The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Yesterday I described the astral world. To-day we shall deal with man's life after death in the astral world. This will give us a basis for an understanding of reincarnation and karma.

We have seen that when we die the following processes take place: The physical body remains behind as a corpse; whereas during sleep the etheric body remains connected with physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the Ego go out of the physical body at the moment of death. Immediately after death, the whole earthly life unfolds itself in every detail before the soul of the departed in the form of pictures. This process lasts for about three days, until the next separation, namely that of the etheric body from the astral body and the Ego. In the occult meaning we therefore speak of two corpses. After a while, the etheric body remains behind as a second corpse.

When the second separation has taken place, the capacity of memory ceases—but not for always—and a new condition begins for the human being. What is this new condition? Man now experiences himself in the world which he enters every night during sleep. But this after-death condition greatly differs from the sleeping condition. Theosophical books sometimes describe death as if it were a kind of sleep. But this is not the case; soon after death man grows conscious of the astral world. Nevertheless there exists in the proverb: Sleep is the brother of death. ... and this is justified. This new state of existence is called life in Kamaloca.

We have seen that during sleep the astral body works on the physical body and on the etheric body in order to renew their forces. This work suppresses consciousness during sleep and prevents us from having perceptions of the astral world. After death the astral body is dispensed from this work indeed no longer to restore fatigue, and for this reason it begins to grow conscious of the astral world. Upon the Earth, this force was used for the reconstruction of the physical body, but now it is free and exists in the form of consciousness. When the astral body is no longer obliged to restore anything, it perceives the images of the astral world. This also shows you why we should strive after a sound sleep.

Observe physical life here in this world, how everyone seeks to satisfy his senses. What a human being enjoys, is enjoyed by his soul, but the organ which enables him to enjoy is physical. If a person enjoys eating, the soul needs the palate for its enjoyment. After death the longing for these enjoyments continues to exist, whereas the organs no longer exist. The soul yearns for good food, but the organ enabling it to taste it is lacking. The longing can no longer be satisfied. The soul is like a wanderer suffering terrible thirst looking in vain for water, for a possibility to quench his thirst.

This state of existence does not last forever, little by little the longings cease. Many religions describe it as a life in purgatory. And old painter sometimes depicted in other pictures with flames of fire. In fact, the soul suffers a burning thirst.

The further courses is that the human being feels his last longings and lives through his whole life backwards, as far as his birth; when he had no passionate longings. Afterwards man enters Devachan. This is clearly indicated in the Gospel verse: unless ye become like little children, ye cannot enter the kingdom of God.—Little by little the human being must free himself from everything which linked him up with the physical world. Kamaloca is the condition in which he emancipates himself from everything which chains him to the world of the senses. It is influenced entirely by the sensory life in the physical world. If a person entirely submitted to his senses, his life in Kamaloca will be long and difficult. Ordinarily the Kamaloca-existence takes up about one third of the duration of earthly life. Past life rises up before the soul in the form of images and beings that torment us. In Kamaloca everything is reversed: what used to satisfy us, is now want. Hot passion calls up the feeling of horrible chilling Beings. And the burning thirst remains throughout. The more a human being freed himself from physical life before death and the easier his death, the more readily will he disaccustom himself to the world of the senses. In the case of suicides this will be most difficult of all, for they were the prey of an illusion: they do not consider that in violently severing themselves from the life of the senses, they will be seized by an unspeakable greed for their physical body, which would keep them in close proximity to the physical world. A similar fate—though in a weaker form awaits those who lost their life suddenly through some accident. Such a sudden death also brings with it an avidity for the physical world, for the physical body, but later on this will be compensated in Devachan. When the soul has laid aside its earthly desires, it enters the Devachan state of existence.

Spiritual science does not teach us to turn away from life. The spiritual scientist may use the following comparison: the soul resembles a bee that flies out to the meadows to seek honey and bring it back to the hive. Here on earth the soul gathers the honey of life which he brings to the altar of the Godhead after death. The soul could never do this without a life in the physical world.

When man incarnates and begins to see, he at first simply perceives through his eyes. Gradually spiritual enjoyment grows out of this. Physical pleasure changes into spiritual enjoyment. The savage with but a few incarnations enjoys the many colors and the simplest sense-impressions. With each incarnation his senses grow more refined.—If we had never enjoyed colours sensually, we could never attain spiritual enjoyment of colors. The sensually enjoyment is therefore a necessary deviation. We should enjoy the beauty of the physical world. Similarly, sensual love gradually leads to the highest, purest, spiritual love. The soul should transform every experience and carry it up to the altar of spirituality. Nothing, really nothing, is ever lost. Without the school of sensuality, we can never reach spirituality. The Earth is not a valley of tears, it is a gathering place and the human beings are—so the Bible says—messengers, Angels of God, sent out to gather honey.

The human being is passing through a process of transformation. Think of your childhood years! How many thoughts and concepts approached you and how much you took in! And how your thoughts and concepts changed from the 10th to the 20th year! Your temperament undergoes a far weaker change. A passionate child will still be passionate in old age. The temperament is engraved in the human body. A choleric person has quite a different expression, bearing and walk from a sanguine, melancholic or phlegmatic person. We should strive, above all, to change our temperament to a certain extent at least. This was a training Occult Schools. The whole trend of life was changed in Occult Schools. The essential thing there was to transform the will.

After death, our spiritual connections and ties reach us as far as Devachan. Two people are intimate friends and their friendship takes on more and more spiritual character. Yet the physical body constitutes a certain obstacle. In Devachan this friendship will find its full, pure expression.

Everything that we drew out of our earthly life becomes interwoven with the soul, with the spirit. This enables us to shape our next incarnation, as far as the body, and earthly life is the expression of what we worked out for ourselves. In the East there is a proverb which says: what you think to-day, you are tomorrow.

During each incarnation we thus work for the next one. In my next lecture I will describe man's experiences in Devachan. Life in Devachan is not a dream-condition, for the human being does not sleep through the spiritual world. There, his consciousness is a much higher one, it is more alive than here on Earth. In Devachan everything appears in a stronger light. We do not lose our friends in Devachan; our connections with them are simply of another kin—it is a far more intimate and spiritual union. Devachan is a far more real state of existence than earthly life.

During the course of these lectures we shall see how in his works Wagner rose up to the gods and at the same time came down to the human beings, in order to set forth, within the human race itself, redemption and salvation.

There were Mysteries also in the North. A special being, Wotan, plays a prominent part in these Mysteries. Particularly in the countries inhabited by the Celts the last traces of the old Druid Mysteries have been preserved. In England we may still find them at the time of Queen Elizabeth.

The old sagas relate first of all of Siegfried, an initiate, who was able, after a certain number of incarnations, to give up his body to an old Atlantean initiate for a dwelling. This we may find in all the Mysteries. Even Jesus sacrificed his body to a higher individuality when he was baptized by John the Baptist.

Wotan was initiated stage by stage, in order to bring about the higher development of the Northern tribes. After the transmigration of the surviving Atlantean peoples to the desert of Gobi, a few tribes had remained behind in the North. Whereas four sub-races were continuing their development in the South, four other sub-races developed in the North. Here, too, we find four stages of evolution; the last one is the Twilight of the Gods. The northern sagas tell us about this, and these legends were conceived by the four preparatory races. Wotan passes four times through an initiation within these four sub-races, and each time he rises by one degree. He hangs upon the cross for nine days; he learns to know the things connected with Mimir's head, the representative of the first sub-race. Also in this case crucifixion brings redemption.

During his second initiation he wins Gunlöd's draught of wisdom. In the form of a serpent he must creep into a subterranean cave, where he dwells for three days before he obtains the draught. During his third initiation, corresponding to the third sub-race, he is obliged to sacrifice one of his eyes in order to win Mimir's draught of wisdom. This eye is the legendary eye of wisdom, reminding us of the one-eyed Cyclops, who are the representatives of the Lemurian race. This eye has withdrawn long ago, and modern men do not possess it; sometimes, in the case of newly-born children, a faint trace of this eye may still be seen. It is the eye of clairvoyance. Why was Wotan obliged to sacrifice it? Every root-race must recapitulate the whole course of evolution. This also applies to the third northern sub-race. Clairvoyance has to be sacrificed once again, in order that something new might arise, which appeared for the first time in Wotan. This new element is the intellectual capacity, the characteristic way in which the Europeans contemplate the world.

Wotan's fourth incarnation is Siegfried, the descendant of gods. Human initiates now take the place of gods.

Siegfried passes through an initiation. He must awaken Brunhilde, the higher consciousness, by passing through the flames, the fire of passion. In this way he experiences a catharsis, a purification. Before his purification he has killed the dragon, the lower passions. He has become invulnerable. There is only one point between the shoulders where he can be wounded. This vulnerable point symbolizes that the fourth sub-race still lacks something which Christianity alone can give. The coming of One was necessary, who was invulnerable where Siegfried was still vulnerable—the coming of the Christ, Who carries the Cross resting between his shoulders at the very point where Siegfried could be wounded to death.

Christianity was called upon to check yet another onset of the Atlanteans. The peoples led by Atli (Attilas) are of Atlantean origin. The attack of these Mongolian races must give way to Christianity, personified in Leo, the pope.

Thus the myths described the course of evolution in symbolical images.

The same thing applies to the myth of Baldur. Also in Baldur we have before us an initiate. In this myth we find that all the conditions of initiation are fulfilled. The riddle of Baldur conceals a truth. The strange position of Loki in this northern saga can only be understood if we bear in mind this fact. You know that Baldur's mother, alarmed by evil dreams, made every living being promise to do no harm to Baldur. An insignificant growth, the mistletoe, is forgotten, and out of this mistletoe, which was not bound by any promise, Loge made the arrow which he gave to the blind god Hodur, when the gods were playfully hurling arrows at Baldur. Baldur is killed by this mistletoe arrow.

You know that another evolution preceded the evolution of the earth; namely, the kingdom of the Moon. At that time matter resembled our present living substance. Some of the Moon-beings remained behind upon the Moon-stage of development, and penetrated into the new world in this form. They cannot grow upon a mineral soil, they can only grow upon a living foundation, upon another living being. The mistletoe is one of these Moon-plants. Loge is the god of the Moon. He comes from the Moon-period and is now the representative of something imperfect, of Evil. This occult connection with the Moon-period also explains Loge's double nature, male and female at the same time. As you know, the division of the sexes coincides with the Moon's exit from the common planet. The Sun-god Baldur is the head of the new creation. The new and the old creation, the kingdoms of the Moon and of the Sun collide, and Baldur, the representative of the civilisation of the Sun, is the victim. Hodur is the blind inevitable force of Nature. Guilt contains a certain progressive element. Thus Baldur had to be called into life again in the Mysteries, after having been killed by Loge through Hodur.

These are the feelings which fill our soul when we penetrate into Richard Wagner's creations.

Man comes down to the earth as a soul-being; his body is formed out of the ether-earth; the human being is not yet man and woman, and he has no idea of possession or power. The soul is referred to as water; possession, implying power, is still guarded by the surging astral forces, by the Daughters of the Rhine. The Ego, or egoism coming out of Atlantis is gradually prepared. But this human being who was originally a soul-being possessed something which he must renounce: it is love, which does not, as yet seek another being outside, but finds its satisfaction within itself. Alberich must renounce this self-contained love; the human being must attain love by becoming united with another individual being. As long as the two sexes were united, the Ring was not needed; when the human being renounced psychical love, or the two sexes in one, then the Ring had to unite externally what had thus become severed. The Ring is the union of individual human beings, the union of the sexes in the physical world. When Alberich conquers the Ring he must renounce love. Now comes the time when the human being is no longer able to work within a united sphere encompassing everything. Once upon a time, soul, spirit and body were one; now the Godhead creates the body from outside. The sexes face one another in a hostile way; the two giants Fafner and Fasolt symbolized this. The human bodies are now endowed with one sex instead of two; they create external life.

The human body is represented in every religion as a temple: the Godhead builds it from outside. The inner temple of the soul must be built by man himself ever since he has become an Ego. The creative Godhead still contains love, it is still creative in the outer temple. The myth explains this in the passage where Wotan wishes to take away the Ring from the giants, and Erda appears advising him to abstain from this. Erda is the clairvoyant collective consciousness of humanity. The god must not keep the Ring encircling what should become free, in order to unite it again upon a higher stage, when the sexes shall have become neutral. Thus the prophetic, clairvoyant power of earth-consciousness prevents Wotan from securing the Ring, which remains the property of the giants. Ever since, every human being has one sex only. (The giant represents the physical bodily structure.) Now the giants begin to build Walhalla. During a quarrel over the Ring, Fasolt is killed by Fafner. This is the contrast between male and female: one sex must first be killed within every human being: the man kills the woman, and the woman kills the man within themselves.

By Marie Steiner

With this book we penetrate into the innermost structure of Rudolf Steiner's activities. For all of his endeavour had this one goal:—to pave for the world the way to the Christ. The Christ was lost for us during the period of rationalism and materialism. The churches yawned in desolate emptiness, and if one did not sit within them as an unmoved, childlike human being there was vacuity or contradiction in head and heart. What came from the lips of the exponent of Christian teaching did not bear the stamp of truth and conviction. Its effect was often hollow, puffed up, or sometimes mechanistic, at best stultifying. The church became conventional, a matter of form, accepting a compromise with science without being able to offset it with something truly effective. Gradually it was forced to withdraw its requirements of faith, because it could not present to the doubter enough that was factual to be able to change belief into sure conviction and knowledge. Candidates for confirmation had already been forced to withdraw their questions before the uncertainty and obvious side-stepping of the truth on the part of the revered pastor. Children who had left school found themselves standing before a spiritual void and felt the foundations of their souls give way beneath them. The Roman Catholic church frightened the Protestants away by its enslavement of freedom, and by the hollow mutterings of the celebrants of the churchly rites whose whole behaviour was often a mockery of what they were intended to represent. And yet, the forms gave evidence of something that had been lost. But where was it to be sought? Certainly not in the direction of modern science, for this had decreed limits to knowledge and functioned like the skull of a skeleton, hollow-eyed, severed from the trunk. Coherent life, the formative lines and the accomplishment were lacking. One could indeed become enthusiastic over the artistry of the individual parts, but the whole lacked hands and feet. It was only a fragment. The great cosmic tortoise of the Brahmanical religion, bearer of the earthly disc, produced in its imaginative force more pleasing effects. Men felt themselves surrounded by the rushing sound of the surging universal ether; they knew that there was something quite different from what is expressed in that cosmic image, something more than an automatically active mechanism, which out of itself sets the earth-wheel in motion—to which, by degrees, a meaning is given by equally automatically-created human beings—only to fall again into insensibility.

Something substantial was wafted over the world out of these ancient religions. If their path is followed, an ascent can be observed from a stifled and benumbed consciousness to ever lighter spheres of thought. Great cultures arose out of these religions; mighty imaginations passed from them over into the present time. Art and science developed within them, leaving sublime monuments behind. Here was a thread to follow which was a spiritual necessity. This thread was lost again and again in a mysterious obscurity. It led down through the temple places before which stood warning guardians who propounded questions and those who failed to answer suffered death. These were enigmatical words which finally culminated with the warning: “Know thou thyself!” This path had again to be discovered and illumined. But how to find it?

From the silent temples, whose doors were closed, traces of these teachings had escaped into the outer world. Their meaning became manifest in ever more powerfully developing civilizations which comprised increasingly larger and larger groups of human beings until at last the individual man emerged as a personality. No longer on the one side the God-inspired leader and teacher or sovereign, and on the other the dull people—but the separate human being, the personality who through his especial qualifications had become an individual. This occurred most gloriously in Greece where God and man approached one another. The super-sensible was blended with the sensible in art. The individual personality had become mature. The Mysteries, however, withdrew, veiled themselves more deeply and their meaning, which formerly was wrapped in secrecy, and therefore secure and untouched by doubt, became hidden.

Human thought began to take its own course. Schools of Philosophy arose. Doubters and sceptics spread abroad and thus caused the gradual disappearance of the greatness of that people which had projected from itself the independent personality. It lost its own value, its firm anchor and waited for the “unknown God.”

But the unknown God was He who, through His sacrifice, allowed the human personality to develop beyond itself in order that it might find its way back to its origin, with a waking consciousness acquired entirely by effort, after a passage rich in knowledge through the phenomenal world of the senses. Thus there was added to the original forces a newly acquired element, lifted out of deep material density.

And this path was prepared in deep racial seclusion within that folk which developed parallel with Hellenism, and which had the mission of bringing to mankind, in flesh and in truth, the one God, the Ego-God.

After the enslavement and degeneration of the Greek peoples, which followed closely upon the expeditions of Alexander, when the Roman she-wolf in Caesardom celebrated her orgies elevating Caesar, seized by mad ambition, to Godhood, building altars to him, and forcing her subjects to worship him, something occurred in the seclusion of a distant people which, through its impulse, rescued mankind, saved humanity from brutalization, namely, the sacrificial act of Golgotha. It shattered the might of the Roman she-wolf, that symbol of the life of instinct and force. Rome sank beneath it. New peoples overran the degenerate empire. A new folk-substance absorbed what later led to a new soul-configuration for mankind.

But the spiritually new became interspersed with the concretions from what had exhausted itself as a realm of power in the Roman Empire. This imbued the new, tender, spiritual estate with the essence of might and passion which had taken possession of the forms ultimately prevailing there. These forms were, to a great extent, taken over together with the already decadent spirit which had permeated them and the germ of disintegration which should have been overcome, but was not.

The phases of this struggle between the new and the remains of the ancient spirituality which had been taken over form the history of the Middle Ages and of the New Age. These can be traced in the development of the church, in the secret brotherhoods, in the orders of the Monks and Knights, in the so-called heretical confraternities, in the humanistic stream, in the Reformation.

Then came the new natural philosophy, natural science, the mechanistic interpretations of the universe, the limits to knowledge, Ignorabimus. In philosophy, a barren subjectivity, a severance from the whole of the cosmos, a subjective idea of the individual—the whole rich phenomenal world; a psychology without knowledge of the soul and spirit, yes, even denying them. Here matter became the point of departure for researches into soul and spirit.

Matter was victorious in all directions and a spiritual chaos began which reached its climax in our own time, drawing mankind into its vortex until that world catastrophe was reached within the effect of which we are still living. We have reached this point in human history and our enlightened minds are prophesying the downfall of the Occident.

In this world of encompassing darkness, there shines a source of light. It has been revealed to us by a man who towered immeasurably above his time. This source pours light upon that event which occurred in human evolution for mankind's salvation at a time when the Roman delirium was casting the world into chains. It brings us what we need in order that the central point of human and earthly happenings may again be understood, that belief may be changed into knowledge, unbelief into understanding. It is active among us since the beginning of this dark century with those forces which are able to transform our darkness into spiritual light.

This source of light revealed itself to those of us who were seeking the path to the lost mysteries. An Initiate was present who could be the guide. He led us, urging us on without ceasing, first with reserve, then in wisdom and insight as the need of the time demanded. We had not grown up to what we received, but we listened, collected and wrote it down, knowing that a time would come when we should have to hand on to others what had been so bounteously given to us, a time which would make grateful acknowledgment to us for it. It is this that a humanity, matured in sorrow and affliction, needs for its salvation and its advancement. The moment has come for us to fulfill this task, therefore we must no longer hold back.

Rudolf Steiner has again paved the way to the Christ for the world. He laid his hand on the wheel of human evolution which was rushing along into the abyss and checked it. He alone resisted the forces of descent, pulled back the wheel with a strong hand and guided it again toward the slow ascent. It was slow, for the band that surrounded him was small and the greatness of what he had to give fairly overwhelmed it. If the humanity of our day had had organs sufficiently capable of receiving what he gave, a new era would have dawned with infinite, impelling force and sun-soaring eagle flight. But what was capable of awakening the slumbering human organs had to occur gradually through hard labour. Through uninterrupted effort, collecting stone by stone, Rudolf Steiner built the foundation for an understanding of the facts about the world and humanity which became continually more subtle, for the construction of concepts of ever increasing fineness. Never in a public lecture did he shrink back from building this foundation anew. Then gradually, where he had his constantly returning audience, he proceeded a step further on the path which leads to healthy, spiritual knowledge. Never did he permit himself to toss off anything that had any semblance of the sensational; never did he wish to overpower a human soul. Each lecture was something that sprang up organically, that sank its roots deep in the soil, drawing up the forces of the earth, dipping down into the colour-shimmer of the surging ether-worlds, into the quickening spirituality, but permitting the luminous corolla of the resulting new concepts to emerge through inner necessity from the well-constructed conceptual organism. A growing, creative, active force—each thought-structure—and a living work of art! One stood amazed before the perfection of this thought-structure, but one remained free in relation to it astonished at the immensity and beauty of what thus arose before the inner eye with a luminous necessity.

Then about the turn of the century there came considerable chaotic activity rustling and bustling upon our materialistic culture, ghostly tappings out of the border lands of the spiritual world. It took courage, endless courage and karmic necessity to bring order into all this disorder and thereby call odium upon himself; to face the accusation that he was anachronistically immersed in neo-oriental streams.

But destiny stood challenging at the threshold of the 20th century, demanding the most vigorous action, namely, the conquest of the dragon of materialism which held our world firmly encircled, threatening to crush it in its embrace. The very structure of the earth, believed to be so solid, soon shook, as the world and civil wars gave eloquent and gruesome evidence.

Alongside, in helpful goodness, with his deep-seeing glance, stood the bearer of the spirit who seemed to have gathered all the riddles of earthly difficulties and of earthly suffering and to have reflected back in quiet restfulness all the splendour of the spiritual world. He knew that he had to illuminate and make this earthly darkness glow with Golden Wisdom, until a heightened consciousness had awakened within mankind. The task was fulfilled. Golden Wisdom, drawn down from the Christ-SpiritSun and given to us, is present here acting among many. It penetrates our earth and its heavy, dense, materialistic world of thought.

By drawing down super-sensible knowledge and perceptions into our world of concepts and thoughts, by transforming them into thought-forms which were able to energize our conscious activity, through this fine alchemy, a new soul-substance has been created which can have a vitalizing effect upon our deadened spiritual organs. The force for this revitalization streams out of the Mystery of Golgotha, but there must be a human activity springing up to meet it, understanding how to open itself up to it. In order that this might occur, Rudolf Steiner was active among us. All that he did, wrote, thought, served this one purpose to make our conceptual and sentient world so alive that it might open itself up again, with strength, to the Christ and thus activate our life of will, so that it might actually join itself with Him.

An immense life-work lies before us dedicated to this one goal which is a comprehension, a synthesis of those other aims, namely, the reunion and reciprocal penetration of the three realms of science, art, and religion, formerly working in harmony, now divided; the comprehension of the spiritual meaning concealed in the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity; the awakening of the human ego to a full consciousness of itself and its cosmic membership. All these aims are to be attained only through the strengthening of the human being with the Christ-Impulse.

The whole of cosmic wisdom must be called into play in order to understand this greatest of all mysteries. The other mysteries were a preparation for this, and Rudolf Steiner led us gradually and steadily into their essence and meaning. They had all pointed to what took place on Golgotha. Step by step he brought us nearer to this understanding. Cosmogony, theogony, geography, knowledge of man and science, already flowering in the thought-life of mankind, supplied building stones.

But there are critics of various kinds who announce what fits into their party program. There are also those among them, men of prominence, who boldly affirm, because it suits them to do so, that although there is much to be recognized in Rudolf Steiner's genius, still one must turn away from him because he rejects the Christ. But those who took the trouble to study Rudolf Steiner's work before commenting upon it found it otherwise. They soon saw how it could become helpful to them.

A number of theologians came to Rudolf Steiner and said to him: Our churches are deserted; our seminars do not give us what we can hand on to hungry souls as the bread of life! You alone have the power to help us. Will you give us something that will make it possible for us to help others inside our parish activities? Otherwise, we must renounce the vocation of priesthood. And Rudolf Steiner gave them what they requested, that is, he gave them the key to the gospels, the living Christ, the Word that leads to the rite of Consecration.

He said to them: You have asked me for something that you can give to those who are not yet strong enough to achieve spiritual science and spiritual communion through their own efforts. You wish to guide them on the path to the sources of that knowledge which awakens men, makes them free and fully conscious in accordance with the demands of the time. You may help in the work in this way if your activity does not become self-interest; if your thought for the church does not prevail over that for the spirit; if the path of the ministry gradually leads to a strengthening of the human ego so that it may in freedom and awareness unite itself with the divine world and the heart of Christ that shines in the sun and pulses through the earth. You have wished it and have promised it; act accordingly, and remain true to your words.

They went away and founded the Fellowship for a Christian Regeneration for the salvation of many souls. In this fellowship knowledge of the Gospels, to which Rudolf Steiner gave the key, is earnestly pursued.

He had begun with this even in the earliest years of his activities in Spiritual Science by always introducing into his lectures something that led us to the Tree of the Cross and to its meaning as the Tree of Life. At that time his listeners came to him and requested a connected cycle of lectures on the Gospel of St. John. It was granted them. These lectures from the year I9o8 we possess in an unfortunately quite incomplete copy. They have been so often asked for and copies have been made in so many places, that we do not wish to withhold them any longer because of their incompleteness. The subject matter will triumph over the incomplete renderings. A breath from the world out of which they have their source still hovers over them. Mankind needs it and needs this subject matter.

The publication of the lectures concerning the other gospels will soon follow this Gospel of St. John. When this introduction into the esoteric gospel was given to us at Whitsuntide, 1908, in Hamburg,—after a similar cycle had for the first time been given in Basel—something like a Pentecostal fire and the wafting of a Galilean springtime passed through our souls. Whitsuntide again approaches, accompanying the appearance of this book. May this be a favorable omen for the book.

Whitsuntide is the festival of the Holy Spirit which is active within human hearts. May the Spirit which rules in this book find its way to the souls of men who thirst after truth and are of good will.

We will try to understand the physical body somewhat more exactly. At the present time we distinguish within the constitution of man four members: physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. In studying the physical body we must now enter into greater detail. Man was already something when he came into the Old Saturn existence from a far-distant past. The physical body is the oldest and most developed member at present possessed by man. It is fourfold, which is not the case with the other bodies. On Old Saturn the groundwork was already laid as a germ. The etheric body was first added on the Old Sun. There the physical body evolved a stage further. The astral body was added on the Old Moon and the physical body underwent a still further stage of development. On the Earth the ego was now added, and the physical body went through a fourth stage. So we may say that the physical body is, as it were, in the fourth grade, while the etheric body is in the third, the astral body in the second and the ego in the first.

This is why it is only the physical body as such that has self-awareness, not the other three bodies. In the moment when man closes his physical sense organs in sleep, awareness of self ceases: when he opens them to what is outside, self-awareness returns. Man gains consciousness of self because his organs enable him to observe his surroundings. Only the physical body is so far advanced that it is able to open its organs to what is outside. If the etheric and astral bodies were able with their organs to observe their surroundings, man would attain self-awareness in them also. But for this, organs are necessary. The physical body has self-awareness only through its organs. These organs of the physical body are the senses.

Let us consider the senses in their successive stages. There are in fact twelve senses.³⁴ Of these, five are already physical and two others will become physical during the further development of the Earth.

The five senses which we already have are smell, taste, sight, touch and hearing. In time man will develop two other senses into proper physical senses. These two are located in the pituitary gland (hypophysis) and the pineal gland (epiphysis). These will develop the two future senses in the physical body which will then have seven senses. To understand the successive stages of the senses we must make it clear that in so far as man is a being conscious of self, he is on a descending curve. So though the body is on an ascending curve, the senses are on a descending curve.³⁵

Of the higher principles in man, Atma developed on Old Saturn, Buddhi on Old Sun and Manas on Old Moon. There was a time when the Monad assembled itself bit by bit, and then in the Lemurian Age entered into its self-constructed house. Now the Monad has descended to the fourth stage, Atma, Buddhi, Manas, Kama-Manas. This descending curve is expressed in the development of the senses. Actually, in the beginning, on Old Saturn, only one sense was present, the sense of smell. The senses that developed later had to descend from higher to ever lower regions.

In Nature we differentiate the solid, the fluid, the gaseous, the warmth ether, light ether, chemical ether and the life ether. These are the seven stages of matter. In his descent man experienced these stages from above downwards. At the beginning of evolution the first human life-germ could only manifest itself in the Life Ether. What corresponds to this stage as sense, is the sense of smell. Then man possessed the first sense, that of smell, of which only an after effect is present today. The solid has its life, as we saw a few days ago on the Maha-para-nirvana plane, the fluid on the Para-nirvana plane, the gaseous on the Nirvana plane, the Warmth Ether on the Buddhi plane, the Light Ether on the Mental plane, the Chemical Ether on the astral plane, the Life Ether on the physical plane. We can therefore also speak of the atomistic ether.

An object can only be smelt when it impinges on the organ of smell, comes into contact with it. The organ of smell must unite itself with the material. To smell means to perceive with a sense that enters into a relationship with the material itself.

As second stage we have the Chemical Ether. Here the sense of taste develops. This depends on dissolving what is to be tasted. We have to do, not with matter itself, but with what is made out of it. This is a chemical, physical process through which matter is changed into something different. The tongue can do this: it can first dissolve and then taste.

The third stage is to be found in the Light Ether. There sight develops. Now we do not perceive what is broken down by chemical, physical processes, but we perceive a picture of the object which is brought about by the external light.

The fourth is the Warmth Ether. In this, the sense of touch is developed. Here one no longer perceives a picture. Warmth is a passing condition of the body, a condition experienced only in the moment. We are speaking here of the sense of touch as the perception of warmth and cold; it is in fact a ‘Warmth sense’.

Fifthly we have what is of the nature of air. This corresponds to the sense of hearing. Here we no longer perceive a condition of the body in question, but what the body says to us. Now we enter into the inner nature of the body. At the sound of a bell it is not the bell itself that interests us, not the outer form, the matter, but what it has to disclose of its inner nature. Hearing is a uniting with what reveals itself as the spiritual in matter. At this stage the life of the senses goes over from the passive to the active. The passively received sound becomes in man active in speech. Through speech man gives utterance to his soul being.

As the sixth stage we have the fluid element. The sense organ corresponding to the fluid is the pituitary gland. This is situated in the brain in an elongated cylindrical form.

As seventh stage we have the solid. The appropriate sense organ is the pineal gland.

As now, when man speaks he influences the air, so later he will gain an influence over what is fluid.³⁶ The ‘I think’, and thought in general, will express itself in the air and indeed in forms, for example as crystals. At the next stage feeling will also be involved with thinking. Development will work backwards. The warmth of the heart will then express itself in oscillations, and flow outwards together with thought. And the last stage will be achieved by man when he will create actual beings which remain; when through the word he will externalise what he wills. The expression of feeling is merely a transition. When man becomes creative through the will, then the beings which he brings forth will have actual existence.

In times to come man will bring forth into his surroundings what he feels. This will be imparted to the fluid element. The entire fluid element of the planet which will follow next (the future Jupiter) will be an expression of what people feel. Today man sends out words; they are inscribed into the Akasha. There they remain, even though the airwaves vanish. Out of these words the Future Jupiter will later be formed. When therefore today man uses evil, blasphemous language, then on Jupiter terrible formations will be brought about. This is why one should be so very careful of what one says, and why it is so immensely important that man should be master of his speech. In the future man will also send out his feelings; the conditions of the fluids on Jupiter will be a result of feelings on the Earth. What man speaks today will give Jupiter its form; what he feels will engender its inner warmth; what he wills determines the separate beings inhabiting Jupiter. The Future Jupiter will be constructed out of the basic powers of the human soul.

Just as today we can trace the rock formation of the Earth back to earlier conditions, so will the rock formation of the Future Jupiter be the result of our words. The ocean of Jupiter, the warmth of Jupiter, will arise out of the feelings of present-day humanity. The beings of Jupiter will arise out of human will. Thus the inhabitants of a previous planet create the basic conditions for its successor. And beings who today still [Gap in text ...] hover over the earth, as was once the case with the Monads, will enter into incarnation on the Future Jupiter. There will then exist a kind of Jupiter-Lemurian race. Beings will be there which we have created as the Pitris did. Just as we inhabited the grotesque forms of the Old Moon, so these beings will inhabit the forms which we develop by means of our pineal gland.

We are building the house for future Monads. A similar procedure took place when the development of the human being led over from the Old Moon to the Earth. This makes absolutely clear how everything external is actually created from within outwards.

It is difficult to distinguish the pure physical body from what has been formed through human error. A hunchback owes his deformity to the astral, to Karma. The external form, the physiognomy and so on, are dependent on Karma. Modifications of the physical body are therefore dependent on the higher bodies. When one eliminates everything that depends on Karma we find that the physical body is in fact wisely ordered. All forms of illness are errors which find their expression in the physical body. All illnesses have been wrong-doing in the past, all wrong-doing will be illness in the future. When human beings become truly worthy, the bodies of the beings they create will be equally imbued with wisdom.

All wisdom, feeling and will, in the next evolution, will actually be present as form and being. The physical body is called a temple in all ancient religions because its structure is so filled with wisdom. It is not correct to speak of the physical body as the lower nature, for what is lower in man does in fact lie in the higher bodies which today are still in infancy.

Here we can consider an important karmic connection. We live in a materialistic age and this is the result of a preceding age. This materialistic age has accomplished much, not only outwardly but also inwardly. We may think for instance of the decrease in mortality through hygienic measures. This is actually a step forward, brought about by hygienic means. Such external progress is always a karmic result of progress which earlier has been made inwardly. These steps forward in the physical are the result of inner steps forward in the Middle Ages. Today therefore it would be quite wrong to look back on the ‘dark’ Middle Ages. Our most significant materialists have been educated idealistically; for instance, Haeckel, Büchner, Moleschott. This is why their systems are thought out so admirably; but this they owe to their idealistic education. Present day materialism is actually the outer expression of the preceding idealistic period.

Now too we must work in preparation for the future. Just as the karmic result of the earlier idealistic period made its appearance in materialism, so again a new beginning must be made in regard to Idealism and spiritual impulses. It was in accordance with this law that the leading personalities acted when they called the Theosophical Movement into life.

The 14th century was the time of the creation of towns. Within a few hundred years independent towns had developed in all civilised European countries. The burgher is the founder of materialism in practical life. This comes to expression in the Lohengrin myth.³⁷ Lohengrin, the emissary of the Grail Lodge, was the wise leader who took hold in the Middle Ages and prepared the way for the establishment of towns. The swan was his symbol; the initiate of the Third Grade is the Swan. Consciousness is always represented as something feminine. Elsa of Brabant represents the consciousness of the materialistic civic sense. The spiritual life had, however, to be saved; this happened through the fact that Christian Rosenkreuz³⁸ founded the Rosicrucian Order. Spiritual life remained in the Mystery Schools. Today materialism has been driven to uttermost extremes. This is why in our time something new must break in. At that time the same movement took hold which today through Theosophy makes popular the elementary teachings of spiritual life in order to create once again a new inner impulse that will later be able to reveal itself outwardly. The inner always comes later to outer expression. An illness is the karmic result of earlier wrongdoing, for instance, lying. When something of this kind becomes outer reality, it manifests as illness. Epidemics can be traced far back to the misdeeds of a people. They are something imperfect which from being inward has been exteriorised. The sixth sense is the Kundalini light radiating warmth;³⁹ the seventh is the synthesizing sense.

• 34. See The Wisdom of man of the Soul and of the Spirit. The Twelve Senses and the Seven Life Processes (Golden Blade 1975).
• 35. Theosophy teaches that all development proceeds in cycles, first on a descending curve from spiritual to material and then back on an ascending curve from material to spiritual. In a lecture to the same audience in Berlin 17.10.1904 Rudolf Steiner says ‘Theosophical writings have described certain evolutionary developments as ascending and descending ... during the descent development is slowed down while during the ascent it becomes ever faster. This accelerated development does not apply to the whole physical plane but only to individual beings.’ In a lecture in Berlin 27.1.1908 there is a further clarification: ‘... so that when we are at a particular moment of our development we can always say: Yes, there are certain forces there that draw into man and pass out of him, forces that descend and forces that rise. For every such force there is always a moment when it changes from a descending to an ascending force. All forces that become ascending forces have been at first descending. They descend down to man, so to speak, and in man they achieve the strength to rise’.
  In this sense ‘when the body is on the ascending curve the senses are on the descending curve’ should be understood as meaning that the physical body in general is on the rising curve because it has passed the deepest point of its material densification, while the senses are on the descending curve since there are two senses which still have to develop as physical senses.
• 36. For further clarification of this passage see lecture 12.6.1907 Occult Seals and Pillars (typescript).
• 37. The Lohengrin figure first appears in Eschenbach's ‘Parzifal’ as a knight of the Grail and son of Parzifal. The saga was further developed in a poem in middle high German dating from the end of the 13th century. A simpler form is Conrad von Würzburg's Schwanenritter. See also Rudolf Steiner's lecture 29.3.1906 on Parzifal and Lohengrin (Typescript).
• 38. See: The Mission of Christian Rosenkreutz lecture 1912-13.
• 39. see lecture 18.10.1904 in History of the Middle Ages (Typescript)

for the inauguration of the Novalis branch

Due to the circumstances, a number of our friends here in Strasbourg have founded a second branch in addition to the already existing one, which is to bear the significant name “Novalis Branch”. Our friends from other places, who have lovingly gathered in Strasbourg today, have shown through their visit how they understand that branches can also exist side by side in one city and that the diversity of work in different fields need not preclude what we must call harmony and concord, which must prevail among all those who consider themselves members of our society spread across the globe. And so this branch should also be part of the great current that we call spiritual science.

You, my dear friends of the Novalis branch, have chosen a significant name for your signature, a sign of your work. The name Novalis belongs to a personality who last, that is, in her last incarnation, was active only in the 18th century; a personality whose whole being is permeated, spiritualized, by what we regard as a spirit-knowing sense, as spirituality. And so you showed from the very beginning that you want spiritual science to be something directly alive, that you seek it wherever it can be found, not just in this or that time, but as it lives through all times, and how it can pour out into the world through one or the other personality in many different ways. In Novalis, we can see how the striving for spiritual knowledge is something that can permeate and interweave our ordinary everyday lives. Of course, if we wanted to point to the sources of the theosophical spirit in Novalis, we would have to look into earlier incarnations of this lofty spirit, and from these earlier incarnations it would become clear to us how what can only be the most profound form of theosophical spiritual life was lived in the incarnations that preceded Novalis's own. But even if we consider only that Novalis, who was barely thirty years old and lived at the end of the 18th century, if we consider only that one incarnation, then we can already see in him how spiritual knowledge is not something that takes people up into a dreamy, fantastic world, something that draws him away from immediate reality. On the contrary, in the most diverse ways, we can see in Novalis how the spirit of reality, how real life acquires its value and true content by permeating it with spiritual science.

Novalis came from a noble family in central Germany in which there was a certain, I might say materialistic piety – for such a thing also exists – but not really that which one can describe as the yearning of the heart for a real, living spirit. In order to fulfill the karma of Novalis in the right way, it happened that the father of Novalis, the old Hardenberg, even in his later age - although he was not imbued with spiritual life, but because he came into the Herrnhut sect, a pietistic sect - was interspersed with pious impulses from a certain side. And from this middle-class, German-speaking environment – which, as I said, had enough of the spirit in it to enable even old Hardenberg, in his later life, to achieve a certain spirituality, even if it was sectarian – our Novalis emerged. He grew into – not into what was destined for him according to the will of his family, for that would have been some military or diplomatic position – he grew into a great time; into that time in which great, powerful minds worked at the chair of the Central German University of Thuringia.

So he could still hear Schiller's history being presented in Jena at that time. Contemporary history teachers may say that Schiller was not an erudite historian. But what history should be in life, a permeation of the whole of human development with spiritual life, that is what came from Schiller to those souls who were able to hear him in Jena as a history teacher. Schiller spoke as a great personality above all. Spirit spoke from this personality; it awakened the spirit.

And there was yet another teacher when Novalis was young, a teacher who, through the great energy of his spiritual life, not only created things in the field of philosophy that belong to the whole human race but are still little understood today. Fichte was working at the time when Novalis was living his life. He worked in such a way that his whole demeanour, Fichte's demeanour, had something spiritual about it. One can look at it as an externality. Those who have a sense for it will not look at it as an externality, that Fichte, when he lectured in the dark hall in the evening and the candle was burning on his lectern, first extinguished the candle by saying: So, my dear listeners, now the physical light has been extinguished, now only the spiritual light should shine in this room.

When the relationship between the spiritual and the physical is conjured up not only before the soul but also before the eyes at the right moment, this means something tremendous for receptive souls like Novalis. Such a soul can thereby become capable of maintaining an unshakable belief in spiritual life. It imbues the soul with a noble sentiment that remains for life when a Novalis comes into such an environment. One cannot say that Novalis was prone to enthusiasm. Those who believe that he was a dreamer do not understand Novalis. No, the spirit that lived in Novalis said – we can read it today in his unpublished writings –: the state of sleep is different from the state of wakefulness. When a person is awake, the inner soul – as it was called in those days, what we would call today the astral body – is united with the outer body. The body enjoys the soul. A beautiful word that Novalis used to express the relationship between the physical and astral bodies. And in sleep, the soul is released from the body, as Novalis said, and the body digests the soul when the person is asleep. This is another beautiful, short, concise expression for a relationship that we also encountered in spiritual science. It is beautiful when Novalis writes the saying in his notes: We are always surrounded by a spiritual world. Wherever we are, spiritual beings are around us. It is only up to the human being to project his or her self in such a way that he or she becomes aware of the spiritual beings that surround us wherever we are. It is wonderful how he shows a deep understanding of the course of esoteric human development and writes: In ancient times, attempts were made to lead the soul to a higher development by mortifying the body, through self-chastisement and so on. In more recent times, the strengthening of the soul must take its place: strengthening the soul. Through this strengthening, the soul must gain power over the body, must not become weaker as a result, and must then exercise a certain mastery.

We could talk about Novalis for hours. We would not find a spirit that expresses itself in words and teachings like the ones we can give in spiritual science today, but we would find a spirit that expresses exactly the same thing with its words. He was no dreamer, no fantasist. Although his lyric poetry took on the highest momentum we can imagine, leading us up to the highest warmth of feeling, Novalis – and this applies to him, who did not live to be thirty – was a practical mind, who studied at the Mining Academy, was a practical man, through and through a mathematician, who felt that mathematics was a great poem, according to whose lines the divine spirit had woven the world, but who proved himself to be practical in everything a mining engineer needs. Novalis was a spirit who, despite this practicality, knew how to implement in his emotional life, in his heart, what was for him a theosophical attitude, directly into his life. Truly, what we know of his relationship with Sophie von Kühn should not be understood as something related to sensuality. He loved a girl who died at the age of fourteen. He actually only began to love her so ardently when she was already dead. He felt that he now lives in the realm in which she has been since her “death.” He decided to die after her. His further life was a living with a physically dead personality. All this shows us what Novalis grew into through the strong pull of his spiritual being.

We can see from Novalis that, as a human being, you basically only need to have one quality in order to have a sense of this spirituality that spiritual science is supposed to bring us. You only need one quality, and this one quality becomes so difficult for people. Because it becomes so difficult for people, people do not come to spiritual science easily. When this one quality is mentioned, it seems to people as if they all have it. Nevertheless, it is this quality, the lack of which prevents people from coming to spiritual science: truthfulness, honestly confessing what really is in the deepest soul. Seemingly, they have so many people — in their own opinion. Nevertheless, Novalis in particular gives us an example of how just a moment of real honesty is needed, and how through this one moment of honesty a person should confess what spirituality can be for the human heart. Novalis' father had a certain inclination towards spirituality; otherwise he would not have joined the Moravian Church. But his soul was not as free and honest as is meant here. What lived in his soul from the external physical world prevented him from doing so. The physical world, with all its prejudices, did not allow him to ascend into the spiritual world. But his son had this truthfulness. What was more obvious than that the father could have no inkling of what lived in this son? The physical world, with its separateness, disharmony, and lack of truthfulness, erected a barrier here between what the young Novalis really was and what the old Hardenberg wanted to be , but which he could not be because of a lack of real inner truthfulness, the physical world with all that it makes of a person did not allow him to realize his son's importance as long as Novalis lived. The son had been dead for a few weeks when old Hardenberg was in his Herrnhut community. They sang a hymn in the community: “What would I have been without you, what would I not be without you.” And this hymn that was sung – old Hardenberg had not yet heard it, but in that moment everything that was spiritual in his soul ignited. He was so overwhelmed by the great impression of what flowed from this song that in that moment his soul, which had become honest, was filled with the spirit of the world, with spiritual life. And when the meeting was over, the old Hardenberg asked someone the name of the song that had so deeply moved him. Then they told him: It is your son's song. It was only necessary that for a moment everything that the physical plane brought could be forgotten, and then, without knowing it, pure truthfulness, pure objectivity, not the prejudices of the physical plane, lived in him for a moment, brought into him by him who had brought it. This is how spirit would find spirit if we, without what are the obstacles of the physical plane, were to face soul to soul. In that moment when man, given over purely to the truth, can find the soul of the other and the soul of the world, in each such moment he must be imbued with what might be called theosophical spirituality.

What could be called theosophical spirituality does not lie only in some theory, in some doctrine, although we must never forget that for us humans, who are born to think, a doctrine is indispensable. But the essence of theosophy does not lie in the doctrine. Anyone who might want to emphasize that the doctrine is superfluous and that it is only important to cultivate what is called universal brotherly love must be repeatedly and repeatedly reminded that universal brotherly love cannot be achieved anywhere in the world by preaching universal brotherly love. If we preach only of love, then for the connoisseur of life it is as if we were saying to a stove: Dear stove, it behoves you, for your stove-love, to warm the room. But the room remains cold, no matter how often we preach of love. If, however, we give it fuel, wood and fire, then the wood and fire in it are transformed into warmth, and it warms the room. The fuel for the human soul is the great ideals, the great thoughts that we can absorb, through which we recognize the context of the world, through which we can learn the secrets of human destiny and human life. These are not thoughts that only fill us with theory, but those that warm us inwardly, and the result of theosophical wisdom is love. And just as surely as the stove warms the room by heating and not by preaching, so surely the right teaching of the great thoughts that permeate the world will make the soul loving. For that is the secret of real wisdom: that it transforms itself into love in the soul through its own power. Those who have not yet found the way from wisdom to love only show that they have not yet come far enough in wisdom. But anyone who wants to believe that the thoughts we absorb about the evolution of the world, the evolution of man, about karma and so on, are unimportant for man should realize again and again in his soul that these are not just human thoughts, that they are not just thoughts that we think first, but that these thoughts, which penetrate our soul, are the thoughts according to which the divine spirits have built the world.

In spiritual science, it is not our thoughts that arise in our mind's eye, but the thoughts of the divine architects, the divine spirits of the world. What the gods of the world thought among themselves before the creation of the physical world is what we reflect on in spiritual science, and in so doing we explore that which flowed from the divine beings into the activity and becoming of the world to which we belong. But that which the gods have thought is spiritual light. And anyone who does not want to think what the gods have thought, even if he does not know it, does not give himself the direction towards the light, but towards darkness. The only possible foundation for a real development of the human soul is the one in which we start from what the divine thoughts of the world are. The abilities of the spirits of the world have not been given to us as potentialities to be left fallow. They have been given to us to develop. And since thinking is our most important and outstanding ability in this cycle of human development, we must start from thinking. But we must not stop at thinking. This gradually leads us to implement spiritual science in our attitudes, so that we learn to understand the secrets of how knowledge leads to character traits, to emotional qualities. Correctly understood knowledge leads to character traits, to real emotional qualities.

We can make this clear to ourselves by means of a single example, by realizing that we humans undergo successive, ever new embodiments, incarnations. What would be the point of these incarnations, these repeated lives on earth, if they were not meant to make man more and more perfect? We must look back from our present incarnation to earlier incarnations and say to ourselves: What we have become at the present time, we have become through the fact that, incarnation after incarnation, these or those qualities of our soul have been added, that our soul has always absorbed new and ever new forces, had new and ever new experiences, had new and ever new experiences. What is built into this soul in one incarnation then comes out in the following incarnation.

We have now become what we have been prepared to become in previous incarnations. But then we can stop for a moment and say: we are not only looking back into the past, but we are also looking up into the future, to later, more perfect lives. What would this human life be through all these many embodiments if we could not say to ourselves: The further we develop into the future, the higher the stages will have been attained by what sits within us today as our ego.

We can only guess at what we are still capable of becoming, for otherwise we would already be it. We must ascribe to ourselves the ability to rise ever higher. — But so we must look shyly and reverently into the future; we must say to ourselves, even if we can already recognize this or that today, are able to experience this or that in the world already today: with the greater abilities that we can attain, we will be able to experience and recognize many more things.

How impossible it is for someone who writes such a thought as has now been expressed in his soul, how impossible it is for him to say to himself: I can decide today what is true or false, I can ultimately judge between true and false. — It behoves him only to say: If I could decide today, then it would be impossible for even higher abilities to arise in me in the future. But when we internalize this, it gives us the great modesty, the true, dignified humility that we need to truly be human in every moment of our development. Thus, the realization of reincarnation transforms into a feeling, a character trait: into dignified humility, into true modesty.

You could put it this way: Anyone who today realizes that he is going through successive incarnations and is constantly rising higher in his development would have to be a fool if he said to himself, “I am perfect.” Or he would say, “There is no need for me to learn today, because tomorrow I will experience it quite differently.” Knowledge is transformed into a real character trait. And when viewed correctly, every spiritual-scientific insight is transformed into a character trait. But we can see that if we are unable to apply our powers at any stage of our existence, then these powers from spiritual worlds would not have been given to us. If we want to wait until the world has reached its final stage, in the belief that we must first be so perfect that we can finally recognize and experience, then we would not have to go through various incarnations. That means, we must be clear that we have to apply our powers of knowledge in every incarnation. We must not say: we want to recognize only in the following incarnation, or at the end of our existence. — We should apply the power that we have despite humility and modesty.

Thus, alongside humility and modesty, there arises a justified human sense of self, which flows directly from our being imbued with the Divine-Spiritual and which tells us: although our knowledge will only be complete when we have reached a high level, we can make it complete precisely by becoming aware of our human dignity today and applying our strength today. In this way our character will acquire something that can be compared to a pair of scales. We can put humility and modesty on one side of the scales and justified self-esteem, boldness in judgment on the other, and say: We have attained a level in knowledge and self-awareness. In short, we will find that whenever you try to introduce into your feelings what spiritual science teaches, the teachings or theories of spiritual science are transformed in our soul, because they contain thoughts of the divine spirits, are transformed in our soul into our character, our will, our feelings. This can show us that in spiritual science the teaching, the theory, is not the main thing, but that it is, so to speak, the kindling for the development of the human soul; that it is that which is to bring forth higher qualities precisely in our soul. And anyone who demands these qualities without realization lives in the worst of illusions, in self-deception, that self-deception which has entered into human evolution in that, in the course of earthly development, other beings have also entered into it, have participated in our evolution, beings who were not only harmful, but also useful. But however useful they were to us, in that they brought us freedom and self-awareness, we must nevertheless be clear about the fact that precisely these gifts of the so-called luciferic entities: freedom and self-awareness, must not be allowed to degenerate into extremes, into radicalism, for then they become pride and arrogance. And pride and arrogance in the face of knowledge lead this knowledge into darkness. Knowledge is the acceptance of divine light, of divine thoughts. Rejection of knowledge is something that leads into darkness and that cannot lead to higher qualities of the soul either. If we look at spiritual science in this way, we will recognize it as one of the most important matters for humanity. We will recognize it as something that we do not do just for our own sake, but because we are aware of our duty to humanity and to development.

We are not living in a completely unimportant time today; we are living in an important time. It is often said by people living in this or that time that they live in a transitional time. All times of human development have been called transitional times, but not all are such significant transitional times. But today we can truly say that our time is a transitional time. To what extent is this the case? Let us first realize the character of another transition period. For example, it was a transition period for human development when the predecessor of our Christ Jesus, John the Baptist, appeared. When John the Baptist appeared, he told the people what was later repeated in significant words by Christ Jesus: “Change your minds, the Kingdoms of Heaven are near.”

What does this mean? We can understand what it means if we remember that as people have developed from incarnation to incarnation, they have passed through various qualities of soul. In the distant past, people did not yet have the qualities and soul abilities that they have today. It was possible for all people in ancient times to develop a dim, twilight, dream-like clairvoyance, to look into the spiritual world. There was the possibility for all people not only to see the physical, but to look into the spiritual world. But in those days when clairvoyance was common, people did not yet have what they have today: clearly developed self-awareness. At that time, people could not yet say “I am” to themselves in a clear way. Stability in the center of the inner being could only be achieved by the old clairvoyance disappearing for a while. They had to accept, as it were, their isolation from the spiritual world in order to develop a clear self-awareness here on the physical plane. Later, this clairvoyance will develop again together with self-awareness, so that the two qualities will arise together again and people will have them once more. We can therefore look back into the distant past. At least for certain periods of time, when people were inattentive to the physical, when they closed their eyes and turned away from the physical, and left their ears inattentive to sounds, they were able to see into the spiritual world and gain direct conviction of the existence of the spiritual world. These qualities faded, but in their place came more and more the ability to think, the ability to be self-aware, to draw conclusions, to make independent judgments, which is what makes up our present-day consciousness. The time can be roughly estimated when it gradually occurred that the old clairvoyant abilities completely disappeared from the abilities of mankind. Before the year 3101, almost all people on our planet were still endowed with dim clairvoyance. Then, from that year on, it diminished more and more, became weaker and weaker. But with this, self-awareness, self-consciousness, judgment, reasoning, and self-confident thinking grew. So, as it were, the light of spirituality grew dim, and that which is the human ego dawned, became brighter and brighter. It grew brighter within, but it grew darker in spirituality. In this year begins what Oriental philosophy calls the Kali Yuga, the dark, black age. Something had come to a crisis, so to speak, at the time when John the Baptist and then Jesus the Christ appeared as forerunners. They had to say to mankind: You must now learn that spirituality exists, even though you do not see spirituality with any spiritual eye. You must learn that the Kingdoms of Heaven are there. You must grasp it from your own self. — Therefore, the Christ had to embody himself in a physical body, because only on the physical plane could self-awareness perceive spirituality during the Kali Yuga.

At that time there was a transition period. The old abilities had faded away. If the people of that time had not heard the call of the Baptist, of Christ Jesus, then they would have fallen into decline at this stage, would not have progressed. Those who heard these voices had to recognize the God who descended into the physical and carnal. They understood that the Kingdoms of Heaven had come close to the ego.

Christ was on Earth in the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth for three years. That was the time when people could only see with the physical eye when a God descended to them.

Today, we are once again living in a transitional age, in a crisis. The Kali Yuga expired around the year 1899. And now, although people are unaware of it, new qualities are developing in them. New qualities are developing in the human soul in a natural way. The fact that so many people are unaware of this is no proof to the contrary. A hundred years after Christ, Tacitus was still writing about an unknown sect of Christians; and in Rome, after Christ Jesus had accomplished the Mystery of Golgotha seventy to eighty years earlier, people still talked about a sect that was said to live in a back alley and was led by a certain Jesus. But the most important events had taken place in front of countless people. If people do not perceive something, that is no proof that this most important, most decisive and most incomparable thing is not there. Since about 1899, abilities have been developing unnoticed in people that will emerge in the mid-thirties of the twentieth century, roughly between 1933 and 1937. Then, because the time has come, these soul abilities will arise in a whole series of people; abilities of etheric clairvoyance will arise. They will be there. Just as there were people with an ego consciousness carried to the highest peak when Christ Jesus was here, so in our century there will be people who will not only see with the physical eye, but who, as a natural development, will experience what strives down from spiritual levels, so that spiritual-soul abilities emerge from their soul, and they enter into the etheric existence. And the happiness of these people will be to understand the new world that they will see. One thing is true and important for our soul to know that Christ Jesus said, “I am with you until the end of our Earth cycle.” He is here. He has been within our Earth orbit since that time. And when their spiritual eyes are opened, they will see him as Paul saw him at the event outside Damascus. That is what will happen around 1933, that he will be seen as an ethereal being, as a being that does not descend to the physical plane, but can be seen in the etheric body, because a certain number of people will then ascend to etheric vision. But people will be ignorant if they are not prepared for what they will see through spiritual science. That is why we are living in a time of transition, because we are growing into a new way of seeing.

Spiritual science has the responsible task of preparing people for the great moment when the Christ will not appear in the fleshly body – for He was only once in the fleshly body – but He is there and He will come again in a form that those whose eyes are open will see Him in the world, which is only visible to clairvoyant eyes. People will grow up to Him. That will be the return of Christ: a growing up of people into the sphere in which the Christ is. But they would stand there foolishly if they were not prepared for this great moment through spiritual science. This preparation must be a serious one, for it is a responsible one. Humanity is to be prepared for the fact that more will be seen than what has been seen so far, if people do not lead this ability into darkness and cause it to wither. Because it could also happen that the whole of the twentieth century would pass without bringing the fulfillment of this goal. We have the responsible task of preparing people for the great moment through spiritual science. But we have to prepare people spiritually, to make them understand that only the spirit will meet the Christ with the spiritual eye open. A materialistic mind might believe that the Christ would appear in a carnal body again. But that would not be spiritualistic, it would be materialistic. If we humans believed that, we would not have the will to work our way up to his spirit. That is why certain prophecies from the Apocalypse will be fulfilled at that time. Relying on and building on the materialistic spirit, individuals will appear in physical bodies who will then say that they are the embodied Christ. And those who are not led to the right knowledge through spiritual science will fall prey to them, for Maya will be great and the possibility of self-deception will be enormous. Temptations will grow to gigantic proportions. Only spiritual knowledge that is aware of its responsibility will bring people to an understanding of what is to happen.

These were reflections intended to show how spirituality through spiritual science should work in the individual human soul, and that spiritual knowledge is a task for the times, because we can also say of today's times: We are facing the most important things. But because even the most important things could be completely overlooked by humanity in the darkness, because the great moment could pass without people seeing it, that is why spiritual science must work in the right way. Penetrating with our spirit what is transmitted to us by the study of the spirit will give us the spirituality we need in every branch to develop our own soul ever higher, to perform ever higher and higher services for humanity.

Let us try to remember more often that the words spoken at the time of Christ also apply to our time: “Change your minds, for the time is at hand.” At that time it was said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” Today, prophetically looking into the near future, we must say: “For the human ego is close to the Kingdoms of Heaven”. Let us prepare ourselves through correct spiritual science so that we may enter worthily into the kingdom that demands something of us. And we ourselves can only flourish if we find the way to the Kingdoms of Heaven. When we process the experiences we have on earth and allow what we experience in the higher spiritual existence to arise, offering it as a great sacrifice at the altar of divine existence, then we fulfill our destiny as human beings to the fullest. Let what you are working on here be imbued with both the spirit of Novalis and the spirit of spiritual science itself, which has come before our soul, and you will see that your work will proceed in the good sense. For when our work is imbued with such an attitude, then, while we are gathered in our branches, there flows in that which we call the light of the Masters of Wisdom and the harmony of the intuitions. We are never without the help of these advanced individuals when we are united in the right attitude in one of our branches. May such spirit unite you! Such spirit, which is at the same time the spirit of the Masters of Wisdom, inspire you! Work in this spirit and your work will be a part of the great spiritual scientific work, your work will be a part of the spirit that shall go throughout the whole world.

In our survey of the world we have now carried a difficult aspect of it far enough to discover to some extent the spiritual behind the phenomena of the external sense-world. Concerning such phenomena, at first outwardly revealing little of the fact that the spiritual in its own peculiar form stands behind them, as we experience this spiritual in our own soul-life—concerning such phenomena we have recognised that nevertheless spiritual qualities and properties do stand behind them. For example, in ordinary life we recognise the properties of heat or fire, and we have learnt to see in these the expression of sacrifice. In what meets us as air and at any rate, to our ideas, seems to reveal so little of its spiritual nature, we have recognised the bestowing virtue of certain Spiritual Beings. And we have learnt to perceive in water what might be called resignation. It may just be mentioned here, that in earlier conceptions of the world there was naturally a greater sense of the spiritual behind the outer material element, and the fact that specially volatile substances have been designated “Spirits” may be looked upon as proving this, for we make a peculiar use of the word ‘Spirit’ to-day. Even in saying “Spiritual”; and indeed in the outer world it may often occur that people use this word with very little application to spiritual things, on one occasion (as some here present are aware) a letter was addressed to a spiritualist union at Munich, and so little did the postman know what a spiritualistic circle was, that the letter was delivered to the Central Committee of Wine and Spirit merchants!

But to-day, when we wish to study that significant transition in the evolution of the Earth planet which took place in the passing from ancient Sun to ancient Moon, we must bear in mind a different kind of development of the spiritual. We must now start from that point which we reached in the last lecture, when we came to the subject of “renunciation.” This, as we have seen, consisted essentially in the refusal of Beings of exalted Spiritual rank to accept the sacrifice, which as we were told, consisted for the most part of will or will-substance. If we represent this to our minds in such a way that we picture certain Beings desirous of offering the substance of their will in sacrifice which through the renunciation of yet higher Beings was rejected, it will be easy to rise to the conception that this substance was compelled to remain with the Beings desirous of sacrificing; who were prevented from doing so. Thus we are introduced to Beings in the Cosmic scheme ready to contribute with fervour what dwells within them—but who are not able to do this, are obliged to retain this substance within them. The Beings whose sacrifice was rejected were unable to establish a particular connection with still higher Beings, which might have been established had their offering been accepted. What we must understand by this is symbolically expressed in the world's history by the figure of Cain confronting Abel, though there the contrast is more sharply emphasised. Cain too wished to offer sacrifice to his God. But it was not pleasing unto God and He would not accept it. The sacrifice offered by Abel was accepted. What we must bear in mind in this story is the inner experience which came to Cain through the rejection of his sacrifice.

If we wish to raise ourselves to the height necessary for the comprehension of what is now under consideration, we must clearly realise that in speaking of the regions referred to, both conceptions and ideas slip into use regarding them which only have meaning in our ordinary life. It will be incorrect to speak of ‘Sin’ or ‘wrong-doing’ as coming into being by the rejection of the sacrifice. Guilt or atonement as we know it in our ordinary life, could not as yet be spoken of in those regions. Rather must we think of these Beings in such a way, that on the part of those Higher Ones who rejected the proffered sacrifice, there is renunciation or resignation. In the soul described in the last lecture there is nothing of guilt or omission; on the contrary, it contains all the greatness and significance to be found in resignation. None the less the fact remains that in those other Beings who wished to contribute their sacrifice there arose a feeling, though very faint, which was the beginning of an opposition to those who rejected it. So that when at a much later epoch, the story of Cain is brought to our notice our feeling is represented in an accentuated form. Hence we do not find in those Beings who continued to evolve from the Sun and to pass over to the Moon, the same disposition of mind as in Cain; in them the mood is different in degree. We only really become acquainted with this if we look into our own souls as we did in the last lecture, trying to find its counterpart there, and thus get a hint of that feeling which was developed in the Individualities whose sacrificial gifts were rejected.

Coming nearer and nearer to the earthly life of man, we find this mood in ourselves—everyone knows it—as uncertainty and at the same time as torment in the domain which can well be included in the hidden depths of Soul-life. This feeling with which we are all acquainted holds sway in the secret depth of our Soul-life, and sometimes pushes its way up to the surface; and then perhaps its torment is least. We often go about with these feelings without being aware of them in our superficial consciousness; yet there they are within us. We might recall the words of the poet: ‘He alone who longing knows, knows what I suffer,’ if we wish to convey an idea of the tormenting nature of this mood with which is connected a certain degree of pain. The longing to be found in the souls of men, is what is here meant.

In order to transport ourselves into what went on spiritually in the evolutionary phases of ancient Saturn and Sun, it was necessary to raise our vision to peculiar states of the soul which only appear, so to speak, when the human soul begins to aspire and prepares for higher striving. We saw this when we tried to understand the nature of sacrifice by referring to our own Soul-life, when we tried to comprehend the nature of the wisdom man can acquire, which we saw trickling in, and which has its origin in what may be called: ‘readiness to bestow,’ ‘readiness to give’, even to giving oneself, so to speak. When we come on to the more earthly conditions which have evolved out of the earlier ones, we encounter a Soul-mood resembling in many respects what a man may even yet experience at the present day. But we must quite clearly realise, that although our Soul-life is fitted into our earth-body, an upper layer exists over this hidden Soul-life in the depths. Who could fail to know that there is such a hidden life of the Soul? Life itself amply teaches us this.

Now in order to make clear to ourselves something of this hidden life of the Soul, let us take the case of a child who in his seventh or eighth year, or at some other age may have experienced some injustice, to which children are particularly sensitive. He perhaps may have been blamed for something which he really had not done, but it suited to convenience of those around him to throw the blame on the child, so as to have an end of the matter. Now children are very specially sensitive to unjust accusation; but as life now is, although such an experience may have bitten deeply into the childish life, the later Soul-life put another layer of existence over it, and as far as everyday life is concerned the child forgot it. And indeed it may very well never crop up again. But suppose that in his fifteenth or sixteenth year this boy should experience fresh injustice, perhaps at school; then that which has lain dormant in the depths below the superficial waves of his soul, begins to stir. The boy need not know that a memory of what he had formerly endured is rising to the surface, he may have different concepts and ideas on the subject. But if his earlier experience had not occurred he would simply have gone home, perhaps grumbled and complained, and shed a few tears, and that would have been the end of the matter. The first injustice had however been experienced, and although, as I make a point of saying, the boy need have no recollection of it, yet it works! It becomes active beneath the surface of the Soul-life just as there may be movements beneath the surface of a calm and glassy sea, and what might have ended in a few grumblings and tears now becomes the suicide of a schoolboy! Thus do the hidden depths of the Soul-life play their part on the surface. The most important of all the forces ruling below in these depths one which governs every Soul and occasionally emerges in, its original form, is—longing. We also know the names by which this force is known to the outer world, but they are only metaphoric and indefinite, for they express very complicated connections and thus do not enter a man's consciousness at all.

Take as an example a phenomenon with which we are all well acquainted; perhaps a man who lives in great cities is less affected by it, but he will have seen it in others:—I refer to what is known as ‘home-sickness’. If you investigate into the true nature of home-sickness you will find it differs fundamentally in every one. Sometimes it takes one form and sometimes another. One person may long for the homely stories of the family circle; he does not know that he is longing for home, he only feels an undefined craving, an undefined want. Another longs for his mountain, or for the river on whose banks he used to play, watching the movement of the rippling water. He is seldom aware of what it is that is working within him. All these diverse characteristics we include in the term ‘home-sickness,’ expressing something that may be active in a thousand forms, and would be more accurately defined as a kind of longing. And what is this longing? We have just said that it is a kind of willing, and whenever we investigate this longing, we find that is of this nature. What kind of willing? It is a will towards an inclination which in its immediate form cannot be satisfied; for were it satisfied, the longing would cease. What we described as longing is an unattainable wish.

So must we define the frame of mind of those Beings whose sacrifice was rejected, it was somewhat of this nature. What we may discover in the depths of our Soul-life is a heritage coming to us from those primeval times of which we are now speaking. Just as we have inherited other things from that ancient stage of evolution, so do we inherit all kinds of longings, all kinds of repressed wishes impossible to fulfil. It is in this way we must also conjecture that through the rejection of the sacrifice during the phase of evolution there came into existence beings whom we may designate as: Beings with wishes which are repressed. Now because they were obliged to exercise this repression they were in a very special position. And as we can hardly rise into these conditions by means of thought, we must once again turn to certain conditions in our own Soul, if we wish to feel, to sense the reflection of them.

A being able to sacrifice its own will, passes in a certain sense, into the being of the other. We can feel this even in our human life, we live and move in one for whom we sacrifice ourselves, we feel glad and satisfied when in that person's presence. And as we are now speaking of the sacrifice offered to highest Beings, to more widely-extending, universal Beings, by others who found their greatest bliss in gazing up at them, what remains behind as repressed longings and wishes can never create the same inner disposition of Soul as would have been theirs if they had been allowed to complete their sacrifice. For if they had been able to do this what they offered would have passed over into the other Beings. We might, by way of example suggest, that if the earth and the other planets could have made sacrifice to the Sun—they would be with the Sun. But if they were not allowed to do this, if they had been forced to withhold what they were preparing to offer up, they would then have been driven back into themselves. If we can understand what has just been said in these few words, we observe that at this stage something new enters the universe. It must be clearly understood that it is impossible to express this in any other way than by saying that the Beings who were ready to offer to others all that dwelt within them, were compelled on the rejection of their sacrifice, to draw all this into themselves. Do you not guess what now flashed up—that this was what is called ego-nature which comes out in every form? It is thus that we must look upon what lives on in the Beings as a heritage—which later on was poured into evolution, so to speak. We see egoism flashing up in the weakest form, as longing, but we can also see it slipping into the evolution of the Cosmos. Thus we see how Beings devoted to themselves, to their own Ego-nature, would in a certain respect have been condemned to a one-sided development, to living only in themselves, if something else had not occurred.

Let us picture a Being, permitted to make sacrifice; such a one lives in the other Being, and does so for all time. One not allowed to made sacrifice can only live within itself. It is thereby shut off from what it would have experienced in another, in this case a higher Being. Thus from the outset it is condemned and exiled by evolution to a one-sided existence, were it not that something here enters evolution to redress the balance. This is the arrival on the scene of new Beings who prevent the one-sidedness. Just as on Saturn there were the Spirits of Will, and on ancient Sun Spirits of Wisdom, so, on ancient Moon the Spirits of Movement make their appearance; we must not, however, think of movement in space, but movement rather more like the nature of thought. Every one knows the expression “thought-vibrations” though this only refers to the fluidic movement of our own thought; yet this expression may serve, if we want to acquire a more comprehensive conception of movement, to show us that we think of something more than the mere movement from one place to another, for that is only one of the many forms of movement. If a number of persons devote themselves to a higher Being who is expressive of all that is within them, and who accepts all the sacrifices they offer Him, these people live in that Being as a plurality in unity, and find full satisfaction in so doing. But if their sacrifices are rejected, the plurality is driven back upon itself and is never satisfied. Then came the Spirits of Movement and in a sense they guide the Beings who would have simply been driven back upon themselves and bring them into relation with all other Beings. The Spirits of Movement should not be thought of as merely bringing about changes of place; they are Beings able to bring forth something whereby one Being is constantly brought into new relation with others.

We can form an idea of what was attained in the Cosmos at this stage if we once more reflect upon a corresponding disposition of the Soul. Who does not know the longing when a condition of Soul approaches in which a man is at a standstill, when he can experience no change! Who does not know the torment of it, how it drives a man into a state of mind which becomes unendurable, and which in a merely superficial person takes the form of boredom? But between the boredom which is as a rule only ascribed to a shallow-pated person, and that which is an attribute of noble character in whom dwells what is generated by their own natures as longing and cannot be satisfied in this world, there are many intermediate states—what better method is there of quieting longing than by change? This is proved by the fact that persons who suffer from it incessantly seek to form relationships to new Beings. The torment of longing can often be overcome by changing the conditions to ever new beings.

Thus we see that while the earth was passing through her Moon-phase, the Spirits of Movement brought into the lives of those Beings who were filled with longing and would otherwise have been desolate--for boredom is also a kind of desolation—the change which is brought about by movement, a constantly renewed relation to ever new Beings and new conditions. Movement in space, movement from one place to another, is but one form of the more comprehensive movement which has just been mentioned. When in the morning we have a definite train of thought in our Soul, not necessarily to be kept to ourselves, but passed on to others—a ‘movement’ takes place. We can then overcome one-sidedness of longing by means of variety, by change and the movement of the things experienced. In outer space there is only one particular form of change. In this connection let us imagine a planet in relation to a Sun: if it always occupied the same position to the Sun, if it never moved, it would be subject to that one-sidedness, which can only accrue when it presents invariably the same aspect to the Sun. Then the Spirits of Movement turn the planet round so as to bring about a change in its conditions. Change of place is but one of the many forms of change. And the Spirits of Movement, by bringing change of place into the Cosmos, merely introduce one specific part of Movement in general.

But as the Spirits of Movement introduce change and movement into the Universe as we know it up to the present, something else must follow. We know that in the whole Cosmic multiplicity in the upward course of development during this evolution, besides the Spirits of Movement, of Personality, of Wisdom, and of Will—there is also what we have called ‘Bestowing Virtue,’ which is radiated forth as Wisdom, and Spirituality behind air and gas. This then combines with the Will now transformed into longing, and within these Beings it becomes what is known to man hardly yet as ‘thoughts’ but as ideas. We can best picture these to ourselves by the ideas that a man has when he dreams; the fluidic ideas that succeeding one another in a dream may evoke a conception of what takes place in a Being in whom the volition of longing dwells, and is guided by the Spirits of Movement into relation with other Beings. But when this is thus guided into a relation with the other Beings, it cannot completely surrender itself—the egotism within it prevents that; but it is able to take in the transitory idea of the other Beings, which lives in him like a dream-picture. This is the origin of what we call the ‘arising’ of pictures of the other world. At this phase of development we see the arising of the picture-consciousness. And as we human Beings our selves passed through this phase of evolution without then possessing our present earthly ego-consciousness, we must think of ourselves at that time without that which we can now acquire through our ego, but living and weaving in the universe, while within us lived something which we can compare with the present feelings of longing. We can in a certain fashion realise, if we do not regard these conditions of suffering as earthly that they could not possibly be so, by reflecting on the following:—Sorrow and suffering—naturally in its Soul-form, came at that time into our being and that of other entities connected with our evolution; through the activity of the Spirits of Movement the inner nature which would otherwise have been barren and empty, suffering the tortures of longing, was filled with the balm which flowed into these Beings in the form of picture-consciousness, otherwise these Beings would have been empty-Souled, empty of everything not to be called longing. But the balm of the pictures was slowly poured in, filling the desolate void with variety, and thus the Beings were led away from exile and condemnation. If we take what is here said seriously, it gives us both the spiritual basis of what developed during the Moon-phase of our Earth, and of what we now have in the deep subsoil of our consciousness, for that has stretched over to the earth-stage of our nature. And this is so imbedded in the subsoil of our Soul, that, as the disturbance beneath the surface of the sea drives up the waves, it can influence us, without our being aware of the cause of what enters our consciousness. Beneath the surface of our ordinary ego-consciousness we have a Soul-life which can play its part. And when it does so, what does the Soul-life say? If we bear in mind the Cosmic subject of this subconscious Soul-life, we can say that what we can thus trace back to the subsoil of the soul is a bursting-forth within that which we have acquired through our earth-phase, of what has moved across from the Moon-phase of evolution. If we clearly grasp what it is that has come into our nature here on the Earth, we really have an explanation of what has been spiritually brought over from the ancient Moon into our Earth-existence.

If we just grasp the fact that it was necessary, as has just been described, that pictures should continually arise to assuage the feeling of desolation, we obtain a conception which is of very great importance and weight: that of the longing human Soul, in all its yearning emptiness. By the constant succession of pictures, arising one after the other, the yearning is satisfied and brought into harmony; but should a picture remain any length of time the old longing begins to glimmer faintly afresh in the background—and the Spirits of Movement call up new pictures. When these have been there for some little time the longing pushes up again, demanding fresh ones. Now with respect to the Soul-life such as this the momentous sentence must be pronounced: that if this longing can only be satisfied by a continual flow of pictures following one after the other, there would be no end to the infinite flow. The only thing that can supervene on this is what must come if the endless flow of pictures is to be replaced by something else, something that is able to redeem it by something other than mere pictures—namely, by realities! In other words, the planetary embodiment of our earth through which we have passed, when pictures were brought to us by the activity of the Spirits of Movement, must be replaced by that planetary phase of the earth's embodiment which we can the phase of redemption. We shall see presently that the earth is to be called the ‘Planet of Redemption,’ just as her last embodiment—that of the Moon-existence may be called the ‘Planet of Longing’; longing capable of satisfaction yet flowing on endlessly. And while we live in the consciousness belonging to this earth, in which as we know redemption comes to us through the Mystery of Golgotha—there arises continually within us from the subsoil of our soul, a never-ceasing craving for redemption. It is as though, on the surface, we had the waves of our ordinary consciousness—while below, in the depths of the ocean of the Soul-life, is longing, which is the ocean-bed of our Soul. This strives continually to ascend to one who accomplishes the sacrifice, the Universal Being, Who is able to satisfy the longing once and for all time—not in a never-ceasing succession of pictures.

The earth-man already feels moods such as these, and they are the very best he is capable of feeling. The citizens of earth of our time who feel this longing—which belongs to this particular age of ours—are those who enter our own movement of Spiritual Science. In external life people have become acquainted with all that can satisfy the ordinary superficial individual consciousness; but from the subconsciousness pushes up that which in its individuality can never be satisfied, but yearns for the central basis of life. This basis can only be provided by a universal science which occupies itself with the totality rather than with the individuality. That which rises from the subconsciousness must in the mind of to-day be brought into touch with application to the study of universal Being living in the world; otherwise that which ascends from the subsoil of the Soul will be further longing for something which can never be attained. In this sense anthroposophy is a response to those longings which dwell in the depths of the Soul. As everything that happens in the world has had a prelude, we need not wonder at a man who at the present day longs through spiritual science for satisfaction for the powers of his Soul, above all, when the unconscious Soul-forces akin to longings, burn up ardently as longing. Suppose that he, through living in an earlier age, in which this spiritual wisdom had not been given, had been unable to have it, and had come to long for it, to have a persistent longing for it, unable to grasp the meaning of life, just because he was an eminently great Soul. If only something could have flowed into his Soul, drowning, silencing the longing for ideas while he yearned for an end to this search for ideas—the greater the yearning, the more intense the search. And is it not like a voice expressing itself to us, the utterance of a spirit living at a time when it could not yet have the Spiritual wisdom which, like balsam, is shed forth into the longing Soul, when we hear Heinrich Von Kleist writing to a friend. In the following words we seem to hear him say:—‘Who would desire to be happy in this world! I could almost say, shame on you if you wished to be. Would it not be short-sighted, noble man, to strive for anything here below, where all ends in death! We meet here, three Springs long we love, and then we shun each other for an eternity. And what is worth striving for, if love be not? Oh! There must be something more than love, happiness, fame, and so on; something of which our Souls do not even dream. It can be no evil spirit at the head of the world, He is only not understood. Do not we smile too when children cry? Just think of the endless continuity! Myriads of ages, each having its own life, and to each a manifested existence like this world of ours! What is the name of the little star we see in the sky when the night is clear and we gaze at Sirius? All this immense firmament but a speck of dust compared with infinity! Tell me, is this nothing but a dream? At night when we are reposing between our linen sheets, we have a wider aspect, richer in intuition than thoughts can grasp or words describe. Come, let us do something good, and die in doing it! One of the million deaths we have already died, and shall yet die. It is as though we pass from one room to another. Lo! The world to me appears enclosed in a nest of boxes, the smallest exactly like the biggest!’—(From a letter written by Heinrich Von Kleist, in 1806.)

The longing expressed in these words was felt by a man who could not then find anything able to satisfy it—such as a modern thinker may find if he studies Anthroposophy in the right way. The writer of these words took his own life 100 years ago, shooting first his friend, Henriette Vogel and then himself, and now he rests on the banks of Lake Vann in that lonely grave which for a century has closed over his remains.

In speaking of the frame of mind which best illustrates what we are endeavouring to grasp, when we speak of the combined action of the sacrifice of will held back in longing, of the satisfaction of this longing, which could only come through the Spirits of Motion, and the urge towards its ultimate satisfaction, only to come on the planet of redemption—a singular Karmic link has caused us to speak here, in accordance with our ordinary programme, on the very day which reminds us of how a great mind expressed this undefined longing in the grandest of words, and finally poured it forth in the most tragic act in which longing could be embodied. How can we fail to recognise that this man's spirit in its entirety as he stands before us, is an actual living embodiment of that which dwells in the depths of the Soul, which we must trace back to something other than the life of earth if we wish to recognise it? Has not Heinrich Von Kleist described in the most significant manner what may live within a man (a description of which you will find at the very beginning of The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Mankind), as something transcending him and driving him, and which he will only understand later on if he does not snap the threads of his life before! Think of his ‘Penthesilea’; how much more there is in her than she can span with her earthly consciousness! We should not be able to describe her at all, did we not take for granted that her Soul was immeasurably further advanced than the narrow little soul (although it was a great one) which she could span with her earthly consciousness. Hence a situation must arise which artistically introduces the whole process of the Drama. Indeed, it was necessary to prevent the whole transaction—which Kleist introduces with Achilles—from being grasped with the higher consciousness; otherwise the whole tragedy could not be perceived. Hence Achilles is called ‘her’ Achilles. What lies in the higher consciousness must be plunged into the non-conscious. Again, what part does this subconsciousness play in Katchen Von Heilbronn, especially in the remarkable relation between her and Wetter Von Strahl, which plays no part in the higher consciousness, but in the deeper strata of the Soul where dwells the forces of which man knows nothing, which pass from one to another. When we have this before us we can trace the spiritual nature of the world's forces of gravity and attraction. For instance, in the scene where Katchen stands before her admirers, do we not feel what lives in the subconsciousness, and how it is related to what is outside in the world which has been dryly called the forces of our planet's attractions? Yet only 100 years ago a truly penetrating and striving mind was not able to find his way into that subconsciousness. But it must be done to-day. And the tragedy of a Prince of Homburg strikes us in a very different way now. I should like to know how an abstract thinker, one who accounts for everything by reason alone, could account for a figure such as the Prince of Homburg, who carried out all his great deeds in a kind of dream-state, even those leading finally to victory. Kleist indicates very clearly that he could not possibly gain the victory by means of his higher consciousness, for as far as that was concerned he was not a particularly great man, for he whines and whimpers over everything he has to do. Only when by a special effort of the will, he brings up what dwells in the depths of his Soul, does he play the man.

What still belongs to a man as heritage of the old Moon consciousness cannot be brought to the surface by abstract science, but by that science which has many sides, and can lay hold in a delicate and subtle way of spiritual contours: that is, Spiritual Science. The greatest unites itself with the mediocre and the ordinary.

Thus we see that Anthroposophy shows that the conditions we are experiencing in our Souls to-day are connected with the Cosmos, with the Universe. We see also, however, how that which we experience in the Soul to-day can alone provide us with an understanding of the spiritual foundation of things. We see, too, that our era had to come to satisfy what was yearned for in the age preceding our own, when men longed for what cannot be given until our age. We feel a kind of veneration for such men, who could not find their bearings as regards what they longed for in their hearts, and what the world could not give them. When we recollect that all human life is linked together, and that the man of to-day can devote his life to those spiritual movements which—as their destiny shows bygone men have so long desired—we cannot but feel a veneration for them. So, on the centenary of the tragic death of one who was consumed by that longing, we may in a sense point to Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science as being the redemption of mankind from that longing. This day may serve to remind us how tragically and stormily that which Anthroposophy is able to give us, has been desired and longed for. This is a thought that we may well take hold of, which perhaps is also theosophical, on the centenary of the death of one of the greatest German poets.

We have now considered the changes in the physical body and etheric body of the student, in so far as they are experienced by him in the course of his endeavour towards development. If we wished to express the fundamental character of these changes we might say that in the course of his development he is more and more conscious inwardly of his physical body and etheric body. With regard to his physical body, we have emphasised that he feels the several organs becoming more and more independent the more he progresses—they become to a certain extent more independent of each other. We might say that the physical body as such feels as though it had more life within; and as to the etheric body, we emphasised that not only does it feel more alive, but grows altogether more sensitive, and permeated by a sort of consciousness; for it begins to sympathise with the course of outer events in a delicate manner. We pointed out that in his esoteric development the student grows more sensitive to the course of spring, summer, autumn and winter; this becomes very pronounced, so that the successive facts of time are more distinct from one another than is the case in the ordinary course of life; they become separate and differentiate themselves. Thus we may say that the student begins to experience sympathetically the processes in the external ether. This is the first beginning of his really becoming free from his corporeality. He becomes more and more independent of his own corporeality as he really begins to experience what goes on around him. He will experience spring, summer, autumn and winter within himself, as it were; but through this living in the outer he ceases to live in his own corporeality.

Now, in the last lecture we laid stress on the close association of all this with a gradual sensitiveness to one's own corporeality. As we become more independent of it, we gradually perceive it to be a sort of calamity; we notice that all that relates merely to our own corporeality becomes a sort of reproach. A very great deal is attained towards a higher development when we begin, in conceptions and feelings such as were described in the last lecture, to be no longer quite at one with our own human personality; and when we experience this to a greater and greater extent, a very great deal has been gained towards the higher spiritual experience.

In this lecture I will endeavour, by making a leap as it were, to strengthen the further progress of our observations—which we so far have followed more from within—by first trying to describe the standpoint of the human being, when with his astral body and his ego he has already become independent of his physical body and etheric body. We will speak of the intermediate conditions in the following lectures, but in order to make this, to a certain extent, easier to understand, I will put forward the hypothesis that ‘while in the middle of sleep’ we experience the moment when we become clairvoyant outside our body, and can look back at our physical and etheric bodies.

So far we have only taken a few steps towards this condition, we have reached the point of coming forth from ourselves to a certain extent, and have thus learned to experience such matters as the seasons of the year and the times of the day; we will now consider the conditions which would come about if, on the one hand, we had the physical body and etheric body, and on the other, we had lifted out the ego and astral body as occurs in sleep; and we will suppose that we could look back at the physical body and etheric body we had left behind. What we look back at then would appear to us in a very different light from that of conscious, ordinary life. For ordinary life, by means of our everyday observation, or by means of external physical science, we look at our material body, and see in it, with a certain justice in a physical sense, the crown of the earthly creation. We so divide this earthly creation that we speak of a mineral kingdom, a vegetable kingdom, an animal kingdom, and the human kingdom; and we see all the sundry qualities which have been spread over the various groups of animals, united, as it were, in this physical crown of creation, the human body. We shall see that external physical observation is, in a way, justified in this view, and the present lecture should not give rise to the thought that what may be seen in looking back at the physical and etheric body, if we suddenly became clairvoyant during sleep, can enable us to come to any final conclusion as to the physical body. It is only a moment of clairvoyant looking back, as it were, firmly retained. Such a moment may give rise to the following: We look back and first of all we see, so to say, our etheric body, which appears something like an articulated cloudy structure, a misty form showing various currents which we will describe more clearly later—a marvellously constructed form, which is in continual motion, never at rest or still in any part; and then we look at what is embedded in this etheric body, that is, our physical body. Now, remember we have been told that our own thinking must be laid aside. So we do not form our own thoughts about what we see there. First and foremost it is a fundamental requirement for this clairvoyant vision that we should let ourselves be entirely inspired, as it were, by the cosmic thoughts which flow into us. So we contemplate what we see there; but this works above all upon our feeling; it affects our feeling and will. As regards our thought, when we have really attained the detachment referred to, we seem to have lost our own thinking. Thus, with the feeling which we still retain, we look back upon what is there embedded in the misty structure, in the ever-moving misty structure of our etheric body, that is: our physical instrument. We first have a general impression. This general impression is such that what we thus see imbues us with infinite sadness, with terrible sadness. And it must be said, my dear friends, that this feeling of the soul, this dreadful sadness, does not depend at all upon the nature of the particular human being experiencing it, for it is quite universal. There is no man when he looks back in the manner described at his physical body, as it lies embedded in his etheric body, who would not be filled through and through with an immeasurable sadness.

All that I am now describing is expressed primarily in the feelings, not in thought. Immeasurable sadness, a feeling of great melancholy, overcomes when we look up to the cosmic thoughts which flow into us. These thoughts, which are not our own, but creative thoughts, weaving and working through the world, throwing light on this structure of our physical body, by the way in which they illuminate it, tell us what it really is that we see there. They convey to us that all we see is the last decadent product of an absolute splendour long passed by. Through what these thoughts say to us we receive the impression that what we see there as our physical body is something which was once mighty and glorious, now dried and shrivelled; a former glory once widely displayed, appears to us as a tiny shrivelled structure. That which is embedded in our etheric body appears as a last remembrance of long-past glory hardened into the physical. We look at the various physical organs which now belong to our digestive system, to the circulation of our blood and our breathing apparatus; we look at them from outside, seeing them spiritually—and behold, they so appear to us that we say: All we have before us in the physical body is the shrivelled, dried-up product of once-existing living beings, living beings with a glorious environment, now shrivelled, and withered. And the life possessed by the lungs, the heart, the liver and other organs to-day is only the last decadent life of a primevally powerful inner life. In this clairvoyant vision the organs gradually assume the form they once possessed. Just as a thought which we can only distantly remember in quite a hazy manner, grows into what it once was, if we take the trouble to draw it forth from memory, so does that which we bear within us, as the lungs, for example, and it appears as the lost remembrance of a primeval splendour and glory. We feel that it goes back again like a present thought to a distant memory, which then develops into what it formerly was. In our vision the lungs develop into the imaginative picture of that which was once known to the occultist as a recognised symbol, which he still knows to-day, as a symbol of the human form—into the imaginative picture of the Eagle. And we have the feeling that these lungs were at one time a being, not to be compared with the Eagle of the present-day animal world; for this, too, represents, though from another side, the decadent products of a formerly mighty being, which occultism designates as the Eagle. The occultist comes, as though in cosmic remembrance, to the Eagle which was at one time there. If we look back upon the heart, we feel in a similar manner that this, too, appears as a dried-up and shrivelled product, something reminding us of a long-past glory; and we feel as though that led back into primeval times, a far-distant past, to a being which the occultist designates the Lion. Then the organs of the lower part of the body appear as a memory of what in occultism is called the Bull, an ancient primeval being once alive in glorious surroundings, now dried up and shrivelled in the course of evolution, and appearing to-day as the organs of the lower part of the body.

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Thus might I sketch what once existed, and what we still see when we observe these bodily organs, clairvoyantly, from outside. They are only roughly sketched; the Bull below, the Lion in the middle, and the Eagle above. Thus do we look upon something which once lived as three glorious, living beings in a primeval past. I will now draw these somewhat smaller, and only sketch them in diagram. (Diagram 2.)

Round these principal organs we can also see the others as they formerly were in a primeval past; and what appears in this way to clairvoyant vision may be compared to almost all the forms in the earthly animal kingdom.

If we once more turn our gaze back to the physical body embedded in the etheric body, looking at what anatomy calls the nervous-system, this also appears as a shrivelled, dried-up product. The nervous system, which at the present time is embedded in the physical body, appears to the retrospective clairvoyant vision as a number of wonderful plant-like beings, embedded in the etheric body, beings intertwined in various ways in and through the other beings known by animal names, so that we see plant-like entities passing through them in every direction. The whole of the nervous system resolves itself into a number of primeval plant-like entities, so that we actually see something like a mighty, outspreading plant, within which dwell the animal beings of which we have just spoken.

As already said, I am relating what is seen by the clairvoyant vision, which has been described as being exercised in a condition similar to sleep; that is, when we look from outside at the physical body embedded in the etheric body. When the student sees all this before him, he then says (that is, he is able to say this because, to a certain extent, the cosmic thoughts give this information, and interpret what he has before him), he says to himself: ‘All that I, as a human being, have within me is the withered and shrivelled remnant of what now appears before me clairvoyantly as though in cosmic remembrance.’ Now, it is important that the pupil should exercise continual self-control, and continual self-knowledge, while developing to this point. Self-knowledge enables him at this point to become aware of and to feel the following: ‘I am outside my physical body. That which appeared to me as my physical body embedded in the etheric body has transformed itself in my vision into what has just been described. What I behold does not now exist; it had to exist in a primeval past in order that my physical body which is there below might be able to come into being. In order that this shrivelled product might be formed, what I now see before me with clairvoyant vision had to exist at one time.’ The physical body makes this sad impression because we recognise in it the last withered product of the former glory, now appearing to the clairvoyant vision. I pray you, do not misunderstand what I am about to say; I am describing facts, and you will soon see how these facts, unravelled, constantly honour the wise guides of the world; we have only to learn the facts, and in the following lectures I will make clear what is in question. If introspection has been carried to this degree of development, the student then becomes aware that in the astral body in which he now is, outside the physical body and etheric body, he cannot do otherwise than recognise himself as an absolute egotist, as a being who knows nothing but himself, and he learns to recognise that there is reason enough to be sad. For the impulse now arises to know why this has come about, why all this has shrivelled up. And, now the question comes: who is to blame for this shrivelling together? Who has made the form which I see clairvoyantly before me, this wonderful plant-being with the animal-like, perfect structure within it—who has made this into the present shrivelled product, the physical body? There now sounds forth from oneself as an inner inspiration: ‘You yourself have brought it to this, you yourself! And the fact that you have become what you now are, you owe to the circumstance that you have possessed the power to impregnate all this glory with your own being. Your being has trickled like poison into this ancient glory, and it has reduced this ancient glory to what it now is!’ Thus it is we ourselves who brought this about, and the possibility of being a self such as we are, we owe to the circumstance that we ourselves sowed the seed of death in all this glory, and so impregnated it that it shrivelled up. Just as you may have a mighty tree growing in its glory and nourishing the various animals living upon it, and you pierce it so that from a certain spot it dries up, withers and shrivels to insignificance and with it die all the beings nourished by it, so the shrivelling of the human physical body is clairvoyantly unfolded before you. This is the awful impression produced by this moment of clairvoyant vision.

More and more the student is impelled in his astral body to understand how this came about. At this moment there actually appears to him among the archetypal animal beings, which he here perceives ... Lucifer at the back of the garden, as it were, twisting in and out. I have drawn it in diagram—Lucifer in a wondrously beautiful form, actually—Lucifer! Here, for the first time, through clairvoyant observation, he makes the acquaintance of Lucifer, and now he knows that this is what happened to the forces, now shrivelled in the physical human body, at the time when Lucifer appeared within this whole being which is now presented to him clairvoyantly.

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And the student now knows that he was present in that far-distant past when all this, that appears to his clairvoyant vision, was a reality; he knows that he then vividly felt himself to belong to all this; he was within it, this was his kingdom, and within this kingdom Lucifer drew him to himself. Man united himself with Lucifer, with the result that the beings of the higher Hierarchies pressed from the back in currents of force which might be sketched in these lines, and pressed out the human being who united himself with Lucifer in these parts towards the front, as is visible to clairvoyant observation. In this part openings were formed; and, in the shrinking up, these openings have developed into our present sense organs. Through these openings the human being who previously lived in this part was pressed out, because he united himself with Lucifer. And because he was pushed out, he now lives in the world outside this structure, and this structure shrank together and is now his physical body.

Now imagine—in order to have a diagrammatical idea—the physical body of to-day growing larger and larger, all the organs becoming larger, all the organs of digestion, circulation and breathing developing as though into mighty, animal-like, living beings in growing larger, and the nervous system becoming plant-like beings, and the human being ruling in this mighty structure. On the one hand now appears Lucifer, and because the human being is attracted by Lucifer, beings belonging to the higher Hierarchies press from the back and press the human being out. By reason of the pushing out of the human being, the whole structure gradually shrinks into the small compass of the human body of to-day, and the human being, with his consciousness, with his whole day consciousness, is outside his body. The result is that man no longer knows, as he did before, what is within his body, only that which is outside. He has been chased out through the openings which are now the senses; to-day he is in the sense-world, and that in which he lived in the primeval past has shrivelled up and forms his inward parts.

I have now given you an idea of how, through clairvoyant observation, the student arrives at what is called Paradise. In fact, this was the conception of Paradise to which the students in the mystery-schools were led. ‘Where was Paradise?’ people ask. Paradise formed part of a world which is no longer present in the sense-world to-day. Paradise has shrunk together, yet multiplied; for Paradise has left behind the physical inward parts of the human body as its last relics; the human being himself has, however, been driven out of it, he no longer lives in these inward parts. He can only learn to know them by means of clairvoyance, as we have seen. A man knows of the objects outside him, he knows of what is before his eyes and about his ears. Previously he knew of what was within; but this within was grandiose, it was Paradise. Try now to form an idea of how man, through having become a being who spreads his consciousness over the external sense-world, actually compressed the world in which he dwelt before he entered the sense-world, into the withered or shrivelled-up product of the interior parts of his body.

Then the beings who first drove man out and then continued to work, made use of Ahriman and other spirits, whose activity they turned into good, forming the limbs, hands, feet, and countenance; these they formed, and thus made it possible for man to use this shrivelled-up Paradise by means of his hands and feet and that which passes through his sense organs into the inner parts of his body.

Thus before our spiritual vision we have seen, enlarged to gigantic proportions, the physical human body, which in its present condition represents the shrivelled-up product of the former Paradise. When we consider this, we may obtain some slight idea of how clairvoyance really progresses. We have seen how the student at first becomes more and more sensitive with respect to his physical body and etheric body. And now, by making a sort of leap forward over an abyss, we have seen what sort of impressions come when from outside the pupil looks back at his physical body embedded in the etheric body. I have said that the etheric body is itself in continual motion; when we look back into it from outside we see nothing really stationary in it, nothing is at rest, everything is in continual motion. Something is continually taking place; and the more we learn through spiritual training to observe what happens, the more does the tableau of these events enlarge, as it were, and everything becomes full of meaning. Just as, in a certain way, the physical body becomes the true Garden of Paradise, so also what goes on in the etheric body becomes significant processes.

We might now make the attempt to describe in a general way what facts and processes are to be observed when we look at the etheric body, and turn our attention away from the physical body. Now, we could really only see the physical body clairvoyantly in the way I have described, if we were suddenly awakened clairvoyantly from the very deepest sleep. Then would the physical body expand into the structure described. But the etheric body can, in a certain sense, be more easily seen; it may indeed be seen if we try in a certain way to seize the moment of going to sleep, so that we do not pass over at once into unconsciousness, but remain conscious for a time after having, with the astral body and the ego, left the physical body and etheric body. We then look principally at the etheric body, and see the moving realities in the etheric body in the form of very vivid dreams. We then see ourselves divided, as by a deep abyss, from what goes on in the etheric body; but we now see everything not as happening in space, but as events in time. When we are outside our etheric body we have to perceive these experiences of movement in the etheric body, as though we had slipped back into it again with our consciousness.

Thus we must feel as though we were separated from our etheric body by an abyss filled, as it were, with ether, with universal cosmic ether; as if we stood on the further shore of the etheric body, and there various processes took place. And as, in this case, all these processes take place in time, we feel like a wanderer returning to our own etheric body. In reality, we are going further and further from it, but in our clairvoyant consciousness we approach it. And in approaching this etheric body of ours we feel ourselves approaching something which thrusts us back. We come, as it were, to a spiritual rock. Then it is as if we were allowed to pass into something. At first we are outside, and then it is as though we were let into something, it seems as though we had first been outside and now were inside, but not in the manner in which we had been within it during the day. Everything depends upon being outside with the astral body and ego, and only looking in; that is to say, we are only inside the etheric body with our consciousness. And now we can see what is going on within it.

In a certain way, everything changes just as the physical body is transferred into Paradise; but that which goes on within the etheric body is in a still more interior connection with the everyday processes in man. Let us consider what sleep really signifies, what this ‘being outside the physical body and etheric body’ means. For we have assumed that the clairvoyant power is exercised at this moment through the person's suddenly becoming clairvoyant during sleep, or remaining consciously clairvoyant on falling asleep. Let us consider what sleep is! That which permeates the physical and etheric body with consciousness is now outside; within the body only vegetative processes take place—everything is done to restore the forces used up during the day. And we perceive all this, we perceive how the forces of the physical, particularly those of the brain, are renewed; but we do not see the brain as the anatomist does—we see how the man of the physical world, of whom we make use for our consciousness during our waking condition, we see how this man, who has indeed been forsaken by us, but who clearly shows that he is our instrument, lies enchanted in a castle, as it were. Symbolised by the brain lying within the skull, our human nature on the earth appears as a being under enchantment living in a castle. We see this humanity of ours as a being imprisoned and enclosed by stone walls. The symbol of this, the shrunken symbol, as it were, is our skull. We see it externally as a little skull. But when we look at the etheric forces which lie at its foundation, the earthly man actually appears to us as if he were within the skull, and imprisoned in this castle. And then from the other parts of the organism there stream up the forces which support this human being who is really within the skull as if in a mighty castle; the forces stream upwards; first the force which comes from that in the organism which is the outspread instrument of the human astral body; there streams up all that makes the human being ardent and mighty through his nerve fibres. All this streams together in the earthly brain-man; this appears as a mighty sword which the human being has forged on the earth.

Then stream up the forces of the blood. These, as we gradually learn to feel and recognise, appear as that which really wounds the brain-man lying in the enchanted castle of the skull. The forces which in the etheric body stream up to the earthly human being lying in the enchanted castle of the brain are like the bloody lance. And then we arrive at a unique perception. This is, that we are able to observe all that may stream up to the noblest parts of the brain. Before this we have not the slightest idea of it.

Thus you see that from a different standpoint I have come back again to what I have already touched upon in these lectures. No matter how much animal food a human being may eat, it is all useless for a certain part of his brain, it is merely ballast. Other organs may be nourished thereby, but in the brain there is something from which the etheric body at once thrusts back all that comes from the animal kingdom. Indeed, the etheric body even thrusts back from one part of the brain, from one small, vital part of the brain, all that comes from the plant kingdom, and allows only the mineral extract to be of value; there this mineral extract is brought into contact with the purest of what comes through the sense organs. The purest of light, the purest sound, the purest heat, here come in touch with the purest products of the mineral kingdom; for the most vital part of the human brain is nourished by the union of the purest sense impressions with the purest mineral products. The etheric body separates from this noblest part of the human brain all that comes from the plant or animal kingdoms. But all the things that the human being takes in as his food pass up also; for the brain also has less noble parts. These are nourished by all that streams up, by which the whole organism is nourished. Only the noblest part of the brain must be nourished by the most beautiful union of the sense perceptions and the highest part of the purified mineral extract. We now learn to recognise a wonderful cosmic connection between man and the whole of the rest of the cosmos. We can now see, as it were, a part of man wherein we perceive how human thought, by means of the instrument of the nervous system which serves the astral body, prepares the sword for human strength on earth; therein we become acquainted with all that is mingled with the blood, and to a certain extent contributes to the killing of the most precious thing in the brain. And this noblest thing in the brain is ever sustained by the union of the most delicate sense perceptions with the purest products of the mineral kingdom. And then, during sleep, when thought is not making use of the brain, there stream to the brain the products which have been formed lower down in the inner parts from the plant and animal kingdoms.

Thus, when we penetrate into our own etheric body, it is as though we had reached an abyss, and across it we could see what goes on in the etheric body; and all this appears in mighty pictures representing the processes of the spiritual man during sleep. The ego and astral body—the spiritual man—descends into the castle, which is formed of that which is only seen symbolically in the skull. Here the human being lies sleeping, wounded by the blood, the man of whom we see that thoughts are his strength—that which must be capable of nourishment by all that comes from the kingdom of nature, that which in its purest parts must be served by the finest, this we have described. All this symbolically represented resulted in the Legend of the Holy Grail. And the Legend of the Holy Grail tells us of that miraculous food which is prepared from the finest activities of the sense impressions and the finest activities of the mineral extracts, whose purpose it is to nourish the noblest part of man all through the life he spends on earth; for it would be killed by anything else. This heavenly food is what is contained in the Holy Grail. And that which otherwise takes place, that which presses up from the other kingdoms, we find clearly represented if we go back to the original Grail legend, where a meal is described at which a hind is first set on the table. The penetrating up into the brain where for ever floats the Grail, that is, the vessel for the purest food of the human hero who lies in the castle of the brain, and who is killed by everything else—all this is represented. The best presentation of this is not that by Wolfram, but it is best represented in an external exoteric way (because almost everyone can recognise, when his attention has been drawn to it, that this legend of the Grail is an occult experience which every human being can experience anew every night), it is best represented, in spite of the profanation which has even crept in there, by Chrestien de Troyes. He put what he wished to say in an exoteric form, but this exoteric form hinted at what he wished to convey, for he refers to his teacher and friend who lived in Alsace, who gave him the esoteric knowledge which he put into exoteric form. This took place in an age when it was necessary to do this, on account of the transition indicated in my book, ‘The Spiritual Guidance of Humanity.’ The Grail legend was made exoteric in 1180, shortly before the transition.

In the outer world these things still appear fantastic ideas, because the only reality recognised by the man of the present day is that which is outside him. Man recognises himself as the crown of creation in a much higher sense, when he sees his physical body in its original, sublime grandeur; and when he sees his etheric body working inwardly upon his physical body to reawaken into life that which has been injured and killed by the sting which I have spoken of as coming from the blood. The etheric body works upon that in order at once, so far as is possible to reawaken it to life; it maintains it throughout its period of human life, although, when born, it is already doomed to death. This the etheric body does by casting out of a small portion of the human organisation all that comes from the animal and vegetable kingdoms, keeping only the purest mineral extract, and bringing that in contact with the purest impressions from the external world of the senses. If this is really felt deeply enough, it enables us to see this noblest part in the human organism as the multiplied Holy Grail. I wished to-day to show by these two indications how typical imaginations appear, and how, to the true clairvoyance, the vision of the physical body gradually passes over into imaginations. And these two, the Paradise-Imagination and the Grail-Imagination, belong to the most sublime imaginations it is possible to experience—at least in this Earth-period.

After a longer break, we have come together again in this, our Berlin working group, and we want to begin what we can consider this winter to be a kind of continuation of our spiritual scientific work, as we have been doing it for years. For Berlin, there was a longer break; but this time the break was not only filled with the usual performances and the lecture cycle in Munich, but also with the laying of the foundation stone of our building in Dornach and with the manifold work associated with the beginning of this building of ours. And so, on this evening, when we are meeting here in this room for the first time in a long while, I would like to draw your attention first of all to what is expressed for us in this Dornach building. It is to be hoped that this building, which is intended to be an outward symbol of our anthroposophical view of the world, can also form a unifying symbol for all those hearts and souls that feel inwardly connected to spiritual scientific striving, as we cultivate it with this anthroposophical worldview.

Basically — as you will have gathered from various comments made over the past few years, which have also been made here — everything in the spiritual life of the present day points to the fact that humanity today unconsciously thirsts for what a true spiritual world view should provide. And not only those souls who today express the need for such a worldview in a positive way strive for such a worldview, but also numerous people who know nothing of such a worldview. Yes, even those who know nothing of it, perhaps even still oppose it, unconsciously strive for it – one might say out of the needs of their hearts, which ideas that are perhaps even expressed in opposing concepts and ideas. They strive, without knowing it themselves, for what is to be given with our world view.

So it was truly a very special feeling when we, together with the few of our anthroposophical friends who were close to the location and able to be present because everything had to be done quickly due to the circumstances, laid the foundation stone of this building in Dornach. It was an uplifting feeling to feel that we were, as it were, standing at the beginning of the construction, which, so to speak, is to form our provisional external symbol for our common striving.

When we stood up there on the hill on which our building is to be erected – and that was at our opening ceremony – and looked out over the surrounding mountains and plains of the country and to much further expanses, one was reminded of the cries of humanity in a further world environment, cries for spiritual truths, for the proclamation of a spiritual world view that can be given within our spiritual current. And one had to think about how even more than what has been expressed or felt, many other symptoms in our time announce that it is a spiritual necessity for such a spiritual world view to be truly fruitfully implanted in the soul life of humanity. So that was the main feeling that inspired us when we laid the stone over which our building is to rise into the earth. And this structure, it should also express in its forms what we want; so that those who will look at the structure from the outside or from the inside in the future, when it is finished, can perceive its forms as a kind of writing in which is expressed what we want to see realized in the world.

When one reflects on and tries to understand such a statement, it is indeed very helpful to bear in mind how karma works, not only in the life of the individual human being but also in the evolution of humanity as a whole. In the life of the individual human being, there is what might be called the small karma; in the evolution of the earth and of humanity as a whole, there is the great karma. And this is the great uplifting thought that one may feel: precisely because something like this is happening on spiritual ground, one is in a certain way – and all anthroposophical aspirants who are involved in the matter are – the instrument, if only a small one, of the Spirit, which works through world karma and creates its deeds. This feeling of being connected to the spirit of world karma is the significant and great feeling, the feeling in which everything that we can cultivate in anthroposophical contemplation should unite again and again. This feeling is what can give the soul rest when it needs rest, what can give the soul harmony when it needs harmony, but what can also give it strength, capacity to act, stamina and energy when it needs strength, capacity to act, stamina and energy.

When the spiritual concepts of the world flow into our soul in their truth, they become something like an inner pulsating life in us, which is transformed into strength that we can feel and perceive. It is active in us, both in the highest realm, to which we can lift our thoughts to, as well as in the smallest things in our daily lives, to which our work forces us; they become something we can always turn to when we need a source of strength, something we can always look to when we need consolation in life. And true morality, true ethical power will only sprout for humanity from this directing of the soul's gaze to true spirituality, to genuine spiritual life.

For in another way we are currently standing in the world karma than humanity stood in the world karma at the time when the event took place that we often refer to as the center, the focus of human development on earth: the Mystery of Golgotha. And just as I have called attention to the most remarkable conditions in connection with the Mystery of Golgotha in other places in recent times, especially in connection with the point in time of our own spiritual-scientific development in which we now stand, so today, when we meet again in this space after a long time, I would like to bring it before your hearts and souls.

The Mystery of Golgotha, the living in of the Christ Impulse, came into the world. At what time did it come into the world? Today, through our spiritual deepening, we know what flowed into a human body at that time to become the property of the development of the earth, the development of humanity on earth. The preparatory studies we have undertaken have enabled us to some extent to grasp the significance of the Mystery of Golgotha. Future periods of time, as we have often emphasized, will understand it even more clearly. But how is it, one may ask, with the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha precisely in the time in which it took place? It is indeed a matter of our grasping the reality of this Mystery of Golgotha, of understanding what it really is about. Is it a matter of what was taught to humanity at that time? If that were the case, then those who say that most of the teachings of Christ Jesus were already present in earlier periods might perhaps claim some semblance of justification; although, as we know, this is not entirely true either. But that is not the main point. What is important is something quite different, namely, what happened at Golgotha and in connection with it, what would have happened even if no human soul in the wide orbit of the earth had understood it. For it is not a matter of a fact being immediately understood, but of its happening. The significance of the fact of Golgotha is not based, in the first place, on what people have understood of it, but on what has happened for humanity, so that the current of this event has found expression in the spiritual facts of the world.

In what time did the Mystery of Golgotha fall? It really fell in a remarkable time. Let us consider only the post-Atlantean development to grasp the strangeness of this period. We have often pointed out that in this post-Atlantic period, humanity first developed in the so-called primeval Indian cultural epoch. We have pointed out the high, the significant nature of primeval Indian culture, how very different the souls were in this epoch, how they were much more intimately accessible for spiritual life, and how this accessibility has then decreased from epoch to epoch. We have also pointed out how in the ancient Persian and Egyptian-Chaldean periods, man's direct participation in the spiritual worlds diminished. For in the primeval Indian epoch, man had taken into his etheric body everything that the world could communicate to him, and he had experienced it in his etheric body; at least those who truly experienced this Indian cultural epoch in those ancient times had experienced it. What one experiences in the etheric body bears the stamp of clairvoyance to a high degree. In the time of ancient Persia, the soul was experienced in the sentient body; this was already experienced with a lesser degree of clairvoyance. In the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch, the soul was experienced in the sentient soul; here again there was a lesser degree of clairvoyance. Then came the fourth, the Greek-Latin cultural epoch: this was the epoch of the Mystery of Golgotha. It is the cultural epoch in which the human soul had already emerged to perceive only on the external physical plane. The culture of the intellect, which relates to external things, begins. The soul develops the powers that relate to the outer world.

In our epoch, in the fifth post-Atlantean cultural period, the experience of humanity has so far been limited to the observation of the external world, to the experience of sensory impressions. But this fifth post-Atlantean cultural period will have to lead again to a new, renewed receptivity for spiritual life, because it must fully live the life in the consciousness soul.

If we now ask ourselves, looking only at the first four periods of post-Atlantean development, which of these periods was least suited to truly understand the Mystery of Golgotha, the descent of the Christ, to pursue it with spiritual understanding, we could say to ourselves: If — as it could not have happened according to world karma, but as one can hypothetically assume, the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place, the Christ had descended into a human body in the time of the ancient Indian culture, then countless souls would have been there to understand this event; for they still had this spiritual understanding. Even in the ancient Persian and Egyptian-Chaldean epochs, an understanding of the mystery of Golgotha would still have been possible for souls to some extent, had it been possible to unfold according to the world karma of that time. In the fourth post-Atlantean period, the human soul was in a state of development in which this understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, this direct spiritual understanding, was closed to it precisely because of its state of development.

We will often have to speak again of the peculiar fact that the Mystery of Golgotha awaited the post-Atlantean cultural period in which spiritual understanding of the event to come had already vanished, was no longer there. The intellectual or mind soul was particularly developing in the Greco-Latin period. Above all, it lovingly turned its gaze to the outer world, as can be seen in all of Greek culture. The Mystery of Golgotha, which could only be followed with an inner gaze, was basically approached by the whole of contemporary culture in the same way as those women who came to the tomb of Christ Jesus and sought the body, but found the tomb open and the body no longer inside, and who, when they asked where the body of the Lord had been taken, had to hear the answer: “He whom you seek is not here anymore!"

Just as they sought Christ in the outer world, but the answer came: ‘He whom you seek is no longer here!’ – so it was basically for the whole era in terms of understanding the mystery of Golgotha. The people of the fourth post-Atlantean cultural period were seeking something that was not where they were looking. And they were still seeking when this fourth post-Atlantean period came to an end – it ended with the 15th century – they were still seeking in the same way. For the Crusades appear to us as the realization on a large scale, that is, only on a spatial scale, of what had happened to the women at the tomb of Christ Jesus. The longing runs through many European minds at the time of the Crusades: We must seek what is precious to us at the tomb of Christ Jesus! — And whole crowds of people moved over to the Orient to find what they wanted to find in this way, because it corresponded to their feelings. And how can one characterize what those who had gone to the Orient in the Crusades felt? It was as if the whole of the Orient had answered them: “He whom you seek is no longer here!” Is it not a deeply symbolic expression that during the whole of the fourth post-Atlantean period humanity had to search in the outer physical-sensuous plane, but that the Christ must be sought in the spiritual plane, even to the extent that He is in the world of the earth.

Where was the Christ when the women sought Him at the sepulchre? He was in the spiritual world, there where He could appear to the apostles when they opened the doors of their hearts and souls, so that through the not merely sensuous powers they might behold the Christ, for a time wandering in the etheric body, after the Mystery of Golgotha.

Where then was the Christ when the crusaders sought Him outwardly on the physical plane in the East? In the way that He can enter as a fact into human souls, we see Him enter at the same time as the crusaders sought Him in the East, into the mystics of the Occident. There is this power of Christ, there is the Christ impulse! While the crusaders journeyed to the East to seek the Christ in their own way, the living impulse of Christ — in the way it could revive in Europe in keeping with the conditions of the time — was revived in the souls of a Johannes Tauler, a Meister Eckhart and others who could take it up in keeping with the conditions of their time; it was revived in the spiritual. It had in the meantime moved over into Western culture and away from the place where it had been and where the answer had to be given to those who sought it: “He whom you seek is no longer here!”

The fifth post-Atlantic cultural period is dedicated to the time of the formation of the I, that is, actually the consciousness soul. But the human being passes through the consciousness soul so that he can become fully aware of his I. We have often spoken of these spiritual scientific truths. I am still speaking of these truths with a very special feeling at this hour.

It is understandable that the proclamation of these views in the present day still evokes opposition after opposition. But it remains significant for this feeling, which I mean, when, for example, one has to say: You see, it has now become necessary for me to finish the second edition of my book 'World and Life Views in the 19th Century'. Now, when this book was published, it was a 'century book', a retrospective view of the past century. Of course, a second edition cannot be the same, because there is no point in writing a retrospective view of the previous century in 1913. So this book had to be redesigned in many ways. Among other things, I also found it necessary to provide a long introduction that would give an overview from the oldest Greek times to the 19th century. Thus, in this last period, I was compelled to let my gaze pass over the world views of Thales, of Pherekydes of Syros and so on – from a more philosophical point of view – right up to our time. Here we have not only the spiritual before us, but also what is historical tradition; and I have set myself the task of describing only what relates to philosophical progress and to exclude all religious impulses. In this way, the truth of that remarkable change that took place at the dawn of the Greco-Latin period was revealed with profound clarity, when the old pictorial conception of the world, which was still present in the Egyptian-Chaldean period, into the intellectual apprehension of the world, and how then, from the 14th, 15th century onwards, the consciousness of the ego impulse developed — not the ego impulse itself, which of course entered into humanity much earlier.

When one studies the individual philosophers and their truth content, it becomes, as it were, historically tangible how true these things are. That is why I am talking about these things today from a completely different point of view than can be done in that book, and with a very special feeling. But even in external history one can see how the sense of self-consciousness, the sense of self, forces its way into the human soul around the 15th century.

This more recent epoch since that time is therefore particularly intended to force man to bring the energies, the powers of his ego to the surface, to become more and more aware of his ego. The limitation of the view to only the external sense phenomena, such a limitation as shown by the modern scientific development, is particularly suitable for this. When man no longer finds in his environment what appeared to him in powerful imaginations, in pictures in the Egyptian-Chaldean period, or what was realized in the Greek-Latin period in great thought tableaux, as in Plato and Aristotle and their contemporaries, but when man, without the tableau of imaginations, without the tableau of thoughts, as it was perceived by Aristotle in the Greco-Latin age, but when man, without these, depends to see only what the senses offer in the surrounding of his perception, then the ego, because it can only intuit the only spiritual in itself, must grasp itself in its essence and seek the power of its self-awareness. And if you look at all the serious philosophers since the 15th century, you see them wrestling with the task of building a worldview that yields such a world picture that the self of the human being, the self-aware soul, is possible and can exist.

The fourth post-Atlantic cultural period, which developed the intellectual or emotional soul, had, even if its understanding of the mystery of Golgotha was far removed, still something that could bring this mystery of Golgotha close to it.

With the new, the fifth period, something quite different announced itself. Not only did people now develop a lack of understanding of the Christ Being, but also a lack of understanding of all divine spiritual reality. And what is the proof of this – one could find many proofs, but one speaks particularly clearly and distinctly in favor of it – how one advanced in lack of understanding, that is, that people could no longer directly absorb not only the Christ principle but also the divine spiritual principle in general? In the 12th century, how prescient the first-person culture was, Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, invented the so-called proof of God's existence; that is, this man felt compelled to “prove” the divinity. What is one trying to prove in such a way? What one knows or what one does not know? If, for example, something has been stolen in my garden and I can watch the thief carrying out the act of theft from my window, then I do not need to prove that it was this person who stole the goods. I only seek to prove it if I do not know the person. The fact that one seeks to prove God is proof that one no longer knows Him, no longer experiences Him. For what one experiences, one does not prove, but what one does not experience, that one proves. And then the lack of understanding actually went on and on, and today we stand at a strange point in this regard. It has often been touched upon from this point of view, what endless misunderstandings have piled up during the past centuries, especially during the last, regarding the understanding of what the Mystery of Golgotha, what the Christ

Jesus, up to the present time, when even from the theological side the Christ Jesus has not only been disparaged and belittled to an, albeit outstanding, human teacher, but, even from the theological side, his very existence is completely denied.

But all this is connected with much, much deeper, characteristic properties of our age. Only the fast-moving nature of our time is not really ready to pay attention to the particularly characteristic of our time; but the facts speak for those who want to observe, a clear, only too clear language.

Let us take a fact; I am citing trivialities, but such trivialities are precisely symptoms. A very well-known weekly magazine recently published a highly remarkable essay that is currently being mentioned more often, and with respect. It amounted to something strange, namely, that when one looks at the world views that have emerged in recent centuries, one actually has too many “concepts” before one; these concepts are too vague. Translated into our language, it means: they are not comprehensible in the sensory world, to which one wants to limit oneself. So this writer finds, oddly enough, that the philosopher Spinoza is difficult to understand, as he seeks to understand the world from a single concept, the concept of divine substance. So this writer makes a certain proposal for the reform of philosophical understanding in our time, which amounts to vividly demonstrating how a concept forms the apex above, and how the concepts then diverge, split; in short, he proposes to to “visualize” Spinoza's thought-building in the way that one often sets up a scheme so that one no longer has to follow how the thoughts present themselves in Spinoza's soul, but can have them sensually in front of one in a film. — Thus, perhaps, when such “ideals” are fulfilled, we will soon go to the cinematograph theaters to see and follow the cinematographic—not recordings, but “translations” of the thought and idea buildings of important men!

It is a significant symptom of what the human soul has come to in our time, a symptom that must be mentioned for a very specific reason: because people have not perceived what they should have perceived if such a symptom had been considered in a healthy way: that a mocking laughter should have developed at this folly, at the madness that lies in such a philosophy reform! For the zeal that would express itself in such mocking laughter can truly be called a sacred necessity.

This is a symptom – for it is to be regarded as a symptom – of how necessary spiritual deepening is for our age, but true spiritual deepening. For it is not only spiritual deepening that is necessary in general, but that spiritual deepening which, if it is the genuine one, must lead to the truth; it is this that the souls of the present age need. Our time is precisely where education and even the formation of world views wants to be at home, only too inclined to be satisfied with what leads far, far away from real spirituality. For our time is easily satisfied with appearances; but appearances, when they stand in for the current reality, always lead in some way to inner untruth and dishonesty. Another symptom of this can be seen in the fact that

today one can often hear a world view praised that has caused quite a stir: that of the philosopher Eucken. Not only has Eucken received a world-famous prize, the Nobel Prize, for his world view, but he is also praised as the one who dares to speak of the spirit again. This praise is not given, however, because Eucken speaks so beautifully of the spirit, but because when it comes to the spirit, people today are so easily satisfied with the very least, if only something of the spirit is preached to them and because Eucken, in countless permutations, always talks about the sentence that can be read again and again in his books, only people do not realize that they are eternal repetitions: It is not enough to understand that the world is sensual, but man must grasp himself inwardly and thus - inwardly - unite with the spirit. - Now we have it: Man must grasp himself inwardly and must unite inwardly with the spirit! Again and again one comes across this sentence in Eucken's books, and not just three or four times, but five or six times: so this is a “spiritual” world view! It is precisely such symptoms that are significant because they show us what can be considered “great” today by those who must count themselves among the best minds. But if only one could read! For if you open Eucken's last book, “Can We Still Be Christians?”, you will find a remarkable sentence there that roughly reads: Today man is beyond believing in demons as one believed in demons immediately in the age of Christ; today one needs a different representation of Christ that no longer represents demons and accepts them as truth. It is very flattering for every person in today's enlightened times that the great teacher Eucken holds up that he has gone beyond still believing in demons. But if you read the book further, you will find a strange sentence: “The contact between the divine and the human generates demonic powers.”

I would like to ask whether all the people who have read Eucken's book really laughed at this Eucken naivety, that is, “wisdom,” which manages to say, on the one hand, that one is beyond belief in demons and, on the other hand, to talk about a “demonic.” Of course, the Eucken people will say: the demonic is meant in a figurative sense, it is not meant so seriously. But that is precisely the point: people use words and ideas and do not take them seriously. Yes, that is where the deep inner dishonesty lies! But the real spiritual-scientific world view includes the realization that one has to take the words seriously and not speak of a demonic force if one has no intention of taking the word seriously.

Otherwise, people could repeatedly experience what happened to the chairman of a worldview association at which I was to give a lecture. In my lecture I pointed out that Adolf von Harnack's book 'The Essence of Christianity' states that it is not essential to learn what happened at Golgotha; one can leave that open; but one should not leave open the fact that the belief in the mystery of Golgotha has emerged from that time, regardless of whether the belief refers to something real or not. The person in question – he was the chairman of a Berlin worldview association and, of course, a Protestant – said to me: I read the book, but I didn't find that in it; Harnack couldn't have said that, because that would be a Catholic idea. For example, Catholics say: Whatever is behind the Holy Robe of Trier is not the important thing, what is important is belief in it. — I then had to write down the page where the sentence is. Perhaps many people feel that they have read a book, but have not read the important thing, the symptomatic thing.

Thus we have cast a spotlight on our time. Here we discover a necessity that is particularly relevant to our time, from the symptoms of the present: the necessity that true spiritual conscientiousness may develop in our age, that we may learn not to accept with indifference when the representative of a spiritual world view says, on the one hand, that one has gone beyond demons and, on the other hand, uses the word 'demonic' in a strange sense. But if we consider that we live in the age of “newspaper culture,” then we must not say that we have little hope that such a culture of conscientiousness can develop; rather, we must say that it is all the more necessary to do everything that can lead to such a culture of conscientiousness. Intensive preparations are being made in the field of spiritual science, but we must open our eyes to see the symptoms of our time.

I would like to point out another fact. From the 1860s, Ernest Renan's book “Life of Jesus” made a tremendous impression. I mention this fact in particular to show the state of our understanding of the mystery of Golgotha in our time. When reading Ernest Renan's book, one says to oneself: Well, firstly, a person writes in a beautiful style, a person who has wandered through all the sites of the Holy Land and is therefore able to provide the most beautiful local color; and then a person writes in it who does not believe in the divinity of Christ, but who speaks with infinite reverence of the exalted figure of Jesus. But now let us take a closer look at the account. Strangely enough, Ernest Renan describes the course of Jesus' life in such a way that he actually shows that Jesus experiences what everyone experiences – some to a greater extent, some to a lesser extent – who has to represent any kind of worldview in front of any larger or smaller number of people. And this is roughly what happens to such a person: At first he appears before the multitude with what he alone believes; then people approach him. One has this need, the other that; one understands the matter thus, the other so; one has this weakness, the other that; and then the man who first spoke out of an inner truth joins them and gives way, so to speak. In short, Renan believes that some people who have important things to say show that their followers have basically spoiled it for them. And he is of the opinion that Christ Jesus was also spoiled by his followers. Take, for example, the miracle of Lazarus. As it is presented, it is said to contain the fact that one has to say: The whole thing would be something of a fraud, but it was good to use to spread the word; that's why Jesus let it happen. And so other things are presented. But then, after it has been shown how, little by little, the life of Christ Jesus is a decline, there is another hymn at the end that can only be addressed to the Most High. Now let us take this inner dishonesty! In Renan's book, fact is a mixture of two things: something extraordinarily beautiful, a brilliant, in some parts sublime description, mixed with a backstairs novel – but in the end a tremendous hymn to the exalted image of Jesus. What is this hymn about? About Jesus? It cannot really be directed at the Jesus whom Renan himself describes, if one has a healthy soul; for one would not speak such words of praise to the Christ Jesus whom Renan describes. Thus the whole thing is inwardly untrue!

What, then, have I actually tried to suggest to you with these considerations? I would like to summarize it in a few words at the end. I have tried to suggest that the Mystery of Golgotha has fallen into an age in the evolution of humanity in which humanity was not prepared to understand it, but that even in our own age humanity is still not prepared for it.

But its effect has been lasting for two thousand years! This effect is there. How is it there? Such that it is independent of the understanding that humanity has brought to it to this day. If the Christ could have worked in humanity only to the extent that He was “understood”, He would have been able to work only a little. But we shall see this too in future meditations: that we are living in a developmental point in the present period, where it is precisely necessary to develop that understanding which has not been there until now. For we live in the period in which a certain necessity will arise to seek the Christ no longer where He is not, but where He really is. For He will appear in spirit and not in the body, and those who seek Him in the body will again and again receive the answer: He whom you seek in the body is not in the body! We need a new understanding, which in many respects will perhaps even be a first understanding of the mystery of Golgotha. The time of non-understanding must give way to the time of first understanding. This is what I wanted to suggest with today's reflections and what we will continue with in the next reflections.

We have said repeatedly that our epoch will end, when the seventh age has passed away, by the War of All against All, but this war must really be pictured quite differently from the way we have been accustomed to think of war. We must bear in mind the foundation, the real cause of this war. This foundation or cause is the increase of egoism, of self-seeking and selfishness on the part of man. And we have now progressed so far in our considerations that we have seen what a sharp two-edged sword this “I” of man is. He who does not fully realize that this “I” is a two-edged sword will scarcely be able to grasp the entire meaning of the evolution of humanity and the world. On the one hand this “I” is the cause that man hardens within himself, and that he desires to draw into the service of his “I” his inner capacities and all the other objects at his disposal. This “I” is the cause of man's directing all his wishes to the satisfaction of this “I” as such. Its striving to draw to itself as its own possession a part of the earth which belongs to all, to drive away all the other Egos from its realm, to fight them, to be at war with them, is one side of the “I.” But on the other hand the must not forget that the “I” is at the same time that which gives man his independence and his inner freedom, which in the truest sense of the word elevates him. His dignity is founded in this “I,” it is the basis of the Divine in man.

This conception of the “I” offers difficulty to many people. It has become clear to us that this “I” of man has developed from a group-soul nature, from a kind of all-inclusive universal “I” out of which it has been differentiated. It would be wrong if man were to crave to go down again with his “I” into some sort of universal consciousness, into some sort of common consciousness. Everything which causes a man to strive to lose his “I” and dissolve it into a universal consciousness, is the result of weakness. He alone understands the “I” who knows that after he has gained it in the course of cosmic evolution it cannot be lost; and above all man must strive for the strength (if he understands the mission of the world) to make this “I” more and more inward, more and more divine. True Anthroposophists possess nothing of the empty talk which continually emphasizes the dissolution of the “I” in a universal self, the melting into some sort of primeval sea. True Anthroposophy can only put forward as the final goal, the community of free and independent Egos, of Egos which have become individualized. It is just this that is the mission of the earth, which is expressed in love, that the Egos learn to confront one another freely. Love is not perfect if it proceeds from coercion, from people being chained together, but only when each “I” is so free and independent that it need not love, is its love an entirely free gift. It is the divine plan to make this “I” so independent that as an individual being in all freedom it can offer love even to God. It would amount to man being led by strings of dependence if he could in any way be forced to love, even if only in the slightest degree.

Thus the “I” will be the pledge for the highest goal of man. But at the same time, if it does not discover love, if it hardens within itself, it is the tempter that plunges him into the abyss. For it is that which separates men from one another which brings them to the great War of All against All, not only to the war of nation against nation (for the conception of a nation will then no longer have the significance it possesses to-day) but to the war of each single person against every other person in every branch of life; to the war of class against class, of caste against caste and sex against sex. Thus in every field of life the “I” will become the apple of discord; and hence we may say that it can lead on the one hand to the highest and on the other hand to the lowest. For this reason it is a sharp two-edged sword. And he who brought the full Ego-consciousness to man, Christ Jesus, is, as we have seen, symbolically and correctly represented in the Apocalypse as one who has the sharp two-edged sword in his mouth.

We have represented it as a high achievement of man that just through Christianity he has been able to ascend to this concept of the free “I.” Christ Jesus brought the “I” in all its fullness. Hence this “I” must be expressed by the sharp two-edged sword which you already know from one of our seals. And the fact that this sharp two-edged sword proceeds from the mouth of the Son of Man is also comprehensible, for when man has learnt to utter the “I” with full consciousness it is in his power to rise to the highest or sink to the lowest. The sharp two-edged sword is one of the most important symbols met with in the Apocalypse.

Now if we understand what was said at the close of our last lecture, that after our present civilization will follow that which is characterized in our last lecture through the community of Philadelphia, we must particularly notice that from the sixth age will be taken those human souls who have to pass over into the following epoch. For, after the War of All against All—as we have already said—there will be expressed in the features all that is in our age being prepared in men's souls. The so-called seventh age will be of very little importance. We are now living in the fifth age of civilization; then follows the sixth, from which will proceed a number of people full of understanding for the spiritual world, filled with the spirit of brotherly love, which results from spiritual knowledge. The ripest fruit of our present civilization will appear in the sixth age. And that which follows it will be what is lukewarm, neither warm nor cold; the seventh age is something like an overripe fruit, which outlasts the War of All against All, but contains no principle of progress.

This was the case also when our culture originated. Let as think of the time before the Atlantean flood. We have said that it was in the last third of the Atlantean epoch—which men experienced on the land now covered by the Atlantic Ocean—when a small group was formed in the neighbourhood of the present Ireland, which had reached the highest stage of Atlantean civilization, and this group then migrated to the East, whence all later civilizations have proceeded. Let us keep this clearly in mind, let us think of this portion of the earth which now forms the ocean west of Ireland, let us think of a migration of people starting from there and going towards the East and from it a number of tribes proceeding, which then populate Europe. All that is contained in the population of Europe originated in this way. The most gifted portion of the Atlanteans wandered towards central Asia; from there proceeded the various civilizations up to our own, as we have described. So we see that our present civilization originated in a small group of Atlanteans.

Atlantis, however, had seven consecutive stages just as our own civilization has seven stages which we know as the ancient Indian, ancient Persian, Assyrian-Babylonian-Chaldean-Egyptian-Jewish, the Graeco-Latin, our own and two further ones. It was in the fifth stage when this emigration began; so that the specially chosen population of Atlantis which lies at the foundation of our culture is taken from the fifth Atlantean race, for in Atlantis we may speak of races. A sixth and a seventh followed. These were, so to speak the lukewarm races. They also survived the great flood but there was no living sprouting force in them. They were related to the fifth Atlanteans civilization somewhat as the bark which is lignified and hardened is related to the sappy stem. These two races which followed the actual root-race were incapable of developing, they were overripe, so to speak. You may still see stragglers of these old overripe races to-day, especially among the Chinese. This Chinese people is characterized by the fact that it has not identified itself with what was manifested in the fifth race, the root-race. It was when the etheric body entered into the physical body that man received the first germs which enabled him to say “I.” They had passed over that period; they had, however, thereby developed the high civilization which is known to-day but which was not capable of development. The fifth Atlantean race sent its people every-where, and they founded new civilizations, civilizations capable of growing and becoming more perfect. Indeed, this all developed from the ancient Indian civilization to our own. The sixth and seventh races of Atlantis allowed themselves to become hardened and therefore became stationary. As we have said, the Chinese civilization is a remainder of that ancient civilization. The old Chinese possessed a wonderful Atlantean heritage but they could not progress any further. Nothing remains uninfluenced from outside. You may examine ancient Chinese literature; it has been influenced from every direction, but its fundamental tendency bears the Atlantean character. This self-completeness, this capacity of making discoveries and going no further, could never bring the Chinese beyond a certain stage—all this proceeds from the character of Atlantis.

Just as it happened at that time with the fifth race, that it provided men who were capable of development and with the sixth and seventh, that they experienced a descent, so will it also be in our epoch. We are now looking with great longing towards the sixth civilization, to that which must be described as developing out of the spiritual marriage between West and East. The sixth stage will be the foundation for the new civilizations which will arise after the great War of All against All; just as our civilization arose after the Atlantean epoch. On the other hand, the seventh race of culture will be characterized by the lukewarm. This seventh age will continue into the new epoch, just as the sixth and seventh races of the Atlantean epoch continued into our epoch as races hardened and stiffening. After the War of All against All, there will be two streams in humanity: on the one hand the stream of Philadelphia will survive with the principle of progress, of inner freedom, of brotherly love, a small group drawn from every tribe and nation; and on the other hand the great mass of all those who are lukewarm, the remains of those who are now becoming lukewarm (Laodicea).

After the great War of All against All, gradually the evil stream will be led over to good by the good race, by the good stream. This will be one of the principal tasks after the great War of All against All; to rescue what can be rescued from those who after the great war will only have the impulse to fight one another and to allow the “I” to express itself in the most external egoism. Such things are always provided for in advance in the spiritual guidance of humanity.

Do not consider it a hard thing in the plan of creation, as something which should be altered, that humanity will be divided into those who will stand on the right and those who will stand on the left; consider it rather as something that is wise in the highest degree in the plan of creation. Consider that through the evil separating from the good, the good will receive its greatest strengthening. For after the great War of All against All, the good will have to make every possible effort to rescue the evil during the period in which this will still be possible. This will not merely be a work of education such as exists to-day, but occult forces will co-operate. For in this next great epoch men will understand how to set occult forces in motion. The good will have the task of working upon their brothers of the evil movement. Everything is prepared beforehand in the hidden occult movements, but the deepest of all occult cosmic currents is the least understood. The movement which is preparing for this, says the following to its pupils: “Men speak of good and evil, but they do not know that it is necessary in the great plan that evil, too, should come to its peals, in order that those who have to overcome it should, in the very overcoming of evil, so use their force that a still greater good results from it.” The most capable must be chosen and prepared to live beyond the period of the great War of All against All when men will confront those who bear in their countenances the sign of evil; they must be so prepared that as much good force as possible will flow into humanity. It will still be possible for those bodies, which are to a certain extent soft, to be transformed after the War of All against All by the converted souls, by the souls who will still be led to the good in this last epoch. In this way much will be accomplished. The good would not be so great a good if it were not to grow through the conquest of evil. Love would not be so intense if it had not to become love so great as to be able even to overcome the wickedness in the countenances of evil men. This is already being prepared for and the pupils are told, “You must not think that evil has no part in the plan of creation. It is there in order that through it may come the greater good.” Those who are being prepared in their souls by such teachings, so that in the future they will, be able to accomplish this great task of education, are the pupils of the Manichaean School. The Manichaean teaching is generally misunderstood. When you hear anything or read something about it, you find merely phrases. You may read that the Manichees believed that from the very beginning of the world there have been two principles: good and evil. This is not so, the teaching of the Manichees is what we have just explained. By the name “Manichaeism” should be understood the above teaching and its development in the future, and the pupils who are so led that they can accomplish such a task in future incarnations. Manes is that exalted individuality, who is repeatedly incarnated on the earth, who is the guiding spirit of those whose task it is to transform evil. When we speak of the great leaders of mankind we must also think of this individuality who has set himself this task. Although at the present day this principle of Manes has had to step very much into the background because there is little understanding for spiritual work, this wonderful and lofty Manichaean principle will win more and more pupils the nearer we approach the understanding of spiritual life.

Thus you see how the present-day humanity will pass into the new epoch beyond the War of All against All, just as that root-race of the Atlanteans lived over into our epoch and founded our civilizations. After the great War of All against All humanity will develop in seven consecutive stages. We have already seen how that which is said concerning the opening of the seven seals in the Apocalypse of John gives us the character of the seven consecutive civilizations after the great war. Then when this civilization—which can only be seen by the initiates in the astral world and in its symbolism—has run its course, a new epoch will begin for our earth development in which again new forms will appear. And this new epoch, which will follow the one just described, is symbolized in the Apocalypse of John by the sounding of the seven trumpets. Just as the epoch after the great War of All against All is characterized by the seven seals, because the seer can only see it to-day from the astral world, so by the sounding of the trumpets is characterized the stage of civilization which follows, because man can only perceive it from the true spiritual world where the tones of the spheres sound forth. In the astral world man perceives the world in pictures, in symbols, in Devachan he perceives it in inspiring music; and in this Devachan is contained the climax, as it were, of what is revealed concerning what follows the great War of All against All.

Thus if we represent it in a diagram, we have our seven ages of civilization in the space between the letters a–b, so that we have the ancient Indian civilization as the first, the ancient Persian as the second, the Assyrian-Babylonian-Chaldean-Egyptian-Jewish, the Graeco-Latin,and our own as the fifth stage of the post-Atlantean epoch. The figure IV would be the Atlantean epoch, (a) the great flood by which this comes to an end, and (b) the great War of All against All. Then follows an epoch of seven stages (VI) which is represented by the seven seals, then follows another (VII) also containing seven stages, represented by the seven trumpets. Here again lies the boundary of our physical earth development.

Now the Atlantean civilization (IV), which preceded our own, was also preceded by other stages of civilization; for that of our own (V), which follows the Atlantean, is the fifth -Stage on our earth. Four stages of civilization preceded it. But we can scarcely call the first stage a civilization culture. Everything was still etheric and spiritual, all in such a condition that if it had developed further in this way it would not have become visible at all to sense organs such as ours. The first stage developed when the sun was still bound up with our earth. There were then quite different conditions, one could not speak of anything which looked like the objects now surrounding us. Then followed a stage characterized by the sun separating. Then one characterized by the moon leaving the earth; this was the third stage, which we call the ancient Lemurian. At this point the present man appeared on our earth in his very first form, concerning which I have pointed out that they were such grotesque bodily forms that it would shock you if you were to hear them described. After the Lemurian followed the Atlantean, and finally our own.

So you see that we have on our earth seven epochs of development. The first two were absolutely unlike our epoch.; the third partly ran its course in a region lying between the present Africa, Asia and Australia, in ancient Lemuria. In the very last Lemurian race there was again a small group of the most advanced. These were able to emigrate, and from them developed the seven races of the Atlanteans. The last Lemurian race founded the Atlantean races. The fifth of the Atlantean races founded our civilizations, of which the sixth will found the future civilization after the great War of All against All. And the very last of those civilizations will have to found that which is indicated by the seven trumpets. After that, what will happen? Our earth will then have reached the goal of its physical evolution. All the objects and all the beings upon it will then have been transformed. For if we have had to say that already in the sixth epoch men will show good and evil un their faces, we shall have to say all the more of the seventh that the form of man and the forms of all the other beings will be an expression of good and evil to a much higher degree than in the sixth epoch. All matter will bear the stamp of the spirit. There will be absolutely nothing in this seventh epoch that can be hidden in any way. Even those belonging to the sixth epoch will be unable to hide anything from him who has the necessary vision. An evil man will express his evil, a good man will express the good that is within him; but in the seventh epoch it will be quite impossible by speech to hide what is in the soul. Thought will no longer remain dumb so that it can be hidden, for when the soul thinks, its thought will ring forth outwardly. It will then be just as thought is already to the Initiates to-day. To them thought now rings out in Devachan. But this Devachan will have descended into the physical world, just as the astral world will have descended into the physical world in the sixth epoch. Even now the sixth epoch can be found in the astral world and the seventh in the heavenly world. The sixth epoch is the descended astral world, that is to say the images, the expressions, the manifestations of it. The seventh epoch will be the descended heavenly world, the expression of it. And then the earth will have reached the goal of its physical evolution. The earth, together with all its beings, will then change into an astral heavenly body. Physical substance as such will disappear. The part which until then had been able to spiritualize itself, will pass over into the spirit, into astral sub-stance. Imagine all the beings of the earth who up to that time have been able to express what is good, noble, intellectual and beautiful in their external material form; who will bear an expression of Christ Jesus in their countenances, whose words will manifest Christ Jesus, for they will ring out as resounding thoughts—all these will have the power to dissolve what they have within them as physical matter, as warm water dissolves salt. Everything physical will pass over into an astral globe. But those who up to that time have not progressed so far as to be a material and corporeal expression of what is noble, beautiful, intellectual and good, will not have the power to dissolve matter; for them matter will remain. They will become hardened in matter; they will retain material form. At this point in the earth's evolution there will be an ascent into the spirit of forms which will live in the astral and which will separate from them-selves another material globe, a globe which will contain beings unfit for the ascent because they are unable to dissolve the material part. In this way our earth will advance towards its future. Through the souls gradually refining matter from within, the substance of the earth will become more and more refined until it receives the power to dissolve. Then will come the time when the insoluble part will be ejected as a special planet. In the course of seven ages that which has hardened itself in matter will be driven out, and the power which drives it out will be the opposite force to that which will have forced the good beings upward.

What, then, will they have used to dissolve matter? The power of love gained through the Christ-principle. Beings become capable of dissolving matter through taking love into their souls. The more the soul is warmed by love the more power-fully will it be able to work on matter; it will spiritualize the whole earth and transform it into an astral globe. But just as love dissolves matter, as warm water dissolves salt, so will the opposite of love press down—again throughout seven stages everything which has not become capable of fulfilling the earth mission. The contrary of divine love is called divine wrath, that is the technical expression for it. Just as in the course of the fourth stage of civilization this love was imprinted in humanity, just as it will become warmer and warmer through the last stages in our epoch, the sixth and seventh, so on the other hand there is growing that which hardens matter around itself the divine wrath. This effect of the divine wrath, this expulsion of matter is indicated in the Apocalypse of John by the outpouring of the seven vials of divine wrath. Imagine what the whole condition will be; the substance of the earth will become finer and finer, the substantial part of man will also become more and more spiritual, and the coarsest parts will only be visible in the finer part like the skins or shells sloughed off, for example, by reptiles or snails. These harder parts will thus become more and more incorporated in the substance which is growing finer. In the last epoch, the epoch of the sounding of the trumpets, you would with spiritual vision see how men consist of delicate, spiritualized bodies; and how those who have hardened the material principle in themselves have preserved in themselves what to-day are the most important constituents of matter; and how this will fall as husks into the material globe which will be left after the epoch indicated by the sounding of the trumpets.

This is prophetically described in the Apocalypse of John, and it is important to develop a feeling in our souls about this knowledge of what is coming, so that it may fire our will. For what will man have made of himself when the sixth and seventh epochs are over? What will he have made of his body? If we now observe the human body we find that it is not yet the expression of the soul within; but it will gradually become an expression of what the soul experiences within. Man's outer body will thus become an expression of the good by his receiving the highest message, the highest teaching there is on this earth; and this highest teaching is the message of Christ Jesus on the earth; the highest that can be given to us is the message of Christ Jesus. We must take it up thoroughly, not merely with the understanding; we must take it into our innermost being, just as one takes nourishment into the physical body. And as humanity develops further it will take up the joyful message into its inner being more and more. It is just this reception of the message of love which it will have to regard as the result of the earth's mission. The power of love is contained in the Gospels, the whole power of love, and the seer can say nothing else than: “In the spirit I see a time before me when that which is in the Gospel will no longer be outside in a book but when it will be devoured by man himself.”

Our earth evolution depends upon two things. Our earth was preceded by what we call the Cosmos of Wisdom, and that was preceded by what we call the Cosmos of Strength, of Power (certainly the word does not convey much, but we must use it because it has become customary). Wisdom and strength have been received as a heritage from previous stages of evolution, from the ancient Moon and the ancient Sun. We shall see that during our earth evolution this is also expressed by our naming the first half after the representative of the Sun forces, Mars, for we only need note at this point that within our earth evolution we have in Mars that which implanted iron in the earth; in Mars we see the bringer of strength. And in that which rules the second half of the earth evolution we have the representative of the ancient Moon evolution, Mercury, which embodies in the earth the heritage received from the Moon, wisdom. Thus the earth evolution consists of two parts, Mars and Mercury. It has received as a heritage two mighty forces. That which it has inherited from the cosmos of strength is expressed in Mars, and that which it has inherited from the cosmos of wisdom is expressed in Mercury. The mission of the earth itself is to bring love. Love is to be gloriously manifested as the result of the earth evolution. This is a very profound thought expressed by the writer of the Apocalypse. It is the profound thought underlying the whole of the earth evolution.

Let us once more go back to the first portion of the Atlantean epoch, to the time of which we said that the air was still saturated with water. Man was still organized for a water existence. Only in the middle of Atlantis had he progressed so far that he forsook the water and trod upon solid ground. Up to the middle of the earth's evolution we must regard water as the vehicle of human evolution, just as afterwards solid earth. It was only comparatively late that the solid earth became the field of human evolution. It is only half the truth if we speak of the whole of Atlantis as consisting of dry land. In many respects it was not covered, let us say, by the ocean, but by something between air and water, air-saturated with water. And this water-air was the element in which man lived. Only later did he become capable of living in clear air and standing on solid ground. That was, comparatively speaking, not long ago; so that if we survey the earth's evolution, we may say, expressing it symbolically: On the one hand we have earth and on the other hand water—that is the earlier period. From the water emanates one of the forces, and from the earth emanates the other force, up to the first half of evolution. In the middle of the fourth period we speak of the Mars forces, of the forces given by water, so to speak, and we speak of the Mercury forces in the later time when the solid earth gives the supporting forces. This fits quite accurately into the conception that man is supported in his entire earth mission by two pillars. They represent two parts of the earth's mission, the two heritages man has received from earlier periods. And above them is symbolized what is to be attained through the earth itself, namely love, which is there gloriously revealing itself, which is supported by these heritages. Thus the writer of the Apocalypse really describes it just as it presents itself to those who ascend. Therefore, when we observe what lies beyond the earth and what confronts us when earthly substance dissolves into the spiritual, this is symbolically indicated by what we see in the fourth seal. See Dr. Steiner's Occult Seals and Symbols. Of course it has to appear reversed, because it represents what belongs to the future. We see the two forces which the earth has received as heritage from the cosmos of wisdom and the cosmos of strength, and we see all that appears as the fulfilment of the earth's mission, as the force of love which man develops. The whole appears to its as the personification of the man of the future. The man of the future here confronts us symbolically, supported by these forces, permeated by this power. The message of love, the book before him, is a book which influences him not only from without but he has to devour it. Here we behold before us the mighty picture which appears at this stage. “And I saw another mighty angel” (that is, a being which is presented thus, because he is already above the present man), “descend from the spiritual spheres” (that is how it is seen by the Seer) “clothed with a cloud, and his countenance was like the sun and his feet like pillars of fire”—these are the two forces of which we have spoken, which the earth has received as a heritage. “And he had in his hand a little book opened; and his right foot was set upon the sea and his left upon the earth. ... And I said unto him, Give me the little book. And he said unto me, Take it, and eat it up; and it shall pain thee in thy belly, but in thy mouth it shall be sweet as honey. And I took the little book from the hand of the angel and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey.” Here we have the feeling arising in the seer when he directs his gaze to the point when the earth passes from the physically material into the astrally spiritual, when the earth mission is attained. And when the seer sees this he learns what is really connected with this message of love, which entered in as an impulse in the fourth age, he learns even in the present life, as the Apocalyptist learnt, what bliss is and the bliss that may lie before humanity. But he learns it in his present body; for if a being wished to live with man, however high he might be, he would be obliged to incarnate in the flesh. And in many respects the present body, just because it offers the spirit the possibility of rising high, also gives the possibility of suffering. While, there-fore, the soul is able to ascend—the soul of the seer—as the Apocalyptist has described, into spiritual regions, in order to receive the Gospel of Love, and in spirit is able to feel the bliss sweet as honey, yet the seer lives in a present-day body, and in accordance with this he must say that the ascent produces in the present body the antithesis of that bliss in many respects. He expresses this by saying that although the little book is at first sweet as honey when he eats it, it gives him severe pains in the belly. But this is only a small reflection of the “being crucified in the body.” The higher the spirit rises, the more difficult it is for it to dwell in the body, and this is the symbolical expression for these pains: “being crucified in the body.”

Thus we have briefly sketched what will happen in our earth evolution, what lies in front of man in his earthly evolution. We have arrived at the point when man is changed into an astral being; when the best parts of the earth disappear as physical earth and pass over into the spiritual; when only something like a separated portion will through the divine wrath fall into the abyss. And we shall see that even there the last stage at which salvation would not be possible has not yet been reached, although that which is in the abyss is pictured by the most frightful symbols, by the seven-headed and ten-horned beast and by the two-horned beast.

Rudolf Steiner's lecture at the Congress of the Federation of European Sections of the Theosophical Society

Those who portray the spiritual life of Germany from the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century usually see, alongside the high point of art in Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Mozart, Beethoven and others, only an epoch of purely speculative thinking in Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer and a few less important philosophers. It is frequently held that the latter personalities are to be recognized as mere laborers in the field of thought. It is admitted that they have done extraordinary work in the speculative field; but one is all too easily inclined to say that these thinkers were quite far removed from actual occult research and real spiritual experience. And so it happens that the theosophically striving person expects little gain from delving into their works.

Many who attempt to penetrate the thought-web of these philosophers give up the work after a time because they find it fruitless. The scientific investigator says to himself: These thinkers have lost the firm ground of experience under their feet; they have built up in the nebulous heights the chimeras of systems, without any regard for positive reality. And anyone interested in occultism will find that they lack the truly spiritual foundations. He comes to the conclusion: They knew nothing of spiritual experiences, of supersensible facts, and merely devised intellectual constructs.

As long as one stops at merely observing the outer side of spiritual development, it is not easy to come to a different opinion. But if one penetrates to the undercurrents, the whole epoch presents itself in a different light. The apparent airy-fairy notions can be recognized as the expression of a deeper occult life. And Theosophy can then provide the key to understanding what these sixty to seventy years of spiritual life mean in the development of mankind. During this time in Germany, there are two sets of facts, one of which represents the surface, but the other must be regarded as a deeper foundation. The whole thing gives the impression of a flowing stream, on the surface of which the waves ripple in the most diverse ways. And what is presented in the usual [literary histories] are only these rising and falling waves; but what lives in the depths is left unconsidered, and from which the waves actually draw their nourishment.

This depth contains a rich and fertile occult life. And this is none other than that which once pulsated in the works of the great German mystics, Paracelsus, Jakob Böhme and Angelus Silesius. Like a hidden power, this life was contained in the worlds of thought that Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel found. The way in which, for example, Jakob Böhme had expressed his great spiritual experiences was no longer at the forefront of the leading literary discussion; but the spirit of these experiences continued to live. One can see how this spirit lived on in Herder, for example. Public discussion led both Herder and Goethe to the study of Spinoza. In the work that he called “God”, the former sought to deepen the conception of God in Spinozism. What he contributed to Spinozism was nothing other than the spirit of German mysticism. One could say that, unconsciously to himself, Jakob Böhme and Angelus Silesius were guiding his pen. It is also from such hidden sources that we can explain how, in the “Education of the Human Race”, the ideas of reincarnation emerged in a mind as rationally inclined as Lessing's was. The term “unconscious” is, however, only half accurate, because such ideas and intuitions led a full life within Germany, not on the surface of literary discussion, but in the most diverse “occult societies” and “fraternities”. But of the above, only Goethe can be considered as having been initiated into the most intimate life of such “fraternities”; the others had only a more superficial connection with them. Much of it found its way into their lives and work as inspiration, without them being fully aware of the real sources.

In this respect, Schiller represents an interesting phenomenon of intellectual development. We cannot understand the real intellectual nerve of his life if we do not delve into his youthful works, which can be found in his writings as “Correspondence between Julius and Raphael”. Some of the material contained in it was written by Schiller while he was still at the Karls School in Stuttgart, while some of it was only written in 1785 and 1786. It contains what Schiller calls the “Theosophy of Julius,” by which he means the sum of ideas to which he had risen at that time. It is only necessary to cite the most important thoughts from this “theosophy” to characterize the way in which this genius assembled his own edifice of ideas from the rudiments of German mysticism that were accessible to him. Such essential thoughts are, for example, the following: “The universe is a thought of God. After this [idealized] image of the spirit entered into reality and the born world fulfilled the plan of its creator – allow me this human representation – so the task of all thinking beings in this existing whole is to find the first drawing again, the rule in the machine, the unity in the composition, the law in the phenomenon and to transfer the building backwards to its ground plan... The great composition that we call the world now only remains strange to me because it exists to symbolically describe the [manifold] expressions of that [being]. Everything in me and outside of me is only a hieroglyph of a force that is similar to me. The laws of nature are the ciphers that the thinking being combines to make itself understandable to the thinking being – the alphabet by means of which all spirits negotiate with the most perfect spirit and with themselves... A new experience in this [realm of truth], gravity, the discovery of blood circulation, Linnaeus's system of nature classification: these things seem to me to be, in their very origin, what an antique, unearthed in Herculaneum, reveals to me – both mere reflections of a spirit, a new acquaintance with a being similar to myself. [...] There is no longer any wilderness in all of nature for me. Where I discover a body, I suspect a spirit. Where I perceive movement, I guess a thought... We have concepts of the wisdom of the supreme being, of his benevolence, of his justice – but none of his omnipotence. To express its omnipotence, we help ourselves with the piecemeal idea of three successions: nothing, its will [and] something. It is desolate and dark – God calls: light – and there is light. If we had a real idea of its active omnipotence, we would be creators, like Him.” Such were the ideas of Schiller's theosophy when he was in his early twenties. And from this basis he rises to the comprehension of human spiritual life itself, which he places in the context of cosmic forces: “Love, then, the most beautiful phenomenon in the creation of the soul, the almighty magnet in the spiritual world, the source of devotion and the loftiest virtue. Love is only the reflection of this one primal power, an attraction of the excellent, based on an instantaneous exchange of personality, a confusion of beings. When I hate, I take something away from myself; when I love, I become richer by what I love. Forgiveness is the recovery of a lost possession; hatred of men is a prolonged suicide; egotism is the greatest poverty of a created being.” From this starting-point Schiller seeks to find an idea of God corresponding to his own feeling, which he presents in the following sentences: ”All perfections in the universe are united in God. God and nature are two entities that are completely equal to each other... There is one truth that runs like a fixed axis through all religions and systems: Approach the God you mean.

If one compares these statements of the young Schiller with the teachings of the German mystics, one will find that in the latter, there are sharply defined contours of thought, which in Schiller's works appear as the exuberant outpourings of a more general world of feeling. Paracelsus, Jakob Böhme, Angelus Silesius have as a certain view of their intuitive mind what Schiller has in mind in the vague presentiment of feeling.

What comes to light in such a characteristic way in Schiller is also present in other of his contemporaries. Intellectual history only has to present it in the case of Schiller because it has become a driving force of the nation in his epoch-making works. It can be said that in Schiller's time, the spiritual world of German mysticism as intuition, as direct experience of spiritual life, was hidden as if under a veil; but it lived on in the world of feeling, in the intuitions. People had retained devotion and enthusiasm for that which they no longer saw directly with the “sense organs of the spirit”. We are dealing with an epoch of veiling of spiritual vision, but of a kind that is based on feeling, on an intuitive sense of this world.

This entire process is based on a certain law-governed necessity. What entered the hidden world as spiritual insight emerged as artistic life in this period of German spiritual life. In occultism, one speaks of successive cycles of involution and evolution. Here we are dealing with such a cycle on a small scale. The art of Germany in the epoch of Schiller and Goethe is nothing more than the evolution of German mysticism in the realm of outer, sensual form. But in the creations of the German poets, the deeper insight recognizes the intuitions of the great mystical age of Germany. The mystical life of the past now takes on a completely aesthetic, artistic character.

This is clearly expressed in the writing in which Schiller reached the full height of his world view, in his [letters “On the Aesthetic Education of Man”]. The dogmatist of occultism will perhaps find nothing in these “letters” either but the spirited speculations of a fine artistic mind. In reality, however, they are dominated by the endeavour to give instructions for a different state of consciousness than the ordinary one. A stage on the way to the “higher self” is to be described. The state of consciousness Schiller describes is indeed far removed from the life of experience of the astral or devachanic, but it does represent something higher than our everyday life. And if we approach it with an open mind, we can very well recognize in what can be called the 'aesthetic state', according to Schiller, a preliminary stage of those higher forms of intuition. Schiller wants to lead man beyond the standpoint of the 'lower self'. This lower self is characterized by two qualities. Firstly, it is necessarily dependent on the influences of the sensual world. Secondly, it is subject to the demands of logical and moral necessity. It is thus unfree in two directions. The sensual world rules in its drives, instincts, perceptions, passions, and so on. In his thinking and in his morality, the necessity of reason prevails. But only the person who has ennobled his feelings, drives, desires, wishes, etc., so that only the spiritual is expressed in them, and who, on the other hand, has so completely absorbed the necessity of reason within himself that it is the expression of his own being, is free in the sense of Schiller. A life led in this way can also be described as one in which a harmonious balance has been established between the “lower and higher self”. Man has so ennobled his desire nature that it is the embodiment of his “higher self”. Schiller sets this high ideal in these “Letters”; and he finds that in artistic creation and in pure aesthetic devotion to a work of art, an approach to this ideal takes place. Thus, for him, life in art becomes a genuine means of educating the human being in the development of his “higher self”. For him, the true work of art is a perfect harmony of spirit and sensuality, of higher life and outer form. The sensual is only a means of expression; but the spiritual only becomes a work of art when it has found its expression entirely in the sensual. Thus, the creative artist lives in the spirit; but he lives in it in a completely sensual way; through him, everything spiritual becomes perceptible through the senses. And the person who immerses himself aesthetically perceives through his external senses; but what he perceives is completely spiritualized sensuality. So one is dealing with a harmony between spirit and sensuality; the sensual appears ennobled by the spirit; the spiritual has come to revelation to the point of sensual vividness. Schiller would also like to make this “aesthetic state” the model for social coexistence. He regards as unfree a social relationship in which people base their mutual relationships only on the desires of the lower self, of egoism. But a state in which mere legislation of reason is called upon to rein in the lower instincts and passions also seems no less unfree to him. As an ideal, he presents a social constitution within which the individual feels the “higher self” of the whole to be so strong that he acts “selflessly” out of his innermost urge. The “individual ego” should come to the point where it becomes the expression of the “total ego”. Schiller perceives social action that is driven by such impulses as the action of “beautiful souls”; and such “beautiful souls”, which bring the spirit of the “higher self” to revelation in their everyday nature: for Schiller, they are also the truly “free souls”. He wants to lead humanity to “truth” through beauty and art. One of his core statements is: “Only through the dawn of the beautiful does man penetrate into the realm of knowledge.”

Thus, from Schiller's view of the world, art is assigned a high educational mission in the evolutionary process of humanity. One can say: What Schiller presents here is the mysticism of the older period of German intellectual life that has become aesthetic and artistic.

It might now appear that it is not easy to build a bridge from Schiller's aestheticism to another personality of the same time, but who is no less to be understood as coming from an occult undercurrent, to Johann Gottlieb Fichte. On superficial examination, Fichte will be seen as a mere speculative mind, as an intellectual thinker. Now it is true that thought is his domain and that anyone seeking spiritual heights above the world of thought will not find them with Fichte. Those who want a description of “higher worlds” will look for them in vain with him. Fichte has no experience of an astral or mental world. According to the content of his philosophy, he is concerned only with ideas that belong to the physical world. But the matter presents itself quite differently when one looks at his treatment of the world of thoughts. This treatment is by no means a merely speculative one. Rather, it is one that corresponds completely to occult experience. Fichte considers only thoughts that relate to the physical world; but he considers them as an occultist would. It is for this reason that he himself is thoroughly conscious of living in higher worlds. We have only to refer to his lectures in Berlin in 1813, where he says: “Imagine a world of the blind-born, who know only those things and their relations that exist through the sense of touch. Stand among them and speak to them of colors and the other qualities that are only present through light for those who can see. Either you speak to them of nothing, and that is fortunate if they say so; for in this way you will soon notice the error and, if you are unable to open their eyes, stop the futile talking. Or they want to give your teaching a reason for some reason: so they can only understand it from what they know through touch: they will want to feel the light and the colors and the other relationships of visibility, feel that they are feeling, and lie to themselves about something they call color. Then they misunderstand, distort, and misinterpret it.” At another time, Fichte states directly that for him his contemplation of the world is not merely a speculation about that which the ordinary senses give, but that a higher sense, one that reaches beyond them, is necessary for it: ”The new sense is is the sense for the spirit; for which there is only spirit and absolutely nothing else, and to which even the other, the given existence, takes on the form of the spirit and is transformed into it, to which therefore existence in its own form has in fact disappeared... It has been seen with this sense ever since man has existed, and all that is great and excellent in the world, and which alone makes humanity endure, comes from the visions of this sense. But that this sense should have seen itself, and in its difference and contrast to the other ordinary sense, was not the case. The impressions of the two senses merged, life disintegrated into these two halves without a unifying bond.” These last words are extremely characteristic of Fichte's place in the world of intellectual life. It is indeed true of the merely external (exoteric) philosophical striving of the West that the sense of which Fichte speaks “did not see itself”. In all mystical currents of intellectual life that are based on occult experience and esoteric contemplation, it is clearly mentioned; but its deeper basis was, as has already been explained, unknown in Fichte's time for the prevailing literary and scholarly discussion. For the means of expression of German philosophy at that time, Fichte was indeed the scout and discoverer of this higher meaning. That is why he took something quite different as the starting point of his thinking than other philosophers. As a teacher, he demanded of his students, and as a writer, of his readers, that they should, above all, perform an inner act of the soul. He did not want to impart knowledge of anything outside themselves, but rather he called on them to perform an inner action. And through this inner action they should ignite the true light of self-awareness within themselves. Like most philosophers of his time, he started from Kant's philosophy. Therefore, he expressed himself in the form of Kant's terminology, just as Schiller did in his mature years. But in terms of the height of inner, spiritual life, he surpassed Kant's philosophy very far, just like Schiller. If one attempts to translate Fichte's demands on his readers and listeners from the difficult philosophical language into a more popular form, it might go something like this. Every thing and every fact perceived by a person imposes its existence on that person. It is there without any action on the part of the person, at least as far as their innermost being is concerned. The table, the flower, the dog, a luminous apparition and so on are there through something foreign to man; and it is only for him to establish the existence that has come about without him. For Fichte, the situation is different for the “I” of man. The “I” is only there to the extent that it attains being through its own activity. Therefore, the sentence “I am” means something completely different than any other sentence. Fichte demanded that one become aware of this self-creation as the starting point for any spiritual contemplation of the world. In every other realization, man can only be receptive; in the “I” he must be the creator. And he can only perceive his “I” by looking at himself as the creator of this “I”. Thus Fichte demands a completely different way of looking at the “I” than at all other things. And he is as strict as possible in this demand. He says, “Most people would be more easily persuaded to consider themselves a piece of lava in the moon than an ego... Anyone who is not yet at peace with himself on this point does not understand fundamental philosophy, and does not need it. Nature, of which he is a machine, will guide him in all his affairs without any effort on his part.” To philosophize requires independence: and this one can only give oneself. We should not want to see without an eye; [but should] also not claim that the eye sees.

This very sharply defines the boundary where ordinary experience ends and the occult begins. Ordinary perception and experience extend as far as the human being's objective perception organs are built in. Occultism begins where man begins to build higher organs of perception for himself through the dormant powers within him. Within ordinary experience, man can only feel like a creature. When he begins to feel like the creator of his being, he enters the realm of so-called occult life. The way Fichte characterizes the “I am” is entirely in line with occultism. Even if he remains in the realm of pure thought, his contemplation is not mere speculation, but true inner experience. But for this very reason, it is also so easy to confuse his world view with mere speculation. Those who are driven by curiosity into the higher worlds will not find what they are looking for by delving into Fichte's philosophy. But for those who want to work on themselves, to discover the abilities slumbering in their souls, Fichte can be a good guide. He will realize that what matters is not the content of his teachings or dogmas, but the power that grows in the soul when one devotedly follows Fichte's lines of thought. One would compare this thinker to the prophet who did not enter the promised land himself, but led his people to a summit from which they could see its glories. Fichte leads thought to the summit from which entry into the land of occultism can be made. And the preparation that one acquires through him is as pure as can be imagined. For it completely transcends the realm of sense perception and the realm of that which originates from the nature of human desire and covetousness (from the human being's astral body). Through Fichte, one learns to live and move in the very pure element of thought. One retains nothing of the physical world in the soul except what has been implanted from higher regions, namely thoughts. And these form a better bridge to spiritual experiences than the training of other psychic abilities. For thought is the same everywhere, whether it occurs in the physical, astral or mental world. Only its content is different in each of these worlds. And the supersensible worlds remain hidden from man only as long as he cannot completely remove sensual content from his thoughts. If the thought becomes free of sensuality, then only one step remains to be taken and the supersensible world can be entered.

The contemplation of one's own self in Fichte's sense is so significant because, in relation to this “self”, man remains without any thought content at all if he does not give himself such a content from within. For all the rest of the world's content, for all perception, feeling, will and so on, which make up the content of ordinary existence, the outer world fills man. He needs - according to Fichte's words - basically nothing but the “machine of nature”, which “manages its business without his intervention”. But the “I” remains empty, no outside world fills it with content, if it does not come from within. The realization “I am” can therefore never be anything other than the human being's most intimate inner experience. So there is something speaking in this sentence within the soul that can only speak from within. But this apparently quite empty affirmation of one's own self is how all higher occult experiences take place. They become more meaningful and full of life, but they retain the same form. Through the ego experience as presented by Fichte, one can get to know the type of all occult experiences, initially in the purely intellectual realm. It is therefore correct to say that with the “I am” God begins to speak in man. And just because this happens in a purely mental form, so many people do not want to recognize it.

Now, however, a limit to knowledge had to be reached precisely by the keenest minds that followed in the footsteps of Fichte. Pure thinking is namely only an activity of the personality, not of the individuality, which passes through the various personalities in recurring reincarnations. The laws of even the highest logic never change, even if in the stages of re-embodiments the human individuality ascends to the stage of the highest sage. The spiritual perception increases, the perceptive faculty expands when an individuality that was highly developed in one incarnation is re-embodied, but the logic of thought remains the same even for a higher level of consciousness. Therefore, that which goes beyond the individual incarnation can never be grasped by any thought-experience, no matter how refined, even if it rises to the highest levels. This is the reason why Fichte's way of looking at things, and also that of his contemporaries who followed in his footsteps, could not bring them to a realization of the laws of reincarnation and karma. Although various indications can be found in the works of the thinkers of this epoch, they arise more out of a general feeling than out of a necessary organic connection with their thought-structures. It may be said that the mission of these personalities in the history of thought was to present pure thought experiences as they can take place within an incarnation, excluding everything that reaches beyond this one embodiment of the human being.

The evolution of the human spirit proceeds in such a way that in certain epochs portions of the esoteric original wisdom are transferred into the consciousness of the people. And at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century it fell to the German national consciousness to shape the spiritual life of pure thought in its relation to the individual personal existence. If we consider what has already been said in connection with Schiller's personality, that art at this time was to be brought to the center of spiritual life, then we will find the emphasis on the personal point of view all the more understandable. Art is, after all, the living out of the spirit in sensual-physical forms. But the perception of these forms is conditioned by the organization of the individual personality living within the one incarnation. What extends beyond the personality into the supersensible realm will no longer be able to find immediate expression in art. Art does cast its reflection into the supersensible realm, but this reflection is only carried over as the fruit of artistic creation and experience by the abiding essence of the soul from one reincarnation to another. That which enters into existence directly as art and aesthetic experience is bound to the personality.

Therefore, in the case of a personality of the marked epoch, a theosophical world view in the most eminent sense also has a thoroughly personal character. This is the case with Friedrich von Hardenberg, who as a poet bears the name Novalis. He was born in 1772 and died as early as 1801. What lived in this soul, which was entirely imbued with a theosophical attitude, is present in some of his poetry and in a series of poetic-philosophical fragments. This attitude flows from every page of his creations to the reader; but everything is so that the highest spirituality is coupled with an immediate sensual passion, with very personal drives and instincts. A truly Pythagorean way of thinking lives in this young man's nature, which was further nourished by the fact that Novalis worked his way up to become a mining engineer by undergoing thorough mathematical and scientific training. The way in which the human mind develops the laws of pure mathematics out of itself, without the help of any kind of sensory perception, became for him the model for all supersensible knowledge in general. Just as the world is harmoniously structured according to the mathematical laws that the soul finds within itself, so he thought this could be applied to all the ideas underlying the world. That is why man's relationship to mathematics took on an almost devotional, religious character for him. Sayings such as the following reveal the peculiarly Pythagorean nature of his disposition: “True mathematics is the actual element of the magician... The highest life is mathematics... The true mathematician is an enthusiast per se. Without enthusiasm, there is no mathematics. The life of the gods is mathematics. All divine messengers must be mathematicians. Pure mathematics is religion. One can only attain mathematics through a theophany. Mathematicians are the only happy people. The mathematician knows everything. He could do it even if he didn't know it. ... In the East, true mathematics is at home. In Europe, it has degenerated into mere technique. He who does not grasp a mathematical book with devotion and read it like the word of God does not understand it. ... Miracles, as unnatural facts, are amathematical, but there is no miracle in this sense, and what is called that is precisely understandable through mathematics, because there is nothing miraculous about mathematics."

In such sayings, Novalis has in mind not merely a glorification of the science of numbers and spatial dimensions, but the realization that all inner soul experiences should relate to the cosmos as the purely sensual-free mathematical construction of the mind relates to the outer numerical and spatially ordered harmony of the world. This is beautifully expressed when he says: “Mankind is the higher meaning of our planet, the nerve that connects this limb with the upper world, the eye that looks up to heaven.” The identity of the human ego with the fundamental essence of the objective world is the leitmotif in all of Novalis's work. Among his “Fragments” is the saying: “Among people, one must seek God. In human affairs, in human thoughts and feelings, the spirit of heaven reveals itself most brightly.” And he expresses the unity of the ‘higher self’ in all of humanity in the following way: ”In the I, in the point of freedom, we are all in fact completely identical – only from there does each individual separate. I is the absolute total place, the central point.” At Noyalis, Noyalis's position is particularly evident, which was dictated by his awareness of art and artistic feeling at the time. For him, art is something through which man rises above his narrowly defined “lower self” and connects with the creative forces of the world. In the creative artistic imagination, he sees a reflection of the magical forces at work. Thus he can say: “The artist stands on man as the statue stands on the pedestal.” “Nature will be moral when, out of true love for art, it surrenders to art and does what art wills; art, when, out of true love for nature, it lives for nature and works after nature. Both must do it at the same time, out of their own choice for their own sake and out of the other's choice for the sake of the other.... When our intelligence and our world are in harmony, then we are equal to God.” Novalis's lyrical poems, especially his ‘Hymns to the Night,’ are imbued with such sentiments, as are his unfinished novel ‘Heinrich von Ofterdingen’ and the little work ‘The Apprentices at Sais,’ which is rooted entirely in mystical thinking and feeling.

These few personalities show how German poetry and thought in that period were based on a theosophical-mystical undercurrent. The examples could be multiplied by numerous others. Therefore, it is not even possible to attempt to give a complete picture here, but only to characterize the basic note of this spiritual epoch with a few lines. It is not difficult to see that individual mystical and theosophical natures with a spiritual and intuitive mind found the theosophical basic ideas in their own way. Thus, theosophy shines out beautifully from the creations of some personalities of this epoch. Many could be cited where this is the case. Lorenz Oken could be mentioned, who founded a natural philosophy that on the one hand points back to Paracelsus and Jakob Böhme through its mystical spirit; on the other hand, through ingenious conceptions about evolution and the connection of living beings, it is a forerunner of the justified parts of Darwinism. Steffens could be cited, who sought reflections of a cosmic spiritual life in the processes of earth development; Eckartshausen (1752–1803) could be referred to, who sought to explain the abnormal phenomena of nature and soul life in a theosophical-mystical way ; Ennemoser (1787–1854) with his “History of Magic”, Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert with his works on dream phenomena and the hidden facts in nature; and the brilliant works of Justinus Kerner and Karl Gustav Carus are rooted in the same school of thought. Schelling moved more and more from pure Fichteanism to theosophy, and then, in his “Philosophy of Mythology” and “Philosophy of Revelation”, which were not published until after his death, traced the developmental history of the human spirit and the connection between religions back to their starting point in the mysteries. Hegel's philosophy should also be viewed in theosophical light, and then one would see how wrong the history of philosophy is in regarding this profound spiritual experience of the soul as mere speculation. All this would require a detailed work if it were to be treated exhaustively. Here, however, only a little-known personality is to be mentioned, who, in the focus of his mind, combined the rays of theosophical world-view and created a structure of ideas that in many respects completely coincides with the thoughts of theosophy that are being revived today. It is I. P. V. Troxler, who lived from 1780 to 1866 and whose works, in particular, the “Blicke in das Wesen des Menschen” (Glimpses into the essence of man), published in 1812, come into consideration. Troxler objects to the usual division of human nature into soul and body, which he finds misleading because it does not exhaust nature. He initially differentiates between four parts of the human being: spirit, higher soul, soul (which he considers the lower soul) and body. One need only see this classification in the right light to recognize how close it is to the one commonly found in theosophical books today. The body in his sense coincides completely with what is now called the physical body. The lower soul, or what he, in contrast to the body, calls the body, is nothing other than the so-called astral body. This is not just something that has been inserted into his world of thought, but he himself says that what is subjectively the lower soul should be characterized objectively by falling back on the term used by the ancient researchers, the astral body. “There is therefore,” he explains, ”necessarily something in man which the sages of ancient times foresaw and proclaimed as a σῶμα αστροιδες (Soma astroeides) [and ομραγιον σῶμα (Uranion soma)], or as a σχημα πνευματιχον ([scheme] pneumatikon) [sensed] and proclaimed, and what is the substrate of the middle sphere of life, the bond of immortal and mortal life.” Among the poets and philosophers who were Troxler's contemporaries, theosophy was alive as an undercurrent; but Troxler himself became keenly aware of this theosophy in the intellectual world around him and developed it in an original way. Thus, he himself comes upon much of what is found in the ancient wisdom teachings. It is all the more appealing to delve into his thought processes, since he does not directly build on old traditions, but rather creates something like an original theosophy out of the thinking and attitudes of his time.