The Rudolf Steiner Archive

IT IS now our task to speak somewhat of the progress of human evolution in the future and of what one calls initiation. It is by means of initiation that present day man passes in advance through stages of life which are otherwise only passed through by humanity in the future.

If we occupy ourselves with the first problem it may seem to you audacious to try to speak about the future, or even that it is impossible to find out anything of the future of man. Nevertheless if you will consider the matter a little you will find that the view that one can know something about the future is not so unfounded after all. You have only to compare these things with what the ordinary researcher, the natural scientist, for example, can know with regard to future events. He can tell you definitely that if he mixes together oxygen, hydrogen and sulphur under certain conditions, sulphuric acid always results. One can say exactly what happens when one intercepts rays by a mirror. In fact, this goes even further in regard to things of external life; one can predict eclipses of the sun and moon for indefinitely long periods of time.

How is it possible to do this? Because, and in so far as [one knows], one knows the laws of physical life. Now if someone knows the spiritual laws of life, from these laws he can likewise say what must come about in the future. Here, however, a question generally arises which weighs heavily in people's minds. It is so easy to imagine that it is a contradiction of freedom, of man's own voluntary acts, if it could be known in advance what will happen. This too is an incorrect idea. When you combine sulphur, hydrogen and oxygen under certain conditions, sulphuric acid arises; that is determined by the laws of the combination. Whether you do it, however, depends on your will; and so it is also in the spiritual course of human evolution. What will happen will be done by man in entire freedom of will, and the higher a man develops the freer he will be. Nor must one think that it is already decided what a man will do in the future because one can see it in advance. Most people, however, have no right understanding of this problem and in fact it presents very great difficulties. Since ancient times philosophers have tormented themselves with the question of human freedom and the law of predestined phenomena. Practically all that has been written in this field is extremely unsatisfactory, for as a rule people cannot distinguish between foreseeing and being foreordained. Seeing in advance is in fact no different from looking out to some distant spot in space. If you look in space to a point far off, let us say the corner of the street over there, and you see a man giving a penny to another, have you brought about this action? Has it been caused through the fact that you see it? No, you only see that he does it, and that exercises no pressure on his act. Now in a certain respect it is like this in time, only people cannot grasp it. Let us suppose you are reincarnated in a couple of thousand years, you then do something of your own free will; that is the same as the example of the gift of the penny. Under certain circumstances the seer sees what is done in the future, and this future act is just as little determined by the present point of time as the gift of the penny by the point of space. People often say if one sees that something will happen then it is actually predetermined. But then one is confounding the present with the future. In fact it would be no prevision into the future if it were already predestined; you are not seeing something that is already there, but something that has first to come; you must grasp with exactness the concept of seeing-into-the-future. It must be exercised and practised in patient meditation, then only does one find it possible to understand these things aright.

After these introductory words we will now speak of some few things that can be said about the evolution of humanity in the future. We have reached the point where humanity has descended most deeply into matter, where men turn to account their spiritual forces in the construction and manufacture of instruments and machines that serve the personal life. Connected with this was an ever-increasing densification, both of mankind and the earth as a whole. We have seen that the mineral kingdom, as we call it, the densest part of the earth, only arose at a definite point of time in our evolution. It was only then that man entered upon his present earthly, development; and the division of the sexes and other phenomena went hand in hand with it. At that time when the human being had not as yet entered this physical development which contains a mineral kingdom, he too was of a much finer, softer nature. Just to give some idea of it, let us note how the reproduction of the human race took place in those ancient times before the two sexes were in existence. At that time the human being who was still of double sex and of a thinner, finer corporeality, brought forth another being from itself. This did not take place as it does today, but somewhat as in spiritualistic seances the etheric body of some other being proceeds from the medium. That gives you more or less a picture of this materialisation from oneself, the manner of human propagation in ancient times. It was like an out-pressure from human beings who were ripe to continue their own development.

Thus you see that with the densification of man in the cosmos is connected a descent into the world of matter. And another force is connected with it which could never have developed without it:—egoism. Egoism has a good and a bad side. It is the foundation of human independence and freedom, but in its reverse aspect the foundation too of all that is bad and evil. But man had to go through this force of egoism if he was to learn to do good of his own freewill. Through the forces which had guided him previously, he would always have been impelled to the good; it had, however, to be possible for him to go his own way. Just as he has descended he must now ascend again to spirituality; and as the descent is linked with the predominance of egoism so does the ascent depend on men's selflessness, their feeling of sympathy for one another, becoming stronger and stronger. Mankind has evolved through various epochs, first through the old Indian, then the Persian, the Egyptian-Chaldean-Babylonian, the Greco-Latin to the present, the Fifth epoch. And this will be replaced by a sixth. And as human evolution is working towards this, it is working at the same time at the overcoming of the principle which has been strongest since the time when the etheric body united with the point in the brain of which I spoke to you yesterday. That was the time of the fall into the deepest egoism.

Man was also egotistic in his earlier evolution, but it was then in a different way. The egoism which enters so deeply into the soul as in our present age is inseparable from the predominating materialism; a spiritual age will denote the overcoming of this egoism. Therefore Christianity and all movements imbued with genuine religious life have worked consciously towards breaking through all the old blood-ties. Christianity has made a radical statement in the words, “He who forsaketh not father, mother, wife, child, brother, sister cannot be my disciple.” This indicates nothing less than that in place of the ancient blood ties there must enter the spiritual bond between soul and soul, between one human being and another.

The only question now is—what are the ways and means by which humanity may attain spirituality, that is, the overcoming of materialism, and at the same time reach what may be called the bond of brotherhood, the expression of universal human love. One might imagine that universal human love need only be stressed strongly enough, and that then it must come about or that one should found Unions which aim at the goal of a universal human love. Occultism is never of this opinion. On the contrary! The more a man speaks of universal brotherly love and humanity, becoming in a sense intoxicated by them, the more egotistic he becomes. For precisely as there is a lust of the senses so is there a lust of the soul; and it is in fact a refined voluptuousness to say: “I will become morally higher and higher.” This, to be sure, is not a thought which creates the ordinary conventional egoism, but it does lead to a subtle form of egoism.

It is not by emphasising “Love,” “Sympathy,” that they are generated in the course of mankind's evolution. Mankind will be led to that bond of brotherhood far rather through something else, namely, through spiritual knowledge itself. There is no other means of bringing about a universal human brotherhood than the spreading of occult knowledge through the world. One may talk forever of Love and the Brotherhood of Man, one may found thousands of Unions; they will not lead to the desired goal, however well intentioned they may be. The point is to use the right means, to know how to found this bond of brotherhood. Only those whose lives are grounded in universal occult truth, valid for all men, find themselves together in the one truth. As the sun unites the plants which strive towards it and which yet remain individually separate, so must the truth to which all are striving be a uniform one, then all men find themselves together. But men must work energetically towards truth, for only then can they live together in harmony.

The objection might be made: surely all are striving towards the truth, but there are different standpoints and therefore strife and dissension arises. That denotes a knowledge of truth which is not sufficiently thorough. One must not plead that there may be different standpoints, one must first experience that truth is single and indivisible. It does not depend on popular vote it is true in itself. Or would you put it to the vote as to whether the three angles of a triangle are equal to 180 degrees? Whether millions of people admit that, or not a single one, when you have recognised it, it is true for you. There is no democracy about truth. And those who are not yet in harmony have not penetrated far enough into the truth—thence originates all quarreling over truth. It may be said: “Yes, but someone asserts this and another that in occult matters!” In genuine occultism that is not so. It is the same in occult things as in materialistic things, there too someone asserts this and another that, but then one of them is false. Even so is it in genuine occultism; it is only that people often have a bad habit of judging occult matters before they have been understood.

The aim of the Sixth epoch of humanity will be to popularise occult truth in the widest circles; that is the mission of that epoch. And the society which is united in spirit has the task of carrying this occult truth everywhere—right into life—and applying it practically. This is precisely what is lacking in our age. Only look how our epoch is searching and how no one can find the right solution. There are innumerable problems, the Educational Problem, the Feminist Movement, Medicine, the Social Problem, the Food Question. And people doctor away at these problems, endless articles are written, and each talks from his own standpoint, without being willing to study what lies at the centre—occult truth.

It is not a matter of having some abstract knowledge of the truths of spiritual science, but of applying them directly to life, of studying the social problem, the educational problem, in fact the whole range of human life, from the standpoint of real occult wisdom. “But then,” it might be urged, “one would have to know the highest wisdom.” That arises from the mistake of thinking one must always understand what one makes use of in life. But that is not necessary; understanding of the highest principles often comes much later than their application. If mankind had wished to wait in the matter of digestion till the laws of digestion were understood then the evolution of mankind would not have been possible. So too one does not need to be aware of all spiritual laws in order to let spiritual science flow into everyday life. That is precisely the way in which the Rosicrucian method deals with the spiritual—fewer abstractions, but instead, the study of the problems of everyday life. Do you think that the child knows all the grammatical rules of speech when it has learnt to speak? First it learns to speak and then learns grammar. So we must lay stress on the value it has for a man, with the help of spiritual teachings, to attack what lies directly around him, before he occupies himself with what is to be found in the highest worlds, with information concerning the astral plane and Devachan. This is the only way to understand what exists in our surroundings, and where we ourselves must play our part. And we shall find that it is our task to bind together through the unifying bonds of spiritual wisdom those portions of humanity who have been torn out of the old bonds of blood and race.

And then, inasmuch as we evolve from the fifth into the sixth and then into the seventh epoch, the ancient connection of race and blood will be increasingly lost. Mankind becomes freer of physical ties in order to form groups from the aspect of the spirit. It was a bad habit in Theosophy to speak of races as if they would always remain. The concept of race loses its meaning in the immediate future. To state incessantly that seven and again seven races have always evolved in the world is the speculative extension of an idea that only holds good for our age—looking backwards and forwards; it has never been said from clairvoyant vision, from occultism. Races have arisen, as everything else arises; and as everything again dies out so will races die out too. Those who have always only spoken of races will have to accustom themselves to making their ideas fluid. It is only a convenient way of talking. If one looks but a little into the future those ideas which applied to past and present are already no longer valid. It is most important that people should not consider that something they have once brought into a beautiful concept is a truth for all time. Men must get into the habit of making ideas fluid, of recognising that ideas change-that will be an advance. The ability of passing over from rigidly dogmatic ideas to mobile ones must be cultivated in those who would be the bearers of the future. For just as times change so must our ideas change too, if we would understand the times.

Souls live now in a human body which you distinctly perceive with the senses. By what means has it arisen? It was very different in earlier times when the soul descended, in fact for our present material outlook even comically different. The soul took up its abode in it. By what means has the human being evolved to its present form? Because the soul has itself worked in the body during all its incarnations. You can form an idea of how the soul has worked on the body if you consider what possibility has remained to the man of our materialistic age to work upon his body. He can work relatively but very little on his dense physical body. See how you work temporarily on the body and its physiognomy. Something for instance causes you terror, anxiety; the impression of anxiety and fear makes you go pale. And your physical appearance is affected in the same way by the blush of shame. This passes away again, but you see how it is caused. Something acts on the soul and the effects extends to the blood and thence to the physical body, changing the very appearance. The effect can be still more intensive. You know that people who lead a life of thought have it very much in their power to create an impression on their countenance of their intellectual work, one can observe whether or not a man has lived a life of mental activity. So men still work on their external expression and a man of noble feelings displays them in dignified movements. These are but very slight relics of how man has worked on himself during millions of years. Whereas nowadays you can only bring the blood to the cheek and drive it away again, in earlier times man was entirely under the influence of a picture-world which was the expression of a world of spirit.

The effect of this influence was that the human being could work much more creatively on his body. At the same time the body was also more soft and yielding. There was a time when you could not merely stretch out your hand, when you could not only point with the finger, but when you could send your will into your hand, and so form it that you could thrust out the fingers as continuations. There was a time when the foot was not yet permanent but could be extended as a continuation when man needed it. Thus through the pictures which he received from the surrounding world man shaped his own body. Today in our material age this moulding is unimaginably slow, but a time will come again when it will proceed more rapidly. In the future man will again acquire more influence over his physical corporeality. We shall see when we consider Initiation by what means he gains this influence; although he may not reach it in one life, yet he will be able to do much for the next incarnation.

Thus it is man himself who will bring about the future form of his body. Inasmuch as the human being becomes softer and softer, inasmuch as he separates himself from the hard parts, he is approaching his future. An age comes when man will live above his earthly portion as it were, as in time gone by. This condition, which is comparable to your present sleep-condition, will then be replaced by another when the human being will be able to draw his etheric body out of his physical body at will. It will be as if the denser part of man were here below on earth and the human being will make use of it from outside like an instrument. Man will no longer bear his body about and live within it, but will float above it, the body will itself have become rarefied and finer. That seems a fantastic idea today, but one can be distinctly aware of it from spiritual laws just as one reckons future eclipses of the sun and moon from the laws of astronomy. Above all it will be upon the reproductive force that man will work. He will transform it. Many people cannot imagine that there will ever be a different generative process. But it will be so, the process of generation will be altered. The generative process and all that stands in connection with it will pass over in the future to another organ. The organ that is already preparing to become the future organ of generation is the human larynx. Today it can only bring forth vibrations of the air, can only impart to the air what lies in the word that goes forth from it, so that the vibrations correspond to the word. Later on, not only will the word press forward in its rhythm from the larynx, but it will be irradiated by man, it will be penetrated by very substance. Just as today the word only becomes airwaves, so in the future man's inner being, his own likeness, which today is in his word, will issue from the larynx. The human being will proceed from the human being, man will speak forth man. And this in the future will be the birth of a new human being—that he is spoken forth by another.

Such things throw a definite light on phenomena in our surroundings which no natural science can explain. That transformation of the reproductive force which will again become free of sex, takes over then the functions of the earlier reproduction. Hence in the male organism at the age of puberty, a transformation also takes place in the larynx. The voice becomes deeper. This shows you clearly how these two things are interconnected. Thus occultism throws light again and again on facts of life and illumines phenomena for which materialistic science can give you no explanation.

And just as the organ of the larynx will be transformed, so too will the human heart. It is the organ which stands in intimate connection with the circulation. Now science believes that the heart is a kind of pump; that is a grotesquely fantastic idea. Occultism has never made such a fantastic statement, as has modern materialism. It is the feelings of the soul which give rise to the movement of the blood; the soul drives the blood, and the heart moves because it is driven by the blood. Thus the truth is exactly the opposite of what materialistic science states. Man today, however, cannot guide his heart as he will; when he feels anxiety, it beats faster, since the feeling acts on the blood and this quickens the motion of the heart. But what is suffered involuntarily by man today, will later, at a higher stage of evolution, be in his own power. Later on he will drive his blood by his own volition, and cause the movement of his heart as today he moves the muscles of his hand. The heart with its peculiar structure is a crux, a riddle for modern science. It has diagonally striped fibres, which are otherwise only to be found in voluntary muscles. Why? Because the heart has not yet reached the end of its evolution, but is an organ of the future; because it will in the future be a voluntary muscle. Thus it already shows the rudiments of this in its structure.

All that goes on in the soul changes the organism. And if you now imagine the man who is able to create his own likeness through the spoken word, whose heart has become a voluntary muscle, who will have altered yet other organs, then you have a conception of the future of the human race in future planetary incarnations of our earth. Humanity will progress on our earth as far as it is possible under the influence of a mineral kingdom. This mineral kingdom, in spite of its having arisen the last, will be the first to disappear again in its present form. Man will then no longer build up his body from mineral substances as today, the coming human body will only incorporate into itself substances of a plant nature. All that works in man today, as mineral will disappear. In order to give you a seemingly grotesque example: the human saliva of today is a mineral product, for the physical body is an inter-action of mineral processes. When man will have ended his mineral evolution he will no longer have a mineral spittle; it will be of a plant-nature—man will, so to speak, spit flowers. Glands will no more secrete what is mineral, but a plant-like substance. The mineral kingdom is brought to an end by the evolutionary return of humanity to plant-like existence.

Thus the human being lives over to Jupiter inasmuch as he expels all that is mineral and passes over to the creativeness of the plant. And inasmuch as he then later passes over to animal-creation—the animals will be different from those of today—when his heart will have progressed so far that it can appear as a creator, then he will create in the animal world, as today he creates in the mineral kingdom, and then the Venus condition will arise. And when he can create his kind by virtue of uttering his own likeness, then is the meaning of evolution complete, then is the word fulfilled: “Let us create man in our own image.”

Only by observing this aspect—that the body will be moulded from the soul—will man really transform the human race. Only through a thinking trained in the occult and spiritual sense, will there appear what has been described as the transformation of the heart and the larynx. What humanity thinks today, that will it be in the future. A humanity that thinks materialistically will produce frightful beings in the future, and a humanity that thinks spiritual thoughts, so works upon and transforms the future organism that beautiful human bodies will proceed from it.

What the materialistic mode of thought brings about has not yet been completed. We have two streams today, a great materialistic one which fills the earth, and the small spiritual stream which is restricted to but few human beings. Distinguish between soul-evolution and race-evolution. Do not think that if races pass over to a grotesque form that the soul too does the same. All materialistically thinking souls work on the production of evil race-formations, and what is done of a spiritual nature causes the bringing forth of a good race. Just as mankind has brought forth that which has retrogressed in the animals, plants and minerals, so will a portion split off and represent the evil part of humanity. And in the body which meanwhile will have grown soft the inner badness of the soul will express itself externally. Just as older conditions which have degenerated to the ape species seem grotesque to us today, so do materialistic races remain at the standpoint of evil, and will people the earth as evil races. It will lie entirely with humanity as to whether a soul will remain in the bad race or will ascend by spiritual culture to a good race.

These are things that we must know, if we would live into the future with real knowledge. Otherwise we go through the world with our eyes bound, for forces are working in humanity which we must recognise and to which we must pay attention. A man would neglect his duty to mankind if he did not wish to become acquainted with the forces which work in the direction of right evolution or against it. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge would be egotism. He who wants to know in order to look into higher worlds acts egotistically. But one who tries to carry this knowledge into the direct practice of everyday life, furthers the advance of the coming evolution of humanity. It is extremely important for us to learn more and more to put into practice what exists as the conception of spiritual science.

So you see, the Spiritual Movement has a quite definite goal, namely, to mould future humanity in advance. And the goal can be reached in no other way than through the acceptance of spiritual wisdom. This is the thought that lives in the mind of one who conceives spiritual science as the great task of mankind. He thinks of it as inseparable from evolution and he regards it not as an object of desire but as a task and duty that is laid upon him. And the more we acknowledge this, the more rapidly do we approach the future form of humanity in the Sixth Age. As at that time in ancient Atlantis, in the neighbourhood of modern Ireland, the advanced human beings were drawn to the East in order to found the new civilisations, so have we now the task of working towards the great moment in the Sixth Age, when humanity will undertake a great spiritual ascent.

We must endeavour to come out of materialism again, and societies with a spiritual aim must undertake to guide humanity, not from motives of arrogance and pride, but as a task and duty.

So a certain group of people must join together in order to prepare the future. But this union is not to be conceived of geographically. All ideas of locality have then lost their meaning because it is no longer a question of racial relationships. The point will be for people over the whole earth to find each other spiritually, in order to fashion the future in, a positive way. For this reason, 400 years ago, when our epoch plunged the deepest into matter, the Rosicrucian Brotherhood emphasised that practical spiritual science which contains an answer to all problems of everyday life.

Here you have the ascending evolution following the descending. Just as old knowledge acts as a disintegrating force, as is shown in Mauthner's Criticism of Language, so the spiritual current of thought seeks the unifying bond of spiritual wisdom. Hence arises the new school of initiation which is directly concerned with leading humanity over into a new cycle of time.

Thus with the principle of human evolution is connected the concept of Initiation.

It is only of recent times that the truths of occultism have been the subject of public lectures. Formerly, these truths were only revealed in secret societies, to those who had passed through certain degrees of initiation and had sworn to obey the laws of the Order through the whole of their life. Today, man is entering upon a very critical period. Occult truths are beginning to be disclosed to the public. In a matter of twenty years or so, a certain number of them will already be common knowledge. Why is this? The reason is that humanity is entering upon a new phase which it is the object of this lecture to explain.

In the Middle Ages, occult truths were known in the Rosicrucian Movement. But whenever they leaked out, they were either misunderstood or distorted. In the eighteenth century they entered upon a phase of much dilletantism and charlatanry and at the beginning of the nineteenth century they were put entirely in the background by the physical sciences. It is only in our day that they are beginning to re-emerge and in the coming centuries they will play an important part in the development of mankind. In order to understand this, we must glance at the centuries preceding the advent of Christianity and follow the progress that has been made.

It does not require any very profound knowledge to realise the difference between a man of pre-Christian times and a man of today. Although his scientific knowledge was far less, man of olden times had deeper feelings and intuitions. He lived more in the world beyond—which he also perceived—than in the world of sense. There were some who entered into direct and actual communication with the astral and spiritual world. In the Middle Ages, when earthly existence was by no means comfortable, man still lived with his head in the heavens. True, the mediaeval cities were somewhat primitive, but they were a far truer representation of man's inner world than the cities of today. Not only the cathedrals but the houses and porches with their symbols reminded men of their faith, their inner feelings, their aspirations, and the home of their soul. Today, we have knowledge of many, many things and the relations among human beings have multiplied ad infinitum. But we live in cities that are like deafening factories in awful Babels, with nothing to remind us of our inner world. Our communion with this inner world is not through contemplation but through books. We have passed from intuition into intellectualism.

To find the origin of the stream of intellectualism we must go back further than the Middle Ages. The epoch of the birth of human intellect, the period when this transformation took place, lies about a thousand years before the Christian era. It is the epoch of Thales, Pythagoras, Buddha. Then for the first time arose philosophy and science, that is to say truth presented to the reason in the form of logic. Before this age, truth presented itself in the form of religion, of revelation received by the teachers and accepted by the masses. In our times, truth passes into the individual intelligence and would fain be proved by argument, would like to have its own wings clipped.

What has happened in the inner nature of man to justify this transition of his consciousness from one plane to another, from the plane of intuition to that of logic? Here we touch upon one of the fundamental laws of history—a law no longer recognised by contemporary thought. It is this: Humanity evolves in a way which enables the different elements and principles of man's being to unfold and develop in successive stages. What are these principles?

To begin with, man has a physical body in common with the mineral kingdom. The whole mineral world is found again in the chemistry of the body. He has an etheric body, which is, properly speaking, the vital principle within him. He has this etheric body in common with the plants. This principle engenders the process of nutrition and the forces of growth and re-production. Man has also an astral body in which feelings and sentiments, the power of enjoyment and of suffering are enkindled. He has the astral body in common with the animals.

Finally, there is a principle in man which cannot be spoken of as a body. It is his innermost essence, distinguishing him from all other entities, mineral, plant and animal. It is the self, the soul, the divine spark. The Hindus spoke of it as Manas; The Rosicrucians as the ‘Inexpressible.’ A body, in effect, is only part and parcel of another body, but the self, the ‘I’ of man exists in and by itself alone—“I am I.” This principle is addressed by others as ‘thou,’ or ‘you;’ it cannot be confused with anything else in the universe. By virtue of this inexpressible, incommunicable self, man rises above all created things of the Earth, above the animals, indeed above all creation. And only through this principle can he commune with the Infinite Self, with God. That is why, at certain definite times, the officiating hierophant in the ancient Hebrew sanctuaries said to the High Priest: Shem-Ham-Phores, which means: What is his name (the name of God)? He-Vo-He, or—in one word—Jev or Joph, meaning God, Nature, Man; or again, the inexpressible ‘I’ of man which is both human and divine.

These principles of man's being were laid down in remote ages of his vast evolutionary cycle—but they only unfold slowly, one by one.

The special mission of the period which began about a thousand years before the Christian era has been to develop the human Ego in the intellectual sense. But above the intellectual plane there is the plane of Spirit. It is the world of Spirit to which man will attain in the centuries to come, and to which he will be wending his way from now onwards. The germs of this future development have been cast into the world by the Christ and by true Christianity.

Before speaking of this world of Spirit, we must understand one of the forces by means of which humanity en masse passed from the astral to the intellectual plane. It was by virtue of a new kind of marriage. In olden times, marriages were made in the bosom of the same tribe or of the same clan—which was only an extension of the family. Sometimes, indeed, brothers and sisters married. Later on, men sought their wives outside the clan, the tribe, the civic community. The beloved became the stranger, the unknown. Love—which in days of yore had been merely a natural and social function—became personal desire, and marriage a matter of free choice. This is indicated in certain Greek myths like that of the rape of Helen and again in the Scandinavian and Germanic myths of Sigurd and Gudrun. Love becomes an adventure, woman a conquest from afar.

This change from patriarchial marriage to free marriage corresponds to the new development of man's intellectual faculties, of the Ego. There is a temporary eclipse of the astral faculties of vision and the power of reading directly in the astral and spiritual world—faculties which are included in ordinary speech under the name of inspiration.

Let us now turn to Christianity. The brotherhood of man and the cult of the One God are certainly features of it but they only represent the external, social aspect, not the inner, spiritual reality. The new, mysterious and transcendental element in Christianity is that it creates divine Love, the power which transforms man from within, the leaven by which the whole world is raised. Christ came to say: ”If you leave not mother, wife and your own body, you cannot be my disciple”

That does not imply the cessation of natural links. Love extends beyond the bounds of family to all human beings and is changed into vivifying, creative, transmuting power.

This Love was the fundamental principle of Rosicrucian thought but it was never understood by the outer world. It is destined to change the very essence of all religion, of all cults, of all science.

The progress of humanity is from unconscious spirituality (pre-Christian), through intellectualism (the present age), to conscious spirituality, where the astral and intellectual faculties unite once more and become dynamic through the power of the Spirit of Love, divine and human. In this sense, Theology will tend to become Theosophy.

What, in effect, is Theology? A knowledge of God imposed from without under the form of dogma, as a kind of supernatural logic. And what is Theosophy? A knowledge of God which blossoms like a flower in the depths of the individual soul. God, having vanished from the world, is reborn in the depths of the human heart.

In the Rosicrucian sense, Christianity is at once the highest development of individual freedom and universal religion. There is a community of free souls. The tyranny of dogma is replaced by the radiance of divine Wisdom, embracing intelligence, love and action.

The science which arises from this cannot be measured by its power of abstract reasoning but by its power to bring souls to flower and fruition. That is the difference between ‘Logia’ and ‘Sophia,’ between science and divine Wisdom, between Theology and Theosophy.

In this sense, Christ is the centre of the esoteric evolution of the West. Certain modern Theologians—above all in Germany—have tried to represent Christ as a simple, naive human being. This is a terrible error. The most sublime consciousness, the most profound Wisdom live in Him, as well as the most divine Love. Without such consciousness, how could He be a supreme manifestation in the life of our whole planetary evolution? What gave Him this power to rise so high above His own time? Whence came transcendental qualities?

Today we'll consider the functions ascribed to some spiritual entities known as luciferic spirits. We'll find that they have some strange connections with humanity. Our starting point shall be the fact that the science of thinking, of reflection, goes back no further than 800 or 900 years before Christ. Anyone who studies the history of philosophy knows that it began with Thales,¹³⁸ who lived in about 600 BC and once predicted a solar eclipse on the basis of his nature studies. This was something highly unusual at the time. The philosophy of western logic only came with Aristotle. Before that no doctrine existed about thinking, for thinking itself, abstract rational thinking, only began to dawn in 600 - 800 BC. Seeds of it were already there in the Atlantean race. We do, of course, know that the Chaldeans, ancient Egyptians and other Orientals knew astronomy, but this came from the deeper roots of clairvoyance.

The rational mind thus only developed half a millennium before Christ, and this had to do with changes in the form of relationships and marriage. These used to be very different from the way they are today. Scientists have established that even among the savage tribes of America the relationship between cousins is much more complex than it is with us. Thus the Iroquois call cousins on their father's side brothers and sisters but not those on their mother's side, the reason being that men who are of the same age in a family could have all women of the same age for their wives. One would thus know exactly who a child's mother was, but not its father. The Iroquois still see family relationships in this way today. It needs occult knowledge to give the right explanation for this. We know that things happened in 800 - 900 BC which indicate that marriage among blood relations changed to become marriage outside the family. Before, the head of a family was the father of the tribe. These ways still survived among the ancient Germans at a much later time, when people in Africa and in Mediterranean countries were already marrying outside the family. In medieval times the transition to marrying outside the family was glorified in legends such as the Gudrunlied¹³⁹ In his Germania, Tacitus wrote of ancient German tribes having one ancestor. Later this custom ceased, and in the Gudrunlied kings go to distant countries to look for wives. In the Siegfried legend¹⁴⁰ we have a description of the way the new order rose in opposition to marriage between blood relations. The marriage of Siegmund and Sieglinde was rejected by the goddess Frigg, wife of Odin. Odin established the principle of marriage outside the tribe. This was introduced at different times among different peoples, but there is a strange connection between the transition to this principle and the emergence of rational thinking. An occult thesis is that marriage outside the tribe kills part of the ether body—the forebrain comes to life, whilst the ancient clairvoyance, which was enhanced by intermarriage, dies away. People began to take a rational view of things. Today humanity has adapted to marriage outside family and tribe, just as in earlier times it was adapted to intermarriage. The latter has a harmful effect on the mental faculties of the children, and above all on the sense organ connected with the development of intellectual faculties, the eye. This is why intermarriage often results in blindness. Mental faculties only improve with marriage outside the family.

This physiological fact is closely linked with human evolution. It was necessary to prepare for the coming of the Christ. Could this have come about under different conditions? It brought love of one soul for another, with one soul influencing the other. Love among blood relations had to be overcome first. Nations will altogether only be ripe to receive Christianity once they have overcome love among blood relations. The initiates of ancient Egypt always came from the same family, for many generations. The earlier wisdom was intuitive by nature, which becomes all the more evident the further one goes back in human evolution. Reflection based on the intellect is connected with the basis of Christianity.

Let us now consider how the gods related to human beings. As evolution progresses, human beings will be gods, and the gods have also gone through a form of human evolution, different from our own, on other planets, but certainly something similar. Those who are at a higher level evolve on the basis of those who are at a lower level—man and animal live on the plant, this in turn on the mineral. There could be no gods if it were not for human beings. The relationship between them is of the same kind. What do the gods need of us? They feed on our love. The division into two sexes developed. The true meaning of nectar and ambrosia, food for the gods, is the love between man and woman. This reflects an occult truth.

Between the gods and human beings are spirits who did not complete their evolution at the same time as the gods, remaining behind, as it were, in the school of evolution. These are the luciferic spirits. They have fanned a higher level of spiritual independence into life in human beings. They taught them to rise against the gods, developing the part in them that does not feed the gods. Lucifer therefore appears as the serpent in the story of paradise, and Jehovah's punishment is that human beings shall bear their children in pain.¹⁴¹ The cohorts of Lucifer continued to influence intellectual development. Anything they did not achieve earlier, they made up for when marriage outside the family became the custom. The old law established order among human beings. Lucifer was set free 800 or 900 years before Christ, and the inner powers of the soul then began to unfold. The Christ came as the representative of the new order. The external law was given on Sinai, the inner law, grace, is given to those who have been set free by the Christ. That is how humanity progresses—the luciferic principle had to develop more and more in them.

Outer science is to be made free through theosophy, with knowledge deepened to become wisdom. The name Lucifer suggests the principle of independence. This is why Mrs Blavatsky¹⁴² gave that name to her first journal, and we have done the same, to make the principle known. Differences between nations will wear off more and more, and the first sentence in the principles of the Theosophical Society will come into force: to be the core for human brotherhood.¹⁴³ Love among blood relations will be progressively overcome and people will look more for soul relationships. Souls will find one another across vast distances. The further development and transformation of the rational mind will bring a new form of clairvoyance in future. Overcoming sexual love will at first mean isolation. The chela has to be uprooted—the great overcoming of all feelings of relationship—that is the function of the luciferic principle.

Questions and answers

(Questions not recorded)

The Indian caste system is based on knowledge of karma. The clairvoyant guides of the Indian nation foresaw the destined caste of an individual so that each was born into the appropriate caste. As the intellect develops with people marrying outside the family, conscious clairvoyance will develop and by the end of the sixth sub-race people will be organized in moral castes. With the next sub-race, all love between blood relations will vanish. The gods will be deprived of food and withdraw progressively from humanity, moving on to higher stages of evolution. Human beings will be guided by their masters, who have risen from the ranks of humanity, as it were, but have consciously evolved more quickly. These divine guides do not need human love to feed them, and sexual love will thus come to an end.

If the luciferic principle had not come into effect, the earth would gradually have become a cinder, like the moon, dead and desolate. This should not happen, and man himself will prevent it, reshaping the earth. When human beings first appeared, the earth was not as it is today. In Lemuria there were no dead, rigid metals and rocks; everything was flowing, rivers of metals flowed through the mountains, which we can still see quite clearly today. The miners who are in intimate touch with the inner earth know this, which makes them the best spiritualists. Many plants were still animals then, and milk, the food for man, flowed freely. In our infancy we go through this stage again unconsciously. We must, however, return to this form of taking nourishment in a conscious way. This is why it was said: ‘Unless you become as little children.’¹⁴⁴ Milk and a plant-based diet call up occult powers of healing, and future physicians will have to feed themselves in this way, that is, eat all the things that reach out for the sun. Indian physicians immunize themselves against snakebite by letting snakes bite them. They are then able to heal snakebite in others. Our food will be mineral by nature. Physiological initiates already live on a mineral diet. There are different kinds of initiates—those who teach wisdom, and among others those who work on improving the blood of humanity, the physiological initiates. They need not be specially clever in other directions, but their feeling for physiology is highly developed. We should only eat the parts of plants and animals that do not contain their vital energies—not their roots, therefore, nor meat, but fruit and milk and leaves. Anything that grows above ground, thriving in the sun and eaten by cows, is the right food. Minerals that form deposits should not be eaten, that is, no salts, only water. Physiological occultists watch over the blood transition to the next race.

In the last century, since Frederic the Great, we have developed ten times as fast as in the thousand years from Charlemagne to Frederic the Great, and evolution will continue to speed up in this way. The sixth sub-race is developing in Russia. Non-belief is a great obstacle to development.

Mercury is the body of some great spirits, one of which incarnated in Gautama Buddha.¹⁴⁵

In the course of evolution, man will govern his body from the outside, carry it with him like a snail its shell, in a way, work on it and transform it. This is something he is already doing in his sleep today.

• 138. Thales ... Aristotle, see Steiner R. The Riddles of Philosophy (GA 18). Tr. F. C. A. Kölln. New York: Anthroposophic Press 1973.
• 139. Middle high German epic.
• 140. Siegfried (Sigurd), folk hero of early and medieval German mythology. His legend provided the source material for several epics, among them the Vblsungasaga and the Nibelungenlied.
• 141. Genesis 3: 16
• 142. Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna, née Hahn (1831–91), Russian theosophist. Founded the Theosophical Society with Henry Steel Olcott in New York in 1875. Her journal Lucifer first appeared in 1887
• 143. First objective of the Theosophical Society: 4To form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood ofhumanity, without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or colour? Proceedings of 2nd Annual Congress of the Federation of European Sections of the Theosophical Society, p. 5.
• 144. Mark 10: 14; Matthew 18: 17.
• 145. Steiner R. The Spiritual Beings in the Heavenly Bodies and in the Kingdoms of Nature (GA 136), lecture given in Helsingfors on 13 April 1912. Tr. unknown. Vancouver: Steiner Book Centre 1981.

Today I will simply describe the rounds to you. You will have to be patient because the facts will be manifold. I can therefore only sketch them. It is also extremely difficult to express and describe them in words because they are quite unlike our present circumstances.

I will try to describe what is called the first round. I will simply describe the actual events. If we want to describe the beginning of the first round, we have to imagine that a sphere separates from the dark space of the universe. This sphere has a reddish color for those who can see at such a high level, A reddish sphere separates itself from the darkness of space. This reddish sphere contains within itself all the beings and substances that will later appear on Earth, but in a completely dissolved state, as it were. At first nothing has a form in it. Everything is formless in this red mist, which is thinner than the thinnest ether, if one can imagine it at all. This red sphere therefore represents that which we receive as a drawing of the first Aupa sphere of our seven globes belonging to the earth.

Now I ask you to watch what is called the transition from one sphere to the other. It is not really a transition, but a transformation of the appearance of the sphere, which remains in the same place. The sphere becomes brighter and brighter and at the same time denser and denser, and there are perceptible lines in it that have a certain arrangement, emanating from certain points, like radiant lines. To the seer's open eye, the sphere gradually takes on an orange color. This is what we call the rupa sphere. There are conditions within which it darkens and then brightens again – the pralaya conditions.

Then it becomes denser and glows yellow; it now consists of astral matter, in which lines now go in all directions, forming figures. These are the forces that later compose the mineral kingdom as such. Then there are small pralaya states again. The sphere then enters a state in which it takes on a kind of greenish coloration. This is the first physical state that the whole first round then takes on.

Everything that was previously merely sensuous intimation has now progressed to a certain degree of density. The physical matter in which this earth is located no longer exists on earth at present. It is a kind of etheric air, but you can find a hint of this physical state in all those who know something. I am reminded of a passage in Goethe's “Faust”: “Macht ein wenig Feuerluft.” Fire air is the first physical matter, a fire air that is greenish and contains everything that came later [...] in which the globe presents itself in this state.

Now there is another small pralaya. The sphere now develops in such a way that it takes on a completely different form. In its next state, it can be compared to a mulberry. It separates into smaller spheres and now takes on a coloration that shimmers towards the bluish. The lines are now distributed over individual spheres, and what used to be active throughout the entire sphere – the elementary forces – is now active in the individual small spheres. Increasingly distinct forms appear. Cubic, dodecagonal forms and so on appear and become increasingly clearer.

The next state indicates how and when it begins to fall apart. The whole thing now has a coloration between blue and violet. It turns into violet and goes through the pralaya state like this. In this seventh state, all forms of minerals have emerged. While this formation was emerging, while this type of mulberry was emerging, the matter became thinner and thinner. First it was Arupa matter, then in the last state, fully developed mineral nuclei appear in it, where the Arupa sphere used to be. The entire mineral kingdom is now archetypally present.

And now it passes into a twilight state. So there have been seven successive states, they had the task of bringing the mineral kingdom to the archetypes of the minerals. I would like to emphasize that, in all this turmoil of facts, this is what has always come from the lunar epoch, as the developed entities of the lunar epoch. These are essentially the human souls that have gone through the entire conditions of the lunar epoch and are at the most diverse stages of development. Not all of them have achieved the goal that could be achieved. Some, on the other hand, have progressed further. There were also, if I may say so, 'Mosesses', 'Platons', 'Pythagorasses'. They are not yet able to participate in all the processes I have described so far. These processes are too low. On the other hand, the beings who have not reached the heights must now catch up. They have to participate in the formation of these forms. They have to catch up on the lessons, as it were, that they neglected earlier. That is kaleidoscopically the succession of conditions that I have described. It is as if you were looking into a kaleidoscope, and just as the different successions can be seen there, so it is to be imagined.

The second round of the first state shows up by the fact that we see a reddish ball shimmering again. But this is much more richly structured than the previous one. Above all, we see intertwining vortex systems in the ball that look like the well-known snake rod of Hermes. At first only in very light, bright suggestion. Such structures stand out. And after the sphere has returned to the pralaya state and glows orange, it becomes such that it passes into motion. The snakes, which were at first motionless around the axis, now begin to move around the axis. The formation enters into a state of complete motion within itself. Then there is another state of pralaya, and an astral sphere in a beautiful, bright yellow color emerges. And the formations I have described now appear at a higher level, in that what they used to show only as movement now shows traces of forms everywhere, so that astral cylinders, discs, lines and all kinds of formations of the most diverse shapes have now emerged from the coils, in magnificent beauty. Radial figures emerge that continually push new formations out of themselves. The whole is in great motion. Then there is another pralaya, and the greenish sphere is formed, the fourth sphere, the physical state.

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This is again in a matter that no longer exists today. It is called the state of fire-air, and that is a critical state at the present hour. Then intermediate states are present. These are of a kind of form between the watery and the airy. Everything is in a foggy state of green color. You could only compare the whole structure to a water pond with all kinds of green aquatic plants moving and stirring. The entities that are in there all have the transparent glowing green color. Then another pralaya occurs and what I have described as the mulberry appears again. The state becomes astral. The individual is formed out of itself, whereas before the change only took place in the whole of the sphere. Then another pralaya occurs.

The indigo sphere emerges, and the entire formations now become mere devachan formations, mere mental formations, but of great certainty. The next state is that in which the archetypes of the entire plant kingdom are formed. It has become a violet sphere. The archetypes are formed, the whole disappears from view. A state of twilight sets in. This state now enables the consciousness of the Pitris, who are already a little higher or souls that have come over from the lunar epoch, to participate in the construction of these structures with their powers. We have now completed what we call the second round. Previously, the mineral kingdom had reached the second round. What I previously described as a physical state has now progressed so that it is as if you imagine snow figures in the great ice, but in distinct watery, fog-like formations. The minerals are now in this fog-like state. This is the case while the sphere has a greenish coloration. With that, we have described what was described as the second round, the actual conditions.

And now comes the third round. The state of eclipse occurs. And now I notice that during these pralaya states, which I will describe, with the archetypes of the mineral and the plant, when they pass into the twilight state, something also happens. But even for the seer's eye it is difficult to see anything. There is no complete extinguishing of the sphere. It is important to emphasize this. It is like seeing the moon, which is half illuminated, and yet the other dark side can still be seen. A reddish sphere now appears for the third time. In this sphere, what is called the boundary in occult language occurs. The beings delimit themselves from the outside, they cover themselves with skins. The result is that living beings appear that shed their skin. This is an aupa state. Then a pralaya state occurs. The orange-colored sphere appears. The forms become more distinct. They begin to move. A pralya state occurs again. The whole now becomes an astral sphere, a sphere of stellar color, in which all three types of formations are present. Regular forms of metals, of minerals, the archetypes of plants, take on the astral form again, and the formations, covering themselves with a skin, begin to collide, to become perceptible to each other. They sense each other, they feel that they are there.

Now another pralaya, and the fourth, the physical state occurs. This is again a critical state, which can be compared, in terms of its consistency, with what is seen in egg white. All the structures that have emerged also take on this protein-like matter, from the densest protein to the completely gelatinous protein. The whole has turned green, and the entities that have emerged with the boundary are so far that they show the mucus-like animal formation; in forms from radiating shapes up to ape-like shapes. The Pitris – souls – already have the possibility to initially incarnate in these forms – imperfectly. They are also called water people. These are people who can stand upright despite their swelling, gelatinous matter.

Now the bluish astral state comes again, in which the consistency is not so dense. It can no longer be compared to the mulberry, it can only be compared to the astral. There is just no intelligence in it. A pralaya is formed again, and the indigo sphere comes. All forms become more definite. They become more alive from within. They are thought beings. And then comes the violet sphere. The whole sum of entities has passed into archetypes. They have become germ-shaped and now merge into the archetypes of the animal world that have emerged. And after another pralaya has taken place, when the red sphere dawns again, what we call the fourth round begins. What can later provide the body for the actual human race is gradually being prepared: the archetypes of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. More and more definite forms emerge. The orange state occurs, the astral state. There are already certain entities that resemble the later animals and humans in form. Then there is another pralaya state, and the actual earth, our present earth, appears in what we now call etheric matter, within the fourth round, on which earth, in etheric substance, man is present. He is still an animal-man, but already guided and surrounded by the solar Pitris, the higher intelligences who have come over, who have reached a higher level of development and are also guided by higher intelligences, which are described in Genesis as the Elohim. They were all working to advance man in his development.

He then goes through the second race and condenses. Then comes what we call the third race, and which we have described several times.

The following is the process as it presents itself:

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The time from Christmas until about now is actually an important, a significant time of the year, also in occult terms. It is called the time of the thirteen days. And the remarkable thing is that this period of thirteen days is sensed in its importance by those people who, in their entire soul disposition, have retained something of the old connection of the human soul with the spiritual world, of which we have often spoken. We know that more than the person of today's urban population has retained from the connection with the spiritual world that once existed in ancient times, the primitive person who lives out in the countryside or in a population that is even less affected by our urban culture. And there we find much that is related in folk poetry about the experiences of the soul, about experiences of the soul during the period from Christmas to Epiphany, January 6.

This is the time when, after the annual eclipse has most befallen the earth, immediately after the winter solstice, when the sun begins its victorious course again, with nature's deepest immersion and release and redemption, the human soul can also undergo very special experiences if it still has special connections with the spiritual world. Those people who no longer have the old clairvoyance but are still connected to the spiritual world in their soul feel a difference in the abnormal world of dreams at this time of year. What the soul can experience there becomes meaningful, because the soul, if it is still receptive, can really get most involved in the spiritual world then. For the modern man, the year really is such that he no longer particularly distinguishes the individual seasons, because while the snow storms outside, darkness already begins at four o'clock in the afternoon and it only gets light late, the city dweller feels the same as in the summer months, when the sun can unfold its full power. Man is torn out of the old connection with the cosmos in which he lived when he was outside in nature. But for those who have retained a connection with nature, it is not the same thing that falls during the Christmas season as what happens at another time, for example, at midsummer. While in midsummer the soul is most emancipated from what is connected with the spiritual world, in the time when nature is most dead, it is most connected with the spiritual world and used to experience special things during this time.

Now there is a beautiful folk tale in the old Norwegian language, a tale that was rediscovered only recently and has quickly become popular again due to the peculiar understanding of the Norwegian population. It is about a man who still had a connection to the spiritual world, about Olaf Åsteson. What Olaf Åsteson experiences in the time between Christmas and Epiphany is beautifully depicted in this poem.

At the New Year's celebration in Hannover in 1912, I first tried to put this folk tale of Olaf Åsteson into German lines so that it could also be performed before our souls. Tonight's program will begin with the Song of Olaf Åsteson, which contains Olaf Åsteson's experiences during the thirteen nights.

It was followed by a recitation by Marie von Sivers.

The poetry itself is old. But, as I said, it has recently been rediscovered by the Norwegian people as if by magic and is spreading rapidly. The fact that something like this is spreading will, among many facts prevailing at present, also be one that proves how it is pushing towards an understanding of the mysteries that anthroposophy can bring us today. For that something like what is described here is taking place in a soul, or at least could take place relatively recently, is not just a 'fiction'. This writing is not just fantasy, but reality, it is real. And with Olaf Åsteson, it is pointed out to people of those Nordic regions who, in the Middle Ages, around the middle of the Middle Ages, still had the opportunity, one might say, to literally experience something as it is expressed here.

When our Norwegian friends gave me this poem during my penultimate visit to Kristiania and wanted to hear something about it from me, it was initially this fact, interesting from a general spiritual scientific point of view, that was emphasized, that pushed itself into the soul. But what led to our wanting to include this poem in our spiritual scientific program, so to speak, is that one can also go into the details more and more. Through anthroposophical understanding, one finds oneself delving ever deeper into what comes to light in the poem. For example, it was significant to me that Olaf — which is an old Norwegian name — has the epithet Åsteson: Åsteson. The son of what? Of Äste. And I tried to find out what kind of mother this son actually is. Of course, one can argue about the meaning of the word “Äst” in many different ways, and there are also things that can be disputed. It is not possible today to sort out everything that comes into question. But if we take into account everything that is in question, then a name such as Olaf Åsteson means: he who is still a son of that soul that goes down from generation to generation and is connected with the blood that runs from generation to generation. But we have traced this name back to what we have so often discussed in the field of anthroposophy, that in ancient times, ancient clairvoyance was connected with the kinship of the blood that runs through the generations. And one would be able to translate Olaf Åsteson as: Olaf, born of many generations and still carrying the characters of many generations in his soul.

If we now go into the experiences, it is extremely interesting to see what the sleeping Olaf Åsteson goes through from Christmas Eve through thirteen days, during which he does not wake up, that is, is in a kind of psychic state. If one allows the individual verses to take effect, which allow the individual experiences to arise before the soul with a broad, folksy comfort, one is reminded of certain descriptions of the first stages of initiation, where it is said that such and such a one has been led to the threshold of death. The poem shows that Olaf Åsteson comes to the gates of death. And it will be particularly vivid when he feels like a corpse himself – except for the earth that he feels between his teeth. If we remember that the etheric body of the person to be initiated grows beyond the boundaries of the skin and the person becomes bigger and bigger, so that the person lives into wide cosmic spaces, then we are pointed to in this poem how the person descends deeply, empathizes with the depths of the earth and ascends to cloud heights. What a person has to go through after death, for example in the sphere of the moon, is also what Olaf Åsteson has to go through. It is poetically described how the moon shines brightly and how the paths stretch far and wide. Then the gulf that has to be crossed in the world is shown, the one that lies between the human and the one that leads out into the cosmic expanse. And the bridge of heaven connects what is human with what is cosmic. Then our attention is drawn to the interplay of the beings that find expression in the constellations of Taurus and Ophiuchus. But for those who can see into the world spiritually, the constellations are only the expression of what is present in the spiritual realm in the vastness of space. And then the world of Kamalokaw is depicted in the description of 'Brooksvalin'. It is shown how a kind of retribution takes place, how people there go through - but in a compensatory way - what they have not acquired here on earth. But one does not need to interpret all the details of this poetry, one should not do that at all with such poetry. But one should feel that they emerged from such an atmosphere, which is closely related to what was present in such a people for much longer than in peoples who lived more in the interior of the continents or came into contact with big city culture. The Norwegian people, who still have much in their vernacular that comes close to the boundary of occult secrets, had the possibility for longer to keep the souls connected with what lives and moves behind the outer material phenomena.

Do you remember how I have dealt with the way the course of the year has its spiritual parallel series of facts? How in spring, when plants sprout from the earth, when everything comes to life, when the days get lighter, we have to recognize what we can call a kind of falling asleep of the elementary and higher spirits that are connected to the earth. In spring, when the earth awakens outwardly, in spiritual contemplation we are dealing with a kind of falling asleep of the earth. When outer nature dies down again, we are dealing with the awakening of the spiritual nature of the earth. And when outer nature is asleep around Christmas time, then that is the time when the spiritual of the earth, which is connected with earthly existence both through elemental, less significant beings and through great, powerful beings, is most active. It only appears so when viewed superficially, as if we had to compare spring with the awakening of the earth and winter with its falling asleep. For occult observation, it is the other way around. The spirit of the earth, which consists of many spirits, awakens in winter and sleeps in summer. Just as in the human organism the organic and vegetative are most active during sleep, as the forces play up into the brain, and as the purely organic activity is killed off during waking, so it is with the earth. When the earth is most active, when everything has sprouted, when the sun is at its highest around Midsummer, the spirit of the earth sleeps. And it is not without connection to these occult truths that Christmas, the festival of the awakening of the spirit, has been moved to the winter season. The things that have come down to us as customs from ancient times correspond in many ways to these occult insights.

Those who know how to live with the spirits of the earth do not just celebrate Midsummer in the summer. For the celebration of St. John's Day in summer is already a kind of materialistic celebration. One celebrates what external materialistic revelation shows. But he who has the connection with the spirit of the earth, with that which lives spiritually in the earth, awakens to his inner self, that is, he sleeps for his outer self, like Olaf Åsteson, best at Christmas time during the thirteen days. This is also an occult fact, which means exactly the same for occultism as, for example, the fact of the external position of the sun for external materialistic science. Of course, materialistic science will take it for granted that within astronomy it describes the activity of the sun in summer and in winter in a certain purely external way; it will consider it foolishness what is a fact for the occultist that the spiritual position of the sun is most intense in the winter time and that therefore the conditions are most favorable for those who want to come close to a deepening of the soul, which is connected with the spirit of the earth and with all spiritual. Therefore, for someone who wants to seek a deepening of their soul, it may turn out that they can have the best experiences during the thirteen days of the Christmas season, when, without us realizing it, the experiences arise from the soul, although the modern person is already so emancipated from external events that the occult experiences can come at any time. But in so far as the external can nevertheless have an influence, the time between Christmas and New Year is the most important.

Thus we are reminded in a very natural way by this poem how much of what we could mention when discussing the time between death and the next birth was still quite close to certain areas of the world relatively recently, as some people still knew from direct experience.

Good morning, gentlemen! Does anyone have a question?

Questioner: A few lectures ago, the great cosmic world was mentioned; I would like to ask about comets with a large tail. What does that mean?

Dr. Steiner: Well, you see, gentlemen, we have to remember what I have said just recently. I will repeat some of what we said a few lectures ago.

When we look at the human being, we have to say: Two things are necessary for his whole life, namely for his spiritual development. Firstly, that carbon dioxide rises to the head. After all, humans constantly excrete carbon within themselves. Actually, one can say: Man, insofar as he is a solid body, is made of carbon. So humans constantly excrete carbon from themselves. Now, this carbon would eventually become so in us that we would all become black pillars. We would become black pillars if this carbon were to remain. We need it to live, but we have to constantly convert it again so that it becomes something else. This is done by the oxygen. Now, in the end, we exhale the oxygen with the carbon as carbonic acid. There is carbonic acid in our exhaled air. But you need this carbonic acid. It can also be found, for example, in mineral water, and the bubbles inside contain carbonic acid. This carbonic acid, which is not exhaled, constantly rises to the human head, and we need it so that we are not stupid, so that we can think; otherwise marsh gas, which consists of carbon and hydrogen, would rise to the human head. So for thinking we need carbonic acid.

Now, I have already hinted at what we need for our will, for our volition. So let's start with walking, moving our hands, moving our arms – that's actually where this volition begins: we always have to form a compound of carbon and nitrogen and then break it down again. But this cyanide or prussic acid must constantly, so to speak, enter our limbs. It then combines with potassium in the limbs. Potassium cyanide is formed, but this is also immediately broken down again. In order for us to be able to live at all, there must be a constant process of poisoning and detoxification within us. That is the secret of human life: carbonic acid on the one hand, potassium chloride, which is connected to potassium, on the other. With every movement, with every finger, a little cyanic acid is formed, and the thing is then that we dissolve the thing again immediately by moving our fingers. So that must also be there in man.

But everything that must be there in man must also be there in the universe, must somehow be present in the universe. It is now the case that comets have always been examined again. And with comets in particular, I would say, a kind of little story has taken place in the anthroposophical movement. I once gave lectures in Paris and, purely out of inner knowledge, said that there must be some cyanic acid in comets, that cyanic acid is present in comets. Until then, scientists had not yet noticed that cyanic acid is present in comets. But then, shortly afterwards, a comet came along. It was the one you are talking about. And it was precisely on this comet that it was discovered, using the more sophisticated instruments that were available at the time, that the comet material really does contain cyanic acid! So that one can point to this when people always ask: Has anthroposophy predicted anything? Yes, this discovery of cyanic acid in comets, for example, was clearly predicted. It was the same with many other things, but in the case of the comet it was quite obvious. Well, today there is no doubt, even in the natural sciences, that in the atmosphere of a comet, in the comet's air - after all, a comet is actually made of very fine material, it is actually only ether, only air - there is cyanic acid.

Yes, what does that mean, gentlemen? It means that the same thing that we constantly have to produce in our bodies is also present outside in the comet's atmosphere. Now imagine how often I have said here that the egg is formed from the whole universe - so humans, animals and plants are also formed from the whole universe, in that they are formed from the egg. I would like to explain this to you using the example of the human being, so that you can see exactly what these comets actually mean in the whole universe.

Let us start with something historical, which may seem strange to some, but you will see that what you want is best explained by it. Centuries before Christianity was founded, there were ancient people in present-day Greece, the Greeks. The ancient Greeks achieved so much for intellectual life that even today our high school students still have to learn Greek because it is believed that if you learn Greek today, you will become a particularly clever person. Well, the Greeks really did achieve an extraordinary amount for intellectual life. Today, people do not learn Indian or Egyptian, but Greek. By doing so, people want to express that the Greeks have achieved a great deal for intellectual life. The simple fact that we cultivate Greek with our high school students shows this. The Greeks themselves only did Greek with their children, even though they achieved so much for intellectual life.

Now there were two main tribes in Greece that were of particular importance, but which were very different from each other: one was the inhabitants of Sparta, the other the inhabitants of Athens. Sparta and Athens were the two most important cities in Greece. In addition, there were a few others that were also important, but not as important as Sparta and Athens. The inhabitants of these two cities were therefore very different from each other. I will ignore the other differences today, but they were different in that they spoke quite differently. The Spartans always sat quietly together and spoke little. They did not like to talk. But when they did talk, they wanted what they said to have a certain meaning; it should have power over people. But because man cannot always say something meaningful when he babbles, they remained silent when they had nothing significant to say, and always spoke in short sentences. These short sentences were famous throughout the ancient world. People talked about the short sentences of the Spartan people, and those that became famous were often tremendous sayings of wisdom.

It was different with the Athenians. They loved beautiful speech; they loved it when it was spoken beautifully. The Spartans: short, measured, calm in their speech. The Athenians wanted to speak beautifully. They learned rhetoric by speaking beautifully. They did indeed prattle more; not as much as we do today, but they did prattle more than the Spartans.

What was the difference between the Athenian who talked a lot and the Spartan who talked less but meaningfully and powerfully? It was based on education. The art of education is of course little studied today. But what I am saying is based on education. The Spartan boys in particular were educated quite differently from the Athenian boys. The Spartan boys had to do a lot more gymnastics: dance, wrestling, all kinds of gymnastic arts. And oratory, the actual gymnastics of the tongue, was not practiced at all by the Spartans. They let speaking come naturally.

Everything that lies in language is formed through the rest of the human body's movements. You can observe it correctly: if a person has slow, measured movements that are truly gymnastic, then they will also speak properly. In particular, if a person walks with proper steps, then they will also speak properly. Of course, it depends on the child's age. If a person gets gout in old age, it doesn't matter anymore; they have already learned to speak. It depends on the time when one learns to speak. But the Spartans attached great importance to practicing a lot of gymnastics, and they supported this gymnastics by rubbing the children's bodies with oil and smearing them with sand; then they let them do gymnastics. The Athenians also did gymnastics – gymnastics were done throughout Greece – but much less, and they let the older boys do tongue gymnastics, oratory. The Spartans did not do that.

Now, this has a very specific consequence. You see, when those little Spartan boys did their gymnastics with their bodies oiled and rubbed with sand, they had to develop a great deal of inner warmth – develop a great deal of inner warmth. And when the Athenians did their gymnastics, it was something very special for the Athenians. If it had been a day like today and the boys had not wanted to do their gymnastics outdoors with the Spartans, well, that would have been it! The gymnasts, the educators, would have treated those boys properly! When the Athenians had a day like today, so stormy, they gathered their boys more in the interior of the rooms and let them do oratory. But they called them out when the sun shone brightly, when everything sparkled. Then the Athenian boys had to do their gymnastic exercises outside. For the Athenians thought somewhat differently from the Spartans. The Spartans thought: All the movements that boys make must be done from the inner body; it may be stormy and hailing and raging and windy outside, it does not matter. They said to themselves: It must come from within.

The Athenian said differently. He said: We live by the sun, and when the sun wakes us up to move, then we want to move; when the sun is not there, we do not want to move. So said the Athenian, and therefore the Athenians looked at the external solar heat. The Spartans looked at the inner warmth of the sun, the warmth of the sun that man had already processed, and the Athenians looked at the outer sun, which shines beautifully on the skin - the skin is not rubbed with sand, at least not as much as it is by the Spartans, but the skin is supposed to be worked by the sun. That was the difference. And when schoolbooks today speak of the difference between the Athenians and Spartans, the only impression you get is that there must have been something wonderful about why the Spartans were quiet, measured in their speech, and also hardy, while the Athenians practiced the art of oratory, which was then further developed by the Romans. People today cannot practice history and natural science at the same time. History speaks for itself, and science speaks for itself. But if I tell you that the Spartans rubbed their boys with oil and sand and then let them practice their Spartan arts in all weathers, and the Athenians did not rub their boys with so much sand and oil and otherwise practiced their oratory inside the palestra, then you know how this difference between the neighboring Spartans and Athenians was actually brought about by natural facts.

So let us say that when we have the earth (it is drawn) and the sun here: if you look at the sun as it shines and there is the Athenian, then the Athenian emerges; and if you look not so much at the sun as at what the sun has already done in man, and you look at the more inner warmth, then the Spartan emerges from that. You see, there you have history and natural history combined. That's how it is.

Now we can say: When a person ensures that he develops a great deal of warmth within himself, his speech becomes short and measured. Why? Because he turns more to the universe with his whole mind. But if a person allows himself to be illuminated by the sun like the Athenian, then he turns less to the universe with his mind; then he turns more inward with his mind, outward with warmth; the Spartan: inward with warmth, outward with mind. And from reason, the Spartan has learned the language of the universe; it is wise, it has been developed within him. The Athenian has not learned the language of the universe, but only the movement of the universe, because he has abandoned himself to gymnastics in the warmth of the sun.

When we look at what remains of the Spartans today, we say to ourselves: Oh, these Spartans have rendered the wisdom of the world in their short sentences. The Athenians began to express more of the mind that is within man in their beautiful turns of phrase. What the Spartans had in their language has been lost to humanity for the most part; it disappeared in Greece with the Spartans. Man can no longer live with the language of the universe today. But what the Athenians began to do: beautifully winding sentences - it became particularly great in Rome with the art of fine speech. And the Romans at least still spoke beautifully. In the Middle Ages, too, people still learned to speak beautifully. Today, however, people speak terrible sentences. You only have to look at it in detail – well, you could take any other city, but in Vienna, for example, the elections have been going on for weeks: yes, they are not beautifully spoken, but terribly, a whole flood of speeches, but not beautifully! And that is what has gradually become of what was still cultivated by the Athenians, albeit beautifully. It comes from within man. The universe, truly, does not make speeches – but man does! The Spartans did not make speeches; the Spartans expressed in their short sentences how the universe speaks. They looked up at the stars and thought: Man, he runs around in the world and is a busybody. The star moves slowly, so that it does not move slowly now, quickly now, but always evenly. Then the saying arose that has remained for all time: haste with Weile - and so on. The star still reaches its goal! And so the Spartans in particular have learned a great deal from what is out there in space.

And now we can move on to something that I have already noticed in your case: we can move from warmth to light. I would just like to say the following about warmth. Consider that if a person needs to develop a great deal of warmth, then he should become a strong person. And if a person has the opportunity to be in the sun a lot, then he should become a person who talks a lot. Now you only need to take a quick look at geography: go to Italy, where people are more exposed to the sun, and you will see what a chatty people they are! And go to the north, where people are more exposed to the cold: yes, you may despair sometimes – people do not talk because, when you always have to develop inner warmth, it drives away the inner urge to talk. Even here with us it seems almost strange when someone comes from the north; he stands there to speak – yes, he stands there but doesn't speak yet. Not so when an Italian agitator steps onto the rostrum, he speaks even before he gets up there, he is already talking down below. Then it continues, then it just gushes! When a Nordic person, who needs to generate a lot of warmth because there is no external warmth, is supposed to speak: a Nordic person like that, he stands there - you get desperate because he doesn't even start; he wants to say something, but he doesn't even start. It's true: inner warmth drives away the desire to speak, while external warmth fuels the desire to speak. Of course, all this can be transformed by art. The Spartans developed this speaking calm not through art but through their own racial character, even though they were neighbors of the Athenians because they mixed a lot with people coming from the north. Among the Athenians, for example, there were many who came from hot climates and intermarried with the Athenians; this is how they developed their flow of speech. So there we see how even the oratorical person is connected to the sun and warmth. Now let's move on to light.

All we need to do is remember something I have already told you. Think of a mammal. A mammal develops the germ for a new mammal internally. The germ is carried internally by the mother animal; everything happens internally. Take the butterfly, on the other hand. I told you: the butterfly lays the egg, the caterpillar crawls out of the egg, the caterpillar pupates itself into a cocoon, and the sunlight drives the multicolored butterfly out of the cocoon. On the other hand, look at the mammal (it is being drawn), this mammal develops the new animal hidden in its uterus. Here we have two contrasts again, wonderful contrasts. Look at the egg: it is uncovered. When the caterpillar crawls out, the light is already coming. The caterpillar, I told you, goes to the light, spins its cocoon, the shell that it becomes a pupa, after the light, and the light in turn causes the butterfly. And the light does not rest and does not rest, gives the butterfly its colors. The colors are caused by the light; the light treats the butterfly.

Take, on the other hand, the cow, the dog. Yes, the little cub inside the maternal uterus cannot have the external light; it is closed off in darkness from the outside. So it must develop inside, in the darkness.

But nothing that lives can develop in darkness. It is simply nonsense to believe that something can develop in darkness. But what is the story here? I will give you a comparison. One can indeed hope that once the Earth becomes very poor in coal, direct solar heat will be able to be used for heating through some kind of transformation; but today that is just not yet possible, that one uses the heat of the sun directly for heating. Perhaps it will not take much longer before one comes up with how it can be done; but today we use coal, for example. Yes, gentlemen, coal is nothing more than solar heat, only solar heat that flowed to Earth many, many thousands of years ago, was trapped in the wood and stored as coal. When we heat, we bring out the solar heat that accumulated in the earth thousands and thousands of years ago.

Do not think that only coal behaves towards the sun as I have just described! Other beings, too, behave towards the sun as I have just described, and that includes all living beings. If you look at a mammal, you have to say: every little young animal has a mother, who in turn has a mother, and so on. They have always absorbed the warmth of the sun; it is still inside the animal itself, it is inherited. And just as we bring the warmth of the sun out of the coal, so the small child in the maternal womb now takes the sunlight, which is stored there, from within. — Now you have the difference between what arises in the dog or in the cow and what arises in the butterfly. The butterfly goes straight into the outer sunlight with its egg, allowing it to be completely transformed by the outer sunlight until it becomes the colorful butterfly. The dog or the cow are just as colorful on the inside, but you cannot see it. Just as the warmth of the sun is not perceived in coal – it must first be coaxed out – so too, with the higher contemplation of dog and cow, one must first coax out what light is stored up within. There is light stored up within! The butterfly is colorful on the outside; sunlight has worked from the outside. Yes, in the dog or the cow, I would say, invisible light is everywhere inside.

What I have described to you, people today could easily determine with our perfect instruments, prove it in their laboratories, if they wanted to. They should just make a laboratory, completely dark, totally dark, and then they should compare in this laboratory a newly laid egg and a cow or dog germ in its early state, then you would see that the dimming that can occur in the dark room shows this difference that I am describing. And if one were to photograph what one does not see with one's eyes - the eyes are not sensitive enough for that - one would be able to prove that the butterfly egg has the spectrum yellow and the dog and cow egg has the spectrum blue in the photograph. These things, which one can see spiritually - one does not need the external when one can see them spiritually - will still be proved with the most perfect instruments.

Now we can say: the butterfly is formed in the external sunlight, the cow or the dog is formed from the sunlight that is stored internally. Thus we have come to know the difference between warmth, which works externally, which makes a person talkative, the light that works externally, which causes the many colors in the butterfly, and the warmth within, which makes a person silent and measured – the light within a being that gives birth to living young, which must receive the light internally. And now we can move on from there to the subject of our question.

There are also things that a person needs inside, but which he must not develop in excess inside, because otherwise he would die from them. And that includes prussic acid, which is also known as hydrogen cyanide. If a person were to continually produce hydrogen cyanide throughout the day, beyond the little bit that is already there, well, that wouldn't work, that would be too much. A person does produce a little prussic acid in himself, but very little. But he also needs some from outside; he absorbs it with what he inhales. It is not much, but a person does not need more.

Now, gentlemen, this potassium cyanide is not present in ordinary air. If comets did not appear from time to time, this potassium cyanide would not be present in the air. Comets and then these meteors, shooting stars, which, as you know, fly through the air in such great numbers, especially in midsummer, bring down this potassium cyanide. And man actually draws his strength from it. Therefore, people who have become weak in their muscles should be sent into the air, which has not only become fresh from the earth, but has become fresh from the whole universe, which has experienced meteorite influences. And it is the case that people who suffer from what used to be called consumption, for example, who become weak in their muscles and for whom this weakness is particularly pronounced towards spring, are sent in the fall to breathe this air that has been refreshed by the universe. In spring there is nothing that can be done; that is why such people most easily die in spring. You have to take precautions, because you can't really do anything for such people until the fall. When the meteor forces deposit their cyanide with the small amounts of potassium cyanide that come in from the universe during the summer, these people should then, when August ends and fall comes, with their weak limbs, come to areas where summer has deposited its best, namely potassium cyanide. Then their limbs become strong again. So for people you notice this happening to, the next year will be very bad for them, because they become weak, and you should actually take precautions in the spring, when you can't do much with external things. You should say to yourself: When spring comes, I will give such people, depending on how weak they have become, the juice of certain plants, for example the juice of blackthorn. If you store the blackthorn juice – you know the tart, acidic plant – and bring it into the mouth of a person who becomes weak in spring, you can sustain them throughout spring and summer. Why? Well, you see, when you give a person the juice of blackthorn, this blackthorn juice forms all kinds of salts. These go to the head and take the carbonic acid with them. So we tilt the head to help this person through spring and summer. And in the fall we have to take him to an area where he is able to take the other thing, which has to go more to the limbs. Carbonic acid goes to the head; we insert it after the head by introducing blackthorn. If we have been fortunate enough to have brought a person through the summer in this way, we can take him to a suitable area in the fall. He should stay for two or three weeks in such air, which we know has just received meteorical influences. Then it is the case that the person, having been strengthened during the spring and summer, really does regain the strength of his limbs.

Yes, gentlemen, there you have the two effects side by side. There you have the earthly effect, which is actually a lunar effect, the earthly effect in the blackthorn juice, and there you have the cosmic effect in what the comets, and when there is no comet, the shooting stars have left behind – it is the same with them, only small; but there are many – which has an effect from the universe. Just as you basically have nothing earthly in the butterfly with its transformation, but light from the universe, just as you have warmth from the universe, from the sun, in the protected eggs, so you also have human warmth within you, which you must develop inwardly in your substance and which stimulates exactly the opposite of the external warmth.

Thus we can see everywhere how there is an alternation in man, but also how there is an alternation in the whole universe: sometimes things must come from the outside of the universe, sometimes from within the earth or from within man. Now you will say: Yes, certain things are regular; but they cannot alone bring about what they are supposed to bring about. Day and night change regularly; they bring about the one thing that comes from the earth. Now, comets appear more or less irregularly; shooting stars too. And that is also the case. There is no such regularity with shooting stars as with the rest. If an astronomer wants to observe a solar eclipse, he can find the exact time when it begins – that can be calculated –; it belongs to the regular, but does not work from the sun. So he can still go to supper beforehand and still get to the solar eclipse. If he wants to observe the meteoritic swarming of shooting stars at the right time, he has to watch the whole night, otherwise he cannot find them. That is the difference between what comes irregularly from the universe to Earth and what is regular.

Now you can raise an interesting question. You can say: The comets that are connected with the cyan - which is connected with our will in our human being - these comets appear irregularly; one comes soon, then it is long absent. - It always also gives rise to superstition in people; but precisely that which does not always appear makes them superstitious when it comes. In the sunrise and sunset, only the formerly prepared human minds have seen the divine; later, superstitious minds have then dreamed up all sorts of things about comets. You may now ask: Why is it not the case with comets that, just as the sun appears at certain hours of the year in the morning, a comet also appears? Well, if that were the case, if comets could regularly appear and disappear with their tails just as regularly as the sun and moon rise and set, then we humans would have no freedom; then everything else in us would be as regular as sunrise and sunset, moonrise and moonset. And what is connected with this regularity in the universe is also a natural necessity in us. We must eat and drink with a certain regularity, and sleep with a certain regularity. If the comets rose and set with the same regularity as the sun and moon, we could not begin to move arbitrarily, but would have to wait: we would be in a state of rigor; the comet would appear, and we could leave! If it disappeared again, we would fall into a state of rigor again. We would have no freedom. These so-called wandering stars are what give man his freedom from the universe. And so we can say: that which is necessary in man, hunger, thirst in their course, sleep, waking and so on, comes from the regular phenomena; and that which is arbitrary in man, which is freedom, comes from the comet-like phenomena and this gives man the strength for the power that works in his muscles.

In recent times, people have completely forgotten how to look at what is free in a person. People no longer have any sense of freedom. That is why, in more recent times, people have become obsessed with what is only necessity. Now people express their attitudes in their festivals. For example, they have festivals for necessity: Christmas, Easter; but they have dropped the autumn festival, the Michaelmas festival, because it is connected with freedom, with the inner strength of the human being. And so, actually, people study at most the material side of the comets. The other, they say: Yes, you can not know about that. - And on the one hand, you see today that people shy away from freedom; on the other hand, you see that they have no real mind, no reason to study the irregularities in space. If they were not there, then you would have no freedom. So we can say: the Athenians took up what was inside people. That made them talkative. On the one hand, materialism has become terribly talkative. But this also makes it insensitive, dull to everything that can be used to strengthen one's resistance to meteorite influences. That is why Michaelmas is at most a farmers' festival, and the other festivals are something that is related to necessities, although they are no longer as respected as they were in ancient times because people have forgotten the connection with the spiritual world altogether.

In this way, everything becomes transparent. When people understand again how beneficial the influence of the comet is, they will probably remember that they like to celebrate some kind of festival in the fall to have a kind of freedom celebration. That belongs in the fall: a kind of Michaelmas festival, a freedom celebration. People today let this pass because they have no understanding of it at all; they have no understanding of freedom in nature outside, and therefore also no understanding of freedom in man. You see, the honorable Lady Moon and the majestic Lord Sun, they sit on their thrones, they want to have everything measured because they have no right sense for freedom in the universe, in the cosmos. Of course, it must also be. But the comets are the freedom heroes in the universe; they therefore also have within them the substance that is connected with activity in humans, with free activity, with arbitrariness, with the activity of the will. And so we can say: When we look up at the sun, we have in it that which always plays rhythmic games within us, the heart and breathing. If we look at a comet, then we should actually write a poem about freedom every time a comet appears, because it is connected with our freedom! We can say: Man is free because in the universe, freedom also reigns for these enthusiasts in the universe, the comets. And just as the sun mainly owes its nature to the acid character, so the comet owes its nature to the cyanic character.

You see, gentlemen, that's where you come to the nature of comets, and that is an extraordinarily significant connection, as you can see that suddenly there is something in the whole universe that is alive, but that lives in a way that is similar to us humans. So you can also say: the Spartans had more sense for the non-withdrawal from the sun, and that is why they appreciated everything that was connected with the universe - this did not arise from external arbitrariness. And Lykurgos, the lawmaker of Sparta, had iron money made. In the schoolbooks you will find: Lykurgos had iron money made so that the Spartans should remain fine Spartans. That is nonsense. In truth, Lykurgos was instructed by those who still knew these things in Sparta; they told him that comets contain cyanide of iron, and so he had iron minted in Sparta as a symbol of the comets for the money. That was something that arose from wisdom; while other nations were changing over to gold coinage, which expresses that which is more in the sun, the image of the solar life in us.

Thus it is that one sees that in the customs of ancient peoples there is still something more of what they knew of the universe.

The various effects of light rays on matter can be isolated. One can remove heat from luminosity by using an alum solution; and conversely, by using carbon disulfide, heat acts without the production of light. Certain rays of light separated from others can excite dormant faculties in a substance to activity or entirely annul them. For example, the rays that normally produce chemical effects, such as violet and ultraviolet ones, have the ability to make sulfur-calcium (a mixture of sulfur and the white metal calcium) luminous. However, if these rays are first allowed to pass through an aesculin solution, this effect will be cancelled, and the mixture will lose its ability of luminosity altogether. The ability to make sulfur-calcium luminous is possessed only by those types of rays that also produce chemical effects.

The red warmth rays have a slower vibration than the violet rays that produce chemical effects. The red ones have 400 trillion vibrations per second, the blue-violet ones 760 trillion, and even more so the ultraviolet ones; the light rays, bright in the middle, have an intermediate speed.

It is not that the vibration of the red warmth rays is slower, but rather the dark matter through which the bright rays shine and produce red makes the red rays more inert and passive. Thus the dark matter obscures the light and slows down the speed capability of the bright rays.

The violet rays cause the dark matter to take on a lighter coloring. That is, the dark matter itself undergoes a change, and therefore does not to disturb the vibrations of the light, but lets them pass. The dark matter changes the bright light rays by darkening them. On the contrary, the dark rays illuminate the dark matter and act on it, making it move and change.

When the light rays are caught by an object, darkness is created behind the illuminated object, and it will then cast its shadow on an opposite screen.

We can perceive an object's color due to the fact that, for example, a red flower vibrates the ether of light between itself and our eye 400 trillion times a second; that the light ether in our eye, set in the same vibrations, reaches the red cone in our retina; and through the optic nerve the image of the red flower which is reflected on the retina is telegraphed to the brain, whereby the reflection is then consciously perceived.

The astral can only perceive directly by empathizing with things. By being separated from things, man lost this ability of immediate perception; he places himself outside of things. He produces organs out of himself so that he may use them to produce images out of things; this enables him to perceive these images, and thereby perceive the things indirectly.

The light ether is now the medium, and the eye has developed as an organ of perception. The eye consists of the round eyeball, which is lined by the retina inside, which consists of rods and cones and is enclosed by an outer cornea. Facing externally is the open pupil and behind it the ciliary muscle, which holds a transparent lens. The ability to adjust causes the light aperture (the pupil) to widen in the dark and to shrink in the light so that not too much light enters, and to collect the light rays in a focal point; to let them fall into the "darkroom" of the retina, where the mirror image is produced and telegraphed to the brain by the nerve to which the eye is attached. Light and color are produced by vibrations in the ether. 400 trillion vibrations red, to 760 trillion and above in a second blue-violet.

The vibrations of air produce sound that are trillions of times slower than light waves.

The perception of air vibration as sound is between 16.5 and over 40000 vibrations per second. Below 16.5 and above 40000 vibrations are no longer perceived as sound.

Between 40 and 40000 vibrations per second musical tone is perceived.

For the measurement of the sound vibration of the air we make use of a rotating disc provided with holes—the siren. If the disk is rotated and vibrates under sixteen and a half times—that is, the air is driven through less than sixteen holes per second while rotating—we will hear only impact noise, not tone. The tone scale can be determined firmly by measuring the air vibrations in numbers. If we compare the prime C with the higher C, one C would relate to the other as 1 : 2, and within the octave we could determine the vibration ratios of the other notes.

Let's assume that the vibrations of the tone scale in the second were as follows:

so we get the following relationship:

The prime to the octave = 1 : 2 = 1st prime
The prime to the second = 8 : 9 = 9/8 second
The prime to the third = 4 : 5 = 5/4 third
The prime to the fourth = 3 : 4 = 4/3 fourth
The prime to the fifth = 2 : 3 = 3/2 fifth
The prime to the sixth = 3 : 5 = 5/3 sixth
The prime to the seventh = 8 : 15 = 15/8 seventh
The prime to the prime = 2 octave

The shades of color behave within the color scale as the pitches behave within the tone scale; the ratio is the same, only the light ether vibrates trillions of times faster.

400 trillion vibrations red
450 trillion vibrations orange
500 trillion vibrations yellow
532 trillion vibrations green
600 trillion vibrations blue-green
665 trillion vibrations blue indigo
750 trillion vibrations indigo
760 trillion vibrations violet
700 trillion vibrations ultraviolet

An ultraviolet would be about the octave of prime = red. Our violet, at 760 trillion vibrations, corresponds in the tone scale to a tone slightly above the seventh.

There is a certain amount of time required for light to propagate through space. The speed of light is approximately 300,000 kilometers per second. This has been calculated both astronomically and terrestrially, and the results of the calculation have given the same result. The cosmic calculation has been made by Olaf Romer, based on the following observation: One has calculated the time, which the four moons need, in order to orbit around Jupiter, and waited with the telescope, until the two moons, which stepped into the shadow behind the Jupiter, appear again. This has produced the irregularity that the moons have sometimes been delayed—and up to 996 seconds longer than they were expected to be. The cause of the delay has been sought, and in the process the discovery of the laws of the propagation of light has been made.

The circumference of the ellipse that the Earth circumscribes around the Sun is 299 million kilometers. A much larger circumference is drawn by the ellipse of Jupiter around the Sun. It has now been observed that the moons always emerge from the shadow at exactly the right time, when the Earth is in a straight line between the Sun and Jupiter.

Now one waited for the time when the Earth arrived at the opposite point, crossed the whole width of its ellipse and puts the Sun between itself and Jupiter. Here the difference of 996 seconds has been observed; consequently the delay has been caused by the space which the earth has covered in the meantime. So the light needs 996 seconds to propagate through a space of 299 million kilometers. In one second it would need the 996th part of 299 million kilometers for it. 299,000,000 / 996 = 300,200. So roughly 300,000 kilometers per second.

The same calculation has been made by Fizeau with a gear. If one has a light behind oneself and a very distant mirror reflecting it back to the eye, and then brings a gear wheel between the eye and mirror and sets it in fast rotation by a crank, then one will see the light through the tooth gaps of the wheel until it has covered the distance back and forth; then the obstacle, the darkening occurs through the opaque gear-tooth. Now, if you measure the distance from the eye to the mirror twice and calculate the time, i.e. how long the wheel has to turn until the light gets from the gap to the tooth, you can also calculate how long it takes the light to propagate through space and return. This calculation agrees exactly with the astronomical one.

The speed of propagation is always the same, whether light or candlelight. Light is nothing other than ether vibrations which propagate in space.

With kerosene or a candle it is always the gas which burns; the liquid or the solid body is transformed by the heat ether into vapor or gas and then begins to shine.

If you make a solid or liquid body glow and deflect its rays with a prism through the opening of a darkroom, you get the continuous spectrum. If, instead of the glowing solid or liquid sphere, you pass a particular gas flame through a spectroscope, you get only a single-color line spectrum through the prism—a discontinuous spectrum—and exactly of the color of the gas in question.

Now if one tried to bring into the rays of the liquid body a glowing vapor, for example sodium vapor, there one found in the spectrum instead of yellow, a black line; the yellow was extinguished, absorbed. On this occasion, in 1859, Kirchhoff and Bunsen discovered the law of absorption: every glowing vapor extinguishes that kind of light which it itself produces, and allows all others to pass through it unimpeded.

Now that every substance has its own color which it emits as a gas and replaces it again by absorbing it from other rays of light, it is now possible to analyze every substance through the spectroscope and even discover unknown substances—for example, argon in the air.

This is also how one came to discover the dark lines found in the solar spectrum—the so-called Fraunhofer lines. One could thus analyze the material world of the Sun and state that it is of the same nature as ours. The glowing ball of fire is surrounded with an atmosphere produced by evaporation of the glowing masses of matter, and the rays of the liquid masses pass through the gas rays, which absorb their colors and give dark lines in the spectrum.

But these dark lines give a luminous band of colors as soon as a solar eclipse occurs and the moon covers the fiery ball of the Sun.

Through a spectroscope the state of evolution of the stars is also detected, and the character of the nebular patches, which may be doubtful through the inadequacy of the telescope, and which have often proved to be distant asterisms.

Only gaseous matter transmits any color and retains only its own color. Solids and liquids absorb all colors and reflect only the color which is their property, whether natural or artificially acquired.

What appears to us as color on a substance is only the reflection back of those rays of light which correspond to its color character, all others are absorbed.

Color is the property of a substance, the living expression of its acquired activity, its karma, and belongs to the karmic world, just as man is the product of his activity, his karma, for karma is life, is activity, is acquired.

Every substance or body is basically nothing but movement, it has its own mode of vibration and makes itself known only through the effects it exerts on other substances or suffers through them. Matter is always life and has a history; it changes through experiences, chooses and suffers. Any simple substance we perceive is in itself highly differentiated.

Light can be either primary—a self-luminous body—or polarized by reflection. In the former case, it has not yet lost its full vibratory capacity by contact with another body. If one puts two mirrors parallel to each other and brings them in contact with a candlelight, the light will be reflected twice in both mirrors. But if one places one mirror perpendicular to the other and brings it into relation with a candlelight, the reflection in the perpendicular one will be extinguished—it will not be present.

The cause is that the reflected light vibrates differently from the primary. It vibrates in all directions; now, as it is caught by a mirror image, this same light changes its mode of vibration, in that the mirror lets all other directions of vibration pass, absorbs, and lets only the parallel ones, which correspond to its mode of vibration, radiate back. This reflected light, which vibrates only in one direction, is reflected by the parallel mirror, but not by the perpendicular one. The first mirror is called the polarizer because it polarizes the light, and the perpendicular the analyzer because it shows the polarized light by extinguishing it. One can also use tourmaline tongs to investigate whether a luminous body emits its own light or only reflects light. Polarized light would be reflected only when the tourmaline is in a parallel position; when it is in a perpendicular position, there would be no reflected image; and when it is rotated obliquely, the light rays would partially vibrate with the tourmaline, and the different directions of the vibrations would form colored figures, similar to the Chladni-sound figures. In contrast, primary light would reflect at each position of the tourmaline tongs. In this way, planets and fixed stars can be recognized by their light.

If one brings a body between the two metal plates of the tongs, the darkened light will shine again, for the light vibrations are again regulated by the body's own movements.

If the rays of the Sun are caught unobstructed by a prism in a darkroom, a white disk with a darker perimeter will show up on the opposite wall, and this penumbra will contain the prismatic colors. The rays entering through the narrow aperture overlap and appear as colors at the boundary between light and dark; so, too, in mirror glass, colors are seen when the light is reflected.

Colors are the incarnation of light produced when the rays of light are stopped by matter and reflected back.

Published in The Golden Blade, 1984. It is also known as, The Michael Impulse and the Mystery of Golgotha. It is the seventh of twelve lectures in the volume The Mission of Michael. The Revelation of the Intrinsic Secret of the Human Being.

For a true understanding of the nature of the human being we have to recognise his division into three members, each of which is, relatively speaking, self-dependent. We have within the human being the head, the organs of the breast system, and the organs of the limbs. These are of course crude expressions that are only roughly true. Under the name of limbs, for example, we have to include a good part of what is contained in the trunk. Moreover, as you will have gathered from my lectures, as well as from my book, Riddles of the Soul, there is a connection between the head of Man and his life of thought and ideation; the whole rhythmic activity in Man—roughly speaking, the breast system—is connected with the sphere of feeling; and finally the sphere of the will, which represents the essentially spiritual part of Man, goes together with the system and organisation of the limbs. Relatively speaking, these three systems of the human organism are independent one of another. Similarly, the life of ideas, the life of feeling and the life of will are each self-dependent, although at the same time they work together.

Now, as you know, we can best comprehend the difference from a spiritual point of view between these three systems when we observe them in the following way. In ordinary waking life Man is fully awake only in his head system—in all that has to do with the life of thinking and ideas. Everything connected with the life of feeling—that is, from a bodily aspect, with the rhythmic system—is a dream-life. Even in daytime the life of feeling pervades our waking life with a life of dreams. What goes on in the sphere of feeling we know indirectly through ideas, but we can never know it directly through the feelings themselves. The life of will is in still greater darkness; we have no clearer grasp of its real content than we have of the life of sleep.

A recognition of these distinctions allows us to indicate more exactly than is usually done the character and extent of the subconscious states lying below ordinary human consciousness. Subconscious ideas lie beneath the life of feeling; and still more deeply unconscious ideas lie beneath the life of will.

Now it is very important to realise that each one of the three systems contains within it thinking, feeling and willing. In the head system or the system of thought, a life of feeling and a life of will are also present; only they are much less developed than the life of ideas. Similarly, thoughts are present in the sphere of feeling, more feebly than in the sphere of the head and only coming to consciousness in a dreamlike manner.

One thing is usually quite disregarded, my dear friends, in our time of abstract science, and it is this. These subconscious members of the human being are more objective in proportion as they are less subjectively present in consciousness. What do I mean by that? I mean this. In our life of ideas, in our head life, we have processes which take place within us. On the other hand, what we experience through our rhythmic system, the processes that go on in the sphere of our feeling, are by no means our own individual property. They take place within us and yet at the same time they represent objective world-processes. This means that when you feel, you have of course an experience in yourself, but this experience is at the same time something that happens in the world and has significance there. And it is of extraordinary interest to follow up the world-processes that lie behind our life of feeling.

Suppose you experience something that affects you very deeply, Some event that moves you to joy or sorrow. Now you know that the whole of life runs its course in such a way that we can separate it into periods of about seven years in length. Roughly speaking, the first is from birth to the change of teeth, the second to the age of puberty, the third to the beginning of the twenty-first year, and so on. All these boundary lines are of course only approximate. Here then we have one division that shows itself in the course of human life.

The turning-points in the development of the human being which we arrive at by this method are clearly marked in the earlier part of life—change of teeth, and puberty—but later are more or less concealed, although they can be distinctly noted by one who knows what to look for. That which takes place in the soul and spirit of the human being about the twenty-first year of life is, for one who can observe it, just as clearly perceptible as the change at puberty is for external physiology. The division into seven-year periods holds true, in fact, for the whole course of human life.

Now let us go back to the event that makes a strong impression on our life of feeling. Suppose the event happens between the change of teeth and puberty. A very remarkable thing then takes place, which in these days of crude observation is not generally noticed. The impression made upon your feeling is there, and then gradually the vibrations of it die away in your consciousness. But something takes place in the objective world quite apart from what is in your consciousness, quite apart from any share your life of soul has in it. And this process that goes on in the objective world may be compared with the setting up of a vibratory motion. It vibrates out into the world. And the remarkable thing is that it does not go out and out endlessly into the infinite, but when it has spread itself out for a sufficient distance—when its elasticity is, so to speak, used up—it swings back and makes its appearance in the next seven-year period as an impulse that works upon your life of soul from outside. I will not say that such an event always comes back seven years later, for the lapse of time depends on the whole form and character of the individual life, but it falls into the course of the next seven-year period, although very often entirely without your notice.

Yes, my dear friends, we continually undergo experiences which strike in upon our feeling life and are the reaction of the world to an experience we had in the sphere of feeling during the previous seven-year period. An event that stirs and moves our feelings resounds again into our life of soul during the next stage of life. People do not usually remark such things, but anyone who takes a little trouble can learn to observe them, even externally.

Who of you has not at one time had the experience that someone you know well suddenly becomes dejected and out of humour? You have no idea why, but a change has come over him “out of the blue”, as we say. If you follow up the matter and have the eyes of your soul open to observe the particular way in which such a man conducts himself in life, if you can feel what is in between the words he says—or rather, what is within the words—then you will be able to go back to some earlier event that affected him deeply. And during the whole of the interval something has been going on in the world which would not have been going on if the man had not had that moving experience. The whole thing is a process which, besides being experienced by the man himself, takes place also as an absolutely objective experience outside him.

You will readily see how many opportunities there are for such things to go on outside us! They come about through our instrumentality, but they are none the less objective world-processes. These processes become involved in all that is going on among the elemental beings outside us, including such elemental beings as I described to you recently. You will remember how in another connection I brought them together with the breathing and the whole rhythmic system. Now you can see them working together with the rhythmic system indirectly through stimulation of the feelings. When we understand these things rightly, we are led to the inevitable conclusion that Man is continually creating around him as it were a great aura. And into the waves that are thus thrown up, elemental beings plunge; they mix themselves up, as it were, in the whole process and are able to influence the reaction that comes back on to Man—their power to do so, however, depending on the individual human being.

Let us picture the whole process. Something moves you deeply. You ray it out all around you. When it comes back to you, it is not unchanged; in the meantime elemental beings have concerned themselves with it, and when it works back on to you, then, together with the process outside you of which the elemental beings took hold, you receive also the influences and workings of these elemental beings. Man spreads out around him a spiritual atmosphere whereby he comes into contact with elemental beings—he and they mutually affect one another. All destiny that works itself out within the course of life is connected with these beings. For even within this life we have a kind of fulfillment of our destiny. If we have some experience today, then that experience has a significance for our later life. And this in fact is how our destiny is moulded. Elemental beings who feel attracted to us by reason of our nature, work at the shaping of our destiny. There they attain to a feeling of themselves: there they work with us and upon us.

We have here obtained an insight into the interplay between Man and his environment, and can see how spiritual forces are at work in the environment. By following this interplay, we can throw a light on many things that happen to Man in the way of destiny. An insight into these connections is nowhere within the scope of the ‘enlightened’ knowledge of our times; we can find traces of it only in traditions that have survived from earlier times, when Man lived in more elemental stages of consciousness and had more direct connection with reality. These traditions you will find sometimes very beautifully brought to expression in poems of earlier ages, where a destiny that befalls a human being is referred to the intervention of elemental beings. One of the most beautiful that has been preserved is a poem often presented to you in a Eurythmy performance. Here you can see how elemental beings from the Elf King's realm intervene in the destiny of Man. The poem runs thus:

THE ELF KING'S DAUGHTER
Sir Olaf rides from house and hall
Till late, his wedding guests to call.

There elves are dancing on the green,
Elf King's daughter amidst them is seen.

“Welcome Sir Olaf, your hand I'll take,
Come dance and join us for my sake.”

“I shall not dance nor dance I may,
Tomorrow will be my wedding day!”

“Mark well, Sir Olaf, and dance with me—
Two golden spurs I'll give to thee!

A silken sark snow white and fine—
My mother bleached it by moonshine.”

“I shall not dance nor dance I may
Tomorrow will be my wedding day!”

“Mark well, Sir Olaf, and dance with me—
A mountain of gold I'll give to thee!”

“To a mountain of gold I'll not say nay,
But I shall not dance nor dance I may.”

“If you refuse to dance with me
Illness and pest shall follow thee.”

Over his heart she struck amain,
Never he felt such bitter pain.

Pale-faced he sat on his horse so tame—
“Go back”, she cried, “to your worthy dame.”

And when at last he reached his gate
Trembling his mother stood to wait.

“My son, my son, oh tell me true
Why is your face of deathlike hue?”

“Of deathlike hue it needs must be
For Elf King's daughter did I see.”

“My son so dear, and loved so well,
What to your bride I needs must tell?”

“Tell her that to the woods I'm bound—
To exercise my horse and hound.”

At early dawn, at break of day,
Came bride and guests in their wedding array.

They feasted and drank of wine and beer—
“Where is Sir Olaf, my bridegroom dear?”

“Sir Olaf to the woods is bound
To exercise his horse and hound!”

The bride she lifted the cloth so red
There lay Sir Olaf—and he was dead.

There you have the elemental world interweaving in the destiny of Man, at the very moment when his destiny strikes in upon him with the shock of illness and of death. Please note the words exactly. In old poems these things are not presented as they would be in poems of recent times. (Herder took these verses from an old folk-poem). Of the poems produced within present day culture we may well say that about 99 per cent are superfluous. The poems that are derived from an ancient knowledge are always to be distinguished by the fact that they are true to reality. It could not possibly have been said in this poem that she struck him on the head, or on the mouth, or on the nose, but:

Over the heart she struck him amain,
He felt therefrom a grievous pain.

In this connection it has to be an organ of the rhythmic system, hence the heart.

What I want you to note is that here you have an entirely faithful reproduction in poetry of what actually goes on around Man in such an hour of destiny. It is in fact always going on around Man, but it makes itself felt particularly strongly in connection with the phenomenon of this periodic return of experiences in the sphere of feeling. For these always come back to us in a changed form. They enter into our destiny only after they have passed through whatever the elemental beings have found to do with them. Just as we live within the external physical air or among the products of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms—in the very same way do we live with the subconscious parts of our nature in spiritual spheres. In particular, with our rhythmic system we live in the spiritual sphere of the elemental beings. And in that sphere is shaped as much of our destiny as can be shaped in the course of life between birth and death.

Only because in our head we are fully awake, do we rise up at all out of this interplay with the elemental beings. In respect of our head life alone we are not involved in the realm of the elemental beings. There in our head we emerge, so to speak, above the surface of the ocean of elemental existence, in which as human beings we perpetually swim. Here then you may see how experiences can come back in the form of destiny even within the ordinary course of life, when they are related to our rhythmic system.

For the limb system, too, there is an interplay with the environment, but it is very much more complicated. Here again the events swing back; but they make a wider circuit and come back only in the next life or in one of the following earth-lives. Thus we can say that what we call our destiny or Karma need not after all be so enigmatic for us, if we look on it as only a further expansion of what can be studied in the return of experiences within a single life. For the experiences do not come back unchanged; they have undergone a very great change in the meantime.

Let me now draw your attention to a particular fact. Wherever I have lectured on education, I have always given emphasis to an important landmark in the course of life that occurs at about the ninth year. It is a turning-point that should be very carefully marked in teaching. Up to that time one's teaching about nature should be entirely of the kind where the description of nature and her processes is connected—by way of fables, legends, and so forth—with the moral life. Only at the ninth year may one begin to describe nature in a simple, elementary manner. Then the child is ripe for it. In Waldorf education the whole arrangement and treatment of subjects is derived directly and entirely from actual observation of the human being, down to the smallest details. I pointed this out in the article I wrote on the educational foundations of the Waldorf School, and I alluded there to this turning-point around the ninth year.

We may characterise this turning-point by saying that the ego-consciousness receives then a new form. The child becomes capable of taking note of external nature in a more objective way. Earlier, he unites whatever he sees in nature with his own being. Now the ego-consciousness unfolds, as you know, in the first seven-year stage of life, from about 2 – 2 ½ years of age. What happens is that it comes back in the second seven-year period, at about the ninth year. This is one of the most striking ‘returns’—this return of the ego-consciousness at about the ninth year of age. It comes back in a more spiritual form, whereas in the second or third year of life it has more of a soul character. This is only one of the events which comes back in a striking manner. The same observation can be made for less significant events.

Indeed, my dear friends, it will become urgently necessary for the future of human evolution to pay attention to these intimate things in the life of Man. An insight into such things must gradually become part of general culture. The culture and education of mankind change from epoch to epoch. We today, for example, are quite unhappy if at ten years old our children cannot read or do sums. The Romans were not so at all; they were unhappy if a child of ten did not yet know the twelve tables of the law. We for our part do not put ourselves to great trouble to make our children acquainted with the terms of the law. Our children's minds would be in a sorry plight if we did! What is thought necessary for people generally to be aware of, changes from age to age; and today we stand at the starting point of a time when the very evolution of the earth and mankind requires that these more intimate connections of Man's life of soul shall be generally recognised. Man will have to come to the point of knowing himself more exactly than has been held to be necessary hitherto. Otherwise these things will work back upon the whole disposition of human life in a most unfavourable way.

Because we do not know that something which stirs us deeply has such an origin, it does not by any means follow that nothing of the kind takes place in our life of soul. The events come back; they exercise their influence upon our life of soul. We cannot account for them. We do not attempt to bring them into our consciousness. The result is that many people today suffer a great deal from conditions of soul which they simply accept, while of course having no idea that they are to be referred to earlier experiences. Whatever concerns our feelings always comes back in some form or other. You will probably remember the typical instance I have often given. If we teach a child to pray—if, that is, we teach him to develop a prayerful mood and feeling, the effect of it will swing back into his life after many years. It swings back in the interval, but then swings out again further, and only later, after a very long time, does the feeling of prayer come back and manifest in a mood of blessing. As I have often said: No-one will be able in old age to bestow blessing upon others, merely from his presence, from the imponderable elements in his nature, if in childhood he has not learned to pray. Prayer turns into the power to bless. That is how things come back in life. And it is becoming imperative that men should understand these things.

The truth is that men's failure to comprehend these things is the cause of their inability to perceive the great significance of the Mystery of Golgotha. What meaning can it have for people who are caught in the toils of present day education when they hear it said: ‘After Christ had passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, He united Himself with the life of earthly humanity?’ People are not ready to form any idea of their reciprocal relation to the very realm of life wherein the Christ is to be found. The influence of the Christ Impulse is not very noticeable in the concept-forming activity of our heads. As soon, however, as we look down into the unconscious, as soon as we turn our gaze downwards into the sphere of feeling and into the sphere of willing, then we live, first of all, in the sphere of elemental beings; but this sphere is interwoven for us with the Christ Impulse. By way of our rhythmic system—that is, by way of our feelings—we dive down into the realm with which the Christ has united Himself. There we come to the place where the Christ is truly to be found, quite objectively, not merely through tradition or through subjective mysticism.

Moreover, we are living now in an epoch when the events that come from this place, in the way I have just explained, are coming to have great objective significance for the life of Man. For they are beginning to exercise an unconscious influence on men's decisions, upon all that men do; and this is true, even if they struggle against it. If only we are willing to enter into this matter and understand it, we shall be able to experience the influence consciously and to reckon with it; and then we shall be able to call on the spiritual worlds around us to aid us and to work with us.

An external observation will suffice to show that in this matter we are standing at a turning-point in human evolution. I need only refer you to one fact of which I have often spoken from one or another point of view. If we look at the accustomed treatment of history, we shall see that it has not yet reached an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. Just recall the history of the world as it is usually set before us. A description is given of the ancient Assyrian and Babylonian kingdoms, of the ancient Persian and Egyptian kingdoms and of Greece and Rome, and then perhaps mention is made that the Mystery of Golgotha took place, and after that follows an account of the migrations of peoples, and so on. Some historians then carry the story up to the French Revolution or to Poincare; others to the downfall of the Hohenzollerns, and so forth. But in all this fable convenue you will find no mention of the continued working of the Christ Impulse. From the point of view of history as conceived today, it is just as though the Christ Impulse had been simply struck out. It is not there.

It is remarkable how, for example, an historian such as Ranke, who was a Christian and had a true appreciation of the Christ Impulse from a subjective aspect, simply cannot bring the Christ Event into his history. He does not know what to make of it. It plays no part in his conception of history. We may truly say that for Man's knowledge of the spirit, as manifested in history, Christianity is not yet there. It is our anthroposophical spiritual science which for the first time treats history in such a way as to reckon quite positively with the necessity that in the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch the event of Golgotha should break in upon the course of historical evolution. This event is placed at the very centre of our picture of the history of Man. Yes, and we go further. Not only do we receive the event of Golgotha into our picture of the history of Man, we portray cosmic evolution also, so that the Mystery of Golgotha has place within it.

If you will study my Outline of Occult Science, you will find that we do not speak there merely of eclipses of the sun or eclipses of the moon or of explosions or eruptions in the cosmos, but we speak of the Christ Event as a cosmic event. Strange to say, while the so-called historians can find no possible way of including the Christ Event in the progress of Man, the official representatives of religion are infuriated when they hear that some kind of anthroposophical spiritual science has entered the field and speaks of the Christ Event as a cosmic event. When they hear this, they treat it as a terrible outrage. Thus you can see how little readiness there is on the part of the Churches to meet the requirements of our time, for it is essential that the Christ Event should be brought into connection with the great events of the universe.

It must be said that even theologians today often speak of the Christ just as they may speak of any other divine Being. They speak of Him very much as the Hebrews of old or the Jews today speak of their Jahve. I told you a few days ago how one could take Harnack's book, The Essence of Christianity, and substitute for the name of Christ, wherever he uses it, the general name of God, and this without altering the sense, for Harnack has no glimmering of the specific nature of Christianity. His book is page for page a description of the very opposite of the essence of Christianity. It does not treat of Christianity at all; it treats of a general Jahve teaching.

It is important to point out these things, for they are deeply connected with the necessary demands of our time. It is no vague awareness of the presence of an abstract spiritual world that is needed: the evolution of human culture requires that Man should bring into it a consciousness of the actual spiritual world in which we live with all that we feel and will and do, and out of which we raise ourselves only in so far as we think. We emerge from it only with our heads, so to speak. Indeed, an entirely new kind of world-picture is justified when the endeavour is made to permeate all our feeling and willing and doing with the Christ Impulse. Our modern astronomy and our theory of evolution have been able to develop so entirely along the lines of abstract formulae solely because the Christ Impulse has not taken hold of men inwardly, but has remained a tradition. Even where it has taken hold of men subjectively, their inner experiences have not been at the same time objective world experiences—that is, experiences where we feel an interplay between ourselves and all that is happening spiritually around us.

Here and there one sees people beginning to be very keenly aware of the need for a new impulse in the evolution of humanity. But it is with the greatest difficulty that they come to the point of resolving to take hold of the life of the spirit in its actuality. When people speak of the spirit, they always have more or less a desire to keep within the abstract.

Even the consciousness of how we stand in relation to our thoughts must change in a certain way. For, as I have repeatedly pointed out, anthroposophical spiritual science is brought forward at this present time in fulfillment of a definite purpose. It is not the result of a wish to promote enthusiasm for some sort of ideal. It springs from an insight into Man's needs at the present time. And we must again at this point relate the needs of the present day to certain powers of the soul that were present in earlier ages, when Man had a closer connection with his spiritual environment. For in earlier times the conditions of Man's life of soul were quite different.

As I have often explained to you, we cannot look for any further development of Man from sources outside himself. The impulses for the progress of human evolution must in future be called forth from within; they must proceed from our connection with the spiritual world, and we must not blind ourselves to the fact that unless something is added by our own exertion to the experiences of life, these will tend increasingly to become experiences of decline. We find ourselves already in the descending evolution of the earth, and as human beings we must lift ourselves up by our own efforts if we are to transcend the earth-evolution, for we can emerge beyond it only through our connection with the spiritual world. It is our strivings in the direction of knowledge that we shall have to feel as a power within us, enabling humanity to pass over into future stages of evolution, when the Earth dies away, even as we pass on to further stages of evolution when our body dies away and we go through the gate of death.

We pass as individual human beings through the gate of death into the spiritual world; the body dies away beneath us. So will it be one day for mankind as a whole. Mankind will evolve over into the Jupiter existence. The Earth will become a corpse. We are even now in the dying stage of its evolution. The individual human being gets wrinkles and grey hairs. For the geologist who knows how to observe correctly, the Earth bears upon her today the unmistakable signs of old age; she is dying away beneath our feet. The spiritual quest we are engaged upon today is working counter to the ageing of the Earth. Awareness of this fact must permeate our consciousness.

Earlier ages spoke from a different point of view of the close relation between their Mystery knowledge and physical health and healing. This is a truth that must now begin once more to find its way into human consciousness. All striving for knowledge must give rise to the thought: I am doing something to promote the further evolution of the whole of mankind. We shall obviously never come to this consciousness as long as we do not pay attention to the actual process that goes on around us in the way I have described. For until we recognise this, we are bound to regard everything we feel and will and do as our personal affair. We shall have no idea that it is something which takes its course outside us, as well as within.

It will be necessary also for the more exact branches of human knowledge to come to meet this extension of our thought and understanding of the world. And here allow me to refer to something that may perhaps not be fully intelligible to everyone.

The more exact domains of knowledge are by no means yet at their zenith—far from it! For example, you can find today in the exact sciences the most impossible ideas. I will select just one, which may perhaps be generally intelligible. People have usually the following trivial picture: out there somewhere is the sun, and from the sun light goes out in all directions, just as from any other source of light. And you will find that wherever people follow this diffusion of light with mathematical ideas, they will say: You see, the light spreads out and out into the infinite, and then—why then it somehow or other disappears; it gradually weakens and is lost. But this is not so. Everything that spreads out or is diffused in this way reaches a boundary, and from this boundary it swings back again; it returns to its source in a changed form. The sunlight does not go out into the infinite, but swings back on itself—not indeed as light, but as something else. None the less, it does return.

So it is in reality with every form of light. And so it is with every kind of activity. All activities and influences are subject to the law of elasticity. The elasticity in them always has its boundary or limit. And yet ideas such as I have described above are current in our so-called exact sciences; you will find them presented there today. If you were physicists, I would draw your attention to how people reckon with distance traversed and time. They call the velocity, usually denoted by ‘v’, a function of distance and time, and they arrive at the following equation: v = d/t

But, my dear friends, that is absolutely false. The velocity is not a resultant; the velocity is an elementary principle or quality that something, be it material or spiritual, bears within it. And this velocity we analyse; we split it up into distance and time. We abstract the two things out of it—space and time. Space and time, however, are not real things in themselves. Velocities, varying velocities, are real.

This observation I make for the benefit of physicists. They will understand me when I say that their theoretical knowledge of time rests in very shaky foundations. These theories would indeed not hold water if we were in a position to grasp the spiritual in its actuality.

That is the very thing required of us in the present Michael Age. It means that we must take full cognisance of the environment of Man; we must come to know the various elemental and higher beings in our environment as surely as we know of the air and water around us. These are the important things for us; and they must once again become a part of general education and culture, as they were in ancient times. People are not prepared to admit this. They will not admit that in human evolution changes occur as momentous as that which occurred, for example, at the turning-point in the middle of the 15th century. And yet it is quite possible to prove it from detailed facts.

Some Swede or Norwegian has recently written a book in which he gives many quotations from the alchemists. In particular he cites a passage where all manner of things are mentioned—mercury, antimony, and so on. And now our author, whom his book shows to be an excellent modern chemist, says he can make nothing of a certain recipe which is indicated by some alchemist. He cannot do so for the simple reason that, when a present-day chemist speaks of mercury or quicksilver, he means the external metal. But in the book from which he is quoting the words mean something quite different. They do not refer to the external metal at all, but to certain processes within the human organism, and they indicate a knowledge of the inner being of Man. They carry the sense they had for the alchemist. Certainly it is quite possible to read them as if one were reading the description of a laboratory experiment, carried out with retorts and the like—but then one gets no meaning out of it! One is bound to regard it all as nonsense. It has meaning, however, as soon as we know what was meant by the words antimony, mercury, and so forth in those times. They have, it is true, a certain application to the external minerals, but they refer paramountly to inner processes of human nature, for which one had other means of approach than those we have today. The relevant writings from before the 15th century have accordingly to be read with an understanding quite different from the way in which we approach scientific writings of later date.

Such things as these give opportunity to study even externally the far-reaching change that has occurred in Man's life of soul. For a long time now, indeed for hundreds of years, mankind has set no value on these things, but today we are living in an epoch when we must begin to place very great value on them.

Today we will try and get a clearer idea of the transition from the Logos to a new system, a new creation.

People usually ask first of all: How did it all come into existence? This is probably the hardest question, but one that is frequently asked. All one can do is to give an approximate idea. Above all we must be clear in our minds that it is our rational mind which asks how things came into existence, getting a more or less plausible notion of how one would have created the world if one had been the creator. The rational mind is, however, one of the things that originated in the Logos, and it is clear that the Logos has a far greater conscious awareness. We therefore cannot judge the Logos with our rational human minds and phrase the question like this: Why did the world have to arise out of the Logos? All we can ask is how the emergence of the world from the Logos proceeded, how things arose. We cannot ask why because why would imply compulsion. The process must be an act the Logos has done in freedom, not something done from necessity.

The creative principle of the Logos can only be given in image form.⁷⁸ We imagine an entity and its mirror image. We have to say to ourselves: The mirror image contains everything which is also to be found in this spirit. It looks exactly the same but is not alive; it does not include the principle of life. It will only be possible to understand how the mirror image can grow like the spirit if we consider that the spirit gives its life, its existence, to the mirror image. We have to consider, therefore, that a spirit gives its life to its mirror image. This is the idea of the first sacrifice. Giving up one’s own existence, transferring one’s own life to the mirror image—that is the original sacrifice.

This is exactly how it is with the Logos. The first Logos relates to the second as if we were standing in front of our mirror image and decided to give our own life to the mirror image. Giving one’s life is the original sacrifice made in freedom. It was the deed of the first Logos. The second Logos is exactly the same as the first Logos, except that it has been given existence through sacrifice. If we study the activity of the second Logos we find that its nature is such that it reflects the essential nature of the first Logos back to that first Logos. The second Logos is thus a reflection of the first Logos having been given the life that flowed from the first Logos.

The first Logos produces a reflection, and then gives its life to the mirror image. In the first Logos everything is directed towards the outside, with its existence an influence on the outside. The second Logos has 1) the existence it has received, and 2) the ability to let its content shine back on to the first Logos. We thus have duality in the second Logos. Its life and content are two things. The content is the same as for the first Logos, but its life is somewhat different from the first Logos (Fig. 17).

The line down the middle of the second circle indicates that in the second Logos life and content are two things, that they have been divided. Yet when it comes to content, image and mirror image are the same in either case, whilst life is two things.

This could not yet as such give a cosmic system, for all one would have, would be the relationship of one Logos to the other; there would be no multiplicity. This could only come with a further sacrifice. A further mirroring process had to come in which the relationship of the two was also reflected.

First, the first Logos was reflected once again, then the mirroring was mirrored. This created the third Logos as a reflection of the other two Logoi. The third Logos thus contains:

1. the mirror image of the first Logos
2. the mirror image of what the first Logos brought about in the second, which is its life
3. the mirror image of the content which the second Logos reflects back to the first.

Let us now visualize this (Fig. 18). The first Logos is reflected in a). If the first Logos is creative activity directed to the outside, its mirror image in the third Logos is the exact opposite of the action of the first Logos. In the first Logos, a) is the most sublime light of the world; in the third Logos it is the most extreme spiritual darkness.

b) in the second Logos is the life which the second Logos received from the first. It is not the life which gives itself in sacrifice but the life which has been accepted. The life which sacrifices itself in the first Logos is love. The opposite of this in the third Logos is absolute desire, longing, striving for Logos. In the third Logos, b) is thus absolute desire.

c) in the second Logos is the mirror image of the first Logos reflected by the second Logos.

In our own mirror image we distinguish

1. the image which shone out and comes back out of the darkness
2. what we have given returns as desire
3. the image itself, which we ourselves are

This corresponds to the three parts in the third Logos:

1. spiritual darkness = tamas
2. absolute desire = rajas
3. the simple mirror image of the first Logo = sattwa.

Tamas, rajas and sattwa are the three gunas, the three parts of the third Logos.⁷⁹

First there are a), b) and c). a) on its own is tamas. If a)—spiritual darkness or tamas—combines with b)—rajas, absolute desire—darkness combines with desire and we have a striving for the first Logos. If a) and c)—tamas and sattwa—are combined, we have the image of the first Logos, created out of the darkness. We can also combine b) and c). Each may occur on its own or be combined with one of the others. All three in combination are what the first Logos itself is. We have seven possible combinations of the three gunas (Fig. 19).

These are the seven different guna combinations. Think of these seven possible combinations as the next world-creative principle which may arise from the three gunas. These seven spirits do exist. They are the ‘seven creative spirits before the throne’, the seven creative powers that come after the three Logoi (Fig. 20).

These seven creative powers give rise to what we call the ‘prajapatis’. As each is able to repeat this exactly at subordinate levels of conscious awareness, life and form, we always have three: three times a, three times b, three times c, three times ab, three times ac, three times be, three times abc, making together three times seven = 21 prajapatis. Each of them acts like an original Logos. This gives us the 21 creators of a specific solar system.

The first concept we meet, therefore, is that of sacrifice made in perfect freedom. Once we have it, the question as to why ceases to have significance. Human progress consists in no longer asking this question but moving on to the concept of the creative Logos.

With a mechanical instrument, a watch, for instance, or a machine, we can predict how it will behave. This is somewhat less the case with natural processes, though to a degree it applies. Thus the time of a solar eclipse can be calculated. We may speak of ‘necessity’ in this case. With a plant it will also still be possible to say what it will do under specific conditions. However, the higher we go in the natural world, the more does it become impossible to say what an entity will do in a given situation. The higher a person is with regard to gifts and content, the less will it be possible to predict his actions, for we cannot grasp his reasons and motives. In that case all we can do is wait and see what he will do in a given situation.

In the same way we have to accept the creation of the world as an act done by the Logos in freedom. Progress consist in knowing that when it comes to the universe we do not ask as to the why, and that the question as to the ground or reason is not justifiable. All of those who understood this never spoke of a ground or reason. Jakob Boehme spoke of a ‘source and origin’ of the world.⁸⁰ To progress to insight into the world-creative power, we can only go to the point where we know that our own evolution must have been the goal, for that is where the creator must once have stood. The creator must have everything we possess, but in reverse. Atman is the lowest point within us. The creator has atman as numerous points in his periphery. When the solar system was in its inception, the world-creative Logos had the qualities we have found to be the goal of our evolution—atman, budhi, karana sharira or manas, kama, linga sharira, prana, sthula sharira—all as part of its essential nature.

We need to be clear in our minds as to where the activity of this creative Logos may lie. So we first of all investigate where the different metamorphoses take us. One form metamorphoses is physical, two are astral, two mental and two arupic, making a total of seven. When we have reached the height of the mental plane, we have become karana sharira from outside; we then become budhi and finally atman (Fig. 21, left). When the Earth has reached its goal we will be active on the higher mental plane. The transition then begins which takes us to the next planet. For this, we must have atman on the outside. This means that karana sharira and budhi must also vanish to the outside (Fig. 21, right).

The consequence is that we should not think that nothing happens in the transition to a new planet—pralaya is not inactivity and sleep—but karana sharira and budhi are shed. We must shed karana sharira on the budhi plane and budhi itself on the nirvana plane.

Evolution therefore becomes this (Fig. 22).

Pralaya is a very different kind of activity from that which occurs during a manvantara. To configure a new planetary chain, the spirit must have gone through the budhi and nirvana planes on the other side. The significance of these planes is that on them the spirits go through exactly the same process between planets as human beings do in devachan. There are also great pralayas—maha pralayas. If we follow the metamorphoses of conscious awareness from one planet to another, we get daytime conscious awareness on Earth, dream consciousness on Moon, and so on (Fig. 23).

It is necessary to go through the nirvana plane between one kind of conscious awareness and another. When the highest state of conscious awareness has been reached and atman has shed all vestments, having become truly all-embracing, it will be capable of creating a new solar system. For this, it must first go through two further planes of conscious awareness. By then it has gained a kind of all-vision, it will then be able to have a view of the whole cosmic system.

Our present daytime conscious awareness can have an overview of the mineral world, psychic consciousness can overview life, intellectual conscious awareness sentience, and spiritual conscious awareness of all that is. Atman has then reached its highest level. Atman is all-awareness.

If atman is to shine out, it must first develop the ability to give everything; it must be creative. It does so by vesting itself in budhi and manas. It can then start a new cosmic system on the arupa plane. When conscious awareness will have reached the final level, therefore, it will still have to go through two other planes. The first plane is the one where it does not peel off budhi but adds it; this is called the ‘para nirvana’ plane. The plane on which the entity descends again so that it may be active on the arupa plane, is called ‘mahapara nirvana plane’. Two planes that are in opposite positions correspond. The lowest is the physical, its opposite nirvana. (Fig. 24)

On the astral plane, desire rules, on the para nirvana plane love, budhi. On the mental plane, perception rules, taking in the thought; on the mahapara nirvana plane the creative thought rules. The budhi plane is absolute, loving dedication to the divine. Its opposite is a state of having completely turned away from all that is divine. Where the budhi plane is beatific, its opposite has absolute wretchedness. That is the eighth plane, the eighth sphere.

Imagine a particular entity has turned its back on evolution on some plane or other, going its own way. It would fall into the eighth sphere and would have to wait there until the whole of evolution has gone round. It could only be taken along again, as lowermost entity, in the next evolution. This cosmic ‘compass rose’ (Fig. 24) shows the opposites very well.

When we have arrived on the nirvana plane, the entity will have reached the point where its atman is completely on the outside. We are then dealing with the kind of Logos which we have called ‘the seven’. These are the seven creative spirits, which is also why we have seven different races [the ‘root races’, with seven sub-races each].

The seven different spirits belong to the nirvana plane. Going through the para nirvana plane and the manapara nirvana plane then, we come to the first and second Logos itself. The second arises on the para nirvana plane, the first on the mahapara nirvana plane. On the nirvana plane the cosmic system is brought to completion by the 7 times 3 = 21 prajapatis. The last of these is abc, the third Logos itself. Only the first Logos is able to take up again anything which has fallen into the eighth sphere. It takes it along with the cosmic dust. To be cast out from evolution is to link one’s life to something which inexorably remains behind, without fail, and to wait until evolution once again coincides with the state in question. A native of an uncilivilized wild place with the soul of such a native is relatively happy; but imagine a more highly developed spirit in the body of such a native or even a dog—that is banishment indeed. The higher soul has taken the road to a lower manifestation. To ‘go into the eighth sphere’ does indeed mean to be no longer progressing in accord with evolution, to be unable to participate in the evolution of the others, but to be cast back to a lower level.

Conscious awareness is perception up to the nirvana plane. From then on it is no longer mere perception but inner activity. On the para nirvana plane it is activity directed to the outside. On the mahapara nirvana plane it is the creative conscious mind of the Logos. This moves on from there through the eighth sphere and on to the physical plane, where it becomes the creative powers of nature. In reality these give expression to divine thoughts which appear to us as powers or forces because we do not have the overview.

• 78. See also part 2 in this volume. Also lecture given in Karlsruhe on 4 February 1907; The Structure of the Lord’s Prayer from GA 97; tr. A. H. Parker; London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1971; also in The Christian Mystery, Hudson: Anthroposophic Press 1998.
• 79. The teaching of the three gunas tamas, rajas and sattva is the foundation of the sankhya philosophy in the Vedanta system. See Rudolf Steiner’s lecture of 18 December 1912, in The Bhagavad Gita and the Epistles of Paul, GA 142; tr. L. D. Monges, D. M. Bugbey; New York: Anthroposophic Press 1971.
• 80. In ‘Aurora oder Morgenroete im Aufgang’, 23. Kapitel, Verse 1-6, in Sämtliche Werke, herausgegeben von K. W. Schibler, 6 Bde, Leipzig 1831–1846, Bd 2, S. 268.

The so-called “Traumlied” (Dream Song), which will be performed today, requires a few remarks to be made beforehand.

I already referred to this Dream Song in my Christmas address to you a few days ago. There I was able to say that the establishment of Christmas is by no means an imaginary one, one that has arisen from thought, but that the establishment of Christmas arises during the course of the year from very specific inner processes that can take place in the human soul when this soul comes to clairvoyant visions as the highest fruits of the soul, either through certain powers inherent in the natural course of things or through trained clairvoyance. We can best understand what may actually lie at the root of the human soul by visualizing the following thought.

All the plants, all the sprouting and sprouted growth that sunlight and solar warmth conjure up in spring and allow to flourish throughout the summer, all this, as it were, enters into a winter sleep, into winter darkness, on a kind of winter path at the time when Christmas was moved from the historical consciousness of humanity. The time in which Christmas is celebrated seems to us like sleep, like the darkness of the natural world. It is the opposite with the human soul as it is with the natural world. While the beings of nature descend into darkness and accompany the human soul into this realm of outer eclipse, it becomes, or can become, lighter in the human soul. She can, through the natural course of things, which we have often hinted at as a certain inherited clairvoyance, or through trained clairvoyance, dive straight into the brightest spiritual world, where the secrets of the spirit, hidden behind the outer sensual things, then dawn on her. And just as this descent of the plant world around the time of the winter solstice is subject to a regular law, so too the spiritual blossoming of human beings is subject to such a law, so that it coincides in its luminous brightness with the natural darkness into which the Christmas festival is placed.

It might seem as though such things are only being expressed out of today's schooled clairvoyance, or, as our opponents say, out of mere fantasy. But there will always be a living, fully valid proof of what people and nations experience outwardly. Therefore, it was extremely interesting for me that, after I had spoken about this Christmas clairvoyance within our movement for several years, which introduces us to the meaning of the Christ-being, to the arising of the Christ-being precisely when the human soul is most strongly immersed in clairvoyance , and I once again came to Norway, which is spiritually related to us, for a lecture cycle — that a remarkable vision was brought to me up there, of which, however, anyone who is familiar with such things must immediately say: Yes, it is reminiscent of many similar visions that have always been experienced by Germanic peoples, visions that many people have seen with their clairvoyant vision during the period of the thirteen nights from Christmas Eve to Epiphany, January 6. There the human soul can look into the spiritual world and see the fate of the human soul in the disembodied state, when it goes through Kamaloka and it then becomes clear to it how a relationship is established between the higher spiritual worlds and the deeds of people here on earth. And it is interesting that the person of whom we are told in this dream song and to whom these visions in this Nordic region are attributed through this dream song is a person who bears the name Olaf Åsteson. It is said of him that during these thirteen nights he underwent in a kind of clairvoyant experience what the Nordic man can feel as a vision in his way. He first learned how human deeds continue to unfold after the human being has passed through the gate of death, but he also learned how that which we call the Christ-being , how the office of judge of Jesus, the Christ, enters into the Nordic spiritual order of life after death, as the old world judge, the so-called face of Jehovah, the archangel Michael. So that, in addition to everything else that appears to the clairvoyance of Olaf Åsteson, the penetration of Christianity into the north can be heard, and that everything becomes clairvoyantly clear to him during the period of the Jesus birthday festival in the thirteen nights that he sleeps through.

Which consciousness becomes clear? It is now strange that this is already hinted at in the name, which quite obviously originally meant in the north such a human consciousness, which is inherited from the forefathers, from the ancestors. Olaf is truly himself in those times when the ancient, clairvoyant ancestral consciousness arises again in him. He who has inherited his consciousness, his inner being, from his ancestors: that is contained in the name Olaf. And Äste means love, the love that is passed down in the blood from generation to generation. Olaf is the son of this love, Åsteson, is the consciousness that has been passed down from generation to generation from the old clairvoyant times, is like resurrected ancestry. Olaf, who is born with this clairvoyant consciousness, recognizes the destiny of the human soul, and at the same time sees the intervention of the being we celebrate in Jesus' birthday festival as his entry into earthly existence. And strangely, while such visions have certainly always been experienced, especially in Germanic countries, this dream song seems to have been forgotten. In 1850, the preacher Landstad set out to collect folk songs in Telemarken, a lonely mountain valley where few people lived at the time. And among the many folk songs, he did not know since when, he did not know for how long, the song of Olaf Åsteson was alive in the vernacular – the song of Olaf Åsteson, who in the thirteen nights saw the destiny of the human soul after it had passed through the gate of death, and the coming into the world of Christ Jesus. He did not know when this song of initiation of the human soul came into being, for it was always recited in the vernacular, leaning on a musical mood. The few people in the lonely mountain valley enjoyed it, and there it was read by the preacher Landstad, in that it spoke to him of the secrets that had been uncovered – as if from the folk mind itself – about initiation in ancient times. And so it came to be that Landstad found it in the vernacular. Many people naturally believe that it alludes to Saint Olaf, who introduced Christianity in 1030 AD and whose mother was called Love. This is the case with many things that have both a historical and a spiritual significance.

Furthermore, it is interesting that this dream song has now quickly penetrated a large part of the Nordic people and lives in the hearts of the Norwegian people. There is, after all, a great movement in Norway to bring the old days back to life, and with that to revive the old language, which is very close to the ancient Germanic language, the Nordic language, in contrast to the Danish language, which was introduced later. Now this song is in a language that echoes the oldest language that has been preserved there, and the people who want to revive their antiquity in the first place, to whom this song spoke to the heart, and in the last ten to fifteen years it has not only penetrated into the hearts of the people, but also into the schools. It is sung and recited everywhere, and everywhere you hear, so to speak, where the soul awakens to the old folkways, the dream song of Olaf Åsteson, who in the thirteen nights from Christmas to January 6, so to speak, was naturally initiated into the sacred secrets of humanity. And for this reason, we would like to present this dream song of Olaf Åsteson to you today. Miss von Sivers will recite it. I tried to make a provisional arrangement so that it could be recited in German. Mrs. Lindholm helped me to make the peculiar language in which the song lives and now lives more and more and has become an aria of folk song possible in German. So we will now hear it in this provisional arrangement, which I was able to create in a few days.

The Dream Song

I.

So listen to my song!
I will sing to you
of a nimble youth:

It was of Olaf Åsteson,
Who once so long slept.

Of him I will sing.

II.

He went to rest on Christmas Eve.
A heavy sleep soon fell on him,
And he could not awaken
Before on the thirteenth day
The people went to church.

It was Olaf Åsteson,
Who once slept so long.
Of him I will sing.

He went to rest on Christmas Eve.
He slept for so long!
He could not wake
Before the thirteenth day
The bird spread its wings!

It was Olaf Åsteson,
Who once slept so long.
I will sing of him.

Olaf could not awaken
Before on the thirteenth day
The sun shone over the mountains.
Then he saddled his nimble horse
And rode hastily to the church.

It was Olaf Åsteson,
Who once slept so long.
I will sing of him.

The priest was already standing
At the altar reading the mass,
When at the church door
Olaf sat down to tell
The content of many dreams,
Which in the long sleep
Filled his soul.

It was Olaf Åsteson,
Who once slept so long.
Of him I will sing to you.

And young and old alike
Listened attentively to the words,
Which spoke of his dreams of Olaf.

It was Olaf Åsteson,
Who once slept so long.
Of him I will sing to you.

III.

“I went to rest on Christmas Eve.
A strong sleep soon embraced me;
And I could not awaken
Before on the thirteenth day
The people went to church.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

I was raised up in the clouds
And thrown into the bottom of the sea,
And anyone who wants to follow me
Cannot be overcome by serenity.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

I was raised up to the height of the clouds
Then plunged into gloomy swamps,
Beholding the terrors of hell
And also the light of heaven.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

And I had to travel in the depths of the earth,
Where the streams of the gods rush terribly.
I was unable to see them,
But I could hear the rushing.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

My black horse neighed not,
And my hounds did not bark,
Nor sang the morn's bird,
There was a single miracle everywhere.

The moon shone bright
And far the paths extended.

I must have traveled in the ghost land
er Dornenheide weites Feld,
My scarlet cloak was torn from me
And also the nails of my feet.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

I came to the Gjallarbridge.
In highest wind heights this hangs,
With red gold it is studded
And nails with sharp points it has.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far.

The ghostly snake struck me,
The ghostly dog bit me,
The bull stood in the middle of the road.
These are the three creatures of the bridge.
They are of a terribly evil nature.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched out wide.

The dog is snappy,
And the snake wants to sting,
The bull, he threatens mightily!
They let no one cross the bridge
Who does not want to honor the truth!

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

I crossed the bridge,
Which is narrow and dizzying.
I had to wade through the mire....
They are now behind me!

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

I had to wade through swamps,
They seemed bottomless to my feet.
When I crossed the bridge,
I felt earth in my mouth
Like dead people lying in graves.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched out far and wide.

Then I came to water,
In which the ice masses shone brightly like blue flames
...
And God, he directed my mind
So that I avoided the area.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

I turned my steps to the winter path.
On the right I could see it:
I looked as if into paradise,
Which shone brightly in the distance.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched out wide.

And God's high Mother,
I saw her there in the splendor!
To Brooksvalin to go,
So she called me, announcing,
That souls are judged there!

The moon shone bright
And the paths stretched far and wide.

IV.

"In other worlds I dwelt
Through many a night's length;
And God only can know
How much of soul-afflict I saw —

In Brooksvalin, where souls
To the world's judgment are subject.

I could see a young man
who had murdered a boy:
Now he had to carry him forever
on his own arms!
He stood in the mud so deep

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the judgment of the world.

I also saw an old man,
He wore a cloak of lead;
Thus he was punished for Living in greed on the earth,

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the judgment of the world.

And men appeared,
Who carried fiery substances;
Dishonesty weighs
On their poor souls

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the judgment of the world.

I could also see children
Who had glowing coals beneath their feet;
They did evil to their parents in life,
Which weighed very heavily on their spirits

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the Last Judgment.

And to approach that house,
It was laid upon me,
Where witches were to work
In the blood they had angered in life,

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the Last Judgment.

From the north, in wild hordes,
There came riding evil spirits,
Led by the prince of darkness,

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the Last Judgment.

What came from the north
Seemed evil above all else;
He rode in front, the prince of darkness,
On his black steed.

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the world's judgment.

But from the south came
Other hosts in lofty calm.
Saint Michael rode ahead
At Jesus Christ's side

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the world's judgment.

The souls, laden with sins,
They had to tremble in fear!
The tears ran in streams
As evil deeds follow

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the Last Judgment.

In majesty stood Michael
And weighed the human souls
On his scales of sin,
And standing by in judgment
The Judge of the world, Jesus Christ.

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the Last Judgment.

V.

"Blessed is he who in life
Gives shoes to the poor;
He need not walk with bare feet
In the field of thorns.

Then speaks the tongue of the scales,
And world truth
Sounds in the spiritual state.

How blessed is he who in earthly life
Gives bread to the poor!
He cannot be hurt
By the dogs in the other world.

Thus the tongue of Libra speaks,
And world truth
Resounds in the spiritual state.

How blessed is he who in earthly life
Gives grain to the poor!
He cannot be threatened
By the sharp horn of the bull
When he must cross the Gjallar bridge.

Then the tongue of Libra speaks,
And world truth
Sounds in the mind.

How blessed is he who in earthly life
Clothes to the poor gives!
He cannot freeze to death
The ice masses in Brooksvalin.

Then speaks the tongue of Libra,
And world truth
Sounds in the mind.

VI.

And young and old alike
Listened intently to the words,
Which told of the dreams of Olaf. You have slept for so long... Wake up now, O Olaf Åsteson!