The Rudolf Steiner Archive

One particular fact, a fact we have been discussing here a number of times, is causing concern to anyone wishing to work along the lines of a spiritual science in the spirit of anthroposophy. I am referring to the fact that modern humankind is basically failing to pay attention to the powers of decline that are clearly in evidence, to powers that must inevitably take our present civilization to the edge of the abyss if they are allowed to come into effect.

Surely we have to admit to ourselves that many things are coming up from the profound depths of human nature and coming to realization; or in other words that there is a great deal going on at present. On the other hand many of our fellow citizens simply cannot make up their minds to pay proper attention to what is really going on.

It is reasonable to say that at the present time little effort is made in cultural life to take a wider point of view and pay genuine attention to the forces that shape our world. There is one school—I have characterized it a number of times over the years—that has its roots mainly among the English-speaking peoples and is rather secretive about its work. It is however extraordinarily effective. A second school is the movement that has come together because people want to take account of the instincts of the masses, instincts that are understandable and indeed also justifiable. In its extremes this movement is represented by people who have no idea of human evolution, who know nothing of the principles that mean progress for the world. Certain conditions, however,—I shall refer to these later—enable them to hold a position of authority in spite of their narrow-minded views and in spite of a natural inclination for criminal activities that is in fact quite considerable. They are of course clever people and able to be to the fore in public life nowadays because they impress people.

The third movement that has an effect in cultural life is based on particularly energetic representatives of the different confessions—confessions of all kinds—who also know very well what they want. They are the fountainhead of everything that usually comes under the heading of Jesuitism. Many people talk about Jesuitism and the like, but still large numbers of our fellow citizens are little inclined to pay proper attention to what is really going on.

To get a proper idea of current events one would have to take account of a number of things. One thing to be particularly taken into account however is connected with a fact I also mentioned in my first public lecture here.²⁰ It is the fact that when it comes to their frame of mind, particularly as regards the way they form ideas, present-day people are in many, many instances continuing in a way that was only suitable for the forming of ideas during the Middle Ages. That was a great and significant way of thinking, but it is now out of date. Some people have gone very intensely into the medieval way of developing sensibilities and forming ideas. These are the people who hold more or less socialist views, and there are many of them all over the globe. The ideas current among them come to expression above all in a belief in authority that is almost limitless. They cringe before anything that assumes authority by simply taking a strong line among them. This has made it possible for people like Lenin and Trotsky²¹ to impose their tyranny on millions of people with the help of just a few thousand. That particular movement is spreading from Eastern Europe into Asia at an incredible pace. It imposes a tyranny worse than anything seen during the worst periods of oriental tyranny.

All these things need to be considered in forming an opinion on current events. It has only been possible to give a rough outline. Basically the only opposition to these trends—and we are still thinking in terms of major forces in world history, forces shaping the world—comes from what should ideally be a truly honest, sincere and genuine spiritual-scientific movement. If we compare the interest brought to this spiritual-scientific movement with the interest those other movements have aroused within a relatively short time, and with the influence these movements have gained, we have to say that interest in this spiritual-scientific movement is as good as nil at the present time.

We do not fail to recognise of course that there are many people who go along with this spiritual-scientific movement, or at least tell themselves that they go along with it. There would be an enormous difference, however, if people really took note of the intensity with which those other three movements work for the things they want to bring to the fore, and then compared this with the intensity of Interest that there is for spiritual science. The spiritual-scientific movement is really approached in a very superficial way, superficial in the way people feel about it. The other movements on the other hand are arousing a limitless intensity of feeling.

Does anyone clearly understand—making it the centre of both heart and mind—that if spiritual science is to intervene to any serious extent in the forces that shape the world, people must first of all give recognition and proper value to initiation knowledge, or initiation science as we call it? Initiation science today also needs humanity's firm and decided interest. Many people believe they are sincerely devoted to it, yet the interest they muster is still rather superficial, subject to all kinds of unimportant considerations.

The people I have often called the real big shots in the Anglo-American movement have initiation knowledge, but certainly not for the benefit of humankind. Everything based on Jesuitism has initiation knowledge and in its own peculiar way Leninism also has initiation knowledge. Leninism knows how to put things cleverly, using rational ideas produced in the head, and there is a definite reason for this The cleverness of the human animal, the cleverness of human animal nature, is coming to the fore in human evolution through Leninism. Everything arising from human instincts, human selfishness, comes to interpretation in Leninism and Trotskyism in a form that on the surface seems very intelligent. The animal wants to work its way to the fore, to be the most intelligent of animals. All the ahrimanic powers that aim to exclude the human element, to exclude everything that is specifically human, and all the aptitudes that exist within the animal kingdom—I have often stressed this—are to become the forces that determine humanity.

Consider—and this is something else I have often stressed—the conceit shown by humans when they invented things such as linen paper, paper made from wood or the like; in short, paper of any kind. Well, wasps and similar creatures made this invention very much earlier, building their nests from the same materials as those from which we make paper. There you have human cleverness within animal nature. If you now take all the cleverness of this kind that exists within the whole animal kingdom, and imagine ahrimanic powers taking this up and making it come to life in human heads, in the heads of people who follow only their egotistical instincts, you can see that it may be true to say that Lenin, Trotsky and others are the tools of those ahrimanic powers. That is an ahrimanic initiation. It belongs to a different cosmic sphere than our own world does. It is however an initiation that also holds the potential for getting rid of human civilization on earth, getting rid of everything that has evolved by way of human civilization.

We are therefore dealing with three schools of initiation. Two are on the plane of human evolution and one is below that plane, though it is an initiation of tremendous will power, almost unlimited will power. The only thing that can bring order into all these developments, setting a goal that is worthy to be called human, is contained within genuine spiritual knowledge. A true goal and genuine sincerity will however only come from this spiritual science if it is made into something that involves the whole of our life, taking note how much empty chatter, how much conceit and inner egotism comes to expression in so much of what is usually said in its name. These things cannot be left unsaid. On the contrary, we need to discuss them over and over again. How else can we hope to give souls the power today that is needed to prevent civilization going into total decline.

Let me take a few minutes to give you a very concrete picture. Just a short time ago I read the following in a newspaper:

Religion is a fantasy that arises in human heads as a reflexive response to the way they relate to each other and to nature. It is doomed to die a natural death in the triumphant progress of a clear, scientific and naturalistic interpretation of the truth that is evolving hand in hand with the planned evolution of a new society.²²

Considering what one comes up against nowadays with regard to souls fast asleep in the present age, we may well ask ourselves how many people reading this kind of thing in a newspaper article pull up short as though stung by a viper, because a truly dreadful symptom comes to expression in those lines. People do not reflect on what would happen on this earth if these words came to realization:

Religion is a fantasy that arises in human heads as a reflexive response to the way they relate to each other and to nature. It is doomed to die a natural death in the triumphant progress of a clear, scientific and naturalistic interpretation of the truth that is evolving hand in hand with the planned evolution of a new society.

‘Religion’ does not refer here to some confession on other, nor to some religious movement that one may quite rightly consider to be wrong, nor merely to religion in the narrower sense, but to all that is moral. If the thoughts expressed in those lines were to come true the result would be that human society in every part of the globe would very rapidly become a herd of animals, animals capable of very sophisticated thought, however. If a way cannot be found now for opposition to arise against the principle that is growing in the East of Europe and spreading across into Asia at an incredible pace, civilization will be doomed. The ideals expressed in those lines would then become reality.

In the light of such impulses in world history I do not think it is Justifiable for people in some places to wish to continue with the mystical small talk within closed circles, small talk that against my Wishes has in the long run also come up in spiritual science working towards anthroposophy. Some people even consider it the ideal! I do not think it is right to continue with this in any form, totally disregarding what is demanded of us in the wider interest of humanity on this earth. It must be our will to consider those wider interests of humankind without bias. We must make an effort and become truly serious about certain basic principles—not merely in theory, using our intellect, but instinctively. Those principles have been obscured by all the confessions in Europe and America and the intention is to obscure them yet further.

We know about the virulent propaganda campaign being launched against spiritual science working towards anthroposophy, we hear the bullets whistling all around. If therefore opposition arises in some corner or another it would be a pity to give oneself up to the harmful illusion—an illusion indeed that today merits punishment—that we may ever hope to achieve anything by converting people who after all are the authorized agents of something or other that belongs to the past. We cannot and must not be opportunists or go for compromise. That should be our special meditation every morning, as it were. There have been well-meaning people who have said we should simply try and explain to people in one direction or another how we are endeavouring to bring the Christ Mystery to the world. The more we do this, the more bullets whistle around our ears from certain quarters. Nothing goes more against the grain for instance with certain Catholic or Protestant groups today than that humankind should today gain true understanding of the Christ Mystery. It is not in their interest that the true Mystery of Christ comes to be known; all they want is to hold on to the old ideas. If we had some kind of strange and peculiar creed concerning Christ they would treat us as a harmless sect, as odd characters, and not fight us with the intensity we have come to experience. Within the two schools, quite apart from the third, there are however quite a number of people who know that our aim is to speak of the Christ Mystery out of the truth, and of social order out of the triune principle. This makes them sit up and listen; it makes them say: ‘It would take the ground away from under our feet if we were to go for the truth; let us therefore vow to destroy it.’ People do not fight us because we are in error, they fight us because it is realized in certain quarters that we want the truth. There is no point is saying anything else about some of the things that go on today. The cultural movement I am speaking of has a profound interest in absolute clarity, particularly also clarity of thought.

Remember some of the things I have told you. What is the essential point when we come to see what humankind needs above all else today? The essential point is that our powers of thought—everything we have by way of ability to form ideas, except for sensory powers—have come down to us from our life before birth or life before conception. Everything we human beings are able to think we have brought into the physical world when we were born; we have brought it with us from the life we had before we were born. All the thoughts we evolve whilst we are in our physical bodies are faculties that govern the whole of our essential human nature between our last death and the birth process that brought us into our present life on earth. When we are thinking here and now, the powers of thought we use, not the thoughts, are a shadow image of something that was at work before we were born or conceived.

Try and think of what we call the forces of nature today, of what goes 01 in lightning and thunder, in the movement of waves, in the way clouds are formed, in the rising and setting of the sun, in wind and rain,in the way the plants rise from the ground, in the way animals are conceived and born and grow. Think of all the natural processes You see all around; then think of them merely as a picture, not the reality. So, please, think of everything you have around you by way of natural forces casting its shadow somewhere or other, and of these shadows being taken up into a container and presenting themselves to us as pictures. The relationship that exists between nature as she actually is now and the reality that lies behind is similar to the relationship between life before birth and our faculties of thought in the present earth life. Just think that there you have everything that happens to your soul between death and rebirth—I am showing it in diagrammatic form—and then its shadow arises; a shadow arises of everything you have there and this shadow becomes the content of Your head, the content of your thoughts; it is your faculty of thought. What you are thinking now, those are the forces active before you were born. That is ‘nature’ in the spiritual world, if I may put it in such a paradoxical way. The evolution of humankind cannot progress unless we become aware that when we are thinking, the existence we had before birth influences our faculties of thought. Having entered into my present earth life, I am continuing the life I had before birth when I am thinking.

Who puts up the greatest opposition to this idea? The greatest opposition is put up by religious confessions that maintain more or less the following: ‘A human child is born. It pleases two people, a male and a female individual on this earth, to come together and God creates a soul in the spiritual world, a soul that then connects with what is created between two people in the act of begetting. That is how the human individual comes into being.’ This is of course very different from what I have just been saying. It is what confessions live on in our modern civilized worlds. They all teach that when two People copulate the spirit very kindly creates a soul up above, a fresh new soul; it is then sent down to unite with the physical body which has been created, and something new has come into existence. To whom do these confessions address themselves? They address themselves to terribly egotistical individuals who simply cannot bear the thought of being extinguished when they die. Yet they are able to bear the thought—for they have got used to it over the centuries, indeed soon it will be millenia—that it pleases God to create souls for human beings procreated here on earth. What their egotism does i not allow them to accept is the thought that death puts an end to it all.

Of course you all know what life after death is like. I do not need to go into it here. But let us turn our attention to something quite different. Preachers in their pulpits always need to assume that they are speaking to people who cannot bear the thought of death being the end of it all. The water they have to pour down from their pulpits—irrespective of the particular creed followed by the people who sit there below them—must make it clear to them—I mean unclear, of course—what happens after death. They have to choose words most liable to excite the egotism of people; they have to utter phrases that are fully in accord with the egotism in the souls of people.

Let us think what would happen for instance—to give a particular example—if someone were freely and in all seriousness to make certain aspects of the Roman Catholic confession his target, say the dogma that when two people copulate it must please God to send a freshly made soul down to them. What would happen if criticism were to be aimed at this? Someone going into the whole issue without prejudice would find that it has nothing whatsoever to do with anything to be found in the true Christian faith. They would find that during the Middle Ages the teachings of Aristotle infiltrated theology and that Aristotle represented these ideas on the basis of misunderstood Platonic ideas, saying that a fresh soul is created for every newly generated human body and unites with it. Something taken for granted as a fundamental tenet in Christian beliefs in fact has nothing to do with Christianity but is an Aristotelian principle.²³

Let us move on to something else. One element in religious beliefs is the dogma of eternal punishment in hell. Again, entirely an Aristotelian thought. Aristotle assumed that once a soul had been created, lived on earth and then come into the spiritual world, there was nothing it could do in the spiritual world, as he saw it, but look back for all eternity on what it had done during its one and only life on earth. Aristotle imagined that a fresh soul was created for every child, that this soul lived on earth until the individual died and then for all eternity occupied itself with the contemplation of what had happened during one life on earth. If someone had committed murder, they would have to look back on this for ever. That is where the dogma of eternal punishment in hell originated. It is a purely Aristotelian concept.

Just think, if the truth were to become known, instead of Aristotelian thoughts presented as Christian dogma, the people wishing to represent such Aristotelian ideas masquerading as Christian dogma would be scared out of their wits that people might find out about this, that People might find out that their priests were not teaching Christian Ideas from their pulpits, but Aristotelian ideas that had crept into Christian teachings.

Christian beliefs also contain an infinite number of ideas deriving from gnostic teachings. The Roman Catholic sacrifice of the Mass has infinitely much in it that derives from the Egyptian Mysteries. Many of the rites of the Catholic Church—and the Protestant, too, in many respects—contain things the origin of which must be sought in all kinds of oriental religions. All they are after is that people do not find out where these things come from. What do they feel compelled to do? They have to resort to slander! They have to say that the people who are presenting the truth today are plagiarists borrowing from oriental and gnostic teachings and so on. ‘Traubism’ is the order of the day. They come up with learned calumnies like those presented by the clergyman Professor Traub²⁴ and all the people who parrot him. Why do people do such things? Because the truth is coming to light and they all have an interest in not letting it come to light. People will go on saying that what we are doing is taken from some source or other. They will provoke something that makes people go against gnosis and things that are part of the very fibre of their souls because they do not want it to come to light in its true form. Gnosis—one is supposed to say—is something terrible, something dreadful. Then people will ignore it, being afraid of it, and the preachers can talk about things that in fact have their origin in gnosis. It is the preachers who talk about things that originally came from gnosis, not the people who speak about what has grown in the soil of spiritual science working towards anthroposophy. What they are most afraid of is that there is such a thing as pre-existence of the soul, a life of the soul before birth and also conception, that the soul has its roots in the spiritual world through all the ages that any kind of knowledge and creed among humankind might cover. For if the truth were to become known there would be no room any more for such blasphemy as that the gods are obliged to send a newly made soul from the spiritual world for every single human body, so that they might unite. All these things have their origin of course in a desire for power that is getting very strong. Behind it all are thoughts of power. It is possible to put tremendous energies into such thoughts of power simply by following certain precepts.

What is going on in Dornach at the moment, for instance? All around, almost everywhere in Switzerland, articles on anthroposophy are being published not one sentence of which is true.²⁵ The whole campaign started when an article appeared that contained twenty-three lies. For weeks now, article on article has picked up on those twenty-three lies; they have appeared almost everywhere in the Catholic press in Switzerland and not a single sentence is true. Why is this happening? It happens because the many followers of these people are brought to a certain state of mind by being told untruths, a state of mind where it is no longer possible to tell the difference between truth and falsehood.

Think of all the efforts we go to in spiritual science working towards anthroposophy to form sufficiently clear ideas; for instance, as to how far the things we become aware of in human minds, in the form of dreams, may or may not be reflecting the truth. As human beings we cannot immediately distinguish truth from falsehood when something appears in the course of a dream. The same state of mind arises for a congregation when they are told lies by people who know that those lies will be believed. The soul is brought to a state, a mood. by those lies where it becomes the willing tool of those desiring power. It is easiest to get people into your power by planting illusions in their unsuspecting minds. Articles full of lies are systematically put out with the intention of creating the kind of mood that can be created with lies. That will be the inevitable consequence of the probabilism which the Jesuits have been teaching for a long time. It is merely a final consequence.

It is of course difficult to rouse modern souls from their general torpor to stand up against such people. The day before I left we were forced to arrange for a lecture—for we must fight, of course, even if we do not want to, against the lies that come up in Dornach. Dr BooS, one of the most courageous of our young protagonists, called on everyone who had anything to say on the subject of the lecture to join in the in the discussion—it was a public lecture, of course. When no one came forward he said openly and publicly that he publicly declared the cleric who had first written those twenty-three lies, a priest called Arnet in Reinach, to be unworthy of his priestly calling, for disseminating scurrilous lies.

One cannot help oneself. And then, even when this had been said, only one individual stood up among those present, a teacher, shaking in his boots if I may put it like that, and said: ‘Just wait. There are more articles to come, and in the end you will see!’ Well, all I could say was that there had been twenty-three lies to begin with, and the truth about those twenty-three lies will without doubt never emerge, however long it takes until there is an end to the matter even if the end does not come until the end of the world. Not the least attempt has been made in everything published so far—and a respectable number of articles have already appeared—to go into those twenty-three lies.

Other things have been tried, using a strange logic. The pamphlet by the Tübingen speaker was brought into play—it actually played a large role—but the people who bring professor Traub's pamphlet into play in their articles have not properly understood what he said. They will write that this man Steiner is borrowing from all kinds of ancient writings, from the Upanishads, the Egyptian Isis Mysteries and the ‘Akashic Records’—well, I suppose the typesetter may have put that in, but on the other hand the clerical gentleman may have done so. I therefore said that it was not really my concern to correct printers' errors, but that it surely is a strange way of reading Traub's Pamphlet if immediately afterwards the reader has forgotten that not even Traub says anything so stupid as that the Akashic Records are to be found on library shelves; I said that one cannot really accuse people of borrowing from that old tome, the Akashic records, for spiritual science based in anthroposophy.

Our attackers have also gained support among liberal thinkers. Dr Boos was going great guns in a liberal paper, saying that this was a deliberate untruth, since the writer must have known that there were no Akashic Records in his library. He could not possibly have them in his library and so he ought to have known; he must have written a deliberate untruth. What did the person concerned do? He wrote that Dr Boos was evading the issue, as it was self-evident that the typesetter must have been responsible for the ‘Akashic Records’ error and not he himself. In his view the kind of sophistry that made authors responsible for that kind of printing error merely showed what kind of stable people came from.

Well, you see the kind of mentality one is dealing with. But do not underestimate it! You have to realize that it is going to be a hard fight, particularly in this direction. The aim is to prevent people from finding out about what I have been saying. What I said, first of all in the medical course, is the following: It is particularly when one is making serious efforts to determine the spiritual laws of this world, doing so on the basis of present-day life, when one tries to reach the deeper secrets of human nature by making these things one's own on the basis of present-day life, and then also finds them written in ancient works—albeit arising from an intellectual life that was more instinctive and atavistic—that one feels very humble in perceiving the greatness of the instinctive, atavistic intellect that human beings once possessed; that has been lost and must now be found again. These words were spoken in awareness of the fact that knowledge which today has to be sought within life was once instinctive wisdom given to humankind. Much of that ancient wisdom has of course survived in the religious beliefs, though it has become corrupted. Yet the people professing those beliefs want to make humankind fear that original wisdom, and when they talk about it say more or less the following: `Those dreadful people who pursue anthroposophy today are borrowing everything from that ancient wisdom'. If they went into the matter they would find that the spiritual science offered to humankind in anthroposophy is very different from anything ever borrowed from anywhere, from the Upanishads or whatever. So we had to borrow indeed from that ancient tome called the Akashic Records! To prevent people getting sight of something that belongs to the present age our enemies are letting their bullets come whistling from all around.

Let us be clear about one thing. You may feel tempted now and then to stress the good points of one thing or another. The alliance between Jesuitism and the Social Democrats which is getting closer and closer by the day is something entirely natural. There is nothing unnatural about it. The Social Democrats are equipped with the same kind of ideas as the Jesuits, only they take them the other way round. One thing, however, that differs from all else that is felt is the 'eternal nature of the human being'. This has become the teaching of egotism. It is restored to its true form when the pre-existence concept, of a human soul having a life before birth, or before conception, once again becomes the effective moral principle. The knives will come out to fight this idea. We shall only be able to progress in the world if in the first place truth has inner power. This inner power can only be effective, however, if in the second place people have the courage, however few they may be in number, to carry this truth in their souls, carry it in their souls in all seriousness, uprightness and honesty and without compromise. It is useless for us to play down the tremendous difference which exists between true Christianity and the Catholic and Protestant Aristotelianism which holds the idea that souls are created for bodies as they arise through procreation. We must not play down this difference. If we do play it down we will not even notice where the idea of power, the desire for power, has its real origins.

I find myself referring again and again to the pastoral issued by a Roman Catholic bishop. This document really exists. According to it the faithful must regard their priest as ranking higher than God and Christ, for each time the priest performs the consecration at the altar Christ is forced to be present by that altar, to be present in the bread and the wine which is His body and His blood. The priest therefore has greater power in the universe than a god. That is what it says in a pastoral that really exists and has also been quoted in many other pastorals. Now you may ask me if that is consistent with the abolition of the spirit by the Council of Constantinople²⁶ in 869. The answer is yes. A Roman Catholic saying that God is more powerful than a priest would say so because people will not accept any other view nowadays. People are so much asleep in their souls that they never ask themselves: ‘What was the person²⁷ writing to Moleschott really saying who had the nerve to say that a criminal, a liar, a murderer is a moral person only if he can be fully himself and is an immoral person if he does not bring to expression what he has in him. for this would impose restraints on his individuality, and that an inclination to murder is just as valid as other inclinations are’? Modern souls do not have the courage to say to themselves: ‘If scientists continue to teach the kind of basic philosophy that they have been teaching, the inevitable conclusion simply has to be that criminals, murderers, are just as good as someone trying to act morally, as it were. People merely lack the courage to admit this.’ When materialism had its flowering, at the time when people like Vogt, Moleschott and Buechner²⁸ , all of them courageous men, were publishing their writings, such things were admitted. The present age is too cowardly, however, to make such admissions. Nor is there sufficient courage in the sleeping souls of the present to admit to oneself: 'If you go by the spirit of those creeds and statements a priest is indeed more powerful than a god.'

The school of thought represented by spiritual science working in the spirit of anthroposophy must above all work towards clear thinking in every respect. Its message cannot be grasped if thoughts are unclear, it cannot be grasped in a vague and vaporous mysticism but only with crystal clear thoughts, thoughts which in my Philosophy of Freedom²⁹ I have tried to show are the starting point for genuine human freedom.

We may continue our discussion of the subject when I am able to speak to you again. I hope this will be soon.

• 20. ‘Der Weg zum gesunden Denken und die Lebenslage des Gegenwartsmenschen’ (A way to develop sound thinking and people's life situation in the present day), Stuttgart 8 June 1920. Published in Geisteswissenschaft und die Lebensfordeningen der Gegenwart No. 6, Dornach 1950. To be published in Germany in GA 355. No record of translation into English.
• 21. Lenin (formerly Ulyanov), Vladimir Ilyich, Russian revolutionary.
  
  Trotsky. Leon (Lev Davidovich Bronstein), Russian revolutionary leader in 1917.
• 22. Basler Vonvärts of 2 June 1920. X.N. , ‘Die Politik der Sowjetregierung auf dem Gebiete der Religion’ (Soviet government policies concerning religion).
• 23. See Franz Brentano. Die Psychology des Aristoteles (The psychology of Aristotle), Mainz 1867. S. 199 ff.
• 24. Traub, Friedrich, professor at Tuebingen University, author of Rudolf Steiner als Philosoph und Theosoph (Rudolf Steiner as a philosopher and theosophist), Tuebingen 1919.
• 25. For details relating to this see Boos, Roman, ‘Aktenmäßige Darstellung der Hetze gegen das Goetheanum’ (The virulent campaign againt the Goetheanum presented in documents), in Rudolf Steiner/Roman Boos: Die Hetze gegen das Goetheanum (The virulent campaign against the Goetheanum), Arlesheim 1920.
• 26. Refers to the Council's rejection of ‘trichotomy’. Rudolf Steiner referred to this on a number of occasions, e.g. in Bausteine zu einer Erkenntnis des Mysteriums von Golgatha GA 175, 1st and 2nd lectures. English translation in Cosmic and Human Metamporphoses. H. Collison ed. London: Anthroposophical Publishing Co. 1926.
• 27. Mathilde Reichardt, a lady who published a book on science and moral philosophy in the form of letters to Moleschott in 1856, is able to lay undoubted and unenviable claim to rank first among those who turn moral concepts upside down. It is the opinion of this lady that moral philosophy merely has to ask whether a human individual develops his or her inherent traits in a balanced way. Yet nature—so she says—expresses a different intent in every human individual. She therefore does not hesitate to state ‘that when someone has an inherent tendency to cheat and to steal, such a person can only be an entirely moral person if he or she is a cheat or a thief.’ ‘Someone born to be a thief has also been born with the right to live out those inherent tendencies, developing them to the full, for that is the only way in which he or she can be a strong and moral individual. And what applies to thieves also applies to all other vices, including those born to be murderers.’
  (Quoted from Jurgen Bona Meyer, Philosophische Zei&agen, Bonn 1874, S. 323 f.)
• 28. Vogt, Carl, champion of Darwinism.
  
  Moleschott, Jakob, physiologist.
  
  Buechner, Ludwig, German physician and materialist philosopher.
• 29. Die Philosophie der Freiheit (1894), GA. 4. English: The Philosophy of Freedom. M. Wilson tr. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1970.

This lecture is number 8 of 12 in the lecture series entitled The Sun Mystery ... Death, Resurrection and is also included in the lecture series Exoteric and Esoteric Christianity.

Today I should like to speak to you about a certain aspect of the Mystery of Golgotha. I have spoken about this Mystery on many occasions in our more intimate Anthroposophical gatherings, yet all that can be said about it is so extensive and belongs to a sphere of such importance and richness that, in order to approach it even approximately from the most varied points of view, we are compelled to elucidate from ever new aspects this greatest of all secrets in human earth evolution.

We shall be able to value this Mystery of Golgotha in the right way only when we allow our soul perception to contemplate two evolutionary streams of human earthly existence: namely, first, that part of the entire evolution of mankind which preceded the Mystery of Golgotha, and second, that other part which has already succeeded it or which will succeed it during the remainder of the earth period.

When we speak of the beginning of earth existence, of the primeval epochs of the earth evolution of humanity during which there already existed thinking of a certain kind, although dreamlike and imaginative in character, it was nevertheless a certain sort of thinking; and when we speak of this beginning we must make clear to ourselves that the human beings of that time possessed faculties which enabled them to have intercourse—if I may so express it—with beings of a higher cosmic order. You know from my Occult Science and from other descriptions something of the nature of these beings of the higher hierarchies.

At present, with our ordinary consciousness, we do not know much about these beings of the higher hierarchies. Our intercourse with them has been cut off, so to say. This was not the case in the most ancient periods of human evolution. It would, of course, be wrong to imagine that the meeting with such a being of the higher hierarchies was of a similar nature to the meeting of two modern men incarnated in physical bodies. It certainly was quite a different sort of relationship. What these beings communicated to the human entity by means of the primeval earth language could only be comprehended by spiritual organs. And these beings communicated the mighty secrets of existence to the human being of that time. Secrets of existence were poured out into the human mind of that time and they called forth in man the consciousness that in the region above us, where today we see only clouds and stars, the earthly life had intercourse with divine worlds. These dwellers in divine regions descended in a spiritual manner to the human earth beings and revealed themselves in such a way that the earth man received, through the communications of these super-earthly beings, what may be called primeval wisdom. Within these manifestations of divine wisdom, originating in these beings, an infinite amount of knowledge was contained which human beings, during their earth life, would not have been able to fathom by themselves. In the beginning of earth existence—in the sense in which I have described it here—human beings were of themselves able to know but very little. Everything that was kindled in them as perception, as perceptive knowledge, they received from their divine teachers. Their divine teachings contained much, but they did not contain one thing of special importance which, as a matter of fact, was unnecessary for humanity of that time but which does contain most essential facts of knowledge for modern mankind. The divine teachers spoke to men of the most varied aspects of truth and knowledge, yet they never spoke to them of birth and death.

Naturally, I cannot today during this short hour speak of all the things said by these divine teachers to the human race in those ancient times. Much of this, however, you know already; but I should like to emphasize the fact very strongly that in all these teachings there was nothing about birth and death. The reason for this is due to the fact that in the course of human evolution there was no need for the human beings of those ancient times—also for a long time after for those who followed—to have any knowledge of the wisdom of birth and death. The entire consciousness of mankind has changed in the course of earth evolution. And although we should not compare the animal consciousness of today, even the higher animal consciousness, with the human consciousness in ancient, primitive times, nevertheless we may consider important facts of present-day animal life. This life lies below the level of the human. In the beginning, the life of primitive man lay, in a certain sense, even above the level of the present-day human being, in spite of the fact that, when compared with modern man, he had a kind of animal shape. If we view the animal of today with unbiased perception, we shall agree that this animal is not interested in birth and death, because it is in the middle evolutionary stage of existence. If we disregard birth—although even there the matter in question is quite obvious—we need only to think of the carelessness and lack of interest with which the animal approaches death. It simply submits to death, accepting this transformation of its existence without experiencing such a deep break in life as is the case with the human being.

As we have already noted, the primeval earth man, in spite of his animal-like shape, stood above the animal; he possessed an instinctive clairvoyance, and by means of this instinctive clairvoyance he was able to have intercourse with his divine teachers. But like the present-day animal he was not concerned about the approach of death. Perhaps we might say that he did not contemplate death at all.

We may ask: Why should he? As a result of his instinctive clairvoyance he still had a memory of a clear experience of what had remained within his inner being after he had descended from the spirit world through birth into the physical world. He knew the essential nature of what had entered his physical body; and because he knew this, because he was sure—if I may say so—that an immortal being lived within him, he was therefore not interested in the transition which takes place at death. He must have had feelings somewhat similar to those of the serpent when, after slipping off its old skin, it is compelled to replace it by a new one. The impression of birth and death was something more self-evident and not so desperately important in human life as it is today, for the human being still possessed a vital perception of the soul nature.

Today we have no perception of the soul nature. Today, in dreaming, there is scarcely any perceptible transition between sleeping and waking, and the dream with its pictures belongs at present absolutely to the realm of the sleeping state, it is still half-sleep. On the other hand the dreamlike pictures of primeval man coincided with the waking state; it was a waking state not yet fully developed. The human being knew that what he received in these dream pictures was real. Thus he felt and experienced his soul nature. And it was impossible for him to raise questions about birth and death with the same vigor as is necessary for our time.

In the primeval periods of human earth evolution this state was especially vital; but it decreased continually. Perhaps I may express it in the following way: Human beings became gradually more and more aware that death means a big break in human life, likewise in the soul life, and, therefore, they had to turn their attention also to the fact of birth. Earth life, in regard to this distinction, assumed a character which became ever increasingly significant for the earthly man; for at the same time the living experience of soul existence grew paler and paler, and he felt himself more and more lifted out of a psycho-spiritual existence during his sojourn on earth. This increased more and more, especially for those who lived near the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. With the Greeks, this feeling had already become so vital that they felt the life outside the physical body as a mere human shadow-life and they looked on death with tragic feelings. But what they had received as teachings from their ancient divine preceptors did not deal with the facts of birth and death. Thus, before the Mystery of Golgotha, men ran the risk that experiences might occur in their earth-life, that the apprehension, the perception of these experiences might enter their earth consciousness—Birth and Death—which they did not understand and which were something absolutely unknown to them.

Now let us imagine that at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha these ancient, divine teachers of mankind had descended. Had they really done so, they would perhaps have been able to reveal themselves to a few pupils or teachers of mankind who had been prepared through the mysteries; they would have been able to communicate, to prepared priests for the mysteries, the content and extent of ancient divine wisdom which actually had been poured out into primeval wisdom. But within the whole of these teachings nothing would have been found about birth and death. The riddle of death would not have been imparted to mankind through this revealed divine wisdom, not even in the mysteries; and outside in earthly life human beings would have observed something—the facts of birth and death—which would have been of great and fundamental interest to them. But the Gods would not have told them anything about it. What was the reason?

You should consider this matter without bias and you should put aside many of the concepts which today have simply become traditional religion. You should understand that the beings of the higher hierarchies who were the teachers of primeval men had never experienced birth and death in their own worlds. For birth and death in the form we experience them on earth, are only experienced on earth, and on earth are experienced only by human beings. Death in animal and plant is something quite different from death in a human being. And in the divine worlds in which the first great teachers of human evolution lived there is no birth, no death; there is only transformation, metamorphosis from one state of existence to another. Therefore an inward understanding of death and birth—we must characterize it in this way—did not exist in these divine teachers. This host of divine teachers includes all the beings who were connected with the Jahve-being, with the Bodhisattva-beings, with all the ancient creators of human world conceptions.

Let us realize for instance how in the Old Testament—there we can actually grasp it—the secret of death confronts us more and more with a tragic mood. And the teachings that are handed down in the Old Testament give the human being no satisfactory and no inward information about death. If at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha nothing had happened that was different from what did happen before the Mystery of Golgotha in the sphere of the earth and the super-worlds connected with it, if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, then human beings would have found themselves in a terrible plight in their earth evolution; they would have experienced on earth the transitions of birth and death which then no longer were mere metamorphoses, which then indicated an abrupt transition in the whole of human life, and they would not have been able to learn anything about the significance of death and birth in human earth-life. In order to permit the teachings of birth and death to enter gradually into the understanding of mankind, the being whom we call the Christ had to descend by degrees into earth-life. The Christ belongs to the worlds from which the ancient great teachers came; but through the decision of these divine worlds He chose a different destiny from the other beings of the divine hierarchies who are related to the earth. He submitted Himself, so to say, to the divine decision of higher worlds that He incarnate in an earthly body and pass with His own divine soul through earthly birth and earthly death.

You see, therefore, that what has happened through the Mystery of Golgotha is not merely an inner-human or inner-earthly affair, but it is at the same time an affair of the Gods. Only through the events on Golgotha did the Gods learn to know inwardly of death and the secret of birth on earth, for they had not participated in it previously. Thus we have here the significant fact that a divine being resolved to go through human existence in this region, in order to have the same earth experiences, the same destiny as the human being.

Much of the Mystery of Golgotha has become known to human beings. There is tradition, there are the Gospels, there is the entire New Testament, and people of today prefer to approach the Mystery of Golgotha by reading the New Testament and by means of the explanation of the latter as it is possible at present. But from the explanation of the New Testament as it is made in our time we acquire but little real insight into the Mystery of Golgotha. It is necessary for people of the present to acquire this knowledge in an outward manner. However, it is mere outward knowledge. Today we do not know at all how differently human beings looked back upon the Mystery of Golgotha during the first centuries A.D., how differently those who were initiated into this Mystery looked back upon it in comparison with those who came later. Although all that I have described had happened, nevertheless at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha individual human beings still possessed remnants of an old instinctive clairvoyance. And up to the 4th century A.D. these remnants enabled them to look back to the Mystery of Golgotha quite differently from later periods. And it is not without meaning that the teachers who then appeared—we can verify this, although quite insufficiently in the historical traditions of the oldest, so-called church fathers and Christian teachers—that the teachers who then appeared put the greatest emphasis not on written traditions but on the fact that they have received knowledge of the life of Christ Jesus from teachers who have seen Him face to face, or from teachers who had been pupils of the pupils of the Apostles themselves in the oldest times, or the pupils of the pupils of the Apostles' pupils, etc. This continued on up to the 4th century A.D., and the teachers of that century referred to this living connection. As already stated, the historical documents are for the most part destroyed, and only attentive study can discover, by external means, how much emphasis was laid on the following: “I have had a teacher, he has had a teacher,” etc., and at the end of the row there stands one of the Apostles who had seen the Lord Himself face to face.

A great deal of this has been lost. But even more has been lost of actual esoteric wisdom which still existed in the first four centuries A.D., thanks to the remnants of old clairvoyant perception. All knowledge of that time about the resurrected Christ has been lost for external tradition. This knowledge is that of the Christ who went through the Mystery of Golgotha, and then in a spirit body, like the ancient teachers of primeval humanity, taught some of His chosen pupils after His resurrection. The Gospels give mere indications, in a very scanty way, of the significance of the teachings which the resurrected Christ gave to His disciples when He met with them. And St. Paul's experience of Damascus is understood by Paul himself as a teaching which the resurrected Christ gave him, through which Saul became Paul. In those past times people were conscious of the fact that the resurrected Christ Jesus had to impart mysteries of a very special kind to men. The human beings themselves were the cause of not being able to receive these communications at later periods. They had to develop those soul forces which led to the use of human freedom and human intellect. This has appeared with especial force since the 15th century, but it was already in preparation from the 4th century A.D. on.

The question must now arise: What was the content of the teachings which the resurrected Christ was able to give His chosen disciples? For He appeared to them in the same manner in which the divine teachers had appeared to primitive mankind. Perhaps I may express it in the following manner: He was now able to tell them in divine language that He had experienced what His heavenly companions had not experienced. He was able to tell them, from His divine point of view, something about the secret of birth and death. He was able to impart to them the knowledge that in the future the earthly human being would possess a day-waking consciousness by means of which he would not be able to perceive the immortal soul in human life and which would be extinguished in sleep, preventing, during sleep, this immortal soul from appearing to the soul's gaze; but He was able to call attention to the fact that it is possible to include the Mystery of Golgotha in human perception. I should like to express in the following words what He explained to them. I can express it merely in weak, stammering words, for our languages do not offer greater possibilities of expression, but I shall try to put it in the following weak, stammering words: The human body has gradually become so dense, the death forces in it have become so strong that, although the human being is now able to develop his intellect and his freedom, he can do this only in a life which distinctly passes through death, a life in which death signifies an incisive break, and in which, during the waking consciousness, the perception of the immortal soul is extinguished. But ye can receive into your soul a certain wisdom, ye can receive the wisdom that through the Mystery of Golgotha—the Christ spoke thus to His initiated pupils—something has occurred in My own being with which ye can imbue your own selves, provided ye are willing to gain the knowledge that the Christ has descended to the earth from extra-earthly spheres; provided ye are willing to acquire the concept that on earth something exists which cannot be beheld by earthly means, which can only be perceived by means higher than the earthly; provided ye can behold the Mystery of Golgotha as a divine event placed in the midst of earth-life; provided ye are able to perceive that a God has passed through the Mystery of Golgotha.

Through everything else that occurs on earth ye can acquire earthly wisdom; but this would be of no use in gaining an understanding of death in a human way. It would only be of use to you if, like ancient humanity, ye were not intensely interested in death. But since ye are compelled to be interested in it, your insight must receive an impulse much stronger than all other earthly perceptive impulses. It is so strong that ye will be able to say to yourself: With the occurrence of the Mystery of Golgotha something has happened that has broken all earthly natural laws. If ye are able to absorb into your faith only earthly natural law, ye will never grasp death in its significance for human life, even though ye may be able to behold it. But if ye can bring about in yourselves the understanding that the earth has acquired meaning only through the fact that in the middle of earth evolution, through the Mystery of Golgotha, something Divine has occurred which cannot be grasped by mere earthly comprehension, then will ye prepare in yourselves a special force of wisdom, and this force of wisdom is the same as the force of faith; ye will prepare a special force of pneumasophia, a force of faith and wisdom. For it is a strong force of the soul which says: “I believe, I know through faith what I shall never be able to believe and know through earthly means!” It is a far stronger force than the one which only ascribes to itself the ability to know what can be fathomed by earthly means. Even were the human being to gain all the wisdom of the earth, he would still be weak if he only knew how to sustain his wisdom by earthly means. If he is willing to acknowledge the fact that the super-earthly lives in the earthly, he must develop a much greater inner activity.

The impulse to develop such an inner activity lies in our consideration of the Mystery of Golgotha. The resurrected Christ proclaimed again and again to His original disciples the teaching that a God had experienced human destiny—for the Gods of previous epochs had not had this experience in their own spheres—and that this God had united Himself with the destiny of the earth through human destinies. And this had a tremendous effect in the world. Just strive for a moment to realize how powerful the effect of this could be; try to realize it in considering present-day conditions. Less is demanded of a human being who in his thinking is able to grasp all that he has gathered from earthly conditions, from traditional religious concepts which, in general, are accepted, than of a human being who we expect will raise his understanding to the point where it can grasp the fact that certain categories of divine beings did not possess a knowledge of death and birth before the Mystery of Golgotha but had to acquire it, at that significant moment of history, for the salvation of mankind. It requires a certain strength in order to “mingle” with divine wisdom, if we may be permitted to use this expression. Certainly no special strength is needed in order to read from any catechism that God is “all-knowing,” “all-mighty,” “all-divine,” etc. You need merely to place the little word “all” before everything, and the definition of the Divine is ready-made, but it is the most nebulous definition possible. Today human beings do not dare—if I may say so—to “mingle with divine wisdom.” But this “mingling” must take place. And a part of divine wisdom is what the Gods themselves have acquired through the fact that One of their number passed through human birth and human death. And it was of enormous importance that this secret was entrusted to the first disciples. And the further great and important fact, taught these disciples, was that it is true that the force once lived in the human being which gives him an insight into the eternal in his own soul.

This actual perception of the eternal in the human soul can never be acquired through brain knowledge, that is, through knowledge acquired through the intellect which uses the brain as an instrument. It can never be acquired in reality in the way it was possessed by ancient humanity, unless nature lends her aid through a knowledge which is gained through a special training of the human rhythmical system.

When the last instinctive seers practiced Yoga they achieved much, as long as it was assisted by an ancient instinctive clairvoyance. The present Oriental, the modern Indian, to whom many Westerners turn their attention in such a fantastic manner, does not, when performing his exercises, attain what can be called a real perception of the immortal nature of the human soul. He lives for the most part in illusions by having a temporary experience, although it is something elementary for earth-life, and, in addition, by interpreting this experience by what he finds in his holy books. Real knowledge, fundamental knowledge of the divine human soul can be gained only in a twofold way: Either it can be attained in the way of ancient humanity, or it can be attained in an infinitely more spiritual way through intuitive knowledge, that is, through a knowledge based on imaginative and inspirative wisdom which then rises to intuitive wisdom. Why is this so?

During earth-life the thinking part of the soul has streamed into the human nervous system. Thinking no longer exists for itself, it has molded this plastic structure. And it exists only partially in the rhythmic system. This offers at best some important points from which we might draw further conclusions. Only in the metabolic system, this most materialistic part of earth-life, do we find hidden the actual, immortal part of the human soul. The metabolic system is regarded as the most material on earth, and outwardly this is true; but because it is the most material, the spiritual remains separate from it. The other material parts of the body—the brain and the rhythmic system—absorb the spiritual; it is not present. It is present in the crude-material substances of the body. But the human being must be able to see, to perceive by means of this crude-material substance. This was the case with primeval humanity, and in our present age it may be found in abnormal cases, although this is not desirable. Very few people know, for instance, that the secret of the style of the Zarathustra of Nietzsche rests upon the fact that he took certain poisonous substances into his system which called forth in him the particular rhythm, the particular style of Zarathustra. In Nietzsche a quite definite substance lived as thought. This, of course, is something abnormal, a diseased condition, though it is in a certain sense something magnificent. We cannot permit ourselves to live in illusions about these things if we wish to understand them, any more than we can wish to live in illusions about the opposite pole, about intuition, etc. We must realize what it means that Nietzsche partook of certain poisons, but we must not imitate him. Thus by causing the human organism to take on an etheric mode of existence these poisons irradiate the thought system, thus calling forth what we see in Nietzsche's Zarathustra. By means of intuition we perceive the psycho-spiritual nature as such, quite separate from matter.

In the sphere of intuition nothing material is active. This is described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment and in Occult Science. These two—the spiritual and material perceptions—are the two opposite poles.

In those mysteries into which the resurrected Christ sent His message there still existed the knowledge that in ancient times the human being possessed the highest knowledge of matter, “metabolic knowledge.” The way was sought to reawaken this ancient knowledge of matter—although not in the way of primeval mankind, nor in the way of the “hashish-eaters,” who wished, through the effects of certain material substances, to gain a knowledge which cannot be obtained without them. The way to reawaken this ancient knowledge of matter was striven for, but in a different manner, namely through clothing the Mystery of Golgotha in certain mantric forms, chiefly in the structural forms of the mystery of Revelation, Offering, Transubstantiation, Communion, by presenting the Holy Supper through the giving of bread and wine to the worshipper. Poison was not given, but the Holy Supper was offered him, wrapped in the mantric formulas of the Holy Mass, in the fourfold form of the Mass—Gospel, Offering, Transubstantiation, Communion. For after the Communion, after the fourth part of the Holy Mass, the actual Communion of the Faithful occurred, and an endeavor was made to give them at least an intimation of the fact that a certain wisdom must be regained which leads to the goal of ancient “metabolic knowledge.” The human beings of today can hardly imagine this “metabolic knowledge,” because they have no idea how much more, for instance, a bird knows than a man—although not in an intellectual, abstract sense; or how much more even a donkey knows than a man, a donkey, which is an animal living entirely in the metabolic system. It is, however, only a dull knowledge, dreamlike knowledge. Today there exists a degeneration of what primeval man once possessed in his metabolic system. It was out of the first Christian teachings, however, that the Sacrament of the Altar was conceived in order to lead mankind to regain a knowledge of the immortal of the human soul.

At the time when the Christ, who had passed through death, taught His initiated disciples, men were unable to attain such knowledge by themselves. He imparted it to them. And during the first four Christian centuries this knowledge continued on alive, in a certain way. Then it grew sclerotic within the Roman Catholic Church, for although the latter retained the Holy Mass, it had no longer a proper interpretation of it. The Holy Mass—thought of as a continuation of the Last Supper as it is described in the Bible—has naturally no meaning, unless a meaning is first inserted into it. The establishment of the Holy Mass with its wonderful cult, its imitation of the four mystery-degrees, is to be traced back to the fact that the resurrected Christ was the instructor of those who were able to receive these teachings in a higher esoteric sense. During the subsequent centuries only a childlike sort of teaching about the Mystery of Golgotha could remain. A faculty was developed which for the time being concealed the knowledge of this Mystery. Human beings had first to become fully acquainted with all that relates to death. This marked the first medieval civilization.

Traditions were preserved. In many occult societies of the present, people gather who, in their writings, possess formulas which remind those who understand and recognize them of the teachings of the resurrected Christ to His initiated disciples. But those who today meet in all sorts of Masonic lodges and occult societies do not understand what lives in their formulas; they actually have no idea about all that these formulas contain. But much could be gained from these formulas, because in their dead letters much wisdom still lives. Yet it is not done! But after mankind in its evolution has gone through a certain period of darkness in regard to the Mystery of Golgotha, it has come today to the point of time where human longing for a deeper knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha needs satisfaction. And this can occur only through Anthroposophy. This can occur only through the appearance of new knowledge, acquired in a purely spiritual way. When it does occur we shall then again acquire a fully human understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. Then we shall again learn to understand that the most significant teachings have been given to humanity, not through the Christ who lived in the physical body until the Mystery of Golgotha occurred, but through the resurrected Christ after the occurrence of this Mystery. We shall gain a new understanding of the words of an initiate like St. Paul: “And if Christ hath not been raised your faith is vain.” (I Cor. XV, 17). Since the experience of Damascus he knew that everything depended upon an understanding of the resurrected Christ, upon the union of the force of the resurrected Christ with the human soul, which enabled him to say: “Not I, but the Christ in me.”

In contrast to this, it is altogether too characteristic that in the 19th Century a theology developed which does not wish to know anything at all about the resurrected Christ. It is a significant symptom of our time that a teacher of theology in Basle, Switzerland, a friend of Nietzsche, Overbeck, as a theologian, wrote a book about the Christian character of present-day theology. In this he tried to prove that the theology of today is no longer Christian. Much that is characteristically Christian may still exist—this is also the opinion of such a personality as Overbeck, who comprehends Christianity; but theology, as taught by “Christian” theologians, is at any rate not Christian. This, in brief, is the opinion of the Christian theologian Overbeck. And his opinion is very intelligently proven in his book.

Mankind has reached a point in regard to the comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha where those who are officially appointed by the church to say something about it know the least. From this springs the longing, the human longing, to be able to learn something about what everyone can experience in his inmost being, namely, the need of Christ.

It was evident from our recent lectures [Anthroposophical-scientific Course, 6 lectures. The Hague, Holland, April 7th–12th, 1922.] that Anthroposophy has much to render in the way of service to the humanity of our time. A significant service which it can render will be that of religion. But we do not intend to inaugurate a new religion!

The event which has given the earth its meaning is of such a character that it will never be surpassed. This event consists in the passing of a God through the human destiny of birth and death. After the advent of Christianity no new religion can be founded—this is evident to anyone who knows the foundation of Christianity. We would misunderstand Christianity were we to believe that a new religion could be founded. But since humanity itself advances more and more in super-sensible knowledge, there will be an ever deeper comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha, and with it of the Christ Being. To this comprehension Anthroposophy wishes to give, at the present time, what it alone is capable of contributing; for nowhere else will there be the possibility of speaking about the estate of the divine teachers of humanity in primeval times who spoke of everything except birth and death, because they themselves had not passed through birth and death. And nowhere else will it be possible to speak of the Teacher Who had come to His initiated disciples in a form similar to the one in which the divine primeval teachers of mankind had once appeared, but Who was able to give the significant teachings of a God's experience in the human destiny of birth and death.

Out of this communication of a God to mankind we shall draw the force to behold death, in which we must be interested, in such a way that we can say: Death does exist, but it cannot harm the soul. The Mystery of Golgotha enabled us to declare this fact. St. Paul knew that, had it not taken place, had the Christ not risen, then the soul would have been enmeshed in the destiny of the body; that is, been enmeshed in the dissolution of the body into the elements of the earth. Had Christ not risen, had He not united Himself with the earth forces, the human soul would unite itself with the human body between birth and death in such a way that it would also link itself with all the molecules of the body which unite themselves with the earth after the body's destruction by fire or through putrefaction. Then in future ages, at the end of the earth evolution, it would happen that human souls would take the same road as the substance of the earth. But the Christ, by passing through the Mystery of Golgotha, is able to tear the human soul away from this destiny. The earth will continue on its path in the cosmos. But just as the human soul is able to emerge from the individual human body, so the sum total of human souls will be freed from the earth and will advance onward to a new cosmic existence.

The Christ is thus connected with the earth in a very intimate way. But the manner in which we have approached this secret alone enables us to understand it.

In the minds of many the following question might arise: How will it be, at that time, with those who do not believe in Christ? In regard to this I should like to say as a consolation that the Christ has died for us all, even for those who today are unable to unite themselves with Him. The Mystery of Golgotha is an objective fact quite apart from human knowledge; but this human knowledge strengthens the inner forces of the human soul. And all the means at our command concerning human knowledge, human feeling, human will, will have to be employed in the further course of earth evolution in order to establish, through direct knowledge, the presence of Christ in the individual human soul.

This, my dear friends, is what I wished to say to you today.

I have lately been describing to you man's relationships to the surrounding world, as they appear when we turn our attention away from the earth and more to the starry world, especially to the world of the planets. Today I should like to add, aphoristically at least, some of the observations and experiences gained by spiritual vision concerning man's relationship to his immediate earthly environment.

In the ordinary way man looks at things in his environment without discrimination and arrives at fallacious conceptions of being and reality. Let me remind you of what on various occasions I have already given as an illustration. When we look at a rock-crystal, we can say, from an earthly point of view: “This crystal is a self-contained entity.” In its finished form we can always see something complete in itself.

This is not so, if, for instance, we pick a rose and take it into our room. As a rose with its stem, just by itself, it is altogether unthinkable within the compass of earthly existence. It is thinkable only while it is growing on its stem on the rose-bush with its branches and roots. In other words, to speak in accordance with reality, we must not call the rose an entity in the same sense as a rock-crystal. For in terms of reality we must speak in that way only of something which, relatively at least, can exist in itself. Certainly, from a different aspect, the rock-crystal cannot be regarded as something that has an independent existence either, but then it is seen from a different point of view. For simple observation, the rock-crystal as a conceptual entity is quite different from the rose.

Unfortunately, far too little attention is paid to such things, and this is why human thinking is so far from grasping reality and men find it so difficult to bring clear concepts to bear upon what spiritual observation has to say. Clear concepts could be attained easily enough if only people would pay the necessary attention to such simple matters.

When we reflect upon our immediate earthly environment, we find, to begin with, various kinds of soil on the surface. If you look round in our own neighbourhood, you find limy soil. Further south you find slaty kinds of soil. I will confine myself, first, to these two main kinds of earth: the limy kind, the lime-formation which, especially as Jura-limestone, you can observe here in our immediate surroundings, and the slate-formation, where the rock, the mineral, is not in such a compact form as in the limestone-formation, but where it is schistous. Just think of shale, even of gneiss, of mica-schist and the like, which you find in the central Alps. Here are two great and important opposites: slate-formation and lime-formation.

Judged by present-day conceptions, these mineral deposits represent something that can be explained only in terms of mineral-physical laws. No account is taken of the fact that the earth is one whole. Let us consider the science of geology as it is today.

The different kinds of earth, the deposits of ore, of metals, of minerals in general in the various earth-layers are observed. But the earth is not regarded as if it were also a dwelling-place for the living world of plants and human beings. To have such a conception of the earth is rather like regarding the human skeleton as having an independent existence. Taking a human skeleton by itself, you must, to be correct, say: that is not a self-contained entity. Nowhere in the world can such a thing as a human skeleton originate by itself. It exists as the remains of a whole human body, but it could never materialize without the supplementary action of muscles, nerves, blood and so on. Therefore we must not look upon the human skeleton as an independent entity or attempt to explain it as such.

Nor is it possible for anyone who thinks in actualities, and not in abstractions, to apprehend the earth with its various rock-formations without reflecting that the earth is a totality; that the plant, animal and human kingdoms belong to it, just as muscles, blood and so on belong to the human skeleton.

We must therefore be clear in our mind what it means to study the earth in terms of geology. It means forgoing at once any chance of reaching realities. We do not arrive at anything real. We arrive at something that can be found within a planetary being only when this contains the plant-world, the animal world and the human world.

If, first of all, we observe what, as part of the earth-skeleton, pervades the earth as slate-formation, we see that its external appearance differs very considerably from that of the concentrated compactness of the lime-formation. And indeed, if we make use of the methods which have been applied to the broad outlines of earth-evolution in my book Occult Science, we have to trace the difference between the slate and lime formations to the relation between one or other of these to man, to animal existence, to plant-existence. We must see how what belongs to the earth as soul-and-spirit is related to these rock-materials.

We cannot understand a human skeleton if we do not connect it ultimately with man's will-nature; and we cannot understand the slate-formation, or the lime-formation, unless we connect them with the tasks which these formations have to perform for what is also present in earth-existence as spirit-and-soul. And then we find an intimate connection between all that is slate-formation and plant-life; between all that is lime-formation and animal-life.

Certainly, as the earth is today, the mineral element contained in slaty matter can naturally be found also in the plants. The mineral substance to be found in animal matter has its origin in very diverse formations. But that is of less importance just now; the important thing is that to spiritual observation and to spiritual experience the particular way in which plant-life, the whole plant-world, belongs to the earth, reveals itself as having a certain special relationship to the slate-formation.

If I am to sketch it diagrammatically, it will be somewhat like this (a drawing is made on the blackboard): Here is the earth, with some accumulation of slate-formation on it, and then the plants growing out of the earth towards the outer universe. Spatially, the plants need by no means coincide with the slate-formation, just as, for instance, a thought, which is based on the instrument of the brain, need not coincide with a movement of the big toe. We are not concerned here with spatial coincidence, but with apprehending the nature of the slate-formation when we try to do so not only through chemical and physical examination, but also through penetrating to the essence of this slaty formation by means of spiritual investigation. Then we shall come to the conclusion: If the forces inherent in slaty matter were to act upon the earth only by themselves, they would have to be connected with a condition of life which develops in precisely the same way as the plant-world.

The plant-world develops in such a way that it represents only physical corporeality, etheric corporeality; that is, in the actual plants themselves. But when we come to the astral element of the plant-world, we must imagine this astral element of the plant-world as an astral atmosphere which encompasses the earth. The plants themselves have no astral bodies, but the earth is enveloped in an astral atmosphere, and this astrality plays an important part, for instance, in the process of the unfolding of blossom and fruit. The terrestrial plant-world as a whole, therefore, has one uniform, common astral body which nowhere interpenetrates the plant itself, except at most in a very slight degree when fructification begins in the blossom. Generally speaking, it floats cloud-like over the vegetation and stimulates blossom and fruit formation.

What unfolds here would fall into decay but for the astral forces which emanate from the rock-material of the slate-formation. Thus we have in the slate-formation all that which tends to turn the whole earth into one organism. Indeed, we must see the relation of the plants to the earth as being similar to that of our hair to ourselves, as being of one and the same order. And what holds this whole organisation of the world together are the forces that radiate from the rock-material of the slate-formation.

In due course these things will also be substantiated by natural science. It will, for instance, be said: Man has his physical body and his etheric body. His organisation as a whole is based on a plant-existence. Man can in fact be regarded as a plant-being on which has been superimposed what is animalistic and human.

When the human being in health or illness is treated with mineral substances deriving from slate-formations, it will be possible to perceive, even externally, the action of these particular minerals; and it will be of special importance to know which types of disease in the human organism are due, for example, to over-exuberance of the plant-element.

Over-exuberance of the plant-element must always be combated by treating the affected person with schistous mineral substance. For everything that belongs to this slate-substance keeps the plant-element in man—if I may put it that way—in a normal condition, in the same way as it perpetually normalizes plant-existence on earth. The plant-life of the earth would tend to spread with over-exuberance into outer cosmic space were it not kept in check by the radiations from the mineral-forces of the slate-formation. One day, people will have to study from this point of view a living geography and geology of the earth; it will be realised that a study of what constitutes the skeleton of the earth, as it were, must be pursued not only from the geological angle, but in relation to the being of the earth as a whole; in relation, also, to its organic life and its nature of soul-and-spirit.

Now the entire plant-world is intimately bound up with the sun-forces, with solar action. The effects produced by the sun are not confined to the emanations of warmth and light radiating from the etheric-physical rays of the sun, for the warmth and light are permeated through and through by spirit-and-soul. These forces of spirit-and-soul are allied with those pertaining to the slate-formation. That in a certain way everything of a slate-nature is spread all over the earth is connected with the fact that plant-life on the earth exists in manifold forms. The spatial aspect is—as I said—of no immediate importance; it must not be imagined, for example, that the slate-formation has to be here or there in order that plants may grow out of it. The radiations of the slate-formation stream out; they are carried all over the earth by all kinds of currents, especially magnetic currents, and on these earth-encircling radiations of the slate-formation, the plants live. Where, on the contrary, the slate-formation is in itself developed to the highest degree, plant-life cannot thrive today because there the life-forces of the plants are drawn too forcibly into the earthly element and therefore cannot unfold. There, the forces which fetter the plant to the earthly element are so overpowering that the unfolding of plant-life—in which the cosmic forces must also play their part—is prevented.

To account for the nature of the slaty element in the earth is possible, therefore, only if one can go back, in the sense in which it is described in my Occult Science, to the time when the earth itself had a Sun-existence. It was then that the slaty element within the earth was being prepared. At that time, when the earth had a Sun-existence, the physical part of the earth had advanced only to a state of sprouting plant-life. The Sun-existence was such that no definite plants or animal beings could develop there. Plants as they are today were non-existent, but the earth itself had a kind of plant-existence, and out of this plant-existence there emerged on one hand the plant-world, while on the other hand a hardening took place of what in the plant-world are also formative forces, a hardening into slate-formation.

When, however, we look at the lime-formation, it reveals itself to super-sensible vision as intimately connected with all that permeates animal existence on the earth with—shall I say—independence. The plant is tied to the ground, is connected with it, as our hair is connected with the skin on which it grows. The animal moves about. But the radiations of the lime-formation are connected less with this movement as such, which is a local movement, than with the independent build of the animal-form.

When you look at a plant you can see that with its root it turns earthwards; it grows into the earth—is, as it were, drawn towards the centre of the earth—and then unfolds outwards. The plant's structure gives a clear indication of its complete adaptation to earth-existence. Naturally, a more complicated plant form calls for a more complicated description, but on the whole it remains essentially the same. The plant is not independent. Where it enters the soil it contracts, unites itself with the earth; where it rises up it spreads out and turns towards the light that radiates in all directions. This structure of the plant is best understood if studied in connection with its intimate relation to the plant's position in respect of the earth.

It is true that in their basic design some features of the animal form—for instance the horizontal position of the spine, the functioning of the limbs in a downward direction—point to an adaptation to earth-existence. All the same, by its natural form the animal has detached itself and has become independent of the earthly. You can discern in every animal-shape not only its adaptation to the earthly element, like that of the plant, but something entirely independent, a form set in itself. The fact is that even in respect of its structure the animal has been released from the grip of the earth.

Now super-sensible observation has revealed that everything that radiates from the light of the moon, everything that streams as reflected sunlight from the moon on to the earth, and also streams into our thought-life as formative force—all this works, too, in the shaping of the animal forms. Essentially, all that is indeterminate, formless will-force in the animal is to be found within the sphere of the direct light from the sun. But all that gives the animal its independent form, which is not adapted to the earthly element, is, in the true sense of the word, woven out of the gleaming moonlight.

All forms on the earth are shaped by the moon-forces. That the animals have different forms is due to the fact that the moon passes through the signs of the Zodiac. According to whether the moon stands in the sign of the Ram or the Bull or the Twins, the lunar formative forces act in their different ways on the animal world. This also establishes an interesting connection between the Zodiac and the animal form itself, of which the ancient dream-like wisdom was dimly aware. What draws these forms down on to the earth—forms which would otherwise dissipate into a kind of fog enveloping the earth—are the forces streaming from the lime-formation. The mineral element on earth does not radiate from radium only. Thus on the one side we have in the slate-formation that which binds the plant to the earth, and in the lime-formation that which draws from the moon-forces all that lives in the specific build of animal-forms. And so spiritual perception tells us how the slate-formation on the earth is connected with the structural nature of the plant-world, how the lime-formation is connected with the structural nature of the animal-world.

We must realise that such attributes as we find, for instance, in the lime-formation are also to be found in every detail of organic life. It can be observed quite exactly, if one is properly equipped for such investigations, that there are, for example, people who show a marked tendency to skeleton-formation. I do not mean that they have a strong skeleton, but that they have many lime deposits in the rest of their organism as well. There are, if I may say so, people who are richer or poorer in lime content.

But you must not think of this in a grossly material sense; it should naturally be conceived as being present in a homeopathic form, but it is of great significance. People with a greater lime content are as a rule cleverer, capable of forming a combination of subtle ideas and of resolving them again under the scrutiny of searching analysis. You must not think that by saying this I am giving a materialistic explanation of the human being. I should naturally never dream of doing any such thing; for the fact that one person deposits more lime than another is connected with his karma. So it is that in both past and future everything has its connection with the spiritual. And a truly penetrating knowledge of the world is not based on any vague talk about the “spiritual” and the “material,” but on a mental outlook which recognises how the spiritual works creatively by shaping out of itself the material world. A man who, as the result of his former earthly lives, has acquired a predisposition for becoming a particularly clever person in his next incarnation, for example a particularly good mathematician, develops between death and a new birth those forces of spirit-and-soul which later deposit the lime-substance in him.

We have to be dependent on lime deposits within us if we want to become clever. We have to rely more on deposits of clay-substance—which exists for instance in slate-formations—if it is primarily a matter of developing the will.

There can be no true conception of the material unless it is understood in its constant interrelation with the spiritual. We can say, therefore, that the lime-formation carries those radiations and currents which are concerned not only with building up animal life in all its forms on the earth, but also with providing the material foundation we need for the shaping of our thoughts. Outside in space are the manifold animal forms; within us, in our intellect, are the thought-forms. These are, in fact, the animal forms projected into the spiritual. The entire animal kingdom is at the same time intellect. And this whole animal kingdom projected into man's inner life, so that it appears there in mobile thought-forms, is the intellect. But as the animal kingdom needs the lime-formation to build up its forms in the outer world, so we need, as it were, a fine inner lime deposit, a lime formation, in order to become clever.

This must, of course, not be carried too far. If a man were to deposit lime in excess, he would forfeit his cleverness; it would not remain his own. He would, as it were, bring about an objective cleverness in which his own personality would have no part. Everything has its limits. And as we follow up these things further, we come to interesting discoveries about the extent to which the mineral element plays its part in the life of man, animal and plant. When we consider all that works in us as lime-forces we are led—as I have said—to what struggles for expression in the formative forces and helps us to develop inner firmness.

Man's connection with the forces of clay, of the clay-slaty element, on the other hand, leads him to fight against this inner firmness; to dissolve it, liquefy it and make it plant-like. Man is always in a sense the embodiment of a kind of interaction between the lime element and slate element—by which, of course, I mean the inner forces they contain.

Now we can look more closely at the slate element. In much of it we find flint and silicious substances, especially those to be found in the rock-crystal, in quartz. In their radiations and currents the forces of quartz are also fully active in man himself; and if he possessed only these quartz-like forces which he takes in with the harder slaty element, he would be in constant danger of his spirit and soul striving to return to what he was in his pre-earthly life. The quartz element always wants to draw man away from himself, to take him back again to his still unembodied being. To counteract this force, another force is needed, and this is the force of carbon.

Man has carbon working in his organism in manifold ways. Carbon is observed by natural science today only in its outer aspect, merely by physical and chemical means. In reality, carbon is the element which makes us always remain with ourselves. Carbon, in a sense, is our house; we dwell in it; while silica always wants to take us back in time to where we were before we took possession of our carbon-house.

This means that a constant struggle is waged in us between the forces of carbon and those of silica. And our life is woven into this battle. If we consisted only of carbon—for instance the physical plant-world has its foundation in carbon—we should be completely earth-bound. We could not have the slightest inkling of our extra-terrestrial existence. The fact that we can know about it we owe to the silica element in us.

If one has insight into all this, one also discovers the healing forces contained, for instance, in silica, in quartz or flint. Where an excessive inclination towards carbon causes a man to become ill—this applies, for example, to all cases of illness due to certain deposits of metabolic products—then silicious substances provide the remedy. Especially when the deposits are peripheral or in the head, the healing properties of the silica element are a strong antidote.

You can see that if one gets to the heart of these matters, with a comprehensive knowledge that combines nature-knowledge and spiritual knowledge, seeking the spiritual in all purely material things, and finding the material again in all that is spiritual, the spiritual being conceived as creative power—you can see that only such knowledge can furnish a clue not only to an understanding of human existence but also to the methods which must be applied when human existence suffers from functional disturbances.

A point of special importance is that attention should be paid to what lives as the nitrogen element in man, to nitrogen as such and to its combinations. The fact that man has nitrogen in his system enables him, as it were, to remain always open to cosmic influences. This again I can best illustrate by a diagram.—Let us assume that this represents the human organism. (A sketch is made on the blackboard.) The fact that man has nitrogen, or bodies containing nitrogen, in his organism, ensures that the laws governing the organism keep, as it were, within their confines everywhere; along these lines (in the diagram) indicating the nitrogen in the body, the latter ceases to impose its own laws. This allows the cosmic laws to enter freely everywhere. Along the nitrogen-line in the human body the cosmic element asserts itself in the body. You can say: As far as nitrogen is active in me, the cosmos, right to the most distant star, works in me. What there is of nitrogen-forces in me draws the forces of the whole cosmos into me. If my organism had no nitrogen-content, I should be shut off from everything that comes in from the cosmos.” And when it is important that the cosmic forces should unfold in a special way, for example in human propagation when in the body of the mother the embryo develops—the embryo which as you know, is moulded from the cosmos—this is made possible only because the nitrogen-containing substances open the human being to the influences of the cosmos. But everything in the universe and in human existence is so ordered as not to go to extremes. Indeed, if one-sided action were allowed to prevail, everything would lead to extremes. If nitrogen, which impels man always to expand, spiritually, into cosmic space, could exert its full force on the human organism, it would work together with the silica element—which induces man, I might say, to lose himself in the spiritual past—and the effect would be that man would constantly lapse into unconsciousness.

Now it is always interesting when observing anything in nature or in man to find that important things play a double role. Thus the lime element, which gives man the physical stamp for cleverness, also counteracts the effect of nitrogen. So that we can say: On the one hand, silica and carbon form polaric opposites in man; on the other hand, nitrogen and lime do the same:

Silica—Carbon.

Nitrogen—Lime.

The lime substances in man so regulate him that he always re-asserts his own organisation in face of the force which, through the medium of nitrogen, seeks to work into him from the cosmos. Through nitrogen, the cosmic forces enter; through lime-action, that which issues from the human organism opposes and balances it. So that in many different places in the human body an influx of cosmic forces and likewise an expulsion of cosmic influences takes place. It is a ceaseless pendulum-movement: nitrogen effect—lime effect, lime effect—nitrogen effect. Thus we can not only relate man to the starry world, but also give him his place in his immediate earthly environment.

In the last number of the periodical Das Goetheanum, I used an aphorism to emphasise that in reality materialism as a world-conception does not arise from the fact matter is too well known; on the contrary, too little is known about it. What is really known about carbon? That it is to be found in nature as coal, as graphite, as diamond. These bodies are then described according to their physical characteristics. But it is not known that carbon is the element which holds us firmly within ourselves, so that we are a self-contained human organism, and that this is constantly challenged by the silica element, which seeks to draw us away from ourselves.

We learn to understand matter only when we learn to know it also from its spiritual aspect there is matter it is penetrated by spirit. You get nowhere if you are content with a vague, nebulous play of fancy and declare: where there is matter there is spirit. It is not sufficient to know: lime, silica, carbon, nitrogen, contain spirit—that goes without saying, but it is not enough. One must also know how the different substances are, as it were, embodiments, “substantiations” of spiritual processes. One must also be able to see how the lime element acts on the inner organisation of man; how the nitrogen element always aims at permeating him with cosmic impulses.

The plants, which must always maintain a relationship to the cosmic element as they grow up from the earth out into the cosmos, need nitrogen-combinations for their growth; and it will be possible to study plant-growth, too, in the right way if proper attention is paid to the relevant connections just mentioned. These matters have, in the first place, their scientific side; we learn to know the world only when we understand the true nature of things; but they also have their practical side. And one really never gets beyond the most primitive aspects if one cannot assess things in their wider connections. One will then have to go into details and find out how the required nitrogen-combinations enter into plant-growth. As you know, this alone is a very important subject of study; but in agriculture, too, this study can be complete only if pursued by the methods of spiritual science. Spiritual science alone is the true science of reality.

You see, everything I have been describing has to be re-established through the methods of spiritual science as they are available today and as they will be more and more developed in the future. For an older science received these things through a kind of dreamlike clairvoyance. We must attain a fully conscious clairvoyance. This, as you know, is a subject I have dealt with on very many occasions.

Today we cannot simply imbibe again the things that once became known to men with the aid of a quite different human make-up. It is, of course, folly for people to devote all their studies to ancient science, for that will not help them to understand things. The ancient things themselves cannot be understood either, unless they are illumined spiritually in the right way. And yet it is remarkable how practically everywhere today the scientific mind, through a kind of instinct, turns to what was once found through dreamlike clairvoyance.

Take a specific case. The old Initiates took for granted the presence of lead everywhere in earthly existence—because to the radiation of lead they attributed what works in the human form from the extreme top, from above downwards. In the widely distributed lead on earth they saw something that is connected with the inner structure of man, especially also with human self-consciousness. Naturally, the modern materialist would say: But lead has nothing to do with the human organism. In answer to that the old Initiate would have told him: It is certainly not, as you imagine, the gross lead-substance that we have in mind, but the forces emanating from exceedingly fine lead-constituents; and such lead is very widely distributed. That is what the ancient Initiate would have said.

What does the modern student of natural science say? He says: There are minerals which give off radiations, among them the so-called radioactive ones. The radiations of uranium are, of course, known; it is known that certain rays—alpha rays they are called—stream out; then, the remaining part, in the course of further radiation, undergoes certain changes, even comes to possess—as the chemists say—a different atomic weight. Briefly, in radioactive matter, transmutations take place. In fact there are people today who are already talking about a kind of revival of the old mystical metamorphoses of matter. But now, those who have investigated such matters say: These radiations give rise to something which appears as a terminal product, no longer radioactive, and this has the properties of lead. Thus you can learn strictly from the investigations of modern science that there are radioactive substances; within the source of these radioactive radiations there is something which, in accordance with its inherent forces, is in course of formation. There is always a lead-content at the bottom.

You see, the researches of modern natural science are getting critically near to ancient initiation-Science. And just as today modern scientists cannot help discovering the presence of lead right under their noses, as it were—or at least under the noses of their physical instruments—so they will also find out things about the other metals. Then it will gradually dawn upon them what was meant when it was said that lead is to be found everywhere in nature. You see, it is only through spiritual science that one can discern what is implicit in the discoveries of natural science—discoveries with which, in the context of ordinary general knowledge, one hardly knows what to do.

But now we still have to consider something important in this field: You know that the air which belongs to the immediate surroundings of our earth consists of oxygen and nitrogen, Nitrogen is, to begin with, of little use for our physical life. Oxygen we inhale; in the body it undergoes a change and carbon dioxide is formed, which we exhale. So the question might arise: Then what exactly is the main importance of nitrogen, which does not enter into chemical combination with oxygen, but lives out there in a kind of intimate mixture with oxygen? In nitrogen we cannot live; for that, we need oxygen. But without nitrogen our ego and our astral body when outside the physical body during sleep, could not exist. We should perish between going to sleep and waking if we could not immerse ourselves in nitrogen. Our physical body and our etheric body need the oxygen from the air; our ego and astral body need nitrogen.

The nitrogen is a substance which brings us into intimate connection with the spiritual world. It is the bridge to the spiritual world in the state in which our soul lives during sleep. Take what I said before, together with what I have now said about nitrogen. Nitrogen draws the cosmic element in from the circumference. From within us, it prepares us for the cosmic element. Outside, it allows those parts of us which are not properly of the earth to live in themselves, so to speak, as forces of spirit-and-soul. Hence it is not for nothing that there is a considerable admixture of nitrogen in the air, for nitrogen carries the physical death-forces and the spiritual life-forces of earthly existence. And when between falling asleep and waking we escape from the physical death-forces to another existence in our soul-life, we immerse ourselves in the nitrogen-element, which forms the bridge between our life of spirit-and-soul and the cosmos. With our earthly-personal existence we are rooted in carbon; with our life of soul-and-spirit, in nitrogen. In earthly existence, carbon and nitrogen are related to one another and to man as I have just described.

Look at carbon; it is contained in ordinary coal, in graphite, in the diamond. These are three different forms in which carbon can occur. What you see as carbon in the black, sooty coal and in the diamond and in graphite, we also carry within us in a different form. We are—not to a very great extent, it is true, but to a small extent—a little piece of diamond and this holds us firmly within our earthly house. That is where our spirit-and-soul are at home when within the body.

Nitrogen, which occurs in the various nitrogen-compounds, nitric acid, and in saltpeter and so on, is the element which always allows us to emerge from ourselves, as it were. As I said, it forms the bridge to the spirit-and-soul element in the cosmos. This too must be discovered again through the new spiritual science. It was once within the realm of earthly knowledge, but only in a dreamlike way. It was perceived with the old clairvoyance by the ancient Initiates.

As I have often said, true respect for an ancient Initiate begins when we rediscover things we cannot learn from tradition. Only when we can find them ourselves can we also value them as tradition. And as we proceed to rediscover them, we also feel a true reverence for what was once the primeval wisdom of mankind.

At the next opportunity I will speak about the connection between all these rediscoveries and the Mystery of Golgotha.¹ For this, I needed spiritual-scientific and natural-scientific premises; and after all, these deliberations will in themselves have helped to throw light on a number of questions concerning the world and human existence.

• 1. The attention of readers is called particularly to the following two Lecture-Courses given by Rudolf Steiner:
  
  Man and the World of Stars (7 lectures, 26th Nov. – 26th Dec. 1922;
  The Spiritual Communion of Mankind (5 lectures, 23rd – 31st Dec. 1922.)
  
  (Translations are available as typescripts in the Library of the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain.)

In our studies we have often called attention to the aphorism written on the Greek Temple of Apollo, ‘Know thyself,’ which comes down to us along the ages. A tremendous challenge to strive after human wisdom as well as cosmic wisdom lies in this sentence. It receives a pregnant renewal, a deepening through the impulse given by the Mystery of Golgotha. If time admits we shall speak further of these matters in the course of this winter. We must seek the path to the goal to which it points.

To-day we shall start from an apparently external consideration of man, from an external form, as it were, of human self-knowledge, yet only apparently external, being a specially powerful force when man makes use of it in order to penetrate the inner nature of the human being. We shall start—apparently only—from the external human form.

We find a consideration of that outer human form in what is approved to-day as science, but in a sense somewhat unsatisfactory to the higher spiritual consideration. We might say: Anyone who wishes to know man as man, finds but little incitement to such knowledge in science, especially as practised at the present time. What science brings forward, what calls for discussion, can be seen from indications given in my book Riddles of the Soul. This book gives an essential and important foundation for a far-seeing knowledge of the human being; but such a foundation is not sought at the present time. Anatomy, physiology, etc., to-day contribute very little to enquirers who wish to penetrate seriously into the nature of man from a knowledge of his outer form. At the present time an artistic study really gives far more. It might be said that science leaves much unsatisfied. If a man will only decide to seek actual substantial truth in art, especially in an artistic consideration of the universe, he may find more truth in that way than by recognised science. In future times there will be a philosophy of life which will derive from Spiritual Science much that man cannot fathom to-day, a philosophy which will unite a scientific and an artistic perception of the world into a higher synthesis and harmony, based on a certain need of human knowledge. There will be much more clairvoyance in that than in the clairvoyance of which most people dream to-day but only dream.

On approaching the human form we at once perceive something of the utmost importance to it when we direct our attention—as we have doubtless all done more or less—to its centre of support, the skeleton. We have all seen a skeleton, and observed the difference between the head and the rest. We have observed that the head, the chief part, is in a sense an enclosed and isolated whole, which is, as it were, mounted on a column above the limb system and the rest of the human organism. We can very easily contrast the head resting on the skeleton, with the rest of the human form. If we thus turn our attention to the most superficial difference, it may strike us that the formation of the head is more or less spherical, it is not a perfect sphere, but spherically constructed. Now the investigator into Spiritual Science must warn students not to expect external superficial analogies to underlie a search for knowledge; but the concept of the human head as approaching a spherical form is no superficial observation, for man is really a kind of duality, and the spherical formation of his head is in no wise accidental. We must bear in mind what we actually have before us in the human head. The first indications of what is intended here is given in The Spiritual Guidance of Man, where I showed how the human head presents an image of the whole universe which surrounds us externally as a spatial globe, a hollow sphere.

In reviewing these things we must observe something which for the man of to-day lies far from the most essential kind of observation, something which he always employs, but not where it is of the utmost importance. It would not occur to anyone who takes a compass, a magnetic needle in hand, to seek in the needle itself the cause of its pointing with one end to the North and with the other to the South; the physicist feels himself compelled to regard the magnetic force proceeding from the needle, and the directing magnetic force coming from the North Pole of the earth, as a whole. The cause of what takes place in the small space of the needle is sought in the great universe. Yet this is not done in other cases where it should be done, and where it is of importance. If anyone—especially a scientist—observes that one living being is formed within another living being, as, for instance, the egg is formed in the body of the hen, he sees there how something forms in the smallest space; but what does not usually strike him is to apply what he knows of the magnetic needle and say, that the reason why the germ of the egg develops in the body of the hen lies in the entire cosmos, not in the hen. Exactly as the great universe has a part in the magnetic needle, so too the whole cosmos has a share in the hen's body,—no matter what other processes also take part in it—the whole cosmos in its spherical form co-operate. The processes that can be traced back through the line of heredity to the fore-fathers, only co-operate when the germ of the egg is formed in the maternal organism. That of course is heresy in the eyes of official science, but it is a truth. The forces of the cosmos co-operate in the most varied ways. Just as it is true that in the case of man (empirical embryology proves this) the head, in its germinal rudiments is formed from the whole universe,—the human head forms first in the maternal organism—so too is it true that, on the other hand, the original causative forces for this formation work from the whole cosmos, and man's head is an image of it. That to which the head is attached (the skeleton), if carefully observed, is seen in its configuration, its form, to be more connected with the line of heredity, with the father and mother, grandfather and grandmother, than with the cosmos outside. Thus even in relation to his origin, his development, man is primarily a dual being. On the one side his form is fashioned from the cosmos, which comes to light in the spherical form of his head, on the other, he is formed from the whole line of heredity, which can be seen in the rest of the organism attached to the head. The whole of man's outer formation shows him to be of a hybrid nature, it shows that he has a twofold origin.

A consideration of this kind has more than one significance, if by means of it we learn two quite different facts. Anyone studying men under the direction of ordinary official science, studying the development of the germ through the microscope—seeing only what is within its range (as though one wished to see by the magnetic needle itself why it is capable of pointing North and South)—lives in a mass of thought which make him immovable and unserviceable for outer life, especially if he proceeds accordingly in outer science. If man applies such thoughts to social science, they do not suffice; or they lead him to world schoolmastering, which in other words may be called Wilsonism. This is a question of what sort of thinking is called up in us, what thought-forms arise when we devote ourselves to certain thoughts. To ‘know’ about things is of less significance; the important point is the particular kind of knowledge, and of what service it is. If one has an open mind to see man's connection with the whole universe, thoughts will arise which lead to the ethical, juridical consideration of the world, which ought really to be the highest, but which to-day is considered somewhat strange. Thus we see, there are certain impulses required to seek such knowledge as is here meant, other than the satisfaction of—I will not say inquisitiveness—but of mere desire for knowledge.

Thus man stands before us as a compound being, a hybrid. This has a much deeper significance still. To-day I only wished to strike the keynote which is to call forth in us a feeling of the reality of what we are studying.

Let us adhere to the fact that in the further course of our life the head—which we have just encountered as an image of the whole cosmos—is really the intermediary for knowledge (I will not say the instrument, for that would not be quite correct). The head however is not the only intermediary. Let us keep to knowledge or perception of the world. The head acts as intermediary for this, but so does the rest of the man. As regards its origin, the rest of the man differs very much from the head, it is something quite different; thus man, in so far as he is a being of perception, consists of a head-man and a heart-man; because in the heart everything else is concentrated. We are, in fact, two men; a head-man, who stands with discernment in his relation to the world, and a heart man. The difference is, that as surely as he inveighs against that world, he uses his head solely in order to know. What is really at the root of this! To draw a parallel between head-knowledge and heart-knowledge would not lead to much. One able to understand with the heart what the head knows, would be ‘warmer’ in his knowledge than another. There would be a difference between the two men, but the difference would not be very great. If, however, facts were approached with the practical knowledge of Spiritual Science, they would appear in a very different light. We acquire knowledge, perception; it gradually comes to us. Then the following happens. Our relation to the world through our head, our perception and knowledge, takes place in a certain respect quickly; and the way in which we confront the world with the rest of our organism takes place slowly. Our head hurries on with its knowledge, the rest of the organism does not. This has a profoundly deep significance. In scholastic education we see only the training of the head; nowadays people only receive education for the head. This can be done by scholastic training, for, if the head has taken part slowly in the development of knowledge, only in exceptional cases does it close as late as the 20th year of life—in the case of most people it does not keep open so long. The head is then ready with its knowledge, its assimilation of the world. The rest of the organism needs the whole time up to death for this assimilation. We might say that in this respect the rate of the head is approximately three times as quick as that of the rest of the organism; the latter has more time and moves three times as slow; the rate is quite different. Hence one who through knowledge has the gift of clearly observing such things, is aware that having grasped something through the head it must wait until he has united it with the whole man. In order to receive something really full of life, after this absorption through the head has lasted about a day, a man must wait three or four days until he has completely absorbed it. The scientific spiritual investigator will never recount what he has received with the head alone, but what he has grasped with the whole man. That has an uncommonly comprehensive and profound significance. According to existing arrangements, we can only give our children a kind of head-knowledge; we do not give them a knowledge compatible with the rest of the organism. It stops at head-knowledge; a knowledge so prepared that it must be quickly accepted by the head and remembered later. Where it is a matter of education, however, one does not always remember later. One is thankful if the knowledge holds out even till the final examination. A knowledge in which the whole of the rest of the organism can be used would, under all circumstance, develop love, joy and appreciation for it when one remembered it later. How to mould education so that a man may look back upon his school time with warmth and joy, and may wish himself back, is connected with one of the deepest secrets of the mysteries of humanity.

In this domain there is a tremendous amount to be done. Anyone acquainted with such things, knows that everything now presented to children in particular, is previously so prepared that the rest of the organism does not receive it, and thus no future pleasure is prepared. This is connected with the fact that man's soul ages comparatively early in our time. One of the Mysteries of man is that when the head is 28 years old, the rest of his organism which follows in its development is only a third or fourth of this age. It maintains a rate three or four times as slow (other connections we have yet to learn). If we were to approach these mysteries as educators, a child might receive something so fruitful, so flourishing, that it would last until its death. Thus if he had received such things up to 25 years, and the time needed for this elaboration by the remaining organism was three times that period, it might take 75 years. Knowledge acquired by the head alone has not unlimited significance for man's whole being; it requires the inner deliberate experience gained by man in his whole being. Public life, however, is averse to this to-day, it will only accept head-wisdom. One can easily reckon the whole significance of what is intended by saying that up to 15 years of age a man might absorb through his head a certain number of ideas which, if directed to the administration of public affairs, would render him fit at 45 years of age to be chosen for state service of parliament, for he ought not to offer himself until he has become a whole man. Thus we may say that if at 15 years of age he can produce ideas of sufficient force to be elaborated by his whole nature, at 45 he would be mature enough to be chosen for the town council or parliament. The mode of view of the ancients, who possessed a living wisdom from the Mysteries, was based on such things. To-day, on the contrary, the endeavour is to set the age limit as low as possible, for everyone is regarded as being as mature at 20 as man used to be at 80. Insistent demands, however, cannot decide these things, but only true knowledge.

These things have a pregnant application to life. The whole of our modern public life takes into account only what people are as regards their heads; yet, while they have social relations only with the head (let us reflect that all social relations are only head-relations) such social relations are wholly unsuited to form a social life. For whence comes the head? The human head is not of this earth, but is brought forth from the cosmos. One cannot attend to earthly affairs with the head. One cannot be a nationalist with the head, or belong to any one part of the earth. With the head we can only determine what belongs to the whole universe. To be able to decide what belongs to the earth, we must grow together throughout life with what belongs to the earth, and what makes us citizens of the earth and not of the heavens. These things must be so. What may underlie public decisions must be drawn forth from deeper knowledge, beyond that of man himself. Further, we must bear in mind what Goethe expressed as ‘The thought of metamorphosis;’ this has a deep significance and far wider application than Goethe himself could make in his time.

Our head is formed from the cosmos. Consider the matter from Spiritual Science: we must say that throughout the time between death and rebirth in the cosmos itself we work in advance on the head. In a sense the head is the grave of the soul, respecting what the soul was before birth or conception. The activity we exercised in the spiritual life between death and rebirth there comes to rest; and to this, which is in a sense formed out of the spiritual world, there is then added that which belongs to the line of heredity. What then is this? It is still something connected with the head. As before remarked, all in man except the head is the germ of the head in the next incarnation. The whole of the remaining organism is something that can pass over to the head at the next incarnation. When we pass through the gate of death, the forces developed throughout life wrest themselves free from the rest of the organism but remain in the same forms borne by the rest of the organism during life; man carries these during the time between death and rebirth, and transforms them into his future head. Thus in our head we have always something which is a heritage from the former incarnation; and in the rest of our organism something which works determinately for the formation of our head in the coming incarnation. In this respect also we are of a twofold nature.

If we consider man as regards his cosmic relations, we find that in reality he does not only arise and develop in the divisions of time and space which we have before us in outer physical view, but stands in a tremendously great relationship. It is especially fascinating not only to look, as Goethe did, at a bone of the vertebral column and then at the bones of the head, saying that the bones of the head are only transformed vertebrae; but to see that all pertaining to the head is also part of the rest of the organism. It needs, however, an exceptionally unbiased observation to recognise not only the nose, for instance, and all belonging to the head as having been thus remodelled, but that also all belonging to the rest of the organism, though at a younger stage of metamorphosis, has in an earlier metamorphosis all been changed to what now meets us in the head.

In matters of educational science the consequences of such a view are extremely important; and some day man's thinking will turn to the knowledge of Spiritual Science, when momentous demands for a practical educational science arise.

One thing especially is significant. In life we grow old, but in reality we can only say that our physical body grows old; for, strange as it may seem, the etheric body, the nearest spiritual part of our being, grows younger. The older we grow the younger becomes our etheric body; and as we become wrinkled and bald as regards the physical body, we become—at least the etheric body does—chubby and blooming. As external nature provides that our physical body shall grow old, we must certainly take care that our etheric body is provided with youthful forces. We can only do this if through the head we introduce such sustenance of spiritual ideas that they suffice for working into the whole life. The investigator of Spiritual Science can have some idea of how children ought to be taught in earliest childhood that man is an image of the whole universe, an image of the divinely wise cosmic ordering; and this should be grasped directly and simply, not by reciting Bible words imperfectly understood. All this must be drawn from the spirit or sources of Spiritual Science, then there will be a richer head-wisdom than that of to-day. During man's lifetime that will be a source of rejuvenation, whereas our present system of education is quite the contrary. If to-day in spite of early education, we are in the fortunate position not to be terribly bad-tempered, it is because the present method of providing for the head (which was prepared approximately 400 hundred years ago and has now reached its zenith) has not yet been able to ruin so much of what still remain, as hereditary culture from older times. If, however, we continue to instruct the head only, we are going the right way to become really bad-tempered. In the last years before the war there was a great leaning towards ‘sanatoria,’ great measures were taken to do away with ‘nervous conditions.’ This is all connected with the fact that the head is not given what the whole man needs. I have mentioned how seldom one finds the right thing done for these things, for I remember an occasion a few years ago when I went to visit someone at a sanatorium. We arrived at mid-day. All the patients walked past us. Some of these were remarkable persons; their nervous condition was partly written on their faces and partly on their fidgeting hands and feet. I then made the acquaintance of the most fidgety and nervous of them all—the medical superintendent. It must be said that a medical director cannot find a cure for his patients if he is himself the one who needs it most. In other respects he was an extremely loveable man; but he was an example of those who, in their youth at any rate, have not absorbed what can keep them young throughout their lives. Such things cannot be changed by any kind of isolated reform, nor can the relationships be changed that way; they can only be improved when the whole social organism is improved. Therefore attention must be directed to that. The great cosmic laws have provided that man as a solitary individual cannot gratify his egoism in such spheres, but can, as it were, only find his welfare when he seeks it together with others.

Thus it appears to me, as it must to everyone who does not live absorbed in material things (as is customary to-day) but is able to look beyond to the super-sensible from which must come the reformation of the world in the near future—it appears to me that in this sphere, as well as in others, Spiritual Science can be introduced into life in such a way that it will come to pass that men can, in an upright, honourable way, work out something in the concrete to which Spiritual Science can give the impulse. As I have often said, there is no need to press towards visionary clairvoyance, but we must learn to understand man as a likeness of the cosmic spiritual nature, then spirituality will come of itself. It is impossible to understand man in his entirety without investigating the spiritual underlying his nature and keeping that in view. One thing is necessary;—I have often emphasised this—the renunciation of intellectual laziness, a fault so terribly persistent in relation to all questions of the philosophy of life. Our whole study of Spiritual Science shows us that man must go forward step by step, that he must be disposed to go into details and thence build up a whole, so that starting, as it were, from the nearest sensible, he can rise to the super-sensible. This he can easily do, for anyone who regards the human head in the right way sees in it something modelled from the whole universe, and in the rest of the organism something also organised into the universe in order to come back in the next incarnation. By rightly observing what is obvious to the senses, one can rightly arrive at the super-sensible. One must, however, be willing to admit that if one wishes to understand the construction of man, the same trouble must be taken as would he necessary—e.g., if one wished to understand the mechanical action of a watch; one would have to bear in mind the connection of the wheels, etc. Yet it is supposed that one can talk of man's highest being without the requisite trouble being taken to gain knowledge of man's nature. It is very frequently pleaded that ‘Truth must be very simple’—and the accusation is made against Spiritual Science that it is very complicated. Man longs to acquire in five minutes—or in less time—what is necessary for the knowledge of his highest being; whereas he is by nature a complicated being, his greatness in the universe is due to that very fact, and we must overcome the tendency to indolence in respect of knowledge if we really wish to penetrate to the human entity. In our time there is no understanding of what is needful for one who wishes to put himself in a position to penetrate even dimly the whole complexity of human nature; for because we only cultivate head-wisdom, because we do not wish the whole man to elaborate what the head learns, nothing is given to the head which can be worked upon by the rest of the man, and we thereby place man in the social order in such a position that his earthly life cannot become a reflection of a super-sensible spiritual life. We are subject to a remarkable cleavage, one not like the others already mentioned, but an injurious cleavage which must be overcome.

Human life has changed in course of evolution. To observe this we need only go back four centuries, indeed not so far. Anyone acquainted with the spiritual history of life—not the ordinary historical literature—knows how tremendously the life and thought of the 18th century differed from that of the 19th. We need only go a little way back to see how the whole of human life has changed in four centuries. Human thinking has wholly changed, ideas formed before the 20th century have gradually become more and more abstract, they have become ideas of the head. When we compare the rich ideas of the 13th and 14th centuries with the natural science of this 19th century, we find an impressive difference in the abstract ideas, the dry conformity to law of the present day. There is a very interesting book by Valentine of Bâle, containing very interesting matter. A short while ago a Swedish scholar wrote a book on ‘Matter,’ quoting various things from Valentine, and his judgment is ‘Let him who can, understand it; no one can.’ We very readily believe that he could not, for, read with the ideas derived from modern physics and chemistry, Valentine is quite incomprehensible. This is connected with such facts as the good old practical wisdom of life: ‘The morning has both God and gold in its hand,’ which has been changed in course of time to ‘The early bird catches the worm.’ The good European saying has been Americanised.

With regard to the description and comprehension of Nature, those older times were permeated with what comes from the whole man. To-day it is head-knowledge. Therefore on the one side it is abstract, dry, and does not fill a man's whole life to the end, yet on the other side it is very spiritual. This dual nature is really present, so that we actually do engender what is most spiritual; for these abstract ideas are the most spiritual that can be, yet they are incapable of grasping the Spirit. It is astonishingly easy to perceive the cleavage in which man is involved through the spiritual ideas he has developed. It is precisely in them that he has become so remarkably materialistic. When these ideas come in the right way, however, materialism never arises from them. The simple existence of abstract ideas is the first refutation of materialism. In this duality we live. We have been tremendously intellectualised for four centuries, and in this spiritual, which we only possess in the abstract, we must find again the living spiritual. We have risen to objective concepts; we must get back to Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. We have cast aside what has been handed down to us of old primeval wisdom in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. We must now recover it, after having so wholly discarded the richness of the knowledge of man's whole being. This is a truth which will fill us with a sense of the seriousness of Spiritual Science.

The object of these two somewhat introductory lectures is to show how, from the most external observation of man, an impulse may arise to apply one's intelligence to that which spiritually underlies the world. In the pursuit of these impulses and ideas something will come to humanity which to-day is so terribly lacking: viz., INNER SINCERITY. Man cannot really strive fruitfully after the Spirit if he does not do so in inner sincerity, and he will never go astray if he acquires knowledge through life's experience; true harmony is only possible between head-wisdom and heart-wisdom when man adopts the right relationship towards life. The man of to-day does not wish to lead head-wisdom over to heart-wisdom, because the latter not only takes longer, but even reacts against the former, and thrusts it back when it is untrue. In this way the rest of the man then makes itself felt as a kind of conscience. The humanity of the present, with a bias towards the head-wisdom only, shrinks from this.

In conclusion, a few directly practical remarks—since when we are thus gathered together we must contemplate the efforts of spiritual science in the whole world.

Spiritual Science can only flourish if people take it in sincerity, with earnestness; for it is just this which at the present time can satisfy man's deepest needs. It must meet those qualms of conscience which easily arise when the heart says ‘no’ to the head—as it always does when the spiritual is not sought, or when knowledge is only sought from pure egoism, greed, ambition, etc. For this reason it is necessary to allow no compromise in any quarter. Spiritual Science must be followed positively for its own sake; no compromise can be made with half and half incomplete things; it is too serious a matter. I may perhaps here introduce a few personal remarks, though not intended personally. A great proportion of the opposition to Spiritual Science can only be understood when man has in view its origin and development. Here or there someone appears, for instance, who turns furiously against Spiritual Science. There are other cases, but in many instances opposition arises as in the following concrete case.

Once, when I was in Frankfort-on-Main, to give lectures, someone telephoned that a gentleman wished to speak to me. I had no objection, and said that I could see him then and there. He came, and said, ‘I have been travelling about after you for a long time, hoping to speak with you.’ I had nothing either for or against that, and he then talked of all sorts of other things. Spiritual Science, however, can only be taken seriously, and much that ‘shows off’ and wishes to appear clever, must be rejected. No compromise can be made. I was not discourteous to this man, but I sent him away letting him see that I would take no further notice of him. I was convinced that he talked much nonsense, for which he hoped to find support in me. (What I am now relating is for the purpose of describing certain occurrences.) I had to send the man away. He said much that was extremely flattering, but the only question was whether his aspirations for Spiritual Science were at all genuine. Soon after advertisements appeared in Switzerland announcing that this man was to speak of the ‘demoniacal,’ ‘devilish’ character of Steiner's Spiritual Science. I might relate the subsequent history of this matter, but I shall not do so. This is one of the ways that opposition shows itself. Often people come forward who really seek some kind of connection with Spiritual Science and whose quest must be disregarded.

In connection with this I may mention that our friend Dr. Rittelmeyer wrote a short time ago in a periodical, an article on the attitude of Spiritual Science to religion, endeavouring to reply to many other prejudices against spiritual science, in a way worthy of appreciation and thanks. Now Dr. Johannes Müller, who is well known, has felt it his duty to write a series of three articles in the same paper against Dr. Rittelmeyer. It is really not my task to go into what Dr. Johannes Müller has written, for it has been my endeavour throughout many years not to talk of him, with the motive of keeping Spiritual Science free from superficial pursuits and any entanglement in compromise. This is best attained by not worrying or at least not troubling to speak about what ostensibly must work by its own merit, if it is to work at all. I have never mentioned Dr. Johannes Müller in any particular connection. In our time there is not much feeling for truth or untruth in these domains. Looking over Johannes Müller's articles, it will be seen that they contain much that is called forth either by carelessness or what might be called objective untruth. They are full of it. These things must be kept well in mind. In the book, Riddles of the Soul, I have described one such case: the false statements of Dessoir. I am now very curious, for something must inevitably follow from what a professor of the Berlin University is proved to have written. Let people but read the second article in Riddles of the Soul upon Professor Dessoir's method of working. Of course anyone who now writes on Dessoir without taking into account the article before us is accessory to these things; but to-day people will not take these things seriously; they excuse themselves by saying ‘I have not read it,’ as if someone who made a statement had not properly given his attention to the matter. Now it can easily be proved that Johannes Müller's accusations are untrue: namely, that my lectures pander to man's love of sensation. In any town where Spiritual Science has as yet no footing, very few people as a rule attend my lectures; where many come, it is because in such places Spiritual Science has been made known and worked for. I will not go further into the matter than to allude to the last part of Johannes Müller's article, which launches forth, saying that I speak of a ‘Divine Drama’ through which man is to be saved, and the like, and where he fills a column and a-half by quoting a few sentences from Christianity as Mystical Fact, which he tears out of their context as they strike him, until through his omissions, what he quotes becomes absolute nonsense. In my book on Christianity I said the very opposite of what he quotes of the ‘Divine Drama’ and its magic. Johannes Müller excuses himself by saying that he was not able to understand my writings. Of that I am confident! Without understanding this book in the very least, he has undertaken to criticise it! I have often called attention to the fact that this book places the Mystery of Golgotha in contradistinction to all other Mysteries, as the central point of Evolution. Of this Johannes Müller has no perception. I should never expect him to understand my book, I do not think he could; yet he criticises it. It is remarkable that this book was published in 1902; so that in 1906 it had been under discussion for four years. It was known that in the first edition I had set forth my relation to Natural Science on the one side and to Philosophy on the other. Christianity as Mystical Fact has since become known. Now if it was not known to Johannes Müller, that is his affair; but I mention that it was known in 1906, and was just as much connected with my general philosophy of life as Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, for instance. Anyone who formed an opinion of me in 1906 ought to do so from the whole aspect of my conception of the universe, and should not really select fragments. In the year 1906, it is a fact that Christianity as Mystical Fact was four years old. In that year, however, Johannes Müller's book on The Sermon of the Mount was sent to me. The dedication of that book is: ‘To Dr. Steiner, in grateful remembrance of Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, Mainberg, 17. viii. 1906.’ This is one of those circumstances which I am compelled to ignore, for it was not possible to compromise in the direction of which I have spoken, and I considered it within my duty when approached in this way, to be silent, instead of saying: ‘I see your meaning on this or that point.’ Sometimes, however, silence annoys people more than anything else. I said that one should look for the opposition to Spiritual Science in its real relations. I could tell of even more annoying things, but anyone who now reads Dr. Johannes Müller's articles against our friend Dr. Rittelmeyer, will perhaps do well not to look for the opposition in these things alone, but in other things too, such as the few just cited. One must seek everywhere for much more sincere reasons than those lying on the surface. It is vexing when one man approaches another with ‘in grateful remembrance of the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,’ and the other turns away and gives no answer.

I did not wish to keep from you this slight contribution to the psychology of Johannes Müller, so that you might see matters more clearly than through his articles alone.

When I tried in the last lecture to explain the influence exercised on man by the part of the Earth on which he as physical man develops, I had chiefly in mind to point out very distinctly that the whole Earth is an organism, an ensouled organism, permeated by spirit. For, as an organism has its separate, distinct differentiated members, each of which has a special task,—the arms have not the task of the legs, nor the heart that of the brain, and so on, if we consider the Earth as one whole, as an ensouled organism permeated by spirit, each part of the Earth has its own special task. The special task of the separate human organic members is perceptible in the form of these separate members. The arms are formed differently from the legs, the heart from the brain. This difference is not so marked as regards the Earth with respect to the physical. To an external materialistic geographer, who observes the separate continents or any other parts of the Earth arranged according to this or that point of view, it does not occur straight away that these different parts of the Earth have different sorts of activity; that only occurs to one who can, to a certain extent, grasp the nature of the psychic and spiritual element of the Earth. To understand this, really signifies rising concretely to the perception that the Earth is an ensouled, spiritual organism, and that man, living on Earth as physical man, is a member of this organism. All kinds of questions arise if one takes this into account, and he looks at the life of man as if it only ran its course once between birth and death, will not come to any very reasonable conclusions about them. For man, as physical man, can indeed only become a member of a particular part of the Earth. He would therefore be condemned to be quite specialized and differentiated by this particular part of the Earth, and would in a sense not be able to be in any way a complete whole, but only a part of the Earth's organism. On the other hand an important discovery results from this insight into the ensouled spiritualized part of the Earth; the discovery that the real deeper being of man, to which he says “I,” can in the real sense, only be connected indirectly with this differentiation of man over the Earth, that's the psycho-spiritual kernel of man's being in a sense only dwells in what is in us specialized through the peculiarity of the Earth. Thus man can obtain, from this very circumstance, the knowledge that his spiritual-psychic kernel cannot subsist in what immediately confronts us in man; that with which, in a sense, man confronts us, can only be the “dwelling place,” the dwelling place of man determined by virtue of the special circumstances of the Earth. I do not mention this because it might appear to those already acquainted with spiritual science as a very weighty truth; of course it cannot be that. But it is to show that a real searching into and pondering over the relationships of the Earth can lead man to build himself up in spiritual science, by this means, in a purely logical manner. For the belief that Spiritual Science can only be comprehensible to one who sees into the spiritual world, must be swept away as one of the most fatal prejudices. This is a prejudice which has over and over again to be taken into account. I might say, for the satisfaction of all the comfort-loving ones who, because they like to believe that they could never acquire clairvoyant cognition, would like to represent Spiritual Science chiefly as a kind of provisional arrangement, or as something which does not concern mankind at all, that in truth, comprehensive, penetrating thought can really understand the spiritually scientific. Only the thought must be really accurate and comprehensive! It must be prepared to relate the phenomena of life to what Spiritual Science confirms. He who brings what is within his grasp in the way of knowledge of the characteristic traits of the different nations of the Earth, and of the different inhabitants of the Earth, to bear upon what Spiritual Science says, will soon acknowledge that what was here explained in the last lecture is verified. We must really relate what life offers to this knowledge; we must be ready to test, free from prejudice, the teachings of Spiritual Science by the experience of life; then a reasonable penetration of the matter will lead to the acknowledgment of Spiritual Science.

It is very important to emphasize this at the present day. For we may say that traditions, containing many of the truths of Spiritual Science, are far more numerous than is usually believed. There is a certain opinion, however, which was fully justified up to the approach of the recent historical age—but which has also been propagated in our own times by many who possess Spiritual Scientific knowledge—the opinion that one should not communicate publicly certain deeper knowledge about life. I have often explained the reasons which people who know something of these things have, for thus withholding these communications, and I have also pointed out why these reasons no longer hold good at the present day. In a certain respect however these facts present a difficulty. For not only have we the opposition to Spiritual Science of by far the greatest part of mankind to contend with, but we also have to contend with the opinion of those who do know something;—the opinion that one who gives publicity to things which come from the fountain of Spiritual Science as one gives publicity to other truths, is wrong. Those who believe that the veil of secrecy over certain things must not be raised, will be healed of this error when they recognize the importance of what has been said, certainly in a somewhat scientific form, but clearly enough, it seems to me, in the foreword and introduction to my book “Riddles of Man.”

It is necessary to comprehend that the conception of truth and righteousness which most men still have today, will indeed have to be overcome. Most men have the idea: One thing is right—and another is wrong. But I must emphasize the fact over and over again, and have also done so more particularly in the preface to “Riddles of Man,” the man's separate view of things from one particular side is like a photograph of an object from one side only. If one photographs a tree, first from the one side and then another, the second picture is still a picture of the same tree, only it looks different. Now today, when men have become so very abstract, when they have become so accustomed to the theoretical, in spite of believing themselves to be men of reality, one view of a thing is reckoned as all-comprehensive, as comprising the whole reality. People believe that it is possible to express reality in thoughts—or in something else. They are particularly arrogant in this belief of being able to express the reality by means of thought. I mean the “arrogant” somewhat in the following sense. People say, “We today have the Copernican world-conception ... but with regard to the men who lived before Copernicus (this is not expressed so abruptly, but still they think it) they were all children (indeed we might say ‘duffers’), for they did not yet have the Copernican world-conception. That alone is correct, all the other world-conceptions are false.” This is an attitude which must be overcome. Even the Copernican world-conception is just one view, it is one definite way of making pictures, thoughts and ideas of things. Certainly there are men to-day, who oppose Spiritual Science as soon as they observe that it gives one a view, a real and regular view of a thing, by placing something else in opposition to it. No one will contest this who knows that there are different points of view about a thing. Today, however, many people wish for something else, something quite special, which may be compared somewhat to the person in the room saying: “When we have lighted up the room from one point and look at it from there, this gives only the view in perspective; it is not the reality; let us turn out the light and make the room quite dark and touch everything separately, then all who have thus touched the things will have the same opinion.” We all know that when we look at the room in the light, one who stands there has this view, and another who stands somewhere else has that view and so on. So today certain ideal of natural science would be to turn out the light and only ‘touch’ everything. Spiritual Science must certainly “turn the light” on to that. Thus the different points of view implies something surveyed from different places.

Now more especially by us should the effort be made to go about trying to form opinions from different points of view. This has already been striven after for many years. Many might object that the one contradicts the other, but that is precisely the essential thing, that in the above-mentioned sense one view should contradict another; for thereby we get an all-round view of a thing, which is what we want. But this is not at all easy, or people would prefer to have a little book, as slender as possible, in which a whole world-philosophy is tabulated. Or, if they wish to have world-philosophies discussed, they would like to have the same thing reeled off, over and over again. Of course this cannot be. Our printed cycles are increasing, are becoming more and more numerous, so that things may be illuminated from different sides, that we may obtain concepts and views from various sides, which only then give a complete picture of reality. We must certainly offend people in a certain respect (and what has just been said will make this comprehensible to you) if we have to repudiate more and more the accepted prejudices, by the truths of Spiritual Science. But chiefly when we thus ‘sin’ against the demand of certain occultists not to communicate important things publicly, we must speak about things which shock people, perhaps even anger and excite them; for these things, like many others, give offense for instance to all those who say that things can only be ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect.’ Rather must we acquire the view that in the successive stages of the evolution of mankind there can never be a condition in which one can really say: “Now we have the absolute truth in regard to any particular matter for thought,” or: “We now know, what is absolute untruth.” There cannot be absolute truth or absolute truth. Searching great conceptions of life do not originate in order at last to give men what is ‘correct,’ so that they may now look arrogantly upon their forefathers as upon children; they spring up from very different reasons.

Let us call to mind something we all know. In the 15th century of our era, mankind entered the fifth cultural epoch of the Post-Atlantean development, which we call that of the “development of the human Consciousness or Spiritual Soul.” What especially appeared in the fifth cultural epoch began with the 15th century A.D. Till then it was the Intellectual or Rational Soul which, in the course of the cultural development of mankind was specially developed. In order then that the Spiritual Soul might arise, certain thoughts, certain kinds of concepts, took on a quite distinct character. Not because the Copernican world-philosophy is the absolutely correct one—I have affirmed often enough that it had to appear; and that in a certain respect it is the right one for us in accordance with the times. I shall declare again and again—not because it is the absolutely correct one did it appear, but because it serves the evolution of man, in that he can best attain the development of the Spiritual Soul if he allows the Copernican world-philosophy to enter his flesh and blood, if he reaches the point of being able to calculate certain constellations of stars through the Copernican world-philosophy, as has been done in more recent times.

What is then really good in the Copernican world-philosophy? Not that at last it has told us the truth in contradistinction to the ‘untruth’ of former centuries, but that it erected a spiritual wall between Earth and Heaven, between the physical world and the spiritual world. Of course this appears frightfully paradoxical, something which excites opposition as a matter of course among those who have the above-mentioned prejudices. But it is true that man has begun to conceive the circumference, a cosmic circumference of the Earth in the Copernican manner, in that by transferring the Copernican conceptions into the circumference of the Earth, he has constructed this spiritual wall which he cannot get through. He is cut off from the spiritual thereby, and can remain with his concepts limited to the environs of the Earth, and there he develops the Spiritual Soul. Thus, in order that man should limit himself as ‘egotistically’ as possible to what is earthly, the Copernican world-philosophy, which erects its virtual wall around the Earth, fell to his lot. The more completely the Copernican world-philosophy is developed, the more certain is it that, through external perception, man is cut off from the spiritual world; but it also becomes the more necessary that he should again through inner perception, and by animating his inner life, find the connection with the spiritual. Remarkable things, very remarkable things run parallel. When such things are uttered, it is rather difficult to follow them, but if in the whole wide world there are none but the anthroposophists to understand them, they must take all the more trouble to do so.

There exists today a something like a “Theory of Knowledge;” that particular philosophical science which is based on Kant is called “Theory of Knowledge.” Yet this theory of knowledge is really—one might say—a nail in the coffin of human knowledge. Take a main thought about the ordinary theory of knowledge which as a rule runs in the minds of people today. It is said: Over there is an object: but what is out there is really only the vibration of ether, it has nothing to do with color or sound but is the movement of the smallest particles in space. The air moves out there, soundless; these concussions of the air approach our ear,—Schopenhauer spoke somewhat disrespectfully of the theory of knowledge, he said that these concussions ‘drum’ on the ear—and afterwards become what we call ‘sound.’ All is silent without, there are merely ‘concussions’ in the air. Then there are waves of ether outside. They strike upon the eye. But the matter does not end there; the waves strike upon the eye and the image is produced on the retina. Man knows nothing of this image, however, until it is investigated by science. The processes continue further with the optic nerve. These can only be of a material nature however; they go as far as the membrane covering the brain and there a quite mysterious process takes place. Then the soul comes in to make a concept of what is outside, of what is ‘dark and silent,’ a shining and colored concept, a warm and cold concept and so on; it creates the objects there within itself, and ‘dreams’ the whole world.

It is very remarkable that that is the road along which the Theory of Knowledge would penetrate from the external material world to the human spirit. But what is really the substance of this Theory of Knowledge? It is strange: if one remains at the things which have sound and color (the Theory of Knowledge calls what uneducated people believe ‘simple realism’), then at least one has a resounding and a colored world. But now, through the Theory of Knowledge, one brings this world for example before one's eyes. One has the image on the retina; within one has only the continuation of the image in the workings on the optic nerve; in the cerebrum there is nothing of the outer world, but the inner being charms forth the whole world again from the ‘vibrations.’ This makes one feel it is Baron Münchhausen again drawing himself up by his own tuft of hair! First, everything is eliminated and one has nothing left but brain-vibrations; and afterwards the soul recreates the outer world which has first been put away; then like Münchhausen, one lays hold of oneself by one's own tuft of hair and draws oneself up. But this is ‘basic philosophical knowledge,’ anyone who has not this, does not stand at the height of present-day knowledge.

If we try to follow up the whole diversified world as far as man himself, what have we finally? The processes in the membrane covering the cerebrum are not nearly as complicated as those in the optic nerve; they are the simplest of all. If we investigate how the world is in man we come to something extremely simple. We look for the spirit, but yet only come to a spirit which ‘dreams’ the world. There we must make a leap for so far no one has succeeded in distilling the spirit. In the quest of the spirit we come first to the brain vibrations, and we must then make something, which is nothing. This is the method science has followed in order to get to the spirit from the external sense-world.

On the earth we have many different conditions of life, and of life-influences, before the manifold variety of which we stand in respect and awe. Then we observe the difference in human beings in the different parts of the world—no matter whether the individual human characters are sympathetic or unsympathetic to us—if we consider the differentiations in mankind, we find that it is really as diversified as the sense-world outside is in its relation to man. In that bygone period in which the so-called childish ‘duffers’ lived, men try to understand the multiplicity of the Earth by rising to Heaven, by rising from the sensible to the spiritual. This they no longer do today. As we ascend farther and farther away from the diversified Earth, we have the same feeling as if we were coming from the external sense-world to the human Spirit through the eye and the brain; we come to what Copernicanism represents to us as the great Spiritual Cosmos. Just as the physiological theory of knowledge adopted the method of erecting a barrier in the vibrations of the brain in order to avoid coming to the human soul by way of the outer world, so in the same way does Copernicanism board up the world spiritually in the direction of the spiritual world. If we wish to realize the value of a world-conception we must know the point of view from which it is conceived. The point of view of Copernicanism does not pretend to place the true in the place of the false, once and for all; but it ‘boards up the world with planks’ so that man shall cultivate his consciousness soul within this ‘earthly tenement.’ This is the secret of the matter. We must look at these things in cold blood and with energy. We must first be able to shatter in our own selves that on which the easy-going people, who accept the world-philosophies of today, believe themselves to stand so firmly. As long as we are not able to shatter this in ourselves, as long as we are not able to see that really through Copernicanism the world is ‘boarded up with planks’—so long shall we not reach the point of acquiring a relationship to Spiritual Science, for which many things are necessary.

Just imagine for a moment what the Cosmos consists of, apart from the Earth. According to the Copernican world-conception, it is a calculation! It can never be that to Spiritual Science but something that presents itself to spiritual cognition. Why have we a geology which believes that the Earth has only evolved from the purely mineral world? Because the Copernican world-conception has to produce the present-day materialistic geology. For it has nothing in itself which could prove that the Earth, from the point of view of the Cosmos or spiritual world, might be conceived as an ensouled, spiritualized being. A universe as conceived by Copernicus could only be a dead Earth! An animated ensouled and spiritualized Earth must be conceived as coming from a different Cosmos, really from quite another Cosmos from that of Copernicus. But of course one can only mention a few features of the Earth's being, as it appears when viewed from the Cosmos

Is it a quite unreal conception to imagine the Earth's being as coming from the Cosmos? It is no unreal conception, it is a very ‘real’ one. A conception which, for example, once existed in the imagination of Herman Grimm, but he excused himself immediately after having written it. In an essay written in 1858 he says: “One might imagine—(but he immediately adds: I am not presenting an article of faith, this is only a fancy picture)—that when the soul of man is freed from the body it moves around the Earth freely in the Cosmos and that in this free movement it would observe the Earth from the outside; what happens on the Earth would then appear to man in quite another light.” That was the fancy of Hermann Grimm.‘Man would become acquainted with all occurrences from a different point of view. For instance he would look into the human heart “as into a glass beehive.’ The thoughts arising in the human heart would spring up as from a glass bee-hive!” That is a fine picture. And he pictured further that this man who had hovered around the Earth for a time, and had looked at it from the outside, now reincarnated on the Earth. He would have a Father and Mother, a Fatherland and everything usual on the Earth, and would have to forget everything he had experienced from another point of view. And if he were perhaps an historian in the sense of today (Hermann Grimm is here describing from a subjective point of view) he could not then do otherwise then forget what went before, for one cannot write history with the other concepts.

This is a fancy which comes very close to the truth. For it is absolutely true that the human soul between death and rebirth is, as it were, floating around the Earth, and—as I have often depicted—conditioned by karmic relations, it looks down upon the Earth. The soul that has altogether the feeling that this Earth is an ensouled and spiritualized organism—and the prejudice that considers it as something without soul, something purely geological, ceases. And then the Earth becomes very greatly differentiated; to man's perception between death and rebirth it becomes so differentiated that in fact the East looks different from the American West. It is not possible to speak about the Earth to the dead, as one would to geologists; for the dead do not understand the geological conceptions. But they know that looking down from cosmic space at the East—from Asia across into Russia—the Earth appears as if covered with a bluey sheen; blue or bluish-mauve. Thus does that side of the Earth appear, seen from cosmic space. When we come towards the Western Hemisphere, to the American side, it then appears as more or less a fiery red. There we have a polarity of the Earth, as seen from the Cosmos. Of course the Copernican world-conception cannot of itself give this; but it is another perception, from a different point of view. It will be comprehensible to anyone who has this point of view, that this Earth, this ensouled Earth-organism, appears different in its Eeastern half from its Western half, when viewed from outside. In its Eastern half it has a blue covering, in its Western it has something like a flashing-forth from within outwards; hence the fiery red seen externally. Here you have one example by which man between death and rebirth can direct himself by what he then learns. He learns to know the configuration of the Earth, it's a different appearance when seen from the Cosmos and the spiritual world; he learns to realize that on one side it is bluish-violet, on the other fiery red. And in accordance always with the spiritual needs which he will develop from his karma, this knowledge decides for him where he will reincarnate. Of course one must imagine things as being much more complicated than this; but from such conditions does man between death and rebirth, develop the forces which occasion him to reincarnate in a child body having a certain inheritance.

I have only mentioned two modifications of color, but there are of course other modifications besides those of color, many others. For the present I will only mention that in the center between the East and the West, for example, in our regions, the Earth is more of a green shade when seen from outside. So that this gives us a three-foldness which can throw a deal of light on the way in which man can determine, by what he beholds between death and rebirth, whether he is to appear in the East or West or elsewhere on the Earth.

If we bear this in mind we shall gradually gain the idea that in the relations between the man incarnated here in the physical body and the discarnate man, certain things come into play which, for the most part, are not taken into consideration at all. If we go into a foreign land and wish to understand the people, we must learn their language. If we wish to understand the dead you must gradually acquire the language of the dead. But this is at the same time the language of Spiritual Science, for it is spoken by all the so-called living and all of the so-called dead. It is this which passes to and fro between us and the beyond. It is particularly important to acquire pictures such as these of the universe, and not mere abstract concepts. We get a picture of the Earth if we imagine a sphere hovering in space, on the one side glowing bluish-mauve, on the other burning a flashing reddish-yellow, and between these a green zone. Pictorial representations gradually carry man over into the spiritual world. That is the point. One is of course obliged to set up pictorial representations when speaking seriously of the spiritual world, and it is further necessary not merely to think of such pictorial representations as a sort of fiction, but to make something out of them. Let us once again recall the bluish-violet glimmering Orient and the reddish-yellow flashing Occident. Here various differentiations come in. When a dead person in our present era observe certain places, then from the place which here on Earth is known as Palestine, as Jerusalem, something with a golden form, a golden crystal form, is to be seen in the middle of the bluish-mauve color and this becomes animated. That is the Jerusalem as seen from the spirit! This it is which also in the Apocalypse (speaking of imaginative conceptions) figures as the heavenly Jerusalem. These are not ‘thought-out’ things, they are things which can be observed, seen spiritually. The Mystery of Golgotha appeared like what physical observation precedes when the astronomer directs his telescope to space and beholds something which fills him with wonder like, for example the flashing-up of new stars. Seen spiritually, from the Universe, the Event of Golgotha was the flashing-up of a star of gold in the blue aura of the Eastern half of the Earth. Here you have the Imagination for what I developed at the close of my lecture the day before yesterday. It is really a question of acquiring, by means of such Imaginations, ideas of the Universe which bring the human soul into union with the Spirit of the Universe.

Try to think with someone who has passed over, of the crystal form of the heavenly Jerusalem building itself up into golden splendor in the bluish-violet aura of the Earth, and that will bring you near to him; for that is something which belongs to the realm of the Imaginations into which she entered at death: “Out of God we are born, and in Christ we die.”

There are means by which we can shut ourselves off from the spiritual reality and there are means by which we can draw near to it. We can shut ourselves off from spiritual reality by trying to ‘calculate’ it. Certainly mathematics do belong to the realm of the spirit, pure spirit; but in their application to physical reality they are the means of cutting us off from the spiritual. In so far as you calculate, just so far do you cut yourself off from the spirit. Kant once said: “There is just the same amount of science in the world as there is mathematics.” But one might also say, from the other point of view, which is equally justifiable, that there is darkness in the world to the same degree as man has succeeded in judging the world by means of calculation. We approached the spiritual life when we press on from external perception, and particularly from abstract concepts, towards Imaginations, to pictorial ideas. Copernicus has led man to calculate the universe; the opposite perception must lead men once more again to picture the universe, to imagine a universe with which the human soul can identify itself, so that the Earth appears as an organism shining into the universe, blue-violet, with the heavenly Jerusalem radiating golden light on the one side, and the yellowish-red flashing on the other side.

Whence comes the blue-violet on the one side of the Earth-aura? When one sees this side of the Earth-sphere, the physical part of the Earth disappears from external view, the aura of light becomes transparent, and the dark part of the Earth disappears. This creates the blue which penetrates through. You can explain the phenomenon from Goethe's theory of color. But because in the Western Hemisphere the inner part of the Earth flashes up—flashes up anyway which verifies what I described the day before yesterday: namely, that in America man is determined by the subterranean element, by what is under the Earth—for that reason the inner part of the Earth rays out and flashes like a red-yellow shimmer, like a reddish-yellow sparkling fire radiating into the Cosmos. This is only meant to be a picture sketched in quite fine outlines, but it should show you that it is indeed possible to speak, not merely in ordinary abstract thoughts, but in very, very concrete concepts about the world in which we live between death and rebirth. Finally, all this is adapted to prepare our souls to obtain a connection with the spiritual world, with the higher Hierarchies; with that world in which man lives between death and rebirth. But I intend to speak specially about this tomorrow; today I should only like to mention just one other thing.

The present era of human evolution, the fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, which exists for the development of the Spiritual or Consciousness Soul, contains manifold secrets. One of these is especially well guarded by those who believe that such truths should not yet be communicated to the humanity of to-day. This again is somewhat difficult. But since in the whole wide world there is no one else inclined to receive such things, you must really condescend to recognize them. In the course of this culture epoch, which began in the 15th century of our era, a remarkable longing began to make itself felt in men, along which lives chiefly in the subconsciousness, but must ever more and more be brought up into consciousness. This longing proceeds from a very definite cause.

I have often said that man is a twofold being. He is a being composed of many more than two parts; but particularly he is a twofold being, and consists as such as head and the rest of the body. The head is in particular that to which we should apply the Darwinian theory, the head is that which can be traced back to animal forms. During the Old Moon period man had animal forms, not those of the present animal kingdom, but a more spiritual, etherical animal form. This has hardened into the human head, and now, when animals on the Earth are developing as they are, man is not developing under the same conditions as were suitable for the head, for that he has inherited; but, according to the requirements of the rest of his body. This however does not descend from the animals. The head descends from the animals, but only from the etheric animals. We therefore carry an animal nature in our head, but it is an etheric animality. That entered men's unconscious nature in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. They noticed more and more that there is something of the animal in man, but they could no longer think of it as anything spiritual. They got it into their heads that man must have ‘animal’ feelings, and this culminated in the Darwinian theory of the descent of man from the animal. This was not only expressed in the Darwinian doctrine of descent. The animal has a different perception from man; it stands in a more intimate connection with things than does man. Man is the superior being of the Earth just because he has cut himself off from the things so as to be obliged to build a bridge again from himself to them. The animal experiences the outer world much more inwardly than does man; if it were philosophically inclined it would not speak of ‘boundaries of knowledge,’ because there are no boundaries to knowledge for the animal such as those of which man speaks; these only exist because of the higher organization of man. The animal feels in a sense the whole universe within it through its group-soul; it has no boundaries of knowledge, knows nothing of them. Man began to feel more and more that he carries an animal within him. He did not wish to conceive this relation spiritually, supersensibly, etherically; he thought man was related to the animals physically. He then wanted to have a knowledge subconsciously, such as the animal has. He was however obliged to prove that he could not have that. The animal lives with the ‘thing in itself.’ The ‘thing in itself’ is unknown to man, when he says: “I should really like to be an animal, I should like to be as well off as the animal, but I cannot be as well off.” To affirm a ‘thing in itself’ which limits our knowledge, proceeds from the longing of man to feel himself animal, while he yet knows that he cannot have such a knowledge as the animal. This is the secret of Kantism. What can be said of the boundaries of knowledge is intimately connected with the impulse of modern humanity towards the consciousness of the animal. The Ancients knew that the animal has no boundaries of knowledge; for that reason they considered it good fortune to understand, for example, the language of the animals. You all know the fable connected with this.

That is one thing which the Ancients knew: that the animal has no boundaries of knowledge, in the sense in which man has them in modern times. But they knew something else as well: they knew that the beings belonging to the Hierarchy of the Angels are free beings, beings with freedom of will. And they knew that man is on the way to become an Angel. When the Earth shall have completed the Jupiter-stage man will have reached the stage of the Angel. He is now on the way to freedom. Freedom is developing within him. But what is left for the epoch which is gradually appearing with the evolution of the Spiritual Soul, if mankind turns away from his evolution to the stage of the Angels? There remains only the thought: freedom is an illusion! Man, in respect to his activity, is subject to the necessities of nature. To the degree in which boundaries of knowledge are erected does man turn away from his development to freedom. This is intimately connected with what has appeared—only in a coarser way—in the declaration of the descent of man from the animals; whereas in reality man has a very complicated descent, as I have often explained.

Today I have burdened you with some of the more difficult concepts. But they were necessary, and tomorrow we shall be able to speak principally on the connection between the present earthly life in the physical body and the life between death and rebirth, from a certain point of view. The concepts will then not be so difficult; but what you were so good as to listen to today in respect to more difficult concepts will help you tomorrow in regard to others.

My dear friends! Today we will reconnect to what was spoken of in the previous lesson, in part in order to maintain continuity, but also in part for new members, or at least for members who were not here last time, but who are here today. Today's lesson should therefore begin with a short recapitulation of what was brought before our souls in the previous lesson.

We made our way in thought, to where just in the normal course of life and connecting to the sense-perceptible world with normal awareness and with the power of reasoning, to where a human being can feel himself confronting the supersensible, confronting, moreover, that part of an individual’s being that is related to his own true being. And we will first cultivate this mood, these inner feelings, before we enter into the mysteries of the life of the spirit, which we will certainly get to the next time.

This initial demeanor should lead us to an awareness of how a person, normally constituted in soul, regards the world of the senses around about himself, which cannot give him any inkling about his own true being. And if with certain justice there resounds to people throughout time, affording noble possibilities, the admonition "Know yourself!", then it is also true that a person can find no answer, can find no satisfaction, if under the inscribed words "Know yourself!" he merely gazes at what is spread out before his senses in the context of the external world. So a person is led by this suggestion to something other than what is in the sensory world, this world external to man.

In regard to this perception, which a person can have when he looks back with the question of his own nature upon the expanse of world existence-awareness, when we with this perception broach in thoughts supersensory existence-awareness, which is identical to the inner nature of humankind, then the corresponding demeanor will once again be given with the words, the words that that I already have placed before your souls at the last lesson:

Where on grounds of earth , color upon color,
Life stirring reveals itself,
Where out of stuff of earth, form on form,
All without life takes shape,
Where feeling creatures , strong in will,
Delight in the warm glow of their existence,
Where you yourself, O Man , derive
Bodily existence from earth and air and light,

There you enter your own being’s
Deep, night-bedecked, cold inner darkness.
You’d ask within the dark expanse
Never, who you are, and were, and will become.
For your true existence the day dims
To the night of the soul, to darkness of spirit
And you turn yourself, soul-searching,
Unto the light, that from darknesses strengthens,

We have before us, we feel it in our souls, the impression, presenting itself before us, that in spite of our perceiving the absolute beauty, immensity, and grandeur of the world around us, as we get a sense of all the surrounding immensity, grandeur, and beauty in this world, that we just cannot find our own true being in this world. For the person striving after the spirit, it is necessary ever and again to bring up this feeling in soul. For the experience of this feeling, its deep experience, as we gaze out on the world outside of ourselves, that in this world there is no answer to the question of what we ourselves are, brought up ever and again in one’s soul, this impression forces the very impulses to emerge from our souls that can carry us over into the spiritual world. But directly because we perceive this, that through such feelings we will be carried over into the spiritual world, we must also bring up in our souls that someone in customary awareness, in customary life, is unprepared to enter into the very world that is certainly the world of his own being.

Therefore, right at the boundary between the sensory world and the spiritual world stands the Guardian, who with all seriousness warns a person about crossing over unprepared. It is always so, my friends, and we must be aware of it, that standing in appropriate holiness at the threshold of the spiritual world, for the unprepared person, stands the Guardian. We will get to know him more and more in times to come. Always it is so, that we must time and again reactivate this inner state of awareness, and so come to the feeling of meeting this Guardian and so making quite clear to ourselves, that a very special condition of soul is needed in order to achieve real knowledge, real insight.

If this insight, which can indeed come in this materialistic age, I might add, to every person on the street, if this true knowledge were present in a person, it would be a shame, for he would receive it wholly unprepared. He would approach it without the proper inner state of being, which certainly must be present, a properly prepared inner state of awareness. Therefore, it is so, that we must also direct ourselves properly and bring up before the soul a second sort of demeanor, which speaks to us, ever and again, of how we must present ourselves before the Guardian::

And from darknesses clarifies itself
(Revealing you in counterpart,
Yet also portraying you as parable,
Earnest spirit-word in ethereal realm,
Audible to your heart, forcefully effective),¹
The bringer of spirit-premonitions to you,
He who alone can illuminate your way;
Before him spread the sensory fields,
Behind him yawns the deep abyss.

And from his fields spirit dark,
Hard by the yawning chasm of existence,
Rings forth the ancient might of his creator-word;
See, I am the only door to inner knowing.

The Guardian himself begins to speak while we are still more or less in the sensory fields. He instructs from a realm, where still, for us, as we approach, impenetrable darkness holds sway, and he holds forth in the darkness. But it grows lighter, forming up before us through spirit-awareness, and initially only he himself emerges from it and forms up, and so coming forth from this apparent darkness, from this maya of darkness, he then speaks:

From the wide expanse of the beings of space
Who in the light experience existence,
From the onward tread of the course of time
Which in creating finds itself expressed,
From the depths of the feeling heart,
Where in one's self the world is born anew:

There sounds in speech filled with soul,
There shines in thoughts filled with spirit,
The from godly healing forces
In world shaping powers
Welling working word of existence-awareness:
O Man, know yourself!

Whoever can inwardly accept with sufficient depth the word resounding from the mouth of the Guardian, will become aware, as he gazes back upon himself, of how the backward gazing, the taking hold of truth in the backward gazing becomes the beginning of self-awareness. Moreover, it is self-awareness that is preparatory for real entry into true proper self-awareness. True self-awareness encloses us in spiritual world-awareness, in the being that is one with our true human essence. And so awareness arises, which can be obtained while still on this side of the threshold of spiritual existence, just so awareness arises, which those impure in thinking, feeling, and willing of course hold in terrible awe, even though the images appear to protect. Awareness then arises of the three emerging from the chasm, from the yawning abyss. Appearing out of the yawning abyss between the sensory world and the spiritual world are rearing beasts.

What we should feel at the chasm of existence, between what is maya, mere appearance, and true being in the world of true reality, this should be placed before our souls in the fourth declamation:

Yet you must beware the abyss;
Lest your beasts within devour
You, if in heedless haste you pass me by;
They are in you throughout this age of man,
As foes of knowing placed within.

Behold the first beast, the crooked back,
The bone-locked head, the withered body,
Dull blunt blue is its skin.
Your fear of spirit-creator-being
Produced this monster in your willing;
Your courage of knowing alone overwhelms it.

My friends, one must clearly place in one’s soul this idea, that at first courage, courage in becoming aware, does not rule in the soul, but in the most thorough manner cowardice rules in the soul, cowardice, which in fact is strongly held onto by most people in these times, as a matter of course, even while approaching insight into the spiritual world.

Behold the second beast, it bares its teeth,
Contorts its face, and lies in scornful mockery,
Yellow with grayish cast is its body;
Your hatred of spirit-revelation
Produced this weakling in your feeling;
Your fire of knowing must tame it.

This is the second that we carry in us, which sows all the doubts in our souls, and which plants all manner of feelings of uncertainty concerning the spiritual world in our souls. It lies in feelings, in feelings that are weak, in feelings that cannot soar in spirited flight, in enthusiasm. Genuine experience must indeed emerge from lowly outward enthusiasm, which twines itself around all possibilities of outer life. A simple entwining! Inner enthusiasm, inner fire, the fire of awareness, is the very thing that vanquishes the second beast.

Behold the third beast, with long-split mouth,
Glazed eye, and slouching attitude,
Dirty red its form appears to you;
Your doubt in spirit-light-dominion
Produced this specter, this ghost in your thinking;
The work of knowing must weaken it.

We must find the courage and the fire to bring activity into our thinking. If we plod along in our usual state of awareness, we work in whims, in caprice, we deal with what really signifies nothing at all. When we prepare ourselves in a manner corresponding to creative thinking, however, the spiritual world streams into our creative thinking. And then a real entrance into the spiritual world is born, out of courage in knowledge, out of fire in knowledge, and out of living work in knowledge.

Only when you subdue the three,
Will wings of your soul grow,
To soar across the deep abyss
That severs you from fields of knowing,
For which your yearning heart,
Healing-seeking, would hallow itself.

These mood-songs of demeanor can carry us quite far, so that we may feel properly what should be made to rule in us, so that as human beings we can enter the spiritual world properly, genuinely, and truly alive. It is also true, that in normal life, the most banal things often lead a person to realize that life is really serious, and not just a game. The very things that should lead us to an existence-awareness, however, do not make as strong an impression as does outer life. Outer life, when made active in the soul, can all too easily be made into a game. A person learns by himself, by playing it as a game, that it is serious. And if he makes endeavors of the spirit into a game, he will thereby embarrass himself and others enormously. He will be embarrassed, even if he deals with them only slightly in anything other than the most absolutely serious manner.

Of course, one does not need to maintain such a serious attitude to the point of becoming sentimentally attached to it. That is not the point, for the serious quality of life can be brought to light even in humor. But then even the humor becomes serious. The very manner portrayed here, which may be serious or playful, is not sentimentality, false piety, or untruthful flirtatious gaming, but rather it is the possibility of really going all out in endeavors of the spirit, and really living in endeavors of the spirit, with persistence, steadfastness, and tenacity..

Concerning the gravity of the words I am now speaking, my dear friends, to really understand their significance, it would be really, really good for striving after knowledge, if all of us, who as friends are sitting here, especially those who have been involved in anthroposophical endeavors for a somewhat longer time, would consider the following question: How often have I undertaken to do this or that as a function of anthroposophical life, and how often after a short time have I simply no longer thought about it? Perhaps I would have done it, had I thought about it, but I just did not think any further about it. It is simply gone, as a dream is gone from my life.

It is not unimportant and insignificant to consider such a question straightaway. And perhaps it might not be totally unimportant if a great number of our friends would place before their souls something actually happening at this time.

The Christmas Conference should have initiated real esotericism in the larger stream of the anthroposophical way of looking at the world, as it will be carried by the Anthroposophical Society in the future, all-inclusive. How often, and many questions could similarly be entertained, how often have I just forgotten what I held in glorious utter certainty during the Christmas Conference, how often have I just forgotten it, and how often have I thus maintained my thoughts and my realizations in the manner formerly present, as if the Anthroposophical Society were continuing as it had before Christmas. And perhaps if a few of you say to yourselves, such is not the case for me, it might be necessary just then to ask yourself this question. Am I not fooling myself, about it not being the case for me? Have I seen, in all acts pertaining to Anthroposophy, have I really seen that with Christmas a new phase of the Anthroposophical Society has begun? Entertaining these questions right away as questions concerning awareness is of very special significance. For then the proper seriousness will be inscribed in the soul.

You see, it would be good for this sort of attitude to be connected with the lifeblood of the Anthroposophical Society, and henceforth also with the lifeblood of each member who has sought admittance into the class. This attitude should be connected, it is imperative that it be attached to everything that impacts strongly on one's life. Hence, it would be good for each and every one who wishes to belong to the class to say to himself: Is there anything that I can do, now that the Anthroposophical Society has been re-founded, that is different from what I was doing earlier? Is there something new that I can take up in my life in devotion to Anthroposophy? Is there some way that I can work differently than before, so that I can bring in something brand new?

Actually, it would be tremendously significant, if this were to be taken seriously by each individual belonging to the class. Through this, the possibility would emerge, my friends, of the class continuing its work without the burden of heavy chains, for each person who continues in the old jog-trot really burdens the progress of the class accordingly. It might not be much noticed, but it is true nevertheless. It is not possible to forge ahead in esoteric life while walking along the hum-drum path that otherwise has dominion in life, on the path of lies, lies portrayed as truth. But if someone tries to work in esoteric life, vague portrayals are not effective, but rather truth is effective. You can certainly make colorful vain constructs, but colorful conceits make no impression on the spiritual world. The unvarnished, the simple unvarnished truth is what works effectively in the spiritual world.

You may conclude from this that spiritual realities are very different, as they continue to work under the surface of existence, from what is displayed today in outer life, which is so many lively lies just patched together. Uncommonly little of actual genuine worth lives between people today. And this should be brought before the soul ever and ever again, right at the beginning of the inner striving of the life of this Class. For only out of awareness built in this way can we find the inner strength that must be used, in the things which we will unravel more and more from lesson to lesson, which will be laid more and more before our souls, and through which we will find our way into the spiritual world.

You may conclude from this that spiritual realities are very different, as they continue to work under the surface of existence, from what is displayed today in outer life, which is so many lively lies just patched together. Uncommonly little of actual genuine worth lives between people today. And this should be brought before the soul ever and ever again, right at the beginning of the inner striving of the life of this Class. For only out of awareness built in this way can we find the inner strength that must be used, in the things which we will unravel more and more from lesson to lesson, which will be laid more and more before our souls, and through which we will find our way into the spiritual world.

And rooted deep within our human nature is all that hinders true cognition, to begin with in thinking. The usual human thinking plays itself out in the thought specter of the third beast, the very third beast whose gestalt has been depicted as follows:

Behold the third beast, with long-split mouth,
Glazed eye, and slouching attitude,
Dirty red its form appears to you;

And this is the picture of the way most people usually think. This type of human thinking looks out over the details of the external world, and does not become aware that these details of the external world constitute a corpse. Where has such a person been living? He has been living on the corpse of this conventional thinking.

Today, my friends, we are all thinking in just this way, in our ever-present human civilization, as it is so called in our present age. From waking in the morning until falling asleep at night, we are thinking under the guidance received in our normal schooling and in our normal living. We are thinking, but in such a way that our thinking is corpse-like. Thinking is dead. It was living once, but when? It was alive once, but where?

It was present before we were born. It was present in our souls in actuality in pre-earthly existence. Now just imagine, my friends, that a person lives on the physical earth, and his soul-nature stirs within his physical body, and that until his death he moves his physical body about by means of the activity of his soul-nature. For external appearance, however, this active soul-nature is invisible, and all that remains visible is the corpse, the dead corpse. Imagine that this dead structure is all that lives in this human frame during life, and so you must imagine, that thinking lives just so. A living, organic, enmeshed, and intrinsically awake reality was present before the person stepped into earthly life. Then it becomes a corpse, it becomes the grave of our true head, the tomb of our true brain. And just as if a corpse in the grave were to assert, "I am a man," just so is our thinking, as if it were in the brain of a corpse, lying entombed, and considering only things of the external world. It is a corpse. It may be depressing for someone to be a corpse, but it is actually true, and esoteric knowledge must stand by truth.

This lies, however, in the continuation of the address of the Guardian of the Threshold. For as soon as our souls have gone beyond the earnest warning concerning the third beast, then the Guardian speaks again. He speaks, as the words so far intoned rest in our hearts.

The third beast’s glassy eye
Is the bad² contrary-type
Of thinking, that denies itself
In you and chooses death,
Forsaking spirit powers
That held it before its earth-life
Living in spirit in spirit fields.

I will recite it once again:

The third beast’s glassy eye
Is the bad contrary-type
Of thinking, that denies itself
In you and chooses death,
Forsaking spirit powers
That held it before its earth-life
Living in spirit in spirit fields.

Thinking, with which we have to accomplish so much here in the fields of sensory life, is to the gods of the world a mere corpse of our being of soul. We have, while we have been treading the earth, during our time on earth, become dead in our thinking. The death of our thinking was in preparation already before the year 333 AC. By the middle of this fourth post-Atlantean period in 333, the ground had been prepared for thinking to be dead. Vitality still poured forth in thinking before this, inherent from pre-earthly existence. The Greeks formerly felt alive, the Orientals formerly felt alive within their thinking, within their thinking that meshed effectively with the work of the spirit, with spirit work. The Orientals, the Greeks of old, they knew that in their thinking, that in each thought, God was living. Such has been lost. Thinking has become dead. And we must abide by the earnest warning of the times, given to us by the Guardian.

Yet you must beware the abyss;
Lest your beasts within devour
You, if in heedless haste you pass me by;
They are in you throughout this age of man,
As foes of knowing placed within.

This era began 333 years after the onset of Christianity, in the fourth century, after the first third of the fourth century had gone by. And such thinking today, among all sorts of thinking in the world, this thinking clearly arises out of forces of death, not out of living forces. And the dead thinking of the 19th century became encrusted on the surface of human civilization's dead materialism.

It is otherwise with feeling. In the same manner, mankind’s great Ahrimanic enemy, Ahriman himself, cannot yet put feelings to death inwardly in the way he has put thinking to death. Feelings still live on in worldly human ways at the present time. For the most part, however, people have tucked feelings out of full awareness into semi-unconsciousness. Feelings do surge up in the soul, but who has it under control, as one has thinking under control? To whom is it clear, what lies in feelings, as clear as it is, what lies in thinking?

Simply take one of the saddest things, specifically, in the eyes of the spirit, the saddest appearance of our time, my dear friends. If people think clearly about it, they are citizens of the world, and they know quite well that thinking makes a man a man, even though thinking is fairly dead in the present age of the world. Today in feelings, however, people are separated into nations and tribes, and directly due to this they allow certain unconscious feelings to rule, to the detriment of all. Everywhere strife arises on the stage of today's world, growing out of these undistinguished feelings, by means of which a person feels himself to be affiliated with only one particular group of human beings.

World karma of course places us into particular human groupings, and it is something that we feel, that is earned in the working process of world karma, that we are situated in this or that clan, class, or culture. It is not in thinking that we become so situated. Thinking, unless it becomes colored by feelings and willpower, is the same in all parts of the world, but feelings form up in particular ways characteristic of particular regions of the world. Feelings may seem to rest in semi-consciousness, but they really live in the unconscious. So the Ahrimanic spirit, that otherwise has no influence on the life of feelings, has acquired the possibility of mucking about unconsciously in feelings. This mucking about in feelings is somewhat limited, limited to confounding truth with error, so through Ahrimanic influences, through Ahrimanic impulses in us, our feelings become colored with prejudice.

Our feelings, if we wish to gain entrance into the spiritual world, must ascend fully into our souls. In regard to self-awareness, we must be fully able to incorporate our feelings. We must be able to say, by continually reexamining our own being, just what sort of people we are, as feeling human beings. We do not attain this easily. In regard to thinking, it will be comparatively easy for us, as we go about gaining clarity about ourselves. Naturally, we don't always do it, but at least we are more likely to admit to ourselves that we are not exactly geniuses, or that we fall short of clear thinking in this or that respect. It is the height of conceit or opportunism not to allow ourselves to come in this way to having at least some sort of clarity about our thinking.

Concerning our feelings, however, we simply cannot come to the point of really placing them clearly before our souls. We may certainly have persuaded ourselves that almost always our streaming feelings are appropriate. Immediately we must sweep our souls, intimately, thoroughly, if we as feeling human beings wish to be on the right track in our self-characterization. Whatever the case, we must just do it. We lift ourselves up only by what we by ourselves as feeling human beings from time to time conscientiously place before ourselves, we lift ourselves up only in this way over every obstacle that the second beast erects before us on the path into the spiritual world.

Instead of this however, if we do not cultivate this sort of self-awareness in ourselves from time to time, then certainly, inevitably, this mocking apparition will be intertwined in us when we regard the spiritual world. We ourselves will become mockers, and if we do not become aware of our sick feelings, we also will not be aware that in regard to the spiritual world we are indeed mockers. We dress up the mockery in all possible ways, but we alone are certainly mocking the spiritual world. Concerning this, which I was impelled to speak about previously, those who are not in earnest are mockers. Sometimes they feel ashamed to carry any sort of mockery inwardly, within their thoughts, but they are mocking nonetheless, in regard to the spiritual world. For how could someone be flippant and playful in regard to the spiritual world, if he were not mocking it? About such things the Guardian of the Threshold speaks.

The second beast, the mocking face,
It is the bad contrary-force
Of feeling, that hollows-out suitable³ soul
And in it fashions living emptiness
Instead of spiritual worth, which was
Illuminating it before its earth-existence
By means of spirit’s sunny might.

The first beast is the mirror image of our will. This mirror image of our will certainly shows us just what is living in our will. And the will certainly does not merely dream. It does not live in mere semi-consciousness. It lives wholly in the unconscious.

This has been presented to you many times, my dear friends, that the ways and means of the will lie deep in the unconscious. And in the life of customary awareness a person seeks the paths of his karma deep in the unconscious. Every step during life that a person takes by way of his karma is certainly measured out, but the person knows nothing of this. It all happens out of awareness. Former lives on earth are woven effectively into karma. Karma carries us to the situations of our life, to the circumstances of our life, to the uncertainties of our life. Such is the error-fraught state of the individual person, of the person who solely for his own individual self seeks for pathways in the world. In thinking, a person seeks the path that all people seek. In feeling, a person seeks the path that his social group seeks. In feelings one certainly knows whether a person's origins are in the north, west, south, or eastern parts of Europe, or in the middle but originating from the west, the south, or the east. And a person must be ready to enter the unconscious impulses of the will, just in order to maintain in himself, not just a generic person, not just a member of a specific group, but a specific unique human individual. So works the will. But please take note, willfulness works in this way in the very depths of the unconscious. The first beast points to this error-fraught state of the will.

And the Guardian speaks of this in earnest warning:

The first beast, the bony mind,
It is the bad creative-might
Of willing, that estranges suitable body
From your soul's domain
And devotes it to adverse powers,
Who would rob world-existence
Of gods-existence in times to come.

In our will, mighty spirits are working which actually wish to rip our body away from us during our conscious earth-existence, and in this way wish to carry off a piece of our souls. This would enable the building of an earth existence, during Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan, that should not be developed, but would instead be a departure from divine intentions regarding the earth. The earth would be estranged, the earth would be dispossessed, after a certain time in the future. In this sort of world robbed of gods, a person would be bound to certain powers working in his will, which is where he seeks his karma.

The first beast, appearing within as a mirror image, appropriately shows what is effectively working within the will, with its bone-locked head, withered body, dull blunt blue skin, and crooked back. Such is the Ahrimanic spirit that holds sway in the will for all seeking after karma, and it can only be vanquished through courage in knowledge. And just so, as I have been leading up to, just so the Guardian of the Threshold speaks about this first beast:

I will read it once again.

The first beast, the bony mind,
It is the bad creative-might
Of willing, that estranges suitable body
From your soul's domain
And devotes it to adverse powers,
Who would rob world-existence
Of gods-existence in times to come.

In these words, sounding forth from the mouth of the Guardian of the Threshold, the admonition is expounded, and called out to those seeking insight, to human spirits seeking knowledge.

Let these words live in our souls, my friends, with truly genuine intensity, and often and again hearken unto the following, spoken by the Guardian:

The third beast’s glassy eye
Is the bad contrary-type
Of thinking, that denies itself
In you and chooses death,
Forsaking spirit powers
That held it before its earth-life
Living in spirit in spirit fields.

You must ever and again comparatively grasp the similarities in these verses. [The first section of the mantra was now written on the board.]

The third beast’s glassy eye
Is the bad contrary-type
Of thinking, that denies itself
In you and chooses death,
Forsaking spirit powers
That held it before its earth-life
Living in spirit in spirit fields.

Feel initially what the section engenders in you.

Next the second section, which alludes to feeling: [The second section of the mantra was now written on the board.]

The second beast, the mocking face,
It is the bad contrary-force

As a "counter-force" it is no longer merely a sort of thinking, a counter-type of thinking, but now is a "force!" [Both words were underlined twice, and then the writing continued.]

Of feeling, that hollows-out suitable soul
And in it fashions living emptiness
Instead of spiritual worth, which was
Illuminating it before its earth-existence
By means of spirit’s sunny might.

Feel next, here [in the first section] "denies", and here [in the second section] "hollows-out" [Both words were underlined twice.], and feel starkly the coloring coming through the verses, in which the first time there is the word "denies" and the second time "hollows-out".

Then the words of the Guardian, in which he addresses the will:

The first beast, the bony mind,
It is the bad creative-might
Of willing, that estranges suitable body
From your soul's domain
And devotes it to adverse powers,
Who would rob world-existence
Of gods-existence in times to come.

[This third section was now written on the board.]

The first beast, the bony mind,
It is the bad creative-might

Now there is not “type”, not “force", but rather "might.” [The word "might" was underlined twice.] You must feel the progression.

Of willing, that estranges suitable body

And here we have the progression, first of something intellectual in "denies", then something lurking within in "hollows-out", and then something that directly takes a person off the inner path in "estranges.” [Estranges was underlined twice, and then the writing continued.]

From your soul's domain
And devotes it to adverse powers,
Who would rob world-existence
Of gods-existence in times to come.

Feel however, how through all three verses, through all three dictums, how "bad" resounds. [In each section the word "bad" was especially emphasized at this point with vertical boundary lines and underlined three times.]

And when you inwardly feel yourself accepting these dictums at each stopping point, given in progressive steps in the distinctions between thinking, feeling, and willing, [These three words were underlined.] and when you truly come to feel how all three may be bound together by the same ever-present badness, then for you, my dear friends, each of the verses becomes a mantra, a mantra in its inner sense, and they will be able to become a guide for you into the spiritual world, on each of three stepping stones, that of the third beast, that of the second beast, and that of the first beast. [The words "third", "second", and "first" were at the same time underlined on the board.] And when you unfailingly keep in mind this concordance, and unfailingly bind these three together with the definitive word into an inner soul-organism, when you unfailingly bring these three verses into motion within yourself in this way, then these three verses will be your guide, my friends, along the way into the spiritual world, as you come upon the Guardian of the Threshold.

Whom we will get to know better in the next class.

• 1. The lines in parentheses were clarified later as a Zwischensatz.
• 2. böse: The German word übel is the same as the English word evil, which carries a high degree of conceptuality, but what is used here is böse, a word any small child can understand, for böse is bad. It is bad contrary confused dead thinking, bad contrary angry heartless feelings, and bad vicious defiant willfulness.
• 3. eigne: In regard to eigne (intrinsic, suitable, appropriate) as opposed to deine (your own), die eigne Seele ward erleuchtend suggests that spiritual worth was illuminating a well-suited soul before its earth-existence. And in the third stanza, den eignen Leib is not “your own” body, but “suitable” body.

Today, gentlemen, I would like to start by telling you a very interesting story that took place in front of witnesses, so it cannot be scientifically challenged. There was once a fisherman who held his fishing rod, was annoyed after a while that absolutely nothing wanted to bite, until suddenly there was a terrible jolt. Something very heavy bit. He held out the fishing rod and was very happy that he had now caught a big fish. But what did he pull out? A very large turtle.

Well, this big turtle stayed on the fishing rod, because it had swallowed the fishhook. It was inside her belly, and the fisherman couldn't get it out. The turtle pulled her head back a little. He tried to persuade the turtle, but she wouldn't let go of the fishhook. So he had no choice but to hang her from a tree branch, cut off her head with his sharp knife, and let her fall to the ground.

You will all agree: if this had happened to a human being – let's say, for example, during the French Revolution or some other beheading – well, he would have been a corpse. What did the turtle do? The turtle straightened up, calmly marched back into the water and disappeared into it. It didn't bother her at all that her head was cut off.

So, as you can see, gentlemen, this turtle did not need its head at all to continue living. How long it lived after that was, of course, not recorded at the time, but anyway, you can see from this: for everything that has to do with walking, for example, the turtle does not need its head at all. It can walk without its head.

I have told you many stories about animals doing all kinds of things, terribly clever things, and from this story about the tortoise you can conclude that the animals are not doing it with their heads, because you can cut off a tortoise's head and it will continue to move around and do everything else as usual. The turtle did not run away blindly, but straight into the water from which it had come. It could not have done it differently, or better, with its head.

Now you might say: That is a unique case. But it is not a unique case, because these experiments have been done and people are doing the same thing now. Those who can grasp the whole thing spiritually do not actually need these experiments. But these experiments are constantly being cited to contradict the matter. They do not contradict it, but they do confirm it. The experiments I am going to tell you about have been conducted countless times. You take a frog and cut its head off with a razor. Now the frog is there without a head. You put it back on the table. At first, it behaves extremely impertinently without a head. It sinks down a bit at the front, and at the back, quite impertinently with the back body, it lifts itself up and hops from the spot. But if you now take a caustic acid and touch the frog a little on the side (it will draw) – the headless frog is then there, has its legs there, only it has no head – so if you touch it a little with a caustic acid, which otherwise hurts, the frog first takes its hind leg and scratches itself there, without a head. You can repeat this over and over – the frog will use its hind leg and scratch itself, without a head. And if you add more acid, then he also uses his front leg to help. Then, of course, he tilts to the side. If you add even more, he also uses the leg from the other side to help. Then, of course, he falls over. So you see, the headless frog does everything he would otherwise do, regardless of whether he has a head or no head.

Not true, so you can see from this: When we go down from mammals to lower animals, these lower animals without heads do exactly the same as humans with their heads and higher mammals with their heads.

Now, however, we must be quite clear about what is actually going on here. So something has been proven. It has been proven that, when we ourselves have pain here, we raise our hand and rub ourselves, we do not need our head for that, because the frog can do that without a head. So that has been proven, that you can do it without a head. So we certainly don't have a head for scratching ourselves; we don't have a head for walking, running. Because the tortoise or the frog, they walk without a head. So we don't need the head at all for walking. We can't quite fulfill the story of the fable, the one about the lazy Hans, who you know, was too lazy to walk, but was very diligent when eating. So someone advised him to walk with his mouth and eat with his feet, in order to acquire a different habit. Of course that doesn't work, but the fact is that we don't need our head at all for walking. We don't need our head for moving our hands either. So why do humans and higher animals need their head? What is the difference – now with regard to the head – between humans and higher animals compared to lower animals? Yes, the difference is that the higher animals and humans die if they don't have their heads, but the frog, the turtle and all the lower animals stay alive. If you take even lower animals, for example worms – you can cut them in half – each half starts to move on its own. So you see, you absolutely don't need the head for what the body actually does. But the bad thing is that you need your head to live as a higher animal or as a human being. You need it to live. And since you need it to live, you die if you no longer have it. It is not because you have no head that you no longer wash off the acid when you are smeared with it as a human being, but because you die without a head. Man no longer washes off the acid when he no longer has a head. Man would have behaved differently if he had swallowed a fish hook and had his head cut off. In any case, something would have happened differently than with the turtle.

So we can say: In higher animals and in humans, everything that is connected with the head is not the cause of our body's movements, but we only have the head to thank for being alive. If we no longer have it, we simply no longer live. So in the higher animals, the life is in the head. In the lower animals, the life is in all the individual parts of the body.

But now I want to tell you something else that shows you that there is also a great difference between the higher animals and between man in regard to everything that belongs to this head and this whole organization.

You have probably already encountered this somewhat unpleasant disease in children, which is called whooping cough; in some areas it is called spasmodic cough. Actually, whooping cough is not so bad for a child at that age, because it usually goes away. The bad thing is what remains if you don't behave properly – that is, the doctors or whoever is responsible – while whooping cough is there. That's when the following can happen. What does whooping cough consist of? Whooping cough consists in the fact that the inhalation always remains proper – you can have a child with whooping cough as severe as you like: it breathes in properly; you can see that when you examine the matter – but when the air wants to come out again when you breathe out, it gets stuck, it doesn't come out properly again, and that's when the coughing fit comes. And because the air cannot come out properly, no fresh air can come in, and that is how whooping cough occurs; that is what it consists of.

But what is the underlying cause of whooping cough in children? You see, the underlying cause is that the inner mucous membrane of the respiratory system, of these tubes that go in and out of the lungs, becomes terribly sensitive. When the air goes in, it also goes out over the sensitive areas, because the chest is empty inside, and you can always pour air into the void. You only have to think of the air pump. The air pump consists of having a glass dome here (it is drawn); you pump the air out of it. Now it is empty of air. Then you can have an opening to support it. If you now take out the plug, the air rushes in with a whistle. There is no need for anything else under the glass cover but empty space. When we have exhaled, there is airless space in our lungs; so the air rushes in by itself. There is nothing special to be done to get the air in. So it is no wonder that air rushes in through the sensitive windpipe, because the air does not feel it. But if you want to get the air out of the air pump again, you have to do something, you have to pump it out. Likewise, you have to push out the air that is inside the lungs. Now, however, the child's respiratory tubes have become sensitive. They are just as sensitive as if they were scratched somewhere. So the inside of the respiratory tubes is a little scratched, they are sensitive. Instead of the act of the will, which drives the air out and expels the air, it scratches the windpipe, and instead of expelling the air, it is concerned with scratching the sensitive spot. You see, while the child wants to scratch, it forgets to expel the air, and then the air stops inside. Then come these fits of whooping cough. Then the body wants to forcefully expel the air, while in life what I recently called the astral body expels the air. You can tell exactly where the physical body is and where the astral body is by looking at a child with spasmodic coughing. When the child does not have spasmodic coughing, the astral body expels the air; the body is not bothered at all. If it is whooping cough, there is a sensitive spot. The astral body wants to scratch away; the physical body first has to come into action and has to expel the air spasmodically. This can even cause a spasm, and from that a secondary illness can arise.

So you see, it is not at all the case that one can say that the physical body does everything. Then one can never understand whooping cough. When someone has whooping cough, something strange is going on. One has to ask: what has actually happened to his astral body? His astral body has become headless, namely, like the other part of the astral body in the frog! As the frog wets its leg, so the astral body wets the air pipes internally, and the physical body then has to get rid of the air. So you can distinguish this quite precisely.

But now you can say: Give us some proof that the astral body, the soul, is really involved. I will tell you what can happen when a child has had whooping cough and therefore has sensitive spots in the windpipes and the astral body wants to clean them, which is when the child has these seizures. Suppose, while the child had whooping cough, the parents had bought a cat, or a cat had come to live with them – I am telling you something that happens quite often. While the child had whooping cough, the parents bought a cat or a dog. This made the child sensitive to the exhaled air of dogs or cats. It would not have happened if it had not had this particular sensitivity. Now it has become sensitive during whooping cough. Well, the whooping cough heals, but sometimes something strange remains. If the child is not used to cats, and a cat comes into the house during the whooping cough of the child, it remains that the child in question gets something – when it has just been cured, it does not occur immediately, but later on what is called asthma occurs, a recurring shortness of breath.

Now, when this shortness of breath occurs - asthma is something that comes and goes periodically - then you can examine and sometimes you will find something strange. For example, a man is having asthma and at first you don't know where it's coming from. If you pay attention, you discover that when a cat is near him or in the room, he is once again afflicted with asthma. If you move the cat, the asthma goes away. There, you see, he is reminded, and he does not need his head for that. He does not need to know that the cat is in the room. The cat can be in the room, he knows nothing about it, but he gets the asthma.

Yes, I can tell you an even more amazing case, a case that is quite strange. There was once a child who had whooping cough, and during the time he had whooping cough, a lot of buckwheat was eaten in the house. As a result, the child became particularly sensitive to buckwheat and developed a tendency, a talent, so to speak, for asthma every time buckwheat was in the room, or even just in the house. And then something very strange happened when he was already a grown boy, already a medical student. He lived upstairs on the top floor. Downstairs, two floors lower, was the kitchen. Once the boy upstairs got asthma, terrible asthma. He had only ever had it when there was buckwheat in the house. Now, of course, they were terribly unhappy. They had forbidden all the cooks to make any food with buckwheat. Buckwheat was not supposed to come into the house at all. What had happened? A new cook was there who didn't know any better. She had buckwheat downstairs, and the young student upstairs on the second floor got asthma! Such things look like fairy tales. But they are absolutely true.

And now you will also understand how human health and illness are related to the whole environment. It does matter for our health whether or not there are rats in our environment. You see, the story I told you about cats is so well known – because the human respiratory organs are particularly sensitive to cats – that there is even a name for it in medicine. You will find the name “cat asthma” in medical books. This is the asthma that people get when cats are around. There are, of course, many types of asthma.

The fact of the matter is that one must say: For the normal person, a dog or a cat or even buckwheat is often something that is taken for granted when they are around. This only makes an impression on his soul. But if the soul is not in order somewhere, then it makes an impression on his soul unconsciously. What actually happens to a person who gets either cat or buckwheat asthma?

Well, you see, whooping cough can be cured again in the following way. Let us assume that you are a child and have a sensitive windpipe; the windpipe and the bronchial tubes and bronchioles have somehow been cut open by coal dust. This can immediately lead to whooping cough. Such things arise from very tiny little things. So the child has a cut windpipe. What happens when a part of the body is injured in this way? You can see what happens when you cut yourself. If it were only a physical body, it would not hurt you. Imagine taking off a rather thick glove finger. You can form the glove just like the skin. You can cut into it and it won't hurt you. But why does your hand hurt when you cut into it? Yes, your hand hurts because, in addition to the physical body being there, the astral body is also inside. The astral body is used to being inside. If you now cut into the physical body – you can't cut into the astral body; now it suddenly realizes: Gosh, there is no physical body! It doesn't fit together! It hurts. Because only the astral body can hurt you. It hurts until it has healed again.

So the story is that where something is injured, the astral body is left to itself. It comes out of the physical body.

Now imagine you get this crack, this fissure in the inside of your windpipe; the astral body becomes somewhat free in the windpipe. Now healing can take place if you are very careful: let us say you have a child with whooping cough. First of all you put the child to bed and let it sweat properly – you can observe this step by step – so you put the child to bed, and it gets hot. The astral body unites easily with heat, with cold it is difficult. If you let it run around outside or just in a cold room, the astral body cannot attach to the physical body because the warmth is not there. But if you wrap the child up very warmly – people do this instinctively; they often tie a stocking around the neck to keep the warmth in – the astral body begins to be attracted to the warmth. The astral body is not attracted by anything else, by water or air, but it is attracted by warmth. So if you have left the child lying in this position for a while, and the astral body has been attracted by the warmth, then it has straightened itself out again towards the limb here. Then you have to take a cloth and put a few drops of lemon juice in some warm water, and put the cloth around it. This pulls together what is cut open, and then takes up the astral body again, and you can heal whooping cough well. You just have to do everything in the right order.

When healing, it is important to be able to see through the whole person and to do things in the right order. And then, during the whole procedure, you have to make sure that the child does not get a fright. Because when the child gets a fright, the astral body always comes out a little, and that makes you undo the whole healing procedure again.

Now, if you heal properly, then the whooping cough can run its course and the child will not get asthma later on. But if you heal wrongly, then these “fissures” in the trachea and in the bronchi and bronchioles heal together, and the child appears to be healthy, but the astral body has not completely entered, always remains a little outside. If the person is very weak, if the child is a weakling, then it will immediately get asthma because it is not breathing out properly. The astral body is not sufficiently present. The astral body, which is outside, cannot properly participate in the exhalation. But when the child is a little stronger, it just uses the other part of the astral body, and the result is that only when a new illness occurs in life, for example when the child gets the flu later or something like that, the rest of the astral body proves to be too weak, and then the child gets asthma.

This is a good way to get inside a person. You can tell when the soul is involved and when it is not.

But now look at a person with asthma. The astral body is at work here. It constantly scratches internally, just as the frog scratches externally when it is wetted with acid. You see, there you have the story, gentlemen, there you have the astral body, which behaves like a frog, like a tortoise. We can actually study the behavior of our astral body in lower animals. If the head could be involved in this activity of the astral body, it would be quite different. We just can't get at it with our head. The fact is that we are not yet human with our astral body. We are human on earth with our physical body, but we are not human on earth with our astral body.

What happens as a result? Yes, as a result, this astral body also behaves like an imperfect being. It behaves in an animalistic way. So don't think you can educate a person by, say, constantly beating him. It is actually quite remarkable how widespread this kind of education still is. There is a person today who is otherwise not pleasant to me, he is boring to me, but he is very interesting. He has also traveled around Europe, he was also in Basel, Rabindranath Tagore, who captivates people today. Isn't it true, an Asian is something else; they go there! A European could do much more; but an Asian, that interests them, that's a rare animal! You see, he has now given his life story. The life story is actually boring too; but it is very important to read the first chapters of this life story. There he tells how he was actually always beaten by everyone. One person in particular, who is now one of the learned Asians, the learned Indians, traveling all over Europe, says that the whole education was actually based on constantly beating the children. So this is not just a European peculiarity. It is precisely from this biography that one sees that the Asians have also been terribly beaten.

Well, Tagore then became a poet, did all kinds of things, so that's no longer so clear. But when someone is constantly beaten as a child, it doesn't just affect the physical body – precisely because the child's mind is not constantly active – but it affects the astral body. And the result is that the astral body becomes like a beaten dog. You can tell a battered dog from a lovingly raised dog. But it is the same with people. When a person is beaten as a child, later life may make him a little more courageous, but his astral body remains beaten throughout his life because it is still at the animal level.

Yes, you see, gentlemen, but you realize how not only physical beatings go into this astral body. At most, the physical beatings create welts. It is not the physical impression that makes the astral body beaten up, but the moral impression. In this astral body, we carry our moral impression from our entire life on earth. And it is true: One person was beaten as a child; later on, his astral body is like that of a beaten dog. Another person beat his teachers (there are such people, too). His astral body is like that of a lion. You look like that inside – you could also say, spiritually, let's say astral, because spiritual has already become a very abstract word and people don't think anything of it anymore – you become so astral inside that you take on one or the other form, depending on the moral impressions you have had in life.

But that is the way it is in life. If a person has a slave nature, he takes everything in a different way than if he has a free, independent nature. If a person has a slave nature, he puts up with everything. Then his astral body becomes stooped, and as a result becomes something dog-like. If a person has a free nature, he does not put up with everything. His astral body becomes somewhat human-like as a result. We can see inside and see what is actually going on with a person during their life on earth.

But now, gentlemen, we die. We have made it clear to ourselves; only the physical body descends from us. It goes away. But this form, which I have described here, remains. With it you go through death. And the one who has acquired a higher knowledge through the means I have described, and which are particularly described in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds', can now distinguish exactly with what character a person passes through death. The moral impression of life is in it. Now you have to enter the world from which you form the next life on earth.

Yes, gentlemen, if you were to enter the world from which you form your next life with an astral body that has been created by the beatings of life, you could become a dog. But a human being cannot become a dog; that is the story. Through the moral impression of life, a human being comes out of death in such a way that he could become anything that comes from his moral impression. If someone has been brave, he could become a lion. Perhaps some people would like to be a lion in their next life. But a person cannot become a lion because he is not predisposed to it by the world, by the cosmos. Another person feels a bit like a cat; he would like to become a cat.

Don't the anthroposophists, after all, reproach the unintelligent people for thinking that the soul goes into the animals afterwards, and that the soul's migration should consist of the soul coming into the animals afterwards? That is nonsense, of course. What is true is that the soul retains an impression of it: one is lion-like, cat-like, tiger-like, crocodile-like, when one has died. And since one must become a human being again, one must first discard that. And one does just that during this one-third lifetime, which I told you about last time. If someone has reached the age of sixty, he needs twenty years for this. This is not plucked out of thin air; we know this because, curiously enough, a person becomes so when he falls asleep at night. He is only preparing for it then. And sleep lasts a total of one-third of life. He needs such a third of life, such a period of time, which thus takes up a third of his lifetime, to free himself from this moral impression.

But, gentlemen, when you are asleep, you are unaware of the whole story that you are going through between falling asleep and waking up. And that is good. Because as a result, the moral impression that you have only comes through a little as conscience. If you have to look at it all, it comes through much more strongly.

And why does it only come through a little as conscience after waking up from what you experienced during sleep? Because you submerge in the physical body, which obscures it. Otherwise, you would remember in the morning when you wake up what sleep has told you, what a horrible guy you are. During sleep you have experienced all of that. It sometimes haunts dreams. And such dreams are particularly interesting to study, in which something is haunted, which actually makes one a dreadful fellow. But in general one does not know that. But when one has no physical body after death, everything that is in the astral body enters into the ego, and in the ego one now has it inside. Now you have to go through the whole time. When you have discarded the astral body, then you have what you have discarded only in the ego. But now you can prepare yourself for the real physical body of the next life. That takes as long as I explained to you last time.

So you see, you just have to look at a person properly as they are now in their earthly life to get a very accurate idea of how these four parts of the human being – physical body, etheric body, astral body and I – are connected.

You see, gentlemen, I will tell you something else: Imagine there is a person's heart. It sits there. Two nerve cords go to the heart. They start from back there, go down there and go to the heart. One goes and then spreads out in the heart. Then another goes and also spreads out in the heart. Now imagine that I am passing an electric current through the nerve. I can observe something remarkable: the heart starts beating faster and faster. Why? Because the electric current excites the nerve, the heart starts beating faster and faster. The electric current excites the nerve.

Now imagine that I don't electrify this nerve, but I electrify the other nerve, the second one. Now you might think, a nerve is a nerve. I electrify it. And you might think, right, the heart starts beating faster and faster again. But it's not like that. When I electrify the nerve here (the first one), the heart beats faster and faster. But if I electrify this one (the second), the heart beats slower and slower. And if I electrify it very strongly, the heart stops beating altogether. I have to stop quickly, otherwise the person will die of a heart attack. It is the case that there is no difference in the construction between this one and that other nerve. They are both constructed in the same way. Yes, what is the matter here?

You see, it's like this: when this one is electrified, the astral body goes in, stimulates the heart to beat faster, because the electrical current takes over a task that the heart would otherwise have to do itself. So it can work faster in the heart. Now suppose, however, that the other nerve were to be electrified. Now the astral body wants to make the heart beat faster; but from the other side an obstacle is put in its way. As soon as it wants to start making the heart beat faster, it cannot through on the other side. This excitation (at the first nerve) is useful to it because it takes over a task from it. This excitement (the second) is harmful to him because it meets him halfway. If I could go into the heart and electrify it from there, it would also make the heart beat faster and faster. But if I electrify this nerve from the outside, the astral body cannot move the heart because there is more and more of an obstacle.

From this you can see that you can see very clearly how things actually work in the human body, how the astral body, on the one hand, intervenes just as it would if, let's say, I wanted to turn a wheel: I push it, turn it further; but if I turn it in the opposite direction, it doesn't work. It is the same with the heart, the same with the lungs, with every organ. Every organ is supplied from two sides with nerves; but what engages is the astral body.

Now you may say: But is it not perhaps the head that is at work in the astral body? No, gentlemen, if it were the head, you would have to electrify at the top of the head. But that would not help you at all; you have to start electrifying from there. If you cut off the head with the astral body, it still always hits the spot, as with the frog or the turtle. You have to electrify where the nerve is still located, which the frog also retains. This point is called the medulla oblongata, or extended marrow. You have to electrify there, and the head does not need to know anything about it.

Incidentally, it is also easy to see from other things that the head does not need to know anything. Yes, think, first of all, if you had to let your heart beat from your head, that would be a nice story. The heart would have to beat seventy-two times every minute, you would have to think about it seventy-two times every minute. So that wouldn't work. And when you sleep, your heart would have to stop. So with the head it is not yet done with these movements, which take place inside the person. They are carried out as they are in the frog or the turtle.

If we now have asthma, these internal movements are carried out in a pathological manner, while when we are healthy, they are carried out normally. You can see from this that everything that goes on inside a person in terms of movements and so on, goes on unconsciously, guided by the astral body.

And this astral body is the one that, after death, must first give up the moral impression that it has received from the world to the I, so to speak. Then the I can form a human life on earth again. These years after death, when the human being lives in such a way that he can discard this inner astral form that he has acquired during his life, are therefore such that he can prepare himself again for a new life on earth, where he can truly be human.

And how does one now bring what one had in the previous life into the new human life? Yes, you see, gentlemen, it is just that the child sleeps at the beginning of his life. If the child were conscious, it could not carry out what the ego has brought with it; after all, it has only unlearned from the astral body. In the astral body, the I is still inside; only the I does not need to work before conception, but the astral body has to work, the astral world has to work, as I told you the other day, from the stars. The child must come in asleep, learn to walk, learn to speak, learn to think. In this process, it pours into walking, speaking and thinking that which is the moral impulse from the previous life and seeks out. That is our destiny.

This does not affect our freedom. I think I already told you that. We carry our destiny within us, we prepare our destiny ourselves. But our freedom is not affected, just as little as our freedom is affected by the fact that we have black or blonde hair, brown or blue eyes, or cannot reach the moon. In the same way, our freedom is not affected by the fact that we bring something or other with us from our previous life on earth, being this or that as a human being. But people are different because they bring something or other with them from their previous life on earth.

Now you may say: But that leads us back to thinking that we will continue to return to further earthly lives forever. — No, gentlemen, there was once a time on earth when man did not progress at all, as a small child is today. In the beginning of the earth, in prehistoric times, he could not yet walk, could not yet speak, could not yet think. He was in such a state that, because the Earth – now remember what I have otherwise told you about the Earth – was still thick, he was not surrounded by air, but by a thick sauce, as I told you at the time, did not need to learn to walk. This thick sauce carried him. He was also more animal, more dependent on his astral body. In relation to the physical body, he has become human today. In relation to the astral body, he is still at the animal level at which he previously stood. He did not bring anything with him, but it gradually emerged. By learning to walk, speak and think, what is his destiny has also come into being. And when man now learns again to absorb something spiritual during his life, then he also gets out of the animal habit again, and then he gets used to a world in which he no longer lives in the way of walking, speaking and thinking, but again in a different way.

So there is a space between these two states, and in this space we come again and again in a certain life.

Now, you see, gentlemen, there is still a question. We will have to discuss that next time, next Wednesday at nine o'clock. That is this important question, which is raised again and again, that someone says: Well, it's easy for you to talk about your past life on earth, but I don't remember it. What I don't remember, I don't believe. Next time I will explain to you how it is with this remembering, and what the reason for it is. Then we will have come a little further again. Then we will have more or less dealt with the question for which we have prepared ourselves.

Question: Is it possible to hear more about the personality of Jesus Christ?

Dr. Steiner: You see, gentlemen, that the question that is being asked is timely, and so we will discuss it today. I must say from the outset that what I am going to say will only be fully understandable to those who have been here for a long time, while those gentlemen who have only come today will slowly find their way into what we are discussing.

So the question that has been put to me and that we will discuss is about the personality of Christ, who was thirty-three years old when he died.

“On the third day he rose from the grave, resurrected. How did that happen, and where did this personality acquire the strength and power? And then you would be so kind as to talk about his ascension after forty days.”

Since time is just right, I will discuss this as it really happened, after we have already discussed the other thing; but, as I said, it can only be fully understood by those who have been here longer. The others will also understand it once we are together here more often.

Well, you see, at first the whole thing about Christ's personality and his destinies was actually quite unknown in the very early days after it happened. You don't have to look at it the way we look at it today, because today we have the feeling that the events in Palestine that are linked to the personality of Jesus became known throughout the world in one fell swoop. This is not the case. Rather, the situation is that in the time when the fate of Christ Jesus was unfolding, the so-called Roman Empire was widespread, a mighty world empire, and Palestine also belonged to this mighty Roman world empire.

You know that we still have a rather unfortunate legacy from this Roman Empire, the so-called Roman law. Perhaps you know that students at universities of so-called legal scholarship have to study for a very long time the so-called Roman law. Now, Roman law was conceived at a time when social conditions were quite different, so that Roman law has naturally become something highly unsuitable for today. But justice is still being done according to Roman law today.

So we have just this one inheritance from this Romanism. We have many other things as well; but this one inheritance, the so-called Roman law, is something that can be noticed by all of you.

Now, this Roman rule was extraordinarily widespread. I will just give you a small idea of how widespread Roman rule was. You just have to imagine the south of Europe: here we have Spain (it is being drawn), here we have Italy; then we have Greece, then we have the Black Sea. Then we have a lot of small islands. There Asia Minor comes over, and over there, in the area I want to mark, there was the small country of Palestine with Jerusalem, Nazareth and so on.

Roman rule now extended over all these lands. The Romans had occupied all these lands with their rule. So it was a very extensive Roman rule! Rome is located there. Of course, everything that was government-related and so on took place in Rome, so it was very far away from Palestine. And what happened in Palestine was very little known in Rome at that time. And those writers who wrote in Rome did not write about it for about a hundred years after the fact that had occurred with Christ Jesus in Palestine! It was only about a hundred years later that people in Rome understood the significance of what had happened in Palestine. And they did not treat it much differently in Rome at the time, except to say: Well, an unknown person has been crucified over there in Palestine. At that time, being crucified meant something like being hanged later. So it didn't cause any particular sensation. It was only after a hundred years had passed, and Roman rule had become more and more tyrannical and luxurious, that it became apparent that, while the people in Rome were enjoying their luxurious lives, Christianity had slowly spread here, and it was only then that they first noticed the Christians. And the Christians in Rome were initially not tolerated at all. Whoever was a Christian was something very much persecuted in Rome. And now I have to tell you why Christians were persecuted in Rome, because otherwise you would not be able to understand at all what the idea is behind the view that arose at the time: that a god died in Palestine, in Jerusalem. You have to realize what the views in the world actually were at that time.

You see, for a Roman in this first Christian century, that is, for a Roman at the time when it was written - they didn't write it back then, they calculated according to the Roman calendar, but if it had been our calendar, they would have written 1 or 10 or 50 for all I care - so if you had asked a Roman back then: Who is God? — he would have said: Emperor Augustus, or: Emperor Tiberius. — Just as today [1923] a Chinese, when you ask him: Who is God? — points to the Chinese emperor. So you must be clear about the fact that in those days for the Romans the ruler, the one in power, was at the same time their god. And that was the first thing the Romans noticed about the Christians: that they were not aware that a human being on earth could be a universal god. The Romans only knew that some human being sitting on the throne, who had powerful rule, was the god, was the highest thing, that had to be worshipped. And so the Romans did honor their emperor in a way that amounted to worship.

Yes, it was the same all over the world in those days. Over there in the Orient, where the great empires once were, the Persian Empire, the Assyrian, the Babylonian Empire and so on in the old days, it was also the case that the ruler was the god. “God” meant nothing more than the one to whom one turned when one needed something. He was the supreme one. He was seen as a helper. He was not always a helper, but he was seen as a helper.

I would like to point out that you are likely to know the word “God” in your language. When children are baptized, people have to be godparents. Now there are areas, I believe also here in Switzerland, where the man is called the Lord and the woman is called Gottel. This means that the godparents have to provide help. This is the same “God”. And the god was only the one who was the general god of the world. If you want to understand the things of the earlier times, you must always go back to the earlier times. So the god was the general god of the world. The name Goethe, the name of the German poet Goethe, also comes from the same word.

And that was the first thing one heard about the Christians: that the Christians did not believe that a human being on earth could be a universal god. For the Romans, this was something they could not grasp at all. Such terrible people, who do not accept the emperor as god, yes, they are very dangerous people. And the Christians, on the other hand, referred to the saying: Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's. — So, they referred to Jesus' saying, where the matter of Caesar and God is cut apart. God is the invisible. God is that which does not dwell in a visible man on earth. That is what the Christians claimed. And that was the big difference between the Romans and the Christians. And the consequence of that was that the Romans considered the Christians to be the most dangerous people of all, undermining the authority of the state because they did not offer sacrifice to the emperor in the temple. The sacrifices in the temples were offered to the emperor by the people. Now, the Christians sacrificed to a God who died in Palestine and who cannot be seen anywhere. That was something the Romans could not understand. And so the first Christians had to perform their sacrifices underground, under the earth. And these underground passages that they dug out there, in which they buried their dead and performed their sacrifices, are called catacombs. There are such extensive catacombs under the earth in Rome, in Italy in general, like small cities. The first Christians performed their sacrificial services there in the first centuries, while above, the Romans had large circuses, huge circuses. And there they had, for example, in such circuses, made a point of somehow tying a person they despised to a stake, to a pillar, and, after smearing him with pitch, setting him on fire and burning him alive. And they watched it in the circuses, just as people watch bullfights today. It was something that was quite common.

Just imagine this picture: above, the wild Romans in the circuses, who tied the pitch-coated man to the column and burned him alive. That amused them very much. And below, the Christians who performed their religious services in the catacombs. That was the difference, gentlemen, between below ground and above ground, which could not be more sharply defined. One must only consider that.

It is true that things were also quite terrible in the Middle Ages with the Inquisition. But as bad as the Romans behaved in the heyday of their imperial era, the Christians did not behave as badly as that later on. You just have to hold on to that. That is just true.

So the first thing one heard in Rome was that the Christians do not want to recognize a visible God. Now, of course, more and more has become known about what was actually meant by this Christ Jesus, and I have already told you some of it. For example, I have pointed out to you that there were actually two Jesus boys – the name Jesus was just as common a name in Palestine as Sepperl or Michel are today – one of whom died very young, and they were, one might say, playmates, extraordinarily capable, talented children.

Now, this story, which you all know from the Bible, about how the twelve-year-old Jesus taught the scribes in the temple, is something that is based on a truth. Of course, you don't have to tell yourselves: if a twelve-year-old boy goes to university today, the professorial council would not have much respect for him. Today's teachings cannot be compared with those of that time. You should not think that I am conservative or even reactionary, but I have to tell you the facts as they are. Nowadays we take it for granted that we have to send our children to school. Gifted children in particular learn an enormous amount of material that is not suited to them. We have to prepare things in such a way that they suit the children, as we do in the Waldorf school. But in general, children learn an extraordinary amount of material that does not suit them. Of course, adults are better at doing the things that do not suit them than children are. But what is driven out of children when they learn our present-day reading and writing, well, gentlemen, people today pay no attention to that. Children, if you know how to listen to them properly, will say extraordinarily clever things. They have brought this with them from the spiritual life before they descended to earth. And this one Jesus boy, he brought an extraordinary amount with him. And because the two Jesus boys were playmates, they actually always knew the same things. Now one of them has died. And so now the Gospels tell only of one Jesus boy, because people liked that better. But that doesn't help us understand the Gospels. If you read the Gospels of Matthew and Luke today, they contradict each other. The whole genealogy of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew is described differently than in the Gospel of Luke. Why? Yes, because the things really refer to two Jesus boys.

I have told you that I have really been dealing with this question from a spiritual-scientific point of view for years, and I have come to the conclusion that there are two Jesus boys, and that the Gospel of Matthew is about a different Jesus boy than the Gospel of Luke.

Now one of them died in his twelfth year, while the other remained. So when it says in the Gospel: “Jesus increased in wisdom, spirit and power,” this is only true of the one.

You see, I found that long before I told you that there were two such Jesus children. It was not known that somewhere in history it is reported that there are two Jesus children until we came across a picture in northern Italy. There this story is depicted of Jesus in the temple, where he teaches the scribes. And there, strangely enough, is this second Jesus child. He is leaving. The one who is teaching and the other who is leaving – that is not the usual Jesus child, we know him! So there are two Jesus children in it, so you can say that in certain centuries people still knew: a second Jesus child existed. He walks away. Only after I had found that out could I know that this second Jesus child is depicted. So you see, gentlemen, for centuries people have known this. But the church has never actually allowed such things, which correspond to the real truth, to come up.

Now, as I have already told you, there are simply certain things in the life of man where one says, there is an enlightenment. Of course, people don't accept that. But you see, there are such revelations, and I will give you an example that was given to me only yesterday by a member of this group. I could give you hundreds of examples, but I will give you this latest example. Mr. Pfeiffer, you don't mind if I do, do you?

There is a very important chemist, Kekulé, an impeccable scholar, simply a real chemist who has written many books on chemistry. Now there are two important scientific views that come from Kekulé. I don't need to explain these views to you in more detail; that would take us hours, it's not important now. These two

important chemical views relate to the structure of substances, such as benzene, in their smallest parts. And these views, which Kekulé established, play an extraordinarily important role in chemistry. Anyone who knows chemistry knows that today everyone is talking about Kekule's theories.

But what did Kekulé himself experience? Kekulé recounts that he was once in London, where he lived quite a distance out of town – before he had formulated any of his theories – and had to take one bus after another to get to the other end of the city at night. He had an acquaintance there whom he visited in the evening. He always had to take one bus after another because he spent the night there. Once he was driving home after spending a long time talking about chemistry with an acquaintance who was also a chemist. He was driving home and sitting on the top of the bus. He dozed off and began to fall asleep. And as he began to fall asleep on top of the omnibus, he dreamt: There is an atom, there is another, there is a third atom; and there are then small atoms that are held together by the large ones (it is drawn). He dreamt of the substance, the matter, how it is made. He dreamt all this on the top of the omnibus. As soon as he comes home, he writes it down carefully. That was the one theory. You see, it was a dream to him. It was given to him, a completely materialistic theory.

The second is the so-called benzene theory. He dreamt that at another time, though not in London, but when he had dozed off at another place.

Yes, gentlemen, you see, a completely materialistic chemist had to confess that he could not have come up with his ideas and inventions through thinking, but that he was enlightened about these two things through a dream. It was all a real inspiration.

Now I would like to know why people object when it is said that the Jesus who was left behind became something completely different in his thirtieth year. Of course, Kekule did not immediately become a completely different person because the inspiration was only a small one. But the knowledge of the whole world entered into Jesus when he was thirty years old. In those ancient times, this was something that was entirely possible, and similar things are still possible today. So you just have to imagine that the Jesus of Nazareth, who had been left behind, was enlightened in his thirtieth year with all that is called the Christ. It entered into him, just as Kekulé's benzene theory entered into him. As a result, he had become a completely different person. And those who now understood something of the matter said: the Romans have a god on the throne. The god on the throne, they said, came into being through the ordinary powers of the earth. Such gods on the throne do not usually have revelations; at least not usually, do they; they do not have such revelations at the age of thirty.

Now, the Christians said: Our God is not appointed by men, He is appointed by the world powers themselves.

But now they had to say something else. You see, what was said about Jesus in those days was not as vague as what I am telling you now. I have to tell you slowly and gradually, which is why the matter is only vague at first. But it was more specific in the following way. You see, today, in order for individual people to become wise according to the view of our time, we have universities. After being made clever for a long time in the so-called grammar school or in secondary school, one comes to the university. There one is now given the finishing touches of cleverness. But you will not always find that the people who come out of the university have become different people in the university, but rather they have learned something externally.

This was certainly not the case in older times. In older times there was no distinction between churches and theaters and schools, but it was all one, and that was called mysteries. That is where people were educated back then. And the most important thing that people were taught in the mysteries was the so-called knowledge of the sun.

You see, when we were talking about natural science, I always told you what influence the sun has on everything that happens on earth. Plants do not grow merely because they are driven out of the ground below, but because the sun drives them out. The power of the sun is in all of us, as is the power of the earth. And I have drawn your attention to the fact that this solar power is not just a dead force, but a wise, living force. I have given you many examples. You have seen that what happens among animals happens wisely, intelligently, judiciously. Yes, when you look up at the sun, the learned imagine it is a ball of gas. Yes, gentlemen, that is about as clever as if we could all get on a big airplane and fly to the moon, as Jules Verne described. We could sit on the moon and look for our work and I would say to you: There, gentlemen, down there, you see, there is the earth. The Earth is a single body, there is nothing else on it. — You would not believe me, gentlemen, because you came up with me. You would believe that there are people on it after all. People who have souls are on Earth.

But that is exactly what the scholars are doing with the sun today. You sit there on the earth, look up at the sun and say: There is nothing up there but burning gas. — But that is real nonsense. The sun is inhabited, even if not by such people as can be seen with the eyes, but it is inhabited.

And this knowledge of the sun was the main thing taught to students in the ancient mysteries. And that is why these students were called sun disciples. It was said: Up there on the sun, there are the forces, the spring forces, the sun forces, there is that which draws everything out of the earth. And so someone who had learned in ancient times the secrets of the sun was called a sun disciple, and later, when he was fully trained, a sun master. And what Jesus of Nazareth suddenly knew at the age of thirty was this solar wisdom. This solar wisdom had come over him. Now you may have already seen that when plants that are beautifully green and full of energy on the earth are below ground in the cellar, they turn completely whitish and appear paralyzed. This is because the solar power does not enter them. This solar power in the mystical, spiritual sense is drawn into Jesus. And those who understood this said: Now the Christ is drawn into Jesus.

You see, now this remarkable thing happened. The Jews, who mainly lived here in Palestine (please refer to the board), had long since heard from their prophets that something must happen so that the earth can be taught from outer space itself. But you can be quite sure that if someone were to write a “Wilhelm Tell” today, as Schiller wrote it, and it were to be performed in the theater, people would say: That's nonsense, it's something very bad. They would not recognize it. And 'Wilhelm Tell' was first recognized by the few people who knew Schiller; then it spread. It is always the case in our social order, it has always been the case, that the majority of people let themselves be led by the hair. So the Jews also let themselves be led by their hair and, when that happened, and they were no longer led by the mysteries, but when someone appeared who had this solar knowledge, they said: But there is someone who claims that everything he says is true! You know, of course, what is done to people who speak a truth that is not yet known among the people. It was a great truth and wisdom that Jesus of Nazareth, in whom the Christ now lived, had to proclaim. Well, and then they crucified him. And he actually went through death.

And now I come to the question as it was put to me directly. You see, gentlemen, today's enlightened theologians are often even worse than their unenlightened counterparts. The unenlightened theologians say: Well, they laid Christ in the grave, and after three days he rose again with flesh and blood, just as he was. Well, of course, the enlightened people said: We don't believe that because no one comes out of the grave. But, I would like to say, it is at least something to profess. It may be debatable, but it is something to profess.

But what do enlightened theologians say? You see, one of the most enlightened theologians, who is well known and named, is Harnack. What does he say about the resurrection? You see, Harnack says: What happened on the third day in the garden of Gethsemane – that is where the grave was – you can't know. So the enlightened theologian says: What happened there on the third day in the garden of Gethsemane, that cannot be known. But many people have gradually come to believe that Christ was resurrected there. So that is the Easter belief, and we assume that we should hold to this Easter belief.

You see, I once raised this question - it was a long time ago - in the Berlin Giordano Bruno Association. The chairman was an academic who thought he knew a great deal about these matters, and he said: Harnack could not have asserted that, because what would that mean if Harnack asserted that one should not believe what really happened, but only in what people believe about it! That would be just like the Holy Robe of Trier, where people also say: Well, whether the Holy Robe of Trier is really the one that Christ wore, nobody knows, but so and so many believed in it, so we believe in it too! — Thus said the Protestant about the Catholic belief in the Holy Shroud of Trier. Or another example is that of the bones of St. Anthony. When they were examined closely, they were found to be veal bones. So the people who believed in them did not make much of it either, but said that it did not matter whether it was reality or not, but whether people believed it.

But it does not depend on that at all; what matters is what happened! Now the Bible actually tells the story in a wonderful way, only people do not pay attention to how it is told. The Bible does not say that such and such happened, but everywhere it says: such and such people have seen, really seen. That is what is told.

So it is related that the women came out, and what they saw at the grave – take that as sophistry if you want! It is related that the Christ met the disciples at Emmaus, and so on; that the Christ was seen, that is related.

Now, remember that I told you that a person does not consist only of this material body that is laid in the grave, but that a person also consists of the etheric body, the astral body, and the I. I have described this to you in detail. Now the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth has indeed been laid in the grave. I have studied this question a great deal, and it is extraordinarily significant that it is stated in the Gospel itself that an earthquake occurred. There was such an earthquake. It made a split and the body was taken up by the earth, so it was really no longer there. And the disciples did not see this physical body, but the etheric body, the supersensible body. The women and the disciples saw Christ in the etheric body, no longer Jesus of Nazareth, but Christ, that which was now the transformed inner man.

Of course, you have to imagine that what happened there was something extraordinarily magnificent for the disciples. You just have to consider that if there is someone among you with whom you have grown so close as friends, who is snatched from you by crucifixion, or as we would say today, by the gallows, you are intimately connected with him – that must have created a state of mind. This state of mind made the disciples almost clairvoyant for these things. And they really saw Christ again and again in the early days, more often than is mentioned in the Gospels. But it was the supersensible Christ.

And you see, when you read the letters of Paul, you read about the famous event of Damascus that Paul experienced. Near Damascus he came into a kind of sleeping state, and there the Christ appeared to him in the clouds. And pay attention to how Paul tells it. He once said: You can't take away my faith in the Christ, because I, like the other apostles, have seen the Christ.

So Paul is not saying that the other apostles saw Christ in the physical body; otherwise he would have to claim that he too saw Christ in the physical body. He explicitly claims that he saw the Christ in the clouds, thus the supersensible Christ, and by saying that he and the other apostles saw the Christ, he is already indicating that the other apostles, like him, saw the Christ in his supersensible body. And isn't it true that people believe that the unbelieving Thomas had to place his hands in the wounds as an objection to this? That just wants to say: the presence of the Christ, that he was there, this experience was so strong that Thomas himself could have the strong faith to touch him. So everything was related to the supersensible Christ.

The wounds were something that touched the hearts of the disciples, especially the apostles. It would be much less vivid if it were not mentioned that the wounds could be touched. Why the wounds in particular? Why not lay his hands on the face or something like that? He would have sensed that something was there. He laid his finger on the wounds because the wounds made a special impression, and what the disciple really became aware of in the Christ actually depended on the higher vision.

So that one can say: For forty days in a row, the disciples were clear about one thing: the Christ is still there.

And from this the Christian teaching arose – which is the original Christian teaching, and which ties in with what I told you last Monday. The Christian teaching arose from this: When Christ is buried, there is only the body in the grave, which of course disappears; Christ showed us the immortal in Himself; He walked around in His immortality for forty days. We have seen him. And he appeared to Paul even much later. So he is always there.

And so we can say today: He is always there. Only the disciples, because this power of vision has disappeared in them, have not seen him after forty days. That's when they said, “Now he has left us: Ascension.” This is an event that naturally filled the disciples with great sadness. They said: Even though he died, even though his enemies crucified him, he was still with us for forty days. Now he is no longer with us. Now he has returned to the vastness of the world.

And then they became truly sad. Not in an ordinary sadness, but in a very deep sadness. And the ten days that are now being talked about, these ten days were for the disciples and apostles something where they went very deeply into their hearts, where they reflected with inner strength on everything the Christ had ever said to them. These ten days were enough for them to say to themselves afterward: Yes, we can know all of this ourselves; this wisdom – they said to themselves, impressed by the strong impression – this wisdom itself resides in us. And now, after ten days, they felt the strength to teach this wisdom as well. The fiery tongues – that is the image of it – came upon their heads. That is Pentecost, the Pentecostal idea, the fiery tongues. Through their great sorrow, when they had lost sight of everything except the Christ, they had reflected so deeply that they were able to teach themselves.

And it is beautifully told that they now began to “speak in all languages”. But here we must realize something about the way people spoke in those ancient times. Of course we must not suppose that it is claimed that the apostles began to speak Chinese or Japanese or even German, but rather that it is meant that, through the way they spoke in those ancient times, they had now become tolerant through all that they had thought in the ten days between Ascension Day and Pentecost. Now, for them, there was no longer any difference between religions, but they proclaimed one religion for all people. That is what is meant by being able to speak in all languages; they proclaimed one religion for all people.

And that is the most beautiful thought of Pentecost; one religion for all people. You see, the thing that has done the most harm to people is always fanaticism in religion, the exclusiveness in religion, that you have Christianity and Buddhism and Judaism and all sorts of things. Why is it that you have so many religions? That you have so many religions comes from the fact that these religions are earth religions, real earth religions.

What do I mean by that when I say: earth religions? Now, you see, there is a time when we go back, let's say – it's 1923 today – to the time when I told you that Christ Jesus lived in Palestine, so at the turn of the age. Now we go further back, let's say, to the year 3500 before Christ Jesus, so back to ancient times, there are people down there in Egypt who also spoke of their God about 3000 or 3500 years before Christ, only in old words. They called him Ra, for example. They spoke of their god, but they said: the god is in the city of Thebes, for example, and in the city of Thebes there was a kind of building with a special artistic, tomb-like structure. The god lived in there. That was the oldest form of worship, that he was in a certain place.

Yes, gentlemen, if someone lived where we live today, he probably did not say: the god is in Thebes; because that was something that not only could not be reached in ancient times, but of which nothing was known at all. They knew nothing of Thebes. So those who were down here, in Egypt, where the Nile flows, said: the god who lives in Thebes. And those who were here, in our area, they also had such local deities. For example, there was a local deity in what is now Alsace, or in Münster. So people worshiped God in a particular place. Yes, that is the reason why there are different religions: the Theban religion, the religion of Münster, the religion of Alsace. There the religions split.

And later, when people wandered more on earth, they could no longer accept any place for God, because then they would have contradicted themselves. They had migrated, and there they no longer accepted the place as God, but the man who led them. And so, gradually, the dignity of God passed to the emperor and the princes. For the people, the prince was emperor. Many princes arose.

You see, in Rome there was still something of this religion, in that the Romans still worshiped their emperor as a god.

But what was Christianity? Christianity said nothing of the sort. What is to be worshipped is not bound to a place on earth, not to a person on earth, but to the power of the sun, the sun's vitality, which the Christ has taken up in himself. And the sun is precisely universal. For no one in Europe can say that when the sun shines on his head it is a different sun from that of the Egyptians, the Chinese or the Australians. Those who truly recognize that the power of Christ comes from the sun must recognize the universal religion for all people.

It was the universal religion for all people, even if people did not always understand it. And it dawned on the disciples that the religion of the sun is there. This is expressed by the fact that they were able to speak in all languages. They were able to bring a religion of reconciliation and tolerance for all people. That is the idea of Pentecost. But as you know, the idea of Pentecost has not yet been fulfilled today. And it must be fulfilled. It must still become quite clear that what the Christ brought to Earth does not depend on a doctrine at all, but on a fact.

When today European missionaries come to an Indian or a Chinese, they demand of them that they believe in what is said about the Christ in Rome. The Indians or Chinese cannot bring themselves to do that, because it has been developed from European conditions. You cannot get people to do that. But if it were said as I have told you today, it could be understood all over the world. Because what applies to all people is the idea of Pentecost.

I have now tried to explain to you the idea of Ascension Day and the idea of Pentecost, which is what the Lord, who recorded the question, wanted to know. I also find it very fitting because today is the day before Ascension Day and in ten days the Pentecost follows. I was very happy to be able to tell you this.

Now I have to go to Norway. I will let you know when the next lecture will be. Goodbye.

Yesterday we spoke of the relation of the spiritual world to the physical world, as expressed by the actual facts which, in a sense work from one world into the other, in so far as the relation between them means something to life in the physical world, in so far as the filling of the soul with feelings and emotions gained through spiritual knowledge is essential and of significance for human life. Something of a general nature must now be added. Here in the physical world we acquire our ideas through our sense perceptions, through the feelings and emotions experienced when events of physical life touch us. Our conscious life in the physical world arises from all these things, and when we observe that life in the physical world, it seems to the vision of the spiritual investigator that in the main, the more this consciousness serves the physical plane the less are its chances of spiritual experiences in the spiritual world ever surrounding us. We may say: the more a man limits himself to his life of ideas and feelings, allowing these to be aroused by the physical plane alone, the less inner strength and power he possesses for gaining a real relationship with the spiritual world. Of course at first a person does not notice that reliance on merely physical ideas is a hindrance to the gaining of a relationship with the spiritual world; but he is compelled to notice it when he has passed through the gates of death; for if during earth-life a man has gained no conceptions beyond the excitements and requirements of the physical plane, his soul is too weak to adapt itself to the experiences of the spiritual world. This can easily be seen when we remember that all that excites us on the physical plane really storms in upon us and so approaches us that we allow ourselves to be captivated by it. Because we allow ourselves to be thus captivated, because we more or less yield ourselves to its influence, we develop too little power in our souls for the spiritual world to mean more to us than a weak dreamy world in which we can neither stir nor move. In order to be able to move freely in that world, something else is needed: viz., that the soul should be inwardly alive, that it should have evolved within itself, by its own efforts, forces to which it had not been incited externally and in which it does not merely remain passive. Out of the depths of our souls such conceptions, such feelings must arise without any incitement from the external world,—however beautiful we may consider that world to be. I may say: Conceptions and feelings arising freely in the soul can alone make it strong enough to establish its own relationship with the spiritual world—a relationship which it needs.

In order that you may properly understand this, I should like to refer to something which is correct though a seeming paradox. Think of a person yielding entirely to the allurements of the physical plane. He thinks and feels only that which is aroused by the physical plane. Such a person is weak in the spiritual world; when he enters the spiritual world after death he can through his own powers only look upon the richness of spiritual life around him, he cannot bring the beings near to him, though he greatly needs them. Spiritual intercourse with them eludes him. Not that the spiritual world is absent, but he cannot find the clues which would bring him into direct relationship with it. Speaking paradoxically, a person who only fantastically arouses ideas and feelings in his soul which, though they are not aroused from outside, yet do not rise above the sense world—this person, who thinks out ideas in a fanciful way thereby produces forces in his soul, which give a free ascending development, and he in a certain sense, finds life in the spiritual world easier than one who will not think at all about spiritual things. It is very significant that we have to grant that visionaries who form conceptions that have nothing to do with outer sense realities, and are only fanciful; nevertheless stand firmer in the spiritual world than those who will not think about it at all. Naturally such fantastic ideas, though they help a man to stand firmly in the spiritual world, only lead him to strange spiritual conditions and relations such as a man would experience in the physical world if his senses were not functioning properly. All the grotesque, lower beings, useless for spiritual life, would come to the person who formed such fantastic concepts; while all that is progressive and helpful in spirit-life would appear before his soul in distorted shape, if it had only been prepared for spirit life by fantastic conceptions. In olden times, before the Mystery of Golgotha took its place in human evolution, conditions were such that human beings could only have conceptions aroused in them from the physical plane; even those ideas which appeared as clairvoyant conceptions were aroused in the physical body. This is the curious part of humanity's ancient clairvoyance; this clairvoyance, these symbolic plastic ideas, although wholly relating to the spiritual world, were aroused through the influences of the physical plane. So that if people had only devoted themselves to the kind of conceptions which reached the level of ancient clairvoyance, they would be in the position of human beings, who look into the spiritual world by means of fantastic conceptions. In order that humanity might have a sound healthy insight into the spiritual world and develop the right relations with it, the various founders of religions appeared in antiquity, Laotze, Zarathustra, Krishna, Buddha, etc. these were very great benefactors of humanity. They appeared to their age and to their peoples, speaking to them of these secrets of the spiritual worlds, and so speaking of these secrets that the manner of their speaking was inspired by immediate impulses which came to them as Initiates and founders of religion out of the spiritual world itself. Through their mighty authority they influenced the people to whom they had a spiritual mission. Thus the people did not receive into their souls merely what came to them and stirred them on the physical plane, but also what was sent as a message from the spiritual worlds. These ancient peoples had the capacity of sensing and feeling when such a founder of religion appeared to them—or when one of his successors and disciples appeared; they perceived the breath of spiritual life which streamed through the soul of such a founder, flowing down from spiritual heights into the evolution of the people and the epoch. Thus to the people of antiquity were given thoughts and feelings which were put into their souls by the founders of religion, but which had to be re-awakened by each human being himself (because each was under the influence of the teacher's authority), each had to bring them to active life in his own soul. In this way arose healthy conditions and relationships for human beings in the spiritual worlds, and also the possibility of knowing where they were after they had passed through the gates of death; of possessing the forces which cannot be found in the external physical world, but must be awakened in the soul of the individual himself; of possessing those forces which enable a man to live in the spiritual world, just as by his physical forces he is able to live in the physical world. Since the Mystery of Golgotha many changes have taken place for humanity in this respect. This is precisely the significance of the Mystery of Golgotha; it closes the old epoch of human evolution and begins the new. We can say the old evolution had to be built on authority, as we have just described; on the authority of the religion-founders. But because these souls (our own souls) have in earlier incarnations been through the school of authority, they have become responsible or have come of age let us say; so that now, in the incarnations which have run their course since the Mystery of Golgotha, those impulses which formerly had to be received on authority are now received inwardly. Not only are conceptions now formed inwardly but also our impulses come from within. This is what St. Paul's words mean: ‘Not I, but Christ in me’; that is the meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha. The Christ-Impulse has flowed into the spiritual substance of the earth, and lives in each soul. Souls must learn to understand this Christ-Impulse, which is to be found in the human soul. Humanity has come ‘of age.’ Impulses which formerly had to come from without, must now spring up within. For this reason Christ came to earth. Greater and greater must our understanding of this Christ become. What we gather from our anthroposophical knowledge, what we try to understand about the evolution of the world and of humanity, about the higher worlds and the Hierarchies in those worlds, really brings us at the last to understand more and more the Christ-Impulse which is within us, but which may also remain hidden within us, as do many other things which we do not attempt to understand or to experience. In a certain respect Spiritual Science is a means of attaining what must be reached—of really finding in our souls that which is the Light of Life, the Inner Warmth of life; that Light and Warmth which will lead humanity to its spiritual home, and which is revealed in the soul. In future evolution, human souls will gradually realize that it is simply an abstract idea to speak of ‘the God within,’ if the soul is too easy-going to concern itself with the understanding of the teachings of Spiritual Science. How do we to-day regard the spiritual world in its reality? All that has been written about Spiritual Science, about Saturn, Sun, and Moon, the evolutionary epochs of earth, about the heavenly Hierarchies and all that the spiritual investigator knows and says about the spiritual world, all this he ultimately realizes is a gift to him through the Christ-Impulse which has entered earth evolution. He realizes this Christ-Impulse in such a way that he sees the truth of Christ's words, ‘I am with you always, even to the end of the earth-period.’ Not only at the beginning of our epoch did Christ say this; if we noisy open our souls to Him He is saying it now, here, and in our Spiritual Science, which we must try to spread all over the world. Therefore it is so very necessary that present-day souls should understand that Spiritual Science is the suitable way and the right path into the spiritual worlds for our time. Humanity having come ‘of age’ must consciously develop thoughts and feelings, must seek step by step, of its own powers and not by external authority, to enter the spiritual worlds. Christ has come into the world that humanity may be able to do this. Even though many assert to-day that Spiritual Science must be believed because it is taught by the spiritual investigator—this is not true. If anyone thinks he must believe what Spiritual Science says, without understanding it by the efforts of his own soul-faculties, these only shows that he has not laid aside the prejudices of his materialistic thinking. Anyone who, with a truly open mind, approaches the most daring teachings of Anthroposophy can understand and grasp them. Souls have not passed through their former incarnations in vain; they can find within their souls the inward spiritual language wherewith to understand what the spiritual investigators say. Of course if these souls allow their minds to become clouded, as they are to-day, not by a true Natural Science but by a mistaken outlook on nature, if they allow mist upon mist to accumulate before their spiritual eyes and then say: ‘We do not understand Anthroposophy, we must only believe its statements,’ this does not mean that Anthroposophy cannot really be understood, for it happens that in such a case people create their own hindrances to it. We live in an age when most people never notice how many hindrances there are and how these hindrances can block their path; but we also are living in a century which unconsciously, from its as yet chaotic soul-force, rises in revolt against these hindrances, when longings are arising in the souls of men for an understanding of the spiritual worlds.

Truly of tremendous importance is the work accomplished by Natural Science during the last few centuries, and our friends know how often I emphasize the great significance of the triumphs of Natural Science, and how I compare the present and future work of Anthroposophy with what Natural Science has discovered, especially during the nineteenth century; but we must bear in mind that this Natural Science has become much more dogmatic than the old religions. To-day, people—and mostly those who take up Natural Science as amateurs—stick to dogmas more rigidly and seriously than was the case with the old religious dogmas. Truly the Copernican views represented a great swing of the pendulum; they had to come, they were a step towards the truth, as I have often said; but, they too are in many respects one-sided and must be completed by a spiritual conception of the Universe. If they are held as dogmatically as they are being expressed if it is said that they are absolutely true, they will then force concepts into men's souls which will prevent them from understanding and grasping Spiritual Science. We can even now see the effects of these dogmatic assertions. In our present age of compulsory education children are taught from their earliest years to imagine the sun with the earth revolving around it, also the planets, just as one forms an imagination, if one has in front of one a model. But no one has any right to picture it thus, as if these things were absolute certainties; as though one were able to place a chair in Cosmic space, set oneself down, and from it watch the movements of Sun, earth, and planets as one looks at a model which one sets up in the schoolroom. In these children's souls a consciousness is awakened that the facts really are such. People are amazed when we speak of these matters. Other things are also experienced today, which are false when looked at in another light. During the last few days an apparently very aspiring man sent me a pamphlet. Nothing shall be said here as to whether its contents were right or wrong, but this pamphlet is one proof among many others, of the way in which the human soul revolts against the dogmatism of the Natural Science of the last century; for this writer tries to prove mathematically that the earth is flat, not round. Of course this assertion seems very absurd in our age, and you will naturally say: ‘But a man can easily sail right round the world, therefore the man who says the earth is flat and not round must be a fool.’ The man who wrote the pamphlet knew this however. We need not agree with him, but he knew this and many another valid objections, I assure you. By all this I am only trying to show that in our day souls are already beginning to rise in revolt against all the dogmatic Natural Science stuff which has been piled up in their souls from earliest childhood and which hinders them from exercising the free, judgment which is necessary for the recognition of anthroposophical truths. When humanity has set itself free from dogma, then—yes then, the time will come when we can speak of spiritual scientific knowledge and it will be said; I see that it could not be otherwise. You see, much that is paradoxical must be said now in speaking of the relation of Spiritual Science to our age. Spiritual Science, however, has gradually to flow into human souls, so that they may become ever greater and greater factors in the spiritual civilization of humanity as it progresses into the future. Anthroposophy itself will be able to strengthen them, so that these souls will be enabled to find their links with the spiritual world. Spiritual Science will be welcomed by human beings, will be gradually received by the youngest and they will know: ‘Around me are not only mountains, rivers, clouds, stars, sun, moon, planets, animals and minerals, but also spiritual beings, beings of the higher Hierarchies, and spiritual events, even -as we have around us physical events and processes. I have relationship with both spiritual and physical processes.’

Let me picture a few things which will gradually be more understood by human souls when Spiritual Science becomes a living factor in the soul of man.

In speaking of these things we must start with concrete facts of spiritual research, for they best show man's relation to the spiritual world.

I know a man who, in his twenty-third or twenty-fourth year, had a kind of vision. He wrote about this vision in a clumsy way, we may even say stupidly. The vision was this: He placed into a sort of scene, very awkwardly, the more important spirits of the German intellectual period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; he did not know why he arranged it so-everything that Goethe, Lessing, Schiller, Herder were doing—but they were doing it after they had already passed to the world to which a human enters after death. Thus he had a vision of these great men living in the spiritual world he saw in his vision what they were now doing. As Spiritual Scientists we must ask: ‘What does such a vision signify? What does it show us?’ It shows the soul as having been greatly permeated by certain influences from the spiritual world, they press into it and become as it were a great dream, which expresses itself in such a way that the soul sees in vision, though indistinctly, its own inner feelings and impressions. Influences work into the soul from the spiritual world. How do they work? What is the actual relationship of the human soul to the beings of the spiritual world, for even the dead are beings in the spiritual world during the period between death and a new birth? What is this relationship? Well, we see an object in the physical world if we look at it—that is the right expression to use; I see the rose, I see the table. It is, however, not right to speak in the same way when referring to spiritual beings. It is not correct. The expression is not quite accurate if we say: I see a being belonging to the ranks of the Angels or Archangels. The expression is not correct; it must be put in a different way. As soon as a human being enters the spiritual world and there has feelings and experiences, instead of his seeing the beings there, they look at him; he is aware of them. He feels the quiet soothing influence of their spiritual senses and forces, which illuminate and resound in his own soul. And we must actually say of the spiritual world, ‘It is not I who see or perceive, but I know that I am seen, that I am perceived.’ Can you feel the change of experience indicated here? When, instead of using the words as in the physical world: ‘I perceive something,’ the other words receive a meaning: ‘Placed as I am in the spiritual world, I am perceived from all sides, that is now my life.’ The ‘Ego’ knows of this ‘being perceived,’ of this ‘being carried away by the experiences which other beings have with me.’ When this change takes place, you have an inkling of what a different relation the soul has to its environment when it rises from the physical into the spiritual world. It will then dawn upon you that a soul's experience is actually different when it passes from the physical to the spiritual world. A part of the task given to the dead is, to turn their glances earthwards, towards those still living; that they may, with their spiritual forces observe them; that those still living on earth may be perceived by the souls of the dead. Humanity will learn through Spiritual Science the meaning of the words: ‘Those who have passed through the gates of death see me; they send their forces down to me.’ Human beings will thus learn to speak of the dead as alive, as spiritually living. The one who had the vision described, realized this relation, though very dimly—for truly Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Herder are not inactive after death; in the spiritual they occupy themselves with those who are still on earth; they watch them, perceive them, stimulate them, according to the measure of the forces they receive from the higher Hierarchies. Thus the man who had this vision felt, without being conscious of the feeling, that he was watched by the spirits who had been sent to aid the evolution of humanity. This may not have been clear, but it expressed itself in the vision which he then put into awkward words, saying that Lessing ‘like a marshal in the spirit world went first,’ followed by Goethe, Schiller and Herder, leading and guiding their successors living on earth.

When such a vision, arising chaotically and as if in a dream, presents itself clearly to the soul, it may mean something for the dreamer; it may mean for instance that his consciousness is directly stirred from the spiritual world so that he can rise to the thought: ‘What I say and do, I will so say and do that I can endure the dead looking down upon me.’ It may also happen that a person living on earth, who is inwardly aroused by a similar vision, feels some task to lie before him, whether small or great, and his power, courage, and energy will be strengthened, his conscience will become easier when he has come to the right conclusion and imagines: ‘The dead are helping me, by watching me.’

Thus can the dead help the living? Through anthroposophy, we learn to feel the responsibility of our actions towards the dead and we may also have the happy feeling: ‘While I am doing this or that, my dead friend with his active power is watching me, and his force is added to mine.’ Not that he gives us the strength—which we must develop ourselves; he does not give us our faculties, those we must already possess; but he is a real help as if he were standing just behind us. He really does stand there. I shall give you a concrete example: for after we have for so long carried on together this anthroposophical work, we may bring forward such examples; perhaps they may sound personal, but they are meant quite impersonally, they set forth only facts and may on that account be mentioned as examples.

In Munich we tried for many years to perform the Mystery Plays, and so arrange the scenes that spiritual force might stream through them into this side of our movement. I am conscious that at any rate the really essential things which were done, those which really mattered, were in complete accord with the spiritual world. Over and over again I went to my work in those days, when the plays were being prepared for the stage, with a definite consciousness. At the commencement of our anthroposophical activity, when we were quite a small society, there was a person among us who was very enthusiastic about Spiritual Science; a person who besides working with quiet enthusiasm in all that could be done in the beginning as regards anthroposophy, introduced into its whole management a wonderfully beautiful and artistic understanding and interest. She was a person who united great kindliness of personal action with great seriousness in her spiritual views. She was soon taken from us, from the physical plane. Not only does she remain what is usually called ‘never to be forgotten’ by us, but she became what a human individual can become, who, by dint of circumstances, is able only in the spiritual world to build up what in physical life has been so beautifully prepared and begun here with many latent powers that she is able to develop in the spiritual world. Many years can be thus spent and many years passed in this case, until the possibility was unfolded, as it were out of a sort of chrysalis condition, for this person to link herself with what was germinating here in the physical world. As if through destiny, it happened that she entered upon a free spiritual life in the spiritual world, a life which had acquired this wonderful power of working, just when we had to undertake our staging, when Karma had led us to that point. Of course we had to bring our own powers and spiritual faculties to the work, but, just as no matter how strong the spiritual powers at our disposal, we must bring our physical abilities to bear when we have physical tasks to accomplish, so must certain forces intervene from the spiritual world, when we have spiritual work to do. Spiritual help, spiritual support must come to us; it comes also to those who cannot see into spiritual worlds, although they are unconscious of it, for we are always being influenced and helped by the spiritual world. In the case of which I speak, it is a fact that I always had the consciousness that the individual to whom I refer was watching over and helping us. We felt this watching as a strengthening force; as a kindling of warmth in our souls, enabling us to carry out our task.

Thus must we describe the way in which the spiritual worlds and the beings living in them—among whom are our dead—work with us in the physical world, and how true is the saying: ‘We are perceived by those in the spiritual world who have developed connections with us.’

There will come a time when human life will be enriched through such events as we have indicated when we shall not merely possess memory pictures in our minds of our dead friends, but shall feel them as real helpers in our undertakings. The souls of our dead will then live on in our consciousness, the consciousness of the human being on earth; although it may seem that the relationship is cut off by death. We can quite understand that this is now only possible for the few, and can understand why. It is because spiritual scientific development is only at its beginning; it has not yet produced in souls the capacities and powers that can act freely.

The road to such conceptions as I have mentioned may be the following: it certainly will be so for many souls in the future. We may think of the dead, while at our daily work here on earth. We may awaken in our souls all the love we had for them, and one day the moment will certainly come, it need not be in a vision—truly it need not be in a vision—when an impression comes to us: ‘Yes the one who died is helping me, as if he were working through my hands and fingers, as if he kindled my ardor for the work. I feel his force within me.’ This clear feeling that spiritual influences work down from spiritual worlds is a fruit, a real living fruit, which comes to souls through Spiritual Science.

Now let us think of the great enrichment that will come to human lives when they are not only aware of what is revealed to their senses, but also have the consciousness impressed upon them (not necessarily in vision) in all their physical work and undertakings: ‘While you are busy and at work, this or that dear one who had been your helper or your protector in life, shields you, helps you still, through powers he did not possess in his physical life, but for which he could only prepare here to be able to exercise them in the spirit world.’ Truly, even as our physical health is refreshed when we inhale the fresh morning air, so will human souls feel refreshed for their spiritual life by breathing in the protecting help they will then be able to perceive and feel coming to them, or even from the gaze directed towards them by the beings in the spiritual worlds. We are looking into a future of humanity which is to be prepared by the culture of Spiritual Science, and which will be much richer than the present life of man. Man will, however, need this enrichment from the spiritual world—for have we not said the old dreamy clairvoyance of antiquity was stimulated in the physical body—but the physical body has changed. It is now only suited for giving to human beings their physical thoughts, thoughts aroused on the physical plane. We must acquire thoughts about the spiritual world through Spiritual Science. Ever less will be the knowledge of spiritual worlds which can be gained by man from the physical plane, the physical body will become more powerless; and as all that is physical originates in the spiritual, and the longing of the soul for a real connection with the spiritual world will become greater and greater.

In olden times something was given to man by his physical nature which flashed into his soul as it were from the workings of his physical body, so that he became clairvoyant. Now we may say: the time has come when human beings will gradually know more of spiritual things, and these must be ever more and more brought down from the spiritual worlds, but the transition must not pass unnoticed. We must gain knowledge of the path which leads into the spiritual world through Anthroposophy. We must not evade the difficulties and inconveniences which a soul may feel when it seeks step by step for knowledge of what happens in the spiritual worlds. It is perhaps very uncomfortable to strain our intellect, our powers of reason, our sense of truth, sufficiently; but we must face this inconvenience. The anthroposophical movement, to which we belong, exists for this. Anthroposophy must gradually cause us to see: By their repeated earth-lives human souls are moving forward, they are being changed; and we are living in the age when human beings must go into the spiritual worlds with understanding. It would not be right if in our Society in particular there were not a growing understanding for the fact, that a man who, without having experienced Spiritual Science, still has the old clairvoyant powers arising out of his body, cannot stand higher than one who with intellectual ideas and understanding learns of what can be communicated about spiritual worlds. Human beings are so easily deceived, led away by their sense of ease not to try to exert their soul's activity, not to strain their powers of perception and observation. Naturally these must be exerted if we wish to live in the spirit of Anthroposophy, but humanity is tempted not to make these efforts. Therefore people are gradually forced to value more highly the mental and psychic forces arising as if out of the body, stimulated by the hidden bodily forces. Indeed we may actually hear people say: ‘What you are trying to make comprehensible about the spiritual worlds is not what we are really seeking, we are not impressed by it; we want to experience the incomprehensible.’ People are much more inclined to accept what cannot be understood than to exert themselves to seek what can be grasped spiritually. This then leads to the fact that there exists what we may call a complete misunderstanding of the true spiritual task of the present; if any one comes forward possessing natural psychic powers without anthroposophical training, people say he is very wonderful, and they put a special halo round his head. Because, they say, we do not know whence his powers come, because he has not been trained through Spiritual Science, and has not made efforts, therefore his powers are so very valuable; another world makes itself evident in our world through him. Truly our Movement would not reach its goal if it did not soon overcome this prejudice. We can often hear it said: This or that man must be the reincarnation of a great individual; he must have been so and so, because he possesses these forces, these chaotic psychic forces, without having worked for them in the present life by means of a really active struggling soul-life. Rather we ought to feel sure that the man who reveals such psychic forces within himself, is a backward soul; one who has remained behind at an earlier stage of evolution, and who must be raised and nurtured in the present age through Spiritual Science. Those who have had the most important incarnations in earlier times, appear to-day more like one of whom we shall be speaking tomorrow, the anniversary of Christian Morgenstern's death, as having powers which, unfortunately, are less valued perhaps by many than is a kind of chaotic psychism, but which are fruits of much higher spiritual forces, even though to-day they are represented as of little value, because they are not understood.

In these two lectures I have attempted partly from concrete facts to put before you a picture of the interpenetration of the spiritual world into the physical, and the working of the physical world into the spiritual. I have tried to show you how unjustifiable it is for people to say that it is useless to trouble about the spiritual world while living on the physical plane. I have tried to show how the very reason why our physical life cannot be understood is that we are not conscious of the concrete inter-working of the spiritual world into our physical world. Not that we receive our knowledge from the spiritual world alone—that is not the point; this knowledge has to be there, we must make it our own because it is truth revealed to us from spiritual worlds and is the key to the understanding and experiencing of the world. This knowledge must, however, lead us to an inner mood, an inner feeling, a kind of ‘knowing oneself to be within the spiritual world.’ Then through the new Spiritual Science there comes into our souls what such an important spirit as Fichte said, and which I have mentioned in a public lecture and shall repeat here. There comes into our souls that at which Fichte could do no more than hint. I know that I speak in the same sense as he did when I add a few words to his, for the understanding of which he still works, from out the spiritual worlds. Thus said the great philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, during his earth life:

The super-earthly will not come to me only when I have lost my connection with earth life. Even now I live in the supersensible world, in it I live a truer life than I do in the sense-world, it is my only firm standpoint; and in that I possess the supersensible world, I possess that for the sake of which alone I would like to continue my life on earth.

‘What you call heaven,’ says Fichte ‘does not only lie on the other side of the grave. It is everywhere around us in Nature, and springs up in every loving heart.’ ‘Now,’ we understand Fichte to mean, as he speaks to us from the spiritual world.

Anthroposophy, as it blossoms in this age and is to become a germ within humanity, shall be the light which strengthens the feelings and emotions for the spiritual life which springs forth in every loving heart. The loving heart will increasingly beget longings for the spiritual world, and Anthroposophy will more and more have to demand this light from the spiritual world for its own possession.

In saying this we are certainly speaking in agreement with those who have died before us, who longed for the spiritual world. While lifting ourselves up into this world, we are truly in harmony with the Cosmic Wisdom which governs human evolution, in so far as we can understand and recognize it with our human powers.

Yesterday I endeavored to show how what is to be presented here about Goethe's innermost and most intimate opinion and view of the development of the human soul can be gained and that nothing in his works and especially in his Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily is arbitrary, that nothing has been arbitrarily secreted into it. I have tried to show how the whole basis for the explanation of the “fairytale” and Goethe's world view can be gained from an historical consideration of Goethe's life, from the historical pursuit of Goethe's most important ideas and impulses. An attempt has been made to substantiate what is to be given on the subject today in a more freely formulated way.

If we allow the fairy tale we discussed yesterday to come to mind, it does indeed seem to us to be completely immersed in mystery, and one might say: either we have to assume that Goethe wanted to incorporate many, many secrets into this fairy tale, as in Faust, according to his own words, or that we could regard this fairy tale as a mere play of the imagination. If the latter were not already excluded by Goethe's whole way of thinking and being, one would have to say that such an assumption is particularly prohibited by the fact that Goethe placed this fairy tale at the end of his story “Conversations of German Emigrants”. For it is the same thought that is characteristic of Goethe's entire life, which also lies in his conversations with German emigrants, and from what immediately precedes it, we can once again take the theme for this fairy tale.

We are presented with the conversations of people who have been forced to emigrate due to events in their French homeland, which look back in the most diverse ways on their sad experiences. The whole story is focused on showing what people who have been uprooted from their environment can go through as a result of this uprooting, in terms of the loneliness of the soul; what people in this situation can gain by reflecting on their psychological experiences, by observing themselves. We can only highlight a few examples to show how Goethe wanted to focus everything on revealing how the soul that wants to observe itself, that asks: What kind of guilt have I accumulated, how have I blocked the paths to development? First of all, we meet an Italian singer who is to reveal her destiny to us because in this destiny a human soul appears before us that must cling to the surface of the world view, which, although it follows what is going on around it attentively because it is forced to do so by is forced by the processes of life to do so, but is not yet mature enough to distinguish between what may be called chance and the spiritual necessity of things, a soul that does not know how the phenomena of life must be connected, if we assume the spirit in the environment. She has behaved towards a man in such a way that he has become seriously ill as a result of her repulsive manner and is dying because of her behavior. She is summoned to his deathbed, but she refuses to come. He dies without having seen her. After his death, all kinds of things happen that give the soul just described food for thought. 'How should I behave towards this?' she wonders. After the man's death, something very strange happens. She hears very strange things in the room, the furniture dances, she is slapped in the face by an invisible hand, and she is always forced to ask herself: Is the dead man somehow there, wanting to assert himself because I refused him? The top of a cupboard bursts, and at the same moment a cupboard in her own apartment in France, made by the same carpenter, goes up in flames. Goethe did not want to express that there was anything in such events that could give rise to the assumption of hidden spirits or the coming of the dead, but he only wanted to say that there could be such spirits that interpret all kinds of events in such a way that they are not sufficiently superstitious to say that the dead are certainly rumbling; they only come into an indefinite feeling and cannot get over it. What happens to the souls in the outside world according to their level of development is what Goethe wants to draw attention to. He then shows how one comes to the position of healing a lady from sensuality and passion; he takes the path of asceticism. This is again an indication of what the soul can go through in order to experience development. Goethe then leads upwards in stages. First a soul digging in the dark, then a more real thing in the lady just described, because many come to a cleansing of their soul through fasting. We are already entering more into a reality. And through the third of the things mentioned by Goethe, we enter completely into reality. He shows how a person is initially somewhat unscrupulous, he is in a subordinate soul development and says: What belongs to my father also belongs to me. He commits theft. Then conscience awakens, the soul rises, and precisely through the unrighteous deed he becomes a kind of moral center for all the people around him. He shows a soul development that signifies an ascent from a subordinate level to a higher level of knowledge and world view.

We are dealing with soul forces that are represented by the figures, the beings of the “fairytale”, and with the play of soul forces that is to be purified into harmony, into a symphony of soul forces in the deeds that the persons perform. At first we are confronted with will-o'-the-wisps that are ferried across the river by a ferryman. These will-o'-the-wisps are initially filled with gold, but the ferryman does not want their gold as a reward because everything would end in wild tumult. He much prefers to have fruits of the earth: three cabbages, three artichokes and three large onions. The will-o'-the-wisps have the ability to create a golden haze around themselves. They meet the snake, the aunt of the horizontal direction. For her, the gold is fertile and beneficial. She becomes inwardly radiant through the gold pieces. She can now illuminate what she could not see before.

When I tried more than twenty years ago to gain access to this fairy tale in every possible way, it was above all a rewarding thought in the tangle of questions of the “fairy tale” when it became clear that above all one had to follow the gold. Gold plays a role in different ways. The will-o'-the-wisps scatter it around. There it is not something blessed in a certain respect. In the snake, it becomes beneficial. Then we encounter gold again in the golden king, on the walls of the hut of the old man with the lamp; the will-o'-the-wisps lick it down, making themselves thicker. Once we are pointed to the human soul quality that gold has something to do with when we are pointed out that the golden king represents the giver, the bringer of wisdom. Goethe himself tells us: the golden king, in comparison to the others, represents the giver of wisdom. So gold must have something to do with wisdom. Gold is what makes the king wise, what enables him to endow the youth with wisdom:

Recognize the Most High!

Gold is something that the giver of wisdom is able to instill in man. The will-o'-the wisp must therefore represent the powers of the soul that are capable of receiving wisdom and that can also shake wisdom off. It must be shown how the gold can be stored; it is stored for a long, long time in the walls of the hut. We will have no choice but to see soul forces in individual persons, because we know how well it is founded. We can describe the will-o'-the-wisps as the abstract mind, the abstract thinking, which is capable of acquiring a certain amount of wisdom. Now we also understand why knowledge in the pure power of reason plays such a role in will-o'-the-wisps. Those who absorb what science is with their bare minds absorb it in order to have something personal about it, in order to be able to use it personally.

Goethe often congratulates himself on not officially representing science as a teacher. He congratulated himself on being able to give of his wisdom to the world only when he was inwardly compelled to do so, rather than being forced to cast it aside, as is necessary when one is destined to be a teacher or mere abstract dispenser of wisdom. Goethe presents such people in the will-o'-the-wisps, who have abstract knowledge. The abstract intelligence can absorb a vast amount of knowledge, but it leads to vanity. It is also spoken in Goethe's sense: However cleverly we think, however many abstract concepts we have, as long as we have ideas that are not drawn from the depths of life, they are unsuitable for ultimately leading us into the secrets of the eternal riddle of existence. Where we need something that goes straight to the heart of the eternal ideas of existence, we need something other than abstract concepts. When we come to the boundary of the physical world and the realm of spirituality, we are repelled by all abstract concepts and ideas. Indeed, all these abstract concepts and ideas are not even capable of making us understand, so to speak, what is closest to us. How far removed the abstraction is from even the most mundane things that surround us. It is incapable of giving anything to the stream through which we must pass if we want to enter the supersensible world. And if we want to approach the very source of life, it rears up when we come up with mere intelligence. The will-o'-the-wisps are from the vertical line, while the snake is from the horizontal line. This indicates that man, with abstract ideas, removes himself from the ground, from the ground of everyday life. We see how vividly the will-o'-the-wisps are formed. But are ideas and concepts, philosophical expositions, under all circumstances that which separates us from the true source of existence? No, it is not that; for if man has the ability to live in such a way that he combines his own life forces with things, that he does not rise up into the realm of abstract concepts and ideas, but moves quietly in things, such a spirit becomes, as Faust is one when he says:

Exalted Spirit, thou gavest me, gavest me everything
I asked for. Thou didst not in vain
Turn thy face to me in the fire.
Gavest me the glorious nature of a kingdom,
The power to feel and enjoy it. Thou dost
You only allow coldly amazed visitors,
Allow me to look into their deep chests,
As into the bosom of a friend,
You lead the line of the living
Before me and teach me my brothers
In the silent bush, in air and water.

Where man truly enters into communion with nature, the same concepts that alienate him from the world when he deals with abstractions serve him to penetrate ever deeper into existence. We must not simply turn around and say: because the abstractionist distances himself from reality, concepts and ideas are worthless in general. If there is a soul-power in them, which lives in and with things, then they become full of light at the same time. This is why gold becomes such a blessing for the snake, which lives in crevices and has a horizontal direction, and does not become alienated. When man loves things, when he mystically immerses himself in things, then ideas are the light that can help him through. Therefore, it can be experienced that sometimes scholastically presented philosophy seems frosty and sober. But when we encounter the same ideas in lonely nature lovers, in herb and root gatherers, and so on, we see how, in fact, in the serpents, in those who make contact with things, the ideas become full of light, which are sober in the abstractions. The snake thus points to the power of the soul, which has the mystical urge to submerge itself mystically in things everywhere. This is represented when the snake moves through the crevices. Man, who does not move in abstract things, comes close, like the snake, to the underground temple. If a person has a sense for the mysterious workings of the forces of nature, he comes to the heart of nature; he can experience something of what lives outside in nature in things, even if he does not have the ideas. The snake shows us the people who can live without ideas in an emergency, but who, by lovingly immersing themselves in things, come to grasp the riddles of the world. But when a balance is created, in that ideas and concepts are immersed in these mystical soul forces, then it comes about that the person who is lovingly inclined towards things can also illuminate with his own light what was previously only sensed from the sources of existence. Goethe says meaningfully:

If the eye were not solar,
How could we behold the light?
If not the divine power of God lives in us,
How can we be enraptured by the divine?

He immediately points out how we must respond to the light of nature's secrets if these secrets of nature are to shine back again. Man must have the inner sense, the open heart, he must have cultivated the recognition of the spiritual. Only then can he also see the spiritual in his environment. Then the snake enters the underground temple. Such underground places exist for the life of the soul. These things can only be characterized if they go into the strange workings of the human soul in development in a little more detail. Can it be felt that before the soul is able to perceive the spirit in the outer world, it has the inner certainty: Yes, there is a primary source from which everything flows? It can have this certainty and still not be able to see the spirit everywhere. Oh, it is a great goal to see the spirit everywhere. [Feeling: I myself have emerged from the spiritual. To do this, man must awaken.] Man must first develop the highest soul powers within himself. He must first evoke in himself the supersensible that sleeps in ordinary, normal consciousness. First he must ascend to higher levels of development.

First, the human being must have an inkling that something like this exists. Then he comes to another realization: I can only achieve my ultimate goal if I see how my whole existence is permeated by the spirit. I have been crystallized, born out of the spiritual, out of the supersensible, without my being involved in this birth out of the supersensible, which I can ultimately achieve through knowledge. In a mysterious way I am born out of the land that I can only reach again in the end. This characterizes the land of the beautiful lily, from which man also comes. The ferryman brings him over. Man is brought over by secret powers. The ferryman who brings to this shore must never bring anyone back again. The same real way by which we are brought over from the supersensible through birth cannot be the way by which we consciously return. Other paths must be taken.

Then the will-o'-the-wisps ask the snake how they can enter the realm of the beautiful lily, that is, how a single soul force can ascend to the highest. Two means are indicated: firstly, when the snake crosses the river at noon. But the will-o'-the-wisps do not like to travel there. It is quite beyond the scope of the Abstract Being, who wants to live entirely in ideas and inferences, to cross over in the way represented by the snake, through devotion to things, through mystical communion with things. This mystical communion cannot always be achieved. A great mystic of the Alexandrian school confesses that he has only achieved a few moments in which the spirit of the infinite has entered the soul, where the God in the breast is experienced by the human being himself. These are moments at midday when the sun of life is at its highest, when something like this can be experienced. For the Abstractlings, who say to themselves: Once you have the right thinking, it must lead to the highest, such midday hours of life, which one must await as a grace of life, are not hours in which they can travel; for them, what they are looking for must be achievable at any time. Then the snake points out to them that the shadow of the giant, who is powerless by himself, will fall across the river, and that is when they can cross over. If we want to understand the giant, we must bear in mind that Goethe was well aware of the powers of the soul that lie below the threshold of consciousness, which in the normal person only emerge in dreams, but which belong to the subordinate clairvoyant powers. These are powers that are not acquired through the development of the soul, but that occur particularly in primitive souls in intuitions, second sight, in all that is connected with less advanced souls, from which a primitive clairvoyance emerges.

Through such clairvoyant powers, man arrives at some notions of supersensible worlds. Many people today still prefer to come to the supersensible world through such intuitions or through spiritualistic shadow images than through the actual development of the soul. Everything that belongs to the realm of the subconscious, to the realm of the soul, that is not illuminated by clear understanding, by the light of insight, of self-control, everything that expresses itself like dream-like knowledge, is represented by the giant. In truth, one can recognize nothing through this consciousness, for it is very weak compared to real knowledge. It is something that one cannot control. It is best personified by a person who cannot carry weight, because through this realization nothing can be recognized that has weight for a worldview. But the shadow of this subconscious plays a great role in life. Only one word needs to be said to characterize this shadow: superstition. If countless people did not have superstition, the shadowy image of the subconscious that operates in the twilight of knowledge, they would have no idea of the supersensible world. For countless people today, superstition is still the shadow of the subconscious that leads into the supersensible. I need only emphasize how people can say that Theosophy, spiritual science, is something that only those people can grasp who put a lot of effort into raising the soul to a higher level. That is an uncomfortable thing. If the spirits want to be there for us, they should descend to us. This is where all the abundant superstitions in the field of modern superstition come from, which even today scholars pay homage to, who absolutely do not want to admit that the soul can become part of the spiritual through development. They are readily available to a medium who can give them some gift from the spiritual world. This is not to say that these things cannot be based on truth, but the distinction between error and truth is extremely difficult here and only possible for the initiated.

Goethe wants to point out this shadow of the subconscious, this realm in the human soul, but not like a polemicist, which Goethe never was. Goethe is clear that every power of the soul has its significance at its level; he even finds it useful here to have the snake give advice to the will-o'-the-wisp. But superstition plays a major role in drawing attention to and directing the human mind to the supersensible world. Goethe, who wanted to depict the entire spectrum of the soul's powers in their symphonic harmony, shows how this superstition has its good basis in the soul, in the powers that do not always come up with sober, clear concepts, but say to themselves, the things are rich, we just want to sense secrets for now, not frame them in sharp contours. This intuitive sense is something tremendously important that is to play a role in the overall consciousness and life of our soul development.

What was so clearly expressed in external nature for Goethe plays into the development at a higher level.

Goethe saw a certain law in all natural activity like a leitmotif. It is a law of balance that nature has a certain measure for all things and can give rise to all possible beings from unity. Goethe sought the law in all of nature in order to see in harmony everything that is embodied one-sidedly in the external world. When Goethe uttered this sentence, he was seen as just a poet, an amateur. The sentence only caused a stir when Cuvier, in his dispute with Geoffroy St. Hilaire, also drew attention to this law. Goethe, who lived in an understanding of nature that saw one-sidedness everywhere and wanted to grasp the whole by harmonizing the one-sided, also saw something in the soul that he wanted to combine by harmonizing. There are people who represent one-sided soul forces. The false prophets, who want to apply their wisdom everywhere, are the will-o'-the-wisps; then there are serpents and so on. He wanted to show that man can reach higher levels by representing the type of human being within himself. Thus, the sense that senses the supersensible in the sensible must be connected with abstract intelligence. One must not let the sober intelligence be subjugated by the sense, but nor should one emphasize the abstract concepts one-sidedly and refuse to understand how full of content is that which lives and moves in things. Goethe wanted to show how man can become one-sided, but how he must strive for the beautiful lily, for the inner, balancing human soul.

After the snake has received the inner glow, it enters the temple. The powers that must inspire the human soul give the strengths that man must have within him if he wants to ascend to higher existence. Goethe shows that there are certain powers of the soul that the soul must have if it is to ascend to higher levels. But if a person wants to attain the higher levels without having found the right path at the right time through inspiration, through the world powers, then this world view is something that can kill him, confuse him in his soul, paralyze him. Therefore, the youth who is not mature will be paralyzed at first, or even killed by complete exposure. So, what wants to free the mind without giving us control over ourselves, that has a killing effect, says Goethe. All our striving must be directed towards making us mature, towards shaping us so that the soul receives the highest in the right mood, in the right state. So the youth is killed at first. He is to be prepared by the endowment of soul powers by the kings. We have already seen from the golden king that he is the spiritual power that can be kindled in the soul and that gives wisdom in the right way when it harmonizes with the other soul powers. The silver king represents piety. For Goethe, beauty and the cult of art are closely related to piety. Beauty is that which makes us inwardly pious. The power of the soul that draws us through our feelings to the spiritual world is represented by the second king. The power of the soul of will [to do good] is represented by the brazen king.

But these soul powers must enter into the soul in such a way that we can distinguish them, that they enter into us in the right way, that we can master them, separate them; the life of feeling from the life of wisdom, and likewise the life of will from the life of feeling and the life of wisdom. These powers, which thus appear separately, condition the higher life of wisdom. The lower life is represented by the mixed king. Every human being has these three soul powers within them, but mixed. A higher age in the development of humanity will only begin when this chaotic mixing of soul forces ceases, when they are no longer mixed in such a chaotic way as in the fourth king, but are clearly separated from each other, with the area of soul power permeated with wisdom, and that permeated with beauty, and that permeated with the will to do good. Then the time comes when man may say to himself: “It is time.” Something else must precede this. A soul that has been led unprepared through wisdom, beauty and power would hardly see anything special.

Another soul force must guide us, which is represented by the man with the lamp. The lamp can only shine where there is already light. It is the light of faith that radiates from our hearts, even if we have not yet penetrated into things. It is what is brought as faith to things. It is a light that can only shine where there is already another light: religion can only generate faith where it is adapted to what people feel in a particular climate, in a particular cultural epoch, and so on. There the serpent, which wants to penetrate to wisdom, beauty and strength through the mere inner soul power, must encounter the light of faith that prepares the soul. Thus Goethe shows that the right time must approach, that first the soul must be guided by the light of faith, and that we can then come up to a direct grasp of the soul forces in being separate and in direct interaction. On this side of the river, then, man must prepare himself. On the other side it is shown how man, if he connects with the soul forces unprepared, damages his soul.

A strange figure is the old man's wife with the lamp, who is described as human, all too human, vain and so on, who is chosen to pay the ferryman with the fruits of the earth. This is primitive human nature, which has the power to be connected to the light of faith. We are shown: that the light shining from the lamp of the old man transforms stones into gold, wood into silver, dead animals into precious stones. The pug is transformed into a precious stone. This shows the power of faith, this very wonderful power of faith, oh, how it is able to show us all things in such a way that they really show us their divine in a certain way, show us what is in them. Dead stones turn to gold, showing themselves to be endowed with wisdom. Faith already senses this in things, how all things are not what they appear to us through the senses. This is shown by the transformation through the lamp. Man, when he remains in his healthy nature, when he cannot attain to science, has something within him that leads much more to the boundary of the supersensible. The scientist becomes a doubter, a skeptic, and one tries to see how certain some original nature, represented by the old woman, is able to give facts to the flow as the will-o'-the-wisps cannot. Such natures have an original feeling that connects them to the supersensible, which weaves and lives in everything; and one can see in such people how a compassionate smile appears when scientists talk, saying, we know something that you cannot know, that brings us together with what we are created from. This is shown by the fact that the woman can pay.

The temple must be transported from below the earth up into the upper realm, it must rise above the river. And it is conceivable that a soul has gone up the steps in such a way that it can experience, feel the midday moments of life; so that it is achieved through a higher soul development, that not only special spirits can cross the river. That is what is achieved in the new culture through spiritual science. And Goethe behaves like a prophet in the new culture by pointing out that not only special minds can find the transcendental realm, but that there is a soul development that everyone can undergo; so that everyone can walk over and across when what is the actual secret has occurred.

“How many secrets do you know?” – “Three,” replied the old man. “Which is the most important?” asked the silver king. “The obvious one,” replied the old man.

The expression “the revealed secret” often occurs in Goethe because, like all true mystics, he believed that the connection between the material and the spiritual is evident everywhere; therefore, it is not so important for man to seek the spiritual in all sorts of detours, but to really connect with things as the snake connects with them. The revealed secret of all three is that which can be found everywhere, and which requires only a certain maturity of soul. The three secrets are simply these: wisdom, piety and virtue. A fourth is still needed for this, the snake whispers into the old man's ear; the old man cannot know that. But he can know that it is now time. What does the snake say now? That she is willing to sacrifice herself to be a bridge over the river. There you have the whole secret of the sacrifice of the lower soul forces. You can find this sacrifice further in Goethe's words:

And so long as you do not have this,
this dying and becoming,
you are only a dull guest
on the dark earth.

First, a person must go through all that has led him through life. But what he has gained, what he has experienced through the lower soul life, he must be able to sacrifice in order to ascend.

Jakob Böhme, whom Goethe knew very well, expressed this secret beautifully:

He who does not die before he dies, will perish when he dies.

He who enters the supersensible world before he has died for the lower self would not yet be able in this embodiment to see correctly the spiritual after death.

He who does not die before he dies, will perish if he dies.

The soul protects itself from ruin in the lower self, says Goethe, when it becomes like the snake that sacrifices itself, that is, there is a soul force in us that can connect with the forces of nature and that must be sacrificed: that which, as lower selfishness, is necessary to achieve human freedom. Therefore, that which has led us becomes the way into the beyond. We enter the supersensible world through that which we have sacrificed ourselves. The will-o'-the-wisps are now able to unlock the door of the temple. Science has the key to the realm of the supersensible, but it cannot lead into the real secrets, because it only leads to the gate of the temple, just as Mephisto has only the key to the realm of the mothers, but cannot penetrate it himself. So we see how the will-o'-the-wisps actually fulfill their role to the end and how Goethe captures the meaning of soul development in each individual case.

What remains of religious belief? The tradition in our cultural processes. Go to the libraries, look up how much of the gold is stored there, and see how the abstractions lick the gold down and make new ones out of the old books, as a librarian once said. Goethe shows that the will-o'-the-wisps can feed on that. How many scholars walk around full of what comes straight from these sources. The pug dog dies from it, it makes him feel worse. But he can be revived by the lily, as he has passed through death. Whoever wants to endure contact with the lily must first have passed through the lower death. The youth is only ready to unite with the beautiful lily when he has suffered the last misfortune, is completely dead, has fully felt the effect of what happens when one unites with the supersensible while still immature. The snake sacrifices itself, which has an immediate effect on the details of natural existence. When all this has happened, the youth can then be led into the temple. Then the soul is led upwards to the realization that everything is permeated and animated by the spirit. Then the temple is led upwards, the soul endowed with that which leads to the supersensible. Wisdom gives him that which is characterized by:

Recognize the Highest

and by the oak wreath; the golden king gives that. The silver king says:

Feed the sheep,

in memory of the pious shepherd,

Feed my lambs;

is an expression of piety. The iron king gives him a sword and a shield and says:

The sword on the left, the right free!

Stand strong and firm on your feet when it comes to defending human dignity and human dignity, but do not be aggressive. Now the young man is allowed to connect with the lily. The powers of the soul may be illuminated with truth and love, which the soul only finds when it connects with the spirit. The young man feels the love, of which it is said last: wisdom, beauty, piety and virtue, they promote the development of the soul, love forms the soul, harmonizes everything. When man ascends into the temple in which knowledge can be experienced, he comes, in holy awe, to see, like a small temple in the great temple, the highest, the secret of man himself, who passes from the spiritual world into the world of this world. The ferryman's hut is placed as a small world in the great temple; when the soul advances to higher knowledge, then it attains what Goethe felt as Spinozian love of God, it comes to the riddles, the secrets of the world. But as the highest of the mysteries, as that which he in turn sees like a small temple in the great one, that is the mystery of the existence of man himself in connection with the divine being.

The giant comes last and becomes something like an hour hand that indicates the time. Our knowledge becomes spiritual, shedding all that is external consciousness as we ascend; all forces that work mechanically, that are a remnant of the subconscious. All this may remain only in one, when we look up at what is the most external for our inner being. Thus, the merely mechanical, which has not yet been elevated to higher knowledge, has a right to exist. Goethe could have had in mind all the superstitions that have been practiced with the art of numbers and all the prevailing beliefs from old worldviews. But one thing remains behind, to form a kind of chronometer for what knowledge gives it. Thus everything is transformed into a plastic image, right down to the last detail, which Goethe felt was the law of human education.

Today I was only able to explain the main features, but if you read the “fairy tale” with this in mind, you will find that every page, indeed every half-sentence, can be proof of its correctness. One can only hint at this symbolically, in richly symbolic images. We must be aware that what is contained in Goethe's “Fairytale” is infinitely richer than what could be said, and that everything said today is only a suggestion of how to search and feel about a symbolic fairy tale. It is not possible to give more than a hint. But perhaps you have gained a sense of the great and immeasurable productive power with which Goethe created, how right he was when he said that only beauty and art can be an expression of truth. This is also what lived as a conviction in Goethe and led him from stage to stage in restless pursuit. But this is also what led us so to Goethe. Goethe is one of those minds that work in a way that only the greatest minds can. You read a work by Goethe and think you have understood it. Each time you read it again later, you believe that you have finally understood it correctly. Finally, you say to yourself: I still don't understand it, I have to wait until I become more and more mature. This is only the case with the most exquisite minds. This assures us that in Goethe we have one who belongs to the leaders of mankind. Thus, in summarizing what is to be characterized here, one may say of Goethe's spirit:

They shine like stars
in the heaven of eternal being
The spirits sent by God.
May all human souls succeed
in the realm of earthly becoming
To see their flames of light.