The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yesterday I tried to show how a more intimate study of man's dream-life can lead us towards the Science of Initiation. To a certain extent, the point of view was that of ordinary consciousness. Today it will be my task to enter more deeply into the same subject-matter from the point of view of ‘imaginative’ cognition—i.e. to present what we were studying yesterday as it appears to one who has learnt to see the world in ‘imaginations’.

For the moment we will neglect the difference between the two kinds of dreams discussed yesterday, and consider dreams as such. It will be a sound approach to describe ‘imaginative’ vision in relation to dreams which a man endowed with imagination may have. Let us compare such a dream with the self-perception attained by the imaginative seer when he looks back upon his own being—when he observes imaginatively his own or another's organs—or, perhaps, the whole human being as a complete organism. You see, the appearance of the dream-world to imaginative consciousness is quite different from its appearance to ordinary consciousness. The same is true of the physical and etheric organism. Now the imaginative seer can dream too; and under certain circumstances his dreams will be just as chaotic as those of other people. From his own experience he can quite well judge the world of dreams; for, side by side with the imaginative life that is inwardly co-ordinated, clear and luminous, the dream-world runs its ordinary course, just as it does side by side with waking life. I have often emphasised that one who attains really spiritual perception does not become a dreamer or enthusiast, living only in the higher worlds and not seeing external reality. People who are ever dreaming in higher worlds, or about them, and do not see external reality, are not initiates; they should be considered from a pathological point of view, at least in the psychological sense of the term. The real knowledge of initiation does not estrange one from ordinary, physical life and its various relationships. On the contrary, it makes one a more painstaking, conscientious observer than without the faculty of seership. Indeed we may say: if a man has no sense of ordinary realities, no interest in ordinary realities, no interest in the details of others' lives, if he is so ‘superior’ that he sails through life without troubling about its details, he shows he is not a genuine seer. A man with imaginative cognition—he may, of course, also have ‘inspired’ and ‘intuitive’ cognition, but at present I am only speaking of ‘imagination’—is quite well acquainted with dream-life from his own experience. Nevertheless, his conception of dreams is different. He feels the dream as something with which he is connected, with which he unites himself much more strongly than is possible through ordinary consciousness. He can take dreams more seriously. Indeed, only imagination justifies us taking our dreams seriously, for it enables us to look, as it were, behind dreaming and apprehend its dramatic course—its tensions, resolutions, catastrophes, and crises—rather than its detailed con-tent. The individual content interests us less, even before we acquire imagination; we are more interested in studying whether the dream leads to a crisis, or to inner joy, to something that we find easy or that proves difficult—and the like.

It is the course of the dream just that which does not interest ordinary consciousness and which I can only call the dramatic quality of the dream—that begins to interest us most. We see behind the scenes of dream-life and, in doing so, become aware that we have before us something related to man's spiritual being in quite a definite way. We see that, in a spiritual sense, the dream is the human being, as the seed is the plant. And in this ‘seed-like’ man we learn to grasp what is really foreign to his present life—just as the seed taken from the plant in the autumn of a given year is foreign to the plant's life of that year and will only be at home in the plant-growth of the following year. It is just this way of studying the dream that gives imaginative consciousness its strongest impressions; for, in our own dreaming being, we detect more and more that we bear within us something that passes over to our next life on earth, germinating between death and a new birth and growing on into our next earthly life. It is the seed of this next earthly life that we learn to feel in the dream.

This is extremely important and is further confirmed by comparing this special experience, which is an intense experience of feeling, with the perception we can have of a physical human being standing before us with his several organs. This perception, too, changes for imaginative consciousness, so that we feel like we do when a fresh, green, blossoming plant we have known begins to fade. When, in imaginative consciousness, we observe the lungs, liver, stomach, and, most of all, the brain as physical organs, we say to ourselves that these, in respect to the physical, are all withering.

Now you will say that it cannot be pleasant to confront, in imaginations, a physical man as a withering being. Well, no one who knows the Science of Initiation will tell you it is only there to offer pleasant truths to men. It has to tell the truth, not please. On the other hand, it must be remembered that, while we learn to know the physical man as a withering being, we perceive in him the spiritual man; in a sense, you cannot see the spiritual man shine forth without learning to know the physical as a decaying, withering being.

Thus man's appearance does not thereby become uglier but more beautiful—and truer, too. And when one is able to perceive the withering of man's organs, which is such a spiritual process, these organs with their etheric content appear as something that has come over from the past—from the last life on earth—and is now withering. In this way we really come to see that the seed of a future life is being formed within the withering process that proceeds from man's being of a former life on earth.

The human head is withering most; and the dream appears to imaginative perception as an emanation of the human head. On the other hand, the metabolic and limb organism appears to imaginative vision to be withering least of all. It appears very similar to the ordinary dream; it is least faded and most closely united, in form and content, with the future of man. The rhythmic organisation contained in the chest is the connecting link between them, holding the balance. It is just to spiritual perception that the human heart appears as a remarkable organ. It, too, is seen to be withering; nevertheless, seen imaginatively, it retains almost its physical form, only beautified and ennobled (I say ‘almost’, not ‘completely’).

There would be a certain amount of truth in painting man's spiritual appearance as follows: a countenance comparatively wise looking, perhaps even somewhat aged; hands and feet small and childlike; wings to indicate remoteness from the earth; and the heart indicated in some form or other reminiscent of the physical organ.

If we can perceive the human being imaginatively, such a picture which we might attempt to paint will not be symbolic in the bad sense that symbolism has today. It will not be empty and insipid, but will contain elements of physical existence while, at the same time, transcending the physical. One might also say, speaking paradoxically (one must begin to speak in paradoxes to some extent when one speaks of the spiritual world, for the spiritual world does really appear quite different from the physical): When we begin to perceive man with imagination we feel in regard to his head: How intensely I must think, if I am to hold my own against this head! Contemplating the human head with imaginative consciousness one gradually comes to feel quite feeble-minded, for with the acutest thoughts acquired in daily life one cannot easily approach this wonderful physical structure of the human head. It is now transformed into something spiritual and its form is still more wonderful as it withers, showing its form so clearly. For the convolutions of the brain actually seem to contain, in a withered form, deep secrets of the world's structure. When we begin to understand the human head we gaze deeply into these cosmic secrets, yet feel ourselves continually baffled in our attempts.

On the other hand, when we try to understand the metabolic and limb system with imaginative consciousness, we say to our-selves: Your keen intellect does not help you here; you ought properly to sleep and dream of man, for man only apprehends this part of his organisation by dreaming of it while awake.

So you see, we must proceed to a highly differentiated mode of perception when we begin to study man's physical organisation imaginatively. We must become clever, terribly clever, when we study his head. We must become dreamers when studying his system of limbs and metabolism. And we must really swing to and fro, as it were, between dreaming and waking if we want to grasp, in imaginative vision, the wonderful structure of man's rhythmic system. But all this appears as the relic of his last life on earth. What he experiences in the waking state is the relic of his last life; this plays into his present life, giving him as much as I ascribed to him yesterday when I said of his life of action, for example, that only as much of man's actions as he can dream of is really done by himself; the rest is done by the gods in and through him. The present is active to this extent; all the rest comes from his former earthly lives. We see that this is so when we have a man before us and perceive his withering physical organisation. And if we look at what man knows of himself while he dreams—dreams in his sleep—we have before us what man is preparing for the next life on earth. These things can be easily distinguished.

Thus imagination leads directly from a study of the waking and sleeping man to a perception of his development from earthly life to earthly life.

Now what is preserved in memory occupies a quite special place in the waking and in the sleeping man. Consider your ordinary memories. What you remember you draw forth from within you in the form of thoughts or mental presentations; you represent to yourself past experiences. These, as you know, lose in memory their vividness, impressiveness, colour, etc. Remembered experiences are pale. But, on the other hand, memory cannot but appear to be very closely connected with man's being; indeed it appears to be his very being. Man is not usually honest enough in his soul to make the necessary confession to himself; but I ask you to look into yourself to find out what you really are in respect to what you call your ego. Is there anything there beside your memories? If you try to get to your ego you will scarcely find anything else but your life's memories. True, you find these permeated by a kind of activity, but this remains very shadowy and dim. It is your memories that, for earthly life, appear as your living ego.

Now this world of memories which you need only call to mind in order to realise how entirely shadowy they are—what does it become in imaginative cognition? It ‘expands’ at once; it becomes a mighty tableau through which we survey, in pictures, all that we have experienced in our present life on earth. One might say: If this¹ be man, and this the memory within him, imagination at once extends this memory back to his birth. One feels oneself outside of space; here all consists of events. One gazes into a tableau and surveys one's whole life up to the present. Time becomes space. It is like looking down an avenue; one takes in one's whole past in a tableau, or panorama, and can speak of memory expanding. In ordinary consciousness memory is confined, as it were, to a single moment at a time. Indeed, it is really as follows: If, for example, we have reached the age of forty and are recalling, not in ‘imagination’, but in ordinary consciousness, something experienced twenty years ago, it is as if it were far off in space, yet still there. Now—in imaginative cognition—it has remained; it has no more disappeared than the distant trees of an avenue. It is there. This is how we gaze into the tableau and know that the memory we bear with us in ordinary consciousness is a serious illusion. To take it for a reality is like taking a cross-section of a tree trunk for the tree trunk itself. Such a section is really nothing at all; the trunk is above and below the mere picture thus obtained. Now it is really like that when we perceive memories in imaginative cognition. We detect the utter unreality of the individual items; the whole expands almost as far as birth—in certain circumstances even farther. All that is past becomes present; it is there, though at the periphery.

Once we have grasped this, once we have attained this perception, we can know—and re-observe at any moment—that man reviews this tableau when he leaves his physical body at death. This lasts some days and is his natural life-element. On passing through the gate of death man gazes, to begin with, at his life in mighty, luminous, impressive pictures. This constitutes his experience for some days.

But we must now advance farther in imaginative cognition. As we do so our life is enriched in a certain way and we accordingly understand many things in a different way from before. Consider, for example, our behaviour towards other people. In ordinary life we may, in individual cases, think about the intentions we have had, the actions we have performed—our whole attitude towards others. We think about all this, more or less. according as we are more or less reflective persons. But now all this stands before us. In our idea of our behaviour we only grasp a part of the full reality. Suppose we have done another a service or an injury. We learn to see the results of our good deed, the satisfaction to the other man, perhaps his furtherance in this or that respect—i.e. we see the results which may follow our deed in the physical world. If we have done an evil deed, we come to see we have injured him, we see that he remained unsatisfied or, perhaps, was even physically injured; and so on. All this can be observed in physical life if we do not run away from it, finding it unpleasant to observe the consequences of our deeds.

This, however, is only one side. Every action we do to human beings, or indeed to the other kingdoms of Nature, has another side. Let us assume that you do a good deed to another man. Such a deed has its existence and its significance in the spiritual world; it kindles warmth there; it is, in a sense, a source of spiritual rays of warmth. In the spiritual world ‘soul-warmth’ streams from a good deed, ‘soul-coldness’ from an evil deed done to other human beings. It is really as if one engendered warmth or coldness in the spiritual world according to one's behaviour to others. Other human actions act like bright, luminous rays in this or that direction in the spiritual world; others have a darkening effect. In short, one may say that we only really experience one half of what we accomplish in our life on earth.

Now, on attaining imaginative consciousness, what ordinary consciousness knows already, really vanishes. Whether a man is being helped or injured is for ordinary consciousness to recognise; but the effect of a deed, be it good or evil, wise or foolish, in the spiritual world—its warming or chilling, lightening or darkening action (there are manifold effects)—all this arises before imaginative consciousness and begins to be there for us. And we say to ourselves: Because you did not know all this when you let your ordinary consciousness function in your actions, it does not follow that it was not there. Do not imagine that what you did not know of in your actions—the sources of luminous and warming rays, etc.—was not there because you did not see or experience it. Do not imagine that. You have experienced it all in your sub-consciousness; you have been through it all. Just as the spiritual eyes of your higher consciousness see it now, so, while you were helping or harming another by your kind or evil deed, your sub-consciousness experienced its parallel significance for the spiritual world.

Further: when we have progressed and attained a sufficient intensification of imaginative consciousness we do not only gaze at the panorama of our experiences, but become perforce aware that we are not complete human beings until we have lived through this other aspect of our earthly actions, which had remained subconscious before. We begin to feel quite maimed in the face of this life-panorama that extends back to birth, or beyond it. It is as if something had been torn from us. We say to ourselves continually: You ought to have experienced that aspect too; you are really maimed, as if an eye or a leg had been removed. You have not really had one half of your experiences. This must arise in the course of imaginative consciousness; we must feel ourselves maimed in this way in respect to our experiences. Above all, we must feel that ordinary life is hiding something from us.

This feeling is especially intense in our present materialistic age. For men simply do not believe today that human actions have any value or significance beyond that for immediate life which takes its course in the physical world. It is regarded, more or less, as folly to declare that something else takes place in the spiritual world. Nevertheless, it is there. This feeling of being maimed comes before ‘inspired’ consciousness and one says to one's self: I must make it possible for myself to experience all I have failed to experience; yet this is almost impossible, except in a few details and to a very limited extent.

It is this tragic mood that weighs upon one who sees more deeply into life. There is so much in life that we cannot fulfil on earth. In a sense, we must incur a debt to the future, admitting that life sets tasks which we cannot absolve in this present earthly life. We must owe them to the universe, saying: I shall only be able to experience that when I have passed through death. The Science of Initiation brings us this great, though often tragical enrichment of life; we feel this unavoidable indebtedness to life and recognise the necessity of owing the gods what we can only experience after death. Only then can we enter into an experience such as we owe to the universe.

This consciousness that our inner life must, in part, run its course by incurring debts to the future after death, leads to an immense deepening of human life. Spiritual science is not only there that we may learn this or that theoretically. He who studies it as one studies other things, would be better employed with a cookery book. Then, at least, he would be impelled to study in a more than theoretical manner, for life, chiefly the life of the stomach and all connected therewith, takes care that we take a cookery book more seriously than a mere theory. It is necessary for spiritual science, on approaching man, to deepen his life in respect to feeling.

Our life is immensely deepened when we become aware of our growing indebtedness to the gods and say: One half of our life on earth cannot really be lived, for it is hidden under the surface of existence. If, through initiation, we learn to know what is otherwise hidden from ordinary consciousness, we can see a little into the debts we have incurred. We then say: With ordinary consciousness we see we are incurring debts, but cannot read the ‘promissory note’ we ought to write. With initiation-consciousness we can, indeed, read the note, but cannot meet it in ordinary life. We must wait till death comes. And, when we have attained this consciousness, when we have so deepened our human conscience that this indebtedness is quite alive in us, we are ready to follow human life farther, beyond the retrospective tableau of which I have spoken and in which we reach back to birth. We now see that, after a few days, we must begin to experience what we have left un-experienced; and this holds for every single deed we have done to other human beings in the world. The last deeds done before death are the first to come before us, and so backwards through life. We first become aware of what our last evil or good deeds signify for the world. Our experience of them while on earth is now eliminated; what we now experience is their significance for the world.

And then we go farther back, experiencing our life again, but backwards. We know that while doing this we are still connected with the earth, for it is only the other side of our deeds that we experience now.

We feel as if our life from now onwards were being borne in the womb of the universe. What we now experience is a kind of embryonic stage for our further life between death and a new birth; only, it is not borne by a mother but by the world, by all that we did not experience in physical life. We live through our physical life again, backwards and in its cosmic significance. We experience it now with a very divided consciousness. Living here in the physical world and observing the creatures around him, man feels himself pretty well as the lord of creation; and even though he calls the lion the king of beasts, he still feels himself, as a human being, superior. Man feels the creatures of the other kingdoms as inferior; he can judge them, but does not ascribe to them the power to judge him. He is above the other kingdoms of Nature.

He has a very different feeling, however, when after death the undergoes the experience I have just described. He no longer feels himself confronting the inferior kingdoms of Nature, but kingdoms of the spiritual world that are superior to him. He feels himself as the lowest kingdom, the others standing above him.

Thus, in undergoing all he has previously left unexperienced, man feels all around him beings far higher than himself. They unfold their sympathies and antipathies towards all he now lives through as a consequence of his earthly life. In this experience immediately after death we are within a kind of ‘spiritual rain’. We live through the spiritual counterpart of our deeds, and the lofty beings who stand above us rain down their sympathies and antipathies. We are flooded by these, and feel in our spiritual being that what is illuminated by the sympathies of these lofty beings of the higher hierarchies will be accepted by the universe as a good element for the future; whereas all that encounters their antipathies will be rejected, for we feel it would be an evil element in the universe if we did not keep it to ourselves. The antipathies of these lofty beings rain down on an evil deed done to another human being, and we feel that the result would be something exceedingly bad for the universe if we released it, if we did not retain it in ourselves. So we gather up all that encounters the antipathies of these lofty beings. In this way we lay the foundation of our destiny, of all that works on into our next earthly life in order that it may find compensation through other deeds.

One can describe the passage of the human being through the soul-region after death from what I might call its more external aspect. I did this in my book Theosophy, where I followed more the accustomed lines of thought of our age. Now in this recapitulation within the General Anthroposophical Society I want to present a systematic statement of what Anthroposophy is, describing these things more inwardly. I want you to feel how man, in his inner being—in his human individuality—actually lives through the state after death.

Now when we understand these things in this way, we can again turn our attention to the world of dreams, and see it in a new light. Perceiving man's experience, after death, of the spiritual aspects of his earthly life, his deeds and thoughts, we can again turn to the dreaming man, to all he experiences when asleep. We now see that he has already lived through the above when asleep; but it remained quite unconscious. The difference between the experience in sleep and the experience after death becomes clear.

Consider man's life on earth. There are waking states interrupted again and again by sleep. Now a man who is not a ‘sleepy-head’ will spend about a third of his life asleep. During this third he does, in fact, live through the spiritual counterpart of his deeds; only he knows nothing of it, his dreams merely casting up ripples to the surface. Much of the spiritual counterpart is perceived in dreams, but only in the form of weak surface-ripples. Nevertheless in deep sleep we do experience unconsciously the whole spiritual aspect of our daily life. So we might put it this way: In our conscious daily life we experience what others think and feel, how they are helped or hindered by us; in sleep we experience unconsciously what the gods think about the deeds and thoughts of our waking life, though we know nothing of this. It is for this reason that one who sees into the secrets of life seems to himself so burdened with debt, so maimed—as I have described. All this has remained in the subconscious. Now after death it is really lived through consciously. For this reason man lives through the part of life he has slept through, i.e. about one-third, in time, of his earthly life. Thus, when he has passed through death, he lives through his nights again, backwards; only, what he lived through unconsciously, night by night, now becomes conscious.

We could even say—though it might almost seem as if we wanted to make fun of these exceedingly earliest matters: If one sleeps away the greater part of one's life, this retrospective experience after death will last longer; if one sleeps little, it will be shorter. On an average it will last a third of one's life, for one spends that in sleep. So if a man lives till the age of sixty, such experience after death will last twenty years. During this time he passes through a kind of embryonic stage for the spiritual world. Only after that will he be really free of the earth; then the earth no longer envelopes him, and he is born into the spiritual world. He escapes from the wrappings of earthly existence which he had borne around him until then, though in a spiritual sense, and feels this as his birth into the spiritual world.

• 1. The drawing is not reproduced.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My dear friends!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We find the proper domain for studying diseases in those illnesses that reveal most clearly the improper influence of the so-called astral body. Such illnesses, in which the influences of the astral body are most evident, can be observed within the thoracic cavity. This domain, which is the most important for the study of illness, is at the same time the most difficult one for healing, for the knowledge of healing. It is this aspect of human nature which is ultimately responsible for the deficiencies in the art of medicine that were especially emphasized by Dr. Scheidegger in his lecture given during the first medical course last year. He explained how recent medical developments have led to advances in the domain of pathology but to a kind of nihilism in therapeutics. His significant presentation brought into clear focus the need for a careful study of what we must stress today.

Illnesses in the region of the human blood and circulation are, in one respect, very different from those of the head organs and nerve-sense aspects of man, and different again from illnesses of metabolism, though they are intimately connected with both. The fact is that the head organization has to be treated in a special way, because it is permeable—as we have seen—to the etheric, astral, and ego-being. In the chest the organs are not permeable to the etheric but only to the astral and ego-being. In the chest organs the etheric and physical bodies work intimately together, cooperating as a unity. There is no longer a sum of physical processes in the human chest organism, but rather a cooperation of the etheric and the physical. A process of becoming plant-like is taking place here, and this must be taken into account particularly in the chest. However, this process of becoming plant-like is well-concealed and much modified by everything else connected with it in the human organism. Nevertheless, we must consider a plant process when dealing with the chest organs, which then interacts with everything coming from the astral and ego of the human being. This must be carefully noted.

I said yesterday that the astral is the original bearer of all that which causes illness in the human being. Therefore, in the human chest region there is a persistant inclination for the tendencies that produce illness to have an influence, because the tendencies to illness and health constantly alternate in the human chest organs. Indeed, the normal condition in the human being is like that of a pendulum swinging back and forth: the strong forces of the healthy human being paralyze the forces of illness that are continually present, and the reverse is also true, that overflowing health, which would lead to excessive proliferation in the etheric, is constantly opposed by the restricting power of the astral, which causes illness when it exceeds its limit and grips the body too strongly. This state of affairs in the human chest organs is of particular importance because it is the result of a rhythm.

This result of a rhythm is influenced on the one hand by everything taking place in the head and on the other hand by everything taking place in the metabolism. Hence we must look for the source of equilibrium of this necessary rhythm outside the chest. In the human chest organs themselves, we find only the effects—the sources that must then be eliminated when illness arises are not really present in these organs themselves. Hence at the time when the faculties of human cognition had lost their intuitive grasp of things, the prevailing tendency in medicine led to helplessness in regard to therapy, which was then by degrees eliminated. It was felt that one had to remain with pathology and not even approach therapy. This was the case primarily in the Viennese school of medicine where this tendency took on a brilliant form. This school has therefore been called the nihilistic school. The particular genius of this school is most evident in the diagnosis of chest complaints.

At this same time, significant advances were made in this field, in which it is possible to acquire more and more knowledge but gain practically nothing from it. The other parts of the human being simply must be taken into account. Little is accomplished through mere knowledge of what is going on in the human respiratory and circulatory organisms. Of course, I do not mean that absolutely nothing can be accomplished, but the knowledge gained by the stethoscope and so on can only accomplish something significant if we also have knowledge of the entire human being and are able, from quite another direction, to “come to grips”—in a literal sense—with what the diagnosis reveals. The disclosures of such a diagnosis are basically only interesting scientific facts. In order to characterize such things, of course, I have to present them somewhat radically, but behind these strong statements you will find the truth.

Especially regarding these illnesses afflicting the human chest, the attempt is made in modern times to divert attention from the actual situation to a mystical concept—a concept that does not need to remain mystical, although for modern materialism it has certainly remained so: These illnesses are spoken of as “epidemics.” This concept is really a sack to be filled with what one does not want to understand and what—in a certain respect—eludes medical art today. In this regard I will draw your attention to a very interesting fact. A Viennese doctor, Moriz Benedikt, stood as a candidate for the Imperial Parliament. The motive for his candidacy was precisely his experience as a physician. He felt that this experience forced him to such a step, because so many patients came to him for whom he was unable to prescribe what he should prescribe for them, namely, better clothes, better living spaces, improved air, etc. These things could come about only through social activity and therefore he felt the need to place himself into social-political life. Here the real issue is actually shoved away. Behind all these things there is something else that must be considered. For in order to deal with the processes of illness found in the human chest organism, we must take into account their origin in the irregular interaction between the astral and the etheric. Such an understanding cannot be gained without a mode of cognition willing to ascend to some degree into the super-sensible.

The process of breathing that takes place between the outer world and the inner world cannot be understood at all without recourse to an understanding of the astral. In the interchange of carbon and oxygen we have a continuous interplay of the astral and the etheric. You must bear in mind that the human being normally spends one third of his life with a large part of his astral body outside the etheric body—that is, during sleep. In this you can see the significant role of the astral in the conditions of human health, for it is obvious that during sleep the astral is active in the human being, acting not from the head but from the rest of the organism. The astral body thus makes use of an activity during sleep that must remain in the organism in the right way even when the part of the astral that penetrates through the head is outside the human being during sleep.

Therefore you can see that by knowing about the interplay between the astral and etheric in healthy and diseased conditions of the human chest, we are led to yet another rhythm running its course in the human being, the rhythm of waking and sleeping. Actual sleep, which, as we have seen, is strongly bound up with the metabolic process, has less significance for the chest organs than does something else; this other aspect is extraordinarily difficult to observe. Those of you who were present may remember the interesting symptom-complexes that result from the use of substances demonstrated in experiments conducted here last time. Dr. Scheidegger demonstrated this on the board. You will also remember, however, that these symptom-complexes consist of many, many details, and that it requires a certain kind of art to group separate symptoms together. For example, an immediate difficulty arises when we try to do the following with a complex of symptoms. To judge an illness correctly, we have to group together the symptoms occurring in the upper human being. It is possible to be confused about a symptom occurring spatially in the upper human being that is essentially only a symptom forced up from the metabolism. One can make a mistake in judging this complex of symptoms and thereby be led astray in one's diagnosis of the illness as a whole. Thus we should not lose sight of how difficult it is to group together the individual aspects of a symptom-complex in the right way.

Of course it is certainly true that a feeling can gradually be acquired for the right way to group the individual aspects of a complex of symptoms. On the other hand, nature—although helping us here to some extent—at the same time makes it extraordinarily difficult for us to use the help that she provides in this realm. Nature herself groups the symptoms together. You could say that she does just what we do with our formula when we group together the individual aspects of a symptom-complex, but she makes it exceptionally difficult for us to observe what she is doing. That is, she concentrates the individual aspects of a symptom-complex into the very way one falls asleep or awakens.

In fact, what happens when a person falls asleep or awakens is an exceptionally brilliant condensation of what must be taken into account here. Of course, the physician is very seldom in a position to observe his patient when falling asleep or when awakening. He must usually depend upon what he is told by the patient, and this will be very inexact in many cases, especially in difficult situations. He is simply not in the position to observe the patient when he falls asleep and awakens. And what the patient tells him, even if, depending on the patient's consciousness, his description is accurate, is nevertheless most unreliable. If falling asleep and awakening are disturbed, the patient naturally tells us things about them that may well live in his consciousness but that do not provide a sound basis for judging his condition. We must be able to see through what the patient relates.

You will realize the truth of what I am telling you if you deliberate on these facts more and more carefully. You will find it most possible to realize the remarkable connection between the etheric and astral bodies if you observe how sorrow and worries continue to work in a person. You should not observe the sorrows and worries merely of the last few days or weeks—these are actually the least significant—but those lying farther back. A certain period must elapse between the time when sorrows and worries overtake a person and the time when they have become organic, when they have passed over into the workings of the organism. Sorrows and worries that reach a certain intensity always appear later as anomalies in organic function, especially in the rhythmic activity of the organism. They work in the organism to the point of disturbing the rhythmic organism, making it irregular, and then they are able to work further on the metabolic organism and so on. This is a fundamental fact on which we must focus our attention.

We can observe such a consequence above all when we consider the effect of hasty thinking, improbable as it may seem to the materialistic frame of mind. It really is so that hasty thinking, a thinking where one thought jumps over the other, which is a fundamental evil of human thinking in our time—this thinking, where one thought steps on the toes of another, continues to work on, after a period of time, into the human organism, and especially into the rhythmic organism. This has particular significance here.

The soul processes must not be overlooked if we wish to understand the abnormalities of the human rhythmic organism, particularly what takes place in his chest organs. Of course, we can also include the rhythms of nourishment and elimination, belonging in a sense to the periphery of this rhythmic organism. Only by including the rhythm of nourishment and the rhythm of elimination is the rhythmic system fully encompassed.

Something else is also of special importance. The other pole of man's being, the metabolic system, works back upon the rhythmic system. Perhaps we can best understand the way in which the metabolic system works back upon the rhythmic system when we realize that to begin with hunger and thirst are phenomena revealed very clearly in the human astral body. As known to the ordinary human being, hunger and thirst are, of course, astral phenomena. What we experience in consciousness, such as hunger or thirst, is to begin with experienced astrally. You must be perfectly clear about this. The ordinary person knows nothing about what he does not experience astrally. What he experiences only etherically lies so deep in the subconscious that he knows nothing about it.

Thus in ordinary life hunger and thirst are astral experiences, but they cease to be astral experiences when they linger on in the experience that unfolds during sleep. They then cease to be ordinary astral experiences but are nonetheless connected with the astral body, which acts in sleep from below upward. Persistent hunger and thirst work back on the rhythmic system, making it irregular and producing illness. This obviously does not apply to hunger and thirst experienced on the day in question and that have gone to sleep with us—it would be wrong to think that. To go to sleep hungry occasionally is not serious; it is only serious if the state of hunger and thirst become habitual, especially if it is produced by a disorder of the metabolic organism so that the rest of the organism is not properly nourished. It is the after-effect of persistent hunger and thirst that underlies these disturbances of the respiratory and circulatory organisms.

Then we must consider a third factor that influences the chest organs; namely, the effects due to the outer world. Through breathing the human being is connected with the outer world, and influences from this world play into him.

Thus you have here a remarkable state of affairs. In the human thoracic cavity—and partly also in the abdominal cavity in so far as the rhythmic process extends there—you have all kinds of influences: influences from the upper human being, influences from the lower human being, influences from the outer world. A more exact knowledge of this tract within the human being therefore leads us to say that effects take their course here, and in this region itself we cannot find the causes for these effects. We must look elsewhere if we are to eliminate the causes in the appropriate way. For this reason it is also clear that, although this realm of the human being provides the domain for studying the nature of illness in general, our investigations that are stimulated by this domain must be extended to other realms. We must begin from this domain in order to progress then to a study of other realms.

Now the most striking and significant realm of causes is that which lies outside the human being and in which the interplay between oxygen and carbon proceeds. In this tract of the human organism the essentially astral influence works from outside. Thus we must look for the corresponding connections between this tract and the outer world. To the spiritual investigator the matter shows itself as follows: on earth there is a reciprocal relationship between what occurs beneath the earth's surface—in which the action of water must be included with the earthly element—and what occurs above its surface. There is a profound process taking place between the earth and its surroundings that ordinary science cannot yet fathom. This process has extraordinarily interesting aspects. It can be studied very well in those realms of the earth where the process taking place between the extra-terrestrial and the terrestrial is very intimate, where a great deal of the extra-terrestrial penetrates into the earth. This is the case in the tropics. The extraordinary conditions there depend on an intimate cooperation between the extra-terrestrial—air, light, and extra-terrestrial warmth—and what is within the earth itself. Moreover, it is not by chance that we find a certain “pole” of magnetic-electric earthly influences in the tropical zone. To use a comparison, you could say that in the tropical zone the earth most strongly sucks in the extra-terrestrial, developing from this extra-terrestrial element what later sprouts up as vegetation. In the polar regions, the earth sucks in little from the extra-terrestrial; it opposes it and actually reflects it to a considerable extent. Thus you could say that the earth, at least as seen from outside, shines least in the tropics, raying back the least, but sucking in the most of the extra-terrestrial influences. At the poles the earth shines most, reflecting most what is extra-terrestrial and developing the greatest luster.

This is an extraordinarily significant fact. When we take it into account, we learn that in the tropics there is a very strong intimacy between the etheric earthly element and the extra-terrestrial astral, whereas at the poles the astral is flung back in a certain way. This insight can prove most fruitful, for on pursuing it we discover a further connection. Let us take the case of a patient whom we expose to conditions in which light is unusually active, the air being strongly penetrated by light. He is thus surrounded by light. This means that we place him into a region where the earthly element that had worked on him is significantly removed and he is exposed to the extra-terrestrial. In strong sunlight we find what the earth no longer needs, what is rejected by the earth. The patient thus enters this region of extra-terrestrial activity. When we take a patient into sun-permeated air it works on his rhythmic organism to a tremendous extent. In this way we can work against an irregular metabolism directly by way of the rhythmic system, for the rhythmic system regulates itself through this exposure to light.

This relationship enables us to recognize the basis of treatment with sun and light. Moreover, if we find someone particularly unable to resist parasitic illnesses, such treatment is especially to be recommended. This does not mean that one has to be an adherent of the germ-theory. You must be clear that the presence of parasites shows that there are deeper causes at work in the patient that account for the accumulation of bacteria and that permit them to remain there. Bacilli are never really the cause of illness; they only indicate that the patient has the causes of the illness within him. Bacteriological research is important on this account, but only as a foundation for research. The actual organic causes lie in the human being himself. These organic causes within the human being are opposed by what streams toward the earth from the extra-terrestrial cosmos, surrounding the earth but not totally absorbed by it. It is a surplus, an “excess-sun,” an “excess-light,” and so on. Thus where the earth not only sprouts but begins to shine, where it contains more light than is necessary for sprouting, we find what acts most favorably in this direction.

Another procedure that also works very favorably in the same direction is the following: If we find a patient especially susceptible to parasitic influences due to his irregular circulatory organism, it will be helpful to send him to a place higher above sea-level than the one to which he is accustomed, that is, to apply a “high altitude treatment.” (Of course, we must take all the other circumstances into account; we will encounter many of these as we proceed.) The beneficial effect of “high altitude treatment” is also to be sought in this direction. Of course, in other cases it may be harmful. Everything that is potentially helpful can also prove harmful, as we saw yesterday.

Now we must consider something else. We must not forget that certain phenomena that are artificially created by us and let loose on the human being first need to be evaluated by us. If I say “artificially produced phenomena,” I am referring to the fact that we do not simply consume the fruits of nature, as they are, but we cook them or prepare them in some way before introducing them into the human organism, first burning them and then using the ash, or something comparable. Here we subject what is earthly itself to a process that absorbs extra-terrestrial effects. When we cook or burn something we release it from what is earthly. Thus, when we give a person something cooked or burnt, we apply something inwardly in a similar way to our exposure of a patient to strong sunlight or high altitudes. We must bear this in mind when we have a patient who requires a certain change of diet on the one hand and on the other some kind of remedy. Let us say he shows an irregular rhythmic system. In all such circumstances we will have to ask ourselves whether we should give him something obtained through the combustion of vegetable matter. In every process of combustion of vegetable matter, we transcend the ordinary plant process. We extend it through an extra-terrestrial element, that is, by combustion.

In addition, however, the following is also particularly significant. In the form of electricity and magnetism, a process on the earth—or a sum of processes—takes place that is intimately connected with what we have had to call the terrestrial and extra-terrestrial. The domain of electricity and magnetism should really be studied more profoundly in relation to health and illness in the human being. This is a realm, however, in which one can easily blunder, for the following reason. If we represent the surface of the earth schematically in this way (see drawing)—here the inner, here the outer—then what constitutes electricity and magnetism has an intimate relationship to the terrestrial as such. You know, of course, that electricity flows by itself from one ground wire to another, from one Morse telegraph station to another. There is always only one conducting wire; the circuit is completed underground. This has to do with the electric field that the earth has already made its own. What is concealed in electricity and magnetism is fundamentally extra-terrestrial and “intra-terrestrial” (yellow); but the earth takes possession of the electrical effects that are extra-terrestrial (blue). The electrical effects, and also the magnetic effects, however, can also be held back in the vicinity of the earth without being appropriated by the earth (red). These are all the electrical and magnetic effects that we have in our electric and magnetic fields.

If we magnetize a piece of iron, we make it into a little thief with regards to the earth. We transfer to it the ability to steal and retain for itself what the earth actually wants to take from cosmic space before the earth has been able to do so. We make a magnet into a little thief. It appropriates for itself, and has the power to retain, what the earth would like for itself. The entire electric and magnetic field we have on earth is actually something we have stolen from the earth for human use; in this way we induce nature herself to steal, thus retaining the extra-terrestrial above. We thus retain an eminently extra-terrestrial element, which we even keep above the earth in a clever way, although the earth, with all the force at its disposal, would like to absorb it so that it may work from within outward. But we do not let it get to this point; we hold it back.

Therefore in the electric and magnetic fields we can expect to find valuable opponents to unrhythmic human processes. We must develop a therapy specially geared to this. For example, if a marked irregularity or powerful disturbance appears in the rhythmic system (or even a weak disturbance; it would actually work better if the disturbance were weak), we might simply hold a strong magnet near the human organism. It should not touch but be held at a greater or lesser distance to be determined by experimentation. As I said, the appropriate distance will need to be established through research.

I would also like to tell you how one can best make use here of previous scientific results. In doing so I do not intend merely to tell you an interesting fact—for outer science is not yet ready for it—but rather to draw your attention to something about which we can acquire quite another complex of thoughts. The Professor Benedikt mentioned above made some very interesting investigations in a dark room on the lowest human auric radiations. These have nothing directly to do with what I have described in my book, Theosophy, for example, though there is an indirect connection. The latter are higher radiations only perceived in the super-sensible. But between these higher radiations and the coarser effects seen by the eye on the human being, there is a domain that can be perceived in a dark room. Professor Benedikt has described his work in the dark room in an interesting way. He used individuals who were sensitive to the phenomena of the divining rod, that is, individuals in whose hands the rod moved significantly. Benedikt investigated the auric radiations of these individuals in a dark room. The following results were obtained. The auric radiations of such individuals differed markedly from those of other people in that there was greater asymmetry: the radiations from the left side of the person were different from those from the right. The head radiation was also quite different.

A beginning has thus already been made in seeing human radiations through physical demonstrations, even though these results are received very skeptically. But we must remain clear that these are only the lowest radiations connected with the human organization. In studying these, one has not yet entered the realm of the super-sensible, as many might maintain who would like super-sensible investigation to be nice and comfortable. Nevertheless, this is a beginning and could have therapeutic results.

For example, one could investigate the effects of applying a magnet to the back of a person in the first stages of tuberculosis; that is, we might let him be irradiated by a magnetic field. This could be made more effective by holding the magnet at a slant, moving it up and down so that gradually the entire chest organism was irradiated by the magnetic field. If this magnetic field is applied we do not need a “light field” at the same time; this would only be a disturbance. We could then put this patient into a dark room and actually observe the radiations from his fingers. These could soon be seen quite clearly. When we do this—put the patient in a dark room, having applied a strong magnet to his back, and observe that fine radiations proceed from the fingertips (cone-shaped, with the apex directed outward)—it is possible to be convinced that he has really been irradiated by the magnetic field. In this way, simply by using a magnetic field, extraordinarily beneficial results can be achieved in working against the manifestations of pulmonary tuberculosis, for example.

These things show us how seriously we must take the statement that only effects occur in the human chest and that we must turn to the environment if we wish to cure; that is, we must apply something from man's environment: light, climatic influences (for instance, sending the patient to a higher altitude), or the magnetic field. We can even include the electric field, but we must be careful about the way that this is applied. There is a vast difference between applying the poles directly to the organism by letting the electricity flow through the human being and calling forth an electric field as such and placing the patient within this field without the circuit being completed from pole to pole through him. Here, too, experiments need to be done that will be exceptionally significant.

In certain circumstances we can also obtain beneficial effects by completing the circuit through the patient. In such cases, however, only what works into the rhythmic system from the metabolic system is effective. Only the metabolic system is influenced if I pass electric currents through the patient himself, completing the circuit through him. On the other hand, if I place a person into an electric field, I will be able to observe the radiations in a dark room from his fingers, toes, and all pointed extremities. I will then notice that I can work curatively on patients who have a regular, healthy digestion but who show symptoms of so-called tuberculosis.

Today we have concerned ourselves with the environment. I pointed out that nature groups together, in the moment of falling asleep and awakening, the complex of symptoms present. I will start from this point tomorrow and will first show the importance, the diagnostic significance, of the moments of waking and falling asleep; then we will study how we can indeed observe what nature tries to indicate at such moments. We will then see how this can be used to guide our observations of symptom-complexes, if only we know the principle involved. And here we will find important indications regarding the very different treatments that need to be applied in chronic and acute illnesses.

You will remember that on the last occasion when I was able to speak to you here, I gave you a description of the experiences of the soul during sleep. Today I would like to carry the subject a little further. It will, I am sure, already be clear to you that one whose knowledge of human life confines itself to daytime existence, knows only half the life of man; for things of the very greatest importance take place during sleep. There is no need for me here to explain first the methods by which one comes to know these things; I assume from the outset that you receive what I say as coming from the exact clairvoyance which you will remember I described in my lectures here in London, a few months ago. [Knowledge and Initiation and Knowledge of the Christ through Anthroposophy. Two lectures, London, 14 and 15 April, 1922.]

When man passes from day-consciousness into sleep-consciousness—which is for the man of the present time unconsciousness—he is not in his physical body, nor in his etheric body. During sleep he is a purely spiritual being. On my last visit I gave you a description, from one aspect, of the experience man undergoes as soul and spirit between the times of falling asleep and awaking. Today I want to describe this experience from another side.

You will remember how in sleep man goes out into the cosmic ether, and feeling himself in the midst of a vast and vague unknown is at first overcome with anxiety and apprehension; then you will also remember how in this moment something awakens in the soul which one can call—borrowing the expression from conscious life—a yearning for the Divine. And we went on to speak of how in the second stage of sleep man experiences a reflection of the movements of the planets, and how, for one who has already a relation to the Mystery of Golgotha, Christ then appears, to be his Guide through the otherwise chaotic experiences that come to him while he is living his way through a kind of reproduction or copy of the life of the stars and the planets. For now comes the experience of the fixed stars. Man goes forth, from the planetary spheres—we mean of course the copy of the planetary spheres—and enters upon an experience of the constellations of the fixed stars. So that between falling asleep and awaking, man actually covers the whole cosmic existence beyond the Earth. I told you moreover that it is the forces of the Moon (the spiritual counterpart of what reveals itself to us in the various lunar phenomena) that bring man back again in the morning—or whenever he wakes up—bring him back into his physical and into his etheric body.

And now I should like, as I said, to describe these experiences from another angle. Unless we have allowed ourselves to become completely involved and imprisoned in the materialistic ideas of modern times, the conscious life that we lead in the daytime has for us a moral and also a religious foundation. We have our knowledge of Nature; but we cannot help feeling that we have in us something more than knowledge and science, that we have as well, moral duties, moral responsibilities, and we feel moreover that our whole being is grounded in a spiritual world. This latter realisation may be described as a religious consciousness. It is, however, only because he is in the physical body, that he is able to have this religious consciousness. It is, however, only because he is in the physical body, that he is able to have this religious consciousness in waking life. For you must understand that in his physical body man is not alone, but with him are spirits of higher cosmic rank; in his physical body, man lives together with higher spirits. And man lives, in his ether-body, with the moral purposes of these higher spirits. Thus, the religious consciousness of man is dependent on his life in the physical body, and his moral consciousness on his life in the etheric body. And this leads us to distinguish two parts in the cosmic ether, from which, as you know, our own ether-body is derived. One part is warmth, light, chemical ether, life ether. But behind all this, behind the warmth and light and chemical processes and life, is a moral element—the moral essence of the cosmic ether.

Now this moral essence of the cosmic ether is present only in the neighbourhood of stars and planets. If you are living on the Earth, then you are not only within the cosmic ether, but also within its moral essence, although by day you do not know it. And when you wander through the cosmos, then whenever you are in the environment of a star, you are in the moral essence of the cosmos ether. But in between the stars, the moral element is driven out of the ether by the action of the sunlight. Note that I say the sunlight, not the Sun, which is a cosmic body within which is contained the very source and origin of the moral ether; but when the Sun shines, then by means of its light it drives away the moral essence of the ether. And so it comes about that when we look out through our eyes on to the world, we see flowers, we see springs and brooks, we see the whole face of Nature, but without any moral element discernible within it; the sunlight has killed out the moral element. And when we fall asleep and leave our physical and etheric bodies, then we take with us what we have acquired in this way during waking hours on Earth by beholding Nature; but strange as it may sound, we leave behind us our religious feeling and our moral feeling, we leave them behind with the physical and with the ether-body, and our soul and spirit live as an a-moral being during the time of sleep.

This has an important consequence for us. We are living during this time in a world that has been irradiated by the light of the Sun. This means that the moral ordering of the world has gone out of the ether. Consequently the Ahrimanic Being has access to the ether in which we find ourselves as soon as we fall asleep. And this Ahrimanic Being speaks to man while he is asleep. And what he says is most mischievous, for he is rightly called the father of lies; he makes good appear bad to the sleeping human being and bad good.

Reference has been made in the newspapers recently to questions that are being investigated by scientists, as to why criminals sleep well, while moral people with a good conscience often sleep badly. The matter is explained when you consider what I have been telling you. In the case of a highly conscientious and devout man, who has a fine moral feeling, his moral sensibility enters so deeply into his soul that he takes it with him into sleep; with the result that he sleeps badly, believing as he does that he has been guilty of many misdeeds. A bad man, on the other hand, whose moral sensibility is very little developed, will carry with him into sleep no such pangs of conscience,—and this will mean of course at the same time that he will have, spiritually speaking, an open ear for the whisperings of Ahriman who makes evil appear good. Hence the quiet and contented sleep of the criminal! People say, it is not fair that criminals should sleep well, while good people often have poor and disturbed slumber. The fact is to be accounted for in the way I have shown.

The enticement to evil to which man is exposed during sleep is, in truth, exceedingly great, and it can easily happen that in the morning he brings over with him from sleep terrible demonic forces of temptation. Only when he has come down again into his physical and etheric body, will a man who is not very good and upright begin to feel pricks of conscience,—not before. There is thus abundant possibility for, man to fall a victim to Ahriman during the time of sleep.

The danger has by no means always been so great as it is today. In the course of the centuries it has gradually come about that men are so gravely exposed during sleep to the seductions of demonic powers, which make evil appear good. In earlier times of the evolution of mankind things were different. Man had then, as I have often explained to you, nothing like so strong an ego-consciousness as he has now. In the daytime, when he was awake, his ego-consciousness was weaker; and that meant also that during sleep he did not sail so smoothly into evil as he does today. He was protected. The fact is, we are living today in a time that is bringing us to a certain crisis in evolution. It behoves men to arm themselves against the powers of evil that approach them when they fall asleep. In older times men were protected through the fact that when they went to sleep, they entered more into the group-soul. During sleep man lived in the group-soul. We today still live to a certain extent in the group-soul during our waking hours; we feel we belong to a particular nation, often even to a particular clan; or perhaps we are inclined to put on aristocratic airs, and like to feel ourselves as members of a certain family. But sleep takes us right out of the group-soul feeling. It is hardly possible for the man of today to be an aristocrat in sleep. Yes, sleep is a great educator, more than you would think; on the one hand it educates man, it is true, in evil, as we have seen; but on the other hand, it educates him in democracy. The man of olden time passed into the group-soul when he fell asleep; and when he awoke and returned to his physical and to his etheric body, he brought with him a strong feeling of belonging to his group.

There you have the one side of man's life,—what he is during sleep. Man, of course, carries in him all the time the part of his nature that is exposed in sleep at the present day to the temptations of demonic forces, he has it in him continuously. Only, when he is awake, he has to let it merge into the moral and religious consciousness. The religious side of man is given to him, as we saw, by the powers that live with him in his physical body, and the moral side by the powers that live with him in his ether-body.

The man of an older time, who during sleep lived strongly, as we have seen, in the group-consciousness—it was with the Mystery of Golgotha that all this became changed for the further evolution of mankind—the man of an older time, when he dived down again, on awaking, into his physical and his etheric body, began to live then more in himself, But here we discover another difference between him and us. For when he was waking up and coming down again into his physical and ether body, before he was quite awake, he had a clear consciousness of the life he had lived ere he descended to Earth. And he had the same clear consciousness again just before falling asleep. Whilst, therefore, on the one hand he developed a strong group-consciousness, he had at the same time also a strong feeling of belonging to the life that is beyond the Earth. He knew quite well that he had come down from the spiritual world, had passed through the world of the stars, and had chosen for himself a physical body here on Earth. As time went on, this consciousness became darkened. In compensation, men became ‘clever’—as we understand the word today. They developed powers of judgment and discrimination. This kind of faculty has evolved only in the course of time. It is our physical body that gives us the power of judgment,—and this is the reason we are able to exercise the power best during the morning hours. We enter more deeply in these days into our physical and etheric bodies than men did in olden times. Consequently, while they had a consciousness of their life before birth, we have a consciousness rather of earthly existence. We establish ourselves firmly in our physical and etheric body. They did not do so. They might be said to ‘carry’ their physical and etheric body, they carried it round with them, feeling it as something external to themselves, rather as we feel the clothes that we wear. We have quite lost this feeling. We no longer say as they did, when they were going through a door: I carry my physical being through the door. That was for them an entirely natural way of speaking. We would never say that; we say: I walk through the door. We press our I, our ego, right into the physical body; it is therefore perfectly natural for us to express ourselves in this way. And in consequence of this development, we have lost also the consciousness of our connection with the spiritual world and with the world of the stars. The man of an earlier time knew that he was connected with the world of the stars. He knew quite well that he was connected with the world of the stars, and also with the spiritual world that is behind the world of the stars: he knew that he had descended from these worlds to earthly existence.

Modern man will say: In order to live, I need meat, vegetables, eggs, etc. He needs, that is, products of the physical world, and with these he must concern himself from birth to death. Please do not imagine for a moment dear friends, that I mean to speak scornfully or slightingly of the food we eat. It is good in itself and belongs to life; let that be fully recognised. I want only to point out that the men of olden time[s] knew that in order to have strength to live, man needs more than the forces of the Earth that reside in beef and cabbage and egg, he needs also Jupiter and Venus and Saturn, They knew for a fact that just as man, when he is here on Earth, needs to eat eggs, so too has he need to have received, before he came down to Earth, the strength of Jupiter and of Venus; otherwise he could not be earthly man at all. Modern man feels united with the Earth and is very much concerned about what he must eat to keep his body in health. The man of an older time felt a need to be in right relationship with the stars. He said to himself: If I suffer, here on Earth, from some inability or lack of skill, it must be that I did not acquit myself well while descending into the world of the stars; I must put that right next time I make the journey from death to a new birth.

It is indeed so that in those times man evolved what might be called a spiritual diet. In the Mysteries there were leaders and guides who were not unlike our modern doctors of medicine. The modern doctor gives his advice about man's body. That is quite understandable, and no reproach is intended. But the leaders in the Mysteries, who were also physicians, would for example, if a man suffered from some physical infirmity, give instruction as to how he could better his relationship to Venus, or it may be to Saturn. It was thus advice for the soul that these leaders in the Mysteries gave. Let us suppose a physician of this kind found that the person who had come to him for healing was too strongly attracted to his physical body. Instead of feeling his body merely as a garment for his soul, he was firmly bound to it, rather like a man of the present day who persisted in sleeping in his clothes. The physician would say to such a person: When the Moon is full, try going out for a walk in its light, when it is rising in the evening; and while you walk, repeat a certain mantram.

Why did the physician of the ancient Mysteries give this advice? Because he knew that when a person goes for a walk in the light of the Moon, repeating the while certain mantrams, that will counteract the Saturn force, and so it will come about that Saturn has less power over him. For, you see, this physician of olden times knew that the clinging to the physical body, the being so closely knit with it, was due to the fact that the person in question had held on too strongly to Saturn when he was passing through the world of the stars, on his way from the spiritual world into earthly life. This excessive attraction to the life of Saturn had given him the infirmity from which he was suffering. But now the two heavenly bodies, Moon and Saturn, tend to counteract one another. In order, therefore, to cure an affliction due to the Saturn forces, the physician would have recourse to the forces of the Moon. He would, in effect, prescribe a spiritual diet.

We have today a physical diet and that is quite right and suitable for us. In the olden times man felt the need for a diet of a more spiritual kind, and we must now learn to add to our physical diet also a spiritual diet. That is the mission of the present age; we have our physical diet, and we must regain a feeling for the importance of a spiritual diet as well. If we can do this, it will enable us to achieve the tasks that call for fulfilment at this present moment in earth evolution.

This is what I wanted to put before you in the first part of my lecture.

*

It is a satisfaction to me, my dear friends, that I shall be able to give you two more lectures after today, and so I do not need to hurry—as I would otherwise be obliged to do—but can go more fully into that which lies on my heart to say to you on the occasion of this visit.

Vision of the pre-earthly life, of the life man lived in the spiritual world before he united himself here on Earth with a physical and an etheric body, was possible to the men of old, for they possessed an elemental clairvoyance. To attain such vision today we need the help of anthroposophical science. When with this help we have learned to look with the consciousness of Inspiration upon the time we pass through before we descend to Earth, we behold how we live for a long while in an entirely spiritual world, a world where there is no mineral kingdom, no plant kingdom, no animal kingdom,—a world where there are not even the stars that we see shining far away in the encircling heavens, a world, where we have around us spiritual beings, beings of the higher hierarchies. Throughout this period of the time between death and a new birth, we live among spiritual beings. And then we begin to travel through the starry heavens on our way back to Earth, passing—now with more, now again with less, sympathy—through the various starry spheres. And this is the time when we prepare our coming earthly life. For according as we relate ourselves to the starry spheres through which we pass, so will be our life on Earth. Let me give you an example of how this preparation takes place.

Coming forth from the world that is purely spiritual, we pass first through the sphere of the fixed stars. Of these I will not speak just now; that will come in the next lecture. Then we pass through the spheres of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars, through the Sun sphere, and through the spheres of Mercury, Venus and Moon, and so by gradual stages come down to Earth. You will realise from the description that we approach the spheres of the stars from the other side. When you stand on Earth and look at Jupiter, you are seeing Jupiter from one side. And when a being—in this case, a human being—is descending from the spiritual world and passes, on his way to Earth, through the spheres of the stars, then at the time when we, looking from the Earth, see Saturn, this being, as he approaches Saturn, will be seeing it from the other side. It will be the same with all the stars. Coming from the spiritual world, he approaches the stars from behind, as it were, and sees the reverse of what men see on Earth with physical sight. You will not of course imagine that the human being who is making his journey to the Earth ‘sees’ in the way we do. He has no eyes as yet, he will only get eyes when he has a physical body. What he sees is spiritual. He sees Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, in their spiritual aspect; Venus also, then Mercury and Moon. And according to the measure of the sympathy or antipathy with which he passes through the one or other sphere, so will be the forces he receives in the course of his descent from each sphere in turn,—forces of Saturn, forces of Jupiter, and so on.

Let us imagine a particular case. In consequence of the way in which he lived his former life on Earth, a human soul may have the feeling, when the time comes to descend to a new life: It will be good if this time I come to Earth as a woman; if this time I incarnate in a female body.

It is an important question for the descending human soul to decide, whether it shall become man or woman. Its whole destiny on earth depends on the decision; for it is by no means a matter of indifference whether in one particular incarnation we go through our life as a man or a woman. But it is not enough for the soul simply to come to the conclusion: I will be a man, or, I will be a woman. Due preparation has to be made. If the soul desires to be a woman, it will approach the Earth at the time of Full Moon. When we, looking from the Earth, see the Moon full, the soul that is approaching from the spiritual world will see it dark. Now what the soul sees is of course, the spiritual aspect of the Moon. Seeing it dark, the soul sees it ‘peopled,’ as it were, with certain beings. And these beings it is who will prepare the soul, so that, when it comes on Earth, it shall be attracted to a female body. On the other hand, when we, looking from the Earth, see New Moon—which means, we cannot see it at all—then the soul that is descending and sees the Moon from the other side, will see it lit up, will see the light that rays forth from it out into cosmic space,—that is, of course, the spiritual in the light. In this case, the soul can become a man. Whether it receives the forces that bring it to a male or to a female incarnation depends, you see, on the manner of the soul's journey through the spheres of the stars.

And now, in addition to passing through the sphere of the Moon, the soul has also to go, for example, through the spheres of Mercury and Venus. While the manner of its journey through the sphere of the Moon determines whether the soul is to become man or woman, by its passage through the sphere of Venus the soul is endowed with greater or less sympathy for a particular family. For the soul could, of course, be man or woman in this or that or any other family. This attraction to a family is determined in the following way.

A human soul may be descending, for instance, at a time when Venus is right on the other side of the Earth, and the soul may thus be able to disregard the Venus sphere. Such a soul will then have no great connection with his family. Or the soul may, on the other hand, go past Venus, and it can do so in a variety of ways. It will then elect to take the path through the Venus sphere that guides it to some particular family. For the soul has this possibility; it can prepare itself for belonging to a particular family by choosing, as it were, the ‘ray’ that goes from Venus to this family. Coming down from the other side, the dark side, of Venus, the soul then draws near to Earth and finds its way to that family,

The same kind of thing may happen in regard to the Mercury sphere. The sphere of Mercury leads the soul to find its way into a particular folk or people. When the region inhabited by this people is receiving rays of Mercury, then the soul, coming from the other side and approaching the dark side of Mercury, will be helped to find its way to this people.

Thus are human souls prepared for life on Earth. Through the influence of the Moon—and when we speak of these heavenly bodies, it is always the spiritual in them that we have in mind—through the influence of the Moon, preparation is made for the soul to become man or woman; through the influence of Venus, for the soul to belong to some family; through the influence of Mercury, to belong to some folk or people.

The whole life of man on Earth depends, as you see, on the relationship he establishes with the spheres in the course of his descent from the spiritual world. The knowledge of this has been lost. We must regain it. We are accustomed to think of ourselves as composed of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, sulphur, etc. But we must come also to feel—quite simply and naturally—that we are composed and are created out of the world of the stars. For we are not just physical human beings made up of protein and a few other substances. All the forces of the universe have combined to form us. These forces of the universe work upon us while we are descending. When we come to Earth, we have them within us,—and something of a memory of this remains to us in sleep. Memory is however always, as you know very well, weaker than the actual experience. When someone who is dear to you has died, think how the memory of the event grows less vivid and powerful as time goes on. And it is the same with the memory we still have in sleep, of how it was with us when we had living and present experiences of the spiritual world, and of the world of the stars. The memory grows dim; and that is why man is exposed now in sleep to the temptations I described earlier in today's lecture. Thus a dim and feeble after-image in sleep—a weak cosmic memory—is all that is left of the experience we had with the spiritual world and with the stars during the time between death and our last birth.

This, dear friends, is what I wanted to say to you today byway of introduction. We shall continue with it next time we meet.

We will utilise the last lecture before the Course which is to be given here, by bringing together what has been said about the various Mysteries belonging to this or that region of the Earth, and attempting to describe to you, at any rate from one point of view, the very nature and being of the Mysteries, in the form they took in the Middle Ages, approximately from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries.

I do not speak of this epoch because it is particularly complete in itself but because it can be used to show the form human striving was taking during that period in the most civilised parts of the Earth. The spiritual striving of that period is often described under the name of the Mysteries of the Rosicrucians. This designation is in a certain sense quite justifiable, but it must not be confused with the charlatan element we often meet in literature without realising how much charlatanry there is in the things of which we read. The name ‘Rosicrucian’ must direct our attention to that deeply earnest striving for knowledge which existed during these centuries in almost every region of Europe, Central, Western and Southern. We must realise that the figure of Faust as described by Goethe, with all his deep striving of soul, with all his earnest effort, is a later figure, no longer anything like as profound in soul as many a researcher to be found in the mediaeval laboratories. These are individuals of whom nothing reaches us by way of history but who nevertheless laboured earnestly during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. I spoke in the last lecture of the tragic note that predominates in the investigators of this epoch. The outstanding trait in them is the feeling that they must needs strive after the highest knowledge that can be creatively active in man; and yet they felt, not only that they could never reach this highest goal but that from a certain point of view the very striving after it gives ground for serious doubt.

I have said that we do not find among these scientists in their alchemical laboratories a knowledge that is ready-made and theoretical but a knowledge that is intimately connected with the whole human being, with the innermost feelings and deepest longings of the heart; it was indeed a knowledge of the heart.

What was its origin? You will most readily understand it if I try now to give you a picture of this tragic scepticism of the mediaeval investigators. Let me first direct your attention once again to the form taken by human cognition on the Earth in very ancient times.

The most ancient form of human knowledge, intimately bound up as it was with the life of the individual human being, was not of such a nature as to lead man to look up to the planets and perceive the grandeur and sublimity of their mathematical movements, such as men reckon out and devise today. At that time, each planet, as all else spread out in the Heavens, was a living being, and not only a living, but an ensouled being, nay even a being of spirit. Men spoke constantly of the families of the planets, of the families of the heavenly bodies, for they knew that just as there exists a blood-relationship between the members of a human family, similarly there exists an inner relationship between the members of a planetary system. There was an absolute parallel between what is to be found in man and what reveals itself outside in the Cosmos.

Let us take on region of the Earth as an example, and show from that the kind of knowledge man learned to acquire in the most ancient of the Mysteries when he looked up to the Sun. At that time there still existed Mystery-sanctuaries arranged with a specially prepared skylight, so that at certain definite times of day the Sun could be seen in a diminished light. Thus you must imagine the most important chamber in many an ancient Sun Temple with a skylight in the roof and the window filled with some kind of material—not glass in our modern sense but a material through which the orb of the Sun was seen in a dim light as of twilight at a certain time of day. The pupil was prepared in his soul to observe the solar orb with the right mood and feeling. He had to make his feeling receptive and sensitive, he had to quicken the inner perception of his soul, so that when he exposed it, through his eye, to the orb of the Sun, the latter made an impression on him of which he could form a clear idea in consciousness.

Now, of course, many people today look at the Sun through smoked glass, but they are not prepared in their power of feeling to receive the impression in such a way that it remains in their soul as a very special impression. The pupil in those ancient Mysteries, however, received a very definite impression of the dimmed solar orb after he had undergone long exercises beforehand. A man who was able once to have such an impression could truly never forget it.

With this impression the pupil also gained more understanding for certain things around him than he formerly had. Thus after he had been prepared by the majestic impression made upon him by the Sun, the special quality of the substance gold was allowed to work upon him; and through this Sun-preparation, the pupil actually came to a deep understanding of the quality of gold.

When one looks into these things, it is painful to realise the triviality of our modern consciousness, when we find in so many historical works the reason why this or the other ancient philosopher allocated gold to the Sun or gave the same symbol to gold and to the Sun. Man has no longer any idea that what was thus known in those olden times, proceeded from long exercises and preparations. A pupil who looked with his whole soul, who as it were steeped his sight in this dimmed light of the Sun, was thereby prepared to understand the gold of the Earth.

How then did he understand it? His attention awoke to the fact that gold is not receptive for that which constitutes for living organisms the breath of life, namely oxygen. Many, indeed most of the other metals are thoroughly receptive to oxygen, but oxygen does not affect or alter gold. This non-receptivity, this obstinacy of gold in the face of that in which man, as you know, has his very life, made a deep impression on the pupil of the ancient Mysteries. He received the impression that gold cannot directly approach life. Now neither can the Sun approach life directly; and the pupil learned that it is well that neither gold nor the Sun can directly approach life. For then he was gradually led to realise the fact that because gold has no relationship with oxygen, the breath of life, when it is introduced in a certain dose into the human organism, it has a quite special effect. It has no relation to the etheric body, no direct relation to the astral body; but it has a direct relation to what lies in human thinking.

My dear friends, just consider how far thinking is removed from life—especially in our modern age! A man can sit like a block of wood and think quite abstractly. He can even think quite livingly in an abstract way. But on the other hand, he cannot by thinking bring about any change in his organism. Man’s thought has become more and more powerless. But this thinking is set in motion by the Egoorganisation, and gold inserted in the right dose into the human organism, can bring back power to thought. It restores to the life of thought the power to work down into the astral body and even into the etheric body; thus through the working of gold man is quickened in his thinking.

One of the secrets of these ancient Mysteries was the secret of gold in connection with the Sun. This relationship between the substance gold and the cosmic working of the Sun was perceived by the pupil of these ancient Mysteries. In a similar way the pupil was led to experience the working of the opposite pole of gold. Gold is an impulse for the quickening of human thinking, so that human thought can work down as far as into the etheric body. But what would be the opposite pole of that?

Ego-organisation, astral body, etheric body and physical body are the members of the human organism, and we may say that through gold the Ego-organisation becomes capable of working down into the etheric body. The etheric body can then go further and work upon the physical body, but gold brings it about that one can actually hold the thoughts in all their power as far as the etheric body.

Now what is the opposite pole of this? It is an activity that manifests itself when the breath of life—oxygen—is attracted by something in man or in nature. For as gold is obstinate in the face of oxygen, repels it, will have nothing to do with it, and has therefore no direct influence on the etheric body or on the astral body but only on the thought-world of the Ego-organisation—as gold repels oxygen, so carbon on the other hand has in man a direct affinity with oxygen.

We breathe out carbonic acid gas. We make it by uniting carbon with oxygen. And the plants require carbonic acid for their life. Carbon possesses the exactly opposite property of gold.

Now carbon played a great part in the very ancient Mysteries. They spoke on the one hand of gold as a very specially important substance in the study of man, and on the other hand of carbon. Carbon was called the Philosopher’s Stone. Gold and the Philosopher’s Stone were very important things in olden times.

Carbon appears on Earth in a variety of forms. Diamond is carbon—a hard carbon; graphite is carbon; coal is carbon; anthracite is carbon. Carbon appears to us in most diverse forms. Through the methods which were practised in the ancient Mysteries, men learned however to understand that there exist still other forms of carbon, besides those we find here on Earth. And in this connection the pupil in the Mysteries had to undergo another preparation. For besides the Sun-preparation of which I have spoken, there was also in addition the Moon-preparation.

Along with the ancient sanctuaries of the Sun Mysteries we find too a kind of observatory, wherein a man could open his soul and his physical vision to the forms of the Moon. Whereas in the Sun-training the pupil had to behold the Sun at certain times of day in a diminished light, now for weeks at a time he had to expose his eyes to the different forms which the orb of the Moon assumes by night. Gazing thus with his whole soul, the pupil received a definite inner impression, which gave him a new knowledge. Just as the soul by exposing itself to the Sun became endowed with the power of the Sun, similarly, by exposing itself to the phases of the Moon, the soul became endowed with the power of the Moon. Man now learned what metamorphoses the substance of carbon can undergo. On the Earth, carbon is coal or graphite or diamond or anthracite; but on the Moon that which we find here on the Earth as diamond or anthracite or coal—is silver; and that was the secret possessed in these ancient Mysteries. Carbon is silver on the Moon. Carbon is the Philosopher’s Stone, and on the Moon it is silver.

The knowledge that was impressed so profoundly on the pupil in the ancient Mysteries was this: any substance whatsoever is only what it seems in this one place, at this one time. It was sheer ignorance not to know that carbon is diamond, coal or anthracite only on the Earth. What exists on the Earth as diamond or graphite, on the Moon is silver. If we could at this moment dispatch a piece of ordinary black coal to the Moon, it would there be silver.

A vision of this radical metamorphosis was what the pupil attained in those ancient times. It is the foundation, not of that fraudulent Alchemy of which one hears today, but of the true Alchemy. This ancient Alchemy cannot be acquired by any such abstract means of acquiring knowledge as we have today. We observe things and we think about them. Alchemy could not be attained in that way at all. Today man directs his telescope to a certain star, he determines parallel axes and the like, and reckons and reckons; or if he wants to study a certain substance, he applies the spectroscope and so on. But everything that can be learned in this way is infinitely abstract compared with what could once be learned of the stars; and this ancient wisdom, this true astrology, could only be learned, as I explained in the last lecture, by establishing a real and living intercourse with the Intelligences of the Cosmos. That itself was attainment of knowledge, when man was able to hold converse, in his soul and spirit, with the Intelligences of the Cosmos.

What gold signifies for the human organism is connected with the secret of the Sun; and through exposing his soul to the Sun-existence, man thereby entered into relation with the Intelligences of the Sun. They it was who could tell him of the properties of gold. In like manner he entered into relation with the Intelligences of the Moon.

And man learned to know how the Intelligences of the Moon were themselves once in olden times the great Teachers of Earth-humanity, who taught on Earth the primeval wisdom. They were the same who today let their forces and impulses work from the Moon. They withdrew from the Earth at a certain time in evolution, and there on the Moon they founded, as it were, a colony after the Moon had separated from the Earth.

Thus those Intelligences who once lived on the Earth and are today the Moon-Intelligences have to do with this second secret, the carbon-silver secret. Such was the character of knowledge in ancient times.

Let me quote another example. As the pupil could receive impressions from the Sun or from the Moon, so by means of a still further preparation of soul he could also receive impressions from the other planets; and one of the secrets thus obtained was that relating to Venus. Venus is studied today through the telescope, and is regarded as being like any other star or planet. The human body, on the other hand, is studied by investigating, say, a section of the liver and then a section of the brain, and analysing them according to their cellular structure, just as though brain substance and liver substance were not radically different. And in the very same way a student will direct his telescope to Mercury, Venus, Mars, and so on, believing all of them to be composed of substances of a like nature. But in ancient times it was known that if a man were considering the Moon or the Sun, he was able to come to an idea of them by means of that which has direct relation to the physical Earth: the earthy, the watery, the airy, the fiery. And if he extended his observation in a spiritual way to the Moon, he came to the ether. If, however, he extended his observation to Venus, then he knew that he came into a spiritual world, a purely astral world. What we see as physical Venus is but the external sign for something which lives and has its being in the astral, in the astral light. Physical light is in the case of Venus something quite different from physical Sunlight, for instance. For physical Sunlight still has a relationship with what can live on the Earth as Earth-produced fight; whereas Venus-light—it is childish to think it is simply reflected Sunlight—Venus-light shines forth from the spiritual world. If the pupil exposed his soul to this light, he learned to know the Intelligences connected with Venus.

These were Intelligences who lived in continual opposition to the Intelligences of the Sun; and a great role was played in the ancient Mysteries by this opposition between the Intelligences of Venus and the Intelligences of the Sun. Men spoke, with a certain justification, of a continual conflict between them. There were starting-points of such conflicts, when the Venus Intelligences began to combat the Intelligences of the Sun. There were times of intensified conflicts, there were culminations, catastrophes and crises. And in that which lay between an attack and a catastrophe or crisis, you had, as it were, a section of that great battle of opposition which takes place in the spiritual world, and appears in its external symbol only in the astrological and astronomical relationships between Venus and the Sun. It worked itself out in successive phases. And no one can understand the inner impulses of history on Earth if he does not know of this conflict between Venus and the Sun. For all that takes place here on Earth in the way of conflict, all that happens in the evolution of civilisations, is an earthly picture, an earthly copy, of this conflict of Venus versus Sun.

Such knowledge existed in the ancient Mysteries because there was a relation between the human beings on the Earth and the Intelligences of the Cosmos.

Then came the epoch of which I have spoken, the epoch from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries a.d. The mediaeval investigators in their alchemical laboratories were no longer able to reach up to the Cosmic Intelligences. They could get only as far as the Nature Spirits. They made countless experiments—of which I gave you an instance in the last lecture, when I spoke of the transformation of oxalic acid into formic acid—countless experiments of such a kind as would reveal to them the divine working and weaving in the processes and things of Nature; but they could only do so inasmuch as they had prepared themselves in the right way through that spirit of piety of which I told you; then, through their experiments, the Nature Spirits spoke to them. Now let us realise quite clearly the position of such an investigator at that time.

He stood in his laboratory, and he could say: ‘I bring to my laboratory the substances, the retorts, the heating ovens, and I make various experiments. I put certain questions to Nature. And when I do this the Nature spirits enter my laboratory with their revelations. I can perceive them.’ This went on even as late as the fifteenth century. The Nature Spirits could still approach the Rosicrucian investigators who were prepared in the right way. But the Rosicrucian investigators knew that in ancient times investigators had not merely been able to reach the Nature Spirits, but could come in touch with the higher Cosmic Intelligences who spoke to them of the gold-secret connected with the Sun, of the silver-secret and the carbon-secret connected with the Moon, and of the important secrets of history connected with Venus, and so on. It is true they had records preserved from still older traditions, records that told them how there had once been this knowledge, but the records were not specially important for them; if one has once been touched by the spiritual, then historical documents are not so terribly important as they are for our modern materialistic age. It is really astounding to see how infinitely important it is to many people when some discovery is made such as the recent case when the skeleton of a dinosaurus was found in the Gobi desert. Of course it is an important find, but such discoveries are never anything but isolated, broken fragments; whereas in a spiritual way we can really enter into the secrets of the Cosmos. Historical documents were certainly not likely to impress those mediaeval investigators. It was in another way that the mediaeval alchemist acquired a knowledge of how man had once been able to attain this cosmic knowledge but that he could now reach only the Nature Spirits, the Spirits behind the Elements. It happened in this way. In moments when certain observations of Nature were made, or certain experiments performed, when these investigators were thus approaching the sphere of the Nature Spirits, then certain Nature Spirits were there present and told how there had once been human beings who stood in connection with the Cosmic Intelligences. That was the pain that gnawed at the heart of these mediaeval investigators! The Nature Spirits spoke to them of a former age when man had been able to come into connection with the Intelligences of the Cosmos. And the investigators had to say: ‘These Nature Spirits tell us of a past age now vanished into the abyss of human knowledge and human existence.’ Thus this gift of the mediaeval alchemist, his gift of access to the Nature Spirits, was really a doubtful one. On the one hand he approached the spiritual of Nature, the spiritual of air, and of water—he approached Gnomes, Sylphs and Undines in all their living reality. On the other hand, there were some amongst these beings who told him of things that overwhelmed him with despair, telling him how humanity had once been in connection not only with the Nature Spirits but with the Intelligences of the Cosmos, with whom the Nature Spirits themselves were still connected but whom man could no longer reach. That was the feeling of these mediaeval alchemists and it often came to expression in a far more sublime, a far more grandly tragic manner than we find in Goethe’s Faust, beautiful and powerful though it is!

The utterance which Faust addresses to the Moon, to the silver shining light of the Moon in which he would fain bathe, would have been made with much greater depth by the investigators of the Middle Ages when the Nature Spirits told them about the secret of carbon and silver, a secret which again is closely and intimately bound up with man. For what was it that man experienced in ancient times in this connection? He experienced not merely how gold is connected with the Sun, but how gold works in man, how silver and carbon work in man, and similarly how other metals related to the other planets work in man. In olden times man experienced these things in the circulation of the blood in his body. He experienced them in a conscious way. He felt the blood streaming and pulsing through his head, and at the same time he felt it as a picture of the whole Earth, this streaming of the blood through the head. And in that sphere where the head is not enclosed by bone, where it opens downwards towards the heart and the breast, he felt a copy in miniature of the rising up of the atmosphere from the Earth. Thus in what man learned from the Cosmos he recognised the metamorphoses that went on in his own organism; he could follow the planets as he passed through the various organs of the body. We find here a confirmation of the penetrating words of Mephistopheles, where he says, ‘Blood is a very special fluid’. For in its metamorphosis our blood reflects the magnificent metamorphosis from carbon to silver. It all lives in man’s blood.

Thus did the mediaeval investigator regard man’s loss of the knowledge of the Cosmic Intelligences as a loss of his own humanity. And it is in reality but a faint reflection of this experience that we find in Faust when he opens the Book of the Macrocosm and wants to rise to the Cosmic Intelligences, then shuts the Book again because he cannot do it, and contents himself with the Spirit of the Earth. We have here only a faint echo of the tragic mood we find in these mediaeval investigators, whose names even have not come down to us. They had to hear from the Nature Spirits, whose sphere they entered through their alchemical investigations, how there had once been a connection between man and the Cosmic Intelligences.

Now all this is very deeply linked with what had to develop in ancient Greece when it became necessary for the Mysteries of Samothrace, the Mysteries of the Kabiri, to be diluted and weakened down into the philosophy of Aristotle, which then played such an important role in the Middle Ages. All the time, below the surface of what we know as Aristotelianism, there continued to work powerfully, although tragically, right on into the fifteenth century what I have been able to sketch for you in this fragment out of those times.

Behind the Macedonian epoch lie two kinds of Mysteries. There lie the Mysteries that saw deeply into the secrets of the cosmic substances and their connections with the Cosmic Intelligences; and there lie, too, the Mysteries with which man began to descend from the Cosmic Intelligences to the Nature Spirits. Man’s vision was closed to those Cosmic Intelligences, but it was turned for that very reason to the Nature Spirits. That was the crisis which came to fulfilment at the time of Alexander and Aristotle. In all that happened at that time we can still see how the abstractions of Aristotle are rooted in the ancient Mysteries. Anyone who knows about the carbon-silver secret, and then reads the observations of Aristotle that have come down to posterity—his most important writings have not come down to us—but anyone who reads what is written there relating to the secret of the Moon, will at once understand the connection with those olden times.

These are things which will be illuminated in the lectures ² I now intend to give on the historical development of humanity from the standpoint of Anthroposophy.

• 2. Eight lectures given in Dornach, 24th to 31st December, 1923. English translation published with the title: World History in the light of Anthroposophy. (Rudolf Steiner Press.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today we want to talk about the fundamental questions of the whole human being, about this question of all questions, which seeks the answer in the exploration of one's own being, the most intrinsic nature of the human being. It is intimately connected with everything that touches the human being, not only in theory, but with everything that encompasses his soul, evokes, with everything that is connected with the happiness and suffering of our existence, with everything in the world that gives strength and power of will.

If we want to find the answers to these questions, if we speak of the essence of man, then we must not only know about what is physically there in man.

In some respects, the animal is happier than man in this respect; it lives in its existence, within the forces instilled in it, and does not need to ask itself about the goal and purpose of its existence, but man must ask these questions; they are posed to him by life itself. All certainty, all hope in life must arise from how the human soul relates to this question of all questions. It contains within itself the secret of life and death. It encompasses the transitory and the eternal, the temporal and the eternal in the life of man.

If you look at the physical body – it fades away in death, it shatters into a thousand and a thousand components, which you see disappearing in the cycle of matter. The question arises quite naturally: Does the disappearance of the human being exhaust everything that he means in the world? And when we look at our cultural life, when we see how man creates and works in the world, when we see how great masters of art, such as Michelangelo and Raphael, create their masterpieces, how they transform spiritual forces into the physical, corporeal, earthly and know that these works of great genius, which people enjoy and are uplifted by, will also one day fade away and be scattered, so that no human eye will see them again and no human soul will enjoy them, then this question arises anew before our soul.

Everything that a person incorporates into the temporal, we see disappearing; what remains of the person and his creations? Does something of himself survive? Is there anything eternal in human life? The deep feeling that has always occupied people in these matters has always been satisfied in many ways. Those who were called have answered the same in the different religions of different nations when these questions about life and death arose. But in our time, we see a peculiar destiny in many people. A deep rift runs through their souls, through their whole lives.

If we look back in time, we see that in the days before the printing press, souls could more easily find a satisfactory answer from those who were called to do so. Today, however, we see that the most thoughtful and striving souls are at a loss when faced with this question. In their youth they have learned much, exercised their minds, trained their intelligence – then the questions of religion approach them. Through so-called modern science, through a thousand other channels, a wealth of knowledge has flowed to them, and it becomes difficult for the soul to hold on to what religion gives as soul food. It is those who thirst most longingly for the truth who then go astray. The information that religion gives him can no longer satisfy man. Science also gives him no world view that strengthens the heart in its endeavors.

And so we see the soul disintegrating within itself, often already in early youth, we see a deep conflict in those who strive most earnestly; and this is carried over into life. In many, a certain indifference to these questions then arises later; they try to keep them out in order not to be disturbed by them. A superficiality of life results from this, and that is perhaps even worse than in other people, in whom the longing to find answers to these questions is constantly giving rise to new doubts that can hardly be satisfied by anything. This is a deep tragedy in the inner life of man!

This is the mood of our time. Man needs something that nourishes his soul, that gives him certainty in the face of these questions. This must come for humanity. Those who know how to read the signs of the times also know that all this will become much sharper, and they also know how necessary spiritual science or the theosophical worldview is for humanity.

Some associate “Theosophy” with a strange view. It is not about something new, on the contrary: humanity has always had something similar to what Theosophy is in a certain form. In the same way that man theoretically investigates the facts of nature, Theosophy seeks to investigate the facts of eternal life.

The facts of eternal life did not arise from a child's imagination, nor from an outdated stage of human development. Rather, Theosophy contains the deepest spiritual wisdom, which, in the form of knowledge, passes on to people what religion answers these questions in the form of feelings. Therefore, we must not imagine that Theosophy is a new religion; it is not. It also does not oppose religions, but clarifies them, explaining the truths of religion themselves so that they can withstand the strictest demands of science. It is the instrument for bringing the truths of religion to the surface. It does not want to found a new religion, but to clarify the old ones. The same scientific thinking, exactly the same method as in science, prevails in theosophy.

Of course, some of what will be said today will seem grotesque and fantastic to the materialistically minded, but we must not overlook the fact that when you hear such truths in their original form, you first have to find your way into them, you can't do it in an hour, because Theosophy encompasses the most important, the most profound questions of humanity! All things have occurred in time and were first regarded as fantasies. If they were truly based on life and truth, they became self-evident over time. Similarly, the theosophical teachings, which are still being fiercely opposed, will soon be taken for granted.

We now want to answer the questions about the nature of man from a spiritual-scientific point of view. It is not so easy to talk about it, because man is a very complicated being, and only if we subject ourselves to the discomfort of looking deeply into the reasons for our existence can we find answers.

A human being first appears to the external senses of human beings. We can touch them, see them, hear them, and understand what they say; they are perceptible to the external senses. The mind can combine all of this; the anatomist can explore the inside of a human being. From all this, we can form an idea of what a human being is. Basically, there is no great difference between what can be seen and felt in a person and what an anatomist or physiologist finds when they dissect a person. We understand all of this together as what we can know about a person. Some say: There is nothing else about a person but what the senses can perceive and what science can research. Others say: There is indeed much more, but we cannot explore it, we must limit ourselves to the sensual facts. But spiritual science does not say that; for her, all this is only a part of the human being. The physical human body is for her only a part of the very complicated human being.

Many people consider it a kind of immodesty to say that there is more to know about the human being and the world. They ask: How do you know these things? You cannot know them, because there are limits to our knowledge! — I quote here a saying of a great German thinker, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who in 1811 discussed before a large audience the same thing that Theosophy will have to discuss again and again: what underlies the human being as the invisible. Fichte says: If you imagine that you are the only one who can see in a world of blind people, and you talk to them about shapes and colors, about all the marvels that the eye transmits to us, then these blind people might say that this is all imaginary stuff. But the moment you are able to give all these blind people the ability to see, they see a new world, everything that the one spoke to them about is then standing before them. The blind man then realizes that he had no right to say that there are no forms, no colors. — In the same sense, Theosophy speaks of higher worlds. These are not new worlds, they are all around us, we are in the midst of them, only man lacks the organs, the abilities to perceive them. – Theosophy says: the world that our physical senses perceive is not the only one; we can expand our perceptions, can perceive other worlds. – They do not lie in an incomprehensible beyond, not in a cloud cuckoo land, but around us. Theosophy does not speak of these worlds in a magical sense, but in the same sense as Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

It is possible to acquire the senses to perceive other worlds through theosophy. Adepts and initiates have always been able to bear witness to what they themselves have seen and experienced in these worlds. These spiritual senses lie within every human being; they can be brought out and developed through the spiritual-scientific method. If a person has enough patience and energy to submit to these methods in training, then he can see into the other worlds as the blind see colors after an operation. (Of course, this operation does not help those born blind, but everyone can attain this spiritual operation through training.)

All religions in the world have emerged from what the initiates have seen in the spiritual worlds that surround us. They have given the world reports of them, and what the seers have seen is recorded in the sacred scriptures. We are now living in a time when humanity is once again drawing a stream of spiritual life from these spiritual worlds. That is why Theosophy is making this wisdom from the supersensible worlds available in popular lectures [to a large part of the world]. This is the reason why such teachings are now being publicly communicated that otherwise only a small circle of prepared people were allowed to receive.

But for a person who sees into the spiritual worlds, the higher limbs of human nature are just as true and real as the physical body. Today I can only give you a few hints and an overview of what Theosophy has to say about these things.

The physical body is the part of human nature that shares the same substances as the entire inanimate, mineral world. All substances in the environment, all metals in the earth contain the same substances as this body. Nevertheless, it differs from the so-called inanimate beings. It has the same substances in itself, but it would disintegrate into itself if it were not for a certain complication, another principle, another link that holds it together. A rock crystal exists in itself. The physical human body cannot do that.

The second link, which it has in common with plants and animals but not with the mineral kingdom, is the etheric body. [This is not the hypothetical ether assumed by physics.] Its task is to prevent the physical body from disintegrating at every moment of life. Only death separates this etheric body from the physical body, then the same is “corpse”, it decays when it is delivered to the substances that are in it. In every moment of life, the life body fights against the decay of the physical body.

Until the nineteenth century, it was taken for granted, even by the external science, that there was something like this in living beings; it was called the life principle. It was only around the middle of the nineteenth century that people began to reject everything that could not be seen with the eyes; and one was considered a fool if one held on to it anyway. The materialistic scholars - such as [Vogt], Moleschott - created a world view that sought to explain life only in terms of a combination of atoms. Today, some are beginning to admit that there must be something beyond that.

For theosophy, this etheric or life body can be found in plants, animals and humans, and it is as real for those who can see into the spiritual worlds as the physical body; one can see it with what Goethe called the spiritual eyes.

This is the second link. We can visualize the third if we consider that the person standing before us is not made up solely of what we see of him, not of colors and forms, but that within the skin that encloses the physical there is something living that only the mindless cannot take into account. And that is something much, much more important than the physical body. Everything we cannot perceive, the drives, joy, pleasure, suffering, pain, desire, that live in a person from birth to death, all that is just as real as the color on his cheeks. All of this is not the result of processes in the tissues of the body. Theosophy says: This carrier of desires, passions, etc. in man is an entity that was there before, that is the origin of the physical body.

Let us make this clear to ourselves with water and ice. Ice is water, only in a different form. Just as surely as ice can become water again and is originally water, so spiritual science shows that all matter, all substance, is nothing other than solidified spirit. As true as ice is water, it is also true that everything that lives in man as instinct, desire, lust and pain has condensed, crystallized, as it were, into the physical body. This is a creature of the astral body, the third link in human nature. Man no longer has this in common with plants, but only with animals.

Thus we have the physical body in common with the mineral, plant and animal, the etheric body in common with plant and animal, and the astral body only with the animal. Some researchers claim, however, that some plants also show sensation because they respond to stimuli, but it is an amateurish view to say that a plant has sensation. Anyone who says that does not know what is meant by sensation. Only a being that reflects this external stimulus internally, only that is a being that can be said to have sensation, only such a being has an astral body. If one wanted to say that about plants, then one could just as easily say it about blue litmus paper, which under certain circumstances, when subjected to a certain stimulus, turns red.

We now have three parts of the human being and come to the fourth. Don't be alarmed at the number of parts! Man is simply a very complicated being. We come to this fourth part by a simple consideration. We understand it most easily if we follow this train of thought: in the entire German-speaking world there is one word that is different from all the others. Everything else around us can be called, but no one can say the little word “I” to you, you can only say it to yourself. This word must resound from the soul of each person; any other word is a you to you; only to yourself are you an I! One does not immediately realize the great significance of this fact. The I can never sound to our ear from the outside; it must sound in the soul itself; the soul must pronounce it as its innermost name. The ancient founders of religions, who built their religions on spiritual science, knew this very well. What begins to speak within man was called the spirit in man, it was called the ineffable name of God! The I, the God in man, announces itself in this word!

No one can say that Theosophy maintains that God is in man, as is often superficially asserted. Just as if you take a drop from the sea, you cannot say: “This drop is the sea,” when we know that the essence of the drop is the same as that of the ocean. In the same way, when you say ‘I’ to your soul, you do not mean the all-embracing spirit. It is not the spirit, just as the drop is not the ocean, and yet it is the same entity as the divine All-spirit. You must understand this in this sense. In this sense, the ancient Hebrews called Yahweh, Jehovah the unspeakable name of God, which means the entity, the I. Therefore, a deep, reverent shudder went through the ranks of the people when, once a year, the one who was called upon to do so, pronounced this holy name: Yahweh, that is, I am, who is, who was and who will be!

Therefore, deeper natures feel that this is a decisive event when, in the course of their lives, they come into inner contact with this eternal spirit of life, when they awaken to the realization: I am a self. Jean Paul, for example, when this became clear to him – he was only a child of seven – felt it to be a tremendous event, as if he were looking into the veiled sanctuary of his inner being. Even in his later years, he still fondly recalled the external circumstances in which this occurred.

And into this veiled sanctuary we also look when we consciously pronounce the little word “I” for the first time. It is this that makes man the crown of earthly creation: this I, glowing and flowing through the body, makes him the most sacred being on earth! This is the fourth link in his being. This is what is meant in the Pythagorean school by the holy tetrad. When this appears in a person, he has risen to a higher level of realization, which mysteriously expresses the deepest thing in human nature. But that is not all.

People do not differ from each other in terms of this tetrad, every person has it. There must be another difference between them. Let us clearly see the difference between a cannibal, an ordinary average person and a high idealist, such as Schiller, or a Francis of Assisi. We see a great difference between such people!

Darwin recounts how, on one of his journeys, he came to an area inhabited by a tribe of man-eaters. He had the interpreter make it clear to the chief how bad it was to eat a human being. The “savage” looked at the European in astonishment and replied naively that he could not possibly know whether it was good or bad before he had eaten a human himself! He was only thinking about whether something was good or bad for him, that is, whether it tasted good or bad.

But such a person also has the four limbs that I mentioned to you. How does the average European person differ from such a “savage”? He says to himself about some urges: you may follow them, but he forbids himself from following others. He has moral concepts that forbid him one thing and allow him another; he has purified and cleansed his urges and passions, and if he is a little higher, he has certain ideals that he strives for. How does he differ from the “savage”? He has worked on his astral body, the body that is the carrier of desires and passions. The savage has not yet done this; he has not yet put any work into it, he still lives in his urges and desires, and the part of his body, the ego, lives in him as it has been handed down to him by the gods. The higher a person is, the more this divine inheritance works in him and transforms the other bodies. The idealist has transformed even more in himself, he has brought even more under the rule of the ego; and the person who has his instincts and passions so well in hand that nothing happens that he does not recognize as right and good, who is never carried away by his instincts and desires, has completely purified and ennobled his astral body.

Thus we have five aspects to human nature: the four physical body, etheric body, astral body, in which the I is located, and then the part that the I has worked out for itself. This aspect we call the spirit self or manas, which is a product of transformation of the astral body. And the more a person has transformed in his astral body, the more of the spirit self or manas he has within him.

A person can now also work on his etheric body or life body. This is not only the carrier of nutrition, growth and the powers of reproduction, but also the carrier of lasting habits, character, conscience and temperament. Whether a person is good or bad in the normal sense depends on the astral body, but whether he is a melancholic or a choleric depends on the etheric body. Think about how little you knew as an eight-year-old child. You have learned a lot since then, but if you were a hot-tempered child, your temper will still flare up from time to time; if you were a melancholy child, you will still have to struggle with gloominess sometimes. Everything in the astral body changes quickly, everything anchored in the etheric body changes slowly, so that the reworking of the astral body could be compared to the minute hand of the clock, and that of the etheric body to the hour hand.

Therefore, the I also has much greater difficulties when it is to act on the etheric body. Strong impulses for its transformation are given by high, pure art, which allows one to sense and see the eternal; strong impulses are also given by the grandeur and glory of nature and of God's creations. But most powerfully, religious impulses work to transform the life body; not moral instructions with abstract concepts, but a deepening in the eternal content of being, a sinking into that which is given to us as wisdom in the great religions, triggers impulses that have a strongly ennobling effect on the human etheric body, and hence the great significance of [the same] for humanity.

This is where the training and education of the initiate begins. He has to learn and undergo different things than what is called learning in the school sense. Of course, he must also learn what lives in the astral body and can be grasped, what is called learning in the ordinary sense, but that is not the main thing. The student has done more in the direction of initiation when he fights an inclination, consciously abandons a habit. In the schools of initiation, therefore, special emphasis is placed on this; the student must undergo exercises that enable him to change his temperament, to overcome his character; and this work leads up to higher worlds. Everything that can be transformed in the etheric body so that the ego can control it is called the spirit of life or Budhi. Thus the sixth part of the human being is the transformed etheric body or life body.

If we go further, we come to the highest level, where the initiate begins to work on his physical body; this is the seventh link of the future. It may seem strange that the lowest part of man, the physical body, is worked on by the highest, but we must bear in mind that in this way man also becomes able to work out into the physical world, from which the human body itself has taken its substance. The initiate at this level can work out into the cosmos! This level is reached through a transformation of the breathing process; it is called Atma – Atma, that is, breathing, because it is connected with breathing – or spiritual man.

Thus we have the tetrad of man and the so-called higher trinity, which arises from the tetrad and is a process of transformation of the tetrad. We now want to take a look at how these elements work in man, we want to consider man in life as well as in death.

What is sleep? It brings about a change in the context of the elements of human nature just described. As long as a person is awake, from morning till evening, they are intertwined and form a living system of interacting forces. It is different when a person is asleep. Desire and suffering, joy and pain, have sunk away when man lies in a deep, dreamless sleep. That all this is not present for man is because his astral body, which is the carrier of desire and suffering, has left him during sleep. Only the physical body of man, connected with the ether body, lies in bed. The astral body is outside of man as soon as he sinks into sleep. What does this astral body do during the night? Does it rest somewhere in the insubstantial? No! Precisely when we know what the astral body does at night, then we can take a deep look into the nature of the human being.

As long as the astral body is in the physical body during the day, it perceives through the physical organs. Through the eye it receives light and colors, through the ear sounds, and so on. The astral body senses these things because the sensation is in it. But because it is inside the physical body, it also senses the disharmony of the environment; there is no harmony around it, and that wears it out continuously. This wear and tear of the astral body is expressed in the fact that the person tires. As long as the astral body is inside, it is occupied with the outside world, but as soon as it is outside, it works to repair the physical body, it is busy at night getting rid of the fatigue substances. That is its business at night. Man would die much sooner if the astral body did not do this every night and did not send its forces down into the physical body to bring it into the state in which it needs to be to continue life.

We have to imagine it like this: we are enclosed in a sea of astrality, as if in a large vessel of water. During the day, each person absorbs a drop of this, like a sponge, and releases it again at night. And so, at night, the astral body submerges into its source, and at night it is back in its home. Only a clairvoyant can tell you what it looks like. The ordinary person has no insight into it, but it is different for the clairvoyant. During his conscious sleep at night, a world of light and colors opens up for him. He consciously lives in the world of the harmony of the spheres, in which the astral body of every human being also lives unconsciously. And this world is not a fantasy. This harmony of the spheres is a reality! It is the source of all things, it is the same as what is called in the Christian religion the Kingdoms of Heaven. The initiates have always known this. — It may sound outrageous to many when I say: Goethe knew that too! When a person is transported up into heaven, he hears the harmonies of the spheres from which the whole world was created, and Goethe expresses this when he says:

The sun sounds in the ancient way
In the singing contest of the spheres,

and so on. If we look at this passage superficially, we cannot explain it. The physical sun does not sound! But the sun has its spirit, and it is this spiritual essence that sounds in the singing contest of the spheres! And this spirit is meant by Goethe, which can be perceived by those who can perceive in the spiritual worlds. And further, the end of the Faust drama, [the Ariel scene, what does it say]:

Resounding for spiritual ears
Now the new day is born;
It trumpets, it trombone,

and so on. Because the soul lives in this sounding astral sea, in this harmony of the spheres at night, Paracelsus rightly calls it the astral body, because every night it is transported to its original home, to the world of the stars.

As long as this astral body has not yet completely left the etheric and physical bodies, it is the time when dreams emerge from the unconscious nocturnal darkness. As long as the astral body has not yet completely severed its connection with the human being, the person dreams. When the astral body is completely within the person, he lives in the waking consciousness of the day.

When a person dies, other changes occur. After death, only the physical body remains of the person; the astral body has left with the etheric body. [It is only in the rarest of cases that the astral body takes the etheric body with it.] Usually, something special happens to the person after death.

The entire past life then appears before the soul of the person like a large tableau, like a panorama, but in a very peculiar way, because everything that has given the person joy or caused him suffering in his life is missing from this painting. The person looks at his life quite objectively. This is as long as the etheric body is connected to the astral body and the ego. Then the astral body separates and the second corpse of the human being remains behind, the etheric corpse. It dissolves into the general cosmic ether just as the physical corpse dissolves, only much faster. But an essence, a center of power remains behind from this life tableau, so to speak, a sum of the experiences. Just as you add a new page to a book, you add the content of your last life each time you look back at your life after death with clairvoyance. This can take hours or even days, depending on the person's individuality.

There are moments in human life that are similar to this. When a person experiences a strong fright, for example, when they suffer a fall during a mountain climb or are in danger of drowning, their whole life probably passes before them like a tableau, and even materialistically thinking people have experienced this and stated it, such as the criminal anthropologist Benedikt in Vienna. What is the cause of this experience? You all know the feeling we have when a limb has fallen asleep, this tingling sensation, children might say: It's like seltzer water in my fingers. As a clairvoyant, you can see that in such a numb limb, the etheric body has loosened so that the etheric hand hangs sideways when the hand is numb, and the same is true of the head when a person is under hypnosis. If a person is then given such a fright, the entire etheric body loosens for a brief moment. Because the etheric body is the carrier of memory and is otherwise constantly embedded in the physical body, in ordinary life it can only remember as much as the physical body allows. But in such moments, when the etheric body is free, that is, when the physical body is no longer an obstacle, then the memory comes fully to the fore.

Recently someone told me that he had been close to drowning, but did not have the memory tableau because he was unconscious. This is precisely the proof of this, because when a person is unconscious, the astral body is also out, which is the carrier of consciousness, so of course this memory cannot occur.

Now, after death, when the astral body is freed from the physical body and the etheric body, which remain as two corpses and release their substances back into the environment, a certain epoch begins: the so-called Kamaloka time. Kamaloka is not a place that is far from us. People who have died are always around us. The clairvoyant eye can always see them.

We can make this clear to ourselves by means of simple logic. What situation are we in after death? Let us think, for example, of a gourmet who, in life, had a passion, say, for beefsteaks. The physical body does not enjoy it, but the astral body, which is the carrier of desires, passions, sensations and so on, does need the physical body to obtain this pleasure; it is, so to speak, its instrument. Now, after death, he has discarded the physical body, so he no longer has an instrument, but still has exactly the same longing for the satisfaction of his desires.

It is the same situation as that of a person who, in a beautiful area, cannot find water far and wide and has to suffer from burning thirst. In the same way, the unquenched longing for physical pleasures burns in the astral body. As long as a person has not yet given up this, as long as his greed for this satisfaction exists, so long will his Kamaloka time last. Only when nothing draws him back into this world can he ascend into the actual spiritual world, the heavenly world.

One could well ask: Is the person conscious in this state of Kamaloka? Certainly, because the same forces that the person has in his astral body and that go out into cosmic space every night, live there in the harmony of infinity and thereby renew the used-up forces of the physical body again and again – it is precisely these forces that he now uses within himself in this state. So man must be conscious after death.

Now man ascends into the spiritual worlds and takes this essence, of which I have spoken to you, from his etheric body and a similar essence from his astral body with him.

The essence that he has acquired in his etheric body during his lifetime influences his emotional life in a moral sense, and what he has acquired in his astral body influences his desires and instincts. He now lives in the spiritual worlds for a certain number of years, then he descends again into the world, equipped with what he has worked for in this way, with a more or less purified etheric and astral body, and each new life he leads is, as it were, a new page in the book of his life. The more embodiments he has experienced and the better he has used them to refine himself and strive higher, the richer the new life is, and so the human being rises from life to life, and it perfects itself more and more. He is not separated in one life, nothing is a mere game of chance, but his lives are connected. Just as in daily life the work of one day prepares and influences that of the next, so our past is connected with the future, and so we create our own future through our behavior in the present. This is a law that runs through all nature, through the inanimate as well as the animate.

And this connection between events that happen later and those that happen earlier is called [“krama” — not “karma”]. A certain [krama] emerges from every course of life for every person. There is something deeply reconciling about this when viewed in the right way; because when we often see a hardworking, good person condemned to poverty and misery in life, and another, seemingly without any merit, living in happiness and joy, then we may well ask in vain how this can be, which seems so unjust! But if we know the law of [Krma], if we know that everyone prepares their own destiny, that [Krma] is a law of life, if we know that everything I do bears its fruit, if I do something foolish, evil, then the fruits will be the same, if I do good, then happiness and joy will be the result - then this law will be something deeply reconciling for everyone, and when it not only theoretically but truly illuminates a person's life, then it will unfold new powers in him, it will give him confidence, orientation and security in life.

Even with the redemption of Christ, the law can be perfectly reconciled as soon as it is properly understood. The theologians say: We speak of the redemption through Christ Jesus, but you speak of the fact that one must redeem oneself. You do not believe in the idea of redemption! — That is not true. Just as a merchant can draw up his balance sheet at any moment and still be able to enter new items every moment, so too can we enter new items in our book of life every moment. [Krma] is completely compatible with the freedom of will; we can enter bad or good items. Now, if we are strong enough, we can help a fellow human being. If we are even more powerful, we can help two, and so on. But an all-powerful being, such as Christ Jesus, who appeared in humanity, can help countless people through a single act that transcends time. Properly understood, the law of karma is completely in line with the Christian idea of salvation; it is also compatible with the whole of Christian teaching.

When the teaching about the nature and essence of man gradually penetrates humanity, when it is imbued and spiritualized by it, then new life and new development will flow through it. For humanity needs these teachings now. The souls of men would dry up under the conditions that were indicated at the beginning. Theosophy had to come, it was a necessity for the life of humanity. Even if it is still treated with hostility, what harm is done? Everything that is new and incomprehensible is treated with hostility at first and only later becomes taken for granted. Think of the postage stamp – no postal administrator came up with this simple idea, and when it first came up it was called 'brain-damaged'. That was only 70 years ago! And it was the same with the first railways. It was said that anyone who traveled on them would inevitably suffer severe nervous shocks.

Theosophy points to things, and it is important that they prove themselves in life when applied; and if Theosophy has proven its truth, then it will naturally find its way through the souls of men. [For it is the spiritual remedy for humanity!] Not through words, not through discussions – the recovery of spiritual life can only be found through action. And this proof is awaited by those who know what Theosophy should mean for humanity in the times to come. Knowledge that is put into practice is what we need. This knowledge cannot be found by the weak powers of our intellect alone, but must flow in from higher worlds in order to revitalize our culture, to give us strength and security in life, and to make us strong, creative human beings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Greek text is as follows:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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