The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Yesterday I spoke of the path followed by man's nucleus after death and of his return into a new earthly life. After death there arises first of all the picture-tableau of etheric body, then follows a short sleep-like condition in which the causal body frees itself. This asserts itself in the form of rays which radiate in blue and indigo colors out of the ether flame-like forms. When the astral body has remained behind is a third corpse, it continues to live for a time in an existence of its own and then it is absorbed by the astral world. Such "astral shades" (specters) are often cited by mediums in spiritistic séances. Then after a long preparation (Kamaloka), man enters Devachan, where he transforms his experiences into capacities.

After having passed through the first two regions, he reaches the third region, the atmospheric region of Devachan. There he experiences everything which takes on the form of pleasure and pain, passions and instincts, these constitute the "atmosphere" of Devachan. To the spiritual human being this is as vivifying an element as oxygen the physical human being.

When the human being has thus transformed his whole life in an alchemistic way, his causal body and his Ego return to the earthly sphere. The human germs arise, described as bell-like shapes, which arise through the fact that the astral substance comes flying towards them in accordance with the inner force-streams of the capacities acquired by each human germ. None of these forms resembles the others in regard to color and shape; this expresses the different individualities. Their whole character is contained in these forms and colors and is expressed in them.

The new etheric body arises, as we have seen, not through the attraction of etheric substance, but only through the activity of the so-called Mahadevas. The attraction of the new etheric body takes place when the bell-like shape has already found a path leading to the embryo. A complete connection of the etheric body with physical germ of man only takes place in the seventh month after conception. Until then the bodies are connected, but this connection does not reach as far as the germ. Beings called the Lipikas lead the human being to the parents and into the family-conditions in which he can best live according to his karma.

Let us now discuss how karma works in the individual human being. Let us envisage man deeds: this will show us that behind them always lies a definite character-disposition. The external deed may be the same, though the motives may differ. Deeds and their effects appear to begin with, in the external favorable or unfavorable karma. Also the character, the inclinations and habits express themselves in karma.

These lasting qualities of man are contained in the etheric body and in the next life they are elaborated in the physical body. They transformed themselves into forces which appear in the next life in the physical body as organ-forming forces. Since the qualities of the etheric body have such an influence upon the physical body of the next life, the healthy or unhealthy constitution in one life depends on inclination and habits of a past one.

In this life we may thus influence our next one by cultivating noble inclinations and feelings, thus rendering the body of our next incarnation strong and healthy. The causes of illness are indeed of a moral kind.

This transformation of the moral forces often lasts very long. Decadent peoples and races have a kind of putrefaction process in their astral bodies. The invading Huns and Mongols also brought such fear and terror to the European populations because they had this decadent astral substance. But fear and terror are a good soil for such putrefying astral substances. These forces entered the bodies of European peoples and the result was the terrible disease of leprosy in the Middle Ages. Such putrescent substances, carried by the Huns and Mongols, cannot harm those who are fearless and courageous.

Since moral qualities appear physically in the next generation, we not only work our own benefit by living morally, but for the health of the next generations.

Ladies and gentlemen present!

Today it falls to me to speak about the relationship of the soul and spirit to the physical world among the Pythagoreans. Up to now I have spoken primarily about the organization of the universe among the Pythagoreans and today I would like to add what we can know from the Pythagoreans about the ideas of the soul, of the spirit and of their relationship of the spiritual and the spiritual to the physical world.

Historically, we know about Pythagoreanism in this area not only from the scanty information we have from the Pythagoreans, but we know much more precisely from the Platonic discussions! A large part of what Plato worked on comes from Pythagoreanism. Plato went to school with the Pythagoreans and drew a large part of his teachings from Pythagoreanism.

However, the teachings of Pythagoreanism can only be properly understood if one starts from certain ideas - which can be gained at all times - and from certain relationships of the spiritual [to] the physical and asks: How do the views of the Pythagoreans relate to these, how do they compare to them? The Pythagoreans had the deepest immersion in the human ego! They transferred a view to their disciples that grasped the human self to the extent that it must be grasped if it is to spill over into the material world.

At a certain level, the material ceases to have meaning; space and time also cease to exist. Images are afflicted with all the properties of sensual nature. If we continue to ascend and imagine these images more spiritually and more spiritually, then we come closer and closer to the spiritual - not insofar as it is spatial and temporal, but only insofar as it is eternal. The Pythagoreans had this view that things are based on a being that is the same at all times, regardless of whether we look at this or that thing. They rose to this view, not only to the view of the conceptual, but actually to the view of the One. It was precisely through the way in which they developed the theory of numbers that they showed that they saw in the great harmony nothing other than the embodiment of a deity in the universe.

The Pythagoreans were influenced by Egyptian views. This Egyptian symbolically shows us the view that the "Nous lives in everything. The Egyptians used symbols in their knowledge that we also find in the Pythagoreans. It is impossible to misjudge these symbols among the Egyptians. If you think you can only look at them superficially, you will find that you cannot understand them. They can only be understood if they are interpreted in a deeper way. We will look at this in more detail when we consider the Platonic world of ideas.

I must draw attention to this in order to make it easier to understand Pythagoreanism and its doctrine of the soul.

I have already hinted at the doctrine of Osiris. In this legend we meet Osiris, who is dismembered by a hostile force called Typhon and scattered throughout the universe; and Isis, a female deity, reassembles the ruins of Osiris. These are then the human being.

A second Egyptian legend follows, according to which the younger god Horus is born of Isis after the death of Osiris. According to the news, legends and stories, these views indicate that the Egyptians symbolically expressed the view in this legend that the universe has flowed out into the world of appearances, into the world that is riding towards us. And the fragmented God is the All-Spirit, which for the Egyptians dissolved into the four elements: Water, Fire, Air and Earth, reunites and binds them, and brings about the various numerical ratios in the mixture of substances.

This then became part of the Greek view. We find it in the form that love and hate hold the world together. These are the thought powers of Osiris, Isis and Typhon. Osiris lives on only in the four elements, which are presented as "Osiris. It is hatred that forces the elements to lie next to each other as multiplicity, and love that wants to lead the fragmentation back into unity.

This is also how we have visualized the idea of the gods among the Greeks. We can also find this symbol when we look at an Egyptian obelisk. It is four-sided and runs together in a point. This symbolizes the four elements that make up the harmonious unity of the world. The obelisk is decorated with the image of a beetle spinning a ball, or with the image of a ram carrying a ball [on its head]. We know that the Egyptians thought of the sphere as the All-Unity.

Now, however, one thing must be noted about this idea: Pythagoreanism can only be fully understood - insofar as it is a world view - if it is based on the idea that Osiris has actually dissolved into the four elements, that he no longer leads a separate existence. Through the separation of the forces, Osiris has been split into the elements, into the elements existing in the outside world.

The Pythagorean was therefore clear about the fact that when he was searching for Osiris, on the way to recognizing God, he did not have to look for this God outside the world in a "thing in itself", but where he could only be found, in the world as such. He was clear about the fact that God is in the world. Therefore, the Pythagoreans did not regard the world as God's creation, but as God's existence. Whoever lives in the world lives in God! The Pythagoreans sought God only within the world. Pythagoreanism is therefore a doctrine that deals with the world and its relationships. It is interesting how they attached Greek names of gods to some numerical relationships.

So we see from this that what the Greeks represented as images of gods, the Pythagoreans represented in the numbers that held the world together for [them].

Pythagoreanism appears as the highest expression of what was present in the world. Just as the Pythagoreans envisioned the world as the confluence of the four elements, they also envisioned man. For the Pythagoreans, the human being was nothing other than the most harmonious combination of the four elements. By "elements [they imagined] not coarse substances, but potencies! It was not a material interaction, but something similar to what [they] imagined by "harmony in music". In the same way, what appears in the human soul was best expressed in the harmony produced by the body. The soul therefore always emerges in the form of the symbol of the body, which is, as it were, composed of the elements.

They distinguished three things in human organics. They realized that man has a longing to return to that from which he originally came. They were clear that man was nothing other than an incarnation of Osiris, an incarnation of the deity that had flowed out into the world. This was what emerged in their view of the world and of which they were convinced that it was the same in every human being, that it was the same in every being.

Whoever was able to develop the view in his consciousness saw the world as a whole - by seeing himself. The universe expanded into selfhood within the ego, and the ego became the universe! But man could only go through this as an individual being. Man is only man in that he has this urge, this inclination towards Osiris, and that he has this power only in so far as he is in a power connection with the whole material world. Therefore the Pythagoreans first distinguished the actual Osiris nature in man and in the universe, the All-I, which was present as a single entity in the universe, and as a second entity a part of the manifold, the corporeal man, a part of the merely sensual-physical man, which arises and passes away and which can be observed through the senses. Man presents himself as a sensory being, perceptible to himself and to others, and then also as a being that is seen purely from within, which is nothing other than a reflection of the light that has flowed down from the Godhead.

Now the Pythagorean had to come to the conclusion that these two opposing things behave in the same way as all other dualities among the Pythagoreans, i.e. that everything diverges into a duality. They distinguish a duality in everything, including man. I could list the various dualities that the Pythagoreans had in the world. Everywhere they looked for them, everywhere they looked for a kind of polarity: that was the "limited and the "unlimited, the "even and the "odd, the "good and the "evil, the "square and the "cube, the "rectangle" and the "column and so on. Thus they distinguished a duality everywhere, in every spiritual and physical identity. Now in man it is not spiritual and physical, but as I have described it. Let us stick to what I have described. This duality needs a connection, and this connection is the third part of which the Pythagoreans composed the human being. This third part is what is called the soul in the Greek world view and in all later world views. This third is a combination of spiritual allness, all-unity on the one hand with diversity, materiality on the other, so that we have three parts: spirituality, materiality and, as the third, the soul. On the one side is the material, and on the other side is the highest spirituality. Together with the other, the third side, this is what makes up the unique human personality.

So for the Pythagoreans, the human personality only exists because the unified spirit, with the help of the soul, is connected to the diversity of materiality. Man discovers the soul within himself and has a right to spirituality when he directs his gaze towards the sphere of spirituality, i.e. when he belongs to the material world on the one hand and is an inhabitant of the spiritual world on the other, with which he is supposed to connect. Thus, for the Pythagoreans, man is divided into three potencies:

1. into that which makes him an individual;
2. into that to which he devotes himself;
3. into that which frees it from singularity;

They distinguish that which belongs to the individual human being, which shines upwards towards the spiritual, but which at the same time also shines downwards towards the physical. So that which the Pythagoreans recognize as the third, which mediates between the divine and the material principle.

So not only Osiris is incarnated, but also something that is closer to the individuality than Osiris as such. So something is reincarnated that is between the personality - to which sensuality belongs - and spirituality - to which sensuality no longer belongs - something that participates in the world and that is both singularity and allness at the same time!

This something [incarnated in man] constitutes that which is the unified Osiris-nature, the individuality, which here below individualizes into the personality - which is not the same for the Pythagoreans - and which, through the mediation of the personality with Osiris, constitutes a unity. This individuality does not live itself out completely in the personality, so that the latter will find something in itself if it looks around within itself and measures its consciousness, where it must say to itself: This does not belong to the piece in which I am incarnated; it is this individualized piece which is the individual.

There are therefore three things connected in human nature:

1. the personal individuality;
2. the spiritual substantiality that transcends the personality;
3. the light of Osiris, the unity that lives in the universe and that can only live because individuality stands between the other members.

This individuality is not only linked to the individual manifestation of the personality, but means more than the individual personality. What can be found in the individuality does not coincide with what can be found in the individual personality.

When the follower of Pythagoreanism looks around to explain this, he will not be able to stop in his consciousness at the personality, but will have to reach out to other individualities. Within his individual personality he will not be able to find everything that lives as a being in the personality. He will find: Man cannot be explained by himself. Only if he assumes in relation to the individuality, the personality - no matter how metaphysically conceived - that the individuality can remain, can incarnate itself in other details, so that a series of developmental stages, a series of such personalities come into consideration for the individuality, will he find the explanation. And here you also have the form which the Pythagoreans gave to the [idea of reincarnation].

In the second potency, the Pythagoreans recognized the soul as encompassing a single personality, and they recognized that more goes into it than the single vessel, the single personality, so that we may therefore speak of a pre-existence of that which lives itself out as individuality in the single personality.

Plato also expounded this doctrine in his discussions. In it, he made Socrates a teacher, and we can imagine that Plato therefore put his teachings into conversational form and made Socrates a teacher in order to show how a pupil can gradually be led up to the highest level.

If we want to imagine the development of a Pythagorean, we can take the discussion on the development of the soul, "Phaidon", to hand. The "Phaidon" is not to be understood as an exoteric conversation, but as a symbol for Pythagorean teaching. This is clearly demonstrated by a passage in the introduction.

We know little about the historical Socrates, and what is false in the external, tangible sense, we can easily leave out. Therefore, when Plato places special emphasis on external facts and communicates them, as is the case in the Phaedo, where he tells us that the delivery of the cup of hemlock is delayed because a certain ship is sailing to Delos, we must see something special in this communication. We can see from the story that in Greece they were forced to send seven young men and seven virgins to King Minos for a time. They were freed from this plague by Theseus, who killed the Minotaur. In return, the Greeks sent a ship to Delos at certain times to make offerings [to Apollo]. No one was allowed to be executed during this time. The condemnation of Socrates took place just at this time and it was therefore necessary to wait. This fact was told to us at the beginning of the "Phaidon". It is not at the beginning by chance. It has a certain meaning. It's just like the Egyptians. When we see a sphinx standing there, it means that we must not limit ourselves to being satisfied with the simple description, but that we should seek deeper truths behind it.

This story at the beginning of Plato's "Phaedo" is just such an allusion. It always indicates that we have something to look for underneath. The legend of Theseus is a symbol of the fact that, once Theseus was freed from certain passions, from certain connections with materiality, i.e. once he had undergone a certain development, he no longer needed to make the sacrifices that others had to make to sensuality. Only after he no longer needed to make these sacrifices did he reach a certain stage of development. This is expressed in the overcoming of the Minotaur. That is symbolic.

We are therefore dealing here with the representation of Pythagorean teaching. The fact that Socrates overcame death in accordance with the facts is intended as a symbol of what and how the Pythagorean must overcome in the sequence of stages of his teaching. Thus we also see that the Pythagorean understands the soul as something that transcends the individual and that he thereby leads his students to a spiritual understanding of the world.

The "Phaidon" presents us with the ascent to spiritual individuality. This is introduced by the legend of Theseus, who found his way out of the labyrinth. The labyrinth represents the path that the individual personality has to go through in order to find its way back to the light of Osiris. Here, then, we encounter the soul doctrine of Pythagoreanism. We may assume that we have here given the soul doctrine of Pythagoreanism in a form that [Plato] believed he could already communicate to certain initiated disciples.

The essence is developed and first shown through all kinds of considerations that the essence of the soul is something that goes beyond the material, which no longer has anything to do with the material as such.

This problem of the soul is solved in many different ways in the "Phaidon". Firstly, it is based on the world of the senses, which is in eternal development. Every being develops from what it is not. In the same way, death emerges from life and life from death, so that we are dealing with the alternation of death and life. But that is only the lowest level.

Now a Pythagorean appears here in the conversation, who presents his image of the lyre with its strings. [...]. Socrates thinks that we cannot compare [it] with harmony. The strings are there first. But the harmony is not in the strings as such, but in the harmony of the strings, in something that first emerges from the strings. And now Socrates rises to a spirituality that is no longer bound to physicality. Socrates leads upwards: I have looked around at all the sciences, at all the philosophers. When I say: I have seen, or: I am going, people everywhere ask: Why? And the answer is: I have, because ..., I go, because ... Everywhere I go I am only told the reasons. That has never satisfied me. The thing is far from being explained when we know the cause.

Now Socrates uses a subtle comparison to make it clear that a thing is not yet explained by stating the cause. He says: I am sitting here in prison. The Athenians have condemned me to this. I expect to die because I didn't want to escape.

So what would the natural scientist say? He would give all the causes. But what if Socrates had escaped? Then [the naturalist] would also be able to find the causes there; you can state causes everywhere, collect causes. They are true, but nothing is explained by them. If he had fled, there would also be causes. If I am sitting here, the causes are also there. So there must be something that transcends purely natural existence. It is that which is not identical with that which can be grasped with natural causes, which has nothing in common with the natural, but with the world that stands above the natural facts; which is indeed expressed in the world of causes, but which stands above the world of causes.

So he seeks to make comprehensible in words that which is incarnated for him in the world of causation and is expressed within the world of causation.

Now we must ask: How was this way of looking at things in the Greek world - causality links the natural world, in which the soul does not merge - to be justified in the natural science of the Greeks? It seems important to me whether such a thing can stand up to our present-day knowledge. We must draw attention to the fact that natural science struggles to achieve a spirituality in order to give birth to a world view out of itself. That spirituality cannot be exhausted in the world of causes can already be proven by natural science. It can be proven that the physicality in which we now live is enclosed within quite [certain limits], that it is a limited thing, and that this already has a certain significance.

I want to show you how natural science today can already show that corporeality has a limit, that the spiritual must extend beyond this corporeality, that it is only incarnated in this corporeality, so that corporeality is something that cannot encompass the spirit. This seems to me to be something that needs to be emphasized. The modern world view has led us to no longer see the world as if it were a random structure of things, it has led us to see transformations of the elemental force in the individual forces of the world. We no longer say that mechanical work is present in electricity, heat, magnetism, pressure and so on, but we see all of these as forms of a single elemental force. Today we say to ourselves that if we apply a mechanical force, for example by exerting pressure on a table, the area of the table is heated. This heat is generated by pressure. Today we have the view that the force that pushes the locomotive forward is nothing other than the force of steam, and this in turn is nothing other than the force of coal and so on. So we have a constant transformation. When we heat a room, we heat it with what was stored up as chemical forces a myriad of years ago. The plants have transformed into denser matter, then into the chemical forces of coal. These are transformed back into heat. So what we use to heat our rooms today is what came from the sun millions of years ago. So even in physics we are dealing with a constant transformation of forces. What is exactly true is the connection between thermal and mechanical energy. Heat is converted into mechanical working power in order to move something forward. What happens in the steam boiler is exactly the same as what moves the train forward. The heat is transformed into mechanical work. This happens because the heat is lost, because it is no longer present. This heat that has been transformed has disappeared, has been transformed into something else. We see this process everywhere in the universe.

Fifty years ago, people were still saying that solar heat is transformed into chemical power, chemical power into mechanical work and so on. So we can imagine that one transforms into the other, that the cycle of forces is formed. This creates an eternity of the material world. The forces are transformed into an eternal cycle. Today we have to admit that this material world does not allow such a cycle of matter, but is limited. We have to admit that what exists is self-explanatory. If we transform the heat of the steam into that which moves the train forward - for heat is always lost, and it is impossible to transform all the heat into mechanical power - then the heat suffers a loss. This is not because the machines are imperfect; the complete transformation cannot take place, a certain amount of heat would always remain. Wherever something happens by transforming heat into mechanical power, a mechanical residue remains.

If we continue this and imagine that all the work is done, something would always be left behind. The consequence of this would be that once all possible heat [would] be transformed, that eventually a state [would] occur where it [would] no longer be possible to develop any amount of heat from things. The available heat [would] reach a minimum. [If this state was reached, it would no longer be possible for anything to happen in this world. It [would] no longer be possible for any work to [emerge] from any heat source. Life [would] be extinguished. This whole incarnation of the earth [would be] self-contained.

So we see that the spiritual is not exhausted by reincarnation, but that the spiritual spills over into the [associated material] world, that the spiritual is that which will have to seek a new expression or return into itself.

However, this material world can only exist because it is permeated by the spirit. The moment this material world is exhausted, the spirit is no longer that which can dominate the world. It has then lost its meaning, it has stepped out of being into non-being. The spirit has then purified itself of all this.

This is not the result of a philosophical consideration, nor the result of a metaphysical consideration, but merely what every physicist must also admit. It is the same as what the Greeks say, that the One lives itself out in the world, lives through it, and that the world as such comes to an end and then, as we have seen, will again be the unlimited and will stand purified in itself as the All-One. This is the great world process that takes place in what the Pythagoreans see as the overarching. He saw this overarching element at the lower level in individuality.

This is the method by which the Pythagorean says: If I find something in the personality that transcends into the spiritual, then I must assume that individuality is as little exhausted with the individual personality as the Osiris unity is exhausted in the individual world. - In the Pythagorean world the unity is not exhausted, but it lives itself out in the worlds, which are limited, closed. In the Pythagorean view, individuality lives itself out in such a way that it only seeks its incarnation within the continuous individual existence.

So in the Pythagorean world view we have a strictly closed chain of ideas that leads us upwards from the earthly level to the highest spiritual unity. But in Pythagoreanism we have a strict adherence to the doctrine of individuality, which reaches beyond the individual personality. From this flowed for the Pythagoreans the view that the individual personality, when it rises to the view of individuality, can no longer merely feel responsible for what it does as an individual personality, for what occurs in it, in so far as it is an individual being in the sensuous manifold, but that it must also feel responsible in so far as it must cooperate and collaborate in that which goes beyond the individual personality into individuality. The ordinary person does not feel responsible for what goes beyond the personality.

This is roughly what can be said about the Pythagorean doctrine of the soul. We may therefore say that the Pythagoreans reached the view that they imposed a much higher responsibility on man, namely that which he bears as an individuality and which is not exhausted in the individual personality. This is the idea of reincarnation seen from within.

Answer to the question:

Today we want to listen to a recitation from the poetry of Friedrich Lienhard and Wilhelm Jordan. Then I will add something of an anthroposophical literary consideration to it about the present time and its tasks. This will conclude our evening, but first I would like to say a few words by way of introduction.

Friedrich Lienhard is one of those poets of the present time of whom we are able to say that as far as his own striving in a certain connection, he comes near to the striving of spiritual science. On October 4, 1915, he celebrated his 50th birthday and we at Dornach joined others from all sides in sending our congraulations to this spirit-filled poet. We can look in a certain way into the actual artistic content of the poetical nature of Friedrich Lienhard who in a certain sense has been very friendly to our movement. He himself, says that he originated from the French Alsace Lorraine region where he had to pass through many difficulties in order to attain what he calls his world conception. He tried to develop out of the European German nature so as to bring to effectiveness the actual beating in of the waves of this Central European German being. We can say how there lives within him above all that which I have just attempted to characterize, an element that can perhaps only be evaluated correctly when we realize its worth as we approach it from the spiritual artistic point of view which is fostered in the science of the spirit. In Lienhard's poetry we have, above all, the wonderful description of nature, lyric nature, but put in a very special way when he attempts to bring human beings into speech with nature. Also there is something of the nature of the human being which actually proceeds directly out of the natural way and shows its spirit in nature existence. Now, what does all this come from?

It comes from something that one can perhaps only correctly notice with Friedrich Lienhard when one attempts to evaluate art today which one should always do—so as to realize that there is something which has been completely extinguished from the consciousness of mankind: people no longer are able to evaluate artistic representations. Today they focus completely upon the content of the art, on its representation characteristics and allow that to work on them, but they fail to realize that the important thing is the formal element, the artistic formal element of what is being attempted, not the content so much but how the ideas and the feeling come together, how they undulate in waves and then dissipate. It is very important to see how the poetic language comes into existence in the actual undulation of the waves. In Lienhard you can see quite readily how in the poetical expression of his experiences there is a swaying of the ruling of elemental spirituality, a sort of participation of the poetic soul with that which we would characterize as something which lives in an elementary way in the ether world behind the pure sense existence when the etheric element is brought to manifestation in a natural way as, for example, in the expression of the soul life of young children. If you follow the words of Friedrich Lienhard in a literal way, it appears as if the elementary spirits want to move on further through these words, they sort of ripple through, warm through, weave through all this natural phenomena and this rippling, this warming, this living, this weaving through of elementary beings in relationship to nature continues itself with such a poet who understands how to really live with the spirit of nature.

A further element of Friedrich Lienhard is that precisely through his ability to grasp the great connections of mankind and of the world, with which, I might say, he with his feelings is inwardly connected without anything of the narrow chauvenistic nationalistic spirit entering into these feelings, you can find in him the driving, working forces and beings of the folk life; and again the folk life not out of the details of the accidental individuals, but from the whole weaving and swaying of the priciple of the Folk Soul itself and being able to grasp all that and to place the single personalities into the great spiritual connections in which they are able to stand within the life of the folk. Through that fact Freiedrich Lienhard is in a position of being able to represent such a figure as that of the priest Oberlin of the Alsace Steinthal who was spiritualized by a kind of atavistic clairvoyance. He was able on the one hand to present Oberlin in a real plastic three dimentional way and on the other hand to grasp him in an extraordinarily intimate soul way. Out of these impulses, Lienhard was able to call forth into the present time the divine figures of antiquity, not in the way of these ancient hero sagas, but he took not only the content of it but also attempted in present day speech to find the possibility of again reawakening that which as a beating in of the waves lived through this ancient time and to be able to realize it can still beat into our present age. Lienhard was able to awaken all this and therefore we can say in a certain sense, as it were, that Friedrich Lienhard is one of the most superior poets of the present age, because other poets of this age have attempted to transpose themselves more into the naturalistic, the realistic aspect also rejecting the real artistic spiritual and in that way wanted to create something new. However, the real poet, when he wants to create something new, does not try to use these naturalistic whimsies of our present age, but creates something new by being able to grasp in a new way the stream of the eternal beauty; he grasps that which is eternal in a new way so that art remains art. And real art can never remain real art without being permeated by the spirit. Through this aspect it was possible for Friedrich Lienhard to approach much nearer to that which he called: The Way Toward Weimer. Acutally in his free time he had produced this periodical for a long time which he called Ways Toward Weimer in which he attempted to turn to the ideas and artistic impulses of that great period which began towards the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, and to recognize that which is in these, precisely much of real worth which existed in that particular period which had been forgotten and had faded away. For that reason, in his later artistic period he attempted again to deepen, to make it more inward, I might say, so that ultimately it was possible for such inward poems to come out as those who relate to personalities such as Odelia and the like. He knew how to unite himself with all that in a true sense with the Christian impulses which weave and undulates through mankind. And it is very noticeable that he, not by the external content of his poetic creation but through the way in which they carry the elementary nature right into the details, that he was able to approach the alliteration aspect of the artistic element which appeared as if it was being lost from the whole of German literature. This allilteration and that which is related to the German nature, has with it the whole central European German Folk substance. Because of Lienhard's ability to do that, that brought him close to Wilhelm Jordan, another peot who partly through his own fault and partly through the fault of our age has been little understood by our present time. We shall attempt to bring Wilhelm Jordan to you later on through recitation.

Precisely through alliteration, Wilhelm Jordan attempted again to renew, as he called it, a way of speaking which belonged to times gone by. He could do nothing else than bring this formal element of the ancient poetry, again into the present time. He attempted to lift it up to great moving impulses out of the smallness of everyday things. One must say that it is literally a calamity, although it is not quite without Jordan's own fault that such a poem as “The Damier” which attempted to bring the world moving spiritual principles into connection with mankind upon the earth, that such a creation as “The Danier” should be passed over without effect in our present time. This is partly his fault, because he allowed himself to be damaged by the natural scientific way of looking at things. Much of this damaged his poem “The Niebelungen”, whereas instead of having the deeper principles which should have been applied in this poem, he allows the naturalistic principle of heredity to dominate it; he allowed the substance transition of the forces of inheritance from one generation to another to dominate instead of the soul aspect dominating. There is too much domination of the blood aspect in a certain sense through that. You can say that Wilhelm Jordan paid his tribute to the natural scientific grasping of the present age. However, on the other hand he has taken away from his poems what perhaps already in an earlier time would have been able to give the great spiritual impulses to the artistic striving of mankind, so that not everything would have had to sink into the inartistic barbarism, which in many cases in the later period appeared in the place of the earlier spiritual principles. We can indeed see how today people want to scoff about that which Wilhelm Jordan wanted to do. But I might say that as far as we are concerned, it is our job to be able, in a certain sense, to allow these great impulses to work upon our soul wherever they might appear, because nevertheless there will come a time when these inpulses will have to fulfill a certain mission in mankind's development.

Certainly the poet, Friedrich Lienhard, will be recognized in wide circles. However, in our circles we should attempt to discover that which perhaps can be found precisely in him, because that will be, above all, what I believe will be able to carry his artistic strivings together upon the waves of the spiritual scientific strivings into the future.

Having said that now we will listen to the poems of Friedrich Lienhard and then to some extracts from the poem “Niebelungen” by Wilhelm Jordan. (The following are the poems recited by Frau Dr. Steiner: “Faith”; “The Morning Wind”; “A Greeting to the Forest”; “TheCreative Light”; “The Lonely Stone”; “Have You Also Experienced?”; “All The Tender FLower Cups”; “Soul Wandering”; “The Dance of the Elves”; “The Summer Night”. “The Songs of Odelian”; “Autumn On the Mount of Odelian”; “St. Odelia” then a recitation from the Niebelungen Song by Wilhelm Jordan.)

It is also good to allow this type of poetic art to work upon us. We have in Friedrich Lienhard a poet who really attempts in the present time to carry in spiritual idealistic soul experiences which are strong enough to unite themselves with nature experiences; and with such things one can detect something which is more appropriate to the ‘how’ in art than to the ‘what’ in art. How wonderful is that which draws itself to the magic in the district around the Mount of Odelian and how beautiful it is, how directly lyrical is the perception which streams out of this protective patroness, Odelia, of the Cloister of Mount Odelian. The fact that Odelia was once persecuted by her horrible father, that she was blinded and precisely through the loss of her eye sight, she achieved the mystical capacity of healing the blind, making them see, this is the saga around which all the rest gathers itself. All that which in truth gathers itself around this saga in deep mysticism is lyrically united with the nature which is around the Alsacian Mount of Odelian and it finds itself precisely within these poems by Friedrich Lienhard which have been recited to you. You can find in these poems that he gives the real opportunity for, I might say, the swinging in of an elemental nature which weaves itself in the form of his poems much of which reminds you of the forgotten Wilhelm Jordan. From this small sample which we have been able to hear today you will be able on the one hand to realize how very much this poet attempted to place these figures from the great spiritual weaving of life before us to create them out of this spiritual weaving of life and to allow us to realize that the weaving of the spiritual world works in the external world. You can experience precisely through Wilhelm Jordan, I believe, how the poetic soul can unite itself with a world historical streaming so that in that which confronts us in a poetic artistic form, there actually lives the striving of a spiritual stream which works through the development of the world.

When we were together last Tuesday, I had to ask the question: What would be the outcome of the development of mankind on earth if it were not possible for a spiritual beating-in to find its way into that which exists in the pure external physical existence. Not only in the external realm of scientific knowledge, of the social life and so on, but also in the realm of art, the fact that confronts us and comes to meet us very strongly is that we live in a very critical age, an age which is filled with crises, because if that which is living in spiritual science is not able to take hold of human soul life, then art itself would gradually disappear from mankind, because it cannot exist without the spirit. This art is trying to disappear from such figures as Wilhelm Jordan. However such figures as Friedrich Lienhard have attempted to hold fast to that which tried to disappear—the spiritual aspect—from Wilhelm Jordan. Today people do not see much of the threatening danger of the artistic decay, because in many connections, intoxication also dominates in this realm of dream life of which I spoke Tuesday, of which one can really only perceive if one has an organ to grasp it. I can only wish that more and more people were actually able to realize from a spiritual scientific perception what it means for the ... is an indication of what is going to come into art if this rejection of all spirtual life, of spiritual perception, still continues. One of the great tragedies of the modern times is that such a large nunber of people are able to consider art as all that which is represented by Rheinhard. When one receives a real artistic perception from Spiritual Science, then one will be able to see clearly the so-called rubbish involved in Rheinhard, because that which in modern life appears in the artistic domain is nothing other than a distorted world. When one really attempts to grasp the life of the present time, one can, I might say, indicate the actual places where a life which has been eaten up by materialism affects the art of our age and causes it to fall into a morass. You can see how everything of what art really is is forgotten. In order for a real artistic sense to continue itself into the development of mankind, it is necessary that that which comes to us from earlier times, which, for example, lives also in Lienhard's poetry and which in a certain way is a kind of nature pantheism and a kind of spirit pantheism can develop from that into something more concrete, so that human beings are able to learn to understand the manifoldness of life so that they can see the etheric, astral and the spiritual by the side of the physical sense aspect. Without seeing these things mankind remains blind, blind precisely in relationship to the artistic. As far as the artistic perceptions is concerned, the world as it is today is predisposed to only take in the quite solid external sense aspect, to look on it exactly as it is and to describe it as it is; and that is not art.

One can also experience this nonsensical unclear staggering and wabbling, this frenzy we find with reference to the phenomena of life as it is regarded by people who are called fine psychologists. It often makes your heart sad to see that so few people are strongly adapted enough to perceive what is happening in this realm, to see it in such a way as to be able to rebel against it. Contemplate human beings as they confront us. The artist must indeed look upon them in so far as he is able to place them into the deeper life of the world. If one looks upon people with that particular soul organ which the evolutionary development of mankind has already brought into existence, then we need the possibility of saying the following. There is a person; he is configured in such and such a way. He has experienced this or that thing. We know that this person is more inserted into his physical life, another is more inserted into his ego, another more into his astral body. We must have a living feeling for the fact that the characteristics of mankind can divide themselves in so far as they are taken hold of more by the physical in one case, another more by the etheric, another more by the astral and another more by the ego aspect; and if one is not able to do this in our present time and still wants to describe people artistically in poetry, etc, then one gets the sort of staggering which today is regarded as art.

You must, I might say, take hold of the significant phenomena of our age in order to obtain a real understanding of what is actually happening. For example, one can meet four people who, shall we say, have been brought together by karma. Then one can understand how they are brought together in certain connections through karma when we see them together, how the stream of karma also flows in the progress of the world and how these human beings precisely in a certain way, through their karma, wanted to insert themselves into the world. One will never be able to understand things from the standpoint which is possible today if one is not able to see such karmic connections. Let us take the four brothers, Dimitri, Ivan, Alyosha and Smerdyakov in Dostoevski's novel The Brothers Karamazov. When you are really able to see them with the eye of the soul, you actually see in these four brothers four types which you can only understand through the way they are carried by karma. Thus one knows the following. The four brothers carry a stream of karma into the world in such a way that they must be the sons of a typical scoundral of the present age who has these four brothers as his sons. They are carried in in so far as they have selected it through this karma. They are placed one by the side of the other so that one sees how they differ from each other, and this can only be understood when one knows the following. In Dimitri Karamazov there is an overpowering by the “I”; in Aloysha Karamazov there is an overpowering by the astral body; in Ivan Karamazov there is an overpowering by the etheric body and in Smerdyakov there is a complete overpowering by the physical body. A light of understanding falls upon these four brothers when one is able to consider them from this standpoint.

Now, just think how a poet with Wilhelm Jordan's gift and with a spiritual grasping of the world as it must be in accordance with our modern age, how such a person would place these four brothers side by side, how he would grasp their spiritual and fundamental conditioning. How would Wilhelm Jordan do it?

Let us consider Dostoevski; how does he grasp the situation? He grasps it in no other way than that he places these four brothers as the sons of a quite typical drunken man in a certain stagnated society of the present age. Let us take the first son, Dimitri, the son of a half adventurous, half hysterical woman who after she first elopes with the drunken sop, Fyador Karamazov, beats him and finally cannot endure him anymore and leaves him with his son, Dimitri, the eldest son. Everything is now placed only an inheritance, it is so placed that one has the impression that here the poet describes something like a modern psychiatrist who only focuses upon the coarsest principle of heredity and has no inkling of the spiritual connections, and wants to bring before us the sin of heredity. Now we have the next two sons, Ivan and Aloysha. They come fron the second wife. Naturally the sin of heredity will work differently with these two sons. They come from the so-called screaming Liza, who, because she is not half hysterical but completely hysterical has spasms of screaming. Whereas the first wife soundly thrashed the old drunkard, now the old drunkard thrashes the screaming Liza. Now we have the fourth son, who, I might say, is overpowered by everything which is in the physical body have Smerdyakov, a kind of mixture of a wise, thoughtful and idiotic man, someone who is quite imbecilic and also a partly clever man. He is also the son of the old drunkard and has been begotten with a deaf person who was regarded as the village idiot, namely, the stinking Lizaveta who is seduced by the old drunkard. She dies in childbirth and it is obvious that he does not know that Smerdyakov is his son. Smerdyakov then remains in the house and now all the scenes which occur between these personalities are played out.

As far as Dimitri is concerned it is understandable that he is influenced by his heredity. He is a man in whom the quite unconscious ego flows and pushes him further in life so that he acts out of the unconscious, but of the thoughtlessness and he is so delineated to us that, in the main, you realize that you are not dealing here with a healthy spiritual person, but with someone of a more hysterical nature. Therefore you will find the effect of all that from the nature evolution of the present, that present which will not permit itself to be influenced by that which comes from the spiritual world conception. All the unclear instincts which can actually just as well develop themselves into the best sort of mysticism as well as the most external criminality, in all that you can find the transition from the unconscious, all that Dostoevski deliniates in Dimitri Karamazov. He wants to depict as Russian, because he always tries to describe the true Russianness.

Ivan, the other son, is a Westerner, they call him the Wesler because he wants to familiarize himself with the culture of the West; whereas Dimitri knows very little of the culture of the West but prefers to function out of the Russian instincts. Ivan was in Paris. He studied all sorts of things. He has taken up the Western world conception; he argues with people; he is completely filled with the materialistic world conception of the West modified however by the brooding of the Russian. He argues with all types of people using all sorts of thoughts about how the modern spiritual culture can enter into the midst of the instincts: Should a person be an athiest? Should a person not be an athiest? Can you assume that there is a God? Can you say that there is no God? Can you arrive at an assumption of God? Yes, I accept God, but I do not accept the world. That is the sort of discussion that goes on and on. This is how it is with Ivan.

Now, the third son, Aloysha, becomes a monk early. He is the one in whom the astral body has the superior powers but it also shows that all sorts of instincts work in him, the same instincts as his older brother had developed in him developed through mysticism. Dimitri, who comes from another mother, actually is predisposed to criminality which manifests itself as with other people, but in the case of Aloysha it manifests itself differently, he becomes a mystic. You can say that criminality is only a special development of the same instinct which on the other hand prays for self-emulation—the belief in divine love which goes through the world. Both of them come out of the lower instinctive nature of men, but they develop themselves in different ways. We are not objecting to having these personalities in art, because anything which is real can be the object of art. The important part is not so much the content but how it is presented—is there a weaving of the spiritual in it?—that is the important point.

In Russian culture you have a certain spirituality which is a further development of natural relationships which I have described in my previous lectures as a contrast of spiritual relationships. From the very beginning Dostoevski was a hater of Germany. He had his task of instinctively letting none of West European culture flow into his soul. Because of his being a true Russian, Dostoevski did not come out of the real soul aspect, but that which comes from his subconscious nature arose, all the brooding in the inner human being, that sort of worked itself out and developed itself in the art with the exclusion of all spirtual aspects.

Now we have in Dostoevski's Brothers Karamazov that remarkable episode of the great inquisitor in front of whom the reincarnated Christ appears. And being a true orthodox Christian of his time, this priest knows that he has to put Jesus Christ in prison. That is the first thing that he does. Then he gets the inquisition to give him a hearing. The great inquisitor who develops religion in the sense of the Christianity of our age says to himself: “Ah, yes, Christ has come back. You are indeed the Christ. However, you cannot enter into Christianity as it is now with our priests of the holy order, because you do not understand these things. Take what you yourself have performed. Has it done anything to make people happy? We had to put right what was impractical in your approach. If Christianity as you know it came among people, it would not have the sort of salvation which we have brought to the people, because when you really want to bring salvation to people, you have to bring them a teaching which actually works upon human beings. Now, you believe the teaching also must be the truth. However, you cannot begin to confront human beings with such things. Above all, human beings have to believe the teachings we have given to them; they have to be forced to accept those teachings. We have done better than you. We have established authority. Therefore the only thing that can be done is to take this reincarnated Christ over to the inquisition.” In the case of Dostoevski you see that there is nothing at all spiritual; you see Christ appearing externally in the physical body and then His being broken up by the-great inquisitor.

It is very necessary that we understand the characteristics of our present age where you get books entitled: Jesus, A Psychopathical study; another entitled: Jesus Christ Considered from the Psychiatric Standpoint. Here you have the standpoint of modern evolution which is the pathological situation of Jesus Christ. A well known psychiatrist—people run after this—writes epoch making works about psychiatry; he gives talks to students and colleagues not only about Goethe, Schiller, Nietzsche, all sorts of people, then he also talks about Jesus Christ.

Now if we just sit down and listen to Anthroposophy with a sort of lust for sensation or some mystical sensation, we cannot move forward; that is not good enough. This Spiritual Science must become living, it must become living impulses within us. We are not anthroposophists because every week we learn about the elementary spirits, about the hierarchies, and so on. No, we really become spiritual scientists if we are able to carry our ideas into all the single details of life and Anthroposophy gives us the sort of mood which will enable us to actually feel a disgust for many things that are going on at the present time. But let us not be fooled by the sort of standpoint which the Theosophists think they are duty bound to follow, the idea of universal human love. Because we believe in universal human love, we avoid all the disgusting things that are happening all around us, we avoid giving them the right names because we are filled with universal love. People today are not inclined to keep their eyes open. Now this is not the guilt of a single people; it is the guilt of the whole spiritual life of the present. Before we come to any judgements about anything, it is necessary that we make sure that we know all that we need to know so that a judgement can be formed. Let us consider Tolstoy, for example. Now everyone who has listened to me for any length of time knows how I see the greatness which is in Tolstoy; nevertheless we must not forget the other aspects of his personality. Here we have a great spirit of the East filled with bitter hatred for what comes fron Germanism. People did not know about that, because the translators of Tolstoy into German left out these very reprehensible passages. Therefore they presented literature with a false Tolstoy. The so-called critics of our age consider Goethe and Schiller and then they put Dostoevski side by side with them without realizing the vast difference. Whereas Goethe and Schiller had some spiritual motivation in them, Dostoevski was thoroughly absorbed by our modern culture; he reflected it. Now, these things must be brought out in order that one can get a perception of the significance of our anthroposophical striving.

I wanted to add this sort of anthroposophical literary consideration to the recitation which you heard today.

I have spoken to you about the Sibyls, pointing out how they appear as shadows of the Greek philosophers in Ionia. Through centuries they conjured up from their chaotic soul-life a mixture of deep wisdom and sheer spiritual chaos, and they exerted much more influence on the spiritual life of Southern Europe and its neighbouring regions than external history is willing to recognise. I wanted to indicate that this peculiar outpouring from the souls of the Sibyls points to a certain power of the human soul which in ancient times, and even in the third post-Atlantean epoch, had some good significance. But as one culture-epoch succeeds another in the course of human history, changes occur. The forces which the Sibyls employed to produce, at times, sheer nonsense, were good, legitimate forces in the third post-Atlantean epoch, when Astrology was studied and the wisdom of the stars worked into the souls of men, harmonising the forces which later emerged chaotically as Sibyllism.

You can gather from this that forces which prevail anywhere in the world—including those which prevailed in the souls of the Sibyls—should never be called good or bad in themselves; it depends on when and where they appear. The forces that appeared in the souls of the Sibyls were good and legitimate, but they were not adapted to the fourth post-Atlantean epoch; for the forces that were then intended to prevail in human souls were not those that come from subconscious depths, but those that speak to the soul through the clarity of the Ego. Yesterday we heard how the Hebrew prophets strove to suppress the Sibylline forces and to bring out the forces that speak through the clarity of the Ego. This indeed was the essential characteristic of the old Hebrew school of prophecy—to press back the chaotic Sibylline forces and to bring out those which can speak through the Ego.

The fulfilment of this task given to the Hebrew prophets—we could call it a task of bringing the Sibylline forces into the right path of evolution—came about through the Christ Impulse. When the Christ Impulse entered into the evolution of humanity in the way known to us, one result was that the chaotic forces of the Sibyls were thrust back for a time, as when a stream disappears below ground and reappears later on. These forces were indeed to reappear in another form, a form purified by the Christ Impulse, after the Christ Impulse had entered into the aura of the earth. Just as in human life, after we have been using our soul-forces throughout the day, we have to let them sink into nightly unconsciousness, so that they may reawaken in the morning, so it was necessary that the Sibylline forces, legitimate as they had been during the third post-Atlantean epoch, should flow for a while below the surface, unnoticed, in order to reappear—slowly, as we shall hear.

The forces—legitimate human forces—which emerged so chaotically in the Sibyls were cleansed, so to speak, by the Christ Impulse, but then they sank below the surface of the soul. Human beings in their ordinary consciousness remained entirely unaware that the Christ continued to work on these forces; but so it was.

From the standpoint of Spiritual Science, it is a superb drama to watch this impact of the Christ Impulse; to see how, from the Council of Nicaea onwards, human beings in their normal consciousness quarrel ardently about dogmas, while what was most important for Christianity takes its course in the subconscious depths of the soul. The Christ Impulse does not work where there is strife, but below the surface, and human wisdom will have to uncover a great deal that we may think strange, if we look at it superficially. Much will have to be revealed as a symptom of the Christ Impulse working below the surface. Then we shall understand that essential developments in the historical configuration of Christianity in the West could not come about through the quarrels of Bishops, but sprang from decisions which were reached below the surface of the soul and rose into consciousness like dreams, so that men were aware only of these dreamlike apprehensions and could not discern what was going on in the depths. I will mention only one symptom of this. There are events that reflect, as though through dreams, the activity which the Christ was undertaking in the depths of the soul in order to bring human soul-forces into a right alignment with the course of Western history.

Many of you will perhaps guess something of what I mean if we observe that on October 28, 312, when Constantine the Great, the son of Constantine Chlorus, was making war against Maxentius on the outskirts of Rome, a decision was taken which proved to be of the highest importance for the configuration of Christianity throughout the West. This battle in front of Rome was not determined by military orders, or by the conscious acumen of the leaders, but by dreams and Sibylline omens! We are told—and this is the significant thing—that when Constantine was moving against the gates of Rome, Maxentius had a dream which said to him: “Do not remain in the place where you are now.” Under the influence of this dream, reinforced by an appeal to the Sibylline Books, Maxentius committed the greatest folly—looked at externally—that he could have committed. He left Rome and fought the battle—with an army four times the size of Constantine's—not within the protection of the walls of Rome, but outside them. For the message received from the Sibylline Books ran thus: “If you fight against Constantine outside the gates of Rome, you will destroy Rome's greatest enemy.” A truly oracular utterance! Maxentius obeyed it and with faith and courage went outside the gates. As on an earlier occasion another Sibylline oracle had guided Croesus, so was Maxentius guided by this one. He destroyed the enemy of Rome—himself.

Constantine had a different dream. It said to him: “Carry in front of your troops the monogram of Christ!” He did so and he won the battle. A decisive event for the configuration of Europe, brought about by dreams and Sibylline sayings! There we gain a glimpse of what was going on below the surface in the soul-life of Europe. Truly, like a stream which has disappeared into mountain cavities, so that it is no longer to be seen up above and one may form the strangest conjectures about it, so the Christ Impulse works on below the surface—works, at first, as occult, i.e. hidden, reality.

My dear friends, allow me at this point to confess to you that when in my occult researches I tried to follow this stream, I often lost trace of it; I had to search for places where it reappeared. I could suppose that the stream of the Christ Impulse had reappeared slowly, and that even today it has not fully reappeared but can only give evidence of itself. But where and how did it come to the surface? That is the question. Where did it lay hold of souls sufficiently to make an impression on their consciousness?

If you follow up the various expositions in my books and lecture-courses, and if you feel about it as I do, you will find, especially in the older ones, that what I have said in connection with the name of the Holy Grail is one of the least satisfying parts. That is how I feel and I hope that others have felt it too. It is not that I have said anything that could not be upheld, but simply that when I spoke of this, I felt unsatisfied. I had to give out what could be told with confidence, but often, when I tried to trace the further course of this stream—when I tried to unravel the further occult development of Christianity in the West—then before my soul rose the admonition: “You must first read the name of Parsifal in its right place.”

I had to experience the fact that occult researches are guided in a remarkable way. So that we may not be enticed into speculation, or into realms where we can very easily be borne away from occult truth on the wings of fantasy, we have to be guided slowly and by stages, if at last our research is to bring to light the truth which can of itself impart a kind of conviction of its rightness. So I often had to be content with waiting for an answer to the injunction: “Search out where the name of Parsifal stands!” I had quite understood something you all know from the Parsifal saga—after Parsifal returns, in a certain sense cured of his errors, and again finds the way to the Holy Grail, he is told that his name will appear shining upon the Holy Vessel. But where is the Holy Vessel—where is it to be found? That was the question.

In occult researches of this kind one is often held back, delayed, so that one may not do too much in a day or a year and be driven on to speculate about the truth. Landmarks appear. For me they appeared in the course of really a good many years, during which I sought an answer to the question—Where will you find the name of Parsifal written on the Holy Grail?

I knew that many meanings can be attached to the Holy Vessel in which the Host, the holy bread or wafer, is placed. And on the Holy Vessel itself “Parsifal” was to shine. I was aware also of the deep significance of a passage such as that in St. Mark's Gospel, Chapter 4, verses 11 and 12, 33 and 34, where we are told that the Lord often spoke in parables and only gradually clarified their meaning. In occult investigation, too, one is, led gradually, step by step, and very often only in connection with karmic guidance, and on encountering something that seems to have to do with a certain matter, one very often does not know what will be made of it in one's own soul under the influence of forces coming from the spiritual world. Often one does not know in the least whether something drawn from the depths of the occult world will have a bearing on some problem that one has been following up for years. Thus I did not know how to proceed when I once asked the Norwegian Folk Spirit, the Northern Folk Spirit, about Parsifal and he said: “Learn to understand the saying that through my powers there flowed into the northern Parsifal saga ‘Ganganda greida’”—“circulating cordial”, or something like that!¹ I had no idea what to make of this. It was the same when I was coming out of St. Peter's in Rome under the strong impression made on me by Michelangelo's work that you find on the right-hand side as you enter—the Mother with Jesus, the Mother who looks so young, with Jesus dead already on her knees. And under the after-effect of looking at this work of art (this was a leading of the kind I mean), there came to me, not as a vision but as a true Imagination from the spiritual world, a picture which is inscribed in the Akashic record, showing how Parsifal, after he has gone away for the first time from the Castle of the Grail, where he had failed to ask about the mysteries which prevail there, meets in the forest a young woman who is holding her bridegroom in her lap and weeping over him. But I knew that whether it is the mother or the bride whose bridegroom is dead (Christ is often called the Bridegroom), the picture had a meaning, and that the connection thus established—without my having done anything about it—had a meaning also.

I could tell you of many indications of this kind that came to me during my search for an answer to the question: Where can I find the name of Parsifal inscribed on the Holy Grail? For it had to be there, as the saga itself tells us; and now we need to recall the most important features of the saga.

We know that Parsifal's mother, Herzeleide, bore him in great suffering and with dream-like visions of a quite peculiar character; we know that she wished to shield him from knightly exercises and the code of knightly virtue; that she arranged for the management of her property and withdrew into solitude. She wanted to bring up her child so that he would remain a stranger to the impulses that were certainly present in him; for he was not to be exposed to the dangers that had surrounded his father. But we know also that from an early age the child began to notice everything glorious in Nature; from his mother's teaching he really learnt nothing except that there was a ruling God, and he conceived a wish to serve this God. But he knew nothing of what this God was, and when one day he met some knights he took them for God and knelt before them. When he confessed to his mother that he had seen the knights and wanted to be a knight himself, she put on him a fool's garments and sent him forth. He met with many adventures, and later on—people may call this sentimental but it is of the deepest significance—the mother died of a broken heart because of her son's disappearance: he had not turned back to give her any farewell greeting but had gone forth to experience knightly adventures.

We know that after many wanderings, during which he learnt much about knightly ways and knightly honour, and distinguished himself, he came to the Castle of the Grail. On other occasions I have mentioned that the best literary account of Parsifal's arrival at the Castle is to be found in Chrestien de Troyes. There we are shown how, after often mistaking the way, Parsifal comes to a lonely place and finds two men: one is steering a little boat and the other is fishing from it. They direct him to the Fisher-King, and presently he encounters the Fisher-King in the Grail Castle. The Fisher-King is old and feeble and has to rest on a couch.

While conversing with Parsifal, the Fisher-King hands him a sword, a gift from his niece. Then there appears first in the room a page carrying a spear; the spear is bleeding and the blood runs down over the page's hand; and then a maiden with the Holy Grail, which is a kind of dish. But such glory streams forth from it that all the lights in the hall are outshone by the light of the Holy Grail, just as the stars are overpowered by the light of sun and moon. And then we learn how in the Holy Grail there is something with which the Fisher-King's aged father is nourished in a separate room. He has no need of the sumptuously appointed meal of which the Fisher-King and Parsifal partake. These two nourish themselves with earthly food. But each time a new course—as we should say nowadays—is served, the Holy Grail withdraws into the room of the Fisher-King's aged father, whose only nourishment comes from that which is within the Holy Grail.

Parsifal, to whom it had been intimated on his way from Gurnemanz that he ought not to ask too many questions, does not inquire why the lance bleeds or what the vessel of the Grail signifies—naturally he did not know their names. He then goes to bed for the night, in the same room (according to Chrestien de Troyes) where all this has happened. He was intending to ask questions in the morning, but when morning came he found the whole Castle empty—nobody was there. He called out for someone—nobody was there. He got dressed, and downstairs he found his horse ready. He thought the whole company had ridden out to hunt and wanted to ride after them in order to ask about the miracle of the Grail. But when he was crossing the drawbridge it rose up so quickly that his horse had to make a leap in order not to be thrown into the Castle moat. And he found no trace of the company he had encountered in the Castle on the previous day.

Then Chrestien de Troyes tells us how Parsifal rides on and in a lonely part of the wood comes upon a woman with her husband on her knees, and weeping for him. It is she, according to Chrestien de Troyes, who first indicates to him how he should have asked questions, so as to experience the effect of his questions on the great Mysteries that had been shown to him. We then hear that he went on, often wandering from the right road, until exactly on a Good Friday he came to a hermit, named Trevericent. The hermit tells him how he is being cursed because he has wasted the opportunity of bringing about something like a redemption for the Fisher-King by asking questions about the miracles in the castle. And then he is given many and various teachings.

Now when I tried to accompany Parsifal to the hermit, a saying was disclosed to me—a saying which in the words I have to use for it, in accordance with spiritual-scientific investigation, is nowhere recorded—but I am able to give you the full truth of it. It was spoken—and it made a deep impression on me—by the old hermit to Parsifal, after he had made him acquainted, as far as he could, with the Mystery of Golgotha, of which Parsifal knew little, although he had arrived there on a Good Friday. The old hermit then uttered this saying (I shall use words that are current among us today and are perfectly faithful to the sense of the utterance): “Think of what happened on the occasion of the Mystery of Golgotha! Raise your eyes to the Christ hanging on the Cross, at the moment when He said, ‘From this hour on, there is your mother’; and John left her not. But you”—said the old hermit to Parsifal—“you have left your mother, Herzeleide. It was on your account that she passed from this world.”

The complete connection was not understood by Parsifal, but the words were spoken with the spiritual intention that they should work in his soul as a picture, so that from this picture of John, who did not forsake his mother, he might discern the karmic debt he had incurred by his having deserted his own mother. This was to produce an after—effect in his soul.

We hear then that Parsifal stayed a short while longer with the hermit and then set out again to find the Holy Grail. And it so happens that he finds the Grail shortly or directly before the death of the old Amfortas, the Fisher-King. Then it is that the Knights of the Holy Grail, the Knights of that holy Order, come to him with the words: “Thy name shines in the Grail! Thou art the future Ruler, the King of the Grail, for thy name shines out from the holy Vessel!”

Parsifal becomes the Grail King. And so the name, Parsifal, stands on the holy, gold-gleaming Vessel, in which is the Host. It stands there.

And now, as my concern was to find the Vessel, I was at first misled by a certain circumstance. In occult research—I say this in all humility, with no wish to make an arrogant claim—it has always seemed to me necessary, when a serious problem is involved, to take account not only of what is given directly from occult sources, but also of what external research has brought to light. And in following up a problem it seems to me specially good to make a really conscientious study of what external scholarship has to say, so that one keeps one's feet on the earth and does not get lost in cloud-cuckoo-land. But in the present instance it was exoteric scholarship (this was some time ago) that led me astray. For I gathered from it that when Wolfram von Eschenbach began to write his Parsifal poem, he had—according to his own statement—made use of Chrestien de Troyes and of a certain Kyot. External research has never been able to trace this Kyot and regards him as having been invented by Wolfram von Eschenbach, as though Wolfram von Eschenbach had wanted to attribute to a further source his own extensive additions to Chrestien de Troyes. Exoteric learning is prepared to admit, at most, that Kyot was a copyist of the works of Chrestien de Troyes, and that Wolfram von Eschenbach had put the whole thing together in a rather fanciful way.

So you see in what direction external research goes. It is bound to draw one away, more or less, from the path that leads to Kyot. At the same time, when I had been to a certain extent led astray by external research, something else was borne in upon me (this was another of the karmic readings). I have often spoken of it—in my book Occult Science and in lecture-courses—and should now like to put it as follows.

The first three post-Atlantean epochs, which occur before the Mystery of Golgotha, reappear in a certain sense after the fourth epoch, so that the third epoch reappears in our epoch, the fifth; the second epoch will recur in the sixth, and the first epoch, the epoch of the Holy Rishis, will recur in the seventh, as I have often described. It became clearer and clearer to me—as the outcome of many years of research—that in our epoch there is really something like a resurrection of the Astrology of the third epoch, but permeated now with the Christ Impulse. Today we must search among the stars in a way different from the old ways, but the stellar script must once more become something that speaks to us. And now observe—these thoughts about a revival of the stellar script linked themselves in a remarkable way to the secret of Parsifal, so that I could no longer avoid the belief that the two were connected with each other. And then a picture rose before my soul: a picture shown to me while I was trying to accompany Parsifal in the spirit on his way back to the Grail Castle after his meeting with the hermit Trevericent. This meeting with the hermit is recounted by Chrestien de Troyes in a particularly beautiful and touching way. I should like to read you a little of this, telling how Parsifal comes to the hermit:

Er gibt dem Ross den Lauf
Und seufst aus tiefstem Herzen auf.
Weil er vor Gott sich schuldig fühlt
Und Reue in der Brust ihm wühlt.
Mit Weinen kommt er durch den Wald,
Doch vor der Klause macht er halt,
Steigt ab von seinem Pferde,
Legt seine Wehr zur Erde—
Und fand in einem Kirchlein klein
Den frommen Mann. In seiner Pein
Er vor ihm auf die Knie sinkt,
Das Nass, das ihm vom Auge blinkt,
Rollt endlos nieder auf sein Kinn,
Als er in kindlich schlichtem Sinn
Die Hände vor ihm faltet.
“Der Ihr des Trostes waltet,
Mein reuiges Geständnis hört:
Fünf Jahre war ich wahnbetört,
Dass ohne Glauben ich gelebt
Und nach dem Bösen nur gestrebt.”
“Sag mir, warum du das getan
Und bitte Gott, dass er dich nah'n
Dereinst noch lässt der Sel'gen Schar.”
“Beim Fischerkönig einst ich war;
Ich sah den Speer, auf dessen Stahl
Es blutig tropft. Ich sah den Gral
Und unterliess die Frage.
Was dieses Blut besage,
Und was der Gral bedeute.
Seit diesem Tag bis heute
War ich in schwere Seelennot.
Weit besser ware mir der Tod!
Und da vergass ich unsern Herrn
Und blieb von seiner Gnade fern.”
“So sage mir, wie man dich nennt.”
“Als Perceval man mich erkennt.”
Da seufzt der Greis aus tiefster Brust,
Der Name ist ihm wohl bewusst.
Er spricht: “Dem Leid hat dich vermählt,
Was ohne Wissen du gefehlt.”

[Quoted from Eduard Wechssler's
Die Sage vom Heiligen Gral
(Halle, 1898).]

He roused the steed to start
And sighed from out his deepest heart,
For guilt to God doth rack his breast,
Remorseful feelings give no rest.
With weeping comes he through the wood
Yet halts where hermitage has stood.
Makes ready to dismount,
Lays weapons on the ground—
And finds within a chapel cell
The pious man. ’Fore him he fell
Upon his knees in woeful plight,
The tear that blinked before his sight
Now rolls at last down to his chin
As he with simple childlike mien
Doth fold his hands together
That he may solace gather.
“Hear ye my sad confession:
Five years I bore delusion
While without faith my life I led
And only strove towards the bad.”
“Say me wherefore thou this hast done
And pray to God that He ere long
Will draw thee near the holy Bond.”
“I once by Fisher-King did stand.
I saw the spear upon whose steel
Hung drops of blood. I saw the Grail
Yet did forbear to put the word
What signified this blood,
This Grail, what signified—
’Twere better had I died!”
Until this day indeed
My soul's in direst need.
Our Lord I thought of never more
And from His Grace I stayed afar.”
“Now tell me what thy name may be.”
“As Parsifal men speak of me.”
Then sighs the aged man with groan,
The name to him is full well-known.
“What thou unwittingly hast left undone
Has brought this sorrow as thy doom.”

[Translation by M. Cotterell.]

Then come the conversations between Parsifal and the hermit of which I have spoken already. And when I sought to accompany Parsifal in spirit during his return to the Grail, it was often as though there shone forth in the soul how he traveled by day and by night, how he devoted himself to nature by day and to the stars by night, as if the stellar script had spoken to his unconscious self and as if this was a prophecy of that which the holy company of Knights who came from the Grail to meet him had said: “Thy name shines forth in radiance from the Grail.” But Parsifal, quite clearly, did not know what to make of the message of the stars, for it remained in his unconscious being, and therefore one cannot so very well interpret it, however much one may try to immerse oneself in it through spiritual research.

Then I tried once more to get back to Kyot, and behold—a particular thing said about him by Wolfram von Eschenbach made a deep impression on me and I felt I had to relate it to the ‘ganganda greida’. The connection seemed inevitable. I had to relate it also to the image of the woman holding her dead bridegroom on her lap. And then, when I was not in the least looking for it, I came upon a saying by Kyot: “er jach, ez hiez ein dinc der gral”—“he said, a thing was called the Grail.” Now exoteric research itself tells us how Kyot came to these words—“er jach, ez hiez ein dinc der gral.” He acquired a book by Flegetanis in Spain—an astrological book. No doubt about it, one may say: Kyot is the man who stimulated by Flegetanis—whom he calls Flegetanis and in whom lives a certain knowledge of the stellar script—Kyot is the man who, stimulated by this revived astrology, sees the thing called the Grail. Then I knew that Kyot is not to be given up; I knew that he discloses an important clue if one is searching in the sense of Spiritual Science: he at least has seen the Grail.

Where, then, is the Grail, which today must be found in such a way that the name of Parsifal stands upon it? Where can it be found? Now in the course of my researches it had been shown to me that the name—that is the first thing—must be sought for in the stellar script. And then, on a day which I must regard as specially significant for me, I was shown where the gold-gleaming vessel in its reality is to be found, so that through it—through its symbolical expression in the stellar script—we are led to the secret of the Grail. And then I saw in the stellar script something that anyone can see—only he will not immediately discern the secret. For one day, while I was following with inner sight the gold-gleaming sickle of the moon, as it appeared in the heavens, with the dark moon like a great disc dimly visible within it ... so that with physical sight one saw the gold-gleaming moon—ganganda greida, the journeying viaticum—and within it the large Host, the dark disc. This is not to be seen if one merely glances superficially at the moon, but it is evident if one looks closely—and there, in wonderful letters of the occult script, was the name Parsifal!

That, to begin with, was the stellar script. For in fact, if this reading of the stellar script is seen in the right light, it yields for our hearts and minds something—though perhaps not all—of the Parsifal secret, the secret of the Holy Grail. What I have still to say, briefly, on this subject I will give you tomorrow.

• 1. Another possible rendering is “journeying viaticum.” (See note at the end of the lectures.)

When a man of our time goes through an occult training which leads him to such experiences as were described in the last two lectures, he enters by means of this training into the spiritual worlds; and there he experiences certain facts and meets with certain beings. The phrase, “To see the Sun at Midnight”, is fundamentally only an expression for spiritual facts and for the meeting with spiritual beings who are connected with the Sun-existence. But when this man of our time ascends into the higher worlds, he goes through certain experiences which one cannot describe otherwise than by saying: A man experiences much that is significant in the higher worlds through such an ascent, but he also feels himself forsaken and alone. He feels that he can gather up his experience in some such words as these: “Much, very much, you are seeing here, but the very thing you must long for above all else, after all you have gone through—that you are not able to experience.” And he would like to question all the beings whom he meets after such an ascent concerning certain secrets he longs to understand. That is the feeling he has. But all these beings, who unveil much that is immense and powerful, remain silent when he wants to learn from them about those mysteries which he must now regard as the most important of all. Hence the man of our time, when he has thus mounted to the higher worlds, feels it to be above all painful that in spite of all the splendour, in spite of his meeting with those glorious beings, he has an immense emptiness in his inner life. And if nothing else were to happen, a protracted experience of this loneliness, this forlorn condition in the higher worlds, would finally bring about something like despair in his soul.

Now at this point something can happen—and usually does happen if the ascent has been undertaken according to the true rules of Initiation—which may be a protection from this despair, at first, though not permanently. Something like a remembrance may arise in the soul, or one might say a retrospect into far-off times of the past, a kind of reading in the Akashic Record about long-past happenings. And what is then experienced (one cannot characterise these things except by trying to clothe them in approximate words) might be put in the following way: “When as a modern man you ascend into these higher worlds, you are met by forlorn-ness, despair. But pictures call up for you long-past happenings, showing you that in distant times men ascended into the worlds into which you now wish to rise. Yes, from these memory pictures you may well come to recognise that in earlier incarnations your own soul took part in what these men experienced when formerly they rose into the higher worlds. It might even appear that the soul of a present-day man, in contemplating these pictures, looks at experiences of his own, gone through in times long since past. Then in those remote ages this soul would have been an Initiate. In other cases, the man would know only that his soul had been connected with those who as Initiates had then risen into the higher worlds; but his soul now feels lonely and forsaken, whereas those once initiated souls did not feel lonely and forsaken in the same worlds, but experienced innermost bliss. He will recognise further that this was so because in those ancient times souls were differently constituted, and for this reason they experienced differently what they beheld in the higher worlds. What is it, then, that is really experienced?

The experience now in question is such that it brings before the soul beings of higher worlds who are working upon the sense-world from the super-sensible worlds; beings are perceived who stand behind our sense-world; conditions are seen such as were described yesterday. But if one tries to summarise all one sees, it can be characterised in some such way as the following: The seer feels himself to be in the higher worlds, and gazing down, as it were, into the sense-world; he feels himself united in some way with spirits who have passed through the Gate of Death, and, with them, too, he gazes downward, and sees how they will again employ their forces in order to enter physical existence. He looks down and sees how forces are sent out of the super-sensible worlds in order to bring about the processes of the different kingdoms of nature in the sense-world. He sees the whole current of events which are prepared for our world out of the higher worlds. Because in the course of a sojourn of this kind in the higher worlds he is outside his physical and etheric bodies, he looks down upon them and sees also those forces in the Cosmos, in the whole spiritual universe, which are working on the physical and etheric bodies of man. And through the activity of the beings into whose company he has entered, he learns to understand how physical and etheric bodies come into existence within the physical world. He learns to understand this thoroughly. He comes to understand how certain beings who are associated with the Sun send their activity into the Earth and work on engendering the physical and etheric bodies of man. He learns also to know certain beings associated with the Moon-existence, who work down out of the Cosmos in order likewise to co-operate in bringing about the physical and etheric bodies of human beings.

Then, however, arises a great longing, a longing that becomes terrible for a man of the present time. It is the longing to know something of how the astral body and the ego are born out of the Cosmos, how they come into existence. Whereas the seer can discern exactly how the physical body and the etheric body arise out of the forces of the Cosmos, completely hidden from him is everything that could point to how the astral body and the ego of man are brought into being. In deepest darkness and secrecy is veiled everything that has to do with the astral body and ego. Thus the feeling grows: What you are in your innermost nature, what you yourself really are, is veiled from your spiritual sight; and that in which you sheathe yourself when you are living in the physical world is disclosed to you precisely enough!

All this is experienced by a man of the present time when he rises to higher worlds in the manner described. It was experienced. also by those who in ancient times undertook the ascent. But they did not feel the great longing we have spoken of: they had no need to behold their innermost being, for they were so constituted that they felt a deep inward satisfaction in perceiving how the spiritual beings whose company they had reached were at work in building physical and etheric bodies on the Earth. In contemplating how these beings worked down from the Sun to accomplish this task, the souls who were initiated in past times found their highest satisfaction. It must be added that the work performed by these beings presented itself under a different aspect in those times; hence the satisfaction it could afford. In our time the work appears in such a light that one asks: Wherefore all this preparation of the physical and etheric bodies, if one cannot understand what these sheaths conceal? That is the difference between a person of the present time and a man of old. And the period in the past which was connected particularly with these experiences is that in which Zarathustra initiated his pupils and guided them up into the higher worlds. If aspirants were to be led up into the higher worlds in the same way today as they were by Zarathustra, they would feel that emptiness and loneliness to which reference has been made. In the time of Zarathustra those who were to be initiated experienced the working of Ahura Mazdao on the physical body and the etheric body, and in the unveiling of this wonderful mystery they felt bliss and satisfaction, for they were so disposed that they felt inwardly stirred when they saw how the sheaths which man needs if he is to accomplish his Earth-mission are brought into existence. In this they found satisfaction.

Thus it was with the Zarathustrian Initiation. For the initiates could “See the Sun at Midnight”; that is, they were not looking upon the physical form of the Sun but upon the spiritual beings who are linked with the Sun. They saw emanating from the Sun the forces which play into the physical body; saw how the forces which the Sun is able to send forth mould the human head and form the different parts of the human brain. For it would be folly for anyone to think that a marvellous construction such as the human brain could come into existence merely through terrestrial forces; solar forces must work into it. These forces bring together the complex lobular formations of the human brain, poised above the human face. Engaged in this task are quite numerous beings; Zarathustra gave them the name of “Amshaspands”. They furnish the stimulus for the forces of the Cosmos which make possible the building of the human brain and the upper nerves of the spinal cord, with the exception of the lower twenty-eight pairs of nerves. Then Zarathustra also pointed out how other currents flow from beings who are linked with the life of the Moon; he showed how wonderfully the structure of the Cosmos is adapted so that from twenty-eight groups of entities—“Izeds” as they are called—currents proceed which build up the spinal cord with its twenty-eight lower pairs of nerve fibres. Thus are physical and etheric bodies formed out of currents which stream forth from cosmic beings.

They were powerful impressions that the initiates of Zarathustra received in this way. And in receiving them as an expression of the work of Ahura Mazdao, they felt an inner bliss concerning all that is thus accomplished. in the world. If a modern man were to raise himself in the same way into the higher worlds, he would of course also be capable of wonderment; he, too, would be able to begin to experience the same bliss. But gradually he would pass on to the feeling which one cannot clothe in words other than these: “What is the purpose of it all? I know nothing about that being who passes from incarnation to incarnation! I know solely about those beings who in each new incarnation build up sheaths out of the Cosmos, but they build only sheaths.” That was precisely the essence of the Zarathustra Initiation: its revelation of the connection between the earthly part of man and the life of the Sun. It was characteristic of the time of Zarathustra that men were able to absorb into their occult knowledge those mysteries we have now described.

Again, it was in a different way that souls in ancient Egypt entered the higher worlds at Initiation—souls, for example, who went through the Hermes Initiation. We have already spoken about all these things; but in these lectures they will be presented in rather more detail than was possible previously. When in ancient Egyptian times souls were raised into the higher worlds through the Hermes Initiation, then—as it must always be after Initiation—they felt themselves to be outside their physical and etheric bodies and knew that they were now within a world of spiritual facts and spiritual beings. Wide was the circuit of vision through which these souls were then led. They were shown the individual beings and facts, as can happen also with the soul of today. But one must not think of it as though they went about on physical feet; it was their vision that was guided, as if a person's sight were to be led all round a region as wide as the universe. Thus it was in this Initiation.

Then came a moment of experience wherein the initiates felt as though a traveler in a country encircled by the sea had reached the shore. They knew they had come to the farthest point attainable. In the Egyptian Initiation they experienced what one cannot clothe in other words than these: “In your vision you have been led far and wide through cosmic realms and have come to know the beings and forces that work on your physical body and your etheric body. But now you are entering the most holy place. You are entering a region where you can feel yourself united with the Being who works with others on the part of you that goes from one incarnation to another, and on your astral body.” It is a significant experience that occurs at this point, for after it all things become in some sense different.

For the initiate, after that, one possibility is closed. In the world he has now entered, on the shores of cosmic existence, he is no longer able to make use of his former ways of thinking and judging. If he cannot cast off all this earthly, physical power of judgment; if he cannot disregard what has guided him so far, then he cannot have this experience on the borders of existence; he cannot feel himself united with that Being who is active when the human being as spirit and soul approaches his birth into a new incarnation, and seeks nation, family and parents in order to clothe himself with new sheaths. All the beings whom he has already come to know, and who make it clear to him how the etheric and physical sheaths arise and are formed out of the Cosmos, are unable to explain what kind of forces are working in that Being with whom he now feels himself united, and who is building and weaving in the innermost astral being of the man himself. It becomes quite apparent to the seer, as it was to the Egyptian soul who was going through the Hermes Initiation, that now, after the soul is outside its sheaths and has passed through the “cosmic existence” already alluded to, it feels itself united with a Being. The soul can feel the qualities of this Being, only it feels itself as if it were within these qualities and not outside this Being, and it can know that this Being is really there, but that it is at the same time within this Being. And the first impression that the aspirant receives of this Being is such that one says to oneself: In this Being lie the forces which bring the soul from one incarnation to another, and also the forces which illuminate the soul between death and a new birth. All that is there within. But when there surges towards you a force like unto spiritual cosmic Warmth, one that conveys the soul from death to a new birth; and when there presses towards you the spiritual Light that illumines souls between death and a new birth, and when you feel how this Warmth and this Light stream out from the Being with whom you are united, you are now in a quite peculiar situation. You have had to drink the waters of Lethe, to forget the art of understanding which formerly guided you through the physical world, to lay aside your former power of judgment, your intellectuality, for here these would only lead you astray; and as yet you have gained nothing of a new kind. In your experience of the cosmic Warmth which brings the soul to a new birth, you are within the ocean of forces which illuminate the soul between death and a new birth. You experience the force and the light which issue from this Being. You behold this Being in such manner that you can do no other than ask of it: “Who art Thou? For Thou alone canst tell me who Thou art, and only then can I know that which takes the essential inward part of me as a human being from death to a new birth. Only when Thou tellest me this can I know what my innermost nature is as man!” And mute remains the Being with whom the aspirant knows himself to be united. He feels with the deepest part of himself that he is united with the deepest part of the Being. The urge towards self-knowledge arises, to know what a man is—and yet the Being remains silent. The aspirant must first have stood for a while before this silent Being, and have felt deeply the longing to have the riddle of the universe solved after a new manner, as it never can be on the physical Earth; he must have brought into this world, to this Being, as a force out of himself, the deep longing to have the riddle of the universe solved in a way foreign to physical existence, and the soul must entirely live in the longing to have the cosmic enigma solved in this manner. Then, when he has felt himself united with the mute spiritual Being, and has lived in him with longing for the solution that we have indicated, then he feels that there streams forth into this spiritual Being with whom he is united, the force of his own longing. And because this force of the aspirant's own longing for the solution of the riddle streams out into the spiritual Being, after a time it gives birth to something like another being projected from it. But what is born is not after the manner of an earthly birth, as the aspirant knows at once through his own vision. An earthly birth arises “in time”; it enters into the stream of time. But concerning the birth from this Being, the aspirant knows: It is born from Him, it has been born from Him since primordial times—always, and this birth continues from primordial ages up to the present. Only this birth-process of one being from another has hitherto not been visible to man; until now it has been withheld from his sight. This birth-process consists in his: it is really continuous, but man, owing to his having prepared himself by means of his yearning for the solving of the riddle, now sees it—it is now perceived in the spiritual world. The aspirant knows this. Thus he does not say: Now a being is born, but: From the Being with whom you have united yourself, ever since primordial times, a being has always been born; but now the process of the being's birth, and the being itself who is born, are perceptible to you.

What I have now pictured to you, as far as it can be done in the words of our language, is that to which the Hermes Initiator led. his pupils. And the feelings that I have just described (I might say with stammering words, for the things contain so much that the words of our tongue can express them only in a stammering way)—these feelings were the experiences of the so-called Egyptian Isis Initiation.

When the aspirant who was going through the Isis Initiation had reached the furthest shore of existence and had gazed upon the beings who build up the physical body and the etheric body, when he had stood before the silent Goddess from whom Warmth and Light come forth for the innermost of the human soul, he said to himself: “That is Isis. That is the mute and silent Goddess whose countenance can be unveiled to no-one who sees only with mortal eyes, but only to those who have worked themselves through to the shores which have been described, so that they can see with those eyes which go from incarnation to incarnation and are no longer mortal. For an impenetrable veil hides the form of Isis from mortal eyes.”

When the aspirant had thus gazed upon Isis and had experienced in his soul the feeling described, he understood what has been described. as the birth. What was this “birth?” He understood that it can be designated as “The resounding through all space of the Music of the Spheres,” and as the merging of the tones of this Sphere-music with the creative cosmic Word—the Word which permeates space and pours into the beings everything that has to be so poured into them, as the soul has to be poured into the physical and etheric body after passing through the life between death and a new birth. Everything that has to be thus poured out from the spiritual world into the physical world, so that what is poured out acquires the inward character of soul, is poured in from the Harmony of the Spheres resounding through space. The Harmony of the Spheres gradually assumes such a form that through the inner significance it expresses it can be understood as the Cosmic Word—the Word which ensouls the beings that are vitalised by the forces of Warmth and Light which pour into those bodies that arise from the divine forces and beings perceived with the vision already attained.

Thus did the aspirant look into the world of the Harmony of the Spheres, the world of the Cosmic Word; thus did he look into the world which is the veritable home of the human soul during the time between death and a new birth. That which is hidden deep in the physical earthly existence of man, but lives between death and a new birth in the splendour of the Light and Warmth; that which deeply veils itself in the physical world as the world of the Harmony of the Spheres and the Cosmic Word, was experienced in the Hermes-Initiation as coming to birth from Isis. There Isis stands before the aspirant, Isis herself on the one side, and on the other side the being she has borne, whom one must speak of as Cosmic Tones and the Cosmic Word. The aspirant feels himself in the company of Isis and of the Cosmic Word born of her. And this “Cosmic Word” is in the first place the appearing of Osiris. “Isis in association with Osiris”: thus do they appear before direct vision; for in the very oldest Egyptian Initiation it was said that Osiris was at the same time spouse and son of Isis. And in the older Egyptian Initiation the essential thing was that the aspirant, through this Initiation, experienced the mysteries of soul-life, which remains united with man during the period between death and a new birth. Through the union with Osiris it was possible to recognise oneself in one's deeper significance as man.

So it was brought to pass that the Egyptian Initiate met the Cosmic Word and the Cosmic Tones as the elucidators of his own being in the spiritual world. But that was up to a certain point of time only in the old Egyptian period. After that it ceased. There was a great difference—this is shown also by the Akashic Records when one looks back into ancient times—between the experiences of the Egyptian Initiate in the ancient Egyptian temples and what he experienced later on.

Let us bring before our souls what the Initiate experienced in these later times. He could still be led through the vast spaces of the universe to the confines of existence; there he could meet with all the beings who build up the physical and etheric bodies of man; there he could approach the shores of being and could have the vision of the mute, silent Isis, and could apprehend in her the Cosmic Warmth which contains for man the forces that lead from death to a new birth. There he could also become acquainted with the Light which illumines the soul between death and a new birth; and the longing arose to hear the Cosmic Word and the Cosmic Harmony; longing lived in the soul when it united itself with the silent Isis. But the Goddess remained dumb! In that later age no Osiris could be born, no Cosmic Harmony resounded, no Cosmic Word expounded that which now showed itself only as Cosmic Warmth and Cosmic Light. And the soul of the aspirant could not have expressed. these experiences otherwise than by saying something like the following; “Thus, 0 Goddess, do I look up in grief to thee, tormented by the thirst for knowledge, the yearning for knowledge, and thou, thou remainest silent and speechless towards the tormented and sorrow-laden soul. And this soul, because it cannot understand itself, seems to itself as though extinguished, as if it must lose its very existence.” And through her mourning countenance the Goddess expressed her powerlessness to bring forth the Cosmic Word and the Cosmic Harmony. The aspirant saw in her that she had been deprived of the power to bring forth Osiris and to have him at her side, Osiris as Son and Spouse. He felt that Osiris had been torn from Isis.

Those who went through this Initiation and came back into the physical world had a serious but resigned world-outlook. They knew her, the Holy Isis, but they felt themselves as “Sons of the Widow”. And the point of time between the old Initiation, wherein one was able to experience the birth of Osiris in those ancient Egyptian Mysteries, and that wherein one met only the mute, mourning Isis and could become a Son of the Widow in the Egyptian Mysteries; the point of time which separates these two phases of the Egyptian Initiation—when was it? It was the time in which Moses lived. For the karma of Egypt was fulfilled in such a way that not only was Moses initiated into the Mysteries of Egypt, but he took them with him. When he led his people out of Egypt he took with him the part of the Egyptian Initiation which added the Osiris-Initiation to the mourning Isis, as she later became. Such was the transition from the Egyptian civilisation to that of the Old Testament. Truly, Moses had carried away the secret of Osiris, the secret of the Cosmic Word! And if he had not left behind the powerless Isis there could not have resounded for him, in the way that he had to understand it for the sake of his people, that great, significant Word, “I AM THE I AM”, (“Ejeh asher Ejeh”). So was the Egyptian Mystery carried over to the ancient Hebrew Mystery.

We have tried now to show, using such words as are available for these matters, what the experiences were like in the Mysteries of Zarathustra and of Egypt. These things do not lend themselves to intellectual presentation. The essential point is that the soul goes through experiences corresponding to what I have endeavoured to describe. And it is important to enter into what took place in the soul of the aspirant in the later Egyptian Initiation: to feel how he raised his soul into the higher worlds and met Isis with the mourning look and sorrow-stricken countenance, the result of her having to look on the human soul which was well able to yearn and thirst for knowledge of the spiritual worlds, but could not be satisfied.

Thus also certain Greek Initiates experienced the same Being of whom the Egyptians spoke as the later Isis. Hence the seriousness of the Greek Initiation, where it appears in its solemnity. What had been experienced in earlier times in the super-sensible worlds—that which gave significance to those super-sensible worlds in that they resounded to the Cosmic Word and Cosmic Tone—was no longer there. It was there no more ... The super-sensible worlds were as though desolate and forsaken by the Cosmic Word, those worlds into which in earlier Initiations man had been able to enter. The Zarathustrian Initiate could still feel satisfied when in these worlds he encountered the Beings already described, for he felt himself fulfilled by the Cosmic Light, which he perceived as Ahura Mazdao. He perceived it as masculine, of solar nature; the Egyptian perceived it as feminine, lunar. And at a higher stage in the Zarathustrian Initiation he perceived also the Cosmic Word, not so concretely as if born from such a Being as Isis; but he experienced it and he knew the Harmony of the Spheres and the Cosmic Word.

In the later Egyptian time—and also in other lands during this late Egyptian time—when a man raised himself into the higher worlds, his feelings were quite similar to those of a present-day man, as described at the beginning of the present lecture. He rises up into the higher worlds, becomes acquainted with all the Beings who co-operate in building up the physical and etheric bodies, but he feels himself forsaken and alone if nothing else appears, because he has something in himself that longs for the Cosmic Word and the Cosmic Harmony, and the Cosmic Word and the Cosmic Harmony cannot resound for him. today such a man feels lonely and forsaken; in the later Egyptian Age he did not only feel forsaken and desolate, but, if he was a true “Son of the Widow” and was out of the physical and etheric bodies and in the spiritual worlds, he felt himself as a human soul in such a way that be was constrained to clothe his feeling in the words: The God is preparing to leave the worlds which you have always trodden when you felt the Cosmic Word; the God has ceased to be active there. And ever more and more did this feeling condense itself into what one may call the super-sensible equivalent of that which one encounters in the sense-world as the death of man—when one sees a person die, when one knows that he is passing out of the physical world. And now, when the Initiate of the later Egyptian Age rose up into the higher worlds, he was a partaker in the gradual dying of the God. As one feels with a person when he is passing into the spiritual world, so did the Initiate of the later Egyptian period feel how the God took leave of the spiritual world in order to pass over into another world. This was the significant and remarkable part of the later Egyptian Initiation—that when the aspirant raised his life into the spiritual worlds, it was not into rapture and bliss, but in order to partake in the gradual passing away of a God who was present in these higher worlds as Cosmic Word and Cosmic Harmony. Out of this frame of mind there gradually condensed the myth of Osiris, who was torn away from Isis and conveyed to Asia, and for whom Isis mourned.

With this lecture we have placed ourselves on one bank of the stream which separates the evolution of humanity into two parts. We have come from the direction of this evolution as far as the bank; we stand upon it, and what this standing there signifies has been brought home to us through the frame of mind, of the later Egyptian Initiate, the “Son of the Widow”, who was initiated in order to experience mourning and resignation. It will now be our task, in the boat of Spiritual Science, to cross the stream which separates the two shores of human evolution.

In the last lecture we shall see what is on the other shore—when we push off our boat from the place where we have experienced the mourning for the God who is dying in the Heavens, when we leave that place in order to traverse the stream and arrive at the other bank. When the boat of spiritual science has carried us across, with the remembrance that we have previously experienced the dying of a God in the Heavens, we shall see what is offered to our view on the other side.

Tis more than a year since I was able to speak here about those things that lie so deeply on our hearts, those things that we believe must enter more and more into human knowledge because, from our time onward, the human soul will feel increasingly that these things belong to its requirements, to its deepest longings. And it is with great pleasure that I greet you here in this place for the second time, along with all those who have traveled here in order to show in your midst how their hearts and souls are dedicated to our sacred work the whole world over.

When I was able to speak to you here last time we let our spiritual gaze journey far into the wide regions of the universe. This time it will be our task to stay more in the regions of earthly evolution. Our thoughts, however, will penetrate to regions that will lead us nonetheless to the portals of the eternal manifestation of the spiritual in the world. We shall speak about a subject that will apparently lead us far away in time and in space from the here and now. It will not on that account lead us less to what lives in the here and now, but rather to what lives just as much in all times and in all the places of the earth because it will bring us near to the secrets of the eternal in all existence. It will lead us to the ceaseless search of man for the wells of eternity where he may drink for the healing and refreshment of something in him which, ever since they gained understanding of it, men have considered all-powerful in life, namely, love. For wherever we are gathered together we are gathered in the name of the search for wisdom and the search for love. What we seek is extended out into space and can be observed in the far horizon of the Cosmic All, but it can also be observed in the wrestling soul of man wherever he may be. It meets us especially when we turn our gaze to one of those mighty manifestations of the wrestling spirit of man such as are given us in some great work like the one that is to form the basis of our present studies.

We are going to speak of one of the greatest and most penetrating manifestations of the human spirit—the Bhagavad Gita, which, ancient as it is, yet in its foundations comes before us with renewed significance at the present time. A short time ago the peoples of Europe and those of the West generally, knew little of the Bhagavad Gita. Only during the last century has the fame of this wonderful poem extended to the West. Only lately have Western peoples become familiar with this marvelous song. But these lectures of ours will show that a real and deep knowledge of this poem, as against mere familiarity with it, can only come when its occult foundations are more and more revealed. For what meets us in the Bhagavad Gita sprang from an age of which we have often spoken in connection with our anthroposophical studies. The mighty sentiments, feelings and ideas it contains had their origin in an age that was still illumined by what was communicated through the old human clairvoyance. One who tries to feel what this poem breathes forth page by page as it speaks to us, will experence, page by page, something like a breath of the ancient clairvoyance humanity possessed.

The Western world's first acquaintance with this poem came in an age in which there was little understanding for the original clairvoyant sources from which it sprang. Nevertheless, this lofty song of the Divine struck like a wonderful flash of lightning into the Western world, so that a man of Central Europe, when he first became acquainted with this Eastern song, said that he must frankly consider himself happy to have lived in a time when he could become acquainted with the wondrous things expressed in it. This man was not one who was unacquainted with the spiritual life of humanity through the centuries, indeed through thousands of years. He was one who looked deeply into spiritual life—Wilhelm von Humboldt, the brother of the celebrated astronomer. Other members of Western civilization, men of widely different tongues, have felt the same. What a wonderful feeling it produces in us when we let this Bhagavad Gita work upon us, even in its opening verses!

It seems that in our circle, my dear friends, perhaps particularly in our circle, we often have to begin by working our way through to a fully unprejudiced position. For in spite of the fact that the Bhagavad Gita has been known for so short a time in the West, yet its holiness has so taken our hearts by storm, so to say, that we are inclined to approach it from the start with this feeling of holiness without making it clear to ourselves what the starting-point of the poem really is. Let us for once place this before us quite dispassionately, perhaps even a little grotesquely.

A poem is here before us that from the very first sets us in the midst of a wild and stormy battle. We are introduced to a scene of action that is hardly less wild than that into which Homer straightway places us in the Iliad. We go further and are confronted in this scene with something which Arjuna—one of the foremost, perhaps the foremost of the personalities in the Song—feels from the start to be a fratricidal conflict. He comes before us as one who is horror-stricken by the battle, for he sees there among the enemy his own blood relations. His bow falls from his grasp when it becomes clear to him that he is to enter a murderous strife with men who are descended from the same ancestors as himself, men in whose veins flows the same blood as his own. We almost begin to sympathize with him when he drops his bow and recoils before the awful battle between brothers.

Then before our gaze arises Krishna, the great spiritual teacher of Arjuna, and a wonderful, sublime teaching is brought before us in vivid colors in such a way that it appears as a teaching given to his pupil. But to what is all this leading? That is the question we must first of all set before us, because it is not enough just to give ourselves up to the holy teaching in the words of Krishna to Arjuna. The circumstances of its giving must also be studied. We must visualize the situation in which Krishna exhorts Arjuna not to quail before this battle with his brothers but take up his bow and hurl himself with all his might into the devastating conflict. Krishna's teachings emerge amid the battle like a cloud of spiritual light that at first is incomprehensible, and they require Arjuna not to recoil but to stand firm and do his duty in it. When we bring this picture before our eyes it is almost as though the teaching becomes transformed by its setting. Then again this setting leads us further into the, whole weaving of the Song of the Mahabharata, the mighty song of which the Bhagavad Gita is only a part.

The teaching of Krishna leads us out into the storms of everyday life, into the wild confusion of human battles, errors and earthly strife. His teaching appears almost like a justification of these human conflicts. If we bring this picture before us quite dispassionately, perhaps the Bhagavad Gita will suggest to us altogether different questions from those that arise when—imagining we can understand them—we alight upon something similar to what we are accustomed to find in ordinary works of literature. So it is perhaps necessary to point first to this setting of the Gita in order to realize its world-historic significance, and then be able to see how it can be of increasing and special significance in our own time.

I have already said that this majestic song came into the Western world as something completely new, and almost equally new were the feelings, perceptions and thoughts that lie behind it. For what did Western civilization really know of Eastern culture before it became acquainted with the Bhagavad Gita? Apart from various things that have only become known in this last century, very little indeed! If we accept certain movements that remained secret, Western civilization has had no direct knowledge of what is actually the central nerve impulse of the whole of this great poem. When we approach such a thing we feel how little human language, philosophy, ideas, serving for everyday life, are sufficient for it; how little they suffice for describing such heights of the spiritual life of man upon earth. We need something quite different from ordinary descriptions to give expression to what shines out to us from such a revelation of the spirit of man.

I should like first to place two pictures before you so you may have a foundation for further descriptions. The one is taken from the book itself, the other from the spiritual life of the West. This can be comparatively easily understood, whereas the one from the book appears for the moment quite remote. Beginning then with the latter, we are told how, in the midst of the battle, Krishna appears and unveils before Arjuna cosmic secrets, great immense teachings. Then his pupil is overcome by the strong desire to see the form, the spiritual form of this soul, to have knowledge of him who is speaking such sublime things. He begs Krishna to show himself to him in such manner as he can in his true spirit form. Then Krishna appears to him (later we shall return to this description) in his form—a form that embraces all things, a great, sublime, glorious beauty, a nobility that reveals cosmic mysteries. We shall see there is little in the world to approach the glory of this description of how the sublime spirit form of the teacher is revealed to the clairvoyant eye of his pupil.

Before Arjuna's gaze lies the wild battlefield where much blood will have to flow and where the fratricidal struggle is to develop. The soul of Krishna's disciple is to be wafted away from this battlefield of devastation. It is to perceive and plunge into a world where Krishna lives in his true form. That is a world of holiest blessedness, withdrawn from all strife and conflict, a world where the secrets of existence are unveiled, far removed from everyday affairs. Yet to that world man's soul belongs in its most inward, most essential being. The soul is now to have knowledge of it. Then it will have the possibility of descending again and re-entering the confused and devastating battles of this our world. In truth, as we follow the description of this picture we may ask ourselves what is really taking place in Arjuna's soul? It is as though the raging battle in which it stands were forced upon it because this soul feels itself related to a heavenly world in which there is no human suffering, no battle, no death. It longs to rise into a world of the eternal, but with the inevitable force that can come only from the impulse of so sublime a being as Krishna, this soul must be forced downward into the chaotic confusion of the battle. Arjuna would gladly turn away from all this chaos, for the life of earth around him appears as something strange and far away, altogether unrelated to his soul. We can distinctly feel this soul is still one of those who long for the higher worlds, who would live with the Gods, and who feel human life as something foreign and incomprehensible to them. In truth a wondrous picture, containing things of sublime import!

A hero, Arjuna, surrounded by other heroes and by the warrior hosts—a hero who feels all that is spread before him as unfamiliar and remote—and a God, Krishna, who is needed to direct him to this world. He does not understand this world until Krishna makes it comprehensible to him. It may sound paradoxical, but I know that those who can enter into the matter more deeply will understand me when I say that Arjuna stands there like a human soul to whom the earthly side of the world has first to be made comprehensible.

Now this Bhagavad Gita comes to men of the West who undoubtedly have an understanding for earthly things! It comes to men who have attained such a high degree of materialistic civilization that they have a very good understanding for all that is earthly. It has to be understood by souls who are separated by a deep gulf from all that a genuine observation shows Arjuna's soul to be. All that to which Arjuna shows no inclination, needing Krishna to tame him down to earthly things, seems to the Westerner quite intelligible and obvious. The difficulty for him lies rather in being able to lift himself up to Arjuna, to whom has to be imparted an understanding of what is well understood in the West, the sense matters of earthly life. A God, Krishna, must make our civilization and culture intelligible to Arjuna. How easy it is in our time for a person to understand what surrounds him! He needs no Krishna. It is well for once to see clearly the mighty gulfs that can lie between different human natures, and not to think it too easy for a Western soul to understand a nature like that of Krishna or Arjuna. Arjuna is a man, but utterly different from those who have slowly and gradually evolved in Western civilization.

That is one picture I wanted to bring you, for words cannot lead us more than a very little way into these things. Pictures that we can grasp with our souls can do better because they speak not only to understanding but to that in us which on earth will always be deeper than our understanding—to our power of perception and to our feeling. Now I would like to place another picture before you, one not less sublime than that from the Bhagavad Gita but that stands infinitely nearer to Western culture. Here in the West we have a beautiful, poetic picture that Western man knows and that means much for him. But first let us ask, to what extent does Western mankind really believe that this being of Krishna once appeared before Arjuna and spoke those words? We are now at the starting-point of a concept of the world that will lead us on until this is no mere matter of belief, but of knowledge. We are however only at the beginning of this anthroposophical concept of the world that will lead us to knowledge. The second picture is much nearer to us. It contains something to which Western civilization can respond.

We look back some five centuries before the founding of Christianity to a soul whom one of the greatest spirits of Western lands made the central figure of all his thought and writing. We look back to Socrates. We look to him in the spirit in the hour of his death, even as Plato describes him in the circle of his disciples in the famous discourse on the immortality of the soul. In this picture there are but slight indications of the beyond, represented in the “daimon” who speaks to Socrates.

Now let him stand before us in the hours that preceded his entrance into the spiritual worlds. There he is, surrounded by his disciples, and in the face of death he speaks to them of the immortality of the soul. Many people read this wonderful discourse that Plato has given us in order to describe the scene of his dying teacher. But people in these days read only words, only concepts and ideas. There are even those—I do not mean to censure them—in whom this wonderful scene of Plato arouses questions as to the logical justification of what the dying Socrates sets forth to his disciples. They cannot feel there is something more for the human soul, that something more important lives there, of far greater significance than logical proofs and scientific arguments. Let us imagine all that Socrates says on immortality to be spoken by a man of great culture, depth and refinement, in the circle of his pupils, but in a different situation from that of Socrates, under different circumstances. Even if the words of this man were a hundred times more logically sound than those of Socrates, in spite of all they will perhaps have a hundred times less value. This will only be fully grasped when people begin to understand that there is something for the human soul of more value, even if less plausible, than the most strictly correct logical demonstrations. If any highly educated and cultured man speaks to his pupils on the immortality of the soul, it can indeed have significance. But its significance is not revealed in what he says—I know I am now saying something paradoxical but it is true—its significance depends also on the fact that the teacher, having spoken these words to his pupils, passes on to look after the ordinary affairs of life, and his pupils do the same. But Socrates speaks in the hour that immediately precedes his passage through the gates of death. He gives out his teaching in a moment when in the next instant his soul is to be severed from his bodily form.

It is one thing to speak about immortality to the pupils he is leaving behind in the hour of his own death—which does not meet him unexpectedly but as an event predetermined by destiny—and another thing to return after such a discourse to the ordinary business of living. It is not the words of Socrates that should work on us as much as the situation under which he speaks them. Let us take all the power of this scene, all that we receive from Socrates' conversation with his pupils on immortality, the full immediate force of this picture. What do we have before us? It is the world of everyday life in Greek times; the world whose conflicts and struggles led to the result that the best of the country's sons was condemned to drink the hemlock. This noble Greek spoke these last words with the sole intention of bringing the souls of the men around him to believe in what they could no longer have knowledge; believe in what was for them “a beyond,” a spiritual world. That it needs a Socrates to lead the earthly souls until they gain an outlook into the spiritual worlds, that it needs him to do this by means of the strongest proofs, that is, by his deed, is something that is indeed comprehensible to Western souls. They can gain an understanding for the Socratic culture. We only grasp Western civilization in a right sense when we recognize that in this respect it has been a Socratic civilization throughout the centuries.

Now let us think of one of the pupils of Socrates who could certainly have no doubt of the reality of all that surrounded him, being a Greek, and compare him with Krishna's disciple Arjuna. Think how the Greek has to be introduced to the super-sensible world, and then think of Arjuna who can have no doubt whatever about it but becomes confused instead with the sense-world, almost doubting the possibility of its existence. I know that history, philosophy and other branches of knowledge may say with apparently good reason, “Yes, but if you will only look at what is written in the Bhagavad Gita, and in Plato's works, it is just as easy to prove the opposite of what you have just said.” I know too that those who speak like this do not want to feel the deeper impulses, the mighty impulses that arise on the one hand from that picture out of the Bhagavad Gita, and on the other from that of the dying Socrates as described by Plato. A deep gulf yawns between these two worlds In spite of all the similarity that can be discovered. This is because the Bhagavad Gita marks the end of the age of the ancient clairvoyance. There we can catch the last echo of it; while in the dying Socrates we meet one of the first of those who through thousands of years have wrestled with another kind of human knowledge, with those ideas, thoughts and feelings that, so to say, were thrown off by the old clairvoyance and have continued to evolve in the intervening time, because they have to prepare the way for a new clairvoyance. Today we are striving toward this new clairvoyance by giving out and receiving what we call the anthroposophical conception of the world. From a certain aspect we may say that no gulf is deeper than the one that opens between Arjuna and a disciple of Socrates.

Now we are living in a time when the souls of men, having gone through manifold transformations and incarnations in the search for life in external knowledge, are now once more seeking to make connection with the spiritual worlds. The fact that you are sitting here is most living proof that your own souls are seeking this reunion. You are seeking the connection that will lead you up in a new way to those worlds so wondrously revealed to us in the words of Krishna to his disciple Arjuna. So there is much in the occult wisdom on which the Bhagavad Gita is founded that resounds to us as something responding to our deepest longings. In ancient times the soul was well aware of the bond that unites it with the spiritual. It was at home in the super-sensible. We now are at the beginning of an age wherein men's souls will once more seek access in a new way to the spiritual worlds. We must feel ourselves stimulated to this search when we think of how we once had this access that it once was there for man. Indeed, we shall find it to an unusual degree in the revelations of the holy song of the East.

As is generally the case with the great works of man, we find the opening words of the Bhagavad Gita full of meaning. (Are not the opening words of the Iliad and the Odyssey most significant?) The story is told by his charioteer to the blind king, the chief of the Kurus who are engaged in fratricidal battle with the Pandavas. A blind chieftain! This already seems symbolical. Men of ancient times had vision into the spiritual worlds. With their whole heart and soul they lived in connection with Gods and Divine Beings. Everything that surrounded them in the earthly sphere was to them in unceasing connection with divine existence. Then came another age, and just as Greek legend depicts Homer as a blind man, so the Gita tells us of the blind chief of the Kurus. It is to him that the discourses of Krishna are narrated in which he instructs Arjuna concerning what goes on in the world of the senses. He must even be told of those things of the sense-world that are projections into it from the spiritual. There is a deeply significant symbol in the fact that old men who looked back with perfect memory and a perfect spiritual connection into a primeval past, were blind to the world immediately around them. They were seers in the spirit, seers in the soul. They could experience as though in lofty pictures all that lived as spiritual mysteries. Those who were to understand the events of the world in their spiritual connections were pictured to us in the old songs and legends as blind. Thus we find this same symbol in the Greek singer Homer as in that figure that meets us at the beginning of the Bhagavad Gita. This introduces us to the age of transition from primeval humanity to that of the present day.

Now why is Arjuna so deeply moved by the impending battle of the brothers? We know that the old clairvoyance was in a sense bound up with external blood relationship. The flowing of the same blood in the veins of a number of people was rightly looked upon as something sacred in ancient times because with it was connected the ancient perception of a particular group-soul. Those who not only felt but knew their blood-relationship to one another did not yet have such an ego as lives in men of the present time. Wherever we look in those ancient times we find everywhere groups of people who did not at all feel themselves as having an individual “I” as man does today. Each felt his identity only in the group, in a community based upon the blood-bond.

What does the folk-soul, the nation-soul, signify to a man today? Certainly it is often an object of the greatest enthusiasm. Yet we may say that, compared with the individual “I” of a man, this nation-soul does not really count. This may be a hard saying but it is true. Once upon a time man did not say “I” to himself but to his tribal or racial group. This group-soul feeling was still living in Arjuna when he saw the fratricidal battle raging around him. That is the reason why the battle that raged about him filled him with such horror.

Let us enter the soul of Arjuna and feel the horror that lived in him when he realized how those who belonged together are about to murder each other. He felt what lived in all the souls at that time and is about to kill itself. He felt as a soul would feel if its body, which is its very own, were being torn in pieces. He felt as though the members of one body were in conflict, the heart with the head, the left hand with the right. Think how Arjuna's soul confronted the impending battle as a battle against its own body, when, in the moment he drops his bow, the conflict of the kinsmen seems to him a conflict between a man's right hand and his left. Then you will feel the atmosphere of the opening verses of the Bhagavad Gita.

When Arjuna is in this mood he is met by the great teacher Krishna. Here we must call attention to the incomparable art with which Krishna is pictured in this scene: The holy God, who stands there teaching Arjuna what man shall and will discard if he would take the right direction in his evolution. Of what does Krishna speak? Of I, and I, and I, and always only of I. “I am in the earth, I am in the water, I am in the air, I am in the fire, in all souls, in all manifestations of life, even in the holy Aum. I am the wind that blows through the forests. I am the greatest of the mountains, of the rivers. I am the greatest among men. I am all that is best in the old seer Kapila.” Truly Krishna says nothing less than this, “I recognize nothing else than myself, and I admit the world's existence only in so far as it is I!” Nothing else than I speaks from out the teaching of Krishna.

Let us once [and] for all see quite plainly how Arjuna stands there as one not yet understanding himself as an ego but who now has to do so. How the God confronts him like an all-embracing cosmic egoist, admitting of nothing but himself, even requiring others to admit of nothing but themselves, each one an “I.” Yes, in all that is in earth, water, fire or air, in all that lives upon the earth, in the three worlds, we are to see nothing but Krishna.

It is full of significance for us that one who cannot yet grasp the ego is brought for his instruction before a Being who demands to be recognized only as his own Self. Let him who wants to see this in the light of truth read the Bhagavad Gita through and try to answer the question, “How can we designate what Krishna says of himself and for which he demands recognition?” It is universal egoism that speaks in Krishna. It does indeed seem to us as though through the whole of the sublime Gita this refrain resounds to our spiritual hearing, “Only when you recognize, you men, my all-embracing egoism, only then can salvation be for you!”

The greatest achievements of human spiritual life always set us riddles. We only see them in the right light when we recognize that they set us the very greatest riddles. Truly, a hard one seems to be given us when we are now confronted with the task of understanding how a most sublime teaching can be bound up with the announcement of universal egoism. It is not through logic but in the perception of the great contradictions in life that the occult mysteries unveil themselves to us. It will be our task to get beyond what seems so strange and come to the truth within the Maya.

When we are speaking within Maya we must recognize what it really is that we may rightly call a universal egoism. Through this very riddle we must reach out from illusion into reality, into the light of truth. How this is possible, and how we may surmount this riddle and reach reality, will form the subject of the following lectures.

My dear friends,

When people encounter the world conception of Spiritual Science their chief desire is to have an answer to their questions, a solution of their problems. That is quite natural and understandable, one might even say justifiable. But something else must be added if the spiritual scientific-movement is really to become the living thing it must be, in accordance with the general course of evolution of earth and humanity. Above all, a certain feeling must be added, a certain perception that the more one strives to enter the spiritual world, the more the riddles increase. These riddles actually become more numerous for the human soul than they were before, and in a certain respect they become also more sacred. When we come into the spiritual scientific world concept, great life problems, the existence of which we hardly guessed before, first appear as the riddles they are.

Now, one of the greatest riddles connected with the evolution of the earth and mankind is the Christ-riddle, the riddle of Christ-Jesus. And with regard to this, we can only hope to advance slowly towards its actual depth and sanctity. That is to say, we can expect in our future incarnations gradually to have an enhanced feeling in what a lofty sense, in what an extraordinary sense this Christ-riddle is a riddle. We must not expect just that regarding this Christ-riddle much will be solved for us, but also that much of what we have hitherto found full of riddles concerning the entry of the Christ-Being into humanity's evolution, becomes still more difficult. Other things will emerge that bring new riddles into the question of the Mystery of Golgotha, or if one prefers, new aspects of this great riddle.

There is no question here of ever claiming to do more than throw some light from one or other aspect of this great problem. And I beg you to be entirely clear that only single rays of light can ever be thrown from the circuit of human conception upon this greatest riddle of man's earthly existence, nor do these rays attempt to exhaust the problem, but only to illumine it from various aspects. And so something shall here be added to what has already been said that may bring us again some understanding of one aspect of the Mystery of Golgotha.

You remember the pronouncement of the God Jahve, radiating from the far distance, which stands at the beginning of the Bible, after the Fall had come about. The words announced that now men had eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil they must be banished from their present abode, so that they might not eat also of the Tree of Life. The Tree of Life was to be protected, as it were, from being partaken of by men who had already tasted of the Tree of Knowledge.

Now behind this primordial two-foldness of the eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil on the one hand and the eating of the Tree of Life on the other hand, there lies concealed something which cuts deep into life. Today we will turn our attention to one of the many applications to life of this pronouncement: we will bring to mind what we have long known: i.e., that the Mystery of Golgotha, in so far as it was accomplished within the evolution of earthly history, fell in the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch, in the Graeco-Latin age.

We know indeed that the Mystery of Golgotha lies approximately at the conclusion of the first third of the Graeco-Latin age and that two-thirds of this age follow, having as their task the first incorporation of the secrets of the Mystery of Golgotha into human evolution.

Now we must distinguish two things in regard to the Mystery of Golgotha. The first is what took place as purely objective fact: in short, what happened as the entry of the Cosmic Being ‘Christus’ in the sphere of earthly evolution. It would be-hypothetically possible, one might say, it would be conceivable, for the Mystery of Golgotha, that is, the entry of the Impulse of Christ into earthly evolution, to have been enacted without any of the men on earth having understood or perhaps even known what had taken place there. It might quite well have happened that the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place, but had remained unknown to men, that no single person would have been able to think about solving the riddle of what had actually occurred there.

This was not to be. Earthly humanity was gradually to reach an understanding of what had happened through the Mystery of Golgotha. But none the less we must realise that there are two aspects: that which man receives as knowledge, as inner working in his soul, and that which has happened objectively within the human race, and which is independent of this human race—that is to say, of its knowledge. Now, men endeavoured to grasp what had taken place through the Mystery of Golgotha. We are aware that not only did the Evangelists, out of a certain clairvoyance, give those records of the Mystery of Golgotha which we find in the Gospels; an attempt was also made to grasp it by means of the knowledge which men had before the Mystery of Golgotha. We know that since the Mystery of Golgotha not only have its tidings been given out, but there has also arisen a New Testament theology, in its various branches. This New Testament theology, as is only natural, has made use of already existing ideas in asking itself: What has actually come about with the Mystery of Golgotha, what has been accomplished in it?

We have often considered how, in particular, Greek philosophy that which was developed for instance as Greek philosophy in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle—how the ideas of Greek philosophy endeavoured to grasp what had taken place in the Mystery of Golgotha, just as they took pains to understand Nature around them. And so we can say that on the one hand the Mystery of Golgotha entered as objective fact, and on the other hand, confronting it, are the different world-conceptions which had been developed since antiquity, and which reach a certain perfection at the time in which the Mystery of Golgotha took place, and then go on evolving.

Whence were these concepts derived? We know indeed that all these concepts, including those which live in Greek philosophy and which approached the Mystery of Golgotha from the earth, are derived from a primeval knowledge, from a knowledge which could not have been at man's disposal if, let us say, an original revelation had not taken place. For it is not only amaterialistic, but an entirely nonsensical idea that the attenuated philosophy which existed at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha could at its starting point have been formed by human beings themselves. It is primeval revelation, which as we know was founded in an age when men still had the remains of ancient clairvoyance; primeval revelation which in ancient times had been given to man for the most part in imaginative form and which had been attenuated to concepts in the age when the Mystery of Golgotha entered, the Graeco-Latin age. Thus one could see an intensive stream of primeval revelation arise in ancient times, which could be given to men because they still had the final relics of the old clairvoyance that spoke to their understanding and which then gradually dried up and withered into philosophy.

Thus a philosophy, a world-conception existed in many, many shades and nuances, and these sought in their own way to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha. If we would find the last stragglers of what was diluted at that time to a world-concept of a more philosophic character; then we come to what lived in the old Roman age.

By this Roman age I mean the time that begins approximately with the Mystery of Golgotha, with the reign of the Emperor Augustus, and flows on through the time of the Roman Empire until the migration of nations that gave such a different countenance to the European world. And what we see flare up in this Roman age like a last great light from the stream flowing from revelation—that is the Latin-Roman poetry, which plays so great a role in the education of youth even up to our own day. It is all that developed as continuation of this Latin-Roman poetry till the decline of ancient Rome. Every possible shade of world-conception had taken refuge in Rome. This Roman element was no unity. It was extended over numberless sects, numberless religious opinions, and could only evolve a certain common ground from the multiplicity by withdrawing, as it were, into external abstractions.

Through this, however, we can recognise how something withered comes to expression in the far-spread Roman element in which Christianity was stirring as a new impulse. We see how Roman thought is at great pains to seize with its ideas what lay behind the Mystery of Golgotha. We see how endeavour was made in every possible way to draw ideas from the whole range of world conception in order to understand what hid behind this Mystery of Golgotha. And one can say, if one observes closely: it was a despairing struggle towards an understanding, a real understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. And this struggle as a matter of fact continued in a certain current throughout the whole of the first millennium.

One should see, for instance, how Augustine first accepts all the elements of the old withered world-conception, and how he tries through all that he so accepts to grasp what was flowing in as living soul-blood, for he now feels Christianity flow like a living impulse into his soul. Augustine is a great and significant personality—but one sees in every page of his writings how he is struggling to bring into his understanding what is flowing to him from the Christ Impulse. And so it goes on, and this is the whole endeavour of Rome: to obtain in the western world of idea, in this world of world-conception, the living substance of what comes to expression in the Mystery of Golgotha.

What is it, then, that makes such efforts, that so struggles, that in the Roman-Latin element overflows the whole civilised world? What is it that struggles despairingly in the Latin impulse, in the concepts pulsating in the Latin language, to include the Mystery of Golgotha? What is that? That is also a part of what men have eaten in Paradise. It is a part of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We can see in the primeval revelations when the old clairvoyant perceptions could still speak to men, how vividly alive concepts were in this ancient time, concepts which were still imaginations, and how they more and more dry up and die and become thin and poor. They are so thin that in the middle of the Middle Ages, when Scholasticism flourished, the greatest efforts of the soul were necessary to sharpen these attenuated concepts sufficiently to grasp in them the living life existing in the Mystery of Golgotha. What remained in these concepts was the most distilled form of the old Roman language with its marvellously structured logic, but with its almost entirely lost life-element. This Latin speech was preserved with its fixed and rigid logic, but with its inner life almost dead, as a realisation of the primeval divine utterance: Men shall not eat of the Tree of Life.

If it had been possible for what had evolved from the old Latin heritage to comprehend in full what had been accomplished in the Mystery of Golgotha, had it been possible for this Latin heritage, simply as if through a thrust, to gain an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, then this would have been an eating of the Tree of Life. But this was forbidden, after the expulsion from Paradise. The knowledge which had entered humanity in the sense of the ancient revelation was not to serve as a means of ever working in a living way. Hence it could only grasp the mystery of Golgotha with dead concepts.

‘Ye shall not eat of the Tree of Life’: this is a saying which also holds good through all aeons of earthly evolution with regard to certain phenomena. And one fulfilment of this saying was likewise the addition: ‘The Tree of Life will also draw near in its other form as the Cross erected on Golgotha—and life will stream out from it. But this older knowledge shall not eat of the Tree of Life.’

And so we see a dying knowledge struggling with life, we see how desperately it strives to incorporate the life of Golgotha in its concepts.¹

Now there is a peculiar fact, a fact which indicates that in Europe, confronting as it were the starting point of the East, a kind of primordial opposition was made. There is something like a sort of archetypal opposition set against the primeval-revelation² decreed to mankind. Here, to be sure, we touch upon the outer rim of a very deep-lying secret, and one can really only speak in pictures of much that is to

There exists in Europe a legend concerning the origin of man which is quite different from the one contained in the Bible. It has gone through later transformations no doubt, but its essentials are still to be recognised. Now the characteristic feature is not that this legend exists, but that it has been preserved longer in Europe than in other parts of the earth. But the important thing is that even while over in the Orient the Mystery of Golgotha had been accomplished, this different legend was still alive in the feelings of the inhabitants of Europe. Here, too, we are led to a tree, or rather to trees, which were found on the shore of the sea by the gods Wotan, Wile and We. And men were formed from two trees, the Ash and the Elm. Thus men were created by the trinity of the gods, (although this was Christianised later, it yet points to the European original revelation) by fashioning the two trees into men: Wotan gives men spirit and life; Wile gives men movement and intelligence, and We gives them the outer figure, speech, the power of sight and of hearing.

The very great difference that exists between this story of creation and that of the Bible is not usually observed—but you need only read the Bible—which is always a useful thing to do—and already in the first chapters you will remark the very great difference that exists between the two Creation legends. I should like but to point to one thing, and that is, according to the saga, a threefold divine nature flowed into man. It must be something of a soul-nature that the Gods have laid within him, which expresses itself in his form and which in fact is derived from the Gods. In Europe, therefore, man was conscious that inasmuch as one moves about on earth, one bears something divine within; in the Orient, on the contrary, one is conscious that one bears something Luciferic within one. Something is bound up with the eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil which has even brought men death, something that has turned all men away from the Gods and for which they have earned divine punishment. In Europe man is aware that in the human soul a threefold nature lives, that the Gods have sunk a force into the human soul. That is very significant.

One touches with this, as I have said, the edge of a great secret, a deep mystery. But it will be readily understood: it looks as if in this ancient Europe a number of human beings had been preserved who had not been taken away from sharing in the Tree of Life, in whom there lived on, so to say, the tree or the trees of Life; ash and elm. And with this the following fact stands in intimate harmony. European humanity (and if one goes back to the original European peoples this would be seen with great clarity in all details) actually had nothing of the higher, more far-reaching knowledge that men possessed in the Orient and in the Graeco-Latin world.

One should imagine for once the immense, the incisive contrast between the naive conceptions of European humanity, who still saw everything in pictures, and the highly evolved, refined philosophical ideas of the Graeco-Latin world. In Europe all was ‘Life’; over there all was ‘Knowledge of Good and Evil.’ In Europe something was left over, as it were, like a treasured remnant of the original forces of life; but it could only remain if this humanity were, in a way, protected from understanding anything that was contained in such marvellously finely wrought Latin concepts. To speak of a science of the ancient European population would be nonsense. One can only speak of them as living with all that germinated in their inner soul nature, that filled it through and through with life. What they believed they knew was something that was direct experience. This soul nature was destined to be radically different from the mood that was transmitted in the Latin influence. And it belongs to the great, the wonderful secrets of historical evolution, that the Mystery of Golgotha was to arise out from the perfected culture of wisdom and knowledge, but that the depths of the Mystery of Golgotha should not be grasped through wisdom; they were to be grasped through direct life.

It was therefore like a predetermined karma that—while in Europe up to a definite point life was grasped—the ego-culture appeared purely naively, vitally and full of life where the deepest darkness was; whereas over there where was the profoundest wisdom, the Mystery of Golgotha arose. That is like a predestined harmony. Out of the civilisation based on knowledge which was beginning to dry up and wither ascends this Mystery of Golgotha: but it is to be understood by those who, through their whole nature and being, have not been able to attain to the fine crystallisation of the Latin knowledge. And so we see in the history of human evolution the meeting between a nearly lifeless, more and more dying knowledge, and a life still devoid of knowledge, a life unfilled with knowledge, but one which inwardly feels the continued working of the divinity animating the world.

These two streams had to meet, had to work upon one another in the evolving humanity. What would have happened if only the Latin knowledge had developed further? Well, this Latin knowledge would have been able to pour itself out over the successors of the primitive European population: up to a certain time it has even done so. It is hypothetically conceivable, but it could not really have happened, that the original European population should have experienced the after-working of the dried up, fading knowledge.

For then, what these souls would have received through this knowledge would gradually have led to men's becoming more and more decadent; this drying, parching knowledge would not have been able to unite with the forces which kept mankind living. It would have dried men up. Under the influence of the after effects of Latin culture, European humanity would in a sense have been parched and withered. People would have come to have increasingly refined concepts, to have reasoned more subtly and have given themselves up more and more to thought, but the human heart, the whole human life would have remained cold under these fine spun, refined concepts and ideas.

I say that that would be hypothetically conceivable, but it could not really have taken place. What really happened is something very different. What really happened is that the part of humanity that had life but not knowledge streamed in among those people who were, so to say, threatened with receiving only the remains of the Latin heritage. Let us envisage the question from another side. At a definite period we find distributed over Europe, in the Italian peninsula, in the Spanish peninsula, in the region of present France, in the region of the present British Isles, certain remains of an original European population; in the North the descendants of the old Celtic peoples, in the South the descendants of the Etruscan and ancient Roman peoples. We meet with these there, and in the first place there flows into them what we have now characterised as the Latin stream. Then at a definite time, distributed over various territories of Europe, we meet with the Ostrogoths, the Visigoths, the Lombardi, the Suevi, the Vandals, etc. There is an age when we find the Ostrogoths in the south of present Russia, the Visigoths in eastern Hungary, the Langobardi or Lombard's where today the Elbe has its lower course, the Suevi in the region where today Silesia and Moravia lie, etc. There we meet with various of those tribes of whom one can say: they have ‘life’ but no ’knowledge.’

Now we can put the question: Where have these peoples gone to? We know that for the most part they have disappeared from the actual evolution of European humanity. Where have the Ostrogoths, the Visigoths, the Langobardi, etc. gone? We can ask this. In a certain respect they no longer exist as nations, but what they possessed as life exists, exists somewhat in the following way. My dear friends, let us consider first the Italian peninsula, let us consider it still occupied by the descendants of the old Roman population. Let us further imagine that on this old Italian peninsula there had been spread abroad what I have designated Latin knowledge, Latin culture; then the whole population would have dried up.

If exact research were made, it would be impossible not to admit that only incredible dilettantism could believe that anything still persists today of a blood relationship with the ancient Romans. Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Lombardi, marched in, and over these there streamed the Latin heritage—though merely mentally as seed of knowledge—it streamed over-the life-without-knowledge, and this gave it substance for continuing. Into the more southern regions there came a more Norman-Germanic element. Thus there streamed into the Italian peninsula from the European centre and the East a life-bearing population. Into Spain there streamed the Visigoths and the Suevi in order later to unite with the purely intellectual element of the Arabs, the Moors. Into the region of France there streamed the Franks and into the region of the British Isles, the Anglo-Saxon element.

The following statement expresses the truth. If the southern regions had remained populated by descendants of the old Romans, and the Latin culture had gone on working in them, they would have faced the danger of completely losing the power of developing an ego-consciousness. Hence the descendants of ancient Rome were displaced and there was poured into this region where Latinism was to spread, what came from the element of the Ostrogoths and Lombardi. The blood of Ostrogoths and Lombardi as well as Norman blood absorbed the withering Latin culture. If the population had remained Romans they would have faced the danger of never being able to develop the element of the Consciousness-soul. Thus there went to the south in the Langobardi and the Ostrogoths what we can call the Wotan-Element, Spirit and Life. The Wotan-Element was, so to say, carried in the blood of the Langobardi and Ostrogoths and this made the further evolution and unfoldment of this southern civilisation possible.

With the Franks towards the West went the Wile-element, Intelligence and Movement, which again would have been lost if the descendants of the primitive European population who had settled in these regions had merely developed further under the influence of Rome. Towards the British Isles went We, what one can call: Configuration and Speech, and in particular the faculty to see and to hear. This has later experienced in English empiricism its later development as: Physiognomics, Speech, Sight, Hearing.

So we see that while in the new Italian element we have the expression of the Folk Soul in the Sentient-soul, we could express this differently by saying: The Wotan-element streams into the Italian peninsula. And we can speak of the journeying of the Franks to the West by saying: the Wile-element streams West, towards France. And so in respect of the British Isles we can express it by saying: the We-element streams in there.

In the Italian peninsula, therefore, nothing at all is left of the blood of the original European peoples, it has been entirely replaced. In the West, in the region of modern France, somewhat more of the original population exists, approximately there is a balance between the Frankish element and the original peoples. The greatest part of the original population is still in the British Isles.

But all this that I am now saying is fundamentally only another way of pointing to the understanding of what came out of the South through Europe, pointing to the fact that the Mystery of Golgotha was ensheathed in a dying wisdom and was absorbed through a living element still devoid of wisdom.

One cannot understand Europe if one does not bear this connection in mind; one can, however, understand Europe in all details if one grasps European life as a continuous process. For much of what I have said is still fulfilling itself in our own times. So, for instance, it would be interesting to consider the philosophy of Kant, from these two original polarities of European life, and show how Kant on the one hand desires to dethrone Knowledge, take all power from Knowledge, in order on the other hand to give place to Faith. That is only a continuation of the dim hidden consciousness that one can really do nothing with knowledge that has come up from below—one can only do something with what comes down from above as original life-without-knowledge. The whole contrast in pure and practical reason lies in this: I had to discard knowledge to make way for Faith. Faith, for which protestant theology fights, is a last relic of the life-without-knowledge, for life will have nothing to do with an analysed abstract wisdom.³

But one can also consider older phenomena. One can observe how an endeavour appears among the most important leading personalities to create a harmony, as it were, between the two streams to which we have referred. For the modern physiognomy of Europe shows that up to our own day there is an after-working of the Latin knowledge in the European life, and that one can immediately envisage the map of Europe with the Latin knowledge raying out to south and west, and the Life still preserved in the centre. One can then see, for instance, how pains were taken at one time to overcome this dying knowledge. I should like to give an example. To be sure, this dying knowledge appears in the different spheres of life in different degrees, but already in the 8th-9th Century European evolution had so progressed that those who were the descendants of the European peoples with the Life could get no further with certain designations for cosmic or earthly relations which had been created in old Roman times. So even in the 8th-9th Centuries one could see that it had no special meaning for the original life of the soul when one said: January, February, March, April, May, etc. The Romans could make something of it, but the Northern European peoples could not do much with it; poured itself over these peoples in such a way as not to enter the soul, but rather to flow merely into the language, and it was therefore dying and withering. So an endeavour was made, especially towards Middle and Western Europe (over the whole stretch from the Elbe to the Atlantic Ocean and to the Apennines) to find designations for the months which could enter the feelings of European humanity. Such month-names were to be:

1. Wintarmanoth
2. Hornung
3. Lenzinmanoth
4. Ostarmanoth
5. Winnemanoth (also Nannamanoth)
6. Brachmanoth
7. Henimanoth (using the word Hay)
8. Aranmanoth (Aran = harvest)
9. Widumanoth (Wide = what is left when one has gone over the field)
10. Windumemanoth (vintage)
11. Herbistmanoth
12. Heiligmanoth

He who was at pains to make these names general was Charlemagne.

It shows how significant was the spirit of Charlemagne, for he sought to introduce something which has not up to now found entrance. We still have in the names of the months the last relics of the drying-up Latin cultural knowledge. Charlemagne was altogether a personality who aimed at many things which went beyond the possibility of being realised. Directly after his time, in the 9th Century, the wave of Latinism drew completely over Europe. It would be interesting to consider what Charlemagne desired to do in wishing to bring the radiation of the Wile-element towards the West. For the Latinising only appeared there later on.

Thus we can say that the part of mankind which has been race, which, as race, was the successor of the old Europe,—of the Europe from which the Roman influence proceeded and which itself became the successor of Rome, wholly for the south, largely for the north—has simply died out. Their blood no longer persists. Into the empty space left, there has poured in what came from Central Europe and the European East. One can therefore say: the racial element both of the European South and West is the Germanic element which is present in various shadings in the British Isles, in France, in Spain and in the Italian peninsula, though in this last completely inundated by the Latin influence.

The racial element therefore moves from East to the West and South, whereas the knowledge-element moves from South to North. It is the race-element which moves from the East to the West and South and along the West of Europe to the North, and gradually flows away towards the North. If one would speak correctly, one can talk of a Germanic race-element,-but not a Latin race. To speak of a Latin race is just as sensible as to speak of wooden iron; because Latinism is nothing that belongs to race, but something that has poured itself as bloodless knowledge over a part of the original European people. Only materialism can speak of a Latin race, for Latinism has nothing to do with race.

So we see how, as it were, the Bible saying works on in this part of European history, how the destiny of Latinism is the fulfilment of the words: ‘Ye shall not eat of the Tree of Life.’ We see how the Life given to the earth with the Mystery of Golgotha cannot come to full harmony with the old knowledge; but rather how into what remained of the ebbing original wisdom, new life had to enter. If we are to give a concrete answer to the question: Where does that remain, which from such new life has not been preserved in its own special character, but has disappeared in history, the element of the Visigoths, the Suevi, the Langobardi, the Ostrogoths, etc.? we must give as answer: It lives on as life within the Latin culture. That is the true state of affairs. That is what must be known regarding the primeval Bible two-fold utterance and its working in early times in the development of Europe, if we are to understand this European evolution.

I had to give you this historical analysis today because I shall have things to say which assume that one does not hold the false ideas of modern materialism and formalism with regard to historical evolution.

• 1. See ‘The Christmas Thought and the Mystery of the Ego. The Tree of the Cross and the Golden Legend’—Rudolf Steiner.
• 2. See Genesis 3:3—The creation of man
• 3. Gap left between these sentences

In our last study evenings various aspects were brought forward which all pointed to the hidden co-operation between man and the spiritual worlds. Spiritual beings are actually around us continually, and not only around us but, in a certain respect, continually passing through us; we live with them all the time. We must not suppose, however, that a relation is established between man and the spiritual beings of his environment, merely in the somewhat cruder respect which we considered in our last studies. A relation is also formed between man and the spiritual world through his many varied interests of thought and deeds. In our last two studies we have had to indicate spiritual beings of a somewhat subordinate character. But from earlier lectures we know that we also have to do with spiritual beings who stand above man and that connections and relationships likewise exist between man and more sublime spiritual beings. We have said that there are lofty spiritual beings living around us who do not consist of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and so on, upwards, as man, but who have an etheric body as their lowest member. They are invisible to ordinary sight since their bodily nature is a fine etheric one and man's gaze looks through it. And then we come to still higher spiritual beings whose lowest member is the astral body, presenting an even less dense bodily nature.

All these beings stand in a certain relation to man, and the main point for us today is this: Man can positively so act as to come into quite definite relations to such beings here in his life on earth. According as men here on the earth do this or that in their situation in life, so do they establish all the time relationship with the higher worlds, however improbable that may seem to the man of the present enlightened age—as one says—which is not in the least enlightened in regard to many deep truths of life.

Let us take in the first place beings who have as their lowest bodily nature an etheric body, who live around us in this fine etheric body, and send down to us their forces and manifestations. Let us set such beings mentally before us and ask ourselves: Can man do something on this earthly planet—or better—have men from time immemorial done something so as to give these beings a link, a bridge, through which they come to a more intensive influence upon the whole human being? Yes, from time immemorial men have done something towards it! We must go deeper into many feelings and ideas that we touched on in the last lectures if we would form a clear thought about this bridge.

We picture then that these beings live, so to speak, out of the spiritual worlds and extend their etheric body forward from there; they need no physical body like man. But there is a physical bodily element through which they can bring their etheric body into connection with our earthly sphere—an earthly bodily element which we can set up and which forms a bond of attraction for these beings to descend with their etheric bodies and find an opportunity to dwell among men.

Such opportunities for spiritual beings to dwell among men are given, for instance, by the temple of Greek architecture, the Gothic cathedral. When we set up in our earthly sphere those forms of physical reality with the relationship of lines and forces possessed by a temple or a plastic work of sculpture, then these form an opportunity for the etheric bodies of these beings to press on all sides into these works of art which we have set up. Art is a true and actual uniting link between man and the spiritual worlds. In those forms of art expressed in space we have on earth physical bodily conditions into which beings with etheric bodies sink down.

Beings which have the astral body as their lowest member need, however, something different here on earth as the bond between the spiritual world and our earth, and that is the art of music, the phonetic art. A space through which streams musical tones is an opportunity for the freely-changing, self-determined astral body of higher beings to manifest in it. The Arts and what they are for man thus acquire a very real significance. They form the magnetic forces of attraction for the spiritual beings whose mission it is to have a connection with man, and who wish to have it. Our feelings are deepened towards human artistic creation and acquire an appreciation of art when we look at things in this way. Yet they can be deepened still more if we realize from spiritual science the true source of man's artistic creation and artistic appreciation. To come to this realization we must consider in somewhat more detail the different forms of man's consciousness.

On various occasions, as you know, we have pointed out that in the waking man the physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego are all before us, while in the sleeping man the physical and etheric bodies lie on the bed, the ego and astral body are outside them. For our present purpose it will be well to observe in more detail these two states of consciousness which alternate for everyone within twenty-four hours. In the first place man has the physical body, then the etheric or life body, then what we call roughly the astral body, the soul body, which belongs to the astral body but is united with the etheric body. That is the member which is possessed too by the animal here below on the physical plane. But then we know—and you can read it in my Theosophy—that united with these three members is what one generally comprises under “I.” The “I” is actually a threefold being: sentient soul, intellectual or mind soul, consciousness soul, and we know that the consciousness soul is again connected with what we call spirit-self or Manas. If we place this more particularized membering of the human being before us then we can say:

What we call the sentient soul—which moreover belongs to the astral body and is of astral nature—detaches itself when man goes to sleep, but a part of the soul body remains in connection with the etheric body that lies on the bed. What is essentially withdrawn is sentient soul, intellectual or mind soul, and consciousness soul; with the waking man all this is bound together and active in him all the time. Thus whatever goes on in the physical body works on the whole inner nature, on sentient soul, intellectual soul, and also on the consciousness soul. All that works upon man in ordinary life with its disorder and chaos, the disordered impressions which he receives from morning to evening—only think of the impressions from the din and rattle of a great city—these are all continued into the members which in waking consciousness are united with the physical and etheric bodies. In the night man's inner being—sentient soul, intellectual soul, consciousness soul—is in the astral world and from there draws for itself the forces and harmonies which have been lost for it through the chaotic impressions of the day. What in a comprehensive sense we call man's ego-soul is thus in a more ordered, more spiritual world than during the day. In the morning the inner soul nature emerges from this spirituality and enters the three-fold bodily nature of physical body, etheric body and that part of the astral body which is united with the etheric body, even during the night.

Now if man were never to sleep, that is, were never to draw fresh strengthening forces out of the spiritual world, then everything living in his physical body and permeating it with forces would become increasingly undermined. Since, however, a strong inner nature submerges every morning into the forces of the physical body, new order enters, one might say there is a rebirth of the forces. Thus man's soul element brings with it from the spiritual world something for each of the body's members, something which works when the inner soul nature and the outer physical instrument are together.

Now what takes place in the interaction of the soul inwardness and the actual physical instrument is able—if man is sensitive in the night for the reception of the harmonies in the spiritual world—to permeate the forces—not the substances—of the physical body, with what one might call the “forces of space.” Since in our present civilization man is so much estranged from the spiritual world, these “space-forces” have little effect upon him. Where the inner being of the soul clashes with the densest member of the human body, the forces have to be very strong if they are to manifest in the robust physical body. In older culture-epochs the soul brought back impulses with it that permeated the physical body and men therefore perceived that forces were always going through physical space, that it was by no means an indifferent empty space but interwoven by forces in every direction. There was a feeling for this distribution of forces in space which was caused through the relationships that have been described. You can realize this through an example.

Think of one of the painters belonging to the great times of art when there was still a strong feeling for the forces working in space. You could see in the work of such a painter how he paints a group of three angels in space. You stand before the picture and have a definite feeling: These angels cannot fall, it is obvious that they are hovering, they support each other mutually through the active forces of space. People who make this inner dynamic their own through that interaction of the inner soul and the physical body have the feeling: That must be so, the three angels maintain themselves in space. You will find this in the case of many of the older painters, less so in more recent ones. However greatly one may esteem Bocklin, the figure which hovers above his “Pieta” produces in everyone the feeling that at any moment it must tumble down, it does not support itself in space.

All these forces going to and fro in space which are to be felt so strongly are realities, actualities—and all architecture proceeds out of this space-feeling. The origin of genuine architecture is solely the laying of stone or brick in the lines there already in space—one does nothing at all but make visible what is already present in space ideally, spiritually laid out; one fills in material. In the purest degree this feeling of space was possessed by the Greek architect who brought to manifestation in all the forms of his temple what lives in space, what one can feel there. The simple relation, that the column supports either the horizontal or the sloping masses—embodied lines, as it were—is purely a reproduction of spiritual forces to be found in space, and the whole Grecian temple is nothing else than a filling-out with material of what is living in space. The Greek temple is therefore the purest architectural thought, crystallized space. And however strange it may seem to the modern man, because the Greek temple is a physical corporeality put together out of thoughts, it is the opportunity for those figures whom the Greeks have known as the figures of their Gods to come with their etheric bodies into real contact with the spatial lines familiar to them and be able to dwell within them.

It is more than a mere phrase to say that the Grecian temple is a dwelling-place of the God. To someone having a real feeling in such matters the Greek temple has a quality that makes one picture that far and wide no human being existed, nor was there anyone inside it. The Greek temple needs no-one to observe it, no-one to enter it. Think to yourself of the Greek temple standing alone and far and wide there is no-one. It is then as it should be at its most intensive. Then it is the shelter of the God who is to dwell in it, because the God can dwell in the forms. Only thus does one really understand Greek architecture, the purest architecture in the world.

Egyptian architecture—let us say, in the Pyramids—is something quite different. We can only touch on these things now. There the spatial relations, the space-lines, are so arranged that in their forms they point the paths to the soul to float up to the spiritual worlds. We are given the forms that are expressed in the Egyptian Pyramids from the paths taken by the soul from the physical world into the spiritual world. And in every kind of architecture we have thoughts that are only to be understood by spiritual cognition.

In the Romanesque architecture with its rounded arches, which has formed churches with central and side naves, with transept and apse, so that the whole is a Cross and closed above by the cupola, we have the spatial thoughts derived from the tomb. You cannot think of the Romanesque building as you think of the temple. The Greek temple is the abode of the God. The Romanesque building can only be thought of as representing a burial place. The crypt requires men in the midst of life to stand within it, yet it is a place that draws together all feelings relating to the preservation and sheltering of the dead. In the Gothic building you have again a difference. Just as it is true that the Grecian temple can be thought of with no human soul anywhere near—though it is inhabited, being the abode of the God—so is it true that the Gothic cathedral closed above by its pointed arches is not to be imagined without the congregation of the faithful within. It is not complete in itself. If it stands solitary, it is not the whole. The people within belong to it with their folded hands, folded just as the pointed arches. The whole is only there where the space is filled by the feelings of the pious faithful.

These are the forces becoming active in us and felt in the physical body as a feeling of oneself-in-space. The true artist feels space thus and molds it architecturally.

If we now pass upwards to the etheric body, we again have what the inmost soul assimilates at night in the spiritual world and brings with it when it slips again into the etheric body. What is thus expressed in the etheric body is perceived by the true sculptor and he impresses it into the living figure. That is not the space-thought but rather the tendency to show by the living form what nature has offered him. The greater understanding possessed by the Greek artist, in his Zeus, for example, has been brought with him out of the spiritual world and made alive to him when it comes in contact with the etheric body.

Further, a similar interaction takes place with what we call the soul body. When the inner soul nature meets with the soul body there arises in the same way the feeling for the first elements of painting, as the feeling for the guidance of the line. And through the fact that in the morning the sentient soul unites with the soul body and permeates it, there arises the feeling for the harmony of color.

Thus to begin with we have the three forms of art which work with external means, taking their material from the outer world.

Now since the intellectual or mind soul takes flight into the astral world every night, something else again comes about. When we use the expression “intellectual soul” in the sense of spiritual science, we must not think of the dry commonplace intellect of which we speak in ordinary life. For spiritual science “intellect” is the sense for harmony which cannot be embodied in external matter, the sense for harmony experienced inwardly. That is why we say “intellectual or mind soul.” Now when this intellectual or mind soul dips every night into the harmonies of the astral world and becomes conscious of them in the astral body—though this same astral body in modern man has no consciousness of its inner nature—then the following occurs. In the night the soul has lived in what has always been called the “Harmony of the Spheres,” the inner laws of the spiritual world, those Sphere Harmonies to which the ancient Pythagorean School pointed and which one who can perceive in the spiritual world understands as the relationships of the great spiritual universe. Goethe too pointed to this when he lets Faust at the beginning of the poem be transported into heaven, and says:

“The sun, with many a sister-sphere,
Still sings the rival psalm of wonder,
And still his fore-ordained career
Accomplishes, with tread of thunder.”

And he remains in imagery when in Part II, where Faust is again lifted into the spiritual world, he uses the words:

“And, to spirit ears loud ringing,
Now the new-born day is springing.
Rocky portals clang asunder,
Phoebus' wheels roll forth in thunder.
What a tumult brings the light!
Loud the trump of dawn hath sounded,
Eye is dazzled, ear astounded,
The Unheard no ear may smite.”¹

That is to say, the soul lives during the night in these sounds of the spheres and they are enkindled when the astral body becomes aware of itself. In the creative musician the perceptions of the night consciousness struggle through during the day consciousness and become memories—memories of astral experiences, or in particular, of the intellectual or mind soul. All that men know as the art of music is the expressions, imprints, of what is experienced unconsciously in the sphere harmonies, and to be musically gifted means nothing else than to have an astral body which is sensitive during the day condition to what whirs through it the whole night. To be unmusical means that the condition of the astral body does not allow of such memory arising. It is the instreaming of tones from a spiritual world which man experiences in the musical art. And since music creates in our physical world what can only be kindled in the astral, I therefore said that it brings man in connection with those beings who have the astral body as their lowest member. With these beings man lives in the night; he experiences their deeds in the sphere harmonies and in the life of day expresses them through his earthly music, so that in earthly music the sphere harmonies appear like a shadow image. And in as much as the element of these spiritual beings breaks into this earthly sphere, weaves and lives through our earthly sphere, they have the opportunity of plunging their astral bodies again into the ocean waves of music, and so a bridge is built between these beings and man through art. Here we see how at such a stage what we call the art of music arises.

Now what does the consciousness soul perceive when it is immersed in the spiritual world at night—though in the present human cycle man is unconscious of it? It perceives the words of the spiritual world. It receives whispered tidings which can be received from the spiritual world alone. Words are whispered to it and when they are brought through into the day consciousness they appear as the fundamental forces of the poetic art. Thus poetry is the shadow image of what the consciousness soul experiences in the night in the spiritual world. And here let us realize in our thoughts how through man's connection with the higher worlds—and only so—in the five arts of architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry, he brings into existence on our earthly globe adumbrations, manifestations of spiritual reality. This is only the case, however, when art is actually lifted above mere outer sense perception. In what one today speaking broadly calls naturalism, where man merely imitates what he sees in the outer world, there is nothing of what he brings with him. The fact that we have such a purely external art in many fields today, copying only what is outside, is a proof that men in our time have lost connection with the divine spiritual world. The man whose whole interest is merged in the external physical world, in what his external senses hold alone to be of value, works so strongly on his astral bodily nature through this exclusive interest in the physical world, that this becomes blind and deaf when it is in the spiritual worlds at night. The sublimest sphere sounds may resound, the loftiest spiritual tones may whisper something to the soul, it brings nothing back with it into the life of day. And then men scoff at idealistic, at spiritual art, and maintain that art's sole purpose is to photograph outer reality, for there alone it has solid ground under its feet.

That is the way the materialist talks since he knows nothing of the realities of the spiritual world. The true artist talks differently. He perhaps will say: When the tones of the orchestra sound to me, it is as if I heard the speech of archetypal music whose tones sounded before there were yet human ears to hear them.—He can say too: In the tones of a symphony there lies a knowledge of higher worlds which is loftier and more significant than anything which can be proved by logic, analyzed in conclusions.

Richard Wagner has brought to expression both these utterances. He wanted to bring humanity to an intense feeling that where there is true art there must at the same time be elevation above the external sense element. If spiritual science says that something lives in man which goes beyond man, something superhuman that is to appear in ever greater perfection in future incarnations, so does Richard Wagner feel when he says: I want no figures striding over the stage like commonplace men in the earthly sphere.—He wants men exalted above ordinary life and so he takes mythological figures who are formed on a grander scale than normal man. He seeks the superhuman in the human. He wants to represent in art the whole human being with all the spiritual worlds as they shine upon the man of the physical earth. At a relatively early time of life two pictures stood before him—Shakespeare and Beethoven. In his artistically brilliant visions he saw Shakespeare in such a way that he said: If I gather together all that Shakespeare has given to humanity, I see there in Shakespeare figures who move over the stage and perform deeds. Deeds—and words too are deeds in this connection—happen when the soul has felt what cannot be shown externally in space, what lies al-ready behind it. The soul has felt the whole scale from pain and suffering to joy and happiness and has experienced how from this or that nuance this or that deed is performed. In the Shakespearean drama, thinks Richard Wagner, every-thing appears merely in its consequences, where it acquires spatial form, where it becomes deed. That is a dramatic art which alone can display the inner nature externalized; and man can at most guess what lives in the soul, what goes on while the deed is performed.

Beside this there appeared to him the picture of the symphonist, and he saw in the symphony the reproduction of what lives in the soul in the whole emotional scale of sorrow and pain, joy and happiness in all their shades. In the symphony it comes to life—so he said to himself—but it does not become action, it does not step out into space. And he brought before his soul a picture that led him towards the feeling that once upon a time this inner nature had, as it were, broken asunder in artistic creation in order to stream out-wards into the Ninth Symphony.

From these two artist-visions the idea arose in his soul of uniting Beethoven and Shakespeare. We should have to travel a long road if we would show how through his unique handling of the orchestra Richard Wagner sought to create that great harmony between Shakespeare and Beethoven so that the internal expresses itself in tone and at the same time flows into the action. Secular speech was not enough for him, since it is the means of expression for the events of the physical plane. The language that alone can be given in the tones of song became his expression of what surpasses the physically human as superhuman.

Spiritual Science does not need merely to be expressed by words, to be felt by thoughts; Spiritual Science is life. It lives in the world process, and when one says that it is to lead together the various divided currents of man's soul into one great stream, we see this feeling live in the artist who sought to combine the different means of expression so that what lives in the whole may come to expression in the one. Richard Wagner has no wish to be merely musician, merely dramatist, merely poet. All that we have seen flow down from the spiritual worlds becomes for him a means of uniting in the physical world with something still higher. He has a presentiment of what men will experience when they grow more and more familiar with that evolutionary epoch into which mankind must indeed enter, when spirit-self or Manas unites with what man has brought with him from past ages. And a divining of that great human impulse of uniting what has appeared for ages to be separated lies in Richard Wagner in the streaming together of the individual modes of artistic expression. He had a premonition of what human cultural life will be when all that the soul experiences is immersed in the principle of spirit-self or Manas, when the full nature of the soul will be immersed in the spiritual worlds. It is of profound importance when viewed as spiritual history that in art the first dawn has appeared for mankind for the approach towards the future—a future that beckons humanity, when all that man has won in various realms will flow together into an All-culture, a comprehensive culture. The arts in a certain way are the actual fore-runners of a spirituality which reveals itself in the sense world. Far more important than Richard Wagner's separate statements in his prose writings is the main feature that lives in them, the religious wisdom, the sacred fire which streams through all and which comes to finest expression in his brilliant essay on Beethoven, where you must read between the lines, but where you can feel the breath of air of the approaching dawn.

Thus we see how spiritual science can give a deeper view of what men bring about in their deeds. We have seen today in the field of the arts that there man accomplishes something whereby, if we may say so, the Gods may dwell with him, whereby he secures to the Gods an abode in the earthly sphere. If it is brought to man's consciousness through Spiritual Science that spirituality stands in mutual relationship with physical life—this has been done in physical life by art. And spiritual art will always permeate our culture if men will but turn their minds to true spirituality. Through such reflections the mere teaching, mere world conception of spiritual science is expanded to impulses which can penetrate our life and tell us what it ought to become and must become. For the musical-poetic art it was in Richard Wagner that the new star has first arisen which sends to earth the light of spiritual life. Such a life impulse must increasingly expand until the whole outer life becomes again a mirror of the soul.

All that meets us from without can become a mirror of the soul. Do not take that as a mere superficiality, but as something that one can acquire from spiritual science. It will be as it was centuries ago, where in every lock, in every key, we met with something that reflected what the craftsman had felt and experienced. In the same way when there is again true spiritual life in humanity, the whole of life, all that meets us outside, will appear to us again as an image of the soul. Secular buildings are only secular as long as man is incapable of imprinting the spirit into them. Spirit can be imprinted everywhere. The picture of the railway station can flash up, artistically conceived. Today we have not got it. But when it is realized again what forms ought to be, one will feel that the locomotive can be formed architecturally and that the station can be related to it as the outer envelopment of what the locomotive expresses in its architectural forms. Only when they are architecturally conceived will they be mutually related as two things belonging to each other. But then too it is not a matter of indifference how left and right are used in the forms. When man learns how the inner expresses itself in the outer, then there will be a culture again. There have indeed been ages when as yet no Romanesque, no Gothic architecture existed, when those who bore in their souls the dawn of a new culture were gathered together in the catacombs below the old Roman city. But that which lived within them and could only be engraved in meagre forms in the ancient earth-caves, that which you find on the tombs of the dead, this lit up dimly there and is what then appears to us in the Romanesque arches, the Romanesque pillars, the apse. Thought has been carried forth into the world. Had the first Christians not borne the thought in the soul it would not meet us in what has become world culture. The theosophist only feels him-self as such when he is conscious that in his soul he carries a future culture. Others may ask what he has already accomplished. Then he says to himself: What did the Christians of the catacombs accomplish, and what has grown from it?

The feeble emotional impulse that lives in our souls when we sit together, let us seek to expand it in the spirit, somewhat as the thoughts of the Christians were able to expand to the vaulted wonders of the later cathedral. What we have in the hours when we are together, let us imagine expanded outwardly, carried forth into the world. Then we have the impulses which we should have when we are conscious that spiritual science is no hobby for individuals sitting together, but something that should be carried out into the world. The souls who sit here in your bodies will find, when they appear in a new incarnation, many things already realized. which live in them today. Let us bring such thoughts with us when we are together for the last time in a season and review the spiritual-scientific thoughts of the winter. Let us so transform them that they shall work as culture impulses. Let us seek in this way to steep our souls in feelings and sensations and let that live into the summer sunshine which shows us outwardly in the physical world the active cosmic forces. Then our soul will be able to maintain the mood and carry into the outer world what it has experienced in the worlds of spirit. That is part of the development of the theosophist. Thus we shall again come a step forward if we take such feelings with us and absorb with them the strengthening forces of the summer.

• 1. Latham's translation

In recent days, we have dealt with the development of European civilization and we shall try to add a number of considerations to what has been said. In this, it is always our intention to bring about an understanding of what plays into human life in the present age from the most diverse directions and leads to comprehension of the tasks posed by our time.

When you look at individual human life, it can indeed give you a picture of mankind's development. Nevertheless, you must naturally take into consideration here what has been mentioned in regard to the differences between the development of the individual and the overall development of humanity. I have repeatedly called attention to the fact that whereas the individual gets older and older, mankind as a whole becomes younger and younger, advancing, as it were, to the experience of younger periods of life. While keeping in mind that in this regard the life of the whole human community and that of the individual are direct opposites, at least for the sake of clarification, we can still say that individual human life can be a picture for us of the life of all humanity. If we then view the single human life in this way, we find that a quite specific sum of experiences belongs with each period of life. We cannot teach a six year-old child something we can teach a twelve-year-old; in turn, we cannot expect that the twelve-year-old approaches things with the same comprehension as a twenty-year-old. In a sense, the human being has to grow into what is compatible with individual periods in life. It is the same in the case of humanity as a whole.

True, the individual cultural epochs we have to point out based on insight into humanity's evolution—the old Indian, the old Persian, the Egypto-Chaldean, the Greco-Roman epoch and then the one to which we ourselves belong—have quite specific cultural contents and the whole of mankind has to grow into them. But just as the individual can fall behind his potential of development, so certain segments of mankind can do the same. This is a phenomenon that must be taken into consideration, particularly in our age, since humanity is now moving into the evolutionary state of freedom. It is, therefore, left up to mankind itself to find its way into what this and the following epoch put forward. It is, as it were, left up to human discretion to remain behind what is posed as goals. If an individual lags behind in this regard, he is confronted by others who do find their way properly into their tasks of evolution. They then have to carry him along, in a manner of speaking. Yet, in a certain sense, this can frequently signify a somewhat unpleasant destiny for such a person when he has to become aware that in a certain way he remains behind the others who do arrive at the goal of evolution.

This can also take place in the life of nations. It is possible that some nations achieve the goal and that others remain behind. As we have seen, the goals of the various nations also differ from each other. First of all, if one nation attains its goal and the other falls short of what it is supposed to accomplish, then something is lost that could only have been achieved by this laggard nation. On the other hand, this backsliding nation will adopt much that is really not suitable for it. It appropriates contents it receives by imitating other nations that do attain their goal. Such things do take place in the evolution of mankind, and it is of particular significance for the present age to pay attention to them.

Today, we shall summarize a number of things, familiar to us from other aspects, and throw light on them from a certain standpoint. We know that the time from the eighth pre-Christian century until the fifteenth century A.D. is the time of the development of the intellectual or rational soul among the civilized part of humanity. This development of the intellectual or rational soul begins in the eighth pre-Christian century in southern Europe and Asia Minor. We can trace it when we focus upon the beginnings of the historical development of the Greek people. The Greeks still possess much of what can be termed the development of the sentient soul that was particularly suited to the third post-Atlantean age, the Egypto-Chaldean epoch. That whole period was devoted to the development of the sentient soul.

During those times, human beings surrendered to the impressions of the external world, and through these impressions of the outer world they received at the same time everything they then valued as insights and that they let flow into the impulses of their will. With all their being people were in a condition where they experienced themselves as members of the whole cosmos. They questioned the stars and their movements when it was a matter of deciding what to do, and so on. This experiencing of the surrounding world, this seeing of the spiritual in all details of the outer world, was the distinguishing feature of the Egyptians at the height of their culture. This is what existed in Asia Minor and enjoyed a second flowering among the Greeks. The ancient Greeks certainly possessed this faculty of free surrender to the outer surroundings, and this was connected with a perception of the elemental spirit beings within the outer phenomena.

Then, however, something developed among the Greeks, which Greek philosophers call “nous,” namely, a general world intellect. This then remained the fundamental quality of human soul developments until the fifteenth century. It attained a kind of high point in the fourth Christian century and then diminished again. But this whole development from the eighth pre-Christian century up until the fifteenth century actually developed the intellect. However, if we speak of “intellect” in this period, we really have to disregard what we term “intellect” in our present age. For us, the intellect is something we carry within ourselves, something we develop within ourselves, by virtue of which we comprehend the world. This was not so in the case of the Greeks, and it was still not so in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, when people spoke about the intellect. Intellect was something objective; the intellect was an element that filled the world. The intellect arranged the individual world phenomena. People observed the world and its phenomena and told themselves: It is the universal intellect that makes one phenomenon follow the other, places the individual phenomena into a greater totality, and so forth. People attributed to the human brain no more than the fact that it shared in this general universal intelligence.

When we work out of modern physics and physiology and speak about light, we say that the light is within us. But even in his naive mind nobody would believe that light is only in our heads. Just as little as today's naive consciousness claims that it is dark outside and light exists only in the human head would a Greek or even a person of the eleventh or twelfth century have said that the intellect was only in his head. Such a person said, The intellect is outside, permeating the world and bestowing order on everything. Just as the human being becomes aware of light owing to his perceptions, so he becomes aware of the intellect. The intellect lights up in him, so to speak.

Something important was connected with this emergence of cosmic intelligence within the human cultural development. Earlier, when the cultural development ran its course under the influence of the sentient soul, people did not refer to a uniform principle encompassing the whole world. They spoke of the spirits of plants, of spirits that regulate the animal kingdom, of water spirits and spirits of the air, and so on. People referred to a multitude of spiritual entities. It was not merely polytheism, the folk religion, that spoke of this multitude. Even in those who were initiates, the awareness was definitely present that they were dealing with a multitude of actual beings in the world outside. Due to the dawn of the rational soul age, a sort of monism developed. Reason was viewed as something uniform that enveloped the whole world. It was not until then that the monotheistic character of religion developed, although a preliminary stage of it existed in the third post-Atlantean epoch. But what we should record scientifically concerning this era—from the eighth pre-Christian to the fifteenth century A.D.—is the fact that it is the period of the developing world intellect and that people had quite different thoughts about the intellect than we have nowadays.

Why did people think so differently about the intellect? People thought differently about the intellect because they also felt differently when they tried to grasp something by means of their intellect. People went through the world and perceived objects through their senses; but when they thought about them, they always experienced a kind of jolt. When they thought about something, it was as if they were experiencing a stronger awakening than they sensed in the process of ordinary waking. Thinking about something was a process still experienced as different from ordinary life. Above all, when people thought about something, they felt that they were involved in a process that was objective, not merely subjective. Even as late as the fifteenth century—and in its aftereffect even in still later times—people had a certain feeling in regard to the more profound thinking about things, a feeling people today do not have anymore. Nowadays human beings do not have the feeling that thinking about something should be carried out in a certain mood of soul. Up until the fifteenth century, people had the feeling that they produced only something evil if they were not morally good and yet engaged in thinking. In a sense, they reproached themselves for thinking even though they were bad persons. This is something we no longer experience properly. Nowadays people believe, In my soul I can be as bad as I want to be, but I can engage in thinking. Up to the fifteenth century, people did not believe that. They actually felt that it was a kind of insult to the divine cosmic intelligence to think about something while in an immoral soul condition. Hence, already in the act of thinking, they saw something real; in a manner of speaking, they viewed themselves as submerged with their soul in the overall cosmic intellect.

What was the reason for that? This came about because in this period from the eighth pre-Christian century to the fifteenth century A.D., and particularly in the fourth century, human beings predominantly employed their etheric body when they engaged in thinking. It was not that they decided to activate the ether body. But what they did sense—their whole soul mood—brought the etheric body into movement when thinking occurred. We can almost say: During that age, human beings thought with their etheric body. And the characteristic thing is that in the fifteenth century people began to think with their physical bodies. When we think, we do so with the forces the etheric body sends into the physical body. This is the great difference that becomes evident when we look at thinking before and after the fifteenth century. When we look at thinking prior to that time, it runs its course in the etheric body (see drawing, light-shaded crosshatching); in a sense, it gives the etheric body a certain structure. If we look at thinking now, it runs its course in the physical body (dark). Each such line of the ether body calls forth a replica of itself, and this replica is then found in the physical body.

Since that time, what occurs in human beings when they think is, as it were, an impression of the etheric activity as though of a seal on the physical body. The development from the fifteenth to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was mainly that human beings increasingly have taken their thinking out of the etheric body, that they adhere to this shadow image brought about in the physical body by the actual thought impulses originating in the etheric body. We therefore deal with the fact that in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch people really think with the physical body but that this is merely a shadow image of what was once cosmic thinking; hence, since that time, only a shadow image of cosmic thinking dwells in mankind.

You see, everything that has developed since the fifteenth century, all that developed as mathematics, as modern natural science and so on, is fundamentally a shadow image, a specter of former thinking; it no longer contains any life. People today actually have no idea of how much more alive an element thinking was in former times. In those ancient days, the human being actually felt refreshed while thinking. He was glad when he could think, for thinking was a refreshment of soul for him. In that age, the concept did not exist that thinking could also be something tiring. Human beings could become tired out by something else, but when they could truly think, they experienced this as a refreshment, an invigoration for the soul; when they could live in thoughts, they also experienced something of a sense of grace bestowed on them.

Now, this transition in the soul condition has occurred. In what appears as thinking in modern times, we are confronted with something shadowy. This is the reason for the difficulty in motivating a human being to any action through thinking—if I may put it like this. One can tell people all sorts of things based on thinking, but they will not feel inspired. Yet this is the very thing they must learn. Human beings must become aware of the fact that they possess shadow images in their current thinking. They have to realize that it must not be allowed to remain thus; that this shadow image, i.e. modern thinking, has to be enlivened so that it can turn into Imagination. It becomes evident, for example, in such books as my Theosophy or my An Outline of Occult Science that the attempt is always made to change modern thinking into Imagination, that pictures are driven everywhere into our thinking so that thinking can be aroused to Imagination, hence, to life. Otherwise, humanity would be laid waste completely. We can disseminate arid scholarliness far and wide, but this dry scholarliness will not become inflamed and rouse itself to will-filled action, if Imaginative life does not once more enter into this shadowy thinking, this ghost of thinking which has invaded mankind in recent times.

This is indeed the profound and fateful challenge for modern civilization, namely, that we should realize that, on the one hand, thinking tends to become a shadowy element into which human beings increasingly withdraw and that, on the other hand, what passes over into the will actually turns only into a form of surrender to human instincts. The less thinking is capable of taking in Imagination, the more will the full interest of what lives outside in society be abandoned to the instincts. Humanity of former times, at least in the epochs that bore the stamp of civilization—you have been able to deduce that from the previous lectures—possessed something, out of the whole human organism that was spiritual. Modern human beings only receive something spiritual from their heads; in regard to their will, they thus surrender to their impulses and instincts. The great danger is that human beings turn more and more into purely head-oriented creatures, that in regard to acting in the outer world out of their will, they abandon themselves to their instincts. This then naturally leads to the social conditions that are now spreading in the East of Europe^T1 and also infect us here everywhere. This comes about because thinking has become but a shadow image. One cannot stress these things often enough.

It is on the basis of precisely such profound insight that the significant strivings of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science will be understood. Its aim is the shadow image once again become a living being, so that something will be available again to mankind that can take hold of the whole human being. This, however, cannot take place if thinking remains a shadow image, if Imaginations do not enter into this thinking once more. Numbers, for example, will have to be imbued again with life in the way I outlined when I pointed to the sevenfold human being, who is actually a nine-membered being, where the second and the third, the sixth and the seventh parts unite in such a way as to become in each case a unity, and where seven is arrived at when one sums up the nine parts. It is this inner involvement of what was once bestowed on man from within that must be striven for. We have to take very seriously what is characterized in this regard by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

From a different direction, an awareness came about of the fact that thinking is becoming shadow like; for that reason, a method was created in Jesuitism that from a certain aspect, brings life into this thinking. The Jesuit exercises are designed to bring life into this thinking. But they accomplish this by renewing an ancient form of life, above all, not by moving in the direction of and working through Imagination, but through the will, which particularly in Jesuit exercises plays an important role. We should realize—yet realize it far too little—how in a community such as the Jesuit order all aspects of the life of soul become something radically different from what is true of ordinary people. Basically, all other human beings of the present possess a different condition of soul than those who become Jesuits. The Jesuits work out of a world will; that cannot be denied. Consequently, they are aware of certain existing interrelationships; at most, such interrelationships are noticed also by some other orders that in turn are fought tooth and nail by the Jesuits. But it is this significant element whereby reality enters into the shadowy thinking that turns a Jesuit into a different kind of person from the others in our modern civilization. These think merely in shadow images and therefore are actually asleep mentally, since thinking no longer takes hold of their organism and does not really permeate their nervous system.

Nobody, I believe, has ever seen a gifted Jesuit who is nervous, whereas those imbued with modern scholarliness and education increasingly suffer from nervousness. When do we become nervous? When the physical nerves make themselves felt. Something then makes itself felt that, from a physical standpoint, has no right at all to make itself felt, for it exists merely to transmit the spiritual. These matters are intimately connected with the wrongness of our modern education. And from a certain standpoint of imbuing thinking with life—a standpoint we must nevertheless definitely oppose—Jesuitism is something that goes along with the world, even though, like a crab, it goes backwards. But at least it moves, it does not stand still, whereas the form of science in vogue today basically does not comprehend the human being at all.

Here, I would like to draw your attention to something. I have already mentioned repeatedly that it is actually painful to witness again and again that modern human beings, who can think all sorts of things and are so very clever, do not stand in a living manner with a single fiber of their lives in the present age, that they do not see what is going on around them, indeed, that they are unaware of what is happening around them and do not wish to participate in it. That is different in the case of the Jesuit. The Jesuit who activates his whole being is well aware of what vibrates through the world today. As evidence, I would like to read to you a few lines from a current Jesuit pamphlet from which you can deduce what sort of life pulsates in it:

For all those who are serious about the fundamental Christian principles, those to whom the welfare of the people is truly a concern of the heart, whose soul was once profoundly touched by the words of the Savior, “Miseror super turbam,”^T2 for all those the time has now come when, borne by the ground swell of the Bolshevist storm tide, they can work with much greater success for the people and with the people. There is no room for timidity. Hence, as a matter of policy, we advocate the all out struggle against “capitalism,” against the exploitation of the people and profiteering at their expense, stricter emphasis on the duty to work even for the higher classes, the procurement of decent housing for millions of fellow citizens, even if such procurement necessitates making use of palaces and larger houses, utilization of natural resources and energy gained from water and air for the general welfare, not for trusts and syndicates, enhancement and education of the masses of people, participation by all segments of the people in government and administration, utilization of the concept of the system of soviets for the purpose of developing class representation having equal rights alongside parliamentary mass representation in order to prevent “the isolation of the masses from the state apparatus” as censured justifiably by Lenin ... God has given the goods of the earth to all human beings, not to a few so they can live on the fat of the land while millions languish in poverty, which is degrading both physically and morally ...¹

You see, this is the fiery mind that does sense something of what is happening. Here is a person who, in the rest of his book, sternly opposes Bolshevism and naturally wishes to have nothing to do with it. But, unlike somebody who has made himself comfortable in a chair today and is oblivious to the conflagration in the world all around him, he does not remain in such a position. Instead, he is aware of what is happening and knows what he wants because he sees what is going on.

People have gone so far as to merely think about the affairs of the world, and otherwise let things run their course. This is what has to be stressed again and again, namely, that the human being has more in him than mere thoughts with which to think about things while really not paying attention to the world's essential nature. As an example we need only indicate the Theosophical Society. It points to the great initiates who exist somewhere, and indeed, it can do so with justification. But it is not a matter of the initiates' existence; what is important is the manner in which those who refer to them speak of them. Theosophists imagine that the great initiates rule the world; in turn, they themselves sit down and produce good thoughts, which they let stream out in all directions. Then they talk of world rule, of world epochs, of world impulses. However, when the point is reached where something real, such as anthroposophy, has to live within the actual course of world events because it could not be otherwise, people find that uncomfortable since then they cannot really remain sitting on their chairs but have to experience what goes on in the world.

It must be strongly emphasized that the intellect has turned into a shadow in humanity, that it was earlier experienced in the etheric body and has now slipped, so to speak, into the physical body where it leads only a subjective existence. However, it can be brought to life through Imagination. Then it leads to the consciousness soul, and this consciousness soul can be grasped as a reality only when it senses the ego descends out of soul-spiritual worlds into incarnation and then passes through the gate of death into soul-spiritual worlds. When this inner soul-spiritual nature of the ego is comprehended, then the shadow image of the intellect can in fact be filled with reality. For it is through the ego that this has to be accomplished.

It is necessary to realize that living thinking exists. For what is it that people know since the fifteenth century? They know only logical thinking, not living thinking. This, too, I have pointed out repeatedly. What is living thinking? I shall take an example close at hand. In 1892, I wrote the The Philosophy of Freedom. This book has a certain content. In 1903, I wrote Theosophy; again, it has a certain content. In Theosophy, mention is made of the etheric body, the astral body, and so on. In Philosophy of Freedom, there is no mention of that. Now those who are only familiar with the logical, dead thinking come and say, Yes, I read the Philosophy of Freedom; from it, I cannot extract any concept of the etheric and astral body; it is impossible; I cannot find these concepts from the concepts contained in the book. But this is the same as if I were to take a small, five-year-old boy and fashioned him into a man of sixty by pulling him upwards and sideways to make him taller and wider!

I cannot put a mechanical, lifeless process in place of something living. But picture the Philosophy of Freedom as something alive—which indeed it is—and then imagine it growing. From it, then develops what only a person who tries to cull or pick out something from concepts will not figure out. All objections concerning contradictions are based on just this, namely, that people cannot understand the nature of living thinking as opposed to the dead thinking that dominates the whole world and all of civilization today. In the world of living things, everything develops from within, A formerly black-haired person who has white hair has acquired the latter not because the hair has been painted white; it has turned white from within. Things that grow and wane develop from within, and so it is also in the case of living thinking. Yet, today, people sit down and merely try to form conclusions, try to sense outward logic. What is logic? Logic is the anatomy of thinking, and one studies anatomy by means of corpses. Logic is acquired through the study of the corpse of thinking. It is certainly justified to study anatomy by means of corpses. It is just as justified to study logic through the corpses of thinking. But one will never comprehend life by means of what has been observed on the corpse!

This is what is important today and what really matters if we wish with all our soul to take part in a living way in what actually permeates and weaves through the world. This side of the matter has to be pointed out again and again, because insofar as the positive world development and evolution of mankind are concerned, we need to invigorate a thinking that has become shadowy. This process of thinking becoming shadow-like reached its culmination in the middle of the nineteenth. century. For that reason, the things that, so to say, beguiled humanity most of them fall into that period. Although in themselves these things were not great, if placed in the right location, they appear great.

Take the end of the 1850's. Darwin's Origin of the Species,² Karl Marx's The Principles of Political Economy,³ as well as Psycho-Physics by Gustav Theodor Fechner,⁴ a work in which the attempt is made to discover the psychic sphere by means of outward experiments, were published then. In the same year, the captivating discovery of spectral analysis by Kirchhoff⁵ and Bunsen⁶ is introduced; it demonstrates, as it were, that wherever one looks in the universe the same materiality is discovered. It is as if everything were being done in the middle of the nineteenth century to beguile human beings into believing that thinking must remain subjective and shadow-like, that it must not interfere in the world outside so that they could not possibly imagine that there might be reason, nous, in the cosmos, something that lives in the cosmos itself.

This is what caused this second half of the nineteenth century to be so unphilosophical. Basically, this is also what made it so devoid of deeds. This is what caused the economic relationships to become more and more complicated while commerce became enlarged into a world economy so that the whole earth in fact turned into one economic sphere, and particularly this shadow-like thinking was unable to grasp the increasingly complex and overwhelming reality. This is the tragedy of our modern age. The economic conditions have become more and more complex, weighty, and increasingly brutal; human thinking remained shadowy, and these shadows certainly could no longer penetrate into what goes on outside in the brutal economic reality.

This is what causes our present misery. Unfortunately, if a person actually believes that he is more delicately organized and has need of the spirit, he may possibly get into the habit of making a long face, of speaking in a falsetto voice and of talking about the fact that he has to elevate himself from brutal reality, since the spiritual basically can be grasped only in the mystical realm. Thinking has become so refined that it has to withdraw from reality, that it perishes right away in its shadowy existence if it tries to penetrate brutal reality. Reality in the meantime develops below in conformity with the instincts; it proliferates and brutalizes. Up above, we see the bloated ideas of mysticism, of world views and theosophies floating about; below, life brutally takes its course. This is something that must stop for the sake of mankind. Thinking must be enlivened; thought has to become so powerful that it need not withdraw from brutal reality but can enter into it, can live in it as spirit. Then reality will no longer be brutal. This has to be understood.

What is not yet understood in many different respects is that a thinking in which universal being dwells cannot but pour its force over everything. This should be something that goes without saying. But it appears as a sacrilege to this modern thinking if a form of thinking appears on the scene that cannot help but extend to all different areas. A properly serious attitude in life should be comprised of the realization: In thinking, we have been dealing with a shadow image, and rightly so, but the age has now arrived when life must be brought once again into this shadow image of thought in order that from this form of thought life, from this inner life of soul, the outer physical, sensory life can receive its social stimulus.

Tomorrow, we shall continue with this.

• T1. This is a reference to what was happening in Russia.
• T2. Latin for “I have compassion on the crowd” (Matthew 15:32).
• 1 . “Bolshevism” in pamphlets of Stimmen der Zeit (“Voices of the Times”), 6, 3rd edition Freiburg i. Br., 1919 by Bernhard Duhr, S. J. (1852–1930), historian.
• 2 . Charles Darwin, 1809–1882, natural scientist.
• 3 . Karl Marx, 1818–1883.
• 4 . Gustav Theodor Fechner, 180–1887, natural scientist and philosopher.
• 5 . Gustav Robert Kirchhoff, 1824–1887, physicist.
• 6 . Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, 1811–1899, chemist.

Dornach, 29th June, 1924

The day before yesterday I tried to picture for you the cosmic drama, as it were, wherein human beings are shown in their relation to Beings of the spiritual world, so that one can see how there stems from this relationship not only the working out of karma, but also the living out of karma during physical life on earth. To-day I should like to turn to a thought touched upon in that lecture. I said that the present period in human evolution confronts anyone who has the knowledge of Initiation-Science with problems of world-karma in the deepest sense of the words. And before proceeding to consider how knowledge of karma is acquired, we will study its world-historic aspects, which in the nature of things must closely concern the whole of civilised humanity at the present time.

Things are happening in the world to-day which stir even the everyday consciousness of man and the heart that is bound up with this everyday consciousness. A heavy cloud looms over the civilisation of Europe and from one point of view it is amazing to find what little willingness there is on the part of mankind in general to feel and realise what this cloud portends.

Think only of what is emerging as the result of views of life and of the world widely prevalent in humanity to-day. Look at what is being made of Christianity in the East of Europe! Information—not entirely to be discredited—has reached us that the works of Tolstoy are to be banned by the present Government of Soviet Russia with the object of keeping them out of the reach of future generations. Although such things do not always work out exactly as they are announced, we must not blind ourselves to the gravity of the present moment in world-history; we do well to listen to the warning which Initiation-Science would like to repeat day in and day out—that now is the time when the many petty concerns occupying men's minds ought to be silenced and the attention of numbers of souls directed to the great concerns of life. But in point of fact, interest in these great concerns is dwindling rather than increasing.

We see views of life and of the world arising to-day with a certain ‘creative’ force, although this actually takes effect in destruction; these views are the offspring of human passions and emotions, of an element in human nature working entirely in a Luciferic direction. It may truly be said that reality is denied and rejected by a large portion of humanity to-day. The essential nature of matter is not understood by materialistic thinkers. Matter can be understood only when the creative spirit within it is apprehended. Therefore anyone who denies the reality of the creative spirit within matter knows only a false image of matter and the consequent idolatry is a far greater menace than that of the primitive peoples who are said to represent civilisation in the stage of infancy. Fantastic ideas and conceptions of what is, after all, unreality, hold sway in mankind.—This is one side of the picture.

Such things have of course occurred in various forms throughout human history. But spiritual science teaches us to recognise their connections in the whole World-Order, and to realise with what earnestness they must be studied.

And so we must be mindful of what is brought into existence when certain social orders are created under the influence of materialistic, fantastic ideas—ideas which have sprung entirely from human aberrations, have nothing to do with reality and could never have originated elsewhere than in man himself.

Having turned our minds to a phenomenon of history which has, however, immediate bearing upon our present age, let us consider occurrences in elemental nature like those mentioned in the last lecture, when groups of human beings are suddenly snatched away from earthly existence as the result of an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, or the like. The news reaches us of a catastrophe of this kind and we hear that a large number of people have met their death or suffered grave disablement.—Again, there are events for which the devices of civilisation are responsible. We hear, for example, of a railway accident, where again the karmic threads of life are abruptly severed, but in this case as the result of man-made institutions.

If we are earnest in our study of karma, we must ask, on the one hand: What form does karma take in the case of adherents of a social order originating from sheer emotionalism, sheer fantasy in man himself and devoid of objective reality? And on the other, we must ask: What form does karma take when the thread of life is suddenly severed by a catastrophe of nature or one that is the outcome of civilisation?

Here is one of the points where Initiation-Science enters deeply into man's life of feeling and perception. Ordinary, everyday consciousness does not ask about the consequences of such happenings in the successive earthly lives of men. In the case of catastrophes of civilisation particularly, the question of human destiny in the wider sense is never asked. The destiny of a man who has been the victim of such a catastrophe is regarded by ordinary consciousness as finished and done with.

Initiation-Science observes on the one side what takes place in the foreground of earth life and, in the background, the deeds of gods in connection with the souls of men. And it is what proceeds in the background that provides Initiation-Science with a criterion for assessing earthly life. For as we shall see in our further studies of karma, a great deal has to be moulded, recast in one way or another in earthly existence in order that the divine things behind it may take effect in the lives of men—in accordance with the will of the gods.

For on looking into the background we perceive the karma that is woven between one human soul and another during the life between death and rebirth; we perceive how human souls work together with the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. We see, too, the activities of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers. Within the living organism of gods behind the organism of the earth we perceive the justification for this intervention by the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers; we realise that Lucifer and Ahriman play an essential part in the deeper, spiritual ordering of the world. But although this necessity becomes evident to us, we must nevertheless often stand aghast at the way in which Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences penetrate into the earthly world.

When our vision extends beyond the earthly into the spiritual world, many things must be viewed in the light of their inter-connections, which need not necessarily be the case in ordinary consciousness. If in times when Initiation Science was regarded with the reverence that must prevail once again—if in those ancient times the question arose whether a person was in truth an Initiate, men knew the right attitude with which such a question must be approached. And when a man who took life earnestly met another like him and their opinions differed as to whether a third person was an Initiate, the question was wont to be put to the one who felt uncertain: “Have you looked into his eyes?” For in those olden times, when clairvoyance was a natural gift in civilisation all over the earth, Initiates were recognised by the deep, earnest look in their eyes.—And something similar will come again. Without losing sight of the humour of life, men must again be mindful of its gravity.

Many of these lessons can be learned from what is happening in our present time and has indeed happened in some form through all ages, but they stand before humanity now as a great and mighty riddle ... And now let us think of the facts connected with a certain kind of event.

Numbers of human beings have perished in some region where a terrible earthquake has taken place. Contemplating the event in the light of spiritual science, it cannot be said that the thread of karma belonging to the present earthly lives of these men has in every case come to an end. Think of the thread of karma in those who have met their death: in the case of the aged, whose earthly karma in this incarnation would soon have been completed, the thread of life will be shortened possibly only by months or at most by a few years. Younger people in the prime of life who have thought a great deal about what they wanted to achieve in the time ahead of them for themselves, for their family, or for a wider circle of humanity, are robbed of many years of activity. Children in process of education as a prelude to manhood are torn away from earthly existence together with the elderly and aged. Babies just weaned or still unweaned are snatched away, together with the old and the young.

The great riddle is this: How does karma work in an event of this kind?

And now think of the difference between such an event in elemental nature and an event that is due, fundamentally, to civilisation, for example, a terrible railway accident. There is obviously a difference, a difference that becomes significant and fundamental when studied from the point of view of karma.

As a rule it will be found that when human beings perish together, let us say in an earthquake, there is some kind of karmic connection between them all—just as men who live in a particular district are, broadly speaking, karmically connected or at any rate have some link with one another. These people have a certain common destiny into which they have been impelled through having descended from prenatal existence to a particular locality on the earth, and with this common destiny they are led along their path to the point where the threads of their lives are severed.

On the other hand, in the case of a railway accident it will generally be found that only a few of the victims are karmically connected with one another. What, then, is their situation? As a rule they are human beings between whom there is no definite link, who are brought together without any such connection as invariably exists between victims of a particular earthquake. The victims of a railway accident may be said to have been brought together at a certain spot by destiny. Do we not see karma working quite differently in these two cases?

With the help of Initiation-Science, let us think of a catastrophe like that of a devastating earthquake. We are concerned there with human beings whose karma at birth did not entail the severance of the thread of earthly life by the time the catastrophe occurred. As the result of this event they were torn as it were out of their karma.

How could this be? It is the decree of the gods that karma shall come to fulfilment, shall be lived out to the full. Now upheavals in nature—earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, great floods and the like—are not an integral part of the onflowing evolution of the earth; something extraneous—although still under the sway of natural laws—intervenes here in the evolutionary process, something that in times when man was not subject to birth and death as we know them to-day was both necessary and propitious for evolution. To form a clear conception of what this means, we must turn our minds to the epoch of the Old Moon.

In the epoch of the Old Moon which preceded that of the Earth, man was not led into physical existence by a transition as abrupt as birth or conception, nor led out of physical existence by a transition as abrupt as death. The transition in each case was much gentler; it was a transformation, a metamorphosis, rather than a sudden change. The Moon-man was not as densely material as the man of to-day; nor in the spiritual world was he as bereft of spirit as he is to-day.

The beings inhabitating the Old Moon were subject to quite different natural laws, laws under which this Moon-life was involved in constant movement; it was inwardly mobile, in ceaseless, surging flow. This surging, flowing life has become rigid—but only partially so—in the present Moon, our companion in the universe. The rigidification in the Moon—it has really a kind of hornlike quality—points to the past inner mobility of the Moon which takes effect in the earth when elemental catastrophes of nature occur of the kind of which I have been speaking. The ordinary natural laws of the earth are not operating, but the Old Moon is beginning to stir, to rumble in the earth. The Moon revolving out yonder in the universe has the constitution that is proper for it to-day, but after its separation from the earth, forces were left behind; and it is these Moon-forces that rumble and stir in the earth when nature-catastrophes occur.

As you will remember, I told you that the Beings who were once the great primeval Teachers of humanity are connected with man's karma; it was they who brought the ancient wisdom to mankind. They did not live on the earth in physical bodies but in etheric bodies, and at a certain point of time they departed from the earth to establish their abode in the Moon; and there we encounter them during the first phase of our life between death and a new birth. These are the Beings who engrave a record of men's karma into the cosmic ether, in an unerring script of soul-and-spirit.

But in the cosmos a pledge has been taken—if I may put it so—a pledge that use shall be made not only of the relations between the present Moon and the earth but also of the Moon-forces that were left behind and are still astir within the earth. And it is here that the Ahrimanic powers can step in and take hold of the threads of human life. It can actually be seen how from the depths of the earth the Ahrimanic powers present a countenance of gloating satisfaction when such catastrophes of nature befall.

With the help of Initiation-Science we can perceive how up to the moment when the thread of life is abruptly severed, part of the karma of one who perishes in a catastrophe of this kind has been absolved. According to whether death occurred in old age, adult life or babyhood, a longer or shorter portion of life would have remained to him; life might have continued until the completion of its course, but as things are, the events that would otherwise have been spread across this whole span lay their grip in a single, sudden moment upon the physical organisation.

Think of this situation, my dear friends.—Suppose such a catastrophe befalls a man at the age of thirty. If he had not been a victim of the catastrophe he might, in accordance with his karma, have reached the age of sixty-five, living through countless experiences which now are no more than possibilities. But everything is contained in his karma, in the make-up of his etheric and astral bodies and of his ego-organisation. And what would have been happening up to the sixty-fifth year of life? After the culmination of the upbuilding process, the organism would have been involved in a process of slow and steady decline; a subtle, gradual decline would have been taking place until the sixty-fifth year of life. This steady decline which, in the slow tempo corresponding to such a lengthy period, would have lasted for at least thirty-five years, is fulfilled in a single moment, concentrated as it were into a single moment. Such a thing can happen to the physical body but not to the etheric body, the astral body or the ego-organisation.

When the circumstances are as described here, a man enters the spiritual world in quite another way than would have been the case had his karma been lived out to the full. Something is brought into the spiritual world that would otherwise not have been there: an etheric body, an astral body and an ego-organisation which might still have been living on earth. Instead of remaining in earthly existence they are taken into the spiritual world. What was destined for earthly existence is carried into the spiritual world.

And so we see an earthly element streaming into the spiritual world from all such nature-catastrophes.

Such is the situation of human beings who have been turned aside in this way from the karmic course of their life by the working of the Ahrimanic powers; such is their situation when they arrive in the spiritual world.

And now we must ask ourselves a question—for if we take spiritual science earnestly we must learn to put questions from the standpoint of the spiritual world and of the spiritual Beings in that world, just as with our ordinary consciousness we put questions relating to the physical world and its beings. We must ask the question: How do the Beings of the three Hierarchies respond when human beings ascend to their realm bearing with them an earthly element, bearing this earthly element into the spiritual world?

It then becomes the task of these spiritual Beings to re-integrate into the World-Order what seems to have been turned to evil, to run counter to the World-Order. The gods have now to reckon with what confronts them in these circumstances, in order that they may transmute the Ahrimanic evil into a higher good.

This leads to the question: What is the situation within the World-Order of those human beings who are destined after their death to pass into the spiritual world in this way? The Beings of the higher Hierarchies are confronted with a particular state of affairs and have to say to themselves: In the previous incarnation of this human being and through the whole sequence of preceding lives, a world of facts was prepared, a world of experiences belonging, properly speaking, to the incarnation that has just ended. But only the first part of what was thus prepared has been able to come to expression; the second part has remained without fulfilment. Hence there is part of a life which ought, in reality, to correspond in respect of karma, to all that went before. There ought to be complete correspondence, but there is not ... there is only a part which corresponds to some extent with the previous incarnation, but not with the whole of it.

As they survey this previous earthly life the gods must say: There is something that has not taken effect as it should have done. Causes are there which have not been utilised or turned to account.—And now the gods can take hold of these unutilised causes, guide them to the human being and so strengthen him inwardly for his next earthly life. The power of what existed as a cause in a previous incarnation can manifest all the more forcefully in the incarnation following the present one. If such a catastrophe had not befallen the man in question he might have appeared again in the world in his next incarnation with inferior faculties or very possibly with faculties of quite a different kind. A change has been wrought in him to the end that karma may be adjusted. But he also comes into the world endowed with special qualities; his astral body is reinforced, as it were, because unutilised causative forces are membered into it.

Will you then still be astonished by the legend of a philosopher who threw himself deliberately into the crater of a volcano? What can have been the motive of such a resolve on the part of one who was initiated into the secrets of world-existence? The motive could only have been a conscious intention to achieve through the agency of human will something that could otherwise have been achieved only through the agency of elemental nature: the sudden sweeping away of a process that would otherwise have worked itself to an end by slow degrees.

What is thus told of a philosopher may be due to a resolve to appear in the world in the next incarnation endowed with special powers. The world takes on a very different aspect when we enter into the deep problems of karma!

In principle, therefore, this is how things are in the case of nature-catastrophes. Let us think now of a catastrophe due to the institutions of civilisation, where human beings between whom there are no strong karmic links are as it were massed together by the Ahrimanic powers to suffer common destruction.

The situation here is altogether different. Again the Ahrimanic powers are in action; now, however, the human beings concerned are not, to begin with, grouped together by karmic ties, but for all that are led together. The consequences here are essentially different from those of nature-catastrophes.

A nature-catastrophe evokes in a man whom it befalls a vivid, intensified remembrance of what lies in his karma as causation. For when the human being passes through the gate of death he is made mindful of everything that is contained in his karma. And remembrance of karma is intensified, made more vivid in the soul as the result of a fatal nature-catastrophe.

On the other hand a railway accident, any catastrophe due to the institution of civilisation, brings about oblivion of karma. But because of this oblivion a man becomes highly sensitive to the new impressions coming to him in the spiritual world after death. And the result is that such a man is impelled to ask himself: What is to become of the unexhausted karma I bear within me?

Whereas in the case of a nature-catastrophe the intellectual qualities especially are intensified in the astral body of the victim, a catastrophe of civilisation leads to a strengthening, an enhancement of the will.

But now we will turn from these catastrophes and think of a state of affairs arising from fanatical emotionalism in a group of human beings, where the sole source of the impulses is man himself, where he lives in sheer unreality and works, moreover, as a destructive force. Let us think of a structure of civilisation as fantastically distorted as that presented to us to-day in the East of Europe, and ask ourselves what happens when the men who help to produce such conditions pass through the gate of death.

Here too—as in the case of the other catastrophes something is carried into the spiritual world, namely a Luciferic element which begets darkness and devastation.

From catastrophes of nature and of civilisation it is, in the last resort, light that is carried from the physical into the spiritual world. But from aberrations and misguided impulses in cultural life, darkness is brought into the spiritual world. When men pass into that world through the gate of death they must make their way as it were through a dark, dense cloud. For the light which Lucifer kindled in human emotions on earth becomes dense darkness in the spiritual world when man enters it after death. And in this case, forces and passions engendered entirely by man himself and are concerns of his subjective life, are carried into the spiritual world.

These are forces which through Ahriman's power can be changed in the spiritual world in a way that enables use to be made of the Moon-elements still present in the earth. Lucifer is here stretching out a helping hand to Ahriman.

What is carried up into the spiritual world through impulses in civilisation arising from sheer emotionalism, from blind, misguided earthly consciousness—this, in different guise, is what bursts from the earth's interior in the form of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and the like.

With this knowledge as a background we are led to the question of the karma of the earth and its peoples, the karma of individuals too, inasmuch as the karma of individuals is bound up with that of the peoples and of the earth itself. In putting the question we shall seek for the seeds in Luciferic activities at work in some region where ancient culture is cast on the rubbish-heap by the working of human emotions, where wild, misguided instincts set out to create something new but succeed in spreading only destruction. And we must ask ourselves: Where shall we see the forces seething in the wild passions of men burst forth one day on the earth, in flames or convulsive upheavals of the ground beneath us?

In respect of many an event of elemental nature, Initiation-Science may, nay must, put the question: When and where was this event set in train? And the answer is that it derives from the horrors and atrocities of enmity and warfare through the course of the development of civilisation. There you have the connection.—These happenings lie in the background of existence. In the light of such knowledge, events do not appear in isolation but are seen in their great cosmic setting. How do they find their place in the destinies of men? As I said already, of a truth the gods are there, gods who are linked with the evolution of mankind, and it is their unceasing task to transform these happenings into what is propitious and beneficial for human destiny.

In the interworking between the earthly and spiritual worlds the destinies of men are continually being wrenched from the pinions of Lucifer and the claws of Ahriman, for verily the gods are good! The unrighteousness originating from the activities of Lucifer and Ahriman behind the scenes of existence is led by the good gods into the path of righteousness again and the karmic connection is finally lawful and good.

Our gaze, which must of course be full of understanding for human karma, is now deflected from the destiny of men to the destiny of gods. For when we contemplate the horrors of war, the guilt and ugliness of war in their connection with death-dealing elemental catastrophes, we are watching the battle waged by the good gods against the evil gods—in two directions evil. We gaze beyond the life of men into the life of gods, beholding the life of gods as the background of human life. We watch this life of gods—not with dry, theoretical thoughts, but with our hearts, with deep, inner participation; we watch it in its connection with the individual karma of men on earth because we see human destiny inwoven with the destiny of gods.

When we contemplate these things, the world lying behind human life has for the first time drawn really near to us. For something is then revealed which cannot but stir the very fibres of our hearts. It becomes clear to us that the destiny of men lies embedded in the destiny of the gods, and that in a certain sense the gods yearn for what they have to take in hand for men while their own battle is being waged. And in making such conceptions our own we are led again to what is brought into the world through the Mysteries—as it was brought, too, in the days of the old clairvoyance.

One who had attained Initiation in the ancient Mysteries told how he was led, to begin with, into the world of the Elements; there he beheld his inmost being, with its moral attributes, turn outwards. But then—and he spoke of this experience in words of power and solemnity—he came to know the nether gods and the upper gods, the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic gods. The good gods, the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic gods. The good gods move in the field of equilibrium. And as the pupil of the ancient Mysteries came to know what must be known again by the pupil in our modern age, he was initiated, stage by stage, into the very depths of existence. When this is understood and its implications realised, the strange, yet all-illuminating conception is reached: To what end does calamity exist in the world? To the end that the gods may transmute it into well-being. Ordinary well-being does not lead into the life of worlds. Well-being that springs from calamities befalling man along his path through the physical world of sense—this alone can lead into the depths of existence.

In the study of karma we must never call theoretical concepts alone to our aid; we must call upon the whole man. For knowledge of karma can be acquired only when the heart, the feelings and the will participate. If, however, knowledge of karma is acquired in this, the right way, human life will be deepened and due importance attached to the relationships and circumstances by which human beings are led together.

There will, of course, be moments when karma weighs heavily upon a man who does not lead a superficial life. But all such moments are balanced out by others when karma lends him wings on which his soul can soar out of the earthly realm into the realm of the gods. In our inmost being we must feel the reality of the connection between the divine world and the human world if we are to speak of karma in the right and true way.

What we are of ourselves, what is in us in a single earthly life passes away along the path from death to a new birth. What remains is that wherein the gods, that is to say the Beings of the Hierarchies, hold us by the hand. And no one will be able to cultivate the right attitude to the knowledge of karma who does not perceive in karma the helping hand of the gods.

Thus you must try, my dear friends, to grasp the knowledge of karma in such a way that it calls up the feeling: If I am to approach the holy ground of the spirit where something concerning karma can reveal itself to me, I must take the hand of the gods.

Thus real, thus immediate our experiences must become, if we are to win our way to true knowledge of the spiritual world—which is at the same time knowledge of karma.