The Rudolf Steiner Archive

This lecture is also known as: Luciferic and Ahrimanic Influences. It is lecture 8 of 8 from the lecture series: The Relation between the Living and the Dead.

From yesterday's lecture you will have seen how the spiritual world, in which we are between death and a new birth, and the physical world interpenetrate. Not only so; the spiritual world and the physical interpenetrate even in our so-called physical life between birth and death. We ourselves give the directions, as it were, for the way we are born with such and such characteristics. For we are connected between death and a new birth with what is taking place here in the physical world, and, among other things, with the stream of inheritance which eventually leads to our own birth.

We may now consider in a more inward way the whole line of evolution which we studied yesterday more externally. We will try to bring before our souls the connection of man with the spiritual world from a certain special aspect. Between birth and death we are living here in the physical world, and the physical world is known to us through our sense perceptions. It is a trite saying and we need scarcely repeat it: If we did not have our sense organs, we could know nothing of our connection with this physical world. All that gives us this connection through the sense organs with the physical world, falls away from us when we pass through the gate of death. Hence we may even say: It is our specific task between birth and death to make acquaintance with the physical world. We are incorporated in this physical body in order to make ourselves acquainted through it with the physical world.

Now we are not only members of the physical world, but equally of the spiritual worlds. The next spiritual world, as it were adjoining this physical, is the world which we have grown accustomed to call the ethereal or elemental. Whether or not the expression is really fitting is a matter of less consequence. To begin with, this elemental world is an unknown world for the human being as he now lives in the physical. It is, in fact, the first of the super-sensible worlds but it is no less fraught with significance for man than this physical world of the senses. For as soon as our sense is awakened for the elemental world—which happens when we are able to perceive Imaginatively—we realise that this world is peopled by many beings, no less abundantly than is the physical. Man himself, inasmuch as he has an etheric body, belongs to the elemental world. As an ether-being, man too is a citizen of the elemental world; only the conditions in the elemental world are somewhat different from the conditions in the physical.

To begin with, I must say something on this one point: the power of perception for the elemental world cannot begin in man till he is able entirely to free himself from that which makes him earthly man. In general it is not even difficult for him to do this. True, it is more difficult for the man of today than for the man of primeval times. We have all heard of the primeval atavistic clairvoyance. For the most part it consisted in this very fact: man was able to free himself from that which makes him earthly man. As earthly men, as you all know, we are formed of solid matter only to a very small extent. To a large extent we consist of liquid; and the moment we can emancipate ourselves from what is solid in us, the moment we feel ourselves only in our liquid part, Imaginative experiences can emerge. It is only our existence in the solid element which prevents our knowing by Imaginative perception all that surrounds us as the elemental world. Imaginative perception will surely return to mankind even as it has been lost. Only the old Imaginative clairvoyance which is lost was in a way unconscious and dream-like, while that which will gradually arise in our Fifth post-Atlantean epoch will be a fully conscious Imaginative seership. By a perfectly normal and natural process of evolution it will enter into human nature.

Let us now return to what I said before. Our relation to the elemental world is different from our relation to the ordinary, physical world. To begin with, I will give one example to confirm this. In the physical world—apparently at any rate—we determine our relationships with other beings by our own free human choice. We form our friendships for ourselves, likewise our other relations to the beings that surround us. In the elemental world, in which we are through our etheric body, this is no longer the case in the same direct way. Through our whole life in the elemental world we are in a more or less close relationship to certain other elemental beings. As an independent elemental being—for such we are by virtue of our etheric body—we are related to a number of other elemental beings, who accompany us throughout our life, and we may compare this relationship to the relation of the Sun to the encircling planets. Our own etheric body is a kind of Sun elemental being, and is actually accompanied by a number of elemental beings belonging to it, like the planets to the Sun. These elemental beings, together with it, constitute a kind of sevenfold entity, as do the planets and the Sun according to the older conception.

During our whole physical life between birth and death, there is a constant interplay between these our elemental satellites and ourselves. Not only does our feeling, our condition, depend on the way in which our elemental or etheric body is related to its ‘planets’; our relation to the outer world, to certain outer beings, and notably to other human beings, is regulated by the mutual relations between these ‘planets’ and our own etheric body. In future time there will be a kind of medicine which will reckon especially with what I have now said; there will be a medical, physiological conception which will ascertain how the one or the other satellite is related to the etheric body; and according to this, it will be possible to diagnose the sick or healthy condition of the patient. For what is called illness today is in truth only the outer physical picture of what is there in reality. In reality there is some kind of irregularity in what I have here compared to a planetary system, and the illness is but an image of this irregularity.

Of course, one might say forthwith: ‘Well, let the people who know this establish a new pathology. Hic Rhodus, hic salta, now let occultism show its art!’ Well, it will do so the moment its legs are freed! A man cannot dance whose legs are tied, and by the fettering of the legs in this case I mean the presence of modern materialism which has simply confiscated the science of medicine. This state of affairs cannot be improved by one individual or another doing this or that it can only be improved by the common will of a larger number of people, strong enough to bring about a system of medical practice which will make the penetration of medicine with spiritual principles a practical possibility.

One thing it is important to perceive. St. Paul did not speak in vain words of untold importance which have, however, never been rightly understood. For people keep on imagining that they are Christian while in reality they are not. St. Paul said that sin came into the world through the law, i.e. sin is there through the law. In a wider sense, that which mars the order of things is there through the law. Even today these truths can only be hinted at. For as a rule, if anything is not in order, our materialistic age will always cry aloud for a law—quite unaware that whatever is not in order comes from the very laws that are made. But, as I said, such a thing can only be hinted at. A very great deal will yet be necessary towards an understanding of these things. I said, people only imagine that they are Christians. For such a passage as this one by St. Paul, though it is read by countless people, is very little understood.

Through the fact that we are etheric beings, we belong to an elemental world, and there is a certain system which stands in a near relation to ourselves. This system consists of the elemental beings or ether-beings who accompany us. Their forces are ordered or arranged in a certain way; and when we pass through the gate of death, it is they, by their forces, who draw our etheric body out of our physical body, and place it—that is to say, place the human being himself to begin with—into the elemental world. The elemental world, as I have indicated, is clearly to be perceived by Imaginative cognition. In it are a multitude of beings whom we may call nature-spirits, but not only these. In it are also all those human beings who have just passed physically through the gate of death. They are only there, however, for a short time, as you know, for a few days. Then what we call the etheric body is given over to the elemental world; a second corpse is laid aside. But we must not imagine that this, the second body which we lay aside, is at all rapidly disintegrated in that world. That is not so. True, in a certain sense, it does become dissolved in the elemental world. It dissolves, it becomes ever more tenuous. But it does not become imperceptible to those beings who by their very nature can perceive Imaginatively.

The elemental or etheric body is always perceptible, for instance, to the human being himself, who has passed through the gate of death. True, he has laid aside this elemental body and he now lives on through the time between death and a new birth. But he remains constantly related to the elemental body which he has laid aside. It is not as with the physical body, to which man loses his relationship when he has cast it off. With the elemental body the opposite is the case; man preserves his relationship to it. Moreover, this relationship of man to his elemental or etheric body can work right down into the physical world.

When a human being here in the physical world has made his soul receptive, when he has acquired the elemental or Imaginative power of perception, then, too, he can consciously converse in his life of thought with the dead. Only, of course, these thoughts are far more refined and delicate than those of ordinary life. Thus he is consciously connected with the dead. Now the connection of which man thus becomes conscious is always there in the subconscious, whenever there was a relation during earthly life between the one who has remained behind in the physical, and the one who has risen into the spiritual world. Let us assume that we lost a beloved friend through death. One who has attained Imaginative perception will be aware of it but, whether we know it or not, the dead human being works upon us. He works—if I may so describe it—as though he were pouring his will into the etheric body which he has laid aside, as into a mirror, and the mirror, in its turn, were sending on the rays to us. Via the elemental or etheric body, the dead react upon the living. This, as it were, is the mediate influence of the dead upon the living.

To describe where this mediate influence comes to expression, I may say, it is expressed in our ordinary conceptions and ideas which we carry with us through the world. As a rule, the human being—especially in our materialistic age—is aware only of the conceptions and ideas which portray to him the outer physical reality. But among the conceptions which we thus carry through the world, some are perpetually living which are so fine and delicate that they are not directly perceptible; we simply do not pay attention to them. If we were wont to observe our soul's life more intimately, we should soon recognise their presence. But we constantly let this finer, more delicate life of the soul be overwhelmed and drowned by the coarser ideas which flow into us from the surrounding physical world. If it were not so, we should soon perceive that finer, more intimate thoughts are constantly there in us. These are due to those who were connected with us and have passed before us through the gate of death; and who, especially in the first period after their passage through the gate of death, are able to communicate their deeds to us.

Through the fact that as ether-beings we belong to the elemental world, we thus bear the being of the dead with us in our own conceptions, in our own life of ideas, for a certain length of time. If we would speak of ‘Monism’ on any basis of reality, we should chiefly speak of the Monism which I have just described—the Monism that is formed by the working together of the living and the dead. In truth, those who have passed through the gate of death are by no means far away from us; they are far nearer to us than we believe.

Now man develops more and more as he lives through the time between death and a new birth, and so he becomes able to work upon the world down here not only indirectly but directly. From a certain time onward we can perceive this influence upon us of the departed; their rays of force begin to penetrate into our soul's life. But this immediate influence cannot work its way directly into our thoughts, into our conceptual life. It works its way rather into our habits, into our whole way of life and conduct; into all this there streams an influence working downward from spiritual worlds, coming to us from those who have passed before us through the gate of death.

We must however realise that this working together of the dead and the living depends on many different conditions. The dead man is in an environment wherein there are beings of his own kind, that is, beings of soul, and all the beings who belong to the higher Hierarchies, down to man himself. And inasmuch as the etheric body which he has laid aside is his mediator, he can also have perceptions of the human beings down here, who are, as it were, veiled from him through the physical body. With the help of his etheric body, he can penetrate the veil. He who has passed through the gate of death is of course subject to the conditions under which man must live in the world of soul and Spirit; he must submit to them. I need only mention one main point, and you will understand what I mean in this connection. We know that throughout the world in which we live Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces are working in the most manifold ways. If these Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces did not entice us, all that comes to expression in man as wrong and evil actions would not be there in the world. The Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces must work upon man, and must give him the opportunity to follow and obey them. Once this fact is brought home to us strongly enough, we shall recognise that man, after all, is a very different being from what we often make him out to be with our hostile criticisms. If we had the faculty, already in the physical world, always to see how the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic work in man, we should judge our fellow men quite differently.

I do not say that we should generally be less critical; for when we divert our adverse judgement from man—though we should no longer be fighting against man himself—we must still be fighting Lucifer and Ahriman. But against man as man, we should be infinitely more tolerant. Now he who lives in the soul life in the time between death and a new birth, practises this tolerance both in relation to the beings who are with him in the spiritual world and in relation to those who are still incarnated as men here in the physical life. It is part of the very character of man, when he has passed through the gate of death, that he acquires this tolerance. He always sees through the fact that Lucifer and Ahriman are playing such and such a part in a human being. He does not say, ‘That is a bad man, following evil desires’, but he sees through the fact that Lucifer is playing such and such a part in him. He does not say, ‘That is an envious fellow’ but he says, ‘Ahriman is playing such and such a part in him’.

He who lives above, between death and birth, judges in this way, it belongs to his very being to do so, just as it belongs to our being to have good eyesight (if we are sound and healthy). Moreover, since this belongs to his very being, it hurts the dead man infinitely when, maintaining his connection with us in the physical life (the connection which was begun during his own life on Earth), he comes up against an altogether different spirit in ourselves. Assume, for instance, that out of our personal antipathy we meet with peculiar hate another human being, who was also connected with the dead man. This hate will signify infinite pain for the dead who tries to approach us—as he must do, since he is still connected with us. This hatred must first be overcome by him; it is like a sword, a jagged sword, a spear that is shivered constantly against him.

And so the way in which the dead man tries to work into us—his own experience as he does so—depends very, very much on the attunement of our soul. Into our ordinary thoughts and ideas borrowed from the surrounding world, into our feelings and sentiments, into our temperament and habits, these influences of the dead are working as I have now described. And there is a constant mutual interaction between what goes on in the realm of those who have passed through the gate of death, and our own souls.

If you bear all this in mind, you will say to yourself: Complicated workings are contained in that which we bear within us as our soul; and much is necessary fully to perceive all the mysterious forces that pulsate in the human soul. The soul has very little in its own consciousness of all that is pulsating in it. But the mood and attunement of the soul, and its ability or inability in one direction or another, depend on all these things. For on a large scale all this is determined once more through our karma. The fact that we are brought together here with this man or that, and that they in turn work down upon us in the way I have described, is, of course, connected with our karma in the widest sense.

In bringing all this before us, we must realise, of course, that our age has a real longing for what Spiritual Science brings to men; and the real longings are frequently satisfied today by quite erroneous methods. Thus there are many people today who have decidedly got beyond the prejudice which people had in the middle of the 19th century, and even in the last third of the 19th century—the prejudice that all things of the soul can still be explained from physical and physiological effects. Frequently, however, half- or quarter-truths have far worse effects than complete errors. Thus it is a half- or quarter-truth which underlies what is so frequently described today as analytical psychology or psychoanalysis. People are truly seeking but they are groping in the dark; they divine that many things are hidden in the foundations of the soul, but they cannot resolve to take the real steps into the spiritual world, so as to find what is hidden there, in the depths of the soul.

What do the psychoanalysts say? They say: Observe a human being as he meets us just in ordinary life. His feeling and condition as a whole depends very largely, not only on what is there in his consciousness, but on a variety of factors which lie in the unconscious, beneath the threshold of consciousness. There comes a man, feeling in a depressed mood; an irregularity in his whole nervous apparatus is apparent. In such a case—the psychoanalyst opines—we must look and see what he may have experienced perhaps many years ago; experiences which he may not altogether have assimilated, but which he pressed down into the subconscious.

The psychoanalyst divines quite well that that which has been removed from consciousness has not therefore been removed from reality; it is still there, down in the subconscious. But his idea is this: If we can only entice it forth into the consciousness by a kind of catechising process, then we shall perceive what is consuming and gnawing at him down below. (I cannot, of course, explain psychoanalysis here in all its ramifications; I will only show you a few features of it.)

Starting from this point, the psychoanalyst looks for many things in the foundations of the soul. Years ago, the human being had perhaps this or that ideal of life, this or that hope or plan. He did not carry it out; he was not able to do so. It is no longer in his consciousness, for he is living in his present life. But it is not eliminated from the reality of his soul; there it goes on gnawing away and consuming him. And his whole mood and condition depends on what is there beneath in his subconsciousness. Perhaps he had an unhappy love affair—that is what the psychoanalysts generally find, for they are on the lookout for it. It is an isolated province in his subconsciousness; he has fought against it, but it goes on working. Notably it will go on working—so believe the psychoanalysts—if feelings of love were there, while the beloved being was removed; that is to say, if the love remained unsatisfied.

In addition to these disappointed spring time hopes of life—in addition to what I have just indicated—the psychoanalyst seeks in the depths of the soul for what we might call the ‘animal morass’ at the very basis of human life—the ‘animal morass’ or slime of life working constantly upward to the surface—connected, as they conceive it, with all that man possesses as an animal being, playing upward into his soul's life. Some psychoanalysts will go still further: if we get further and further down, we find at length what plays upward into the soul out of racial and national connections and the like, playing into the soul's life in more or less unconscious ways. And at last, at the very bottom, there is something demonic—the most undefined of all—lying even beneath the ‘animal morass’, at the very ground of life. Such people, who are among the special followers of the modern psychoanalysts, will sometimes gently hint that in these demonic depths beneath are to be found the impulses that lead people to such subjects as Gnosis, Theosophy and Anthroposophy. Although it is hinted at in a rather veiled way, still the hint is there. Read one of the last numbers of the periodical Wissen und Leben—I think it is called—and you will find such hints at one place and another, albeit they are rather hidden between the lines.

I said half- or quarter-truths often have a far worse effect than complete mistakes. Analytical psychology in its search for the sub-conscious foundations of the soul contains half and quarter-truths. Compare it with what we have pointed out today. The realities that live in the foundations of the soul work in towards us from the realm of the dead. Here we are led to quite a different way of thinking; we shall not seek for the ‘animal morass’ of the soul; we shall not try to interpret this or that mood of the soul from the aspect of disappointed love affairs. On the contrary, we shall often have to seek the underlying cause of an unhappy mood of soul in this or that departed one, for whom we are making difficulties through our own conduct—which difficulties find expression in dissatisfactions of one kind or another, surging up into our consciousness.

In short, we shall do well to bring home to ourselves with true reverence this actual connection with the spiritual world. It is the connection of our world, not with an abstract, vaguely pantheistic spiritual world, but with the real spiritual world wherein those who have passed through the gate of death are living as real beings. They are with us even now, as they were with us in life. But what they do with us now touches our soul far more nearly than what they did in life, when we were always separated from them by our body and theirs, which stood between us like a barrier.

Then comes a later time, when man has become utterly free from the astral body—when he has laid aside the astral. Not long after this, man is able to work down from the spiritual world into the physical in a more inward way. In former times, the outer life was frequently arranged instinctively according to these truths. Customs that arose in outer life might often be referred, it is true, to ordinary outer reasons, but an inner reason underlay the outer, though it was often only known by instinct. I said: the dead, soon after passing through the gate of death, are in direct connection with the human beings whom they have left behind, especially with those to whom they are lovingly united, and the connection is such that they work upon our habits. For this reason, in the times when such things were still felt instinctively, care was taken that a son should remain as far as possible in the whole circle with which his parents were connected. Learning the same business, spending his life in the same profession, he should remain where access was easier for them. All in all, this conservative way of holding on to the same stream of life was an instinctive expression of the desire to make it easier for those who had passed through the gate of death to work in upon those whom they had left behind. For if the latter were in similar circumstances to those in which the dead themselves had lived, it made it easier for the dead to find the way to them. In time to come historians will well observe such intimate impulses and underlying reasons in the historic evolution of mankind.

Now, as we know, when man has been still longer dead, he will have completely laid aside the astral body. But this only happens after decades, for we experience things much slower in the spiritual world than in the physical. One year of the spiritual world corresponds to 30 years of the physical. Man has a way of hastening here in the physical world whereas in the spiritual world, so to speak, he always has to revolve in far larger circles. So, as one spiritual year is equal to 30 earthly years, in one year of the spiritual he experiences approximately the same piece of the world as in 30 years of the physical. He thereby experiences it more intensively, more inwardly.

All in all, what man lives through on Earth is multiply connected with the great universe, the macrocosm. Therefore, what is experienced in the microcosm, in man himself, always finds expression even in the numerical relations to the macrocosm. I will only draw your attention to one point: Reckon up the number of days in an average human life; you get the same number of years—purely as a number—which the Sun requires to process through the complete Platonic year, the cosmic year. Man's life is numbered by as many days as the Sun requires years to advance through the whole cosmic circle in its precession from one sign of the zodiac to another. The Sun requires about 25,900 and a few more years to process through all the signs of the zodiac. Man lives for about as many days—though, of course, it is not always equal—in his individual life between birth and death.

Another interesting connection is this one: man has as many breaths in one day as the number of days he lives, or as the number of years it takes for the Sun to process through the whole zodiac. You see, therefore, in the very deepest sense the world is ordered according to measure and number. One should imagine that this delicate incorporation of man into the universe—this correspondence of the harmonies—would lead the crude materialists of our time beyond their limited outlook which sees nothing more in the whole universe than a great mechanism. Truly it is a strange mechanism which contains all its individual beings organically within itself, in wondrously harmonious numerical relation to the whole.

It is indeed a strange thing. When we consider the world spiritually, we can actually say: In the evolution which takes its course between death and a new birth, man advances more slowly in order that he may do things more thoroughly. Not only so; he advances as many times more slowly in the spiritual world as Saturn courses around the sun more slowly than the Earth. Saturn runs its course around the Sun as many times more slowly than the Earth, as man in the spiritual world moves more slowly than he moves on the physical Earth. For this reason, and not because they knew less than the astronomers of today, the ancients reckoned Saturn as the outermost planet of the solar system. Even astronomically speaking, they were right, for the other planets which are now included—Uranus and Neptune—joined the system at a later time; moreover, they circle around in quite a different order, even in a different rotation than the planets belonging to the solar system proper.

Now at least one such spirit-year—that is, 30 earthly years—must have elapsed before the soul (assuming, needless to say, that a normal age of 70 or 80 was attained) can enter not merely into the habits, but into the whole thought and outlook, into the spiritual life of those whom they have left behind or who join on of their own free will. Nevertheless, in this way too the dead work into our life on a very large scale. It is so indeed. In the whole spirit, in the whole way of thought in which we live, we bear within us the impulses of men who died long ago and who work into us. Altogether, the connection of the future with the past is brought about precisely in this way, through this actual connection of the dead with the living.

The mediate manifestation of the dead, through the etheric body which they have laid aside, works upon our Imaginative cognition. That influence which enters, as above described, into our habits, works upon our Inspirational cognition. And the influence to which I now refer, which can only work when man has passed through a whole spirit-year, works—if we are conscious of it—into our Intuitive cognition. But in any event these influences are working all the time; nor can we truly understand the sense of evolution unless we bear these things in mind.

Forgive my inserting at this point a personal remark—you know I am not fond of doing so, and I do so seldom. Anyone who looks at what I wrote when I first began my work, decades ago, will see that at that time I disregarded what I had to bring forward as my own opinion. I did not write my opinion about Goethe, but tried to express the thoughts that came forth from Goethe. I did not write my own Theory of Knowledge, but a Theory of Knowledge implicit in Goethe's Conception of the World. In this way it is possible quite consciously to connect oneself with men long dead and work out of their spirit. Indeed this is what gives one, as it were, a true, legitimate certificate to influence the living. It is a bad certificate which people of our time are so very keen upon: namely, that every individual, scarcely has he conceived an opinion, should wish to communicate it forthwith to as many followers as possible.

He who is aware of the conditions of existence, the fundamental laws that work from the spiritual world, knows that in truth a man cannot rightly work into the depths of the souls of his fellowmen until he is dead—strange as it may sound. Even then he cannot, till he has passed through a spirit-year, that is to say, 30 earthly years. Infinitely much would be achieved if once this selflessness gained ground a little in the world, so that those who lived later would connect their own work with the dead, and consciously try to maintain the continuity in evolution. Whether it be a pure elective affinity, or some other relationship brought about by karma, to attach ourselves to those who are trying so hard to send the pure rays of their influence out of the spiritual world is of infinite significance, and it is so most of all if we do it consciously.

I have tried to call forth in you a feeling for the way in which the so-called dead and the so-called living work together. Now we must realise that the conditions are very different in the spiritual world and here. You will find a great deal about the conditions of experience in the spiritual world in the lectures Life Between Death and a New Birth which I gave a few years ago in Vienna. But of course one can only select a few points especially important from one aspect or another. Now here it must be said that there is in the spiritual world something very similar, and again dissimilar, to our physical experience.

Before we enter the physical world in the full sense, we undergo the embryo period of existence. There the conditions of life are very different from what they become the moment we enter fully into the physical world as breathers of the outer air. Now in a certain sense and style, the time we go through after death in the first spirit year, which is so often called the period of Kamaloca, is very like the embryo period of existence. Just as the human being calls to his aid, as it were, another human being by whom he lets himself be borne into the physical world through the 10 lunar months, so likewise, through all the wishes and cravings which hold him to the physical and which he slowly casts aside, he lets himself be borne into the spiritual world. Moreover, his consciousness in this first year of the spirit still to some extent resembles his consciousness in the physical world, although the faculties which are only to be acquired in the physical world can only be transmitted mediately through the etheric body. But after this first spirit-year a far higher consciousness ensues than anything which we can have here in the physical body.

If you remember many things that were said in the above-mentioned lectures, you will see how very different is this consciousness in the spiritual world. You need only remember how much our consciousness depends on what can enter into us. When we go about as ordinary men in the physical world, the phenomena of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms of nature, and of the physical human kingdom, come into us along with other experiences of soul—experiences of civilisation and the like. But after death, what becomes of the major part of that which enters our soul life through the faculties we possess here in the physical world? The mineral world as such—this we no longer perceive at all, as you are well aware; and of the plant world we only see the all-pervading life. You can read in my Theosophy how these things are, as we ascend within the spiritual world.

Experience in the spiritual world is in fact quite different in kind. Indeed, for these things, there are no words which you can understand. Our language after all is created for the physical; hence it is always difficult to describe these things correctly, and one can easily be misunderstood. Above all, we can only express ourselves by comparisons. Consider the following: here in the physical world you stand as it were, in a single point of the whole world structure, and look out with your eyes in all directions of the surrounding sphere. In the spiritual world it is not so; there you look in from the circumference as it were, towards the interior of a hollow sphere. But this is only a comparison; in reality it is not a hollow sphere, for time plays a greater part in it than space. Nevertheless, it is from the circumference that you observe all things. Hence the conditions of ideation are quite different; even within your thinking the conditions are quite different.

I will describe it somewhat crudely: suppose a man had passed through the gate of death 60, 70 or 80 years ago, or even earlier. He feels distinctly a certain inner experience. When you feel hunger in the physical life, you do not say ‘the hunger is here’ or ‘the hunger is there’ but ‘the hunger is in you’. Or again, take the case when you feel pain in this or that part of your body. So it is when you look inward from the whole surrounding sphere; you feel that at a certain place there is something. You know there is something that wishes to have something to do with you, and now you must begin making great efforts to getrid of it.Think what this means: to get rid of that which has manifested itself. And only when you have got rid of it, only then does there emerge the true being that is trying to reveal itself. Thus we may say: as spiritual beings we have an idea within us, but the idea tells us nothing whatever as yet; we must first get rid of it. Then, when we have got rid of it, then do we find within us—strange as it may sound, it is so—an angel or archangel who is revealing himself to us. His presence is first announced to us in the idea; yet we ourselves must first achieve the actual presence. Perception in the spiritual world is thus bound up with real labour, with a strong exertion of our forces. And only the souls who have remained here in the physical body can to some extent manifest themselves upward to the dead without their undergoing this exertion. This is what happens when you concentrate your thoughts on the dead man, or bring something before him by reading to him or the like. In all that I have been saying, I only wished to make it clear to you how altogether different are the conditions of life and experience in the spiritual world. This being so, you will no longer find it surprising that one year of spirit time represents 30 years of physical time. For in the spirit we are in the circumference and look in towards the centre; it is very important to remember this.

I made it my chief task today to describe to some extent how the souls who have passed through the gate of death work down into the world in which the others have remained behind, with whom they were connected while in the physical body. Thus you have seen once more, from another aspect, how the world is an interconnected whole. Truly it is only for outer physical perception that the dead are dead. In reality, the moment they pass through the gate of death they have a new way of access to our souls. That is the difference. They now work into us from within, whereas they formerly worked into us from without. For us, these things should more and more become no mere external theories; they should live their way into our consciousness, till they are no longer a merely theoretic ‘world conception’, but world perception, or even world feeling. Then will Spiritual Science bear the fruits which it is meant to bear, and which it truly can.

One more remark in conclusion. Think what it means that at a certain period between death and a new birth man must have the inner Feeling that he carries the Hierarchies within him as his own inner experience. It is really so. This might well lead the human being to the most appalling arrogance, which would live as a dim feeling in his soul when he is reborn. In ancient times there was a natural limit to such arrogance, in this way: human beings passing through the gate of death and entering into the spiritual world were somehow aware that it was not they themselves who were beholding, but that the highest beings of the Hierarchies were living in them and communicating the vision to them. But man has lost this connection in the spiritual world, just as in the physical world he has lost the old atavistic clairvoyance. Instead there must now come into us what St. Paul expressed in the words ‘Not I, but Christ in me’, which words are endowed with real spiritual feeling when we say ‘Out of God we are born; into Christ we die’.

If we learn this in all its depths, through the feeling which can come to us in Spiritual Science, that Christ is for the Earth, then we shall rightly place ourselves into the vision from the surrounding sphere. Then, having lived through the gate of death with the right feeling: ‘Into Christ we die’, and gazing in from the surrounding sphere, among all the beings whom we behold—beings of the Hierarchies, elemental beings, beings such as the human souls, incarnate or discarnate—among all these, we shall also find our own Ego-being; and we shall behold from outside the relation of this our own Ego to all the other beings. To be able to have this feeling after we have passed through the gate of death is of infinite importance. Only if we can have this feeling towards our own Ego, only then can we find our true way again into physical incarnation. And there is no other way of having this feeling; we can only owe it to the right passage through the gate of death—the passing through the gate of death with the inner feeling: ‘we have died into Christ’. This union with Christ gives us the possibility to behold, as it were with the eye of the soul of Christ Himself, our relation within the spiritual world, to behold ourselves as Ego being among the other beings.

This, my dear friends, is what I would always like to attain. When, as a result of such studies as we have made today, we take with us once more a new piece of knowledge, the knowledge should also be transformed into inner feeling. Even if all the ideas developed in this lecture should have passed by us like a dream; if the one fundamental feeling remains, which I have sought to gather up in these concluding words, then we shall carry with us into our further life the real fruits of such a line of thought. For I have tried to show how the death in Christ can place us rightly into the spiritual world—so rightly, so abundantly, that we can carry it with us through the physical world in our next earthly incarnation

We remain together in such feelings, recognising that they have power to unite us more intensely. So there will by and by arise in the world the true, invisible community of those who are devoted to Anthroposophy, holding together through such inner feelings born out of the clear ideas of Spiritual Science. The world has need of this indivisible community of souls, able to carry into it the inner force of such communion as I have just described. In this sense we will be together spiritually for the future, though for a time we may not be together physically. So indeed it should always be among us; our communion in the spirit should sustain our coming together in the physical.

Everyone involved to any degree at all in social life will certainly feel that the moral aspect is one of the most important aspects in the entire field of education. At the same time, one realizes that it is precisely this aspect that is the most subtle and difficult one to handle, for it relates to the most intimate area of education.

I have already emphasized that educational practice needs to be built on real knowledge of, and insight into, the human being. The comprehension, perception and observation that I tried to characterize last night will give the knowledge necessary to train the child’s cognitional capacities. Practically speaking, knowledge of the human being, supported by the science of the spirit, will enable one to reach, more or less easily, the child’s powers of cognition. One will be able to find one’s way to the child. If, on the other hand, one wishes to appeal to a child’s artistic receptivity as described yesterday, which is equally important, it is necessary to find a way to each child individually, to have a sense for the way various children express themselves from an artistic comprehension of the world. When it comes to moral education, all of one’s skill for sensitive observation and all of one’s intimate psychological interest must be kept in mind, so that all the teacher’s knowledge of the human being and of nature can be put at the service of what each child brings forth individually. To reach children in a moral way, the only choice is to approach each child on an individual basis. However, with regard to moral education, yet another difficulty has to be overcome—that is, an individual’s sense of morality can only be appealed to through full inner freedom and with full inner cooperation.

This requires that educators approach moral teaching so that, when later in life the students have passed the age of formal education, they can feel free as individuals in every respect. What teachers must never do is to pass on to developing students the relics of their own brand of morality or anything derived from personal sympathies or antipathies in the moral realm. We must not be tempted to give our own ethical codes to young people as they make their way into life, since these will leave them unfree when it becomes necessary that they find their own moral impulses. We must respect and acknowledge the young person’s complete inner freedom, particularly in the realm of moral education. Such respect and tolerance truly demand a great deal of selflessness from educators, and a renunciation of any self-interest. Nor is there, as is the case in all other subject matters, the opportunity of treating morality as a subject in its own right; as such, it would be very unfruitful. The moral element must be allowed to pervade all of one’s teaching.

These difficulties can be overcome if we have truly made our own and imbued with spiritual science the knowledge that we bring to the pupils. Such knowledge, by opening one’s eyes to each individual child, is all-important, particularly in this moral sphere. Ideally speaking, moral education would have to begin with the first breath taken in by the newborn, and in a certain sense, this really is what must be done. The great pedagogue Jean Paul (who is far too little recognized, unfortunately) said that a child learns more of value during the first three years of life than during the three years spent at university. If these words were to be applied more to the moral aspect of education than to the cognitive and esthetic realms, they could be rephrased as follows: How an adult educator acts around the child is particularly important during the child’s first years, until approximately the change of teeth—that is, until we receive the child into our schools.

The first life period really needs to be examined closely. Those who have embarked on the path to a true knowledge of the human being will need to consider three main stages during this first life period. At first sight, they do not seem directly connected with the moral aspect, but they nevertheless shed light on the child’s entire moral life to come, right up to the point of death. In the first developmental phase of the child, the moral is tightly linked with the natural. In fact a crude psychology makes it difficult to notice the connection between later moral development and the child’s natural development during these first years. The three stages in the child’s development are usually not granted enough importance, yet they more or less determine the whole manner in which the child can become a human being inhabiting the Earth. The first one, when the child arises from what could be termed an animal-like existence yet in the human realm, is generally called “learning to walk.” In learning to walk, the child has the possibility of placing into the world the entire system of movements—that is, the sum of all potential movements that human beings can perform with their limbs, so that a certain equilibrium is achieved. The second stage, when the child gains something for the entire course of life, is “learning to speak.” It is the force through which children integrate themselves into the human environment, whereas by learning to walk, children learned to integrate themselves into the whole world through a whole system of movements. All of this happens in the unconscious depths of the human soul. And the third element the child appropriates is “learning to think.” However indistinct and childlike thinking may appear during the first life period, it is through learning to speak that the child gradually develops the capacity to make mental images, although in a primitive way at first.

We may ask: How does the child’s acquisition of the three capacities of walking, speaking, and thinking lead to further development, until the conclusion of the first life period when the permanent teeth appear? The answer seems simple enough at first, but when comprehended with some depth, it sheds tremendous light on all of human nature. We find that during this first life period, ending with the change of teeth, the child is essentially a being who imitates in a state of complete unconsciousness, finds a relationship to the world through imitation and through trial and error. Until age seven, children are entirely given over to the influences coming from their environment. The following comparison can be made: I breathe in the oxygen of the air, which is part of my surroundings, to unite, at the next moment, my bodily nature with it, thus changing some part of the external world into my own inner world, where it works, lives, and weaves within me. Likewise, with each indrawn breath, children up to the age of seven bring outer influences into their “inner soul breath,” by incorporating every gesture, facial expression, act, word, and even each thought coming from their surroundings. Just as the oxygen in my surroundings pulsates in my lungs, the instruments of my breathing, and blood circulation, so everything that is part of the surroundings pulsates through the young child.

This truth needs to stand before the soul’s eye, not just superficially, but with real psychological impact. For remarkable consequences follow when one is sufficiently aware of the child’s adaptation to its surroundings. I will discover how surprisingly the little child’s soul reverberates with even an unspoken thought, which may have affected my facial expression only fleetingly and ever so slightly, and under whose influence I may have slowed or speeded up my movements, no matter how minutely. It is astonishing how the small details that remain hidden within the adult’s soul are prolonged into the child’s soul; how the child’s life is drawn into the physical happenings of the surroundings, but also into the soul and spiritual environment. If we become sensitive to this fact of life, we will not permit ourselves even one impure, unchaste, or immoral thought near young children, because we know how imponderable influences work on children through their natural ability to imitate everything in their surroundings. A feeling for this fact and the attitude it creates are what make a person into a real educator.

Impressions that come from the company of adults around the child make a deep, though unconscious, imprint in the child’s soul, like a seal in soft wax; most important among them are those images of a moral character. What is expressed as energy and courage for life in the child’s father, how the father behaves in a variety of life situations, these things will always stamp themselves deeply into the child’s soul, and will continue their existence there in an extraordinarily characteristic, though subtle and intimate, way. A father’s energy will energize the entire organization of the child. A mother’s benevolence, kindness, and love, surrounding the child like an invisible cocoon, will unconsciously permeate the child’s inner being with a moral receptivity, with an openness and interest for ethical and moral matters.

It is very important to identify the origin of the forces in the child’s organization. As unlikely and paradoxical as this may sound to modern ears, in the young child these forces derive predominately from the nerve-and-sense system. Because the child’s ability to observe and perceive is unconscious, one does not notice how intensely and deeply the impressions coming from the surroundings enter its organization, not so much by way of various specific senses, as through the general “sensory being” of the child. It is generally known that the formation of the brain and of the nerves is completed by the change of teeth. During the first seven years the nerve-and-sense organization of the child could be compared with soft wax, in its plasticity. During this time, not only does the child receive the finest and most intimate impressions from the surroundings, but also, through the workings of energy in the nerve-and-sense system, everything received unconsciously radiates and flows into the blood circulation, into the firmness and reliability of the breathing process, into the growth of the tissues, into the formation of the muscles and skeleton. By means of the nerve-and-sense system, the child’s body becomes like an imprint of the surroundings and, particularly, of the morality inherent in them. When we receive children into school at the time of the change of teeth, it is as if we received the imprint of a seal in the way the muscles and tissues are formed, even in the rhythm of breathing and blood circulation, in the rhythm of the digestive system with its reliability or its tendency toward sluggishness; in short, in the children’s physical makeup we find the effects of the moral impressions received during the first seven years.

Today we have anthropology and we have psychology. Anthropology’s main concern is the abstract observation of the physical aspect of the human being, while that of psychology is the abstract observation of the human soul and spirit as entities separate from the physical body. What is missing is the anthroposophical perspective, which observes the human being—body, soul, and spirit—as a unity; a point of view that shows everywhere how and where spirit is flowing into matter, sending its forces into material counterparts. The strange feature of our materialistic age is that materialism cannot recognize matter for what it is. Materialism believes it can observe matter wholly externally. But only if one can see how soul and spiritual processes are everywhere streaming and radiating their forces into material processes, does one really know what matter is. Through spiritual knowledge, one learns to know how matter works and what its real nature is. One could answer the question, “What is materialism?” by saying, “Materialism is the one worldview that does not understand matter.”

This can be followed up even in details. If one has learned how to see the nature of the human being by viewing body, soul, and spirit as a unity, one will also recognize, in the formation of the muscles and tissues and in the breathing process, the ethical courage inherent in surroundings to which children have adapted during the first seven years. One sees, not only the moral love that warmed them, in the form of harmonious ethical attitudes in their environment, but also the consequences of disharmonious ethical attitudes and lack of love in the surroundings. Here a perceptive educator cannot help feeling that, by the time children are received by the school, they are already formed from the moral viewpoint—an insight that, taken seriously, could in itself engender a mood of tragedy. Given the difficult, disorderly, and chaotic social conditions of our time, it might almost seem preferable from a moral viewpoint if children could be taken into one’s care soon after birth. For if one knows the human being out of a sensitive and refined psychology, one realizes how serious it is that by the time the child loses the first teeth, moral predispositions are fixed. On the other hand, this very same psychological insight offers the possibility of identifying the child’s specific moral disposition and needs.

Children absorb environmental impressions, especially those of an ethical nature, as if in a dream. These dreams go on to affect the inmost physical organization of children. If children have unconsciously experienced and perceived courage, moral goodness, chastity, and a sense of truth, these qualities will live on in them. The presence of these qualities will be such that during the second life period, by the time children are in school, these qualities can still be mobilized.

I would like to illustrate this with an example: Let’s assume that a child has spent the earliest years under the influence of an environment conducive to introversion. This could easily happen if a child witnesses lack of courage and even downright cowardice in the surroundings. If a child has seen in the environment a tendency to opt out of life, witnessed dissatisfaction with life or despondency, something in the child’s inner being, so to speak, will evoke the impression of a continuously suppressed pallor. The educator who is not perceptive enough to observe such symptoms will find that the child takes in more and more intensely the effects of the lack of energy, the cowardice and doubt that has been witnessed in the surroundings. In some ways, even the child will exhibit such characteristics. But if one can view these things with greater depth, one will find that, what thus began as a distinct characterological disposition during the first seven years, can now be seized educationally and directed in a more positive way. It is possible to guide a child’s innate timidity, lack of courage, shyness or faintheartedness so that these same inherent forces become transmuted into prudence and the ability to judge a situation properly; this presumes that the teacher uses classroom opportunities to introduce examples of prudence and right judgment appropriate to the child’s age and understanding.

Now let’s assume that a child has witnessed in the surroundings repugnant scenes from which the child had inwardly recoiled in terror. The child will carry such experiences into school life in the form of a characterological disposition, affecting even the bodily organization. If such a trait is left unnoticed, it will continue to develop according to what the child had previously absorbed from the environment. On the other hand, if true insight into human nature shows how to reorient such negative characteristics, the latter can be transformed into a quality of purity and a noble feeling of modesty.

These specific examples illustrate that, although the child brings into school an imprint—even in the physical organization—of the moral attitudes witnessed in the earlier environment, the forces that the child has thus absorbed can be redirected in the most diverse ways.

In school we have an immensely important opportunity to correct an unbalanced disposition through a genuine, intimate, and practical sense of psychology, which can be developed by the educator who notices the various tendencies of character, will, and psyche in the students. By loving attentiveness to what the child’s nature is revealing, the teacher is in a position to divert into positive channels what may have developed as an unhealthy or harmful influence from the early environment. For one can state explicitly that, in the majority of cases, nothing is ever so negative or evil in an ethical predisposition that the child cannot be changed for the better, given a teacher’s insight and willing energy.

Contemporary society places far too little trust in the working of ethical and moral forces. People simply do not know how intensely moral forces affect the child’s physical health, or that physical debilitation can be improved and corrected through proper and wholesome educational practice. But assuming we know, for example, that if left uncorrected a characteristic trait in a child could turn into violence later on, and that it can be changed so that the same child will grow into a courageous adult, quick and ready to respond to life’s tasks—assuming that an intimate yet practical psychology has taught us these things, the following question will arise: How can we guide the moral education of the child, especially during the age of primary education? What means do we have at our disposal? To understand the answer, we will again have to look back at the three most significant stages in the development of the very young child.

The power of mental imagery and thinking that a child has developed until this point will continue to develop. One does not notice an abrupt change—perhaps at most, with the change of teeth, that the kind of mental imagery connected with memory takes on a different form. But one will notice that the soul and physical forces revealed in speech, which are closely linked to breathing and to the rhythmic system, will reappear, metamorphosed, during the years between the change of teeth and puberty. The first relationship to the realm of language is founded through the child’s learning to speak during the first years of life. Language here includes not just language itself in the restricted meaning of the word, for the entire human being, body, soul, and spirit, lives in language. Language is a symptom of the entire threefold human being.

Approximately between the ages of seven and fourteen years, however, this relationship to language becomes prominent in the child in an entirely different—even reversed—way. At that point, everything related to the soul, outwardly expressed through the medium of language, will reach a different phase of development and take on a different character. It is true that these things happen mostly in the unconscious, but they are nevertheless instrumental for the child’s entire development. Between the ages of seven and fourteen, the child wrestles with what lives in the language, and if he or she should speak more than one language, in all the languages spoken. The child knows little of this struggle because it remains unconscious. The nature of this wrestling is due to increasingly intense merging of the sounds issuing from the rhythmic system with the pupil’s thoughts, feelings, and will impulses. What is trying to evolve during this life period is the young adolescent’s hold on the self by means of language.

It is extremely important, therefore, that we understand the fine nuances of character expressed in the ways students bring their speech and language into the classroom. The general directions I have already presented regarding the observation of the pupils’ moral environment now sound back to us out of the tone of their voices, out of the very sound of their speech, if we are sensitive enough to perceive it. Through the way children use language, they present us with what I would call their basic moral character. Through the way we treat language and through the way students speak during lessons, every hour, even every minute, we are presented with the opportunity as teachers to guide what is thus revealed through speech, into the channels we consider appropriate and right. Very much can be done there, if one knows how to train during the age of primary education what, until the change of teeth, was struggling to become speech.

This is where we meet the actual principle of the growth and development that occurs during the elementary school age. During the first years up to the change of teeth, everything falls under the principle of imitation. At this stage the human being is an imitator. During the second life period, from the second dentition until puberty, the child is destined to surrender to what I would call the authority of the teacher. You will hardly expect me, the author of Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path, to plead for the principle of authority per se. But for the time between the child’s change of teeth and puberty, one has to plead for the principle of self-evident authority, simply because during these years the child’s very nature needs to be able to look up to what comes from the authority of the adult.

The very young child observes the surroundings unconsciously. One could almost say that a child breathes in the whole character of the environment during the first seven years. The next seven years are spent not so much breathing in the environment, but listening to what it has to say. The word and its meaning now become the leading motive. The word becomes the guiding principle as a simple matter of human nature. During this stage the child learns to know about the world and the cosmos through the mediation of the educator. Whatever reaches the pupils through the mouth of the teacher as authority represents the truth to them. They observe beauty in gestures, in general conduct and again in the words spoken around them. Goodness is experienced through the sympathies and antipathies engendered by those in authority.

These few words give the main direction for moral education during the age between the second dentition and puberty. If we attempt to give the child abstract moral values upon its way, we will encounter inner resentment, not because of any inherent shortcomings in the child, but because of a natural response. On the other hand, if we can create moral pictures for the child, perhaps taken from the animal kingdom, letting animals appear symbolically in a moral light, and possibly extending this approach to include all of nature, then we can work for the good of the child, particularly during the seventh, eighth, and ninth years of life. If we create vivid, colorful human characters out of our own imagination and allow our own approval or disapproval of their deeds to shine through our descriptions, and if we allow our sympathies and antipathies to grow into definite feelings in the children that will lead them over into a more general moral judgment of good and evil, then our picture of the world cultivates ageappropriate moral judgements based in perceptions and feelings. But this particular way of presenting the world is of the essence. During the first years, the child has learned from direct perception. As we reach the primary school age, whatever comes toward the child, to strengthen a moral feeling leading to moral judgment, must have passed through the medium of those in authority. Now the teacher and educator must stand before the child as representatives of the order of the world. The child meets the teachers in order to receive the teachers’ picture of the world, colored by their sympathies and antipathies. Through the feelings with which children meet the teachers, and through instinctual life, children themselves must find what is good and what is evil. The students have to receive the world through the mediation of the educator. The children are happy who, thanks to a teacher’s interpretation of the world can form their own relationship to the world.

Those who have been fortunate enough to have enjoyed such a relationship with their teachers in childhood have gained something of value for the rest of their lives. People who say that children should learn intellectually and through their own observations, free from the influence of authority, speak like flagrant amateurs; for we do not teach children merely for the years during which they are under our care, but to benefit their whole lives. And the various life periods, right up to the point of death, are mutually interrelated in very interesting ways.

If, because of their teachers’ natural authority, pupils have once accepted subject matter they could not yet fully comprehend with their powers of reasoning—for the intellectual grasp belongs to a later stage of development and works destructively if enforced too early—if they have accepted something purely out of love for their teachers, such content remains deeply preserved in their souls. At the age of thirty-five or forty perhaps, or possibly even later in life, it may happen that they speak of the following strange experience: Only now, after having lived through so many joys, pains, and disappointments, only now do I see the light of what I accepted at the age of eight out of my respect for my teacher’s authority. This meaning now resurfaces, mingling with the many life experiences and the widening of horizons that have occurred meanwhile. What does such an experience mean for later life? A sensitive and empathetic psychology tells us that such events give off life-invigorating forces even into old age. Education gains new meaning from knowing that such an expansion of childhood experiences into older ages brings with it a new stimulus for life: we educate not only to satisfy the short-term needs of the child while at school, but also to satisfy the needs of life as a whole. The seeds laid into the child’s soul must be allowed to grow with the child. Hence we must be aware that whatever we teach must be capable of further growth. Nothing is worse than our pedantic insistence that the child learn rigid, sharply outlined concepts. One could compare this approach with that of forcing the child’s delicate hands into an iron glove to stop them from growing. We must not give the child fixed or finished definitions, but concepts capable of expansion and growth. The child’s soul needs to be equipped with the kind of seeds that can continue to grow during the whole of the life to come. For this growth to take place, it is not enough just to apply certain principles in one’s teaching; one has to know how to live with the child.

It is especially important for the moral and ethical aspect of education that we remember, for the ages between seven and fourteen, that the child’s moral judgment should be approached only through an appeal to feelings called forth by verbal pictures illustrating the essentials of an inherent morality. What matters at this age is that the child should develop sympathy for the moral and antipathy for the immoral. To give children moral admonitions would be going against their nature, for they do not penetrate the souls of children. The entire future moral development is determined by those things that, through forming sympathies, become transformed into moral judgments. One single fact will show the importance of the teacher’s right relationship to the child with regard to moral development. If one can educate with a discriminating, yet practical, sense of psychology, one will notice that, at a certain time around the ninth or tenth year (the exact age may vary in individual cases), the children’s relationship to the world—an outcome of sympathies and antipathies that can be cultivated—will be such that they forget themselves. Despite a certain “physical egotism” (to give it a name), the child will still be fully open to environmental influences. Just as teachers need clear insight into the child’s developmental stages when they use observational methods in object lessons with children of nine or ten, such insight is particularly important when it comes to moral education. If one pays sufficient attention to the more individual traits emerging in pupils, an interesting phenomenon can be observed at that age: the awareness that the child has a special need for help from the teacher. Sometimes a few words spoken by the child can be like a call for help. They can be the appropriate signal for a perceptive teacher, who now must find the right words to help the child over the hump. For the child is passing through a critical stage, when everything may depend on a few words spoken by the teacher to reestablish the right relationship between pupil and teacher.

What is happening at this time? By wrestling with language, the young person becomes aware, very consciously, for the first time that “There is a difference between myself and the world.” (This is unlike the time during the first seven-year period when, unconsciously, the child first learned to refer to the self as “I.”) The child now strongly demands a new orientation for body, soul, and spirit vis-à-vis the world. This awareness happens between the ninth and the tenth year. Again, unconsciously, the child has a remarkable experience in the form of all kinds of seemingly unrelated sentiments, feelings, and will impulses, which have no outward relationship with the behavior. The experience is: “Here before me stands my teacher who, as authority, opens the world for me. I look into the world through the medium of this authority. But is this authority the right one for me? Am I receiving the right picture of the world?” Please note that I am not saying this thought is a conscious one. All this happens subtly in the realm of the child’s feelings. Yet this time is decisive for determining whether or not the child can feel the continued trust in the teacher’s authority necessary for a healthy development until the onset of puberty. And this experience causes a certain inner unrest and nervousness in the child. The teacher has to find the right words to safeguard the child’s continued confidence and trust. For together with this consolidation of trust, the moral character of the child also becomes consolidated. At first it was only latent in the child; now it becomes inwardly more anchored and the child attains inner firmness. Children grasp, right into the physical organism, something that they had perceived thus far as a self-evident part of their own individual self, as I described earlier.

Contemporary physiology, consisting on the one side of anthropology and on the other of an abstract psychology, is ignorant of the most fundamental facts. One can say that, until the second dentition, all organic formations and functions proceed from the nerve-and-sense system. Between the change of teeth and puberty, the child’s physical fitness or weakness depends on the good functioning of the rhythmic system, on the breathing and blood circulation. Between the ninth and the tenth birthdays, what previously was still anchored primarily in the breathing, in the upper part of the organism, basically shifts over to the blood circulation; this is the time when the wonderful number relationship of one to four is being developed, in the approximately eighteen breaths and the seventy-two pulse beats per minute. This relationship between breathing and blood circulation becomes established at this time of life. However, it is only the outer expression of deep processes going on in the child’s soul, and the reinforcement of the trust between teacher and child must become part of these processes, for through this trust the consolidation of the child’s inner being also occurs.

These interactions between physiological and moral development must be described in detail if one wishes to speak of moral education and of the relationship between pedagogy and morality. As an educator, whether or not I am aware of this particular point in a child’s life will determine whether or not I exercise a beneficial or a harmful influence for the rest of a person’s life.

I should like to show, as a comparison, how things done at this stage continue to affect all of the rest of life. You may have noticed that there are people who, when they grow old, exert an unusual influence on those around them. That there are such people is generally known. Such people don’t even need to say much when they are with others. Their mere presence is enough to bring what one may call an “air of blessing” to those around them. A grace emanates from them that brings about a relaxed and balanced atmosphere. If one has the patience and energy to trace the origin of this gift, one will find that it has developed out of a seed that came into being during childhood through a deeply felt respect for the authority of someone in charge. One could also describe it by saying that, in such a case, the child’s moral judgment had been enhanced by a feeling of veneration that gradually reached the level of religious experience. If a child, between the change of teeth and puberty, experiences the feeling of reverence for certain people, reverence tinged even with a genuine religious feeling that lifts moral feelings into the light of piety, expressed in sincere prayer, then out of this childlike prayer grows the gift of blessing in old age, the gift of radiating grace to one’s fellow human beings. Using pictorial language, one could say: Hands that have learned to pray in childhood have the gift of bestowing blessing in old age. These words, though symbolic and pictorial, nevertheless correspond to the fact that seeds planted in childhood can have an effect right to the end of life.

Now, for an example how the stages of human life are interrelated; one example in the moral realm is, as I said earlier, that the child’s ability to form mental images in the thinking process develops along a continuous line. Only memory will take on a different character after the change of teeth. Language, on the other hand, becomes somehow inverted. Between the second dentition and puberty, the young person develops an entirely different relationship to language. This new relationship can be properly served by bringing to the child at this time the grammar and logic inherent in language. One can tackle practically every aspect of language if, instead of rashly bringing to consciousness the unconscious element of language from early childhood, one makes this translation in a way that considers the child.

But what about the third relationship: the young child’s creation of an individual equilibrium with the external world after having learned to walk? Most people interpret the child’s attempt to use the legs for the first time in a purely external and mechanistic way. It is not generally known, for example, that our ability for spatial imagination and our capacity for mathematical imagery is an upward projection of our limbs’ potential movements into the intellectual sphere; in this projection, the head experiences, as mental activity, what is experienced in our limbs as movement. A deeply hidden soul element of the human being lives especially in this system of movement, a deep soul element linked to outer material forces.

After crawling on hands and knees, the child assumes the vertical position, lifting vertically the bodily axis, which in the case of the animals remains parallel to the Earth’s surface. This upright achievement of the child is the physical expression of the moral potential for human will forces, which lift the human being above the level of the animals.

One day a comprehensive physiology, which is at the same time anthroposophy, will learn to understand that moral forces express themselves in the way a child performs physical movements in space. What the child achieves by assuming the upright posture and thus becoming free of the forces that keep the animal’s spine parallel to the Earth’s surface, what the child achieves by rising into a state of equilibrium in space, is the physical expression of the moral nature of its will energy. It is this achievement that makes the human individual into a moral being.

The objection may be raised that during sleep the position of the human spine is also parallel to the Earth’s surface. However I am speaking here about the general human organization, and about the way spatial dimensions are organized into the human being. Through an accurate assessment of these matters, within this upright position the physical expression of human morality can be seen, which allows the human countenance to gaze freely into the world.

Let me compare what actually happens in the child with a certain phenomenon in nature. In the southern region of old Austria, (now part of Italy) there is a river named the Poik, whose source is in the mountains. Suddenly this river disappears, completely vanishes from sight, and surfaces again later. What appears as the second river does not have its own source, but after its reemergence, people call it the Unz. The Unz disappears again, and resurfaces as a river called The Laibach. In other words, this river flows, unseen, in the depths of the Earth for part of its journey. Similarly, what the child has absorbed from its surroundings in its early years rests unperceived during childhood sleep. During the first years of life, when the child is unconsciously given over to moral forces inherent in the environment, the child acquires the ability to use the limbs in an upright position, thus becoming free of animality. What the child puts into this newly won skill is not noticeable between the change of teeth and puberty, but reappears as freedom in the making of moral judgements, as the freedom of human morality in the will sphere. If the teacher has cultivated the right moral sympathies and antipathies in the child at primary school age—without, however, being too heavy-handed—then, during the time before puberty, the most important aspects of the will can continue their “underground existence.” The child’s individual will, built on inner freedom, will eventually become completely a part of a human sense of responsibility, and will reappear after puberty so that the young person can be received as a free fellow human being. If the educator has refrained from handing down interdicts, and has instead planted sympathies and antipathies in the pupils’ emotional baggage, but without infringing upon the moral will now appearing, the young person can transform the gifts of sympathies and antipathies according to individual needs. After puberty, the young person can transform what was given by others into moral impulses, which now come freely from individuality.

This is how to develop, out of real empathy with the human being, what needs to be done at each age and stage. If one does so properly between the seventh and fourteenth years by allowing moral judgements to mature in the pupil’s life of feeling, what was given to the child properly with the support of authority will be submerged into the human sphere of free will. The human being can become free only after having been properly guided in the cultivation of moral sympathies and antipathies. If one proceeds in this manner regarding moral education, one stands beside the pupils so that one is only the motivator for their own self-education. One gives them what they are unconsciously asking for, and then only enough for them to become responsible for their own selves at the appropriate age, without any risk or danger to themselves.

The difficulty regarding moral education to which I drew your attention at the beginning of today’s meeting, is solved in this way. One must work side by side with one’s pupils, unselfishly and objectively. In other words, the aim should be never to leave behind a relic of one’s own brand of morality in the psychological makeup of the pupils; one should try instead to allow them to develop their own sympathies and antipathies for what they consider morally right or wrong. This approach will enable them to grow rightly into moral impulses and will give them a sense of freedom at the appropriate age.

The point is to stand beside the child on the basis of an intimate knowledge and art of psychology, which is both an art of life and an art of spiritual endeavor. This will do justice not only to artistic, but also to moral education. But one should have due respect for the human being and be able to rightly evaluate a child’s human potential. Then one’s education will become a moral education, which means that the highest claim, the highest demand, for the question of morality and education is contained in the following answer: The right relationship between education and morality is found in a moral pedagogy whereby the entire art of education is itself a moral deed. The morality inherent in an art of education is the basis for a moral pedagogy.

What I have said so far applies to education in general, but it is nearest to our heart at the present time, when an understandable and justified youth movement has been growing apace. I will not attempt to characterize this youth movement properly in just a few words. For many of you here, I have done so already in various other places. But I wish to express my conviction that, if the older generation of teachers and educators knows how to meet the moral impulses of the younger generation on the basis of an art of education as outlined here, this problem of modern youth will find its proper solution. For in the final resort, the young do not wish to stand alone; they really want to cooperate with the older generation. But this cooperation needs to happen so that what they receive from their elders is different, something other, from what they can themselves bring; they need to be able to perceive it as the thing which their soul needs and which the older people can give.

Contemporary social life has created conditions regarding this question of the younger generation that I would characterize in this way: It is often said that the old should retain their previous youthful forces in order to get on better with the young. Today (present company, as always, excluded) the older generation appears excessively youthful, because its members have forgotten how to grow old properly. Their souls and spirits no longer know how to grow into their changed bodies. They carry into their aging bodies what they used to do in their young days, but the human garment of life no longer fits. If now the old and the young meet, the ensuing lack of understanding is not caused by old age as such, but, on the contrary, because the old have not grown old properly and, consequently, cannot be of much help to the young. The young expect that the old should have grown old properly, without appearing childish. When today’s young meet their elders, they find them not very different from themselves. They are left with the impression that, although the old people have learned more in life, they do not seem to understand life more deeply, to be wiser. The young feel that the old have not used their age to become mature, that they have remained at the same human level as the young themselves. Youth expects that the old should have grown old in the right way.

For this concept to enter social life properly, a practical art of education is needed, which ensures that the seeds planted in education bear fruit right into ripe old age, as I have described it in various examples. One has to be able to unfold the appropriate life forces for each stage of life. One must know how to grow old. When the old understand how to grow old properly, they are full of inner freshness, whereas if they have become gray and wrinkled while remaining childishly immature, they cannot give anything to the young that the latter don’t have already. This sheds some light on the present situation. One must only look at these things objectively. Basically, those who find themselves in this situation are quite innocent of the problems involved. What matters is that we tackle this most important and topical human problem by looking closely at our contemporary education, and in particular at the moral factor in education. Coming to terms with it is of great import, not only from the educational point of view, but for the entire social life.

When all is said and done, the moral education of the human being is the crown of all education and teaching. In Faust, Goethe puts the following strange words into the mouth of the Creator-God:

The good person, in darkest aberration,
is of the right path conscious still.

It is worth noting that although Goethe let these words be spoken by the Lord God Himself, pedantic minds could not resist nitpicking over them. They said, “‘The good person, in darkest aberration ... is conscious...’ ”; this is a contradiction in terms, for the darkest aberration is purely instinctive and certainly not conscious. How could Goethe write such words in his Faust?” So much for erudite barbarians. Well, I believe that Goethe knew very well what he had written in this sentence. He wanted to express the idea that, for those who look at the moral life without prejudice, morality is connected with the darkest depths of the human being, and that in this realm one approaches the most difficult area of the human being. In today’s meeting, we saw for ourselves the difficulty of approaching moral issues in practical education. In these areas the darkest realms of the human being are encountered. Goethe clearly recognized this, but he also recognized that what the moral person can achieve only through the brightest rays of the spirit light, has to be attained in the darkest depths of the soul. I would like to think that Goethe’s words consecrate the moral aspect of education, for what do they really say? They express a deep truth of life, into which I wish to condense all that has been said about the meaning of moral education.

I therefore will sum up in the sense of Goethe’s words what I outlined for you today by concluding as follows: If you wish to enter the land of knowledge, you must follow the Spirit-light of day. You must work your way out of the darkness into the light. If you wish to find your way to the land of art, you must work your way, if not to the dazzling light of the Sun itself, at least into the colored brightness that Spirit-light radiates into the world. For in this light and in this light alone is everything turned into art.

However, it would be sad if, before becoming a morally good person, I first had to work my way toward these two goals. To become a morally good person, the innermost kernel of the human being has to be taken hold of down to its deepest recesses, for that is where the right orientation is needed. And the following must be said too: True, in our search for knowledge, we must work our way toward the light, and the pursuit of art means striving toward the colorful light of day; but it is equally true that, in the moral life, the human being who has found the right orientation can be a good person without light, and also without brightness; it is possible to be a good person through all the darkness and obscurity of life. If, as “the good person,” one is “conscious of the right path still,” one will be able to find the right way through all existing darkness, into the light and into all the colorful brightness of the world.

In the course of these lectures we have been able to show how in the most widely different epochs men have formed conceptions of what really lies behind the world and its happenings. By forming stable ideas, stable concepts, by acquiring definite sentiments and feelings about what happens in the world, and about its Beings, man attains a certain satisfaction, arrives at something of which he can say that it relates him fitly to things, either because it throws light for him upon the mysteries of the world, or because it satisfies him in some other way. Through this activity man demonstrates that he is not content to adopt a passive attitude towards the world, but that he has an impulse to struggle for a knowledge beyond what is evident to his senses, or even to his clairvoyant knowledge; he aims at a knowledge which goes further, a knowledge which is, to begin with, hidden from him, so that he may achieve true harmony with the world. In this way he shows that he is seeking for an explanation of the world, that the world presents itself to him as a riddle, and that his ultimate relationship to it is not limited to the one he started from.

In ancient times this was expressed by dwelling upon the feeling which men have in face of the most arresting Beings and facts of the world-process. It was said that the human being starts out from a feeling of wonder about things and Beings and that from this feeling of wonder all philosophy, all men's efforts to reach enlightenment about the world spring. However it is now a matter of common experience that the soul works its way out of this feeling of wonder to something which reduces it. The soul cannot remain at the stage of mere wonder, for in that way the whole world would consist of nothing else. The soul cannot continue to stand in amazement before the wonders of the world, it has to subdue its astonishment, it has so to say to get rid of what seems a marvel by finding, through its own activity, a kind of explanation, an answer to the enigma, an answer to what is marvellous in the phenomena and Beings of the world.

We have seen for instance how the ancient Greeks got rid of this wonder in quite a different way, by gazing with penetration upon what was current among them as the ancient clairvoyant consciousness and expressing what they saw in the figures of their gods. As soon as the Greek became aware that in one or another fact, one or another thing in the world, spirit-forms were at work which were represented by the figures and Beings of Greek mythology, his feeling of wonder transformed itself into a kind of harmony between his own soul and these ‘world-wonders’. Today, in a world which is materialistic compared with that of the Greeks, we think in a very different fashion. Today when we deem it necessary to reduce the feeling of wonder, we are not at all inclined to find the answer to the riddle of the world in pictorial images. In our time this would be regarded as ridiculous. Our age seeks an answer to the world-enigma which appeals to the understanding, one which we can call scientific. But as a result of the varied sentiments which have perhaps been evoked in these and other lectures you may well understand that the modern way, this dry, prosaic appeal to reason, is only a phase, an epoch, in the struggle to assuage our wonder at the marvels of the world. For when the man of today looks back from the method which he calls scientific to the Greek way of explaining the world and calls it childish, regarding it as derived purely from fantasy and as having nothing to do with reality—when the man of today believes that he has found what will continue to be regarded as scientific for all time, then we must tell him that he is very short-sighted. For just as the progress of humanity has advanced beyond the form of Greek enlightenment to a stage suited to the prosaic intellectual demands of our time, so it will reach beyond this intellectual, materialistic phase. And unless meanwhile man has become much more sensible, he will in future think much the same of what today counts as true science as we today do of Greek mythology. The laws of Kepler, our biological laws, will inevitably appear to our descendants to be as much a mythology as that of the Greeks, unless these descendants of ours are enabled through a wider outlook on the world to perceive that each kind of explanation is justified in its turn. The great arrogance of our age which maintains that mythology is fantasy and our own science a definitive explanation of the universe, will be overthrown, and it will be seen that our own time, just like earlier ones, only represents a phase which in its turn has to be superseded. But when we consider our own intellectual explanation of the world, an explanation which is generally called science, one has to say that it is just this explanation of the world, intellectual in form and idea, which is least able to enter into the realities. We must seriously try to discover why this is so.

If you take into account the whole spirit of this course of lectures, as well as of many others which have been addressed to you from time to time, you must see that the manner in which the human being looks at the world has undergone many changes. Man has become very different. Far stronger, more powerful forces, forces emanating from the entire human being, came into play in the old clairvoyant days. To achieve the purely materialistic interpretation, the soul through the instrument of the brain detaches from itself highly attenuated shadow-like images as intellectual ideas wherewith to explain the world. The old interpretations in times which were more or less clairvoyant were filled with far more life, far more reality. We saw yesterday that our brain is a kind of apparatus which impedes our astral body, brings it to a standstill, and lets the images of this astral body, because they are not allowed to pass through our brain, come to consciousness as our thoughts about the world. But in ancient clairvoyant times it was not only the images of the astral body that were held back, but also those of the etheric body. The result was that the human being let flow far more of his own self, far more of the stuff of his own soul, into the images of his knowledge.

Expressed diagrammatically it is like this. The old clairvoyance, even the ancient Greek outlook (more disposed as it was to fantasy) was such that when a thought of Zeus or of Dionysos came before the soul, this thought was full of the living sap of reality. Admittedly this really came in the first place from the stuff of the human soul; but because this stuff itself derived from the depths of the cosmos, ancient Greek thoughts about their gods contained far more reality than the thought-forms of modern times. If I represent the thoughts of the ancient Greeks as a circle,¹ I have to show the thoughts of the man of today as far more thinly filled with soul-stuff, soul-substance. In forming the ideas of today the human soul draws forth far less from itself, what it produces is much thinner. Thus in the picture of the world which the soul can acquire with present-day consciousness there is far less of world-reality than was to be found in the earlier images. So that what the arrogance of modern academic learning for the most part supposes, namely that the Greeks formed pictures of their gods out of fantasy, pictures in which there was no reality, and that the only reality lies in the abstract ‘laws of nature’ of today, is the very opposite of the truth. This modern view is not true. The creations of Greek knowledge were far more densely packed with true reality, and compared with it the knowledge which we acquire today through the laws of nature is like a squeezed-out lemon! This is something which the soul can feel if it is not preocccupied with the pride of present-day science, but thirsts to fill its consciousness with reality. Such a thirst will reveal that it is just what is lauded as strictly scientific that is above all entangled in illusion, in maya. There has never been in the world such entanglement in maya as in the thought-forms of present-day philosophy and science.

Why has that come about? It is because man in the course of his Earth evolution has had to develop his present ego-consciousness. He has had to become independent, to stand entirely alone with his own ego. He has had to be weaned from his union with the world outside him. The very strong substantial content which made it possible for him to instil much of the stuff of his soul into the figures he fashioned, as happened in the case of the Greek gods, this very thing would have made it impossible for him—just because he would have been too much poured out into the world—to attain to consciousness of his ego. To enable man to become strong as regards his ego-consciousness he had to be torn away from the world-realities, cut off from them; for objective knowledge of the world our souls had to become weak, utterly weak. Our soul, the knowing soul, the soul which perceives through understanding, the soul which is ego-conscious, is at its very weakest as regards cosmic consciousness, as regards conditions which it once passed through. This weakness, which we had to develop, has rendered inevitable the emergence in modern consciousness of our tenuous ideas, devoid of reality, and our abstract laws of nature.

Anyone who by academic learning or by some form of belief in authority has been trained to a natural science which is only at home in pure abstractions will not succeed in feeling this great impoverishment as regards true reality. But anyone who feels within him a thirst to grow into world-reality knows that at a certain point in his life there comes over him the feeling: ‘How hopelessly cut off from true reality one feels by all the ideas of today, and what phantom and shadowy forms they are!’ That sentiment could even be formulated in the terms of ordinary science and you will find it so formulated in my little book Wahrheit und Wissenschaft, on Goethe's theory of knowledge, which appeared many years ago. There I showed that in the attainment of the customary intellectual knowledge the human being acquires only a part of knowledge, a part of truth, and that he is pressing forward to another aspect of the world than the one offered by the intellect. This is to take a scientific path which is quite practicable, even though to modern philosophy it may sound incomprehensible; whereas the feeling I have described gives rise to an attempt to penetrate along the esoteric path into a much more vital reality than the purely abstract laws of reason can provide. If the soul feels that with the normal consciousness of today it can only produce ideas which are maya in face of the living reality, and if it is not like a squeezed lemon, acknowledging only the science of today, then it feels itself empty in face of the real world. It certainly feels able to reach with its ideas the furthest limits of the world, but it fails to take into account the warning in my second Mystery Play The Soul's Probation—(Scene 1)—‘End not at last in cosmic distances’. To do that must involve a feeling of being spread out, with a set of weak ideas, through an endless expanse of space. The further we expand thence into space the thinner our ideas become, and we find ourselves at last before an empty and bottomless abyss. That is an ordeal which the soul has to face. The man thirsting for reality who seeks to solve the riddles of the world, the ‘wonders of the world’, along the lines of abstract science, finds himself at last standing before the cosmic void with his ideas entirely dissipated into spiritual vapour. Then his soul has to experience an infinity of terror in the presence of this void. The man who is unable to experience this fear in the presence of the void is simply not sufficiently advanced to feel the truth about present-day consciousness.

Thus, when we try to expand our present-day consciousness into the far spaces of the world, we have to face this terrifying spectre, this fear of the cosmic void; nobody who takes seriously what normal modern consciousness is can be spared this experience. The soul has to undergo this ordeal if it wants to experience the meaning and the spirit of our time. It has at some time to face the abyss which opens out on all sides when we try to penetrate the widths of space with our ideas; it has to experience the unending fear of the void, the fear of losing oneself in cosmic distances.

If we are familiar with the Goethean phrase, ‘to become one with the whole world, to enlarge oneself to become a world’, then we must say: ‘If a healthy soul with the means available to modern knowledge has reached out into the far spaces of the world, and tries to comprehend the world with the philosophic principles of today—which are bound to be abstract, because they are derived from present-day consciousness—then that soul is bound to experience the ordeal of standing before the void, before the abyss on every hand; every healthy soul has to undergo the fear of being swallowed up with the best part of his being, with what constitutes his consciousness, in infinite nothingness.’ This is the universal experience and any other feeling is but a variation of this horror vacui. Closely confined as the life of the soul is, there would be something amiss with it if, as soon as it tries to expand to the limits of the universe, it were not to feel its present-day consciousness pulverised, shattered, in face of the infinite universe. That is the fate of the soul when with its present-day consciousness it tries to penetrate into cosmic distances, into the widths of space.

There is another path open to the soul. It can descend into its own depths in such a way that it experiences what its own organisation is. Under modern conditions of consciousness the soul really only experiences what has been added to its organisation on the Earth. What it received on the Old Moon as astral body remains subconscious; it lights up in the etheric body, but in normal consciousness is not experienced. Still less does man experience what he acquired during the Sun evolution as etheric body, or what through Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions he has received in his physical body. These are closed regions to him. But upon these closed regions countless generations of gods, of spiritual hierarchies, have laboured. Indeed when through clairvoyant knowledge, through esoteric training, we descend into these regions and penetrate behind our ego-consciousness into our own being, when we encounter what is in us as astral, etheric and physical bodies, then we do not come to a vacuum, we come rather to a condensed world-substance. We meet there everything which has been worked into us men throughout millions and millions of years by innumerable spiritual hierarchies. But when through the serious cultivation of self-knowledge such as is given by esoteric training a man tries to enter, learns how to plunge into the work of countless generations through millions of years, he does not encounter in a pure form what the gods have created. For man has stamped into it all that through the generations he himself has experienced as impulses, desires, passions, emotions and instincts. In the course of his terrestrial incarnations what he has developed in this way has united with what is there below in his astral, etheric and physical natures. Together they form a dense mass; and it is into this dense mass that he first enters. What we ourselves have done to this divine nature of ours veils it from us.

Thus when we plunge into ourselves we find the opposite of what we find when we expand into cosmic space. If we expand into the widths of space there is the danger of finally encountering the void; if we descend into ourselves there is the danger of coming into denser and denser regions, which we ourselves have condensed through our impulses, desires and passions. Just as we feel the matter of our consciousness scatter and disintegrate if we go out into cosmic distances, so when we plunge into our own soul-depths we feel ourselves to an ever greater extent repulsed; we feel like a rubber ball resuming its shape after it has been squeezed. Again and again we are repelled, when we try to penetrate into our own inner being. We can be very clearly aware of this. It is not only that our impulses, desires and passions, which are what we first meet when we enter into ourselves, seem horrifying to us when we meet them face to face, but—added horror—they seem at every moment to be trying to capture us. They wax strong and powerful, their will-nature comes to the fore. Whereas in ordinary consciousness we do not obey this or the other impulse, this or the other instinct, as soon as we descend a little way into ourselves, these instincts develop their full strength, and we cannot but give way to them. Again and again we become gripped by a will of a lower nature in ourselves, and are thrown back upon ourselves worse than before. That is the other danger—that when we plunge into ourselves we are confronted as it were by the density of our impulses and instincts.

Thus we have to face formidable dangers. If we expand into universal space we are in danger of dissolving with our consciousness into nothingness; if we plunge into ourselves, we are in danger of surrendering our consciousness to the impulses and instincts which are within us and of falling a prey to the worst possible egotism. Those are the two poles between which lie all vicissitudes of soul—fear of the void and the collapse into egotism. All other ordeals are variations directed against what we may call dissolution into nothing, or against surrender to egotism. Even higher knowledge is dangerous in this connection. For through it we learn that countless spiritual hierarchies have been at work upon us, we learn how our physical, etheric and astral bodies in all their parts have been assembled by the hierarchies, we learn how cosmic Spirits have been at work in order that at last man should come into existence. So when in the esoteric life a man delves into his own inner being, he is overcome by the thought: ‘You are actually the aim and goal of the gods. It is to create you that the gods have laboured.’ Here he confronts the great danger of falling into immeasurable arrogance.

When Capesius learns from the mouth of Felix Balde² how the spiritual hierarchies have laboured, and how man is the goal of all their efforts, he is afraid of this pride. That is the significance of the uneasiness he expresses. It is part of his soul's ordeal that he should feel this. That is why it is so necessary that man should humbly draw near to this knowledge that he is the goal of the gods, and in lowliness assimilate it, otherwise it will lead to overweening presumption. For when we recognise that man is the goal of the gods, we in this world have every occasion for pride, for presumption. When we see the gods in the macrocosm exerting themselves all the time to develop what is human being, we have every occasion for pride.

It will be good for us to make our ideas as to how the gods have laboured at the formation and perfecting of man a little more concrete. Throughout the Saturn evolution the Thrones co-operated with the Spirits of Personality, during the Sun evolution the Cherubim worked with the Spirits of Wisdom and the Archangels, during the Moon evolution the Seraphim worked together with the Spirits of Movement and the Angels.

Can we point to something upon the Earth now of this work from without upon the human form? Here we encounter once more a characteristic phenomenon of the life of the mind in modern times, a phenomenon to which we have already often had to refer in these lectures. In point of fact nothing is so well able to furnish proof for all that is proclaimed in Spiritual Science as the facts of modern science. The development of this science during the last decades provides, in general, proof of all that is here said. It is only that the facts are often least understood by those who discover them. The interpretation put upon the facts by modern philosophy and modern science does constitute a great stumbling-block to an understanding of Spiritual Science. The facts themselves invariably support what we say here, but the current explanation of the facts always constitutes a stumbling-block. It is really phenomenal. I have drawn attention to specific instances of it in a number of places. You will have gathered from my lectures that the brain was the last human organ to be developed; the rest of the human organisation was worked into man earlier by the Spirits of the various hierarchies. But even today the half unconscious part of us continues to work on the organisation of the brain; that is something capable of observation, only the marvellous and beautiful phenomena furnished by modern science are not interpreted in the right way. Let me give you an example.

In April of this year there could have been celebrated the half-centenary of an extremely important discovery of modern science, a discovery which, rightly understood, fully confirms the spiritual-scientific doctrine of evolution. Of course spiritual-scientific discoveries can only be made through clairvoyance, but they can be confirmed by the facts which ordinary science brings to light. The fiftieth anniversary of that important dissertation on the speech-centre which the great doctor and philosopher Broca delivered before the Paris Anthropological Society in April 1861 might well have been celebrated this year; for the work of Broca is a complete proof that the predisposition to that configuration, that formation of a specific part of the brain which brings about both the aesthetic consciousness of speech and the understanding of its sounds does not lie in the inner laws of the physical brain. When in April 1861 Broca found that the organ of speech lies in the third convolution of the brain, and that this organ must be in order if a man is to understand the sounds of speech, and that another part must be in order for him to speak, the discovery constituted an important advance which can be turned to good account by Spiritual Science and is a verification of the facts known to it. Why is this? Because the way this speech centre is developed shows that a man's outer movements, the movements of his hands (i.e. what he does half unconsciously) plays a part in the configuration of this speech centre. Why is this speech-centre especially developed on the left side? It is because under the cultural conditions which have prevailed hitherto, men have made particular use of the right hand. Thus it is the etheric and astral bodies which, out of the unconscious, bring about the movements of the hands which work into the brain and mould it. Today anthropology makes it plain that the brain is formed from without by macrocosmic forces. When this part of the brain is injured, there is no capacity for speech. If we take into consideration that the side of the brain which through our right-handedness has been strongly developed can be relieved from without by the use of the left hand—a thing which is still possible in childhood though no longer so in later life—then it is seen that, by means of systematic activity from without, the brain can be so moulded that a speech-centre develops in the corresponding third convolution of the brain on the right side. Are we not driven to say that it is the greatest possible error to think that the faculty of speech is formed through the predisposition of the brain? It is not the natural tendency of the brain which brings into existence the faculty of speech but the activity which the man himself develops. The faculty of speech is developed in the brain from out of the macrocosm. The organ of speech comes from speaking, not speaking from the speech-organ. That is what has been established through the important physiological facts discovered by Broca. It is because the gods, or the Spirits of the hierarchies, have helped men to carry out such activities as create his speech-centre, that this speech-centre has been fashioned from without. The speech-centre arises from speech, not vice versa.

When rightly understood all such modern discoveries provide confirmation for Spiritual Science, and it is a pity that I am never able to do more than make a brief reference to such things. Were I able to speak at greater length about characteristic examples of this kind you would see how shortsighted are the people who say that Spiritual Science contradicts modern science. On the contrary it is only at variance with the interpretation placed on the facts by modern scholarship, not at all at variance with the actual facts themselves.

Thus it is the activity of the hierarchies, who have worked into us from without, which has made of our macrocosmic formation what we are during Earth existence. We are indeed a product of the macrocosm. Today we are a product of the movements of our limbs, of our gestures, which carry on a silent speech; these movements imprint themselves on the brain, which had no prior disposition to speech. The archetypal man had of himself no predisposition to anything, but everything has been formed and developed and bestowed upon him by the macrocosmic activity of the spiritual hierarchies.

From this you will see that in our present consciousness we are in fact but feeble. If we try to go out into the cosmos we find ourselves before the void; if we try to sink into ourselves we find ourselves ensnared in our own will-nature. This is what brings about the severe ordeals which are inevitable when a man, starting from his present-day consciousness, would seek to probe in either direction the mysteries of the world, about which he begins by marvelling because they confront him as world-wonders.

Why is this so? It is because when we press out into cosmic space we come into a region which we have closely described in the last two lectures as the region of the upper gods or spirits, spirits who are only the ideas or representations of the real gods; thus we come into a world which has no independence. It is no wonder that what we can gain from this world leads us in the end to the void. However hard a man is struggling to acquire knowledge, when he reaches the utmost limits to which his ideas can attain, he himself can only come to ideas of the gods, he cannot attain to true reality. But if a man plunges into himself, into what has been built up during millions and millions of years, then he comes to the deeds, to the achievements, of the other divine-spiritual Beings, whom in the course of recent lectures we have called the sub-earthly, the true gods. But in order to reach these we have first to penetrate through our own impulses, desires, passions, through all that imprisons us, seizes hold of us and changes us so that we are obliged to follow it. This leads us into egotism and cuts us off from those lower gods. This constitutes the other pole of the soul's ordeals. If we try to reach the upper gods we come to the void, to the world of mere idea; if we try to reach the lower gods, all thought abandons us because we are seized by the blindly raging impulses of our own inner beings and burn ourselves up in them. That is why the ordeals are so arduous. But there is one thing which offers a ray of hope, to begin with purely theoretical. We have to say to ourselves: ‘However tenuous the ideas are, or however slight is what our egotism enables us to receive, it comes nevertheless from the entire cosmos.’ And if we can only find ourselves within this consciousness of ours in the right way, so that we can look, upon it in its independence, observe it as it is in itself, and if this consciousness becomes stronger and stronger, then we can perhaps make progress along one or the other path in such a way that we can withstand the ordeals. This is only meant to give a slight indication of how it is possible to make progress in another way than with the ordinary consciousness.

Let us suppose that we permeate ourselves with what we have already in a variety of contexts named the Christ Impulse. We then learn to understand in its deepest significance the saying of St. Paul, Not I but Christ in me.’ We stand there to begin with in our normal consciousness and say to ourselves: ‘We do not wish this normal consciousness of ours to work alone, we do not wish to remain alone in this personality of ours; we wish to be permeated by the Substantiality which since the Mystery of Golgotha is contained in the atmosphere of the Earth, we wish to be permeated by the Christ-substance.’ When we permeate ourselves with this Substance we do not take out with us into the cosmos merely our own tenuous ideas, but however far we soar into the widths of space, we carry with us the Substantiality of the Christ, and thereby something most remarkable comes about, which I should like to make clear to you in terms of modern scientific development.

Modern science took its start from the phenomena of external nature, and traced these phenomena back to all manner of forces. Then it went on to trace what goes on in the outer world in light and sound and so on, to vibrations, to particles of ether in motion, even to ponderable fragments of matter in motion, and considered it a triumph to be able to reduce the whole world to a world of moving, whirling atoms of ether and so on. This method has now for the most part been abandoned, since people have seen that it leads nowhere, but the consciousness of the general public in this respect still lags behind, it always does remain several paces behind scientific advance. There is still a widespread desire to explain the whole world through the abstraction of whirling atoms, as if space were made up of pure vibrations, pure oscillations. Of course, when we with our ideas and with the empirical experience which one can have of realities, meet such conclusions, the moment we approach what is called the atomic universe, we at once feel the void; for those thought-out atoms have no existence. Atoms there can be within the limits of empirical reality, within the range of microscopic investigation, wherever there is matter endowed with light and warmth, but it is not legitimate to attempt to explain light and warmth themselves by means of atoms or atomic vibrations; for then one is thinking-out a theory of the universe, and a thought-out cosmology leads to something which no longer has any real content. There this old atomic theory has no longer any validity whatsoever. We think it out—and yet feel it has nothing to do with reality.

But it is quite different when we permeate our ideas, our abstract laws, with what in truth is the Christ Impulse; and when I speak of the Christ Impulse you all know that I do not mean anything that the orthodox creeds look to; I am referring to the great macrocosmic Christ Impulse. We must permeate ourselves with this in the Pauline sense. It is not our abstract ideas and concepts which we bear out into the cosmos, but what they become as our modern form of consciousness permeated by the Christ Impulse. And here we experience something very strange. Just as when we press outwards with a consciousness devoid of the Christ we become emptier and emptier and more impoverished, and our consciousness becomes finally completely dissipated, dispersed into the cosmic void ... so, as soon as we have received the Christ Impulse our consciousness becomes richer, fuller, the further we come into the cosmic distances, into the widths of space. And when we have reached the stage of clairvoyance, then is the Christ-filled soul abundantly filled with soul-substance, so that the true grounds of reality stand at last before us in all their might and grandeur as super-sensible realities. Whereas without Christ our consciousness brings us to the void, the Christ-filled consciousness brings us to the true causes of world-phenomena and ‘world-wonders’. Foolish as this may sound today, I ventured to say in the book The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind that in the future there will be a chemistry and a physics, a physiology and a biology permeated by the Christ Impulse, and that true science, to an extent not today dreamt of, will become permeated by the Christ Impulse. Anyone who does not believe this has only to turn the pages of history to discover how the rational opinion of the future is often the foolishness of earlier times. If anyone pities us for supposing that what is regarded as foolishness in our day will be the reasonableness of the future, let him remember this. Foolish as it may seem to the humanity of the present day to think of a Christian chemistry it will in the future appear quite reasonable. When we carry the Christ with us into our outlook upon the world, He will give us plenitude in place of emptiness.

If we take the second road, if in the spirit of what has been said so far we fill our souls in the Pauline sense with the Christ Impulse, and then plunge into ourselves, what then happens? The Christ Impulse has the quality of working as a solvent, as a destructive influence upon our egotism. We notice that the deeper we descend with the Christ Impulse into ourselves, the less is egotism able to get a hold upon us. We then press further and further into ourselves and by penetrating with the Christ Impulse through our egotistic impulses and passions, we learn to recognise the being of man, learn to know all the secrets of the ‘world-wonder’ which is man. Indeed the Christ Impulse enables us to go much further. Whereas without it we bounce back like an india-rubber ball, and do not succeed in entering into ourselves, into the sphere of our own organisation, with the Christ we penetrate deeper and deeper into ourselves, and at last come out of ourselves, so to say, on the other side. So that whether we go out into the cosmos and find the Christ-principle in the widths of space, or whether we penetrate below into the sphere of the sub-earthly gods, in either case we find it all impersonal and freed from ourselves. In either direction we find something which transcends ourselves. In cosmic space we are not dissipated, atomised, we find the world of the upper gods; below we penetrate into the world of the true gods.

We could represent the two paths—the one which leads into ourselves, and the other which takes us into the widths of space—by a circle, and show how at last we meet ourselves outside ourselves. Both what is of the nature of will, into which we should otherwise plunge as if into a region of burning fire, and what constitutes the widths of space, wherein we should otherwise vanish into nothing—these two realms meet. Our thoughts about the world unite with the will which comes out of the world to meet us when we descend. Will-filled thoughts, willing thoughts! Thereby we are no longer in the presence of abstract thoughts, but of cosmic thoughts, thoughts which are themselves creative, thoughts which can will. Willing thoughts—but that means divine Beings, spiritual Beings, for thoughts filled with will are spiritual Beings. Thus the circle is completed. Thus do we come safely through the trials which have beset our soul, whereas otherwise we should vanish into nothingness on account of the weakness of our own souls. Thus when we descend into ourselves we come through our colossal egotism, that is to say, through the soul strong in its egohood and its egotism; in either direction we come to what of itself can certainly lead us into tribulation, but can never tell us anything about the world.

We have to travel both these paths, we have to experience both obstacles, the fear before the void, as well as the resistance of our own egotism. And as we thus pierce through ourselves to the other side of the will-nature, and draw near to the cosmos, as soon as we thus emerge from ourselves, we are seized by an infinite compassion, an endless sympathy with all beings. It is this sympathy, this compassion, which, when the circle has been completed, unites with the cosmic thoughts which would otherwise evaporate and which now receive substantial content. Little by little the Christ Impulse leads us to complete the circle, leads us to recognise what lives and subsists in the widths of space as thoughts filled with will, which means real thoughts, thoughts filled with being. But if in this way our ordeals have led us on, our souls then become purified, thoroughly penetrated by the cleansing process we have had to undergo. Because in the downward direction we have to fight our way through what is shown to us by the Guardian of the Threshold as the prompting to egotism, we are also proof against all that might cause us to vanish away in the widths of space, we are proof against the fear of the void.

Such was the wisdom which prevailed in the Greek Mysteries, a wisdom which leads us to the deepest secret behind the soul's ordeals. Therefore the Greek neophytes, the pupils of these Mysteries, were led on the one side to fear of the infinite abyss, and to knowledge; on the other side they were led, through the temptation to egotism and its overcoming, to infinite compassion and sympathy with all beings. In the marriage, the union, of compassion with thought they experienced purification from all the soul's trials. A faint reflection of this is shown in early Greek tragedy, Greek drama. The first dramas of Aeschylus, and in a lesser degree also those of Sophocles enable us to recognise what their purpose was. The way in which the action takes place on the stage is intended to arouse both fear and pity, and through them to lead to catharsis, to purification. Aristotle, who held the tradition that Greek drama portrayed in miniature those tremendous sensations of fear and egotism, of the overcoming of fear through fearlessness, and of egotism in sympathy, in boundless sympathy—Aristotle, who knew that drama was a way of teaching in miniature, defined tragedy as a representation of connected events calculated to arouse fear and pity in the human soul and through those qualities to purify it.

In course of time these tremendous truths have been lost. When, from the eighteenth century and on into the nineteenth, Aristotle began to be studied again, a whole library was built up to explain what he had actually meant by this. What he really meant will not be grasped until it is understood that drama originated in the ancient Mysteries. Thus scholarship is barely able to touch the fringe of the subject, for despite all the labour expended on the concept of drama, very little enlightenment on the Aristotelian definitions of fear and pity is gained from these libraries. We see, then, that inner ordeals arise inevitably from the development of the world and of humanity. But we also see that these ordeals come because the soul feels impelled to take two paths, one into cosmic distances, the other into the depths of its own being; we see that the soul must undergo these ordeals because in neither direction is the prospect open, but we see that it can hope to complete the circle, to find will from the one side, thought from the other, and thereby to reach the true realities, the revelation of the world as willing-spirit, spiritual will.

We come at last to the point at which the whole world is dissolved into spirit, we see spirit everywhere, and we have to recognise everything material as merely the outer manifestation of spirit, as the phantom, the illusion of spirit. It is because we live in the spirit but do not know ourselves in the spirit that we have to undergo such ordeals. For we do indeed live in the spirit without knowing it. We see spirit in a deceptive form, and we must press on towards the reality out of that deception which we ourselves are, out of the dream as which we dream ourselves; we must strip off all that still reminds us of matter or of the laws of matter. That is a path whose end we can only dimly surmise, but it gives us the strength to say that in the end we shall be able to close the circle and to find in the ‘Revelations of the Spirit’ the solution of the ‘Wonders of the World’, and the compensation for our ‘Ordeals of Soul’.

Thus a real study of Spiritual Science must never discourage us. Even when it has to be pointed out how severe will be our inner ordeals, how they have to be repeated over and over again, we must nevertheless say to ourselves: ‘We must get to know them, we must actually undergo them, for it does not help us to know them in an abstract way.’ But we must also have confidence that we shall advance through these ordeals to the revelations of the spirit. Of course anyone who could set his mind at rest with the thought that the revelations of the spirit are bound to come someday, and that therefore one need not go looking for ordeals, would be the first to run into them. For instance, if anyone were to say, ‘Since you have given us your first Rosicrucian drama, in which we find a development of soul which seems to show that Johannes Thomasius has already reached a certain level, we can rely on this and dispense with the second play The Soul's Probation and can simply hope that the revelation of the spirit will follow someday. What need have we to become involved in inner ordeals?’ Anyone arguing in this way would at once be plunged into the severest of them, for our normal consciousness, our intellectuality makes them inevitable. Hence it is better for us to experience every kind of trial that the soul is capable of experiencing, better for us to get to know without flinching every inner ordeal, so that we should understand that even a man like Johannes Thomasius can fall into error and illusion, and has to make progress by unexpected ways. But we must never lose confidence that the human soul is meant to bear aloft her divine self to the revelations of the spirit. For this is the way of the soul of man! She confronts the world, she sees the world as maya or the great illusion, she feels that within this maya there lie hidden the ‘world-wonders’; wonder comes upon her as her first trial, then the trials become more and more severe, but the soul can keep up her strength until the circle is completed and at last the ‘world-wonders’ find their solution, and the ‘ordeals of the soul’ their purgation in the ‘revelations of the spirit’. This is the way of the soul of man—and yet not hers alone, for within her all the divine hierarchies are labouring and aspiring.

This brings to an end the task we have set ourselves in this year's course of lectures—to evoke an idea of the connection between ‘The Wonders of the World, the Ordeals of the Soul and the Revelations of the Spirit.’

• 1. Dr. Steiner drew on the blackboard.
• 2. See Scene 5 of The Soul's Probation

Basically Spiritual Science aims at understanding humanity in its essence, tasks, and strivings in the course of evolution. We have often talked about how the outside world misunderstands our spiritual science. This is largely because people nowadays have a hard time getting used to certain fundamental truths—truths that simply must be perceived and acknowledged if we are to understand the life and nature of humanity at all.

Let us begin today by asking what modern scientific thinking, whose great and significant triumphs over the last four centuries we must fully acknowledge and appreciate, is based on. It is based on what it can perceive, on what is manifest, in physical existence. Now, of course, it goes without saying that first we trust in what we perceive as so-called reality in our environment, and then we try to explain this reality on the basis of all that we find within its domain. It is naturally difficult for us to be aware at the outset that this reality itself may well contain an element of semblance or illusion, that it may well be deceiving us. Those who truly want to understand spiritual science must first overcome this stumbling block. They must realize that the reality around us can indeed deceive us—it can mislead us into interpreting it falsely. Much of what we have learned in spiritual science over the years has convinced us that immediate reality, as it surrounds us, may indeed be deceptive.

Today we will start from a particular point that can only be reached through spiritual science. In spiritual science we must first understand things; then, when we have understood them, we can find them confirmed in reality. Some of the most important things in spiritual science must first be understood before they can be seen. It would be easy to show that this same method is frequently applied in the outer world, notably in the sciences, but we will not go into that today. It is not always possible to develop everything from the beginning.

Now one aspect of the outer appearance or physiognomy of reality that is most apt to deceive us about this reality is the differences, the diversities among human beings. When we look at the human beings inhabiting the earth, we realize that no two of them are alike on the physical plane. Here in the physical realm all human beings are different from one another. Once we have accepted this diversity of human beings as a fact—I mean the diversity of their physical bodies—it is quite natural that people then try to find out, on the basis of the facts of earthly life, why human beings are different, why they look so different.

However, from the point of view of spiritual science we see something very different. According to spiritual science, if we consider only the forms the physical body can take through the forces of the earth, we find that human beings could not be different but rather would all have to be alike and have the same outer form. Indeed, the forces that exist on earth to give us our physical shape are such that if only these formative forces were to work on us, we would all have the same outer, physical form. This is because the physical human body has undergone a long preparation. We know it was prepared through the epochs of Saturn, Sun, and Moon.¹ It was prepared by forces that worked during these three epochs in such a way that the forces of the earth itself could influence our physical body in no other way than to give it a uniform shape if they had indeed been the only forces at work. I might put it this way: Through all the forces that have been incorporated into our physical body during the Saturn, Sun, and Moon epochs, we human beings are so fortified against any diversities coming from earthly forces that if we were left to the earthly forces alone, we would be alike everywhere on earth. Spiritual science, therefore, must start from the fact that a single and uniform shape is predestined for humanity so far as the terrestrial forces are concerned.

Even if we consider just the difference between male and female what I have just said is true. This difference is not caused by the work of earthly forces; it is the result of quite other forces, which we will speak of presently. Thus, we can assume a certain totality of earth forces that works formatively upon human beings and wants to produce absolutely identical human forms everywhere on earth.

Of course, we must now ask why human beings are so different after all. We know we must consider not only our physical body, but also the etheric body that stands behind it. Spiritual science shows us that while we should all be alike in our physical body, in regard to our etheric body we must be different because earthly forces are not the only ones that work on our etheric body. Forces coming out of the cosmos work on our etheric body, forming and shaping it.

We must therefore distinguish between the uniform earthly forces working all over the earth that would make all human forms the same and the forces working out of the universe on the earth, making each etheric body different. We can see the differences between etheric bodies through spiritual scientific research. At the one extreme are those etheric bodies that have strong forces and are tough, retaining their form almost as much as we do our physical form. This is one kind of etheric body. There is a second kind that is mobile, like something that is fluttering and always in movement, flowing and moving. But these two kinds of etheric bodies still reveal themselves in such a way that we can describe their inner tone and shading as being more or less alike. There is another kind of etheric body that is inwardly tinted, inwardly shimmering, not uniform in color but having various tones and colors. There is a fourth kind of etheric body that has one primary color throughout its whole substance, but this color changes over time though we cannot pinpoint other than purely inward causes for this. These etheric bodies are not shimmering in different colors or shaded in many tones; they have only one color, but they change it in the course of time. We may call them chameleon-like etheric bodies.

Then there are those etheric bodies that have a strong tendency to light up inwardly, growing at times brighter and brighter. Other etheric bodies have a powerful faculty to reproduce the harmonies of the spheres. Finally, there are those etheric bodies that appear especially in inventive people and persons of genius—etheric bodies that, if I may say so, reveal forces within them that are rare and strange in this earthly world. Whereas the above-mentioned six kinds of etheric bodies are found among ordinary, even average, human beings, the last kind of etheric body produces the type of human being with powerfully developed faculties, those we often say are “not of this earth”—poets, artists, and the like.

It is not by arbitrarily picking the number seven that we distinguish these seven forms of etheric bodies. We simply have to count, and we find no others besides those I have just described as typical. For this simple reason, there are seven kinds of etheric bodies. There are seven different kinds of human etheric bodies, and in the etheric bodies we have forces that are not earthly, but come in from the cosmos.

Our etheric body forms and molds the physical body. If only earthly forces worked on us, we would all be alike in our physical body. However, the influence of the etheric body makes us different. The astral body brings about further differences, such as those between male and female bodies, through forces it develops between death and a new birth, during the time when we prepare ourselves for the gender that karma requires us to have in the next incarnation.

But for the moment, let us just look at the etheric body. If we take only earthly forces into account, we can say that our physical bodies would have to be alike. However, because our etheric bodies differ in their constitution, composition, and structure in the cosmos, there would have to be seven groups of human beings. This is the fact we gradually arrive at when we investigate the relationship between our etheric body and our physical body with the methods of spiritual science. Now this difference is connected with the racial diversities on the earth. Basically, because of this difference in etheric bodies, the several races can always be reduced to the number seven. Even though certain typical forms atrophy, and though natural science may distinguish fewer than seven basic races, there are really seven basic racial distinctions in the human species. These diversities are brought about by the etheric body; they do not result from the earthly forces that work during our evolution, but originate in cosmic forces.

Now, when we trace the evolution of the earth back into the Atlantean or even into the Lemurian epochs, we find that initially impulses and tendencies existed that would have prevented our physical body from developing the physiognomy it now has through the power of the etheric body—that is, the diversities. Instead, if everything had gone a certain way (we shall see directly in what way), the seven-colored etheric body would have brought about diversities in our physical form, but successively, one after the other. Thus, the etheric body would have created one form of human being in the fifth period of Atlantis, a second in the sixth period of Atlantis, a third in the seventh, a fourth in the first post-Atlantean period, a fifth in the second post-Atlantean period, a sixth in the third, and a seventh in the fourth post-Atlantean period, that is, in the Greco-Roman time.

That is what would have happened; various types of human beings would have appeared one after the other. Thus, in the fifth Atlantean period we would have had human beings in whose physical formation one type of etheric body would have predominated. In the sixth Atlantean period, the second of the etheric bodies just described would have been at work, and so on right until the fourth post-Atlantean period. That was the original conception. However, Lucifer and Ahriman opposed this; they did not want it to happen that way. They fought against this harmonious tendency of development in the evolution of humanity, and they managed to change the whole process so that various developments were shifted and displaced. While there should have been basically only one form of human being in the fifth Atlantean period that was to develop gradually into another type, Lucifer and Ahriman preserved the form of the fifth Atlantean period into the sixth, and again that of the sixth Atlantean period into the seventh, and even into the time after the Atlantean flood.

Thus, forms that should have disappeared remained. Instead of racial diversities developing consecutively, older racial forms remained unchanged and newer ones began to evolve at the same time. Instead of the intended consecutive development of races, there was a coexistence of races. That is how it came about that physically different races inhabited the earth and are still there in our time although evolution should really have proceeded as I have described it. Even when we consider only what resulted from the development of the etheric body, we see everywhere that Lucifer and Ahriman play their part in the earthly evolution of humanity.

Now we must ask what the intended consecutive development of humanity up until the Greco-Roman epoch meant in the larger cosmic context. As we know, around the Atlantean time, human souls gradually came down from the planets to which they had ascended. You may remember that I described in my An Outline of Occult Science that the souls had ascended and then came down again and that the life of earthly incarnations, properly speaking, begins with their descent.² Thus, the I of human beings, their individualities, would have gone through the various human forms mentioned above in consecutive periods. In the fifth Atlantean period, the I would have had one human form, in the sixth another, in the seventh again another; in the first post-Atlantean epoch it would have had yet another form, and so on. We would all have lived through these types of humanity, one after the other.

Indeed, it was planned that human beings would thus complete the necessary schooling of human individuality by passing through various etheric formations that had different effects on their physical body. In fact, according to the original plan, there could have been a type of human being on the earth who would have been the result, as it were, of seven successive periods of development, each of which would have contributed to the perfection of that human type. In the fifth post-Atlantean period, then, there would have been one united type of human being spread over the whole face of the earth.

However, Lucifer and Ahriman interfered and thwarted the original design. As a result, the ancient Greeks could only dream of an ideal, superhuman type, which they tried to represent in various ways, for example, in the form of Apollo, Zeus, or Athena. They could not fully encompass this type simply because it did not really exist. But if we have a sense for Greek sculpture, we can feel how the ancient Greeks dreamed of a uniform, perfect, beautiful type of human being that should have developed. This development did not occur because Lucifer and Ahriman preserved older racial forms that had developed, so that there was a coexistence of races rather than a succession.

In the fourth post-Atlantean period, in the Greco-Roman era, human evolution was faced with the fact that what the gods guiding the evolution of the earth had intended for the outer forms on this earth had not been realized because of the luciferic-ahrimanic influence. The spirits of the hierarchy of form had intended that the harmonious working of the various hierarchies of form should really lead to a human type with perfect physical development. As it turned out, the ancient Greeks could only dream of this perfect type and express it in their art.

It is a deeply moving experience to realize in the course of spiritual research why the Greeks created such perfection in their plastic art. They did it because through a soul-spiritual instrument they perceived that Lucifer and Ahriman had disappointed the good divine-spiritual beings, whose plans for humanity were different from the development that actually occurred. What should have developed through the work of these good divine-spiritual beings weighed on the ancient Greeks' minds, and so they wanted to at least represent it even though it did not exist in outer reality. It is great and wonderful and also deeply moving to behold these inner forces of human evolution that appear there in artistic forms, striving to express what could not be achieved in outer reality. Such insights shed new light on Greek art as it was developed so uniquely and unrepeatably at that time.

The Greek era was also the time when humanity faced a crisis because of the luciferic-ahrimanic influence. Lucifer and Ahriman had caused races to live side by side instead of one after the other. At the same time, however, all the forces the spirits of form were pouring into human evolution on the earth were immobilized. Now they could do no more than stimulate and inspire the creative imagination of the Greeks so that it developed as I have described it. The spirits of form had to decide whether the human race should continue to develop so that human beings would never again be united in earthly evolution. For this indeed is what would have happened. If earthly evolution had continued beyond the fourth, the Greco-Roman period, in the same way it was prior to that, then humanity would have become separated into seven groups due to luciferic and ahrimanic forces. These seven groups would have been as different from each other as the various species of animals. Animal species do not understand each other, but regard each other as foreign. Similarly, toward the end of the fourth post-Atlantean period and in the fifth one, in which we live, people would have had to develop more and more the view that there are seven groups of human beings on earth that see each other as completely different species. This view would still have prevailed in our time; in fact, the separation between the seven groups would not yet have reached its culmination or completion, but would still be developing and widening. The term “human being” for all people on earth would have seemed wrong; we would have had seven different terms, one for each of the seven groups.

Therefore, in the fourth post-Atlantean age, in the Greco-Roman period, something had to be done in the universe to forestall the development that threatened to result in the future, at the end of earth evolution, namely, the evolution of seven groups of human beings, each called by a different name, just as each animal species has a different name. These groups would not have regarded each other as belonging to the same species, and at most there would have been handed down to them some copy of the Greek forms, such as the statues of Zeus or Apollo. They would have regarded these statues as something alien to them—something that could never have existed on earth. Precautions had to be taken to prevent such a development. Physical evolution had already gone too far and could not be changed anymore. Therefore, precautions had to be taken for our etheric body; an impulse had to enter our etheric body that would counteract the separating of earthly humanity into seven groups. This impulse that was to counteract the growing fragmentation of humanity and that was to make it possible for the term “human being” to retain—and, in fact, increase—its true meaning over the whole face of the earth was the Mystery of Golgotha, which we can now see in a new light.

The first attempt that had been made with earthly humanity before the luciferic and ahrimanic impulses interfered in evolution was to create unity among human beings everywhere through the forming of the physical body. This attempt by the spirits of form failed because of luciferic-ahrimanic interference. But it could not be allowed to fail altogether; precautions had to be taken to prevent complete failure and to immobilize and offset the work of Lucifer and Ahriman. The physical body could no longer be worked on as was originally intended; therefore, the etheric body had to be worked on. This was done by the divine-spiritual being we have so often spoken of—the Christ Being—taking on human form at the time in human evolution when the possibility to express the archetype of humanity was the greatest.

At what period in human evolution was this? All the forces that counteract the original, identical design of our physical body are at work in us mostly in the first seven years of life, when the physical body is still soft and pliant. They do not allow our physical body to become the same everywhere, but from within the body they immobilize the forces for the original identical design.³ These opposing forces can still go on working in the second seven years until puberty; indeed, they can even continue to work in the third and fourth seven-year periods during the development of the astral body and the sentient soul. However, in the middle of the development of the intellectual or mind soul, which evolved above all in the fourth post-Atlantean or Greco-Roman time, the extra-earthly forces are less and less able to reach us. And in the very midst of this development, that is, in the period between our twenty-eighth and thirty-fifth years, they have least access to us. If we add two years at the beginning of this period and subtract two years at the end, the time in question is that between the thirtieth and the thirty-third year. In the time following those years, extra-earthly forces once more have the greatest influence. The period from the thirtieth to the thirty-third year, however, is the time of the greatest influence of earthly forces on the human being. And if in this period of three years there remained only the degree of diversity that existed in younger years and only what is to appear in later years would be added—in short, if only what works on human beings between the thirtieth and the thirty-third year remained effective, then people would indeed be much more alike.

Christ had to use these three years—very special and unique years—to unite with those earthly forces in human beings that had retained most of the earthly element in the human being. To this end, as we have discussed, the body for Christ was prepared through the two Jesus bodies up to the thirtieth year. Then, from the thirtieth to the thirty-third year, Christ took possession of this body. Where the earth forces were most active and where deformations could have set in, there no further development was possible, and physical death occurred. Thus, the sun-being, Christ, really entered into the earth sphere and united with the whole etheric body of the earth, as I have often explained. He then entered into the earth aura and now continues to work there. This sun-being must work for us in such a way that we realize more and more that in Christ the divine spirit was sent to us who was to counterbalance and redeem from within the separation and diversification in humanity created by Lucifer and Ahriman's opposition to the original impulses.

In outer human nature, the good spiritual beings work together with Lucifer and Ahriman. But what human beings originally, at the beginning of earth evolution, were intended to have on the outside, namely, uniformity and the applicability of the term “human being” everywhere on earth, was now to be brought forth out of the innermost essence of the human being through the Christ-Spirit. It is one of the many meanings of the Mystery of Golgotha that with the Christ-Spirit something was given to the earth that, when rightly understood, makes the name “human being” again applicable to all earthly humanity. The real substance of Christianity, which has already been partially revealed through its teachings, will be explored by those who, in regard to Christ, seek in the spiritual world what Christ is continually revealing in accordance with his words: “I am with you always, to the close of the age.” When what can be conveyed to human beings in the name of Christ from within thus gradually becomes known, then, as a result, what Lucifer and Ahriman did in earthly humanity can more and more be made up for and redeemed.

We may, of course, ask now if there is any meaning in this detour. This is really a childish question, and it is often raised by people who think themselves cleverer than the cosmic wisdom—and indeed there are many who aspire to such superior cleverness. Such people say, “If there are mighty divine beings, could they not have eliminated the luciferic-ahrimanic influence at the beginning of earthly evolution in order to protect their work?” This may be human wisdom, but in St. Paul's sense it is “folly with God.” It is nothing more than mere human wisdom.

In our lectures, we must look at things as we are now doing, and then what has developed through the opposition of Lucifer and Ahriman does not seem absolutely evil to us, but only relatively evil. For let us now consider the other side of the matter. Let us assume the original, divine cosmic plan for the earth had been fulfilled. Imagine that in the regular course of evolution the Greco-Roman era would have arrived, as I have pointed out, and that beautiful, harmonious type of human being the Greeks dreamed of would not only have been created by their sculptors, but would have lived among them and would gradually have spread over the whole earth. All other human forms would gradually have disappeared, and only what lives in the Apollo type, the Zeus type, the Diana type, and the Athena type would have spread over the earth. Since such beings would have recognized each other as belonging to the same species, they would have given themselves the name “human being.” Then the term “human being” would indeed have been applicable, and at the same time there would have been a sense of the equality of all people.

In that case, a human race of Grecian beauty would have spread over the earth, and in our age we would already see humanity approaching more and more this beautiful Grecian type, which would reach its perfection when the earth arrives at its goal in the seventh post-Atlantean epoch, after which it will pass over into other stages of existence. However, human beings would have advanced to this common humanity in unfreedom—that is what we must bear in mind. We would have been compelled to see all human beings everywhere as the same beings. It is only because such an identical form did not develop that all the other things could happen that allow us to see others as different, so that each sees the other as unlike himself and does not love his neighbor as himself. You will probably understand that if human beings had really become outwardly as alike as the original divine-spiritual forces had intended if Lucifer and Ahriman had not interfered, the feeling that one must love one's neighbor as oneself would necessarily have developed. There would not have been any choice; for anything else would have seemed to be nonsense, both in terms of feeling and of perception.

However, this development was not supposed to come from the outside because then it would have made us into beings who love automatically—that is, we would have loved others because they are our own kind, but without knowing the force that urges us to this love. Thus, what would otherwise have come to us in unfreedom was prepared for freedom through Lucifer and Ahriman's opposition. This sanction of the opposition is therefore inherent in the original plan of divine wisdom. Indeed, we may say that in still earlier periods of earthly evolution, the opposition against the harmonious progressive divine-spiritual powers was created precisely so that it could later bring about freedom.

At this point, we must realize that our concepts must change when we leave the sphere of physical observation and ascend to a higher order of perception. Many of you probably know that philosophy speaks of antinomies, and that Kant has even gone so far as to claim that it can be proven with equal conclusiveness that the two statements “the world is infinite in terms of space” and “the world is finite in terms of space” are correct. Similarly, both “the world has had a beginning” and “the world has had no beginning” can be proven conclusively. Why is this? It is because logic does not apply when we come into a sphere that can no longer be comprehended by physical means. We finally have to realize that our physical logic works neither in the realm of philosophy nor anywhere else where we concern ourselves with other than physical forms of existence. We must not make the mistake of looking at the opposition of Lucifer and Ahriman as we would at the antagonism between a good and an evil person on earth. This kind of mistake occurs when we continue to carry over the earthly into the super-earthly realm.

Most people picture Ahriman and Lucifer as evil beings—albeit much more intensely evil than human beings. But this is not true; we must keep in mind that certain earthly feelings we associate with our concepts lose their meaning when we go beyond the earthly realm. Thus we cannot say that there are good gods on the one hand and the evil gods Ahriman and Lucifer on the other. We must not assume that a trial should be held in the universe where a highly qualified cosmic judge would sit on the cosmic judgment seat and sentence Lucifer and Ahriman to be locked up once and for all, so that only the good gods can get to work. True, locking somebody up can at times make sense in earthly life; in the cosmos it would not make any sense because there such ideas and concepts have no meaning. The opposing forces were created by the good gods themselves in an earlier period so that they would be able to bring to bear their full force for the development I have described.

For freedom to enter in so that human beings did not develop an unfree love through their outer shape or form, the luciferic and ahrimanic elements had to be part of our evolution. Only in this way can we arrive from within ourselves at the unity indicated by the term “humanity.” Thus, the gods allowed humanity to be fragmented by the opposing forces, so that later, after their bodily nature had been thus separated, human beings could again be brought into a unity in their spiritual nature through Christ.

This is one of the meanings of the Mystery of Golgotha: the attainment of the unity of humanity from within. Externally human beings are becoming more and more different. The result will be not sameness but difference over the earth, and human beings must exert all the more force from within to attain unity. There will always be setbacks in this process of achieving unity—we can see them coming if we look for them. What was actually intended only for an earlier epoch is preserved into a later epoch, and what was to create differences in consecutive periods coexists. Human beings form different groups, and while they are struggling for unity all over the world in the name of Christ, through the Christ impulse, differences remain as aftereffects and setbacks. Such differences will always exist because human beings will only gradually be able to attain unity. At the same time, different groups will fight each other tooth and nail about everything concerning their outer life. There are setbacks from earlier epochs that run counter to the Christ impulse, rather than in harmony with it.

Indeed, here we see a very profound meaning of this Christ impulse. Based on true knowledge, we can say Christ is our savior who keeps humankind from being fragmented into groups. This is not yet fully understood by all people because the old still exists alongside the new. Today, people hardly understand the community of life in the Christ impulse, and this is connected with the fact that this understanding must proceed from our innermost being. We must realize that the Christ impulse has worked in the earth aura for the last two thousand years, but has not been understood. As we have often emphasized, this Christ impulse can only be fully understood through what spiritual science gives us. It is only when a growing number of people can more and more grasp, think, and feel what actually entered our earthly evolution in the fourth post-Atlantean period that understanding for that event will increase. To expect modern humanity to understand the Christ impulse is really asking too much. After all, just think how unwilling people are to acknowledge that this fourth post-Atlantean period of evolution, the Greco-Roman epoch, is of such paramount, such mighty significance in human evolution. Just think how unwilling people are to recognize any such post-Atlantean age at all with the Greco-Latin epoch as its pivotal point. To accept such truths, people need to take in the ideas of spiritual science. Without them one cannot understand these things at all—that is, one cannot understand the evolution of humanity if one has not taken in these concepts.

We have to understand the significance of the spirits of form, who had intended to develop a homogeneous human race in seven successive stages. This homogeneous human race was fragmented by Lucifer and Ahriman, but the force that wants to spread the one name “human being” over all the earth and unto the end of time—in spite of the outer differences between people—was revived from within by the Christ impulse. One of the chief tasks of the immediate future is to understand that Christ stands between Lucifer and Ahriman and to grasp his significance in relation to them. Therefore, we must always call Lucifer and Ahriman by their true names—we must call a spade a spade, so to speak—and look to the Christ impulse as the one combating them and saving the earth from this one-sided luciferic-ahrimanic impulse. This is what must be presented more and more often.

In our Dornach building we have therefore placed the statue The Representative of Humanity in the most prominent place; it presents the archetype of humanity that is to be recreated by Christ from within, surrounded by the luciferic-ahrimanic elements.⁴ That is the meaning of this central statue in our building. Looking at this central figure, people will realize that this is indeed what the good gods had intended. The human race was fragmented, Lucifer and Ahriman made their appearance, but the Christ impulse triumphs and recreates from within, from within us, what was originally intended for the outside. In the process, our freedom is created. Our building and what will be in it are to place before humanity what must be accomplished in terms of understanding human evolution. What is most needed for humanity in the immediate future is to be revealed in our building; we want people to understand human evolution showing and telling them what is most important for the near future.

Of course, many objections can be raised, and some of them have already been brought to our attention. After seeing the paintings and sculptures in the Goetheanum, some people have said that a true work of art must be understandable immediately to everyone without requiring an explanation. Here, on the other hand, people need theoretical explanations to understand our art works. Well, if people would only think a little! Imagine a Turk, for example, understanding nothing at all except what is contained in the Koran, a Turk who has heard nothing about Christ except that he must fight against Christianity. Suppose you took this Turk to see the Sistine Madonna and showed it to him without any explanations. Naturally, a work of art can only be understood by those who live in the same spiritual stream out of which the work was created. Thus, our ideal figure surrounded by Lucifer and Ahriman will only be understood by those who live in our spiritual stream.

This is true for all works of art in all ages: they are comprehensible only to those who live in the same spiritual stream. Only within that stream are they true works of art. The spiritual orientation must be inherent in them. Those who understand Raphael's Sistine Madonna or, let us say, his Transfiguration must know something of the spiritual stream in which the pictures were created. Similarly, to understand what they have seen in our building, people must have some element belonging to our spiritual stream in their souls and hearts. If they have this element within them, then the work of art must speak for itself, and no labels, identifying names, or other comments will be needed to explain or interpret it.

For example, when people look at one of our glass windows, they see in the bottom part a kind of coffin with a dead man in it; above that, they see an old man, a youth, a young woman, and a child standing on a winding path. If people have taken in our spiritual stream, they will realize that this is the review of life. Immediately after we have passed through the gate of death, we will see the course of our earthly life in reverse. Of course, you have to know this fact to make sense of the picture in the window. But if you know this, then the picture works by virtue of what it contains, just as the Sistine Madonna works upon those who know the Christian history behind it, but it has no such effect on the Turk. By the same token, what is presented in our building cannot work upon those who have not taken in our spiritual stream. These things just have to be seen in the right way.

Today, I wanted above all to explain that Christ was that spirit from the cosmos who, in the course of earthly evolution, brought spiritually what was originally intended for our outer form but could not develop externally, because we would then have become automatons of love and equality. On the physical plane there prevails the fundamental law that everything must operate through antitheses, through polarities. The gods could not simply have sent down Christ at the very beginning of earth evolution, as our naive wisdom might suggest they should have done. For then the antithesis of external fragmentation and inner concentration could never have developed. Humanity, however, must live in this antithesis and polarity. We have the right feelings for Christ only when we see in him the savior, rescuing humanity from dispersion and separateness; only then can Christ fill our own innermost I. Christianity lives wherever people are able to understand this union of all humanity through Christ. In the future, it will not matter much whether what Christ is will still be called by that name. However, a lot will depend on our finding in Christ the spiritual uniter of humanity and accepting that external diversity will increase more and more.

We will also have to accept that there will still be many setbacks for this spiritual understanding of the Christ impulse. What developed at the same time instead of consecutively will for a long time continue to evoke forces that fight against a spiritual understanding of global human equality. There will be many and terrible onslaughts, and, for the most part, their purpose will be to continue the luciferic-ahrimanic war against the Christ impulse. And it will be one of the greatest, most beautiful and significant achievements of our age if we can be among the few who understand this thought of the unifying of all human beings, who understand how remnants of the luciferic-ahrimanic elements strive to bring to the fore what is unique in various groups of human beings so as to exclude all others. It is very difficult to say anything at this time about the final outcome of these matters. As human hearts are now, to speak about that outcome would only be upsetting and bewildering; it may lead to opposition, perhaps even to hatred and abuse rather than to working in accordance with the Christ impulse. However, what can be said about this principle in the Christ impulse, namely, the salvation of humanity out of bodily fragmentation into spiritual unity, must be told, for it must become more and more effective in human evolution.

We have to be able to face calmly and courageously the increasing diversity in human nature because we know that we can carry a word into all these diversities that is not merely a word of speech but one of power. Though there may be groups that fight against each other and though we may even belong to one of them, we know that we can bring something that will express: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” into every group. We know that this “Christ who lives in me” will not lead to the forming of groups; rather, it will bring about the spreading of the glory of the name “human being” over the whole earth.

The understanding of spiritual science brings to life the realization that we can carry the power that comes from the words “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” into the groups that are fighting each other—no matter into which group we bring our I. This is one of the practical and moral-ethical aspects of our strivings in spiritual science. With the force of these words we bring something into the group that does not belong exclusively to one or the other group but to all humanity. It is only through this that we can arrive at a true spiritual understanding of Christianity.

It is the hallmark of mighty spiritual paths that they are finally expressed in simple words. Think of the simple words that can express the whole of Christianity, which has permeated the world for nearly two thousand years. But these simple words can only be found on the basis of big, long-term developments. These simple words that express Christianity were not just there all at once; they had to be worked for. We must be aware that we are among those people working to make it possible that someday simple words may be found to express, in a basic, elementary way, the truths we have to spread and develop today. Without such development the simple could never come about. We may not yet be able to put our spiritual science into simple words in any language—words that would condense it on a quarter of a page—so that all striving people would understand it, as was done for Christianity when it originated two thousand years ago. Yet, we can be sure that those simple words will contain something of what I said today, something that will direct our attention to the Greco-Roman age, especially to the Mystery of Golgotha during that time, as well as to the contrast or polarity between Christ and Lucifer-Ahriman.

What can be seen everywhere will be concentrated in a few simple words that can then be handed down to future humanity in the same way as the commandment, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” Just as this commandment expresses something that had to be attained as a result of a long development, so, in the future, the findings of spiritual science will be put into simple words, and then all people will understand them.

This requires our spiritual work, for the simple can only arise in the spiritual evolution of humanity when people have been willing to spend long periods of time learning about the details. You are called upon to help in this development, which will lead to something appearing to people in bright clarity, something we cannot yet express because we do not have the words for it in our languages, yet something spiritual science works toward. When you feel you belong to such a spiritual stream, and feel at home in it, because you see that it is necessary for human evolution, then you have the right understanding of our spiritual movement—you belong to it in such a way that you rightly understand the greatest of its goals based on your increasing understanding of the contrast between Christ and Lucifer-Ahriman. You understand that this contrast is vital and had to exist.

This is what I wanted to bring before your souls today. It is all connected with the question of the meaning of our whole earthly evolution. For when spirits from other planets look down upon the earth and ask what the meaning of this earthly evolution is, they will understand it when they learn about the Mystery of Golgotha. Everything that happens in the course of earthly evolution has its meaning only through the Mystery of Golgotha. The Mystery of Golgotha radiates out into the cosmos and imparts to everything else that radiates out from the earth its meaning, its central meaning.

• 1. These names do not refer to present-day planets but to ancient evolutionary stages and are therefore capitalized.
• 2. Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult Science, vol. 13 in the Collected Works, repr. (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1989).
• 3. Editor's note: The transcript seems to be faulty here. The original reads: “They [the opposing forces] let it [the physical body] become the same; they make it identical from within.” This obviously contradicts not only the statements directly preceding this passage, but also the lecture as a whole.
• 4. The statue is Rudolf Steiner's wood sculpture The Representative of Humanity. It survived the burning of the first Goetheanum and stands now in the second Goetheanum.

Last time I spoke to you here, I spoke about an area of unconscious life, that is, of that life which remains unconscious for the ordinary consciousness of man as he has it today in his earthly existence. I spoke about the character of the life of sleep and tried to describe to you in detail and very specifically what the human soul experiences from falling asleep to waking up. Perhaps you have been able to recognize that these experiences of the human soul between falling asleep and waking up are clear revelations of the eternal, immortal life of the human soul, because you must have seen that what the soul goes through in the state of sleep are experiences from the spiritual world. And you know, of course, that the cognitions of such supersensible experiences can be gained through that which I have often explained to you verbally and which I have set forth in writing in my book How to Know Higher Worlds, in my Occult Science and so forth. You know that what is present as knowledge in the ordinary consciousness of man can be developed into so-called imaginative, inspired and intuitive knowledge. The experiences that the soul has unconsciously in sleep are, as it were, illuminated by the power that the cognizant human soul can acquire when it develops itself upward to imagination, inspiration and intuition. But by the same development it is also possible to fathom to a certain degree that part of man's unconscious experience of which sleep-life is but a reflection, the part from which the human soul emerges when it enters physical earthly existence through birth, or, let us say, conception, and which it enters again when it detaches itself from this physical earthly existence through death. And today I will at least give you a rough outline of some of the things that lie behind the events of birth or conception and death for the soul and spiritual life of man.

If a person first arrives at imaginative knowledge — I will not describe this here, I have often done so, as well as how it can be acquired — the first thing is that his physical life on earth lies spread out before him as a unity, as in a large tableau. In ordinary physical consciousness, a person has his earthly life only as a memory in his soul. What then are memories? They are something that consists of pictures, pictures that through their own inner essence point to the experiences that the person has gone through since birth or since a point in time somewhat later. But they are images that cannot be said to unfold an existence independently of the body, based on the knowledge of ordinary human life as it is today on earth. Today's physical science is absolutely right when it points out to people how these memory images are dependent on the constitution of the physical body. It is right when it points out that this memory is not yet present in the very first years of a person's life, how it develops with the physical organism, and how it also declines again when the physical organism of the person itself approaches its twilight. And it can also be established from certain symptoms of disease, from examinations of the physical organism of sick people after death, how the loss of memory is caused by certain physical organs. Of course, science has not yet come to a conclusion in such matters; but anyone who penetrates the spirit of the relevant physical scientific results can already see through how the time will come when it will be possible to show how ordinary memory images are connected to the physical human organism. But what we have as individual images of memory, as it were, surging up out of the stream of our experiences, when we look back over our lives, is not what is meant when it is said that imaginative knowledge has the earthly life of the human being, in so far as it is a spiritual-soul life, spread out before it in a great tableau. What one surveys in imaginative knowledge is truly not the abstract memory images that ordinary memory preserves. Rather, imaginative knowledge is preceded by an active, organic experience that not only has the passivity of memory images, but also an inner strength, like the growth forces that are active in our organism when we transform the substances of the external world that we take in as food in a – now, it is permissible to say – wonderful way into that which we need to constitute our organism. What lives and works in us, creating and generating, is something different from what is merely in our memory images in a more passive way. Look at the thoughts. They brighten our consciousness; certainly, we owe an infinite debt to the life of thought during our earthly existence. It is only through this that we actually become human and only through these thought images do we become fully aware of our human dignity. But these are fleeting images, bound to the physical human organism, like the flame to the fuel of the candle. That which the imaginative cognizer surveys as the spiritual-soul life that underlies physical earthly existence, that which he surveys as a wonderful, great tableau, is not something passive. It is an inwardly living alive, and one that, although it presents itself to us spiritually and soulfully, we know through direct soul perception just as we know through the eye what a red-colored external object is. And we can say in imaginative knowledge that we not only have thoughts that flash into our consciousness, but that we become truly aware of such forces at work in our organism.

I would even say that it has been taken amiss, as an absurdity, that I once said in my book “The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity” that all the wisdom of the adult human being is not as capable as the wisdom of the young child, which, however, unconsciously in this little child; but look with the most developed, with the most learned human knowledge of the way in which a human brain, how a human whole organism is in the first human years of life, and look at how man actually forms himself inwardly. All the activity of even the most ingenious sculptor is insignificant compared to what is powerfully carried out by the child's inner spiritual soul through plastic activity, as it develops its brain in a plastic way. Only when we consider and understand this can we gain a true insight into the mysterious wisdom at work here, a wisdom that is a forceful one, not just one that is stored in a person's head to enlighten itself about the world, but of a wisdom that contains within itself a spiritual-soul organism of forces that, so to speak, penetrates the child's outer organization hour by hour and only makes it a full human being. Just try to form a fleeting mental image of what is working there, so full of wisdom and magnificent that the human being, with his intellect and intellectual wisdom, cannot possibly keep up with what is working in the child, what must work for many years out of the unconscious , for example, the miracle of human speech. Try to form a picture, albeit an abstract one, of this wisdom-filled work up to the point where the human being becomes conscious enough to be able to use his intellect. Then, I would like to say, this intellect creates an ephemeral wisdom according to that wisdom that first formed man out of the innermost forces of the world. But we must also be clear about the fact that when we develop the human intellectual mind, I would say, in the upper layers of our being, in the lower layers of our human beingness, that which continues to shape our organism in childhood, full of wisdom, as a wonderful sculptor, continues to do so. What lies at the basis as a system, as an organism of forces, is surveyed in a unified tableau by imaginative knowledge. This imaginative insight is not confronted with abstract memory images, which cannot be said to persist when the organism disintegrates into its elements because they are bound to that organism. Rather, this imaginative insight is confronted with the system of forces that builds this organism, that is, is not bound to it, that is bound to the material no more than the creative, ingenious power of the sculptor is bound to it. In order for the material to become what it becomes, the sculptor's formative power must first be applied to it. For the human being to become what he is in his earthly existence as a physical organism, these entirely non-physical, supersensible forces must underlie it as a spiritual-soul organization that governs the human being's physical existence.

This is the first thing we acquire as an insight when we ascend to imaginative knowledge.

But at the same moment that we are able to do so, that is, to see what it is that works in us as a spiritual-soul element during our earthly existence, which is not only independent of the physical organism but actually brings about the shaping of this physical organism itself . At the same moment that we are able to do this, we are also able to disregard our earthly existence, to abstract from it, as we can abstract from a thought in physical life. We must gain this power through those meditation exercises of which I have often spoken to you, not only to be able to refrain from a thought, not only to be able to suppress a thought, but to be able to erase from our consciousness that which we have only just acquired with great effort in our contemplation of the spiritual and soul in our physical existence on earth. But then, when we are in a position, I would say, in a knowing selflessness, in a knowing altruism, to be able to erase from our inner vision what we are spiritually-soulfully during earthly life, then, before our consciousness, our true spiritual-soul eternal appears before our consciousness, then what we were before we descended from spiritual-soul worlds into physical earthly existence appears before our consciousness as a concrete spiritual-soul being. We learn to look at ourselves as spiritual-soul human beings in our pre-earthly existence. And we learn to speak not only in general, abstract terms about this pre-earthly existence, but we learn to look at it in its development, and today I have described some of this development to you.

You see, when we are here on earth, when we speak of ourselves, we feel connected to our physical body; in our waking state we feel connected to this physical body. No matter how dull the feeling of connection with the physical body may be, it is there, and it becomes particularly apparent when something is wrong with this physical body. Then we feel not only the physical body in general in a dull sensation of life, but also its individual parts. We may feel our lungs, our stomach, our heart, our head organs. In ordinary life, all this is immersed in a dull sensation of life; but unless a person is exclusively healthy throughout his or her entire life, there will come a time when he or she has the opportunity to feel his or her individual organs. In short, man feels himself during his waking consciousness between birth and death in earthly life, in that he feels himself in his being, together with his physical body, with all that is enclosed within his skin. But in the moment when man is not connected with his physical life on earth, in those times when he has a spiritual-soul existence before entering his physical earthly existence, he does not feel as his inner self, of course, what his physical body or its limbs are, but he also has an inner self then. I had to hint to you how the soul experiences inner images between falling asleep and waking up, even if it is not conscious of these images. But in the state in which the soul was before it descended from the spiritual-soul existence into the physical earthly existence, it had the consciousness of a different inwardness. This consciousness of a different inwardness is only hidden, only veiled by the fact that in our physical earthly existence our physical body also becomes an organ of knowledge. And it obscures the soul's introspection, which is only present when the soul is free of the body. But what the soul then experiences as its inwardness is now not what is enclosed within the skin of the physical body, but what the organization of the cosmos is. And just as the human being here in this physical earthly existence is connected with his lungs, with his stomach, with his heart, with his other bodily organs, so in the supersensible existence he is connected with what otherwise appears to our eyes, to our other sense organs, as the outer world of the cosmos. What is the outer world for us in our earthly existence is the inner world for us when we are in our extra-earthly existence. And we look down on our earthly existence as on an outer world from the supersensible existence that we spend between death and a new birth. And just as we are, I might say, steeped in our lungs, our heart and so on here, we are embodied before we descend to physical life on earth in that which appears to us in the outer reflection in the planetary movements, in the constellations of the fixed stars, as forces that permeate and interweave the cosmos. That which is the cosmic external world during our earthly existence is our internal world when we are in extra-terrestrial existence.

You must not be misled by the thought that the external world is one for all earthly people with different bodies; it is precisely that which is significant, that we have a common world when we are in extra-terrestrial existence, that the same world that one person has is also the same world that another person has, and that people who are spatially separate from one another here on Earth, in that each is enclosed in his own skin, are then separate from one another through the inner strength of the soul. In the extra-terrestrial existence, everyone is also an individuality; but he is not separated from the other individualities by space, but by the inner strength of his soul, by the cohesive forces within him. But what flows into these cohesive forces is that which corresponds spiritually to the universe, which appears to us in the physical image of the sun, the moon, the planets, the fixed stars.

Just as we here on earth see a person with our outer senses, only the shape of his face, the shine of his eyes, the movements of his limbs, but we become aware that we ourselves are spiritual-soul beings, that in these formations of his face, in the shine of his eyes, in the incarnadine of his skin, in the movements of his limbs, a spiritual-soul element is of his skin, and in the movements of his limbs, a spiritual-soul element is living itself out. Thus, the person who is able to view the world spiritually and soulfully recognizes that it is not true when it is claimed that the sun and moon, fixed stars and planets, and the movements of the planets are only that which our present-day physical astronomy describes. This description is actually similar to that which someone would give if they only wanted to describe the external movements of a muscle in our face, if they only wanted to describe the movement of the eyelashes, and did not want to see the expression of a spiritual soul in the movements of the facial muscles, in this movement of the eyelids. The one who is able to look at the world spiritually and soulfully sees the physiognomic expression of a cosmic spiritual-soul life in the phenomena of the moon and the sun just as we see the expression of a spiritual-soul life in the human face. In the movements of the planets, he sees expressions of spiritual-soul events, just as one sees in the movements of the limbs of human beings the revelations of spiritual-soul impulses. And in these spiritual-soul backgrounds of what appears to us in the physical image of the outer physical sun, the outer physical moon, the stars and their movements, in this spiritual-soul that corresponds in the cosmos to the spiritual-soul of the individual human being, the human being lives, if he is a supersensible being, before he descends into earthly existence. And just as I can say here as an earthly human being: I have lungs and a heart within me, so as a supermundane human being, before I descend into the sensual-physical existence in order to constitute my physical body, I can say: I have moon and sun within me. However, I must be aware that I do not mean the sensual earthly reflection of the sun and moon, but that which underlies them as spiritual-soul. The entire spiritual world of divinity interweaves and lives in me, in that I am in a supermundane human existence. Only when one sees through this does one get that deep reverence for all real world existence into which man has been woven. For one now sees through the wonderful connections that exist between man and the universe. One learns to look at man as he stands there in his physical earthly existence, and one learns to say to oneself: In that which is enclosed within the walls of the skin, not only what you see with your physical eyes, what the anatomist can look at and unravel on the dissecting table after death, but the ultimate goal of all cosmic activity lives within it. The wonderful saying of ancient religious times, that man is an image of God Himself, takes on a new meaning of infinite intimacy. And inspired knowledge teaches us to look at what man actually experiences in connection with the spiritual-divine powers that underlie the cosmos in his pre-earthly existence.

In scientific terms, when we survey earthly human life, we first speak of the human germ that develops from the mother's body into the physical human form of the growing child. We naturally address the germ as something small that gradually enlarges. In a kind of germ, the human being lives in his pre-earthly existence, only this germ is the experience of the entire spiritual-soul cosmos. In a sense, the human being has become one with the spiritual-soul cosmos; the divine spiritual forces live in him, they are active in him, they permeate him and they develop within him the great spirit germ, which contains within itself the forces that must pass through the spiritual existence until birth or conception, so that they then emerge again when the human being, as the inner sculptor, has to shape his physical organism in earthly life. The formation of the physical organism becomes clear; for this physical organism is the goal of that which the human being experiences in an immeasurably magnificent way in spiritual-soul, fully aware of himself as the cosmic germ of his inner life. The human being receives the physical germ from the physical world; the human being receives the spiritual germ from the spiritual world. And we are, so to speak, in a certain time before we have descended to the physical existence on earth, a huge spiritual-soul human germ that has poured out into the whole world, which then unites with the physical human germ that receives us here when we descend into earthly existence.

We look at our cosmic existence when we look through the inspired knowledge into the pre-earthly existence. Just as we know ourselves as one with our organism here, we know ourselves as one with the whole world through this looking. Here, in this world, the human being looks at the outer revelations of the spiritual in nature and in the human existence; he senses the divine-spiritual behind these physical-sensory revelations. In the pre-earthly existence, he is permeated, imbued and interwoven with this divine-spiritual existence, and this divine-spiritual existence lives itself out in him in such a way that it implants in him those forces that tend towards physical earthly existence. Just as we direct our eyes up to the marvelous starry sky here, so we direct our eyes from our extra-terrestrial existence to the marvelous structure of the physical human being as he lives here in his earthly existence. I would like to say that we look from the earth to heaven in our physical earthly existence, but we look from heaven to earth in our pre-earthly existence. There the earth becomes understandable to us as the work of the gods, as it should actually live in our soul. And all of this is direct experience, initially in the pre-earthly existence.

But after we have gone through this pre-earthly existence, after a certain time something happens: the divine spiritual beings withdraw from us human beings. We do not yet have nature around us, because in this spiritual-soul existence we also have no physical eyes, no physical organs, and so we could not see nature at all. We have around us something that is only like a shining in of the divine-spiritual. That is the great change in the pre-earthly existence, that we first experience an immediate being in, being permeated by and with the divine-spiritual existence, but that then a point in time comes when we look at the spiritual world that surrounds us, which is still a spiritual world, but we have to say to ourselves: before that we lived with the divine spiritual beings, now they show themselves to us through their actions, now their appearance is there. It is a spiritual-soul manifestation that we do not have only in our earthly life, but it is only a revelation of what we ourselves have experienced earlier. We enter from the sphere of experience into the sphere of revelation. And to the same extent that we enter from experience into revelation, we have to say to ourselves: The divine spiritual beings have withdrawn from us human beings for direct experience, we can now only look at them, they are certainly there for us human beings, but only for our spiritual-soul contemplation. In the same moment, in our spiritual-soul pre-earthly existence, that which I can compare to what lives in our physical organism as a desire awakens. Man is inwardly permeated by desire to the extent that the world becomes a revelation before birth. Only now do we actually feel ourselves as a self that is separate from the rest of the world. We move away from an experience that is at once a world experience and an experience of our own human nature. Between death and a new birth, we are not only human beings, we are world beings. World consciousness and human consciousness coincide. Then comes the time when world consciousness and human consciousness part, when we no longer experience the world but it reveals itself to us, when an inner life separate from the world arises in us. In the past, our inner life was one with the world; now an inner life separate from the world arises, and this first announces itself as an inner desire, as a wish, a will. A wish, a want, a desire is always directed at something. This wish and this want and this desire is directed at our future life on earth, to which we will descend after some time. We are filled with the visions of our future life on earth and we absorb those forces, which then become unconscious when we go through the embryonic life on earth. We are conscious there; but consciousness becomes more and more dimmed, and there comes a time when desire grows strong and even the revelation of the divine spiritual world, in which we previously lived and moved, becomes more and more obscured. As spiritual beings in the pre-earthly existence, we feel that we must say: The spiritual world around us becomes increasingly shadowy and shadowy. That which previously still shone brightly as divine revelation becomes increasingly shadowy. As the external world becomes increasingly shadowy, the inner desires become more vehement, the external world darkens within our spiritual existence, the inner world becomes more powerful, but after some time this powerful inner world completely takes away our awareness of future earthly life. For a time, not long before earthly conception, the view of earthly existence darkens. We used to look down on this earthly existence; it was, as it were, the target appearance, that magnificent, mighty world tableau in which we lived. Now our view of the earth is lost to us, but instead another view opens up to us. It is not long before we descend to the earth, but just as we descend, our view of the earth is lost to us and our view of the etheric world opens up. What the ether phenomena are that hold the light, that hold the forces of life, that are spread out in space, but not centrally from the earth up into space, but rather as if from the periphery of the world, pouring in upon the earth, the etheric becomes visible to us. As in a great cosmic fog containing the most diverse formations, an etheric world becomes spiritually visible around us, and from this etheric world we can, with the power that remains to us, with the power of desire, take from the general etheric cosmic fog our own etheric body, can shape it, and by shaping our own etheric form our own etheric body, we form with this etheric body an image of what we used to be in the spiritual-soul world, integrate this etheric body with what is brought to us from the evolution of heredity, what is brought to us by our ancestors in physical substantiality, and we descend to the earthly existence.

I have been able to sketch for you only what arises for imaginative and inspired knowledge when man expands his consciousness beyond ordinary earthly consciousness. In the course of earthly development, man has progressed to the consciousness he has today, which is bound in the narrowest sense to physical corporeality, and has lost an original consciousness. I have often pointed this out. I have pointed out how history actually only describes the external aspects of the earthly life of mankind, how we need a soul history, how this soul history shows us that people have not always had the same state of consciousness as today, when they can only combine with their intellect what the sensory organs perceive, and when they can only bring up what rises from the physical body to consciousness. The further we go back in time to earlier periods of human history, the more we see that people had a kind of original, if dreamlike, clairvoyance. What the human being acquires today in imaginative, inspired knowledge is a fully conscious realization, I would say, as fully conscious as mathematical realization; the people of an earlier time had a dull, dream-like clairvoyance, but it was no less imbued with wisdom. These people of an earlier time not only perceived what today's human being experiences with ordinary consciousness when he looks within, but they also saw something of what I have described to you now. If we go back even further, to the most ancient Egyptian times, and then still further back to still more ancient times, of which there are no records in the form of external history but only in the form of the kind of history I have described in Occult Science, we find men who did not have to acquire the power through such exercises as I have often described to you, but who could speak of this pre-earthly existence because something of this pre-earthly existence lived in their souls during their earthly existence, like a memory. Modern man has bought his freedom by only being able to have a memory in abstract thoughts of the events and experiences that he encounters during his life on earth. Mankind in earlier primeval times did not only have such memories living in the soul, but by looking into this soul, they brought forth, in addition to these memories of this physical life, images from the soul of what I have now told you. Just as one remembers today in the ordinary consciousness what one experienced on earth twenty or thirty years ago, so in a certain sense a person of older epochs remembered what he had experienced in his pre-earthly existence and what I have described to you today from spiritual science. But just as the human being of today is certain, through his memory, that he was not born this morning but was already here before this morning, so the human being of older epochs knew of his pre-earthly existence through what he experienced in his soul. But from this also arose the certainty that what he experienced as such already existed in a spiritual-soul world before he descended to physical earthly existence, that it goes through the passes through the gate of death and is not dependent on the physical organism, that just as it builds up the physical organism for earthly existence, it finds its further existence when the gate of death is passed.

But what goes out of physical earthly existence? What we experience here in physical earthly existence as thoughts is also bound to the physical organism; but what wells up as will in such a wonderful way from within the human being that he can actually grasp his volitional acts only in thoughts, only in images, and can only say: I will raise my hand or arm. But he does not know what happens between these thoughts and between the actual raising of the arm, the whole miracle that lies in between, the tensing of the muscle. All this is in the unconscious, just as the events of the life of sleep itself are for the soul. That which arises as will remains unconscious for the most part, that is, it is reflected only in the life of thought. But he who looks down into this life of will with inspired and intuitive knowledge makes tremendous discoveries within it. Here in our physical existence on earth, which we only view externally, we perform our actions, and a materialistic age could even believe that these actions are exhausted in the physical existence on earth, that they have no further significance.

But he who looks into the true nature of the human will, which remains unconscious to ordinary day-consciousness, sees there how, not out of thinking, but out of willing, to the same extent that man progresses in physical earthly existence, something is formed which is composed of the evaluation of his actions. In our physical existence on earth, we say: an action is good, an action is evil, we are satisfied or dissatisfied with some deed. We can perhaps believe that this is only an abstract judgment that we add to the deed. If we look into the human being's volitional existence with our truly true inspiration and intuition, we see how a real being weaves itself out of what is only a thought here, such as the judgment: I can be satisfied with an action — or: I must be dissatisfied —, inwardly, in accordance with our will, becomes a fact, how a whole being is woven in the depths of our human nature, a being that, if I may express it this way, has a countenance, depending on our actions here in our earthly existence. If we have done bad deeds, which we cannot be satisfied with while fully conscious of our humanity, then an entity with an ugly face develops within us; if we have done deeds that we can be satisfied with, then an entity with a sympathetic face develops. Indeed, the evaluation of our actions becomes an inner being in us, and to the same extent that our thoughts become more and more dependent on the physical organism - in the child they were not yet dependent on the physical organism, they worked on the physical organization, then they became abstract - the same measure in which, I might say, our thoughts become a corpse in our physical organism, for they are not alive, they are dead thoughts. In the same measure, the human being's moral being stirs down there, which he develops during his life. This moral being is there, and this moral being unites with his ego, and this moral being he now carries through the gate of death into the spiritual world. When the human being passes through the gate of death into the spiritual world, he has first laid aside his physical body, as described in my book Theosophy. He is now in his etheric body, and still has a consciousness of his earthly deeds. But this consciousness begins to be permeated by a cosmic world consciousness. That which is the etheric body dissolves into the general world ether; just as it was contracted hard before birth, it now dissolves into the world ether. With the astral body, which you will find in my book called 'Theosophy', the human being gradually reintegrates with the cosmos, but he still lives together with his newly formed moral-spiritual organism; he carries this out with him, and with it he lives out.

And now a task arises for him that is connected with what I already told you the last time I spoke to you about the life of sleep in humans: I explained to you how humans have the strength to re-enter their physical organism during sleep, that they have this strength through what can be described as lunar forces. The lunar forces are what bring the human being back into physical earthly existence, even every morning. Man is initially within this sphere of the lunar forces when he has discarded his physical and etheric bodies. But within these lunar forces he cannot receive the comprehensive world consciousness that I described to you earlier; rather, there the human being still has something that connects him to the earth through this moral earth organism. He must snatch himself from the lunar forces; he must leave behind in the lunar sphere that which he has woven for himself out of his moral actions, out of all that he has done as a moral or immoral act; he must leave that behind in the lunar sphere and must penetrate into the solar sphere, into the world of the stars. Now he must not only penetrate into the image, as I have described it for the state of sleep, but into the real world of sun and stars; he must snatch himself from the lunar sphere.

The clairvoyant consciousness of primitive man also had an experience of this, could speak of these things, which today man can only gain if he develops his spiritual and soul powers. Primitive man could speak of these things through the natural elementary powers with which he was endowed. But primitive man was at the same time always guided, just as man is today guided by science, just as he is guided by the various educational institutions (such as did not exist in ancient times). What human beings could see of the pre-earthly and post-earthly existence was, so to speak, oriented by what the initiates of the mysteries knew through their higher knowledge. And so the members of primitive humanity learned what became an inner experience for some of them, who were knowledgeable in the sense of the word at that time: that man cannot escape the lunar sphere through his own strength after death, that a spiritual being from the cosmos must come to meet him, of which the sun is the external physical reflection. That must come to meet him, that must snatch him from the lunar sphere. He must leave behind what he carries with him from the earth in the form of guilt; he must be led up into the guilt-free sphere of the cosmos by what the ancient initiates called the high being of the sun, which found a wonderful description in all the ancient mysteries. You need, as people said in those days, the power that comes to meet you from the heavens. But man was organized differently in those days. I have already indicated today how differently man was organized in those days. He had clairvoyant powers within him; he knew from inner vision that there is a supersensible world on earth. He had no real fear of death, for what was death? An experience in life. He saw that something within him was independent of death. He had that which was independent in his body, and because he had that in the body, he could see the sun being coming to meet him, he could accept the help after death.

But therein consists the earthly progress of men, that men have lost the natural way of looking at their Eternal. Mankind has acquired an intellectual consciousness that is completely bound to the physical body, that is dependent on the physical body; we have an earthly consciousness depending on the organization of the physical body. This earthly consciousness obscures the spiritual world for us, even before we are born and after we die. For today's man, it is not the same as for prehistoric man or even for man in the older Egyptian times, that he brings a certain light with him through the gate of death and can illuminate the space — if I may express it this way; it is only a figure of speech — of the supersensible world, and can, as it were, hasten towards the high solar being that comes to lead him out of the lunar sphere. Through what he had within him between birth and death, he was able to recognize this high being of the sun.

You see, you need not be offended by the expression; the old initiates, out of their knowledge, had the right to call this being the high being of the sun. But there came a time in the development of mankind when mankind would have lost the possibility of penetrating into those worlds after death, into which it must penetrate if it does not want to lose itself. On the other hand, mankind on earth had to penetrate to that consciousness in which one can only and alone acquire freedom as a human being. As a result, a terrible state would have occurred for mankind at a certain time. The terrible situation that would have arisen for humanity would have been that people would have been cut off from the supersensible world, that precisely because of the perfection they attain here on earth, which predestines them would have been deprived of the supersensible world, because they could no longer find the connection to that spiritual being that would snatch them from that which holds them together with the earth for life after death.

And what has happened to further real progress of mankind? Not an external abstract knowledge, not a theory could help. The only thing that could help was that being, which had previously only lived in the supersensible worlds and came to meet people when they were between death and birth in the supersensible, could only help if the being descended to earth, so that the earthly human being could have a connection with it already on earth. And this descent is the event of Golgotha. The Christ-Being has descended and has assumed an earthly existence in Jesus of Nazareth.

Within his earthly existence, the Meusch gains a connection with the Christ Jesus. What he adds to his earthly consciousness by looking to the Christ Jesus, by feeling with, sympathizing with the mystery of Golgotha, what he instills into his earthly consciousness by not only calling himself an ego that can be free, but by fulfilling Paul's words: “Not I, but the Christ in me,” could he make this word a truth in his earthly life by connecting his ego, which he attains here but which would at the same time cut him off from the supersensible world, by connecting this earthly consciousness with what has entered into earthly existence through the sacrifice of the Christ Being: this is what man carries through death. The ability that used to come to him only through the fact that he had elemental powers within him: since the Mystery of Golgotha, it is the connection of the earthly human being in his consciousness, in his soul life, with Christ, with the Mystery of Golgotha, which secures his life when he passes through the gate of death. For the consciousness that one attains through the physical body would have to be lost with the physical body; one would not find the way through the spiritual worlds. If one finds on earth the Guide, that is to say, the Christ, who has passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, and if one's spiritual powers are linked with those of humanity on earth in the sense of St. Paul's words: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me,” then one will find a living way through the gate of death. Therefore St. Paul's words can be taken in all seriousness: And if the Christ had not come to earth, that is, if He had not conquered death, then all would avail man nothing in his faith.

The old adepts told men: A supermundane Being will take up the thread of your consciousness, which you have here of your entire human nature, and will lead you out of your lunar existence into pure cosmic world existence. The more recently initiated must tell people: Look to what was accomplished by the Christ in the Mystery of Golgotha, take into your consciousness the substantiality of the Christ with all its power! This goes with you through death and leads you towards those worlds which you must pass through between death and a new birth. In the lunar sphere you will leave behind your moral being, only to find it again when you return to the lunar sphere. And in your earthly fate will appear the image of that which you first left behind and then will find again in the lunar sphere.

From what I can tell you now, human science, through the natural human science, only knows through those powers that came to humanity in the last third of the 19th century. In the past, these powers were more or less obscured in humanity. They were still there, but in the form of dreams from the ancient times that I described to you earlier. In the first centuries of Christianity, people did not have what we can achieve today through imagination, inspiration and intuition, but they had a natural, atavistic clairvoyance, and there were still old initiates at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha; they were able to tell their people who trusted them: The Christ, who was in that world, which you remember as the time of your pre-earthly existence, the Christ, who used to be only in extraterrestrial spheres, descended to Earth through the cross of Golgotha. Therefore, in the first four centuries of the development of Christianity in the West, the main focus was on the descended Christ. Everywhere you find descriptions from the first centuries AD (most of the literature has been destroyed) of how the Christ descended from cosmic and spiritual worlds and took on an earthly existence in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. At that time, the greatest value was placed on this descent, on this leaning towards the earth. But when, with the fourth century A.D., the old initiates began to die out and the new science of initiation was not yet there, which could only come with the last third of the 19th century, when these old initiates had died out, then what had previously been a direct vision had to be hardened into the documents. It had to be handed down traditionally; in order to attain the consciousness of freedom, people had to forget the old, initiated science for a time. That is why, the more humanity approached the 19th century, the more was forgotten about how the supermundane Christ-Being descended into earthly existence and took on an earthly existence in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. In the end, people only looked at the historical event, and gradually they lost sight of the Christ in Jesus. We must begin again today to speak of the Christ as a supersensible entity. We must understand what it means for the Christ to keep the human soul alive, for the body has changed in the course of human evolution. Why did the ancients have clairvoyance? Because the body was softer and the glands within the human body were even more active. It is precisely the glandular activity that has approached a hardening, and the more this hardening progresses, the more the human body hardens, the glandular activity becomes a tougher one, that which can serve as a can serve as a hardened human body for intellectualism, which is becoming more and more developed, as the glandular activity in the human body hardens, the human body itself becomes extraordinarily useful for the intellect. But man must acquire the connection with the spiritual world all the more with the soul. The initiates of the early Christian centuries still knew all this, but they expressed it with a courage that is no longer spoken of today. They said that people would have gradually become physically sicker and sicker if Christ had not come and healed them from the soul. Therefore, in the first Christian centuries, Christ was not only revered in our abstraction, but above all revered as the healer, as the great world physician, as the savior.

Today, all these things must be achieved again; they can only be achieved if man can once more look into the secrets of birth and death. The ability to look into these secrets of birth and death can only be acquired through the path of imaginative, inspired and intuitive science. We must gradually receive knowledge of this, for the one who receives knowledge of it also acquires the vision of it in his soul.

This is what I had to say to you today about the connection between man and those worlds that he leaves through birth and reenters through death.

There are many reasons why the theosophical attitude is currently finding it difficult to gain access to people's hearts. On the one hand, it is confronted by the prejudices of the calculating mind, which, once accustomed to accepting only the tangible, meets the doubting feelings of those who say: the cultivation of the higher spiritual life may be something wonderful, something noble, but we have more important things to do today. Such objections often arise from genuine philanthropy, true compassion for the hardships and sufferings of humanity. Attention is drawn to how many people live in the bitterest misery, how many are tormented by hunger, dulled by living conditions that are truly inhuman. Look at yourselves, the theosophists are called out, the thousands in the big cities in their dark holes that do not deserve to be called human dwellings. Many people are crammed into a space that condemns them to physical and moral depravity. Look at the workers who sacrifice their strength from early morning until late at night for the meagerest of wages and who are condemned to a life unworthy of a human being! Is it not necessary above all to help humanity in this direction? Those who speak in this way see the theosophical endeavors as the work of idle minds who know nothing of what is most urgently needed. And one can only say that such objections to Theosophy have much appearance of right for themselves. One would have to close one's eyes to the things that are happening all around us if one did not want to admit this. It is undoubtedly true that the bitterest need of countless people makes it impossible for them to even think for a moment about the higher goals of life. It can easily even appear as an outrage, as a sin against humanity, when the theosophist speaks to a few who have the good fortune of a more or less carefree existence of the “destiny of man”, of the “higher life of the soul”, while the great mass is wasting away in material misery. Theosophy is only for a few enthusiasts who have no sense of the true, the immediate tasks of life: this can be heard not only from malicious opponents, but also from noble humanitarians, from people whose clever minds and noble hearts above all force them to devote their energies to improving the material circumstances of their fellow human beings. For them, the “social question” is the most important one in the present. And they demand of the theosophists that the teachings of “universal love of humanity” and “fraternity” be practiced above all where practical life, where hunger and misery, where physical and moral decay loudly call for relief.

The theosophical side should not simply reply to such noble humanitarians by saying that Theosophy wants nothing to do with the struggles of the parties and the interests of the day. It is true that it cannot be the task of the theosophist to intervene directly in the disputes of political parties. He must seek to serve and help humanity in other ways than those which parties and legislation can employ. But he must also bear in mind that, by pursuing some unworldly aim which is of no value to thousands upon thousands of people, he would be seriously failing to do what is really needed. The theosophist speaks of the necessity of not allowing the noble spiritual powers in the child's soul to wither away; he speaks of the fact that the germ of the Divine lies hidden in every human being, and that teachers and educators in home and school must make it their business to cultivate this germ of the Divine, that they should make the soul of the child a citizen in the Kingdom of the Eternal. And the socially minded philanthropist replies: you may talk for a long time; but just look at these children, for whom their parents have no breakfast, who come to school weak, hungry and cold, with their mental powers completely dulled. Is nothing more necessary for them than to think of the eternity of their soul?

The theosophist will have to listen to such and similar speeches again and again. And it is not surprising if those who believe that they are doing the right thing to alleviate material need and misery call him an idle dreamer. — Misery and want also kill every spiritual urge in man, they blunt him for all higher aspirations. And if one speaks to a starving crowd about spiritual life, one preaches to ears that are incapable of grasping the words.

These are the facts of which the Theosophist must be clear. The fundamental principle of the Theosophical Society is: “to form the nucleus of a brotherhood that extends to all mankind, without distinction of race, religion, class, nationality or sex”. This is in fact the only principle that is considered binding for the members of this society. All other aspirations should be only means to the great goal that is expressed in this essential requirement. — Many socially minded people of the present day will object: we do not need Theosophy for such a requirement. After all, many humanitarian organizations of our time also make this demand, and in a comprehensive way it is made by those parties that strive for an improvement in the social situation of the economically and spiritually oppressed classes. But, it is said, the socialist parties are grounded in practical life and in real interests that the masses must understand; but theosophy is content with more or less general phrases, with preaching and with an emphasis on things that cannot help the oppressed. And radical socialist newspaper writers and agitators are quick to say: the theosophical talk is only likely to cause confusion in the minds of those who are to be won over for a true improvement of their living conditions. They claim: “We must challenge the oppressed to fight against the oppressors; we must work to put power into the hands of those who are economically weak today, so that their labor does not always remain the prey of those classes by whom they are dominated. The power of the working classes must be conquered by all means of struggle. The workers must fight in their own well-understood interest; and you, Theosophists, want to preach “universal love of humanity” to them; you want to talk to them about “fraternity.” In doing so, you only want to distract them from what can really help them. Have the ruling classes of today ever based their power on “human love” and “fraternity”? It is a pipe dream if you believe that such ideals can ever rule the world. What the ruling classes have achieved, they have achieved out of the selfish interests of their classes; and in the same way, the oppressed today can only act out of their class interests. And then the conclusion is drawn, as a matter of course: “The laboring and starving population could wait a long time if they were to rely on you, Theosophists, with your talk of ‘love’ and ‘selflessness,’ to get anyone to strive for the solution of a social task if that solution is contrary to their class interest.” — It could seem as if Theosophy is a rather superfluous thing in the face of the serious social duties of our time. Demagogic speakers and writers, in particular, will emphasize that it is; and in view of the current situation, they will certainly have the applause of the crowd on their side.

But the ugly phenomena that we are currently witnessing within the socialist party efforts in Germany should prompt those who think more deeply to reflect. We are witnessing how those who have been talking about “class struggle” and “liberation of the people” in the sense described above for years are persecuting and fighting each other in blind passion. One question should arise in any case: Can a movement lead to a fruitful goal whose principles give rise to such attitudes in the leading personalities as we can observe today? Just think about what it means to entrust the leadership of humanity to minds that are not in the least able to be leaders of their own passions. Can such people really contribute to improving the general human condition? It should not be denied that the forms under which we live would change if such personalities achieved their goals. Only the intellectually immature could claim that the nature of human society would be different. The trusting will console themselves with the thought that the terrible things that are coming to light today in the leadership of the masses are only of a temporary nature; and that a great movement must necessarily produce such facts. Well, the reasons for many distressing facts in the present are to be found in the fact that the contemplation of social life that our contemporaries have and from which they would like to intervene in the circumstances in a better way, remains entirely in the external, material conditions of life. As a result, they can only approach their social work in the same way that a simple village locksmith who has never learned anything about electricity would have to behave if he wanted to make an electric motor. No one can understand the external actions of human beings without learning the spiritual laws that underlie them. The personalities who want to heal today's social effects should first of all learn about the causes of these effects. And these causes lie in the depths of human nature. What Theosophy reveals as the soul (astral) and as the spiritual world contains the laws for human life, just as the science of electricity contains the laws for the electric motor. It is understandable that people in socialist circles in particular do not want to know about these laws of the higher worlds because they have no idea of their existence. But as long as people are not willing to engage with these higher worlds, all social work will be powerless. Those who understand something of social conditions and theosophy know this. Annie Besant, the soul of the Theosophical movement in the Gegenwatt, was for years in the midst of social work, developing an exemplary and meaningful activity in it. And when she had made the views of Theosophy hers, it became clear to her that all such work is powerless without the enforcement of the spiritual powers, to which Theosophy provides the key. In her speech on “Theosophy and Social Issues” at the Theosophists' Congress in Chicago in 1892, she spoke the momentous words: “I, who have spent so many years of my life dealing with these — the social — issues in the material realm, who have devoted so much time and thought to the quest to find a cure for the social ills of humanity; I consider it my duty... to say that a single hour of spiritual energy devoted to the welfare of mankind bears a hundredfold fruit more than years of labor in the material world.” In the following, the task of Theosophy in the direction indicated here will be presented.

It will be shown that the words of the great Buddha, “Hate can never be overcome by hate, but only by love,” are not mere figures of speech.

An economics teacher, Professor Dr. Werner Sombart, describes the change that took place in the course of the nineteenth century in relation to thinking about social issues in the following sentences: “It is extremely appealing to observe how, since the middle of our (nineteenth) century... the character of the social movement has been transformed in its fundamental ideas, parallel to the theoretical approach to social issues. For it is obviously the same transformation: that in the theoretical interpretation and this in the practical application. Here, too, it is nothing other than an outflow of that fundamental transformation in the entire conception of the world and life, that gradual displacement of what we can call an idealistic or, better, ideological worldview, through realism... What I mean here by an idealistic view of people and life, which has now increasingly begun to retreat from the marketplace into the study, is the belief in the naturally good human being, who, as long as he is not misled by any error or malice of individual evildoers, lives in the most amicable peace with his fellow man, the belief in that “natural order”: in the past or the future, the unshakable confidence that it would only take enlightenment and encouragement to lead people out of this vale of tears and back to the laughing islands of the blessed, the belief in the power of eternal love, which would overcome evil through its own strength and help good to triumph... This basic sentiment was now reversed into the absolute opposite: faith in the naturally good human being gave way to the conviction that man is primarily dominated by selfish, by no means “noble” motives, that he carries the “beast within him”; in his innermost being, even in all civilization and despite all “progress”. And from this, the conclusion: that in order to achieve something in the world, one must above all awaken the 'interest', the normal, material instincts, but that also - and this was the most important conclusion for the fate of the social movement - because in the world, where something had to be achieved, interest , to shape a state of affairs in a certain sense, to 'emancipate' a class like the proletariat, that one must not oppose eternal love to the interest of the capitalist class, but that one must muster a power against the power, a real power, a power consolidated by the interest.” Without doubt, what is expressed in these sentences has increasingly become the attitude of those who want to play a leading role in the social movement. They have completely withdrawn their attention from the spiritual life of man and are of the opinion that one only needs to keep an eye on material interests and economic conditions if one wants to bring about a favorable situation for humanity. They completely overlook the fact that the causes that determine a person's fate include, above all, the drives and instincts of his or her spiritual life. It is certainly true that the domination of the machine, that the development of industry and world trade have created the situation of our proletariat. But they could only have brought about this situation by developing under the influence of those drives and instincts that have dominated humanity in recent centuries. What is important is to recognize the connection between human perceptions, feelings, and drives and between their destinies. Those who want to change economic conditions without recognizing how they are connected to the development of the human soul are like those who believe that a town hall plan can be transformed into a church plan simply by cutting the stones differently and using different materials. Whoever wants to provide for the people what belongs to the people must, above all, direct his attention to the spiritual connections on which all material life depends. He must turn his eye up to the forces of the soul from which the fate of the nation is woven. — And it is unfortunate that at the very time when the social question has become an urgent one, a materialistic way of thinking has taken hold of the masses, and especially of their leaders. Only in the light of an idealistic, spiritual way of thinking can social questions flourish. Under the influence of materialistic thinking, the character traits of the leading personalities of our time have developed in such a way that no one wants to understand the higher laws of human nature anymore, that no one really wants to learn anything that goes beyond mere sensual reality. But no one can exert a truly favorable influence on the destiny of humanity without knowing the true laws of that destiny. And Theosophy is the way to learn these laws. It is the way to penetrate the souls of those with the right attitude who want to guide material development. Just as a blacksmith's tools are of no use to him if he does not know the laws of how to use them, so all economic measures are of no use to the “world-blesser” if he does not gain access to human souls from his soul. The world is guided by the spirit, and anyone who wants to contribute to its guidance must grasp the essence of the spiritual. Theosophy must therefore become the soul of social affairs. And only when material interests arise on the basis that it creates, can the salvation of mankind follow from it. Therefore, nothing could be more false than the assertion that Theosophy is a foreign spiritual movement from which one can expect nothing for the happiness of nations and the liberation of mankind. No, the theosophist only lives with the realization that you do not build human society by merely laying bricks and stones on top of each other, but above all by fully devoting yourself to learning about the plan of this building. And at the present time, those who claim to have a say and a part in social matters do not want to know anything about this. They suspect nothing of it, and in their materialistic blindness they do not want to suspect anything of the fact that they must investigate the true nature of man. They expect nothing from the “love” in the soul, because they close their eyes to the laws of this “love”. It is sometimes the fate of truth to sound paradoxical in the circumstances of the time. This should not prevent the truth-lover from expressing it. One such truth, however, is that the leaders of social issues cannot work for the benefit of humanity until they have absorbed the knowledge and attitudes of Theosophy. There may be Theosophists who want to remain unworldly and keep repeating that it is the karma of the present-day nations to be tested by their purely materialistic attitude. To them it may be said: it is certainly also the fate of the sick person to be sick; but he who is supposed to heal and does not heal fails in his duty because he regards his sickness as a test.

Some time ago, a highly peculiar book was published that shares the fate of receiving far too little attention with similar literary phenomena of its genre in the present day: "Chaos in Cosmic Selection" by Paul Mongré. But it deserves a different fate. Anyone who goes through the book without being blinded by contemporary prejudices will find that there is little today that is so stimulating, indeed, for those who are intensely interested in the highest questions of existence, even exciting. The author confesses to being a dilettante in philosophical matters. He does not have a thorough knowledge of philosophical literature. That is why he does not approach his task with the same bias as many of our philosophically trained contemporaries. This gives the book something philosophically naive. Paul Mongré admits that it is not his personality that has driven him to the problem, but that the problem has, so to speak, overwhelmed him, that it has approached him and has not let go until he has gained a position, a relationship to it. There is something much more natural about this than when someone comes to such a task through a philosophical education. If we start from philosophy as such, we all too often have to ask ourselves: would this man have come to his questions at all if he had happened to become a physician or chemist rather than a philosopher? And when we read the writings of such a personality, we are reminded of this question again and again by all sorts of things. This is not the case with Paul Mongré. Rather, we are constantly reminded of how powerfully the questions raised weigh on the human soul, how they torment us no matter what else we do in life, and how the relationship we develop with them is infinitely influential for our happiness in life.

The author comes from mathematics. This is evident in every sentence. His whole way of thinking is mathematical. Now this way of thinking has just as many advantages as disadvantages. The conclusions of mathematics have an exemplary reliability. Anyone who is trained in mathematics will also strive for the same reliability when thinking about other things as he is used to from his science. But mathematical thinking has its pitfalls. As such, it has nothing directly to do with reality. It rests on assumptions that are purely ideal. If a point in a plane moves in such a way that its distance from a fixed point always remains the same, then a circle is formed. And all the laws that we get to know through mathematics apply to the circle. All these laws would also be correct if there were no circle anywhere in reality. In any case, the reasons why we consider these laws to be correct are quite different from those on the basis of which we assert the correctness of any real process. In a way, mathematics is a great poem. If I want to prove the Pythagorean theorem, I do not measure the two sides of a right-angled triangle and then the hypotenuse to prove that the square over the latter is equal to the sum of the two over the former. I prove this by mathematical means using a purely ideal structure. Nevertheless, on a real right-angled triangle, what I have established purely intellectually must be justified. In mathematics, I decide on relationships in reality without asking them first. And it always proves me right with regard to all conclusions if it fulfills my assumptions. If there is a right-angled triangle or a circle somewhere, then they fulfill the laws that I have established about them without first asking reality. This seems so self-evident to most people. But if you go deeper, a big question is revealed here. Everyone is convinced that the mathematical laws he has devised here with his earthly mind also apply on Mars. But he did not even ask about the conditions on Mars. We invent mathematical laws, and reality is always good enough to fulfill them for us.

I don't want to talk about what it is that actually distinguishes mathematical judgments from those about real things. Nor do I want to talk about whether there is anything else in our lives that carries the same or similar certainty as mathematics. But I wanted to talk about the subjective habits of thought that distinguish the mathematician from those who work in another branch of knowledge.

The mathematician is accustomed to asking only himself, only his own mental necessities, when he makes decisions. And he is also used to finding his truths absolutely valid in reality. With such feelings, he basically enters every sphere into which life leads him.

And with such feelings, Paul Mongr& steps onto the ground of the great question of existence. That is his danger. It is doubtless that his conclusions will be decisive for these highest questions of existence, just as the Pythagorean theorem is decisive for reality, if the presuppositions of reality are just as true for those conclusions as they are for the Pythagorean theorem. Yes, if it weren't for this "if"!!! Construct mathematical relationships. There are two possibilities for you. Either in reality there are somewhere such presuppositions as you make, then you can also spin the conclusions that reality draws from these presuppositions into your mathematical web. If, however, reality does not fulfill your presuppositions, then your mathematical inventions will float in the void. But neither the one nor the other does any harm to the truth of your assertions. The Pythagorean theorem would remain true even if it were not fulfilled in any reality. The truth of the mathematical is therefore not at all dependent on reality in this respect. The mathematician is therefore only dealing with himself.

In no other case than the right-angled triangle towards the mathematician is the human being towards the mathematical thinker. A mathematical thinker is too inclined to overlook this. He easily believes that he can talk about the world problem as if it were a mathematical problem. Paul Mongré falls into this error. An example. He puts forward the following idea, which has already been asserted elsewhere: "Because of the relativity of our measurement, the absolute dimensions of the spatial formations do not fall into our consciousness - we would not notice anything if the universe suddenly increased or decreased its real dimensions a hundredfold, since both the objects to be measured and our scales participate in this overall change. Does this mean that the universe is really, in the transcendentally realistic sense, a rubber ball that swells or shrinks at will? No, but only that beyond our relative perception of size, the concept of spatial size becomes irrelevant." That is mathematical thinking. But suppose someone were to go further and draw the conclusion from this undoubtedly true thought: if everything outside our consciousness loses its validity in the same way as the determinations of size seem to do, then it could also be correct that within our consciousness we rightly regard ourselves as descended from lower organisms; outside, however, a demon could be at work that apes human formations. For mathematical thinking there is no objection to drawing such a conclusion. If it were valid, then I would only ever be dealing with conclusions, with truths that apply to me - within my consciousness; outside of it would lie endless possibility - for me chaos, about which I know nothing, about which I am not even allowed to talk without having to make it clear to myself that I am going beyond what I am allowed to assert. Two things would then be certain. I would have truths; these would apply to me. But they apply to nothing but me. I seek the laws according to which the things that are spread out before my senses work; I seek the laws of my own working. But apart from me, none of this could be as it appears to me. Instead of the laws of light, there could be a demon at work, instead of my psychological and physiological laws, according to which I direct my foot to move forward, there could be a demon pushing it forward. That is one thing. The other is: I know the limits to which my truths extend. I build a lawful world for myself within these limits. And yet I say: this far and no further. The mathematician says: I measure things. They have this certain size in relation to my scale. If everything and therefore my scale grows, then I am at the end. I can't go any further. And for me, we are at a crucial point. Is there any point in talking about size if we can't measure it? What does it mean to say that the universe is getting bigger if nothing retains its former size? Has the universe really become larger if nothing has retained its original size? Does a size exist at all without being compared with another? But if it makes no sense to talk of increasing size where there is no measurement, does it not also make sense to allow measurement to apply unconditionally where there is measurement? Or, from a broader perspective: if it makes no sense to speak of an animal descent of man outside our world, is it not also correct to say that it makes absolute sense within this world and cannot be otherwise?

If I wanted to discuss all the mathematically conceived details that Paul Mongré presents, I would have to write a book myself, at least as comprehensive as his. But I only want to characterize his way of thinking. To do this, it will suffice to deal with as simple a matter as possible in the sense that dominates his entire way of looking at things. In the world of experience in which we live, we see the son following the father, the son following the grandson. This succession occurs in the course of time. If we now look at this time sequence, no other sequence is conceivable in it than this: Father - son - grandson? Another is also conceivable. We can imagine that there is some observer of the world who does not see forwards as we do, but backwards, that is: grandson - son - father. We could think of another observer who sees the following sequence: son - grandson - father, another one: grandson - father - son. Thus, what we see is only a special case of other possible, abstractly conceivable cases. If we now extend this observation in the most manifold way to the whole world of experience before us, we can imagine that all the regularity which we perceive as a cosmic connection is only a special individual case of an infinite number of conceivable worlds. All laws, all concepts that we apply to our world are only special cases. Where do we end up if we imagine all cosmic lawfulness in this way as a special case? We come to the conclusion that in the vast number of general worlds none of the laws that apply in ours apply, that none of our concepts apply in them. We come to the conclusion that when we leave our world and enter another, we enter into lawlessness and lawlessness, into chaos. And finally we go even further. Nothing compels the various possibilities that exist apart from us (in our example: son - grandson - father; grandson - father - son and so on) to take on the particular form of existence given to us (in our example: to become father - son - grandson). Indeed, none of the conceivable possibilities need exist at all. And since for thinking ours has no preference over the other conceivable ones, ours does not necessarily have to exist either. Our entire world, which we perceive, therefore does not need to exist before a higher instance (in the transcendental sense, as Paul Mongré's terminology puts it). "Why shy away from the name? Our idealism here, if the last consequence applies, runs out into the sharp and dangerous point of a transcendental nihilism" (p. 188).

Paul Mongré's mathematical thinking has now led him to such extravagances of the concept. The mathematician separates time and space from the other content of the world in his thoughts and then deals with them as abstract entities. He can speak of the passage of time that exists alongside the sequence: father - son - grandson. But in reality, this passage of time does not exist as such at all. It is not separate from the content of the sequence: father - son - grandson. The son is only possible as a consequence of the father and the grandson only as a consequence of the son. They give themselves the time sequence. And the latter has no meaning at all without them, is an empty abstraction. Another observer of the world may, for my sake, see the grandson first, then the son, then the father. This does not change the fact that the order which he does not give to the three members, but which they give to themselves, remains the same. Paul Mongré first separates his many conceivable worlds from our real one through abstraction. They are conceivable. But that does nothing. They are only conceivable as abstractions from the real one. They are nothing without it. No matter how boldly we speculate, we cannot leave our world. We remain within it. We cannot be dealing with a majority of worlds, but only with the one, with our cosmos. And because this is the case, this cosmos is also necessary, it has its lawfulness in itself through itself. It is not a single case out of an immeasurable number; it is the unity, the direction and cause, which also has the reason for its existence in itself. Paul Mongré's conclusion can also be illustrated by the following comparison. A ruler governs his people according to certain laws, which have grown out of the feelings, habits and so on of the people. They only endure because of the latter. Now someone comes along and says: Let us detach the ruler from the laws. These can now also be others. We can think of countless possibilities; how he governs his people is just one case of countless possible ones. Here everyone immediately sees the inadmissibility of the conclusion. We can indeed think of infinite possibilities for the ruler, but such thinking takes place in a complete void. How this ruler rules is only possible in one way due to the peculiarity of the people. Paul Mongré's entire conclusion is inadmissible. It must not be drawn at all.

As you can see from my "Philosophy of Freedom" published several years ago, I agree with Mongré to the extent that I, too, restrict all observation of the world to the world of experience given to us, as I, too, reject any thinking about another (transcendent) world. But for me, our world is also the only one we are entitled to talk about. Paul Mongré rejects metaphysics because its content is chaos; I reject it because nothing leads out of our world and one does not talk about what there is no reason to talk about. But I also do not arrive at nihilism because I do not say to myself: since none of the conceivable worlds has anything ahead of another, ours must not exist either, and can therefore stand out from the chaos of nothing as an appearance and dream image, but I say to myself: because there is none conceivable to us apart from ours, ours is necessary, must be as it is through itself, not through selection from an infinite number of worlds.

Died on December 2, 1900

I

We have seen him grow in recent years, grow in creative joy and the boldness of new plans, grow in artistic ability, spiritual strength and inner clarity. We had to experience the pain of seeing this growth abruptly, cruelly - cut off. On December 2, we had to sink into the empty, barren void all the joyful, proud hopes we had pinned on the personality of Ludwig Jacobowski. Anyone who was able to talk to him recently about his plans and his expectations will have an idea of what German intellectual life has lost in this man. He was one of those people of whom it can be said that the scope of their intellectual interests is as broad as intellectual life itself. And there was an energy in his soul, an indefatigable desire to create, which gave his friends the firm belief that he could do whatever he wanted. - He had to wrestle hard with fate. Apart from "death, there is probably not much that this fate bestowed upon him without a difficult struggle. And one can say of his entire art what he prefaced his last creation "Glück", an "act in verse":

It was like dying when I lived it!
It was a comfort to me when I wrote it!
Who ever trembled in the same affliction,
Accept it and love it!

When talking about two events in his youth that had a profound influence on his life, Ludwig Jacobowski mentioned the death of a school friend and his first reading of Schiller's works. It was not yet five weeks ago that he spoke to me of both events as memories that had a very special place in his soul. "I am once again creating a poetic monument to my school friend," he said. In the short notes on his life, which he wrote in October [1887] for external reasons, we find the sentence: "When I was twelve years old, my mother died. I owe it to this hard blow, as well as to a friend who had already died, but especially to the influence of reading our literature, that I became a different person." Anyone with a psychological eye can see from this sentence that it comes from a soul whose feelings are as deep as its aims are broad. Jacobowski wrote these lines at the age of nineteen. Even then, he had gone through times when the seriousness of life had confronted him in its darkest colors. But he also had hours behind him in which his strong energy and the will to rely solely on his own strength gave him comfort and hope. Early on, he sought "consolation" in what he wrote. He was twenty years old when his first collection of poems "Aus bewegten Stunden" was published. In one of the first poems in the booklet, we read the words that are deeply characteristic of his nature:

Man strives to grasp the insubstantial,
To solve the riddles of the universe with the power of thought,
To reach boldly up to the light out of dull nights,
To dive down to the source of all beings,
And over labyrinths of deep-secret questions
Rolls majestically his spirit's chariot of victory.

What Goethe once said to Eckermann, Jacobowski felt early on: "In poetry, only the truly great and pure is beneficial, which in turn stands there like a second nature and either lifts us to itself, or spurns us." In his "eventful hours", moods took place that lifted him up to the great arena on which the highest affairs of man come to fruition, and moods that made him appear like a scorned person who does not have enough strength to participate in these affairs. - He later faithfully described these two moods to us in his novel "Werther, the Jew" (1892) and in the drama "Diyab, the Fool" (1895). In the novel, one side of Jacobowski's character is portrayed, the sensitive soul that is tormented by the adversities of existence, that has to endure harsh pain because it is tender and irritable. The drama portrays the poet's willful nature, which feels superior to those who cause it pain, which draws from itself what the outside world denies it. And how much this nature had to draw from itself was presented to the world in significant art in the book "Loki. Novel of a God" (1898). With this creation, Jacobowski achieved something that can only be achieved through the interaction of three spiritual forces in the personality: childishness, artistry and philosophy. Simplicity in the perception of world phenomena, harmony in artistic creation and depth in the thoughtful contemplation of nature and man: Jacobowski's essence lay in the interpenetration of this trinity. I used this trinity to characterize his nature after he had presented us with his last collection of poems in his "Shining Days". It is one of the most beautiful memories of my life: how I saw his eyes light up when I was able to hand him my review of his "Shining Days" and he read the above words in it. He thought he recognized himself. As an artist, he sought the simplest forms. And he probably saw the goal of art in achieving the most popular simplicity through the highest means. But he never wanted this simplicity without depth. - He disdained all artistic refinement. He did not need to seek out oddities if he wanted to portray life in its true meaning. Poetry came to him from the smallest phenomena of everyday life. He knew how to see in broad strokes.

Jacobowski was a man who pursued all the mysteries of existence in his solitary sensations. In his "Loki", he sketched the labyrinths and lighthouses of existence. Out of gloomy experiences, he came to the harmonious view of life of his "Shining Days". The light from which the verses originate finally fell on his bitter experiences:

Ah, our shining days
Shine like eternal stars.
As consolation for future lamentation
They glow from a golden distance.

Don't weep because they have passed!
Smile, because they have been!
And even if the days become gloomier.
Redeem our stars!

And the man who wrestled with himself was at the same time inspired by the desire to work ceaselessly on the elevation of intellectual culture. His ten-penny booklets "Lieder fürs Volk" and the collection "Deutsche Dichter in Auswahl fürs Volk" (published by G. E. Kitzler, Berlin, at a price of 10 pfennigs) arose from a deeply social trait in his personality. He experienced great joy through this undertaking. He liked to speak of this joy. He wanted to serve the spirit of the people; and he had been able to see clearly how deep the need and receptivity for spiritual creations is among the people. He received reports from all sides about the success of his endeavors in this field. He wanted to describe the experiences he had made in this direction in the very near future. Like so many of his plans, this one was also destroyed by a cruel fate.

The preparatory work that Jacobowski left behind for a major work on the development of the popular imagination cannot be overlooked. He once wanted to present the development of the human spirit in thought and artistic creation on a comprehensive basis. His love of folk poetry resulted in the beautiful work "Aus deutscher Seele", a "book of folk songs" (Minden in Westf. 1899). And while he immersed himself in the folk soul on the one hand, he ascended to the lonely heights of romantic poetry on the other. Together with Oppeln-Bronikowski, he recently published "Die blaue Blume", an "anthology of romantic poetry". (Published by Eugen Diederichs in Leipzig.)

Jacobowski's friends were still aware of a plan that was to result in a life's work. He was striving for an artistic interpretation of the cosmic secrets in a poem entitled "Earth". He set himself the highest standards for this creation. He thought of the greatest efforts to become mature for this work.

This all needs to be said in order to appreciate how deeply those who were close to Ludwig Jacobowski feel his loss. It is depressing for them to have to speak of such dashed hopes. They cannot overcome the pain with the awareness that Jacobowski's achievements will leave his name deeply engraved in the annals of German intellectual history. Because for them, this awareness is linked to the bitter thought of what this name would mean if an intellectual power that would have been sufficient for a long, long life had not been destroyed in its first bloom.

II

Death tore Ludwig Jacobowski away from beautiful and far-reaching plans in the thirty-third year of his life. A life that was in constant upward development, filled with restless creative joy, has thus come to an abrupt end. Not so long ago, separated by a relatively short period of time, I was able to present the readers of this magazine with two pictures of this poet's creations, his "Loki. Roman eines Gottes" and of his last collection of poems "Leuchtende Tage". In his "Loki", Jacobowski had reached a temporary high point in his work. This work points both forwards and backwards in the poet's development. Backwards to a life full of external and internal struggles, to a life for which the struggle for existence had not been easy, but which had created a rich content in the struggle with the highest riddles of humanity; forwards to a future that seemed to bring fulfillment to great hopes. It was not a novel in the usual sense of the word, but a symbolic representation of the eternal struggles of the human soul. Jacobowski depicted what constantly weighs on the human heart in the form of a battle between enemy gods. The human mind clings with love to everything that has been created; it wants to cherish and nurture what has been created with devotion. But this created thing must, for its own salvation, give birth to its worst enemy from within itself; the created must be continually transformed so that it does not - in Goethe's beautiful words - arm itself to stare. As true as it is that good human qualities flourish within peace and order, it is also true that the old good must be destroyed from time to time. Jacobowski contrasts this destructive force of existence with the sustaining gods, the Aesir, in the form of Loki.

Only a poet who combines the gift of deep contemplation with the ability to create in the simplest artistic forms is able to conquer the characteristically meaningful world problem through poetry. And Ludwig Jacobowski was gifted with the qualities that made him capable of such a task. After his "Shining Days" appeared, I thought I could not better characterize the essence of his personality than by depicting him as a harmony of the three forms of soul life: the childlike, the artistic and the philosophical. I can still see him before me as he read this characterization of his way of thinking in my review of his "Bright Days" with eyes filled with joy. He believed he had recognized himself. He was always devoted to the study of folk poetry. He believed he recognized the ideal of poetic creation in its simplicity. He competed with this simplicity in his own creations. He did not think much of artistic refinement. That one must return to the childishness of the simple life of the soul at the height of the spirit was a kind of unconscious conviction in him. He really saw the highest things in the simplest lines. And this simplicity was accompanied by the depth of a world observer. Those who were close to him know how he was in his element when he could talk about the great problems of knowledge, when he could ponder the eternal questions of humanity. Everywhere in his poetry we also encounter this process. Broad perspectives leapt out at him from the most mundane experiences.

Ludwig Jacobowski had finally come to a free, harmonious view of the world. It was this that gave rise to verses such as these:

Ah, our shining
Days shine like eternal stars
As consolation for future lamentation
They glow from a golden distance.

Don't weep because they have passed!
Smile, because they have been!
And even if the days become gloomier,
Redeem our stars!

But the light he has worked his way up to is dearly bought. And he could have given many of his poems the same motto as the one before his last creation, the one-act play in verse "Glück":

It was like dying when I lived it!
It was a comfort to me when I wrote it!
Whoever trembled at the same time,
Take it and love it!

Jacobowski entered the public eye at an early age. He was twenty-two years old when his first collection of poems "Aus bewegten Stunden" was published. He captured the moods of his secondary and primary school years in these poems. They stem from a youthful life that made it as difficult as possible for him to believe in himself. A highly aspiring idealism lived in this youth, who only believed he was worthy of existence if he set himself the highest tasks. But at the same time, this young man's soul was riddled with the harshest doubts. It had depressing, difficult hours in which all confidence in itself seemed lost. An irritable, brooding mind was combined here with an unshakeable energy, a fine sensitivity to all the impressions of the world with an invincible pride that he owed nothing to anyone but himself. Moods of powerlessness and moods of defiance alternated constantly in the young Jacobowski. We encounter these moods in two of his poems. One is depicted in his novel "Werther, the Jew" (1892) and the other in the drama "Diyab, the Fool" (1895). There, the young man who is cruelly tormented by the adversities of life with a soft, irritable, hypersensitive disposition; here, the defiant one who bravely resists everything hostile and draws all the energy he can from himself to take up the struggle for life.

We could still expect much from the spirit that had grown so visibly with each of his creations. Especially his friends, who were familiar with his rich plans, who had seen how deeply he knew how to take every experience, and who knew his strength, which seemed to increase with ever higher tasks. From a devastating experience he had drawn the material for his poem "Glück" (Happiness), an "act in verse" (Bruns Verlag, Minden 1900), written that fall. Here, too, he had found a beautiful way to transform the harsh bitterness of existence into a poem of great perfection that comforted him.

And just how high the demands he placed on himself were could be fully appreciated when one heard him speak of a poem that was germinating in his mind. In a cosmic work of art, "Earth", he wanted to depict his way of looking at the mysteries of the world. He spoke of this plan as something that was mysterious to him, something that would be difficult to detach from his soul. First of all, he wanted to spend his days "maturing" for this task.

Hand in hand with his artistic interests, Jacobowski had a great thirst for knowledge. He spent a great deal of time thinking about and researching the origins of poetic creation. A small book and numerous essays bear witness to this aspect of his work. He worked towards a major work that would depict the development of the poetic imagination. He collected incessantly for it. He researched the poetry of lower cultures in order to get to know the beginnings of poetic creation. His preliminary work and collections in this field are immense.

And while he was trying so hard to work energetically on the development of the spirit himself and to penetrate this process in a recognizing way, he was restlessly striving for ways to make the treasures of the spirit accessible to the broadest strata of the people. He wrote in quick succession in his books "Aus deutscher Seele. Ein Buch Volkslieder" and (together with Oppeln-Bronikowski) in the "Blaue Blume", a compilation of the most valuable creations of German Romanticism. His venture with cheap popular editions of valuable poetry was particularly fruitful. His "Lieder fürs Volk" and his "Deutsche Dichter in Auswahl fürs Volk" are masterpieces of their kind. He has published a booklet of the best contemporary Iyrian works, which costs only ten pfennigs. At the same price, he has also published a selection of Goethe's and Heine's works. This undertaking promised great results. It was one of his most beautiful experiences in the last months of his life to feel these effects from everywhere. He wanted to bring the best spiritual treasures to the people; and every day brought him new written and oral evidence of the receptiveness of the broadest strata of the people to this enterprise. He often said to me: "That was an attempt. I would readily admit that the attempt was a failure, if that were the case. But the attempt succeeded in the most surprising way. He wanted to describe the experiences he had made in this field in the collection "Freie Warte", also a work from his last years.¹ Fate also destroyed this plan for him.

The seeds of a rich, long human life lay in this personality. Only a small number were allowed to mature.

• 1. Three issues of this collection were published by Bruns in Minden.

When the Earth reappeared out of the darkness of Pralaya, it did not emerge alone; it was at first united with the Sun and our present Moon. Sun, Moon and Earth formed one huge body. This was the first stage of our planet.

At that time the Earth consisted of a very, very tenuous substance. There were no solid minerals, no water, only this subtle material we call ether. The whole body was thus a planet made up of fine etheric material and surrounded by an atmosphere of spirit, in the same way as our own Earth is surrounded by air. This spirit-atmosphere contained everything which today constitutes the human soul. Your souls, which today have come down into your bodies, were at that time up above in this spirit-atmosphere. The Earth was a vast globe of ether, very much bigger than our Earth today, and surrounded by spiritual substance which contained the souls of mankind. Down below, in the rarefied substance of the etheric globe, something rather denser was present—millions of shell-like forms. These were the human germs of the Saturn stage, now emerging as a recapitulation of the forms developed on Saturn in ancient times.

There was of course no possibility of physical reproduction or increase; a quite different process prevailed in those times. The whole of the spirit-atmosphere was, like our present atmosphere, a more or less homogeneous whole, except that spiritual offshoots rather like tentacles stretched down from it into the etheric globe and enveloped the shell-like forms. You must picture the spirit descending from above and enfolding each individual body. A tentacle worked on a body and built up a human form. When one form was complete, the tentacle withdrew, stretched itself in another direction and went to work on another body. The resulting forms were thus brought forth directly by the spiritual worlds. In the beginning there was a confused interwoven ether-substance, much denser than the homogeneous divine-spiritual substance which stretched forth its arms to create the forms out of chaos. This first epoch of our Earth is well described in the book of Genesis: “In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth and the Earth was without form, and void, and the spirit of God moved on the face of the waters.” The ether, as it then was, is called “water” in occult science.

You could not then have seen the Earth or the shell-like forms; they were resounding human forms, and each one, as it came into being, expressed itself through a specific note. The forms possessed no individuality, for individuality was still dissolved in the spirit-atmosphere. Seven kinds of forms could be distinguished by their ground-notes. These seven groups constituted the first human Root-race.

After millions of years a great cosmic event took place: the whole vast ether-body contracted and assumed a biscuit-like shape which it retained for a period. Finally a small part, consisting of Earth and Moon, separated off from the whole. An important stage in human evolution is bound up with this occurrence. The germinal human forms were differentiated and articulated; and because of the departure of the Sun, objects could now for the first time be illuminated from outside. All our seeing depends on the fact that the Sun's rays fall on some object and are reflected back. When the Sun withdrew, there were now bodies in existence on which it could shine, and this led to the development of an organ of sight, for light is truly the creator of the eyes. The germinal human forms, which had hitherto been maintained by the common divine atmosphere, could now see their environment. This period is described in Genesis with the words: “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.” The whole of the Earth's body now began to revolve and thus there were day and night. When we read the Bible in the light of occult science, we can again take it all literally.

A great number of the spiritual Beings who had surrounded the Earth had gone forth with the Sun. They formed the spiritual population of the Sun and exerted their influence on the Earth from the Sun. The etheric human forms were now furnished with an astral covering. The united body of Earth and Moon was surrounded by an astral atmosphere which had previously been dissolved in the spiritual atmosphere. The ether, which had earlier existed as the basic substance, had now condensed into independent etheric bodies surrounding the separate physical forms, which in their turn had become denser.

In contrast to the etheric body, however, the astral body had as yet no independent existence: there was still a common astral covering for all beings. This was the Earth-spirit, which now again stretched forth its tentacles and enveloped each single human ancestor. And now a new faculty appeared: each human form could produce another out of its own substance—a sort of reproduction without fertilisation between two beings. When the fertilisation withdrew from one form, it sank into another without a break. It was rather the same as when part of the front of a cloud detaches itself and is immediately replaced by another part from behind. It was no more than a metamorphosis; an uninterrupted continuity of consciousness prevailed. The experience was like that of a simple change of clothes. The whole planet was bathed in wonderful beauty; it floated in glorious colours in the light-ether, and gradually condensed.

Side by side with the ancestors of humanity there were already forms of plants and animals, destined to be man's companions. The plants were of the lower types which have now become dwarfed. The animals, too, had not yet acquired their present-day shapes. There were shining plants and animals that whirled through the ether. All were still of one sex, except that certain animals were beginning to develop bi-sexual rudiments. There was still no real mineral kingdom. Then the etheric forms gradually became more and more densified, with increasing absorption of the astral element.

After the passing of a further million years or so, Earth and Moon had acquired a very different appearance. Animals and plants were now like jelly or white of egg, rather like some of our jelly-fishes and sea-plants. In this more condensed form of matter were to be found the ancestors of humanity, with rudimentary organs. The forms of animals and plants were increasingly densified by the fertilising astral force. Then came an important stage when the fertilising Beings in the astral atmosphere permeated the nature-forms of that time, so that man and animals were able to draw directly from the vegetable kingdom the substances they needed for nourishment and for reproduction. The plants secreted a substance rather like present-day milk; a last survivor of these milk-secreting plants is the dandelion. So the human beings of that time were nourished and fertilised by the nature around them, and they were self-less. They were complete vegetarians, absorbing only what nature freely offered, and living on juices similar to milk and honey. It was a wonderful state of existence in those primeval days, scarcely describable in our modern language.

Then came an immensely important event: Earth and Moon separated. The smaller body of the Moon split off from the Earth. Now there were three bodies: Sun, Moon and Earth. This had far-reaching consequences for all living beings: the Moon carried off with it a great part of the forces that human beings and animals needed in order to reproduce themselves. Each individual now had only half the fertilising power he had previously possessed, and the result was a gradual emergence of two sexes. Man now had to receive the fertilising power from another being like himself. This was the Lemurian epoch, that of the third Root-race.

During this period, too, matter began to become harder and more solid. Shortly before the separation of Earth and Moon denser deposits had been formed, and after the separation cartilaginous substances, leading towards bone-formation, began to appear in the bodies of men and animals. The solidity of the bones developed, in correspondence with the solidifying of the Earth's crust. By degrees, solid mineral forms appeared. Previously, everything had been etheric, then airy, then watery; the various beings swam as though in water or flew as though in air. Now the Earth developed a solid skeleton of rocks, parallel with the development of the human skeleton. Bone-formation and rock-formation went hand in hand. The human form at that time was something like a fish-bird-animal. Most of the Earth was still watery and the temperature was still very high. This watery element contained in solution much that later on became solid—our present-day metals, for instance, and other substances. Human beings moved in it with a swimming, floating motion. They were well able to endure the tremendous heat which reigned on Earth; their bodies were still constituted of a material which corresponded to the prevailing conditions, and in this way they could live.

Small continents on which men could roam about were embedded like islands in the water; but the whole Earth was riddled with volcanic activity which constantly destroyed parts of the Earth with immense violence, so that elemental destruction and rebuilding went on continually, turn by turn.

As yet man had no lungs; he breathed through tubular gills. But he was already a very complex organism; he had deposited in himself a backbone, at first cartilaginous and then bony, and in order to propel himself as he floated and swam he had a swim-bladder, rather like that of some present-day fish.

Soon—but this means after millions of years—the Earth became more solid. The water withdrew and separated from the solid parts; the air developed its own purity, and under the influence of the air the swim-bladder changed into lungs. Man now raised himself out of the watery element—a specially important and significant event. The gills were transformed into organs of hearing. With the development of lungs, man learnt to breathe, and then all mankind lived in a common element, the air. Each human being breathed in his portion of air, shaped it to his own fire, and breathed it out again. In the beginning, therefore, man was filled with pure spirit, later with the astral element, and finally with air. As soon as he had reached the stage where the breathing of heat was transformed into the breathing of air, that which Mars had provided was turned to good account; human blood became warm. The moment had come when something spiritual which had previously surrounded man entered into him—and how? Through the air. The capacity to breathe signifies the acquisition of the individual human spirit. The Ego enters into him together with the air he breathes. If we speak of an Ego common to all men, it also has a common body, the air. Not without reason did the ancients call this universal Ego, Atma—Atmen, the breath. They knew very well that they drew it in with the breath and breathed it out again. We live in one common Ego because we live in the all-pervading air. Of course the event I have been describing must not be taken too literally. The sinking down of the individual Ego into man is spoken of in theosophical literature as the descent of Manas, or Manasaputra.³⁴ With every breath, man slowly took in Manas, Buddhi and Atma, more or less germinally. Genesis describes this moment and we can take it literally: “And God breathed into Adam the breath of life, and Adam was a living soul.” This is the reception of the individual spirit.

Man now had warm blood also, and was thus able to retain warmth permanently within himself. And with this something further of great importance is bound up.

On the Old Moon there were Beings who were at a higher stage of evolution than the humanity of that time: these were the gods who in Christian tradition are called Angels and Archangels. They had once been at the human stage, but in the course of time they had ascended higher, just as we, too, will have ascended higher when we reach the next planetary stage. Although they no longer had a physical body, they were still connected with the Earth. They were no longer subject to human needs, but they needed men to rule over.

When the Old Moon had completed its evolution, some of these gods had not fully evolved with it; they had to remain as they were. They had not progressed as far as they should have done. Thus there were beings halfway between gods and men—demi-gods. They became quite especially important for the Earth and for humanity. They could not rise completely beyond the human sphere, but equally they could not incarnate in human bodies. They could establish themselves only in one part of human nature, so as to use this part for furthering their own evolution and at the same time to help mankind. On the Moon they had breathed fire, and in the fire which had become permanent in man, in the warm human blood—the original seat of passions and desires—they took up their abode, and imparted to man some of the fire which had been their element on the Moon. These are the hosts of Lucifer, the Luciferic beings: the Bible calls them the tempters of humanity. They tempted man in so far as they lived in his blood and gave him independence. Without these Luciferic beings, everything would have come to man as a gift from the gods. Man would have been wise, but not independent; enlightened, but not free. Because these beings anchored themselves in his blood, man not only became wise, but could be fired with enthusiasm for wisdom and ideals.

At the same time, however, the possibility of error arose: man was now able to turn his back on the highest and to choose between good and evil. The Lemurian race gradually evolved with this disposition, this inherent possibility of evil, and in consequence the Earth had to endure great upheavals, convulsions and earthquakes. In the end, Lemuria was destroyed through these passionate impulses of mankind.

Meanwhile, the Earth had undergone further changes and had become more solid. Other continents had arisen, and most important among them was Atlantis, between present-day Europe, Africa and America. The descendants of the Lemurian race had spread over this continent. In the course of millions of years they had greatly changed, and had acquired a form which resembled the form of man today. Yet they were very different from modern man. The shape of the head and forehead was quite different; the forehead was much lower and the digestive organs were much more powerful. The etheric body of an Atlantean extended far beyond and around his head. In the etheric body there was an important point which corresponded with a point in the physical head. In the course of Atlantean evolution the two points drew together, until the point in the etheric body sank into the physical. At the moment when these two points coincided, man could begin to say “I” to himself. The forepart of the brain could now develop as an instrument for the spirit; self-consciousness began. All this happened first among those Atlanteans who dwelt in the neighbourhood of modern Ireland.

The Atlanteans gradually evolved though seven sub-races: Rmoahals, Tlavatli, and primal Toltecs, Turanians, Semites, Akkadians and Mongols. It was among the primal Semites that the unification of the two points first occurred, and clear self-consciousness arose. The two following sub-races, the primal Akkadians and Mongols, really went beyond the goal of Atlantean humanity.

Until the two points were thus united, the soul-powers of the Atlanteans were fundamentally different from our own. The Atlanteans had a much more mobile body, and, especially in their early times, a very powerful will. They were able, for instance, to replace a lost limb; they could make plants grow, and so on. Thus they exercised a powerful influence over nature. Their sense-organs were more strongly developed: they could distinguish different metals by touch, just as we can distinguish smells. They still possessed also a high degree of clairvoyance. Their sleep at night was not like that of modern man, who mostly has only confused dreams; it was rather a dimmer sort of clairvoyance. During the night they were in touch with the gods, and what they experienced lived on in myths and legends. They pressed the powers of nature into their service; their dwellings were partly natural structures and partly hewn out of rocks. They constructed airships which were not propelled by inorganic forces, such as coal, but by the use of the organic, germinating power of plants.

As long as the two points I have mentioned were not yet united, the Atlanteans had no combinative intellect; for instance they could not count. But to make up for that they had particularly well-developed memories. A logical combinative intellect and self-consciousness emerged only with the fifth sub-race, the primal Semites.

Atlantis perished in a vast water-catastrophe; the whole continent was gradually flooded, and most of the people migrated eastward towards Europe and Asia. One of the main groups passed through Ireland and Europe to Asia; everywhere numbers of people remained behind. The Leader was a high Initiate in whom the migrants had complete faith; through his wisdom he picked out the best of them to accompany him to a distant part of Asia, where he settled them in the district now known as the Gobi Desert. There a small colony developed in complete isolation. From there colonisers went out into all inhabited lands and founded the civilisations of the next Root-race: the Indian, the Persian, the Egypto-Chaldean-Assryian, the Graeco-Latin. And then the AngloSaxon-Germanic civilisation arose.

We shall see tomorrow how this development went on.

• 34. Manasaputras. Described in Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine as “Sons of Wisdom, who at the creation endowed mankind with Manas.”

Goethe expressed a certain feeling, which he often had, in the most different way. He said, if I look at the inconsistency of the human passions, sensations, and actions, I feel attracted to the all-powerful nature and I want to draw myself up at her consequence and logic.—What humanity expressed in the festivals since the oldest times is based on the aspiration to look up from the chaotic life of the human passions, desires, and actions at the big consistently uniform facts of the big nature. It complies with these big facts of the big nature that great festivals are connected with characteristic phenomena in nature. Such a festival that is connected with a phenomenon in nature is the Easter festival, which is for the Christian of today the celebration of his Saviour, which was committed from time immemorial as the awakening of something particular for the human being. We look at the ancient Egypt with her cult of Osiris, Isis, Horus, which expresses the continual rejuvenation of the immortal nature. If we look at Greece, we find a festival to honour Dionysus, a spring festival that is brought together with the awaking nature in spring in any way.

In India, there is a spring festival of Vishnu. Brahmanism divides the divine in three aspects, in Brahman, Vishnu, and Shiva. One rightly calls Brahman the great master builder of the world, who causes the order and harmony in the world. One calls Vishnu a kind of saviour, liberator, awakener of the slumbering life, and Shiva is that who blesses the slumbering life woken by Vishnu and raises it to the heights to which one can absolutely raise it. Something like a festival was consecrated to Vishnu. One said, he falls asleep at the time of the year when we celebrate Christmas and awakes at the moment of the Easter festival. Who call themselves his servants celebrate this whole time in a significant way: they abstain from certain dishes, beverages, and meat. Thus, they prepare themselves to get an understanding of that which takes place when at the Vishnu festival the resurrection is celebrated, the arousal of the whole nature. Also Christmas builds in a significant way on big physical facts, on the fact that the strength of the sun becomes weaker and weaker, that the days become shorter and shorter and that from Christmas on the sun emits bigger heat again, so that Christmas is a festival of the reborn sun. The Christians felt it as something like that, this festival of the winter sun.

When in the sixth and seventh centuries Christianity wanted to go back to old, holy events, the birth of Christ Jesus was rescheduled to the day when the sun ascends again. The spiritual significance of the world Saviour was associated with the physical sun and the awaking and resurrecting life.

In spring, one also builds on a certain sun event with the Easter festival, like with all similar festivals, which is also expressed in external customs. In the first century of Christianity, the symbol of Christianity was shown in the cross at whose foot lies a lamb. Lamb and Aries signify the same. In the spring, the sun appears in that time in which Christianity prepared in the sign of the Aries or lamb. The sun goes through the signs of the zodiac; every year it moves forward a little distance. About from 600 to 700 BC, the sun moved forward to this sign of the zodiac. For 2 500 years the sun moves on in this sign; it was in the sign of the bull before. At that time, the peoples celebrated that which seemed to them as important in connection with the human development, by the bull because at that time the sun stood in the sign of the bull.

When the sun entered the sign of Aries or Lamb, there the ram appeared also in the legends and myths of the peoples as something significant. Jason gets the fur of the ram from Colchis. Christ Jesus calls himself God's lamb, and he is shown in the first time of Christianity symbolically as the lamb at the foot of the cross. Thus, one can connect the Easter festival with the sign of the Aries or Lamb, and considers this festival, therefore, as the resurrection festival of the saviour because the saviour causes everything to a new life, after it has died in the winter months.

With it, Christmas and Easter do not separate so distinctly, because the sun gains strength again since the own resurrection festival, Christmas. Something different must be expressed in the Easter festival. The Easter festival is felt in its deepest meaning always as the festival of the biggest human mystery, not only as a kind of festival of nature that goes back to the sun, but it is substantially still more: it is suggested in the Christian meaning of the resurrection after death. The awakening of Vishnu points still more to the awakening after death. The awakening of Vishnu takes place in the time when the sun begins its rise in winter again, and the Easter festival is a continuation of the increasing strength of the sun, which increases already since Christmas. We have to look deeply into the secrets of human nature if we want to understand which sensations the initiates had if they wanted to express that in the Easter festival.

The human being appears to us as a double being, connecting a mental-spiritual being with a physical being. The physical being is a confluence of all remaining natural phenomena that are in the surroundings of the human being: they all appear as a fine essence in the human nature in which they have flowed together. Paracelsus shows the human being significantly as a confluence of that which is spread out outdoors in the world: Nature appears to us like letters, and the human being forms the word that is composed of these letters.—The biggest wisdom is contained in his construction; he is physically a temple of the soul. All principles that we can observe in the dead stone, in the living plant, in the animal filled with joy and sorrow are joined in the human being; they have coalesced to a unity filled with wisdom.

If we look at the wonderful construction of the human brain with its countless cells, which co-operate in such a way that all this can be expressed which the thoughts, the sensations of the human being are, what permeates his soul anyhow, we recognise the supreme wisdom in the organisation of his physical body. In the whole environment, if we look out we recognise crystallised wisdom. If we penetrate all principles of the environment with our knowledge and look then back at the human being, we see the whole nature concentrated in him, we see him as a microcosm in the macrocosm. In this sense, Schiller said to Goethe, “You take together the whole nature to understand the single; in the all-ness of her phenomena, you look for the explanation of the individual. From the simple organisation you go up, step by step, to more developed ones to build up, finally, the most complex of all, and the human being, genetically from the materials of the whole building of nature.”

Due to the wonderful construction of the human body, the human soul is able to direct its look at the environment. The mental human being looks at the world through the senses and tries to fathom that wisdom bit by bit with which the world is built up.

If we look at a still rather undeveloped human being from this point of view, his body is the most reasonable which anybody is able to invent; there the divine reason has flowed together in this human body. However, a rather childish soul lives in it that can hardly develop the first thoughts to understand that mysterious force which prevails in the heart, in the brain, in the blood. Quite slowly, the human soul develops up to understand that gradually which has worked on the human body. However, this bears the imprint of a long past in itself. The human being stands there as the crown of the remaining creation. Aeons had to precede until the universal wisdom was summarised in this human body.

However, in the soul of the undeveloped human being the universal wisdom starts growing. There it hardly dreams of the great thought of the universal spirit that has built up the human being. However, the human being understands the mental-spiritual in future that lives still like sleeping in himself. The universal thought has worked for countless years, he has created in nature to form the crown of all this creating, the human body. In this human body, the universal wisdom now slumbers to recognise itself in the human soul, to form an eye in the human being to grasp itself. Universal wisdom outdoors, universal wisdom inside, creating in the present like in the past, creating in the future, which we can only anticipate in its sublimity. The deepest human feelings are called if we look at the past and at the future in such a way.

If the soul starts understanding the miraculous that the universal wisdom built up, if it gets the prudent clearness about that, the enlightening heart knowledge of it, then the sun is the most marvellous symbol, which expresses this inner awakening, which opens the access to the outside world to the soul through the gates of the senses. The human being receives the light because the sun illuminates the things. What the human being sees in the outside world is the reflected sunlight. The sun wakes the strength in the soul to look at the outside world. The awaking solar soul in the human being, which starts recognising the universal thought in the seasons, sees its liberator in the rising sun.

If the sun again begins its rise, if the days increase again, the soul looks at the sun and says, to you I owe the possibility to see the universal thought spread out in my surroundings that sleeps in me and in all the others.—Now, the human being looks at his former existence, at that which preceded the groping feeling of the universal thought. The human being is much, much older than his senses. Spiritual research lets us reach that time, in which the senses of the human being existed only as rudiments. We come to the time when the senses were not yet the gates through which the soul could perceive the surroundings. Schopenhauer felt this and characterised the turning point where the human being reaches the sensuous perception of the world. He means this if he says, this visible world only originated when an eye was there to see the world.—The sun formed the eye, light formed light. Once when such an external vision was not yet there, the human being had an internal vision. In the primeval times of human development an external object did not stimulate the human being to perceive, but from the inside images rose in him: the old vision was a vision in the astral light. At that time, the human being had a vague, twilit clairvoyance.

In the Germanic world of gods, the human being also saw the gods in vague, twilit astral vision and took his images of the gods from it. This vague clairvoyance descended into darkness and disappeared completely bit by bit. The strong light of the physical sun extinguished it, which appeared in the sky and made the physical world visible to the senses. Thus, astral vision of the human being disappeared. If he looks at the future, then he realises that this astral vision has to return to a higher stage: what was extinguished because of the physical vision, so that the full awake clairvoyance of the human being could be caused, has to revive. An even brighter, more luminous life of the human being is added to the day consciousness in the light of the future. To the physical vision, the vision in the astral light is still added.

The leaders of humanity are those spirits who were able—due to an earthly life full of renunciation—to bring that condition about already before death which one calls the passage through the gate of death. He encloses those experiences in himself that are bestowed on the whole humanity once when it has acquired the astral vision, which makes the mental and spiritual perceptible. The initiates always called this making perceptible of the spiritual-mental around us the awakening, the resurrection, the spiritual rebirth that adds the gifts of the spiritual senses to the gifts of the physical senses. Someone who feels the new astral vision awakening in himself celebrates an internal Easter festival.

We can understand this way that the spring festival always carries such symbols that remind of death and of resurrection. The astral light is dead in the human being; it sleeps. However, this light will resurrect in the human being. A festival that points to the awakening of the astral vision in the future is the Easter festival.

The sleep of Vishnu begins around Christmastide when the astral vision fell asleep and the physical light awoke. If the human being is successful to renounce the personal, then the astral light awakes again in him, then he can celebrate the Easter festival, then Vishnu is allowed to awake again in his soul.

Out of cosmic knowledge, the Easter festival is tied not only on the awakening sun, but on the emergence of the plant realm in spring. As well as the sowing corn is immersed in the earth and must rot to awake anew, the astral light must slumber in the human body to be woken again. The symbol of the Easter festival is the sowing corn, which sacrifices itself to let arise a new plant. It is the sacrifice of a phase of nature to let arise a new one. Sacrificing and coming-into-being—this is concentrated in the Easter festival. Richard Wagner felt this idea as something great. He was in the Villa Wesendonck at the Zurich Lake in 1857; there he looked out at the awaking nature. With the idea of it, he got the idea of the dead and resurrecting World Saviour, of Christ Jesus, and the idea of Parzival who seeks for the holiest in the soul.

All leaders of humanity who knew how the higher spiritual life of the human being awakes from the lower nature understood the idea of Easter. Hence, Dante (Dante Alighieri, ~1265-1321) also showed his awakening at Good Friday in his Divine Comedy. Immediately at the beginning of the poem, this becomes clear to us. In the 35th year of his life, Dante has this big vision, which he describes. In the middle of his life, he lets it take place. The normal human life counts seventy years, 35 years is the middle. He reckons 35 years for the physical experience in which the human being still takes up new physical experiences. Then the human being is ripe that the spiritual experience is added to the physical one. Then he is ripe for the perception of the spiritual world. If all the growing forces of the physical are united, the time begins when the spiritual is woken to life. Therefore, Dante let this vision take place at Easter.

The original growing of the solar strength is celebrated at Christmas. Easter is tied on the middle of the growing solar strength. We are in the centre of spring, at the Easter point where Dante believed to stand in the middle of human life when he felt the spiritual life rising in him. The Easter festival is put with reason in the middle of the rise of the sun, according to the time when in the human being the slumbering astral light is revived. The strength of the sun wakes up the slumbering seed, the grain resting in the earth. The grain has become a picture of that which takes place in the human nature, if the astral light awakes in him. It is born inside of the human being. The Easter festival is the festival of the resurrection inside of the human being. The thought of the redeeming Christ was connected with the cosmic thought.

A kind of contrast was felt between the Christian view of the Easter festival and the spiritual-scientific idea of karma. It seems to be a contrast, this idea of karma and that of the redemption by the Son of Man. People who do not understand a lot of the basic view of the spiritual-scientific thought see such a contradiction between the redemption by Christ Jesus and the idea of karma. They say, the thought of the redeeming god contradicts the self-redemption by karma.—They understand neither the Easter thought of redemption in the right sense, nor the thought of karmic justice. It would not be right if anybody saw a fellow man suffering and said to him, you yourself have caused this suffering—and, therefore, he did not want to help him because karma should have its effect. He misunderstands karma. On the contrary, karma says, help that who suffers, because you are there to help. You improve the karmic account of necessity, while you help your fellow man. Thereby, you give him the possibility to bear his karma. Then you appear as the saviour from suffering.—Thus, one can also help a whole circle of persons instead of a single one. One fits thereby into the karma of these persons, while one helps them. If a mighty individual comes to the assistance of the whole humanity like Christ Jesus, his sacrificial death has an effect on the karma of the whole humanity. He could help to bear the karma of the whole humanity, and we may be sure that the redemption by Christ Jesus was taken up in the karma of humanity.

Just the thought of resurrection and redemption is only correctly understood by spiritual science. A future Christianity combines karma and redemption. Because cause and effect are connected in the spiritual life, this big sacrificial action must also have its effect on the human lives. Spiritual science also deepens this festival idea. The knowledge of spirit deepens the idea of Easter that seems to be written on the starry firmament, which we believe to read on the starry firmament. Also in the future emergence of the spirit, which will take place in the human being, we see the depth of the Easter thought. The human being lives now in the middle of his life in disharmonious, bewildering conditions. Nevertheless, he also knows: as the world has arisen from the chaos, the harmony will once arise from his chaotic inside. As well as the regular orbits of the planets around the sun originated, the internal saviour of the human being will arise who will mean the uniform, the harmonious compared with all disharmony. Everybody should be reminded by the Easter festival of the resurrection of the spirit out of the present darkened nature of the human being.