The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 1. Latham's translation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If we consider only the human physical body, it is very difficult to arrive at insights such as those we discussed last time. This applies particularly to the peoples who are the peoples of the new world, of Europe and America.

In these areas, the physical body is formed from within to a much lesser extent than in Asia and Africa, for example. In the case of the peoples of Asia and Africa, the physical body is more formed from within, from the forces lying in the etheric body. In the case of the peoples of Europe and America, the greater influence in the formative forces of the physical body comes from external influences.

We can say something like this: as soon as we look for the forces that form and shape the physical body of a person, we must find etheric forces. These etheric forces lie more in the interior of the etheric body for the inhabitants of Africa and Asia. For the inhabitants of Europe and America, they lie more in the etheric world that surrounds people from the outside.

The people of Africa and Asia are therefore more connected with the inner etheric forces, and the people of Europe and America more with the outer etheric forces, and thus more with the nature spirits.

If I want to express myself in a primitive way, paying less attention to what has become clear to us through spiritual scientific observation, I would have to say: the physical body of African and Asian peoples is more shaped from the inside out, more through internal formative forces. The body of the peoples of Europe and America is more shaped by the way they relate to the conditions of the outside world. The external forces are more impressed in the plastic forms and therefore shape the forms of the physical body more.

In the book Threshold of the Spiritual World, I pointed out that when we consider a human being's etheric body, we find that they are connected to the Earth's whole organism to a greater extent than one might think if one focuses only on the physical body. The Earth itself is a kind of living being. But while the human being, as a living being, appears to us, as it were, as a closed unit, so that we must also perceive him as a unit, we must consider the earth as a living organism in such a way that we see in it a multitude of natural beings interacting with each other.

The Earth includes, first of all, the solid Earth itself, which forms the continents. But what we perceive as this material, solid Earth is nothing other than Maja. The reality is a great multitude of nature spirits, which in turn are led by spirits of higher hierarchies. That this mass of spirits coalesces and functions as solid Earth is Maja. The Earth is spirit through and through. This has often been emphasized.

Now the earth is not only the solid earth, but also what permeates the earth as water, and insofar as the matter of the earth lives out in the liquid, we are again dealing with the water as the maja. In reality, however, we are dealing with a large number of nature spirits. It is the same with the air and the warmth that permeates and washes around the earth. All this is a sum of nature spirits, and the material is only the outer Maja.

More than that in Asia and Africa is the case with the European human being - let us limit ourselves to this for the time being - there is, as it were, a constant exchange of impulses between the inner etheric forces and the elemental beings contained in fire, water, air and earth. These elemental beings act from the outside in on the human etheric body, and thereby they receive the formative and educational forces, which then appear in the appearance and the activities of the physical body, right down to speech. For speech is also an activity of the physical body. But of course the impulses for speech lie in the etheric body.

Now, you see, if we consider the human being as he lives on earth, as he is an earthly being via the etheric body, and as he belongs to the earth, we must take into account the different ways in which the individual essences of earth, water, air and so on affect the human etheric body. For the elemental and etheric entities of the earth are of a very different nature, the etheric and elemental entities of water are of a very different nature, so that we can say: simply by the fact that any person lives as a physical being in the mountains or on the seashore, other entities have a greater influence on his etheric body. In the case of the person living on the seashore, the elemental entities that have their Maya expression in water have a much greater influence than in the case of the person living in the mountains. In the case of a person living in the mountains, the beings that live in the earth have a greater influence than the entities that have their Maya expression in water.

Now that which is formed, made, out of man is influenced by this interaction – I am now speaking mainly of the European human being – I say influenced, and in the way these elementary spirits of nature work, there is something of what forms man out of the spiritual world, insofar as this man is an earthly being.

Last time I spoke to you about the fact that Eastern culture preceded European culture, let us say, a layer of culture whose people were so constituted that they still had something in their souls of what is more pushed back into the subconscious in today's people, that they had something in their ordinary lives of a division of the soul into the soul of feeling, mind or emotion and consciousness. I have pointed out to you that the Finnish people, the great Finnish people of old — the present-day people are only a remnant of the once widespread Finnish people — had such a soul that the souls of these people, in their direct experience of the day, had something of a division of the soul into a soul of feeling, a soul of mind or emotion, and a soul of consciousness, in a certain ancient clairvoyance that was developed in them.

I have told you that in the great epic Kalewala, the three figures of Wäinämöinen, Ilmarinen and Lemminkäinen express the way in which this threefold soul is determined, as it were, by the cosmos.

Now, how could something like this come about at all? How could a great nation develop at a certain point in Europe - so we ask ourselves - that had a soul like the one I have described?

Now, you see, how the human being develops his actual self, the gift of the earth, comes from the spirits of the earth working on him from below, through the maya of earthly matter. From below, as it were through the firm earth, the spirits of the earth work, and in our cycle it is so that these spirits of the earth are essentially used to evoke the I-nature in man.

Should something arise in the soul of a people, such as the ancient Finnish people, that lies beneath the nature of the I, that is more spiritual than the nature of the I, that is more closely connected to the divine forces (for when the soul feels that it is split three ways, it is more with the divine powers than when it does not. If something like this were to arise, then not only the earthly with its elementary spirits from below was allowed to radiate into the earthly of man, but something else had to radiate into this earthly, another elementary influence.

In the same way that a person's physical existence is intimately connected with the spirits of the earth — physical existence, insofar as it is an earthly existence and one develops one's self in it — with the spirits that work from the earth itself, from below upwards, then the soul life of the human being, which manifests itself as natural, temperamental, character-shaped soul life, is connected with everything that lives on the earth as a watery element, as a liquid element. So the spirits of the watery, liquid element must have an effect on these souls, which are thus split into three.

Now, for our time cycle, the earthly element is the ego-forming element, that is, the one that matters. If another element intrudes, such as the watery element, for example, it intrudes more from the spiritual world. It is not contained in the human being itself. It must, as it were, sink into the human being as a spiritual being, so that he can receive into his earthly nature something that leads him into the spiritual world.

Let us assume that the surface of the blackboard is where the elementary forces of the earth come out. If a spiritual element wants to sink into this, it must come from the organism of the earth itself, from something that is spiritual in itself. There must be a being, a real being, which is not the human being himself, which, as it were, inspires the human being to the threefold nature of the soul. There must therefore be a Being that acts on the soul in such a way, acting from natural spirituality, that the sentient soul, the soul of mind or feeling, and the consciousness soul separate, so that the souls can truly say: For my sentient soul, something like Wäinämöinen is at work from nature, something that flows towards me like a nature being, that gives me the powers of the sentient soul.

But there is also something like Ilmarinen, something that gives me the powers of the intellectual or mind soul, and there is also something like Lemminkäinen, something that gives me the powers of the consciousness soul. If there is a being that extends its feelers into nature as if through a kind of neck, if a being that has its main body here and extends its feelers here, so that we have one of the feelers with the sentient soul here, and the second feeler the second feeler horn and here the third feeler horn, so the nature being has a body and stretches its soul into it, as it were, like soul feelers, to inspire, and there the ether bodies can form, which give the soul the ability to feel divided into three.

The ancient Finns, the population of old Finland, said: We live here, but we feel something like three mighty beings that are not beings of the physical plane, that are nature beings. They reveal themselves from the west, they are three parts, as it were, organs of a great being that has its body over there, but it extends its feelers towards us here: Wäinämöinen, Ilmarinen, Lemminkäinen. A mighty sea creature is spreading out from west to east, stretching out its feel-horns and endowing this tribe with that which is the three-part soul.

The nations that still felt this, felt it this way and also spoke it, also in Kalewala, as I have explained it. The modern man, who today lives only on the physical plane, says that the western sea extends into this; that is the Bothnian, that is the Finnish and that is the Rigaian Gulf. But we take all of this together, wanting to see through the spiritual of the outer physical, that which appears to us as a cross-section of nature, we take the following together. There is still a lot of water down there, over there is the air, human beings breathe air, and the world of the sea is a great, mighty being, which is only formed differently than we are accustomed to. It is a mighty being that extends over it, and with this being the human being of the earlier race was in a very distinct, definitely configured connection. And when we now speak of folk spirits, these folk spirits have in the elemental beings, who live in numerous such soul expressions, the tools to work. They organize themselves, as it were, into an army to work, to work their way into the etheric body and, from the etheric body, to make the human being in such a way that his physical body is a tool for what he is supposed to be for his specific mission on earth.

Only when we can see the forms that appear to us in nature as expressions of the spiritual can we understand nature itself in its connection with the human being. We can understand nature when we do not simply look thoughtlessly at the sea and land borders, but understand what is expressed in these forms. After all, someone might think when looking at a person's face: Yes, there are such forms. There the flesh and the air border each other. — If someone says this, however, little will have been understood of it. It is only understood when it is grasped as an expression of the human being, as a face. Here, too, it is only understood when it is seen as the physiognomy, as it were, of a mighty being that extends certain parts of its main body out of the ocean, that extends this part of its physiognomy.

Much really does go on below the threshold of consciousness, and the Spirits of Form have not placed the forms in nature for nothing. These forms can be understood. They are the expression of inner essence. And when we become disciples of the Spirits of Form, we ourselves form shapes that express what lives in the inner essence of the natural and the spiritual.

Thus, for example, in our architraves, in what is above the columns, forms should be formed that are truly the expression of the spirituality that is to be associated with what is to take place within the building. Man is a being that emerges from a sea, as it were, from a sea of reality, of hidden reality, in which he is immersed.

You see, this is another example of how we actually have to penetrate behind the Maja if we really want to understand what is in the world, namely if we want to understand the human being with all his expressions. We often have to go down into what lives in the human being without him knowing it, or what he only gradually learns through the mediation of knowledge.

We cannot help but look at the outer Maya first, and then we must be clear about the fact that something extraordinarily complicated lies behind this outer Maya.

If we were inclined to enter into what lies behind the maya everywhere, then there could be infinite harmony, a consonance in the whole human being, because, to a certain extent, this human being is infinite underground impulses with a harmonious unity being, and everything that exists in the world can only be understood if it is examined in relation to what lies beneath the surface of existence.

It is always one-sided to look at anything only in relation to Maya. I want to interject something here. It is true that we can only fully understand the things we have discussed now, little by little. I want to show how difficult it is, even in ordinary life, to really go into everything that lies in the things that come to us. For example, perhaps very few of our dear friends have noticed that I once spoke at length about Switzerland in a recent lecture, about something that is closely related to Swiss nature. I don't know how many of you are actually aware of what I am talking about. But perhaps you remember that I followed the four lectures I gave on occult reading and hearing with a lecture in which I spoke a great deal about Herman Grimm from a purely external, historical point of view. That was a lecture in which an extraordinary amount was actually said about Switzerland, but one has to go back to the essence of the matter, to what lies beneath the surface. Why is that?

You see, the human being – I repeat something very elementary – consists, as we know, of his physical body, his etheric body, his astral body and his ego nature. We know that the I-nature and the astral body leave the physical and etheric body during sleep and, as it were, dwell in the spiritual world, in a world of which we can say: At night we are in this world, where the elemental, etheric beings are also. But there are also those spiritual elemental beings in it that are connected with the whole structure of our physical being. They are all there and at work. A number of elemental beings are connected with the whole structure of our physical being. In a lecture series I once gave in Kassel on the connection between the Gospel of John and the other gospels, I pointed out how man is connected to the entities of elementary nature through his ancestors. I pointed out – you can read about it in this lecture cycle – that if we arrange the four parts of the human being in this way, we have the physical body, the I, the etheric body and the astral body, and that what lives more in the physical body and the I is inherited from the paternal side.

Those who have read the lecture cycle carefully will remember that what lives more in the etheric body and in the astral body is inherited from the maternal side. When we sleep, we have the physical and etheric bodies in bed, so we have something paternal and something maternal. But we have the I and the astral body outside. The astral body contains that which is imprinted on our feelings, on our entire temperament, that which gives us our soul character. And in this, which gives us our soul character, in turn, in the succession of time, elemental beings have an effect, beings that carry the forces from the ancestors to the descendants, so that these descendants become, in a certain way.

In the case of a personality such as Herman Grimm's, something very peculiar takes effect. One has an after-effect with Herman Grimm from what his immediate ancestors were. His immediate ancestors, his father and his uncle, were the collectors of the Children's and House Tales, and they heard these Children's and House Tales told. They simply listened when they were told and then wrote them down. But you don't do something like that unless you have a specially tuned astral body that is predisposed to it. Such things must be deeply rooted in the whole course of events.

Who was this mother? Dorothea Grimm, née Wild, was from an old Bernese family. She herself was still a citizen of that city. Her ancestors had fought in the Battle of Murten. All the feelings that she had gained there, with all the elemental spirits, were then carried up into Hessian, because the father, who had emigrated from Bern – Herman Grimm's grandfather – had learned the apothecary's trade, then moved to Kassel and founded the Sonnenapotheke (Sun Pharmacy). So if we look for what the elemental spirits were doing in Herman Grimm, what was making the particular configuration of this spirit, so to speak, because these spirits were working in him while he slept, then we have to think of Switzerland, and we are actually talking about the characteristic of Herman Grimm when we speak of the characteristically Bernese-Swiss.

And so, sometimes, outwardly completely overshadowed by Maja, we encounter the essential. If we consider the peculiar structure of his mind, we listen attentively to what the essence is in the mind of Herman Grimm's mother, so that I actually said something directly Swiss in the spiritual, in what I emphasized as lying below the threshold of consciousness, and spoke of the Swiss, especially the Bernese, when I spoke of Herman Grimm. Therefore, it was to be assumed that precisely this kind of thing, of which hints had been made, would evoke quite familiar, homely feelings among some of our friends.

So it does not just depend on what, so to speak, appears externally to us, but on what lives in what appears externally to us. The earth with all that is on it is actually intimately connected, the earth as a unified being is actually intimately connected with what the human being can be on it, with what is formed around the human being through the etheric body.

Now that I have made it clear through the present example how we have to go through the Maja if we want to understand what is there, let us go back to the sea dragon, which is, so to speak, the inspirer of European humanity, which pushed its way across from the Atlantic Ocean to be the inspirer of European humanity. If we consider the totality of its elemental-etheric beings, it contains everything that is spiritual in European humanity. If we could understand it completely, this dragon, if we could give ourselves completely to it, then we would all be clairvoyants. But it is not the task of European humanity to be merely clairvoyant; rather, it has the task of developing precisely that part of the soul that rises above clairvoyance like islands rise above the sea. That which now had to develop particularly as, I might say, the basic types of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural period, had to have the basic character to stand out as a nature of consciousness, to stand out from the merely soul-like. It had to be inspired by the nature spirits working through the earth. It had to have the possibility of being connected everywhere, of being connected with this inspiring being through countless flowing impulses, as it were. But it had to be set apart, it had to send the earthy into the watery. And this happened through the British Isles rising out of the inspiring sea with the sum total of all their nature spirits.

When there is a real spiritual science, then it will be known that on such a continental area of the human soul-bearer, his physical and etheric bodies, must form in the same way as the relationship between sea and land requires. Just as the elevation above the sea, the elevation of the land above the sea, determines this, so it is that the human being, in his nature, must fill certain spaces by not letting them be muscles, but letting them become bones, so that the soft and the hard have a certain relationship to each other.

This is also how it is formed outside in the great Earth Mother, and in such a way that the solid element emerges from the liquid element. One can say: the Earth sends up from its depths the elemental spirits that form the Earth in a certain configuration, at a certain point of spiritual inspiration, so that such soil can arise on which such bodies can dwell, in which the consciousness soul develops.

The solid land in the sea is really like a skeletal structure in the elementary being. Just as our skeletal system sits within the soft muscle system, so the solid land of the earth sits within the sea, configured within it. And the countries do not arise so randomly as geology presents them, but arise in their forms just as regularly as our bone system arises regularly in us, although not through cells, as the bones form. We just have to learn to understand why the individual continents are formed in this or that form. I would like to use another comparison, which should just not lead you to misunderstand. I would like to say: In order for the view we have been talking about to arise here among this ancient Finnish people, it was necessary for such a land configuration to arise in the gulf.

Just as human lungs let in air, so in this land configuration are outlined – as if drawn in – the tentacles of that great being that is connected with the entire configuration of Europe.

We have now spoken for the last time about the bodies that are given to the Russian soul when this soul incarnates in a Russian body. We have shown, last time and also in the course of other considerations, that in a Russian body the Russian soul forms itself expectantly, that it forms in itself that which a future being can once receive. For this it is necessary that this soul should in a certain way remain in relation to the spiritual. Otherwise the spiritual self could never be formed. But on the other hand this soul must be prevented from developing too early into those regions which are actually pictured for it.

Let us assume that here - where the Baltic Sea is now - there would be land and that here - where Russia is - would be sea. Only peninsular formations like Italy and so on would stretch out. The Gulfs of Bothnia, Finland and Riga would extend as far as the Caspian Sea, instead of us having Russian land here. Then we would have a seafaring people here, sailing these seas. But then the bodies would not be able to form here as they should. The being that stretches its tentacles over here would breathe out what these seafarers would receive, and they would develop their abilities prematurely, that is, at too early a time. They would develop too early that which should have waited for a later time. The spirit self must wait a certain time and must not be developed too soon. Therefore, there must not be a sea here, but the land must emerge to such an extent that the spirit self is not developed too early, but that there is still the possibility of receiving the inspirations of this great being. There must not be high mountains like the Alps, nor flat lands, only such elevations that the spiritual self is not received too early. There must be just enough land to produce the spiritual self: extensive, more flat land areas. If there were a seafaring people here, they would have developed the spiritual self long ago. But that would be immature, and development would occur at the wrong time.

And now we come to the cosmic mind of the earth. The earth has cosmic mind, which conditions its form, conditions its form in such a way that it raises the land everywhere as far as is necessary for the right elemental spirits to come into contact with the beings on the earth, and on the other hand allows the water to exist as far as is necessary for the inspiring genii to work.

We get the impression that we are literally looking at our earth and that we can see something similar in such an elevation of land, as when we form this or that expression in the face, where the soul also appears in the expression in this or that configuration of expression. The soul of the earth meets us in the configuration of the earth. In fact, as soon as we touch on the human ether body, this essence of the human ether body expands, as it were, over the entire organization of the earth, and the human ether body is connected with the earth organism everywhere. Everywhere we find that what is actually earthly — the Maja for the earth spirits — is connected for the present human being with his I-nature, with the outer physical nature. Everything that is water and air – spiritually speaking – is connected with what he develops in contradiction to the nature of the I. For the whole earth exists to form the earthly human being. The other thing is to nuance this earthly human being. This nuancing is achieved through the mutual relationship of land and water and air through the earth.

If we look at southern Europe, and in particular at the Greek and Italian peninsulas, we find that the way in which land and water are distributed here prepares the earth for such bodies, which could carry the fourth post-Atlantic culture, in which the mind or soul soul is so particularly expressed.

If the countries in southern Europe had been larger and the sea inlets smaller, something should have arisen in Greece and Italy that was only to arise later. That is to say, something would have arisen for evolution in an unusable way. In order for the Greek character to find its counterpart in the Romanic character, as I have described it, there had to be a broader land mass stretching out towards the sea than is the case with Greece. But that is the case in France. And in the relationship that I have said exists between France and Greece, you can find it expressed precisely in the physiognomy of Greece, how it is cut into by the sea everywhere, and in the physiognomy of France, how it extends its projections towards the sea more on a large scale.

I wanted to give you a few pointers today for all kinds of things that need to be done during our time together. We will then build on these pointers tomorrow.

My dear friends,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tomorrow, we shall continue with this.

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

Today, in preparation for the next two reflections, we want to call to mind something about the nature of the human being, insofar as the human being is a being of thought. It is precisely this characteristic of the human being, that he is a being of thought, that is scientifically unrecognized today, interpreted in a completely wrong way. It is thought that thoughts, as they are experienced by the human being, come about in the human being, that the human being is, so to speak, the bearer of thoughts. No wonder this view is held, for the human being's essential being is only accessible to a finer observation. Precisely this human essence withdraws from coarser observation.

If we regard the human being as a being of thought, it is because we perceive, in the waking state, from waking to sleeping, that he accompanies his other experiences with thoughts, with the content of his thinking. These thought experiences seem to arise somehow from within the person and to cease to some extent during the period between falling asleep and waking up, that is, during sleep. And because one is of the opinion that thought experiences are there for a person as long as he is awake, but get lost in sleep in some kind of vagueness, about which one does not try to get further clarification and one just imagines the matter, one cannot actually enlighten oneself about the human being as a thinking being. A more delicate observation, which does not yet advance very far into the region I have described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” shows that the life of thought is not at all as simple as one usually imagines it to be. We need only compare this ordinary thought life, the coarse thought life, of which everyone becomes aware when observing a person between waking and sleeping, with an element that is indeed problematic for ordinary consciousness, namely the element of dreaming.

Usually, when we talk about dreams, we do not really get involved in anything other than a general characteristic of dreaming. One compares the state of dreaming with the state of waking thought and finds that in dreaming, arbitrary associations of thoughts are present, as one would say, that images string together without such a connection being perceptible in this stringing together as it is perceptible in the external world of being. Or else one relates what takes place in the dream to the external sense world, sees how it stands out, as it were, how it does not fit into the processes of the external sense world after beginning and end.

Of course, one does advance to these observations, and in relation to these observations, beautiful results can certainly be seen. But what is not noticed is that, firstly, when a person abandons themselves a little, I would say with a touch of contemplation, lets themselves go a little and lets their thoughts run free, they can then perceive how something is mixed into this ordinary train of thought, which follows on from the external course of events, that is not unlike dreaming, even when we are awake. One could say that from the moment we wake until we fall asleep, while we are making an effort to adapt our thoughts to the external circumstances in which we are immersed, there is a kind of vague dreaming. It can seem to us, in a sense, like two currents that are there: the upper current, which we control with our arbitrariness, and a lower current, which actually runs much as dreams themselves run in their succession of images. Of course, you have to give yourself a little to your inner life if you want to notice what I am talking about right now. But it is always there. You will always notice: there is an undercurrent. Thoughts swirl around in just as pictorial a way as they do in dreams, where the most colorful things line up next to each other. Memories arise from all sorts of things, and just as in dreams mere similarity of sound may call other thoughts and connect them with them. And people who let themselves go inwardly, people who are too indolent to adapt themselves to outer conditions with their train of thought, they may notice how there is an inner striving to give themselves up to such waking dreams.

These waking dreams differ from ordinary dreams only in that the images are more faded, more like mental images. But in terms of the mutual relationship of these images, waking dreams do not differ particularly from so-called real dreams. There are, of course, all degrees of people, from those who do not even notice that such waking dreams are present in the undercurrents of their consciousness, who thus let their thoughts run entirely along the lines of external events, to those who indulge in waking dreams and let them run in their consciousness, as, I might say, the thoughts there want to interweave and intertwine. There are, after all, all degrees of human nature, from those of a dreamy nature, as they are also called, to those who are very dry natures, who accept nothing but what exactly matches some factual course of events. And we must say that a large part of what inspires people artistically, poetically, and so on, comes from this undercurrent of waking dreams during the day.

That is one side of the matter. It should certainly be taken into account. Then we would know that a surging dreaming is actually constantly taking place within us, which we only tame through our contact with the outside world. And then we would also know that it is essentially the will that adapts to the outside world and brings system, coherence, and logic into the otherwise randomly flowing inner mass of thoughts. It is the will that brings logic into our thinking. But as I said, that is only one side of it.

The other side of the matter is this: here too one can notice, observe – as soon as one only enters a little into those regions which I have described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” – how, when one wakes up, one takes something with one from the state in which we were from falling asleep to waking up. And if you add just a little to what you can perceive, you will be able to see very clearly how you wake up, as it were, from a sea of thoughts when you wake up. You do not wake up from a vague, dark state, but rather from a sea of thoughts, thoughts that seem to have been very, very distinct while you were asleep, but you cannot hold on to them when you transition into the waking state.

And if you continue such observations, you will be able to notice that these thoughts, which you bring with you, as it were, from the state of sleep, are very similar to the ideas, the inventions that we have in relation to something we are supposed to do in the outer world, that even these thoughts, which we bring with us when we wake up, are very similar to the moral intuitions, as I have called them in my “Philosophy of Freedom”.

While in the former kind of thought weaving, which to a certain extent runs as an undercurrent of our clear consciousness, we always have the feeling that we are standing face to face with our waking dreams, that something is seething and bubbling within us, we cannot say that about the latter. Rather, we have to say to ourselves about the latter: when we return to our body and to the use of our body when we wake up, we are no longer able to hold on to what we have lived in thought from falling asleep to waking up.

Whoever truly realizes these two sides of human life will cease to regard thought as something that is, as it were, produced in the human organism. For what I characterized last, in particular, what we distinguish ourselves from when we wake up, we cannot directly see as some product of the human organism as such, but we can only see it as something that we experience between falling asleep and waking up, when we are torn out of our body with our ego and our astral body.

Where are we then? This is the first question we must ask ourselves. We are outside our physical and etheric bodies with our ego and our astral body. A simple consideration, which one cannot escape from if one simply devotes oneself to life without prejudice, must tell us: in that which appears to us when we direct our senses to the external world, as the sensory veil of the world, as everything that sensory qualities present to us, in that we are when we are outside ourselves. Only then, in ordinary life, does consciousness fade away. And we feel why consciousness fades when we wake up from this state in the morning. We then feel weak in our body, too weak to hold on to what we have experienced from falling asleep to waking up. Our ego and our astral body cannot hold on to what they have experienced by immersing themselves in the physical and etheric bodies. And by then participating in the experiences that are made through the body, what is experienced from falling asleep to waking up is erased for them. And as I said, only when we have ideas that relate to the external world, or when we have moral intuitions, do we experience something like what must appear to us in an immediate contemplation of what we live in between falling asleep and waking up.

If we look at it this way, we see a very clear contrast between our inner and outer world. In a sense, this also sheds light on the statement we often make that the outer world, as it presents itself to us from waking to sleeping, is a kind of delusion, a kind of maya. For in this world, which shows its outside to us, we are in it when we are not in our body, but when we are outside our body. Then we dive into the world that we otherwise perceive only through our sense revelation. So that we have to say to ourselves: This world, which we perceive through our sense revelation, has subsoils, subsoils that actually contain its causes, its essences. And in our ordinary consciousness we are too weak to perceive these causes and these essences directly.

Nevertheless, even unprejudiced observation yields something that reaches far into the regions described in “How to Know Higher Worlds”; unprejudiced observation already yields that which I can schematically present in the following way. If I want to depict the ordinary life of thought, then I do so by having it embrace everything that a person experiences inwardly and mentally from waking up to falling asleep, whether in terms of external perceptions or in terms of physical pain, physical feelings of pleasure, and so on. What is experienced in the mind during ordinary consciousness, I would like to represent schematically as follows (see drawing, white). Below this, like a waking dream, weaves and lives, not subject to the laws of logic, what I first depicted (red below). On the other hand, when we pass into the external world between falling asleep and waking up, we live, as we can perceive in reminiscence after waking up, again in a world of thought, but of thoughts that absorb us, that are not in us, from which we emerge when we wake up (red outside). So that, as it were, we have separated two worlds of thought from each other through our ordinary thinking: an inner world of thought and an outer world of thought, a world of thought that fills the cosmos that receives us when we fall asleep. We can call the latter world of thought the cosmic world of thought. The former is just any world of thought; we will discuss it in more detail in the course of these days.

Thus we see ourselves, as it were, with our ordinary world of thoughts placed in a general world of thoughts, which is kept apart as if by a boundary, and of which one part is in us and one part is outside us. That which is in us appears to us very clearly as a kind of dream. There always rests at the bottom of our soul a chaotic web of thoughts, we can say, something that is not permeated by logic. But this outer world of thoughts, yes, it cannot be perceived by the ordinary consciousness. So only the real spiritual vision can reveal the nature of this outer world of thoughts from direct observation, from direct experience, and then it enters even more deeply into the regions described in “How to Know Higher Worlds”. But then it also turns out that this world of thoughts, into which we plunge between falling asleep and waking up, is a world of thoughts that is not only as logical as our ordinary world of thoughts is logical, but that contains a much higher logic. If one does not want to misunderstand the expression, I would like to call this world of thoughts a super-logical world of thoughts. I would say that it is just as far above ordinary logic as our dream world, our waking dream world, is below logic.

As I said, this can only be fathomed through spiritual vision. But there is another way by which you can check this spiritual vision on this point. It is clear to you, however, that ordinary consciousness cannot penetrate into certain regions of one's own organism. I have spoken about this a great deal in recent lectures. I have said that in the fact that we have our memory, our ability to remember, for ordinary consciousness, we have, as it were, a skin drawn inwardly towards our inner organs. We cannot observe directly through inner vision what the inner organs are, lungs, liver and so on. But I also said: It is a false mysticism, a nebulous mysticism, which only fantasizes about the inner being and speaks in the manner of Saint Therese or Mechthild of Magdeburg, who find all sorts of beautiful poetic images (the beauty of which should not be denied), but which are nothing more than organic effusions. If instead of devoting oneself to this nebulous mysticism, one really studies the human mind, then, when one penetrates to the inner being of man, one comes to an understanding of the organs. One sees spiritually the significance of the lungs, liver, kidneys, etc., one pierces spiritually the memory membrane and comes to an inner insight into man. But this is something that cannot be achieved with ordinary consciousness. With ordinary consciousness, it is only possible to observe externally through anatomy how the organs look when they are viewed as belonging to the ordinary physical and mineral world. But to look inwardly and see what permeates them, what is active in them, what I have described to you in recent days, requires a truly developed spiritual vision.

So there is something in man that he cannot reach with ordinary consciousness. Why can he not reach it with ordinary consciousness? Because it does not belong to him alone. What can be reached with the ordinary consciousness belongs to the human being alone. That which pulsates down there in the organs does not belong to the human being alone, it belongs to the human being as a world being, it belongs to the human being and at the same time to the world.

Perhaps it will become most clear to us through the following discussion. If we look at the human being schematically and have any organ, lung or liver in him, we have forces in such an organ. These forces are not merely inner human forces, these forces are world forces. And when everything that is the external physical world and appears to us as the physical world, when all this has once disappeared with the end of the earth, what now exists as the inner forces of our organs will continue to work. One might be tempted to say that everything our eyes can see and our ears can hear, the whole external world, will fade away with the end of the earth. What covers our skin, what we carry within us, what is enclosed by our organization, is what spiritually contains that which will continue to exist when the external world that our senses see will no longer be there. In essence, something works within the human skin that lives beyond the earth; within the human skin lie the centers, the forces of that which works beyond earthly existence. We do not stand as human beings in the world merely to enclose our organs for ourselves; we stand in the world as human beings so that the cosmos itself is formed within our skin. In that which our ordinary consciousness does not reach, we enclose something that does not merely belong to us, that belongs to the world. Is what belongs to the world built out of the chaotic processes of waking dreaming?

We need only look at these chaotic processes of waking dreaming and you will say to yourself: the whole structure, everything that you perceive as a kind of undercurrent of your consciousness, is most certainly not the builder of your organs, of your entire organism. The organism would look beautiful if everything that lives chaotically in your subconscious were to build your organs, your whole organism! You would see what strange caricatures you would be if you were a reflection of what pulsates in your subconscious. No, just as the outer world, which reveals itself to us through the senses, so to speak on the surface that it presents to us, is constructed from the thoughts that we experience between falling asleep and waking up, so we ourselves are constructed from the same outer powers of thought, within our ordinary consciousness, in what we do not reach within ourselves. If I want to fully represent what a human being is, then I would have to draw it schematically like this. I would have to say: There is the surrounding world of thought (red). This surrounding world of thought also builds up the human organism, and this human organism produces, as it were, flooding over it, the higher world of thought (white), which inclines towards the sensual outer Maja between our thoughts and the surrounding world (blue).

Try to visualize how only a small part of yourself is actually aware of what you are encompassing with your consciousness, and how a large part of yourself is constructed from the same external world into which you submerge yourself between falling asleep and waking up. But this can also be seen from another point of view when you look at a person impartially, and I have already pointed out this point of view here on several occasions.

Man, in his ordinary consciousness, actually encompasses only his thoughts; his feelings are already like dreams floating among thoughts. Feelings arise and subside. Man does not see through them with the clarity with which he sees through his thoughts, his ideas. But the experience between falling asleep and waking up is quite different from the experience of what is willed in us during the day. And what does a person know – as I have often told you – of what happens when he moves his hand or arm through the will! He knows all of this conceptually; first he knows: I want to move my arm. That is a concept. Then he knows what it looks like in his form when he has moved his arm: again, an idea. What he knows of it in his ordinary consciousness is a fabric of ideas; feelings surge beneath this fabric of ideas. But what works in him as will sleeps just as deeply during waking as our whole being sleeps from falling asleep to waking.

What sleeps there? That which sleeps down there, which is built into us from the outer cosmos, is just as much asleep as the minerals and plants are asleep for us outside. That is to say, we do not penetrate into them from the outside, do not look down into what is cosmic for us. We weave and live in this cosmic from falling asleep to waking up. And to the same extent that we see through the outer world, we live ourselves into our own organization. To the same extent that we stop having mere reminiscences, as we peel them from life's events, we get ideas of forces that constitute and build up our organs — the lungs, liver, stomach, and so on. To the same extent that we learn to see through the outer world, we learn to see through our piece of cosmos, which we have incorporated, in which we are, which is in our skin, without us knowing anything about it in our ordinary consciousness.

What do we take with us from this cosmos when we wake up in the morning? The thing that we take with us is very clearly experienced by the unbiased observer as will. And basically, the difference between the life of waking thought and that which flows dreamily in the subconscious is nothing other than that the former is permeated by the will. It is the will that introduces logic, and logic is basically not actually a doctrine of thinking, but a doctrine of how the will orders and tames thought images and brings them into a certain external order, which then corresponds to the external course of the world.

When we wake up with a dream, we perceive particularly strongly this surge down there of chaotic, illogical swirls of images, and we can notice how we plunge our will into this chaotic swirling of images, and our will then orders what lives in us in such a way that it is logically ordered. But we do not take with us the world logic, what I just called super-logic, we only take the will with us.

How is it that this will now works logically in us? You see, here lies an important human mystery, something extraordinarily significant. It is this: when we delve into our cosmic existence, which is not present in ordinary consciousness, when we delve into our whole organization, then we feel in our will, which is spreading there, the cosmic logic of our organs. We feel the cosmic logic of our organs.

It is extremely important to realize that when we wake up in the morning and plunge into our body, we are forced by this immersion to form our will in a certain way. If our body were not already formed in a certain way, the will would swirl like a jellyfish in all directions when we wake up; the will could strive chaotically in all directions like a jellyfish when we wake up. It does not do that because it is immersed in the existing human form. There it submerges, takes on all these forms; this gives it a logical structure. This is why he gives logic to the otherwise chaotically swirling thoughts within the human body. At night, when man sleeps, he is incorporated into the super-logic of the cosmos. He cannot hold on to it. But when he submerges into the body, the will takes on the form of the body. Just as when you pour water into a vessel and the water takes on the shape of the vessel, so the will takes on the form of the body. But it is not just that the will takes on the spatial forms, like when you pour water into a vessel and the water takes on the whole shape of the vessel. Rather, it flows into the smallest veins everywhere. That cannot move, at most, according to Professor Traub, tables and chairs in the room move by themselves, but that is theological university logic, otherwise such a device does not move – the water takes on the resting form and only touches the outer walls. But in the case of humans, this will is completely integrated into all the individual branches and from there it then dominates the otherwise chaotic sequence of images. What one perceives as an undercurrent is, I would say, released from the body. It is truly released from the body, it is something that is connected to the human body, but which actually constantly strives to free itself from the human body, which constantly wants to get out of the forms of this human body. But what the human being carries out of the body when falling asleep, what he carries into the cosmos, what then submerges, that submits to the law of the body.

Now it is the case that with all the organization, which is the human head organization, the human being would only come to images. It is a general physiological prejudice that we also reason and draw conclusions with our heads. No, we merely imagine with our heads. If we only had a head and the rest of the body were inactive for our imaginative life, then we would be waking dreamers. The head has only the ability to dream while awake. And when we return from the head to the body in the morning, passing through the will, the dreams come to our consciousness. Only when we penetrate deeper into our body, when the will adapts not only to the head but also to the rest of the organization, only then is this will again able to bring logic into the otherwise pictorially intertwined powers of images.

This will lead you to something that I have already mentioned in previous lectures. It must be clear to you that man visualizes with his head and that he judges, as strange and paradoxical as it may sound, with his legs and also with his hands, and then again concludes with his legs and hands. This is how we arrive at what we call a conclusion, a judgment. When we imagine, it is only the image that is reflected back into our heads; we are judging and concluding as a whole person, not just as a head person. Of course, it does not occur to us that if a person is mutilated, they cannot or should not judge and conclude, because it depends on how things are arranged

in such people who, as it were, happen to lack one or other limb. We must learn to relate what the human being is spiritually and soulfully to the whole human being, to realize that we bring logic into our imaginative life from the same regions that we do not even reach with ordinary consciousness, which are occupied by the being of feeling and the being of will. Our judgments and conclusions arise from the same sleeping regions of our own inner being, from which our feelings and our will resound.

The most cosmic region in us is the mathematical region. The mathematical region belongs to us not only as a resting human being, but as a walking human being. We always move somehow in mathematical figures. When we look at a walking person from the outside, we see something spatial; when we experience it internally, we experience the mathematics within us, which is cosmic, only that the cosmic also builds us up. The spatial directions that we have outside also build us up and we experience them within us. And by experiencing them, we abstract them, take the images that are mirrored in the brain and interweave them with what is shown to us externally in the world.

It is important to note today that what man puts into the world in the form of mathematics is actually the same thing that builds him up, that is, what is cosmic in nature. For through nonsensical Kantianism, space has been made merely a subjective form. It is not a subjective form; it is something that we experience in the same region as the will. And there it shines forth. There the shining forth becomes something with which we then penetrate that which presents itself externally.

Today's world is still far from being able to study this inner interweaving of the human being with the cosmos, this standing within the cosmos. I have drawn attention to this relationship in a striking way in my Philosophy of Freedom, where you will find remarkable passages in which I show that, in our ordinary consciousness, human beings are connected with the whole cosmos, that they are a part of the whole cosmos, and that, as it were, the individual human element blossoms out of this general cosmic element, which is then embraced by ordinary consciousness. This passage in particular of my “Philosophy of Freedom” has been understood by very few people; most have not known what it is about. It is no wonder that in an age in which abstraction flourishes to the point of being taken for granted, in an age in which this view, which is admittedly extremely ingenious in itself but absolutely abstract, is presented to the world as something special, that which seeks to introduce reality, true reality, is not understood.

It must be emphasized again and again: it is not enough for something to be logical. Einsteinism is logical, but it is not in touch with reality. All relativism is not in touch with reality as such. Thinking in touch with reality begins only where one can no longer leave reality by thinking. Isn't it true that today man reads, or listens, I should say, quite calmly, when Einstein says, as an example: What would happen if a clock were to fly out into the cosmos at the speed of light? Yes, a person today listens to that quite calmly. A clock flying out into the cosmos at the speed of light is, for someone who lives in reality in his thinking, lives in reality in his soul, roughly the same as if someone were to say: What happens to a person when I cut off his head, and in addition, his right hand and his left hand, or his right arm and so on? He simply ceases to be a human being. In the same way, what one is still justified in imagining when one talks about a clock flying out into the cosmos at the speed of light immediately ceases to be a clock! It is not possible to imagine that. If one wants to arrive at valid thinking, the reality must be adhered to. Something can be logical and ingenious to an enormous degree, but it does not necessarily follow that it is in accordance with reality. And it is thinking in accordance with reality that we need in this age. For abstract thinking ultimately really leads us to no longer seeing reality at all because of all the abstractions. And today humanity admires the abstractions that are presented to it in this way. It does not matter whether these abstractions are somehow logically substantiated or the like. What matters is that man learns to grow together with reality, so that he can no longer say anything other than what is actually spoken from reality.

But such conceptions about the human being, as I have presented to you today, provide a kind of guide to realistic thinking. They are often ridiculed today by those who have been trained in our abstract thinking. For three to four centuries, Western humanity has been trained through mere abstraction. But we live in the age in which a reversal in this direction must take place, in which we must find our way back to reality. People have become materialistic, not because they have lost logic, but because they have lost reality. Materialism is logical, spiritualism is logical, monism is logical, dualism is logical, everything is logical, as long as it is not based on real errors in reasoning. But just because something is logical does not mean that it corresponds to reality. Reality can only be found if we bring our thinking more and more into that region of which I said: in pure thinking, one has the world event at one corner. This is in my epistemological writings, and this is what must be gained as the basis for an understanding of the world.

In the moment when one still has thinking, despite having no sensory perception, in that moment one has thinking as will at the same time. There is no longer any difference between willing and thinking. For thinking is a willing and willing is then a thinking. When thinking has become completely free of sensuality, then one has a glimpse of world events. And that is what one must strive for above all: to get the concept of this pure thinking. We will continue our discussion from this point tomorrow.

As terrestrial beings, human beings initially experience three alternating states of consciousness: the waking state from the moment we wake until we fall asleep; the opposite state, which is the sleeping state, where the soul, as it were, descends into spiritual darkness and has no experiences around it; and between the two, the dream state, of which we are aware of how our waking experiences play into it, but on the other hand, how the connections of waking are changed by certain extraordinarily significant and interesting inner forces, how, to mention just a few examples, something long past appears as something immediately present; how something that passed by the consciousness in complete carelessness, that one perhaps did not pay special attention to in ordinary waking life, moves into the dream consciousness and so on. Things that otherwise do not belong together are brought together by the dream.

But at the same time, it is a very characteristic feature of the dream state that the dream content, everything that is perceived in the dream, is of a strong pictorial quality, that even when the word sounds into the dream, it is the pictorial quality of the word that plays into it, the tone of the word, the modulation of the sounds, all of which are resolved into pictorial quality, even if it is only audible pictorial quality that is heard by the soul.

Now, dreams contain an extraordinary amount of material that can occupy the human soul at its deepest level. But one does not gain insight into the actual spiritual existence if one is unable to form valid ideas about the relationship between these three states of consciousness: waking, dreaming and sleeping.

Today, we would like to characterize these three states of consciousness with the help of spiritual science, as far as possible. First, the state of consciousness during waking life.

A person can become aware that he can lead this waking life by beginning to make use of his body, the organs of his body, but also of his thinking, which is bound to the body, when he wakes up. And even if one has no knowledge of the fact that the I and the astral body submerge into the physical and etheric bodies when one wakes up, one must still feel how, albeit quickly, but distinctly perceptibly, at least distinctly perceptibly, one acquires power over one's limbs, power over one's organs and power to unfold one's inner thinking.

All this can teach people how the waking life of the day is bound to the physical body. And by looking at the etheric or formative body from the point of view of spiritual science, we must also say that this waking life of the day is bound to the etheric or formative body just as it is to the physical body. We must delve into these two aspects of our human nature, we must make use of their organization in order to lead an active daily life.

Now one can succumb to the most diverse illusions about this waking day life if one does not begin to illuminate it from the point of view of spiritual science. We need say little about the sense life; for what could be clearer than that man makes use of his sense organs precisely in the waking day life and that these sense organs convey to him what is around him as a manifestation of the external physical world. One has only to observe the nature of the sense organs to see how, through the relationships of the eye, the ear, and the other senses to the environment, what the human being calls his waking daytime experiences as a revelation of the sensory world comes about.

What now makes it necessary to proceed to a more exact observation is thinking, imagining. Let us be quite clear about the fact that man, with his imaginations, has initially only given an internalization of his sensory life.

If man looks honestly within himself, he will say to himself: Through the senses I receive impressions, in thinking I continue these impressions inwardly. And if we then examine our thoughts, we will find that these thoughts are shadowy images of what the senses convey to us. In a sense, the human being's thinking is directed entirely outwards. Thinking is now the activity of the etheric or formative body, so that we can also say: by thinking as a sentient being on earth, the human being's etheric or formative body is directed outwards. But in this way we have really only considered one side of the etheric or formative body. And if we consider what we have in ordinary waking consciousness, our thoughts about the outer world, it is as if we could only physically observe a person from behind under certain circumstances. Imagine that you had only ever seen a number of people from behind. You would form ideas about them that you might not dare express to them. You would be curious, inquisitive, as to what the people in question look like from the front, and you would be convinced from the outset that the front belongs to the back of a person, that this is the other side, the more expressive side for the physical human being on earth.

So it is when we become aware of the thinking of the external world: we see, as it were, the back side of thinking. It is the other way around because the direction of the currents of the senses always goes from front to back in the human being. Even where it appears to be otherwise, it must be thought of this way: What is represented physically as the front side is for thinking the back side. And basically we have to put ourselves in a position to view human thinking from the other side, where it is not turned towards the impressions of the outer senses, where it shows us its hidden inner side.

But then we come upon something very strange. Then thinking does not present itself to us as it appears when we carry images of the sensory external world in our consciousness. Then, viewed from this other side, our thinking, which after all constitutes the forces of the etheric or formative body, is transformed into forces that build our physical organism, into forces that create our physical organism.

When we grow, when our organs are built up from the germinal state, when our organs are plastically formed, it is the other side of thinking that actively intervenes from the etheric or formative body and organizes us. What works and lives in us as we grow, as we process the food in us, what formative forces are present in us at all, that is the other side of thinking. Ordinary thinking only gives rise to shadowy thoughts in us; it is the reverse side of thinking. But what first gives form to our thinking apparatus, what our brain and our entire nervous system develop, is the creative power of thinking, and this is at the same time the creative power of the formative forces or etheric body. That is the other side.

It does not take much clairvoyant power to see how this creative power of thinking works in man as a force of growth, as a formative force. One needs only, I might say, to turn inward to become aware that thinking is not just a shadowy reflection of the outside world, but an inner activity. One needs only, so to speak, to turn back from being turned to the outside world to what one does inwardly, what one thinks, then one becomes aware of this activity of thinking.

In this grasping of the activity of thinking, we now grasp first of all what human freedom is, and the understanding of freedom is one with the grasping of this activity of thinking. Therefore, by grasping the activity of thinking in this way, one also grasps the morality that permeates and interweaves the human being.

In my Philosophy of Freedom, I wanted to make comprehensible this grasping of thinking as an active element, this grasping of pure thinking as opposed to thinking filled with external sense images, this inward jerk, and to make comprehensible how the human being can inwardly grasp this activity of thinking, and how, through this inward turning, he can grasp morality as something that can arise in pure thinking, and how, through this, he can also truly attain the consciousness of freedom.

So that we can say: Let us turn human thinking, which initially shows us in its first aspect shadowy images of the sensual outside world, let us turn it around before us, then it becomes the plastic creative power of the human being himself, then it becomes the inner activity, then it becomes the carrier of freedom, that in which, as it were, what moral impulses are in the human being can be intercepted.

In this way, we advance from the physical body into the etheric body in a spiritual way. We can therefore say: the first step up into the spiritual world is the actual experience of the feeling of freedom.

And now let us look at dream consciousness. Dreams may be chaotic, they may be dreams of terror and fear, they may be sweet dreams, but they always weave and live in images that they conjure up before the soul. Let us disregard the content of the dream, but let us look at the drama of the dream, and we see how the soul, so to speak, weaves and lives waking up or falling asleep in these dream images.

Yes, a certain power of the soul expresses itself in this way. One may argue about the extent to which these images are right or wrong, but the fact that these images can be formed must indicate to us that there is a power in the soul that forms these images. The dream image is placed before this soul itself by an inner power of the soul. There is an inward weaving power of the soul in the formation of dreams.

Look at the moment of waking up. You must feel how, emerging from the darkness of sleep, this inner weaving power is present. But it submerges into the physical and etheric bodies. You would dream away if this power did not submerge. It is the power of the astral body. The astral body, which is incapable of becoming aware of itself when it is outside the physical and etheric bodies, begins to feel itself, to sense its own power, by awakening, by feeling the resistance of the physical and etheric bodies when it enters them. It appears chaotic in dreams, but it is the soul's own power that has been alive from the moment of falling asleep until waking up and that is now submerging. Yes, the dream-forming power pours into the physical and etheric bodies. It descends into the blood circulation, it descends into the muscle tension and relaxation. The dream-forming power also enters into the etheric body. Thereby this dream-forming power is strengthened. By itself it is weak and powerless. The dream images flit about aimlessly when the dream-forming power is alone. But when the dream-forming power engages with the physical and etheric bodies, making use of the organs of the physical and etheric bodies, it becomes strong.

What does it do as it becomes strong? Well, it develops memory in the human being. Remembrance and memory are nothing other than the dream-forming power embodied in the physical and etheric bodies. The dream enters into the physical body and is thus integrated into the order of the physical world. It then forms the content of memory, which is no longer chaotic but integrated into the physical world.

We could not remember anything if we did not bring the power of dreams with us into our physical body when we wake up; for in the physical body, the power of dreaming becomes the power of remembering, of memory.

And when you sit quietly, turned away from the external world of the senses, and let your memories play, your memories that surface, calm, bless, your memories that stir the imagination – when you let them run their course, it is the dream power, strengthened by the physical and etheric body, that dream-power which, when the astral body kept it outside the physical and etheric bodies, was immersed in the spirit of the world and experienced the secrets of things in the spirit of the world.

If you were to perceive the same power that forms the power of memory in your waking state asleep, you would not have the chaotic images of the dream, which only form in the moment of immersion in the physical and etheric bodies, but you would experience yourself immersed in the external world, freed from the physical and etheric bodies, sleeping in a majestic world of images.

This world of images would be the cosmic counter-image of what ascends and descends in your memories in lonely contemplation. Your memory life is the microcosmic counter-image of that macrocosmic, gigantic, majestic weaving and billowing of images that our dream power undergoes when the astral body has submerged, instead into the physical and etheric bodies, into the things and processes of the outer cosmos.

And when we speak of the spiritual content of our soul and find that this spiritual content of our soul undulates in what is transformed from external impressions and lives in our memories, in the content of our memory, which, appropriated by our own inner being, basically constitutes everything blissful and tragic, joyous and sorrowful of our soul life, when we consider all that lives in our soul as spiritual content in our memory, then we must realize that we owe it to the fact that we can immerse the dream-forming submerge the dream-forming power, which is actually akin to the cosmos, into our inner being, so that what lives in the formative forces out there in the cosmos, what creates and works outside, is present in our inner being as the memory power that spiritualizes us and spiritualizes our soul.

Thus, in the power of remembrance, we feel related to all the creative and working forces of the cosmos. And we may say: when I look out and see how the images of plants unfold in spring, when I look into the forest and see how the trees develop from their germs over the years and decades, when I look up and see how clouds change under the influence of the more external formative forces, when I look out and see how mountains form and eroded away in the world, I look up at all these formative forces that work their way up to the stars: I have something akin to all this in my own soul, I have the powers of remembrance in my soul, and these are the microcosmic image of what weaves and works out there in the world in the metamorphoses of things.

And now let us consider the I, which, even in a sleeping state, leaves the physical and etheric bodies and connects with the things and processes of the cosmos outside. We then become aware of how we, as human beings, are able to immerse ourselves in things with our actual being, even if this remains unconscious in our experience of the world. However, the self itself emerges from the deep sleep, emerges into the physical and etheric body. And here it is only spiritual scientific initiation that can pursue this. While for memory, the slipping of the power of dreaming into the physical body still provides a point of reference for ordinary observation, with imagination, as it can be developed in the sense of my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, one must now also learn to observe how, from falling asleep to waking up, the things and processes of the cosmos, how the I, which remains from falling asleep to waking up, submerges into the physical and etheric body, how now also that which is so powerless for the present human development on earth that the human being is immersed in sleep as in darkness, in the darkness of his soul , and when it submerges into the physical and etheric bodies, it now also strengthens itself in the physical and etheric bodies, as it takes hold of the pathways of the physical and etheric bodies and seizes the innermost power of the blood, through the innermost power of the blood.

And this too has its manifestation in the waking consciousness of the day. The I, immersing itself in the physical and etheric bodies, then expresses itself. The I is that which works and weaves in the human being as the free one; it can express itself, it cannot express itself. But when it expresses itself, what is its most characteristic expression in the human being? It is the power of love appearing in the human being.

We would never have the ability to merge with love in another being or another process, to merge with this other process, so to speak, if the I did not also leave us every night in real terms in order to immerse itself in the things and processes of the cosmos outside. There it submerges itself in reality. By slipping into us in our fully awakened consciousness, it gives us the inner strength to love through the abilities it has acquired outside. This is what emerges as the threefold power of the soul at its deepest core: freedom, memory life, love power.

Freedom, the inner primal form of the etheric or formative body. The power of memory, the inwardly occurring dream-forming power of the astral body. Love, the inwardly occurring power of love that leads the human being to devotion to the outer world.

Through the fact that the human soul can partake of this threefold power, it permeates itself with spiritual life. For this threefold permeation with the sense of freedom, with the power of remembrance, through which we hold together past and present, through the power of love, through which we are able to give our own inner being to the outer world and become one with the outer world, through the holding of these three powers of the soul, this our soul becomes spiritualized.

To grasp this with the right soul nuance means to grasp what it means that man carries the spirit in his soul. And anyone who does not understand this threefold inner spiritualization of the soul does not understand how the soul of man harbors the spirit.

This then extends to life. If we are able to establish a living inner connection between memory and love - the memory that prevails in us through the astral body, love through the I - then in certain cases a wonderful thing can be achieved.

In this way, these things are grasped directly in life. We preserve the memory of a beloved dead person beyond death. We carry his image in our soul, that is, we add to the sensual impressions we received from him during our lifetime that which remains with us when his sensual existence has been withdrawn from us. We continue life with the dead in our memory with all the strength and intensity of our soul, continuing it in such a way that we no longer have the support of external sensory impressions, and we try to bring these memories to such a vibrancy that it may seem to us as if the dead person is there in the immediate present. We remain aware that we carry this in our memory, but we then connect this power, which is strengthened by our astral body, with the power that we have through our ego, with the power of love. We preserve the intense love for the dead person beyond the grave. We enable ourselves to connect the power of love with the image, which no longer receives sensual stimulation, in the same way that we could otherwise develop the power of love under sensual stimulation.

In this way, it is possible to strengthen what the astral body and the ego would otherwise only express when they make use of the organs of the physical body. Particularly when we preserve the memory of the dead, which can no longer be stimulated in us by the physical body and the etheric body, when we can keep this memory so active and alive that we can connect it with an intense love, then this is a way to awaken inwardly to a certain degree of astral body and I, and precisely in the memory that we are able to preserve for the dead lies one of the first steps to freeing the I and the astral body from the physical body. to a certain degree of the astral body and the I, and it is precisely in the memory that we are able to preserve for the dead person that one of the first steps towards freeing the I and the astral body from the physical and etheric body during the waking state lies.

If people could understand what it means to keep the memory alive, to look at the image that remains of the dead person as one would look at it alive, then they would experience the liberation of the astral body and the ego in this way, which leads across the threshold that lies between the physical and the spiritual world. This experience contains the following insight: We first have the memory, vividly, as if the dead person were still there; we know that through our waking consciousness we connect the image of the dead person with love, which we otherwise only had when we received sensual impressions from him. We bring all this to life within us. The jolt occurs when we are able to develop the necessary inner strength. The jolt occurs, we cross the threshold into the spiritual world. The dead person can be there in his reality.

This is one of the ways for a person to enter the spiritual world. It is connected with something that can only be revered, something that can even be recognized in reverence and with a certain inner serious attitude.

If you allow all the seriousness to take effect on your soul that can be associated with such ideas, as I have just presented to you for the case of crossing the threshold into the spiritual world, if you visualize this seriousness, then at the same time you have an idea of all the seriousness that must be associated with entering the spiritual world at all. Life must, as it were, have shown us by our own will its deep seriousness if we truly want to enter the spiritual world, yes, if we really seriously want to understand the spiritual world.

This is what the science of initiation has always sought to infuse into external civilization. But this is also what our so externalized time needs again.

For it is a remarkable phenomenon that to man today dogmatic science is worth more than reality. In every moral act man can be conscious of his freedom. And just as we experience red or white, so we actually experience freedom as human beings. But we deny it. We deny it under the authority of contemporary science. Why? Because contemporary science only wants to look at the mechanical, wherever the earlier is the cause of the later. And there this science dictates dogmatically: everything must have its cause. It dogmatically dictates causality, and because causality must be right, because one wants to swear by causality dogmatically, therefore one numbs oneself to the feeling of freedom. Reality is plunged into night in order to maintain the dogma, in this case the dogma of external science, which exercises such strong authority.

Science abolishes life. For if life were to become aware of itself in man, this life would immediately grasp freedom in the activity of thinking. And so purely external science, based on causality, has become the great killer of the sense of life in man. One must be aware of this.

Can we hope that if man inwardly abolishes the experience of freedom, he can then go further to the spiritual form, to the spiritual form of memory? Can one hope that man, just as he otherwise lets the red of the red rose be revealed, will thus let memory be that which, in him, reveals the 'power of dreaming' that is weaving and working in the universe? Can one hope that man can gain conviction for the second step if he kills the sense of freedom on the first step through the so-called dogma of causality? In so doing, man fails to look into the spirituality of his own soul. Thus he does not penetrate down to the point where he realizes that, in addition to the ability to live asleep outside among things, he acquires the ability in the spiritual I to love through his spirit. The last reason for love lies in the spirit-imbued I, which submerges into the human physical and etheric organism. And to recognize the spirituality of love means, in a certain case, to recognize the spirit at all. He who recognizes love also recognizes the spirit. But in order to recognize love he must penetrate to the inner spiritual experience of love. It is precisely in this respect that our civilization has taken the most false course.

Memory is a weaving and living within the soul, and there the differences are not so clearly and deeply apparent. Only mystic spirits, Swedenborg, Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, feel, as they immerse themselves in their memories, the weaving and living of the spiritual-eternal in this memory, speak of the igniting spark that flashes up in man when he becomes aware in remembrance that in this remembrance the same thing lives inwardly microcosmically that works and weaves outwardly in the creative, forming powers that lie dream-like at the basis of all world existence. There the things are not so clear.

But they become clear when we go to the third stage, when we see how our civilization has misunderstood the original spiritual nature and weaving of love. Everything that is spiritual naturally has its outer sensual form, for the spirit submerges into the physical. It embodies itself in the physical. If it then forgets itself and becomes aware only of the physical, it believes that what is stirred by the spirit is merely stirred by the physical. Our time lives in this delusion. It does not know love. It only fantasizes about love, yes, lies about love. In reality, it only knows eroticism when thinking about love. I do not want to say that the lonely do not experience love, because man in his unconscious feeling, in his unconscious will, denies the spirit much less than in his thinking - but when contemporary civilization thinks about love, then it only speaks the word love, then it actually speaks of eroticism. And one can truly say: if you go through contemporary literature, everywhere, for example, where love is written in German, the word eroticism should actually be used. For that is all that thinking immersed in materialism knows of love. It is the denial of the spirit that turns the power of love into the power of eroticism. In many areas, not only has the genius of love been replaced by its lower servant, eroticism, but in many places the opposite image, the demon of love, has now also emerged. But the demon of love arises when that which otherwise works in man as willed by God is claimed by human thinking, is torn away from spirituality by intellectuality.

So the descending path is: one recognizes the genius of love, one has spiritualized love. One recognizes the lower servant, eroticism. But one falls into the demon of love. And the demon of love has its genius in the interpretation, not in the real form, but in the interpretation of sexuality by today's civilization. How today, when one wants to approach love, not only is there talk of eroticism, but only of sexuality!

It can be said that much of what is aimed at today as so-called sex education is already included in this way in which civilization talks about sexuality. The demonology of love lives in this present-day intellectualized discourse on sexuality. Just as, on another level, the genius that an age is meant to follow appears in its demon, because the demon enters where the genius is denied, so it is in this area, where the spiritual is meant to appear in its most intimate form, in the form of love. Our age often prays to the demon of love instead of to the genius of love, and confuses that which is the spirituality of love with the demonology of love in sexuality.

Of course, the most complete misunderstandings can arise in this area. For that which lives originally in sexuality is permeated by spiritual love. But humanity can fall away from this spiritualization of love. And it falls back most easily in this intellectualistic age. For when intellect takes on the form of which I spoke yesterday, then the spiritual element of love is forgotten, only its external form is taken into account.

It is within man's power, I would say, to deny his own nature. He denies it when he sinks from the genius of love to the demon of sexuality — although I do understand the way people feel about these things, as it is mostly present in the present.

If we bear this in mind, we will have to admit that anthroposophy can guide us, not just intellectually, but also in our innermost soul and spiritual life, and help us to rediscover the spirit within the soul. For we can become intimate with anthroposophy. And we will become intimate with it if we understand how to take it in its reality.

Today, in some external way, it has been suggested that one should develop a picture or something similar of anthroposophy. Yes, is it not there in its reality? Do we still need a picture? But what we need is to become intimate with anthroposophy through our own inner honesty. Then it penetrates into the innermost fabric of our soul life and soul being. We should not try to form an image in an external way. But inwardly we should become intimate with this living being, which, as Anthroposophy, should, I would say, go everywhere between our ranks when we are united as people who understand such things.

If we really live with Anthroposophy as a real entity that walks among us in a higher sense, if we are real human beings, if we become intimate with this Anthroposophy, then we will be impelled to experience in real terms what humanity so urgently needs to experience in our time: not just an image for the soul's eye, but a love for the essence of anthroposophy in our hearts. That is what we need, and that is what will most be able to be an impulse of our time.

In this way, I have tried to add the spiritual perspective to the physical and soul perspectives of anthroposophy. The spiritual perspective is not an external pursuit of the spirit; on the contrary, the spiritual perspective is the experience of anthroposophy in the deepest, most intimate part of the human soul and heart. And this deep, intimate experience of anthroposophy in the human soul and in the human heart is the meditation that leads us to an encounter, to a real encounter with anthroposophy.

This is an attempt to present the three perspectives that anthroposophy can open up: the physical, the soul and the spiritual.

From the descriptions given yesterday you will have gathered that man has gradually to acquire freedom in the present period of world and human evolution. On looking back into the past evolution of the world, we find how, in respect of his most important activities, his walking, speaking, thinking, man has been prepared from above by divine-spiritual Beings. We see how, in order to ensure that what these divine Beings have accomplished in man during his earthly existence shall take effect, if only unconsciously, he is always led between death and rebirth into association with these Beings.

You will remember that I spoke of a man being led through the forces of Sun and Moon, and then, in the realm of the Sun, through Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, into the world of the stars, spiritually understood. To this I would add that when a man in the life between death and rebirth has, so to say, to retrace his steps after, as at present, progressing in the region of the planetoids to a perception of the Saturn impulses, on this return journey he comes into relation with the most sublime divine-spiritual Beings of the higher Hierarchies—Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim. These are spiritual Beings whose impulses extend over both spiritual and natural existence. While entering into the laws of nature and infusing them with life and with spirit, they have the purpose of bringing about enduring harmony between these laws of nature and the moral life of the whole Cosmos. They are Beings who have never appeared in any physical form, yet in the spiritual world they exercise a scarcely conceivable power upon the Earth, and make it possible for moral law to be brought into continuous harmony with natural law. And so, because a man during his existence beyond the Earth is able constantly to give new life to impulses of the past, he reaches a point in his evolution when he can work in accordance with these extra-earthly impulses.

In the present epoch of the evolution of world and of man, however, we are faced with the task of taking under our own free control everything that in the past was more or less a matter of compulsion, determined for all human beings by higher Powers.

When we survey this evolution of world and of man we find that at a certain definite time man encountered difficulties which had to be overcome on his way from being led exclusively by divine-spiritual Beings to the conscious work of raising himself to knowledge of these Beings and so to the gaining of human freedom. This point of time, which in a certain sense signifies the greatest crisis in the whole evolution of man, came approximately 333 years after the Mystery of Golgotha. Such dates are only approximate owing to time being reckoned in various ways. According to our present reckoning, it was 333 years after the Mystery of Golgotha that this crisis came about.

If we look back at this critical moment, we can describe it more or less in the following way. If the evolution of mankind and that of the Earth itself had continued as they were doing, if men had remained under the guidance of the divine-spiritual Beings who had been leading them up to that time, then, since it was intended by those Beings that men should acquire freedom, it would have been achieved—but with what result? At that time it would have meant upsetting the balance between the two parts of the human astral body.

Think of the connection between the physical body and the astral body: we will keep to the astral body first. Before the year 333 the greater part of the astral body had been active essentially in the upper man, and its smaller part in his lower body—the middle man being between the two. And because in those times the upper part of the astral body was the more powerful, it was through it that divine-spiritual Beings exercised upon man their greatest influence. In accordance with the plan for mankind, human evolution has proceeded in such a way that up to about 3,000 years before Christ those conditions for the astral body held good, but by 1,000 years before Christ the lower part of the astral body was becoming larger and the upper part relatively smaller, until, in the year 333, the two parts had become equal. This was the critical situation 333 years after the coming of Christ, and since then the upper part of a man's astral body has been continuously decreasing. That is the course taken by his evolution.

It is impossible to follow the evolution of man in its reality unless we are able to understand what happens to the human astral body in the course of earthly evolution. If human beings had not undergone this decrease in the upper part of the astral body, their Ego would never have been able to gain sufficient influence and they could never have become free. This decrease in the astral body therefore contributes to the evoking of freedom. I have already said that there is no sense in asking why the Gods have not arranged everything to give human beings pleasure. The Gods had to create a universe that was inherently possible. Much that gives men the greatest pleasure rests on that, besides other things which, until they are enlightened, they do not find at all agreeable. This decrease of the astral body is connected with something else, for on the size of the astral body in the upper part of man—not on its size as a whole—depends his power to control, with his Ego and astral body, his physical and etheric bodies. Hence all men are likely to have their health gradually impaired by this decrease in the astral body. We can form a true conception of human evolution only if we recognise that freedom has to be paid for on Earth by a general weakening of health. Not, of course, in the form of cholera or typhus, but freedom is not to be gained without bringing ill-health of some kind along with it.

If all human forces after the year 333 had remained as they were, men on Earth would have become weaker and weaker, increasingly powerless. And earthly life would have come to an end through this complete decadence of mankind.

At this point there took place what I should like to describe as follows. At a gathering of those divine-spiritual Beings I spoke of as belonging to the Sun, it was decided to send down to the Earth their representative, the Christ, there to go through something that the divine Beings connected with mankind would be experiencing for the first time. Birth and death are certainly not what materialists imagine them to be, but they are part of man's earthly existence. None of the divine-spiritual Beings above man—Angels, Archangels, and so on up to the highest—had ever known death, but only metamorphoses. They change from one form to another, but they are not born and do not die. A man, too, changes form, but at the same time he lays aside his physical and etheric bodies, thus making birth and death a more radical change than any change experienced by the higher Hierarchies. So the leaders in the harmonies and impulses of the Sun resolved to send down to Earth the Christ, as a Being who had not yet experienced birth and death, so that He might go through this purely human destiny. The Mystery of Golgotha, therefore, is not merely the concern of mankind; it is also a concern of the Gods, and this can be put into words such as these: The Sun Gods met and held counsel together as to the steps they should take for warding off from mankind the danger of becoming weaker and weaker through the decline of the astral body.

And so the Christ was sent down to Earth and went through birth and death—naturally not as a human being but as a divine Being. The consequence was that through the Mystery of Golgotha, through the fact of Christ's death, forces came into Earth-evolution for the healing of those other forces which, in the sense already described, were the cause of sickness. Thus Christ became for mankind, in very truth, the great cosmic and terrestrial Healer of mankind. In other words, His forces entered everything that has to be healed in human beings, so that man, having his tendency to decadence on the one hand, but on the other the saving forces of Christ, can find his way to freedom. Therefore, provision was made in world-evolution to ensure that, 333 years before the great crisis, the Mystery of Golgotha should take place.

Human evolution on Earth, accordingly, could not have gone forward without this threat of disastrous universal sickness, to begin in the year 333. Then, through the Mystery of Golgotha, came the great universal healing. Everything therefore done by man without Ego-consciousness, everything that derives from the deeper forces tending to his future downfall, can be healed through association with the Christ. That is what the Mystery of Golgotha means for earthly and human evolution.

The situation I have just been explaining was known, until the fourth century after the coming of Christ, to certain men who still had some knowledge of the facts through having absorbed the spiritual life of their time. In all ages before the Mystery of Golgotha there had been old Mysteries, where the pupils were instructed concerning men's past earthly evolution, the coming of Christ, and what was to take place in mankind's future evolution. They were shown in great and powerful pictures the connection of men on Earth with the spiritual Beings of the higher worlds. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha there were still isolated individuals here and there who, though scarcely more advanced than the old Mystery pupils, had preserved some knowledge of these matters—a knowledge later called Gnosis. They were scattered through Western Asia, Africa, Southern Europe. Their knowledge, their wisdom, extended to the source of events in the evolution of Earth and man, and to the mighty part played by the Mystery of Golgotha for dwellers on the Earth. But these men, who still had knowledge of the old Mystery secrets, were filled with anxiety. They knew that a crisis was coming for mankind. They knew that in the future human understanding would no longer be able to fathom the depths of earthly and human evolution.

Thus, in certain personalities of the first four Christian centuries it is possible to discern anxiety—not about earthly affairs but about the whole course of world-evolution. Will men be truly ripe enough, they asked, to receive what the Mystery of Golgotha has brought? This, in the first four centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha, was the great question for those we might call successors of the old Initiates.

From among those who in these first centuries were still initiated in Christian Mysteries there came, for example, a wonderful poem. It told of the coming of Christ to Earth, but it also gave in impressive dramatic form—although as a whole the poem was epic—powerful pictures of the men of the near future, who would no longer be able to understand the need for a healing element in human evolution. After these pictures had revealed something of what the Gods had decreed from the Sun—in the way I mentioned—and the descent of Christ into the man Jesus had been impressively described, the poem went on to picture how in human evolution there was to be, in a new, metamorphosed form, a revitalising of the old Demeter-Isis being. It was shown how this being was to be revered in a special, powerfully depicted human form, coming in the future as a solemn promise to mankind.

These poet-priests, as I might call them, of the first four Christian centuries, or at least the most outstanding among them, described how in the further evolution a certain cult was to arise, practised by all who were to attain to learning and a life of the spirit. For such men a sacrificial act of some kind would be established.

The epic pictured a younger man who was to enter into the whole way in which human evolution at that time was understood. It was shown how he was to pass from youth to maturity by developing a cult of the Virgin. This ritual observance, this sacrificial act, shown as necessary for all who were becoming learned and wise, if humanity was to find connection with what had come to men through the Mystery of Golgotha, was portrayed in vivid colours. A mighty poem, full of colour, came into being in those early centuries of Christianity. And among those living more or less in the atmosphere of this poem there were also painter-priests, who, it is true, painted these scenes in the simple way understood by ordinary folk; but their pictures had power and went straight to the heart.

This is what that poem accomplished. But together with all that came definitely from the Gnosis, it was rooted out later by the Church. We have only to remember how it was merely by so-called chance that later on the writings of Scotus Erigena were saved, and it will not seem absurd when spiritual research claims that this greatest of poems, evoking the New Testament, was exterminated root and branch by the later Church, so that nothing of it was left in the following centuries. Yet this poem had been there. It was rooted out, together with all the simple but impressive paintings connected with it. Concealed in it was all the anxiety felt at the time by the successors of the old Initiates. There rang through this poem the grave tones of an elegy.

Now, among those who did not follow Augustine into a quite different stream, a number of people retained the capacity to understand these things right into the fourth century, even up to the beginning of the fifth. But this understanding could not remain as vivid as it had once been; the spiritual forces of people in Southern Europe were no longer adequate for that. So the fundamentals of understanding became crystallised in the dogmas that have endured, though this could not have happened if the dogmas had not been preserved in a language growing ever more lifeless—the Latin language. This carrying on of Latin into the Middle Ages by learned men had the effect of benumbing a once living understanding, so that finally all that was known about Christ becoming man, about the sending of the Spirit, and about the great healing of which I have spoken, had become rigidified in dogmas. These dogmas were propagated through the Latin tongue, the very words of which had nothing more to do with the true content of the teaching. Thus, in the spreading of Western scholarship through the medium of Latin, there took place a gradual drying-up of the fiery, phosphoric element which had permeated that exterminated poem.

Then came all the youthful peoples of the North, stirred up more from the East, and they received the Christ Impulse in the Latinised form through which it was losing vitality.

We must picture this Christ Impulse coming up from the South, and the peoples who spread over the North accepting a dried-up Christianity because their youthful spiritual forces lacked power to give fresh life to the greatness underlying the frozen dogmas. The aftermath of all this is still with us to-day. Even now in those Northern regions there can apparently be found—for all this is only apparent—forces that seem to have been too late in receiving the Christ Impulse, already rigid in dogma, but are called upon, out of direct knowledge of the spirit, to rediscover all the secrets of the fact of Golgotha and of Christ's entry into earthly life—all of which has, however, to be re-discovered in complete freedom. For even the fact that after the year 333, Christianity, in its benumbed state, made its way up out of Italy, and young races of men swept down, whose successors are now spread throughout Russia, Sweden, Norway, Middle Europe, England, still living under that same influence—all this came about so that, ultimately, human beings should be able to lay hold of the Christ Impulse in freedom.

It is the present task of those peoples who, as representatives of a civilisation, are the first to whom Anthroposophy has to be brought, to accept all that is connected with Christ Jesus, and to recognise that without the Christ Impulse all men would have become mere “pillars of salt”. We can use these physical terms, for the Christ Impulse goes into the physical—right into the healing of the physical. Christ has become the great spiritual Phosphorus working to overcome the salt-forming processes in man. Christus verus Phosphorus—this phrase could be heard on all sides in the first three centuries of Christianity. It was also a leading motif in the lost poem I have described.

So, between past and future, we must take our place in the present, and by the same token be able to look back. Naturally, I have no wish to urge upon you dogmatically what I have just been relating about a lost poem and a forgotten teaching. That is far from my intention. But the methods leading to investigation of man's true spiritual course bring us knowledge of such facts, no less reliable than the facts discovered by modern science and far more reliable than its hypotheses. Just as nobody can be compelled to interest himself in matters which, influenced by present-day materialism, he has always rejected, so will nobody who is as sure of them as of his own life be deterred from speaking of them to those who, with a sound feeling for the whole course of human evolution, are able to perceive the reality of such an impulse at work therein.

After the fourth century of Christianity, the poem referred to no longer existed, but in certain circles many details of it were passed on by word of mouth, and lived on in memory. But the members of these circles were prevented by the growing power of the Church from speaking publicly of any such occurrences during the early Christian centuries. One of those who still had some notion of the poem—though they knew of it only in a greatly changed and weakened form—and some idea of the mood from which it arose, was the teacher of Dante. It may indeed be said that Dante's Commedia, though dogmatically inclined, owed some of its inspiration to what had been there in the first few Christian centuries.

Naturally I am well aware of the objections that can be made to such an interpretation of history—I could make them myself. But recognising, as one must, the care taken by authors of the history taught in our schools, and with all respect for the precision that relies on records and conscientious historical criticism, what is it all worth? It cannot claim to be true history, real history, for it takes no account of those records which have been side-tracked in the course of time. Hence, though documents may be subjected to the most conscientious criticism, true history will be revealed only in the same way as true knowledge of nature and of the heavens—through spiritual investigation. Men must therefore find courage not only to speak about the world of the stars, as we have been doing during our time here, but also to introduce into the usual presentation of history all that it lacks because it was in the interest of certain circles to deprive posterity of relevant documents. But the impulses in those destroyed documents live on in the souls of human beings; live on in those who have come later and crave for the impulses no longer recorded but once so alive in mankind. Hence it will not only be necessary for men—if they wish to reach in their evolution the future intended for them—to transform, to a certain extent, many of their concepts; they will have also to transform their attitude to the truth.

To speak fundamentally: we must find our way again to Christ. Christ must come again. This assumes that during the present century there will be men able to understand in what way Christ will announce His presence, in what guise He will appear. Otherwise terrible disturbances may be stirred up by people who, having in the subconscious depths of their being a premonition of this coming of Christ in the spirit, will represent it to others in a shockingly superficial way. Clear vision into man's evolution during the early future will be possible only when an ever-increasing number of people are sufficiently ripe to see how spiritual research can make real progress; people who are able to discover in the spiritual world what men need for the right shaping of their further course. Failing this, we shall become more and more implicated in all that hinders our approach to the spiritual—not so much where ideas and concepts are concerned, as in our general attitude.

In the ideas and concepts of to-day there is much which looks like a movement towards what must be the true goal of knowledge in our time. In fact, however, this serves somewhat to hinder men from seeing the findings of natural science in the right light. They are left groping for the facts, as it were, in the dark. Observe how to-day—with the general spreading of scientific, medical conceptions—we hear of men who in their later life begin to suffer from nervous troubles that affect their whole physical constitution and lead to genuine symptoms of illness. Our present-day physicians realise, then, how powerless they are to get the better of these symptoms in any obvious way, or to proceed from pathology to therapy. As an immediate contemporary of the outstanding Viennese physician, Breuer, I remember his having a patient in whom physical examination could detect no pathological condition. It was decided to have recourse to hypnosis, which was becoming very popular at that time. Under hypnosis, the patient was found to have had, at an earlier period in his life, a terrible experience, overwhelming him with horror. As far as could be made out, this experience had been repressed into the realm of the subconscious, the unconscious, creating there a “hidden province” of the soul. Though the man himself knew nothing of this, it was there in his life and threatened his health. A man can thus have within him something which, beginning as a soul-experience, has disturbing after-effects; it sets up in his soul an isolated region of which he is unconscious.

It was thought that if the patient recalled his experience, and so became fully conscious of it, this very awareness would lead to his cure.

Cases such as this will be found with increasing frequency in life to-day. But if we are to understand why people are afflicted so often in this way, spiritual knowledge must teach us what happens when the upper part of the astral body decreases, while in its lower part there is a tendency to accumulate subconscious provinces of the soul. We must rise from knowledge of man's soul to the historical knowledge of the spirit, to cosmic spirit-knowledge, in order to explain such phenomena. I knew Breuer well; he was a man of depth; and, because he felt that with our present degree of knowledge no progress was to be made in these matters, he gave up this line of research. He then became involved with other interests, particularly with those of Freud and his followers. Out of that grew psycho-analysis, which rests upon something true, for the phenomena certainly exist. The origin of physical symptoms must be searched for in the soul; the idea is quite right. But the knowledge needed to master the phenomena is not to be found here, for it has to become spiritual knowledge.

Hence this psycho-analysis, which has to do with the quite natural, historical decrease in man's upper astral body, is in the hands of people who are not only amateurs at investigating soul and spirit, but also amateurs in the investigation of the physical body, not knowing how to follow the working of spirit there. So we have two forms of dilettantism coming together; they are really alike, for these people know just as little of the real life of man's soul and spirit as they do of his physical and etheric life. The two extents to which they are dilettante coincide; and when two similar quantities work on each other, they multiply: axa=a², or dxd=d²; thus dilettantismxdilettantism=dilettantismsquared. So it really comes about that something right, based on true foundations, appears amateurish because of the weakness of present-day research. In all this, however, we can see a striving in the right direction. Anything like psycho-analysis should not, therefore, be treated as an invention of the devil, but as an indication that this age of ours wants something it is unable to achieve, and that anything like psychoanalysis will prosper only when founded on spiritual research. Otherwise psycho-analysis will come to us in the strange form to which Jung's logic has driven it.

Jung is indeed capable of writing, for example, a sentence such as this: One can say that through the “hidden provinces” of the soul, man was at one time disposed to assume the existence of a Divine Being. Jung then adds (he is, of course, inclined to atheism): It is obvious that such a Being cannot exist. Psycho-analysis, however, argues that man, having this disposition to believe, must assume the existence of a Divine Being in order to preserve the balance of his soul. For a conscientious person—and I would never fail to recognise that a man such as Jung is both conscientious and precise—this really means: You are obliged to live with an untruth because you are unable to live with the truth. There is no truth in theism, but you have to live with it. In our state of development to-day such things are not taken in earnest; they must, however, be taken with all possible earnestness.

So on all sides, without it being realised, these subconscious yearnings arise. Those of you who have heard or read other lecture-cycles of mine will know that I have often pointed out, from spiritual perception, how it is not right to say: Light streaming from the Sun, for example, goes out endlessly into the infinity of cosmic space, always decreasing in intensity with the square of the distance.

I have repeatedly said that spiritual perception gives a different picture. The idea that light from a centre streams out into endless distance is not correct. Just as a bow-string when drawn can be stretched only to a certain point, and will then spring back, so light goes only to a certain point and always returns. It does not only expand; it is also elastic, rhythmical. Hence the Sun not only radiates light but is all the while receiving it back; for at the end of their outward course the intensity of the rays is different and their course can be changed. I want merely to indicate this as revealing itself in connection with higher cognition, with cosmic knowledge of the world—the true knowledge of Spiritual Science.

Please do not take these remarks as indicating any lack of respect for science on my part. I appreciate science fully; it cannot be sufficiently praised, and one must recognise the high level of intelligence it brings into life to-day. But its statements about light, for example, are amateurish compared with the truth. It is important that the truth should be reached, if only to bring into all these prevailing ideas, which men do not know how to deal with, the impulse that could raise present-day research into the spiritual realm.

In certain occult circles there is a wrong practice: the student is given various occult teachings, but is never brought to the point of being shown whence they derive. The teachings are given in pictures, and the student is not led on to the realities which are imaged in the pictures. Hence his soul is surrounded by a world of pictures, and he never comes to see that through the pictures he ought to be learning about the whole Cosmos.

For this reason, after my Theosophy had appeared, it had to be followed by Occult Science. Here the pictures given in Theosophy are led on into the reality of the starry world, into the evolution of the Earth through Saturn, Sun, Moon, and so on. The two books are complementary to each other.

When in any sphere men are given nothing but pictures, they are hemmed in by them. Persons who practise a wrong kind of occultism do this with a student they are not sure of, and by this means they lead him into what is called “occult imprisonment”. He is then encircled by confusing pictures from which there is no escape—a veritable prison of pictures. That is how much occult harm has been practised, and is still practised to-day. There are even spiritual beings who drive certain people into this occult captivity; but for the soul the phenomenon is just the same. These spiritual beings are let loose in nature when nature is not understood spiritually, but viewed as though atomic processes were part of nature. The spirit in nature is thus denied. Those spirits who are always striving to work against man—the Ahrimanic spirits—then become active in nature, encompassing man with pictures of every kind, so that in this case, too, human beings are occultly imprisoned.

A great part of what to-day is called the scientific outlook—not the facts of science, for they can be relied on—consists of nothing else than pictures of the general occult captivity threatening to overtake mankind. The danger lies in the surrounding of people everywhere with atomistic and molecular pictures. It is impossible, when surrounded by such pictures, to look at those of the free spirit and the stars; for the atomistic picture of the world is like a wall around man's soul—the spiritual wall of a prison house.

This prospect can show us, in the light of Spiritual Science, what should be rightly striven for to-day. The facts of natural science are always fruitful and lead out into the wide realms of the spirit, if they are not approached with the prejudices of the occult prison in which, fundamentally, science is at present confined. These things must be a deep inward experience for us, if we wish to take our right place in the evolution of the Earth and mankind, in accordance with its past and its future. It is all this that speaks to us when in some region we have before our eyes the evidence of human aspiration in the past and are now able to see it in the full light of spirit and of soul.

When here we climb the hills and come upon the Druid stones, which are monuments to the spiritual aspirations of those ancient times, it can be a warning to us that the longings of those people of old who strove after the spirit, and looked in their own way for the coming Christ, will meet with fulfilment only when we, once again, have knowledge of the spirit, through the spiritual vision that is our way of looking for His coming. Christ must come again. Only thus can mankind learn to know Him in His spiritual form, as once, in bodily form, He went through the Mystery of Golgotha.

This is something that here, where such noble monuments of the past have been preserved, can be felt in a particularly living way.