| 125. Three Lectures on the Mystery Dramas: Self-Knowledge as Portrayed in the Rosicrucian Mystery, The Portal of Initiation
17 Sep 1910, Basel Translated by Ruth Pusch, Hans Pusch Rudolf Steiner |
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| For the one who finds his Self out in the cosmos, the whole cosmos becomes an ego being. We cannot bear then anything coming toward us that is not related to the ego being. Art will gradually learn something in this direction; it will come to the ego principle, because the Christ has brought us our ego for the first time. In the most various realms will this ego be alive. |
| 125. Three Lectures on the Mystery Dramas: Self-Knowledge as Portrayed in the Rosicrucian Mystery, The Portal of Initiation
17 Sep 1910, Basel Translated by Ruth Pusch, Hans Pusch Rudolf Steiner |
|---|
Many of you know that recently in Munich we repeated last year's performance of Schuré's drama, The Children of Lucifer. We also put our efforts into the production of a Rosicrucian Mystery in which we tried in a variety of ways to bring to expression what is living in our movement. For one thing, it was meant to show how the life of anthroposophy and its impulses can flow into art, into artistic form. Besides that, we should be aware that this Rosicrucian Mystery contains many of our spiritual scientific teachings that perhaps only in future years will be discerned. Please do not misunderstand me when I say that if people would exert themselves to some degree to read what is in it—not between the lines but right in the words themselves, though certainly in a spiritual sense—if people would exert themselves during the next few years to try to work with the drama, I would not have to give any more lectures for a long time. Much could be discovered in it that otherwise I would have to put forth as one or another theme in lectures. It is much more practical, however, to do this together as a group rather than as single individuals. It is fortunate in one sense that everything that lives in spiritual science also exists in such a form. In relation to the Rosicrucian Mystery I should today like to speak about certain peculiarities of human self- knowledge. For this we will have to remind ourselves how the individuality living in the body of Johannes Thomasius brings about a characterization of himself. Therefore, I wish to start my lecture with a recitation of the scenes from the Rosicrucian Mystery that portray the self-knowledge of Johannes. SCENE TWO A place in the open; rocks and springs. The whole surroundings are to be thought of as within the soul of Johannes Thomasius. What follows is the content of his meditation.
Johannes:
Johannes
Maria
Johannes
Maria
Johannes
SCENE NINEThe same placed as in Scene Two
Johannes
Maria
Johannes
Maria
Johannes
In these scenes two levels of development, two steps in the unfolding of our souls, are shown. Now please do not find it strange when I say that I do not mind interpreting this Rosicrucian Mystery just as I have interpreted other pieces of literature in our group. What I have often said about other poetry can also be brought before our souls in a lively, spontaneous way by this drama. In fact, I have never failed to point out that a flower knows little, indeed, of what someone who is looking at it will find in it; yet, whatever he finds is contained in it. And in speaking about Faust, I explained that the poet did not necessarily know or feel everything in the words he was writing down that later would be discovered in them. I can assure you that nothing of what afterward I could say about the Rosicrucian Mystery, and that I know now is in it, was in my conscious mind as I wrote down the various scenes. The scene-pictures grew one by one, just like the leaves of a plant. One cannot bring forth a character by first having an idea and then turning this into a concrete figure. It was continually interesting to me how each scene grew out of the others preceding it. Friends who knew the earlier parts said that it was remarkable how everything came about quite differently from what one could have imagined. This Mystery Drama exists now as a picture of human evolution in the development of a single person. I want to emphasize that true feeling makes it impossible to throw a cloak of abstractions around oneself in order to present anthroposophy; every human soul is different from every other and, at its core, must be different, because each one undergoes the experience of his own development. For this reason, instruction to the many can provide only general directions. One can give the complete truth only by applying it to a single human soul, to a soul that reveals its human individuality in all its uniqueness. If, therefore, anyone should consider the figure of Johannes Thomasius in such a way as to transfer the specific description of that figure to general theories of human development, it would be absolutely incorrect. If he believed that he would experience exactly what Johannes Thomasius experienced, he would be quite mistaken. For while in the widest sense what Johannes Thomasius had to undergo is valid for everyone, in order to have the same specific experiences one would have to be Johannes Thomasius. Each person is a “Johannes Thomasius” in his own fashion. Everything in the drama is presented, therefore, in a completely individual way. Through this, the truth portrayed by the particular figures brings out as clearly as possible the development of the soul of a human being. At the beginning, Thomasius is shown in the physical world, but certain soul-happenings are hinted at that provide a wide basis for such development, particularly an experience at a somewhat earlier time when he deserted a girl who had been lovingly devoted to him. Such things do take place, but this individual happening has a different effect on a man who has resolved to undertake his own development. There is one deep truth necessary for him who wants to undergo development: self-knowledge cannot be achieved by brooding within oneself but only through diving into the being of others. Through self- knowledge we must learn that we have emerged from the cosmos. Only when we give ourselves up can we change into another Self. First of all, we are transformed into whatever was close to us in life. When at first Johannes sinks more deeply into himself and then plunges in self-knowledge into another person, into the one to whom he has brought bitter pain, we see this as an example of the experience of oneself within another, a descent into self-knowledge. Theoretically, one can say that if we wish to know the blossom, we must plunge into the blossom, and the best method of acquiring self-knowledge is to plunge again, but in a different way, into happenings we once took part in. As long as we remain in ourselves, we experience only superficially whatever takes place. In contrast to true self-knowledge, what we think of other persons is then mere abstraction. For Thomasius at first, what other people have lived through becomes a part of him. One of them, Capesius, describes some of his experiences; we can observe that they are rooted in real life. But Thomasius takes in more. He is listening. His listening is singular; later, in SceneEight, we will be able to characterize it. It is really as if Thomasius' ordinary Self were not present. Another deeper force appears, as though Thomasius were creeping into the soul of Capesius and were taking part in what is happening from there. That is why it is so absolutely important for Thomasius to be estranged from himself. Tearing the Self out of oneself and entering into another is part and parcel of self-knowledge. It is noteworthy, therefore, that what he has listened to in Scene One, Thomasius says, reveals:
Why has it made a “nothing” of him? Because through self-knowledge he has plunged into these other persons. Brooding in your own inner self makes you proud, conceited. True self-knowledge leads, first of all, by having to plunge into a strange Self, into suffering. In Scene One Johannes follows each person so strongly that when he listens to Capesius he becomes aware of the words of Felicia within the other soul. He follows Strader into the loneliness of the cloister, but at first this has the character of something theoretical. He cannot reach as far as he is later led, in Scene Two, through pain. Self-knowledge is deepened by the meditation within his inner Self. What was shown in Scene One is shown changed in Scene Two through self-knowledge intensified from abstraction to a concrete imagination. Those well-known words, which we have heard through the centuries as the motif of the Delphic Oracle, bring about a new life for this man Johannes, though at first it is a life of estrangement from himself. Johannes enters, as a knower-of-himself, into all the outer phenomena. He finds his life in the air and water, in the rocks and springs, but not in himself. All the words that we can let sound on stage only from outside are actually the words of his meditation. As soon as the curtain rises, we have to confront these words, which would sound louder to anyone through self-knowledge than we can dare to produce on the stage. Thereafter, he who is learning to know himself dives into the other beings and elements and thus learns to know them. Then in a terrible form the same experience he has had earlier appears to him. It is a deep truth that self-knowledge, when it progresses in the way we have characterized, leads us to see ourselves quite differently from the way we ever saw ourselves before. It teaches us to perceive our “I” as a strange being. Man believes his own outer physical sheath to be the closest thing to himself. Nowadays, when he cuts a finger, he is much more connected with the painful finger than when, for instance, a friend hurts him with an unjust opinion. How much more does it hurt a modern person to cut his finger than to hear an unjust opinion! Yet he is only cutting into his bodily sheath. To feel our body as a tool, however, will come about only through self- knowledge. Whenever a person grasps an object, he can feel his hand to some degree as a tool. This, too, he can learn to feel with one or another part of his brain. The inward feeling of his brain as instrument comes about at a certain level of self-knowledge. Specific places within the brain are localized. If we hammer a nail, we know we are doing it with a tool. We know that we are also using as tool one or another part of the brain. Through the fact that these things are objective and can become separate and strange to us, we come to know our brain as something quite separate from us. Self-knowledge requires this sort of objectivity as regards our body; gradually our outer sheath becomes as objective to us as the ordinary tools we use. Then, as soon as we have made a start at feeling our bodily sheath as separate object, we truly begin to live in the outside world. Because a person feels only his body, he is not clear about the boundary between the air outside and the air in his lungs. All the same, he will say that it is the same air, outside and inside. So it is with everything, with the blood, with everything that belongs to the body. But what belongs to the body cannot be outside and inside—that is mere illusion. It is only through the fact that we allow the internal bodily nature to become outward that in truth it finds a further life out in the rest of the world and the cosmos. In the first scene recited today there was an effort to express the pain of feeling estranged from oneself—the pain of feeling estranged because of being outside and within all the other things. Johannes Thomasius' own bodily sheath seems like a person outside himself. But just because of that—that he feels his own body outside—he can see the approach of another body, that of the young girl he once deserted. It comes toward him; he has learned how to speak with the very words of the other being. She says to him, whose Self has widened out to her:
Then guilt, very much alive, rises up in the soul when, plunging our own Self into another and attaching ourselves to the pain of this other being, the pain is spoken out. This is a deepening, an intensifying. Johannes is truly within the pain, because he has caused it. He feels himself dissolving into it and then waking up again. What is he actually experiencing? When we try to put all this together, we will find that the ordinary, normal human being undergoes something similar only in the condition we call kamaloka. The initiate, however, has to experience in this world what the normal person experiences in the spiritual world. Within the physical body he must go through what ordinarily is experienced outside the physical body. All the elements of kamaloka have to be undergone as the elements of initiation. Just as Johannes dives into the soul to whom he has brought such grief, so must the normal human being in kamaloka dive into the souls to which he has brought pain. It is just as if a slap in the face has to come back to him; he has to feel the same pain. The only difference is that the initiate experiences this in the physical body, and other people after death. The one who goes through this here will afterward live otherwise in kamaloka. But even all that one undergoes in kamaloka can be so experienced that one does not become entirely free. It is a most difficult task to become completely free. A man feels as if he were chained to his physical conditions. In our time one of the most important elements for our development—not yet so much in the Greco-Roman epoch but especially important nowadays—is that the human being must experience how infinitely difficult it is to become free of himself. Therefore, a notable initiation experience is described by Johannes as feeling chained to his own lower nature; his own being seems to be a creature to which he is firmly fettered:
This belongs to self-knowledge; it is a secret of self- knowledge. We should try to understand it correctly. A question about this secret could be phrased like this: have we in some way become better human beings by becoming earth dwellers, by entering into our physical sheaths, or would we be better by remaining in our inner natures and throwing off those sheaths? Superficial people, taking a look at life in the spirit, may well ask: why ever do we have to plunge down into a physical body? It would be much easier to stay up there and not get into the whole miserable business of earthly existence. For what reason have the wise powers of destiny thrust us down here? Perhaps it helps our feelings a little to say that for millions and millions of years the divine, spiritual powers have worked on the physical body. Because of this, we should make more out of ourselves than we have the strength to do. Our inner forces are not enough. We cannot yet be what the gods have intended for us if we wish to be only what is in our inner nature, if our outer sheaths do not work some corrections in us. Life shows us that here on earth man is put into his physical sheaths and that these have been prepared for him by the beings of three world epochs. Man has now to develop his inner nature. Between birth and death, he is bad; in Devachan he is a better creature, taken up by divine, spiritual beings who shower him with their own forces. Later on, in the Vulcan epoch, he will be a perfect being. Now on the earth he is a being who gives way to this or that desire. Our hearts, for one thing, are created with such wisdom that they can hold out for decades against the excesses we indulge in, such as drinking coffee. What man can be today through his own will is the way he travels through kamaloka. There he has to learn what he can be through his own will, and that is certainly nothing very good. Whenever man is asked to describe himself, he cannot use the adjective “beautiful.” He has to describe himself as Johannes does in Scene Two:
Our inner nature stretches flexibly within our bodily sheaths and is hidden from us. When we approach initiation, we learn really to see ourselves as a kind of raging dragon. Therefore, these words are drawn up out of the deepest perception; they are words of self-knowledge, not of self-brooding:
At bottom, they are both the same, one the subject, the other the object.
This flight, however, merely leads the human being directly to himself. But then the crowd turns up, the crowd we find ourselves in when we really look into ourselves. We find ourselves to be a collection of lusts and passions we had not noticed earlier, because each time we wanted to look into ourselves our eyes were distracted to the world outside. Indeed, compared to what we would have seen inside, the world outside is wonderfully beautiful. Out there, in the illusion, in the maya of life, we stop looking at ourselves inwardly. When people around us, however, begin to talk all kinds of stupidity and we cannot stand it, we escape to where we can be alone. This is quite important at some levels of development. We can and should collect ourselves; it is a good means of self-knowledge. But it can happen that, coming into a crowd of people, we can no longer be alone; those others appear, either within us or outside us, no matter; they do not allow us to be alone. Then comes the experience we must have: solitude actually brings forth the worst kind of fellowship.
Those are genuine experiences. Do not let the strength, the intensity, of the happenings trouble you. You do not have to believe that such strength and intensity as described must necessarily lead to anxiety or fear. It should not prevent anyone from also plunging into these waters. No one will experience all this as swiftly or with such vehemence as Johannes does; it had to come about for him in this way for a definite purpose, even prematurely, too. A normal self-development proceeds differently. Therefore, what occurs in Johannes so tumultuously must be understood as an individual happening. Because he is this particular individual, who has suffered a kind of shipwreck, everything he undergoes takes place much more tempestuously than it otherwise would. He is confronted by the laws of self-development in such a way that they throw him completely off balance. As for us, one thing should be awakened by this description of Johannes, that is, the perception that true self-knowledge has nothing to do with trite phrases, that true self- knowledge inevitably leads us into pain and sorrow. Things that once were a source of delight can assume a different face when they appear in the realm of self- knowledge. We can long for solitude, no doubt, when we have already found self-knowledge. But in certain moments of self-development it is solitude we have lost when we look for it as we did earlier, in moments when we flow out into the objective world, when in loneliness we have to suffer the sharpest pain. Learning to perceive in the right way this outpouring of the Self into other beings will help us feel what has been put into the Mystery Drama: a certain artistic element has been created in which everything is spiritually realistic. One who thinks realistically—a genuine, artistic, sensitive realist—undergoes at unrealistic performances a certain amount of suffering. Even what at a certain level can provide great satisfaction is at another level a source of pain. This is due to the path of self- development. A play by Shakespeare, for instance, an immense achievement in the physical world, can be an occasion for artistic pleasure. But a certain moment of development can arrive when we are no longer satisfied by Shakespeare because we seem inwardly torn to pieces. We go from one scene to the next but no longer see the necessity that has ordered one scene to follow another. We begin to find it unnatural that a scene follows the one preceding it. Why unnatural? Because nothing holds two scenes together except the dramatist Shakespeare and his audience. His scenes follow the abstract principle of cause and effect but not a concrete reality. It is characteristic of Shakespeare's drama that nothing of underlying karma is hinted at; this would tie the scenes together more closely. The Rosicrucian drama grew into a realistic, spiritually realistic one. It makes huge demands on Johannes Thomasius, who is constantly on stage without taking part actively or showing a single important dramatic characteristic. He is the one in whose soul everything takes place, and what is described is the development of that soul, the real experience of the soul's development. Johannes' soul spins one scene realistically out of the one before it. Through this we see that realistic and spiritual do not contradict each other. Materialistic and spiritual things do not need each other, and they can contradict each other. But realistic and spiritual are not opposites; it is quite possible for spiritual realism to be admired even by a materialistic person. In regard to artistic principles, the plays of Shakespeare can be thought of as realistic. You will understand, however, how far the art that goes hand in hand with a science of the spirit must finally lead. For the one who finds his Self out in the cosmos, the whole cosmos becomes an ego being. We cannot bear then anything coming toward us that is not related to the ego being. Art will gradually learn something in this direction; it will come to the ego principle, because the Christ has brought us our ego for the first time. In the most various realms will this ego be alive. In still another way can the specific human entity be shown within the soul and also divided into its various components outside. If someone asked which person represents Atma, which one Buddhi, which one Manas? ... if someone in the audience could exclaim, “O yes, that figure on the stage is the personification of Manas!” ... it would be a horrible kind of art, a dreadful kind of art. It is a bad theosophical habit to try to explain everything like this. One would like to say, “Poor thing!” of a work of art that has to be “explained.” If it were to be attempted with Shakespeare's plays, it would indeed be absurd and downright wrong. These habits are the childhood diseases of the theosophical movement. They will gradually be cured. But for once at least, it is necessary to point them out. It might even happen that someone tries to look for the nine members of the human organization in the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven! On the other hand, it is correct to some extent to say that the united elements of human nature can be assigned to different characters. One person has this soul coloring, a second person another; we can see characters on the stage who present different sides of the whole unified human being. The people we encounter in the world usually present one or another particular trait. As we develop from incarnation to incarnation, we gradually become a whole. To show this underlying fact on the stage, our whole life has somehow to be separated into parts. In this Rosicrucian Mystery, we will find that everything that Maria is supposed to be is dispersed among the other figures who are around her as companions. They form with her what might be called an “egoity.” We find special characteristics of the sentient soul in Philia, of the intellectual soul in Astrid, of the consciousness soul in Luna. It was for this reason that their names were chosen. The names of all the characters and beings were given according to their natures. In Devachan, Scene Seven, particularly, where everything is spirit, not only the words but also the placing of the words is meant to characterize the three figures of Philia, Astrid, and Luna in their exact relationships. The speeches at the beginning of Scene Seven are a better description of sentient soul, intellectual soul, and consciousness soul than any number of words otherwise could achieve. Here one can really demonstrate what each soul is. One can show in an artistic form the relationship of the three souls by means of the levels at which the figures stand. In the human being they flow into one another. Separated from each other, they show themselves clearly: Philia as she places herself in the cosmos; Astrid as she relates herself to the elements; Luna as she directs herself into free deed and self-knowledge. Because they show themselves so clearly in the Devachan scene, everything in it is alchemy in the purest sense of the word; all of alchemy is there, if one can gradually discover it. Not only as abstract content is alchemy in the scene but in the weaving essence of the words. Therefore, you should listen not merely to what is said, nor indeed only to what each single character speaks, but particularly to how the soul forces speak in relation to one another. The sentient soul pushes itself into the astral body; we can perceive weaving astrality there. The intellectual soul slips itself into the etheric body; there we perceive weaving ether being. We can observe how the consciousness soul pours itself with inner firmness into the physical body. Soul endeavor that has an effect like light is contained in Philia's words. In Astrid is contained what brings about the etheric-objective ability to confront the very truth of things. Inner resolve connected at first with the firmness of the physical body is given in Luna. We must begin to be sensitive to all this. Let us listen to the soul forces in Scene Seven: Philia (Sentient soul)
Astrid (Intellectual soul)
Luna (Consciousness soul)
I would like to draw your attention to the words of Philia,
and to those of Astrid that carry the connotation of something heavier, more compact,
“Dass dir,” “Dass du,” and then we have the “Du” again in Luna's speech woven together with the still heavier, weighty
There the “u” is woven into its neighboring consonants, so that it can take on a still firmer compactness.1 These are the things that one can actually characterize. Please remember, it all depends on the “How.” Let us compare the words Philia speaks next:
with the rather different ones of Astrid:
Just here, where these words are spoken, the inner weaving essence of the world of Devachan has been achieved. I am mentioning all this, because the scenes should make it clear that when self-knowledge begins to unfold into the outer cosmic weaving and being, we have to give up everything that is one-sided. We have to learn, too, to be aware—as we otherwise do only in a quite superficial, pedestrian way—of what is at hand at every point of existence. We become inflexible creatures, we human beings, when we stay rooted to only one spot in space, believing that our words can express the truth. But words, limited as they are to physical sound, are not what best will communicate truth. I would like to put it like this: we have to become sensitive to the voice itself. Anything as important as Johannes Thomasius' path to self-knowledge can be rightfully experienced—it depends on this—only when he struggles courageously for that self-knowledge and holds on to it. When self-knowledge has crushed us, the next stage is to begin to draw into ourselves, to harbor inwardly what was our outer experience, learning how closely the cosmos is related to ourselves (for this comes to us after we understand the nature of the beings around us); now we must attempt courageously to live with our understanding. It is only one half of the matter to dive down like Johannes into a being to whom we have brought sorrow and have thrust into cold earth. For now, we have begun to feel differently. We summon up our courage to make amends for the pain we have caused. Now we can dive into this new life and speak out of our own nature differently. This is what confronts us in Scene Nine. In Scene Two the young girl cried out to Johannes:
In Scene Nine, however, after Johannes has undergone what every path to self-knowledge demands, the same being calls to him:
This is the other side of the coin: first the devastation and despair, and now the return to equilibrium. The being calls to him:
It could not have been described otherwise, this lifting into perception of the world, this replenishing of himself with life experience. True self-knowledge through perception of the cosmos could only have been described with the words Johannes uses when he comes to himself. It has begun, of course, in Scene Two:
Then—after he has dived down into deep earth, after he has united himself with it—the power is born in his soul to let the words arise that express the essence of Scene Nine:
The words, “O man, unfold your being!” are in direct contrast to the words of Scene Two, “O man, know thou thyself!” There appears to us once and again the very same scene. It leads the first time downward to:
Then afterward it is the opposite; it has changed. The scene characterizes soul development.
But Scene Nine shows how the being of the girl attains first hope and then security. That is the turning point. It cannot be constructed haphazardly; it is actual experience. Through it we can sense how self-knowledge in a soul like Johannes Thomasius can ascend into a self- unfolding. We should perceive, too, how his experience is distributed among many single persons in whom one characteristic has been formed in each incarnation. At the end of the drama a whole community stands there in the Sun Temple, like a tableau, and the many together are a single person. The various characteristics of a human being are distributed among them all; essentially there is one person there. A pedant might like to object. “Are there not too many different members of the whole? Surely nine or twelve would be the correct number!” But reality does not always work in such a way as to be in complete agreement with theory. This way it corresponds more nearly with the truth than if we had all the single constituents of man's being marching up in military rank and file. Let us now put ourselves into the Sun Temple. There are various persons standing in the places they belong to karmically, just as their karmas have brought them together in life. But when we think of Johannes here in the middle and think, too, that all the other characters are mirrored in his soul, each character as one of his soul qualities—what is happening there if we can accept it as reality? Johannes Thomasius  Karma has actually brought these persons together as in a focal point. Nothing is without intention, plan, or reason; what the single individualities have done not only has meaning for each one himself, but each is also a soul experience for Johannes Thomasius. Everything is happening twice: once in the macrocosm, a second time in the microcosm, in the soul of Johannes. This is his initiation. Just as Maria, for example, has a special connection with him, so, too, there is an important part of his soul with a similar connection to another part of his soul. Those are absolute correspondences, embodied in the drama uncompromisingly. What one sees as outer stage- happening is, in Johannes, an inner happening in his development. There has to come about what the Hierophant has described in Scene Three:
It has already formed itself, and this truly entangled knot shows what everything is leading toward. There is absolute reality as to how karma spins its threads; it is not an aimless spinning. We experience the knot as the initiation event in Johannes' soul, and the whole scene shows us a certain individuality actually standing above the others, that is, the Hierophant, who is directing, who is guiding the threads. We need only think of the Hierophant's relationship to Maria. But it is just there that we can realize how self- knowledge can illuminate what happens to Maria in Scene Three. It is not at all pleasant, this emerging out of the Self. It is a thoroughly real experience, a forsaking of the human sheaths by our inner power; the sheaths left behind become then a battleground for inferior powers. When Maria sends down a ray of love to the Hierophant, it can only be portrayed in this way: down below, the physical body, taken over by the power of the adversary, speaks out the antithesis of what is happening above. From above a ray of love streams down, and below arises a curse. Those are the contrasting scenes: Scene Seven inDevachan, where Maria describes what she has actually brought about, and Scene Three, where, from the deserted body, the curses of the demonic forces are directed toward the Hierophant. Those are the two corresponding scenes. They complete each other. If they had had to be “constructed” theoretically from the beginning, the end result would have been incredibly poor. I therefore have based today's lecture on one aspect of this Mystery Drama, and I should like to extend this to include certain special characteristics that underlie initiation. Although it has been necessary to bring out rather sharply what has just been shown as the actual events of initiation, it should not let you lose courage or resolve in your own striving toward the spiritual world. The description of dangers was aimed at strengthening a person against powerful forces. The dangers are there; pain and sorrow are the prospect. It would be a poor sort of effort if we proposed to rise into higher worlds in the most convenient way. Striving to reach the spiritual worlds cannot yet be as convenient as rolling over the miles in a modern train, one of those many conveniences our materialistic culture has put into our everyday lives. What has been described should not make us timid; to a certain extent the very encounter with the dangers of initiation should steel our courage. Johannes Thomasius' disposition made him unable to continue painting; this grew into pain, and the pain grew into perception. So, it is that everything that arouses pain and sorrow will transform itself into perception. But we have to search earnestly for this path, and our search will be possible only when we realize that the truths of spiritual science are not at all simple. They are such profound truths for our whole life that no one will ever understand them perfectly. It is just the single example in actual life that helps us to understand the world. One can speak about the conditions of a spiritual development much more exactly when one describes the development of Johannes, rather than when one describes the development of human beings in general. In the book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment,2 the development that every human being can undertake is described, simply the concrete possibility as such. When we portray Johannes Thomasius, we look at a single individuality. But therewith we lose the opportunity of describing such development in a general way. I hope you will be induced to say that I have not yet spoken out the essential truth of the matter. For we have described two extremes and must find the various gradations between them. I can give only a few suggestive ideas, which should then begin to live in your hearts and souls. When I gave you some indications about the Gospel of St. Matthew,3 I asked you not to try to remember the very words but to try—when you go out into life—to look into your heart and soul to discover what the words have become. Read not only the printed lectures, but read also in a truly earnest way your own soul. For this to happen, however, something must have been given from outside, something has first to enter into us; otherwise, there could be self-deception of the soul. If you can begin to read in your soul, you will notice that what comes to you from outside re-echoes quite differently within. A true anthroposophical effort would be first of all to understand what is said in as many different ways as there are listeners. No one speaking about spiritual science could wish to be understood in only one sense. He would like to be understood in as many ways as there are souls present to understand him. Anthroposophy can tolerate this. One thing is needed, however, and this is not an incidental remark; one thing is needed: every single kind of understanding should be correct and true. Each one may be individual, but it must be true. Sometimes it seems that the uniqueness of the interpretation lies in being just the opposite of what has been said. When then we speak of self-knowledge, we should realize how much more useful it is to come to it by looking for mistakes within ourselves and for the truth outside. It shall not be said, “Search within yourself for the truth!” Indeed, truth is to be found outside ourselves. We will find it poured out over the world. Through self- knowledge we must become free of ourselves and undergo those various gradations of soul experience. Loneliness can become a horrid companion. We can also perceive our terrible weakness when we sense with our feelings the greatness of the cosmos out of which we have been born. But then through this we take courage. And we can make ourselves courageous enough to experience what we perceive. Then we will finally discover that, after the loss of all the certainty we had in life, there will blossom for us the first and last certainty of life, the confidence that finding ourselves in the cosmos allows us to conquer and find ourselves anew.
Let us feel these words as genuine experience. They will gradually become for us steps in our development.
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| 297. Spiritual Science and the Art of Education
27 Nov 1919, Basel Translator Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
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| It is a peculiar relation of the child to its own ego, to its own “I.” Now of course a certain inner soul- relationship to the ego begins at a very much earlier stage. |
| In later life we remember hack up to this point; and for the normal human being what lies before it vanishes completely, as a rule. It is at this point that the ego enters the inner soul-life of the human being. But it does not yet fully enter the spiritual or mental life. |
| In short, one should not separate the human being at this stage from his environment in Nature. About the ninth year, at the moment when the' ego awakens, the human being performs this separation of his own accord. Then he becomes ready to compare the phenomena of Nature and their relation to one another in an objective way. |
| 297. Spiritual Science and the Art of Education
27 Nov 1919, Basel Translator Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
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 I count it a special honour to be able to speak among you on the connection between that spiritually scientific outlook on the world to which I have devoted my life's work, and the educational activity, to which your lives are devoted. Let me begin with two introductory remarks. The first is, that what I now intend to say to you will, of course, have to be clothed in apparently theoretic words and phrases, for the simple reason that words are necessary in order to set forth our thoughts. But I say expressly at the outset, that it is not meant theoretically. For I should speak on this present subject least of all, were it not for the fact that I have always devoted a part of my activity to practical educational work, and indeed to the whole educational culture of mankind. What I want to put forward is definitely intended in this sense: it is derived from actual practice. The second thing I would like to observe by way of introduction is this: The Spiritual Science, which I am here representing, is itself very widely and vehemently controverted and attacked as yet. And for the very reason that I represent this Spiritual Science, I can understand it well, if many an objection is brought forward at this present stage to one or other of the things I have to say. For in effect, the method which is adopted by Spiritual Science is new and unaccustomed from the points of view that still hold sway in modern thought. But it may be that the very way in which we are endeavouring to make it a real force in life, endeavouring to introduce it in so eminently practical a sphere as mar -of education, will contribute something towards an understanding, a way of approach to Spiritual Science itself. There is no sphere in life that lies remote from the activity and interests of education. To one who has to work as a teacher or educator, the human being is entrusted at an age when he may still develop into anything in the wide world. And only when the teacher, the educator, is imbued with the very warmest interest in the whole life and civilisation of humanity, only then can he pour forth all that is needed for the teaching, the education of the child. In bringing forward the particular subject of Spiritual Science and Education, I have this special reason: At this very point of time. Spiritual Science is intended as an element of thought and spiritual culture, to unite and gather up again the diverse spiritual and intellectual interests of mankind which have drifted so far apart in recent centuries, particularly in the 19th century. Through Spiritual Science, it is possible to draw together again into a concrete conception of the universe, all those things that have become specialised, without however failing to meet the demands of expert and special knowledge. And to-day there is a very real reason to consider the relation of the Spiritual Science here intended, to Education. For Education, too, has had its share of the overwhelming influence that modern Natural Science, with its attendant triumphs, has exercised on all human thought and activity. Applied as a method in the sphere of Natural Science itself, the natural-scientific way of thought has led to glorious results. But at the same time—far more so than the individual realises or is conscious of—this way of thought has gained influence on all our activities. And it has gained especial influence on that activity which I call the Art of Education. Now while in the nature of the case I cannot go into the foundations of Spiritual Science as such—which I have often done in lectures in this town—there is one thing I would like to point out by way of comparison. It concerns the peculiar relation of the natural-scientific method to human life. Consider, for example, how' the human eye comes to be this miraculous instrument, whereby in a certain sphere of sense-perception we see the outer world. This wonderful' function is fulfilled by the human eye, inasmuch as its whole construction fits it to see the surrounding world, and—I speak by way of comparison—ever and always to forget itself in the act of seeing. I might put it in this way: We must entirely invert the observing point of view (which we can only do- approximately with external scientific methods), if we would investigate and really penetrate our instrument of external, sensely sight. In the very act of seeing, we can never at the same time look back into the nature of our eye. We may apply this image to the natural-scientific method in its relation to life. The man of modern times has carefully and conscientiously developed the natural-scientific method, until, in its Natural Law's and scientific conceptions, it reflects a faithful and objective picture of the outer world. And in the process, man has so formed and moulded his underlying mood and attitude of soul, that in his scientific observation of the world he forgets his own human self; he forgets all those things that have direct and immediate connection with human life. So it has come about, that the more we have! developed in the sense of Natural Science, the less able have we become, with this our scientific method, to see the essence of Man himself, and all that has to do with Man. Now Spiritual Science—working entirely in the Spirit of Natural Science, but in this very spirit transcending natural- scientific knowledge—Spiritual Science would add to Natural; Science, if I may put it so, that inversion of observation which leads back again to Man. This can only be accomplished by really entering on those processes of inner life which are described in my books on the attainment of higher knowledge, or more briefly indicated in the second part of my book on “Occult Science.” Those processes do actually carry man's soul-life beyond the sphere wherein it moves in ordinary life and thought, including even Natural Science. [See “The Way of Initiation” and its sequel “Initiation and its Results” (particulars on back cover of this booklet). Dr. Steiner's book, “An Outline of Occult Science” is, unfortunately, out of print at present.] In order to find our way into the thought of Spiritual Science, we must needs have what I would call: Intellectual Modesty. Some time ago, in a public lecture in this town, I used a certain image to indicate what is needful in this respect. Consider a child of five. Suppose you place a volume of Goethe's poems in the child's hand. A whole world is contained within its pages. The child will take it in its hand, turn it this way and that, and perceive nothing of all that would speak to the human being from out this volume. But the child is capable of development; powers of soul are slumbering within the child; and in ten or twelve years it will really be able to draw from the book what lies within it. This is the attitude we need, if we are to find our way into the Spiritual Science of which I am speaking here. We must be able to say to ourselves: By developing his intellect, his method of observation and experiment ever so carefully, the human being is brought up to a certain stage and not beyond. From that stage onwards he must take his own development in hand; and then he will develop powers which were latent and slumbering before. Then he will become aware, how before this development he confronted external Nature (so far as its spiritual essence is concerned), and, most particularly, he confronted Man, as the five-year-old child confronts the book of Goethe's poetry. In essence and in principle, everything depends on our making up our minds to this attitude of intellectual modesty. It is the first thing that counts, if we would find our way into what I have here called “Spiritual Science.” Through adopting special methods of thinking, feeling and willing—methods which aim at making our thought independent and at training our will—through making our life of thought and will ever more and more independent of the bodily instruments, we become able, as it were, to observe ourselves. We attain the faculty of observing the human being himself. And once we are able to observe the human being, then we can also observe the growing human being, the human being in process of becoming—and this is of extraordinary importance. It is true that the spirit is much spoken of to-day; and independence of thought is spoken of as well. But Spiritual Science as we understand it cannot join this chorus. For, by a real development of inner life, it seeks the spiritual methods to grasp the spiritual reality in actual and concrete detail. It is not concerned with that spirit of which people 'talk in a vague and misty sense, which they think of as vaguely underlying all things. The Spiritual Science here intended enters into the spiritual being of man in detail. To-day we are to speak of the being of man in process of growth, development, becoming. People will speak, it is true—in abstract and general terms, if I may put it so—of the human individuality and of its development. And they are rightly conscious that the educator, above all people, must reckon with the development of the human being as an individual. But I may draw your attention to the fact that educationalists of insight have clearly recognised, how little the natural-scientific development of modern times has enabled man to understand any real laws or stages in the evolution of the growing human being. I will give you two examples. The Vienna educationalist, Theodor Vogt, who was well-known m the last third of the 19th century, speaking from out of the reformed Herbartian conception that he represented, made the following remark. He said: In the science of history, in our conception of the historic life of mankind, we have by no means got so far, up to the present, as to recognise how mankind evolves. ... From the evolution of species, the Natural Scientist arrives at the embryological development of the individual human being. But we have no historic conception of humanity's evolution, from which, in this sense, we might deduce conceptions about the evolving child.—This view was repeated by the Jena educationalist, Rein. It culminates in the admission, that we do not yet possess any real methods of spiritual science, such as might enable us to indicate what really lies beneath the human being's development. In effect, we must first awaken such faculties as those to which I have just alluded, and of the cultivation of which you may read in further detail in my books. Then only are we able to approach that riddle, which meets us with such wonder when we observe how from birth onwards something works itself out from within the human being, flowing into every gesture, working itself out most particularly through language, and through all the relations which the human being enters into with his environment. Nowadays the different types of human life are, as a rule, considered too externally, from points of view of external Physiology or Biology. They make themselves no picture of the whole human being, in whom that which is bodily, that which is of the soul, and that which is spiritual, are working inwardly together. Yet if we would sensibly educate and instruct a child, it is just such a picture of the child which we must make. * * * Now one who, strengthened by the methods of Spiritual Science, observes the growing child, will discover, about that period of time when the change of teeth occurs—about the sixth ok; seventh year—a most significant break in the child's development. There is a constantly repeated proverb: “Nature makes no jumps.” Natura non facit saltus. That is true to a certain extent; but all these general ideas are after all one-sided. You can only penetrate their real truth, if you recognise them in their one-sidedness. For in effect Nature is continually making jumps. Take, for example, a growing plant. We can apply the proverb, “Nature makes no jumps.” Yet in the sense of Goethe's idea of metamorphosis we should have to say: “Although the green leaf of the plant is the same thing as the coloured petal, yet Nature makes a jump from the leaf to- the sepal of the calyx, from the sepal to the coloured petal, and again from the petal to the stamen.” We do not meet the reality of life if we abstractly apply the idea that Nature and Life make no jumps at all. And so it is especially in man. Man's life flows by without discontinuity, and yet, in the sense here indicated, there are discontinuities everywhere. There is a significant break in the life of the child about the sixth or seventh year. Something enters the human organism, that penetrates it through and through. Of this, modern physiology has as yet no real conception. Outwardly, the change of teeth takes place; but something is also taking place in the spiritual and. soul-being of the child. Until this point of time, man is essentially an imitative being. His Constitution of soul and body is such that he gives himself up entirely to his surroundings. He feels his way into his surroundings; from the very centre of his will his development is such, that the lines of force, and rays of force, of his will are exactly modelled on that which is taking place in his environment. Far more important than all that we bring to the child, in this age of life, by way of admonition and correction, is the way in which we ourselves behave in the child's presence. In real life, the intangible, imponderable elements are far more effective than what we observe externally and clearly. So it is with regard to the child's impulse to imitate. It is not only tin- gross external behaviour of the human being that matters. In every tone of voice, in every gesture, in everything the educator does in the child's presence during this period of life, lies something to which the child adapts itself. Far more than we know, we human beings are the external impress of our thoughts. We pay little heed, in ordinary life, to the way we move our hand. Yet the way we move our hand is a faithful expression of the peculiar constitution of our soul, of the whole mood and attunement of our inner life. In the developed- soul-life of the grown-up human being, little attention is paid to the connection between the stride of the legs, the gesture of the hands, the expression of the face, and that which lies, within the soul as a deep impulse of wi)I and feeling. But the child lives its way right into these imponderable things of life. It. is no exaggeration to say: If a man most inwardly endeavours to be a good man in the presence of a child before the age of seven; if he endeavours to be sound in every way, if he conscientiously resolves to make no allowances for himself even in his inner life, in thoughts and feelings that he does not outwardly express—then, through the intangible, imponderable things of life, he works most powerfully upon the child. In this connection there are many things still to be observed, things which, if I may so express myself, “lie between the lines.” We have become enmeshed in a more materialistic way of life, especially as regards life's more intimate and finer aspects. And so we have grown accustomed to pay little attention to these things. Yet it is only when they are rightly observed and estimated once again, that a certain impulse will enter into our educational thought and practice—an impulse that is very badly needed, especially in an age which claims to be a social age, an age of social thought. There are certain experiences in life, which we cannot rightly estimate unless we take into account these real observations of the soul- and spiritual-life within the human being. I am referring to actual facts of experience. For instance, a father comes to you in some consternation and says: “What am I to do? My child has been stealing.” It is of course very natural for the father to be concerned about it. But now you look into the matter more closely. You ask, How did it happen? The child simply went to the drawer and took out some money. What did the child do with the money? Well, it bought some sweets for its playmates. Then it did not even steal for selfish reasons? And so at length you are able to say: “Now look, the child did not steal at all. There is no question of its having stolen. Day after day the child saw its mother go to the drawer and take, out money. It thought that was the right thing to do and imitated it. The child's action was simply the outcome of the impulse which is predominant in this early age—the impulse to imitation.” Bearing in mind that this imitative impulse is the most powerful force in this first stage of childhood, we may guide the child rightly in this sense. We may direct its attention to actions, whose influence will be powerful at this stage and permanent in its effect. And rye must be fully aware that at this period of the child's life exhortations and admonitions are as yet of no assistance. It is only what works on the will, that really helps. Now this peculiar constitution of the human being lasts until the point of time when that remarkable period, is reached physiologically—when, if I may put it so, the hardening principle makes its final onset and crystallises the permanent teeth from out of the human organism. To look into that process by the methods of Spiritual Science and see what lies beneath it. in the growing organism when this final period is reached, when the change of teeth takes place, is extraordinarily interesting. But it is still more important to follow what I just now described, namely, the spiritual psychical development that goes parallel with this Organic change, and that still takes its start from imitation. About the seventh year a very distinct change begins to make itself felt in the spiritual and soul-nature of the child. With this change a new faculty bursts in upon the young child, a faculty of reacting to different things. Previously the eye was intent to imitate, the ear was intent to imitate. But now the child begins to listen to what goes out from grown up people as expressions of opinions, judgments, and points of view. The impulse to imitate becomes transformed into devotion to authority. Now I know that many people to-day will particularly disapprove if we emphasise the principle of authority as an important factor in education. Nevertheless, if one is out to represent the facts with open mind and serious purpose, one cannot go by programmes nor by catchwords; one must be guided simply and solely by empirical knowledge, by experience. And it must be observed how much it means for a child, to be guided by a teacher or educator, man or woman, to whom the child looks up with reverence, who becomes for the child a natural and accepted authority. It is of the very greatest significance for the growth of the human being, that at this age he will accept this or that thought as his own, because it is the thought of the grown-up man or woman whom he reveres; that he will live into a certain way of feeling, because it is their way of feeling, because in effect there is a real growing together between the young developing human being and the mature one. We should only know how much it means for the whole after life of man, if in this period of life—between the change of teeth about the sixth or seventh year, and that last great change that comes at the time of puberty in the fourteenth or fifteenth year—he had the good fortune (I use this word deliberately) to be really able to give himself up to a natural and accepted authority. But we must not stop at the abstract generalisation; we must enter more deeply into this most important period of life—the period which begins about the sixth or seventh year and ends with puberty. The child is now taken from its home—educated or spoilt through the principle of imitation—and handed over to the school. The most important things for after life are to be done with the child during this time. Here indeed it is right to say, that not only every year but every month in the child's development should be penetrated and investigated with diligent care by the teacher or the educator. Not only in general terms—but as well as may be, even in teaching large numbers at a time, each succeeding month and year should thus be studied and observed in every individual child's development. As the child enters school, and until about the ninth year, we see the imitative impulse still working on alongside the impulse of devotion to authority, which is already making itself felt. And if we can rightly observe the working together of these two fundamental forces in the evolving human being, I hen the full and living result of such observation will provide the true basis for the method of teaching and for the curriculum. This question came upon me very strongly during the present year, when the new “Waldorf School” had to be instituted in Stuttgart. By the sympathetic co-operation of our friend Emil Molt, we were in a position to found this school in connection with the Stuttgart firm, “The Waldorf-Astoria Cod' The Waldorf School is in the fullest sense of the word a unitary school, i.e., a school without distinction of class, a school for the whole people. [For further particulars of the Waldorf School, see Numbers 1, 2 and 5 in Volume I of the “Threefold Commonwealth” fortnightly (price 3d. each), and also Volume I, Number 2 of the bi-monthly magazine “Anthroposophy” (price 1/-). To be obtained from the Publishers of this booklet. The Waldorf School is a “unitary” school in that it makes no distinction of Class. About 500 boys and girls, between the ages of 6 and 14, or 6 and 19, are educated there; and among them the children of manual workers and of the “educated classes” are represented in fairly even proportion. They all receive the same education, up to the time when they leave school, which varies according to their future vocation and the wishes of their parents.] In its whole plan and method, and in the arrangement of the subjects, it proceeds from the impulse that Spiritual Science can give towards an Art of Education. During last September I had the privilege of giving a course of training for the group of teachers whom I had selected for this school. At that time, all these questions came upon me in a very vivid way. What I am now endeavouring to say to you is in its essential features an extract of what was given to those teachers in the training course. For they were to direct and carry on a school, founded on principles of Spiritual Science and on the social needs of this time—a real people's school, on a basis of unity. Now in effect not only the method of instruction, but the curriculum, the arrangement of subjects, the definite aim of the teacher, can be drawn from a living observation of the evolving human being. So, for example, we shall find much in the young child's life, even after the sixth or seventh year, that still proceeds from the peculiar will-nature which alone could make it possible for the child to have so powerful an impulse to imitation. As a matter of fact, the intellect develops very much later, and it develops from out of the will. The intimate relationship which exists between the one human being—the grown-up teacher, for example—and the other human being—the growing child—this intimate relationship finds expression as a relationship from will to will. Hence in this first year of elementary school we can best approach the child if we are in a position to work upon the will in the right way. But that is just the question—How can we best work upon the will? We can not work on the will by laying too' much stress, at this early stage, on external perception and observation—by directing the child's attention too much to the external material world. But we can very effectively approach the will if we permeate our educational work in these first years with a certain artistic, aesthetic element. And it is really possible to start front the artistic and aesthetic in our educational methods. It is not necessary to begin with reading and writing lessons, where there is no real connection between the instruction given and the forces which are coming- outwards from the soul-centre of the child. Our modern written and printed signs are in reality very far removed from the original. Look back to the early forms of writing, not among “primitive” peoples, but in so highly evolved a civilisation as that of ancient Egypt, for example. You will see how at that time, writing was thoroughly artistic in its form and nature. But in the course time this artistic element gradually became worn, down and polished away. Our written signs have become mere conventional symbols. And it is possible to go back to the immediate, elementary understanding, which man still has for that which later on became our modern writing. In other words, instead of teaching writing in an abstract way, we can begin with a kind of drawing-writing lesson. I do not mean anything that is arbitrarily thought-out. But from the real artistic sense of the human being it is possible to form, artistically, what afterwards becomes transformed, as the child grows and develops, into the abstract signs of writing. You begin with a kind of drawing-writing or writing- drawing, and you enlarge its sphere so as to include real elements of plastic art, painting and modelling. A true psychologist will know, that what is brought to the child in this way" does not merely grasp the head—it grasps the whole human being. In effect, things of an intellectual colouring, things which are permeated by the intellect only, and by convention most particularly, like the' ordinary printed or written letters, do only grasp the head, part of man. But if we steep our early teaching of these subjects in an. artistic element, then, we grasp the whole human being. Therefore, a future pedagogy will endeavour to derive the intellectual element, and objective teaching of external things, object- lesson teaching also, from something that is artistic in character at the outset. It is just when we approach the child artistically, that we are best able to consider the interplay of the principle of authority and the imitative principle. For in the artistic there lives something of imitation; and there also lives in it something which passes directly from the subjective man to the subjective man. Anything that is to work in an artistic way must pass through the subjective nature of man. As a human being, with your own deep inner nature, you confront the child quite differently if what you, are teaching is first steeped in an artistic quality. For there you are pouring something real and substantial into yourself as well, something that must appear to you yourself as a natural and unquestioned authority. Then you will not appear with the stamp of a merely external conventional culture; but that which is poured into you brings you near to the child in a human way, as one human being to another. Under the influence of this artistic education it will come about quite of its own accord: the child will live and grow into a natural and unquestioning acceptance of the authority of the person who is teaching him and. educating him. This again may bring it home to us, that spirit must hold sway in education. For instruction of this kind can only be given by one who allows spirit to permeate and fill his teaching; Spirit must hold sway in our whole treatment of our teaching work, and we ourselves must fully live in all that we have to convey to the child. Here 1 am touching on another of the intangible things in the teacher's life. It is very easy, it seems to come quite as a matter of course, for the teacher as he confronts the child to appear to himself as the superior and intelligent person, compared with the simple ingenuous nature of the child. But the effects of this on our teaching work are of very great significance. I will give you a concrete example, one which I have already mentioned in other connections, in my lectures here. Suppose I want to give the child, a conception of the immortality of the human soul. I take an example, a picture of it, adapting myself to the child-like spirit. I draw the child's attention, in a real nature-lesson, to the chrysalis and the butterfly emerging from it. And now I explain to the child: Look, just as the butterfly rests in the chrysalis, invisible to- the external eye, so your immortal soul rests in your body. Just as the butterfly comes out from the chrysalis, so when you go through the gate of death, your immortal soul rises out of your body into another world. And as the butterfly enters an entirely new world when it emerges from the chrysalis, so the world into which you enter, when you rise out of the body, is a very different world from this one. Now it is perfectly possible to think out an image like this with one's intellect. And as an “intelligent person,” while one teaches it to the child, one does not quite like to believe in it oneself. But that has its effect in education and in teaching. For by one of the intangible facts of life, through mysterious forces that work from hidden soul to hidden soul, the child, only really accepts from me what I, as teacher, believe in myself. In effect, Spiritual Science does lead us to this point. If we have Spiritual Science, we do not merely take this picture of the butterfly and the chrysalis as a cleverly thought- out comparison, but we perceive: This picture has been placed in Nature by the divine creative powers, not merely to symbolise the immortality of the soul for the edification of man, but because, at a lower stage, the same thing is actually happening when the butterfly leaves the chrysalis, as happens when the immortal soul leaves the human body. We can raise ourselves to the point of believing in this picture as fully and directly as we should desire the child to believe in it. And if a living and powerful belief flows through the soul of the educator in this way, then will he work well upon the child. Then, his working through authority will be no disadvantage, but a great and significant advantage to the child. In pointing out such things as this, we must continually be drawing attention to the fact that human life is a single whole, a connected thing. What we implant in the human being when he is yet a child will often re-appear only in very much later years as strength and conviction and efficiency of life. And it generally escapes our notice, because, when it does appear, it appears transformed. Suppose, for example, that we succeed in awakening in the child a faculty of feeling that is very necessary: I mean, the power of reverence. We succeed in awakening in the child the mood of prayer and reverence for what is divine in all the world. He who has learned to observe life's connections, knows that this mood of prayer rc-appears in later life transformed. It has undergone a metamorphosis, and we must only be able to recognise it in its re-appearance. For it has become transformed into that inner power of soul whereby the human being is able to influence other human beings beneficially, with an influence of blessing. No one who has not learned to pray in childhood, will in old age have that power of soul which passes over as an influence of blessing, in advice and exhortation, nay, often in the very gesture and expression of the human being, to children or to younger people. By transitions which generally remain unnoticed, by hidden metamorphoses, what we receive as an influence of grace and blessing in childhood transforms itself in a riper age of life into the power to give blessing. In this way every conceivable force in life becomes transformed. Unless we observe these connections, unless we draw our art of education from a full, broad, whole view of life, a view that is filled with spiritual light, education will not be able to perform its task—to work with the evolving forces of the human being instead of working against them. When the human being has reached about the ninth year of life, a new stage is entered once again—-it is not so distinct a change this time as that about the seventh year, yet it is clearly noticeable. The after-workings of the imitative impulse gradually disappear, and something enters in the growing child which can be observed most intimately if one has the will to see it. It is a peculiar relation of the child to its own ego, to its own “I.” Now of course a certain inner soul- relationship to the ego begins at a very much earlier stage. It begins in every human being at the earliest point to which ill alter life he can remember back. About this point of time, the child ceases to say “Charlie wants that” or “Mary wants that,” and begins to say “I want that.” In later life we remember hack up to this point; and for the normal human being what lies before it vanishes completely, as a rule. It is at this point that the ego enters the inner soul-life of the human being. But it does not yet fully enter the spiritual or mental life. It is an essentially spiritual or mental experience of “I,” that first becomes manifest in the inner life of the human being about the ninth year, or between the ninth and tenth years (all these indications are approximate), Men who were keen observers of the soul have sometimes pointed out this great and significant moment in human life. Jean Paul tells us how he can remember, quite distinctly: As a very young boy he was standing in the courtyard of his parents' house, just in front of the barn (so clearly does he describe the scene), when suddenly there awoke in him the consciousness of “I.” He tells us, he will never forget that moment, when for the first time he looked into the hidden Holy of Holies of the human soul. Such a transformation takes place about the ninth year of life, distinctly in some, less distinctly in others. And this point of time is extraordinarily important from the point of view of education and of teaching. If by this time we have succeeded in awakening in the young child those feelings, if we have succeeded in cultivating those directions of the will, which we call religious and moral, and which we can draw out in all our teaching work, then we need only be good observers of children, and we can let our authority work in this period of life—as we see it approach—in such a way that the religious feelings we prepared and kindled in the preceding period are now made firm and steadfast in the young child's soul. Tor the power of the human being to look up, with true and honest reverence from his inmost soul, to the Divine and Spiritual that permeates and ensouls the world, this period of childhood is most decisive. And in this period especially, lie who by spiritual perception can go out into the young child's life, will be guided, intuitively as it were, to find the right words and the right rules of conduct. In its true nature, education is an artistic thing. We must approach the child, not with a normal educational science, but with an Art of Education. Even as the artist masters his substances and his materials and knows them well and intimately, so he who permeates himself with spiritual vision knows the symptoms which arise about the ninth year of life, when the human being inwardly deepens, when the ego- consciousness becomes a thing of the spirit—whereas previously it was of the soul. Whereas his previous method of teaching and education was to start from the subjective nature of the child, so now the teacher and educator will transform this into a more objective way of treating things. If we can perceive this moment rightly, we shall know what is necessary in this respect. Thus, in the case of external Nature-lessons, observation of Nature, things of Natural Science, we shall know, that before this moment these things should be brought to the child only by way of stories and fairy-tales and parables. All things of Nature should be dealt with by comparison with human qualities. In short, one should not separate the human being at this stage from his environment in Nature. About the ninth year, at the moment when the' ego awakens, the human being performs this separation of his own accord. Then he becomes ready to compare the phenomena of Nature and their relation to one another in an objective way. But before this moment in the child's life, we should not begin with external, objective descriptions of what goes on in Nature, in man's environment. Rather should we ourselves develop an accurate sense, a keen spiritual instinct, to perceive this important transformation when it comes. * * * Another such transformation takes place about the eleventh or twelfth year. While the principle of authority still holds sway over the child's life, something that will not appear in full development till after puberty already begins to radiate into it. It is, what afterwards becomes the independent power of judgment. After puberty, we have to work in all our teaching and education by appealing to the child's own power of judgment. But that which takes shape after puberty as the power of independent judgment, is already active in. the child at an earlier stage, working its way into the age of authority from the eleventh year onwards. Here again, if we rightly perceive what is happening in the soul-nature of the child., we can observe how at this moment the child begins to develop new interests. Its interest would be great, even before Ibis time, in Nature lessons, and descriptions, properly adapted, from Natural Science and Natural History. But a real power of comprehending physical phenomena, of understanding even the simplest conceptions of Physics, does not develop until about the eleventh or twelfth year. And when I say, a real power of understanding physical phenomena and physical conceptions, 1 know the exact scope and bearing of my statement. There can be no real art of education without this perception of the inner laws and stages of development underlying human life. The Art of Education requires to be adapted to what is growing and developing outwards and upwards in the human being. From the real inner development of the child, we should read and learn and so derive the right curriculum, the planed teaching, the whole objective of our teaching work. What we teach, and how we teach it, all this should flow from a knowledge of the human being. But we shall gain no knowledge of the human being until we are in a position to guide cur attention and our whole world-outlook towards the spiritual—the spiritual realities that underlie the external facts of this world of the senses. Then too, it will be very clear that the intangible imponderable things of life play a real part, above all in the Art of Education. Our modern education has evolved, without our always being fully conscious of it, from underlying scientific points of view. Thus, we have come to lay great value on lessons that centre round external objects, external objective vision. Now I do not want you to take what I am saying as though it were intended polemically or critically or by way of condemnation ex cathedra. That is by no means the case. What I want to do, is to describe the part which Spiritual Science can play in developing an educational art for the present and for the immediate future. If we have emphasised external objective methods of instruction overmuch, the reason lies, at bottom, in those habits of thought which arise from the methods and points of view of Natural Science. Now I say expressly, at the proper age of childhood and for the right subjects it is justified and good to teach the child in this external and objective way. But it is no less important to ask, whether everything that has to be communicated to the growing child can really flow from objective perception, whether it must not rather pass by another way, namely, from the soul of the teacher or educator into the soul of the child. And this is the very thing that needs to be pointed out: there are. such other ways, apart from the way of external, objective perception. Thus, I indicated as an all-pervading principle between (be change of teeth and the age of puberty, the principle nl authority. That something is living in the teacher as an opinion or a way of feeling, this should be the reason why the child accepts this opinion or way of feeling as its own. And in. the whole way the teacher confronts the child, there must be something which works intangibly. There must in effect be something, which flows out from a knowledge and perception of life as a single whole, something which flows from the living interest that such a knowledge of life will kindle. I indicated the significance of this, when I said that what we develop in the age of childhood will often reappear, metamorphosed' and transformed, only in the grownup human being, nay, even in old age. There is one thing we fail to observe if we carry the principle of external objective instruction to an extreme. We can, of course, bring ourselves down to the child's level of understanding. We can restrict ourselves and endeavour to place before the child only what it can see and observe and really grasp—or, at least, what we imagine it can grasp. But in carrying this principle to an extreme, we fail to observe an important law of life, which may be thus described: It is a very source of strength and power in life, if, let us say, in his 35th year a man becomes able to say to himself: “As a child you once heard this thing or that from your teacher or from the person who was educating you. You took it up into your memory and kept it there. Why did you store it in memory? Because you loved the teacher as an authority; because the teacher's personality stood before you in such a way that it was clear to you:—If he holds that belief, then you too must take it into yourself. Such was your instinctive attitude. And now you suddenly see a light; now you have become ready to understand it. You accepted it out of love for him who was your authority; and now by a full power of maturity, you recall it once again, and you recognise it in a new way. Now only do you understand it.” Anyone who smiles at the idea of such a source of strength in after life, lacks living interest in what is real in human life. He does not know that man's life is a single whole, where all things are inter-connected. That is why he cannot rightly value how much it means, not to stop at ordinary objective lessons (which within limits are perfectly justified), but rather to sink into1 the child's soul many things that may afterwards return into its life, from stage to stage of maturity. Why is it that we meet so many, many people to-day, inwardly broken in their lives? Why is it that our heart must bleed, when we look out over vast territories where there are great tasks to perform, where men and women walk through life, seemingly crippled and paralysed before these tasks? It is because, in educating the children as they grew up into life, attention was not paid to the development of those inner forces that are a. powerful support to man in after years, enabling him to take his stand firmly in the world. Such things have to be taken into account, if we would pass from a mere Natural Science of pedagogy to a real Art of Education. Education is a thing for mankind as a whole. For that very reason it must become an Art, which the teacher and educator applies and exercises individually. There are certain inner connections which we must perceive if we would truly penetrate what is so often said instinctively, without being clearly understood. For example, the demand is quite rightly being voiced that education should not be merely intellectual. People say that it does not so much matter for the growing man to receive knowledge and information; what matters, they say, is that the element of will in him should be developed, that he should become skilful and strong, and so forth. Certainly, this is a right demand; but the point is that such a demand cannot be met by setting up general principles and norms and standards. It can only be met when we are able to enter into the real stages and periods of the human being's evolution, in concrete detail. We must know that it is the artistic and aesthetic that inspires the human will. We must find the way, to bring the artistic and aesthetic to bear on the child's life of will. And we must not seek any merely external way of approach to the will; we must not think of it merely in the sense of external Physiology or Biology. But we must seek to pass through the element of soul and spiritual life which is most particularly expressed in childhood. Many things will yet have to be permeated with soul and spirit. In our Waldorf School in Stuttgart, we have for the first time attempted to transform gymnastics and physical exercises, which in their method and organic force have generally been based on physiological considerations, into a kind of Eurhythmic Art. What you can now see almost any Saturday or Sunday in the performances of Eurhythme at Dornach, is of course intended, in the first place, as a special form of art. It is a form of art using as its instrument the human organism itself, with all its inner possibilities of movement. But while it is intended as a form of art, it also affords the possibility of permeating with soul and spirit those movements of the human being which are ordinarily developed into the more purely physiological physical exercises. When this is done, the movements that the human being executes will not merely be determined by the idea of working, in such and such a way, on such and such muscles or groups of muscles. But they will flow naturally, from each inner motive- of the soul into the muscular movement, the movement of the limbs. And we, who represent the spiritualisation of life from the point of view of Spiritual Science, are convinced that Eurhythme will become a thing of great importance, for Education on the one hand, and on the other hand for Health. For in it we are seeking the sound and natural and healthy relationship which must obtain, between the inner life and feeling and experience of the soul, and that which can evolve as movement in the human being as a whole. Thus, what is generally sought for through an external Physiology or through other external considerations, is now to be sought for through the perception of man as being permeated by soul and spirit. [For further information about Eurhythme (not to be confused with other forms of art known in England as “Eurhythme” see “The Threefold Commonwealth” fortnightly, Volume I, Numbers 2, 5 and 6. Demonstrations are given and classes arranged in London and other parts of Britain. For particulars, apply to the Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in London.] Thus, in the first years of elementary school, the whole principle of teaching must be saturated with the different arts, in order to work upon the will. And most particularly; that part of education which is generally thought of as an education of the will—gymnastics and physical exercises—must now be permeated with soul and spirit. But that which is soul and spirit in man must first be recognised, in its real scope, in its potentialities, in its concrete manifestation. So again, we must recognise the connection between two faculties of the human soul—a connection which has not yet been properly discovered by modern Psychology, for in effect modern Psychology is out of touch with Spiritual Science. If we can look objectively into that important period of change which I described as occurring about the ninth year, we shall see how at that moment a very peculiar thing is happening, on the one hand, in the child's faculties of feeling, in its life of feeling. The child grows more deeply inward. New shades of feeling make their appearance. It is as though the inner soul-life were becoming more independent, in its whole feeling of the outer world of Nature. On the other hand, something else is taking place, which will only be noticed if one can observe the soul really intimately. It is certainly true, as Jean Paul observed and stated in a very penetrating epigram, that we learn more in the first three years of our life than in the three years we spend at the University. In the first three years, our memory is still working organically, and for actual life we learn far more. But about the ninth year a peculiar relationship a relationship which plays more into the conscious H/c comes about between the life of peeling and the tile of memory. These things must be seen; for those who cannot see them, they are simply non-existent. Now, it we can really perceive these intimate relationships between the life of feeling and the memory, and if we rightly cultivate and nurture them, we find in them the right aspect for all that part of our leaching work in which a special appeal has to be made to the child's memory. As a matter of fact, appealing to the memory we ought always at the same time to appeal to the life of feeling. Particularly in our History lessons, in all stories from History, we shall find just the right shades of colouring in the way to tell the story, if we know that everything that is meant to be memorised should be permeated, as we give it out, by something that plays over into the life of feeling—the life of feeling, which at this age has grown more independent. And if we recognise these connections in life, we shall rightly place our History lesson in relation to the whole plan and curriculum. In this way also, we shall gain a correct view of historic culture in general. Through all that primarily works upon the memory, we shall at the same time influence the life of feeling; just as we began, through artistic elements, to work upon the life of will. Then, after this period in life, we shall gradually find it possible to let the intellectual element work it way out through the elements of will and feeling. If we do not proceed in this way—if in our teaching and educating work we do not rightly develop the intellectual element from out of the elements of will and feeling—then we are working against, not with, the evolving forces of the human being. You will have seen from the whole tenor of this lecture that in outlining the relation between Spiritual Science and the Art of Education the real point is that we so apply our Spiritual Science that it becomes a knowledge and perception of man. And in the process, we ourselves gain something from Spiritual Science which .passes into our will, just as everything which has in it the germ of art passes over into the will of man. Thus, we get away from a pedagogic science as a mere science of norms and general principles which always has its definite answers ready to hand: “Such and such should be the methods of education.” But we transplant, into our own human being, something that must live within our will—a permeation of will with spiritual life- in order that we may work, from our will, into the evolving forces of the child. In the sense of Spiritual Science, the Art of Education must rest on a true and effective knowledge of man. The evolving man—man in process of becoming—is then for us a sacred riddle, which we desire to solve afresh every day and every hour. If we enter the service of mankind in this spirit with our Art of Education, then we shall be serving human life from out of the interests of human life itself.—In conclusion, I should like to draw your attention once again to the points of view from which we started. The teacher or educator has to do with the human being in that age, when there must be implanted in human nature and drawn forth from human nature, all those potentialities which will work themselves out through the remainder of the human being's life. There is, therefore, no sphere of life, which ought not somehow to concern and touch the person 1 whose task it is to teach, to educate. But it is only those who learn to understand life from the spirit, who can understand it. To form and mould human life, is only possible for those who—to use Goethe's expression—are able spiritually to form il. And it is this which seems to me important above all things in the present day: that that formative influence on life, which is exercised through education, may itself be moulded according to the spirit, and ever more according to the spirit. Let me repeat, it is not for purposes of criticism or laying clown the law that these words have been spoken here to-day. It is, because in ail modesty we opine that Spiritual Science, with those very points of knowledge that it gains on the nature of man, and hence on the nature of evolving man, can be of service to the Art of Education. We are convinced of its power to bring fountains of fresh strength to the Educational Art. And this is just what Spiritual Science would do and be. It would take its part in life, not as a strange doctrine or from a lofty distance, but as a real ferment of life, to saturate every single faculty and task of man. It is in this sense that I endeavour to speak on the most varied spheres of life, to influence and work into the most varied spheres of life, from the point of view of Spiritual Science. If to-day I have spoken on the relation of Spiritual Science to Education, you must not put it down to any immodest presumption on my part. You must ascribe it to the firm conviction, that if we in our time would work in life in accordance with the spirit, very serious investigation and penetration into spiritual realities will yet be necessary—necessary above all in this our time. You must ascribe it to the honest and upright desire, for Spiritual Science to take its share in every sphere of life, arid particularly in that sphere, so wonderful, so great, so full of meaning—the formative instruction and education of man himself. Printed for the Publishers by Charles Raper (t.u.). |
| 129. Wonders of the World: The living reality of the spiritual world in Greek mythology
19 Aug 1911, Munich Translated by Dorothy Lenn, Owen Barfield Rudolf Steiner |
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| They assist in the development and formation of the ego principle, making it firmer and firmer. Whereas in primeval times these forces were dedicated to the task of making man clairvoyant, today they devote themselves to the establishing to the consolidation of our ego. |
| His essential being is enclosed in three bodily sheaths; it is enclosed in the physical body, the ether body and the astral body; our innermost, our ego, is hidden within these three sheaths. These three have all become different in the course of evolution from the age of Atlantis up to our own time. |
| The old clairvoyant form of knowledge had to be buried in the Plutonic region of the human soul, and for a period, from the time of Socrates right up to our own day, men had to remain more or less in ignorance about all these things. Men had to build up, to consolidate, their egos. But under the surface the old knowledge, the knowledge aroused by those impressive pictorial images of the Greeks, still remained. |
| 129. Wonders of the World: The living reality of the spiritual world in Greek mythology
19 Aug 1911, Munich Translated by Dorothy Lenn, Owen Barfield Rudolf Steiner |
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Yesterday I tried to give you some idea of the way the Greeks thought about the relationship between the human soul and our Earth evolution, laying special emphasis upon two things. I said the Greeks were conscious that in primeval times the soul had been gifted with clairvoyance, and they regarded Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, as the ruler of those clairvoyant powers which played into men's souls from the cosmos. On the other hand I showed how the entire intellectual civilisation of mankind can be traced back to the stream associated with the names of Odysseus, Menelaus and Agamemnon. I tried to make you feel that this civilisation calls for a continual sacrifice. Thus the finest feelings and sentiments of which the human soul is capable, when it comes under the influence of this intellectual civilisation, were offered up to a kind of religious sacerdotal-ism, and the sacrifice of Iphigenia expresses this thought for us. Such views enable us to realise that the tradition, and to a certain extent the actual knowledge, of what we are now endeavouring to regain through Spiritual Science was still very much alive in ancient Greece. We draw attention to the fact that in primeval times the soul had clairvoyant capacities. You can read in my Occult Science—An Outline how in Atlantis men saw into the spiritual world and how cosmic forces appeared to them as actual forms or figures; so that men did not then speak of abstract forces, but of real Beings. Such a figure as Persephone is a relic of this consciousness. Through Spiritual Science we are struggling gradually to come to know again from our modern viewpoint the same living reality in the spiritual world which was familiar to men in primeval times, the same living Beings who lay hid behind the figures of Greek mythology. The more deeply one goes into Greek mythology, the greater is one's respect, one's admiration, for the profound cosmic wisdom which lies behind it. To give you some idea of this, let me just mention one thing. I said yesterday that Greek mythology draws attention to two different trends—to the intellectual civilisation associated with the names of Menelaus, Agamemnon and Odysseus, and so beautifully exemplified in the sacrifice of Iphigenia, and to the other culture associated with Persephone and her mother Demeter. Now a thoughtful person will naturally reflect that such movements do not take their course in complete independence. Despite their apparent separation there must have been a point of contact somewhere. How does Greek mythology express this profound truth? We know that modern scholarship has nothing but a few abstract ideas to offer in this connection. But Greek mythology traces the ancestry of Agamemnon back to a representative of human soul-forces whom we may call Tantalus. According to the Greek legend Tantalus wantonly offered his own son to the gods as food. We know too that the gods recognised the impious nature of this act, and only one—a goddess—partook of a shoulder-blade. That goddess was Demeter. In this remarkable touch of symbolism—Demeter's eating of the shoulder-blade of the son of Tantalus—we find an indication that there is a connection between the two streams. It confirms that Demeter forces enter into the entire modern civilisation associated with the names of Agamemnon, Menelaus and Odysseus. Thus every item of Greek mythology has its correspondence in what we are bringing to light again in the form of modern spiritual wisdom. It is worth while to call attention now and again to such deeply significant features. It brings home to us the fact that the way man looks at the wonders of Nature changes in course of time. Our natural science is proud of its interpretation of Nature. There seems little ground for this pride when we reflect that by representing the force hidden in the depths of Nature as the female ruler of the wonders of Nature, the Greek system of divinities showed a far deeper wisdom than the science of today has any inkling of, or will so much as guess at until Spiritual Science is allowed to penetrate into our civilisation. It can give a considerable spur to our own knowledge, to the knowledge which we have acquired in the course of years, to consider it in relation to the depths of wisdom in Greek mythology. One feature of The Mystery of Eleusis draws attention to an important natural wonder. What is really the crucial event of the drama? Persephone, who represents the ancient clairvoyant forces of the human soul, is carried off by Pluto, the god of the underworld. The whole wondrous action comes alive for you in the Pluto scene of the reconstructed drama; once more we have it before our very eyes ... what does it mean, when we apply what Greek mythology and the Mystery of Eleusis thus express to the nature of man himself? What in terms of Spiritual Science has happened to the old clairvoyant faculty of the human soul? This rape of Persephone has in fact been going on from the earliest times right up to our own day; the old clairvoyant culture has vanished. But nothing in the world ever really disappears, things are really only transformed. Whither, then, has Persephone gone? What is the Regent of the old clairvoyant forces doing today in human nature? In the opening chapters of a little book1 now on the verge of publication, and which virtually reproduces the contents of my recent lectures in Copenhagen, you can read that the human soul encompasses far more than what it knows by way of intellect, by way of reason. A more comprehensive soul-life, a subconscious soul-life, is at work in us—it is better to call it subconscious rather than unconscious—a soul-life which in most modern men does not emerge into consciousness at all. In this subconscious life which is at work today in the human being without his being able to give a reasoned account of it, is Persephone; that is where the suppressed clairvoyant forces have gone. Whereas in primeval times they worked in such a way that the soul could see into spiritual worlds, today they work in the depths of the human soul. They assist in the development and formation of the ego principle, making it firmer and firmer. Whereas in primeval times these forces were dedicated to the task of making man clairvoyant, today they devote themselves to the establishing to the consolidation of our ego. Thus these Persephone forces have been drawn down into the human subconscious, they have been embraced, have so to say been raped, by the depths of the human soul. Thus in the course of the historical development of humanity, the rape of Persephone has been brought about by soul-forces which lie deep in the subconscious, forces which in outer Nature are represented as Pluto. According to Greek mythology Pluto is the ruler of the underworld, of the interior of the earth. But the Greek was also aware that the same forces which are at work in the depths of the earth are also at work in the depths of the human soul. Just as Persephone was carried off by Pluto, in the same way, in the course of human development, the soul was robbed of its ancient clairvoyant capacity through Pluto's intervention. Now Persephone is Demeter's daughter, and so we infer that in Demeter we have a still older ruler, both of the forces of external Nature and of the forces of the human soul. I said yesterday that Demeter is a figure of Greek mythology whom we associate with the kind of clairvoyant vision which belongs to the very oldest endowment of wisdom of Atlantean humanity—for it is in Atlantis that Demeter is really to be found. When an Atlantean man gazed into the spiritual world, he saw Demeter; she really came to meet him. When, out of this spiritual world, this whirling world of constant movement and changing forms, the archetypal mother of the human soul and of the fruitful forces of Nature appeared to him, what did he say? He said to himself, not in full consciousness, but as it were in the unconscious, ‘I myself have done nothing, I have gone through no inner development, as later ages will do, in order to see into the spiritual world. The same forces of Nature which have given me my eyes, my brain, my organism, and are active in me, these very same forces give me also the power of clairvoyance; just as I breathe, so also I have clairvoyant sight.’ Just as man went through no special development to produce breathing, so at that time he did not form his own clairvoyant faculty, but both these things were given to him by the powers of Nature, by divine Beings. When man turned his attention to what was outside him, to what existed all around him, and along with the sensible received the spiritual, he consciously felt: ‘I absorb into myself the substance of the plant kingdom in the world around me (a plant kingdom quite different from our present one), I absorb from outside everything that is growing, but with the substances I take in also the forces active in them.’ The man of that time was not so hopelessly limited in his outlook as to believe that what he took in as food was only physical substance, only something which could be analysed by the chemist; he knew that with the substances he took in the inner configuration of the forces which are active in them, and that it is these forces which construct him, which build up his body again. Atlantean man said to himself: ‘Outside in Nature, forces are at work; through my breathing and through the food I eat they enter into me. What they are outside me is under the control of the great Demeter. But Demeter sends these forces into the human soul, there they are worked upon and transformed into the faculty of clairvoyance.’ (We may call these forces the process of digestion, but the digestion was then a spiritual one.) ‘Through the forces under the control of Demeter, the fecundating goddess of the whole world, the clairvoyant capacity represented by Persephone is born in the human organisation.’ Thus Atlantean man feels that he too has his place among the wonders of Nature. He feels this clairvoyant capacity born in him as the birth of Persephone, he feels that he owes this birth to Demeter, who spreads abroad in the wide cosmos the very same forces which in man develop into the faculty of clairvoyance. Thus the man of old looked up to the great Demeter, and in ancient Greece man was still aware that it had once been so. But you will have already realised from this that the human organism, the entire bodily constitution, has changed since those ancient times. The human body of today, with its organisation of muscle and bone, is substantially denser, more compact, than the bodies of those men who were still able to give birth to Persephone within themselves, since they still had the faculty of clairvoyance. And because this organism of ours has become denser, it can also hold fast the clairvoyant forces in the sub-earthly realm of the soul. The imprisonment of the clairvoyant forces within human nature comes about as a result of the densification of the human body. And when the ancient Greek feels the old, more delicate, rarefied body becoming denser, it is because he is taking in forces which are active in the inner earth, whereas formerly he had been more under the sway of forces connected with the surrounding air, which rendered him in consequence softer, more supple. And what is active in the sub-earthly realm, the realm governed by Pluto, obtained a greater and greater influence on the human body, so that we may say that Pluto obtained an ever increasing hold over man; he densified the human body and in doing so abducted Persephone. This densification went on right into the physical body. For even in the earlier postAtlantean times the human organisation appeared very different from what it does today. It is very shortsighted to think that the human being was always formed as he is today. Thus we see that the rape of Persephone and man's connection with Demeter are really expressions of the wonders of Nature within man himself. They show us how Greek mythology was dominated by the consciousness that man is a microcosm, an expression of the macrocosm, the great cosmos. As Demeter works without in the powerful forces of all that brings forth fruit from the Earth, so also is what comes from Demeter active within us. As the forces represented in Greek mythology by Pluto are active within the Earth and not on the Earth's surface, so does Pluto work in man's own organism. We must be able to blot out entirely the usual way of looking at things today, our own habits and customs, if we want to understand the completely different habit of thought even of people as recent as the Greeks. When the modern man wants to make laws he looks to the government, he looks to his parliaments. This is of course, not a criticism, it is merely a comment. That is where our laws come from today, and a man would probably be considered a fool if he were to put forward the theory that cosmic forces pass through the heads of the sitting members! We will not pursue this any further; it is sufficient that the man of today would find such an idea grotesque. It was not so in prehistoric times, it was not even so in ancient Greece. In those times there was prevalent an idea so wonderful, so impressive, that modern man can scarcely believe it. Think of all that I have told you about the development of the Greek gods. I pointed out how Demeter worked in ancient times, how she instilled her forces into human nature—her forces which were active in the plants and caused her child to be born in that human nature. That is what Demeter did in ancient times. Now there were also other gods working in like fashion both with the forces of Nature and the wonders of Nature. How did they work? Well, when the human being ate and when he breathed, he knew that the forces which he took in from the air and from the plants came from Demeter, and he knew that it was Demeter who gave him his clairvoyant consciousness, but he knew too that it was she who taught him how he had to behave in the world. There were at that time no laws in the later meaning of the term, there were no commandments outwardly expressed, but since man was clairvoyant, it dawned in him clairvoyantly how he ought to behave, what was right, what was good. Thus in those very remote times he saw Demeter, who gave him his food, also as the cosmic power of Nature who, when he took in foodstuffs, so transformed their forces within him that they gave him his morality, his rule of conduct. And the man of old said to himself: ‘I gaze upwards to the great Demeter, and whenever I accomplish something in the world, I do so because forces active in the plant world without are sent into my brain.’ This Demeter of old was a law-giver, giving law which did not flash up into consciousness, but which was self-evident, impelling the soul. And it was the same with other gods. In nourishing human beings, in causing them to breathe, in prompting in them impulses to walk and to stand, they at the same time gave men the impulse for morality, for the whole of their outer conduct. When the gods assumed the forms they had later and of which we have spoken ... when Demeter saw her child Persephone lost in man's nature, saw her raped as it were by the now denser human body so that these clairvoyant forces could henceforth only be used for coarser bodily nutrition. ... When at that point she so to say gave up imparting the moral law directly, what did she do? She instituted a Mystery, thereby providing a substitute, a new form of law, for the old law which worked through the forces of Nature. Thus the gods withdrew from the forces of Nature into the Mysteries, and gave moral precepts to men who no longer possessed a morality drawn from the activity of Nature within them. This was the essence of Greek thought in the matter, that originally the gods bestowed morality upon men along with the forces of Nature; then the forces of Nature more or less withdrew, and later the gods substituted a moral law in a more abstract form through their messengers in the Mysteries. When man became estranged from Nature he needed a more abstract, a more intellectual morality, hence the Greeks looked to their Mysteries for guidance in their moral life, and in the Mysteries they saw the activity of the gods, as previously they had seen their activity in the forces of Nature. For this reason the earliest Greek period attributed the moral law to the same gods who were at the back of the forces of Nature. When the Greeks spoke of the origin of their earliest laws they did not refer to a parliament, but to gods who had come down to men and who had in the Mysteries given them the laws which continue to live in human morality. But as the human body became denser and denser, as it became transformed, what happened to the original Demeter forces? If I may use a very rough illustration, you all know that one cannot do with ice what one can do with water, because ice is in another form. In the same way one cannot do with the solid human body what it was once possible, out of the forces of Nature, to do with the finer body. Into this more rarefied body Demeter had been able to instil, with the products of Nature, the spiritual forces which were in them and thereby to develop clairvoyant forces. What became of the Demeter forces as a result of the solidifying of the human body, or to use the language of Greek mythology, through the rape of Persephone by Pluto? They had to take a back place in the organisation of the human body, they had to become less active; man had to be alienated from the direct influence of Demeter, to become subject to other forces, forces to which I called attention yesterday. What is it that makes the denser human body fresh and healthy? Just as of old it was Demeter, now it is Eros, it is what is represented in the Nature-forces by Eros, who brings this about. If Eros were not working upon the human body, if Demeter had continued to work, the body would be shrivelled and wrinkled throughout life. Today, Demeter forces are not to be found in youthful bodies, in chubby rosy cheeks; they are in the body just when it eliminates the Eros forces, as it does when it becomes older, when it becomes shrivelled and wrinkled. This profound truth is actually portrayed in The Mystery of Eleusis. After the rape of Persephone, Demeter appears before us denuded of her original forces. She is transformed by Hecate, so transformed that she now bears the forces of decline. The rape of Persephone also represents the withdrawal of Demeter from the bodily organisation in the course of the historical development of humanity. How splendidly those ancient wonders of Nature are expressed in the figures of the ancient gods! When in old age Eros begins to withdraw from the human body, then the influence of Demeter begins again. Then Demeter can, once again in a way, enter the body, then forces of fruitful chastity can predominate, while the Eros forces fall into the background. We are touching upon a tremendous mystery in human growth, human development, when we speak of old age, when we speak of the metamorphosis of Eros into Demeter forces. Secrets such as this were hidden deep within the Eleusinian drama, so deeply hidden that no doubt anyone with the usual education of today would regard everything I have just said as fantasy. In fact, however, it is the pronouncements of materialistic science about these things that are fantastic, that is where all the dreaming and the superstition really lie! What is it then that, between the time of Atlantis and our own time, has really changed in human nature? It is that part of man in which his essential being is ensheathed. His essential being is enclosed in three bodily sheaths; it is enclosed in the physical body, the ether body and the astral body; our innermost, our ego, is hidden within these three sheaths. These three have all become different in the course of evolution from the age of Atlantis up to our own time. What is the essential drive which makes these sheaths different? We have to look for this impulse primarily in the ether body. It is the ether body which is the energising influence, which is the really impelling factor. It is the ether body which has made the physical body denser, and which has also transformed the astral body. For these three bodies are not like the rind of a fruit, or the layers of an onion, one outside the other, but their forces mutually interpenetrate, they are in living interplay with one another. The sheath which plays the most important part in this process of transformation, in this historical development of the human being, is the ether body. Let us make a diagram of the three bodies to illustrate this. I will draw them simply as three layers lying one under the other.  We have to look for the real forces, the effectual forces, especially those of Eros and Demeter here in the ether body; from the etheric they are sent upwards into the astral body, and downwards into the physical body; that is to say, the ether body has an influence both on the astral and upon the physical bodies. During the period I have referred to the ether body makes the physical body definitely denser, more compact; it so transforms the astral body that it no longer develops forces of clairvoyance, but only the intellectual forces of human nature. Because man has been transformed in this way, because the ether body has brought about a transformation in all three bodies, important and fundamental changes have taken place. They have all three been changed. The Atlantean body, even a post-Atlantean body of the first period, was utterly different from a body of the present day. All the relationships and conditions of life were quite different, everything has changed. If we look at the physical body as it develops from the earliest times right up to the present day, we see that through having become denser it has come more under the influence of its physical environment whereas the delicate physical body of old was more subject to the spiritual conditions of existence. Hence certain characteristics of the physical body which did not exist earlier in a similar form have been enhanced; the causes of disease, of illness, in the physical body in particular have become quite different. In olden times what we call sickness and health were due to quite other causes. In those times human health was directly dependent upon conditions in the spiritual world. Today the physical body is bound up with external physical conditions and therefore dependent upon them; today we have to look for the requisite conditions for health more to the external physical environment. Thus, to use the language of Greek mythology, because of the rape of Persephone by Pluto and her captivity in the nether world of human nature, man in his inmost being has become subject, so far as sickness and health are concerned, to external conditions. That is one of the things which has happened to humanity. The second thing has to do with the ether body itself. Besides being the source of the forces of metamorphosis, the ether body has also changed in itself. In primeval times this ether body was so organised that the human being did not get to know the world in the way he does today; but when through the old Persephone clairvoyance he gazed into the spiritual world he saw pictures of spiritual Beings. Man saw around him a world of images. Of course it was the forces of the astral body which called forth these images, but the astral body would not have been able to see them if it had depended upon itself alone. The astral body does not of itself see images. Just as a man does not see himself advancing unless a mirror confronts him, so the astral body would not see the images it produces if its activity were not so to say reflected back by the ether body. Thus it is the ether body which brings to the point of vision, to perception, the images called forth by the astral body. What man perceives of the goings-on in his own astral body is what is mirrored for him by his ether body. If all our inner astral processes were not reflected by our ether bodies we should of course still have the astral body's activity within us, but we should not be aware of it, we should not perceive it. Hence the whole picture of the world which the human being makes, the total content of his consciousness is a reflection of his ether body. Whether a man knows anything of the world depends upon his ether body. This was so in the old clairvoyant days, and it is still so today. What is the secret of the ether body? Its secret is that it is the key to knowledge of the world. What the world brings about in the astral body would not open the door to knowledge of the world were it not for the ether body. The ether body contains all that I have referred to in certain passages of the two Mystery Plays2 of mine which you have just seen performed. The Plays mention the labyrinth of thought, the threads which have to weave our knowledge of the world. We do not come to know the world merely by looking at it. Either, as in the old clairvoyance, we move from picture to picture, or as in modern intellectualism, we move from thought to thought as if through a labyrinth. This association too is brought about by the activity of the ether body. Thus what we may call the key and what we may call the threads which connect the single images of our consciousness when we acquire knowledge of the world have both undergone a change. Thus you see what is dependent on the forces of the ether body and what has to be changed in these forces. Let us now consider the third member, the astral body itself. This is the element in us which is subject to the influences of the world and in which the forces and the skills are formed which are then reflected by the ether body. Knowledge is kindled in the astral body; it is brought to consciousness through the ether body. A thought, an image, is kindled in the astral body; we have these in us because we have astral bodies. But these thoughts and images become conscious in us because we have ether bodies; they would still be in us even if we had no ether bodies, but we should not be aware of them. The torch of knowledge is kindled in the astral body; this torch is reflected as conscious knowledge in the ether body. This torch of knowledge which is kindled in the astral body has changed in the course of the historical development of mankind; in ancient times man had clairvoyant or imaginal knowledge; today he has intellectual or rational knowledge. That is the change which has come about in the astral body. Thus during the course of the historical development of man forces have been at work in his nature which have changed his whole relationship with Demeter. Out of the human body, once so rarefied, Demeter was so to say driven. She was driven out of the astral body with its lost clairvoyant capacities and Eros took her place. In return, as I have shown you today, certain different Eros-free forces in human nature came more under the sway of Demeter. Thus during this period from the time of Atlantis up to the present day a force has been working on the development of human nature in three ways: there is a triple kind of development, of transformation, a triple kind of metamorphosis, emanating from the ether body and working upon the physical body, upon the ether body itself, and upon the astral body. This force of genetic change has been and still is in human nature. It changes us from youth to age by leading over the forces of Eros into those of Demeter. There is in our organisation this threefold development which in the physical body brings about changes in the conditions affecting sickness and health, which causes the ether body to reflect knowledge in a different way, and which transmutes the torch of knowledge in the astral body. How wonderful it is to find these genetic forces represented in Greek mythology, forces which are active in all of us, forces which transform our astral bodies and therefore the nature of Demeter herself. These human etheric forces which work upon the physical body, upon the ether body itself and upon the astral body are represented by the threefold Hecate. Whereas today we say that forces of metamorphosis emanate from the ether body in a threefold way, the Greek spoke of the threefold Hecate. One of Nature's wonders in the genesis of the human organisation is expressed in this threefold Hecate. We there get a glimpse into immense wisdom. You can still see the statue of this ‘triple Hecate’ in Rome today.3 It reveals how one of her aspects has to do with the conditions determining sickness and health, being furnished with the symbols of the † and the serpent (this latter symbol was also assigned to Aesculapius as the representative of medicine). The † represents the external destructive influences upon the human organism. The endowment of one aspect of the threefold Hecate with these emblems indicates forces which act upon the ether body in its development. The second aspect of Hecate had to indicate that in the ether body itself the key to knowledge of the world had changed; what are the symbols shown by this second form? They are the key and the coil of rope, typifying the labyrinth of thought. The third Hecate carries a torch—the torch of knowledge developed in the astral body. We cannot help feeling that the way in which this profoundly meaningful figure is regarded in our materialistic age is one great mass of superstition. What new life such profound and impressive symbols as that of the threefold Hecate will acquire when we know once more what they mean! When the soul steeped in Spiritual Science stands before such a statue, ancient Greece will arise anew in her thought, all the knowledge of the spiritual nature of man mysteriously hidden in such a statue will stream into her again. We should not take these things in an abstract way. Of course we can only express them by clothing them in abstract thought, but all this can become for us living feeling if we permeate ourselves with the consciousness that Hecate has only changed the manner of her activity, that she is in us even today, is at work in every single one of us. The ancient Greek said that not only humanity as a whole but every individual is subject in his development to the forces of Hecate, in the changes undergone by physical, etheric and astral bodies. Hecate works in man in a threefold way. But what was communicated to the soul at that time in pictorial form can also be learnt again today. How is this expressed by the pupil of Spiritual Science, who no longer speaks in this pictorial way? He says that in the course of the development of the individual from birth to maturity his sheaths undergo changes. In the first seven years the physical body is changed, in the second seven years the ether body, in the third seven years the astral body. The forces which you find described in my little book Education of the Child4 without the use of pictures, work in the human organisation in a threefold way. They are the Hecate forces. When Spiritual Science describes for you how up to the change of teeth the human being develops primarily his physical body, it is saying that one form of Hecate is working in him. There we are saying in a modern way what the Greek meant when he represented one part of Hecate with † and serpent; and the second seven years of transformation, when the ether body works upon itself, is represented in the key and the coil of rope; and the third seven years, during which changes take place in the astral body, is represented in the emblem of the torch. Thus long ago I said in modern form what was expressed in the ancient Greek Mysteries by the figure of Hecate. That is also the meaning of the development of our European civilisation. Going back to Greek times, we find in the tradition of Greek mysticism, of Greek mythology, the powerful pictures which were placed before the pupils in order to awaken in them the knowledge which man at that time needed. In a different way the figure of the threefold Hecate awakened the knowledge which we today absorb when we grasp the doctrine of the threefold change which takes place between birth and about the age of twenty. And when we understand such teaching, then we grasp correctly the course which human civilisation has to take. The old clairvoyant form of knowledge had to be buried in the Plutonic region of the human soul, and for a period, from the time of Socrates right up to our own day, men had to remain more or less in ignorance about all these things. Men had to build up, to consolidate, their egos. But under the surface the old knowledge, the knowledge aroused by those impressive pictorial images of the Greeks, still remained. It was buried as it were under the load of intellectual culture. Now it is emerging again from the dark depths of the spirit. What was submerged in the depths of the soul is coming to the surface again for the life of today in the form of Spiritual Science. Today we are again beginning in the way I have described in Education of the Child to recognise the threefold Hecate in a more abstract way. This is preparing the human soul for a future clairvoyance which is already in sight, notwithstanding our intellectualism. The triple Hecate, Demeter, Persephone, and all those other figures of whom Greek mythology tells us, were not in Greek times abstractions as the credulous scholars of today imagine. No, they were living figures of Greek seership! All these figures will appear again to clairvoyant vision, which in the future will press more and more urgently upon man from the spiritual world. And the force which penetrates into human souls in order to lead them up again to clairvoyance—or I could also say in order to bring down clairvoyance to them—is the force which was first prepared as conscious thought in the old Jahve civilisation, and then reached its full development through the coming of the Christ Being, who will become ever better understood by men. And when among the adherents of genuine Spiritual Science it is said that this clairvoyant vision of the Christ, who has been united with the Earth since the Mystery of Golgotha, is already beginning in this twentieth century, it is also made clear that this return of Christ will certainly not be in a physical body, but will come about for etheric vision, as it did for Paul at Damascus.5 The power of the Christ provides all the impulses to enable human nature to rise again and to see all that has been buried in the depths of the soul—such as for instance, the figures of the Greek gods. That will be the greatest event for the future history of the human soul. It is the event for which Spiritual Science must prepare, so that the soul may become capable of acquiring the etheric vision. In the next three thousand years it will lay hold of more and more souls, the next three thousand years will be devoted to kindling the forces in the human soul which will make it aware of the etheric wonders of Nature around it. It will begin to happen in our own century that one here and one there will see with their etheric souls the reappearing Christ, and within the next three thousand years more and more men will see Him. Then will come the fulfilment of the true oriental tradition, a tradition with which all true occultism is in agreement. At the end of three thousand years the Maitreya Buddha will descend, and will speak to humanity in a form which every human soul will understand, and will mediate the Christ-nature to man. That is the secret guarded by oriental mysticism, that about three thousand years after our time the Maitreya Buddha will appear. What can be added as the contribution of western culture is that the cosmic Individuality who has only once appeared in a human body will become ever more visible to the etheric vision of man; you will find this again emphasised in my Mystery Play, The Soul's Probation. The Soul's Probation. Thereby He will become a trusted friend of the human soul. Just as two thousand years ago the Buddha spoke of what was natural to the best human souls of his time, so in words which will thrill the soul, the Maitreya Buddha will be able to proclaim everywhere what today cannot be proclaimed publicly: the vision of the Christ in the etheric world which is to come. That is the greatest event of the twentieth century, this upward development of human nature towards what we may call the recurrence of the vision of St. Paul. In the vision at Damascus it came to one person only; in the future it will come little by little to all humanity, beginning in our own century. Whoever has faith in the progress of human nature, whoever believes that the soul will develop ever higher and higher powers, knows that it was necessary for the soul which had sunk to the uttermost depths of the physical plane, that the Christ too should appear once in a physical body. It was necessary because at that time the soul could only see the Godhead in a body which was visible to the physical eye, to physical organs. But because, after the old Hebrew civilisation had paved the way for it, this event did take place, the soul is being led to ever higher capacities. The soul's heightened capacities will show themselves in that man will learn to see the Christ even when He no longer walks among men in a physical body, when He shows Himself as He is among us now, as He has been since the Mystery of Golgotha, visible of course only for clairvoyant sight. Christ is here, He is united with the ether body of the Earth. What matters is that the soul should develop so as to be able to see Him. Herein lies the great advance in the evolution of the human soul. Anyone who believes in this progress, who believes that Spiritual Science has a mission to fulfil in regard to it, will understand that the powers of the soul must become ever higher, and that it would mean stagnation if in our time the soul were obliged to see the Christ in the same physical form in which He was once seen. He will know that there is a sublime meaning in the old Rosicrucian formula about God the Son, who once, and once only, incarnated in a human body, but Who, beginning from our own century, will become visible as an etheric Being to human souls to an ever increasing extent. This is confirmed by prophecy as well as by our own knowledge. Anyone who believes in human progress believes in this Second Coming of the Christ, who will be visible to those endowed with etheric sight. Those who refuse to believe in this progress may well believe that the powers of the soul remain stationary, and still today need to see the Christ in the same form in which He was seen when humanity was plunged in the uttermost depths of matter. They are the ones who can believe in a Second Coming of Christ in a physical body.
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