The Rudolf Steiner Archive

With somebody who hears the word “social question” today, the most different sensations stir according to his situation and experience and the seriousness with which he is able to take life. Thus, it must be compared with a question that should deeper occupy our time, actually, than it occupies it. Indeed, this seems to be paradoxically expressed. Those who are touched immediately by that which the word social question encloses deal indeed enough with it. However, those who are preserved even today to come into immediate contact with that which forms the basis of the social question as a cause are not still convinced thoroughly enough that every thinking human being should absolutely occupy himself with it.

Those who take each day as it comes and probably blink the requirements of the day may experience that either they themselves or their descendants have negative experiences just because of their ignorance. You hear even today when people speak of the social question in the sense that our time must find a way out from the situation in which many human beings got into because of the form of our social life: there were always rich and poor people; there was always a social question as long as humanity lives and strives. Hence, it is not surprising if in our time those want to express this more or less distinctly who are not blessed with worldly goods and want to conquer that in conflict which fortune does not give them. There were always rich and poor human beings, those who were depressed and those who were blessed more or less with possessions.

With these words, one probably wants to wipe away the peculiarity of the social question, wants to darken it. One points to the slave revolts of antiquity, to the revolts in the Middle Ages and to other events where the depressed ones tried to get their rights, and one consoles himself with such phenomena.

Today everybody should know, actually that the social question is really something new in the human life, that it is something different from similar movements in other times of the historical life. For those who look for a solution of the social question today are persons within our social order first who exist with this character and stand before us since a short time only. This depressing fact is a result of the last 120 to 130 years at most; this originated due to the present, infinitely important progress of the human civilisation. We see this progress coming up at the end of the 18th century, when those machines etcetera emerged from the heads of our inventors.

Since life flows together more and more in the industrial centres and cities, the wageworker, the proletarian appears in the modern sense of the word. One cannot separate the social question from this human class actually created due to the immense progress of civilisation. The slave of antiquity struggled, actually, only if he felt depressed in particular, and he did not have the consciousness that his life could be improved or his oppression could be reduced with any other social order. It was similar in the Middle Ages, too. However, the modern proletarian demands more and more that not this or that single matter is to be combated, but that only a thorough reform, maybe also a radical change of the conditions, can generally change his situation. This conviction has found an immense propagation, a much bigger propagation within the working class than those believe who close their eyes. It is sometimes for someone who figures the matters out quite astonishing that; nevertheless, there are always still people who do not have seriousness enough to go into these matters.

It could seem rather odd if anybody examined such a practical demand of the day, such a question of life from the point of view of spiritual science. For the most people have the idea of it that it is something impractical, the most impractical stuff of the world that it has arisen from the heads of some dreamers and deals with all kinds of matters not dealing with reality. Indeed, people hear that there is the spiritual-scientific movement, which teaches about various things and beings of a supersensible world round us and about the supersensible basis of the human being himself. Indeed, one also hears that this spiritual research speaks of many facts, for example, of the repeated lives on earth and of the great principle of the spiritual causing of our actions and destinies. One hears that it leads up to all kinds of higher worlds et cetera. Now someone can simply think, which practical and interesting facts of such a question of life like the social one can anybody recognise who occupies himself with such things!

However, life praxis has a particular explanation. We want to speak once about this subject just to show how spiritual science has a real significance only if it is able to intervene in the practical questions of life. At the same time, we ask ourselves, what have we to direct our attention upon, if there is talk of the social question?—The social question exists, the appearance can convince us of it, and this appearance convinces somebody most urgently who deals with life. We could show that with the boom of our industry—just in England—social conditions of the most dreadful kind have originated. It was for those who wanted to make industry fertile for what they called their world solely the question: how does one get labour force the cheapest?—There we see those excesses then which were often described how industry also produces strong shadow beside strong light and how the blessings of our machines, railways, and steamboats develop during the 19th century. However, we also realise that in the wake of that the human being must work, now and again for working hours, which certainly exceed all that is humanly possible. We know that in the 19th century not only adults had to work for 12, 16, 18 or even 20 hours. People who are not immediately touched know nothing about these matters. We also know that one employed children of the tenderest age in an almost unbelievable way in factories. We know how people have become blind to the impossibility of such a thing.

We only need to point to a fact that once in a parliament one discussed whether it is not incredible that children are employed in the industry for eighteen to nineteen hours, as it was the case, and a doctor countered that this had to be that way in some cases! One asked the gentleman whether he did not regard a working time of 24 hours as something impossible. He replied, I have convinced myself by deep reasons that the commonplaces that are talked in such matters cannot always be taken seriously, and I cannot furnish particulars of any working time below 24 hours, which could be anyhow detrimental to health.—Such a thing characterises the situation more than even the fact in which humanity has been brought by that which is such a blessing for it at the same time. Who has not realised in life—if he is able to open his eyes—that now and again human beings of the tenderest age cannot learn anything if they are sent to school. All attempts and ideals to make them human beings are of no avail because they are not equipped—because of the social need—with those forces which are sufficient to a humane existence.

It is impossible to describe the social need in which humanity was often brought; I had to unroll too many pictures. However, we can no longer deny that one fact is sure: that big progress of the human mind, which has constructed the machines etcetera, which has spun round our whole earth with a matchless traffic network, this development of the human mind did not keep abreast of the reflection that is the optimal way of the human living together. Today nobody would believe that a machine constructs itself that no intelligence, no mental power must be applied to bring a machine into being and to create a traffic system. However, how many are there today who—even if they do not admit it—take the view in their innermost feeling that the human co-existence originates completely from itself that one does not need any mental strength to intervene in it as one intervenes in a factory.

Indeed, one does not need to go as far as a great naturalist of the 19th century who said, oh, humanity has made immense progress of the knowledge and understanding of the world; however, concerning morality it has not taken a step forward!—One does not need to go so far, but it is a fact which nobody can deny that only a very few human beings who are not immediately touched by the social misery feel the necessity today to deal with the social question.

However, if we look at those who deal or should deal with the social question, what about them? There a book appeared, for example, not so very long ago by the councillor Kolb: As a Worker in America (1904). The man left his office with immense unselfishness, with a real devotion for a while and went to America. He worked hard in a bicycle factory to get to know the social life. I have to say first—that nobody may reproach that I judge unfairly—that his action is an exceptionally meritorious one that one cannot appreciate it enough. However, we want to look at a single statement of this book. You read a rather typical sentence in it: “How often have I asked once seeing a healthy man begging with moral indignation: why does this beggarly fellow not work?—Now I knew it.” He adds, “In theory, one looks at it somewhat different from in practice, and one deals even with the most joyless categories of economics still quite tolerably with the study.”

One would like to say that a whole world of human sensations and human work speaks from such a sentence. We have a man before us who got the position of a councillor. He discloses that he has known life so little that he called everybody a beggarly fellow who did not work, that he had to leave his office and go far away to America to get to know the life for which he should give advice, to which his actions referred. One can study; one can advance to an excellent position and can be in need of such! One does not have eyes to see to the left and to the right; one knows nothing about life. This is possible!

If we notice such a matter, we may raise the question whether it could not be that the conditions of certain matters are bad because anybody on whom it depends disdains to get to know life. One talks about a lot of improvements, proposals, and matters that one should establish. Human beings must establish them. May there not be a little difference between things, which persons have established who understand something of life, and things, which such persons have established who admit so brilliantly that they understand nothing? What is the use of all talking if one does not see that it depends on somebody who talks about it and knows something about it? How much of that which whirrs through life may be quite empty gossip and how much could be really accomplished and come into being?

The question is probably justified. Many people think about the social question; too many, if we consider the question more seriously if we consider what is necessary to understand something useful of this question. Today there are many people who say: at the moment when the conditions become better when the conditions are changed, the life of the human beings and their situation will be better, too.—We know that above all the most comprehensive social theory in the present, socialism, also positions itself on this point of view. We know that it always stresses, do not give us all kinds of proposals how the human beings should become better how the human beings should behave! Do not give us all kinds of moral demands! What it depends on, is merely—they stress this—to improve the conditions.

Symptomatically you can face such a starry-eyed idealist who represents his social theories at different places of Germany and says repeatedly, yes, people state that the human beings had to become better first if the conditions should become better. However, he says, everything depends on the fact that humanity is transported to the right conditions.—He also tells that one limited the pubs here and there once and that then less drunkards were there, and, therefore, some people were doing better. Then he preaches to the workers that charity, mutual brotherliness is an empty phrase. Everything would depend on causing such conditions of employment and life that everybody has his sufficient existence, and then the moral condition would already become better by itself, too.

You know that socialism develops such a view extensively. This is nothing else than a result of the materialism in our time, that materialism which cannot look, like spiritual science, into the inside of the human being and cannot recognise that any social condition is created by human beings, is the result of human thoughts and feelings. Socialism, however, believes that the human being is a product of the external conditions. This belief paralyses the fruitful consideration of the social life in the highest degree. It is paralysing, and we do not want to state any theoretical proof of it, but we want to adduce a historical evidence.

If anybody was suited for a social reformer, it was Robert Owen (1771-1854) living around the turn of 18th to the 19th centuries. He had two virtues that enabled him to intervene in the social life from his point of view: a candid look for the industrial progress and for the damages, for human welfare and human luck, which this progress brings. He had a candid look and an open heart for human grief, and on the other side, he had a good will and initiative to give at least a number of human beings a worthy existence. He lived in a materialistic time at first and, therefore, he was, like so many, depending on the theory that one needed to cause suitable conditions only to develop a thoroughly moral humanity.

Therefore, he founded a little colony in America, which one could call a model in every respect if the condition had been right. He had guaranteed a humane existence by means of external facilities to the people. Among diligent and keen people, he had neglected ones whom the example of the first should inspire to become decent human beings. An exemplary economy developed that induced the idea in him to try the same in a bigger scale. Then there came the second colony, which was formed as practically and humanely as the first. However, he who had put up not only the theory that the improvement of the conditions must cause the improvement of the human destinies had to experience the disillusion which we characterise with his own words. Because the human beings were not ripe for the conditions he wrote, what does any improvement of the conditions help if not the general moral and knowledge are raised before? First, it depends on informing the human being about his inner life, above all, about his soul forces; then only one can envisage to solve the social question rather worthily.

A practitioner, no theorist judges that way, and it is typical in certain respect how little humanity learns from facts that one maintains the same theories in spite of this repeatedly. However, someone who is able to see a little deeper into the human souls knows that such an individual case is generally connected with the development of the human souls in the present. Whether the one or the other admits it or not, it is the basic conviction that everything can be done if one changes the external conditions, and finds a remedy quickly with the damages which threaten humanity. These are the basic convictions in our time. If we see, for example, repeatedly that laws are justified saying: one is not allowed to deliver the inexperienced humanity to these or those people, and then one does not notice at all that one would have another task than to make laws, that one should teach the inexperienced humanity, so that it could determine their actions itself.

One does not easily look from the conditions to the human beings. However, this is the task of spiritual science. It completely turns away from the conditions and completely to the human beings. We ask ourselves, where from do the conditions round us come?—In so far as they are not imposed by nature, they are the results of the human feeling and thinking. The conditions of today were thoughts and intentions of human beings who have lived once. The conditions are in such a way because human beings have thought them that way. If we want to improve conditions, we have to learn above all to develop better thoughts, feelings, and intentions. However, if we look around among the social theorists, even among the most radical ones, the social democrats if you like, then these theories mostly do not go beyond that which the human beings have always thought. They have originated from the same thoughts and impulses from which our conditions have arisen and have led to our situation. We must be able to have human beings who know life and know what is about the forces that work behind life.

What did Robert Owen lack? He himself had to admit: knowledge of human nature!—One never gets to know the human being if one puts up a worldview that is directed only to the external appearance. As long as the human being does not know what is hidden behind this physical corporeality and he thereby does not attain the ability to look, so to speak, behind the scenes, he is able by no means to understand something about the forces controlling life. However, this is just the task of spiritual science. One may admit that it does not fulfil its task everywhere sufficiently; one has to admit that within the circles looking for it one often plays with the highest questions of existence. That does not matter, but it matters what the spiritual investigation can mean to us. It can be not only something that teaches us that gives us dogmas, but it can be a powerful education of our innermost soul forces. This is the best that one can gain from spiritual science if we consider the spiritual-scientific worldview from the point of view how it transforms the human being. Then the picture presents itself this way.

We speak here about views that the spiritual investigation has about the various fields of life. We were able to speak about this and that of its teachings. However, we will not speak about that. Someone who familiarises himself with spiritual science will notice one thing: concerning one important point it distinguishes itself from everything that is, otherwise, theory today. This is important. In most cases, the human being soon finishes if he should develop a worldview, and he likes it very much if he can have a rounded off worldview as soon as possible. It is clear to experts of the conditions that many a materialist is a materialist only because he does not go far with his thoughts because he falls short. Materialism makes it easy for its followers, very easy. One can oversee the construction of the world from purely material facts easily and see—particularly if it is still illustrated with photos—how the human being has developed. One needs only to stare at them and can pursue the whole way of the world evolution using the usual ideas of life. It is simple to follow what the materialists say about the riddles of the world because the thoughts do not tangle up because no particular requirements are imposed.

The matter is not so easy with spiritual science. It does not make it easy for the human being, because it starts from the real and the true requirement that the secrets of the world are deep and that you must dig up deeply into the basis of the things if you want to understand the world. What spiritual science teaches about the development of the universe and the human being gets the thoughts in manifold tangles. That forces the human being sometimes to deal with details and, on the other side, he is led to the greatest perspectives. However, that has a certain result, and about this result, I want to speak openly. It trains and prepares thinking there where we face this complex human life in the single case to understand this life. Someone will say, the worlds that spiritual science describes have made me quite dizzy.

Is this a bad sign of spiritual science? It would be better if this approach did not make the human being dizzy, but strengthened him, and then he would be ready to understand life with strong soul forces. However, the practical ideas about the world and life are such ones: if a human being thinks about the riddles of the world in short thoughts, he also thinks about the social order in short thoughts. Thus, we see that that which famous people think about social questions is a rather precise picture of that which is offered to us as a materialist worldview unable to penetrate into the depths of life. Besides, everybody has the uncertain feeling that that which causes difficulty for him is a fantastic, dreamlike stuff, and that spiritual science would have to be a fantastic, dreamlike, at least rather idealistic stuff, in any case, unsuitable for practical purposes in life. Indeed, Fichte (Johann Gottlieb F., 1762-1814, philosopher) said more than hundred years ago to his Jena students: those practical people to whom comprehensive ideas always seem impractical because ideas and ideals are not always applicable in life prove only that in the plan of creation one did not count on them. May a benevolent providence give them sunshine, food, and clever thoughts!—Fichte also spoke about the incapability of some people to imagine the spiritual aspect of the ego: “One could most people convince to regard themselves as pieces of lava on the moon than as egos.” However, it is a necessity of life to imagine the ego.

If we consider life and the social question from this point of view, we must say that we consider spiritual science as the great school of life. It makes it impossible that one goes through life, receives a certain position, even becomes a councillor and becomes a life coach, and has to go far, far away to get to know life once during a vacation in order to be convinced of the fact that not everybody who does not work is a beggarly fellow. Such a thing becomes impossible by spiritual science.

Hence, we do not speak only about a spiritual point of view, about any spiritual-scientific views concerning socialism, but we talk about something else. We consider spiritual science as a real thing, not only as a sum of dogmas, but as something that gives knowledge and wisdom, which flows directly in the immediate life at every moment and opens our eyes, so that we cope with this life. Thus, spiritual science is the general basis of any judgment whether we judge in the field of the social life or that of education.

Our judgment becomes sounder because it arises from the true human nature, if we start from spiritual-scientific points of view. We say that someone himself, who is infiltrated with that which spiritual science is able to give, gets to a correct judgment. Anybody may ask, how does a follower of spiritual science think in which way this or that parliamentarian has to judge about a question if he has judged wrongly according to his view?—This is no correct question from the spiritual point of view, but one has to say, it does not concern of saying how this or that should think, but one is convinced that he has—if he is filled with basic truth—a clear judgment on every post. We do not dictate his judgment to him, but he finds the correct judgment. In this respect, spiritual science is the most liberal life principle that can be there. It is not dogmatic, but it gives the human being the possibility to have his own, sound free judgment always and everywhere.

Conditions—we have started from it—are often regarded as that which can change the human being, and one thinks in the abstract how conditions can be changed. Spiritual science is solely concerned with the real human soul, with the relations from human being to human being. It is quite impossible today to go into single concrete matters of the social question. However, I want to point to this or that to find the components that show us the way where we are in life to intervene correctly. For it is our task to intervene. If we want to find the components, we ask ourselves, which is, actually, the basic fact, the basic phenomenon on which all misery, all social grief may generally depend in the world?—Spiritual science can show us this basic fact, putting us before a fact that most people do not understand and acknowledge today. This fact is connected with a basic phenomenon of any development. I would like to say, speaking dryly, it shows us by deeper views on life that poverty, grief and misery not only—and least of all if one finds the underlying cause of the things—depend on external conditions, but on a certain soul constitution and in the connection with it on its external effects.

The practitioner who regards himself as much cleverer thinks that this is ridiculous. However, one can only stress that it is the most practical in life. It is the sentence of which you persuade yourselves more and more that need, misery and grief are nothing else than the results of egoism. Like a physical law we have to understand this sentence, not in such a way that possibly with a single human being need and grief happen if he is always selfish, but that this grief is connected with this egoism—maybe at another place. Like cause and effect, egoism is connected with the need and grief. Egoism leads to the struggle of existence in the human life, in the social human order. The struggle for existence is the real starting point of need and grief, if they are social. Because of our modern way of thinking there is a conviction to which appears absurd what I have just stated. Why? Because one is persuaded today that a big part, by far the biggest part of the human life must be built on egoism. Indeed, with words and theories, one does not want to admit it, but in practice, one will soon admit it. One admits it in the following way. One says, it is quite natural that the human being is paid for his job that he receives the yield of his work personally—and, nevertheless, that is nothing but the implementation of egoism in the economic life. Egoism controls us as soon as we live by the principle: we have to be paid personally; one has to pay to me what I work.—Truth is a long way from this thought so that it seems quite senseless. Who wants to convince himself of the truth about egoism has to go more intimately into various universal principles. He would have to abandon himself thoughtfully to the question whether the work that is paid personally is really life-sustaining, whether it depends on this work?—It is curious to put this question. However, not sooner than one thinks about it, one is able to inform about the social question.

Imagine—this is a paradoxical comparison—a man transported to an island. He has only to supply himself. You say, he must work!—However, he must not only work, this is not the point, but something must be added to his work. If the work is only work, it can eventually be useless for his life. Think once that the man on the island would do nothing but to throw stones during fourteen days. This would be a strenuous work, and according to usual human concepts, he could earn quite a lot of wage. Nevertheless, this work is not at all connected with life. Work is life-sustaining and has value only if anything else is added. If this work consists of the cultivation of the soil and one receives the products of the earth, then work has something to do with life. We see even with lower beings that work is separated from production. Thus, we see a possibility to get to the tremendously important sentence that work as such has no meaning for life, but only that work which is guided wisely. What is to be produced using human wisdom serves the human being. The modern social thinking offends against this sentence because it does not understand in the least.

It does not depend on the fact that anybody invents beautiful abstract theories, but the real progress depends on the fact that every single human being learns to think socially. Modern thinking is often antisocial. It is antisocial, for example, if anybody is on Sunday afternoon outdoors and says, animated by occasion: I write twenty postcards. It is correct and socially intended to know and to feel that these twenty cards cause so many postmen climbing so and so many stairs. It is social thinking to know that any action, which one does, has an effect in life. Now, however, somebody comes and says that he thinks socially inasmuch as he understands that more postmen must be employed and get their bread because of this card writing.—This is, as if one thinks of anything that one wants to build in order to employ unemployed workers. However, it does not depend on job creation, but that the work of the human beings is used solely to create valuable goods.

If one thinks that through to the last consequences, it does no longer seem so strange if the ancient sentence of spiritual science is pronounced which sounds today as incomprehensible as possible: in a social living together, the impulse of working must never be in the own personality of the human being, but only in the dedication to the community. This is also often emphasised, but it is never understood in such a way that misery and need originate from the fact that the single human being wants to have paid what he has worked for. However, it is true that real social progress is only possible if I do that which I work for in the service of the community, and if the community gives me what I need, if, with other words, what I work for does not serve me. The social progress depends solely on the recognition of this sentence that someone does not want to get the yield of his work as a personal remuneration. Somebody leads an enterprise to quite different purposes who knows that he should have nothing for himself from that which he works for, but that he owes work to the social community, and that, vice versa, he should claim nothing for himself, but limits his existence to that which the social community gives him. As absurd this is for many people today, as true it is. The opposite fact influences our life today: by the claim of the worker to get the full yield of his work more and more. As long as the thinking moves in this direction, one comes into worse and worse situations.

This antisocial thinking tempts to shift all concepts. Think once how within the widespread socialism one speaks of exploiters and exploited. Who is the exploiter, and who is the exploited from the view of clear thinking? Let us look at a worker who produces a garment for starvation wages. Who is his exploiter? Perhaps, the man who buys the garment and pays a very low price for it. Does only the rich man buy this garment? Does the same worker who complains about exploitation not buy this cheap garment? Does he not require today, within the social order, that it should be as cheap as possible? You see the working woman who works with bloody fingers during the week can wear the dress for a cheap price on Sunday because the human labour of another person is exploited!

That has nothing to do with wealth or poverty in front of the clear thinking, but solely with our idea of human relations in the world. Anybody could easily say, if you demand that the existence of the human being should be independent of his performance, then an official complies with the ideal most nicely. The modern official is independent. The measure of his existence is not depending on the product, which he produces, but from that which one regards as necessary to his existence.—Indeed, but such an objection has a very big mistake. It depends on the fact that everybody is able to respect this principle and to implement it in life freely. It does not matter that this principle is carried out by general power. This principle has to penetrate every single human life to make the personally acquired independent from that which one works for the community. How does it assert itself?

There is only one possibility to assert itself, which will seem rather impractical to the so-called practitioner. There must be reasons why the human being works; nevertheless, namely rather diligently and devotedly if no longer the self-interest is the impulse of his work. Somebody does not create anything real concerning the social life in truth, who takes out a patent of any achievement and shows this way that he regards the self-interest as significant in life. However, somebody works really for life who is led by his forces to right achievements merely by love, by love to the whole humanity, which he gives his work with pleasure and willing. Thus, the impulse of work must be in anything else than in remuneration. This is the solution of the social question: separation of remuneration from work. For this is a worldview which aims at the spirit to wake such impulses in the human being that he does no longer say: if my income is secure, I can be lazy.—A spiritual worldview can only achieve that he does not say this. Any materialism solely leads to its opposite in the long run.

Anyone may now say: this is a nice little test of the social question; this is rather cute! Have we not always preached this, the one may say, that the human beings are selfish, and that one must count on their egoism? Now there comes the spiritual worldview and says that this can change.—Indeed, one has always preached that this could not be different and one was very proud of it and said, someone is a true practitioner who counts on the human egoism.—Indeed, but here the thinking of the people does not turn the tables. For those who blame everything for conditions, for facilities must admit that at least—because just the conditions were in such a way as they have developed up to now—that also this desire and impulse came into the human being. However, there the thinking becomes too short. For, otherwise, they would have to say, yes, quite different surroundings are created at any rate, if the idea becomes established that it is indecent to found everything on personal self-interest. Materialism becomes inconsistent there even compared with its own requirements.

We must understand that the impulses of spiritual science could never be given to the human development up to now. In this respect, it is a new spiritual movement, and it will have the strength to work on the innermost soul because it penetrates into the innermost world. Only a worldview that penetrates the core and fetches truth there can show us the true face of the world. It is never right that we can become bad by true knowledge if we see the true face of the world. Nevertheless, it is true that the bad in the human being can come only from mistake and error. Hence, spiritual science bases because of its knowledge of the human nature on the fact that it will achieve that with which just the noble Owen deceived himself so much.

He says, it is necessary that the human beings are enlightened first so that moral is improved.—Spiritual science, however, says, it is not sufficient to emphasise this principle, but the means must be given by which the soul can be improved. If a spiritual worldview improves and strengthens the souls, the conditions and external relations will follow because they are always reflections of that which the human beings think. The human beings are not determined by conditions, but the human beings make these conditions, as far as the conditions are social. If the human being suffers from conditions, he suffers in truth from that which his fellow men bring on him. Any misery that has come with the industrial development came only from the fact that the human beings did not bother to apply the same strength of mind, which they had applied to the beneficial external progress, to the improvement of the destinies of those persons who are needed for the transformation of this progress.

Whatever you have studied in the external life, study the laws of the human living together equally busily! If, however, human beings live together, not only bodies, but also souls, minds live together. Hence, only spiritual science can be the basis of any social worldview. Thus, we see that, indeed, the deepening of the mind can enable us to assist from our low posts within our sphere in the big social progress. For this progress is not achieved by an abstract rule, but it is a sum of that which the single soul does. Only a worldview like spiritual science approaches the single soul in such a way that it really raises this soul above it. If our social misery has its reason in the personal self-interest, in the position in our social orders, then only a worldview can help which raises the ego out of the personal self-interest. As peculiar as it appears, food originates not only from our work; food originates also from the spiritual-scientific deepening instead of need, grief, and misery. Spiritual science is a means to give the human being food and prosperity, in the true sense of the word.

Thus, it is really justified, even concerning our changed conditions, what Goethe said about the real liberation from all obstacles and misfortune of life. Goethe says in the poem The Secrets: “From the power that ties all beings that human being frees himself who overcomes himself.”

That sentence that Goethe said about the single human being also applies to humanity in as much as this human being is a social being: those human beings who overcome themselves free the world from the power that ties all beings.

We will now go on to consider the children of whom we had not time to speak yesterday.

There was a little girl of ten years old, who was suffering from loss of memory. She is only in the Second Class at school (where the children would be mostly about seven years old.) She has adenoids. The symptom is connected with an excess of etheric powers of growth in the region of the bladder, which condition is then reflected in the head. Thus we have here a case where the physical origin of the trouble is immediately patent. The girl is ten years old—that is to say, she is at the age when, as I have repeatedly pointed out, it is particularly important that the teacher shall have made the right relationship with the child.

The child herself has of course, so to speak, slept through the antecedent facts and processes that have led up to the present moment. The inflamed condition that shows itself in the neighbourhood of the bladder and has its reflection in the upper part of the organism is clear evidence of the fact that the ether body is not properly at home in the organism—the reason being that its co-operation with the astral body is not able to come about as it should. You must never lose sight of the fact that where a process of this kind occurs, which finds expression in the soul organism, then its source and origin has to be sought in the subtler, finer organisation of the body; for the coarser, cruder organisation cannot put us on the right track in our search. An irregularity in the higher organisation of man is, naturally, more easily noticed than in the lower organisation. In this child, owing to a defective astral body, the ether body does not function properly, with the result that what the child receives by way of impressions fails to penetrate into the organisation. What we have to do, therefore, if we are to help such a child, is to strengthen as much as ever possible the impressions we intend her to receive; in all our work with her, we must see to it that strong impressions are brought to bear on the child.

For consider how it is with memory. Memory is dependent on a right and proper organic relation between physical body and ether body; astral body and I have no part in the retention of impressions in memory. As you know very well, dreams make their appearance only when astral body and ego have begun to enter into the physical and ether body, not before. As far as astral body and ego are concerned, everything is forgotten between the times of falling asleep and awakening. The impressions are left lying in the part of the human being that remains in bed. But when, as in the child we are considering, this part is not properly organised, then what is left there of the impression of the day does not succeed in embodying itself into it. Our first task will be therefore to induce strong impressions, in order to bring it about that the higher organisation—I and astral body—shall be roused to an energetic activity within the lower organisation—ether body and physical body.

I do not know whether the experiment has yet been made of testing the little girl's memory for simple folk-melodies? (Frl. Dr. K.: “She finds that easier.”) So the capacity for receiving impressions of this nature is, you see, present. Starting from it, we should now try to work on further. We should, for example, take with the child little poems where a refrain is repeated—say, after every three lines. She will in this way receive a powerful impression of rhythm; and then later on, the moment will come when we can approach her with impressions that are without rhythm. Do not imagine that any substantial success can be looked for under three or four years—that is, not before puberty. Working on these lines, we must first reach the point where rhythmical impressions are able to act upon the child, and then go on to non rhythmical impressions. In this way we shall be able to achieve something in the educational sense. The therapy we have already indicated; the girl should have compresses with Berberis vulgaris 10 per cent, and Curative Eurythmy: L—M:S—U.

Note that an inner perception underlies the giving of these particular sounds in Curative Eurythmy. The formative, moulding influence will enter right into the mobile astral body. Then the M, as I have told you, is the sound that places the whole organism into the out-breathing, and so the astral organisation will there meet the etheric. With S, the aim is to bring the astral body into powerful and living activity—but it must be an activity that is restrained, held in check; and for this purpose the U is added. These are the measures that suggested themselves when we had the child immediately before us; here we are simply recalling them. Compresses of Berberis vulgaris are prescribed because the causes of inflammation require to be neutralised, and can be by this means.

And then we had a sixteen-year-old boy, a kleptomaniac of the very same type as the little fellow who was brought before you a few days ago, and in whom you could see a perfect example of kleptomania. Your boy at Lauenstein will have to be treated on exactly the same lines. You will need however to watch whether the impressions you bring to him link up with this or that. The results of our work with kleptomaniacs can differ quite considerably according to the education the children have already received.^E6

And now we must go on to speak of the child who is so restless and fidgety. A sleepy, backward little boy, who has not learned to speak and is behind-hand with all the education he should have received in the first epoch of life. You can see at once what is lacking; the child has entirely failed to get hold of the principle of imitation, he has never attempted to imitate. This means, in other words, that his I and astral body are incapable of bringing his organs into movement. He is a most lovable little fellow, but it is extraordinarily difficult for him to overcome the longing that he has in his physical body for rest and quiet. The first thing to be done is to give him Tone Eurythmy. That will be the way to help him on. (You will understand, I can do no more here than indicate the ideal.) If the boy does Tone Eurythmy properly, it can come about that he is so stirred and stimulated in his astral body that the rhythm begins to take hold also of the ether body.

Another thing you must do is to let him repeat after you rhythmical sentences, so that he plunges, as it were, right into sound as such. Take, for instance, the line: “Und es woget und woget und brauset und zischt.” [From Schiller's Der Taucher.] You must go through the sentence with the child rather slowly (you will discover for yourselves what is just the right pace), first forwards and then backwards. (For this particular case, I purposely say “woget” instead of “siedet”, since we are here using the line with a therapeutical end in view.) Go on doing this again and again, forwards and backwards. Wherever possible, the same method should also be followed with a sequence of vowels. In this way we can awaken the child, inwardly. Surprise, amazement, begin to rise up in him, as we get him to intone A (ah), then E (eh), I (ee); and then backwards, I, E, A; then again, A, E, I, and so on. The child gradually wakes up, and, despite all difficulties, the principle of imitation will begin at last to work. It will be necessary to take the child by himself, and to see to it that imitation has its place in everything you do with him; always stop after a few moments and get him to intone after you.

And then, in addition, some therapeutical treatment will be needed; and here you will have to ensure that two opposite influences work together. First, you must provide a dispersing influence that works centrifugally and drives the substantiality of the organism to the circumference. Hypophysis always works in this way. For the child we are considering, hypophysis must not however be used just in the way we use it for rickety children in whom we definitely want to induce dispersal. Here we have to call into action at the same time the opposite principle that works centripetally. You will accordingly need to find something which will have, while working together with hypophysis, the tendency to build up the human organism out of substance. Both Carbo Vegetabilis and Carbo Animalis are able to do this. You could therefore use Carbo Animalis, alternating it with the hypophysis. The Carbo Animalis will supply the form principle, and then in the hypophysis cerebri you will have the organising principle that tends to encourage organic growth.

One of the most important things to bear in mind, when you are starting a Home for Curative Education, is the necessity for constant observation. Each single person who is helping in the work must observe everything he or she takes in hand to do with the children. And it should really be so that we accompany—and in that way strengthen—all that we do with a certain inner trust and confidence.

In the case of this child, our worst trouble will be, not with the boy himself—you will soon be able to notice progress in him—but with the parents. The mother is firmly convinced it is for us to do wonders with him, and that quickly. I have heard that she even wants to come with the child. (One of the teachers interposed: “She is only bringing him to us.”) That is better, it is a relief to hear that you will not have the mother there with you. But with a child of this kind, it will, in any case, be imperative to hold your own—even with a certain obstinacy—in face of the demands and expectations of the parents. These demands are perfectly understandable, but sometimes terribly foolish and unwise. The parents of such a child do not, and cannot, know what is right and necessary for him.

Now it will be very good if you can bring such a child even physically also into the alternating conditions that can be induced by means of the A E I, I E A, etc. I will tell you an excellent way of doing this. First, put the child into a bath of moderately warm water, and then, comparatively quickly, give him instead a douche, also of a moderate temperature. You will by this means call to life that which needs to be roused to life and activity. As a matter of fact, wherever an abnormality expresses itself in laziness and inertia, this measure cannot fail to have good effect, so long as we are careful not to overdo it. Do not be anxious if, immediately after a bath treatment of this kind has been begun, the children get rather excited. That will pass. You will see, a reaction will come, and a more balanced condition gradually establish itself.

And now we must pass on to another boy who sees everything in colours. He is the boy, you remember, who never has any money! I can see him there before me as I speak. The fundamental fact about this child is that he is incapable of making the right approach to the external world; he remains rooted in himself. In order to render this phenomenon intelligible, I shall have to explain it for you in plastic terms. The boy cannot make his way out into the external world; consequently his I organisation is perpetually pushing at his astral body from within. This gives rise to an inner clumsiness—better expressed, an inner slovenliness. But along with this, in connection with the continual pressure on the astral body, there develops also a delicate sensitiveness; so that the boy has really something gentle and noble about him. And that goes together with the seeing in colour. He sees colours because he is able to be awake in his astral body.

Now, we cannot begin to do anything in the way of education for this boy until we have a clear perception of a state of affairs that is developing in him all the time in increasing measure—namely, a certain dim hankering after ideals, but at the same time a starting-back, a flinching from the world as from something he cannot get on with. The boy can be taught entirely on the lines of Waldorf School education, but everything will depend in his case on how you yourself feel and behave towards him; you must preserve all the time a natural trust and confidence in him. There is really hardly anything more than this to be said.

Take for example, writing. The boy writes something like this, does he not? Now it will be for you to set to work and take the utmost care and pains that he shall gradually change his handwriting and develop it into a finely formed script. And you will find that while he is doing this, there will be clear signs also of a transformation taking place in his whole inner constitution. When he shows a tendency to boast and talk big, then you must at once, on the basis of the trust he has learned to place in you, contrive some means to make his boasting ridiculous.^E7

I was speaking to you yesterday about the albinos, and I came to the point where I said we need to find the cosmic impulse that can have influence in such cases. Let us now first ask our expert on cosmic constellations whether she has noticed anything special in these or other horoscopes that albinos have in common. (To Dr. Vreede) Did you notice that among the outer planets, Uranus and Neptune were particularly prominent? (Dr. Vreede replied: “Yes, there are many such aspects. Apart from that, I should not have anything special to say about them.”) I address my question purposely to you, because you are frequently engaged in the contemplation of horoscopes and have probably often had such things in your mind. Up to now, I have from you only these two that we are considering. We are here treading new ground, and it will be best if we go forward entirely in the spirit of discovery. A great many factors in the case might well claim consideration, but I would like us to give our attention for the moment to the following.

Consider the human being. We divide him into certain members. In accordance with that memberment which arranges the whole nature and being of man rather from the etheric principle, we divide him, as you know, into physical body, etheric body, sentient body, which last we then bring into relation with sentient soul; after that we have intellectual or mind soul (which the Greeks call soul of force or power), and consciousness or spiritual soul. And then we come to spirit-self, life-spirit and spirit-man. And all these several members reveal themselves to us as forming together a single, relatively independent whole; taken all together, they compose man. But now, the way in which the members are put together to compose man, differs in each single human being. One person will have a little more power and strength in his ether body, and correspondingly less in his physical body; another a little more power in the consciousness soul; and so on. And right in the midst of all these members stands man in his very own individuality, which individuality goes through repeated earth lives and has the task of bringing under control this whole connection of various members, has the task of uniting them, on the principle of freedom, under one individual ordering.

And now let us see how that which comes to man from cosmic realms unites itself with these several members. The influence of the Sun, which works strongly on man as a whole, works strongest of all on the physical body. In connection with the etheric body we find that the strongest influences come from the Moon; in connection with the sentient body it is the influences of Mercury that work with special strength; and in the sentient soul we have the strongest influences of Venus. The strongest influences of Mars serve to help the development of the intellectual or mind soul, and of Jupiter the consciousness or spiritual soul, whilst Saturn brings its influences to bear especially on the spirit self. And the members that have not yet developed in man find their support in Uranus and Neptune—the vagrants, so to speak, among the planets, who attached themselves at a later time to our planetary system. In Uranus and Neptune therefore we shall expect to find planetary influences which, under normal conditions, exert no very strong influence upon the constellation at birth.

You know of course, from other anthroposophical lectures how strong is the influence of the Moon on man, via the ether body. I need not remind you of how the Moon is connected with the whole principle of heredity, of how it impresses all manner of forces and powers into the model of the physical body, which comes from the parents. Beginning with the earliest embryonic development, this Moon influence determines the whole direction that development shall take in the child.

Now it is possible for a constellation to occur where the impulse from the Moon is sufficiently strong for the human being descending to Earth to receive by way of heredity a disposition to be drawn down into the metabolic organisation. Or again, it can also happen that the Moon influences are to some extent wrested away, turned aside, whilst influences that come from quite another quarter and that refuse to tolerate the Moon influences, namely Uranus and Neptune, attract what should really be in the sphere of the Moon's influence: Other constellations are also possible. But in the case of the children we are considering, the latter is the constellation that we find; and we have here a clear instance of how by looking at what the horoscope shows we can see what is really the matter.

Take first this horoscope (of the elder sister). It will probably have struck you that you find here in this region, Uranus together with Venus and Mars. You will not really need to carry your considerations any further than this triangle. Here then are Mars, Venus and Uranus. Consider first Mars. For this child, who was born in 1909, Mars stands in complete opposition to the Moon. Mars, which has Venus and Uranus in its vicinity, stands—itself—in strong opposition to the Moon. Here is the Moon and here is Mars. And Mars pulls along with it Uranus and Venus.

And now I would ask you to pay careful attention also to the fact that the Moon is at the same time standing before Libra. This means, the Moon has comparatively little support from the Zodiac, it wavers and hesitates, it is even something of a weakling in this hour; and its influence is still further reduced through the fact that Mars (which pulls along with it the Luciferic influence) stands in opposition to it.

Now let us turn to the horoscope of the young child. Again, here are Venus and Uranus and Mars near together, the three of them covering between them no more than this section of the heavens. So you see, once again these three are found near to each other. In the case of the elder girl we saw that they were standing in opposition to the Moon, which was at the time standing in Libra. On this second horoscope, Mars, Venus and Uranus are in close proximity, exactly as before; but when we examine more nearly the position of Mars, we find it is not, as before, in complete opposition to the Moon. It is however very nearly so. Although the younger child does not come in for a complete opposition, there is an approximation to opposition.

But what strikes us as still more remarkable is that when we come to make our observation of the Moon, we discover she is again in Libra—while being at the same time, as we have seen, almost in opposition to Mars, which latter drags Uranus and Venus along with it. We have therefore again a background of Libra. I am not saying that it must have been so; we have, you see, no properly authorised records of the births. On the first horoscope the Moon is in Libra, and here on the second too. (Dr. Vreede said: “It is curious that in both there is also the same constellation between Moon and Neptune.”) That would have to be explained on its own account. Horoscopes require to be interpreted quite individually. It is not a matter for surprise that there is this similarity in the two horoscopes, considering that the girls are sisters. That we find in the elder child a stronger opposition than in the younger (who has been influenced by the elder) is also no cause for astonishment. What is important for us is that we find here a constellation that is perfectly intelligible, a constellation that, when interpreted, shows us the following.

Mars, who is the bearer of iron, makes himself independent of the principle of propagation—independent, that is, of the Moon. He brings away from its true mission that which comes to man through the Venus principle and is connected with love. Mars tears this out of its true path of action, does not allow it to be in connection with generation, nor afterwards with growth; with the result that that which rightly stands in connection with the growth forces and should live in the lower part of the body, presses up into the head organisation. Consequently we find that in the growth process that takes place within the child iron will be lacking, whereas everything that tends to be in conflict with iron, notably sulphur, will be present to excess.

We have therefore here to do with an extraordinarily strong predestination of the will, and our first concern must be to see that we treat the nerves-and-senses organisation of these two children with the utmost care and delicacy. Their nerves-and-senses organisation is, as a whole, slippery and unstable, unable to endure strong impressions; and we must be ready at every moment with the right thing to do, we must sense it in our finger-tips! A fine feeling and tact is needed in all one's dealings with the nerves-and-senses organisation of children of this kind; especially must we avoid straining the eyes in reading and such-like occupations. Try to impart your teaching without requiring the use of the eyes at all—I mean, without any reading. On the other hand, accustom the eyes to colour impressions where the colours shade off gently into one another. For instance, let the colours of the rainbow pass over from one into another, slowly, the child following all the time with her gaze. There you have, you see, measures that will be quite easy to carry out.

If you are also to treat the children therapeutically, there is just one thing I must tell you, and that is, that after puberty the remedies will no longer be very effective. And that can be an important indication for you, since the one child was born in 1909, and the other in I921; the effects of treatment can in their case be thoroughly observed and the difference noted.

What we want to do for a child of this kind is to introduce powerful radiations of iron, letting them stream up from the metabolism-and-limbs organisation. The way to bring this about is to take pyrites in very fine powder form and lay it on a surface that transmits iron radiations only very slightly. A glass surface would fulfil this condition, but naturally you cannot use glass. So you must try using a clean grease-saturated paper; best of all would be a very thin parchment-like paper, but it must be really thin so that it clings to the body. Ordinary paper that is made from linen rags is no good. You must rub resin or something of that sort over the paper and sift the pyrites powder finely on to it. By this means you can bring the iron radiation to enter right into the child. Lay the paper all along the legs and on the shoulder-blades, and then try the application of a “drawing” compress—say, of cochlearia—on the forehead.

If this treatment be applied to the organism at the time when the change of teeth is taking place—a time when particularly powerful streamings and counter-streamings (or radiations) are going on—much can be done towards overcoming the instability.

Such is then the result of our investigations so far. The problem must of course be the subject of further study. Up to now, the world has done nothing with albinos except expose them for show, getting them to tell their tale: “I am rather fat, I have white hair, I can see nothing by day, I can see better at night.” This is the kind of thing that actually goes on with albinos today, and there is on the whole very little knowledge about them; for the scientists of our day do not concern themselves with problems of this nature. But directly we turn our attention to striking facts such as those I have been putting before you here we begin to see how strongly the cosmic influence is working, wherever this complete irregularity is present in the mutual disposition of the members of the human being.

And now I should like you to bring forward any questions you are wanting to ask.

(Question: “That we find ourselves in the situation of having questions to ask has come about through Dr. L. approaching Frau Dr. Wegman on quite other grounds. He was of opinion that the mood of those attending the lectures was not as it should be.”)

It is surely quite unnecessary that we should waste time discussing what is after all a simple matter. Dr. L. came to me and explained that there was a deep feeling among the Lauenstein members of the importance of the task they were undertaking; they felt they were about to embark upon what would prove to be a new mission within the Anthroposophical Movement, and it would surely be good if the karmic connections between those who are engaging in the work could be thoroughly explained and understood. (l. shakes his head.) Well, anyway, let us concentrate our attention on the main point. What L. said amounted to this: The Lauenstein members believe that they have now set out upon a task that is entirely new and of fundamental importance; to which I replied that in that case what they will need before all else will be sincerely and faithfully to learn what is being given in this course. If it should prove that anyone is not satisfied with what is being given in this course of lectures and would rather remain in the realm of abstractions, would rather set to work, for example, to organise a completely new movement, then all I can say is that such an attitude would be no more than the natural result of practices that have been followed only too long among our members. Anyone taking such a path would find himself in danger of megalomania. Nevertheless, in order that the partly justified feelings in the background may have ample opportunity to find expression, I have asked you to put your questions. And so now our best plan will be to ask and consider together quite practical questions.

(S. asks, what connection has the Lauenstein Home with the fact that Trüper [Johannes Trüper, 1855-1921, Founder and for many years Leader of the Youth Sanatorium in Jena.] was the first to undertake the education of backward children.)

What do you mean? That Trüper was the first to concern himself with these children and do something for them? You are attaching too much importance to the work of this man. I do not think that the Educational Homes for backward children which were started in Hanover—very early, comparatively speaking, and not without success—can have been influenced by Trüper. In point of fact, the first step in this direction dates much farther back. But what has been lacking all along is just the very thing that can enable one to look right into the whole being of the child. For we have really no means of discovering the simplest facts without the help of anthroposophical knowledge. And the converse is no less true, that the human beings themselves are constantly affording us new and deeper insight into Anthroposophy.

Consider how it is, for instance, with regard to Goethe's Theory of Metamorphosis. In the form it was able to develop under Goethe himself, who was after all a clever man, it appears to us today, does it not, as an abstract theory? It abounds in statements and premises, but has to be content with showing how the leaf lives in the blossom, how a petal changes into a stamen, etc.—treating, that is, of no more than an elementary metamorphosis. When it goes on to speak of animal and man, all that the theory can do is to adduce—rather shyly—the transformation of the vertebrae into the bones of the skull. In no realm of nature does it get beyond the elementary stage. I myself was amazed and perplexed. Did it never dawn upon Goethe—so I kept asking myself all through the eighties—that the whole brain is a transformation of one single ganglion? Spiritually, I could see that it was so; it had dawned upon him. Then, later on, I made a discovery, which showed that it was only Goethe's discreet reserve which had restrained him all the time from giving expression to the truth he clearly perceived. When I came to Weimar, I found in a little note-book—which was written all in pencil—this note: The brain is a transformed main ganglion. It was not until the nineties of last century that that sentence of Goethe's found its way, through me, into print. Suddenly it was as though a new author made his appearance; Goethe became thenceforward the most fruitful of authors.

But now consider what a long way it is from the Theory of Metamorphosis as taught by Goethe to the Theory of Metamorphosis as demonstrated in the one-year-old little child who was lying there before you a few days ago—normal in other respects, but metamorphosed into a giant embryo. That was an instance of a metamorphosis of retardation, where the embryonic condition was retained after birth. And you will yourselves come to acquire a true insight into this kind of metamorphosis if you continue to practise again and again the meditation I gave you yesterday, when I told you: Here is a circle, here is a point; there the circle is a point, there the point of a circle, and so (see Figure 3.). Over and over again you must, in meditation, let the circle steal into the point, let the point expand to the circle. As you do this, you will find that something reveals itself to you, namely, how the metabolism-and-limbs organisation comes into being out of the head organisation. Continue with the meditation until, when you say to yourself: The point is a point, the circle is a circle, you are sensible of the head; and when you say to yourself: The point is a circle, the circle is a point—when, that is, you assert the converse—you discover that you are gliding right down into the metabolic system. You will then have before you the developed Theory of Metamorphosis, and you will see quite clearly that it is only through this kind of thinking that we can ever hope to attain insight into the nature of the defects in backward children. And this is what we have been attempting in these lectures.

Search for the impulses that are already there in the place where you are beginning your work; find what impulses are there that can inspire you with enthusiasm and so make for a continuity. Ask yourselves the question: What antecedents are there here which we can link onto?

Now, as you know, a remarkable historical figure is associated with Jena. Once, long ago, the German Abbot Hildebrand, feeling within him—exactly as do the youth of today—great gifts and capacities, moved too, as they also are, by religious and spiritual impulses (but in his case the spiritual was methodically conceived), went to Rome, became Pope Gregory VII, and strongly influenced the direction given from Rome to the course of affairs in European history. We have thus a powerful Roman impulse, spreading its activity out over Europe, mediated through an impulse that derives from the order of Cluny and has been transplanted into the Roman stream. You should study that passage of history. For the remarkable thing is that in his next life on Earth this individuality is drawn to Jena and appears there as Ernst Haeckel. The development is really just the same as happens in the human being when the disintegrating principle inserts itself, dovetails itself, in a regular manner into the upbuilding principle. So you have here in Jena a centre for currents of influence that are in direct and explicit opposition to the current of Roman activity. Jena is the meeting place of opposite streams.

Haeckel made a speech in Jena on his sixtieth birthday. He was speaking on that occasion at the Phylogenetic Institute. Listening to him, one could really have the feeling that the old Hildebrand was standing there before one. The same manner of expression, the very same kind of delivery—speaking slowly, with a good deal of “padding”, weighing the words carefully, like someone who has done quite a lot of speaking and yet never made himself quite master of the art. Another curious thing could be noticed. Abbot Hildebrand, who had of course always very much the air of being a strict Pope—he would stand there before you as the very mouthpiece of the Church—had, at the same time, this trait in his character: he was fond of relating stories that made the rest of the company smile—not overmuch, but with pleasure and enjoyment. And now with Haeckel, it was really quite delightful to watch how he would sometimes at dinner between the courses fall into the mood of telling funny anecdotes out of his own life, and loosening in this way the tongues of the rest of the company. This sixty-year-old man with his childlike smile would lead the others on, and by his whole manner and behaviour bring them right away from the subject in hand. I can still remember how amusing it was to see Oskar Hertwig sitting there in travail with his speech that could not be brought to birth, while Haeckel went on and on with one funny story after another.

You would, I believe, find yourselves well repaid if, now that I have laid for you this esoteric foundation, you were to get hold of this speech that Haeckel made on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. It is not long, but remarkable for being personal and at the same time extraordinarily objective. And then compare with it the speech delivered by Prof. Gärtner, who invariably manifested a disinclination to see in Haeckel a person of any particular historical significance. Indeed, he expressly states in his speech that this time he will leave out of account that Haeckel is the author of the “History of the Creation” and concentrate attention on the vast number of microscope slides that Haeckel has made; for we shall find, he says, that Haeckel has made more slides than all the rest of us put together—a most remarkable fact; actually the rest of us have made so few, that taken all together ours fail to reach the number made by Haeckel alone. A pedant, a regular pedant, this Gärtner! Really quite absurd! In Haeckel's speech you have something so alive, so quick with fresh, new life! Then the scaffold is brought in, and Gärtner comes forward and performs the execution, while the physiologist (a Catholic clerk in holy orders!) looks sadly on.^E8

But what a power Haeckel was amid all that company! What a rejuvenating influence he had upon them! Even the young students grew suddenly brilliantly clever, and showed quite remarkable powers of imagination. Look up the little book where all the songs are recorded which were sung that day. You will find a most witty account of how an archaeopteryx sharpened his bill on a church steeple. That book of songs will enable you to form some picture of the fresh young life that suddenly blossomed forth in Jena on that day.

This event too I would commend for your meditation. By entering meditatively into the event, you will come to have an intimate experience of the place occupied by Jena in the spiritual evolution of Europe.

• E6. At Lauenstein, Dr. Steiner said that the pathological symptoms which reveal themselves in this boy are due to some suffering he underwent in his previous incarnation. He had perhaps been alone for a long time—stranded maybe from a shipwreck and forced to spend long and tedious days in solitude. This experience was then transformed and shows itself today as weakness of the ego.
  
  For treatment, the boy should have sugar injections D 6, seven injections in fourteen days. Afterwards he should be sponged with starchy water, this treatment also to be continued for fourteen days. The body will have to change the starch into sugar, and that will provide another means of stimulating the ego.
  
  Dr. Steiner's advice for the education of the boy was as follows: He must keep a diary, recording all that he has done right through the day. That will strengthen his I. He should have stories told him with pedagogical purpose in them, stories in which it turns out that people who steal get the worst of it. The magpie is always thieving, and in consequence the other birds will have nothing to do with it. Then, the boy should be taught some practical job. He should learn how boots are made. “He could make boots for your whole family!” He could also learn gardening. And he should be encouraged to solve all manner of little practical problems. For example, how the door of a train might be so constructed that as soon as someone got on to the step, the door would open (and afterwards close again) automatically—and other things of that kind.
• E7. In reference to this boy, Dr. Steiner spoke of a “dwarfed or stunted pituitary body.”
  
  Therapy: Injections of hypophysis (pituitary body) and treatment with arsenic, as indicated in the lecture.
  
  Curative Eurythmy: L, M, S, R.
  
  Note 8.
• E8. The title of this booklet is Lieder zum Commers in Jena am 17 Februar 1894. The verse referred to, from the song 'Zoologischer Jubelgruss' by Edwin Bormann is as follows:
  
  Staunet nicht, O Festkumpane,
  Wenn ein Archaeopt'ryx jetzt
  Eben an der Rathausfahne
  Seinen werthen Schnabel wetzt;
  Wer heut' heimwärts sucht die Pfade
  Geh' voll Fürsicht Schritt für Schritt,
  Dass er auf der Promenade
  Nicht'nen Plesiosaurus tritt. :' :
  
  An English equivalent might read:
  
  On your homeward way, good people,
  Should you chance to find a sleek
  Pterodactyl, on the steeple
  Whetting of his noble beak,
  Do not be surprised or flustered,
  But turn the corner with some care,
  For you'll very, very likely
  Find a Dinosauros there.

At the beginning of this lecture Dr. Steiner emphasised that those relatively new to the study of Spiritual Science would find many things difficult to understand. He added that unless the necessary efforts were made by these recent Members to master the elementary principles of Spiritual Science, erroneous ideas would be inevitable.

My book Christianity as Mystical Fact will have made it clear to all of you that if the Gospels are to be rightly understood, they must be regarded as treatises of Initiation. This means that in essence they are adaptations of rites and rituals of Initiation. Scripts of this nature indicated the path along which the candidate was led step by step to the higher worlds, how he must undergo certain experiences and awaken forces slumbering in his soul, how each higher stage was related to the one below, until at the stage of Initiation itself the spiritual world penetrated into his soul and revealed its mysteries. At this stage he gazed into the spiritual worlds and a vista of the Beings of the Hierarchies lay open before him. The content of these Initiation-scripts, then, was a description of the experiences which every candidate for Initiation had to undergo.

In pre-Christian times many human beings were initiated in the different centres of the Mysteries. Generally speaking the process was the same, although there were variations in details. The candidates were led stage by stage to the point where they were able to gaze into the spiritual world and the Beings of the Hierarchies were before them as spiritual—not physical—realities. That is what happened in pre-Christian times. But what did Christianity, what did the Christ Impulse signify for those who had been initiated in the ancient Mysteries? It signified that a Being, known in the physical world as Jesus of Nazareth, had revealed the secrets of the spiritual world in a new way, not in the way that had been customary in the pre-Christian Mysteries. A man who had been initiated according to the ancient rites was able to speak to others about the secrets of the spiritual worlds. But the Christ Event meant that something had come to pass whereby without having traversed the usual paths, Jesus of Nazareth was able to speak of these secrets through what happened at the Baptism in Jordan, when the Christ Being entered into him. From the moment when in an event of supreme historical significance, Jesus of Nazareth was thus initiated, the Christ Spirit spoke to those around Him of the secrets of the spiritual worlds. Christ made manifest on the physical plane, for all the world to see, something that in former times could be attained only in the secrecy of the Mysteries by those who were to be initiated: they could then go forth and speak to their fellow-men of the secrets of the spiritual worlds. We can imagine ourselves looking into sanctuaries of the ancient Mysteries and seeing how the aspirants were initiated by the Hierophants and were then able to look into the spiritual worlds and go forth to teach of them. All the rites of Initiation took place in the deepest secrecy of the temples; and outside the Mysteries there was no possibility of speaking at first hand about the spiritual worlds. But now, what had been enacted time and time again in the secrecy of the Mysteries was brought into the open in Palestine, presented there as an historical event, as the story of Jesus of Nazareth, which culminated in an Initiation of supreme significance in world-history. This was the Mystery of Golgotha. The supreme Mystery enacted as an historic fact before the eyes of all the world—this is how we must picture the connection of the Mystery of Golgotha with the Mysteries of pre-Christian times.

Now the directives for Initiation, although concerned in essentials with the same stages, differed in details among the peoples living in different parts of the Earth and these directives were adapted to the nature of the individuals living in different places at different times. Let us think of the soul of one of those generally called the Evangelists who participated in the writing of our Gospels. From their own occult training such men had some knowledge of the directives for Initiation among various peoples and in various Mysteries. They knew what experiences a man must undergo before he could proclaim the secrets of the spiritual worlds and of the Hierarchies. And now, through the events in Palestine and the Mystery of Golgotha, they had been made aware that what could previously be witnessed only by those who had attained Initiation in the Mysteries, had taken place openly on the stage of world-history and would enter more and more deeply into the hearts and souls of all men.

The Evangelists were not biographers in our sense of the word. They did not include in their writings details of no significance to the world which it is quite unnecessary for anyone to know. They were not the kind of biographers who ferret out every detail of a man's private affairs. They described the life of Christ by saying that in Jesus of Nazareth, in whom the Christ was present, something happened which had been witnessed again and again in the Mysteries but never as an historic event, concentrated into a few years. It was now an historic reality, yet it was a repetition of the temple-rituals.—The life of Jesus could therefore have been described by specifying the stages passed through in other circumstances during the process of Initiation.

The directives for Initiation in the ancient Mysteries are found again in the Gospels and indications are given there of the reason why what had formerly taken place in the deep secrecy of the temples had now been transferred to the great arena of world-history. And it is the writer of St. Mark's Gospel who, at the outset, states why he is in a position to write of an historic event which in fact fulfils a rule of Initiation though enacted on an infinitely greater scale. From the beginning he speaks of how humanity has developed in such a way that this great event might come to pass and Initiation might be transferred from the secrecy of the temple-sanctuaries to the arena of history. He proclaims that this is connected with an event foretold by the Hebrew prophets. For the Mystery of Golgotha had been foreseen and foretold by the true Initiates, among whom the Hebrew prophets may, in a certain sense, be included.

If we try to penetrate into the soul of a man such as the prophet Isaiah, the meaning of the words at the beginning of St. Mark's Gospel is approximately this: that a time will come when the souls of men will not be as they are at present. This time is already now being prepared for.—This was Isaiah's view in his own day. What did he really mean? The deeply impressive words of this prophet with which St. Mark's Gospel begins, are, as you know, usually rendered:

‘Behold, I send my messenger before thy face which shall prepare thy way before thee. The voice of one crying in the wilderness. Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.'¹

In these words the prophet Isaiah points to the greatest event in all world-history—the Mystery of Golgotha in Palestine. You know what trouble we have had when studying the other Gospels to make the most important passages to some extent intelligible in translation. What really matters is to render the turns of phrases in a way that will convey the profound meaning of the original language. The words should not merely lend themselves to theoretical interpretation but be able to arouse feelings similar to those aroused in men who understood the inherent character of the language in current use. Language at that time was not as abstract, dry and prosaic as it has now become. Its character as the means of verbal expression was such that in addition to the usual meaning of the words spoken the hearer was always aware of a richer significance and fullness of content and knew precisely what that content indicated. At that time a whole world of meaning was heard in the words. The ancient Hebrew language was particularly rich in this respect, even when the picture used was drawn from the realm of the senses. Phrases such as ‘prepare the way’ or ‘make his paths straight’ are pictures derived entirely from the sense-world—as if a way, or a path, were being prepared with spades and shovels. But it was a peculiar feature of Hebrew—a language of outstanding grandeur among the others—that behind these expressions which were applied to outer things, spiritual worlds could be apprehended with great exactness. Fanciful interpretations were unheard of and the procedure was unlike that adopted by our modern scholars when they read all sorts of implications into the works of poets. Arbitrary interpolations were quite impossible. This was partly because in the ancient Hebrew language the vowels were not marked in the script, and by varying them, world-secrets could be revealed in the sounds themselves. In those days men had a true feeling for all this.

In Greek—the language of the Gospel texts—this was no longer the case to the same extent. All the same, far better renderings than those produced by most translators of the Gospels would have been possible, even without occult knowledge. What has happened is that for the most part one translator has just copied another without any searching philological study of the passages in the Greek texts. Later on I will give you definite examples of errors that have been made. I do not want to interrupt our study to-day and will try, not on a philological basis but with the help of knowledge derived from spiritual-scientific investigations, to clarify the most significant passage occurring at the beginning of the Gospel of St. Mark. The following is a prophecy of Isaiah, showing what the event of Palestine was to mean.

The Greek text is as follows:

(Idou egō apostellō ton angelon mou pro prosōpou sou, hos kataskeuasei tēn hodon sou emprosthen sou,
Phōnē boōntos en tē erēmō: Hetoimasate tēn hodon Kyriou, eutheiās poieite tās tribous autou.)²

It is essential to realise from the beginning that the word Angelos (‘angel’ or ‘messenger’) was used in those ancient times only in the sense in which we use it when, in speaking of the Hierarchies, we are referring to the Beings of the hierarchical rank immediately above man. When the words τόѵ ἂγγελόѵ occur, we must realise that a Being of this rank is meant; otherwise the whole sense of the passage will be lost. Spiritual Science alone can provide the basis for understanding such a passage. But once understood it can be a foundation for what occultism has to say about the Christ-event. What is the fundamental significance of the Christ Impulse? We have expressed it as follows.—Through the Christ Impulse the human soul became conscious for the first time that an Ego, an ‘I’, was to find a place within it, a self-conscious ‘I’ through which in the further course of Earth-evolution there must be revealed all the secrets formerly revealed by the astral body through natural clairvoyance.

In the epoch of post-Atlantean culture preceding our own, men were still endowed, to some extent, with faculties of clairvoyance which enabled them to see into the spiritual world. In certain abnormal conditions of soul the secrets of the spiritual world streamed into them and they were able to gaze into the realms of the Hierarchies. Vision of the Hierarchy of the Angels persisted the longest and was the most frequent. The Angels were known as Beings belonging to the rank immediately above man. In the times of ancient clairvoyance men were not aware that they themselves possessed a faculty capable of leading them into the spiritual worlds; they regarded this possibility as a grace vouchsafed to them from without, as the implanting of spiritual powers in their souls. Hence the Prophets could point to the future, saying: “The time will come when man will be conscious of his ‘I’ and know that it is by the self-conscious ‘I’ that the secrets of the spiritual worlds will be unveiled. Man will be able to say: I penetrate into the secrets of the spiritual world through the power of the ‘I’ within me.”

But preparation was necessary before this stage could be reached. As the lowest rank of the Hierarchies, man had to be prepared by being sent an example of what he must become. The ‘Messenger’ or ‘Angel’ was to proclaim to man that he was to become an ‘I’ in the full sense of the word. And whereas the mission of earlier Angels had been to reveal the spiritual world, it was now the mission of a particular Angel to carry the revelations to a further stage, to make known to man that he was to enter into full possession of the Ego, the ‘I’. The earlier revelations were of a different character, not intended for a self-conscious ‘I’.

Isaiah proclaimed that the time of the mystery of the ‘I’ was to come and that from the host of the Angels one would be deputed to announce this.—Only in this sense can we understand what is meant when it is said that the Angel, the Messenger, was ‘sent before’—that is to say, sent before man who was to become a self-conscious ‘I’. The one who had been ‘sent before’ was to come as a Being of the Hierarchy of Angels. No Angel had yet spoken to man as a self-conscious ‘I’. So this messenger of whom the prophet Isaiah speaks is to make men aware that they must prepare to make a place in their souls for the ‘I’, the fully independent ‘I’. This passage therefore draws attention to a great revolution in the development of the human soul: whereas hitherto men had always to go out of their bodies in order to reach the spiritual world, henceforward they would be able to remain within their own ‘I’ and draw forth from the ‘I’ itself the secrets of that world.

Let us compare a soul of remote antiquity with a soul living near the time of Christ. When a man of very early pre-Christian centuries strove to rise into the higher worlds he could not retain even the degree of self-consciousness so far developed. He was obliged to discard all consciousness of self and be transported into the world of the Hierarchies, the world of pure spirituality. His consciousness was entirely suppressed.—Such were the conditions in the early pre-Christian era.

What, then, was the situation of a man living in times when in order to enter the spiritual world it was no longer necessary for self-consciousness to be suppressed but when the stage had been reached for the development of the ‘I’? Even in the Atlantean epoch the ‘I’ was already present—in a certain sense; but complete assurance that the greatest secrets and mysteries could flow from the ‘I’ itself was brought by the Christ Impulse. That is why a man who had achieved the old type of Initiation felt that if he desired to penetrate into the spiritual world and receive its revelations, he must suppress a certain part of his soul and make other parts of it particularly active. The part of his inner being that was gradually to grow into the ‘I’ had to be suppressed, darkened, to become a desolate waste in the soul. On the other hand the astral body—the body which could make a certain degree of clairvoyance possible—must be fired into activity. And then the old clairvoyant visions lit up within it.

I said that the ‘I’ was in a certain sense already present, but could not be used to investigate the secrets of the spiritual world. The ‘I’ had to be suppressed, the astral body fired into activity. But more and more it became impossible to quicken the impulses in the astral body. In olden times one of man's most elementary powers was that he was able to suppress the ‘I’ and kindle the astral body into activity; the secrets of the spiritual world then streamed into him. But progress in evolution was actually achieved just because the astral body became more and more incapable of receiving the secrets of the spiritual world. Man was obliged to admit to himself that his astral body was becoming more and more incapable of attaining what human beings had once been able to attain with the old faculty of clairvoyance, and the ‘I’ within him was not strong enough yet to achieve anything itself.

It was the best clairvoyants who were the most strongly aware of something barren, something desolate in the soul. This was the ‘I’, to which no impulse had yet been given. They were aware, too, how impossible it was to reach the spiritual world through the ‘I’. This will give you an idea of the feelings and mood of a man living in the period just before the coming of Christ. Such a man was bound to say to himself that he could no longer unfold in his astral body the powers it once possessed: but as yet he had no alternative impulse, so that there was something barren in his soul, something that could not rise into the spiritual world.

When the time for the Christ Impulse was drawing near, certain methods of training were adopted with the object of acquainting men with that province of the soul which could not yet be filled with the spirit. An individual who aspired to gain entry into the higher worlds was told that he could not rise into those worlds in his astral body, that he must withdraw into that province within him where he would feel as though he had no contact at all with the external world.

This was the mood of soul in an aspirant for Initiation at the time of the Christ Impulse. He said to himself: I must abandon all hope of reaching the spiritual world through the powers of my astral body; the time for that is past and the ‘I’ is still not ready. But from something within me that is trying to emerge and to penetrate into the spiritual world, I can surmise—no more than surmise—that it is striving with might and main to receive the spiritual impulse.

This experience, known in those days to every seeker for the light of the spirit, was called ‘the way into the solitude of the soul’, or also, ‘the way into the solitude’. The messenger who was to prepare for the Christ-event had therefore to describe the way into the solitude to those who wished to hear about the approaching Impulse. He had himself to know the depths of solitude, to preach from actual experience of the solitude of the soul.

In your study of St. Mark's Gospel you will come to realise more and more clearly that certain lofty spiritual Beings through whom matters of vital importance in human evolution are to take place, look for their instruments in suitable beings of flesh and blood and then descend to live in the soul incarnated in such a body. The messenger of whom Isaiah spoke—who must not be thought of as a man in the ordinary sense—took possession of the soul of the reincarnated Elias—John the Baptist—lived in him and was destined to proclaim to men that the Christ Impulse was at hand.

Where, then, did the voice of this messenger resound? It resounded in what I have just described to you as. ‘the solitude of the soul’. In St. Mark's Gospel we read: ‘Hear the cry in the solitude of the soul’. ὲν τῇ ὲpήμω (tē erēmō) must not be translated as if the image of a ‘wilderness’ were meant in an external sense. ὲν τῇ ὲpήμω really means: in the solitude. The imagery used helps us to glimpse the spiritual world.

We shall have a truer understanding of this expression if we devote a little study to the meaning conveyed by another word, Kyrios, or Lord, as in the usual rendering of this passage. ‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord.’ The actual meaning is still discernible in the Greek but can be confirmed by comparison with ancient tradition. In the language of those early times the meaning of a word such as this was not as abstract and shallow as it is to-day. In the age of materialism men have become superficial in their attitude to language and no longer feel as they once did, that words are the bodies of soul-beings, soul-realities, that a whole world lives in the words. The most that can be done to-day is to try to revive something of this feeling, as I have attempted to do in the Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation.

What men felt when they uttered the word Kyrios in circumstances such as those indicated, was that it was an image, a picture, of happenings in the inner life of the soul. They felt the ‘I’ rising upwards from the depths towards the surface of the soul as the appearance of a Lord and Master, the Director and Ruler of the soul-forces. Nowadays we speak of thinking, feeling and willing as servants of the soul. But within the soul there is a Lord, a Kyrios: the ‘I’ or Ego. In olden times man could not say: ‘I think’. He said: ‘It thinks’—or, ‘it feels, it wills in me.’

At the time when the Lord of the soul-forces, the ‘I’, appeared as Ruler, the result of this crucial change in the evolution of humanity was that man now said: ‘I think, I feel, I will.’ Hitherto the soul had lived in a certain subconscious state, the captive as it were of its own forces. Now, the Lord of those forces, the ‘I’, was at hand. This passage in St. Mark's Gospel does not refer to any personality or being but to the emergence of the ‘I’ as the Lord in the whole structure of the soul. ‘The Lord within the soul is at hand.’

This was also made known in the temples where preparation was in train for what was now to take place in mankind. In a mood of holy awe and reverence it was affirmed: Hitherto the soul has had within it only the forces of thinking, feeling and willing—they are its servants: but now the Lord, the Kyrios, is drawing near.—This mighty process will continue to unfold until the end of the Earth-period and its power will constantly increase. The impulse is given by Christ and His life marks the supreme moment in earthly time. The hour on the cosmic clock indicates the point when the ‘I’ becomes more and more powerful as Lord of the soul-forces. The goal will be attained when the Earth dies in the Cosmos and man rises to higher stages of existence.

Only if you are able to feel what this means can you have an idea of what was prophesied by Isaiah and repeated by John the Baptist. Both of them wished to call attention to the crucial event in the evolution of the human soul. But the word εὐθεἱαç (eutheiās) must not be translated ‘straight’, as is usual; the right rendering is ‘open’—that is to say, not only ‘straight’ but ‘open’, meaning that the paths along which the Kyrios comes to the human soul are clear. But man must himself do something to enable the Kyrios to take hold of the soul. The way must be made free, must be made open. In short, if the passage is to be translated at all intelligibly and at the same time kept fairly close to the conventional version, it would run somewhat as follows:

‘Mark well!’—‘behold’ is not really correct—‘I send my angel before the ‘I’ in you; he will prepare the way. Hear the cry in the solitude of the soul’—the cry for the Lord of the soul. (The word ‘soul’ is not actually used but was intuitively understood.) ‘Prepare the way of the Lord of the soul; labour to make the path open for him.’

These sentences give an approximate idea of what can be felt in the words of Isaiah. The Angel in the soul of John the Baptist used them once again.

What made this possible? To answer this question we shall have to give some thought to the nature of John the Baptist's own Initiation and to its effect in his soul.

You know from earlier lectures³ that a man can be initiated either by descending into the depths of his own soul or by being prepared in such a way that his soul passes out of the body and its forces pour into the Macrocosm. Among different peoples these two paths were adopted in very diverse forms. When a man wished to pour his soul into the Macrocosm, the twelve stages to be passed were symbolised, so to speak, by the twelve signs of the Zodiac. The souls flowed out in particular directions, to particular regions of the Macrocosm. Generally speaking, a very great deal was achieved, especially for the realisation of some particular purpose in world-evolution, when a soul had developed so far that it could receive all the forces originating from the cosmic secrets of a particular zodiacal constellation. The practice in all the ancient rites of Initiation was that a candidate should be initiated into the secrets of the Macrocosm in such a way that his soul flowed out in the direction, let us say, of Capricorn, or in the case of other candidates, in the directions of Cancer, Libra, Virgo, and so on. I have said repeatedly that there are twelve different possibilities of passing out into the Macrocosm, directions indicated symbolically by the twelve constellations of the Zodiac. If a candidate was unable at once to attain the highest Initiation, the Sun Initiation, but could achieve a partial Initiation only, his soul was directed to the secrets connected with one particular constellation. But his vision must become independent of everything material. This meant that either in the rites of the Mysteries or, as in the case of John the Baptist, by grace from above, the candidate's gaze was guided to a constellation when the Earth lay between him and the constellation—that is to say, by night. Physical eyes see the physical constellation only. But when vision can penetrate through the material Earth—which means that the constellation is masked by the material Earth—then what is seen is not the physical but the spiritual reality, that is to say, the secrets which the constellation expresses.

The vision of John the Baptist was trained in such a way that at night he could look through the material Earth into the constellation of Aquarius. When the Angel took possession of his soul he had attained the Aquarius Initiation. Thus John the Baptist was able to place all his faculties and all he knew and felt at the disposal of the Angel, in order that through the Angel the secrets connected with the Aquarius Initiation might be proclaimed and the announcement made of the coming of the ‘I’, the χὐριοç, the Lord of the soul-forces.

At the same time, however, the Baptist proclaimed that the time had come when this Aquarius Initiation must be replaced by another, which would make fully intelligible the approaching rulership of the ‘I’. Therefore he said to his intimate disciples: I am one who is able to place at the disposal of my Angel all the forces coming from the Aquarius Initiation: but after me must come one whose forces are derived from an even higher source.

If you follow the course of the Sun in the daytime from the constellation of Aries, through Taurus, Gemini and so on, to Virgo, you must follow its progress at night from Libra on to Aquarius and Pisces. This is the direction of the spiritual Sun. John had attained the Aquarius Initiation and announced that He who was to come after him would possess the powers of the Pisces Initiation—the Initiation that followed his own and was regarded as the higher. Hence John the Baptist declared to his disciples: Through the Aquarius Initiation I can place at the disposal of my Angel only those powers which enable him to proclaim the coming of the χὐριοç the Lord; but there will come One who has the powers symbolised by the Pisces Initiation; and into him the Christ Himself will enter!

With these words John the Baptist pointed to Jesus of Nazareth; and for this reason, tradition assigned to Christ Jesus the symbol of Pisces, the Fishes. Moreover because every outer event is a symbol for inner happenings, fishermen were assigned as helpers of the Pisces Initiate. All these happenings are external, historical events and at the same time profoundly symbolic of the spiritual secrets.

John proclaimed: A higher form of Initiation will be vouchsafed to mankind! He himself could give only the Initiation that comes from Aquarius and he called himself an Aquarian, a Water-man. We must realise more and more clearly that astronomical and cosmic secrets are connected with the images used to express the secrets of Man. John said: ‘I have baptised you with water!’ Baptism with water lay within the power of those who had received from heaven the Initiation of Aquarius. The spiritual Sun progresses from Aquarius to Pisces (representing the progress from John the Baptist to Jesus of Nazareth) and when a being appeared in the world who had attained the Initiation of the Fishes and was therefore able to receive the spiritual impulse which must be the instrument of the Pisces Initiation—it was then possible for him to baptise, not only as John had baptised, with water, but in the higher sense described by John as ‘baptism with the Holy Ghost’.

In this lecture I have put a twofold conception before you. First: the words at the beginning of St. Mark's Gospel indicate processes in the historical evolution of humanity and speak of a higher Power—an Angel who speaks through the body of John the Baptist. Second: the passages in question relate to happenings in the heavens—the progress of the spiritual Sun from the constellation of Aquarius to the constellation of Pisces. Every line of St. Mark's Gospel contains something that can be read rightly only if in following the words we always have in mind both a human and a cosmic-astronomical meaning, and when we realise that there lives in man something that in its true significance can be found only in the heavens.

We must grasp the connection between the secrets of the Macrocosm and the secrets of human nature more exactly than is usual. At the end of this lecture I can do no more than hint at what lies behind this and I have only wished to give certain hints of these things. In studying St. Mark's Gospel we shall have to plumb depths of wisdom about which you will have to ponder for a very long time if hints are to lead to anything more. I will try to make clear to you in the following way how this Gospel should be read.

A rainbow appears to a child as something real in the sky and until it is explained to him, he thinks that he can touch and take hold of it with his hands. Later on he learns that a rainbow appears only when there is a certain combination of rain and sunshine; when the conditions of rain and sunshine change, the rainbow disappears. The rainbow is therefore not a reality in itself but only a mirage, an illusion; a combination of rain and sunshine is the reality.

Once we make a little progress on the path of occult knowledge we are likely to have an experience which will remind us of the sort of thing I have said about the rainbow, namely that ultimately there is in the external world no solid reality but only appearances which are sustained by factors outside themselves.—And do you know what this chimera is? It is man himself! Man himself is also such an appearance. If you take him as you see him with your physical senses as being reality, you are much mistaken. You are in fact surrendering to maya, to the great ‘non-being’. The word ‘maya’ is derived from mahat aya—mahat = great; ya = being; a = non, negation; hence maya = the great non-being.

On the path of occult development a man reaches the point where he begins to think of himself as something like the rainbow. He is a chimera, like everything that comes before his physical senses. Even the Sun seen as a physical globe is a chimera. When physical science describes it as a globe of gas in cosmic space, that is good enough for practical purposes; but anyone who takes the globe of gas to be a reality is becoming a victim of maya, of illusion, of non-being. The truth is that the Sun is a meeting-place for Hierarchies of spiritual Beings, whose deeds come to expression in the warmth and light streaming from the Sun. The warmth and light themselves are an illusion; our other perceptions are also illusions. Normally we picture ourselves as having a heart in our breast; but that heart is nothing more than an appearance. What we see as a heart is rather like the rings we see around street lamps when we go out in the evening in an autumn mist; the rings are not really there but are the result of definite conditions. This is also true of the human heart. Imagine that this circle represents the vault of heaven and imagine various kinds of forces streaming in from different directions of the heavens and meeting at a particular point of intersection. In ultimate reality, where we think our heart is there is nothing but these heavenly forces that stream in and intersect. If you can somehow ‘think away’ everything except those instreaming forces, then the point of intersection actually is your heart. The same sort of thing is true of our other organs which are in reality only the outcome of intersecting cosmic forces.

Look at it from another point of view. When you move from one place to another you probably think that it is some impulse inside yourself that makes you move. If you do, then you are falling a victim to what we have called maya. The real fact is that there are forces streaming in from the Macrocosm which intersect, and thus evoke an illusion about the direction in which you are walking and the forces which make you walk. Down on Earth all that you really experience is the intersection of cosmic forces. If we want to get at the truth we have to find out what is going on in the Macrocosm and what the upper and lower cosmic forces are doing. Those forces create the effect of making us think we have a heart or a liver and talk as if we were going from place to place. If we want to express all this in terms of actual reality we should have to describe the movements of cosmic forces.

If we want to give an adequate description of the reality of the Baptism administered by John the Baptist, we should have to refer to what the cosmic forces—those symbolised in Aquarius—were requiring him to do. The ultimate decision had been taken in the great World Lodge and in consequence the necessary forces were sent into John. We must therefore read in the cosmic language accounts of what happened at a particular place on Earth. The writer of St. Mark's Gospel read in the heavens the processes corresponding to the events in Palestine. It is cosmic-astronomical events which he is describing, and so he says: Look at things in this way: here you have a wall on which you can see shadows playing, and if you want to know what ‘causes’ the shadows you must look upward to what is casting those shadows. I am giving you an account of what happened at the Jordan, but those happenings are really the means by which others are reflected on Earth. These things that I am describing come about through the interplay of macrocosmic forces active in the heavens.

The writer of this Gospel is therefore describing cosmic forces, phenomena and happenings in the heavens. And what he describes is the expression, the projection, the shadow-image cast by the happenings in the Macrocosm upon the little area of Palestine on the Earth. Only if we are quite clear about this will any real understanding of the greatness and significance of the Gospel of St. Mark be possible. We had first to form an idea of its contents and to understand what is said at the beginning, namely this: The prophet Isaiah foretold that the Lord of the soul-forces will come to men and that the ‘messenger’ will live in John the Baptist; he will prepare men for the approach of the Lord of the soul-forces.

This messenger had to take up his dwelling in the body of a man who had passed through the Aquarius Initiation. John could thus make possible on Earth the work of an individual such as Jesus of Nazareth; Jesus, on His side, had been prepared for the Pisces Initiation and through it was able to receive the Christ into himself.

Events on the Earth are the reflections of cosmic happenings, related to cosmic evolution as the rainbow is related to rain and sunshine. We must study rain and sunshine if we are to describe the true nature of the rainbow. And if we want to understand what lived in the heart of John the Baptist or in the heart of Jesus of Nazareth who became the vehicle of the Christ, we must study cosmic happenings. For the whole Universe was speaking to men in what took place in Palestine and on Golgotha. The Gospel of St. Mark as it stands merely provides the letters for accounts of mighty cosmic happenings. Whoever thinks otherwise is like someone who sees one set of ink-marks here and another there but has no conception of what the word ‘Lord’ signifies. The truth is that what is recounted in this Gospel amounts only to the letters—and moreover even they are an outermost shell. We must rouse ourselves to understand to what the events in Palestine are pointing, as it were in a play of shadows.

Try to grasp what is meant by saying that earthly events are shadows of macrocosmic events and you will then have taken the first step towards a gradual understanding of St. Mark's Gospel—one of the greatest sacred records in the world.

• 1. Dr. Steiner quoted the translation by Carl Weizsacker.
• 2. Translation in the Authorised Version. Mark i, 2-3: ‘Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee. The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’
• 3. See Macrocosm and Microcosm, notably lectures 1 and 3. A course of eleven lectures given in Vienna, March 1910.

From indications in the preceding lecture you will have been able to gather that in a certain respect the Greco-Latin civilisation-epoch lies in the middle of the Post-Atlantean epoch as a whole. The three preceding civilisation-epochs are as it were a preparation for that activity of the human soul which characterises Greek culture—the ego working in the ego. The culture of the ancient Indian, Persian and Egyptian epochs represents a descent from clairvoyant vision to purely human vision in the Greek epoch. What begins with our own age, and must be attained in ever-increasing measure during the coming centuries and millennia, should be conceived as a reascent, a reattainment of forms of culture imbued with clairvoyance. The Egypto-Babylonian-Chaldean epoch is therefore to be regarded as the last stage of preparation for the essentially human culture of Greece. In the preceding, third Post-Atlantean epoch, man descends from the old clairvoyant conditions which enabled him to participate directly in the life of the spiritual world, in preparation for the purely personal, purely human culture characterised by the activity of soul that may be described as “the ego works in the ego.” Hence we saw how the vision into earlier incarnations which had been implicit in clairvoyant culture was, to begin with, uncertain and indistinct in Gilgamesh, the inaugurator of the Babylonian civilisation; how even when Eabani had as it were endowed him with certain faculties for looking back into earlier incarnations, he was not really sure of his bearings. And everything we see transmitted to posterity through the activity of these Babylonian souls is entirely in accordance with this descent from spiritual heights and entry into the purely personal element that is peculiarly characteristic of the Babylonian soul.

In studying the occult aspect of history it is borne in upon us more and more that with their activities and cultural achievements the several peoples by no means stand isolated in world-evolution, in the general progress of humanity. Each people has its spiritual task, a special contribution to make to human progress. Our civilisation to-day is extremely complex, for many single streams of culture have converged in it. In our present spiritual life and in external life, too, there is a confluence of the most varied folk cultures which were developed more or less one-sidedly by the several peoples in accordance with their own missions, and then flowed into the general stream. Hence the single peoples all differ from one another; in each case we can speak of a particular mission. And we may ask: To what can we, who have received into our own culture the work achieved for civilisation by our forefathers—to what can we point that will show us what contribution was made by this or that people to the general progress of humanity

It is deeply interesting here to think of the task and mission of the Babylonian people. The Babylonian people presented a great riddle to historical research in the 19th century as a result of the decipherment of the cuneiform writing. And even the superficial information which it has been possible to acquire is in the highest degree noteworthy. For the researcher can state to-day that the length of time formerly accepted as historical has been almost doubled by the information gained through the decipherment of the cuneiform script. Evidence provided by external records themselves enables historical research to look back five and six thousand years before the Christian era, and to affirm that through the whole of this period a civilisation of greatness and significance existed in the regions which later on were the scene of the activities of the Babylonians and Assyrians. There, above all in the earliest times, lived a most remarkable people, known in history as the Sumerians. They lived in the regions around the Euphrates and the Tigris, mainly in the upper districts but also towards the lower. There is not enough time to go into the question of the historical records themselves and we must rather concern ourselves with what can be learnt from occult history.

In their thought and spiritual achievements, and also in their outer accomplishments, this people belonged to a comparatively very early stage of Post-Atlantean civilisation. And the farther we go back in the history of the Sumerians, who may be called the predecessors of the Babylonians, the more evident it becomes that spiritual traditions of the highest significance were alive in this people, that there was present among them a spiritual wisdom which may be described by saying that in them the whole mode of life, the way of living not in thought alone, but in the very soul and spirit, was entirely different from anything that developed in later periods of world-history. In the men of later times there is evidence, for example, of a certain hiatus between the thought and the spoken word. How can anyone fail to realise to-day that thinking and speaking are two quite different matters, that in a certain respect speech consists of conventional means of expression for what is being thought This is evident from the very fact that through our many different languages we express a great many common ideas. Thus there is a certain hiatus between thinking and speaking. It was not so among the Sumerians, this ancient people whose language was related to the soul quite differently from what came to be the rule in all later languages. Especially when we go back into times of the greatest antiquity we find something like a primal human language—although no longer preserved, even then, in complete purity. True, we already find differentiation in the languages of the various tribes and races in widespread areas of Europe, Asia and Africa, but there existed among the Sumerians a kind of common speech-element which was intelligible through the whole of the then known earth, especially to more deeply spiritual men. How was this possible? It was because a tone or a sound evoked a definite feeling and the soul was bound to express unequivocally what was felt in association with a particular thought and at the same time with a particular sound.

Let me indicate what this implies by saying that even in the names I quoted from the Epic of Gilgamesh—even there striking sounds are still to be found: Ishtar, Ishulan and the like. When these sounds are pronounced and their occult value is known, one realises that they are names in which the sounds Gould not be other than they are if they are to designate the beings in question, because U(oo), I(ee) and A(ah) can relate only to something quite specific. In the course of the further development of language men have lost the feeling that sounds—consonantal and vowel sounds—are related to specific realities, so that in those ancient times a thing could be designated only by a definite combination of sounds. As little as when we have some definite object in mind to-day do we have a fundamentally different idea of it in England and in Germany, as little could men in those times designate some object or being otherwise than by a specific combination of sounds, because the immediate spiritual feeling for sounds was still alive. So that language in ancient times—and in the Sumerian language there was an echo of it—bore a quite definite character and was intelligible to one who listened to it simply because of the nature of the soul. This applies, of course, to the very earliest Post-Atlantean civilisations.

But it was the task of the Babylonian people to lead this living connection of man with the spiritual world down into the personal, to the realm where the personality is based entirely upon itself in its separateness, in its singularity. It was the mission of the Babylonians to lead the spiritual world down to the physical plane. And with this is connected the fact that the living, spiritual feeling for language ceases and language adjusts itself according to such factors as climate, geographical position, race, and the like. The Bible—which narrates these things more accurately than do the phantasies of the self-styled philologist Fritz Mauthner²¹ describes this significant truth in the story of the Babylonian Tower of Babel, whereby men who speak a common language are scattered over the earth.²² When we know that the erection of sacred buildings in ancient times was guided by certain principles, we can also understand this Tower of Babel in the spiritual sense. Buildings intended to serve as places where certain acts dedicated to the sacred wisdom were to be performed, or which were to stand as signs and tokens of the holy truths—such buildings were erected according to measures derived either from the heavens or from the human structure. Fundamentally, these are identical, for man as the microcosm is a replica of the macrocosm. Therefore the measures to be found in buildings such as the pyramids are taken from the heavens and from the human body.

If we were to go back into relatively early times, we should find in sacred buildings symbolic representations of the measures contained in the human structure or in the phenomena of the heavens. Length, breadth, depth, the architectural form of the interior—everything was modeled on the measures of the heavens or those of the human Body. This was possible because when there was living consciousness of man's connection with the spiritual world, the measures were brought down from that world. What, then, was bound to happen when human knowledge was to be led down from the heavens to the earth, from the universal spiritual-human to the human-personal? The measures could then be taken only from man himself, from the human personality in so far as it is an expression of the single egohood. Thus the Tower of Babel was to be the cultic centre for men who were henceforward to derive the measures from the human personality. But at the same time it had to be shown that the personality must first mature to the stage of being able again to ascend to the spiritual worlds. The fourth and the fifth civilisation-epochs must be lived through before the reascent is possible—which it would not have been at that time. That the heavens were not yet within the reach of powers deriving from the human personality—this is indicated by the fact that the Tower of Babel was bound to be an unhappy affair. Infinite depths are contained in this world-symbol of the Tower of Babel through which men were limited to the personality as such; to what the personality could achieve under the particular conditions prevailing among some rate or people.

Thus the Babylonians were led downwards from the spiritual world to our earth; there lay their mission and their task. But, as I have already said, underlying the external Babylonian civilisation there was a Chaldean Mystery-culture which, while remaining esoteric, nevertheless flowed quite definitely into the outer civilisation. Hence we see the primeval wisdom still glimmering through in the ways and means available to the Babylonians. But these means were not to be used for the purpose of ascending into the spiritual regions; they were to be applied on the earth. This element in the mission of the Babylonians was embodied in their culture and has come down to our own times, as can be demonstrated. We must, however, learn to have at least some respect for that still great and powerful vision into the spiritual worlds which nurtured the old traditions in the soul and over which the shadows of twilight were only just beginning to creep. We must learn to have respect for the profound knowledge of the heavens possessed by the Babylonians, and for their great mission, which lay in drawing forth from what was known to mankind through vision of the spiritual world, from the laws of measure prevailing in the heavens, everything that must be incorporated into civilisation for the needs of outer, practical life. At the same time it was their mission to relate everything to man. And it is interesting that certain ideas have lived on into our own times, ideas that are like an echo of feelings that were still living experiences in the Babylonians—feelings of the inflow of the macrocosm into man, of a law which, holding sway in man as an earthly personality, mirrors the great law of the heavens.

In ancient Babylon there was a saying: “Look at a man who goes about not as a greybeard and not as a child, who moves about as a healthy, not as a sick being, who neither runs too swiftly nor walks too slowly—and you will behold the measure of the sun's course.” It is a momentous saying and one that can point us deeply into the souls of the ancient Babylonians. For they pictured that if a man with a good healthy gait, a man who maintains a pace in his walking consonant with healthiness of life, were to walk round the earth neither too quickly or too slowly, he would need 365¼ days to complete the circuit—and that is approximately correct, assuming he walks day and night without pause. And so they said: “That is the time in which a healthy human being could complete the circuit of the earth, and it is also the length of time which the sun takes to move round the earth” (for they believed in the apparent movement of the sun around the earth). “If therefore you walk as a healthy human being, neither too quickly nor too slowly around the earth, you are keeping the tempo of the sun's course.” And this means: “O Man, it lies in your very health that you keep the pace of the course of the sun around the earth.”

This is certainly something that can inspire us with respect for the majestic vision of the cosmos possessed by the Babylonian people. For on this basis they divided up the journey of a man sound the earth, using certain fractional measures and then arriving at a result approximately equal to the distance covered by a man when he walks for two hours: this comes to about a mile. (Note by translator: a German mile equals about five English miles.) They calculated this on the basis of a normal, healthy pace and adopted it as a kind of norm for measuring the ground on a larger scale. And in fact this measure persisted until fairly recently—when everything in human evolution became abstract—in the German mile, which can be covered in about two hours, And so there lasted on into the 19th century something that stems from the mission of the ancient Babylonians, who brought it down from the cosmos, calculating it in accordance with the course of the sun.

Not until our own time were there measures which originated from man's nature itself reduced inevitably to abstract measures taken from something deal. For it is obvious that measure to-day is abstract in comparison with the concrete measures directly connected with man and with the phenomena of the heavens—measures which are in truth all to be traced back to the mission of the Babylonian people. In the case of other measures too, such as the “foot,” derived from a human limb, or the “ell,” derived from the human hand and arm, we could find underlying them something that had been discovered as law prevailing in man, the macrocosm, In point of fact the ancient Babylonian way of thinking still underlay our system of measure until a time not so very long ago. The twelve zodiacal constellations and the five planets gave the Babylonians 5 times 12 = 60—this they took as a basic number. They counted up to 60 and then began again. Whenever they were counting things of everyday life they took the number 12 as the basis, because, since it derives from laws of the cosmos, it is related in a fax more concrete way to all external conditions. The number 12 is capable of much division. Twelve—the dozen—is nothing else than a gift from the mission of the Babylonians. We ourselves base everything an 10—a number which causes great difficulty when it has to be divided into parts, whereas the dozen, both in its relation to 60 and in its various possibilities of division, is eminently suited to be the basis of a metrical and numerical system.

When it is said that humanity has sailed into abstraction even in respect of calculation and counting, this is not intended as a criticism of our time, for one epoch cannot do the same as the preceding epoch. If we want to portray the course of civilisation from the Atlantean catastrophe to the Greek period and on through our own, we may say: The Indian, Persian and Egyptian epochs are periods of descent; in Greek civilisation the point is reached where the essentially human is unfolded on the physical plane; then the reascent begins. But this reascent is such that it represents one aspect only of the actual course of development, and on the other side there is a progressive descent into materialism. Hence in our time, side by side with spiritual endeavour there is the crassest materialism which links deeply, deeply into matter. These things are natural parallels. This current of materialism is inevitably present as an obstacle which has to be overcome in order that a higher forte may be developed. But it is the nature of this materialistic current to make everything abstract. The whole decimal system is an abstract system. This is not criticism but simply characterisation. And in other directions, too, the whole tendency is to suppress the concrete reality. Just think of the proposals that have been put forward—for example to make the Easter Festival fall an a fixed day in April, in order that the inconveniences caused to commerce and industry may be avoided! No heed is given to the fact that there we still have something which, determined as it is by the heavens, reaches over to us from ancient times. Everything has to nun into abstraction, and concrete reality, which pressed on again to the spiritual, flows into our civilisation to begin with only as a tiny trickle.

It is extraordinarily interesting to see how not only in Spiritual Science, but outside it as well, humanity is instinctively impelled to take the upward path, to ascend again, let us say to a connection with measure, number and form similar to that which prevailed in the ancient Babylonians and Egyptians. For in our time there is actually a kind of repetition of Babylonian and Egyptian culture; the civilisation-epochs preceding our era repeat themselves: the Egyptian in our own epoch, the Persian in the sixth, the Indian in the seventh. The first corresponds with the seventh, the second with the sixth, the third with the fifth, our own; the fourth Stands by itself, forming the middle. For this reason., so much that went to form the ancient Egyptian view of the world is being repeated instinctively. Remarkable things come to light. Men may be rooted in thoroughly materialistic ideas and concepts, nevertheless through the weight of the facts themselves—not through the scientific theories, all of which are materialistic to-day—they can be 1ed into the spiritual life. For example, there is in Berlin au interesting doctor who has made remarkable observations based entirely an facts, apart from any theory. I will indicate it on the blackboard.—Let us suppose that this point represents the date of a woman's death. I am not speaking of a hypothetical case but of something that has been actually observed.—The woman is the grandmother of a family. A certain number of days before her death a grandchild is born, the number of days being 1,428. Strange to say, 1,428 days after the grandmother's death another grandchild is born, and a great-granddaughter 9,996 days after her death. Divide 9,996 by 1,428, and you have 7. After a period, therefore, seven times the length of the period between the birth of the first grandchild and the death of the grandmother, a great grandchild is born. And now the same doctor shows that this is not an isolated case, but that one may investigate a number of families and invariably find that in respect of death and birth absolutely definite numerical relationships are in evidence. And the most interesting point of all is that if, for example, you take the number 1,428, again you have a number divisible by seven. In short, the very facts compel people to-day to rediscover in the succession of outer events certain regularities, certain periodicities, which are connected with the old sacred numbers. And already to-day the number of findings in this direction collected by Fliess—such is the name of the doctor in Berlin²³—and his students, is a proof that the sequence of such events is regulated by quite definite numbers. These figures are already available in overwhelming quantity. The interpretation placed upon them is thoroughly materialistic, but the facts themselves compel belief in the factor of number in world-happenings. I must emphasise that the application of this principle by Fliess and his students is extremely misleading and erroneous. The way he applies his main numbers, especially 23 and 28—28 = 4 times 7—will have to be amended in many respects. Nevertheless, in a study such as this we can see something like an instinctive emergence of ancient Babylonian culture in the age when mankind is an the path of ascent. Of course, such things are confined to Small circles; the vast majority of people have no feeling for them. But it is certainly remarkable to see the unusual thoughts and feelings which arise in people such as the pupils of Fliess, for example, who discover these things. One of these pupils says: “If these things had been known in ancient times, whatever would men have Said?”—But they were known! And the following passage seems to me particularly characteristic.

After this pupil of Fliess has collected a great deal of such material, he says: “Periods constructed on the clearest mathematical principles are here derived from nature, and such things have at all times been beyond the reach of gifted minds accustomed to far more difficult problems. With what religious fervour would the Babylonians, with their love of calculation, have investigated this domain and with what magic would these questions have been surrounded.”—So you see how near people have already come to an inkling of what has actually happened! How unmistakably men's instinct is working once again in the direction of the spiritual life! But just where the science current in our time passes blindly by, there is much to be found that sheds great illumination on the occult force of which people are completely unconscious. Those who draw attention to this remarkable law of numbers explain it in an altogether materialistic way; but the weight of the facts themselves is already compelling people to-day once again to recognise the spiritual, mathematical law prevailing in the things of the world. We see how deeply true it is that everything which comes to expression in personal form in the later course of human evolution is a shadow-image of what was present formerly in elemental, original grandeur, because the connection with the spiritual world was still intact.

In order that it may be deeply inscribed in your souls, I want to emphasise that it was the Babylonians who in their transition to the fourth civilisation-epoch bad, as it were, to bring down the heavens into measure, number, weight; that in our own day we experience the echo of it; and that we shall find our way again to this technique of numbers which will inevitably come more and more into prominence, although in other domains of life an abstract system of measure and number is naturally the appropriate one. Here again, Chen, we can see how on the path of descent a certain point is reached in the Greco-Latin cultivation of pure, essential manhood, of the expression of personality an the physical plane, and how then a reascent begins. So that in very fact the Greek epoch lies in the middle of the whole course of Post-Atlantean civilisation.

But we must remember that in this Greek epoch there came the impulse of Christianity which is to lead humanity upwards into other regions. We have already seen how in the first phase of its development this Christianity did not at once appear with its full significance, with its spiritual content and substance. The behaviour of the men of Alexandria towards Hypatia gave us a picture of the failings and the shadow-sides with which Christianity was fraught at the beginning. It has indeed often been stressed that the times have yet to come when Christianity will be understood in all its profundity, that there are still infinite and unfathomed depths in Christianity, which really belongs more to the future than to the present—let alone to the past. We see how in Christianity something still in the throes of birth places itself into what had entered into the heritage of primeval world-wisdom and spirituality. For what the culture of Greece had received, what it bore within itself, was actually like a heritage of everything that in countless incarnations had been acquired by men through their living connection with the spiritual world. All the spirituality experienced in the preceding ages had sank down into the hearts and souls of the Greeks and lived itself out in them. Hence it is understandable—especially in view of what had resulted from the Christian impulse in the first centuries that there were men who could not regard the coming of Christianity as equal in value to all that had been transmitted to Greek culture with overwhelming greatness and depth of spirituality, as an ancient heritage of thousands of years.

There was a particularly characteristic personality who experienced as it were within his own breast this battle of the old with the new, this battle between treasures of primordial, spiritual wisdom and what was only at its very beginning—a feebly flowing stream. This personality of the Greco-Latin epoch in the 4th century, who experienced these things in the arena of his own soul, was Julian the Apostate.²⁴ It is interesting in the very highest degree to follow the life of the Roman Emperor Julian. He was a nephew of the ambitious, revengeful Emperor Constantine, and the intention was that he and his brother should both be put to death in childhood. He was allowed to live only because it was feared that his death would cause too great an uproar, and because it was expected that whatever harm he might be able to do could afterwards be counteracted. Julian was obliged to acquire his education through many wanderings among various communities, and strict care was taken to ensure that he should imbibe what at that time was accepted, for opportunistic reasons, in Rome and by Rome, by the Roman Empire, as Christian development. This, however, was a hotchpotch of what took shape by degrees as the Catholic Church and what existed as Arianism, the desire being that neither element should be impaired by the other. And so at that time hostility against the old Hellenistic-Pagan ideal, the ancient Gods and the ancient Mysteries, was fairly vehement on all sides. As I said, every effort was made to ensure that Julian, who might be expected eventually to succeed to the throne of the Cæsars, should become a good Christian.

But a strange urge was asserting itself in this soul. This soul Gould never really acquire any deep feeling for Christianity. Wherever the boy was taken, and wherever vestiges not only of ancient Paganism but of ancient spirituality still survived, his heart warmed to it. Wherever he found something of the old sacred traditions and institutions living an into the civilisation of the fourth epoch, he drank it in. And so it happened that on his many wanderings, to which he was driven by the persecutions meted out to him by his uncle the Emperor, he came into contact with teachers of the so-called Neo-Platonic School and with pupils of the men of Alexandria, who had received the old traditions handed down from there. It was then that for the First time Julian's heart was nourished with that to which he was so deeply drawn. And then he came to know such treasures of ancient wisdom as still existed in Greece itself. And with all that Greece gave him, with all that the old world gave him in the way of wisdom, Julian could not bat unfold a living Feeling for the language of the heavens, for the secrets which in the starry script speak down to us from cosmic spare. Then came the time when he was initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries by one of the last hierophants; and in Julian we have the strange spectacle that one who is inspired by the ancient Mysteries, one who stands fully within what can be received when the spiritual life becomes a reality through the Mysteries—that such an initiate sits on the throne of the Cæsars. And although many misconceptions crept into Julian's writings against the Christians, we know what greatness there was in his conception of the world when he was speaking out of the majestic experiences of his Initiation.

But because as a pupil of Mysteries already in decline he did not rightly know how to find his bearings in the times, he faced the martyrdom looming before one who is inspired but is no longer aware of which secrets must be kept hidden and which may legitimately be communicated. Out of the ardour and enthusiasm kindled in Julian by his Hellenistic education and through his Initiation, out of the sublime experiences which the hierophant had enabled him to undergo, there arose in him the resolve to re-establish what he beheld as the active, weaving life of the ancient spirituality. And so we see him endeavouring by many ways and means to introduce the old Gods again into a civilisation already penetrated by Christianity. He went too far both in the matter of speaking openly of the Mystery-secrets and in his attitude towards Christianity. And so it came about that in the year 363, when he had to conduct a military campaign against the Persians, he was overtaken by his destiny. Just as destiny overtakes anyone who has unlawfully uttered those things which may not be uttered without authorisation, so it was in the case of Julian, and there is historical proof that on this expedition against the Persians, he fell by the hand of a Christian. For not only did this news spread abroad very soon afterwards and has never been disavowed by any of the Christian writers of note, but it would have been highly astonishing if the Persians had brought about the death of their arch-enemy without boasting about it. Among them, too, the view prevailed immediately afterwards that Julian had fallen by the hand of a Christian. It was really something like a storm that went forth from this inspired soul, from the fiery enthusiasm acquired from initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries which were already approaching their period of twilight. Such was the destiny of a man of the 4th century, of an entirely personal human being whose world-karma consisted, essentially, in living out in personal anger, personal resentment and personal enthusiasm, the heritage he had received. That was the fundamental law prevailing in his life.

For the study of occult history, it is interesting to observe the laxer course taken by this particular life, this particular individuality. During the 16th century, in the year 1546, a remarkable man was born of a noble house of Northern Europe, and in his very cradle, so to speak, everything was laid—including family wealth—that could have led him to positions of great honour in the traditional life of that time. Because, in line with his family traditions, it was intended that he should occupy some eminent political or other high position, he was marked out for the legal profession and sent with a tutor to the University of Leipzig to study jurisprudence. The tutor tormented the boy—for he was still a boy when he was forced to study law—all day long. But at night, while the tutor was sleeping the sleep of the just and dreaming of legal theories, the boy stole out of bed and observed the stars with the very simple instruments he had himself devised. And very soon he knew not only more than any of the teachers about the secrets of the stars but more than was to he found at that time in any book. For example, he very soon noticed a definite position of Saturn and Jupiter in the constellation of Leo, turned to the books and found that they recorded it quite erroneously. The longing then arose in him to acquire as exact a knowledge as possible of this star-script, to record as accurately as possible the course of the stars. No wonder that in spite of all his family's resistance he soon extracted the permission to become a natural philosopher and astronomer, instead of dreaming his life away over legal books and doctrines. And having considerable means at his disposal, he was able to set up a whole establishment.

This was arranged in a remarkable way. In the upper storeys were instruments designed for observing the secrets of the stars; in the cellars there was equipment for bringing about different combinations and dissolutions of substances. And there he worked, dividing his time between observations carried out on the upper floors of the building and the boiling, fermenting, mixing and weighing which went on in the cellars below. There he worked, in Order to show, little by little, how the laws that are written in the stars, the laws of the planets and fixed stars, the macrocosmic laws, are to be found again microcosmically in the mathematical numbers underlying the combinations and dissolutions of substances. And what he discovered as a living connection between the heavenly and the earthly he applied to the art of medicine, producing medicaments which were the cause of bitter animosity around him because he gave them freely to those he wanted to help. The doctors at that time, intent upon extorting high fees, raged against this man who was accused of perpetrating all sorts of “horrors” with what he endeavoured to bring down from the heavens to the earth.

Fortunately, as the result of a certain happening, he found favour with the Danish King, Frederick the Second, and as long as he retained this favour, all went well: tremendous insight was gained into the spiritual working of cosmic laws in the sense I have just described. This man did indeed know something about the spiritual course of cosmic laws. He dumbfounded the world with things which admittedly would no longer find the same credence to-day. On one Occasion, when he was at Rostock, he prophesied, from the constellation of the stars, the death of the Sultan Soliman, which came true within a few days of the date he had foretold. The news of this made the name of Tycho Brahe²⁵ (also Appendix) famous in Europe. To-day the world at large knows hardly anything more of Tycho Brahe, whose life lies such a short time behind us, than that he was somewhat of a crank and never quite reached the lofty standpoint of modern materialism. He recorded a thousand stars for the first time in the maps of the heavens and also made the epoch-making discovery of a type of star, the “Nova,” which flares up and vanishes again, and described it. But these things are mostly passed over in silence. The world really knows nothing about him except that he was still “stupid” enough to devise a plan of the cosmos in which the earth stands still and the sun together with the planets revolve around it. That is what the world in general knows to-day. The fact that we have to do here with a significant personality of the 16th century, with one who accomplished an infinite amount that even to-day is still useful to astronomy, that untold depths of wisdom are contained in what he gave—none of this is usually recorded, for the simple reason that in presenting the system in detail, out of his own deep knowledge, Tycho Brahe saw difficulties which Copernicus did not see. If such a thing dare be said—for it does indeed seem paradoxical—even with the Copernican cosmic system the last word has not yet been uttered. And the conflict between the two Systems will still occupy the minds of a later humanity.—That, however, only by the way; it is too paradoxical for the present age.

It was only under the successor of the King who had been well-disposed towards him that the enemies of Tycho Brahe arose an all sides. They were doctors and professors at the University of Copenhagen, and they succeeded in inciting the successor of his patron against him. Tycho Brahe was driven from his fatherland and was obliged to go south again. It was in Augsburg that he had originally set up his first great planisphere and the gilded globe an which he always marked the new stars he discovered—finally amounting to a thousand. This man was destined to die in exile in Prague. To this very day, if we turn, not to the usual textbooks, but to the actual sources, and study Kepler, let us say, we can still see that Kepler was able to arrive at his laws because of the meticulous astronomical observations made by Tycho Brahe before him. Here indeed was a personality who again bore the stamp, in a grand style, of what had been great and significant wisdom before his time; one who could not reconcile himself to the kind of knowledge that became popular immediately afterwards in the shape of the materialistic view of the world. Truly it is a strange destiny, this destiny of Tycho Brahe!

And now, placing both personal destinies side by side, think how endlessly instructive it is when we learn from the Akasha Chronicle that the individuality of Julian the Apostate appears again in Tycho Brahe, that Tycho Brahe is, so to say, a reincarnation of Julian the Apostate. Thus strangely and paradoxically does the law of reincarnation take effect when the karmic connection of the single individual are modified by world-historic karma; when the cosmic Powers themselves use the human individuality as their instrument.

Let Inc expressly emphasise that I do not speak of such matters as the connection between Julian the Apostate and Tycho Brahe in order that they shall be proclaimed at once from the housetops and discussed at every dinner-table and coffee-table, but in order that they may sink into many a soul as the teaching of occult wisdom, and that we may learn to understand more and more how super-sensible reality everywhere underlies the human being in his physical manifestation.

• 21. Fritz Mauthner, 1849–1923. A writer, Journalist and author of philosophical works, notably on the subject of language, often referred to by Rudolf Steiner.
• 22. Genesis, XI.
• 23. Wilhelm Fliess, b. 1858. Author of Der Ablauf des Lebens: Grundlagen zur exakten Biologie, Leipzig and Vienna, 1906; also Das Jahr im Lebendigen, Jena, 1919.
• 24. Julian the Apostate, 331–63. Emperor from 361–63. See Rudolf Steiner: Building-Stones for an Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, lectures VII and VIII; Man's Life on Earth and in the Spiritual Worlds, lecture I; The Sun Mystery in the Course of Human History; Karmic Relationships: Esoteric Studies, Vol. IV, lectures V and VI; World-History in the light of Anthroposophy, lecture VI.
  
  There are many other references, too numerous to be detailed here. The above are of outstanding importance.
• 25. Karmic Relationships: Esoteric Studies, Vol. IV, lectures V and VI; also Appendix, p. 121.

The glimpse into the development of individualities such as those whom we were able, in the lecture yesterday, to follow through two incarnations allows us to discern something of the mysterious inflow and activity of the cosmic Spirits during the evolution and history of mankind. For when we keep before our minds the pictures which, in brief outline at least, came before us yesterday, the pictures of Julian the Apostate and of a later expression of this individuality in history as Tycho Brahe, the great astronomer, one thing may strike us particularly. Precisely in the case of personalities who signify something in history we can observe that the special qualities of the individuality work over from one incarnation into another; but that what spiritual Beings of the higher Hierarchies desire to accomplish in history, using single individuals as their instrument, asserts itself in the straightforward course of reincarnation as a modifying factor.

For we shall realise that in the 4th century A.D. it was the function of the individuality who appeared as Julian the Apostate to give as it were a last impetus for the final flaring up of the spiritual wisdom belonging to earlier epochs, and thus to preserve it from the fate that might easily have befallen it if struggling Christianity alone had been left to handle such treasures. And on the other hand we shall realise that an individuality incarnated in a man whose good fortune it was to be initiated into the Elusinian Mysteries had opportunities, on reincarnating, for receiving in endless abundance the impulses of the time and the influences of beings working in the way destined for the 16th century. We shall find entirely understandable the greatness and power of the personality of Tycho Brahe, as outlined yesterday, if we realise that precisely because he had been an Initiate in an earlier incarnation he was able to bring to light an untold fund of macrocosmic science in its application to the microcosm. Such studies of occult history make us aware that it is men themselves who make history, but that history in the last resort becomes comprehensible only when we find the connection between the single personalities who appear and pass away and the individual threads which run through the whole course of human evolution, reincarnating in personalities. But if we are to understand the historical life of mankind on our earth, we must always associate with it that which streams in from other worlds, super-sensible worlds, through the Powers of other Hierarchies.

In the course of these lectures we have heard how certain high-ranking Powers of the Hierarchies have worked, through human beings, into all the civilisation-epochs since the Atlantean catastrophe. This was most strongly evident in the ancient Indian soul which may be said to have been simply an arena for the inflowing of higher spiritual Beings. In the soul of the ancient Persian it was not so to the Same extent. And then we heard how in Egypto-Chaldean civilisation it was even then the mission of the human soul—noticeable particularly in the Babylonian people—to bring the super-personal down into the personal, the spiritual down to the physical plane. The significance of personality constantly increases the nearer we come to the Greek epoch, when the ego works and weaves in the ego. In the strong and forceful figures of the Greek epoch the stamp of personality is complete. It is with the Greeks, and later with the Romans, that what can at first be bestowed on the individuality only from higher worlds withdraws to the greatest extent, while what a man expresses in his personality as his proper humanity comes to the forefront.

The question may arise: Which particular Spirits, from which Hierarchies, worked through the ancient Indians, the ancient Persians, the Babylonians, Chaldeans and Egyptians respectively It is the answer to this question that alone can give us deeper insight into the occult course of history.²⁶ The investigations made possible from occult sources enable us, in a certain sense at any rate, to say which particular Beings of the higher Hierarchies worked through men as their instruments in each of these periods. Into the ancient Indian soul, which created the civilisation immediately following the Atlantean catastrophe, the Beings we call the Angeloi, the Angels, poured their forces. And in a certain connection it is true to say that when a man of ancient India spoke, when he gave expression to what was active in his soul, it was not his own egohood speaking directly, but an Angelos, an Angel. Ranking only one stage higher than man, the Angel is the hierarchical Being most closely related to him and therefore able, as it were, to speak more directly. It is in the ancient Indian mode of speech that an element foreign to the human comes most strongly into evidence, because the Angel, as the Being most closely related to man, is able to speak with the greatest directness.

This direct expression was less possible for the Beings of the higher Hierarchies who spoke through the souls of the ancient Persian people, for they were Beings of the next higher rank—the Archangels. And because these Beings stand two stages higher than man, what they were able to express by means of human instruments was farther away from their own inherent nature than what the Angels could express through the ancient Indians. Thus, stage by stage, everything becomes more human. Nevertheless this downflow from the higher Hierarchies is continuous, unbroken. Through the souls of the Babylonian, Chaldean, Egyptian peoples, the Spirits of Personality (the Archai) express themselves. Hence it is in this period that the emergence of personality is most prominent, and what man is still able to give out from the forces streaming down to him is therefore the farthest removed from its origin, bearing the essential stamp of the human-personal. And so, as evolution advances to the Egypto-Babylonian epoch, there is a continuing manifestation of the Angels, the Archangels and the Spirits of Personality.

In the ancient Persians, especially, we can see very exactly how they had an awareness that the Archangels—the Spirits of paramount importance in that epoch—were working into the human organism, the human organism in its totality. We must not, to be sure, take an average Persian when considering the downflowing of forces from the Hierarchies. The forces streamed down, too, upon the average Persian, but only those who were the immediate pupils of the inspirer of the ancient Persian culture, of Zarathustra himself, were capable of knowing how this happened, of seeing through to the reality. And they did indeed possess this knowledge. For you will remember from many descriptions I have given of the teachings of Zarathustra, or from exoteric traditions, that according to the view of the ancient Persians the primal Divinity, Zervana Akarana, reveals himself through the two opposing powers, Ormuzd and Ahriman. The ancient Persians were clearly aware that whatever comes to manifestation in the human being derives from the macrocosm, and that the phenomena of the macrocosm—especially, therefore, the movements and positions of the stars—are mysteriously connected with the microcosm, with man. Hence the pupils of Zarathustra saw in the Zodiac the external expression, the image, of Zervana Akarana, of the primal reality of Being living and weaving through eternity. Even the very word “Zodiac” is reminiscent of the word Zervana Akarana. The pupils of Zarathustra saw twelve powers proceeding from the twelve directions of the Zodiac, six directed towards the light side of the Zodiac traversed by the sun by day; the other six towards the dark side—turned, as they said, towards Ahriman. Thus the Persian conceived of the macrocosmic forces coming from the twelve directions of the universe and penetrating into, working into humanity, so that they are immediately present in man. Consequently, what unfolds through the working of the twelve forces must reveal itself also in its microcosmic form, in human intelligence; that is to say, it must come to expression in the microcosm, too, through the twelve Amshaspands²⁷ (Archangels), and indeed as a final manifestation, so to say, of these twelve spiritual, macrocosmic Beings who had already worked in former ages, preparing that which merely reached a last stage of development during the epoch of Persian civilisation.

It should not be beyond the scope of modern physiology to know where the microcosmic counterparts of the twelve Amshaspands are to be found. They are the twelve main nerves proceeding from the head; these are nothing else than material densifications of what arose in the human belong through the instreaming of the twelve macrocosmic powers. The ancient Persians pictured the twelve Archangel-Beings working from the twelve directions of the Zodiac, working into the human head in twelve rays, in order gradually to produce what is now our intelligence. Naturally they did not work into man for the first time in the ancient Persian epoch, but finally they worked in such a way that we can speak of twelve cosmic radiations, twelve Archangel-radiations, which then densified in the human head into twelve main cerebral nerves. And just as knowledge in a later age includes what was already known in an earlier one, so could the Persians also know that Spirits of a lower rank than the Archangels had been at work previously, in the Indian epoch. The Persians called the Beings of the rank below the Amshaspands, “Izads,” and of these they enumerated 28 to 31. The Izads, therefore, are Beings who give rise to a less lofty activity; to soul-activity in man. They send in their rays, which correspond to the 28, 30 to 31 spinal nerves. And so in Zarathustrianism you have our modern physiology translated into terms of the spiritual, the macrocosmic, in the twelve Amshaspands and in the 28 to 31 Izads of the next lower Hierarchy.

A true fact of historical evolution is that what was originally seen spiritually is now presented to us through anatomical dissection; things that were formerly accessible to clairvoyant vision appear in later epochs in materialistic form. A wonderful bridge is disclosed here between Zarathustrianism, with its spirituality, and modern physiology, with its materialism. Of course, the destiny of the great majority of mankind makes it inevitable that such an idea as that of the connection between the Persian Amshaspands and Izads and our nerves is regarded as lunacy, especially by those who study the materialistic physiology of to-day. But after all, we have plenty of time, for the Persian epoch will be fully recapitulated only in the Sixth epoch which follows our own. Then, for the first time, the conditions prevailing will enable such things to be intelligible to a large part of humanity. Therefore we have to content ourselves with the fact that indications of them can be given to-day as part of the spiritual-scientific outlook. And such indications must be given if a spiritual-scientific conception of the world is to be spoken of in the true sense, and attention called, not merely in general phrases, to the fact that man is a microcosmic replica of the macrocosm.

In other regions, too, it has been known that what comes to manifestation in the human being flows in from outside. For example, in certain periods of Germanic mythology mention is made of twelve streams flowing from Niflheim to Muspelheim. The twelve streams are not meant in the physical-material sense, but they are that which, seen by clairvoyance, flows as a kind of reflection from the macrocosm into the human microcosm, the human being who moves over the earth and whose evolution is to be brought about through macrocosmic forces.

It must however be emphasised that these streams are to be regarded to-day as astral streams, whereas in the Atlantean epoch, which immediately followed that of Lemuria, and in Lemuria itself, they could be seen as etheric streams. So a planet which is related to the earth, but represents an earlier stage of development, must reveal some similar phenomenon. And as from a distance things can often be observed which in proximity escape our observation, because what we see is then broken up into details, so in the case of a planet resembling the earth, when it is sufficiently distant and passing through earlier stages of development such as those undergone by our earth, it might be possible, even to-day, to observe these twelve streams.

To be sure, they will not look quite the Same as once they appeared when seen an the earth. Distance is an essential factor, for if, to take an example, you are standing in the midst of a swarm of gnats, you do not see the swarm with its different shades of density; these are perceived only when you see the swarm from some way off. What I have just said lies at the root of the observations of so-called “canals” an Mars. It is there a matter of certain streams of force which correspond to an earlier stage of the earth²⁸ and are described in the old Germanic myths as streams flowing from Niflheim to Muspelheim. Naturally this is rank heresy from the point of view of modern academic physiology and astronomy, but these sciences will have to submit to a great deal of revision in the course of the next few thousand years.²⁹

All these things show us what profound wisdom is to be divined in the simple saying: The human microcosm is a kind of image of the macrocosm. Such sayings themselves bear witness that the words touch directly upon the deepest treasures of wisdom. The saying that man is a microcosm in relation to the macrocosm can be just a trivial phrase, but rightly understood it epitomises an untold multitude of concrete truths. All this has been said in order to indicate to you the configuration of soul in the man of ancient Persian civilisation; especially in the leading personalities there was a living feeling of man's connection with the macrocosm.

After the Beings whom we have named in their sequence as Angels, Archangels and Spirits of Personality had worked until the age of the Babylonian-Egyptian civilisation, there followed that remarkable Greco-Latin civilisation which brought the personality as such, the weaving of the ego in the ego, particularly to expression. There, too, certain Beings made themselves manifest—the Spirits of Form, who are one stage higher than the Spirits of Personality. But the manifestation of these Spirits of Form was different from that of the Spirits of Personality, the Archangels and the Angels. How do the Spirits of Personality, the Archangels and the Angels manifest in the Post-Atlantean epoch? They work into man's inner nature. The Angels worked as inspirers of the ancient Indians; the Archangels similarly in the ancient Persians, but here the influence of the human element already asserted itself to a somewhat greater degree. The Spirits of Personality stood as it were behind the souls of the Egyptians, urging them to project the spiritual on to the physical plane. The Spirits of Form manifest in a different way. They manifest from below upwards as far more powerful Spirits who are not dependent upon using man merely as an instrument; they manifest in the kingdoms of Nature around us, in the configuration of the beings of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. And if man would recognise the Spirits of Form in their manifestation, he must direct his gaze outwards, he must observe Nature and investigate what has been woven into her by the Spirits of Form. Consequently in the Greek epoch, when the paramount manifestation is that of the Spirits of Form, man does not receive any direct influence as an inspiration. The influence of the Spirits of Form works far rather in such a way that man is allured by the outer world of sense; his senses are directed with joy and delight towards everything spread out around him, and he tries to elaborate and perfect it. Thus the Spirits of Form attract him from without. And one of the chief Spirits of Form is the Being designated as Jahve or Jehovah. Although there are seven Spirits of Form and they work in the different kingdoms of Nature, men of the present age have a faculty of perception only for the one Spirit, Jehovah.—If we reflect on all this, it will be intelligible to us that with the approach of the fourth epoch, man is more or less forsaken by these inner Guiding-Powers, by the Angels, Archangels and Spirits of Personality, and that he turn his gaze entirely to the external world, to the physical horizon where the Spirits of Form are in manifestation. They were of course already present behind the physical world in earlier times, but they had not as it were yielded themselves to human recognition. In the period immediately following the Atlantean catastrophe, the Spirits of Form had been at work; they had been at work in the kingdoms of Nature, in the laws governing wind and weather, in the laws of the plants, animals and minerals. They had also worked in times more ancient still. But man did not direct his gaze to what then came to meet him externally, for he was inwardly inspired by the other Spirits. His attention was diverted from the outer world.

How is this to be explained? In what sense are we to understand the fact that these other Hierarchies, who are of a lower rank than the Spirits of Form, asserted their influence so dominantly over against the already existing activity of the Spirits of Form? This is connected with a definite period in the evolution of the earth as a whole. To the clairvoyant vision which with the help of the Akasha Chronicle looks back into the past, these things present an appearance entirely different from the speculative pictures based on the geological data of the present day. When we go back before the activity of the Spirits of Personality in the Chaldean epoch, before that of the Archangels in the ancient Persian and of the Angels in the ancient Indian epoch, we come to the period when the Atlantean cataclysm was at the height of its fury. We find our way gradually into the conditions then prevailing. This is the time to which the legends of the Deluge existing among the different peoples refer, but their picture of it was very different from that drawn by the hypotheses of modern geology. In still earlier Atlantean times, the picture was again quite different. Man was a being capable of transformation. Before this catastrophe the whole face of the earth was different from anything that can be imagined to-day. You can well conceive that at that time Spiritual Hierarchies worked into the earth still more strongly.

Between the old influences in the Atlantean epoch and those in the Post-Atlantean, there was a boundary-period filled by the Atlantean catastrophe—by those events whereby the face of the earth was totally changed in regard to the distribution of water and land. Such periods and changes consequent upon them are connected with mighty processes in the constellation, position and movement of the cosmic bodies connected with the sun. In fact, such periods in the earth's evolution are determined and directed from macrocosmic space. It would lead too far if I were to attempt to describe to you how these successive periods are directed and regulated by what is called in modern astronomy the precession of the equinoxes. This is connected with the position of the earth's axis in relation to the axis of the ecliptic, with mighty processes in the constellation of neighbouring celestial bodies; and there are definite times when, on account of the particular position of the earth's axis in relation to these other bodies of the cosmic system, the distribution of warmth and cold on our earth is radically changed. This position of the earth's axis in relation to the neighbouring stars causes the climatic conditions to change. In the course of something over 25,000 years, the axis of the earth describes a kind of conical or spherical movement, so that conditions undergone by the earth at a certain time are undergone again, in a different form and indeed at a higher stage, after 25,000 to 26,000 years. But between these great periods of time there are always shorter periods. The process does not go forward in absolute, unvarying continuity, but in such a way that certain years are crucial points, deeply incisive times in which momentous happenings take place. And here, because it is of essential significance in the whole historical development of earthly humanity, we may point particularly to the fact that in the seventh millennium before Christ there was a very specially important astronomical epoch—important because, on account of the constellation brought about by the relative position of the earth's axis to the neighbouring stars, the climatic conditions on earth culminated in the Atlantean cataclysm. This happened six to eight thousand years before our era, and the effects of it continued for long ages. Here we can only emphasise what is correct, as opposed to the fantastic periods of time that are mentioned, for these happenings lie much less far behind us than is generally believed. During this period the macrocosmic conditions worked into the physical in such a way as to bring about the mighty physical upheavals of the Atlantean cataclysm, which completely changed the face of the earth. This was the greatest physical transformation of all, the most drastic action of the macrocosm upon the physical earth. Hence the influence from the macrocosm upon the spirit of man at that time was at its lowest; this epoch therefore provided an opportunity for the less powerful Beings of the Hierarchies to begin to exercise on man a potent influence, which then ebbed gradually away.

Thus when the Spirits of Form were working powerfully to revolutionise the physical, they had less time to work also upon the spirit of man, with the result that the physical vanished as it were from under man's feet. But an the other hand it was precisely during the time of the Atlantean catastrophe that men were transported most completely into spiritual realms and only gradually found their way again into the physical world in the Post-Atlantean epoch. Now when you picture that at this time—six to eight thousand years before the Christian era—the least influence was exercised upon the human spirit and the strongest influence on the physical conditions of the earth, it will not be difficult for you to conceive that there may be another point of time when the opposite situation comes about: when those who are cognisant of such a matter experience the reverse of these conditions—namely, the least influence upon the physical and the greatest influence, precisely of the Spirits of Form, upon the human spirit. Hypothetically you can conceive that there may he a point in history where the reverse of the great Atlantean catastrophe applies. Of course it will not be so easily noticeable, for the Atlantean catastrophe, when parts of the very earth were blotted out, is bound to be a very striking event for people of our Post-Atlantean epoch, with their strong leanings to the physical. When the Spirits of Form are exercising a powerful influence on the human personality and have only a little influence upon what is taking place in the external world, the impression will be less vivid. The point of time when this condition—in the nature of things, less perceptible to men—set in, was the year A.D. 1250 This year 1250 is of momentous importance in history.³⁰ It fell in a period that can be characterised briefly as follows.

The spirits of men felt as though impelled to express with the greatest possible precision how the mind and heart can look upwards to the Divine Beings above the other Hierarchies, how man seeks to come into relation with these Beings, conceived primarily as a unity, first through Jehovah, then through Christ, and how all human knowledge is to be applied to the unveiling of the mystery of Christ Jesus. That was a point of time especially adapted for conveying to mankind the mysteries which come to direct expression in the connection of the Spiritual with the working of Nature. Hence we see that this year 1250 was the starting-point of great and detailed elaborations of what was formerly only believed, only divined: it was the starting-point of Scholasticism, which is greatly undervalued to-day.³¹ It was also the starting-point of revelations which found expression in spirits such as Agrippa of Nettesheim, and which took effect most deeply in Rosicrucianism. This shows that if we want to search for the deeper forces of historical development, we must take stock of conditions quite other than those outwardly in evidence. In point of fact, behind the things of which I have just been speaking there are also hidden the forces working, for example, in the waves and subsequent ebbing of the Crusades. The whole of European history, especially the flow of happenings between East and West is attributable solely to the fact that forces are at work behind the events, as I have now elucidated.

We may therefore say: There are two points of time, one of them marked by a great upheaval an the outer physical plane and the other by a change in character of all that had once resounded in the secrecy of the Mysteries. But we must keep well in mind that in all such matters there are again other laws which cut across the main laws. Hence we can understand that in this period there lies the starting-point for great revelations; that this period is entirely in keeping with the appearance of a man such as Julian the Apostate, who had once been inspired in the Eleusinian Mysteries. At that time he had opened his soul to the revelations coming from the Spirits of Form. But the initial onset of a powerful influence always works for a period of about four hundred years, then it begins to ebb and the streams as it were to separate. Hence the eventual effect of what had been perceived at that time as spiritual reality behind the manifestations of Nature was that men forgot the Spiritual and paid attention only to the manifestations of Nature. That is the modern mentality. Tycho Brahe is one of the last of those who still grasped the reality of the Spiritual behind the data constituting the sciences of external Nature. Tycho Brahe was a truly wonderful personality, because with. his supreme mastery of external astronomy he discovered thousands of stars, and at the same time he had such deep inner knowledge of the sway of the spiritual Powers that he could astonish all Europe by boldly predicting the death of the Sultan Soliman. We see how out of the spiritual nature-knowledge, which begins to appear in 1250 and is exemplified in Spirits such as Agrippa of Nettesheim, there gradually emerges what later on amounts merely to perception of the manifestations of external Nature; while the inner, the Spiritual, remains in that mysterious stream known to us as Rosicrucianism. Then the two streams flow on.

It is indeed remarkable how this process shows itself in actual personalities. Once, near the beginning of our German Movement, I drew your attention to how in a personality of the 15th century there appears the continuance of a spiritual movement still connected with a certain knowledge of Nature, and how the Spiritual is then cast aside and the further course is a purely external one. We can follow this in the case of a single individuality: Nicolaus Cusanus (1401-1464). The mere reading of his works—and one can do much more than read—shows clearly that he combined a most penetrating spiritual vision with knowledge of outer Nature, especially where this knowledge is clothed in mathematical forms. And because he perceived how difficult this was, in an age moving more and more towards external learning, he entitled his work, with epoch-making humility, Docta Ignorantia, “Learned Ignorante.” He did not of course mean to imply that he was himself an utter dunce, but that what he had to say was above the level of what was going to develop as mere external learning. To use a prefix much in vogue nowadays, we may say: this “Learned Ignorance” is a “super”-learnedness. Then, as you know, he was born again—it was a case of a very quick reincarnation—as Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)³² The same being who had lived in Nicolaus Cusanus continued to work in Nicolaus Copernicus. But you can see how far human mentality had moved by that time towards the physical, for the depth of knowledge possessed by Nicolaus Cusanus could work in Copernicus only in such a way as to produce the plan of the outer, physical cosmos. The knowledge that had lived in Nicolaus Cusanus was as it were filtered; the Spiritual was ignored and re-cast in terms of external science. There we have a tangible illustration of how that mighty impulse was to work within a short period from the year 1250, which was its central point in time. What streamed into our earth at this point of time worked on its own way. It worked an in there two streams, one of which is materialistic and will become ever more so, while the other strives for the Spiritual, manifesting particularly in what we know as the Rosicrucian revelation, which flowed in greatest intensity from this very starting-point, although there had of course been previous preparation.

So you see that there is a certain epoch, lasting for about six to eight thousand years, during which earth-evolution passes through an important cycle in regard to the historical facts with which man's development is interwoven. Such cycles are again intersected by others, for periodic forces of the most diverse kinds work into our earth-evolution. Only when we analyse, when we investigate the particular forces and their configurations—only then can we really fathom how things come to pass on the earth. Through all such forces and laws mankind is brought forward and human progress effected. You know, too, that in our century, but proceeding from a different stream, there is an important point of time indicated in the Rosicrucian Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation: vision once again into the etheric world and the revelation of Christ in that world.³³ But that belongs to a different stream—I am speaking now more of forces that work into the broad basis of historical happenings.

If we want to understand there happenings fully, we must also take into consideration that such crucial points in evolution are always connected with certain positions of the stars, and that in the year 1250 the earth's axis lay in a definite position and was therefore related in a particular way to the so-called minor axis of the ecliptic. When we take account of the fact that what happens on the earth is brought about by great celestial conditions, even external climates show us that further specialisation and differentiation take place in the sphere of the earth itself. Because the forces work in a certain way from the cosmos, the earth is girdled by the torrid zone, then the temperate zone, then the arctic zone. This can be taken as a kind of example of how what is brought about by spiritual happenings, through the sun and other factors, takes effect on the physical plane. But there is again differentiation an the earth itself; in the torrid zone the climate of low-lying land is not the same as on heights, where it can be extremely cold. Hence in the same latitude there is a quite different distribution of climatic conditions to be observed in Africa, say, as compared with America. There is also something in spiritual evolution which allows of comparison with this kind of differentiation; for it is really true that in epochs during which a definite character due to the stellar constellations is widely predominant over the earth, modifications, special conditions, come about in the activities of the spiritual Beings and in the souls of men.

This is of great importance, for from time to time provision has obviously to be made for the distant future. Just imagine—naturally this is said hypothetically—that the wise leadership of the world was obliged, thousands of years ago, to say: There is a group of souls who must be prepared in order to accomplish this or that task in their next incarnations.—In such a case, connections have to be created so that perhaps a small group of men who have undergone some quite definite happening, who are incarnated together an a little corner of the earth, can pass through an experience which, at that particular time, may seem unimportant. But when we perceive how such men, having been crowded together in a small area, are scattered abroad in their next incarnations, and make effective for humanity as a whole what they received when they were living in this narrow compass—then the matter takes an a very different aspect. And so we can understand that in times when the general character of mankind has a certain definite quality, something very surprising may make its appearance in separate sections of civilisation, something that is entirely distinct from the prevailing character. I will give you an example of this, because it lies fairly near our own time.

In Steinthal, near Strassburg, Oberlin lived.³⁴ The deep-thinking German psychologist and researcher, G. H. von Schubert, has repeatedly referred to him This Oberlin was an unusual personality and he had a strange effect upon people. He was clairvoyant—I can allude to this only briefly—and after he had lost his wife comparatively early, he was able to live with her individuality in a communion as real as with a living person. Day by day he made notes of what was happening in the world where his wife now dwelt; he also marked this an a map of the heavens and showed it to the people who gathered around him, so that actually a whole community shared in the life Oberlin was leading with his deceased wife. Such a thing is strangely out of place at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries; but if you take what I have said into consideration, you will grasp what it portends. Things such as were revealed to Oberlin are among the most significant in this domain in modern times. I may perhaps remind you that we now have a very fine literary and historical work dealing with Oberlin and these affairs: it is the novel by Fritz Lienhard.³⁵ You will find it extraordinarily stimulating reading, with regard not only to the character of this priest but also to the cultural conditions of those days. Such things, which can easily be underestimated and regarded as chance, are able to show us how an occurrence of this kind strikes into evolution, how it can take effect in the whole process of the evolution of mankind. For the human beings who are thrown together in such circumstances, who gather round a personality as the central figure, are destined to undertake certain tasks in later incarnations.

So you see—and this is what I wanted to bring before you today—how the great macrocosmic penetration from the vast universe into the souls of men is connected with what may take place in a minute arena. But these things become especially interesting if we connect them with another law, with such points of intersection in evolution as was the year 1250. At that time there was the strongest possible penetration into the souls of men—and that is not so readily noticed as the upheavals of continents. During the Atlantean catastrophe the Spirits of Form worked so little into the souls of men that the younger hierarchies held the field, as it were, at that time. Thus the activities of the different ranks of hierarchical Beings are distributed. And it is important to know that again in these cyclic movements certain laws of ascent and decline prevail. I indicated something of this when I said that in the year 1250 there was an impetus and then an ebbing away which manifested in the current of materialism. Such things are often to be perceived. And it is interesting to notice how cycles of ascent and of decline alternate in the history of mankind.

• 26. See Rudolf Steiner, The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind. Lectures II and III.
• 27. See Rudolf Steiner, Turning-Points in Spiritual History. Lecture I.
• 28. See Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Hierarchies. Lecture 8. “Mars is a repetition of the ancient Moon and stands in the Same orbit to which the ancient Moon extended. ...” See also, Arenson's Index to Rudolf Steiner's Lecture-Courses, Vol. II, p. 181: “The Mars of to-day arose when the Earth was repeating the ancient Moon existence. What separated off and remained behind at this stage of repetition is the Mars of to-day.”
• 29. See Rudolf Steiner, The Whitsuntide Festival: its place in the study of Karma. (Lecture given at Dornach, 4th June, 1924.) “ ... The physical science of to-day looks to find also in the Universe everything which is on the Earth. But the physical organisation is not there in the Universe at all. Man begins with his physical organisation: then he has the etheric and the astral. The Universe an the other hand begins with the Etheric. Out there in the Cosmos the Physical is nowhere to be found. The Physical is only on the Earth and it is but empty fancy and imagination to speak of anything physical in the far Universe. ...”
• 30. See Rudolf Steiner, The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind. Lecture II.
• 31. See Rudolf Steiner, The Redemption of Thinking: a Study in the Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. With an Introduction, Epilogue and Appendices by A. P. Shepherd and Mildred Robertson Nicoll. (Hodder and Stoughton, 1956.)
• 32. See Rudolf Steiner, The Life between Death and Rebirth in relation to Cosmic Facts. Lecture 5.
• 33. See Rudolf Steiner, The Portal of Initiation, Scene I. Four Mystery Plays, Vol. I, p. 28. The following is the English version of words spoken by Theodora, a seeress:
  
  “... Once, long ago, Christ lived upon the earth,
  And from this life ensured the consequence
  That in soul-substance clad He hovers o'er
  The evolution of Humanity,
  In union with the earth's own spirit-sphere;
  And though as yet invisible to men,
  When in such form He manifests Himself,
  Since now their being Lacks that spirit-sight
  Which first will show itself in future times;
  Yet even now this future draweth nigh
  When that new sight shall come to men an earth.
  What once the senses saw, when Christ did live
  Upon the earth: this shall be seen by souls
  When soon the time shall reach its fullness due.”
  
  See also, Rudolf Steiner, The Vision of Christ's Advent in the Etheric World.
• 34. Johann Freidrich Oberlin. Protestant priest in Steinthal.
• 35. Oberlin. A novel by Fritz Lienhard. (Stuttgart, 84th ed., 1920.)

Today we shall concern ourselves with the question: What does modern man really possess in spiritual science? The answer to this question will be based on many things that have come to our knowledge in the course of lectures, especially those given last winter. Spiritual science may appear, at first, to be one conception of the world among the many others now existing. It may be argued: The riddles of existence are there; people endeavor with every possible means at their disposal, religious or scientific, to answer these riddles of existence in an effort to satisfy, as it is said, their eagerness and desire for knowledge. Spiritual science may well be considered just another philosophy of life—whether calling itself materialism, monism, animism, idealism, realism, or what you will. It may be represented as something that endeavors to satisfy the desire for knowledge on a par with other modern world-conceptions. But this is not correct. In what man acquires through spiritual science he has something of positive, continuous value in life, something that not only satisfies his thinking, his thirst for knowledge, but is a real and potent factor in life itself. To understand this we must look far afield and consider the evolutionary course of mankind from a particular point of view.

We have often looked back to the times preceding the great Atlantean flood, to the times when our forefathers, that is to say our own souls in the bodies of those forefathers, lived on the ancient continent of Atlantis between Europe, Africa and America. We have also looked still further back, to the Lemurian epoch, when the souls of men incarnated at the present time were at a much lower stage of existence. We shall now speak again of this epoch, reminding ourselves, to begin with, of the following: Man has attained the present stage of his life of feeling, his life of will, his intelligence, nay even his form, because higher spiritual Beings in the cosmos have also been at work in earth-existence. We have spoken of these Beings as the “Thrones”, the “Spirits of Wisdom”, the “Spirits of Movement”, the “Spirits of Form”, the “Spirits of Personality”, and so forth.

They are the great builders and architects of existence who have led the human race onward step by step to its present stage. But we must bring clearly before our minds to-day that Spirits and Beings other than those who help human evolution forward have also intervened; there are spiritual Beings who oppose the progressive Powers. And for every epoch—Lemurian, Atlantean, Post-Atlantean—it is possible to indicate which particular spiritual Beings bring the “hindrances”, which spiritual Beings are the opponents of those whose only aim is the progress of humanity.

In the Lemurian epoch—the first that concerns us to-day—it was the Luciferic Beings who intervened in man's evolution, in opposition to the Powers who at that time were striving to help him forward. In the Atlantean epoch, the Spirits opposing the progressive Powers were the Spirits of “Ahriman” or “Mephistopheles”. The Ahrimanic or Mephistophelean Spirits—to give the precise names—are those known in medieval times as the Spirits of “Satan”—who must not be confused with “Lucifer”.

In our own epoch, as time goes on, other spiritual Beings of whom we shall speak later, will stand as hindrances in the path of the progressive Spirits. We will ask ourselves now: What did the Luciferic Spirits actually achieve in the ancient Lemurian epoch?

These things will be considered to-day from a particular point of view. Of what domain did the Luciferic Spirits lay hold during the Lemurian epoch? The best way to understand this is to cast our minds back over the course taken by human evolution.

You know that on Old Saturn the Thrones poured out their own substance to lay the first foundation of the human physical body. On Old Sun the Spirits of Wisdom imbued man with the ether- or life-body. And on the Earth the Spirits of Form endowed him with the ‘I’, the ego, in order that by realizing himself as distinct from his environment he might become an independent being. But even if through the deed of the Spirits of Form he had become independent vis-à-vis the external world surrounding him on earth, he would never have become independent of the Spirits of Form themselves; he would have remained dependent on them, he would have been directed by them as on leading-strings. That this did not happen was due to something which had, in a certain sense, a beneficial effect, namely the fact that in the Lemurian epoch the Luciferic Beings set themselves in opposition to the Spirits of Form. It was these Luciferic Beings who gave man the prospect of freedom—but therewith the possibility of evil-doing, of succumbing to passion and desire in the world of sense. Where did these Luciferic Beings actually take hold? They took hold of what had been instilled into man as his innermost member at that time—the astral body. They established their footing in the human astral body and took possession of it. Had it not been for the coming of the Luciferic Beings this astral body would have remained in the sole possession of the Spirits of Form. They would have instilled into this astral body the forces which give man his human countenance, making him into an image of the Gods, namely, of the Spirits of Form. All this man would have come to be; but in his life through all eternity he would have remained dependent upon the Spirits of Form.

The Luciferic Beings had crept, as it were, into man's astral body, so that Beings of two kinds were now working in it: the Beings who bring man forward and the Beings who, while obstructing this constant impulse, had at the same time established the foundations of his independence. Had the luciferic Beings not approached, man would have remained in a state of innocence and purity in his astral body. No passions inciting him to crave for what is to be found only on earth would have arisen in him. The passions, urges and desires of man were densified, debased, as it were, by the Luciferic Beings. Had they not approached, man would have retained a perpetual longing for his heavenly home, for the realms of spirit whence he has descended. He would have taken no delight in what surrounds him on the earth; earthly impressions would have aroused no interest in him. It was through the Luciferic Spirits that he came to have this interest, to crave for the impressions of the earth. These Spirits impelled him into the earthly sphere by pervading his innermost member, his astral body. Why, then, was it that man did not fall away entirely at that time from the Spirits of Form or from the higher spiritual realms as a whole? Why was it that in his interests and desires he did not succumb wholly to the world of sense?

It was because the Spirits who lead humanity forward took counter measures; they inculcated into the being of man what would otherwise not have been his lot, namely, illness, suffering and pain. That was the necessary counterweight to the deeds of the Luciferic Spirits.

The Luciferic Spirits gave man material desires; as their countermeasures the higher Beings introduced illness and suffering as the consequences of material desires and interests, to the end that he should not utterly succumb to this world of sense. And so there is exactly as much suffering and pain in the world as there is interest only in the physical and the material. The scales are held in perfect balance; the one does not outweigh the other—so many passions and desires on the one side, so much illness and pain on the other. This was the effect of the mutual activities of the Luciferic Spirits and the Spirits of Form in the Lemurian epoch. Had the Luciferic Spirits not approached, man would not have descended into the earthly realm as soon as he actually did. His passion and craving for the world of sense also brought it about that his eyes were opened and he was able to gaze at the surrounding field of material existence earlier than would otherwise have been the case. If evolution had proceeded uninterruptedly along the course intended by the progressive Spirits, man would have had sight of the surrounding world only from the middle of the Atlantean epoch onwards. But then he would have seen it spiritually, not as he sees it to-day; he would have seen it as the direct expression of spiritual beings. Because man came prematurely into the earthly sphere, forced downwards by his earthly interests and desires, conditions were different from what they would otherwise have been in the middle of the Atlantean epoch.

The result was that the Ahrimanic Spirits—“Mephistophelean Spirits” as it is equally correct to call them—mingled in what man was able to see and apprehend; thus he fell into error, into what, for the first time, can correctly be called “conscious sin”. The host of Ahrimanic Spirits has worked upon man since the middle of the Atlantean epoch onwards. To what did these Ahrimanic Spirits entice him? They enticed him into regarding everything in his environment as material, with the result that he does not see through this material world to its true, spiritual foundations. Were man to have perceived the Spiritual in every stone, in every plant, in every animal, he would never have fallen into error and therewith into evil; if the progressive Spirits alone had worked upon him he would have been protected from those illusions to which he must always fall a prey when he bases himself solely upon the manifestations of the world of sense.

How did those spiritual Beings who desire to further man's progress act in order to combat this corruption, error and illusion arising from the material world? They saw to it—the process was of course slow and very gradual—that man was actually lifted away from the material world as such; this enabled him to shoulder and work out his karma. Whereas, therefore, the Beings upon whom it fell to rectify the enticement of the Luciferic Beings brought into the world suffering, pain and what is connected with them, namely death, the Beings whose task it was to rectify the outcome of error concerning the sense-world, made it possible for man, through his karma, eventually to blot out all the error, all the evil he has wrought in the world. For what would have happened if he had become the prey of evil and error? Little by little he would have become one with the evil; no progress would have been possible for him. For with every error, every lie, every illusion, we cast an obstacle in the way of progress. We should fall back in our progress to exactly the same extent to which we had cast obstacles in our path through sin and error, if we were not in a position to rectify them; in other words, we could not reach man's true goal. It would be impossible to attain this goal if the counter-forces, the forces of karma, were not in operation.

Suppose that in some life you commit a wrong. If this wrong were to become firmly fixed in your life it would mean nothing less than that you would lose the step forward which you would have taken had you not committed the wrong; with every wrong, a step would be lost—enough steps to correspond exactly with the wrongs committed. If the possibility of surmounting error had not been given, man must ultimately have been submerged by it. But the blessing of karma was bestowed. What does this blessing mean for man? Is karma something at which to shudder, something to dread? No, indeed! Karma is a power for which man should be thankful. For karma says to us: If you have committed a wrong, remember that “God is not mocked; whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap”. An error demands that you shall right it; then, having expunged it from your karma you can again take a step forward!

Without karma, no progress would be possible. Karma is a blessing that has been vouchsafed to us, inasmuch as it obliges us to rectify every error, to re-achieve the steps that thrust us back.

Karma was thus the indirect consequence of the deeds of Ahriman. And now let us go further. In our days we are moving towards the epoch when other Beings will draw near to man—Beings who in the future before us will intrude more and more deeply into human evolution. Just as the Luciferic Spirits intervened in the Lemurian and the Ahrimanic Spirits in the Atlantean epoch, so our epoch too will see the intrusion of Beings. Let us be clear about the nature of these Beings.

Of the Beings who intervened during the Lemurian epoch we must say: They entrenched themselves in the astral body of man, drew his interests, impulses and desires down into the earthly sphere. Where—to speak more precisely—did these Luciferic Beings entrench themselves?

You can only understand this by taking as a basis what is set forth in my book Theosophy. There it is shown that the following members of man's being must be distinguished: first, his physical body; then his ether or life-body and his astral body—or as I have called it in that book, the sentient body, or soul-body.

These are the three members with which man was endowed before his earthly existence. The foundation of the physical body was laid on Old Saturn, the ether-body on the Old Sun, the soul or sentient body on the Old Moon. On the Earth was added the sentient soul—which is actually a transformation, an elaboration carried out unconsciously, of the sentient body. Lucifer anchored himself in the sentient soul; and there he remains. Through the unconscious transformation of the ether-body, the intellectual soul came into being, a more detailed description of which is contained in the book entitled The Education of the Child. It was in this second soul-member, the intellectual soul—the transformed part of the ether-body—that Ahriman established his footing. From there he lures man to false conceptions and judgments of material things, leads him to error, to sin, to lying—to everything that originates in the intellectual or mind soul. In every illusion that matter is the sole reality, we must perceive the whispered promptings of Ahriman, of Mephistopheles. Thirdly, there is the consciousness soul (spiritual soul), arising from an unconscious transformation of the physical body. You will remember how this transformation came about. Towards the end of the Atlantean epoch, the etheric body corresponding to the head came right into the physical head and gradually brought about selfconsciousness in the physical body. Fundamentally speaking, man is still working at this unconscious transformation of the physical body, at the development of the consciousness soul. And in the age now, approaching, those spiritual Beings known as the Asuras¹ will creep into the consciousness soul and therewith into the human ‘I’ or ego—for the ‘I’ lights up in the consciousness soul. The Asuras will generate evil with a far mightier force than was wielded by the Satanic powers in the Atlantean epoch or by the Luciferic Spirits in the Lemurian epoch.

In the course of the Earth-period man will cast away all the evil brought to him by the Luciferic Spirits together with the blessing of freedom. The evil brought by the Ahrimanic Spirits can be shed in the course of karma. But the evil brought by the Asuric powers cannot be expunged in this way. Whereas the good Spirits instituted pain and suffering, illness and death in order that despite the possibility of evil, man's evolution may still advance, whereas the good Spirits made possible the working of karma to the end that the Ahrimanic powers might be resisted and the evil made good, it will not be so easy to counter the Asuric powers as earth-existence takes its course. For these Asuric Spirits will prompt what has been seized hold of by them, namely the very core of man's being, the consciousness soul together with the ‘I’, to unite with earthly materiality. Fragment after fragment will be torn out of the ‘I’, and in the same measure in which the Asuric Spirits establish themselves in the consciousness soul, man must leave parts of his existence behind on the earth. What thus becomes the prey of the Asuric powers will be irretrievably lost. Not that the whole man need become their victim—but parts of his spirit will be torn away by the Asuric powers. These Asuric powers are heralded to-day by the prevailing tendency to live wholly in the material world and to be oblivious of the realty of spiritual beings and spiritual worlds. True, the Asuric powers corrupt man to-day in a way that is more theoretical than actual. To-day they deceive him by various means into thinking that his ‘I’ is a product of the physical world only; they hue him to a kind of theoretic materialism. But as time goes on—and the premonitory signs of this are the dissolute, sensuous passions that are becoming increasingly prevalent on earth—they will blind man's vision of the spiritual Beings and spiritual Powers. Man will know nothing nor desire to know anything of a spiritual world. More and more he will not only teach that the highest moral ideals of humanity are merely sublimations of animal impulses, that human thinking is but a transformation of a faculty also possessed by the animals, that man is akin to the animal in respect of his form and moreover in his whole being descends from the animal—but he will take this view in all earnestness and order his life in accordance with it.

Man does not as yet entirely base his life on the principle that his true being descends from the animal. But this view of existence will inevitably arise, with the result that men will also live like animals, will sink into animal impulses, animal passions. And in many things that need not be further characterized here, many things that in the great cities come to expression in orgies of dissolute sensuality, we can already perceive the lurid, hellish glare of the Spirits we call the Asuras.

Once again let us look back. We have said that suffering and pain, nay even death, were brought by the Spirits who are intent upon man's progress. The words of the Bible are unambiguous: “In travail shalt thou bear thy children!” Death has come into the world. Death was decreed for man by the Powers opposing the Luciferic Spirits. From whom came the gift of karma itself, who made karma possible for man?—To understand what is here being said you must discard all earthly, pedantic notions of time. Earthly notions of time give rise to the belief that what has once happened here or there will have an effect only upon what comes afterwards. But in the spiritual world it is the case that what comes to pass reveals itself in its effect, beforehand; in its effect it is already there, in advance. Whence comes the blessing of karma? Whence has there arisen in our earth-evolution this blessing of karma? From a Power none other than Christ.

Although Christ appeared only later, He was always present in the spiritual sphere of the earth Already in the ancient Oracles of Atlantis, the priests of those Oracles spoke of the “Spirit of the Sun”, of Christ. In the old Indian epoch of civilization the Holy Rishis spoke of “Vishva Karman”; Zarathustra in ancient Persia spoke of “Ahura Mazdao”, Hermes of “Osiris”; and Moses spoke of the Power which, being eternal, brings about the harmonization of the temporal and natural, the Power living in the “Ehjeh asher Ehjeh” (I am the I AM) as the harbinger of Christ. All spoke of the Christ; but where was He to be found in those ancient times? In the realm to which the eye of spirit alone can penetrate, in the spiritual world. In the spiritual world He was always to be found, working in and from the spiritual world. It is He Who even before man appeared on earth, sent down the possibility of karma. Then He came Himself to the earth, and we know what this has meant for man. We have described what was wrought by Him in the earthly sphere, we have spoken of the significance of the Event of Golgotha and of its effect also upon those who at that time were in the spiritual world, not incarnate in earthly bodies. We know that at the moment on Golgotha when the Blood flowed from the wounds, the Christ-Spirit appeared in the underworld, flooding the whole world of spirit with radiance and light; we have said that the appearance of Christ on the earth is the event of supreme importance also for the world through which man passes between death and a new birth.²

The impulse going forth from Christ is in the fullest sense reality. We need but ask ourselves what would have become of the earth had Christ not appeared. Precisely from the opposite picture—an earth without Christ—you can apprehend the significance of Christ's coming. Let us suppose that Christ had not come, that the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place.

Before Christ's Coming, the condition in the spiritual world of human souls who were the most progressed, who had acquired the deepest interest for earthly life, was truly expressed by the saying of the Greeks: Better it is to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of the Shades. For before the Event of Golgotha the souls in the spiritual world felt completely isolated, enveloped in darkness. The spiritual world in all its gleaming clarity was not transparent to those who entered it through the portal of death. Each one felt isolated, thrust back into himself as though a wall were between himself and every other soul. And this feeling of isolation would have become more and more intense. Man would have hardened within the ego, would have been thrown back into himself, nor could he have found any bridge to the others. And egoism, already intense, would have increased beyond all telling with every new incarnation.

Earth-existence would more and more have made men into utter egoists. There would have been no prospect of brotherhood on the earth or of inner harmony among souls; for with every journey through the spiritual world, stronger influence would have penetrated the ego. That is what would have happened to an earth without Christ. That the way from soul to soul will be found again, that it has been made possible for the mighty force of brotherhood to pour over all humanity—this is due to Christ's Coming, to the Event of Golgotha. Therefore Christ is the Power who has enabled man to turn earth-existence ultimately to good account, in other words to give karma its true configuration—for karma must be worked out on the earth. That man finds in himself the force to profit by his karma in physical existence, that advancing evolution is possible for him—all this he owes to the working of the Christ Event, to the presence of Christ in the earthly realm.

And so we see many diverse forces and beings working together in the evolution of humanity. Had Christ not come upon the earth, man would have been engulfed in error, because having hardened within himself he would have become as it were a globe on its own, knowing nothing of other beings, entirely self-enclosed, driven into that condition by error and sin.

Christ is verily the Light which leads out of error and sin, the Light which enables man to find the way upwards. And now let us ask ourselves: What was it that was lost to man in that he descended from the spiritual world, was ensnared in desires and passions under the influence of Lucifer, and then, under Ahriman's influence, in error, illusion and lying in the earthly world?—He lost direct vision of the spiritual world, he lost understanding of the spiritual world.

What, then, must he regain? He must regain full understanding of the spiritual world. As a self-conscious being, man can grasp the import of Christ's Deed only by realizing with full clarity of understanding, the significance of Christ. The Christ-Power is there in very truth—not brought by man, for the Christ-Power was brought to the earth by none other than Christ Himself. Karma has come into humanity through Christ. But now, with self-consciousness, man must learn to know Christ in His real nature and His connection with the whole universe. Only so can man work in the true sense as an ‘I’. What then, does he actually achieve when, after Christ's appearance, he does not merely rest satisfied with letting Christ's power work upon him unconsciously, with saying: I am content with the knowledge that Christ came to the earth; He will redeem me and ensure my progress!—but when he says: I am resolved to know what Christ is in all reality, how He descended; I am resolved to participate through my own spirit in Christ's Deed!—what does man achieve thereby?

Recall to your minds that because the Luciferic Spirits slipped into his astral body, man has come down into the world of sense, thereby falling prey to the evil but also acquiring the possibility of self-conscious freedom. Lucifer is in very truth present in the being of man, has drawn him down to the earth, has ensnared him in earthly existence; inasmuch as the passions and desires contained in the astral body had first been led by Lucifer into the earthly realm, Ahriman too was able to invade the astral body—in the intellectual soul. Christ appeared, and with Him the force which can bear man upwards again into the spiritual world. But now, if he so wills, man can come to know Christ, he can gather all wisdom to this end. What does he achieve thereby? Something of untold moment! When a man knows Christ, when he absorbs the wisdom which begets insight into what Christ truly is, then he redeems himself and the Luciferic Beings through this knowledge of Christ. Were man merely to say: I am content with the fact that Christ appeared and to allow myself to be redeemed by Him unconsciously—then he would contribute nothing to the redemption of the Luciferic Beings. These Luciferic Beings who have brought man freedom, also make it possible for him, if he so wills, to turn it to account in order to understand Christ. Then the Luciferic Spirits are cleansed and purified in the fire of Christianity and the wrong done to the earth by them is changed into blessing. Freedom has been attained; but it will also be carried into the spiritual sphere as a blessing. That man is capable of this, that he is capable of understanding Christ, that Lucifer, resurrected in a new form, can unite with Christ as the good Spirit—this, as prophecy still, was told by Christ Himself to those around Him, when He said: “Ye shall be illumined by the new Spirit, by the Holy Spirit!” This “Holy Spirit” is none other than the Spirit through whom man can apprehend what Christ has wrought. Christ desired not merely to work, but also to be apprehended, to be understood. Therefore the sending of the Spirit by whom men are inspired, the sending of the “Holy spirit”, is implicit in Christianity.

In the spiritual sense, Whitsuntide belongs inseparably to Easter. This “Holy Spirit” is none other than the Lucifer-Spirit, resurrected now in higher, purer glory—the Spirit of independent understanding, wisdom-inwoven. Christ Himself foretold that this Spirit would come to men after Him, and in the light of this Spirit their labors must proceed. What is it that works onward in the light of this Spirit? The world-stream of spiritual science, if rightly conceived! What is this spiritual science? It is the wisdom of the Spirit, the wisdom that lifts into the full light of consciousness that in Christianity which would otherwise remain in the unconscious. The torch of the resurrected Lucifer, of the Lucifer now transformed into the good, blazons the way for Christ. Lucifer is the bearer of the Light—Christ is the Light! As the word itself denotes, Lucifer is the “Bearer of the Light”. That is what the spiritual scientific movement should be, that is implicit in it. Those who know that the progress of mankind depends upon living apprehension of the mighty Event of Golgotha are they who as the “Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings” are united in the great Guiding Lodge of mankind. And as once the “tongues of fire” hovered down as a living symbol upon the company of the apostles, so does the “Holy Spirit” announced by Christ Himself reign as the Light over the Lodge of the Twelve. The Thirteenth is the Leader of the Lodge of the Twelve. The “Holy Spirit” is the mighty Teacher of those we name the “Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings”. It is through them that his voice and his wisdom flow down to mankind in this or that stream upon the earth. The treasures of wisdom gathered together by the spiritual scientific movement in order to understand the universe and the Spirits therein, how through the “Holy Spirit” into the Lodge of the Twelve; and that is what will ultimately lead mankind step by step to free, self-conscious understanding of Christ and of the Event of Golgotha Thus to ‘cultivate’ spiritual science means to understand that the Spirit has been sent into the world by Christ; the pursuit of spiritual science is implicit in true Christianity. This will become more and more evident to men; and then they will realize that in spiritual science they have a potent asset in their lives. Men owe to spiritual science the consciousness which dawns in them by degrees, that Christ is the Spirit Who fills the world with light. And the consequence will be that here on this earthly globe, in the physical world itself, men will make progress in their moral life, in their life of will, in their intellectual life. Through physical life itself the world will be spiritualized in ever-increasing measure. Men will grow in goodness, strength and wisdom and will gaze with ever deepening vision into the foundations and origins of existence. They will bear with them into the super-sensible life the fruits acquired in this physical life, and ever and again bring these fruits back from the super-sensible life into a new incarnation.

Thus the earth will more and more become the expression of its Spirit, of the Christ-Spirit. Spiritual science will be understood in the light of the world's foundations, apprehended as a real and active power. In various respects to-day mankind is near to losing the Spirit altogether. In the recent public lecture³ it was said that men suffer to-day under the fear of heredity. The fear of the burden of heredity is the direct offspring of our materialistic age. But is it enough if a man simply says to himself that he need not have this fear?—By no means does that suffice. A man who does not concern himself with the spiritual world, who does not instill into his soul what can flow from spiritual science, is subject to the forces of physical heredity. Only by steeping his whole being in what spiritual science can communicate to him does he gain mastery over the forces of heredity, regards it as a factor of no essential significance and becomes the victor of everything that the powers of hindrance place in his way in the external world. It is not by arguing or philosophizing it away, or by contending: Spirit exists!—that man brings the life of the senses under his command, but by permeating himself with the Spirit, by absorbing the Spirit, by having the will to acquire intimate knowledge of the Spirit. Then spiritual science will make men healthier even in the physical world; for spiritual science is itself a therapy that brings vigor and health. And the essential power of spiritual science will become still more evident to us when we consider what becomes of the human being when he passes through the gate of death. The modern mind finds great difficulty here.

Man thinks to himself: Why need I trouble about what happens in the spiritual world? When I die I go into the spiritual world in any case and then I shall see and hear what goes on there! In endless variations one hears this easy-going way of talking: Why should I trouble about the spiritual before I die? When the time comes I shall see what there is to see. My relationship to the spiritual world will not be altered in the slightest, no matter whether I do or do not concern myself with it.—But indeed this is not so! A man who thinks in such a way will enter a world of darkness and gloom, unable to make very much of what is said in my book Theosophy about the spiritual worlds. For it is only by allying himself in spirit and soul with the spiritual world during life in the physical world that man can acquire the faculty of perception in the spiritual world; the preparation must be made in his life here on earth. The spiritual world is there in very truth—the faculty of being able to see in that world must be acquired on the earth; otherwise there is blindness in the spiritual world.

Spiritual science is therefore the power which alone makes it possible for man to enter the spiritual world with consciousness. Had Christ not appeared in the physical world, man would have gone under in that world, could not have found entry to the spiritual world. But Christ lifts him into the spiritual world in such a way that he can see and be conscious there. This depends upon his knowledge of how to unite his being with the Spirit sent by Christ; failing that knowledge, he remains unconscious. Man has to win his immortality through his own efforts, for an unconscious immortality is no immortality. A beautiful saying of Meister Eckhardt is: “What does it profit a man to be a king if he knows it not,”—What he meant was: Of what use is the spiritual world to a man if he does not know what the spiritual worlds are in reality? The capacity for seeing the spiritual world can be acquired only in the physical world. Those who ask: Why was it necessary for man to descend at all into the physical world? do well to take this to heart.—Man descended in order to acquire vision of the spiritual world. He would have remained blind to the spiritual world had he not descended and attained the self-conscious manhood which enables him to return to the spiritual world now lying in radiance and light before his soul.

Spiritual science is therefore not merely a “conception of the world” in the accepted sense but something without which—even in the immortal part of his being—man can know nothing about the worlds of immortality. Spiritual science is an active power, permeating the soul as reality. And in that you are present here in the pursuit of spiritual science, you are not only gathering knowledge but you are growing into something you would otherwise not have become. That is the difference between spiritual science and other world-conceptions. The latter are rooted in knowledge; spiritual science is rooted in being.

Rightly conceived, these things will make us say to ourselves: With this illumination, an inner, fundamental connection is revealed between Christ, the Spirit, and spiritual science. In face of this connection all the superficial statements made to-day to the effect that a Western trend is being set up in opposition to an Eastern trend of occultism fall to the ground. There can be no question of any such opposition. There are not two occultisms, there is only one occultism; and there is no opposition between eastern and western Theosophy. There is only one truth. And what is our reply to be when we are asked: If eastern occultism is the same as western occultism, why is it that in eastern occultism, Christ is not acknowledged? The right reply is that it is not for us to give the answer; that obligation does not rest upon us, for we fully acknowledge eastern occultism. If asked whether we acknowledge what eastern occultism says about Brahma, about the Buddha, we shall answer: Most certainly we acknowledge it. We understand what is meant when we are told that the Buddha attained his exalted rank in this or that way. We deny no single one of the eastern truths; in so far as they are positive truths we acknowledge them all. But shall this prevent us from acknowledging as well, what goes yet further? No indeed! We acknowledge what is said by eastern occultism, but that does not prevent us from acknowledging, too, the western truths.

When people allege that it is an inferior way of thinking on the part of orientalists to say that the Buddha died from eating too much pork—as these learned gentlemen assert—and it is explained that this actually has a deep meaning, namely that the Buddha imparted to those immediately around him too much of the esoteric wisdom, so that this over-abundance caused the onset of a kind of karma—then we agree that it is so; we say: certainly there lie behind it the deeper esoteric truths as stated by you who are eastern esotericists!—But when the statement that the Apocalypse was revealed to St. John on Patmos amid thunder and lightning is held to be unintelligible,⁴ then our answer will be: everyone who is aware of what is really meant, knows that it is a truth! We do not refute what is said about the Buddha but we cannot agree when the validity of the other statement (concerning the Apocalypse) is denied. We do not contest the assertion that the astral body of the Buddha was preserved and was later incorporated in Shankaracharya. But that does not prevent us from teaching that the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth was preserved and in multiple replicas was incorporated in various individuals dedicated to Christianity, like St. Francis of Assisi or St. Elizabeth of Thüringen. We deny no single truth of oriental esotericism. Therefore when we are asked: Why is anything refuted? Why is there opposition?—it is not incumbent upon us to answer. It would be incumbent upon us to answer if the opposition came from our side. But it does not! The duty to answer rests upon one who denies, not upon one who agrees. That is obvious enough.

In the coming weeks⁵ you will be able to hear of the connection between spiritual science and the Event of Golgotha and you will realize that the whole vocation, the whole mission of the spiritual scientific movement in the world is raised to a higher sphere inasmuch as spiritual science puts into effect the inspiration, the power proclaimed as the Spirit by Christ Himself.

So we see how Powers work together in the world, how everything that appears to oppose the progress of mankind subsequently turns out to be a blessing. We realize, too, that in the Post-Atlantean epoch—from age to age—the Spirit who has brought man freedom will appear again in a new form; Luciferus, the sovereign Bearer of Light, will be redeemed. For everything in the great World Plan is good and the evil endures only for a season. Therefore he alone believes in eternity of the evil who confounds the temporal with the eternal; he who does not rise from the temporal to the eternal can never understand the evil.

• 1. The Asuras are retarded Beings of the Hierarchy of the Archai (Spirits of Personality). They are Beings who instead of furthering man's progress to independence, lure him into gross egoism. In the negative sense they now bear the name originally pertaining to the entire Hierarchy. C.S.P.
• 2. Cp. Lecture 13, Cycle VIII: The Gospel of St. John in relation to the other three Gospels, especially to the Gospel of St. Luke. “At the moment when the Blood flowed from the wounds on Golgotha, the earth—which in the course of evolution had grown ever darker—began to send rays out into cosmic space, began to be radiant.”
• 3. Berlin, 18th February, 1909.
• 4. The reference is to a passage in The Secret Doctrine, by H. P. Blavatsky. A later volume, compiled by Annie Besant from manuscripts left by Blavatsky includes a statement indicating that the author was not unaware of the significance of thunder and lightening as an accompaniment of spiritual revelations. (C.S.P.)
• 5. Lecture-Course on the “Spiritual Hierarchies”.

If anyone present at the last lecture given here has been carefully thinking it over, and remembering how certain stages previously passed through are recapitulated at a later stage, how, for instance, on our Earth a Saturn stage, a Sun, a Moon stage gradually emerges and only then our earthly condition fully develops, he could feel urged to make the following remarks.

He could say: In various earlier lectures it has been stated that on Saturn the first physical rudiments of man went through something like a sort of senses-system, as though the first Saturn rudiments had consisted of primitive elementary sense-organs; then on the Sun a glandular system developed: on the Moon a nervous system and on our Earth all this was recapitulated. But how does that tally with what was said in the last lecture, that is, that the first to appear on Earth was the first rudiments of the blood-system, a kind of warmth-man? Then it was said that there was a condensation to an airy-state and light arose, on the one hand a sort of air-system was added which later became our present breathing system, while the warmth-system was trans-formed to the later blood-system, and under the influence of the light a kind of inwardly perceiving nerve-system was formed. It was further described how that was all still in a rarefied etheric condition, was then filled out with a kind of albumen which, under the influence of cosmic sound and tone, arranged itself into the different substances.

If I admit—the objector might say—that the glandular system only began with the depositing of this organic sub-stance, then the first thing on the Earth would be a kind of warmth-system which formed the rudiments of the blood-system, and a kind of nerve-system present in fine etheric lines of force; then the glandular system would arise which in a certain respect was already organically substantial, and last of all the mineral element would be deposited as was de-scribed in the last lecture. If the successive conditions of Saturn, Sun, Moon have appeared and these conditions are then recapitulated on the Earth, it is strange that the senses-system is not the first to re-appear, then a glandular system, a nerve-system, and finally a blood-system. Yet last time just the reverse was described: first blood, then nerves, glands, and finally the solid deposits which, as it was emphasized, first open the senses towards the outer world. The objector might say: This recapitulation-principle works out very badly since the order which has been given is just the reverse of what one might expect if a really literal repetition took place.

It must be admitted that if someone wished to describe the succeeding conditions as a simple repetition of the fore-going, he would probably give a description that was the very opposite of what had really existed. For the intellect would conclude that in an automatic way first the Earth would recapitulate what had taken place on Saturn, then what had happened on the Sun, then on the Moon, and that only then the blood-system arose. I have often emphasized that as a rule in occultism one always goes wrong and can make terrible mistakes unless one describes out of the occult facts and does not trust oneself to mere intellect or any purely logical conclusions. For if one follows the evolution of Saturn, Sun, Moon in the Akashic Record it is a fact that one must say a kind of senses-system was planned on Saturn, a glandular system on the Sun, a nervous system on the Moon, and with the Earth the blood was added. If one follows up the occult facts further, then one finds that actually on the Earth first a kind of blood-system appears, then a glandular system, a nervous system, and only then arises what appears as the senses-system in the form suited to Earth-conditions. Thus if one speaks of recapitulations, according to the actual facts one must speak of a reversed recapitulation. What has been shown in earlier lectures and what was shown in the last springs from no speculation, but from the actual facts and these display just such a reversal, which makes the recapitulation all the more complicated.

We must not, however, content ourselves with the idea that we have to do with a mere reversal. Just as the blood-system in its first rudiments appeared on the Earth as a kind of warmth-man, as I described last time, yet at the same time it was really a kind of sense-system. It was in fact a system of warmth and perception. The human being was, so to say, wholly a blood or warmth-man. He was not permeated by the substance of blood, but etheric warmth-lines of force penetrated him, and these etheric warmth-force lines out of which the blood-system later arose were in the first rudiments distinctly a kind of sense-system. It was the first rudiments of a sense-system, and the nerve-and-light system was at first a kind of glandular system, and the later glandular system which was organized was really only able to arise because the other systems, the blood- and nerve-systems, now incorporated, advanced in their development. This advance occurred in the following way: Whereas the nervous system developed as a kind of glandular system, something of the blood remained behind as the later rudiments of the blood. But as well during the second stage the blood-system itself changed to a kind of nerve-system; and when that was achieved and, in the third stage, the glandular system was incorporated, the two earlier systems again changed, so that in fact the blood-system advanced a degree and the nerve-system also a degree. Changes and transformations are continually taking place. Evolution is very complicated and one may not rest content with the idea of the reversed recapitulation. For the “reversal” is again only partial: the blood-system is a sense-system which is transformed later, and it is the same with the nerve-system, and so on.

So you see that what has gone before and enabled the human being to reach his present height is certainly not an easy-going matter for the intellect. The point is with patience and perseverance to familiarize oneself with this complicated course of evolution. However, this is merely a kind of introduction which I wanted to give for those who have been studiously dwelling again upon what was said in the last lecture.

A quite different task shall concern us today—that of considering man and his evolution on Earth from an entirely different standpoint, so that this human being shall come before us with increasing clarity. If, with this in mind, we look back once more to the previous embodiment of our Earth, the ancient Moon, then we remember that the human being had physical body, etheric body, astral body, but not yet a personal ego as he now possesses on Earth. If we now examine the consciousness of such a Moon-man we find it was radically different from that of a human being of today. The consciousness of man today is really expressed in what one could call “personality.” With this word much is said in the characterization of the Earth-man, for there was no “personality” on the old Moon. We have seen how this personality has been formed gradually on the Earth and how in ancient times man still felt himself much more as a member of a whole number of others who belonged to one an-other. Even if we go back not at all far in the regions where we ourselves are living, yes, even if we go back to the first Christian centuries, we shall still find there the last echoes of an ancient consciousness. The ancient member of the Cherusci, the Sugambri, Heruli, Bructeri, did not feel him-self to the same extent a personality as does the man of to-day, he felt himself one of his tribe. And when he said “I,” that signified something entirely different from what it means today. If a modern man says “I,” he means the entity of his personality, that which, so to speak, is enclosed within his skin. At that time men felt with regard to their tribe as a limb feels on our organism. He felt himself in the first place as a member of the Sugambri, Heruli, Bructeri, Cherusci, and only in the second place a personal “I.” You will have a better understanding of many ancient conditions if you bear in mind this radical alteration in personality, if you realize, for instance, that certain forms of family revenge, tribal revenge, are to be explained completely by the common consciousness of the tribe, a kind of group-soul-consciousness. And if we go still farther back to the classical Old Testament time, the time of the Jewish people, we know that the individual Jew felt absolutely that he was a member of the whole Jewish people. We know that when he said “I” he did not feel himself as representative of his ego, but felt the blood of the whole folk as it had streamed down in the generations since the Father Abraham: “I and the Father Abraham are one.” Each member of the race felt that this was what gave him his value and position. He felt the group-soul in the blood right back to the Father Abraham. And if we go still farther back, into the earliest ages of the Earth, we find the group-soul element still more clearly expressed. The individual had a memory of what his fore-fathers had done, back to the earliest ancestor. The memory of the descendants went back for hundreds of years. In our day, in normal circumstances a man no longer remembers what his father has done, unless he has seen it. He no longer remembers what his ancestors have experienced. In ancient times man had a memory not only of what he had himself experienced, but also of the experiences of the ancestors with whom he was of common blood, not because he knew of it but because memory was continued beyond birth. And we know that the great age attributed to the Patriarchs, to Adam and the succeeding ancestors of the Jewish people, meant originally nothing but the length of memory, how far one remembered in the ancestral tree. Why did Adam live so long? Why did the other Patriarchs live so long? Because one was not designating the single personality, but remembered past generations as one remembers one's youth today. That was denoted by a common expression, personality did not come into question at all. A man remembered not only what he had gone through in childhood, but what his father, his grandfather had experienced in childhood, and so on through the centuries, and one compressed the contents of this memory into a unity and called it—let us say—“Adam” or “Noah,” and so on. In primitive ages the separated personality had nothing of the value that it has now; memory reached beyond father, mother, grandfather, and so on, and as far as it reached one used a common name. That seems clumsy and fantastic to the present-day materialistic conception of the world, yet it must be affirmed from the depths of the facts by a fundamental psychology which knows how to reckon with the facts.

On our Earth therefore man had a kind of group-consciousness connected with his group-soul. If we were to go back to the old Moon where the human being had not a restricted ego of this sort embedded in the group-consciousness, but where he had no ego at all, where he still consisted of physical body, etheric body, astral body, we should find that this old Moon-consciousness was not a smaller one but embraced immensely great groups—that in fact all-embracing group-souls were the basis of the human race on the Moon. These group-souls who, so to speak, set individual Moon-men on to the Moon merely as their limbs, were wise souls. We have, as you know, also described the animal group-souls on the Earth and have also found wisdom as their out-standing characteristic. These Moon group-souls have implanted in our planet's previous embodiment the wisdom which we know today and which we so much wonder at and admire. And when today we are amazed how every bone, how heart and brain, how every plant leaf, is permeated and imbued with wisdom, then we know that the wisdom of the group-souls trickled down from the atmosphere of the old Moon—as clouds today let the rain trickle down—and membered itself into all the beings. These received it as a propensity and brought it out again when they appeared on the Earth after the Pralaya. Thus there were present on the Moon all-embracing group-souls filled with wisdom.

Now if we were to seek on the old Moon for a quality which we find today on Earth in ever-increasing measure as evolution goes forward, we should not find it existing in the Moon beings. This quality is love, the impulse which leads beings together of their own free will. Love is the mission of our earthly planet. Hence in occultism we call the Moon the “Cosmos of Wisdom” and the Earth the “Cosmos of Love.” As we today, standing on the Earth, wonder at the wisdom embedded in it, so one day the beings of Jupiter will stand before beings from which love will stream forth to them in fragrance. Love, as it were, will issue in taste and fragrance from all the surrounding beings. Just as wisdom shines towards us on the Earth, so on Jupiter there will come fragrantly towards the Jupiter beings that which is evolving here on Earth as love—from the purely sex-love to Spinoza's “Divine Love.” It will send out perfume as plants send out their various aromas. Thus will the grades of love stream out as the perfume ascending out of the cosmos which, as successor to our Earth, we have named Jupiter. Thus in the course of evolution conditions alter, and whenever an advance occurs in evolution the beings advance too; they who are united with the stages of planetary evolution are ever advancing to higher stages. The human beings living on the Earth today are the instruments of the evolution of love. For the animal kingdom has developed forms of love which have stayed behind as laggard forms; and in so far as love appears among the animals, a simple reflection would show that it is all pre-stages of human love, of the love that is continually being spiritualized. As man is the instrument for the evolution of love on Earth, so when he has evolved to Jupiter he will be capable of receiving a still higher quality. So too those beings who “trickled” down wisdom from the periphery of the Moon became capable of a higher evolution when the Moon became Earth; they ascended higher. The beings who at that time were able to let wisdom trickle into the Moon-beings were in fact those who were so advanced at the time when the sun withdrew from the earth that they went out with the sun and made it their scene of action. The beings who on the Moon were spirits of wisdom—the wisdom that trickled down—were not the Spirits of Wisdom which have been so named in connection with Saturn—these spirits, or at any rate a great number of them, chose the sun as their theatre. Only the Being whom one designates Yahve or Jehovah, who had reached full maturity on the Moon, became the Lord of Form on the Earth, the Regent of the Moon forces. But we have already spoken of other beings who did not complete their development on the Moon, who remained, so to speak, midway between human and divine existence. We have characterized them in manifold ways. We have indicated that the sun at a certain stage of its evolution put Venus and Mercury out of itself in order to give these beings a theatre which was suited to them. We have also spoken of beings who have taken part in man's progressive development and who, as Venus and Mercury beings, have been the great teachers of humanity in the Mysteries.

Today we will enlarge this picture from another standpoint.

We have already pointed out that if the forces and beings which left the earth when the sun withdrew had remained united with the earth as they were originally, then man would have been obliged to develop at a tempo too rapid for him to endure. He would never have reached his evolution if the Spirits of Wisdom had been bound up with the earth as they were on the Moon. They had to remove to a distance and work from outside if man was to have the right speed in his development. Otherwise, no sooner was he born than he would have become old, he would go through his development at too rapid a tempo. I can make that clear to you in another way.

The spirits who had evolved up to the sun existence are not at all interested in man's gradual, slow development of his spiritual nature during his bodily existence, during childhood, youth, maturity, old age. They have an interest only in the perfected development of spirituality. If they had remained in connection with the earth, human bodies in a certain way would have been stunted, burnt up. Without maturing the fruits won from an earthly existence the spirit would have gone towards a rapid evolution and the human being would have lost all that he can learn on the earth. Above all, the imprinting of Love into the evolution of the cosmos would have remained concealed. In order that love might develop on earth the body had first to be developed at a primitive stage. Love had to be inaugurated in the lowest form as sex-love, in order to rise through the various stages and finally, when the perfected Earth has reached its last epochs, to be imprinted into man as pure, spiritual love. All lower love is schooling for the higher love. Earthly man is to develop love in himself, so that at the end of his evolution he may be able to give it back to the Earth, for all that is developed in the microcosm is in the end poured into the macrocosm. The wisdom which streamed into the Moon-men shines towards the earth-man as the wisdom which permeates his structure. The love which by degrees is implanted in man during the Earth period will waft fragrantly towards the Jupiter beings out of the whole realm of Jupiter. This is the path that the various cosmic forces must take.

Thus the starting point of our Earth's mission—the impressing of Love—was in a certain way confronting the two following tendencies. The Spirits of Wisdom, the creators of wisdom, who on the Moon had streamed wisdom into the kingdoms of the Earth, were on the Earth, as such, uninterested in the physical bodily nature of man. As Spirits of Wisdom they were uninterested in it, and being interested only in wisdom they gave up the special Earth mission to the “Spirits of Love.” These are another rank and as Spirits of Love they too had been able to go through their own evolution for a time on the sun. In this way we have a twofold tendency in the evolution of the Earth: an instreaming of love which, as it were, appears for the first time, and an instreaming of wisdom which works from outside, since the spirits pre-eminently interested in wisdom have withdrawn to the sun. It is very important to grasp correctly this cooperation of the Spirits of Wisdom and the Spirits of Love, for it expresses an infinitely important contrast. If I now try to put into human language what this contrast expresses, it is that the Spirits of Wisdom wholly relinquished to the Spirits of Love man between birth and death and the way in which he develops, and took for them-selves the control of the “individuality” which goes through the various “personalities” in the course of reincarnations. If you picture man in his totality you have here the analysis which shows under what two powers he stands in cosmic rulership. What man is between birth and death, what he develops in himself while living in the body, what really makes him, so to speak, an entity who stands on his two feet on the earth, that is placed under the authority of the Spirits of Love. What weaves through the personalities as the enduring individuality, is born with the man, dies, is born again, again dies, and so on, that stands in a certain respect under the authority of the Spirits of Wisdom. But you must not treat this mechanically and say: So you state that the human individuality stands under the influence of the Spirits of Wisdom and the human personality under the influence of the Spirits of Love.—If one were to stereotype things it would only lead to nonsense. For concepts are only valid if we understand them in their relativity and know that every concept has two sides. Only if you were of the opinion that this one life between birth and death were meaningless for all the following lives then you might stereo-type it like that. But you must keep in mind what I have al-ways emphasized, namely, that the fruits of each separate earthly life, that is, the fruits of all that has been gained under the influence of the Spirits of Love stream into the whole of evolution and thus into what is guided by the Spirits of Wisdom. On the other hand you must be clear that everything in the human body, right up to the astral body (we have already described how experiences made on the earth must be transformed) proceeds under the power of the Spirits of Wisdom, so thus again the Spirits of Wisdom work on man's being since he has a physical body, an etheric and an astral body. And because whatever man as personality develops under the element of love is enduring for his individuality, the Spirits of Love work again into what is developed in the single human life via the Spirits of Wisdom. Thus they work together. Then the rulership of these Spirits is again divided inasmuch as all that is personality stands directly under the control of love, and all that happens between birth and death stands indirectly under the element of wisdom.

Thus we see how man's personality and his individuality are within two different tendencies and currents. That is important for the following reason. If the Spirits of Wisdom who are meant now, had, so to speak, arrogated authority to themselves, then that exuberant, vigorous development would have come about which one could also describe by saying that in a single incarnation man would have gone through, pressed together, all possible perfectings from all incarnations. That which the Spirits of Wisdom were to give, however, became distributed among all man's successive earthly incarnations. That is expressed in occultism quite definitely by saying: Had the Spirits of Wisdom remained in evolution man would rapidly have developed to spirituality, burning himself up bodily through-out evolution. But the Spirits of Wisdom refrained from bringing man to such a violent development. They went away from the earth in order to circle round it—in order to regulate and modify the time-periods which would other-wise have rushed past so vehemently. One therefore says in occultism that these Spirits of Wisdom became the “Spirits of the Rotation of Times.” The successive incarnations of man were regulated in the successive revolutions of time which were again regulated through the course of the stars. The Spirits of Wisdom became Spirits of the Rotation of Times. They would have been able to lift man away from the earth by their wisdom-filled power, but then he would have had to forgo the maturing of fruits which can only take place in the course of time. The fruits of love, of earthly experience, would not have been gained. Those secrets which beings must possess and hide in their hearts in order to mature the fruits of love, of Earth's experience, were veiled from these Spirits of the Rotation of Time. Hence it has been recorded: “They veiled their faces before the Mystical Lamb.” For the “Mystical Lamb” is the Sun-Spirit Who holds the secret of lifting not only the spirits away from the earth but of redeeming the bodies, spiritualizing them, after many incarnations have been passed through. The possessor of the Love-Mystery is the Sun-Spirit Whom we call the Christ, and since He has an interest not only in the individuality, but directly in each single personality of the earth, we call Him the “Great Sacrifice of the Earth” or the “Mystical Lamb.”

Thus certain Spirits became the Spirits of the Rotation of Times and regulated the successive incarnations. The Christ became the centre, the focus, in so far as the single personalities were to be sanctified and purified. All that man can bring as fruit out of the single personality into the individuality he achieves through having a connection with the Christ Being. Looking towards, feeling oneself united with the Christ purifies and ennobles the personality. If Earth's evolution had taken its course without the appearing of the Christ then the human body—if we speak in a comprehensive sense—would have remained evil; it would have had to unite with the earth and fall a prey to materiality for ever.

If, however, the Spirits of Wisdom had not renounced the immediate spiritualizing of man at the beginning of Earth's evolution one of the following two courses could have been taken: Either the Spirits of Wisdom, at the very beginning of earthly evolution—in the Lemurian age—would have torn man away out of the body, led him to a rapid spiritual evolution and quickly consumed his body, in which case the Earth could never fulfill its mission;—or, on the other hand, they could have said: We do not wish for that, we want the human body to develop fully, but we ourselves have no interest in it. We will relinquish it therefore to the Late-born, to Jehovah; he is the Lord of Form—and man would have been dried up, mummified. The body of man would have remained united to the earth, it would never have been spiritualized.

Neither of these ways was chosen, but in order to form a balance between the Spirits of Wisdom and the Last-born of the old Moon, the Lord of Form, who was the point of departure for the creation of the present moon, a central situation was created. This mid-way solution prepared for the appearance of Christ Who is exalted above wisdom, before Whom the Spirits of Wisdom veil their countenance in humility, and Who will redeem men if they permeate them-selves more and more with His Spirit. And when the earth itself reaches the point where man will have spiritualized himself fully, then a dried-up ball will not fall out of evolution, but through what he has been able to draw out of evolution man will lead his increasingly ennobled human form to complete spiritualization. And we see how human beings are spiritualized. If we were to see the original human bodies of the Lemurian Age—which I should never describe in a public lecture—we should find that they represented the extreme limit of ugliness, and men became more and more ennobled as love increasingly purified them. But man will evolve even beyond the present human countenance. To-day we are in the 5th race. In the 6th race the external physiognomy of man's countenance will show his inner goodness, the inner state of his soul. Man will have then quite a different physiognomy; by the outer form one will recognize how good, how noble he is, one will see by his countenance what qualities lie within his soul. Increasingly will the physiognomy receive the imprint of the nobility and goodness contained in the soul, until at the end of the earth-condition man's bodily nature will be entirely permeated by spirit and will stand out in complete relief from those who have remained attached to materiality and will bear the image of evil on their countenance. That is what will come. It is called the “last crisis” and must be described as “Spiritualization” or, as it is popularly called, the “Resurrection of the Flesh.” One must only understand these things in the true sense as given by occultism, then they cannot be attacked. Enlightened circles will not be able in any case to understand that matter could someday become quite different from matter. What could be called in the best sense of the word the “madness of materiality” will never be able to imagine that matter could one day be spiritualized that is, that someday something will come about which one calls spiritualization, the Resurrection of the Body, of the Flesh.

But this is how things are, and this is the course of earthly evolution, and thus comes about the meaning of earthly evolution and the place of the Christ within earthly evolution. If we were merely to look at all we have been considering today, then we should have a peculiar picture of the evolution of our Earth. Such a picture would show that the scales were in fact held between the Spirits of Form and the Spirits who have become the Spirits of the Rotation of Time, the actual Spirits of Light. Through the fact that the Christ from the time of the Mystery of Golgotha has to guide earthly evolution, they would be in the position of equilibrium and a continuous ascent would result. But the matter is again not so simple. We know that Spirits have remained behind—Spirits who had not attained the full maturity of the development of wisdom, and who therefore had no interest in relinquishing their authority on the instreaming of love. These Spirits wanted to work on and let wisdom continue to stream in. They did so, and hence their work on earth has not been entirely unfruitful. They have brought men to liberation. If the Christ-Principle has brought love, so have these Spirits, whom we call Luciferic Spirits, brought men freedom, the freedom of the personality. Even the staying behind of certain Spirits has its very good side, and everything, whether advance or staying back, is of divine nature. So there were Spirits of the Rotation of Time who guided progressive incarnations—that which passes as individuality through all the different incarnations; and there were Spirits of Love under the guidance of the Christ-Principle who so prepare this individuality that the personality can little by little go over into a Kingdom of Love. If we would characterize the great ideal that hovers before us as a Kingdom of Love we can do so in the following way.

In the widest circles today the radical error is still circulated that the well-being of a single personality is possible without the well-being of all others on the earth. Although men may not admit that directly, yet in practice our modern life is based on the fact that the individual lives at the cost of others and it is a widespread belief that the welfare of the one is independent of the welfare of the others. Future evolution will bring about the full community of the spirit, that is, on Jupiter the belief will begin to prevail that there is no health and happiness of the one without the health and happiness of all the rest, and indeed to an equal degree. Christianity prepares this conception and it is there in order to prepare it. A community arose at first through the love that was bound to the blood, and in this way sheer egotism was overcome. The mission of Christianity is now to kindle in man the love that is no longer bound to the blood—that is, that men learn to find the pure love, where the well-being of the one cannot possibly be conceived without the well-being of the other. Anything else is no real Christianity. In this way we can characterize the evolution of man to a higher stage. But the advance of evolution to such a stage occurs in cycles, not in continuity. You can make these cycles clear to yourself through simple reflection.

You see how a civilization arises in the first epoch of the Post-Atlantean Age, reaches its culmination and must again decline, how it attains its highest point in the flight from materiality but how it must recede because it has sought its culture on the ground of the non-acknowledgment of matter. You then see how a new cycle enters with the old Persian civilization, how it conquers the earth through the acknowledgment of matter, at all events as a power striving against man, which man subdues through his labor; again this culture reaches its culmination and sinks into decadence. But a new civilization ascends, the Egyptian-Chaldean-Assyrian-Babylonian, which no longer merely acknowledges matter, but penetrates it with human intelligence—where the orbits of the stars are investigated, where buildings are erected in accordance with star-wisdom, laid out in accordance with the laws of geometry. Matter is no longer an opposing power but is recast and remoulded to the spiritual. And after the Egyptian-Chaldean-Assyrian-Babylonian culture has fallen into decay, we go on further to the Greco-Latin culture, where in Greek art man has so transformed matter that he has formed his own image in it. It had never been the case before that, as in Greek sculpture, Greek architecture and drama, the human being imprinted his own image into matter. And with Roman civilization we see added the legal idea of the personality. It is only a quite perverted scholarship that says the legal concept had already existed earlier—a rational man can see that at a glance. The Law-book of Hammurabi is entirely different from what was created in Rome as jurisprudence. That is a genuine Roman product, for jurisprudence emerged where the personality created its image in law too; in law man is placed entirely on his own personality. One should study and compare the testament of the Roman Law with what one finds in the Law-book of Hammurabi, where man's personality was definitely given its place in a theocracy. The “Roman citizen” was a new element in the evolutionary cycle of mankind. And there will be a new cycle when men have fully grasped what comes forward today as Theosophy. We see how each cycle in civilization reaches its peak and again declines and how each new cycle has the task of carrying civilization further.

The firm position of balance gives man the certainty that he can be redeemed from the Earth, and the struggling up-wards and the striving away is the struggle for actual freedom, which the Luciferic Spirits have imprinted into mankind. Thus the Christ-Principle and the Luciferic Spirits work together in world evolution and determine the conditions of civilization. It is of no consequence that in early Christian centuries the Luciferic principle was excluded and men were referred to the Christ-Principle alone. Humanity will surely come again to their attainment of freedom by complete devotion to the Christ-Principle; for the Christ-Principle is so all-embracing that he alone can grasp it who seeks to encompass it on the level of the loftiest wisdom. Let us glance back into pre-Christian times. We find religions existing there as preparation for Christianity. We see religions, it is true, among the Indians and the Persians but religions suited to the particular people out of which they have been born. They are national, tribal, racial religions, appearing with the coloring out of which they have arisen, limited inwardly, because in a certain way they still proceed from the group-souls and are bound up with them. With the Christian religion an element entered humanity's evolution which is the true element of earthly evolution. Christianity from the beginning at once broke through the principles of all earlier religions. It sharply set itself against the sentence “I and the Father Abraham are one.” It opposed in the first place the idea that one can feel oneself a unity with something that is only a human group. On the other hand the soul that dwells in every personality must be able to feel one with the eternal Ground of the World Whom we call the “Father” and Who dwells in every soul, and this is expressed in the sentence: “I and the Father are one.” And in contrast to the Old Testament which begins with the words: “In the beginning was the Light,” Christianity sets the New Testament words: “In the primal beginning was the Word.” With this was given one of the greatest advances in humanity's evolution. For in referring to the light that arose, one speaks, in so far as one can speak of light, of something externally visible. The old records contain a Genesis that establishes the physical as a manifestation of the light. The “Word,” however, is what issues from the inner nature of the being, and before any manifestation of light had appeared there existed in man “what was, what is, and what is to come,” namely, man's inmost being. In the Primal Beginning was not the Light, but the Word. The Gospel of St. John is not a document that may be placed side by side with the others; it expands the others from the temporal to the eternal.

So Christianity stands there, not as a religion which might be a national religion but, if it is rightly understood, as a religion of mankind. In that the Christian feels himself one with the “Father,” soul confronts soul, no matter to what people or nation it belongs. All divisions must fall away under the influences of Christianity, and the Jupiter condition must be prepared under the influence of this principle. Christianity therefore has begun as a religion, for humanity was founded on religion. Yet religion must be replaced by wisdom, by knowledge. In so far as religion rests upon faith and is not inflamed with the fire of full knowledge it is something that must be replaced in the course of humanity's progress. And whereas formerly man had to believe before he could come to knowledge, in the future full knowledge will shine with light and man will know and thence ascend to the recognition of the highest spiritual worlds. From religion mankind evolves to wisdom, glowed through by love. First wisdom, then love, then wisdom glowed through by love.

Now we can ask: If religion is to merge into knowledge, if man is no longer given religion according to the old form, namely, that according to his faith he is directed to the wisdom that guides evolution—will then Christianity too no longer exist? There will be no religion that is founded on mere faith. Christianity will remain; in its origins it was religion—but Christianity is greater than all religion! That is Rosicrucian wisdom. The religious principle of Christianity as it originated was more all-embracing than the religious principle of any other religion. But Christianity is still greater than the religious principle itself. When the outer coverings of faith fall away it will be in wisdom-form. It can entirely strip off the sheaths of faith and become wisdom-religion, and spiritual science will help to prepare men for this. Men will be able to live without the old forms of religion and faith, but they will not be able to live without Christianity, for Christianity is greater than all religion. Christianity exists for the purpose of breaking through all forms of religion, and that which fills men as Christianity will still exist when human souls have grown beyond all mere religious life.

Spiritual Science—The Gospel—The Future of Mankind

In the autumn of this present year Nuremberg can celebrate an important centenary, for it was in 1808 that this city received one of the greatest German spirits within her walls. He was one of those spirits of whom we hear little to-day and whose works are understood still less; but he will signify very much for man's intellectual life in the future when he is once understood. He is doubtless difficult to understated and it may be some time before people grasp him again. In the autumn of 1808 Hegel became Director of the Royal Grammar School in Nuremberg.

Hegel made a statement that we may perhaps take as foundation for what we are going to study. He said: The most profound thought is connected with the figure of Christ, with the outer historical figure. And it is the greatness of the Christian religion that every grade of consciousness can grasp the historical external figure, while at the same time it is a challenge to the most earnest labours of the mind and the deepest penetration. The Christian religion is comprehensible at every stage of culture and yet at the same time it challenges the deepest wisdom.—These are the words of Hegel, the German philosopher.

That the Christian faith, the message of the Gospel, can be understood at every stage of consciousness has been taught for a period to be reckoned almost in millennia. To show that it is a summons to the deepest thought, to a penetration into humanity's whole fund of wisdom, will be one of the tasks of Spiritual Science, if this is understood in its true sense and inmost impulse and made the guide of human life. What we are to consider to-day will be misunderstood if it is thought that Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science is in any way a new religion or desires to establish a new religious faith in place of an old one. One might say, not to be misunderstood, if Spiritual Science is grasped aright, it will be clear that though it is a sure and firm supporter of religious life, in itself it is no religion, nor will it ever contradict any religion as such. It is another matter, however, for it to be the instrument to explain the profoundest truths and the most earnest and vital secrets of religions and show how they may be understood.

It may seem somewhat far-fetched if we make the following comparison in order to show the relation of Theosophy or Anthroposophy to religious documents (and to-day we shall be concerned with the religious documents of Christianity). Anthroposophy is related to the religious documents as mathematical instruction is related to the books on mathematics which have appeared in the course of mankind's history. We have an old work which is really of interest only to students of history versed in mathematics, namely, the geometry of Euclid. It contains for the first time in a scholastic form the mathematical and geometrical facts that are now taught to children in school. How few of the children are aware, however, that all that they learn about parallel lines, triangles, angles, etc., stands in that old book, that it was given to humanity then for the first time. It is quite right to make the child conscious that one can realize these things in oneself, that if the human spirit sets its forces in motion and applies them to the forms of space it is able to realize these forms without reference to that ancient book. Yet someone who has never heard of the book and has been taught mathematics and geometry will value and understand it in the right sense if he one day comes across it. He will know how to prize what was given to mankind by the one who set this work for the first time before the human spirit. In this way one might characterize the relation of Spiritual Science to religious documents.

The sources of Spiritual Science are of such a nature that if it is understood in its true impulse it is not to be referred to any kind of document or tradition. Just as knowledge of the surrounding sense-world is given us by the free use of our forces, so can the knowledge of the super-sensible, the invisible lying behind the visible, be given us by the deep-lying spiritual forces and faculties slumbering within the human soul. When man uses the instruments of his senses he can perceive things lying before him and combine them with his intellect. In the same way someone using the means given him through Spiritual Science can look behind the veils of sense-existence to the spiritual causes, to where beings weave and work which are imperceptible to the physical eye and ear. Thus it is in the free use of man's forces, though they are still slumbering as super-sensible forces in the majority of men, that we have the independent source of spiritual knowledge, just as the source of external knowledge lies in the free use of forces directed to the sense-world. And when man possesses the knowledge which introduces him into the super-sensible behind the sensible, the invisible behind the visible, a knowledge as definite as his knowledge of outer objects and events, then he may go to the traditional books and records. Furnished with super-sensible knowledge he may approach the records through which, during the course of evolution, tidings have reached man of the super-sensible world, just as the geometrician approaches the geometry of Euclid. And then he tests them as the modern geometrician tests the geometry of Euclid; he can prize and recognize these documents at their true value. Nor does one who approaches the records of Christianity equipped with knowledge of the super-sensible world find that they lose in value; indeed on the contrary, they appear in a more brilliant light than they showed first to the mere believer, they prove to contain deeper wisdom than had been dreamt of earlier, before the possession of anthroposophical knowledge.

But we must be clear on another point before we can realize the right relation of Anthroposophy to the religious documents. Let us ask ourselves who is better able to judge the geometry of Euclid—one who can translate the words and give the contents without having first penetrated into the spirit of geometry, or one who already understands geometry and is therefore able to discover it in the book? Let us think of a mere philologist, one who knows nothing of geometry, how many incorrect statements would appear if he tried to convey the meaning of the contents. Many have done this with the records of religion, even those who are supposed to be chosen to fathom their true sense. They have gone to these records without first having any independent knowledge of super-sensible facts. And so we have to-day most careful explanations of religious documents, explanations that explore the history of the time and show how the documents originated, and so on. But the explanations resemble explanations of Euclid's geometry by a non-geometrician. Religion—and this we will hold fast—can only be found if one is aided by spiritual-scientific knowledge, although Spiritual Science can only be an instrument of the religious life, never a religion itself. Religion is best characterized through the content of the human heart, that sum of feelings and emotions through which man's sensitive soul sends up all that is best in it to the super-sensible beings and powers. The character of a man's religion depends on the fire of these feelings, the strength of his sensitivity, just as it depends on the warm pulse-beat in the breast and on the feeling for beauty how a man will stand before a picture. True it is that the contents of the religious life is what we call the spiritual or super-sensible world. But just as little as an aesthetic feeling for art is the same as an inner grasp of its laws—though it may assist understanding just as little are the wisdom, the science, that lead into the spiritual worlds the same as religion. This science will make religious feeling more earnest, worthier, broader, but it will not be religion itself. Grasped in its true sense it may lead to religion.

If we wish to understand the force and significance, the real spirit of the Christian religion we must penetrate far into spiritual life. We must look back into times of a primeval past, the pre-religious age of mankind, and try to envisage the origin of religion. Is there a pre-religious age of humanity? Yes, a time existed on earth when there was no religion; this is acknowledged by Spiritual Science though in a very different sense from the assertions of materialistic civilization. What does religion signify for mankind? It was and for a long time will still be that which the word itself signifies. The word “religion” means the uniting of man with his divine element, with the world of the spirit. The religious ages are essentially those in which man has longed for union with the divine, be it out of the sources of knowledge, or from a certain feeling, or because he felt that his will could only be strong if it were permeated by divine forces. Ages in which man had an inner premonition rather than definite vision, in which he rather sensed that a spiritual world was around him, than saw it—these are the religious ages of our earth. And before these ages were others when man did not need such a sense of longing for union with the super-sensible spiritual world, because he knew that world, as to-day he knows things of the sense world. Does man need to be convinced of the existence of stones, plants, animals? Does he need documents or doctrines to prove to him or let him surmise that there are rocks, plants, animals? No, for he sees them round him and needs therefore no religion of the sense-perceptible world. Let us imagine someone from quite another world, possessing quite different senses and organs of knowledge, one who would not see the stones, plants and animals because to him they were invisible. Let us imagine that he was informed through writings or in some other way of their existence, which to you is a matter of direct sight and knowledge. What would that be for him? It would be religion. If he were informed through some book of the existence of stones and plants and animals it would be religion to him, for he has never seen them. There was a time in which humanity lived amongst those spiritual beings and deeds that are recorded in the religious teachings and teachings of wisdom.

The word “evolution” has become a magic word in many fields of thought to-day, but it has been applied by science solely to outer sense-perceptible facts. To one who regards the world from the standpoint of Spiritual Science everything is in process of evolution, and most of all the human consciousness. The state of consciousness in which man lives to-day, through which when he wakes in the morning he is able to grasp the world with his senses, this state has evolved from a different one. We call the present consciousness the clear day-consciousness. But this has evolved from an ancient state which we call the dull picture-consciousness of mankind. There, however, we reach back to humanity's early evolutionary stages of which anthropology tells nothing, since it uses only the instruments of the senses and methods of the intellect. It believes that man has gone through stages in the far past which are the same as the animal creation passes through to-day. We have seen in earlier lectures how the relation of man to the animal is to be understood. Man was never such a being as the present animal, nor is he descended from beings like them. If we were to describe the forms out of which man has evolved they would prove very different in appearance from the present-day animal. These are creatures which have stayed behind at earlier stages of evolution, con-served these stages and hardened them. The human being has grown beyond his earlier evolutionary stages, the animal has gone down below them. So in the animal world we see some-thing like laggard brothers of humanity, who no longer, however, bear the form of those earlier stages.

The earlier stages of evolution took their course when there were different conditions of life on the earth, when the elements were not distributed as they are to-day, when the human being was not encumbered with the kind of body he now bears, and yet was man. He was able to wait, figuratively speaking, within the course of evolution for his entry into the flesh, was able to wait until the fleshly materiality had reached a condition in which he could develop the forces of the present spirit. The animals were not able to wait, they became hardened at an earlier stage, took on flesh earlier than was right. They were therefore obliged to stay behind. We can thus picture that the human being has lived under other conditions and other forms of consciousness. If we follow these back for thousands and thousands of years we shall always find different ones. What to-day we call logical thought, intellect, understanding, has only evolved late in man's history. Much stronger were certain forces in him which are already beginning to decline, such, for instance, as memory. In an earlier age memory was far more developed than it is now. With the growth of the intellect in mankind, memory has stepped essentially into the background. If one uses some measure of practical observation one can recognize that what Spiritual Science relates is not said without foundation. People might assert that if that were true about memory, then a person remaining backward in development by some accident, should be backward least of all in memory. It could also be claimed that if intellectuality were fostered in a person artificially kept back, then his memory would suffer. Here in this city a characteristic case of this very nature is to be found.

Professor Daumer, whom one must hold in the highest esteem, observed this case very thoroughly. It was the case of that human being, so enigmatic for many people, who was once placed into this city in a mysterious way, and who in just as mysterious a way met his death in Ansbach. An author, in order to indicate the mystery of his life, wrote that as he was carried out to burial the sun was setting on the one horizon and the moon was rising on the other. I speak, as you know, of Caspar Hauser. If you disregard all the pros and cons that have been asserted, if you look only at what has been fully verified, you will know that this foundling—who was one day simply there in the street, and who since he did not know whence he came, was called the Child of Europe—could neither read nor write when he was found. At an age of twenty years he possessed nothing of what is gained through the intellect but he had a remarkable memory. As they began to instruct him, as logic entered his soul, his memory disappeared. This transition in consciousness was accompanied by something else. He possessed at first an incredible, an entirely inborn truthfulness and it was precisely in this truthfulness that he went more and more astray. The more he nibbled, so to say, at intellectuality, the more it vanished. There would be many things to study were we to enter deeply into this human soul which had been artificially held back. It is not difficult for the student of Spiritual Science to credit the popular tradition, so unacceptable to the learned people of to-day, which relates that while Caspar Hauser still knew nothing, while he still had no idea that there were beings besides himself of different form, he exercised a remarkable effect upon quite savage creatures. Savage animals humbled themselves and became mild, something streamed from him that made such beasts gentle, although they savagely attacked anyone else. We could in fact penetrate deeply into the soul of this remarkable personality, so enigmatic to many, and you would see how things that cannot be explained from ordinary life are led back through Spiritual Science to spiritual facts. Such facts cannot be learnt by speculation but only by spiritual observation, though they are comprehensible to an unbiased and logical thinking.

All this has only been said in order to show you that the modern consciousness has evolved from another, an age-old-state when man was not in direct touch with outer objects in the modern sense, but on the other hand was in connection with facts and beings of the spiritual world. A human being did not see another's physical form—nor did this form resemble that of to-day. When another being approached him a sort of dream-picture arose and by its shape and colouring he knew whether the other was antagonistic to him or sympathetic. Such a consciousness perceived spiritual facts and the spiritual world. To-day man is among beings of flesh and blood, at that time, when he turned his gaze to himself and himself was soul and spirit, he lived among spiritual beings. They were present to him, he was a spirit among spirits. Although his consciousness was only dreamlike, yet the pictures that arose in him were in living relation to his environment. That was the far distant age when man still lived in a spiritual world. Later he descended from it in order to take on a corporeal nature suited to his present consciousness. Animals already existed as physical creatures while man still perceived in spiritual realms. He lived at that time among spiritual beings, and just as you need no proof to be convinced of the presence of stones, plants and animals, so man in those primeval times needed no testimony in order to be convinced of the existence of spiritual beings. He lived among spirits and divine beings and therefore needed no religion. That was the pre-religious age.

Then man descended, the earlier form of consciousness changed into the modern. Colours and forms are no longer perceived as floating in space, colour is laid upon the surfaces of sense-objects. In the same measure as man learnt to direct his senses to the outer world, did this outer world draw itself like a veil, like the great Maja, over the world of spirit. And humanity had to receive tidings of the spiritual world through this sheath, religion became necessary.

There is also a state, however, between the time preceding a religious consciousness and the time of actual religion: there is an intermediate condition. Thence are derived the mythologies, sagas, folk-stories of the spiritual worlds. It is a dreary arid learning that has no inkling of real spiritual events and asserts that all the figures of Nordic or German mythology, of Greek mythology with its accounts of the deeds of the gods are merely inventions of popular fantasy. They are not inventions, the peasant folk do not indulge in such fancies and if they see a few clouds stretched across the sky, say that they are little sheep. That the people have such fantasies is a fiction of our modern learnedness which abounds in lively fantasy about such things. The truth of the matter is quite different. The old saga and stories of the gods are the last relics, the last memories of the pre-religious consciousness. They are records of what men themselves have seen. Those who described Wotan, Thor, Zeus, etc., did so because they remembered that such things had been experienced once upon a time. Mythologies are fragments, broken pieces of what had once been experienced. The intermediate stage was shown in another way as well. Even when clever men had already—let us say—become very clever, there were still persons who under exceptional conditions (call them states of insanity or being carried away, as you will) could see into the spiritual worlds, who could still be aware of what in earlier times was seen by all. They recounted that they themselves still saw something of the spiritual world. This was linked with the memories and led to a living faith among the people. That was a state transitional to the state of actual religion.

We may ask: what paved the way in mankind to an actual religion? It was because men found a means of so developing their inner being that they were once more able to behold the worlds from which they had sprung, which they used to see in a dull consciousness. And here we touch upon a chapter which to many modern minds contains but little probability, the question of initiation. What are initiates? They were those who so developed their inner nature of soul and spirit through certain methods that they grew again into the spiritual world. There is initiation! In every soul super-sensible forces and faculties lie dormant. There is, or at least there can be, a great and mighty moment when these forces awaken. We can gain some idea of this moment if we picture the general course of human evolution. To speak in the words of Goethe we can say that we look back into the far past when the human body had no such physical eye or physical ear as exist to-day. We look back to times when there were undifferentiated organs, able neither to see nor to hear, at the places where these organs are now situated. A time came for physical humanity when such blind organs evolved to radiant points, gradually evolved until light itself dawned upon them. In the same way a time came when the human ear had developed to such a stage that the former silent world revealed itself in tones and harmonies. The sun's forces worked upon the formation of the human eye. And to-day man can live the life of spirit and thus develop the organs of soul and spirit which are largely undeveloped in present mankind.

The moment is possible and for many has already dawned when the soul and spirit are transformed just as once the external physical organism was transformed. New eyes and ears arise through which the light shines and tones resound out of the spiritually dark and silent world. Development is possible, even to the point of living into the higher worlds. That is initiation. And the Mystery Schools provided methods of initiation as in ordinary life the methods of the chemical laboratory or of biological research are made available. The difference is only this—official science has to prepare instruments and other apparatus for its use, while he who would become an initiate has but one instrument to perfect, namely, himself in all his forces just as the force of magnetism can lie dormant in iron, so there slumbers in the human soul the power to penetrate into the spiritual world of light and sound. And so the time came when normal humanity saw only physical sense-existence and when the leaders were initiates. These could see into the spiritual worlds and give information and explanation of the facts of that world in which man had earlier lived.

To what does the first stage of initiation lead? How does it appear to the human soul? Do not imagine that this development is merely a matter of philosophic speculation, a spinning out, a refinement of ideas. The ideas man has about the sense-world are transformed when he grows into the spiritual world. No longer does he apprehend things through sharply outlined concepts, but through pictures, through Imaginations. For the human being grows into the spiritual process of world creation. The firm definite contours of the physical material world exist, in fact, nowhere else. In the world creative process the animal does not appear with clear outline. One has there something like a basic idea of the animal from which the diverse external forms can originate, a living reality, membered in itself. One must take one's stand strictly on the basis of Goethe's words: “All things corruptible are but a semblance.” The initiate learns at first to know and grasp in pictures, he learns to ascend into the spiritual world. There his consciousness must be more mobile than that which serves us for apprehending the surrounding sense-world. Hence this stage of development is called the Imaginative Consciousness. It leads man again into the spiritual world, but not in a dull twilight state. The initiate consciousness to be gained is clear and bright, as clear as man's consciousness by day. There is thus an enrichment, the spiritual consciousness is added to the day-consciousness. In the first stage of initiation man lives in the imaginative consciousness. The documents of humanity record what the initiates experienced in the spiritual world just as information with regard to the science of geometry was imparted to mankind through Euclid. We recognize what stands in these records when we go back to the sources—the spiritual vision of the initiates.

Those were the conditions prevailing among men up to the appearance of the greatest Being who has trodden upon the earth, Christ Jesus. With his appearance anew element entered evolution. If we would understand the essential nature of the new element bestowed on mankind through Christ Jesus, we must realize that in all pre-Christian initiation the candidate was completely withdrawn from ordinary life, he must work upon his soul in centres of profoundest secrecy. Above all we must realize that when man raised himself again into the spiritual world something of that merely dreamlike picture-consciousness still remained. Man had to retreat from this sense-world to be able to enter the spiritual world. That this is no longer necessary to-day has been brought about through the appearing of Christ Jesus on earth. Through the fact that the Christ-principle has entered humanity, the Central Being, the very Centre of the spiritual world, has once existed historically in a human being on this earth. It is the same Being for whom all these have longed who have developed a religious life, who have beheld in the Mystery Centres, who have left the sense-world in order to enter the spiritual world. The Being of whom it has been proclaimed that man confronts it as his highest nature, this has entered humanity's evolution with Christ Jesus. One who understands something of genuine spiritual science knows that all religious proclamation before the coming of Christ Jesus is a prophecy of him.

When the ancient initiates wished to speak of the highest that was accessible to them in the spiritual world, of that which they were able to see as the origin of all things, then under the most diverse names it was of Christ Jesus that they spoke. We need only remember the Old Testament, itself a prophecy. We remember how when Moses was to lead his people he received the command: “Say to thy people that the Lord God has said unto thee what thou shalt do.” Then Moses asks: “How will the people believe me, how can I convince them? What shall I say when they ask who has sent me?” And he was commanded: “Say the ‘I-am’ has sent thee.” Read it again and compare as exactly as you can with the original text and you will see its significance. The “I-Am,” what does that mean? The “I-Am” is the name for the divine Being, the Christ-principle of man—the Being of whom man feels like a drop, a spark, when he can say “I am.” The stone, the plant, the animal cannot say “I am.” Man is the crown of creation inasmuch as he can say “I am” to himself, he can utter a name which does not hold good for anyone but the one who utters it. You alone can call yourself “I”; no one else can call you “I.” Here the soul speaks within itself in a word to which none other has entrance except a Being which comes to the soul through no external sense, on no outer path. Here Divinity speaks. Hence the name “I-Am” was given to the Godhead whose being fills the world. “Say that the ‘I-am’ has told thee !” Thus was Moses to speak to his people.

Men learn only gradually to understand the true, deep meaning of this “I-am.” Human beings did not feel themselves as individuals at once. You can still find this in the Old Testament, these men did not as yet feel individual. Even the members of the German tribes, right into the time of the Christian Church, did not feel themselves to be individualities. Think back to the Cherusci, the Teutons, etc., the German tribes in whose land modern Germany now lies. The separate members felt the tribal ego, and themselves as a part of it. A man would not have said “I am” in the clear, definite way it is said to-day; he felt himself part of an organism composed of those who were related by blood. This blood-relationship assumes the greatest proportions among the followers of the Old Testament religion. The individual felt himself sheltered in the whole folk which for him was ruled by one Ego. He knew the meaning of “I and the Father Abraham are one,” for he traced the blood-relationship back through the generations to Abraham. If he wished to go beyond his single ego he knew himself to be sheltered in the Father Abraham, from whom flows all the blood through the generations, which is the external bearer of the common Folk-Ego.

Now if this expression, which signified the highest they knew to the people of the Old Testament is compared with what has been brought through Christ Jesus then a lightning-flash illumines the whole advance that has come about through Christian evolution. “Before Abraham was, was the ‘I-am.’” What does this mean? “Before Abraham was the ‘I-am.’” (That is the right rendering of the biblical passage.) It means: Go back through all generations, and you find something in yourself, in your own individuality which is even more eternal than what flows through all blood-related generations. Before the ancestors were, was the “I-am,” that Being which draws into every human being, of which each human soul can directly feel something in itself. Not “I and the Father Abraham,” not I and a temporal Father, but I and a spiritual Father, who has no part in anything perishable, we are one! I and the Father are one. The Father dwells in each separate individual, the Divine Principle lives in him, something which was, which is, and which is to be.

Men have actually only begun after 2,000 years to feel the force of this world-impulse; in future ages, however, they will realize the significance for mankind of this forward step in the remission and evolution of the earth. What the ancient initiates tried to reach could only be realized if one went beyond the individual human being and grasped the spirit of a whole people. If the normal man heard that he would say: That is a transient entity which begins with birth and ends with death. But if he were initiated in the secrets of the Mysteries, he saw as the Folk Spirit, as the actual Being who flows through the blood of the generations, that which was only dimly sensed by the others. He could see what can be reached only in the spiritual realm and not in external reality. He could see a divine Being who flows through the blood of the generations. To stand face to face in the spirit before this God could only take place in the Mysteries.

Those who were round Christ Jesus with full understanding as his intimate pupils were conscious that a Being of divine spiritual nature stood outwardly before them, clothed in the flesh as human personality. They were sensible of Christ Jesus as the first human being to bear a Spirit who otherwise was felt only by interrelated groups, and who could only be seen in the spiritual world by initiates. He was the Firstborn among men.

The more individualized a man becomes the more he can become a bearer of Love. Where the blood links men together they love because they are led to what they should love. When man is granted individuality, when he tends and nurtures the divine spark within him then the impulses of love, the waves of love, pass from man to man out of the free heart. And thus with this new impulse man has enriched the old bond of love that is bound to the blood-tie. Love passes over gradually into spiritual love which flows from soul to soul and which will ultimately encompass all humanity in a common bond of brother-love. But Christ Jesus is the Force, the living Force, once historically and externally present, through whom for the first time mankind has been brought to the bond of brother-love. Men will learn to understand this bond of brother-love as the perfected spiritualized Christianity.

People say very lightly to-day that theosophy should seek the common kernel of truth in all religions, for the contents of all religions are the same. People who talk like that and only compare religions in order to note the abstract resemblance have no understanding of the principle of evolution. World evolution is not without meaning. All religions undoubtedly contain the truth, but inasmuch as they evolve from form to form they evolve to higher forms. It is true that if you search deeply enough you can find teachings in other religions that are also to be found in Christianity. Christianity has not brought new doctrine. The essential element of Christianity does not lie in its teachings. Take the founders of pre-Christian religions, in their case it was a matter of what they taught. If they themselves had remained unknown, their teaching would have been preserved and this would have been enough. But with Christ Jesus that is not the point. What matters is that he was there, that he has lived here on this earth in a physical body. Not belief in his teaching but in his Person—that is the essential thing. The point is that he has been beheld among mortals as the Firstborn; whom one asks: if Thou wert in the position in which I find myself, wouldst Thou feel as I do? Wouldst Thou think as I am now thinking? Will, as I am willing? That is the important thing, that he is the greatest example as Personality, with whom it is not a matter of listening to his teaching, but of looking at him himself, and seeing how he acted. And so the intimate pupils of Christ Jesus speak quite differently from the pupils and disciples of other religious founders. It is said of those: The Master has taught this or taught that. The disciples of Christ Jesus say: We are not telling you invented myths and doctrines; we say to you what our eyes have seen, our ears heard. We have heard his voice, our hands have touched the Source of Life whereby we have community with you. And Christ Jesus himself said: “You shall bear witness for me in Jerusalem, in Judea to the end of the world.” These words contain a very great significance; testimony shall you bear for unto the end of the world. That means that there will at all times be those who, just as the men in Judea and Galilee, could say out of direct knowledge who Christ was, in the sense of the Gospel.

“In the sense of the Gospel”—what does that mean? Nothing less than that he was from the beginning the Principle that lived in all creation. He says, “If you do not believe in me, believe at least in Moses, for if you believe in Moses, then you believe in me, for Moses has spoken of me.” We have to-day seen this. Moses has spoken of him by saying: The “I-Am” has said it to me; the “I-am,” who up to then was only perceptible in the spirit. The fact that the Christ has entered visibly into the world, appearing as man among men, is what distinguishes the Christ-gospel from the divine proclamations of other religions. In all of these religions spiritual wisdom was directed to something which was outside the world. Now, with Christ Jesus, something entered the world which was to be grasped as the sense-perceptible itself. What did the first disciples experience as the ideal of their wisdom? No longer merely to understand the life of the spirits in spirit-land, but how the Highest Principle could have been present on the earth in the historical Personality of Christ Jesus. It is much easier to deny divinity to this Personality than to acknowledge it. Here lies the distinction between a certain doctrine of early Christian times and what we may call inner Christianity—the distinction between Gnosis and esoteric Christianity. The Gnosis certainly recognizes Christ in his divinity, but it could not raise itself to the conception that the Word has become flesh and dwelt among us, as the writer of the John Gospel emphasizes. He says: You shall look upon Christ Jesus; not as something to be grasped purely in the invisible, but as the Word which has become flesh and dwelt among us. You must know that with this human personality a force has appeared which will work into the farthest future, which will encircle the earth with the true spiritual love as a force that lives and works in all that lives into the future.

And if man gives himself up to this force he grows into the spiritual world from which he has descended. He will ascend again to where the initiate's vision can already reach to-day. Man will divest himself of what belongs to the senses when he penetrates into the spiritual world. The candidate who was initiated in ancient times could see in retrospect the far past of spirit-life; those who are initiated in the Christian sense through receiving the impulse of Christ Jesus are enabled to see what becomes of this earthly world of ours when humanity acts in the sense of the Christ Impulse. As one can look back to earlier conditions, so, starting from the coming of Christ, one can look into the farthest future. Consciousness will alter again, there will be a new relation of the spiritual to the sense-world. Earlier initiation was directed to time past, to age-old wisdom; Christian initiation reveals the future to one who is to be initiated. That is a necessity; man is to be initiated not only in wisdom, or in feelings but in his will. For then he knows what he is to do, he can set himself a goal for the future. Ordinary everyday people set themselves aims for the afternoon, for the evening or the morning; the spiritual man is able, out of spiritual principles, to set himself distant aims which pulse through his will and make his forces quicken. To set goals before humanity means in the true, highest sense, in the sense of the original Christ principle, to grasp Christianity esoterically. In this way it was grasped by the one who has written the great principle of the initiation of the will—the writer of the Apocalypse. We misunderstand the Apocalypse, if we do not understand it as the impulse given for the future, for action and deed.

Everything that we have let pass before us to-day can be understood out of anthroposophical Spiritual Science. I have been unable to give more than a slight sketch. When through Spiritual Science one grasps what lies behind the sense-world, one can look with understanding at all that has been given in the Gospels, at what has been proclaimed in the Apocalypse. And the more deeply penetrating is one's approach to the super-sensible worlds, the more profound is what one will find in the Christian documents. The records of Christianity will appear in higher brilliance, with deeper truths when one goes to them strengthened with the spiritual vision that may be gained by the help of Anthroposophy. True it is that the simplest heart can have some feeling of what truths lie hidden in Christianity. But man's consciousness will not be satisfied for ever with a dim sensing, it will evolve higher and wish to have knowledge and under-standing. Yet even when it mounts to the highest teachings of wisdom, there will always be mysteries in Christianity still more profound. It is for the simplest heart but also for the most developed intellectuality. The initiate experiences it again as pictures, and so the naive consciousness may divine what truths are slumbering there. Man, however, will demand knowledge and not faith—and even then he will find satisfaction in Christianity. If the explanations of the Gospels are given him through Spiritual Science he will be able to find the fully satisfying content in Christianity. Hence Spiritual Science will take the place of the highest philosophies of the past. It will bear testimony to the beautiful words of Hegel quoted at the beginning: “Profoundest thought is linked with the historical external figure of Christ Jesus, and every degree of consciousness—therein lies the greatness of Christianity—can grasp it externally. At the same time, however, Christianity demands the deepest and most penetrating wisdom. Christianity is for every stage of culture, but it can meet and satisfy the highest demands.”

The observations we shall have to make in this and succeeding lectures may be exposed to a certain misunderstanding. We shall have to deal with various questions about disease and health from the standpoint of karma, but owing to the contrary nature of present currents of thought on this subject a wrong idea of the spiritually scientific basis may easily be formed when this subject is touched upon. We know that the most varied circles discuss these questions of health and disease, and that the discussion is often carried on with considerable vehemence and passion. Sides are taken by the laity quite as much as by certain physicians against what is called scientific medicine, and it can easily be seen how the partisans of scientific medicine are perhaps provoked by many an unjustified attack, so that they not only fall into a kind of passion when they feel called upon, and rightly too, to enter the lists on behalf of what science has to say on this matter, but they also wage war against what is said contrary to their own views on the subject in question. Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science will be able to do justice to its high task only if it succeeds in maintaining an unprejudiced and objective judgement in this field which has been so much darkened by discussions. Those who have often heard lectures from me will know how little I am disposed to join the chorus of those who wish to discredit what is described as academic medicine; in Spiritual Science there is no question of agreement with one particular party or another.

As a preliminary observation we may say that the achievements of recent years in regard to health and the actual investigations into the phenomena of disease really arouse praise, recognition, and admiration, just as do numerous other scientific discoveries. Concerning what has been actually accomplished in this realm, it may be said that if anyone may rejoice at all about what medicine has accomplished in recent years it is Spiritual Science that should do so. On the other hand, we must point out that the achievements and actual knowledge and discoveries of Natural Science are by no means always truly and satisfactorily interpreted and explained by present-day scientific opinion. It is indeed most patent in many fields of scientific investigation that the opinions and theories have not grown in accordance with the positive ideas and facts which are sometimes marvellous. The light which proceeds from Spiritual Science will also successfully illuminate the scientific conquests of recent years.

After this preliminary observation it will be seen that we are not concerned with any sort of an agreement in a paltry skirmish regarding what can be done at the present time in the field of scientific medicine. It may be said, however, that the most admirable facts which have so far been brought to light cannot bear fruit for the good of humanity in our day because the materialistically coloured opinions and theories prevalent to-day render them sterile. So it is much better for Anthroposophy modestly to say what it has to say than to take part in any sort of party war. In this way it will arouse much less the passions already so excited at the present time.

If we wish to obtain a point of view from which to consider the questions that are to occupy us, we must first realise that the cause of any phenomena has to be sought for in a variety of ways; there are nearer and more remote causes, and where Anthroposophy wishes to discover the karmic cause of health, it will have to occupy itself a little with the more remote causes not on the surface. We will give an illustration of this, which upon reflection will soon be understood.

Let us take the standpoint of one who thinks that we are gloriously advanced at the present day in this field, and who altogether despises the opinions on health and disease which were advanced in previous centuries. If we survey the questions of disease and health, we gain the impression that the representatives of this view usually conclude that what has come to light in this field within the last twenty or thirty years is a kind of absolute truth which may, indeed, be supplemented, but can never be gainsaid as can the knowledge which has been acquired in past ages. For example it is often said: ‘In this field we find the grossest superstition in bygone times!’ And then truly startling examples are given of the way in which in past centuries they tried to heal one complaint or another. It is considered to be exceptionally bad when one comes across terms which for the modern consciousness have lost the meaning they possessed at that time. Thus some say: ‘There were times when every illness was ascribed to God or the devil!’ This was not so bad as these people make it out to be, because they can form no idea of what was intended by the expression ‘God’ or ‘devil.’ We can make this very clear by means of an illustration.

Let us suppose that two persons are speaking together. One says to the other: ‘I have just seen a room full of flies. Someone said it was quite natural the room should be full of flies, and I thought so too, for the room was very dirty and so the flies thrive.’ It is quite natural that one should accept this as a reason for the existence of the flies and it will be quite reasonable to say that if the room were thoroughly cleaned the flies would disappear. But there was another person who said that he knew a different reason for the flies in the room, and that the real cause was that for a long time a very lazy housewife had lived there. Now what boundless superstition to think that laziness was a kind of personality which needed only to beckon, and then in came the flies! Surely the explanation which attributes the presence of flies to the dirt is a better one. There happens almost the same thing when one says: ‘Someone has fallen ill through being infected by some sort of bacillus; if this is driven out, the person will be well again.’ Others talk about a spiritual cause which lies deeper down, but to effect a cure they still think it necessary only to drive out the bacillus. To talk of a spiritual cause of illness while admitting all the rest is no more superstitious than to say as in the first case that the presence of the flies was due to a lazy housewife. And there is no need to be angry if someone says that the flies would not be there if the room were clean. It is not a question of one view being in opposition to the other; rather the holder of each view should learn to understand the other and study his meaning. One must carefully take into consideration whether only the immediate causes are spoken of, or whether indirect causes are referred to. The objective Anthroposophist will never take this standpoint that laziness needs only to beckon for the flies to come into the room; he will know that other material things also come into consideration. But everything which has a material expression has its spiritual background, and for the welfare of humanity this spiritual background has to be sought. Those, however, who would like to take part in the combat should also be reminded that spiritual causes will not always be understood in the same way and also cannot be combated in the same way as ordinary material causes; and one must not always think that by fighting the spiritual causes there would be no need to combat the material causes; for then one might allow the room to remain dirty, and seek to cure the idleness of the housewife. What is necessary is that each of these two parties should understand the other's point of view and not quarrel with him about it.

Now when we are considering karma we must speak of connections of events which came into human life in former times, and how they manifest themselves later in their after-effects on the same human being. If we speak of health and disease from the standpoint of karma we must ask: ‘Can we connect the healthy and diseased condition with the former deeds and experiences of this person, and how will his present condition of health or disease later react upon him?’

The man of the present day would far rather believe that disease is connected only with immediate causes. For the fundamental tendency in the modern view of life is always to seek what is most convenient. And it is certainly convenient to go no further than the immediate cause. Therefore in considering human diseases, only the immediate causes are taken into consideration, and most of all is this the case with the invalid himself. For it cannot be denied that the patients themselves are led to take this standpoint, and because of this there exists so much dissatisfaction. When there is the belief that the disease must have an immediate cause which must be found by the skilled physician, and when he cannot help, he is accused of having bungled somewhere. From this convenient method of judgement proceeds much of what is said at the present day on this subject. One who knows how to observe the wide-spreading effects of karma will always extend his gaze more and more from what happens now to events which lie comparatively far back. Above all, he will be convinced that a complete understanding of some circumstance in a person's life is only possible when an extended view over what lies further back can be obtained. Especially is this so in the case of illness. When speaking of people who are ill, and also of those who are well, the question arises, ‘How can we form an idea of the nature of disease?’

When spiritual investigation is carried on directly with the aid of the spiritual organs of perception, it will always—when dealing with the diseases of man—notice irregularities, not only in the physical body, but also in the higher principles, in the etheric and astral bodies. The spiritual investigator must always in the case of illness consider, on the one hand the share the physical body may have in this particular case, and, on the other, the share of the etheric body and the astral body; for all three principles may be involved in the disease. The question now arises: ‘What ideas can we form about the processes of disease?’ The answer to this question may be found most easily by first considering how far the idea of disease may be extended. Let us leave it to those who enjoy using such allegorical and symbolic language to talk about diseases of minerals or metals. Let them talk about rust as disease of the iron. We must be quite clear that if we use purely abstract ideas we can gain no practical knowledge of life but can arrive at only a fantastic view, and not one which really penetrates into the facts. If we wish to arrive at a real idea of disease and also a real idea of health, we shall have to guard against saying that minerals and metals can also have diseases.

But matters are quite different when we come to the vegetable kingdom. We may certainly speak of the diseases of plants, for a real comprehension of the idea of disease these diseases of plants are especially interesting and important. In the case of plants, if again one does not go to work in a fantastic way, one cannot well speak of ‘inner causes of diseases,’ in the same way as with animals and men. The diseases of plants can always be traced to outer causes, such as some detrimental influence in the ground, insufficient light, this or that effect of the wind and other elementary activities in nature. Or they may be traced to the influence of parasites which live upon the plants and injure them. In the vegetable kingdom the idea of ‘inner causes of disease’ cannot be justified. It is, of course, impossible in the short space of time at our disposal to furnish innumerable proofs of what I have just indicated, but the deeper one goes into the pathology of plants the more it can be seen that in their case inner causes of disease do not exist, but that we have to deal with external injuries or other external influences.

Now a plant such as we see in the external world is a being which is made up of a physical and etheric body. At the same time it is a being which brings to our notice the fact that what we call the physical and etheric body are in principle healthy, and that it has to wait until it meets with an external injury before it can become diseased. The researches of Spiritual Science confirm that this is the true state of affairs. Whereas through spiritual scientific research into the diseases of animal and human being we are able to see quite decided changes in the inner or super-sensible part of the being, in the case of a diseased plant we are never able to say that the original etheric body itself is changed, but only that all kinds of disturbances and harmful influences from outside have penetrated into the physical body and especially into the etheric body. Spiritual Science entirely confirms the following general conclusion: In the constituent parts of the plant, namely, physical and etheric bodies, we have before us something which is in essence healthy. But it is another thing to see how when it has suffered external damage it can safeguard by all sorts of means its growth and development, and heal the injury. Notice for instance how, if you cut a plant, it tries to grow round the injured part, and to get round what then interferes with and injures it. We can see when an external injury occurs, the clear manifestation of the healing power which the plant has in its inner organisation. In the etheric and physical bodies of the plant exist healing forces which are brought into play when some exterior injury is inflicted. This is an extremely important fact if we wish to come to a clear understanding in this realm. A being such as a plant, having physical and etheric body thus shows that these principles are fundamentally healthy. There is in them sufficient force not only for the development and growth of the plant, but also there is a super-abundance of these forces which manifest themselves as healing powers when injuries come from outside. Whence, then, do these healing forces come? If you wound a merely physical body the injury will remain; it is unable of itself to repair the injury. For this reason, we cannot talk of a disease in the case of a merely physical body, and least of all can we talk of a relation between disease and healing. This we can best see when a disease appears in a plant. Here we have to look for the principle of the inner healing power in the etheric body. Spiritual investigation shows us this very clearly, for the activity of the etheric body of the plant is much intensified round the part where the wound has been inflicted. It brings forth from itself entirely different forms, and develops entirely different currents. It is an extremely interesting fact that we call on the etheric body of a plant to exercise increased activity when we injure its physical body.

We have not indeed defined the concept of disease but we have done something to arrive at its nature, and we have gained something which gives us an inkling of the inward process of healing.

Following the clue given by inward spiritual observation let us go further and try to understand the external phenomena to which Spiritual Science leads us. Then we may pass from the consideration of the injuries we give to plants to those we give to animals which, in addition to the etheric body, have also an astral body. If we carry our observations further we shall see that the etheric body of a higher animal reacts correspondingly less to an external injury. The higher the animal is in the scale of evolution so much the less will be the action of the etheric body. If we cause a severe injury to the physical body of a lower or even a higher mammal; if, for instance, we tear a leg from a dog or some such animal, we find that the etheric body cannot answer with its healing power in the same measure as the etheric body of a plant replies to a similar injury to itself. But even in the animal kingdom this action of the etheric body can still be seen to a great extent. Let us descend to a very low order of animals—to the tritons. If we cut off certain organs from such a being they do not experience anything particularly painful. The organs quickly grow again, and the animal soon looks as it did before.

In this case something similar has taken place to that which occurred in the case of the plant; we have called forth a certain healing power in the etheric body. But we should not deny that such provocation to develop healing powers in the etheric body of man or of higher animals would mean a considerable risk to health. The lower animal on the contrary will only be stimulated from its inner being to put forth another member by means of its etheric body.

Now if one of the limbs of a crab is severed, the animal cannot at once renew it. But when it casts its shell the next time and arrives at the next transition stage of its life, a stump appears; the second time the stump grows larger, and if the animal were to cast its shell often enough, the limb would be replaced by a new one. These facts show us that the etheric body must make greater efforts to call forth the inner forces of healing; and in the higher animals the healing power is still less. If you mutilate a higher animal it can do nothing towards replacing the limb. Here we must allude to a fact which at the present time is the subject of an important dispute in the field of Natural Science: If you mutilate an animal, and the animal has progeny, the deformities are not transmitted to the offspring; the next generation has again the complete parts. When the etheric body carries its qualities over to the offspring it is again stimulated to form a complete organism. The etheric body of a triton still acts in the same animal; in a crab it acts only when it casts its shell; in the higher animals the same phenomenon appears only in the offspring, and there the etheric body replaces what had been mutilated in the previous generation. If we observe these phenomena rightly we shall clearly perceive that we must still speak of the healing forces in the etheric body even if these forces are manifested only in the succeeding generation when the offspring is born without the mutilation which the parent suffered. Here we have, as it were, a research into the why and wherefore of the healing powers of the etheric body.

We might now ask the question: How is it, then, that the higher we rise in the animal kingdom—and this applies externally to the human kingdom also—we find that the healing forces of the etheric body have to make greater efforts to manifest themselves? This depends upon the fact that the etheric body may be bound to the physical body in very different ways. Between the physical body and the etheric body there may be a more intimate union or a loose one. For example, let us take the triton, in which the severed member is replaced very quickly. Here we must assume a loose connection between the physical body and the etheric body, and this applies in the vegetable kingdom to a still higher degree. This union, let us say, is such that the physical body is unable to react upon the etheric body, and the latter remains untouched by what happens to the physical body and is in a certain sense independent of it. Now the nature of the etheric body is that of activity, of generation and growth. It encourages growth up to a certain point. When we cut off a part, the etheric body is immediately prepared to restore that part, and to that end unfolds all its activities. But what is the reason if it cannot develop all its activities? The reason is to be found in a closer dependence on the physical body. This is the case with the higher animals. There is here a much more intimate union between the etheric body and the physical body, and when the physical body develops its form and organises the forces of physical nature, these forces react upon the etheric body.

To put it clearly: In the lower animals or the plants, that which is outside does not react on the etheric body but leaves it untouched, carrying on an independent existence. When we come to the higher animals, reactions of the physical body are imposed upon the etheric body which adapts itself completely to the physical body; so that if we injure the physical body, we injure the etheric body at the same time. Hence the etheric body has to exercise greater powers if it has first to heal itself and then the corresponding member in the physical body. Therefore in the case of the etheric body of a higher animal, deeper healing forces must be called forth. But what is the connection? Why is the etheric body of a higher animal so dependant upon the forms of the physical body?

The higher we advance in the animal creation the more do we have to consider, not only the activity of the etheric body and the physical body, but also that of the astral body. In the case of the lower animals the activity of the astral body comes but little into consideration. For this reason the lower animals still have so many qualities in common with the plants. The higher we ascend, the more does the astral body come into action, and this action is such that it makes the etheric body subservient to itself. A being such as a plant, which has only physical body and etheric body, has little to do with the external world; an action may be exercised upon the plant from outside, but this is not reflected as an inward experience. Where an astral body is active, external impressions are reflected into inner experiences, but a being in which the astral body is inactive is more shut off from the external world. The more the astral body is active the more does a being open itself to the external world. Thus the astral body unites the inner nature of a being with the outer world, and the increasing activity of the astral body brings it about that the etheric body has to use much stronger forces to make injuries good.

If we now pass on from animals to man, a new element arises. Man does not simply conform to certain prescribed functions inspired by the astral body as is the case with the animals which have, as it were, a course outlined for them in advance, and which live more according to an established programme. We could scarcely say of an animal that it departs to any great extent from its instincts, or that it follows its instincts with more or less moderation. It follows its plan of life, and all its actions are submitted to a sort of general programme. But man, having risen higher on the ladder of evolution, is able to discern between right and wrong, truth and falsehood, good and evil. Through purely individual motives he comes into touch with the outer world in various ways. These contacts react and make an impression upon his astral body, and as a consequence of the interaction between his astral body and etheric body, both now suffer these reactions. Thus if a person leads a dissolute life in any respect it will make an impression on his astral body which in its turn influences the etheric body. How it will do this will depend upon what has been laid down in the astral body. Therefore we shall now be able to understand that the etheric body of man alters, according as he leads this or that life within the limits of good or evil, right or wrong, truth or falsehood, etc. All these exercise an influence on his etheric body.

Let us now remember what takes place when a human being passes through the portal of death. We know that the physical body is laid aside and that the etheric body, now united with the astral body and the Ego, remains. When a certain length of time has passed after death, a time which is measured only by days, the etheric body is thrown aside as a second corpse; an extract, however, of the etheric body is left over and this is taken along and kept permanently. In this extract of the etheric body is contained as if in an essence, all that has penetrated the etheric body, for example, from a dissolute life, or from true or false thinking, feeling and action. This is contained in the etheric body and he takes it with him in the period up to a new birth. As an animal does not have such experiences, it cannot, of course, take anything over in the same way beyond the portal of death. When the person again comes into existence by birth, the essence of his previous etheric body is something which now impregnates his new etheric body, and permeates its structure. Therefore in his new existence the person has in his etheric body the results of what he had experienced in his previous life, and as the etheric body is the builder of an entirely new organisation at a new birth, all this now imprints itself on his physical body also. How does this come about?

Spiritual investigation shows us that in the form of a human body which enters into existence by birth, we are able to see approximately what deeds a person did in a previous life. In the case of an animal we cannot say that at its birth it brings with it a reincarnated individuality from a previous earth life. Only the common astral body of this species of animal is active, and this will limit the healing power of the etheric body of this animal. In man we find that not only his astral body but also his etheric body is impregnated with the results of the deeds of his previous life: and as the etheric body has within itself the power to bring forth what it formerly had, we shall also understand that this etheric body will also build into the new organism that which it brings with it from previous incarnations. We shall now understand how our deeds in one life can work over into our conditions of health in the next life, and how in our state of health we have often to seek a karmic effect of deeds of a previous life.

We may approach the matter in still another way. We may ask: Does everything that we do in the life between birth and death react in the same manner on our etheric body? Even in ordinary life we can perceive a great difference on our inner organisation between the reaction of what we experience as conscious beings, and many other experiences. Here comes a very interesting fact which can be fully explained by Spiritual Science and which can also be quite reasonably understood. In the course of his life a person has a great number of experiences which he receives consciously and unites them with his Ego. Within him they develop into concepts which he works upon, etc. But a great many experiences and impressions do not come as far as to concepts, and yet they are really there in man and act upon him. If you walk along the street it often happens that someone says to you: ‘I saw you today, and you even looked at me!’ And yet you know nothing about it! This is often the case. Of course, this has made an impression; your eyes indeed saw the other person but the direct impression did not come as far as a concept. There are innumerable cases of this sort, so that our life is really divided into two parts—into a realm of soul-life which consists of concepts, and another realm that we have never brought really into clear consciousness. There are again other differences. You will easily be able to distinguish between impressions which you have in your life and can remember, and those which you cannot remember.

Thus our soul-life is divided into entirely different categories, and there is, indeed, a very considerable difference between these various categories if we consider the effect upon the inner being of man. Let us now consider for a few minutes the life of man between birth and death. First of all we observe this great difference between the concepts which come again and again into our consciousness, and those which have been forgotten. This difference can be most easily exemplified by the following. Think of an impression which called forth a clear idea within you. Let it be an impression which aroused joy or pain, an impression which was accompanied by a feeling.

Let us bear in mind that most impressions, really all the impressions that are made upon us are accompanied by feelings and these feelings express themselves not only on the conscious surface of life, but they work down into the physical body. You need only remember how one impression will cause us to become pale, and another causes us to blush. These impressions affect the circulation of the blood. And now let us pass over to what on the whole does not come to consciousness, or only fleetingly so, and is not remembered. In this case Spiritual Science shows how these impressions are none the less accompanied by emotions in the same way as are the conscious impressions. If you receive an impression from the outer world which, if received consciously, would have frightened you so much that it would have made your heart beat, that same impression is not, however, without effect, even when unconsciously received. It not only makes an impression, but it also goes down into the physical body. It is remarkable that an impression which produces a conscious idea, finds a kind of resistance when working into the deeper human organisation; but if the impression simply acts upon us without our bringing it to a conscious idea, then nothing hinders it, and for this reason it is even more effective. Human life is much richer than the conscious human life.

There is a period in our life when we experience a great number of impressions which act very strongly upon the human organisation and which we are unable to remember. In the whole of the period from birth up to the moment when a person can first remember, a great number of impressions are made upon him which are all there, and which have been transformed during this time. They work, just as do the conscious impressions, but there is nothing opposed to them, especially when they are forgotten. Nothing that is otherwise contained in the soul-life in the way of conscious conception can thereby form a dam as it were, and the sub-conscious impressions are those which act most profoundly. Now in the external life one can often find proof that there are moments in human life when the second kind of inner effect is manifested. We are unable to explain many of the events in later life and we cannot discover why we have to experience one thing or another in this particular way. For example, we experience something which has such a tremendous impression upon us that we cannot explain how such a comparatively insignificant experience could make such a great impression. Now if we investigate, we shall perhaps find that exactly in that critical time between birth and the time back to which we can remember, we had a remotely similar experience, but which we have forgotten. No idea of it has remained behind, but at the time we had an impression which affected us very much. This has lived on and now unites with the present impression, strengthening it so that what would otherwise have moved us much less or perhaps not at all now makes a particularly strong impression. If we perceive this clearly we shall be able to form an idea of the extreme importance of the impression made upon a child in its earliest years and how something may throw its very significant shadow or light on the later life. Here again, something from the earlier life works into the later life.

It may happen that these impressions of childhood—particularly if they are repeated—influence the whole disposition in such a way that from a certain point of time on, an inexplicable depression of spirit comes. This can only be accounted for when one goes back and discovers the impressions received during childhood which throw their lights or shadows into the later life, and which are now expressed in a permanent depression of spirits. Now we shall find that those events which then made particular impressions upon him work the more strongly on the child. We may say that if emotions, particularly feelings and sensations, were connected with the impressions which were later forgotten, these emotions and overflowings of feeling are particularly effective in producing later similar experiences.

Now remember what I have often said about the life during the kamaloca period. After the etheric body has been laid aside as a second corpse, man lives the whole of his last life backwards. He goes over all the experiences which he has had, but not in such a way that he is indifferent to them. During the period in kamaloca, as man still possesses his astral body, what he has gone through brings about the most profound experiences in feeling. For example, let us suppose that a person died at the age of seventy. He lives his life back to his fortieth year when he struck a man on the face; he then experiences the pain which he gave to the other. A kind of self-reproach is thereby called forth; this then remains, so as to compensate the matter in a future life. You will understand that as in this period between death and a new birth there are all kinds of astral experiences, that which is experienced by us as an action imprints itself all the more surely and deeply into our inner being, and contributes to the construction of our new body. Thus, if even in ordinary life we are so strongly affected by certain experiences, especially if they were accompanied by feeling, that they are able to bring about later a depression of spirits, we shall understand that the much stronger impressions of kamaloca life are able to express themselves so that they work deeply into the organisation of the physical body.

Here, then, you see a stronger form of a phenomenon which on careful observation you are able to find, even in the life between birth and death. The ideas which meet with no hindrance from the consciousness will lead to other irregularities in the soul—to neurasthenia, to various kinds of nervous diseases and perhaps also to mental diseases. All these phenomena present themselves as causal connections between earlier and later events, and furnish us with a clear picture of them.

If we now wish to go further with this idea we may say that our actions will, in the life after death, be transmuted into a powerful emotion. This emotion which is not then weakened by any physical idea, not limited by any ordinary consciousness—for the brain is not then necessary—is experienced by the other form of consciousness, which then works down more deeply. So it is brought about that our actions and the whole nature of our previous life appear in the constitution of our whole organisation in a new life. Hence we shall quite easily understand that when a person who in one incarnation has thought, felt and acted very egotistically, sees before him after death the fruits of his egotistic thoughts, feelings and action, he is filled with strong feelings against his former deeds. This is in fact the case. He develops tendencies which are directed against his own being, and these tendencies, in so far as they have proceeded from an egotistic nature in the previous life, express themselves in a weak organisation in the new life. (The ‘weak organisation’ here refers to the being, and not to the external impression.) Therefore we must clearly understand that a weak organisation can be traced back karmically to egotism in a previous life. Let us go further.

Let us suppose that in one life a person manifests a particular tendency towards telling lies. This is a tendency which proceeds from a deeper organisation of the soul; for if a person only follows what is in his most conscious life he will not really lie. It is only emotions and feelings which work up out of his sub-consciousness which lead him to this. Here again we have something deeper. If a person is untruthful, the actions which proceed from untruthfulness will again arouse the most forcible feelings against himself in the life after death, and a profound tendency against lying will appear. He will then bring with him into the next life not only a weak organisation but—so Spiritual Science shows us—an organisation which is incorrectly built, so to speak, and which manifests irregularly formed inner organs in the finer organisation. Something is there which does not agree and this is due to the previous tendency to lying. And whence came this tendency to lying?—for in that tendency the person already has something which also is not in order.

Here we shall have to go back still further. Spiritual Science shows that a fickle life which knows neither devotion nor love—a superficial life in one incarnation—expresses itself in the tendency to lying in the next incarnation; and in the third incarnation this tendency to lying manifests itself in incorrectly formed organs. Thus we can karmically trace the effects in three consecutive incarnations: superficiality and fickleness in the first incarnation, the tendency to lying in the second, and the physical disposition to disease in the third incarnation.

Thus we see how karma is connected with health and disease. That which has just now been said is based upon facts revealed as the result of spiritual investigation. We are not advancing theories, but actual cases which have been observed, and which can be investigated by the methods of Spiritual Science. We commenced this lecture by referring to the most ordinary facts—the healing powers of the etheric body of the plants. We then showed how through the addition of the astral body in the animals the etheric body is less active. And we saw further how through the reception of the Ego which develops an individual life for good or evil, truth and falsehood, the astral body which, in the case of the higher animals only hinders the healing power, again adds something new to man, namely the karmic influences of disease which flow into him out of the individual life. In the plant there are no inner causes of disease, because disease is still something outside, and the healing powers work without being weakened. In the lower animals we find an etheric body but with such healing powers that it can even replace certain parts; but the further we rise the more does the astral body imprint itself into the etheric body and thereby limit its healing powers. The animals do not survive in reincarnations; therefore that which is in the etheric body is not connected with any moral, intellectual or individual qualities, but only with the common type. In man, however, that which he experiences in his Ego works down into the etheric body. Why then do the experiences of childhood in the realm of feeling we have mentioned manifest themselves only in light diseases? Because we are able to find in the same life the causes of much that manifests itself as neurasthenia, neurosis, hysteria. But we shall have to look for the causes of severer cases of disease in the moral causes set up in the previous life because that which is experienced morally and intellectually can only be fully implanted in the etheric body on passing over to a new birth. On the whole, the etheric body of man cannot embody the deeper moral activities in one life, although we shall still hear of exceptional cases, and indeed of very important ones.

Such is the connection which exists between our life of good or evil, our moral and intellectual life in one incarnation, and our health or disease in the next.

My dear Friends,

We have tried, so far as is possible in a few short hours, to picture the journey of man through the super-sensible world. For that is the world in which man verily lives his life between death and a new birth. But in the physical world too, where man is living in his physical and etheric bodily nature,—here too his forces extend into the super-sensible world. In the physical world he feels his super-sensible existence more or less as a riddle; and unless he be able to find at least a partial solution to the riddle, his soul will not attain inner harmony, inner balance, inner security. Nay, more, his life will lack energy and vigour; and human love that is really worthy of the name will be beyond him.

A study of man as he is on Earth presents an aspect in relation to his super-sensible being which can give us insight into the reason why the Divine-Spiritual worlds have sent him down to this world of the physical senses. It is, after all, in the physical world that appeal has to be made to man to interest himself in knowledge concerning the super-sensible world. We would have to deal quite differently with the riddles of the super-sensible world if we were going to speak of them to the dead, to those who are passing through their existence between death and a new birth. It will accordingly be well, in bringing our study to a certain conclusion to-day, to take the indications that have been given in the last few days concerning the mysteries of the super-sensible world, and let them light up again in our hearts in connection with the sojourn of man on Earth.

Let us think, to begin with, of man as he is here in earthly life,—of ourselves, that is. We have in the first place our senses. Our senses give us information of all that is around us; they are the occasion of our earthly joy and happiness and also of our earthly suffering and pain. We are apt to forget how very much sense impressions and sense experiences signify in life. Studies such as we have been pursuing in this course of lectures take us beyond the life of the senses into spiritual regions, and it might well seem that the tendency of Spiritual Science would be to lead to an undervaluing of the life of the senses, making us feel that it is, after all, of secondary importance and that we should flee from it even while we are still in earthly life. Such a feeling can never be the final outcome of Spiritual Science. It can only serve to bring home to us that there is an inferior way of taking the life of the senses incompatible with the dignity and nobility of human existence, but that it is possible for man to lose the life of the senses in its less worthy aspects, and find it again in its deeper meaning from a higher, super-sensible angle of vision. We would naturally shrink from studying things in their spiritual aspect if we were obliged to tell ourselves that all the loveliness and wonder of the world of nature which makes such a deep impression on our souls, all the beauty of plants, of the blossoming flowers, of the ripening fruits, all the majesty of the starry heavens, mean so little in human life that they must be regarded as beneath our notice in comparison with spiritual-scientific knowledge. This is not so at all. If you look back to the impulses given by Initiates and Masters in different epochs for the enhancement of the dignity of human life, you will find that the words uttered by Initiates never undervalue the beauty, the splendour, the majesty of the earthly life of the senses. Wonderful, full of poetry and artistic imagination are often the words used by Initiates to express the most lofty super-sensible truths! Think only of the image of the lotus flower—to take one example among many—and you will realise that the Initiates have never considered it unworthy to speak of the development of spiritual life in imagery drawn from the world of the senses. They have invariably held that in the contemplation of the sense-world something is immediately present, or can at any rate be discovered, that leads man on to the highest.

The sense-world, however, as man perceives it in ordinary consciousness, cannot in itself afford him satisfaction. And for this reason. The impressions that come to man through his eyes, ears and other senses, are indeed connected with his Ego, with its whole life and development, but they can do nothing to promote the inner stability of the Ego. There they cannot help man. We turn our gaze outward to the beauty and splendour of the flowers; we have before us a world of infinite variety. We turn our gaze inward, to our Ego; and for ordinary consciousness it seems, to begin with, as if this Ego is vanishing away from us. It seems to be just a point within us, a spiritual point, capable of saying little more than the mere word “I.” Nor can we wonder at this. We need only consider how man's senses have to be wholly surrendered to the world if they are to mediate between him and the world. The eye, in order that it may see, must renounce itself. It must be completely transparent if the splendour and beauty of the outer world of sense is to shine through it in all the lustre and radiance of colour. It is the same with the other senses. We really know nothing of our senses. Is there, then, any way by means of which we can begin to know and understand what they are in their real nature? There is indeed, but here again we must tread the path which leads to the super-sensible world. Knowledge even of the senses has to be sought in the super-sensible world.

You are familiar with the descriptions I have given of the paths which lead to the higher worlds. Try to picture livingly the consciousness that can develop into Imaginative cognition. In a certain respect we withdraw from physical perception of the outer world when we enter into Imaginative cognition. But the most interesting thing of all that happens on this path is the following. I will describe it for you in a picture.

When, in meditation—in accordance with the exercises given in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment—you draw near to the world of Imagination, when, that is, as a result of your strivings, your etheric being begins to emerge from your physical being and this first super-sensible member begins itself to possess a kind of consciousness, you can as it were, “catch” yourself at a stage that lies between ordinary sense-perception and Imaginative vision. You have not yet advanced to a fully developed Imaginative vision, but you are on the way to it. We will now suppose that a man who is already on the way to Imaginative vision goes into some high mountainous region that is particularly rich in primeval silicious rock. Forces of soul will be readily quickened in him where there is an abundance of quartz-containing silicious rock. Certain inner faculties of soul can, as it were, suddenly spring to development as a result of a vivid impression caused by silicious rock on high mountains. Ordinarily, this kind of rock is slightly transparent, slightly translucent. But when our faculties of soul have pressed forward to the stage of which I have spoken—at that moment silicious rock becomes wholly transparent. We climb up on to a high mountain, and behold, the silicious rock appears to us with the transparency of glass. We feel moreover that something is streaming out from our own being and uniting with it. Here, at the outermost surface of the Earth, by a kind of natural surrender of our consciousness we become one with the whole Earth's surface. It is as though our eyes were sending out rays that enter right into the silicious rock; and in that moment we begin to feel ourselves one with the whole Earth. When we have this experience, beginning at the same time to feel ourselves one with the whole World, with the Cosmos, then, if we are to attain, not to a dream, nor to any abstract thought, but to a first actual realisation of oneness with the Cosmos, we must carry the experience further. An inner consciousness can light up within us which I may perhaps express in the following words. “Thou, O Earth, art not alone in the World-All! Thou, O Earth, together with me and all the other beings upon thee, art verily one with the great World-All!” Living in this experience of oneness with the silicious rock, we no longer see the Earth separated from the rest of the Universe. We see the Earth as an ether-sphere, emerging from the sphere of the cosmic ether.

This is a first feeling that can come over us. Many an ancient song, many an ancient myth, brimful of wonderful revelations, rings to us across the ages from a literature born in the time when mankind was possessed of instinctive clairvoyance. People read these songs and myths to-day, and like to persuade themselves that they are uplifted in heart and soul by what they read. But the truth contained therein eludes them. It is quite impossible to experience, or to have any insight into the real mood and feeling of the Bhagavad Gita, for example, or of other Indian and Oriental literature, without having at least begun to learn, through spiritual knowledge, in how real a sense man can become one with the Earth and thereby one with the Cosmos. Many a time the mood of such a song will have been born from a realisation of oneness with the Cosmos, a kind of “going in consciousness” with the light—even with the light that penetrates the hard silicious rock, so that now the light enfills and permeates it with the human soul itself, making this hard rocky substance into a cosmic eye through which man gazes out into the wide expanses of the Cosmos.

It is indeed so, that when out of real knowledge we begin to describe super-sensible man, we find ourselves quite naturally turning away from abstract, theoretical expressions. We cannot help speaking a language in which the whole feeling-content of the human soul is united with the ideas. In all our study of super-sensible man we must realise in the depths of our hearts that knowledge of the super-sensible cannot be clothed in words without making will and feeling one with the thoughts and ideas, without letting our whole being pour into the words. Life has, we all know well, to be endured and much that life brings is hard to bear. But for one who is conscious of the deeply human quality of super-sensible knowledge, the thing that is hardest of all is to listen to this super-sensible knowledge being expressed in theories and abstractions. The pain that is caused him by hearing people speak of the super-sensible world in a theoretical manner, is just like the physical pain caused to a finger by putting it into a flame.

When further progress has been made in super-sensible knowledge, when, through Imagination, we understand the working of the super-sensible forces in the human being during earthly life, then we can go on to attain the knowledge that belongs to Inspiration. Through Inspiration we can gaze into what man was before birth, before he descended to earthly existence, and also into what he will be when he has passed through the gate of death. We can look upon all that I have been describing to you in these lectures,—the journey through the different planetary regions, where the forming of the “physiognomy” takes place, and then the process of metamorphosis from an earlier to a later earthly life. At the stage of Inspiration we can follow the human being in his whole journey through the several starry worlds.

Now this knowledge, by means of which we can penetrate to the depths of our inner being, receives a new quality, a new colouring when we realise that what has been described in connection with the life stretching between death and a new birth lives within us even during our life on this physical Earth. It is all there within man when he is on Earth—tiny and insignificant as he appears from a spatial point of view, standing there in his physical body, enclosed by his skin. Within him live all the splendours of the Cosmos, and we must not omit to tell of these when we are describing the true and essential being of man. Man belongs to the worlds of the stars and to yet higher worlds—the worlds of the Hierarchies. And in such measure as our knowledge is able to penetrate to what is thus living within us—this earthly heritage of what we were in our true being, between death and a new birth—we can at the same time do something more. We can penetrate to the depths of our Earth planet, to the veins of the metals—lead ore, silver ore, copper ore—we can learn to perceive what lives in the rocks through the presence there of the metals and their ores. Seen with the eyes of sense, the metallic substances are little more than indications of different kinds of earth. But if we are able to gaze into the Earth with that spiritually sharpened perception which we owe to the super-sensible part of our being, the metallic substances in the Earth can give rise to wonderful experiences. The copper, silver and gold within the Earth begin to speak a language full of richness and mystery. Then something happens which brings us, men living on the Earth, into close kinship with the living soul of the Earth herself. The metallic ores tell us something; they become for us cosmic memories.

Think for a moment how it is with you when in quietude of soul—inwardly active quietude of soul—you let old memories rise up within you, memories which bear on their wings many an event of long ago. You feel as if you were living through past experiences, as if you were together again with many a one who has been dear to you in the course of your life, maybe with many a one long since gone hence. You are wafted right away from the present moment, you are living in the sorrows and joys of days gone by.

An exactly similar experience arises—but on a majestic scale—when, imbued with a spirit-knowledge that is also felt, you become one with the veins of metal in the Earth. It is not now as it was with the silicious rock which carried you out with seeing eyes, out into the cosmic spaces; in this new experience it is as though you became one with the very body of the Earth. And as you listen inwardly to the wonderful story told by the metals, you say to yourself: “Now I am one with the inmost beat of the soul and heart of the Earth herself. I have memories which are not my own personal memories; memories of the Earth herself are sounding into my being,—memories of earlier times, of ages when she was not yet the Earth we know, when there were no animals, no plants upon her surface, least of all any minerals in the bosom of the Earth. I remember, together with the Earth, those ancient days when the Earth was one with the other planets of our planetary system. I remember ages when there was no separate Earth, because the Earth was not yet dense, not yet firm in herself as she is to-day. I remember the time when the whole planetary system was a living organism of soul, and human beings indwelt this living organism, in quite a different form.” Thus do the veins of the metals in the Earth lead us to the Earth's own memories.

Now this experience leads us on to see quite clearly why it is that we have been sent down to the Earth by the Divine Beings who rule over the World-Order.

Living thus in the Earth's memories, we feel for the first time the true measure of our thinking. Having once taken hold in this way of the Earth's memories, we feel how our thinking is bound up with the Earth. And the moment we make the Earth's memories our own, we have around us the Beings of the Second Hierarchy, the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes. This, then, is the way whereby we can have around us even in earthly life those Beings who, as we have heard, are round us again during a certain period of our life between death and a new birth. We know now with full conviction that we come in contact with these Beings of the Second Hierarchy while we are incarnated on Earth between birth and death. The task of these Beings is not only that of working together with us between death and rebirth at the metamorphosis of our being; they have also their part in the whole forming and shaping of the Cosmos. We are able now to see how these Beings of the Second Hierarchy are entrusted by the spiritual World-Order with the task of bringing about in the Earth what is wrought there by virtue of the metallic ores.

Let us look back once more at the experience we had with the silicious rock. We were not then able to grasp the fact of which I am now going to speak, for at that stage it was not sufficiently clear. Only now at last does full clarity come from the marvellous experience of perceiving the Earth's memories in the veins of the metals. Having once reached this further stage, we can go back again and understand something which perhaps, to begin with, we did not understand. When our consciousness is borne out into the universe on the wings of the light that fills and pervades the silicious rock, the Beings of the Third Hierarchy—Angels, Archangels and Archai—are all around us. We know now that what the ordinary eyes of sense tell us when we go up a high mountain is not really true. Neither do our eyes tell us true when we descend into the deep places of the Earth and gaze upon the veins of the metals. On a high mountain, among the silicious rock, around and over the rocky peaks weave the Angels, Archangels and Archai; and when we go down into the Earth we find the Beings of the Second Hierarchy moving in the paths of the veins of the metals. Once again therefore we can say to ourselves that even during earthly life we are in the company of spiritual Beings who are connected with our own innermost being in the life which extends from death to a new birth.

In our life after death we pass consciously, after a time, into the world of the Angels, Archangels and Archai. In the discarnate state we unfold a consciousness in which we know that these Beings of the Third Hierarchy are around us, just as on Earth the three or four kingdoms of Nature are around us. When, in this higher state of consciousness, we behold the Angels, Archangels and Archai, all that the senses on Earth can perceive has of course vanished, for our senses have been given over, with our body, to the elements. Between death and a new birth we can see nothing that the senses perceive in earthly life. But the Angels, Archangels and Archai tell us—I can use this expression, for it exactly accords with the reality—the Angels, Archangels and Archai relate to us the story of what they are doing down below on the Earth. They tell us that they are not only active in the life which we ourselves are now sharing with them. They whisper softly into our souls: “We take our share too in the creative work of the Cosmos, we are creative Beings in the Cosmos and we look deep down in the Earth and behold in what earthly forms the silicious rock and kindred substances are fashioned.” And then man realises, when he is among the Angels, Archangels and Archai, that he must come down again to Earth. He learns to know these Beings of the Third Hierarchy between death and a new birth, and he hears them speak in wonderful manner of their deeds upon the Earth. He knows then that he can only behold these their deeds, by descending to Earth, clothing himself in a physical, human body and partaking in the world of sense-perception.

The deepest mysteries of sense-perception—not only of perceptions connected with the silicious rock on high mountains, but the deepest mysteries of all sense-perception—are revealed to us in wonderful words by the Beings among whom we live between death and a new birth. The beauties of material Nature on Earth are so full of greatness and mystery that the memories we take with us through the gate of death are only seen in their full and true light when we hear the Angels, Archangels and Archai describing to us all that our eyes have been able to see, our ears to hear and our other senses to perceive down here in earthly life.

Such is the connection between the physical and the super-physical; such too the connection of man's physical life with his superphysical life. The universe is full of splendour, and it is right that what we see in material existence should delight and uplift us. Its real mysteries we learn to know when we have passed through the gate of death. The more we have learned to rejoice in the physical world, the more deeply we have entered into all the joys which the sense-world has to bestow, the greater the measure of understanding we shall bring to the world of the Angels, who are waiting to tell us of these mysteries which here on Earth we do not yet understand and shall only learn to understand when we have passed over into the superphysical world. The same is true of our relation to the Second Hierarchy, the Exusiai, Kyriotetes, Dynamis, among whom we also live for a certain period between death and a new birth. We can, on Earth, come into a special relation to these Beings when, following the path of the light into the veins of the metals in the Earth, we awaken within us the Earth's memories. But here again, only when we have come over yonder into the region of the Beings of the Second Hierarchy are we able to understand all the experiences we have had on Earth in connection with the metals.

One of the most wonderful experiences man can have is to be able to investigate and prove the manifold connections that exist between the metals and the health of man, and I have good hope that the Anthroposophical Movement will do a great deal to open up the truly beautiful aspect of this field of knowledge. Every metal and every metal-compound has its relation to the health of man. As man goes through life, whether in health or disease, he is in connection all the time with that which gives to the Earth her memories—namely, the metals and their various compounds. We must get beyond mere theorising as to the healing influences of lead and lead compounds, of copper and copper compounds, and so forth. These substances are all extremely significant and important remedies, if we know how to prepare them in the right way, and we must not be satisfied with speaking in an abstract manner of the wonderful connections between the metals and the being of man. A feeling of holy awe does indeed even now arise within us when we contemplate the veins of metal in the depths of the Earth, but we must go a step further and develop also a deepened insight into the marvellous connection of the metals with the being of man—a connection which is revealed to us only when we have first studied the human being in health and in disease. As I indicated, it is to be hoped that the Anthroposophical Movement will be able to spread this knowledge in the hearts and minds of men, for it is of the greatest importance. In times gone by it was not so important, because men knew instinctively the connections, for example, between the lead-process or the silver-process with some process in the human head. In days of yore these connections were spoken of a great deal. Nowadays people read what was written long ago without understanding a single word. Approaching it from the point of view of modern science, they talk of it as if it were nothing but empty abstractions. When through Anthroposophical knowledge man attains to the deepened feeling and insight which can come to him in contemplation of the wonderful connection between the metals of the Earth and the sickness and health of the human being, then indeed he will carry up into the spiritual world through the gate of death something that will help him to understand the speech of the Second Hierarchy. The greatest mysteries of the world will be able to reveal themselves to him, precisely because he has prepared himself in this way on Earth and brings with him the necessary understanding. For it is really so, my dear friends. We learn what Anthroposophy has to teach us not merely for the sake of satisfying human curiosity, but in order that the knowledge may bear fruit after we have passed through the gate of death. For only what we learn and receive through spiritual science can bring us into a right relation, between death and a new birth, to those Spiritual Beings whom we must needs contact with our whole being, since it is they who are then our cosmic environment.

It is thus possible to give a detailed picture of how we come into relation with the Beings of the Hierarchies between death and a new birth. But there is still a further experience that can befall us as we pass through those regions, and it must now be described.

When we can grasp the connection between the metals in the Earth and the being of man in health and disease, secrets of Nature are revealing themselves to us. Within these secrets something more lies hid. We hear the Beings of the Second Hierarchy speaking of the nature of gold, silver, lead, copper and the other metals. But in our relation to the great spiritual world, it is with us now as it is here on Earth when we are beginning to learn to read and it dawns upon us that learning to read will enable us to fathom many a world-mystery which might otherwise remain for ever beyond our ken. I say this only by way of comparison, for the speech through which we learn to understand the Beings of the Second Hierarchy in a certain sphere of existence between death and a new birth—the speech which tells of the metals and their relation to man in health and disease—will only be true when, in the spiritual world, we can hear it, not as prose, but as cosmic poetry,—let me rather say, when we ourselves rise to the level of cosmic poetry. At first we listen in much the same way as someone with no appreciation of poetry may listen to the recitation of a poem. But just as we can, on Earth, learn—unless we are quite devoid of poetic feeling—to appreciate what is contained in the swing of the verse, in the rhythm, in the whole artistic form of the poem, so is it possible for us, after death, to rise from the prose to the poetry of that world beyond the Threshold, from the speech of the Second Hierarchy which tells us of the relation of the metals to man in health and disease, to a higher stage, where we understand the mysteries of moral existence in the Universe,—that moral life in which not only human souls but the divine souls of all the Beings of the Hierarchies are involved. We have come to a region where the mysteries of the life of soul begin to lie open before us.

Then we can go a step further. I have described the experiences that can be ours when we go up a mountain, and again when we go down a deep mine. It was all still and quiet; we contemplated the crystals at rest on the ridges of rock, and the veins of the metals at rest in the bosom of the Earth. Now we can go further and contemplate something else that is usually only regarded from the prosaic aspect of utilitarian considerations. Such considerations are not to be despised; we must always have our feet planted firmly on the Earth if we want to penetrate into the spiritual world healthy in soul and body. But suppose we are looking at a metal that is passing, under the influence of intense heat, from the solid into the liquid condition. Then, if we can get beyond the utilitarian point of view, wonderful revelations will be vouchsafed to us. If we walk through foundries and watch how the iron becomes glowing and fluid in the furnaces, above all if we can watch metallic ores such as antimony ore being led over from the solid into the liquid and by and by into other conditions, then if we can receive deep into our soul the impression of this destiny of metallic substance in fire, an entirely new element will be born in the spiritual knowledge that has awakened within us; we shall receive a strong and profound impression of the mysteries of our own existence.

Think of the human being in relation to the animal. (I have frequently spoken of this.) Anatomical comparisons, such as are made to-day, comparing the bones, muscles, and even the blood of man and animal reveal the existence of certain affinities. But the secret of what it is that places man higher than the animal cannot be discovered until we give attention to some facts that have more significance than is generally realised. The spine of the animal lies in the horizontal direction, parallel with the surface of the Earth, whereas man stands upright. The faculty of speech is denied to the animal, whereas man not only speaks, but from speech evolves thought. When we observe how the faculties of speaking and thinking begin to unfold in a little child and how its body rises into the upright position that it may have the right orientation for human life on Earth, we are then beholding the marvellous forces by means of which the child finds its bearings in the dynamics of the universe. And then we see how the forces of orientation living in the limbs of a little child express themselves also in the melody, in the articulation of speech. We see the human being building and forming himself in the sense world. We see the formative forces working calmly and quietly within him. Wonderful it is beyond all telling to watch month by month how the little child gradually leaves off crawling and begins to stand upright, how his limbs and body orientate themselves to the dynamics of the universe! Then the faculties of speaking and thinking begin to emerge, as it were, from the bodily nature. There is no more beautiful sight than to watch a little child learning to walk, to speak and to think. But now if on the one hand we can contemplate this process in all its wonder and calm majesty, beholding it with mind at rest, sensitive to its surpassing beauty, and if on the other hand we are able to look with a higher power of vision at the metals melting in the fire, then we can perceive there, in its spirit form, the force by means of which the child can learn to walk and to speak. The archetype of this power is revealed to us when the flames lay hold of the metal, melt it and make it fluid. The more fluid, the more volatile the metal becomes, the more clearly are we able to perceive the inner resemblance between this process—which really constitutes the destiny of the metal—and the process which, smelted and volatilised in the fires of the Cosmos, enables the little child to walk, to speak and to think.

We know now that the activity of the Beings of the First Hierarchy—the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones—is a two-fold activity. They speak to us out of that spiritual world into which we pass during the middle period of our life between death and a new birth, they reveal to us there the mysteries of planetary life; and they work down also into the visible world. Here, in the visible world, the influences of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones are active in the little child as he learns to walk, to speak and to think, and we behold also their working wherever fire has part in the process of the Earth, wherever metals melt and are fused in fire. Our Earth has been built up by the smelting and fusing of metals in the cosmic fire. In the smelting of the metals by the cosmic fires, we see the deeds of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones within the earthly world. We gaze back into remote ages of the past when the metals, all aglow and incandescent through the power of fire, played an essential part in the coming-into-being of the Earth's body. The Thrones, above all, were active in this process, though with them worked always the Seraphim and Cherubim. The Cherubim it is who play the chief part in the unfolding of the child's faculties of walking, speaking and thinking. But everywhere the Beings of the First Hierarchy work and weave together in unison.

With this kind of knowledge, death in earthly life is linked on to resurrection in the life beyond the Threshold. For when such knowledge reveals the kinship of the cosmic fires by which the metals are melted, with the powers that make man truly man, then the whole world becomes one and we realise that there is no difference between the earthly life that stretches from birth to death and life in the spiritual world beyond the Threshold. The life between death and a new birth is a metamorphosis of earthly life. By knowing how the one passes over into the other, we realise that the one is but a different form of the other. When the soul is deepened by this knowledge, then an understanding of still other mysteries can be added. This further understanding can also be reached on quite another path.

If you think about what I have told you of the connection of the melting and dissolving of metals in fire with the unfolding of the faculties of walking, speaking and thinking in the little child, if you place these pictures before your imagination, meditating upon them and deepening thereby your understanding, then a power will quicken and strengthen your soul and enable you to find the solution of a great riddle—the riddle of the working of karma, or human destiny. In between what happens when a child learns to walk, to speak and to think and what happens when metals become fluid and volatile under the influence of great heat,—amid all the sulphurous and phosphoric glow and gleam of colour in the burning metal, amid the working of the right and true transition from animal to man that takes place in the little child as he learns to walk, to speak and to think, karma stands revealed. There lies the way to a true understanding of karma. Karma is a super-sensible reality that works straight into the very deeds and actions of man's life.

Rising up therefore in this way in meditation, we learn to know the mysteries of destiny that weave through our life. On the one side we have the picture of the destiny of the metal in the fire, on the other side the picture of the essential and primordial destiny of man when he descends to Earth, expressed in the learning to walk, to speak and to think. Within these pictures man can find revealed as much of the riddle of destiny as he needs for his life.

So it is, that for the riddle also of human destiny super-sensible man speaks into the world in which “sensible” man is living. Of this too I wanted to speak to you, for it belongs essentially in our study of super-sensible man. Such a study can never be merely a matter of assimilating theories. In order to understand the being of man we must reach out on every hand to the mysteries of the universe—mysteries of Nature and mysteries of Spirit. For man is intimately and closely bound up with all the mysteries of the Natural as well as of the Spiritual Universe. Man is in truth a universe in miniature. Only it must not be imagined that what takes place out in the great expanses of the Cosmos takes place in exactly the same way in the microcosm. The majestic flames of cosmic fire that rise up from the molten metals stream out to the boundaries of cosmic space—for boundaries there are! Try, my dear friends, to picture to yourselves these cosmic fires in which the metals are being smelted and made volatile. What is thus made volatile streams out into cosmic space, to return once again in powers of light, radiations of warmth and light. And what thus returns from cosmic space enables the tiny child who cannot yet speak or walk but only crawl, to become a child who stands and walks. Upward and outward radiate the streaming forces from the molten metals, and when they have gone far enough out into the cosmos they turn and come back again and are then the forces which enable the child to stand upright. Here you have a picture of ascending and descending cosmic forces, as they work in the universe, and of their many metamorphoses and variations.

You will now also be able to understand the true meaning of something which in days of yore was connected with the science of those times, namely, the priestly sacrifice. The sacrificial flame, together with what was burning in it, was sent forth into cosmic spaces to the Gods that it might come down again thence to work in the world of men. As he stood before the fire on the altar the priest would say: “To thee, O Flame, I commit what is mine on Earth, that the Gods may receive it when the smoke rises upward. May that which is borne upwards by the Flame be changed into divine Blessing and pour down again to Earth as creative and fructifying power!”

Thus, as we listen to the words of the priest of olden time, who is speaking of super-sensible worlds, we may hear how he too gives utterance to the cosmic mysteries in the midst of which man stands.

This, my dear friends, is what I wanted to say to you about the super-sensible nature of man, anthroposophically perceived and understood.