone of the Wise, the Philosopher's Stone.

At the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century a good deal of information about occult development leaked out. The Stone of the Wise was often mentioned in published writings, but one can see that the author understood little of it, even though it all came from the right sources. In 1797 a local Thuringian newspaper printed an article about the Stone of the Wise which included, inter alia, the following: “The Stone of the Wise is something one has only to recognise, for every man has seen it. It is something which everyone holds in his hand for part of almost every day, but without knowing that it is the Philosopher's Stone.” This is an enigmatic way of indicating that the Philosopher's Stone can be found everywhere. Yet this strange expression is literally true.

This is how it comes about. The plant, as it builds up its body, takes in the carbon dioxide and retains the carbon for its body-building purposes. Men and animals eat the plants, take in the carbon, and give it up as carbon dioxide when they breathe out. So we have a carbon cycle. In the future there will be a great change. Man will learn to extend the range of his innate powers and will gradually come to do for himself what at present he leaves to the plant. Just as man passed through the plant and animal kingdoms in the course of his evolution, so will he in a certain sense retrace his steps. He will himself become plant; he will take up the plant-nature into himself and accomplish the whole plant-process within himself. He will retain the carbon dioxide and will consciously build up his body with it, as the plant now builds up its own body unconsciously. He will prepare the necessary oxygen in his own organs, unite it with carbon to form carbon dioxide, and then deposit the carbon again in himself. Thus he will be able to build up his bodily structure. Here is an idea which opens up a great perspective for the future; and when it comes about man will cease to be a killer with his breath.

Now we know that carbon and diamond are the same substance; diamond is more thoroughly crystallised and a more transparent form of carbon. Hence we need not think that in the future people will go about looking like negroes. Their bodies will consist of soft, transparent carbon. At that stage man will have found the Philosopher's Stone and he will transform his own body into it.

Anyone undergoing occult development has to anticipate this process as far as possible He must deprive his breath of the capacity to kill, and must organise his breathing so that the air he exhales is usable and can be breathed again. How is this to be accomplished? You have to bring rhythm into your breathing. The teacher gives the necessary instructions. Breathing in, holding your breath and breathing out again—this must be done rhythmically, if only for a short period. With every rhythmical exhalation the air is improved, slowly but surely. Here the old saying applies drops of water wear away the stone. The chemists cannot yet confirm this: their instruments are too coarse to detect the finer substances, but the occultist knows that breath imbued with rhythm is life-promoting and contains more than the normal amount of oxygen. The breath can be purified also, and at the same time, by meditation. This, too, contributes, if only by a very little, towards bringing the plant-nature back into man, so that he may become a being who does not kill.

5. Pratyahara, the curbing of sense-perception. Nowadays in ordinary life a person receives a continual stream of sense-impressions and allows them all to work on him. The occult teacher says to the pupil: “You must concentrate on a single sense-impression for a specified number of minutes and pass on to another only by your own free choice.”

6. Dharana, when the pupil has done that for a while he must learn to make himself deaf and blind to all sense-impressions; he must turn away from them and try to hold in his thought only the concepts they leave behind. If he thus lives in concepts only, and controls his thoughts and links one concept to another by his own free choice, he has reached the condition known as Dharana.

7. Dhyanam. There are concepts—often disregarded by Europeans—which do not derive from sense-impressions. We have to form them for ourselves—mathematical concepts, for example. No perfect triangle exists in the outer world; it can only be conceived in thought, and the same is true of a circle. Then there is a whole range of concepts which anyone undertaking occult training must study intensively. They are symbolic concepts which are connected with some objects—for example, the hexagram, or the pentagram, symbols which occultism can explain. The pupil must keep his mind sharply concentrated on such symbolic objects, not to be found in the outer world. It is the same with another kind of concept: for example, that of the species Lion, which can be laid hold of only in thought. On these, too, the pupil must focus his attention. Finally, there are moral ideas, such for example as the following, from Light on the Path:⁴³ “Before the eye can see, it must be incapable of tears.” This, too, cannot be experienced outwardly, but only inwardly. This meditation on concepts which have no sense-perceptible counterpart is called Dhyanam.

8. Finally, Samadhi, the most difficult of all. After concentrating for a very long time on an idea which has no sense-perceptible counterpart, you allow your mind to rest in it and your soul to be filled with it. Then you let the idea go, so that nothing is left in your consciousness. But you must not fall asleep, as would then normally happen; you must remain conscious. In that state the secrets of the higher worlds begin to reveal themselves. This state can be described as follows. You are thinking, for you are conscious, but you have no thoughts, and into this thinking without thoughts the spiritual powers are able to pour their content. But as long as you yourself fill your thinking, they cannot come in. The longer you can hold in your consciousness this activity of thinking without thoughts, the more will the super-sensible world reveal itself to you.

These are the eight realms with which a teacher of Eastern Yoga deals.

Now we will speak about the Christian way of occult training, as far as this is possible, and we shall see how it differs from the Eastern way. This Christian way can be followed with the advice of a teacher who knows what has to be done and can rectify mistakes at every step. But in Christian training the great Guru is Christ Jesus Himself. Hence it is essential to have a firm belief in the presence and the life on Earth of the Christ. Without this, a feeling of union with Him is impossible. Further, we must recognise that in the Gospel of St. John we have a document which originates with the great Guru Himself and can itself be a source of instruction. This Gospel is something we can experience in our own inner being and not something we merely believe. Whoever has absorbed it in the right way will no longer need to prove the reality of Christ Jesus, for he will have found Him.

In Christian training you must meditate on this Gospel, not simply read and re-read it. The Gospel begins: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God ...” The opening verses of this Gospel, rightly understood, are sentences for meditation and must be inwardly absorbed in the condition of Dhyanam, as described above. If in the morning, before other impressions have entered the soul, you live for five minutes solely in these sentences, with everything else excluded from your thoughts, and if you continue to do this over the years with absolute patience and perseverance, you will find that these words are not only something to be understood; you will realise that they have an occult power, and you will indeed experience through them a transformation of the soul. In a certain sense you become clairvoyant through these words, so that everything in St. John's Gospel can be seen with astral vision.

Then, under the direction of the teacher, and after meditating again on the five opening verses, the pupil allows the first chapter to pass through his mind for seven days. During the following week, after again meditating on the five opening verses, he goes on to the second chapter, and so in the same way up to the twelfth. He will soon learn how powerful an experience this is; how he is led into the events in Palestine when Christ Jesus lived there, as they are inscribed in the Akashic Record, and how he can actually experience it all. And then, when he reaches the thirteenth chapter, he has to experience the separate stages of Christian Initiation.

The first stage is the Washing of the Feet. We must understand the significance of this great scene. Christ Jesus bends down before those who are lower than himself. This humility towards those who are lower than we are, and at whose expense we have been able to rise, must be present everywhere in the world. If a plant were able to think, it would thank the minerals for giving it the ground on which it can lead a higher form of life, and the animal would have to bow down before the plant and say: “To thee I owe the possibility of my own existence.” In the same way man should recognise what he owes to all the rest of nature. So also, in our society, a man holding a higher position should bow before those who stand lower and say: “But for the diligence of those who labour on my behalf, I could not stand where I do.” And so on through all stages of human existence up to Christ Jesus Himself, who bows down in meekness before the Apostles and says: “You are my ground, and to you I fulfil the saying, ‘He who would be first must be last, and he who would be Lord must be the servant of all’.” The Washing of the Feet betokens this willingness to serve, this bowing down in perfect humility. This is a feeling that everyone committed to occult development must have.

If the pupil has permeated himself with this humility, he will have experienced the first stage of Christian Initiation. He will know by two signs, an outer and an inner, that he has gone thus far. The outer sign is that he feels as though his feet were being laved with water. The inner sign is an astral vision which will quite certainly come: he sees himself washing the feet of a number of persons. This picture rises up in his dreams as an astral vision, and every pupil has the same vision. When he has experienced it, he will have truly absorbed this whole chapter.

The second stage is that of the Scourging. When the pupil has reached this point, he must, while he reads of the Scourging and allows it to act upon him, develop another feeling. He must learn to stand firm under the heavy strokes of life, saying to himself: “I will stand up to whatever pains and sorrows come to me.” The outer sign of this is that the pupil feels a kind of prickling pain all over his body. The outer sign is that in a dream-vision he sees himself being scourged.

The third stage is that of the Crowning with Thorns, and for this he has to acquire yet another feeling: he learns to stand firm even when he is scorned and ridiculed because of all that he holds most sacred. The outer sign of this is that he experiences a severe headache; the inward symptom is that he has an astral vision of himself being crowned with thorns.

The fourth stage is that of the Crucifixion. A new and quite definite feeling must be developed. The pupil must cease to regard his body as the most important thing for him; his body must become as indifferent to him as a piece of wood. He then comes to look quite objectively on the body he carries with him through life; it has become for him the wood of the Cross. He need not despise it, any more than he does any other tool. The outer sign for having reached this stage is that during the pupil's meditation red marks (stigmata) appear at those places on his body which are called the sacred wounds. They do indeed appear on the hands and feet, and on the right side of the body at the level of the heart. The inward sign is that the pupil has a vision of himself hanging on the Cross.

The fifth stage is that of the Mystical Death. Now the pupil experiences the nothingness of earthly things, and indeed dies for a while to all earthly things.

Only the most scanty descriptions can be given of these later stages of Christian Initiation. The pupil experiences in an astral vision that darkness reigns everywhere and that the earthly world has fallen away. A black veil spreads over that which is to come, and while he is in this condition the pupil comes to know all that exists as evil and wickedness in the world. This is the Descent into Hell. Then he experiences the tearing away of the curtain and the world of Devachan appears before him. This is the rending of the veil of the Temple.

The sixth stage is that of the Burial. Just as at the fourth stage the pupil learnt to regard his own body objectively, so now he has to develop the feeling that everything else around him in the world is as much part of what truly belongs to him as his own body is. The body then extends far beyond its skin; the pupil is no longer a separate being; he is united with the whole planet. The Earth has become his body; he is buried in the Earth.

The seventh stage, that of the Resurrection, cannot be described in words. Hence occultism teaches that the seventh stage can be conceived only by a man whose soul has been entirely freed from the brain, and only to such a man could it be described. Hence we cannot do more than mention it here. The Christian teacher indicates the way to this experience.

When a man has lived through this seventh stage, Christianity has become an inner experience of the soul. He is now wholly united with Christ Jesus; Christ Jesus is in him.

• 42. “The form of instruction in oriental schooling.” From the old Indian classic, The Yoga-Sutras of Patanjali.
• 43. Light on the Path, written by Mabel Collins.

It really is exceedingly difficult in our Western civilization to speak intelligently and intelligibly about such a work as the Bhagavad Gita. This is so because at present there is a dominating tendency to interpret any spiritual work of this kind as a kind of doctrine, an abstract teaching, or a philosophy, that makes it hard for people to come to a sound judgment in such matters. They like to approach such spiritual creations from the ideal or conceptual point of view. Here we touch upon something that makes it most difficult in our time to gain a true judgment about the great historical impulses in mankind's evolution. How often, for instance, it is pointed out that this or that saying occurring in the Gospels as the teaching of Christ Jesus is to be found in some earlier work no less profoundly expressed. Then it is said, “You see, it is the same teaching after all.” Certainly, that is not incorrect because in countless instances it can be shown that the teachings of the Gospels occur in earlier spiritual works. Yet, though such a statement is not incorrect, it may be nonsense from the standpoint of a truly fundamental knowledge of human evolution. People's thinking will have to get accustomed to this and realize that a statement can be perfectly correct and yet nonsense. Not until this is no longer regarded as a contradiction will it be possible to judge certain matters in a really unbiased way.

Suppose, for instance, someone says that he sees in the Bhagavad Gita one of the greatest creations of the human spirit, a creation that has never been surpassed in later times. Suppose further, having said this, he adds, “Nevertheless, what entered the world with the revelation inherent in the Christ Impulse, is something altogether different, something to which the Bhagavad Gita could not attain even if its beauty and greatness were increased a hundred times.” These two statements do not contradict each other. According to the habits of modern abstract thinking, however, we may have a contradiction here. Yet, in no sense is it in truth a contradiction. Indeed one might go further, and ask, “When was that mightiest word spoken that may be regarded as giving the impulse to the human ego, so that it may take its place in the evolution of man?” That significant word was uttered at the moment Krishna spoke to Ar-juna; when he poured into Arjuna’s ears the most powerful, incisive, burning words to quicken the consciousness of self in man. In the whole range of the world’s life there is nothing to be found that kindled the self of man more mightily than the living force of Krishna’s words to Arjuna. Of course, we must not take those words in the way words are so often taken in Western countries where the noblest words are given merely an abstract, philosophic interpretation. In any such we would certainly miss the essence of the Bhagavad Gita. In this way Western scholars today have so outrageously misused and tortured the Bhagavad Gita. They have even gone so far as to dispute whether it is more representative of the Sankhya philosophy or of some other school of thought. In fact, a distinguished scholar, in his edition of this poem, has actually printed certain lines in small type because in his view they ought to be expunged altogether, having crept in by mistake. He thinks nothing is really a part of the Gita except what accords with the Sankhya, or at the most with the Yoga philosophy.

It may be said though that no trace is to be found in this great poem of philosophy as we speak of it today. At most one could say that in ancient India certain basic dispositions of soul developed into certain philosophic tendencies. These really have nothing to do with the Bhagavad Gita, at least not in the sense of being an interpretation or exposition of it. It is altogether unfair to the intellectual and spiritual life of the East to set it side by side with what the West knows as philosophy because there was no philosophy in the East in the same sense there is philosophy in the West. In this respect the spirit of our age, just beginning, is as yet imperfectly understood.

In the last lecture we spoke of things that men still have to learn. Above all we must firmly realize how the human soul, under certain conditions, can actually meet the Being whom we tried to describe from a certain aspect, calling him Krishna. We must realize how Arjuna meets that Spirit who prepared the age of self-consciousness. This knowledge is far more important than any dispute as to whether it is Sankhya or Vedic philosophy that is contained in the Bhagavad Gita. To understand it as a real description of world history—of history and of the color and temper of a particular age in which living, individual beings are placed before us—is the important point. We have tried to describe their natures, speaking of Arjuna’s thoughts and feelings as characteristic of that time, trying to throw light on the new age of self-consciousness, and showing how a creative Spiritual Being preparing for a new age appeared before Arjuna. Now, if we seek a living picture of Spiritual Beings in their relation to each other, we need an all-around point of view to know this Krishna Being more exactly. The following may therefore help us complete our picture of him.

To really penetrate into the region where we can perceive such a mighty being as Krishna one must have progressed far enough to be able to have real perceptions and real experiences in the spiritual world. That may seem obvious. Yet when we consider what people generally expect of the higher worlds the matter is by no means so self-evident. I have often indicated that misunderstandings without number arise from the fact that people wish to lift their lives into the super-sensible world carrying a mass of prejudices with them. They desire to be led along the path into the super-sensible toward something already familiar to them in the sense world. In that higher realm one perceives, for instance, forms, not indeed of gross matter, but forms that appear as forms of light. One finds that he hears sounds like the sounds of the physical world. He does not realize that by expecting such things, by entering the higher world with such preconceived ideas, he is wanting a spiritual world just like the sense world though in a refined form. In our world here man is accustomed to color and brightness, so he imagines he will only reach the higher realities if the Beings there appear to him in the same way. It ought not to be necessary to say all this since the super-sensible beings are far above all attributes of the senses and in their true form do not appear at all with sense qualities because the latter presuppose eyes and ears, that is, sense organs. In the higher worlds, however, we do not perceive by means of sense organs but by soul organs.

What can happen in this connection I can illustrate by a childish comparison. Suppose I am describing something to you, verbally. Then I feel impelled to represent it with a few strokes on the blackboard, thereby materializing what I have expressed in words. No one would dream of taking the diagram for the reality. It is the same when we express what we have experienced supersensibly by giving it form and color and stamping it in words borrowed from the sense world. Only that in doing so we do not use our ordinary intellect, but a higher faculty of feeling that thus translates the super-sensible into sense terms. In such a way our soul lives into invisible worlds, for instance into that of the Krishna Being. Then it feels the need of representing to itself that Being. What it represents, however, is not the Being himself but a kind of sketch, a super-sensible diagram. Such sketches, super-sensible illustrations so to say, are Imaginations. The misunderstanding that so often arises amounts to this, that we sensualize what the higher forces of the soul sketch out before us. By thus interpreting it sensually we lose its real essence. The essence is not contained in these pictures, but through them it must be dimly felt at first, until by slow degrees we actually begin to see it.

I have mentioned among other things the wonderful dramatic composition of the Bhagavad Gita. I tried to give an idea of the form of the first four discourses. This same dramatic impulse increases from one discourse to the next as we penetrate on and on into the realms of occult vision. A sound idea of the artistic composition of this poem may be suggested by looking to see if there is not a central point, a climax to this increase of force and feeling. There are eighteen discourses, therefore we might look for the climax in the ninth. In fact, in the ninth one, that is in the very middle, we read these striking words, “And now, having told thee everything, I will declare to thee the profoundest secret for the human soul.” Here indeed is a strange saying that seems to sound abstract yet has deep significance. Then there follows this most profound mystery. “Understand me well. I am in all beings, yet they are not in me.”

How often men ask today, “What is the judgment of true mystic wisdom about this or that?” They want absolute truths, but actually there are no such truths. There are only truths that hold good in certain contexts, that are true in definite circumstances and under definite conditions. Then they are true. This statement, “I am in all beings but they are not in me,” cannot be taken as an abstractly, absolutely true statement. Yet this was spoken out of the deepest wisdom of Krishna at the time when he stood before Arjuna, and its truth is real and immediate, referring to Him Who is the creator of man’s inmost being, of his consciousness of self.

Thus, through a wonderful approach we are carried on to the central point of the Gita, to the ninth discourse where these words are poured out, to Arjuna. Then, in the eleventh discourse, another element enters. What may we expect here, realizing the artistic form of the poem and the deep occult truths contained in it? When we take up the ninth and tenth discourses, the very middle of the poem, we notice a remarkable thing—a peculiar difficulty in imagining and bringing to life in our souls the ideas presented to us in this part of the song.

As you begin with the first discourse your soul is borne along by the continually increasing current of feeling and idea. First, immortality is the subject. Then you are uplifted and inspired by the concepts awakened through Yoga. All the time your feeling is being borne along by something in which it can feel at home, one may say. We go still further and the poem works up in a wonderful way to the concept of Him Who inspired the age of self-consciousness. Our enthusiasm is kindled as we approach this Being. All this time we are living in definite, familiar feelings. Then comes a still greater climax. We are told how the soul can become ever more free of the outer bodily life. We are led on to the idea, so familiar to the man of India, of how the soul can retire into itself, realizing inaction in the actions the body experiences. The soul can become a complete whole, independent of outer things as it gradually attains Yoga and becomes one with Brahma. In the succeeding discourses we see how our certainty of feeling—the feeling that can still gain nourishment from daily life—gradually vanishes. Then as we approach the ninth discourse our soul seems to rise into giddy heights of unknown experience. If now in these ninth and tenth discourses we try to make the ideas borrowed from ordinary life suffice, we fail, As we reach this part of the song we feel as if we were standing on a summit of mankind’s attainment, born directly out of the occult depths of life. If we are to understand it, we must bring to it something our soul in its development has first to attain by its own effort.

It is remarkable how fine and unerring the composition of the Bhagavad Gita is in this respect. We can get as far as the fifth, sixth, or seventh discourse by developing the concepts given us at the very beginning, in the first discourse. In the second our soul is awakened to realize the presence of the eternal in the ever-changing flow of appearance. Then follows all that passes into the depths of Yoga, from the third song onward. After that an altogether new mood begins to appear. Whereas the first discourses still have an intellectual quality, reminding us at times of the Western philosophic mode of thinking, something enters now that requires Yoga, the devotional mood, for its understanding. As we continue purifying more and more this mood of devotion, our soul rises higher in reverence. The Yoga of the first discourses no longer carries us. It ceases, and an altogether new mood of soul bears us up into the ninth and tenth discourses because the words here spoken are no more than a dry, empty sound echoing in our ear if we approach them intellectually. But they radiate warmth to us if we approach them devotionally. One who would understand this sublime poem may start with intellectual understanding and so follow the opening discourses, but as the song proceeds toward the ninth a deep devotional mood must be awakened in him. Then the words of the mighty Krishna will be like wonderful music echoing and re-echoing in his soul. Whoever reaches this ninth song may feel this devotional mood as if he must take off his shoes before treading on holy ground; there he feels he must walk with reverence. Then follows the eleventh discourse. What can come next, now that we have reached the climax of this devotional mood?

When man has risen to the summit where Krishna has led Arjuna—a height that cannot be attained except in occult vision or in reverent devotion—it can only be the holy and formless, the super-sensible, that appears before him. Then the super-sensible can be poured out into Imagination. Then the uplifted and strengthened soul-force that belongs not to the realm of the intellect but to imaginative perception, can cast into living pictures what in its essential being is without form or likeness. This is what happens at the beginning of the second half of the sublime song—that is to say, about the eleventh discourse. Here, after due preparation, the Krishna Being to whom Arjuna has been led step by step, is conjured up before his soul in Imaginations. This is where the majesty of description in this Eastern poem appears in its fullness, where Krishna finally appears in a picture, in an Imagination.

We may truly say that experiences such as this, which only the innermost power of the human soul can undergo, have almost nowhere else been described in such a wonderful way, so filled with meaning. For those who are able to realize it the Imagination of Krishna as Arjuna now describes it will always be of most profound significance. Up to the tenth discourse we are led on by Krishna as by an inspiring Being. Now the radiant bliss of Arjuna’s opened vision comes before us. Arjuna becomes the narrator, and describes his Imagination in words so wonderful that one fears to reproduce them.

“The Gods do I behold in all thy Frame, O God. Also the hosts of creatures; Brahma the Lord upon His lotus throne; the Rishis all; the Serpent of Heaven. With many arms and with many bodies, with many mouths and many eyes I see Thee, on every side endless in Thy Form. No end, no center, no beginning see I in Thee, O Lord of All! Thou, Whom I behold in every form, I see Thee with diadem, with club and sword, a mountain flaming fire, streaming forth on every side—thus do I behold Thee. Dazzled is my vision. As fire streaming from the radiance of the Sun, immeasurably great art Thou! Lost beyond all thought, unperishing, greatest of all Good, thus dost Thou appear to me in the Heaven’s expanse. Eternal Dharma’s changeless guardian, Thou! Spirit primeval and Eternal, Thou standest before my soul. Neither source, nor midst, nor end; in-. finite in power, infinite in realms of space. Great are Thine eyes like to the Moon; yea, like to the Sun itself. And what streams forth from Thy mouth is as the Fire of Sacrifice. I look upon Thee in Thy glowing Fire; Thy splendor, warming all worlds. All that I can dream of between floor of earth and fields of Heaven, Thy power fills it all. Alone with Thee I stand. And that heavenly universe wherein the three worlds live, that too doth in Thee dwell, when to my gaze is shown Thy wondrous, awesome Form. I see whole hosts of Gods approaching Thee, hymning Thy praise. Stricken with fear I stand before Thee, folding my hands in prayer. ‘Hail to Thee!’ cry all the companies of holy seers and Saints, chanting Thy praises with resounding songs. Filled with wonder stand multitudes beholding Thee. Thy Form stupendous with many mouths, arms, limbs, feet, many bodies, many jaws full of teeth—before it all the universe doth quake, and I with dread am filled. Radiant, Thou shakest Heaven. With many arms I see Thee, and mouth like to vast-flaming eyes. My soul trembles. Nothing firm I find, nor rest, O Mighty Krishna, Who art as Vishnu unto me. I see within Thine awful form, like unto fire itself. I see how Being works, the end of all the ages. Nought know I anywhere; no shelter I find. O, be Thou merciful to me, Thou Lord of all the Gods, refuge of all the worlds!”

Such is the Imagination that Arjuna beholds when his soul has been raised to that height where an Imagination of Krishna is possible. Then we hear what Krishna is echoing across to Arjuna once more as a mighty inspiration. In reality it is as if it were not merely sounding for the spiritual ear of Arjuna, but echoing down through all the ages that followed. At this point we begin dimly to perceive what it really means when a new impulse is given for a new epoch in the world’s history, and when the author of this impulse appears to the clairvoyant gaze of Arjuna. We feel with Arjuna. We remind ourselves that he is in the midst of the turmoil of battle where brother-blood is pitted against its like. We know that what Krishna has to give depends above all upon the old clairvoyant epoch ceasing, together with all that was holy in it, and a new epoch to begin. When we reflect on the impulse of this new epoch that was to begin with fratricide; when we rightly understand the impulse that forced its way in through all the swaying concepts and institutions of the preceding epoch; then we get a correct concept of what Krishna lets Arjuna hear.

“I am time primeval, bringing all worlds to naught, made manifest on earth to slay mankind! And even though thou wilt bring them unto death in battle, without thee hath death taken all the warriors who stand there in their ranks. Therefore arise; arise without fear. Renown shalt thou win, and shalt conquer the foe. Rejoice in thy mastery, and in the victory awaiting thee. It is not thou who wilt have slain them when they fall in battle. By Me already are they slain, e’er thou lay them low. The instrument art thou, nought else than he who fighteth with his arm. The Drona, the Jayandana, the Bhishma, the Karna and the other heroes of the strife I have slain. Already they are slain, now do thou slay, that My work burst forth externally apparent. When they fall dead in Maya, slain by Me, do thou slay them. And what I have done will through thee become perceptible. Tremble not! Thou canst not do what I have not already done. Fight! They whom I have slain will fall beneath thy sword!”

It was not in order to bring to mankind’s ears the voice that should speak of slaying that these words were uttered, but to make them hear the voice that tells that there is a center in man’s being that has to develop in the age to come; that into this center there were focused the highest impulses realizable by man at that time, and that there is nothing in human evolution with which the human ego is not connected. Here we find in the Bhagavad Gita something that lifts us up and sets us on the horizon of the whole of human evolution.

If we let the changing moods of this great poem work upon us we shall gain much more than those who try to read into it pedantic doctrines of Sankhya or Yoga philosophies. If we can only dimly feel the dazzling heights that can be reached through Yoga, we shall begin to lay hold on the meaning and spirit of such a mighty Imagination as that of Arjuna presented to us here. Even as an image it is so sublime and forceful that we are able to form some lofty conception of the creative spirit, which in Krishna is grafted onto the world. The highest impulse that can speak to the individual man speaks through Krishna to Arjuna. The highest to which the individual man can lift himself by raising to their full pitch all the powers that reside within his being—that is Krishna. The highest to which he can soar by training himself and working on himself with wisdom—that is Krishna.

When we think of the evolution of humanity all over the earth, and trace it through as we are able to do by means of what is given, for example, in our occult science; when in this sense we see the earth as the place where man has first been brought to the ego through many different stages following one another and developing from age to age; when we thus follow the course of evolution through the epochs of time; then we may say to ourselves that here then on earth these souls have been planted; the highest they can attain is to become free souls. Free—that is what men will become if they bring to full development all the forces latent within them as individual souls. In order to make this possible Krishna was active, indirectly and almost imperceptibly at first, then ever more definitely, and at last quite directly in the period we have been describing. In all of earthly evolution there is no Being who could give the individual human soul so much as Krishna.

I say expressly the individual soul because—and I say this deliberately—on earth there exists not only the individual human soul but also mankind. Consider this in connection with all I have tried to give about Krishna, because on earth there are all those concerns that do not belong to the individual alone. Imagine a person feeling the inner impulse to perfect himself as far as ever a human soul can. Such might be. Then, each person separately and by himself might go on developing indefinitely. But there is mankind. For this earthly planet there are matters that bring it into connection with the whole universe. With the Krishna Impulse coming into each individual soul, let us assume every soul would have developed in itself a higher impulse; not immediately, nor even up to the present time, but sometime in the future. So that from the age of self-consciousness onward the stream of mankind’s collective evolution would have split up. Individual souls would have progressed and unfolded to the highest point, but separately, dispersed, broken apart from each other. Their paths would have gone further and further apart as the Krishna Impulse worked in each one. Human existence would have been uplifted in the sense that souls individualized themselves and so lifted themselves out of the common current, developing their self-life to the utmost. In this way the ancient time would have shone into the future like many, many rays from a single star. Every one of these rays would have proclaimed the glory of Krishna far into future cosmic eras. This is the path on which mankind was traveling in the sixth or eighth centuries before the foundation of Christianity.

Then from the opposite side something else came in. The Krishna Impulse comes into man’s soul when from the depths of his own inner being he works, creates, and draws forth his powers more and more until he may rise into those realms where he may reach Krishna. But something came toward humanity from outside, which men could never have reached through the forces that lived within themselves; something bending down to each individual one. Thus the souls that were separating and isolating themselves encountered the same Being who came down out of the Cosmic Universe into the age of self-consciousness from outside. It came in such a way that it belonged to the whole of humanity, to all the earth. This other impulse came from the opposite side. It was the Christ.

Though put rather abstractly for the present, we see how a continually increasing individualization was prepared and brought about in mankind, and how then those souls who had the impulse to individualize themselves more and more were met by the Christ Impulse, leading them once more together into a common humanity. What I have tried to indicate has been a rather preliminary description of the two impulses from the Christ and Krishna. I have tried to show how closely the two impulses come together in the age of the mid-point of evolution, even though they come from diametrically opposite directions. We can make very great mistakes by confusing these two revelations. What I have developed today in a rather general way we will make more concrete in the succeeding lectures. But I would close today with a few words that may simply and clearly summarize what these two impulses are—truly the most important in human evolution.

If we look back to all that happened between the tenth century before Christ and the tenth century afterward, we may say that into the universe the Krishna Impulse flowed for every individual human soul, and into the earth the Christ Impulse came for all mankind.

Observe that for those who can think specifically, “all mankind” by no means signifies the same as the mere sum total of all individual human souls.

In our efforts to understand existence it is our practice to trace the course of some aspect of its development up to the present time, and we have had many opportunities of becoming familiar with the idea that everything we perceive around us is in course of evolution. We must get used to applying the idea of evolution more widely, we must apply it in spheres not usually associated with it today—for instance, we must apply it to the life of the soul. We probably do recognise it as it manifests itself outwardly in the life of the individual between birth and death. But so far as humanity as a whole is concerned, people immediately think of evolution as an ascent from the condition of the lower animals and draw the conclusion—even from the standpoint of modern knowledge a somewhat fanciful one—that the human has evolved out of the animal—as if the higher could, without more ado, evolve out of the lower! It is of course not my task in this cycle to show in detail, as I have often done, that our present consciousness has undergone a far-reaching evolution, that the kind of consciousness, the kind of soul-life we have today, was preceded by another form of consciousness. We have often described this earlier form as a kind of lower clairvoyant consciousness. Our modern consciousness furnishes us with mental images of outer objects by means of external perception. But that other earlier consciousness can best be studied if we look back to the Moon evolution.

The most outstanding difference between the evolution of the Moon and that of our present earth is that the old form of clairvoyance, a kind of picture-consciousness, has been superseded by the present-day object-consciousness. I have for many years been calling attention to this, and years ago I was able to give information out of the Akasha Chronicle on the subject of evolution. It appeared in the early essays of the magazine Lucifer-Gnosis.¹ There I pointed out that the old, dreamlike picture-consciousness which characterised our own nature in former times has developed into our earth-consciousness, into what today gives us consciousness of external things, consciousness of things outside us in space as contrasted with what we ourselves are in our inner being. This ability to distinguish between external objects and our own inner life is what characterises our present state of consciousness. When we have an object in front of us—let us say a rose—we say: “That rose is there in space! It is separated from us; we stand at a different spot from it.” We perceive the rose, and make a mental image of it. The mental image is within us, the rose is outside. The distinction between outer and inner is the mark of our present-day consciousness. Consciousness on the Moon was not like that. Beings with the Moon-consciousness made no such distinction. Suppose that when you looked at the rose you were not conscious that the rose was outside, and that you were making a mental image of it, but that you felt “The real being of this rose which hovers there in space is not confined to the space which it occupies, but its being extends outward into space, and is actually in me.” Indeed you could go further. Suppose that when you looked at the sun you did not feel that the sun was above you and that you were below, but felt that while you were forming a mental image of the sun it was within you; suppose your consciousness was taking hold of it in amore or less spiritual way! Then there would be no distinction between outer and inner. If you can make that clear to yourselves, you will have grasped the outstanding characteristic of consciousness as it was throughout the Moon evolution.

Another quality of this consciousness was that it was pictorial; things did not appear directly as objects, but as images, just as today dreams often unfold as imagery. For example, a dream can take its course in such a way that a fire external to ourselves appears as a being radiating light. It was somewhat in this way that consciousness on the Moon perceived things. It was a pictorial consciousness, at the same time permeated with the quality of inwardness.

There was yet another essential in which the consciousness of that time differed from that of our present time. It did not work in such a way that outer objects would have been there at all as they are for our present earth-consciousness. For the consciousness of the Moon period what we today call our environment, what we perceive in the vegetable, the mineral, the human kingdoms as sense-objects, was not there. What was there—on a lower, dreamlike level—was something similar to what there is in the soul today when the power of seership awakens, when conscious clairvoyance awakens. The first awakening of clairvoyant consciousness is of such a nature that to begin with it does not extend to external Beings. This is a source of countless deceptions to those who are training themselves esoterically to develop clairvoyance.

Such a training progresses by stages. There is a first stage which unfolds in various ways. In it the student sees many things around him. But he would make a great mistake if he were straightway to think that what he sees around him, so to say in spiritual space, is also spiritual reality. Johannes Thomasius in my Mystery Play goes through this stage of astral clairvoyance. Let me remind you of the scenes which rise before his soul as he sits in meditation down-stage, and feels in his soul the dawn of the spiritual world. Pictures arise in his soul, and the first one is that the Spirit of the Elements brings before him persons whom he has previously known in life. In the Play, Johannes Thomasius has come to know Professor Capesius and Doctor Strader. He knew them on the physical plane, and there formed certain impressions of them. Then, when after his great sorrow his clairvoyant capacity breaks through, he sees them again. He sees them in remarkable forms. He sees Capesius as a young man, as he was at the age of twenty-five or twenty-six, and not as he is at the moment when he, Johannes Thomasius, sits meditating; and he sees Doctor Strader as he will be in his present incarnation when he is old. This and many other pictures pass through the soul ofJohannes Thomasius. These pictures which are really living in the soul through meditation can only be represented in the play as happening on the stage. It would be quite wrong for Johannes Thomasius to regard this as deception. The only right attitude towards all this would be to say to himself that he cannot yet know how far this is reality or deception. He does not know whether what the pictures show is an external spiritual reality or not; that is, he does not know whether it is something inscribed in the Akashic record or whether he has expanded his own self to a world. It could be either, and he must recognise that fact. It is only from the moment when the Devachan consciousness begins, when in Devachan he perceives the spiritual reality of a being whom he knows on the physical plane—Maria—that he is able to look back again and to discriminate between reality and mere picture-consciousness. Thus you can see that man has to pass through a stage in the course of his esoteric development in which he is surrounded by pictures, but is unable to distinguish between what is a manifestation of spiritual reality and what is merely picture. The scenes of the Mystery Play of course were intended to express spiritual realities. The appearance of Professor Capesius is a real picture of the young Capesius, as it is inscribed in the Akashic record, and the appearance of Doctor Strader is the real Strader as he will be in his old age. They are intended to be real in the play, only Johannes Thomasius does not know it.

The stage of consciousness I have just described was experienced on the Moon, only at a lower, more dreamlike level, so that no faculty of discrimination was possible. The ability to discriminate only began later. You must try to get a thorough grasp of what I am telling you. Let us bear in mind that the clairvoyant lives in a kind of picture-consciousness. But during the Moon period the pictures which arose were in the main quite different from the objects of our earthly consciousness; and the same thing applies today in the early stages of clairvoyance. To begin with, the clairvoyant does not see spiritual things at all; he sees pictures, and the question is what do these pictures signify? In the first stages of clairvoyance they do not express real spiritual Beings, but a kind of organic consciousness. The experience is a pictorial representation, a projection into space, of what is actually taking place in himself. To take an actual example, when the clairvoyant begins to develop these forces in himself, he can have the experience of seeing two luminous globes far outside in space. He sees pictures of two globes in luminous colour. If he were then to think to himself “there outside me are two Beings,” the probability is that he would be quite wrong; at any rate that would be the case to begin with. What is happening is that his clairvoyance is projecting outwards into space forces which are at work in himself, and he sees them as two globes. And these two globes could represent what is at work in his astral body to produce within him the power of sight in his two eyes. This power of sight can be projected outwards in the form of two globes. Thus what is actually to be seen is an inner faculty showing itself as an external phenomenon in astral space. It would be a very great mistake for such an experience to be taken to herald the external presence of spiritual Beings.

It would be a still greater error if in these early stages by some means or other it were to happen that voices were heard, and these voices taken as inspirations from outside. That is the greatest error into which one can fall. Such an experience can hardly be more than an echo of an inner process; and while what appears in picture form, in colour, usually represents fairly pure inner processes, voices as a rule manifest lower and rather worthless elements of soul-life. It is best for anyone who begins to hear voices to cultivate the greatest distrust of them. The early stages of these imaginal representations should always be received with the greatest caution. It is a kind of organic consciousness, a projection outwards into space of one's own inner being. Such an organic consciousness was quite normal during the Moon evolution. The human being at that stage scarcely perceived anything except what was happening to himself.

I have often called attention to an important saying of Goethe's: “The eye has been formed by the light for the light.” This saying should be taken quite seriously. All man's organs have been formed by his environment, out of his environment. It is a superficial philosophy which stresses only one side of this truth, that without the eye man could not perceive light. For the other important aspect of the truth is that without light the eye could never have developed; and in the same way without sound there would have been no ear. Looked at from a deeper standpoint Kantianism is very superficial, because it only gives half the truth. The light which weaves and floods throughout the cosmos—that is the cause of the organs of vision. During the Moon period, the main task of the Beings who took part in the development of our universe was the construction of our organs. First these organs have to be built up; then they are able to perceive. Our present objective consciousness is due to the fact that organs have first been formed for it. The sense organs, as purely physical organs, had already been formed on Saturn, with the eye somewhat like the photographer's camera obscura. Purely physical apparatuses like that can perceive nothing. They are constructed according to purely physical laws. In the Moon period the organs acquired an inner life. Thus on Saturn the eye was so formed that it was merely a physical apparatus; at the Moon stage, through the sunlight which fell upon it from without, it was transformed into an organ of perception, an organ of consciousness. The essence of this activity during the Moon evolution is that the organs were, so to say, drawn forth from the Beings. During the earth period light works essentially on the plants, maintains plant development. We see the outward result of this activity of light in our flora. During the Moon evolution light did not act in this way, it drew forth our organs; and what was perceived by man at that time was this work upon his own organs. He perceived it in the form of pictures which seemed, it is true, to fill cosmic space. The pictures seemed to be spread out in space. In reality they merely represented the work of elementary existence upon the human organs. During the Moon period what man perceived was his own inner becoming, he perceived this work upon himself, saw the way he was fashioning himself, the way he was evolving his perceiving eye out of his own being. Thus the outer world was an inner world, because the entire outer world was working upon his inner being. And he made no distinction between outer and inner. He did not perceive the sun as external to himself. He did not separate the sun from himself, but within himself he felt his eyes coming into existence. And this active coming into existence of his eyes expanded for him into a pictorial perception which filled space. That was how he perceived the sun, but it was an inner process. The characteristic thing about the Moon-consciousness was that one was surrounded by a world of pictures, but these pictures represented an inner development, an inner formation of soul. Thus the Moon-man was enveloped in the astral and felt his own development as an external world. Today it would be an illness to perceive this inner development as an outer world, not to distinguish these pictures from the world outside, to perceive the outside world merely as a reflection of one's own growth. During the Moon evolution it was normal. For instance, man perceived in his own being the work of those Beings who later became the Elohim. He perceived the activity of the Elohim somewhat as today you might perceive your blood flowing into you! It was inside him, but it was reflected in pictures from without.

But on the Moon such a consciousness was the only one possible. For what happens upon our earth has to take place in harmony with the whole cosmos. A consciousness such as man has upon the earth, with this distinction between outer and inner, with this perception that real objects are there outside us, and that our inwardness exists alongside them, called for the whole evolutionary transition from the Moon to the earth, called for an entirely different kind of cleavage in our cosmic system. During the Moon evolution, there was no separation between Moon and earth, as there is today. We have to think of the Moon as the present earth would be if the moon were still united with it. So all the other planets, including the sun, were quite differently formed; and under the conditions which then obtained only a picture-consciousness was possible. It was only after our whole cosmos had assumed the form it now has, encompassing the earth, that our present objective consciousness could develop.

Such a consciousness as man has on earth today was withheld from him until the time of earth evolution. Not only was man without it, but none of the other Beings whom we speak of as belonging to this or that hierarchy had it. It would be superficial to think, because the angels underwent their human stage on the Moon, that they must therefore have had on the Moon such a consciousness as man has today on the earth. It was not so, and this is what distinguishes them from men—that they experienced their humanity in another consciousness. An exact repetition of the past never takes place. Each evolutionary impulse happens once only, and happens for its own sake and not for the sake of repeating something. Thus to produce what we know today as human, earthly consciousness all the processes which have actually brought this earth about were needed—for that purpose man had to be there as man. It was impossible for such a form of consciousness to develop at an earlier stage of evolution. To us an object is something outside us; earlier, all the Beings of whom we can speak had a consciousness which made no distinction between outer and inner, so that it would have been nonsense for any of them to say: “Something is standing before me.” Even the Elohim could not say that; they had no such experience. They could only say: “We live and weave in the cosmos; we create, and in creating are aware of this our creation; objects do not stand before us, do not appear to be before us.” To say “objects appear before us” conveys a situation in which we are confronted by something real formed in an external space from which we ourselves are separated. This did not come about even for the Elohim until the time of earth evolution. During the Moon evolution, when these Elohim felt themselves weaving and working in the light which streamed from the Sun upon the Moon, they might have said to themselves: “We feel ourselves to be within this light, we feel how with this light we sink into the beings who live as men on the Moon; we speed through space with this light.” But they could never have said: “We see this light outside us.” There was no such thing on the Moon. That was a completely new earth experience.

When at a certain stage in the Genesis account the momentous words occur And God said, Let there be light, it meant that something new had happened, that the Elohim did not merely feel themselves to be flowing with the light, but that light streamed back to them from objects, that objects appeared to them from without. This is expressed by the writer of the Genesis account when to the words And God said, Let there be light he adds: And God saw the light. In this ancient document there is nothing superfluous, nothing meaningless. If only men could learn, among much else that this document could teach them, to ascribe to it nothing that is not pregnant with meaning, to take nothing in it as an empty phrase! The writer of the Genesis account wrote nothing unnecessary, nothing by way of commonplace embellishment to enhance the beauty of the creation of light; he does not make the Elohim say anything like this: “We see the light and are very pleased with ourselves that we have made it so well.” What the brief sentence emphasises, what it signifies, is simply that something new has come about.

Moreover it does not say merely And God saw the light, but that He saw that it was beautiful—or good.² Note that in the Hebrew tongue the distinction between “beautiful” and “good” was not made as it is today. The Hebrew language has the same word for good and for beautiful. What is the significance of this? In ancient Sanskrit, even in German, there is still an echo of what it meant. The word “beautiful” covers all words in all languages which mean that an inner spiritual element reveals itself in an external form. To be beautiful means that something inward is externally manifest. Today when we use the word “beauty” we are thinking most truly when we hold that an inner spiritual reality in the beautiful object is represented on its surface in physical form. We say that something is beautiful if the spiritual, so to say, shines through what is externally sense-perceptible. When does a marble sculpture become a thing of beauty? When its form arouses the illusion that spirit indwells it. Beauty is the manifestation of the spiritual through the external. Thus when in Genesis we come to the words God saw the light, we can say that they convey the specific quality of earth evolution; also that what could formerly only be experienced subjectively now manifests itself from without; that the spirit presents itself in its external manifestation. Thus we can paraphrase the biblical words by saying “and the Elohim experienced the consciousness that something in which they themselves formerly existed confronted them as an external phenomenon; and they realised that the spirit was behind this appearance and came to expression in the external.” This is the significance of the word “beautiful” or “good.” Wordy explanations will not help us to understand the Genesis account, but only diligent search for the secrets which are really hidden behind the words. Then research will yield rich fruits; whereas all too many interpretations are nothing but tiresome pedantry.

Let us go a step further. We have seen that the characteristic features of the Moon evolution were only able to come about through the separation of the Sun from the Moon. Then we have seen that during the earth evolution it again became necessary for the sun to separate off from the earth; we have seen that a duality is necessary for a life of full consciousness. The earth element had to withdraw. But in such a withdrawal something else is also involved; the elementary conditions of the moon nature and of the sun nature change, become different. If you make a study of our present sun, even from a purely physical aspect you are obliged to say to yourselves: “The conditions which we have on earth and which we call solid and liquid are not to be found in the physical sun.” The most you can say is that the sun still condenses to the gaseous state. This is recognised by modern physics. Such a separation of elementary conditions comes about through the severing of what was previously a unity.

We have seen that the earth develops in such a way that a gradual densification downward takes place from warmth to solid, to earth, and that what is above as elementary existence light-ether, sound-ether, life-ether—seems to press inwards from without. But this description does not fit the part which goes out as the sun. It would be better therefore to say that there are seven states of elementary existence. The first, the most rarefied state, which constitutes and brings about life; then what we call number, or sound-ether; then light-ether; then warmth-ether; then we have air, or the gaseous element, the watery element and fmally the earthy or solid. It is in the earth that we have to look mainly for the elements up as far as warmth. Warmth permeates the earth, whereas the earth only shares in light in so far as the Beings in its environment—or if you like the bodies in its environment—take part in the life of the earth. Light streams upon the earth from the sun. If we wish to locate the three higher elementary states—light-ether, the ether of spiritual sound, and life-ether—we must place them in the sphere of the sun. In the earth we have to look for the solid, fluid and gaseous elements; warmth is shared by both earth and sun.

The Sun separated off for the first time during the Moon evolution. It was then that the light was for the first time active from without, but not then as light. I have just pointed out that the sentence in Genesis which reads And God saw the light ... could not have been spoken in respect of the Moon evolution. There one would have had to say that the Elohim speeded through space with the light, were in the light, but saw it not. Just as today one swims in water and moves forward in it without actually seeing it, so one did not see the light, but light was a bearer of the work in cosmic space. It was with the coming of earth evolution that light began to appear, to be reflected by objects.

It was natural that this, which held good for light on the Moon, should itself reach a higher stage of development during earth evolution. It is therefore to be expected that what applied to light on the Moon should during earth evolution apply to the sound-ether. This would involve that what we call spiritual sound was not perceived by the Elohim as reverberating back to them in the manner of the reflected light. Thus, if Genesis wished to convey that evolution was advancing from the activity of the light-ether to that of sound-ether, it would have to say something like this: “And the Elohim saw the light in the developing earth, and saw that it was beautiful.” But it could not go on in the same way to say: “And the Elohim during this phase perceived the sound-ether”; it would have to say “they lived and wove in it.” Nor could it be said of the second “day” of creation that the Elohim perceived the stir which separated the elements above from those below; it could not be said of this work of the Elohim that they perceived. The words “perceive” and “beautiful” would have had to be omitted. Then the description would correspond with what can be observed through Spiritual Science.

Thus the seer who wrote the Genesis account had, when describing the second “day,” to leave out the words: And God saw ...

Now look at Genesis. On the first “day” it reads: And God saw the light, that it was good. On the second day of creation, after the end of the first day, it says: And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters ... and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. The sentence And God saw ..., which we find on the first day, is left out on the second day. Genesis gives the facts as we should expect them to be given from what we have been able to observe by spiritual scientific method.

Here again is a knotty point of which the commentators of the nineteenth century have not known what to make. There have been commentators who said: “What does it matter if the second time the words are omitted? The writer just forgot them.” Men should learn that Genesis not only records nothing irrelevant, but also omits nothing relevant. The writer has forgotten nothing There is a profound reason why on the second day of creation these words are not to be found. Here we have another example—I could quote many—of what fills us with immense reverence for such ancient records.

We could learn much from these ancient writers, who really needed to take no oath, but followed of their own accord the rule of telling the whole truth, and nothing but the truth which they knew. They felt through and through that every word that stands there must be sacred to us, and equally that nothing essential must be omitted.

We have now gained an insight into the composition of what are called the first and second “days” of creation. Anyone who discovers through spiritual investigation what lies behind things might well say to himself, as he turns to his Bible, “It would be marvellous, it would be astounding, if these intimate details which can be discovered by scrupulous spiritual investigation should be corroborated by the words of the ancient seer who took part in the making of Genesis.” And when he finds that the astounding thing is true, a wonderful feeling comes over him—a feeling such as should indeed penetrate human souls if they are once more to appreciate the holiness of this ancient document.

• 1. Many of these articles were subsequently published in English in book form as Atlantis and Lemuria (Anthroposophical Publishing Co., 1923).
• 2. The English Authorised Version uses the word “good.”

In our efforts to understand existence it is our practice to trace the course of some aspect of its development up to the present time, and we have had many opportunities of becoming familiar with the idea that everything we perceive around us is in course of evolution. We must get used to applying the idea of evolution more widely, we must apply it in spheres not usually associated with it today—for instance, we must apply it to the life of the soul. We probably do recognise it as it manifests itself outwardly in the life of the individual between birth and death. But so far as humanity as a whole is concerned, people immediately think of evolution as an ascent from the condition of the lower animals and draw the conclusion—even from the standpoint of modern knowledge a somewhat fanciful one—that the human has evolved out of the animal—as if the higher could, without more ado, evolve out of the lower! It is of course not my task in this cycle to show in detail, as I have often done, that our present consciousness has undergone a far-reaching evolution, that the kind of consciousness, the kind of soul-life we have today, was preceded by another form of consciousness. We have often described this earlier form as a kind of lower clairvoyant consciousness. Our modern consciousness furnishes us with mental images of outer objects by means of external perception. But that other earlier consciousness can best be studied if we look back to the Moon evolution.

The most outstanding difference between the evolution of the Moon and that of our present earth is that the old form of clairvoyance, a kind of picture-consciousness, has been superseded by the present-day object-consciousness. I have for many years been calling attention to this, and years ago I was able to give information out of the Akasha Chronicle on the subject of evolution. It appeared in the early essays of the magazine Lucifer-Gnosis.¹ There I pointed out that the old, dreamlike picture-consciousness which characterised our own nature in former times has developed into our earth-consciousness, into what today gives us consciousness of external things, consciousness of things outside us in space as contrasted with what we ourselves are in our inner being. This ability to distinguish between external objects and our own inner life is what characterises our present state of consciousness. When we have an object in front of us—let us say a rose—we say: “That rose is there in space! It is separated from us; we stand at a different spot from it.” We perceive the rose, and make a mental image of it. The mental image is within us, the rose is outside. The distinction between outer and inner is the mark of our present-day consciousness. Consciousness on the Moon was not like that. Beings with the Moon-consciousness made no such distinction. Suppose that when you looked at the rose you were not conscious that the rose was outside, and that you were making a mental image of it, but that you felt “The real being of this rose which hovers there in space is not confined to the space which it occupies, but its being extends outward into space, and is actually in me.” Indeed you could go further. Suppose that when you looked at the sun you did not feel that the sun was above you and that you were below, but felt that while you were forming a mental image of the sun it was within you; suppose your consciousness was taking hold of it in amore or less spiritual way! Then there would be no distinction between outer and inner. If you can make that clear to yourselves, you will have grasped the outstanding characteristic of consciousness as it was throughout the Moon evolution.

Another quality of this consciousness was that it was pictorial; things did not appear directly as objects, but as images, just as today dreams often unfold as imagery. For example, a dream can take its course in such a way that a fire external to ourselves appears as a being radiating light. It was somewhat in this way that consciousness on the Moon perceived things. It was a pictorial consciousness, at the same time permeated with the quality of inwardness.

There was yet another essential in which the consciousness of that time differed from that of our present time. It did not work in such a way that outer objects would have been there at all as they are for our present earth-consciousness. For the consciousness of the Moon period what we today call our environment, what we perceive in the vegetable, the mineral, the human kingdoms as sense-objects, was not there. What was there—on a lower, dreamlike level—was something similar to what there is in the soul today when the power of seership awakens, when conscious clairvoyance awakens. The first awakening of clairvoyant consciousness is of such a nature that to begin with it does not extend to external Beings. This is a source of countless deceptions to those who are training themselves esoterically to develop clairvoyance.

Such a training progresses by stages. There is a first stage which unfolds in various ways. In it the student sees many things around him. But he would make a great mistake if he were straightway to think that what he sees around him, so to say in spiritual space, is also spiritual reality. Johannes Thomasius in my Mystery Play goes through this stage of astral clairvoyance. Let me remind you of the scenes which rise before his soul as he sits in meditation down-stage, and feels in his soul the dawn of the spiritual world. Pictures arise in his soul, and the first one is that the Spirit of the Elements brings before him persons whom he has previously known in life. In the Play, Johannes Thomasius has come to know Professor Capesius and Doctor Strader. He knew them on the physical plane, and there formed certain impressions of them. Then, when after his great sorrow his clairvoyant capacity breaks through, he sees them again. He sees them in remarkable forms. He sees Capesius as a young man, as he was at the age of twenty-five or twenty-six, and not as he is at the moment when he, Johannes Thomasius, sits meditating; and he sees Doctor Strader as he will be in his present incarnation when he is old. This and many other pictures pass through the soul ofJohannes Thomasius. These pictures which are really living in the soul through meditation can only be represented in the play as happening on the stage. It would be quite wrong for Johannes Thomasius to regard this as deception. The only right attitude towards all this would be to say to himself that he cannot yet know how far this is reality or deception. He does not know whether what the pictures show is an external spiritual reality or not; that is, he does not know whether it is something inscribed in the Akashic record or whether he has expanded his own self to a world. It could be either, and he must recognise that fact. It is only from the moment when the Devachan consciousness begins, when in Devachan he perceives the spiritual reality of a being whom he knows on the physical plane—Maria—that he is able to look back again and to discriminate between reality and mere picture-consciousness. Thus you can see that man has to pass through a stage in the course of his esoteric development in which he is surrounded by pictures, but is unable to distinguish between what is a manifestation of spiritual reality and what is merely picture. The scenes of the Mystery Play of course were intended to express spiritual realities. The appearance of Professor Capesius is a real picture of the young Capesius, as it is inscribed in the Akashic record, and the appearance of Doctor Strader is the real Strader as he will be in his old age. They are intended to be real in the play, only Johannes Thomasius does not know it.

The stage of consciousness I have just described was experienced on the Moon, only at a lower, more dreamlike level, so that no faculty of discrimination was possible. The ability to discriminate only began later. You must try to get a thorough grasp of what I am telling you. Let us bear in mind that the clairvoyant lives in a kind of picture-consciousness. But during the Moon period the pictures which arose were in the main quite different from the objects of our earthly consciousness; and the same thing applies today in the early stages of clairvoyance. To begin with, the clairvoyant does not see spiritual things at all; he sees pictures, and the question is what do these pictures signify? In the first stages of clairvoyance they do not express real spiritual Beings, but a kind of organic consciousness. The experience is a pictorial representation, a projection into space, of what is actually taking place in himself. To take an actual example, when the clairvoyant begins to develop these forces in himself, he can have the experience of seeing two luminous globes far outside in space. He sees pictures of two globes in luminous colour. If he were then to think to himself “there outside me are two Beings,” the probability is that he would be quite wrong; at any rate that would be the case to begin with. What is happening is that his clairvoyance is projecting outwards into space forces which are at work in himself, and he sees them as two globes. And these two globes could represent what is at work in his astral body to produce within him the power of sight in his two eyes. This power of sight can be projected outwards in the form of two globes. Thus what is actually to be seen is an inner faculty showing itself as an external phenomenon in astral space. It would be a very great mistake for such an experience to be taken to herald the external presence of spiritual Beings.

It would be a still greater error if in these early stages by some means or other it were to happen that voices were heard, and these voices taken as inspirations from outside. That is the greatest error into which one can fall. Such an experience can hardly be more than an echo of an inner process; and while what appears in picture form, in colour, usually represents fairly pure inner processes, voices as a rule manifest lower and rather worthless elements of soul-life. It is best for anyone who begins to hear voices to cultivate the greatest distrust of them. The early stages of these imaginal representations should always be received with the greatest caution. It is a kind of organic consciousness, a projection outwards into space of one's own inner being. Such an organic consciousness was quite normal during the Moon evolution. The human being at that stage scarcely perceived anything except what was happening to himself.

I have often called attention to an important saying of Goethe's: “The eye has been formed by the light for the light.” This saying should be taken quite seriously. All man's organs have been formed by his environment, out of his environment. It is a superficial philosophy which stresses only one side of this truth, that without the eye man could not perceive light. For the other important aspect of the truth is that without light the eye could never have developed; and in the same way without sound there would have been no ear. Looked at from a deeper standpoint Kantianism is very superficial, because it only gives half the truth. The light which weaves and floods throughout the cosmos—that is the cause of the organs of vision. During the Moon period, the main task of the Beings who took part in the development of our universe was the construction of our organs. First these organs have to be built up; then they are able to perceive. Our present objective consciousness is due to the fact that organs have first been formed for it. The sense organs, as purely physical organs, had already been formed on Saturn, with the eye somewhat like the photographer's camera obscura. Purely physical apparatuses like that can perceive nothing. They are constructed according to purely physical laws. In the Moon period the organs acquired an inner life. Thus on Saturn the eye was so formed that it was merely a physical apparatus; at the Moon stage, through the sunlight which fell upon it from without, it was transformed into an organ of perception, an organ of consciousness. The essence of this activity during the Moon evolution is that the organs were, so to say, drawn forth from the Beings. During the earth period light works essentially on the plants, maintains plant development. We see the outward result of this activity of light in our flora. During the Moon evolution light did not act in this way, it drew forth our organs; and what was perceived by man at that time was this work upon his own organs. He perceived it in the form of pictures which seemed, it is true, to fill cosmic space. The pictures seemed to be spread out in space. In reality they merely represented the work of elementary existence upon the human organs. During the Moon period what man perceived was his own inner becoming, he perceived this work upon himself, saw the way he was fashioning himself, the way he was evolving his perceiving eye out of his own being. Thus the outer world was an inner world, because the entire outer world was working upon his inner being. And he made no distinction between outer and inner. He did not perceive the sun as external to himself. He did not separate the sun from himself, but within himself he felt his eyes coming into existence. And this active coming into existence of his eyes expanded for him into a pictorial perception which filled space. That was how he perceived the sun, but it was an inner process. The characteristic thing about the Moon-consciousness was that one was surrounded by a world of pictures, but these pictures represented an inner development, an inner formation of soul. Thus the Moon-man was enveloped in the astral and felt his own development as an external world. Today it would be an illness to perceive this inner development as an outer world, not to distinguish these pictures from the world outside, to perceive the outside world merely as a reflection of one's own growth. During the Moon evolution it was normal. For instance, man perceived in his own being the work of those Beings who later became the Elohim. He perceived the activity of the Elohim somewhat as today you might perceive your blood flowing into you! It was inside him, but it was reflected in pictures from without.

But on the Moon such a consciousness was the only one possible. For what happens upon our earth has to take place in harmony with the whole cosmos. A consciousness such as man has upon the earth, with this distinction between outer and inner, with this perception that real objects are there outside us, and that our inwardness exists alongside them, called for the whole evolutionary transition from the Moon to the earth, called for an entirely different kind of cleavage in our cosmic system. During the Moon evolution, there was no separation between Moon and earth, as there is today. We have to think of the Moon as the present earth would be if the moon were still united with it. So all the other planets, including the sun, were quite differently formed; and under the conditions which then obtained only a picture-consciousness was possible. It was only after our whole cosmos had assumed the form it now has, encompassing the earth, that our present objective consciousness could develop.

Such a consciousness as man has on earth today was withheld from him until the time of earth evolution. Not only was man without it, but none of the other Beings whom we speak of as belonging to this or that hierarchy had it. It would be superficial to think, because the angels underwent their human stage on the Moon, that they must therefore have had on the Moon such a consciousness as man has today on the earth. It was not so, and this is what distinguishes them from men—that they experienced their humanity in another consciousness. An exact repetition of the past never takes place. Each evolutionary impulse happens once only, and happens for its own sake and not for the sake of repeating something. Thus to produce what we know today as human, earthly consciousness all the processes which have actually brought this earth about were needed—for that purpose man had to be there as man. It was impossible for such a form of consciousness to develop at an earlier stage of evolution. To us an object is something outside us; earlier, all the Beings of whom we can speak had a consciousness which made no distinction between outer and inner, so that it would have been nonsense for any of them to say: “Something is standing before me.” Even the Elohim could not say that; they had no such experience. They could only say: “We live and weave in the cosmos; we create, and in creating are aware of this our creation; objects do not stand before us, do not appear to be before us.” To say “objects appear before us” conveys a situation in which we are confronted by something real formed in an external space from which we ourselves are separated. This did not come about even for the Elohim until the time of earth evolution. During the Moon evolution, when these Elohim felt themselves weaving and working in the light which streamed from the Sun upon the Moon, they might have said to themselves: “We feel ourselves to be within this light, we feel how with this light we sink into the beings who live as men on the Moon; we speed through space with this light.” But they could never have said: “We see this light outside us.” There was no such thing on the Moon. That was a completely new earth experience.

When at a certain stage in the Genesis account the momentous words occur And God said, Let there be light, it meant that something new had happened, that the Elohim did not merely feel themselves to be flowing with the light, but that light streamed back to them from objects, that objects appeared to them from without. This is expressed by the writer of the Genesis account when to the words And God said, Let there be light he adds: And God saw the light. In this ancient document there is nothing superfluous, nothing meaningless. If only men could learn, among much else that this document could teach them, to ascribe to it nothing that is not pregnant with meaning, to take nothing in it as an empty phrase! The writer of the Genesis account wrote nothing unnecessary, nothing by way of commonplace embellishment to enhance the beauty of the creation of light; he does not make the Elohim say anything like this: “We see the light and are very pleased with ourselves that we have made it so well.” What the brief sentence emphasises, what it signifies, is simply that something new has come about.

Moreover it does not say merely And God saw the light, but that He saw that it was beautiful—or good. [ The English Authorised Version uses the word “good.”] Note that in the Hebrew tongue the distinction between “beautiful” and “good” was not made as it is today. The Hebrew language has the same word for good and for beautiful. What is the significance of this? In ancient Sanskrit, even in German, there is still an echo of what it meant. The word “beautiful” covers all words in all languages which mean that an inner spiritual element reveals itself in an external form. To be beautiful means that something inward is externally manifest. Today when we use the word “beauty” we are thinking most truly when we hold that an inner spiritual reality in the beautiful object is represented on its surface in physical form. We say that something is beautiful if the spiritual, so to say, shines through what is externally sense-perceptible. When does a marble sculpture become a thing of beauty? When its form arouses the illusion that spirit indwells it. Beauty is the manifestation of the spiritual through the external. Thus when in Genesis we come to the words God saw the light, we can say that they convey the specific quality of earth evolution; also that what could formerly only be experienced subjectively now manifests itself from without; that the spirit presents itself in its external manifestation. Thus we can paraphrase the biblical words by saying “and the Elohim experienced the consciousness that something in which they themselves formerly existed confronted them as an external phenomenon; and they realised that the spirit was behind this appearance and came to expression in the external.” This is the significance of the word “beautiful” or “good.” Wordy explanations will not help us to understand the Genesis account, but only diligent search for the secrets which are really hidden behind the words. Then research will yield rich fruits; whereas all too many interpretations are nothing but tiresome pedantry.

Let us go a step further. We have seen that the characteristic features of the Moon evolution were only able to come about through the separation of the Sun from the Moon. Then we have seen that during the earth evolution it again became necessary for the sun to separate off from the earth; we have seen that a duality is necessary for a life of full consciousness. The earth element had to withdraw. But in such a withdrawal something else is also involved; the elementary conditions of the moon nature and of the sun nature change, become different. If you make a study of our present sun, even from a purely physical aspect you are obliged to say to yourselves: “The conditions which we have on earth and which we call solid and liquid are not to be found in the physical sun.” The most you can say is that the sun still condenses to the gaseous state. This is recognised by modern physics. Such a separation of elementary conditions comes about through the severing of what was previously a unity.

We have seen that the earth develops in such a way that a gradual densification downward takes place from warmth to solid, to earth, and that what is above as elementary existence light-ether, sound-ether, life-ether—seems to press inwards from without. But this description does not fit the part which goes out as the sun. It would be better therefore to say that there are seven states of elementary existence. The first, the most rarefied state, which constitutes and brings about life; then what we call number, or sound-ether; then light-ether; then warmth-ether; then we have air, or the gaseous element, the watery element and fmally the earthy or solid. It is in the earth that we have to look mainly for the elements up as far as warmth. Warmth permeates the earth, whereas the earth only shares in light in so far as the Beings in its environment—or if you like the bodies in its environment—take part in the life of the earth. Light streams upon the earth from the sun. If we wish to locate the three higher elementary states—light-ether, the ether of spiritual sound, and life-ether—we must place them in the sphere of the sun. In the earth we have to look for the solid, fluid and gaseous elements; warmth is shared by both earth and sun.

The Sun separated off for the first time during the Moon evolution. It was then that the light was for the first time active from without, but not then as light. I have just pointed out that the sentence in Genesis which reads And God saw the light ... could not have been spoken in respect of the Moon evolution. There one would have had to say that the Elohim speeded through space with the light, were in the light, but saw it not. Just as today one swims in water and moves forward in it without actually seeing it, so one did not see the light, but light was a bearer of the work in cosmic space. It was with the coming of earth evolution that light began to appear, to be reflected by objects.

It was natural that this, which held good for light on the Moon, should itself reach a higher stage of development during earth evolution. It is therefore to be expected that what applied to light on the Moon should during earth evolution apply to the sound-ether. This would involve that what we call spiritual sound was not perceived by the Elohim as reverberating back to them in the manner of the reflected light. Thus, if Genesis wished to convey that evolution was advancing from the activity of the light-ether to that of sound-ether, it would have to say something like this: “And the Elohim saw the light in the developing earth, and saw that it was beautiful.” But it could not go on in the same way to say: “And the Elohim during this phase perceived the sound-ether”; it would have to say “they lived and wove in it.” Nor could it be said of the second “day” of creation that the Elohim perceived the stir which separated the elements above from those below; it could not be said of this work of the Elohim that they perceived. The words “perceive” and “beautiful” would have had to be omitted. Then the description would correspond with what can be observed through Spiritual Science.

Thus the seer who wrote the Genesis account had, when describing the second “day,” to leave out the words: And God saw ...

Now look at Genesis. On the first “day” it reads: And God saw the light, that it was good. On the second day of creation, after the end of the first day, it says: And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters ... and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. The sentence And God saw ..., which we find on the first day, is left out on the second day. Genesis gives the facts as we should expect them to be given from what we have been able to observe by spiritual scientific method.

Here again is a knotty point of which the commentators of the nineteenth century have not known what to make. There have been commentators who said: “What does it matter if the second time the words are omitted? The writer just forgot them.” Men should learn that Genesis not only records nothing irrelevant, but also omits nothing relevant. The writer has forgotten nothing There is a profound reason why on the second day of creation these words are not to be found. Here we have another example—I could quote many—of what fills us with immense reverence for such ancient records.

We could learn much from these ancient writers, who really needed to take no oath, but followed of their own accord the rule of telling the whole truth, and nothing but the truth which they knew. They felt through and through that every word that stands there must be sacred to us, and equally that nothing essential must be omitted.

We have now gained an insight into the composition of what are called the first and second “days” of creation. Anyone who discovers through spiritual investigation what lies behind things might well say to himself, as he turns to his Bible, “It would be marvellous, it would be astounding, if these intimate details which can be discovered by scrupulous spiritual investigation should be corroborated by the words of the ancient seer who took part in the making of Genesis.” And when he finds that the astounding thing is true, a wonderful feeling comes over him—a feeling such as should indeed penetrate human souls if they are once more to appreciate the holiness of this ancient document.

• 1. Many of these articles were subsequently published in English in book form as Atlantis and Lemuria (Anthroposophical Publishing Co., 1923).

What we have now been studying for some time in our Group-lectures is meant as a completion or expansion of the subjects that have occupied us during the winter. It may well be that a remark here or there seemed somewhat aphoristic, and we want by means of these studies to enlarge or round off thoughts and concepts that have been aroused in us.

In the last lecture we were particularly occupied with the presence of all sorts of spiritual beings which are to be found, so to speak, between the sense-perceptible kingdoms of nature that surround us. We saw especially how in the place where the beings of different nature-kingdoms come together, where the plant is pressed close to the stone at a spring, where ordinary stone impinges on a metal as constantly occurs under the earth, where there is a communion as between bee and blossom, how everywhere in such spots forces are developed which draw various beings, whom we have called elemental beings, into earthly existence. Moreover, in connection with these elemental beings we have been occupied with the fact of a certain cutting off, a detaching of beings from their whole connection. We have seen that the elemental beings called by spiritual science “Salamanders” have in part their origin from detached parts of animal group souls. These have, as it were, ventured too far forward into our physical world and have not been able to find their way back and unite again with the group soul, after the death and dissolution of the animal. We know that in the regular course of our life, the beings of our earth, the beings of the animal, plant, mineral kingdoms, have their “ego soul”—if one may so call it, have indeed such ego souls as man, differing only in the fact that the ego souls of other beings are in other worlds. We know that man is that being in our cycle of evolution who has an individual ego here on the physical plane—at least during his waking life. We know further that the beings which we call animals are so conditioned that—speaking loosely—similarly-formed animals have a group soul or group ego which is in the so-called astral world. Further, the beings which we call plants have a dreamless sleeping consciousness for the physical world here but they have group egos which dwell in the lower parts of the devachanic world; and, finally, the stones, the minerals, have their group egos in the higher parts of Devachan. One who moves clairvoyantly in the astral and devachanic worlds has intercourse there with the group souls of the animals, plants and minerals in the same way as here in the physical world he has intercourse during the day with other human souls or egos.

Now we must be clear that in many ways man is a very complicated being—we have often spoken of this complexity in different lectures. But he will appear more and more complicated the further we go into the connections with great cosmic facts. In order to realize that man is not quite the simple being which he may perhaps appear to a naive observation we need only remember that by night, from going to sleep to waking up, the man of the present evolutionary cycle is quite a different being from what he is by day. His physical and etheric bodies lie in bed, the ego with the astral body is lifted out of them. Let us consider both conditions, and in the first place the physical and etheric bodies. They lie there, and if we disregard the transitional state of dream, they have what we may call a sleep consciousness devoid of content, perceptions, or dreams. But the ego and the astral body outside have, in this present cycle of evolution, just the same dreamless sleep consciousness. The sleeping man, whether in the members remaining here in the physical world, or in those which are in the astral world, has the same consciousness as the plant covering of the earth. We must occupy ourselves a little with these two separated parts of the sleeping human being.

From other lectures we know that the man of the present time has arisen slowly and gradually. We know that he received the first rudiments of a physical body in the embodiment of our Earth lying in a primeval past which we call the Saturn evolution. We know that then in a second embodiment of our Earth, the Sun evolution, he received the etheric or life body, that in the third embodiment, the Moon evolution, he also received the astral body, and that in the present Earth embodiment of our planet he acquired what we call the ego. Thus the human being has evolved quite slowly and gradually. This physical body which man bears today is actually his oldest part, the part that has gone through most metamorphoses. It has undergone four changes. The first rudiment, received by man on ancient Saturn, has gone through three modifications, on the Sun, on the Moon, and finally on the Earth, and is expressed in man's present sense-organs. They were quite different organs on ancient Saturn, but their first rudiments were there while no other part of the physical body as yet existed. We can look on ancient Saturn as a single being, entirely consisting of sense-organs. On the Sun the etheric body was added, the physical body went through a change, and the organs arose which we call today the glands, though at first they existed merely in their rudiments. Then on the Moon when the physical body had undergone a third transformation through the impress of the astral body, were added those organs which we know as the nerve organs. And finally on the Earth was added the present blood-system, the expression of the ego, as the nervous system is the expression of the astral body, the glandular system of the etheric body, and the senses system the physical expression of the physical body itself. We have seen in former lectures that the blood system appeared for the first time in our Earth evolution and we ask: Why does blood flow in the present form in the blood channels? What does this blood express? Blood is the expression of the ego and with this we will consider a possible misunderstanding, namely, that man actually misunderstands the present physical human body.

The human body as it is today is only one form of many. On the Moon, on the Sun, on Saturn, it was there but always different. On the Moon, for instance, there was as yet no mineral kingdom, on the Sun there was no plant world in our sense, and on Saturn no animal kingdom—there was solely the human being in his first physical rudiments. Now when we reflect on this we must be clear that the present human body is not only physical body, but physical-mineral body, and that to the laws of the physical world—hence it is the “physical body”—it has assimilated the laws and substances of the mineral kingdom, which permeate it today. On the Moon the physical human body had not yet assimilated those laws: if one had burnt it there would have been no ash, for there were no minerals in the present earthly sense. Let us remember that to be physical and to be mineral are two quite different things. The human body is physical because it is governed by the same laws as the stone; it is at the same time mineral because it has been impregnated with mineral substances. The first germ of the physical body was present on Saturn, but there were no solid bodies, no water, no gases. On Saturn there was nothing at all but a condition of warmth. The modern physicist knows of no such condition because he thinks that warmth can only appear in connection with gases, water, or solid objects. But that is an error. The physical body which today has assimilated the mineral kingdom was on ancient Saturn a nexus of physical laws. We are physical laws working in lines, in forms, what you learn to know as laws in physics. Externally the physical human being was manifested on Saturn purely as a being which lived in warmth. We must thus clearly distinguish between the mineral element and the actual physical principle of man's body. It is physical law which governs the physical body. It belongs, for example, to the physical principle that our ear has such a form, that it receives sound in quite a definite way; to the mineral nature of the ear belong the sub-stances which are impregnated into this scaffolding of physical laws.

Now that we have become clear about this and realize particularly how the sense-organs, glands, nerves and blood are the expressions of our fourfold nature, let us turn again to the observation of the sleeping human being. When man is asleep the physical and etheric bodies lie on the bed, the astral body and the ego are outside. But now let us remember that the astral body is the principle of the nervous system and the ego that of the blood system. Thus during the night the astral body has deserted that part of the physical body of which, so to say, it is the cause—namely, the nervous system. For only when the astral body membered itself into man on the Moon could the nervous system arise. Thus the astral body callously leaves what belongs to it, what it is actually due to maintain, and in the same way the ego deserts that which it has called into life. The principles of the blood and of the astral body are outside and the sleeping physical and etheric bodies are absolutely alone. But now nothing of a material physical nature can subsist in the form which has been called forth by a spiritual principle when this spiritual principle is no longer there. That is quite out of the question. Never can a nervous system live unless astral beings are active in it, and never can a blood system live unless ego-beings are active in it. Thus you all meanly desert in the night your nervous and blood systems and relinquish them to other beings of an astral nature. Beings which are of the same nature as your ego now descend into your organism. Every night the human organism is occupied by beings fitted to maintain it. The physical body and the etheric body which lie on the bed are at the same time interpenetrated by these astral and ego beings; they are actually within the physical body. We might call them intruders, but that is in no sense correct. We ought in many ways to call them guardian spirits, for they are the sustainers of what man callously deserts in the night.

Now it is not so bad for man to leave his bodies every night. I have already said that the astral body and the ego are perpetually active in the night. They rid the physical body of the wear and tear which the day has given, which in a broad sense we call fatigue. Man is refreshed and renewed in the morning because during the night his astral body and ego have removed the fatigue which were given him by the impressions of daily life. This all-night activity of the astral body in getting rid of the fatigue substances is a definite fact to clairvoyant perception. The ego and astral body work from outside on the physical and etheric bodies. But in the present cycle of his evolution man is not yet advanced enough to be able to carry out such an activity quite independently. He can only do so under the guidance of other, higher beings. So the human being is taken every night into the bosom of higher beings, as it were, and they endow him with the power of working in the right way on his physical and etheric bodies. These at the same time are the beings—that is why we may not call them intruders—who care for man's blood and nerve systems in the right way in the night.

As long as no abnormalities arise the co-operation of spiritual beings with man is justified. But such irregularities can very well enter and here we come to a chapter of spiritual science which is extraordinarily important for the practical life of the human soul. One would like it to be known in the widest circles and not only theoretically but as giving the foundation for certain activities of the human soul life. It is not generally imagined that the facts of the soul life have a far-reaching effect. In certain connections I have also called your attention to the fact that it is only when viewed in the light of spiritual science that events in the life of the soul can find their true explanation. We all know the deep significance of the statement: “Regarded from the spiritual-scientific aspect a lie is a kind of murder.” I have explained that a sort of explosion really takes place in the astral world when man utters a lie—even, in a certain way, if he only thinks it. Something takes place in the spiritual world when man lies, which has a far more devastating effect for that world than any misfortune in the physical world. But things which one relates at a certain stage of spiritual-scientific observation, characterizing them as far as is possible then, gain more and more clearness and confirmation when one advances in the knowledge of spiritual science.

Today we shall learn of another effect of lying, slandering, although these words are not used here in the ordinary crude sense. When more subtly, out of convention, for in-stance, or out of all sorts of social or party considerations, people color the truth, we there have to do with a lie in the sense of spiritual science. In many respects man's whole life is saturated, if not with lies, yet with manifestations bearing an untruthful coloring. The enlightened materialist can at any rate see that an impression is made on his physical body if he receives a blow on the skull from an axe, or if his head is cut off by the railway, or he has an ulcer somewhere or is attacked by bacilli. He will then admit that effects are produced on the physical body. What is not usually considered at all is that man is a spiritual unity, that what happens in his higher members, the astral body and ego, has positive effect right down into his physical nature. It is not considered, for instance, that the uttering of lies and untruthfulness, untruth even in the affairs of life, has a definite effect on the human physical body. Spiritual vision can experience the following: If a person, let us say, has told a lie during the day, its effect remains in the physical body and is to be seen by clairvoyant perception while the person sleeps. Let us suppose this person is altogether un-truthful, piling up lies, then he will have many such effects in his physical body. All this hardens, as it were, in the night, and then something very important happens. These hardenings, these “enclosures,” in the physical body are not at all agreeable to the beings who from higher worlds must take possession of the physical body in the night and carry out the functions otherwise exercised by the astral body and ego. The result is that in the course of life and by reason of a body diseased—one might say—through lies, portions of those beings who descend into man at night become detached. Here we have again detachment processes and they lead to the fact that when a man dies his physical body does not merely follow the paths which it would normally take. Certain beings are left behind, beings which have been created in the physical body through the effect of lying and slander, and have been detached from the spiritual world. Such beings, detached in this circuitous way, now flit and whir about in our world and belong to the class that we call “phantoms.” They form a certain group of elemental beings related to our physical body and invisible to physical sight. They multiply through lies and calumnies, and these in actual fact populate our earthly globe with phantoms. In this way we learn to know a new class of elemental beings.

But now, not only lies and slanders but also other things belonging to the soul life produce an effect on the human body. It is lies and slanders which so act on the physical body that a detaching of phantoms is caused. Other things again work in a similar way on the etheric body. You must not be amazed at such phenomena of the soul: in spiritual life one must be able to take things with all calmness. Matters, for example, which have a harmful result on the etheric body are bad laws, or bad social measures prevailing in a community. All that leads to want of harmony, all that makes for bad adjustments between man and man, works in such a way through the feeling which it creates in the common life that the effect is continued into the etheric body. The accumulation in the etheric body caused through these experiences of the soul brings about again detachments from the beings working in from the spiritual worlds and these likewise are now to be found in our environment—they are “spectres” or “ghosts.” Thus these beings that exist in the etheric world, the life world, we see grow out of the life of men. Many a man can go about amongst us and for one who is able to see these things spiritually, his physical body is crammed, one might say, with phantoms, his etheric body crammed with spectres, and as a rule after a man's death or shortly afterwards all this rises up and disperses and populates the world.

So we see how subtly the spiritual events of our life are continued, how lies, calumnies, bad social arrangements, deposit their creations spiritually among us on our earth. But now you can also understand that if in normal daily life the physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego belong together, and the physical body and etheric body have to let other beings press in and act upon them, then the astral body and the ego are not in a normal condition either. At any rate they are in a somewhat different position as regards the physical and etheric bodies. These two have in sleeping man the consciousness of the plants. But the plants on the other hand have their ego above in Devachan. Hence the physical and etheric bodies of sleeping man must likewise be sustained by beings which unfold their consciousness from Devachan. Now it is true that man's astral body and ego are in a higher world, but he himself also sleeps dreamlessly like the plants. That the plants have only a physical and an etheric body and that man in his sleeping condition possesses further an astral body and ego, makes no difference as regards the plant-nature. True, man has been drawn upwards into the spiritual, the astral world, but yet not high enough upwards with his ego, to justify the sleep-condition. The consequence is that beings must now enter his astral body too when the human being goes to sleep. And so it is: influences from the devachanic world press all the time into man's astral body. They need not in the least be abnormal influences, they may come from what we call man's higher ego. For we know that man is gradually rising to the devachanic world, in as much as he approaches ever nearer to a state of spiritualization, and what is being prepared there sends its influences into him today when he sleeps. But there are not merely these normal influences. This would simply and solely be the case if human beings were fully to understand what it is to value and esteem the freedom of another. Mankind at present is still very far removed from that. Think only how the modern man for the most part wants to over-rule the mind of another, how he cannot bear someone else to think and like differently, how he wants to work upon the other's soul. In all that works from soul to soul in our world, from the giving of unjustifiable advice to all those methods which men employ in order to overwhelm others, in every act that does not allow the free soul to confront the free soul, but employs, even in the slightest degree, forcible means of convincing and persuasion, in all this, forces are working from soul to soul which again so influence these souls that it is expressed in the night in the astral body. The astral body gets those “enclosures” and thereby beings are detached from other worlds and whir through our world again as elemental beings. They belong to the class of demons. Their existence is solely due to the fact that intolerance and oppression of thought have in various ways been used in our world. That is how these hosts of demons have arisen in our world.

Thus we have learnt again today to know of beings which are just as real as the things which we perceive through our physical senses, and which very definitely produce effects in human life. Humanity would have advanced quite differently if intolerance had not created the demons which pervade our world, influencing people continually. They are at the same time spirits of prejudice. One understands the intricacies of life when one learns about these entanglements between the spiritual world in the higher sense and our human world. All these beings, as we have said, are there, and they whiz and whir through the world in which we live.

Now let us remember something else which has also been said before. We have pointed out that in the man of the last third of the Atlantean age, before the Atlantean flood, the relation of etheric body to physical body was quite different from what it had been earlier. Today the physical part of the head and the etheric part practically coincide. That was quite different in ancient Atlantis; there we have the etheric part of the head projecting far out—especially in the region of the forehead. We now have a central point for the etheric and physical parts approximately between the eyebrows. These two parts came together in the last third of the Atlantean age and today they coincide. Thereby man is able to say “I” to himself and feel an independent personality. Thus the etheric and physical bodies of the head have joined together. This has come about so that man could become the sense being that he is within our physical world, so that he can enrich his inner life through what he takes in through sense impressions, through smell, taste, sight, and so on. All of this becomes embodied in his inner being so that having obtained it he can use it for the further development of the whole cosmos. What he thus acquires can be acquired in no other way, and therefore we have always said we must not take Spiritual Science in an ascetic sense, as a flight from the physical world. All that happens here is taken with us out of the physical world and it would be lost to the spiritual world if it were not collected here first.

But humanity is now getting nearer and nearer to a new condition. In this Post-Atlantean age we have gone through various culture epochs: the old Indian, the ancient Persian, lying before the time of Zarathustra, then the epoch which we have called the Babylonian-Assyrian-Chaldean-Egyptian, then the Greco-Latin, and now we stand in the fifth culture-epoch of the Post-Atlantean age. Ours will be followed by a sixth and a seventh epoch. Whereas in the course of past ages and up to our own time the united structure of our etheric and physical bodies has always grown firmer, more closely united inwardly, man is approaching a period in the future when the etheric body gradually loosens itself again and becomes independent. The way back is taken. There are people today who have a much looser etheric body than others. This loosening of the etheric body is only right for man if during his different incarnations in those culture-epochs he has absorbed so much into himself that when his etheric body goes out again it will take with it the right fruits from the physical sense world of the earth, fruits suitable for incorporation into the increasingly independent etheric body. The more spiritual are the concepts which man finds within the physical world, the more he takes with him in his etheric body. All the utilitarian ideas, all the concepts bound up with machine and industry which only serve outer needs and the outer life, and which man absorbs in our present earthly existence, are unsuitable for incorporation in the etheric body. But all the concepts he absorbs of the artistic, the beautiful, the religious—and everything can be immersed in the sphere of wisdom, art, religion—all this endows man's etheric body with the capability and possibility of being organized independently. Since this can be seen in advance, it has often been emphasized here that the world-conception of spiritual science must send its impulses and activities into practical life. Spiritual science must never remain a conversational subject for tea-parties or any other pursuit apart from ordinary life; it must work its way into the whole of our civilization. If spiritual-scientific thoughts are one day understood, then men will understand that everything our age accomplishes must be permeated by spiritual principles. Many human beings, among them Richard Wagner, fore-saw in certain fields such a penetration with spiritual principles. Some day men will understand how to build a railway-station so that it streams out truth like a temple and is in fact simply an expression suited to what is within it. There is still very much to do. These impulses therefore must be effective and they will be effective when spiritual-scientific thoughts are more fully understood.

I still have a vivid recollection of a rectorial address given about twenty-five years ago by a well-known architect. He spoke about style in architecture and uttered the remarkable sentence: “Architectural styles are not invented, they grow out of the spiritual life!” At the same time he showed why our age, if indeed it produces architectural styles, only revives old ones and is incapable of finding a new style because it has as yet no inner spiritual life. When the world creates spiritual life again then all will be possible. Then we shall feel that the human soul shines towards us from all we look at, just as in the Middle Ages every lock on a door expressed what man's soul understood of outer forms. Spiritual science will not be understood till it meets us everywhere in this way as if crystallized in forms. But then mankind too will live as spirit in the spirit. Then, however, man will be preparing more and more something that he takes with him when he again rises into the spiritual world, when his etheric body becomes self-dependent. Thus must men immerse in the spiritual world if evolution is to go further in the right way.

Nothing symbolizes the permeation of the world with the spirit so beautifully as the story of the miracle of Pentecost. When you contemplate it, it is as though the interpenetration of the world with spiritual life were indicated prophetically through the descent of the “fiery tongues.” Everything must be given life again through the spirit, that abstract intellectual relation which man has to the yearly festivals must also become concrete and living again. Now, at this time of Pentecost, Whitsuntide, let us try to occupy our souls with the thoughts that can proceed from today's lecture. Then the Festival, which as we know is established on a spiritual foundation, will again signify some-thing living for man when his etheric body is ripe for spiritual creation. But if man does not absorb the Whitsuntide spirit then the etheric body goes out of the physical body and is far too weak to overcome what has already been created, those worlds of spectres, phantoms, demons, which the world creates as phenomena existing at its side.

You will have realised from lectures given recently that in our times a materialistic view of the world, a materialistic way of thinking, is not the outcome of man's arbitrary volition but of a certain historical necessity.

Those who have some understanding of the spiritual process of human evolution know that, fundamentally speaking, in all earlier centuries and millennia man participated in spiritual life to a greater extent than has been the case during the last four or five hundred years. We know with what widespread phenomena this is connected. At the very beginning of Earth-evolution, the heritage of the Old Moon clairvoyance was working in mankind. We can envisage that in the earliest ages of Earth-evolution this faculty of ancient clairvoyance was very potent, very active, with the result that the range of man's spiritual vision in those times was exceedingly wide and comprehensive. This ancient clairvoyance then gradually diminished until times were reached when the great majority of human beings had lost the faculty of looking into the spiritual world, and the Mystery of Golgotha came in substitution. But a certain vestige of the old faculties of soul remained, and evidence of this is to be found, for example, in the nature-knowledge which was in existence until the fourteenth and fifteenth, and indeed until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This nature-knowledge was very different in character from modern natural science. It was a nature-knowledge able to some extent still to rely, not upon clear, Imaginative clairvoyance but nevertheless upon vestiges of the Inspirations and Intuitions which were then applied and elaborated by the so-called alchemists. If an alchemist of those times was honourable in his aims and not out for egotistic gain, he still worked, in a certain respect, with the old Inspirations and Intuitions. While he was engaged in his outer activities, vestiges of the old clairvoyance were still astir within him, although no longer accompanied by any reliable knowledge. But the number of people in whom these vestiges of ancient clairvoyance survived, steadily decreased. I have often said that these vestiges can very easily be drawn out of the human soul today in states of atavistic, visionary clairvoyance. We have shown in many different ways how this atavistic clairvoyance can manifest in our own time.

From all this you will realise that the nearer we come to our own period in evolution, the more we have to do with a decline of old soul-forces and a growth of tendencies in the human soul towards observation of the outer, material world. After slow and gradual preparation, this reached its peak in the nineteenth century, actually in the middle of that century. Little as this is realised today by those who do not concern themselves with such matters, it will be clear to men of the future that the materialistic tendencies of the second half of the nineteenth century had reached their peak in the middle of the century; it was then that these tendencies developed their greatest strength. But the consequence of every tendency is that certain talents develop and the really impressive greatness of the methods evolved by materialistic science stems from these tendencies of the soul to hold fast to the outer, material world of sense.

Now we must think of this phase in the evolution of humanity as being accompanied by another phenomenon. If we carry ourselves back in imagination to the primeval ages of humanity's spiritual development, we shall find that in respect of spiritual knowledge, men were in a comparatively fortunate position. Most human beings, in fact all of them, knew of the spiritual world through direct vision. Just as men of the modern age perceive minerals, plants and animals and are aware of tones and colours, so were the men of old aware of the spiritual world; it was concrete reality to them. So that in those olden times, when full waking consciousness of the outer, material world was dimmed during sleep or dream, there was really nobody who would not have been connected with the dead who had been near him during life. In the waking state a man could have intercourse with the living; during sleep or dream, with the dead. Teaching about the immortality of the soul would have been as superfluous in those primeval times as it would be nowadays to set out to prove that plants exist. Just imagine what would happen at the present time if anyone set out to prove that plants exist! Exactly the same attitude would have been adopted in primeval times if anyone had thought it necessary to prove that the soul also lives after death.

Humanity gradually lost this faculty of living in communion with the spiritual world. There were, of course, always individuals who used whatever opportunity was still available to develop seership. But even that became more and more difficult. How did men in olden times develop a particular gift of seership? If with insight today we study the philosophy of Plato, or what exists of that of Heraclitus, we must realise—and this applies especially to the still earlier Greek philosophies—that they are altogether different from later philosophies. Read the first chapter of my book Riddles of Philosophy, where I have shown how these ancient philosophers, Thales and Parmenides, Anaximenes and Heraclitus, are still influenced by their particular temperaments. This has not hitherto been pointed out; the first mention of it is in my book. Inevitably, therefore, some time must elapse before it is accepted—but that does not matter. Of Plato, we can still feel: this philosophy still lays hold of the whole man. When we come to Aristotle however, the feeling is that we have to do with an academic, learned philosophy. Therefore to understand Plato requires more insight than a modern philosopher usually has at his command. For the same reason there is a gulf between Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle is already a scholar in the modern sense. Plato is the last philosopher in the old Greek sense; he is a philosopher whose concepts are still imbued to some extent with life. As long as a philosophy of this kind exists, the link with the spiritual world is not broken, and indeed it continued for a long time, actually into the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages did not develop philosophy to further stages but simply took over Aristotelian philosophy; and up to a certain point of time this was all to the good. Platonic philosophy too was taken over in the same way.

Now in days of antiquity, as long as at least the aptitude for clairvoyance of a certain kind was present, something very significant took place when men allowed this philosophy to work upon them. Today, philosophy works only upon the head, only upon the thinking. The reason why so many people avoid philosophy is because they do not like thinking. And especially because philosophy offers nothing in the way of sensationalism they have no desire to study it. Ancient philosophy, however, when received into the human soul, was still able, because of its greater life-giving power, to quicken still existing gifts of seership. Platonic philosophy, nay, even Aristotelian philosophy, still had this effect. Being less abstract than the philosophies of modern times, they were still able to quicken faculties of seership inherent in the human soul. And so it came to pass that in men who devoted themselves to philosophy, faculties that were otherwise sinking below the surface were quickened to life. That is how seers came into existence. But because what had now to be learnt about the physical world—and this also applies to philosophy—was of importance for the physical plane alone, and became increasingly important, man alienated himself more and more from the remnants of the old clairvoyance. He could no longer penetrate to the inner depths of existence and it was increasingly difficult to become a seer. Nor will this again be possible until the new methods indicated as a beginning in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. How is it achieved? are accepted by mankind as plausible.

We have heard that a period of materialism reached its peak—one could also say, its deepest point—in the middle of the nineteenth century. It is certain that conditions will become more and more difficult but the threads of connection with the earlier impulses in the evolution of humanity must nevertheless not be broken. The following diagram indicates how seership has developed:

Here (yellow) seership is still present in full flower; it vanishes more and more completely until the lowest point is reached in the middle of the nineteenth century, and then there is again an ascent. But understanding of the spiritual world is not the same as seership. Just as in regard to the world, science is not the same thing as mere sensory perception, clairvoyance itself is a different matter from understanding what is seen. In the earliest epochs men were content, for the most part, with vision; they did not get to the point of thinking to any great extent about what was seen, for their seership sufficed. But now, thinking too came to the fore. The line a–b, therefore, indicates seership, vision; line c–d indicates thought or reflection about the spiritual worlds.

In ancient times man was occupied with his visions and thinking lay, as it were, in the subconscious region of the soul. The seers of old did not think, did not reflect; everything came to them directly through their vision. Thinking first began to affect seership about three or four thousand years B.C. There was a golden age in the old Indian, Persian, Egypto-Chaldean and also in very ancient Greek culture when thinking, still youthful and fresh, was wedded with vision in the human soul. In those times, thinking was not the laboured process it is in our day. Men had certain great, all-embracing notions, and, in addition, they had vision (e in diagram) . Something of the kind, although already in a weaker form, was present to a marked degree in the seers who founded the Samothracian Mysteries and there gave the monumental teaching of the four gods: Axieros, Axiokersos, Axiokersa and Kadmillos. In this great teaching which once had its home in the island of Samos, certain lofty concepts were imparted to those who were initiated in the Mysteries and they were able to unite with these concepts the still surviving fruits of ancient seership. It may be possible on some other occasion to speak of these things too in greater detail.¹

But then seership gradually sank below the threshold of consciousness and to call it up from the depths of the soul became more and more difficult. It was, of course, possible to retain some of the concepts, even to develop them further; and so finally a time came when there were initiates who were not necessarily seers—mark well, initiates who were not necessarily seers.

In different places where there were assemblies of these initiates, they simply adopted what was in part preserved from olden times, of which it could be affirmed that ancient seers revealed it—or what could be drawn forth from men who still possessed the faculties of atavistic clairvoyance. Conviction came partly through historical traditions, partly through experiments. Men convinced themselves that what their intellects thought was true. But as time went on the number of individuals in these assemblies who were still able to see into the spiritual world, steadily diminished, while the number of those who had theories about the spiritual world and expressed them in symbols and the like, steadily increased.

And now think of what inevitably resulted from this about the middle of the nineteenth century, when the materialistic tendencies of men had reached their deepest point. Naturally, there were people who knew that there is a spiritual world and also knew what is to be found in the spiritual world, but they had never seen that world. Indeed, the most outstanding savants in the nineteenth century were men who, although they had seen nothing whatever of the spiritual world, knew that it exists, could reflect about it, could even discover new truths with the help of certain methods and a certain symbolism that had been preserved in ancient tradition. To take one example only.—Nothing special is to be gained by looking at a drawing of a human being. But if a human form is drawn with a lion's head, or another with a bull's head, those who have learnt how these things are to be interpreted can glean a great deal from symbolical presentations of this kind—similarly, if a bull is depicted with the head of a man or a lion with the head of a man. Such symbols were in frequent use, and there were earnest assemblies in which the language of symbols could be learnt. I shall say no more about the matter than this, for the schools of Initiation guarded these symbols very strictly, communicating them to nobody who had not pledged himself to keep silence about them. To be a genuine knower a man needed only to have mastered this symbolic language—that is to say, a certain symbolic script.

And so the situation in the middle of the nineteenth century was that mankind in general, especially civilised mankind, possessed the faculty of spiritual vision deep down in the subconsciousness, yet had materialistic tendencies. There were, however, a great many people who knew that there is a spiritual world, who knew that just as we are surrounded by air, so we are surrounded by a spiritual world. But at the same time these men were burdened with a certain feeling of responsibility. They had no recourse to any actual faculties whereby the existence of a spiritual world could have been demonstrated, yet they were not willing to see the world outside succumbing altogether to materialism. And so in the nineteenth century a difficult situation confronted those who were initiated, a situation in face of which the question forced itself upon them: Ought we to continue to keep within restricted circles the knowledge that has come over to us from ancient times and merely look on while the whole of mankind, together with culture and philosophy, sinks down into materialism? Dare we simply look on while this is taking place? They dared not do so, especially those who were in real earnest about these things.

And so it came about that in the middle of the nineteenth century the words “esotericist” and “exotericist” which were used by the initiates among themselves, acquired a meaning deviating from what it had previously been. The occultists divided into exotericists and esotericists. If for purposes of analogy, expressions connected with modern parliaments are adopted—although naturally they are unsuitable here—the exotericists could be compared with the left-wing parties and the esotericists with the right-wing parties. The esotericists were those who wanted to continue to abide firmly by the principle of allowing nothing of what was sacred, traditional knowledge, nothing that might enable thinking men to gain insight into the symbolic language, to reach the public. The esotericists were, so to speak, the Conservatives among the occultists. Who, then—we may ask—were the exotericists ? They were and are those who want to make public some part of the esoteric knowledge. Fundamentally, the exotericists were not different from the esotericists, except that the former were inclined to follow the promptings of their feeling of responsibility, and to make part of the esoteric knowledge public.

There was widespread discussion at that time of which the outside world knows nothing but which was particularly heated in the middle of the nineteenth century. Indeed the clashes and discussions between the esotericists and the exotericists were far more heated than those between the Conservatives and Liberals in modern parliaments. The esotericists took the stand that only to those who had pledged themselves to strictest silence and were willing to belong to some particular society should anything be told concerning the spiritual world or any knowledge of it communicated. The exotericists said: If this principle is followed, people who do not attach themselves to some such society or league will sink altogether into materialism.

And now the exotericists proposed a way. I can tell you this today: the way proposed by the exotericists at that time is the way we ourselves are taking. Their proposal was that a certain part of the esoteric knowledge should be popularised. You see, too, how we ourselves have worked with the help of popular writings, in order that men may gradually be led to knowledge of the spiritual worlds.

In the middle of the nineteenth century things had not reached the point at which anyone would have ventured to admit that this was their conviction. In such circles there is, of course, no voting, and to say the following is to speak in metaphor. Nevertheless it can be stated that at the first ballot the esotericists won the day and the exotericists were obliged to submit. The society or league was not opposed, because of the good old precept of holding together. Not until more modern times has the point been reached when members are expelled or resign. Such things used not to happen because people understood that they must hold together in brotherhood. So the exotericists could do no other than submit. But their responsibility to the whole of mankind weighed upon them. They felt themselves, so to speak, to be guardians of evolution. This weighed upon them, with the result that the first ballot—if I may again use this word—was not adhered to, and—once again I will use a word which as it is drawn from ordinary parlance must be taken metaphorically—a kind of compromise was reached. This led to the following situation.

It was said, and this was also admitted by the esotericists: it is urgently necessary for humanity in general to realise that the surrounding world is not devoid of the spiritual, does not consist only of matter nor is subject to purely material laws; humanity must come to know that just as we are surrounded by matter, so too we are surrounded by the spiritual, and that man is not only that being who confronts us when we look at him in the material sense, but also has within him something that is of the nature of spirit and soul. The possibility of knowing this must be saved for humanity. On this, agreement was reached—and that was the compromise.

But the esotericists of the nineteenth century were not prepared to surrender the esoteric knowledge, and a different method had therefore to be countenanced. How it came into being is a complicated story. Particularly on occasions of the founding of Groups I have often spoken of what happened then. The esotericists said: We do not wish the esoteric knowledge to be made public, but we realise that the materialism of the age must be tackled.—In a certain respect the esotericists were basing themselves on a well-founded principle, for when we see repeatedly the kind of attitude that is adopted today towards esoteric knowledge we can understand and sympathise with those who said at that time that they would not hear of it being made public. We must realise, however, that over and over again it can be seen that open communication of esoteric knowledge leads to calamity, and that those who get hold of such knowledge are themselves the cause of obstacles and hindrances in the way of its propagation. In recent weeks we have often spoken of the fact that far too little heed is paid to these obstacles and hindrances. Most unfortunate experiences are encountered when it is a matter of making esoteric knowledge public. Help rendered with the best will in the world to individuals—even there the most elementary matters lead to calamity! You would find it hard to believe how often it happens that advice is given to some individual—but it does not please him. When the outer world says that an occultist who works as we work here, exercises great authority—that is just a catchword. As long as the advice given is acceptable, the occultist, as a rule, is not grumbled at; but when the advice is not liked, it is not accepted. People even browbeat one by declaring: “If you do not give me different advice, I simply cannot get on.” This may come to the point of actual threats, yet it had simply been a matter of advising the person in question for his good. But as he wants something different, he says: “I have waited long enough; now tell me exactly what I ought to do.” He was told this long ago, but it went against the grain. Finally things come to the point where those who were once the most credulous believers in authority become the bitterest enemies. They expect to get the advice they themselves want and when it is not to their liking they become bitter enemies. In our own time, therefore, experience teaches us that we cannot simply condemn the esotericists who refused to have anything to do with popularising the esoteric truths.

And so in the middle of the nineteenth century this popularising did not take place; an attempt was, however, made to deal in some way with the materialistic tendencies of the age. It is difficult to express what has to be said and I can only put it in words which, as such, were never actually uttered but none the less give a true picture. At that time the esotericists said: What can be done about this humanity? We may talk at length about the esoteric teaching but people will simply laugh at us and at you. At most you will win over a few credulous people, a few credulous women, but you will not win over those who cling to the strictly scientific attitude, and you will be forced to reckon with the tendencies of the age.

The consequence was that endeavours were made to find a method by means of which attention could be drawn to the spiritual world, and indeed in exactly the same way as in the material world attention is called to the fact that in a criminal the occipital lobe does not or does not entirely cover the corresponding part of his brain.—And so it came about that mediumship was deliberately brought on the scene. In a sense, the mediums were the agents of those who wished, by this means, to convince men of the existence of a spiritual world, because through the mediums people could see with physical eyes that which originates in the spiritual world; the mediums produced phenomena that could be demonstrated on the physical plane. Mediumship was a means of demonstrating to humanity that there is a spiritual world. The exotericists and the esotericists had united in supporting mediumship, in order to deal with the tendency of the times.

Think only of men such as Zöllner, Wallace, du Prel, Crookes, Butlerow, Rochas, Oliver Lodge, Flammarion, Morselli, Schiaparelli, Ochorowicz, James, and others—how did they become convinced of the existence of a spiritual world? It was because they had witnessed manifestations from the spiritual world. But everything that can be done by the spiritual world and by the initiates must, to begin with, be in the nature of attempts in the world of men. The maturity of humanity must always be tested. This support of mediumship, of spiritualism, was therefore also, in a certain sense, an attempt. All that the exotericists and esotericists who had agreed to the compromise could say was: What will come of it remains to be seen.—And what did, in fact, come of it?

Most of the mediums gave accounts of a world in which the dead are living. Just read the literature on the subject! For those who were initiated, the result was distressing in the utmost degree, the very worst there could possibly have been. For you see, there were two possibilities. One was this.—Mediums were used and they made certain communications. They were only able to relate what they communicated to the ordinary environment—in the material elements of which spirit is, of course, present. It was expected, however, that the mediums would bring to light all kinds of hidden laws of nature, hidden laws of elemental nature. But what actually happened was inevitable, and for the following reason.—

Man, as we know, consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. From the time of going to sleep to waking, therefore, the real man is in his ego and astral body; but then he is at the same time in the realm of the dead. The medium sitting there, however, is not an ego and an astral body. The ego-consciousness and also the astral consciousness have been suppressed and as a result the physical and etheric bodies become particularly active. In this condition the medium may come into contact with a hypnotist, or an inspirer—that is to say, with some other human being. The ego of another human being, or also the environment, can then have an effect upon the medium. It is impossible for the medium to enter the realm of the dead because the very members of his being which belong to that realm have been made inoperative. The mediums went astray; they gave accounts allegedly of the realm of the dead. And so it was obvious that this attempt had achieved nothing except to promulgate a great fallacy. One fine day, therefore, it had to be admitted that a path had been followed which was leading men into fallacy—to purely Luciferic teachings bound up with purely Ahrimanic observations. Fallacy from which nothing good could result had been spread abroad. This was realised as time went on.

You see, therefore, how an attempt was made to deal with the materialistic tendencies of the age and yet to bring home to men's consciousness that there is a spiritual world around us. To begin with, this path led to fallacy, as we have heard. But you can gather from this how necessary it is to take the other path, namely, actually to begin to make public part of the esoteric knowledge. This is the path that must be taken even if it brings one calamity after another. The very fact that we pursue Spiritual Science is, so to say, an acknowledgment of the need to carry into effect the principle of the exotericists in the middle of the nineteenth century. And the aim of the Spiritual Science we wish to cultivate is nothing else than to carry this principle into effect, to carry it into effect honourably and sincerely.

From all this it will be clear to you that materialism is something about which we cannot merely speculate; we must understand the necessity of its appearance, especially of the peak—or lowest point—it reached about the middle of the nineteenth century. The whole trend had of course begun a long time before then—certainly three, four or five centuries before. Man's leanings to the spiritual passed more and more into his subconsciousness, and this state of things reached its climax in the middle of the nineteenth century. But that too was necessary, in order that the purely materialistic talents of men might develop unhindered by occult faculties. A materialistic philosopher such as Kant, a materialistic philosopher from the standpoint of the Idealists of the nineteenth century—you can easily read about this in my book Riddles of Philosophy—could not have appeared if the occult faculties had not drawn into the background. Certain faculties develop in man when others withdraw, but while the one kind of faculties and talents develops outwardly, the other kind takes its own inner path. These three, four or five centuries were not, therefore, a total loss for the spiritual evolution of mankind. The spiritual forces have continued to develop below the threshold of consciousness, and if you think about what I have indicated in connection with von Wrangell's pamphlet² on the subject of what he there calls the “dreamlike”, you will be able to recognise the existence of occult faculties which are merely waiting to unfold. They are present in abundance in the souls of men; it is only a matter of drawing them out in the right way.

It was necessary to say these things by way of introduction, and tomorrow we will pass on to the question of the relation between the Living and the Dead, bearing in mind that in one respect the wrong path resulting from the compromise between the exotericists and the esotericists has actually been instructive. To understand the nature of this compromise we must study the questions of birth and death and then show what effect the materialistic methods have had in this connection.

• 1. See Mystery Knowledge and Mystery Centres, Lecture XII. Fourteen lectures given in Dornach, 23rd November to 21st December, 1923. (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1973)
• 2. Published in Leipzig in 1914, with the title, Wissenschaft and Theosophie.

My dear Theosophical friends,

If the Theosophical movement is to achieve the great goals it has set itself, then it must, above all, assert its first principle everywhere and realize its first principle in all its endeavors. As is well known, this is to form the core of a general human brotherhood without distinction of race and so on. But then, if this principle is paramount to us, then differences between peoples and nations can only be an expression of what animates people in their innermost thoughts.

We must seek out everywhere the people we want to unite with us in brotherhood. With this principle in mind, the Theosophical Congress in London two years ago decided to propose the introduction of an annual congress of the European sections of the Theosophical Society. This year, the first European congress of the various sections of the continent that truly deserves this name has been convened.

Thus, from June 19 to 21, the European sections of the Theosophical Society were united in Amsterdam for the purpose of to be laid down on the common altar in a free exchange of ideas for inspiration, and on the other hand, to bring the common work that is being done here and there in the service of the general public to the attention of the assembled. Both were achieved by the extraordinarily efficient and energetic approach of our Dutch brothers, so that the congress took an extraordinarily dignified course.

The Congress showed how deeply the Theosophical idea has already taken root in those gathered there. Five European sections have indeed united to form the so-called Federation. These are the sections from which the Theosophical movement initially emerged. First the English, second the French, third the Italian, fourth the Dutch and finally fifth the German section, which has only existed for two years.

Our esteemed Annie Besant has taken over the chairmanship of this congress. She recently returned to Europe from India, where she has spent most of her time working. It was wonderful that she was able to chair this congress. All those who have inwardly grasped the task and mission of the Theosophical movement know that their ideal is embodied in the personality of Annie Besant. When Mrs. Blavatsky died, the spiritual leadership passed to Annie Besant, and she was the most suitable person to take over this leadership. Everything that must live in Theosophy lives in her. She unites the ideal of the will, the enthusiasm of feeling and at the same time the scientific direction of our movement. And all this is immersed in what constitutes the basic element, in spirituality, regardless of whether Annie Besant is discussing a scientific, an agitative or an occult topic.

In the views, only the outer form of expression for the innermost part of her soul is embodied. And that is the task that the Theosophical movement has set itself, to immerse all branches of human activity today, all impulses of the will and all scientific ideals in spirituality, to bring everything out of the dead. This spirituality speaks for itself when Annie Besant speaks to us. It was therefore a solemn moment when she opened the congress in Amsterdam, when she explained the 'why and wherefore' of the movement.

She said, roughly, the sense, not the wording: The task of the Theosophical movement is the spiritualization of our entire culture, our entire civilization. If we survey the last decades of our culture, we see that it has reached an infinite height in the most diverse points. We see that science, that the external material life, has reached such a summit as has never been the case before. We see how the horizons of the nations have expanded infinitely, we see that these nations have made the whole world the dwelling place of the nations. This outer material life can only be the outer expression of the inner life of culture, of the inner life of civilization, of the very soul of human development and progress. And to impress this soul of human development and progress on the outward, splendid aspects of our culture is the task of the Theosophical movement. It has been justified by the developments of the last thirty years in the evolution of our culture. We see everywhere that our civilization has changed in the last thirty years. We see that nobler spirits are striving out of purely material culture, out of intellectual science, out of the luxury to which material culture has risen. Thus we see that the yearning for spirituality runs through our entire time. This ideal is not limited to our Theosophical movement alone. It also lives in those who know nothing or want nothing to do with the theosophical movement. The theosophical movement wants to be nothing more than something that must happen in our time. Thus, in our society, there are women and men who want to show that they are touched by the fact that there is soul and spirit, that there is spirituality. To this end, the theosophical movement turns to the most ancient thoughts of humanity, to those that have given great impetus to all civilizations and cultural advances at all times since humans have existed on earth. It does not address these thoughts in an abstract, lifeless form, but in a living form. These thoughts did not arise by chance in this or that head. They have been instilled from time to time by the great leaders of humanity, instilled by those leaders who, in their own development, have outstripped our entire race, who have already achieved today, or rather, some time ago, what the masses will only achieve in a distant future. Such advanced brothers were always in possession of great, moving thoughts. And they have preserved these in the so-called occult brotherhoods. They have handed them down to the human race, graded according to the needs of the time and the peoples. As a rule, these brothers have remained in hiding. But they have sent their messengers where it was necessary; to this or that people, to this or that time. And from these messengers arose the great civilizing movements, the world religions, the great spiritual and material movements, which are said to be the expression of the souls of the people.

In the last third of the nineteenth century, such a wave was to pour forth again. It was to convey something of the ancient wisdom again. And what it conveys is contained in what the Theosophical Society has been teaching since its founding by Olcott and Blavatsky. That is what we have to incorporate into our culture, that is what offers the source for the spiritual civilization of humanity. Those who are inspired by these thoughts and want to work for the development of all of humanity based on these thoughts are worthy members of the Theosophical Society. If we win the souls of humanity, our culture will also present the right view from the outside. Everything has gone astray. Take a single trait: beauty. Beauty can only be present in culture if it contains true belief in the highest ideals of humanity. See why the true painters of the Middle Ages have had such a great effect, and you will find that they have kept their ideals secret in their works, which then speak for them. When we come to such true faith, to such wisdom, a divine light will also arise from our art. This is one of the tasks that the Theosophical Society will fulfill. And there are many such tasks. The Theosophical Society is not there to instruct individuals, to perfect individuals, but to educate them to be willing to make sacrifices, to be of service. Not the one who wants to perfect himself is a true member of the Theosophical Society, but the one who puts all his strength, his whole being, at the service of humanity.

Such a speech, which contained much wisdom, and the words of Annie Besant had cast a solemn atmosphere over the whole congress. If I am to describe the course of the events that followed this speech, which took on a more communal character, I have to say that the individual sections were represented by their general secretaries. The English section was represented by Mr. Keightley, the French by Mr. Pascal, the Italian was not represented, the representative could not be present; the German by Dr. Steiner.

Our theosophical brother in Holland, Mr. van Manen, managed the preparatory work and the work during the congress, so that the external management can indeed be called exemplary.

On the evening of that day – it was Sunday – Annie Besant gave a second speech, a speech about the new psychology. This speech was public, open to everyone, and held in the Free Church in Amsterdam. If in the morning one had the opportunity to see the spiritual life springing from the mind and idealism of Annie Besant, in the evening one had the opportunity to admire the whole scientific sense of this spiritual leader of the Theosophical movement. I can only hint at the ideas she expounded.

Those who can remember back to the time about forty years ago, to the course of the soul development theory, will remember the materialistic high tide. There was a saying by Karl Vogt, which roughly translates as: This is how the brain sweats out thoughts, just as the liver sweats out bile.

In this age of materialistic science, there were attempts to regard thought, spirit and soul as mere products of the outer mechanism of the body, attempts to explain thought in much the same way as the turning of the hands of a clock is explained by the mechanism of the clockwork. This view has undergone a fundamental change in the last forty years. It has been found that it is just as impossible to explain the mind from the nervous system as it is to explain a work of art by Mozart or Beethoven from the keys or strings of the piano. It has been recognized, scientifically recognized, that this is impossible. This was recognized by the experimental method itself. It has been found that when the brain is in a different state than during everyday life, it is not without all consciousness, but shows a different kind of consciousness, a different form of mental and spiritual phenomena. These states have been observed in dream life and then also in abnormal personalities, and it has been concluded that what we call soul has a very different expression in the brain mechanism. It has been found to manifest itself in a different way in the dream life and in yet another way in trances, somnambulism and so on. This has led to the realization of the great independence of the spirit in relation to the brain mechanism. French researchers have recognized that one and the same human individual shows completely different conditions in everyday consciousness when we interact with him than when we observe him in an abnormal state of the brain. There is a personality who has the pseudonym Leonie. During her examination, it was found that she has three states of consciousness: in one state she is a personality who tends to antipathy, while in the other state of consciousness she shows completely different characteristics. And a third state could also be induced in her. This justifies one of the basic convictions of all religious systems, that the mind has only one tool in the brain mechanism and that what it accomplishes in it is only one form of expression, and that the mind therefore has an independence from this form of expression. This justifies the theosophical aspiration to seek the truth not only with the help of the brain, but also with the help of such states in which certain personalities can place themselves.

This was a lecture by Annie Besant, which essentially shows the difference between what is established on our lecterns and what the theosophical worldview represents. It is precisely from such lectures that it becomes clearer and clearer that our culture and civilization of today will culminate in what the theosophical worldview proclaims. In this sense, it is an advanced post, and Western civilization will follow it.

For the next two days, the work was divided into so-called departments. A large number of lectures were announced, from all parts of the world. There were different rooms for the lectures, in order to cover all the material. It became clear that the various representatives of the Theosophical worldview have pursued their ideals everywhere. The work of Theosophical students already extends to all sciences, to art and to social life. And here it has become clear how sources can be drawn from all branches of contemporary culture, flowing together into the great stream to which our theosophical movement belongs. It was also possible to see how the theosophical movement has a fertilizing effect. What otherwise seemed to us to be without content appeared to us here in a light in which even those who do not belong to the theosophical movement will soon be drawing their insights.

The departments were: firstly, the department of science; secondly, the department of comparative religious studies; thirdly, the department of philology; fourthly, the department of general human brotherhood; fifthly, the department of occultism; sixthly, the department of philosophy; seventhly, the department of methods of theosophical work. In these seven departments, the work of the Theosophical Society was carried out in the following days.

Allow me to sketch out just a few of the achievements. Since the talks were held in different rooms, I cannot talk about everything.

An interesting lecture was given by Dr. Pascal on the nature of human consciousness, and it was precisely in this lecture that modern thinking, modern scientific view, gradually wants to embrace the theosophical concepts and ideas, as it tries to express the concepts, ideas and truths that are the content of ancient wisdom in a modern way.

In the second presentation, our Munich member Ludwig Deinhard gave a stimulating talk. Following on from Annie Besant, he tried to provide a suggestion and first spoke about the multiple personality. This is precisely the multiple personality that we encounter in appearances, as they occur to us through the medium Leonie. There we are dealing with three states of consciousness, including one that is quite different from the ordinary consciousness of the medium Leonie. The experimenter himself said that a medium in such a state remembers things from her youth, of which she otherwise has absolutely no memory. The medium also shows memory for the past, which did not take place in this present life, but must have taken place in another, previous life. This is a reference to reincarnation. Deinhard tried to explain this personality; and those members of society who enjoy a higher state of consciousness should take the opportunity to follow these points of view, which are being taken up by modern psychology, in their higher consciousness, so that we can establish a kind of harmony between what modern science is doing and what the mystic endowed with clairvoyance is able to experience within himself.

Following this discussion, another one took place about double consciousness, about the second self, which our member [Orage from Leeds] held.

Then a series of other lectures followed, which dealt with the important question of the fourth spatial dimension. These are particularly important because this question must be thoroughly studied by researchers at some point. We have particularly interesting and instructive literature. There are books today about things that were laughed at not too long ago. In the explanations about space and the fourth dimension, we have a guide to how people can directly form a real idea through external experiments of what Hellscher actually calls four-dimensional space. This is a guide to give even the everyday person an idea of it. Until now, only mathematicians could gain such an insight. But here you have the opportunity to gain such an insight through ingenious models. When I have made the models myself in the fall, I will give you a series of lectures here to show you how to gain such an insight directly from the model. That was the scientific part.

The second department was that of comparative religions. Here, an Indian lecture on the future of religions was particularly significant.

This was followed by the third department on philology. There were some very interesting papers that could give us important insights into the development of various concepts. I cannot go into details here. The yearbook will provide more information about these lectures.

Then the fourth department spoke about the idea of brotherhood. And then the fifth department about occultism. Mrs. Annie Besant gave another speech. She talked about the nature of occultism. I can only briefly touch on the content of this extremely important speech. The speaker started from a saying of Mrs. Blavatsky, who said that occultism is the realization that the universal spirit of the world has brought forth all things, that we must seek an expression, an outward form of a universal spirit in all things, and that he who seeks this universal spirit and finds the methods and means to find this spirit is an occultist. This is what occultism is in abstract form, but it is not so easy to state exactly what the essence of occultism is in detail. Man sees around him material things, which he sees ruled by forces that we call natural forces: electricity, heat, light, and so on. Then he sees the phenomena controlled by the laws of nature, by the law of gravity, by the law of attraction and repulsion, by the law of causality, by the laws of life. Material forces and laws are what ordinary science is able to convey to us about the world. The occultist differs from the ordinary scientist in that something else dawns on him about the forces and something else about the law. Through the methods he is able to apply, he comes to see and perceive that which is hidden behind the forces in the world, that which is occult. And when he perceives what is hidden behind the forces, then these are not again forces, not such things as can be perceived by the ordinary, everyday consciousness, but they are beings, beings of a higher nature, which belong to the so-called higher worlds. The occultist rises from the nature of the forces to the nature of the beings, from the nature of the forces to the creative beings. He arrives there through direct vision. He recognizes the Formers of the world. The forces which the ordinary man sees as means of expression are only the outer projections, the outer shadow and reflection of these Formers of the world. And where ordinary science fails, the occultist ascends to Beings of an even more exalted nature, to Beings that extend from the Formers of the world up to the so-called Logoi. These are for the occultist what is hidden behind what science calls laws. The scientist recognizes the material forces, the material laws, the occultist sees the higher beings, the creative entities, whom he gets to know as the agents and shapers of the forces of nature. He gets to know the most exalted Logoi, which only externally reveal themselves in the existence of the laws of the world that permeate the celestial spaces. In order for the occultist to arrive at these insights, he must undergo careful training and manifold tests. They consist of two things: first, to expand the consciousness of the person, to broaden the horizon beyond this sensual, physical world; and secondly, to develop senses that can perceive those higher worlds just as the outer eyes and ears perceive the outer physical world.

Before a person can seek to expand their consciousness, they must exercise careful control over their thoughts. Without this, no step forward can be taken in occultism. The everyday person is ruled by his thoughts, but the occultist must rule his thoughts. Before you have managed to prevent any thought, any movement, any emotion from creeping into your consciousness, before you can summon and control them, we cannot gain access to occultism. Complete control of the thoughts, which makes man the master of them, is necessary. If man were to enter the occult fields without this control, he would suffer great disadvantages. The ordinary power is just enough to hold thoughts together. If man were to enter the occult with only this power of thought, it would be destroyed by the forces that assail it in the astral. When man has achieved complete control over his thoughts, when no emotion has access to him anymore, then he can develop the higher senses, the senses for higher perception. This is again a training full of tests. Here we are confronted with all the dangers that the occultist is well aware of. He whose sense is awakened in the spiritual realm knows that he is first tormented in the most terrible way by his own desires and passions. Desires, lust and pain are constantly flowing out. We see them and mistake them for objective entities. The difficulty is to distinguish them from the truly objective things. This is something we learn only through careful and strict training.

Another danger is that hostile forces threaten us and we are exposed to them. We must also learn to avert this danger. Furthermore, we must learn not to mistake the individual grimaces and fragments that present themselves to us for exhaustive reality. The strictest training is required here so that a person can stand on firm ground when he leaves the world, namely the physical world. Above all, the occultist must have eradicated all personal desires and passions within himself. He must want nothing for himself. He must put everything at the service of a great cause, which only he knows and which he may not even be able to express. When he has become desireless in this sense, then, when his consciousness is expanded and his senses developed, something will approach him that is called the voice of the Master. This does not approach us until we have learned to distinguish it from the other voices. When he is ready, he can go through the narrower gate, then he is ripe for initiation. Only those who really go through such a path are occultists. To them the exalted divine beings reveal themselves, which in the lower world present themselves only as laws.

This third lecture was an extraordinary complement to the first two. If I may say that in the first lecture the mind was uplifted to enthusiasm, that in the second lecture there was knowledge that enlightens, so I may also say that in the third lecture, where Annie Besant spoke about occultism, she sanctified the will, this root of being.

After this lecture we had the reading of a lecture by Leadbeater about occultism. I will only emphasize one point. It was said that experiments have been carried out to see what effect musical forms have in the astral realm. If you play a piece of music by Mozart or Beethoven in a room, then if you have astral hearing and vision, you can see the forms in the astral world in which the one or other work of art is expressed. The lines and forms of a wonderful piece of architecture are reflected in the lines and forms of a musical work of art in the astral realm. This astral architecture of music was particularly explored in America.

The next day, Tuesday, we still had to complete the scientific department and the department for methods of work. In the scientific department, I talked about mathematics and [occultism]. I tried to show how it came about that Plato demanded a mathematical course from his students on the basic concepts of mathematics before admitting them to

why the Gnostics called mathematics “mathesis” and why Pythagoras sought the essence of the world, insofar as it can be known by man, in numbers. I have tried to show that what was taught in those ancient times is by no means the abstract mathematics of today, but that in mathematics they had an immediate, intuitive perception, just as the person who hears a piece of music does not mathematically calculate the tone relationships, but perceives them in a sea of tones; in the same way, the occultist perceives these things. The ancients called it music of the spheres. In their intuition, the sensually pure, mathematical view allows a higher kind of intuitive music to arise. He perceives the three kinds of occult knowledge that are equally present in the occultist: the material, the intellectual, and the perception of great musical relationships that are based on numbers and numerical relationships. Only someone who knows what the Gnostics meant by mathesis can form a concept of this. A turning point occurred with the discovery of infinitesimal and integral calculus since Newton. Since then, one can calculate with infinitely small and infinitely large quantities. The ordinary mathematician cannot enter into this infinitely small and this infinitely large. Only those who know and are able to bring it to life within themselves can understand it. They can then also free themselves through a mathematical means. And so, as a mathematician, he can find access to the occult worlds and make a contribution to them. I then showed how, in the time when Plato's and Pythagoras' music of the spheres had been lost and Galileo and Newton were exerting their influence, the world of the senses was conquered, the physical laws of nature were discovered, mathematics became different and people took possession of mathematics itself. In the past, finite mathematics was known. Since Newton and Leibniz, we have had the mathematics of infinity. Those who study it arrive at occult, intuitive vision. They arrive at turning back, at moving upwards. They become free from everything that speaks to them in the sensual-material world. And something very peculiar enters their astral body. Those who truly grasp mathematical concepts, grasp them in a living way, their thought forms become completely different. Every thought-form that is influenced by sensuality seems to be closed off as if with a breath. Then it rebounds from the outside. But if it is free of sensuality, the thought-form opens up and then envelops every thing with its thought-form. Everything that is antipathetic has been transformed into something sympathetic. In this way you have become an occultist. This is a contribution, an attempt to come from a particular branch of science to occultism.

Then a Frenchman spoke about the rhythm in the world and [Bhagavän Däs, Benares, read a paper about the relationship between self and non-self]. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel are a closed book for modern science itself. It would be satisfying if our very powerful German philosophy were to be transformed by the ingenious thinking of India.

From the department on the methods of the theosophical work, the lecture given by Misses [Hooper, London] must be emphasized, which is appealing because of a certain turnaround in the external way in which this entity represents theosophy in the world. Those who heard my report on the London Theosophical Congress will recall that I had to mention that Christianity was almost completely rejected there. This rejection of Christianity has now given way to a complete understanding of it, so that we are learning not only to speak in Indian and Muslim terms, but also to endeavor to reveal the infinitely deep core of truth of the Bible, of the Old and New Testaments. And then something emerged of which the more recent times knew little until today. It turned out that the Bible is a deeply esoteric scripture and that the deepest truths on which it is based are also the expression of the theosophical truths. Those who understand what is hidden in this book must marvel and admire the occult, and they must say to themselves: Only now do I recognize what the Bible is. Mrs. Hooper must have been moved by such feelings when she said, “The core has always been the same, but the forms have changed.” We find in the Bible and in Christianity symbols of such depth and such conciseness and forcefulness that we can speak entirely from the Bible when we advocate the Theosophical teachings. Now, during the Theosophical Congress in Amsterdam, we have been able to observe how there is already a current within the Theosophical movement towards the revival of the Gospel of John. I will talk about this again next Monday.

The congress was closed on Tuesday afternoon. Mrs. Annie Besant was able to sum up in a few concise words what we had all felt during these days of the congress, that our Dutch brothers, who have made such great strides in the Theosophical movement, had indeed made every effort to make this congress a worthy one, that they had proceeded judiciously and energetically.

The Dutch may be a small country, but they have a big heart, and it is better to have a small country and a big heart than the other way around.

In the evening there were more thanks and a lecture about the aura. Between the individual events there were also artistic performances. All the choir members and declaimers were taken only from members of the Theosophical Section in Holland, so that we have to say about the Dutch that the members have made gratifying progress in recent years. We can therefore say that this congress was an extraordinarily dignified expression of the Theosophical movement and that we look forward with great enthusiasm and interest to the reunion in London. The symbol of the movement came to me in a small experience. We visited the house where Spinoza was born. It is a small house. There is no plaque, no memorial. On the other hand, it is a house of squalor. One could say that this is irreverent. I had a different thought. Nothing of the temporal reminds us of the great spirit of Spinoza. The eternal lies in the progress of the spirit.

When we consider an appearance such as the one we were talking about yesterday, it becomes as clear as possible that not only did materialism arise in the last third of the 19th century in the spiritual development of humanity, but something that is fundamentally even worse than materialism: a certain insecurity and lack of stability has arisen, especially among those minds and thinkers who could not unconditionally go along with materialism. In this last third of the 19th century, we actually find the following situation. We find that the actual materialistically minded and attuned people at that time already had a certain inner security. One need only take a look at all those people who, out of their, one might say, power of knowledge, declared the scientific results to be sovereign and, from there, founded a world view. They appeared with a certain tremendous self-assurance. And it was not so much the content of what they gave as the certainty of their appearance that produced the numerous materialistic followers at that time. On the other hand, all those who, as I discussed yesterday, only held to the spirit with the abstract ideas, felt more or less as uncertain as the Swabian Vischer, of whom I spoke yesterday. They could only hold on to the spirit by saying: There are ideas at work behind the phenomena of the external sense world. But they could only present these ideas in the abstract. They could not bring a real spiritual life behind these ideas to the people's attention. They could not speak of a real spiritual life. Therefore, the abstract ideas did not have a guiding power for them. And so, by the 1890s, there was actually nothing left in public life of that idealism that had still been valid in the first half of the 19th century, which was then represented by isolated people, as I indicated in the penultimate issue of the “Goetheanum”, but which had just dried up by the turn of the century.

It is characteristic that the last third of the 19th century was introduced by a very effective book, the “History of Materialism” by Friedrich Albert Lange. This “History of Materialism” made an extraordinarily deep impression. It was first published in 1866, so it actually marks the beginning of the last third of the 19th century. This “History of Materialism” can be seen as a symptom of the state of mind that humanity was now approaching. For what exactly does this “History of Materialism” contain?

Friedrich Albert Lange presents the idea that man could not arrive at any other rational worldview than materialism, that he could not actually do otherwise if he did not want to indulge in illusions, than to declare atomistically arranged matter to be the starting point for a knowledge of the world. So one must take this world of material atoms filling space as the basis for reality.

Friedrich Albert Lange, of course, noticed that one had to form concepts about this world and that these concepts, ideas, were nevertheless something other than that which lives in atoms. But he said: Well, the concepts are just a fiction. - He actually coined the term “conceptual poetry”. And so man fashions his concepts for himself. Only the extraordinary fact arises that not every man fashions his own concepts; but, to understand each other a little, it comes about that people fashion common concepts. But the concepts are fictions. Real is only the atomic matter scattered in space.

You see, that would be crass materialism, which explains everything that goes beyond materialism as fiction. And one could say: at least it is a consistent point of view! But that is not the case in Friedrich Albert Lange's book. If he only went as far as I have told you so far, he would be a consistent materialist. Fine. I told you yesterday that consistent materialism cannot be refuted. And if someone has no access to the spiritual world – Friedrich Albert Lange certainly had none – then he can actually do nothing but posit materialism as the only valid world view.

But that is not what he does. Instead, Friedrich Albert Lange says something else that, I would say, runs like a red thread through all the arguments in his book. He says: It is true that one can only assume the material world of atoms to be real. But if one assumes that, if one now goes and says that the material world of atoms is at work in space, arranged in hydrogen and nitrogen in such and such a way, interacting in such and such a way, if ideas are boiled down in the brain, and so on – if one assumes all this, then in the end it is also just a construct of concepts. So materialism, which one is forced to profess, is itself actually only idealism, because one is again only inventing the world of atoms.

There is a much simpler image to express what Friedrich Albert Lange expressed in his world-famous book; with regard to logical form, there is a much simpler image. It is the famous Munchausen personality, which grasps its own hair and pulls itself up. The idealist takes the idealistic hair and pulls himself into materialism.

We see that one of the world's most famous works, written at the beginning of the last third of the 19th century, is actually nothing more than quite ordinary nonsense. It cannot be said otherwise. It is actually quite ordinary nonsense. If it were materialism, this “History of Materialism,” then at least it would be new. But that it is a materialistic materialism, a fabricated materialism, yes, that is pure nonsense. But what happened in this last third of the 19th century, which was so successful scientifically? This historical fact must be brought to mind. What happened? Friedrich Albert Lange's book became world-famous, because it was translated into almost all the cultural languages, and the most outstanding, enlightened minds regarded it as a redemptive act.

You are familiar with the matter that has now been performed so often in eurythmy: “Bim, Bam, Bum”, where the one tone, Bam, flies past the tone Bim; but Bim has surrendered to Bum:

“He is also a good Christian,
but that is just it”.

I have to remind you: All those who then drew their wisdom from Friedrich Albert Lange and who in turn formed the starting points for the fact that basically all our public thinking is permeated by this, were all enlightened minds – but that is just it: for the last third of the 19th century! And those who were merely the audience didn't notice any of this. And so, with regard to the most profound issues of human interest, a state of intense sleep has indeed descended.

You will say: these things are exaggerated. — They are not exaggerated! Only the depth of the sleep that has befallen humanity with regard to the greatest questions of spiritual life, the depth of this sleep is understated, not what I have said is exaggerated, but the general view of these things is understated. And if a healthy foundation is to be created for a future spiritual life, this whole serious fact, as I have just characterized it, must be brought to mind, brought to mind with all intensity. For it is just this that has excluded the interest of humanity in the spiritual world from the development of this humanity. And gradually it became the case that the less someone touched on spiritual problems at all, the more he was considered a great scientist. That was the situation at the turn of the century.

It was into this situation that Anthroposophy was to be introduced. And this is how, if I may put it, the task of Anthroposophy must be conceived. It must be conceived in such a way that it must actually work from the foundations, and must not tie in with this or that that already exists in one direction or another. There is simply nothing there, and one must understand the essence of anthroposophy from the foundations. Then, when one understands the essence of anthroposophy from the foundations, one will find that the facts that are currently available through the natural sciences are highly useful for anthroposophical research in all areas and that these facts of natural science can only be properly illuminated through anthroposophical research. This is how the situation must be understood. But for this to happen, it is necessary that a certain part of humanity really decides to lead intellectualism into the spiritual.

Of course, the people who join the anthroposophical movement are all deeply imbued with a certain urge and inclination towards the spiritual world. But very few people love to lead the world of ideas of the present into the spiritual. They would like to take in Anthroposophy as a kind of comfort for the soul, so to speak, by excluding the world of ideas. But that will not suffice to give Anthroposophy its impulsive power in spiritual life. You see, what is involved here must really be grasped in the individual, concrete fact, and today I want to present you with just such a single concrete example.

I have often told you that what you have put on as a head today is the transformed organism from your previous life. But you have to imagine the head as being separate from this organism from your previous life on earth. It really is like that. In the previous life on earth, you had to think away the head, it dissolved in the universe. But what was the rest of the organism, that now becomes the head of the next life on earth. And this organism in turn becomes the head of the next life on earth, and so on. That is how it is.

Now someone might say: But not only my head was buried in my previous life, but also the rest of my organism. It has not had the opportunity to transform into the head of my present life. — Yes, that is a very superficial view. You do not look at your head and the rest of your organism, but at the physical matter that fills your head today. Yes, that also changes about every seven years during your life on earth. What you carry within you today as matter, you did not have eight years ago. That which goes through the earth life is the invisible, supersensible form.

The matter that fills your head you have, of course, only taken up in this life. But the form, the supersensible forces that today round the eyes and turn up the nose, are the same forces that in the previous life formed arms and legs and the rest of the organism. That you can be seen by other people with physical senses is due to the fact that completely formless matter fills your form. It is not matter that gives you form. If you eat salt, the salt wants to be cubic, it does not want to be nose-shaped, nor eye-shaped, it wants to be cubic and so on. You do not owe the form in which you appear as a human being to the matter that is the basis of your physical visibility; but the form of your present head has really gone through metamorphoses, through the form of your organism, except for the head of the previous earth life. But that is why your head was really in an extraordinarily favorable situation. Because it has been so well treated in the universe, it is also the first to appear as a properly formed head in embryonic life. Just think, the head is very beautifully formed at first, while the other organs in the first embryonic life are really only attached to it as secondary organs. It must first be formed from the outside, and actually looks terrible in relation to the human form when you look at it, while the head is actually very beautifully formed from the very beginning. Of course, for someone who only recognizes the fully grown human being, the embryo's head will also have something unappealing about it, but actually it is already beautifully formed. This is because it brings its formative forces with it from the previous life.

This head has actually been worked on between death and the present birth, as I described in the lectures on cosmology, religion and philosophy, which I gave some time ago at the Goetheanum. This work between death and a new birth relates precisely to the development of the formative forces of the human head.

But that is why the human head is something extraordinarily perfect in relation to the cosmos. The human head actually contains the material image of the human spirit, soul and body. So when you look at the head, you have spirit, soul and body working together in a material way, in that they appear in shaped matter. One could say: for the human head, spirit, soul and body are still bodily. You see, that is the secret of the human head, that the spirit appears in a bodily way, that we can show materially in the miracle of the brain: this miracle is an image of the spirit. Just as sealing wax expresses what is on the seal, so through the head we have materially given spirit, soul and body.

In the case of the metabolism-limbs-human being, you can say: Actually, everything is more or less physically present. The legs, these two pillars, have not yet received anything of the miracle of the human head. They will undergo a metamorphosis. The lower jaw, with its wonderful function and mobility, will appear in the next life on earth, while the arms, after transformation, will be incorporated into the upper jaw in the next life, and so on. So that one can say: In the movement system - it is true that the arms are somewhat transformed after man has acquired his upright gait - the opposite is essentially the case, there spirit, soul and body are actually spiritual. There spirit, soul and body are thoroughly spiritual.

One would like to say that the way a person looks materially in terms of his legs and everything that is attached to them is not true. It will only show itself in its true material form in the next life on earth, when it has become a head. Now it is at the very beginning, and is actually quite insignificant in what it appears materially. The essential thing about it is what it first becomes through the will: the movement, the dynamics, the statics, everything that the human being transfers from his system of movement into the will. Thus, what is spiritually intangible, what is spiritually supersensible, is what this remaining human being is. So while the head of every material being is an image of the spirit and the spirit itself appears bodily, the bodily system of the body is hardly bodily. If one wants to find meaning in the whole bodily system at all, one must look everywhere: to what extent is the bodily suitable for the spiritual, for the spiritual revelation of the human being? So that one can say: This is the great mystery of the head, that spirit, soul and body are physical. That spirit, soul and body are spiritual, that is the great mystery of the lower human being.

You see, the Old Testament knew much more about these things from instinctive clairvoyance than today's man. Today's man actually overestimates the head. I have already discussed this from various points of view. In the Old Testament you will never find the illusion presented as if the brain concocted dreams! It says: “Yahweh tormented the man in his sleep in relation to his kidneys.” They knew that what is represented in dreams lies in the metabolic system. They did not attribute everything to the head. Why do we attribute everything to the head today? I'll tell you why: we don't believe in the spirit, so we don't look at the part of the human being where even the body is still spiritual. We don't really look at the lower human being, we are not proud of it. But we look at where even the spirit is physical and material, at the head: we are proud of that because that is where the spirit becomes material and bodily.

So, overrating the head, that is materialism. One wants only matter and also wants to have the spirit only as matter. That is why today in our physiological, in our scientific representations, the head is described as it is described, because one wants to have the spirit only materially. That is what it is, but in the head. Of course, no one knows that before this head could bring the spirit down to the physical, that is, material pictoriality, it had to go through the whole life between death and a new birth. That this material image of the human spirit could arise in the head at all had to be preceded by a long spiritual development. This material miracle of the development of the human brain is the conclusion of a wonderful spiritual development. But people only want to look at the material side and only want to accept the spirit in its material form.

Now, let us try to pay attention, my dear friends. Even if you are over fourteen years old, you can still pay attention. Isn't there a region in man that is entirely physical, and a region in man that is entirely spiritual? Yes, must there not be an intermediate point that is neither entirely physical nor entirely spiritual, that is both, and therefore neither of the two? There must therefore be a neutral point in the middle, where the spiritual passes into the physical and the physical into the spiritual, where neither of the two is present, where man is dependent neither on above nor below, where he is independent of both. That must exist somewhere in the middle.

Let us try to understand the significance of this point, which must therefore lie in the middle man, in the chest man. Imagine you have a scale here. Imagine a load here, and weights on the other side; now you create a balance. I must not give an excess weight here, otherwise it will go down; I must not give an excess weight there either, otherwise it will go down; I must not take anything away either, otherwise the whole thing will move. But look, here is a point, a neutral point. You could add as much as you wanted to this point, nothing would change in the balance of the scales. You could also take the scales there, and if you avoid creating an excess weight somewhere by any swing or something like that, you can move the scales all around, the balance remains the same. You can carry out the weighing correctly during the movement. This is a point that is not at all concerned with the whole system of the scales, an equilibrium point. You can do whatever you want with it, and nothing will change for the rest of the balance. For example, someone has a load on one side and weights on the other. Now he realizes: the balance beam is made of iron, I don't like that, I'll make it out of gold. Now all he has to do is enlarge the center point a little, because actually the point of rest is a mathematical point, but it will be possible to enlarge it a little. You can bring gold into this point of rest quite well: the balance will not be changed. If you put the gold somewhere else – outside the center – then the balance will change immediately. But if someone wants to create a hollow space there and put flesh in it, they can do that too, it won't change the balance. Another person puts butter in there: the butter melts in the sun, the balance of the scales does not change. In short, there is a point here, quite independent of the whole system of the scales, where you can do whatever you want.

In the same situation is the point that lies between the physical and the spiritual as a point of balance. It is not dependent on either the physical or the spiritual. Man can do whatever he wants with this point.

If you simply imagine that a person is a physical being and that everything is connected one-sidedly according to cause and effect, then you will not find this point. If you imagine that a person is only a spiritual being and that everything is determined from above by divine worlds, then again nothing can be done, because then a person must carry out what is determined by the gods. But if you know that there is a point of equilibrium, where man is determined by God upwards and by matter downwards, and with the one point, which can now be demonstrated in his middle-stage human existence, he can begin in the world whatever he wants to begin out of himself – if you have this threefold constitution of man, then you will find in the middle part, scientifically and strictly demonstrable, the fact of human freedom. You can say that, it is as scientific as any quadratic equation can be solved or a differential quotient can be sought or anything. It is something that can be treated according to the strict rules of science. So freedom is the result of a real knowledge of the human constitution, because there is a point in man that is as independent upwards and downwards as the fulcrum of the scales is independent of the load on the right and left. You can carry the scales around with you everywhere, you can replace this point, as I have told you, with whatever you want. In this way, you can also find a point in a person where natural causality, the connections between cause and effect, end, where the connections from above also end, the determination by the spiritual world, where the two maintain a balance. There, in this hypomochlion of human nature, human freedom is guaranteed. And it can be rigorously proven scientifically if one has a true physiology and a true psychology, not what one has today and which, as I have already shown you, adds up to amateurism squared in psychoanalysis.

These are the things that should make people who learn about them think, bearing the following in mind. You can take all of literature and philosophy, you can read about the problem of freedom everywhere – no one can cope with the problem of freedom. Why? Because they have no real view of the human being. Today, this does not exist except in anthroposophy. And the fact that one cannot cope with the problem of freedom points, in turn, to the other fact that I tried to shed light on yesterday, albeit with a humorous tone. But what I tried to characterize humorously yesterday, from an at least supposedly humorous creation, can also be presented in all seriousness.

And these things must be treated seriously if one is to profess Anthroposophy in earnest. Then it is really a matter of getting at the real realities and using them in the appropriate way. Not if one is not quite sure: should one profess spirit because one only knows spirit in abstract ideas, or should one profess materialism, yes, then one becomes a humorist like the Swabian Vischer, then, as a humorist, one devises a humoristic world system that, I might say, is not for a finer taste, the catarrhal world system. Of course, one can laugh about it, but one cannot say with absolute certainty that the world did not come into being through a “sneeze of the Absolute.” Once again, a material is not used in the right way. It is only a matter of always using the material in the right way. Whether you just want to recognize it or actually want to use it, you have to use this material in the right way. Yesterday I gave you an example of this, I presented the view of the Swabian fisherman, how he actually creates an entire world system out of catarrh as a compelling, overwhelming reality. Yes, in the field of anthroposophy we do not do that! There I also have a catarrh like I had yesterday, but I have only used it from time to time for illustration: now and then the catarrhal, the coughing came out; that was only used for illustration, not to somehow gain the basis for a worldview, but only to provide illustrative instruction.

Not true, if you stagger so aimlessly between the catarrhal matter and the merely ideal spirit, then you come to speak of the seduction and temptation by the god Grippo. That is no longer possible on the basis of anthroposophy. There you propagate a flu remedy precisely in order not to be exposed to the temptation of linking a whole myth of the Fall to the god Grippo! It is a matter of grasping the material at the right corner and putting it in its right place.

So things have to change significantly. If you were a person of the mindset of Vischer in the last third of the 19th century, you would get annoyed and spit and clear your throat and finally come up with the farce of the god Grippo. If you are an anthroposophist, you try to fight the flu with our very effective flu medicine! These are the things that point to the right difference in how one treats the material out of the spirit.

Just by looking at the way the human head is viewed epistemologically today, one can see that the entire contemporary worldview has a deep sympathy for materialism. And the fact that we are at a loss when faced with the problem of freedom is expressed by the fact that we simply do not know that two very different world impulses are at work in the upper human being and in the lower human being. And those who, in ancient times, only looked at the upper human being, found that man cannot be free because he is determined everywhere from the spiritual world. Those who look at the human being today simply ascribe a natural causality to everything that manifests itself in the human being. From both points of view, the human being cannot be free. But spiritual causality applies to the head, natural causality applies to the metabolism-limb-human being. In between lies the rhythmic organization, which is rhythmic precisely because things within it balance each other out rhythmically. In the rhythmic organization there is something that is neither determined in the spiritual nor in the material sense, that is neither determined nor causalized, that represents the point from which the impulse of freedom comes in the human being.

You see, at such specific points one can show how anthroposophy can shed light on the deepest problems of human existence. The moment the threefold human nature was presented in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln': the nerve-sense human being, the rhythmic human being, and the metabolic-limb human being, the same moment was reflected back to the 'Philosophy of Freedom', in which freedom was simply presented as a fact. It was illuminated by this fact of freedom, so that one could say: If you consider the human being in terms of his true essence as such a threefold organization, then you can arrive at a completely scientifically exact representation of freedom in the human being, just as one arrives at the representation of the hypomochlion in the case of the scales, or at some point in a system of forces, at the representation of a point of equilibrium, which is then there, independent of the rest of the interplay of the forces in question in the system. But you will also see from this how you can actually look everywhere today: Nowhere will you find the truth about these things. And from those inadequate concepts, which are very far removed from the true organization of the human being, people are educated today, forming moral systems, religious systems, and especially social systems. Yes, it is no wonder that these social systems reveal themselves in such aberrations of thought, as is so clearly evident from the example recently given by Leinhas in the “Goetheanum”, where one has to admit that the views that tie in with Marxism have been refuted by life itself, that life shows that they cannot apply. But that is not decisive; one must first wait until someone scientifically proves that they are invalid. One can actually, as it has been done by Leinhas, only quote such things in quotation marks with the authority's own words, because if one wants to repeat them, one thinks one's head will burst. Not only does a mill wheel turn in one's head, but one generally thinks one's head will burst if one is only to think about such things.

It is necessary not just to move within the anthroposophical movement and let everything go straight and crooked outside, but to take an interest first in how chaotic our knowledge and that which has been drawn from this knowledge in the world is gradually becoming.