The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Recently, I have presented a number of important facts about the human being that can be investigated by spiritual science. I attach less importance to the details of these facts being grasped – for I have often spoken about the nature of these facts – than to a certain impression being awakened by them: the impression of the nature of what may be called the deception of the physical physical world, so that you get a sense of what is actually meant when one speaks of the outer world as we see it around us - I say see, not have - is deception at first, and behind it lies the true, the real world. And I wanted to evoke a more thorough sense of what is meant when one speaks of the real world on the basis of spiritual science. So it is more about these general feelings. And with that, I have arrived at the point where we have, so to speak, another opportunity to tie our spiritual-scientific observations to important and significant interests in the spiritual life of the present, whereby I am thinking, of course, of a broader present, not just of today, but of the centuries in which we live.

Our intellectual life is caught in a conflict, a conflict that can be characterized in a variety of ways, that can be defined in many ways. But all these definitions must ultimately converge into a kind of feeling for two currents that we must form for ourselves as currents of ideas from the intellectual culture of the present, and that, to a certain extent, cannot be properly united. Two currents of ideas are present. One of them, we may call it in the broadest sense the scientific current, by which I do not mean merely what is thought and asserted in the circles of natural scientists, but that scientific current which today lives more or less in the perception of all mankind. This scientific current has gradually become a popular, widespread view. It produces concepts that have become deeply, deeply rooted in the soul life of people today. One can best see how this scientific world view has taken root when one considers that it is most deeply rooted where one believes one is penetrating to spiritual life. After all, what is commonly called spiritualism and what is advocated by very many as a theosophical theory is nothing more than an emanation of a materialistic worldview. What is generally known about the etheric body and the astral body, what is produced experimentally in spiritualistic séances, is entirely captured in concepts borrowed from the scientific world view, which is best demonstrated by people like du Prel, who believes he is addressing the spiritual world. But everything he says about the spiritual world, he thinks in scientific terms, that is, in terms in which one should think only about nature, not about the spirit. Similarly, it is downright laughable how materialistic the theories of most Theosophists are, how they positively endeavor to attach conceptions such as etheric body or even astral body to the scientific concepts that should only be applied to nature. The etheric body is very often imagined as something quite material, as a fine haze or the like. Now, I have often spoken about these things.

This is the one conceptual mass, I would say, that we have: the concepts of natural science. And, to avoid being misunderstood, I would like to emphasize once more that it is not so important that these scientific concepts be found in the natural sciences themselves, where they are largely justified. Rather, the important thing is that they creep into the general world and that they are used to understand spiritual matters, so that some people are even under the delusion that they are saying something special when they emphasize the similarity between the concepts they have in spiritual matters and the concepts of natural science.

The significant fact that we have to consider is that these scientific concepts can only capture a certain sphere of our world, a certain sphere of the world in which we live, in our understanding, that another world must remain beyond our understanding if we only apply scientific concepts. These scientific concepts thus form one current.

The other current is formed by certain concepts that we form about the ideal or the ideal, and probably also today, for a long time, about the moral. Take a scientific concept such as the concept of inheritance or the concept of development. You think scientifically when you think these concepts purely and cleanly; you think in terms when you extend these concepts of inheritance and development, as they are commonly used in science, to spiritual matters. Take certain concepts that are needed in life, for example, the concept of the inner freedom of our soul, the concept of goodwill, the concept of moral perfection, or higher concepts, the concept of love and the like, and you again have a stream of ideas, of concepts, that are also justified because they are needed for life. But only by indulging in self-deception can one build a bridge from the way of scientific thinking today to the way of thinking in terms of ideals, ideas or morals today. If someone thinks purely scientifically, that is, if they seek a scientific world view, as is the ideal of many people today, then within a world that corresponds to this world view there is no place for anything that is understood by terms such as goodwill, or, for that matter, happiness, love, inner freedom, and so on. A certain ideal of scientific thinking is to bring everything, as they say, under the concept of causality, to think of everything in terms of cause and effect. And a very popular generalization is – I have already mentioned this here – the law of the conservation of energy and of matter. If you form a worldview using only the concepts of cause and effect in the scientific sense, or of the conservation of energy and matter, then you can only either be ideologically dishonest or you have to say: Within such an order of the world, in in which only the law of causality, only the law of cause, applies, or in which the law of the conservation of matter and force applies, in such a world everything that is an ideal, that is an idea, that is a moral concept, is basically just nonsense. For a worldview that universally conceives of the law of the conservation of energy and matter, nothing else makes sense except to say: our world order develops according to this law of the conservation of energy and matter. Out of certain causes, the human race has also emerged within this world order. This human race dreams of goodwill, of love, of inner freedom, but all these are concepts that people make up, and when the time comes that such a state of affairs must occur in our world system according to scientific conceptions, then there is actually a general grave for all such ideas of goodwill, inner freedom, of love and so on. These are dreams that people dream while they are completing their existence within the evolution of the earth in accordance with the pure natural-law order, and there is no point in speaking of anything else in terms of the validity of ideals and ideas other than that they are dreams of people, because within such a natural-scientific world view, ideas and ideals have no power to realize themselves. What then should become of ideas and ideals if the world really corresponds to the scientific world view, once the state has been reached that one must necessarily think if one thinks only in scientific terms? They are buried, the ideas and ideals! But today people think in such a way — even if they do not admit it — that they have no inner power to realize themselves. They are mere thoughts that are realized when people attach their feelings to them, when people behave towards each other in a way that corresponds to the ideas. But they have no inner power to realize themselves, as magnetism, electricity or heat have – they have inner power to realize themselves! Ideas as such – so always think of moral ideas for my sake – do not have such inner power to realize themselves within our world view if we think only scientifically.

Of course, very few people are aware of the dichotomy that exists between these two currents of our present time, but it is there, and the fact that it is at work in the subconscious of people is much more important than being aware of it in theory. Only one class of people is theoretically aware of what I have just said, and it is this one class of people that we should keep an eye on in the present day. Clearly stated, the fact of the matter is that the whole world is only scientifically ordered and that ideas and ideals only have a meaning because people feel that they must follow them in their mutual behavior, this view can only be found within the socialist theory of the present. Contemporary socialist theory therefore rejects all spiritual science, even regards the traces of old spiritual science that can still be found in jurisprudence, morality and theology as prejudices that belong to the infancy of human development, and it wants everything that could be called spiritual science to be understood as social science: it wants to form socialist social science as merely valid for the mutual behavior of people. The world is organized by natural science, and apart from the natural scientific explanation of the world, there is only one social science left. This is the fundamental conviction of every self-aware socialist.

If you want to get to the bottom of such things, you cannot indulge in confused concepts. Of course I know that one can come and say: Yes, but that is not how socialists think! But that is not the point. As I explained in the first few days of my return here, it is not the content of ideas that is important, but how ideas are put into practice, how they penetrate and take root. And the socialist idea takes root by rejecting any talk of any spiritual world content, by claiming that the world content is only scientifically organized and that spiritual science is to be replaced by mere social science.

Now man feels that mere ideas and ideals, if they are thought as they are thought in the present, really have no more power than to find their way into the human emotional life and thereby to realize themselves, to realize themselves as a dream that humanity dreams within the evolution of the earth. No idea, however beautiful or ideal, has the power to bring anything into being, to generate warmth anywhere, to move a magnet or the like. Thus it is already condemned to be a mere dream, because — as long as one thinks of the world order only as the sum of electrical, magnetic forces, of light forces, heat forces and so on — it cannot intervene in the structure of these forces, especially if one postulates the law of the conservation of force and matter, according to which force and matter are supposed to have eternal validity. Because then they are always there, and then ideas can't intervene anywhere, because force and matter then have their own eternal laws.

With this law - I say only in parentheses - of the conservation of force and matter, a lot of nonsense is done. As one finds spoken of in the literature today of the law of conservation of force and matter, namely of force and energy, it is also often attributed to Jz / ius Robert Mayer. Anyone who is really familiar with Julius Robert Mayer's writings knows that it is just as foolish to attribute the law of the conservation of energy and matter to Julius Robert Mayer, as is done in the literature today, as it would be to attribute the invention of the printing press to Gutenberg in the case of pulp fiction. For what is presented in textbooks and popular manuals as the law of conservation of energy and matter has nothing to do with the law of Julius Robert Mayer, who was locked up in an insane asylum for his work.

Now, for anyone who takes spiritual science seriously, the question arises from all that I have presented: what is the relationship, what is the connection between what can never be united within the present world view: moral idealism and naturalistic observation of the world? This question cannot be answered theoretically without further ado. In many cases, the present age craves theoretical answers, and even those who turn to theosophy or anthroposophy sometimes crave theoretical and dogmatic answers more than anything. But the answers that are to be given on the basis of spiritual science must be answers based on direct perception. In this respect, it is not acceptable to carry the present age's preference for dogmatism into spiritual science. Spiritual science demands something else. Of course, in many cases scholars demand that other dogmas be established, but spiritual science cannot agree at all with the view that other dogmas should be established than those that already exist. Rather, it demands that thought be approached differently and viewed differently, that certain things be thought of from completely different points of view. What is often practiced today as spiritual science, especially as theosophy, can often give the impression of a somewhat modified scholasticism of the Middle Ages. I do not want to speak out against scholasticism, because scholasticism has things in it that are much more significant than what is produced philosophically in the present. But the tendency of many people today is to have only other dogmas, about God and immortality and heaven and hell, and to think differently about these things, but only to think, not to arrive at views that are based on quite a different ground than earlier ideas. If one is truly grounded in spiritual science, one says to oneself: During the scholastic period, there was enough speculation about the Trinity, about the nature of man, about his immortality, about the Christ problem, if I do not use the term now with any kind of unpleasant connotation. For the real value of this scholasticism does not lie in the dogmas it has established, but in the technique of thinking, as I once described it in my writing 'Philosophy and Anthroposophy', which is now being republished in a new edition that has been significantly expanded; it lies in the way of thinking about things. But nowadays it is actually better to learn this thinking by going to the scholastics than by turning to the often confused ideas that have been called theological or philosophical in recent times. There has been enough theorizing about these things in the Middle Ages. For example, the Christ-problem was wrestled with in such a theoretical way. Those who know the nature of this struggle cannot derive much benefit from a somewhat modified scholasticism, as it has been practiced in theosophy, for example, where, instead of having, in the past, trinity, immortality or other things, one now has again physical body, etheric body, astral body. It is a different kind of theotizing, but basically it is qualitatively the same thing. Those who are well informed about this school of the Middle Ages know that it is a moot point to want to penetrate, let us say, to the Mystery of Golgotha. Today it is much more important, for example, to penetrate to the figure of Christ Jesus, which is being attempted by us here in the center of the structure, where we are trying to really find the figure of Christ Jesus again. Those who are really interested in earlier dogmas will be much more interested today in bringing the figure of Christ out of spiritual life, because today is the time to do so. The Middle Ages were the time for keen reflection and the spinning out of scholastic concepts; today — as I have already characterized many times — is such a point in the fifth post-Atlantic period, where man's view must be directed towards spiritual forms. What was previously sought as the form of Christ are, after all, fantastic forms. I have often spoken here about the development of the figure of Christ. The form of the Christ will be found again through spiritual vision. Each time has its special task. It is not important that something is fixed, but that humanity seeks in its development and thereby reaches ever further and further stages of its development.

What is important, then, is to find a kind of bridge where the modern world view cannot find a bridge, but where, if it understands itself correctly, it must necessarily come to socialism, that is, to socialist theory – not to socialism in its justification; I have spoken about this before. But this bridge can only be found if one has the honest will to penetrate into what happens between birth and death, and also into what happens between death and a new birth, if one does not just have the will to analyze the world here, so to speak, but if one has the will to really engage with the spiritual. One speaks of man and says: Man consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, the I and so on. That is certainly justified; but it is justified for the human being who lives here between birth and death. However, what I explained last time and the time before that can already point out to you that one can now speak in a similar way about the human being after death, about the human being between death and a new birth. If you want to ask: What does the human being consist of? you cannot merely ask: What does the human being consist of here on earth? And answer: He consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an ego. Rather, we must now also raise the question: What does the human being consist of when he is not on earth, but in a spiritual world between death and a new birth? How can one speak of the members of human nature there? One must be able to speak of the members of human nature in just as real a way there. And if one is completely honest with oneself in such a matter, one must realize that each age has its special task.

People do not really realize that the way they think, imagine, even feel, yes, even look at the outside world – just remember certain statements I made in my “Riddles of Philosophy” about the relatively short period of six hundred years before our era to us – is only like this now. We cannot go back over the eighth century before the Mystery of Golgotha with the thinking and the feeling and the looking that we have now. I have given you the exact year: 747 BC before the Mystery of Golgotha is the true founding date of the city of Rome. If we go back beyond this 8th century BC, then the whole way of human life is different from the one we now know as the life of the soul. All ways of looking at the world become different. There is, however, one boundary that can be observed better than the others, which can actually be observed well, but not yet for the present-day human being: the boundary that lies in the 15th century. The 15th century is too close for present-day people; they cannot really put themselves in the place of the great change that occurred there. On the whole, people imagine: they have always thought and felt the same way as they do now, even if they go further and further back; but how little they go back! Well, the thing is that as soon as you go back beyond the 8th century BC, you have a completely different way of thinking. And now we can ask the question: why did they have a different way of thinking back then? Nowadays, when people imagine things, they come up with rather foolish ideas, one might say. When people of the present day hear how, let us say, in the Egyptian mysteries — which were the most sought-after in those days — it was taught, when they hear how the truths were discussed there, they think: Well, that corresponds to the fantastic times of yore, when people were not as clever as they are now, when they still had childish ideas; now we have the right thing! It is particularly easy for a modern person to think this way, because they cannot imagine anything different, since they have sunk so terribly into this way of thinking in the present. Let us assume that a Greek, Pythagoras for example, came to Egypt and studied there, just as someone today goes to a famous university to learn. But what did he learn? I will tell you something that Pythagoras really could have learned there: He learned that in primeval times Mercury once played chess with the moon, and in this chess game Mercury won. He won twenty minutes from the moon for each day, and these twenty minutes were then added up by the initiates. How much do these twenty minutes amount to in three hundred and sixty “days”? They amount to exactly five days. Therefore, the year was not counted as three hundred and sixty days, but rather as three hundred and sixty-five days. These five days are what Mercury won from the moon in the game and what he then gave to the other planets and to the whole human race, in addition to the three hundred and sixty days in a year.

Now, if you say that Pythagoras could have learned something like this from the wise Egyptians, then every person in the present will laugh, quite naturally. Nevertheless, it is only another clothing for a deep spiritual truth - we will speak of it again in these days - that the present has not yet rediscovered at all, but it is a truth.

You may ask: Why was it calculated quite differently in the past? Compare the lecture of such an Egyptian sage, who lectures the clever fox Pythagoras: Mercury has won twenty minutes from the moon for each day in the game of chess – with a lecture on modern astronomy, which is held in a lecture hall, you will better notice the difference. But if you ask yourself why there is such a difference, then you have to delve a little deeper into the whole nature of human development. For if we go back to the 8th century BC – Pythagoras does not belong to this early time, but in Egypt the remnants of a wisdom have been preserved that was founded well before the 8th century BC, when it could still be imprinted – if it was taught in this ancient time, there is a profound reason for it. The whole relationship of man to the world had been viewed differently, and had to be viewed differently in those days.

I would like to point out that various remnants of old views have been renewed again and again atavistically, whereby I do not mean or understand the word “atavistically” to mean anything derogatory. Anyone who, for example, reads a work like Jakob Böhme's “De signatura rerum” will, if he is honest, actually say today: he cannot do anything with it. For there are given very strange arguments that either have to be judged from a higher point of view – then they make sense – or that, from the point of view of a modern-thinking person, should actually be rejected as the unreasonable stuff of a layman who has gone a little crazy. All the fantastic talk that is often heard in immature theosophical circles about Jakob Böhme is actually harmful. Nevertheless, from a higher point of view, Jakob Böhme is reminiscent of modern science in his whole way of thinking, in the way he analyzes certain words, for example, when he breaks down words like sulfur and searches in the broken-down parts for something. We do not want to look at the material but on the way he proceeds in his work 'De Signatura rerum', he reminds us much more of a certain concrete connection of the human being with the entire spiritual world than any of the abstract sciences, which only exist in public today. He, Jakob Boehme, is much more immersed in this spiritual world. And this immersion in the spiritual world is characteristic of thinkers who lived before the 8th century BC, before our era. They did not think with the individual, separate reason with which we think today. We all think with our individual reason; they thought more with cosmic reason, with creative reason, with the reason that one must, I would like to say, still listen to in some of its creations if one wants to come upon it.

Today there is actually only one area in which one can perceive a little bit of how something like creative reason still pours into and works in human life. One can still perceive something of a realization of the ideal in one area; but, I would like to say, there is only a shadow of it left, and this shadow is mostly not taken into account. Today, there are a number of naturalistic anthropological theories about the origin of language and how it is thought to have developed. As you know, there are two main theories, as I have mentioned before. One is called the 'wauwau' theory, the other the 'bimbam' theory. The woof-woof theory is advocated more by continental scholars, while the Max Müller school of thought favors the ding-dong theory. The woof-woof theory is based on the idea that humans started out in a very primitive state and that their internal organic experiences barked out like a dog when it goes “woof woof.” Through a corresponding development evolution - everything develops, doesn't it, from the primitive to the perfect - the dog's “bow-wow”, which can still be seen in humans at its primitive level, has become human language. If you follow the development from the baying of the dog to today's speech, in a similar way to the theory of evolution, Darwin or Haeckel, starting with the simplest monera, that is, from the simplest, most inarticulate form to today's language, then that is just the baying theory. Another theory says that one can develop a certain feeling of kinship with the tones of the bell: ding dong; one would have a certain inner sound each time that one imitates. According to this, one would follow more of an evolutionary theory with the woof woof, and more of an adaptation theory with the ding dong, an adaptation of the human being to the inner nature of the material words. Then you can also combine things in a witty way, the Bim-Bam theory with the Bow-Wow theory, which is then something more perfect, then you have combined development with adaptation. Well, these things are more or less common practice today. There are also those who laugh at these two theories and have other theories; but in principle they are not much different either.

From a spiritual point of view, there can be no question of the development of language being as it has just been characterized. Rather, purely externally, the structure of language shows that real reason prevails in the formation and development of language. And it is interesting to trace the workings of reason precisely in language, for the simple reason that it is still in language that an ideational element lives most vividly, that is to say, that which is observed in the one current today, and because language does not merely address itself to the human mind, but has its own laws, so that the ideational is already realized in it in a certain way, even if only shadowily, in relation to natural laws. Take, for example, a word – I will only draw your attention to a few very elementary cases – where you can see how inner reason prevails in the emergence of language; take a word like: oratio, speech. It is remarkable when we take a word like oratio, speech, and then observe what becomes of this word in the life of man after death, for there is a remarkable similarity with what has been the work of nascent reason in the development of language. This gives us a certain certainty that today can hardly be gained in any other way. At best, we can only arrive at hypotheses by other means. The dead person will rarely, at least after a certain time has passed since death, still understand the word oratio; he will no longer understand it, he loses the understanding of it. On the other hand, he will still understand a contemplation, an imagination that leads back to what can be expressed by the words: Os, Oris, Mund, and: Ratio, Vernunft. The dead man breaks down the word oratio into os and ratio. And in evolution the reverse process has actually taken place: the word oratio has actually come into being through a synthesis of original words, os and ratio. Oratio is not as original a word as os, oris and ratio, but oratio is formed from os and ratio.

I would like to give you a few more examples of such elementary things. These things can be most vividly studied in the Latin language because they are most clearly evident there, but the laws that can be found are also important for other languages. Take, for example, three original words: Ne ego otior; that would mean, if taken as a word: I am not idle. Ego otior: I am idle; ne ego otior: I am not idle. These three words are composed through the ruling cosmic reason in Negotior, that is, doing business. There you have three words put together into one, and you see the structure of the words in a rational way. You see reason at work in the development of language.

I would not, as I said, assert this so strictly if the remarkable fact did not occur that the dead dissolve what has been put together here in the world. The dead dissolve something like negotior into: Ne ego otior, and he understands only these three words or ideas, which he combines from this trinity, and he forgets that which was created by the combination.

Another obvious example is: unus, the one, and alterque, the other; this is combined into the Latin word uterque, each of the two. We would be quite happy if we had a word in modern languages like Uterque, which gives that concept; the Frenchman can only express it by staying with the upper one: I'un ct l'autre; he doesn't have a single concept to express that. But Uterque expresses it much more precisely.

Take an example to illustrate the principle I am talking about. You all know the word “se”, the French word “se”: to oneself. You know the word “hors” (out): you could also say “hors de soi” (out of oneself), and “tirer” (to draw) – I'll just keep the “tir” – “tir”: to draw, to draw away. If you then combine these three things according to the same principle, you get “sortir”, to go away, which is nothing more than a combination of “se hors tir”; “tir” is the rest of the word “tirer”. So you can still see the same governing reason at work in a modern language. Or take an example where the matter is somewhat obscured by the fact that different levels of language are at work: “coeur, the heart; ‘rage’, that is the lively, the invigorating, the enthusiasm that comes from the heart; composed: ‘courage’. These are not just any inventions, but real events that really happened. That is how the words are formed.

But the possibility of forming words in this way no longer exists today. Today, man has stepped out of the living connection with cosmic reason, and therefore there may be a possibility at most in very sporadic cases of venturing to approach language in order to extract from it words that are, as it were, in the spirit of language. But the further back one goes, and especially the further back one goes behind the 8th century BC, also in the Greek and Latin languages, the more the principle is active in real life that language develops in this way. And what is significant here is that one has to point to this as if it were eurythmic, by discovering in the dead person: he pulls the words apart again, he breaks them down again into their parts. He has more feeling, the dead man, for these parts of the words than for the whole words. If you think about it consistently, you would break the words apart into the sounds, and if you then translate the sounds, not into movements in the air but into movements of the whole human being, then you have eurythmy. Eurythmy is therefore something that the dead can indeed understand very well when it is practised perfectly. And you can see that such things, like eurythmy, cannot be judged externally, but that one can only understand their place in the overall structure of human development if one is also able to enter into this overall development of the human being.

Much more could be said about what eurythmy actually aims to achieve, but there will be an opportunity to do so later. For now, I wanted to draw your attention to a field, however shadowy, where, even in ancient times, the ideal was still reflected in the real through the living activity of human beings themselves. I said at the beginning today: In today's world view, we no longer find the possibility of building a bridge between the ideal, the moral, and that which lives in nature. The bridge is missing. It is also quite natural for the bridge to be missing in the current cycle of human development. The ideal no longer creates. I wanted to show you an example in the human realm itself, even if, as I said, it is a shadowy one, where something ideal still exists in the human being himself. For in the composition of such words, it was not the agreement of people or the consideration of a single human individuality or personality that was at work, but reason, without the human being being really present. Today, people want to be present in everything they do: Now, if something as beautiful, great and meaningful as this were to be done – you should see what would come of today's human wisdom if language were to be formed today! But it was precisely in those times when man was not yet so self-aware that these great, wise, significant things happened in humanity, and they happened in such a way that in this event, a close coexistence of the ideal and the real interacted, namely, ideal, that is, rational becoming, and real movement of air through the human respiratory organs. Today we cannot build a bridge between the moral idea and, for my sake, the electrical force; but here a bridge is built between something that happens and something that is rational. Of course, this does not lead us to build the same bridge – I will elaborate on this tomorrow – it must be built in a completely different way today. But you can see from this that humanity has progressed to its present state from a different state: from being inside a living web that was close to what, in a certain way, takes place in reverse post mortem, that is, after the death of human beings. Today, after death, in order to find his way between death and a new birth, man must again take apart what has been so joined together by forces - we will speak of this again tomorrow - that this joining together can still be clearly seen if one goes back to the older stages of speech formation.

These are important things, things that we really must consider when we turn our attention to the question of how spiritual science can be integrated into the whole structure of contemporary spiritual life. We have often spoken about this, and it is something we must consider. And if we repeatedly speak of the importance of integrating spiritual science into the whole of evolution, then we must also think concretely in this field. In these lectures I would now like to contribute something to this concrete thinking. If it were possible for spiritual science to be carried by a certain movement in the present day, by a human movement, then this spiritual science would be able to have a fruitful effect in all fields. But above all, there would have to be the will to respond to such subtleties, as they are often emphasized here. For it is on these subtleties, which always relate to the relationship of our spiritual science to contemporary spiritual culture, that we must base what we can call our own engagement with the spiritual movement of the present day through spiritual science. It is truly the case that the sad, catastrophic events of the present should make people aware that old worldviews have gone bankrupt. Not from spiritual science alone, but from its relationship to these old worldviews, one could see what has to happen for us to emerge from the bankruptcy of the present time.

To do this, it would of course be necessary to finally address the intentions that I have often expressed as those of the spiritual scientific movement. It would truly be necessary to recognize the reasons why, for example, working on the building has become so fruitful within certain circles, while other endeavors of the Anthroposophical Society have remained equally fruitless, so to speak; why, if one disregards what it has really achieved, namely the Dornach building, the Society often fails. On the one hand, if it is not to evoke the opposite, such an achievement always requires that many other things happen. It is necessary that the Anthroposophical Society should not fail in other respects, as it has completely failed in during the years of its existence. This failure need not be emphasized again and again if the opinion were much more widely spread that one must reflect on why the Anthroposophical Society fails in so many other respects. If people would reflect more deeply, they would recognize, for example, why the opinion keeps spreading in the world that I only lead the Anthroposophical Society by the hand and give everything away; while there is hardly a society in the world where less happens that a so-called leader wants than in the Anthroposophical Society! As a rule, the opposite of what I actually intend happens. So, it is not true that the Anthroposophical Society in particular can show how far reality is from its so-called ideals in practice. But then one must also have the will to stand on the ground of reality. In a society, there are naturally personal issues; but one must also understand these personal issues as personal. If people in some branch are fighting for purely personal reasons, one should not make black out of white or white out of black, but one should calmly admit: We have personal reasons, we do not like so-and-so for personal reasons. Then one is speaking the truth; there is no need to distort reality into an ideal. It is therefore necessary to recognize that while on the one hand I am endeavoring to lift everything of an intellectual nature out of the sectarian, to strip away everything that is sectarian, the Anthroposophical Society is increasingly sinking into sectarianism and has a certain love for the sectarian. If there is anywhere an effort to get out of the sectarianism, then this very desire to get out of the sectarianism is hated.

Of course, I do not want to criticize anyone, nor do I want to be ungrateful for the beautiful aspirations that are everywhere, I fully recognize everything, but it is necessary to reflect a little on some things, otherwise things will arise again and again, and I have been told about them again in these days. Isn't it true that the personal is also intimately entwined with the matter? If some kind of disaster occurs in a country, the constitution of the Anthroposophical Society is such that I might say the Society has the sensation of quarreling a little, and from all this quarreling, I myself am personally insulted in the most disgraceful way. Yes, if this repeats itself over and over again, we will not get anywhere. If I am always insulted in the most vicious way because the others quarrel and I am played out, if it always comes down to me being played out, then of course I can no longer hold the anthroposophical movement in the world. It would be possible to work in a positive way if one wanted to focus more on the positive, which I am always hinting at enough. It would be possible to keep such things in the background, which are mostly based on terribly inferior things. But in many circles there is much more desire to quarrel, much more desire for dogmatic disputes, out of which personal quarrels often develop. And then it happens that the cursing usually turns against me – which of course leaves me personally highly indifferent, but the movement cannot continue if it is to go on like this. It is not that I am criticizing what the friends have done in such a case, but I would point out that they have not done something else, which is not for me to suggest in a blunt way, but which would much more surely prevent what is constantly happening than the way it is constantly being attempted. Today it is already the case that one can say: We have only given cycles to members of the Society, and I know how I myself am often strangely approached by this or that member of the Society when I am much more liberal than members on the fringes often want to be in giving cycles. Yes, what has been brought into the world through the cycles could never have fared worse through outsiders than it has through members of the Anthroposophical Society! This must also be taken into account. Today we have already reached the point where the cycles are being abused by members, by apostate members of the Anthroposophical Society, to such an extent that it may soon be said that we no longer set any limits, we sell the cycles to anyone who wants them. It cannot get much worse.

I am not saying that it will happen tomorrow, but I am merely hinting that society does not work as a society at all – always except for the building and except for individual circles – that it does not actually do what a society would otherwise do. As a result, society is of no help at all; it is not at all what a movement would result in.

Here it is so clear that I cannot mean anyone personally, that I can discuss this here quite impartially, for the simple reason that this is precisely the place where work is being done fruitfully out of society, namely on the building. This is already a real thing that has emerged out of society. And if other things that could be much cheaper than construction were to be worked on by such a social spirit as the workers on our construction site, then the Anthroposophical Society would be able to produce tremendous blessings. But then one must call white white and black black. One must also really say when personal matters are at hand: these are personal matters — and not inflate them into lofty idealism; otherwise one will just have to consider what needs to be put in the place of the Anthroposophical Society. A society could not be substituted, because it would be the same old misery all over again! Right? The society cannot be just a means to an end, a way of dealing with all kinds of inferior personalities. But it has become a means that forces you to take into account all kinds of inferior stuff.

Well, I don't want to bore you any longer with this matter today, but I just wanted to add it after the time was up. I finished the lecture beforehand; I only say such things when the lecture time is up, afterwards as an appendix.

I should like to begin today by saying a few words about the boiler house attached to the Goetheanum and the architectural principle underlying it. If you want to study what motivated the architectural forms of this house, you must bear in mind that it is part of the whole Goetheanum building and belongs to it. This fact of it belonging to the building has to come to expression in the artistic conception of the building itself, if this conception is correct. It should not be an abstraction but has to be expressed in the artistic form.

Now let us have a look at the whole question of related artistic forms. We get closest to this if we do what human beings unfortunately do far too seldom, and think of the tremendous artistic creative activity we find exemplified if we are able to look at the spiritual aspect of nature and recognise natural creation as a product of the spirit. I would like to draw your attention to the forms of the bony system because it is easiest to see there. Man's bony system, especially, is less difficult to study than the forms of any other living organisms.

You will know that I have been trying for decades to arouse some understanding in the world for the significant discoveries Goethe made in the field of anatomy and physiology, which I should like to call his second major achievement in this realm. I will not touch on the first one today but only refer to the second. This second significant discovery owes its origin to what one might, in the external materialistic world, call the combination of chance and human genius. Goethe himself relates that one day when he was going for a walk in the Jewish cemetery in Venice he found a sheep's skull that had fallen apart at the seams. Picking it up and looking at the form of the bones the thought occurred to him, ‘When I look at these head bones, what actually are they? They are transformed dorsal vertebrae.'

You know, of course, that the spinal cord that encloses the spine marrow as a nerve cord is composed of rings which fit into one another, rings with a definite shape and processes (procesus vertebralis). And if you imagine one of these rings expanding so that the hole the marrow passes through—for the rings fit into one another—begins to get larger and the bone gets correspondingly thinner and expands like elastic, not only in a horizontal direction but also in other directions, then the form that arises out of this ring form is nothing else but the bone formation which forms our skullcap. Our skullcaps are transformed dorsal vertebrae.

On the basis of spiritual science we can develop this discovery of Goethe's even further and can say today that every bone man has is a transformation, a metamorphosis of a single form. The only reason we do not notice this is because we have very primitive views of what can arise through transformation. If you think of a bone of the upper arm—you know of course what it looks like—a tubular bone like that would not immediately strike you as being similar to a bone in our head. But that is only due to our not having developed the concept of transformation far enough.

The first idea you will have is that the tubular bone has to be puffed up until it is hollow inside, then you ought to arrive at the form of the head bone. But that is not the principle underlying the shapes of the bones. A tubular bone would first have to be turned round, and you would not see the similarity it has to the skullcap until you had turned it inside out like a glove. But when a person turns a glove inside out he expects it to look the same as it did before, doesn't he? This is because the glove is something dead. It is quite different with something living. If the glove were alive, the following would happen when it was turned inside out: changes would occur like the thumb and the little finger getting very long, the middle finger very short, and the palm contracting, and so on. The turning inside out and the varying elasticity of the material would bring all sorts of changes about, in fact, the glove would acquire a totally different form, although it would still be the glove. This is how you must imagine a tubular upper arm bone being turned inside out, and then a skullcap would emerge.

You will realise that the wise powers of the Godhead in the cosmos possessed a greater wisdom than arrogant man has today, to be able to set the forces of transformation in motion that are needed to form a skull.The inner unity in nature comes from the very fact that, fundamentally, even the most dissimilar forms are transformations of one archetypal form. There is nothing in the realm of life that could not arise as a metamorphosis of a primary form. In the course of this metamorphosis something else happens as well. Certain parts of the primary form become larger at the expense of others, and other parts become smaller; also various limbs expand, but not all to the same extent. This produces dissimilarities, although they are all transformations of the same primary form.

Now look at the primary form of our whole Goetheanum building. I can only give you a very sketchy account of what I want to tell you, and only mention one point of view. If you look at the Goetheanum you will see that it has double domes and that the domes rest on a cylindrical sub-structure. The fact that it is a building with double domes is vital, for these double domes are an expression of the living element. If there had only been one dome then in essence our building would have been dead. The living quality of our building is expressed in the fact that the consciousness of the one dome is reflected in the other, as it were, that the two domes mirror one another, just as the part of man that is in the external world is reflected in man's organs. The basic concept of the double dome must be borne in mind in relation to anything organically connected with the Goetheanum, for if it were not to contain the double dome form, however hard it was to recognise, it would not express the essential nature of the concept of the building. Therefore the annexe must also contain the concept of the double dome.

Now look at the double dome and its additional constructions. First of all we have the interpenetration of the two dome motifs, whose importance I have often referred to. They represent a kind of new innovation in architecture and, as you know, were done with the help of Herr Englert. The interpenetration of the two domes is of special importance in the main building because it expresses the inner connection of the two elements which mirror one another. I am giving you this concept of mirroring in an abstract way at the moment. A very great deal is contained in this interpenetration of the two dome motifs; an infinite amount of different aspects. The further stage of the building, the artistic stage, that expresses the image of the concept of spiritual science, can only come into being because we have succeeded in achieving this interpenetration of the double dome motifs. So we have this interpenetration in the main building. If we were to cancel the interpenetration and separate the dome motifs, we move towards the ahrimanic principle. If we bring them closer together or overlap them completely, by building one inside the other, we would approach the luciferic principle.

So the ahrimanic principle has to be taken out of the building. In the annexe the domes have to be pushed apart, for in the case of the annexe, too, the dome concept is vital. And now imagine the domes kept apart. Imagine that on one side, this side motif (south portal of the main building) has shrunk to nothing, so the dotted line has gone, and on the other side it has grown considerably larger (and become the chimney). With the main building in mind, imagine that here (south) you have the separated domes, here is a front structure, and here the whole thing has been pushed in (see a). There the whole thing has been pulled out instead of being pushed in (b) but here (a) it has shrunk to nothing instead of growing. Imagine that on the other side (the front structure of the north portal) it developed considerably, and you have the transformation motif for an annexe of our main building which has developed out of the primary forms. For if you imagine this getting smaller and smaller (the chimney), that coming out again and the whole thing pushed together, then the annexe would be transformed into the main building.

(Dr. Steiner was using a model of the boiler house as he spoke.)

The point is that this metamorphosis of our main building shall be suitable for its purpose. Just as a vertebra arises out of the same primary form as the human skull, and you can think of one changing into the other, you can also think of the main building and the annexe changing from one to the other. The concept of the form can pass from one form to the other, if it metamorphoses and becomes alive.

We really have to become apprentices of the creative hierarchies who created by means of metamorphosis, and learn to do the same thing ourselves.

Now imagine the kind of force necessary to enlarge this insignificant-looking part on this side (north portal of the main building which becomes the chimney). If you have a small rubber bag that you want to enlarge, you have to press it this way and that way from inside so that it gets bigger. A force has to be there that can enlarge things and develop them. So if one of these side wings really has to be puffed up, it would have to be done by a force working from inside, from here (see left diagram).

What kind of forces can they be, in there? You can study these forces in the forms of the architraves. If you imagine the forces in the architraves jumping into the side structure and pushing this up, you get this form (chimney and back wall). You have to try and slip inside these forms of the architraves with your formative artistic thinking and contract and expand them. Imagine, that because you have slipped inside, you enlarge what is small in there. Then this form arises (chimney and back wall). There is no other way of going about creating things that belong together, than by trying to get inside them.

This slipping into things and being inside them is another way of imitating the creative forces in nature, and unless modern industrial civilisation does this, it will not overcome its godforsakenness. It would be impossible to imagine the ordinary kind of chimney as a product of natural creation. It only exists because there is a denial of divine-spiritual forces in nature. There is hardly anything outside in nature that you could compare with an ordinary chimney except possibly the rather hideous-looking asparagus plant. But that is a kind of exception. Whatever grows with the forces of earth can never go straight upwards like a chimney. If you want to study the forces that work in an upward direction, a tree is the best example in which to find what corresponds to the hidden forces in the earth, for a tree does not only develop a trunk in the vertical, but also has to reach out with its branches. The point obviously is not to imitate this directly in the model, but to study those forces which radiate out from the earth and overcome the purely vertical direction of the tree trunk by reaching out breadthways and putting forth branches. This part here does justice to the centrifugal forces in space, in the cosmos, to what I would like to call the branchlike centrifugal forces (on the chimney).

Although I have only been able to show you the roughest principles, I could justify the principles behind this architectural form in minute detail in the case of every single plane, but it would take too long.

Now a form such as this is only complete when it is fulfilling its purpose. If you look at the form now it is not complete. It will only be complete when the heating is actually functioning inside and smoke is coming out; smoke belongs to it, it really belongs, and this has been included in the architectural form. One day when the rising of the smoke is observed clairvoyantly, and the smoke coming out of the chimney, the spiritual part of the rising smoke will also be taken into consideration—for we shall know, when we have really observed it clairvoyantly, that the physical also contains a spiritual element. For just as you have a physical, an etheric and an astral body, the smoke also has at least an etheric part. And this etheric part goes a different way from the physical: the physical part will go upwards, but the etheric part is really caught by these twigs that reach outwards. A time will come when people will see the physical part of the smoke rising while the etheric part wafts away. When this kind of thing is expressed in the form, a principle of all art is gradually being complied with, namely, the presenting of the inner essence in outer form, really making the inner essence the principle according to which the outer form is created.

As I said, I would have to do a lot of talking if I were to go into all the details on which these architectural forms are based, although these might be far more interesting than those we have already discussed. One of these interesting things is that it was possible to express everything that had to be expressed in this modern material, and build with concrete. For it will be possible to go a long way with form-making in this modern material, especially in the designing of buildings in this style that will serve modern ahrimanic civilisation. In fact it is essential to do so. There is no need for me to go into any further details, because I am more concerned with showing you the principle of this building and everything to do with it. This principle can he modified in many respects. For instance the dome can be modified so that it does not look like a dome any more, if it is looked at merely from the geometrical-mathematical point of view and not organically, and so on. But today I wanted to discuss the particular principle of inner metamorphosis and transformation, the life principle within these. I wanted to cite this to show you in what way real artistic creativity, when it has to do with our spiritual-scientific conception, has to differ from any kind of symbolic interpretation, for that is external. It is a matter of getting an inner grasp of what you are being shown here and following the process with your whole soul.

When the building is eventually finished we do not continually want to be asked, ‘What does this mean and that mean?', and have to witness people happily believing that they have discovered the meaning of some of these things. Regarding some of these interpretations, we have come into a strange position along some of the by-paths of theosophy, with respect to quite a number of poetic and literary works. For instance, people have explained plays by saying that one person means manas, another person buddhi and a third person atma, and so on. If you want to, you can of course explain everything like this. But we are not concerned with this kind of interpretation, but with entering into things and joining in the process of creativity that came from the higher hierarchies and fills and forms the whole of our world. There is no need to avoid doing this just because it is more difficult than symbolic or allegorical interpretation. For it leads into the spiritual world and is the very strongest incentive for really acquiring imagination, inspiration and intuition.

A vital part of the present-day impulses for change is that we acquire more and more understanding for the way the human soul rises into the realms that open up to imaginative, inspirational and intuitive observation. For these realms contain the elements that will make our world whole again, and which will lift us up out of mere maya and lead us to true reality.

It has to be stressed again and again that the new spiritual knowledge we are moving towards, cannot consist of repeating the results of earlier clairvoyance. There are certainly a lot of people striving to repeat earlier clairvoyance, but the time for this clairvoyance is over, and it is only atavistic echoes of ancient clairvoyance that can possibly occur in these few individuals. But the levels of human existence to which we must ascend will not open up to a repetition of ancient clairvoyance. Let us have another look at the essential basis of this new clairvoyance. We have often referred to the principle of the thing, and now we want to try and approach it from another angle.

Again we will start with something we all know, namely, that during waking day man lives with his ego and his astral body within his etheric and his physical body. But I have already emphasised during the past few days that, awake as he is between waking up and going to sleep, man is not fully awake, for something in him is still asleep. What we feel as our will is really only partly awake. Our thoughts are awake from when we wake up until we go to sleep, but willing is something we carry out completely in a dream. This is why all the pondering about freedom of will and about freedom altogether has been in vain, because people have failed to notice that what they know about the will during the daytime is actually only the dreaming of their will impulses. If you have an impulse of will and make a mental image of it you are certainly awake. But in waking life man only dreams with regard to how the will arises and goes over into action.

If you pick up a piece of chalk and make a mental image of picking it up, that is of course something you can have a mental image of. But with only your day consciousness and without clairvoyance you know no more about how the ego and astral body stream into your hand and how the will spreads out, than you know about a dream whilst you are dreaming. We can only dream about the actual will with ordinary waking consciousness, and where most things are concerned we do not even dream, we just sleep. You can clearly visualise putting a mouthful of food on your fork, and to a certain extent you can visualise chewing it, but you do not even dream about swallowing it. You are usually quite unconscious of it, as you are unconscious of your thoughts while you are asleep. So during waking life a major part of our will activity is carried out in waking day sleep.

If we did not sleep with regard to our desires and the feeling impulses bound up with them, something strange would begin to happen. We would follow the course of our actions right into our body; everything we do out of will impulse would be followed up inside us in our blood and throughout the whole circulation. That is, if you could follow the picking up of a piece of chalk from the point of view of the will impulse, you would follow what is going on in your hand right into the blood circulation; you would see the activity of the blood and the feelings that are bound up with this from inside. For instance, you would have an inner perception of the weight of the piece of chalk and become aware that you are seeing the nerve channels and the etheric fluid inside them. You would feel yourself moving through the activity of the blood and the nerves, which would amount to an inner enjoyment of your own blood and nerve activity. But we have to be free of this inner enjoyment of our own blood and nerve activity during earthly life, otherwise we would go through life wanting this inner enjoyment to accompany everything we do. Our enjoyment of self would increase enormously. But as man is now constituted he should not have this enjoyment. And the secret of why he should not have it can again be found in a passage of the Bible, for which we ought to feel greater and greater reverence.

After what had occurred in paradise and is told in the paradise myth, man was permitted to eat from the tree of knowledge but not from the tree of life. Now this inner enjoyment would be the enjoying of the tree of life, and man is not permitted to do this. I cannot develop this theme further today as it would lead too far, but through meditating on it yourselves you will be able to discover more about it. Another thing that can have special significance for us in connection with these present lectures and arises out of this, is the following: not being able to eat from the tree of life means not being able to enjoy the blood and nerve activity going on within us. Yet just because we know the outer world by means of our senses and our reason, something comes about that surely has something to do with this kind of enjoyment. Whenever we perceive anything in the outer world and whenever we think about it, we follow the course of our blood circulation in the region of the senses—eyes, ears, nose and taste nerves—and, in the case of thinking, the nerve channels. But we do not have the perception of what is going on in the blood circulation and nerve channels, for what we would have perceived in the blood is reflected and mirrored by the senses, thus causing the sense impressions to arise. And what is conducted through the nerve channels is also reflected and conducted back to the nerve ends, where it is then mirrored as thought.

Now imagine for a moment a human being who is in the following situation: he does not just follow the course of his blood as it responds to the outer world and then receive a mirror image of what his blood does, nor does he just follow the course of his nerves and receive a mirror image of what his nerves do, but he is in a position to experience within himself what is denied us with regard to our blood and our sense nerves; he experiences the blood moving towards the nerve and the eyes. If this were the case he would enjoy his own inner process, at least in the blood and the nerves in this area. This is how the inner pictures of atavistic clairvoyance arise. What we see reflected are only pictures, filtered pictures as it were of what is in the blood and the nerves. There are world secrets in the blood and nerves, but the kind of world secrets that have already given their substance to creating us. It is only ourselves we get to know when we acquire the imaginations resulting from experiencing the blood circulating to the senses, and it is only the inspirations which have the task of building up our bodily nature we get to know, when we experience ourselves in the nerves leading to our senses.

A whole inner world can arise in this manner, and this inner world can be a collection of imaginations. Yet although, when perceiving the outer physical world in a way that is proper for our earth evolution, we perceive reflections of our blood and nerve activities, we still cannot get beyond the senses when we indulge in inner enjoyment, but reach only to the point where the blood circulation flows into the senses. Then the experience of the imaginative world is comparable to swimming in blood like a fish in water. But this imaginative world is in reality not an outside world but a world living in our blood. If one lives in the nerves leading to the senses one experiences an inspirational world full of music of the spheres and inner pictures. This is cosmic again but it is nothing new. It has already fulfilled its task in that it has flowed into our nerve and blood systems.

The kind of clairvoyance arising in this way, and leading man further into himself instead of beyond himself, is self-enjoyment, veritable self-enjoyment. This is why a kind of refined voluptuousness is brought about in people who become clairvoyant in this way and experience a world which is new to them. And on the whole we must say that this kind of clairvoyance is a return to an earlier stage of evolution. For although this experiencing of a person's own sense organs and blood, as I have been describing to you, did not exist then in the form in which it does today, the nervous system was already there in a germinal state. This kind of perception was the normal one for man on ancient Moon, and what he had then in the way of the beginning of nerves served to give him an inner perception of himself. The blood had not yet taken form inside him. It was more like a warm breath coming towards him from outside, like we receive the rays of the sun. Therefore what is now, on the earth, a perception of the inner blood system was regular, normal perception of the outside world at the Moon stage.

You could say that if this is the borderline between man's inner and outer world (a diagram was drawn), then, what are now our nerves were already there, in germinal form, on the Moon. By following the course of the nerves he could perceive what was within him, as a world of inner imagination. He saw that he himself belonged in the cosmos. He also had an imaginative perception of what came to him as a breath from outside and not from inside. That has now ceased, and what was outside, on ancient Moon, has become internalised as the blood circulation in Earth evolution. So it is a regression to the old Moon evolution.

It is good to know of these things, because that kind of clairvoyance keeps on making its appearance. It does not need to be acquired along the hard path of meditation and concentration described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. The kind of clairvoyance that arises as a result of learning to experience one's nerves and blood as an inner enjoyment is just a more refined development of organic life, a further development of the experience of eating and drinking. This is certainly not mankind's present task, but is a kind of hot-house plant which arises when self-enjoyment of things such as eating and drinking is developed to a fine art. Just as a wine connoisseur has an inner after-taste which is only an imagination of the taste and is not formative, some people have a subtle inner enjoyment which is their clairvoyance.

A lot of clairvoyance is nothing more than a subtle, refined, forced kind of after-taste of life. We must become aware of these things again in our time. For people have not known about these secrets nor referred to them in literature since the first half of the nineteenth century. Then the second half of the nineteenth century came, with all the discoveries that are considered so wonderful, and they certainly are wonderful from their point of view, and an understanding of these things and the finer connections of existence were lost. But what has not yet been lost—and this is said in parenthesis—is the enjoyment of the effects of the coarser things we imbibe. Mankind continues to be able to live in the after-enjoyment of eating and drinking, and, precisely in the materialistic age, has cultivated this to an extent.

But mankind lives in a rhythmic cycle where things like this are concerned. Of course, because it has eradicated the general feeling it used to have of indulging in self-enjoyment in the senses, nerves and blood circulation, which people had to a greater extent in the past, the materialistic age can devote itself even more strongly to the effects of eating and drinking. You can easily study the whole change and rapid development that has taken place in a relatively short time in this realm. You have only to compare a hotel menu of the 1870's with a present-day one (1915), and you will see the progress that has been made in the sphere of refined pleasures, in the self-enjoyment of one's own body. Yet things of this kind also move in cycles, and achievements are only carried to a certain level. Just as a pendulum can only swing to a certain point before it has to go back again, the indulgence in mere physical pleasure will also have to go in the other direction once it has reached a certain point. This will occur when the keenest epicureans, that is, people with the most longing for pleasures, will look at the choicest dainties and say, ‘Ugh! I don't feel like having that, that is just too much!' This moment will certainly come, for it is a necessary development. Everything moves in cycles.

Man experiences the other side of life during sleep. His thought life is asleep and quite different conditions prevail, of course. Now I said that it was chiefly the first half of the nineteenth century that had insight into these matters still; and the kind of clairvoyance that arises when one follows the course of one's own blood and nerve channels was still called pythian clairvoyance at that time, from certain memories the people had, and it is indeed related to the foundations of ancient pythian clairvoyance.

Other conditions prevail during sleep. Man is outside his physical and etheric body with his ego and astral body. In ordinary life thoughts are then suppressed and devitalised. But between falling asleep and waking up man lives continually with the longing for his physical body. This is precisely what sleep consists of, acquiring a longing for his physical body from the moment he falls asleep. This rises to a climax and then urges him more and more to return to his body. When he is asleep the longing to return to his own physical body becomes stronger and stronger. And because the longing pervades the ego and the astral body like a mist, the life of thought is dimmed. Just as we cannot see the trees any more when mist encloses them, we cannot experience our life of perception within us when the mist of our longing envelops us.

Now it can happen that this longing grows so strong during sleep, that man does not keep it outside his physical and etheric body, but that his greed grows to the extent that he partly takes hold of his physical and etheric body and comes into touch with the extreme ends of his blood and nerve channels; he penetrates from outside as it were through his senses into the extreme ends of his blood circulation and his nerve channels.

In ancient times, when man still had experiences like these with the help of the gods, as it were, it was a normal and healthy process. The old Hebrew prophets, who accomplished so much for their people, acquired their prophetic gifts through making use of the tremendous love they bore precisely for the blood and nerve composition of their own people, so that even during sleep they did not want to let go altogether of that which lived physically in their people. These prophets of Jewish antiquity were seized with such longing and filled with such love that even in sleep they wanted to remain bound to the blood of the people to whom they belonged. This is precisely what gave them their prophetic gifts.

This is the physiological origin of these prophetic gifts, and splendid achievements came about through this channel. This is precisely why the prophets of the various peoples had such significance for their people, because even when they were outside the body they maintained a contact with it in this way.

As I mentioned, there was still a certain awareness right up to the first half of the nineteenth century, of this connection in the life of humanity. Just as they called the other kind of clairvoyance pythian clairvoyance, this kind of clairvoyance, which came about through contact of the ego-astral nature of man with the blood and nerve channels of the physical body during sleep, was called prophetic clairvoyance.

If you look at the literature of the first half of the nineteenth century you will find descriptions of pythian and prophetic clairvoyance, even if they are not as precise as spiritual-scientific descriptions of them would be today. People do not know the difference between them any more, since they have no understanding for what they can read about them in the books of the first half of the nineteenth century. But neither of these kinds of clairvoyance can really help humanity forward today. Both of them were right for olden times. Modern clairvoyance, which has to develop further and further in the future, can come about neither through enjoying what is going on in our bodies while we are awake, nor by entering into the body from outside in a sleeplike state, urged on by love—even if it is not for ourselves, but for the part of mankind to which our body belongs. Both these levels have been superseded.

Modern clairvoyance must be a third way, neither a taking hold of the physical body from outside, in loving longing, nor an enjoying of the physical body from inside. Both these phenomena, that which lives within and floods the body with pleasure, and that which can seize hold of the body from outside, have to go out of the body, if modern clairvoyance is to occur; they may only have the sort of relationship with the body, during incarnation between birth and death, in which they neither enjoy nor love the blood and nerves, either from inside or from outside, but remain connected with the body whilst freely abstaining from such self-enjoyment or self-love. The connection with the body has to be maintained nevertheless, of course, otherwise it would mean a dying. Man must remain bound to the body that belongs to him in physical incarnation on earth, and this must be done by means of the organs which are remote, as it were, or at least relatively remote from the activity of blood and nerves. A detaching from the activity of blood and nerves must be achieved.

When a person no longer indulges in enjoyment of self along the channels leading to the senses, nor takes hold of himself, from outside, as far as the senses, but has the kind of relationship to himself, both from inside and from outside, in which he can actually take living hold of what symbolises the death of physical life, then the proper condition has been reached. For we actually die physiologically because we are able to develop the bony system. When we are capable of taking hold of the skeleton which folk wisdom recognises as the symbol of death, and which is as remote from the blood system as it is from the nervous system, then we come to what we can call spiritual-scientific clairvoyance, which is higher than either pythian or prophetic clairvoyance.

With spiritual-scientific clairvoyance we take hold of the whole and not just part of the human being, and it actually makes no difference whether we take hold of it from inside or outside, for this kind of clairvoyance can no longer be an act of enjoyment. Instead of being a subtle enjoyment it is an opening up and rising into the divine-spiritual forces of the All. It is a uniting with the world. It is no longer an experiencing of the human being and the mysteries that have been woven into him, but an experiencing of the deeds of the beings of the higher hierarchies, whereby one truly lifts oneself out of self-enjoyment and self-love. Man must become a thought as it were, an organ of the higher hierarchies, just as our thoughts are organs of our souls. To be thought of, pictured and perceived by the higher hierarchies, is the principle of spiritual-scientific clairvoyance. To be received, not to take oneself.

I would like to express the wish that what I have just been saying might become a real object for your meditation, for precisely that which I have been telling you today can bring many, many things to life in all of you and enliven the actual impulses of our spiritual-scientific movement to an ever greater extent. And how seriously we have to take the enlivening of our spiritual-scientific movement has often been spoken of during these days together. We could bring to realisation a further part—I will not say of what was intended—but of what ought to be intended within this spiritual-scientific movement, if as many people as possible would resolve to think about this threefold form of knowledge of higher worlds in a living way, so that our thoughts become clearer and clearer about what, at bottom, we all intend, and which can become so easily confused with what can be had much more comfortably.

Truly, it is not for nothing that we work from cycle to cycle to accumulate more and more concepts and ideas. It is not needless work studying these concepts and ideas, for it is precisely the way to prepare the soul impulses that will lead us to real spiritual-scientific clairvoyance. By snatching up one or two ideas given by anthroposophy you can sometimes make a chink in one or another part of the human organisation, causing fragments of pythian and prophetic clairvoyance to arise, enough to make people proud of themselves. If this is the case, we often hear statements like this, ‘I don't need to study everything in detail, and I don't need what the cycles say. I know all that, I knew it already.’ And so on. Many people are still satisfied with the principle of living in a few imaginations which we could call blood and nerve imaginations. A lot of people fancy they have something really special if they have a few blood and nerve imaginations. But this is not what can lead us to selfless co-operation in mankind's development. Indulging in blood and nerve imaginations actually leads to a heightening of self-enjoyment, to a more subtle form of egoism. Then, of course, the cultivation of spiritual science can be the very thing that breeds an even more subtle kind of egoism than you ever find in the outside world.

It is taken for granted that one is never referring to the present company nor to the Anthroposophical Society, which is, of course, here. But it should be permissible to mention that there are societies in which some people manage to turn the principles in their favour, and without really giving their unselfish support, make use of one or another thing, preferably those things which stimulate blood or nerve imaginations, and then imagine they can spare themselves the rest. As a result they acquire an atavistic clairvoyance, or perhaps not even that, but only the feelings that accompany that kind of imaginative clairvoyance. These feelings are not an overcoming of egoism, just a heightened form of it. You find in societies like this—the Anthroposophical Society excepted for politeness’ sake—that although it would be people's duty to develop love and harmony out of the depths of their hearts from one member to another, you find disharmony, quarrelsomeness, people telling tales about one another, and so on. I can say things like this, for as I said, I always make an exception of the members of the Anthroposophical Society.

This shows us that dark shadows are thrown just where a strong light is about to appear. I am not finding such faults because I imagine these things can be exterminated overnight. That cannot happen, because they come from nature. But at least each person can work on himself; and it is not a good thing if you are not made aware of these things.

It is thoroughly understandable that just because a particular movement has to be founded, the shadow sides also make themselves felt in these societies, and that what is rampant in outside life is far more rampant within them. Yet it always gives one a bitter feeling if this happens in societies which, by their very nature—otherwise there would be no point in having a society—should develop a certain brotherliness, a certain loyalty, but just because they come closer together, certain faults that are short-lived in the outside world develop all the more fiercely. As the present company, the Anthroposophical Society, is excepted, it will give us all the more opportunity to think and reflect about these things quite objectively and impartially, so that we really know what they are about. Then if we come across them somewhere, we shall know them for what they are, and not imagine that if someone thinks he has a particularly deep grasp of anthroposophy, that we cannot understand that faults which occur in the outside world appear much more strongly in him. We shall understand it, but we shall also know that we have to combat them. Sometimes we cannot combat them until we have really understood them.

This is another example showing how closely connected life is with the spiritual-scientific outlook; that this spiritual- scientific outlook cannot, in fact, achieve its aim unless it becomes an attitude to life, an art of life, and is brought into the whole of life. How wonderful it would be if in—let us now say the Anthroposophical Society—all the various human relationships proved to be as harmonious as we have tried to make the forms of our Goetheanum building, where they change from one to the other and each is in harmony with the other. If it could be the same in life as it is in the Goetheanum, and the whole life of our Society could be like the wonderful co-operation among the people engaged in building the Goetheanum, so that even this very building activity is a harmonious and noble image of what comes to expression in the building itself.

Thus, the inner significance of the life principle of our Goetheanum building and the inner significance of the co-operation among the souls—no, I would rather not say that—the inner significance of the harmony of the forms of our building, should find their way into all the various human relationships in our society, and their inner formative force should stand before us as a kind of ideal. I should just like to assure you that the wrong words did not slip out just now, when I stopped in mid-sentence. I stopped quite deliberately, and sometimes the thing is said without actually saying it.

To summarise the theme I have given in many variations over these days; what I want to recommend to you most warmly is not only to look at the thoughts and ideas of spiritual science, the results of spiritual research, with your intellect and reason, but to take what lives in spiritual science into your hearts. For the salvation of mankind's future progress really depends on this. This can be said without presumption, for anyone can see it if they try at all to study the impulses of our evolution and the signs of our times. With these thoughts I will close the series of lectures I ventured to give you at the turn of the year.

We have followed man up to the point where he enters the spiritual world. Let us now take a look at this world. This is not so easy, because the conditions in the spiritual world are essentially different from those of the physical world and we have no words to describe such things. Every language is shaped for the physical world, and because we are talking about supersensible worlds, we cannot use the usual language, but must use images. Nevertheless, the spiritual world can be compared to the physical world. Everything the latter contains – lands, seas, air – has its counterpart in the spiritual world. What 'earth is in the spiritual world contains what the physical world also has, that is, people, animals, plants, minerals, but as in a negative image. For example, a crystal has a certain form of physical matter filled in [on earth]. But in the spiritual world, this matter does not exist. In its place there is a hole, and what the clairvoyant sees as an aura around the [earthly] crystal is all that is present of the crystal in the spiritual world. It is the astral light, whose rays penetrate into the space corresponding to the physical part of the crystal.

When we observe a plant in the spiritual world, we do not see its root, but only the part of the plant that rises above the earth, especially the leaves and flowers. A rose, for example, shows reddish glowing leaves; the flower is transparent and has a greenish-yellow color. Of the animals, only the nervous system, which looks like a tree, can be seen. These animal figures in Devachan are quite fantastic when you think of them as a prototype [...] of a future stage of the animal kingdom as we know it. A horse, for example, shows the clairvoyant eye a colossal mass above the head. The elephant has an even larger head, as big as a house, and the physical body disappears completely from the clairvoyant's eye. The same applies, comparatively, to humans. All these forms together form what could be called the solid earth of Devachan, on which its human inhabitants walk.

In Devachan there are also things that can be compared to our seas and rivers, also running regularly. There too there is a unifying element that can be compared to the water here on earth: the unified life that, as on earth, also there animates all people, animals and plants. But there, on the spiritual earth, it works like a spiritualized element. The rivers can be compared to the regular currents of the blood, the seas to the blood reservoirs [...].

There is also a spiritual air, which is formed from the same ever-changing substance that forms our sensations, feelings and passions here on earth. Just as our air has storms and thunderstorms, so it is there. The storms there are the passions materialized here on earth. So, for example, when violent passions here on earth bring people to fight each other, the clairvoyant above in the spiritual world sees the battle of passions, while on the physical plane the physical battle takes place. Hence the legend of the battles in the air, as they were seen after the defeat of Attila. Just as we have the four elements in the physical world, so in the occult we have earth, water, air and fire, and in Devachan just as many realms. The realm that would correspond to fire is formed by what we create that is original. And next to it we also see the archetypes of what exists on earth. In reality, man brings something original from himself that he does not receive from the outside world.

Let us consider the moment in the history of human development when the first fire was created by rubbing two pieces of wood together, and then let us look at all the passions that arose from this discovery. Progress is due to this inventive activity of man. The archetypes of these human thoughts are the fourth element, which spreads throughout the whole devachan as “warmth”. Then there are further fields, which, however, have no correspondence here on earth, so that it is unnecessary to mention them. Man enters devachan with his ego, his purified astral being and the essence of the life body. What happens to him then? He is then irradiated by the light like a vegetal germ. Everything that surrounds him affects him like the juices of the earth and the light affect the vegetal germ. And just as the plant develops here on earth, so does the human being develop in Devachan, gradually transforming into another being.

What are the first perceptions in Devachan? [The deceased] sees various forms. First that of his own body, which is very different from our physical body. Furthermore, while we identify ourselves with our physical vehicle on the physical plane, in Devachan we clearly perceive the difference between our ego and its vehicle. We see the form of the latter like a drawing and understand that we have left it, risen above it and left it behind to form part of the earthly element of Devachan. The basic feeling is therefore this: 'I am I' and 'You are I', whereas before we also said 'I' about our body.

Around us we perceive pink currents of spiritual fluid, and we realize that there is a unified life in everything. This life gives us a more powerful conviction of the unity of all life than even the greatest religious feeling can give, and fills us with joy.

Then we become aware of the air: everything, love, hate, joy and sorrow, is visible there in its true form. Everything that lives hidden in the souls here on earth can be seen. What is down here hides everything behind a mask; seen from there, everything is visible and every soul is unveiled. A sensation similar to warmth or cold is produced in Devachan by perceiving the real form of the world of thoughts. Here on earth, thought is not a reality, especially not for the materialist. Only the spiritualist has an inkling of its reality. So what we understand here by thoughts is only a shadow in relation to the real essence of thoughts, which are true entities. There we move between real figures that are interwoven with our thought material. We have already said that man is like a germ there; this develops like a plant on earth and acquires limbs and organs. What kind of organs? Spiritual organs, that is, spiritual eyes and ears. The first sense to open is sight. Hearing follows. When the sense of hearing is developed, the person, who was previously in absolute silence, will begin to hear the harmonies of the spheres, as Pythagoras spoke of them. Music, the spiritual Word, or as the church calls them: the choirs of angels.

Just as a plant bears fruit when its cycle has run its course, so too does a person in devachan reach a point of maturity. On the whole, the stay in devachan lasts a long time. Once that person has reached the point of maturity, he returns to earth with what he had brought with him in his astral and etheric bodies as a result of his own experiences.

The teaching of reincarnation can be found in all religions; nevertheless, it has been little emphasized in Christianity for two thousand years. But the Christ talked about it with his apostles. He took three of them with him to the mountain and made them clairvoyant for the moment. The past appeared to them as the present, and they saw Jesus between Moses and Elijah. Then they said: How is it [possible] that Elijah is here, while he is yet to come? But Christ answered: Elijah has already come, but you have not recognized him; John the Baptist was Elijah, but say it to no one until the Christ shall be lifted up by men. - We shall see later why they should keep it secret.

If we follow the development of man from birth, we see that his physical body is formed from the physical world and changes with each embodiment, while the actual essence of man always remains the same for all embodiments, including the life in heaven between two embodiments. What happens to the connections we make during this life, which is so short compared to the one we spend in the spiritual world? Do we find our loved ones in devachan? The answer of spiritual science is a definite “Yes!”

Yes, we find them again, and in a much more intimate way because the physical obstacles are removed. Take, for example, a mother with her child: In the beginning, the relationship was simply physical, bodily; later it becomes more and more spiritual, and it is this spiritual and soul bond that lasts. Nothing of what has been spiritually bound is lost, and we can find the loved one again, even in the last incarnations. The incomprehensible affection people feel for each other, the strangest encounters point to previous connections.

Let us now return to what we have called the history of the soul's states after death. We already mentioned the Mystery of Golgotha and its real and great significance in the realm of the dead as well. Before the appearance of Christ on earth, the soul went through the fire of purification in Kamaloka after death, and when it came to the threshold of the spiritual world, a guide met it. In ancient times this guide was one of their ancestors, followed by an even older one, and so on until the most ancient was reached, the progenitor of the race or people. This fact explains the expression in the Old Testament: to unite in Abraham.

In Egyptian mythology, these guides were called the 'Forty-two judges of the dead' and their mission was to lead the dead to the gates of paradise. From there on, the soul was considered mature enough to continue on its own. In every era and among every people, we find a particular type of such guides. In addition to the ancestors, the great teachers of humanity appear as guides, such as the Rishis, Krishna among the Indians, Zarathustra among the Persians, Hermes in the Egypt of Moses, Buddha, Lao-Tse among the peoples concerned. They are the great initiates who shortened the path for people so that they did not have to go up the entire succession of ancestors step by step.

Through the appearance of Christ, His light has become the guide of the soul. He comes to meet them and accompanies them. In pre-Christian oriental wisdom, there are two paths. Those who were not ready for the teachings of Buddha, Lao-Tzu and so on, had to go up the entire path of the ancestors, the so-called “Pitriyana”. The others, who had entered into a living relationship with a “master” in their lives, were guided by him on the path of the gods, the so-called “Devayana”. But Christ gave a single, common divine path for all those who enter into a living relationship with him, and this path will one day unite them in a great brotherhood. All other paths will merge into this one Christian path through ever-increasing realization.

Let us now compare the path of Buddha with the Christian one. Buddha saw above all the suffering, misery, pain and so on in life and preached that one should quench the thirst for existence. Six hundred years later, Christ Jesus came, and through the Christ impulse, humanity recognized its task on earth. The more the Christ principle penetrates into us, the more we recognize that growing old means “growing” and that the illnesses are “trials”. The Christ principle even overcomes the illnesses because it rules over matter. This property will be recognized more and more by people, and they will be able to use it to eradicate the illnesses. Death brings us closer to the Christ, and through its attraction the Christ principle in us will grow more and more in the following incarnations until we can see the mighty Christ of the Revelation, who redeems everything.

The power of Christ unites souls and destroys the expression that says separation is suffering, because through it no more separation is possible. Even that which we did not love before, we will feel as one with us, without the slightest nuance of opposition or antipathy. Furthermore, it will not be a cause for “longing”, not only because the Christ principle teaches renunciation, but also because in the end there is the feeling of complete satisfaction, which excludes all longing. Christ said, “I am the Way.”

This evening we will speak of sin, original sin, disease, and so on. First, let us look back at the past and then let us envision the future. Before our time, we have the time of Rome and of Athens, which was preceded by the Egyptian-Chaldean time; further back, the actual historical documents are missing. For the even older epochs, we have two sources from which we can draw information: the old religious teachings, if one knows how to decipher them, and the retrospective images that the clairvoyant consciousness can see. We want to talk about the latter. Everything on earth is subject to the laws of evolution, and this applies in a very special way to the human soul life. In ancient times, the life of the soul was different from the present soul life. In the prehistoric age, people in Europe, Asia and Africa had a soul life that was quite different from today's human soul. When we look back thousands of years, we find that the ancestors of today's humanity had a much broader spiritual outlook than we have now. They did not have the intellect that enables us to read and calculate, but they did have a primitive clairvoyance and, in addition, an enormous memory, of which ours cannot even give a pale idea. We will see how this was possible. To give you an idea of how the world appeared to them, I will say, for example, that when they woke up in their day-consciousness, they saw everything as if surrounded by an aura. A flower, for example, appeared to them surrounded by a circle of light similar to the one we see around lanterns in the evening mist. During sleep, however, these people could perceive spiritual entities in reality. Gradually man learned to see the outlines of things more distinctly. At the same time, however, the conscious intercourse with the spiritual world and the entities in it became less and less, until it finally ceased altogether when the ego individualized itself in each individual being. Before this individualization, people were not separate from each other.

The earth also had a completely different configuration in those times than it does now. Humanity lived in different areas - continents - and our ancestors lived on a continent that is now occupied by the Atlantic Ocean. Tradition calls this continent Atlantis. The disappearance of this part of the world is told in the myths of all peoples, and the legend of the universal flood refers to this. The Atlantean civilization was magnificent, and with its demise, humanity lost many important insights that it must now laboriously regain. Just as we know how to use the forces hidden in fossil plants - coals - for trade and industry, so the Atlanteans knew how to use the driving forces in seeds, for example, to move their airships, which moved a little above the ground, in that air, which was much denser than ours.

Let us now look at the physical organism of the Atlanteans. It showed a significant peculiarity, namely that the etheric body was not completely similar to the physical body and that the etheric head protruded beyond the physical head. This peculiarity is precisely connected with the clairvoyant abilities of the Atlanteans, with their extraordinary memory and their magical powers. The etheric head had a special point of perception [...]. In the course of evolution, this etheric head retreated more and more into the physical head, thereby changing the profile. Now, at the point in question, we have the organ whose development will give humanity back its clairvoyance: the pineal gland. Thus, the clairvoyant power of the Atlanteans gradually disappeared, along with their tremendous memory and magical powers, and our ability to think and count developed.

If we go back even further, we find other catastrophes. Entire continents were destroyed by fire. Our present-day volcanoes are the last remnants from that era. The continent that perished at that time is called “Lemuria” and was the area that is now mostly occupied by the great ocean and the Indian Ocean. The inhabitants of that continent had a form that was very different from ours, which would even seem grotesque to us. Their physical and astral bodies were different. The crown was open, and the rays of light penetrated into this opening, so that the head was surrounded by a radiant aura and the people looked as if they had a lantern on top.

The body was huge and formed by a fine, almost gelatinous substance. We see the last hint of the Lemurian crown on the head of a newly born child, namely the small opening at the top, which remains open until about a year old. or something:maehr.

At that time, man was not independent at all; he could only do what was inspired by the spiritual powers in the midst of which he was, so to speak, embedded. He received everything from them, and he acted as if driven by a psychic instinct. This revealed the power of spiritual beings who had not descended to physical incarnation. These beings were not well-disposed towards humanity and influenced it in such a way that it gained the independence it lacked. According to the divine plan, humanity was to achieve this independence securely at some point, but these beings brought it about earlier. Together with the other forces, they slipped into the astral body of the person who had not yet entered into a close relationship with his or her essence, and gave the person a kind of willpower that, because it was only astral and not guided by reason, enabled him or her to do evil. These forces are called the luciferic forces. As we can see, the influence of these forces has a good and an evil side, because on the one hand they seduced humanity, but on the other hand they gave it freedom.

Our present consciousness comes from the clairvoyant consciousness, and we find the latter more and more developed the further we go back in human evolution. The Lemurians could only perceive spiritually. For example, they perceived neither the shape nor the color nor the external characteristics of a flower. They saw a luminous astral form that they perceived with a kind of inner organ. According to the divine plan, human beings were not supposed to have begun to perceive with the external sensory organs until the middle of the Atlantean period. But the luciferic forces caused this fact to occur earlier, while human instincts were still pure. This is what the “fall of man” consists of. The religious records say that the serpent opened the eyes of man. Without the interference of the luciferic influence, the human body would not have become as solid as it is now, and the Atlantean humanity would have seen the spiritual side of all things. Instead, man fell prey to sin, illusion and error. To make matters worse, towards the middle of the Atlantean period, the influence of Ahrimanic forces was added. The Luciferic forces had worked on the astral body, whereas the Ahrimanic forces worked on the etheric body, especially on the etheric head. As a result, people fell into the error of regarding the outer physical world as the true world. “Ahrimanic” comes from Ahriman, the name given to this principle by the Persians. Zoroaster spoke of him to his people and said that they should beware of him and strive for union with Ahura Mazdao - Ormuzd. Ahriman is the same as Mephistopheles and has nothing to do with Lucifer. Mephistopheles comes from the Hebrew word: Me-phis-to-phel, which means “the liar,” “the deceiver.” Satan in the Bible is also Ahriman and not Lucifer. The ancient Atlantis was gradually destroyed by floods over the course of centuries, and the remaining inhabitants retreated to areas that were spared from the catastrophe, in Asia, Africa and America. The first area in which Atlantean culture developed further was what was later called “India”. There, people retained a clear memory of their former clairvoyance and of their vision of the spiritual world. It was not difficult for their teachers, the Rishis, to draw their attention to the spiritual side of the world, and initiation was an easy matter. Clairvoyance was never completely lost, and until Christ there were always clairvoyants. We see a remnant of this primitive clairvoyance in mythology, the core of which refers to beings who really lived, such as Apollo, Zeus and so on. Although, as we have said, the Ahrimanic influence had its beginning in the Atlantean epoch, it did not assert itself fully in Humanity until later. The ancient Indians were sufficiently protected against him, and the physical world was never anything but Maya, illusion, to them. It was only in the epoch of Zarathustra, the original Persian, that the physical world began to have a value for people, who thereby fell prey to the power of Ahriman. In this way, Zarathustra's admonition, of which we have already spoken, becomes clear to us.

Thus the evolution of humanity continued until Greek times. Then another power approached man, which began to drive him up again to the spiritual world from which he had been driven out, so to speak, since the Lemurian time. The new power was the Christ principle, which entered into Jesus of Nazareth, permeating his three bodies - physical, etheric and astral. When the human soul is completely filled with the Christ principle, the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic forces are conquered, and through this principle a reversal in evolution takes place. But the Christ could not have influenced people if his appearance had not been proclaimed to them long beforehand. But he has always guided them inwardly; we see this in the magnificent images in which people were prophesied that he would come. Otherwise, who would have given them the strength to form such powerful imaginations?

A great change takes place in the physical, etheric and astral bodies of humanity through the incarnation of the Christ, just after the Mystery of Golgotha has been accomplished, when the blood flows from the five wounds and the Christ penetrates into the lowest realms. His etheric and astral bodies multiplied like a seed, and the spiritual world was filled with these images. So that, for example, in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries, those people who had reached a sufficient degree of development were incorporated at birth with such an image of the Christ-incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth. The person in whom this participation in the etheric body of Christ is most clearly evident is St. Augustine. The great significance of his life can be attributed to this fact. From the tenth century until approximately the sixteenth century, the astral body of Christ was embodied. We have to thank this for the appearance of people like Saint Francis of Assisi and the great Dominicans, full of humility and virtue, who reflect the great astral qualities of Christ. That is why they had such a clear image of the great truths within them, which they practiced in their lives, in contrast to Augustine, who was never free of doubt and always argued between theory and practice. Among the great Dominicans, special mention should be made of Saint Thomas, in whom the influence of the astral body of Christ was highly developed, as we shall see later. In the sixteenth century, the time began when the images of the Christ-I began to weave themselves into the ego of individual individuals. One of these was precisely Christian Rosenkreutz, the first Rosicrucian.

It is thanks to this fact that a more intimate connection with Christ has become possible, as revealed to us by esoteric teaching. The power of Christ will make man ever more perfect, will spiritualize him and lead him back into the spiritual world. Humanity developed its reason at the expense of clairvoyance; the power of Christ will enable people to learn and ascend here on earth with what they have acquired. Man comes from the Father and the power of Christ leads him back to the Father.

Today I will continue the reflections of the last few hours in order to then continue the apocalypse, which can now be done very briefly if one approaches the document with the prior knowledge that we have gained in the last few hours. These are the ideals of the initiate, to look at everything with the impression that it will come true. But it must also be possible to shape, not just out of the blue.

Our round will conclude with an absorption of the mineral; then in the next, the plant kingdom as the lowest kingdom -—

Physical is everything that can be seen; mineral is subject to chemical and physical laws. Mineral beings are also all other beings in nature; the plant also has a chemical process.

All the kingdoms are mineral. Therefore, the fourth round is the mineral one.

The fifth round will have nothing mineral anymore, only the plant kingdom at the bottom. A moral world order will be established in the fifth round. The well-being of the individual will be no different from that of all other beings. Karma will be fulfilled. It will be fulfilled in the next race - the sixth - of the fourth round. It will be realized in the fifth round - no more crystal - everything will be one great garden in the manner of interlocking crystals.

Everything is transformed into growing beings.

In the fourth round, the mind is formed. As long as a person comprehends with the mind, [gap in the transcript]

The living is not grasped by the mind, only the pure spirit will understand this. One must learn to think without using one's senses. Both Goethe and Plato had such thinking. That is the process up to the fifth round. We are currently living in the fifth root race.

The Atlanteans did not yet have sober minds. Life was interspersed with dull clairvoyance.

The first root race, the polaric one, could only live as it did because the earth was of a finer substance and at a higher temperature. It was a fine, ethereal substance. The souls incarnated in this substance. They were people of a different kind – etheric people.

Reproduction was as follows: the people were elongated, hands had not yet developed – the beings divided, one being gave birth to the other. There was no death yet. Death did not occur until the second race. The first race lived in the area around the pole. The temperature conditions were different. Every being was filled with soul. There was no dying. The earth cooled more and more, and matter could no longer reproduce itself in the same way. The soul lost the ability to affect matter in the first way and created other organs for reproduction. The daughter beings were now smaller, and now the beings could absorb more substance to cause the division. But the daughter beings were very small at first; but then they grew very quickly. The chemical dies off. The beings now had to develop new organs. Because with the second race, sensation occurs. With the first race, only the sense of hearing was present. The whole environment was sound. The sound was perceived.

With the second race, the sense of touch was added. Man begins to make heat differences. That is the Hyperborean time. The second race were the Hyperboreans. The third race, the Lemurians, developed something very special. Before that, man was transported by external heat, but now the earth has become colder and colder, and a kind of reaction occurred. Man now had his own warmth, whereas before, beings could not have their own warmth.

So the third race had their own warmth.

The soul now became a place of independent life. Expression of Kama in the physical body. Through emotional life the beings could absorb the outer warmth. Therefore man now became a flame.

In those days, before man could generate inner warmth, the instincts, passions, were still undeveloped, in the sense of the outer world.

In the early days of the Lemurian race, the beings were bisexual, male-female, and hermaphroditic. Then the being split, and man and woman appeared.

Those selected by the Atlanteans were led to the Gobi Desert, and from these the fifth root race - our present root race - emerged, which had the particular task of developing the intellect. The first sub-race of this fifth was sent out from Gobi to various parts of the south, to India.

The first sub-race are the Indians; the high culture of this people can still be found in the echoes of the Vedas. The second sub-race are the Medo-Persians, the Near Easterners. The dual divinity appeared.

The third, the Near Eastern-Egyptian race.

The triad of goddesses appeared.

The fourth, the Greek-Latin, and also the Celtic, Southern Europe, Central Europe, Christian culture.

The fifth is our Aryan race, and this must preferably develop the intellect. — This race must descend completely to the physical plane. The following sixth sub-race will, it can only be hinted at in perspective, arise from none other than the Slavic race. There is no other for further sub-race than the Slavic one; in the East in the “oppressed” race.

This sub-race in its dull childishness today [gap in the transcript]

The mind will be taken up by the eastern peoples, and it will then be more spiritual sense. It may seem dreamy, but the sense is already prefigured.

The fifth root race will reach its end through destruction – the third root race perished through fire, the fourth root race through water – the fifth root race will perish through evil, through war, conflict, evil.

But we are approaching the moral root race, the sixth.

When the sixth sub-race of our fifth root race is formed from the Slavic peoples, the seventh sub-race is formed from the Americans. The remnants of the latter will then look like the Chinese do today, who are remnants of the Mongolian, the seventh sub-race of the Atlantic, the fourth root race. But the spiritual, the sixth sub-race, will reach a different physical state, the substances will be finer, hardening of the solid, this will proceed in a conscious way, it will deliver the first sub-race of the sixth root race. In this sixth root race - in the middle - a separation will take place. Male and female will cease, a regression to earlier behavior. In the seventh root race, the mind will reach its highest perfection.

Then it is transition to the next globe, to the next round. Then a physical life / gap in the transcript]

But a new sense will be added, the moral sense. During our fourth round, a majority of people already have that sense; they are artificial fifth-rounders. Those who cannot reach this high level cannot develop further.

Those who are left behind have a very special task.

The physical materiality is no longer there, it will have cooled down in those who have not attained spirituality, who have remained at that level, this level of today's fifth race of the fourth round.

These now have a kind of inclination towards the physical, and they bring this inclination with them. The present round is the mineral one, the earth will lose this composition.

There would no longer be a physical state if it were not for these retarded ones [...] to develop a new kind of mineral kingdom. The earth will no longer come into a physical state. These retarded ones will represent what was represented in the Lemurian great entities incarnating in this race, mid-way through the third race, what is referred to in the Bible as the Fall of Man, good and evil arose; and the animals remained [gap in transcript]

And just when this heavy element is expressed, the earth becomes an appearing star, and man will approach his deification; this is how the planets were formed. The formation of planets happens by itself – this is how new planets are formed.

Just as some animals are soft on the inside and have a hard crust on the outside, these animals have already hardened before – moon animals – and have thus become a materially perceptible being. So people who have remained at this material level, who cannot develop further, will then be able to work materially in the fifth round.

There is still something else, a mystery. The time has come for revelation, and every normal person will make it that far. People will bring their karma with them into the fifth round. This karma, which they have acquired by the end of the fourth round, is then passed on.

A being whose karma is complete then appears.

The account book is closed, the balance on his karma is zero.

[Gap in the transcript]

so far only sub-balance Solar beings.

[Gap in the transcript]

The sum of karma is expressed in its outer form, on its face.

Today, people can hide, but in the fifth round, people can no longer be hypocrites – they will become what they have made themselves. In the sixth round, people will develop Budhi; spiritual perception, much higher, superphysical clairvoyance.

Man will have a relationship to the world - which will displease the being. The sense of self will be integrated and will experience a world that has a basis in feeling, as the inner man lives today.

He will express himself, man will have become word.

In the sixth round, what he feels will materialize, only he will no longer speak - the exterior will be separated, which is why Christ says: “And the Word became flesh.”

In the sixth round, the human being will become the word.

In the fifth round, the emotional life will take on a fixed form.

In the sixth round, his surroundings will be filled with his life.

In the seventh, he will be so far advanced that he is God-like.

All nature has ceased in him.

Today man says 'I'.

No one can say I to another, only to himself can man say I. The naming of all beings is the stage where his I awakens.

With the I, the deity is pronounced.

He then called his name Jehovah, which means “inexpressible”.

In the seventh round, he will be like a great ego-concept – a world complex with the ego.

In Genesis – the first four days are the first four rounds and the three following rounds are then on Jupiter, then Venus, then Vulcan. And the Mars stage would already be here. Jupiter should be the same as Venus. The next planet – the fifth round – will have the Mars stage, the seventh may not yet be named because one cannot imagine this state, it is called Vulcan for the time being.

Man will find the fifth planet at a stage that differs from today's because he is creatively active. Imaginary creator, creator, he is a creator himself. This is how he develops on the seven rounds of the earth.

But he will be more [gap in the transcript]

He will be a creator, magical images will be his, and the color images will be realities. Creating images separate from matter.

The third elementary realm emerges from the human being; it will be what Christian esotericism calls “glory”. The sixth planet will be like this in the fourth elementary realm.

The human being will be able to do more than just weave the imagination.

For while in the fifth round man is only capable of creating as an appearance, as our sun does today, on the other hand, in the sixth round, this created color image will be a productive being. On Venus, such a state of creating while alive has been achieved today; one can only imagine this state.

The seventh cannot yet be spoken of.

If man could see it – the sight is so harrowing that he cannot bear it. Only someone who can think without a physical brain can imagine such a thing.

Let us take a look at the short life of Friedrich von Hardenberg, known as Novalis. Novalis is more a memory of a past life than a life in itself, a fine personality, an individuality who, from the very beginning, had the most profound spirituality as an inclination within him. One is always amazed at how Novalis combines the highest intellectuality, the sharpest thinking, with a wonderful spirituality.

He was a trained mining engineer who had a complete mastery of mathematics and the physical sciences, who combined mathematical thinking with a fine, delicate, and yet fiery, ether-like spirituality, who lived this harmoniously in a way that is perhaps unparalleled in life. You have to be able to empathize with what is contained in Novalis' sayings and fragments to realize how deeply he penetrated into the inner structure of the world. You also have to be able to empathize with his enthusiasm for mathematics. For him, it is a great poem that introduces us to the secrets of the world. Man ponders the connections between space and time. If he can imbibe the harmony of the stars, which revolve around the sun according to eternal laws, with the formative forces that work within the earth in ore veins, crystal formations and so on, then he can sense the living essence of the world.

Novalis is filled with true enthusiasm for mathematics. He calls mathematics, which can show such paths of understanding, a sublime religion. It is wonderful how he is able to embrace this seemingly dry science with fervent devotion. For him, the sensory world existed only as a reflection of eternally living spiritual facts, which reveal themselves to earthly perception in natural laws.

Novalis fell deeply in love with a thirteen-year-old girl who died soon after their engagement. The shock he experienced was tremendous. It opened the gates of the spiritual world to him. Novalis speaks with the deceased as with a living person; he called his own further life a 'her-after-death'. She is always present to him. The friendship that later united him with another girl can be called a supersensible one. She is like an emblem for the spiritual being that hovers above and with whom he will completely merge.

There was a power of spirituality in him that stands unparalleled in the modern age.

In earlier lives, Novalis had undergone profound initiations. Thus, he entered this life with a predisposition for a true, real understanding of world events. He appeared in the spiritual sky like a meteor, scattering spirit everywhere in a way rarely found in the expressions of newer spirits.

The fresh, youthful nature of Novalis was characterized by two poles: a great intellectuality and a deep spirituality. The whole wealth of his manifold creative thinking converged in him into an all-embracing sense of totality, which had its source of life in a divine source. He sensed the source everywhere as spirit. Novalis called this consciousness “magic”. The creative imagination, the feeling of the soul was for him a reproduction of the great cosmic feeling; it became for him “magical idealism”. He experienced his ego as related to the ego of all other beings, and he felt that all beings were related to each other. Thus Novalis merged with the spiritual weaving and life of nature.

In the “Apprentices of Sais” you will find the story of the young man “Hyacinth”, who has an intimate relationship with the creatures of nature. He and the girl “Rosenblüte” are bound by a warm friendship. The animals of the forest and the flowers of the fields are his companions in his secrets. It is told how he meets a man with a long beard who has a book from which Hyacinth learns a great deal. Now he is driven to seek out what constitutes the innermost being of man. This, what man must seek, Novalis called “the blue flower”. It is the seeking of the higher self in man.

We also find this significant symbol in oriental mysticism as the lotus flower. It is a symbol of the higher self, of chaste, purified humanity, in which the self can unfold. It is still enclosed as if by petals – later it will bear fruit and seeds. Novalis had brought such knowledge with him from his previous incarnations.

We are now told how Hyacinth wanders to the land of secrets, always searching, until he finds a veiled figure. When he removes the veil, he sees little roses.

In Novalis's “Hymns to the Night”, his experience of cosmic-human unity is expressed lyrically. This is also the case in the “Spiritual Songs”, this harrowing document of merging with Christ.

Everything he wanted to say to the world, Novalis set out in the novel “Heinrich von Ofterdingen”. But he died before he could finish it. Let us recall in our minds what he intended to accomplish.

We are transported back to the time of the Wartburg Singers' Contest when Heinrich was young. But the course of events takes us out of the world of the present and into a fairytale world. We have to transport ourselves back to the time when the area of the Atlantic Ocean was still land. There was once a lively life there, people whose activities would indeed seem like a fairytale to present-day people. It was a land where rain and sunshine were not distributed as they are now. The sun was hidden by fog, the air was watery. It is not for nothing that the Nordic sagas called Atlantis 'Niflheim', that is, Mistheim. There was no distinction between rain and sunshine, only a gradual transition from water to air. A rainbow would not have been possible there. The events of those ancient times are preserved in the legends of the flood, the ark, the rainbow, and one stands amazed at the infinitely deep truths contained in the ancient religious records. At first glance, the biblical account of the rainbow seems allegorical. But here we are faced with a fact: a rainbow would not have been possible in ancient Atlantis. It is one of those sacred moments that overwhelm the occult researcher when he is transported back in time to these older times.

Novalis's seer's eye looked into this ancient realm, which one can truly speak of as a fairytale realm. Man did not yet have his reasoning mind back then; he lived life with nature. He built his house in such a way that it grew out of the rocks and plants. There were no myths back then. What are the myths that our peoples tell each other? The gift of shaping worlds in poetry is only peculiar to our post-Atlantic race; the Atlanteans did not have it. But the Atlanteans still had the gift of transforming plants, even animals and humans. The metamorphic powers of Circe in the Odyssey point to such metamorphic powers of humans. Everything that humans bring forth from within as myth, the people of Atlantis had experienced and seen with their own eyes. The great poets of our time have preserved the images of their poetry from what they had seen on Atlantis itself.

Novalis interweaves his own memories with the story of “Heinrich von Ofterdingen” and brings the ancient Atlantis to life in his tales. He then takes us to more recent times, to the period of city foundations. This time brings with it the emergence of the bourgeoisie and material culture. The rise of the bourgeoisie is linked to external, material culture. What was previously poetry becomes something else.

The origin of our poetry points to the mysteries. We have to go back to the time when the sacred mysteries were the source of inspiration for the poetry of Homer or Aeschylus and Sophocles, when ancient culture laid the foundation for what worked as a spiritual force in Homer and Aeschylus. Only after long trials were the purified admitted to the higher mysteries, the primeval mysteries, which took place in the supersensible, in the astral world. But there was a reflection of this in later times, for example in the Eleusinian mysteries. There the so-called primal drama was enacted. It was depicted how God, the soul of the world, descended into matter and how the descending, suffering and resurrecting God shows the way of redemption. It was the choir that, as in an echo, expressed the language of cosmic events in the ancient Greek mystery drama.

In Aeschylus we experience the transition of the ancient sacred primal drama into the secular drama. It blossoms from a branch that has grown out of the mystery being. The other branch was philosophy, and the third branch was religion.

In the mystery centers, the ancients possessed the unity of religion, poetry and science. There, science was vividly demonstrated. As three branches from one root, these areas worked side by side and into each other. It was only later that they diverged. This separation of the three areas was necessary so that each could become perfect in its own way. So they had to go their separate ways for a while. Great minds seek to reunite what has had to separate in this way. Therefore, we find the striving for the unification of the arts in such phenomena as, for example, in the musical drama of Bayreuth. The aim is to create a total work of art that encompasses the three areas of intellectual life on earth.

Poetry arose out of truth. Originally, poetry was nothing other than the garment of truth. Novalis looks back to primeval times, when poets strove to express the highest truth in their works. If we turn our gaze to the primal poems of humanity, we do indeed find this expression in them. In Atlantis, man was still at one with nature, with his God, and the mysteries presented a picture of reality as it was experienced. Later, memories of these times were revived in the myths. These memories were something sacred and real for Novalis. He said to himself: In the future, what people still carry hidden within them as memories will become reality again. What we create out of our imagination as poets and thus bring into consciousness will one day become fact. The present world is growing into a new spiritual reality. As people carry the seeds of poetry into material life, something very special also grows out of material life. The guide on the way to this new world is Sophia, wisdom.

Novalis sets the events of his story in the time of the rising city culture, in that time when the outer life begins to become material, when it passes into the civil element of the physical plan. For him, the bearers of the future are the poets. The seed of poetry is placed in material culture. Novalis lets Heinrich von Ofterdingen be a kind of seer. He dreams of the blue flower, dreams that are not like other dreams, but a reflection of spiritual reality. He lets him experience different things: legends and historical events come to life, for example, the time of the Crusades shines in, the spiritual that flowed from the Orient into Europe, in the description of the prisoners in the castle.

The most important thing for Henry is his encounter with a miner who has spent almost his entire life underground. It is described what one can feel when working in the shafts under the earth. The stars of heaven shine towards him like the future. In the depths of the earth, he finds his past, as it were. The metals are wondrously related to man. What has developed down there over the millennia, the secret of the divine world order, is brought up by the miner, thrusts itself towards the miner. The selflessness in the work is brought home to us when it is described how the gold is brought to the surface. The miner is only interested in how the gold comes out of the earth: in it he recognizes the creative divinity. It is a beautiful, moral description of the selfless interest in what would otherwise inflame people's selfishness. The miner, who always works in the dark, only has the right idea of the magnificence of light.

Heinrich then meets the old hermit in the cave. The hermit has a wealth of life experience behind him and records it in a book. He talks about how only he who sees in all that is mortal a parable of the immortal is a true historian. This encounter deepens Heinrich's experiences again.

Then, in Augsburg, Heinrich meets Master Klingsor, who is a seer. In a fairy tale, we learn from him what the future will be for all of humanity: a higher world will be born out of this world. There is a poetic magic in the story of the young man's love for Mathilde, who later turns out to be Cyane again – a reference to the fact that the ephemeral is a symbol of the eternal. He knows that out of what is now a hard, stony reality, another world will grow in the future.

Then the absorption into the astral world is described: the land of Astralis symbolizes evolution, development. Poetry becomes a magical force that transforms people. Novalis believes in the magical power of the imagination, where it does not flow licentiously, but rather places itself under the guidance of Sophia and permeates the whole world with the power of creative Eros.

We may see a reincarnated Pythagorean in Novalis.

We understand the cosmos best if I say something about the human aura first, and this will enable us to better present the development of the rounds and races with regard to the influence of the so-called Pitris. You will see why I am including this.

What is called the physical human being is only part of the human being; the complete human being consists of a number of members that are actually visible to those whose sense organs are open to them. Although you know all of this in essence, I still have to link it to what I have to say in order to describe it accurately. The physical human being then has what I would call an etheric double body within him, which is visible to someone who has ether vision. It is a true double image of the ordinary physical body.

Then a so-called soul body or astral body penetrates both of these. This astral body extends beyond the physical body, is slightly larger and has the shape of an oval, of an egg, because it extends a little further beyond the body at the head and is a little narrower. It contains all the feelings, passions and desires that make up a person's inner life. All things that are caused by physical life are contained in it as dark clouds. The purer it is, the more it resembles the stars. It has a color that ranges from orange to yellow. If you imagine the physical body away, you have a kind of elongated circle that has an orange color as its basic tone. You can see the most diverse cloud formations flickering in it and the tiniest figures playing in it. In the human being, as he exists today as the average human being, this is visible to the seer.

You then find this astral body permeated with another form, with what we call the mental body. This mental body has only existed in human beings since the middle of the third race; the Lemurians, who were at the beginning of their development, did not yet have a mental body. If we go back to the area south of the front and rear India towards Australia, where the Lemurians lived, they had a physical body, something condensed in the middle, and then the astral body. Otherwise, nothing could be seen in them. The more the Lemurian race developed, the more a dark, black, spherical spot appeared inside these astral bodies, at a point - and if you want to describe this point, it is where our physical brain has its center. This black point, this spherical spot within the astral body, is what is actually referred to as the human ego, which has developed since the Lemurian period. This is the outer form of the ego!

Since the development of the Lemurian race, the beginning of what I have called the mental body has been located within this point. From this point begins an emanation that grows ever larger and larger and permeates the aura, so that the aura is animated from within. In the Lemurians, the point was still very small; it grew larger and larger, and now, in the average person, it protrudes above the astral body to the extent that it gains predominance over the passions and drives through thinking, through the mind, through moral feeling; that is what has developed since the Lemurian race.

We must now ask ourselves: why is this developing? The answer to the question of the “why” of this mental body lies in the fact that it is only now that what one is actually entitled to call spirit is emerging in humans. Since that time, since the spiritual impact on humans has taken place - that is, since the middle of the Lemuria - the emergence of the human mental body has been taking place.

Now I ask you to consider that the driving force behind what causes the mental body to emerge is the higher self: AtmaBudhi-Manas; this wells up. If we could see it alone in its swelling, it would be a blue mass, which, the further it comes outwards, becomes more and more violet. Because it is also mixed with the earlier formations of the astral body, it takes on various other nuances; it is mixed. That which is the I in man was only at that point during the time of the Lemurian race, because in reality this point then becomes the boundary of the mental aura, so you have to imagine - let us say - the astral body of the Lemurian Age in such a way that what was initially just a black dot formed a spiritual skin that became bigger and bigger [see sketch]; and in the spiritual skin is the I.

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We have so far progressed in our development. Now let's go back to the point where, apart from the astral body, the Lemurian human being was completely in absolute darkness and only the astral body was luminous, in that the black dot appeared and the astral body began to radiate.

Before that, the astral body was surrounded by a bluish shell. They were in an astral body that was surrounded by a blue shell on the outside. However, this was not present on its own; it continued until it reached the blue shell of the next Lemurian. This blue atmosphere represents the collective human spirit, which holds together from the outside what was organized there. The development consists in this blue mass being drawn in and absorbed; the entire blue auric mass is finally drawn in and completely absorbed. Then the Lemurians are pure astral bodies. This also comes to the fore at the point I mentioned and wells up from within. Then the whole mental world is drawn in, and the astral body now glows in the dark.

We are now going back more and more. All the astral bodies were enclosed in the general aura that belonged to them. If we go back to the beginning of our development on earth, we would have what underlies development. When we look at these natures, these astral spheres, they are the descendants of what we call the Pitris. Everything in these astral auras comes from the Pitris, who came over from the Junarian epoch into our development. This total matter in the aura comes from the Lunarian epoch.

In the interval between the Lunar and Earthly epochs, these entire astral entities are present as seeds and slumbered over. So that you now have to imagine the total blue aura as a total mass that is drawn in, that appears as a total mass in a very dark violet, so that it could be seen even during the pralaya, so that it could be seen as it developed from the lunar to the earthly development; one would see how it exists in a dark violet.

When earthly development begins, the earth is red; it glows reddish; but it has the blue atmosphere around it. The reddish earth is what has formed from the Pitri seeds. The Pitri seeds form the reddish Arupa sphere, and that which is spirit surrounds this Arupa sphere as a blue atmosphere. This spirit, which was present, is differentiated as such; it is differentiated in itself, that is, it already carries the spiritual seed for every human being that will arise later. Just as our soul contains individual thoughts, so the spirit carries the individual human being as a thought. At the intersections there are dark spots (see sketch).

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When the old moon was in its nirvana, the individual Pitris were completely separate from each other; they had the most perfect astral bodies imaginable. What I have just described comes from the lunar epoch. What comes across? The Pitri seeds and their entire auric atmosphere; they undergo the Pralaya there. However, they would not be able to develop further in earthly evolution if they did not now encounter something that is present everywhere in the universe, but which can only be suitable for them in a certain form, namely that which can later become physical matter and which is present everywhere in the universe as cosmic dust.

Worlds are constantly being created and destroyed, filling the entire universe with cosmic dust. Take, for example, the comet discovered by Biela. It split into two parts, then into several parts, and finally into many parts; it will eventually disintegrate into world atoms. Cosmic dust was discovered in the nineteenth century. It makes it so that when we calculate a planetary orbit, we get a number that is slightly too large because the planets have to overcome the dust masses.

Now you have to imagine that what comes across as the Pitri seeds and the auric atmosphere combine the world dust, but such world dust, which is attracted by them with a magnetic force, is what they need so that they can integrate it and become firm. This is how they get the physical body. So the Pitris organize the world dust; the Pitri is dependent on absorbing the world dust like the plant absorbs the earth dust from the soil. This process is expressed in the theosophical scriptures as follows: the Pitris form the seed forms and then build out the forms with matter so that the blue spiritual atmosphere can be absorbed.

The building is done from two sides: from the inside, from the Pitri seeds, the physical body is built; and the blue atmosphere, flowing in from the outside, forms the mental body.

The Pitris are present in various degrees of perfection; not all have reached the same high level. It is exactly the same as with Plato, Pythagoras and so on, who, when Nirvana of the Earth is reached, will be further along than the general human race; they were simply more advanced. The most advanced were the solar Pitris. There are two types of them. But then there are also two types of lunar-Pitris who had reached a fairly normal level of development, namely such that they were able to develop a kind of karma within themselves, a karma that was similar to the karma of our animals at the end of our earth development. Certain animals will have reached the point where one can speak of guilt and atonement in relation to them. Our animals do not yet have this, but at the end of their development they will. The karmic principle was already present in some species. In other species it was only in the process of development, and in still others it was only present in a rudimentary way. There are seven levels here, which are again related to the seven human rounds. In the very first stage the Solar-pitris were unable to intervene; they had no need to. They were there, but they hovered around the earth, as it were, waiting to be admitted. I will compare this with the following:

Imagine yourself back in the old days of the pile dwellings in Germany. Imagine that there would have been trained engineers there; they would not have been able to start anything, they would not have been able to do anything; there would have had to be more primitive natures: these were the still imperfect Pitris. When a later stage of development was reached, only the more perfect Pitris had the ability to take in. This continued until the Solar Pitris were able to intervene during the fourth round. It was only during the Lemurian race that the Solar Pitris were able to incarnate. The entire auric atmosphere was drawn in to make them swell from within. This was something that had nothing to do with Earth at all, but it gained influence. Then the more perfect beings, who already had the power to draw forth something from themselves, and whom we know as the Venus Sons - the Manasa-Putras, higher entities that were not intended within earthly development - had to intervene. They were there, and when they had incarnated, the first of the still lower human beings could receive the first teaching.

I. Report in the “Weimarische Zeitung” of April 22, 1903

Third lecture by Dr. Rudolf Steiner – Berlin on “Theosophy and the scientific spirit of the present day”. Following on from the two lectures already given, the lecturer undertook to sketch out a comparative and concordant picture of theosophy and natural science for the numerous listeners who had again turned up, and the following is reproduced from this topic:

In my previous lectures I have already tried to show that the great mystery surrounding us is nothing more than the lawfulness, the logical consequence of all research that has been and is being undertaken to fathom the mystery. In the near future, research in the natural sciences will have reached the point where theosophy begins, thus ensuring a future for it as its representatives strive for. The longing for enlightenment of the highest riddles on the one hand and the discouragement, the doubts regarding the highest questions on the other are still facing each other undefeated. But the struggle will make it necessary even for the most brilliant minds of the present day to press on to the points which Theosophy regards as its fundamental questions. Not only a scholar, in his book on the origin of man, shows by means of research how the physical man came into being, how the first imperfect creatures were formed from carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen. In the tenth stage, he shows how the original fish formed from the aforementioned primeval substances, which possessed an indication or hint of a backbone but no complete nervous system. He further shows how the brain, teeth and limbs developed in these primitive animals, albeit only to an imperfect and informal degree. In the further stages, we find how these primitive animals, otherwise living only in the water, become accustomed to life on land and the limbs necessary for this develop. The animals become more perfect and, after a long transformation, come into the world as kangaroos and later as monkeys, the animal most similar to humans in physical terms. In the 21st link of the development, we see the great ape, from which the 22nd link is the human being itself. But in the chain of investigations, one forgets to add the soul, the spiritual power of the human being, as the 23rd link, because it is in the biography, in the individuality of our ego, that which elevates us above all other living beings. With the 22nd link, the species may well come to an end, but now our soul life begins, the development of which we can observe in exactly the same way as physical development, if we go from stage to stage. The course of science shows in the 1860s (Haeckel) that Western natural science is nothing more than elementary theosophy, and we may assume that this elementary theosophy will develop into a higher one over time. When the greatest naturalists seek to draw the consequences, they find in them the theosophy.

[Huxley], the most important anatomist, who rendered the greatest service to the doctrine of Darwinism, says in his last great manifestation that it cannot be just nature in the degrees of development up to the most complicated human brain, but that one must ascend to a higher intelligence, which stands exalted above the most perfect living being. In 1866, Haeckel pointed out the biogenetic law, which states that every animal species undergoes the entire new development again during germ development. And just as the animal acquired the possessing properties through its perpetual development, so man also received the organs that now adorn him from what his ancestors acquired and what he acquired himself. This is the law of karma in the physical realm. Only in this way did the perfect living beings come into being, because they have an unconscious memory that connects them to their ancestors. And in the sense of Ostwald: Matter does not exist, as was also stated in 1895 at the Lübeck Natural Science Assembly. Matter is perpetual activity. From physics and chemistry we enter the spiritual world and the natural scientist is forced, in order to continue his research, to borrow from the spiritual realm. Goethe also characterizes this spiritual essence of our ego in his well-known saying: “When I have been restlessly active in all of life and developed to full activity, the power of nature cannot possibly dissolve me into the vile elements, but must seek a new place for further activity.” Bunge teaches that the basis of all theosophical knowledge is to be found in self-observation: If you want to know the activity, you must not only look at the outside world. That our living soul life cannot have developed from dead matter is also taught by [Darwin] and Preyer, who consider it impossible for something alive to develop from the dead. - And to recognize the divine unity, to thankfully profess that “God cannot do the slightest thing without me” is to reach the first stage in the belief that we individual human beings are members of the body of God.

After a short break in his remarks, the lecturer dealt with a few written questions, and also answered a personal question. His remarks were met with general applause.

II. Report in “Germany,” First Page, April 23, 1903

The third and final lecture by Dr. Steiner, Berlin, held on Monday evening at 8 p.m., was about theosophy and the scientific spirit of the present day. The speaker began with a brief reference to the two lectures he had given previously and explained that the main tenet of the theosophical doctrine is, above all, self-knowledge. Today, he said, we would explore the extent to which the spirit of contemporary science was suited to absorbing the teachings of Theosophy. He said that once the leading minds of science in our time had embraced the Theosophical knowledge, we could be sure that Theosophy had a future and would indeed conquer the world. We are dealing here with a Janus face, on the one hand a yearning of the minds for a magnificent new world view, on the other hand a discouragement and despondency to penetrate the deep wisdom of karma. It is the spirit of the present that must first be penetrated in order to characterize the position of modern science in relation to the theosophical teaching. A large part of modern science is virtually pushing towards the theosophical science. The speaker pointed out the significant lecture by the Leipzig chemist Ostwald, which was held at the naturalists' congress in Lübeck. Dr. Steiner explained that this lecture would have been impossible about 10 years ago, because Ostwald took the view that there is no matter at all, only activities. Using drastic examples, Ostwald explained how he justified this point of view. For example, Ostwald said: “When we are struck with a stick, it is not matter that strikes us, but the activity that moves the stick and inflicts the blow.” Here, the law of karma is emphasized again, and the human spirit is also formed by this activity in the course of a long period of development. Exactly the same developments that the physical body of man has undergone over a long period of time, exactly the same further developments the human spirit undergoes. It is a perfect process that takes place from personality to personality. It must be emphasized again and again that the spiritual development corresponds exactly to the physical development. Ernst Haeckel was the first to present this science in a rather radical way in the 1860s. It is clear that Theosophy also has to develop to a higher level, and if all signs are not deceptive, this circumstance will soon occur. It is well known that natural science is in a state of continuous change, and already today a great deal of theosophical thinking can be found among natural scientists. Ernst Haeckel, in particular, is one of the leading minds who are pushing hard towards the theosophical movement, even if he himself might not want to admit it. Other leading minds also admit the circumstance that runs like a red thread through all living beings, and which we call the causal body. Another researcher says, “All my organs I have acquired in the course of long development, always from my ancestors. Today my physical organs remember everything that has been acquired over time.” This, Dr. Steiner continued, is not said by a theosophist, but by a radical naturalist. Just as natural scientists are always surprising humanity with new scientific problems for which there is just as little clear evidence, so it cannot be prevented that the spiritual world of humanity is penetrated from another side. Just as Ostwald established the principle “not matter but activity”, it can be claimed that only materialism can assume that spirit lies buried in matter. This is the level from which Goethe also arrived at his spiritual world view. Goethe expressed his view of the destiny of the human spirit in the following sentence: “If I have been restlessly active throughout my life, nature has the obligation not to dissolve me into the base elements, but to assign me a new arena for my activity!” The researcher Bunge also cites a number of examples to show that only activity has caused the further development of the human soul. However, for all those who want to understand human life, deep self-observation is essential. From this arises the realization that everything that happens around us in the universe is activity (karma) and not matter. Of course, the actual activity cannot be seen either, but only the result of it. Thus one arrives at the main tenet of Theosophy, which can be summarized in a single word: self-observation. We have explored the fact that we have a causal body that continues to propagate itself. But we are not a single special being in the universe, but a link in the whole cosmos. The three parts of the human individuality are called Manas, Budhi and Atma in the wisdom of the East, and in these three words they summarize the levels of intellect. If a modern scholar such as Professor Baumann of Göttingen, Germany, speaks of what Theosophy calls reincarnation, then it can be seen that modern science is leading everywhere to the main tenets of Theosophy. However, in order for this high science to become clear to every thinking person, a continued self-knowledge must work in man, the spirit must itself feel and notice that individuality is properly evaluated in the theosophical teaching. When this principle of self-knowledge is established, a saying of Goethe comes to our aid: “If the eye were not sun-like, the sun could not behold it; if there were not in us the power of God, how could we be delighted by the divine?” It is the task of the Theosophical Society to instill this very truth into Western culture. In the future, the same will also be actively developed in Germany, and specifically here in Weimar, a “Theosophical Society” has been founded in which everyone who has absorbed even a spark of theosophical wisdom can continue to work on their further development in a spiritual sense. Finally, Dr. Steiner pointed out that he would be happy to answer any questions that may be put to him, and that some questions had already been received. One question, which had appeared in the Weimarer Zeitung, was as follows: “Can't the spirit of Goethe, just for a change, enter a female individual?” Dr. Steiner, who described this question as very facetious and naive, explained that this could very well be the case, but of course one could not say in which time period Goethe's spirit took possession of another body. Nevertheless, this time could be about 38 generations in the past. Another question dealt with whether a soul community could not also exist between a highly developed animal, such as a dog, and a human being; a noble dog has intellect, loyalty, a sense of shame, even imagination, all of which are qualities that cannot be observed in “lower human races”, as Dr. Steiner himself noted in the previous lectures. In response to this, Dr. Steiner explained that there is a great difference between the abilities of the dog's soul and the human soul. In the animal, there is no biography of the individual, but only a concept of the race. Above all, however, animals lack the ability to count, which every human being possesses. This is probably the most significant difference between human and animal souls. Another question, whether Theosophy was a science or a religion, was answered by the lecturer to the effect that in Theosophy, science, religion, philosophy and ethics were combined into a whole. An objection to this answer, that religion and science should not be mixed up, otherwise one would lose one's footing, was rejected by Dr. Steiner when he explained that the theosophist must indeed disregard this outdated view, as had already been explained in the previous lectures. With enthusiasm and gripping rhetoric, the speaker once again advocated his Theosophical teachings, pointing out that the first point of the Theosophical principles is to form a brotherly spiritual community that extends to all of humanity, regardless of race, religion, class, nationality or gender. — The lecture was met with enthusiastic applause.

Within our European spiritual culture, one may already express the name of Buddha with very different feelings today than fifty years ago; yes, one must consider that the greatest mind of our culture, Goethe, knew nothing of Buddha. It is precisely here that we can recognize how feelings change. There is widespread interest in Buddha today. Where does this interest come from, which is present in broad sections of society, and why is the name of Buddha familiar not only in research? This is connected with the development of humanity, with the penetration of spiritual elements into this development, which will become common property in later times. I would like to draw attention to the fact that the interest shown in the Buddha promises to become a matter of the heart, a matter of the soul. At first, people do not always judge soul matters correctly when they arise. Now something is happening today that happened [in a similar way] a few centuries ago in a field more remote from the great interest, when the old scholars, misled by inaccurate observation, did not want to accept Francesco Redi's sentence “Living things come only from living things”. We see a parallel to our time, which also believes it must reject the sentence “Spiritual-soul-like comes only from spiritual-soul-like” - precisely because of inaccurate observation.

It is believed that a person's inner disposition is inherited only from their father and mother. Of course, anyone who does not believe in spiritual beings cannot go further, but anyone who recognizes the realities of the spiritual world will find it self-evident that a person's spiritual soul comes from a previous spiritual soul and that this spiritual soul draws on the predispositions of the ancestors, that there is therefore an essential core. And that is the teaching of reincarnation. Just as the animal is the repetition of its species, so the human being is the repetition of his individuality. What we see growing within us here in the way of inner gifts is nothing other than what we have acquired in previous lives on earth. Just as every plant can flourish only in soil that is suitable for it, such as the edelweiss that can take root only in the high mountains, so every human being seeks out his environment, which forms the basis for his destiny, because the environment that is beneficial and appropriate for him exerts an attraction on him. So this person is born in this country and this language area, in this family, that person in that country in that family - because his or her individual character determines this. That is the law of karma: we ourselves forge our destiny. To many, this seems fantastic, and it can easily be refuted from a scientific point of view. But just as Francesco Redi was pushed by scientific facts to express his assertion that “living things come only from living things”, so we are pushed to express the sentence: “spiritual things come only from spiritual things”. Just as Francesco Redi's sentence was misunderstood, so will our sentence be misunderstood. But every new truth evokes resistance - and from the experiences of the past we may draw courage.

Now the question arises: Why does man not remember his previous lives on earth? This ability to remember can be acquired, although it is difficult, but it must be possible to trace a thread back to previous earthly lives. Now, today's human being is mostly unable to see the bigger picture; today's European human being is not even able to remember back to birth, and the first years are dark for him. We have heard that remembering begins when the idea of self emerges in the soul. We also know that the concept of self places itself like a wall in front of the past and that we therefore cannot see into the spiritual world. If we understand this, then we can also understand the work that is involved in penetrating past earthly lives. Strict soul exercises are part of this: the self must be carried out, the self must become objective; everything that could come must meet us with complete composure. It is difficult to achieve and carry this out not only theoretically, but also in our inner life, but by doing so we gain an [independent position with respect to the ego]. We are in an important time. The human brain will think differently when it has to tell itself that everything is cause and effect [of a past life]. This is something that deeply affects everyone. Man must mature to this.

We will understand how people today can be interested in the Buddha's teachings: Buddhism, this religious confession, contains the teaching of reincarnation – albeit not quite as it is understood in Theosophy. So the interest in Buddhism is connected with something that is affecting humanity today. Now we need to ask ourselves: how does this truth fit into what European culture means? How does it relate to Christianity? For our culture is completely based on Christianity, and all opponents of Christianity have taken their concepts from the Christian arsenal. For those who think this way [in terms of the doctrine of reincarnation], the question arises: How can the Christian impulse be reconciled with this concept? Even without Buddhism, the doctrine of reincarnation would have to be crystallized out of European culture.

If you read a book about Buddhism today, you will find many [special] terms: “Nirvana” [for example] is presented as the great goal for the Buddhist; “Nirvana” is a place that is associated with the extinction, the annihilation of all existence - it cannot be put into words, since there is no word for non-existence. One could hold great discussions about what Buddha meant by it. But we just want to try to determine the mood content, to contrast Buddhism and Christianity, to place the Buddhist's perception next to that of the Christian. First, there is a story among Buddhists: the wise King Milinda comes to an initiate and wants to hear something about the secrets of life. The conversation goes as follows. The initiate asks: How did you get here? — The king answers: By carriage. — The sage looks at the carriage; he sees the wheels: Are these wheels the carriage? — No, they are not. — Is this seat the carriage? — No, it is not. These are only the parts of the carriage, but all the parts are not yet the carriage. So what else is there? — Name and form. All the individual parts are really there, but together they are only name and form. But name and form are something unreal, just like the mango fruit on the tree, which only has name and form in common with the fruit from which the tree grew. What does the wise man mean by this? The concept of reincarnation was self-evident to him. So he explains how in this life, a person only has name and form in common with the previous life. The Buddhist does not recognize the continuous self that passes through the embodiments – only name and form. He sees the individual parts of the carriage, connected by name and form to form a whole. This is not quite in line with the teachings of the Buddha, but it depends on the feelings of a follower of Buddhism.

Now let us transfer this parable into the Christian realm: let us imagine a Christian sage speaking to a Christian king. Let us imagine that the conversation is the same as the one above, but in the end, the sage would have to say, based on the spirit of Christianity: You cannot come here on a mere name, on a mere form. These are words that must be backed by something real, something spiritual. That mango fruit at the top of the tree has become the same as the fruit that was the origin of the whole tree, although nothing physical connects them. There must be something that has formed them as equals: there must be something spiritual. - In the same way, the Christian feeling must assume that there is a continuous self from embodiment to embodiment in reincarnation. The Buddhist, on the other hand, sees the path from embodiment to embodiment without knowing the bond of a common ego, and thus he gets the feeling of futility.

Buddha, the king's son, who had grown up without having known suffering, was deeply moved when he saw a sick person for the first time - then the idea of suffering poured into him. When he saw a dead body for the first time, he realized: Death is suffering. And now it became clear to him: Life is suffering, being born is suffering, being sick is suffering, being separated from what we love is suffering - everything is suffering. Why is everything destined for suffering?

Now imagine a person like Buddha, how he faced this riddle of life. Many lives before, many lives after – and always, always suffering, suffering! He felt the urge to explore this, and a long quest followed. When enlightenment came to him – which we refer to as “sitting under the bodhi tree” – he realized: the passion, the thirst for existence, comes from previous incarnations, and this is connected to life. Therefore, suffering is connected with the thirst for existence, and so, if suffering is to cease, the thirst for existence must be extinguished. This is what he said in the sermon of Benares. Man can, through his own work, become indifferent to existence and thereby extinguish all previous embodiments and free himself from suffering. There is nothing in the world that cannot cause us suffering. If we free ourselves from everything, we can enter into Nirvana. We cannot describe Nirvana, because we lack the concept for the absolute nothing. We simply have to leave out everything that is in our imagination. The ideal of Buddhism is the extinguishing of existence. Buddha stands before us and says: I look back on many embodiments. In my present body I know that I must become free from all thirst for existence. The previous embodiment pushed me towards this body, towards that which now pushes me to become free from corporeality. I know quite certainly that each time spirituality has built the body for me as a temple; but my goal is no longer to return to such a temple of the body - I feel this.

Now let us compare this feeling with the Christian one. In the Gospel of John, Christ Jesus says of the temple of his body: “Destroy it, and in three days I will raise it up.” Christ Jesus has the will within himself not to leave what is earthly life. This is not suffering, but something that should be developed. Even if there are still many embodiments to come, keep improving your temple, live each life on Earth in such a way that you continue to perfect yourself. When we let the warmth of the Gospel sink in, we ask: What did Christ bring? The answer is: In the Christ impulse we find the indication that life can be purified. Buddha descends to become free of the embodiments; Christ descends to make life perfect. Buddhism is a doctrine of salvation, but Christianity is a doctrine of resurrection! Christ says: When you acquire the higher, you will become ever higher, and a new life will arise. The Christian impulse is compatible with the concept of reincarnation – it is strong enough for that. Why is that so? Because Christ is not just a teacher. It is significant that Christ did not write anything down himself, because the essential thing is his deed – his deed at Golgotha has eternal significance.

The historical event at Golgotha is a seed for something other than the liberation from suffering. Is birth suffering? No. - Is death suffering? No. - Is being separated from those you love suffering? No. — Because death leads to new birth, and every birth brings powers that are exhausted through life. But illness is purification; by conquering illness, strength comes. Not being united with those we love is not suffering, because the Christian knows the realm of the spirit, where what belongs together is together. Nor is being united with those we do not love suffering, because the Christian seeks to live in love. To make everything Christian – that is Christianity. To learn through suffering, to learn through happiness, that is what we as Christians want.

And so we see the great difference in development that extends from Buddha to Christ. One religion is a religion of salvation, the other a religion of resurrection. But then we will also understand how the Buddhist confessor cannot even approach the self. The sensations, the feelings, the ideas, the consciousness – none of this is the self. The Christian, on the other hand, says: the self is everywhere. The spiritual self is behind everything, but we do not see it because we are not able to perceive it. We may strive for the resurrection of our self through Christ – so that the spirit may shine out to meet us from every stone, from every tree. And so, Western intellectual life has nothing to gain from Buddhism, but it has much, very much to gain from accepting the doctrine of reincarnation. And just as Buddha tied the doctrine of suffering to a corpse, so several centuries later we see people looking up to a corpse. A corpse became a source of comfort and strength for them: Christ on the cross.

The theosophical worldview seeks to deepen our spiritual life, not arbitrarily, but because it wants to serve, to satisfy the deeply felt yearning of our time. That the theosophical worldview is not arbitrary can be seen by comparing it with other spiritual currents.

Today we want to consider a cultural current in art in relation to Theosophy. We want to talk about Richard Wagner. Richard Wagner always emphasized that he wanted to serve an ideal that could permeate people like any other religious ideal.

Goethe longed for an interpreter of art. Richard Wagner endeavored to be such an interpreter throughout his life. One could say: What is not said about Richard Wagner, what is not thought of him! Richard Wagner himself would not have thought that. Nor is it necessary that he should have consciously thought all this so clearly. Just as a plant cannot itself say what a poet might say about it, so Richard Wagner does not need to have said or thought all that is said about him. The botanist cannot place himself above the forces of the plant. He only knows their laws. The plant, on the other hand, can grow according to these laws without knowing them. The same applies to the artist: he implements the laws of art. Richard Wagner himself was of the opinion that truth comes to light in philosophy and that the secrets of the world are revealed in art. He says of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony that in such a creation there is a revelation of another world, much more than through logical thinking.

Richard Wagner always had the feeling that the spiritual world, as the basis of the sensual world, stands behind this sensual world. He sees beings in the devachanic world, as we call it, that are connected to the physical bodies. An extract of this spiritual world is the physical. One must have what Goethe calls spiritual eyes and ears in order to see and perceive this spiritual world.

The Pythagorean spoke of the harmony of the spheres, which is not an arbitrarily chosen, superficial image. Goethe speaks very clearly about this spiritual world of the music of the spheres. For him, what is around us is the material expression of this spiritual world. He says in Faust:

What a roar brings the light! It trumpets, it trombones, the eye blinks and the ear is amazed, the unheard does not listen.

And elsewhere:

The sun sounds in the ancient manner In the song of the spheres, And it completes its prescribed journey With a thunderclap.

A great artist does not just use images like these as pictures.

Richard Wagner said that the individual musical instruments are like individual organs through which the world expresses itself in primal feelings. He had no theosophical view. However, since he was imbued with a theosophical attitude, he always knew that there are deep relationships between people and what stands behind them. Much of this is contained in old legends, for example in the legend of “Poor Henry”. A maiden must sacrifice herself so that the sick Poor Henry can be healed. The sacrifice acts as a force from one to the other. The outer science can find nothing of the magical power that passes from the redeemer to the redeemed.

In the Flying Dutchman, we have before us a man who has become sinful. The sacrifice of Senta, the power that passes from person to person, must have an effect here.

The whole music drama is imbued with this idea. Richard Wagner felt: In the ordinary drama, only the external action takes place, only the purely external expression of inner experiences. In the symphony, on the other hand, we experience the feeling only inwardly, that is, what is missing in the drama. Beethoven sought a balance in the Ninth Symphony, in which the feeling resonated in the word. Wagner's music drama also arose from the same endeavor.

Richard Wagner saw the ideal human behind the ordinary everyday person. He saw this ideal human in myths and legends, which contain in the imagination what man contains in his nature and in his germs. The saga of the Nibelungs is a particularly vivid expression of this. At the time of the ancient Atlantis, people lived under very different conditions than we do today. Year in, year out, Atlantis was covered by dense masses of fog. Rain and sunshine were not distributed as they are today, so that the rainbow could only appear after the great flood, the Deluge, because only then were the conditions for its appearance present. Noah saw the first rainbow. In myths and legends, the memory of the old conditions has been preserved, for example in the name Niflheim – Mistheim. We receive truer knowledge from the myths than from materialistic science. The state of mind at that time was such that the individual ego did not yet exist. In the course of the migration from the west to the east, the human being developed his ego nature. The Atlanteans had a collective consciousness at that time. The Germanic tribes, for example the Cherusci, still had this collective consciousness as well. Legends and myths depicted this in images.

In the transition from the collective self to the individual self, to the single self, the self contracts more and more around the individual human being. This increasingly contracting individual self was depicted as a ring. Truth and wisdom are interwoven with the image of poetry. The human egoistic self is expressed in the ring. The masses of mist flowed together to form rivers where people now live. In the Rhine, the myth sees what has become of the harmonious, collective consciousness of the self. The last stragglers of those endowed with universal consciousness have been drawn into the waves of the Rhine, as it were. Gold is the symbol of power.

With love, the possibility of selfish love also flows into the soul of the self. What is represented by gold, the symbol of power, is what the egoistic self strives for. Alberich kills love in order to take for himself what used to come to every individual from the All-consciousness. In the long-held E-flat major pedal in the prelude to “Rheingold”, we see the drawing in of the self into the human being.

The relationship between people must be regulated by external law. We find this with Wotan. Through his love for his wife, he loses his only eye, even if it is only slightly clairvoyant. For what the giants have done for him, he wants to give up the representative of love, of that which preserves youth, love for selfish power. Wotan still has connections to the All-consciousness. This emerges in Erda, this ancient consciousness, which is a dim but clairvoyant consciousness. She experiences the depths of the natural world clairvoyantly in what lives and weaves in springs and waters:

Her sleeping is dreaming, her dreaming is sensing, her sensing is prevailing knowledge.

This ancient consciousness cannot be expressed better, and all this is also expressed in drama and music. When the I was locked in the ring, it was locked in the skin. People who have the clairvoyant consciousness and the consciousness of today are called initiates. This was always represented in the image of the feminine. Goethe's words:

The Eternal Feminine

Draws us upward

refers to the higher human consciousness that humanity yearns for. Every nation has leaders who correspond to its character. Here, among the Germanic peoples, bravery is the corresponding characteristic. The soul of the warrior rises above the ordinary consciousness. This is symbolized in a female personality, the Valkyrie. Those who do not die on the battlefield die a death on the battlefield. But those who fall in battle are led up by the Valkyries. The feminine leads into the spiritual realm.

The initiate experiences in life what the ordinary person experiences only after death. Siegfried is an initiate. He unites with the Valkyrie already here. The All-consciousness passes over into the I-consciousness. From close marriage gradually arises distant marriage. The mixing of related blood gave the power of vision. This power passes with distant marriage. When distant blood is brought to distant blood, clairvoyance and ruling knowledge perish.

This transition to long-distance marriage can be found in the world of legends, where a member of the blood relationship goes out and marries outside of it. This is characterized in the saga in such a way that it is always associated with suffering and hardship. Siegmund and Sieglinde are characteristic representatives of close marriage. The child of this marriage, Siegfried, must not know any of this. He must grow up, completely on his own. Fricka, the representative of the new order, rebels against the union of Sieglinde and Siegmund.

In his unfinished drama “Der Sieger”, begun in 1856, Richard Wagner incorporated theosophical teachings. Amander, an Indian prince, is loved by a Jandalah maiden. He does not consider her worthy of him and enters a monastery. The maiden remains behind and later realizes that in a previous incarnation she was a king's daughter and that the present prince was a Jandalah, whom she did not want to marry. A balance had now been struck. She too enters a Buddhist monastery. This would have been a purely theosophical drama with reincarnation in it, but Richard Wagner did not yet feel up to it.

The following year he was invited to stay at Villa Wesendonck. From his window he saw spring outside, the first signs of sprouting, the resurrection of nature. He recognized the connections between this cosmic event and the mystery of resurrection. The “Parsifal” was created from this. The symbol at the center of the Parsifal problem is the Holy Grail. There really was a school of the Holy Grail. It still exists today: the realization of the pure ideal.

What the Grail student and the Rosicrucian student go through is to be reflected in a dialogue that did not take place literally in this form, but in spirit. The pupil was shown: Look at the plant. The root goes down into the soil, the sap – the “blood” – goes up, where the fruit attaches itself. It stretches the calyx towards the sunbeam, the holy lance of love. Compare this with man. Unconscious, the plant is not yet permeated by desires. It develops upwards to become human. Then the plant sap becomes blood, permeated with desires, the plant leaf becomes flesh. By incorporating the desires, the human being acquires day-consciousness in contrast to the sleep-consciousness of the plant.

One also spoke of future development: everything is in development. The human being will develop to ever more perfect levels. Richard Wagner also points this out. An organ that is still developing, that is still at the lowest level – every materialist will find what I am about to say terrible, but that does not matter, it is still true – the heart, it is indeed a real crux for materialistic science; it is an involuntary muscle with striated fibers like the voluntary muscles. This already points to a later stage of development. The human larynx will also have a higher development. It will be productive, it will create the image of man: it will become the future organ of reproduction. Later, like the plant now, man will turn his chalice chastely towards the sun, towards the holy lance of love. This was said to the Grail disciple. One can only arrive at this knowledge through spiritual insight, not through speculation. The Grail disciple should feel and relive it.

In “Parsifal” the one who strives for the Grail ideal is portrayed, the Christian initiate. The pure fool, he knows nothing through his own speculation, but he has felt it, he knows through compassion.

In Kundry, Wagner depicts the lower sensuality that passes from incarnation to incarnation. Kundry is Eve, is Herodias. She mocked the Redeemer. But she must not be lost; she must also be redeemed. This happens through the kiss of Parsifal. Klingsor represents black magic, brute force.

In Siegfried, the old initiation is combined with the Christian initiation. Siegfried is vulnerable only in one place: where the Redeemer later carried the cross. The old can only develop into unselfish free love if Christian love is grasped. This is expressed in Richard Wagner's transition from the “Nibelungen” to “Parsifal”, when he moved from the Nibelung saga to the Parzival saga. Richard Wagner himself felt he was a herald.

Wahnfried shall this house be called,
Where my delusion found peace.

That is written on his house. Man must pass through delusion if he wants to ascend to the spiritual world.

If one wants to interpret the secrets of the world, one must turn to art.