The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today I would like to begin by considering a simple fact of which everyone is aware. If we cast an understanding and observant eye over the variety of natural occurrences, we will notice that they seem to fall into two very different and distinct realms: one realm which manifests the greatest kind of regularity and order, and another realm of extensive disorder, irregularity and virtually impenetrable interconnections. This, at any rate, is how we experience them. Even though there is a sharp dividing-line between these two realms, our normal natural sciences do not distinguish clearly between them. On the one hand we have all the things that happen with the regularity with which the sun rises and sets each morning and evening, and with which the stars rise and set, and with which all the other things associated with the rising and setting of the sun occur—such as the plants, which regularly send forth their growing shoots in the spring, develop through the summer, then fade away and disappear in autumn. And the realm of nature presents us with many other things in which we can see a similarly great degree of regularity and order.

But there is another realm of nature, one which cannot be experienced in the same way. One cannot anticipate storms in the way one can anticipate the sunrise and sunset each morning and evening, for storms do not occur with that kind of regularity. We can say that the sun will occupy a certain position in the heavens at ten o'clock tomorrow morning, but we cannot say that we will see a certain cloud formation in a certain position, let alone say anything about how the clouds will look. Nor can we predict, in the way we can predict the quarters of the moon, that, here in our building in Dornach, we are going to be surprised by a storm or shower at some particular time. It is possible to calculate eclipses of the sun and moon that will happen centuries hence quite accurately, but the occurrence of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions cannot be predicted with the same degree of certainty.

You see here two distinct realms of nature, one that manifests regularities our reason can grasp, and the other whose manifestations are irregular and cannot be experienced in the same way. Great regularity and extreme unpredictability are intertwined in what we call nature as a whole. I would like to describe the overall impression that nature makes on us at a given instant as a mixture of the orderly procession of regular events with those other events, the ones that can take us by surprise, even though they come again and again with at least a certain degree of consistency.

Now, there is a profound truth that we have considered from many points of view in the course of our studies here, the truth that man is a microcosm—that man mirrors the macrocosm and that everything that is to be found at large in the macrocosm can be rediscovered in some form in mankind. So we would expect to find these two spheres of nature expressed in some human form, one which exhibits great order, the other which exhibits a pronounced lack of order. Naturally, in a human life these would be expressed very differently from the way they are expressed out there in nature. Nevertheless, that twofold division of nature into order and irregularity should remind us of something in man. Now, consider the typical example I tried to present to you yesterday.

That typical individuality was well able to think logically. When it was a matter of logical thinking, he could reckon, pass judgements and regulate his life with a degree of order, overseeing it and planning and acting accordingly. In other words, he had access to everything that regularity can contribute to the functioning of our understanding, our reason, our capacity for experience and our will-impulses. But, alongside these, this person also lived another life, a life that was expressed in those two works I described to you. From the little I have told you about the content of these books you can well imagine how stormy a life this was, how erratic when compared with what human reason has to offer. There were storms in the depths of that soul, profound storms, and these storms were lived out in the way we described yesterday. Such things truly do happen in the way thunderstorms and outbursts of wind and weather play into the regular procession of sun and moon, into the orderly succession of sprouting, fading away and dying in the plant world. Into all that develops out of the human head and the regular course of the human heart come the storms we experience as waking dreams or as lightning flashes of genius. These flash through the soul and discharge themselves like storms. But be in no doubt about it, every human soul has the tendency to experience the very same things that Otto Weininger experienced in such an extreme, radically paradoxical fashion. They are there in the depths of every human soul. Ordinary people who are not so disposed, as Weininger was, to experience their own genius, express it through their dreams—but always as dreams. Everyone dreams and, in the final analysis, dreams are things that bubble up out of the depths of the astral realm. They make their appearance at times when the astral body is being reflected in the etheric body. Every human being possesses a day-to-day awareness that a man like Weininger dismisses as the pedantic consciousness of a philistine, and every human being possess that other consciousness, the one that bubbles up in dreams.

One should not say, you see, that these dreams and this world of dreams are only present at night when one knows one is dreaming or has been dreaming. For a human being is constantly dreaming. Real dreams, or what one calls real dreams, are only the results of a temporary view of the continuous stream of dreams. Actually, however, one is continuously dreaming. All of you seated here are dreaming. Alongside the thoughts expressed in this lecture which, I trust, are living in you, you are all dreaming. In the depths of your souls you are all dreaming. And the only thing that distinguishes the dreams you have now from the ones you have at night is that at the moment there are other thoughts that are more conscious and stronger, and which I would think outweigh the dreams in most cases. But when waking consciousness has been suppressed and, simultaneously, sleep is interrupted, then what is now being dreamed unconsciously can emerge for a while. That is when a conscious dream appears. The life of dreams, however, proceeds without any interruption.

The contrast in human nature between the regularity of normal thinking and the lack of it in dreams is really of this nature. A person is spiritually ill if he does not have access to the regularity of normal thinking, to the kind of regularity which governs the appearance of the sun at its appointed time. A person must be able to apply the canons of reason and distinguish one event from another. But alongside his healthy waking consciousness a person also has, living in the depths of his soul, this other realm that I have described as stormy and irregular.

The forces upon which waking consciousness is based really do mirror the astronomical pathway of the stars across the heavens. If the pathway of the stars were not a part of us, we would have no waking consciousness. But, as you can see from remarks I made in the lecture cycle, The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Humanity, the very same external forces that can be observed at play in wind and weather, in storm and earthquake, are also at work in the depths of the human soul and they are reflected in the unconscious and half-conscious aspects of human life. In this respect, a human being is truly a microcosm in which the macrocosm is repeated.

These days, there is a restricted awareness of such things, for we live in an age when humanity has been called upon to restrict itself more and more to the physical plane—to become materialistic. The cultivation of an understanding and a rationality divorced of spirituality is simply a symptom of this. But, as we have often explained here, humanity will also proceed beyond this age. And the spiritual-scientific movement should be preparing the manifestations of the spirit for the time to come.

Men are little aware that the spiritual world is connected with what they pursue here, with the events and facts of earthly existence. But mankind has not always lived in the spirit-less style of today. Human institutions have not always taken so little account of the influences of the spiritual world on the physical world. Think of Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome. I once described to you how he wanted to set about establishing institutions here on the physical plane. The story is symbolic, but a significant fact lies behind the symbolism. In order to find out how the eras of history would unfold, he consulted the nymph, Egeria, whose knowledge was derived from the spiritual world. Thereafter, he designated the era of Romulus as the first, his own as the second, and five others that would follow his, making a series of seven. There is something remarkable in this story about a king of Rome: the sevenfold order he constructs is the same as the order on which the seven members of our organism are based. In earlier times there was a tendency for physical life to be arranged so that its institutions reflected the demands of the spiritual world—so that they in some way reflected what happened in the spiritual worlds. Today, men take no account of this.

I have often mentioned how people have lost their sense of piety as regards establishing the time of the Easter festival, the festival of the Easter season. Today there are even some who want to set a fixed day for Easter Sunday, rather than following the present custom of determining the festival in accordance with the course of the stars. For it would simplify our account books if Easter were always to be, say, the first Sunday in April. Then one would no longer have to set up the books for a different Easter each year and it would be easier to close the accounts for the year. This is simply one crass example from among the countless examples that could be mentioned. It shows how little sense the men of today have for arranging their earthly institutions so that they will reflect what is happening in the spiritual worlds and in the stars. But it was not always so. There have been times when there was a profound awareness that a man's own life and the life he shares with other men should be an earthly reflection of what is happening in the spiritual worlds and is expressed in the stars. These were earlier ages, when atavistic clairvoyance was still present.

Let us look at an example from the ancient Hebrews. Their religious year, and thus the year that really mattered, was a moon year of 354 3/8 days. Now that is somewhat shorter than a sun year. So if one reckons in moon years, some days will be lost because the moon year does not entirely fill out a sun year. After a certain time, more and more days will have been left out. Then a balance would need to be established again. But the ancient Hebrews had a very special way of creating a balance between sun years and moon years. I will only go into this method briefly, since what we need today is to let the whole sense and spirit of the matter pass before our souls, not the particular details. Ancient Hebrew tradition recognised a so-called ‘Jubilee Year’. This was a year of universal conciliation and reconciliation. It was celebrated after 49 sun years, which add up to slightly more than 50 moon years. In such a year of reconciliation, people forgave one another for various things for which they held each other to be to blame: those who were debtors could be, or should be, released from their debts, property should be returned to those who had lost it, and such like. It was a year for balancing things out, for reconciling the 7 x 7 sun years with fifty moon years-actually 50 1/2 moon years, but one can call it 50 because this year lasted for a while and it furnished the starting point for one's reckoning. Thus, a Jubilee Period lasted 50 x 354 3/8 days; during this period one accumulated all the various things that would need balancing out.-If one takes into consideration that this Jubilee Year was a time for reconciling 49 (which equals 7 x 7) sun years with 50 moon years, one can say that it is ordered in accordance with the number 7. Therefore the institution of the Jubilee Year was based on a certain awareness of the significance of seven-foldness.

Today we want to make the spirit of the thing present for our souls, so we should give special heed to the following. We want to see what it would have been like to live in the ancient Hebrew times when one said: we experience the course of the days, one following after the other. After 354 days, a new year begins. And after experiencing 49 or 50, respectively,—years in a row, then begins a special festive year for humanity. And now just imagine how it would have been if, accompanying everything that people lived through, there was the awareness that it is 7, 8, or 9, years since the Jubilee Year, and that one would have to wait a certain number of years for the next Jubilee Year. Nor is this set up arbitrarily; it is established on the basis of an occult division according to certain numbers.

You need have no doubts that those who were living 24 years after a Jubilee Year would be reckoning back 24 years to the last Jubilee Year and 26 years forward to the next one. That gives you some degree of access to those times. In other words, the human souls here on earth were occupied with something that involved them in a particular numerical relationship, and this numerical order affected the way they felt things-this numerical order flowed through their souls in an uninterrupted stream. In the course of thousands of years, human souls became accustomed to living with what I have just characterised. And as you know, experiences that are repeated again and again are imprinted on life. They become part of the life that shapes the soul and gives it its configuration. Thus, investigating the ancient Hebrews, one discovers an awareness for a particular temporal order living in their souls, a particular temporal configuration which expressed itself in their awareness of the passage from one Jubilee Year to the next Jubilee Year. This gave every single day a special relationship to the passage of time. The soul had become accustomed to an order that was based, on the one hand, on 354, and on the other hand, on 49 (7 x 7)—or, respectively, 50. And this accompanied the soul wherever it went.

This is comparable to the way it is necessary to learn in one's youth the calculations that one will need to use later in life; once learned, they become a possession. A certain configuration has been established in the soul. We want to take note of that as we now move on to another consideration.

According to the calculations of today's astronomy, Mercury circles the Sun much more rapidly than the Earth does, so that if we refer to the revolutions of Mercury, we obtain a picture of the Earth slowly moving about the Sun while Mercury moves quickly. Now keep the orbit of Mercury in mind. We want to take 354 of these—in fact, we can take 354 3/8 of them; and then we want to multiply yet again by 49 or, respectively, by 50. Simply picture these numbers. If you think of one orbit of Mercury as a kind of celestial day, then 354 of these Mercury orbits would be a kind of Moon year on the planet Mercury. Then take 49 or 50 of these: that would be one celestial Jubilee Year. Naturally, one celestial Jubilee Year is much longer than an earthly Jubilee Year, but of course it is calculated with reference to Mercury.

Thus we are calculating a Jubilee Year that is based on Mercury, just as the ancient Hebrews calculated a Jubilee Year based on Moon and, respectively, on Earth. For 354 3/8 times they experienced one Earth day after the other. One year had passed. That, multiplied by 7 x 7 (49 or 50), made up one of the ancient Hebrews' Jubilee Years. Corresponding to this would be 354 3/8 Mercury orbits multiplied by 50 (or 49). Naturally, that is an entirely different expanse of time, an entirely different expanse of time from an Earth year, although it is based on the same numbers.

Now let see how yet another number is determined. Now we take Jupiter. Jupiter is much slower, it moves much more slowly. It takes twelve years to go around the Sun once. Mercury moves much more quickly than the Earth, Jupiter much more slowly. Now we will take Jupiter and consider one of these years for Jupiter. Actually, it would be a Jupiter year, but because Jupiter is in the heavens where we can think on a very large scale, we look upon that as one Jupiter day. We will let one of the periods in which Jupiter circles the Sun correspond to one of our Earth days. Then 354 3/8 of these days would add up to a large Jupiter year of the kind based on the Moon: one large Jupiter year. We will not multiply it by 7 x 7, but only once, because it lasts so long. Using the same method, then, we have calculated one Jubilee Year for Mercury, and one for Jupiter—just a single, great year.

Then we consider yet another planet, one not known to the ancient Hebrews. They were, however, aware of its sphere, which they thought of as being beyond the planets; they thought of it as the crystal sphere that formed the vault of the heavens. Much later it was discovered that one could speak of Uranus as being there. But we can consider Uranus, even though it was discovered much later. The only difference is that the ancient Hebrews thought of a sphere in the place where Uranus was later located. We will take 49 (or 50) orbits of Uranus, which moves very slowly.—And now we will compare all of this with Earth years.

Each of these would correspond to a definite number of Earth years, would it not? Thus, 354 3/8 x 50 revolutions of Mercury around the Sun would correspond to a certain period of Earth years. One great Jupiter year, consisting of 354 3/8 orbits, would correspond to another period of Earth years. And 49 (50) orbits of Uranus would give us yet another period of Earth years.

The extraordinary thing is that each of these yields the same number of Earth years. One obtains a given number of Earth years if one takes 50 (49) orbits of Uranus. One obtains the same number if one takes 354 3/8 orbits of Jupiter, or 50 x 354 3/8 of the orbits of Mercury: each yields that particular span of Earth years. In the case of Uranus, you multiply by 50, with Jupiter, you multiply by 354 3/8, and with Mercury, by 50 x 354 3/8—in each case you obtain the period I have already called a celestial Jubilee⁴ Year based on Mercury. All three planets give us the same number.

And how did the ancient Hebrews experience this number? The number is 4182. (Naturally, there are certain irregularities which play into this and which we are ignoring today.) In each of the three cases the number comes out at 4182. One has to say that this is approximate, but you can investigate it exactly, for the irregularities are balanced-out by compensating movements: it comes to 4182 Earth years! And what would an ancient Hebrew have had to say about this? He could say, ‘Here on Earth your soul experiences 354 3/8 x 50 days in each Jubilee Year, and that is one great year of reconciliation. But something is also happening out there where cosmic thoughts are formed. Out there live beings for whom one revolution of Mercury is equivalent to one of your Earth days. These beings also experience the macrocosm in other ways, for example, in a way that corresponds to your experience of a Jubilee Year. And such a being would tell you that one orbit of Mercury is equivalent to one day and that 354 3/8 x 49 (or 50) of these days is equivalent to one Jubilee Year reckoned on the basis of Mercury. The being would also tell you that this same number is identical to one Jupiter year and is also identical to 50 revolutions of the celestial sphere.’

The ancient Hebrews had reasons for calculating time from the beginning of the Earth in the following way—we also place an event at the beginning of our reckoning of Earth time, although it is a different event. According to their reckoning, 4182 years after the beginning of the Earth would be the time of a great, cosmic year of reconciliation, the year in which the Christ would appear in the flesh. In other words, the ancient Hebraic culture lived in a time-span that extended from the beginning of the Earth to the appearance of Christ in the flesh. This span was that of a single Jubilee Year of Mercury, one great Jupiter year, or 50 revolutions of the outermost, celestial sphere, which we now know as the orbit of Uranus.

In this wonderful example you see how the human soul was being prepared for the great, cosmic Jubilee Year. It was prepared by social institutions that based the temporal reckoning on 354 3/8 and 7 x 7, or 50. Thereby the soul was enabled to experience the ordering of the cosmos, which means that cosmic forms were inscribed in the soul. This is a tremendous thing. The connections are immensely profound.

And if you follow the thoughts of those who have emerged from Judaism, you will see that these souls bore thoughts of a cosmos inhabited by infinitely lofty beings. And they assumed that the laws governing the movements of the stars would announce to their interpreters the time of the Christ's descent from the sphere of the Sun to the Earth. The events out yonder were thought of in terms of 354 3/8 and 7 x 7. Out yonder, things were ordered so that someone who followed the clock of Mercury, counting one orbit of Mercury as one day, could determine the span of one Jubilee Year from the beginning of the Earth to the Mystery of Golgotha. Just as man thinks of the beginnings of earthly existence, so also do the cosmic beings think of that moment which, for the ancient Hebrews marked the beginning of the Earth—but cosmic beings think on a cosmic scale. Meanwhile, here on Earth a human institution was preparing human souls for thinking the great thought that is spread out before them in the heavens; it was shaping their souls so they would be able to apply the thought to their own passage through time. Those who lived in the time of Christ's coming and who could understand the place of the Mystery of Golgotha in the course of time were men who had gone through this preparation and whose souls had been shaped by it. Thereby they knew: The Mystery of Golgotha is approaching. They were thereby enabled to write the Gospels, for they could understand what lay behind the descent of the cosmic Sun Spirit to Earth. Such an understanding presupposes that the soul has been prepared.

Here you have a wonderful example of how social institutions that have been spiritually ordered by initiates can prepare the human soul for understanding an event—or for comprehending it at all. What does this show us? It deepens our understanding of why we should use our waking consciousness to shape our human social life so that it is related to the world of the stars. The Mystery of Golgotha cannot be understood—one cannot bring it within the scope of reason—until one has understood the connection of reason itself to the course of the stars. This is expressed in numerical relationships. Thus, everything that is connected with our waking consciousness is connected—consciously or unconsciously—with the orderly procession of the stars. In this case it was consciously determined by initiates. And so, emerging from the depths of our souls, these things begin to make their appearance in the forms I have described to you, in dreams or in the lightning flashes of genius of a man like Weininger. As I explained yesterday, these things do not belong to the present course of the stars and will only be developed in later incarnations.

What, then, are these things connected with? All the things that are consciously or unconsciously thought by our heads and felt by our hearts,—in short, everything connected with our waking consciousness—corresponds to the movement of the stars. What, then, corresponds to the things that go on in our more dreamlike or fantasy-filled states of consciousness and often fill our more inspired moods? These latter correspond more to the elemental world of natural events, the world on which such things as thunder and storms and hail and earthquakes depend. And in this fashion we can look deeply into nature. It begins to appear to us as it has appeared to men who are to some degree initiated and who have always asked, ‘What, then, is this part of nature that is not regulated by the regular course of the sun and moon and their like—this part of nature that does not proceed regularly or in accordance with rules? What is this nature of rain, of hail, of storms, of thunder, of earthquake, of volcanic eruption?’ And these initiates have always answered, ‘Here nature appears as a somnambulist!’

And now let us look up at the procession of the stars. In its regular, numerical relationships, as in its occult connections, it presents us with the macrocosmic representation of our waking consciousness. Then let us contemplate our dream consciousness and everything that is to a greater or lesser degree expressed there. There we find mirrored all the irregular happenings of the external world. Looking up to the heavens, we behold the external, macrocosmic representation of our waking consciousness. Looking down towards the Earth and its manifestations, we find nature as a somnambulist, a somnambulistic dreamer, who is the mirror and the outer picture of what goes on in the depths of our souls. Our waking spirit thinks in accordance with astronomy. Our dreaming, fantasy-filled, often somnambulistic soul lives and weaves in harmony with the great, somnambulistic consciousness of earthly nature. That is a profound truth.

Between now and tomorrow, reflect on the extent to which astronomy is governing your waking consciousness, and the extent to which meteorology rules in your unconscious. Yesterday, Otto Weininger provided us with an example of a man in whom astronomy came to expression only to be obscured by meteorological clouds. We will speak further about this tomorrow.

• 4. For the sake of clarity, the exact astronomical calculations for the three cases discussed are shown here (one Sun-year / 365.26 days):
  
  Cosmic Jubilee Year:
  Mercury-orbit, 87.97 days x 354 3/8 x 49 = 4,182 years
  
  Jupiter Year:
  Jupiter-orbit, (11.86 years = 4,332.59 days)
  4,332.59 days x 354 3/8 = 4,203 years
  
  Uranus:
  Uranus-orbit, (84.01 years = 30,688.39 days)
  30,688.39 days x 49 = 4,117 years
  x 50 = 4,201 years

Now that we have gathered together a number of elements in order to get at the essence of the Apocalypse, we will have to look more at the Apocalypse itself, and we will have to arrange things in such a way that we begin with several questions which are connected with the goal or end of what the Apocalypticer sees and what he wants to communicate to mankind; later on we will see why this particular choice of study materials is appropriate.

If we look at what he gives, one could say that it is a communication to human beings, a revelation to human beings, but a revelation which differs considerably from what arises when other communications which don't proceed from clairvoyance are brought to men. The Apocalypticer points out that it was a special event, a mighty enlightenment which enabled him to make his statement to humanity. However, thereby the Apocalypse appears as something which arises as a fact and an event which belongs to the continuation of Christian evolution.

We can say that of course the Mystery of Golgotha is the great starting point of Christian evolution upon earth which towers over everything else and which could only be anticipated and hoped for before; but then come the individual facts which must occur in order that Christian evolution continues from the Mystery of Golgotha through all the cycles of time to come. And the revelation which occurred through the Apocalypse is such an event. The author of the Apocalypse is fully aware that he's thereby not only putting what he experienced and is communicating to people into present-day evolution, but that what lies in the reception and further elaboration of the Apocalypse is a reality.

You see, the important, difference between Christianity and other religious confessions is that one has teachings in the ancient religious confessions, whereas the deed of Golgotha is the important thing in Christian evolution, and more deeds must be added to this important one. Therefore, the important thing for Christianity to do is to look for a real connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, and it's not of primary and fundamental importance to have the gospels interpreted for one. In recent times Christianity has taken on intellectualistic forms through the influence of intellectualism. One could, say that this is why that famous statement could be made: Jesus doesn't belong in the gospels. In other words, one can take the content of the gospels as teachings, but one doesn't have to: take the teacher who stands, behind them into account; he's not important. This means that, only the Father belongs in the gospels. It's as if the main thing about the Mystery of Golgotha was that Christ Jesus has appeared and has given a teaching from the Father. That is not the important thing. The important thing is that a deed was done on Golgotha—that Christ Jesus lived on earth and did the deed on Golgotha. The teaching is an incidental, accessory thing. Christianity must struggle through to, a recognition of this again, but it must also do it.

And so the Apocalypticer is aware that he receives this revelation and that this fact has taken place and that he works on through this fact; this is the important thing for him. For what is continually happening as a result of this? You know that from a formal viewpoint present-day man is living in such a way that he wears his three garments, physical body, etheric body and astral body which is connected with a certain normality. When he is in a sleeping condition the astral body and ego are outside the physical and etheric body and are in the earthly environment, in the spiritual region of the earthly environment, which is behind sensory, physical phenomena. They are not equipped for perceptibility in people today, they only become equipped through initiation. Man lives a dull existence during sleep, and only retains a general feeling about this on awaking, or he sees things in dreams, which emerge from sleep in the way which has often been described. Now if we don't think anything else than this; we have man's astral body and ego in the spiritual world, and they stand in that world in such a way that they can receive no direct impressions of Christ and his real nature.

Thus if we would think nothing else than what I just mentioned, the ego and astral body would enter the spiritual world every night and would have no direct connection with the Christ, would come back again to this earthly, physical garment, and since the Mystery of Golgotha has taken place in the course of earth evolution, they would have an impression of Christ, for the Christ is in the earth's aura, but this impression would remain dull. Just as other nocturnal impressions remain dull for day consciousness, so this impression that the Christ dwells in the physical and etheric bodies which lie there during sleep would only be perceived in the way that the sleeping condition is perceived by someone when he is waking up, and no distinct, clear experience could be there.

Let's suppose that right after the Mystery of Golgotha was accomplished, human beings were there who experienced what happened and who could communicate their direct impressions of the Mystery of Golgotha to others. And in fact Christ gave his apostles an esoteric training and a number of important teachings after his resurrection. All of this was handed on and it continued in the first decades after the Mystery of Golgotha had been accomplished. At a certain point this had to come to an end. And we can see how it gradually died down in certain circles. It's correct to say that there were tremendous esoteric teachings about Christianity in the writings which were denounced for being gnostic and in other writings of old church teachers who were apostolic students or pupils of apostolic students, which were then eradicated by the church, because the church wanted to get rid of the cosmic elements which were always connected with these teachings. The church destroyed very important things. They were destroyed; a reading of the akashic records will restore them to the last dot on the “i” when the time has come to restore them again.

Nevertheless, the great impressions which were there would have faded for outer historical evolution. The Apocalypse appeared the moment these things were in danger of dying out. And if the Apocalypse is taken in properly—and various people have made this attempt in the second epoch after the Mystery of Golgotha—if the Apocalypse is taken in, if this grand picture, this prophetic picture of evolution penetrates man's astral body and ego, then the ego and astral body bear a revelation which comes directly from the spiritual world—as I told you in the first lecture—which is really a kind of a letter, a direct verbal revelation from the spiritual world which is connected with visions. If this is taken into the astral body, and namely into the ego-organization and carried out into the sphere of the earth's aura during sleep, it means that all those who had taken in this Apocalypse; with inner understanding were gradually inscribing its content into the ether of the earth's aura. So that one can say: the presence of Christ gives the fundamental tone in the earth's aura, and he continues to work in it.

This Christ impulse has a strong influence upon man's etheric body every night when the astral body and ego are outside of the physical and etheric body, except that the average person is usually not able to find the Christ impulse which is contained in the etheric body when he returns to the physical body in the morning with his ego and astral body. But when John's pupils in the wider sense of the word take in the content of the Apocalypse, it becomes inscribed in the ether of the earth's aura. What is inscribed there then works upon the human etheric body between the times of going to sleep and waking up. It was inscribed there already through the great, significant impressions which the author of the Apocalypse, or better said, the receiver of it, got from divine, spiritual beings, so that people who have an inclination to relate themselves to the Mystery of Golgotha can expose their etheric body to the content of the Apocalypse during their sleeping condition. This is a real thing. Through the necessary Christ sentiments one can bring about such a condition of sleep that what is as it were brought about in the earth's ether by the content of the Apocalypse and what lies in the direction of Christ-evolution is inscribed in man's etheric body. This is the way it really happens. This is what was present as the deed of the Apocalypse revelation which continued to have an effect.

And in one's work as a priest one can quietly say to those souls who are entrusted to one's care: the Christ has entered earth evolution through the Mystery of Golgotha. He inspired the writing of the gospels to serve as a preparation, so that their content can pass over into men's astral body and ego—one has to use suitable terminology here—and so that they are prepared to receive the Christ impulse in their etheric body when they wake up. Through the fact that the Apocalypticer is focusing on Christian evolution and is describing it through the various epochs of evolution and into the future, what is present in this evolution is incorporated into man's etheric body in a concrete way.

You see, therewith we have something in earth evolution which is quite new with respect to the ancient mystery teachings. For what did the ancient mysteries really convey to initiates? They gave them what one can see if one surveys the real spiritual nature of what was laid down an eternally long time ago, as it were, and if one finds the divine being who has been working along certain lines all the way back to eternity in outer physical activities. So that the initiates in the ancient mysteries didn't expect to get anything else into their etheric body than what gets into one's etheric body through the results of initiation.

A Christian initiate gets past this point. He wants to take what has come into earth evolution in the course of time, namely, everything which is connected with the Mystery of Golgotha and with Christ, into his etheric body. So that in fact the revelation of the Apocalypse is the beginning of a kind of an initiation for the whole Christian world, and not for individuals; but individuals can prepare themselves to participate in it.

One could say that it's only this which opens up a path to get beyond the Father-nature principle. According to its form, all ancient initiation is basically a Father initiation. One sought nature and the spirit in nature and one could be satisfied with that. For man stood in the world. Now the Christ has been there in the earth. Now he remains there; he did his deed and he remains there now. One cannot take in what has taken place through the Mystery of Golgotha through an ancient initiation. One has to raise oneself into a world of the, spirit which is not the one that streams through the ancient mysteries. What streams through the old mysteries only hoped that the Mystery of Golgotha would stream through the new mysteries at some point. However, man now connects himself with the spirit directly through the spirit and not through nature. In ancient times initiates always chose the detour, through nature. New initiates, that is, many half or partly initiated people in the later centuries after the Mystery of: Golgotha—not in the first ones—thought that they connected themselves with the spiritual nature of the world through what has flowed into it through Christ and through what has been built upon Christ. This is the way such an initiate looked upon the Apocalypse; this is the way it was looked, upon at that time. Thus he looked upon it as something, which he spoke about as follows: Nature is one way to get into the spiritual world, and the marvelous knowledge which is revealed through the Apocalypses is the other way. It is a perplexing, felicific thing when the spiritual investigator encounters people in the second to sixth centuries—but not before—who. Say: “Nature is great,”—they meant what one knew about nature in antiquity—“but what is disclosed in a supersensible way by, the Apocalypticer or other apocalypticers is just as great or greater.” For nature leads to the Father, and what is opened up by the Apocalypticer leads through the Son to the Spirit. One was looking for a path to pure, unmediated spiritual things through something like the Apocalypse.

At the: same time this pointed to a real change which must and will come about when men make themselves worthy of it. In ancient times one had the strong feeling that man comes out of the spiritual world but that he has a development which connects itself strongly with what comes to meet him in the physical, sensory world. One felt this connection with the physical sense world ' very strongly and one was of the opinion that man has become a sinful, iniquitous being because he connects himself with the matter which is present in the earth.

By contrast with this another time was to be prepared, and it was foreseen by the Apocalypticer and announced in advance. He looked for an image or the right Imagination in order to place what is behind these secrets before the soul in imaginative pictures. And so he renewed and summarized an idea which was commonplace in esoteric Hebraic teachings. But only there. One pointed out the following there. Souls come out of the spiritual world. These souls which come out of the spiritual world clothe themselves in what comes out of the earth, and when they build houses for the most external work of the spirit, cities arise. But when they ensheathe the inner activity of the human soul, the human body arises out of the earth's building blocks. Thereby the concept of the construction of outer dwelling places merged with the concept of the building of one's own body. That was a beautiful and wonderful image, because it has such a factual foundation, namely, that one looked upon a house as a sheathe for the more extensive and extended part of one's deeds, soul processes and soul functions that—one saw the sheathe for this in the outer house. However, one had the beautiful and wonderful idea: If I do an outer deed in a house which is built for me out of earthly matter, and I use the house walls and the whole house as a sheathe, this is just the hardened, scleroticized extension of what is there when I do the inner deeds of the soul. Whereas man's body is the first house which man builds for the innermost deeds of the soul.

Then when he has his body and he extends what he has, he builds himself a second house; this second house is built out of the earth's ingredients. That was a very common idea, that one really looked upon one's body as a house, and that one looked upon a house as the outermost garment which man puts on here in the physical earth world.

Therefore, one looked upon man's housebuilding activity as something which proceeds from the soul's creative activity. In past times man was very much grown together with his house and the like, namely when he could think: O.K., he certainly has this body and this skin (See drawing). And now if he would get another skin in the course of his life for the more extensive activity of his soul, it would be a tent; except that this doesn't grow, he has to make it himself.

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Now one feature of the Hebraic esoteric doctrine was that one looked upon the absorption of earthly ingredients for human development and the flowing together and control of earthly things in a quite particular way. You see, with respect to the physical, one will always admit: The earth is arranged in such a way that it has a north pole where cold accumulates, as it were. And one will describe this north pole from the nature of the earth in a physical, geographic way, and one will consider it to be an important part of the earth. Hebraic esoteric doctrine also did this with the soul activities which are contained in the earth's forces and in a way which was the opposite of the situation with the north pole on the earth it looked upon Jerusalem, the very concrete Jerusalem, as the place where cultures run together and the most perfect houses are collected. This was a pole for the concentration of outer culture around the human soul, and its culmination was Solomon's temple.

Now one felt that this was exhausted in the evolution of the earth, and the people who knew something about the Hebraic esoteric teaching looked upon the destruction of Jerusalem after the Mystery of Golgotha as something which was not an outer event that was brought about by the Romans; they thought that the Romans were the puppets of spiritual powers and that they only carried out the plan of the spiritual powers. For they thought that this method of looking for ingredients from the earth in order to build human bodies and houses was no longer usable. When Jerusalem became great all the substances and materials from the earth which were to be used in order to build human bodies and houses had become exhausted.

If one translates this Hebraic esoteric teaching into the Christian one, it means that: If the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, Jerusalem would have been destroyed anyway. But what can be a new construction by men who create with the aid of the earth would not have been inserted into this destruction. A kind of a seed of a completely new structure was laid into what was destined to be destroyed in Jerusalem. Mother earth dies in Jerusalem. Daughter earth is expectant or lives in the expectation of another seed. Bodies and houses are not built from the earth here through the gathering together of ingredients as in the old Jerusalem which stands there as the culmination of what occurs on the earth, but the earth rises as a spiritual pole of the old Jerusalem. One will no longer be able to or it will be increasingly difficult to make something like the old Jerusalem from the earth's ingredients. Another time arises instead which was laid down as a seed by the Mystery of Golgotha. Men receive something from above which envelopes them, more on the outside, or more on the inside. The new city sinks down from above and pours over the earth—the new Jerusalem. The old Jerusalem was made out of the earth and its substances: the new Jerusalem is made out of spiritual ingredients from heaven.

You will think that such an idea is rather strange by comparison with everything which is thought in our time and compared with what you could learn from what is thought in our time. How does one picture man's development from an anatomical, physiological viewpoint today? Man eats, stuffs food into his stomach, digests it, throws off certain substances and replaces what has to be replaced by the substances he assimilates.

However, this is not what happens, for man is a three-membered being who consists of a nerve-senses man, a rhythmic man and a metabolic limb man. None of the substances in food go into the actual metabolic limb man—they all go into the nerve-senses man. The nerve-senses man absorbs the salts and other substances which are needed and which are always finely distributed in air and light, and it guides them into the metabolic-limb man. The latter is fed entirely from above. It's not true that it gets its substances from physical foods. Diseases arise if substances from the earth, enter the metabolic limb man. All of the food which is taken in and digested only supplies the organs of the nerve-senses man. The head is formed by substances, from the earth. The organs of the metabolic-limb man are formed by things from the heavens. What is in the rhythmic man is only a coarser indication which goes in two directions. Man doesn't eat the oxygen in the air—he inhales it. This is coarser than the way that man assimilates things for the metabolic-limb man. Man takes in what he needs for the metabolic-limb man through a very much finer breathing. Respiration is something which is coarser. And what man does with oxygen to produce carbonic acid is something which is finer than what happens so that the food stuffs which go through the stomach can supply the head. This is the transition in the rhythmic man.

This is the real story about man's building and its processes. The truth of the matter is that what is created by the materialistic view and is taught by anatomy and physiology is nonsense. The moment one knows this one knows that what builds up the human body doesn't only come from below upwards from the earth's plant, mineral and animal kingdoms, and one knows that what supplies the organs which are often considered to be the coarsest ones comes from above. Then one will be able to see that there was a kind of a surplus in nourishment from below until Jerusalem was destroyed. A surplus of what comes from above gradually begins to be important after the Mystery of Golgotha.

Even though we saw that people have twisted the facts around, things are developing in such a way today that nourishment from above is becoming more important than the one from below. Thereby man is being transformed. Our head is no longer like the heads people had in ancient times. They used to have foreheads which receded more. (see drawing) Present-day foreheads protrude more; the outer brain has: become more important. This is the thing which has changed. What is becoming more important in the brain is more like digestive organs than what is at the center. The peripheral brain is more like man's digestive organs than the delicate tissues in the whiter brain, that is, in the continuation of the sensory nerves into the center of the head. And metabolic organs are nourished from above.

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One can understand these things right down to the smallest details if one has the will to speak about certain things in the way that the Apocalypticer does when he says: Here is wisdom. Except that what is in the ordinary knowledge which is living and weaving among people today is not wisdom, but darkness. What one calls “scientific results” today is definitely the result of Kali Yuga; it is a total eclipse of the human mind. One should look upon this as a secret and not blare it out in the streets. Something is esoteric if it remains in a certain circle. You see, the growing of the new Jerusalem has already begun, has begun since the Mystery of Golgotha.

When man's earth period will be completely fulfilled he will not only be able to work heavenly substances into his body through his senses but he will also extend this heavenly substance to what will then be an outer city through what one calls spiritual knowledge and art—an extension of the body in the way that I explained. The old Jerusalem was built from below upwards, the new Jerusalem will really be built from above downwards. This is the tremendous perspective which arose from a vision, a super-colossal vision of the Apocalypticer. He became aware of this mighty thing: Everything arises here which men could build out of the earth upwards, as it were, and becomes concentrated in the old Jerusalem. This came to an end. He saw this rising up and this melting away in the old Jerusalem and he saw the approach of the human-being city, the new Jerusalem from above, from the spiritual worlds.

This is the goal, the last tendency of the revelation in the Apocalypse. In this respect it really contains Christian paths of humanity and Christian goals of humanity. If we try to understand them, we arrive at a certain peculiarity concerning the Apocalypse which some people have an inkling of although they can't quite understand it. Anyone who makes a serious effort to understand the Apocalypse cannot help asking himself: How do I do this? How do I get into this, how do I get into the idea about the old and new Jerusalem, what do I have to do in order to understand it? Anyone who seriously wants to understand the Apocalypse cannot help telling himself: I have to get into its content and I can't just continue to talk about images which have no content for me. In order to get into the content one needs a cosmology and a view of humanity which can only be given by a new Anthroposophy and by a real perception of' the spiritual world. One comes to Anthroposophy through the Apocalypse because one is using the means to understand the Apocalypse and because one notices: John received the Apocalypse from regions where Anthroposophy was before it came to human beings.

This is why one needs the transition; one has to understand the Apocalypse in an Anthroposophical way if one wants to understand it in an honest and serious way. You notice this most of all in something like the final goal, the new Jerusalem. However, you have to know the secrets about the building up of man from above and below better than science knows them. Then you can extend these ideas to the overall activity of men on earth, which is also from below upwards and which changes into one from above downwards. The building of the old Jerusalem will change into the spiritual building of the new Jerusalem from above downwards. People should grow into what is being built in a spiritual way not just in the exegetes' symbolical, theoretical, pictorial way but in such a way that the spirit becomes just as real for us as the material and physical was for thousands of years.

To the extent that you are worthy of it you will look upon the new Jerusalem as something which hangs down from above in just as real a way as the old Jerusalem stood on its foundations from below upwards, and you won't just take this in a pictorial way or in the way that the exegetes present it. This is something which one has to remember the Apocalypse contains no symbols, but references to quite concrete facts and to what happens, and not to something which just wants to indicate the events through symbols. That is the important thing. This is the way we have to feel and find our way into the Apocalypse. We will take this up again tomorrow.

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My task of to-day and of tomorrow will be to show you the path into the spiritual worlds which has been followed ever since the 14th and 15th century, particularly in the so-called Occult Training, and which is the most suitable path for modern people. But it will be easier for us to understand the essential points if we first cast a glance over the future development of humanity.

We have already spoken of the course of human development through the Stages of Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth. Those who are only accustomed to think in accordance with present-day conceptions will find it difficult to understand that it is possible to know something about the future course of evolution: But you must bear in mind that certain great laws which are now active, will also exercise their activity in the future, and those who know these laws can therefore cast a glance into the future.

In the sphere of physical reality no one doubts that things can be foretold,—for example, lunar and solar eclipses and other astronomical phenomena can be calculated in advance, far into the future. In the sphere of physical reality there is no doubt as to this. And everybody knows that when certain substances are mixed in a retort, scientists can foretell the result. This is a prophecy relating to external sensory facts, and these things can be foretold because the laws which influence the substances are known.

Similarly we learn to know through spiritual science the laws which govern the course of human life, so that it is possible to foretell what will take place in the future.

An objection might now be raised which has been advanced by the thinkers of every epoch: “It is impossible to speak of human freedom if future events can be foreseen!” But here people confuse the capacity of looking into the future with predestination. In every philosophy you will therefore come across the strangest observations, for all philosophers were unable to make this distinction. Jacob Böhme was the only exception!

Let me now give you an example to make things clearer to you. Let me compare time with space. Imagine yourself standing here, and two people in the street, outside. You can see what these two people are doing, for you are watching them from a distance. But are you able to influence their actions, in view of this fact? No, you are simply looking at them, and these two people act in perfect freedom. You can determine nothing in their actions through the fact that you are looking at them. Now imagine a clairvoyant who observes what will take place in the future. He merely sees this, and he does not in any way influence the events. If these events could be influenced, if they were, so to speak, predestined in the present, there would be no pre-vision. But we can only grasp the difference between predestination and prevision if we ponder over this problem for a long tune.

I do not intend to describe to you what the Earth will be like when it shall have reached the Venus and the Jupiter stages; instead, I wish to tell you something which will give you an idea of man's future development; I wish to explain to you something which comes from the oldest Christian Mysteries, which originates from the Christian School of the true Dionysius; it was a teaching which was always taught in the Christian esoteric schools.

The following comparison was taken as a starting point:—I am now speaking to you. Yell can hear my words; you hear the thoughts which were, to begin with, in the depths of my soul; you hear thoughts which would remain concealed to you were I not to express them in sounds. But you could not hear my words, if the air did not exist between us. Whenever I utter a word, the air in the space around us is set into motion; whenever I speak, I cause the whole volume of air around me to vibrate, it vibrates in accordance with the words which I pronounce. Let us now proceed further: Imagine that you were able liquefy the air, and then to render it solid. Air can be liquefied; you know that water can exist in the form of steam and that this air becomes liquid when it cools; and then the liquid can become a solid block of ice. Imagine now that I pronounce the word.“God” into the air; a form would fall down, for instance, the form of a shell; if the sound-vibrations could render the air solid. And another wave of sound would fall down as a solid form if I pronounce the word “World”. A crystallized form of air would correspond to every word I utter, and you would be able to perceive these crystallized forms.

This example was in fact advanced in the Christian schools. First of all we have the spoken word, and then this word becomes a solid form, but before it became solid, it existed as an inner thought. Now the early Christian imagined the following: The creative process in the universe resembles the creative process which takes place in space, when we speak. The creative proceeded from the idea of things and then the Godhead expressed these ideas in the form of words uttered out into space. Everything which appears to us outside in the form of plants, minerals, etc. is the crystallization of God's utterances. It is possible to imagine everything dissolved into tone-vibrations of the Divine Cosmic Word. “Whatever I see before me, is the crystallization Word of God!” said the Christian. And on a certain wy he made a distinction between the “Father in Concealment”, Who had not yet expressed Himself, the “Word” or the Son, Who resounds through space, and the crystallized Word, the “Revelation”.

This enables us to understand in a deeper sense the beginning of the Gospel of St. John:—“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. It was in the very beginning with God. Everything was made by Him, and except through Him was nothing made that was made.” Everything that was made, was made by the Word! We should take things as literally a possible, then we can easily recognise the creative element of the Word, or the Logos. In the Christian meaning, the Word or the Logos stands in the second place. “Logos” should only be translated with “Word”, for this means that at the foundation of everything which exists in the created world lies the unuttered creative Word; it then resounded as spoken Word, and this is the origin of every existing thing. If we go far back into times we could hear animals, plants, minerals, and men, resound through the cosmic spaces as “Word”—even as you now hear my own words—for in those remote, times, the air had not yet cooled down to such extent as to enable words to take on solid form.

Let us bear this in mind, for then we can say to ourselves: Once upon a time, the Word was ,creative. Men are now beginners in an activity which was once carried out by their ancestors, the Gods, who stood above them. Once upon a time, the Gods created the world by uttering their words into the cosmic spaces, and this creative activity gave rise to the created world round about us. The forces of procreation in the vegetable, animal, and human kingdoms are but, a metamorphosis of the former creative Word of God. We still bear within us a higher and a lower nature. The greatest perfection has been reached by that part within us which is endowed with sex, whereas our larynx contains the first stage of a new procreative power. Whenever we pronounce words, we are at the beginning of an activity which will one day become procreative. At present we are only beginners in an activity which was once carried out by the Gods. A new form of procreation will replace the old one. The larynx is now able to form words but in the future it will become an organ of procreation, a generative organ, which will produce more and more condensed and higher forms. The larynx can now mould forms of air, but in future it will give rise to real beings. When the earth shall have reached the Jupiter stager the Word will have creative power in the mineral kingdom, and during the Venus stage it will be able to produce plants. Thus the course of development will proceed, until man will be able to procreate himself through the Word.

The present form arose, when man first sent the air streaming through his lungs through sounds. But in future stages of the earth's development, the words, the mere words which we now tell each other, will have a lasting form. And finally, the larynx will become man's generative organ, through which he will procreate himself in purity without the intromission of sex.

This shows us the future aspects of human development, and the predisposition of the human larynx. Indeed, an enigmatic phenomenon can show you how intimately the larynx is connected with certain stages of development: When a boy reaches puberty, his voi0e breaks, it undergoes mutation. The human larynx is at the beginning of its development, whereas sexual life is at the end of its development. This shows us the intimate connection of certain things in Nature. In sexual life we are confronted by something which is dying off; the larynx, the word, on the other hand, will in the future become man's generative organ.

We might indicate many other examples showing how the human being will gradually develop organs which now exist in a rudimentary form—for instance, the organs which now constitute his breathing system, but which really form part of the heart system.

The training which was introduced into Europe since the 14th century in fact anticipates future conditions of human evolution and it enables us to follow a speedier course of inner development than the ordinary one. The training which is called the Rosicrucian training is the one most suited to modern men. In a certain sense, Rosicrucianism has not a good reputation among men who have only heard of it now and then. If we could rely on the statements made in books, and on what scientists know about Rosicrucianism, then it would indeed be the swindle which it is reputed to be! But those who judge Rosicrucianism by these sources do not know real Rosicrucianism, but a mere swindle!

But let us now consider Rosicrucianism in it s true form; it arose through an individuality concealed under the name of Christian Rosenkreutz, who gave rise to the Rosicrucian Movement in the year 1459.¹

I expressly remark that what I an telling you now is only to be taken as an example, in the same way in which I spoke to you yesterday of the Christian. training. Let me therefore indicate right away the seven chief points of Rosicrucian training. The sequence of these stages is not the same for all, but let me point them out to you, for they come into consideration for everyone who passes through the Rosicrucian training.

The first thing is what we call Study; the second is what we call the Appropriation of Imaginative Knowledge; the third, the Appropriation of the Occult Writing; the fourth, the Preparation of the Stone of the Wise; the fifth stage is called Conformity of the Small World, the Microcosm, with the Large World, the Macrocosm. ² The sixth stage is the Penetration into the Life of the Macrocosm and the seventh is what we the Divine Blissfulness.

The Rosicrucian path leads in the surest and profoundest way to a knowledge of Christianity. The Christian path of training is more suited for those who can abide in faith and who can awaken their feeling life within them, in the manner described to you yesterday. But the Rosicrucian path is for these people who can connect the truths of Christianity with the truths relating to the external world This above all, will enable them to protect Christianity against every attack from outside. Christianity is a world-conception of such profundity that our wisdom will never suffice to grasp it fully. The path of Rosicrucian training is the most suitable one for modern men.³

If we follow a train of thought which has nothing in common with the sensory world, we pursue study in the Rosicrucian meaning. What is designated as “thinking in free thoughts” is only known to the civilisation of the west, through geometry, the Christian-Gnostic schools therefore used the name “mathesis” for the designation of things connected with the higher truths, with God and the higher world, for such truths had to be grasped independently of everything pertaining to the sensory world, even as mathematics must be grasped independently of all sensory impressions. A circle drawn with chalk is most imperfect, a real circle can only be conceived in thoughts; thought alone is able to grasp everything that can be learned in connection with the circle. Through mathematics we learn to think of the circle independently of the senses; we construct it in thought, with the aid of the triangle built up spiritually, whose angles equal to 180 degrees.

It is somewhat uncomfortable to have to think without the support of external sensory objects, and for the majority of men there is no other field of study in this direction than spiritual science. In my first lecture I told you that the knowledge contained in spiritual science can absolutely be grasped through logic. But clairvoyance is needed if anyone wishes to investigate these truths. Logic suffices, however, for the understanding of the truths contained in spiritual science.

Our materialistic age could only invent the calculating machine, which teaches us to form thoughts which are not independent of the senses: A child, above all, should learn to grasp things independently of sensory impressions. Thee influence of spiritual science will therefore be of greatest value in education: Spiritual science is an excellent training for the development of a thought activity independent of the senses. Everything which I have told you in connection with Saturn, the Sun, and the various members of the human beings relates to things which cannot be, seen; they must be grasped through thought, independently of the senses. No one should, however, believe that he can train himself unless he first grasps these truths theoretically. The advantage of such truths is that they do not exist for the senses, so that they can transmit us a way of thinking which goes beyond sensory life. For many people it is sufficient at first, to penetrate into the truths which theosophy describes in connection with facts which cannot be grasped through the senses. These truths constitute, the kind of thoughts which were always explained to the pupils of the Rosicrucian Schools, and the truths were well impressed upon them.

If we now wish to proceed, we can find a good means of a Training in Thought in my books “Truth and Science” and “The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity”. These books are merely a gymnastic in a form of thinking which is independent of the senses. Generally speaking, you will find that in other books it does not make much difference if the thought- contained in one sentence is transferred to another one. But in the above-mentioned books no thought can be transferred to another place. These books have arisen in such a way that my own person merely, gave this thought-structure the opportunity to take on a sensory form. It was necessary to yield to these thoughts, so that they could arise of their own accord, continue of their own accord. Those who are willing to penetrate more deeply into these thoughts, devoting themselves to this study for, say, half a year (this is not easy, but the effort entailed is the very best way of tackling ) those who can read these books to the very end, have drawn out of their inner being a dormant force.

The second stage is Imagination, or the Imaginative Knowledge, which is entirely under the influence of Goethe's beautiful words: “All transient things are but a symbol”. Only those who have acquired a firm, sure thinking, should enter this second stage. For they might easily fall into delusive fancies without a firm foundation of thought. Consequently, the first condition is to have a clear head; nothing can protect us more against mistakes than a clear way of thinking.

In the widest meaning, imagination might be characterized by observing everything which surrounds us in the following Manner:—Observe the face of a human being; you see upon it creases and wrinkles,which come and go; you do not only describe these lines, but you designate them as smiles or sorrow. A man's smile reveals to you his happy disposition of mind. You do not only deduce an inner truth from something which you see outside, but this outer perception is for you a real symbol of that man's inner life or else you see a tear falling; you are not only a physicist who observes that tear in accordance with the law of gravity, but you know that that falling tear is the expression of the soul's inner sadness. Thus everything which you see outside on a person's countenance becomes for you the expression of the soul's inner mood. The Rosicrucian pupil learns to feel that everything which he sees outside is similarly the expression, let us say, of the Earth-Spirit, a certain plant, for, example the meadow-saffron, really appears to him as the expression of the mourning life of the earth. Even as a smiling countenance reveals to him the soul's happy mood, so the flowers become an expression for the earth's happy or sorrowful mood.

Goethe did not only wish to convey an external image when the Earth-Spirit in “Faust” speaks:

“In Lebensfluten Tatensturm,
Wall ich auf und ab,
Webe hin und her
Geburt und Grab,
Ein ewiges Meer,
Ein wechselnd Weben,
Ein glühend Leben,
So schaff ich am sausenden Webstuhl der Zeit,
Und wirke der Gottheit lebendiges Kleid.”

In the floods of life,
in the storm of action,
I surge up and down,
I weave to and fro!
Birth and the Grave;
An eternal ocean,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life,
Thus I work on the whirring loom of Time
And weave the Godhead's living garment.

For Goethe, the Spirit of the Earth gradually becomes something that lives in the earth; he acquires a soul-spiritual connection with the whole surrounding Nature.

Let me now explain to you more in detail one of the moods which can be found in Nature.

We have a Rosicrucian pupil walking across the fields. He sees the tiny pearls of dew upon each plant. This reminds him of the ancient “Neflheim, the “Land of Mists”, where the air was filled with a dewy mist and where the human beings had quite a different connection with Nature than they have now. The Rosicrucian pupil who is thus walking over the meadows and who perceives the pearls of dew upon the plants says to himself: In the ancient Land of Mists this was once dissolved in the atmosphere. And within his soul rose up a deeply concealed memory of the Atlantean age.

Imagination was specially cultivated among the pupils of the medieval Rosicrucian Schools, and als0 among the pupils of the Holy-Grail. Since I cannot express myself in any other way, let me now convey to you in the form of a dialogue some of the truths which were taught in these Schools.

The teacher said to his pupil:—“Behold the plant: see how it springs out of the ground, opening its calyx with the organs of fructification; see how the sun's rays come down upon it and open the blossom, so that the fruit can ripen”. The Rosicrucian pupil, and also the pupil of the Holy Grail, had to conjure up before their soul this image, this idea.

Now there is something very significant, even in materialistic science, whenever a plant is being compared with the human being. You must, in that case, take the plant's root as corresponding to the human head, whereas the flower corresponds to man's generative organs, to the which he shame-facedly conceals. In the plant the root corresponds to the human head. Man is a reversed plant, the animal is a half reversed pant. Rosicrucianism therefore says: Behold the plant: Its root is in the ground and its organs of fructification are chastely turned towards the sun's ray. Behold the animal: Its spine is horizontal ... and then behold man: There you have a complete reverse, a complete transformation. In the cosmic process of evolution the plant, the animal and man are symbolized by the Cross! The Cross is the plant, the animal and man.—Now you will be able to understand Plato's words: The soul of the universe hangs upon the Cross of the universe.—the soul of the universe, the cosmic soul which permeates everything, is stretched out upon the plant, the animal, and man.

Now it was impressed upon the Rosicrucian student: “Behold the plant: In its kind, it is lower than you, for it is not endowed with consciousness and with the power of thinking; but its substance is pure and chaste; it turns its calyx towards the sun; its organ of reproduction is turned without any passion towards the sun's ray, the holy spear of love. But physical substance has become permeated with passion. Now think of the future ideal—a purified substance, producing itself in purest chastity,” And his attention, was drawn towards the larynx, where man shall one day have attained the purity and chastity of the flower's calyx. “Think of the plant's calyx, which is devoid of passion. It develops through passion, but it will become pure again and reproduce itself chastely, by allowing itself to be fructified by the spiritual ray of the sun, by the Holy Spear of Love.” A prototype of this “holy spear of Love” is the spear which pierced the heart of Christ-Jesus upon the Cross.

Yesterday we have seen that this blood which streamed out of the Redeemer's wound banished egoism from the earth. The spear which pierced him is therefore a foreboding of that higher spear, the sun's ray in a spiritual form. And the Holy Grail indicates the chalice of humanity which develops out of the larynx, and which will be the purified generative organ of the future, as is the case to-day in the plant.

This is the deeper meaning of the Holy Grail, which was brought to the knowledge of the Rosicrucian students and of the disciples of the Holy Grail when they had reached the imaginative stage. Now compare the vision which you obtain through these images—the plant's calyx, sex filled with passion, the Holy Grail. the passionless chalice—compare this with the dry, intellectual concept supplied by modern science; this will show you the difference between imagination and mere intellectual thought: the whole cosmic process must be grasped in images! This is important, for the more intellectual concepts which we have to-day are not creative; but if these concepts are added to an image, then the images will become creative. This was felt in past times, and it should be considered in the education of the child.

Let me now discuss an actual problem. To-day people say so easily: What nonsense our elders taught us children, by telling us the story of the stork! Children should be told the truth.

If our descendants will treat us as we treat our forefathers, they will also laugh at us and say: Our forefathers thought that that the human being arises through a physical act!—And they will look back upon the time when this was explained to children in a spiritual way. In ancient times, when the story of the stork arose, also adults believed in it, for they knew that when a human being is born, his soul descend a from the spiritual world; and so they always connected birth with the descent of a winged being. You may even find this again in nursery-rhymes, for instance in the following one:

Flieg, Käfer, flieg!
Dein Vater ist im Krieg!
Deine Mutter ist im Pommerland
Pommerland ist abgebrannt;
Flieg, Käfer, flieg!

Fly, Beetle, fly!
Your father is in the war.
Your mother is in Pommerland,
Pommerland is burnt to ashes!
Fly, Beetle, fly!

This “fly, beetle” is meant as an image for the human soul, because a faint knowledge still existed of the astral world, from where the souls fly down into the physical world. And what is “Pommerland”? “Pommer” is the sane word as “Pommerle” which means a small child, so that “Pommerland”, or “Pommerleland”, is the Land of babies, where the mother goes to-fetch her baby. Such things must simply be explained in the light of the spiritual world. If you bear in mind that the image of the stork bringing babies is really an image for a spiritual process—reincarnation—you will realise how immensely important it is that certain things should first be grasped in the form of pictures; if the child is first taught to look upon the image of the spiritual process, he will develop an entirely different frame of mind enabling him to listen reverently even to the description of the physical process.

If you know that the stork is an image for the descending soul, you, yourself will once more believe in the stork! Your words can wing a child's fancy, if you understand the truth underlying an image; in that case a mysterious fluid will stream out of it and pass over to the child. This applies to every image. Children can thus be taught everything.

How can you deal with the problem of life after death? Lead the child to a butterfly's cocoon and tell him: Even as the butterfly flies out of its cocoon, so the soul flies out of the body when we die, but we cannot see this. If you really believe in this, you will be able to convince the child that when the butterfly leaves its cocoon, this is, upon a lower stage, the same as when the soul leaves the body. If spiritual science enables us to dive down again into the spiritual world, so that living images rise up in human hearts, education will change altogether; then the child will no longer be taught dry intellectual facts which coarsen his soul. We should not pull things down to a grotesque or comic sphere but we should realise instead what important things lie at their foundation.

The third thing which must be acquired for the paving of the “path” is the Learning of the Occult Writing. This does not consist in learning a writing, as is the case in ordinary life. The letters of the alphabet may indeed ba traced back to occult images but they are not by a long way an occult writing. In occult writing we must penetrate into the real great cosmic forces which are active in the universe. And all that we write down, must be so that one process of development passes over into the next. Take a plant: It bears seeds; in the seed you have the starting point for a new plant. But if you could really investigate the process, you would find that nothing of the old plant passes over into the new plant. In reality, the old plant perishes completely in regard to its substance; while the new plant builds up its form from entirely new substances—all that passes over into the new plant is a kind of movement. Here you have some sealing wax and there a seal: you press the seal into the wax. Of the seal itself nothing has gone over into the wax, only the form remains.—This is the case in every process of development. When it perishes the old substance merely supplies the opportunity for a new form to arise in accordance with the old form. This is designated

with two inter-twining spirals which do not meet. Such a transition existed after the Atlantean epoch of culture; this epoch disappears and a new one arises in the Indian epoch of culture; also this must be designated with two spirals. I have already told you that in the year 800 A.D. the sun rose in the sign of Aries; before that in the sign of Taurus; further back in the sign of Gemini and still further back in the sign of Cancer. The Greco-Latin age, containing the seeds of our present epoch, coincided with the time when the sun rose in the sign of Aries; the preceding civilisation; the Chaldean-Assyrian-Egyptian one, coincided with the time when the sun rose in the sign of Taurus; before that we have the Persien culture; when the sun rose in the sign of Gemini; and the ancient Indian culture developed itself when the sun stood in the sign of Cancer. It was then that the sign of Cancer; two inter-twining spirals was first written down.

Thus I might explain to you each sign of the Zodiac according to its true meaning. These signs were formed out of Nature, they are an expression for the forces and laws which are active outside, in Nature. If we learn to know the occult signs we begin to go outside ourselves; we penetrate into the mysterious foundations of Nature.

Thus I have given you some indications 0n the first three stages of the Rosicrucian path: Study, Imaginative Knowledge, and the Acquisition of the Occult Writing.

To-morrow we shall discuss the other stages, beginning with the Preparation of the Stone of the Wise.

• 1. See lecture 5 of Life Between Death and a New Birth.
• 2. See Macrocosm and Microcosm. Soul Problems, Life Problems, Spiritual Problems.
• 3. See The Path of Knowledge and its Stages

From many studies on the subject of the forming of human destiny or karma you will have realised that human life is not viewed in its entirety if sleep is left out of consideration. When a man reflects about himself with the ordinary consciousness of to-day, he looks back only upon the days because the nights are passed in unconsciousness. In the case of normal sleepers, therefore—as nowadays there are no Seven Sleepers—a third of life is disregarded. But for experience of the super-sensible and of man's participation in the spiritual world, it is this very third of life that is of essential importance. When a person has reached a definite age he looks back over the days he remembers, as far back as his memory goes. The nights are between the days but in his recollection the nights are left entirely out of consideration. A true retrospect is really not possible for a man of modern times because his observation of life is far too superficial. But if he were capable of carrying out such a retrospect, then precisely through what he does not see in the ordinary way he would have an indication of karma. Observation of the life of sleep gives significant hints of individual karma. Attention must above all be paid to the essential difference between the two moments of waking and going to sleep.

Ordinary consciousness can feel this difference instinctively, but Initiation-Science alone can throw light upon it. The difference between the moment of waking and the moment of going to sleep is particularly evident to people who are sick or ailing. They notice more readily than do those in good health that the moment of going to sleep is often accompanied by at least a slight feeling of pleasure. The moment of waking, on the other hand, has something slightly unpleasant about it; waking is accompanied by happiness only if the attention of the person concerned is at once turned to the outer world and when his consciousness of the outer world drowns what is rising up from within him. For many people the moments both of waking and of going to sleep are shrouded in a certain dimness. At the moment of going to sleep a man has the feeling that he is somehow dragging the past day's experiences along with him, that these become more and more nebulous and that he then abandons them. The moment of waking is accompanied by a slight feeling of oppression, a feeling of lifting oneself out of certain depths, bringing from them something that is carried over into the day and is got rid of only during the course of it. The result is that a certain feeling of unpleasantness may be associated with the experience of waking. An unpleasant sensation of taste may intensify into an equally unpleasant sensation of a stupefied head. People do not as a rule distinguish between these delicate experiences but they are unmistakeable indications of a great deal in human life. For what is really taking place? We describe quite correctly and from a certain standpoint very exactly what is taking place if we say: during sleep the physical and etheric bodies lie in the bed and the ego and astral body pass out into the spiritual world, returning into the physical and etheric bodies in the morning on waking. But how does this process take place? In order to make progress in our study of karma we will envisage the whole process which, to begin with, it is justifiable to describe in a rather abstract way.

This emergence of the ego and astral body from the physical and etheric bodies can be sketched like this. Let us suppose this figure to be the human being and here are the physical body and the etheric body. In the evening, when sleep begins, the ego and astral body move outwards. We will draw quite diagrammatically how the two members widen out, expand, but describe a kind of circle. In the morning, on waking, the ego and the astral body pass into the physical body again through the limbs, actually by way of the fingers and toes. The fact is that a circle is described and this statement must be taken more literally than is usually imagined. In reality, when a normal human being wakes in the morning, the picture seen by clairvoyance is not of the whole astral body and the whole ego being immediately within the physical and etheric bodies; on the contrary, ego and astral body pass only slowly and by degrees into the physical body from morning onwards until towards midday and afternoon. You will say that if this were really the case we should feel our ego and astral body moving only gradually from the tips of the fingers and toes towards the head. To very exact clairvoyant observation this is actually the case, only the person concerned does not inwardly feel it to be so, for the reason that the way in which these higher principles work is different from any kind of physical activity. You see, if a locomotive is propelling a carriage, it pushes forwards from the spot where it is at the moment. And if a railway line is, say 30 metres long and the engine is pushing forward, as long is needed for the first metre, then so long for the second, and so on, at a certain point there may be no effect from the engine if it has not yet reached thus far. But with spiritual conditions it is different; spiritual conditions are effective at other places as well as where they happen to be centred. So the waking hours of the day are used for the purpose of bringing our ego and astral body slowly into our physical and etheric bodies from the tips of our fingers and toes. But the ego and astral body begin to be active from the very beginning, from the moment of waking, so that one has the feeling of being completely filled by them. To clairvoyant sight, however, it is clear that an actual revolution takes place through the day; the complementary revolution takes place during the night. But a revolution also takes place—one that is less dependent upon time—when you have an afternoon nap. Here again the ego and astral body leave the physical and etheric bodies and the process adapts itself to your need of sleep. Sleep is a prophet and knows when you will wake although you yourself do not; your astral body under all circumstances knows it. It knows when you will wake even if as the result of some disturbance you sleep for a shorter time than you intend, even if before going to sleep you say that you want to sleep for only half-an-hour but you lie asleep for three hours instead. The astral body knows exactly how long you will sleep. It is an accurate prophet because the inner, spiritual circumstances are, in fact, different from the external circumstances experienced at the time.

You will certainly have realised that there is a very great difference between the process of going to sleep and that of waking. When we wake we have just been in the spiritual world and when we go to sleep we pass out of the physical world and into the spiritual world. A stream bears us along in the spiritual world between sleeping and waking and we also have experiences then—experiences which are, however, wrapt in unconsciousness. We have experiences during sleep which are, in fact, similar to those of the daytime, only they are of much greater intensity.

If you observe the soul's waking life you will find there, in the first place, the thought-experiences evoked by the various impressions made by life. But memories of the earthly life already past are always intermingled with these experiences. Try for once to consider how in every situation memories mingle with the momentary impressions made by life. In fact, if close attention is paid, one can get a picture of how, at different moments, life is a veritable hodge-podge, a mingling of memories and instantaneous impressions. There are two quite different factors: the thoughts which rise up from within and the thoughts which enter via the senses. These are quite different currents of the inner life and during sleep they are also in evidence. The stream of what is present (impressions of the daily life) on going to sleep continues during the night and perpetually flowing towards this is what we experience on waking.

These two currents stream towards each other: the one stream, experienced particularly on going to sleep, is the one already mentioned, the one that is experienced consciously, vividly and powerfully during the first decades after death when life is lived through again in reverse order. As I put it to you rather drastically: if you give someone a box on the ear, then, in living through the event after death you do not experience the anger which you consciously felt on Earth when giving the blow, or maybe the satisfaction at being able to express the anger. Instead, you undergo what the other person experienced, his physical pain and also his moral suffering. This is what you would experience, but in a picture, not yet in reality, if you could consciously continue your life when it is already becoming dim at the approach of sleep. If you were to pass into sleep with full, clear consciousness, you would live through the day's experiences in reverse, but in pictures. Whereas during the first decades after death it is all experienced as reality.

What I have described applies, approximately, to life by day in the waking state, when we are given up to outer life merely with our thoughts. But there is also the other current and this has something stupendous in it. We experience it on waking, as I have explained, but there is an element of heaviness in it which is carried into the day and is only gradually overcome; later in the day we become free of it. When this second stream is fully perceptible to Initiation vision it is seen to be a repository of the whole karmic past which passes before the human being every time he sleeps. Whereas a person can experience something of the karma that is taking shape for the future, when he wakes from sleep he has in the feeling I have described a faint, admittedly a very faint, glimpse of his present karma. The moment of waking brings a faint indication of what an individual bears within him from his past earthly lives. This is of course taken into what the astral body and the ego radiate when from the tips of the fingers and toes they spread through the body. A very burdensome karma, a karma that is difficult to bear, radiates unhealthy material deposits into the head, whereas a good karma radiates health-bringing deposits. And it is here that the spiritual and the natural make contact. The good in a man's karma radiates the healthy states of the organism into the head in the morning and clarifies it; healthy elements radiate upwards from good karma. From bad karma, from the residue of whatever guilt has been incurred, unhealthy deposits in the human organism are reduced to a kind of vapour which rises up into the head. The head then feels dull and heavy. The weaving of karma right into the physical can be perceived from the condition prevailing on waking in the morning. Karma takes shape through the alternating effects of sleeping and waking life. Now just as the karma that takes shape from what we have done every day of our life until its end, signifies in sleep during the night what the momentarily formed thoughts signify during the day, so does that mighty spectacle encountered when we have slept from evening to morning signify the cosmic memories of our past karma. Just as we have personal memories when we wake, from going to sleep until waking we have our karmic memories, if our consciousness extends so far. Memories of the different lives through which we have passed on Earth come to meet us. Soon after going to sleep there can be revealed to one who is able to understand such experiences through Initiation wisdom and Initiation insight, the last Earth-life, the last Earth-life but one and so on, right back to lives which become indefinite because the individual himself was then still living in the universal All, with a dreamlike, plant-like consciousness. Thus sleep is actually the window through which man looks at his karma. He becomes familiar with his karma and works at its further shaping during sleep through the deeds and thoughts which fill his waking life. This is the first weaving of karma: it takes place during sleep. We have already considered a second weaving that takes place during the first decades after death.

We shall acquire a more serious conception of life when the significance of sleep has been grasped in this way, when we realise that we sink into sleep every night because it is then that we work at the formation of our karma, and because it is during sleep that our karma from previous earthly lives finds the way whereby it can play a part in our daily life. From the night, karma gradually enters into our daily life and we bring something quite definite with us into the day. An individual who can recollect clearly how at one point in his life a particularly significant event occurred to him, will, if he has a more intimate, finely developed faculty of introspection, easily perceive that if, let us say, this event took place in the afternoon, ever since morning an inner restlessness was impelling him towards it. Most people who can perceive something of the sort will have had the feeling that from the morning onwards they had been moving towards an event that was to be significant in their life. Such an event—if it was a really fateful although entirely unexpected event—affected all the preceding hours of the day. On days when something important is to happen to us we do not wake up exactly as we do on days that take their usual course—only we do not notice it. Those who used to lead the life of peasants on the land—such people knew about these things and did not like to be torn suddenly out of sleep, because when there is no gradual transition into the waking life of day one is wrested away from such intimate experiences. Peasants say that on waking one should never look at the window at once but away from it, so that while the light is still dim one can become aware of what is emerging from sleep. The peasant will not at once look at the window nor does he like to be startled into waking suddenly; he likes to be wakened naturally, at the same time every morning by the church bell, so that he can prepare himself for this through the whole period of sleep. Then the day dawns, the church bell sounds into his life and then, in the early morning he has inklings of his destiny, of events of destiny, not those resulting from acts of free will. This is what he likes to happen and unlike people claiming to be highly civilised he would hate to be wakened by an alarum clock, for that drives one with dead certainty away from everything spiritual—much more forcibly, of course, than the window looked at immediately on waking. But our modern culture has introduced materialism into all the circumstances of life and will continue to do so. There is a great deal in modern life which makes it impossible for men to perceive the spirit living and weaving in the world. The more aware they become of that indefinite, half mystical influence which can radiate from sleep, the more clearly is their attention directed to their karma.

And now you will understand why I was able to say that we readily dream of individuals whom we meet in life and to whom we at once feel drawn or the reverse, quite independently of whatever outer impression they make. What is happening in such cases? These are individuals with whom we were together in earlier lives on Earth. Let us say that in the afternoon of 14th June, 1924, we have had the experience of meeting someone we perhaps dislike. We now carry into sleep the experience that gave rise to the feeling of dislike. But there, in sleep, the karma is revealed; this person stands before us as he was in the last earthly life or in the last but one, and so on; we meet him as he was in his earlier life. We encounter everything we experienced in connection with this individual who has now appeared and who simply reminded us of something—we meet him as a bodily figure, but in a spiritual way. No wonder that we begin to dream of him; with ordinary consciousness we cannot do otherwise. But if we come across an individual for the first time, however beautiful or ugly his features may be or however strongly he interests us, in our sleep we never meet him, for he was never with us in earlier lives on Earth. No wonder we cannot dream of him! You see how transparent such things become when he facts are examined spiritually.

Now what transpires between sleeping and waking in the forming of karma may follow a normal, perfectly normal course. Then a man will experience how his destiny takes shape as the fulfilment of what he brought upon himself in earlier earthly fives. Or he will experience the ultimate karmic value of what he thinks or does in this present fife. It will as a rule live itself out in what he thinks or does. But something quite different may come about.

Suppose a man who is living on the Earth today achieved in deed or thought something of real importance in an earlier life. The karmic result of this does not lie in the physical body or in the etheric body which are inherited from the parents, but it lies in the astral body and ego—the members which are outside the physical and etheric bodies during sleep at night. But suppose that this karmic load has such strength that it cannot wait until the age of life when the astral body may be weak, for in old age muscles and bones have already become brittle. Let us take seventy years—the patriarchal age—to be the normal length of a man's life on Earth. In these seventy years man's astral body and ego also undergo development. The astral body of a child can work strongly and forcefully upon the whole physical and etheric organism; it can hammer, as it were, upon muscles and bones. In old age this is no longer possible, for the astral body then becomes relatively weak. The strength of the ego increases but it withdraws into the weaker astral body and hence works with less power. The astral body, however, is particularly responsible here, for in old age it is no longer able to hammer effectively upon muscles and bones. Now imagine that someone is living at the present time, in the twentieth century, having lived before in the fourteenth or eleventh century. During his life in the eleventh century he performed a really significant act, one that made very strong impressions on the astral body. The ensuing result remains in the astral body and when the man comes again in the twentieth century it wants to be finally fulfilled and from this astral body to give the necessary stimulus. When the result of the experience in the eleventh century is of such significance that it cannot make use of a feeble, aged astral body hardly capable of performing important deeds, then it must use an astral body in the early years of life. And if the event has been so important as to eclipse all other events of life, a great deal must be compressed into the period while the astral body is still youthful. What does this mean? It means that the individual concerned will have a short life in the twentieth-century incarnation. Here you see how the length of life is determined by the consequences of former earthly thoughts and deeds being anchored in the astral body.

We now go further. Think, for instance, of an astral body that is positively inflated as the result of important deeds—particularly evil deeds—in an earlier incarnation; such deeds inflate the astral body and it makes a strong impact upon the physical and etheric bodies. This strong impact is not healthy; only a certain normal relation of the astral body to the physical and etheric bodies is healthy. The strong impact which can, for instance, be caused by bad karma, batters the organs, softens them and causes disease. Now comes the second incarnation. Such action or thinking in the eleventh century can inflate the astral body, thereby condemning the individual to death at an early age. But he may fall ill in any case, apart from this violent impact; he may have a severe illness and die from it. That is the physical aspect. For when we see what is going on in the person's physical body, we say: he is ill and the illness ends in death; he falls ill at the age of twenty-five and dies at thirty in consequence of the illness.

Is this also the spiritual aspect? Is this also what would be said by Initiation Science? No! Initiation Science would say the opposite. For it is precisely the earlier significant action or thought that brings about the death in the next earthly life; the deed in the eleventh century brings about the death in the twentieth century. And the death sends the illness on in advance ... a man becomes ill so that he may die at the right moment. The consequence of the later death, which is a karmic necessity, is, as you now realise, the illness which is sent in advance. That is the spiritual aspect. When one rises from the physical world to the spiritual world everything is in fact reversed; it takes the opposite course and we see how the illness is karmically brought into man. That is the karmic aspect of illness. This karmic aspect of illness can be an extremely important factor for diagnosis. It need not immediately be discussed with the patient but it may certainly be important. If you bear in mind that what is contained in karma has its own definite place, you will certainly discover it.

Now if the significant incident, action or thought affecting another human being or some particular matter occurred in an immediately preceding incarnation, let us say in the eleventh century, when we are asleep we encounter what took place in that century before anything dating from a still earlier incarnation, let us say in the second century B.C. Thus we gradually encounter what has happened to us in earlier earthly lives. But if one begins here (pointing to the sketch) then what is encountered first is what has made the way from here to here. The karma comes to meet us; but this means that what is above here has come from what is below, perhaps from the heart; something that is low down in the organism and was affected in the previous incarnation comes, however, from the head. In the case of illness, therefore, when we see how far back the influential events lie, karma can indicate to us that an affection, let us say, of the legs, comes from incarnations in the relatively near past, whereas a symptom of illness in the head comes from incarnations in the relatively far distant past. Thus the transition from the spiritual into the physical can also be indicated by karma.

What results from this is extremely important for therapy. For where must we seek the remedy for illness affecting the head and for illness affecting the legs? The remedy for illness affecting the head will be found in what existed far, far back in the evolutionary process of Nature, in what is reminiscent of very early Nature-processes, for instance, mushrooms, which in their present imperfect form recapitulate an earlier plant formation, or in algae and lichens, or, in the case of the fully developed plant, in the root, since that is the part that has remained at the earliest stage. Illness in the lower body and more towards its periphery will have to be healed with what appeared at a later stage in the evolution of Nature, namely, blossoms, flowering plants or also with later formations in the mineral kingdom. Whatever is a late development in man must be healed with what is also a late development in Nature. In the head, too, there are, of course, organs which are comparatively late formations. When the Earth was still recapitulating the Moon-evolution and Sun-evolution, man existed without his present eyes, in general without sense-organs, although the first rudiments of them were already present during the Saturn-evolution. As they are today, mirroring the outer world inwardly, they are a relatively late product of evolution, appearing at the same time, for instance, as siliceous substance in its present form on the Earth. Silica as it is today is a late product in the evolution of the world of Nature, although its rudiments were laid in the far, far past.

Hence when silicic acid is correctly administered as a remedy it acts upon everything belonging to the nerves-and-senses system, especially the senses, through the whole organism. In their present form the senses developed in an age when rocks containing silica also appeared in their present form. In the first incarnation which can still be called an incarnation, when with our whole bodily make-up we were a more integral part of Nature, we lived, simply in accordance with our karma, an existence shared with different forms of plant and animal life, the successors of which are here to-day. The mushrooms and the roots of plants are unlike what they were in that early epoch but in a certain way what is present to-day in the mushrooms, lichens, algae and roots of plants is reminiscent of the conditions prevailing in our first definite incarnation. In the blossoms and flowering plants of today and in minerals at a corresponding stage ... (a gap in the transcript here). I bring this before you only to show how a true observation of karma leads to stages in the evolution of Nature. And from the relation of Nature to Man we can recognise how to heal. Every branch of life must ultimately be widened in such a way that it gradually becomes spiritual knowledge. Everything else is so much groping and fumbling, an existence in spiritual darkness, and it is this that has brought mankind into the present situation. If men are to emerge from it again they must grasp the reason for it in clear consciousness, that is to say, knowledge of the physical must be widened to knowledge of the spiritual. And nothing can lead more positively to realisation of the spiritual than the study of karma.

When we picture how the forming of karma proceeds from sleep, how again it passes into and through sleep, how the normal forming of karma impels a man to action, makes his action again subject to karma and how he thus lives out the ordinary karma of life—from all this we see how karma works. When again we see how the life of an individual is shortened and he dies at an early age, indicating that karma has inflated his astral body and must make strong demands upon it as the result of past deeds, thus contributing to illness—everywhere the working of karma is in evidence. Or let us suppose a man has an accident and is ill as a result; then, under certain circumstances, such an accident—which is possibly, but not necessarily, determined by karma—can continue to be a factor in the further course of karma through the following lives on Earth. Illness may also be the beginning of karma and then it will be found that such illnesses make going to sleep an unwelcome and difficult process. But when illnesses are the beginning of karma they have something consoling about them.

In the case of many illnesses the following must be said: illnesses that are a fulfilment of karma, that make waking unpleasant, point to previous experiences; illnesses that are an augury of future karma and make going to sleep an unwelcome and difficult process are the beginning of good karma. For there will be compensation for what is suffered in such an illness. We have the pain now and afterwards the compensation for the pain, the uplifting, joyous experience. A great deal in life looks different when viewed from the spiritual and not from the physical standpoint. It is sometimes a thoroughly painful physical experience not to be able to sleep, but true observation of the spiritual aspect can be comforting. And if we do not value the momentary physical effect above the spiritual life we can actually say: Thank goodness that I so often have difficulty in going to sleep, for that is a sign that I shall experience much that will be uplifting in my future earthly life; a great deal from my present life will pass into the next one.

Sleeplessness can sometimes be a good comforter and if it were not karmically beneficial in its spiritual aspect, it would be much more harmful than it actually is. Many people tell one such legends about their long bouts of sleeplessness that from the medical point of view one might well ask how comes it that they are still alive! Normal sleep is essential for normal life. People tell one for how long they have not slept; one can only wonder that they are still alive for they really ought to be dead and yet they are not! But in such circumstances the vivifying spiritual element contained in the ego penetrates into life as compensation. To a brief survey of life it is obvious that really restful sleep after hard struggles and hard work is also at times desirable. But to lie in complete restfulness without sleeping and to pass the night quietly and fully awake is nevertheless the more desirable because when it is done of set purpose a person then becomes more and more aware of the Eternal. But the will must be in operation; the condition must not, in essentials at least, be due to physiological causes. Nevertheless there is karmic consolation for difficulty in going to sleep and in sleeplessness, for this really points to future karma, points to the future in certain respects.

We will turn our thoughts to-day to the Festival which every year revives remembrance of the Mystery of Golgotha.

There are three such main Festivals in Christendom: at Christmas, Easter and Whitsuntide. Each of these Festivals brings man's life of soul into a different relation with the great events from which the whole of earth-evolution receives purpose and meaning.

The Christmas Festival is connected more directly with man's life of feeling. In a certain sense it has the most popular appeal of all the Festivals, because when rightly understood it deepens the life of feeling and is always dear to the human heart.

The Easter Festival makes great demands upon man's powers of understanding, because here some measure of insight is essential into the Mystery of Golgotha itself, into how a super-sensible Being entered the stream of earthly evolution. Easter is a Festival which carries the faculty of human understanding to the highest level, a level which is, of course, ultimately accessible to everyone; but the appeal of the Easter Festival can never be as widespread as that of Christmas.

Through the Whitsuntide Festival, relationship is established between the will and the super-sensible world to which the Christ Being belongs. It is of the impulses of will which then take effect in the world that the Whitsuntide Festival makes men conscious when its meaning is rightly understood.

And so the great Christian Mystery is illustrated in a threefold way by these Festivals. There are many aspects of the Christmas Mystery and in the course of years we have studied them from different points of view at the time of the Festival. To-day we will think of an aspect brought graphically before us in the Gospels.

The Gospels tell of two proclamations of the birth of Christ Jesus. The one proclamation is made to the simple shepherds in the fields, to whom—in dream or in some kindred way—an Angel announces the birth. In this case, knowledge of the event was brought by inner soul-forces which were of a particular character in the shepherds living near the birthplace of Christ Jesus. And the Gospels tell of another proclamation made to the Three Kings, the Three Magi from the East who follow the voice of a star announcing to them that Christ Jesus has come into the world.

Here we have an indication of two ways in which higher knowledge came to men in earlier times. This is again a matter of which the modern mind has no understanding. The idea prevailing nowadays is that man's faculties of apprehension and thinking—that is to say, inner powers of the soul—have for thousands and thousands of years been fundamentally the same as they are to-day, except that in earlier times they were more primitive. But we know from spiritual science that the tenor and mood of the human soul has undergone great changes in the course of the ages. In times of antiquity, let us say about six or seven thousand years ago, man had a quite different conception not only of his own life but also of the universe around him. His attitude of soul underwent continual change until, in the modern world, it amounts simply to intellectual analysis and a purely physical conception of things in the outer world. This development proceeds from an instinctive clairvoyance in ancient times, through the phase of our present mood-of-soul, in order, in the future, to return to a form of clairvoyant vision of the world pervaded by full, clear consciousness.

At the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place on the earth, the old instinctive clairvoyance had already become dim. Although men's attitude of soul differed widely from that of to-day, they no longer possessed the powers of that ancient clairvoyance; neither were they able to apply the old forms of wisdom in seeking for intimate and exact knowledge of the world. The teachings of the ancient wisdom, as well as the faculties of instinctive clairvoyance, had lost their power when the Mystery of Golgotha took place. Nevertheless, echoes still survived, as the Gospels clearly indicate if we understand them aright. Echoes of the ancient wisdom survived here and there in certain exceptional individuals. These individuals might well have been the simple shepherds in the fields who with their great purity of heart possessed a certain power of clairvoyance which came over them like a dream. And there might also well have been individuals who had reached the heights of learning, like the Three Magi from the East, in whom the ancient faculty to gaze into the how of cosmic happenings had been preserved.

In a kind of dream-condition, the simple shepherds in the fields were able inwardly to realise what was drawing near in the event of the birth of Christ Jesus. On the other hand, the knowledge possessed by the three Magi from the East enabled them, by contemplating the phenomena of the heavens, to discern that an event of a significance far transcending that of the ordinary course of life was taking place on the earth.

Our attention is therefore directed to two definite but quite distinct forms of knowledge. We will think, first, of the knowledge possessed by the three Magi as a last remnant of an ancient wisdom. It is clearly indicated that these Magi were able to read the secrets of the movements of the stars. The story of the three Kings or Magi points to the existence of an ancient lore of the stars, an ancient knowledge of the secrets of the worlds of stars in which the secrets of happenings in the world of men were also revealed. This ancient lore of the stars was very different from our modern astronomical science—although in a certain respect it too is prophetic in that eclipses of the sun, of the moon, and the like, can be predicted. But it is a purely mathematical science, speaking only of conditions and relationships in space and time in so far as they can be expressed in terms of mathematics. What plays with a higher significance into man's inner life from beyond space and time, but into the world of space and time, was read by an ancient star-lore from the courses and movements of the stars, and it was this star-wisdom that formed the essential content of the science belonging to an earlier epoch. Men sought in the stars for explanations of what was happening on the earth. But to such men the world of stars was not the machinelike abstraction it has now come to be. Every planet was felt to have reality of being. In a kind of inner speech of the soul, these men of old conversed, as it were, with each planet, just as to-day we converse with one another in ordinary speech. They realised that what the movements of the stars bring about in the universe is reflected in man's inmost soul. This was a living, spirit-inwoven conception of the universe. And man felt that as a being of soul and spirit he himself had his place within this universe. The wisdom relating to cosmic happenings was also cultivated in Schools of the Mysteries where the pupils were prepared, carefully and intimately, to understand the movements of the stars in such a way that human life on earth became intelligible to them.

What form did these preparations take? These preparations for knowledge of the stars and their workings consisted in training the pupils, even in the times of instinctive clairvoyance, to unfold a more wide-awake consciousness than that prevailing in normal life. The masses of the people possessed faculties of instinctive clairvoyance which were natural in a life of soul less awake than our own. In ancient times the wide-awake thinking of to-day would not have been possible. Nor could mathematics or geometry be grasped in the way they are grasped by the modern mind. Man's whole life between birth and death was a kind of dreamlike existence, but on that very account he had a far more living awareness of the world around him than is possible in our fully wide-awake consciousness. And strange as it seems, in the age which lasted into the second millennium or even as late as the beginning of the first millennium B.C. (—it was to the last surviving remains of this age that men like the three Magi belonged—) individual pupils in the Mysteries were initiated into a kind of knowledge resembling our geometrical or mathematical sciences. It was Euclid¹ who first gave geometry to the world at large. The geometry presented to mankind by Euclid had already been cultivated for thousands of years in the Mysteries, but there it was communicated to chosen pupils only. Moreover it did not work in them in the same way as in men of later time. Paradoxical as it seems, it is nevertheless a fact that the geometry and arithmetic learnt by children to-day was taught in the Mysteries to individuals specially chosen from the masses on account of their particular gifts who were then received into the Mysteries.

One often hears it said to-day that the teachings given in the Mysteries were secret and veiled. In their abstract content however, these so-called ‘secret’ teachings were no different from what is now taught to children at school. The mystery does not lie in the fact that these things are unknown to-day but that they were imparted to human beings in a different way. For to teach the principles of geometry to children by calling upon the intellect in an age when from the moment of waking until that of falling asleep the human being has clear day-consciousness, is a very different matter from imparting them to pupils specially chosen because of their greater maturity of soul in the age of instinctive clairvoyance and dreamlike consciousness. A true conception of these things is rarely in evidence to-day.

In Eastern literature there is a Hymn to the God Varuna which says that Varuna is revealed in the air and in the winds blowing through the forests, in the thunder rolling from the clouds, in the human heart when it is kindled to acts of will, in the heavens when the sun passes across the sky, and is present on the hills in the soma juice. You will generally find it stated in books today that nobody knows what this soma-juice really is. Modern scholars assert that nobody knows what soma-juice is, although, as a matter of fact, there are people who drink it by the litre and from a certain point of view are quite familiar with it. But to know things from the vantage-point of the Mysteries is quite different from knowing them as a layman from the standpoint of the experiences of ordinary waking consciousness. You may read to-day about the ‘Philosopher's Stone’ for which men sought in an epoch when understanding of the nature of substances was very different from what it is today. And again, those who write about alchemy assert that nothing is known about the Philosopher's Stone. Here and there in my lectures I have said that this Philosopher's Stone is quite familiar to most people, only they do not know what it really is nor why it is so called. It is quite well known, because as a matter of fact it is used by the ton.

The modern mind with its tendency to abstraction and theory and its alienation from reality, is incapable of grasping these things. Nor is there any understanding of what is meant by saying that our geometrical and arithmetical sciences were once imparted to mature souls quite different in character from the souls of modern men, In my book Christianity as Mystical Fact I have indicated the special nature of the Mystery-teachings but these significant matters are not as a rule correctly understood; they are taken far too superficially. The way in which the subject-matter of the Mystery-teachings in ancient times was imparted—that is what needs to be understood.

Novalis was still aware of the human element, the element of feeling in mathematics which, in utter contrast to the vast majority to-day, he regarded as being akin to a great and wonderful Hymn.² It was to an understanding of the world imbued with feeling but expressed in mathematical forms that the pupil of the ancient Mysteries was led. And when this mathematical understanding of the universe had developed in such a pupil, he became one whose vision resembled that of the men described as the three Magi from the East. The mathematics of the universe which to us has become pure abstraction, then revealed reality of Being, because this knowledge was supplemented and enriched by something that came to meet it. And so the science and knowledge of the outer universe belonging to an ancient culture which in its last echoes survived in the Magi, was the origin of the one proclamation—the proclamation made by way of wisdom pertaining to the outer universe.

On the other side, inner feeling of the secrets of the evolution of humanity could arise in men of a disposition specially fitted for such experiences. Such men are represented by the shepherds in the fields. These inner forces must have reached a certain stage of development and then instinctive-imaginative perception became direct vision. And so, through their faculty of inner vision, the simple shepherds in the fields were made aware of the proclamation: ‘The God is revealing Himself in the heavenly Heights and through Him there can be peace among all men who are of good-will.’

Secrets of the cosmos were thus revealed to the hearts of the simple shepherds in the fields and to those who were the representatives of the highest wisdom attainable by the human mind at that time. This is the revelation made to the three Magi from the East. The great mystery of earth-existence was proclaimed from two sides.

What was it that came to the knowledge of the Magi? What kind of faculties developed in specially prepared pupils of the Mysteries through the mathematics imparted to them?

The philosopher Kant says of the truths of mathematical science that they are a priori. By this he means that they are determined before the acquisition of external, empirical knowledge.³ This is so much lip-wisdom. Kant's a priori really says nothing. The expression has meaning only when we realise from spiritual-scientific knowledge that mathematics comes from within ourselves, rises into consciousness from within our own being. And where does it originate? In the experiences through which we passed in the spiritual world before conception, before birth. We were living then in the great universe, experiencing what it was possible to experience before we possessed bodily eyes and bodily ears. Our experiences then were a priori—a form of cognition independent of earthly life. And this is the kind of experience that rises up, unconsciously to-day, from our inmost being. Man does not know—unless, like Novalis, he glimpses it intuitively—that the experiences of the life before birth or conception well up when he is engrossed in mathematical thought. For one who can truly apprehend these things, mathematical cognition is in itself a proof that before conception and birth he existed in a spiritual world. Of those to whom this is no proof of a life before birth, it must be said that they do not think deeply and fundamentally enough about the phenomena and manifestations of life and have not the faintest inkling of the real origin of mathematics.

The pupils of the ancient Mysteries who had absorbed the kind of wisdom which in its last echoes had survived in the three Magi from the East, had this clear impression: If as we contemplate the stars we see in them the expressions of mathematical, arithmetical progression, we spread over universal space the experiences through which we lived before birth. A pupil of the Mysteries said to himself: Living here on the earth, I gaze out into the universe, beholding all that is around me in space. Before my birth I lived within these manifestations of cosmic realities, lived with the mysteries of number connected with the stars, with all that I can now only mentally picture in terms of mathematics. In that other existence my own inner forces led me from star to star; I had my very life in what is now only a mental activity. Such contemplation made vividly real to these men what they had lived through before birth, and these experiences were sacred to them. They knew that this other world was a spiritual world—their home before they came down to the earth. The last echoing remains of this knowledge had survived in the Magi from the East and through it they recognised the signs of the coming of Christ.

Whence came the Christ Being? He came from the world in which we ourselves live between death and a new birth, and united Himself with the life that extends from birth to death. Knowledge of the world in which our existence is spent from death to a new birth can therefore shed light upon an event like the Mystery of Golgotha. And it was through this knowledge that the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christmas Mystery too, was announced to the Magi.

While man is living on the earth and unfolding the forces which bring knowledge of the world around him, while he is unfolding the impulses for his actions and social life, he is unconsciously experiencing something else as well. He has no knowledge of it, but just as he experiences the aftereffects of his life before birth, so does he also experience what finally passes through the gate of death to become the content of the life after death. These forces are already present in germ between birth and death but come to fruition only in the life after death. They worked with intense strength in the old, instinctive clairvoyance, and in their last echoes they were still working in the simple shepherds in the fields because of their purity of heart. We live within the play of these forces above all during sleep, when the soul is outside the body, within the outer universe. The soul is then living in the form of existence in which it will live consciously after death, when the physical body has been laid aside.

These forces from the world of sleep and dream which in certain conditions can penetrate into waking life, were very active in the old, instinctive clairvoyance, and they were working in the simple shepherds to whom the Mystery of Golgotha was proclaimed in a way other than to the three Magi.

What kind of knowledge is brought by the forces that are paramountly active between death and a new birth, if, as was the case with the Magi, they have been kindled during life between birth and death? It is a knowledge of happenings in the world beyond the earth. The human being is transported from the earth into the world of the stars in which he lives between death and a new birth. This was the world into which the three Magi from the East were transported—away from the earth into the heavens.

And what kind of knowledge is brought by the forces that well up from the inmost being of man, above all in the world of dream? These forces bring knowledge of what is coming to pass within the earth itself. In this kind of knowledge it is earthly forces that are most strongly at work, the forces we have through the body, through existence in the body. These are the forces which are particularly active between sleeping and waking. Then too we are within the outer universe, but the outer universe that is especially connected with the earth.

You will say: this contradicts the statement that during sleep we are outside the body. But in reality there is no contradiction. We perceive only what is outside us; we do not perceive that within which we actually live. Only those who lack real knowledge and are satisfied with phrases speak of such things in glib words to the effect that it is meaningless to base spiritual science upon knowledge acquired outside the human being, for what really matters is that knowledge of outer nature shall be gained through the forces within man. ‘Schools of Wisdom’ like the one in Darmstadt⁴ may be based on high-sounding principles of this kind, but a man can remain a phrasemonger in spite of being the founder of such a ‘School of Wisdom.’ We must understand the inner nature of the world before we can acquire super-sensible knowledge, and it is only then that we can penetrate into the nature of our own inmost being. Men like Keyserling speak of the need to view things from the vantage-point of the soul, but they do not penetrate into the inmost being of man; they simply pour out phrases.

The truth is that between sleeping and waking we look back, feel back, as it were, into our body. We become aware of how our body is connected with the earth—for the body is given by the earth. The revelation to the shepherds in the fields was the revelation given by the earth, proceeding from their bodily nature. In a state of dream the voice of the Angel made known to them what had come to pass.

And so the contrast is complete:

To the Magi: revelation through heavenly lore.
To the Shepherds: revelation given by the earth.

That the revelation should have been from two sides is entirely in keeping with the Mystery of Golgotha. For a heavenly Being, a Being Who until then had not belonged to the earth, was drawing near. And the coming of such a Being must be recognised through wisdom pertaining to the heavens, through wisdom that is able to reveal the descent of a Being from the heavens. The wisdom of the shepherds is knowledge proceeding from the earth; the weaving life of the earth becomes aware of the coming of the Being from heaven. It is the same proclamation, only from another side—a wonderful, twofold proclamation to mankind of a single Event.

The attitude with which the Event of Golgotha was received by mankind is to be explained by the fact that only vestiges of the ancient wisdom remained. In the first centuries of our era, certain Gnostic teachings were able to shed light upon the Mystery of Golgotha, but as time went on, men strove more and more to understand it through purely intellectual analysis and reason. And in the nineteenth century, naturalism invaded this domain of belief. There was no longer any understanding of the super-sensible reality of the Event of Golgotha. Christ became the ‘wise man of Nazareth’—in the naturalistic sense. What is necessary is a new, spiritual conception of the Mystery of Golgotha. The Mystery of Golgotha as such must never be confused with the attitude adopted to it by the human mind.

The mood-of-soul prevailing in the shepherds and in the Magi was in its final phase at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Everything in the evolution of humanity undergoes constant change and metamorphosis. What has the wisdom possessed by the Magi from the East now become? It has become our mathematical astronomy. The Magi possessed super-earthly knowledge which was actually a glorious remembrance of life before birth. This knowledge has shrivelled away into our mathematical-mechanistic conception of the heavens, to the phenomena of which we apply only mathematical laws. What wells up from within us in our mathematical astronomy is the modern metamorphosis of the knowledge once possessed by the Magi.

Our outer, sense-given knowledge, conveyed as it is merely through eyes and ears, is the externalised form of the inner knowledge once possessed by men like the shepherds in the fields. The mood-of-soul in which the secrets of earth-existence were once revealed to the shepherds now induces us to look at the world with the cold detachment of scientific observation. This kind of observation is the child of the Shepherd-wisdom—but the child is very unlike the parent! And our mathematical astronomy is the child of the Magi-wisdom. It was necessary that humanity should pass through this phase. When our scientists are making their cold, dispassionate researches in laboratories and clinics, they have very little in common with the shepherds of old, but this attitude of soul is nevertheless a metamorphosis leading back directly to the wisdom of the shepherds. And our mathematicians are the successors of the Magi from the East. The outer has become inward—the inner, outward. In the process, understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha has been lost, and we must be fully conscious of this fact. Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha has vanished most completely of all, perhaps, in many of those who claim to be official ministers of Christianity to-day.

With the forces of knowledge, feeling and belief possessed by modern men, the true reality of the Event of Golgotha can no longer be grasped. It must be discovered anew. The Magi-wisdom has become inward; it has become our abstract, mathematical science by which alone the heavens are studied. What has become inward in this way must again be filled with life, re-cast, re-shaped from within.

And now, from this point of view, try to understand what is contained in a book like my Outline of Occult Science.

The Magi gazed at the worlds of the stars; therein they beheld the Spiritual, for they could behold man's experiences in his life before birth. In our mathematics this has become pure abstraction. But the same forces that are unfolded in our mathematical thinking can again be filled with life, enriched and intensified in Imaginative perception. Then, from our own inner forces there will be born a world which, although we create it from within, can be seen as the outer universe, embracing Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan. We then behold the heavens through inner perception, inner vision, as the Magi discerned the secrets of the Mystery of Golgotha through outer perception. The outer has become inward, has become mathematical abstraction. Therefore what is now inward must be expanded into perception of the outer universe; inward perception must lead to a new astronomy, to an astronomy inwardly experienced.

It is only by striving for a new understanding of Christ that we can truly celebrate the Christmas Festival to-day. Can it be said that this Festival still has any real meaning for the majority of people? It has become a beautiful custom to take the Christmas Tree as the symbol of the Festival, although as a matter of fact this custom is hardly a century old. The Christmas Tree was not adopted as a symbol of the Festival until the nineteenth century. What is the Christmas Tree, in reality? When we endeavour to discover its meaning and know of the legend telling that it grew from the tiny branch carried in the arms of the boy Ruprecht on the 6th of December, when we follow its history, it dawns upon us that the Christmas Tree is directly connected with the Tree of Paradise. The mind turns to the Tree of Paradise, to Adam and Eve. This is one aspect of the way in which the Mystery of Golgotha can again be proclaimed in our time. The mind turns from the Mystery of Golgotha, back to the world's beginning. The meaning of world-redemption is not understood and the mind turns again to the Divine creation of the world. This comes to expression in the fact that the real symbol of Christmas—the Crib—so beautifully presented in the Christmas Plays of earlier centuries, is gradually being superseded by the Christmas Tree which is, in reality, the Tree of Paradise. The old Jahve religion usurped the place of Christianity and the Christmas Tree is the symbol of its recrudescence. But in its reappearance the Jahve religion has been split into multiple divisions. Jahve was worshipped, and rightly worshipped, as the one, undivided Godhead in an age when his people felt themselves to be a single, self-contained unity not looking beyond their own boundaries and full of the expectation that one day they would fill the whole earth. But in our time, although people speak of Christ Jesus, in reality they worship Jahve. In the various nations (this was all too evident in the war), men spoke of Christ but were really venerating the original Godhead who holds sway in heredity and in the world of nature—Jahve. Thus we have the Christmas Tree on the one side, and on the other, national Gods at a level inferior to that of the Christian reality. These were the principles by which men's comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha was diverted back again to the conceptions belonging to a much earlier epoch. The assertion of the principle of nationality, the claiming of national Gods, denotes a step backward into the old Jahve religion. Those who see fit to worship Christ as a national God—it is they who deny Him most deeply.

What must never be forgotten is that the proclamations to the Shepherds and to the Kings contained a message for all mankind—for the earth is common to all. In that the revelation to the shepherds was from the earth, it was a revelation that may not be differentiated according to nationality. And in that the Magi received the proclamation of the sun and the heavens, this too was a revelation destined for all mankind. For when the sun has shone upon the territory of one people, it shines upon the territory of another. The heavens are common to all; the earth is common to all. The impulse of the ‘human universal’ is in very truth quickened by Christianity. Such is the aspect of Christmas revealed by the twofold proclamation.

When we think of the Christmas Mystery, our minds must turn to a birth, to something that must be born anew in our time. For true Christianity must verily be born anew. We need a World-Christmas-Festival, and spiritual science would fain be a preparation for this World-Christmas-Festival among men.

• 1. About 300 B.C.
• 2. None really comprehend mathematics who do not undertake the study with reverence and devotion as a revelation from God." (From Thoughts on Physics).
• 3. "Mathematics and physics are the two theoretical sciences of reason which have to determine their objects a priori." (From the Preface to the 2nd ed. of The Critique of Pure Reason, 1787).
• 4. Founded in 1920 by Count Hermann Keyserling (1880-1946).

When with the normal perception belonging to outer existence we study human life in its relation to life in the rest of the Universe, we are observing only the smallest part of world-existence that is connected with man himself. In other words, what a man can observe if he is not prepared to penetrate behind the mysteries of existence, can throw no real light upon his essential nature and being. For when we look around us with the ordinary organs of perception, with the organ of thinking, we have before us only that which does not in any way contain the deepest and most significant secrets of existence. This fact will strike us most strongly of all if we succeed in developing, even to a comparatively small extent, the capacity to view life and the world from the other side, namely, from the side of sleep. What can be seen during sleep is for the most part concealed from man's present faculty of perception. As soon as a person goes to sleep, from then until the moment of waking he really sees nothing at all. But if and when in the course of development the time comes when observation is also possible during sleep, most of what a man sees to begin with is connected with him as a human being but remains entirely hidden from ordinary observation. It is easy to understand why this is so, for the brain is an instrument of judgement, of thinking. Hence we must use or at least activate the brain when in everyday life we want to think or form judgements, but for that very reason we cannot see it. After all, the eye cannot see itself while it is actually observing something, and the same holds good of the whole organism. We bear it about with us but we cannot observe it in the real sense, we cannot penetrate it to any depth. We direct our gaze out into the world but in modern life we cannot direct this gaze into our own being.

Now the greatest mysteries of existence are not to be found in the outside world but within man himself. Let us recall what we know from Spiritual Science, namely that the three kingdoms of nature around us owe their existence to a certain retardation in evolution. Mineral kingdom, plant kingdom, animal kingdom are, fundamentally speaking, entities attributable to the fact that something remained backward in the evolutionary process. Normal progress in evolution has in point of fact been made only by beings who have reached the stage of human existence during the Earth period. When a man looks at the mineral, plant or animal kingdoms, he is really observing in the world that which amounts in his own existence to what he ‘remembers’, to the content of his memory of his actual experiences; he is in fact contemplating what has taken place in the past and still enjoys a certain existence. But he is not experiencing the living, invisible soul-life of the immediate present when he concerns himself only with his memory. The memory with all its mental pictures represents something that has been deposited in our living soul-existence, is fixed there. All this is, of course, to be taken metaphorically, but the memories embedded in the soul are not the direct, basic elements of its life. The same applies to the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms in outer nature. The thoughts conceived by divine-spiritual Beings in the past live on in these kingdoms and they continue into present existence, just as our memory-pictures continue into our present life of soul. Hence we have in the world around us, not the thoughts of the immediately present, living, divine-spiritual Beings but the memory-pictures, the preserved thoughts of the Gods.

As to the content of our memory, this may well be of interest because with our memory we grasp a tiny corner of world-creation, we grasp what has passed over from creation into existence. Our memory-pictures are the first, the lowest, the most fugitive stage of created existence. But when we waken spiritually during sleep we see something quite different. We see nothing of what is outside in space, nothing of the processes manifesting in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms or in the external aspects of the human kingdom. But then we know that the essential realities which we are there beholding are the creative, life-giving principles working on man himself. It is actually as if everything else were blotted out and as if the Earth, observed from the viewpoint of sleep, contained nothing except Man. What would never be seen by day, in the waking state, is revealed when contemplated from the viewpoint of sleep. And it is then, for the first time, that knowledge dawns in us of the thoughts which the divine-spiritual Beings kept in reserve in order to work at the creation of man, at a level above that of mineral, plant and animal existence.

Whereas through physical perception of the world we see everything except the real being of man, through the spiritual perception exercised from the viewpoint of sleep, we see nothing except man—as a creation, together with happenings in the human kingdom—that is to say, from the viewpoint of sleep we see everything that is hidden from the ordinary perception of waking life. This accounts for the element of strangeness that is present in our vision when we are contemplating the world from the viewpoint of sleep, in other words, when we become clairvoyant, having wakened spiritually during sleep.

Now the human body—and here I mean the physical and etheric bodies together—which lies in the bed during sleep, this human body itself has a singular appearance, a characteristic of which can be expressed in words somewhat as follows. Only in the very first years of a child's life does this human body as seen during sleep show a certain similarity with the weaving life and activity in the other kingdoms of nature. The body of a grown-up person, however, or of a child from a certain age onwards, when seen from the viewpoint of sleep, reveals a constant process of decay, of destruction. Every night during sleep the forces of destruction are ever and again subjugated by the forces of growth; what is destroyed by day is repaired during the night, but the forces of destruction are always in excess. And the consequence of this fact is that we die. The forces that are renewed during the night are never the equal of those that have been used up during the waking life of day, so that in the normal life of the human being a certain surplus of destructive forces is always present. This surplus accumulates and the natural death of old age ensues when the destructive forces eclipse the upbuilding forces.

Thus when we observe the human being from the viewpoint of sleep we are actually witnessing a process of destruction—but without sadness. For the feelings we might have in our waking life about this process of destruction are absent when we see it from the viewpoint of sleep, because then we know that it is the precondition of man's true spiritual development. No being who did not destroy his body in some measure would be capable of thinking or of developing an inner life of soul. No life of soul as experienced by man would be possible if the process of growth were not opposed by processes of destruction. We therefore regard these processes of destruction in the human organism as the precondition of man's life of soul and feel the whole development to be beneficial. Looked at from the other side of life, the fact that man's body can gradually be dissolved is felt to be a blessing. Not only do things look different when viewed from the other side of life but all our feelings and ideas are different; consciousness during sleep has always before it the spectacle of the body in decline—and rightly in decline.

Study of the life between death and rebirth, however, affords a different spectacle. A certain connection with the preceding life is experienced for a time after death. All of you are aware that this is the case during the period of Kamaloka; even after that period, however, the experience of connection with the previous life continues for a time. But then, at a certain point during the life between death and rebirth, a reversal of all ordinary vision and perception takes place, a reversal far more radical than takes place during sleep-consciousness. During existence on Earth we look out from our body into the world that is not our body; from the point of time to which I have just referred, between death and the new birth, we direct hardly a gaze to the universe around us but look with all the great intensity at what may now be called the human body; we discern all its secrets. Thus between death and rebirth there comes a moment when we begin to take special interest in the human body. It is extremely difficult to describe these conditions and it can really only be done with halting words. There comes a time between death and the new birth when we feel as if the whole universe were within us and outside us only the human body. We feel that the stars and other heavenly worlds are within our being, just as here on Earth we feel that the stomach, the liver, the spleen, are within us. Everything that here, in life on Earth, is outside us becomes in that other life an inner world, and just as here we look outwards to the stars, clouds and so forth, in that other life we gaze at the human body. At which human body?

To understand this we must be clear that the new human being who at his next birth is to enter into existence, has for a long time previously been preparing his essential characteristics. Preparation for a return to the Earth begins a long time before birth or conception. The conditions of central importance here are quite different from those accepted by modern statistical biology which assumes that when a human being comes into existence through birth he simply inherits certain traits from his father, mother, grandparents and the whole line of ancestors. Quite an otherwise attractive little book about Goethe has recently been published, in which his characteristic qualities are traced back to his ancestors. Outwardly speaking, that is absolutely correct in the sense I have often indicated, namely, that there is no contradiction between a scientific fact that is correctly presented and the facts brought forward by Spiritual Science. It is just as if someone were to say: Here is a man; how comes it that he is alive? It is because he has lungs inside him and there is air outside. Needless to say, that is quite correct. But someone else may turn up and say: This man is alive for an entirely different reason. A fortnight ago he fell into the water and I jumped in after him and pulled him out; but for that he would not be alive today! Both these assertions are correct. In the same way, natural science is quite correct when it says that a man bears within himself characteristics inherited from his ancestors; but it is equally correct to attribute them to his karma and other factors. In principle, therefore, Spiritual Science cannot be intolerant; it is external natural science alone that can be intolerant, for example, in rejecting Spiritual Science. Someone may insist that he has preserved the characteristics of his own ancestors. But there is also the fact that from a certain point of time between death and rebirth a human being himself begins to develop forces which work down upon his ancestors. Long before an individual enters into physical existence there is a mysterious connection between himself and the whole line of his ancestors. And the reason why specific characteristics appear in a line of ancestors is that perhaps only after hundreds of years a particular individual is to be born from that ancestral line. This human being who is to be born, perhaps centuries later, from a line of ancestors, regulates their characteristics from the spiritual world. Thus Goethe—to take this example once again—manifests the qualities of his ancestors because he worked continuously in the spiritual world with the aim of implanting into these ancestors qualities that were subsequently to be his. And what is true of Goethe is true of every human being.

From a specific point of time between death and rebirth, therefore, a human being is already concerned with the preparation of his later earthly existence. The physical body which a man has on Earth does not by any means derive in all details from the physical lives of his ancestors, nor indeed from processes that can operate on the Earth. The physical body we bear is in itself fourfold. It has evolved through the periods of Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth. Its very first foundation was laid during the Old Saturn period; during the Old Sun period the etheric body was woven into this foundation; during the Old Moon period the astral body was added and then, during the Earth period, the Ego, the ‘I’. As a result of these processes the physical body has undergone many changes. Thus we have within us the transformed Saturn foundation, the transformed Sun and Moon conditions. Our physical human body is the product of transformed physical conditions. The only part of all this that is visible is what has come from the Earth; everything else is invisible. Man's physical body is visible because he takes in the substances of the Earth, transforms them into his blood and permeates them with something that is invisible. In reality we see only the blood and what has been transformed by the blood, that is to say, a quarter of the physical human body; the other three-quarters are invisible. In the first place there is an invisible framework containing invisible currents—all this exists in the form of forces. Within these invisible currents there are also the influences exercised by one current upon another. All this is invisible. And now this threefold entity is filled out, permeated by the foodstuffs that have been transformed into blood. It is through this process that the physical body becomes visible. And it is only when we come to deal with the laws governing this visible structure that we are in the earthly realm itself. Everything else stems from cosmic, not from earthly conditions and has already been prepared when, at the time of conception, the first physical atom of the human being comes into existence. Thus what is later on to become the body of the human being has been prepared in past ages without any physical connection with the ultimate father and mother. It was then that the qualities transmitted by heredity were first worked into the process of development.

The human soul looks down upon what is thus being prepared from the above-mentioned point of time onwards between death and the new birth. It is the spiritual embryo, the spiritual seed of life. This is what constitutes the soul's outer world. Notice the difference between what is seen when we wake spiritually during sleep and have clairvoyant perception of the human body undergoing a process of continual destruction, and what is seen when our own inner organism is perceived as outer world. The outer world is then the inner man in process of coming into being. This means that we are then seeing the reverse of what is perceived clairvoyantly during sleep. During sleep we feel that our inner organs are part of the outer world, but otherwise what we see is a process of destruction. From the above-mentioned time onwards between death and rebirth our gaze is focused upon a human body in process of coming into being. Man is unable to preserve any remembrance of what he has seen between death and rebirth, but the spectacle of the building of the wonderful structure of the human body is veritably more splendid than anything to be seen when we gaze at the starry heavens or at the physical world with vision dependent in any respect upon the physical body. The mysteries of existence are truly great, even when contemplated from the standpoint of our physical senses only, but far greater still is the spectacle before us when, instead of external perception of our inner organs, we gaze at the human body that is in process of coming into being with all its mysteries. We then see how everything is directed to the purpose of enabling the human being to cope with existence when he enters the physical world through birth.

There is nothing that can truly be called bliss or blessedness except vision of the process of creation, of ‘becoming’. Perception of anything already in existence is trivial compared with vision of what is in process of coming into being; and what is meant by speaking of the states of bliss or blessedness which can be experienced by man between death and rebirth is that during this period he can behold what is in process of coming into being. Truths such as these, that have been revealed through the ages and grasped by minds adequately prepared, are indicated in words to be found in the ‘Prologue in Heaven’ in Goethe's Faust:

Das Werdende, das ewig wirkt und lebt,
Umfass' euch mit der Liebe holden Schranken,
Und was in schwankender Erscheinung schwebt,
Erfistiget mit dauernden Gedanken.

May that which works and lives, the ever-growing,
In bonds of love enfold you, mercy-fraught,
And Seeming's changeful forms, around you flowing,
Do ye arrest, in ever-during thought!

(Tr. Anna Swanwick, L.L.D.,
Bohn's Standard Library)

The difference between vision in the world between birth and death and the world between death and rebirth is that in the former we behold what is already in existence and in the latter what is coming into being.

The thought might occur: Is a man, then, concerned only with the vision of his own being? No, that is not the case. For at the stage of coming into being this body is actually part of the outer world; it is the manifested expression of divine mysteries. And it is then that we realise for the first time why the physical body—which after all is only maltreated between birth and death—may be seen as the temple of cosmic mysteries, for it contains more of the outer world than is seen when we are within it during earthly existence. At that stage between death and rebirth what is otherwise outer world is our inner world; what is otherwise called Universe is now that of which we can say ‘I’—and what we then behold is outer world. We must not allow ourselves to be shocked by the fact that when we are looking at our body—or rather the body that will subsequently be ours—all other bodies which are coming into being must naturally also be there. This is of no significance because here it is simply a matter of number. In point of fact, differentiation between human bodies that can be of interest and importance to us has little significance until shortly before human beings enter into physical existence. For the greater part of the period between death and the new birth, when we are looking down upon the body that is coming into being, it is actually the case that the single bodies are differentiated only according to their number. If we want to study the essential properties of a grain of wheat, it will not make much difference whether we pick an car from a grain of wheat in a particular field or go fifty paces farther on and pick one there. As far as the essential properties are concerned, one grain is as good as another. Something similar applies when between death and rebirth we are gazing at our own body; the fact that it is our own has significance only for the future because later on we are to inhabit it on the Earth. At the moment it interests us only as the bearer of sublime cosmic mysteries and blessedness consists in the fact that it can be contemplated just like any other human body. Here we stand before the mystery of Number which will not be further considered now, but among many other relevant aspects there is this, namely, that Number—that is to say, multiple existence—cannot be regarded from the spiritual standpoint exactly as it is from the physical. What is seen in countless examples will again be seen as a unity.

Through the body we feel ourselves to be in the Universe and through what in physical life is called Universe we feel that we are living within our own Ego-hood. Such is the difference when the world is contemplated at one time from this world and at another from yonder.

For the seer, the most significant moment between death and the new birth is when the human being concerned ceases to concern himself only with his last life and begins to direct his attention to what is in process of coming into existence. The shattering impression received by the seer when, as he follows a soul between death and the new birth, this soul begins to be concerned with what is coming into being—this shattering impression is due to the fact that the soul itself at this moment experiences a severe shock. The only experience comparable with it is the coming of death in physical existence, when the human being passes over from life into being. In the other case—although it is impossible to describe it quite exactly—the transition is from something connected with a life that ended in death to experience of the process of ‘becoming’, of resurrection. The soul encounters that which bears a new life germinally within it. This is the moment of death in reverse. That is why it is so immensely significant.

In connection with these things we must turn our minds to the course of human evolution on the Earth. Let us look back to an age, for example the ancient Egypto-Chaldean epoch, when our souls, looking out through physical bodies, did not see the stars merely as material bodies in the heavens; spiritual Beings were connected with the stars—although this experience occurred only in certain intermediate states during the life between birth and death. The souls of men were deeply affected by this vista and in those times impressions from the spiritual world crowded in upon them. It was inevitable that in the course of evolution the possibility of beholding the spiritual should gradually cease and man's gaze be limited to the material world. This came about in the Graeco-Latin epoch, when men's gaze was diverted to an ever greater extent from the spiritual world and limited to the world of the senses. And now we ourselves are living in an era when it is becoming more and more impossible for the soul to see or detect spiritual reality in the life of the physical environment. The Earth is now dying, withering away, and man is deeply involved in this process. Thus whereas in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch men still beheld the spiritual around them, they now see only what is material and actually boast of having established a science which deals only with what is physical and material. This process will go to further and further lengths. A time will come when men will lose interest in the direct impressions of the world of the senses and will concentrate attention on what is sub-material, sub-sensory. Today, in fact, we can already detect the approach of the time when men will be interested only in what is sub-sensory, below the level of the sense-world. This often becomes very obvious, for example when modern physics no longer concerns itself with colours as such. In reality it takes no account of the actual quality of colour but concerns itself only with the vibrations and oscillations below colour. In many books today you can read the nonsensical statement that a yellow colour, for example, is merely a matter of oscillations, wave-lengths. Observation here is already diverted from the quality of the colour and directed to something that is not in the yellow colour at all but yet is considered to be the reality. You can find books on physics and even on physiology today in which it is emphasised that attention should no longer be fettered to the direct sense-impression but that everything resolves itself into vibrations and wave-lengths. This kind of observation will go to further and further extremes. No attention will be paid to material existence as such and account will be taken only of the working of forces. Historically, one example suffices in order to provide empirical evidence of this. If you refer to du Bois-Reymond's lecture ‘On the Boundaries of Knowledge’, given on 14th August, 1872, you will find a peculiar expression for something that Laplace already described, the expression ‘astronomical knowledge of a material system’—that is to say when what lies behind a light- or colour-process is presented as something only brought about by mathematical-physical forces. A time will come when human souls—and some of those who are being educated in certain schools today will have the best possible foundations for this attitude in their next incarnation—will have lost real interest in the world of light and radiant colour and enquire only into the working of forces. People will no longer have any interest in violet or red but will be concerned only with wave-lengths.

This withering of man's inner spirituality is something that is approaching and Anthroposophy is there to counter it in every detail. It is not only our present form of education that helps to bring about this withering; the trend is there in every domain of life. It is in contrast to everyday life when with our Anthroposophy we want to give again to the souls of men something that fertilises them, that is not only a maya of the senses but springs forth as spirit. And this we can do when we impart to human souls knowledge that will enable them to live in the true world in their following incarnations. We have to speak of these things in a world which with its indifference to form and colour is in such contrast to what we ourselves desire; for it is particularly in regard to colours that the world of today is preparing souls to thwart what we want to achieve. We must work not only according to the concepts and ideas of everyday existence but with cosmological ideas. Hence it is not a mere liking on our part when we arrange surroundings such as those to be seen in this room¹ but it is connected with the very nature of Spiritual Science. Immediate response to what is presented to the senses must again be generated in the soul in order that active life in the spirit may begin. Now, in this incarnation, each one of us can assimilate Anthroposophy in the life of soul; and what is now assimilated is transformed into faculties for the new incarnation. Then, during his life between death and the next birth, the individual sends from his soul into his body that is coming into being influences which prepare his future bodily faculties to adopt a more spiritual view of the world. This is impossible for him without Anthroposophy. If he rejects Anthroposophy he prepares his body to see nothing but barren forces and to be blind to the revelations of the senses.

And now something shall be said that enables a seer to form a judgement of the mission of Anthroposophy.

When a seer today directs his gaze to the life between death and the new birth of souls who have already passed beyond the above-mentioned point of time and are contemplating the body that is coming into being for a further existence, he may realise that this body will afford the soul no possibility of Developing faculties for the comprehension of spiritual truths. For if such faculties are to be part of life in the physical body, they must have been implanted before birth. Hence in the immediate future more and more human beings will be devoid of the faculties needed for the acceptance of spiritual knowledge—a state of things that has existed for some time already. Before the seer there will be a vista of souls who in previous lives deprived themselves of the possibility of accepting any knowledge of a spiritual kind. In their life between death and rebirth such souls can indeed gaze at a process of development, but it is a development in which something is inevitably lacking—that is the tragic aspect. These vistas lead to a grasp of the mission of Anthroposophy. It is a shattering experience to see a soul whose gaze is directed towards its future incarnation, its future body, beholding a budding, burgeoning process and yet being obliged to realise: something will be lacking in that body but I cannot provide it because my previous incarnation is responsible. In a more trivial sense this experience may be compared with being obliged to work at something knowing from the outset that ultimately it is bound to be imperfect. Try to be vividly aware of the difference: either you can do the work perfectly and be happy in the prospect, or you are condemned from the outset to leave it imperfect.

This is the great question: are human souls in the spiritual world to be condemned in increasing numbers to look down upon bodies which must remain imperfect, or can this be avoided? If this fate is to be avoided, souls must accept during their life in physical bodies the proclamation and tidings of the spiritual worlds.

What those who make known these tidings regard as their task is verily not derived from earthly ideals but from the vista of the entire span of life, that is to say, when to life on Earth is added the period of existence between death and the new birth. Herein is revealed the possibility of a fruitful future for humanity, the possibility too of militating against the withering of the souls of men. The feeling can then be born in us that Spiritual Science must be there, must exist in the world. Spiritual Science is a sine qua non for the life of mankind in the future but not in the sense that is applicable to some other kind of knowledge. Spiritual Science imparts life, not concepts and ideas only. But the concepts of Spiritual Science, accepted in one incarnation, bring life, inner vitality, inner forcefulness. What Spiritual Science gives to man is an elixir of life, a vital force of life. Hence anyone who regards himself as belonging to a Movement for the promulgation of Spiritual Science should feel Spiritual Science to be a dire necessity in life, unlike anything that originates from other unions and societies. The realisation of being vitally involved in the necessities of existence is the right feeling to have in regard to Spiritual Science.

We have embarked upon these studies of the life between death and rebirth in order that by turning our minds to the other side of existence we may receive from there the impulse that can kindle in us enthusiasm for Spiritual Science.

• 1. Dr. Steiner recommended that restful and refreshing colours should be displayed in lecture halls and rooms used for the presentation and study of Spiritual Science, also in rooms for the sick.

(For a different translation of this lecture, see: The Proclamations to the Magi and the Shepherds)

Let us begin to-day by considering certain questions connected with this time of festival, with this season which yearly renews the memory of the Mystery of Golgotha, renews also a direct experience of it in our feeling.

We really have three such times of festival in Christian tradition: the Christmas, the Easter and the Whitsuntide festivals. And we may say that, each in a different way, these three festivals bring man into connection, into relationship, with that in which the Christian tradition sees the meaning of all earth-evolution. These three festivals also differ as regards the human soul-forces. Christmas appeals more to the feeling and in a certain sense is the most popular festival, because to understand it requires a deepening of the feeling-life, and because it is the most readily approachable for the large masses of humanity. The Easter festival, which requires that we raise ourselves to an understanding of the real Mystery of Golgotha, of the entrance of a super-sensible Being into human evolution, is the most challenging to the human powers of understanding. It is a festival which lifts human understanding to the highest level, and which, although it is also generally celebrated, cannot however be popular in the same sense as the Christmas festival.

The third, the Whitsun festival, establishes a relationship particularly between the human will and the super-sensible world, the world to which the Christ-Being as such belongs. The carrying over of will-impulses into execution in the world is brought to human consciousness through a right understanding of the Whitsun festival.

Thus what we may call the secret of Christianity is given form in these yearly celebrations. The way in which the Christmas mystery touches man can be brought before our consciousness in the most manifold ways; and with the recurrence of the Christmas festival during the course of the years, we have considered the Christmas-Thought from the most varied standpoints. This time let us call to mind something which can become clear to any one who considers the Christmas mystery in the light of the Gospels.

In the Gospels we find a twofold announcement of the birth of Christ Jesus. One annunciation is made to the poor shepherds out in the fields. An Angel announces the birth of Christ Jesus to them—in a dream, or however one may wish to call it. Here we have to do with the perception of this event through inner soul-forces, soul-forces which, in the case of these shepherds in the vicinity where Christ Jesus was born, were in a special condition. And a second annunciation is set forth in the Gospels, the annunciation to the Three Kings, the Three Wisemen from the Orient. We are told that they followed a star which announced to them the advent of Christ Jesus on the earth.

Thus we are shown two ways by which this earlier humanity reached what we may call its higher knowledge. This is another example of something which is never properly grasped in the present age. To-day we usually conceive of human beings as possessing thought and perception, and we imagine this thinking and perceiving, in fact, all use of the inner soul-forces, to have been in all past centuries and millenia essentially the same—only more primitive—as it is to-day. We know from anthroposophical spiritual science how the soul-constitution of man has changed with the passage of time; how differently in ancient times—for instance, seven or eight thousand years after the beginning of the post-Atlantean period, or even earlier—humanity regarded its own life and the nature of the surrounding universe. Moreover we know how this soul-constitution underwent many changes before it became that reasoning analytical faculty existing to-day, which in its approach to the outer world knows only the purely sense-perceptible aspect of things. This evolution takes its starting-point from a certain ancient instinctive clairvoyance and proceeds through the state found in our modern soul-condition, to return again in future to a clairvoyant perception of the world which will be permeated by full human consciousness.

At the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place on earth the ancient instinctive clairvoyance was already greatly dimmed. Men's souls were indeed differently constituted than they are to-day, although they no longer had the old clairvoyance; gone also were their old wise ways of fathoming the universe. The ancient wisdom-teachings as well as the old instinctive clairvoyance had grown very dim as the Mystery of Golgotha approached humanity. But remnants of both still existed, and we are clearly shown in the Gospels, if we rightly understand them, that this was the case. Such remnants were still present among single favoured individuals. We may recognise as such the poor shepherds out in the fields, who in the piety of their hearts possessed a certain clairvoyant capacity of a dreamlike nature. And we also recognise as such the Three Magi from the East, who are pictured as standing on the topmost rung of human society, and had retained from ancient times a capacity gained from a certain stream of wisdom, giving them insight into the course of world-events. Thus, on the one hand, the poor shepherds could be approached in a kind of dream-experience, in inward perception, by the event of Christ Jesus' birth, while, on the other, the Three Magi from the East developed a science which enabled them, by the study of world-phenomena, the appearances in the heavens, to be aware of significant events taking place open the earth quite beyond ordinary human ken.

Thus there are pointed out to us two quite definite, but widely differing, modes of knowledge. Let us turn our attention for the moment to what was present as the last remnant of an ancient stream of wisdom in the Three Wisemen from the Orient. We are shown clearly that these Wisemen were able to read the riddles in the movements of the stars. In the existing descriptions we are made aware of an ancient knowledge of the stars whereby access was gained to the mysteries of the starry worlds and wherein the secrets of human events were also revealed. This ancient knowledge of the stars was something quite different from that of to-day. Our astronomy is in a certain sense also prophetic; it can prophesy eclipses of the sun and moon and so on, but it is merely mathematical and mechanical. It only speaks of space and time-relationships in so far as these may be represented mathematically, whereas the ancient wisdom of, the stars perceived in these movements something of higher significance, remote from space and time, taking place in the inner life of man. If we examine the science of humanity in olden times, we find its content essentially one of this wisdom of the stars. Men sought in the stars for a deeper understanding of earthly happenings. For to them the starry world was not the abstract mechanical thing it has become for modern humanity. For them the starry world was something full of life. They felt the presence of an essential Being in the universe, in the case of every planet. By means of an inner soul-language, in a certain sense, they even spoke with the individual planets, as we to-day speak merely from man to man in external words. People were conscious of inward soul-experience which was a reflection of what was going on out in universal space in the movement of the stars. This was a living, spiritualized way of looking at the universe. And man felt himself connected as a soul and spirit with this universe. This wisdom of the world was fostered in schools, in what may be described as Mystery schools, where the pupils were prepared in a careful, intimate and inner way to gain an understanding of the movements of the stars such as might illuminate human life upon the earth.

Of what nature were these preparations? These preparations for a knowledge of the starry heavens and their influences were of such a character that, even then, in the age of instinctive clairvoyance, the pupil was led to develop a more wide-awake life than normally. The large mass of mankind had a kind of instinctive clairvoyance, corresponding to a state of soul which was less wide awake than the one normal for us to-day. In ancient periods of human evolution people were not able to think as clearly as we can now. Geometry and mathematics as we know them could not then exist. The whole of life between birth and death had more of a dreaming character; but just because it was dreamlike it had a far more lively way of perceiving the surrounding universe than does our waking life to-day. And the strange thing was that the pupils of those ancient Mysteries existing 2000 years, or even 1000 years, before the Mystery of Golgotha (such men as the Magi may be counted among the last remaining disciples of this training), were trained in a knowledge which was very similar to our geometry and mathematics. Euclid was the first to give geometry to humanity; but he merely communicated it to humanity in general. What Euclid gave in the way of geometry had already lived in the Mysteries for thousands of years as something communicated only to the most carefully selected Mystery-pupils. It had a different effect then than in later times. It may seem strange and paradoxical, but it is nevertheless true, that what our children learn as arithmetic and geometry was taught in the Mystery-schools to selected individuals who were considered specially endowed and so accepted in the Mysteries.

To-day we often hear reference made to the mysterious matters supposedly taught in the Mysteries. Actually, in their purely abstract content, these mysterious matters are none other than those taught to children to-day. They are nothing else; and their Mystery-character lies not in the fact of their being unknown to us, but in the different way in which at that time they were taught. It is quite a different matter to call upon the reasoning of children through the content of geometry in an age in which, from the moment of awaking until falling asleep again man lives in a wide-awake consciousness, than it was to present these matters to specially selected human beings, whose consciousness was more mature, during the age of ancient instinctive clairvoyance and dreaming consciousness.

Our modern conceptions of these things are by no means always accurate. For example, there is a poem to Varuna in Oriental literature describing Varuna as appearing in the air, as wafting like the wind through the woods; Varuna appears in the lightning flashing out of the dripping clouds; in the human heart when the will is roused to action; in the heavens when the sun moves across them. Varuna is to be found on the mountains in the juice of the Soma.

What the juice of the Soma is, modern books profess not to know. To-day in our great learning we agree that we do not know what the juice of the Soma is, although there are people who drink it by the quart, and certainly know it very well from a certain standpoint. But it is a different matter to know these things—from the standpoint of the Mysteries than from the standpoint of waking consciousness in profane feeling.

You can read to-day of the Philosopher's Stone, which was accounted precious in an age when the nature of substance was somewhat differently regarded than it is to-day. Again the historians of alchemy will tell you that the Philosopher's Stone is quite unknown. Here and there in my lectures I have indicated that the Philosopher's Stone is quite familiar to most human beings; they simply do not know its qualities, or why it is so named. But since it is used by the ton, it is very familiar to most human beings.

The facts are simply upon occasion quite different from the concepts we hold of them with our present-day abstract, theoretical grasp of things, so remote from life and reality. There is not even a true grasp of what it might mean to take in the sciences of arithmetic and geometry with quite another soul-constitution than we have to-day, with a mature soul-condition. I have referred to this particular type of Mystery-schooling in my book “Christianity as a Mystical Fact”; but just such important things as these are usually not properly understood, they are not ordinarily understood in their real significance. The fact that the way in which people were approached with things constituted the very kernel of the Mysteries in ancient times is something which should be grasped. And it was thus also in the case of such purely mathematical considerations, the content of feeling and the human fullness of which Novalis still sensed when he felt mathematics to be like great poetry—something which most people now-a-days will not agree with. And it is to such grasping of the world, permeated as it was with feeling, but poured into mathematical mould, that the pupil of the ancient Mysteries was led. And when the pupil of the ancient Mysteries was thus brought to a mathematical understanding of the universe, he developed just such a world-outlook as that possessed by the Wisemen from the East, as they are described to us.

The mathematics of the universe, which have become so thoroughly abstract to us, revealed at that time something really living, because the revelation found completion in what was brought to understand it. Thus what sprang as science from an ancient culture, and was still preserved in its last fragments to the Magi, made possible the one annunciation, through the channel of the teachers of wisdom, through external science, the annunciation experienced by the Magi.

On the other hand, it was possible for the inner experience of the secrets of humanity to develop in human beings who, like the shepherds in the fields, had a special predisposition in this direction. In such cases the inner forces of man had to reach certain heights; then what took place in the world of men became direct imaginative perception, an instinctive, imaginative picture-perception. Thus, through inner vision, the poor shepherds in the fields partook in the annunciation: “God makes revelation of His Being in the heavenly heights, and His peace shall be with all men of good will.” Thus did the secrets of the universe speak to the innermost being of the poor shepherds in the fields, as well as to the utmost heights attainable to human wisdom at that time, to the Wisemen of the East. Thus the great mystery of earthly life was imparted from two different sides.

What did these Wisemen of the East experience? What was the special development brought about in the souls of these pupils through the introduction of mathematics into their soul-condition, when this was found especially mature and ready? Kant speaks of mathematics as being “a priori” truth. With “a priori” he means a truth which is present within us before our external, empirical knowledge, before our experience of it existed. This is mere word-wisdom; nothing at all is said with this “a priori”! A meaning attaches to it only when it can be shown by spiritual science that mathematics is something that rises up within us, that rises to consciousness out of man's inner being.

Whence does it come? It proceeds from the experiences we went through in the spiritual world before birth, or conception. There we lived in the great wide universe. There we experienced what could be experienced before we had bodily eyes and ears. There we had “a priori” experience, when considered in relation to our life on earth. These “a priori” experiences rise in an unconscious way out of our inner being into the sphere of consciousness. Unless modern man has a premonition of this, as had Novalis, he does not know that when he does mathematics, experiences of the time before conception and birth are rising up within him. But for a person with true insight into these matter the mathematical capacity is in itself a proof of man's life in the spiritual world before conception. As far as those are concerned for whom this is not a proof of pre-natal existence, the fact remains that they do not think thoroughly enough about life's phenomena and have no idea what the true origin of mathematics is.

The pupils of the ancient Mysteries who possessed that wise outlook, still extant in its last fragments in the Wisemen of the East, had the clear impression: “When we study the stars and apply our mathematical forms and reckoning to them, we are spreading out again over the outer reaches of universal space what we actually lived in before our birth.” And it seemed to such a pupil of the ancient Mysteries as though he must say: “Now I am living on earth; my eyes look out into universal space and see my spatial surroundings. In these same phenomena of the spatial universe I lived before my birth; there I myself counted from star to star what I now merely copy and symbolize in mathematics. With my innermost forces I moved from star to star, living in what I now merely draw.”

Thus they experienced again all they had gone through before birth, or conception, and consequently it was holy to them. They realized that they had lived in a spiritual world before they walked on earth. This knowledge of the world in which man lives before he descends to the earth was present in its last remnants in the Wisemen of the East, and by its means they knew of the advent of the Christ-Being.

Whence came this Christ-Being? He came out of that time which we live through between death and rebirth, and He united Himself with the life we live through between birth and death. For this reason the science that concerns itself with the world we live in between death and rebirth can unveil such a mystery as the Mystery of Golgotha. And out of this science announcement was made to the Magi of the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christmas Mystery.

As man lives here on the earth and concerns himself with gaining knowledge of his surroundings, with developing impulses for his actions, for his social life, he has still another unconscious experience. He knows nothing of it; but just as he experiences the after-effects of his pre-natal life, so does he also experience what passes through the gates of death and becomes the content of life after death, namely, the forces already present like a seed between birth and death, which only come to their full blossoming in the life after death. These forces worked with great intensity in the ancient instinctive clairvoyance. And they worked in their last remnants in the poor shepherds in the fields because of their special piety. Moreover, it is in these forces especially that we live between falling asleep and awaking, when our souls are outside of our bodies in outer space. The soul then lives as it will live consciously in future when it has laid aside the physical body after death. These forces, which under special conditions can penetrate from the world of sleep and dream into waking life, were once very active in the ancient instinctive clairvoyance. And these the poor shepherds experienced, receiving through them a revelation of the Mystery of Golgotha from a different quarter than that from which the annunciation came to the three Magi.

What does one experience by means of the forces peculiar to man between death and rebirth when, as in the case of the Wisemen from the Orient, they are kindled in the life between birth and death? One experiences what takes place beyond what is earthly. One is borne away from the earth out into the world of the stars where we live between death and rebirth. This was the world into which the Wisemen of the East were led away from the earth out into cosmic space.

And what does one experience by means of the forces which rise up from the inner being of man, especially in the world of dreams? One experiences what goes on within the earth. Here the Tellurian forces, the forces of which we partake because we live in our bodies, are at work. These forces work particularly in what we live through between falling asleep and awaking. Here, too, we are in the outer world, but essentially in that outer world belonging to the earth.

You will say that this is a contradiction of the truth that we are outside of our bodies. But it is not a contradiction. We always perceive only what is external to ourselves; that wherein we live is never perceived. Only people who are especially ignorant about certain subjects, and who are bent on establishing a knowledge consisting solely of phrases, are capable of skipping lightly over such matters with their phrases and of saying, for example, that the point is not to found a science of the spirit upon knowledge gained outside man, but to add to natural science a science derived from man's inner being.

With such a torrent of phrases Darmstadt wisdom-schools may indeed be founded, but one may still remain a mere phrase-maker even when founding schools of wisdom. For rightly understood, the matter is as follows. We may indeed say that, to arrive at the super-sensible, the world must be described from within; but we must first get into the inner being and then look at what is external from outside the body, by looking back upon the body. Keyserling's talks concerning observation from the standpoint of the soul do not attempt to enter man's inner being, they merely use phrases.

The fact really is such that when we are in the condition experienced between falling asleep and awaking, we look back, we feel our way back, as it were, into our bodies. We feel what is of the earth in our bodies; for they are of the earth. The poor shepherds in the fields really, felt the revelation of the earth through their bodies when in a dreamlike condition, they perceived what was happening in the form of the perception of an angel's voice.

These are the two absolute contrasts: the Magi with their knowledge of the heavens, and the shepherds with their earth-revelation. And it corresponds completely to the Mystery of Golgotha that the revelation came from two such different quarters. For a heavenly Being, as yet untouched by earth, was descending to it, and this descent had to make itself known by means of the wisdom of the heavens, which knew that something heavenly was descending.

In the shepherds' wisdom we learn to know the earth by feeling our way into its weaving life as it perceived the descent of the heavenly Being. It is the same annunciation, only from another side. Wonderfully unified, we thus see what, although it was one and the same event, was announced in a twofold way to men.

And when we see how humanity received the event of Golgotha, we must say that, in regard to this and other matters, there were only the merest remnants of the ancient wisdom left to man. I have already shown how the Mystery of Golgotha was grasped in the first centuries of Christianity with the help of the fragments of an ancient wisdom known as Gnosis. From then on it became more and more a matter of trying to penetrate into the nature of the event of Golgotha with analytical reasoning powers alone. And in the 19th century naturalism gradually made its appearance in the confessional sphere. The super-sensible content of the event of Golgotha was no longer grasped at all, Christ became merely the “wise man of Nazareth”, naturalistically conceived. A new, spiritual grasp of the Mystery of Golgotha became necessary. The fact of the Mystery of Golgotha must not be confused with the way in which human understanding has dealt with this fact.

Now a soul-constitution such as the shepherds in the fields and the Wisemen of the East possessed still existed in its last fragmentary form at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha occurred. But all this changed in the course of human evolution. Everything changes and undergoes metamorphosis. What then became of the wisdom of the Eastern Magi? It has become our mathematics, with its knowledge of the heavens! The Magi possessed a super-earthly science based on sublime recollections of pre-natal life. All this has been shrunken and cramped into our mathematical, mechanical grasp of the heavens, so that we apply nothing but the laws of mathematics and mechanics to their phenomena. What we have in the way of mathematical astronomy is all that still rises up out of our inner being as the modern metamorphosis of what the Magi once possessed.

And looking at our external sense-knowledge, which is merely a perceiving with eyes and ears, we find it to be the externalized inner knowledge of the shepherds in the fields. What could once convey to the shepherds in the fields the inner secrets of earthly existence now permits only of that cold, natural-scientific observation of the outer world which is the offspring of the shepherds' wisdom. The child bears but slight resemblance to its mother. And our mathematics, our astronomy, are the offspring of the wisdom of the Magi.

Humanity had to go through this development. Our scientific researchers, sitting in their laboratories and clinics, have very little in common with the shepherds but theirs is a direct metamorphosis of the shepherds' wisdom. And our mathematicians likewise are in direct line of descent from the Eastern Wisemen. The outer has become the inner, and the inner, outer. And so we have indeed grown remote from the Mystery of Golgotha. We must become aware of this fact. We have become far removed indeed from such understanding. Perhaps many of those who call themselves preachers and ministers of Christianity in the official sense are the most remote from it of all.

The forces of knowledge, faith and feeling that live in man to-day can never penetrate through to the true being of the Mystery of Golgotha. It must be found entirely anew.

The wisdom of the Magi too has become dry mathematics, perceiving the heavens only in designs. It has become an inner thing. But inwardness must take on life once more. What was once outer must be built up again from within.

And now let us try to understand the content of a book such as my Occult Science from this standpoint. The Magi had a real penetration into the starry heavens; they saw what was spiritual there because they had insight into human pre-natal experience. This has become abstract in our mathematics. But the very same forces out of which we develop mathematics can be brought back to life, and intensified as imaginative vision. Then there is born from out our inner being a world which, although we create it within us, we see as the outer world, as though: containing Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan. We see the heavens in inner vision just as the Eastern Wisemen externally perceived the secrets of the Mystery of Golgotha. The external has become an inner thing, has become mathematical abstraction; and in like manner the inner must be widened out until it becomes a universe around us, until inner vision leads us to a new astronomy experienced within.

Only by thus reaching out for a new understanding of the Christ can we fill the festival of Christmas with a certain meaning. Has the Christmas festival any meaning for most human beings nowadays? It is a very beautiful custom, scarcely 150 years old, to have the Christmas Tree as a symbol of the Christmas festival. The custom of having a Christmas Tree came into being only in the 19th century. What is this Christmas Tree really? It is not so easy to find its meaning. In making the effort to find it, and by discovering how the Christmas Tree gradually came into use, how it grew from being the little branch, carried on St. Nicholas' arm on the 6th of December, into being our Christmas Tree, we come to realize that this Christmas Tree is also directly connected with the Tree of Paradise.

Human consciousness thus looks back here to the Tree of Paradise, to Adam and Eve. What does this signify? This is one aspect of the way we make the Mystery of Golgotha known to-day. We turn back from the Mystery of Golgotha to the creation of the world, to the beginning of the world. We fail to grasp the meaning of the world's redemption, and instead turn back to the God who created the universe. This is expressed in the gradual disappearance of the real Christmas symbol, of the manger—so sublime a part of the Christmas plays of earlier centuries—and in the appearance of the Christmas Tree which is really the Tree of Paradise.

Thus the old Jehovah-religion again took the place of the Christ-religion; the Christmas Tree is the symbol of the reappearance of the religion of Jehovah. This Jehovah-religion makes its appearance in many shapes and forms to-day. For Jahve was once rightly worshipped as the one and only God in an age when his people felt themselves to be a unified folk, content within their limits, and living in the expectation of some day filling the entire earth. In our age people talk of Christ Jesus, but really worship only Jehovah. For, as we saw during the war, the people of the various nations talked of Christ, but were really concerned with the original God, Jehovah, who lives in the forces of nature and heredity.

On the one hand, the Christmas Tree, on the other, the national gods so remote from Christianity—with these humanity has turned back from grasping the Mystery of Golgotha to lay hold again on something belonging to a much earlier period. There has been a retrogression into the ancient Jehovah religion in the adherence to the nationalistic principle, in the announcement that the various peoples would follow their national gods.

You see, what must be taken into consideration is that in the annunciation, to the shepherds, and in the annunciation that came to the Magi, there is a human element common to all men. For the earth is the common property of all. The earth-annunciation received by the shepherds was one which could make no national distinctions and differentiations. And the Magi, who received a sun-annunciation, an annunciation from the heavens, also received a purely human element. For after the sun shines upon the lands of one folk, it shines on the lands of others also. Heaven and earth belong to all in common. With Christianity, a common human element is roused in all humanity.

This fact is pointed to in the twofold annunciation of the Christmas story. Such matters which were fully understood when man's soul-constitution was an entirely different one, will only be comprehensible to-day with the help of spiritual science.

We should inscribe this into our hearts to-day when we think of the Christmas festival. To-day, in thinking of the Christmas Mystery, we have need to look for a birth. We should not merely busy ourselves with idle talk about the Christmas festival and our own feelings, but should look for what must be born anew in this our age. For truly, real Christianity must be born anew. We need a cosmic Christmas festival for humanity.

Dear Attendees!

When any worldview asserts itself – be it a more materialistic-intellectual or an idealistic-spiritual worldview – it can be said that such a worldview has an opponent on the corresponding opposite side, or even just on a side that is more or less turned away from it, and that it is fought from that side. But of the spiritual scientific world view, as I have been developing it from this place for years now, it can be said that it is fought more or less by all of these world views, whether they lean more towards the idealistic-spiritual direction or the materialistic-realistic direction. The fact that it still has opponents from all sides today is largely due to the fact that the most essential basic characteristics of this spiritual scientific worldview are misunderstood and then judged or condemned before one has actually got to know them.

This spiritual-scientific worldview is misunderstood not only because of what it asserts, but above all from many sides because of certain fabrications that are made about it, because of certain false ideas that are formed about it. I have often emphasized this here, and I will have to ask you again today to allow me to say things that have already been said in some small details, but which are necessary to tie in so that new points of view can be developed.

For example, it is widely believed that spiritual science does not want to stand on the standpoint of firmly established scientific knowledge, which has rushed from triumph to triumph in recent centuries. But this is quite a mistake! For spiritual science, when it is represented from its true foundations, is entirely based on the point of view that says: everything that scientific knowledge has brought us must today be regarded as a first starting point for any, including the spiritual scientific, world view.

I have often said here that I would not say a word from the spiritual-scientific point of view if I were not aware that none of the scientifically justified truths would be contradicted by spiritual science.

First of all, there are two things to be emphasized if one wants to speak of the opposition of those who say: We stand on the firm ground of natural science, and we must fight against this amateurish intervention from an authoritative, spiritual-scientific point of view. In this connection two things must be considered. Firstly, that such people can either stand on the ground from which they say: everything that can be the subject of scientific observation and that may be taken into account when a scientific world picture is being built up, is the experience of natural science, that is, what natural science has brought.

Another direction, which arises from its point of view and is opposed to this humanistic direction, is that which says: Of course, one can admit that behind the facts that natural science establishes for the sensory world, there are still other spiritual facts or spiritual beings to be sought; but the human capacity for knowledge is not at all predisposed to recognize anything of this world of existence hidden behind the sensory world.

And from these two points of view, spiritual science is then fought against, as if from its side it itself somehow appeared antagonistic, appeared opposed to these two views, insofar as these two views are positive. But it does not do that at all! That it does not do that at all will be clear from some of the reflections of this evening.

On the other hand, however, spiritual science, as it is meant here, also has an opponent, an opponent who often does not present himself as its opponent, but who in many respects is perhaps even an honest opponent, as honest as the one just mentioned. And this other opponent of spiritual science, as it is meant here, is that which is brought into the world in terms of ideas and fantasies in a large number of unclear minds under all kinds of mystical names, and sometimes also under all kinds of mystical fraud. On this side, dear attendees, there are, above all, people who can count on such listeners and confidants who, in blind faith, accept everything that is somehow chattered about the spiritual world, and who accept it all the more willingly when such chatter occurs, usually in an amateurish way, of course, with a judgmental attitude towards strict science, which often appears all the more snobbish the less the person in question has taken in the denier of this strict science into his soul.

Then there are those who make all kinds of assertions that are supposed to come from the spiritual world, and who pursue quite different purposes with them, in that they first want to befuddle people with all kinds of assertions from the spiritual world so that they can then use them as tools for whatever purposes they have in mind.

Perhaps it will be possible, if time permits, to talk about this kind of opposition to spiritual science at the end of the lecture. This opposition is not harmless because people who are often quite honestly striving for science either lack the opportunity or the ability to engage with spiritual science and therefore lump together true spiritual science with nebulous mystical ravings, superstitious ideas, and the delusions of such ambiguous minds.

The question may still be raised as to why spiritual science is being fought by the more or less materialistically colored world view, which also believes that it stands on the firm ground of natural science.

This, esteemed attendees, is something that must indeed be seriously considered, considered for a very specific reason. From this side, from the more or less materialistically colored world view, which believes that it is standing on the firm ground of natural science, it will be emphasized again and again that spiritual science claims all sorts of things that cannot be understood, while the materialistically colored world view only says what can be observed everywhere, so to speak, what everyone can understand.

Spiritual science, however, does not want to deny the latter; and that is why it is so difficult for it to penetrate precisely against this objection. A materialistically colored worldview, such as the one I mentioned yesterday as that of de La Mettrie in his “Man a Machine”, such materialistic worldviews can be understood extremely easily. Everything about them is extremely plausible, obvious, clear. That is why they find such willing adherents in our time. And then such worldviews often spread the opinion that their clear views are denied by spiritual science.

Just as de La Mettrie can be described as the father of the newer, more materialistically-oriented positivism, how can spiritual science appreciate something like what de La Mettrie says in his book 'The Human Machine' to prove how everything of a spiritual nature is dependent on material things, how everything of a spiritual nature is conditioned by material things? De La Mettrie says:

“What power does a meal have over us? Joy awakens in a sad heart; it passes to the souls of the fellow diners and is expressed in those charming songs in which the French excel.”

No one with a humanistic worldview would dream of doubting such a palpable truth as is expressed here. And whether such a palpable truth is expressed in a coarse, boorish manner, as here, or whether it is expressed in a somewhat more refined way, is ultimately irrelevant!

This same de La Mettrie says, for example: Man's mental qualities, everything he reveals of his soul to the outside world, are so dependent on the mechanism of his body that one can say: If only some little thing in the brain of Erasmus or of Fontenelle – a little thing that cannot even be proved anatomically – had been different, then Erasmus and Fontenelle might have become blockheads instead of geniuses!

These things are always mentioned, with the intention of making it appear as if spiritual science could somehow be refuted by them! Spiritual science will readily admit this; it will only have to consider such a crude truth and the somewhat finer truth lying on the same board, as when one says, for example: It could have been much worse; let us assume that Erasmus, the one who should have become Erasmus, had been killed as a five-year-old boy by a bandit, then of course his soul would have been able to develop even less than if only a cog in his brain had been wrong! Or even before he was born, his mother would have been killed by a bandit!

All the things that are put forward from that side cannot be refuted at all; they even stand out because they are taken for granted, but it can still remain a small thing to keep mentioning them and to awaken the belief as if the spiritual scientist were so foolish that he could not admit such “tangible” things.

But the humanities scholar, he knows, dear attendees, that – [just as] such assertions are true, [just as] well-founded they are – that they are, on the other hand, just as well contestable, of course! – Because that which one can say with regard to the external world, can combine with the mind, can be totally wrong on the other hand! I have often repeated here what the unforgettable Vincenz Knauer said against materialism. He said: Just do the test and lock up a wolf, lock him up. After you can be sure that everything [he had in terms of matter was pure wolf matter], feed him only lamb meat. One will convince oneself that, even though he will have rebuilt his body out of lamb, one will convince oneself that, even though he will have rebuilt his body out of lamb, the wolf will not have become a lamb!

It is a matter of the fact that what de La Mettrie says about the influence of a meal on the soul is certainly very true; it is absolutely true. But assertions that are supposed to have the strength to support a worldview are likely to gradually merge into others, or even into their opposite; and that, when viewed from the other side, their opposite can be asserted just as well.

I had to presuppose this, especially today, when it will be a matter of entering, from a certain point of view, the path that spiritual scientific research takes. This path is initially characterized by the fact that, in its further pursuit, it leads the spiritual scientist to confirm certain scientific findings even more than the natural scientist himself can confirm them today.

Now I have often explained here that the path that spiritual research has to take is an entirely inward one; that although this spiritual science wants to be as scientific, as strictly scientific as any natural science, the path it has to take because it does not deal with the sensory world but with the spiritual, that this path must be a purely inward one. I shall not go into the exact nature of this inner path today; I have done so here often enough, and the same thing cannot be repeated over and over again. I must refer you to what is written in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, where it is described in detail what the soul has to do with itself if it wants to go the way that awakens certain dormant powers in it, which can be called spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, to use these Goethean expressions. It describes the development the soul must undergo to acquire such spiritual eyes and ears, in order to be able to see into a spiritual world just as the senses can see into the world of the senses.

But when everything that is needed for the soul to find the way that has just been indicated will come, then it will be found that the essential part of it is that thinking, and then imagining, is treated in a different way than this thinking, this imagining, is treated in ordinary life. In ordinary life, man forms ideas about the external world, and he is intent on this – and must be intent on this, for only in this way can he stand firmly in the external world and in practical life – he is intent on this and must be intent on this, in his ideas to have images of what is outside as reality, inwardly awakened images.

But something else is also necessary. Not only do the images have to be formed within us, but these images, which the human being forms as representations of reality in his environment, must - if I may use an expression that, although it does not accurately indicate the fact, allows us to communicate - these images must remain in the inner life of the human being: memory and recollection must be present. If the images did not stick, if what we imagine passes by without leaving a trace [in the form of memories], we would not have our continuous ego image, which must accompany us from the time we can remember back to our death and which must remain undisturbed. We only have this idea of self, we can only carry it with us, if the ideas we form are not just momentary, present experiences, but if they remain in our inner life, if they can be brought out of this inner life.

Now the essential thing about the first inner undertaking, the first inner activity that the spiritual researcher has to undertake with his own soul, is that this imagining, which is quite right for ordinary outer life, is changed, so that it occurs in the soul in a completely different way than it occurs in ordinary life. So in order to really recognize the spiritual, something must happen to the soul that arranges the life of ideas quite differently than it is in ordinary life.

Now, I have often emphasized that the point is for the spiritual researcher, in order to find his way into the spiritual world, to make a plan for himself, that it is a matter of making certain thoughts - the external reality of which is not important at first, they can be pictorial thoughts, symbolic thoughts - present in his soul. This is called 'meditation'; the soul's entire activity is concentrated on a thought-content that is placed arbitrarily in the soul, which one can survey, in which therefore no subconscious feeling, unconscious feeling driving forces can play a part, but a content that one can survey, that one places transparently clearly before the soul, is placed at the center of consciousness, moved to the center of thinking.

And then thinking must – this is a long path of practice that must be traversed, which can often take years – thinking must repeatedly return to placing this content at the center of consciousness. In this way, the entire life of the soul is concentrated – certainly, it may only last a short time, minutes during the day, for example – in this content. And in this way, little by little, I am describing what spiritual research really involves, the soul life gradually comes to separate two things that are always linked in ordinary thinking: namely, to separate the inner activity of thinking, of imagining, from the content. One must separate that, dear attendees, which one does when thinking, when visualizing – this inner activity of thinking must be completely separated from the content. So that when you place such a content at the center of your mental life, you gradually become aware: It does not depend on this content; I have only introduced this content so that I can exercise the inner activity of thinking with it.

And then I experience inwardly, now not a particular thought, now not a particular content, but the inner activity of thinking. This is less that which one otherwise calls thinking, but rather that which otherwise always remains unconscious in thinking; it is a certain activity of the will that is practiced in other thinking and imagining, a fine activity of the will. In ordinary life, in ordinary thinking, when one is thinking, one does not pay any attention to this at all. One does not pay any attention to the fact that one actually always uses one's will when one thinks, when one imagines; one does not pay attention to this. But now one experiences the fact that one exercises a fine inner will activity there. The soul becomes aware of certain powers within itself, which it otherwise exercises all the time in ordinary life, but to which it does not direct its consciousness and which remain unconscious. So that all the content of meditation can emerge from the imagination, and only this inner movement in thinking, in imagining, is inwardly grasped, so to speak. And that is what matters. Because when you continue to practise in this direction, you will have very definite experiences as you continue your search for the spiritual world. Certain experiences attach themselves to it when you have come to really separate the content and to be able to experience the mere inner activity, the activity in thinking, in imagining. Then you initially have an inner feeling as if you were now in some very vague experience. It is important - I would even say essential - to focus on these fine details if you want to know something about true spiritual scientific research.

What otherwise is the resting of thinking in the imagination can initially cease under the influence of such exercises if the goal is to be achieved, and must actually cease for certain experiences if the goal is to be achieved. One enters into an inner experience, into an inner movement. One does not feel external now - only the comparison is linked to the external - one feels as if one is groping spiritually in the darkness all around; one feels completely absorbed in the inner activity of thinking and imagining, which one has grasped. Through inner experience, one now has a certain experience; and that consists in saying to oneself: So, you have now reached the point where you live only in the activity of thinking, in the activity of imagining. First of all, one experiences that with regard to these inner experiences in the activity of thinking, in the activity of imagining, that which is otherwise the power of recollection, that which is otherwise memory, is no longer there. That is no longer there. One notices that one has entered into a completely different inner stream, that one does not experience what one now experiences as thinking activity in the same way as when one remembers something or when one otherwise thinks with reference to external objects or facts; but one notices that one is now developing thinking activity, just as one develops will activity out of habit – not a thinking, but an inner activity out of a certain fine habit, that is what one experiences inwardly now. And this inner experience has only one value, one meaning at that moment – this experience of inner activity has one meaning at the moment when one experiences it. It is also a rough comparison, but I can still use the comparison: what one experiences by separating one's inner thinking activity from one's thoughts now belongs to the momentary experience, just like eating and drinking. It is a rough comparison, but it is a comparison that illustrates everything I want to say. We cannot, when we have eaten yesterday, use yesterday's food or yesterday's drink to nourish the body today, but we have to eat and drink again today. Eating and drinking only have this momentary, present meaning. We cannot say: We eat today; and tomorrow, when we perform this activity, which [...] reminds us of our eating and drinking today, thereby also nourishing us. It is an activity – eating and drinking – that must always be repeated.

And so this inner activity of imagination is something, this inner activity of imagination is now something that has no value for a later time, but must always be evoked anew from the experience. You have to acquire the inner ability, not to remember what you have once experienced in this way, so that you can recall it, but so that you can experience it again and again from a now inner, finer habit. So that you realize that what you have now developed as an idea actually flows like dreams. Just as dreams flit by, so does this real sensing, spiritual-soul sensing, which is in an unchangeable mobility, as I have indicated.

So what do you actually notice at this moment, dear ones who are present? You notice that which can now have a shattering effect on the soul, as do many things that I have already mentioned on the occasion of the spiritual path of knowledge: you notice what it actually has to do with what we call memory, with what we call the power of remembrance. At first, we cannot use this power of recollection for spiritual knowledge. We have to let go of this power of recollection if we want to gain spiritual knowledge. And now we clearly recognize that the thinking that can be recollected – and that is all everyday thinking and must be all everyday thinking; if it is no longer everyday thinking, then one is no longer spiritually healthy – we recognize that the thinking that can be passed on to memory is directly connected to the physical body. One recognizes that the physical body really does function like a machine, albeit a more delicate one, in contributing to the thoughts we have in our daily lives in such a way that they can evoke memory.

You see, esteemed attendees, the spiritual researcher comes through an experience precisely to an affirmation of the trivial truth, which materialism claims as its own, that the thinking that is developed in everyday life is definitely conditioned by the body. Only what we have now peeled away, the inner activity, is not conditioned by the body. [It is not thinking, the activity of thinking, that is conditioned by the body, but the content of the thought is entirely dependent on the body.] The content of the thought is entirely dependent on the body.

And when some amateur spiritual scientists, or philosophically nuanced experts, come along and say: Yes, but a thought has an inner quality from which one recognizes that it cannot be absorbed into the body, that it is something other than the body, then one will say, with science that may not yet exist today – but with the ideal of science, which will one day be fulfilled, spiritual science –: there are certain materials that, when exposed to light, absorb it to a certain extent and then continue to radiate it for a while. Will these radiations now be regarded as something that is not based in matter? In the same way, when the external world, the physical, sensory external world, makes an impression on a person, and these thoughts are only retained during our lifetime, when they fluoresce, as it were, out of the physical body, these too should not be regarded as something that is spiritually alone, as something that could have significance for the eternal forces of the human soul. They are phenomena that occur in the physical matter of the human being. Just as electricity occurs in matter. Not in the denial of this justified scientific view, but in the right understanding lies what spiritual science has to do with it.

So that all philosophical talk, which is based on the observation of thoughts as they are, will never be able to say anything about the eternal powers of the human soul. Just as the fluorescence of matter, when it is removed as matter, naturally causes the fluorescence to cease, so anyone who is grounded in natural science cannot help but state the truth: when the body decays, its basis for the appearance of thoughts from the body also decays.

Only the direct evidence that arises from the fact that the otherwise unconscious thought activity, imagination, has separated itself from the thoughts themselves, has grasped itself inwardly, that initially gives the higher consciousness that one now lives in something that is really outside of the body. With the thoughts of everyday life, one does not live outside of the body. By seizing hold of the activity that one has isolated in the manner described from the content of one's thoughts, one knows that one is living with something in a sphere that is now outside of the body.

Thus, dear ones, one can never explore the eternal powers of the human soul from what a person consciously practices in relation to the physical environment and in relation to his outer life; but it is necessary that, from what a person experiences within himself in ordinary physical life, first that which can be inwardly grasped in the manner described is separated. But it is not enough for a person to go through the path just described; for by doing so, he would never come to anything other than to feel, in a sense of eternal departure, as if in a darkness of soul. So that is not enough.

What has a person actually achieved in this way? Basically, they have shed the content of thought, the thoughts themselves, and have recognized that these ideas, these thoughts, are bound to the physical, and that only the activity of imagining, the activity of thinking, is not bound to this physical.

Therefore, they must now go hand in hand – the exercises, the inner exercises that I have mentioned, in order to train the soul in the right way, must not be followed merely on their own – but they must be accompanied by other exercises. The exercises I have just characterized are actually intended to develop the life of thought, the life of imagination. One separates the activity of the will in imagining from the content of the life of imagination. These exercises must be accompanied by others that relate less to the life of thought and more to the life of the will. And just by practising the meditations – and that is usually enough; you can read more about it in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' – just by practising the meditations, by carrying out this daily concentration of thought, which is an inner activity of the will – a fine will activity – one practises the will in a way that is not otherwise used in ordinary life. In ordinary life, one does not do this, that one makes an original decision of the will out of oneself. So there you are already practicing a volitional activity that, so to speak, does not develop as darkly as the impulses that otherwise arise from our desires, from our wishes, or for that matter from all kinds of ideals; but you are practicing a volitional activity for which you must first equip yourself directly, which must arise from the most direct, inner resolve.

But that is not the important thing; rather, the important thing is that this activity of the will is now actually practiced with a completely different goal than the activities of the will in ordinary life. The activities of the will in ordinary life are practiced in such a way that one brings about this or that external action, that this or that happens. Isn't it true that when you will something, you want this or that to happen. But outwardly nothing should happen at all if you just want to direct your thinking in a certain direction, in a certain concentration. But inwardly something does happen; inwardly something very essential happens. What happens inwardly is that through such a volitional decision, the human being's I itself, its innermost soul essence, advances, that what is otherwise always, so to speak, the center of all volition, from which all volition emanates, the I, is now itself made the object of volition. Otherwise the I wills this or that; now one wants to transform the I with the will, to make the I into something else: The ego becomes the object, the goal of the will. And that is what matters.

These exercises can be intensified and made more effective if one starts out from the point just characterized, saying to oneself: the volition of ordinary life proceeds in such a way that one satisfies one's desires, and perhaps also pursues certain very justified ideals in the outer life. But now I will also take on something besides all that. Of course, the spiritual researcher must not step out of all the justified claims and demands of life step out of the justifiable claims and demands of life, otherwise he would become a crank and no spiritual researcher; but I will also, so to speak, take on things that do not have an external effect, that do not aim at the realization of these or those desires or ideals, but which are aimed at taking my own inner being in hand, at developing my own inner being in a way that would not otherwise develop if I did not take it in hand. For example, after I have poured, I realize that under certain circumstances I would wish for this or that: I want to consider not pursuing these desires, but rather to tame my ego and to steer it in a different direction of desire, and so on, and so on. In short, [the aim is] to develop an inner will that does not start from the ego, but that is directed precisely towards the ego, towards the development, the unfolding of the ego, towards the progress of the ego.

A will is developed that runs in the opposite direction to the ordinary will, a will that runs towards the I; while the ordinary will runs from the I. If you continue the practice in this way, after a reasonable period of time – which may be longer for some, shorter for others, and may take weeks for some and years for others, depending on their disposition – you will then you will notice that just as you have discovered the activity of the will in thinking through the treatment of the life of thinking, you will now, strangely enough, discover in the will a hidden consciousness, a real, true hidden consciousness. This is not just a figure of speech, but a statement that corresponds to reality: you discover a hidden consciousness, a constant observer of what actually develops as will activity. One really discovers now that in the self lives a higher self, a real higher self; not just as one often speaks in a figurative way of a higher self, but a real being lives there in the will. You discover this by colliding with the ego through the opposite direction of will, and now the ego becomes so objective to you, so external, so external to you, as it is otherwise always within you.

So the second, which must go hand in hand with the development of the life of thinking, and which must likewise discover consciousness, the more comprehensive thinking in the will - as one has discovered the will in thinking through the foregoing -, that is precisely an inner exercise of the will.

Both exercises must go hand in hand. And when one speaks of this, what arises in the soul, it appears to the uninitiated, who absolutely wants to remain with the obviously plausible world view with its more materialistic coloration, as a great folly. But it is there, and it can be described as an inner spectator. And what one calls an inner spectator, which speaks from the will when it is treated in the appropriate way – which you can read about in more detail in the book mentioned – is now able to brighten, really brighten, the darkness of which I spoke earlier, this darkness of the soul. And so two inner experiences are drawn together, as it were. The first is this groping experience in the realm of the movable; and the other is the survey, with the higher consciousness that one has now developed within oneself, of that which was at first dark. One illuminates for oneself that which was at first in the dark.

And now one recognizes that the refutation of materialism lies in a completely different area than where one usually looks for it! What de La Mettrie says, that some small cog, which anatomy cannot even explore, could perhaps have been just a little bit different in Erasmus, and Erasmus would have become a fool instead of a genius - that is quite right, so right that it is quite self-evident. But that is not the point; rather, the point is that the inner, finer structure of his organism, which made Erasmus Erasmus and a genius out of him, had already been created, had been made under the influence of the soul-spiritual!

So that, in our body, we initially carry something like a machine, but this machine has been made by the soul-spiritual, has been made under the influence of this soul-spiritual, which also emerges from the spiritual world and connects with what is inherited from the father and mother, as well as with what is present that has been inherited from the father and mother. Those 'cogs' in Erasmus that truly enabled him to make of his corporeality precisely that which his ingenious thoughts and ingenious creations were, the structure that was in him , these little cogs, were first made by his soul-spiritual individuality, which had descended from the spiritual world to his physical birth, and were first structured there!

If you look for the soul, the deeper soul of the human being, alongside the physical, during our physical life, you are quite wrong! You go so far astray that the spiritual researcher himself objects: Yes, what develops during your physical life, for example, as your world of thought, that is entirely dependent on your corporeality. And then, as a spiritual researcher, you are very aware of materialism insofar as it is justified. But that which is our material body is created out of spiritual power!

And it is with that, dear ones present, that which has gone before our physical existence and that which will be there after our physical existence has disintegrated, it is with that that one connects through the spiritual research path. And just as it is true that at the moment when the heat that I put into the steam engine is converted into propulsive power, the heat that is converted into propulsive power is no longer present as heat, but rather as propulsive , it is equally true that the power we have as soul and spirit before we have accepted physical existence, that this is precisely what is transformed by organizing the body, by becoming physical. And as long as we are physical, it is absorbed in the physical and can only be regained by spiritual research showing that the soul-spiritual is separated from the physical in the way described and knows itself as such soul-spiritual, living alongside the physical. One can be convinced that there was a spiritual-soul in us before it transformed into the physical – that it will be there spiritually-mentally when we have passed through the gate of death.

But it is crude spiritualism, one-sided spiritualism, to believe that on the one hand you have the matter of the body and on the other hand the spiritual, and that the two go side by side like two good comrades between birth and death.

The real process is very different. The real process is that this miracle of the human organism is actually created out of the spirit, is structured out of the spirit. And when it is structured, then it can unfold as a body. For just as it develops during ordinary external physical life through a higher fluorescence, so the eternal powers of the human soul are really only discovered through spiritual research. One cannot approach the human being philosophically and say: We point to the thoughts that have grown in the human being, and so on, and show that these thoughts are imperishable. Every sleep shows that they can be extinguished. And why should they not be extinguished as in sleep for all when the human being passes through the gate of death? In this way, one can never develop a proof of the eternal powers of the human soul. But if you want to develop a proof, win, then you have to win it on the way of spiritual research, by separating the will from the thoughts, and connecting this will, separated from the thoughts, with the thoughts that jump out like a higher consciousness from the development of the will. There you have that which goes through births and deaths.

Now I know, dearest attendees, that there are countless objections to what I have just said, as there are countless objections to spiritual research in general. And these objections are so self-evident internally, and so seemingly logical, that they must be convincing. And so, for example, someone could also raise the objection and have the opinion: The spiritual researcher is talking nonsense again; he says that the soul must be involved when a person comes into existence physically. As if it were not known through external science how a person comes into existence physically! That happens all by itself; no spiritual activity from spiritual worlds is necessary for that, that happens all by itself; natural science proves that very precisely in the doctrine of generations, in embryology and so on!

I will now use a comparison, one that can, of course, be refuted by obvious objections. But anyone who wants to think about this comparison will find it so powerful that it will overcome the purely materialistic objection alluded to here.

Let us assume that there are beings who cannot understand anything, perhaps cannot even see anything – of course it is a hypothesis, but it is a hypothesis that can be put forward after all – who cannot see how clocks are made. Let us assume that there are such beings walking around here in Stuttgart who cannot perceive how clocks are made. All the activity of making clocks and watches passes them by; they do not see it. But they see the clocks and watches; they are seen by them. They go into a watchmaker's shop, do not see how the clocks and watches are made, but they see the finished clocks and watches, the clocks and watches that have been created. Since they cannot see the clocks and watches coming into being, they will come to the conclusion that the clocks and watches come into being by themselves! That they will come together from the outside through an inner attraction of their individual parts and so on. These beings would speak in a way that is similar to the way people speak when they say: That which arises in the human being in the continuous succession of generations arises all by itself! Because what is not seen is that the spiritual forces that come from the spiritual world are involved in the deception that takes place here in the physical world. And in these spiritual forces lies that which we discover in ourselves through the paths of spiritual research just discussed.

In this way we arrive at a spiritual view of the eternal core of the human being, consisting of soul and spirit, which stands before our soul and of which we know that It inclines down from a spiritual existence and unites as a third with that which the person materially inherits from father and mother. And then one also knows what it is that passes through the gate of death in order to live again in a spiritual world.

And now possibilities arise for the spiritual researcher to speak of a structure of the human being, just as he does. You see, dear audience, when the spiritual researcher comes first and says: This person is not just made up of the physical body that the eyes can see and that ordinary science describes and explains – all that ordinary science has to say is readily admitted by spiritual research – when the spiritual researcher says: This person also has an etheric body - the spiritual researcher says: This person also has an ethereal body on them. The term is not important, it could also be called something else, there is no need to be put off by the term “ethereal body”; “ethereal” is meant quite differently from the usual ether in physics. When this is simply stated as an example - when it is said: There is a finer body living inside the coarser body and this gives rise to the idea: Now, the coarser body is just coarse, and a somewhat finer body lives in it, so a finer etheric body is woven into it, and this finer, woven-in body is just the etheric body – so one could indeed say that this is nonsense. But the spiritual researcher does not take this point of view; the spiritual researcher takes the point of view that just imagining, thinking, can be transformed in different ways, that thinking becomes such that the thinking person says: That is nonsense. But the spiritual researcher does not take this point of view; the spiritual researcher takes the point of view that precisely the imagination, the thinking, can be transformed in various ways, that thinking becomes such that the power of memory is woven out of thinking; that thinking is developed such that the imagination becomes such that it is not only experienced instantaneously, as is otherwise the case with coarse eating and drinking. And by living and moving in this thinking, which does not now lead directly to memory, but which must always be newly created, one lives in something other than the physical body; one lives in the etheric body. There the etheric body is pointed to as an experience. There it is pointed out what it is. And spiritual scientific truths are not found by simply showing physical facts in a more refined form, as spiritualism wants to do – this corruption of a true spiritual science – but by showing what the spiritual world is in inner experiences, which, however, also want to be inwardly experienced.

And then, when the spiritual researcher also talks about the existence of a so-called “astral body” in addition to this etheric body, well, then the objections come flying in from all sides, spurred on by all the scorn. One can say, as all the fine phrases are already called, one can say: spiritual research aims at man to “astralize” himself – and so on and so on.

The people who talk like this do not even notice how the spiritual researcher quite agrees with the most foolish way in which the astral body is often spoken of: But I have to explicitly point out that by developing one's will in the way I have explained, that one then discovers in oneself a more comprehensive , a consciousness that can illuminate what is first experienced in the etheric body, and which soul darkness provides us with; and this consciousness, which is shown to be a reality, is now what is figuratively called the “astral body”, these are the inner realities, but realities that are gained in inner experience!

The world is indeed comfortable and would like to have the spiritual world in front of it as one has the material world in front of one; this is called “spirit-matter” so that one can see it with physical eyes. One can then indeed spare oneself the trouble of using one's spiritual eyes! But these ghosts are usually something quite different from real ghosts, even when, as in the majority of cases, there is more than mere fraud. It is precisely this that spiritual science needs to shake off, because it is based on strict inner experience. And in this strict inner experience, the first thing that is achieved is that the human being has the experience of being able to distinguish between another consciousness and another experience in a world of facts, to distinguish this soul from its ordinary corporeality and to live in what its eternal powers are.

When he then lives in what his eternal powers are, then he will become aware of what actually builds up his body – or let us say 'helps to build it up' so that it cannot be misunderstood. that this whole life breaks down into lives that are spent in the body between birth – or let us say conception – and death here on earth, and such lives that are spent between death and a new birth [in a spiritual world].

In what the person experiences when he feels the indicated consciousness emerging from his will, he experiences something very special. If I am to characterize what he experiences, then I must show it as a consciousness. And that is what essentially matters – not that one points out that there is something nebulous, monadic – or whatever one wants to call it – contained in man, but that it is a certain consciousness. I have also described it as consciousness; consequently, I can characterize it.

When we survey external material processes, there is the possibility, as you all know, that from certain constellations of the sun and moon today, we can predict that after a certain time a lunar eclipse or a solar eclipse will occur. This means that the realization of a future event is already present in the present event. Here we are dealing with an external realization that lives in concepts, in concepts that correspond to the laws of nature. Here we see a future event in the present event.

As the soul develops that consciousness out of the will, of which I have spoken, she actually experiences in the present physical body that which must necessarily lead to a next life on earth. What must lead to the next life on earth is experienced as truly as the future can be foreseen in the present constellation of the sun and moon. [How the future can be foreseen], so is experienced in advance that which must lead to the next earthly life. And so it is experienced that what goes through the gate of death, then lives in the spiritual world for a time, and then must come again to a new earthly life. This is experienced.

And this must be said as a general characteristic: the insights of spiritual science are not merely hinted at, but are inwardly experienced insights. Mere conceptual inner activity is transformed into direct experience. And things are experienced.

There is something important about this, very revered attendees, when we emphasize that what is, so to speak, detached from memory, that this only has a meaning for the moment, that it must be experienced again and again if it is to be there properly.

This is how it is in general with regard to the spiritual world. The spiritual world must always be experienced anew. And if someone wants to speak from the spiritual world, to characterize the facts of the spiritual world, then basically he cannot always remember and then recite them, but basically, if what he has to say is to come directly from the spiritual world, he must give it in the moment as his own experience again and again, he must bring it out of his innermost being in that moment.

Therefore, what is to be spoken of the spiritual world will have to have a somewhat different character than what is spoken in external science from mere memory. What is spoken from the spiritual world will be directly related to the present insight into the spiritual world, so that it can be described from the spiritual world. But as a result of this, dear attendees, one is also protected from falling into a kind of aberration of spiritual scientific research, namely, that one merely adheres to what has been said.

Those who stand on materialistic ground, on self-evident materialistic ground – I must emphasize this again and again – will say: Well, what the spiritual researcher claims to have developed within himself through his special development of thinking, what is it other than what we all know in psychology as hallucinations, visions and so on and so forth? What is it other than that? It is a riding-oneself-into-an-unhealthy-mental-life that is indicated as a spiritual research path!

There is another objection, which is just as foolish as it is self-evident and plausible; plausible for anyone who stands on the ground of a materialistic interpretation of psychiatric phenomena, self-evident. It is only through constantly experiencing anew that one actually knows that one is in touch with the spiritual world; because there is nothing to prove. It is not possible to prove that anything is a reality. Those people who believe that one can prove that something is a reality – I have often pointed this out here – do not understand anything about the concept of reality. You cannot prove that a whale is a reality if you cannot show its existence in the external world. Reality can only be experienced, not proven. But in the direct experience of reality, what we need to show something as reality arises vividly. And so, in the direct experience of the spiritual world, what the spiritual world is must always be experienced anew; otherwise, of course, one can indulge in all sorts of fantasies.

This relationship between logic and reality even played a trick on Kant, causing a dispute. Kant sought to eliminate the so-called proof of the existence of God by agreeing that conceptually one hundred ordinary dollars, one hundred merely imagined dollars contain exactly the same amount as one hundred real dollars – not a penny less. Of course, in concept, a hundred imagined dollars contain just as much as a hundred real dollars. But in reality, which one reaches not in concepts but in experience, a hundred real dollars mean precisely a hundred dollars more than a hundred merely imagined ones! Everyone can convince themselves of this through life!

Now, it is very easy to fall into error by saying: Yes, but does this ordinary consciousness, which is bound to our physical body, as today's explanations have sufficiently shown, does this consciousness, which leads into the spiritual world, have no connection at all? One can have such a connection – and must even have it, and it is important that one has it. It is a very important thing that, while unfolding this higher consciousness, man should always have his quite ordinary rational human being at his side, so that he knows: as he otherwise looks at external objects that are before him and which he can neither imagine nor fantasize, he should look at his quite ordinary human being as he stands in the physical-sensual world; and while one dwells in the spiritual world, one must never for a moment lose sight of the quite ordinary physical man with his memory-producing thinking, with his will, which arises from desires, ideals, and so on. That is the characteristic. And anyone who understands this will immediately understand the truly foolish nature of the materialistic psychiatric objections that speak of an 'unhealthy mental life' in relation to spiritual research endeavors.

What happens when you enter into an unhealthy mental life, an abnormal mental life, a morbid consciousness? Then the consciousness, which may have been healthy before – I say “may” have been healthy, if it is not completely healthy but perhaps has certain aptitudes, these will develop the morbid, abnormal consciousness – then they become morbid and can no longer develop the healthy soul life, cannot develop one out of the other. For, to put it trivially, one cannot be a fool and healthy at the same time, otherwise one would no longer be a fool! But what is really necessary for proper spiritual research is that the person, so to speak, really knows himself as a duality, and that he, in his completely rational, healthy human being, equipped with the physical conditions of reality, has worked into all of way of life as it otherwise was, so that when he puts himself in the place of the other consciousness, which can see into the spiritual world, these two consciousnesses do not develop apart, but one must place itself next to the other. And that is the essential thing that must be thrown in more and more if one wants to put together in a dilettantish way that into which the spiritual researcher lives with some form of unhealthy consciousness: it is precisely the most healthy consciousness, because the spiritual researcher not only lives in his otherwise healthy human being, but because he also looks down on him, looks up to him or looks into him, if we want.

Now it is self-evident, dear attendees, that in order to start spiritual research, one cannot be a crank or something similar. Otherwise, one can only look at the crosshead, and one must not demand that any other starting point for spiritual research is the right one than that of a person who is in real life, who has a sound judgment for all things of immediate, practical life, who also has the corresponding sense of truth for all things of practical life. Nothing is more unhealthy than being in any way affected by untruthfulness or dishonesty and the like when it comes to the development of spiritual vision.

One must even say: that which is achieved on the two paths that have been indicated is achieved precisely by seeking out what is independent of physicality, what is not achieved with the help of physicality. One frees oneself precisely from physicality. Therefore, all things that are bound to physicality – and these are visions, hallucinations, which do not come from the spirit, as they are understood in the ordinary, trivial, superstitious, mystical sense – these have nothing to do with true spiritual research, because they depend on physicality. And they are not in a more spiritual realm than the one we are in when we are in the physical world; rather, they are in a more material realm than the one we are in when we are in the physical world. One can be a visionary because one works with fewer tools on one's physical body than one works in ordinary, external physical life. There one works with the entire healthy body and looks into ordinary reality.

The ordinary visions are only a kind of afterimage, are afterimages of what one can also see with the eyes; only that they are pressed out of the physical body. They are based on the fact that certain parts of our organism do not come into effect, and others can only then come into effect; so that we are driven to the undersensory, not to the supersensory in this case, that we see less reality than we see with the ordinary, healthy senses.

Spiritual science, when understood in its true basis, is not suitable for reinforcing any kind of superstition. On the contrary, it is precisely that which will eliminate any kind of superstition, of strange mysticism, because it wants to develop a different soul life, not out of a sick person, but out of a healthy one, and because it wants to reject everything that has to do with the ill visions and hallucinations, which must be eradicated root and branch, so that true clairvoyance can arise, leading to the spiritual worlds, on which alone spiritual science can be based!

In the way described, dear attendees, the human being discovers the eternal powers of the human soul, he discovers that which goes through births and deaths, he arrives at a certainty of the eternal significance of man.

And this is the task of spiritual science: to show, in a scientific way, that what science has produced so gloriously about the external world has a counterpart in the spiritual world of spiritual human development. That is the task of spiritual science.

For some centuries now, I would say, natural science has had to educate humanity to a sense of reality that did not exist in the past. The time could come – and it has now come – when, with the same rigor in the development of inner soul forces, man can also speak about the spiritual world. And even if today all the reasons that have already been mentioned are still being objected to this spiritual science – this spiritual science will become as much a part of the spiritual development of humanity as natural science has become a part of it. What is today taken for granted in natural science was, relatively recently, still fought against, fought against in the worst way. That which is fought against today in spiritual science will become a matter of course, like certain achievements in natural science. But then the time will come when people will realize that just as everyone does not have to be an astronomer to understand what astronomy contributes to general knowledge and to convey to the world, so too does not everyone need to be a spiritual researcher. Today, anyone can become one to a certain extent, as can be seen from my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds'. But it is not even necessary. It is just as little necessary as it is necessary, in order to understand a book, to have the gift of writing that book oneself. When the truths about the spiritual world have been brought forth by this spiritual world through this or that spiritual researcher, then ordinary human comprehension is enough to understand what the spiritual researcher says - not just to believe it, but to really absorb it and have it as soul food. So that even in such difficult times as these, when we are surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of deaths every day, we can develop an even greater awareness of the eternal significance of the human soul and the everlasting eternal powers that underlie the human soul.

I do not want to say, esteemed attendees, that our time – this time, which is so fateful – is more suitable than any other time to grasp these truths about the immortal powers of the human soul ; but what is happening around us and what we spoke about yesterday can be a pointer to point out to people that we need to reflect on what is happening around us a hundredfold every day, especially in our time. Our fateful time can serve as a pointer, if not as an extension of understanding, for these spiritual truths.

The spiritual researcher must speak when he, as I have indicated, looks into the spiritual world, a real, concrete spiritual world; not into the nebulous spiritual world already mentioned yesterday, which is spoken of by pantheism: “Spirit, spirit is behind everything! Spirit, spirit and always spirit again.” Abstract philosophy speaks of this. It is just the same as if one were always to say, “Nature, nature, nature!” and not “lilies”, “tulips” and so on. The spiritual researcher speaks of concrete spiritual facts and entities, with which spiritual life is related in the same way as our body is related to the outer sensory world through its senses.

However, when one enters this field, all those who, out of sheer cleverness in our time, have become foolish out of the obvious truths, which the spiritual researcher by no means denies, will rise up. But the time will also come when people will realize that just as there may still be people today who have not learned that there is air in the gap in the transcript, so too is there space. If space is empty, then air is not there. Just as it is a matter of course for someone who has learned something about these things to take the presence of air for granted, and even to consider it indispensable for life, so too will it be recognized as indispensable for the life of soul and spirit, that which constantly flows to us, as air flows to our lungs — flows to us from the spiritual and soul world that surrounds us and in which we live, just as the body lives in the physical and sensory world. A time will come when people will speak of this world, in which we are rooted spiritually and soulfully, just as the senses speak of the sensory world. However, there is still much to be improved, including the way in which spiritual science itself is practised. Today, strict scientists will say, and those who are immersed in and respect science will agree with them: 'Well, let's look at the people who talk about a spiritual world! We need only watch a little to see that some kind of enthusiasm, a morbid consciousness, is what brings it all about. And when you see how superficially this spiritual science sometimes behaves - well, then we have had enough!

One can certainly agree with those who, on the basis of their esteem for and application of the strictly scientific method, which is truly to be highly esteemed, come to such a judgment; because, as I have already indicated, that it can all too easily be lumped together with all kinds of amateurish and fantastic reveries and ravings, with starry-eyed nonsense. As true as it is on the one hand that there is a way into the spiritual world, to understand, to convince oneself of the eternal nature of the human soul, of its eternal life, as true as it is on the other hand that precisely this spiritual science, which by no means produces pathological clairvoyance, that this spiritual science must reject the community with all that wants to assert itself as a revelation of the spiritual world in a charlatan-like, twisted mystical way!

In our serious time, it is perhaps necessary that at the end such things are pointed out in more detail, dear attendees, so that people in wider circles do not believe that they can simply mix spiritual science, because it does not defend itself, with all kinds of confused stuff, and even worse than confused stuff. And so, because this has already been discussed in the circles of materialistic thinkers, let me, in conclusion, cite a fact, just as a fact, for a reason that will soon be apparent.

In 1912, in a yearbook published for 1913 by a person widely revered as a special prophetess who has much to say from the spiritual world, as many you could read in a yearbook that was published in 1912 for 1913, you could read – take note of the timing – you could read with reference to Austria: 'The one who still believes he can govern today will not govern. Instead, a young man will govern who should not yet govern. And the same assertion in a similar way then appeared again in 1913 in the same yearbook for 1914. And then, as we know, in June 1914 there was that assassination attempt on the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand. I just want to put the facts together. Of course, anyone in their right mind would think of something other than the fact that the person in question, who is a highly dubious character in many other ways, prophetically foresaw it!

But this becomes even clearer when one makes the following discovery – as I said, these things have also been discussed in a healthy way in the materialistic field, and spiritual science has every reason to show where it stands in relation to such things – the matter becomes even clearer when one considers that as early as 1913 in a Paris newspaper – “Paris-Midi” – the wish was expressed to commit the assassination of Sarajevo; that in this same newspaper it was also expressed, on the occasion of the introduction of the three-year term of service in France, that if there were to be a mobilization in France, Jaures would be killed in the first days of mobilization!

Combine these facts with the fact that they are prophetically - seemingly - bandied about among people - prophetically, seemingly from spiritual realms, bandied about among people - then you have the choice of either thinking of something that I don't want to insinuate – some kind of underground connection between this apparent prophecy and what actually happened – or the fact that what actually happened was really foreseen!

But spiritual science emphasizes that clear, realistic, healthy thinking is particularly important for it and that it does not want to be mixed with what, especially in our time, people are willing to accept who, through some external evidence, want to have the spiritual realm “proven” to them.

Just as little as any materialist will the true spiritual researcher think of the “prophecy” of that dubious personality, but of something else! And there is every reason, esteemed attendees, that now that things are being discussed publicly, it should be pointed out that spiritual science must shake off everything that likes to attach itself to its coattails: all that is charlatan-like, all frauds, and all that speculates on the credulity of humanity to achieve certain ends, which may sometimes be ends reprehensible. And in no other field does charlatanry, nonsense and speculation on the folly and superstition of people flourish more than in the field of striving for the truth about the spiritual worlds with the spiritual-scientific direction and world view.

This serious word is especially necessary if one wants to put the sense of truth, which is inseparable from spiritual scientific research, in the right light, and if one wants to draw attention to how everything spiritual must be inward, must be based on the internalization of human must be based on the internalization of human nature, and how it strictly separates itself – when spiritual science also speaks of things that can only be recognized from the spiritual world, even with regard to such things it will not be dismissive – but it will strictly separate itself from all that has just been characterized. This is especially necessary in our serious time, because it is necessary on the other hand that spiritual science incorporates the course of development, the spiritual course of development, as natural science once incorporated the spiritual course of development of humanity.

This will only be possible if it is understood how spiritual scientific endeavor is really sought in the sense indicated today, as paradoxical as it may seem, outside of the body and not through physical strength. If it is pointed out that these complicated spiritual scientists are vegetarians, for example, then that is a matter of taste, which has nothing to do with spiritual science as such, and should not be lumped together, just as one should not lump together the fact that some who consider themselves part of the spiritual scientific school of thought , wear short hair, if they are men, long hair, and that they wear these or those clothes and the like; just as little can the spiritual world be “eaten” through a false asceticism, through any mortification of the body - even if it is necessary, of course, to develop a healthy life - just as little can the spiritual world be “eaten” through an unhealthy mortification of the body! You cannot enter the spiritual world by eating or by doing this or that, but only through spiritual and soul forces!

I wanted to add this in particular, dear readers, to what true spiritual research is and what true spiritual research often has to face difficulties in asserting its position in the world today, compared to what presents itself as such.

One can only ever act from this or that point of view. Of course, much could be said in support of what has been presented today; I just wanted to hint at individual points of view - individual points of view that should once again show how well grounded in human experience, and especially in healthy human experience, the spiritual research direction is.

And if this spiritual research direction, esteemed attendees, is still fought today from many a self-evident side – the time will come when people will have worked themselves up in sufficient numbers to that inner activity that makes the spiritual world an immediate knowledge, and when that which is spiritual knowledge will be incorporated into human knowledge, just as the Copernican world view incorporated itself into human knowledge.

Yesterday we saw how anchored in Central European intellectual life in particular is the path of spiritual research and how virtually, if also forgotten, a tone of German intellectual life strives towards a real grasp of the spiritual world. Therefore, we may confidently point to what was mentioned yesterday as a faded note of German spiritual life, confidently to that which is effective after all, even if it is not seen today, which will be the germ and root of blossoms and fruits that must develop. What has been prepared in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel and the others mentioned yesterday must come to the fore, what is a preparation for actually stepping into the spiritual world.

But this progression will come about just as surely as the plant, if it cannot be prevented, will develop from germ and root to leaf, flower and fruit. And the spiritual cannot find obstacles in the physical if it is well grounded. Therefore, we can look with confidence at the further development of what is in the German spiritual life and may do so - as a special act of self-reflection on the German nation - in this present, serious hour of world history. And we may also say to ourselves: however high and ever higher all the prejudices accumulate, all the prejudices against true spiritual-scientific knowledge, however great the power of those who exclude this spiritual-scientific world view or do not want to allow it to arise for whatever reasons: Looking into the nature of spiritual science, one can say: If spiritual science is truth, it will find the ways that truth has always found. It will develop through clefts and crevices as it has always developed, and so will spiritual truth. Even if many prejudices and opposing forces should pile up, he who is able to examine the relationship between truth and the human soul from a genuinely human, truly human feeling must say to himself again and again: Let it seem to him as if the human soul and truth are connected like sisters.

Truth, dear attendees, can be fought as an enemy, but it will always find ways and means. Even if it is suppressed by opposing prejudice in any given time, it will always find ways and means to prevail in the times to come.

Those who mock and ridicule spiritual science may be told by those who, as indicated, think about truth and life as indicated: Whatever powers still want to suppress spiritual science today, spiritual science can rely on its own strength. It will find itself in its own strength against all suppression; for one can suppress the truth, but one cannot erase it from the world.

Truth and the human soul are related and belong together like siblings, siblings in spirit. And even if human souls that tend towards error, not towards truth, may also diverge to a greater or lesser extent at one time or another, They will always find each other again in brotherly and sisterly love, and let me say this as the final word of today's lecture: these siblings, truth and the human soul, must find each other more and more in the spiritual love that rejects them both to their common origin, in which their brotherhood is rooted. And this origin is the light of the world, from which they both come, the spiritual world, the world of origin, the spiritual world, which is the paternal-maternal principle for truth and soul and to which truth and soul will always strive, embrace each other as siblings, mindful of their common origin in the all-encompassing, world-imbuing and world-interweaving spiritual of the world, in which this world has its true, its only true origin.

The secrets of space and time. The Moses and Hermes Wisdom. Comparison of the Turanians and the Hebrews.¹

In the opening lines of the Gospel of Matthew emphasis is laid on the descent of the physical nature of the Jesus of this Gospel from Abraham. The fact of most importance to the spiritual scientist is that by inheritance throughout thrice fourteen generations this individual bore within him an extract of the whole race of Abraham. He is the same individual who is spoken of as Zoroaster or Zarathustra.

In the last lecture we described the external conditions in which Zarathustra worked. Something must now be said of the opinions and ideas that obtained in his immediate circle.

In that district where in very far-off ages Zarathustra worked, conceptions and ideas flourished that, in their broad outlines, were of profound importance. It needs but a few extracts from what since earliest times has been regarded as the teaching of the first Zarathustra to show how deeply these affected the thought of the whole post-Atlantean period. Even external history relates how the teaching of Zarathustra proceeded from two principles, which we describe as the principle of Ormuzd, the beneficent Being of Light, and Ahriman, the dark Being of Evil. At the same time historical descriptions of this religious system trace the origin of these two principles back to a single common principle Zeruane Akarene. It is customary to translate Zeruane Akarene as ‘Uncreated Time.’ It may, therefore, be said that the teaching of Zarathustra leads back to an original principle, in which we have to recognize quiescent Time, Time flowing on in its universal course. The very meaning of the word shows us that it is unnecessary to question further as to the origin of this Time, this revolution of Time.

True, the external abstract thinking of man will hardly ever refrain from inquiring again and again after the cause of this cause, forever driving his conceptions back, forever seeking the primal cause. But the spiritual scientist realizes through deep meditation that questionings about the beginnings of things must cease somewhere. To continue them beyond a certain point is merely to play with thinking, as is shown clearly in Occult Science. It is stated there that when wheel tracks are seen on a road it may well be asked whence they came. The answer will probably be that they were caused by the wheels of a carriage. A query as to the reason for the wheels on the carriage may produce the information that they were needed to enable it to travel along the road. A further inquiry as to the cause of this may bring the reply that someone wished to travel along the road. Ultimately we arrive at the resolve of the man which led him to travel along the road. Here it is advisable to stop, for further inquiries would inevitably lead to losing one's way in a maze of questions.

It is the same as regards great universal questions—a halt must be made somewhere; made at what lies at the fountain of the teaching of Zarathustra; at Time, calm, onflowing Time. Then, according to Zarathustra, there proceeded from Time, Ormuzd, the principle of Light, and Ahriman, the evil principle of Darkness. The profound meaning underlying this Iranian or old Persian idea is that the wickedness in the world, all that in its physical form is described as darkness, was not originally wicked, dark and evil. In the same way the wolf was originally good, but when left to itself it degenerated so that Ahrimanic forces could be active in it. To the Iranians or Persians evil came to pass through something that at one time—a time suited to it—was good, retaining its form on into a later age with which it was out of harmony. To them, all that was black and evil arose through a form which was good in one age, continuing on into a later age, instead of adapting itself to change. Through the clashing of such forms of being with the more advanced ones of a later time, the struggle between good and evil arose. Evil is therefore not absolute evil, but misplaced good, something that was good in an earlier time. There, where earlier conditions did not as yet come into collision with later conditions, enduring Time rolled on, Time that was undifferentiated, not yet separated into individual moments.

Such is the very important point of view expressed in Zarathustrianism; and this should be recognized as the fundamental principle of the teaching of Zarathustra among the earliest post-Atlantean peoples, and must be associated with the facts given in the first lecture. The people influenced by him had, above all, insight into the necessity for the birth of this duality from out the uniform stream of Time, and for the coming of opposition, which opposition would only be overcome in the course of time. We see the necessity that the new should arise and the old remain behind; that in the balance between the old and the new, the goal of the universe, and especially the goal of the Earth, will gradually be attained. It is this point of view that lies at the root of all that higher development which has sprung from Zarathustrianism.

The impression made by the influence of Zarathustra on subsequent ages was strong and deep. It was possible through the fact, that having reached the highest summit of initiation attainable at that time, he had also trained two pupils. These pupils I have spoken of before. To one he taught everything connected with the mystery of Space as it is spread around us, and therewith the mystery of all things contemporaneous. To the other he imparted the mystery of the flight of Time, the mystery of development and of evolution. I have also already indicated that at a definite point of time of such a discipleship as existed between these two great disciples and Zarathustra, something quite especial enters: the teacher can sacrifice part of his own being to his disciples. And Zarathustra, as he was in his Zarathustra-age, gave up to his pupils something of his own being, he sacrificed his own etheric and astral bodies. His individuality, his own inmost being, he retained for future incarnations; but his remarkable astral ‘garment,’ in which he had lived as Zarathustra in the earliest post-Atlantean periods, which had attained such a degree of perfection, and was so permeated by his whole being that instead of dispersing like that of an ordinary man, it remained intact—he gave this to another. The depth and power of the individuality of this great Initiate made this possible, and this is why the astral body of Zarathustra persisted. Similarly his etheric body remained also intact.

According to occult investigation, one of these pupils, the one who had received knowledge concerning the mystery of Space, of all that fills space contemporaneously, reincarnated as that personality known to history as Thoth, or Hermes of the Egyptians. Hermes had not only to establish in himself what he had received from Zarathustra in an earlier incarnation, but he had to establish it more firmly; this he was able to do in the Holy Mysteries, because he had received into himself the astral sheath of the great Initiate. Permeated by the teaching of Zarathustra, and filled by his astral nature, the individuality of this pupil was born again as Hermes, the inaugurator of the civilization of Egypt. We have, therefore, a direct member or principle of the being of Zarathustra in the Egyptian Hermes. With this principle, and with what he had brought with him of the teaching of Zarathustra, Hermes was able to give the impulse for all that was best and of greatest moment in Egyptian civilization. Naturally, a suitable race was necessary in order that the work of the messenger of Zarathustra might be effective. A race promising a fruitful soil for the development of this work could only be found among those Atlantean wanderers who had taken the more southern way and had settled in East Africa and had retained much of their old clairvoyance. The essential soul-nature of this race was quick to receive the wisdom of Hermes, and in this way Egyptian civilization arose. It was a very special type of civilization. You must try to realize how all that is included in the mysteries of contemporaneous things, of that which exists side by side in space, was contained in the wisdom of Hermes—all this had been entrusted to him as a precious gift from Zarathustra, so that in his own being Hermes possessed the most important teachings that Zarathustra had to impart.

It has often been stated that the most characteristic teaching of Zarathustra referred to the external sunlight and the external physical light-body of the Sun as the outer sheath of an exalted Spiritual Being. What was confided to Hermes was the mystery of that which as Being, underlies all Nature, all space and everything contemporaneous, yet which advances ever in time from epoch to epoch, and reveals itself in certain epochs Hermes knew what comes from the Sun, and what through the Sun continues to develop. This knowledge he implanted in the souls of the Egyptians, who retained a memory of the Atlantean Sun-Mysteries, and were, therefore, specially adapted to receive his teachings. All this, within the advancing line of evolution, was in the soul of Hermes, as well as in all those souls ripe to absorb his wisdom.

The mission of the second of Zarathustra's pupils was very different. Upon him had been bestowed the secrets of the passing of Time. He had to experience within himself the conflict between the old and the new, how in evolution something was active as opposition, as polarity. As already stated this pupil had also received part of the being of Zarathustra; on reincarnating he could therefore receive the sacrifice of Zarathustra.

Thus, while the individuality of Zarathustra remained intact, his sheaths were separated from him, they endured and were not dispersed for they were held together by such a mighty individual. This second pupil—to whom was imparted the wisdom concerning Time in contradistinction to that concerning Space—received at a specific moment of his reincarnated existence the etheric body of Zarathustra, which had been sacrificed in the same way s his astral body. This reborn pupil was none other than Moses. Moses received in quite early childhood the fully preserved etheric body of Zarathustra.

Our religious documents which are really founded on occultism contain all this, though in a veiled form. In them we find suggestions of the secrets revealed through occult investigation. As Moses was the reincarnated pupil of Zarathustra and had received his etheric body, something quite unusual had to take place in him. This is recorded in the Scriptures. Before he could receive the ordinary impressions from his surroundings like another human being, before he could descend with his individuality so as to receive impressions from the external world, there had to percolate into his being that which he was to receive as a marvellous inheritance from Zarathustra. This fact is expressed in the symbolic legend which relates that Moses was placed in a casket and lowered to the river. This should be accepted as indicating a remarkable initiation.

Initiation consists in a man being withdrawn from the world for a certain time, during which he slowly absorbs what has been given to him. While thus withdrawn, Moses was able to be united at the right moment with the etheric body of Zarathustra that had been preserved for this purpose. The wonderful wisdom concerning Time, the gift of Zarathustra in an earlier period, was then able to blossom within him; he gave this wisdom to his people in a series of pictures fitted to their understanding. Hence from Moses we have those mighty pictures of Genesis, those imaginations dealing with the wisdom of Time, of the ages as they succeed one another, received from Zarathustra. This was a re-born knowledge—a re-born wisdom—received by him, and was firmly established in his inner nature since he had received the etheric sheath of Zarathustra himself.

An initiate is not only needed as inaugurator of a new civilization for the advancement of the human race, but he must have a suitable medium in which to work, a race fitted to receive the germ of this new civilization. To understand the folk-soul, the folk-germ in which what had been received by Moses from Zarathustra was to be planted, it would be well to consider more exactly the peculiar wisdom of Moses.

In a former incarnation, Moses as Zarathustra's pupil had received the wisdom concerning Time, and that secret which we referred to as the ‘opposition between the earlier and the later’ that arises in every age. If the wisdom of Moses was to enter human evolution it had to be established as a polarity to that other wisdom, already in existence, the wisdom of Hermes. And this took place.

Hermes had received direct Sun-wisdom from Zarathustra: that is to say, through his astral body he had gained knowledge of the Being dwelling mysteriously within the outer physical sheath of Light—the body of the sun. With Moses it was otherwise. Moses, whose wisdom was connected with the denser etheric body, received the Sun-wisdom less directly. His was not that wisdom which looks up to the Sun asking: “Does not everything come forth from the Being of the Sun?”; but he was the recipient of a contrasting knowledge, the wisdom that understood earthly things, things that had become dense and fixed, and appeared old, though not degenerate—Earth-wisdom in contrast to direct Sun-wisdom. Earth-wisdom was indirect Sun-wisdom. It derived its life from the Sun, yet was of the Earth. Moses declared the mystery of the Earth's origin, of the formation of the solid Earth after the withdrawal of the Sun, and told how man evolved on it. This is revealed to our inward, not our outward, vision; and now we see how and why the teaching of Hermes presents such a vivid contrast to that of Moses.

There are certain people to-day who consider all such problems on the principle that in the night all cows are grey. They can only see resemblances, and are enchanted when, for instance, some likeness between the Hermetic and Mosaic teachings is discovered; here they find a trinity, there a trinity, there a quaternary, and here a quaternary. This leads nowhere. It is like someone training a botanist by pointing out the likeness between a rose and a carnation, but omitting the differences. Through Spiritual Science we learn in what way both beings and forms of knowledge differ. The wisdom of Moses was quite different from that of Hermes, even though both proceeded from Zarathustra. As unity divides and manifests itself in various ways, so Zarathustra imparted to his two pupils revelations of a very different kind.

When we are steeped in the influences streaming from the wisdom of Hermes, we become aware of all that fills the world with Light, of the origin of the world, and how this was affected by the Light; but we do not learn from him how, in all development, the earlier influences the later; how this brings about strife between past and present, and the opposition of Light to Darkness. Earthly wisdom, the wisdom concerning the development of the Earth and of man after the separation from the Sun, is nowhere to be found in the teaching of Hermes. But it was the special mission of Moses to make the development of the Earth, after its separation from the Sun, comprehensible to man. Hermes brought us Sun-wisdom; Moses Earth-wisdom. Moses, with his Zarathustrian inheritance, taught of the dawn of earthly existence and of the earthly evolution of man. He starts from the things of earth, but these earthly things, though separated from the sun, still contained, if weakened, something of the nature of the sun. Therefore the Earth-wisdom of Moses had to encounter the Sun-wisdom of Hermes in concrete existence. These two streams of wisdom had to meet. This is shown most wonderfully in the initiation of Moses in Egypt, where he came in contact with the Hermes-wisdom. In the birth of Moses in Egypt, in the sojourning of his people there, in the conflict between them and the Egyptians, who were the people of Hermes, is seen the reflection in external life of the clashing of the Earth-wisdom with the Sun-wisdom. Both had originated with Zarathustra, and though they followed entirely different courses of evolution they had to work together and to coincide.

There is a certain kind of knowledge, one closely connected with the profound secrets of human and earthly existence, which in accordance with the methods of the Mysteries, is always expressed in a special way. This was referred to in Munich in the lectures on the Biblical Secrets of Creation. There it was shown how unusually difficult it is to speak in ordinary language of such mighty truths, truths comprising not only the deepest mysteries of man but of the universe. We are often hampered by words, for they have their precise meaning determined by long usage; and when endeavouring to express the mighty facts revealed inwardly to the soul, we often find ourselves in conflict with the feeble instrument of speech which is really in a certain respect so extraordinarily inadequate.

The greatest triviality of the newer culture in general that has been uttered in the course of the nineteenth century, is that every truth can be expressed simply, and that the mode of expression is the criterion of whether someone possesses this truth or not. Such a statement only shows that those who use it are not in possession of absolute truth, but only of those truths which, in the course of centuries, have been communicated in words, the form of which they only alter a little. For such people words suffice: they are quite unaware of the great struggle which must sometimes be carried on with words. This struggle becomes apparent whenever the soul strives to express what is grand and exalted. I spoke in Munich of how in the Rosicrucian Mystery Drama, The Portal of Initiation, at the end of the scene in the room provided for meditation, there was for me a very great difficulty with language. What the Hierophant had to say to the pupil could only be expressed in a most restricted way through the feeble instrument of speech.

Within the Holy Mysteries, however, the most profound secrets had to be expressed. There the inadequacy of speech to call up the images of reality was felt most strongly. Hence the age-long effort in the Mysteries to find other means to express the inner experiences of the soul. These feeble means of expression—words—have for centuries been reserved for external intercourse, but the pictures and images seen when men turned their gaze towards the heavenly spaces have proved far more suitable. The constellations, the rising of a star at a certain time, the occultation of a certain star by another at a definite time—such pictures were used to express experiences within the human soul.

Let us suppose that someone desired to say that a great event was to take place at a certain time, because at that particular moment a human soul would be sufficiently ripe to receive a great experience and to pass this on to his people; or that some nation, or a large part of mankind, having reached a certain high stage of ripeness, a certain individuality could appear among them, coming perhaps from a quite other direction. In such a case the climax of development of the individual would coincide with the highest point of development of the folk-soul. No words are sufficiently exalted to convey the full meaning of such an event. Therefore it was expressed in this wise: The coincidence of the climax of power of an individual, with the climax of power of a folk-soul, is as when the sun is in the constellation of Leo and thence sends us its light. The constellation of the Lion is here chosen to represent, in a pictorial way, something that had to be expressed as taking place with utmost power in human evolution. What could be seen thus outwardly in cosmic space was used as a means of expressing something taking place in humanity. Certain expressions found in human history have arisen in this way; they are taken from the movements of the heavenly bodies, and are the method used to denote spiritual facts.

When it is stated, for example, that the sun is in the sign of Leo, or that through some event in the heavens, such as an eclipse of the sun by a certain constellation, a fact in human evolution is symbolically expressed, it may very well happen that people reverse this and suppose, in a trivial way, that all the events relating to mankind's history were myths clothed in the motions of the stars; whereas the truth is that incidents in the life of humanity were expressed by means of images taken from the constellations.

This connection with the cosmos ought to fill us with certain feelings of reverence towards all we are told concerning the great events of human evolution, when we find these expressed in images taken from cosmic existence. But there is, nevertheless, an intimate connection between the existence of the whole cosmos and the life of man this is, that events taking place on earth are a reflection of cosmic events. Thus the meeting of the Sun-wisdom of Hermes with the Earth-wisdom of Moses in Egypt is, in a certain way, a reflection of cosmic activities. Picture to yourselves that certain forces streaming from the sun to the earth meet others streaming from the earth into cosmic space. It is not a matter of indifference where these two forces meet; but according as the meeting be near or far, the result of the outgoing and incoming forces is different.

Now the contact of the wisdom of Hermes with that of Moses was pictured in the Mysteries of ancient Egypt as representing something that, according also to Spiritual Science, had previously taken place in the cosmos. We know that early in evolution the sun separated from the earth, leaving the moon for a period within the earth. Later a part of this globe separate from the earth, and remained as the present moon. Thus the earth sent a portion of itself; as moon, into universal space, towards the sun. We may think of the remarkable occurrence of the meeting of the Earth-wisdom of Moses with the Sun-wisdom of Hermes as comparable with this streaming forth of the Earth-forces towards the sun. One might say: The wisdom of Moses, in its further course, after separating from the Sun-wisdom of Zarathustra, developed as the wisdom of the earth and of men in such a way that it drew again towards the sun, absorbing and filling itself with direct solar wisdom. The earth was destined to receive direct Sun-wisdom only to a certain extent, then to develop further alone and independently. The wisdom of Moses, therefore, only remained in Egypt until it had absorbed sufficient for its needs. Then came the Exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt, in order that the Sun-wisdom taken up by the Earth-wisdom might be assimilated and brought to greater self-dependence.

The wisdom of Moses was two-fold. One part was developed under the sheltering wing of the Hermes-wisdom which it continually absorbed from every side, then, after the exodus from Egypt, it separated from this development, continued further within itself, and later passed through three stages. Towards what should this wisdom evolve? What is its task? Its ultimate task was to find its way back from the earth to the sun. It had become earthly wisdom. Moses was born with all he inherited from Zarathustra, as a wise man of earth. He was to find the way back, and he sought it in three stages, the first being that in which he absorbed the wisdom of Hermes. These stages are again best expressed in the images drawn from cosmic events. When what takes place upon the earth streams back in space from the earth towards the sun, it first encounters what is of the nature of Mercury (in ordinary astronomy the Mercury of astronomy is the Venus of Occult Science), then that of Venus, and ultimately that which is of the nature of the sun. The soul of Moses had to develop his Zarathustrian inheritance in inner experiences in such a way that he might return and find once more what appertained to the Sun. In order to do this he had to attain a certain degree of development. The wisdom Moses had implanted in western culture had to develop according to the way he gave it to his people. The wisdom he had gained from Hermes and which came to him like the direct rays of the sun, he had to develop anew, and reflect it back again in a changed form, after he had absorbed some part of it.

Now we are told that Hermes, who was later called ‘Mercury,’ brought to his people science and art, that is, external knowledge and art, in a form suitable to them. But it was in a different and almost opposite way that the wisdom of Moses attained to the Hermes-Mercury standpoint. Moses had himself to develop the wisdom of Hermes further. This is shown in the progress of the Hebrew people up to the age and reign of David. David, who is presented to us as the royal singer of Psalms and holy prophet, who as a man of God worked both as warrior and harpist, is the Hermes, or Mercury, of the Hebrew people. That stream of the Hebrew folk had now so far evolved that it had developed an independent form of Hermetic or Mercury wisdom. At the time of David the wisdom received from Hermes had reached the Mercury sphere, or Mercury stage, on its return journey. It then continued to the region of Venus. This came to pass for the Hebrews when the Moses-wisdom, or rather that version of it which had endured as his wisdom for hundreds of years, had to unite with an entirely different element, with a stream issuing from another direction.

Just as that which streams back in space from the earth towards the sun encounters Venus, so the wisdom of Moses encountered an Asiatic wisdom that came from another direction during the Babylonian Captivity. The Moses-wisdom came in touch with the weakened form of another wisdom in the Mysteries of Babylon and Chaldea. Like a wanderer who, having acquired knowledge of the earth, leaves it for the Mercury sphere, and thence passes on to Venus desirous of experiencing the sunlight as it is felt there, so the Moses-wisdom, having received the direct Sun-wisdom from the holy teachings of Zarathustra, passed over in a weakened form to the mystery schools of Chaldea and Babylon. The wisdom of Moses experienced this weakening during the Babylonian captivity, where it united with all that had penetrated into the lands of the Tigris and Euphrates. Here something else happened.

In the sanctuaries which the wise men among the Hebrews were obliged to frequent during their captivity, the wisdom of Moses was directly impregnated with the qualities of the Sun-wisdom. For at this time Zarathustra was himself incarnated and taught in the mystery schools of the Tigris and Euphrates, and was known to the learned among the Hebrews. He who had relinquished part of his wisdom so that he might receive it back again, was himself teaching at this time. He had frequently reincarnated, and in this incarnation in which he was known as Zarathos or Nazarathos, he taught the captive Jews in Babylon.

Thus in the course of its further progress, the wisdom of Moses came in touch with what Zarathustra had himself become after he had withdrawn from the more distant Mystery Sanctuaries and had entered those of Asia Minor. Here he became the teacher of the initiate Chaldean disciples, as well as teacher of the Hebrews. They now received a fructification of their Mosaic wisdom by a stream they were now fitter to encounter, because what had once been given to their ancestor Moses by Zarathustra came to them now directly from himself, in his incarnation as Zarathos or Nazarathos. This was the destiny through which Mosaic wisdom passed. Originally it sprang from Zarathustra, but was then transplanted into an alien land. It was as if a Sun-being with bandaged eyes had been brought down to earth, and now, on its backward journey, had to seek all it had lost. Such a wanderer was Moses, the pupil of Zarathustra. His destiny had placed him within Egyptian civilization, so that all the wisdom given him at one time by Zarathustra might be quickened and illuminated in his inner being. He was cut off, as it were, from the sun on the fields of earth, where unaware of the source of his illumination he moved unconsciously towards what once was sun. In Egypt he was attracted towards the wisdom of Hermes, which brought to him direct Zarathustra-wisdom, not an indirect reflection like his own. After absorbing sufficiently of this, the wisdom of Moses continued its development in a more direct way. Having founded an Hermetic wisdom at the time of David, and a science and art of its own, it turned again towards the sun from which it had originally come forth, though in a way that had at first to appear veiled.

In the ancient Babylonian schools of learning where, among others, Zarathustra taught Pythagoras, his teaching was restricted by the type of physical body of the period. If Zarathustra was to give full expression to his Sun-nature through a form suited to those times, as he was able to do in that earlier incarnation when he had passed it on to Moses and Hermes, he would require a bodily instrument fitted to the new age. Restricted by a body such as could be produced in ancient Babylonia, he was only able to convey such wisdom as he passed on to Pythagoras, to the learned Hebrews and wise men of Chaldea and Babylon, who in the sixth century before Christ, were ready and able to hear it. In respect of this teaching it was exactly as if the sunlight were first taken up by Venus and prevented from shining directly on the earth; as if his teaching could not shine with its original splendour but only in a weakened form. Before the Sun-wisdom of Zarathustra could shine forth once more in its pristine power, a body suited to him must first be provided, and in a very special way. This will now be described.

In the first lecture, we told of the three folk-souls of Asia, the Indian in the South, the Iranian, and the Turanian to the North, and we described the connection of these with the Atlantean migrations into Asia. Where the northern stream which came from Atlantis met the southern stream which passed through Africa, an extraordinary mixture of races occurred. From this admixture a race developed from which later the Hebrew people sprang.

Something unusual occurred in the development of these ancestors of the Hebrews. The lower astral-etheric clairvoyance which had become so decadent among certain races because it was the last phase of external perception, had in those people who developed into the Hebrew race, turned inwards and manifested as an organizing force. That which we have described as being externally decadent, as having remained behind in certain races as a last phase of declining clairvoyance, and as being permeated somewhat by the Ahrimanic element, had progressed among the Hebrews in the right direction by becoming an actively organizing force within the human body. Through this, bodies became more perfect. What among the Turanians was decadent worked constructively and progressively in the Hebrews. Within the physical nature of the Hebrews, as propagated from generation to generation in the close bond of blood relationship, all those forces were active which had accomplished their mission in developing external sight. These were no longer required to provide external sight, so could enter on another sphere of action, thus passing into their right element. That which had given to the Atlantean the power to gaze spiritually into space and into spiritual realms, that had run wild in the Turanians, appearing as a last relic of clairvoyance—all this force worked inwardly in the little Hebrew nation. What in the Atlantean had been spiritual and divine, worked inwardly in the Hebrew race to form certain organs. It worked constructively in the body and could therefore flash forth in the blood of this people as and inward divine consciousness. With the Hebrew people it was if all the Atlantean had seen when directing his clairvoyant vision into space was turned inwards, as if it constructed inwardly an organ of consciousness which was the Jahve-consciousness—the consciousness of God within him. This people felt the God Who filled all space to be united with their blood, felt they were filled, impregnated with Him, and that He lived in the pulsation of their blood.

As in the last lecture we contrasted the Iranians and the Turanians we have now considered the Turanians and the Hebrews, and have seen that what in its further progress and in its essence had become decadent in the Turanians, pulsated later in the blood of the Hebrew people. All that the Atlantean had seen, lived on in the Hebrew as an inward feeling, and could be comprised in a single word: Jahve or Jehovah. The consciousness of God lived throughout the generations of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob concentrated as into a single point, invisible but inwardly felt. The God Who had revealed Himself to the Atlantean clairvoyance behind all living things was now the God dwelling in the blood of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and led the generations of their race from destiny to destiny. The outward had thus become inward it was experienced, no longer seen; it was no longer described by different names, but by one single name ‘I am the I am!’ It had taken on an entirely different form. Whereas for the Atlantean this was found where he was not—in the external world—it was now found by man in the centre of his own being; in his ego; he was conscious of it in the blood that coursed through the generations. The mighty God of the Universe had now become the God of the Hebrews; the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and flowed through the generations as the blood of the race.

It was in this way that the race was founded whose special inner mission for humanity we shall consider in the next lecture. We have thus far only been able to indicate the very earliest stage of the composition of the blood of this people, in which was concentrated everything that in the age of ancient Atlantis, humanity had allowed to be impressed upon it from without. We shall see later what mysteries were fulfilled in that which had here its beginning, and shall learn to recognize the peculiar nature of that people from which Zarathustra could take his body to become the being we call Jesus of Nazareth.

• 1. In a footnote to this lecture the reader is recommended to study these early lectures in conjunction with the author's lectures on St. Luke, in order to understand the events in the life of Christ Jesus.

Those of you who have been attending these group lectures for years will perhaps have noticed that the themes have not been haphazardly chosen but have a certain continuity. In the course of each winter, too, the lectures have always had a certain inner connection, even if, on the surface, this has not been immediately apparent. Therefore it will obviously be of the utmost importance to follow up the various courses that are being held here alongside the actual group evenings, and which are intended for the purpose of bringing newer members up to the level, as it were, of these group lectures; for various things said here cannot be immediately understood by every newcomer. But there is something else we should note as well, which will gradually have to be taken into consideration in the various groups of our German section. As there is a certain inner thread in the lectures, it is incumbent upon men to form each lecture so that it is part of a whole. Therefore it is not possible to say the things that can be presented to advanced participants in that kind of single lecture in such a way that they are equally suitable for newcomers. We could speak about the same theme in a very elementary way, of course, but that would not do in face of the progressive path we are planning to take in the anthroposophical life of this particular group. This again is connected with the fact that the further we progress the more we can anticipate in the way of wide-spread lecture publications and reporting of lectures from one group to another. For with regard to these lectures I give in the groups it is becoming less and less immaterial whether you hear the one on one Monday and the next the following Monday. It may not be immediately apparent to the audience why the one lecture succeeds the other, yet it is important nevertheless; and when you lend lectures to one another you cannot take this into account at all. One lecture might get read before the other, and then it unavoidably gets misunderstood and causes confusion. I want to make a special point of this, as it is an essential part of our anthroposophical life. Even the inserting of a phrase here or there, or the over or under emphasising of a word depends on the whole development of the life of the group. Only when the publication of the lectures can be strictly supervised so that nothing is published unless it has been submitted to me, can any good come of this duplicating and publishing of lectures.

This is also a kind of introduction to the lectures about to be held in this group. There will be a certain inner connection in the course of this winter's lectures and all the preparatory material will eventually be directed towards a definite culmination with which the course will then close. Last week's lecture was a small beginning, and today's lecture will be a kind of continuation. But it will not continue like a newspaper serial, where the thirty-eighth installment follows on after the thirty-seventh. There will be an inner connection, even though the subject matter will appear to differ, and the connection will consist in the fact that the whole series will culminate in the final lectures. So, with these concluding lectures in view, we will start today by sketching the nature of illnesses, and next Monday we will talk about the origin, historic importance and meaning of the “Ten Commandments”. These could well appear to have nothing in common; however, you will eventually see that it all has an inner connection, and that these lectures should not be taken as separate ones, as is often the case with those given for a wider public.

We would like to speak today about the nature of illness from the point of view of spiritual science. As a rule people are not concerned about illness, or one or another type of illness at least, until they themselves fall sick with it, and even then their interest does not go much beyond the cure. That is, they are only concerned about their recovery. How this cure is effected is sometimes a matter of complete indifference, and the pleasantest thing is not to have any further responsibility for the “how”. Most of our contemporaries content themselves with the thought that the people who carry out the job have been appointed to do so by the authorities. In our time there exists in this sphere a much more rabid belief in authority than has ever existed in the religious sphere. The papacy of medicine, irrespective of its various forms, still makes itself felt with great intensity and will do so to an even greater extent in the future. Laymen are in no way to blame for the fact that this can and will be like this. For they do not think about these matters or care in the least about them unless it affects them personally and they suffer from an acute case that requires treatment. Thus a large section of the population calmly looks on whilst the papacy of medicine assumes greater and greater dimensions and insinuates itself into things in all manner of ways, like the way it is now speaking out and interfering so horribly in the education of children and the life of the schools, and claiming its right to a particular therapy. People do not care about the deeper significance that is actually behind all this. They look on whilst one or another law is instituted. People do not want to have any insight into these matters. On the other hand there will always be people who are personally affected and cannot manage with ordinary materialistic medicine, the basis of which does not concern them, but only the fact of whether they can be cured or not, and then they will apply to the people who work out of occultism—and there again they only care about whether they can be cured or not. But they do not care whether public life as a whole, with its methods and its way of understanding things, completely undermines a deeper method arising out of the spirit. Who cares whether the public prevents any cures being effected in the method based on occultism, or cares whether the one who applies the method is put in prison? These things are not taken seriously enough except when people are personally affected. However it is just the task of a really spiritual movement to awaken a consciousness of the fact that there has to be more than an egoistic desire for recovery; in fact there has to be knowledge of the deeper foundations in these matters, and this knowledge has to be made known.

In our age of materialism it appears to anyone who can see to the bottom of these matters as only too obvious why just the theory of illness in particular comes under the strongest influence of materialistic thinking. However, if we follow this or that slogan, or give special credit to this or that method, merely criticising what is trimmed with materialistic theories, despite the fact that it arises out of a scientific basis and is useful in many respects, we shall be making just as much of a mistake as if we were to go to the other extreme and put everything under the heading of psychological cures and suchlike, and fall victim in this way to all manner of one-sidedness. Present-day mankind must, above all, realise more and more that man is a complicated being and that everything to do with man is connected with this complexity of his being. If there is a kind of science holding the opinion that man consists merely of a physical body, it cannot possibly work beneficially with the healthy or the sick human being. For health and sickness, have a relationship to man as a whole and not to one part of him only, namely the physical body.

Nor must the matter be taken superficially. You can find plenty of doctors nowadays, properly recognised members of the medical profession, who would never admit to being sworn materialists; they profess to one or another religious faith, and they would staunchly deny the accusation of being materialistic. But this is not the point. Life does not depend on what a man says or believes. That is his personal concern. To be effective it is necessary to know how to apply and make valuable use in life of those facts that are not limited to the sense world but have an existence in the spiritual world. So that however pious a doctor is and however many ideas he has regarding this or the other spiritual world, if he nevertheless works according to the rules that arise entirely out of our materialistic world conception, that is, he treats people as though they only had a body, then however spiritually minded he believes himself to be, he is nevertheless a materialist. For it does not depend on what a person says or believes but on his ability to set in living motion the forces behind the external world of the senses. Nor is it sufficient for anthroposophy to spread the knowledge of man's fourfold nature and for everybody to go repeating that man consists of a physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego, even if people can define and describe them in a certain way. The essential thing is not just to know this, but to understand more and more clearly the living interplay of these members of man's being and the part the physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego play in the healthy and in the sick human being and what their interrelationship implies. Unless you make it your business to know what spiritual science can tell you about the nature of the fourth member of man's being, the ego, then however much you study anatomy and physiology you would not know anything about the nature of blood. That would be quite impossible. And you would never be able to say anything of any value about the illnesses connected with the nature of the blood. For the blood is the expression of the ego nature of man. And if Goethe's words in Faust: “Blood is a very special fluid” [see the lecture: Occult Significance of the Blood, e.Ed] are still quoted today, they do in fact say a very great deal. Present-day science has no inkling of the fact that scientists ought to treat blood, even physical blood, in an entirely different manner from any other organ of man's physical body, because these other organs are the expression of entirely different things. If the glands are the expression, the physical counterpart, of the etheric body, then even physically we have to look for something quite different in the composition of a gland, be it liver or spleen, than we have to look for in the blood that is the expression of a much higher member of man's being, namely the ego. And scientific methods must be guided by this if they are to show us how to work with these things. Now I want to say something which will really only be understood by advanced anthroposophists, yet it is important that it is said.

A materialistically-minded scholar of today takes it as a matter of course that when he makes a prick in the body blood will flow out that can be examined in all the known ways. And blood is described according to the method of investigating its chemical composition in exactly the same way as is done with any other substance, such as an acid. One thing, however, is left out of account, although, needless to say, it is not only bound to be unknown to materialistic science, but it is sure to be considered sheer folly and madness, and yet it is true: the blood flowing in the arteries, and sustaining the living body, is not what flows out when I make the prick and take out a drop. For the moment blood comes out of the body it changes to such an extent that we have to admit it is something quite different; and what flows out as coagulating blood, however fresh it is, is no proof of the living essence within the organism. Blood is the expression of the ego, a member of the human being that is at a high level. Even as physical substance blood is something that you cannot examine physically in its totality at all, because when you are able to see it, it is no longer the blood it was when it flowed in the body. It cannot be looked at physically, for the moment it is exposed to view and can be examined by some method similar to X-ray, you are no longer examining blood but something that is the external image of blood on the physical plane. These things will only gradually be understood. There have always been scientists in the world working out of occultism who have said this, but they have been called things like madmen or philosophers.

Everything to do with man's health or sickness really is bound up with man's manifold nature, with the complicity of his being; hence it is only through a knowledge of man arising out of spiritual science that we can arrive at a conception of man in health and in sickness. There are certain ailments in man's organism which can only be understood when we realise their connection with the nature of the ego, and these ailments also appear in a way—but in a limited way—in the expression of the ego, the blood. Then there are certain ailments in man's organism that point to an illness of the astral body and which therefore affect the external expression of the astral body, the nervous system. Now whilst mentioning this second case I shall have to ask you to be somewhat aware of the subtlety of thought necessary here. When man's astral body has an irregularity that comes to expression in the nervous system, the external image of the astral body, the first thing we notice physically is a certain disability in the functioning of the nervous system. Now when the nervous system cannot do its job in a certain area all kind of symptoms can result, affecting the stomach, head or heart. However, an illness that shows symptoms in the stomach does not necessarily point to a disability of the nervous system in a certain area and originate therefore in the astral body, it can come from something entirely different.

Those types of illnesses connected with the ego itself and therefore also connected with its external expression, the blood, appear as a rule—but only as a rule, for things are not so clear cut in the world, even though you can draw clear lines when you want to make observations—these illnesses appear as chronic illnesses. Various other disturbances appearing to begin with are usually symptoms. One or another symptom may appear, which nevertheless originates in a disturbance in the blood, and that has its origin in an irregularity of that part of the human being that we call the bearer of the ego. I could speak to you for hours about the types of illness that are chronic and which originate from the physical point of view in the blood and from the spiritual point of view in the ego. Those are chiefly the illnesses that are in the proper sense hereditary, and these are the illnesses that can only be understood by those people who look at the being of man from a spiritual point of view. Here and there are people who are chronically ill, who are, in other words, never really fit; they always have one or another thing the matter with them. To get to the bottom of this, we must ask ourselves what the actual basic character of the ego is like. What kind of a person is he? If you understand what life really is, then you will know that definite forms of chronic illnesses are connected with one or another basic soul character of the ego. Certain chronic illnesses will never occur in people who have a serious and dignified attitude to life but only in those of a frivolous nature. This can merely be an indication, to show the way these lectures are leading.

As you see, the first thing you have to ask yourself when somebody comes and says he has been suffering from this or that for years, is what kind of person is he fundamentally? You have to know what basic character type his ego is, otherwise you are bound to go wrong with ordinary medicine, unless you are lucky. The important thing in curing people of these, illnesses which are mainly the really hereditary ones, is to consider their whole surroundings, in so far as they can have a direct or indirect influence on the ego. When you have really got to know this aspect of a person, you may have to advise that he is sent to another natural surrounding, perhaps for the winter, if possible; or, if he has a certain job, to change it and encounter a different aspect of life. The essential thing will be to try to find the setting that will have just the right effect on the character of the ego. To find the right cure, you need, in particular, a wide experience of life, so that you can enter into the person's character and can say: For this person to recover, he must change his job. It is a matter of pinpointing what is necessary from the point of view of his soul nature. Sometimes, perhaps, just in this sphere, no recovery can be achieved at all, because it is impossible to effect a change; in many instances it can be effected, however, if people only know of it. A lot can be done for some people, for example, if they simply live in the mountains instead of the lowlands. These are the things that apply to the kind of illnesses that appear externally as chronic illnesses, and that are connected physically with the blood and spiritually with the ego.

Now we come to those illnesses that have their spiritual origin mainly in irregularities of the astral body and that appear in certain disabilities of the nervous system in one or another direction. Now a large part of the common acute illnesses are connected with what we have just mentioned, in fact most of them. For it is sheer superstition to believe that when someone has a stomach or heart complaint or even a clearly perceptible irregularity somewhere, the right treatment is to deal directly with the symptom. The essential thing could be that the symptom is there because the nervous system is incapable of functioning. Thus the heart can be affected simply because the nervous system has become incapable of functioning in the area where it ought to support the movement of the heart. It is quite unnecessary to maltreat the heart or, as the case may be, the stomach, for they may, in principle, have nothing directly the matter with them, for it is only the nerves that provide for them which are incapable of carrying out their job. If in a case like this the stomach complaint is treated with hydrochloric acid, it would be a mistake comparable to tinkering with an engine that is always running late because you think something is the matter with it—yet it still runs late. For you would find, on closer examination, that the engine-driver always gets drunk before driving; so you would do better to deal with the engine-driver, for the train would be punctual otherwise. So it could well be that with stomach complaints we have to treat the nerves that provide for the stomach instead of the stomach itself. In the domain of materialistic medicine, too, you may perhaps hear various remarks to this effect. But it is not just a matter of saying that with stomach symptoms you have to deal with the nerves first. This achieves nothing. You only achieve something when you know that the nerve is the expression of the astral body and seek for the causes in the irregularities to be found there. The question is, what is the main thing?

The first thing to consider in the treatment of this sort of complaint is diet and finding the right balance between what a person enjoys and what is good for him. What matters is his way of life, not with regard to externalities but regarding what has to be digested and worked through by him, and in this respect nobody can possibly know anything on the basis of purely materialistic science. We need to realise that everything around us in the wide world of the macrocosm has a relationship with our complicated inner world of the microcosm, and every kind of food there is has a definite connection with what is within our organism. We have heard often enough that man has passed through a long evolution, and how the whole of outside nature has been built up out of what has been thrust forth from man. Time and again in our studies we have gone back to the ancient Saturn period, where we found that there was nothing in existence apart from man, who, as it were, thrust forth the other kingdoms of nature: the plants, the animals, and so on. In that evolution man built up his organs in accordance with what they thrust forth. Even when the mineral kingdom was pushed out, certain specific inner organs arose. The heart could not have arisen if certain plants, minerals and mineral possibilities had not arisen externally in the course of time. Now what arose externally has a certain connection with what arose within. And only the person who knows of this connection can prescribe in individual cases how the macrocosmic element outside can be used in the microcosm, otherwise man will experience in a certain way that he is taking in something that is not right for him. So we have to turn to spiritual science for the actual basis of our judgment. It is always superficial to follow purely external laws taken from statistics or chemistry when prescribing dietary treatment. We need quite a different basis, for spiritual knowledge has to be active when we deal with man in health or sickness.

Then there are those types of illness, partly chronic and partly acute, which are connected with the human etheric body, and which therefore come to expression in man's glands. As a rule these illnesses have nothing to do with heredity, but a great deal to do with nationality and race. So that in the case of the illnesses originating in the etheric body and appearing as glandular complaints, we must always ask whether the illness is occurring in a Russian, an Italian, a Norwegian or a Frenchman. For these illnesses are connected with the national character and therefore take quite different forms. Thus for example a great mistake is being made in the field of medicine, for over the whole of Western Europe they have a completely wrong view of spinal consumption. Although they have the right judgment of it for the West [Europeans, they are quite wrong about it where the East European population is concerned, because it has quite a different origin there, as even these things still vary considerably nowadays. Now you will realise that the mixture of peoples affords us a certain survey. Only the person who can distinguish differences in human nature can make any judgment at all. These illnesses are simply treated externally today and lumped together with acute illnesses, whilst they really belong to quite a different field. Above all we must know that the human organs that come under the influence of the etheric body, and which can fall sick as a result of irregularities of the etheric body, have quite definite relationships with one another. There is for instance a certain relationship between a man's heart and his brain which can be described in a somewhat pictorial way by saying that this mutual relationship of the heart and the brain corresponds to the relationship of the sun and the moon—the heart being the sun and the brain the moon. So we have to know, if a disturbance occurs in the heart for instance, that in so far as this is rooted in the etheric body it is bound to have an effect on the brain. Just as when something happens on the sun, an eclipse for instance, the moon is bound to be affected. It is no different, for these things have a direct connection.

In occult medicine these things are also described by applying the images of the planets to the constellation of man's organs. Thus the heart is the sun, the brain the moon, the spleen saturn, the liver jupiter, the gall mars, the kidneys venus and the lungs mercury. If you study the mutual relationships of the planets you have an image of the mutual relationships of man's organs in so far as they are in the etheric body. The gall could not possibly ail—and this would show spiritually in the etheric body—without the illness having its effect on the other organs mentioned, in fact if the gall is described as mars, its effect would be similar to the effect of mars in our planetary system. You have to know the interconnections of the organs when there is an etheric illness, and yet these are principally those illnesses—and from this you will see that any form of one-sidedness must be avoided in the field of occultism—for which specific remedies are to be used. This is the place to use the remedies you find in the plants and minerals. For everything belonging to the plants and minerals has a profound importance for everything to do with the human etheric body. So when we know an illness has arisen in the etheric body, and it appears in a certain way in the glandular system, we must find the remedy that can correctly repair the complex of interconnections. Particularly with those illnesses where the first thing you have to look for is obviously whether they originate in the etheric body, and secondly whether they are connected with the national character, and all the organs are interconnected in a regular way, these illnesses are the first ones for which specific remedies can be used.

Now perhaps what you are imagining is that if it is necessary to send a person to another place, you will not be able to help him as a rule if he is tied to a job and cannot move. The psychological method is indeed always effective. What is called the psychological method works best of all when the Illness is actually in a person's ego being. Thus when a chronic illness of this type occurs, one that is in the blood, psychological remedies are justified. And if they are carried out in the right way, their effect on the ego will entirely compensate for what impinges on him from outside. Wherever you look you will be able to see the subtle connection between what a man experiences in his soul when he is habitually working behind a work bench and when he gets the chance to enjoy country air for a short while. The joy that lends wings to his soul can be called a psychological method in the widest sense. Then, if the therapist is carrying out his method properly, he can gradually exercise his own influence in place of this, and psychological methods have their strongest justification for this form of illness and should not be overlooked, because most of the illnesses came from an irregularity of the ego being of man.

Then we come to the illnesses arising out of irregularities of the astral body. Although purely psychological methods can be used, they certainly lose their greatest value, therefore they are seldom used for these. Dietary remedies apply here. The type of illness we described in third place are actually the first in which we are justified in using external medicines to assist the course of recovery. If we see man as the complicated being he is, the treatment of illnesses will also be a broad-minded one, and one-sidedness will be avoided.

The only illnesses left now are those that actually originate in the physical body itself, having to do with the physical body, and these are the actual infectious diseases. This is an important chapter and will be considered in greater detail in one of the coming lectures, after we have first of all dealt with the real origin of “Ten Commandments”. For you will see that this really has a connection. Today, therefore, I can only just mention that there is this fourth type of illness, and that a deeper understanding of these involves knowing the nature of everything connected with the human physical body. The basis of these illnesses is not physical but very much of a spiritual nature. When we have looked at the fourth type we shall still not have finished with all the important illnesses, for we shall see that human karma also plays in. That is a fifth category to be considered.

Let us say, then, that we shall gradually attain an understanding of the five different forms of human illness, that stem from the ego, the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body, and also from karmic causes. The sphere of medicine will not improve until this whole sphere includes a knowledge of the higher members of man's being. Up to now we have not had a medical practice that has really come to grips with what is at stake. Although, as with many another occult insight, these things have to be brought up to date and put in a modern form, you must realise that this wisdom is, in some respects, not new.

Medicine arose from spiritual knowledge and has become more and more materialistic. And perhaps in no other science can we see so clearly how materialism has overtaken mankind. In earlier times people were at least conscious of the fact that they had to have a knowledge of man's fourfold being in order to understand it. There have been instances of materialism before, of course, and even earlier than four hundred years ago clairvoyants observed materialistic thinking arising all around them in this sphere. Paracelsus, for instance, who is taken for a madman or dreamer and not understood at all today, drew full attention to the increasing materialism of medical science centred in Salerno, Montpellier, Paris and also certain parts of Germany. And just because of his responsible position in the world, Paracelsus felt compelled—as we do today—to draw attention to the difference between medicine based on spiritual knowledge or on materialism. Perhaps it is even more difficult nowadays to achieve anything with paracelsian thinking. For in those days the materialistic approach to medicine was not so rigidly opposed to the paracelsian approach as materialistic science is today to any insight into the real, spiritual nature of man. What Paracelsus said about this, therefore, still applies today, though its significance would be less readily recognised. If we look at the opinions held today by the people working at the dissecting benches and in laboratories, and at the way research is applied to the understanding of man in health and in sickness, we could, to a certain extent, react similarly to the way Paracelsus did. It might not be appropriate, though, to add a plea for understanding and forgiveness, too, perhaps, as Paracelsus did to his local contemporaries in the medical sphere—that is, with any real hope of forgiveness. For Paracelsus himself said he was not a man of good breeding, nor had he moved in high circles; he lacked grace and refinement, therefore he would be forgiven if what he said was not always couched in the best language. Whilst discoursing on the nature of the different illnesses Paracelsus said the following about the foreign and also the German medical doctors: “It is a bad business, all those foreign doctors, to name those in Montpellier, Salerno and Paris, who want to have all the credit and pour scorn on everybody else, yet they themselves know nothing and can do nothing, and it is common knowledge that it is nothing but talk and show. They are not ashamed of their enemas and purgatives, and rely on them even if the patient is dying. They boast about all the anatomy they know, and they cannot even see the tartar on people's teeth, let alone anything else. Fine doctors they are, even without spectacles on their noses. What kind of eyesight and anatomy have you got? You can do no earthly good with them, and see no further than your own noses. They work so hard, too, those German swindlers and thieves of doctors and newly-hatched fools, that when they have seen everything, they know less than they did before. So they choke in filth and corpses and afterwards put on holy airs—they ought to be thrown to the rabble!”