The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If we wish to obtain a more exact knowledge of how Karma comes about, we must go back a certain way in the development of humanity. If we transpose ourselves back some thousands of years we find Europe covered with ice. At that time, the glaciers of the Alps forced their way right down into the low-lying plain of Northern Germany. The districts in which we now live were then cold and raw. Here dwelt a race of human beings who made use of extremely simple and primitive tools. If we go back about a million years we find in the same territory a tropical climate such as today is only to be found in the hottest districts of Africa. In some parts there were huge primeval forests in which lived parrots, monkeys, especially the gibbon, and elephants. We should however hardly have met in our wanderings in these forests anything approximating to present day human beings and not even to those of periods some thousands of years later. Natural science can prove from certain strata of the earth which arose between these two epochs the existence of a type of human being in whom the front part of the brain was not yet as developed as it is today and whose brow receded far back. Only the back part of the brain was developed. We go back further to times in which people did not yet know the use of fire and made their weapons by grinding pieces of stone. The natural scientist likes to compare this stage of humanity with that of savages or of a clumsy child. Remains of such human beings have been found in the Neandertal and Croatia. They have a skull similar to that of the ape and the finds in Croatia reveal that before their death they were roasted, thus proving that cannibals lived there.

Now the materialistic thinker says: We trace man back into the times in which he was still undeveloped and clumsy and assume that the human being has developed from this childish stage of existence up to the present stage of human culture and that this primitive man has evolved from animals bearing a similarity to man. In this theory of evolution therefore he simply makes a leap from primitive human beings to animals similar to man. The natural scientist takes for granted that the more perfect has always evolved from the less perfect. This however is not always the case. If for example we trace the human being back to childhood we do not come to greater imperfection for the child is descended from father and mother. That is to say we come to a primitive condition deriving from a higher condition. This is important, for it is connected with the fact that already at birth the child has the predisposition to a later stage of perfection, whereas the animal remains at the lower stage.

When the natural scientist has gone back to the stage at which man had no frontal brain and no intellect he should say to himself: I must assume that the origin of man is to be sought elsewhere.

Just as a child is descended from his parents, so all those primitive human beings are descended from others who had already attained a high degree of development. We call these human beings Atlanteans. They lived on that part of the earth which is now covered with the waves of the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlanteans had even less frontal brain, an even farther-receding brow, nevertheless they still possessed something which differed from later human beings. They still had a much stronger, more vigorous etheric body. The etheric body of the Atlanteans had not yet developed certain connections with the brain; these arose later. Thus over the head there was still an immense etheric head. The physical head was comparatively small and embedded in an etheric head of immense size.

The functions which people now carry out with the help of the frontal brain were carried out in the case of the Atlanteans, with the help of organs in the etheric body. By this means they could enter into connection with beings to whom today access is barred to us, just because our frontal brain has been developed. With the Atlanteans a kind of fiery coloured formation was visible, which streamed out from the opening of the physical head towards the etheric head. He had access to all sorts of psychic influences. A head of this kind, which thinks as an etheric head, has power over the etheric, whereas a head which thinks in the physical brain only has power over the physical, over the putting together of purely mechanical things. He can make physical tools, while someone who still thinks in the etheric can cause a seed to grow and bloom.

The Atlantean civilisation was still in close connection with the growth forces of nature, of the vegetation, a power which present day man has lost. For instance, the Atlantean made no use of steam power to bring vehicles into motion, but used the seed power (samenkraft) of the plants. With this he propelled his vehicles. Only from the last third of the Atlantean epoch, from the time of the original Semites until the time when Atlantis was covered with the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, did the frontal etheric head develop the frontal brain. Through this man lost the power of influencing the growth of plants and gained only the capacity of the physical brain, of intellect. With many things he now had to make a new beginning. He had to begin to learn mechanical work. In this he was like a child, clumsy and awkward, whereas before in developing the vegetable kingdom he had achieved great skill. It is necessary for man to pass through the stage of intelligence and then to regain what he could do earlier. At that time, higher spiritual beings had an influence on the unfree will; through the open etheric head they worked through the intellect.

Going still further back we reach the Lemurian Epoch. Here we come to a stage in human development at which the union of the maternal and paternal principles takes place for the first time. This etheric head naturally branches out into the astral body which surrounds the human beings with its rays ... [Gap in text ...]. If one had found the means of lifting the head with the astral body out of such a human being something quite peculiar would have occurred. He would thereby have lost the possibility of holding himself upright; he would have folded up. Just the opposite procedure was taken with man at that time and through this he gradually raised himself to the upright posture.

In the Lemurian Epoch, however, man was still at a stage at which he did not yet possess what we are assuming could be lifted out of him. In this earlier period he did not yet possess this etheric head with the astral body. At that time, they were not yet there. Man as he wandered over the earth was then really a being folded together. The two organs now used for work, the hands, were then turned backwards and formed additional organs of movement, so that he went on four legs. One must picture two people of the present day, man and woman, entwined in one another, think away the upper half of the body, leaving only the lower half there. The human being was actually male-female. He also had at that time an astral and etheric body, but not the one which he had later. This was a different astral body, that is, such a one as had reached its highest perfection on the Old Moon. There, on the Old Moon, the astral body together with the etheric body had acquired the capacity of developing a physical body which then had a crab-like form. The human being could stand on one pair of legs and make a kind of leaping movement.

This astral body with the etheric body was then of quite another nature. It had a form which was not entirely egg-shaped, but more like a bell which descended like a dome over the human being who went on all fours. The etheric body provided for all the life functions of this Lemurian human being. In his astral body he had a dull twilight consciousness similar to that of our dreams. His consciousness was however unlike the reminiscences inherent in our dreams, for he dreamt of realities. When he was approached by another human being unsympathetic to him, there arose in him a sensation of light which indicated what was unsympathetic.

Already on the Old Moon man had some slight power of using both his front limbs for the purpose of grasping, so that now the time came for assuming the upright posture. His other living companions were, in the Lemurian Age, of the nature of reptiles; animals of grotesque shapes who have left no traces behind them. The ichthyosaurs and so on are descendants of these animals. It is a fact that at that time the earth was inhabited by beings reptilian in character; human bodies too were reptile-like. When eventually this reptilian human being assumed the upright posture, the formation of the head, quite open in front, out of which gushed a fiery cloud, became visible. This gave rise to the tales about the winged serpent, about the dragon. Such was man's grotesque form at that time, reptile-like. The Guardian of the Threshold, the lower nature of man, frequently appears in a form of this kind. It represents the lower nature with the open formation of the head. At that time, the union took place between these forms on the earth and the other beings already described. The astral body with the head formation united with the winged-serpent body with its fiery opening. It was the fructification of the maternal earth with the paternal spirit.

In this way there proceeded the fructification with the Manas forces. The lower astral body merged with the higher astral body. A great part of the astral body, as it then was, fell away. One portion formed the lower parts of the human astral body, and the other newly acquired astral body, connected with the head, united with the upper parts of the human being. What was then peeled off abandoned this astral body which was bound up with the form of the winged-serpent; it could no longer have any further development on the Earth. It formed, as a conglomerate substance, the astral sphere of the moon, the so-called eighth sphere. The moon actually provides shelter for astral beings which have come into existence through the fact that man has thrown something off.

This union of the paternal spirit with the maternal substance was described in Egypt as the union of Osiris and Isis. From it came forth Horus. The merging of the serpent form with the etheric head, with the newly acquired astral body and head formation, led to the conception of the form of the sphinx. The sphinx is the expression of this thought in sculpture.

There were seven kinds or classes of such forms, all of which differed somewhat from each other, from the finest, approximating to the highly developed formation of the human form down to those which were utterly grotesque. These seven kinds of human forms had all to be fructified. One must conceive the descent of the ‘Sons of Manas’ in this pictorial way. Only then can one understand how the astral body of man came into existence. It is composed of two different members.

If we consider human development we shall find that the one part of the astral body is continually endeavouring to overcome the other half, the lower nature, and transform it. In so far as man today consists of astral body with etheric body and physical body, it is in fact only the physical body which in its present state is a product which has reached completion. In the case of the etheric body also there are two parts that seek to merge into one another.

Now when man dies he gives over to the forces of the earth his whole physical body, but the etheric body divides itself into two members. The one member is derived from the upper formation and this man takes with him. The remainder falls away, for over this he can exert no mastery; it came to him from outside. He can only exert mastery over it when he has become an occult pupil. This part of the etheric body therefore in the case of the ordinary person is given over to the etheric forces of cosmic space.

What clings to the person from that astral body which came with him from the Old Moon compels him to spend a period of time in Kamaloka until he has freed himself from this point as regards that particular life. Then he still has that part of the astral body which has found a state of balance; with this he makes his journey through Devachan and back to physical life. This is why one sees bell-like formations in astral space rushing about with terrific speed. These are the human souls again seeking incarnation. When here with us such a bell-like human being darts through astral space and an embryo in South America is karmically connected with it, this human bell must immediately be there. So these returning souls rush through astral space. This bell formation is reminiscent of those which appeared in the Lemurian Age, only it has already found its state of balance with the higher astral body. We know that the human being develops by working from the ego upon the three other bodies. The ego is nothing other than what worked at that time in a fructifying way; the upper auric part with the etheric head. The members which the human being has developed are the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body.

Upper Etheric or Mental body
Astral body as Buddhi
Astral body
Lower Etheric body
Physical body

The physical body has arisen through a transformation and ennobling of that serpent-like body which we meet with in the Lemurian Age. This was male-female. The present day human being is also male-female. In the case of a man the basis of the upper members is female, with a woman the basis of the upper etheric body is of male formation. So actually the physical nature of the human being is also male-female.

The etheric body consists of two members, that part of human nature which originally came over from the Old Moon and its opposite pole. They were at first not yet joined together; later they approached one another and became united. The one is the pole of animality, the other the pole of the spiritual. The pole of animality is called ‘etheric body’, the pole of the spiritual, ‘mental-body’. The mental body is materialised ether.

Between them is the astral body and this too has arisen out of the union of a duality. Fundamentally it is also a two-fold formation. We have to differentiate in it a lower and a higher nature. The higher nature was originally connected with the mental body. This part of the astral body which has its seat in the mental body—what therefore has come into it from above—is the other pole of the lower astral body. One of the characteristics of the lower astral body is that it has desires. The upper part has instead of these, devotion, love, the giving virtue. This part of the astral body is called Buddhi. The description here given of the human being is as seen in this way in the Cosmic Light. When man himself works into his sheathes it is different. The one portrays his cosmic structure, the other how he himself works into it.

Thus Buddhi is the ennobled astral, the Mental the ennobled etheric and the Physical has its opposite pole in Atma.

Spiritual science, when properly recognized, gives life assurance and strength. How can it be beneficial in life? Many people believe that learning and gaining spiritual knowledge is more of a hindrance than a help to a truly good human life. Why do you actually need so much spiritual knowledge, why do you need to learn so much about the development of the earth and an entire planetary system? If you simply try to search for your higher self within yourself and thereby become a good person, then you are basically also the best theosophist. — Other, more theoretically inspired minds enjoy hearing what a person consists of, to exercise their intellect by seeing how humanity has developed through the various cultural periods, to know regular number periods, and they want to learn such things as soon as possible, preferably to be able to write down the most important teachings in a nutshell and spread them in a kind of catechism.

These two views do not correspond at all to what spiritual science can be for a person and what it becomes for someone who is able to place himself in life in the right way through spiritual science. First of all, it is certainly true that we consist of physical, etheric, astral bodies and I. But if one believes that this is all there is to it, that one can list these, then one is mistaken. One knows nothing but a schema. One only knows something about the human being when one can apply such knowledge to life. But one cannot do that if one is not clear about the fact that it is not just a matter of knowing the names of these four members, but of knowing how these four members are connected in the human being. Whether the etheric body is more or less connected to the physical body in a person, whether the etheric body and the astral body strive towards each other and seek close contact with each other, or whether they are more loosely connected, that is what matters. If we focus our attention on this, it becomes clear that in the course of human development on earth, this relationship between the limbs changes. It was different in the past and will be different in the future than it is today. If we look at the ancient Egyptians in the very early millennia of Egyptian culture, that is, at ourselves in earlier incarnations, we find in this ancient Egyptian a person in whom the connection between the physical, etheric and astral bodies is looser. If we look at present-day man, we find a much more intimate, denser connection. And in the future, this connection will become ever denser and denser. It is only in this context that the passage through the different cultural periods makes sense for us. When we speak of the fact that a person embodies himself so and so often, one can also ask: Why does he embody himself again? We do indeed encounter a different kind of outer human being each time, because the connection of the sheaths is always different. As Chaldeans, we actually had a very different bodily structure than we do today, and in the future we will have still others. Thus we have different experiences because we have different human sheaths.

Now it is a matter of forming correct ideas about how this inner human core, which goes from embodiment to embodiment, actually relates to the one in which we clothe ourselves, to the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body. External science basically only examines the outer shell. It knows nothing of the deeper laws that prevail from incarnation to incarnation. But external science also misunderstands the laws of the outer shell in terms of their actual deeper meaning. We can see this for ourselves when we look at the connections that external science believes in and those it does not believe in. It is quite interesting to note that for a long time science tended to ascribe free will to man. But I have already pointed out that more recent science often denies this free will. It relies on external research. This tells us: Look at the course of external life. For example, statistics can be used to determine how many suicides occur in a particular area. A certain regularity of suicides can be observed. The statistical data show that something like this happens with a certain regularity. There are simply so and so many people doomed to commit suicide. How could one still speak of free will there? One could go much further and could point to actuarial practice. This practice consists of calculating and formulizing how many of so and so many people are still alive after thirty years. So it is numerically determined how many people born today will still be alive after thirty years. Death and life are bound in strict external natural laws.

This has been recognized by external science. But it will be forced to recognize other things as well. It is already being asserted that facts are coming to light that will force people to think spiritually. In general, science is not inclined to accept something new very quickly. It has a peculiar habit in this regard. One can hear great declamations about the fact that in the “Dark Ages” there were people who opposed the discoveries of Copernicus. His teaching had to be established with great effort against the obscurantists of that time. And those who talk most about it do not just behave in this way with regard to spiritual science, but also with regard to such facts of science that force us to seek spiritual laws. For example, a doctor in Berlin established certain numerical relationships in the course of life. This doctor, Wilhelm Fliess, began to make notes about how births were related to deaths in individual families. For example, on a certain day a female personality died in a family. 1428 days before, the first grandchild of this person was born, 1428 days after the death of the second grandchild, so that we have the death of the grandmother and symmetrically forward and backward a grandchild is born. But that's not all. In a period of 7 times 1428 days after the death of this person, a great-grandson is born. So that if you follow this, you always come across very specific numerical relationships; numerical relationships that ultimately determine the connection between deaths and births in a most wonderful way. Fließ has found this out in numerous cases.

But apparently science still does not want to recognize it today, it is still too much against its direction. Even the improvement of health conditions is subject to numerical relationships. The number of deaths from tuberculosis in a given period, compared with the number of deaths decades before, is found to be regulated by certain numbers. The doctors say they have limited the number of cases through hygienic measures. But Fliess proved that this could be calculated according to arithmetic relationships. This is very inconvenient for today's science, but it will be forced to recognize the rule of objective arithmetic. It will again come back to the old Pythagorean theorem: Number is something that rules everything, that moves and lives. While we do our calculating in our souls, the higher spirits have long since done the calculating in order to place themselves in the course of life, which corresponds to the numbers. The Pythagorean theorem: God practises mathematics by allowing life to run its course – seems to be coming into its own again. But on the other hand, this would in turn strengthen that attitude of external science, which leaves the inner life of man out of account of his life's fortunes. If it is arithmetically certain when we must die, if birth and death are so related that they are 7 times 1428 days apart, then our inner life seems to be harnessed into external violent circumstances.

We apparently have to refrain from speaking of special laws that govern our inner selves. But one can certainly cite external reasons that show us that history is not quite right after all. If it is calculated that so and so many suicides are committed or so and so many thefts are perpetrated in a particular place, does that prove that a person must commit a theft? According to the formulas of probability one can calculate the probable length of a person's life. But I do not believe that any person would admit that he must die on the day calculated by arithmetic. Nothing follows for the inner being from these laws of mathematical formulas.

What about it, when Fließ proves that 1428 days elapse between two births and death? Does this prove anything for the inner lawfulness of our ego? It is not so easy to see how the relationship between this inner core of our being and the outer course of life is. How does this fit with the idea that we follow our karma, that we have to follow our inner ego? This is not easy to understand. It can be made clear with the help of an image. It is quite possible that two events, two currents, two facts, which are very much related to each other, proceed independently of each other. Consider the following: if you want to get from here to Zurich, you take the train. But you can see when the train leaves from the timetable, which also contains a lot of numbers. So you are, in a sense, closely connected with the numbers. You feel dependent on the numbers in the timetable in what you think, strive for, and inwardly experience. But isn't it possible, alongside this series of facts, that you can study the timetable, the other one related to the development of your soul, that you want to get on the train? Studying the timetable will never tell you whether you are good or evil, wise or foolish. Just as it is unimportant for the inner workings of our soul which timetable exists, it is equally unimportant for the karma of our lives which numbers result from the calculations made by Fliess. We step into the stream of life, which is governed by laws that have nothing to do with our inner laws other than what we ourselves bring about. We must decide to get on the train. It is equally true that through the inner laws of karma we must determine to step into a stream of life, which is then governed by the laws of arithmetic. Why are all these things being said? Because the spiritual seeker should increasingly develop a feeling that life is complicated, that life is something that cannot be grasped with the most convenient thoughts. Those who think that life can be easily understood by knowing a few sentences from spiritual science are very much mistaken. One must have the will to penetrate deeper and deeper into these connections. One must develop a feeling for the fact that the thoughts according to which the world is structured also apply to the human being. If there were no connection between the external laws and human karma, then the whole of life would fall apart.

This will be demonstrated by two facts. In spiritual science, efforts are made to provide the best possible parables. In a sense, however, the numbers on the timetable are connected with practical life. Even if it has nothing to do with the timetable whether we travel to Zurich at all or not, even if we see no connection at all, the timetable is still connected with human circumstances. People have put it together in such a way that it corresponds to life circumstances in a not altogether unskillful manner. So originally the timetable was nevertheless adapted to human living conditions in general. Something similar is the case for our karma and the stream of our life, which is regulated by it. The beings of the higher hierarchies have also determined the “timetable” according to the numerical relationships that statistics finds when it advances with regular numbers, so that these correspond externally to general human conditions. When he is re-embodied, one person finds life comfortable, while for another it is uncomfortable. This law does not apply to all families in such a way that a grandchild is always born 1428 days before the grandmother's death. But if we consider that 1428 can also be divided by 28 - it is 51 times 28 - we understand the numerical ratio a little better. We will not always get the number 1428 in these calculations, but as a rule, there is a multiple of 28 between the death of any family member and a birth. The multiplying factor may be 13 or 17 or something else, but the number 28 is in it, it is regularly arranged. So we have the opportunity to get on different trains according to the timetable. And so, according to our karma, we have the opportunity to arrange our lives, comfortably or uncomfortably.

I am not just saying this to suggest how complicated these external conditions are, but I would also like to point out that we humans can draw a moral consequence from all such insights. And that is what spiritual science gives us as something so infinitely important. We can say: I stand in this world, I find in this world numerical relationships that show how our outer life is regulated. It has taken long periods of human cultural development to discover this. But how much do we actually know about this regularity? — And here we have to say: infinitely little. Slowly and gradually we have explored some of the divine wisdom. But just when we absorb the most beautiful and important things of wisdom, it urges us to humility. It shows how little we can grasp life with the thoughts we have. This contemplation is then an incentive to strive further for the light.

This moral sense, this awe for the wisdom of the world, is what we can acquire and what makes us better people. And this sense of wisdom we acquire, it comes over us when we realize that this wisdom has been close to us in our intermediate life between death and new birth. When we need to descend to a new earthly existence, we choose which train to board in order to fulfill our karma. Then the decision presents itself to us, and we decide whether to choose this or that family tie, this or that parent. But we would not be able to answer if we were asked now which incarnation would be better for us, whether in this or that family. So we are wiser before our incarnation than in our physical existence, because back then, before our embodiment, we made the right choice. This feeling that we have not become any wiser after incarnation than before cannot give rise to pride in what we have achieved.

Why are we so much wiser before birth, when we can make the right choice? We would not be so much wiser on our own, but in our lives between death and new birth we are imbued with different forces than in the moment when we enter physical existence. When we enter physical existence, we are imbued with the substances of the earthly realms that are around us, with oxygen, nitrogen and so on; we absorb these into our bodily shells. When we discard our physical body, when we pass through the gate of death and live between death and a new birth, we are taken up by the beings of the higher hierarchies. Just as we live here in the different kingdoms, with animals, plants, and minerals, so we live there with the archai, with archangels and angels. We are integrated into their nature, just as we are integrated here into physical substances. Just as these substances assert their laws here, just as iron in the blood pulsates according to its laws, so the entities of the higher hierarchies are active in us between death and new birth, and their wisdom steers us in the right direction in existence. The entities of the higher hierarchies have wisdom within them, just as we have physical substances within us. And it is entirely justified when humility is the moral consequence that comes over us; when we truly realize what a small part of the sublime wisdom of these beings we have absorbed into ourselves in physical life. Between death and new birth we are embedded in the bosom of these entities of the higher hierarchies; we must surrender ourselves to them. To refuse to do so would be the same as wanting to live without absorbing the physical substances hydrogen, oxygen and so on. It would be absurd to want to live without full devotion to the beings of the higher hierarchies.

Those who consider that they must surrender themselves to the beings of the higher hierarchies during the time between death and a new birth will ask themselves: What is the best preparation for that time? — And they will answer: The best preparation is to develop this feeling of devotion to the spiritual world now, between birth and death. — Veneration and devotion will permeate everything we take in when we imbue ourselves with the right feelings in the right way. Humility and devotion to the spiritual world will permeate all our feelings.

When a person begins to think and live in this way, he also finds harmony with the world around him. These thoughts also regulate and harmonize his other perceptions. Many vices of the external world are carried into Theosophy. They do not come from 'Theosophy', but from the fact that people carry them in from outside. Let us imagine a person who has been hardworking and industrious in the outside world, but in such a way that those around him say: It is ambition that makes him industrious, he overdoes things, he ruins his strength, he pays no attention to the fact that this work must have limits. — Now he comes to Theosophy. There he encounters quite different ideas from those he had before. But this general characteristic, which he had outside, he can also carry into theosophy. There he hears, for instance, that a certain study is necessary to advance the soul. Well, so he studies, but he studies like a student who wants to outdo his colleagues. He should learn to exercise moderation in his efforts; he should learn to pay attention to how much he can achieve according to the karmically allotted powers; he should not overdo his theosophical studies. So he may have heard that it is good for spiritual development not to eat meat, and he does not ask himself: Is it also good for my body? He abstains from meat to accelerate his development. But we are taught by Theosophy: First I must investigate whether my karma allows me to follow the highest rules at once. We acquire calm and humble observation of our own karma, our own abilities and powers, when we engage in the right way with what spiritual science can give us. Especially those who are most advanced in occult matters observe the rule of balance most precisely. Sometimes, however, the opposite happens: when external circumstances are opposed to proper training, people want to force themselves, they push towards the set goal, they slave away in spirit to get an immediate answer to a question that arises. The advanced student never does this. He will first realize: This question is present. Then he examines himself: Are you able to get a full answer to the question right now? He says to himself: Wait a moment and see if the beings from the spiritual world will give you this answer. If he has to push and pull, he refrains for the time being. He knows he must wait. He can wait because he is imbued with the eternity of life and because he knows that karma, which he does not disregard, gives everyone what is meant to be theirs. Then at some point he will receive an inner hint and the powers of the spiritual world will reveal the answer to him. Perhaps this happens after years, perhaps only after several incarnations. This characterizes the right attitude: being able to wait, developing patience and equanimity, not rushing into anything.

Those who allow the teachings of spiritual science to take effect on them in the right way will be able to master their feelings and perceptions through these teachings in such a way that they allow such equanimity, such harmony to be observed. With this attitude, we permeate the astral body from the ego in such a way that this astral body absorbs the truths from the spiritual world, if I may use a trivial comparison, like a sponge absorbs the water in which it is immersed. The spirit-knowledge gradually enters into the astral body, and the astral body is permeated by it. We live today in an age where it is necessary and where it is becoming more and more necessary that we imbue the astral body with spiritual wisdom. The times are changing more and more in such a way that the astral body of a person who passes through the gate of death and then enters future incarnations will be immersed in darkness, so that he will no longer be familiar with the spiritual world if he is not imbued with spiritual knowledge. But when he is imbued with the spiritual knowledge that we are now absorbing, then he will become a source of light, he will illuminate his surroundings. The wisdom that we are absorbing here will become the light in the spiritual world.

If we now ask ourselves why Theosophy has only come today, why it was not here earlier, we have to say: It did not come because there was an ancient wisdom in the past that impressed itself on people without them having to do anything. It was found as a kind of heritage that people had received from the old world. With this inheritance they could penetrate into the spiritual world. It lasted until Christian times. But then man could no longer directly absorb spiritual wisdom. He must first permeate the soul with spiritual-scientific knowledge, and this will then be the power that causes man in the future to enter the spiritual world with the light of his soul. Human conditions change from epoch to epoch.

All occultism knows that there is a wisdom that comes from the old moon and still worked in its remnants until the 15th and 16th centuries, so that when people came into the spiritual world, they saw the light that shone without their doing. Today, however, we can absorb as much of this ancient wisdom, which was handed down as an ancient heritage in humanity, as we want with our soul - it no longer shines after people have passed through the gate of death. Only the wisdom that people absorb through Christ, by saying, “Not I, but the Christ in me,” only this wisdom will be a shining light for the future passage of man through the gate of death. So we absorb the Christ-centered spiritual science in order to have a source of light in the astral body when we pass through the gate of death.

But when we take in this Christ-imbued spiritual knowledge, when we permeate our astral body with it, then it does not remain mere wisdom; it permeates our feelings. We learn what happened on the old Saturn, on the old Sun and the old Moon, and what the task of the Earth is. If you read into the descriptions given in my 'Occult Science', you will feel that the description of Saturn has a completely different tone than the descriptions of the other planetary conditions. When reading about the Saturn condition, you can feel how the circumstances are described in a certain harshness. You can feel this in your soul, and that is necessary. You can feel the existence of the sun as if there were blossoming, sprouting life. You can feel the description of the moon as if a certain melancholy, gloomy trait runs through the multitude of concepts given there. A sensitive person can perceive this down to the sense of taste, down to the tongue.

Fools will say: the descriptions are uneven, the style is not fixed. But we should know that this is necessary, and for what reason. We need to know why a melody of three particular notes is necessary, which must sound from the words, and when we know it, we can also transform it into feelings and send the feelings out into the world. The feelings that we ignite within us in this way are transformed. What is taken up into the astral body as wisdom is transformed into a voluntary surrender to world conditions, and this then takes hold of our etheric body. If we are wise, we prepare the way. The forces with which we descend into the next incarnations shape and permeate the etheric body. If we have imbued our ether body with true, right devotion, and it is then dissolved into the general cosmic ether, we have given the universe an ether body imbued with devotion that benefits the whole world. But if we are unpious, materialistic, then we discard an etheric body that has a dispersing, destructive effect when it is to be dissolved in the general world ether. To the extent that we are wise, we serve ourselves directly, but indirectly we also serve the world. To the extent that we are pious, we serve the world directly, because our piety is shared with the whole world. And spiritual science can give not only wisdom and piety, but also certainty and reflection on the life forces of the body. The very awareness of the connection with the spiritual world gives such life forces.

I have mentioned before that Fichte, who stood at the gateway of Theosophy, knew something of these connections. He had such a sense of certainty of life that he could say, when speaking about the nature of man: “I lift my head boldly up to the threatening rocky mountains and to the raging waterfall and to the crashing clouds floating in a sea of fire and say: I am eternal and defy your power! Break down on me all, and you earth and you heaven mingle in wild tumult, and you elements all foam and rage and grind in wild struggle the last solar dust of the body that I call mine – my will alone with its firm plan shall float boldly and coldly over the ruins of the universe. For I have grasped my destiny, and it is more enduring than yours; it is eternal and I am eternal as it, “- assurance of life flows from the consciousness that man walks in the eternal of the spirit. Can a person become weak when he is rooted in the eternal of the spirit? It is spiritual knowledge that pours more and more strength into us.

What comes to us from this power? Wisdom gives the astral body that through which we increasingly overcome the inhibiting forces. Piety regulates the forces and the correct structure of the ether body. But what flows into our body through the fact that we know about our connection with the eternal is the certainty of life, and it communicates itself to us right down to the forces of the physical body. When we possess this, then maya, illusion and deception recede from us. It is an illusion when someone says: our physical body only disintegrates into dust at our death. No. How the physical body was put together, how the person formed it, is not irrelevant. When such security in the eternal permeates this physical body, then we give back to the earth what we have appropriated as security for life. We fortify our planet with what we have acquired during our lifetime. We give our life security to the world through the physical body. In the disintegrating physical body, the disintegrating is only maja. He who follows the physical body through death sees that the degree of life security that man has acquired during life flows into our earth.

Thus, through wisdom, piety and assurance of life, we strengthen that which we as human beings can work out as our best for the whole evolution of our earth in the astral body, in the etheric body and in the physical body. In this way we work on our planet Earth, but we also acquire a feeling for the fact that the human being does not stand alone, isolated, but that what he works out in his soul has value and significance for the whole. And just as no dust particle in the sun does not carry the laws of the universe within it, so no human being does not build and destroy the universe through what he does and does not do. We can give as much to the progressive world process as we take from it, as much as we can crumble away from it by not caring about the development, by not permeating ourselves with piety, by not acquiring a sense of security in life. Through these omissions, we contribute just as much to the destruction of the planet as we build it through the appropriation of wisdom, piety and life security. So we begin to sense what spiritual science can become for us emotionally when it takes hold of the whole person.

[ 1 ] To-day we have reached a point in our description of the higher Beings and their relations to our world and solar system, which, to the men of the present day who have received their ideas about the world from ordinary popular science, would seem the most impossible of all; for we shall have to touch on things of which the modern scientist can have no idea. This is naturally not the result of any feeing of opposition; but if one is firmly grounded in Occultism one can survey from this standpoint the facts of modern science. In what has been said in these lectures you will nowhere find anything which contradicts the facts of modern science, but naturally the harmony is not always easy to establish. But if you have the patience to follow it all, you will gradually see how all the separate facts combine to form one stupendous and harmonious whole.

[ 2 ] Much that has been mentioned in these lectures has been also demonstrated from different standpoints, in lectures held in Stuttgart, and in Leipzig; and if you take those lectures and compare them superficially with each other, you may indeed find some contradiction between this or that expression. This happens only because it is my task to speak in these lectures not of speculative theories, but about the facts of clairvoyant consciousness, and because facts appear in a different way when they are considered from one side or from another. To use a comparison — a tree you are painting from one side will appear different when you paint it from the other side, yet it will still be the same tree. It is the same with descriptions of spiritual facts, when the light is turned on them from different sides. Certainly, if one starts with one or two ideas only, and builds a whole system upon them, it is easy to form an abstract system; but we are working from below upwards, and the unity of the whole will first be revealed in the crown. With each statement you must reflect in what sense, and in what direction it has been made.

[ 1 ] When it is said, for instance, in a popular work, that the air and gas on Jupiter are as thick as tar or honey, and that from the point of view of spiritual science this is a grotesque idea — the turn of phrase which I used was intended to convey its grotesqueness — one can from the standpoint of the science of the present day certainly answer: do you not know that modern physics can produce air of such thick condition that it will be as thick as tar or honey? Certainly, this is a self-understood fact in science; but this is not the point, for these studies do not move along these lines. That which science calls air can certainly be thickened to that extent; but for the observations of spiritual science it is nothing more nor less than that other fact, that water can be made to become as hard as a stone — to become ice. Ice is certainly water, but the point is whether one considers the things in their living functions or in the lifeless, inanimate sense of modern science. It is self-understood that ice is water; but if someone who is accustomed to have his mill turned by water throughout the whole year was advised to move it by the means of ice, what would he say? Thus, we have not to do with the abstract idea that ice is water, but what we have to do is to comprehend the universe in its activity. Here quite different standpoints have to govern as to what one entertains in the abstract about purely material metamorphoses in relation to density. Just as one cannot move a mill by means of ice, one also cannot inhale air which is as thick as honey. This is what we have to consider in the study of spiritual science. For we do not look on the world globes in the way they are considered to-day as lumps of matter of different sizes moving about out there in universal space; and in which the modern astronomical ‘mythology’ sees only material globes. We consider them in their living soul and spirit existence, in other words, we consider them in their completeness. Thus in this completeness we have to consider that which we call, in the spiritual scientific sense, the origin of each single globe.

As an example of the origin of a heavenly body, we shall choose that ancient Saturn from which, we know, our evolution started. I have already told you that ancient Saturn was, fundamentally speaking, as large as the whole of our solar system. We must imagine ancient Saturn not merely as a material globe, for we know that it had nothing as yet of the three conditions of matter which are called to-day solid, liquid and gaseous, but that it consisted only of warmth or fire. And now let us imagine that this primeval globe of warmth is the circle a, b, c, d.

You remember that we said: when the Saturn globe had evolved to the Sun globe, there distinctly appear encircling it, those Beings, who form the Animal circle or Zodiac, but I indicated at the time, that, even though they did not surround it so compactly as they did in the Sun existence, that they were already there on ancient Saturn. Thus, around ancient Saturn we must think of the Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim wielding their power, and they are to us, in the spiritual sense, the Zodiacal circle. Thus the line A-B-C-D represents for us the Zodiacal circle, in a spiritual sense.

You will ask how this agrees with the modern definition of the Zodiac. We shall see that it agrees with it completely. But you must represent it to yourselves as follows. Imagine that you could place yourself on some definite spot of that ancient Saturn globe. If you now lift your hand and point upwards with your finger, over that place is the region of certain Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim. If you move on, and point to some other place, it will be another region of other Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim; for these three groups of Beings form a circle around the ancient Saturn. Suppose that you wanted to indicate the direction in which certain Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim are to be found. They are not all alike; but each one is very distinctly different from the other, they are all individualised, so that one indicates different Beings when one points with the finger to different places. And to be able to indicate the right Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim, one marks the spot by a certain constellation of stars. This is then a mark or sign. In this direction one would say are the Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim, called Gemini, in another those called Leo, and so on. These are signs to show the direction in which certain Beings are. We must consider those separate constellations as such signs. They are something more, but we must first be clear, that when we speak of the ‘animal circle’ or Zodiac, we have to do with spiritual Beings

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[ 3 ] The Thrones were the first to exercise their activity upon that fire formation which was ancient Saturn. The Thrones had progressed so far in their development, that they could let their own substance stream out. They let their warmth substance percolate, as it were, into that Saturn mass. Through this, those forms originated around it which we have called, somewhat grotesquely, eggs — but they really had that shape.

[ 4 ] You may now ask: How is it really with that substance? Did warm sub-stance exist from the beginning? What was there already, we can only describe as a kind of neutral universal fire, which is, fundamentally speaking, one with universal space, so that I might as well say: formerly there was only the space which had been separated off, and then on to its surface percolated that which can be called the warmth substance of ancient Saturn. In the moment when this warmth substance was infused into Saturn, the Beings with which we are concerned, came into action on both sides. We have shown that, in the interior of Saturn, we find the Exusiai, or Powers, or Spirits of Form; the Dynamis or Spirits of Motion or Mights; and the Dominions or Spirits of Wisdom. These are active in the interior; from outside, the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones are active; and the result is a conjoint action of the Beings inside, and outside Saturn. [ 5 ] It was said in an earlier lecture that we can distinguish the inner soul's fire, which is felt as an inner comfortable warmth, from the outwardly perceptible fire. This neutral warmth is really within the Egg forms. Opposed to it we find the soul warmth, spread around it, radiating into it from outside, but as if holding itself back. It is as if the soul's warmth radiated from outside, but held itself back from the neutral fire within. The really perceptible warmth is pushed back from within. So that the egg of warmth which is drawn in Diagram I is really shut in between two currents; an external (x) stream of soul-warmth, and a stream of inner (y) warmth, which could be perceived by external senses. Only that which is in the interior, is warmth, physically perceptible. And now through the action of the inner and outer warmth, each of these Saturn eggs begins to rotate. Each of them circles round, and comes in turn under the influence of each of the Thrones, Cherubim, and Seraphim, which are out in space. And now something very strange happens.

Each egg in its wanderings, comes back to the point where it was first formed. When it reaches this point it remains stationary, it cannot go any further. Each egg has been formed on some definite spot, then wanders round the circle and is stopped when it returns to the place where it has been created.

The production of those eggs of warmth lasts, however, only up to a certain time; it then ceases and no more eggs are formed. Now when all those eggs are stopped at a certain place, they fall over each other. When they have covered each other up, they form, so to speak, one single egg. Thus on the point where the eggs were originally created, they come to rest. And, naturally, from the moment when no new ones are formed any more, they all meet and in the end, cover each other. Thus a globe is formed. This globe is naturally formed only by degrees. It is the densest part of the fire substance, and that which in a narrower sense is now called Saturn, (for it stands on the spot where the Saturn of to-day is). And as in a certain sense everything is a reflection, the whole process has been repeated in the origin of our own earth. Even the Saturn of to-day originated in such a way that it was actually stopped at a certain place — not exactly at the spot where the ancient Saturn was stopped, because for certain reasons things always shift a little, but the process of formation of the present day Saturn is the same. Thus a small Saturn-globe is born from the large all-embracing one, through the joint action of the universal powers who belong to the Hierarchies.

[ 6 ] Now let us consider that point at which all those globes came to a stand-still on primeval Saturn. About this the sages of primeval wisdom taught the following: On ancient Saturn the first foundation of the human physical body was formed. That first foundation was really formed of warmth, but in that body of warmth were already contained the germs of all the future organs. At the point where the first movements which had been produced were brought to a stop, was formed the germ of that organ of the human body which, when its movements were one adjusted, later changed the whole mechanism of the human body from rest to movement — this is the heart. Here, from the first stimulation to movement, arose the beginning of the heart; but this could only originate because at that same point the movement was brought to a standstill. Through this, the heart is that organ by which, when it ceases to beat, the whole physical body and its functions are brought to rest.

[ 7 ] Each member of the human body was given a distinct name in ancient speech. The heart was called the Lion within the body. Primeval wisdom said: to which direction of the Zodiac must one point, if one wishes to indicate the region out of which were laid the first foundations of the human heart? They pointed upwards, and named the Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim who acted from the region of Leo (Lion). Man received the first outline of his physical body projected from out [of] universal space, and the region of his body, which he was accustomed to call inwardly, Leo, was also called the region of Leo out in the Zodiac Thus are these things connected.

[ 8 ] Thus also have all the other foundations or germs of the human organs been formed by the Animal Circle or Zodiac. The heart was formed by Leo the Lion. Near the heart, the cage of the ribs, which is necessary for the protection of the heart, was called the breastplate. In the beginning a region had naturally to be formed before the inclusion of the heart. Another name for the breastplate arose, which was taken from an animal who had received such a breastplate from nature — Cancer, the Crab; that which is out in space is really called ‘breastplate,’ a protection which the Crab has from nature, hence that region was called ‘the Crab.’ It lies on one side of the Lion. [ 9 ] The other regions of the Zodiac were named according to the same principle. In fact, it is man projected outwards into universal space who has given these designations to the Zodiacal circle. But it is not always so easy to discover the original intention, in the transformed names, as for example, with the Crab. The name has not always been transmitted in a direct line, so that one has to return to the original sense if the meaning is to be made clear.

[ 10 ] We shall pass over the disappearance or dissolving of Saturn; we shall now describe how its evolution progressed after it had passed through the Pralaya. After the Saturn formation had dissolved, a new evolution, or new formation, began. What first took place was exactly the same as that which had formerly taken place on Saturn. When the whole formation of Saturn had been repeated in this way, a second formation began, after the centre had been reached. We are now advancing towards that stage of development which we generally designate as that of the primeval Sun. Just as, formerly, the Thrones sacrificed themselves, so now, another grade of the Hierarchies are making the sacrifice, namely, those Beings whom we call Spirits of Wisdom. The Thrones are Beings of greater power; they could let their own physical substance stream from them, their warmth substance. They could pour out the substance of Saturn from their own bodies — as has been described. The spirits of Wisdom were only able to give an etheric body, which is not so dense. Man already had the foundation of the physical body; the Spirits of Wisdom gave him now his etheric body. This happened, as it were, in a second circle. I shall now draw this in Diagram III. This represents the original size of the ancient Sun. It has shrunk in comparison to the former larger circumference. Because it has shrunk it has grown denser; inside the Sun there is not only warmth-substance, but also condensed warmth-substance, gaseous-air substance. Now, from the surrounding circumference, along with the previously mentioned Beings, the Spirits of Wisdom are working upon the Sun: together and within the globe of the Sun the Spirits of Form, and the Spirits of Motion are carrying on their activity. The following now happens, which is similar to what happened on Saturn. Certain currents are created by the surrounding spirits — the Spirits of Wisdom and the Thrones. These currents are somewhat denser than those which were produced by the Thrones alone. Inside, the mass contracts, and a ball of mist is now compressed between those two streams.

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[ 11 ] This globe is different from the Saturn globe, because in reality Saturn with all its beings consisted only of warmth, but this globe is now interpenetrated by ether, by a body of ether. Although it is as dense as gas, it is interpenetrated by an ether-like body. Therefore, the whole of this globe is alive; it is a Being inwardly alive. Whilst Saturn was a being which was in motion inwardly, which was full of mobility, until its motion was brought to a standstill by the Lion, Jupiter, (one can also call it Jupiter, for the planet seen in the heavens as Jupiter is a reproduction of that which was formed at that time as part of the Sun) Jupiter is inwardly living. Such was the ancient Sun. The balls which now begin to circle round it, are living balls, living creatures.

[ 12 ] Now, instead of the Lion, imagine another region of the Zodiac where those balls were originally stimulated and called into being; I called this region that of the Eagle. In this region occurred the first stimulation into life of the Sun-globe, of that living being within cosmic space. Now, when this living globe had once completed its circle and returned to its starting point, to the region of the Eagle, something else comes into operation. Whilst the globe had first begun to be inwardly alive at this point, when it reaches the same point again it is killed through the same influence which originally called it to life. One ball after another was killed. When they all had been killed, and no new ones were produced, the life of the ancient Sun also came to an end. Its life consisted in the production of new balls, which, after circling round, covered each other at the point they started from and were killed by forces entering from universal spaces.

This ‘sting of death,’ which the life of the ancient Sun received from universal space, was felt as the sting of the scorpion. Therefore that region where they were killed is called the ‘region of the Scorpion.’ At this point the constellation can be seen which rouses dead matter to life: the Eagle and also that wherein work the forces which kill: the constellation of the Scorpion

[ 13 ] We can therefore say: in the region of the Lion are those forces of the Zodiac, which brought the original life of the germinal physical human body to rest; in the region of the Scorpion are these forces which had the power to kill life as such. We shall get to know the correspondence to modern conditions, which are differently constituted, but this can only be explained gradually. A thick veil or Maya has been drawn over the original conditions.

[ 14 ] Let us proceed. We need not describe the next conditions so much in detail, for the meaning of these designations and the whole procedure has now grown clearer. But one thing must yet be recalled to your mind which is the following.

When you consider Saturn, you would be quite mistaken if you imagined it to be a globe such as could be compared with any other world's globe, with Jupiter or Mars, for instance. What is there is nothing more than a space of warmth. And you can see it in the way you do only because you are looking at it through an illuminated space of light. Just think, how would a thing that is unilluminated appear if you looked at it through a space full of light? It would appear bluish to you. You can observe this with common candle-light; it looks blue in the middle and around it there is a kind of radiance. I say this, being conscious that I run the danger of appearing to be talking nonsense in the opinion of the whole school of mechanical optics of modern times. But it is a fact. Modern physics does not know why the whole space of heaven appears blue. It seems blue, because in reality it is dark, is black, and is seen through illuminated space. All that is dark, seen through light, appears blue. Therefore, Saturn seems a blue globe when you look at it. All that has been said agrees completely with the facts of science, but not with the fanciful theories which are imagined. It would lead us too far if I explained to you why the ring formations of Saturn also arise because of this, because with each Saturn we have to do with a neutral space of warmth, a stratum of soul's warmth, and with one of physically cognisable warmth. Thus the illusion arises, when one observes those different strata through illuminated space; it is as if one saw a globe of gas with a sort of ring of dust around it; it is but an optical delusion, for Saturn is to-day but a body made of the substance of warmth.

[ 15 ] These things can naturally only be said, when speaking to Anthroposophists, elsewhere they would be incomprehensible. Each Saturn must be regarded. as a being consisting of warmth substance, and everything connected with it is to be explained from that standpoint. Each Jupiter, which is nothing else than a Solar stage of development, is a form consisting of gas and warmth. So it is with the Jupiter of to-day which is a repetition of the former Jupiter, the ancient Sun. Certainly the conditions of space and motion do somewhat change. For the Jupiter of to-day is not on the same spot as the former one was, but essentially it is the same.

Now we go further and must explain Mars in the same way. We must explain it as a large globe cooled down to the density of waters, and we must also see in it a point, where a ball of compressed water has formed, and become differentiated from the surrounding much thinner water. It is formed by the same process, as Jupiter, all the single balls of water which are produced on its circumference are at a certain point again brought to a standstill. Just as the movement is hindered on Saturn by the Lion, on Jupiter or the Sun by the Scorpion, which brings death, so on Mars these balls of water are also stopped; only the details are a little different on Mars. The Mars of to-day is a repetition of the ancient Moon. It stands on the same place to which the boundary of the ancient Moon extended. It is the other part of the ancient Moon; one part is our own Moon, which is but a shell; but the living part of it, which represents its other pole is Mars. When speaking of Mars as the third condition of our planetary development, this condition corresponds to that of the ancient Moon. Mars was essentially a body of water. On Mars, or the ancient Moon — call it as you will — the astral body was organised into man, so that he received his first consciousness. The body of that man consisted of the moon substance or moon-water. Just as the body of the man of to-day is formed out of the substance of the Earth, so was the body of the man of that day formed of fire, air, and water. According to the densest substance in him, you might have called that man the water-man. He became this especially, because the astral body was infused into him. He was not yet a man with an Ego, but a man with astral endowments. This entrance of the astral took place because, at a certain place, the stimulus was again given. Then what was on the circumference moved round and returned to the place where it had started from. This was the region of the Zodiac which is designated as the Waterman. So that you have to see in the Waterman that sign of the Zodiac which gave consciousness to man on the ancient Moon or ancient Mars after he had circled once around its circumference..

[ 16 ] And now we pass on to the earth, this is the fourth evolutionary condition. The first three are a repetition one of the other; a Saturn is formed, then a Sun is formed, and leaves behind it a Jupiter; a Moon is formed, and leaves behind it a Mars; and last the earth appears, and all those things I have described; the departure from it of the Sun, and of that dross-like part which is our present Moon. You know that the first foundation for the Ego was prepared in old Lemuria, when the present Moon separated from the earth. This was only possible because once again from the surrounding circumference the impulse to rotation was given. Then, that which had received the stimulus, after having rotated once, was ripe to receive the earliest beginnings of the Ego germ. This happened in Lemurian times, and we here point to that part of the Zodiac which is called the Bull, the reason for this being, that man, during the time these names were given, had very concrete and very clear feelings. This name originated in the Mystery teachings of Egypt and Chaldea. It is there that the origin of this designation is to be found, and it is only in real Occultism that the consciousness of the true significance of the Word exists at the present day. The first stirring of ‘I am’ finds expression in speech, in tone; but all tone-formation is related in a certain way which cannot be touched on here, but which every Occultist knows, and which may be explained some time in more intimate lectures; all tone formation has a very definite relation to the processes of propagation, which you can perceive in the fact that the voice of the male changes when sex maturity is reached. There is here a hidden correspondence. All that is associated with these faculties and processes of the human being, was comprised, for ancient consciousness, in the bull nature of man. And. the name given to that particular constellation has its origin in the fact that it has now the same importance for the earth which Lion had for Saturn, Scorpion for the Sun, and Waterman for the Moon. With the Egyptian age, came the third post-Atlantean period of civilisation. The first was the old Indian, the second the old Persian, the third the Egyptian. These periods of civilisation are the corresponding repetitions — as we have often repeated — of the whole processes of development of the earth. The Lemurian epoch was the third epoch of the earth. Therefore Egyptian Occultism repeats in a spiritual reflection the essential parts of the occurrences of Lemurian times. That which happened in Lemurian tunes was best known by the Egyptian mystery priests, for it is reflected in the special features of the Egyptian civilisation. Therefore the culture of Egypt was closely related to the constellation of the Bull, and to the cult of the Bull generally.

[ 17 ] Thus you see, that it is not all so easy to indicate the real events which happened during the origin of our heavenly bodies, and all connected with them. For how do celestial bodies originate? Our Saturn, our Jupiter, our Mars have in fact originated thus, that at first spheres were formed on them. One after the other of these is killed, and when nothing more is called into life, all the spherical forms, which previously constituted the shells, finally mass together into a body, and this becomes the visible Planet. In fact, any such celestial body as Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, originated thus, that at first a kind of shell was formed. This shell, through the agglomeration of the special forms, was condensed to that formation which then is revealed visibly in space. You have here no mechanical process taken from the dreary Kant-Laplace theory about the world's creation, but you have the living origins of those formations springing from the spiritual interaction of the Hierarchies, as we see them to-day in the heavenly bodies, in Saturn, Jupiter and Mars.

It really is exceedingly difficult in our Western civilization to speak intelligently and intelligibly about such a work as the Bhagavad Gita. This is so because at present there is a dominating tendency to interpret any spiritual work of this kind as a kind of doctrine, an abstract teaching, or a philosophy, that makes it hard for people to come to a sound judgment in such matters. They like to approach such spiritual creations from the ideal or conceptual point of view. Here we touch upon something that makes it most difficult in our time to gain a true judgment about the great historical impulses in mankind's evolution. How often, for instance, it is pointed out that this or that saying occurring in the Gospels as the teaching of Christ Jesus is to be found in some earlier work no less profoundly expressed. Then it is said, “You see, it is the same teaching after all.” Certainly, that is not incorrect because in countless instances it can be shown that the teachings of the Gospels occur in earlier spiritual works. Yet, though such a statement is not incorrect, it may be nonsense from the standpoint of a truly fundamental knowledge of human evolution. People's thinking will have to get accustomed to this and realize that a statement can be perfectly correct and yet nonsense. Not until this is no longer regarded as a contradiction will it be possible to judge certain matters in a really unbiased way.

Suppose, for instance, someone says that he sees in the Bhagavad Gita one of the greatest creations of the human spirit, a creation that has never been surpassed in later times. Suppose further, having said this, he adds, “Nevertheless, what entered the world with the revelation inherent in the Christ Impulse, is something altogether different, something to which the Bhagavad Gita could not attain even if its beauty and greatness were increased a hundred times.” These two statements do not contradict each other. According to the habits of modern abstract thinking, however, we may have a contradiction here. Yet, in no sense is it in truth a contradiction. Indeed one might go further, and ask, “When was that mightiest word spoken that may be regarded as giving the impulse to the human ego, so that it may take its place in the evolution of man?” That significant word was uttered at the moment Krishna spoke to Ar-juna; when he poured into Arjuna’s ears the most powerful, incisive, burning words to quicken the consciousness of self in man. In the whole range of the world’s life there is nothing to be found that kindled the self of man more mightily than the living force of Krishna’s words to Arjuna. Of course, we must not take those words in the way words are so often taken in Western countries where the noblest words are given merely an abstract, philosophic interpretation. In any such we would certainly miss the essence of the Bhagavad Gita. In this way Western scholars today have so outrageously misused and tortured the Bhagavad Gita. They have even gone so far as to dispute whether it is more representative of the Sankhya philosophy or of some other school of thought. In fact, a distinguished scholar, in his edition of this poem, has actually printed certain lines in small type because in his view they ought to be expunged altogether, having crept in by mistake. He thinks nothing is really a part of the Gita except what accords with the Sankhya, or at the most with the Yoga philosophy.

It may be said though that no trace is to be found in this great poem of philosophy as we speak of it today. At most one could say that in ancient India certain basic dispositions of soul developed into certain philosophic tendencies. These really have nothing to do with the Bhagavad Gita, at least not in the sense of being an interpretation or exposition of it. It is altogether unfair to the intellectual and spiritual life of the East to set it side by side with what the West knows as philosophy because there was no philosophy in the East in the same sense there is philosophy in the West. In this respect the spirit of our age, just beginning, is as yet imperfectly understood.

In the last lecture we spoke of things that men still have to learn. Above all we must firmly realize how the human soul, under certain conditions, can actually meet the Being whom we tried to describe from a certain aspect, calling him Krishna. We must realize how Arjuna meets that Spirit who prepared the age of self-consciousness. This knowledge is far more important than any dispute as to whether it is Sankhya or Vedic philosophy that is contained in the Bhagavad Gita. To understand it as a real description of world history—of history and of the color and temper of a particular age in which living, individual beings are placed before us—is the important point. We have tried to describe their natures, speaking of Arjuna’s thoughts and feelings as characteristic of that time, trying to throw light on the new age of self-consciousness, and showing how a creative Spiritual Being preparing for a new age appeared before Arjuna. Now, if we seek a living picture of Spiritual Beings in their relation to each other, we need an all-around point of view to know this Krishna Being more exactly. The following may therefore help us complete our picture of him.

To really penetrate into the region where we can perceive such a mighty being as Krishna one must have progressed far enough to be able to have real perceptions and real experiences in the spiritual world. That may seem obvious. Yet when we consider what people generally expect of the higher worlds the matter is by no means so self-evident. I have often indicated that misunderstandings without number arise from the fact that people wish to lift their lives into the super-sensible world carrying a mass of prejudices with them. They desire to be led along the path into the super-sensible toward something already familiar to them in the sense world. In that higher realm one perceives, for instance, forms, not indeed of gross matter, but forms that appear as forms of light. One finds that he hears sounds like the sounds of the physical world. He does not realize that by expecting such things, by entering the higher world with such preconceived ideas, he is wanting a spiritual world just like the sense world though in a refined form. In our world here man is accustomed to color and brightness, so he imagines he will only reach the higher realities if the Beings there appear to him in the same way. It ought not to be necessary to say all this since the super-sensible beings are far above all attributes of the senses and in their true form do not appear at all with sense qualities because the latter presuppose eyes and ears, that is, sense organs. In the higher worlds, however, we do not perceive by means of sense organs but by soul organs.

What can happen in this connection I can illustrate by a childish comparison. Suppose I am describing something to you, verbally. Then I feel impelled to represent it with a few strokes on the blackboard, thereby materializing what I have expressed in words. No one would dream of taking the diagram for the reality. It is the same when we express what we have experienced supersensibly by giving it form and color and stamping it in words borrowed from the sense world. Only that in doing so we do not use our ordinary intellect, but a higher faculty of feeling that thus translates the super-sensible into sense terms. In such a way our soul lives into invisible worlds, for instance into that of the Krishna Being. Then it feels the need of representing to itself that Being. What it represents, however, is not the Being himself but a kind of sketch, a super-sensible diagram. Such sketches, super-sensible illustrations so to say, are Imaginations. The misunderstanding that so often arises amounts to this, that we sensualize what the higher forces of the soul sketch out before us. By thus interpreting it sensually we lose its real essence. The essence is not contained in these pictures, but through them it must be dimly felt at first, until by slow degrees we actually begin to see it.

I have mentioned among other things the wonderful dramatic composition of the Bhagavad Gita. I tried to give an idea of the form of the first four discourses. This same dramatic impulse increases from one discourse to the next as we penetrate on and on into the realms of occult vision. A sound idea of the artistic composition of this poem may be suggested by looking to see if there is not a central point, a climax to this increase of force and feeling. There are eighteen discourses, therefore we might look for the climax in the ninth. In fact, in the ninth one, that is in the very middle, we read these striking words, “And now, having told thee everything, I will declare to thee the profoundest secret for the human soul.” Here indeed is a strange saying that seems to sound abstract yet has deep significance. Then there follows this most profound mystery. “Understand me well. I am in all beings, yet they are not in me.”

How often men ask today, “What is the judgment of true mystic wisdom about this or that?” They want absolute truths, but actually there are no such truths. There are only truths that hold good in certain contexts, that are true in definite circumstances and under definite conditions. Then they are true. This statement, “I am in all beings but they are not in me,” cannot be taken as an abstractly, absolutely true statement. Yet this was spoken out of the deepest wisdom of Krishna at the time when he stood before Arjuna, and its truth is real and immediate, referring to Him Who is the creator of man’s inmost being, of his consciousness of self.

Thus, through a wonderful approach we are carried on to the central point of the Gita, to the ninth discourse where these words are poured out, to Arjuna. Then, in the eleventh discourse, another element enters. What may we expect here, realizing the artistic form of the poem and the deep occult truths contained in it? When we take up the ninth and tenth discourses, the very middle of the poem, we notice a remarkable thing—a peculiar difficulty in imagining and bringing to life in our souls the ideas presented to us in this part of the song.

As you begin with the first discourse your soul is borne along by the continually increasing current of feeling and idea. First, immortality is the subject. Then you are uplifted and inspired by the concepts awakened through Yoga. All the time your feeling is being borne along by something in which it can feel at home, one may say. We go still further and the poem works up in a wonderful way to the concept of Him Who inspired the age of self-consciousness. Our enthusiasm is kindled as we approach this Being. All this time we are living in definite, familiar feelings. Then comes a still greater climax. We are told how the soul can become ever more free of the outer bodily life. We are led on to the idea, so familiar to the man of India, of how the soul can retire into itself, realizing inaction in the actions the body experiences. The soul can become a complete whole, independent of outer things as it gradually attains Yoga and becomes one with Brahma. In the succeeding discourses we see how our certainty of feeling—the feeling that can still gain nourishment from daily life—gradually vanishes. Then as we approach the ninth discourse our soul seems to rise into giddy heights of unknown experience. If now in these ninth and tenth discourses we try to make the ideas borrowed from ordinary life suffice, we fail, As we reach this part of the song we feel as if we were standing on a summit of mankind’s attainment, born directly out of the occult depths of life. If we are to understand it, we must bring to it something our soul in its development has first to attain by its own effort.

It is remarkable how fine and unerring the composition of the Bhagavad Gita is in this respect. We can get as far as the fifth, sixth, or seventh discourse by developing the concepts given us at the very beginning, in the first discourse. In the second our soul is awakened to realize the presence of the eternal in the ever-changing flow of appearance. Then follows all that passes into the depths of Yoga, from the third song onward. After that an altogether new mood begins to appear. Whereas the first discourses still have an intellectual quality, reminding us at times of the Western philosophic mode of thinking, something enters now that requires Yoga, the devotional mood, for its understanding. As we continue purifying more and more this mood of devotion, our soul rises higher in reverence. The Yoga of the first discourses no longer carries us. It ceases, and an altogether new mood of soul bears us up into the ninth and tenth discourses because the words here spoken are no more than a dry, empty sound echoing in our ear if we approach them intellectually. But they radiate warmth to us if we approach them devotionally. One who would understand this sublime poem may start with intellectual understanding and so follow the opening discourses, but as the song proceeds toward the ninth a deep devotional mood must be awakened in him. Then the words of the mighty Krishna will be like wonderful music echoing and re-echoing in his soul. Whoever reaches this ninth song may feel this devotional mood as if he must take off his shoes before treading on holy ground; there he feels he must walk with reverence. Then follows the eleventh discourse. What can come next, now that we have reached the climax of this devotional mood?

When man has risen to the summit where Krishna has led Arjuna—a height that cannot be attained except in occult vision or in reverent devotion—it can only be the holy and formless, the super-sensible, that appears before him. Then the super-sensible can be poured out into Imagination. Then the uplifted and strengthened soul-force that belongs not to the realm of the intellect but to imaginative perception, can cast into living pictures what in its essential being is without form or likeness. This is what happens at the beginning of the second half of the sublime song—that is to say, about the eleventh discourse. Here, after due preparation, the Krishna Being to whom Arjuna has been led step by step, is conjured up before his soul in Imaginations. This is where the majesty of description in this Eastern poem appears in its fullness, where Krishna finally appears in a picture, in an Imagination.

We may truly say that experiences such as this, which only the innermost power of the human soul can undergo, have almost nowhere else been described in such a wonderful way, so filled with meaning. For those who are able to realize it the Imagination of Krishna as Arjuna now describes it will always be of most profound significance. Up to the tenth discourse we are led on by Krishna as by an inspiring Being. Now the radiant bliss of Arjuna’s opened vision comes before us. Arjuna becomes the narrator, and describes his Imagination in words so wonderful that one fears to reproduce them.

“The Gods do I behold in all thy Frame, O God. Also the hosts of creatures; Brahma the Lord upon His lotus throne; the Rishis all; the Serpent of Heaven. With many arms and with many bodies, with many mouths and many eyes I see Thee, on every side endless in Thy Form. No end, no center, no beginning see I in Thee, O Lord of All! Thou, Whom I behold in every form, I see Thee with diadem, with club and sword, a mountain flaming fire, streaming forth on every side—thus do I behold Thee. Dazzled is my vision. As fire streaming from the radiance of the Sun, immeasurably great art Thou! Lost beyond all thought, unperishing, greatest of all Good, thus dost Thou appear to me in the Heaven’s expanse. Eternal Dharma’s changeless guardian, Thou! Spirit primeval and Eternal, Thou standest before my soul. Neither source, nor midst, nor end; in-. finite in power, infinite in realms of space. Great are Thine eyes like to the Moon; yea, like to the Sun itself. And what streams forth from Thy mouth is as the Fire of Sacrifice. I look upon Thee in Thy glowing Fire; Thy splendor, warming all worlds. All that I can dream of between floor of earth and fields of Heaven, Thy power fills it all. Alone with Thee I stand. And that heavenly universe wherein the three worlds live, that too doth in Thee dwell, when to my gaze is shown Thy wondrous, awesome Form. I see whole hosts of Gods approaching Thee, hymning Thy praise. Stricken with fear I stand before Thee, folding my hands in prayer. ‘Hail to Thee!’ cry all the companies of holy seers and Saints, chanting Thy praises with resounding songs. Filled with wonder stand multitudes beholding Thee. Thy Form stupendous with many mouths, arms, limbs, feet, many bodies, many jaws full of teeth—before it all the universe doth quake, and I with dread am filled. Radiant, Thou shakest Heaven. With many arms I see Thee, and mouth like to vast-flaming eyes. My soul trembles. Nothing firm I find, nor rest, O Mighty Krishna, Who art as Vishnu unto me. I see within Thine awful form, like unto fire itself. I see how Being works, the end of all the ages. Nought know I anywhere; no shelter I find. O, be Thou merciful to me, Thou Lord of all the Gods, refuge of all the worlds!”

Such is the Imagination that Arjuna beholds when his soul has been raised to that height where an Imagination of Krishna is possible. Then we hear what Krishna is echoing across to Arjuna once more as a mighty inspiration. In reality it is as if it were not merely sounding for the spiritual ear of Arjuna, but echoing down through all the ages that followed. At this point we begin dimly to perceive what it really means when a new impulse is given for a new epoch in the world’s history, and when the author of this impulse appears to the clairvoyant gaze of Arjuna. We feel with Arjuna. We remind ourselves that he is in the midst of the turmoil of battle where brother-blood is pitted against its like. We know that what Krishna has to give depends above all upon the old clairvoyant epoch ceasing, together with all that was holy in it, and a new epoch to begin. When we reflect on the impulse of this new epoch that was to begin with fratricide; when we rightly understand the impulse that forced its way in through all the swaying concepts and institutions of the preceding epoch; then we get a correct concept of what Krishna lets Arjuna hear.

“I am time primeval, bringing all worlds to naught, made manifest on earth to slay mankind! And even though thou wilt bring them unto death in battle, without thee hath death taken all the warriors who stand there in their ranks. Therefore arise; arise without fear. Renown shalt thou win, and shalt conquer the foe. Rejoice in thy mastery, and in the victory awaiting thee. It is not thou who wilt have slain them when they fall in battle. By Me already are they slain, e’er thou lay them low. The instrument art thou, nought else than he who fighteth with his arm. The Drona, the Jayandana, the Bhishma, the Karna and the other heroes of the strife I have slain. Already they are slain, now do thou slay, that My work burst forth externally apparent. When they fall dead in Maya, slain by Me, do thou slay them. And what I have done will through thee become perceptible. Tremble not! Thou canst not do what I have not already done. Fight! They whom I have slain will fall beneath thy sword!”

It was not in order to bring to mankind’s ears the voice that should speak of slaying that these words were uttered, but to make them hear the voice that tells that there is a center in man’s being that has to develop in the age to come; that into this center there were focused the highest impulses realizable by man at that time, and that there is nothing in human evolution with which the human ego is not connected. Here we find in the Bhagavad Gita something that lifts us up and sets us on the horizon of the whole of human evolution.

If we let the changing moods of this great poem work upon us we shall gain much more than those who try to read into it pedantic doctrines of Sankhya or Yoga philosophies. If we can only dimly feel the dazzling heights that can be reached through Yoga, we shall begin to lay hold on the meaning and spirit of such a mighty Imagination as that of Arjuna presented to us here. Even as an image it is so sublime and forceful that we are able to form some lofty conception of the creative spirit, which in Krishna is grafted onto the world. The highest impulse that can speak to the individual man speaks through Krishna to Arjuna. The highest to which the individual man can lift himself by raising to their full pitch all the powers that reside within his being—that is Krishna. The highest to which he can soar by training himself and working on himself with wisdom—that is Krishna.

When we think of the evolution of humanity all over the earth, and trace it through as we are able to do by means of what is given, for example, in our occult science; when in this sense we see the earth as the place where man has first been brought to the ego through many different stages following one another and developing from age to age; when we thus follow the course of evolution through the epochs of time; then we may say to ourselves that here then on earth these souls have been planted; the highest they can attain is to become free souls. Free—that is what men will become if they bring to full development all the forces latent within them as individual souls. In order to make this possible Krishna was active, indirectly and almost imperceptibly at first, then ever more definitely, and at last quite directly in the period we have been describing. In all of earthly evolution there is no Being who could give the individual human soul so much as Krishna.

I say expressly the individual soul because—and I say this deliberately—on earth there exists not only the individual human soul but also mankind. Consider this in connection with all I have tried to give about Krishna, because on earth there are all those concerns that do not belong to the individual alone. Imagine a person feeling the inner impulse to perfect himself as far as ever a human soul can. Such might be. Then, each person separately and by himself might go on developing indefinitely. But there is mankind. For this earthly planet there are matters that bring it into connection with the whole universe. With the Krishna Impulse coming into each individual soul, let us assume every soul would have developed in itself a higher impulse; not immediately, nor even up to the present time, but sometime in the future. So that from the age of self-consciousness onward the stream of mankind’s collective evolution would have split up. Individual souls would have progressed and unfolded to the highest point, but separately, dispersed, broken apart from each other. Their paths would have gone further and further apart as the Krishna Impulse worked in each one. Human existence would have been uplifted in the sense that souls individualized themselves and so lifted themselves out of the common current, developing their self-life to the utmost. In this way the ancient time would have shone into the future like many, many rays from a single star. Every one of these rays would have proclaimed the glory of Krishna far into future cosmic eras. This is the path on which mankind was traveling in the sixth or eighth centuries before the foundation of Christianity.

Then from the opposite side something else came in. The Krishna Impulse comes into man’s soul when from the depths of his own inner being he works, creates, and draws forth his powers more and more until he may rise into those realms where he may reach Krishna. But something came toward humanity from outside, which men could never have reached through the forces that lived within themselves; something bending down to each individual one. Thus the souls that were separating and isolating themselves encountered the same Being who came down out of the Cosmic Universe into the age of self-consciousness from outside. It came in such a way that it belonged to the whole of humanity, to all the earth. This other impulse came from the opposite side. It was the Christ.

Though put rather abstractly for the present, we see how a continually increasing individualization was prepared and brought about in mankind, and how then those souls who had the impulse to individualize themselves more and more were met by the Christ Impulse, leading them once more together into a common humanity. What I have tried to indicate has been a rather preliminary description of the two impulses from the Christ and Krishna. I have tried to show how closely the two impulses come together in the age of the mid-point of evolution, even though they come from diametrically opposite directions. We can make very great mistakes by confusing these two revelations. What I have developed today in a rather general way we will make more concrete in the succeeding lectures. But I would close today with a few words that may simply and clearly summarize what these two impulses are—truly the most important in human evolution.

If we look back to all that happened between the tenth century before Christ and the tenth century afterward, we may say that into the universe the Krishna Impulse flowed for every individual human soul, and into the earth the Christ Impulse came for all mankind.

Observe that for those who can think specifically, “all mankind” by no means signifies the same as the mere sum total of all individual human souls.

After the opening of the Pforzheim branch we are together again and will best fill our time by immediately entering into a spiritual theme, a theme which, through Anthroposophy, shows that we don't only absorb teaching and thoughts but that our life of feeling and of experience is enriched, calmed and protected. We do not dare imagine that teaching, imagining and thoughts are unimportant in our life of feeling. It's like this: in our time we will gradually come to say: Of thoughts and science there is enough in the world and we only need to take some or other book of instructions regarding the starry worlds or whatever else, to fill our minds with enough science. Theosophy however should be involved with mood or experience.—That is definitely correct because science, as encountered through popular lectures and publications, can offer little for the heart and soul. We don't dare conclude however that teaching, observation and knowledge are worthless.

Spiritual scientific knowledge is quite different to teachings of outer science. When we allow spiritual knowledge to really work into us, it becomes transformed in us as feelings, as soul impulses, as a way of thinking and in no other way can we acquire courage, certainty and power than through the deepening of this knowledge. It is quite different to merely recognise and know sense perceptible things and pioneering events, how things come about, than it is to penetrate behind the sensual things into the preceding spiritual events. When we allow spiritual events to work through the soul, we become warm, healthy and strong. We recognise the connections between us and that which weaves throughout the entire world as spirit and soul, the originators of all appearances. Consequently we want to come to grips with the relationship between the outer sensual world, outside, and our soul. On looking at our own souls, we find so to speak those things closest to us—suffering, joy, pain and pleasure—and now the question arises: When spiritual sciences says that everything in the world is spirit-penetrated, then we can argue that suffering, joy, pain and pleasure can also be found in those things which surrounds us, as well as in those things which we also meet as being callous, painless and insensitive.—We need to acquire the right way of thinking about things around us, through Anthroposophy.

We see for instance the various plants, animals and minerals around us. Not only do animals equally give us joy and suffering, pleasure and pain; that no one doubts. With plants and the apparently lifeless world of stones we can come to doubt that feelings, pleasure, joy and pain can be inherent in them. It is exactly this, which we acquire as experiences related to the entire surrounding world, that all beings are not only physically linked to us but that these beings link to us in such a way as to have soul content, just as we have soul content. Now we need to deepen within us, in the right way, what spiritual research and spiritual knowledge has to say about it. It is even understood in our time, from more sensory thoughts, that the plants could posses something spiritual, yes, one may be tempted to admit that an apparently lifeless stone could contain something spiritual.

When you consider you can still easily make mistakes if you don't take into account spiritual scientific research, you can easily say: If I cut the physical body of a person then I cause hurt, the same with animals; but when I cut a plant, will it also feel hurt?—Hence I can infer that if I crush a stone, I'm hurting it also. As a result, when people think about these things they come to believe that everything happening to other beings is experienced in the same way as to human beings, and because of this belief, they find it so difficult to enter with their thoughts into knowledge of spiritual knowledge. Occult science offers us quite a different way of recognising the soul nature of plants and stones, for instance. It appears, when we contemplate the plant, that certainly, when the plant is partly damaged where it grows out of earth towards the heights, no feeling of pain penetrates the plant, that it doesn't hurt but that the opposite is the case. That which comprises the actual soul of the plant feels pleasure, almost joy, when over the surface of the earth sensitive parts of plants are destroyed. Pain only starts for the plant soul when the plant is pulled out of the earth, uprooted; a similar pain is experienced when we or animals for instance have hair pulled out. This is something which a soul can gradually experience when on the so-called way or path of knowledge.

These things only allow us to experience them in our own souls when we transform our souls in such a way as to wake the slumbering, true powers of knowledge. Then the ability begins for the soul not only to feel compassion towards other people but to have compassion for the whole of the rest of nature, and the rest of nature becomes understandable in a wonderful way.

Now we could say: what do we get from spiritual scientific research if we ourselves can't feel such things?—It is an incorrect objection if we believe Anthroposophy has no meaning. It already has an account of spiritual-soul facts of great value. When such knowledge for example speaks about the relationship of plant suffering to plant joy then we really need to think about this knowledge and should allow such thoughts to work on us. Through our mere reflection regarding this knowledge we lure out contained forces and we will soon feel that it is indeed so, what is said by spiritual science. We learn however through knowing that when we look into the wisdom of nature, the plant soul experiences pleasure when we pick it. From this we can get the notion that we can think what is going to happen should the plant have been able to experience pain. Just think about it, what a large part of the earth's beings are nourished through plants, and how, through the nourishment of people and animals the pain could increasingly be spread over the earth. That isn't the case, but pleasure and joy spreads over the earth when an animal grazes in a pasture. Whoever has knowledge about this, feels entire streams of joy weave over the earth when in autumn the sickle cuts through the blades of grain. When the young animal sucks milk from its mother it does not mean there is pain, but a definite feeling of pleasure. Thus we see into the wisdom of nature when we go through life this way.

Against these things one should never turn your back: yes, it can appear gentler under the circumstances when a plant is dug out with its roots and replanted, instead of picking flowers.—Certainly, but this doesn't change the facts that uprooting causes actual pain to the plant soul. Deliberate ripping off blossoms can naturally from a certain point of view be rebuked, but even that changes nothing about the plant soul undergoing pleasure. From various points of view it looks different. A person may consider for example, from a standpoint of beauty, that pulling out the first grey hairs seems quite justified, even though it causes pain. Something else comes to our notice when we take this comparison of the uprooting of plants and the uprooting of human hair. We start to understand what it means when spiritual science considers not a single plant, but so to speak looks at the plant growth over the entire earth. Just as hair belongs to all human beings, so plants and earth create a unity, and we understand and can also think that, what we call the “I” (Ich) in spiritual science regarding a person, we can't find in a single plant but in the central point of the earth. The plant is absolutely not a single being, but becomes part of the great living being, existing out of many single living beings, but which has their “I” in the centre of the earth.

No one dares ask the question: Is there a place for this “I” everywhere?—Certainly, because it is spirit and can penetrate all. So our earth becomes a living being. So every single plant becomes something which grows out of a large supersensible being and, on the surface, becomes what nails or hair is to the human being. When we take such a fact seriously then we no longer argue about dry cerebral concepts regarding a physical planet on which we are living but then we feel that not only are we living beings but that we are linked to a great living being which is our planet. We learn to take cognisance of this spiritual being and we learn that it concerns more than just a comparison, when, in the sap flowing through the plant something happens similar to when blood courses through the human body. We learn to transform these things in our feelings by understanding them spiritually.

When we touch a plant we experience the soul-spiritual, we feel safe within the soul-spiritual. Gradually it becomes possible to add the thought given in spiritual science: The earth has gone through divers metamorphosis. We discover, when we go back in the most distant past, that the earth appeared quite different, that for example such solid rock masses as we have today, were not present then. There had been a time when the earth existed of only air and water and a certain condition of warmth. Only gradually solidity developed from the fluid and soft conditions. On contemplating this whole development, the activity within the entire development appears to us as one of growing and thriving. At one time the earth was young and in time it will become old and aged.

If we apply all imaginings which we relate to ourselves, to the earth, then we will understand that during our earth development certain extraordinary important stages were reached. We will bring such important stages in our earth development before our souls when we contemplate the following: Already from our earth's plant growth we realize, by considering the earth as a whole, that it is a living being. Similarly various other heavenly bodies are living beings which stand in a certain relationship to us. Let us look at our sun and moon. Consider the sun. You all know what we owe to the sun. You all know that when you have rested for the night, when you had been in a state of consciousness which had brought about the astral body and the ego (Ich) leaving the physical and ether bodies—you know, when the astral body and ego return, that it so to speak expects everything which the earth owes to the sun. What would the earth be without the sun? The sun surrounds our entire earthly mass with warmth and light. But we have to consider the activity of such a heavenly body on another not only as merely substantial and materialistic but we need to be clear that this sun does not only have a physical body floating in space but the sun is inhabited by spiritual beings and that in each ray of sunshine not only physical light but also spiritual activity streams to us.

A spiritual exchange between sun and earth was always there, but it has essentially changed in the course of earthly development. While no great difference in the physical exchange between sun and earth has come about during many, many millions of years, a spiritual and meaningful stages were reached. High beings these are, who live in the light and warmth of the sun and who work into the earth from there, flooding us with light and warmth.

A Sun Being, who had up to a specific moment in time his stage in the sun, which man could through long, long earthly cycles only observe clairvoyantly, this Being descended at a specific moment from the sun down to the earth. This is something which allows us to see in depth into spiritual development: through the event which we call the Mystery of Golgotha, or in other words, through the passage of Christ on earth, the spiritual Being who had been up to that point on the sun, united himself with the earth. He connected himself with the earth. Humanity's division of earthly time into pre-Christian and post-Christian has its origin in this: that this living being, which we call the earth, underwent through this deed an important development through the appearance of Christ on earth. What was previously only found in the sun, since then can be found in the astral body of the earth. The astral body of the earth changed through the Mystery of Golgotha: at the very same moment the blood flowed out of the wounds of the Redeemer, at that moment the Christ-Soul felt itself uniting with the body of the earth.

This has to be understood in order for us to consider the reported story of Christianity in the correct light. We can ask ourselves: what then was one of the most important events with reference to the spreading of Christianity? When one looks at the propagation of Christianity one can say: firstly more had been accomplished by Paul than those who were the physical companions of Christ Jesus in Palestine; Paul who was no physical companion of Christ Jesus, who had even persecuted the Christ. Paul didn't become a believer through sharing the life and suffering of the Christ, but he became a warrior for Christ through the Event of Damascus.

In theology much dust is raised over the Event of Damascus. Yet no one comes to an understanding of the Events of Damascus but through spiritual science. Let's try to bring this into harmony in only a few words—which will be uttered now. The moment Paul's reasoning consciousness changed into the higher consciousness, what did he see? He saw in that moment this spirit in the astral world, who had become the earth spirit; he saw the living Christ, who since the Event of Golgotha had united with the earth. One can well ask: what was this light which he saw, which people could not see before?—Paul first learnt to know the Christ from the time Christ united with the earth. Thus we may point out this important moment of the earth by saying: the earth prepared itself for this, to become a worthy body for the Christ-Spirit and while the earth was preparing for the uniting of itself and the Christ-Spirit, during this time the Christ-Spirit worked into it. Christ said according to the St John's Gospel: “Whoever eats my bread, treads me with their feet.” People who walk on earth step on the earth with their feet. “Whoever eats my bread, treads me with their feet,” is an expression for the mystery which lies in this important stage of earthly development.

How endlessly profound this becomes with the inauguration of Communion with this in mind, that the earth became from then on the body of Christ! How meaningful this becomes with reference to the words: “This is my body” and that which flows through the plants: “This is my blood.” We learn to take literally what we only dared pronounce in words. So we come, when we consider the earth as alive, as a living being which gradually matures, to the right moment, ready for the acceptance of the Christ-soul.

So from all sides it appears that we encounter the physical planet as spiritual; it appears penetrated by spirit. We then learn to understand connections between that which we meet daily and the super-sensible. When we turn our attention from the plant kingdom to the stone realm then it will not appear through clairvoyant consciousness that we inflict pain when we crush a stone to dust; by contrast, when a stone is turned into dust, what we could call the stone-soul, experiences pleasure and joy. Those who have the sight know that with crushing the stone world, joy streams out of the rock. When, for example, salt is dissolved in a glass of water, pleasure spreads through the water as the salt particles move apart. The opposite is the case when through cooling the solution of salt crystallizes; through the crowding together of the stone particles pain takes place. We look again deeply into the way in which the Initiates speak to us, when they want to tell humankind something like this.

These things are not simply said. We must go through them in a spiritual way to reach an understanding of the great religious documents. It has already been said that originally no hard rock kingdom existed, that the earth was fluid. Its solidity came into existence through the gathering of parts and by hardening. What does man and animal owe to the earth's condensing? Surely so man and animal can live in the present state? Without solid ground and land the earth couldn't offer a base for man and animal. Now bring this imagination into our souls as actual spiritual history. This is hardly understood when only considered with the mind of a physicist. Only when we, with our hearts and minds, explore the earth's coming into being, then we can become conscious of what lies in the stone kingdom, that soul processes are at play, while the was earth solidifying. Pain and suffering was involved—through this, man and animal owe the possibility to live on the earth.

These are the facts that lie at the basis of Paul's words after his Initiation and perception into these things: “All creatures suffer and sigh under the gradual solidification, all creatures sigh and wait for the spiritualisation.” He points with these deep words to the innermost, to the soul of the earthy beings. Now we may en-soul everything, by looking through the eyes of spiritual science, and only through glimpsing the soul and spirit in everything, will we gradually find the world around us becoming more and more comprehensible. We come to an understanding that the world which surrounds us, as in physiognomy, is an outer expression of an inner life. Then we will learn to grasp that the world looks exactly as it appears to people. Further we will learn to understand that behind all physicality is the soul-spiritual which has to be the origin of everything physical, and when the spiritual researchers take us back they show us how in the far, distant past, everything gradually developed out of the spiritual. The human being gradually descended from the spiritual world into the physical, and we must not imagine this descent as something as materialistic as is usually done these days, but rather ask: where does this actual material world which surrounds us, originate from, which is spreading ever more around us?

Mankind were for some time through and through spiritual, embedded in the soul-spiritual. Mankind developed only gradually out of this soul-spiritual. If we glance back to a relatively short time ago—when the realms of time were long, but for the spiritual researcher they are short to name—we find that our earth didn't appear as it does today, that her countenance has thoroughly changed, above all things through the event of the Flood, which in spiritual science goes under the name of the Atlantean Flood. Under this Atlantean flooding we may consider that through air and water activity the face of the earth was completely transformed. Previously the people lived in an area of the earth where the Atlantic Ocean is today. Land existed and there our souls actually lived in previous embodiments in Atlantean bodies. If we look spiritual scientifically at these people at the beginning of this Atlantean time, they appear quite differently to our souls from today. They appear in the early Atlantean times as if they perceived everything in a different way to later. Today, when one of us, during our waking hours glances around, we perceive objects in colour and light. When in the night, the physical and ether bodies are released from the ego and astral bodies, this world disappears. We call this unconsciousness.

During early Atlantean times it was not the case that unconsciousness surrounded people when they entered into another condition during night time. Everything emerged at that time that was soul and spirit in the physical world. People for instance saw flowers before they fell asleep. During sleep they perceived the soul-spiritual of the flower in the soul-spirit world. Therefore these things were, what we call physical outer objects today, not sharply defined as today, because the people saw these as if in a mist surrounded by edges of colour. So we see how the soul too has gradually changed its look. When we go back even further, we will find that the souls only perceived the spiritual, because the physical had not solidified out of the soul yet.

Now the people on our earth were subject to an important point in their development and this moment lay in the middle of their Atlantean development. At this midpoint the people would, if a certain achievement hadn't already been reached, not have ceased perceiving the spiritual world with their nocturnal consciousness. If a certain event hadn't intervened, the people of the middle Atlantean time would for instance not have seen some or other object, like a flower, as yellow, but as it were the spirit of the plant would have appeared to them. That this happened differently was due to people allowing Lucifer and his supporters to exert their influence earlier. The Atlantean was so to speak unaware of the outer physical world; it would have appeared transparent. He had perceived the spiritual world behind everything.

What now happened for the physical world to be not spread under a transparent crystal blanket but to become opaque? Through the spiritual world becoming concealed, yet another possibility, the influence of Ahriman, or as Goethe called him, Mephistopheles, could be expressed. As a result this spirit, which we call the ahrimanic, could penetrate, and after a certain time error and illusion stepped in. That which we call Maya, illusion, could mix into the conception of the world. So behind everything which we take as the physical world, stand the principals of this world, as we call them in the Bible. Their influence penetrates everywhere. Without these influences, matter would appear transparent and reveal the underlying spiritual. As a result an enormous change came about through these events within the souls of people. When we consider how human beings developed on the earth, we see how at a certain time the luciferic and at another time the ahrimanic influences made themselves effective.

When we look back at that time when the human being was still spiritual, when solidity hadn't crystallized, we see how the forces of nature and humanity were not as separate as they are today. They were in that time much closer while the earth was still penetrated by the watery element. The softer the earth was, the more spiritual were the people—human thoughts and human feelings influenced forces of nature. When we go even further back behind the Atlantean times, we find: As human will impulses turned to anger it had quite a definite influence on fire, and thus a large portion of the earth was destroyed in order for the human being to go through the luciferic influence and stimulate evil instincts, through which in an alternate hindsight mankind acquired his freedom and independence. Thus, what we call forces of nature, were linked to human thinking during the Atlantean time.

Now it happened, through humanity's so called luciferic influence granting them independence, that it was given the possibility to influence the forces of nature through the will. Gradually human beings withdrew from the influence of nature forces. This went hand in hand with the influence of Ahriman who wanted to mask the spiritual world from the human being. People who could still see the spiritual world were able to influence nature's forces. Single people were able to withdraw from these influences, the majority of mankind not. Even today actually very few individuals have a direct influence on the forces of nature, in comparison to humanity as a whole, and when we consider humanity in its entirety then we will see accordingly that besides individual karma there exists earth karma for the whole of humanity.

This is a result of what once were a luciferic and then an ahrimanic influence. This being we call Ahriman stands in a mysterious connection to the powers of earth fire which goes back to the direct influence of a few single people. These fire powers of the earth is a life element of ahrimanic spirits and through the ahrimanic influence the collective karma of the whole human race is bound in a certain extent to Ahriman. When specific soul attitudes of mind and events enter into human development, then again the relationship between people and Ahriman is valid, and that, which enabled people to influence forces of nature, still takes place today through Ahriman and his spiritual horde.

Every time Ahriman stirs, it indicates nothing other than that something had happened in human history which attracted Ahriman and brought him into turmoil and rage. In the soul of man something happens, something which for instance lets the largest part of mankind fall into materialism. This enables Ahriman to work in his own element—he then has a living element—because human materialism attracts him more than people who become spiritual. Ahriman awakens storms, volcanic outbursts and earthquakes. Here we really have something which shows how nature and spirit are connected. Nothing happens on earth without a spiritual connection. Our soul is connected to its good and evil deeds as a result of what is going on, on earth. When the earth rages during an earthquake, we will never say it is as a result of a single person's karma, but mankind's karma. Everyone can thump his heart and say his individual karma is included here, the single must perish, because right here the valve of the earth had to open up. He will be recompensed in future.—A materialistic point of view will say this is superstitious but whoever says this doesn't realise how childishly the argument is. How can a flower grow without a spiritual basis, how can it be an expression of spirit and soul, just so no earthquake, no volcanic eruption can be without a spiritual origin, without a spiritual cause. When we, as we said, stare karma in the face, then we make it valid for the entire life of humankind.

Only when we don't bring spiritual scientific teaching into movement, it appears cold and calculated by the mind. When we however allow our feelings, our attitude of mind and our experiences to be penetrated, then we will see the earth as a living being, through and through soul and spirit, and then you will see that this earthly body is bound to spiritual beings of the most various kinds and that a very important event has come to the fore, whose effectiveness is only beginning: the appearance of Christ on earth. Through Christ alone are the consequences of Ahriman's power driven out.

As a result of spiritual science's infusion into the human heart with this Christ-Spirit, that which spreads out on earth as the entire spirit of humanity, now enables the earth right into its nature elements to come to peace and harmony.

When all human hearts in the true sense experience the Christ-Spirit then the power which will stream from this will be so strong, it will calm fire and water. Then the Christ-Spirit would bring peace and harmony into the elements of nature, and the earth itself become an expression of the spirit. The earthly body, which is a living being, would become soft and mild and rise with the human spirit and human soul towards its spiritualisation. To a higher spiritual existence the earth will rise. We can place this as a higher, further ideal and can allow this to penetrate us each moment. No moment is lost in the development of humanity which is applied in such a way that knowledge and will impulses are inter-penetrated by spirit.

[ 1 ] When considering the conditions of Saturn which are still transparent and less immersed in Maya, we glance back a little at what was said this morning, we shall be able to understand in what way the liberation or imprisonment of certain beings can be brought about — the liberation of those beings of which we spoke yesterday in relation to that most significant and incisive passage of the divine Gita. Remember it has been said that if the Spirits of Personality in ancient Saturn had each time absorbed those egg-shaped bodies of warmth without leaving anything behind, then at the end of its evolution the whole of Saturn would have been reabsorbed into the spiritual world. As was stated, this did not happen, but the Spirits of Personality impressed their mark on the whole of Saturn in a much more intense way than they would otherwise have done; they impressed it through those remnants they left on Saturn, for they did not take everything away with them; they left those outwardly perceptible bodies of warmth behind them.

[ 2 ] What is the power that rules in the Spirits of Personality on ancient Saturn? It is no other than that which we know in modern man as the power of thought. For in reality, the Spirits of Personality did nothing else on ancient Saturn but exercise the power of their thoughts. They brought about the formation of these eggs of warmth, because they conceived the idea of them. Thus it is the power of conception in the Spirits of Personality which has, however, a much stronger potentiality than is the case with modern humanity. What is the power behind the force of ideas, or concepts, in modern humanity? When one formulates an idea to-day, it is formed only in the astral; the conception penetrates only a far as the astral. And so the permanence of that form cannot be distinguished in the outer physical world. On ancient Saturn the Spirits of Personality were powerful magicians. They formed those eggs of warmth on Saturn by the force of their thoughts, and through that same force they also left them behind. So in reality it was the power of those Spirits of Personality which caused the residue of ancient Saturn to be left behind, and this appears again and again, and still appeared even during the Sun evolution.

[ 3 ] It is perfectly comprehensible that an entity, who is really human should take on form from his surroundings, (for the eggs that were formed there were constructed out of the surroundings of Saturn) and those eggs were bewitched, or chained to a further existence. To day, this is presented to you in a more general sense, for the conditions we spoke of yesterday had not as yet become so complicated.

[ 4 ] At this point we might say: Behold the Saturn fire, behold that which is always spiritualised anew by that ancient fire, that which is ever withdrawn again as inner soul's fire, as comfortable warmth which rises upwards into higher worlds. But if only this had been there, Saturn would have disappeared into higher worlds. That which is perceptible as outer warmth, which has condensed into external warmth must be born again, must appear again, and does appear next on the Sun, as has been described.

[ 5 ] Now let us glance at the other things we have described in the previous lecture. We have made it clear that those beings of the spiritual hierarchies whom we call Archangels, or Fire Spirits, passed through their human stage on the ancient Sun; that there the element of warmth condensed on the one side to smoke, or to gas, so that the sun became a ball of gas, and that on the other side the gas burned in such a way that light streamed out into the world; and it is the Archangels or Fire Spirits who lived in the outstreaming light, who inhaled it and poured it forth and had their being in the light. As I have already said, if you could have then taken a voyage through the universe to the Sun, you would have seen that ancient Sun shining before you in the distance. In the interior you would have seen various streams and currents of gas; you would have perceived it as the breathing process of the whole body of the Sun.

[ 6 ] Let us now call up once more before our minds this ancient Saturn and ancient Sun. We have seen that in both of these planetary bodies life and activity reigned, that something was happening there. We have been able to describe ancient Saturn, the egg formations, which were always built up there anew and again dissolved, with the exception of those remnants which remained behind. Anyone observing this inner activity of Saturn would have said to himself: ‘Saturn is really a living being. It is in truth exactly as if it were a living being. It lives: it lives in itself; it continually builds up forms out of its own life and so on.’ In a still higher degree is this the case with the ancient Sun. It presents itself as an unit, as a totality in the changing conditions of its Sun's night and Sun's day, of the inhalation and the exhalation of light. If it could have been observed it would have given the impression of a heavenly body which was not dead, but was full of life.

[ 7 ] Now everything that lives, that has that sort of activity, is inwardly living and inwardly in motion because spiritual beings govern and guide that motion. We have indeed said, that the Spirits of Personality built those egg forms through their thought power. Yes, but first something must exist, out of which the substance of those eggs can be taken. The Spirits of Personality, those primeval ‘beginners’ or Archai cannot produce that substance. That is the first, principle thing we must put before our minds, that something must be there which provides the substance, that is the undifferentiated warmth, the fire itself. The spirits of Personality are only those who mould that substance. But the warmth — they must receive from elsewhere. Whence does the total world of Saturn, and whence, before all others do the Spirits of Personality, get that warmth substance, that warmth or fire element?

It comes from Spirits essentially higher, Spiritual Beings who have passed through their human evolution so very long ago, that on the ancient Saturn they were already far beyond that stage.

In order to form an idea of such sublime Beings, and why they were necessary to the out-giving of the fiery warmth of ancient Saturn, we must by way of a comparison, recall to our minds the development of man himself, for man will also, some day, become a divine being.

[ 8 ] We know that the man of to-day, as he stands before us, consists in his human nature of four parts which are the key to all spiritual science — that the man consists of the physical, etheric and astral bodies, and of the ‘I.’ We know how a man develops these further, that the ‘I’ works from within outwards, that in the first place the astral body is changed in such a way as to bring it completely under the dominion of the ‘I.’ Now when the astral body is so far transmuted that the ‘I’ has complete power over it, we say: this astral body has become of such a nature that it can contain the Spirit-self or Manas. It is the same with the etheric body. When the work of the ‘I’ becomes still more effective, it masters also the resisting forces of the etheric body, and the transmuted etheric body is the Life-spirit or Budhi. And last of all, when the ‘I’ becomes ruler of the physical body, when it overcomes the strongest of the resisting forces, the forces of the physical body, then the man has in him the Spirit-man or Atma. So he should be a seven-membered man when he had transmuted his physical body to Atma or Spirit-man. Externally, the physical body is seen just as a physical body, but internally, it is completely dominated by the ‘I,’ it glows with the ‘I;’ such is the body which is physical body and Atma at the same time. The etheric body is at the same time etheric body and Life-Spirit or Budhi, the astral is astral body and Spirit-self or Manas; the ‘I’ has now become the general Ruler. Thus man pushes onwards to higher stages of development, thus he transforms himself, and works at his own godliness, at his deification, as is said by Dionysius, the Areopagite, the friend and pupil of the Apostle Paul. But arriving at this point, development is not yet finished. When the man is so far advanced that he has completely conquered and absolutely dominated the physical body, he has still higher stages of development before him. This rises ever higher and higher, and we gaze upwards into spiritual heights, to super-human beings, and these become ever mightier and mightier. In what really does the continual increase in the power of those Beings consist, how is it expressed? It consists in this, that in the first place they are in need of something, they want something, they demand something from the world, and that later on they develop to the point, when they themselves have something to give. Fundamentally, the whole meaning and spirit of evolution rests on the fact, that we pass from taking, to giving. You have an analogy for this in human evolution in our life here between birth and death: the child is helpless, it must receive the help of those about it. It grows more and more out of this helplessness, and at last itself become a helper in its turn. So too in the great universal evolution of the human race.

[ 9 ] On ancient Saturn, man existed only as the earliest human physical germ. There he had to content himself with receiving the first foundations of his humanity; and so it continued all through the Sun and Moon period. On the Earth he acquired his ego, and now he is gradually preparing himself to let his Ego act upon his astral and etheric bodies and his physical body. Through this he will gradually grow into a Being who will be able to give, cosmically. This Being grows gradually in cosmic, universal giving; from taking he grows to giving.

You have an example of this indeed in those beings of whom we have spoken already, in the Archangels or Archangeloi. In a certain sense they already developed on the Sun to the point when they could give out light to universal space.

Thus, evolution progresses from taking to giving. In the case of giving, the thing goes very far indeed. Let us take some being who can give only his thoughts; that speaking truly, is not as yet much to give; for he who gives thoughts — even if he has given ever so many thoughts, when he goes away things remain as they were. He has not given anything visible or tangible, in the higher sense. But a time comes when Beings do not only give thoughts and the like, a time when they are able to give much more, when for instance, they will be able to give just that which the Spirits of Personality had need of on ancient Saturn: the substance of the warmth-fire.

[ 10 ] Who was at such a high stage of development that they could then let that warmth of ancient Saturn stream out of their own bodies? They were the Beings whom we call Thrones or Spirits of Will.

[ 11 ] Thus we see that ancient Saturn took form through the fact, that from the surrounding universe the Thrones concentrated on one point in space. They did in great measure what in a lower sphere of existence is done by the silkworms, when they spin threads of silk out of their bodies. The Thrones spun the substance of warmth out of themselves, sacrificed themselves on the altar of Saturn.

We have to regard the life of the Spirits of Personality on Saturn in such a way, that these Spirits of Personality or Archai actually imparted personality, Ego-consciousness to the warmth. The substance of the fire-warmth streamed together from out [of] the universe, — the Cosmos, it streamed forth from highly exalted Beings — the Thrones.

We now know of what those eggs of warmth, that arose on Saturn, consisted. They were spun out of the bodies which the Thrones offered up as a sacrifice.

[ 12 ] But that would not have sufficed; the co operation of the Spirits of Personality had the power to give form to the substance of warmth, but they could not do it alone. To produce that inner life and activity, other spiritual beings were necessary who had also had to inhabit ancient Saturn, beings inferior to the Thrones, but higher than the Archai or Spirits of Personality. To their share fell the task of helping the Spirits of Personality. We can form an idea of that help if we think of the Angels who are the first immediately above us, then of the Archangels, then of the primeval Beginnings, or Spirits of Personality — Archai. These Beings belong to the Hierarchy which stands next above us. The Thrones do not come immediately above the Spirits of Personality. There are intermediate stages between the Spirits of Personality, and the Thrones, and it is there that those Beings stand, whom we call Powers or Exusiai, according to Dionysius the Areopagite; Powers is the name in English (also Spirits of Form). The Powers are one stage higher than the Spirits of Personality. They hold the same relation to the Spirits of Personality which the Angels do towards us. Yet a stage higher than these Powers are those Beings we call Mights — Spirits of Motion — Dynamis. These were related to the Spirits of Personality on ancient Saturn in the same way as the Archangels are to us to-day. A stage higher still than the Spirits of Motion are those beings we call Spirits of Wisdom — Dominions, Kyriotetes. They were to the Spirits of Personality on ancient Saturn, what the Spirits of Personality or Archai are to us now. Then, after these come the Thrones or Spirits of Will.

[ 13 ] Thus on ancient Saturn we have an ascending scale of Beings: the Spirits of Personality who awaken and bring about the ‘I’ consciousness; we have the Thrones, Spirits of Will, who stand four stages higher than the Spirits of Personality, and who give out the fire substance; and in between, to order and guide all the life on ancient Saturn, we have, naming them from below upwards: the Powers, or Spirits of Form; the Might or Spirits of Motion; the Dominions, or Spirits of Wisdom; in Greek Exusiai; Dynamis and Kyriotetes. These were, if one may so call them, the inhabitants of ancient Saturn.

[ 14 ] Whilst the ancient Saturn is evolving into the Sun — as we have described in the last lecture — those Beings who have just been named are also evolving each one stage higher, and the Archangels enter upon the human stage. Externally — we might say physically — the warmth condenses into gas. The Sun is a gaseous body. While ancient Saturn was a dark warmth-body, the Sun now begins to shine outwardly; but it alternates, so to speak, from Sun-days to Sun nights. It is particularly important to take notice of those interchanges from Sun-days to Sun-nights. For an enormous difference between the life of the days and the nights obtains on ancient Sun. If nothing else had intervened but what has been described in the Third Lecture, the Archangels, who are the men of the ancient Sun, would during the Sun-days hurry with the rays of light out into the Universe, would expand to the Universe and would have to return to the Sun during the Sun's nights. It would be an inhaling and exhaling of the light, together with all the creatures weaving their existence within it. But it is not so.

I should like once more to describe these Archangels, in a simple, I might also say trivial, way. It pleased them too much, when they soared out into the Universe; the flowing outwards, the soaring up to the Spirits of the universe, pleased them more than the contracting, or drawing of themselves together again. The latter seemed a narrowing, inferior existence. Life in the light-ether pleased them better. But they never could have extended this life in the light-ether further than a certain limit, if something had not come to their help. If those Beings on the ancient Sun had been left to themselves, it would have been quite impossible for them to do anything else than bravely to return to the Sun, in the Sun-night. Yet they did not do it, they lengthened the time of their stay outside in the Universe always more and more, they remained longer and longer in the Spiritual World. Who helped them to do this?

[ 15 ] Let us imagine that the small circle is the ball of the Ancient Sun; the Archangels strive to get out into the spaces of the world from all sides of that ancient Sun ball, they spread out their presence, spiritually into the Universe. The Archangels were helped in this out-spreading by the fact that there were Beings out in the Universe who came to meet them. Just as earlier, the fire elements of the Thrones, streamed towards ancient Saturn, so now other Beings come to meet the out-streaming Archangels, Beings who are still higher than the Thrones, and these help them to stay longer out in the Universe than they otherwise could have done.

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[ 16 ] Those Beings who came out of spiritual space to meet the Archangels, we call Cherubim (The Spirits of Harmony). They are Beings of an exceptionally sublime nature; they have power to receive the Archangels, so to speak, with open arms. When the Archangels spread outwards, the Cherubim came to meet them, out of the Universal All. Thus, all round the globe of the ancient Sun, we have the approaching Cherubim. If I may use the comparison — just as our earth is surrounded by its atmosphere, so was the ancient Sun surrounded by the realm of the Cherubim, for the benefit of the Archangels. When the Archangels went out into the Universal spaces, they beheld their great helpers.

[ 17 ] In what way did those great helpers meet them, and what appearance had they? This can naturally only be stated by clairvoyant consciousness as read in the Akasha Chronicles. These great Universal Helpers revealed themselves in quite definite etheric shapes or figures. Our forefathers who, through their traditions, were still conscious of these most important facts, represented the Cherubim as those strangely winged animals with differently formed heads — the winged Lion, winged Eagle, winged Bull, winged Man. The fact is, that the Cherubim made their approach from four sides, in forms afterwards represented in the way the Cherubim are known to us. In the schools of the first post-Atlantean Initiates, these Cherubim, approaching the Ancient Sun on four sides, were given names, which later became the names, Bull, Lion, Eagle, Man.

[ 18 ] The aspect presented by the Ancient Sun, was that of its human inhabitants, otherwise called Archangels, passing out into Universal space, and the four kinds of Cherubim, coming from four sides to meet them. On account of this, the Archangels were enabled to stay in the spiritual region which surrounded the ancient Sun longer than they otherwise could have done. For the influence of those Cherubim upon the Archangels was vivifying in the highest degree, in the spiritual sense. But as the Cherubim came into the vicinity of the Sun, their influence was active also in another way. They acted in the way described, on those Sun-beings who had evolved up to the element of light, who knew how to live in that element. But this element of light could be influenced only during the Sun-days, when light streamed out into Universal space. But there were also the Sun-nights when light did not stream out. The Cherubim were then also in the skies. During this time, when the Sun-planet was darkened, only warmth-gas was there, the illuminated warm gases streamed within the Sun-ball. Round about it were the Cherubim sending down their influence, which was active now within the dark gas. When the Cherubim could not act in a normal way upon the Archangels, they sent their influence into the dark smoke and gas of the Sun. Whilst on ancient Saturn influences were exercised upon the warmth, influences were now exerted out of cosmic space on the condensed warmth, or gas, of the ancient Sun. To this action we must ascribe the fact, that out of that Sun-mist was built the first foundation or germ of what we call to-day the animal kingdom. Just as the earliest foundations of the human kingdom arose in the physical human body on Ancient Saturn, so on the Sun, out of its smoke and gas was formed the first germ of the animal kingdom. Out of the warmth of Ancient Saturn was formed the first germ of the human body; on the Ancient Sun was formed the first germ of the smoke-like changing animal bodies, created through the mirroring of the forms of the Cherubim in this Sun-gas.

[ 19 ] Thus, we find, spread abroad in space surrounding the Sun — that totality of exalted Beings, the Cherubim who receive the Archangels, as it were, with open arms — and we find also, evoked as by magic out of the Sun-gas during the Sun's nights, the earliest germinal beginnings of the animal kingdom. The animal kingdom in its first physical foundation grew out of the Sun mist. Therefore those of our forefathers who from the Mysteries had knowledge of these deeply important things out of spiritual Cosmology, called the Beings, who, acted upon the Ancient Sun, from all sides of Space: the Zodiac or Animal Circle. That is the primeval significance of the Zodiac. On Ancient Saturn the germinal beginnings of humanity were first laid down, and the substance which to-day is in the physical body was poured out, sacrificed, by the Thrones.

On the Sun was laid down the earliest beginnings of the Animal Kingdom, through the forms of the Cherubim being mirrored in, and conjured forth from, the gas which had condensed from the warmth substance of the earlier planet.

Thus the animals were in the first place reflected Sun-images of the Zodiac. There is a real inner relation between the Zodiac and the animals which were coming into existence upon the Sun. Truly it is not for nothing, that such names have been given to those things. One must never think that in those ancient times names were chosen at random. To-day, when a new planet is discovered out of the planetary chain, what does the Astronomer do who has had the luck to discover it? He opens a Lexicon, finds a Greek mythological name which is still unappropriated and sticks it upon the star. In the times when in names people looked for the expression of the things represented; in the times when the Mysteries were still powerful, names were not given in that way; but in the names then given you could always find the deeper meaning of the thing itself.

[ 20 ] The forms of our animals, even although to-day they are degenerated into caricatures, have been brought down from the encircling Universe, from the figures of the Zodiac, as they then existed.

It may strike you that we have mentioned only four names of the Zodiac. These are the principal expressions for the Cherubim; for in reality each of those Cherubic forms has to left and to right a sort of follower or companion. Think of the form of each Cherubim having two companions and you will have twelve forces and powers encircling the Sun, certain indications of which already existed on the Ancient Saturn. We have twelve such powers, belonging to the kingdom of the Cherubim, who have to perform their task in the Universe in the way we have just described.

[ 21 ] You may now ask: What relation has this to the ordinary names of the animal circle or Zodiac? We shall say a word about this during the next few days. For the sequence of the names has somewhat changed. One generally begins to count with Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo. Then comes Virgo the Virgin and Libra the Scales or Balance. The Eagle, through a later transformation, has had to be named Scorpio, for a definite reason. And then the two companions: Sagittarius, Capricornus. The Man, for reasons which we will hear later, is called Aquarius the Water-man. Then Pisces the Fishes. You still see the true form, out of which the Zodiac originated, in the Bull (Taurus), in the Lion and a little in the Man, which in the ordinary exoteric nomenclature is called the Waterman. We shall explain in the next few days why the Zodiac has passed through this transformation. [ 22 ] High spiritual Beings, high Hierarchies, the Thrones gave out of their own substance the fire of Ancient Saturn. Still higher Beings, whom we characterise as Cherubim, took into themselves the light which sprang from the fire and glorified its existence, uplifted it. But each time that an uplifting process happens in the Universe, a lowering process must also step in to create the relative balance or adjustment. In order that the Archangels should have the opportunity of extending their spiritual existence during daytime, the Cherubim were obliged to continue their activity by night, and bring forth the animal beings which are lower than humanity, forms evoked out of that warmth-substance which had condensed into mist, gas and smoke.

[ 23 ] You have thus been given the first idea, in the sense of the primeval wisdom, of the way in which certain Spiritual Beings of the Universe act in unison with our own planetary body; and at the same time you have been shown how in the outward, physical world everything can always be traced back to spiritual Beings. That which we call so materially the Zodiac to-day (from the Greek word which implies figures), animals, and living beings originated in the kingdoms of the Cherubim, who, from the encircling Universe, sent down their influence upon the Ancient Sun and allowed their forces to stream forth into this Universe as a force of light.

[ 24 ] With this we have introduced an important conception of the Animal circle or Zodiac, and we shall continue this study tomorrow; we shall gradually be able to rise to the comprehension of other universal bodies, and have more and more light thrown upon their relationship with the spiritual Hierarchies.

The lecture given the day before yesterday on the conditions between death and a new birth shows how closely the whole being of man is connected with the universal life in the cosmos. It is really only during his earthly life that the human being is fixed to one place, occupies a small space, whereas during the period between death and a new birth he is part of the planetary system and, at a later period after death, even of the world beyond the planetary system. In his development between birth and death the human being is the expression of a microcosmic image of the macrocosm, so between death and a new birth he is macrocosmic; he is poured out into the macrocosm. He is a macrocosmic being, and he must draw forth from the macrocosm the forces he needs for his next incarnation.

During the first period after death man still bears the shells of earthly life around him. He is connected with what earthly life gave him and was able to make of him. This period is especially close to the needs and the interests of the heart. Occult vision observes someone who has left the physical plane a comparatively short time ago in the sphere of kamaloca, which extends in the macrocosmic sense to the orbit of the Moon. Man's soul and spirit expand in such a way that he dwells in the whole Moon sphere. During this period he is still entirely bound up with the earthly world. The wishes, desires, interests, sympathies, antipathies he has developed formerly draw him back to the earthly world. During the kamaloca period he is enclosed within the atmosphere of his own astral nature acquired on the earth. He still wishes to have what he wished to have on earth. He is interested in the things that interested him on earth. The reason for this kamaloca period is that he may put away these interests, and inasmuch as they are dependent on physical organs, and this is true of all sense enjoyment, they cannot be satisfied. Gradually he is weaned from them precisely because they cannot be satisfied. It will be understood that this refers to the individuality of man in the narrowest sense, to that part of the astrality of a human being that has to be extirpated, removed.

In yet another respect man bears his earthly connections with him into kamaloca, for the beings or events that he will encounter there are dependent upon the nature of his inner life, the disposition of his soul. For instance, let us consider a man who goes through the gate of death and another to whom he had a close relationship who passed somewhat earlier through the gate of death. Both are in kamaloca and they may find one another. Occult investigation shows that man is not only concerned with his own development—the process of getting rid of his desires and interests, for instance—but soon after death, following a brief embryonic period of sleep, he is reunited with those individuals to whom he was closely connected on earth. Yet, generally speaking, there is little prospect that a man finds all those who are with him in kamaloca. Space and time relationships, and especially those of space, are quite different there. It is not that one does not approach such beings. A man may come close to them but may not notice them because perception there is born out of the closeness of a connection in life. So, shortly after death in the kamaloca period, a man finds himself in the environment of those with whom he was closely related in life, and thus in the beginning hardly any other beings come into consideration. The relationships after death are still in accordance with what we formerly have developed. In kamaloca we are related to others in exactly the same way as we were on earth except that we cannot do what is still possible here, that is, change the relationship. It remains as it was on the earth. Here we can develop hatred for someone we once loved, or love for one whom we once hated. We can endeavor to transform our relationship. This is not possible in kamaloca.

Suppose we come across a person who died before us. At first we feel related to him in a way that corresponds to the last relationship we had with him on earth. Then, as you know, we live backwards in time. If formerly we had a different relationship, this cannot be produced artificially. We must live backwards quietly and reach the corresponding period of time when we can again experience the relationship we formerly had with him. This again cannot be changed. It expresses itself as it did on earth. One can readily imagine that this is an exceedingly painful experience, and this is true in a certain sense. It is just as if one wished to move, but were chained to the ground. One feels spiritually bound to a relationship that was established on earth. One literally feels in a state of coercion. Naturally, if this condition of coercion is sufficiently intense, the relationship will be painful. Now in order to understand this condition rightly and sense it from the heart, we should not merely imagine it to be painful. In many respects it is so but the dead one is not conscious only of the painful aspect. He is definitely aware that this condition is necessary, and that to avoid such pain would merely mean to create future obstacles in one's path.

What happens as a result of this process? Imagine that after death we are experiencing the relationship we had formed with another person in life. Through the fixed gaze of our perception, through the experience of the relation, forces are formed in our soul, at first in their spiritual prototypes. These are needed so that our karma might lead us rightly into the future, so that we may find ourselves together with the other person in a next incarnation in such a way that the karmic adjustment may come about. The forces necessary for this karmic adjustment are welded together technically, as it were.

To begin with, the dead one can hardly bring about any change in his environment, and yet the instinctive longing to do so does arise at times. Unfulfilled wishes acquire great significance for him but mostly those that do not always come to the surface of consciousness in life. In this connection it is exceedingly important to pay attention to the following. In our everyday life on the physical plane we are conscious of our sympathies and make mental representations of them, too, but below this lies the subconsciousness. This does not rise powerfully into our upper consciousness, into the true ego-consciousness. As a result, something incomplete rises into the consciousness of the human being. Indeed, he hardly ever lives himself out fully as a conscious being in life. Our soul life is exceedingly complex. Man is seldom truly himself. It may happen that out of prejudice, indolence or for some other reason, a man in his ordinary consciousness strongly dislikes or even hates something, while in his subconsciousness there is a powerful longing for the very thing he hates in his upper consciousness. Moreover, the soul frequently tries to delude itself about such matters.

Let us take an example. Two people are living together. One of them comes to anthroposophy and is enthusiastic about it, the other does not share this enthusiasm. In fact, the more the former becomes interested in anthroposophy, the more the latter rages against spiritual science and slanders it. Now the following is possible, for human soul life is complicated. The one who slandered anthroposophy would have become an anthroposophist himself at some time if his friend or the person related to him had not become an anthroposophist. The one who is living with him is the hindrance to his becoming an anthroposophist. This certainly can happen. The one who slanders anthroposophy, bringing forward all manner of things against it in his ego-consciousness, may have the most intense longing for it in his subconsciousness or astral consciousness. Indeed, the more he slanders spiritual science the stronger is his wish for it. It may well occur that a man slanders those things in his upper consciousness that appear all the more strongly in his subconsciousness.

Death, however, transforms untruths into truths. Thus one can observe that human beings passing through the gate of death who out of indolence or for similar reasons have slandered spiritual science, and this is applicable to many other things, experience after death a profound longing of which they were unaware during life. So it can be observed that human beings pass through the gate of death who apparently showed no wish for some particular thing, and in whom, nevertheless, after death a most intense desire for it arises. During our trials in the kamaloca period it is therefore immaterial whether our wishes, desires and passions are present in our upper ego-consciousness or whether they dwell in our astral subconsciousness. Both work as burning factors after death, but those wishes and desires we have concealed during life are even more active after death.

It should be borne in mind that by the very nature of the soul everything connected with it will, under all circumstances, make an impression on it. The following has been carefully investigated and it is good if we take an example in connection with anthroposophy. Suppose two people are living together on earth. One of them is a zealous anthroposophist, the other does not wish to hear anything about spiritual science. Now because spiritual science is in his environment, the latter does not remain uninfluenced by it in his astral body. Things of considerable significance and of which we are not aware are constantly happening to our souls. They work in a spiritual way and there are influences that transform our soul life.

So we find hardly anyone who has lived in the environment of an anthroposophist, however obstinate his opposition, who in his subconscious does not show a leaning towards spiritual science. It is precisely among the opponents of anthroposophy that one finds after death a sphere of wishes in which a passionate longing for spiritual science is manifest. This is why a practice that has become customary among us has proved to be so beneficial for the dead, that is, to read to those who during their lives were unwilling to receive much anthroposophy. This proves to be extraordinarily beneficial for the souls concerned. This should be done by vividly picturing the face of the person who has died as he was during the last period of his life on earth. Then one takes a book and quietly goes through it sentence by sentence with one's thoughts directed towards the dead person as if he were sitting in front of one. He will receive this eagerly and gain much from it.

Here we reach a point where anthroposophy enters into life in a practical way. Here materialism and spirituality do not merely confront one another as theories but as actual forces. In fact, by means of spirituality bridges of communication are created between people irrespective of whether they are living or dead. Out of an active spiritual life we can help the dead in this and many other ways of which we shall speak when the opportunity arises.

If we do not stand within the spiritual life, however, the result is not only a lack of knowledge. It also means that we dwell within a limited space of existence encompassed only by the physical world. A materialistically minded person at once loses the connection with one who has passed through the gate of death. This shows how very important it is for the one world to work into the other. If, for instance, the dead person, who has an intense longing to learn something of spiritual wisdom, must forego this wish, it will remain a burden to him. At most, it might be possible, although even in kamaloca this is hardly likely, that he would encounter another soul who has died and with whom he has had such a connection on earth that by the mere nature of the relationship he would find some limited satisfaction. In fact it hardly comes into the picture as compared with the considerable service and the acts of charity that the living can perform for the dead.

Consider the situation of the dead one. He has some intense wish. In the period after death this wish cannot be satisfied because what we bear in our soul is unchangeably rigidified, but from the earth a stream can flow into this otherwise fixed longing. That is actually the only way in which the things that play into our soul can be altered. Therefore, during the first period after death, for the experience of the dead person much depends on the kind of spiritual understanding that is unfolding by the living who were closely related to him.

By acting in accordance with what may be learned through spiritual science, relationships of quite a different kind can be formed in life, relationships that work over from the one world into the other. In this connection there has not yet been much progress, particularly in making anthroposophy into a life force. So much has to be done still in developing anthroposophy so that real powers arise. It is therefore good to make oneself familiar with the truths of spiritual science and then to direct one's whole way of life in accordance with them. If anthroposophy were understood in this deeper sense, it would pulsate like life blood and there would be less discussion and strife in the world about spiritual theories. We should remember that not only our existence on earth but the whole life of mankind is transformed through spiritual science. Once anthroposophy becomes, by way of an understanding of the ideas, more a matter of the heart, men will act and behave in the anthroposophical spirit, to use trivial words. Then such interrelationships will arise more and more often.

We must now broach a matter that is not so easily acceptable, although it can be grasped if one gives thought to it. Man's knowledge on the physical plane is extraordinarily misleading. It is really most deceptive because on the physical plane he knows no more than the facts and connections that he observes. Whereas for the ordinary scientists of the materialistically minded this is the be-all and end-all of what he terms reality, it constitutes the merest trifle of soul life.

Let me give you an apparently paradoxical example. No doubt we remember Schopenhauer's words that truth must blush because it is paradoxical. Man is aware of facts and combines them intellectually. He knows, for example that it is half past seven. He goes out of his house and crosses the street. At eight o'clock he has arrived somewhere. He knows this by means of sense perception, through intellectual combination, but in most cases he does not realize why he did not leave his house two or three minutes later than intended. Few people will bother to consider such a fact as leaving a few minutes earlier or later. Nevertheless, this may be of significance.

I will take the grotesque example, but examples of this kind in miniature are constantly happening in life, of a man being three minutes late. Had he left his house punctually he would have been run over and killed, and he was not killed because he was three minutes late. It is unlikely that events will happen in this grotesque manner, and yet they are occurring all the time in such a way more or less, but people are not aware of them. The man started out three minutes late, and just as it is true that he would be dead had he left his house punctually at eight o'clock, it is true that he is now alive. His karma saved him from death because he started three minutes late. Now this may appear unimportant, but it is not so. In fact, a person is only indifferent to such an event to the extent that he is unaware of the true reality. If he knew, he would no longer be indifferent.

If you were aware of the fact that had you left punctually you would be dead then it would not be a matter of indifference to you. It would actually make a deep impression on you and a profound influence would radiate into your soul as a result of this awareness. You need only recall the significance of such an event for our soul life when such an event actually happens. But is this not tantamount to saying we are constantly going through life with firmly closed eyes? This is in fact true.

A man knows what is occurring externally but he is not aware of what would have happened to him had things gone just a little differently. That means that knowledge of the different possibilities is withheld from his soul. The soul lives indifferently, whereas the knowledge of the various possibilities would shatter or uplift our inner consciousness. Man knows the merest trifle about existing connections. He only knows what emerges from the circumstances. As a result, the life of soul is poor, and what would otherwise be expressed fails to be so. One perhaps would not make such a seemingly paradoxical statement if it were not for the fact that one runs one's head up against it in investigating life after death. Among the many things that arise in the soul we must include what has just been described. After death many things appear vividly before the soul of which it had no inkling that at such a moment you were in danger of your life ... at such and such a time you threw away your happiness ... here you were lazy, and had you not been so easy-going you might have been able to do some good. A host of things that one has not experienced confronts one after death. What appears ludicrous actually becomes reality after death. A whole world of which one is not aware in life then comes to expression.

Are not the things of which we have been speaking really there? Let us again take the example in which we started out three minutes later than intended, and that we thereby have avoided death. We are unaware of this. To the materialist the fact of not knowing something is regarded as unimportant. An intelligent person does not attach undue importance to the fact that he knows or does not know something because he realizes that things are simply there whether he be aware of them or not. The play and opposition of forces was there and so were we. All the preparatory conditions for our death were present. Forces were working towards one another. They passed on another by, and yet they approached one another. There are many such cases in life. Something is actually there. We do not perceive it, but it is around us nevertheless.

If in our present cycle of evolution people continually acquire an understanding for the spiritual world, things that cannot exist for sense perception but are nevertheless in our environment will work upon us in a definite way. This leads us to an extraordinarily interesting fact. Suppose that events happen as they have been described, and that we avoid death because we left three minutes late. This will make no impression whatsoever on the materialist. But in the man who gradually unfolds an understanding in his heart for such connections there will be a change. Remember that the development of anthroposophy is only just beginning. If he has understood and lived in anthroposophy, not merely acquired an external understanding of it but really lived in it with his heart and mind, then his experience will be different. He may start three minutes late, thereby avoiding death, but at the moment when death would have struck had the circumstances been different, he will sense something within him that will manifest as a feeling for the various possibilities. This will be the result as anthroposophy becomes the life blood of the soul.

What will happen when we gradually unfold such feelings, when human nature directs itself according to spiritual-scientific understanding? Moments in which something might have happened to us lift us for a short time into a kind of temporary mediumistic condition during which we are able to let the spiritual world shine into our consciousness. Such moments may be exceedingly fruitful when a person is to know consciously something of the working of the dead on him. Moments when events that have not happened are experienced in the way described awaken impressions out of the spiritual world. The whole strange realm of a world of subtle sensing will unfold in those who draw near to anthroposophy.

Humanity is evolving, and only an obtuse person would maintain that the human race has always been endowed with the same soul forces.

Soul powers change, and although it is true to say that today man is primarily equipped for external perception upon which he works with his thinking, it is equally true that through experiences of the kind that have been described he will evolve into a period when soul-spiritual forces will develop. In this respect, too, we have the prospect of spiritual science becoming a real force intervening creatively in life. Earlier we considered how influences from the physical plane can be exerted on the life after death, and now we have seen where doors or windows can be created so that the experiences of the dead can be perceived here in earthly life. I also wanted to give you an idea of how opportunities arise to establish communication between the two worlds.

Among the many things that can be said about the life between death and rebirth, and we shall get to know them as time goes on, let me just mention this one today. During the life between death and a new birth we find that essentially three forces—of thinking, of feeling and of will or wish—come to expression in the soul. The forces of thinking or of the intellect express themselves in such a way that our consciousness is either clear or vague; for forces of feeling in that we are more or less compassionate or hardhearted, more or less religious or irreligious in our attitude; the forces of volition and wish in that our deeds are more or less egotistical. Thus these three kinds of forces assert themselves. These soul forces each have a different significance for the life after death.

Let us first consider the intellectual forces. How do they assist us after death? They help to render our conscious experience of the period between death and a new birth particularly clear. In fact, the more we endeavor to think clearly and truly during our physical existence, the greater our efforts to acquire a true knowledge of spiritual realities, the brighter and clearer will be our consciousness between death and a new birth. I will speak quite concretely here. A man, for example, who is untrue in his intellectual qualities, who lacks interest in acquiring real knowledge of the conditions obtaining in the spiritual world, will find that, although a consciousness develops, slowly it will become dim. Strange as it may seem, this dimming of consciousness after death causes us to pass through a certain period more rapidly. We pass the more quickly through the spiritual world the more asleep we are. If, therefore, a man is obtuse in his intellect, although he will retain his consciousness for a time, he will not be able to maintain it beyond a certain point. His obtuseness will bring about a twilight condition, and from then onward his life in the spiritual world will pass rapidly and he will return comparatively soon to a physical body.

It is different with the forces of will and wish. They help us to draw forth from the macrocosmic environment between death and rebirth strong or weak forces that are needed for building up our next earthly existence. A man who enters into these macrocosmic conditions with an immoral attitude of soul will not be able to attract the forces essential to a proper building up of the astral and etheric bodies, which will then be stultified. This produces weaklings or the like. Thus it is morality that makes us capable of drawing the forces from the higher worlds that we need for the following incarnation. Intellectuality and morality are closely connected with what the human becomes as a result of his sojourn in the super-sensible world between death and rebirth.

The forces of the heart and of feeling, the innermost forces in the human soul, come before us objectively in the corresponding period between death and a new birth. They are outside us. This is significant. One who is capable of love and compassion lives through his life between death and a new birth surrounded by pictures that promote life and happiness corresponding to the measure of his compassion. These come before the soul as his environment. Pictures of hatred appear to the one who has hated.

At a certain stage of the period between death and a new birth we behold as an outer cosmic painting what we are in our innermost being. There is no better painter than these forces, and the firmament after death is filled with what we truly are in heart and mind. We behold this innermost tableau just as here on earth we behold the firmament of the heavens. Thus we have a firmament between death and a new birth, and it remains with us. It is conditioned by whether we have received the Mystery of Golgotha into the innermost depths of our soul in the sense referred to previously as expressed in the words of St. Paul, “Not I but the Christ in me.” If we experience the Christ within us, then we have the possibility during our Sun existence to experience in the surrounding Akasha picture-world the Christ in His most wondrous form, in His manifested glory, as the element in which we live and dwell. This thought need not merely have an egotistical significance. It may also be of objective significance because in our further existence this outspread picture is again taken into the soul and is brought down into our next incarnation. As a result, we do not only make ourselves into better human beings, but also into a better force in the evolution of the earth.

So the efforts we make to transform our heart forces are intimately connected with our faculties in the next life, and we see the technique that is at work in transforming our heart forces into a great cosmic panorama, a cosmic firmament between death and a new birth that is then again incorporated into our being, giving us stronger forces than previously. Thus an all-around strengthening process is the result of the fact that we behold in the period between death and a new birth what has been experienced inwardly in life.

We have once again considered matters of considerable importance in relating to the conditions of existence between death and a new birth. They are significant because on earth we are in fact nothing else than what life between death and a new birth has made of us. Furthermore, if we ignore them, we shall be less and less able to gain a true knowledge of our own being. If we ignore the conditions of existence between death and a new birth, we shall be incapable of true action and thinking in times to come. These studies are part of wider matters that can be mentioned in relation to the life between death and a new birth. I wished to make a beginning with a content that is to become more and more the substance of spiritual science.

My dear friends!

We are gathered together for the last time in this Conference from which much that is strong and important is to go forth for the Anthroposophical Movement. So now let me shape this final lecture in a way that connects it inwardly, in its impulse, with the various prospects thrown open to us by this series of lectures as a whole,⁷⁹ but also in a way that will allow us to gain a sense for the future, especially the future of anthroposophical endeavour.

When we look out into the world today we see something that has already been there for many years: a tremendous amount of destructiveness. There are forces at work that give us an inkling of the abysses into which western civilization is still to plunge. Looking at those individuals who externally are the cultural leaders in the various fields of life, we notice how they are enmeshed in a terrible cosmic sleep. They think, and until recently most people thought, that until the nineteenth century mankind was childlike and primitive in its insights and views, and that now that modern science has entered into all the various fields truth has at last arrived, truth that must be upheld forever.

People who think like this are, without knowing it, living in a state of tremendous arrogance. On the other hand, here and there amongst mankind today there are some inklings that things are perhaps not as the majority would like to imagine.

Some time ago I was able to give a number of lectures in Germany organized by the Wolff agency.⁸⁰ The audiences were exceptionally large, so that people here and there began to notice that Anthroposophy was something for which people were looking. All kinds of foolish voices were raised in antagonism, among them one which was not much more intelligent than any of the others but which nevertheless expressed a kind of presentiment. It consisted of a note in a newspaper referring to one of the lectures in Berlin. This notice in the newspaper said: Listening to stuff like this you get the impression—I am quoting the article approximately—that something is happening not only on the earth but also in the whole of the cosmos that is calling mankind to a form of spirituality that is different from what has existed so far; even the forces of the cosmos, not merely earthly impulses, are demanding something of mankind; a kind of revolution in the cosmos which must lead man to strive for a new spirituality.

So there was this voice, which was in its way quite remarkable. For it is true: The proper impulse for what must now go forth from Dornach must, as I have emphasized from various angles over the last few days, be an impulse arising not on the earth but in the spiritual world. Here we want to develop the strength to follow the impulses coming from the spiritual world. In the evening lectures during this Christmas Conference I have spoken about manifold impulses present in historical development so that your hearts might be opened to take in spiritual impulses which still have to stream into the earthly world and are not taken from the earthly world itself. Everything that has hitherto borne the earthly world in the right way has had its source in the spiritual world. And if we are to achieve something fruitful for the earthly world, we must turn to the spiritual world for the appropriate impulses.

My dear friends, this encourages me to point out that the impulses we are to bear away with us from this Conference must be linked to a great sense of responsibility.

Let us spend a few minutes on the great responsibility that is now incumbent on us as a result of this Conference. In recent decades it has been possible for someone with a sense for the spiritual world to wander, in spiritual observation, past many personalities, gaining bitter sensations with regard to the future destiny of mankind on earth. It has been possible to wander past one's fellow human beings in the manner available to spiritual insight, observing how they lay aside their physical and etheric bodies in sleep and live in the spiritual world with their ego and astral body. Wandering among the destinies of those egos and astral bodies while human beings slept has, in recent decades, given rise to experiences which can point to a heavy responsibility incumbent on the one who can know such things. These souls, having left behind their physical and etheric bodies between going to sleep and waking up, were often to be seen approaching the Guardian of the Threshold.

The Guardian of the Threshold has entered the awareness of human beings in many and various ways during the course of human evolution. Many a legend and many a saga—for this is the form in which the most important things are preserved, rather than that of historical records—many a legend and many a saga tells of the approach by one personality or another to the Guardian of the Threshold in order to receive instruction on how to enter the spiritual world and then return once more to the physical world. Entering rightly into the spiritual world must bring with it the possibility of returning to the physical world at any moment with the full ability to stand on both feet as a practical and thoughtful human being, not as a dreamer, not as a dreamy mystic.

Throughout all the thousands of years during which human beings have striven to enter the spiritual world, this has been the fundamental stipulation of the Guardian of the Threshold. But especially in the final third of the nineteenth century hardly any human beings were to be seen approaching the Guardian of the Threshold in a state of wakefulness. And even more so in our own time, when mankind as a whole has the historical task of passing by the Guardian of the Threshold in one way or another, do you find, when wandering in the spiritual world, that souls are asleep when they approach the Guardian of the Threshold as egos and astral bodies. This most significant picture meets us today: There stands the Guardian of the Threshold surrounded by groups of sleeping human souls who do not have the strength to approach him in a waking state but who approach him instead while they are asleep.

Witnessing this scene, you become aware of a thought which is bound up particularly with what I would like to call the germination of a necessary great responsibility. The souls who thus approach the Guardian of the Threshold in a state of sleep demand entry into the spiritual world. They demand to be allowed to wander across the threshold in a state of sleep; their consciousness is that of a sleeping human being—which so far as the waking state is concerned remains unconscious or subconscious. And countless times the voice of the grave Guardian of the Threshold is heard: For your own good, you may not cross the threshold; you may not gain entrance to the spiritual world. Go back! For if the Guardian of the Threshold were to allow them to enter without more ado, they could come over into the spiritual world with all the concepts passed on to them by today's schools, today's education, today's civilization; with all those concepts and ideas with which human beings have to grow up nowadays from their sixth year onwards right, you could say, until the end of their earthly lives.

These concepts and ideas have a particular characteristic: If you enter into the spritual world with them, with the way you have become with them through present-day civilization and schooling, you become paralysed in your soul. And on returning to the physical world you would be void of thoughts and ideas. If the Guardian of the Threshold did not gravely reject these souls, if he were not to reject many, many of today's human souls but were to let them step over into the spiritual world, then, waking up on their return, waking up at the decisive moment on their return, they would have the feeling: I cannot think; my thoughts do not grasp my brain; I have to live in the world without thoughts. For the world of abstract ideas which human beings today attach to everything is such that one can indeed go into the spiritual world with them but one cannot bring them out again. And when you watch this scene, which is experienced today by more souls than you would ordinarily imagine, you say to yourself: If only these souls could be successfully protected from experiencing also in death what they are now experiencing in sleep. For if the inner condition experienced before the Guardian of the Threshold were to endure for a sufficiently long period of time, if human civilization were to remain for a long time under the influence of what can be taken in in schools by way of what is traditionally passed down by civilization, then sleep would become ordinary life. Human souls would pass through the portal of death into the spiritual world and then be incapable of bringing any strength of ideas with them into their new life on earth. For though you can enter the spiritual world with today's thoughts, you then cannot leave it with them. You can only leave it in a state of soul paralysis.

You see, present-day civilization can be founded on the kind of cultural life that has been nurtured for so long. But life cannot be founded on it. It would be possible for this civilization to endure for a while. During their waking hours, the souls would have no inkling of the Guardian of the Threshold; then while they slept they would be turned away by him so that they should not become paralysed; and the final consequence would be that a human race would be born in the future without any understanding, without any possibility of applying ideas to life when they were born in this future time, so that the faculty of thinking and living in ideas would have disappeared from the earth. A sick human race, living only in instincts, would have to populate the earth. Terrible feelings and emotions alone, without orientation through the force of ideas, would come to dominate human evolution.

Indeed, the soul failing to gain entry into the spiritual world, and being turned away by the Guardian of the Threshold in the way I have just described, is not the only sad sight to meet the one who has spiritual vision. If such a one were to take with him a human being from eastern civilization on his journeyings to where the sleeping souls can be observed approaching the Guardian of the Threshold, then such an eastern human being would be heard to utter spirit words of terrible reproach towards the whole of western civilization: See, if this goes on, then the earth will have fallen into barbarism by the time those living today return for a new incarnation; people will live by instincts alone, without ideas; this is what you have brought about by falling away from the ancient spirituality of the orient.

Thus a glimpse like this into the spiritual world bears witness to a strong sense of responsibility for the task of man. And here in Dornach there must be a place where it is possible to speak, to those who wish to listen, about every important direct experience of the spiritual world. Here there must be a place where the strength is found to point to those little traces of the spirit not only in the cleverly put together dialectical and empirical scientific manner of the present time. If Dornach is to fulfil its task, then it must be a place where human beings can hear openly about what is going on historically in the spiritual world and about the spiritual impulses which then enter into the world of nature and govern it. Human beings must be able to hear in Dornach about genuine experiences, genuine forces and genuine beings of the spiritual world. This is where the School of true Spiritual Science must be. And we must henceforth not shy away from the demands of modern scientific thought which causes human beings to approach the earnest Guardian of the Threshold in a state of sleep in the way I have described. In Dornach it must be possible to win the strength, spiritually, to look the spiritual world in the eye, to learn about the spiritual world.

Therefore we shall not let loose a tirade of dialectics on the inadequacy of present-day scientific theory. Instead I had to draw your attention to the position in which this scientific theory, and its consequences in ordinary schools, places the human being with regard to the Guardian of the Threshold. If we can face up to this in our soul in all earnestness during this Conference, then this Christmas Conference will send a strong impulse into our souls which can carry them away to do strong work of the kind needed by mankind today, so that in their next incarnation human beings will be able to encounter the Guardian of the Threshold properly, or rather so that civilization as a whole will measure up to the Guardian of the Threshold.

Compare today's civilization with that of former times. In all former civilizations there were ideas, concepts, which were turned first of all towards the super-sensible world, towards the gods, towards the world which engendered, which created, which brought forth. Then with those concepts, which belonged above all to the gods, it was possible to look down onto the earthly world in order to understand it with concepts and ideas which were worthy of the gods. And if souls then approached the Guardian of the Threshold with these ideas which had been formed in a manner that was worthy of the gods and that had a value for the gods, then the Guardian said: You may pass, for you are bringing with you into the super-sensible world something that is directed towards this super-sensible world even during the time of your life on earth in a physical body; therefore when you return to the physical, sense-perceptible world sufficient strength will remain to prevent you from becoming paralysed through having seen the super-sensible world. Nowadays human beings elaborate concepts and ideas which, in accordance with the genius of the times, they want to apply solely to the physical, sense-perceptible world. These concepts and ideas deal above all with anything that can be weighed and measured, but they are not at all concerned with the gods. They are not worthy of the gods and they are of no value to the gods. That is why the souls who have fallen entirely under the spell of the materialism of these ideas which are unworthy of the gods and valueless for the gods are met, when they cross the threshold in sleep, by the thundering voice of the Guardian of the Threshold: Do not step across the threshold! You have misused your ideas for the sense-perceptible world; therefore you must remain with them in the sense-perceptible world; if you do not want to become paralysed in your soul, you cannot enter with them into the world of the gods.

Such things have to be said, not because it is necessary to brood upon them but so that heart and mind and soul may become filled to the brim with them. Then we may come into the mood that will be the right mood to bear away from this solemn Christmas Conference of the Anthroposophical Society. The most important thing of all is the mood of soul we bear away with us, a mood of soul for the spiritual world that gives us the certainty: In Dornach a central point for spiritual knowledge will be created.

That is why it was so good to hear Dr Zeylmans speak this morning about a field which is to be cultivated here in Dornach, the field of medicine, and to hear him say that it is no longer possible to build bridges from ordinary science to what is to be founded here in Dornach. If we have the ambition to make what grows in the soil of our own medical research into something that can stand the scrutiny of present-day clinical requirements, then we shall never achieve any definite goal in the things that really make up our task, for then other people will simply say: Well, yes, here is a new method; we too have initiated new methods once in a while.

The important thing is that a branch of practical life, such as medicine, should be taken up into anthroposophical life. I think I understood rightly this morning that this is what Dr Zeylmans longs for. Did he not say in connection with this goal that someone who today becomes a doctor longs for impulses from a new corner of the universe. Let me tell you that in the field of medicine the work here in Dornach is to be carried on just as has that in a number of other fields of anthroposophical work which have remained within the bosom of Anthroposophy. With Dr Wegman as my helper, work is already in train on a system of medicine based entirely on Anthroposophy, a system which is needed by mankind and which will be presented to mankind quite soon. Equally it is my purpose to bring about the closest ties between the Goetheanum and the Clinic in Arlesheim which is working so beneficially. In the very near future such ties are to be brought about so that all that is flourishing there may be truly oriented towards Anthroposophy, which is indeed the intention of Dr Wegman.

In what he said, Dr Zeylmans was indicating with reference to one particular field what the Vorstand in Dornach will make its task in all the fields of anthroposophical work. Thus in future the situation will be clear. No one will say: Let us first show people eurythmy; if they hear nothing about Anthroposophy, then they will like eurythmy; and then, having taken a liking to eurythmy, if they hear that Anthroposophy stands as the foundation for eurythmy, they will take a liking to Anthroposophy as well. No one will say: First we must show people how the medicines work in practice so that they see that they are proper medicines, and will buy them; then, if they later hear that Anthroposophy is behind the medicines, they will also approach Anthroposophy.

We must have the courage to regard such a method as dishonest. Not until we have the courage to regard such a method as dishonest, not until we inwardly detest such a method will Anthroposophy find its way through the world. So in future here in Dornach we shall fight for the truth, not fanatically but simply in an honest, straightforward love of the truth. Perhaps this will enable us to make good some of what has so sinfully been made bad in recent years.

With thoughts which are not easy but which are grave we must depart from this Conference that has led to the founding of the General Anthroposophical Society. But I do not think that it will be necessary for anybody to go away with pessimism from what has taken place here this Christmas. Every day we have had to walk past the sad ruins of the Goetheanum. But as we have walked up this hill, past these ruins, I think that in every soul there has also been the content of what has been discussed here and what has quite evidently been understood by our friends in their hearts. From all this the thought has emerged: It will be possible for spiritual flames of fire to arise, as a true spiritual life for the blessing of mankind in the future, from the Goetheanum which is being built anew. They shall arise out of our hard work and out of our devotion. The more we go from here with the courage to carry on the affairs of Anthroposophy, the better have we heard the breath of the spirit wafting filled with hope through our gathering. For the scene which I have described to you and which can be seen so frequently, that scene of present-day human beings, the products of a decadent civilization and education, approaching the Guardian of the Threshold in a state of sleep, is actually not one which is found amongst the circle of sensitive anthroposophists. Here on the whole the circumstance is such that only a warning, one particular exhortation, resounds: In hearing the voice from the land of the spirit you must develop the strong courage to bear witness to this voice, for you have begun to awaken; courage will keep you awake; lack of courage alone could lead you to fall asleep.

The exhortation to be awake through courage is the other variation, the variation for anthroposophists in the life of present-day civilization. Those who are not anthroposophists hear: You must remain outside the land of the spirit, you have misused ideas for merely earthly objects, you have not gathered ideas which have value for the gods and which are worthy of the gods; you would be paralysed on your return to the physical, sense-perceptible world. But those souls who are the souls of anthroposophists hear: Your remaining test is to be that of your courage to bear witness to that voice which you are capable of hearing because of the inclination of your soul, because of the inclination of your heart.

My dear friends, yesterday was the anniversary of the day on which we saw the tongues of flame devouring our old Goetheanum. Today we may hope—since a year ago we did not allow even the flames to distract us from continuing with our work—today we may hope that when the physical Goetheanum stands here once more we shall have worked in such a way that the physical Goetheanum is only the external symbol for our spiritual Goetheanum which we want to take with us as an idea as we now go out into the world.

We have here laid the Foundation Stone. On this Foundation Stone shall be erected the building whose individual stones will be the work achieved in all our groups by the individuals outside in the wide world. Let us now look in spirit at this work and become conscious of the responsibility about which I have spoken today, of our responsibility towards the human being who stands before the Guardian of the Threshold and has to be refused entry into the spiritual world.

Certainly it should never occur to us to feel anything but the deepest pain and the deepest sorrow about what happened to us a year ago. But let us not forget that everything in the world that has any stature has been born out of pain. So let us transform our pain so that out of it may arise a strong and shining Anthroposophical Society by dint, my dear friends, of your work.

For this purpose we have immersed ourselves in those words with which I began, in those words with which I wish to close this Christmas Conference, this Christmas Conference which is to be for us a festival of consecration not merely for the beginning of a new year but for the beginning of a new turning point of time to which we want to devote ourselves in enthusiastic cultivation of the life of spirit:

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the limbs
Which bear thee through the world of space
In the spirit's ocean-being.
Practise spirit-recalling
In depths of soul,
Where in the wielding will
Of world-creating
Thine own I
Comes to being
Within God's I.
And thou wilt truly live
In the World-Being of Man.

For the Father-Spirit of the heights holds sway
In depths of worlds begetting being.
Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones!
Let there ring out from the heights
What in the depths is echoed
Speaking:
Ex Deo nascimur.
The spirits of the elements hear it
In East, West, North, South,
May human beings hear it.

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the beat of heart and lung
Which leads thee through the rhythm of time
Into the realm of thine own soul's feeling.
Practise spirit-awareness
In balance of the soul,
Where the surging deeds
Of the world's becoming
Thine own I
Unite
With the World-I.
And thou wilt truly feel
In the Soul-Weaving of Man.

For the Christ-Will in the encircling round holds sway
In the rhythms of the worlds, bestowing grace on the soul.
Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai!
Let there be fired from the East
What through the West is formed
Speaking:
In Christo morimur.
The spirits of the elements hear it
In East, West, North, South,
May human beings hear it.

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the resting head
Which from the grounds of eternity
Opens to thee the world-thoughts.
Practise spirit-beholding
In stillness of thought,
Where the eternal aims of Gods
World-Being's Light
On thine own I
Bestow
For thy free willing.
And thou wilt truly think
In the Spirit-Foundations of Man.

For the world-thoughts of the Spirit hold sway
In the being of worlds, craving for light.
Archai, Archangeloi, Angeloi !
Let there be prayed from the depths
What in the heights will be granted
Speaking:
Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus.^A

At the turning of the time
The Spirit-Light of the world
Entered the stream of earthly being.
Darkness of night
Had held its sway,
Day-radiant light
Streamed into souls of men:
Light that gives warmth
To simple shepherds' hearts,
Light that enlightens
The wise heads of kings.

Light Divine
Christ-Sun
Warm thou our hearts,
Enlighten thou our heads,
That good may become
What we from our hearts would found
What we from our heads would direct
In conscious
Willing.

And so, my dear friends,^B bear out with you into the world your warm hearts in whose soil you have laid the Foundation Stone for the Anthroposophical Society, bear out with you your warm hearts in order to do work in the world that is strong in healing. Help will come to you because your heads will be enlightened by what you all now want to be able to direct in conscious willing. Let us today make this resolve with all our strength. And we shall see that if we show ourselves to be worthy, then a good star will shine over that which is willed from here. My dear friends, follow this good star. We shall see whither the gods shall lead us through the light of this star.

Light Divine
Christ-Sun,
Warm thou
Our hearts,
Enlighten thou
Our heads!

• 79. See Rudolf Steiner World History in the Light of Anthroposophy, op. cit.
• 80. See Note 3.
• A. According to the shorthand report, the final words of the verse were not spoken on this occasion.
• B. In the following sentences, as in the gathering on 25 December 1923 at which the Foundation Stone was laid in members' hearts, Rudolf Steiner once again changed from the formal mode of address to the more intimate ‘Du’. (Tr.)

Recently¹ it has repeatedly been my task to point out that it would be just as possible to write a person's biography for the time spent between going to sleep and awakening as it is for the time spent between awakening and going to sleep. Whatever man goes through between awakening and going to sleep is experienced through his physical and etheric bodies. Because in his physical and etheric bodies he has suitably developed sense organs, he is conscious of the world around him, for it is linked with his physical and etheric bodies so that it forms, as it were, a unity with him. But because at his present stage of evolution he does not possess similar organs of soul and spirit in his ego and astral body—organs which, if I may be permitted this paradoxical expression, would be super-sensible sense-organs—he is unable to be conscious of his experiences between going to sleep and awakening. Accordingly, only with spiritual sight would one be able to perceive what is contained in the biography of the ego and astral body, which runs parallel with the biography lived through with the help of the physical and etheric bodies.

In speaking about man's experiences between awakening and going to sleep we naturally include the events which take place in his physical and etheric environment, things which happen in connection with him, things he experiences and things which are caused by him. Thus we must speak of a physical and etheric environment, a physical and etheric world inhabited by man in the period between awakening and going to sleep. Similarly he inhabits another world between going to sleep and awakening, only the nature of this world is quite different from that of the physical and etheric world. Through spiritual vision it is possible to speak about this world which is just as much our environment when we sleep as the physical world is our environment when we are awake. You will find the elementary facts in the descriptions given, for instance, in my book Occult Science: an Outline. There you will find, albeit only in brief, a description of how the realms of the physical and etheric world, the mineral, plant, animal and human kingdoms, extend on into the realms of the higher Hierarchies. Let us give this some consideration today.

If, while awake, we direct our eyes or other sense-organs outwards towards our physical and etheric environment, we perceive the four kingdoms of mineral, plant, animal and man. If we then ascend further into those regions which can only be perceived supersensibly, we find that which may be called the continuation of these kingdoms: the kingdom of the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai, the kingdom of the Exousiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes, and the kingdom of the Thrones, Cherubim, and Seraphim.

Thus we have two worlds which permeate one another: the physical and etheric world and the super-sensible world. And we already know that we live in this super-sensible world between going to sleep and awakening; we know that we have experiences there, although these experiences cannot make their way into our ordinary consciousness because we have no organs of soul and spirit.

As a matter of fact a more exact understanding can be reached of what man experiences in this super-sensible world, if the same sort of description of this world is given as is given of the physical and etheric world with the help of science and history. In order to set forth what we may call a super-sensible science of the actual course of the world we inhabit in sleep, we must begin by pointing out certain details. Today we shall first turn our attention to an event of deep signfiicance for the whole of human evolution during the last few thousand years.

We have already discussed this event frequently from the point of view of the physical and etheric world and its history. Now we shall look at it from the other side, as it were, taking our viewpoint not in the physical and etheric world but in the super-sensible world. The event I am referring to and which I have often portrayed from the one point of view took place in the 4th century A.D.

I have described how the whole disposition of man's soul in the Western world changed during this 4th century A.D.; how in fact without spiritual-scientific insight into the matter we today no longer have the slightest understanding of human feelings and sentiments as they were before the 4th century A.D. But we have often portrayed these feelings and this disposition of soul, describing what human beings experienced round about that century. Today we shall turn our attention for a moment to the experiences undergone by the Beings of the super-sensible realm during this time. So we shall be concerned, so to say, with the other side of life and speak from the viewpoint of the super-sensible realm.

That thoughts are confined to the head is a preconceived notion of man's so-called enlightenment. We should learn nothing about things through thoughts if these thoughts were confined to the heads of men. Anyone who believes that thoughts are to be found only in men's heads is a victim of the same prejudice, paradoxical though it may sound, as a person who believes that the sip of water which quenches his thirst arose on his tongue instead of flowing into his mouth from his glass. Really it is just as absurd to say that thoughts arise in men's heads as it is to say: If I quench my thirst with water from my glass, this water has come into being in my mouth. For thoughts are quite definitely spread throughout the world. Thoughts are the forces at work in things. And the organ of our thinking merely taps the cosmic reservoir of thought forces, taking the thoughts into itself. Accordingly we must not speak of thoughts as though they were something belonging to man alone. We must speak of thoughts with an awareness that they are forces which govern the world and are spread throughout the cosmos. But they do not just fly about at random; they are always borne and worked upon by beings of one kind or another. And most important of all: they are not always borne by the same beings.

Turning to the super-sensible world, we find by means of super-sensible investigation that until the fourth century A.D. the thoughts through which human beings make the world comprehensible to themselves were borne, or perhaps one should say, poured forth (earthly expressions are little suited for the description of such lofty events and beings) by the Beings of the Hierarchy called the Exousiai or Beings of Form.

If an ancient Greek wanted to account for the origin of his thoughts through knowledge of the Mysteries, he would have had to say the following: I lift up my spiritual vision to the Beings revealed to me by Mystery knowledge as the Beings of Form, the Forces of Form. They are the bearers of the cosmic intelligence, they are the bearers of the cosmic thoughts. They cause the thoughts to stream through the events of the cosmos, and they bestow these human thoughts upon the soul which becomes aware of them by experiencing them. When someone in the days of ancient Greece adapted himself to the super-sensible world by means of a special initiation, he was able to come to an experience of these Beings of Form; he actually beheld these Beings, and in order to find a true picture or Imagination of them he had to attach to them, in a way as an attribute, the thoughts which flowed shining through the universe. This ancient Greek saw how these Beings of Form as it were sent out shining thought forces from their limbs, forces which entered into the world-processes and there continued to work as world-creative forces of intelligence. He would say perhaps: Throughout the universe, throughout the cosmos, it is the task of the Beings of Form, the Exousiai, to pour thoughts through the universal processes. Therefore just as science based on sense-perception describes the activities of human beings by recording what they do individually or co-operatively, so a science based on super-sensible perception, in examining the activities of the Form Forces during the era under consideration, would have to describe how these super-sensible Beings cause the thought forces to flow from one to the other, how they receive them from each other, and how embedded in this outflowing and receiving lie the universal processes which present themselves to man externally in the shape of natural phenomena.

And then came the 4th century A.D. in the evolution of mankind. For the super-sensible world it brought an event of the utmost importance: the Exousiai, the Forces or Spirits of Form, transferred their thought forces to the Archai, the Primal Forces or Principalities.

At that time the Archai, the Principalities, took over the task previously carried out by the Exousiai. Events of this kind do take place in the super-sensible world. And this was an event of immense cosmic importance. The Exousiai, the Spirits of Form, retained merely the task of controlling external sense-perceptions; with special cosmic forces they rule over everything present in the world of colour, tone and so on. Accordingly, those who have insight into these things must say with reference to the times which follow the 4th century A.D.: the thoughts which rule the world are transferred to the Archai, the Principalities; now, all the manifold forms of the world, the constant metamorphoses seen by eyes and heard by ears constitute a fabric woven by the Exousiai, who formerly gave thoughts to human beings and now give them sense-impressions, while the Archai now give them thoughts.

This reality of the super-sensible world was mirrored here below in the world of the senses by the fact that in ancient times, for instance, the times of the Greeks, thoughts were perceived objectively in things. Just as today we believe we perceive red or blue on things, so a Greek found that a thought was not merely grasped by his head but that it radiated forth from an object in the same way as red or blue radiates forth.

I have described this human side of the matter in my book Riddles of Philosophy. In this book you will find a description of how this important event in the super-sensible world was reflected in the world of the physical senses. Philosophical terms are used there because the language of philosophy is suitable for describing the material world, whereas in discussing the point of view of the super-sensible world one also has to mention the super-sensible fact that the task of the Exousiai has been transferred to the Archai.

The preparation of such things in humanity takes many epochs. And such things are linked with basic transformations of the human soul. When I say that this super-sensible event took place in the 4th century A.D., this is of course only an approximation applying merely to the central period, whereas the whole process took place over many ages. Preparations began in pre-Christian times and the change was not completed until the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries A.D. The 4th century A.D. is only the central period and is alluded to in order to have something definite to point to in the historical development of mankind.

This is also the point in human evolution when men's outlook into the super-sensible world begins to become wholly obscured. The consciousness of the soul loses the capacity of super-sensible vision and perception while the soul devotes itself to the world. You will perhaps understand this more clearly in your souls if light is thrown upon it from another angle.

What is the point I am trying so insistently to make clear? It is that human beings begin to feel increasingly aware of themselves as individuals. When the thought-world passes from the Spirits of Form to the Principalities, from the Exousiai to the Archai, man feels more aware of the thoughts of his own being, because the Archai live one step nearer than the Exousiai to man. Somebody who begins to acquire super-sensible vision will receive the following impression. He will say: Certainly this is the same world which I know as the world of the senses.

Ordinary consciousness knows nothing at all about the conditions under consideration here. But with super-sensible consciousness there is definitely the feeling that Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai are present between man and his sense impressions. The feeling is that they are present here in the sense-world. They are not seen with the ordinary eye but they are actually present between man and the whole fabric of sense impressions. It is the Exousiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes who are beyond this world; they are concealed by the fabric of the senses.

Thus an individual possessing super-sensible consciousness feels that thoughts, after they have been handed over to the Archai, come nearer to him. He feels them now to be more in his own world, whereas previously they were behind the colours on things, behind the red or the blue; we might say they approached him through the red or the blue or through a C sharp or a G. He feels that his communication with the thought-world has become freer since the transfer. Of course this also brings about the illusion that man makes the thoughts himself.

It took a long time for man to evolve to the point of being able to take into himself, as it were, what had formerly presented itself to him as the objective external world. This only came about by degrees during the course of human evolution. Looking back a very long way in evolution, right back beyond the Atlantean catastrophe and into the time of ancient Atlantis, I must ask you to imagine man at that time as I have described him in my books Occult Science: an Outline and Cosmic Memory. As you know, human beings at that time were formed quite differently. Their bodily substance was much more delicate than it became later on during the post-Atlantean age. Because of this the soul element was related differently to the world and the Atlanteans experienced the world quite differently. Let me give you just one instance of this particular way of experiencing the world. The Atlanteans could not experience the interval of a third, or even of a fifth. Their musical experience began with the experience of the seventh. They were also aware of greater intervals, but the seventh was the smallest. Thirds and fifths escaped their hearing; no such intervals existed for them.

As a result their experience of tone-structures was quite different; the soul had a quite different relationship with the tone-structures. For if, without the smaller intervals, we were to live only in the music of sevenths, if we were to live as naturally in these sevenths as did the Atlanteans, we would not perceive music as something taking place within us or in connection with us; we would find ourselves outside our bodies the moment musical perception began. We would live outside in the cosmos as was the case with the Atlanteans. For them a musical experience was a direct religious experience. In experiencing sevenths they could not say that they themselves had anything to do with the creation of these intervals; they felt that the Gods, weaving and flowing through the world, revealed themselves in sevenths. To say: ‘I am making music’ was senseless to them. But it meant something when they said: ‘I live in the music made by the Gods.’

In a much weakened form this musical experience was still present in the post-Atlantean age, when mainly the interval of the fifth was experienced. This must not be compared with our present experience of the fifth. Today the fifth gives us the impression of an empty shell. In the best sense of the word we feel the fifth to be empty. It has become empty because the Gods have withdrawn from mankind.

But in post-Atlantean times man felt that the Gods still lived in the fifths. It was not until later, when the third, both major and minor, made its appearance in music, that music as it were submerged itself in man's inner nature, so that in musical experience he was no longer outside himself. In the real age of the fifth man was still definitely outside himself in the experience of music. In the age of the third, which as you know is comparatively recent, man remains within himself when he experiences music. He embraces music with his body. He interweaves musical and bodily nature. That is why the experience of the third is accompanied by the differentiation between major and minor, so that we have the experience of the major mood an the one hand and the experience of the minor mood an the other. With the arrival of the third, with the entry into music of the major and minor moods, musical experience links itself with the elevated and joyful moods and also with the depressed, painful and sad moods experienced by man because he bears a physical and an etheric body. We might say that man removes his experience of the world from the cosmos; instead he unites himself with his experience of the world. In olden times, in the age of the fifth, and even more so in the age of the seventh, if I may be permitted to use these expressions, man's most important experience of the world was such that it took him immediately outside himself. He could thus say: The world of tones draws my ego and my astral body out of my physical and etheric bodies; I interweave my earthly existence with the divine-spiritual world; the tone structures resound as something an whose wings the Gods flow through the world; and I experience this flowing of the Gods by perceiving the tones.

You see therefore in this particular field how cosmic experience in a certain sense makes its way towards the human being, how the cosmos penetrates into the human being. You see how if we look back into ancient times it is in the super-sensible world that we must seek man's most important experiences. And you see how later the time comes when man as an Earth-being endowed with physical senses must be included when the most important world events are being described.

This becomes necessary when the thoughts are given by the Spirits of Form to the Principalities, the Archai. Another expression of this may be found in the transition from the ancient period of the fifth to the period of the third and the experience of major and minor.

Now it is of particular interest, in connection with this experience, to go back into an age even earlier than the Atlantean, an age of human evolution upon Earth which fades away into the dim and far-distant past but which can be recalled with the aid of super-sensible vision. You will find this distant age described in my book Occult Science: an Outline as the Lemurian age. At that time man's perception of music was such that he could not even be conscious of intervals contained within an octave; at that time man could perceive an interval only if it extended beyond an octave, for instance: C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D, where the interval C, D, is experienced only if the D lies in the next octave.

Thus in the Lemurian age there could be no musical experience in listening to intervals smaller than an octave; the interval experienced goes beyond the octave to the first tone of the following octave and then to the next tone of the next octave. Thus man experiences something which is difficult to describe, but you may be able to imagine it if I say the following: man experiences the second in the next higher octave and the third in the next octave after that. He experiences a kind of objective third, indeed the two thirds, both major and minor. But of course it is not a third as we know it today, since for us the third only comes about if we take the tonic and the next note but one within the same octave. Because man in ancient times was able to have a direct experience of intervals which we describe today as the tonic in one octave, the second in the next octave and the third in the third octave, he was able to perceive a sort of objective major and minor; not a major and minor mood experienced within himself but a major and minor expressing a feeling of what the Gods experienced in their souls.

We cannot describe what man in the Lemurian age experienced by any such names as joy and sorrow, exultation and depression; we must say that through this particular musical perception in Lemurian times, when he was quite outside himself in perceiving these intervals, he experienced the cosmic jubilation of the Gods and the cosmic lamentation of the Gods. We are able to look back to a time an Earth really experienced by man when what is experienced today as major and minor was, as it were, projected out into the universe. What man experiences inwardly today was then projected out into the universe. What today flows through his emotion and feeling was then perceived by him outside his physical body as the experience of the Gods in the cosmos. What must be characterized as our present inner experience of the major mood was experienced by him outside his body as the cosmic jubilation, the cosmic music of the Gods rejoicing in their creation of the world. And what we know today as the minor mood was experienced in Lemurian times as the vast lamentation of the Gods over the possibility of what is described in the Bible as the Fall of man, the falling away of mankind from the divine spiritual powers, the powers of good.

This is something which echoes down to us out of that wonderful knowledge of the ancient Mysteries which of itself passes over into the realm of art; we not only perceive in a more abstract way how mankind once upon a time succumbed to Luciferic and Ahrimanic seduction and temptation and experienced this or that, but we also perceive how human beings heard in ancient times the music of the Gods rejoicing in the cosmos about their creation of the world and also the cosmic lamentation of the Gods whose prophetic vision showed them that man would fall away from the divine-spiritual powers.

This artistic understanding of something which later became more abstract in form is given to us out of ancient Mysteries; from it we may win the deep conviction that knowledge, art and religion have flowed from a single source. This must lead us to the conviction that we must seek to return to that state of soul which will appear once again when the soul has knowledge because religion streams and art flows through it, that state of soul which brings a deep and living understanding of what Goethe meant so many years ago when he said: ‘Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws which would have lain concealed forever had beauty not appeared.’

The secret of human evolution within the Earth's existence, within the Earth's evolution, itself reveals to us this inner unity of everything man must experience together with the world knowingly, religiously and artistically in order that he may experience his complete potentiality together with the world.

It is a fact that now the time has come when these things must once again enter human consciousness, for otherwise man's soul-nature would simply begin to decay. Now and in the near future man's soul would shrivel up as a result of increasingly intellectual and one-sided knowledge; his soul would be dulled by the one-sidedness of art and he would lose his soul altogether through the one-sidedness of religion if he could not find the way which leads to the inner harmony and unity of these three, the way which helps him to leave his body in a more conscious manner than of old and once more see and hear the super-sensible world together with the world of the senses.

Through Spiritual Science we can look at the more ancient and profound personalities of the developing Greek culture, personalities whose successors were such people as Aeschylus and Heraclitus. We find that these personalities, in so far as they were initiated into the Mysteries, all had similar feelings as a result of their knowledge and their artistic, creative powers. Like Homer, who said: ‘Sing me, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus,’ they still felt their knowledge and their creative powers not as something working in them personally but as something they carried out in their religious feeling together with the spiritual world. Thus they could say: In most ancient times man experienced himself as man when, in carrying out the most important human activities, he passed out of himself and shared his experiences with the Gods (as I have shown you in connection with music, but it was also true in the forming of thoughts). But man has now lost what he was thus able to experience.

This feeling of having lost an ancient knowledge and an ancient artistic and religious possession of mankind most certainly weighed upon the more profound Greek souls.

Something different must come to mankind today. By developing the proper powers of his soul-experience, man must come to the point where he is able to rediscover what was lost long ago. What I want to say is that man must develop a consciousness—after all, we are living in the age of consciousness—of how what has become inward must find its way outwards again towards the divine-spiritual world. And it will be possible to accomplish this—as I have indicated in answer to a question put to me during a lecture-course at the Goetheanum—in one field for instance, when the inner wealth of feeling experienced in melody is transferred to the single tone, when man discovers the secret of the single tone, in other words when man experiences not only intervals but is also able to experience with inner richness and variety the single tone as if it were a melody. This is something which today can scarcely be imagined.

But you see how things progress: from the seventh to the fifth, from the fifth to the third, from the third to the prime and so down to the single tone and onward still further. So what once represented the loss of the divine world must be transformed in human evolution into the rediscovery of the divine by man on Earth, if humanity is to go on developing on Earth instead of perishing.

We only understand the past aright when we are able to see in contrast the true image of our development in the future, when we feel with an emotion which affects us deeply what was also felt by the more profound human beings in ancient Greece, namely that we have lost the presence of the Gods, and when we can contrast this by saying with deeply moved but intensely striving souls:

We will bring to blossom and fruition the spirit whose germ exists within us, so that we may once more find the Gods.

• 1. The translation by Johanna Collis of this lecture is also included in the volume entitled Art in the light of Mystery Wisdom, a collection of eight lectures given by Rudolf Steiner on various dates and published by Rudolf Steiner Press (London). Permission has been given for publication in the present volume.

If we wish to bring before our souls the nature of our experiences between death and rebirth, we must above all grasp the great difference between them and those of earthly life. Here on Earth we carry out whatever we do in such a way that once done, it separates from us—it no longer belongs to us. For example, we manufacture various things and they become detached from us. Most people get free of them by selling them. Hence we find that anything a man makes on Earth, as the outcome of his will, goes out into the world in such a way that he feels relatively—I say expressly, relatively—little connection with it. And the thoughts out of which he creates something on Earth slip back within him, into his inner being, where they either remain merely passive or become memories, habits, aptitudes.

It is different between death and a new birth. There, everything a man achieves flows back to him, in a certain sense.

Now we must remember that here on Earth we carry out the impulses of our will on things belonging to the kingdoms of nature—on the minerals, plants and animals. We more or less mould them, move them around, and even set other people into motion.

In the spiritual world, between death and rebirth, we are among purely spiritual Beings, partly with those whose whole existence has been in the spiritual world, who have never been incorporated in earthly substance. Among such Beings belong the higher Hierarchies—the Angels, the Exusiai, the Seraphim and Cherubim. Other names may be preferred; but here, too, there is no need to quarrel over terminology. These particular names are old and venerable; they may well be used now for what we are rediscovering in spiritual realms.

Between his death and rebirth, accordingly, a man dwells partly among such Beings, and partly with the souls of men who have cast off their earthly bodies and taken on spiritual ones; or with those souls who are awaiting their coming re-descent to Earth. This co-existence, it is true, depends somewhat on whether we are connected with such souls, whether we have formed a bond with them in earthly life. For those persons with whom we have not been in close contact on Earth have little to do with us in the spiritual world. I shall have more to say about this.

Then, too, a man stands in relation to other beings who have never been so directly incorporated in earthly life as he was himself, for they are at a lower stage and not ready to take on human form. These are the elemental beings who live in the kingdoms of nature, in the plant kingdom, in the kingdom of the rocks, of the minerals, as well as in that of the animals. Thus, between death and rebirth, a man grows together with the whole spirit-populated world.

I must add that these beings are perceptible to Inspired, Intuitive and Imaginative consciousness, for with these forms of consciousness one can see into the world where we live between death and a new birth.

Because a man lives then in a quite different way, his whole mood and condition are changed. When here on Earth, for example—I am coming back to this same important theme—we make a machine, our action, the handling and fitting together of the parts, flow from our will and our thoughts. But all this becomes detached from us. When between death and a new birth we are in the spiritual world—where as souls we are continually active, always doing something—there shines out from our actions something we recognise as thoughts living in light. Here on Earth a thought stays with us; there, it shines out in everything we do, gleaming as a being of light. So that in the spiritual world we can never do anything without a thought springing from it. This thought is not like the thought of an earthly human being which he can often conceal, however harmful it may be, for it is a personal, individual thought. But in the life between death and rebirth the thought which springs out of things is a cosmic thought, expressing the response of the whole spiritual cosmic world to what we are doing.

Now picture this to yourselves vividly. In the life between death and a new birth a man is active. Through his activity, every action by the soul, every grasping, one might say every touch, immediately changes into a cosmic thought, so that in doing anything we imprint it on the spiritual world. Then on all sides an answer rings back from the Cosmos; out of what we do there flashes up what the Cosmos says of it, and this cosmic verdict is final. But that is not all. In this flashing up of the cosmic world of thought, something else glimmers—other thoughts which we cannot say originate in the Cosmos. Thus we find the brilliantly flashing thoughts permeated by all sorts of dark thoughts, glimmering out of our surroundings.

While the brightly gleaming thoughts from the Cosmos fill us with a profound feeling of pleasure, the glimmering ones—very often, though not always—carry something extraordinarily disquieting; for they are thoughts still working on from our life on Earth. If we have cultivated good thoughts during earthly life, they glimmer out, after death, from the radiant cosmic environment. If we have cherished bad thoughts, evil thoughts, they may be said to glimmer out towards us from the shining thoughts of the cosmic verdict.

In this way we behold both what the Cosmos is saying to us and what we ourselves have brought with us to the Cosmos. This is not a world that detaches itself from a person; it remains intimately bound up with him. After death he bears within him his cosmic existence, and, as a memory, his last existence on Earth. His next task is to lay aside this earthly life and to accustom himself to a different way of living, so that he may become a cosmic being in the true sense. As long as we are in that region of spiritual experience which in my book, Theosophy, I called the soul-world, we are pre-occupied with this aftermath of glimmering earthly thoughts, earthly ways of life, earthly aptitudes. Because of this we make what we feel could be beautiful cosmic forms into grotesque ones, and so, under the guidance of these distorted cosmic forms during our passage through the soul-world, we wander on through the Cosmos until we are freed from everything binding us to the Earth. Then we can find our way into the realm called spirit-land in my book, Theosophy. We have then left behind the state of soul habitual to us in physical life on Earth, and we are able to act in perfect accordance with the admonitions of those spiritual Beings whose realm we have to enter as the only one where it is possible for us to be.

You will see that a man does not take with him into the world after death anything that lives in his physical and etheric bodies. That is thrown off and sinks away into the Cosmos. He takes with him only what as Ego and astral body he has experienced within his physical and etheric bodies.

Something of outstanding significance and importance follows from this. While a man is going about on Earth, he regards his physical body and his etheric body—of which he knows little, but at least he feels it in his powers of growth, and so on—as his own body, but he has no right to do so. Only his Ego and his astral body are his. Everything present in his physical body and etheric body—even while he is on Earth—is the property of the divine-spiritual Beings who live and weave within them, and continue their work while the man is absent in sleep. It would go badly with anyone if he had to care for his own etheric and physical bodies in continual wakefulness between birth and death. Time and time again he is obliged to hand over his physical and etheric bodies to the Gods—especially during childhood, for then sleep is the most important thing of all. Later in life sleep works only as a corrective; the really fructifying sleep is the sleep that comes to a child in the first years of its life. Thus the human being has continually to be yielding up both physical and etheric bodies to the care of the Gods.

In past ages of human evolution this was so clearly perceived that the body was called the temple of the Gods, for so was its wonderful structure experienced. And in all architectural work—this can best be seen in oriental buildings, but also in those of Egypt and of Greece—the laws of the physical body and the etheric body were followed. In the very way the Cherubim are set on the temples of the East, in the attitude of a sphinx, or in the placing of pillars—in all this the work of divine-spiritual Beings in the human physical and etheric bodies has been made to live again. In the course of evolution, consciousness of this has been lost; and to-day we refer to the physical body as our own—with no notion of how unjustified this is—whereas as an earthly creation it belongs in reality to the Gods. Hence, when anyone to-day talks of “my body”, when he speaks of the healthy functioning of his body as due to himself, it is just an instance of the prodigious arrogance of modern man—a subconscious pride, certainly, expressed with no awareness of it, but none the less deplorable. It shows how in speaking of their bodies as their own, people are really laying claim to the property of the Gods, and this pride is embodied in their very speech.

To all these things attention must be drawn anew by Spiritual Science; it must show how a moral element is already mixed into our ordinary naturalistic life—and truly, as we have seen in the case just referred to, it can take a by no means healthy form. These matters show how, through genuine spiritual knowledge, our whole feeling life can be so transformed that, if Spiritual Science has been really understood, even ways of speaking can become different from the way in which people like to talk under the influence of purely materialistic thinking.

In order to understand the further experience we have between death and rebirth, we must be able to recall what was said yesterday—that, on growing accustomed to the spiritual world, a man loses the physical aspect of the stars and in its stead there arises the spiritual counterpart of the brilliance of their rays which meet the eye physically. Just as the Earth is the dwelling-place of men who, with their Ego and astral body, live upon it as spiritual beings, so certain spiritual Beings dwell in every single star. And during his physical life a man is connected also with elemental beings dwelling in the kingdoms of the minerals, plants and animals. He is also connected through his ordinary bodily life with other human souls. Then, between death and a new birth, he is in connection with the dwellers on other stars, and his life is actually spent in experiencing the world of the stars through its spiritual counterpart, through life in common with the other divine-spiritual Beings dwelling there.

We have already seen how, immediately after earthly life, we pass through existence in the soul-world, and how it is essentially a living backwards through all that we have slept through in unconscious imagery during our nights on Earth. One-third of the duration of a man's earthly life is thus spent in weaning himself from that which his glimmering thoughts carry into the thoughts of the Cosmos. Anyone who has lived to the age of sixty, say, on Earth, will therefore go through the soul-world in twenty years, while he is working his way out of everything connecting him with physical existence. Inwardly, during this time after death, he experiences his coming into relation with the world of the stars, and especially with the Moon. Yesterday I spoke of a man describing a circle, as it were, completing the first half between birth and death, and the return half in a third of that time. I would now add that he feels this circling to take place round the Moon-existence and the spirits belonging to it. As I pointed out yesterday, he is not conscious of returning to his birth, and so his movement is not actually a circle but a spiral, a progressive spiral.

The reason why we do not simply circle round the Moon, but move on to approach another state of existence, is partly the onward driving force of the Mercury beings. These beings are rather stronger than those of Venus. Existence is urged forward by the Mercury beings, whereas through the Venus beings it is brought to a stop, as though completed. Hence the essential course of a man's passage through the soul-world is such that he feels himself taken up into the activity of Moon, Mercury, Venus.

We must make a quite clear picture of this form of existence. Here on Earth we say: “As a man I have a head”, activated chiefly by what might be called the middle brain—the pineal gland and so on. “In the middle of my body is my heart, and in my whole kidney system the organism for metabolism and movement.” In the soul-world all this would have no meaning; we have laid it all aside. After death we say: “As a man I consist of what comes from the Moon-spirits on the Moon.” This corresponds with saying on Earth: “I have a head.” And whereas on Earth we say: “I have a heart in my breast”—which covers the whole breathing and circulatory system—in the soul-world we say: “I bear within me the forces of Venus.” Again whereas on Earth we say: “I have a metabolic-limb system with all its organs,” of which the chief is the kidney system, after death we have to say: “The forces coming from the Mercury beings live in me.” Therefore on Earth we must say: “As man I am head, breast, lower body and limbs”; and after death: “As a man I am Moon, Venus, Mercury.”

This corresponds entirely with our true inner existence during life. For our whole physical existence here on Earth depends upon how head, heart, and digestive system work together—everything turns on that. The slightest movement of the hand involves the action of head, heart and digestive system, for continuous changes in the relevant substances come into play. Our whole earthly existence takes its course in head, heart, limbs—to put it in a very summary way. So in the soul-world the activity of the Moon, Mercury and Venus forces within us fills our whole existence. And through this we are in fact carried back to a time when human beings were experiencing natural existence in long past epochs of human evolution—epochs to which I have often alluded during these lectures.

In those days people had a kind of instinctive vision, and I have already spoken here of certain types of this which can still be found. Even on Earth a man then had a presentiment of his connection, in life beyond the Earth, with Moon, Mercury and Venus. Why has this consciousness disappeared today? When anyone speaks of these deeply significant things which lie behind the veil of the physical world and can be spoken of only from the realm beyond the threshold, one naturally stirs up ill-feeling, or, to put it more elegantly, one arouses contemporary criticism. For to-day it is particularly difficult to put into words the truths of Initiation. It must either be done in such abstract concepts that people to-day will not realise what is meant, or terms that really belong to such truths must be used—and this makes many people downright angry. One can understand this anger, for they are being told about a world they want to be rid of, a world they fear and hate. But this cannot prevent a start being made in speaking honestly of these matters in civilised circles. Were one to show great consideration—though it would not help us much—towards the people who hate Initiation-knowledge—not of course any of those sitting here but those in the world outside—one would have to say: As a man grows accustomed to life in the soul-world, he finds himself in conditions resembling an earlier condition on Earth, when he had instinctive spiritual knowledge of the truth, and in this knowledge, lived the forces of the Moon. In that way one might perhaps have gone halfway, quite respectably, towards the materialistic concepts of to-day; but it would have been put far too abstractly. If one is not afraid of the criticisms that will of course come from materialistic thinkers, one has to speak differently and say: When people were going through a far-off prehistoric epoch in earthly evolution—of which more is to be said later—even on Earth they were in the company of spiritual beings who were in direct connection with the Cosmos rather than with the Earth itself. We can say that divine Teachers, not earthly ones, directed the Mysteries and instructed human beings then on Earth.

In such remote ages these Teachers did not take on physical bodies of flesh, but worked in their etheric bodies upon men. So that the highest Teachers in the Mysteries, to whom physically incorporated men stood merely as servants, were etheric and divine; but they dwelt among men on Earth. Hence we are expressing something very real when we say: Once, in a long past period of human evolution, divine-spiritual Beings dwelt on Earth together with men. They did not always make their presence known if someone, let us say, was simply going for a walk, but they did reveal themselves if a person was led to them in the right way through the servants of the Mystery-temples. This happened only in the Mysteries, and through the Mysteries these Beings became companions of earthly men. Since then they have withdrawn from the Earth to the Moon, where they now dwell as if in a cosmic citadel, not perceptible from earthly existence, within the Moon's inner being. Thus, when considering this inner existence of the Moon, we have to look upon it as a gathering of those Beings who once, in etheric bodies, were the great Teachers of men upon Earth. And really we should never look at the Moon without saying: Our one-time Teachers on Earth are now assembled there.

Nothing that comes to earthly men from the Moon is inherent in it, but only what is reflected by the Moon from the rest of the Cosmos. For the Moon reflects all cosmic activity in the same way that it reflects the light. Hence when we look at the Moon and see its light most clearly, this is really the least part of it. We are seeing a mirror of cosmic activities, not the inner life of the Moon.

Within the Moon dwell those Beings who once lived on Earth, and it is only during man's life in the soul-world, after death, that he again comes under their influence. It is these Beings who, in accordance with the judgment of the far-distant past, work correctively on what a man has done on Earth. After death, therefore, in our epoch, a man actually comes once more into relation with these Beings who formerly, as divine-spiritual Beings, educated and instructed him and all mankind on Earth.

When the human being has passed through this realm of the Moon, it is then his appointed task in the Cosmos to enter the Sun-existence. Whereas the first circle, the first completed spiral, has existence on the Moon for its central point, this spiral movement now takes a man a further step forward, and on leaving the realm of the Moon, he enters the realm of the Sun.

Any spatial diagram illustrating this process can be no more than illusory, for it all takes its course in the one-dimensional, the super-sensible. However, as we must use earthly words, we can say: When a man has completed the first revolution in the realm of the Moon, he comes to the Sun realm, and the Sun, the spiritual Sun, then stands in the same relation to him as the Moon did previously. The man has now to become a being who—on entering what in my book, Theosophy, I called spirit-land, the spiritual realm of the Sun—must transform his previous Moon-, Venus-, Mercury-, existence. He must in actual fact become a different being. In earthly life he says: I am a being of head, heart, breast; a being of metabolism and limbs. Immediately after death he says: I am a being of Moon, Mercury, Venus. But then he can no longer say this, for it would mean his having come to a standstill in the spiritual world, between the soul-world and the real world of the spirit. He has now to go through a special metamorphosis even of his soul-spirit being and become what I may describe as follows: The Sun must be his skin. Everything around must be Sun. As here on Earth our physical body is wrapped in our skin, so now, on entering the life of the spirit, we have to be clothed in a skin consisting entirely of the Sun's spiritual forces.

Now it is not easy to picture this, for on the Earth you think: There is the Sun, shining down upon us; the Sun is in the centre and sheds its rays all around. On entering the realm of the spiritual Sun we find the Sun to be no longer in a definite place—it is everywhere. A man is then within the Sun; it shines in upon him from the periphery, and is, in truth, the spiritual skin of the entity he has become. Moreover, within the realm of the spiritual Sun, we have what must be described as organs. In the same way that in earthly life we have head, heart, limbs, and, immediately after death, Moon, Mercury, Venus, so, after that, we have organs which we must attribute to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn.

These are then our inner organs, just as heart, pineal gland, kidneys, are on Earth. All this has gone through a metamorphosis into the spiritual and these new organs, not fully formed when first we leave the soul-world and enter the world of spirit, now have to be gradually developed. For this purpose we do not describe one circle only in the Sun-existence, as in our Moon-existence, but three. In the first circle the spiritual Mars organ is developed; in the second, the Jupiter organ, and the Saturn organ in the last circle. If we compare them with earthly periods of time, we find that these three circles are traversed much more slowly, about twelve times more slowly than the relatively fast Moon circle. And during this whole journey, while a man is living in the world of spiritual spheres and participating in its forces, he is continually active. Just as we are active here with the forces of nature, so there we are active with the forces, the Beings, of the higher Hierarchies, whose physical manifestation in the surrounding starry heavens is only an outer reflection, as with the Sun and Moon.

In order to find his way from the realm of the Moon to that of the Sun, however, a man must have the guidance to which I have already referred. We have seen how, in the most ancient epochs of mankind, Beings lived on Earth who have since withdrawn, entrenching themselves, as it were, in the cosmic stronghold of the Moon. They are the Beings with whom a man, after death, first enters into a relationship. But these Beings have had successors who, in the epochs after the ancient Hyperborean period, appeared on Earth from time to time. In the East they have been called Bodhisattvas. Although they have always made their appearance embodied as men, yet they are the successors of the Beings now entrenched on the Moon, and their life is passed in community with these Beings. There lie the springs of their strength, the sources of their thoughts. And they were the Beings who once acted as the guides of mankind. Through the teaching they gave on Earth, men were enabled to have the strength, on coming to the end of their journey through the Moon-sphere, to pass over into the realm of the Sun.

In future lectures we shall see how, in the course of man's earthly evolution, this has become impossible, and how the Christ Being had to descend from the Sun to carry out the Mystery of Golgotha so that mankind, through the teachings of that Mystery, should be given sufficient force to make the crossing from the soul-world to spirit-land, from Moon-sphere to Sun-sphere.

In the ancient days of Earth evolution, the Moon-influence was closely connected with the Earth, and cared for its spiritual element, with the participation, direct or indirect, of the Bodhisattvas. Then, when the time was ripe, after the first third of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch had expired, the effects of the Mystery of Golgotha, the working of the Christ, came in. This work of the Christ was surrounded by the twelve-fold activity of the Bodhisattvas, indicated—though indeed it was a reality—in the twelve Apostles. Thus the Christ, incorporated in the body of Jesus, is the power who, coming from spiritual existence in the Sun, has now united Himself with the Earth.

If we look up to the Moon with the desire to understand it, rather than merely to gaze at it with our soul and spirit clouded by materialism, and if we realise it to be a gathering of beings pointing to the past evolution of the Earth, then we must look up in the same way to the Sun. The Sun is a gathering of those Beings who point to the future of Earth-evolution and now also to the present, and whose great representative is the Christ, who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha. Through as much as human beings absorb on Earth in their relation to that Mystery, so will their entrance into the spiritual land of the Sun be facilitated, so that they are enabled to take up inwardly the Mars organ in the sphere of Mars, the Jupiter organ in the Jupiter-sphere, and in the sphere of Saturn the corresponding Saturn organ. This is accomplished in threefold circles which take their course far more slowly than that of the Moon; yet this also underlies world-evolution. The complete fulfilment of what I have just been describing—the development into Mars man, Jupiter man, Saturn man—will come about only in the future. During our present epoch we can make only the circle of the Mars region after death, through the activity of world-forces; after that we are unable to do more than touch on the Jupiter region. We have to go through many earthly lives before being able—between death and rebirth—to enter fully the Jupiter region and, later still, that of Saturn.

In order that man, though not yet able to enter the Jupiter region, may receive, between death and a new birth, something of the forces of Jupiter and also of Saturn, many planetoids are interspersed between Mars and Jupiter; in their outer aspect they are constantly being discovered by the astronomers. They make up the region which in its spiritual aspect is experienced by a man after death because he cannot yet reach Jupiter. They have the remarkable characteristic of being spiritual colonies, as it were, of beings from Jupiter and Saturn who have withdrawn there. And before a man is ripe for existence on Earth, he can find in this region of the planetoids, which are there for that purpose, a kind of preparatory substitute, before he is able to enter the region of Jupiter and Saturn. At present, therefore, by the time a man has gone through death and rebirth, he has achieved his Mars-organisation, and has absorbed those Jupiter and Saturn forces to be found in the colonised regions of the planetoids. With the after-effects of this—we still have to learn about them—the human being embarks on another earthly life.

How this life between death and a new birth, which I have now described in relation to the world of the stars, can be further characterised, we shall hear tomorrow.