The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Our lecture to-day shall be devoted to subjects interesting to Anthroposophists in the widest sense, subjects intended to throw light on certain points which may have puzzled those who have attended our Group-Meetings for a considerable time. It is well, now and then, to recollect that the point of importance in Anthroposophy is not so much the learning of certain things as theory or doctrine, but that we should continually enter in greater detail into the questions and enigmas of life.—Some people may perhaps say: All that is necessary to know of Anthroposophy for use in life could be comfortably contained in a small pamphlet of sixty pages or so; everyone could possess a copy and would then be convinced as to the nature of man, reincarnation and karma, and the evolution of humanity on the earth,—and could go through life needing nothing further. A person who would like to have that carried out might perhaps suggest: ‘Why does not the Anthroposophical Movement distribute as many copies as possible of a booklet containing these principal points of view, so that everyone might acquire a copy and be able to convince himself? Why does the Anthroposophical Society adopt the curious method of holding meetings week after week, assembling all those interested or likely to become interested for the purpose of constantly recapitulating what might comfortably be reduced to a sixty-page pamphlet? What can these Anthroposophists possibly have to say to their followers, week after week?’

There may be certain orders of mind of our day who would like to have a small outline of Anthroposophy which they could keep in their waistcoat pockets, and thus study what it is most important to know. We must, however, over and over again, bring to mind the fact that nothing can be done in this way with Anthroposophy. There can be no ‘tabloid-knowledge!’ Although Anthroposophy does depend both on knowledge and perception, it does not consist of mere ‘phrases,’ but of very definite knowledge. But it is not enough merely to acquire this knowledge as a general conviction according to present-day methods, and then rest satisfied. For the point in question is not merely that one should acquire the conviction and know that man lives many lives and that there are causal conditions which pass over from one life into another, that there is such a thing as reincarnation, as karma. The beneficial effects of Anthroposophy do not lie in the spreading of this knowledge, but are felt in the constant and repeated study of all the details connected with it, and in allowing the teaching to work upon one's soul. It does one no good simply to believe that man lives more than once and that there is such a law as that of reincarnation, karma, and so on. The mere belief in this will not carry one far. As regards the real depths of life there is not much difference between the soul of a man who knows of reincarnation and karma and one who knows nothing of it. In an anthroposophical sense our soul is only changed if we constantly study, not only the generalities, but the deeper things that Spiritual Science can teach us. That is why it is a good thing that we should over and over again consider how the various details of life appear in the light of the Anthroposophical conception. It is by no means sufficient merely to know that there is a great law of destiny establishing a connection between the past deeds, feelings and thoughts of a man and his present and future experiences. Anthroposophy will only become a life-factor when we can apply this general doctrine to the different experiences of life, when we become able to put our whole soul into such a position, that we obtain an entirely new outlook on life. That is why we will to-day give a little time to studying the law of karma, the great law of destiny, with reference to the details of life. Things will be spoken of to-day which are familiar to all; but they will be considered from the standpoint of karma.

Karma says in a general sense that there is a connection in the spiritual world between what takes place to-day and what has taken place in the past. It is not really a good thing to call karma the law of causality, and then to compare it with the law of cause and effect in the external world. If we wish to find a comparison for this great law of destiny, we must take care that the comparison is valid, that it really does represent this law.

Let us take the following as an example. Suppose we have two vessels containing water—and two metal balls of the normal temperature of the living-room. We throw one ball into one of the vessels; and the water remains as it was. We now take the other ball and having heated it, we throw it into the other vessel. The water in that gets warm.—Why has the water in the second vessel grown warm and not in the first? Because the ball itself underwent a change before it was thrown into the vessel; and having itself been made hot it brings about the warming of the water. An event occurred which was the result of another event, the result of the ball having been heated.—The experiences and activities of a former time are connected with the experiences and phenomena of the present or future.

When we grasp the law of the spiritual connections between past, present and future in this way, we shall be able to find it confirmed in ordinary life, in the everyday life around us,—though we ourselves may be very far from having as yet developed any clairvoyant faculties. For we must always establish as a golden rule the fact that while a law of the spiritual world can only be proved by the spiritual investigator through clairvoyant observation, it can always be corroborated by the experiences of the external world.—People will, however, have to accustom themselves to observe external life a little more carefully than usual, if they wish to find confirmation of the law of karma. As a rule they do not see, figuratively speaking, beyond the end of their noses. What lies beyond that, they do not observe. Anyone who observes more profoundly will, however, find plenty of confirmation between birth and death of the existence of a law of karma. We will keep as far as possible to the concrete, and take the following example. A young lad, fifteen years of age, has been torn away by unforeseen circumstances from the life he had been accustomed to lead. Till then the position of his parents had permitted him to study; now at the age of fifteen, in consequence, perhaps, of his father having lost his fortune, he had to go into trade, and was thus pitchforked from one calling to another. Of course the point here is not that the one calling was in any way better than the other, but that his life was altered by the change. Now people who contemplate life in the ordinary materialistic sense would probably not expect anything worthy of note to be brought about by the influence of such an event in a man's life, and they would find nothing. But a closer observer would discover that a young man who goes into trade in that way, will at first feel pleasure in the change, will like his calling,—that his interest in it grows with his own growth, as one might say. After a while, however, something remarkable will become evident, The soul-experiences, the sympathies and antipathies he feels in his work, may, as he reaches the age of eighteen or nineteen, assume a different form. He may cease to take pleasure in it; his attitude towards trade may alter. Those who had never heard of Anthroposophy would feel at a loss to account for what takes place in the young man's soul.

What then has actually occurred?—When the young man was fifteen and was put into the new trade, he took a great interest in it. At first the interest he felt drove out the feelings and sentiments that had formed within him when he was following a different line of activity. Those feelings were pushed into the background. The time, however, comes when these break through again with all the more strength. It is just as though one compressed an elastic object; it can be compressed for a while but it springs back with all the more rapidity, and the result in the case of the lad may be that the interests which have been thrust aside for a time, now burst forth with greater zest. When he is eighteen or nineteen the feelings and sentiments that penetrated his soul, three years before the change of calling, now come forth anew,—that is, those he felt at eleven or twelve.—Life can only be explained in such a case by saying: When this lad was fifteen a turning-point occurred in his life. After that, things happened whose external effects are felt the same number of years after the turning-point as the cause of them originated before that time.

Just think how one would be able to help a person as regards his soul-moods and the difficulties of life, if we were able to ask ourselves:—When did such a turning-point occur?—It may have been connected with something quite private and intimate; but, if one can place it, we can then reckon back; and it will be found that the spiritual effects reveal themselves just as long after the turning-point, as the cause of them was before that time. This gives one an insight into karma. Such knowledge is a help in life, and we may say:—Causes and effects of this nature are connected with definite periods of time and they are determined by a definite period in life, so that if we count backwards and forwards from that point of time, we can find the connection between cause and effect.

Now this might, of course, be concealed by the intervention of other events. Someone might say: ‘The example you have just given us is no use; I have just met a young man to whom it does not apply:’—Well,—I have known a case of two men having a game of billiards, when a passing waiter bumped into the one who was just about to play, thus driving his ball in quite a different direction from what was intended! The law of cause and effect was not at fault, but other circumstances intervened. We must reflect that we shall never learn to know that law if we do not make an exception of the things that upset it. After the age of fifteen other circumstances may arise which interfere with the law. We do not become acquainted with laws simply by observing life, but by acquiring the right method of summing up its phenomena. For in life things are being constantly disturbed and the laws cannot so easily be seen; we can only regulate our life by knowing how these laws are to be found. When we know the particulars, we can say in the case of the young man whose life has been so smashed up, that it is the task of those who have his education in hand to look out for the result. In this way karma becomes a law of life; and if we have knowledge of the law, we can make use of our knowledge when such a case occurs. If we find that we can no longer give the lad what he had before, we can at any rate become his adviser. But we can only give the right advice if we know of the existence of such connections as those I have spoken of,—if we know what is the matter with him and intervene with help just where and when his particular lack is making itself felt. If we are ignorant of this law we cannot help him with advice.—When we regard the law of karma as a law of life it may become an influence in life, we can learn to become counselors.

The above-mentioned case does not of course exhaust all the combinations that are possible; there is another way in which the law of karma is experienced between birth and death. There is a remarkable connection between the experiences a man has in the first half of his life and the second,—but this is not as a rule observed. One often makes acquaintance with a man in his youth and loses sight of him before he reaches maturity, or else one only meets a man when he is already old and one knows nothing of his youth; or even if one did know him in youth, one may have forgotten what has happened to him since. Were we to study and compare the beginning and end of people's lives when it is possible so to do, we should find the finest confirmation of the law of karma even in the life between birth and death.

Perhaps you may remember in this connection what I have said in public lectures about the ‘noble’ anger which appears in youth. I have explained that a young person is not able fully to judge of an injustice that may be going on in his vicinity; he is not yet mature enough. Yet the wise rulership of the world has so ordained things that our feelings will help us to judge truly before our reason is mature enough to do so. A noble nature will, even in childhood, be moved to a righteous anger by anything like injustice, although it may be only in his feeling that his soul can sense the injustice. He may perhaps not yet be ripe to judge of it through his intellect. When this noble sense of indignation is to be found in the character of a child we ought to take particular note of it, for the feeling aroused by the injustice remains in the soul. This noble anger in early youth permeates the soul and, as life goes on, it becomes transformed. In the second half of life it reappears in a different form; it appears as the quality of loving kindness and goodness. We shall not often find that loving, bounteous goodness in the latter part of a man's life—if other things are equal and nothing has occurred to distort the sequence—without finding that it was expressed in his early years by a noble anger aroused at the stupidity or the ugly things of life. In ordinary life we find a karmic connection which we may clothe in the form of a picture and say: The hand that never clenched its fist in noble anger in the first half of life, will not easily be stretched forth in blessing in the latter half.—Such things will of course only be observed by one who can see a little further than ‘the end of his nose,’ which is just what most people do not do. I might give a simple example to show how little people are inclined to notice such things in life.

I have often mentioned how helpful it is to one who wishes to become intimately acquainted with life in order to study more deeply the occult conditions of the soul, to have been a teacher at some time. One learns more of the soul in that way than can be learnt from the ordinary text-books on Psychology, which, as a rule, are quite valueless. A knowledge of the soul is acquired when we do not merely observe and study but have to take the responsibility of guiding and directing the life of others. One learns a closer observation. During the long years of my tutorship I not only observed the children of whom I had charge, but I had many opportunities when other families came to visit them, of studying other children of all ages, even from the time they came into the world.

That is now some twenty-five to thirty years ago. You may have noticed how every five years or thereabouts the doctors have a different opinion as to what is ‘good’ for people. Well,—at that time they were strongly of opinion that it was very strengthening for delicate children three, four or five years old, to drink a glass of red wine every day.—I knew certain children who had their glass of wine and others who did not, and was able to make my own observations. For of course at that time, the doctor's opinion was considered infallible. It would have been of no use to attempt to go against it. I was thus able to await results. The children who were then from two to five years old and who were given the glass of wine to strengthen them, are now young men and women of twenty-five to twenty-eight years of age. I particularly noticed that only then the results of this treatment show themselves. All the children who had the wine have become ‘Fidgety Phils’; their astral bodies are fidgety, they have not much control of them; they do not know how to control the involuntary movements of their soul-life. On the other hand, those children who,—unfortunately, as was then said,—could not have their glass of red wine, have now become stable natures, less ‘wobbly’ in their astral bodies, or, as materialists would say, in their nervous systems.

This is an example of the connections that exist in life. It is rather a trivial one and not particularly illustrative of karma; but it serves to show that we should not only look as far as the end of our noses but should survey longer periods of time, and that it is not sufficient merely to affirm that a remedy will have such and such an effect, for what is actually brought about can only be observed by the true observer many years after. Nothing but the great connections and all that leads us to find them can in reality give us the true explanations of the relation between cause and effect in the life of man. Thus we must try to connect the qualities of the soul with those phenomena of life which lie apparently very far apart; and we shall then be able to trace the law of karma even between birth and death, and shall frequently find that the events of later life are connected with the experiences of the earlier.

You may remember what I said of the mission of Devotion, of the importance of looking up in feeling to some being or some phenomenon which we do not yet understand, but which we revere for the very reason that we have not yet grown up to the level of being able to understand it. I always like to remind you of how fortunate it is when a man can say: ‘As a child I heard of a member of our family who was very greatly respected and honoured. I had not yet seen him but I had a profound reverence for him. Then one day the opportunity came, and I was taken to see him. A feeling of profound and holy awe came over me as I laid my hand on the handle of the door of the room where this wonderful person was to be seen.’

In later life a man will have good reason to be grateful for that feeling of reverent devotion; we owe much gratitude to anyone who aroused a feeling of reverence in us in our early life. That feeling is of great and special value in any life. I have known men who exclaim, when such a feeling of reverent devotion to the Spiritual and Divine is alluded to: ‘I am an Atheist! I cannot revere anything spiritual!’—We can reply: ‘Look at the starry heavens! Could you create those? Look at that wisdom-filled structure and reflect: there it is surely possible to have a feeling of real, true reverence.’ There are many things in the world which our understanding has not yet grown up to, but to which we can look up in reverence. Especially is this the case in youth, when there is so much we can look up to and venerate, without being able to understand it.

A feeling of devotion in early youth is transformed into a very special quality in the second half of life. We have all heard of persons who just by being themselves, are, as it were, a blessing to those around them. There is no need for them to say anything particular, their presence is enough. It seems as though by the very nature of their being, something invisible flows forth from them to the souls around them. Through their very nature they radiate a healing and beneficent influence on their environment. To what do these people owe their power of blessing? They owe it to the circumstance that in their youth they lived a life in which reverence played a part. Reverence in the early part of their life was transformed in later years into a force which works invisibly, pouring forth blessing and help. Here again is a karmic connection which, if we look for it, is clearly and distinctly to be observed. It was really a true feeling for karma which led Goethe to choose as the motto for one of his works, these beautiful words: ‘What we desire in our youth is fulfilled in old age!’ If one only observes the connections to be found within short periods of time, it may certainly seem as though one could speak of unfulfilled wishes,—but taking longer spans of time, this cannot well be said. All these things can pass over into and become part of life's daily round; and as a matter of fact, only one who studies in this anthroposophical way is qualified to educate children, for he will be able to provide them in their early years with that which, as he knows, they will be able to use in the latter part of their life. The responsibility that a man assumes when he instills one thing or another into a child is not realised to-day. It has become the custom to look down on these things to-day—to speak of them from the high horse of materialistic thinking. I should like to illustrate this by an experience we ourselves once had here in Berlin.

A theosophical visitor once came here,—one of those who think if at some time in their lives they have attended one or two meetings, they are well able to form an opinion on the whole subject. Such persons desire to learn about a spiritual Movement like Anthroposophy so as to be able to write objectively about it. Those who wish to provide the world with newspaper articles, believe that they can judge of a movement by going to one or two lectures!—This visitor also went away and wrote. It was curious to read later on in an American paper what was said of one of our anthroposophical meetings. Of course the description given was remarkably correct!—As I have said, if anyone really wishes to grasp Anthroposophy it cannot be done in that way; it is only possible to penetrate into the life of Anthroposophy if one has the distinct will really to enter into it in detail and experience. I am only saying all this to characterise the opinion formed by this visitor, which he did not hide under a bushel! He said he did not like the way in which Anthroposophy splits up everything,—dividing the world into physical world, astral world, devachanic world, and so on. Why should everything be so split up?—This was after one or two visits. What a terrible effect it would have had on him if he had heard of the other divisions! He was of the opinion that it was unnecessary to consider things in this way, but that one should speak of the spiritual world in general terms.—Why should it be divided into classes?

That is the way people talk to-day about Education and all other departments of life; Science itself talks in the same way. The world talks from an arbitrary observation of life, not from an objective investigation of the separate phenomena. That is why the impressions which all such reforms and programmes must make on one who is able really to observe the world is so dreadful; they arouse a feeling that may be compared to physical pain. Take any ordinary book on Science to-day; no matter how conscientiously the conclusions are drawn, it is terrible to see how they are put forward, for there is no conception of the way the phenomena ought to be observed. In the same way many a man is admired to-day, who blazons forth his opinion, based simply on his own predilections or antipathies.

It is of immense importance that Anthroposophy should become aware of the fact that life must be observed, down to its very smallest details, according to the methods which the knowledge of karma and other laws put into our hands. That is why we can only hope for a blessing on the future evolution of humanity—even as regards the question of Education—if the anthroposophical views penetrate to the fundamental principles of Education. Karma provides a firm support for all questions connected with that.

For instance, it is extremely important that we should know the karmic connections of a certain phenomenon in Education expressed in the view: ‘If a child is properly brought up, he must be this or that—that is what I admire!’ It seems as though the child were supposed to be a sack, into which one can stuff whatever is thought to be right! People wish to stamp their own nature, with its personal sympathies or antipathies, upon the child. If they knew the karmic consequences of this, they would take a different view. They would see that what is stuffed in that way into a child, as into a sack, will work out karmically by making the grown man or woman a hard, dry nature, prematurely old, for the very core of their being is killed. If we wish to educate a child, and to imbue it with any particular quality, we must set to work in a roundabout way. We must not try to force it upon the child, rather ought we to arouse a longing for that particular quality, so that the child itself will desire to acquire it. We must even go a step further. If we know that a particular food is good for a child we must not force him to eat it, but should try so to cultivate his taste, that he will ask for it of his own accord. That is a very different method to that of forcing everything into him as into a sack, saying:—‘in with you!’—If we begin to regulate the child's requirements, we reach the very life-germ of his being and we shall see the effects of this working out karmically in the second half of his life, in his joy in life, in his life-force. In his later years, instead of being arid and dry, he will remain alive in the centre of his being.

If we consider the law of karma in this way we shall say: ‘It does not suffice merely to write a little book entitled ‘There is a law of karma, a connection between the earlier and the later,’ but we must study life itself in the light of that law.’ Anthroposophy is only present in its true form when we enter into all the details of life; but we must also determine to do this work without cessation. We must find time to study all the phenomena of life from the standpoint of Anthroposophy.

The above are a few of the things that indicate the connections to be found in life between birth and death. Now we can follow out the law of karma beyond this limit and connect one life with other lives or with one other. We must connect what we experience to-day, in the present life between birth and death, with things we experienced formerly, or that we shall experience later, in subsequent lives. I will to-day confine myself to throwing light on one important question, from the standpoint of karma in so far as it extends from one life into another. That is, the question of health and sickness, more especially the latter.

Many people when they are stricken with some malady believe that according to karma they would be right in supposing they have brought it upon themselves, that it is their fate; but that alone does not always characterise karma aright. Where there is a malady we must first of all be quite clear as to the nature of the trouble in a spiritual sense. It will be well to begin with the nature of pain, and then pass on to the spiritual understanding of the nature of illness.

What is the nature of pain? We will now consider external pain, such, for instance, as we feel when we cut our finger. Why does that hurt?—We shall never be able to explain the nature of pain from the spiritual standpoint if we do not realise that the physical finger is permeated by an etheric and an astral finger. The outward appearance of the physical finger, its shape, the way in which the blood circulates in it and the position of the nerves within it,—all these things are determined by the etheric finger. It is the builder; and still takes care that the nerves are in their proper place and that the blood flows in the right way. The way in which the etheric body carries out these functions is regulated by the astral body, which permeates the whole. We will now explain by an external example why it hurts when we cut a finger.

Perhaps it may be a favourite occupation of yours to water the flowers in your garden once a day; that gives you a feeling of satisfaction. One morning, however, you find that your watering-pot is spoilt or perhaps stolen, and you are not able to water your garden. You are distressed; what you feel is not physical pain, yet the fact that you are prevented from carrying out your favourite occupation may somewhat resemble that; you cannot carry out an activity because you lack the necessary instrument. The external lack felt in this instance, which can only call forth a moral pain, may become a physical pain in the way that will now be described.

The etheric and astral bodies are organised for the purpose of maintaining the finger as it now is. I can never cut the etheric finger nor the astral finger. If I cut my finger in two, the etheric finger can no longer carry out its proper duty. It is accustomed to have the fingers in their right connection. Now this connection is interrupted:—just as your activity was interrupted, when you wanted to water your garden. Thus the astral and etheric bodies are not able to intervene, and the prevention from exercising the usual activity is felt in the astral body as pain. But the moment these bodies are interrupted, they make an extra effort,—just as you, wishing to water your garden, would make extra efforts to find the watering-pot or the like. In the same way our astral and etheric bodies must now call forth greater activity in order to repair the injury. It is the extra activity thus called forth which is the actual healing force. Whatever calls forth great activity in the spiritual bodies of man, produces healing. Now the cause of all illness is, that through some disorder in the physical or even in the etheric body of man, the spiritual principles are prevented from intervening in the proper way, they are hindered, as it were; and the healing consists in the calling forth of a stronger resistance to the disorder.—An illness may either be healed, or we may die of it.—Let us consider both these possibilities from the karmic standpoint.

If the illness takes such a course that we recover from it, it means that in those members that we have brought with us from former incarnation, we had stored up such strong life-force that it is able to intervene and heal us. When we look back at those incarnations we can say:—Not only were we able at the time to provide for what we normally have in life, but we brought with us a reserve fund, which we may call up from the spiritual members of our life.

Now, suppose we die. How does the case stand then?—We must then say: When the effort to heal was made, we called upon the strongest forces within us—but they did not suffice. Yet whenever we call up these forces, demanding extra strength from them, it is not without avail, for in so doing we have had to make stronger efforts. Although we may not be able in this life to restore order to any one part of our organism, yet it has, none the less, grown stronger. We desired to resist the malady, but our powers did not suffice. Yet although they did not succeed, the forces we called up in making the effort, are not lost. They pass over into the next incarnation and the injured organ will then be stronger than if we had not had the disturbance. We are then able to build up the particular organ that brought us a premature death and to impart to it special strength and regularity. This will be all the more successfully accomplished if we treat the illness in the right way and yet are not able to cure it. In such a case we must look upon the illness, karmically, as something which will in a future life prove to have been fortunate. We shall then have gained a special strength through having fought the malady though we were unable to cure it.—One ought not, however, on that account, to say: ‘Perhaps it might be as well to let an illness take its course, for then if we do not interfere and try to curb it, the forces within us will be stronger and our karma will have a better fulfilment.’—That would be nonsense. The point is this: the healing must be carried out in such a way that the equalising forces are able to intervene in as favourable a manner as possible; in other words, we must do all in our power to bring about a cure, regardless of whether it be successful or not. Karma is always a friend, never an enemy to life!

By this example it is proved that the law of karma, which extends from one life to another, works for the strengthening of life. We can, therefore, say that if any one organ is particularly strong, this points to a preceding life in which that organ was once ailing and we were not able to heal it. The forces for so doing were called up and they have caused it to grow particularly strong now. Thus we see the events and facts stretching across from one life into another. If we become conscious in the right way of how it can be strengthened, our life-kernel will become stronger and stronger. In this way we can attain a more and more living comprehension of our spiritual life-kernel through the law of karma.

We now come to an answer to the question: ‘Why do we meet together so often?’ We do so, because not only do we enrich our knowledge when we take in anthroposophical teaching, but also because, if it be given in the right way, it is able to make our life-kernel more and more strong and forceful. We pour a spiritual life-sap into all we do, by meeting together and occupying ourselves with Anthroposophy. Thus Anthroposophy is not a theory, it is a life-giving draught, an elixir of life which ever anew pours itself into our souls and of which we know that it will make them grow stronger and stronger. When Anthroposophy emerges from the position which now, through lack of comprehension, it occupies in the outer world, when it really intervenes in our whole spiritual life, people will then see how the salvation, even of the physical life, of the purely external life, will depend on the strengthening which can be acquired through the study of Anthroposophy. The time will come when anthroposophical gatherings will be the most important sources of strength to man, from which they will go forth, saying: we are most grateful to these meetings, for we owe to them our health and strength and the fact that we are constantly able to strengthen anew our own life-kernel, the core of our being. People will only realise what the mission of Anthroposophy is, when they feel that it furnishes us with the means of working forcefully on the physical body and making it sound and healthy. Those who are occupying themselves with Anthroposophy to-day, should regard themselves as pioneers for Anthroposophy as a means of strengthening life. Then only will it become what it ought to be, the right point of attack against something which in many cases is weakening life to-day.

In conclusion I will draw your attention to one thing more. There is no phrase more frequently mentioned than ‘inherited tendency.’ No man is considered an educated man to-day who does not mention it at least two or three times a week! An educated man must at least make himself acquainted with what the learned. medical profession has ascertained as to ‘inherited tendencies.’ When a person does not know what to make of himself, most people say at once: ‘he is suffering from an inherited tendency.’ Anyone not saying that is regarded as badly educated, perhaps among other things an Anthroposophist!—Here Science begins not only to go astray in theory, but also to be injurious to life. This is the boundary where theory encroaches on morality—where it is immoral to hold a wrong theory. Here life's strength and security really depend on correct knowledge. What will a man be able to do who, through the right spiritual conception in his soul, strengthens, fortifies himself by taking in the elixir of life? No matter what he may have inherited, these inheritances are only in the physical body or at most in the etheric body. Through his right conception of the world he will be able to make his own vital centre stronger and stronger, and will be able to conquer his inherited tendencies; for the spiritual, if present in the right way, is able to equalise the body. If, however, a man does not strengthen the spiritual core of his being, merely asserting that the spiritual is the fruit of the physical, he will have a weak inner nature, he will be the victim of his inherited tendencies; they will work harmfully in him. No wonder then, that so-called inherited tendencies have such dreadful results; for people are first of all talked into belief of the powers of such tendencies and are deprived of what counteracts them. The belief in inherited tendencies is cultivated, and the spiritual conception of the world—the best weapon with which to fight them,—is taken away. First the power of the inherited tendencies is discovered, and by this means they become active. Not only is this a wrong insight, which arouses a life-destroying activity and takes the weapons of defence out of the hands of the sufferer, but it is the beginning of a theory based absolutely on a materialistic conception. Here a materialistic conception of the world begins to play a part which is in effect not only theoretically incorrect but immoral.—This cannot be got over, simply by saying that those who assert such things are mistaken. We need not be too severe in judging those who put forth these theories. We are not attacking individual scientists here; it is quite comprehensible that they are involved in a line of thought which must lead to such errors—we must admit this in all fairness. The one, perhaps, may not be able to free himself from scientific tradition; another perhaps considers it excusable, for, having a wife and children he would be in an awkward position if he were to break away from the ruling opinions. But the whole thing must be considered as a phenomenon of the times, for Science is beginning not only to spread abroad false theories, but to take away the life-promoting remedies, the spiritual conception of life, which is able to fortify and which is alone able to stand up against the physical,—the power which must otherwise overwhelm man. The physical can only possess overwhelming power as long as a man does not build up strength in his spiritual nature. If he does this, a warrior will grow up within him, a warrior who will defend him against the physical.

We cannot hope that this should come about from one day to the next. But those who have the right understanding of things will gradually learn the anthroposophical view of phenomena in face of which man at first seems powerless. What is not equalised in one life is made good in the long run. If we contemplate a single life, as well as life from incarnation to incarnation, we shall see that rightly understood, karma is a law that no longer depresses us, but rather one which brings us comfort and force whereby to make ourselves stronger. The law of karma is a law of life, and we must understand it as such. The point is, not that we should know a few single abstract thoughts, but that we should study the life-truths of Anthroposophy in the details of life, and never weary of anthroposophical work, while we permeate ourselves with its different truths.

If you hold this as an ideal before you, you will be living an anthroposophical life in the true sense of the words. You will then know why it is that we do not satisfy ourselves with merely reading one or two books, but regard Anthroposophy as something in which our heart is concerned and which never ceases to occupy us; something to which we gladly return again and again, and of which we know that the oftener we return the more it will enrich our lives.

In each of the Gospels light is thrown on the great Mystery of Golgotha from one particular aspect. I have drawn your attention to the fact that the secret of Golgotha, the secret of Christ Jesus, is presented by the Gospel of St. Mark from the aspect of the great Cosmological connections, while that of St. Matthew shows how this secret was developed out of one special people, the ancient Hebrews. We have seen how that people had to develop little by little, from generation to generation, from the time of Abraham, so as to bring forth later, as their flower, the Human Being in whom could be contained the individuality of Zarathustra or Zoroaster. We have seen how all the qualities peculiar to the Hebrew people—qualities which had to become more and more intensified in the course of their descent from one generation to the next—were based entirely on the principle of physical inheritance. We were thus able to describe how the character of the mission of the old Hebrew people differed from that of others in that it had to inherit certain qualities, which could only be attained by physical inheritance, and which had gained in intensity from the oldest generations of the time of Abraham down to Jesus. The Gospel of St. Matthew contains many other secrets, as indeed do all the Gospels. Although in the course of this Winter we shall open up a few aspects and perspective glimpses into the Gospels, these can at the most only stimulate the understanding. For in order to understand the Gospels completely a never-ending spiritual work is necessary. Light shall be thrown to-day from one particular side on the Gospel of St. Matthew and it will be shown how the lessons to be drawn there from can be usefully applied by those who now form part of the anthroposophical spiritual stream.

If we look back at much of what we have learnt as the years went by, we shall see that the development of humanity, as described by Spiritual Science, passes through various crises; it reaches an important point, then continues for a while along a more level road, then comes another important point, and so on. We have often emphasised that one such important point in the development of humanity on earth was reached when the Christ-Impulse was given at the beginning of our era, according to the modern reckoning of time. When we look back beyond the Atlantean into the Lemurian age, we come to that point in time when the first rudiment of the human ego was implanted in the human being. To understand such an event, the words must be taken very accurately. For instance, we must make a clear distinction between the statement that in the Lemurian epoch ‘the first rudiments of the ego were implanted in the human being,’ and that other, that at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha began the period, the age, in which humanity became conscious of this ego. ‘There is a great difference between having the ego only in rudiment, as something working in man, and the knowledge that one possesses it. A sharp distinction must be made between these things, for otherwise it is impossible to understand the true laws of evolution.

We know that the implanting of the ego in man is part of the collective development of the earth. The earth passed through the Saturn, Sun and Moon ages, and then only did it become the structure it is to-day. On Saturn the germ of the physical body was laid, on the Sun that of the etheric body, on the Moon that of the astral body, and the germ of the ego was added on the earth; this germ was placed in the development of the earth in the Lemurian epoch. Now something else also took place in the Lemurian epoch, something that we have always called the ‘luciferic influence’. During that epoch man was endowed with the germ of the ego, which in the course of the subsequent earth-periods was destined to attain greater and greater perfection, and at the same time his astral body was ‘inoculated’ with the luciferic influence. The whole nature of man was altered by this influence, even to the forces and elements in his etheric and physical bodies. Thus in the Lemurian epoch man became an entirely different being from what he would have been if there had been no luciferic influence. We see him altering in two respects: we see him becoming an ego-being—and we see him becoming a being in whom the luciferic principle is hidden. Even if the luciferic principle had not set in, the ego-influence would still have entered man.

Now what took place in the human being as a result of the luciferic influence having made itself felt in the Lemurian epoch?

When such a circumstance is described from one aspect or another, I beg you not to consider that as all that can be said on the subject; for this may well be only one point of view, selected for the moment. In the course of years a great deal has been said as to what the luciferic influence brought about in the evolution of man; it is all part of the same, but we cannot repeat it all now. To-day we will select one point of view only, that describes one aspect; that is, that as a result of the luciferic influence man reached a certain point in evolution earlier than was intended, earlier than the wise guidance of the world had predestined for him. The luciferic influence caused him to descend more deeply into the three principles which came over from the former embodiments of the earth, (the astral body, etheric body and physical body) and he has become more entangled in them than would have been the case if no such influence had prevailed. Man, with his ego, would have remained nearer to the spiritual worlds, he would have continued for a longer time to feel himself, through his ego, a member of the spiritual world, if the luciferic influence had not caused that ego to descend more deeply into the three principles. We may say that as a result of the luciferic influence, man descended more deeply on to the earth in the Lemurian epoch. We can indicate the time when he would have descended thus far to the earth or into physical matter had there been no luciferic influence; it would have been in the middle of the Atlantean epoch. If no luciferic influence had come about man would have been obliged to wait till then for his descent to earth; but that influence caused him to descend earlier. It enabled him to become a free being, able to act in accordance with his own impulses. He would otherwise have remained entirely dependent upon the spiritual world until the middle of the Atlantis epoch; neither would he have been able before then to distinguish between good and evil, nor act from his own impulses. He could only have acted from psychic influences, that is to say, from forces implanted in his soul by Divine Spiritual Beings. The luciferic beings made it possible for him to begin at an earlier stage to decide between good and evil; not simply to allow himself to be guided by the laws of the divine-spiritual world Order, but to decide for himself, creating a kind of law and order for himself. This fact is expressed in a very profound way in the description of ‘the Fall’ which represents in a wonderful imaginative picture, what I have just stated. The Old Testament describes this by saying that Divine Spiritual Beings implanted into man a living soul. ‘Now if this living soul had merely remained as it was, man would have had to wait until later on, until the Divine Spiritual Beings had brought the living soul, or, in other words, the yet undeveloped ego, to the degree of maturity able to make distinctions. But now there came the luciferic influences, represented in the Bible as ‘the Serpent.’ Through these, man himself became able to distinguish between good and evil, instead of merely instinctively following the inpourings of Jehovah or the Elohim. From a being who till that time had been guided and led by Divine Spiritual Beings, man thus became a being able to decide for himself. The Bible clearly shows that self-decision was brought to man by the Serpent, or in other words, by the luciferic beings. We then hear the words ring forth, words spoken from the side of the gods: ‘Man has become as one of us!’ Or, if we wish to put this into plainer words:—‘Man has acquired something through the luciferic influence which has till now been reserved only for the gods. It was given to the gods to decide between good and evil, the beings dependent upon them had no such decisions to make.’

As a result of the luciferic influence man now became a being capable of making distinctions; that is, he became a being who developed divine qualities within him prematurely. In this way and through this influence, something entered human nature which would otherwise have been withheld from his evolution till the middle of the Atlantean epoch. As you can well imagine, man would have been quite different if this descent into matter had not taken place till then; his soul would have been more mature for the descent. He would have descended into matter as a better, a riper, man. He would have brought quite different qualities into his physical, etheric and astral bodies and would have possessed a very different power of distinguishing between good and evil. Because man was already a being able to distinguish between good and evil from the Lemurian epoch to the middle of the Atlantean epoch, he made himself worse than he would otherwise have been; he entered a state of lesser perfection. He would otherwise have spent all the intervening time in a much more spiritual way; but as it was, he passed through it more materially. The effect of this was that if he had received in the middle of the Atlantean epoch what the gods had intended him to have, he would have fallen utterly and completely.

What was it that would have been given to man at the middle of the Atlantean epoch, if he had continued to be guided and directed till that time, instinctively, as it were, by Divine Spiritual Beings?

He would have then received that which, the luciferic influence having in the meanwhile intervened, was afterwards given to him through the Mystery of Golgotha. The Christ-Impulse would have been given to man at the middle of the Atlantean epoch. Now, however, on account of the luciferic influence, man had to wait as long a time for the Christ-Impulse as had elapsed between the intervention of the luciferic influence and the middle of the Atlantean epoch. There was the same span of time between the entrance of Lucifer and the middle of the Atlantean epoch, as between that time and. the arrival of the Christ-Impulse. Thus, through man's having acquired a likeness to the gods before he was meant to do so, we have to describe a delay of the Christ-Impulse. For before that could come man had to go through the Earth-Karma due to him on account of the evil that had entered the earth through the luciferic impulse. He had to wait, not only till that influence had rendered him able to distinguish between good and evil, but until, in the course of the earth's development, all the consequences of the luciferic influence had come. He had to wait for these, for then only could the Christ-Impulse descend to the earth. In accordance with the wise guidance of the earth, man was not intended to escape for ever from what was to come to him through the luciferic influence, but it would not have come upon him till the middle of the Atlantean epoch. It must have come in any case; but it would certainly not have come in the same form. Not only did man acquire from Lucifer the power of free decision in everything connected with spiritual things, but also the capacity of enthusiasm for what is good and noble, wise and great. As human beings, we are not only able coldly to distinguish between good and evil, but also to feel a warm glow for the noble, good and wise. That is because something was carried into our astral body, which, if it had only reached man in the middle of the Atlantean epoch, would have been taken into the ego, that ego which is capable of judgment. All the feeling, the idealism and enthusiasm for what is good, for high ideals, we owe to the circumstance that something entered our astral body before we had acquired the likeness to God in our ego, before the acceptance of the Christ had taken place therein. The essential point is that this likeness to God, the possibility of finding the good within ourselves, had to come to man. If the luciferic influence had not come, this impulse would have come in the middle of the Atlantean period, but as things are it came in the age in which Christ Jesus Himself worked.

Thus through the Christ-Impulse the consciousness came to man that in his ego he had something of Divine substance and of Divine nature. The thought that man can take in the Divine in his Ego-being and that this Divine part can be active therein and distinguish between good and evil, underlies all the deeper sayings of the New Testament. We may therefore say that with the reception into the inner nature of man of the Christ-Impulse, it was made possible for man to say: ‘I must be my own guide for the knowledge of my existence and the distinction between good and evil.’

Now if we look back to the pre-Christian time, we must say that when the impulse enabling man to distinguish between good and evil was not yet present, such distinction, and the judgment of man as to the good, the beautiful and the true, was necessarily meagre; it did not actually proceed from his inner being. He could not, before the Christ-Impulse, have distinguished in his inner being between good and evil. In the pre-Christian time the decision as to the really Good, Beautiful and True could only be accomplished through certain beings—such as the Bodhisattvas—reaching up as time went on with a part of their being into the divine-spiritual worlds; the distinction between good and evil was therefore not made from out of man's inner being, but in the divine worlds. Through their companionship with divine spiritual beings these Guides acquired it and it flowed from them into the souls of men, as though by suggestion. Had it not been for those guides, men could only have made feeble distinctions between good and evil in those days. If these guides had depended on their own hearts alone, they could not have done this either; but because they descended into those depths of the soul which were not yet accessible to man and entered in their ego-being into the kingdoms of heaven, they received the impulse needed by man to help him to decide between good and evil at the time of his need, that the good might nevertheless be implanted in the earth by way of preparation. Thus, before the time of Christ, man was a being still insufficiently prepared to acquire the likeness to God. On this account, since the Lemurian epoch, everything done by man was done less well than would otherwise have been the case. This applies above all to what regards himself. His astral, etheric and physical bodies, which but for the luciferic influence would have remained more spiritual, were, through that influence, less well formed, made more material. That was the reason of all the evil which developed in the life of man as time went on. In the course of a very long time have these evils developed.

From the Lemurian epoch to the Mystery of Golgotha they developed in the physical, etheric and astral bodies. In the astral body a high degree of egotism was developed; in the etheric body the possibility of mistaken judgment and the possibility of lying. If man had remained under the influence of divine-spiritual beings, acting instinctively in accordance with their impulses, he would not to-day, when he desires knowledge of the world around him, be able to fall into error, nor could he be led into untruth. Thus did the tendency to lying and the danger of error find place in the development of man; and since the spiritual is always the origin of the physical, and because the luciferic influence and its consequences ate their way more and more deeply into the etheric body during incarnation after incarnation, the possibility of disease entered the physical body. Illness is the evil that entered the physical body through that development; but something of still greater significance has come. If man had not been subject to these influences, if he had not allowed them to work upon him, he would never have supposed that anything more than a change of life takes place when the physical body falls away from us; consciousness of death would not have come to him. If man had descended less deeply into matter and had kept hold of the threads uniting him with the divine-spiritual, he would have been aware that when the physical sheath is laid aside, a new form of existence begins; but he would never have looked upon that as a loss, as the end of an existence he had grown fond of. Everything in evolution would have taken on a different aspect.

Man descended more deeply into matter, he thus made himself more free and independent, but he also thereby made his own development more limited than it would have been.

Everything lacking in man will be made good by the Christ-Impulse; but one must not expect that to be done in a short time nor even in a comparatively short time. A very long time elapsed between the Lemurian epoch and the Mystery of Golgotha. Slowly and gradually, during incarnation after incarnation, came egotism, error and lying, disease and the realisation of death. Man is being led back into the spiritual world, so to speak, with the qualities he has acquired “from below.” The re-ascent will be a quicker progress than the descent; but it cannot be expected that in one or two incarnations man will be enabled, through what he can take in of the Christ-Impulse, to overcome selfishness and to heal his etheric body to such an extent that all danger of lying and error is at an end, still less can he be expected to be able to work healingly on his physical body. All this must go on slowly and gradually; but it is going on. Just as man has been led down into all those qualities by the luciferic impulse, so will he be led up out of them by the Christ-Impulse. Selfishness will be transmuted into selflessness, lying into truthfulness, the danger of error into absolute certainty and true judgment. Illness will become the foundation for more complete health; the illness we have overcome will be the germs of greater good-health; and when we have gradually learnt to understand death in such a way that the Death at Golgotha works as a prototype of death in our own soul, death will then have lost its sting. Man will then know why from time to time he must lay aside his physical covering, in order to rise higher and higher in the course of his embodiments. In particular, the Christ-Impulse brought with it the impulse to make good something connected with man's knowledge and observation, with his knowledge of the world.

We have said that man has become more entangled in matter, less perfect in his three bodies than he would have been if there had been no luciferic influence; this caused him to be possessed by an urge to sink more deeply into material existence, to soak himself more completely in mere matter. This refers more especially to his knowledge, but even that only came about slowly and gradually. Man did not, as soon as the luciferic influence made itself felt, immediately sink down so deeply as to close all the doors into the spiritual world behind him. He still remained, for a long time, in connection with the spiritual world from which he grew forth and with which he would have remained in connection with his whole being, if the luciferic influence had not come. He long remained a participator in it; for a long time he continued to feel that his finer, more spiritual instincts were guided by the threads from the divine-spiritual world. For a long time he still continued to feel that his impulse was not a merely human one, it was as though the Gods had been at work behind it. That was more particularly the case in more ancient times. Man was driven slowly into matter and he thus gradually lost the consciousness of the divine.

Those spiritual movements and world-conceptions of humanity which had knowledge of these things, have also hinted at this. They said: There was once upon a time an age in which man was driven some way into material existence by the luciferic influence—though not so far as to prevent the divine influence from still having a powerful effect upon him. In the early ages of man's development this was known as the ‘Golden Age.’ This is no fanciful conception: ‘Golden Age’ is simply the expression used by those men of olden times who still had an inkling that there had been something like a primeval age of humanity, such as has just been described. This Golden Age, known to Eastern philosophy as Krita-Yuga, lasted, comparatively speaking, much longer than the Ages we still have to describe. After the Golden Age came the so-called ‘Silver Age.’ Man was pushed further down into the physical world; but the process went on slowly and gradually. Even then the doors of the spiritual world were not yet completely closed. Man still had intense moments in which, in a dreamy sort of clairvoyance, he saw the Gods at work behind his instincts. Man could no longer be called a companion of the Gods in this Silver Age, but he could still perceive them standing behind him. Eastern philosophy calls this age, Treta-Yuga. Then came an Age which extends into our own Post-Atlantean period; its last stragglers extended into historical times when there still were people gifted with the old dream-like, twilight consciousness. The consciousness of a spiritual world from which man had come forth, still existed; though only as a kind of memory remaining over from former incarnations. It was just as when we now remember our own childhood, our youth, and our present age. In childhood we had direct experience of our childish happenings; in like manner man still experienced in Treta Yuga in a direct way, the impulse of a divine-spiritual world. In the Age following on that, known as the ‘Bronze Age,’ what man had was more like a memory. It might be compared with the way a grown man contemplates his childhood; for we say: ‘I experienced my childhood; it was not a dream!’ That was like the state of things in the Third Age. Men then knew: ‘In earlier ages we had experience of communion with the Gods; that is now nothing but a memory!’ I have explained at some length how in the Old-Indian period of civilisation the memory of the Atlantean epoch worked retrospectively, thus enabling the holy Rishis to reveal their great divine teachings. This Bronze Age is known in Eastern philosophy as Dvapara-Yuga. That is followed by an Age in which all memory of the divine-spiritual world is lost, when man, with his knowledge and perception, is entirely given up to the physical world. That age began about the year 3101 B.C. In Eastern philosophy it is known as Kali-Yuga, ‘the dark age’; because man had then lost all connection with the spiritual world and become completely one with the physical world. I wish expressly to note that I am now using these expressions for smaller divisions of time, but they can also be applied to larger spans. We are now speaking of the divisions of time corresponding to the smaller ages, and we make Kali-Yuga begin, as does Indian philosophy, with the year 3101 before our era. The Age was then being prepared in which men were taught only to see that which conceals the divine-spiritual world as by a veil, by a covering; when they only perceived the external physical. At the beginning of Kali-Yuga there were still many who could either see or recollect the divine-spiritual world, but for normal humanity the time set in when they could only see the physical world of nature.

That was the descent of man to Kali-Yuga. It was the time of deepest descent. Into that had to come the impulse for re-ascent. That is why this impulse, the Christ-Impulse, had to come during the Kali-Yuga, in the “dark” age.

This Christ-Impulse was prepared for by the religion of Jahve or Jehovah; for this religion taught man how little reliance could be placed on his former decisions. During the time which extended from the old Lemurian epoch to the Revelation on Mount Sinai, we have that age in which man was given the power to choose good or evil, while at the same time he became liable to err in judging between them, and became more and more likely to bring on earth that which is known as ‘Sin.’ Sin then ate its way into the life of the earth. Man became ‘like to the Gods,’ but in return for this he acquired qualities which were in nowise ripe for the likeness to God. What had to happen then? First of all man had to be shown what the Godhead expected from him if he was to become a self-conscious ego. This was shown to him by the announcement made on Mount Sinai in the ‘Ten Commandments.’ The people then heard proclaimed through Moses: ‘The good and evil thou hast already developed are not sufficient. I will show thee how these Commandments should sound if thou hadst not descended, and in return for thy defective qualities, received the power of judging between good and evil.’ The Decalogue, the law, given to man on Sinai, was given to man as he had then become; so that out of the spiritual worlds man heard sounding forth that which was right, in contrast to what he had insufficiently developed. The Ten Commandments stand forth as a law of iron, as a torch, showing man what he had not become. He had to submit himself to that law, with all he had become. Man could not at first have submitted to the Ten Commandments, because he had become lacking in decision, lacking in self-guidance. Therefore, they had to be given to him by one who was inspired,—by Moses—that is to say, they were given him from above by Divine administration. They were, however, given in such a way that they were intended for the ego. They told man how an ego must act, if it is to attain the goal of humanity.

In the lecture on The Ten Commandments of Moses (16th November, 1908) this is traced out in detail. Therein is first shown the right attitude of the ego to the spiritual worlds; this is contained in the first three Commandments. The next ones refer to man's conduct towards his fellow-men in act and deed, and the last Commandments refer to the control of his feelings and sensations. The Ten Commandments give instructions for the education of the ego. This was the preparation by means of which the ego was to learn in its most inward being how to give itself the impulse after having descended into Kali-Yuga, into the age of darkness. At first man was to be given the Law from above. The Law of one's own ego could however, only become what it was to be, when that ego takes into itself the great Prototype of Golgotha, saying: ‘If I take into my soul such thinking as was thought by the Being Who offered Himself in sacrifice on Golgotha,—if I take into myself such feelings as were felt by the Being Who offered Himself as sacrifice on Golgotha,—if I take into myself such willing as was willed by the Being Who offered Himself in sacrifice on Golgotha, then will my being come to a decision within itself to develop increasingly a likeness to God, it will then no longer have to follow the Outer Law, the Ten Commandments, but an inner impulse, its own Law.’

Thus Moses first put before mankind the Law, but Christ gave them the Prototype and the strength which the soul ought to take in, whereby to develop itself. Hence all the spiritual impulses were to be taken into the innermost of the soul, even into the ego itself; they were all to be deepened into inwardness through Christ Jesus. That could only take place if men thought as follows, and Christ Jesus radiated it forth as an impulse:—

Man has descended into the dark age, into Kali-Yuga. Before that dark age men saw into the spiritual world with a dim twilight consciousness. They were then able, not merely to make use of the instruments of the physical body, but when they observed the physical world through their eyes, ears and so on, they perceived the spiritual surrounding all things, flowers, plants, stones, etc. As regards this observation of the spiritual, men were rich in those days. In the older times the spirit was bestowed on them; whereas, in the dark age, as regards the spirit they were reduced to beggary; for the spirit was no longer bestowed upon them. They had become poor in spirit. Kali-Yuga came upon them more and more, that time when men had to say to themselves: In the old days things were different, the spirit was then bestowed on men; they were able to look up into a spiritual world, they were then rich in spirit; the kingdoms of heaven were then accessible to them. Now men are pressed down into the physical world. The gates of the spiritual world are closed to human senses, and no view of the kingdoms of heaven is open to the physical body. But Christ was able to say: ‘Lay hold of the ego, where it must now be apprehended! Then will the Kingdoms of Heaven draw near to you. They will arise within your own ego. Though the spiritual light may be concealed from your eyes behind the external light which is perceptible to the senses, though spiritual sound may be concealed from your ears behind physical sound; yet, when Christ Himself shall raise you, ye shall find the Kingdoms of Heaven within you! ‘Unhappy were those who had become poor in the dark age, who had become beggars as regard the spirit. They can now become blessed, the impulse having been given through which Christ is able, from the spiritual world, from the Kingdoms of Heaven, to penetrate into the very ego or ‘ I ’ of man. Therefore, with respect to man's poverty of spirit, the highest Christian proclamation is this: ‘From henceforward, blessed are they who are beggars in spirit, who no longer receive the spirit bestowed upon them according to the old conception. Henceforth, they can be blessed if they take in the Christ-Impulse; for, through the developing of their ego, the Kingdoms of Heaven will be within them.’

Let us pass on to the etheric body, which is the builder of the physical body. What has entered that? Illness only expresses itself in the physical body. The trouble itself is first in the etheric body; that then expresses itself in a subsequent incarnation as illness in the physical body. ‘Now, however, something has entered the world,’ so Christ Jesus had to say, ‘whereby an impulse may arise within gradually to clear away the auction from the etheric body. Blessed may those now be who have an affliction attached to their etheric bodies if they take up the Christ-Impulse; for they have something within them which lifts them above the suffering and teaches them to find inner comfort, the inner paraclete, the inner comforter!’

Now what had the astral body become through the luciferic influence? It had become less perfect than before. It had been given the possibility which we have described as a good quality: of being able to be aglow for what is great and good, to feel enthusiasm for the sublime treasures of the true, the beautiful and the good. On the other hand it has to purchase this at the price of feeling sympathy or antipathy for the treasures of the earth. But a man who takes up the Christ-Impulse learns to control the astral body, which stirs his physical body to opposition to the treasures of the earth, he learns to bring it under the power of the spirit; and in so doing he becomes happy or blessed. ‘Blessed will he be who makes his astral body indifferent to the things of earth; which will thereby fall to his share. For when he is all afire for the things of earth, feeling both emotion and sympathy or antipathy for them, he casts away that which they might become to him; but when the astral body is brought under the power of the spiritual and he grows indifferent to the things of earth, the Kingdom of Earth is added as a reward.’

Let us now ascend to that which works as sentient soul within the astral body. Herein we still possess in a dim sort of way, a ruling ego, an ego which has not yet wholly emerged and hence is still developing the most egotistical passions. As long as the ego is still really within the sentient soul, it develops the most selfish egoism. The wish that others should have the same as we have is lacking. Egoism dims the sense of justice, for the ego wants everything for itself. But if the ego transmutes itself in imitation of the Christ-Impulse, it will hunger and thirst after justice for all the beings around us. ‘Blessed will be those who hunger and thirst after the feeling of justice in their sentient-soul; for they shall be satisfied. ‘They will be able to bring about conditions all over the world corresponding to the proper new spirit of justice in the depths of the soul.

Let us further ascend to the intellectual or mind soul. This principle brings about to a still greater extent the consideration of one man for another, not merely as a feeling of justice such as is produced by the sentient soul, but as compassion, a true compassion for the sorrows of others and a sharing in their joy. One who takes in the Christ-Impulse grows to feel what others feel, not only what he feels himself; he immerses himself in the ego of others and in so doing feels bliss in his intellectual or mind soul. Blessed is he who develops fellow-feeling; for only by feeling himself within the soul of others, does he stimulate them to feel themselves in him. He will receive the sympathy of others when he himself radiates fellow-feeling for them. ‘Blessed are those who feel with others, for others shall feel with them.’

You will now see how, having gone a little further in our study of these connections, we are able to understand in a different way from the very depths of the nature and being of man, those words in St. Matthew's Gospel, generally known as the Sermon on the Mount. Each sentence of the Sermon on the Mount relates to one of the nine principles of man. In the next lectures we will go further into this. The Sermon on the Mount must become transparent to our spiritual eyes as that deed of Christ Jesus by means of which he turned what was contained in the Old Law of Moses into something quite inward, an inner impulse enabling man's ego to become active, as it must become in all the nine principles of man for if the ego takes up the Christ-Impulse, it affects all these.

Thus we see the profound truth of what I have already indicated here once before: that in Kali-Yuga Christ made the ego of man capable of discovering something in the physical world which can lead man up into the spiritual world, into the Kingdoms of Heaven. Christ has made the ego of man a participator in the spiritual world. On ancient Saturn the physical body was taken straight out of the spiritual world. It was still within that world, because the physical body was at that time much more spiritual and was not aware that it could separate from the spiritual worlds. The etheric body was added on the Sun and the astral body on the Moon, but only on the earth was it made possible—through the development of the ego—to set oneself free from the divine-spiritual. In consequence of this, as the ego must be led back again, God had to descend to the physical plane, and on that plane show man how to find the way back to the Kingdoms of Heaven.

A most important event was brought about through the Christ-Impulse. Now just ask yourselves this question: Did all those living at the time when Christ Jesus worked on earth know that such an important event was taking place? Just reflect that Tacitus—the great historian, mentions the Christians as an almost unknown sect. A hundred years after Christ he only mentions the Christians as a sect living in a side-street in Rome, whose teacher was a certain Jesus; they are simply mentioned as living there. For a long time after the Christ-Event many people in Rome believed Jesus was a contemporary of theirs, as though he had only just appeared. In short, important events can take place in the evolution of man, without contemporaries noticing that anything has happened. The most important things may come about and pass unobserved if people do not cultivate the understanding for them. They would then miss the experience, and as far as that was concerned they would be barren and dried up. ‘Change your hearts! The Kingdoms of Heaven have approached!’ That was the proclamation of John the Baptist and of Christ Jesus Himself. They hinted to those who had ears to hear that something most important was occurring. That nothing is known in the world of an important happening is no proof that it is not taking place. Those whose business it is to-day to point out the signs of the times, are aware of what is taking place to-day. They must point to an occurrence which, though not one of the most cogent, is yet important. True it is that just in our own time something of infinite significance is developing. Just as John pointed to Christ, and Christ Himself pointed to the approach of the Kingdoms of Heaven, to the ego; so must we to-day point to another important event.

Christ descended once to the earth in a body of flesh; He spent the first years of our era on earth, in the flesh. In accordance with the wise guidance of our world-evolution it is not ordained that men should again see Christ in the flesh, as a physically incarnated man; nor is it necessary that they should. For Christ will not return in the flesh. Why? Because what we call the dark age—the Kali-Yuga—was completed at the end of the nineteenth century, and because with the twentieth century began a new age, in which men must prepare to develop new capacities, those faculties which were lost in the dark age. Slowly and gradually these are being prepared. These faculties will develop so far that single individuals will be here who will possess them as natural tendencies. These faculties will be seen in a certain number of persons, particularly between the years of 1930 and 1940, and by means of these a number of people will enter into new relation with the Christ.

This indicates an important point in human development. Spiritual Science is here to open the understanding of men to these new faculties which will be developed in the world of men. Anthroposophy has not come into the world because a few people are in sympathy with it and would like to make it further known; it has come because it is wanted if people wish to understand what will take place in the first half of this century. For it is only by means of that which Spiritual Science can give mankind that it will become capable of understanding this. When people become capable of perceiving in the spirit that which will then occur, they will also be incapable of confusing that event with their mistaken representations. For as materialism spreads further, it will extend even to the spiritual conception of the world where it will have a particularly evil influence. In that realm it might tend to prevent men from understanding what should be spiritually comprehended. What should really be grasped in the spirit they will seek in the world of matter. Because we are to enter into a new relation to Christ in the course of the first half of our century, it must over and over again be emphasised during the next decades and until the event occurs, that false Messiahs, false Christs will arise who will knock at the doors of those who are only able to be materialists in the realms of Spiritual Science, and can only imagine a new relation to Christ if they see Him before them in the flesh. A number of false Messiahs will turn this to their own use, saying: ‘Christ has reappeared in the flesh!’

Anthroposophical wisdom has the duty of preparing the relation which can be attained during the first half of our century by purely human capacities. The responsibility of the Anthroposophical effort becomes ever greater and greater, for it has to prepare for a coming event which will only be understood if Anthroposophy makes its way into the souls of men and thus becomes fruitful for the further development of humanity. The alternative is that men will neglect to accept and make use of the instrument of Spiritual Science, through which this Event can be understood; in that case it will pass humanity by uncomprehended. For if men so entirely reject Spiritual Science that nothing of it should remain, they would not know that this event is there or would interpret it wrongly. The fruit of this event would then be lost to the future of humanity, and man would thus be thrust down into dreadful misery.

I have thus hinted at a new relation to the Christ which is germinating in the souls of men and which they will be able to evolve in a comparatively near future.

To-day we must again refer to the old and important teaching contained in the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount, and, starting from that we shall carry forward our vision to our own times and the near future.

The Sermon on the Mount as reported in St. Matthew's Gospel can only be understood if we grasp the whole spirit of it, in the sense of the development of all humanity. Let us briefly recapitulate what was put before us in the last lecture: that the old dim clairvoyance of man had gradually receded and that the capacities and knowledge of man had to be more and more limited to the physical plane, and that for this reason the connection of man with the Spiritual worlds had to be based on an event on the physical plane. If we recollect all this we shall understand that the Divine-Spiritual Being whom we have characterised as the Christ, had to embody Himself in a physical body at the very time when the perception of man had become limited to the physical plane. This was done so that the most essential part of the life of this Divine-Spiritual Being could be described in words and expressions used on the physical plane. The important point is not so much that few persons (in comparison to the whole of humanity) were able to have a bodily perception and observation of Christ Jesus, as that what is related of Him is a presentation of events on the physical plane. For it cannot be said that the earlier records of other Divinities related in words belonging to the physical plane refer to actual physical events. In everything that we are told of these, words can only be useful as indications;—for what occurred with respect to these Divinities can only be understood by one able to apply the words to the events of higher planes. The life of Christ Jesus can however, be understood by anyone who can apply what is told to the events of the physical plane. In reference to this we can say: The Christ-Being descended into a physical embodiment, into complete life in a physical body. That had to be because human capacities at that time were of this nature, and because the human ego as such had to become conscious of its being if evolution was to go forward in the right way.

We have seen that the most important of the older intermediaries for the event of Golgotha was Zarathustra or Zoroaster. In order that he might become what he was to be, at that time a body had to be prepared, containing an extract, as it were, of what had been given to a whole people, a people who had to give to humanity the qualities which can only be communicated through physical inheritance. We have seen that the most essential thing in the old Hebrew people was the duty of developing in successive generations, from father to son, from son to grandson, and so on, those qualities which had to be inherited in a continually increased form, till they finally appear in their highest and best form in the body which was derived by inheritance from Abraham and Solomon and which was finally occupied by Zarathustra. We have a great deal more to learn through our studies before we shall be able to understand the full mission of the old Hebrew people, in all its details. This necessitates that we should gradually learn how the qualities needed for the body of Jesus were more and more ennobled in the course of the descent from generation to generation. It had to be made as perfect as possible for the fulfilment of its world-historical mission, for that mission could only be carried out if all that pertained to the body of the Solomonian Jesus Being was as perfect as possible in itself as regards those qualities. Now we know that the four principles of man's nature, the physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego, are active in every human body; and that in time to come Spirit-self, Life-Spirit and Spirit-man, will also be active therein. This must not be taken to mean that the activity of the astral body will suddenly cease, or that the later is not being prepared in the earlier. In a certain respect everything that follows later must be prepared in what went before. Of course man cannot of his own strength so work upon himself to-day that the Life-Spirit, for instance, could come to particular expression within him; but in him work other Divine Spiritual Beings, with an activity which may be called an activity of the Life Spirit. This applies also to Spirit-man. Therefore, all the seven principles of the body, or rather of the human organism of Jesus of Nazareth had to be ennobled, as regards the qualities which had to be dealt with. This required very special preparation. This preparation may to-day give us an inkling of the secrets concealed in the development of humanity and of the earth.

The germs of the perfection in the body of Jesus of Nazareth had to be prepared long before. We have seen how during the first period (extending from Abraham to Solomon or David), the generations were worked upon just as a man's physical body is worked upon during the time between his birth and the change of teeth. This work was so performed by the forces active behind evolution, that at a certain time there was actually an ancestor of Jesus who already contained within him, capacities as nearly perfect as possible, and these re-appeared in the body which became the vehicle of Zarathustra. Thus in an ancestor of Jesus the foundations of a right development of all the seven principles of man's nature were present. In other words: If we trace back the ancestry of Jesus, we must find one ancestor who possessed the germ of the seven-principled-nature—although not so perfectly developed as in the body of Jesus of Nazareth—yet present in rudimentary form. Although not expressed in their external tradition, the secret doctrine of the ancient Hebrews was cognisant of this fact. It was aware that once upon a time a man lived of whom it must be said that the seven principles worked in him in such a way that they had to be described as quite peculiarly worthy of note! The Initiates of the old Hebrew secret doctrine actually pointed to an ancestor of Jesus of Nazareth, knowing that be possessed these seven human principles in a quite remarkable degree!

They called the ego of this ancestor, ‘Itiel,’ to indicate that in him the ego must have possessed that force (for Itiel signifies something like ‘possessor of force’). He must have possessed that dauntlessness, which would, when carried down through the generations, become the proper ego-vehicle for the high being who was to reappear in Jesus of Nazareth. In the same way they called the astral body of this ancestor ‘Lemuel’; that would more or less describe an astral body so far developed that it does not merely feel the law, the conformity to law, outside itself, but feels that it bears the law within it. They called the etheric body of this ancestor ‘Ben Jage’; that would signify an etheric body as far as possible transmuted within, which having attained a certain perfection, is able to take habits into itself. The physical body of this ancestor they called ‘Agur’, because the physical activity, the capacity of this ancestor on the physical plane, consisted in his having assimilated everything brought over from old tradition; for ‘Agur’ signified a collector. ‘All the ancient conceptions of the world, all the old traditions, were gathered together in Jesus; and the rudiments of this were already developed in this ancestor. What worked as Spirit-Man in this ancestor, was called, (because the Divine-Spiritual Beings gave loving attention to their work on the rudiments of Spirit-Man,) ‘Jedidjah’, a word signifying something like ‘the darling of the Gods’. What worked in this ancestor as Buddhi or Life-Spirit, was called ‘Kohelet’; for it was said: ‘In this ancestor there must have worked a Life-Spirit which was able to act as a teacher to the whole nation, so that its content could be poured out to them all’. And finally, Manas or Spirit-self in this ancestor was known by the word, ‘Salomo’, which signifies inner balance, for they said: Such a Spirit-self must have had within it the rudiments of being inwardly whole, of being in a state of balance within. Thus this ancestor, who is usually known only by the name of Schelomo, Schleimo, or Solomon, has three principal names: Jedidjah, Kohelet, Salomo; and four additional names: Agur, Ben Jage, Lemuel and Itiel, for these names signify the four coverings, whereas the three first names signify the divine inner part. The secret doctrine of the old Hebrews had seven names for this person. If later, people were dissatisfied with Solomon, as was the case even among certain sects of the Jews themselves (whether rightly or wrongly cannot be gone into here), this can easily be accounted for. In Solomon there were great, important rudiments, which were to be further propagated for a distinct purpose. Now an individual human being, at a definite stage of his evolution, does not always display in his outer life the germs of the qualities he is to bequeath to his descendants; perhaps for the very reason that such great forces are within him he may even be more subject to failure in this direction. The lack of morality to be observed in Solomon is not in contradiction to what the old Hebrew secret doctrine saw in him; on the contrary it would explain his failings.

Thus the old Jewish secret doctrine looks back to an ancestor of Jesus, fully conscious of his significance for the whole mission of their people. All that was but rudimentary in this personality, was propagated by descent through the generations, and appeared in its essence when it was required and made use of in the course of the world's history. This may give us an inkling of the secrets, regulated by laws, which lie behind the evolution of mankind.

Now if the mission of the old Hebrew people pre-eminently consisted in the fact that through the physical inheritance certain capacities are, as it were, instilled into their blood, capacities to be given to all mankind from the Spiritual world through this people, then, at the time of the appearance of John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth, humanity ought to have been sufficiently advanced to be able, through these ennobled capacities, to reascend into the Spiritual world; in other words it ought to have been able to take up the Christ-Impulse. I have told you all this to show what preparations were necessary in order, in the development of physical humanity, to create a sheath capable of enclosing the Christ-Being.

We can now perhaps feel and realise the intrinsic nature of the progress in the mission of humanity brought about by the descent of the Divine mission into physical matter, in the Jewish people. We can feel how the Divine was carried down into the depths of physical matter, in order that from this turning-point man might reascend so much the higher, from the now finer physical into the Spiritual. The ascent into the Spiritual had to begin from that time. For this however, an impulse had to be given to mankind which should to some degree place all that man can desire or expect from evolution into that deepest centre in man's being which can be designated as the ego. Through Christ, the impulse was to penetrate to the depths of man's inner being, out of the body of Christ there spoke such an impulse as called to the deepest part of man's nature. What was to be made different by this impulse?

Before this impulse came, all that brought happiness to men, that gave them bliss and made them feel ‘filled with the Divine,’ came to them in a sense from without; they expected it to come thence. If we do not merely study the history of the world from external documents but according to what the Spiritual records can give us, we must say that we look back to ancient times, when man ascended to the realm of Spiritual beings through arousing in himself,—whether by normal means or not,—the gift of clairvoyance. But this vision awoke in a dreamy way; Divine-Spiritual forces worked in it and the ego was suppressed. Man was more or less outside his ego. Although in his normal state he was not so conscious of his ego as he became later, yet he was then in the age when the spirit worked within him and carried him outside himself, without his ego into the Spiritual world. He yielded himself completely, either to the external Divine-Spiritual or to the Divine-Spiritual within his soul. But during that time of ecstasy, of enchantment, he was not in any sense conscious of his condition. The time was still to come when man would realise the relation to the spirit in his own ego, and thence permeate the deepest core of his being with the consciousness: I belong to a Divine-Spiritual kingdom. That could only come about through Christ pouring His own Being into the earth-being, so that the ego could permeate itself with what was the pattern of Christ. That enabled man to say: ‘I am now in a Spiritual realm, in the Kingdoms of Heaven with my ego, ‘whereas man formerly entered the Kingdoms of Heaven while outside it. ‘The Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near, was the teaching given. For this the minds of men had to be changed, they were no longer to believe that they could only enter the Spiritual world in a state of ecstasy, for they would be able to find their relation to the Kingdoms of Heaven in full ego-consciousness.

We can see that this had to take place, for the old clairvoyant condition had, in the course of thousands of years, grown worse and worse. Whereas in olden times man, when in ecstasy ascended to the good Divine-Spiritual powers, that which still remained of the old ecstatic condition at the time of the founding of Christianity, had become such that when man was now outside himself he did not ascend to the good but to the evil spiritual powers. That is the great difference between the two states of development. In ancient times when man dreamily rose into the Spiritual worlds by the suppression of his ego—‘mediumistically’ as we should say to-day—he was then in the company of the good Spiritual beings. This had become different at the time when man was to find the way into the Kingdom of Heaven with his ego; when he now sought or brought about the states of ecstasy, they are described as being states of ‘obsession,’ which brought him into connection with evil hostile spiritual powers. So at the time of the appearance of Christ Jesus the following had to be proclaimed as a healing doctrine: ‘It is not right for you to try without your ego to get into a condition in which you can become aware of the Spiritual worlds; the right way now is to seek contact with the Divine-Spiritual worlds in the deepest core of your being!’

This is essentially the teaching contained in the Sermon on the Mount of St. Matthew's Gospel. We might re-write it thus: In olden times there was a dream-like clairvoyance. In this man was, in ecstasy, transported into the Spiritual worlds. At that time he was rich in Spiritual life; he was no beggar in the spirit as he became when Christianity was founded. When in olden times he was filled with the spirit, with what the Greeks called ‘Pneuma’, he was transported into the Spiritual worlds. Christ could not now say: ‘Blessed or God-filled are those who in their ecstatic states become rich in the spirit, for these are the very ones who will certainly be healed’! He now had to proclaim: ‘The time has come when blessed or God-filled are those who have become beggars in the spirit!’ That means, those who can no longer rise into ecstatic dreamy clairvoyant conditions, but who are obliged to seek the Kingdom of Heaven within, from out of their ego.

Formerly, when man was placed amidst the sorrows and sufferings of earth, he only had to call forth within him the state in which he could be transported into the Divine-Spiritual worlds. He was not obliged to endure suffering, for when it came to him, he could at once seek the state in which he was filled with the spirit, God-filled, and in that state—severed from his ego—he could find balm for the sorrows and sufferings of earth. Christ Jesus had to proclaim that this time too was now past and over. Those would now be blessed, or God-filled, who, while they could no longer look outside for help for their sufferings, might through the strengthening of their own ego seek within themselves the power to find the Paraclete in their inner being. ‘Blessed (God-filled) are they who do not banish sorrow by ecstatically raising themselves to the Divinity, but who endure it, developing the power of the ego whereby they can find within themselves the Paraclete, known later as the Holy Ghost who reveals himself through the Ego. ‘Even Buddha in his time did not recommend that sorrow should be endured, but that it should be thrown off, with all the thirst of earth. Even six hundred years before Christ Jesus, Buddha described sorrow and suffering on earth as the worst consequences of the longing for existence. Six hundred years later, in the Sermon on the Mount, Christ in the second Beatitude proclaimed that sorrow must not be done away with in that way, but must be endured, that it was a trial through which the Ego might develop the strength it can find within itself: the inner support of the Paraclete. This is literally contained in the second sentence of the Sermon on the Mount, even to the expression; Paraclete. It is only necessary to read these things in the right way. That is precisely the task of our age; we must learn, through what is given to us in Spiritual Science, to read the great scriptures of old aright, through the teachings of Spiritual Science.

A third point is this. In olden times, when men could permeate themselves with what came to them in ecstasy and which the Greeks called ‘Pneuma’ or Spirit, they were then guided instinctively in their course. All their impulses, actions, emotions and desires—in fact, all that dwells in the astral body of man—was instinctively guided, when man was able to raise himself to the good Spiritual beings. He had not yet tried from his own ego to control and purify his inner passions and desires and to bring them into balance. Now, however, the time had come—and Christ was to proclaim this—when men having tamed, purified and balanced the passions, desires and impulses of this astral body—would of themselves reach the goal for the humanity of to-day, to which we give expression by pointing to the great progress of evolution. This has often been presented to us in the following way. Man began his existence on ancient Saturn; he continued it through the Sun and Moon-existence, until on the earth the ego was added to him. Only when he becomes conscious of this ego, when he tames and balances what was added to him by the astral body on the Moon, can he really attain to the goal of the earth-mission. Those who are able to control and balance the desires in their astral body can be blessed (God-filled), for by this means they will, through themselves, discover the Earth. Thus the third sentence of the Sermon on the Mount, which as usually translated contains a meaningless word, tells us the following: Those who ‘balance’ their passions desires and emotions (not make them ‘meek’) to them shall be given—or they shall ‘inherit’—the earth.

Thus the three first sentences of the Sermon on the Mount in their worldwide significance, place before us the following summary.

The first sentence of the Sermon on the Mount refers to the physical body, and informs us that it was formerly possible, in the olden times of humanity through a particular training of the physical body to perceive the Spiritual in clairvoyant dreamy conditions, but the physical body has now become poor as regards the inner possession of the spirit.

As regards the etheric body, through which man becomes conscious of suffering—although he is first aware of it in the astral body—the indication is given that men must learn to develop in themselves a force which will enable them to find help for the suffering which is given them as a trial.

Thirdly, we come on to the astral body, concerning which we are told, that through the taming and purifying of his impulses and passions man will find in his inner being the strength which will enable him to become a real ego, one to whom the earth mission is then allotted as his portion.

When we now ascend to the Ego, we know that this works in the sentient soul, intellectual soul and spiritual soul. The ego works in the sentient soul, that is: it spiritualised it. This enables man to feel the outpouring of human brotherly love—which becomes universal through the spreading of Christianity—as righteousness: ‘hunger and thirst after the all-ruling righteousness’. The sentient soul otherwise feels only in the physical body; it must now, through Christianity, learn to feel for spiritual things: to hunger and thirst after righteousness. Those who are able to find their human centre in the ego, will, as a result of their work on themselves, satisfy the longing in their sentient soul for an all-ruling earthly righteousness. ‘Blessed are they who, through the Christ-Impulse, learn to hunger and thirst after righteousness; for they will find a strong force in their inner being whereby, because they are working for the righteousness of the world, they shall find within themselves the satisfaction of this quality.’

We now come to the intellectual soul. We have often emphasised the fact that whereas in the sentient soul the ego is as yet but dimly brooding, in the intellectual soul it begins to shine forth, later to attain full consciousness in the spiritual soul where it first becomes a pure ego. In the intellectual soul something very singular happens: the human ego—i.e., that wherein we each resemble all other men, for each of us bears the ego within him—shines forth. No matter in what part of the world we meet with our fellow-man, through the fact that an ego shines out of his intellectual soul he is a human being like ourselves. Something shines forth from our intellectual soul, and if we receive it as well as we can and carry it out into the world, we can enter into the right relation with our fellow-men. In our intellectual soul we are to develop something which we must pour forth into our surroundings and which must flow back to us again. That is why this is the only occasion in the Sermon on the Mount when the subject of the Beatitude is like the predicate, ‘Blessed (or God-filled) are they who develop love; for as they radiate forth love, it will return to them again. ‘This shows the infinite depths of such a spiritual document, for it can be understood by the very way in which the sentences are constructed, it can be understood even down to the smallest details, if gradually, year after year, one collects all that Spiritual Science can give for the understanding of man. The difference between the fifth Beatitude and the others, in all of which the subject and the predicate are different, cannot in the least be understood without knowing that the fifth Beatitude points directly to the intellectual soul, or Mind-soul. We will now ascend to the work of the ego on the Spiritual or Consciousness soul. Here at last the ego is pure and unalloyed; only here can it become conscious of itself. This is beautifully expressed in the Sermon on the Mount, in the verse which expresses that only in the ego can the divine substance in man come to life. ‘Blessed are they, who are pure in blood or in heart (which is the expression of the ego), who allow nothing to enter there but the pure ego-nature; for they will recognise God therein, they will perceive God!’

The Sermon on the Mount now rises to that which refers to the Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit, and Spirit-Man. Here man can no longer work through himself alone; at this stage of his evolution be must appeal to the divine Spiritual worlds, which, through Christ, have been brought into connection with the earth; he must look up to the renewed divine spiritual worlds. Whereas in former times strife and disharmony entered humanity through the ego-nature—as indeed it still does to-day—peace will be poured out over the earth through the Christ-Impulse. And those who take up the Christ-Impulse will become the founders of peace in that part of human nature which in the future will gradually develop as Spirit-Self; they will thus in a new sense become the sons of God, in that they will bring down the spirit from the Spiritual Realms—‘Blessed are they who bring peace—or harmony into the world; for they shall thereby be the sons of God!’ Thus must they be called, who are really filled inwardly with a spirit self which is to bring peace and harmony on the earth.

Now, we must clearly understand, that of all that develops on the earth, some part survives into later ages. This, in a certain respect, is hostile to what implants itself as a germ in later ages. What the Christ-Impulse brings, enters into the whole evolution of humanity—it does not, however, enter all at once, but rather in such a way that something still remains from the earlier stages of evolution. It is therefore necessary that those who first understand this Christ-Impulse should stand firm on the basis thereof, quite permeated inwardly with its force. If they are inwardly permeated by the force that proceeds from the seed that has come from the Christ and stand firm on that foundation, they will then be blessed in a new sense; in this they develop the force of firmness. ‘Blessed are they who stand under the new order, who stand under Christ and who suffer persecution from that which remains over from the old order!’ And the last of the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount points straight to the Christ-Impulse itself, for He says to the Apostles: ‘Blessed are ye, who are especially called to carry the Name of Christ out into the world!’

Thus we see how the Sermon on the Mount directs Christianity from out of the great teachings of cosmology and humanity, while everywhere directing attention to the force within, the centre point of which must be found in the Ego itself. The time has now come when this must be understood, and understood in such a way that people must not believe themselves to be true Christians because they try to find Christianity in some dogmatic collateral signification or side issue, but rather those are true Christians who understand the meaning of the text: ‘Change the disposition of your souls, for the kingdoms of heaven have descended even into the ego!’ Those persons can be called ‘Christians’ in the true sense who realise that this is the essential point, and who further understand that this had to be put at the beginning of our era in a different way from that in which it must be given out now! It would be a mistaken idea of Christianity to believe that what was considered Christian in the words spoken two thousand years ago has not since then undergone further development. Christianity would stand for nothing but a dead stream of culture. But it is a living one! It is developing, and will continue to develop! Just as it is true that Christianity had to start from the time when man had descended right down to the physical plane, when a Divine Being became man in a physical human body, so it is also true that at our present time man must learn to rouse himself to the understanding of Christianity and of the Christ Being Itself, from a Higher Spiritual Standpoint!—What does this mean?

Just as it is true that the old dreamy clairvoyant forces had been lost, so that at the time of Christ those persons who were filled ‘with God’ in the old sense could no longer be described as ‘blessed,’ but only such as formed the kingdoms of Heaven within them, it is also true that the ego of man will reascend into the Spiritual world in full consciousness and will develop ever new forces and capacities. Just as it is true that the time of the Baptist was the time when those capacities which led down to the physical plane had reached a crisis in humanity, it is also true that we have now again reached an important time. What is called the ‘Dark Age,’ which began in the year 3101 B.C. and reached its height at the time of the Incarnation, came to an end at the close of the 19th Century. The Kali-Yuga was concluded in 1899! We are now approaching a time when new forces and capacities will be developed by man and these will be distinctly apparent in the last half of our present century. These new forces and capacities must be understood. Particularly those persons who have studied and understood Anthroposophy must realise that such an uplifting of humanity towards the Spiritual has again become possible. For during the important times that will follow after 1930, single individuals will find it possible to develop higher forces in their nature, whereby what we know as the etheric body will become visible. A certain number of people will develop etheric clairvoyant powers.

One of two things will then be possible, either the materialism of our age will continue, in which case when these forces are manifested men will fail to understand that they lead into the Spiritual worlds; they will then be wrongly understood and so be crushed. Should that occur, would not people, speaking in a materialistic sense at the end of the year 1940, be justified in saying: ‘Now see what fantastic prophets those were who spoke at the beginning of the 20th century! Nothing of what they foretold has been fulfilled.’ But if the new capacities have not appeared, that would not contradict what may be said now, and must indeed be said; it would only prove that people without the right understanding have choked them in the bud and that they have missed something which humanity must possess if its further evolution is not to collapse into dissolution and decay. That is the great responsibility of Anthroposophy. Anthroposophy has sprung from a knowledge of the necessity for an advanced preparation for something which will come, but which might be overlooked and suppressed. Anthroposophy has the task of bringing about an understanding of the Spiritual forces developing in man. If these forces are suppressed humanity will sink deeper into the mire of materialism.

On the other hand, Anthroposophy may be successful in spreading through its teachings an understanding of the fact that man must rise into the Spiritual worlds; it may succeed in lifting mankind out of the materialistic frame of mind. For this, however, something must now come forth from the anthroposophical movement, something that was prepared centuries ago, but which must now, in our own age, evolve to a particular and important turning-point.

The centuries that lie behind us were fitted for cultivating to an increasing extent the materialistic ideas of man. Under this materialistic influence it was easy to believe that the Christ-Impulse and the Christ-Being would come into touch with the world by incarnating once again—or perhaps oftener—in a physical, material body. Instead of acquiring clear notions of the fact that men must grow up as regards their capacities so that a great number, and finally all, might experience the Event of Damascus—that is: might experience the Christ in the atmosphere around the earth, and see Him in His etheric body—it was believed that Christ would descend again in a physical body, for the materialistic satisfaction of those who refuse to believe in the spirit, and who will not believe what St. Paul saw in the Event of Damascus: that Christ is in the Earth-atmosphere and that He is always there! ‘I am with you always, even unto the end of the world!’ Those who develop the methods of clairvoyant vision into the Spiritual world will find what, could not be found there in the pre-Christian time: the Christ in His etheric body. That is the important progress in the evolution of humanity; before the first half of our century has elapsed, those faculties by means of which the event of Damascus becomes a personal experience, will develop naturally as it were, and men will see the Christ in His etheric body. He will not descend into flesh, but man will ascend when he has acquired understanding of the spirit.

That is the manner of Christ's return in our own age, for in this 20th century men must work their way up out of the Kali-Yuga into a century of clairvoyance. They must ascend to Christ by means of the capacities which they will develop; they must ascend to the Christ where He is and where He can be seen, at first sight, by those in the vanguard, those who through the teachings of Anthroposophy can be guided to what in the course of the next 2,500 years will be experienced to a greater or less degree by every human soul.

The great event which awaits mankind in the near future is, that those who raise themselves—with full Ego-consciousness—to the etheric vision of Christ in His etheric body, will be ‘God-filled’ or blessed. For this, however, the materialistic mind must be thoroughly overcome, and men must acquire understanding of Spiritual doctrine and Spiritual life.

In bygone centuries it was, comparatively speaking, not harmful for men continually to return to the materialistic conception of the so-called return of Christ. Particularly at the small times of transition, when that which has now reached its climax in a materialistic sense was being prepared for, as, for instance, in France in 1137, when a Messiah was expected, and was awaited by many in wide circles. A Messiah did actually appear then, but he led the people astray, because the belief in him had arisen through their materialistic ideas, for it was believed the Messiah would come in the flesh. Thirty years before, another Messiah appeared in Spain; there, too, it had been foretold that a Messiah would come in the flesh. At about the same time another new Messiah appeared in North Africa; there, too, it had been prophesied that one would come from the East, and appear in the flesh. Throughout the whole time during which the materialistic mind was being prepared, in that the highest things were being grasped by it, there appeared such prophets whose coming was foretold. Such phenomena are well known to those who understand the times, and they continued into the 17th century, when the approaching appearance of a sort of Christ, a Messiah, was proclaimed far and wide. This again found acceptance by the materialistically religious minds of men. Based on these prophecies, a false Messiah was thus able to arise in Smyrna, in 1667, bearing the name of Shabbathoi Zewi. He wrote letters and epistles at that time from Smyrna, which, although they contained nothing but false matter, being written in a materialistic sense, shook the world as greatly as had once the Epistles of St. Paul. In the 17th century there went forth from Smyrna the proclamation that in that city there dwelt a Messiah in the flesh! And Shabbathoi Zewi, the ‘just man of God’ was so considered, that it was said the whole world-reckoning would now take on another form. ‘He will pass through the world with his faithful disciples and all must believe in him who are willing to see the truth, who wish to see Christ in the flesh!’ It was preached to the people that his birthday must be held as the greatest Festival on Earth! Whole hosts of people undertook pilgrimages there—not only from Asia and Africa, but also from Poland, Russia, Spain, France, and so on; great numbers of persons traveled as pilgrims to Smyrna to see Shabbathoi Zewi, who was supposed to be Christ in the flesh, until the thing grew beyond all limits and he was arrested by order of the Sultan! This, said the people, was but the fulfilment of the prophesy, for it was foretold he would be in prison for nine months! The Sultan could think of no other method than to have him brought forth and stripped, saying: ‘We will see whether thou be a Messiah, a Christ; I shall have thee shot!’ And so it was finally proved that Shabbathoi Zewi was only an ordinary Ba Rabbi after all!

Such impersonations are the result of the materialistic thinking of our times, and there will be more of the kind, for the materialistic mind will make use of men.

What I am now saying will often and often be said during the next few decades: that the capacities of man will develop up to seeing the Etheric vision of Christ, in the reality of which they can then believe, just as firmly as did St. Paul himself! This is the immediate future of man, and this it is for which Spiritual Science must prepare him. But on account of the materialistic thoughts of men the time will also come when strong temptations will arise; false Messiahs will appear in the flesh. It will then be proved whether Anthroposophists have rightly understood Anthroposophy. Those who have not will be so adversely affected by the materialistic mind that they will succumb to the temptation. Although they believe in Christ they will believe in an incarnated Christ. But those who have gained understanding of true Spiritual life will realise that the ‘second Coming of Christ’ in our century, that greatest of Events, signifies that He comes to man in the Spirit, because mankind in the course of its development will have developed up to the Spiritual, will have evolved up towards Christ! Therefore in our century, the Sermon on the Mount undergoes a complete modification. It must be entirely re-modeled, so to speak. Those persons will be God-filled (or blessed) who, through having been beggars for the spirit in their past incarnations, have now advanced so far as to be able to ascend to that part of the kingdom of Heaven where Christ will appear before their spiritual sight!

Every single sentence of the Sermon on the Mount in its present form might be reconstructed in this sense. Christianity will only re-conquer its ancient documents when they are grasped in a living sense, when it is realised that they are living, not dead writings. When the time comes—and that time is here now—when materialistical research extends to the Gospel and takes away the tradition of Christ, then, as we have often stated, Spiritual research will give back the Gospels to mankind! This coincidence will not be accidental, it will come of necessity. It may be that in our own time—during which the materialistic mind having gone as far as it can, will reach a crisis—certain unfortunate persons having, through their mistaken philosophy been led into curious ideas, may conclude that effects may be produced without causes, and that there never was an historical Jesus-Christ. This should be comprehensible to Anthroposophists. They ought, indeed, to feel a certain pity for those poor men who, notwithstanding their philosophy, are so entangled in materialistic thought that they have altogether lost the faculty of imagining the existence of spirit, and who, consequently, keep flying in the face of the saying, that there is no effect without a cause. Christianity as an effect could not have existed without a cause! Anthroposophy, speaking from spiritual investigation, will tell men of Christ in the form in which He now lives, if they will but listen with an understanding mind. The understanding must be sufficiently matured to recognise definitely that the Christ will reappear, but as a reality higher than a physical one, a reality to which one can only look up, after first having acquired a sense and an understanding for spiritual life.

Inscribe in your hearts that Anthroposophy must be a preparation for the great epoch of humanity which is immediately ahead of us. Do not in this look upon it as matter of the first importance whether the souls now incarnated are still incarnated in physical bodies when Christ appears in the manner described, or whether they will then have already passed through the Portal and stand in the life between death and rebirth. For that which takes place in the 20th century is not of importance to the physical world alone, but to all the worlds with which man is connected. Just as those persons who will be in incarnation between 1930 and 1950 will experience the vision of the Etheric Christ, so a mighty revolution will also take place in the world in which man lives between death and rebirth. Just as Christ after the Mystery of Golgotha descended into the underworld, so will the effects of the Event which will occur for the inhabitants of the physical plane, rise into the spiritual plane. Those people who have not been prepared for this by Spiritual Science will miss the great and mighty Event, which will also take place in the Spiritual worlds in which man then lives. Those persons will have to wait for a new incarnation to experience on earth what makes them capable of receiving the new Christ-Impulse. For it is on earth that we must acquire the capacity of grasping all the Christ-Impulses, no matter how high they may lead us! Not in vain has man been placed in the physical world; for it is here we must acquire that which leads us to an understanding of the Christ-Impulse! For all the souls now living, Anthroposophy is the preparation for the Christ-Event that awaits us in the near future. This preparation is necessary. Other events will follow this Christ Event in the course of the development of mankind. It will therefore be a great omission, if those who have the opportunity of raising themselves during this century to the Christ-Event, do not take advantage of it.

Only if we look upon Anthroposophy in this way and inscribe it in our souls, can we realise what it means to each human soul and what it ought to become to all humanity.

Our lecture to-day will consist of a kind of summing up of all we have heard in the course of the various lectures given here this winter, which may be taken as a continuation of the lectures on St. Luke's and St. Matthew's Gospels and of what was given here with reference to the lectures on St. John's Gospel which I gave in Stockholm. From the way in which these lectures were given, it will be clear that there never was any question in a narrow sense of explaining the Gospels, but rather that from the truths which in the first place are truths in themselves and as such can be found in the Gospels if rightly understood, light can be thrown in different ways upon other riddles of life.

When we go back beyond the founding of Christianity, we find two different kinds of Initiation: that of the North, described in more detail in the above-mentioned Stockholm Lectures, and that of the South, the chief characteristic of which is its connection with the Egyptian methods of Initiation. In the world of the ancients there were two different methods by which they could penetrate into the Spiritual world. In old Egypt a candidate for initiation had to descend into the depths of his own soul, beyond all that plays its part in the ordinary soul-life, as thinking, feeling and willing, and the like. There he found that from which the soul itself came forth: the divine Spiritual life of the world. A descent beneath those regions of the soul which are illuminated and permeated by the Ego, was the essential point in the Egyptian, or indeed, in any southern Initiation. In the Northern Initiation, on the other hand, the object striven for was that man should come out of himself, and expand into the phenomena of the world in a state of ecstasy. This was especially the case in the Germanic Druidic Mysteries and those of the Trotten. We heard how these two kinds of Initiation were combined in one stream, in what we call the Christian Initiation, and how this represented a higher unity combining the ecstatic Initiation of the North with the mystical contraction of the South. This gives an indication of a deeper foundation of cosmic Mysteries, permeating all existence. In reality this is in itself as great and mighty a fact as the fusion of the two different forms of Initiation of ancient times into the one single form of Christian Initiation; it is an example of a great and still more comprehensive law permeating all human existence, and also interwoven in the existence of all the outer world-phenomena, in so far as these are known to man. Everywhere we find ourselves confronted by opposites, by two parts of a duality. The Northern and Southern initiations offer one example of two opposite sides—polarities, as we might call them—that confront us in the life of the world. The other, the Christian initiation—in which these two forms of initiation flow together and as it were celebrate a Spiritual marriage—is an example of how opposites, dualities of any sort, reunite. This takes place without cessation; unities are always separating into dualities for the purpose of furthering evolution, while dualities unite again, and once more form unities. We can point externally to one great and mighty fact, extending beyond human evolution, which is an example of this division of unity into a duality, and of the streaming back of the two into one.

We have often thrown light on the Lemurian Epoch, which experienced, among other things, that great fact in the evolution of the world, the separation of the Moon from our Earth. That epoch also saw the first beginnings of that which in the present day sense of man's development, we may call the two opposites: man and woman; whereas in the ages preceding that of Lemuria we should only find unity of sex. There was an original unity, which separated into man and woman. We have already indicated, moreover, that in a future age the two sexes will once more become one, that the duality will again become a unity, a unity will come forth from a duality. That is the external indication of a far-reaching series of facts connected with the relation of two to one, or one to two.

What we thus meet with in the development of mankind is actually the expression, the image, of a still greater cosmic polarity rooted in a unity; greater than the example in our present-world life, of the two that in a distant future will be fused into one. It is necessary that we should take every one of the thoughts given us by Spiritual Science in its full depths, not allowing ourselves to form a habit of taking such thoughts in the same superficial way as other thoughts and conceptions which prevail in the world to-day, and which our present civilisation in its hasty and superficial triviality accepts. The thoughts of Spiritual Science must be taken as earnestly as possible. Therefore such a thought as that often spoken of and which indeed underlies all our teaching—that man as a little world, as a microcosm, is born out of the Macrocosm, the great world—must not simply be taken as an abstract thought, for in its content it is manifold and infinite. Above all, we must realise that the world contains more depth than is supposed; and that even when we have grasped a polarity or a truth in one of its aspects, that does not by any means signify that we know the last truth about it; rather must we patiently wait and observe, so that when we know one side of a thing, we should try to learn what refers to the other side of it.

Man is born out of the whole Cosmos; he must look up it to as to his Father-Mother, of whom he himself is an image. Yes, man is an image of the whole world with which he is acquainted, there is nothing in the being of man which does not in some way relate to what can be found in the great Cosmos. If we compare man, as seen to-day in the light of Spiritual Science, with the human forms of early ages, we find among others one characteristic feature of immense importance for the understanding of the nature of man. This sign can teach every one of us that, as regards what we have known about the world, the fact that some things that have been said are true, is not of sole importance; there is something else besides, something very different. When a man has proved the truth of a thing, he has not even then told us what is of greatest importance in it. For example, there is much truth in what a trivial natural scientist will tell about the resemblance between man and the higher mammals. It is an indisputable truth that man has the same number of bones and muscles, and so on. But after this has been proved, the last word on the subject has not been said. Man must learn, through the deepening and inwardness of Spiritual Science, to acquire a feeling for the value of a particular truth, to sense whether or no it is important and essential for the elucidation of a matter. People come along to-day and speaking from their trivial consciousness, keep on assuring us of the truth of their assertions. We have no wish to contradict them. But the point is, of what value are they for the understanding of the world? Now there is a certain fact—which is undeniably true, and with which everyone is acquainted, because we meet with it over and over again every day—the value of which, in its significance to man should be realised and felt in the right way. That is, the fact that man stands and walks upright and can gaze out into space around him. Man alone is capable of that! For we must say that even though the apes look as though they might possess this power, they have somehow missed it, for they cannot walk upright. Man is the only being who has achieved this, and who has succeeded in raising his countenance freely into the space around him. This fact is immeasurably more important than all those that a trivial Natural Science tells us as to the position occupied by man among the animals. What science says is true, but this is of much greater importance. If we wish to feel the force of this, we must make ourselves acquainted with the reason why man is a being that walks upright, a being certainly still bound to the earth, but one who, through his mental outlook and even through his sense-perceptions, raised himself into an upright position in space. The reason is that there is a certain polarity, a duality in the Cosmos, which corresponds to another duality in man. We can point to a duality in the universe and to a duality in man, as two opposites, existing in the microcosm and the macrocosm. The one alluded to in the macrocosm, in the great world, is that of the Sun to the Earth; and the same polarity that exists between Sun and Earth exists also in man. It is that between his head and his hands and feet; between his head and his limbs. As time goes on these things will be gone into more fully, but we must in the first place make ourselves acquainted with them and learn to feel that in a certain respect the head and limbs of man bear the same relation to each other as the Sun does to the Earth in our solar System. There are, in fact, in our earth those forces which in the course of the ages have brought about the whole form and movement of our hands and feet through certain mysterious forces which bind man to the Earth; while the forces which have lifted his countenance up in space, and which have transformed him from a being which gazes on to the earth to one who can look out into the infinite distances of cosmic space,—these forces have their seat in the Sun. Anyone who really has the right feeling will have the same impression when contemplating the self-evident polarity between man's head and his limbs, as he will if he turns his attention to the polarity between the Sun and Earth. This polarity will some day become a unity in the life of man, just as the Cosmic polarity will do.

Even as the Sun and Earth were once a single being which later divided into a duality, so will they some day be re-united; and the polarity in man between head and limbs will also some day become unity, difficult to imagine as it may seem to the man of to-day, who is not accustomed to such concepts.

We have thus pointed to a polarity in man and to its correspondence in the universe. There are, however, other polarities in man, which also have their corresponding counterparts in the universe. As regards the polarity between the head and limbs, all human beings on the earth are alike. It exists equally in man and woman. In this respect there is no difference between them; for every other polarity, for example that in the configuration of the soul, is not affected by this. If there were no other polarity but that existing between the microcosm and macrocosm, man and woman would be alike, but as it is they form another polarity in the being of man. Now we may ask: can we not also find a polarity in the universe corresponding to that between man and woman in human life? That can be found too. But before we are able to look for it we must make ourselves to some slight extent acquainted, in an occult sense, with the polarity between man and woman. In so doing we must not fall into the error of our materialistic age, which applies the polarity between man and woman—taking it simply as a question of sex—to the whole universe. Not only is that a trivial thing to do, but our learned men are taking a liberty when they consider that what is found in one domain is applicable to every other.

The corresponding polarity in the universe to that existing on our earth between man and woman cannot be called male and female. That would be nonsense. We must investigate the occult foundations of this other polarity. The polarity between male and female in our earthly evolution does not, of course, apply to the ‘human being.’ The human being as such is the same in both man and woman. When we speak of man and woman we only refer to the configuration of their physical and etheric bodies. This has nothing to do with the inner being of man; so that we cannot, in an occult sense, speak as our materialistic age does. A man and woman each possesses an astral body and an ego, but the ordinary perception knows nothing of that which makes a man or woman a human being, it can only speak of them as it sees them. We are not now speaking of the human being as such in man or woman, but of what constitutes a man or a woman, which is merely their outer sheaths. This must be thoroughly understood; for if what is about to be said were to be applied to the human being as such, it would be completely wrong. The polarity between man and woman within the above-named limits is as follows:—

In primeval ages the external human form was totally different. The present human forms—male and female—have gradually evolved out of an earlier single form, which had not yet divided into two. There was formerly a unity, where now there is a polarity, between man and woman. Now we know too, that the earlier uni-form was of a finer, more spiritual kind. Only in the course of ages did man develop a dense material form. When we look back not only do we find uni-form, but one which was more spiritual than the human form to-day. We have a primeval human being neither man nor woman, unity as yet undivided, and finer, more etheric, more spiritual than the later and more material human being, now separated into man and woman. What was the cause of the original unity having later developed into Man and Woman? This cause came about because, when the unity became a duality, the woman formed a physical body for herself which, if we may say such a thing, did not completely pass from the earlier form into the normal material form. The body of woman remained at a more spiritual stage, it did not fully descend into the material. It has certainly become dense and material, but at the same time it has retained an earlier, more spiritual form. Thus a spiritual stage has become material. The body of woman has, as it were, retained an earlier, more spiritual form, which has not descended completely into matter. Though it has become material, it has not done so as regards its form, for it still retains the form the human being originally possessed. Hence we may say: Woman is a manifestation of an earlier formation which was intended to be Spiritual and which, as seen to-day, is actually false, a maya, an illusion. If we accept the idea of a certain point in evolution when a spring-forward was made and when matter was crystallised, we can say: -the woman did not press forward as far as that point, she crystallised an earlier form. To one who can really perceive the facts of life, or who learns them through imaginative cognition, a woman's body is a somewhat truer imprint of the Spiritual behind it only as far as the head and limbs are concerned, that is to say, that her head and limbs alone express in their material appearance, something of a resemblance to their spiritual counterpart. The Spiritual behind the material form does not look like that, because the latter is not a true form.

Thus the saying that the world is ‘Maya’ can be applied to every region of life. It is very easy simply to state that ‘the world is Maya,’ but a man cannot grasp its meaning, if he does not go seriously into it, inquiring: ‘In how far are forms illusion?’ Some are more so and others less. There are those which at any rate approximately do in their outer semblance express the Spiritual behind them; these are the head and limbs. Others there are which are completely wrong and out of drawing; to these belong the rest of the human body, which is quite out of drawing. When the world understands these things it will no longer speak as foolishly as it does to-day, for it will then see that a certain deep, yet more delicate artistic sense tells us that the female form, with the exception of the head and limbs, is out of drawing, and if it is to be artistically represented the defects must be corrected. In better and more artistic times this was actually done, for no one who really has an eye for form can fail to observe that in the Venus of Milo the form has to a certain extent been corrected; but this as a rule is not noticed.

In this way we have divided the human being into two parts, consisting of those members of the body which are less of an illusion and those others that are more so and quite out of drawing. This does not apply to woman alone; but where a man is concerned the whole thing is reversed. He is the opposite pole. Just as the female form did not descend so far as the normal point necessary for rightly expressing the spirit in matter but crystallised at an earlier stage, so the male body on the other hand sprang just as far beyond that normal point as the female form stopped short of it. Thus the male body descended more deeply than the normal into materiality, and manifests this in its outer form. It would have quite a different appearance if it had not sprung beyond the middle point. Only as regards the head and limbs does the human body even approximately correspond to truth. As regards the rest of its form we must say that the female body, having reached a certain point, remained at a standstill; it consolidated before the waves of material existence broke over it; hence it manifest quite a different form from that which we should have seen if it had but waited till it had come in contact with material life before crystallising. The male body on the other hand plunged too deeply down and is just as greatly out-of-drawing as that of woman. Thus the woman's body manifests a distorted form in the Spiritual, while the man's body is distorted in the material. The true form would be between the two; it would consist of a happy average of both. Of course this affects the whole human being in his earth-life, in so far as he has a physical covering. What I have just said has nothing to do with the polarity between the head and limbs, it refers to the whole human being in one incarnation between birth and death. We incarnate either as man or woman. In so doing we have to take into account that which is out-of-drawing in the man or woman; but that extends to the whole human being, and the consequence is that if in one incarnation one has the body of a woman, the whole of this female body is influenced by the fact of its having remained behind at an earlier stage when the form was more pliable. In a male incarnation the whole physical body is permeated with the effects of having plunged down too strongly into coarse solid matter. If people had even the smallest inkling of what it means to think in the spirit, to live in the spirit, using the physical body only as an instrument,—so that one does not feel firmly fastened into it, identifying oneself with it—they would sing psalms about the misery of having to use a male body in an incarnation, for of course these material effects have also filtered into the brain. One observes that the forms of the male brain, through having been deeper into matter, are more difficult to manage than the more flexible forms of the female brain. It is truly a more difficult matter to train a male brain for the ascent into the higher worlds, and to translate the truths into thoughts, than it is to train a female brain for the same purpose. ‘For this reason it is not surprising to people who think, when a new conception of the world arises such as that of Spiritual Science, it is more easily grasped by the more manageable female brain; for it is more difficult for the male brain, being less pliable and obedient, to free itself from certain thoughts which it has absorbed. Hence Spiritual Science will not find an easy acceptance amongst the men who are to-day the leaders of culture and of the cultured ideas prevalent in our day. We must realise how awkward an instrument is the brain of a learned man to-day, not only for the acceptance of Spiritual Science, but also for thinking along those lines. But we must not look at these things in a wrong way and draw our own conclusions—rather should we look upon it as all the more significant that there are so many men whose brains are so pliant that they have become intimately acquainted with Spiritual Science.

These things can at first merely be hinted at, but if you allow them to work on you and then reflect over them, you will find immense perspective opening out regarding the life of man.

When we think of human life in its two opposites of man and woman, we are confronted with two forms, one that has remained at a standstill at an earlier stage, and one which has jumped on beyond the present stage and which draws into the present a form intended for the future, but presents it as a caricature. The female has preserved an earlier form and the male has taken on a later form, but has made it what it must not be in the future. The male form is incorrect, because it has brought later conditions of life into an age as yet too early for them.

Can we find a correspondence in the Cosmos to the polarity between male and female. Is there anything in the Cosmos which on the one hand shows us a development which has retained earlier forms and carried these over into a later age? And are there on the other hand forms which have transcended a certain stage, thus representing the caricatured form of a future state? If we bring to mind the concrete development which we know from the Akashic Records, we may put the question thus: Is there anything in the Cosmos outside, resembling an old Moon-existence which would not enter the Earth-existence, but retained from the old Moon something feminine in the Cosmos?

Is there anything which carries into the present time something like an old Moon existence belonging to an earlier stage? And is there in the Cosmos anything which has gone beyond a certain stage, and has condensed and thickened, so that it represents a later condition, a Jupiter condition?

There is! There is in the Cosmos the same polarity as we have described between male and female; and that is the polarity between a Comet and the Moon. If we wish to understand the nature of a Comet, wandering as it does in cosmic space regardless of the other laws of the Solar System, we must be clear as to the fact that the Comet carries the laws belonging to the old Moon-existence into our own. Those laws it has preserved, and with those it enters our existence. It has taken on the present substance of the solar-terrestrial system; but, as regards its motion and its nature, it has remained behind at that stage of natural law which prevailed in the Solar System when our earth was still Old Moon. It carries a former condition into a later, into the present; just as the woman's body carries an earlier condition into present-day existence. The nature of the Comet is one part of a polarity, and that of the Moon represents the other pole. When, in the Lemurian age the Moon evolved out of the Earth, it took with it certain portions, which had to be removed in order that the human being as such might develop. The earth was not to become as dense as it must have become if it had retained the Moon within it. The Moon actually represents a caricature of the Jupiter-condition. Just as a fresh ripe fruit is found in a petrified state in a stalactite, so the Moon in its configuration transcended the middle form, as has the male form of the human being. Exactly the same polarity that we find in human life between the male and the female, we can find in the Cosmos between the natures of Moon and Comets.

Thus are these things connected: as sun to earth, so head to limbs,—as Moon to Comet, so man to woman in the human being. Here again we must not go home and say:—well, now, we have some nice polarities to observe!—We must take these things very seriously and remember that on other occasions I said something more besides this. We must take into consideration the fact that a man is only male as regards his physical body, for as regards his etheric body he is female; and the woman on the other hand is only female in her physical body. A woman can only be said to be female as far as her physical body is concerned and that can be said of the etheric body of a man; so that the relation of the etheric body of a man to the etheric body of a woman is as that of Comet to Moon. If you like you may perhaps say: this makes everything confused again! But these things are so. In a culture which has created its ideas with a densified brain, those same ideas tend to create dense outlines which cannot be modified, so that when ideas are once formed they must be held on to. But the spirit does not admit of this. That is mobile, and when we form ideas, we must keep them plastic. So we must apply what has just been said as to the relation of the Moon and Comets to Man and Woman, to the male in the woman and the female in the man. It applies to the male and female elements in the human being but not to man and woman as we meet them externally.

We have now found some extremely interesting connections between the development of the human being and that of the Cosmos. Of course, as I have already observed: Those who sit in the high places of ‘true scientific observation’ will consider what has just been put forward about the Comet and the Moon, as utterly wild and absurd. That cannot be helped. They do not desire to investigate the truth. But on the ground of Spiritual Science, we can build a bridge between that which comes from the Spiritual and what is seen on the physical plane. Those others will not do this.

In the year 1906, during the Congress in Paris, I called attention to the fact that Spiritual investigation from its knowledge of the nature of Comets, was able to say: As the combinations of carbon and hydrogen play the same part on our earth as did the combinations of carbon and nitrogen (cyanogen) on the Old Moon, the cometary life must contain cyanogen compounds,—combinations of carbon and nitrogen. Those persons who have followed these things attentively will remember this. Our Spiritual Science, therefore, some time ago announced that the cometary nature must contain cyanogen in some form. During the last few weeks this fact has been mentioned in all the newspapers as an external fact discovered by spectro-analysis. This is only one case—hundreds of others could be quoted—in which Spiritual investigation builds bridges for the facts of external research. In this case spectro-analysis asserts what Spiritual Science stated years before. The results of external materialistic investigation never contradict those of Spiritual research. We may depend upon statements such as the above-mentioned, when those who sit in the high places of true science constantly point to the external facts. Only we must not confuse these facts with the limited conclusions which people draw for themselves. If everything in Natural Science to-day was really a fact, Natural Science would greatly contradict Spiritual Science; but their facts are no facts, only the corrupt conceptions of those who, through the conditions prevailing in our age, are called upon to deal with such matters.

Now, having brought before our minds the polarity to be found in human life as well as in the Cosmos, we may ask: What then is brought forth from the Universe as a result of this?

It is rather difficult to describe in a somewhat short time the immensity underlying such a fact. You will allow me, therefore, by way of example, to describe the life of man as it runs its course seen externally. First of all, we see something of which we may say, it pursues its course like the life of a good citizen, from day to day. He gets up in the morning, eats his breakfast and completes the rest of the day in accordance with the usual rules. There are certain events, however, which can intervene in a man's life at one fell swoop, and may bring about changes in the day's course. Take the case of a man and wife living for a while the life of good citizens with but little variety in the usual programme of their day, till something occurs which actually causes a leap in the ordinary external life of people in such circumstances. When a new human being incarnates, and enters life as a citizen of the world, the event causes a leap, a great change in the ordinary process of everyday life. When a new citizen of the world comes on the horizon of man and wife, something actually occurs which gives the whole family connection a new form. I brought this forward as an example by means of which we can gain some little understanding of the deep occult background of cometary life. In the Cosmos too, life goes on from day to day, from year to year—like the life of the good citizen—one day is like another; the Sun rises and sets, the plants blossom in spring, and wither away in autumn, and when there is rain or sunshine or hail or the like, these correspond to such events in ordinary life as, for instance, when instead of our ordinary five o'clock tea, we have a little party. We see these things happening as a matter of course. All this hangs together with the laws underlying the movements of Sun, earth, and so on, and the way in which these continue day by day and year by year. Into this regular process, there intervenes the rarer, yet in a certain respect recurrent, appearances of the comets. They come upon the process of Cosmic happenings like a new citizen entering the horizon of man and wife. Through the appearance of a comet in the cosmos, something is actually brought about in the life of humanity which could not occur in the ordinary process of life. If evolution is to continue, there must be, not only that which repeats itself day by day, but something new must be introduced into it. Just as something quite special enters the life of a family with the birth of a new earth-citizen, so something quite different enters the progress of the human race on earth through the appearance of a comet, which breaks through the ordinary process of cosmic existence. It is actually as though something new were born, when a comet appears.

One who can investigate these things spiritually is able to indicate quite definitely the different functions of the separate comets, and how each one has to introduce something spiritually new into the world. Thus Halley's comet is one of those which, in its periodic appearances, always introduces something specially new into the life of man. Whereas otherwise things recur in the ordinary way, this comet brings about a new birth in human inner life and culture. I can only characterise what I mean, by referring to the three last appearances of Halley's comet, in the years 1759, 1835, and the one we are now expecting. What are the tasks of these three appearances? Other comets have other tasks. New births in the universe are not always to be greeted with the same joy as the birth of a young citizen into a family. All sorts are born into the universe; those that bring humanity forward as well as those that drive it back. Now the appearance of Halley's comet, or what it signifies spiritually for the further evolution of humanity, is connected with that which humanity had to absorb out of the Cosmos at the various periods of Kali-Yuga in order that thought should descend more and more into materiality. With every new appearance of this comet a new impulse was born, to drive humanity further away from a spiritual cosmic conception by the Ego, and to urge it to grasp the world in a more materialistic way. This does not mean a descent into matter, but rather the driving of that Spiritual substance which the human Ego should draw from the universe for its Spiritual existence, down into the sphere of materialistic conception. All those conceptions of the second half of the 18th century, which are called shallow and superficial and which Goethe so ridiculed in his Truth and Poetry and which found their exponent for instance in Holbach's Systeme de la Nature, are understood in their cosmic sense through the appearance of Halley's comet in the year 1759. The commonplace materialistical literature of the second third of the 19th century was preceded by the appearance of that comet in 1835. Things that take place microcosmically on the earth are macrocosmically connected with events of the great world. A new impulse towards materialism was again given by the appearance of Halley's comet in 1835. Buchner, Vogt and Moleschott are examples of those who were influenced on the earth by what appeared with Halley's comet, as a mighty sign from the Cosmos. We are now to be confronted in the near future—for humanity must be tested, must rise out of itself, must feel the resistance to Spirituality so that it may unfold all the more forces for its re-ascent—we shall be confronted with the forces which the new appearance of this comet will send forth from the universe, forces which may lead humanity down into a still more arid and dreadful materialism. Something may be born, which even the most arid and driest thoughts of the Buchner school could not have imagined. but this possibility is a necessity, for only if man overcomes the opposing forces can he acquire the strong force able to lead him up again.

If we bear this in mind, we shall then encounter in the right way what we call ‘Signs from the Heavens.’ This is really a fact; though what I have said must not be taken in a superstitious sense, as though God were pointing with a wand from Heaven to show men what they have to do! The approaching appearance of Halley's comet is one of these signs, and notice should be taken of it. For a mighty ascending impulse must follow it that we may rise from the depths of materialism into which we have sunk, into Spirituality. Just as we are given the possibility of being swamped in materialism, we are also given the chance to ascend into clearer, spiritual heights.

It was clearly and distinctly indicated in the last lectures that during the first half of the 20th century an etheric clairvoyance will develop in a few single individuals, as a natural capacity. In order that man may not sink more deeply into the materialism indicated by the present sign of 1910, those who have understanding of Spiritual Science have the possibility of developing those forces in the human soul which can lead man beyond materialism. If a man understands these forces, they will teach him how he may himself see the etheric nature of Christ. We are living at an important crossing-point, when men will be taught, even by signs from heaven, that in one direction the path will lead deeper into the mire, while the other path leads to the development in themselves of the forces which, at the conclusion of Kali-Yuga, will lead to etheric clairvoyance. The cry of John the Baptist: ‘Change the disposition of your souls,’ applies to us to-day! This may really be said. Just as on the one hand we are given the possibility of perishing in the materialistic morass, on the other it is possible, through the Sun reaching a certain point in the Constellation of Pisces at the Vernal Equinox, that a certain etheric clairvoyance may be acquired. For the spiritual ascent there are also signs, to show us how the forces come from the Cosmos. If a man is a student of Spiritual Science he will of necessity grow to understand this decision; if he does not, that means that he has not understood Spiritual Science aright. We must pass through the test submitted to us by the sign in the Heavens which we now recognise to be the appearance of Halley's Comet.

Let us now picture the vision of Christ, as it will appear to the first fore-runners during the next 2,500 years, and as it appeared to Paul on the way to Damascus. Man will ascend to a cognition of the spiritual world and will see the physical world permeated by a new ‘country,’ or new realm. Man's physical environment will present a totally different aspect in the course of the next 2,500 years, through the addition of an etheric realm, which indeed is already here now, but which he will learn to perceive. This etheric sphere is even now spread out before the eyes of those who have carried their esoteric training as far as ‘Illumination’—as was the case with the Initiates even in Kali-Yuga. That which men will see more and more in the future is visible in its greatest heights to the Initiates. The Initiate draws from thence at repeated intervals, the forces he requires. When he has to carry out some special work, he draws his forces from those realms within the earth's circuit which are visible to him, but which can only be seen by those who have the vision. It will help us to understand this, when we know that a part of that land from which the Initiate drew his forces during Kali-Yuga, will be thrown open to a great part of humanity during the next 2,500 years. Formerly, in the days of primeval clairvoyance, man, though then without the strong Ego-consciousness, could see into the Spiritual world—and in a way he saw more or less what he will see now,—but he will now enter it with his newly acquired self-consciousness. At that time he saw it in dream-like ecstatic conditions, or by looking into his own soul. That world which during Kali-Yuga became physical was then open to man's gaze. Hence the traditions, which have preserved recollections of the old clairvoyance, tell us of an unknown Fairy-Land which has now disappeared from sight. There are wonderful documents in Eastern literature full of a peculiar tragical enchantment, and telling us that at one time it was possible for human beings to travel to a land where the Spiritual flowed into the physical. It is that Land from whence at certain times the Initiates—and at all times the Bodhisattvas—drew fresh forces. The Eastern writings speak with deep sorrow of that land, asking: ‘Where is it? We are told the names of places, paths are named; but the Land itself is concealed, even from those most initiated among the Lamas of Thibet!’ Only to the highest Initiates is it accessible. But it is always stated that some day this Land will return to earth. That is true; it will return to earth! And the guide thereto will be He Whom men will see, when, through the vision of the Event of Damascus, they reach the Land of Shamballa. ‘Shamballa’—for so this Land is called—has withdrawn from the sight of man. It can only be entered to-day by those who, as Initiates, go there from time to time to be strengthened. The old forces can no longer lead man thither. That is why Eastern literature speaks with such tragic despair of the vanished Land of Shamballa. But the Christ-Event, which will be vouchsafed to man in this century through his newly-awakened faculties, will bring back the Fairy-Land of Shamballa, which through the whole of Kali-Yuga could only be known to the Initiates.

Thus humanity is now called upon to make a decision, whether it shall allow itself, through what comes with the Halley Comet, to be lead down into a darkness even lower than that of Kali-Yuga, or whether through an understanding developed by Anthroposophy it shall not neglect to cultivate the new faculties by which it may find the way to the Land which according to Eastern Literature has disappeared, but which Christ will once more reveal to mankind;—the Land of Shamballa. That is the great question of the dividing of the ways: either to go down or to go up. Either to go down into something which, as a Cosmic-Kamaloka lies still deeper down than Kali-Yuga, or to work for that which will enable man to enter that realm, which is really alluded to under the name of Shamballa.

In the course of the lectures given here last winter we considered the Being of Christ from many different aspects and we endeavoured in various ways to point out that what we know as the Christ-Impulse is the most powerful factor for the development of mankind that we have ever possessed in the whole evolution of the earth. It is therefore easy to understand that, in the first place, this subject can never be exhausted, that there could be no end to all one might do to elucidate further the Christ-Impulse from all sides, and moreover, when all is said and done, all that is of profoundest interest to man is really connected with the appearance of Christ. We saw that the Gospels themselves attempted to approach the subject of the Being of Christ from four different sides, and we touched upon several of the secrets contained in the different Gospels. We were only able up to a certain point to throw light on that of St. Matthew. It must be left for the present, and we shall return to the secrets of St. Matthew's Gospel in lectures to be given at a later time, after which we can venture further into the depths of St. Mark's Gospel. If we were now, at the conclusion of our winter lectures in this group, to give more sketchy indications of what remains to be discussed, it would interfere with the harmony of the lectures to be given later. To-day, as also in our next lecture, we shall touch upon questions which in a certain respect relate to the Christ-Problem; in fact, we shall to-day refer to the question of the connection between the human conscience and the intervention of the Christ-Impulse in the development of mankind. In so doing we also achieve another object. Next Thursday the public Lectures on ‘The Human Conscience’ will be given, and we shall speak on that same subject in our group-meeting to-day. There is a definite purpose in this—one which, as time goes on, will often be apparent to our Spiritual vision. The object is to show that the same subject can be spoken of in a different way in a study-group such as this, from the way in which it must be handled in a public lecture, intended for persons who are not members of our movement. The Anthroposophist, among many other capacities which he must acquire, must also acquire a feeling of how matters concerning the world can be approached from many standpoints and from many different sides, and that a man who has already mastered certain basic facts can both speak and hear of a subject in a different way from one who has not. When we speak in a study-group we assume that the minds of those present have to some extent become accustomed to the conceptions of a Spiritual world, that as regards their thoughts and feelings they are already in that world and are therefore able, by means of those thoughts and feelings, to form a concept of the human conscience. The answer to such questions can be drawn from much greater depths in a study-group than in a public lecture given to a non-Anthroposophical audience. Those public lectures have indeed the mission, by means of the phenomena of the soul-life,—introduced in the first place as external experience,—of giving a sort of proof that the truths known to Spiritual Science are truths indeed. That is a different task for the Spiritual Scientist, who probably brings with him certain inner convictions and perhaps even certain opinions about the Spiritual world. He must gradually learn to become acquainted with ideas and concepts from all sorts of different sources and sides which will help him to make certain things clear, and he must leave off looking at things and speaking of them in one way only, though that method, of course still prevails in external life.

The question of the human conscience is one that must stir the very depths of our souls. For centuries philosophers and thinkers the whole world over, have been more interested in this subject than in any other. With regard to the phenomenon of conscience one might easily succumb to the illusion—which has often been here described as such—of believing that everything to be found in the human soul to-day, was always to be found there. Yet, as we know, the various soul-faculties and processes which man has developed in the course of thousands of years, were very different in primeval times from what they are now. Much of what is now most prized and valued in our soul-life, we did not possess when we wandered on earth thousands of years ago, in other incarnations. There is a purpose in these many incarnations of ours, as we have often emphasised. The purpose is that the soul should in the course of its development from one incarnation to another, acquire ever-new capacities and forces; that it should have a history of its own; that its earth-existence should be a time of learning to realise that the soul was not the same when our incarnations just began as it is now, and that moreover in the distant future it will again he different. The human conscience too,—that precious possession of the human soul, which speaks like the voice of God in each individual man or woman, warning them of good or evil—even this precious gift was not always in man's inner being. Conscience, too, is something that has developed. And indeed it is not so very long ago, comparatively speaking, that the human conscience announced its presence, since when it has developed more and more. Yet precious as this possession is to us, it is not intended that it should continue to live in the human soul in all the ages yet to come, just in its present form. It will develop further, and take different forms; it will discover itself as something which man had to acquire, and which will bear fruit. And in later ages, when these fruits are his, it will be something upon which man can look back, saying: There once was a time when, in the course of my passage through the different incarnations, I was able to embody into my soul that which is now my conscience, and I am now enjoying the fruits of that! Just as we now look back at a time when our souls were in other incarnations and did not possess what we call conscience, so in later times our souls will look back at the present time and exclaim: Hail to that past! Thanks for the gifts which in the past became our human conscience! If we had not then been able to develop a human conscience in our souls, we should now lack what we need for our present life!

From this we see that conscience forms part of the treasures of the soul at the present time, and if we understand something of the nature and being of the human conscience it gives us a sort of understanding of our age, and of its psychic life. Man's conscience came into being; that is a fact we have often referred to in various connections. In the public lecture next Thursday I shall state that one can, as it were, point to the very time when conscience was first discovered in the human soul. If we go back a few centuries into ancient Greece, about five hundred years before the Christian era, we come to the great poet, Æschylos. When we let the personages depicted by the mighty genius of the old Greek dramatist work upon us, we do not find what is to-day called conscience, or at any rate not designated by that name. Five hundred years before the Christian era the greatest dramatist then existing had no words to express what we now call the human conscience. If he wanted to express that process in the human soul which corresponds to what we now call conscience, he had to do so in this way:—If a man committed the sin of murdering his mother, he was, through the might of the event made to see into the Spiritual worlds and there he perceived certain figures, which were known to the ancient Greek as the Erinyes and later to the Romans as the Furies. Thus, according to Æschylos, a man who had committed the evil deed of murdering his mother, did not, as he would to-day, hear the reproachful voice of conscience in his inner being; but something drove him to spiritual vision, and he saw around him figures, the avengers of his deed.

This is one of the remarkable proofs to be found in the historical development of man, of what has just been asserted, that in olden times the capacities of the human soul were quite different. We have repeatedly emphasised that only gradually has the soul developed to its present power of perceiving the physical-sense world through the senses, and of using reason as it is used to-day. We stated that in olden times the soul possessed a certain clairvoyance as a normal capacity. At the time of Æschylos this only appeared in special cases. For instance, it became clairvoyant when it was to see what it had brought about in the physical world by its wrong-doing. The soul of Orestes became clairvoyant after the murder of his mother. He then saw the spirits he had aroused in the spiritual world by his deed. They encompassed his soul on all sides. There was nothing of the nature of conscience in his soul; but a clairvoyant consciousness set in, enabling him to see the disorder brought about in the spiritual world by his wrong-doing. In olden times we find that when an evil deed was accomplished, no voice of conscience was heard, for in those days the soul was in a clairvoyant condition and could see what came about in the external world in consequence of a wrong.

What is it then that occurs when a wrong is done? Something is brought about by ourselves in the spiritual world. It is a purely materialistic belief that a wrong can take place without anything taking place in the spiritual world; it produces quite definite processes therein,—effects radiate from us which, though invisible to sense perception can be clearly seen by spiritual sight. These spiritual processes, radiating from one who has done wrong, provide nourishment for certain Spiritual beings who are actually present in the spiritual world. Such beings cannot approach man at all times; they can only do so when the radiations resulting from evil actions emanate from him. It is just the same as with a room—if it is quite clean no flies will enter it; there are no flies in a perfectly clean room; but if food is left about or dirt of any kind, the flies come immediately—so, the moment a man radiates certain spiritual emanations as a result of his evil action, he is surrounded by beings who feed on them. These are the beings whom Æschylos, the great Greek dramatist, depicts around Orestes. What we to-day know as the inner voice, Æschylos represented in external forms because he was so conscious of it; for he knew that in special cases, a certain clairvoyant consciousness which was formerly the common possession of all men, could still be aroused. There is always something remaining in later times of what existed previously, but it appears atavistically, and only in abnormal cases. No blame should attach to Shakespeare for representing something of the nature of an objective conscience.

We need only trace Greek Art a little further, from Æschylos to Euripides, who in his tragedies shows us that he already had the idea of conscience. In ancient Greece we can see how the idea of conscience gradually came into being during the last five hundred years before Christ. Look where you will in the old Testament for a word corresponding to what we to-day call conscience: you will not find one. Conscience, as a quality, drew into the human soul; and if, instead of contemplating short spans of time we look at great periods, we see that conscience entered the human soul at about the same time as the Christ Impulse. We might say that conscience followed close on the Christ Impulse; it entered the historical development of the world almost like the shadow of that Impulse. In order to understand this, we must call to mind much that we have learned in the course of past years and make it fruitful for our understanding of what the human conscience really is.

If we wish in a deeper sense to grasp what conscience is, we must call to mind that particular period of time during which mankind in the course of its development was approaching the Christ Impulse and in which it absorbed this Impulse, and then gradually passed into our own, when development proceeded further. We know that this includes three epochs of civilisation in the development of man, which we designate as the Egyptian-Chaldean, the Greco-Latin and our present period. (The two epochs preceding these we may for the moment leave out of consideration; for our own souls were then too far removed from the possibility of having even an inkling of what we mean to-day by the concept of conscience.) In the Egyptian-Chaldean civilisation we see a gradual preparation of everything which subsequently rose to the greatest height possible, so that in the Graeco-Latin civilisation it might be able to reach and absorb the significant impulse we know as the Christ Impulse. And in our own age we see the epoch in which this Impulse will be further developed, and this will be continued increasingly in the epoch still to come. Now, if we recollect more closely the development of man from the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch, through the Graeco-Latin, into our own, it is clear that in each of these epochs one part of the human soul was developed. Of these, what we know as the Sentient Soul was developed during the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch. That means that we had at one time to be incarnated in Egyptian-Chaldean bodies, so as to be in a position to acquire aright those qualities which serve for the special development of the Sentient Soul. We then as souls, took that quality with us into our next incarnations during the Graeco-Latin epoch, in order then to develop the intellectual or mind-soul, or soul of higher-feeling. And we live in our present incarnations with the fruits of what we gained in that Epoch, so as to be able now, gradually to bring to a higher stage of development, what we call the forces of the Spiritual- or Consciousness-soul. (Dr. Steiner has, since 1923, called this the Spiritual Soul.)

So that our souls—as human beings—have been developed throughout these three epochs; and when our own age comes to its conclusion, our souls will then rise to the development of the quality of Spirit-Self. That will come about in the sixth epoch of civilisation. Thus we see, what a profound purpose there is in our going through successive incarnations, namely, that we may gradually acquire these faculties with which we, as human souls, are acquainted,—and in a wider sense acquire those also which extend beyond the mere life of the soul.

Thus, during the Egyptian-Chaldean culture our souls acquired the forces of the Sentient Soul and brought them to their full development;—during the Graeco-Latin age we developed the intellectual soul or soul of higher feeling. Man had to develop in a normal way as far as the intellectual soul; for then only could the Christ-Impulse be exercised upon him.

Now this development took place in quite a different way in different parts of the earth. If we were to allow ourselves to believe, in an easy sort of way, that the development of mankind proceeds in the most simple way possible, we should never arrive at an understanding of that development. One must indeed learn much before one can even to some slight extent grasp the great thoughts of the guiding Cosmic Beings! When man asserts that the truth is simple, that is great arrogance on his part; it shows that he wants to twist the truth to suit his own convenience. It is simply a love of ease which leads him to assert that the truth must be simple. The truth is indeed very complicated, and the spirit of the guiding cosmic beings can only be grasped by us when we make the most intense efforts to plunge into their thoughts, into their most subtle and intimate thoughts. So we ought not to believe that we have exhausted everything, when we say that: our souls have gradually evolved through Egyptian-Chaldean, the Graeco-Roman, and our own epoch. Let us now for a moment transport ourselves to that time when there was as yet no Graeco-Latin, but only Egyptian-Chaldean civilisation.

There were also human beings living then in Greece and in the countries of the Roman Empire; they lived in the countries of the Graeco-Romans before that age began. And in our own countries, on the soil we tread to-day, there were human beings living at the time when the Egyptian-Chaldean civilisation was playing its part in Asia and Africa. While certain souls, in Asia and Africa, at the epoch of the Egyptian-Chaldean period, were more particularly going through all that was to prepare them to receive the Christ-Impulse, others living in the regions of the subsequent Graeco-Latins were preparing to bring something quite different into the collective development of mankind. In our own countries too, there were people living then who were preparing themselves for something else. Not only do our souls take up different qualities in successive ages, but during the same age they live together side by side.

In this way different influences are brought to bear on the souls and further complications thus arise in evolution. By this means more is brought into the development of humanity than if everything went along smoothly in a straight line. It is indeed a fact that preparations had to be made in the Graeco-Latin lands, as also in our own, that the right thing might be brought into the development of civilisation from various sides. The Asiatic and African peoples had one mission and the South European peoples another,—while the peoples inhabiting Northern and Central Europe had a different one again. They all had to bring quite different qualities into the collective development of humanity, and they were able to do so because both their gifts and their training were essentially different.

When we turn our gaze towards the Egyptian-Chaldean peoples, to the souls who reached their zenith in that particular age, we must say: These peoples developed certain qualities of the Sentient-Soul, qualities which can be specially developed by the study of the wonderful teachings which then flowed from the sacred centres of Egypt, or from the marvellous astrology which could be learnt in a similar centre in Chaldea. That which flows from the various centres was sent for the very purpose of aiding the soul's progress. The true meaning of what thus flows forth is not to be found in the content of the streams of civilisation, but in what they contribute to the development of the human soul. The content itself passes away! Only those who in a deeper sense have not all their wits about them can believe otherwise than that in a few centuries of time our contemporary science will just as much have sunk into oblivion, as certain things connected with the Egyptian-Chaldean civilisation have done to-day. Anyone who believes that the Copernican conception of the universe yielded eternal verities, is making a very great mistake; that will become a thing of the past later on, just as have the discoveries of old Egypt to-day. As far as the content of these things is concerned they pass away, like many another thing in the development of humanity. For instance, in that wonderful picture of the Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci in Milan, familiar to you all, at any rate in reproduction, there are only faint outlines to be seen to-day; and we know that before long nothing will remain of the work into which Leonardo da Vinci put his best powers. Some day there will be just as little left of Raphael's works, which so move our souls to-day, when we allow ourselves to be affected by them. All these works of art will perish and there will be no memory of them on the physical plane. The content of these pictures will succumb to death, like the content of the civilizations themselves. But when we stand before these pictures we ought to remember that they flowed out of Raphael's soul, and that his soul was different after he had conjured them forth from what it was before. Thousands and thousands of people who are moved and uplifted by these pictures, are made different through having this experience. And someday, when the whole earth crumbles into dust—as it certainly will,—the external arrangements organised by the various civilisations will no longer exist. But what the souls have acquired will pass over with them into eternity. What the civilisations give us, is given for the advantage of human souls, for into human souls was poured forth what flowed from the Sanctuaries of Egypt and Chaldea and which—for that time—was exalted wisdom. The souls of men were thereby to be brought a step further; and to the extent that they did advance further, to that extent were they ripe to encounter new treasures, which then, in the Graeco-Latin Age helped the human souls a little further still. If our own souls had not absorbed what they could in the Graeco-Latin Age, they could not now be living into the spiritual soul. That constitutes progress in time.

If we recollect various things said in the public lectures, we are aware that what we call the ‘ I,’ the ego, works in the three soul-principles. Out of the chaos of soul-experiences that we encounter in the Sentient-Soul, Intellectual-Soul and Consciousness- or Spiritual-Soul, the ego gradually develops, crystallising itself there from:—but not in the same way in different parts of the earth. For instance, while the souls in Asia and Africa, during the Egyptian-Chaldean Age, had been developed by the influence so long exercised upon them by the revelations of the Chaldean and Egyptian Sanctuaries,—the peoples in Europe who were far removed from these as regards distance, had developed in such a way that they were in a sense ahead of them. In the European countries men had already in a certain sense developed the ego in the Sentient-Soul,—they had developed a strong feeling for the ego.

Here we come to an extremely important point; those men passed over to Asia and Africa who could wait with their ego until there should have developed in the Sentient-Soul that which was to be the result of the influence of the Egyptian and Chaldean sacred knowledge. Souls were incarnated in the regions subject to this culture, who, more or less without any distinct feeling of the ego-nature, absorbed the sublime teachings and lofty culture. The lofty culture of ancient Chaldea was poured into a Sentient-Soul as yet unconscious of its ego. Here in the North, no such lofty culture was sunk into the soul. It remained more or less uncultivated, but on the other hand, in this very lack, the Sentient-Soul, which had never experienced the warm glow of the revelations pouring in from the Sanctuary knowledge, developed the Consciousness of an ego. We may say that among the peoples of Egypt and Chaldea the ego-consciousness was late in coming, it waited till the Sentient-Soul had absorbed a certain culture and until the later soul-principles had developed. In Europe the ego did not linger, it developed at once in the Sentient-Soul, but on the other hand, it waited till the later soul-principles had been developed before absorbing certain qualities pertaining to the treasures of civilisation. Thus there were certain souls, incarnated in Asia, and Africa, who had hardly any consciousness of their ego but who, in their Sentient-Souls, were granted revelations of a high order; while in Europe there were souls who, without having any high degree of culture, were able to emphasise their individual ego; they could both look upon and feel themselves as men, as human individuals. The people of the Greek and Latin countries occupied a middle place between the two extremes and they had the mission of developing the qualities of the Intellectual-Soul. They developed the ego in the Intellectual-Soul,—while at the same time they were also able in that soul to absorb certain forms of civilisation. Thus then, the Egyptian-Chaldean culture waited, holding back the ego for a later time, while the European culture developed it prematurely; but the Graeco-Latin culture in a sense kept the balance, for it developed a certain civilisation at the same time as the ego.

In this way we can divine a great mystery of our human development, and without knowledge of this we can never understand why the Christ-Impulse could find so unhindered an entrance into Europe and why it gained so much influence there. Why was this? Could Christ have appeared in Europe? Might He not have incarnated there in a carnal body? No! that would not have been possible. He appeared in the Graeco-Latin Age, that in which the Intellectual-Soul was developed. That age was particularly adapted to come forward to meet Christ, as it were. But Christ could not have made his appearance in Europe, because of the strong ego-feeling prevailing there. This strong, individual feeling of self, was not adapted to produce one single person having the sole prerogative of being able to provide the vehicle for the highest. A premature ego-feeling, a too great feeling of the equality of mankind, had developed in the countries of Europe. It would have been impossible there for one person to tower so greatly above his contemporaries, as did the one who was to provide the vehicle for the Christ. If Christ was to find a body fit for Him to occupy, there must be no premature appearance of the feeling of ‘ I.’ He had, therefore, to appear on the borders of the Egyptian-Chaldean and of the Graeco-Latin culture, where it was possible for a body to be formed not having the premature ego-feeling within it, but having nevertheless the profoundest comprehension of the Spiritual world given by the Egyptian and Chaldean cultures. But if Europe had not the power of preparing a body for the Christ, yet, just because it had prematurely developed the ego in the very dawn of the new life, it had also acquired other faculties, which served—after Christ had appeared—to bring to mankind a full consciousness of the ego, to help men to a full understanding of it. This was possible because the European peoples had acquired the feeling of the ‘ I ’ too early and had as it were grown up with it.

This must be borne in mind if we wish to understand the newer civilisation. In Asia and Africa we find people who know much concerning the world-secrets, and who are skilful in the setting up of certain symbols—who have in fact cultivated their Sentient-Soul in such a way that they have a rich soul-life; but their Sense of Ego is weak. In Europe we find people who have received less culture through revelations from without; but on the other hand we find there the type of man who looks to himself, who finds the strongest support in himself. So in Asia the ground was prepared for the coming of Christ, for there a body could be found into which He could draw in,—and in Europe we find the people best prepared to understand the bringer of the ego-consciousness. He brought to the peoples of Europe what they were longing for. Hence it was in Europe that Christian Mysticism was developed, that wonderful Mysticism in which a man sought to draw Christ into his own soul, into his own ego.

Thus the wise guidance of the World prepared mankind in different parts of the earth, so that each epoch of development should find what is right for that time. It is one of the great assets acquired by studying the conception of the world presented by Spiritual Science, that we gain more and more strongly a sense of the wise way in which the development of humanity and of the whole world has been carried on. We see how for thousands of years souls were prepared on the soil of Europe, that they might develop as early as possible a firm centre in their inner being, and for this very purpose they were actually kept back from acquiring the forces so highly evolved in Asia. Therefore, the stream of culture flowed across from Asia, while the strong sense of the personal ego was being developed in Europe. Again, we can actually point out how the Adriatic almost constituted a boundary between a rather weaker sense of self in Greece, where a man did not so much feel himself to be a separate individual as an Athenian, a Spartan, a Theban, a member of his city,—and the Roman culture on the other side, where the strong ego-feeling was developed in the consciousness of the Roman citizen, who stood firmly on his own ground as an individual person. In Greece we still find the ego somewhat of a retiring nature; man still took in more from the outer world, in such a way that the ego need not be present. If we cross the Adriatic and come to Rome we find the Roman citizen standing firmly on his feet—already conscious of his ego. All this is connected with deep and significant sub-depths. These things do not occur on the physical plane without corresponding events taking place in the Spiritual world. We see that in the culture of Greece there was still a strong influence of the ego that was withheld. Much in Greece was still taken impersonally. The Greek did not feel himself to be a separate citizen, but a member of the organism of Athens, Sparta, or Thebes. This had to be done away with. The longing of man to draw things into himself from without must disappear, and as he becomes more and more a Westerner he must learn to find entrance into the inner part of his soul. What is to be formed by the masses, must be lived and experienced in advance by the Great Leaders, the Great Individualities of humanity. Let us keep before our minds the fact to which we have often referred—that the Greek still had a strong consciousness that what was given him from without, apart from his having greatly developed his inner personality, was of particular value. Once more I would remind you of the saying of a very cultured Greek, which gives us a deep insight into the longings of the Greek people. ‘Better be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realms of shades!’ The great value of the invisible, of the super-sensible life, had not then been realised. That which could be drawn from the environment without the help of the ego, is drawn from that environment. It is profoundly moving to perceive how at this juncture, at the turning-point of the times, a great Leading Personality stands like a sign-post, to cast off the disposition towards the earlier and to put on the disposition for the new; to ring forth far and wide, speaking as it were for the spiritual-world: ‘A time is now coming when men must no longer take into themselves that which can flow into their personality apart from the ego, but rather that which enters it through the ego!’

This deed was accomplished by one of the great Sages of ancient Greece; it was in part fulfilled in Empedokles, in the island of Sicily. In many of the legends which to-day are only told as tales, great depths lie concealed. Empedokles,—the great Sage who was not only a great philosopher but an Initiate into the deep mysteries of his time, who was both one of the greatest statesmen of all times and also a sacrificial priest,—of him the legend (which in an occult sense is true) relates as follows. Having completed his task in Sicily, Empedokles threw his body into Etna, that his external sheaths might be united with the soil of Sicily, thereby to record that ‘firm faith in the ego would follow, now that the outer had disappeared!’ The sacrifice of the outer sheaths of Empedokles was accomplished when he surrendered them to Etna. There is a deep occult truth behind this. Among the Spiritual experiences in Sicily to-day is the following. If spiritually one breathes the air of Sicily one can still trace in it the after-effects of the deed of Empedokles!—His soul has continued to incarnate; but his body attained a special significance by having been consciously given over to the elements, so that it can still be found in the spiritual atmosphere of Sicily to-day. The body of Empedokles forms a considerable part of the spiritual atmosphere of Sicily. It was a very important moment to me—such things can be discussed within our groups—when a few days ago I was able to tell our Palermo friends in their actual presence, that if anyone wanders in Sicily with a spiritual consciousness, he certainly still breathes spiritually, even to-day, that which has permeated the air of Sicily ever since the death of Empedokles!

So now we see that the boundary between East and West,—which we, speaking in an external and spatial sense, have referred to as the Adriatic Sea,—was indicated by a great Leader of Humanity, who, as he was to work on further in the West, stripped off the principle by means of which man could grow in the East, desiring to preserve for the future development of man that which is exalted above all the elements of the external physical plane.

It is a very great thing to become aware of these distinctions for they show how, in regions widely separated in space, different effects are being prepared in order that in this variety the greatest may be attained. It is through the co-operative effects of differentiation that the goal of the collective development of mankind must be attained. By this we can see that Christ, after having appeared in the East, went across to the West, there to be accepted by those who were made ready for this by a strong ego-consciousness; that they might thereby understand the Bringer of that consciousness. That is the secret of Christ's entrance into the West, that He there found souls prepared for Him, and that those souls accepted Him. Thus in the East we see humanity doing everything possible to prepare a body or a corporality,—consisting of physical body, etheric body and astral body—into which could penetrate the Christ, He who, together with the ego-consciousness and by means of it, brings the impulse of Love to the earth. Love is that which, in its most psychic and spiritual form, came to the earth with Christ, appearing in its psychic and spiritual form in the East,—for thus we first see it—and then flowing on further, to the West, where it is understood. In this way do we see development progressing further.

In what way was the ego-consciousness able so to work in the West that it felt itself related to Christ? What had happened to the souls who had prematurely taken up the ego-consciousness?

The Egyptian-Chaldean people waited for the spiritual or Consciousness Soul before they developed the ego; the Graeco-Latin peoples developed it in the Intellectual-Soul or soul of higher feeling; the culture of Northern Europe had prematurely developed the ego in the Sentient-Soul. That was in the human soul early in those countries; thus the Sentient-soul and the ego-consciousness worked together there in a different way than anywhere else in the world. In Northern Europe they first made themselves felt in the development of mankind. What was the result of the Ego-consciousness being firmly established in the Sentient-Soul in the European peoples, before a Christ had entered into the development of mankind, and before the latter had taken up what had been developed in Asia?

Because of this a force had been developed in the soul of man, together with the Sentient Soul, which could only have been developed through the Sentient-Soul being permeated with the ego-feeling while still quite virginal and uninfluenced by other civilisations. This permeation of the Sentient-Soul with the sense of self (the ego-sense) has grown into man's conscience. This accounts for the wonderful innocence of conscience! How does it speak? It speaks in the same way in the simplest and most primitive of men, as it does in the most complex soul. It says quite simply: that is right! that is wrong! without any theory or dogma. When it says: that is right, or that is wrong, what it tells us works with the might of an instinct or an urge. You will only find it developed in this way in the West. Therefore it throws its first rays like a rosy dawn, towards Greece and from thence towards Rome, where indeed we find it very strongly developed. We first meet with the word conscience,—conscientia—in the works of the Roman writers. Whereas among the Greeks we only find the first sporadic hints of it in Euripides, we find the Romans quite familiar with it, it had then become a word in general use. This is because of the influence of that strain of culture which came into being through the mutual inter-permeation of the Sentient-Soul and ego-feeling; for the ego-feeling, which lifts men up from the lowest to the highest, already speaks in the Sentient-Soul,—in which hitherto nothing spoke but instincts, desires and passions,—and speaks there like a voice from God, urging man to do what is right that he may press up to the higher ego.

In this way we can trace the first rise of conscience among the peoples of Europe. From thence it spreads its rays abroad to the other peoples of the Earth. Thus through a wise world-guidance, the humanity in one part of the world was so prepared that conscience could be added as a contribution to the whole collective development of humanity. We have now mentioned everything that can throw light upon conscience. We mentioned that indefinable attribute of conscience, its pressing forth from the depths of the soul. Conscience speaks like an urging impulse; but it is not an impulse. Those philosophers who so describe it, are far from hitting the mark. It speaks with the same power as does the Spiritual-Soul itself when it appears; but yet with elemental, original forces.

So, we see: Love appears on the earth in the East; Conscience in the West. The two belong together; as Christ appears in the East, so Conscience awakens in the West, that through it Christ may be accepted. In the simultaneous occurrence of the fact of the Christ-Event and the comprehension of it, and in the preparation for these two things in different parts of the Earth, we see the ruling of an infinite Wisdom guiding our development. We have thus indicated the past history of Conscience.

If we recollect what has often been emphasised,—that now, after the conclusion of Kali-Yuga, we are going through a transition in which new forces will have to be developed,—we shall easily understand that we are now faced with important questions regarding the further development of conscience. In the last lecture we strongly and clearly emphasised the fact that we are advancing towards a new Christ-Event, in that the soul will become capable of perceiving the Christ by means of a certain etheric clairvoyance, and of re-experiencing, in itself, the Event of Damascus. We are therefore justified in asking the question: What will happen as regards the parallel experience, that of the development of conscience, in the epochs towards which we are advancing? We will go into this question next Sunday (8th May), for the best way of celebrating our White Lotus Day will be to point out the living nature of the movement of Spiritual Science, and to explain that the conscience of man is in a state of transition. We shall see that light can be thrown upon it from many different sides. The public lecture will treat the subject quite exoterically, but even in these lectures many a thing can now be mentioned, because they have been going on for a number of years. Conscience can be spoken of in a deep sense, as we have done to-day,—or quite exoterically as we shall do on Thursday,—or it may be gone into yet more profoundly. But it will be some time before we can do that.

To-day, the 8th May, the Theosophical Society celebrates the Day of the White Lotus, which to the outer world is known, in the usual terminology of the day, as the death-day of the instigator of that Spiritual stream in which we now stand. To us it would seem more appropriate to select a different designation for to-day's festival, one taken from our knowledge of the Spiritual world and which should run more like this: ‘The day of transition from an activity on the physical plane to one in the Spiritual worlds’. For to us it is not only an inner conviction in the ordinary sense of the words but an ever-increasing knowledge, that what the outer world calls death is but the passing from one form of work, from an activity stimulated by the impressions of the outer physical world, to one entirely stimulated by the Spiritual world. When to-day we remember the great instigator, H. P. Blavatsky, and the leading persons of her movement who have also now passed over into the Spiritual realm, let us in particular try to form a clear idea of what we ourselves must make of our Spiritual movement so that it may represent a continuation of that activity which she exercised on the physical plane as long as she remained on it; so that on the one hand it may be a continuation of that activity and at the same time be possible for the Foundress herself to continue her work from the Spiritual world, both now and in the future. On such a day as this it is seemly that we should in a sense break away from our usual study of theosophical matters, and theosophical life, and should instead go through a sort of conscientious retrospect, a retrospect concerning what the tasks and duties the theosophical movement sets before us, and which may also lead us to a sort of prevision of what this movement should become in the future, and what we should do, and avoid doing.

What we are carrying on as the Theosophical movement came into the world as the result of certain quite special circumstances and certain historical necessities. You know that there was here no question, as in other Spiritual movements or unions of any sort,—of one or more persons determining to follow certain ideals according as the quality of their hearts and minds leads them to feel enthusiasm for these ideals, trying to enthuse other people and to induce them to form societies or unions for carrying these into practice. Not in this way should we view the Theosophical movement if we understand it aright. We only do this if we look upon it as an historical necessity of our present life: something which, regardless of what people feel or would like to feel about it, was bound to come, for it already lay in the womb of time, so to speak, and had to be brought to birth. In what way then may we regard the Theosophical movement? It may be considered as a descent, a new descent of Spiritual life, of Spiritual wisdom and Spiritual forces, into the sensible physical world from the super-sensible ones. Such a descent had to take place for the further development of man, and must repeatedly take place in the future. It cannot of course be our task to-day to point out all the different great impulses through which Spiritual life has flowed down from the super-sensible worlds in order that the soul-life of man should be renewed when it had, so to speak, grown old; but in the course of time this has frequently occurred. One thing, however, must be borne in mind.

In the primeval past, not long after the great Atlantean catastrophe which the traditions of the various countries record as the story of the Flood, came that impulse that we may describe as the inflow of Spiritual life that poured into the development of mankind through the Holy Rishis. Then came that other stream of Spiritual life that flowed down into man's evolution through Zarathustra or Zoroaster, and we find another stream of like nature in that which came to the old Israelites through the revelations of Moses.

Originally published in Anthroposophical Quarterly, Volume 21, Number 4, Winter 1976.

In a public lecture such as the one given yesterday on Spiritual Science and the Future of Man, account must always be taken of the very limited receptive capacity of the world today. In our time, data of knowledge that are essential for humanity do indeed flow down from the spiritual worlds but can be accepted open mindedly only by very few people. To most individuals who have not prepared themselves adequately for the reception of such knowledge, the deeper aspects of our Spiritual Science prove to be something of a shock, something that seems fantastic or dreamlike.

All the more it behoves us to deepen our feeling for the most significant questions that arise in the course of fairly lengthy study in a Group. And now I want to speak of the need for a closer study of the great truth of the implanting of the Ego, the ‘I’, in man and to indicate that the subject is more complicated than it is usually thought to be at the present time.

We have heard that during the period of Old Saturn man was endowed with the rudiments of the physical body, during the period of Old Sun with that of the etheric body, during the period of Old Moon with that of the astral body, and that the essential task of our Earth evolution is the incorporation of the Ego into the other members of man’s constitution. Not until the end of Earth’s evolution will the human being be completely permeated—as is possible—by the Ego. If we study the man of Earth as such, we can say that the actual centre of his being is the Ego, the ‘I’ But then it must occur to us that in each of the different periods of our present life this Ego is connected with us differently, by no means always in the same Way. We must realise above all that the different members of our being are not understood when we simply enumerate them as physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. Now let us consider in what different ways the members can be connected with each other both during the various epochs of mankind’s evolution and during the single life of the human being.

Let us think, to begin with, of a child. We know that it is not until a comparatively late period that he learns to say ‘I’ of himself. This is very indicative. Although modern psychology, in its endeavours to be a bona tide science, does not grasp the fact, it is deeply significant that the inner experience, the mental conception of the ‘I’ wakens in the child comparatively late. In the very earliest years, until the age of 3 or 3½, although now and then the child babbles the sound ‘I’, he has no real experience of Egohood. You may come across a book by Heinrich Lhotzky entitled Die Seele deines Kindes (Your Child’s Soul) which contains the curious statement that the child learns to think before he learns to speak. This is nonsense, because it is by speaking that the child learns to think. Those who strive to grasp Spiritual Science must be cautious of what purports to be Science today. It is approximately) after the third year of life that a child learns for the first time to experience and be cognisant of the ‘I’.

This is connected with another fact, namely that in normal consciousness—not in higher, clairvoyant consciousness—we have no remembrance of our life before a certain point of time. If you think back over the past, you will realise that remembrance ceases at a certain point and does not extend as far as birth. What others have told us can often be confused with what we ourselves have experienced, but the thread breaks at approximately the point when the ‘I’ is experienced for the first time. A very young child has no such experience; it arises later on and it is then that a very dim kind of remembrance begins.

We now ask ourselves: if the experience of ‘I’ was not present during the first three years of life, was the ‘I’, the Ego, itself also not there in the child? The question to put to ourselves is this. Are we cognisant of something that is actually within us or is it within us without our knowledge? The Ego is indeed within the child only he is unaware of it, just as during sleep a person is connected with the Ego but is not cognisant of it. The fact is that we know of something, but that can be no criterion for us. We must say: the ‘I’ is present in the child but the child is not conscious of it.

What, then, is there to be said about the Ego? It has its own task to perform. If you were to investigate the human brain purely physically, you would find that just after birth it looks very imperfect compared with its later structure. Many of the finer convolutions have to be elaborated and moulded later on, during the subsequent years. This is what the ‘I’ achieves in the human being and because this is its task it cannot itself become conscious of it. The Ego has to elaborate the brain into a more delicately complicated structure, in order that later on the human being will be able to think. During the first years of life the Ego is very active.

When the Ego becomes conscious of itself, we could ask in vain: how have you managed to construct this brain with such artistry?—you will admit that during the whole span of life between birth and death the Ego does not develop consciousness on a par with that by which the brain is elaborated. Nevertheless we can ask ourselves the question. And the answer is that in its activity the Ego is under the guidance of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. When we observe a child clairvoyantly, his Ego—as Ego-aura—is certainly there, but streams go out from this aura to the higher Hierarchies, to the Angels, Archangels, and so on; the forces of the Hierarchies stream in. Therefore when naive consciousness speaks of a child having a Guardian Angel, this is a very real truth. Later on this closer connection ceases; the ‘I’ experiences itself more in the nerves and can therefore become conscious of its own existence. A kind of detachment takes place. In the child a sort of ‘telephonic connection’ exists, inasmuch as the ‘I’ extends into the divine-spiritual Hierarchies. The statements of Spiritual Science must be taken seriously. I once said that the very wisest person can learn a great deal from a child. He can also learn a great deal because he need not look only at the child himself but also through him into the spiritual world, because in the child there is the ‘telephonic connection’ with the spiritual world—the connection that is ultimately severed.

Hence during the first three years of life we have before us a being quite different from the one who is there later on. Under the guidance of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies a childhood Ego works at the development of man’s instrument of thinking. This ‘I’, this Ego, then passes into the instruments themselves and can no longer work at them. Man’s instruments of thinking must then already have developed. Certainly they can develop to further stages, but the ‘I’ can no longer be working at this development.

The human being may therefore be thought of as twofold: the one we see during the first three and a half years, and the one which represents the rest of his life. In the language of esotericism, the first being is called the divine man, or the Son of God, because he is connected with the higher Hierarchies; the other is called the Son of Man. In the latter the Ego is present, moves the limbs and works—as far as it is possible to work—from within outwards. A distinction must therefore be made between the Son of God and the Son of Man.

The Son of God who is preeminently active for the first three and a half years of life embraces all the vitalising forces, stimulates the human being to pour these life giving forces in greater and ever greater measure into his organism. In comparison with those in an older person these forces are also health giving, strengthening factors. If we are not content in later life to be human beings who have to rely entirely on the senses and on the instrument of the physical body for our connection with the surrounding world but determine in our later years to strive upwards to the spiritual world, then we must contrive by some means to awaken these forces within ourselves; we must evoke the forces that are within us in earliest childhood, but with the difference that now we awaken them consciously, whereas a child awakens them unconsciously. In this respect too, therefore, it is obvious that man is a twofold being.

What is it, in reality, that is brought to light by these forces during the first three and a half years of life? In these forces—which are active under the direction of the higher Hierarchies—what is working over from earlier incarnations is asserting itself. You can easily convince yourselves of this by handling the human skull, where you find individual mounds and depressions. No skull is exactly similar to another, hence there is no universally valid Phrenology. Each case must be studied individually. The forces working in the formation of the human skull come over from earlier incarnations and their impetus ceases after the first three and a half years of life. During these years everything is still pliable and the spirit is still able to work in it. Later on, everything has become solid and the spirit can no longer come into play.

What, then, is responsible for the fact that in later life we are no longer able to work with these forces? To what is this due? It is due to the essential character of our Earth evolution. When the ‘I’ has become conscious of itself in the body, this presupposes that the body is very firmly knit and can no longer be elaborated by the forces just described. There are also forces which essentially belong to man as a generic being, which mould him in accordance with the architectural principles of the human form. Were we to work in the physical body with the forces of early childhood for more than the three and a half years which are the appropriate period, the physical body could not .survive. It would be rent asunder, shattered, for now the forces by which the physical body is attached to the line of physical heredity become operative. If the action of the other forces did not cease, the body would break up, disintegrate. The Son of Man within us brings about our destruction; the Son of God within us cannot offer resistance to the Son of Man after a period of three years. For all that, we bear this Son of God within us. These forces work within the physical body throughout life but they cannot participate directly in the up-building process. If we look within our own inmost being, however, we can nevertheless find the continuation of the Ego with the ‘telephonic connection’. It is only that the physical body has become too coarse, too solid, too wooden to enable the Son of God to mould it any further.

Thus the best forces are present in us during the first three to three and a half years of childhood. The whole of life is nourished by them but they are obscured. In an entirely different form they are nevertheless present in the later years of life. We are permeated by these forces but cannot allow them to come to direct expression. When through Spiritual Science we endeavour to acquire ideas and conceptions of the higher worlds, this will be all the easier, the more forces have remained in us of those that were within us during the first three years when our ‘I’, our Ego, was within us but without self-consciousness. The fresher, the more flexible these forces have remained, the less time-worn they have become in advanced age, the more easily we can bring about transformation in ourselves through these spiritual forces.

It is the very best part of manhood that we have within us during these early years, only the solid physical body prevents us from using these forces then to the fullest extent. Even if someone in his later years succeeds in developing them to a special extent, he cannot transform his physical body which is by no means as pliable as wax. But if through esoteric wisdom he is able to use these forces to the full, their power streams through the tips of his fingers, and he acquires the gift of healing, of health-bestowal, through the laying on of hands—if, that is to say, these spiritual forces are still active. They can no longer transform his body but when they stream out from him they bring about healing.

The goal of Earth evolution is to enable these forces—the best that are within us—to take effect. When the evolution of the Earth is at an end and we have lived through our many incarnations, we must consciously have permeated our whole being with the forces that are within us unconsciously during the first years of childhood. There is a difference between bearing these forces unconsciously and bearing them consciously. At the end of Earth evolution human beings must be completely permeated by this childhood consciousness. And then, because the process of expansion will be slow, the body will not burst asunder.

In world-evolution a prototype of penetration of the forces of childhood into mankind was necessary. Needless to say, this prototype could not be a child. It was necessary that an individual of a certain age should be permeated in full consciousness by the same forces by which all human beings are permeated unconsciously in earliest childhood. Suppose we were to remove his Ego from a human being, empty his Ego and pour into him the forces that are active in a child during the first years of life, he would become conscious of these forces with his developed brain. What had been active within him during the first years of childhood would become a conscious experience in him. For how long is a human life on Earth able to endure this? For no longer than three years, for then the body would be shattered. If there can be no transformation—in the case of man this takes place in the process of ordinary evolution—the human body can endure this state of things for no longer than three years. Were it possible for any being to bear the forces of early childhood consciously within himself, the karma of that being must be so adjusted that the physical body involved is shattered.

It is conceivable that what man attains through all the incarnations leading to the goal of Earth evolution can be brought to the notice of the world by a prototype, by an individual whose bodily nature makes it possible for his Ego to depart and be replaced by another Being. In such a case the human body would not tolerate the presence of the other Being for longer than three years. It would be the karma of the body to be shattered. And this actually happened. At the baptising by John in the Jordan we see this human body which made it possible for the Ego, the Zarathustra-Ego, to depart. A Being, the Christ Being, came down into this body, indwelt it for three years but could remain in it no longer. After three years the body broke up when the Mystery of Golgotha took place.

What was able to live for three years in a human body at that time must be tended and cherished by man and gradually, in the course of incarnations, made a living reality in his soul, in order that at the end of the incarnations it may be present in full strength.

A remarkable connection is apparent between the Son of God in man and the Christ Event. Everything to be found in the domain of occultism can be illuminated from different sides. Proofs such as are demanded by conventional science cannot satisfy occultism. Proofs must convince by virtue of truths being gathered together from all sides, truths which sustain and support each other. We can study the Christ Event from still another side by deriving it, as has been done today, from the very nature of man. We realise that the best way to understand the Christ is to develop the attitude of soul arising from such a truth. We must realise too that in a fully evolved human body, there was present in Jesus of Nazareth through the Baptism in Jordan a Being who is present in every human body, but unconsciously only, during the first three years of life. And then we must contemplate the three years when this child has become conscious. That is how understanding of the Christ can best be acquired.

Ancient utterances have different meanings. One such meaning is disclosed by the words: Unless you become as a little child you cannot enter into the Kingdoms of Heaven. There we have a glimpse of the deeper meaning often contained in single sentences of the religious texts.

Let us contemplate this life of childhood especially in the period when it is actually developing. Science today does not know much about what can contribute to the study of the true nature of man. In the first place we must realise clearly that from the very beginning man differs quite radically from all other beings. Take an example near at hand, let us say, an ape. Its gait is determined from the very outset because the characteristic equilibrium is established by the arrangement of its limbs. The human being cannot, to begin with, walk at all, for he must first bring about equilibrium in his body. Through the work of his Ego his limbs must be brought into the positions which enable him to stand upright and walk. Thus in the first years of childhood the Ego must work not only at moulding the brain but must also bring about the equilibrium that is not, from the beginning, established in the human being as it is in the animal. The bones of the human being must first be arranged in the angles necessary for the main-tenance of his centre of gravity, in order that he may be able to walk and make his way about. This capacity is implanted from the beginning in every animal, up to those of the highest species, whereas in the human being it must be acquired gradually though the work of the Ego. Before then he crawls about or falls down. He would be fettered to the same spot on the ground if his Ego was not at work during the first three years of his life.

We have already heard that the Ego works at man’s brain, sculps and moulds it into a form that enables him later on to become a being possessed of intelligence. Thus it can be said that we acquire the capacity to recognise the truth in life as a result of the Ego having moulded its instrument. It must become obvious to us that there can be no further life unless we bring it about by work and activity.

What further distinguishes man so radically from all other things is his speech. That capacity too must be acquired through the work of his Ego. Man is not, from the beginning, organised for speech. Cows utter the sound ‘moo’ but that is not speech. The acquisition of speech depends upon the Ego sojourning among other human Egos. If a human being were transported to a remote island he would not learn to speak. The coming of the second teeth is due to heredity; so too is the fact that we grow. The teeth would come even if we were on a lonely island. But it is through the Ego that we acquire the faculty of speech. These differences are important. Thus in human life, speech is the third faculty acquired through the Ego.

Through the activity of these forces the human beings finds his way on Earth, he recognises the truth and lives his life in common with the surrounding world. If a child were able to express what he thus acquires, he could say: the Ego within me transforms me in such a way that I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. Think of this translated into a higher, spiritual reality, and let us ask: what will be said to man by a Being who with fully conscious forces of childhood lives for three years in a human body? Such a Being will say: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.” In very fact, when the forces of childhood rise to a higher, fully conscious stage, there we have the great prototype of what is revealed at a lower stage in the child. Through Christ Jesus it becomes a basic, fundamental truth. Not only is the utterance “Except ye become as little children, ye cannot enter into the kingdoms of Heaven” incomprehensible without a knowledge of what Spiritual Science has to say about the connection with the life-giving forces of early childhood, but it is also true that we can best understand the radical utterance, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life” when we recognise its prototype in what the Ego achieves by its activity in the body of early childhood.

Such truths make it possible for us to generate—if not for the body at least for the soul—some measures of the life-giving forces we need on the Earth. The man of today who does not acknowledge the reality of the spiritual world has no genuine feeling for such facts. If you go to a number of individuals in outer life and tell them something of what has been said here today: ‘Unless you become as a little child you cannot enter into the kingdoms of Heaven’—you will find that these people say: “Well, yes, these are quite clever analogies, but what use can be made of them?” They consider it more advantageous to go to some blood-curdling drama, if not anything worse! Those who have no feelings that these facts are significant will regard them as unjustifiable because it is in the feeling for such things that there lies the power to instil the gift of childhood into life. If we lack enthusiasm for the idea of Christ being compared with the activity of the human Ego during the first years of life, if we reject such a comparison as unjustifiable, then we have no faculty for kindling to life the forces of earliest childhood. Wizened scholars have so little power to awaken these forces and thereby to approach the reality of the spiritual world! But if we have the enthusiasm to concern ourselves with such truths, we can permeate our whole being with these forces.

Thereby something is given to an individual which enables him to uphold the principle of universality in his Christianity. Have I not often said that we are only at the beginning of a true conception of Christ? Until the twelfth or thirteenth century there was no possibility of hearing the Bible read. Christians were obliged to rely upon preaching and the proclamations of evangelists. Then came the Christianity which adhered strictly to the Bible, deriving its knowledge from that one source. We are not mindful of Christ’s power if we ignore His words: “I am with you until the end of the ages.” We are Christians when we realise that after Christ had once revealed Himself He will do so again, for anyone who has eyes to see Him. The content of the Gospels by no means represents all that Christ has to say. We should not constantly be quoting the words: “You could not bear it now”. Humanity must become mature enough to understand Christ’s declaration.

It also follows that we ought to be able to adopt the right attitude to what is revealed through the Baptism by John, namely, the manifestation of the health-giving, fertile forces of early childhood. That in itself would be a fruitful conception. Even if there were no human being who knew anything about the name of Christ or about the Gospels—we do not overstress the importance of names—what is all-important is the Being Himself. We leave it to others to say that an individual who does not swear allegiance to Buddha is no true adherent. What matters to us is the reality, not the name. This is the principle we follow when, for example, we recognise that during the first years of life there are within the human being forces which once streamed down into the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

Think of a remote, lonely island to which no single record of the Mystery of Golgotha has ever found its way. If human beings there through their spiritual life consciously draw the powers of earliest childhood into themselves until they reach old age, then they are Christians in the true sense of the word. In such circumstances there is no need for them to search in the Gospels, for Christianity in itself is a living power and will evolve to further and further stages.

There is a difference here that must be strictly remembered. We shall realise ever more clearly how intimately Christ’s mission is connected with the very being of the Earth. We shall be able to say that the mission of Christ is something that can be understood by contemplating man as he is today. The need to be filled with the power of Christ, to make a reality of Paul’s affirmation “Christ in me”, is confirmed when we say that the whole of our life must be dedicated to the transformation of what is present within us during the first years of childhood. Then the Christ is in us in very truth.

This realisation makes it possible to have a wide understanding of Christianity and reveals the prospect that it will take quite different forms. Times will come when Christ will be referred to in an entirely different way, when sources of an essentially different character will be in existence, when there will be no reference to the external history of the existence of such a Being, but when this fact will be revealed by the actual consciousness of mankind.

These matters are brought forward because they show how deeply Spiritual Science can influence man’s life of feeling and must become actual practice. It is only then that what we find in original sources becomes really intelligible to us. For many human beings, however, these original sources are verily a book with seven seals. At the end of the Earth’s existence, a man of today will have reached the stage where his soul is inwardly Christian in the truest sense. Today he is only at the beginning of this development. Nevertheless Christ lives within him and will do so in an ever wider sense through all the following incarnations.

What was the state of things before Christ came to the Earth, before He revealed Himself on the Earth? The Ego was then only in the preparatory stage, for it is by Christ that the Ego is given its very purpose and meaning. When the mission of a Being is in the preparatory stage, his predecessors must help him. Until the Mystery of Golgotha, man’s Ego was still at the stage of preparation. Until then it was necessary for other Beings to help man, Beings who had reached the human stage previously, namely, during the

Old Moon embodiment of the Earth. We know that these are the Beings of the Hierarchy immediately above us—the Angels. Their evolution has reached a stage higher than that reached by man. It was chiefly these Beings who took over the guidance of humanity before man was in a position to say: Christ gives my Ego purport and meaning. Man could not lead himself to Christ but had perforce to be led to Him by the Beings who are his elder Brothers.

The Bible records this with wonderful accuracy. Let us think of John, the forerunner of Christ Jesus. The true forerunner could not have been the Being who is presented in external history, for as we now know man had as yet no Ego. Therefore it cannot be strictly true to say that John the Baptist himself was Christ’s forerunner. Remarkably, the Gospel of St. Mark begins at once with the words: “I send my Angel before thee, who shall prepare thy way.” We must pay attention to something that theologians have, it is true, noticed in a very abstract form but ignored as a concrete reality. The external world is primarily maya. We must learn to see it in the right way and then it is no longer maya. The narration of the external events connected with John the Baptist on the physical plane, is maya. We do not understand them. The biblical picture of John the Baptist is maya. The truth is that an Angel lives in John, takes possession of his soul, and it is this Being who leads men to Christ. John is the sheath in which the Angel is revealed. The reborn Elijah was able and ready to receive into himself the Angel who entered into and spoke out of him, using him—John—simply as an instrument. The story given in the Bible is accurate in every detail.

It can therefore be said that it was only because the Beings who had reached the human stage on the Old Moon embodiment of the Earth became the leaders of man in the pre-Christian era that he could be prepared to receive the Ego. In point of fact, all the leaders of humanity in the pre-Christian era could be leaders because Angels were working through them. What would happen in the case of a man of the modern age? In pre-Christian times the Angel could work in a man because he had no Ego of his own. Since the Christ has come, man can turn to Him and a power enters into him instead of the Angel, as formerly. Man today must take the Christ into himself through devotion and reverence. John could still say: Not I but the Angel in me has been sent and uses me as the instrument for preparing the way. Man must say as did St. Paul: ‘Not I, but Christ in me.’ Man must learn to understand Christ in the light of the teaching of Spiritual Science.

What has been said today about the first three years of childhood can, for example, usefully be emphasised. Man is ‘christianised’ when the truth is brought home to him that the forces at work during the age of earliest childhood shed their sunlike radiance over the whole of life. Modern science, on the other hand, is ultimately responsible for the onset of senility, for resistance to the sunlike forces in early childhood, for ossification of parts of the brain, and a great deal else besides.

From such truths we realise that it is possible to understand the living truth of Christianity even when original records are left out of account and we simply study the nature and being of man. If our understanding of Spiritual Science is such that we do not simply say, ‘now I know that man consists of four members—physical, etheric, astral bodies and Ego’ but realise that what matters is to know how these single members are interconnected in his constitution—then we can become aware that the Ego working in early childhood is related to another entity, that the first Ego is like a sheath and that after about three years its connection with all the members of the rest of man’s nature changes entirely.

This knowledge acquires genuine value when it becomes a power within us and when we say to ourselves that because in the future many incarnations lie ahead of us we can develop what is in us to further and further stages of consciousness, that we can enable the forces of the higher man, The Son of God within us, to be victorious over the Son of Man, thereby rising higher in each succeeding incarnation until the Earth reaches its goal. The Earth then becomes a corpse just as the individual human being becomes a physical corpse; the corpse sinks into the Earth and the soul rises into the spiritual world. This is what will also happen to the Earth as a whole.

If we think of the Earth as the body of all humanity, we can say: the Earth dies as a corpse, dissolves into the substance of the Universe, is pulverised in order to be used in a new material form. But man rises into spiritual worlds in order to pass over into the next planetary existence. It behoves us to remember that these are no abstract words.

Strange to say, there are people who believe that our Earth, together with the Sun and the other planets, was once a great nebula and nothing else, that then Sun, Earth and man himself, through the consolidation of matter, came into existence, that he will evolve to further and further stages and will eventually be entombed in the Earth the whole process being an aimless episode!

In future histories of civilization great efforts will have to be made to understand this patho-logical fantasy, to grasp how it could have been possible for man’s imagination to become sickly enough to accept this as a serious conception. To uphold the Kant-Laplace theory is exactly the same as to think that man can be explained by studying the dust produced by his cremation. Such science is pernicious, incapable of engendering living power in the soul.

The aim of Spiritual Science is to kindle the power to develop our stature as human beings to higher and higher stages, no longer connecting ourselves with the dust of the Earth but evolving towards a new planetary existence.

We have devoted much attention in these lectures to a subject that arose out of the dramatic performances which preceded them, but it is a subject which is intimately bound up with the aim we have set before us in this year's Cycle. I am referring to the world of the Greek gods and the form it took. Since our actual subject is ‘Wonders of the World, Ordeals of the Soul and Revelations of the Spirit’, why should we have spent so much time talking about the world of the Greek gods? The reason is that such a study can provide—as well as much else—the basis we need for a spiritual-scientific study of the world. I have pointed out that the concept of nature and natural existence which is generally accepted today was quite unknown to the ancient Greek. If we call to mind what the thought and feeling of ancient Greece was really like, we find there no chemical, physical, biological laws as we understand them today. What lit up in the soul of the ancient Greek, what was enkindled in the spirit of this marvellous Greek civilisation when the eye (clairvoyant or otherwise) was directed upon the wonders of the world, presented itself to them as a kind of knowledge, a kind of wisdom; but for us it is the marvellous structure of their world of gods. Anyone who looks upon this world as having no inner coherence, which is the usual attitude, knows nothing of what it is trying to express. This world of the Greek gods, in its wisdom-filled structure, is actually the Greek reply to the question ‘What is the response of the human soul to wonders of the world?’ The Greek response to the riddle of the world was not a law of nature as we understand it, but the shaping forth of some group or other of divine beings or divine forces. Hence in these wonderful clues we have followed up in the last few lectures, and which we sometimes found so astonishing, but which, pieced together, give us the world of the Greek gods, we cannot help seeing the equivalent of our own dry-as-dust, prosaic, abstract wisdom. And if we want to make real progress in Spiritual Science we must acquire a feeling that it is possible to think and feel in an entirely different manner from the modern way.

But when in the last lecture we were considering the figure of Dionysos, our attention was drawn to yet another thing. While the rest of the gods represent what was reflected in the soul of the Greek when he tried to understand the wonders of the world, we found that in the figure of Dionysos the Greek has concealed what we might call the inherent contradiction of life, and we shall get no further unless we give some thought to this aspect. Abstract logic, abstract intellectual thinking, is always trying to discover inconsistencies in higher world-conceptions, and then to say, ‘This world-conception is full of inconsistencies, it cannot therefore be accepted as valid.’ The truth is, however, that life is full of contradictions, indeed nothing new, no development would be possible unless contradiction lay in the very nature of things. For why is the world different today from what it was yesterday? Why does anything become, why does not everything remain as it was? It is because yesterday there was a self-contradictory element in the state of things, and today's new state has arisen through the realisation of yesterday's contradiction and its overcoming. No one who sees things as they really are can say, ‘Falsehood is detected by proving contradiction’ ... for contradiction is inherent in reality. What would the human soul be like if it were free from contradictions? Whenever we look back at the course of our life we see that it has been activated by contradictions. If at some later date we are more perfect than we were earlier, it has come about because we have got rid of our earlier condition, because we have discovered our earlier state to be in contradiction to our own inner nature, and thus have called forth a reality of our own inner being in contradiction to what was. Contradiction is everywhere at the basis of all beings. Particularly when we study the entire man, the four-fold man, as we are accustomed to treat of him in the light of occultism, do we find this contradiction, a contradiction which addresses itself not only to our reason, to our philosophy, but to our hearts, to our whole soul-nature.

We must constantly remind ourselves of the fundamental basis of our Spiritual Science, that man as he stands before us consists of physical body, ether body, astral body and ego. Our being consists of these four members. Let us look at them as they meet us to begin with on the physical plane, in the physical world. We will for the present ignore the question as to how the human being appears to clairvoyant sight, we will just ask how the four members of the human being appear to physical eyes, for the physical world. Let us begin with the innermost member of the human being, the ego, which as you know we regard as the youngest—or better call it ‘the ego- bearer’. The outstanding characteristic of this human ego occurs at once to anyone who studies the world with even a little intelligence. However widely we search, we shall never find this ego by the exercise of our physical senses, by exercising our faculties for knowledge of the physical world. It is not visible to our eyes, nor in any way perceptible to any faculty for acquiring knowledge of the outer world. Hence when we meet another man, if we only try to study him physically, with purely physical instruments, if we do not enlist the help of the clairvoyant eye, we can never observe his ego. We go about among men, but with organs of perception for the outer world we do not see their egos. If anyone thinks he can see egos he is utterly deceiving himself. With physical faculties for acquiring knowledge of external things we cannot observe the ego as such; we can only contemplate its manifestation through the organs of the physical body. A man may be inwardly a thoroughly untruthful person, but so long as he does not utter the lie so that it passes over into the external world, we cannot see it in his ego, because egos cannot be observed with external physical instruments. Thus, however far we go in investigating with the forces of physical knowledge, we only encounter this ego once. Although we know quite well that there are many egos upon the Earth, only one of them is to be perceived, and that is our own. In the physical world, or for physical instruments of knowledge, each man has only one opportunity of perceiving the ego, that is his own ego. So that we may say that the peculiarity of this youngest and highest member of the human being is that its existence, its reality, is capable of being perceived in one example only, in ourselves. The egos of all other men are hidden from us within their bodily sheaths.

From this ego, as the innermost, as the youngest, but also the highest member of the human being, let us now turn to the outermost member, to the physical body. As you know from things I have written or said on various occasions in recent years, the physical body can only be known in its true inner being to clairvoyant consciousness. To ordinary consciousness, to the physically based powers of physical knowledge, the physical body manifests itself only as maya or illusion. When we meet a man, what we see as his physical body is maya, illusion. But there are as many instances of this illusion of a physical body as there are men to be met with on Earth. And in this respect—as maya—our own body is just like that of other men. Thus there is a great difference between the perception of our own ego, of which only one example is given, and the perception of human physical bodies, of which we have as many examples as the people we know on Earth. We only learn to know the ego when we direct our physical faculty of knowledge upon ourselves. We have to look into ourselves with the power of knowledge which we have acquired upon the physical plane if we wish to learn to know our ego.

I should perhaps add, because there is so much unclear thinking, that what I mean by the ego which we perceive with our physical powers of knowledge belongs entirely to the physical world. It would be idle nonsense to say that what a man's normal faculties find within him as his ego ever belongs to any other world than the physical. If anyone were to consider the ego, observed not with clairvoyant but with normal faculties, as belonging to any other world than that of the physical plane, he would be making a mistake. In the higher worlds things look quite different; the ego too for clairvoyant consciousness is something very different from what man finds within him in normal consciousness. We must not think of the ego of which ordinary psychology and ordinary science speak as belonging to anything but the physical plane; only we are looking at it from within, and because we stand within it, as it were, because we do not confront it from the outside, we are able to say: ‘Admittedly we learn to know this ego upon the physical plane only, but we do at least learn to know it in its own inner being, by direct knowledge, whereas what we know of the physical body, of which we see so many specimens in the world, is only maya.’ For as soon as the faculty of clairvoyance is turned upon the physical body it dissolves like a cloud, vanishes away, reveals itself as maya. And if we wish to get to know the physical body in its true form we have to rise, not just to the astral plane but to the highest region of Spirit- land, to Devachan; thus a clairvoyance of a very high order is needed if we wish to learn to know the physical body in its true form. Here below, in the physical world, the physical body has only a quite illusionary stamp, and it is this counterfeit image that we see when we look at this physical body from outside. Thus these two members of the human organism, the highest and the lowest, show a very remarkable contrast. Here in the physical world we see the human physical organism as maya—that is to say, it is not at all in accordance with our inmost being; but the ego we see here in the physical world is in its physical manifestation quite in keeping with our inmost being. Please take note of that, it is an extremely important fact. Let me put it in another way, half symbolically, and yet with all the seriousness which the reality demands. Half symbolically ... yes, but this pictorial approach has a fulness about it which comes nearer to expressing the truth than any abstract concepts.

Half symbolically then, but also half seriously, I ask how we have to think of Adam and Eve in Paradise before the Fall. We know that according to the Bible they were unable to see each other's outer physical bodies before the Fall, and that when they did begin to see them they were ashamed. That is the expression of a most profound mystery. The Old Testament tells why Adam and Eve were ashamed of their bodies after the Fall. It indicates that before the Fall the bodies they had were more or less spiritual bodies, bodies only accessible to clairvoyant consciousness, bodies of quite different appearance from physical bodies, bodies which expressed the ego in its true form. We see that even the Bible recognises that quite a different bodily form, one only perceptible to clairvoyant vision, was really fitted to the deepest being of man, and that the external physical body we have today actually does not measure up at all to the inner being of man. What then did Adam and Eve feel when their relation to each other was no longer one in which they did not see their physical bodies, but on the contrary, one in which they did see them? They felt that they had fallen into matter, that, out of a world to which they had formerly belonged, denser matter than had been theirs formerly had been instilled into them. They felt that man with his physical body had been transplanted into a world to which, if the true nature of his ego is taken into account, he does not belong. No more striking expression could be found to mark how little the outer expression of his being, the sensible reality, really measures up to the divine ego than this being overcome by shame.

But we can look at the matter from another aspect, which throws quite a different light upon it. If man had not descended into his physical body, had not taken into himself the denser matter, he would not have been able to acquire his ego-consciousness, or in terms of the Greek mind, he would not have been able to participate in the Dionysos forces. That also was felt by the Greeks. They felt that the ego of man as it lives on the physical plane has within it not only those forces of a higher spiritual, super-sensible world which it had had before the Fall, and which stream into it out of the spiritual worlds above, but that it is also dependent upon forces which come from quite another side, from the opposite direction. We know that before man had acquired his present ego-consciousness it was normal for him to have a clairvoyant consciousness. But this clairvoyant consciousness was a pictorial one, a dreamlike one, it was not a consciousness lit up by any real intellectual light; man only acquired that later. This old clairvoyant consciousness had to be lost to man in order that a new ego-consciousness could arise. To this end the old form of the ego, the old Dionysos Zagreus had to be destroyed.

We had before us yesterday the impressive picture of how this came about—of how in the language of Greek mythology the elder Dionysos was dismembered by the Titans, and emerged again later as the younger Dionysos, that is, as our present ego-consciousness, the consciousness which has come about in human evolution as the achievement of time. But in order to bring about the birth of the younger Dionysos the human mother, Semele, has to play her part. The figure of Semele furnishes another example of the unerring wisdom of Greek feeling for the true wonders of the world.

A necessary condition for the coming into existence of this younger human ego was that the old clairvoyant consciousness had to die out, had to sink below the horizon of consciousness. Anyone who knew that—and those who built up Greek mythology did know it—said to himself: ‘Once upon a time the human soul was endowed with a clairvoyant consciousness which looked up into a world full of spiritual beings and spiritual deeds, into a world in which the human being was still a fellow-citizen. But in course of time man has withdrawn from this spiritual world, and has become a quite different being, a being permeated by an ego.’ What would happen to a man of today if, without his having undergone any preparation, any kind of esoteric training, suddenly, in a moment, there were to stand before him, instead of the physical world as it appears to physical eyes and physical ears, the world that was there for the old clairvoyant consciousness? Let us imagine that, by some miracle or other, instead of the world which displays itself to him in the star-strewn heavens, in the rising and the setting of the sun, in mountain and cloud, in minerals, plants and animals, suddenly the world of old Atlantis were to stand before a normal human consciousness of today ... the man would be shattered, so dreadful, so alarming, would seem the world which is nevertheless all around us; for this world is there behind everything, it is all around us ... but it is covered over by the world of our ego. There is a world around us which would fill the man of today with fear, would shatter him with terror, if he were suddenly confronted by it. But the ancient Greek felt this too. That is also implicit in the wonderful, wisdom-filled form of the Dionysos saga. Dionysos had to come from another direction from that of the world-wonders in which the ancient Greek consciousness had placed Zeus and the other figures of the upper gods ... the ancient Greek felt that in what constituted the world of men there lived something different from what lived in the gods of Zeus's world.

That the world in which we live has a heterogeneous constituent was felt too by the Greek. He felt that an element is included in our physical human existence that is certainly not present in the super-sensible world. Hence the younger Dionysos, macrocosmic representative of our modern ego-consciousness, could not be like the elder Dionysos, a son of Persephone and Zeus, but he had to be a son of an earthly mother—he was the son of Semele and Zeus. But we must bear in mind what the Greek consciousness added in the further development of this saga. It was brought about through the machinations of Hera that Semele saw Zeus in his true form, not as the old Atlantean hero, but as he now is. That could only happen by means of clairvoyant consciousness. What then does it mean that Semele was to see Zeus for a moment as he now is? It simply means that Semele became for a moment clairvoyant. She was destroyed by flame because she saw Zeus in the flames of the astral world. Semele bears witness to this human tragedy, a tragedy which would immediately come about if man, unprepared, were to enter clairvoyantly the spiritual
world.

Hidden somewhere or other in the world of the Greek tales, all the truths about the wonders of the world are to be found. We find secreted there how Dionysos, the macrocosmic representative of the ego—the ego which no man endowed with normal consciousness can see in more than one exemplar—derives from a being of the physical world; that, so to say, what only meets the eye for normal physical consciousness as a maya was embodied in Dionysos; in other words, we see how Dionysos had to participate in the great Illusion, in maya. Today when we discuss the wonders of the world in our prosaic, dry-as-dust way, we speak of physical, chemical, biological laws. The Greek used splendid pictures which really penetrate far deeper into those wonders than our laws that only skim the surface. This is true of the whole world of Greek legend and Greek mythology.

Thus we see as if in a mighty occult script, the question arising out of this Greek myth. If this essential human ego is to manifest in a bodily form, can we expect to see it in the human form we have in the physical world? No, for this form is maya, it is not at all a manifestation of the real ego, it is truly of such a nature that the real egos in Adam and Eve were right to be ashamed of it. What we as men are confronted by today is in fact a real contradiction, and the Greek felt that too. Although it has often been said, very superficially, that he only paid attention to the outer beauties of Nature, even the Greek felt the self-contradiction in the external human form. He was not a naturalist in the sense in which modern man believes he was, but he felt profoundly that the human form as it walks the Earth today is a compromise, from no aspect does it show itself to be what in reality it ought to be. Suppose for a moment that the human form had only arisen under the influence of physical, etheric and astral bodies, suppose that no ego had entered into this human form, then it would have been fashioned as it was when it came over from the previous embodiments of our Earth, as it came over from Saturn, Sun and Moon. Then the human form would be different from what it actually is. If the Earth had not endowed man with the ego, men would be walking about with quite different-looking physical forms. Secretly, in the depths of his soul, the ancient Greek wondered what the human form would look like if earthly men today were ego-less, if men had not participated in the blessings bestowed by the Earth, had not participated in the coming into existence of the ego, had not taken Dionysos into themselves! If there were among us on the Earth men who had developed purely under the influence of the forces of physical, etheric and astral bodies, he wondered what they would look like. And the Greek—uplifted, inspired by the spirit, and moved by unutterable depth of feeling—even put to himself the corresponding question: ‘If there were only the ego, if the ego had not been drawn into the physical, etheric and astral bodies, how would it be formed?’

It would not have a physical body such as it has now, it would have a spiritual body that would be quite different from our external human body. But this spirit-body exists only for a clairvoyant consciousness, it is nowhere to be seen in the physical world. What, then, really is the man who actually walks about the earth? He is neither the ego-less man, purely under the influence of astral, etheric and physical bodies, nor is he the ego-man, but a compromise between the two, something coming about as the result of a combination of both. The man we see before us is a composite being. The Greeks felt this and they said to themselves: ‘Since Dionysos, the younger Dionysos, is really the first teacher of intellectual civilisation, we must imagine him as not yet in a body which has already been subjected to the influence of the ego, for it is through the effect of the Dionysos civilisation that man has first to acquire the intellectual ego. Therefore Dionysos must be represented as this human ego still outside the human body.’ So when the Greeks depicted the procession of Dionysos, which I have called a march of civilisation, they could only accurately represent it on the basis that the essential ego of Dionysos had not yet entered the human body, but was just on the point of doing so; they could only imagine that Dionysos and all his followers had the kind of bodies which would inevitably come about if there were no egos in them, if their bodies were under the influence of forces emanating only from the physical, etheric and astral bodies. They said to themselves: ‘Dionysos and his rout should not look like the man of today, whose bodies are the combined result of the invisible ego and the visible body, but the invisible ego should hover as an aura over the bodily form and the body should be so fashioned as would inevitably come about under the sole influence of physical, etheric and astral bodies, that is, as a man would inevitably be formed if he had continued to develop the forces he had brought over from the Moon without taking in the Earth ego.’

Because the Greek soul has given a graphic answer to this world-riddle quite in accordance with the truth, it has portrayed in the figure of Dionysos, and particularly in the figures of those who constituted his band of followers, human figures who have the ego outside them, and whose own external forms really show only the forces of physical, etheric and astral bodies. These are the satyrs and Sileni who follow Dionysos on his travels, that wonderful creation of picture forms which comes to us from Greek thought. That is what man would look like if we were able to separate the composite form into its component parts. Imagine for a moment that by some kind of magic the physical, etheric and astral bodies of a man could be so treated that the invisible, super-sensible body of the ego could be torn out of him, then he would turn into a figure resembling those who followed in the train of Dionysos.

But the Greeks in their admirable mythology have also drawn attention to something else. We know that the ego has only gradually drawn into the human form, that in the time of Atlantis it was not yet within the body. What then, were these Atlantean bodies like? In the satyrs and the fauns and in Pan, as we shall see later, Greek fantasy and Greek intuition has elaborated pictures of the average Atlantean. Under present Earth conditions such human forms can of course no longer arise. The figures of the satyrs and the fauns and the whole rout of Dionysos represented those stragglers who had most closely retained the ancient Atlantean form. Dionysos had to take with him on his travels the very men who bore the least trace of the ego within them, because he was to become the ego's first teacher.

We see then that the Greeks represented in this train of Dionysos the forms of average Atlantean men. Atlantean men were so formed that they did not have skeletons such as men have today. The human body has become more solid; it was much softer in Atlantean times. For this reason it was incapable of preservation, and the geology, the palaeontology, of today will be hard put to it to find any trace of the real Atlantean man. But a geology, a palaeontology, of quite a different kind has preserved the Atlantean man for us! It is not in the geological strata of the earth that we have to delve if we wish to know the man of prehistoric times, the man whose higher corporeality was still outside the physical body. To burrow in the earth is quite absurd; in the earth we shall never find traces of prehistoric man which are anything but decadent. But in the strata of human spiritual life, in the strata of spiritual geology which have been preserved for us in the wonderful Greek mythology, there we shall find the normal, average, Atlantean man, just as in the geological strata of the earth we find snail shells and mussel shells. Let us study the configuration of the fauns, of Pan and of Silenus; it is there that we have the spiritual fossils which lead us to the Earth's prehistoric humanity. Therein we see how the ancient Greek consciousness had an answer to wonders of the world which today may be dubbed sentimental, dreamy, fantastic, but which nevertheless was imbued with a kind of science more profound than our modern abstract, prosaic, intellectual science. There are today many Darwinian and anti-Darwinian hypotheses as to what prehistoric man looked like. The Greeks set this world-riddle before us in a way that can satisfy the soul. Neither Haeckelism nor any other branch of Darwinism, nor the excavations of geology, tell us anything about the outward appearance of prehistoric man, but Greek mythology has supplied the answer to this question for us by its representations of the rout of Dionysos in its plastic art.

We must come to feel that Greek mythology really provides a serious answer to questions about the wonders of the world, and then we shall be able to enter into it ever more deeply. It is only someone who does not understand what underlies these things who can say, ‘I can't accept that interpretation, it is too far fetched.’ Anyone who knows the whole story in all its ramifications, besides knowing the true development of man as revealed by the Akasha Chronicle, knows that there is nothing fantastic, nothing sentimental in what is being put before you today as Spiritual Science. The fancifulness, the sentimentality, lies in the abstract, empirical science of today, which imagines that it can dig up from the strata of the physical earth something that is not there, and can make a study of that while it ignores the wondrous script of spiritual geology which comes before us, to the rescue of human wisdom and its evolution, in the impressive mythology of ancient Greece.

Let us first send our thoughts to those who are outside on the battlefields, where the great events of the present are taking place, to those who must stand for these serious events with their life, body and soul:

Geister ihrer Seelen, wirkende Wächter!
Eure Schwingen mögen bringen
Unserer Seelen bittende Liebe
Eurer Hut vertrauten Erdenmenschen,
Dass, mit Eurer Macht geeint,
Unsre Bitte helfend strahle
Den Seelen, die sie liebend sucht!

(TRANSLATION)

Spirits of their Souls, working Guardians!
May your pinions bring
Our souls' beseeching love
To the human beings on this earth, entrusted to your care,
That, united with your might,
Our prayer may helpfully ray out
To the souls whom it lovingly seeks!

And let us remember those who have already passed through the portal of death, as a result of these events:

Geister ihrer Seelen, wirkende Wächter!
Eure Schwingen mögen bringen
Unsrer Seelen bittende Liebe
Eurer Hut vertrauten Sphärenmenschen,
Dass, mit Eurer Macht geeint,
Unsre Bitte helfend strahle
Den Seelen, die sie liebend sucht.

(TRANSLATION)

Spirits of their Souls, working Guardians!
May your pinions bring
Our souls' beseeching love
To the human beings of the spheres, entrusted to your care,
That, united with your might,
Our prayer may helpfully ray out
To the souls whom it lovingly seeks!

And the Spirit Whom we seek through our spiritual-scientific endeavours, the Spirit Who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha for the welfare of the earth and for mankind's freedom and progress, may He be with you and with your difficult tasks!

The time in which we live, reminds us daily and hourly of death, this significant event in human life, it reminds us of man's passage through the portal of death. For only in the light of spiritual science, death becomes a real event, in the true meaning of the word, because spiritual science shows us the eternal forces that are active within us, that pass through births and deaths and take on a special form of existence between birth and death, in order to assume another form of existence after their passage through the portal of death. In the light of spiritual science, death becomes an event, instead of being merely the abstract end of life (only a materialistic world-conception can look upon death as the end of life), it becomes a deep and serious event within the whole compass of human life. Even from our own ranks, dear friends of ours have left us in order to pass through the portal of death, chiefly as a result of the present historical events, but also for other reasons, and so it may perhaps be particularly appropriate just now to say a few things on death, on this great event, and on the facts of human life that are connected with it.

Explanations have often been given in our spiritual-scientific lectures on the life between death and a new birth, so that we were able to gain many essential facts, particularly in regard to this subject. The course which spiritual science has followed up to now, will have shown you that in every single case it can only speak of things from one definite standpoint, so that a more accurate knowledge can gradually be acquired by speaking of things repeatedly and throwing light upon them from many points of view. To-day I shall therefore add to the facts that you already know in connection with this subject, a few things that may be useful to our comprehension of the world as a whole.

Through spiritual science, we consider, to begin with (and that is a good thing) the human being such as he stands before us, here, in the physical world as an expression of his whole being. We must depart first of all from the manner in which the human being presents himself to us in the physical world, and for this reason, I have frequently pointed out that we obtain, as it were, a general view of man's whole being if we contemplate him so that we first take, as a foundation, his physical body, which we learn to know externally in the physical world through our senses and the scientific-dissection of what we perceive through the senses. We then proceed, by studying that form of organisation which we designate as our etheric body: this already possesses a super-sensible character and cannot, therefore, be contemplated with the aid of the ordinary intellect, which is bound to the brain, and is consequently also inaccessible to our ordinary science. The etheric body is an organism having super-sensible character, concerning which we may say that it was already known to men such as Immanuel Hermann Fichte, son of the great thinker Johann Gottlieb Fichte, to Troxler and others. Indeed, man's etheric body can only be grasped through imaginative knowledge owing to its super-sensible character, but as far as imaginative knowledge is concerned, it can be contemplated externally, just as the physical-sensory body can be contemplated externally through our ordinary sensory knowledge.

We then ascend in our contemplation to the astral body. The astral body in man cannot be contemplated in an external-sensory manner, in the same way in which we contemplate the physical body through our external senses, or in the same way in which we contemplate our etheric body through our inner sense; the astral body is something that can only be experienced inwardly. We must experience it inwardly and in order to experience it, we must be within it. The same thing applies to the fourth member which must be grasped in the physical world, to the Ego. With these four members of human nature, we build up our whole being.

Past lectures showed us that what we designate as man's physical body is a very complicated structure, formed during long periods of development that passed through the stages of Saturn, the Sun and the Moon¹ also the evolution of the earth contributed to this development of the physical body, from the very beginning of earthly existence up to our time. A complicated process of development therefore built up our physical body.

That form of contemplation which is, to begin with, accessible to us in the physical world, merely sees the external aspect of everything that lives within the physical body. Even ordinary science merely sees this external aspect. We might say: Our ordinary physical contemplation and ordinary science, in the form in which it now lives in the world, merely know of the physical body as much as we would know of a house, if we would only go round it outside, without ever going inside, so that we would never learn to know what it is like inside, nor what people live in it.

Of course, those who stand upon the foundation of ordinary science, in the usual materialistic meaning, will argue: “We are thoroughly acquainted with the interior of the physical body! We know what it is like, because we have frequently studied the brain inside the skull, when dissecting corpses; we have frequently studied the stomach and the heart.” This interior, however, that can thus be studied from outside, this spatial interior is not what I mean when I speak of man's inner being. Even this spatial interior is nothing but an external thing. Indeed, in the case of the physical body, this spatial interior is far more external than the real spatial exterior.

This must sound strange. But our sense-organs—you know this from other descriptions contained in our spiritual science—were formed already during the Saturn period and we carry them on the surface of our body. Spatially speaking, they are outside. Nevertheless, they were built by forces that are far more spiritual than those that formed our stomach, or everything that exists, spatially speaking, inside our body. What is inside our body, is built up by the least spiritual of forces. Strange though it may sound, I must nevertheless point out that we really speak of ourselves in an entirely mistaken manner—upside down, we might say. Since we live on the physical plane, it is natural to speak in that way; nevertheless the way in which we speak of ourselves is quite wrong. We should really designate the skin of our face as our interior, and the stomach as our exterior. This would lead us far closer to the truth! It would lead us closer to the real truth if we were to say: We eat in such a way that we send the food out of us; when we send food into our stomach, we really send it out, we do not send it into our body, as we generally say at the present time. The more our organs lie on the surface, the more spiritual are the forces from which they come; and the more they lie inside our body, the less spiritual are the forces that gave rise to them,

The descriptions that were given so far in our spiritual science enable you to grasp this with a certain ease. If you carefully remember the descriptions of spiritual science, you will no doubt remember what it says in regard to the Moon stage of development, namely, that something split off during the Moon stage of development, and that something also split off during the Earth-development; it went out into the world's spaces from the Saturn, Sun and Moon stages of development. A very strange thing is connected with this splitting-off process: namely, we were turned inside out! Our inside became our outside, and our outside became our inside. During the Saturn and Sun periods, our human countenance, that is now turned towards the outer world, was really turned towards our inner being. Of course, this was only the case during the early stages of development; but even during a part of the Moon period, during the Moon existence, the foundation of the inner organs which we now possess was still formed from outside. Since that time, we have really been turned inside out, like an overcoat that can be turned. We should bear in mind that many super-sensible facts are connected with our physical body; its whole structure is super-sensible; the super-sensible world has formed it, and when we look upon the physical body as a whole, it merely shows us its external aspect,

If we now come to the etheric body, we shall find that it is neither visible nor accessible to the physical-sensory contemplation. But when the human being passes through the portal of death, it becomes all the more important. The time through which the human being now passes, the first days after his death, are particularly important as far as the etheric body is concerned. But we must learn to think differently, even in regard to the physical body, if we wish to grasp in the right way all that we encounter after our passage through the portal of death.

You already know (for you can observe this even in the physical world) that when we pass through the portal of death, we lay aside our physical body, as we generally say. We lay aside our physical body. Through decomposition or cremation (the only difference between these two processes lies in the length of time that they take up) the physical body is handed over to the elements of the earth. Now we might think that the physical body simply ceases to exist for those who have passed through the portal of death. But this is not the case, in this meaning. For we can hand over to the earth only those parts of our physical body that come from the earth itself. We cannot, however, hand over to the earth that part of our physical body that comes from the ancient Moon existence, nor that part which comes from the ancient Sun existence, or from the ancient Saturn existence. For those parts that come from the ancient Saturn existence, from the Sun existence, from the Moon existence, and even from a great portion of the Earth existence, are super-sensible forces. These super-sensible forces contained in our physical body, of which only the external part is accessible to our sensory contemplation, as explained just now,—where do these super-sensible forces go to, after we have passed through the portal of death? As stated, we hand over to the earth, we return to the earth, only that part of our physical body, of that most wonderful structure which exists in the world, to begin with, as a form,—we return to the earth only what the earth itself has given to the physical body. And where is the other part, when we have passed through the portal of death? The other part withdraws from the one that sinks down into the earth, as it were, through the process of decomposition or cremation; the other part is taken up by the whole universe.

If you now think of everything you can at all imagine in the environment of the earth, including the planets and the fixed stars, if you imagine this in the most spiritual form, this spiritually conceived idea would give you the place where the spiritual part of our physical body abides after death. Only a portion of this spiritual part, a portion contained in the element of heat, separates and remains with the earth. But every other spiritual part of our physical body is borne out into the spaces of the universe, into the whole cosmos.

Where do we go to, when we abandon our physical body? Where do we dive down? Through our death, we dive down with lightning speed into that which forms our physical body, from out [of] all the super-sensible forces. Imagine that all the constructive forces that have worked upon your physical body, ever since the time of Saturn, were to stretch themselves into infinity, in order to prepare the place in which you live between death and a new birth. Between birth and death, all this is drawn together, I might say, within the space enclosed by your skin; it is merely drawn together.

When we are outside our physical body, we experience something that is of utmost importance for the whole subsequent life between death and a new birth. I have often mentioned this. This experience is of opposite character to the corresponding experience during our life here, upon the physical plane. During our life upon the physical plane, we cannot look back as far as the hour of our birth; we cannot look back upon it with the aid of our ordinary cognitive power. There is not one person who can remember his own birth, nor look back upon it. The only thing we know, is that we were born; in the first place, because we have been told so by others, and in the second place, because all the other human beings that came to the earth after us, were also born, so that we infer from this that we too, were born. But we cannot pass through the real experience of our own birth.

Exactly the opposite is the case with the corresponding experience after death. Whereas, during our physical life, the immediate contemplation of our birth can never rise up before our soul, the moment of death stands before our soul throughout our life between death and a new birth, if we only look upon it spiritually. We must realise that we then look upon the moment of death from the other side. Here, on earth, death has a terrifying aspect only because we look upon it as a kind of dissolution, as an end. But when we look back upon the moment of death from the other side, from the spiritual side, then death continually appears to us as a victory of the spirit, as the spirit that is extricating itself from the physical. It then appears as the greatest, most beautiful and significant event. Moreover, this experience kindles that which constitutes our Ego-consciousness after death. Throughout the time between death and a new birth, we have an Ego-consciousness that not only resembles but far exceeds that which we have here, during our physical life. We would not have this Ego-consciousness, if we could not look back incessantly, if we would not always see—but from the other side, from the spiritual side—that moment in which our spiritual part extricated itself from the physical. We know that we are an Ego only because we know that we have died, that our spiritual has freed itself from our physical part. When we cannot contemplate the moment of death, beyond the portal of death, then our Ego-consciousness after death is in the same case as our physical Ego-consciousness here upon the earth, when we are asleep. Just as we know nothing of our physical Ego-consciousness when we are asleep, so we know nothing concerning ourselves after death, if we do not constantly have before us the moment of death. It stands before us as one of the most beautiful and loftiest moments.

You see, even in this case we must set about thinking in an entirely different way of the spiritual world, than of the sensory-physical world. If we indolently remain by the thoughts which we have in connection with the physical-sensory world, it will be impossible for us to grasp the spiritual in any way more precisely. For the most important thing after death is that the moment of death is viewed from the other side. This kindles our Ego-consciousness on the other side. Here, in the physical world, we have, as it were, one side of Ego-consciousness; after death, we have the other side of Ego-consciousness. I explained just now where we should look for the super-sensible part of our physical body after death. We should seek this physical body in the shape of a relation of forces, of an organism of forces, as a cosmos of forces, within the whole world. This physical essence prepares the place through which we must pass between death and a new birth.

Within our physical body, which is so small in comparison to the whole world, our skin really encloses a microcosm, something that is, in reality, a whole world. Trivially speaking, I might say that this world is merely rolled together and that afterwards it unrolls again and fills out the universe, with the exception of one tiny space, that always remains empty.

Between death and a new birth, we really exist everywhere in the world; we live in it with that part which, here on earth, lies at the foundation of our physical body in the form of super-sensible forces. We are everywhere, except in that one place. This remains empty. It is the space enclosed by our skin, the space which we take up in the physical world. This remains empty.

Yet we constantly look upon this empty space. That is to say, we look upon our own self, from outside; we look into a concavity. This remains empty. It remains empty to such an extent that a fundamental feeling rises up in connection with it. Namely, we do not contemplate things in an abstract manner, we do not simply stare at them, but our contemplation is connected with a powerful inner life-experience, with a mighty experience. It is connected with the fact that when we contemplate this emptiness, a feeling rises up in us, a feeling that accompanies us throughout our life between death and a new birth and constitutes a great deal of what we generally designate as our life beyond. It is the feeling, that there is something in the world which must again and again be filled out by us. And then we acquire the feeling: “I exist in the world for a definite purpose, which I, alone, can fulfil.” Thus we learn to know our place within the world. We feel that we are building stones, without which the world could not exist. This is what arises through the contemplation of that empty space. When we gaze at it, we are overcome by a feeling telling us that we stand within the world as something that forms part of it.

All this is connected with the further development of our physical body. The more elementary forms of description only enable us to explain schematically as it were, a reality of the spiritual world that really requires to be explained in the form of images. In order to rise gradually to those concepts which penetrate more deeply into the reality of the spiritual world, we must first have those images.

We know that our next experience is a kind of retrospective memory, that lasts for days. But this retrospective memory is inappropriately designated (but nevertheless with a certain right) as a retrospective memory, for we have before us now, for a few days, something that resembles a tableau, or a panorama, woven out of all we have experienced during our past life. It does not, however, rise up in the same way in which an ordinary memory rises up in our physical body. You see, the memories that live in our physical body are of such a kind that we draw them out of our memory. Memory is a force that is connected with our physical body. Our recollections rise up in the form of thoughts; through the power of memory, we draw them out successively, within the stream of time. But the retrospective memory after death is of such a kind that everything that occurred during our earthly life, now surrounds us simultaneously, as if it were a panorama. Our life-experiences now rise up in the form of imaginations. We can only say that we now live, for whole days, within our experiences. What we experienced just before death, and what we experienced during our childhood, stands before us simultaneously, in powerful pictures. A panorama of our life, a life-picture stands before us and it reveals, simultaneously, in a woof woven out of the ether, what normally occurs successively, within the stream of time. Everything that we now see before us, lives in the ether.

We feel, above all, that we are now surrounded by something that is alive. Everything within it lives and weaves. And then we experience that it resounds spiritually, that it shines forth spiritually and gives warmth spiritually.

We know that this life-tableau disappears after a few days. What makes it cease and what is the essence of this life-tableau?

If we study the true essence of this life-tableau, we must really say: Everything that we have experienced during our life, is woven into it. How did we experience these things?—In the form of thoughts, connected with our experiences. Everything that we experienced in the form of thoughts and concepts is contained in this picture of our life.

In order to grasp this concretely, let us now say: During our earthly life, we lived together with another human being, we spoke with him and in speaking with him, his thoughts communicated with our thoughts. We received love from him, we allowed his soul to influence us and experienced all this inwardly. In this manner, we shared the experiences of the person we lived with. He lived and we lived, and through him we experienced something. What we experienced through him, now appears to us woven into this etheric life-tableau. It is the same thing that constitutes our memories. Think, for instance, of the moment, ten or twenty years ago, when you first met him and experienced something through him. Imagine that this memory now rises up before you, but that you do not remember it in the same way in which you would remember things during your ordinary life. The ordinary memories are grey and faded, but now you remember things in such a way that they rise up within you as LIVING memories; you see your friend standing before you in exactly the same way in which he stood before you during the real experience.

Here, on earth, we are often very dreamy and what we experience upon the physical plane in a living and hearty manner, becomes dulled and loses its vitality. But when we pass through the portal of death, when our experiences rise up before us in the life-tableau, they are no longer dull and lifeless, but exist there, in the original freshness and vitality which they possessed when we passed through them, during our earthly life. In this form they become inwoven with our life-tableau; in this form we experience them after death, for whole days.

In regard to the physical world, we have the impression that our physical body falls away from us when we die; in a similar way we now have the impression that also our etheric body falls away from us after a certain number of days, but it does not fall away from us in the same way in which our physical body falls away, for it becomes inwoven with the whole universe, with the whole world. It lives in the world and stamps its impressions upon the whole world, while we are experiencing our life-tableau. What we thus have before us in the form of a life-tableau, has now been handed over to the external world: it lives in our surroundings and has been taken over by the world.

During those days, we have an important and impressive experience in this connection. For, after death, our experiences do not merely resemble the memories which we have during our earthly life, but they are in every way substance for new experiences. Even the manner in which we grasp our Ego, through the fact that we constantly look back upon our death, is a new experience, for our earthly senses do not enable us to experience anything similar. This can only be grasped through the knowledge of initiation. But even what we experience during the days in which we are surrounded by this life-tableau, by this etheric life that frees itself from us and becomes inwoven with the universe, even what we experience in this manner, is impressive and lofty, it is an overwhelming and powerful experience for the human soul.

You see, during our physical life on earth, we face the world: we face the mineral, vegetable, animal and human kingdom. It enables us to experience what our senses are able to experience, what our intellect, that is bound to the brain, obtains through the sense-experiences, what are our feelings, that are connected with our vascular system, experience: we experience all these things, here on earth.

But in reality, and from a loftier standpoint, we human beings are extremely great dunces (excuse this expression!), gigantic dunces between birth and death. In regard to the wisdom of the great world, we are fearfully stupid if we believe that here on earth, when we experience something in the manner described and bear it along in the form of memories, everything is finished; we are fearfully stupid if we think that our experiences are finished, when we take them up in this manner, as human beings. For while we experience things, while we form concepts and feelings rise up in our experiences, the whole world of the Hierarchies is active within this process through which we acquire our experiences; the Hierarchies live and weave in it.

When we face a human being and, look into his eyes, then the Spirits of the Hierarchies, the Hierarchies themselves, the work of the Hierarchies, live in our gaze and in what is sent towards us through the gaze of the other human being. Our experience merely shows us the external aspect of things, for, in reality, the Gods work within our experiences. We think, that we only live for our own sake; yet the Gods work out something through our experiences; they obtain from them something that they can weave into the world. We form ideas, we have feeling experiences; the Gods take them up and communicate them to their world. And when we die, we know that the purpose of our life is to give the Gods the opportunity to spin out of our life this woof coming from our etheric body and to hand it over to the whole universe. The Gods gave us the chance to live, in order that they might spin out something for themselves, thus enriching the world.

This is an overwhelming thought. Every one of our strides is the external expression of an event connected with the Gods; it forms part of that woof which the Gods use for their plan of the world and which they leave to us only until we pass through the portal of death. After our death, they take it away from us and incorporate with the universe these, our human destinies. Our human destinies are, at the same time, the deeds of Gods, and the form in which they appear to us human beings is merely their outward aspect. This is the significant, important and essential fact which we should bear in mind.

What we acquire inwardly, during our earthly life, through the fact that we can think and have feelings, whom does this belong to, after our death? Whom does it now belong to? After our death, it belongs to the universe. We look back upon our death, and in the same way we now look back with that part which remains to us, namely, with our astral body and our Ego, upon that which has become inwoven with the universe, with the world. During our earthly life, we bear within us what thus becomes inwoven with the universe after our death; we bear it within us, as our etheric body. But now it is spun up and becomes inwoven with the world. And we now look upon it, we contemplate it. After our death, we look upon it in the same way in which we experienced it inwardly, here on earth. It now lives in the world outside. Just as here on earth we see stars, mountains, rivers, so after our death, we see, in addition to what our physical body has become with lightning speed, also that part of our own experiences which has become inwoven with the universe. That part of our own experiences which now incorporates with the whole world-structure, is reflected in those members which we still possess, in our astral body and in our Ego; it is reflected in the same way in which the external world is reflected, here on earth, in our physical organs and through our physical being.

While this is reflected in us, we acquire something that we cannot acquire during our earthly life, something that we shall only acquire later on, during the Jupiter period, in the form of a more external, physical impression. Now we acquire it spiritually, through the fact that our etheric being, outside makes an impression upon us. The impression which is thus made upon us, is, to begin with, a spiritual one; it is made in the form of images; in its image-character it is, however, the prototype of what we shall one day possess upon Jupiter: namely, the Spirit-Self.

A Spirit-Self is therefore born to us, through the fact that our etheric part becomes inwoven with the universe; this Spirit-Self comes to birth spiritually, not in the form in which we shall have it later on, upon Jupiter.

The etheric body has now detached itself, so that we now have the astral body, the Ego and the Spirit-Self.

The astral body and the Ego therefore remain to us from our earthly life.

You already know that our astral body, in the earthly form in which it was subjected to us, remains with as for a long time after death. The astral body remains with us, because it is permeated with all those things that only pertain to the earthly-human life, and because it cannot immediately expel this. We now pass through a time during which we can only cast off little by little what has become of our astral body as a result of our earthly life.

You see, here on earth, we can only experience, in regard to the astral body, one half at the most of everything through which we pass. We really experience only half of what takes place in every one of our experiences. Let us take an example: Imagine—this applies, both to good and to evil thoughts and actions—but let us take as an example an evil action: Imagine that you say something bad to another person and that your words hurt him. When we say something unkind, we only experience that part which concerns us personally; we only experience the feelings that prompted us to say those evil words: This is the soul-impression which we gather when we say bad and unkind things. But the other person to whom we addressed our unkind words, has an entirely different impression; he has, as it were, the other half of the impression and feels hurt. The second half of the impression lives in him. What we ourselves experience during our physical life on earth is one thing, and what the other person experiences is another thing.

Now imagine the following: After our death, when we pass retrogradely through our life, we must once more live through everything that other people, outside, have experienced through us. As we go backwards through our life, we experience the effects of our thoughts and actions. Between death and a new birth, we therefore pass through our life by going through it retrogradely. And when we have gone back as far as our birth, we are ripe for the moment when also that part of our astral body may be cast off, which is permeated with earthly things. It abandons us, and a new state of-existence begins for us when we have cast off our astral body.

The astral body always kept us connected, I might say, with the earth; it maintained this connection in all our experiences. When we pass through our astral body—not in a dreamy condition, but by living through our earthly experiences backwards—we are still connected with our earthly life; we still stand within our earthly existence. Now that we have cast off—but this is not the right expression; it is, however, impossible to use another one—now that we have cast off our astral body, we are quite free of all that pertains to the earth, and we live in the real spiritual world.

A new experience now sets in. This casting-off of the astral body is, again, merely one aspect of the whole experience; the other aspect is an entirely different one. When we have passed through our earthly experiences and no longer have our astral body, we feel, as it were, inwardly filled and permeated with—we cannot say with material—but with Spirit; then we really feel that we are in the spiritual world and the spiritual world rises up within us. In former times, it rose up before us in the outer world when we contemplated the universe and saw our own etheric body inwoven with the universe. But now it rises up within us; we now experience it inwardly. And our Ego rises up within us, as a prototype of what we shall possess physically only upon Venus; our Ego rises up as a prototype of the Life-Spirit.

We now consist of Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit and Ego.

Just as here on earth, we live in a rather dreamy state from our birth until that moment of our childhood in which we acquire self-consciousness, which is the earliest moment of life that we can recall, so we now lead a form of life that is fully conscious, indeed more conscious and higher than our earthly life. However, we experience a purely spiritual life, only when we have detached ourselves from our astral body, from our astral life, retaining only that part of our astral which permeates us inwardly. Consequently, we are, from that time onwards, Spirits among Spirits.

Now another important and essential experience rises up. During our life in the physical world, we carry on our work, do this or that thing and [have] experiences in connection with all these things. (We just spoke of this). Our experiences are, however, not limited to the physical world; simultaneously and in connection with them, we also experience something else. Although the expression which I shall now use for these simultaneous experiences is just an ordinary, more general expression, let me nevertheless use this word: while we experience these things, we grow tired, we get used up. This is constantly the case: we grow tired. Although our weariness is eliminated for our next state of consciousness through the fact that we sleep, or rather, through the fact that we rest during our sleep, this elimination, or adjustment, is nevertheless only a partial one, for we know, of course, that during our life we gradually become used up, we grow older, and our strength gradually dwindles. Consequently, we also grow tired in a wider sense. When we grow older, we know that we cannot adjust everything by sleeping. Thus we wear out our strength, we grow tired, during our life on earth.

Indeed, we are now able to view this problem from another aspect. After our preceding explanation, we can now advance this problem in a different way; we can ask: Why do the Gods allow us to grow weary? The fact that here on earth we get tired and wear out our strength, gives us something that is really most significant for our whole life. Let us, however, grasp the idea that we get tired, in a wider sense than the usual one. Let us place it clearly before our soul.

You will grasp it best of all if you imagine it in the following way: Ask any one of those present: Do you know anything concerning the interior of your head?—Probably only a person who is suffering from headache would answer that at the present moment he does know something concerning the interior of his head. He alone would feel what the inside of his head is like; all the others would not feel it.

We can feel our organs only when they are not quite in order; we are then to some extent aware of their existence through our feelings. As a rule, we only have a more general feeling of our physical body, and this feeling increases when anything is out of order. But when we only have this general feeling, we know very little concerning the interior of our body. Those who suffer from bad headaches know a little more concerning the inside of their head than an anatomist, who is merely acquainted with the head's vessels. I explained this just now. In growing more and more tired, during the course of our life, we acquire an ever stronger feeling in regard to the body's interior, its spatial interior.

Consider the fact that the more weary we grow, the more the infirmities of life arise, for instance the infirmities of old age. Our life consists therein that we gradually begin to feel and to sense our physical body. We learn to sense this physical part of our being, because it becomes hardened within us and because it pushes itself, as it were, into our being. Just because it develops so slowly, we regard it, I might say, as an insignificant feeling. Its real significance could be gauged, if we could feel (excuse this trivial expression, but it conveys what I wish to say) in the pink of health, like an exuberantly healthy child, and immediately afterwards, for the sake of comparison, like an old man of 80 or 85, whose limbs have grown fragile. This would enable us to experience that feeling more strongly; simply because it develops so slowly and little by little, we do not notice the fact that we gradually spin ourselves into the feeling experience of our physical part, while we grow weary; we do not notice this feeling simply because it develops so slowly. Yet growing weary is a real process. At first, it does not exist at all, for a child is full of exuberant vitality. But later on, fatigue gradually begins to drown the vital forces, and then the process of getting tired breaks through. We have the possibility of growing weary, and during this process (even though it only gives us, let us say, a dim feeling of our body's inner structure), during this process, something takes place within us, something really takes place within us.

Our life in the physical world only shows us the outer aspect of deep, significant and lofty mysteries. The fact that this dim, insignificant feeling of growing weary accompanies us throughout our life, so that we are able to feel the inner structure of our body, is merely the outer aspect of something that becomes inwoven with us; it is wonderfully woven out of pure wisdom, a complete woof of pure wisdom.

While we thus grow weary during our life and begin to experience ourselves inwardly, a delicate knowledge becomes inwoven with us, a knowledge of the wonderful constitution of our organs, of our inner organs. Our heart grows tired, yet this weariness means that a knowledge of the heart's structure becomes inwoven with us, a knowledge of how the heart is built from out the universe. Our stomach gets tired—most of all, when we spoil it by eating too much—yet during this process that tires the stomach, an image of wisdom from out the cosmos is woven into us, and this image shows us how the stomach is built up.

The lofty, wonderful structure of our organism, of this great work of art, arises within us in the form of an image. But this image only comes to life when we cast off that part of our astral body which is bound to the earth. What now lives within us, what now fills us as LIFE-SPIRIT, is the wisdom connected with our own being, it is the wisdom connected with the wonderful structure of our inner being and this wisdom now lives in us.

Now begins a time in which we compare, as it were, what fills us in the form of Life-Spirit from out the wisdom of our inner being, with the etheric woof that has already been woven into the universe. Our task is now to compare how one thing fits in with the other, and we then build up, in the form of an image, our inner being; we give it the shape which it should have during our next incarnation.

This is how we begin, but little by little our life approaches the World-Midnight, which you will find described in one of the Mystery Plays, in “The Souls' Awakening”. Particularly after the World-Midnight, we are engaged in a work that consists therein that we now participate in the world's creative work; we call into life what we afterwards enjoy here, DURING OUR LIFE BETWEEN DEATH AND A NEW BIRTH, WE SHARE IN THE WORK, WE PARTICIPATE IN THE WEAVING OF THE GODS' IMAGES. We have the privilege of sharing in a divine task, in what the Gods aimed at, when they placed man into the world. We are allowed to prepare our next incarnation.

Of course, this is not only connected with processes that exclusively and egoistically concern our own being, for all manner of other processes take place as well. This may be evident particularly from the following:

If we gradually succeed in experiencing, in spiritual contemplation, this wonderful process—which is, above all, far higher than the one which takes place on earth, when summer and winter alternate, or when the sun rises and sets—and when all that takes place which occurs in the form of earthly work, then something occurs in the spiritual world finally leading to our earthly incarnation, to human existence. This is a lofty, heavenly process, which has not only an external significance, but a deep significance for the whole world.

We also encounter something else, when we contemplate this process. It may sound strange to say this, but you see, the higher mysteries at first necessarily appear strange in the light of a physical-Sensory contemplation. What rises up before our soul in connection with these mysteries must move us. The more it moves us, the better it is, for these things, the very nature of these things, should not approach our soul so that we remain dry and indifferent. They should not be taken up in such a way that we remain indifferent, dry and cool; but they should, instead, give us a soul-impression of the loftiness and greatness of the divine spiritual world.

We can say: If anybody would undertake to present spiritual science in such a dry way that it does not take hold of our WHOLE being, and so that we do not gain an impression of the loftiness and greatness of the divine-spiritual that pulses and weaves through the world—if, after all these descriptions, we would live on indifferently and dryly, then we would be born without heads, in accordance with the present conditions of the world and in spite of everything we know! We would be born without heads! The structure of our head is something that we are unable to build. In its whole structure, the human head is such a lofty image of the universe, that the human being would be unable to form it, even with the aid of that life-wisdom which is woven into him; he would be unable to prepare it for the next incarnation. All the divine Hierarchies must cooperate in this work. Your head, this slightly irregular and somewhat transformed sphere, is a real microcosm, a true image of the great world-sphere. Within it lives, within it is collected everything that exists outside, in the universe. All the forces that are active in the different Hierarchies cooperate in order to produce the head. And when we begin to shape our next incarnation, from out [of] the wisdom, which we collected during the process of growing weary, all the Hierarchies cooperate and influence this activity, in order to embody in us, as an image of the whole wisdom of the Gods, what afterwards becomes our head!

While all this occurs, our physical, hereditary stream is being prepared generations ahead, here upon the earth. Just as after our death we can only hand over to the earth what comes from the earth, so our parents and grand-parents only give us that part of our being which pertains to the earth. Our earthly part is merely our exterior, it is merely the external expression within this earthly part. Woven into it, is, in the first place, everything that we ourselves are able to weave in the manner described, and what all the Hierarchies of the Gods weave, before we gain a connection (through conception) with that which enwraps us and clothes us about, when we enter the physical plane.

I explained to you, that the more of this lofty knowledge we take up in our feelings, the better it will be for us. Just consider the fact: We use our head. In so far as we live in materialism, we generally have not the slightest idea that whole Hierarchies of Gods are at work in order to produce our head, in order to mould that which lies, spiritually, at the foundation of our head, so that we are able to live. If we grasp this, in the meaning of a spiritual-scientific knowledge, it will spontaneously be filled with feelings of gratitude and thankfulness towards the whole universe.

Consequently, what we acquire through spiritual science, should incessantly continue to increase and raise our feelings. In the sphere of spiritual science, our sentient life should more and more hold pace with our cognitive work. It is not good to remain behind with our feelings. Whenever we learn to know a new and higher portion of spiritual science, we should be able to unfold, I might say, more and more reverent feelings towards the world's mysteries, which finally lead to the mysteries of man. A true progress in spiritual science really lies in this purifying, spiritual, warmth of our feelings.

Let me mention one more thing because it completes all that we have contemplated in this lecture. Here, in the physical world, we gradually grow accustomed to life by having, to begin with, the dull consciousness of childhood. At first, we only recognise our mother and little by little we learn to know other people. As we grow accustomed to life in the physical world, we believe that we are constantly coming across new people. As far as our physical consciousness is concerned, this is, in fact, true. But when we pass through the portal of death, we have a real, true connection with all the souls that we encountered during our earthly life. They rise up again before our spiritual eye. The souls with whom we were connected during our earthly life and that crossed the portal of death before us, we find these souls, as it were. The word “to find” really applies to physical conditions, but we may use it here, to define that living way in which souls approach other souls. This “finding” of the souls that crossed the portal of death before us, should, however, be imagined in such a way that we approach them, as it were, in an opposite manner from the one in which we approach human beings, here on the physical plane.

On the physical plane we encounter human beings so that we first approach them physically, and then we gradually become acquainted with their inner being. Their inner being unfolds only when we penetrate into their inner life. Hence, what we experience inwardly in connection with a human being, is the result of that which develops from out [of] our own inner life. When we ourselves have crossed the portal of death and encounter the souls that have passed through the portal of death before us, we know to begin with: There is that particular soul. We can feel it, we know that it is there. Now we must, however, surrender our whole inner being to the first impression that arises, to the first most abstract impression. Here on earth we should allow other human beings to exercise their influence upon us; but in the spiritual world we must SURRENDER OUR INNER BEING and we must now build up the image, the imagination, ourselves. The imaginative element, what we can look upon, this we must gradually build up. You may have an idea of the soul's experiences after death if you imagine that you do not see it, but that you TAKE HOLD of it ... and as you gradually ENCOMPASS IT WITH YOUR GRASP, you, form an image: you build up an image for yourself. You must therefore build up in inner activity the image of the soul whom you encounter. You realise, as it were: “I am now facing a soul ... What soul is it? It is the soul ...”, and this knowledge rises out of your own soul ... “towards whom I had the feelings of a son towards his mother.” And you begin to feel: “I experience myself together with this soul”. Now you begin to build its spiritual form. You must be active within it, and then it develops into an image. Through the fact that you build this image together with the other soul, you are united with that dead person, even before you begin, to form its spiritual shape. In this manner you are united with everything with which you were united during your earthly life; that is to say, you now experience these things in their own world. You must discover them, by awakening within you the power of vision, so that you may look upon yourself, but this requires activity on your part.

It is not the same with souls that still dwell in their physical body, with souls that are still alive when we die. Even here on earth, we encounter them in the form of images. Thus we look down upon the earth, and do not need to build up their image, for they already face us as images. Of course, we may weave into these images something that can become spiritual warmth and nourishment for the dead, namely the image which we are able to form through our thoughts for the dead, through our lasting love and memory, or—we know this, as spiritual scientists—by reading something to them.

You see, all this extends the human gaze, so that it penetrates, really penetrates into the real world. If this rises up before our soul, we begin to realise how little we know of the spiritual world. This was not always the case. Only the completely materialistic people of modern times boast of the great extent of their knowledge. But we know that in the past the human beings were clairvoyant and that this ancient, atavistic clairvoyance was lost only because certain qualities had to be acquired, which disappeared in the midst of an existence connected with a materialistic world. If a real materialist, a thoroughly materialistic thinker, approaches us, he will, of course, say: “It is nonsense to speak of an ancient clairvoyance, or that people had a special knowledge in the past”. But if we would only open our physical eyes a little as we pass through the world, we would very soon discover the confutation of such an argument! It is not even so long ago, that people used to know more than they do at the present time.

You know, for we have often considered this matter—but let me mention it again at the conclusion of this lecture—that Lucifer and Ahriman have a share in our spiritual existence. We also know that in the Bible Lucifer is symbolized as a Serpent, as the Serpent on the Tree. The physical serpent, such as we see it to-day, and as modern painters always paint it when they depict the Paradise Scene, is not a real Lucifer; it is only his outer image, his physical image. The real Lucifer is a Being that remained behind during the Moon-stage of evolution. He cannot be seen upon the earth, among physical objects. If a painter wishes to paint Lucifer's real aspect he would have to paint him so that he can be grasped as an etheric form, through a kind of inner clairvoyant form of contemplation. He would then appear in the shape in which he works upon us; he would show that he is not connected with our head or with our organism in so far as these are exclusively formed by the earth, but that he is connected with the continuation of our head, with the spinal cord. A painter who knows something through spiritual science, would therefore paint Adam and Eve, the Tree, and on the Tree the Serpent, but this serpent would only be a symbol and it would have a human head. If we would come across such a painting to-day, we would assume that the painter has, of course, been able to paint this picture through spiritual science,

Probably such a painting may even be found here in Leipzig; but people do not go about with open eyes, they go through the world with bandaged eyes. In the Art Gallery of Hamburg there is a painting of the Middle Ages by, Master Bertram, setting forth the Paradise Scene. In that painting, the Serpent on the Tree is painted correctly, as described just now. That picture can be seen there. But other painters have also painted the Paradise Scene in that way. What may we gather from this? That in the Middle Ages, people still knew this, they knew it to the extent of being able to paint it. In other words: It is not so long ago, that human beings were pushed completely on to the physical plane.

The course of man's spiritual history, as related by materialistic thinkers, is, after all, nothing but an outer deception, because they think that man always had the aspect which he assumed in the course of the past few centuries, whereas it is not so long ago that he used to look into the spiritual world with the aid of his ancient clairvoyance. He had to abandon the spiritual world, because he was not free, and in order to acquire full freedom and his Ego-consciousness, it was necessary that he should leave the spiritual world. Now he must once more find his way into the spiritual world.

Spiritual science therefore prepares something very important and essential: namely, that we may once more penetrate livingly into the spiritual world. Again and again let us conjure up in our soul the necessity of feeling that this small number of men that is now living in the very midst of a materialistic world and is led through its Karma to the possibility of grasping mankind's most important task for the future, that this small number of men is called upon to fulfil important, most important tasks, through its soul-life. We should realise without any pride, we should realise modestly and humbly the great difference between a soul that is gradually finding its way into the spiritual world, and all the people outside, who have not the slightest idea of this, who are, above all, NOT WILLING to have any idea of it. This fact should not merely arouse in us discouraging and painful feelings, but produce feelings that incite us to continue our work with increasing energy and to work faithfully within the stream of spiritual science, to which we were led through our Karma.

When we were together last, I also mentioned that when a human being passes through the portal of death before having lived through the whole of his life, then that part which is given to him in the form of an etheric body has not been used up completely. When a human being passes through the portal of death in his youth, then his etheric body might still have worked for years upon his physical body. But these forces do not go lost; they are still there. I also mentioned that in the present time, through the fact that every day and every hour death so numerously approaches mankind, many, many etheric bodies that might still have worked for a long time upon their physical body, here on the physical plane, are handed over to the spiritual-etheric world and hover in it. The forces that might, for decades, have provided for the physical body, become spiritual forces, that cooperate in the spiritual development of humanity. Thus a time will come, when these forces that constitute these etheric bodies, can be used for the spiritual progress of humanity; but this time will only come, if here on earth there will be human souls who are able to understand this.

When the terrible events of the present shall have passed over the earth and there will be peace once more, then the souls of those who are still living on the earth in human bodies, will have the possibility of grasping something of the fact that all those who have gone into the spiritual world before their time have their etheric bodies in that world and that they can ray their forces into the earth. It will be necessary that this fact be grasped by these souls. These souls can then cooperate in that spiritual progress which is rendered possible particularly through the many deaths of self-sacrifice.

Imagine what it would mean if spiritual science were to disappear, and if no one were to have any comprehension for all that is being prepared in the spiritual world through these deaths of self-sacrifice! Imagine what this would mean! In that case, all those forces would become the property of Beings who would use them for other purposes than those for which they should be used, in accordance with the plan and resolution of the Gods who follow the right course of development.

This is an admonishment that also comes from the events of our time, an admonishment to the effect that we should stand fully within all that which constitutes the spiritual world. For even these events of our time have their spiritual aspect. What they reveal outwardly, in the form of blood, death and sacrifices, is the external expression of an inner spiritual course of events, which should, however, be grasped in the right spirit.

Of this I wish to remind you again and again, with the words that conclude our present considerations:

Aus dem Mut der Kämpfer,
Aus dem Blut der Schlachten,
Aus dem Leid Verlassener,
Aus des Volkes Opfertaten,
Wird erwachsen Geistesfrucht,
Lenken Seelen Geist-bewusst,
Ihren Sinn ins Geisterreich.

(TRANSLATION)

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the sufferings of the abandoned,
From the nation's deeds of sacrifice,
Shall grow out a spiritual fruit,
If souls lead, in Spirit-consciousness,
Their heart and mind into the Spirit-realm.

• 1. See Rudolf Steiner's An Outline of Occult Science

Yesterday's lecture will have enabled you to see what I meant when I said at the outset of this course that the Greeks thought of the whole of Nature as permeated by Spirit; they had no such conception of nature as we have today. You will have realised this from the way I tried to show the position of the three great gods, Zeus, Poseidon and Pluto in Greek spiritual life. We see that we have to think of the microcosmic forces found in man's astral body as transplanted into cosmic space. If we think of the sovereign ruler of these powers, their controlling centre, as superpersonal, superhuman, we have what Greek feeling associated with the name Zeus. Similarly, if we think of the forces of our ether bodies transplanted into cosmic space, we have what the Greeks associated with Poseidon; if we think of the forces of our physical bodies as transplanted into space, we have what the Greeks associated with Pluto.

Now it will certainly occur to you to ask: ‘What about the fourth member of our human being?’ For in our time we have of course to regard the whole man as consisting of physical, etheric, astral, and also of the ego or the ego-bearer. Now it is obvious that because this ego is in such a peculiar position in relation to the other members of the human being, the forces of the universe corresponding to the ego must also be in a peculiar position. One can say of the forces of the physical body that transplanted into the world of space they are governed by the central power of Pluto; similarly the forces of the ether body come into the sphere of Poseidon, and the forces of the astral body into the sphere of Zeus. But when we consider the ego itself, we find that it is closely bound up with all that is happening around us. Indeed with our egos we are right inside the world. Upon what goes on in the world around us our whole destiny, our happiness or unhappiness, depends. Very little reflection upon the matter leads us to feel that the forces of our ego must be very different from the forces of Pluto around us in space. Just as the destiny of the ego is closely connected with the environment, so too we must think of the forces of this ego as also connected with the divine-spiritual forces outside in space which are their counterpart, just as the other divine-spiritual forces correspond to soul-forces within us. Think how closely the experiences of our ego are bound up with our environment! How different our ego feels if we raise our eyes and allow it to plunge into the star-strewn heavens, or to gaze, at dawn or dusk, upon the rising or the setting sun! How little can we detach our egos from all this! How intimately we are bound up with the macrocosm out there! With our egos we are as if emptied out into our environment. What radiates into us from without, the golden rays of the sun, the majestic world of the stars, at one moment is something objective outside in the macrocosm, at another, an idea within the human soul, within the microcosm; in actual life we can scarcely distinguish between the two, they merge into one another. From the way the Greek had of experiencing the world and its wonders directly, we may expect him to think of the divinity who represented to him the ego-forces holding sway outside in space as far more closely related, far more closely bound up with the human being than the other gods—whom he really thought of as quite remote from human nature. Hence we find, as the representative of the ego-forces in the world outside, a divine figure with a certain affinity with human nature, so to say, one whose destiny, whose whole life, seems in a way quite human. That god is Dionysos. Just as we have to look upon Pluto as representing the forces of the physical body, Poseidon as representing the forces of the ether body, and Zeus as representing the forces of the astral body, transplanted into the universe, so we have to regard Dionysos as the macrocosmic representative of the soul-forces which live in our ego. The way in which the Greeks looked upon Dionysos, that figure which stands before our ego at last in such a remarkable way in the Mystery of Eleusis, will only become fully clear to us if first we learn a little about the way spiritual powers and spiritual beings in general work into our earthly existence, into the wonders which constitute our own human existence.

Much of what I am now about to say by way of parenthesis you will find in the little book I have just completed and which in essentials reproduces lectures that I gave a short time ago in Copenhagen. It is called The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind. I shall have to refer to certain passages in this little book which have a bearing upon our purpose in these lectures. First we have to reflect that humanity, as it evolves on the earth, determining its own destiny, little by little shaping the epochs of its own civilisation, is guided by Beings whom we must call super-human, Beings not accessible to human sense-perception, but to be found in the main in a super-sensible world, and attainable only to clairvoyant sight. If we turn to the category of Beings concerned with the guidance of mankind which is nearest to man, we find those who in eastern mysticism are called Dhyani, in Christian terminology Angels, Angeloi. We have often spoken of these superhuman Beings of the first category, and you know the relationship in which they stand to us. We know that, under quite different conditions of life, they too were once human; that was during the Moon evolution, at the time when our present Earth was passing through its previous embodiment. At that time these Angel Beings, who today take part in the guidance of humanity, were themselves passing through their human stage; thus at the commencement of the present evolution of the Earth they had got so far that today they stand one stage higher than humanity; at the end of Earth evolution that part of humanity which reaches the goal of the present Earth evolution will be as far advanced as the Angels were at the end of the Moon evolution. Hence these Beings are particularly fitted to be responsible for this guidance at the point where it is nearest to man. They are at work within our human evolution.

Now we invariably find in evolution that one thing, one epoch, is never exactly like another, and when we say that the Angels were the leaders nearest to men, that is not to be taken as of universal application. Thus no one should say, ‘then Angels were leaders of humanity in the first postAtlantean culture-epoch, in the Persian epoch, in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, and so on.’ To do so would be to think in a very abstract way. Things are not like that in the real world; there are all sorts of distinctions. As a matter of fact, there are only two post-Atlantean epochs in which the Angels have the direct and in a way, independent guidance of humanity—the third, the Egypto-Chaldean, and our own, the fifth epoch. In the Egypto-Chaldean epoch it was Angels who were the actual leaders of the epoch. How did they carry out their leadership?

On this point we may quote the Greek historian Herodotus. Once when the ancient Egyptians were asked who were their great leaders they answered, ‘the gods’. In the language of olden time ‘the gods’ meant these Angelic Beings, and the ancient Egyptians who were instructed in such things said quite seriously that at that time those who were the leaders of mankind were not normal men, but Beings of a superhuman nature, Beings who had already completed their human stage during the Moon evolution. But these leaders of humanity in the Egypto-Chaldean culture-epoch were unable to appear directly in human bodies. The physical bodies which we men have are an Earth product, wholly dependent upon earthly conditions of existence; and only beings who are going through their human evolution on the Earth—that is to say, only men—have a constitution of soul able to live out their lives in this sheath of the human physical body. Because the Angels went through their human stage on the Moon, it is impossible for them to clothe themselves in such a sheath as the human physical body. Thus they could not descend into incarnation in physical, fleshly bodies. These leaders of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch did not tread the Earth in human form. There were however men gifted with clairvoyance who were susceptible to inspiration from the spiritual worlds. In moments when they were specially open to these inspirations they were able to see before them those guiding Beings and to permeate themselves with their substance. These old clairvoyants offered up their bodies to the guiding Beings, they said to them, as it were, ‘Behold my body; enter into it, permeate it with spirit, inspire it.’ Thus in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch there walked on Earth an ordinary man, but one who was clairvoyant; what he said and did and what he taught was spoken and enacted in him and through him as the instrument of a higher Being, one who had completed his human development on the Moon. This was how the Egypto-Chaldean epoch was guided, and this guidance endeavoured above all to direct humanity along the straight line of evolution, to further its unfettered development towards the goal of the Earth. Thus Angels—Angeloi—who had completed their human stage on the Moon, inspired the loftiest seers of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, and through their instrumentality became kings and priests, the leading personalities of the period.

Side by side with these individualities there were yet others. One would have sought in vain for the leading individualities in human bodies. But there were others in a different position. They were Angel Beings in the lowest stage of Luciferic development, Angel Beings who had not completed their evolution on the Moon, who had not attained the goal of lunar humanity, thus Beings who, when the Earth evolution began, were themselves not so far advanced as men will be at the end of Earth evolution, if they reach their full development. These Beings too instilled their forces into the Egypto-Chaldean civilisation; but just because they had not fully completed their human stage, they were able to tread the Earth in human fleshly bodies. They incarnated in human bodies and mixed with the rest as real men. Legends are to be found among all peoples of such individualities, not only in Chaldea and Egypt, but among all the peoples of that time; they tell us of men who dwelt on Earth, but who were really in their inner soul-nature backward Angel Beings from the Moon. It was these individualities that the Greeks were referring to, when they spoke of their Heroes—for example, Cecrops and Cadmos. None of the great leaders of civilisation were actually men (I am not now speaking of the ones who only inspired men, but of those who really dwelt among men in physical bodies); their human form was maya, they were in truth backward Moon Beings. These individualities were the Heroes, superhuman Beings who were in the lowest of the Luciferic ranks. What then was the actual task of these Beings? It is wisely decreed in the plan of universal evolution that not only those Beings who guide evolution along its line of direct advance have legitimate tasks; if man were only subject to the spiritual guidance of those normally developed Beings, he would push forward in his evolution too swiftly, with too little weight, too little gravity. Evolution has need of hindrances in order that the right tempo can be maintained. Evolution needs a certain weight. The progressive forces gain strength only by meeting with resistance. Those Beings who by the wise guidance of the world lagged behind during the Moon evolution have the task of imparting weight to evolution.

I said that it would be wrong if one were to apply what I have just described for the Egypto-Chaldean epoch to all the culture-epochs. Things were different in the Persian epoch. There it was not the Angels who played the outstanding part in the guidance of humanity; there humanity was much more directly subject to the Archangels or Archangeloi. One may say that the Persian, the Zarathustra culture, was guided by Archangels just as the Egypto-Chaldean culture was under the direct guidance of Angels. And just as the Egyptian clairvoyant kings and priests were inspired by Angels, so Zarathustra and his pupils were inspired by Archangels, Amshaspands. If we go right back to the first post-Atlantean epoch, to the civilisation of which we still get a faint echo in the Vedas, we come to the great teachers of India, who are called the Holy Rishis. The Holy Rishis were inspired by a still higher hierarchy, they were inspired by the Spirits of Personality, the Principalities, the Archai, who of course used the Archangels and the Angels as their instruments, but who at that time intervened far more directly than they did later.

Thus we have to record a continuous progress of humanity from the first post-Atlantean epoch through the succeeding epochs, inasmuch as ever lower ranks of hierarchies intervene in the spiritual guidance of mankind. First in the Indian epoch the highest rank, the Archai or Spirits of Personality, then in the Persian epoch the next lower hierarchy, the Archangels, and in the Egyptian epoch the Beings who are next above man, the Angels. In the Greek period quite special conditions prevailed. At that time the leaders of humanity were the Beings who, of all superhuman Beings, had the greatest need themselves, so that those leaders of the Greco-Latin time gave men the greatest independence and freedom; for they were hoping to attain as much for themselves through their leadership as man could attain through them. Hence in Greco-Latin times we have the remarkable phenomenon that mankind seems to be thrown upon its own resources, seems to be self-sufficient. There has been no epoch of civilisation since the Atlantean catastrophe during which man was thrown so entirely on his own resources, or in which so much depended upon his expressing his own peculiar self as in the Greco-Latin time. Hence we see too how everything in this epoch tends to bring to expression in its purest form the human individuality. It could be said that this was so because the guiding hierarchies slackened the reins, because at this time men were most left to themselves.

In our own epoch, which follows the Greco-Latin time, we again find something very distinctive. Hence the same Beings who were the leaders of humanity in the Egypto-Chaldean time intervene again. If in clairvoyant consciousness we lift ourselves into the presence of the leaders of humanity, the same Beings appear to us as our spiritual leaders who were the leaders of the Egypto-Chaldean time, both those who at that time only inspired men, those Angels who had reached their full goal on the Moon, and also the Heroes, the leaders who took on fleshly form, that is to say, those who had not reached their full development on the Moon, the Luciferic Beings. They all appear again. But we must bear in mind that they have all undergone a further development of their own. Just as man today is at another stage than he was in the ancient Egyptian time, so also with these Angels and Luciferic Angels. Their achievement in guiding humanity in the EgyptoChaldean epoch raised them to a higher stage of evolution. If we turn with the eye of seership to the Akasha Chronicle and see how these leading Beings looked during the EgyptoChaldean epoch, we find that at that time they had reached a certain level of development. Now they emerge again from the twilight of existence and intervene anew in human evolution, having meanwhile reached a greater degree of perfection. But there is one difference.

Let us for a moment ignore the Beings who at that time were Luciferic Angels, and turn our attention to the normal Angels, those who during the Egypto-Chaldean epoch directed evolution in the straight line of advance. During that epoch some of them reached the normal goal of their own development, but there were also among them a number who lagged behind. Thus there are some who, although they had attained their normal development on the Moon and thus entered into the evolution of our present Earth as Angels, nevertheless, during the Egypto-Chaldean epoch failed to achieve all that they could have achieved on Earth. At that point they lagged behind. Thus among those Beings who were still in the line of normal development during the Egypto-Chaldean time there arose once more two classes, and there is really an enormous difference between these two classes of Angels. This difference has to do with the loftiest mystery of human evolution, and it is of paramount importance that we should understand it. I have already referred to it in the book The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind. In order to give an account of this difference we have to introduce the name of Christ, the Christ who is so very closely bound up with the whole range of Earth evolution.

We know that as far as concerns Earth-development on the physical plane Christ was incarnated for three years in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. We know that that incarnation took place once for all, that there had been no previous incarnation, and that there will be no other like it. What the Christ did by dwelling for three years in a human body was necessary for human beings on the Earth, it was necessary for men as earthly beings of sense to have the Christ also among them once as an earthly being of sense. But in His essential nature the Christ is not restricted to His life for three years in the sheaths of Jesus of Nazareth; He is also the leader of all the Beings of the higher hierarchies. He is an all-embracing, cosmic, universal Being. Just as through the Mystery of Golgotha He entered into human evolution, so for the Beings of the higher hierarchies corresponding events took place. That means that as time went on Christ brought something about for all these Beings of the higher hierarchies. How did this happen?

During the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, as I have already said, the Angels went through an evolution which has enabled them to take over the leadership of mankind today as more highly developed Beings. What made it possible for them to reach a higher stage of evolution? It was because they themselves, while they were guiding human souls in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, became pupils of Christ in the spiritual, super-sensible world. During the Egypto-Chaldean epoch Christ was the teacher of the Angels. His impulse flowed into them during that epoch, and it is because of this, because they have meanwhile been permeated by Christ that they now appear at a higher stage of development. Thus if at the time when the Greco-Latin age begins we were to look at those Beings who had been the spiritual leaders of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, we should say that by the beginning of the Greco-Latin age the most highly developed of them, those who were the best prepared to play a leading part in our fifth epoch, had received into themselves the Christ Impulse, which formerly they did not have, and that as Christ-filled Beings they now influence mankind from the higher worlds. In the same way the Archangels, who when they acted as the inspirers of Zarathustra and his pupils had not yet been ‘Christ-ened’, have meanwhile absorbed the Christ Impulse, and in the sixth culture-epoch, the epoch following our own, they will be the spiritual leaders of mankind. But in contradistinction to what they were in the Persian epoch, in the sixth epoch they will appear as Christ-filled Beings. The Archai, the Spirits of Personality, who were the inspirers of the Holy Rishis in the Indian epoch, have also meanwhile absorbed the Christ Impulse, and they will be the spiritual leaders of the seventh post-Atlantean epoch. Then everything which was once proclaimed to mankind by the voice of the Holy Rishis will come to pass in great glory and majesty; but in the most advanced men of the seventh culture-epoch it will all be illuminated, inflamed, set on fire by the Christ Impulse. The Holy Rishis will rise again in the splendour of the Christ Sun in the seventh culture-epoch of post-Atlantean humanity.Thus we see that for the Beings of these four hierarchies—not only for man, but also for Angels, Archangels and Archai—the Christ-event signifies the very highest experience of which we in our cosmic evolution can speak.

Why was it that certain Beings lagged behind? It was because they rejected the Christ Impulse. Thus we now have one class, one category, of guiding Beings who have accepted the Christ, but in the action upon our own epoch of another category, the backward Angelic Beings, there is no trace of the Christ Impulse to be found. They have not been ‘Christened’. Whereas the Angels who since Egypto-Chaldean times have been filled with the Christ Impulse now imbue human evolution with forces which lead them upwards to a spiritual life, the other Beings, those who rejected the Christ Impulse, seek to give to humanity for their inspiration everything which we can call materialistic culture and materialistic science. Hence the confusion prevailing in our time between the inspiration derived from the purest Christ Impulse, which should guide humanity upwards to spirituality—and it is to this which we devote ourselves when we follow strictly the goal of Spiritual Science—and the other inspirers who have turned away from the Christ and are concerned to introduce the material element into human civilisation. These two tendencies intermingle in our time. We can only understand our own epoch if we are aware that these two currents of spiritual leadership dominate it. So long as we cannot distinguish between them, and so long as we fanatically uphold one or the other of them, we are not in a position to understand clearly the course of our civilisation. Today under the guidance of the Angels who have rejected the Christ Impulse we have a science which is quite abstract, entirely unspiritual. We have the urge to rise to spirituality because the other Angels whom I have described are gaining an ever stronger hold upon the guidance of humanity. All the great spiritual Beings who lead humanity forwards, whether as Angels, Archangels or Archai, have at some time since Atlantis been open to the Christ Impulse, just as at the lowest level man was open to it through the Mystery of Golgotha. That is what the intervention of the Christ Impulse means in human evolution.

Of course we have to be quite clear that the Beings who were pressing forward towards spirituality with the greatest intensity could not become incarnated in human physical bodies even in the Egypt-Chaldean epoch. Even less so can this happen in our own time. Even today we have to seek for the outstanding spiritual leaders of humanity in the spiritual world through the eye of seership, through spiritual-scientific knowledge; to expect to find the highest leaders of humanity, the really progressive authoritative leaders, incarnated in human bodies would be quite wrong. From the universal rule that the real, guiding individualities do not incarnate during Earth evolution in human bodies, the Christ in a certain respect forms an exception, since He was incarnated for three years in a human body. What is the reason for this? It is because the Christ Being in all His forces, in all His impulses, is an essentially higher Being than any of the individualities of the hierarchies we have described—an Individuality even higher than the Archangels and the Archai, a Being of whose full greatness we can only be dimly aware. These stronger forces and impulses enabled this Individuality to fulfil a purpose that we shall come to understand more closely; they enabled Him to assume a human fleshly sheath as a sacrifice for three years. But something else is connected with this assumption of human bodily sheaths by the Christ which then led to the Mystery of Golgotha—something which it is important for us to understand.

It is only when we reflect upon this other factor that we are able to grasp not only the nature of Christ Himself, but also the nature of another figure, of whom we know that he plays a very considerable role in human evolution, a figure of whom we have already often treated in our lectures, but who can only gradually be fully characterised—I mean Lucifer. Let us consider these two individualities, Christ on the one hand and Lucifer on the other, and let us take to begin with only one characteristic of the Christ—that He once descended to Earth so far as to incarnate in a human physical body, that He dwelt for three years in such a body. What then is the consequence of the event which culminated on the physical plane in the Mystery of Golgotha?

The consequence was that now the etheric and astral spheres of the Earth became substantially permeated by the Christ Being. Whereas previously the Being whom we know as Christ was not there, now the etheric and astral spheres have become permeated through and through by Him. This is hinted in the words spoken by Theodora in my Mystery Play The Portal of Initiation. Anyone who becomes clairvoyant in the manner of St. Paul sees into the etheric sphere of the Earth and perceives there the Christ—something which at an earlier time was not possible even for the most advanced clairvoyant, something which was first made possible by the Mystery of Golgotha. You know that it is actually in the twentieth century, actually in our own time that a number of men will repeat this event of Damascus and recognise the Christ. Through their further development men will raise themselves ever more and more to a recognition of the etheric Christ. This shows you that it is an essential feature of the evolution of Christ that after the Mystery of Golgotha, search as we may in the physical realm, we shall not find the Christ substance as such incarnated there. Nevertheless the Earth is saturated by the Christ substance, because it reaches right down to the etheric sphere of the Earth, and will be able to be found there for all time, though it could never condense to the physical in a body of flesh. Today what is physical upon Earth is like a snail shell, which one day when the Earth has reached the goal of its evolution will fall away from the totality of human souls, just as the physical body now falls away from the individual soul at death. There will be a death of the Earth when it has reached the goal of its evolution. Just as today the individual soul throws off the physical body and enters a spiritual realm when man passes through the gate of death, so at the death of the Earth the totality of human souls will pass over into a spiritual sphere, and will cast off as dross, as husk, what today constitutes the physical element of the Earth. Where will be the Christ-substance when the Earth has undergone its earthly death? It will permeate the totality of human souls, who will rise out of the corpse of the Earth, out of the earthly dross. The Christ Being, together with the totality of human souls, ascends further into the spiritual realms, in order later to come to the next incorporation of the Earth, which in Spiritual Science we call Jupiter. That is the essence of the Christ Being, that in a wholly spiritualised form He continues to lead mankind in its development; He does not enter into any kind of physical manifestation, but for the time being remains close to the physical, but only until the death of the Earth; He remains close to the physical inasmuch as it is permeated by the etheric, but when the Earth has reached the goal of its evolution, the physical will be cast off as a corpse. Since the Mystery of Golgotha the Christ has retained absolutely nothing which could arouse in Him a desire to assume any kind of physical body. His renunciation of all physical substance is absolute.

That is the great secret connected with the Mystery of Golgotha, that by the sacrifice of His three years passed in a physical body, the Christ Being brought it about that nothing of Him will be left behind in the Earth-husk which will fall away at the death of the Earth. Because, though the Christ does indeed permeate the Earth's physical substances, He does not since the Mystery of Golgotha unite Himself with them, nothing remains in His nature which could look back with longing towards the cast-off husk at the death of the Earth. This husk will be cast off, it will shine from afar like a star. It will be seen by Beings then dwelling upon the outer planets as they gaze outwards into the heavenly spaces.

Will not only the Christ and those belonging to Him, but all other Beings, cease to have any connection with this star which will be cast off as dross at the death of the Earth? Not at all. I have just been speaking, for instance, of those Beings who rejected the Christ Impulse in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch. Some of them will go on rejecting Him. In certain circumstances even in time to come these Beings may incarnate in physical bodies and walk the Earth as men. They will be the ones who will yearn in a way after the star cast off at the death of the Earth, which will radiate in splendour out there in space. After the death of the Earth all those souls who belong to the Christ will in the future admire this star, but they will not hanker after it, they will not say, ‘That star is our home’. Neither these souls nor the souls of the Beings of the higher hierarchies will yearn after this star, any more than souls on the Earth hanker after Mars. They raise their eyes to Mars, receive its beneficent influence, but they do not yearn after it.

What then would have happened if the Christ Being had not entered into Earth evolution? There would have been a tremendous difference in the destiny of humanity. Suppose for a moment that the Christ had not entered human evolution; the Earth would still undergo death, human beings and the higher hierarchies would still continue their development in the spiritual worlds, but they would carry into those worlds the perpetual longing for that star which, as the husk of the Earth, would radiate with wondrous brilliance into the universe. Human beings without the Christ would look down from Jupiter with tragic longing towards the star formed of earthly dross, and not only would they admire it, but longingly they would say: ‘That is our home, it is grievous that we have to be here, grievous that we cannot be in our true home upon that star.’ That is the difference it would have made in the course of evolution if the Christ Impulse had not united itself with the Earth. To liberate men from the Earth, to make them free and independent for evolution that is to come in the future, that was the mission of Christ upon Earth. We see the immensity of the Christ-event, we see that it is because Christ has dwelt upon the Earth that humanity will become mature enough to evolve towards the future structure of our planet.

Is there any instance of Beings working on another planet who yearn after some other heavenly body as if it were their own true home? Yes, there are such cases; let us take one of them and compare him with the Christ. During the Moon evolution there were powerful Beings, exalted Beings, who however in a certain respect did not reach the goal of their Moon evolution. Among these exalted Beings was a host under its own leader which, when the Moon evolution came to an end and the evolution of the Earth began, had not attained the goal of its own evolution. Now this host of Beings entered into Earth evolution, and participated in the guidance of humanity, but always with this tragic longing for a cosmic star which had been cast out of the Moon evolution in the way I have described in the book Occult Science. Within the spiritual evolution of the Earth are mighty, highly significant Beings, with their leader, who, because they had to quit the Moon and go on to the Earth without having reached their full development, really feel this yearning for a star outside in the cosmos which they regard as their true home, but to which they cannot attain. These hosts are the hosts of Lucifer. Lucifer himself takes part in Earth evolution with the perpetual longing within him for his true home, for the star Venus outside in the cosmos. That is the salient feature of the Luciferic nature seen from the cosmic aspect. Clairvoyant consciousness comes to know just what the star of Venus is by entering into the soul of Lucifer, thus experiencing from the Earth Lucifer's tragic longing, like a wonderful cosmic nostalgia, for the star Phosphorus, Lucifer or Venus. For what Lucifer cast off as a husk, what at the death of the Moon was cast out of the Luciferic beings, as the physical body is cast off by the human soul at death, shines down from heaven as Venus.

I have now put before you from the cosmic aspect something about our Earth and about its neighbouring planet Venus. This was of course not experienced by the Greeks quite in the way I have expressed it, but it nevertheless lived in their sensations and feelings. When a Greek turned to the stars, especially when he turned to Venus, he sensed in his soul the inner connection between such a star and certain beings who inflame and inspire the earthly realm. When the ancient Greek felt what Lucifer was to the Earth, when he said to himself, as it were ‘The Luciferic principle wafts through our earthly existence’, he looked up to the star Venus and said: ‘There is the wandering point in the heavenly spaces towards which Lucifer's longings perpetually tend’.

This gives you the Greek sense of one of the ‘wonders of the world’, and it brings out very clearly that the Greek was far from gazing into space as do our modern astronomers, describing Venus as a purely physical globe. What then was Venus to the Greek soul? It was that region of space which he came to identify by observing clairvoyantly the spiritual content of Lucifer's soul; for in the soul of Lucifer he detected the great longing which reaches out as a living bridge from the Earth to Venus. This longing which the Greek soul recognised as being Lucifer's, he also felt to belong to the substance of Venus. The Greek did not see just the physical planet, he saw something which had been severed from the Luciferic Being, just as the physical body is severed from man when he goes through the gate of death, and as the corpse of the Earth will be severed when the Earth has reached the goal of her evolution. But there is this difference. The physical body of man is destined to disintegrate, whereas the body of a Lucifer is destined, when it falls away from the being of soul, to shine as a star in the heavenly spaces. In what I have just said about Venus, I have at the same time described what in the spiritual sense stars are. What are they to a quickened insight—those wonders of the world, those wonders of Nature—but the bodies of gods? What has gone forth into space from the bodies of the gods has become star. Looking up into the starry worlds, this is how the Greek saw the planets and the fixed stars. He said to himself: ‘The spiritual beings whom we revere as gods were once upon a time out there in space. They have undergone development. When they reached that point which for them corresponds with what for man during earthly existence is death, then their physical substance left them and became star.’

Stars are the bodies of gods, gods whose souls work on in the world in another way, independently of those bodies—just as Lucifer became independent of his body and continues to work in our Earth evolution. To grasp this is to have a spiritualised conception of nature and of the world. This of course has nothing in common with the wishy-washy pantheism which gives out that all Nature is permeated with a uniform divinity. Such a statement is inadequate; stars cannot simply be defined in this abstract way, as bodies through which the gods manifest themselves; when one looks up to those far-distant worlds one has to understand that the stars are bodies which the gods have abandoned, having progressed to other stages of evolution. But in this we find the difference between all the planetary gods and the Christ. As I have explained, the Christ leaves no such physical star at the death of the Earth, no residue still unspiritualised, but passes over entirely into the spiritual world, and as spirit goes over with the human soul into the Jupiter existence. That is one of the essential differences between the planetary spirits and the Christ-Spirit. It is of supreme importance to bear this distinction in mind for it shows that the whole meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha would be lost if, after that event, He whom we rightly call the Christ could once more incarnate in a physical body. For if, after the Mystery of Golgotha, the Spirit to whom we rightly give the name of Christ were again to incarnate in a physical body, this physical substance would furnish the first germ to which other substance would attach itself to form a star which in the future would remain behind, and the profound significance, the profound purpose of the Mystery of Golgotha would fail to be attained. The Christ would only have to incarnate in some physical body to belie Himself, and to annul the Mystery of Golgotha. He would then create a point of attraction of a material nature to which other material would attach itself. There would then have to be other incarnations of the same Being. In this way a star would be created towards which man would yearn for all time. Such a nostalgia may not be brought about by the Christ Being. Hence, after the Mystery of Golgotha, no one is justified in associating any incarnation in a body of flesh with the name of Christ. To do so implies either an abuse of the name of Christ, or a complete lack of comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha.

It is extremely important that these things should be understood. For only so is it possible to bring the universal nature of the Christ into a right relationship to human evolution. The forces which will be produced in a part of the human soul through the obliteration of the longing for the Earth, these forces, like all others, have to be strengthened by opposition. Hence it must necessarily be brought about by the wise guidance of the world that again Beings are left behind who, as was the case with the leading Angels of the Egypto-Chaldean time, with the Archangels of the Persian epoch, and the leading Archai of the Indian epoch, do not permeate themselves with the Christ Impulse, and therefore will continue to guide evolution without it. In future evolution they will be the element through which there will still admittedly be a certain longing and even a certain union with what as planetary residuum, as stars, will be out there in the universe and will be seen from Jupiter, just as our Venus, our Mars and our Jupiter are seen from the Earth. Thus it is really a different stream of humanity and a different stream of the higher hierarchies which will continue to hanker after the influence exerted upon the humanity of Jupiter from its future planetary neighbours. One must clearly distinguish these two things, then the greatest truth will throw light upon the lesser ones. Everywhere these two streams intermingle. Everywhere we see the progressing Christ Being, Who will guide men upwards to a higher vision of Himself; on the other hand we see the forces of hindrance, to which we must not give the name of the Christ, forces which even incarnate in human bodies; they too can acquire knowledge of the Christ, but they cannot acquire a Christ Impulse such as have the Angels who completed their evolution in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch; they are Beings who even in future times will be able to descend to fleshly embodiment.

We must clearly distinguish the one from the other. All the materialistic thought of our time comes from the Spirits who hinder, who hold progress back. To expect the salvation of mankind solely from individualities who could in the future incarnate in the flesh is a thought which comes from these Spirits of hindrance, for it is a materialistic principle. It deflects men from their upward course towards the vision of the spiritual. It concentrates their attention upon individualities incarnated in physical bodies upon whom they rely just because they can be seen by the physical senses.

Pre-Christian Greece had no clear insight into all that I have been saying about the Christ, because the Mystery of Golgotha had not yet taken place; but it had a spiritual perception of Lucifer and of his connection with the planet Venus, and of the connection of other gods with other stars. All these sensations and feelings which the Greeks derived from an archetypal wisdom, are a preparation for the ideas, the feelings, the impulses of soul which awoke in the informed Greek when the name Dionysos was spoken. Hence what has been said today has been a necessary preparation to enable us tomorrow to enter into those wonders of the world, those marvels of Nature, of which the Greeks thought when they spoke of Dionysos. This will serve to build a bridge to something which concerns man more closely, this will lead us to his inner nature, to the ordeals of his soul.