The Rudolf Steiner Archive

When I spoke here last time, I tried to tell something from the Fifth Gospel about the life of Jesus of Nazareth from the age of twelve to the time of John the Baptist in the Jordan. When I related the significant experience that Jesus of Nazareth had at a pagan place of worship, I showed how reading in the Akasha Chronicle allows us to see Jesus of Nazareth at this pagan place of worship, how he is impressed by the demons surrounding the altar. I will only briefly recall how he then fell as if dead, how he was transported into another world in which he was able to perceive the divine-spiritual secrets of the ancient sacred mystery teachings of the pagans. For in this way he was able to absorb within himself a living idea of what paganism once was and of what it had become in his time.

I already mentioned that during this time – that is, in this other state of consciousness at a pagan altar, which we talked about last time – he heard something like the proclamation from the spiritual world of words that expressed, as it was expressed in the ancient sacred teachings of the pagan peoples, what can be considered the secret of man's connection with the material, with the sensual-physical world. So he heard, as it were, from the spiritual worlds that voice to which the old pagan prophets had access. And what he heard there may be described as a kind of Cosmic Lord's Prayer. It expresses how the destiny of the human soul must take shape through the fact that man is united with earthly matter from birth to death. This cosmic Lord's Prayer, the later inversion of which became the earthly Lord's Prayer, was first made audible by me at the laying of the foundation stone in Dornach. I shall read it here again, for these words contain the primal teaching of pagan mankind. As far as possible I shall attempt to render them into German:

Amen
Evil reigns
Witnesses of the dissolution of egoism
From the guilt of others' self-interest
Experienced in daily bread
In which heaven's will does not prevail
Because man has separated himself from your kingdom
and forgot your name
you fathers in the heavens.

This is approximately what Jesus of Nazareth heard during his wanderings in pagan regions as the secret of man on earth in the sense of the ancient holy teachings. These words express truly profound mysteries of the evolution of humanity. This momentous hearing entered into Jesus' soul when he was approaching his twenty-fourth year, and from that time on he knew something that had once come down from the spiritual world in the ancient times of human development, which seemed so great and powerful to him that he said to himself, especially after he had had the impression described last time at the ruined old pagan place of worship: Now people are no longer here on earth to understand all this.

That was how he had come to know paganism. We have seen how, in the three successive epochs of his youth, he came to know the deepest depths of Judaism, the deepest depths of paganism, and also the deepest depths of Essene Judaism. We have seen how these realizations were, step by step, the source of the deepest suffering for him. For all three realizations led him to say: They could be there if the conditions were present in humanity to receive them; but these conditions cannot be created now.

That was the result of this life of Jesus. Thus the Fifth Gospel shows us that Jesus could say to himself, before he had taken up the Christ in himself: There has been an evolution of mankind, but in such a way that people have acquired abilities that have obscured the other abilities of primeval times, so that people are now no longer able to receive the revelations of the spiritual world as they took place in primeval times for Jews and Gentiles. But he had also been told, through his connection with the Essenes, that just as the Essenes came to a reunion with the spiritual world, only a small group, not all of humanity, could come to such a reunion. So this path also seemed impossible to him. Poor, poor humanity – it went through his soul – if the voices of the old pagan prophets were to sound to you, you would no longer understand them. If the voices of the old Jewish prophets were to sound to you, you would no longer understand them. But you cannot ever want to strive for this as humanity; only a small group can strive for this, and they do so at the expense of the rest of humanity.

What I am telling you in a few dry words was a painful reality of the soul in his life. He felt infinite compassion for all of humanity, the compassion he had to feel in order to mature and to be able to receive the essence of Christ within himself.

But before this happened, Jesus of Nazareth had another important conversation with the personality we know as his foster or stepmother. We know that the mother of the Jesus of Nazareth who had received the individuality of Zarathustra when he was twelve years old, that is to say, the real mother of this Jesus of Nazareth, had died soon after this Jesus child had received Zarathustra, who was embodied in the other Jesus child, so that her soul had long since been in the spiritual world. We also know from earlier lectures in past years that the father of the other Jesus, the Solomonic Jesus, had died, and that the two families of the two Jesus boys had become one family in Nazareth, within which Jesus was with his brothers and sisters and with the Zarathustra mother. We know that the father of Jesus of Nazareth died when Jesus was about twenty-four years old, after he had returned from a major journey, and that Jesus of Nazareth then lived alone with his mother, his foster or stepmother. In general, it must be said that this foster or stepmother only slowly but surely acquired a deep understanding of the mind for all the profound experiences that Jesus of Nazareth went through. In the course of the years, these souls, those of Jesus of Nazareth and those of the foster or stepmother, grew into each other.

In the first period after his twelfth year, he was also alone with his experiences in his family home. The other siblings actually only saw in his soul, which had to cope with its deep, painful experiences, a soul that was heading towards a kind of state of madness. His mother, on the other hand, found it possible to gain more and more understanding for this soul. And so it came about that the Jesus of Nazareth, in his twenty-ninth or thirtieth year, was able to have an important conversation with this mother, a conversation that was actually of the deepest effect, as we shall see shortly.

This conversation contained, in a kind of retrospective, everything that Jesus of Nazareth had experienced since the age of twelve. The Akashic Records show us how this conversation went. At first, Jesus of Nazareth spoke of the experiences that had taken place between the ages of twelve and sixteen or eighteen, and how he had gradually experienced within himself during this time what had once been the ancient Hebrew teaching, the ancient teaching of the Hebrew prophets. He had not been able to experience it in his surroundings through anyone, just as he had not been able to experience those words through anyone in his surroundings, which he had presented to the amazement of the scribes in their midst on the well-known occasion. But inspirations always arose in his soul, which he knew came from the spiritual world. The Hebrew teaching arose in him in such a way that he knew himself as the owner of this old Hebrew teaching, but for which there were no ears in his time. He was alone with this teaching. That was his great sorrow, that he was alone with this teaching.

His mother had a lot to say when he said: Even if the voices of the old Hebrew prophets were to resound today, there would still be no people to understand those voices. His mother said that, for example, Hillel was there, a great teacher of the law, and that Jesus of Nazareth also appreciated who Hillel was and what he meant for Judaism. I do not need to tell you what significance this Hillel had. You will find it sufficiently honored in Jewish literature. Hillel was a reviver of the most beautiful virtues and teachings of ancient Judaism, as well as a personality who, through his own way, brought about a kind of renewal of this ancient Judaism. But this was not because Hillel was a scholar, but because, through his actions and, above all, his feelings, desires and wishes, and in the way he treated people, he expressed how real wisdom of every kind works in the human soul, transforming the soul. What was especially praised in Judaism, but no longer properly understood in those days, was patience in dealing with other people. This was rightly attributed to Hillel. He had also attained the opportunity to work among the Hebrews in a remarkable way. He came from Babylon, but from a family that had been transplanted there by the Jews at the time of the captivity, and which traced its origin back to the family of David himself. In this way he had united within himself what he had been able to absorb from Babylonianism with the Hebrewness pulsating in his blood. And how this took shape in his soul is told in a meaningful legend.

Once, so it is said, when Hillel had just arrived in Jerusalem, the most important other Jewish scholars were gathered for all sorts of discussions, in which one could hear how pro and contra were spoken about the secrets of Jewish teaching. One had to pay a small amount to be able to attend such discussions. Hillel had no money, for he was very poor. “Despite the cold, he tried to climb a small hill in front of the house where the discussions were taking place to listen through the window to what was being said. For he could not pay for his entrance. It was so cold that night that he became stiff with frost, so that he was found stiff later that morning and had to be warmed up again to thaw. But by having gone through this experience, his etheric body had taken part in the whole discussion. And while the others themselves heard nothing but the abstract words that flew back and forth, Hillel had seen a world of wonderful visions that transformed his soul.

There were many more such events to tell. In particular, his patience was praised. This patience, it was said, was inexhaustible. And once, so it is even said, someone made a bet to exhaust Hillel's patience to the utmost, so that Hillel would become angry. The bet was on, and the one who wanted to make Hillel angry, that is, exhaust his patience, had the task of doing so. And he did the following. He went there when Hillel was preparing for what he had to teach on the Sabbath and was in his negligee, knocked on the door and shouted: 'Hillel, Hillel, come out! — Hillel asked: What is it? Oh, Hillel, come out, I have an important question for you! 'Hillel put on his robe, went out and said, “My son, what is it you want to ask me?” — So the person who had made the bet said to him, “Hillel, I have an important question for you. Why do some people among the Babylonians have such pointed heads? And Hillel replied: My dear son, you know that the Babylonians have such bad midwives, and so they are born under such unfavorable circumstances. That is why some people there have such pointed heads. Now go, your question has been answered. And Hillel went back into the house and prepared himself further for the Sabbath.

But after a short time, the same man came back and shouted as before: Hillel, Hillel, come out! – Hillel replied: What is it? – Oh, Hillel, I have an important question that needs to be answered immediately. – And Hillel came out again and said to the questioner: What is the question? — And the questioner replied: Oh, Hillel, please tell me why there are so many people in Arabia with eyes that are so narrow? — Hillel replied: In Arabia, the desert is so vast that you can only survive there if your eyes are adapted to the desert. That is why so many people in Arabia have squinted eyes. Now go, my son, for your important question has been answered. And Hillel went back into the house.

But it was not long before the man came back for the third time, again shouting: “Hillel, Hillel, come out! What is it? – Hillel, come out, I have an important question that needs to be answered immediately! – Hillel went out, and the man said: Oh, Hillel, please answer my question: Why do some people near Egypt have such flat feet? – And Hillel replied: My dear son, they have such flat feet because they live in marshy areas. They need feet as flat as those of some birds that live in swampy areas, and their feet have to be adapted to their environment. That is why they have such flat feet. Now go, my son, your question has been answered. — And he went back inside.

But after a few minutes the same man came back, knocked on the house again, but he had become sadder with every question, and he called out, even sadder than before: Hillel, come out! - And when Hillel came, he said: Oh, Hillel, I bet that I can make you angry. Now I have tried it three times with my questions. Tell me, O Hillel, what I must do so that I do not lose my bet!” But Hillel replied, ‘My son, it is better that you lose your bet than that Hillel should become angry. Now go and pay your bet!’

This is an example that is supposed to show the degree of patience that Hillel had achieved at that time in the eyes or opinion of his Jewish fellow residents. The impact of this man was also felt by Jesus of Nazareth. But he not only knew what Hillel had done, but he himself had heard in his soul the great Bath-Kol, that is, the voice from heaven, where the secrets, as they once resounded to the prophets, had risen to him in the depths of his soul from the divine-spiritual world. And he knew that even Hillel was only a very faint echo of what the ancestors of the Hebrews had once been ready for. But now the descendants of the ancient Hebrews were not even ready for the faint echo that sounded in Hillel's voice, much less for the great Bath-Kol.

All this weighed on his soul, and he shared it with his mother. He told her what he had suffered, how he realized more and more from week to week what the ancient sacred teachings of Judaism were, and how the descendants of the ancient Hebrews no longer had ears to hear what the words of the great prophets once were. And now his mother understood him, so that a deep understanding of his feelings and mind met his words.

And then he told of the event that happened to him after he had reached the age of eighteen and had gone out into Jewish and pagan areas. He told his mother how he had come to a pagan place of worship during his travels, but how the priests had fled. For a virulent disease had broken out among the population that could infect anyone. And when he came, he was seen, and like wildfire it spread that a very special person was coming. For it was peculiar to him that he, by his very appearance, as Jesus of Nazareth, made a special impression wherever he went. So the people of that area, whose greatest sorrow was that the pagan priests had abandoned them and their altar was no longer served, believed that a sacrificial priest was coming in Jesus of Nazareth who would perform their sacrifices again. They gathered in large numbers around the dilapidated altar. Jesus of Nazareth did not have the will to perform their sacrificial cult. But he saw the deeper reasons why those people suffered. He saw what could be expressed as follows:

At such sacrificial altars, legitimate sacrifices were once offered that were the outward expression of the ancient mystery revelations of those pagan regions. The mystery revelations were expressed in the cultic acts. And when such cultic acts were performed in ancient holy times – he now knew this through direct insight – and were performed with the right attitude by the priests, then the divine spiritual beings with whom the pagan people were connected took part. But little by little these sacrificial acts had declined, had degenerated, had become corrupted. The priests were no longer endowed with the right attitudes, and so it had come about that instead of the good old divine beings, demons ruled at such a place of worship. And it is in these demons that the reason lies why the population had to suffer. These demons now saw Jesus of Nazareth gathered together. They challenged his clairvoyant gaze, as it were, and he fell down, as if dead. And when he fell, the people realized that he had not come to perform the sacrifices at their altar again. They fled, and in that moment he saw the whole transition of the old pagan world of gods into the world of demons and recognized that these were the reasons for the suffering of this people.

But he was now also transported to those pagan times when the real revelations of the ancient holy teachings came down to people. He heard on this occasion what I read as the Cosmic Lord's Prayer. Now he knew how far removed the present, and also his present, humanity was from the old teachings and revelations, both in paganism and in Judaism. Only he had acquired what he had to learn about Judaism through the voice of the great Bath-Kol. Paganism, on the other hand, had revealed itself to him in a terrible vision. It had a completely different effect than an abstract message; it transformed his soul. So he knew that now there were no longer any ears to understand what once sounded for Judaism in the voices of the prophets, but also for the other, which once sounded for ancient paganism, now there were no longer any ears to understand it.

He now told his mother all this in moving words. Then he also told of his fellowship with the Essenes, especially what would have been difficult for him to understand if his mother had not already shown him such an understanding of mind: that he once saw Lucifer and Ahriman fleeing from the gates when he left an Essene meeting. He knew that the methods of the Essenes were impossible for the masses of people. It was indeed possible to achieve union with the divine spiritual world by means of these methods, but only by repelling Lucifer and Ahriman. Yet by doing this, Lucifer and Ahriman had all the more opportunity to flee to other people and push them further into the entanglements of earthly existence, so that they could not participate in the union with the spiritual world. Through this experience, then, Jesus of Nazareth knew: the Essene way cannot become a general human way either, because it is only possible for a small group of people. — That was a third painful realization in addition to the other two.

He told it in a very special way. Not only did his words go out to his mother, but the words flowed to his mother's heart like living beings. When the deep meaning of these words – the meaning steeped in suffering, but also in the deepest human love – flowed into her soul, the mother felt as if her soul was inwardly strengthened, as if it was being enlivened by a power coming from him and undergoing an inner transformation. That was how the mother felt. It is really as if everything that lived in the soul of Jesus of Nazareth had passed into the soul of the mother during this conversation. And it was the same for him. For here, looking into the Akasha Chronicle, something remarkable and mysterious reveals itself to us.

Jesus of Nazareth told his story in such a way that his words, as they escaped him and passed into the heart and soul of his mother, always took a piece of his own self with them. One could say: on the wings of his words, his own self went over to his mother, but without his actual self passing into the mother, who only felt animated by these words. For the remarkable thing happened now that through the effect of this conversation the soul of that mother, who was the physical mother of the Nathanic Jesus, came down from the spiritual world and connected with the soul of the stepmother or foster mother, so that from that conversation on in the soul of the stepmother or foster mother at the same time the soul of the real mother of the Nathanic Jesus lived. The soul of the stepmother or foster mother had received the soul of that other mother. What took place here was a kind of rebirth of virginity. This transformation, this penetration of the mother's soul with another soul from the spiritual worlds, makes a deeply, deeply moving impression when observed, when one sees how the stepmother or foster mother now continues to walk around only as a shell of the mother who spent the time from Jesus' twelfth to thirtieth year in the spiritual world.

There was now something in Jesus himself, as if he had given his ego to his mother, as if only his physical body, etheric body and astral body were living in him, as if governed by cosmic laws. And an inner urge arose in this threefold physicality of Jesus of Nazareth to go to the one whom he had met in the Essene community, who, like him, was not really an Essene but had been accepted into the Essene community, to go to John the Baptist. And then, as we know from the four other Gospels, during the baptism, the Christ-being descended into the body of Jesus of Nazareth, who had placed his I, with all its suffering and its entire being, into the conversation that had passed into the soul of his mother. This threefold body took on the Christ-being, which has often been described to you and which now lives in these three bodies in place of that other ego. And now this Fifth Gospel, which can be gained from the Akasha Chronicle, also speaks to us of the temptation that followed the conception of the Christ-being. Only this time, the Akasha Chronicle shows that the temptation arises in a different spirit. Again, I will try to tell what happens and how the scene of temptation unfolds.

So now we can say that Christ Jesus first faced Lucifer. And Lucifer actually asks the question, through that process, which the spiritual researcher can fully understand, and also in that form, which the spiritual researcher can understand. The question, which is reported in the other gospels, is a question of temptation that should speak particularly to pride: All the kingdoms you see around you – and Lucifer meant the vast realms of the astral world – shall be yours if you acknowledge me as your lord!

This question, posed at the right moment, at least to a human being, expresses the deepest temptation, for all the forces and impulses of pride and self-importance are released in the soul. Of course, it is not easy to imagine this if one only thinks of the astral world in abstract terms. But if one is in it, then the effect of the forces of this astral world, in which Lucifer speaks, on the whole constitution of man is so effective that all demons of pride are released in him with the same necessity as one becomes hungry if one has not eaten anything for four to five days. One cannot speak there in the harmless way of the physical plane: One should not let oneself be blinded by pride. — That is all very well for the physical plane, but it is no longer of the same value when the whole astral world assails the constitution of man. But the Christ Jesus withstood the temptation of Lucifer. This entity could not fall prey to pride. He rejected Lucifer.

I would like to make a small interjection here. It is generally easy to mix up the order when reading the Akashic Records. I believe that the order of the so-called temptation is as I believe it to be correct. However, it could be that it is reversed. I do not believe this, but I could not say that a later verification might not show the reverse order. Therefore, I would like to make it quite clear that I am telling you nothing other than what really happens in these communications from the Akasha Chronicle. Therefore, where there is uncertainty, I point out that a correction could be possible later.

So after the first Luciferic attack had been repulsed, Lucifer and Ahriman now appeared united. United, they posed the question to Christ Jesus of throwing oneself down deep into the abyss. This was a question posed to pride. This question was to be posed to pride, to the feeling of superiority over all fear, in a special way. Christ Jesus rejected the question. He could not be tempted by an appeal to his pride, which in this case meant his feeling superior to fear. Lucifer now had to give way, to let go of him.

Ahriman remained behind, and he asked the third question, which again in the Fifth Gospel corresponds to the question in the other Gospels, the question regarding the stones becoming bread. If the Christ really had the power, he should make the stones become bread. And behold: this question remained unanswered. Christ Jesus was not quite able to answer this question to Ahriman, and Ahriman did not leave completely defeated. This is certainly shown to us by the Akashic Records consideration of this matter. And Christ Jesus knew: with regard to Ahriman, there remains a remnant that cannot be overcome by such an inner spiritual process, but to which other things are still necessary.

I would like to try to explain this in a perhaps trivial way. But this will make it easier for us to understand what it is about. Ahriman is actually the lord of the world of material laws. When the Munich lectures of this year are printed, the whole world of Ahriman will be even more clearly understood. Ahriman is the lord of material laws, those laws which can only be spiritualized after the entire evolution of the earth has taken place, those laws that remain active, that remain effective. Ahriman is the rightful lord of material laws. If he did not abuse this dominion, did not extend it to something else, he would be a necessary being within the evolution of the earth. But what is written in the Cosmic Lord's Prayer applies: “Self-debt incurred by others, experienced in daily bread, in which heaven's will does not prevail.” It is true that man in his life on earth is bound to material laws, and that he cannot achieve the direct spiritualization of what comes from material laws by a mere inner, soul process, but that something external is necessary for this. Everything that is related to rich and poor is connected with this question. Everything that draws us into a social order so that we are under the yoke of laws that we can only spiritualize in the overall course of the development of the earth belongs in this category. And connected with this — as I said, I have to say something trivial, but the triviality is not meant that way — is that the social order is gradually dominated by what can be called money, the domination of money, which makes it impossible to live directly in spiritual laws. Everyone understands what is meant by such a thing. But because of the impossibility of making “stones into bread”, the impossibility of having the spiritual in matter directly, independently of the material, because of this impossibility and its mirror image, the domination of money, Ahriman has the domination. For socially, Ahriman also lives in money.

The question that remained unanswered for Ahriman had to lead to the ideal that the Christ Jesus would now pour out into the evolution of the earth and gradually work in the whole further evolution of the earth. This could not be settled merely on a soul level. The whole of the following evolution of the earth had to be permeated by Christ! The Christ had to merge with the evolution of the earth. Ahriman had the power to impose the necessity on the Christ to really connect with the earth. Therefore, he later imposed Judas, and through Judas he had the medium to really lead the Christ to his death. And through death, the Christ-being passed over into the earth-being. What Judas did was the question of Ahriman, which was not fully answered. The Lucifer temptation could be inwardly resolved by the soul. Every soul must resolve the Lucifer temptation within itself. Ahriman's nature is such that he will be overcome in the entire subsequent historical development of humanity, as people increasingly permeate and identify with the Christ-being.

One is indeed looking at a deep secret of historical development after the mystery of Golgotha when one considers this third question, which Ahriman did not fully answer, in the Akasha Chronicle. Everything lies therein. And the Christ now knew that He must completely unite with the earthly body, that He must truly become completely human.

This becoming human was now the source of further, three-year suffering. Because not immediately - so the observation of the Fifth Gospel in the Akasha Chronicle tells us - did the Christ-being become completely one with the three bodies of Jesus of Nazareth. In the beginning, when we see Christ Jesus walking on earth, we can see that the three bodies are indeed permeated by the Christ-being, but that this Christ-being is not completely within them, as another ego is within a person. For it is possible, and has taken place countless times, that the physical body of this Christ Jesus was somewhere or other, staying somewhere in solitude or with other people, but the Christ was far away, walking around the country as a spiritual being. Not always, when the Christ appeared here or there, appeared to one or the other apostle, was this spiritual being then present in the physical body of Christ Jesus. Even then He appeared in a spiritual body that was so strong that He was always felt to be a physical presence. According to the Fifth Gospel, what is spoken of as the disciples' being with Christ is not always a being in the physical body, but often only the visionary way of being together, rising to the level of physical presence.

This is the peculiar thing, that in the beginning there was indeed only something like a loose togetherness between the Christ and the body of Jesus of Nazareth. But this became more and more dense. More and more the Christ-Being had to sink into and unite with the bodies of Jesus of Nazareth. But only towards the end of the three years did the Christ-Being and the bodies of Jesus of Nazareth become, so to speak, one unit, but only completely at the death on the cross, immediately before the death on the cross. But this uniting with the human body was a gradual, ever-increasing suffering. The all-embracing, universal spiritual being of Christ could only unite with the body of Jesus of Nazareth through unspeakable suffering. This suffering lasted for another three years.

When you see this, you really don't become sentimental, because the impression you get from the spiritual world has nothing to do with sentimentality. There is hardly any other impression that can be compared to the suffering of the Christ-being becoming one with the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth. And one learns to recognize what a God had to suffer so that aging humanity could experience a new rejuvenation, so that man could become capable of completely taking possession of his ego.

This development was such that when individual disciples had already gathered around Christ Jesus, Christ Jesus was occasionally united with the disciples in the physical body, but as a spiritual being, of course, invisible to all except those with physical eyesight, so that only the disciples knew about him through the way he had united them with him, knew him among them.

But the Akashic research of the Fifth Gospel now reveals something very peculiar. Especially in the first period of the three years, Christ Jesus spoke very little. He worked. And he worked through his mere presence. I will come back to this later. Due to the special way in which the Christ-being was connected with the body of Jesus of Nazareth, effects emanated from him to other people that were otherwise not there in the development of the earth, and whose reflection is called a “miracle” with a very inappropriate or poorly understood word today. Such effects emanated from him through the composition of the being. More about this next time. But what I want to say now is something very peculiar.

You see the crowd of disciples walking around, and with some impressions you have the distinct feeling: Now the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth is also among the disciples. This is especially the case when Christ Jesus walks among his disciples in solitude. But often one also has the impression that the physical personality of Jesus of Nazareth is far away, but the disciples are aware that they are walking around and among them is the Christ Being. But it can speak through each of the disciples, alternately through one or the other. And while one or the other speaks, the whole physiognomy of the speaker is changed for the listeners from the people, as if hallowed, everything is different. One is always transfigured among them, and another always in the last days. The rumor had spread through the most diverse circumstances: there is someone who is stirring up the people, who is spreading something that the leading Jews of the time did not want. But no one knew who it was. It spoke once from this, once from that. Therefore, the Akasha Chronicle tells us, the betrayal of Judas was necessary.

I myself must confess: the question of why Judas' betrayal was necessary, why it is seriously necessary that someone who could know from among the disciples, through the Judas kiss as if pointing to them with his fingers: “This is the one!”, that actually always seemed a strange message, until I knew that it was really impossible to know which of them it was, because he could speak through anyone; so that even if he was among them in the flesh, you could not recognize it by the body. For each one could be mistaken for him, depending on whether he spoke through one or the other. And each one spoke! It was only when one who knew, when the Christ Jesus was really in the body among them, told the Jews: This is he! — only then could he be seized.

It was truly a phenomenon of a very special kind that took place at that time in the center of gravity, in the center of the evolution of the earth. I have spoken on various occasions, more theoretically, about how humanity experiences a descent and an ascent, how this Christ impulse once took hold within humanity, and at its center of gravity. There we get, so to speak, the impression of the essential significance of the Christ impulse for the evolution of the earth. We get the impression by characterizing the matter in such a way that we see what this impulse is for the development of the earth as a whole. I do not believe that if we now present, piece by piece, purely narrating, how the things present themselves to the eye, that the events, presented purely narrating, would make a lesser impression on our minds. I do not believe that anything of the significance attributed to the Christ impulse will be diminished when we see what Jesus of Nazareth experienced when Zarathustra was in his , how he grew with his suffering and all the goodwill that flowed from that suffering, so that the Zarathustra ego was bound to the words it spoke to the mother and left itself in these words. |

When we then learn how the Christ-being has sunk into this Jesus-being, which had become so free from itself through the conversation with the mother, how this Christ-being struggled with Ahriman and Lucifer, and how all that followed developed out of these sufferings, when we set forth these details, I believe they are in the fullest sense a confirmation of what results from spiritual research in broad lines. And as difficult as it is to speak unreservedly of these things, especially in the present, it must be considered a real obligation to give individual souls whatever will be more and more necessary for the development of souls towards the future. Therefore, I ask once again to accept and preserve these things with reverence.

We will now continue with the interpretations that we have linked to the Wrangell brochure “Science and Theosophy”. We left off at the chapter “Essence of Jesus' Teaching”, according to which the essence of Jesus' teaching is said to consist of “the raw message that the creator and ruler of the universe, to the human being whom he created in his image, is a loving Father, that love for God and fellow man is the highest moral commandment, that the soul of man is immortal and that after death a fate is prepared for it which corresponds to the moral behavior of man during his life.

We had to point out that it is indeed possible to describe the teaching of Jesus in this way, but that the essence of Christianity in the spiritual-scientific sense is not captured if one does not become aware of the facts that are present in the appearance of the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth and in the Mystery of Golgotha, which must be understood by anyone who gradually wants to find their way into the essence of Christianity. These facts belong to the essence of Christianity. As I have often said, Christianity is not just a doctrine, but encompasses a reality. To understand this reality, which can be expressed as the “mystery of Golgotha”, is part of understanding the essence of Christianity.

Then attention is drawn to the fact that the various religions have caused a conflict between faith and science: “The obvious aberrations into which the organized Christian communities, the historical churches, have fallen, have brought their dogmas into opposition to some firmly established scientific achievements, thereby causing the conflict between faith and knowledge, religion and science, which has been corroding the spiritual life of European culture. This situation explains the interest that has turned to other religious systems that claim not only to be in harmony with science, but to expand it. Among these teachings, Theosophy deserves special attention. Since H.P. Blavatsky drew the attention of European culture to this teaching, which originated in India, it has found various representations.

From the spiritual scientific point of view, it must be pointed out in particular that what spiritual science is for modern humanity must not be described as a doctrine originating in India, but that it has formed purely out of itself, out of the impulses of the present cycle of development. And when outsiders repeatedly point out a relationship between our spiritual science and Indian teachings, it is only because the concept of repeated earthly lives is so foreign to the Occident that everyone who hears about repeated earthly lives immediately thinks of India, because there this teaching has become a dogma within religious beliefs. It is important to emphasize again and again that our spiritual-scientific content is built up out of the needs of the counterweight itself and is not a doctrine that comes from here or there, but is to be grasped and understood out of itself.

Finally, it must also be said with regard to Blavatsky that she was initially quite independent of any orientalizing cultural trend with her teachings, as expressed in the “Entschleierte Isis”, for example; that what she wrote in the early days belongs entirely to European intellectual culture. It was only through various complications that Blavatsky felt more and more drawn to the Indian. As a result, she imposed a kind of Indian vignette on the current that originated with her and swore by her, which in turn must be removed because it would be impossible to accomplish even the slightest thing in modern culture with any old religious system. This is extraordinarily important and remains so for our consideration of the particularly interesting chapter in our brochure in which the theosophical teachings are summarized. The chapter is entitled: “The Nature of the Theosophical Teachings.” Here Mr. von Wrangell does not describe what spiritual science is as such, but rather what he has found in the literature of the various world views that call themselves theosophical. I will read this chapter and then we will link our considerations to it. So:

The Nature of the Theosophical Teachings

The most essential assumptions common to the various presentations and conceptions of Theosophy can be expressed as follows.

1. There are other spiritual worlds besides the one perceptible to our five senses, with each higher world having an effect on the lower ones.

2. There are people who have other means of perception in addition to the usual five senses, so-called “occult senses”.

3. Thoughts, feelings, impulses of will, in short, what we call “spiritual phenomena” in human experience, are - even if they have not expressed themselves in the sense world as words or deeds - living entities capable of producing effects in the spiritual worlds and indirectly in the sense world.

4. The soul life of every human being leaves imperishable traces in the higher worlds, which in their totality are called the “Akasha Chronicle” by secret researchers and can be investigated by some qualified people (initiates).

5. The living human being is not a simple being consisting of the living body, but the physical body is only the tool by which the actual essence of the human being, his indestructible “I”, can enter into a relationship with the physical world. These relationships are mediated by intermediate links: firstly, the “etheric body”, which is the carrier of unconscious, vegetative life and forms the material substances of the body according to its own laws; secondly, the “astral body”, carrier of desires, passions, instincts.

6. The human “ego”, the seat of self-awareness, is endowed with freedom, i.e. it can guide its desires, impulses, thoughts, etc., setting them a goal and direction.

7. Depending on whether the ego utilizes the external possibilities offered to it in life in accordance with the eternal laws and the purpose of the world as a whole, or neglects to do so, it shapes its “karma,” i.e., the measure of satisfaction or torment due to it in the world as a whole.

8. After physical death, the immortal “I” of man passes through various spiritual worlds, carrying with it the sum of the eternal values that it has gained in earthly life. After a period of time that is different for each individual, the “ego” begins the return journey from the higher worlds to the lower ones, enriched by the insights gained in those worlds, and begins a new life on earth through re-embodiment, which takes shape according to its karma and the aspirations of its changed “ego”.

9. World affairs are regulated in accordance with the purpose of the whole by spiritual beings who intervene in events either favorably or unfavorably, according to their nature or volitional direction.

10. These beings are hierarchically structured according to their sphere of activity and power and, like everything in the world, are subject to evolution from lower to higher levels.

11. The supreme law of all world events is “free sacrifice out of love”. The Godhead, following this law, sacrificed Itself through manifestation in the outer world by endowing the spiritual beings that originated from It with the ability of free impulses of will. The Cosmos, brought into being through this act, is left to its own development.

12. This development leads through eons from unconscious to conscious comprehension of the supreme law of the world and through realization of it to the reunification of the individual with the whole.

We will now go through the individual points. In point 1, it says: “There are other spiritual worlds besides the one perceivable by our five senses, and each higher world has an effect on the lower ones.” We can agree with this. Under 2. it says: there are so-called occult senses. - I already said yesterday that it is necessary to emphasize that spiritual science stands on the standpoint that through special treatment of ordinary abilities, spiritual perceptual abilities can also be developed in man, and that in today's cycle of development, these methodically developed abilities are of primary importance. One can also find such abilities in man that still come from earlier times. They can be awakened, since they are present in almost every person, but they must be developed in the way described in “How to Know Higher Worlds”. It is therefore not good to say it as Mr. von Wrangell says, but one should say: It is possible that man, just as he develops his five senses through prenatal development and continues to develop them in extra-maternal existence, he also develops inner powers in the purely spiritual; develops abilities to see purely spiritual worlds. Such abilities are conscious transformations of older abilities, which were appropriate for earlier epochs on earth, and which awaken in every person already by themselves, either through external influence or during systematic training through the methods described in “How to Know Higher Worlds”. The expression “occult senses” should be avoided, because one cannot say that a person acquires occult senses, but rather that it is a completely different way of perceiving. What organizes what are called lotus flowers should not be called senses, but at most sensory faculty.

In point 3, it says: “Thoughts, feelings, volitional impulses, in short, what we call ‘spiritual phenomena’ in human experience, are - even if they have not expressed themselves in the sense world as words or deeds - living entities capable of effect in the spiritual worlds and indirectly in the sense world.” Now, this has often been described in great detail, especially recently, when I described the transition from the perception of thoughts to the experience of living thoughts. And it would be even better if one were to say: That which appears in man as thoughts, feelings and impulses of will is, as it appears to man in the soul, the image of entities of the higher worlds, the elemental world and the still higher worlds, so that we actually have the true reality in what we initially have as thoughts, feelings and impulses of will, in the same way that one has the true reality in sensory perceptions. It lies behind the one as well as behind the other.

The 4th point is: «The soul life of every human being leaves imperishable traces in the higher worlds, which in their totality are called the 'Akasha Chronicle' by secret researchers and can be explored by some qualified people (initiates).» This has often been described, and it is of particular importance to take into account the fact that when one enters the Akasha world, one enters a living world and not a world of dead images.

Then, in point 5, it is pointed out that a person consists of different aspects of his being. You know this much better than it is stated here.

Regarding point 6, about freedom, we have often said that people are led towards freedom on their path, that people become more and more free.

Point 7 is about karma, which you also know very well.

Point 8 is: “After physical death, the immortal ‘I’ of man passes through various spiritual worlds, carrying with it the sum of the eternal values that it has gained in earthly life. After a period of time that is different for each individual, the “I” begins the return journey from the higher worlds to the lower ones, enriched by the insights gained in those worlds, and, through re-embodiment, begins a new life on earth, which takes shape according to its karma and the aspirations of its changed “I”. — You can experience to a certain extent what is said about this in the lecture cycle “The Inner Nature of Man and Life between Death and a New Birth”.

Point 9: “World affairs are governed, in accordance with the purpose of the whole, by spiritual beings who intervene in events in a promoting or inhibiting way, depending on their nature and volitional direction.” — You are familiar with this too.

Point 10 reads: “These entities are hierarchically structured according to their sphere of activity and power and, like everything in the world, are subject to development from lower to higher levels.” — It is not good when everything is generalized again in this way. The idea of development also has a limited validity. I have often said that it is necessary to form new thoughts when ascending into the higher worlds. Thus, one can say that when ascending into the higher worlds, one first penetrates regions in which time still plays a role; but then one comes to regions that can be described as regions of duration. In these, time no longer plays a role. One can only speak of the fact that the law of development applies only as a symbolic, as I have done in my “Secret Science”.

Point 11 reads: “The highest law of all world happenings is ‘free sacrifice out of love’. The Godhead, following this law, has sacrificed Itself through manifestation in the outer world by endowing the spiritual entities that originated from It with the faculty of free will impulses. The Cosmos, brought into being through this act, is left to its own development.

Now Mr. von Wrangell tries to recapitulate and characterize the points mentioned, saying:

All secret researchers in European culture agree on these basic teachings: H.P. Blavatsky, Mrs. A. Besant, Leadbeater, Dr. Hartmann, Dr. R. Steiner, among others. The same teachings are also said to apply in the Indian secret schools from which H.P. Blavatsky took them.

But here we now know that spiritual science – as it presents itself in its purity to the world, little by little – must not be mixed with other things, for it can truly fulfill its mission only if it takes into account the essentials of Western culture and therefore also of Western science. But this cannot be said of such personalities as the late Dr. Franz Hartmann. Nor has the form which Theosophy has taken under the leadership of Mrs. Besant or even under Leadbeater anything to do with Western culture, as it is now making its self-evident cultural demands.

And here I may well refer those who, as seekers, are beginning to develop a certain interest in our spiritual science and attach great importance to our spiritual science breaking away from what otherwise often prevails in the world as Theosophy, to a very nice and dear article written by Dr. Rittelmeyer in the journal “Christianity and Contemporary Life”. The reason I mention this article is not that Dr. Rittelmeyer says a few things about me in it. Those who know me better are aware that I am not mentioning this for that reason, but because the article speaks of our work with a certain loving understanding and characterizes it with loving attention to one side or the other. It seems important to me to highlight one passage from this article, which I received this morning:

It is therefore important for those who, from within Western culture, are interested in what spiritual science seeks to be, that we do not want to reheat ancient Indian teachings, but that we want to create something out of the spiritual world that is suitable for our own time cycle.

Perhaps I may still refer you to the article. I can do so with reservation; because after the many things that are said about our movement and my writings, something can be said that does not complain, but responds with some understanding. The article is in issue 10 of the journal “Christianity and Contemporary Life” from October 1915, which is published in Nuremberg, Ebnergasse 10, bookstore of the Association for Inner Mission. As I said, do not misunderstand this reference when you read the article. But since I have said that it would be good to get to know the ideas that connect the outside spiritual life with us, it might interest you if something were to appear that does the opposite of what usually happens with our movement. The article is called: “Two Buildings of the German Future (Dornach and Elmau).” Elmau was founded by Dr. Müller. In this article, particular attention is paid to the differences between the Dornach and Elmau buildings. Perhaps I may read this passage. There is another passage I am not allowed to read because it mentions me too much; but perhaps I may read the following:

What Rittelmeyer is saying here is that those of us at Elmau want to keep the old ways alive, while we here want to create something new. We can be quite satisfied with that. It is very gratifying that there are some people who have an understanding of the spiritual science movement, while it is so denigrated in such an unpleasant way by those who do not want to educate themselves about it.

Now Mr. von Wrangell continues:

The occult abilities, similar to the sensory abilities in the earthly life of man, are said to be of very different degrees. The highest degree of initiation that can be attained at present enables a person, in an awakened state and in full possession of his mental faculties, to go with his ego at will into higher spiritual worlds, even into that world where the Akasha Chronicle provides information about the past of the whole world and of every single human being.

So on the whole, one can very much agree with the presentation. It is only necessary to know what our spiritual scientific movement wants in particular and to keep this clearly in mind. It is indeed necessary not to be confused with others who also deal with the spiritual worlds, but who mix everything together and speak of a deepening into the divine and so on. It is important to keep this clearly in mind.

This is followed by the chapter:

Secret teachings

The results of the knowledge gained by the secret researcher were previously only communicated in secret schools, but are now partially revealed in writings and lectures accessible to everyone. These communications naturally bear the stamp of the personality of the secret researcher in form and content. Since they are based on occult perceptions, their truth can only be independently verified by people who possess the same degree of occult gifts and the same power of judgment. For from the perceptions gained in the spiritual world, judgments must first be drawn and these conclusions must be translated into the language of the earthly sense world in order to be able to communicate them to fellow human beings.

On the other hand, it should be noted that although the content of the spiritual worlds can only be explored in the presence of the abilities that have been mentioned, anyone can actually check what has been explored. This is because the world that everyone can observe is, in a sense, a reflection of the spiritual world, which can be seen through the ability of spiritual perception. And if someone just looks at the world around them with truly open eyes and asks themselves: Does what the secret researcher has discovered in the world of spiritual reality correspond to what happens in life, then they can judge everything without developing occult abilities. It is not because one cannot judge when one says that one must “trust” the researcher of secrets, but because one does not want to engage in a test. What is said about spiritual science proves itself in life and in the world, and everyone can test it. He who says he cannot test is basically saying: I do not want to get involved in whether spiritual teachings can be tested in life and in the world; I do not want to get involved in this alert observation, I want to sleep with my intellect and my judgment. And because people like to sleep with their intellect and their judgment, that is why they say: You cannot test.

But again and again I would like to impress upon the world, so to speak, that it is important that spiritual science is not accepted on authority, but can be tested by what happens in the sensual world. Just because science still observes sensually, it does not engage in a spiritually alert contemplation of life. Therefore, one does not see the correctness of what the spiritual researcher says. And that is why I try not to rely on an authority, not to claim a belief, but I try again and again, through this or that in external science, in philosophical directions of striving, to show how people stand before the spiritual world and just do not want to admit to themselves that they should go further. One need not rely on authority, but only have open eyes, then the striving in spiritual science proves to be a genuine and necessary one in our time.

On the other hand, one must be clear about the fact that much of what is called spiritual science is likely to bar the mind of man from the real spiritual world. This is the case with world views that otherwise mean well, for example Eucken's. But it blinds people by speaking of spirit in words, words, words, that describe nothing other than what the physical soul reflection gives. Therefore, one need not be unjust. You will see that in my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” I have shown that what is said about people like Eucken cannot be called unjust. But one must also know that the wrong spiritual science obscures the view of the right one. It is infinitely more convenient to speak of the spiritual in Eucken's way than to concern oneself with the real spiritual that can be investigated.

The next chapter:

Difference between sense science and spiritual science

In this respect they differ essentially from the truths that can be gained by means of the ordinary senses, for here the testing of the facts can be undertaken by countless people and the logical chain of these is subject to the judgment of each one. In the case of occult knowledge, the most important criterion for the credibility of the communications of a secret researcher is the moral value of his personality.

— Not that is the important thing, but the important thing is that he stands on the ground of true spiritual striving, that he endeavors to lead people into the spiritual world in the right way. If one sees the paths that lead into ordinary science and can thus imagine the possibility of how it is to be passed on, then one gets a basis that is not met with the objection that one simply believes the spiritual researcher as a decent human being.

If there are reasons to doubt his truthfulness, then his occult communications are of course of little value.

- It would be as if, when someone has achieved something in ordinary science, we were to make our personal approval of his research dependent on his personality.

If you have no confidence in his judgment in ordinary life, it is highly unlikely that he should prove it under the infinitely difficult conditions, for example, of researching the Akasha Chronicle.

— One can indeed investigate whether what has been discovered from the Akasha Chronicle is in line with life.

But even with unusual occult gifts, with the highest development of the intellect, with the full impartiality of the researcher, it is not likely that people who are never infallible in earthly things should be so in unearthly ones.

- One should not speak of infallibility at all, but only of the fact that the spiritual researcher presents things from a certain point of view. But that has basically nothing to do with the way we relate to the secret researcher's messages.

One is therefore compelled to confront the secret investigator's communications with much sharper criticism than is required of any witness of earthly perceptions.

— So do not confront it with rejection or criticism. Most of what is achieved is rejection or criticism; if one were to reject 72:7 criticism, so much rejection would not come out.

A more or less reliable sense of probability must guide the inner agreement of the various messages, but above all, trust in the person of the secret researcher.

- So we must not have false ideas about this trust. On the other hand, what comes next is particularly important:

If his communications from those worlds, inaccessible to most people, contradict what has been proven by means of sensory perception, then no unbiased person will hesitate as to which communication deserves preference. If, for example, I really know all the facts that speak for the earth rotating freely in space, and a secret researcher tells me that he has learned from occult perceptions that the earth does not rotate, but that the fixed stars move around the earth, a person of sound mind will pay no attention to such occult research.

— Thus, occult science must agree with external science; and if it does not agree, it must indicate why and try to come into line with science.

Of course, such a contradiction can only refer to facts of the sensory world, and not to transcendental questions that lie beyond all sensory experience.

Nevertheless, even transcendental questions can be considered.

Thus, to cite another example, an astronomer who considers the Kant-Laplace hypothesis about the origin of the solar system to be probable cannot tell the secret researcher, who communicates a completely different cosmogony, as in the first case, that his assertion is erroneous, because the rotation of the Earth is considered proven by every healthy person, whereas the formation of the solar system from a nebula, according to the Kant-Laplace hypothesis, can be considered probable, but not proven.

— Mr. von Wrangell is quite right. I have always pointed out the inadequacy of the Kant-Laplace hypothesis that the world formed out of a primeval nebula, which is demonstrated to children in school by the well-known experiment. You pour a drop of oil on water, pierce it with a needle to which a piece of a map is attached, turn it, move this needle and then see how the individual drops split off. If you forget yourself, you have the process of the formation of a world system. But when you do this experiment, you have to point out that the teacher is there, turning the pin, because otherwise you also forget the teacher, the great one who turns the world system.

It is therefore, and this is my deepest conviction, in a dispute between really proven facts of the sensory world and the results of occult research, that victory will always remain on the side of science.

— There will be no victory, but when the facts of sensory science have been reliably researched and on the other hand the facts of spiritual science have been reliably researched, they will agree.

When some occultists express the view that there is nothing certain in earthly science, this is only possible for those who are only familiar with sciences at second hand, but not with the foundations in question.

However, the leading Theosophists in Europe at the time, Mrs. A. Besant, Dr. R. Steiner and others, claim that there is no contradiction between their occult research and the certain results of earthly science, and Dr. Steiner in particular is well qualified to judge about the methods of the exact sciences through his extensive and thorough knowledge of them. Whether the secret researcher is mistaken in detail may be left open, and in my opinion it is not of great importance, because if such a contradiction were proven, it seems to me that the question of whether the basic teachings of Theosophy correspond to the truth or not is not affected. All these teachings relate to spheres that lie beyond sense experience and can therefore be neither confirmed nor refuted by science, which is based exclusively on sense perceptions.

This is important because it shows that anyone who professes to be a scientist comes to the conclusion that a spiritual world view is necessary on the basis of his scientific convictions, and that one is necessarily led to it if one is a scientific person in our time.

The next chapter is headed:

Theosophy – a religion

The theosophical teachings claim to provide information about the purpose and goal of the world as a whole and of the individual human life, and thus to be a religious worldview.

My dear friends, it is necessary that we realize that the actual spiritual science, our spiritual scientific movement, really has nothing to do with religion, that it does not want to be a religious movement. Let us be clear about the fact that in relation to religious life, spiritual science can give nothing other than an inner relationship of the human soul with Christ. That is the religious moment, that is the religious element, but that is Christianity. The humanities recognize that Christianity is the fulfillment of the religious striving of humanity, that new religions will neither take place nor be able to take place. One should get to know the spiritual facts and for that, the humanities is a new instrument, but does not want to found a new religion. It does not want to set itself up as a new movement alongside Christianity, but only presents the research, just as Copernicus made his discovery.

But how was it in those days? In the 15th century, Copernicus came and gave what he had to give, but the Catholic Church did not allow people to believe in the Copernican doctrine until 1822. And Luther said: “The new astrologer, Copernicus, wants to prove that the earth moves and not the sky, the sun and the moon.” Now think how long it took before Copernicus was recognized. When people come along and say that it is a fantasy to teach repeated lives on earth, that is understandable, but it is not for us to teach people as if it were a matter of founding a new religion. Christianity is the synthesis, the confluence of world religions. Through spiritual science, we want to learn to understand Christian truths better than we can understand them without spiritual science. But we do not want to leave it in our heads that we are dealing with a new religion, with a new religious worldview, in theosophy. Spiritual science must defend itself against this. It wants to be science and thereby also deepen religious life. But religious life is also deepened by Copernicanism. In the nineties, the Catholic theologian Müllner, whom I mentioned when reciting Delle Grazie's poems, said about Galilei: “The one who is truly Christian and understands the religious relationship of the human soul to the divine worlds can only experience a deepening of religious life by exploring the world more closely, and not a threat.

It must be emphasized again and again that it is a weakness to resist what is brought by spiritual science in terms of deepening the religious. Imagine if someone had told Kolurmbus: not discover America, because there might be other people, other gods. Imagine what a weakness it would be not to stand so firmly on the ground of Christianity as to be able to say: Whatever will be discovered, the ground of Christianity is so strong that it will hold firm! Therefore, it is nothing but proof of the weakness of those who say that we must reject spiritual science. To them we must say: It is not Christianity if you believe that your teachings could be overthrown by spiritual science. Copernicus did not overthrow either, on the contrary, religious life was deepened by him. It is weak and timid cowardice that imposes the fight from the external, official, so-called Christian point of view, against what spiritual science wants.

This is the point of view we must take against those who come to us with their feeble, timid objections to Theosophy.

[The chapter “Theosophy - a Religion” is read to the end:] It seems doubtful whether any solution to the world riddle can fully satisfy the critically educated person of the present day in terms of its intellectual justification. It will always be a matter of how far the mind and soul of the person are satisfied by the solution to the great eternal questions that presents itself to him. Since it is not possible to prove this intellectually, the feeling for the greater or lesser probability of one or the other solution must also be taken into account.

We want to compare some of the world views as they present themselves to the educated person of European culture from this point of view.

In the following chapters, Wrangell compares materialism, agnosticism, and occultism with each other, and then has a chapter on re-embodiment and karma. He then comes to Lessing's view of reincarnation and a recapitulation of the whole train of thought. There is no longer enough time to discuss the final chapters. We will therefore continue the discussion tomorrow at seven o'clock, because we still have a few important things to say about the final chapters.

In our examination of the Wrangell brochure on “Science and Theosophy”, we have tried to consider various ideas that show how someone who wants to stand firmly on the ground of modern science is nevertheless pushed towards the recognition of knowledge of spiritual life. And as you have seen, we have fewer objections to Wrangell's pamphlet than the fact that we have only had additions to make in the sense of spiritual science. So in this pamphlet there is, as it seems at first, a subjective judgment about how the path of the modern scientist to spiritual science is, how, in other words, one can be a modern scientist and still find the path to spiritual science.

It is important to consider this train of thought, because it seems to me to be absolutely necessary that those who stand on the ground of spiritual science clearly recognize that the objections of so-called scientists are not at all really scientific, but come from the fact that today one can be an excellent scientist who knows how to use materialistic scientific methods quite well in some field of science and can be a complete amateur in all other world-view questions.

Now today, so to speak, in continuation of the thoughts developed on the basis of the brochure, I would like to develop some other thoughts that are important for us. I would like to show how the present development of humanity has reached a point that should suggest to the insightful scientist, to the one who really takes science seriously and appreciates it, that he should engage in spiritual scientific study and not do it the way it has been done so far: to regard it as something to be rejected from the outset.

I have, as some of you may recall, in the context of the considerations related to the Wrangell brochure, in some respects actually sung the praises of the materialistic scientific method. I have said that it has produced great and significant results in recent times, that one need only gain a correct point of view in relation to this materialistic scientific method and one will appreciate it and not underestimate it. We will familiarize ourselves with its results, precisely if we necessarily intend to draw the threads between it and spiritual science.

Now, I would first like to start from a kind of scientific train of thought that can show us how the thinking scientist — precisely when he understands himself in the right way — should knock on the door of spiritual science. I would like to draw attention to a chapter of modern natural science that also has great significance in socio-ethical terms, but which cannot achieve this in a way that is satisfying for the human being until and unless natural science has found the path to spiritual science. I would like to discuss some of the lines of thought in so-called criminal anthropology.

One of the great researchers in criminal anthropology is Professor Dr. Moriz Benedikt, whom I have mentioned before. He was one of the first to examine the brains of criminals in a thoroughly modern and systematic way, by dissecting criminals, especially murderers who had been sentenced to death. The results were so surprising compared to many of the pre-existing theories that, at first, after the first few examinations, he thought he was dealing with a kind of scientific adventure and not at all with something on the trail of the truth. When he examined the brains of criminals, then, those familiar with the configuration and structure of the normal human brain would always see very specific internal structures with very specific characteristics that differ from the structure of the brain of a person who is not a criminal. And so that we don't go too far afield, I will stick to the main feature.

It was found that a certain part of the human brain, called the occipital lobe, which covers the cerebellum, is too small in the case of criminals, so that it only covers the cerebellum sparsely or not at all, whereas it would otherwise cover it completely.

Now imagine dissecting the brain of a criminal and finding that this criminal brain differs from a normal brain in that the occipital lobe does not completely cover the cerebellum. Then you have to come to the conclusion that If you are born in such a way that you cannot possibly develop the occipital lobe to such an extent that it covers the cerebellum, then no matter what you do in life, you will become a criminal and consequently you cannot help it. And if you now examine ape brains, the same peculiarity can be seen: the occipital lobe does not completely cover the cerebellum. So you have to say: In the various developmental stages on the way from ape to man, it should also be noted that man has progressed beyond the ape's development and has become a more perfect being because his occipital lobe has grown and completely covers the cerebellum. This means that when a person becomes a criminal, he falls back into the ape's organization. In the criminal, then, we have to do with an outspoken atavism. This means nothing other than that there are individuals among human beings who, in the structure of their brains, have atavistically reverted to the ape-like image. These atavistic individuals become criminals.

Now think of the ethical and social consequences of such a view and then you will know what it means to have to accept these facts under the auspices of the current materialistic world view – I do not mean the prevailing natural science. For the facts are there and only a fool could deny them. So anyone who allows themselves to be guided by the materialistic worldview is confronted with the challenge: just look at the brains of criminals and you will see that the structure of the brain regresses to that of an ape. So you can clearly see how what is revealed in man in terms of morality is simply a consequence of the material organization of the physical. There you see it quite clearly. The man who had this brain had become a criminal precisely because he had this brain. With the same necessity with which the clockwork serves us, if it is working properly, to catch the ten o'clock train, while a clockwork that is not working properly, which perhaps only shows seven o'clock, makes us late for the train, with the same necessity a brain that has not fully developed the occipital lobe indicates a criminal person who is retarded. Since you would certainly not be able to bring yourself to fantasize a demon into the clock that drives the hands around, you will also not be able to bring yourself to dream the demon “soul” into the brain. |

To resist the proven results of criminal anthropological investigations of criminal brains so readily is to pursue an ostrich-like policy in science, to simply refuse to reckon with those things that have been absolutely researched.

Now, as you know, there is still a philosophy besides materialistic science. But if you look at this philosophy, perhaps especially at those who are often counted among its most important representatives today, you will find that this philosophy is completely powerless in the face of materialistic methods. The concepts that philosophers arrive at either boil down to, as I showed you with Otto Liebmann, who is a very astute person and who says that one cannot get beyond certain points, that one cannot cross certain boundaries. I gave you the example of the chicken egg. Or take the philosophy of Rudolf Eucken in Jena, and you can see how they talk around it and dress up the words nicely, but how the concepts that are developed cannot approach the materialistic methods. They are like the actions of someone who is standing on one bank of a river and is making every possible effort to get to the other bank, but cannot get there.¹ Over there is the materialistic scientific method, but he cannot get over to it; therefore, philosophizing remains just beating about the bush.

What is actually going on here? Well, let us go back to something we have known for a long time; let us go back to the division of the human being into physical body, etheric body, astral body and I. Let us start with this roughest classification, as it has presented itself to us in the course of our spiritual scientific investigations, and ask ourselves: What happens when we look at something external and sensual – and a criminal mind is also something external and sensual – what happens then? The external sensuality acts on our sense organs. These are in the physical body. That is where sensual perception comes about. Nobody denies this. We would be fools if we, as spiritual scientists, were to deny it. It would be foolishness if we did not concern ourselves with the results I have cited from criminal anthropology. We cannot deny their validity either, for they prove conclusively that the criminal has the brain of an ape and the normal human being no longer has this ape-like brain. So when we philosophize, as today's philosophers do, what are we doing? In which regions of the human being do we then move? Then we move in the sphere of the I. Today, all philosophical concepts are there. And you will see that even those who are most astute in their philosophy today are all swimming in the region of the I, as it were. You can find scientific proof of this in the introductory chapter of my Rätsel der Philosophie (Puzzles of Philosophy), where I have shown how philosophy in our time tends to be essentially a swimming in the I. But between natural science and philosophy there is a wide distance, that is the river over which philosophy cannot cross, that is, the philosophical concepts are on one side - inwardly in man - and all sensual perceptions are outside, on the other side.

I once had a clear, if only symptomatic, insight into the abyss between philosophy and scientific perception – but I ask you to bear in mind that this is only meant to be symptomatic – when the sixtieth birthday of Ernst Haeckel was celebrated. I took part in the celebration in Jena. Various people spoke there, supporters of Haeckel and so on. Now it was interesting for me to see what would happen if Haeckel's philosophical colleagues, among whom was Dr. Rudolf Eucken, would propose a so-called toast during the lunch, as is so common, because then one could somehow see how the representatives of philosophy of a university relate to the representatives of natural science and sensory perception. The toast – proposed by Eucken – had the following content; I will only give the main idea. Eucken said something like: at a birthday party like today's, it is customary to say what particularly characterizes the birthday child. Now, I have tried to think of what could particularly characterize our birthday child, but I have not found anything special in my own thinking. So I asked the daughter of our guest of honor and she told me that it is one of the characteristic peculiarities of our guest of honor that he cannot manage his tie, for example, when he wants to turn it down. - In this tone the toast continued.

Now, as I said, what the representatives of philosophy at a university had to say about the representative of sensual, scientific perceptions was symptomatic of what I encountered. It is really symptomatic, because there is no real bridge between today's philosophy and science, because the concepts of philosophers are very thin and the sensual facts that science brings to light are beyond their reach. You cannot cross over with philosophical concepts.

Now I have already drawn your attention to the fact that there is a possibility of bringing the facts of natural science into play, of really bringing them into play. This possibility consists in really engaging with the spirit of Goethe's scientific observations. Just remember that I explained to you how Goethe came to regard the skull bones, despite their quite different external form from the vertebrae, as transformed spinal vertebrae. I called your attention to this theory of transformation when I told you that our boiler house is only a transformation of our main building, in that it is enlarged on the one hand and stunted on the other. I also pointed out to you in another lecture that when one ascends from ordinary concepts to spiritual-scientific concepts, one has to set the concepts in motion. I recommended reading Goethe's poems about the metamorphosis of plants and animals. There you will see how mobile the concepts are, and how he has shaped all of this.

If you take what I have said on various occasions and combine it with what we need to be guided by today, then you will say to yourself: If I take the sensory perceptions directly, they are more limited, but if I move on to the Goethean worldview, then such a vertebral bone appears to me to be more elastic, softer, so that it gradually becomes part of the skull. I look into the creative nature. I see how, for example, the individual skull bones in fish are very similar to the dorsal vertebrae, and how the transition to humans occurs by developing the dorsal vertebrae into skull bones... *

You can only follow this mentally, however; you cannot see it with your senses. If you wanted to see it with your senses, you would have to observe for thousands, millions of years, how one passes into the other. So you have to spiritualize the observation, the sensory perception.

You see, Goethe instinctively did this spiritualization of sensory perception correctly. I have often referred to the momentous conversation between him and Schiller when they once walked out of the Natural History Society in Jena after a lecture by the botanist Batsch. Schiller said that he had found everything only side by side in Batsch's lecture. Goethe then drew his archetype, which one gets when one moves from one plant form to another. Schiller said: “But that is not a perception, that is an idea.” Goethe replied: “Then I have my ideas before my eyes.” He was aware that he not only saw the individual transformations, but that he saw a plant in all its parts. This is based on the fact that Goethe instinctively observed everything not only with his physical senses, but by immediately capturing physical perception in the observation of the etheric body. That is, Goethe takes the metamorphosing perception - and this is a continually moving perception - into his view of nature. As a result, the whole sensory world comes into motion for him. The particular is then only a special expression of a very general one, but not of a general one as abstract philosophers make it, but of a general one that winds its way through the individual sensory perceptions. There you see a raising of sensory perception into the imaginative that arises in man when one does not disdain to add his etheric body to sensory perception.

You will not understand what Goethe wrote about animals and plants if you do not consider that he included the etheric body. Now you have already pushed it a little higher. We would have done something if we had pushed the philosophical concepts over here as well, so that they could approach [the perceptions] (...).²

Now take what we have often considered over the years. It is part of the first step of “How to Know Higher Worlds”: that one can raise physical, objective perception to a higher level, to imaginative perception. But do you remember the characteristic that I have given over and over again - in countless places in our cycles it says - what this imaginative view consists of? It consists of the fact that the I works its way back into the etheric body. As long as one only forms objective concepts, as the philosopher also does - for the fact that he works in the spirit is only his megalomania - one does not get any further. One must pass from the objective to the imaginative, that is, as soon as life enters into the concepts, one passes from the mere ego back into the etheric body. One works the astral body into the spirit-self, that is, one can say that the philosophical concepts become imaginative concepts or ideas, if one can still apply the word “concept” there.

But now things have come together: the imaginative concepts are no longer separated from the metamorphosing perceptions by a gulf, but are immediately adjacent.

We will now see that while philosophy and sense perception are separated by a gulf and cannot come together because physical perception takes place in the physical body and the philosopher in the ego , here, however, [it was apparently drawn again] the imaginative concepts and the perceptions come together because the objective concept is in the physical body and the metamorphosed concepts are in the etheric body. So there is a deepening in both directions. On the one hand, we have to approach the world with the whole human being, and on the other hand, we have to deepen the concepts by bringing them to life, by transforming them into imagination.

Philosophers want to avoid this. They cannot engage with the concept of imagination, and natural scientists cannot engage with the metamorphosing perception. But spiritual science brings this about. Our entire spiritual science is precisely an answer to the question: How does the rational human being, living in his astral body, perceive the metamorphosing perceptions living in his etheric body? How does he think them? That is what is so important, that we really know that we bring the outer world closer to the inner world, that they approach each other, that we bring them together.

Now we can gain a ray of hope with regard to the reality of criminal anthropology. Of course, someone who is born with a occipital lobe that does not properly cover the cerebellum will have to walk around with such an ape-like occipital lobe for their whole life. But where does such an ape-like occipital lobe come from? From a spiritual science point of view, it arises as a result of the previous life, because what a person used to be in the past creates their physical development from the inside out. This is how they create the structure of their body and brain, and thus also of their occipital lobe. We can therefore say: If a person walks around with an atrophied occipital lobe, then in his previous life he did not gain enough strength to form the occipital lobe normally. This is not really a consolation, because there is always the possibility that such a person will become a criminal, because the occipital lobe cannot become enlarged. One could say that people are then divided into two parts: those who have a too small occipital lobe and who are born to be criminals, and those who have a fully developed occipital lobe and who do not become criminals. For the materialistic world view, there is hardly any error here. It will come to this conclusion. Theoretically, there is no other answer for spiritual science either, but since it knows that the physical body is not the only body, but also carries an etheric body within it, the situation changes for it. For if a person is born with an atrophied occipital lobe, that is, with an unfavorable disposition, then we can still educate this person properly. We can shape the education in such a way that we teach him the appropriate moral and ethical concepts. Although the physical body cannot be changed in the present incarnation, the etheric part of the occipital lobe can. It can be enlarged by what a person is taught through proper education. Thus, it is possible to help a person who, due to a previous incarnation, has a occipital lobe that is too short, by means of a suitable education. By educating such a person correctly, we make the etheric part of the occipital lobe larger and the person in question can thus be saved from becoming a criminal.

Now, given the fact that those who have become criminals have a too-short occipital lobe, one would also have to do the reverse experiment. One would have to dissect normal people and prove that they all had normally developed occipital lobes; and in doing so, one might discover that even in normally developed people, some have occipital lobes that are too small, but nevertheless have not become criminals, precisely because their etheric occipital lobes have grown larger through appropriate education.

Ethical education adds something to the etheric, not to the physical, constitution. However, education must be organized in such a way that it corresponds to spiritual laws. If you take what has been developed as an educational principle in the small publication “The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science”, you will find that the principles of development from seven to seven years have been followed. When one begins to grasp these laws and to implement them in appropriate measures, then one intervenes more deeply than with the purely rationalistic educational methods that have been common practice for a long time. One does not get any further with what has emerged as Froebelism. With all the educational methods that are practiced today, one only gets to the I. But as long as you only reach the I, you cannot do anything, the occipital lobe remains too small. But if you eavesdrop on the secrets of spiritual existence and turn them into educational measures, you will enter the etheric body. There you really normalize the etheric body, that is, with spiritual science you gain powerful concepts, concepts that really have power over the human being, that can change him. If you take the concepts that can be gained today - whether from observation of the world of sensory perception, or from abstract talk, which comes only from the ego - you will not get any educational principles or principles for social life that really have an effect on people. The concepts remain powerless. You can search through whole libraries - and enough has been written about education - but all of it is a will to rule out of the ego, whether you believe you are educating more theoretically or otherwise. As long as it is not eavesdropped on the secret of human nature and the spiritual principles of education and thereby made effective into the etheric body, as long as it remains powerless against what grows in the human being. As we approach the world with concepts that are becoming more powerful, we also approach what is becoming and growing in the world, so that we do not incorporate anything theoretical. If we go from philosophical to imaginative concepts, as spiritual science does, and if you go from sensory perception to metamorphosing perception, we approach our principles to the spiritual, and then we will gain appropriate measures and principles from spiritual science.

From what I have said, you can see how right and how necessary it is in our time - after centuries of development have pointed the world to mere sensory perception and thereby pushed it back to mere comprehension in the ego - how necessary it is to bring external perception and inner soul life closer together again, both for contemplation and for practical life. With spiritual science, we gain powerful concepts that intervene in life, concepts that really have something to do with life. Concepts such as those of Eucken's philosophy never intervene in real life. With spiritual science, we touch reality, we touch it where it is more real than sensory perception.

When we approach reality with our ordinary concepts and with ordinary sensory perception, we look at what is on the surface; we look with our sensory tools. For example, we look at the mountain with its plant world. And now there are two types of people: some look at the mountain with its plant world and forget themselves (Haeckel), while others look at nothing of the external world, but only talk in terms and stare into space; as a result, philosophy becomes empty (Eucken's philosophy). Spiritual science approaches reality with metamorphosing perception and thus looks at something that is not expressed on the surface, but at something that lies beneath. But even when it looks at the human being, it goes from the mere sensory perception of the physical sense organs back to the metamorphosing perception (etheric body) and from the mere philosophical concept to the imaginative conception and thus has something like an underground channel between the mere sensory perception (physical sense organs) and the mere philosophical concept (I). Now you will also understand that a bleak world view must arise if spiritual science does not take hold, because philosophy will naturally be completely powerless with its concepts in the face of the human being. Sensory perception cannot be denied; it will become less and less possible to deny it. So it is natural that the materialistic world view will say: What can you do about becoming a criminal? What can you do about having a short occipital lobe? Imagine what this must do to the concept of responsibility and to legal concepts! We must face up to this prospect. It is cowardly not to face it.

However, there is a way to go beyond this by working on the etheric body from within through appropriate good education, so that the etheric occipital lobe is developed. But this education must be an education of the heart and of love, as shown in the essay 'The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science'. When one realizes this, one says to oneself: Of course, a person with a short occipital lobe will walk around with the shortened occipital lobe his whole life and be tempted. But by developing the etheric occipital lobe, he will always be able to find the necessary balance. Spiritual science will thus become a great factor when those who only know the achievements of the materialistic world view knock at the door of spiritual science.

Secondly, I would like to show you another thing that can be taken from the life of the soul. Especially in our time, we have the opportunity to see that feelings, for example feelings of hatred, are spreading throughout entire communities. Now someone who still has a naive worldview, when asked why they hate, will of course not know exactly why something is hateful because they still have a naive worldview. They might say, “I hate because I find it hateful.” Now there is a psychological world view today that goes beyond this naivety, that knows more than that one hates something because it is hateful, just as the criminal anthropologist knows more than the person who believes that a person became a criminal because he was a bad guy and did not improve; because the criminal anthropologist knows that the person in question has a occipital lobe that is too small. And so it is also a naive judgment to say: I hate this or that because it is hateful. Now, there too, people have already risen to a correct judgment. If you take a closer look at human nature, you can see how the feelings that are developed in the soul belong to the soul's tools, to its living conditions. And if one does not look naively but with real observation of the facts at the world of the soul today, one comes to the conclusion that a certain amount of need to hate is stored up latently in man without it becoming visible. He must hate. And when so much hatred has accumulated that the barrel overflows, so to speak, he seeks an object for his power to hate. Now consider the way in which a person comes to a worldview. We endeavor to show how one can come to a spiritual-scientific worldview in an objective way. But one does not always come to a spiritual-scientific worldview, or even to a materialistic worldview, because of this, but because one is emotionally predisposed to it. What logically speaks for a worldview comes into consideration only in the second or even third place. Go, for example, to the meetings of the Communists or materialists and examine what they present to logically found their worldview, then you can see that it is not their logic but their feeling that is predestined. And so it is with the spiritual worldview. Perhaps you have the mystical worldview because it appeals to your feelings and does you more good than a materialistic worldview. The emotional and affective factor plays an enormous role here. It is the same with hatred of the outside world. When a person hates something, the psychologist will not ask: What is the object like? but rather: What is the person like? The need for hatred is in him and the object arises by itself. He must hate, as one must eat at certain times. This is a realization that contemporary psychology has already achieved.

I have in my hand a copy of the journal “Die Zukunft” from September 25, 1915. It contains an essay by Franz Blei entitled “Truths.” It discusses something like what I have done now. It then explains what Avenarius - Franz Blei is a student of Avenarius - has established in his empirical criticism. This is summarized in individual sentences and there you will find very beautifully expressed in these sentences what can already be understood today as the results of psychological research: “Pure feelings are to be assumed theoretically as preexisting feelings laden with ideational components and not experienceable. Practically, we know of no feeling that has no ideational component.” This sentence does not exactly concern what we need, so we do not want to dwell on it. It is not necessary for us to peel it apart, otherwise we would have to go into the concepts that were used. But another sentence may be more important for us, namely: “Pure ideas are to be assumed to preexist humanly conceived ideas and cannot be experienced purely. Practically, we know of no idea (thought, image) that has not already served as a component of a feeling.

So, when an idea arises in us, we must ask ourselves: what feeling has driven us to this idea? The idea arises in one person: the world can be broken down into atoms. What feeling drove him to this? In another, the idea arises: the world has a hierarchy, a ladder. - What feeling drove him to that? So the component of feeling is in it everywhere. And when someone hates, what feeling drives him to it? Blei says: “It is not ideas that evoke feelings, but pure feelings take possession of ideas that can satisfy those feelings.” For example: the Social Democrat hates the bourgeois. He hates him because he needs a quantity of hate and he turns that against the bourgeois. Or the anti-Semite needs hate and the Jew presents himself for the purpose. Franz Blei says in point 8: “It is not the truth of an idea in itself that decides whether it is accepted by people, but its affective content.”

So you see, he already knows that too! You don't become a materialistic monist because you see the truth, but because you are predestined by your feelings, and you don't become a spiritualist because it is true, but because you are predestined by your feelings.

The essay continues: “Ideas are accepted whose probability is zero, others together again and at the same time with those that are the opposite of the first. Think of the multiplicity of the ”Thou shalt not kill!” Here only the believer is allowed an objection, to which Hegel once gave the expression of the “cunning of the idea”, which uses our passions for its realization, in that people think they are working for themselves, while in reality they are doing it for the “world spirit. The Christian believer speaks of the inscrutability of God's ways.

The whole essay is therefore about the fact that it is not the ideas, the so-called truths, that take hold of people, but the emotional content.

Anyone who looks at the world today, at how it has gradually developed, will find this quite right and it is very significant that a school of philosophy like Avenarius' has come to realize that the social democrat hates the bourgeois not because he finds him hateful, but because he himself needs a certain amount of hate. So Avenarius' school of philosophy has already come to understand this today.

But let us consider what social consequences this has. Imagine for a moment – and one would say that this point of view, if one still has any real feelings at all, must become the very bitterest of soul-pills – that you seriously accept these things as truths. Then you will have to say to yourself: In this case, truth no longer decides anything, but emotions do. I am admitted to a worldview, but only because I do not know the truth. This leads to absolute desolation. There is no escape. Just as there is no escape in criminal anthropology from admitting that a short occipital lobe makes a criminal, so there is no escape from external psychology from the fact that people are driven by their affects to what they call truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche has attempted to express this most clearly, most significantly and most convincingly in the most diverse variants of his world view. All of Nietzscheanism is based on this. I have quoted the passage myself in my book “Friedrich Nietzsche, a fighter against his time”. The question there is: What is truth? And because Nietzsche did not accept the correctness of this sentence because of the truth, but rejected it because of the whole preparation of human subjectivity, Nietzsche wanted to put an end to fantasy [of the will to truth], that is, also to Christianity. Therefore, he wrote “Antichrist”, the next one was to be “The Immoralists” and the whole thing was then to be “The Will to Power”.

Desolation and absolute nihilism is what such schools of philosophy lead to, with their realization that those who are predisposed to believe that they can best relate to the world by adhering to matter, become materialists; and those who believe that they live through a dependence on the spiritual world become spiritualists out of their affect.

- Now, my dear friends, all you have to do is take one thing, you just have to open the last chapter of “Theosophy”, where the path to knowledge is described, and take the fact that is taken as a starting point. It is not based on the idea that one should logically speculate in order to arrive at these truths, but it is based on the idea that it is necessary to develop and shape the whole affective world of the human being, the direction of feeling, in a certain way. It deals with what underlies the search for truth. It tackles what psychology points to, but does not know how to deal with. Why do we not refute materialism with logical arguments, why do we not establish spiritualism with logical arguments? Because all this means nothing. Rather, something else is to be shown. It is to be shown: You have to do this and this with your affects so that you are no longer guided by the subjective, but... . [space].

Take this chapter of “Theosophy” and you will see that everything depends on an objectivization of the affective life, and then you can see how this intervenes in the impasse of the modern worldview... [The final sentences are no longer decipherable in shorthand.]

• 1. was obviously drawn on the blackboard; however, the drawing has not been handed down.
• 2. Here are a few more lines in the original shorthand that do not reveal any coherent meaning.

Quite a number of lectures have now been given by me on the changes that must necessarily take place in our whole civilization. First and foremost, what was said in this connection was expressed in such a way as to appeal to the will of men. We now live in a cycle of humanity's evolution in which people have to discover inner activity in order to contribute their share towards the necessary change. For human soul substance will have to stream into external life, into the objectivity of external life, and human beings themselves will have to bring about what should appear. In the present cycle of human development it is no longer possible to wait passively for divine powers, far removed from man, to step in and to do something for human evolution, without the participation of man himself.

The essential thing is to be in a position to understand such things by observing the individual phenomena of social life and the life of nature, but today, certain phenomena of social life shall be our topic. I would like to start with a quite definite fact. Let us suppose that someone announces himself; he may, for example, send his business card with the name “Edmund Miller” printed on it. Yet, on seeing this card with the name “Edmund Miller,” it would be foolish to assume that a miller was coming, a man who grinds corn. For the person announcing himself by this name may be a contractor, or a professor, or a court advisor, and so on. It would not be justified in such a case to deduce anything from the name “Miller.” Initially, it would perhaps be better to form no thoughts whatever, but just to wait and see what kind of a person conceals himself behind the name. Or, through certain other circumstances, we may already know something about the actual person, the real living entity concealed behind this name, “Miller.”

It is clear to us in this case that it would be quite wrong to infer from his name anything about the character of the approaching individual. If a person named “Smith” announces himself we would not think that he is a smith. This shows that in regard to those words we consider proper names, we feel the need to discover, by means of something that is not inferred from the name, what or whom we are dealing with.

Well, in this respect, even proper names have undergone a certain history. A person bearing the name Smith today no longer has anything to do with a real smith; a person called Miller has nothing to do with a miller. Yet these names originally arose at a time when name-giving such as is customary today did not exist, when people in a village would remark, “The smith said,—the miller said this or did that,”—or, “I saw the miller,”—and referred to the actual smith or miller. One who has lived in villages knows that people frequently do not refer to each other by proper names but say instead that they saw the smith, or the mason, or somebody else. Therefore, the name itself originally caused people to infer from the words what lay behind them.

All words, the whole language, will undergo the same development in the-course of evolution from the fifth to the sixth post-Atlantean epoch that proper names have undergone, a development which in their case we can clearly survey. Nevertheless, human beings today are still almost completely caught up in the whole of language; we basically acquire all our knowledge out of language. In actual fact, the general attitude towards nearly the whole compass of language is to infer the things from their words. Now, it is convenient to do so, but human evolution follows a different course, and in regard to such things we must have the same attitude that we adopt in regard to natural phenomena. They contain objective necessity. Objective necessity also exists where the causality of nature holds sway in the sphere of life, something that is experienced by many people with abstract superficiality. It happens frequently—I have often pointed this out—that people will say, “I never intended to do or say this; I meant it quite differently; I had this or that intention with regard to this matter.” But regardless of how pronounced the child's intention is not to get burned, when it reaches into fire, it will burn itself. Concerning the things of life, intentions that do not delve into life are not decisive; at most, only those intentions that do delve into life, or, certainly, facts, and the relationships of these facts that follow natural laws, are decisive.

People must become used to this way of thinking; based on spiritual science, this is, above all, necessary in the most eminent sense. And one must also get used to the thought: “As pleasant as it might be if one could just take words as they are, it is nevertheless a fact that the objective course and laws of human evolution point in a different direction.” They indicate that man's whole conception, his whole soul life, is becoming emancipated from words. Words are gradually becoming mere gestures that simply indicate the being or thing in question, no longer designating and explaining anything fully. If spiritual-scientific descriptions are to be taken seriously, for example, then something must come about for which people are often annoyed with me, namely, that one can no longer use words in the manner that words and sentences are customarily used at present. For if one sets forth spiritual-scientific facts, one is above all presenting facts of the future; something is represented that in future time will have to become the possession of mankind. In a certain sense, one has to anticipate something that is supposed to occur in the future. What is to happen in the future must be received into one's will. Therefore, one is obliged to give spiritual-scientific descriptions in such a way that even the words point like gestures to the essential reality lying behind them. Since our ideal today concerning the reconstruction of the social order will have to be born out of spiritual science, as I explained yesterday, it is necessary that, particularly in matters of social reconstruction, we speak from the above-mentioned viewpoint. This is precisely what people did not at all wish to comprehend, for instance, in my book, Towards Social Renewal. They absolutely wanted matters presented to them in the old style, matters that cannot be described in the old style since they are part of the future. And basically, what one is being faced with here can best be made evident by the fact that almost all the questions that, up to now, have been connected by one side or another to the expositions in Towards Social Renewal always proceed totally out of the old manner of thinking. No attempt is made to find one's way into the transformed new way of thinking.

Thus we may say that, particularly in the descriptions of social relationships of the future, it must become evident that we have to develop an emancipated soul life that no longer clings merely to words. One who follows my descriptions in the various fields of spiritual science, including the recent ones into the field of social life, will find that I am always at pains to describe a matter from many different sides. As a rule, I use two sentences instead of one, because the first sentence indicates the matter from one side, the other one from the other side. This is then supposed to call forth a desire in the listener or reader to approach the matter by transcending the words and sentences, as it were. This is what must be mentioned in reference to human soul life as far as the transformation of the meaning of human language is concerned. This is an important matter. It is important for the reason that the greatest part of what occurs today in regard to confusion of one's manner of thinking and conceptions comes about for no other reason than the fact that the objective laws and impulses of human evolution already demand that we free ourselves from language. Because of their easy-going habits of thinking, however, human beings do not wish to give up clinging to language. When such a phenomenon is clearly understood, it leads to a deeper insight into the whole course of human development. Indeed, from this transformation of our language or languages, we can actually build a bridge to profound spiritual facts. Naturally, this is more the case in one language than in another. But this is then a matter of the specific treatment of a language, of the meaning of words in a language in the individualized differentiated regions of human civilization, as I have pointed out.

We now live in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch of human civilization and are approaching the sixth condition of development. These evolutionary conditions are not of such a nature that a clear line could be drawn between one and the other epochs; instead, one epoch, bearing its own peculiarities, passes over into the next; and long before it arises, the future one casts its shadows—one could also say its lights—into the present. One must take hold of these lights if one wishes to participate in the evolution of humanity with one's soul.

Let us try and connect what might be termed the “suprahistorical” fact, namely, that we are supposed to work our way towards the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, with another fact known to all of us. It is this: With his spirit-soul entity, the human being descends out of a spiritual world to earthly incarnation through birth or conception. On earth, he then experiences the life between birth and death; then, he passes through the gate of death, and in so doing bears his soul-spiritual being once again into that environment of life which is definitely of a spiritual and soul nature.

Now we must clearly understand—and the significance of this for the art of education, for example, has also been outlined here recently—that we bring down from the spiritual world, at least in the form of effects, what we have experienced in this spiritual world. When we move in ordinary life from one locality to another, we take with us not only our clothes but also our soul-spiritual belongings. In like manner, one brings along into this world through conception and birth the consequences and effects of what has been undergone in the spiritual world. In the period that mankind has presently lived through, concerning which we know that it began around the middle of the fifteenth century A.D., man, through his spirit-soul entity, brought along forces of the soul life devoid of images, forces containing no pictures. It is for this reason that, above all, the intellectual life has arisen and has flourished. During this period, prior to descending through conception and birth into physical existence, the human being was endowed in a sense with something lacking in capacities, lacking in images. This explains the slight inclination mankind had for developing original creations of fantasy since the middle of the fifteenth century. Human fantasy is, in truth, only a terrestrial reflection of super-earthly imagination. The Renaissance does not contradict this, for just the fact that one had to resort to a “renaissance,” not a “naissance,” clearly shows that original forces of imagination were not present, only a fantasy that required fructification from earlier periods. In short, the fact is that the human soul was permeated in a certain sense with forces that are devoid of images.

Now begins the age—and in many respects, this is the real reason for the stormy character of our times—in which the souls who descend through conception and birth into earthly life bring along for themselves images from the spiritual world. When pictures are brought along out of spiritual existence into physical life, and if salvation is to arise for the human being and his social life, they must under all circumstances be united with the astral body, whereas the element lacking images only unites with the ego. It is predominantly the unfolding of the ego which has blossomed in humanity since the fifteenth century.

Now, however, the time is beginning when man has to feel: Within me there live pictures from my prenatal existence; during my earthly life, I have to make them come alive. I cannot accomplish this merely with my ego; I must work deeper into myself, and this must reach as far as my astral body.

Now, it is generally true that humanity resists the images indwelling in the astral body, images experienced prior to conception. In a way, human beings repel what is supposed to find its way out of the depths of their being into the astral body. The dry, prosaic attitude of the present time is one of its fundamental characteristics, and there are many broadly based movements that oppose an education whose concern it would be that the forces arising from the soul and trying to make themselves felt in the astral body will actually assert themselves. There are insipid, dry people who would really like to exclude any education by means of fairy tales, legends and anything illuminated by imagination. In our Waldorf School system, we have made it our priority that the lessons and instruction of the children entering primary education will proceed from pictorial descriptions, from the life-filled presentation of images, from elements taken from legends and fairy tales. Even what the children are initially supposed to learn about the nature and processes of the animal kingdom, the plant and the mineral kingdoms, is not supposed to be expressed in a dry, matter-of-fact manner; it is supposed to be clothed in imaginative, legendary, fairy tale-like elements. For what is seated deep within the child's soul are the imaginations that have been received in the spiritual world. They seek to come to the surface. The teacher or the educator adopts the right attitude towards the child if he confronts the child with pictures. By placing images before the child's soul, there flash up from its soul those images, or, strictly speaking, those forces of pictorialized representation which have been received before birth or, let us say, prior to conception.

If these forces are suppressed, if the dry, prosaic person guides the education of the child today, he confronts the child from earliest childhood with something that is actually not at all related to the child, namely, the letters of the alphabet. For our present letters have nothing to do anymore with the letters of earlier pictorial scripts. They are really something that is alien to the child; a letter should first be drawn out of a picture, as we try to do it in the Waldorf School. The child is confronted today with something devoid of a pictorial element; the young person, on the other hand, possesses forces in his body—naturally, I am referring to the soul when I am now speaking of “body,” for after all, we also speak of the “astral body”—forces seated in his body that will burst out elsewhere if they are not brought to the surface in pictorial representation. What will be the result of modern mistaken education? These forces do not become lost; they spread out, gain existential ground, and invade the thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will after all. And what kind of people will come into being from that? They will be rebels, revolutionaries, dissatisfied people; people who do not know what they want, because they want something that one cannot know. This is because they want something that is incompatible with any possible social order; something that they only picture to themselves, that should have entered their fantasy but did not; instead, it entered into their agitated social activities.

Therefore, we can say that people who, in an occult sense, do not have honest intentions in regard to their fellowmen, do not have the courage to admit to themselves: “If the world is in a state of revolt today, it is really heaven that is revolting.” It means the heaven that is held back in the souls of men, which then comes to the fore, not in its own form, but in its opposite—in strife and bloodshed instead of imaginations. No wonder that the individuals who destroy the social fabric actually have the feeling that they are doing good. For what do they sense in themselves? They feel heaven within themselves; only it assumes the form of a caricature in their soul.

This is how serious the truths are that we must comprehend today! To acknowledge the truths that matter today should be no child's play; such acknowledgment should be pervaded by the greatest earnestness. In general, it is no light task today to describe such things, for, in the first place, people do not care for them; secondly, they cling to words. Indeed, one who states that heaven is revolting in human souls is naturally taken literally by his words; people do not notice how he is trying to show that additional facts must be known, whereby the word “heaven” is related to something more than they are in the habit of connecting with the term. This is the same as not thinking of a miller who grinds corn when a “Mr. Miller” announces himself. The emancipation from language is definitely required in individual concrete cases if, in the sense that the laws of human evolution demand it, we wish truly to make progress.

Here, we see how something that comes from the life before birth pushes into the social life. One who is familiar with these relationships knows that he has to recognize something that is actually heavenly in what appears on earth in a caricature. This is in regard to the social questions, but there is something else in addition.

During the age of intellectualism, which has developed predominantly since the middle of the fifteenth century, human beings have obtained very little from their life of sleep in the form of imaginations for their waking life. Even those who have somewhat more lively dreams tend to interpret them quite rationally and intellectually. In this direction, theosophists, for example, are rational and intellectual. I could not begin to describe in a small volume, only in a big one, how many people have come to me in the course of time and wished to have rational explanations for their dreams! What is important here is that even those imaginations that express themselves in dreams point to a deeper spiritual life. I have often said that the outward appearance of the dream does not matter at all; that has already emancipated itself from the actual content. The content which we receive and then interpret in words of a language, from which, in turn, we actually have to emancipate ourselves as well, is not the true course of the dream; it really has very little to do with the true course of the dream. The dream's content is represented in its dramatic sequence, in the way one image follows another, the way complications arise and are resolved; one can experience the same spiritual content in a number of different ways as a dream. One person comes and describes how he climbed a mountain; he ascended quite easily up to a certain point, then, he suddenly stood before an abyss and could not proceed. Another person relates that he was walking along a path; everything around him filled him with joy. Suddenly, when he reached a certain point in the road, a man with a #8224 came up 'to him and killed him. Here we have two completely different dream images. Yet the process concealed behind them may be exactly the same. It can express itself in one instance in the climb up the mountain and the feeling of confronting an abyss; in another instance, it can be expressed in a cheerful walk down a path until one confronts a person who intends to kill one. The content of the images is not important; it is the dramatic sequence of experiencing something that offers resistance. It is the dynamics behind the images that matters. The course taken by the forces can envelop itself in any number of images, indeed in hundreds of pictures!

We can only understand the spiritual world when we know that what appears in the physical world in the form of dreams, or what clothes itself in images from the spiritual world in such a manner that it resembles the physical world, is only an image. As long as one has the inclination, however, to interpret the images in a rationalistic, purely intellectual way, so long does one also occupy an intellectual standpoint in regard to the dream life of sleep. What matters here is that we understand this dream life of sleep as the expression of a deeper spiritual life. Then only do we comprehend it imaginatively; then we grasp the pictures as something that stands in place of the content.

Then we shall not turn against something that is beginning for the human being today, namely, making inner soul demands out of sleep in a manner similar to the demands made by the imaginations prior to birth or conception. For today we are beginning to sleep differently from the way sleep was experienced in the regular life of the intellectual age since the middle of the fifteenth century. Man brought along into the waking state little inclination for faculties that wish to experience, rather than interpret, the images.

We have now reached the point in human evolution where, out of sleep as well, we draw imaginations that seek to indwell not only our ego, where rationality reigns supreme, but also our astral body. If we work against this, we once more reject something that is trying to rise into consciousness out of the depths of the human soul; we also work against the whole course of mankind's evolution, and what matters here is that we do not oppose humanity's development but work in harmony with it. We do this in the first place by permeating our culture once again with as many elements as possible connected in some way with the spiritual world. Naturally, in regard to external life, it is important for us to imbue ourselves with what is grasped from the spiritual world; hence, that we also imbue ourselves with a true spiritual insight, to fill ourselves with something that in this physical world cannot be comprehended in terms of the physical world. The whole past epoch of human life was actually opposed to this. Consider a case that I have already mentioned a number of times.

It is true that Christianity confronts human beings in such a way that they can only grasp its essence, especially the nature of the Mystery of Golgotha, if they come round to a comprehension of something super-sensible. For one must envisage that Christ, a being Who formerly had not been connected with earth evolution, united with the human being, Jesus of Nazareth, and that super-sensible events took place. One must conceive of the fact that in regard to the event of Golgotha, even birth and conception differed from the way they take place in ordinary human circumstances. In short, the demand is made by Christology to understand the Mystery of Golgotha in a super-sensible sense.

There is an interesting passage in a book written by a modern naturalist⁹⁴ where fulminations are uttered against the Immaculate Conception, where it is said that it is an impertinent insult to human reason to claim that an immaculate conception can occur.

Well, a modern rationalist, a purely intellectual person, can't help feeling this way. In a certain sense, what is intended out of the spiritual life is indeed an impertinent mockery of human reason. But the point is that we now live in an age where we must gradually begin to bring into waking life what has been spiritually experienced between falling asleep and waking in such a manner that our astral body can be impregnated and permeated with a pictorial element—not merely our ego, which is the seat of rationality, of intellectualism.

It is interesting that even the theology of the nineteenth century developed in such a way that it opposed Christology with rationalism, with pure intellectualism. Increasingly, modern theology felt called upon altogether to deny Christ as such, and to describe the humble man from Nazareth, the mere Jesus, as a human personality somewhat more outstanding than other human beings. One did not wish to make the effort to comprehend something super-sensible. What is to confront the human being supersensibly, what is to awaken him to the super-sensible realm, this one tried to grasp with concepts gained here in the sensory world.

A Protestant theologian,⁹⁵ with whom I once discussed this matter, told me after we had talked about it for some time, “Yes, we modern theologians should really not call ourselves Christians any longer, for we no longer have Christ. If the name ‘Jesuit’ had not been appropriated already, we should really claim it for ourselves.” This is not something that I am saying; it is something that a Protestant theologian of the modern school said to me as a confession of his own soul.

One who has insight into the whole character of our time, however, will understand that we must advance to a comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha. Just because it is the central manifestation of our human evolution, it will tear us away from the earthly manner of thinking, and will draw us with might and main to understand something that is incomprehensible based an the earthly sense domain. Whoever wishes in everything to remain caught in the earthly sensory sphere would say, “The Immaculate Conception is an impertinent insult against human reason.”

One who understands the task of present-day man will say: I must accustom myself to such ideas. In that case, I must emancipate myself from the customary use of words today. When somebody by the name of Smith or Miller announces himself, I must not assume that he is coming with a hammer in hand or overalls powdered with flour. I must expect something quite different from what I might deduce from the words. Thus, I have to become used to emancipating myself from what was ingrained into the words by the merely physical life of the senses.

Today, the Mystery of Golgotha is in fact the first test for us to see whether we are willing to go along with the comprehension of something that extends beyond the physical-sensory sphere. We, therefore, can no longer content ourselves with a merely traditional, historical description of Christianity, we need instead a creative understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. Out of spiritual science, we need inner strength of soul which, in a new way, approaches the Mystery of Golgotha and is in a position to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha as a supersensory fact. Then, having positioned the Mystery of Golgotha into the central point of human thinking and feeling, we must make a new beginning especially in regard to education, and prepare the child in such a way that it does not suppress, does not have to suppress, the imaginations that seek to arise from the depths of the soul. We must meet the imaginations halfway by making pictures of our conceptions.

This is the deeper reason why, in the last issue of Soziale Zukunft (Social Future),⁹⁶ which is a magazine dealing with education, I described education and instruction as an art in the most eminent sense. In the field of pedagogy, teachers and educators must actually proceed in the way an artist does—indeed, they must proceed in a style surpassing that of an artist. It does not do to impose abstract principles in an abstract pedagogical sense. What matters is that one penetrates the being of man, and, through this comprehension of man's nature, arrives at the point of reading from the inner human being what one has to do in each case. An artist who is creating something cannot go by abstract rules. The purpose of aesthetics is not that of establishing rules for the artists. An artist cannot even go by what he has created yesterday when he creates something today. At every moment he must endeavor to be creative and original. This is how the teacher must be, in a still higher sense. One must not say based on a certain attitude of mind: "Well, if we are looking for teachers like that, we have to wait another three to four hundred years." The only reason that we do not have such teachers as yet is because we say things like this. We can have them the very moment that we have the strong power of faith in it; but it is the strong, not the passive, power of faith that is needed here. Therefore, what is important here is that when we return from sleep, upon awakening, we truly experience in the astral body and imprint into the etheric body what the astral body experiences from the moment of falling asleep until waking up. It can only take place through pictorializing the whole cultural life.

This pictorialization of the whole life of culture, this pictorialization that is demanded by the laws of humanity's evolution, will come into being when the whole spiritual life is left to the decision of those who participate in the spiritual life; when no instructions, no school regulations are laid down by a government which by its very nature stands outside the spiritual life. It is important here that the state does not hand down pedagogical regulations, school curriculums, and such like in an abstract manner. What matters is that one has human beings in an emancipated spiritual life who act out of their own free personality, and that one accomplishes with them what one can or wishes to accomplish with them.

The fact that the human being is presently beginning to bring along through conception and birth something that differs from what he brought with him since the middle of the fifteenth century, and the fact that he also brings something different with him out of sleep, both these facts demand that careful attention be given such matters, and that one really permeates oneself with the knowledge of such decisive facts. But from where can this knowledge be gained, if not from spiritual science? The external culture, today's science, certainly does not deal in any way with these matters. It ignores them; indeed, its present methods compel it to do so. I feel obliged to say that the present situation becomes most poignant when one observes the frequent and strange discrepancy between the inner requirements of humanity's evolution and the way in which people meet them. In recent times, the need has arisen to reckon with what flows into the human being from the spiritual world. Those who were intellectual, who did not reckon with what flows out of the spiritual world, made hypotheses about atoms, molecules, and the like. It was thought that bodies possessing volume point back to an atomistic formation, and so on. Out of the root causes of mankind's evolution, the need arose to grasp spiritual facts. And this instinct to grasp the spiritual expressed itself also in something, for example, like the Theosophical Society. One of its heroes is a certain Mr. Leadbeater who wrote an occult chemistry. What did he do in this book? He did something quite horrible, for he pictures the spiritual world in an atomistic sense; meaning, the materialistic manner of thinking is carried into the spiritual world.

I have recently mentioned this whole grotesque thing. Something very clever came about in the Theosophical Society. Someone wished to prove that here is one life; there is the next one (see drawing below). Now, it is so, isn't it, that something has to pass from the preceding life to the later one. One sees the body fall into decay. A proper materialist says that the body disintegrates and it is all over with man. A theosophist, however, wants another earth life to come; so, something must pass from one life to the other! The proper materialist says that all atoms unite with the earth. The theosophist also does not think in any other way than materialistically, but at the same time he tries to think “theosophically.” He wants something to pass from the first to the next life. So he says: “Of course, the atoms become one with the earth; one atom, however, remains and it passes through the whole period of existence between death and a new birth. There it appears again. This is the permanent atom.” One atom! Oh, the theosophists were especially proud then, when they discovered this “permanent” atom! They had no inkling that in this way they were carrying materialism into the spiritual world conception! Materialism induced them to believe that something—they never said what it was—of the many atoms that sink down into the ground is saved; and this fortunate, saved, permanent atom then reappears in the next incarnation. Much has been written about this permanent atom. It is nothing more than an example of the fact that something was borne into spiritual science that people could not rise above, namely, materialism. It permeates, by the way, the whole description of man, in the way it is frequently presented in the literature of the Theosophical Society. As I have often pointed out, they present the physical body as dense, the etheric body as thinner, the astral body as still thinner. Then come degrees of thinness, where even thinking and conceptions become quite thin. Yet, one is still dealing with something substantial, like mist; hence, although Buddhi and Atma are mists, they are still tangible as mists. One does not have the will power truly to discard materialism even in one's conceptual life; to pass from concepts of matter to concepts of the spirit.

All these things prove how closely human beings are tied to the old ways of thinking. Out of such considerations, anybody who honestly wishes to acknowledge spiritual science should take up the inner challenge to test himself as to how far he has freed himself from the old materialistic concepts; or, when he turns to something spiritual, to what extent he imagines this spiritual manner in materialistic pictures, not being aware of the fact that they are just pictures.

It is always a matter of being conscious of this. For if, say, I were to draw a picture of one of you on the blackboard, the picture could mean a lot to me, if the person in question were no longer present. But if I were then to imagine that the person in the picture would shake my hand, or would speak to me, in other words, that he would be the actual person, then I would be suffering from illusions! Therefore, one may naturally sensualize the spiritual in pictures, but one must always be aware of the fact that they are nothing but pictures.

In the case of words, too, people must realize more and more clearly that language is on the way to turning the word into a gesture, and that we should go no further than to allow the word to indicate something to us that no longer is contained in the word. All words will have to take the same direction that proper names have taken.

For philosophers, I have something even better to say. Philosophers of recent times have set up any number of theories. When I say, “The child is small,” they have a concept of “small;” they have a concept of “child.” The “is,” however, the copula of the two—what does it mean? Oh, much has been written about this copula even in the philosophical sense, not just from the grammatical or philological standpoint. Everything that has been written about it suffers from the fact that this verb, “is,” no longer has the meaning of which people speak. It has already emancipated itself from its meaning and the soul content has become a different one. Thus, people in fact philosophize about something that no longer lives in the soul in an alive sense.

This is just an incidental philosophical remark which perhaps doesn't have much significance, but it is supposed to draw your attention to the fact that something that is not noticed by the outer world is by no means noticed immediately by the philosophers. Nevertheless, it is often true that the philosophers are the last to notice the things that really occur in the world, and many of our philosophical systems lag considerably behind what exists outside of themselves!

By proceeding principally from the example of language, however, I have tried to show you quite concretely how present-day human development presents itself. What actually takes place in regard to human development can really only be seen by looking at super-sensible facts. Anthropology can no longer discover what actually takes place, only anthroposophy. This is the reason why anthroposophical cultural thinking must lie at the foundation of everything that constitutes work for the progress of mankind.

• 94 . Ernest Haeckel: Anthropogenie oder Entwicklungsgeschichte des Menschen, Leipzig, 1891, p. 871.
• 95 . Max Christlieb: 1862–1916.
• 96 . In “Soziale Zukunft,” #5–7, Dornach, 1920.

If we want to fathom the meaning of the materialistic age we need to research how the combination of important fundamental forces add up to the development of mankind. Next we need consider human evolution from a specific angle today. I will link these to various things I have already mentioned recently and reach a clear outcome.

I have often referred to the importance of the time period in an individual's development which co-insides with the change of teeth around the seventh year of life. The change of teeth indicates that certain forces present and active in the organism up to this time no longer exercise their actions as is the case up to the seventh year. From the moment the stage of dentition begins or is taking place the human being goes into a state of metamorphosis. What appears with the pushing out of the second set of teeth is something which had been working in the human body already. When they appear as if freed out of the body then the appearance is by contrast more like a soul force. We discover by researching this appearance, that up to the seventh year a soul force is active within the human being and to a certain extend finds its conclusive work done with the change of teeth. When we develop the inclination and ability to observe such things we will come to see how the child's entire soul constitution is metamorphosed, how precisely from this moment in life the ability arises to construct defined concepts similar to the way other soul abilities occur. Where had these soul qualities been before the change of teeth? They were in the body and were active there. That which later would become spiritual was working in the body.

Here we arrive at quite a different observation regarding the cooperation between the soul-spiritual and the bodily aspects in contrast to how they are depicted by abstract psychological representations, which refers to a psycho-physical parallelism or to an alternate interaction between soul and body. We arrive at a true observation of what works in an important way during the first seven years of the human organism. We gradually see something which is hidden up to the moment it becomes freed to work as a soul force. We only need to develop an ability to observe such things to become aware how a certain process of power gradually works into the bodily aspect during the first seven years of life and how from this moment onwards reappear as something soul-spiritual. Then we also realise what the actual activity within the human body, at least in part, is during the first seven years of life.

When we find ourselves in the condition in life which takes place between falling asleep and waking, something happens which I have just described, in two conditions following upon one another in a meaningful way. We can also observe that a child sleeps in a certain way which is different to the one he or she will become after the change of teeth. It is as if the difference is not apparent, but it is there. The child up to his seventh year is in a state of sleep—a state in which its soul is intrinsically within the state of falling asleep and waking—unable to transmit the same forces which he later sends as soul forces because these forces are related to the physical, to the corporeal organism. As a result the child doesn't send sharply outlined concepts into his state of sleep. It sends very few sharply defined concepts and even less outlined imaginations but these indistinct representations have the peculiar ability to encompass the soul spiritual reality in a better way than through sharply defined representations.

This is something important, the sharper the outlines of our concepts in daily life, the less these concepts are able to enter our sleep condition, understanding realities from there. As a result of this the child often in fact brings a particular knowledge of spiritual reality out of its sleeping condition. This ceases in the same way as I described in the forces being freed during the change of teeth, sharply outlined concepts now come to the fore and can influence sleep life. These sharply outlined concepts subdue to a certain extent the view on spiritual realities as we live between falling asleep and waking.

What I have just said can be proved through supersensible sight which develops the power I have often described which can be found in my “Occult Science” and in my book “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds.” When clairvoyant sight attains the power of imagination, when each image appears, as we know, as having a spiritual reality as foundation, then we gradually come to behold spiritual realities amidst the condition of sleeping and waking, and then we can evaluate the difference between a child's sleep before his seventh year and its sleep after turning seven. We can see how to some extent insight is eased regarding what in our imagination we have clarified regarding observation of spiritual realities in whose proximity we are between falling asleep and waking up.

When the change of teeth has come about, the development of puberty starts within the soul element, which can be grasped to a certain degree through imagination. Through simply experiencing our imagination we can see what is forming in the soul.

Man acquires simply through the imaginative experience that which is formed in the soul. The experience I have mentioned regarding the conditions between falling asleep and waking is only one of the experiences which can be made through imaginative knowledge. Under these interesting conditions which take place in the child between dentition and puberty, we see how there is actually a strong struggle taking place in the becoming of the human being. The fight to a certain extent in this period of life is between the ether body and the astral body which undergoes a particular transformation towards puberty. When we consider the physical correlation corresponding to this condition of a struggle, then we can say that it's during this period of the child's life when there is a struggle between growing forces and those forces which appear through physical inspiration, through breathing. This is a very important process in inner development, a process which has to be studied time and again. A part of what becomes freed up for the soul during dentition, are growing forces. Of course a considerable part of these growing forces remain in the body and see to growth, while a part of this is freed during dentition and come to the fore as soul forces.

The growing forces working on in the child resists against what appears essentially in the respiratory process. What now appears in the breathing process could not essentially appear before. The respiratory process is certainly present in the child but as long as it has the forces rising from dentition, so long will nothing in the child happen which is actually as striking, as meaningful as what later takes place between breathing and the physical body. The greatest part of our development depends upon the breathing process. As a result Oriental exercises focus particularly on the breathing process while the human beings who live into the breathing exercises actually come into contact with their inner organisation, brings physicality into an inner movement which is related to perception of the spiritual world.

As we said, before the start of dentition, what breathing actually wants to affect in us fails to become active in the body. Now the battle starts between the growing forces retained in the body against the forces penetrating through the breathing processes. The first meaningful process appearing as a result of the physical breathing processes is puberty.

This connection between breathing and puberty is not yet being examined by science. It is, however, definitely present. We actually breathe in what brings on puberty, which also gives us the further opportunity to step into a relationship in the widest sense between the world and loving surroundings. We actually breathe this in. In every process of nature there's also a spiritual process. In the breathing process exists not only the spiritual but also the soul spiritual. This soul spiritual process permeates us through breathing. It can only penetrate when the forces have become ensouled, forces which formerly worked up to the change of teeth and stopped at this point. What wanted to stream in through the breathing process can now take place.

However, again they come into opposition—a war—of what comes out of the growing processes and what is still a growth process, coming from ether forces in other words. This war is evident between the ether forces rising from the ether body and their correlation found in the material, in the metabolism and blood circulation as astral forces. Here the metabolic system plays into the rhythmic system. We can schematically say: we have our metabolic system but this plays into our blood rhythm; the metabolic system I depict here in white (weiß) and the circulation system playing into it: red (rot) in the drawing. This is what streams from the ether body upwards between the ages of seven to fourteen.

The astral body works against it. We have the inward streaming of the rhythmical in the physical correlation which comes from breathing and the war takes place between the blood circulation and the breathing rhythms in blue (blau). This is what is happening in that period of life.

To speak somewhat vividly in perhaps a radical image: between about the ninth and the tenth year in the life of every child, what had been planned before and appeared as skirmishes before the actual main battle, now goes over into the main battle. The astral and ether bodies direct their chief attack during the ninth and tenth year of life.

As a result this period in time is so important for educators to observe. It is simply so, that teachers, educators and instructors need to give their full attention to something—which may appear differently in nearly each person—taking place in this moment in time.

Here something exceptional can be seen in each child. Some temperamental qualities move into an evident metamorphosis. Marked ideas appear. Above all this is the moment in time where one could start—while before it had been good to not let the child distinguish between the Ego (Ich) and the outer world—allowing this distinction between the Ego and the outer world to come to the fore. While it had been preferable before to use fairy tale imagery to the child, how processes of nature were like human processes, by personifying and clarifying, now the child may be educated about nature in a more instructive manner.

Stories of nature, even in their most elementary forms, should actually only from this moment be presented to the child because the child, as it starts with its first period of life, feels its Ego clearly, while it had just sensed its Ego before. This is a clearly outlined concept, a more or less sharply outlined term linked to the Ego which appears at this time. The child first learns at this moment to really distinguish itself from the surroundings. This corresponds to a definite counter streaming of the breathing rhythm with the circulatory rhythm, the astral and the ether bodies.

There are two sides to this within the human being. On the one side it is present in the condition between waking up and falling asleep. For this state I have just made indications. In the condition between falling asleep and waking, something different presents itself. When we have made progress in Imagination and developed Inspiration somewhat, we may evaluate what happens through Inspiration during the breathing process which has its physical correlation, we discover only at this moment in time—for one child it will be a little earlier, for another a bit later but on average between nine and ten—there is a liberation of the I and the astral body from the physical body during sleep. The child namely becomes intimately connected with his physical and etheric bodies even during asleep. From this time the I lights up as an individual being when actually the I and astral body are not participants of the functions of the ether and physical bodies.

If a child dies before this moment when life had led it up to its fifth, sixth and even into its eighth, ninth year, it still has something which hasn't separated much from the soul spiritual world which is experienced between death and a new birth; so that children relatively easily are pulled back into the soul spiritual world and to some extent only attach something to life which they completed with conception or birth, that an actual cutting off from a new life, if we consider this kind of death, is only really there when children die after this point. Their connection to a certain extent to a new life will be less intensive than the life before. Here clearly conditions are experienced as I've described in “Theosophy” where children who have died earlier are thrown back and then piece life together from what they experience to the life they had led up to their conception or up to birth. One should even say: what we have before us in the child up to the time between his ninth and tenth year of life shows there is much less separation between the soul-physical and the soul-spiritual than in the later human being. Later a person is much more of a dualistic being than the child. The child has the soul-spiritual incorporated into his body and this works into the body. As a duality the soul-spiritual appears opposite the bodily soul element only after this illustrated time. One should say: from this moment the soul-spiritual is less concerned by the bodily element than it had been concerned before. The child as a bodily being is far more of a soul being than the older person. The body of the child is even permeated by the soul forces of growth because it still retains soulful forces even when the largest part of dentition has taken place.

Thus we can say that this battle I have depicted calms down gradually from about the twelfth year onwards and with sexual maturity the astral body takes its full entitlement in the human constitution. That which loosens itself from the human being, which to some extent now is less concerned with the physical is that which the human being takes again with him or her through the gate of death on dying. As we've said, the child in its earlier years is more thrown back to its former life; human beings after this period in time are separated from their former life. What is released here holds within it a seed which allows it to pass through the gate of death. One can really penetrate these things with imaginative knowledge and one can discern particularities precisely. One can point out how the forces rising here lead to sharply defined concepts—which however diminish spiritual realities in whose presence we are during sleep—and make the human being into an independent being.

As a result of the human being cutting off, diminishing the spiritual realities, the human being again becomes the spirit amongst spirits who he must be when he goes through the gate of death. The child always slips, I might say, into spiritual realities; the later human being detaches himself from these spiritual realities and becomes consistent in himself. Admittedly, what becomes consistent can only be seen clearly with imaginative and inspired knowledge, but it does exist in people. This process happens anyhow, as I've indicated yesterday. When human beings don't allow spiritual science to work on them, then it is already so: what is released—particularly during this age in which we receive such materialistic concepts and intellectual ideas, where already at school intellectualism and materialism are imported, because our school subjects are presented materialistically—what is released here is organised in an ahrimanic direction. Because we are asleep in our will even during the day, what becomes released here are trapped by our instincts. We educate ourselves in order to master our instinctive lives by absorbing spiritual scientific concepts.

Intellectuals, materialists or sensualist have an opinion about these concepts, they say these spiritual scientific concepts are fantasy, there's nothing real in them compared with reality. What they mean with “reality” is only what can be perceived by the senses. This is not what is meant by these concepts at all. Everything which appears as concepts in my “spiritual science” does not refer to the outer sense world, it wants to describe the supersensible world. Should these concepts be accepted thus, then they are taken up in a supersensible way even though one can't yet see into the supersensible. Concepts are taken up which are suitable for the supersensible world and not applicable to the senses, physical world, and one thus breaks free from the physical sensory world, in other words, instincts.

This education however is necessary in the human race; without it humankind will enter more and more into social chaos. The actual results—it is like I said yesterday—the actual results of intellectualism and materialism in science, the actual outcome of our present day scientific leaning is a social condition which is chaotic and rising in such an alarming manner in Eastern Europe.

As I said, with logic you can't derive Bolshevism from Bergson's philosophy or from Machsher Avenarius's philosophy; but plain logic brings you closer to deriving it. This is something which present day mankind must look at clearly; dualism has developed in the last centuries between nature observation and the moral world of ideas. On the one side we have the observation of nature which only works with the necessity, as I've often pointed out, to being strictly exact and wanting to link everything to definite connections and causalities. This kind of nature observation creates a worldly structure, builds hypotheses about the beginning and the end of the earth.

Here you stand before what the human being experiences in religious and moral ideas. This is completely torn away from what lives in the observation of nature. This is why people strive so hard to justify the moral-religious content through mere faith. The moral-religious content has been elevated to a system whose content must stand for itself which to some extent should not be allowed to be ruined by anything else, like how outer nature is described, what a person may feel, how the one influences the other. Our present day nature observation, as it exists in its newest phase, where optics and electrodynamics merge, draws by necessity the imagination of the death of warmth to itself. Then the earth with all its people and animals will die and then no human soul will develop despite all its moral ideals. This earth's demise is ensured by the Law of Conservation of Matter, of the Conservation of Energy: through this Law of the Conservation Of Energy the result is the death of the earth, the death of all human souls just like materialists consider the death of the soul as connected to the death of the human body. Only when we are absolutely clear in our mind that what lives in us as morality, what permeates us as religious ideas, form a seed within us, a seed containing a reality, just as the seed of a plant unfolds into a plant the following year, only then can we know that the start of this seed is for a future natural existence and that the earth with everything it contains, visible, audible, perceptible to our senses, does not depend on the law of conservation of energy but that it dies, falls away from all human souls who then carry the moral ideals through as new natural events, into the Jupiter-, Venus-, and Vulcan existence; only when we are clear that Heaven and Earth will perish but My word, the Logos, which develops in the human soul, will not perish—when we are clear, literally clear about these words, only then can we speak of moral and religious content of our human souls. Otherwise it is dishonest. Otherwise we put to a certain extent morality in the world and adhere to another certainty than the natural certainty. If we are clear in our minds that the words of Christ are true, that a cosmos originates from morality, wrested free from the death shroud when this cosmos disintegrates, then we have a world view which indicates morality and naturalness in its metamorphosis.

This is essentially what must penetrate present day humanity because with the schooling of natural thinking developed over the last decades, it is impossible to also accomplish the most essential social concepts which we need. Something must live in the social concepts which recognise morality at the same time in its cosmic implications. The human being must once again learn that he or she is a cosmic being. Earlier the social affairs which needed to be organized on the earth round was not understood; before it had been acknowledged that human beings are connected with cosmic intentions, with cosmic entities.

This is what is felt by people in our age who experience the whole tragedy in their souls, who have come from the abyss between the natural scientific notion and the moral view which we have. Probably only a few slightly sense the implications of this abyss, but it must be crossed over—to say this literally: “Heaven and Earth will perish but my Word will not perish.” This means, what sprouts in the human soul will enfold, just as the earth will perish.

One can't be an avid supporter of the Law of Conservation of Energy and believe at the same time that the moral world indicates eternity. Only to the degree with which courage is found to establish and view the world through the view of nature, will a way be found out of this chaos of the present. This way out can only be found when human beings decide, once again, but now fully conscious, to revert back to that wisdom which once was experienced in the old mysteries in an instinctive way. If humanity makes the decision to consciously penetrate the spiritual world it is an objective possibility, my dear friends. Since the end of the 19th Century a wave from the spiritual world wants to enter our physical world. I could say, it storms in, it is there. Mankind only needs to open their hearts and their senses, and human hearts and human souls will be spoken to. The spiritual world has good intentions, but humanity is still resisting. What was experienced in the second decades of the 20th Century in such a terribly way, ultimately is the bracing of humanity against the inward thrusting wave from the spiritual world. However one could say, it is at its worst, just where scientific minds turn against the streaming in from the spiritual worlds. One should not however, once materialistic and intellectual thinking habits have been withdrawn, now introduce some sort of form which would rule, which could be acquired from the spiritual world.

In relation to this the intellectual-materialistic wave it had its peak, its impact in the second half of the 19th Century. Obviously materialism prepared this long in advance. I have repeatedly referred to its actual worldly historic beginning: what lived in Hellenism as materialism was only a prelude, somewhat in Democritus and in change. Its world historical importance only gradually developed from the 15th Century. It developed slowly, certainly, but it still, when the actual dogmatic tradition was relinquished, I might say, allowed a feeling for a spiritual world's existence within the physical, that the spiritual world can be grasped but not registered through mere intellectual gestures.

Today some who do not see the essence of it, point out with a certain nostalgia to not that far back in time, positivism and materialistic thoughts actually shamed the human being who was regarded as completely inhuman. After that, basically only in the second half of the 19th Century they came to view humankind as completely inhuman, wiping out the specifically human. Thus they avenged themselves by claiming that the human being had thoroughly educated itself in a relatively total abstract way of thinking, as it appeared in the renewed version of the Theory of Relativity. As a result it is always interesting and one should take responsibility for it, that there are still singular minds who refer back to the time when even materialistically orientated minds considered that anything pertaining to people should be dealt with through the mind.

Certainly, a thoroughly intellectual and positivistic mind was Auguste Comte but he wasn't alive in the end of the 19th Century when people were completely excluded from human observation even though, where intellectualism and materialism only became external nature's concepts—but only the outer nature concept, where a human being no longer considered his own humanity in relation to it, that even his own human qualities were thought of as being in the images of nature. Thus it is interesting if we can read what the English thinker Frederick Harrison, briefly wrote about Auguste Comte. He said: I'm thinking about a concise remark by Auguste Comte which he made more than sixty years ago. Auguste Comte, the positivist, the intellectualist who was still somewhat touched by the spirituality of olden times, already saw that in the future the human being will be completely omitted. Despite his positivism, despite his intellectualism it displeased him to what he referred to and what he had been creating, which only came about in the last third of the 19th Century so he hadn't seen it: our modern doctors, said Comte, appear to be essentially animal doctors. He meant, so Harrison continues, that they often, more particularly with women, are treated like horses or cows.

Comte stressed that an illness should be observed from more than one side, that it contains a spiritual element and occasionally even a prominent kind of spiritual element, thus the human doctor should just as much be a philosopher of the soul as an anatomist is to the body. He claimed that true medication would have two sides. From this basis—Harrison adds—he would reject Freudian one sidedness. Harrison continues—how this Comtian point of view has developed further and how people have gradually degenerated to the point of view where people are treated like horses and cows and how this has gradually made human doctors into animal doctors. Everything is relative—this is already contained in the kernel of the theory of relativity. The main teaching of Auguste Comte had a better basis and a more thorough philosophical depth and life than Einstein, he said.—It is always refreshing when one can still today hear such a statement, because we live in the age where the scientific mind opposes everything which comes from a spiritual side, namely what wants to transport the mind in human life, in human action and particularly in important areas such a medical activities.

If we ask ourselves: what is it then, which makes materialism and intellectualism so attractive for today's science? Look for yourself how things are taking place. Consider how our education is set up to hardly involve the teachers in the child's whole organization. The teacher is far too comfortable, and has personally been raised far too comfortably to really delve into the intricacies of child development, like I have depicted today again. Such things would rather not be bothered with—because what would be required? It would call for not shying away from every transition in daily life while living a delusion, to a life which is quite different, where our knowledge becomes reality.

This transformation of people, this otherness, this change pertaining to knowledge is shied away from today; people do not want it. People want to comfortably rise to higher truths which can only be the highest abstractions because to reach abstraction can be done with a certain comfort. This way no inner changes are needed in order to reach it. However, to come to a real life content, how it forms the basis of our outer sensory content, can't be attained when at least concepts aren't changed which have no significance for ordinary sense life, whose meaning one can only penetrate with a power coming from within and working outward. People are put into life which also stretches into the supersensible world, and in our age it relies on this supersensible world being elucidated in a healthy way. When I said yesterday that the materialistic-intellectual point of view doesn't just include a few scientifically educated people, even with a scientific education, but that they are popular beliefs in the simplest people still connected to ancient beliefs, then it must be said: it is urgent and necessary that whatever flows into our overall life in popular form should also contain information of the spiritual world.

Presently overall characteristic attributes can be found everywhere where the effort is made to introduce Anthroposophical spiritual science into areas of life. In medicine, in religion, the social life, everywhere the introduction of anything non-sectarian should be made: Anthroposophically orientated spiritual science, which comes to the fore with the same scientific earnest with which it had been introduced since the middle of the 15 Century as scientific, is to be fully recognized.

When a child has grown up and has had the luck to have undergone some higher learning, what becomes apparent today? These young people, doctors, theologians, philologists, lawyers, will not become anything else; they will not be converted but stay as they are and only accept abstractions applicable to their science. If an attempt is made to offer them some knowledge of the world then they immediately withdraw particularly into this comfortable life of abstraction in which they desire to continue living—but which is leading towards chaos. Thus we can observe an interesting symptom arising which I want to single out. On occasion where the Nurnberg main preacher Geyer held seemingly many lectures at various places, it can be noticed: here people suspect, mainly scientific people suspect that an attempt is being made to introduce Anthroposophically orientated spiritual science into their lives. This the people don't want. Even well minded people don't want it. They sense that here they must re-adjust their views in relation to their entire scientific orientation, here they must think quite differently about their own basic beliefs. As a result when something appears which challenges their own basic beliefs, they revert to their comfortable abstract criticism. So we discover already at the start of the Geyer lectures a quote by the topmost Medicinal Council psychiatrist Kolb, director of the mental hospital and nursing institution in Erlangen, but also a person who should be able to greet with inner satisfaction and joy anything available in this area where spiritual science can fruitfully bring clarification into the psychological areas and is fruitfully elucidated.

Spiritual science goes along a healthy path while the psychiatrist follows it in a morbid way. Psychiatry can only become healthy if it is enlightened in all areas, in all its details if it is based in the healthy manner of anthroposophical spiritual science. Through this the psychiatrist should rise up, letting his psychiatry be permeated by spiritual science; because this psychiatry has basically become nothing other than psycho-pathology. This is a terrible thing at the present—this psychiatry. What does the psychiatrist do? He doesn't sense how the rays of light which can come to him through anthroposophical spiritual science can clarify psychiatry. Instead, he positions spiritual science as he does psychiatry at present that means, he uses the same measure for both. Even if he means well by doing so it becomes something extraordinarily interesting because we can compare it to looking at our faces in a garden mirror ball—if you have a pretty face you will still see the beauty, but it is broken up in squares. Naturally spiritual science will thus appear checkered if it is opposed in full force even by someone with good intentions. It is always interesting to read a bit of what Dr Kolb, the principal medical psychiatrist, always meaning well, has to say:

“The famous Anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner I see ...” excuse me, I must read this—“a genial but extraordinarily imbalanced personality with some understandable striking traits according to psychiatric knowledge. The principal preacher Geyer from Nurnberg appears to base his teachings on Steiner. I have twice heard a public lecture like this from many highly respected clergy. The lecture as a piece of art, was charming. I would consider it an atrocity to pick this blue flower of poetry, which was served so gracefully, and the blue haze”—the blue appears to be less critical than the haze—“in which he brings us closer to Steiner's painted age clouded by critical colour. Now as psychiatrist I must say: the `clairvoyance' of Steiner is nothing other than ordinary thinking which is influenced by a kind of self-hypnosis when a genial and what I would like to accept as...”—after this it becomes quite different!—“an ethically high-standing personality with glowing scientific and general education, highly informed about the present religious-philosophic teachings, as Steiner is, to some extent see into your brain and offer the content of the brain as `Anthroposophy,' yet amongst a multitude of fantastic traits much which is good, noble and morally high standing, perhaps isolated valuable scientific thoughts can be found.”

Now I ask you, just listen to this: ordinary thinking, influenced by Anthroposophy, sees into the brain and what is seen in the brain, is presented as Anthroposophy! Please, take this genial quote from this psychiatrist: therefore everything perceived by looking into the brain is also a bit influenced by auto suggestions!

“When however his teaching up to now are thrown to be people from the pulpit, then fewer genial people, without previous training, will preach about the marvelling products of his `clairvoyance.'”

They have actually done quite well, these untrained people! It is in fact as if this psychiatrist, whose anthroposophical thoughts are influenced by auto-hypnosis which he sees in the brain, actually lives completely outside the actual world.

“As occultism is similar to communism with a fatal attraction on the mentally weak, on immature youth, the prematurely old aged, on dreamers, on hysterics, above all on psychopaths, the insecure, the sick liars and swindlers, so we will experience that demoralized through war, death and misery and worry about the future we have become susceptible for the rise of `Prophets' similar to those historical deeds of the Munster Anabaptists we read with horror. The Catholic church is greatly merited by rejecting Steiner with complete lucidity and sharpness.” This `lucidity and sharpness' you read near a living person here!—“and I would like as Protestant to ask every single spiritual Protestant heartily, to test the danger of the demise of our church into a dreary and dangerous sect before it becomes a dangerous temptation of ideally orientated Christians with pathological traits strongly recommending Steiner's teachings.”

This lesson was received by the principal preacher Geyer from the topmost Medicinal Council psychiatrist Dr Gustav Kolb, director of the mental hospital and nursing institution in Erlangen.

You see how the state of mind of a person is constituted who has completely accepted the thinking habits of the modern scientific spirit. Please, just consider for a bit, just for my sake meditate over what appears when a person, instead of directing his gaze to the outer world, directs himself through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition and brings sharply into focus what is in my `occult science,' letting this gaze turn inward and depict the human brain, as if influenced by auto hypnosis. Isn't it true that what the psychiatrist is describing is madness! This depiction actually rises from a psychiatric base! Yet one must say that such a man as Gustav Kolb is well meaning and discovers that the blue haze should not be dissected by other critical colours; because he finds it barbaric to oppose the blue flower introduced by the priest Geyer. So from the one side he is even benevolent but he is really a typical representative of modern science.

This is the situation which can definitely be hoped for and expected from by modern science towards anthroposophically orientated science. Therefore it must always be mentioned that active, spiritual science orientated collaborators are needed, in every shop, found on every corner, who are revealed in this way and then drawn into the right light in which they are moved when there is a reference to, first of all, present day science being unable to be different from what it is, and secondly: brain instead of Anthroposophy.

Really, we must free ourselves from preconceived ideas in order to make it possible today, to convince the occasional person permeated by these modern scientific habits, to change. The joy several of our short minded followers often have that the occasional person can be converted, is a misplaced joy. It is concerned with unprejudiced humanity being penetrated by what anthroposophic spiritual science offers and then grimly facing the characteristics of modern science where it turns into nonsense, even when well meant. We are confronted today with immense seriousness. Therefore it must ever and again be stressed that at least among us many who sense this earnestness must rise instead of merely sitting and listening for a bit with the pleasure of hearing anthroposophic truths, but should rather want to permeate anthroposophic orientated spiritual science into every part of active life and also have the courage and energy to step forward where it is needed. I draw your attention repeatedly to what opposes spiritual science, with all the possible grotesque, ridiculous, deceitful and good-natured impotent forms it assumes. The battle which is fought against this, is even more sparse. It has to be done for the salvation of the further evolution of humanity. Healing must come through the modern spirit of science—as you know, where it is entitled, it is also appreciated by spiritual science—because it wants to set itself up in those areas of which it understands nothing, making it sick.

We cannot fully estimate the nature of man's being, as it appears at present, without fixing our eyes on extended periods through which he has passed in the course of his evolution. This will become evident when considering the facts described by me during recent days. Our souls undergo repeated earth-lives that are always separated from one another by the life between death and a new birth. In this manner our souls have passed through the most manifold periods of human evolution. By reflecting on these things, we shall clearly recognize that the nature of the human being can be comprehended only when we consider extended periods during which our souls have repeatedly lived on earth.

These matters have been discussed by me in previous Kristiania (Oslo) lectures, dealing with the sequence of evolutionary epochs, such as those that preceded and those that followed the Mystery of Golgotha. Today I wish to discuss this subject from a particular standpoint.

Mankind has undergone great changes in the course of its evolution. This fact is not sufficiently appreciated. People know that a Greek period existed, an Egyptian period, and other earlier periods. But, although they are aware of evolving culture-impulses, they believe that human beings in regard to their soul-life were just the same (at least, in historic ages) as they are today. This is not true. At a certain stage we come to a stop in this historic retrospect. We come to a long pause leading to a period which present-day scientists are very fond of describing as that of man's supposedly ape-like ancestors.

Mankind's evolution, however, was not in the least as people now imagine it. In order to understand the changes it has undergone, let us envisage the relatively great dependency, existing in the present age during the human being's first years of life, of the spirit and soul organism on the physical-bodily one.

You need only to consider the stage of early childhood until the change of teeth, and the extensive transformation accompanying the change of teeth which must strike every unprejudiced observer. The child's entire soul-constitution becomes different. We then find another life period lasting until puberty. We all know that at this age the development of spirit and soul is dependent on the development of the body. And, if we observe these things without prejudice, we notice the same dependence of spirit and soul on the body also at a later age lasting until the twenties, although today, in the time of youth movements (this is not said in a critical sense) it is just the young people who do not like to emphasize this dependence. Naturally, they consider themselves, at sixteen or seventeen, fully developed young women and young men; and those vaunting unusual mental faculties write newspaper articles at twenty-one. These young people would thus like to hush up the fact that their spirit and soul is greatly dependent on their bodily organism. At any rate, the present-day human being becomes more or less independent of the body once he has reached a certain age. A man in his twenties is an adult who does not feel himself as dependent upon his body as would a child were it to pass in full consciousness through the stages between change of teeth and puberty.

There was still a feeling in comparatively recent ages that the human being matured gradually. It was then clearly realized that the so-called apprentice had to be treated differently from the journey-man; and a master's rank could not be attained until relatively late in life.

As regards present-day man, however, it can be asserted that after a certain age, his spirit and soul are no longer greatly dependent on his body. Of course, on reaching a venerable age, we notice a renewed dependence on our physical organism. When the legs become shaky, when the face becomes wrinkled, when the hair becomes grey, we cannot then deny the influence of the body. This, however, is not ascribed to a genuine parallelism of body and soul. People of today feel that, even though the bodily forces decline, soul and spirit remain, and must remain, more or less independent of the bodily-physical. Yet this was not always the case. If we go back to earlier epochs of mankind's evolution, we find the human being even in his old age remaining as intensely dependent on his body as does a child's soul today remain dependent on its body between the change of teeth and puberty. And if we are enabled—not by external history, but by spiritual science—to go back to the first period of evolution after the great Atlantean catastrophe which caused a new configuration of the earth's continents, we come to what I called in my Occult Science the primeval Indian epoch. The human being then felt himself, even after having reached his fifties, to be just as dependent on the physical as the child's soul is dependent on the change of teeth, and the youthful person's soul on puberty. This means: Just as we experience today during childhood the ascending line of growth, so ancient man experienced, in his fifties, the descending line within spirit and soul. Then things happened in such a way that a man, on reaching his fifties, matured inwardly just by becoming older, in a similar manner as modern man matures on attaining puberty. And at that time, seven or eight thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha, human beings eagerly looked forward, during their whole life, to this stage of existence. For everyone could say to himself: Something will be revealed to me out of my bodily constitution that I could not experience in younger years, before I became forty-nine or fifty. Naturally, such an idea is bound to shock modern men most profoundly. You only need to think of a present-day man who is absolutely sure of being a finished product after reaching the twenties. What could be said if he had to wait until the age of maturity revealed something to him which he could not know before, which he could not feel, and experience before!

In ancient India, however, man's bodily constitution enabled him to feel, already in his fifties, something like a gradual separation of the physical body from spirit and soul. He felt more and more how the physical approximated, as it were, the corpse-like. And he felt in this estrangement of the physical body, in this approach of the physical body to the earth-elements, a liberation of spirit and soul. By considering the body merely as a garment, he felt its relationship to the earth, to all that would belong to earth after death. It was less amazing to ancient than to modern men that the body had to be discarded, delivered to the earth-forces. For ancient man passed slowly and gradually through this process of discarding the body.

This sounds paradoxical, because it implies the terrifying conception of having a physical body that is slowly becoming a corpse. Ancient man, however, did not think of his body as a burdensome object passing, as it were, into a kind of putrefaction. Instead, he thought of it as an independent sheath or shell which, even though becoming earth-like, was yet full of life. Yet the physical body, at the age of fifty, assumed a sheath-like, shell-like character.

This gradual becoming similar to the earth taught ancient man something that can be known today only through abstract science. The inner nature of metals, for instance, became known to him. At the age of fifty, he was instinctively able to differentiate between copper, silver, and gold. He felt the resemblance of these metals to his own organism gradually turning to earth. A rock-crystal called forth in him other feelings than furrowed soil. By aging, man gained wisdom concerning terrestrial matters.

This fact influenced primeval civilization. The young, looking up to the old, said to themselves: These ancients are wise. Once I have become as old as they are, I shall also be wise. Such an attitude caused a profound veneration and a tremendous respect for old age.

In those ancient days of mankind's evolution (the epoch of primeval India), a lofty civilization, connected with a wondrous veneration, a wondrous respect for old age, existed in a certain part of the world (not in that part, however, inhabited by men with receding foreheads, such as are excavated today by anthropologists). And we must ask ourselves: How did it actually happen that men passed through these experiences?

It did happen, because primeval man lived less intensively in his physical body than we do. Today man crawls into the very core of his physical body, the experiences of which he shares. Thus he feels himself to be identical, at one with his physical body. And we must undergo a common destiny with whatever is felt to be at one with us. Because, in those ancient times, men felt themselves more self-dependent within the physical body; because their thinking was more imaginative; because their feeling was like an inward weaving and living in the world of reality—for all these reasons their physical body from the beginning seemed to them like a sheath in which they were encased. This sheath began to harden as life drew near its end. A man in his fifties could feel how the body developed increasingly in accord with the outer world, thus becoming a mediator that could instill in him wisdom concerning the outer world.

The situation changed when civilized mankind of those days passed into the next age, called by me in my Occult Science the primeval Persian. Then a man in his fifties could no longer experience this dependence of his physical body upon the earthly. Instead, the aging physical body exerted a different influence on those still in their forties, from the forty-second or forty-third year to the forty-ninth or fiftieth. During these years, they participated intensively in the change of seasons. They experienced spring, summer, autumn, winter within their body. As it were, their body began to bud and blossom during spring and summer, and went into decline during autumn and winter. Human life took part in the seasons, the changing air-currents ...

And this perception of the changing air-currents, the changing seasons, was connected with another thing. Man felt that his speech was being transformed into something no longer belonging essentially to him. Just as the primeval Indian felt that, once he had attained the fifties, his whole physical body did not really belong to him, but more or less to the earth, so the primeval Persian felt that the body, by producing speech, belonged to the people around him. At fifty, a member of primeval Indian culture no longer said: I am walking. If expressing his own feelings, he would say: My body is walking. He did not say: I enter through the door; but instead: My body carries me through the door. For he experienced his body as something related to the outer world, to the earth. And, five or six millennia before the Mystery of Golgotha, a member of the Persian civilization felt that speech came forth by itself, that he had it in common with his whole surroundings. At that time, people all over the world did not live in such an international way as today, but as members of definite folk communities. They felt how speech became alienated from them; how, if expressing their real feelings, they could say: “It is speaking within me.”

It was really the case that people after attaining the forties expressed the following in a certain, very respectful sense: Divine-spiritual forces are speaking through me. And the human being also felt as if his breath did not belong to him any longer, but was dedicated to the surrounding world.

On reaching his late thirties, a member of the Egypto-Chaldaean culture—which lasted from the third or fourth millennium until the eighth or ninth pre-Christian century—had a similar feeling with regard to his thoughts, his mental images. The Egyptian or Chaldaean felt in his thirty-fifth year as if his mental images were connected with heavenly forces, the course of the stars.

As the primeval Indian, at the end of his life, felt the connection of his body with the earth, as the primeval Persian felt the connection of his speech, his breath, with the seasons and the surrounding world, so a member of ancient Egyptian, of ancient Chaldaean culture felt that his thoughts were directed by the course of the stars. And he felt how divine star-powers were interwoven with his thoughts.

In Egypto-Chaldaean culture, the human being felt this dependence of his thoughts upon heavenly powers until his forty-second or forty-third year. Subsequently no new element entered into human development. The primeval Persian, too, felt as if his thoughts had been given to him by the stars; but he attained, moreover, in his forties the relationship to speech that I have described. Likewise, the primeval Indian, from his thirty-fifth year, possessed this relationship to the star-powers. Therefore he considered astrology as something self-evident. In his forties, he also attained the dependence of speech upon his surroundings. In his fifties, moreover, he experienced how his physical body became objective, became shadow-like. He accustomed himself, as it were, to the dying, because dying had approached him already in his fifties. The soul was less firmly joined to the body. Hence outer conditions could bring forth these bodily changes. This fact was perceived by the soul, experienced by the soul. And thereby man, as he grew older, merged himself more and more with the world.

Then came the Graeco-Latin era, which lasted from the eighth pre-Christian century until the fifteenth post-Christian century, for until then, the echo of Graeco-Latin culture still resounded in all civilized countries. This marked the age when man felt himself until his thirties still dependent upon his physical body, but no longer dependent on the stars, the seasons, the earth. He felt himself firmly entrenched within his physical body. The Greek felt a concord, a harmony between the soul and spirit element and the bodily-physical. Only this bodily-physical element no longer separated itself from him. This is all very difficult to express, for we are prevented, by the customary and totally inadequate historical teaching given to us in school, from forming a conception of these changes in mankind's evolution.

There then came the time when the human being became connected with his physical body in such a way that his physical body was committed no longer to participate in the course of the universe directed by spiritual laws. Now man was completely bound to his physical body. Mankind did not reach this stage until the eighth pre-Christian century.

Thus a great transformation of mankind's whole evolution occurred in as far as it concerned civilized mankind. Although the human being on reaching the thirties felt himself still at one with his physical body, he no longer was separated from it. He felt himself united with his physical body. It could no longer unveil to him the world's mysteries. During this period, therefore, mankind attained an entirely new relation to death. At an earlier time, when the human being prepared himself for dying, as it were, by undergoing a separation from his physical body, this dying signified for him nothing but a transformation in the midst of life; for, in his fifties, he became familiar gradually with the process of dying. He experienced dying as a process which merged him, in a wisdom-filled and blissful way, with the universe. He experienced death as something guiding him into a world in which he had already lived during his earth-life. Death at that time was something entirely different from what it became later. It might be said: More and more the human being was confronted by the possibility that soul and spirit might participate in death.

Let us compare Hellenism with the primeval Indian epoch. In primeval India, the body gained independence. The individual was aware of being something else besides his body which became independent and sheath-like. He could not have possibly conceived the thought that death might be the end. Such a thought did not exist among human beings of the primeval Indian period. Only by degrees, and most decisively in the eighth pre-Christian century, did man say to himself (still out of an unconscious feeling, because he was unable to think about these things in a rationalistic way): My body dies; but, with regard to soul and spirit, I am at one with my body. No longer did he notice the difference between the bodily and the spirit and soul element.

The human being became dominated by a thought that terrified him when it first arose out of dark spiritual depths in the ninth or eighth century before the Mystery of Golgotha. It was the thought: Might not my soul pursue the same path as my body—die, as my body dies?

This thought which in the primeval Indian epoch would have been totally inconceivable now came more and more to the fore. Out of this mood emerged words like those famous ones of the Greek hero: Better a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of the shades.

This was the time when mankind nurtured a mood that grew in the right way towards the Mystery of Golgotha. For, what brought forth in ancient human beings the ability to preserve a freshness of soul which made it impossible for them to conceive that the soul might take the same path of death as the body?

This freshness of soul, this independence of soul with regard to feeling, was given to ancient man by this knowledge: I have had a life—for he could look into this life—which was pre-earthly; through it I passed with my soul and spirit before I descended to the physical world. While dwelling in this higher world, I was united with the exalted Sun-Being.

The ancient Mysteries had evolved a teaching which pointed out that man, in his pre-earthly existence, was united with the spirit of the sun, just as in earth-life his body is united with the physical light of the sun.

The teachers in the ancient Mysteries told the following to their pupils who, in their turn, told it again to others (they did not designate the exalted Sun-Being as the Christ, but He was the Christ, and we may therefore be permitted today to use this name): The Christ is a Being Who shall never descend to the earth. You, however, dwelt in your pre-earthly existence, before descending to earth, within spiritual worlds in communion with the Christ. And the force of the Christ has given you the faculty of making your soul independent of the body.

This instinctive memory of a pre-earthly existence was lost through the soul's increasing identification with its physical body. And, in the Greek epoch, earthly man could employ his instinctive consciousness-forces only by looking at physical life. The Greek was able to live such a harmonious earth-life, because his outlook into the divine worlds of the spirit had faded away. He was so successful in subduing the sensible-physical that the spiritual vanished more or less from his life's horizon. No longer did civilized men have a consciousness of the fact that before descending to earth, they dwelt in the presence of the exalted Sun-Being Who was later called the Christ. Now darkness encompassed those who looked at pre-earthly, prenatal existence. And thus arose the mystery of death.

What happened henceforth must be envisaged as something concerning not only mankind but also the gods. The divine-spiritual powers who sent the human being down to earth gave him the impulses towards the development that I have just described. Since his spirit and soul became increasingly merged with the physical body; since, as it were, his spirit and soul became identical with the physical, and since, therefore, the mystery of death confronted also the spirit and soul, the divine-spiritual powers who had sent the human being down to earth were threatened with the danger that he might be lost to the gods, that his soul, as well as his body, might die.

Yet man would never have become a free, independent being, had he not grown into his body during this epoch. Man could only become free in evolution if his view of the pre-earthly was dimmed. He was obliged to stand on earth—totally forsaken, as it were—within his physical body's abode. Thus his independent ego could radiate and gleam up.

For this shining forth of the independent ego can be best accomplished by the human being entering completely into his physical body. When man grows upward into the worlds of spirit and soul, his ego retreats; he is being merged with the objective element of spirit and soul. Man could become a free ego-being only if given the impulse by the gods to merge himself more and more with his physical body. He was thus, however, confronted by the mystery of death; for the physical body was bound to be claimed by death.

Now, if man's vision had not been awakened in another way, all of mankind on earth would have become more and more convinced that the soul and physical body were both dying together. And, if nothing else had happened; if history had continued its course in a straight line, all of us today would have come to the common conviction that the soul as well as the body are doomed to be laid in the grave.

At this point, the divine-spiritual powers decided to send down on earth the exalted Sun-Being, the Christ, in order that men, who no longer had any knowledge of their communion with the Christ during pre-earthly existence, could gain consciousness of their communion with the Christ after He had descended on earth and had shared on Golgotha and in Palestine their human destiny in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. The God descended into the earthly world at the moment of mankind's world historic evolution when men had lost their feeling of communion with the Sun-Being beyond the earthly world.

Why did the Christ come down on earth? Because human beings, having fought their way to the attainment of complete ego-consciousness, needed Him on earth. Men had to experience the presence of a victor, who could die and resurrect himself—be the vanquisher of death.

In the course of history, this mystery had to be set before mankind at a time when man, no longer able to look back into pre-earthly existence, was granted a view of his communion with the giver of man's immortality, with the Christ. It is a divine event, and not merely for mankind, that the Christ was sent down on earth from higher worlds. For the human race would have fallen away from the gods, had they not sent down upon earth the loftiest among them, in order that He undergo a human destiny, a human existence, thus interweaving a divine event with earthly-human events and mankind's entire world evolution.

The Mystery of Golgotha cannot be comprehended unless we regard it not only as a human event, but also as a divine event. The fact must be grasped that something which could be envisaged previously only in the divine worlds could now be envisaged in the earthly world.

Possibly you might raise the objection: Not all men have become followers of the Christ; many do not believe in the Christ. Must all these have the opinion that at death their soul would be laid in the grave with the body?

This, however, is not the way in which the Mystery of Golgotha may be interpreted. It is valid through all the centuries preceding ours that the Christ, in His infinite compassion overflowing with grace, died not only for His immediate followers, but for all men in all ages, everywhere on earth.

All men on earth have been redeemed from the riddle of death by the Christ. At first, this deed did not touch human consciousness. It is natural, however, that some men were found who could consciously grasp the grandeur and significance of the Mystery of Golgotha. Yet the Christ did die and did rise as much for the Chinese, Japanese, and Hindus as for the Christians.

Just because since the fifteenth century human evolution must increasingly regard intellectualism as its highest soul-force, and just because this intellectual impulse will become more and more powerful in the future, have we approached an epoch when it is incumbent upon the earth's entire population to grasp, with its ever growing consciousness, what was brought forth by the Mystery of Golgotha.

Thus it will become necessary that the Mystery of Golgotha be penetrated by a knowledge that can be really understood by all men on earth.

In preceding centuries, Christianity developed in a way that still conformed to the peculiarities of ancient ethnic religions. Christian development had not yet attained universality. The Christian missionaries who went among the followers of other religions found little or no understanding, because the Christ was presented as a separate god who had the same qualities as those possessed by the ancient heathen folk deities. This was the manner in which Christianity had been disseminated. Why had Constantine, why Chlodvig, accepted Christianity?—Because they believed that the Christian god would be a more powerful helper than their former gods. They exchanged, as it were, their former gods for the Christian god. Hence the Christ had to take on many qualities of the ancient folk deities. These qualities have adhered to the Christ through the centuries.

In this way, however, Christianity could not become a universal religion. On the contrary, it had to retreat more and more before intellectualism. And we have seen, particularly in the nineteenth century, many a theological development which understood nothing whatsoever of the Christ-event in its super-sensible aspect. Here the desire was to speak only of Jesus, the man, although conceding that as man he towered above all other men. Yet, henceforth, the desire was only to speak of Jesus, the man, and not of Christ, the God.

We must, nevertheless, be able to speak again of Christ, the God, because this Christ, while undergoing His destiny through the Mystery of Golgotha, manifested to men on earth what He had formerly signified to them, before they had descended to earth from the high heavens.

Hence, we must state that the ancient folk religions were primarily local religions. People prayed to the god of Thebes, to the god on Mount Olympus. They were local deities who could be worshipped only in near-by places. Thus, from the beginning, these ancient faiths were bound to certain territories.

Later the local gods, who had their abode in a definite spot, were replaced by gods bound to the personalities of single men, of the guiding folk heroes. Yet a people's god was either a still living folk hero or his surviving soul, the ancestral folk soul. All religious faiths had a restricted character.

With Christianity, however, there appeared a world religion which bestowed a spiritual element upon the whole earth, just as the sun bestows a physical element upon the whole earth. The climate in the vicinity of Mount Olympus is different from the climate in the vicinity of Thebes; the latter, in its turn, is different from the climate in the vicinity of Bombay. If a religious faith nestles close to a locality, it cannot spread beyond this locality. The sun, however, sheds its light on all the earth's localities, shines upon all men as the same sun.

When, however, the human form was taken on by that God Whose physical reflection shone forth in the sun's radiance, then the human race received a God who could be accepted as God by all men on earth. If the possibility is found of penetrating the being of this Christ-Divinity, we shall be able to represent Him as the God acceptable to all mankind. Today we stand only at the beginning of anthroposophical teachings. As it were, we are still stammering the language of Anthroposophy. Yet Anthroposophy will continue to develop more and more. And a part of this development will consist in its capability of finding words to describe the Mystery of Golgotha—words of a kind that spiritual science can bring to the Hindus, the Chinese, to all men on earth; and which will elucidate the Mystery of Golgotha in such a way that the Hindus, the Chinese, the Japanese will be unable to reject what is told them concerning the Mystery of Golgotha.

For this purpose, we must attach a genuinely serious significance to all that represents Christian tradition. Throughout the centuries, people have subjected themselves more or less to the words of the Gospels. They have studied these Gospels in a way commensurate with their understanding of these ancient books. We have certainly no intention of speaking against the validity of the Gospels. Our cycles on each of the Gospels attempt to penetrate, by means of special anthroposophical interpretation, into the deeper meaning of these Gospels. Yet one thing must be said: Why is the passage at the end of one Gospel taken so lightly? There it is written: 1 have still many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. And why are the words of another Gospel not taken more seriously: And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the earth-cycles? For the Christ spoke the full truth. He could have said to men other things than those recorded in the Gospels. Only those Christ-words are recorded in the Gospels, for the understanding of which the men of that epoch—few in number—were ready. But mankind must become more and more mature in the course of earthly evolution. From the Mystery of Golgotha on, the Christ dwelt among men as the Living Christ, and not as the dead Christ. And He is still present among us. If we learn to speak His language, we shall recognize His presence; we shall recognize the truth of His words: And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the earth-cycles. And the anthroposophical world view desires to speak His language, His spiritual language. The anthroposophical world view desires to speak in such a way of nature, of all the beings on earth, of the starry sky and the sun that, by means of this language, the Mystery of Golgotha may be understood; that the Christ may be experienced as the One Who is ever present.

And, also after the Mystery of Golgotha, we may regard as Christ-words all that we have gained from the spiritual world; aided by that power which, through the Mystery of Golgotha, descended from heaven to earth. If as men we speak of the spiritual worlds, we may make true the word of St. Paul: Not I, but the Christ in me. For today we have entered an age in which we cannot even emulate the Greeks who, although feeling themselves still at one with their physical body, yet felt this physical body as something harmonious and independent. Today we penetrate at a still earlier age than the Greeks into that which underlies our physical body, thus separating ourselves from the spiritual around us. We can deepen our being only by seeking the union with the God Who descended from heaven to earth. And we can feel ourselves united only with that God Who entered the earthly sphere, because men on earth could no longer enter the heavenly sphere with their immediate and ordinary consciousness. By finding the Christ, we also find anew the approach to the super-sensible world; not now, however, by means of the physical body (this was the case in ancient times), but by means of heightened soul-power. And today, when the parallelism between the development of body and soul lasts only up to the age of twenty (later on it will last a still shorter period), this heightened soul-power can be attained alone by immersing ourselves, in the midst of the sensible events of earthly evolution, into the knowledge of a super-sensible event: the Mystery of Golgotha. Everything on earth took place in a sensible way. Only in the Mystery of Golgotha something super-sensible mingled with earthly events. And this can be understood only out of a super-sensible knowledge.

Hence the union with the Christ awakens in our human souls the powerful faculty of attaining a relationship to the super-sensible world—a relationship formerly attained by human beings through being connected with their physical body in such a way that the body could become sheath-like. Thus, feeling the approach of death before physical death occurred, they merged themselves with the spirit prevailing in their surroundings.

We must attain by means of the soul what could be attained, in earlier days, through the mediation of the body. For, although we admire in the highest degree what has been preserved of Indian writings—which did not originate, however, from the earliest primeval Indian epoch, but from a later period—although we admire what has been bequeathed to us through the glory of the Vedas, the grandeur of the Vedanta-philosophy, the radiant splendor of the Bhagavad-Gita, we must, nevertheless, recognize the fact that this could be attained in ancient times only because the body reflected to the human being, as he grew older, a certain spirituality. Ancient man was compensated for the waning of his physical existence, which set in after the thirty-fifth year, by having, as it were, the spirit pressing out of his body, as the latter became hard, withered and wrinkled. And this spirit was perceived by the human being. The great philosophical poems of ancient times were not composed by youths, but by patriarchs who had acquired wisdom. It resulted from what was given by the body. In the present stage of human evolution, which differs from the ancient ones, we must receive from the soul, as it grows more powerful, what was formerly contributed by the body. Our body becomes old. We must remain united with it. We cannot let the spirit emerge from this body, because we have utilized it since early childhood.

If we did not do this, we could never be free men. This must be accepted as our rightful earthly destiny. One fact, however, must be made clear to us: Our soul has to gain strength. Since the spiritual strength formerly corresponding to the waning body flows to us no longer we must attain it by strengthening our soul through our own effort. And we shall experience this strengthening of the soul by looking, in a genuine and living way, toward a great and powerful event: The divine event that took place as the Mystery of Golgotha in the midst of earthly life. In beholding the Mystery of Golgotha and becoming conscious that its after-effect is still dwelling among us, is still existing in the spiritual-super-sensible sphere, our spirit and soul become strengthened and approach the spiritual world anew.

The Christ has descended to earth in order that men, who no longer see Him in heaven by means of their memory, may be permitted to see Him on earth. Seen from today's viewpoint, this is what rightly places the Mystery of Golgotha before our spiritual eye.

The disciples, who had preserved a remnant of ancient clairvoyance, could still have the Christ as their teacher when He dwelt among them after the resurrection in the spiritual body.

Yet this power gradually fell away from them. And its complete disappearance is symbolically represented through the Festival of the Ascension.

The disciples sank into profound sadness, because they were forced to believe that the Christ was no longer among them. They had taken part in the event of Golgotha. Now, however, they had to believe that the Christ had moved away from their consciousness, that the Christ was no longer on earth. Thus they were plunged into deep sorrow, for they had seen the Christ-figure disappear in the clouds, that is, move away from their consciousness.

But every genuine knowledge is born out of sorrow, of suffering, of grief. True, profound knowledge is never born out of joy. True, profound knowledge is born out of suffering. And out of the suffering, which encompassed the disciples of the Christ at the Festival of the Ascension, out of this deep soul-anguish arose the Mystery of Pentecost. The disciples could no longer view the Christ by means of their outer, instinctive clairvoyance. But the force of the Christ unfolded within them. The Christ had sent to them the spirit enabling their soul to experience the Christ-existence in their innermost depths.

This experience gave meaning to the first Festival of Pentecost occurring in human evolution. The Christ, Who had disappeared from the outer, clairvoyant view still clinging to the disciples as a heritage of ancient evolutionary periods, appeared at Pentecost within the disciples' inner experience. The fiery tongues signify nothing but the arising of the inner Christ in the souls of His pupils, the souls of the disciples. Out of inner necessity, the Festival of Pentecost had to follow the Festival of the Ascension.

I would like to add a few more things to what I told you last Saturday, and I can answer the two questions I was given for today next time. We talked about poisons and their effects on people, and we have just seen from the poisons that if you understand real science, you have to ascend to the supersensible, to the spiritual parts of the human being.

Now, in order to give you a complete picture, I would like to add to what produces such strong toxic effects, so that you can see the full picture, what the more or less healthy body can cope with when it comes to nutrition. I have spoken about nutrition several times, but let us talk about it again and take into account what we presented last time.

When it comes to nutrition, humans mainly consume three to four types of food. The first of these is protein, which you can best recognize by looking at a chicken egg. Protein is produced by plants as well as by animal and human bodies. Not only do human and animal bodies need the forces they have within themselves to produce protein, because every living body produces protein, but they also need the protein that is independently produced by plants. The human body also absorbs animal protein. In relation to this protein, science in particular has basically been embarrassed in the very latest times; because it was still taught everywhere twenty years ago that a person must absorb at least 120 grams of protein per day in order to stay healthy. And so the whole diet was organized in such a way that people were prescribed which foods they should eat in order to get the necessary amount of protein into their bodies. It was believed that 120 grams were necessary.

Today, science has completely abandoned this view. It now knows that if a person eats that much protein, not only does it not help their health, but it directly contributes to their illness, because most of the protein in the human intestinal tract decays. So that the human organism, by consuming 120 grams of protein a day, constantly has something like rotting eggs in its intestines, which terribly contaminate the intestinal contents and sweat out the poisons, which then pass into the organism, into the not only easily produce in the body what later leads to so-called hardening of the arteries – most hardening of the arteries comes from eating too much protein – but also what makes people extremely susceptible to all kinds of infectious diseases. The less protein a person consumes, the less he is exposed to the risk of contracting diseases – provided, of course, he has the necessary resistance. People who consume a lot of protein contract infectious diseases such as diphtheria, measles, and smallpox more easily than people who do not consume as much protein.

It is indeed very peculiar that today science teaches that not 120 grams of protein are necessary, but only 20 to 50 grams. That is the amount, they say, that a person actually needs daily. In just two decades, science has so quickly changed its views. So you can see how little you can actually rely on when something is supposedly scientifically established. If you happen to need to inform yourself on this subject and you pick up a twenty-year-old encyclopedia, you will read in the relevant chapter that you need 120 grams of protein. If you get a later edition, you will read: 20 to 50 grams, and if you had more, you would become ill from it. So you see what the situation is with scientific truths. We are taught what is to be considered true or false depending on which edition of the encyclopaedia we get hold of. All this just goes to show that you cannot get a clear idea of such things, which go into the spiritual, at all in this way. And that is of course a reason, when one really considers the matter, to go into the spiritual, when one wants to understand what happens when man takes in egg white. But it is that food, which must still be processed in the intestines, in the abdomen, and the abdomen itself must have the strength to process this egg white. You know that protein, especially fresh egg white, is semi-liquid. All protein is semi-liquid. The human etheric body has access to all semi-liquid substances. The human etheric body cannot do anything with solid substances, only with liquid ones. So the human being must take all the food he consumes in a liquid state.

Now you will say: When a person takes salt, sugar or something like that, it is solid. But it is immediately dissolved! That is what the saliva is for. The solids that make up the actual physical body must not enter the human body from the outside world at all. Therefore, you can conclude: You have solids in you, you know that; the bones are solid. But the thing is this: The firm bones are formed only out of the fluids in the human body itself. Nothing solid from the outside can ever enter the human body. The human body must allow everything solid to arise from the fluids. Therefore, you can say: We have the solid in us and the physical body forms it. But the physical body is formed entirely out of the liquid, and for the liquid, the etheric body is there, the fine body that cannot be seen, but which permeates the whole human being. And the egg white must also be completely processed by the etheric body, in the lower abdomen. Of course, as I have already told you, the other spiritual elements of the human being also work in there; but the egg white must be processed in the etheric body. So the fluid is there for the etheric body of the human being. Now, from the fact that you can know that the egg white must be processed in the human abdomen, you can see that the egg white cannot actually do the very hardest work in the human being, because it does not need to work its way up into the thoracic body, and above all, it does not need to work its way up into the human head. You see from this that egg white cannot serve as a nutrient that comes into consideration in the first place. One could say that it is actually impossible for a person to eat too little protein, because in the abdomen, what one eats is immediately inside; it does not need much work there. The protein is processed in the abdomen. Even if a person only consumes food that is very low in protein, all protein is processed immediately.

So you can see that it is entirely possible for humans to get by on a low-protein diet. Today, science already admits that, but years ago, children in particular were overfed with protein. Today, we see the children who were overfed with protein in the 1870s or 1880s; they now suffer from hardening of the arteries or have already died from it. So the harmfulness of something does not become apparent in the same period of time, but only much later.

The second type of food is fat. Fat naturally goes into the abdomen when it is eaten. But fat passes through the intestines and has a very strong effect on the middle part of the human body, on the chest. So for the middle part, the thoracic region, for the proper nourishment of the heart, chest and so on, humans must take in fatty substances.

From this it follows that man needs fat in the thoracic region because breathing takes place in the thoracic region. What does that mean? It means that the carbon that humans carry within them combines with oxygen. When carbon combines with oxygen, warmth is needed. The function of fats, in combining with oxygen, is to produce warmth. So fats contribute greatly to what the human chest organism needs.

Now one can say: proteins, when not processed by the body, and specifically when not processed in the abdomen, have a tendency to rot. If we have proteins in us that cannot be properly processed, we really do have something like rotten eggs in our intestines. Isn't that right, gentlemen? You are well aware of the smell of rotten eggs, and the thing is that if a person takes too much protein, he sweats this rotten-egg smell out internally into his body. He permeates himself completely with this rotten egg stench. Yes, if you leave eggs standing, then they will become rotten eggs, then they will stink like rotten eggs. And the part that the body has not processed will of course also stink in the body; but the other part, which is processed, will not stink, but will be transformed into something pure in the body. But that is the work of the etheric body. The etheric body is there to overcome and eliminate that which arises as a putrid stench. It is the case in the human body that the etheric body is the fighter and the victor over putrefaction. Putrefaction is conquered in the human being through the etheric body. If a person no longer has their etheric body after death, then they begin to rot. So I would like to say quite tangibly here: a person does not rot while they are alive; as soon as they are no longer alive, they rot. Why is that? Because the etheric body is gone when a person is dead! The etheric body is therefore the part of the human being that prevents rotting. So we are constantly fighting putrefaction within us, and the one who fights putrefaction is our etheric body.

So I think, gentlemen, anyone who thinks this through must find with the utmost clarity, merely by external observation, that an etheric body must be there, that an etheric body must be there everywhere at all. Just imagine, proteins are produced everywhere on earth, and they rot. The earth would have to stink up to heaven if it were not for the ether, which repeatedly drives away this putrefaction. So, inside and outside the human organism, it is the ether that constantly fights against the proteins from becoming putrid. This must be taken into account.

If we move on to fats, then we have to say: fats do not go bad, but they do go rancid – you all know this if you have ever left fats out somewhere – even butter goes rancid. So fats have the peculiarity of going rancid. Now, if you have left butter standing, you won't be able to tell whether it's rancid or good, fresh butter — unless you're trained to look at it. But when you put the butter on your tongue and taste it, you know immediately that the butter is rancid. So it has something to do with consciousness, with sensation. Rotting has something to do with smelling, with the external, you can smell it. Of course, it is different with rotten eggs than with the scent of roses, but at least you smell it. But not the process of going rancid. Rancidity is something that is described in terms of something more internal, of tasting.

This already indicates that it has much more to do with inner sensation than with what is putrid about eggs. The human thoracic body is physically connected to all that is sensation in consciousness, but the astral body is spiritually connected to it. And you know that what is air-like is in the thorax. We breathe in the air. We process the air. In the chest, the air is in the right place. In the other part of the human body, only a small amount of gases and air types may be produced. If too much gas is produced in the intestines, it causes bloating, and that is not healthy. The middle body of the human being is there for the actual gas production. And the higher supersensible spiritual link that intervenes there — that intervenes in the gaseous — is the human astral body. This human astral body now fights the rancidity of fats within itself; just as the etheric body fights the putrefaction of proteins, so the astral body fights the rancidity of fats. Man would constantly have a rancid belching of his own fats, would taste rancid inside, if his astral body did not constantly fight this rancidity. So that we have this astral body within us to fight the rancidity of fats.

You see, gentlemen, that is quite wonderful, because you can see from it that what is outside in the ordinary physical, material world takes a completely different course from what is inside with us. Outside in the physical world, fats definitely go rancid. Man does not always go rancid for his own good, only when he becomes ill inside. So the thing is that in a healthy state, a person's astral body is such that it cannot go rancid. It only goes rancid if the person eats too much fat for the astral body to cope with, or if too much fat is produced due to some other reason. But internally, the person does perceive when their fat is going rancid. And one can say: When a person becomes very rancid, that is, when the activity of the astral body is much too weak, then he has an unpleasant taste in his mouth all the time. This unpleasant taste then has an effect on the stomach. And in this roundabout way, a person first gets stomach and intestinal diseases from the rancid fat within himself.

If you notice that a person is becoming rancid inside, then arsenic is a good remedy for the fats that he has inside that he is not processing. Arsenic fights against fattening and strengthens the astral body. And the result is that the person can fight this rancidity. These are things that are extremely important. If a person shows an inclination within themselves to be unable to overcome their putrid protein through the etheric body, then some compound with copper usually has an extremely strong effect on the person as a remedy. Copper is effective when the lower abdominal diseases, intestinal diseases, are directly caused by the protein. But if you notice that something is making itself felt through the mouth, through the sense of taste, it does not help to give the person copper, but arsenic is needed because you first have to strengthen the astral body. So it is not enough to simply state that this or that disease lies in this or that part of the human being; instead, one must know where they come from. Whether they come from rotten protein in the intestines or from fats that have gone rancid, which in turn affect the intestines and stomach through the taste of the mouth.

So you see, gentlemen, we have within us the opposite of what these substances show on the outside. We have an astral body that fights the rancidity of fats, whereas in the ordinary physical material world, fats simply go rancid.

A third food that humans consume is the substances that are carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are found in particular in potatoes, for example, in lentils and beans, and of course in all types of grain. The carbohydrates are in there. In a great many of these substances, either sugar is directly contained, which we always take with our food, or sugar is produced directly from these carbohydrates by converting what we take in with the potato, for example. Potatoes contain mostly starch. This starch paste is first converted into dextrin and then into sugar in our bodies. So when you eat potatoes, you are actually nourishing yourself with sugar, because the potato paste, the starch paste, is converted into sugar in the human body. Isn't it true that grapes, for example, contain a lot of this sugar, and so does alcohol. What alcohol is for a person is actually based not only on the alcohol itself but also on its sugar content. Sugar is produced in the human organism from alcohol.

The first kind of food was therefore protein, the second kind was fat and the third kind was starch, sugar. We have seen that protein is processed by the etheric body in certain quantities, so that it does not become putrid. The fats are processed by the astral body, so that they do not go rancid. Now for starch and sugar! If you look at the etheric body, you have to say that it is mainly active in the lower body. The astral body is mainly active in the chest area. Now we come to something else. You all know, I don't want to say from your own experience, but from seeing people who are not like you, the effect of alcohol, and you know that alcohol produces a particular characteristic in people, first in the intoxication, but we don't want to talk about that for now. But you know, the next day – we have already spoken about this – the so-called “brummschädel” (headache) comes, it is also called a hangover. What does the headache or hangover mean?

Yes, gentlemen, you will already have gathered from the name that a headache has something to do with the human head. And if you have heard people describe how they were different from you the next day because they had a little too much to drink the day before, you will have heard them complain mainly about their heads. Their heads hurt, and when they don't hurt, they feel like they might fall off their shoulders and the like. What actually happens then?

The task of the head is namely to fight what starch and sugar want. What do starch and sugar want? You only have to look at wine. Isn't it true that when autumn comes, you harvest the wine, the grapes. They are pressed and then the mixture ferments. What is left after the process is enjoyed as wine. Now, because wine has become wine through fermentation, it has overcome fermentation. But when you bring wine into the stomach, something is created from it that in turn goes into the food. The alcohol is almost transformed back. And now the substances that want to ferment directly are starch and sugar. Starch and sugar in the human organism want to ferment. When you drink alcohol, the alcohol in the head drives away the forces that prevent the fermentation of sugar and starch in the human body. Let's take the story very clearly. Say you ate potatoes and beans on January 22nd and drank alcohol with them. Well, if you hadn't drunk alcohol, your head would have stayed sober. Potatoes and beans contain starch and sugar, which is produced from the starch; the head would have the power to properly prevent the fermentation of starch and sugar. If you take alcohol, the head loses the ability to prevent the fermentation of starch and sugar that you have taken in with the potatoes, and the potatoes and beans, and also the other things, cereals for example, begin to ferment in you.

So instead of preventing fermentation in the human being, it now occurs. And it occurs through an inability of the head that has occurred as a result of alcohol, so that the person is now full of fermentation. There is a strange expression in central Germany, in Thuringia. When someone talks nonsense, they say in Thuringia: He is fermenting. In these parts, it is not customary to say that someone who talks nonsense is fermenting; but those who have been to Germany will have heard it said in central Germany. And if someone always talks nonsense, then in central Germany, in Thuringia, they call him an old hag. So the thing is that in central Germany, fermenting is associated with being confused in the head, with talking nonsense. That is a very good folk instinct. You know that there is too much ferment in a person when they talk too much nonsense. Now, if someone has drunk alcohol and has a headache, then he does not talk nonsense, because he becomes quiet, but the nonsense is in him, it rumbles in him. So it is something that occurs to prevent starch and sugar from fermenting, something that counteracts the tangible effect of alcohol. So that one can say: There is something in the human mind that constantly works to prevent the starch and sugar in it from fermenting.

Now, no one denies that the human head is home to the strongest I, just as the abdomen is home to the etheric body and the middle body to the astral body, the I, the actual I. It is now the case that this actual I has to do with the warmth, just as it has to do with the solid of the physical body, with the liquid of the ether body, with the gaseous of the astral body. It is the case that in everything that depends on the actual self, the human being sets warmth in motion. This can be traced in the human body down to the last detail. The actual self is also connected with the blood, which is why the blood generates warmth. But the actual self, that which the human being experiences in consciousness, is also connected, for example, with glandular secretion. Therefore, glandular secretion is now associated with warmth. It is also the real self that now prevents fermentation from the supersensible through the powers of the head. So one can say: the etheric body fights the putrefaction of the proteins, the astral body fights the rancidity of the fats, the I fights the fermentation of sugars and starches.

This is also the reason why I had to tell you that excessive consumption of potatoes is bad for the head. Excessive consumption of potatoes has the following effect on people. You see, potatoes contain little protein. Because they contain little protein, they are actually a good food for humans. And if a person eats potatoes in moderation with other foods, then it is a good food because of its low protein content. But the potato contains an extraordinary amount of starch, which has to be converted into sugar in the human body, first into dextrin and then into sugar. I told you at the time that if a person eats too many potatoes, his head has to work terribly hard; of course, because the head has to prevent the fermentation. That is why people who eat too many potatoes and therefore have to work their heads terribly to process the potato fermentation become weak-headed. In particular, the middle sections of the brain become weak; only the frontal sections of the brain, which do not have to work as hard to prevent potato fermentation, remain. And so it is precisely because of the fact that potato food has become widespread in recent times that materialism has come about, because it is produced in the forebrain.

It is so strange: one believes that materialism is a logical thing. In a way, materialism in modern times is nothing more than the result of eating potatoes! Well, it's not true, people don't like to think that they should live on potatoes alone; but then they like materialism. So they are actually in a contradiction. If you really wanted to be a materialist, you would actually have to advise spreading potato food everywhere, because it would be the best way to become convinced of materialism, wouldn't it? That is something that most people don't succeed at. But if the materialistic monists wanted to fight effectively, they would actually have to ensure that other foods are replaced by potato foods as much as possible. Then the Monist League would achieve quite tremendous successes. If it did not work very quickly, it could work best over a period of several decades, and it would have the best possible results if it tried to influence people to eat only potatoes. But the people on whom it wanted to exert an influence would have a few tricks up their sleeves to get around its efforts, so it would not have the best possible success!

But you can see from this that spiritual science, as practised here, recognizes precisely the right kind of materialism. Materialism knows nothing at all about the material; spiritual science recognizes precisely that the potato is the right producer of materialism. It is terribly insidious, the potato, cunning, clever to excess. For just see, man can only eat the tubers of the potato, not even the eyes on the potato – they are harmful in themselves – and he certainly cannot eat the flower, because the potato is a member of the nightshade family and the flowers are poisonous. But what is the poison? I already told you last time: in large quantities the poison kills, in small quantities, finely distributed, it is a remedy. The potato itself has a great deal of starch paste in it, it consists almost entirely of starch paste. It could not live because the starch paste would be terribly harmful; at the same time, it draws the poison out of the world and destroys the harmful effect in itself. That is why I call her clever and cunning. She herself has her poison, through which she removes the harmfulness for herself. But the poison of the potato is particularly harmful to humans; she does not give that to him, she only gives him what she herself combats in herself through her poison. It is really something that can be called that: the potato is a clever, cunning creature! And humans must be clear about the fact that if they eat too many potatoes, their midbrain will atrophy and that even their senses can suffer precisely from excessive potato consumption.

If you eat too many potatoes as a child or very young person, your midbrain will become extremely weak. But the midbrain contains the sources of the most important sensory organs. The midbrain contains the four-mound body, the visual mounds and so on, and excessive potato consumption can even weaken vision because it has its sources in the midbrain. And some eye diseases in old age are caused by the fact that a person was raised on too many potatoes as a child. The person then becomes visually weak, weak-eyed. It is really the case that in the past, people in Europe became visually weak much less often in old age than they do now. And that in turn stems from the fact that, in addition to what otherwise affects the eyes – but that does not even have such a strong effect because it does not work internally, electric light and so on – the excessive consumption of potatoes has a very harmful effect on the eyes, on vision and even on the sense of taste – even on the sense of taste! You see, that is where the following comes from. Suppose a person eats too many potatoes from childhood on. You will often see this in later life: the person never knows when he has had enough because his taste has been spoiled by eating too many potatoes. In contrast, a person who has not eaten too many potatoes knows instinctively when he has had enough. So the instinct, which is more tied to the midbrain, is spoiled by excessive potato consumption. This is what has emerged particularly strongly in recent times.

But from all that I have told you, you can see that a person must be particularly careful to be strong enough to overcome, firstly, the decomposition of proteins, secondly, the rancidity of fats, and thirdly, the fermentation of starch and sugar.

Now, as I told you last time, a person cannot be completely teetotal, because if he does not drink any alcohol at all, alcohol is produced in him. But this alcohol remains in the abdomen; it does not go up to the head, because the head must be free of alcohol, otherwise it is immediately unable, as the carrier of the ego, to fight the fermentation that is in the body in the right way. You see, now you can form an idea of the way in which man relates to his natural environment. If you look, for example, at the protein that is rotting everywhere – after all, animals and plants are rotting – you have to say: there is ether everywhere, which gradually balances this out. If you look at the fats, which are also in the plants and are everywhere, you have to say that these fats would gradually make all living things incapable of living, both animal and human, if it were not for a fighter against rancidity in the astral body. So, in fact, the human being fights that which is outside in nature. And when the human being dies, the etheric body, the astral body and the ego leave the physical body. The human being then passes over into the spiritual world. What happens then? Well, gentlemen, you know what happens. The corpse immediately begins to decompose, to go rancid and to ferment at the same time, except that the decomposition is of course more visible, or rather more noticeable, because people rarely walk around with their noses stuffed up. So the putrefaction is easily smelled. But somehow lying over a grave and tasting whether the fat of the corpse in question has gone rancid is not something one usually does, and that is why one usually knows nothing about it. And the fermentation that does take place is certainly not studied. So it is actually the case that when the ego departs, the human body begins to ferment; when the astral body departs, the human body begins to go rancid; and when the etheric body departs, the human body begins to rot. Man carries this within him continually, but while he lives on earth, he fights it continually. Anyone who denies that the etheric body, the astral body and the I are spiritual realities within the human being must be asked: what do you think actually happens, why does the human being not rot? Why does he not ferment? Why does he not turn rancid? He would have to do so if he were like the mere physical body!

But what does our science do? Our science waits with its study until the human being has died. Because what it knows about the living human being is actually very little compared to what it actually knows from anatomy when the human being is a corpse, has died. Everything you can actually learn relates only to the corpse. Our science always waits for the corpse. So this science cannot know anything at all about the real human being who is alive, because it does not take this human being into account at all. And that is precisely the damage to our science – it has only been like this since the 17th century – that it has basically only gained its knowledge from the corpse. But the corpse is no longer the human being, because one must ask: What is it that, while the human being is alive, the corpse, which he also carries with him during his lifetime, does not behave as a corpse in such a way that it rots, ferments and becomes putrid? It is precisely when one really looks at the living human being that one comes across these spiritual, these supersensible aspects of the human being. And then one also notices that the ego works primarily in the head, that the astral body works primarily in the chest, and that the etheric body works primarily in the lower body. And science does not even know about the lower body, because it believes that the same processes that are outside in nature are in the lower body. That is simply not the case.

Well, gentlemen, it is interesting to study things, I would like to say, not in the study chamber, but to study them in the life of the people outside. There are, as you know, baths where it smells of rotten eggs, for example Marienbad. There are also German baths that contain hydrogen sulfide, where it smells like rotten eggs. Yes, really: people who are otherwise gourmets and also have a fine sense of smell have to go to such bathing places. And why do they do that? Why do they sometimes live there for several months during the summer in places where it smells as if everything has been sprinkled with rotten eggs? You see, it is like this: these people have actually eaten too much protein, and now they come to the seaside resort; because they are covered with skin and the thing is internal, they themselves do not smell like that, but if you could smell it, they would smell terribly of rotten eggs inside! Now all these people, who smell of rotten eggs on the inside, come to the seaside resorts, where it smells of rotten eggs, and what happens there? Yes, you see, one time the rotten egg smell is inside, the other time it is outside. The first time it is inside, the nose does not notice it; the second time it is outside, the nose notices it. Head and stomach are opposites. What the stomach produces in terms of rotten egg smell when it comes from the head through smelling is fought. And so, in the seaside resorts that smell of rotten eggs, the internal rotten egg smell is fought.

This is especially noticeable for those who have the sense to make such observations. As a boy, I happened to go to a seaside resort like this. I had to go to Bad Marienquelle every other day. So it stinks of rotten eggs there. While it is so unpleasant on the outside because it smells so terrible, you suddenly start to feel very comfortable in your stomach. So if you are not sick, if you don't have a rotten egg smell in your stomach, you experience a feeling of a higher zest for life. Those who do not let themselves be repelled by the rotten egg smell can experience this. Of course, the one who holds his nose shut does not have the opposite, does not have this spring effect in the stomach that one has when one really surrenders to the rotten egg smell. And the rotten egg smell, for example, even when artificially produced, is an extraordinarily good healing agent. It gives the body the strength, for example, to make fading muscles firm again, to make them strong. Now, people do not love such cures, but they are extremely useful in a certain respect. Because, you see, when the rotten egg smell approaches a person externally, it becomes spring in the belly internally. And in spring everything sprouts and grows, and a person can become strong again by getting spring in his belly.

This is what happens to people who gluttonously spoil their stomachs during the winter. You see, if you don't spoil your stomach in winter through gluttony, then you join in with the spring that is outside. It is precisely the abdomen that participates in spring in an extraordinarily strong way. But if you really want to experience spring outside in nature, then you should eat as few such things as goose liver pâté and so on as possible. If you have eaten a lot of goose liver pâté, then it is not spring in the human stomach, but rather it remains in the human stomach as it is under the earth in winter - not as it is on the earth, but as it is under the earth. It is warm there, that is where you put the potatoes in the pits. But everything in the person rots because the warmth is stored in the belly; it does not spring in the person. And then you have to look for an artificial spring in the rotten egg smell.

Such is the contrast between the ego and the etheric body. The I and the etheric body must balance each other out in the human being. You can see from this that if you only really study nature, if you go to a seaside resort with an open mind and there is a rotten egg smell, hydrogen sulfide, then the feeling of spring in the belly teaches you how the opposite of this actually works internally in the putrefaction of the protein substance.

I wanted to give you some additional information to what I said last time. You know that I told you that when someone has taken a certain poison, they must take liquid egg white as an antidote. Those things that are healthy become poisons if they are not properly treated in the body, if too much of them enters the body. So even egg white can expel a toxin from the human body, but egg white itself is toxic if it decays in the body, if too much of it enters the body. So close together are nutrition and poisoning. And you will have heard for yourself how excess in nutrition can become poisoning. A large part of illnesses are nutritional illnesses, that is, no consideration is given in nutrition to the fact that the substances in question should only be consumed in a certain amount if they are to be processed.

I will have the next lesson announced because I cannot be there on Saturday. I will be in Bern.

Good morning, gentlemen! Well, have you thought of any more questions? If not, then I would like to bring up something that follows on from the previous point, so that you can see how one can find evidence from all sides, so to speak, that the human physical organism, that is, the human physical body, is permeated by the soul. Today, let us look at the blood circulation in the human body from a certain point of view. As you know, blood flows through the veins of the human body. The blood goes from the lungs, where the blood vessels are and where it absorbs oxygen during breathing, to the heart. From the heart to the rest of the body, it is red the whole time. As it passes through the body, it turns , becomes bluish in color as it passes through the body, then returns to the heart and lungs as blue blood, is turned red again by oxygen, and so the blood circulates, as it were, throughout the body.

Let us assume that the blood flows through the body in a circle. Now let us visualize a very simple circulation of a liquid. Imagine a round tube (see illustration on p. 252). For the sake of clarity, we will put a red liquid into this round tube. Of course, if we have such an external tube, then we need some kind of pump somewhere if we want to set this liquid in motion. So let's imagine that we have some kind of pump here (arrow) that sets the red liquid in motion. If I leave it open at the top, the liquid will naturally squirt out. But I don't want that, so I'll put a tube on top. And now I'm going to set this liquid in motion so that it swirls around continuously. You can imagine that, can't you? — The liquid is driven around. Now imagine: if the liquid here is driven around by a pump, then some of the liquid will rise at this point (above). But when we move it around, it only goes a little way. If I put a lot of force into the pump, the liquid here will go up a little further; if I push gently, it will go up less. So I can measure the pressure in the swirling liquid by this height of the liquid.

You see, I can do something similar with human blood. If I insert a tube like this into a vein somewhere, the blood will rise a little way up it. So I can insert a tube into any vein – not into all of them. Imagine that I have some artery, for example in my arm, into which I insert a small ampoule-like tube. The blood flows from the artery a little way into the tube, passes through it and flows in it. This tube is now also such that, depending on the person, it has either a higher or lower blood level. There are people in whom the blood rises very high in the tube, and in others it rises less. It follows, therefore, that people have different blood pressures, because that is the pressure that is exerted and that is shown in the tube. So it is not true that if the blood presses a little harder on the veins, the blood rises higher in the tube, but if it presses less hard, it rises less high.

The materialists now imagine that man also needs such a pump to keep the blood circulating. But what I have drawn for you is only an external instrument. In fact, man has no such pump anywhere in his body, and the heart is not a pump either. Man has no pump, but the blood moves through something quite different. That is what we want to realize today. But first, let us realize that this column of blood, through which we measure blood pressure, is of varying height. In a healthy person, it always has a certain height. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that in a healthy person between the ages of thirty and fifty, this liquid is about 120 to 140 mm high. If this column of liquid is only 110 mm high in an instrument set up like this – you could call it a manometer – then the person is sick. If it were 160 mm, then the person would also be sick. If it is 160 mm, the blood pressure is too high; then the blood in the body presses too strongly. If it is only 110 mm, then his blood pressure is too weak, and the blood pressure is too weak. So you can see that we always need a certain blood pressure in our body. The blood must push with a certain strength. So we are completely filled with our blood pressure. If we climb a very high mountain, the air outside becomes thinner, and because the outer air becomes thinner, the pressure from within becomes very strong. Then the blood squirts out through the pores. That is mountain sickness. So you see, we have to go around in the world with a very specific blood pressure.

Let us first look at people who have low blood pressure. People who have low blood pressure become extremely weak, tired, pale, and their digestion suffers greatly. Such people become inwardly weak and cannot properly perform physical functions, and as a result they gradually decline. So low blood pressure makes people tired and weak and sick.

Now let us look at people who have high blood pressure. Sometimes very peculiar symptoms occur. You see, if you put something like this, which you insert into the skin – it has to be pointed at the front – if you insert it and you have high blood pressure, then you can be sure that, little by little, the kidneys of a person with high blood pressure will become unsuitable. The kidneys begin to form their vessels, that is, their veins, everything that is in the kidneys, in a way that is not supposed to be. They calcify, become swollen, and degenerate, as they say. They no longer have the form they should actually have. So that if you cut out the kidneys of people who had high blood pressure after they die, the kidney looks like a completely degenerate kidney.

Now the question is: where does all this come from? - Precisely this connection between blood pressure and kidney disease is completely unclear to the materialistically thinking person. You have to be clear about this: our astral body, of which I have told you as the supersensible body of man, lives in the pressure that we have within us, in this blood pressure. It is not true at all that the astral body lives in some kind of substance, in some kind of material, but it lives in a force, in the blood pressure, and the astral body is healthy when we have the right blood pressure, which in middle age is 120 to 140 mm. When we have the right blood pressure, then when we wake up our astral body enters our physical body and feels well. It can expand in all directions. So if the blood pressure is correct, about 120 mm, then the astral body expands in the blood pressure correctly, and when we wake up, the astral body can enter all parts of the physical body. And while we are awake, with this so-called normal blood pressure, the whole astral body is expanded everywhere.

You see, the astral body is what makes our organs always have the right shape and form. Gentlemen, if we were always asleep, that is, if the astral body were always outside, as it is in sleep, then our organs would very soon become fatty. We would not have proper organs. We need the astral body to stimulate the etheric body so that we always have healthy organs in the right shape. So the astral body must always find the right blood pressure so that it can spread.

Let us assume that when a person enters a room, it is not filled with air but with carbon dioxide. When a person enters such a room, they would fall over; they would not be able to breathe. In a body like that, where there is no proper blood pressure, the astral body and the ego cannot live. They have to keep coming out when you fall asleep. Let us assume that there is insufficient blood pressure. If there is insufficient blood pressure, the astral body does not properly enter the physical body when waking up. Then there is little astral activity in it; then the person feels something like a continuous fainting spell in their body. So if the blood pressure is too low, the person always feels something like a slight fainting spell, and as a result he becomes weak and his organs cannot be formed in the right way, because they always have to be newly formed. I have told you: every seven years the organs have to be newly formed. - Then the astral body must always be able to be active.

Let us assume that the blood pressure is too high. Yes, if the blood pressure is too high, what happens then? You see, I once told you that if the air had a different mixture of oxygen and nitrogen, our lives would be in trouble. There is 79 percent nitrogen in the air, and the rest is essentially oxygen. So there is little oxygen in the air. If there were more oxygen in the air, we would be old people by the age of twenty. We would age quickly. It also depends on the astral body whether the physical body ages early or late. If the blood pressure is too high, the astral body likes it inside the physical body. That is precisely its element, the blood pressure. It sits very deeply inside. And what is the result? The result is that at the age of thirty we already have kidneys that we should only have at the age of seventy. We then live too fast due to the high blood pressure. Because the kidneys are such sensitive organs, we develop degenerative kidneys early on. The thing about aging is that the organs become calcified more and more. Now, if the blood pressure is too high, then the sensitive organs calcify too early, and a kidney disease like the one that occurs with high blood pressure is actually a sign that the person has grown old too soon, that he has already made these sensitive kidneys in his youth as they should actually be in old age.

Now, you see, gentlemen, this whole explanation that I have given you shows you that in his physical body, man has something like a soul, which I call the astral body, that goes out at night. And so you can also say: Man lives in the forces that develop in his body. He lives in the forces, not in the substance, not in the material.

Therefore, we can see everywhere how materialistic science is quite powerless when faced with such an occurrence as I have just explained to you. It does not get to the bottom of what is going on. You will find it everywhere in the books: if someone has high blood pressure, there is always a risk that the person has kidney disease. But how it is actually connected – that's what it says in the books – we cannot explain. In reality, however, it means nothing other than: we do not want there to be something supernatural, something spiritual, something of the soul in man. We do not want that.

But without that, you just can't explain things. And that is what actually makes people today basically stand before the whole world not knowing what to do or how to react. Because actually, gentlemen, the external things that occur today, the increasing misery in the world, which will become much, much stronger in the near future because people absolutely do not want to take in anything spiritual with their thoughts - because first you have to know the matter - this misery comes from the fact that people simply do not want to engage in knowing anything about reality. And one cannot know about reality if one does not respond to the spiritual. In the course of the nineteenth century, it has come about that people have actually only been taught about external things. That they would have grasped something of the soul, of the spiritual, was no longer considered at all. And so people today go around and actually have no idea how the spiritual and soul actually exist in the world.

You see, gentlemen, something very important has happened as a result. When a lot of time has passed and people have then struggled through the force of circumstances to look at things spiritually again, then these people in the future will say: Yes, at the beginning of the 20th century something tremendously important in human history took place. Everything that can be told today about old wars is nothing compared to what actually took place among us. It is sometimes quite incredible how people do not even realize that all the wars mentioned in history books are actually trivial compared to what has happened from 1914 to the present day. What has happened in history is nothing compared to what has happened among people during the time in which we live. And you see, in order to understand what is at issue here, you have to look deeply into what really is. But people today do not do that.

For example, I have drawn your attention to the fact that the potato only came to Europe at a certain time. Yes, if you ask today what people eat most, they will say potatoes! And if you see hunger starting somewhere, the first thing you do is think about how to get potatoes. Today, people actually accept potatoes as if they had always been there. Yes, gentlemen, if you had lived five centuries ago, you would not have eaten potatoes at all in Europe, because they did not yet exist! You would have eaten something completely different. But if you know that everything depends on the spiritual, then you also know that eating potatoes or not eating potatoes depends on the spiritual. And as it is with the potato, it is with many other things. So terribly much has changed in the last few centuries of human history, and all the beating about the bush in theories, that is all of no value. Because one can still put up such beautiful theories: Rousseauist theories, Marxist theories, Leninist theories, whatever you want, they are all thoughts thought up, with which one can do nothing when one knows nothing. Thoughts only have value when you know how to use these thoughts. All these gentlemen who have put forward these beautiful thoughts were in reality ignorant through and through. And that is the characteristic of the present time, that people are actually ignorant through and through. They want to present theories to people about how to make the world a paradise, and they don't even know how the human body is affected when a person eats potatoes. That is what is so terribly important to people today, that people have no desire to know anything. Of course, the masses can't do it because the masses are persuaded that What the gentlemen at the universities know is already the right thing. And so they then found adult education centers and now they also want to know what the others know. But it is precisely those who should know something, who devote themselves to knowledge by profession, who in reality know nothing at all. And that is why people talk about all sorts of things today, but basically don't know anything.

Now, of course, it is not just the potato, there are many other factors, but I only mention the potato because it is a very stark example. A tremendous amount has happened in the last few centuries, which, I would say, has now come to a kind of discharge at the beginning of the 20th century, so that an enormous amount has happened. And today we want to point out something that has happened and that is extremely significant.

You can say: When the lungs are inside the human being (see drawing), between the lungs is the heart, then in these ancient times the knowledge of the lungs went up into the head. That is the secret of knowledge, that the human head cannot actually do anything. The head does not really know much about the world, it only knows the inner being. Gentlemen, if we only had a head and not eyes and not ears, but only a head closed on all sides, then we would know a great deal about ourselves, but nothing about the outside world. And the most important thing that comes into us from the outside world is air. Air now also stimulates the head, already through our nose, but it also enters very thinly through our eyes, through our ears, everywhere. It is the air that sets the head in motion. So that one can say: If you go back very, very far in these millennia, of which I told you last time, six to eight thousand years, then people practiced breathing a great deal in order to gain knowledge. They knew that they had to force the air into their heads in a different way, and then they would gain knowledge.

Today, people only know that if they gasp for air, it invigorates them. But these ancient people knew that if they sucked in the air in a special way, if they looked at the tip of their nose, then the nasal muscles were compressed, the air was sucked in in a very special way, and then knowledge arose in the head.

But you see, it remained that way until the Middle Ages, indeed until very recent times. Then, four hundred years after the birth of Christ, people stopped knowing anything. Knowledge disappeared. But they still had memories in the books. That is precisely the difference between ancient times and the times that begin around the 8th or 9th century BC: In ancient times, people had heads for knowledge, and in later times they had books for knowledge. That is the difference. You know, the old educational institutions, which were called mysteries, did not care about writing down all knowledge, but trained people so that they could read in their heads. Whatever was out there in the wide expanse of the universe, a true scholar could read in his head. You could say that his head was a real book, but not in the same sense as we say it today about a bluestocking. Rather, his head had become, through breathing, a vessel from which wisdom could be drawn.

Then came the times when people's heads were no longer of any value. People still wore them, but they were empty, and everything was written down. There were still very, very many written records of the old wisdom several centuries before and at the time of the birth of Christ. These things were burned by the church, because they did not want this old wisdom, which people had drawn from their heads, to somehow reach their descendants. You see, this old wisdom was actually terribly hated by the church, it was eradicated. Anthroposophy, on the other hand, wants to give the human being a head so that he is not just an empty vessel. But that is something that the church actually hates terribly. Well, you can see that it doesn't like it very much! Gentlemen, it should again be possible for people to know something that you cannot find in books at all today, because the old knowledge has disappeared and been burned, and the new knowledge that people have written in books is only about external things.

Now, everything that people thought up until the 19th century is actually only the inheritance of ancient times. It is, if I may express it this way, inspired by the lungs. Lung knowledge, you could say. The head is inspired by the lungs, by breathing: lung knowledge.

You see, in the 19th century great scientific discoveries were made, but no thoughts were found. All the thoughts were taken from ancient times. In fact, thoughts have only existed in ancient times of mankind. The 19th century made great external discoveries, but it only thought with the old thoughts. So that was still the old lung knowledge. And it is very amusing that one could say: Yes, you modern scholar, you look down on the old Indian who sits down, crosses his legs and looks at the tip of his nose to get thoughts about the inside. You no longer do that, but you use his thoughts, which have been written down, to find the X-rays and so on! — It is also true that all this was discovered with the help of ancient thoughts.

Over the course of the 19th century, however, the lungs have become completely incapable of providing anything to the brain. The lungs of the human being underwent a major transformation in the 19th century, and what has become much more important than the lungs in the course of the 19th century is really what we call the kidneys, those organs that are closely related to the activity of the heart. The impulse has passed from the lungs to the organs that lie more towards the bottom in the human being, and as a result, humanity has come into such a huge confusion.

You see, the spiritual world still pays attention to the lungs, so to speak. When people had lung knowledge, they breathed in the air and through breathing in air they received inspiration for knowledge. Today people depend on getting their knowledge through the inspiration of the kidneys. But the kidneys do not give anything to the head independently. You have to make an effort, as I described to you in 'How to Know Higher Worlds'. There you must first say: Yes, when people still had the stimulation from the lungs for their head, they could attain knowledge because spiritual still flowed into the lungs. Spiritual flows into the kidneys only unconsciously, so that people cannot know anything about it unless they go through such spiritual things with full consciousness, as I have described in “How to Obtain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?”

What happens if people do not want to go through such things? Yes, gentlemen, then the lungs remain in such a state that they give no stimulus, and people are completely dependent for what they can know only on their belly, on their kidneys. And so, in the course of the 20th century, in the time in which we live, the transition from lung knowledge to kidney knowledge has occurred. Lung knowledge still had a spirituality. Kidneypowered knowledge has no spirituality for people unless spirituality is added.

So there has been a huge change in human beings. This change has taken place in the two decades that we have lived through. Nothing so important has ever happened in human nature that the whole apparatus of knowledge has slipped down from the lungs into the kidneys. And because the astral body found nothing in the kidneys, today there is confusion, a materialistic confusion in everyone's mind.

What would you say if you really wanted to describe the reality of why there were so many people in the 20th century who didn't know their way around the world, who didn't even know what to do, so that in the end, when people admitted it, they ended up sliding into this huge war? What actually happened there? The one who wants to find out what happened there has to describe the time before a little. You see, gentlemen, in the Middle Ages and later, an awful lot of people went to a certain place of pilgrimage, to Lourdes, or to places of pilgrimage that were modeled after it, because the clergy had persuaded them that they would get well if they went there, if they had the water of Lourdes. Well, only the name has changed; in the 19th century, the clergy persuaded people that they had to go to Lourdes to get well; in more recent times, doctors have persuaded people that they have to go to Karlsbad or Marienbad or Wiesbaden or some other place. What has all this actually amounted to? It has actually all amounted to the doctors telling people: Yes, my dear patients, your renal system is not in order; you have to drink as much Wiesbaden or Karlovy Vary or Marienbad water as possible – after all, it all goes through the kidneys! – you have to push through that. So that actually the state of health of many people consisted in their abandoning their kidney function in the winter, and the kidney function actually did the thinking for them; in the summer, on the other hand, they needed to go to Karlovy Vary or Marienbad or Wiesbaden because they couldn't actually do without mental stimulation – but they didn't want it – and that's where they improved their kidney system again. Little by little, this story, where only the abdomen was actually ever cured, has become a superstition. Isn't it true that what it should have been about was taking an interest in spiritual activity and spiritual stimulation. That is what one should have sought, because with no spiritual stimulus at all, the things that are out of order in the kidney area cannot be put right. And the situation in the 20th century was such that all the people who should really have thought through the soul, only thought through the kidney.

You see, what is important is to really find out how things are connected in reality. Then we will know how to educate young people, then we will know that it is quite impossible to teach young people only what we teach them today. Then we will know that we must use the beautiful years of youth, of childhood, to teach young people something quite different. But the 19th century became proud of the fact that it knew nothing of soul and spirit, and the consequence of this was that this giant kidney disease, which still lurks in the world today, emerged. So the future will one day say: What made humanity so befuddled at the beginning of the 20th century? An unnoticed kidney disease! — That is what strikes the heart today. And two things can be done: we can let things continue as they are, and then the doctors will indeed have a lot to do. People will become increasingly incapable of thinking rationally. They will become increasingly tired. They will think less and less about making progress through solid, sensible organization. What has actually flourished to a very great height today, this whole nonsensical activity, will reach the highest point. People will become weak, and doctors will examine the urine; they will find all kinds of wonderful things in it, won't they: protein, sugar and so on. They will only find that the kidney activity is out of order. Because if you find all these beautiful things in the urine, the kidney activity is out of order. And they will find: Yes, it is strange, the world has never produced as much sugar and as much protein as it does now! But no one will know what the connection is. At most, it will occur to some clever industrialist to use some of the sugar that is being produced in the industrialist's factory. That is the one way.

The other way is this: We must stop talking about all these external arrangements for the time being and reform the spiritual life of humanity, reform above all the school life, the spiritual life of humanity, and instill proper spiritual thoughts into people. Then people will find out how to live properly in the external world. For only when people have proper thoughts can we hope that they will be able to live in the right way in the external world.

But, gentlemen, this cannot be achieved by simply continuing the activities that have been pursued up to now. The issue here is to radically rethink. And the world will not become better through any external means, but only by beginning to know something. You see, the materialists imagine that they know so much about matter. But they know nothing about matter. That is precisely the strange thing, that the materialists know nothing about matter. The materialists say: Where did misery come from? Yes, misery, that has come from economic conditions, for example.

Yes, you see, that is just the same as when someone says: Where does poverty come from? Poverty comes from the poverty! - Not a different word. Economic misery is just another word for what we have. It is just beating about the bush, because of course people have created economic misery, and people experience economic misery because of what they are. Today, an enormous number of people simply have the urge to become, let us say, profiteers. But all this arises from the fact that the subordinate human organism, which is becoming decisive today, needs spiritual stimulation. The materialist merely tells people: Yes, this subordinate organism is important! But it is only by getting to know it in the spiritual that one can understand why it is important. And so materialism can measure blood pressure quite well, but it does not know what too low or too high blood pressure means, that too low blood pressure means: the astral body and the ego go too little into the physical body, and too high blood pressure: the astral body and the ego go too deeply into the physical body.

And indeed, it is the case today that blood pressure has slowly but surely become too high throughout the history of mankind, and people today suffer from high blood pressure. It is true: when a person wakes up today, he lives under too much blood pressure; then, so to speak, this too much blood pressure snaps at the astral body and the ego. The consequence of this is that the astral body and the ego enter completely into the physical body. This must be made good again by the human being receiving spiritual stimuli, by him really devoting himself to the spiritual with some interest.

This is not done by learning anthroposophical theories. If one merely learns anthroposophical theories, then that is just the way one learned to read in the 19th century, the way to memorize thoughts in an external way. That is not enough. What a person takes in must become such that it permeates him inwardly.

You see, gentlemen, when you go out into the fresh air from a stale atmosphere, you feel an inner joy. So you should have an inner joy, an inner interest, when you come out of all the stuff that is called knowledge today and into the fresh air of the soul, which in turn tells you about the spiritual. This inner joy, this deep interest, is what is needed for the spiritual life. And by permeating himself with interest, the blood that has become too heavy - after all, the blood has become too heavy in all people today - is lightened again. The kidneys become spiritualized, and the result of this will be that it will become better in the world when people again want to know something of that which has been taken from them for centuries. That is what must always be repeated, what I must say to you in all forms, because it is essential that we face the truth and not be blinded by what is pseudoscience. Therefore, I wanted to add a few things today to what I have told you in the previous lectures. There is still much to be said about these matters, but they will become clearer and clearer.

Now we have to take a short break in the series of lectures. I have to make a trip to England and will let you know when we can continue.

But that is what I wanted to make clear to you today, how the great events in human history are actually connected with what man is inwardly, and that one must start there, that therefore humanity must first be enlightened, but enlightened about realities, not about empty phrases. That is it.

The origin and significance of cults, nutrition issues.

In the course of these lectures we have been able to show how in the most widely different epochs men have formed conceptions of what really lies behind the world and its happenings. By forming stable ideas, stable concepts, by acquiring definite sentiments and feelings about what happens in the world, and about its Beings, man attains a certain satisfaction, arrives at something of which he can say that it relates him fitly to things, either because it throws light for him upon the mysteries of the world, or because it satisfies him in some other way. Through this activity man demonstrates that he is not content to adopt a passive attitude towards the world, but that he has an impulse to struggle for a knowledge beyond what is evident to his senses, or even to his clairvoyant knowledge; he aims at a knowledge which goes further, a knowledge which is, to begin with, hidden from him, so that he may achieve true harmony with the world. In this way he shows that he is seeking for an explanation of the world, that the world presents itself to him as a riddle, and that his ultimate relationship to it is not limited to the one he started from.

In ancient times this was expressed by dwelling upon the feeling which men have in face of the most arresting Beings and facts of the world-process. It was said that the human being starts out from a feeling of wonder about things and Beings and that from this feeling of wonder all philosophy, all men's efforts to reach enlightenment about the world spring. However it is now a matter of common experience that the soul works its way out of this feeling of wonder to something which reduces it. The soul cannot remain at the stage of mere wonder, for in that way the whole world would consist of nothing else. The soul cannot continue to stand in amazement before the wonders of the world, it has to subdue its astonishment, it has so to say to get rid of what seems a marvel by finding, through its own activity, a kind of explanation, an answer to the enigma, an answer to what is marvellous in the phenomena and Beings of the world.

We have seen for instance how the ancient Greeks got rid of this wonder in quite a different way, by gazing with penetration upon what was current among them as the ancient clairvoyant consciousness and expressing what they saw in the figures of their gods. As soon as the Greek became aware that in one or another fact, one or another thing in the world, spirit-forms were at work which were represented by the figures and Beings of Greek mythology, his feeling of wonder transformed itself into a kind of harmony between his own soul and these ‘world-wonders’. Today, in a world which is materialistic compared with that of the Greeks, we think in a very different fashion. Today when we deem it necessary to reduce the feeling of wonder, we are not at all inclined to find the answer to the riddle of the world in pictorial images. In our time this would be regarded as ridiculous. Our age seeks an answer to the world-enigma which appeals to the understanding, one which we can call scientific. But as a result of the varied sentiments which have perhaps been evoked in these and other lectures you may well understand that the modern way, this dry, prosaic appeal to reason, is only a phase, an epoch, in the struggle to assuage our wonder at the marvels of the world. For when the man of today looks back from the method which he calls scientific to the Greek way of explaining the world and calls it childish, regarding it as derived purely from fantasy and as having nothing to do with reality—when the man of today believes that he has found what will continue to be regarded as scientific for all time, then we must tell him that he is very short-sighted. For just as the progress of humanity has advanced beyond the form of Greek enlightenment to a stage suited to the prosaic intellectual demands of our time, so it will reach beyond this intellectual, materialistic phase. And unless meanwhile man has become much more sensible, he will in future think much the same of what today counts as true science as we today do of Greek mythology. The laws of Kepler, our biological laws, will inevitably appear to our descendants to be as much a mythology as that of the Greeks, unless these descendants of ours are enabled through a wider outlook on the world to perceive that each kind of explanation is justified in its turn. The great arrogance of our age which maintains that mythology is fantasy and our own science a definitive explanation of the universe, will be overthrown, and it will be seen that our own time, just like earlier ones, only represents a phase which in its turn has to be superseded. But when we consider our own intellectual explanation of the world, an explanation which is generally called science, one has to say that it is just this explanation of the world, intellectual in form and idea, which is least able to enter into the realities. We must seriously try to discover why this is so.

If you take into account the whole spirit of this course of lectures, as well as of many others which have been addressed to you from time to time, you must see that the manner in which the human being looks at the world has undergone many changes. Man has become very different. Far stronger, more powerful forces, forces emanating from the entire human being, came into play in the old clairvoyant days. To achieve the purely materialistic interpretation, the soul through the instrument of the brain detaches from itself highly attenuated shadow-like images as intellectual ideas wherewith to explain the world. The old interpretations in times which were more or less clairvoyant were filled with far more life, far more reality. We saw yesterday that our brain is a kind of apparatus which impedes our astral body, brings it to a standstill, and lets the images of this astral body, because they are not allowed to pass through our brain, come to consciousness as our thoughts about the world. But in ancient clairvoyant times it was not only the images of the astral body that were held back, but also those of the etheric body. The result was that the human being let flow far more of his own self, far more of the stuff of his own soul, into the images of his knowledge.

Expressed diagrammatically it is like this. The old clairvoyance, even the ancient Greek outlook (more disposed as it was to fantasy) was such that when a thought of Zeus or of Dionysos came before the soul, this thought was full of the living sap of reality. Admittedly this really came in the first place from the stuff of the human soul; but because this stuff itself derived from the depths of the cosmos, ancient Greek thoughts about their gods contained far more reality than the thought-forms of modern times. If I represent the thoughts of the ancient Greeks as a circle,¹ I have to show the thoughts of the man of today as far more thinly filled with soul-stuff, soul-substance. In forming the ideas of today the human soul draws forth far less from itself, what it produces is much thinner. Thus in the picture of the world which the soul can acquire with present-day consciousness there is far less of world-reality than was to be found in the earlier images. So that what the arrogance of modern academic learning for the most part supposes, namely that the Greeks formed pictures of their gods out of fantasy, pictures in which there was no reality, and that the only reality lies in the abstract ‘laws of nature’ of today, is the very opposite of the truth. This modern view is not true. The creations of Greek knowledge were far more densely packed with true reality, and compared with it the knowledge which we acquire today through the laws of nature is like a squeezed-out lemon! This is something which the soul can feel if it is not preocccupied with the pride of present-day science, but thirsts to fill its consciousness with reality. Such a thirst will reveal that it is just what is lauded as strictly scientific that is above all entangled in illusion, in maya. There has never been in the world such entanglement in maya as in the thought-forms of present-day philosophy and science.

Why has that come about? It is because man in the course of his Earth evolution has had to develop his present ego-consciousness. He has had to become independent, to stand entirely alone with his own ego. He has had to be weaned from his union with the world outside him. The very strong substantial content which made it possible for him to instil much of the stuff of his soul into the figures he fashioned, as happened in the case of the Greek gods, this very thing would have made it impossible for him—just because he would have been too much poured out into the world—to attain to consciousness of his ego. To enable man to become strong as regards his ego-consciousness he had to be torn away from the world-realities, cut off from them; for objective knowledge of the world our souls had to become weak, utterly weak. Our soul, the knowing soul, the soul which perceives through understanding, the soul which is ego-conscious, is at its very weakest as regards cosmic consciousness, as regards conditions which it once passed through. This weakness, which we had to develop, has rendered inevitable the emergence in modern consciousness of our tenuous ideas, devoid of reality, and our abstract laws of nature.

Anyone who by academic learning or by some form of belief in authority has been trained to a natural science which is only at home in pure abstractions will not succeed in feeling this great impoverishment as regards true reality. But anyone who feels within him a thirst to grow into world-reality knows that at a certain point in his life there comes over him the feeling: ‘How hopelessly cut off from true reality one feels by all the ideas of today, and what phantom and shadowy forms they are!’ That sentiment could even be formulated in the terms of ordinary science and you will find it so formulated in my little book Wahrheit und Wissenschaft, on Goethe's theory of knowledge, which appeared many years ago. There I showed that in the attainment of the customary intellectual knowledge the human being acquires only a part of knowledge, a part of truth, and that he is pressing forward to another aspect of the world than the one offered by the intellect. This is to take a scientific path which is quite practicable, even though to modern philosophy it may sound incomprehensible; whereas the feeling I have described gives rise to an attempt to penetrate along the esoteric path into a much more vital reality than the purely abstract laws of reason can provide. If the soul feels that with the normal consciousness of today it can only produce ideas which are maya in face of the living reality, and if it is not like a squeezed lemon, acknowledging only the science of today, then it feels itself empty in face of the real world. It certainly feels able to reach with its ideas the furthest limits of the world, but it fails to take into account the warning in my second Mystery Play The Soul's Probation—(Scene 1)—‘End not at last in cosmic distances’. To do that must involve a feeling of being spread out, with a set of weak ideas, through an endless expanse of space. The further we expand thence into space the thinner our ideas become, and we find ourselves at last before an empty and bottomless abyss. That is an ordeal which the soul has to face. The man thirsting for reality who seeks to solve the riddles of the world, the ‘wonders of the world’, along the lines of abstract science, finds himself at last standing before the cosmic void with his ideas entirely dissipated into spiritual vapour. Then his soul has to experience an infinity of terror in the presence of this void. The man who is unable to experience this fear in the presence of the void is simply not sufficiently advanced to feel the truth about present-day consciousness.

Thus, when we try to expand our present-day consciousness into the far spaces of the world, we have to face this terrifying spectre, this fear of the cosmic void; nobody who takes seriously what normal modern consciousness is can be spared this experience. The soul has to undergo this ordeal if it wants to experience the meaning and the spirit of our time. It has at some time to face the abyss which opens out on all sides when we try to penetrate the widths of space with our ideas; it has to experience the unending fear of the void, the fear of losing oneself in cosmic distances.

If we are familiar with the Goethean phrase, ‘to become one with the whole world, to enlarge oneself to become a world’, then we must say: ‘If a healthy soul with the means available to modern knowledge has reached out into the far spaces of the world, and tries to comprehend the world with the philosophic principles of today—which are bound to be abstract, because they are derived from present-day consciousness—then that soul is bound to experience the ordeal of standing before the void, before the abyss on every hand; every healthy soul has to undergo the fear of being swallowed up with the best part of his being, with what constitutes his consciousness, in infinite nothingness.’ This is the universal experience and any other feeling is but a variation of this horror vacui. Closely confined as the life of the soul is, there would be something amiss with it if, as soon as it tries to expand to the limits of the universe, it were not to feel its present-day consciousness pulverised, shattered, in face of the infinite universe. That is the fate of the soul when with its present-day consciousness it tries to penetrate into cosmic distances, into the widths of space.

There is another path open to the soul. It can descend into its own depths in such a way that it experiences what its own organisation is. Under modern conditions of consciousness the soul really only experiences what has been added to its organisation on the Earth. What it received on the Old Moon as astral body remains subconscious; it lights up in the etheric body, but in normal consciousness is not experienced. Still less does man experience what he acquired during the Sun evolution as etheric body, or what through Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions he has received in his physical body. These are closed regions to him. But upon these closed regions countless generations of gods, of spiritual hierarchies, have laboured. Indeed when through clairvoyant knowledge, through esoteric training, we descend into these regions and penetrate behind our ego-consciousness into our own being, when we encounter what is in us as astral, etheric and physical bodies, then we do not come to a vacuum, we come rather to a condensed world-substance. We meet there everything which has been worked into us men throughout millions and millions of years by innumerable spiritual hierarchies. But when through the serious cultivation of self-knowledge such as is given by esoteric training a man tries to enter, learns how to plunge into the work of countless generations through millions of years, he does not encounter in a pure form what the gods have created. For man has stamped into it all that through the generations he himself has experienced as impulses, desires, passions, emotions and instincts. In the course of his terrestrial incarnations what he has developed in this way has united with what is there below in his astral, etheric and physical natures. Together they form a dense mass; and it is into this dense mass that he first enters. What we ourselves have done to this divine nature of ours veils it from us.

Thus when we plunge into ourselves we find the opposite of what we find when we expand into cosmic space. If we expand into the widths of space there is the danger of finally encountering the void; if we descend into ourselves there is the danger of coming into denser and denser regions, which we ourselves have condensed through our impulses, desires and passions. Just as we feel the matter of our consciousness scatter and disintegrate if we go out into cosmic distances, so when we plunge into our own soul-depths we feel ourselves to an ever greater extent repulsed; we feel like a rubber ball resuming its shape after it has been squeezed. Again and again we are repelled, when we try to penetrate into our own inner being. We can be very clearly aware of this. It is not only that our impulses, desires and passions, which are what we first meet when we enter into ourselves, seem horrifying to us when we meet them face to face, but—added horror—they seem at every moment to be trying to capture us. They wax strong and powerful, their will-nature comes to the fore. Whereas in ordinary consciousness we do not obey this or the other impulse, this or the other instinct, as soon as we descend a little way into ourselves, these instincts develop their full strength, and we cannot but give way to them. Again and again we become gripped by a will of a lower nature in ourselves, and are thrown back upon ourselves worse than before. That is the other danger—that when we plunge into ourselves we are confronted as it were by the density of our impulses and instincts.

Thus we have to face formidable dangers. If we expand into universal space we are in danger of dissolving with our consciousness into nothingness; if we plunge into ourselves, we are in danger of surrendering our consciousness to the impulses and instincts which are within us and of falling a prey to the worst possible egotism. Those are the two poles between which lie all vicissitudes of soul—fear of the void and the collapse into egotism. All other ordeals are variations directed against what we may call dissolution into nothing, or against surrender to egotism. Even higher knowledge is dangerous in this connection. For through it we learn that countless spiritual hierarchies have been at work upon us, we learn how our physical, etheric and astral bodies in all their parts have been assembled by the hierarchies, we learn how cosmic Spirits have been at work in order that at last man should come into existence. So when in the esoteric life a man delves into his own inner being, he is overcome by the thought: ‘You are actually the aim and goal of the gods. It is to create you that the gods have laboured.’ Here he confronts the great danger of falling into immeasurable arrogance.

When Capesius learns from the mouth of Felix Balde² how the spiritual hierarchies have laboured, and how man is the goal of all their efforts, he is afraid of this pride. That is the significance of the uneasiness he expresses. It is part of his soul's ordeal that he should feel this. That is why it is so necessary that man should humbly draw near to this knowledge that he is the goal of the gods, and in lowliness assimilate it, otherwise it will lead to overweening presumption. For when we recognise that man is the goal of the gods, we in this world have every occasion for pride, for presumption. When we see the gods in the macrocosm exerting themselves all the time to develop what is human being, we have every occasion for pride.

It will be good for us to make our ideas as to how the gods have laboured at the formation and perfecting of man a little more concrete. Throughout the Saturn evolution the Thrones co-operated with the Spirits of Personality, during the Sun evolution the Cherubim worked with the Spirits of Wisdom and the Archangels, during the Moon evolution the Seraphim worked together with the Spirits of Movement and the Angels.

Can we point to something upon the Earth now of this work from without upon the human form? Here we encounter once more a characteristic phenomenon of the life of the mind in modern times, a phenomenon to which we have already often had to refer in these lectures. In point of fact nothing is so well able to furnish proof for all that is proclaimed in Spiritual Science as the facts of modern science. The development of this science during the last decades provides, in general, proof of all that is here said. It is only that the facts are often least understood by those who discover them. The interpretation put upon the facts by modern philosophy and modern science does constitute a great stumbling-block to an understanding of Spiritual Science. The facts themselves invariably support what we say here, but the current explanation of the facts always constitutes a stumbling-block. It is really phenomenal. I have drawn attention to specific instances of it in a number of places. You will have gathered from my lectures that the brain was the last human organ to be developed; the rest of the human organisation was worked into man earlier by the Spirits of the various hierarchies. But even today the half unconscious part of us continues to work on the organisation of the brain; that is something capable of observation, only the marvellous and beautiful phenomena furnished by modern science are not interpreted in the right way. Let me give you an example.

In April of this year there could have been celebrated the half-centenary of an extremely important discovery of modern science, a discovery which, rightly understood, fully confirms the spiritual-scientific doctrine of evolution. Of course spiritual-scientific discoveries can only be made through clairvoyance, but they can be confirmed by the facts which ordinary science brings to light. The fiftieth anniversary of that important dissertation on the speech-centre which the great doctor and philosopher Broca delivered before the Paris Anthropological Society in April 1861 might well have been celebrated this year; for the work of Broca is a complete proof that the predisposition to that configuration, that formation of a specific part of the brain which brings about both the aesthetic consciousness of speech and the understanding of its sounds does not lie in the inner laws of the physical brain. When in April 1861 Broca found that the organ of speech lies in the third convolution of the brain, and that this organ must be in order if a man is to understand the sounds of speech, and that another part must be in order for him to speak, the discovery constituted an important advance which can be turned to good account by Spiritual Science and is a verification of the facts known to it. Why is this? Because the way this speech centre is developed shows that a man's outer movements, the movements of his hands (i.e. what he does half unconsciously) plays a part in the configuration of this speech centre. Why is this speech-centre especially developed on the left side? It is because under the cultural conditions which have prevailed hitherto, men have made particular use of the right hand. Thus it is the etheric and astral bodies which, out of the unconscious, bring about the movements of the hands which work into the brain and mould it. Today anthropology makes it plain that the brain is formed from without by macrocosmic forces. When this part of the brain is injured, there is no capacity for speech. If we take into consideration that the side of the brain which through our right-handedness has been strongly developed can be relieved from without by the use of the left hand—a thing which is still possible in childhood though no longer so in later life—then it is seen that, by means of systematic activity from without, the brain can be so moulded that a speech-centre develops in the corresponding third convolution of the brain on the right side. Are we not driven to say that it is the greatest possible error to think that the faculty of speech is formed through the predisposition of the brain? It is not the natural tendency of the brain which brings into existence the faculty of speech but the activity which the man himself develops. The faculty of speech is developed in the brain from out of the macrocosm. The organ of speech comes from speaking, not speaking from the speech-organ. That is what has been established through the important physiological facts discovered by Broca. It is because the gods, or the Spirits of the hierarchies, have helped men to carry out such activities as create his speech-centre, that this speech-centre has been fashioned from without. The speech-centre arises from speech, not vice versa.

When rightly understood all such modern discoveries provide confirmation for Spiritual Science, and it is a pity that I am never able to do more than make a brief reference to such things. Were I able to speak at greater length about characteristic examples of this kind you would see how shortsighted are the people who say that Spiritual Science contradicts modern science. On the contrary it is only at variance with the interpretation placed on the facts by modern scholarship, not at all at variance with the actual facts themselves.

Thus it is the activity of the hierarchies, who have worked into us from without, which has made of our macrocosmic formation what we are during Earth existence. We are indeed a product of the macrocosm. Today we are a product of the movements of our limbs, of our gestures, which carry on a silent speech; these movements imprint themselves on the brain, which had no prior disposition to speech. The archetypal man had of himself no predisposition to anything, but everything has been formed and developed and bestowed upon him by the macrocosmic activity of the spiritual hierarchies.

From this you will see that in our present consciousness we are in fact but feeble. If we try to go out into the cosmos we find ourselves before the void; if we try to sink into ourselves we find ourselves ensnared in our own will-nature. This is what brings about the severe ordeals which are inevitable when a man, starting from his present-day consciousness, would seek to probe in either direction the mysteries of the world, about which he begins by marvelling because they confront him as world-wonders.

Why is this so? It is because when we press out into cosmic space we come into a region which we have closely described in the last two lectures as the region of the upper gods or spirits, spirits who are only the ideas or representations of the real gods; thus we come into a world which has no independence. It is no wonder that what we can gain from this world leads us in the end to the void. However hard a man is struggling to acquire knowledge, when he reaches the utmost limits to which his ideas can attain, he himself can only come to ideas of the gods, he cannot attain to true reality. But if a man plunges into himself, into what has been built up during millions and millions of years, then he comes to the deeds, to the achievements, of the other divine-spiritual Beings, whom in the course of recent lectures we have called the sub-earthly, the true gods. But in order to reach these we have first to penetrate through our own impulses, desires, passions, through all that imprisons us, seizes hold of us and changes us so that we are obliged to follow it. This leads us into egotism and cuts us off from those lower gods. This constitutes the other pole of the soul's ordeals. If we try to reach the upper gods we come to the void, to the world of mere idea; if we try to reach the lower gods, all thought abandons us because we are seized by the blindly raging impulses of our own inner beings and burn ourselves up in them. That is why the ordeals are so arduous. But there is one thing which offers a ray of hope, to begin with purely theoretical. We have to say to ourselves: ‘However tenuous the ideas are, or however slight is what our egotism enables us to receive, it comes nevertheless from the entire cosmos.’ And if we can only find ourselves within this consciousness of ours in the right way, so that we can look, upon it in its independence, observe it as it is in itself, and if this consciousness becomes stronger and stronger, then we can perhaps make progress along one or the other path in such a way that we can withstand the ordeals. This is only meant to give a slight indication of how it is possible to make progress in another way than with the ordinary consciousness.

Let us suppose that we permeate ourselves with what we have already in a variety of contexts named the Christ Impulse. We then learn to understand in its deepest significance the saying of St. Paul, Not I but Christ in me.’ We stand there to begin with in our normal consciousness and say to ourselves: ‘We do not wish this normal consciousness of ours to work alone, we do not wish to remain alone in this personality of ours; we wish to be permeated by the Substantiality which since the Mystery of Golgotha is contained in the atmosphere of the Earth, we wish to be permeated by the Christ-substance.’ When we permeate ourselves with this Substance we do not take out with us into the cosmos merely our own tenuous ideas, but however far we soar into the widths of space, we carry with us the Substantiality of the Christ, and thereby something most remarkable comes about, which I should like to make clear to you in terms of modern scientific development.

Modern science took its start from the phenomena of external nature, and traced these phenomena back to all manner of forces. Then it went on to trace what goes on in the outer world in light and sound and so on, to vibrations, to particles of ether in motion, even to ponderable fragments of matter in motion, and considered it a triumph to be able to reduce the whole world to a world of moving, whirling atoms of ether and so on. This method has now for the most part been abandoned, since people have seen that it leads nowhere, but the consciousness of the general public in this respect still lags behind, it always does remain several paces behind scientific advance. There is still a widespread desire to explain the whole world through the abstraction of whirling atoms, as if space were made up of pure vibrations, pure oscillations. Of course, when we with our ideas and with the empirical experience which one can have of realities, meet such conclusions, the moment we approach what is called the atomic universe, we at once feel the void; for those thought-out atoms have no existence. Atoms there can be within the limits of empirical reality, within the range of microscopic investigation, wherever there is matter endowed with light and warmth, but it is not legitimate to attempt to explain light and warmth themselves by means of atoms or atomic vibrations; for then one is thinking-out a theory of the universe, and a thought-out cosmology leads to something which no longer has any real content. There this old atomic theory has no longer any validity whatsoever. We think it out—and yet feel it has nothing to do with reality.

But it is quite different when we permeate our ideas, our abstract laws, with what in truth is the Christ Impulse; and when I speak of the Christ Impulse you all know that I do not mean anything that the orthodox creeds look to; I am referring to the great macrocosmic Christ Impulse. We must permeate ourselves with this in the Pauline sense. It is not our abstract ideas and concepts which we bear out into the cosmos, but what they become as our modern form of consciousness permeated by the Christ Impulse. And here we experience something very strange. Just as when we press outwards with a consciousness devoid of the Christ we become emptier and emptier and more impoverished, and our consciousness becomes finally completely dissipated, dispersed into the cosmic void ... so, as soon as we have received the Christ Impulse our consciousness becomes richer, fuller, the further we come into the cosmic distances, into the widths of space. And when we have reached the stage of clairvoyance, then is the Christ-filled soul abundantly filled with soul-substance, so that the true grounds of reality stand at last before us in all their might and grandeur as super-sensible realities. Whereas without Christ our consciousness brings us to the void, the Christ-filled consciousness brings us to the true causes of world-phenomena and ‘world-wonders’. Foolish as this may sound today, I ventured to say in the book The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind that in the future there will be a chemistry and a physics, a physiology and a biology permeated by the Christ Impulse, and that true science, to an extent not today dreamt of, will become permeated by the Christ Impulse. Anyone who does not believe this has only to turn the pages of history to discover how the rational opinion of the future is often the foolishness of earlier times. If anyone pities us for supposing that what is regarded as foolishness in our day will be the reasonableness of the future, let him remember this. Foolish as it may seem to the humanity of the present day to think of a Christian chemistry it will in the future appear quite reasonable. When we carry the Christ with us into our outlook upon the world, He will give us plenitude in place of emptiness.

If we take the second road, if in the spirit of what has been said so far we fill our souls in the Pauline sense with the Christ Impulse, and then plunge into ourselves, what then happens? The Christ Impulse has the quality of working as a solvent, as a destructive influence upon our egotism. We notice that the deeper we descend with the Christ Impulse into ourselves, the less is egotism able to get a hold upon us. We then press further and further into ourselves and by penetrating with the Christ Impulse through our egotistic impulses and passions, we learn to recognise the being of man, learn to know all the secrets of the ‘world-wonder’ which is man. Indeed the Christ Impulse enables us to go much further. Whereas without it we bounce back like an india-rubber ball, and do not succeed in entering into ourselves, into the sphere of our own organisation, with the Christ we penetrate deeper and deeper into ourselves, and at last come out of ourselves, so to say, on the other side. So that whether we go out into the cosmos and find the Christ-principle in the widths of space, or whether we penetrate below into the sphere of the sub-earthly gods, in either case we find it all impersonal and freed from ourselves. In either direction we find something which transcends ourselves. In cosmic space we are not dissipated, atomised, we find the world of the upper gods; below we penetrate into the world of the true gods.

We could represent the two paths—the one which leads into ourselves, and the other which takes us into the widths of space—by a circle, and show how at last we meet ourselves outside ourselves. Both what is of the nature of will, into which we should otherwise plunge as if into a region of burning fire, and what constitutes the widths of space, wherein we should otherwise vanish into nothing—these two realms meet. Our thoughts about the world unite with the will which comes out of the world to meet us when we descend. Will-filled thoughts, willing thoughts! Thereby we are no longer in the presence of abstract thoughts, but of cosmic thoughts, thoughts which are themselves creative, thoughts which can will. Willing thoughts—but that means divine Beings, spiritual Beings, for thoughts filled with will are spiritual Beings. Thus the circle is completed. Thus do we come safely through the trials which have beset our soul, whereas otherwise we should vanish into nothingness on account of the weakness of our own souls. Thus when we descend into ourselves we come through our colossal egotism, that is to say, through the soul strong in its egohood and its egotism; in either direction we come to what of itself can certainly lead us into tribulation, but can never tell us anything about the world.

We have to travel both these paths, we have to experience both obstacles, the fear before the void, as well as the resistance of our own egotism. And as we thus pierce through ourselves to the other side of the will-nature, and draw near to the cosmos, as soon as we thus emerge from ourselves, we are seized by an infinite compassion, an endless sympathy with all beings. It is this sympathy, this compassion, which, when the circle has been completed, unites with the cosmic thoughts which would otherwise evaporate and which now receive substantial content. Little by little the Christ Impulse leads us to complete the circle, leads us to recognise what lives and subsists in the widths of space as thoughts filled with will, which means real thoughts, thoughts filled with being. But if in this way our ordeals have led us on, our souls then become purified, thoroughly penetrated by the cleansing process we have had to undergo. Because in the downward direction we have to fight our way through what is shown to us by the Guardian of the Threshold as the prompting to egotism, we are also proof against all that might cause us to vanish away in the widths of space, we are proof against the fear of the void.

Such was the wisdom which prevailed in the Greek Mysteries, a wisdom which leads us to the deepest secret behind the soul's ordeals. Therefore the Greek neophytes, the pupils of these Mysteries, were led on the one side to fear of the infinite abyss, and to knowledge; on the other side they were led, through the temptation to egotism and its overcoming, to infinite compassion and sympathy with all beings. In the marriage, the union, of compassion with thought they experienced purification from all the soul's trials. A faint reflection of this is shown in early Greek tragedy, Greek drama. The first dramas of Aeschylus, and in a lesser degree also those of Sophocles enable us to recognise what their purpose was. The way in which the action takes place on the stage is intended to arouse both fear and pity, and through them to lead to catharsis, to purification. Aristotle, who held the tradition that Greek drama portrayed in miniature those tremendous sensations of fear and egotism, of the overcoming of fear through fearlessness, and of egotism in sympathy, in boundless sympathy—Aristotle, who knew that drama was a way of teaching in miniature, defined tragedy as a representation of connected events calculated to arouse fear and pity in the human soul and through those qualities to purify it.

In course of time these tremendous truths have been lost. When, from the eighteenth century and on into the nineteenth, Aristotle began to be studied again, a whole library was built up to explain what he had actually meant by this. What he really meant will not be grasped until it is understood that drama originated in the ancient Mysteries. Thus scholarship is barely able to touch the fringe of the subject, for despite all the labour expended on the concept of drama, very little enlightenment on the Aristotelian definitions of fear and pity is gained from these libraries. We see, then, that inner ordeals arise inevitably from the development of the world and of humanity. But we also see that these ordeals come because the soul feels impelled to take two paths, one into cosmic distances, the other into the depths of its own being; we see that the soul must undergo these ordeals because in neither direction is the prospect open, but we see that it can hope to complete the circle, to find will from the one side, thought from the other, and thereby to reach the true realities, the revelation of the world as willing-spirit, spiritual will.

We come at last to the point at which the whole world is dissolved into spirit, we see spirit everywhere, and we have to recognise everything material as merely the outer manifestation of spirit, as the phantom, the illusion of spirit. It is because we live in the spirit but do not know ourselves in the spirit that we have to undergo such ordeals. For we do indeed live in the spirit without knowing it. We see spirit in a deceptive form, and we must press on towards the reality out of that deception which we ourselves are, out of the dream as which we dream ourselves; we must strip off all that still reminds us of matter or of the laws of matter. That is a path whose end we can only dimly surmise, but it gives us the strength to say that in the end we shall be able to close the circle and to find in the ‘Revelations of the Spirit’ the solution of the ‘Wonders of the World’, and the compensation for our ‘Ordeals of Soul’.

Thus a real study of Spiritual Science must never discourage us. Even when it has to be pointed out how severe will be our inner ordeals, how they have to be repeated over and over again, we must nevertheless say to ourselves: ‘We must get to know them, we must actually undergo them, for it does not help us to know them in an abstract way.’ But we must also have confidence that we shall advance through these ordeals to the revelations of the spirit. Of course anyone who could set his mind at rest with the thought that the revelations of the spirit are bound to come someday, and that therefore one need not go looking for ordeals, would be the first to run into them. For instance, if anyone were to say, ‘Since you have given us your first Rosicrucian drama, in which we find a development of soul which seems to show that Johannes Thomasius has already reached a certain level, we can rely on this and dispense with the second play The Soul's Probation and can simply hope that the revelation of the spirit will follow someday. What need have we to become involved in inner ordeals?’ Anyone arguing in this way would at once be plunged into the severest of them, for our normal consciousness, our intellectuality makes them inevitable. Hence it is better for us to experience every kind of trial that the soul is capable of experiencing, better for us to get to know without flinching every inner ordeal, so that we should understand that even a man like Johannes Thomasius can fall into error and illusion, and has to make progress by unexpected ways. But we must never lose confidence that the human soul is meant to bear aloft her divine self to the revelations of the spirit. For this is the way of the soul of man! She confronts the world, she sees the world as maya or the great illusion, she feels that within this maya there lie hidden the ‘world-wonders’; wonder comes upon her as her first trial, then the trials become more and more severe, but the soul can keep up her strength until the circle is completed and at last the ‘world-wonders’ find their solution, and the ‘ordeals of the soul’ their purgation in the ‘revelations of the spirit’. This is the way of the soul of man—and yet not hers alone, for within her all the divine hierarchies are labouring and aspiring.

This brings to an end the task we have set ourselves in this year's course of lectures—to evoke an idea of the connection between ‘The Wonders of the World, the Ordeals of the Soul and the Revelations of the Spirit.’

• 1. Dr. Steiner drew on the blackboard.
• 2. See Scene 5 of The Soul's Probation

In today's additional consideration of the discussions that I was able to give here in Stuttgart this time, I will deal with adding a few things to what has already been said, in order to round it off, so to speak.

To begin with, it will be best if I pick up from where I left off in yesterday's public lecture. There we saw how the human soul, in its threefold nature, has relationships with the bodily and the spiritual. And we emphasized in particular that the feeling element of the soul has relationships with the body towards the respiratory life, that, so to speak, what is breathing in the body, and in a comprehensive sense, with all its ramifications and ramifications, is the tool for the emotional life. On the other hand, we have been able to show that the life of feeling has a special relationship to everything that is accessible to inspiration in the spiritual world. But what is accessible to inspiration in the spiritual world is also, at the same time, everything that is contained in the world to which we belong with that part of our being that passes through birth and death, the world that we live through between death and a new birth, the world in which we naturally also live between birth and death. This world is hidden by sense perception and ordinary thinking, that is, by the life of the body. So that what corresponds to breathing and feeling actually points us to the great, all-encompassing world into which we ascend when we pass through the gate of death, the world to which we belong when we no longer use the tool of our bodily life. The tool of our bodily life, so to speak, fetters us to earthly existence. From various lectures given over many years and recorded in the cycles, you know that when the soul has passed through the gate of death, it is not tied to earthly life, but rises into the cosmos to live in the spiritual worlds of that cosmos, in that which can be called the spiritual world. Is it not to be expected that precisely the emotional life, which corresponds bodily to breathing, spiritually to the inspired world, the emotional life with the breathing life, is in a much, much more comprehensive relationship to the cosmos, to the great world, to the macrocosm than our narrowly limited perception and imagination? What do we perceive in the end? We perceive a very small part of the world; a small part of the world plays into our physical existence between birth and death through our eyes and ears. Even if we are people who enjoy looking around and perceiving everything through our senses and then processing it in our imaginations, it is still a small part of the world that plays into our existence.

But what happens when we turn from the life of the nerves, to which the life of thinking belongs, to the life of breathing, to which the life of feeling belongs? A concept that is capable of elevating our feelings can be given to us by what can approach our soul in the following way: You all know that the sun rises at a certain point in spring. At the beginning of spring, on March 21, the sun rises in the morning at a certain point. But this point is not the same at all times, you know that. In ancient times, the sun rose at the beginning of spring in the constellation of Taurus, then in the constellation of Aries; the vernal point thus moves on and has now entered the constellation of Pisces. If you turn to what I mean now, you are therefore looking at the progression of the vernal point through the zodiac. The vernal point itself moves on in the zodiac. When a point in a circle moves on, it must of course arrive at the same point again after a certain time. Now, ordinary astronomy is familiar with this progression of the vernal point and its return to the same point in the zodiac. That is to say, if in a particular year of the past the vernal point was in Aries, the next year it will be a little further along, and so on, and then it will have moved out into Pisces and so on, and after a certain time it will be back in Aries again. The time it takes the vernal point to move through the entire zodiac is approximately 25,900 years, about 26,000 years. This number of 26,000 years expresses a measure of the outer cosmos: the measure by which the vernal point progresses. In this number, we have, so to speak, the means by which the course of the sun is measured in the cosmos. We could say, approximately. If we hold on to this number, we can add another consideration, which we now want to make.

A person breathes in and out, taking a certain number of breaths in one minute. We do not take the same number of breaths at every age between birth and death, but there is a certain average number of breaths per minute that a man of average strength can take. That is eighteen breaths in one minute. Now let's calculate how many breaths a person takes in the course of a twenty-four-hour day. First, we have to multiply the number of breaths taken in one minute by sixty, which gives us one thousand and eighty. Then we multiply that by twenty-four, which gives us the number of breaths a person takes in one day, including night and day: 25,920 breaths. It is remarkable that if we count the breaths of a person over the course of a twenty-four hour day, we get the same number as when we calculate the number of years that result from the advance of the sun in the great cosmos. The number of years that the equinox advances in fits and starts corresponds to the number of times that a person breathes in one day. The same number! Just think how wonderfully true that biblical saying is: that the wisdom of the world has ordered everything according to measure and number. — A number that is inscribed in the cosmos is reflected in our twenty-four-hour breathing. We can therefore also take this number into consideration, and we will find that human breathing is related to the great world in the way that was revealed yesterday by spiritual science.

But now, in a sense, we are again looking at something that is also a breathing, because breathing is nothing more than a special case of the general world rhythm. The essential thing in what was meant by breathing yesterday is the rhythmic movement, the rhythm. Let us look at something that is quite similar to breathing, another rhythmic movement that we know from our spiritual scientific considerations. When we fall asleep, our ego and our astral body leave our physical body and ether body; when we wake up again, our ego and our astral body enter our physical body and ether body. I have often compared the peculiar behavior of the ego and the astral body, this going out and coming in into the physical and ether bodies, with breathing out and breathing in. Just as we breathe in and out the air in an eighteenth of a minute, so, in the course of twenty-four hours, we breathe in our ego and our astral body, as it were, by waking up, by falling asleep; by waking up again, we breathe them in again, and by falling asleep again, we breathe them out. It is only a more comprehensive breathing out and breathing in of our ego and astral body in the course of the twenty-four hours of an ordinary astronomical day. How very remarkable, something is breathing! Let us first disregard what is breathing. There is a definite rhythm, which represents a kind of slow breathing, with each breath lasting twenty-four hours. Now, you know that the Bible speaks of the patriarchal age, of seventy, seventy-one years. Of course, this does not mean that this is something different from the average age. Some people die very young, some live to be a hundred, even over a hundred years old, but the patriarchal age is meant to be something average. So that when we mean something average in terms of human age, we can speak of seventy to one hundred and one years. Let's work out how many days that is. If we calculate that, we would find out how many such great breaths we take in an earthly life, where we exhale and inhale the ego and the astral body over the course of twenty-four hours. Let's calculate that: we take about three hundred and sixty-five such breaths in a year, as many as there are days in a year. So in seventy years it is seventy times as much: that would be 25,550. But let us assume that we are calculating for seventy-one years, and then we come a little closer: that makes 25,915. So a person only needs to live a little over seventy-one years to reach 25,920 such breaths. This means that if a person lives to be a little over seventy-one years old, he has breathed his I and his astral body in and out 25,920 times; that is, as often as a person breathes in and out during the day. Think about it: the same number again!

So you see that we can regard human life as a day, and the individual day that we live through as a breath: then our seventy-one to seventy-two year life is given by the number that is also the number of the advance of the vernal point, which is the number of breaths in one day. Our life is one great day, and the great Being at whose center we can imagine the Earth breathes out and in the I and astral body as often as we go out and in with our single breath. So our single life on Earth would be one day, one day of something. What is it a day of? If you multiply seventy-one by three hundred and sixty-five, you naturally get the year for the day of seventy-one years. If you count seventy-one years as one day and ask: What is one year of this day, it is three hundred and sixty-five times as much. But that is 25,920 years. That means, if we count our single life on earth with its 25,920 breaths, which are waking and sleeping, as one day, count a human life as one day, and see what year corresponds to this one human life with its 25,920 breaths: it is the orbit of the vernal point, 25,920 years! We get a wonderful numerical rhythm.

That is why I said: we get an idea that must be uplifting for our feelings, because we can feel that we are placed in the macrocosm through measure and number. Numbers reveal to us that which is true for us in the realization that what belongs to breathing, and therefore to the emotional life, is the inspiring world, the great world to which we belong not only between birth and death, but also in the time between death and a new birth and in repeated earthly lives. We are, as it were, in the bosom of the rhythm of our entire solar system, breathing in our individual breathing movements the great macrocosmic rhythm of our entire solar system. This is a thought that places us with certainty in the midst of the great life of our solar universe. In the course of time, people will have to make many more similar observations, and then they will be convinced that in this way they will again come to spirit-filled perceptions about the relationship between man and the universe. We need spirit-filled perceptions for our age and for the following ages in the sense that they are stimuli for our inner life, as was explained here the day before yesterday. In ancient times, it was the case that man's enlightenment came, so to speak, from outside. Today, this has been lost through the nature of the declining ages of humanity. We are now in an age in which, if humanity is not to descend into decadence, a development of the human soul from within must begin in an energetic way. And only he understands what our time needs who, as a necessity of earthly development, understands that spiritual life must take hold of the innermost part of the human soul from the fifth post-Atlantic period in which we live, into the time to which we are to develop further. What spiritual science says about this is not said out of some arbitrary idea or out of an agitative sentiment, but it is said out of the realization of the necessity of human development.

Now today we are once again looking at this human development from a slightly different point of view. Let us go back to the first post-Atlantic age, that is, the age immediately following the great Atlantic catastrophe. The day before yesterday, after having done so from a different point of view on several occasions, we emphasized how, in this first post-Atlantean age, man was still related to that series of beings that we call archai or spirits of personality in the hierarchies. Spiritual life was still revealed in these ancient times of humanity because the age of life in those days was such that we can compare it to the present age between the fifty-sixth and forty-eighth year, as I explained the day before yesterday. Man had, so to speak, instruction from spiritual beings. How did these spiritual beings come to man? In those days, man did not look at nature in the same way as he does today. For man today, nature is a kind of mechanical order. Man today regards abstract, almost mathematical laws of nature as his ideal, an abstract order. Take the images that are spread out around you when you go out into nature. Compare what is out there with what is written in botanical and zoological textbooks about plants and animals. Compare these distorted, abstract ideas with life, and you can say: What is written in these books of botany and zoology is what is revealed to the human spirit today. Such botany and zoology, of which today's humanity is so tremendously proud, did not exist in that age. If we compare what modern botany, zoology and biology have to say about nature with the knowledge of nature that arose from the ancient way of knowing, we arrive at a different view. There was no botany or zoology of that kind in those days, but there was something else, something that is still very difficult for modern humanity to understand. It came from nature itself, and I would like to call what came out of nature: the light-filled, formed word. Just as we see nature today through our senses and minds, they did not see it that way, but nature sent them figures of light, and these figures of light also sounded, said something, expressed themselves about what they are. And every person could experience this atavistic clairvoyance in certain states of consciousness, whereby the light-filled, formed word came to meet him from nature; one could also say words, because a wealth of such figures came, speaking out of nature. The human being knew: You too belong to this world from which these words full of light come forth. You too belong there. But now you are here in nature, surrounded by minerals, plants and animals. You are in nature because you have an outer physical body; through this you belong to this nature. But nature lets the light-filled word sprout forth: you belong to it in your soul's nature just as your physical body belongs to the outer mineral, plant, and animal world. You were in this world of the light-filled, light-shaped word before your birth or conception, and you will be in it after your death. You will live in it again.

In the first post-Atlantean period, one could still see and feel an echo of the world in which one lives between death and a new birth by observing nature in certain states of consciousness. In the second post-Atlantean period, things were already somewhat different. The word was lost for these atavistic states. The figures no longer spoke themselves, but they were still there, light-filled figures were still there, only they had become mute. That which lay outwardly before the senses was felt as the darkness in this light-filled formation within, and one's own body was felt as a piece of the darkness. So that one could say: light and darkness! One's own body is ruled by darkness. By coming out of the light and going into darkness, he enters into earthly life through birth or conception; by going through the gate of death, he passes through the dark world back into the light. In the world there is a struggle between light and darkness, between Ormuzd and Ahriman. Thus Zarathustra, who was the teacher of this second post-Atlantean cultural epoch, spoke to his disciples. One does not understand what Zarathustrism means with its Ormuzd and Ahriman teachings if one does not relate it to the way people viewed the world at that time.

The situation had changed again in the third post-Atlantic period. If you look at the outward appearance, the light-filled figures had gradually disappeared in the third post-Atlantic period. But people still had the power to put themselves into an intermediate state between sleeping and waking, just as we put ourselves to sleep today. They only had to make a little effort. When sleeping, one does not need to make an effort, but in this different state, one had to make some effort. But if one made an effort, one could conjure up such a world of light around oneself, which now came from within and was similar to that which used to come from nature, from outside. So what was the actual progression from the second post-Atlantean cultural period to the third, the Egyptian-Chaldean-Babylonian period? What was the transition like? Well, in the second, in the Persian cultural period, people still saw the figures of light when they looked outwards and could say to themselves: Before my soul went through conception, it belonged to this world of light figures. In the third cultural period, this world of light no longer shone from the outside in, but the human being could, as it were, squeeze it out of himself; then he had conjured up out of his soul and in front of his soul what was there in the spiritual world before his birth or conception and what will be there in the spiritual world after his death. So that we can say: the third post-Atlantean period had the world of light as a soul experience. People had the world of light as a soul experience, so to a certain extent man had been pushed back from the external world more to his inner being. It was no longer the natural way for man to look at the outer world and see the world of light, that is, to see the spiritual world around him. Therefore, it had become necessary during this time to initiate a small circle of people in the manner of the Mysteries, so that they would be able to see the outer world of light again and bear witness to the fact that what was brought up from the depths of the soul was truly the same as that which lived in the spiritual realm.

Now came the fourth post-Atlantean period, the Greco-Latin one. In this fourth period, no more light came up when man put himself in a special state, as in the third period. The light no longer came, nor did that come up from the depths of the human being that would have been an echo of the soul's life before conception and after death. But there was still a certainty that the human being's inner being is filled with soul. This certainty came up. One still sensed something of what one had seen earlier when one inwardly brought the soul to see. One no longer saw the light, but one still felt the warmth of the light. That was the case in the Greco-Latin period. There we must say: the world of light was no longer experienced inwardly as a soul experience, but the soul itself was experienced as a soul experience.

But naturally this had to become weaker and weaker in the course of time. And how is the whole relationship expressed at all? It was expressed in the following way. We will have to look particularly at the Greeks if we want to understand the matter: the Greeks had, like the average person today, the consciousness of their body. But through what I have described, they also had the consciousness: the soul pervades the body. They felt the soul as invigorating, the body as it lives through. This feeling, which the Greeks still had, has been lost. The fact that history says nothing about the fact that this feeling has been lost today is only because we live in the age of materialism. No one really understands Homer, no one understands Sophocles or Aeschylus, if they do not read them with the feeling that the Greeks had a different spiritual experience than that of today's people. If one were to read Aeschylus with this feeling, one would provide different translations than those that are provided today and sometimes admired, and which, especially in the most intimate things, truly do not resemble Aeschylus. But the fact that it was so had a very definite consequence for the Greeks, namely that they felt the invigorating soul element in their bodies during the time between birth and death, and thus came to another realization: that body and soul actually belong together very intimately. Never in the development of humanity has this realization been as strong as in the Greek era. For in earlier epochs, which preceded the time of the Greeks, people actually always had the feeling that the soul belongs to the world of light, the world of the word, the world of the Logos, in which the human being lives before birth and after death. Now, in the materialistic age, it is the case that the human being no longer feels the soul at all. In Greek times, and to a lesser extent in Roman times, there was a sense of the intimate connection between body and soul. The Greeks regarded the body as the external form for the soul. Growth and decay of the body appeared to the Greeks as an expression of the growth and decay of the soul. The Greek loved the body as much as he loved the soul. This feeling, as it existed in the Greek, was not present in the same way in the past – as I have just explained – and is not present again today. But the consequence of this was the feeling that is so deeply expressed in the words put into the mouth of Achilles: “Better a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of shadows.” The Greeks had to pay for the beautiful harmony they felt between body and soul with the fact that, if they were not members of the mysteries, any notion of how the soul fares in the spiritual world after death had completely disappeared. Now, the remarkable thing is that the great Greek philosopher Aristotle, who was a great thinker but not initiated into the mysteries, spoke in a grandiose way about the experience of the soul after death, as one could speak in those days if one was able to envision the intimate harmony between body and soul in the way of the Greek age.

And when in the Middle Ages, in the so-called scholastic philosophy, Aristotle was revived, the scholastics said: In philosophy, one must think about the soul as Aristotle thought. If one wants to know more about it, it can only come from faith. With mere human research, one cannot go further than Aristotle. — How far did Aristotle go, he who is so very much the philosophical expression of the Greek way of looking at body and soul? He really did arrive at what can be so beautifully expressed in the words of the recently deceased masterly Aristotle scholar Franz Brentano, who says: If a person has lost a limb, he can no longer make use of that limb; he is, as it were, no longer a whole person. If he has lost two limbs, he is even less of a whole person. If he has now lost his entire body – so says Aristotle and with him Franz Brentano – and is still a soul after death, which Aristotle does not deny, then he is in a state of incompleteness compared to the state in which he is between birth and death. He is not a complete human being. And that is indeed the true doctrine of immortality of Aristotle, the greatest thinker of the Greek world, that man is only here between birth and death a complete, a perfect human being. If he goes through the gate of death, he is only a piece of man; he is indeed immortal, but at the expense of no longer being a whole human being. This is indeed the price that Hellenism had to pay for its beauty and harmony, that it came to the age of man – you know, compared to the human age – where one could indeed sense the soul from within, but where one could not yet see the life of the soul in the spiritual world, where one had to say of the soul: it is no longer a complete human being after death. Only those who were initiated into the mysteries, that is, those who were endowed with powers of knowledge that went beyond the normal, were revealed what the soul experiences between death and a new birth. That is the great difference between Plato and Aristotle, that Plato was initiated into the mysteries and Aristotle was not. Therefore, Plato must be understood in a completely different sense than Aristotle, who came to the “Chimborasso of thought” but could not penetrate to the secrets of the spiritual world.

That is why those who had power in this age strove for something different from what one can achieve in normal human life. Who were the men who had the power, who were able to develop this power? Certainly, there was a great, significant world of initiation, spread by the mysteries here and there, filling the then cultural world; but these mysteries gave people that which Plato said lifted people above the mud of transience. Those who had power in this fourth post-Atlantean period were primarily searching for something in the soul that would enable them to participate in the spiritual world. According to the general karma of humanity, one normally had to wait until one was introduced to the mysteries in the sense of the initiation principle of that time. In Greece this was common practice. The Roman Caesars did not need that. The Roman Caesars, who gradually rose to dominate the world at that time, were able to use their power to be initiated into the mysteries.

And so we see that from the time of Augustus onwards, the Roman Caesars sought initiation simply through their power. They forced one priesthood or another to initiate them into the mysteries. So that in this fourth period a peculiar phenomenon can be observed: on the one hand we have the mystery principle, the mystery knowledge that was still there, but which gradually disappeared, gradually declined I have often described why this had to happen: because the Mystery of Golgotha took its place. On the other hand, the priests were forced to reveal their secrets to the Roman Caesars. Augustus was the first emperor to be initiated in the fourth post-Atlantic period; but his successors were also such initiates. They differed in their nature from the other initiates, who were initiated into the mysteries on the basis of moral qualities, namely, of moral development. The Roman Caesars were initiated on the basis of their power, in that they were able to force the priesthood to reveal their secrets to them. And so we see that even a successor of Augustus like Caligula was an initiate. But that is why a person like Caligula was familiar with the secrets of the spiritual universe. He was familiar with the fact that the impulses of this spiritual universe are revived in the soul, that the human ego is divine within the divine. That which was a sacred truth of humility for the initiated priests became a symbol of external world power for the Caesars. For what did a Caligula know? The others stared at the mythological figures of the gods that had come down to them from ancient times; they worshiped them. An initiate like Caligula knew what these gods meant. Above all, he knew that man belongs to the same world as his innermost being. From experience, Caligula knew that he belonged to the same world as those beings who have their images in these gods: Bacchus, Hercules, Mercury, Apollo, Zeus. Caligula knew the secret of how he could commune with the gods of the lunar world in a sleep-like state. And it is not mere myth, but absolutely true, when it is said of Caligula that he was said to have associated in his sleep – but it is meant in another state of consciousness – with Luna, the moon goddess, and to have drawn from it nourishment for his sense of power. The world lives in me – he said to himself – for I am in it. By looking up at the gods, he saw himself as a god among gods. And the initiated Roman emperors meant it when they said that. The initiated priest knew how to enter the dwelling of the gods, and so the Roman Caesar forced himself into communion with the gods. “My brother Jupiter,” ‘My brother Zeus’: these were terms that Caligula in particular used again and again. And it was Caligula who once asked a tragedian which of them was greater, Jupiter or he, Caligula. And when the tragedian refused to answer that Caligula was greater than Jupiter, he had him flogged. These are not myths, these are historical facts. Hence the processions in which Caligula appeared before the people as Bacchus with 'thyrsus and ephhebe wreath', because he was aware that he could transform himself into those figures he knew as images of the gods. As Hercules he appeared with the club and lion skin, as Mercury with the Hermes wand, as Apollo with the corona and surrounded by choirs. Thus he appeared in order to instill in his people the awareness that he belonged to the gods and not to men. Such was the situation in those times, in which, one might say, the less favorable image of what was great in the Greek world was reflected in the Roman world. Of course, no one saw this better than a Caligula or other uninitiated emperors such as Commodus and others. Caligula once heard that a court case had taken place in which a judge sentenced a defendant to death. And when the matter was reported to him, since it was a special case, he said: “The judge could just as well have been sentenced to death, because he is worth just as much as the other.” This was how he viewed the moral state of his time. In Romanism, the opposite of Greek culture really appears. We no longer have any conception of the inner constitution of the Romans of the time of Caesar. But we must form a conception of it, for it is one of the roots from which our new, our fifth cultural epoch developed in the course of time.

Nero, too, was such an initiate, an initiated emperor. And precisely because of that, Nero was able to see something very special. Those who were initiated into the mysteries at that time knew that evolution had gone downhill to a certain point. It must go up again, but it must also become more spiritualized. That is really what is meant by the “Parousia,” by the new age, of which Christ Jesus also speaks.

If you compare what is alive in all these ancient cultural epochs up to the Greeks with later times, you will find that in these ancient cultural epochs, the soul-spiritual still reveals itself in a certain way through the physical. Then it ceases; it no longer reveals itself, and must now be sought through other means. If man wants to seek the spiritual and soul through what he can see with his eyes and hear with his ears, he can no longer find it. The Kingdoms of Heaven were once revealed through the bodies, but now they must arise in the spirit. The Kingdoms of Heaven must come near. This is the prophecy of John the Baptist. This is also what Christ Jesus meant by the Parousia. Only, in a certain sense, the theologians still stand to this day on the peculiar point of view that they believe that Christ meant by the Parousia that the earth must physically change. Blavatsky also criticizes the saying of Christ Jesus about the Parousia, the coming of the Kingdoms of Heaven, saying: “It was foretold that the Kingdoms of Heaven would come upon the Earth, but the grain has not improved; the grapes are no richer than before; no Heavens have come upon the Earth. All the people who speak in this way do not understand what is meant. What Christ Jesus meant, what John meant, had already come to pass: the Kingdom of Heaven had already descended upon the earth, in that the Christ had embodied Himself in Jesus of Nazareth. The event is to be understood as a spiritual one.

But an initiate like Nero, who knew this also from the mysteries, rebelled against it. He actually came to the delusion that he said to himself: Well, the world is in decline, so it shall perish! — And that is actually the psychological reason why Nero had Rome set on fire — which he really did — because he at least wanted to have the spectacle of the firebrand coming from there to burn the whole world. For he no longer thought much of this world. He did not want to admit the renewal that came through the mystery of Golgotha. He was a madman, but he was also a genius. Through his power, he had forced his initiation, so all his ideas were great, greater than those of others who did not have this prerequisite. In a sense, therefore, Nero was the first psychoanalyst, but a generous one, not a psychoanalyst like those who are called Freud or otherwise. For Nero idolized the physical, in that he, like the psychoanalyst, wanted to bring up what was spiritual and mental from the subconscious. Today's psychoanalyst says: What is down there in the soul? Disappointments, all kinds of wasted lives and so on, and then he says: the animalistic, basic sludge of the soul is down there, there is not much beauty down there. When you hear a psychoanalyst today, it is as if a person is describing a field that has just been fertilized and then cultivated with the seeds for the near future, but the person only sees the fertilizer, the manure. So the psychoanalyst sees only what is really dung in the soul, comparatively speaking, of course. He does not see the eternal in the soul, that which goes from life to life. This is why psychoanalysis is so dangerous: although it goes down to the subconscious, instead of the soul-spiritual essence of the soul, it sees the animalistic mud, as if one does not see the germinating seed but only the dung. Nero was a great psychoanalyst when he said: There is absolutely nothing in man but the animalistic primeval mud; everything else is mere appearance. It used to be different when people were still close to the divine, but now man consists only of this animalistic primeval mud; there is not even the slightest part that is chaste; everything in man is dissolute – so said Nero. One can see from this, one feels especially with those who had forced their way into initiation in this way, the materialization of the world. In these circles, the old, spiritual principle of initiation was generally translated into the material. When Commodus, who had made himself not only an initiate but also an initiator, wanted to give a symbolic blow to someone whom he himself had to initiate, he killed him on the spot. Instead of delivering him to spiritual death, that is to say, to raising him, he killed him! Thus Commodus, the initiator. This is an historical fact.

What occurred during this fourth period is the Mystery of Golgotha. And since the spiritual can no longer come from the external and material, the spiritual must be conquered again. The ascent within has received an impulse through the Mystery of Golgotha. But we live in the fifth period, where this conquest has not yet flourished, where precisely those forces that emerged so grotesquely in Roman times are still strong in people and fight against the impulse of ascent that was brought by the Mystery of Golgotha. And so it is understandable that in this fifth post-Atlantic period, the age of materialism in the way of thinking and feeling has mainly emerged.

The Mystery of Golgotha has already brought an impulse so that the great corruption of the Romans has somewhat diminished, but man has not yet brought it about that the spiritual-soul in his soul also naturally shines forth again. For this, further impulses are needed; for this, a more intensive, a more thorough becoming acquainted with the Christ Impulse is needed. This must become more and more familiar. And so, in the fifth cultural period, the normal human being no longer encounters the soul when they experience themselves. The sense of the soul, the inner experience of the soul, has disappeared for the normal human being. The human being experiences themselves in the experience of the body; they experience themselves as a body, as a natural body.

Self-awareness of the body! And that is why the soul has disappeared from science in particular, and is still disappearing more and more. This soul must be conquered again from within. The fifth post-Atlantic cultural period, which began around 1413-1415, is only just beginning. Humanity will have to develop further in it in such a way that the spiritual is truly conquered more and more within. But this is initially making itself felt in the realm of the soul through a peculiar phenomenon: the phenomenon that something in man himself is appearing materially that was not so material before: namely, thinking itself. Such thinking, as we have it in the fifth period, would have been impossible for the Greeks, and even more so for the Egyptians, Chaldeans or the ancient Persians. Behind the Greeks, imaginative ideas still existed to a certain extent, and even more so in older times; and anyone who can really read Aristotle will notice effective imaginations even in the dry Aristotle, because thinking was still more consciously taking place in the etheric body. Now thinking is completely drawn into the physical body, has become completely brain thinking, and then it takes on the abstract character of which our time is so proud. Thinking that becomes completely abstract is thinking that is really bound to matter, to the matter of the brain. And this thinking, it shows itself precisely in the most epoch-making impulses, which in turn must be deepened, otherwise thinking becomes more and more materialistic and materialistic. And as thinking becomes more and more materialistic, life must also become more and more materialistic. Fundamental ideas - that is the characteristic of our present fifth epoch, which should work as impulses, they only work as abstract ideas.

And there was a time when abstraction as a principle of life had reached its zenith. Everything is necessary – understand me correctly – I do not want to criticize, I am not speaking from the point of view of sympathy and antipathy, I am characterizing as one does scientifically. I do not want to criticize – nobody should think that – the fact that there was an epoch in which abstract world ideas celebrated their greatest triumph. That epoch was when three ideas were expressed in the most extreme abstraction: liberty, equality, fraternity. They were expressed in the most extreme abstraction. This is not said from a conservative or reactionary point of view, but to characterize the development of humanity. At the end of the 18th century, everything calls for freedom, equality, fraternity, not from the soul, but from the thinking brain. And this developed in the 19th century in such a way that we still feel it reverberating everywhere like a habit today. In the course of the nineteenth century, people became terribly accustomed to the abstraction of thinking and are content in the abstractness of thinking because it makes them feel so clever. They believe that in thinking they have truth and feel no need to immerse their thinking in reality. This must be learned again, to immerse oneself in reality; otherwise it remains with the declamation of abstract ideas that have no value for life.

This is the great disease of our time, the declaiming of abstract ideas that have no value for life. If someone says today that a time must come when the world offers the path to success to the hardworking, when the hardworking are given the right place, well, what could be better than this idea! Is it not a wonderful ideal: a free path for the brave! — Sometimes, in today's materialistic times, when one expresses such an ideal, one feels as if one were carrying the whole future in one's breast. But what use is such an abstract ideal if it means that one considers one's son-in-law or one's nephew to be the most capable? What matters is not that we recognize, express and proclaim an abstract ideal, but that we are able to immerse our souls in reality, to see through reality in its essence, to recognize, penetrate, experience and work with reality. Expressing beautiful ideas and enjoying expressing beautiful ideas will increasingly prove harmful. What must enter into our soul is love for reality, knowledge, and adaptation to reality. But this can only come about when people learn to recognize the whole of reality, for the reality of the senses is only the outer shell of reality. If someone who sees a horseshoe-shaped magnet says, “That's the best way to shoe a horse's hoof,” does he have the whole of reality? No, only when he recognizes that there is magnetism in the horseshoe does he have the whole reality. But just as the person who knows nothing else to do with a magnet but to shoe a horse acts, so too is the person who wants to found an external natural science or political science, under the assumption that everything is only the visible world and can be grasped with concepts borrowed from the visible world. This is precisely the extreme abstraction, the harmfulness of abstract ideals. And one does not recognize this harmfulness because the ideals are true, because they are also good, but they are ineffective. They only serve human epistemological egoism, which feels lust in living in such ideals. But no world is ruled by that. At best, it governs a world as it has become in the first half of the 20th century.

One must surrender oneself to such feelings if one wants to understand our time more deeply. The soul life must come alive in the human being, which has emerged so gradually, as I have described, from our environment, from our observed environment. The ideas must become concrete and alive again. Brotherhood is a beautiful idea, but as an abstraction it means nothing. If, firstly, we know that the human soul lives in the body, through the body, on the physical plane here, that is, in a bodily-spiritual, spiritual-bodily way, and secondly, if we know that the human being is not only spiritual-bodily, but is truly a soul, and thirdly, if we that the soul is filled with spirits, and so, if one knows the soul as threefold and the human being as threefold, one knows the human being in his composition of body, soul and spirit: then one has begun to give concrete form to the abstract three ideas of brotherhood, freedom and equality. To say of man in general, of this abstract man, that he should live in brotherhood, freedom and equality, is nothing but a torrent of words. What is necessary is to acquire a living realization of the fact that man, inasmuch as he lives in the body in the physical world, needs a social order that is based on the foundation of real brotherhood, but that brotherhood can only be understood if one regards man as a body. That is the beginning of the right idea of brotherhood. Brotherhood has only one meaning if one knows that man is a trinity and that brotherhood is applicable to the bodily. Freedom: To understand this, one must know that man has a soul, because bodies can never become free. There is no institution by which bodies can become free; the development of mankind can only be such that souls become free. Freedom, when expressed as a general human idea, is an abstraction. Free souls in relation to fraternally living bodies is a concrete idea. People are equal in spirit. An old folk saying was even aware of this: after death, everyone is equal. It was based on the spirit. By living as spirits, people are equal here on earth, but speaking of equality only makes sense when speaking of this third part of the human being, the spirit. It must come to life, my dear friends, so that one can say: that which walks around here on earth in any order lives in body, soul and spirit. Evolution must progress in such a way that bodies live in brotherhood, souls in freedom, and spirits in equality. There is not enough time today to develop this further, but you will already notice today the very significant difference between abstract ideas of equality, freedom and fraternity and the concrete ideas permeated by knowledge, which are then applied to the right thing.

But what is the reason for the fact that one has become so abstract? Well, what has been lost to humanity is that which, relatively late, was still a mystery truth: that the human being consists of body, soul and spirit. Among the Greeks, it was still common to regard the human being as body, soul and spirit. With the first Church Fathers it was still a matter of course. That which lay in the decline of human development, which in turn needs an ascent from the Christ principle, was dogmatically established by the Council of Constantinople in the year 869 by abolishing the spirit. Forgive me for expressing it so grotesquely. It is only on the surface that what emerged in human consciousness through the circumstances I have described has been established. Since that time, it was no longer permissible to teach in theology that man consists of body, soul and spirit, but rather that man consists only of body and soul, as philosophy professors still teach today. And if some good Wundt or other professor of philosophy in our own time has no inkling that man is a trinity, but always talks of body and soul, then he does not know that he is only following the decrees of the Council of Constantinople of the year 869. He is completely unaware that his teaching is only a reproduction of this council decision. Yes, this “presupposition-free” science, if one knows its developmental history more precisely, sometimes has very strange presuppositions. The presupposition-free science of our present age in philosophy is in fact inconceivable without the Council of Constantinople, only the gentlemen do not know it.

What has been obscured, namely that man consists of body, soul and spirit, must be regained through spiritual science. Therefore, the first thing I tried to do, with full awareness, was to apply it symptomatically to our Central European, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, namely, to the structure of the human being into body, soul and spirit, as described in the book “Theosophy”. The whole book is built upon this. This had to be presented to humanity radically again and again; humanity had to be made aware of the threefold nature of man through evolution.

You see how, when you are grounded in spiritual science, everything is justified down to the last detail, but also how spiritual science is suited to giving us such ideas, such impulses of feeling and will, that can make us true co-workers in the right progress of the newer development of humanity. And I always wish that I could evoke a feeling that spiritual science must not remain a theory, must not remain a doctrine, that it must not remain something that is cultivated as a science, but that it can become a truly living, inner soul life. This seems to me much more important than the mere enrichment with concepts, which is of course also necessary, because if something is to be enlivened, it must first be grasped. We must have the concepts within us, but the concepts must not remain dead, they must come to life. Then spiritual science works in such a way that when it is grasped in reality, it stimulates the whole person. But then it is also necessary that the whole person tries to understand it perceptively and willfully. But when the whole person understands this spiritual science perceptively and willfully, then he can live accordingly in it. But then he must never run short of love for true knowledge and for humanity as it continues to develop. In our time, this love is still a tender little plant. And it is understandable, even if it is infinitely sad, when in the field of the spiritual-scientific movement, as we understand it, personal interests, sometimes not of a noble kind, still disfigure the tender little plant of love for the knowledge demanded by the times, celebrates its orgies precisely among those who do not approach spiritual science out of a pure longing for knowledge, who approach it in such a way that, if their vanity is not satisfied, their apparent love immediately turns into hatred. For only real love can conquer hatred; apparent love is even a producer of hatred.

If we feel this correctly, then we will also be able to cope with the phenomena to which I have already referred twice, with those phenomena that are looming so sadly over our Anthroposophical Society, in which we see that the strong haters arise precisely from the circles of the Anthroposophical Society. We will not overcome these things as long as we apply a principle of our materialistic time, as we are so fond of doing today: “I want to be left in peace!” — when we close ourselves off to things or do not want to call things by their right name. If numerous defamatory writings are now appearing, nothing is achieved by taking these defamatory writings so seriously that one refutes the individual sentences. For gentlemen such as those who are now writing do not care whether they put this or that as a proposition. To such a gentleman, for example, who had to be rebuffed when he submitted a work that could not be published by us, who felt offended in his ambition as a result, who, while he then became an enemy, to whom one must say: What you write is simply nonsense, you know better yourself; you write all this because your writing has been rejected. That is the truth. If one understands how to serve spiritual science, it is not important to refute all these things in detail as inventions and fabrications, but rather to show in its true light the person who has belonged to the spiritual-scientific movement in appearance and then afterwards does such things as many are now beginning to do, and more will be done.

Or there is someone — as I told you a few days ago — who wanted to become a great painter, but tried it by begging to be allowed to learn; but when every effort was made to help him, he wanted to know everything better. He thought you didn't become a great painter by learning, but by declaring that you were a genius! If you then have the misfortune not to become one, and, despite being given teachers, you can't learn to paint, but only make a mess of things, and if others are not able to recognize the mess as great paintings, then you come and say that it is the fault of the exercises. You cure such a person in the right way by telling the truth. It must not appear as if spiritual science were endangered and things were not being corrected.

Things will fulfill themselves karmically. The right thing should also be done in many other details in our circles, as it has been done on important points of principle. Consider that since 1911 all ties with Mrs. Besant's Theosophical Society have been cut, and that England's war against Germany did not begin until 1914. This is something where it may be said: the Anthroposophical Society has acted prophetically. There is a lot of defamation in general – this is of course not directed against the English people, but against the defamers who today abuse the nationality principle in this way – but defamation against all better judgment, as Mrs. Besant defames our Anthroposophical Society and me, is a rarity. And after we first made the book “The Great Initiates” popular in Germany and staged Schure's plays, we now have to experience being attacked by Schure in the most impossible way. These are things that, to a certain extent, take place in the wide open spaces. But enemies are also gradually emerging in the narrow spaces.

The anthroposophist must acquire a little foresight and a little will to see what is happening and what will come. One acquires this foresight by taking seriously the motto of our Anthroposophical Society, “Wisdom lies only in truth”, even if it is correctly placed as a motto at the beginning. The one who is able to grasp this deeply enough, “Wisdom lies only in truth”, will take the right position.

With this, my dear friends, I must bid you farewell for this time. I hope that our meeting this time can be the starting point for good cooperation in the spirit, even if we cannot be together physically. Let us try to think, feel and will in the spirit of our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, then we will work together properly.