The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Yesterday I attempted to roll out before you the overall significance of the earnestness of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science through the fact that I made the effort to show you what a difference exists between the overly abstract representations and conceptions, and that which also comes about in the soul in the form of representations and concepts—which also takes on the configuration of representations and concepts—but then is reality, effective working. We are concerned with the fact that man has the strong insight, how the human being, in his increasingly materialistic attitude (through the fact that he completely turns away from spiritual concepts) only concerns himself with concepts of the natural realm etc., makes himself evermore similar to the element of matter, how he in fact climbs down into this matter element, so that in the end it is no longer false when he maintains that the matter of his body thinks, his brain thinks—but that that is even correct that man becomes in fact a robot of the universe—and gradually, bit by bit, through the denial of the soul-spiritual element, the actual losing of this soul-spiritual element occurs. I said that this is naturally an uncomfortable view of the world for many people, and that many take to be something that they do not wish to accept for the reason that they believe that the human being, without his own input, will somehow in the long run be able to have his soul-spiritual element saved. This however, is not the case. The human being can also so strongly immerse himself into the material element that he cuts himself off from the soul-spiritual element, that he sinks himself into the Ahrimanic powers and continues on with these Ahrimanic powers in a world stream alien to our world, but without his ego, which indeed cannot belong to the Ahrimanic world, but which can only find its actually intended development when man follows the normal progressive element, that is, when he joins himself to everything that is connected to the Mystery of Golgotha, when he, above all else, recognises that in our time one has to seek the connection to what can be brought to all mankind in the way of spiritual research. In this evolution of humanity that has taken place for the occident since the middle of the 15th century, the period has begun in which the human being, when he looks out into his environment perceives only the sense world. And when he looks into himself since the middle of the 15th century he has been increasingly misled in the direction of intellectualising, abstracting, making thin his inner soul experiences.

What we experience today as concepts, what we receive for our view of the world out of the customary official professions, that contains, basically, absolutely no relationship to existence. That also cannot be used to penetrate into the true realities. It is only a prejudice when one believes that the human being, in that he makes the usual abstract thoughts, actually has a life of soul. These abstract thoughts are actually an element alien to reality, they are merely a sum of images; so that we can say: outside himself man sees the sense world, and inside man sees that which, fundamentally is only a world of images which basically has no real connection to existence.—That is actually the destiny of mankind since the middle of the 15th century; to perceive the sense world outside—we shall soon see what significance this sense world has in regard to a universal world view—and to experience “inside” a soul element that increasingly becomes a mere image element. One can raise the question: why is it then that mankind of the civilised world since the 15th century, in regard to soul existence, has become increasingly mere images? That is so, so that man, through this, can ascend to a true freedom.

So as to understand that, lets look at our world more closely as it is for us today and as we ourselves stand within it, Let us disregard the human being himself in the whole of the wide world; look upon all that can be found in all the wide world, shall we say as clouds, mountains, rivers, as structures of the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms, and let us ask ourselves: what is then actually in the whole surrounding, of what one may so describe as I have done it? Let us just schematically sketch what we are concerned about. Shall we say: everything above us, everything spread out around us as the minerals, the plants, and to a certain degree the animals—the human beings we shall disregard, which naturally in reality we cannot do, but which we may do hypothetically - thus we imagine that that is nature without the human being. Here, in this entire nature, without the human being, there are no gods. That is what has to be seen and understood! In this nature devoid of humans the gods do not exist, just as in the shucked oyster shell the oyster does not exist or in a separated snail shell the snail does not exist, This entire world devoid of humans which I have spoken of hypothetically, it is what the divine beings have separated from in the course of development, just as the oyster separates from its shell, The gods, the divine beings are no longer within it, as little as the oyster or the snail are in their separated and shed shells. What we have around us as world as I have described it is in the past. In that we look out upon the nature, we look upon the past of the spiritual element, and upon what has remained as a leftover from the past of the spiritual element, Therefore, there also no longer exists the possibility of truly coming to a religious consciousness merely through looking upon the outer world, for one should by no means believe that in this outer world there is present anything consisting of the actual humanity—creating spiritual divine beings. Elemental beings, certainly: a lower order of spiritual beings, that is another matter; but what the actual creative spiritual beings are that belong to the consciousness of religion as such, that belongs to this world only insofar as it is the shell, the residue, what is left behind.

Such things as we have just touched upon are indeed sometimes felt as earnest truths by single outstanding personalities. Truths that arise in the souls of such personalities. The one who, in the spiritual development of the 19th century, felt most deeply how what surrounds man as nature is the remainder of a divine spiritual development is Phillip Mainlaender, who through the overburdening heaviness of this knowledge arrived at his philosophy of suicide, and then also ended his life in suicide. Sometimes it is the destiny of human beings through their karma, to have to go very deeply into such one-sided truths. Then this destiny itself becomes for one incarnation one-sided and difficult, as it did for Phillip Mainlaender, the unfortunate German philosopher.

After you have taken that up into yourselves which we had to say about this hypothetical outer nature, you can now ask yourself: indeed, where are then the gods, those gods of which we speak as the actual creative ones? Here I would have to make the schematic sketch a little different, here I have to sketch the human being, and within the human being the gods. If I may put it this way: within the human skin, in the human organs are the actual creative gods. The human beings, in their being, are the bearers of the Divine Spiritual Being at present. Thus the divine-spiritual, that is also the actual creative element in the present, is within the human being. And if today you imagine the entire outer nature, and then imagine a future of several thousand years lying before us, nothing will then exist of these clouds, minerals, plants, and even the animals. Nothing of all that will exist, that now lives outside the human skin. But what gives the inner human organisation its permeating spirit and soul, that will find its continuing development, that will be the future.

If I were to sketch this schematically, then I would have to say: if this large outside circle is nature, and the smaller one within it is man, and the smaller kernel within it is the human-divine element, then, in the future nature will be shattered and disbursed (shown by outraying beams). The human being will be expanded into a world, and that which today is his inner core will be his outer surroundings, the nature itself.

The insight into the fact that the divine-spiritual, which we have to address as the really creative element in the present, lies within the human skin, is a uniquely serious bit of knowledge. For that lays a responsibility upon the human being in regard to the whole cosmos. This enables the human being to understand such a thing as the Christ word: “Heaven and earth shall pass away,” that is, the outer world, “but my words will not pass away.” And if the word of Paul is fulfilled in the single human being: “Not I, but the Christ in me,” then again the words of Christ live in the single human being: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words” in the single human being, that is, what is within the skin and is taken up by Christ, “will not pass away.”

But what does what I have said indicate? It indicates that man through his abstract concepts, through what he has intellectualised, has so to speak, made himself empty in his inner being ever since the middle of the 15th century. For what purpose then has he made himself empty? He has made himself empty, just so that he can take up the Christ impulse, that is to take up the creative-divine into his own inner being. We look into the outer world, I said: we look only into the sense element. There we see only the divine past. Among those things that have remained out of this divine past are also the elemental spirits etc. which have remained at a lower stage. We look into our inner being, and in this inner being we see at first the mere imaged abstract concepts that are increasingly intellectualised—which only thereby become something concrete and real, in that the human being takes up the spirit-impulse through spiritual science and joins it to his inner life. Man has the choice—and this choice becomes an ever more serious matter since the middle of the 15th century—either to remain static with the intellectualised abstract concepts, or to take up the vitalising content of spiritual science. If he stays with the intellectual abstract concepts, then he will further develop a brilliant natural science—for these concepts are dead, and he will grasp the dead nature with the dead concepts in a remarkable way. But all that makes a mummy out of him, all that similarises him to the element of matter, all that leads to the fact that he succumbs to the Ahrimanic element, For the continuing progress of earthly affairs, for the progressive continuation of the entire earth development he needs the taking up of the spiritual element—which today does not approach the the human being in an atavistic instinctive way, but rather which has to be worked for, worked hard for, by the human being. Thus the taking up of the science of the spirit is not a theory, but rather is the working out, the working for, of something real. It is the filling out, of the otherwise empty inner soul life, with a spiritual and spiritualised content. With an empty inner life, confronting the past in what is outside, thus will humanity in its mass remain today in that it only wants to give real meaning to thought-logic along with experimentation and does not want to take up what is a vitalising spiritual life. The world today stands not only in danger of succumbing to the Ahrimanic element, but it is also in danger of losing the mission of the earth as a whole.

Whoever thinks this through and feels this through will only first properly sense the deep earnestness that is to be connected to the acquisition of spiritual science, And he will then not underestimate this knowledge, which is the knowledge of the human being. The knowledge of the human being does not actually exist within present day natural science or within the old religious traditions. What do the old religious traditions offer? They direct the gaze of the human beings up into abstract, world-estranged heights; they do not speak of how the gods indeed live, organically, in the inner life of man's being, These thoughts they would declare to be heretical to the highest degree. If today one wanted to bring the traditional European and American religious confessions to an understanding that the gods live in human beings, and that this ancient word is a truth: the human body is the temple of the gods - they would rise up in indignation and wrath against such heresy. Thus, this is on the one hand.

On the other hand we have a materialistically oriented natural science which, just because it is materialistic, does not understand matter. What does natural science understand about the function of the human brain? What does natural science understand about the function of the heart, etc.? I have often showed you, and have also expressed it publically that material science holds the view, for instance, that the human heart is a kind of pump that pumps the blood in the body. This general heart science taught as university science is simply nonsense, no more or less than simple nonsense. It is really not the case that the heart is a pump that presses the blood out in all directions and again allows it to return, but the actual vitalising element is the circulating of the blood itself. There is in the blood, in the circulating blood itself, there lives what just in human existence is the actual mover of the circulation in the human organism, and the heart is only the expression of this and nothing else, The circulating movement is evident. Whoever says, in the sense of today's natural science that the heart drives the blood into the body he speaks in approximately the same way, as though one would say: when it was ten minutes to nine the one hand was close to nine, and the other hand was over ten, and these hands along with the whole clock works have driven me up here to the podium. But that is, indeed, not so! the clock is only the expression for that which has happened. Just as little is the heart the pump works that brings it about that the blood is driven through the body; it is only the expression for it; it is a concomitent part of this entire blood system, and is the expression for the blood system.

Natural science as it is generally practised today also leads just as little into the inner life of the human being; at the very most it makes the inner into something external in that it dissects corpses. However, through this one does not come into the inner life, one comes thereby only to making the inner into something external, for at the moment when one anatomises the interior of the human being, one makes what one achieves into something external. Thus we are concerned with the fact that in the entire spiritual life today there is tendency present to really penetrate into the inner life of the human being. This is just what spiritual science has to bring; here spiritual science has to bring the knowledge of the human being. However, most of our contemporaries are frightened away from this knowledge of man. why, then? Because the religious traditions for centuries have expressly surrounded man in a fear regarding all real striving for knowledge. One needs only to consider what nebulosity, what a swimming in words the traditional confessions have presented to man, which they then bring to a climax in the sermon, that the human being ought not to cognise the super-sensible element, but just believe it, merely feel it in a darkling way. All that bears within it the tendency that man, even out of his arrogance, his having too high an opinion of himself, and yet at the same time out of his tendency to inertia, brings to birth the idea: one does not need to think about the divine, that must rise up out of the depths in dim feelings and instincts. Then, however, there rises up nothing other than the dim miasma of the organic element, which is then transposed into illusions, which then again are transformed by the practioners and theologians (who are working toward comfortably convenient practices) into all sorts of nebulous things.

Through many centuries the instinct for knowledge was suppressed which solely and along can bring humanity forwards, on the course of earthly development, and then onwards in the course of spiritual development. Today, human beings downright get gooseflesh when they are to begin to develop real cognition and are to live up into the spiritual world. But to the degree that one gets this gooseflesh, to that same degree one cuts oneself off from the spiritual-soul beings, and similarises oneself to the element of matter.

One can say that when such things are to be undertaken seriously, then human beings immediately withdraw in fright, because today everything is considered only externally. I should like to intersperse something here which I have recently noticed again. We have founded the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. This Waldorf School was founded entirely out of the spirit of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, that is to say, a pedagogy and didactics was given in lectures to those who were expressly chosen for this school. Here we are concerned with spirit that has permeated into this pedagogy and didactics. Today it is already even happening—for everything that is founded by us becomes a sensation—that people want to visit this Waldorf School and observe it for a couple of hours, in order to see whether in this couple of hours something or other could be observed that is somewhat different than in other schools—thus, again, only a sensation! However, the spirit of the Waldorf School one can become acquainted with only through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, not in that one sits down so as to audit the lessons, and disturbs the instruction to a lesser or greater degree. To take up anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is just more inconvenient and less sensational, than it is to audit -that is to say, basically to make it more convenient and comfortable for oneself.

The pedagogy and didactics we are dealing with here reckon with spiritual worlds and above all with the pre-existence of the human being. How is it then with the pre-existence of the human being? Well, we think back to the earthly year of our birth. Let us suppose we were descended to earthly life in this period of time (a short red line is drawn). Children who are born quite a bit later, during this same time, have still been above in the spiritual world (a longer red line above). We were already on the earth during the time when those children were still above. They bring something to us that has been experienced in the spiritual world during the time when we were already down in the physical world.

One can see that consciously in the children that are before one, if one instructs with the pedagogy and didactics in such a way as the instruction should be in the Waldorf School. One should vividly place onesself into the spirit of the child, that is, develop the practice in daily life, for the reality of what must be given in representations and ideas from out of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. But just from such things people were kept away through the traditions of the traditional religious confessions, who above all else, did not want that the inner activity would be more highly developed in human beings, which then also leads to real knowledge of man, and which brings about the deep truth that the location of the gods is itself within the skin of the human being.

Let us look upon our planets from outside. In all of what otherwise is in the planets, there is no divine-spiritual element, From out of the human-like beings that are upon them, there radiates the divine element out from the planet. Are the planets thereby diminished, because this radiates out from the bodies of the human beings? You will also become formally friendly with this thought, if you take it away from earthly life and transpose it onto another planet. In that you stand here upon the earth, you will to be sure, find that this thought has something preserved and oppressive about it, the thought that you and your fellow human beings are the bearers of the divine-spiritual element. But if skilfully you direct your gaze to another planet, then you shall more easily be able to conceive the thought, that among those beings who constitute the highest kingdom of nature there, is the location from which the divine-spiritual element gleams down toward you.

The thought which we have developed today supplements from a particular side the other earnest thoughts which we have yesterday allowed to appear before our souls.

Yesterday we have allowed the thought to appear before our soul, that in the interior of the human being that is developed, which is to bring forth the further reality of the earth development which is to carry the earth development forward, whereas it also lies within the will of the human being to hinder this earth development: to take up the Ahrimanic stream alone. And today we place alongside this the other thought, that actually everything that is around us is transitory outer nature, for it today represents only a leftover of the divine-spiritual creating. Divine-spiritual creating which hold sway in the present and will hold sway in the future: that is what is present within the human skin; so that it appears to be paradoxical, and yet is true, when one says: everything which the eyes see, which the ears hear from out of the human surroundings, that passes away with the earth. That alone which lives in the spaces that are enclosed in the human skin that lives over into Jupiter, that carries earth existence into the future planetary development. One will again receive an urge to really become acquainted with the relationship of the human being to the cosmos, when one places the tremendously serious necessity before one's gaze, to learn the real knowledge about the human being.

The human being indeed actually lives between two extremes. We have called these extremes the luciferic stream and the ahrimanic stream. We can also grasp them, I should like to say, in a more elementary way. The philosophers have always spoken of the fact that man cannot actually grasp his being going out from the thoughts. That is also actually true; for, what it is that man has as the feeling of Being; from whence does that actually come? The human being exists in the spiritual world before he enters, through conception or birth, into the physical existence. He comes down out of supersensible worlds into his earthly, physical, sensory existence, Here he experiences, above all, something new that he has not experienced in the supersensible worlds, which actually encompasses when he has descended. That is what one—but only representatively—can call gravity, the attractive force of the earth, which one can call “having weight.” Now, you know: the expression “having weight” is only actually taken from the most important phenomenon of gravity. For what we have, for example, as “being tired” is also something similar to “having weight” and what we feel in our extremities when we exercise them is also something that is related to “having weight.” But because “having weight” is the most representative of these things, we can say: the human being places himself into gravity. And in a concealed way the human being always perceives something of this gravity when he designates something or other on the earth as real.

In the opposite sense, if the human being is between death and a new birth, there, just as on earth he is joined to gravity, he is then joined to the light. For light also has a sense: “to the light” is again used in a representative way, for we receive through the eyes most of our higher sense perceptions, when we have vision, and then we speak of light. But that which lives in the sense-feeling of the eyes as light, is the same as what lives as sound for the sensing-feeling of the ear and gives evidence of itself in single tones, as the light gives evidence of itself in single colors, And this it is also for the other senses. Fundamentally speaking it is the stimulation by all the senses which one designates representatively as light, just as one designates gravity in a representative way. We are taken up into the extreme of gravity when we descend to the earth. We are taken up into the extreme of light when we transpose ourselves through death into the world between death and a new birth. And we are always, actually fitted into the middle condition between light and gravity, and every sense-feeling, in that we experience here, is fundamentally half light and half gravity. At the moment when we, perhaps through something pathological or through a dream, experience ourselves without our gravity, we experience the mere spiritual element as just in a bout of fever or in a dream. The bout of fever, in regard to the soul, consists in this, that man has experiences, without being aware of his own gravity while experiencing them. This balance between gravity and light, into which we are spanned, that is, for a great deal of what we experience in the world in that we as men are spiritual-physical beings, just that which is intimately with the world riddles. But neither the world stream that lives itself out in the traditional religious confessions, nor that which lives itself out in the fantasies of natural science, arrives at the break-through from the abstract concepts into the light or form the sense-feelings down into gravity. Human beings have indeed become blind, deaf, and stupid regarding these things.

Let us take a crystal; that gives itself its own from. What then is in that as a force? In that is the same force man feels pressing down upon him, the same force that gives form to the entire earth. Just look there where the earth can give form: in the whole surface of the sea, in water; here gravity gives the form. Then the same force gives the crystal the form, only here it works from within. The scientific fantasies move in the direction of saying: what lies behind matter, or in matter, one does not know, that is a world riddle. What lies behind the surface of matter we experience, when we experience our own gravity, for in regard to the whole earth we are placed within the same forces which, for example, work in the small entities and hold the single parts together. One must just be in the position to recognise the great in the small, and the small in the great, and not just speculate what may stand behind matter. What goes beyond matter, the divine-spiritual element that holds sway in the beings, that must be recognised through the fact that one stokes up the fires that can be stoked in the inner element, which brings one to higher inner experiencing, that brings to understanding the concepts and representations that are really related to what dwells in the temple, which is represented by old traditions as being man himself,

There is something within old atavistic widsom, as I have often emphasized, which one can experience with deep devotion, In the present, one is called upon again in full consciousness to fetch it up again out of the depths of being, and also to make this a guideline for the spiritual and social actions, and for life.

We have been considering the human form, human life, the inner life and the human spirit in relation to the cosmos. Looking back on the different aspects considered, we are able to produce a kind of extractof it all and say: Deep down in the to produce a kind of extract of it all and say: Deep down in the depths of human nature lies the will (Fig. 37).

In a number of ways it is the most “mysterious” element in human nature, if I may put it like this. When we think of the moral sphere, it inevitably strikes us that our aberrations, tendencies in us which are often entirely hostile to the world, arise from the moral sphere as if from unfathomable depths, and that all pricks of conscience and self-reproaches we may feel stream up from the depths of the will.

We also know that this sphere of the will is mysterious by nature because in many respects there is something indefinite about it, something over which we have little control. It is an element which pushes us hither and thither on the billows of life, and we are not always able to say that we relate to it with our conscious impulses. In another respect, relating to our understanding, I have always stressed that the true nature of the will impulse lies outside our conscious awareness, being at the same level as experiences made in deep, dreamless sleep. In this respect, too, will intent is an indefinite, mysterious element which has been poured into human nature.

Considering the human mind and spirit, we are not able to say that human beings have it only when awake, say, or consciously forming ideas; we also have it in sleep and in the part of us into which will intent have been poured and where we are in the equivalent of deep sleep. We can imagine, therefore, that mind and spirit are also present when we sleep.

With reference to our will intent, two things can be distinguished. In the first place there is the will intent which induces us to be active from the time we wake up until we go to sleep—unless, of course, we are real lay-abouts. We are unable to perceive the nature of this will intent, but its effects come to awareness because we are able to form ideas of them. We do not know how our will impulse works when we take a step, but we can see that we have taken a step forward. We form an idea about the effects of our will intent and in our waking life we thus have an idea and awareness of those effects. This is one aspect of our will intent.

Another aspect is that the will is active in us even while we sleep. Internal processes occurring while we sleep are also effected by the will. We merely do not perceive them. Just as the sun also shines at night—on the other half of the earth, where we do not live—so will intent streams through our inner nature while we sleep, though we are not aware of this. It does, however, show itself afterwards, when we look back on the state of sleep.

We may thus distinguish between two kinds of will intent, an inner and an outer one.

Our will intent may be said to be down in the ocean depths of soul, rising up in waves. Since we had to agree that it is active also during sleep, when our living body is merely involved in organic activity, with no soul element streaming through it nor the light of mind and spirit illumining it, we also have to say: Our sleeping will intent has to do with organic activity, for organic, or vital, processes occur in us that are essentially connected with the will. They continue when we are awake and our will intent is in full flow. Will intent is revealed in internal metabolic processes, another area where we can speak of organic activity.

Out of the depth of this will ocean in human nature rise the waves of what comes to expression in our feelings. We know that in feeling, human nature works at a dimmed-down level (Fig. 37), with the intensity of conscious awareness reduced to the level of dreams. It is, however, less dim than our will intent. Something from the depths of human nature rises up into the light. Human beings bring light into their inner nature through feeling. In the process, the two aspects of will intent rise up into the more intensive level of conscious awareness; both inner and outer will extent can rise up and come to conscious awareness.

We therefore distinguish two kinds of feeling. One is the feeling which rises up from the sphere of the will and is related to the sleeping state in us. It comes to expression mainly in the antipathies of which we have so many. The kind of will intent which makes us active in the outside world when it rises up into our feeling, bringing us together with the world in sympathy, comes to expression in all the sympathies we feel for the world. In this region of the soul, therefore, we have dreamlike feeling experience coming to expression in sympathy and antipathy, sympathies and antipathies which go all the way up to our feeling for beauty, sympathies and antipathies relating to forms in life, both man-made and natural forms, and also the sympathies and antipathies which we have thanks to our organs of smell or taste, as we perceive odours and tastes, finding them good or repellent. All this rich and varied activity is the actual activity of the soul. Will intent is therefore revealed in organic activity, feeling in soul activity (Fig. 37).

If we study soul life from this point of view we can learn a great deal. We perceive that the waking state rouses us to be in sympathy with the world around us. Our antipathies essentially come from more unconscious levels. They rise from the sleep level of our will. It is as if our sympathies were more on the surface and as if our antipathies entered into them from unknown depths. Antipathies reject. With them, we put the world around us at a distance, isolating and shutting ourselves off. Egotism is mainly based on antipathies rising up inside us. The more egotistical a person, the more is the element of antipathy active inside. Egotists want to isolate themselves and be as far as possible by themselves.

In ordinary life we are not aware of the interplay of sympathies and antipathies in the inner life. We do become aware of it when our relationship to the outside world becomes abnormal and our defensive reactions, using our antipathies which come from the realm of sleep, also become abnormal. This happens, for instance, when our breathing is out of balance during sleep and we have nightmares. Inwardly we experience this as antipathy used to defend us against something that wants to invade us, reducing the experience of our egoity.

We get a glimpse of deep secrets in human life. When someone develops very powerful antipathies which then also enter into waking life, antipathy may enter into everything, even the astral body. The astral body then lets antipathetic nature stream out in front, rather like an abnormal aura. It may happen that the individual feels even people with whom he normally has a neutral relationship to be antipathetic and indeed people he normally loves. All the different kinds of persecution mania arise from this kind of situation. When we experience antipathetic feelings that cannot be explained by external circumstances, they come from overflowing antipathies in the soul. The pole arising from the realm of sleep in the life of the soul has undergone abnormal development in this case.

If this antipathetic element gains the upper hand, we get someone who hates all the world. And this can go to extremes. All education and all work done together in the social sphere should be designed to prevent people from developing this hatred. But just consider, if the element which rises up from the depths of human nature can make people into such egotists when it becomes too powerful, what must the inner will intent be like which is at the sleep level and which is mercifully hidden from us! We never come to realize the all-pervading presence of this sleeping will intent in the whole of our organism and our limbs. At most, highly unusual dreams may make some people a little aware of what lives in the will intent which restores the organism when we are sleeping. This element—I have shown it from another point of view in earlier lectures³⁴—is rightly beyond the threshold of ordinary consciousness. When you come to know it, you come to know everything in human beings which can take them to an extreme degree of badness. It is a profound mystery of life that our organic activity is balanced out by powers which would make a person a criminal, a bad character, if they were to gain the upper hand in conscious life.

Nothing in the world is in itself evil or good. Something which is thoroughly evil when it comes up into conscious life, also regulates our organic functions and restores our used up powers of vitality during sleep, which is the right place for it to be used. If you enquire into the nature of the powers which restore used-up vitality, you have to say: It is evil. Evil has its function. When human beings gain spiritual insight and see this element it is an element about which spiritual scientists of earlier times also said: Its true nature must not be described, for sinful are the lips which utter it, sinful the ears which hear it. People must know, however, that life is a dangerous process and that evil is very much present down in the depths, a much-needed power.

The waves also rise higher than this, into the forming of ideas. When the sleeping inner will intent which brings light in the sphere of feeling rises into the forming of ideas, light is shed, but at the same time the quality of our ideas is reduced through abstraction. Feelings of antipathy still have living intensity in human experience. When they rise up into the sphere of ideas, they live in all the negative, dismissive attitudes people have (Fig. 37). Everything we dismiss in this way, every “negative judgement”, as logicians call it, is due to antipathetic feeling, or sleeping will intent, rising up into the life of ideas.

When the sympathetic feelings which have their origin in wide awake, outside-related will intent, rise into the sphere of ideas we get positive attitudes. As you can see, we now have merely abstract images. In our feelings of sympathy and antipathy we still have something very much alive. In the opinion-based attitudes formed in the sphere of ideas we are standing still, as it were, and observing the world. We take a positive or negative stance. We are not as intensely involved as in antipathy, we merely say no. This is an abstract process. Instead of developing the heat of antipathy we simply say no. Instead of developing the warmth of sympathy we say yes. In contemplative calm we are above any relationship to the outside world to the point of forming an abstract judgement. Activity is merely at image level, therefore, and we are able to say, especially in the light of what was said yesterday: Here (Fig. 37) is the activity of mind and spirit, but will intent, feeling and judgement, or the forming of ideas, rise even further, into the sphere of the senses. What becomes of a negative opinion when it enters into the sphere of the senses? It becomes a situation where we perceive nothing. In terms of the most notable form of sensory perception, vision, we may call it a situation in which we see nothing and experience darkness: Experience of darkness. A positive judgement on the other hand means experience of light. We might of course just as well speak of experience of dumbness, experience of sound, etc. We could put this into words for every one of the twelve senses.

We may now ask ourselves what kind of activity we have in the sphere of the senses. We have considered organic activity, activity of the soul, and activity of mind and spirit. The last of these is entirely image-based, but still our own activity. The processes which occur between our senses and the outside world, on the other hand, really are no longer our own activity, for the world is influencing us. It is perfectly possible to draw the eye schematically, making it an independent entity, as it were. What happens in the eye is that the outside world penetrates into the organism as if through a bay. Here we are not engaged in our own activity in the world, but our position in the world is such that we may say: It is the activity of the gods. This is active throughout the whole world around us which in darkness inclines towards negative judgement and in light inclines towards positive judgement. Wise minds of the second post-Atlantean age had a particularly strong feeling for this activity of the gods influencing human beings in their relationship to the world. They had a powerful feeling for God in the light and God in the dark. God in the light is the divine principle with luciferic bias, God in the dark with ahrimanic bias. This is how people of the ancient Persian civilization experienced the world around them. To them, the sun represented that outside world—Sun as source of divine Light: second post-Atlantean age.

The sphere which lies between judgement and feeling was the main sphere of experience for the third post-Atlantean civilization, which is the Egyptian and Chaldean civilization. People then experienced the divine principle not so much in light and darkness outside but in the area where ideas come together with feelings. The influence of the gods on Egyptians and Chaldeans caused people to pour something of their antipathies into their negative judgements and something of their sympathies into their positive attitudes. We need to be able to read the images and other documents which have survived from that period to see how everything arose from positive sympathies and negative antipathies. Looking at figures from Egyptian tombs and elsewhere you can sense something in them that was artistically created out of positive sympathies and negative antipathies. You cannot create a sphinx without bringing in ideas alive with sympathy and antipathy. People then experienced not only light and darkness but the living quality inherent in feelings of sympathy and antipathy. The Sun was experienced as the source of divine Life.

During Greco-Latin times people had largely lost the direct connection with the outside world. In my Riddles of Philosophy³⁵ I have shown how people still experienced thoughts the way we experience sensory perceptions today but were gradually progressing to the state in which we are today. Due to I development, we essentially no longer have a real relationship to the outside world in which our I is in effect asleep in the body, and we tend towards the sleeping state. This was not so highly developed in ancient Greece, though it had already become quite powerful. The ancient Persians had not entered deeply into their physical nature. They did not really see themselves living fully in their bodies, particularly if they were sages. It was their belief that they moved and were active throughout the whole universe on the waves of light. The ancient Greeks had already reached a stage where they were asleep inside their bodies where this cosmic aspect was concerned. When we are actually asleep, our I and astral body are outside us; but compared to the wakefulness of the ancient Persians, even our waking state is one of sleep. The wakefulness, or let us say the “waking up”, of the ancient Persians which I have characterized in my Occult Science was like entering into the human senses, with light itself coming in at the same time.

We are no longer aware of the fact that on awakening we bring light into our eyes. Light is a shadowy element outside us. This meant that the Greeks were no longer able to perceive the sun as the true source of life but as something which penetrated them inwardly. To them, the element in which the sun lives inwardly in human beings was the element of Eros, love. Eros, the sun-element in man, was the true inner experience of the Greeks. Thus the sun was seen as the source of divine love.

Then, from about the 4th century onwards—I have spoken of various aspects of its specific nature on other occasions—came the age when the sun was experienced as no more than a physical body, a sphere of vapour, out there in space. The sun had, in fact, become obscured for humanity. Persians truly felt the sun to be the reflector of the light which billowed and lived in space with tremendous vigour. The Egyptians and Chaldeans saw it as life billowing and pulsing through the universe. The Greeks experienced it as something which instilled love into organic nature, as Eros guiding them through the waves of the emotions. Entering more and more into the human being, experience of the sun vanished into the deep down depths of soul. Today we carry the sun element down in those depths. We are not meant to reach it, because the Guardian of the Threshold stands before it, and because it is in the depths of which it was said in the ancient mysteries that no utterance should be given, for sinful were the lips which uttered it, and sinful the ear which heard it. Schools existed in the 4th century who essentially taught, to allow Christianity to spread: The Sun Mystery must not be revealed; a civilization has to come where the Sun Mystery is not known.

Behind everything which happens in the physical world are the inner powers which, I’d say, are teaching out of the universe. The Roman emperor Constantine (306–337) was one of the instruments of those powers. Under him, Christianity took the form in which the sun is denied.

Another emperor, Julian the Apostate,³⁶ took less account of developments in his day but let himself be guided by his enthusiasm for the last remnants of the old instinctive wisdom learned from his mystery teachers. He was murdered because he sought to restore the old tradition of the threefold Sun Mystery. The world did not want to take that road.

Today we have to realize that the old, instinctive wisdom needs to be revived in conscious wisdom. Wisdom which has gone down to subconscious levels, into mere organic, and even sub-organic, activity needs to be brought back to consciousness. The Sun Mystery must be found again.

When the Sun Mystery was in the process of being lost, Julian, who still wanted the world to be aware of it, made the most terrible enemies who finally killed him. Today we have enemies who are against the new Sun Mystery which anthroposophy must give to the world. Historical evolution now follows the opposite trend. The 4th century brought the decline; today we need the rise.

In this respect Constantine and Julian are symbols of historical evolution. Julian may be said to have stood on the shattered ruins of the past, wanting to rebuild the forms of the old wisdom out of those ruins. The old forms had been destroyed by Christianity, which initially, under Constantine, had taken materialistic form. Countless works of art, works of ancient wisdom and written works were destroyed, anything that might give people even a hint of the old Sun Mystery.

It is true that in order to achieve freedom, humanity had to come to believe that a sphere of gases moved through the universe out there, though physicists who would be able to go there would be really surprised, for instead of a sphere of gases they would find an empty space, indeed less than space. They would discover that the sun out there is not a sphere of luminous gases—which is a nonsense—but in the first place just a reflector (Fig. 39), unable to radiate light and at most merely reflecting it. In the spirit, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Venus and the moon radiate light. Physically the sun appears to be shining on them, but in reality they radiate light towards the sun, which acts as a reflector. This is the physical reality. The ancient Persians were still able to perceive the sun as the source of light for the earth, but not an actual source but a reflector. Later it became the reflector of life and the reflector of love.

Julian the Apostate wanted people to understand this and was got rid off because of this. To achieve freedom, humanity had to go through superstitious belief in a sphere of gases radiating light—something we see represented as the absolute truth in modern physics textbooks. Now we must penetrate to the truth of the matter again.

In this respect, therefore, Constantine and Julian are very much like two symbols. Julian wanted to preserve the old traditions so that the true Sun Mystery might still reach people. During the early centuries, the Christ was still an Apollo or Sun figure.

The Sun Mystery was seen as the most precious jewel humanity possessed. It was symbolized in the Palladium,³⁷ which was said to have been kept in Troy, where the mystery priests used it to reveal the true nature of the sun to people in ritual, sacramental form. It was then taken to Rome, and part of the secret knowledge held by Roman initiates was that the Palladium was in safe keeping in Rome. Essentially the initiate priests of ancient Rome, and also the early emperors of Rome, above all Augustus,³⁸ based their actions on the knowledge that the greatest jewel the world possessed, or at least its physical symbol, was in Rome. The Palladium had been placed beneath the foundations of the most highly esteemed temple in Rome, a fact only known to those who knew the deepest secrets of Roman life. Through the spirit, it had, however, also become known to those whose role it was to bring Christianity to the world. The early Christians went to Rome because of this. So there was a definite spiritual element.

When Christianity was secularized under Constantine, the Palladium was removed from Rome. Constantine founded Constantinople and had the Palladium put in the ground under the column he erected to himself. The further development of Roman Christianity was that the Sun mystery was taken away by the very emperor who established the rigid forms, rigid mechanisms, of Christianity in Rome. With this, Christendom has lost the wisdom of the world, the outward sign of this being the transfer of the Palladium from Rome to Constantinople.

In some parts of the Slavonic world—people always put their own interpretation on this—it was believed until the beginning of the 20th century that in the not too far distant future the Palladium would be taken from Constantinople to another city, in their belief a Slav city.

Whichever way this may be, the Palladium—you may take the whole as an outer symbol, but it is the inner aspect which matters—is waiting to go forth from Constantinople, which is casting darkness on it, to a place where it will be totally obscured. The Palladium is thus taken to the East, where the old wisdom lives in decadence and growing obscurity. Just as the Sun is a reflector of light given to it from the universe, everything depends on it in the further evolution of the world that the Palladium be illumined by a wisdom arising from the treasury of insight gained in the West. The Palladium, heirloom of the past taken from Troy to Rome and then to Constantinople, and to be taken even further into the darkness of the East, the Palladium, jewel of the Sun, must wait until in the West grows in mind and spirit and is able to release it from the dark, obscured treasury of insight limited to the natural world. Our mission for the future is thus linked to the most sacred tradition of European development.

To this day, then, legends are still alive for those initiated into these mysteries, some of them very plain, simple people who walk about on this earth. Legends are still alive of the Trojan Palladium being taken to Rome, of the Palladium jewel of wisdom, being taken to Constantinople when Roman Christianity became worldly and superficial, and that it shall be taken to the East one day when all the old wisdom will have been stripped away in the East, having fallen into utter decadence, and legends that speak of the need to bring new light from the West to this Sun jewel.

The Sun has vanished into the depths of human nature. We have to find it again by developing the science of the spirit. Humanity must find this Sun again, or the Palladium will vanish into the obscurity of the East. Today it is sinful to utter words that are wrong: “Ex oriente lux”. The light can no longer come from the East, which has fallen into decadence. Yet the East, which will have the Sun jewel, however obscured, is waiting for the light of the West. Today, people walk in the darkness, arrange to meet in the dark, their eyes turned to—Washington.³⁹ Salvation, however, will only come from Washingtons able to speak out of the mood of the spiritual world in such a way that they not only open economic gates for China, looking for the darkness which surrounds the Palladium. Salvation will only come when conferences held in the West decide to take light to the East, letting the Palladium shine out again. Like a fluorescent body, the Palladium in itself is dark; it shines out when light streams into it. The same holds true for the wisdom of the East. Dark in itself, it will be illumined and fluoresce when the wisdom of the West, the light of the spirit from the West, enters into it.

The people of the West are as yet unable to see this. The legend of the Palladium needs to be placed in the bright light of consciousness. We must feel the right kind of compassion for Julian the Apostate who wanted to close his eyes to the age when the light of freedom would be able to germinate in the darkness, who wanted to preserve the instinctive wisdom of old and therefore had to perish. We have to realize that Constantine took the light of wisdom from the Romans by giving them a worldly Christianity, sending Christianity into the darkness. We have to realize that the light which will let the Palladium shine out again must be sought in modern science. Only then will an important step in world history come to fulfilment. Only then will the Palladium, which became Western the moment the Greeks burned down Troy and which still holds the light that shone from Troy, become Western and Eastern. It is now in the dark and must be brought out of the dark. Light must be brought to the Palladium.

We can win enthusiasm from historical evolution if our hearts are in the right place. If they are, in the sense of what I have been presenting today, we shall also be able to find the right response to the impulses which are the true impulses of the science of the spirit.

I’ll continue with this on Friday.

• 34. See the lectures given on 23 and 24 September 1921—Cosmosophy Vol. 1. (GA 207)
• 35. Steiner R. Riddles of Philosophy (GA 18), tr. by F. C. A. Koelln. New York: Anthroposophic Press 1973.
• 36. Flavius Claudius Julianus (c. 331–363), half-brother of Constantine, Roman emperor (361–363).
• 37. In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an image of the goddess Pallas Athene which had come from heaven and was “the luck of Troy”. Stolen by Odysseus and Diomedes, it was thought to be in Argos, Athens or Sparta. According to the Romans, Anaeas had taken it to Rome.
• 38. Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus (63 BC–AD 14), first Roman emperor.
• 39. Washington Conference (21 November 1921 - 6 February 1922) to discuss naval disarmament and the Far East. Led among other things to American-British-French-Japanese agreement to guarantee each other’s territories and a collective guarantee of China’s independence.

We have been studying how the living form of man, his soul and his spirit, are related to the cosmos. The various aspects of this subject presented in recent lectures may be summarized in somewhat the following way:—

In the deep foundations of man's being lies the will. In many respects the will is the most mysterious and secret element in human nature. It is obvious that aberrations, inclinations that often run counter to the world's well-being surge up from fathomless depths of the moral life; everything experienced by the soul in the form of pricks of conscience or self-reproach streams up from the deep ground of the will.

The reason why the will is so mysterious and secret is that in many respects it is a highly indeterminate force; there is in it an instinctive element over which we have little control and which drives us hither and thither on the turbulent waves of life often without our being able to claim that any conscious impulses are racing effect. In another respect too, namely in respect of our knowledge of the operations of the will, it has again and again been emphasized that these operations of the will are as withdrawn from human consciousness as the experiences of deep, dreamless sleep; so that in this respect too, the will is an indeterminate, mysterious element.

But when we think of man's spiritual nature we cannot conceive that this spirituality is active in him only during his waking hours or in his conscious mental life; the fact is that this spirituality is at work in him during sleep too, within that part of his being where his will lies and which, like the experiences of deep sleep, is wrapt in unconsciousness.

Spirit is therefore also present and at work in the sleeping human being. Two aspects of the will can be distinguished.—There is first of all the will which—unless we are out-and-out idlers—spurs us to activity from the time of waking until that of falling asleep. True, we cannot perceive the will in actual operation, but the effects rise into our consciousness inasmuch as we can form mental concepts and images of them. We do not know how the will-impulse works in us when we are walking; but we can see ourselves stepping forward. We form mental images of the workings of our will and in this sense are conscious of its effects. That is one aspect of the will.

The other aspect is that the will is also active in us while we sleep; for then inner processes are taking place, processes that are also operations of the will, only we are not aware of them—precisely because we are asleep. But just as the sun also shines during the night on the other side of the earth where we are not living, so does will stream through our being while we are asleep, although we have no consciousness of it.

Thus two kinds of will can be distinguished: an inner will and an outer will. The workings of the outer will are made manifest to us while we are awake; those of the inner will take effect while we are asleep. Strictly speaking, the inner will is not revealed to us; nevertheless when we look back, its effects can be apprehended afterwards, as having been part of the condition of sleep.

The will is present as it were in ocean depths of the soul. It surges upwards in waves. But just because we must admit that the will is at work during sleep, when the bodily part of our being is engaged in purely organic activity, neither pervaded with soul nor illumined by spirit, it follows that the will as such has to do with this organic activity. The will that is working while we are asleep has to do with organic activity, inasmuch as organic processes, life-processes take place in us. These processes are essentially connected with the will.

But during waking activity too, that is to say when our will is in flow, life-processes are taking place. The will takes effect in the processes of internal metabolism. So that here again we can point to organic activity.

Out of the ocean-depths of will in the human being, waves which come to expression in the form of feeling, surge upwards. We know that feeling is a dimly apprehended experience, that so far as actual consciousness is concerned it has really only the intensity of a dream. But at any rate it is clearer than the workings of will. It raises into greater clarity what lies in the ocean-depths of man's being. Feeling brings a certain light into, intensifies, consciousness; the two poles of the will rise into this intensified consciousness and in it both the inner will and the outer will are made manifest.

Thus we distinguish two kinds of feeling, as we did in the case of the will: an inner will in the sleeping state, an outer will in the waking state. One kind of feeling surges upwards from the will that is connected with man's sleeping condition. This kind of feeling lives itself out in the antipathies—taking the word in the widest sense—unfolded by the human being. This is feeling which tends towards antipathy. Whereas the will that is involved in outer activity and therefore leads man into the external world, manifests in all those experiences of feeling which have in them the quality of sympathy. The dreamlike experience of feeling which comes to expression in sympathies and antipathies aroused by different forms of life, by forms of art or of nature, or in sympathies and antipathies connected more with the organs and arising in us through smell or taste or through a sense of well-being or comfort—all this weaving activity belongs to the soul. Will therefore reveals itself in organic activity, feeling in activity of the soul.

If the life of soul is studied from this point of view, great illumination will be shed upon it. Waking life arouses in us sympathy with the surrounding world. Our antipathies really come from more unconscious realms. They press upwards from the sleeping will. It is as though our sympathies lie more on the surface, whereas antipathies rise up through them from unplumbed depths. Antipathies repel; antipathies draw us away from the surrounding world; we isolate ourselves, shut ourselves within our own being. Inwardly up-streaming antipathies are the antecedents of human egotism. The greater a man's egotism, the more strongly is the element of antipathy working in him. He wants to isolate himself, to feel enclosed within his own being.

In normal life we do not notice the constant interplay of sympathies and antipathies in the life of soul. But we become aware of it when our connection with the outer world becomes abnormal, and when the antipathetic element that derives from sleep also works in an abnormal way. This happens when our breathing, for example, functions irregularly during sleep and we have nightmares. In a nightmare, the soul is putting up an antipathetic defence against something that is trying to penetrate into us, preventing us from full experience of our egohood.

We are gazing here into deep secrets of human experience. If a man unfolds the element of antipathy in his life of feeling so strongly that it plays into his waking life, his whole being is permeated with antipathy which then lays hold of his astral body; his astral body is steeped in the element of antipathy; antipathy streams out from him like an abnormal aura. It may then happen that he begins to feel antipathy to people to whom his attitude was otherwise neutral, or indeed even to those he loved or knew intimately. These conditions can give rise to persecution mania in all its forms. When feelings of antipathy not to be explained by outer circumstances are experienced, this is due to the overflowing antipathies in the soul, that is to say, to an abnormal intensification of the one pole in the life of soul which forces its way upwards out of sleep. If this antipathy gets the upper hand in a human being, he becomes a world-hater, and such hatred can assume incredible proportions. The aim of all education and all social endeavor should be to prevent human beings from becoming world-haters.

But think of it.—If what surges up from the ocean-depths of man's being can promote overweening egotism when it gets the upper hand—and persecution mania in all forms is nothing but superabundant, excessive egotism—if all this is possible, what is there to be said of the inner will itself, which a beneficent creation conceals by means of sleep? We have no knowledge at all of how this inner will permeates our limbs, our entire organism. The most that can be said is that now and then, through strange dreams, something comes up into the consciousness of what lies in the will that works in our organism during sleep. What lives in this will lies—and rightly so for the ordinary consciousness—on yonder side of the Threshold. He who comes to know it, learns to know the force by which the human being can be led to uttermost evil. The deepest secret of human life is that we have the counterbalance of our organic activity in the very forces which, were they to gain control in the conscious life of a man, would make him into a criminal.

Let it be remembered that nothing in the world is in itself evil or good. What is radically evil when it breaks into our conscious life, is the counterbalance for our spent life-forces when it take effect in its right place, namely as the regulator of organic activity during the sleeping state.

If you ask: What is the nature of the forces which make compensation for the spent life-forces?—the answer is: They are the forces of evil. Evil has its mission—and it is here. If this becomes known to anyone through spiritual training, it is for him as it was for earlier seers, something of which they said: Of its essential nature it is not lawful to speak, for sinful is the mouth that speaks of it, and sinful the ear that hears of it.—Nevertheless man must realize that life is a process fraught with danger and that evil lies in its deep foundations as a necessary force.

Now these waves of the will surge even higher—into the conceptual life, the mental life. The sleeping will lights up in feeling, and when it surge upwards into mental life, it becomes still clearer but at the same time denuded qualitatively—it becomes abstract. In feeling fraught with antipathy there is still a certain lively intensity. When this element of antipathetic feeling surges into the conceptual life, it comes to expression in the form of negative judgments, judgments of rejection or denial. Everything we negate in life, everything the logician calls “negation”, negative judgment, is the uprush of antipathetic feeling, or of the inner will, into the conceptual life.

And when sympathetic feeling—which has its origin in the will of waking life, in the outer will—rises up into the conceptual life, our judgments are affirmative. We have arrived at something which, as you see, lives in us as abstraction only. In feeling, inasmuch as we unfold sympathies and antipathies, there is still intensity of life. Whereas in acts of judgment—which are a mental, conceptual activity—we are, as it were, immobile, contemplative observers of the world. We affirm and negate. We do not come to the point of actual antipathy; we merely negate. It is an abstract process. We do not rouse ourselves to antipathy: we merely say, no. In the same way we do not rouse ourselves to sympathy: we merely say, yes. We are raised above our relation to the outer world—to the level of abstract judgment.

This, then, is a purely mental, concept-forming activity, which can be called spiritual activity. But will, feeling and conceptual activity can surge even higher—into the domain of the senses. When negative judgment surges into the domain of the senses, what is the result? The condition wherein we perceive nothing. If we think of it in relation to the most obvious process of perception, we can say: It is the experience of darkness—where we see nothing. On the other hand, affirmative judgment becomes experience of light. The same could be said with regard to the experience of silence, or of tone and sound. To all the twelve senses it would be correct to apply what has here been said in connection with the experiences of light and of darkness.

And now let us ask: What, in reality, is this activity in the domain of the senses? I We have spoken of organic activity, activity of the life of soul, spiritual activity. Spiritual activity is merely a concept-forming activity but it is still our own. What takes place between the senses and the outer world is in truth no longer our own activity, for there the world is playing into us. It would be quite correct to depict the eye as an independent entity; what takes place in the eye is that the outer world penetrates into the organism as it were through a gulf. We are no longer standing in the world with our own activity, but this is divine activity. This divine activity weaves through the world surrounding us. Darkness inclines in the direction of negation, light in the direction of affirmation.

The influence of this divine activity upon man in his relationship to the world was an especially vivid experience in the wisdom of the second Post-Atlantean epoch.—God in the Light—that is to say, the Divine with a Luciferic quality; God in the Darkness—the Divine with an Ahrimanic quality.—Thus did the ancient Persians experience the world. And to them the sun was the representative of the outer world. The sun as the divine source of Light—so it was experienced in the second Post-Atlantean epoch. On the other hand in the third Post-Atlantean epoch (Egypto-Chaldean) men experienced more strongly the sphere lying between judgment and feeling. At that time they did not feel so intensely that the Divine in the outer world is experienced in light or darkness, but rather in the impact between conceptual activity and feeling. Experience of divine activity among the Egyptians and Chaldeans caused men to bring an element of antipathy into negative judgments and sympathy into affirmative judgments. And only when we are able to decipher and understand the pictorial or other records of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch shall we realize that all were created and shaped out of sympathetic affirmation or antipathetic negation. When you look at Egyptian statues, figures on tombs, and so forth, you can still feel that their forms give expression to sympathetic affirmation or antipathetic negation. It is simply not possible to create a sphinx without bringing into it sympathies and antipathies inhering in the conceptual life. Men did not experience merely light and darkness but something of the element of life that is present in sympathies and antipathies. In that epoch the sun was experienced as the divine source of Life.

And now we come to the Greco-Latin epoch when man's experience of direct communion with the outer world was largely lost. In my book Riddles of Philosophy, I have shown that although in that age man still felt his thoughts as we today feel sense-impressions, he was already approaching the condition in which we live at the present time, when owing to the development of the ego we no longer feel any really living connection with the external world, when with our ego we are practically asleep within the body, are in a state of slumber. This condition was not so pronounced in the Greeks, but to some extent it was certainly present. To understand the Greek nature we must realize that the Greek had already begun to live very intensely in his body—not as intensely as we do, but nevertheless intensely.—Not so the ancient Persians. The wise men among them did not believe that they were living enclosed within their skins but rather that they were borne on the waves of the light through the whole universe. In the Greek, this experience of cosmic life was already losing intensity, falling into slumber within the body. When we ourselves are asleep, the ego and astral body are outside the physical body; but our waking, in comparison with that of the ancient Persians, really amounts to sleep. When the Persians woke from sleep—I am speaking of course of the ancient Persians as described in my An Outline of Occult Science, it was as though the light actually penetrated into them, into their senses.

We no longer feel that at the moment of waking from sleep we summon the light into our eyes. For us the light is outside, phantomlike. Nor could the Greeks any longer see in the sun the actual source of Life; they felt that the sun was something that pervaded them inwardly. They felt the element in which the sun lives within the human being as the element of Eros—the element of Love. Thus: the sun as the divine source of Love. Eros—the sun-nature within the human being—this was what the Greek experienced. Then, from about the fourth century A.D. onwards, came the time when, fundamentally speaking, the sun was no longer regarded as anything but a physical orb in space, when the sun was darkened for man. To the ancient Persians the sun was the actual reflector of the Light weaving through space. To the Egyptians and Chaldeans the sun was the Life surging and pulsating through the universe. The Greeks felt the sun as that which infused Love into the living organism, guiding Eros through the waves of sentient existence.

This experience of the sun sank more and more deeply into man's being and gradually vanished into the ocean-depths of the soul. And it is in the ocean-depths of the soul that man bears the sun-nature today. It is beyond his reach, because the Guardian of the Threshold stands before it; it lies in the depths of being as a mystery of which the ancient teachings said: Let it not be uttered—for sinful is the mouth that speaks of it and sinful the ear that hears of it.

In the fourth century A.D. there were schools which taught that the sun-mystery must remain untold, that a civilization knowing nothing of the sun-mystery must now arise. Behind everything that takes place in the external world lie forces and powers which give guidance from the universe. One of the instruments of these guiding powers was the Roman Emperor Constantine. It was under him that Christianity assumed the form which denies the sun.

Living in that same century was one whose ardor for what he had learnt in the Mysteries as the last remnants of the ancient, instinctive wisdom, caused him to attach little importance to the development of contemporary civilization. This was Julian the Apostate. He fell by the hand of a murderer because he was intent upon passing on this ancient tradition of the threefold Mystery of the Sun. And the world would have none of it.

Today, of course, it must be realized that the old instinctive wisdom must become conscious wisdom, that what has sunk into the subconsciousness, into purely organic activity and even into sub-organic activity, must once again be lifted into the light of consciousness. We must re-discover the Sun-Mystery.

But just as when the Sun-Mystery had been lost, bitter enemies rose up against the one who wished this mystery to be proclaimed to the world, and brought about his death, so again enemies are working against the new Sun-Mysteries which must be brought to the world by spiritual science. We are living now at the other pole of historical evolution. In the fourth century A.D. there was sunset; now there must be sunrise.

In this sense Constantine and Julian the Apostate are two symbols of historical evolution. Julian the Apostate stands as it were upon the ruins of olden times, intent upon building again out of these ruins the forms of the ancient wisdom, upon preserving for humanity those ancient memorials which Christianity, assuming a material form for the first time in the days of Constantine, had destroyed. Countless treasures were destroyed, countless works of art, countless scripts and records of the ancient wisdom. Everything that could in any possible way have given men an inkling of the ancient Sun-Mystery was destroyed.

It is true that in order to reach inner freedom, it was necessary for men to pass through the stage of believing that a globe of gas is moving through universal space—but the fact is that physicists would be very astonished if they could take a journey in space; they would discover that the sun is not a globe of gas giving out light—that is nonsense—but that it is a mere reflector which cannot itself radiate light but at most throw it back. The truth is that in the spiritual sense, light streams out from Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury, Venus and the Moon.

Physically it appears as though the sun gives the planets light, but in reality it is the planets that radiate light to the sun and the sun is the reflector. As such it was recognized by the wise men of ancient Persia with their instinctive wisdom, and in this sense the sun was regarded as the earthly source of Light—not indeed as the source itself, but as the reflector of the Light. Then, among the Egyptians and Chaldeans, the sun became the reflector of Life and among the Greeks, the reflector of Love.

This was the conception that Julian the Apostate wanted to preserve—and he was done away with. In order to reach freedom it was indeed necessary that men should hold for a time to the superstition of the sun as a globe of gas in space, giving out light—a superstition enunciated as a categorical truth in every book of physics today. But our task must be to penetrate to the reality.

In truth, Julian the Apostate and Constantine stand before us as two symbols ... Julian the Apostate was bent upon preserving those ancient memorials of the world which could, in a certain way, have made it possible for the true Sun-Mystery to find its way to men. Indeed during the first centuries of Christendom, Christ was still a Sun-Figure—an Apollo.

This Sun-Mystery was felt to be the greatest spiritual treasure possessed by mankind. And it was symbolized by what was known as the Palladium. It was said that the Palladium had once been in Troy and that the priests of the Mysteries there saw in it the means whereby, in sacred ritual and cult, they revealed to the people the true nature of the sun. Then the Palladium was taken to Rome, and its presence there was a secret known to the initiate in Rome. The initiated priests of the Romans, and even the first Emperors—Augustus, for example—worked in the world out of a direct consciousness that the greatest of all treasures was represented in Rome, at all events in an outer symbol, inasmuch as beneath the foundations of the most venerated Roman temple, lay the Palladium, its existence known only to those who were initiated into the deepest secrets of Roman existence and destiny. But in a spiritual sense it had become known to those whose task it was to bring Christianity to the world. And out of the knowledge that the Palladium was guarded in Rome, the early Christians made their way thither. A spiritual reality lay behind these journeys.

But when, under Constantine, Christianity was secularized, the Palladium was taken away from Rome. Constantine founded Constantinople, and he caused the Palladium to be buried in the earth under a pillar erected there by his orders. Thus it transpired that in its further development Roman Christianity was deprived of the knowledge of the Sun-Mystery by the very Emperor who established Christianity in Rome in its rigid, mechanical forms. In the secularization of Christianity brought about by Constantine, the cosmic wisdom was lost to Christianity—and this comes to expression in the removal of the Palladium from Rome to Constantinople.

In certain Slavonic regions—people always interpret things according to their own conditions—a belief reigned for centuries, lasting indeed until the beginning of the twentieth century, that in a none too distant future the Palladium will be removed from Constantinople to another place—to a Slavonic town, as the people believed. At all events the Palladium is waiting, expecting to be removed from the darkening influence shed upon it by Constantinople to that locality which, by its very nature, will bring it into complete darkness. Yes, the Palladium goes to the East, where the decadence of the ancient wisdom still survives but is passing into darkness. And in the further evolution of the world, everything depends upon whether—just as the sun is the reflector of the light bestowed upon it from the universe—the Palladium-treasure is illumined by a wisdom born from the riches of the knowledge living in the West. The Palladium, the ancient heritage brought from Troy to Rome, from Rome to Constantinople, and which, as it is said, will be carried still farther into the darkness of the East—this Sun-treasure must wait until it is redeemed spiritually in the West, released from the dark shadows of a purely external knowledge of nature. Thus the task of the future is bound up with the holiest traditions of European development.

Legends are still extant, even today, among; those who are initiated into these things—often they are quite simple people going about here and there in the world. These legends tell of the removal of the Palladium, the treasure of wisdom, from Troy to Rome, from Rome to Constantinople when Roman Christianity was secularized; they tell of its future removal to the East when the East, denuded of the ancient wisdom, will have fallen into utter decadence; and they tell of the necessity for this sun-treasure to receive new light from the West.

The Sun-Mystery has disappeared into the nether regions of human existence. Through spiritual-scientific development we must find it again. The Sun-Mystery must be found again—otherwise the Palladium will vanish into the darkness of the East. It is wrongful today to utter a saying as untrue as Ex Oriente Lux. The light can no longer come from the East, for the East is in decadence. Nevertheless the East waits—for it will possess the sun-treasure, even though it be in darkness—it waits for the light of the West. But today men are groping in darkness, arranging conferences in the darkness, are looking expectantly towards—Washington! Only those “Washingtons” that speak with the tones of the spiritual world—not conferences looking for the darkness that surrounds the Palladium, for an open door for trade in China—only those conferences will bring salvation which are conducted in the West in such a way that the Palladium can be kindled once again to light. For like a fluorescent body, the Palladium, in itself, is dark; if it is suffused with light, then it becomes radiant. And so it will be with the wisdom of the East: dark in itself, it will light up, will become fluorescent when it is permeated by the wisdom of the West, by the spiritual light of the West.

But this the West does not understand. Only when the Palladium legend is brought into the clear light of consciousness, only when men can again feel true compassion for one like Julian the Apostate who felt constrained to ignore the age in which the light of freedom could germinate in the darkness, who longed to preserve the old instinctive wisdom and therefore met with his death—only when men realize that Constantine, in giving an externalized form of Christianity to the Romans, took from them the light, the wisdom, and sent Christianity into the darkness—only when men realize that the light whereby the Palladium can again be made to shine must be born out of modern nature-knowledge in the best sense—only then will an important chapter of world-history be brought to fulfillment. For only then will that which became Western when the Greeks see Troy on fire, become Western-Eastern. The light that flamed from Troy is present even to-day; it is present but it is shrouded in darkness. It must drawn forth from the darkness; the Palladium must again be illumined.

If our hearts are in the right place, knowledge of the course of history can fire us with enthusiasm; and this same enthusiasm will give us the right feeling for the impulses which spiritual science would fain impart.

We have often turned our gaze back to the views of older times, and we want to do so again today, with the aim of gaining some insights into history and the development of humanity. If we go back thousands of years in human development, for example to the times that we, in our terminology, refer to as the ancient Indian cultural period, we find that people's way of looking at things was quite different then than it is in our time, even if we take a period that is very far removed from that time. If we go back to those older times, we know that people simply did not see nature as we see it today. They perceived spiritual beings directly in everything, in the individual elements of the earth's surface, in mountains and rivers, but also in everything that immediately surrounds the earth, in clouds, in light, and so on. It would have been inconceivable for a person of those ancient times to speak of nature as we do. For he would have felt as we would feel if we were to sit opposite a collection of corpses and then say that we were among human beings. What presents itself to man as nature today, millennia before our era, man would have felt only as the corpse of nature. For in everything that surrounded him, he perceived the spiritual and soul-like.

We know that when today's humanity hears from poetry or from the messages of myths and legends how it was once believed that spiritual-soul qualities can be found in the source, in the flowing river, in the interior of the mountains, and so on, it believes that the ancients let their imagination run wild and that they were inventing. Well, that is a naive point of view. The ancients did not make things up at all, but they perceived the spiritual and soul just as one perceives colors, as one perceives the movements of tree leaves, and so on. They perceived the spiritual and soul directly, and they would have thought of what we call nature today as merely the corpse of nature. But in a certain sense, some individuals among these ancients strove to gain a different way of looking at things than that which was the general one.

You know, today, when people strive to gain a different view from the usual one, and when they are at all capable of doing so, they become 'studied people', they receive concepts that go beyond what they otherwise see only externally. Then they absorb science, as it is called, into themselves. This science did not exist in the times of which we are now speaking. But there were individuals who aspired to go beyond the general observation, beyond what one knew in everyday life. They just did not study as it is done today. They did certain exercises. These exercises were not like those we speak of today in anthroposophy, but they were exercises that were more closely tied to the human organism in those older times. For example, there were exercises through which the breathing process was trained to do something other than what it is by nature. So they did not sit in laboratories and do experiments, but they did, so to speak, experiments on themselves. They regulated their breathing. For example, they inhaled, held back their breath and tried to experience what happened inside the organism when the breath was altered in this way. These breathing exercises should not be copied today. But they were once a means by which people believed they could come to higher knowledge than they could come to if they simply observed nature with their ordinary perceptions, if they saw external natural things as we see them, but also saw the spiritual and soul-like in all natural things.

When people devoted themselves to such exercises, the nature of which, although in a weakened form, has been preserved in what is described today as yoga exercises from the Orient, when they thus changed their breathing in relation to ordinary breathing, then the spiritual-soul aspect disappeared from the view of the surroundings, and it was precisely through such breathing that nature became for these people as we ourselves see it today. So, in order to see nature as we see it today, such people first had to do exercises in those ancient times. Otherwise, spiritual-soul entities would have leapt out of all the beings around them for them to see. They drove away these spiritual-soul entities by changing their breathing process.

Thus they — if I use the term that is current today for those who aspire so high above the general contemplation — as “learned men” no longer aspired to have nature around them as ensouled and spiritualized, but to have it around them in such a way that they perceived it as a kind of corpse. One could also say that these people felt, as they looked out into nature, as if they were in a surging, billowing, soul-spiritual universe, but they felt within it as a person of the present day would feel when dreaming in vivid images and could hardly wake up from these dreams. That is how they felt. But what did these individuals — let us call them the scholars of that ancient time — achieve when, through such special exercises, they distinguished themselves from this living surging and killed it in contemplation, so that they really felt that they now had a dead, corpse-like thing around them? What did they strive for as a result?

They strove for a stronger sense of self. They strove for something through which they experienced themselves, through which they felt themselves. Today's man says every moment: “I am”. “I” is a word that he uses very frequently from morning till night, because it is natural to him, it is self-evident to him. For these ancient people, it was not a matter of course in their ordinary daily experience to pronounce the “I” or even the “I am”. They had to acquire this. To do so, they first had to do such exercises. And by doing these exercises, they came to such an inner experience that they could say with a certain truth: “I am”. Only by doing this did they come to the awareness of their own being.

So what we take for granted only became an experience for these people when they made an effort in an inner breathing process. They first had to, so to speak, kill the environment for contemplation, to awaken themselves. This is how they came to the conviction that they themselves are, that they could say “I am” to themselves. But with this “I am” they were given something that we take for granted again today. They were given the inner development of the intellectual. Through this they developed the possibility of having an inner, secluded thinking.

If we go back to times when the old oriental views set the tone for civilization, it was the case that people felt a souled nature in their everyday lives, but had a very weak sense of self, almost no sense of self at all, did not at all summarize this sense of self in the conviction “I am,” but that individual people who were trained by the mystery schools were led to experience this “I am.” But then they did not experience this “I am” in the way we take it for granted today, but in the moment when they were brought to it through their breathing process, to be able to say “I am” at all out of inner conviction, out of inner experience, they experienced something that even today's man does not really experience at first.

Think back to your childhood: you can only think back to a certain point, then it stops. You were once a baby, but you have no memory of what you experienced as a baby. Your ability to remember ends at some point. You were certainly already there, crawling around on the ground, being caressed by your mother or father. You may have wriggled and moved your hands, but you do not know in your ordinary consciousness what you experienced inwardly at that time. Nevertheless, it was a more active, more intense soul life than later on. For this more intense soul life, for example, has shaped your brain plastically, has permeated your rest of the body and shaped it plastically. There was an intense soul life present, and the old Indian felt transported into this soul life at the same moment that he said to himself, “I am”.

Imagine very vividly what that was like. He did not feel in the present moment when he said to himself “I am”; he felt transported back to his babyhood, he felt the way he felt in his babyhood, and from there he spoke to his whole later life. He did not have the feeling that he now But this was only drawn into this inner being after it had previously lived in the spiritual-soul world. That is, by first transporting himself back to his babyhood through his breathing process, this old Indian yogi became aware of the time before his existence on earth. It seemed to him like a memory. Just as if a person today remembers something that he experienced ten years ago, it was like the occurrence of a memory in the moment when the “I am” shot through the soul, when in this ancient Indian time a person strengthened himself inwardly by breathing exercises and killed the outside world around him, but made it alive, which was not his outside world now, but what the outside world was before man descended into the physical world.

In those days, if I may use a modern expression, which of course sounds infinitely philistine when I use it for those ancient times, one was really lifted out of one's present earthly existence and into the spiritual-soul existence through the study of yoga. One owed one's elevation into the spiritual-soul worlds to one's studies at that time. One had a somewhat different consciousness than we have today. But precisely when one was a yogi in the former sense, one could think – the other people could not think, the other people could only dream – but one thought into the supersensible world, from which one had descended into earthly existence.

This is also a characteristic of the time of the earth's development, which, if we characterize it somewhat roughly, preceded, for example, the Greco-Roman conceptions in the fourth post-Atlantean period. There, the “I am” had already penetrated more into people in their ordinary everyday consciousness. Admittedly, the verb in language at that time still contained the I; it was not yet as separate as it is in our language, but nevertheless there was already a distinct I-experience. This distinct I-experience was now a natural, self-evident fact of the inner life. But in contrast to this, outer nature was already more or less dead. The Greeks, after all, still had the ability to experience the two aspects side by side, and without any special training. They still clearly experienced the spiritual and soul-like in the source, in the river, in the mountain, in the tree, albeit weaker than people of older times. But at the same time, they could also perceive the dead in nature and have a sense of self. This gives the Greeks their special character. The Greek did not yet have the same view of the world as we do. He could develop concepts and ideas about the world like ours, but at the same time he could take those views seriously that were still given in images. He lived differently than we do today. For example, we go to the theater to be entertained. In ancient Greece, people only went to the theater for entertainment in the time of Euripides, if I may put it this way – hardly in the time of Sophocles, and certainly not in the time of Aeschylus or in even older times. In those times, people went to dramatic performances for different reasons. They had a clear sense that spiritual and soulful beings live in everything, in trees and bushes, in springs and rivers. When you experience these spiritual and soulful beings, you have moments in life when you have no strong sense of self. But if you develop this strong sense of self, which the ancients still had to seek through yoga training, and which the Greeks no longer needed to seek through yoga training, then everything around you becomes dead, then you only see, so to speak, the corpse of nature. But in doing so, you consume yourself. They said to themselves: Life consumes the human being. The Greeks felt that merely looking at dead nature was a kind of mental and physical illness. In ancient Greek times, people felt very strongly that the life of the day made them ill, that they needed something to restore their health: and that was tragedy. In order to become healthy, because one felt that one was consuming oneself, that one was making oneself ill in a certain sense, one needed, if one wanted to remain fully human at all, a healing, therefore one went to tragedy. And tragedy was still performed in Askhylos' time in such a way that one perceived the person who created the tragedy, who shaped it, as the physician who, in a certain sense, made the consumed person healthy again. The feelings that were aroused – fear and compassion for the heroes who appeared on stage – had the effect of a medicine. They penetrated the human being, and by overcoming these feelings of fear and compassion, they created a crisis in him, just as a crisis is created in a pneunomia, for example. And by overcoming the crisis, one becomes healthy. So the plays were performed to make people who felt used up as people well again. That was the feeling that was attached to tragedy, to the play, in the older Greek era. And this was because people said to themselves: When you feel your ego, the world is divested of its gods. The play presents the god again, because it was essentially a presentation of the divine world and of fate, which even the gods must endure, thus a presentation of what asserts itself behind the world as spiritual. That was what was presented in the tragedy.

Thus, for the Greeks, art was still a kind of healing process. And in that the first Christians lived according to what was given in the embodiment of Christ in Jesus and what can be contemplated and felt in the Gospels – the death of Christ Jesus, to suffering and crucifixion, to resurrection, to ascension – they felt, to a certain extent, an inner tragedy. That is why they also called Christ, and he was increasingly called the physician, the savior, the great physician of the world. In ancient times, the Greeks sensed this healing quality in his tragedy. Humanity should gradually come to experience and feel the historical, the historically healing in the sight, in the emotional experience of the mystery of Golgotha, the great tragedy of Golgotha.

In ancient Greece, especially in the time before Aeschylus, when what had previously been celebrated only in the darkness of the mysteries had already become more public, people turned to tragedy. What did people see in this older tragedy? The god Dionysus appeared, it was the god Dionysus who worked his way out of the forces of the earth, out of the spiritual earth. The god Dionysus, because he worked his way out of the spiritual forces and up to the surface of the earth, shared in the suffering of the earth. He felt, as a god, in his soul, not in the way it was in the Mystery of Golgotha, also in his body, what it meant to live among beings that go through death. He did not experience death in himself, but he learned to look at it. One sensed that there is the god Dionysus, suffering deeply among human beings because he had to witness all that human beings suffer. There was only one being on the stage, the god Dionysus, the suffering Dionysus, and around him a chorus that spoke and recited so that people could hear what was going on in the mind of the god Dionysus. For that was the very first form of the drama, of the tragedy, that the only really acting person who appeared was the god Dionysus, and around him the choir, which recited what was going on in Dionysus' soul. Only gradually did several persons develop out of the one person who represented the god Dionysus in the older times, and then the later drama out of the one play. Thus the god Dionysus was experienced in the image. And later, as an historical fact in the evolution of humanity, the suffering and dying God, the Christ, was experienced in reality. Once as an historical fact, this was to take place before humanity so that all people could feel what had otherwise been experienced in Greece in the drama. But as humanity lived towards this great historical drama, the drama, which was so sacred in the old grienzeit that one felt in it the saviour, the miracle-working human medicine, was, more and more, I would say, thrown down from its pedestal and became entertainment, as it is already the case with Euripides.

Humanity lived contrary to the times in which it needed something other than being shown in pictures the spiritual and soul world, after nature had been de-animated for viewing. Humanity needed the historical mystery of Golgotha. The ancient yoga student of the Indian times had taken in the breath, held back the breath, so to speak, in his own body, in order to feel in this breathing: In you lives the divine I-impulse. - The human being experienced God in himself through the breathing process as a yoga student. Later times came. Man no longer experienced the divine impulse in himself through the breathing process. But he had learned to think, and he said: Through the breath the soul came into man. - The old yoga student went through that. The later human being said: #SE211-056 he became a soul. The older yoga student experienced it, the later human being said it. And by saying this in ancient Hebrew, one already experienced in a certain sense abstractly what one had previously experienced concretely. But one did not look in ancient Hebrew either, but in ancient Greek. One always takes place in one part of the earth, the other in another part of the earth. One no longer experienced the God within oneself as the old YOGA student did, but one experienced in the image the existence of God in man. And this experience in the image of the existence of God in man was certainly present in the older Greek drama. But this drama now became a world-historical event. This drama became the Mystery of Golgotha. But now the image was also abandoned. The image became a mere image, just as the breathing process was merely described in thoughts. The whole human soul became different.

Man saw the external world dead, and that was the elementary, the natural thing for him, that he saw the external world dead. He saw it without a god. He saw himself as an external world, as a physical external world, deified. But he had the consolation that once in this deified world the real God had come down, the Christ, and had lived in a human being, and through the resurrection as the Christ impulse had passed into the whole of earthly evolution. And so man could now develop a certain view in the following way. He could say to himself: I see the world, but it is a corpse. He did not say it to himself, of course, because it remained in the unconscious; man does not know that he sees the world as a corpse. But gradually the corpse formed in his view on the cross, the dead Christ Jesus. And if you look at the crucifix, at the dead Christ Jesus, then you have nature. You have the image of nature, of that nature in which man is crucified. And if you look at the one who rose from the grave, who was then experienced by the disciples and by Paul as the Christ living in the world, then you have what was seen in all of nature in older times. Of course, in a multitude, in many spiritual beings, in gnomes and nymphs, in sylphs and salamanders, in all possible other entities of the earth hierarchies, one saw the divine-spiritual; one saw nature spiritualized and ensouled. But now, through the burgeoning of intellectualism, there arose the urge to summarize what is scattered in nature. It was summarized in the dead Christ Jesus on the cross. But in Christ Jesus one sees everything that was lost in external nature. One sees all spirituality by looking at the fact that the Christ, the Spirit of God, rose from this body, having conquered death, and that every human soul can now partake of His essence. Man has lost the ability to see the Divine-Spiritual in the sphere of nature. Man has gained the ability to recognize this Divine-Spiritual in Christ in view of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Such is evolution. What mankind has lost, it has been given back to it in Christ. In what it has lost, it has gained selfishness, the possibility of feeling itself. If nature had not become dead to human contemplation, man would never have come to the experience of “I am”. He has come to the experience “I am”; he could feel himself, inwardly experience himself, but he needed a spiritual outer world. That became the Christ. But the “I am”, the egoity, is built on the corpse of nature.

Paul sensed this. Let us imagine Paul's perception for a moment. All around, the corpse of what people had once seen in ancient times. They saw nature as the body of the divine, the soul-spiritual. Just as we see our fingers, so did these people see mountains. It did not occur to them to think of the mountains as inanimate nature, any more than it occurs to us to think of the finger as an inanimate limb; rather, they said: There is a spiritual-soul element that is the earth; it has limbs, and the mountain is such a limb. — But nature became dead. Man experienced the “I am” within. But he would only stand there as a hermit on the de-spiritualized, de-souled earth if he could not look to the Christ. But this Christ, he must not look at him merely from the outside, so that he remains external; he must now take him up into the I. He must be able to say, by rising above the everyday “I am”: Not I, but the Christ in me. If we were to schematically depict what was there, we could say: Man once sensed nature (green) around him, but this nature everywhere ensouled and spiritualized (red). This was in an older period of human history.

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In later times, man also felt nature, but he felt the possibility of perceiving his own “I am” (yellow) in the face of nature, which had now become soulless. But for this he needed the image of the God present in man, and he felt this in the God Dionysus, who was presented to him in Greek drama.

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In even later times, human beings again felt the soulless nature (green) within themselves, the “I am” (yellow). But the drama becomes fact. On Golgotha, the cross rises. But at the same time, what man had originally lost arises within him and radiates (red) from his own inner being: “Not I, but the Christ in me.”

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What did the man of ancient times say? He could not say it, but he experienced it: Not I, but the Divine-Spiritual around me, in me, everywhere. Man has lost this “Divine-Spiritual everywhere, around me, in me”; he has found it again in himself and in a conscious sense he now says the same thing that he originally experienced unconsciously: Not I, but the Christ in me.

The primal fact, unconsciously experienced in the time before man experienced his ego, becomes a conscious fact, an experience of Christ in the human heart, in the human soul.

Do you not see, when you draw such a trivial diagram, the form that the reality must take in ideas? Do you not see the whole world filled with the spirit of Christ, which arises from within the human being, and draws from the cosmos into the human being? And when you realize what significance sunlight has for human beings, how human beings cannot live physically without sunlight, how light surrounds us everywhere, then you will also be able to understand when I tell you that in those older times of which I have spoken today, human beings certainly felt themselves to be light in the light. They felt they belonged to the light. He did not say 'I am', he perceived the sunbeams that fell on the earth, and he did not distinguish himself from the sunbeams. Where he perceived the light, he also perceived himself, because that is where he felt himself. When the light arrived, he felt himself on the waves of light, on the waves of the sun, the sun.

With Christ, this became effective in his own inner being. It is the sun that enters one's own inner being and becomes effective in one's own inner being. Of course, this comparison of Christ with light is mentioned many times in the Bible, but when anthroposophy wants to draw attention to the fact that one is dealing with a reality, today most people rebel who have “divinity” listed as their faculty in the university directories. They actually reject knowledge of these things. And it is a deeply significant fact that there was once such a theologian in Basel who was also a friend of Nietzsche: Overbeck, who wrote the book on the Christianity of today's theology. With this book, he actually wanted to state as a theologian that one still has Christianity, that at that time, in the 1870s, there was still this Christianity, but that much had already become unchristian, and that in any case, theology was no longer Christian. This is what Professor Overbeck, of the Faculty of Theology at Basel, wanted to prove with his book on the Christianity of today's theology. He was highly successful. And anyone who takes the book seriously will come to the conclusion that there may still be some Christianity today, but modern theology has certainly become unchristian. And there may still be some Christianity today, but when theologians begin to talk about Christ, their words are no longer Christian. These things are just not usually taken seriously enough. But they should be taken seriously, because if they were taken seriously, then one would not only see the necessity of today's anthroposophical work, but one would also see the full significance of anthroposophy. And above all, people would be aware of their responsibility towards contemporary humanity with regard to something like anthroposophical knowledge. For this anthroposophical knowledge should actually underlie all knowledge today. All knowledge, especially social knowledge, should be derived from this anthroposophical knowledge. For by learning that the light of Christ lives in them - Christ in me - by fully experiencing this, they learn to see themselves as something other than what one gets when one sees man only as a corpse of nature. But it is from this view that man belongs to nature that has become a corpse that our antisocial, unsocial present has emerged. And a real view, which in turn can make people brothers and sisters and bring real moral impulses into humanity, can only come about if man penetrates to an understanding of the word: Not I, but the Christ in me — when the Christ is found as an effective force precisely in the dealings from person to person. Without this realization we make no progress. We need this realization, and this realization must be found. If we advance as far as it, then we will also advance beyond it, and our social life will be thoroughly imbued with the Christ.

Some friends who were present at my lectures in Munich on the relationship between spiritual science and art were of the opinion that I should also speak about the thoughts expressed there here in Vienna. And in complying with this wish, I would ask you to accept what I am going to say this evening entirely as meant to be unpretentious and as consisting only of aphoristic remarks about many things that could be said about the relationship between what might be called modern seership, as it is striven for by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, and artistic creation and the nature of artistic enjoyment.

First of all, there is a certain prejudice against such a consideration as the one to be presented here, and prejudices are not always unfounded. There is a certain well-founded prejudice that is based on the insight that artistic creation, artistic enjoyment, artistic feeling actually have nothing to do with any view of art, with any knowledge of art. And very many people who are involved in the artistic process are of the opinion that they actually do harm to the element of the artistic creation and the artistic enjoyment if they associate thoughts, concepts, and ideas with what one experiences as an artist. I believe, however, that this prejudice is well-founded with regard to everything that can be called abstract, conventionally scientific aesthetics. I think that this science is rightly shunned by the artistic view, because truly artistic feeling is actually desolate, impaired by anything that somehow leads to a conventionally scientific view.

On the other hand, however, we live in an age in which, out of a certain necessity in world history, much of what previously worked unconsciously in man must become conscious. Just as we are no longer able to view the social and societal relationships between people in the light of myth, as was the case in earlier times, but are simply forced by the course of human development to seek our refuge in a real understanding of what is pulsating in the historical process, if we want to recognize what social structure, social togetherness and so on is among human beings, it is also necessary that much of what has rightly been sought in a more or less conscious or unconscious way in the instinctive workings of the human imagination and the like, be raised into consciousness. It would be raised up even if we did not want it. But if it were raised up in a way that was contrary to the progress of creation, the result would be what should be avoided: impairment of the intuitive-artistic, which impairment must be excluded precisely by the living-artistic.

I am not speaking as an esthete, nor as an artist, but as a representative of spiritual scientific research, as a representative of a world view that is imbued with the conviction that, as human development progresses, we will increasingly be able to penetrate into the real spiritual world that underlies our sensory world. I am not speaking of some metaphysical speculation, I am not speaking of some philosophy, but of what I would call supersensible experience. I do not believe that it will take long before it is recognized that all mere philosophical speculation and all logical or scientific endeavor is inadequate to penetrate into the spiritual realm. I believe that we are on the threshold of an epoch that will recognize as a matter of course that there are forces slumbering in the human soul and that these slumbering forces can be drawn out of this soul in a very systematic way. I have described how these slumbering powers in the human soul can be awakened in my various books, in 'How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds', 'Soul Mysteries' and 'The Riddle of Man'. So I understand spiritual knowledge to mean something that is basically not yet there, something that is only taken into account by a few people today, something that is not based on the continuation of already existing knowledge, be it mysticism or natural science, but on the acquisition of a special kind of human knowledge, which is based on the fact that man, through the methodical awakening of certain slumbering soul powers, brings about a state of consciousness that relates to ordinary waking life as this waking life relates to sleeping or dreaming life. Today, we are basically only familiar with these two opposing human states of consciousness: the dull, chaotic consciousness of sleep, which is only seemingly completely empty, only subdued, and the daytime consciousness from waking up to falling asleep. We can relate the mere images of dream life, when the will nature of the human being falls asleep, to the external physical reality, which relates him to the things of the environment. Likewise, as humanity continues to develop, it will come to effect an awakening from this waking consciousness to what I call the seeing consciousness, where one does not have external objects and processes before one, but a real spiritual world that underlies our own.

Philosophers want to open it up; you cannot open it up, only experience it. Just as little as you can experience your physical environment in dream life, you cannot experience the spiritual environment in waking consciousness: not through mysticism, not through abstract philosophy, but by bringing yourself into a different state of mind, by moving from dream life into ordinary waking consciousness.

Thus we speak of a spiritual world from which the spiritual and soul-life emerges just as the physical and bodily life emerges from the sense world. Such spiritual research is, of course, completely misunderstood in its peculiarity today. People are such that they judge what arises among them according to the ideas they already have, some even according to the words they already have. They want to tie in with something already known. As far as the results of the seeing consciousness are concerned, this is not the case, because it is not what is already known. The seeing consciousness, one could, if the word were not misunderstood, call it the visionary, the clairvoyant consciousness, whereby I do not understand anything superstitious. What comes from the visionary is judged by what people already know. Everything of a dubious nature, such as visionary life, hallucinations, mediumship and so on, has been brought close. What I mean here has absolutely nothing to do with any of this. All that I have listed last are the products of the sick soul life, that soul life which is more deeply embedded in the physical body and which brings images from the physical body to the soul. What I call the seeing consciousness takes the opposite path. The hallucinatory consciousness goes below the ordinary state of mind into the physical, while the seeing consciousness goes above the ordinary state of mind, lives and breathes only in the spiritual-mental realm, making the soul completely free from bodily life. In our ordinary consciousness, only pure thinking is free from bodily life, which many philosophers therefore deny because they do not believe that man can unfold an activity that is free from the body. That is the starting point: a seeing consciousness can be trained that develops upwards into the spiritual world, where there is nothing physical around us. This seeing consciousness now feels completely unrelated to any medium or visionary, but it does feel very much related to a real, genuine artistic understanding of the world. That is what I hope and long for, that a bridge could be built between real, genuine seership and artistic experience, whether in creation or in artistic enjoyment, in an unpedantic, artistic way between these two human perspectives.

It is indeed an experience for those who live in a visionary way that the source, the real source from which the artist creates, is exactly the same as that from which the seer, the observer of the spiritual worlds, draws his experiences. The only difference is the way in which the seer attempts to gain his experiences and to express these experiences in concepts and thoughts, and the way in which the artist creates. This is a considerable difference, and one which we may perhaps discuss today. But the source from which the artist and the seer draw is, in reality, one and the same.

Before I go into this question of principle, I would like to make a few preliminary remarks that may seem trivial to some, but which claim nothing less than to show that an artistic world view is not something that is arbitrarily added to life. For someone who strives for a certain totality, for a certain wholeness of life, artistic world view appears as something that belongs to life just as much as knowledge and the external banal hustle and bustle. A dignified existence is inconceivable without the permeation of our cultural life with artistic feeling.

It is important to truly recognize that wherever we go and stand, there is a latent urge within us to perceive the world aesthetically, artistically. I would like to give a few examples of this. However, we often do not become aware of the artistic experience that accompanies our life, our existence between the lines. It lives quite below the threshold of consciousness. If I have to visit someone and I enter their room and the room has red walls, red wallpaper, and they then come and talk to me about the silliest things, or perhaps don't talk at all, behave very boringly, then I feel that there is a falsehood. It remains entirely in feeling; it does not become thought, but I feel that there is untruth. However strange, however paradoxical it may appear, if someone papers his room in red, he disappoints me if he does not bring me something meaningful in thoughts in the red room in which he receives me. This does not need to be true, of course, it does not need to happen, but it does accompany our soul life. We have this feeling deep in our souls. If we enter a room with blue walls and someone spouts words at us, not letting us get a word in edgewise and considering himself the only person of importance, we feel it is at odds with the blue or violet walls of his room. The external prosaic truth need not correspond to this, but there is a special aesthetic truth that is as I have stated it. If I am invited to dinner somewhere, or let's not say snowed in, but politely invited to dinner, and I see that the place setting is red, painted red, I have the feeling that these are gourmets who eat to eat, enjoy eating. If I find a blue place setting, I have the feeling that they don't eat to eat, but that they want to tell each other something while eating, and leave the telling to the telling that otherwise accompanies social gatherings. These are real feelings that always live in the subconscious. If I meet a lady in a blue dress on the street and she shoots at me and behaves aggressively instead of reservedly, I find that contradictory to the blue dress, but I would find it natural if I met a lady in a red dress like that. Of course, I would also find it natural if a lady with snail hair was snappish. There is something that lives in the soul as a fundamental tone. I do not mean to say anything other than that an aesthetic feeling is there, even if we do not bring it to mind, which we cannot exclude: our mood depends on it; we are in a good or bad mood. We know what a good or bad mood is, but only those who engage more closely with things can become aware of the reasons for it. In this lies what might be called the necessity to pass from natural aesthetic feeling to life in art. Art simply accommodates natural life, just as the other ways of looking at people do.

The seer who has developed these powers, of which I have spoken, has a special way of experiencing art, and I believe that, even if not artistically, then at least in terms of the evaluation and perception of art, something can be gained from the special experience of seership in relation to art. The seer, who awakens his soul in such a way that he can have a spiritual world around him, is always able to turn his soul life away, to distract it from all that is merely external, sensual reality. If I have before me – I speak in the third person, not individually – a piece of external physical object or process, I am always able, in the space where the object is, to exclude perception for myself, so that I see nothing of the physical in that space. That is the real abstraction that is possible for seership. It can only be done with natural objects, not with what is truly artistically created. And I consider that to be something significant. When confronted with a work of art, the seer is not able to completely exclude the object, the artistic process, just as he can exclude an external process. What is truly artistic creation, imbued with spirit, remains spiritually before the consciousness of the seer.

This is the first thing that can testify to us that truly artistic creation and visionary beholding come from the same source. But there is much more that is very significant in this direction. You see, the seer, when he applies the means that develop his soul, comes to a very different way of conceiving as well as willing. If we use ordinary expressions, we can of course say that both the conceiving and the willing become inward, but this 'inward' is actually not correct, because one is still outside, spreading one's whole view over a real spiritual world. A different conceiving and a different willing occurs in seership.

The visualization does not proceed in abstract thoughts. Abstract thoughts are something that is suitable for the physical world, for registering it in its phenomena, for finding natural laws, and so on. The seer does not think in such thoughts, he does not think in abstractions, he thinks in thoughts that are actually weaving images. This is still somewhat difficult to understand in the present, because it is not yet fully known what is meant by an activity that is actually a thinking, but which does not think abstract thoughts and follows things, living in the forms and configurations of things. This imagining can be compared to the formation of surfaces and curves, as the mathematician does. But it comes to life inwardly, as Goethe attempted in his theory of metamorphosis in its elementary state. Today, the inward, visual imagination can become much more alive. This visual imagination is extraordinarily akin to the basis of certain areas of creative art, namely sculpture and architecture.

The strange thing is that in relation to this new thinking, this new imagining that the seer acquires, he feels most akin to the forms that the truly artistic architect develops and the forms that the sculptor must base his work on. There is really something like architectural visualization, or visualization in sculptural forms, that is capable of following things in the visionary grasp of the world in such a way that one learns to understand them in their spiritual inwardness, and also learns to transcend them, to rise purely into the spiritual world. With abstract thoughts one can learn nothing about the inner nature of things. The seer feels akin to the architect and the sculptor in his new thinking. He must think the world in the way of spiritualizing that unconsciously or subconsciously underlies the work of the sculptor and the architect. This prompts one to inquire as to the source of this. The question arises: What is it that the seer actually uses? He uses certain hidden senses, senses that are present in ordinary life but that only resonate softly and are not fully expressed in ordinary life. For example, we have a sense that could be called the sense of balance. We live in it, but we are only aware of it to a limited extent, not fully consciously. When we take a step, for example, or stretch out or bend our hand, all these actions that bring us into some kind of relationship with space are connected with a perception that does not quite reach our consciousness, as it does with seeing and hearing, except that these senses are much louder and more clearly audible. But this sense of balance and the related sense of movement are only subtly present because they are not just meant for our inner life, but convey our place in the cosmos. How I stand in the cosmos, whether I am walking towards the sun or away from it and feel that I am drawing closer and closer to the light, and at the distance the light feels dimmed in some way, this feeling of being inside the whole of the world is something that cannot be described in any other way than to say: man in his movement is constructed as a microcosm out of the macrocosm and experiences as a microcosm his being placed in the macrocosm through such a sense.

When a sculpture is created, it is nothing more than perceptions of a usually hidden meaning being translated into the design of external surfaces and the like. What we as human beings always carry with us in our feeling for the world is unconsciously expressed in architecture and sculpture. However strange this observation may at first seem, anyone who is truly able to explore psychically the relationship between individual architectural forms, what lives in the sculptor's imagination as he shapes his surfaces, knows that what I have just hinted at plays a mysterious part in this creative work. The seer does nothing other than to bring this sense of placing oneself in the world to full consciousness. He develops it in the same way that the architect, the sculptor, is artistically prompted by what he feels in his body to shape as forms in the external material. From this point of view, one sees certain things; I could not only talk for many hours in this regard, I could talk for days. Anyone who acquires a feeling for sculpture knows that mere imitation is not truly sculptural. Those who try to answer the question “What is actually in the sculptural?” perceptively, not abstractly, cannot say that a surface is only significant to them because it imitates a surface in the human body and the like that exists in external nature. That is not it. What is experienced in the sculptural is the intrinsic life of the surface. Anyone who has discovered the difference between a surface that is curved only once and one that is curved again knows that no surface that is curved only once can somehow have sculptural life within itself. Only a surface that is curved within its curvature can express life as a surface. This inner expression – not symbolic, but artistic – is what is at issue here, not imitation, not adhering to the model, this is what constitutes the secret of the two-dimensional itself.

This touches on a question that is indeed as unresolved as possible in the present day. Not only do we see many people today enjoying art, which is quite right, but we also see many people judging art almost professionally. Now, I believe that, precisely on the basis of the premises underlying today's considerations, I really do not have to express a critical judgment, but simply express what comes more and more to mind: I do not believe that anyone who has never kneaded clay, who is only a critic, can ever get an idea of what is actually essential to sculpture. I do believe that everyone can enjoy art, but I don't believe that anyone can judge art who has not made those attempts that have shown him what artistic forms can be realized within the material. Because very different things are realized in reality by the material than mere imitation of the model and the like. Mere imitation of the model is thus artistically no more valuable than the imitation of the nightingale's song through the use of certain tones. Real art begins where nothing is imitated anymore, but where something new and creative is created. In architecture – not in music, but very much so in sculpture – we draw on the model. But something that is somehow imitative in relation to the model is not art. Art begins where imitation can no longer be spoken of. And what works and weaves as an independent spiritual reality, unconsciously by the artist, consciously by the seer, is what is common to the seer's perception of the world and the artist's creation, except that it is also expressed spiritually by the seer, and by the artist, because he cannot express it, but only has it unconsciously in his hands, in his imagination, to which “material can be incorporated.

The seer feels a completely different affinity with the poetic and the musical arts. It is particularly interesting in the case of music how the seer experiences his experiences in a different way when he enters the realm of art with his seership. I must make a comment about what I call seeing: I do not mean all the time, but only in the moments when one puts oneself in this state. Therefore, it does not apply that the seer experiences the musical in other times than when he wants, as it is now described. At other times, he experiences music as any other person does. He can compare what he experiences musically and what he experiences when he sees the musical work of art. When it comes to musical works of art, it is important that the seer is clear about experiencing music in such a way that it is entirely spiritual, and in such a way that the concrete spiritual feels a direct connection to the musical. I have said before that the seer develops a new power of imagination, he visualizes in such a way that he feels at home in architectural and sculptural creation. — In that the seer not only grasps things imaginatively, but also develops feeling and pictorial powers, but in such a way that they enter into a union, one cannot speak of a separation of feeling and willing; one must speak of a feeling will and a willing feeling, of an experience of the soul that connects these two, which usually go hand in hand in ordinary consciousness, to form the totality of feeling will. Sometimes this sentient volition is more nuanced towards volition, at other times more towards feeling. When the seer, in the elevated spiritual state of soul, places himself in the realm of music, he experiences everything that occurs in his soul with the nuance of feeling in the truly musical, in the genuine musical. He experiences it in such a way that he does not separate the objective tone and the subjective tone experience from one another, but that these are one in the visionary experience, that the soul flows as the tones flow into one another, only that everything is spiritualized. He experiences his soul poured out into the musical element; he knows that what he experiences through the newly formed feeling volition is woven into the tone substance by the musician from the same source. It is particularly interesting to investigate the origin of the fact that the creative musician brings up from the unconscious the spiritual that the seer beholds and lays it into his material. In the realm of music, there is a revelation of what underlies it.

In all unconscious phenomena that occur in the life of the soul, the miracle structure of our organism plays a role in a completely different way. It is becoming more and more apparent that our organism should not be regarded in the way that it is by the ordinary biologist and physiologist, but that it must be regarded as an image of a spiritual model. What the human being carries within him is the image of a spiritual model. The human being enters into existence through birth or through conception, and he applies the laws of heredity that are his, as well as that which descends from a spiritual world and behaves in relation to the physical in such a way that the physical is truly an image of the spiritual. How this comes about, I cannot explain today. The fact exists that in our organism such a working takes place, which proceeds according to spiritual-pictorial laws. With music, this is particularly remarkable. We believe that when we enjoy music, the ear is involved and perhaps the nervous system of our brain, but only in a very external way. Physiology is only just beginning in this field and will only reach a certain level when artistic ideas are incorporated into this physiological and biological area. There is something completely different at the root of it than the mere hearing process or what takes place in the nervous system of our brain. What underlies the sense of music can be described as follows: every time we breathe out, the brain, the head space, the inner space of the head, is caused by breathing to let its brain water descend through the spinal cord sac into the diaphragm region; a descent is caused. The inhalation corresponds to the reverse process: the brain water is driven against the brain. There is a continuous rhythmic up and down movement of the cerebral fluid. If this were not the case, the brain would not lose as much of its weight as is necessary to prevent it from crushing the underlying blood vessels; if it did not lose so much of its weight, it would crush our blood vessels. This cerebral fluid moves up and down in the arachnoid space, in expansions that are elastic and less elastic, so that when it rises and falls, the cerebral fluid flows over the less elastic expansions, over some that expand more or less. This gives a very wondrous way of working within a rhythm. The whole human organism, apart from the head and limbs, expresses itself in this inner rhythm. What flows in through the ear as sound, what lives in us as a sound image, becomes music when it encounters the inner music that is played by the fact that the whole organism is a strange musical instrument, as I have just described.

If I were to describe everything to you, I would have to describe a wonderful inner human music, which is not heard but is experienced inwardly. What is experienced musically is basically nothing more than the response of an inner singing of the human organism. This human organism is, precisely in relation to what I have just described, the image of the macrocosm: that we carry within us, in the most concrete laws, more strictly than natural laws, this lyre of Apollo, on which the cosmos plays within us. Our organism is not what biology alone recognizes, but it is the most wonderful musical instrument.

One can cite very rough things to show how man is built according to strange cosmic laws. To cite the most trivial thing: we take eighteen breaths on average in one minute. Let's calculate how many that is in a twenty-four hour day: that's 25,920 breaths; that's how many breaths in a whole day. Let's calculate a human day. We can calculate a person's day, although many people grow older, to be between seventy and seventy-one years: a person's day. Try to calculate how much that is for a single twenty-four-hour day! 25,920 – that's how many breaths you take in one day! The world breathes us out and breathes us in as we are born and as we die. It takes just as many breaths during a human day as we do during a twenty-four-hour day.

Take the Platonic solar year. The sun rises in a certain sign of the zodiac. The vernal point moves on. In ancient times, the sun rose in the sign of Taurus, then in Aries, now in Pisces. Modern astronomy schematizes. This vernal point apparently goes around the whole sky – but apparently, but that is not important – and of course, after a significant number of years, it arrives at the same point again: after 25,920 years. The Platonic solar year is 25,920 years long! Take a human day of 71 years: it has 25,920 individual days; take a single human day of 24 hours: it has 25,920 breaths in the experience. You see, we are integrated into the rhythm of the world. I believe — and one could engage in many reflections on this point — that there is no more abstract religious concept that could evoke such fervor as the awareness that one's own outer physical organism is so embedded in the macrocosm, in the cosmic structure. The seer attempts to penetrate this embeddedness in a spiritual way. It lives itself out in our inner music: What comes out of the organism, what strikes up into the soul — the soul's resonance, resonating with the cosmos — is the unconscious element of artistic creation. The whole world resonates when we truly create artistically.

There you have the common source between being an artist and being a seer: unconsciously in the artist, by incorporating the laws of the world into the material; consciously in the seer, by attempting to behold the purely spiritual through the seeing consciousness.

By studying these things in this way, one learns to recognize what causes the artist to unconsciously incorporate what is entrusted to the material. Just as inner music lives in our respiratory system, which then becomes outer music in art, so too does poetry live there. In this respect, today's physiology is still very far behind. Because if you want to understand it, it is not the sensory physiology or the nervous physiology of the brain that needs to be studied, but the border area where the brain and nervous system converge. It is precisely at this border, in the physiological area where, if a person is predisposed to it – you always have to be predisposed to the artistic – that the source of poetic creation lies. And the seer finds the poetic creation most particularly when he enters into the realm of his inner experience, where the feeling-will inclines more toward the side of the will. Otherwise, the will expresses itself in the entire physical body; in that which is the imagination, the will lives where the brain and nerves and sense organs meet: that is where the poetic images are generated. When this is detached from the physical, it is the feeling will through which the seer enters into the realms from which the poet draws from the same source. Therefore, through this feeling, willing sense of the seer, when he appropriates the state of mind in order to enjoy the poetic with his state of mind, he feels in a peculiar position vis-à-vis the poetic. He must see what the poet creates. This leads to the fact that at the moment when the poet presents one thing or another, not drawing from reality but presenting something that is actually merely imagined, composed, unreal, inartistic, at that moment the seer sees in a creative way what is presented. A person who is not a seer does not feel so strongly when the playwright presents an unreal figure. The seer, for example, cannot feel about Thekla from “Wallenstein” other than as if she were made of papier-mâché, so that when he looks at her, he sees her knees buckling. And this with a great poet! Every deviation from reality, every failure to depict reality, is felt in such a way that the seer must recreate in plastic form precisely what the poet creates, and he withdraws his thinking from the plastic. The seer submerges himself in an inner plastic in relation to the poet. The peculiar thing about this is that in the poetic, the seeing consciousness creates sculpture, which is why the seer sees caricatures in what is often truly much praised. But the satirist cannot but see in many a dramatic performance, in which it is not even noticed that the figures are only puppets stuffed with tow, such puppets marching across the stage, or they arise before him when he reads the drama. Therefore, the seer can endure torments through what is brought about by fashion folly or otherwise, because he sees what is created formlessly in mere poetry.

Christian Morgensiern, who aspired to seership, made a beautiful statement. It can be found in the last volume of his posthumous works, in the “Stufen”. There he says, wanting to characterize his own soul, that he feels close to the architectural, the sculptural. This is the feeling: When one aspires towards the visionary, inwardly the poetic aspect is transformed into the plastic. When one looks at it this way, one can never believe that the visionary, with its inner mobility and its response to spiritual entities, can have a scorching and paralyzing effect on the artist, but only as a good friend, a good patron. They cannot disturb each other. Only things that flow together can disturb each other. But the seer can never allow his seership to disturb his artistry; he can permeate it with his seership. They are completely separate from each other; flowing from the same source, they can never disturb each other in life. This is no longer sufficiently felt.

The seer has a very difficult time making himself understood to people. He has to use language. But language has something very peculiar about it. It only appears to be a unity; in reality it is a tripartite thing. One experiences it namely on three levels. First, as we have it, in the way we communicate from person to person in everyday life, in the way we live our philistine lives and say the words that have to flow from person to person in order to shape that philistine life. Anyone who has a vivid sense of language, who experiences language through the eyes of a seer, cannot help but feel that the use of language as just described is a debasing of it. Perhaps one will say: Man is grumbling about life. He merely recognizes that not everything can be perfect, and thus refrains from creating perfection in a sphere where imperfection must necessarily prevail. In the outer physical life it is absolutely necessary that there should be imperfections: trees must also wither, not only grow. There must always be imperfection in life for perfection to arise. Language is pressed down from its original level, is pushed to a subordinate level. And the way we use language in life, we could only become a schoolmaster, then we would only turn a withered, dried-up, philistine state into a straw-like being, but otherwise we would achieve nothing. Words cannot have the values that they have by themselves, because language, as the property of a people, lives on its own level and, on its own level, is an artificial construct, not a prosaic one. It is not there to facilitate communication in everyday life; as an expression of the national spirit, it is an artificial construct. We belittle it, but we have to, by pressing that which is actually an artistic creation down into the prose of life. It only comes into its own in the poetic creations of a people when the spirit of language truly reigns. That is the second way in which language lives.

The third way is only experienced in the realm of seeing. One is in a strange position: for if one wants to express what is seen, one does not have the words of the language. They are not there in reality. Just as one learns to speak in any language and uses the words to express what one wants, one cannot express what one has as a seer's vision. The words are not shaped for it. Therefore, the seer has the need to express some things quite differently. He is always struggling with language to be able to say what he wants to say. He has to choose the way to put some thing into a sentence that approximately expresses what he wants to say; he has to say a second sentence that says something similar. He must count on the goodwill of his listeners so that one sentence illuminates the other. If this goodwill is lacking, then people want to criticize various contradictions. The one who really has something to express must work in contradictions, and one contradiction must illuminate the other, since the truth lies in the middle. By putting oneself in this position, one arrives at something in terms of language that already expresses the relationship between the artistic and the visionary in this field. The seer must count on goodwill to seek to penetrate more into how he says the thing than what he says. He strives to say much more in the way he says the thing than in what he says. He gradually succeeds in transporting himself back to the spirit of language creativity that prevailed before any language came into being, to re-immersing himself in the sounds, in the genius of the sounds, to submerging himself in it with his mind. He sees how a vowel is enclosed, how a vowel soon flows into this or that language. In order to transport himself back into the language-creative state of his people, the seer is compelled to express himself more through the how than through the what. In this way, one can distinguish in language the stages that stand side by side, artistically and seerically. Because they are experienced separately, they cannot disturb each other; on the other hand, they can support each other because, when they live side by side, they illuminate each other. The time may come when hostility towards the visionary on the part of the artistic side will no longer be tolerated, nor the opposite on the visionary side. For unfortunately all that is false scholasticism tends too much towards a supersensible philistinism. To clothe everything that is not seen with the external senses in visionary seeing is hostile to artistry. But what is really grasped by the seeing consciousness of the spiritual world is already the same as what lives unconsciously in artistic creation and in aesthetic perception. It is commonly believed that the clairvoyance referred to here is something quite alien to man; it is present in human life, only in an area where it goes unnoticed.

There is a great difference in the way we face a plant, a mineral, an animal or another human being. External things affect me through what they are with the help of my sense organs. When one person faces another, the senses work quite differently. In our time, people are quite averse to grasping the spiritual. People say that some fields have overcome materialism – yes, people talk about that today. They can find such arguments, but they say: When I stand opposite a person, I see the shape of his nose, and from such a shaped nose I conclude that he is a human being. An analogy. There is no such thing in reality. He who can perceive the world seerically knows where conclusions lie; these conclusions to the analogous do not exist. The soul of man is perceived directly; his external sensuality is such that it is annulled. This is very important to bear in mind when considering another art, because it makes clear to us the juxtaposition of seership and artistic skill.

When we stand face to face with a person, we look at him, and we do not know that what appears of him appears in such a way that it cancels itself out, that he makes himself spiritually transparent. Every time I stand face to face with a person, I see him clairvoyantly. The seer has a very special problem where the person stands opposite him: this is the mysterious incarnate. The seer sees the incarnate parts of a person not in a static way, but rather in an oscillating movement. When he is standing opposite a person, he sees a state in which what appears on the person fades, and then again, where the person, when warmed, becomes redder than he is. The physical form oscillates between these extremes, so that it appears to the seer as if the human form changes, reddens with shame and pales with fear, as if it were constantly establishing its normal state between feelings of fear and shame, just as the pendulum has its point of rest between swinging up and down. The complexion as it appears to us in the external world is only an intermediate state. The seen complexion is connected with something that remains unconscious to the human being: it makes possible the first unconscious glimpse behind the scenes. The way the human complexion is seen by the seer, so that he sees in it something soul-like in the sense-perceptible — the seer beholds in the complexion something sense-supersensuous — so everything that is out there in color and form is gradually transformed in such a way that one sees it spiritually. He beholds it in such a way that he perceives something inward in all that is otherwise colored, the impression of form. You will find the most elementary of this in Goethe's sensual-moral part of the “Theory of Colors”. The whole theory of colors becomes an experience, but in such a way that the seer experiences the spiritual in it. He also experiences the rest of the spiritual world in such a way that he has the same experiences that he otherwise has of colors. In my “Theosophy” you will find that the soul is seen in the form of a kind of aura. It is described in colors. Coarse people who do not go into the matter in greater depth, but write books themselves, believe that the seer describes the aura by saying that there really is a mist in front of him. What the seer has before him is a spiritual experience. When he says the aura is blue, he is saying that he has a soul-spiritual experience that is as if he were seeing blue. He describes everything he experiences in the spiritual world and what is analogous to what can be experienced in the sensual world in terms of colors.

This gives an indication of the way the seer experiences painting. It is a different experience from that of any other art. In the presence of every other art, one has the feeling that one is immersed in the artistic element itself. One has the element, goes to a limit, where the seership ends. If the seer were to continue, he would have to put this color here and that color there; if he were to continue, he would have to tint what he experiences entirely in colors. If he experiences painting, it comes to meet him from the other side. The painter, by painting what is formed out of light and dark, brings his artistic work exactly to the point where painting meets seeing, where the seeing begins. And that is exactly where the seeing begins, where, if one wanted to continue it outwardly, one begins to paint. When one has a concrete seer-like vision, one knows: one should paint this color with the brush, and next to it the other. Then one begins to grasp the secret of color, to understand what is written in my mystery drama “The Portal of Initiation”, that the form of color is a work, that actually drawing lines is an artistic lie. There is no line. The sea does not border on the sky with a line; where the colors border on one another, there is the boundary. I can help myself with a line, but it is only the consequence of the interaction of colors. The secrets of color are revealed to you. You learn that you perform an inner movement, that movement lives in what you paint. You know: you cannot do it any other way than by treating the blue in a certain way. You live with color its inwardness. That is the special thing about painting, that the visionary and the artistic, the creative, touch each other.

If one understands what is at stake in this field, then one will see that what is meant by the visionary can be very much in harmony with artistic creation, that they can stimulate and inspire each other. However, it will become more and more apparent that those who have never held a paintbrush and know nothing of what can be done should not judge from abstract principles. Criticism from outside art, critical criticism, will perhaps have to retreat when friendship between artistry and vision arises. But precisely what is meant here by modern spiritual science is something quite different from what was formerly called aesthetics and is so called today. Artists have told me that such people are called “aesthetic grunters of delight”. Aesthetic bliss is not what is meant here; it is a life in the same element in which the artist also lives, only that the seer experiences in the pure spiritual what the artist forms. I would like to say that this also seems to me to be one of the many things that help humanity. I believe that the times when it was thought that the elementary and original would be affected by what is explored through the spirit will come to an end.

Christian Morgenstern said: “Anyone today who still believes that they should not grasp that which lives in the world as spiritual in clear ideas, but only wants to reach it in a dark, mystical contemplation, is like an illiterate who, with the reading book under his pillow, wants to sleep away his entire life in illiteracy. We are living in a time when much of what is subconscious must be raised into consciousness. The art of seeing will only then have found its true home when it rises above all philosophy and feels akin to the art of creating. I believe that in this field, too, there is something that is connected with the significant questions of human development. More and more will be understood of the fact that the sense world is based on a supersensible one. What can be recognized by supersensible vision cannot be an arbitrary addition to life, but what is true is what Goethe said from his experience of life: “He to whom nature begins to reveal her secret feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.” — Anyone who wants to understand how art is part of life as a whole, of its overall development, anyone who truly understands art in its essence, and feels it while understanding, must admit to themselves that this is aided by the gift of sight, that the gift of sight will be something that, in the future, will stand hand in hand with the artist, providing new inspiration and support.

Our first thoughts must once again be directed to the guardian spirits who are guiding those who are at the front where the events of our day are taking place. We address ourselves to the spirits protecting those who are with us in this movement but are now out there, and have to stand up with their life and the whole of their physical being in response to what the time is asking of them. And in a wider sense we are also turning towards the spirits who protect all who have to offer life and limb out there in the field, even though they are not part of our community.

Spirits of your souls, guardian guides,
On your wings let there be borne
The prayer of love from our souls
To those whom you guard here on earth.
Thus, united with your might,
A ray of help our prayer shall be
For the souls it seeks out there in love.

And for those who have already gone through the gate of death we say:

Spirits of your souls, guardian guides,
On your wings let there be borne
The prayer of love from our souls
To those whom you guard in the spheres.
Thus, united with your might,
A ray of help our prayer shall be
For the souls it seeks out there in love.

May the spirit we are seeking in our movement, the spirit we have been seeking in coming together through the years, rule over you and spread his wings over you, so that you shall be able to complete your task according to your karma. Dear friends, I do not know how many of our friends were able to sense that it is much harder than usual to speak in public lecturers in the present day, lecturers like those given yesterday and the day before¹⁵—especially in public lectures of the type given yesterday. The reason is that the things which have to be said may only too easily be subject to misunderstanding. It is particularly when we are within our movement with heart and mind that we need to let a thought I also made reference to the last time I was able to speak to you here, enter more and more profoundly into our souls. It is the thought that, fundamentally speaking, external life—life on the physical plane as man normally encounters it, not in its reality—is Maya, a kind of ghostly dream, and that the truth, the reality, lies only behind this. It must be clear to us that this truth of the Maya cannot be grasped by theories only, nor indeed just with the intellect. It has to be grasped with all the powers of our soul, the whole of our soul-life and, above all, also the impulses of our heart and feelings. Our intellect is focused on things physical and finds it impossible to grasp that this world that surrounds us is not to be regarded as the true, real world. And our feelings, our will impulses, find this truth even more difficult to grasp. Entering into the life of spiritual science we not only have to learn to think differently but also to feel differently and go down to the wellsprings of our will activity in a different way.

It is difficult to find adequate expression for these things, for no words exist for what pertains to the spiritual world. It is therefore only too easy for the things I said yesterday to be taken to show a certain bias, a certain sympathy or antipathy, in the characterization of one folk soul or another in these days when human thoughts and feelings are so strongly tinged with the sympathies and antipathies that arise out of the mood of the time. And yet, when spiritual science is spoken of in the right frame of mind, it will have to be believed that things like the characterization of folk souls in fact cannot be presented in sympathy or antipathy in the usual sense, even if it is necessary to characterize them sharply. If they were presented in sympathy or antipathy they could not be true, they would have to be untrue, a lie. Why is this so?

It is very easy to think that someone developing his soul life in a certain way to attain to perception of the spiritual worlds, to an objective view of these spiritual worlds, might dry up in his inner feelings and will impulses. That definitely is not possible, however. It would be quite impossible for someone to attain to an objective vision of the spiritual world if he first allowed himself to dry up in the sphere of his living will and feelings, dry up in the inner fire of the impulses that are normally arising in the world of human feelings, sentiments and paSsions. On the contrary all the inner feelings there are, all the inner will activity, must be firmly taken hold of, must become as fiery as possible. But they need to be transformed in the soul. They cannot remain the way they are in ordinary life. They need to be transformed to such effect that through this life of feeling and will impulses the person achieves something of a new synthesis in the sphere of his will and feelings. It is exactly in this way that something must evolve which we may call the inner eye, the inner ear. It is impossible to become inwardly dried up when seeking the spiritual world. Yet once that world is perceived, once it has been reached after all the inner struggles, all inner victories, then it does present itself in such a way that, for example, it may still evoke sympathy and antipathy in us, but that any characterization given of it has as little in it of budding sympathy and antipathy as you would find of budding sympathy in a rose you arc looking at. We are able to experience sympathy with it and antipathy, but it is there before our eyes as an objective presence and if we wish to grasp its nature we are merely able to characterize. For a person who is forced, as it were, to characterize the spiritual world, it is in every single case an impossibility to speak in either sympathy or antipathy.

Yesterday the attempt was made to characterize the Italian, the French, the British and the German folk souls. There will, of course, have been some people in the audience who felt that what was presented was not objective characterization but sympathy and antipathy. Yet if sympathy and antipathy were to come to expression the characterization itself would have to be a lying one, it could never be reliable.

You will be able to understand this very well in this individual instance if I tell you the following. You all know that man is not merely the entity that stands before us when we look at him with our everyday eyes. There he is living in his physical body by his very nature, there he looks at us, as it were, through his physical body. Yet he has another reality, one he is not conscious of in ordinary life on earth for reasons you are aware of. This reality essentially lies within his ego and astral body, and he lives and passes through it quite independent of his physical and etheric body between going to sleep and waking up. A spiritual scientist obtains the results of his researches by illuminating for himself what normally remains unconscious between going to sleep and waking up. This gives him inner experiences of things that normally remain hidden behind the outer impressions of the world, the ghostly dreams of the world.

One thing I said in yesterday's lecture was that the folk spirit, the folk soul, lives specifically in the etheric body of man, and we are within this body from the moment we wake until we go to sleep. On waking we become immersed in the folk soul as we enter into the body. When asleep we are not in the folk soul—only between the moments of waking and going to sleep.

The question is: If the spiritual scientist brings inner life and light particularly into the aspects that are not within the physical body, what is the situation with regard to his life in the folk soul when separate from the body? There the folk soul has a divisive effect. The spiritual scientist cannot live within the folk soul when consciously going through the things man goes through in his sleep. The peculiar thing is that at any time, at any particular moment, a certain number of folk souls may be said to be reigning. The way these folk souls behave toward one another actually makes up the whole earth life of mankind, in so far as it is on the physical plane. Entering into the physical body we also enter into our folk soul. Coming out of the physical body, and having conscious experience outside it, we also enter into the folk-soul element—this is one of many experiences one has—but not into our own folk soul. We enter into the other folk souls and never our own, that is the one we live in during the day in our physical bodies. Accept the full weight of these words. On going to sleep we do not enter into one particular folk soul but into the concerted action, the dance as it were, of the other folk souls. The one soul which does not contribute to the dance is the one we enter into on returning to the physical body. In doing his researches, the spiritual scientist actually joins those other folk souls—which are acting in concert and with them lives through the same things we normally experience on the physical plane in relation to our own folk soul, the soul belonging to the nation within which we ordinarily find ourselves.

Let me ask you then: If a spiritual scientist really knows of life not only in his own folk soul but also in those other folk souls, if he has to go through this, would he then have any real reason to describe his own folk soul with a different kind of objectivity than other folk souls? He does not. Here the potential is given to rise above the prejudices of sympathies and antipathies and be objective. Of course it is not only the spiritual scientist who goes through this—and he does it consciously—but all human beings go through it. Between going to sleep and waking up every human soul lives in the sphere where all folk souls act in concert, except for the one his soul lives in when awake in the daytime.

This is something spiritual science offers so that the horizon of our feelings and sentiments can be truly widened. We often say that spiritual science is able to provide for genuine love, with no distinction of race, nation, class and so forth, because of the nature of the insights it makes possible. This statement is so profound that anyone who clearly sees himself as a human being in that part of himself that is of the spirit simply cannot shut himself away in hatred and antipathy from that which is humanity. He will have to say to himself that it is really senseless not to love. Yet in order to be able to say ‘It is really senseless not love’ spiritual science simply must come to us as something we live, not something we merely know. That is also why we pursue spiritual science not merely as knowledge but in such a way that in living together for years in our branches it truly becomes one with us, a spiritual nourishment that we take in and digest.

I have said that between going to sleep and waking man usually lives in the interplay of folk souls other than the one which is his own folk soul at the time. That is the usual way. There is a way, however, of living one-sidedly, as it were, in just one particular folk soul. There is a way in which one is forced, in this state between going to sleep and waking, to live not within the whole interplay of those other folk souls, within their dance as it were. Instead one is more or less under a spell to live together with one or several folk souls that are taken out of the total concord of all folk souls. There is such a way. It consists in our feeling a particular hatred for one or several folk souls or nations. This hatred we produce lends the special power that forces us in our sleep state to live with the folk soul we hate most or even hate altogether. There is no better way of preparing ourselves for entering completely into one particular folk soul when in the unconscious state between going to sleep and waking, and having to live with it the way we live with the folk soul we know when in our physical bodies, than to hate it—but to hate it sincerely, at the level of our feelings, not merely persuading ourselves that we hate it.

When such things are said we become aware how the reality of Maya has to be taken with profound seriousness. It is not only that our intellect, being what it is, does not want to see that things are different in their depths than in the outer ghostly dream they present, but our feelings, our will, also rise in protest against something which holds true for the spiritual world. If we consider such truths as the one of having to live in other folk souls, and particularly in the one we hate, we have to say to ourselves that the vast majority of people reject spiritual truth not only because it is not accessible to the intellect but also because they simply do not want it, because it upsets them also in the sentiments they ordinarily live with on earth. As soon as one enters more deeply and seriously into the realities of the spiritual world, they are not the least bit comfortable; they are not in the least the kind of thing man really likes when he desires to live on the physical plane only. They are uncomfortable. They shake us up and shake us through and the more profound they are the more they demand of us, really at every single moment, that we must be different from the way we usually are on the physical plane. As a living inner entity it demands something different from us than we are on the physical plane, and that is usually one of the reasons why people reject spiritual reality. We cannot do other than see ourselves linked, not with just one part of the world or of mankind but linked with the whole world and the whole of mankind.

Fundamentally speaking, our physical existence is merely the swing of the pendulum to one side. The swing of the pendulum in the other direction is in many respects the opposite, only we do not know of it in our ordinary life. It can be said that things are getting serious as soon as we consider the deeper truths of spiritual life. These deeper truths can become infinitely important in pointing the way for what human evolution, progress for mankind, demands of us at this very time. Let us take a particular example from spiritual science that can be of special importance for the present time.

Things being the way I have just described to you—so that in entering into physical body and ether body we join in experience what is normally called the folk spirit, the folk soul—you will easily understand how sharing in the experience of the fate of the individual folk spirit is one of the things we will gradually shed after death. Many things have been spoken of that man will shed after death; and one of these things is the link with the folk spirit. The folk spirit is active in the progress of earth evolution, it is active in the way mankind develops on earth from generation to generation. After death, between death and rebirth, we have to come free of the folk spirit in the same way we also grow out of other things. This at the same time lends significance to the hero's death, on the field of battle for instance, a significance that is felt. Any who feel it in the right way—and those going through such a death in the right frame of mind surely will feel this—will know that this death is a death of love. It is not suffered for personal reasons, not for the things one can keep with one for. the whole period between death and rebirth—it is suffered for the folk soul, in that this physical and ether body is given up selflessly. It is impossible to think of death in battle without knowing that it is filled through and through with genuine and most heartfelt love, with men being upheld by something that contributes to the future good of mankind. That is what is so great, so utterly tremendous in this death on the field of battle, if it is experienced in the right frame of mind. For it is impossible to conceive of it except in conjunction with love.

The association with our particular folk spirit has to be cast off between death and rebirth. It has to fall away from us. We have to reach a region where we do not live with the individual folk spirit as such. We shall not, however, be able to enter immediately into other folk spirits. That only happens between going to sleep and waking up. We have to free ourselves altogether of everything that is wholly of the earth, and enter into a life that is separate from anything to do with the evolution of mankind on earth. We must also free ourselves of everything that links us to folk spirits. And this again is something that widens and enlarges the horizons of our feeling life, if we make it something we know, for it lets us look towards the other element, an element we seek that is not around us when we live on the horizon of physical existence.

As you were able to see from the characterization of individual folk spirits given yesterday, it is so that in conscious awareness one of them may be more inclined towards the individual personality of man, to what man is as an individual personality, whilst another is less inclined that way. I have compared it with the way one person looks more into his inner life whilst another lives more in the life of the outer world. One particular folk spirit is more concerned with individual human personalities, another less so. As we belong to one folk spirit or another, this determines the way we relate to what the folk spirit is doing in our ether body, what is in preparation there. As a result there are certain differences in the casting-off process after death, in the gradual emergence out of what the folk spirit has made of us.

Let us take the French folk spirit, for example. It is a folk spirit whose Inspirations are connected with a highly developed culture, a culture that can only be seen as arising because this folk spirit is looking back to ancient Greek civilization. I have discussed this already. This folk spirit now works on the people belonging to that particular nation in such a way—and that is the very nature of the folk spirits that go hand in hand with highly developed civilizations—that deep impressions are made on the human ether body, that the signature of the folk spirit leaves a sharp imprint on the ether body. This has to do with something I pointed out yesterday, that the Frenchman becomes attached to the image he has created of himself. The consequence of the sharp impressions left on the ether body by the folk spirit is that when the soul leaves the body when death occurs, sharply distinct features are left in their ether body and also in the astral body of man. It is particularly if one belongs to a nation such as the French that the soul emerges from physical life with an astral body bearing distinct features. The consequence is that it takes a lot to cast off all that is left of the folk spirit after death.

If we compare the shedding of the essential folk spirit as it occurs in a member of the French nation with the same process for a soul that has been under the influence of the Russian folk soul, for example, we get really the opposite effect in the latter case. The Russian folk soul is young, as it were, and as yet concerns itself less with the individual human beings put in its care. Because of this, individual people passing through the gate of death bear little of the stamp of the Russian folk soul in the ether and astral bodies. Looking at the overall situation in the spiritual world we find, in looking at the souls that have passed through the gate of death, that we encounter sharply defined ether bodies and also sharply defined astral bodies in the souls of the French people whilst Russian souls show little of the imprint of the folk spirit on their ether and astral bodies. Because of this the different souls can be used for different purposes by the guiding spirits that have the task of furthering the evolution of mankind.

We are now in an age that truly cannot progress unless a certain sum of spiritual truth reveals itself to mankind. That has been discussed on many occasions, even to the point that it has been said that by a certain time-span in the present century the revelation of Christ will be made to man in the spiritual world. But we can take it in such a way that we say: A spiritual element has to come into the world. This spiritual element entering into human evolution is first of all the fruit of a struggle won by the spirits in the supersensible sphere. Higher spirits, spirits belonging to higher hierarchies, are fighting in this supersensible sphere to enable the spiritual stream to enter into human evolution. In this struggle they also bring into play forces deriving from human beings who have passed through the gate of death. In the life between death and rebirth man is always participating in the work that brings about what happens in the world. Being individual in his constitution he will also contribute in quite a different way, depending on whether he comes from a French body, for example, or a Russian one. That is why the spirits of the different higher hierarchies are able to use these souls in different ways.

The future development of mankind does, however, depend on a tremendous struggle taking place in the spiritual world at this moment. A struggle in the spiritual world does have a different meaning from one in the physical world. A struggle in the spiritual world means working together to give form and function to something fruitful. It is a struggle necessary for human evolution; in short it is a struggle that gets somewhere. It is being fought by certain spirits belonging to the higher hierarchies. They are fighting it by making use of certain young souls coming from the area of Eastern European civilization and certain souls coming from the Western European civilizations. It is a struggle that will go on for a long time yet, a struggle between Russian souls that have gone through the gate of death and French souls that have gone through death; a war waged by spiritual Russia against spiritual France. It is a terrible war if we use the words belonging to the physical plane. Looking into the spiritual world today one sees this struggle between spiritual Russia and spiritual France, and the spiritual world is full of it. It is a distressing struggle.

And now, in the light of this, let us look at what is happening on on the physical plane. An alliance is made. That is the mirror-image of the struggle in the spiritual world. Now this is the kind of problem one has to cope with in spiritual science. Please do not think that it is possible simply to generalize and say: ‘It is easy to arrive at spiritual truths by always thinking the opposite of what is happening on the physical plane’. If that were made the rule we would get the most silly and erroneous results. For it may hold true in five out of a hundred cases, but not in the other ninety-five. All spiritual truths are individual and have to be considered individually! They cannot be determined by mere dialectics. But the truth I have spoken of is one of those that make a particular impact today, for it can make us aware once again how very different the world looks when we see behind the veil of Maya and how the external doings of man may present the opposite of the true reality, of the spiritual.

If we take this point of view it is inevitable that our feelings must change in the contemplation of external happenings. We come to understand that proper discernment must first be used with regard to external events if the truth is to be seen. A cloud formation may look undefined when seen from a distance and quite different from near by. And that is also true for things that happen on the national scale. And right in the middle, I would say, between the warring parties in East and West, lies the German area in the spirit, and this exists for the purpose of mediating between the two sides, truly to mediate between the two, and also does this. And whilst in the spirit there is mediation between the two sides we see them hitting out from both directions and in both directions in the physical world.

In a sense the events we are now experiencing have to do with the deepest impulse in present-day human evolution. I have often said: Why do we actually pursue anthroposophy? We pursue it because it is a cosmic mission, a work the spiritual world demands of man. A number of Imaginations have to be conveyed to mankind; within the near future men will have to take in a number of spiritual truths. That is part of the plan, I would say, for human evolution. Against it there is the objection, the very real objection, the opposing view, that men have to mature gradually and that this takes a long time. But the Imaginations want to come in now into human evolution. Something has to enter into human evolution that lies a bit above the physical plane, I would say, something higher. Men are still rejecting it today, rejecting it as comprehensively as possible. As a result the counter-image appears. And the counter-image of Imaginations are passions, are emotional outbreaks arising from the depths of human nature, from a point as far below the physical plane as the Imagination are above it. When we see human beings face one another in hatred today, in genuine untruthfulness—what is this hatred, this untruthfulness? They are the mirror-images of the Imaginations that want to burgeon forth and are now emerging in this form because men resist them. An element present at a certain height above the physical plane emerges as a product of transformation, as something that lies at the same distance below the physical plane; it has to work itself out. Again it is possible to find the reason for these disagreeable events in the general karma of mankind.

Why does it have to be now, in our present age, that men receive a certain sum of spiritual truths? The question can be answered as follows.

Two things are possible. One is that a person has a certain feeling for spiritual truths and does not meet them with deaf ears, but rather takes them into his heart and his soul. That he becomes an anthroposophist, as it were, the way it is possible now to become an anthroposophist. Or it may happen that a person rejects spiritual truths, that he will say perhaps that all this is foolish, stupid nonsense; that it all comes out of the heads of a few foolish dreamers who would do better to take up something else.

When a person passes through the gate of death he does of course enter into the spiritual world. If someone were to say: ‘Do we only enter into the spiritual world if we acquire knowledge of that world in the time between birth and death?’ we might perhaps say to him: ‘Of course, a person who knows nothing of the spiritual world will also enter into it.’ But what it the difference between these two types of people? The difference is considerable. I am now always speaking only of our own time, for spiritual truths are individual. And if someone were to say in relation to what I described earlier: 'I assume Imaginations unable to come through will therefore always be transformed into a war of malice, like the one we have now?’ that would be the wrong view. At other times they may behave quite differently. Spiritual truths are always individual and what I am going to say now represents a truth that is individual to our time.

A person going through the gate of death without having made use of the opportunity to take in spiritual elements that exist in our time hands over his soul to the higher worlds on passing through the gate of death in almost the same state he received it when he went through birth to enter into physical existence. The higher worlds receive nothing from him but what they have given him on his incarnation. On the other hand, a person may make his own here on earth what it is possible to obtain from the spiritual world, not by mere faith, but by entering into the spiritual worlds in a living way. On his death he will not hand over his soul to the spiritual worlds the way he received it at birth. He will also hand over to the supersensible beings the concepts, ideas and feelings he has achieved here. These belong not only to him, they belong also to the supersensible beings. Any who do not bring these with them will, of course, also live into the spiritual world but make no contribution to human progress, and if people had always lived like that, or done so from a certain point of time, mankind would have remained as it was. There is progress, further development, and souls will always find something new on entering the earth in a new incarnation because they find opportunity to take in the particular mission of an age. In the final instance, a decision always has to be made as to whether we relate to the spiritual world or not. For instance, someone might say: ‘What do I care about the progress of mankind! What does the evolution of the earth matter to me? Let the earth come to a stop! I shall go on regardless.’ That is how a person may speak who has no real love, no interest in earthly progress. Any, however, who bear within them the love for human progress as their highest responsibility will be unable to choose that road. There is also freedom in this sphere. And souls will come to anthroposophy only through freedom and love for man's true progress and man's true good. So it is not possible either to become an anthroposophist out of mere egotism; in becoming one we contribute something to the progress which one otherwise withdraws from. One is active in love therefore—not merely for oneself but for something else.

This is something I hope will always shine through in all our discussions of the spiritual knowledge we are seeking: that this spiritual science is a living, active force. I am not talking about visions; I am talking of this science. Vision merely yields the results. I am speaking of the results coming alive in man. Spiritual science is something alive, something active, that takes up its abode in our souls, that is working and active in our souls.

I have often used the comparison that merely to speak of love—considering particularly the talking that goes on in the theosophical movement—is like standing in front of a stove and preaching that it shall grow hot, this being its duty as a stove. Even the best of sermons concerning its responsibilities as a stove will not make it grow hot. It will grow hot, however, if we put some wood in it and put a match to it. Basically that is how it is with all preaching of human love, and such preaching will prove hardly more successful when directed at men than a sermon directed at the stove, telling it to grow hot. Such preaching has been done at all times and the results can be seen. But anything that is not mere knowledge of the spiritual world, not mere idea, mere word, but is instead something alive, something active in the word, that is the wood we give to our soul, and it will burn if it is rightly taken in by the soul. This can be learned particularly from conflicts like the present one. There knowledge is set aflame, knowledge becomes love, for man is transformed by the spiritual life he has recognized in his depths, in his foundations. This profound transformation is indeed most uncomfortable for him; he rejects spiritual truth and would rather remain in Maya.

Basically, that is also the next reason for the often-heard statement that spiritual truths should not be offered too freely to the public. After all, these are not truths that act as neutrally as physics or chemistry when they are spoken, but truths towards which the human soul cannot maintain a wholly neutral attitude, having to either reject them or take them in. To take them in, however, the soul has to change in a certain way from what it is in ordinary physical life. So it is true that the world does get somewhat stirred up, excited, when the deeper spiritual truths are presented. Yet our age is ordained not to shrink from such excitement and really to go through this excitement. This will be the only way of preparing the ground for a new spiritual life, a spiritual life we must live towards, for we are now indeed at its starting point. And the signs of the times indicate that it is necessary to understand certain things. We may find many of the things that are happening in the outside world particularly in these days incomprehensible and senseless. Just try and take a number of things together. It is my task here, as it were, to speak to you in more intimate fashion than is possible in a public lecture. I have the task of formulating the things I said in my public lectures that were in the context of current events in such a way that they become effective truth; to formulate them in such a way that the words are the right ones for this our time. If you try and take a number of things together, you will see that one particular aim has been present all the time: to call forth ideas that are a little more the right ones, sentiments and feelings that are more the right ones, with regard also to current events, than those that come so easily and are so widespread.

Try, for instance, to hold on to the fact that in my first public lecture I endeavoured to show how the German people at heart really had a very strong inclination towards peace, towards peaceful progress, and how it really is quite accurate to say: the German people as such did not want the war. Though if we listen to our left and to our right we find they all say, they all stress: ‘We did not want the war!’ The French did not want the war. The English did not want the war. They had to go to war for 'moral reasons'. But those moral reasons were produced in just eighteen hours! They all stress they did not want the war. Let us hold fast to that—there is a lot of truth in it, a great deal of truth—and consider what I did when I said: the German people did not want the war. I did not follow this with the conclusion: this means the other side did want it. Instead, I said quite expressly in that first lecture that at most we could raise a question, the question as to who could have prevented the war. And there I pointed to the Russian East, for they could have prevented the war.

I have drawn special attention to the fact that the right answer depends on the right question being asked. If someone insists he did not want the war this does not necessarily mean the other person did want it. It is possible that both did not want it and yet it came about. Leaving aside the peculiar situation of Russia, we are basically able to say that the war really had not been wanted or intended—what we call ‘intend’ on the physical plane. This war arose with elemental necessity out of opposing forces; quite incomprehensibly out of forces in elemental opposition. Basically, it has never before happened in world history that an event popped up as though out of a box within such a few days. This has shown that whatever takes place in external events arises from spiritual contexts and presents itself as something physical.

From this point of view the events of today may serve as a lesson, to show mankind that we will never get the right answer by asking: ‘Did he do it?’ or ‘Did another do it?’ Instead you have to accept the premise that something else has been involved as well; you will have to make the effort and go somewhat deeper. Only then will we learn to speak of events in the right way.

There is yet another reason why it will be necessary to go to the effort of taking a deeper view of things. We are now experiencing how the world appears divided against itself. People are not yet able to do other than always blame another person. The time will come when the deeper truths relating to karma will have entered into the hearts and minds of men. Then this way of blaming the other for whatever has to be lived through will no longer exist. Then people will know that every nation is, in its karma, living through the things it has to live through for its own sake. A nation will be aware of the necessity to gain strength in battle—not because of another but for its own sake—to progress; the other is in a certain way only the agent. This will focus attention on the karma of folk souls. And seen from a higher point of view, the statement: ‘I am standing here and the other is standing there. It is his fault. He is responsible for my having to go through these events, these struggles. It is his doing’ is like a man of fifty looking at a child. The child is young, he is old; when the child did not yet exist he was not yet old, and as the child grows he is getting old. It is then as though he were to say: ‘It is the child's fault that I am getting old; for if the child were not to grow and get older I also would not get old!’ But the child can merely make him aware of getting old.

This is what we must take note of. Every nation has to experience whatever it does experience out of its karma, even the most serious of events. Do not say that such a truth, when it enters into the hearts and minds of men, will be something comfortless that enters into their hearts and minds. Instead, it will lead to a heroic view of life, a courageous view of life, a view of life that encompasses evolution. Once men are able to hold such a view of life it will appear to them as a waste of energy always to seek the fault in another and always to carry on to the usual conclusion. They will call upon the energies that can help them onward. They will learn to identify with their destiny in every sphere. We have seen, in my public lecture, that this destiny, generally seen as something external, can only be properly grasped when we surrender to this destiny. And it is the same with the karma of a nation. When love comes to earth then this attitude will arise among men.

Again, as on former occasions, I would appeal to you, dear friends, who have dedicated yourselves to a spiritual movement, to consider that in future it will be necessary to fill the mental horizon we live in not merely with the kind of thoughts that existed before, but to fill it with new thoughts. These, however, can only be thoughts arising from the spiritual world. It will not be immaterial whether or not a number of people send up thoughts into the spiritual world like those deriving from such considerations as have been presented today. In deciding to meditate on these truths you will help the events that are to happen in the future to happen in the right way, for the good of man. You are anything but inactive with regard to human progress if you meditate on the thoughts the present time calls for in order that man may truly progress. Let us hope that a good many of us succeed in doing spiritual work side by side with the work that is done with blood and death; spiritual work which consists in filling the World with the right thoughts, with thoughts that relate to the mission of age. We shall then be able to feel that these are the true thoughts of love. Looking for a quotation, many people have been reaching for the popular volume by Buechmann these days to find the right phrase and quoted the words of old Heraclitus, according to which war is the ‘father of all things’.¹⁶ Heraclitus was right in saying this and those who quote him are also right. Yet a father on his own cannot produce a child. The child has to have a mother. As war is the father, so anything achieved in peace-filled work is the mother. Unless the father is to remain sterile, there has to be a mother. And she in turn will have to come from the hearts and minds of those who understand the mission of our time in the spirit and know how to come to love out of understanding.

That is what I want to put into your souls in today's gathering, so that in keeping with the demands made in the present day our spiritual science shall not serve merely to satisfy our curiosity or thirst fa: knowledge but give us the right living energies, energies that we develop to make them a true comfort in the sorrows our time is bringing. True comfort does not result in weakness but leads to strength, courage to be active—spiritually active or physically active, but in any case active. Over and over again we have to remember how important it is in our time for a number of people to feel the free impulse to enter more deeply into the spirit. For this in itself means that progress is made not by the individual but by the whole of mankind.

And in this attitude of mind let us in conclusion return once more to the thoughts we are sending forth, in the way I have indicated, to those who are at the front.

Out of courage shown in battle,
Out of the blood shed in war,
Out of the grief of those who are left,
Out of the people's deeds of sacrifice
Spirit fruits will come to grow
If souls with knowledge of the spirit
Turn their mind to spirit realms.

• 15. Lectures given on 26 November 1914 (‘Die Menschenseele in Leben und Tod’) and 27 November 1914 (‘Die Seelen der Volker’) both in Aus schicksaltragender Zeit (GA 64). The Human Soul in Life and Death (tr. V. Compton-Burnett, C. Davy, D.S. Osmond and K. Wegener) London, Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co. 1935 and The Soul of the People (tr. not mentioned) London, Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co. 1934.
• 16. Heraclitus (c. 540–480 BC), Greek philosopher of Ephesus: Fragment B53 in H. Diels Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Vol. I.

Today I should like to add a few remarks to what I started to say in the last lecture. Since our friends wish it, I shall today and tomorrow endeavour to penetrate more deeply into this matter. But so that we may understand, and not misunderstand, one another when I start to illuminate the subject more from the spiritual side, as is the intention, I must first of all lay the foundation. For if we cannot take into account certain circumstances now prevailing on the physical plane and also the times during which these circumstances were being prepared, then it is not possible to enter into the more spiritual aspects. You know that it is not a question of taking sides or of sympathies or antipathies, but of displaying certain conditions and relationships which, so I have heard, some people wish to know in order to help them understand today's difficult times. So today, in so far as time allows, I shall give a few more introductory explanations.

To start with, it must become clear to us that everything that happens externally on the physical plane is dependent on the underlying spiritual forces and powers. But it is difficult to get to know precisely and concretely the manner in which these spiritual forces and powers work. For the incursions of the spiritual world into the physical plane are more obvious in some places than in others. I have often pointed out here that there are, in a certain way, lines of connection, via the most varied intermediate links, between the external world and the secret brotherhoods, and onwards from the secret brotherhoods to the spiritual world. To understand this rightly it is necessary to take into account that wherever human beings work with the help of spiritually effective forces, whether with good or evil intent, they have to reckon with long stretches of time; because of this, account must also be taken of the fact that much depends on the ability of the individual to grasp and use the conditions of the physical plane with a certain cold-blooded detachment. This is particularly required when existing spiritual streams are to be used in order to achieve something. During the course of my description you will doubtless see whether something is striven for or achieved with good or bad intent. One characteristic of those who make use of spiritual forces is that very frequently—not always but very frequently—they have reasons for not wishing to appear on the stage of the physical plane. Instead they make use of intermediaries through whom certain plans can be realized. Often these things have to be done in such a way that others do not notice what is going on. I have already pointed out a number of times that people are, in a way, inattentive; they do not like looking closely at what is going on. Many of those who work with certain occult connections in order to bring something about in the world make use of this fact. Those of us who see the world, not in the usual way but with free and open eyes, will know that there are people who can be influenced by those who want to make use of such means. Someone who is intent on influencing people, someone who, as an occultist, is not entirely scrupulous, can indeed gain power over people in this way.

Let me start right at the beginning and take an example. You will find that starting at the beginning will lead us to an understanding of more profound aspects later. In the year 1889 Count Richard von Pfeil, who had lived in St Petersburg and knew it quite well, wrote the following lines about the reigning Tsar of Russia:

‘The overall impression I gained of Tsar Alexander III confirmed what I had long suspected: that those around him were purposely keeping him in a state of deep mistrust towards Germany and that this mistrust was now so firmly rooted in him that a change could hardly be expected. He was rightly convinced of his own deep love of peace, but he also believed his counsellors and other influential people in Russia, many of whom did not desire peace nearly as strongly as did he.’

Here, in a most prominent position, you have an individual of whom it must be said: He can be influenced by those who approach him for that purpose, yet who do not want to show themselves by stepping into the foreground. What does someone do who knows about certain connections arising out of the impulses of the fifth post-Atlantean period and wants to make use of them for his own ends or those of some group? He aspires to approach such a person by awakening the impression that nothing is further from his mind than the desire to influence him, so that no one will notice that he does indeed desire to gain influence. And so he gains influence over him. All he need do is form his sentences in a certain way, use certain expressions, and other means which I shall not describe, and he succeeds in turning the other's mind in the desired direction. The world at large, being to a certain extent unobservant and therefore kindly disposed in its judgement of certain people, will simply assume: Well, he is rightly convinced of his love of peace, but he also believes all his counsellors and other influential people!

You see how easy it is in the widest context to practise something similar to what I have described in another case, that of Blavatsky. After the mahatma who is known as K.H. had had a good influence over her for a while, he was replaced, through machinations, by another who was a spy in the hands of a particular society. He had run away from certain secret brotherhoods into whose highest degrees he had been initiated, and it was thus possible for him to remain in the background as a mahatma and achieve, through Blavatsky, things that he wanted to achieve.

By pointing out these elementary matters I simply want to draw your attention to what you must take into account if you want to form a judgement; for the world is frequently misled by the way in which history is written. The writing of history is really something very much more profound. Only at the outermost edge of physical existence, in the utmost maya, can it be said: If this or that professor is a competent historian who has mastered the historical method, he will know how to depict the right things historically. This need not be the case at all. Whether a historian knows how to depict the right things or not depends on whether his karma leads him to the possibility of discovering the right things or not. Everything depends on this. For the right things are often not expressed in what he finds when he looks here or there; they are often revealed only to one who knows how to find the right places to look. Let me say this in another way: For one who is led by his karma to see the right things at the right moment, they are revealed at the point where something significant is expressed by a single phenomenon. Often a single phenomenon expresses something that throws light on decades, illuminating like a flash of lightning what is really happening. To prepare for what will be specially important when we turn to the more spiritual aspects, I should now like to tell you a little story.

There was, in Vienna, a physician who, even in the eighties of the last century, was practising analytical psychology, psychoanalysis, though not to the exaggerated extent that has since become fashionable through the theories of Freud. He still lives there, as a matter of fact, but no longer occupies himself so much with these things. He enjoyed some outstanding successes with his psychoanalysis because he managed to draw a good deal out of people by his method of catechism. In 1886 a man came to this physician who gave the impression that he might have a great deal inside him. So he started to treat him for his nervous condition. And indeed, for a doctor who knew his job, there was a good deal to be found in this man's soul life; it was handed to him on a plate, you might say. This was a particularly interesting case. The doctor found out that his patient was involved in the most varied political factions, that he could poke his nose in everywhere and had his finger in every pie. He also discovered that he wrote articles for certain journals and that these articles had a great influence on the ruler of his country.

The patient, Voidarevich was his name, was a late descendant of a family of voivodes from Herzegovina. He said a great many things. Amongst much else he knew all about the interconnections in the net spun from Russia in the seventies in Herzegovina and Bosnia before the beginning of the Russo-Turkish war. Under normal conditions people do not usually give away such secrets; but under the hands of a psychoanalyst things come out which would otherwise remain hidden. After a number of sessions it became clear that he had also been involved when, before the declaration of war, King Milan and Nikita had resisted Turkey at the end of the seventies, and the uprisings in Bosnia and Herzegovina had been arranged. The motive for declaring war on Turkey had been given to Nikita and Milan by sources in Russia. And yet, outwardly, it was said, the people of the Balkans had been roused by the bad treatment given them by Turkey. This is not to deny that such treatment did occur. I am only relating the connections and, in this respect, we must realize that causes often lie, or are made, far longer ago than is suspected.

Something else was revealed by Voidarevich, something that prompted the doctor to seek an interview with an appropriate authority in Vienna, for even though it was only a matter of disconnected sentences, nevertheless the doctor, an intelligent man, was able to deduce a great deal. He learned from Voidarevich that the Russian ambassador was in Vienna and was on his way to St Petersburg, and not to Constantinople as the papers were saying. Further, he learned that the Russian Foreign Minister was staying at home and would not be going to a Bohemian spa as the papers were saying. These two things made a strange impression on the doctor: that the Russian ambassador in Constantinople was on his way to St Petersburg via Vienna, and that the Russian Foreign Minister was not going to a Bohemian spa but was waiting in St Petersburg to receive the ambassador, and also that the newspapers were saying something quite different. It suddenly dawned on him—it was one of those obscure intuitions that come by instinct: All this is connected with the fact that Alexander von Battenberg is to be deposed in Bulgaria. It all seemed very suspicious to the doctor, and he informed the appropriate authority. But the appropriate authority merely knew that the Russian ambassador was travelling to St Petersburg on private business, as they say; and the authority was quite satisfied with this explanation, as often happens, because such authorities, too, can be so plagued by that urge for inattentiveness about which I have spoken, that they are not in the least concerned with getting to the bottom of things. And a week later Battenberg was forced to abdicate.

You see, this is quite an insignificant event from a historian's point of view, but it is nevertheless an event that throws light in the deepest sense. And if it had not happened ‘by chance’—as is so easily said—that the doctor wormed these things out of Voidarevich by psychoanalysis, it would never have come to light. The threads of karma run in remarkable ways. We know from the psychoanalysis that Voidarevich—who gave away a number of other things of a similar kind—was destined, had everything gone according to plan for the descendants of the ancient voivodes in Bosnia and Herzegovina, to assume the rank of voivode himself. Because of the light that dawned on the doctor we know how the threads ran from Russia in the East to Herzegovina and Bosnia and we can eavesdrop on the origins of a story that later on played an important part in history. For Voidarevich was in the service of Russia and was a party to all this from the beginning.

So we are dealing here, not exactly with magic but with the knowledge of how to utilize the situation and conditions of the physical plane in order to achieve certain quite definite aims. Voidarevich failed to serve his purpose only because he grew nervous; a great deal had been instilled into him and it was intended that he should achieve much. You have here a striking example of how to work in the world while at the same time obliterating the tracks you intend to follow. From this you will be able to grasp that forming judgements about world events is not as easy as is usually imagined. Those who desire to work systematically behind the scenes of world history know very well how to pull such strings and they are cold-blooded enough to make use of them in a way that suits their purpose. Much can be exploited in this connection. Only a thirst for knowledge and a will to learn can lead us to see the things of the world clearly.

In order to understand what many of our friends here are striving to grasp, let us turn our attention to what exactly there is that can be utilized. We will look at the manner in which the streams of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch work through certain externally discernible endeavours and facts of the present time in a wider sense. Let us start with the Russian people in the East of Europe. I said only last Monday that all the people of Europe have taken them to their hearts. In the Russian people, together with various other Slav elements, there lives—I have spoken about this a number of times—a folk element of the future. For in the folk spirit of all that is gathered together as the Slav peoples there lives what, one day in the future, will furnish the material for the spiritual stream of the sixth post-Atlantean epoch.

In this Slav element we have first the Russian people and, in addition, all those other Slavs who, though differentiated from the Russians, nevertheless feel themselves in some degree linked as Slavs with the Russian Slavs. Out of these links arises, or arose, what is nowadays known as Pan-Slavism, a sense among all Slavs of belonging together in spirit and in soul, in political and in cultural life. In so far as such a thing lives within the folk soul it is a thoroughly honest and, also in the higher sense of human evolution, a right thing—though the word ‘pan’ is thoroughly misused these days. For one who understands the interconnections it is possible to use the phrase ‘Pan-Slavism’ for that spiritual communion which, I would like to say, quivers through all Slav souls in the way I have just described. To speak of ‘Pan-Germanism’, whether within or outside Germany, is nonsense, more than just mischief, for it is not possible to force everything into the same mould. If something does not exist, it is not possible to speak about it. It might perhaps be posed as a theory and even haunt the minds of some individuals; but it is quite different from that genuine communion which quivers in the many Slav souls, varying from one Slav people to another.

Whoever, since the nineteenth century, has concerned himself seriously with certain spiritual knowledge, knows that in the East of Europe there is a separate folk element. Spiritual scientists have always known that a folk element for the future lives in the Slavs. If certain occultists belonging to the Theosophical Society have maintained something else, for instance that this folk element for the future sixth sub-race lies with the Americans, this only goes to prove either that these people were no occultists or that they wished to bring about something other than that provided for by the facts. So we must reckon with the fact that there is in the East an element which bears a certain future within it, that emerges as though out of the blood, an element that today is still basically naive and does not know itself, yet prophetically and instinctively contains within itself something which will one day evolve from it. It is often present in dreams.

As every spiritual scientist further knows—not externally, but as a cultural fact—the Polish element comes forward in a quite particular way as the most advanced and culturally secure, because it is both political and religious; this element differs from all the other Slav elements in that it possesses a uniform, firmly-rooted spiritual and cultural life that is exceptionally vigorous and energetic. This just as a short sketch. Perhaps we will go into more detail later.

Let us return to what I have just described. In contrast to what I characterized just now there is the spiritual and cultural life of the British people, which is equally well-known to the spiritual scientist in its deeper significance. I mean the kind of cultural life as it appears before the world in British institutions and the life of the British people. This element is, above all, extremely political in character; its tendency is supremely political. One consequence emerging from it is the political thinking that is so much admired by the rest of the world; in a certain way the most advanced and free kind of political thinking. Wherever in the world efforts have been made to set up political institutions in which freedom can live—freedom in the sense we have come to understand it since the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century—there, ideas have been borrowed from British thinking. The French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century was more a matter of feeling, of passionate impulsiveness, but the thoughts it contained had been brought over from British thinking. The manner in which political concepts are formed, the manner in which political bodies are structured, the manner in which the will of the people is led within political organizations that are as free as possible so that it can work from all sides—all this is expressed in British political thinking in accordance with its original tendencies. That is why so many new states in the nineteenth century imitated British institutions. In many places efforts were made to take over the British way of parliamentary life and parliamentary institutions, for in this connection British thinking is the teacher of modern times.

In England during the nineteenth century, let us say up to its final decades, this political thinking came to expression in some very important politicians who modelled their thoughts in particular on this political thinking. One thing especially became obvious: The salvation of the world could be brought about by this thinking if only people would devote themselves entirely to it and allow nothing else to take effect in the arrangements of the various institutions. Therefore, politicians who may seem one-sided to some extent but who model their thoughts entirely on this political thinking and endeavour to work in accordance with it, appear as outstanding and entirely moral. Think of Cobden, Bright and others, not to speak of greater men who are always being mentioned; for in this field it is very possible to go astray as soon as a really prominent position is reached. That is why I mention those who have not gone astray in any direction but who are genuinely important in the sense I now mean. I could name many others. This phenomenon was really present there as an impulse right up to the nineties of the nineteenth century, and as such it is, in a certain way, the counter-image of what I described earlier as being borne by the Slav people. For this way of forming thoughts of a political orientation belongs in its character very much to the fifth post-Atlantean period. That is where it belongs and where it has to be developed. And those people I have mentioned have taken it up in the right way. On the one hand we have something that is made visible through good sense, intelligence and political morality, and on the other something that exists as a future folk potential deep down, not only in the soul but in the blood.

Let it be clear to us that what I am speaking about is not only my own knowledge; it was viewed in the way I have described throughout the nineteenth century by those who are concerned with such things. In those western brotherhoods I told you about there lived an exact knowledge of these things and of their connection with the stream of evolution in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch and its transition to the sixth post-Atlantean epoch. And in some individuals there was the will—we have yet to see whether for good or bad—to make use of the forces concerned. For these are indeed forces: on the one hand the talent to think in that way, and on the other a folk element for the future.

If someone wants to use these things, he can. Of course there exist not only those streams I have described but also others which flow side by side with them, and it is necessary gradually to point these out as well. There exist ways and means in the world of carrying out what I might call ‘mass hypnosis’. To bring about a suggestion on a grand scale you have to place something in the world which makes an impression. Just as it is possible to insinuate an idea into the mind of an individual in the way I have shown, so too, by using suitable means, suggestions can be made to whole groups of people, especially when one knows what actually binds these groups together. It is possible to steer a force that lives in an individual person in a particular direction. This person may then be totally convinced of his deep love of peace; and yet he does what he does because somehow or other a suggestion has been planted in him. He is quite at odds with what he does. In the same way, with the right knowledge, similar things can be done to whole groups; it is merely a matter of selecting the appropriate means. You take a force that lives but has no particular direction, such as the force living in certain Slav races, and by suggestion on a grand scale you nudge it into a definite direction.

There is a suggestion on a grand scale which has worked, is still working and will continue to work in a marvellous manner: the so-called ‘Testament of Peter the Great’. You know the history of Peter the Great; you know how he was at pains to introduce western life into Russia. There is no need for me to describe it since you can read it up in any encyclopaedia. I have no intention of recounting external history nor of developing sympathy in any one direction; I shall merely point in the simplest way to certain facts. Much of what is said of Peter the Great is true, but it is not true that he composed that testament. The testament is a forgery; it did not come from him but emerged at a certain point, in the way such things do emerge, out of all sorts of underground goings on. It was thrown in amongst human evolution; suddenly it was there. It has nothing to do with Peter the Great but a great deal to do with certain underground currents. It is very convincing, for it vindicates the future of Russia—I say Russia, not the Slav people—by stating that Russia must extend her boundaries over the Balkan states and Constantinople, across the Dardanelles and so forth. All this is contained in the testament of Peter the Great. It is easy to be so moved by this testament that one says: This is no bungling effort, it has been given to the world by a grand gesture of genius! I still sometimes recall the impression made by the testament of Peter the Great, during a course I had to give, when I studied it with individual students in order to demonstrate the implications of the separate paragraphs and their influence on the cultural development of Europe.

Those who desire to work in this way are always concerned, not to stimulate just one stream but to make sure that one stream is always crossed by another, so that they influence each other in some way. Not much is achieved by simply running straight ahead with a single stream. It is necessary sometimes to throw a sidelight on this stream so that certain things become confused, so that certain tracks are covered up, and other things are lost in an impenetrable thicket. This is very important. Thus it comes about that certain secret streams which have set themselves some task or other also set about achieving the exact opposite. These opposing tasks have the effect of obliterating all tracks. I could point to a place in Europe where so-called Freemasonry, so-called secret societies, had a great influence at a certain time when significant things were going on; certain people were acting under the suggestive influence of certain Masonic societies with an occult background. It was then necessary to obliterate the tracks at this point. So a certain Jesuit influence was brought to play so that the Masonic and Jesuit influences met; for there are higher instances, ‘empires’, which can quite well make use of both Masons and Jesuits in order to achieve what they want to achieve through the collaboration of the two. Do not believe that there can be no individuals who are both Jesuit and Freemason. They have progressed beyond the point of working in one direction only. They know that it is necessary to tackle situations from various sides in order to push matters in a particular direction. I say this in order to point out certain connections in an elementary way.

Peter the Great—let us return to him once more—introduced western civilization into Russia. Many genuine Slav souls bear a deep hate for all the western elements that Peter the Great brought to Russia; they have a deep antipathy against it all. This has grown particularly strong during this war, but it has always been present. On the other hand there is the testament of Peter the Great, which is not really his but which somehow made its appearance, and which is suitable for making use, by means of suggestion, not of individuals, but of whole masses of Slav connections, those masses in whom lives that antipathy towards the west that is symbolized by the name Peter the Great. So here we have two things at the same time in a way amounting, I must say, to historical genius: sympathy with the testament of Peter the Great and antipathy towards everything western. They work beautifully all muddled up together, so mingled, in fact, that their working can become extremely effective. And with this I point to another side of this stream in the East. I shall show as we continue how, after years of preparation, use can be made of such a stream from a definite moment onwards. Then there is one stream into which, as it were, two tributaries haved been made to flow. As I said at the beginning, account has been taken of long passages of time. Once a stream has been brought to the point of being effective, it can then be put to use.

Now let us prepare in yet another way. I want to show you another stream that flows along in the West beside the one that has brought into being what is hitherto the most mature political way of thinking in the fifth post-Atlantean period. This other stream has been more hidden and has only revealed its occult basis from time to time, smuggled into all kinds of public activities. With that I have to point once again to certain secret brotherhoods in the West. It is characteristic of these, more than anything else, that they have an exact knowledge of the kind of situations I have been describing and can instruct their pupils how things are going for the fifth, for the sixth post-Atlantean period, and what kind of forces are at work: for instance for the one the element of intelligence, and for the other the folk element. And they can show their pupils how such things can be used for one purpose or another.

These occult streams which live, as I have said, through the secret brotherhoods have, as one of their basic doctrines, the teaching that the English-speaking peoples are for the fifth post-Atlantean epoch what the Romans were for the fourth. This is a fundamental doctrine among these brotherhoods and they say further that, whatever happens, account must be taken first of the Latin element. This expresses itself in the various Latin cultures and peoples—I am not saying this myself but am merely repeating what has always been taught in the brotherhoods—and is destined to be submerged further and further in the materialism of science, the materialism of life and the materialism of religion. There is no need to take any trouble over these, for eventually they will disintegrate in the decadence into which they will fall. So, they say, their chief attention must be turned to ensuring that what they call the Latin race is in the process of total disintegration, that it is an element that is perishing; the task is to arrange and do everything in such a way that the Latin element will perish.

This view goes so far as to say: Those forces which push the Latin element down the slippery slope must be absorbed into all political impulses and also all spiritual and religious impulses. Of course nothing of this must show outwardly; but support must be given to anything that helps to free the world of the Latin element. They say that, just as at the end of the fourth post-Atlantean period everything was to be permeated with the Latin culture, so at the end of the fifth period the nature of everything must be filled with the culture that is to arise out of the English-speaking peoples. I am only speaking of the teachings of the secret brotherhoods and of what can, and indeed does, ensue from them. In addition, it has always been taught that, just as the Germanic-British element, as they call it, opposed the Latin; so will the Slav element come to oppose the English element, for that is the way of the world. Only now there is a ninety-degree change of direction. Whereas the Latin element found its impulse in the North, now the impulse strives from East to West.

We must realize that such things flow into much that is printed, much that is read by the general public, and into whatever else seeps into human social life. There are ways and means of bringing this about unnoticed, as I have described. For just imagine if this were to become known in certain quarters—it is, of course, unthinkable! It is just that things are expressed differently; it is a matter of exercising influence by means of suggestion. You can do one thing and say another, you can say something different from what you are doing, and you can often do something that seems to be the opposite of what is supposed to happen and of what you are really doing.

You may look upon what I have been sketching for you as some kind of spiritual atmosphere; indeed care is taken that it should be a kind of spiritual atmosphere. You might read something quite innocuous, but between the lines—this concept ‘between the lines’ can be something perfectly concrete—you find yourself reading something quite different as well; you learn something quite different and find you are looking at something quite different. So now people are immersed in this atmosphere and their thoughts form themselves accordingly. The thoughts of even the most intelligent people sometimes take on quite bizarre forms. Thus, in order to judge the way other people think, it is not enough to develop that naive enthusiasm of inattentive people, of which I have often spoken during these lectures; attention has to be paid to the kind of atmosphere in which people are living. This is perfectly real and is not that nebulous, abstract something which many people call the influence of the environment. Eucken, for instance, speaks of the influence of the environment without noticing that he is saying on the one hand: The environment creates the person; and on the other hand: The environment is created by people; which is equivalent to saying: I want to lift myself up by my own pigtail! The way to look at what is termed the environment in which people are immersed is to realize that this environment emerges in a definite way from certain spiritual streams. It is not the nebulous something that many people consider it to be.

Let us look at a case in point. You will have to forgive me, but I did say last Monday that I would not be able to make matters easy for you. We cannot avoid going into certain details; and you will understand the connection tomorrow. I want to read to you some passages from a letter written in the middle of April 1914 by Mitrofanoff, a history professor in St Petersburg, to a German who had been his teacher and with whom he had remained friends. Imagine this Mitrofanoff immersed in the various streams. In April 1914 he writes a letter that contains the following passages:

‘... aversion towards the Germans is felt in every soul and expressed by every mouth, and it seems to me there has rarely been such unanimity of public opinion.’

The following is a particularly interesting passage. Please pay particular attention to this passage, but not because of the name it mentions; it is possible to feel sympathy or antipathy with regard to this personality. I simply want to draw you attention to the formal content living in this passage:

‘It was perhaps Bismarck's greatest political mistake that he did not want to be more Russian than those Russian diplomats who, from weakness and lack of understanding, meanly surrendered the interests of their country during the Congress.’

What a marvellous expectation! This man reproaches Bismarck for not having been more Russian than the Russian statesmen who attended the Berlin Congress! That is why it is necessary to hate the compatriots of Bismarck! Whatever you may think of it, this sentence is certainly most original. And because the good professor of St Petersburg indulges in thoughts of this kind, he can also write the following:

‘As a reaction’—against the Triple Alliance that had come about in Central Europe—‘the Double Alliance was formed, which meant that Russia was associated with a vengeful France instead of the Triple Alliance.’ ... ‘For Russia the Balkan question is no guerre de luxe, no adventurous dream of the slavophiles. Its solution is without doubt an economic and political necessity. The Russian budget is based on export; if her balance of payments becomes negative the Russian treasury will be bankrupt, because it will be incapable of paying the interest on its enormous foreign debts. And two thirds of these exports pass through the southern ports and the two Turkish straits. If these outlets are blocked Russian trade will falter, and the economic consequences of such a blockade would be incalculable. The last Italo-Turkish war showed this clearly. Only possession of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles can bring to an end this insufferable situation, since the existence of a world power such as Russia cannot be allowed to depend on chance and the arbitrary acts of others. On the other hand Russia cannot possibly behave with total indifference towards the fate of the southern Slavs of the Balkan peninsula. First of all, the little Balkan states provide rear cover for the two straits and, secondly, over the course of the centuries far too much Russian blood and Russian gold have been expended on the Balkan heroes for the whole thing to be dropped now: Such an act would constitute moral and political suicide for any Russian government.’

Connect this, please, with the various remarks I have made about the Slav Welfare Committee. Too much Russian gold has been expended! Mitrofanoff continues:

‘One must, of course, not exaggerate the significance of Pan-Slavism and its ideals, but it does exist and it is doubtless quite vigorous; the demonstrations by the slavophiles in 1913 on the streets of so many Russian towns, in which even elements of the opposition participated, provide a clear demonstration of this.’

This letter of April 1914 then gives the following summary:

‘Once more: The urge to go south is a historical, political and economic necessity and whatever foreign power opposes this urge is eo ipso an enemy power. For some time the Triple Alliance has been single-mindedly set upon this course towards war. In Austria the urge to go south is also seen as a historical necessity, and the Austrians are just as right from their point of view as are the Russians from theirs. During the first half of the nineteenth century there were three directions in which the mighty Habsburg monarchy could expand: towards Italy, towards Germany and towards the Balkan peninsula. Since 1866 only the latter remains; Bismarck once again, this time perhaps unintentionally, caused Austria and Russia to face one another for a decisive battle, and by entering into the Triple Entente he placed the might of the German Empire at the disposal of Austria. Austria of course took advantage of this: everywhere and at every opportunity, if it was a matter of the Balkans, Russia found Austria standing in her way. The annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which made a deep impression in Russia, constituted not more than a page in the thick volume of Russian-Austrian enmity. Indignation was so great and danger was approaching so obviously that even the peace-loving Russian Government, despite its shattered finances, was prepared to go to war.’

He means in 1908.

‘But the “Nibelung” by the Spree threateningly shook his armoured fist and Russia, not sure of her allies, was forced to yield. In the year 1913 the realization of the Slavo-Russian ideal at last seemed almost within reach. The Turks were hit on the head, the victorious southern Slavs pressed forward to Salonika and Constantinople; one small push and the matter was settled.’

This letter is really interesting for it points to a number of remarkable matters. For instance the writer gets all excited about the following:

‘The workshops of Essen sent their cannon to the Turkish artillery; they were not up to the standard of the Creuzot guns, but nevertheless were very well made. And most important of all, German instructors drilled the Ottoman field army ... It has now become clear to the Russians’—April 1914—‘that if everything remains as it is at present, the road to Constantinople lies through Berlin. Vienna is merely a secondary question.’

April 1914! A number of other things are said which demonstrate clearly that in this head there is a dream of what is to happen soon. Whether the head in question imagined that the time was so close is another question; but this head, together with its body and limbs, of course, now set out to visit its teacher in Berlin. They spoke about many things together and I intend to tell you about a number of these. The professor of history said:

‘If you do not leave Constantinople to us, war will be inevitable.’

He repeated over and over again: It goes without saying that the Germans will remain God's choice of teacher for the Russian people, and that we only have to keep the peace—that the Germans only have to keep the peace—in order to conquer by means of spiritual, inner superiority. But do not believe that you can conquer us. On my estate at Saratov I own a house in which my ancestors have lived for centuries; but I would set it on fire with my own hands before allowing German soldiers to be quartered there. We could get on rather well together if we were to share Austria between us, so that German-Austria became part of the German Empire while the other part of Austria was taken over by Russia!

This is in June 1914! We could show in a number of ways how thought forms come into being in a particular environment. Quite a bit has taken place recently that could astonish us. Where social forms are more autocratic, things that happen tend to emanate from single sources, whereas in other situations they arise more out of popular streams. Never generalize, for in one place it is like this and in another like that. We could ask, for instance: What is the basis for this peculiar, puzzling behaviour by a country like Romania? I am not speaking of the incident that gave the final push but of the stream out of which it arose. But I do not want to give what is nowadays usually called a ‘historical’ explanation, for the type of history that has been coming into being since the nineteenth century and has now entered the twentieth is not worth a snap of the fingers. A true science of history has to proceed symptomatically; it has to show the different situations which are suddenly illuminated as if by lightning. I should like to point out one such lightning illumination.

Those who are knowledgeable in the field know that much that has gone on in Romania recently has been puzzling. This is connected with the fact that in the whole of the East a certain circumstance has been reckoned with that has dominated very many people like a suggestive idea. I do not want to characterize this by means of impressions; instead I shall merely tell you certain remarks made—I do not want to be vague—by the Minister for Interior Affairs, Take Ionescu, in 1913 to a certain Mr Redlich. He said, almost word for word, that in his opinion the monarchy of Austria-Hungary would not exist beyond the death of Franz Josef, and he would surely die soon. It would then be a matter of dividing this monarchy into its constituent parts. This was a firmly-rooted opinion and, in accordance with it, people's thoughts tended to go in one particular direction. It was another of those widespread, suggestive ideas.

‘But whatever surprises may be in store for us in the future, one thing is certain, and that is that the Triple Entente would only constitute a true political alliance if France were to enforce a three-year military service and if England were to introduce general conscription.’

June 1914! This is how that prince sees the Triple Entente that had gradually come about; for he thought that the alliance with France was no longer sufficient. The French would have to be quite strong, yet this was not enough; England must also introduce general conscription!

You see, the thought is so comprehensive that there was no time to realize it before the outbreak of war; but general conscription was introduced in England anyway. To understand the real situation in the world it is not enough to single out one thing or another arbitrarily; it is necessary to develop the will to look at those things that really matter. One person can say something far more important than a hundred others who chatter away like the blind talking of colours, repeating what they hear, and whose words have no effectiveness.

I have attempted, on the one hand, to show you how definite environments come into being and, on the other hand, to give you a few examples which show how people are immersed in these environments, and how it is necessary to get to know the environment if one wants to understand the thoughts that are expressed in one place or another. It is necessary, at least once, to thoroughly absorb the demand that is made of life as it is developing today: to develop, not the enthusiasm of inattentiveness but the enthusiasm of attentiveness.

We shall speak more about such things tomorrow, and thence endeavour to penetrate more deeply into our subject. We need these details in order to do this. It would be more comfortable to skim over the surface, but those who do not know at least a few actual cases cannot put the right questions to the spiritual world.

Translated by Steiner Online Library

The friends of our spiritual movement who are here in Ulm got together some time ago to cultivate the thoughts, aspirations and impulses of our spiritual movement here as well. We are here, friends from out of town, united with our Ulm friends today to commemorate this event together, which consists in the fact that friends of our movement have also come together in this city of Ulm. They have joined together in a serious time, in difficult times, in a time that speaks to the human soul through significant signs. And so it is appropriate on this occasion today to remember larger contexts, spiritual connections in the development of humanity, into which our spiritual movement will place itself for our time and for the near future. I would like to say: First we want to turn our gaze from what is connected with the very nearest human interests, including those in the spiritual, to the all-encompassing, that all-encompassing with which our movement is connected.

We know, of course, that those personalities of the present day who join together under the sign of our spiritual impulses must feel deeply in their souls and hearts that they want to seek something that another spiritual movement, another spiritual endeavor in the present time, and which is connected with what the soul of man must seek in our time and in the near future if he is to become truly conscious of his humanity. In this seeking, precisely as it is expressed in our movement, we find many opponents. And our opponents are precisely those who believe that they must protect the true interests of the development of humanity from this or that point of view, and protect it from what they consider to be such an aberration of the human spirit as is found in our movement. Thus many people of the present day who are religiously minded or apparently religiously minded believe that our movement is likely to lead away from what they need for real religious deepening.

Now, one could indeed reply to some of those who speak in this way, with a somewhat superficial but no less apt judgment: Has the Christian idea, for example, in the course of the last few centuries, managed to bring humanity to a height that could have mitigated, or I will not even say eliminated, the present terrible catastrophe? But those people who never want to learn from events, who learn nothing even from them, that religious life has been developing in their sense for centuries, even millennia, and now, despite this religious life, this catastrophe has been able to break out over the whole earth. But even if it is obvious to ask, we do not want to move our thoughts in this direction. Today, by way of introduction, we would like to raise another question that is perhaps given very little consideration, but which is in fact connected with very, very profound matters of the present.

Do you know which word is most unknown to contemporary scholars, to philological scholars, in terms of its origin and development? Do you know which word is most often found in even the most learned works when you seek advice, a word for which you cannot determine its origin, what it actually means, or what it means? The word for which you will most often search in vain in the scholarly resources, both in terms of its linguistic and spiritual origin, is the word “God.” No science today can give you any information about the linguistic and spiritual origin of the word God. That is a peculiar fact. For this fact does not merely point to externals, to something that is in this or that series of facts, but it points to something that is deeply, deeply connected with the human mind. People all believe they are saying something when they speak of the divine, when they speak of their turning to God. And with all the means of present-day learning, they do not even know how to somehow indicate the origin of the word God. This indicates that by far the greatest number of people in the present day who speak on religious or other spiritual subjects really do not know what they are talking about. If one would only go deeply enough into what is actually meant by people not knowing what they are talking about when they believe they are talking about what is most intimately connected with the human soul's striving! This is felt, if not clearly conscious, then instinctively by those who feel compelled to come to our spiritual impulses from the various spiritual confusions of the present. That these spiritual impulses, which come precisely from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, are connected with the most urgent needs of our time, has been emphasized by me again and again in the times when the present severe thunderstorm has actually gathered for a long time.

I would like to remind you of a sentence that I have often spoken, as those friends who have been following our movement for years now know. I have often said that over the last three to four centuries, the earth and its various peoples have become one in commercial, industrial, banking and so on. I have pointed out how modern means of transportation and what, through modern means of transportation, has rolled across the whole earth until recently, has poured out over the whole earth a unity of economic, of external economic life, a unity, if we may say so, of physical life on earth. We had a unity of physical life on earth. A check written in New York could be cashed in Tokyo, Berlin, or wherever. In the years leading up to the war, I always added the following demand to this fact: Not only does the human body need a soul, but every body needs a soul and cannot live without one. What has spread across the earth as a physical body in commercial, industrial, or other ways, needs a soul, a soul that offers the possibility that people on earth understand each other spiritually as they understand each other commercially and monetarily. To give the earthly body an earthly soul is something I have often spoken of as desirable.

Now, something like this certainly does not develop in a day; it takes time. And what I am expressing here is not meant as a criticism of the time, but only as a description; it is intended to stir in human souls what the impulses of action, of thinking, of feeling, and of will should be. It is not meant to accuse, but to express what should happen. Therefore it is not meant in the form of a reproach, [when it was said] that people have neglected to form a common earth soul for this earth body in the last decades, in which the common earth body has developed particularly intensively. This earth soul can only be found if people are made to understand what is as common to people in a spiritual sense as the sun is in a physical sense, and what is to be spread among mankind through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

But this has been neglected until now. And in this present catastrophic time, we are experiencing it in the most terrible way, as has never happened before in the history of the development of humanity, which can be traced with documents, that humanity finds itself in a dead end, in a real dead end. And it will only escape from this deadlock if it decides to add to the physical culture of which humanity is so proud, the spiritual culture of the earth soul for our time and for the near future, which belongs to this physical culture.

One may resist these efforts to give the earth a new spirituality as much as one wants, but the truth will have to prevail under all circumstances. Humanity is now living in the midst of a terrible catastrophe. If humanity does not decide to truly adapt to the new spirituality meant here, then these catastrophes will keep recurring in ever new periods, perhaps in very short periods. This catastrophe and all its consequences will never be healed by the means that humanity already knew before this catastrophe broke out. Anyone who still believes this is not thinking in terms of the earthly development of humanity. And this catastrophic time will last as long as it can be bridged, apparently, for a few years in between, until humanity interprets it in the only correct way, namely, that it is a sign that people are turning to the spirit that must permeate purely physical life. Today this may still be a bitter truth for many because it is inconvenient, but it is a truth.

Let us ask ourselves what it is that has actually maintained some connection with the spiritual world to this day, despite the increasingly intense purely materialistic culture of the earth that has been occurring for three to four centuries. Anyone who has experience in this field knows that it is actually only a single fact that is still maintaining the connection with the spiritual world, and that this is a fact of great importance for humanity. A man who had been one of the most important leaders of the barren “Society for Ethical Culture” in recent years once told me one day that he had thought for a long time about how it could be that in our enlightened times, when humanity knows that salvation can only lie in understanding the material world, how it is possible that in these enlightened times there are still churches, churches alongside the various states. And he said he had come up with the reason why there are still churches. He clothed this solution, with which he meant to express a deep secret, in the following words: “The states administer life, the churches administer death; and since people have not yet ceased to think of death as something terrible, the power of the church lies in the fact that it administers death.” It is a truly materialistic way of thinking, because the man wanted to express that when people would finally have given up thinking of death as something terrible in people's lives, when they would have gotten used to letting death come over them like an animal, then the churches would have lost their power.

Now, of course, this saying is complete nonsense, absolutely brilliant nonsense; but looking at the intellectual life of the present day, it is not entirely unfounded. Sometimes, in order to understand itself, to express what it is in intellectual terms, the present day has to say nonsense. In the future, this will be cited as a special characteristic of our time: that the most ingenious people of the present were compelled, when they sought to express the character of the present, that is, the time around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, that they then had to say nonsense. But now, there is something true in this nonsense, namely the truth that for many people of the present time, it is almost the only connecting bridge to the spiritual world, that in a certain respect they either have a fear of death or cannot bear the thought that their loved ones have gone and cannot imagine them as being in a nothingness. Certainly, it should not be denied that these thoughts are still significant enough, that they are still connected with the deepest interests of the human soul. However, neither fear nor any other feeling about death can lead to a real connection with the spiritual world. For this, there must be real, true knowledge of the spiritual world, there must be understanding of the reality of the spiritual world. And this understanding of the reality of the spiritual world is not possible today other than by adding a spiritual-scientific attitude to the natural-scientific attitude.

If people do not know where the word of God actually comes from, what the divine actually is, what do people who speak of the divine today actually do out of need of this or that religious worship? Those people who often believe themselves to be deeply religious, pretending to worship the highest divine, what are they actually doing? It is not unimportant to ask yourself this question in a moment of seriousness. What does this question imply? This question implies: What is the God that most people of the present time speak of, who pretend to be of a religious nature?

Now, people reject it when we speak from the standpoint of spiritual science that there are other beings above us, the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai and so on, so that we see a hierarchy of spiritual beings, and that the way up to what is the highest divine is long. People of the present day do not want this epistemological modesty. They often express it by saying that they want no mediation between themselves and God; they always want to turn directly and immediately to the Most High God. But it is not a matter of what one believes about such a turning, but of what one really does in one's soul, what one really experiences in one's soul.

Take everything that a preacher of any recognized religious community tells you about the divine today, everything he talks about the divine. What does it refer to if you do not go by his words, but by reality? It refers to two things. Either what he talks about refers not to a higher being than to his angel, who stands as a guiding entity over each and every one of us. He worships this angel; he calls him the highest God. He who knows what words can really mean, he knows that everything that is said about God in modern sermons never refers to any higher God than an angel, or if not to an angel, then to something else. If one investigates the question of where such people get what they feel when they speak of their God, when they preach of their God in their churches, when they often even claim to have an experience of God in their souls, as some people of the present time do – they then call themselves with a certain pride “evangelized people” and the like – where one comes from, one arrives at the following: In their souls, such people feel the impulse of their own being, how this being has developed in a purely spiritual environment between the last death and birth. This spiritual being that has developed in us between the last death and our birth is now in our body, has taken up residence in our body. Much of what we now experience in life comes only from this being, from this prenatal being. Man feels this prenatal being as a spiritual one; it is this prenatal being with which he feels united. Yes, even so-called theosophists of the most varied schools of thought have repeatedly told people, in order to make something spiritually honeyed sound, that it is a matter of man uniting with his God within himself. But what man feels when he supposedly unites with his God is he himself, it is only his spiritual-soul being in the time between the last death and the last birth. And what numerous pastors and priests speak of when they speak of the God they feel in their soul is nothing more than that they sense their own ego, not as it develops here in the physical body, in the physical environment, but as it developed in the spiritual world between death and birth. They sense this, and then they begin to pray. And what do they pray to? To themselves.

This is the one that comes from many spiritual currents of the present so heartbreakingly. If you look at these things in reality, so you have to confess that people have gradually come to worship themselves unconsciously, without them knowing it. And once someone finds out, he expresses it in strange forms, as Friedrich Nietzsche has done. This must be made perfectly clear: either the person who does not want to recognize the hierarchies, the wonderful breadth and greatness of the spiritual world, merely worships his angel - which is also a form of selfish worship - or he worships himself. This is the spiritual form of egoism to which humanity has gradually come under the influence of the materialistic development of modern times. Now you will say: What is he telling us? That is not true! People do not say that they worship themselves, that they only worship their angel! - Of course they do not say it, but they do it; and what they say only happens in order to numb themselves to the fact that it is no less real. What is spoken today is often an anesthetic for humanity, because, of course, people do not want to admit to themselves what it is actually about. Today, people often find it too inconvenient to rise to the spiritual worlds through inner work. They do not want that. They want to penetrate to the spiritual worlds in a much easier way, as simply as one can. Therefore they deceive themselves, therefore they anesthetize themselves. But one cannot deaden one's senses with impunity. The world goes its course. The Divine-Spiritual is at work in the world, even if one does not want to acknowledge it. It is at work and weaving therein. And that is the most profound task of our time: to rediscover the connection with the real spiritual, to bring out of ourselves the spiritualized egoism that we have just described, to overcome it. That is what speaks so powerfully to the heart when one has grasped the actual deeper impulse of spiritual science for the present time. The world – as I pointed out earlier – will, through its mighty signs, force people to seek the spirit again. But there must be a certain core of striving humanity that can find its way into this spiritual striving, which alone can be the right and true and real thing for the present.

You see, the earth has gone through various tasks. It is not only the individual human being who has a task; the whole earth is constantly having its various tasks. In the period immediately following the great Atlantic catastrophe, the people of Indian culture had a different task; a little later, the people of Persian culture had a different task; the people had a different task when the Egyptians and Chaldeans were in charge, and a different task when the Greco-Roman peoples set the tone. This continued until the 15th century. Another task has been assigned to us from the 15th century until today. And this task, which is now assigned to us, is quite different from any other task on Earth. One can characterize this task, which is presently allotted to mankind, which began with the 15th century and which will last into the 4th millennium, by pointing out the most essential thing that is happening on earth during this period.

If we look back to the time before the 15th century from a spiritual scientific point of view, we see that until the 15th century everything that people did was imbued with a certain spirituality. External history tells us nothing about this, because it is a fable convenue that we learn in schools and universities. But if you really study what people have created in their daily lives, you will see that it is imbued with a certain spirituality. The characteristic feature of our epoch is that this spirituality has declined and must gradually be lost altogether if man does not add a new spirituality to the purely external, material culture. Through purely external conditions, the development of the earth is doomed to become purely materialistic. The spirit, which more or less came of itself in earlier epochs of earth evolution, must be added by mankind of its own free inner deed to what presents itself.

If we disregard what people can bring to earthly culture out of their inner freedom, out of their consciousness, and only look at what has arisen by itself in our fifth period, which has lasted since the middle of the 15th century, then it turns out that this is the period in which the Earth is gradually beginning to die for the whole cosmos, for the whole universe. The fifth period is the beginning of the death of the Earth. While all the earlier periods could contribute to the spirit of the universe through what arose from the Earth itself, all the brilliant culture that developed in this fifth period - the telegraph, the telephone, the railroad - has its great significance for the Earth, but no significance outside the Earth. Nothing of what arose in Egyptian or Greek civilization perishes with the earth; but what arises in our time on the soil of purely materialistic culture perishes with the earth when the earth itself becomes a corpse of the cosmos. That which the present material culture creates perishes with the earth. This time had to come. For people must become free. They did not have to be forced to find the spirit; they had to find the spiritual through a free act of consciousness. That is why this present period came, in which everything that we can find externally, of which we can be so proud, is only there for the earth, but is not there for the spiritual world. But that is why it is also the time that leaves it up to man to rise to the spirit, that refers man to his inner being, to his soul, to his heart, to his mind, when they want to become more spiritual, that does not force man to be more spiritual, but that leaves it up to man whether they want to decline with the outer declining culture, or whether they do not want to decline with this culture.

We can either understand a truth such as the one that has just been expressed, that is, what is absolutely necessary for humanity, from spiritual science – and everything that you find in spiritual science literature gives you the building blocks for understanding what I have now summarized. But people are still not very inclined to read the signs of the time.

Consider the following. Anyone who has looked around a little in the fields of human development in recent decades has been able to make very strange observations. If he has asked himself: How are people striving for ideals for the future, for spiritual renewal? - and when he went to really get to know these things, he found active striving, he found spiritual striving, spiritual activity, a sense that things must change on earth in the area that used to be called socialism in the working-class world, in the labor movement. Purely material, but correct ideals for the future, always asking how the world must be transformed, how something new must come, that was one thing.

If you ask in other areas than the field of socialism, our intellectual movement is still a very small group of a few, as people say, quirky, half-crazy people – if you ask among the clever people, among those who have really understood the ideas of the time, you will find the most outrageous intellectual barrenness everywhere in recent decades. Within church theology, the strangest discussions arose: Whether Jesus Christ ever lived at all or not, but in any case that he could not have been some extraterrestrial being; after all, the “simple man from Nazareth” was the only thing that people cared about. And otherwise? Yes, what did they find? In this time, when people have “gotten rid of all belief in authority,” when people only follow the principle: test everything and keep the best, they found the most blind belief in authority in what, as they say, science demands. Blind belief in authority in all fields! Blind faith in authority from the historical branch right into the medical branch. Nobody found it very convenient to somehow know a lot about what health depends on; you let the one who is an authority in this field take care of that. Simply the most terrible belief in authority! Clinging to the remnants and scraps of what had been saved from the past, what had been held on to out of convenience. No striving that would have emerged from the awareness that a renewal of humanity in spiritual terms is necessary!

At the same time, it became apparent to those who were able to observe spiritually that in the east of Europe, I would say under the sign of fire, something of a new spirit was announced through pure natural processes, so that under the most disgraceful external yoke in the east of Europe, a future time developed in the minds of even the dull inhabitants of this part of Europe. It is remarkable how, since the 9th century, the rest of Europe has been pushed back to the east by that which was to remain, which was not to be eaten away by the west, as it then appeared in the outer form of the so-called Russian Empire in the various centuries, inwardly preserving the old and, in the shell of the old, as in a chrysalis, preparing a new one for a later culture! One is tempted to say that mystery cults have been preserved within this Russian people, that this Russian people, which has little understanding of the abstract religious concepts of the West, but which has a deep, profound inner feeling for cultic forms, lives with these, and that these cultic forms bring the human soul to the Divine in a pictorial form. In the East, people feel in their own souls that which the Western religious leader bears the name of: “pontiff”, that is, bridge-maker, bridge-maker to the spiritual. But in the East, as much of the old as was necessary to keep the bridge to the spiritual at least open, untouched by the new, the new materialistic.

And now take today's signs of the times together with this! One would like to say: the most bitter irony of human evolution has been poured out precisely over Eastern Europe, the bitterest irony! The caricature of every higher human aspiration, which has asserted itself in Leninism, in Trotskyism, as the final caricature consequence of purely materialistic socialist ideas, is like a dress that does not fit the body, put on the people of the East. Never before have greater contradictions collided than the soul of the European East and the inhuman Trotskyism or Leninism. This is not said out of any sympathy or antipathy, it is said out of the realization that the greatest contradictions that have ever come together are brewing in the European East through the combination of the greatest contradictions that have ever come together. This should also remind us that the signs of the times speak meaningfully. This should show us that, above all, we must begin to take spiritual science so seriously that we want to enter into reality through it; because with it we can penetrate into the reality of the present.

Rabindranath Tagore gave a remarkable lecture to the Japanese on the spirit of Japan. He speaks as an Oriental, Tagore; but the Oriental is already speaking today in such a way that the European, if he wants to, can understand him a little. But just when one delves into what Tagore said about the spirit of Japan, what he wanted to say to the whole world, then one finds that this Tagore knows with all insightful people of the East: The East preserves an ancient spiritual culture, a spiritual culture that the sages of the East have carefully kept secret, which they have not allowed to come out among ordinary people. But it is a spiritual culture that they have incorporated into the social institutions until very recently. A culture that is spiritual through and through, but whose time is up. Hence the peculiar unnaturalness that confronts us, I might say, throughout the Asian Orient. People are adapting the Western forms of thought and culture to their old spiritual way of feeling. This is basically a terrible thing, because spiritual thinking, especially as developed by the Japanese, is flexible and penetrates reality. If it fraternizes with European-American materialism, then, if European materialism does not want to spiritualize, it will certainly outstrip it. For the European does not have the flexibility of mind that the Japanese have. They have this as a legacy of their ancient spirituality.

Now, as if by some wonderful wisdom, I would like to say, the Russian folk soul had been preserved from everything that leads to abysmal development, to decadence. But now it is to be poisoned by Leninism and Trotskyism. It is to be infected by that which would extinguish the spirit from all earthly culture if it came to power. Of course, that must not be allowed to happen. But if it is not to be allowed to happen, then success, spiritual success, depends on our deciding to regard spiritual science not merely as an abstract theory, not merely as a convenient means of developing a certain inner voluptuousness, a certain mystical ic dreaming in the soul, in which one feels comfortable, through which one pretends that one has nothing to do with the world - one despises this vile world, one feels one is in a spiritual beyond. But this is only selfishness, a higher selfishness, but still only selfishness. One should want nothing to do with such mysticism, such theosophy, but only with that spiritual comprehension of existence that really grasps the spirit, experiences the spirit, but wants to comprehend reality through the spirit.

Now we must recognize the subject as a task, as a serious task for the present time. But these things are sometimes inconvenient. And precisely because they are inconvenient, certain brotherhoods have kept them secret from the masses and guarded them. That time is past. It is time that people strive out of their conscious inner being in free spirituality. The things that have been kept secret for thousands of years must now be communicated to people. One must realize that in the East in old, bygone epochs, a spiritual wisdom already existed, but the time for this spiritual wisdom is past. Another spiritual wisdom must come. In this, people often want to be mistaken. How many people have appeared in our present time of searching and wanted to make things comfortable for the Europeans, because something like our spiritual science is much too difficult for them, because there you have to think; thinking is something so uncomfortable! You have to be spiritually awake; being spiritually awake is something so uncomfortable! So many people were found who wanted to spare the Europeans the trouble of seeking their own path to the spirit and taught them all kinds of oriental wisdom, Zarathustrian wisdom and all sorts of other things. The Europeans felt so comfortable when they did not have to seek the spirit themselves, but when the spirit was brought to them ready-made from ancient India. This was a narcotic, for they did not want to search the universe through the spirit. They wanted to anesthetize themselves by taking hold of an old means of knowledge. That was the mistake made in many fields after the East.

And another mistake has been made. This other mistake is connected with the fact that this more recent time, which is leading the earth to die off in its culture, so to speak, brings with it the unconscious necessity in people to seek their own inner being. The urge to seek and find this inner being is already there. Oh, there are more and more people who are out to search for their own inner being! The search for the inner being even disguises itself, masks itself, in the worship of God, which is either a worship of the angel or of one's own self. The search for the inner being will become ever more lively and lively in modern humanity. The more science and technology people in modern times embrace, the more vividly the counter-thrust of the search for the inner self will come. Today, people often search in the wrong ways, but they search for it. Those who search the least are those who are employed as official organs to search for the spirit; they search for the “limits of knowledge”. They seek to determine what man cannot know of the spiritual world. And so today we have spiritual leaders who, above all, endeavor to tell people how not to penetrate into the spiritual world, and a humanity that seeks but has no real awareness of its seeking.

This is the most striking phenomenon. If you really want to unravel the souls on earth, you will find that people who are laymen, who are in the midst of the trials and struggles of life, are searching for the soul everywhere. Ask about the leaders who should speak down to the people from the pulpits and lecterns in such a way that the search is satisfied. They will tell you that science does not allow you to cross the boundaries of knowledge, that man cannot penetrate into the spiritual world. Kant established the limits of human knowledge for all time, and anyone who does not accept this is a fool. This is the most striking phenomenon of the present time. But the urge is there in the widest circles, even if they are not aware of this urge to search within. Where such an urge exists, in the long run one will not be satisfied with mere limitations, but one will seek for something else.

Just as the East has sent the narcotic of an old culture, a culture that has passed away, the Far West is sending people another narcotic. This is what people will gradually come to realize: Anglo-Americanism is culturally the narcotic of modern times for the spiritual search within the human heart. On the one hand, Anglo-American culture has the task of organizing and spreading material things across the earth, but it combines this task, by virtue of an inner characteristic of the Anglo-American nature, with the task of numbing people through Americanisms in their search for the spiritual in the soul. The more Europe becomes orientalized, the more it will become numbed to spiritual knowledge of the world; the more Europe becomes Anglo-Americanized, the more it will become numbed to the search for the true spirit, the true self within the human soul.

These things are not said here to develop chauvinism, not to talk all sorts of tirades about this or that world mission, but because - in the most modest way - this must be seen through in order to understand the responsible situation of the Central European human being. For since the times of the spiritual deepening through Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, through everything that I have tried to describe in the book “Vom Menschenrätseb as the forgotten sound of German intellectual life, the Central European spirit has been called upon to lead humanity away from these two narcotics: from the narcotic of Orientalism, from the narcotic of Americanism.

To understand how the spiritual tableau is spread across the earth, to understand what is placed on our souls, for this spiritual science is intended to be a guide. Can people out there in the world know today what spiritual impulses can come from Central Europe into the world? Can they know that? Let us ask the question in a different way: Have we proved ourselves worthy of such spiritual seeking as was inspired by Herder and Goethe? My dear friends, meditation is rightly recommended to us in spiritual science. Do you know what a wonderful meditation would be that you could start with even the youngest children? Read Herder and see how he presents every sunrise in the morning as a new creation in a grandiose world picture. And read the countless images that Herder presents in his “Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind”. Forgotten, faded away! Just recently, a gentleman who is serious about Central European intellectual life said to me: I have never heard of any of this at Herder's!

Yes, we have a task; we must recognize this task. Listen today to a Chinese like Ku Hung-Ming. Listen to an Indian like Tagore. Do you think that these people have the opportunity to really understand what is going on in Central European intellectual life and what intellectual impulses are at work there? They look and say to themselves: Well, Goethe lived; even a Goethe Society has been founded to cultivate Goetheanism. But what has happened? In recent years, they have been looking for someone to lead this Goethe Society, to stand at the helm of this Goethe Society; the question has not even been raised: should it be a man who works in the spirit of Goetheanism, who could work for spirituality in the sense in which it is to be thought now, a hundred years after Goethe? No, a man who was a former finance minister has been placed at the head of the Goethe Society. The world sees him as the administrator of Goethe's spirituality. No one other than a former finance minister is seen as the administrator of Goethe's spirituality!

It is not enough to call out: Spirit, Spirit, Spirit! We must permeate reality with what we have gained from spiritual insight, but we must also lead this spiritual insight into reality. A task has been assigned to the Central European, and this task has begun. For spiritual science, as it is conceived here, is nothing other than the continuation of that which has emerged around the great turning point of the newer spiritual life, to which I have just pointed. It should have found a counterpart, the purely material socialist striving, which for decades was the only impulsive movement in a spiritual movement! It is never too late, but it must be understood at last, so that it does not decay, that which is precisely our task. It must finally be understood that one cannot get ahead with all the buzzwords, that a new spirit must take hold of humanity. But people today walk past the spirit. Life gives us countless examples of this.

One example among thousands upon thousands could be cited. Recently a remarkable essay by a very clever man appeared in a widely read German newspaper. This witty man gave a book a roasting in the collection “From Nature and the Spiritual World” that had unfortunately been published; he was horribly scathing about this little volume. And when one read this essay, one could not understand why the man was actually scolding. Because in this book, the development of astrology and the horoscope is discussed as a normal, well-behaved, upstanding university professor today, who does not participate in the “superstition” of astrology, would discuss it. And at the end he develops his view by describing Goethe's horoscope, and he actually makes fun of the fact that you can find all sorts of things in this horoscope. So a very good university professor wrote from today's point of view. You couldn't be a more decent university professor than the one who wrote the little book. But Fritz Mauthner rants like a pipe about this book, that someone is spreading superstition. He rants and rants and doesn't know why! A few days later, the author published a correction in which he pointed out: “I am quite in agreement with Fritz Mauthner, he makes fun of astrology and horoscopes, so do I! I only quoted the horoscope to show that you can read anything you want into it. So we are in complete agreement. The “Berliner Tageblatt”, of which Fritz Mauthner was once the theater critic, had nothing to add, because it did not think that Mauthner had misunderstood. Mauthner does not offer a word of clarification either. In short, two people who were absolutely in agreement came into the most furious conflict, and no one knew why. There was not the slightest reason for it.

That is the way it is in general in the present time, that is the characteristic of the present time! People no longer listen to what they have to say to each other; they also usually have very little to say to each other. But what they develop, what they have against each other, arises from something quite different from what they confess. One lives in a completely inexplicable way, in a completely irrational way, because one has become estranged from what reality is and can no longer enter into it.

If you think and feel your way through such things, you will feel the importance, the significance of what spiritual science is, in your soul. Anyone who believes today that spiritual science is something impractical is on the wrong track. In fifty years' time it will no longer be possible to found factories or establish any kind of working community without permeating things with spiritual science, because it alone will find the way to reality. When people understand, really understand, that all the old catchwords lead to dead ends, that we need insight into the spirit that rules the world for the very most material life, then one will understand spiritual science, then one will not want to get into the spiritual world in an egoistic way through the “only bridge of death”, but then one will also draw life from death.

Perhaps someone who has seriously studied spiritual research is allowed to speak of such things in such an intimate circle. I, who have been writing about Goethe for more than thirty years now, have not wanted to write about Goethe in an outwardly philological or philosophical or other scholarly way, but rather, my aim has always been to offer, through my relationship with Goethe, a possibility to express in my books what Goethe now wants to say to humanity in a particular field that is close to me. I did not want to go to the dead Goethe to study him, but through what Goethe left behind, I wanted to find the way to the living Goethe. To the Goethe who speaks to our souls when we know that the dead are alive like us, that they live in the world in which we ourselves live, only that we walk around in the body, but the dead are among us in the spirit.

Do religious communities really believe that they live together with the dead? There is, admittedly, a selfish belief in immortality, and this should not be criticized. But only spiritual science can make fruitful the life of the dead. For it is through spiritual science that men will find the way to those with whom they were karmically connected and who have passed over into the other world and still cling to the world with a thousand and one threads. For in what happens here on earth, not only the impulses of the living work. Man does not cease to work for the world when he has passed through the gate of death.

We are only partially awake. When we perceive and form ideas, we are awake. When we feel, we are dreaming. Our feelings do not live more strongly in our consciousness than our dreams. And our will impulses, we oversleep them. We know how to remember dreams in our imagination, but in our ordinary consciousness we do not even know how our will works when we move our arm. We dream in feeling, we sleep in willing. Because we are sentient beings who feel and will, there is a world of spirit around us that we cannot see into in our ordinary consciousness. We are torn out of this world by perception and thinking. Because we are perceivers and thinkers and enjoy the physical world, we do not know that the dead walk among us. The dead walk among us. Man, when he has developed throughout his life, goes through the gate of death. He remains connected with earthly existence, the threads go down from him into earthly existence. We cannot feel and will without the dead who were karmically connected with us working in our feelings and wills. Spiritual science gives recognition of what looks in as a life not lost to the earth, which one otherwise believes in nothing, in a living way. The spiritual inclinations of the people of the East are also based on this. The peoples of the European center have the task, out of the freedom of the soul, to draw everything that the human being can consciously create out of the freedom of his soul into the fourth millennium. To do this, however, the outer material reality must be spiritually permeated. But it must not be immersed in Wilsonism, which is the opposite of all spirituality. In the East, what is preparing itself as the next culture must be released from those terrible contradictions, from that which does not belong together, which has developed from the grafting of Trotskyism and Leninism onto burgeoning spirituality. This next culture will be called upon each time something happens on earth to ask: What do the dead say about this?

Yes, it is a much more important thing today to know that this is something we are approaching in our development on earth. Today people are clever, they are so clever at twenty! They let themselves be elected to parliament at twenty because today everyone has their own point of view by the time they are twenty, they are fully formed human beings. That life from the age of twenty until we die is not given to us in vain, but that we are constantly growing, that new things are revealed to us, that when we have passed through the gate of death, wisdom continues, life continues, we become wiser, that is something that people must imbibe. And in the future, people will realize that the wisest people to ask about what is happening on earth are the dead.

The consciousness soul - if you read about what that is in my book 'Theosophy' - develops the present, the spirit self develops the nearest culture. The spirit self develops in that the dead will be the advisers of the living on earth. Today this is still considered a fantastic reverie, half madness. It will become a reality. There will come a time when people united on earth to do something worthwhile and meaningful for the evolution of the earth will not only consult the living but also the dead. It is not possible at present to go into detail about how this will take shape politically in the future and how it must be prepared. This can only remain a mystery. But one can already penetrate with the fact that this living consciousness must arise in humanity, that we are with the dead; that man should not only develop egoistic striving for immortality, but that living striving that lives in work, in action.

To become aware that spiritual knowledge would like to place the individual human striving into the all-embracing striving of the earth, I thought was particularly suitable to be considered on this occasion, when our friends have come together here to find the spiritual-scientific answers to certain questions of life. That it is not just about narrow-minded human soul needs, but that today, if we are serious about what spiritual science is, it is about the fate of earthly culture, to This realization is not arrogance, not megalomania; it can be done in all humility, but it must be done because there must be people today who truly understand the seriousness of human endeavor on earth. Immerse yourself in spiritual science, and you will find that however small a branch it may still be, it can make its contribution to what should come about in the development of humanity, what must come about if the earth is to reach its goal!

In those days, when the earth and moon were still together, in the time of fiery gases, all water was still dissolved in steam, it was a smoke of all substances.

Those physical bodies into which the souls had moved were not like today's humans and animals. They would appear grotesque to us; the physical bodies were formed by the soul entering them. It is of great importance that the lungs form when the soul enters. Until then, the beings moved by floating and swimming in the air. During the cooling period, the swim bladder transforms into lungs; they formed when the soul entered.

This transformation enabled blood to be formed. The I was able to couple with the human being. These conditions do not occur quickly; millions of years are necessary for this. The ability to breathe through the lungs and the descent of the souls into the bodies is wonderfully expressed in the Bible: God breathed the breath of life into man, and he became a living soul.

Thus, through theosophy, the profound truths in the religions emerge, compelling people to respect the tremendous facts in the development of mankind. This worship of the supernatural remained until about the fourteenth century, until Christianity became materialistic. It is not at all Christian to understand the spiritual essence of Christianity in its spiritual form in an abstract, dry way through the research of theology, geology and so on. It is genuinely Christian to express the great events in cosmology as Moses did in the past: “Adam fell into a deep sleep!” This means: Adam saw clearly the development on the astral plane. It is presented as a symbol that he clairvoyantly perceived on the astral plane how the [gill-breathing] being was transformed into a lung-breathing being through the self.

The migratory instinct on the moon was related to the mating and rutting season. Reproduction took place on its sunny side, and the interim period was spent on the other side.

The animal-men, who were the highest lunar beings, had not yet attained a degree of love; love, which descends from the highest level to the plant world, had not yet gained any strength on the moon. Everything was strictly regulated by cosmic forces; wisdom was the guiding principle. With the advent of the astral body, humans descended to a lower level, and with that, love began. The moon is the planet of wisdom, the earth the planet of love.

The wisdom-filled structure of the body developed mainly on the moon; at the end of the earth, love will be the motto. When we see the wonderful plant formations and the wisdom-filled structure of the human being, we find everything permeated by love. In the human being, it first reveals itself in the blood relationship of the ancient Atlanteans, and then develops into the compassion of brotherly love. From the coarsest forms of sexuality to the finest soul bonds, all beings are entwined in the bond of love. The transition from wisdom to love is a great step forward.

Mankind owes the gradual infusion of love to the high solar beings, who already possessed all parts of the spirit and whose progress had reached its peak. Yahweh lowers the ego; he is the bringer and giver of love, through whom a unified bond is created; it is a mutual giving and taking that furthers the soul in love.

There were also beings between gods and humans, only a part reached the Atma level. Many remained at the Budha level, while humans developed the beginning of Manas.

The Atma gods, the sun beings, wanted to imprint love on people, while the moon gods wanted to imprint wisdom on them. The important role that blood love played at the beginning of the Lemurian period approached people. Because the Hebrews felt that they were related by blood, they were able to base their legislation on it.

Love brings people together. They form larger and more comprehensive communities. The moon gods create an important counteraction. Freedom, individuality would have disappeared, people would have merged into a general love mess, that is why the moon gods directed their strongest attack against the union, their leader was Lucifer. So there were two currents, that of Yahweh and that of Lucifer, that of love and freedom.

The Atlanteans already had their secret schools. In the post-Atlantean period, the most developed people moved under the great leader Manu to the Gobi Desert, from where colonizers went out to all cultures. Wisdom was spread by people, by initiates, not by books.

The Indian culture consisted of descendants of the Lemurians and Atlanteans. The Indians received the Vedanta wisdom from the emissaries from Gobi, who were the holy rishis, seven in number.

The first post-Atlantean culture, the Indian culture, preserved the memory of the clairvoyance of the Atlanteans, hence the deep longing of the Indians for this time when man still felt connected to the divine; they valued clairvoyance more than the vision of external objects. They said to themselves: What we see outside are mere shadows, illusions! That is why they aspired to transcend this world. Through the yoga training, they sought to achieve the extinction of physical reality in order to exchange it for clairvoyance.

The Indians have retained their appreciation of the supernatural, but also their underestimation of the sensual world. It is a great mistake if this culture must pass away irretrievably, that it should be brought back into the present.

Persian culture is a step forward in that it regards the earth as reality, as a field of labor. The Persians were aware that one must plant the spiritual in the sensual world. [The Persian] wanted to redeem the sensual world with the help of the spirit. The great Zarathustra saw the god of light in the solar aura, and opposite him stands Ahriman, the god of darkness.

This was followed by the Chaldean-Babylonian-Assyrian-Egyptian culture. It had powerful leaders who married spirit and science. The Egyptians tried to impress the spirit of reality. Their interpretation of the stars was based on astrology and was imbued with spiritual wisdom, as were their architectures and famous monuments.

In the fourth post-Atlantean period, the Greco-Latin period, something new was added. While the Indians longed for a dream world, the Persians progressed by thinking of the sensual world as a field of work, and the Egyptians were able to align their earthly existence with the orbits of the stars, it was left to the Greeks to see themselves as a form of spiritualization. Form and material became the means of a living immortalization of the spirit. The Greeks brought art down into earthly reality. Its social effectiveness was a real, social state structure.

Great states are founded on causes other than physical facts. The Romans were the first to develop the concept of the “citizen”. In Greece, people were like members of a state; with the Romans, the individual figure came into its own. They imbued their own being with spiritual concepts, which is why jurisprudence flourished among them. They were conquerors of the external reality of man.

Then came an event of fateful significance. From the Atlantean era until the Romans, the God of Love, Yahweh, and the God of Wisdom, Lucifer, fought within man. It was a matter of uniting and individualizing the two extremes. The close blood ties also diverged among the Hebrews. The time came when these associations were no longer sufficient. The peoples were thrown into confusion by the campaigns of Alexander the Great; the campaigns of the Romans formed a center of spiritual selfishness.

It was a tremendous advance when Christ Jesus transformed the bond of love from a natural into a spiritual bond. His words are to be understood in this way: “Whoever does not leave brother and sister, son and daughter, and so on, cannot be my disciple.

The beginning of love was sexuality. The soul relationships between people must become ever more refined until, at the end of the earth, brotherhood embraces all people.

The preliminary stage of brotherhood came through Yahweh; the Christ brought spiritual love into the world; only then can man completely abandon it when love is spiritualized. This love must increase more and more in the relationships between people; it must become so great that it will triumph over all resistance.

The Christ Jesus appeared at a time when people were drifting apart, to unite them in a great brotherhood. Therefore, the Christ Jesus is the true spirit of the sun and the earth, the ruler of the earth, who puts love at the center.

Through Christ's atonement and sacrificial death, the astral plan is transformed from love of blood relationship into universal brotherly love. The first act takes place in Palestine, where a great brotherly bond is formed around humanity, the bond to love correctly where no blood ties exist. Christ Jesus provided the impetus for a transforming love that overcomes all. Christ Jesus is the greatest marriage between God and Man.

The fifth epoch signifies a deep descent into matter; the spirit is held captive by it, it becomes its slave. Even religion has become materialistic, Christianity must be renewed through theosophy.

It is a descent of the spirit into matter, this is not meant to be a criticism [of our age], but it must also be understood as a necessity. It is through this that concepts and logic are developed; natural science becomes the ruler of natural forces. However, it is still an enslavement of the spirit when the gigantic achievements are used only to serve the basest needs that were previously satisfied in the simplest way, while the spirit was cultivated. It is a waste of spiritual strength when animal instincts are satisfied with it.