The Rudolf Steiner Archive

for the inauguration of the Vidar branch.

A number of friends from out of town have come to visit our friends in Bochum to see the branch of our spiritual endeavor that has been established here under the Christmas tree. And there is no doubt that all those who have come from out of town to celebrate the opening of this branch with our Bochum friends feel the beauty and spiritual significance of our Bochum friends' decision to found this place of spiritual endeavor and feeling here in this city, in the middle of a field of material activity, in the middle of a field that, so to speak, mainly belongs to the outer life. And in many ways, each of our dear branches, here in this area more than anywhere else, can be a symbol for us of the significance of our kind of anthroposophical spiritual life in the present day and for the future development of human souls.

We are truly not in a situation where we can look critically or disparagingly at what is going on around us when we are in the midst of a field of the most modern material activity, because we are rather in a field that shows us how it must become more and more in later outer life on earth. We would only show ourselves to be foolish if we wanted to say: ancient times, when one was more surrounded by forests and meadows and the original life of nature than by the chimneys of the present, should come back again. One would only show oneself to be unintelligent, for one would prove that one has no insight into what the sages of all times have called “the eternal necessities in which man must find himself.” In the face of the material life that covers the earth, as the 19th century in particular has brought about and which later times will bring to mankind in an even more comprehensive way, in the face of this life there is no justified criticism based on sympathy with the old, but there is only and alone the insight that this is the fate of our earth planet. From a certain point of view, one may call the old times beautiful, one may look upon them as a spring or summer time for the earth, but to rage against the fact that other times are coming would be just as foolish as it would be foolish to be dissatisfied with the fact that autumn and winter follow spring and summer. Therefore, we must appreciate and love it when, out of an inwardly courageous decision, our friends create a place for our spiritual life in the midst of the most modern life and activity. And it will be right if all those who have only come to visit our branch for the sake of today leave with a grateful heart for the beautiful activity of our Bochum friends, which is carried out in a truly spiritual scientific way.

What is so endearing about what we have been calling our “branch initiations” for years is that on such occasions, friends from outside the circle that has come together in a particular place often come from far and wide. As a result, these friends from afar can ignite the inner fire of gratitude that we must have for all those who found such branches, and that, on the other hand, these friends from afar can take with them a vivid impression of what they have experienced, which keeps the thoughts alive, which we then turn to the work of such a branch from everywhere, so that this work can be fruitful from all sides through the creative thoughts. We know that the spiritual life is a reality, we know that thoughts are not just what materialism believes, but that thoughts are living forces that, when we unite them in love, for example over any place of our work, there they unfold, there they are help.

And I would like to be convinced that those who have brought their visit here will also take with them the impulse from today's get-together to think often and often of the place of our work, so that our friends here can feel when they sit together in silence, into that which, by the grace of the hierarchies, becomes spiritual knowledge for us, so that our friends, when they sit together in silence again, may cherish the feeling that creative thoughts are coming from all sides into their working space, their spiritual working space.

Looking at what is, and not practicing an unjustified criticism of existence, is something we are gradually learning through our anthroposophical worldview. There is no doubt that the earth is undergoing a development. And when we, equipped with our anthroposophical knowledge, yes, when we look back with understanding, with what we can know outside of anthroposophical knowledge, to earlier times in the development of the earth, then earlier times appear to us in relation to the earth, which is is riddled with telegraph wires and swept by those electric currents, these times of the earth appear to us like spring and summer time, and the times we are entering appear to us like the autumn and winter time of the earth. But it is not for us to complain about this, but for us to call this a necessity. Nor is it for us to complain, just as it is not for a person to complain when summer comes to an end and autumn and winter arrive.

But when autumn and winter come, the human soul has been preparing for centuries to erect the sign for the living word to enter into the evolution of the earth in the depths of the winter night. And in this way the human heart, the human soul, showed that what is created from the outside by summer without human intervention must be created by human intervention from within.

When we rejoice in the sprouting, sprouting forces of spring, which are replaced by gentle summer forces from the outside, without our intervention, winter, with its blanket of snow, covers what would otherwise, without our intervention, please us during the summer and always brings new proof that divine-spiritual forces prevail throughout the world, so we receive during the cold, dark winter time, we receive what is placed in winter as the summer hope for the future, which tells us that just as spring and summer come after every winter, so too, once the earth has reached its goal in the cosmos, a new spiritual spring and summer will come, which our creative powers help shape. Thus the human heart erects the sign of eternal life.

In this very sign of eternal spiritual life, we feel united today with our friends in Bochum, who some time ago founded their branch here. It is wonderful that we can inaugurate it just before Christmas.

Perhaps to some who at first glance look at it superficially, all that has been discovered about Christ Jesus through our spiritual science, and all that has been revealed to it about Christ Jesus, will look at it superficially, it may seem as if we are replacing the former simplicity and childlikeness of the Christmas festival, with its memories of the beautiful scenes from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, with something tremendously complicated. We must draw people's attention to the fact that at the beginning of our era two Jesus-children entered into earthly evolution; we must speak of how the ego of one Jesus-child moved into the bodies of the other Jesus-child; we must speak of how, in the thirtieth year of Jesus' life, the Christ-being descended and lived for three years in the bodies of Jesus of Nazareth. It might easily appear as though all the love and devotion which men through the centuries have been able to summon up for their own salvation, when they were shown the Christ Child in the manger, surrounded by the shepherds, when the wonderfully moving Christmas carol sounded to their ears, when the Christmas plays were celebrated here and there, when the lights appeared on the Christmas tree, delighting the most childlike hearts, it might appear that in the face of all what so immediately kindles the human heart to intimacy, to devotion, to love, when the warm feeling, the warm sensation, should fade away when one has yet to take in the complicated ideas of the two Jesus children, of the passing over of the one ego into the body of the other, of the descent of a divine spiritual being into the bodily shell of Jesus of Nazareth. But we must not indulge in such thoughts, for it would be a bad thing if we did not want to submit to the law of necessity in this area.

Yes, my dear friends, in the places that lay outside the forest or in the middle of the fields and meadows, the snow-capped mountains and distances or the wide plains and lakes spoke down and into them. In those places that were not traversed by railroad tracks and telegraph wires, hearts could dwell there that were immediately ignited when the manger was built and when one was reminded of what the Gospels of Matthew and Luke told of the birth of the wonderful child. What is contained in these narratives, what has happened on earth in such a way that these narratives bear witness to it, lives and will continue to live. It just takes time, which occurs, we may say, in the “earthly winter”, a time of railways and telegraph wires and meals, stronger forces in the soul, to ignite warmth and intimacy in the heart in the face of the external mechanism, in the face of the external materiality. The soul must grow strong in order to be so inwardly convinced of the truth of what has happened in preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha that it lives firmly in the heart, however outwardly the mechanical natural order may intervene in earthly existence. The knowledge of the child in Bethlehem must penetrate differently into the souls of those who are allowed to live on the edge of the forest, on mountain slopes, by the lakes and in the midst of fields and meadows; the knowledge of the same being must penetrate differently to those who must have grown to the newer conditions of existence.

For this reason, for our own time, those whom we call the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings tell us of those higher contexts that we must consider when speaking of the Child of Bethlehem. With our newer insights, we stand no less soul-filled before the Christmas tree because we must know something different from what earlier times knew. On the contrary, we come to a better understanding of those earlier times, we come to understand why the hope and joy of the future spoke from the eyes of young and old at the Christmas tree and at the manger. We learn to understand how they lived in a way that went beyond what could be seen immediately, when we explain to ourselves, in our own terms, the reasons why we feel such deep, heartfelt love for the Child of Bethlehem. We may call the Jesus child, the one from the Nathanic line of the House of David, in the most beautiful sense, in the most beautiful sense, “the child of humanity, the child of man”. For what do we feel when we look at this child, whose essential nature shines through even in the descriptions of Luke's Gospel?

Humanity took its origin with the origin of the earth. But much has passed humanity in the course of the Lemurian, Atlantean and post-Atlantean times. And we know that this was a descent, that in primeval times there was an original knowledge and original looking, an original connection with the divine-spiritual powers, an old inheritance of a knowledge of the connection with the gods. What lived in the souls of human beings from divine beings has increasingly become less and less. Over time, people have come to feel their connection with the divine spiritual source less and less through their direct knowledge. They were increasingly thrown out into the field of mere material observation, of sensuality. Only in the early years of life, in childhood, did people know how to revere and love innocence, the innocence of the human being who has not yet taken up the descending forces of the earth.

But how, now that we know that with the Jesus child an entity came to earth that had not previously been on earth as such, that was a soul that had not gone through the rest of the evolution of mankind on earth — which I have indeed presented in my “Occult Science Outline», was held back, as it were, in the innocent state before the Luciferic temptation, that such a soul, a childlike human soul in a much, much higher sense than is usually meant, came to earth, how can one not recognize this human soul as the «child of humanity»? What we human beings, even in the most tender childhood, may no longer have in us, because we carry within us the results of our previous incarnations, which we cannot recognize in any of us, even in the moment when we first open our eyes on the field of the earth, is presented in the child who entered the earth as the St. Luke's Boy Jesus. For in this child there was a soul that had not previously been born on earth out of a human body, that had remained behind when the evolution of humanity began anew on earth, and that appeared on earth at the very beginning of our era, in the infancy of humanity. Hence the marvelous event that the Akasha Chronicle reveals to us: that this child, the Nathanic Jesus-child, immediately after his birth, uttered intelligible sounds to his mother only, sounds that were not similar to any of the spoken languages of that time or of any time, but from which sounded for the mother something like a message from worlds that are not the earthly worlds, a message from higher worlds. That this child Jesus could speak, could speak immediately at his birth, that is the miracle!

Then it grew up as if it were to contain, concentrated in its own being, all the love and loving ability that all human souls together could muster. And the great genius of love, that was what lived in the child. He could not learn much of what human culture has achieved in earthly life. The Nathanian Jesus Child was able to experience little of what had been achieved by people over the course of thousands of years until he was twelve years old. Because he could not, the other ego passed into him in his twelfth year. But everything he touched from the earliest, most tender childhood was touched by perfected love. All the qualities of the mind, all the qualities of feeling, they worked as if heaven had sent love to earth, so that a light could be brought into the winter time of the earth, a light that shines into the darkness of the human soul when the sun does not unfold its full external power during this winter time. When later the Christ moved into this human shell, we must bear in mind that this Christ-being could only make itself understood on earth by working through these shells.

The Christ-Being is not a human being. The Christ-Being is an Entity of the higher Hierarchies. On earth It had to live for three years as a human being among human beings. For this purpose, a human being had to be born to It in the way I have often described for the Nathanian Jesus child. And because this human child could not have received — since it had not previously set foot on earth, had no previous education from earlier incarnations — because it could not have received what external culture had worked for on earth, so a soul entered this child that had, in the highest sense, worked for what external culture can bring: the Zarathustra soul.

And so we see the most wonderful connection when Jesus Christ stands before us. We see the interaction of this human child, who had saved the best human aspiration, love, from the times when man had not yet fallen into Luciferic temptation, until the beginning of our era, when it appeared on earth for the first time, embodied, with the most developed human prophet Zarathustra, and with that spiritual essence which, until the Mystery of Golgotha, had its actual home within the realms of the higher hierarchies, and which then had to take its scene on earth by entering through the gate of the body of Jesus of Nazareth into its earthly existence. That which is the highest on earth, and which we can only glimpse in its purity in the still innocent gaze of the human being, in the eye of the child, that is what the human child brought with him to the highest degree. That which can be achieved on earth as the highest, that is what Zarathustra contributed to this human child. And that which the heavens could give to the earth, so that the earth might receive spiritually, which it receives anew each summer through the intensified power of the sun, that the earth received through the Christ-being.

We will just have to learn to understand what has happened to the earth. And in the times to come, the soul will be able to swell with intimacy, the soul will be able to strengthen itself through a power that will be stronger than all the powers that have so far been connected to the Mystery of Golgotha, in a time that can offer little outward support to the strengthening of those forces that tend towards man's true source of power, towards man's innermost being, towards an understanding of how this being flows from the spiritual-cosmic. But in order to fully understand such, we must first understand ourselves as one once understood the Christ Child on Christmas Day; we must first rise to the knowledge of the spirit. Times will come when, as it were, one will look at earthly events with the eye of the soul. Then one will be able to say many a thing to oneself that one cannot yet say to oneself in the broadest circles today, for which only spiritual science enables us today, so that we can already say many a thing to ourselves that one cannot yet say to oneself in the broadest circles today.

We see spring approaching. During the approaching spring, we see the plants sprouting and sprouting from the earth. We feel our joy igniting in what comes out of the earth. We feel the power of the sun growing stronger and stronger to the point where it makes our bodies rejoice, to the point of the Midsummer sun, which was celebrated in the Nordic mysteries. The initiates of these mysteries knew that the Midsummer Sun pours itself over the earth with its warmth and light to reveal the workings of the cosmos in the earth's orbit. We see and feel all this.

We also see and feel other things during this time. Sometimes lightning and thunder crash into the rays of the spring sun when clouds cover these rays. Irregular downpours pour over the surface of the earth. And then we feel the infinite, uninfluenced, harmonious regularity of the sun's course, and the — well, we need the word — changeable effectiveness of the entities that work on earth as rain and sunshine, as thunderstorms, and other phenomena that depend on all kinds of irregular activity, in contrast to the regular, harmonious activity of the sun's path through space and its consequences for the development of plants and everything that lives on earth, which cannot be influenced by anything. We feel the infinite regular harmony of the sun's activity and the changeable and fickle nature of what is going on in our atmosphere like a duality.

But then, when autumn approaches, we feel the dying of the living, the withering of that which delights us. And if we have compassion for nature, our souls may become sad at the dying of nature. The awakening, loving power of the sun, that which regularly and harmoniously permeates the universe, becomes invisible, as it were, and that which we have described as the changeable weather then prevails. It is true what earlier times knew, but what has faded from our consciousness due to our materiality: that in winter, the egoism of the earth triumphs over the forces that permeate our atmosphere, flowing down from the vast cosmic being to our earth and awakening life on our earth.

And so the whole of nature appears to us as a duality. The activity of spring and summer is quite different from that of autumn and winter. It is as if the earth becomes selfless and gives itself up to the embrace of the universe, from which the sun sends light and warmth and awakens life. The earth in spring and summer appears to us as showing its selflessness. The earth in autumn and winter appears to us as showing its selfishness, conjuring forth from itself all that it can contain and produce in its own atmosphere. Defeating the working of the sun, the working of the universe through the selfishness of earthly activity, the winter earth appears to us.

And when we look away from the earth and at ourselves with the eye that spiritual research can open for us, when we look beyond the material and see the spiritual, then we see something else. We know that, yes, in the elemental forces of the earth's atmosphere, which appear to be at work only in the unfolding of the sun's forces, in the spring and summer struggles that take place around us, the elemental spirits live, innumerable spiritual entities live in the elemental realm that swirl around the earth, lower spirits, higher spirits. Lower spirits, which are earthbound in the elemental realm, have to endure during the spring and summer season that the higher spirits, which stream down from the cosmos, exercise greater dominion, making them servants of the spirit that streams down from the sun, making them servants of the demonic forces that rule the earth in selfishness. During the spring and summer season of the earth, we see how the spirits of earth, air, water and fire become servants of the cosmic spirits that send their forces down to earth. And when we understand the whole spiritual context of the earth and the cosmos, then during spring and summer these relationships open up to our souls and we say to ourselves: You, earth, show yourself to us by making the spirits, which are servants of egoism, servants of the cosmos, of the cosmic spirits, who conjure up life out of your womb, which you yourself could not conjure up!

Then we move towards autumn and winter time. And then we feel the egoism of the earth, feel how powerful those spirits of the earth become, which are bound to this earth itself, which have detached themselves from the universe since Saturn, Sun and Moon time, feel how they close themselves off from the working that flows in from the cosmos. We feel ourselves in the egoistically experiencing earth. And then we may look within ourselves. We examine our soul with its thinking, feeling and willing, examine it seriously and ask ourselves: How do thoughts emerge from the depths of our soul? How do our feelings, affects and sensations emerge first? Do they have the same regularity with which the sun moves through the universe and lends the earth the life forces that emerge from its womb? They do not. The forces that reveal themselves in our thinking, feeling and willing in everyday life are similar to the changeable activity in our atmosphere. Just as lightning and thunder break in, so human passions break into the soul. Just as no law governs rain and sunshine, so human thoughts break out of the depths of the soul. We must compare our soul life with the changing wind and weather, not with the regularity with which the sun rules our earth. Out there it is the spirits of air and water, fire and earth, that work in the elemental realm and that actually represent the egoism of the earth. Within ourselves, these are the elemental forces. But these changing forces within us, which regulate our everyday life, are embryos, germinal beings, which, only as germs, but as germs, resemble the elemental beings that are found outside in all the vicissitudes of the weather. We carry the forces of the same world within us as we think, feel and will, which live as demonic beings in the elemental realm in the wind and weather outside.

When the times approached in which people, who were at the turning point of the old and the new times, felt: there will come a time reminiscent of the wintertime on Earth. Indeed, there were teachers and sages among these people who understood how to interpret the signs of the times and who pointed out: Even if our inner life resembles the changeable activity of the outer world, and just as man knows that behind the activity of the outer world, especially in autumn and winter, the sun still shines, the sun lives and moves in the universe, it will come again - so man may also hold fast to the thought that, in the face of his own fickleness, which lives in his soul, there is a sun, deep, deep in those depths where the source of our soul gushes forth from the source of the world itself. At the turn of the ages, the sages pointed out that just as the sun must reappear and regain its strength in the face of the earth's selfishness, so too must understanding develop from those depths of our soul for that which can reach this soul from the sources, where this soul is connected in its life itself with the spiritual sun of the world, just as earthly life is connected with the physical sun of the world.

At first this was expressed as a hope, pointing to the great symbol that nature itself offered. It was expressed in such a way that the winter solstice was set as the celebration for the days when the sun regains its strength, the time when it was said: however the selfishness of the earth may unfold, the sun is victorious over the selfishness of the earth. As if through the darkness of a Christmas in the world of elemental spirits, which represent the egoism of the earth, the spirits that come from the sun and show us how they make the egoistic spirits of the earth their servants.

At first it felt like a glimmer of hope. And when the great turning point had come, when nothing but desolation and despair should have been felt in human souls, the Mystery of Golgotha was preparing itself. It showed in the spiritual realm that, yes, there are forces at work within the human being that can only be compared to the changeable forces of the earth's atmosphere, to earthly egoism. They manifested themselves in ancient times, when people still carried within them the legacy of the ancient powers of the gods, like the forces that show themselves in spring and summer: they were servants of the old hierarchies of the gods. But in the time when it was heading towards the Mystery of Golgotha, the inner forces of human souls became more and more like the outer demonic elemental spirits in autumn and winter. These forces within us were to break away from the old currents and workings of the gods, just as the changeable forces of our earth withdraw from the activity of the sun in winter. And then, for man in his evolution on earth, what had always been symbolically depicted in the hope that it would come about in the victory of the sun over the winter forces, the winter solstice of the world began, in which the spiritual sun underwent for the whole evolution of the earth what the physical sun always undergoes at the winter solstice. These are the times in which the Mystery of Golgotha occurred.

We must really distinguish between two periods on earth. A time before the Mystery of Golgotha, when the earth is heading towards autumn through its summer, when the inner forces of human beings become more and more similar to the changeable forces of the earth, and the great Christmas festival of the earth, the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, when breaks over the earth, which is indeed winter time for the earth, but where out of the darkness the victorious spirit of the sun, the Christ, approaches the earth, bringing the souls within what the sun brings to the earth externally in the way of growth forces.

So we feel our whole human earthly destiny, our innermost human being, when we stand at the Christmas tree. So we feel intimately connected with the human child, who brought message from that time, where humanity had not yet fallen into temptation and thus the disposition to decline, brought the message that an ascent will begin again, as in the winter solstice the rise begins. On this day in particular, we feel the intimate relationship of the spiritual within the soul with the spirit that permeates and flows through everything, that expresses itself externally in wind and weather, but also in the regular, harmonious course of the sun, and inwardly in the course of humanity across the earth, in the great festival of Golgotha.

Should humanity not develop a new piety out of these thoughts, a piety that is not meant to remain a mere thought but can become a feeling and an intuition, a piety that cannot become dulled even by the most extreme mechanism, as it must unfold more and more on earth? Should not Christmas prayers and Christmas songs be possible again, even in the abstract, telegraph-wired and smoke-filled earth's atmosphere, when humanity will learn to feel how it is connected with the divine spiritual powers in its depths, by intuiting in its depths the great Christmas festival of the earth with the birth of the boy Jesus?

It is true, on the one hand, what resounds through all human history on earth: that the great Christmas festival of the earth, which prepared the Easter festival of Golgotha, had to come one day. It is true that this unique event had to occur as the victory of the spirit of the sun over the fickle earth spirits. On the other hand, it is true what Angelus Silesius said: “A thousand times Christ may be born at Bethlehem, and not in thee, thou art still lost forever.” It is true that we must find within us, in the depths of our soul, that through which we understand the Christ Jesus.

But it is also true that in the places at the edge of the forest, on the lakeshore, surrounded by mountains, people, after a summer spent in the fields and pastures, were able to look forward to the symbol of the Christ Child , that they felt something else in their souls than we do, who must also feel the power to sense the Christmas message in the face of our smoky, dry, abstract and mechanical times. If these strong thoughts, which spiritual science can give us, can take root in our hearts, then a solar power will emerge from our hearts that will be able to shine into the bleakest external surroundings, to shine with the power that will be like when in 'our inner being itself light kindled light on the tree of our soul life, which we, because its roots are the roots of our soul itself, are to transform more and more into a Christmas tree in this winter time. We can do it if we absorb, not just as theory, but as direct life, what the message of the spirit, what true anthroposophy can be for us. So I wanted to bring the thoughts of Christmas from our spiritual science into the space that we want to consecrate today for the work that our dear friends here have been doing for a long time.

In the name of that deity who is regarded in the north as the deity who is supposed to bring back rejuvenating powers, spiritual childhood powers of aging humanity, to which Nordic souls in particular tend when they want to speak of what, flowing from the Christ Jesus being, can bring our humanity a new message of rejuvenation, to this name our friends here want to consecrate their work and their branch. They want to call it the “Vidar Branch”. May this name be as auspicious as it is auspicious for us, who want to understand the work that is being done here, what has already been achieved and is intended by loving, spirit-loving souls here. Let us truly appreciate what our Bochum friends are attempting here, and let us give their branch and their work the consecration that is also intended to be a consecration for Christ today, by unfolding our most beautiful and loving thoughts here for the blessing, for the strength and for the genuine, true, spiritual love for this work. If we can feel this way, then we will celebrate today's festival of the naming of the “Vidar” branch in the right spirit with our friends in Bochum.

And let us let our feelings reach up to those whom we are naming as the leaders and guides of our spiritual life, to the Masters of the Wisdom and the Harmony of Feelings, and let us implore their blessing for the work that is to unfold here in this city through our friends:

You who guide the spiritual life, give people
what they need according to the times,
you work with us when our friends devotedly serve the spiritual life
here in this city.

We would like to send this up as a prayer to the spiritual leaders, the higher hierarchies, at this moment, which is solemn in two respects. And we may hope that what has been promised will prevail over this branch, despite all the resistance that is piling up more and more, despite all the obstacles and opposition, what has been promised for our work: that through it the mystery of Christ will be incorporated anew into humanity in the way it must happen.

That this may prevail, that may be our Christmas gift today: that this branch too may become a living witness to what flows as strength into the evolution of humanity from higher worlds and can ever more and more give human souls the consciousness of the truth of the words:

The senses speak
The things in the vastness of space,
They change in the stream of time;
Recognizing, the human soul,
From the vastness of space,
And unreachable by the stream of time,
Into the realm of eternity.

Our dear friends in Bochum will return to their work here imbued with this feeling. Those who, through their meeting with them, are now aware of their work will think of it often and with great intensity. These thoughts can unfold their special power all the more because we were able to consecrate the work immediately before Christmas this year, before the festival that can always be a symbol for us of all that the spirit has achieved in victory over the material, over all the obstacles that it can and must face in the world.

The relation between man's waking and sleeping states has been broadly described, and it was said that he draws from the latter the forces he needs during waking life in order to sustain his life of soul. These things are much more complicated than is generally supposed and today, as the result of spiritual research, there will be something more detailed to say about the difference between man's waking life and the state of sleep. Let me mention in parenthesis that there is no need to speak of all the hypotheses, some more interesting than others, that are advanced by present-day physiology in order to explain the difference between the two states. It would be easy to speak of these theories but this would only divert us from genuinely spiritual-scientific study of the two states. All that need be said is that modern science concerns itself only with the part of man which, during sleep, remains behind in the physical world. The fact that the Ego and astral body emerge from the physical and etheric bodies when man goes to sleep can be reality only to spiritual investigation, to the eyes of a seer. The whole process is completely foreign to modern physical science—which need not, however, be severely criticised on that account; in a certain respect it is justified in asserting a one-sided point of view. Man's Ego and astral body are in a spiritual world while he is asleep and in the physical world when he wakes and comes down into the physical and etheric bodies.

Let us now consider the sleeping human being. Quite naturally, normal human consciousness regards sleep as an undifferentiated state that is not a subject for further investigation. The question is rarely asked whether, during the time man spends at night in a spiritual world, an influence on his body-free soul is exerted by several forces, or by a single force only which permeates the spiritual world. Are we able to distinguish various forces to which he is exposed in that world during sleep? Yes, several quite different influences can be distinguished. The influences do not, of course, primarily affect the members that remain lying in bed, but they affect man as a being of soul when his astral body and Ego have emerged from his physical and etheric bodies.

By considering certain familiar experiences and facts we will now explore the different influences which are exerted upon the sleeping human being. A man has only to be more attentive to what happens to him when he goes to sleep and he will notice how the inner activity through which, during the day, he moves his limbs and brings his body into movement with the help of his soul, begins to flag. Anyone who practises a little self-observation at the time when he is about to go to sleep will feel that he can now no longer exercise the same control over his body. A kind of lethargy begins to overpower him. First of all he will feel incapable of directing the movement of his limbs by the will; control of speech is then lost. Then he feels that the possibility of entering into any connection with the outer world is slipping away from him, and all the impressions of the day gradually disappear. What disappears first is the ability to use the limbs and especially the instruments of speech, then the faculties of taste and smell, and finally of hearing. In this gradual cessation of the inner activity of the soul, man experiences the emergence from his bodily sheaths.

In saying this we have already indicated the first influence that is exerted upon man as a preliminary to sleep; it is the influence that drives him out of his physical and etheric bodies. Anyone who practises self-observation will notice how a power seems to be overcoming him, for in normal life he does not order himself to go to sleep, to stop speaking, tasting, hearing, and so forth. A power is now asserting itself in him. This is the first of the influences to be exerted from the world into which man passes at night; it is the influence which drives him out of his physical and etheric bodies. But if this were the only influence to be exerted, the outcome would be absolutely calm, unbroken sleep. This is of course known in normal life; it is the state induced by the first influence connected with sleep. But there are other kinds of sleep.

We all know the state of dream, when chaotic or clear pictures obtrude themselves into sleep. Were only the first influence at work, the influence that draws man into a spiritual world, sleep unbroken by any dream would be the result; but another influence becomes evident when sleep is broken by dreams. Two influences can be distinguished: the one extinguishes consciousness inasmuch as it drives us out of our bodily sheaths, and the second conjures the world of dreams before the soul, thrusts this dream-world into our sleep.

But some people have yet a third kind of sleep. Although this third kind occurs only rarely, everyone knows that it does occur; it is when a man begins to talk or act in sleep without the consciousness that is his in waking life. Usually he knows nothing the next day of the impulses which have driven him to such actions during sleep. The condition can be enhanced to the point of what is usually called sleepwalking. While he is walking in his sleep a man may also have certain dreams; but it is not so in the majority of cases; in a certain sense he acts like an automaton, impelled by obscure urges of which he need not have even the consciousness of dream. Through this third influence he enters into contact with the outer world as he does by day, only now he is unconscious. Such actions in sleep are therefore subject to a third influence.

Three influences, then, to which the human being is exposed during sleep can be clearly distinguished; they are always present, and spiritual investigation confirms this. In the great majority of people, however, the first influence predominates; most of their sleep is unbroken by dreams. The second influence, giving rise to the state of dream, takes effects at intervals in nearly everybody. But in by far the greater number of people these two states are so predominant that speaking and acting during sleep rarely occur. The influence that takes effect in a sleep-walker is present in every human being but in a sleep-walker this third influence is so strong in comparison with the other two that it gets the upper hand. Nevertheless every human being is liable to be exposed to all three influences.

These three influences have always been recognised in Spiritual Science as distinct from each other. In man's soul-life there are three domains, the first being mainly subject to the first influence, the second more to the second influence and the third more to the third influence. The human soul has a threefold nature, and it can be subject to influences of three distinct kinds. The part of the soul that is subject to the first influence which drives the soul out of the bodily sheaths, is known in Spiritual Science as the Sentient Soul; the part affected by the second influence which drives the pictures of dream into man's life of soul during sleep is known as the Intellectual or Mind-Soul; the third part, which in the case of most people does not assert its unique character during sleep because the other two influences predominate, is called the Consciousness or Spiritual Soul. Thus three influences are to be distinguished during the state of sleep; the three members of the soul which are subject to these three influences, are: Sentient Soul, Intellectual or Mind-Soul, Consciousness-or Spiritual Soul. When man is transported by one force into dreamless sleep, an influence from the world into which he passes is being exerted on his Sentient Soul; when his sleep is pervaded by dream-pictures, an influence is being exerted on his Intellectual or Mind-Soul; when he begins to speak or to act in his sleep, an influence is being exerted upon his Consciousness-Soul.

So far, however, we have considered only one aspect of man's life of soul during sleep. We must now describe the aspect of soul-life that is the opposite of the sleeping state. Let us think of a man who is returning from sleep to waking life in the physical world. What is happening to him when he wakes? At night a certain force is able to drive him out of his physical and etheric bodies because he succumbs to it. In later stages of sleep he succumbs to the other two influences—those that are exerted on the Mind-Soul and on the Consciousness-Soul. But when these influences have been exerted, the man is different; he undergoes a change during sleep. The evidence of the change is that at night he was fatigued but in the morning has become able to cope with his life in the physical world. What has happened to him during sleep has made this possible.

The same influence which makes itself felt in certain abnormal conditions in the dream-world is present through the whole of sleep, even when there are no dreams. The third influence, which takes effect in a sleep-walker but in other cases does not operate, is the one that is exerted on the Consciousness-Soul. When the influences on the Mind-Soul and Consciousness-Soul have taken effect, man is strengthened and energised; he has drawn from the spiritual world the forces he needs for his life during the next day in order to recognise and enjoy the physical world. It is primarily the influences exerted on the Mind-Soul and on the Consciousness-Soul which strengthen man during sleep. But when he is thus strengthened, the same influence which drove him out of his physical and etheric bodies brings him back again into them when he wakes in the morning. The same influence is being exerted then in the opposite direction, and it is exerted on the Sentient Soul. Everything connected with the Sentient Soul has become exhausted by the previous evening. But in the morning, when we are fresh again, we take renewed interest in the impressions of the physical world—colours, lights, objects—which will become causes of interest, pain or pleasure, inspire sympathy or antipathy in us. We are given up to pleasure, to pain, in short to the external world. What is it that is kindled in us when we are thus given up to the external world? What is it that feels pleasure and pain? What is it that has interests? It is the Sentient Soul. In the evening we feel the need of sleep, we feel that our lively participation in the outer world is exhausted; but in the morning it is refreshed again. We feel that the same manifestations of the Sentient Soul which flag at night, revive and reassert themselves in the morning. From this we can recognise that the same force which bore us out of ourselves brings the waking soul back again into the body. What at night seemed to be dying away is as if reborn. The same force is operating, but now in the one, now in the opposite, direction.

If we wished to make a diagrammatic sketch of what happens, it might be done in the following way, but I emphasise that it is meant only as an indication.

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I have indicated by a dot the moment of going to sleep, when man is drawn into the subconscious; and by drawing loops I have indicated his surrender to the state of sleep and his awakening from that state. The lower loop indicates the course of life during the waking state and the upper loop the sleeping state. We can therefore say of the moment of going to sleep that a force, working on the Sentient Soul from the spiritual world, is drawing us into that world. This is indicated by the first section of the upper loop in the diagram. The second section of the same loop indicates the influence that is exerted upon the Intellectual or Mind-Soul, causing dreams. And the third section of the loop indicates the influence or force that is exerted on the Consciousness-Soul. In the morning, the same force that has drawn us into the sleeping state drives us out of it and into the life of day. This is the force that works upon the Sentient Soul. The same applies to the influences exerted on the Mind-Soul and on the Consciousness-Soul. During the night man moves around a kind of circle. On going to sleep he moves towards the region where the influence upon the Consciousness-Soul is strongest. From that point he moves again towards the force that works upon his Sentient Soul and brings him back into the waking state.

Thus there are three forces which work upon man during sleep. Since early times these three forces have been given definite names in spiritual science. These names are familiar to you, but I beg you now not to think of anything in connection with them except that they stand for the three forces which during sleep work upon these three parts of the human soul. It we were to go back to ancient times we should find that these designations were used originally for these three forces; and if the designations are now used in other ways, they have simply been borrowed. The force which works upon the Sentient Soul and at the times of going to sleep and waking drives man out of his bodily sheaths and eventually into them again, was designated in one of the ancient languages by a name that would correspond with the word “Mars”. The force which works upon the Mind-Soul after the man has gone to sleep and again before waking, that is to say, in two different periods, was designated by the word “Jupiter.” It is the force which drives the world of dreams into the Mind-Soul. The force which works upon the Consciousness-Soul during sleep and under special circumstances would make a man into a sleep-walker, was designated by the name “Saturn.”

We may therefore say, using the terminology of ancient spiritual science: “Mars” sends man to sleep and wakes him; “Jupiter” sends dreams into his sleep; and dark “Saturn” stirs into unconscious action during sleep a man who cannot withstand its influence. For the time being we will think of the original, spiritual significance of these names as denoting forces that work upon the human being during sleep, when he is outside his physical and etheric bodies in the spiritual world, not of their significance in astronomy.

Now what happens when man wakes in the morning? He actually enters a quite different world which he normally regards today as the only one belonging to him. Impressions from outside are made upon his senses, but he is unable to look behind these impressions. When he wakes from sleep, the whole tapestry of the sense-world lies outspread before him. But not only does he perceive this external world with his senses; together with every perception he feels something. However slight the pleasurable sensation may be on perceiving, for example, some colour, nevertheless a certain inner process is always present. All external sense-perceptions work in such a way that they give rise to certain inner states; everyone will realise that the effect of violet is different from that of green. It is the Sentient Body that enables the sense-impressions to be received; it causes men to see yellow, for example; but what we experience and feel inwardly as a result of the impressions made upon us by the red, violet or yellow colour—that is caused by the Sentient Soul. A fine distinction must be made between these functions of the Sentient Body and the Sentient Soul.

In the morning the Sentient Soul begins to be given up to the impressions of the outer world brought to it by the Sentient Body. The part of us (Sentient Soul) which during sleep was exposed to the Mars influence is given over on waking to the external world of the senses. Spiritual science again gives a special name to the whole of the external sense-world in so far as it arouses certain feelings of pleasure or pain, joy or sadness in our souls. But under that name we must think only of the influence working upon our Sentient Soul from the tapestry of the outer world of the senses; this force does not let us remain cold and impassive but fills us with certain feelings. So that just as the first influence exerted on the Sentient Soul after we go to sleep is given the name of Mars, the influence which takes effect on waking is called the force of “Venus”.

Similarly, an influence from the physical world is exerted during waking life upon the Intellectual or Mind-Soul when it is within the bodily sheaths. This is a different influence; it is the influence which enables us to withdraw from external impressions and to work upon them inwardly, to reflect upon them. Notice the difference there is between the experiences of the Sentient Soul and those of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul. The Sentient Soul has experiences only as long as a man is given up to the outer world; it receives the impressions of the outer world. But if for a time in waking life he pays no attention to the actual impressions of the outer world, if he ponders over them and lets the feelings of pleasure, pain, and so forth, merely echo on within him, then he is given over to his Mind-Soul. Compared with the Sentient Soul it has rather more independence. There are influences which enable a man during waking life not merely to stand gazing at the tapestry of the sense-world but to turn his attention away from all that, to form thoughts whereby he combines external impressions in his mind and enable him to make himself independent of the influences of the outer world. These are the influences of “Mercury.”

The influence of Mercury works during the day upon man's Intellectual or Mind-Soul just as the influence of Jupiter works upon it during sleep at night. You will notice that there is a certain correspondence between the influences of “Mercury” and of “Jupiter”. [* See, Human Questions and Cosmic Answers, lecture 2.] In the case of a normal person today the Jupiter influences penetrate into his life of soul as dream-pictures. The corresponding influences during waking life, the Mercury influences, work in a man's thoughts, in his inner, reflective experiences. When the Jupiter influences are working in a man's dreams, he does not know whence his experiences come; during waking consciousness, however, when the Mercury influences are working, he knows the source of them. In both cases, inner processes are being pictured in the soul.—Such is the correspondence between the influences of Jupiter and those of Mercury.

In the waking life of day there are also influences which work upon the Consciousness-Soul. What are the differences between Sentient Soul, Intellectual or Mind-Soul, and Consciousness-Soul? The Sentient Soul operates when we are merely gazing at the things of the external world. If we withdraw our attention for a time from the impressions of this outer world and work over them inwardly, then we are given over to the Mind-Soul. But if we now take what has been worked over in thought, turn again to the outer world and relate ourselves to it by passing over to deeds, then we are given over to the Consciousness-Soul. For example: As long as I am simply looking at these flowers in front of me and my feelings are moved by the pure whiteness of the rose, I am given up to my Sentient Soul. If, however, I avert my gaze and no longer see the flowers but only think about them, then I am given over to my Intellectual or Mind-Soul. I am working in thought upon the impressions I have received. If now I say to myself that because the flowers have given me pleasure I will gladden someone else by presenting them to him and then pick them up in order to hand them over, I am performing a deed; I am passing out of the realm of the Mind-Soul into that of the Consciousness-Soul and relating myself again to the outer world. Here is a third force which operates in man and enables him not only to work over in thought the impressions of the outer world, but to relate himself to that world again.

You will notice that there is again a correspondence between the activity of the Consciousness Soul in the waking state and in sleep. You have heard that when this influence is being exerted in sleep a man becomes a sleep-walker; he speaks and acts in his sleep. In the waking state, however, he acts consciously. At night, in sleep-walking he is impelled by the force of dark “Saturn.” The influence which during waking life works upon man's Consciousness-Soul in such a way that independence can be achieved in conditions of ordinary life, is called in Spiritual Science the force of the “Moon”. Here again, please forget whatever mental pictures you have hitherto connected with this word. You will presently understand the reason for these designations.

Thus we have found that man's soul in waking life and in sleep has three different members, that it is subject to three different influences. During the night when man is in the spiritual world he is subject to the forces designated in Spiritual Science as those of “Mars”, “Jupiter” and “Saturn”; his threefold life of soul by day is given over to the forces designated as those of “Venus”, “Mercury” and “Moon”.

This is the course traversed by man in the 24 hours of day and night. And now we will think of a series of phenomena which belong to a quite different domain but which for certain reasons can be studied in connection with what has been said. These reasons will be made clear as the lectures proceed. Please remember that many things said at the beginning of this Course will be explained only at a later stage.

You are all familiar with the ideas held by modern astronomical science of the course of the Earth around the Sun and also of the other planets belonging to the solar system. What is said in treatises of the usual kind represents, in the view of Spiritual Science, only the most elementary beginning. What takes place in the physical world is for Spiritual Science a symbol, an external picture, of inner, spiritual processes and what we are accustomed to learn about our planetary system from elementary astronomy can be compared, as regards what really underlies it, with what is learnt by a child about the movements of a clock. We explain to him what the twelve conventional figures stand for, and what the rotation of the two hands—one slow and the other quicker—means. The child will eventually be able to tell us from the position of the hands when, let us say, the time is half-past nine. But that would not mean very much. The child must learn a great deal more, for example, to relate the movement of the hands to what is happening in the world. When the hour-hand stands at six and the minute-hand at twelve, he must know what time of the day this signifies—namely that at a certain season of the year, if it is early morning, the Sun will be rising then. He must learn to relate what is presented on the face of the clock to conditions in the world and to regard what the clock expresses as a picture of them.

We are taught as children that the Sun is at the centre of the solar system and that the planets revolve around it-first the planet now called Mercury, then the planet now called Venus, [*In former times the names of these two planets came to be reversed. See later paragraphs of this lecture.] then the Earth plus Moon, then Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Astronomical maps of the heavens show us where Saturn or Jupiter or Mars are to be found in certain months of the year. When we have learnt to know the relative positions of the planets at definite times of the year, we have learnt as much about the heavens as a child has learnt about the clock when from the position of the hands he is able to say that the time is half-past nine.

But then we can go on to learn something else. Just as a child learns to recognise what conditions are indicated by the position of the hands of a clock, we can learn to recognise macrocosmic forces penetrating invisibly into space behind a great cosmic timepiece. We realise then that our solar system, with the planets in their different positions and mutual relationships, gives expression to certain macrocosmic powers. From this timepiece of our planetary system we can pass on to contemplate the great spiritual relationships. The position of every planet will become the expression of something lying behind and we shall be able to say that there are reasons for the various relationships in which, for example, Venus stands to Jupiter, and so on. There are actual reasons for saying that these conditions are brought about by divine-spiritual Powers, just as there are reasons for saying that the cosmic timepiece is constructed according to a definite plan. The idea of the planetary movements in the solar system then becomes full of significance. Otherwise the cosmic timepiece would seem to have been constructed haphazardly. The planetary system becomes for us a kind of cosmic clock, a means of expression for what lies behind the heavenly bodies and their movements in the solar system.

Let us first of all consider this cosmic clock itself. The idea of the planetary system having formed itself is easily refuted. You will all have been taught in school about the formation of the planetary system. You will have been told, in effect, that a gigantic nebula in the universe once began to rotate and then the Sun, with the planets around it, were formed by a process of separation from the nebula itself. This will probably have been demonstrated by an experiment. It is easy to rotate a drop of oil on the surface of water in a bowl. Tiny drops separate off and rotate around a larger drop which remains at the centre. The teacher will point out that this represents, on a minute scale, the formation of a planetary system and nobody will question it. But a sharp-witted pupil might say to the teacher: “You have forgotten something that in other circumstances it might be convenient to forget, but not in this case. You have forgotten your own part in the experiment because it is you who have rotated the drop of oil!”—For the sake of logic the most important factor of all should not be forgotten. It should at least be assumed that a colossal power in cosmic space brought the whole solar system into existence through rotation. The experiment in itself points to the fact that there must be something behind what is rotating; it points to the existence of forces which cause the movement that is perceptible to the eye. In the same way there are forces and Powers behind the great cosmic edifice of our solar system.

And now we will think of the outer aspect of this solar system. (See diagram). The Earth revolves around the Sun

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at the centre. I will leave out details. At a certain time of the year the Earth stands at one point and at another time somewhere else. The Moon revolves around the Earth and the planets usually called Mercury and Venus are nearer to the Sun and revolve around it. I emphasise here that in the course of time a change has taken place in the names of these two planets. [* This change of names must be kept closely in mind when references are made to the two planets.] The planet that is called Mercury today was formerly called Venus, and the planet called Venus today was formerly called Mercury. Venus, (formerly Mercury) is nearer the Sun than the planet now called Mercury (formerly Venus). Then, farther away than the Earth, the diagram indicates Mars, Jupiter and Saturn revolving around the Sun. The relative positions are not strictly correct but that does not matter here. We will leave the other planets out of consideration today.

Now let us assume that as it revolves the Earth comes to a position between Mars and the Sun. This will very seldom be the case but we will assume for the moment that it is so. Then, in the space between Earth and Sun there will be the planets Mercury and Venus, and on the other side of the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Leaving aside the Earth, the sequence will be: Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon, on one side; Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, on the other. A looped line (see diagram) drawn around the heavenly bodies is a lemniscate,

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with the Sun at the centre of the loops-it is the same line as the one indicating the cycle of man's waking and sleeping life.

Thus it is possible—though not generally the case—for the planets to be arranged in the solar system in an order similar to that followed by man in completing the cycle of waking and sleeping. Taking the moment of going to sleep and that of waking as the centre, the same spatial order can be indicated for the planetary system as for the daily life of man.

The perspective here revealed is one of mighty forces underlying the order of our planetary system, regulating the great cosmic timepiece as our own lives are regulated through the course of 24 hours. The thought will then not seem absurd that mighty forces are operating in the Macrocosm—forces analogous to those which guide our lives during the day and night. As the outcome of such thoughts the same names came into use in ancient science for the forces of the universe as for the forces which work upon our own lives. The force which in the Macrocosm drives Mars around the Sun is similar to the one that sends us to sleep. The force in the Macrocosm which drives Venus around the Sun is similar to the one which regulates the Sentient Soul by day. Far-off Saturn, with its slight influence, seeing to resemble those weak forces that work, in special cases only, upon the Consciousness-Soul in people who are sleep-walkers. And the rotation of the Moon around the Earth is due to a force similar to that which regulates our conscious deeds in waking life. The spatial distances signify something that comes to expression in a certain respect in our own time-regulated life.—We shall go into these things more deeply and it is only a matter today of calling attention to them.—If we consider, quite superficially, that Saturn is the most remote planet and has accordingly the weakest effect upon our Earth, this can be compared with the fact that the forces of dark Saturn have only a slight effect upon the sleeping human being. And similarly, the force which drives Jupiter around the Sun can be likened to that which penetrates comparatively seldom into our lives, namely, the dream-world.

Thus we find a remarkable correlation between human life, the Microcosm, and the forces working in the great cosmic clock, driving the several planets round the Sun in the Macrocosm.

In very truth the world is infinitely more complicated than is supposed. Our human nature is comprehensible only if we take account of its kinship with the Macrocosm. Knowing this, spiritual researchers in all epochs have chosen corresponding designations for the Great World and the Little World—the latter being the seemingly insignificant bodily man enclosed within the skin.

I have only been able today to give a faint indication of correspondences between the Microcosm (man) and the Macrocosm (the solar system). But it will now be evident to you that such correspondences do indeed exist. As though from afar I have alluded to Beings whose forces work through space and regulate the movements of our planetary system just as the movements of the hands of a clock in the physical world are regulated. We have only so much as glanced at the frontier of the region where we may hope that spiritual worlds will reveal themselves to us. In the coming lectures we shall learn to recognise not only the planets as the hands of the great cosmic clock but also the actual Beings who have brought the whole solar system into movement, who guide the planets round the Sun and prove to be akin to what goes on in the human being himself. And so we shall come to understand how man is born as a Little World, a Microcosm, out of the Great World, the Macrocosm.

During the next few days we are to occupy ourselves with a very profound theosophical subject. Before beginning our studies let me express my great satisfaction that we are able to place before friends from so many parts of Germany, and indeed of Europe, this deep and important subject. Especially do I express it to our friends in Nuremberg, who for their part are certainly not less happy than the speaker to cultivate for a short period of time anthroposophical life in this city in common with our foreign friends. There has always been in this city a very earnest search for the knowledge of great spiritual truths, and a deep understanding of anthroposophical life, of the true anthroposophical attitude towards life, has always been manifest.

This kind of life which is only understood when our anthroposophical doctrines are not merely a theoretical interest, but something which spiritualizes, kindles and uplifts our inmost life, links us in closer bonds with our fellow-men and with the whole world. It means much to man to feel that everything he sees in the outer world in his objective sense-existence can be recognized as the external physiognomy of an invisible super-sensible existence lying at its foundation. The world and all it contains will at length become to one who applies Anthroposophy to life more and more a physical expression of divine spiritual realities; and when he observes the visible world around him it will be to him as if he penetrated from the mere features of a person's face to his heart and soul. All that he sees externally, the mountains and rocks, the vegetation of the earth, the animals and human beings, human activities—everything in the world surrounding him—will be to hint the physiognomical expression, or the countenance, as it were, of a divine existence lying behind it. From this mode of observation new life rises up within him and permeates him; and a different, a noble enthusiasm fires all that he wishes to undertake.

Let me give you a small symptomatic example from my experience on one of my latest lecture tours, showing how significant world history is when looked upon as the expression of the divine spiritual, and how it can speak to us in a new language. A few weeks ago in Scandinavia I noticed that in the entire life of Northern Europe there is still an echo of that ancient period of the Norse world when all spiritual life was permeated by the consciousness of the beings who were to be found as the gods of northern Mythology. One might say that in those countries one may hear the echoes everywhere of what the Initiates of the Druidic and Trotten Mysteries imparted to their pupils and which constituted the old Norse spiritual life. One becomes aware of the magic breath of that spirit life pervading the North; one sees something like the expression of beautiful karmic connections. One feels oneself placed—as it was my privilege in Upsala—in the midst of all this, when one contemplates the first German translation of the Bible, the Silver Codex of Ulfilas ... It came to Upsala through karmic complications of a peculiar kind. It had previously been in Prague. In the Swedish war it was taken as booty and brought to Upsala, and there it now lies; a token of something which can be penetrated by one who is able to look a little more deeply into the nature of the ancient Mysteries. The Mysteries within the ancient European civilizations in which pupils were taught how to penetrate into the spiritual world were all pervaded and permeated by a remarkable characteristic, which could be observed more deeply by those who received initiation in those ancient tines. Their hearts were filled with a feeling of tragedy when it was made clear to them that although they were indeed able to glimpse the secrets of existence, nevertheless, something would appear in the time to come which would give the most complete solution of the riddle. They were shown again and again that a higher light was to ray into that knowledge which could be given in the ancient Mysteries. One might say that in all these Mysteries it was prophetically indicated what was to come about in the future, namely, the appearance of Christ Jesus. The undertone, the attitude of expectation, this mood of prophecy lay in the nature of the Northern Mysteries.

The statement I am now about to make must not be pressed too far or too sharply outlined in thought. It is only intended to express symptomatically the deeper truth which lies behind in the legend of Siegfried, which has remained like a last page out of the traditions of the old German Mysteries, there is something like an echo of that mood. When we are shown that Siegfried is really the representative of the ancient nordic initiation, that on the place where he is vulnerable there lies a leaf, that this place is on his back, then one who is able to feel such a thing symptomatically feels: That is the spot on the human being where something different will rest, when such injury as the initiates of the ancient Northern Mysteries experienced can no longer touch him. This spot the Cross shall cover, there the Cross of Christ Jesus shall rest. It did not yet rest there in the case of the initiates of the ancient Northern Mysteries. In the old Mysteries of the German peoples, this is indicated in the legend of Siegfried. Thus even here is symptomatically indicated how the ancient initiations of the Druids and Trotten should be thought of as harmonizing with the Christian Mysteries. The placing of the first German translation of the Bible in the northern world reminds one of this like a physiognomic gesture. And the fact that it is like a karmic chain may also appear symbolically to you by the circumstance that eleven leaves were once stolen from this Silver Codex and that the one who possessed them later on felt such qualms of conscience that he would not keep these eleven leaves and so returned them. As already said, these things ought not to be pressed too far, but they may be taken as a pictorial representation of those karmic developments which come to physiognomical expression in the placing of the first German translation of the Bible in the northern world. And just as in the case of this historical event, so will everything which meets us in life, great or small, also be deepened and irradiated with a new light through the anthroposophical outlook, which sees everything physically perceptible as the physiognomical expression of super-sensible spirit. May we, during this course of lectures, be filled with the conviction that this is the case, and may the spirit and feelings which are to fill our hearts and minds during this series of twelve lectures proceed from this conviction.

In this frame of mind let us approach these lectures which will deal with the most profound document of Christianity, the Apocalypse of John. The deepest truths of Christianity can be considered in connection with this document, for it contains nothing less than a great part of the Mysteries of Christianity, the profoundest part of what may be described as esoteric Christianity. It is therefore not to be wondered at that of all Christian documents this one has been most misunderstood. Almost from the beginning of the spiritual movement of Christianity it has been misunderstood by all who were not really Christian initiates. And it has always been misunderstood at various times according to the prevailing thought and disposition of those times. It has been misunderstood by the ages which, one might say, have thought in a spiritually materialistic way; by the ages which have forced great religious movements into one-sided fanatical party affairs; and it has been misunderstood in modern times by those who, its the grossest and most sense-bound materialism, believed themselves able to solve the riddle of the universe. The high spiritual truths announced in the early days of Christianity, and witnessed by those who were able to understand them, are disclosed as far as is possible in writing in the Apocalypse of John, the so-called canonical Apocalypse. But even in the first ages of Christianity exotericists were little inclined to understand the deep spiritual truths contained in esoteric Christianity. Thus in the very first ages of Christianity the idea came into exotericism that things which in the world's evolution first take place in the spiritual, and are recognizable by those who can see into the spiritual worlds—that such purely spiritual proceedings were to take place externally in material life. And so it came about that while the writer of the Apocalypse expressed in his work the results of his Christian initiation, others only understood it exoterically; and their opinion was that what the great seer saw—and of which the Initiate knows that spiritually in it takes place over thousands of years—must happen in the very far future in external life and be visible to the senses. They imagined that the writer indicated something like a speedy return of Christ Jesus, a descent from the physical clouds. As this did not happen, they simply lengthened the period and said, “With the advent of Christ Jesus a new period has begun for the earth as regards the old religious teachings, but”—this again was understood materialistically—“after a thousand years the earliest events represented in the Apocalypse will take place in the physical world.” Thus it came about that when the year A.D. 1000 actually drew near, many people waited for the coming of some power hostile to Christianity, for an Antichrist who should appear in the sense world. As this again did not occur, the period was further extended, but at the same time the whole prediction of the Apocalypse was elevated to a kind of symbolism—whereas the crass exotericists represented this prediction more literally. With the advent of a materialistic world-conception these things were enveloped in a certain symbolism; external events were invested with a symbolic significance. Thus in the twelfth century Joachim of Floris, who died at the beginning of the thirteenth century, gave a notable exploration of this mysterious record of Christianity. It was his opinion that Christianity contained a deep spiritual power, that this power would have to expand more and more, but that historical Christianity had always given this esoteric Christianity an external interpretation. Thus many people came to this point of view, which was that the Romish Church with the Pope at its head, this externalization of the spirituality of Christianity, was something hostile and anti-Christian. And this was particularly fostered in the following centuries through certain Orders attaching higher value to the fervent spiritual aspect of Christianity. Thus Joachim of Floris found followers among the Franciscans, and these looked upon the Pope as being the symbol of Antichrist. Then in the age of Protestantism this conception passed over to those who looked upon the Romish Church as an apostate of Christianity and Protestantism as its salvation. They considered the Pope as Symbol of Antichrist, and the Pope retaliated by calling Luther the Antichrist. Thus the Apocalypse was understood in such a way that each party drew it into the service of its own view, its own opinion. Each regarded the other party always as Antichrist and their own party as having the true Christianity. This continued into modern times when modern materialists developed, with which, for grossness, the materialism I have described as belonging to the early centuries of Christianity cannot be compared. For at that time spiritual faith and a certain spiritual comprehension still existed. Men could not understand, only because they had no initiates among them. A certain spiritual sense was there; for although it was crudely imagined that a Being would descend in a cloud, there still belonged to it a spiritual faith. A spiritual life such as this was no longer possible with the crass materialism of the nineteenth century. The thoughts of a genuine materialist of the nineteenth century regarding the Apocalypse may be described somewhat as follows: “No man can see into the future, for I myself cannot. No one can see anything more than I can see. To say that there are initiates is an old superstition. Such persons do not exist. What I know is the standard. I can scarcely see what will happen in the next ten years, therefore no man can say anything about what is to happen in thousands of years. Consequently he who wrote the Apocalypse, if he is to be taken as an honest man, must have been describing something which he had already seen—for I only know what has already taken place and what I can discover from documents. Therefore the writer of the Apocalypse could see nothing more either. What, therefore, according to this, can he relate? Only what has happened to him. Consequently it is obvious that the events of the Apocalypse, the conflicts between the good, wise and beautiful world and the ugly, foolish and evil world, this dramatic contrast is only intended to represent what the author had himself experienced, what had already taken place.” The modern materialist speaks in this way, it is his opinion that the writer of the Apocalypse describes things as he himself does.

What, then, was the most dreadful thing to a Christian of the first century? It was the beast which made war against the spiritual power of Christianity, against the true Christianity. Unfortunately only a few people perceived that there was something behind this, but they did not know how to interpret it correctly.

In certain esoteric schools there was a kind of writing in numbers. Certain words which it was not wished to impart in ordinary writing were expressed by figures. And, like much else, some of the deep secrets of the Apocalypse were hidden in numbers, particularly that dramatic event in the number 666. It was known that numbers were to be dealt with in a particular way, especially when such a distinct indication is given as in the words, “Here is wisdom.” “The number of the beast is 666.” When such an indication was given it was known that the figures must be replaced by certain letters, in order to ascertain what was intended. Now those who had heard something, and yet really knew nothing, came to the conclusion in their materialistic conception that when letters were substituted for the number 666, the word “Nero” or “Caesar Nero” resulted. And nowadays in a large part of the literature dealing with the deciphering of the Apocalypse you may read: Formerly people were so foolish that they imagined all sorts of things in connection with this passage, but the problem is now solved. We now know that nothing else is intended than the Emperor Nero. Therefore the Apocalypse must have been written after Nero's death, and the writer wished to say by all this that the Antichrist had appeared in Nero, and that what is contained in this dramatic element is an enhancement upon what had preceded it. We need now only investigate what happened immediately before and we shall discover what the writer of the Apocalypse really wished to describe. It is reported that earthquakes took place in Asia Minor when the struggle between Nero and Christianity was raging. Therefore it was to these earthquakes that the writer was referring in the opening of the seals and the sounding of the trumpets. He also mentions plagues of locusts. Quite correct! We know from history that at the time of the persecution of the Christians by Nero there were plagues of locusts. He was, therefore, speaking of these. Thus the nineteenth century has come to materialize the profoundest document of Christianity so far as to see nothing in it but the description of what may be found by a mere materialistic observation of the world.

I have only mentioned this in order to point out how fundamentally this deepest and most important document of esoteric Christianity has been misunderstood. I shall postpone to the last lectures what is to be said about the historical part of the Apocalypse until we have understood what is contained in the Apocalypse. To those who have studied Anthroposophy but little, there can be no doubt that even the introductory words of the Apocalypse show us what it is intended to be. We need only remember that it says that he from whom the contents of the Apocalypse proceeded was placed in an island solitude, which had always been surrounded by a kind of sacred atmosphere, in one of the ancient places of the Mysteries. And when we are told that the author was in the spirit, and that in the spirit he perceives what he gives us, it may indicate to us that the contents of the Apocalypse originate from the higher state of consciousness, to which a person may attain through the evolution of the inner creative capacity of the soul, through initiation. In the Secret Revelation of the so-called John is contained that which cannot be seen and heard in the sense world, and cannot be perceived with external senses; and it is given in the way in which it can be imparted to the world through Christianity. In the Apocalypse of John we have therefore the description of an initiation, a Christian initiation. For the present we need only briefly recall what initiation is. We shall, indeed, go more and more deeply into the question as to what takes place in initiation, and how initiation is related to the contents of the Apocalypse, but to begin with we will only draw something like a rough sketch and paint in the details later.

Initiation is the development of the powers and capacities slumbering in every soul. If we wish to have an idea of the manner in which it really takes place we must clearly bear in mind what the consciousness of the present normal man is; we shall then also recognize in what way the consciousness of the initiate differs from that of the ordinary man of the present day. What is, then, the consciousness of the normal human being? It is a changing one; two entirely different states of consciousness alternate, that of the day, and that during sleep at night. The waking day-consciousness consists in our perceiving sense objects around us and connecting them by means of concepts which can only be formed with the aid of a sense organ, namely, the brain. Then, each night, the astral body and the Ego withdraw from the lower principles of the human being, the physical and etheric bodies, and therewith the sense objects around man sink into the darkness; and not only this, for until re-awakening unconsciousness prevails. Darkness spreads around man. For the human astral body to-day under normal conditions is so organized that it is unable of itself to perceive what surrounds it. It must have organs. These organs are the physical senses. Therefore in the morning it must plunge into the physical body and make use of the sense organs. Why does the astral body see nothing when during sleep at night it is in the spirit-world? For the same reason that a physical body without eyes or ears could experience neither physical colours nor physical sounds. The astral body has no organs with which to perceive in the astral world. In primeval times the physical body was in the same position. It too did not yet possess what later was plastically worked into it as ears and eyes. The external elements and forces moulded the physical body, formed the eyes and ears, and thus the world was revealed to man, a world which previously was hidden from him. Let us imagine that the astral body, which is now in the position in which the physical body was formerly, could be so treated that organs could be built into it in the same way that the sunlight plastically moulded the physical eyes, and the world of sound the physical ears in the soft substance of the physical human body. Let us imagine that we could mould organs in the plastic mass of the astral body; then the astral body would be in the same condition as the present physical body. It is a question of moulding the organs of perception for the super-sensible world into this astral body, as a sculptor moulds his clay. This is the first thing. If a man wishes to become a seer, his astral body must be treated as a piece of clay by the sculptor; organs must be worked into it. This was, in fact, always done in the schools of initiation and the Mysteries. The organs were plastically formed in the astral body.

In what does the activity consist by means of which it is possible for the astral body to have organs plastically moulded into it? It might be thought that a person must first have the body in front of him before he can work the organs into it. He might say: “If I could take out the astral body and have it in front of me, I could then mould the organs into it.” That would not be the right way, and above all, it is not the way for modern initiation. Certainly an initiate who is able to live in the spiritual worlds could mould the organs like a sculptor, when during the night the astral body is outside. But that would entail doing something with a person of which he is not conscious; it would mean interfering in his sphere of freedom, with the exclusion of his consciousness. We shall see why this has not been allowed to happen for a long time past, and particularly not at the present time. For this reason, even in esoteric schools such as the Pythagorean or old Egyptian, everything had to be avoided whereby the initiates would have to work from outside upon the astral body which was taken out of the physical and etheric bodies of the neophyte. This had to be avoided from the very outset. The first step towards initiation had to be undertaken with man in the ordinary physical world, in the same world where man perceives with the physical senses. But how can this be done? For it is exactly through physical perception coming into earthly evolution that a veil has been drawn over the spiritual world formerly perceived by man, although but dimly. How can one work from the physical world upon the astral body? Here it is necessary that we should consider what happens with regard to our ordinary everyday sense perceptions. What happens in these cases? What happens while man is perceiving all day long? Think of your daily life, follow it step by step! At every step the impressions of the outer world press in upon you, you perceive them; you see, hear, smell, etc. When you are doing your work impressions storm upon you all day long and you work upon these impressions with your intellect. The poet who is not an inspired poet permeates them with his fantasy. All this is true! But all this cannot, to begin with, lead man to the consciousness of the super-sensible spiritual which lies behind the sensible and material. Why does it not come to his consciousness? Because all this activity which man exercises with respect to the surrounding world does not correspond with the essential nature of the human astral body as it exists to-day. When in the primeval past the astral body proper to man saw the pictures of the astral perception rise up—those pictures of joy and sorrow, of sympathy and antipathy—inner spiritual impulses were present, causing something to rise in man which formed organs. These were killed when man had to allow all the influences from outside to stream in upon him, and at the present time it is impossible for anything to remain in the astral body from all the impressions received during the day which could mould it plastically.

The process of perception is as follows: All day long we are subjected to the impressions of the external world. These work through the physical senses upon the etheric and astral bodies, until the ego becomes conscious of them. The result of what affects the physical body is expressed in the astral body. When the eyes receive impressions of light, these influence the etheric and astral bodies and the ego becomes conscious of them. So, too, with the impressions made upon the ears and other senses. Thus the whole of one's daily life affects the astral body through-out the day. The astral body is continually active under the influence of the outer world. Then in the evening it withdraws from the physical body. It now has no power in itself to become conscious of the impressions in its present environment. The ancient forces of the distant past were killed with the first perception of the present sense world. During the night it has no power because the entire life of the day is incapable of leaving anything in the astral body which could work formatively upon it. All the things you see around you produce effects as far as into the astral body, but that which then takes place is unable to create forms capable of becoming astral organs. It must be the first step of initiation to allow a person to do something during the life of the day, to allow something to play into his soul, which continues during the night when the astral body is withdrawn from the physical and etheric bodies. Imagine that—pictorially expressed—something were given to a person while he is fully conscious, which he has to do, which he has to allow to happen, and which is so chosen, so constructed that it does not cease working when the day is over. Imagine this activity as a sound, which continues when the astral body is withdrawn; this resounding would then constitute the force which worked plastically on the astral body, as at one time external forces have worked upon the physical body. This was always the first step of initiation—to give a person something to do during the life of the day, which has an after-effect in the life of the night. What is called meditation, concentration, and other practices which a person undertakes during his daily life, are nothing but exercises of the soul, the effects of which do not die away when the astral body withdraws, but reverberate, and then in the night become constructive forces in the astral body.

This is called the purification of the astral body, the purification from all that is unnatural to it. This was the first step, which was also called catharsis, purification. It did not yet constitute activity in super-sensible worlds; it consisted in exercises of the soul which the pupil performed during the day as a training of the soul. It consisted in adopting certain forms of life, certain feelings, a certain way of treating life, so that it could reverberate; and this worked upon the astral body until it had been transformed, until organs had developed in it. When the pupil had progressed so far that these organs had developed in the astral body, the next thing was that everything which had been formed there should be imprinted in the etheric body. Just as the characters on a seal are imprinted in sealing-wax, so must everything which has been formed in the astral body be imprinted in the etheric body. This imprinting is the next stage of initiation; it was called illumination. For it brought with it an important stage in initiation. A spiritual world then appeared around the pupil, just as formerly the sense world was around him. This stage is also characterized by the fact that the events of the outer spiritual world do not express themselves as physical objects do, but in pictures. At this stage of illumination the spiritual world first expresses itself in pictures. The pupil sees pictures. Think of the ancient initiate I referred to yesterday who saw the group-soul of a people. When he had progressed to this stage, he at first saw this group-soul in pictures. Imagine an initiate such as Ezekiel, who, when his illumination began, became aware of spiritual beings as folk-souls, group-souls; he felt himself in their midst; he saw group-souls in the form of four symbolical beasts.

To begin with, the spiritual world appeared to the pupil in significant pictures—that was the first stage. Then followed a further penetration into the etheric body. What at first was present as the impression of a seal, continued as a further penetration into the etheric body. Then there began to be added to the pictures what was known as the music of the spheres. The higher spiritual world is perceived as sound. The higher initiate having, through illumination, perceived the spiritual world in pictures, begins spiritually to listen to those sounds which are perceptible to the spiritual ear. Then he comes to the later transformation of the etheric body, and afterwards in a still higher sphere something else approaches him. If, for example, there is a screen here and behind it a man is speaking whom you cannot see, yet you may hear sounds. It is somewhat similar with the spiritual world. At first it appears in pictures, then sounds are heard, and then the last veil falls away, so to speak—as if we were to take away the screen behind which the man is standing and speaking. We see the man himself; we see the spiritual world itself, the beings of the spiritual world. First we perceive the pictures, then the sounds, then the beings, and lastly the life of these beings. It is indeed only possible to give a hint of what exists as pictures in the so-called Imaginative world by making use, as symbols, of pictures from the sense world. One can only give an idea of the harmony of the spheres by comparing it with ordinary music. Now what may be compared with the impressions of the beings at the third stage? It is comparable alone with that which to-day constitutes the inmost being of man, his acting in accordance with the divine will. If the pupil works according to the will of the spiritual beings who are helping the world onwards, the being within him will then become similar to these beings and he will perceive in this sphere. He perceives that the element within him which opposes the evolution of the world, which retards its progress, is something which must be thrown off in this world, something which must fall away like a last covering.

Thus the pupil first perceives a world of pictures as a symbolic expression of the spiritual world, then a world of sphere-harmony as a symbolic expression of a higher spiritual sphere, then a world of spiritual beings of whom he can to-day only form an idea by comparing them with the depths of his own being, with that which works within him in accordance with the good powers or even in accordance with the evil spiritual forces.

The neophyte passes through these stages, and they are faithfully portrayed in the Apocalypse of John. The start is made from the physical world. That which is first to be said by means of the physical world is said in the seven letters. What we wish to do in outer civilization, what we wish to say to those working in the physical world, we say in letters. For the word expressed in the letter can produce its effect in the sense world. The first stage provides symbols which must be brought into relation with what they express in the spiritual world. After the seven letters comes the world of the seven seals, the world of pictures of the first stage of initiation. Then comes the world of the sphere-harmonies, the world as it is perceived by those who can hear spiritually. It is represented in the seven trumpets. The next world, where the initiate perceives beings, is represented by those who appear at this stage and who strip off the shells of the forces opposed to the good. The opposite of the divine love is the divine wrath. The true form of the divine love which carries the world forward is perceived in this third sphere by those who for the physical world have stripped off the seven shells or husks of wrath.

Thus the neophyte is led step by step upward into the spheres of initiation. In the seven letters of the Apocalypse of John we have that which belongs to the seven categories of the physical world, in the seven seals that which belongs to the astral imaginative world, in the seven trumpets that which belongs to the higher world of Devachan, and in the seven husks of wrath that which must be cast aside if the pupil wishes to rise into what is spiritually the highest to be attained in our world, because this spiritually highest is still connected with our world.

To-day we wished to give merely a sketch of the outer structure of the Apocalypse of John, which serves to show that this is a book of initiation. In our next lecture we shall begin to fill in this brief sketch.

For the modern man there always seems something hazardous in the prophecy of future events. We have already seen that in the seven seals we had to point out facts which are to come in the evolution of humanity, and as we unveil the Apocalypse of John, more and more we shall have to exercise this prophetic art. The question now is: What grounds are there for speaking at all of these things? We already referred in part at the beginning of our lectures to what lies at the basis of this. We said that at a certain stage of initiation the Initiate sees in the spiritual world that which descends later and becomes a physical event. But in the last two lectures we have shown that there is another basis for the prophetic art. We showed how man has developed out of spiritual spheres to his present existence. Now the future is in a certain sense a repetition of the past; not that the things of the past will happen again in the same way, but past events repeat themselves in a changed form.

In our last lectures we pointed out that in the ancient Atlantean epoch man had a kind of clairvoyance, and that, especially during his night condition, he consciously ascended into spiritual worlds; and we must clearly understand that the condition of a certain clairvoyance will be repeated in humanity. Between the Atlantean epoch and that which will come after the War of All against All we have our epoch, which we have described. In a certain way that which existed previously, that which was in the Atlantean epoch, will be repeated after our epoch, but there will be a very great difference. In the Atlantean epoch man had a dreamy, hazy, clairvoyant consciousness, and when he ascended into the higher worlds his clear self-consciousness faded and he then felt himself within the group-soul. After the great War of All against All man will again see into the higher worlds in a certain way. He will again have the former hazy clairvoyance, but in addition he will possess what he has gradually acquired in the external physical world.

Between the Atlantean flood and the great War of All against All man has had to renounce for a time the power to see into the spiritual world. He has had to content himself with seeing only what is around him in the physical world in the so-called waking consciousness. This is now the normal condition. But in its place it has become possible for him fully to develop his self-consciousness, his individual “I,” during this time, to feel himself within his skin as a separate “I”-personality, so to speak. This he has won. Now he also retains this individuality when he again rises into the higher spiritual worlds, and this ascent will be possible to him after the great War of All against All. But this ascent would not be possible if he had not taken part in that great cosmic event in the middle of our epoch which runs its course in the physical world, as was shown in the last lecture. Man would have been obliged to sink down into a kind of abyss had he not been preserved from it by the entry of Christ into our world. We must keep in mind that man has descended completely into the physical world in this epoch of ours.

Let us represent the physical plane by this line; above it what is called the spiritual, the heavenly world, and below it what is called the abyss. Man really reaches the line separating the spiritual world from the abyss in the fourth age, which we have described. We described the ancient Indian age, when man was still, on the whole, in the spiritual sphere. Previously he was above in the spiritual world. In Atlantis he still had a dim clairvoyance. He now comes down and reaches the line during the period of the Roman Empire. In this Empire man became fully conscious as an external sense-being, as a personality. That was at the time when the Roman idea of justice came into the world, when every one's aim was to be a separate personality, an individual citizen. Man had then reached the line. At this point it was possible either to return or sink below it. We have now, in fact, reached a point in human evolution—and all that I am saying is in accordance with the apocalyptic presentation—when in a certain way humanity is confronted by the need for a decision. We have already shown that in our age an enormous amount of mental and spiritual energy is used to provide for the lowest needs; we have shown how the telephone, telegraph, railway, steamboat and other things still to come have absorbed a tremendous amount of spiritual force; they are only used for the mere satisfaction of lower human needs. Man, however, has only a certain amount of spiritual force. Now consider the following: Man has used an enormous amount of spiritual force in order to invent and construct telephones, railways, steamboats and airships, in order to further external culture. This has to be so. It would have gone badly with humanity if this had not come about. This spiritual power has also been used for many other things. Only consider how all social connections have gradually been spun into an extremely fine intellectual web. What tremendous spiritual force has been expended so that one may now draw a cheque in America and cash it in Japan. An enormous amount of spiritual force has been absorbed in this activity. These forces had once to descend below the line of the physical plane, so to speak, which separates the spiritual kingdom from the abyss. For in a certain way man has actually already descended into the abyss, and one who studies the age from the standpoint of Spiritual Science can see by the most mundane phenomena how this goes on from decade to decade, how a certain point is always reached where the personality can still keep a hold on itself. If at this point it allows itself to sink down, the personality is lost, it is not rescued and lifted into the spiritual worlds.

This may be illustrated by the most mundane things. I could prove it to you, for example, in the details of the development of banking affairs in the second half of the nineteenth century. Perhaps it is only for future historians to show clearly that a fundamental change then came about which we may describe by saying that in banking affairs the personality was gradually shattered. I should have to draw your attention to the time when the four Rothschild's went out into the world from Frankfurt, one to Vienna, another to Naples, the third to London, the fourth to Paris. The whole of banking affairs was then brought into a personal sphere by the personal talent directed to them. The personality immersed itself in finance. To-day you see banking affairs becoming impersonal, they are passing into joint stock companies; capital is no longer managed by a single personality. Capital begins to control itself. Purely objective forces are working in capital, and there are already forces in this realm which draw the will of the personality to themselves, so that the personality has become powerless. Thus with seeing eyes one can penetrate into these mundane things and one can see everywhere how humanity, as regards the personality, has descended to the lowest depth. Now the personality may save itself and ascend again. It can save itself, for example, by really learning to strengthen its inner soul-forces and depend upon itself and make itself independent of the objective forces of capital. But the personality may also throw itself into these forces, it may in a certain way sail into and plunge into the abyss by allowing itself to be ensnared by the forces active in capital. The most important point of time, when the human personality descends to the earth and would have to turn back again, is the point of time of the appearance of Christ Jesus on the earth. He gave to the earth the power which made it possible for man to rise again; and he rises to the extent to which he has fellowship with Christ Jesus. Humanity will ascend to the point where the understanding dawns of what this event signified, so that for a large part of humanity this Christ impulse becomes the innermost impulse of their being, from which they work in life. Men must learn to understand more and more what Paul said: It is not I who work; but Christ works in me.

Therefore if the impulse which descended to the physical world in the fourth age enters into the hearts of men, if it becomes the impulse behind their activity, then the ascent takes place, and all the souls who find this union with the Christ principle find the way upward. But all the souls who failed to find this union would have gradually to go down into the abyss. They would have gained the “I”; they would have attained egoism, but would not be in the position to rise up again with this “I” into the spiritual world. And the consequence to a man who makes no connection with the Christ principle would be that he disconnects himself from the spiritual ascent; instead of ascending he would descend and harden himself more and more in his “I.” Instead of finding in matter merely the opportunity to develop the “I” and then rise up again, he would only descend deeper and deeper into matter.

Yes, everything repeats itself. The possibility arose for man to enter our physical world. By surviving the Atlantean flood it has become possible for him to create and develop his present human countenance. This is really an image of the spiritual “I”-divinity dwelling in man. Towards the end of the Atlantean epoch the etheric body united with the physical; its forces drew into the physical head and thereby man received his present human countenance, in which the spirit of God is reflected.

Let us suppose that he were to deny that it was the spirit which has given him the human countenance; then he would not use the body as an opportunity to attain the “I”-consciousness and again spiritualize himself; but he would grow together with the body and love it so much that he would only feel himself at home in it. He would remain united with the body and go down into the abyss. And because of not having used the power of the spirit, the external shape would again come to resemble the previous form. The man who descends into the abyss would become animal-like. Thus humanity will realize what we have already indicated. Those who use the life in the body merely as an opportunity to gain the “I”-consciousness will descend into the abyss and form the evil race. They have turned away from the impulse of Christ Jesus, and from the ugliness of their souls they will again create the animal form man possessed in former times. The evil race, with their savage impulses, will dwell in animal form in the abyss. And when up above those who have spiritualized themselves, who have received the Christ principle, announce what they have to say regarding their union with the name, Christ Jesus—here below in the abyss will sound forth names of blasphemy and of hatred of that which brings about the spiritual transformation.

A person who thinks superficially might say at this point: Yes, but very many have lived who have experienced nothing of the Christ-impulse; why should not these have partaken in the impulse of Christ Jesus? This is objected from the materialistic side: Why should salvation only come with Christ Jesus? If persons who are not Anthroposophists say this, it is comprehensible; but if Anthroposophists say it, then it is incomprehensible; for they ought to know that man returns again and again, and the souls which lived in earlier times will return in new bodies in the period after the event of Christ, so that there are none who could not participate in the event of Christ Jesus. The above objection can only be made by one who does not believe in re-embodiment.

Thus we see how the division takes place. There will come a time when those who have striven for spiritualization will be capable of living in the spiritual world, a time when that which they have formerly acquired will be made manifest, when they will bear the name of Christ on their forehead because they learned to look up to Him. Now when the seal is opened man will have imaged in his outward figure what he bears inwardly in his heart. One who inwardly bears Christ in his soul will after the unsealing bear in his face the sign of Christ; his external form will be like Christ Jesus; but those who remain in the civilizations before the appearance of Christ Jesus will have to experience some-thing else. These four civilizations, the ancient Indian, Persian, Assyrian-Babylonian-Chaldean-Egyptian-Jewish and the Graeco-Latin were preparatory ages. The soul had to go through the bodies of these civilizations in order to prepare itself for the great event of the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth. During the period of preparation there were two great forces. The forces which brought men together were forces which had their material foundation in the blood. If men had simply been placed side by side in their present form, what was to develop in humanity would never have originated.

Prior to the earth the old Moon was the bearer of our creation. This old Moon was the Cosmos of Wisdom; our Earth is the Cosmos of Love. It is the mission of our Earth to bring men together in love. In the future, when the seventh trumpet has sounded and the earth has dissolved, when it has lost its physical substantiality and is changed into an astral heavenly body, then love, the force of love, will have flowed into the whole human race, into everything earthly. For this power of love must flow in as the earth-mission of humanity—just as you now see the power of wisdom in your environment. We have often drawn attention to that wonderful construction of the thigh-bone. This does not consist of a compact mass, but of many delicate lattice-like structures which are so wonderfully put together that the greater carrying capacity is attained with the expenditure of the smallest amount of material, such as no engineer of the present day can achieve. And if we were to examine everything we should find that the wisdom man has gained in the course of his earthly evolution was already contained in the earth.

How often have we been told in the course of lessons on history that man has made continual progress and that he has grown wiser and wiser! You will remember how these several stages were presented; for example, you were shown that at the beginning of modern times man arrived at the point where he invented gunpowder, paper from rags, wood-pulp, etc. You have experienced pleasure in seeing how mankind has ascended. By means of his intellect man has learned to make paper. One might suppose it was an original invention. But to one who contemplates the world in its totality this appears in a different light. The wasps could do this long before, for the wasp's nest is constructed of material which is exactly the same as paper. Thus thousands of years before in the nest of the wasp there already existed what man afterwards achieved through his subjective wisdom. Not the single wasp is able to make paper, but the group-soul, the ego which holds together the whole group of wasps. It possessed this knowledge long before man. And wherever you look, if you are not blind, you will find wisdom in everything.

Do not imagine that this wisdom had not to develop! The world was not always thus filled with wisdom. It was only during the Moon evolution that it gradually flowed into all that now surrounds us. During the Moon period, that which was all chaos was rearranged so as to acquire wisdom. If you could direct your gaze to the Moon evolution you would find every-thing chaotic, so to speak, but as yet no wisdom. Only in the course of the Moon evolution was wisdom poured into the various beings and creations, so that it was there by the time the Earth came forth from the twilight. All things are now filled with wisdom. And as man to-day looks into his environment and sees wisdom in everything, so will he, when he has reached Jupiter, see all the beings around him in a remarkable way. They will pour out something like the fragrance of blissful love. Love will stream forth from all things, and it is the mission of the earth-evolution to develop this love. Love will then flow through everything, just as wisdom is now in everything. And this love is poured into earthly evolution by man's gradually leaning to develop love.

He was not able to have spiritual love immediately, love had first to be implanted in him at the lowest stage. It had to have a material vehicle, namely, the blood-relationship. The first schooling was to exercise love in the realm of blood-relationship; the separated human beings were brought together through that which coursed through their veins being imbued with love. This was the preparatory school of love; it was, in fact, the great school of love. And the impulse which spiritualizes this love, which does not merely allow it to remain where it works physically, but imparts it to the soul, is the great Christ-impulse in the world.

Now, had only this one impulse of blood-brotherhood operated, human evolution would have taken a strange course throughout the whole of antiquity. The beings who were the guides of the ancient times, and above all Jehovah, led men together in love, so that they united in blood-relationship; but if men had been united only through blood-relationship before the appearance of Christ Jesus, then individual human beings would never have been able to progress to personality. The individual would have been emerged in the tribe. As it was, the individual did very much lose himself in the whole. The consciousness that one is an individual human being has only developed very gradually. In the Atlantean epoch there could be no question of a man feeling himself as an individual being, and this was also the case much later. People do not understand how names were given in ancient times, otherwise they would discover how men then felt. Think of the people of the Old Testament; in pre-Christian times they experienced their “I”—if they wished to feel it aright—by no means in their separate personality. Each one who thoroughly felt the impulse streaming from the Old Testament said: I and Father Abraham are one. For he felt that he was secure in this community which reached back to Abraham, whose blood flowed through all the generations down to the last. Hence he said: “I feel that I am not a lost member when I realize that my blood is the same as that of my Father Abraham.”

And they tried to follow the community back still further. They felt secure in the group-soul. They pointed to Noah, to Adam. It is no longer known what these names signify. It is not known that in those ancient times the consciousness of man was quite different from what it is to-day. A person can only remember with difficulty what happened in his childhood, and memory certainly stops at birth. In the time of the patriarchs a man remembered not only what he himself had experienced but what his father, grandfather and great-grandfather had experienced. This was in his memory, just as with you the remembrance of your childhood. He did not know that his life specially began with his birth. The memory reached back for hundreds of years. No name was given to the separate consciousness, for there would have been no meaning in it. As a person remembered the experiences of his father, grand-father, great-grandfather, etc., a common name included the whole chain. The names Adam or Noah signify the remembrance which passed through several generations. As far as the memory of the experience of Noah extended, the chain was called Noah; this was an inner man, a spiritual being, who lived through several generations. It would have been considered meaningless to give a name to the outer man.

Thus the name Adam applied to a spiritual being, and the individual human being was not yet aware of his “I.” He would have disappeared in such a community but for the impulses which continually attacked this merging in the community, and whose object was to tear man away from the blood-ties and bring him to independence. In his astral body nestled certain spiritual beings who gave him the impulse not to allow his consciousness to become submerged. These were the Lucifer beings. It was they who in the pre-Christian period worked against the unification and it is to them that man owes his independence, his developing personality. It is extremely important to understand that we owe to Jehovah that which strove to unite, and to the Lucifer spirits that which strove to separate. In the early ages of Christianity there was a saying which ran: “Christus verus Luciferus,” i.e. Christ is the true Light-bearer; for Lucifer means the Light-bearer. Why is Christ called the true Light-bearer? Because through him has now become justified what previously was not justified. Previously there was a tearing asunder; men were not mature enough to be independent. Through the “I”-impulse which they received through Christ Jesus they had progressed so far that in spite of the “I” they could develop love of one another. Thus that which Lucifer wished to give to humanity in anticipation, so to speak, when humanity was still not sufficiently mature, was brought to humanity by the true Light-bearer, Christ Jesus. He brought the impulse to independence, but he also brought the spiritual love which unites those who are not related by blood. Through him came the epoch when humanity matured to the point which Lucifer previously wished to bring about. This saying, “Christus verus Luciferus,” was later no longer understood. He alone who rightly understands it learns to know the first teachings of Christianity.

We have therefore to comprehend this impulse in this way; we have to see how humanity was prepared for the standpoint it had to attain. Thus the Indian, Persian, Egyptian, Graeco-Latin periods were times of preparation pointing to the great Christ-event. But it is possible for man to harden himself, as it were. Let us imagine a person living at the time of Christ Jesus, and let us imagine that he could consciously decide what he wished to do. If Christ Jesus were to come he could say, “Oh, what was there previously is sufficient for me, I wish to know nothing, I will have no fellowship with Christ Jesus.” He would have in his soul the forces, the impulses, which could be acquired in the time before Christ Jesus, which could be gained through the Indian, Persian, Egyptian and Graeco-Latin civilizations. But in cosmic evolution a man ought only to have such impulses until a new one arrives. If he stands still, then he remains behind at this stage. We must not misunderstand historical development; we must not say that the same principle works in all civilizations, for it is not for nothing that one civilization is built up on another. Let us suppose some one wished to sleep through the Christian development. He would then live into the future until after the great War of All against All, but he would have nothing of the great love-principle of Christ which brings the Egos together, which makes communities of individuals. He would have everything which leads the Egos into the abyss. He would have the separating forces. This brings us to a consideration which may give rise to the question: Why does the unveiling of the first four seals provide such a comfortless picture? Because here come forth the men who wish to remain in these four preparatory civilizations in which is contained the old form of Lucifer that drives men asunder. Hence in the unveiling of the seals we are shown, too, how they got the form which they have acquired. They have slept through the event of Christ Jesus and are re-born in the forms which can be given them without the influence of the Christ-principle. Hence there appears again that which indicated the mere intelligence, the mere intellect; the horse appears four consecutive times. The old form of man appears which he obtains by receiving into himself the horse nature. This form appears at the opening of the seals.

And when the fifth seal is opened what is then brought to our notice? Those who in the preceding period have learned to understand the event of Christ Jesus! These are clothed in white garments, they have been passed by, figuratively they have been slain, they are those who are preserved for the spiritualization of the world. Thus it is the union with the Christ-principle which brings it about that men have these white garments and appear when the fifth seal is opened. Here we see a clear indication that the time when Christ appears is an important epoch for mankind; it is the epoch which brings it to pass that after the War of All against All the four ages may appear when those who have remained behind are tormented by the materiality which had proceeded with evolution and to which they have chained themselves; they are tormented by all the evils and torments of the coarsened, hardened materiality. Everything which is now described in the breaking of the seals represents nothing else than the descent into the abyss. While in the fifth seal we are only briefly directed to those who are chosen, we are shown for the rest those who remain in materiality, who go down into the abyss, who assume the forms which existed previously because they did not progress, because they have not acquired the power to transform these shapes.

You may form a picture of it; imagine that your human forms were to-day made of indiarubber; and within this rubber human body is your inner soul power which gives this rubber body its human form. Imagine that we take out the soul-force, then the rubber body would collapse. Men would receive animal forms. At the moment when you draw the soul out of this human body of rubber, man would manifest the animal form. What man has gained for himself is like something which he produces to-day by his own power. If you could observe what he formerly produced in the astral body you would see its likeness to the animal. It is really an inner force such as this which gives the rubber man the present form. Imagine that this power is removed, imagine man not fertilized by the Christ power; he springs back into the animal form. Thus it will happen to those who fall back. They will afterwards form a world beneath the present world, so to speak, a world of the abyss, where man will again have assumed animal shape.

Thus we learn to understand the direction evolution will actually take. That which is now prepared will come out again bit by bit in the future, just as that which was laid down in the Atlantean epoch has come out bit by bit in our epoch. I have said that in the last third of the Atlantean epoch a small colony was formed from which our civilizations have been derived, and from which the two following will also originate. It will be somewhat different in the next epoch which will succeed all these. There will not be a colony limited to one place, but from the general body of humanity will everywhere be recruited those who are mature enough to form the good, the noble, the beautiful side of the next civilization, after the War of All against All. This again is a progress as compared with the earlier Atlantean epoch when the colony developed in one small place, but with us there is the possibility that from all races of the world will be recruited those who really understand the call of the earth mission, who raise up Christ within themselves, who develop the principle of brotherly love over the whole earth; and indeed, in the true sense, not in the sense of the Christian confessions, but in the sense of the true esoteric Christianity which can proceed from every civilization. Those who understand this Christ-principle will be there in the period following the great War of All against All. After our present purely intellectual civilization, which is now developing in the direction of the abyss of intellect—and you will find that this is the case in every field of life—there will come a time when man will be the slave of the intelligence, the slave of the personality in which he will sink. To-day there is only one way of preserving the personality, and that is to spiritualize it. Those who develop the spiritual life will belong to the small band of the sealed from all nations and races, who will appear in white garments after the War of All against All.

We are now beginning to comprehend the spiritual world from our immediately present intellectual civilization. It is the aim of true Anthroposophy, from out of the present intellectual standards, to comprehend the spiritual world, and to gather together those who can understand the call to spiritualize the world. These will not form a separate colony but will be gathered from every nation and will gradually pass into the sixth age, that is to say, not yet beyond the great War, but primarily into the sixth age, for necessities still exist which are connected with old race ties. In our epoch, races and civilizations are still inter-mingled. The true idea of race has lost its meaning but it still plays a certain part. It is quite impossible at present for every mission to be carried out equally by every people. Certain nations are predestined to carry out a particular mission.

The nations which to-day are the vehicles of Western civilization were chosen to lead the fifth age to its zenith; they were the nations who were to develop the intellect. Hence wherever this civilization extends we have predominantly the civilization of the intellect, which is still not yet finished. This intelligence will spread still further, people will exercise still more of their spiritual forces in order to satisfy their bodily needs; to slay one another they will employ much greater spiritual forces before the great War of All against All. Many discoveries will be made in order to be able the better to carry on war, an endless amount of intelligence will be exercised in order to satisfy the lower impulses. But in the midst of it something is being prepared, with which certain nations of the East, the Northern part of the East, are gifted. Certain nations are preparing to emerge from a certain dullness and bring in a spiritual impulse with mighty force, an impulse which will be the opposite pole to intelligence. Before the sixth age of civilization, represented by the Community of Philadelphia, we shall experience something like a mighty marriage of peoples, a marriage between intelligence and intellect and spirituality. At the present time we are only experiencing the dawn of this marriage and no one should understand what is here said as a song of praise to our age; for one does not sing songs of praise to the sun when there are only the first signs of dawn. But we find remarkable phenomena when we compare East and West, when we look into the depths and foundations of the different nations.

Do not let us look upon this as a desire to take sides. These lectures, which are intended to be objective, are far, far removed from any party spirit. But you may compare objectively that which is attained as science and philosophy in the European West with that which appeared in the East, let us say in Tolstoi. One does not need to be a follower of Tolstoi, but one thing is true; in a book such as Tolstoi's about life you may read one page, if you understand how to read it, and compare it with whole libraries in Western Europe. And you may then say the following: In Western Europe one acquires spiritual culture with the intellect; certain ideas are put together out of details which are intended to make the world comprehensible, and the achievements of Western European civilization in this respect will never be surpassed. But if you understand such a book as Tolstoi's Concerning Life, you will often find condensed into ten lines what, in these Western European libraries, it takes thirty volumes to say. Tolstoi says something with elemental force, and in a few lines of his there is the same amount of energy as is assembled in thirty such volumes. Here one must be able to judge what comes forth from the depths of the spirit, what has a spiritual foundation and what has not. Just as overripe civilizations contain some-thing that is drying up and withering, so do rising civilizations contain within them fresh life and new energy. Tolstoi is a premature flower of such a civilization, one that came far too soon to be fully developed. Hence he has all the faults of an untimely birth. His grotesque und unfounded presentations of many Western European things, all that he brings forward in the way of foolish judgment, show that great personalities have the faults of their virtues and that great cleverness has the folly of its wisdom.

This is only mentioned as a symptom of the future age when the spirituality of the East will unite with the intellectuality of the West. From this union will proceed the age of Philadelphia. All those will participate in this marriage who take into themselves the impulse of Christ Jesus and they will form the great brotherhood which will survive the great War, which will experience enmity and persecution, but will provide the foundation for the good race. After this great War has brought out the animal nature in those who have remained in the old forms, the good race will arise, and this race will carry over into the future that which is to be the spiritually elevated culture of that future epoch. We shall also have the experience that in our epoch, between the great Atlantean flood and the great War of All against All, in the age represented by the community at Philadelphia, a colony is being formed, the members of which will not emigrate but will be everywhere; so that everywhere there will be some who are working in the sense of the community of Philadelphia, in the sense of the binding together of humanity, in the sense of the Christ-principle.

The position of our cognizing personality in relation to the objective world also gives us our ethical physiognomy. What does the possession of knowledge and science mean to us?

The innermost core of the world is expressed in our knowledge. The lawful harmony that governs the universe manifests itself in human knowledge.

It is therefore part of man's vocation to transfer the basic laws of the world, which otherwise dominate all existence but would never come into existence themselves, into the realm of apparent reality. This is the essence of knowledge, that it extracts from objective reality the essential lawfulness on which it is based. Our cognition is - figuratively speaking - a constant living into the ground of the world. Such a conviction must also shed light on our practical view of life.

The whole character of our way of life is determined by our moral ideals. These are the ideas we have of our tasks in life, or in other words, the ideas we have of what we should accomplish through our actions.

Our actions are part of general world events. It is therefore also subject to the general lawfulness of these events.

If an event occurs somewhere in the universe, a twofold distinction must be made between it: the external course of it in space and time and the internal regularity of it.

The realization of this lawfulness for human action is only a special case of cognition. The views we have derived about the nature of cognition must therefore also be applicable here. To recognize oneself as an acting personality thus means: to possess the corresponding laws for one's actions, that is, the moral concepts and ideals as knowledge. If we have recognized this lawfulness, then our actions are also our work. The lawfulness is then not given as something that lies outside the object on which the action appears, but as the content of the object itself that is conceived in living action. In this case, the object is our own ego. If the latter has really penetrated its action in a recognizing way, then it also feels itself to be the master of it. As long as this does not take place, the laws of action confront us as something alien; they dominate us; what we accomplish is under the compulsion they exert on us. Once they have been transformed from such a foreign entity into the very own action of our ego, this compulsion ceases. The categorical imperative is to human action what the expediency ideas of teleology are to the science of living beings. The ideas of expediency hinder research into the purely natural laws of organic beings; the categorical imperative hinders the living out of purely natural moral impulses. The imperative has become our own nature. Lawfulness no longer rules over us, but in us over the events emanating from our ego. The realization of an event by means of a lawfulness that is external to the realizer is an act of bondage; the realization of an event by the realizer himself is an act of freedom. To recognize the laws of one's actions means to be aware of one's freedom. The process of cognition is, according to our explanations, the process of development towards freedom.

The following circumstance shows how little understanding there is in the present day for Goethe's ethical views and for an ethic of freedom and individualism in general. In 1892, I spoke out in favor of an anti-teleological monistic view of morality in an essay in "Zukunft" (No. 5). Mr. Ferdinand Tönnies in Kiel responded to this essay in a brochure entitled "Ethische Kultur und ihr Geleite. Nietzsche fools in the future and present" (Berlin 1893). He put forward nothing but the main propositions of philistine morality expressed in philosophical formulas. But he says of me that "on the road to Hades I could not have found a worse Hermes" than Friedrich Nietzsche. It seems truly comical to me that Mr. Tönnies, in order to condemn me, brings up some of Goethe's "sayings in prose". He has no idea that if there was a Hermes for me, it was not Nietzsche, but Goethe. I have already explained the relationship between the ethics of freedom and Goethe's ethics in the introduction to the 34th volume of my edition of Goethe's scientific works. I would not have mentioned Tönnies' worthless pamphlet if it were not symptomatic of the misunderstanding of Goethe's world view that prevails in some circles.

Not all human action has this free character. In many cases, we do not possess the laws for our actions as knowledge. This part of our actions is the unfree part of our actions. On the other hand, there is the part where we are fully immersed in these laws. This is the free area. Insofar as our life belongs to it, it can only be described as moral. The transformation of the first area into one with the character of the second is the task of every individual development, as well as that of humanity as a whole.

The most important problem of all human thought is this: to understand man as a free personality based on himself.

Goethe's views do not correspond to the fundamental separation of nature and spirit; he only wants to see a great whole in the world, a unified chain of development of beings, within which man forms a link, albeit the highest. "Nature! We are surrounded and enveloped by it - unable to step out of it and unable to get deeper into it. Uninvited and unwarned, she takes us into the cycle of her dance and carries us along until we are tired and fall from her arms." Compare this with the above-mentioned statement: "If the healthy nature of man acts as a whole, if he feels himself in the world as part of a great, beautiful, worthy and valuable whole, if harmonious pleasure grants him a pure, free delight: then the universe, if it could feel itself as having reached its goal, would rejoice and admire the summit of its own becoming and being." Herein lies Goethe's genuinely far-reaching transcendence of immediate nature, without distancing himself in the slightest from what constitutes the essence of nature. What is foreign to him is what he himself finds in many particularly gifted people: "The peculiarity of feeling a kind of shyness towards real life, of withdrawing into oneself, of creating a world of one's own within oneself and in this way achieving the most excellent inwardly." (Winckelmann: entry.) Goethe does not flee reality in order to create an abstract world of thought that has nothing in common with it; no, he immerses himself in it in order to find its immutable laws in its eternal change, in its becoming and movement; he confronts the individual in order to see the archetype in him. Thus arose in his spirit the primordial plant, thus the primordial animal, which are nothing other than the ideas of the animal and the plant. These are not empty general concepts that belong to a gray 'theory, these are the essential foundations of organisms with a rich, concrete content, full of life and vivid. Vivid for that higher faculty of perception which Goethe discusses in his essay on "Visual Judgment". Ideas in Goethe's sense are just as objective as the colors and forms of things, but they are only perceptible to those whose faculties are equipped for them, just as colors and forms are only there for the sighted and not for the blind. If we do not approach the objective with a receptive spirit, it will not reveal itself to us. Without the instinctive ability to perceive ideas, they will always remain a closed field for us. Here, Schiller looked deeper than anyone else into the structure of Goethe's genius.

On August 23, 1794, he enlightens Goethe about the essence that underlies his spirit with the following words: "You take the whole of nature together in order to shed light on the individual; in the totality of its manifestations you seek the ground of explanation for the individual. From the simple organization you ascend, step by step, to the more complex, in order finally to build the most complex of all, man, genetically from the materials of the whole structure of nature. By recreating him from nature, as it were, you seek to penetrate his hidden technique." In this re-creation lies a key to understanding Goethe's world view. If we really want to ascend to the lawful in eternal change, then we must not look at what has been created, we must listen to nature in its creation. This is the meaning of Goethe's words in the essay "Anschauende Urteilskraft": "If in the moral sphere we are to elevate ourselves to an upper region through faith in God, virtue and immortality and approach the first being, then it should probably be the same case in the intellectual sphere that we make ourselves worthy of spiritual participation in its productions through the contemplation of an ever-creating nature. Had I after all ... had restlessly insisted on that archetypal, typical thing." Goethe's archetypes are therefore not empty schemas, but the driving forces of phenomena.

This is the "higher nature" in nature that Goethe wants to seize. We see from this that in no case is reality, as it lies spread out before our senses, something with which man, having arrived at a higher level of culture, can stop. Only when the human spirit penetrates this reality by thinking does it realize what holds this world together in its innermost being. We can never find satisfaction in individual natural events, only in the laws of nature, never in the individual individual, only in the generality. Goethe presents this fact in the most perfect form imaginable. What also remains with him is the fact that for the modern spirit, reality, mere experience, is reconciled with the needs of the cognizing human spirit through thinking.

Goethe's attitude to nature is intimately connected with his religion. One might say that his concepts of nature were so high that they themselves put him in a religious mood. He did not know the need to draw things down to himself, stripping them of any sacredness, which so many have. But he has the need to look for something worthy of reverence in the real, in the here and now, which puts him in a religious mood. He seeks to gain a side to things themselves that makes them sacred to him. Karl Julius Schröer has shown this mood bordering on the religious in Goethe's behavior in love (cf. his spiritual work "Goethe und die Liebe", Heilbronn 1884). Everything frivolous and frivolous is stripped away, and love for Goethe becomes piety. This fundamental trait of his nature is most beautifully expressed in his words:

"In our pure bosom a striving surges,
To a higher, purer, unknown
To surrender voluntarily out of gratitude.
--------------------------------------
We call it: being pious!"

This side of his nature is now inseparably connected with another. He never seeks to approach this higher side directly; he always seeks to approach it through nature. "The true is God-like; it does not appear directly, we must guess it from its manifestations" (Proverbs in Prose). In addition to the belief in the idea, Goethe also has the other belief that we gain the idea through the contemplation of reality; it does not occur to him to seek the divinity elsewhere than in the works of nature, but he seeks to extract their divine side everywhere. When, in his boyhood, he erected an altar to the great God who "stands in direct connection with nature" (Dichtung und Wahrheit, I. Teil, 1. Buch), this worship arose decisively from the belief that we can attain the highest we can reach by faithfully cultivating our contact with nature. Thus Goethe's way of looking at things, which we have justified in terms of epistemology, is innate. He approaches reality with the conviction that everything is only a manifestation of the idea, which we only gain when we elevate sense experience into a spiritual contemplation of eternal, causal necessity. This conviction lay within him; and from his youth he viewed the world on the basis of this presupposition. No philosopher could give him this conviction. So that is not what Goethe was looking for in the philosophers. It was something else. Even if his way of looking at things lay deep in his being, he still needed a language to express it. His nature was philosophical, that is to say, it could only be expressed in philosophical formulas, could only be justified from philosophical premises. In order to make himself clearly aware of what he was, in order to know what his living activity was, he looked to the philosophers. He looked to them for an explanation and justification of his being. This is his relationship with the philosophers. To this end, he studied Spinoza in his youth and later became involved in scientific negotiations with his philosophical contemporaries. Even in his youth, Spinoza and Giordano Bruno seemed to the poet to express his own nature. It is curious that he first became acquainted with both thinkers through their opposing writings and, despite this, recognized how their teachings related to his nature. His relationship to Giordano Bruno's teachings in particular confirms this. He gets to know him from Bayle's dictionary, where Bruno is fiercely attacked. And he received such a deep impression from him that we find linguistic echoes of Bruno's sentences in those parts of "Faust" which, according to their conception, date from around 1770, when he was reading Bayle (see Goethe Yearbook, Volume VII, 1886). In the "Tag- und Jahreshefte", the poet tells us that he studied Giordano Bruno again in 1812. This time, too, the impression is a powerful one, and in many of the poems written after this year we recognize echoes of the philosopher of Nola. But all this is not to be taken as if Goethe had borrowed or learned anything from Bruno, he merely found in him the formula for expressing what had long been in his nature. He found that he expressed his own inner self most clearly when he did so in the words of this thinker. Bruno regarded the universal world soul as the creator and director of the universe. He calls it the inner artist that forms matter and shapes it from within. It is the cause of everything that exists; and there is no being in whose existence it would not take a loving interest. "Be the thing ever so small and tiny, it has in itself a part of spiritual substance" (see Giordano Bruno, "Von der Ursache etc.", published by Adolf Lasson, Heidelberg 1882). This was also Goethe's view that we only know how to judge a thing when we see how it has been placed in its place by the eternal harmony of the laws of nature - and nothing other than this is the world soul for him - and how it has become precisely what it appears to us as. If we perceive with the senses, that is not enough; for the senses do not tell us how a thing is connected with the general world-idea, what it has to mean for the great whole. We must look in such a way that our reason creates for us an ideal ground on which then appears to us what the senses deliver to us; we must, as Goethe expresses it, look with the eyes of the spirit. He also found a formula for expressing this conviction in Bruno: "For just as we do not recognize colors and sounds with one and the same sense, so we also do not see the substrate of the arts and the substrate of nature with one and the same eye", because we "see that with the sensual eyes and this with the eye of reason" (see Lasson, p. 77). And it is no different with Spinoza. Spinoza's teaching is based on the fact that the Godhead has merged into the world. Human knowledge can therefore only aim to immerse itself in the world in order to recognize God. Any other way of reaching God must appear impossible to a person who thinks consistently in the sense of Spinozism.

The idea of a God who led a separate existence outside of the world and directed his creation according to externally imposed laws was alien to him. Throughout his life, he was dominated by the thought:

"What would a god be who only pushed from the outside,
Run the universe in circles on his finger?
It befits him to move the world within,
Nature in itself, to nurture itself in nature,
So that what lives and weaves and is in him,
Never misses its power, never misses its spirit."

What did Goethe have to look for in the science of organic nature in accordance with this attitude? Firstly, a law that explains what makes a plant a plant and an animal an animal; secondly, another that makes it comprehensible why the common underlying principle of all plants and animals appears in such a diversity of forms. The basic essence that expresses itself in every plant, the animality that can be found in all animals, that is what he sought first. The artificial dividing walls between the individual genera and species had to be torn down, it had to be shown that all plants are only modifications of an original plant, all animals of an original animal.

Ernst Haeckel, who perfected Darwin's ideas on the origin of organisms in a manner appropriate to German thoroughness, attaches the greatest importance to recognizing the harmony of his basic convictions with Goethe's. Haeckel's view of nature also becomes the basis of religion. The knowledge of nature communicates itself to feeling and lives itself out as a religious mood. For Haeckel, Darwin's question about the origin of organic forms immediately became the highest task that the science of organic life can ever set itself, that of the origin of man. And he was compelled to take the place of the dead matter of the physicists in assuming such principles of nature with which one need not stop at man. In his essay "Monism as a Bond between Religion and Science", and in his "Welträtseln", which appeared recently and which I believe to be the most significant manifestation of the latest natural philosophy, Haeckel expressly emphasized that he could no more conceive of an "immaterial living spirit" than of a "dead spiritless matter". And Goethe's words that "matter can never exist and be effective without spirit, spirit never without matter" are entirely consistent with this.

* One of the most interesting facts in German intellectual history is how Schiller, under the influence of Goethe, formed an ethic from Goethe's world view. These ethics arise from an artistic and liberal view of nature. But these letters are often not taken as sufficiently scientific by systematizing philosophers, and yet they are among the most important things that aesthetics and ethics have ever produced. Schiller takes Kant as his starting point. This philosopher defined the nature of beauty in several ways. First, he examines the reason for the pleasure we feel in beautiful works of art. He finds this feeling of pleasure to be quite different from any other. Let us compare it with the pleasure we feel when we are dealing with an object to which we owe something useful. This pleasure is quite different. It is intimately connected with the desire for the existence of this object. The desire for the useful disappears when the useful itself no longer exists. It is different with the pleasure we feel towards the beautiful. This pleasure has nothing to do with the possession, with the existence of the object. It is therefore not attached to the object at all, but only to the idea of it. Whereas in the case of the practical, the useful, the need immediately arises to transform the idea into reality, in the case of the beautiful we are satisfied with the mere image. This is why Kant calls the pleasure in beauty a "disinterested pleasure" that is uninfluenced by any real interest. It would be quite wrong, however, to think that this excludes expediency from the beautiful. This only happens with the external purpose. And from this flows the second explanation of beauty: "It is a thing formed purposively in itself, but without serving an external purpose." If we perceive another thing of nature or a product of human technology, our mind comes and asks about its use and purpose, and it is not satisfied until its question about the why is answered. In the case of beauty, the why lies in the thing itself; and the intellect does not need to go beyond it. This is where Schiller comes in. And he does this by weaving the idea of freedom into the line of thought in a way that does the highest honor to human nature. First, Schiller contrasts two incessantly asserting human drives. The first is the so-called material instinct or the need to keep our senses open to the inflowing outside world. A rich content penetrates us, but without us being able to exert a determining influence on its nature. "Everything happens here with absolute necessity. What we perceive is determined from outside; here we are unfree, subjugated, we must simply obey the dictates of natural necessity. The second is the form instinct. This is nothing other than reason, which brings order and law into the confused chaos of perceptual content. Through its work, system comes into experience. But even here we are not free, Schiller finds. For in this work, reason is subject to the immutable laws of logic. As there under the power of natural necessity, so here we are under that of the necessity of reason. Freedom seeks a refuge from both. Schiller assigns it the realm of art by emphasizing the analogy of art with a child's play. What is the essence of play? Things from reality are taken and changed in their relationships in any way. This transformation of reality is not governed by a law of logical necessity, such as when we build a machine, for example, where we have to strictly submit to the laws of reason, but rather serves a subjective need. The player puts things into a context that gives him pleasure, he does not impose any constraints on himself. He does not respect the necessity of nature, for he overcomes its constraint by using the things handed down to him entirely at will; but he does not feel dependent on the necessity of reason either, for the order he brings to things is his invention. In this way, the player imprints his subjectivity on reality; and in turn, he lends objective validity to the latter. The separate action of the two drives has ceased; they have merged into one and thus become free: the natural is spiritual, the spiritual is natural. Schiller, the poet of freedom, thus sees in art only a free play of man on a higher level and exclaims enthusiastically: "Man is only fully man where he plays, ... and he only plays where he is human in the full meaning of the word." Schiller calls the instinct underlying art the play instinct. This produces works in the artist that satisfy our reason in their sensual existence and whose rational content is simultaneously present as sensual existence. And the nature of man works at this stage in such a way that his nature is at once spiritual and his spirit natural. Nature is elevated to the spirit, the spirit immerses itself in nature. The latter is thereby ennobled, the former is moved from its inconceivable height into the visible world.

In Schiller's "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man" - in this gospel of humanity liberated from the barriers of both natural compulsion and the logical necessity of reason - we read Goethe's ethical and religious physiognomy. These letters can be described as Goethe's psychology drawn from all-round personal observation. "I have long watched the course of your mind, albeit from quite a distance, and have noted with ever renewed admiration the path you have marked out for yourself." This is what Schiller wrote to Goethe on August 23, 1794. Schiller was best able to observe how Goethe achieved harmony in his mental powers. These letters were written under the impression of these observations. We may say that Goethe sat as a model for the "whole man who reaches perfection through play". Now Schiller writes in the letter containing the words quoted: "If you had been born a Greek, indeed only an Italian, and had been surrounded from the cradle by an exquisite nature and an idealizing art, your path would have been infinitely shortened, perhaps made entirely superfluous. Already in your first view of things you would then have absorbed the form of the necessary, and with your first experiences the great style would have developed in you. Now, since you were born a German, since your Greek spirit was thrown into this Nordic creation, you had no choice but either to become a Nordic artist yourself or to replace your imagination with what reality withheld from it through the help of the power of thought, in order to give birth to a Greece, as it were, from within and in a rational way." Since this is true of Goethe, it is understandable that he felt the deepest satisfaction of his being when, in front of the Greek works of art, on his Italian journey, he could say to himself that he felt that the Greeks, in producing their works of art, proceeded according to the same laws that nature itself follows and that he is on the trail of. And that he found in these works of art what he called the "higher nature" in nature. He says to these creatures of the human spirit: "There is necessity, there is God."

Nature service is Goethe's service to God. He cannot find traces of God anywhere other than where nature reigns in creation. He is therefore unable to speak about his relationship to Christianity in any other way than by sharply emphasizing his way of thinking that merges with his view of nature. "If I am asked whether it is in my nature to show adoring reverence to Christ, I say: Absolutely! I bow before him as the divine revelation of the highest principle of morality. If I am asked whether it is in my nature to worship the sun, I say again: Absolutely! For it is also a revelation of the Highest, and indeed the most powerful that we children of the earth are granted to perceive. I worship in it the light and the generative power of God, through which alone we live, weave and are, and all plants and animals with us. But if I am asked whether I am inclined to stoop before a thumb bone of the Apostle Peter or Paul, I say: spare me and stay away from me with your absurdities."

Everything has been said about Goethe's position on Christianity. It is a long way from the church historian Nippold's assertion that he resolutely upheld the "Christian idea of God" to that of the Jesuit priest Alexander Baumgartner, who speaks of Goethe's "insolently anti-Christian spirit". There will hardly be a station on this path where some observer of Goethe's religious views has not settled down. And statements by Goethe that support one or the other assertion will always be available to the gentlemen. But when referring to such sayings of Goethe, one should always bear in mind what Goethe said of himself. "I for myself, with the manifold directions of my nature, cannot have enough of one way of thinking; as a poet and artist I am a polytheist, but as a naturalist I am a pantheist, and one as decidedly as the other. If I need a god for my personality, as a moral man, then that is already taken care of." Since Goethe himself said this, can we still be surprised when we are told from one side that Goethe is a confessor of a personal God? An interpreter of Goethe need only quote the following statement by Goethe, and he has constructed Goethe the believer in the personality of God: "Now Blumenbach gained the highest and ultimate expression, he anthropomorphized the word of the riddle and called what was being spoken of a nisus formativus, a drive, a violent activity, through which the formation - of living beings - should be brought about... This monstrosity personified confronts us as a god, as creator and sustainer, whom we are called upon to worship, adore and praise in every way."

If I liked sleight-of-hand tricks of the mind, I would be able to prove one after the other that Goethe was a polytheist, theist, atheist, Christian and - what else do I know? But it seems to me that it is not important to interpret Goethe according to a single statement, but according to the whole spirit of his world view. He imbued his entire emotional life with this spirit; it was in this spirit that he proceeded when he sought to investigate the laws of nature and made important discoveries in this field; it was out of this spirit that he organized his entire attitude towards art. In art he saw a "manifestation of secret natural laws"; and nature was for him the revelation of the only God he sought. It is in this sense that a word like this should be understood: "I believe in one God!" This is a beautiful, praiseworthy word; but to acknowledge God, where and how he reveals himself, that is actually bliss on earth" (Proverbs in prose). And this is also significant: "The true, identical with the divine, can never be recognized by us directly, we see it only in reflection, in example, symbol, in individual and related phenomena; we become aware of it as incomprehensible life and cannot renounce the desire to comprehend it nevertheless." But Goethe was not one of those who saw the great, otherworldly unknown in the true, the divine. He does not call the essence of things incomprehensible because human knowledge does not reach this essence, but because it is basically absurd to speak of an essence in itself. "Actually, we undertake to express the essence of a thing in vain. We become aware of effects, and a complete history of these effects would at best encompass the essence of that thing. In vain do we endeavor to portray the character of a man; but put together his actions, his deeds, and a picture of his character will present itself to us." We are probably speaking entirely in Goethe's spirit when we add: In vain do we endeavor to portray the essence of God; put together, on the other hand, the phenomena of nature and its laws, and an image of God will confront us.

I have described Goethe's way of conceiving the world from these points of view in my book "Goethe's Weltanschauung". I described the starting points that such an examination must take with the words: "If one wants to understand Goethe's world view, one must not content oneself with listening to what he himself says about it in individual statements. It was not in his nature to express the core of his being in crystal-clear sentences... He is always anxious when it comes to deciding between two views. He does not want to rob himself of his impartiality by giving his thoughts a sharp direction... Nevertheless, if you want to see the unity of his views, you have to listen less to his words than to his way of life. One must listen to his relationship to things when he investigates their essence, and add to what he himself does not say. We must look into the innermost part of his personality, which is largely concealed behind his utterances. What he says may often contradict itself; what he lives always belongs to a consistent whole."

If you delve into Goethe's personality, then you can evaluate his statements in the right sense. This becomes most necessary when talking about his relationship to Christianity. Where Christianity confronts him with all its dark sides, as for example in the person of Lavater, he speaks out openly. He writes to him (August 9, 1782): "You hold the Gospel, as it stands, to be the most divine truth; I would not be convinced by an audible voice from heaven that the water burns and the fire is quenched, that a woman gives birth without a man and that a dead man rises from the dead; rather, I consider these to be blasphemies against the great God and his revelation in nature... I am as serious about my faith as you are about yours." And when he speaks out in favor of Christianity, he reinterprets it in his own way. Nothing is more indicative of his way of reinterpreting than the sentence in which he turns Spinoza, who was decried as an atheist, into a Christian: "Spinoza does not prove the existence of God, existence is God. And if others scold him for this, I would like to call him thesssimum, indeed christianissimum and praise him." We must not forget that he calls himself "not an anti-Christian or unchristian, but a decided non-Christian".

And if he wants to make the full truth clear to himself in a decisive manner, then he does so with such distiches as those found in the diary of the Silesian journey (1790), which are what caused the Jesuit priest Baumgartner such horror at the "insolent anti-Christian spirit":

"To endure it is good to be a Christian, not to waver:
And that's how this teaching first came about."

"What is true of Christianity is true of the Stoics, free
It is not fitting for people to be Christians or Stoics."

These verses are sharply illustrated when put together with the religious sentiments that Goethe found in himself:

"What more can man gain in life,
than that God-nature reveals itself to him,"

or:

"There is also a universe within,
Hence the peoples' laudable use,
That each one the best he knows,
He names God, even his God,
Surrender heaven and earth to him,
fears him and perhaps loves him."

by Hella Wiesberger

The information contained in the section 'Notes on the Temple Legend' about the re-embodiments of Hiram Abiff as Lazarus-Johannes and as Christian Rosenkreutz needs to be supplemented, since it only forms part of what can be called Rudolf Steiner's research on Hiram and Johannes in the field of reincarnation. For it is not only concerned with the individuality of Lazarus-Johannes, the evangelist and apocalypticist, but also with that of John the Baptist, as well as the mysterious connection between the two.

These reincarnation research findings, which encompass both John figures equally, occupy a prominent position in the biography of his work because they stand at the beginning and end of Rudolf Steiner's spiritual scientific lecturing activity and also run like a “red thread” through his entire work (Marie Steiner).

The first of these research results can be found at the beginning of Steiner's spiritual scientific lectures (1901/02) in connection with the threefold approach to justifying Christianity as a mystical fact and as the central event of human history: the lecture cycle “From Buddha to Christ” in the Berlin literary avant-garde circle “Die Kommenden”; the lecture series on Egyptian and Greek mystery religions and Christianity in the circle of Berlin theosophists; and the essay “Christianity as Mystical Fact”. All three presentations culminated in the interpretation of the Gospel of John, beginning with the raising of Lazarus as an initiation performed by Christ Jesus and in the conclusion that the raised Lazarus was the author of the Gospel of John. The cycle 'From Buddha to Christ', of which there are no transcripts, ended, according to Rudolf Steiner's statement in his lecture Dornach, June 11, 1923, with this motif; in the transcripts of the lecture series to the Theosophists, it is found under the date of March 15, 1902. In the writing 'Christianity as a Mystical Fact' does not state directly that Lazarus is the author of the Gospel of John, but it follows from the whole presentation.¹

Immediately after the attempt to justify Christianity, Rudolf Steiner also began to introduce the teachings of reincarnation and karma into European intellectual life, since all spiritual scientific research is based on them. ² This applies particularly to those on history; after all, history is brought about by the re-embodied human souls, in that they carry over the results of their lives in one epoch into their lives in other epochs. And because this also applies to the spiritual guides of humanity, an essential chapter is devoted to their impulses in the various ages in the wide-ranging subject of history and reincarnation. The two John figures are given a great deal of space in it.

The first communications from earlier lives on earth of these two Christian leaders were made by Rudolf Steiner in 1904, beginning with John the Baptist. In the public lecture on Christianity and Reincarnation held in Berlin on January 4, 1904, it is stated that reincarnation was taught in the mysteries at all times, including by Christ, who, as it is already stated in the Gospel, pointed out to his trusted disciples that John the Baptist was the reincarnated prophet Elijah. Further messages followed at the turn of the year 1908/09. The background to this is described by Marie Steiner in an essay written after Rudolf Steiner's death:

"It was at the time when Rudolf Steiner encouraged me to come forward more and more with the recitation. At the time, I was trying to work my way through to Novalis. I told him that it was not easy for me, that I had not yet found the key to Novalis. He advised me to put myself in the place of the holy nuns. The nuns did not help me. On the contrary. I didn't really know what to do with them. Then suddenly it brightened up: Raphael's figures surrounded me. The child, with his deep, profound eyes, shone in his mother's arms. “I see you in a thousand images, Maria, sweetly expressed...” A resounding ocean all around, harmonies of color. I said to Rudolf Steiner: The nuns did not do it. But someone else helped: Raphael. Now Novalis is completely transparent to me. A glow passed over Rudolf Steiner's mild countenance. A few days later, he revealed the secret of Novalis, Raphael and John Elias to us for the first time.3 From “On the Eve of Michaelmas Day” in “What is happening in the Anthroposophical Society. News for its members”, 2nd year 1925.

This “a few days later” cannot be dated exactly.⁴ The first fixed date is handed down through the recollections of a Novalis event that took place in Munich on January 6, 1909, and which is described as follows: “I saw and heard Marie von Sivers for the first time under the Christmas tree in the Munich branch's room, when she, surrounded by colorful afterimages of Raphael's paintings, recited verses by Novalis. It was around New Year 1908/09. The whole room was lined with rose-red satin, a rose cross – at that time still with twelve red roses – hung in the middle above the lectern, from where we have just heard through Rudolf Steiner about the being that was incarnated as Elijah, John the Baptist, Raphael, Novalis.” ⁵

It must therefore have been a very solemn event. The same applies to a half-year later event, when, in the middle of the lecture cycle on the Gospel of John in relation to the three other Gospels, a Novalis matinee took place again in Kassel (Kassel, July 4, 1909). Again, we have only the later written memory of a participant: “After a musical introduction, Rudolf Steiner announced that Marie von Sivers would recite some poems by Novalis. With deep empathy, Marie von Sivers spoke in the speech formation that was already her own. After that, Rudolf Steiner began his lecture, in which he presented the incarnations of Elijah-John the Baptist-Raphael-Novalis as a sequence of lives of the same individuality. ... Rudolf Steiner spoke in accordance with the mood of this recitation, in an extremely warm, insistent, even solemn manner. The lecture had an almost sacred character. ... And so at the end of the lecture - the only subject of which was this series of re-embodiments - there was a deep sense of emotion among the audience and many a eye shimmered with restrained tears among the men and welling tears among the women.6From Rudolf Toepel's memoirs for the Rudolf Steiner estate administration archive.

The fact that the process of re-embodiment is not as simple as one might imagine has already been pointed out:

"People, even theosophists, usually have far too simple a mental image of the secrets of reincarnation. One must not imagine that any soul that is embodied today in its three bodies simply embodied itself in a previous incarnation and then again in a previous incarnation, which was then preceded by another one, always according to the same pattern. The secrets are much more complicated. (...) We often cannot fit a historical figure into such a scheme if we want to understand them correctly. We have to approach it in a much more complicated way.” (Leipzig, September 12, 1908)

This was, so to speak, the announcement of what was then begun at the end of 1908 as a higher chapter of the doctrine of re-embodiment. Using concrete examples of historical figures, it was shown how, due to the law of spiritual economy for the preservation of what is valuable in spiritual terms, not only the human ego but also other aspects of the being can be re-embodied, and in other individualities. The descriptions of such interpenetrating embodiments in great spiritual teachers, the highest of whom are the so-called bodhisattvas, were one of the main themes of the years 1909 to 1914.⁷

Among the figures presented in this way, John the Baptist appears again and again. In particular, in the lecture cycle “The Gospel of Mark” (September 1912), not only is he given a great deal of space, but there is also a reference to an incarnation that predates the time of Elijah. Since then, five incarnations in spiritual history have been recognized: Phinehas (in the time of Moses), Elijah, John the Baptist, Raphael, Novalis. It is therefore all the more surprising that in the lectures on the “Fifth Gospel” (1913/14), delivered a year later, the following remark is made with reference to John the Baptist: “I am not saying this now from the Fifth Gospel” - by which he meant the results of the Akasha research on the figures of the Gospels - ‘because, with regard to the Fifth Gospel, it has not yet reached the figure of John the Baptist; but I am saying it from what might otherwise arise.’ (Berlin, January 13, 1914). In view of the amount of research that had already been done on John the Baptist, this remark can only refer to the research into the interpenetration of the embodied beings, as it had already been researched and presented for other figures in the Gospels. The reason why this research on John the Baptist could only be carried out years later is explained by the tradition that Rudolf Steiner was once asked during the war of 1914-1918 whether the reflections on the Fifth Gospel could not be continued and that he replied that the spiritual atmosphere was much too unsettled for such research as a result of the war; and when the question was repeated after the war, the answer was that other tasks were now more urgent.⁸The fact that a possibility must have arisen later is shown by Rudolf Steiner's last address, given on September 28, 1924.

Five incarnations of spiritual-historical significance had also been communicated over the years, also starting in 1904, by the other John figure, Lazarus John: Hiram Abiff, Lazarus John, Christian Rosenkreutz in the 13th and 14th centuries, and the Count of St. Germain in the 18th century. ⁹ In the Berlin lecture of November 4, 1904, it was stated that the Count of St. Germain was a re-embodiment of Christian Rosenkreutz, and the connection of this incarnation with Hiram Abiff is evident from the general tenor of the entire lecture, even if it is not explicitly stated. The reincarnation of Hiram as Lazarus-Johannes was probably first mentioned in the context of the work of the Erkenntnis cult in the time of Austria in 1908; in the two lectures of September 27 and 28, 1911, in Neuchâtel, the two incarnations of Christian Rosenkreutz in the 13th and 14th centuries were described. It is not possible to say exactly when the connection between the incarnations of Lazarus and Johannes and Christian Rosenkreutz was first mentioned, because it was passed on orally without a precise date.¹⁰

Even before Lazarus was spoken of as the reincarnation of Hiram Abiff in the Erkenntniskultischer working group at Easter 1908, the Lazarus-Johannes research had been documented in a special way by the initiation experiences of Lazarus-Johannes from his apocalypse being designed into images of occult seals and columns for the Munich Whitsun Congress in 1907, which at the same time formed the basic elements of the new building idea. Furthermore, it was manifested in word and picture that the path of schooling that is decisive for the West is the Christian-Rosicrucian one founded by Christian Rosenkreutz.¹¹

The extent to which the individuality of John the Baptist can also be seen in connection with the building idea can be seen from the following events. When the laying of the foundation stone for the building originally planned in Munich was scheduled for May 16, 1912, Rudolf Steiner spoke again and repeatedly on his journey there about the already known four incarnations: Elijah, John the Baptist, Raphael, Novalis; last in Munich, on the same day that the laying of the foundation stone should have taken place there. Due to difficulties caused by the authorities, the laying of the foundation stone did not take place. However, in the summer, the artistic-dramatic realization of the idea behind the building - to create a modern, and that means public, mystery center - was embodied in the first great scene of the new mystery drama “The Guardian of the Threshold”. This scene takes place in the anteroom to the rooms of a mystery society, where several people have been summoned to be informed that a major scientific work that has just been published has created the necessary condition for people who were previously not allowed to do so because they had not been initiated to now be able to appear at the place of initiation. The Grand Master of the Mystical Union explains this in a speech about the continuity of the spiritual leadership of humanity, which is given according to a stage direction by Rudolf Steiner in front of the four portraits of Elijah, John the Baptist, Raphael and Novalis, and begins with the words:

In the name of that spirit which

---

in our place of worship, we appear at this moment before people who have not yet been allowed to hear the word that sounds here mysteriously...

And when, eight years later, in the fall of 1920, the building that had since been erected on the Dornach hill near Basel was put into operation, Rudolf Steiner reworked this same speech for the first building event in the first person, which appears extremely rarely in his poetry, and had Marie Steiner read it into the two domed rooms from the organ gallery at the festive opening ceremony:

In the name of that spirit which

---

in our striving proclaims itself,

---

I appear at this moment

---

before people who from now on want to hear

---

the word that sounds so earnestly here for the souls...

Through texts taken from the “Chymischen Hochzeit Christiani Rosenkreutz anno 145% the other Johannes individuality, Lazarus-Johannes, was also included in this first building event.

Then, with the end of Rudolf Steiner's spiritual scientific lectures in September 1924, exactly four years after the first building event (in September 1920), the importance of the research on John was once again forcefully expressed. For when, on Sunday, September 28, 1924, on the eve of Michaelmas, he struggled to his feet, already seriously ill, to speak once more to the members present, what was his concern? The two Johannes individualities! In a deeply moving way, he spoke about the four incarnations of Elias, Johannes, Raffael, Novalis, in order to then actually lead up to the new result of the Johannes research: the mysterious connection between the two in the resurrection of Lazarus. However, his strength was no longer sufficient to present this new research result. It was only hinted at by not always mentioning John the Baptist, but Lazarus-John as the re-embodied Elijah. However, because it could not be further explained, an understanding difficulty arose for the audience. Some friends who were still able to ask him about it have handed down what he replied as follows:

In answer to the further question of how this connection between two individualities is to be understood in terms of further incarnations, Marie Steiner pointed out:

Thus Rudolf Steiner's Hiram-Johannes research, with the mystery of the connection between the two Johannes individualities, as hinted at in the last address, has become a spiritual legacy that calls for constant efforts to understand it, not least because the question of the two Johanneses is one whose solution is of particular importance for the future. This is a statement by Rudolf Steiner from the very last period of his life.¹⁵

Now, a fully valid answer to the question raised by Marie Steiner regarding the distinction between the secrets of incarnation and incorporation will have to be left to future spiritual research. However, the available research results can shed some light on the question of what meaning must be associated with the secret of the interpenetration of the two John individualities. Thus, if one brings together the descriptions that Rudolf Steiner gave in different contexts, it can be seen that a decisive part of this meaning must lie in the significance of the Mystery of Golgotha as “the conquest of earthly death through the life of the spirit” (Berlin, October 23, 1908). What this means can be seen from the following fundamental clarification of the relationship between individuality and personality:

"Today, it is easy to confuse the concepts of individuality and personality. Individuality is the eternal element that runs through life on earth from one incarnation to the next. Personality is what a person acquires in the course of one lifetime. If we wish to study individuality, we must look into the depths of the human soul; if we wish to study personality, we must see how the essential core lives. The essential core is born into the people, into the occupation. All this determines the inner being, depersonalizes it. In a person who is still at a lower level of development, little will be seen of the work on his inner being. The way he speaks, the way he gestures, and so on, is simply as his people have it. But those are the advanced people who give themselves the way of speaking and gesturing from their inner being. The more a person's inner being can work on his outer being, the more he develops as a human being. One could now say that this is how individuality is expressed in personality. The one who has his own gestures, his own physiognomy, even in his actions and in relation to his surroundings, has a distinct personality. Does all this get lost at death for later? No, it is not. Christianity knows very well that this is not the case. What is meant by the resurrection of the flesh or of the personality is nothing other than the preservation of the personal into all subsequent incarnations. What a person has achieved as a personality remains with him, because it is incorporated into the individuality and this carries it forward into the following incarnations. If we have done something with our body that has a unique character, then this body, this power that has worked, rises again. As much as we have worked on ourselves, as much as we have made of ourselves, is not lost on us.” (Berlin, March 15, 1906)

The real consciousness of immortality is thus connected with the depersonalization of the individuality, the higher spiritual faculties of man. And the fact that this process also means the permeation of man with Christ is indicated by the following brief commentary on a passage from the so-called Gospel of the Egyptians:

“There is an old writing in which the greatest ideal for the development of the ego, Christ Jesus, is characterized in such a way that it says: When the two become one, when the outer becomes like the inner, then man has attained Christ-likeness within himself. That is the meaning of a certain passage in the Egyptian Gospel.” (Munich, December 4, 1909)

The interpretation that Rudolf Steiner gives of the Provençal saga of Flor and Blancheflor in his lecture Berlin, May 6, 1909, shows even more clearly what is meant by the union of the inner and the outer, of individuality and personality. This saga - which is closely related to the Hiram Johannes research because it is said that the soul celebrated in Flor reappeared in the 13th and 14th centuries in the founder of Rosicrucianism, for the founding of a new mystery school, which has to cultivate the Christ secret in a new way that corresponds to modern times. It tells of a couple who were born on the same day, at the same hour, in the same house, and were raised together and were devoted to each other from the beginning in great love. Separated from each other due to a lack of understanding on the part of others, Flor sets out to find Blancheflor. After severe, life-threatening dangers, they were finally reunited until they also died on the same day.

Rudolf Steiner interprets these images as follows: Flor means something like the flower with the red leaves or the rose, Blancheflor means the flower with the white leaves or the lily. Flor or Rose is “the symbol of the human soul that has taken up the personality, the I-impulse within itself, that lets the spiritual work out of its individuality, that has brought the I-impulse into the red blood. But in the lily, one saw the symbol of the soul that can only remain spiritual by keeping the ego outside of it, only reaching to the boundary. Thus rose and lily are two opposites. The rose has self-awareness entirely within itself, the lily entirely without itself. But the union of the soul within and the soul without, as the world spirit animating the world, has existed. Flor and Blancheflor express the finding of the world soul, of the world I, by the human soul, the human I. (...) In the union of the lily soul and the rose soul, that was seen which can find connection with the Mystery of Golgotha. (Berlin, May 6, 1909)

When it is said that the union of the soul within and the soul without, which as the world spirit animates the world, has taken place, it is certainly meant that the Christ principle, as the highest spiritual, has united with the personality, the earthly body, of Jesus of Nazareth. For only by these two becoming completely one, right down to the physical, could earthly death truly be conquered.

The extent to which the contrast between Rose Soul and Lily Soul also applies to the two individualities of John can be seen from the fact that Hiram Lazarus is always characterized as a representative of the forces of personality, while the Elijah Soul is often described as such a highly spiritual being that it is only loosely connected from the outside with its earthly vehicles, including John the Baptist. was only loosely connected from the outside.¹⁶ If the union of Rose Soul and Lily Soul can lead to a connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, then, with regard to the union of the two John souls in the resurrection of Lazarus by Christ Jesus, it may be concluded that the disciple whom the Lord loved has become that being to whom the Christ-secret of the conquest of death has been transmitted and is carried forth by it, as is expressed in the saying about Christian Rosenkreutz: “With this individuality and its work since the 13th century” - in which it was allowed to experience a new initiation - ‘we connect everything that includes us, the continuation of the impulse that was given through the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth and through the accomplishment of the Mystery of Golgotha.’ (Berlin, December 22, 1912)

A further aspect arises when the words from the Gospel according to Egypt are added to the words: “When the two become one and the outside becomes like the inside” and the subsequent words: “and the male becomes like the female, so that there is neither male nor female”. This latter word indicates that there will be no more death if there is no more sexuality, since death and sexuality are mutually dependent. Hiram Abiff was already promised in the temple legend that a son would be born to him who, even if he could not see him himself, would bring forth a new race that, according to Rudolf Steiner, would no longer know death because reproduction would no longer take place through sexuality, which conditions death, but through the word connected with the heart, through speech (Berlin, October 23, 1905). Therefore, as stated in the lecture Cologne, December 2, 1906, the perfection of man will consist in the fact that the powers of reproduction will be raised from the heart to the heart and that “precisely the soul power of John” will cause the loving heart to send out “streams of spiritual love”. This is indicated in the Gospel by the fact that, in the description of the Last Supper, it is said that the disciple whom the Lord loved and who knew about this secret of development rose from the Lord's lap to his breast.

Seen in this light, all the documents the various incarnations of the Hiram-Lazarus-John individuality (the legend of the Temple, the Gospel of John, the saga of Flor and Blancheflor, the “Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz in the year 1459”; also the cosmic deed of Christian Rosenkreutz at the beginning of the 17th century, was to make possible the overcoming of the Cain and Abel conflict both in the individual human being and in humanity as a whole.¹⁷ on the central Christian mystery of the overcoming of death.

Rudolf Steiner also saw the goal of his work in this line. This is evident from a statement he made when founding the Erkenntniskultischer (Cult of Knowledge) working group, when he spoke of the fact that the significance of the theorespekte or anthroposophical movement lies in the fact that, through its wisdom, which is neither purely male nor purely female, but transsexual, it is to prepare in the spiritual realm what will later happen on the physical plane: the reunion of the sexes (Berlin, October 23, 1905). This not only gives the full-fledged collaboration of men and women, which he practiced everywhere, including in the context of cultic work, but also the word spoken in the same lecture: “I have reserved for myself to achieve a unification between those of Abel's and those of Cain's sex” a very special biographical significance. And this in turn can help to explain why the Hiram-Johannes research is at the beginning and end of his spiritual scientific lecturing activities and runs like a “red thread” through his entire work.

• 1. This is indicated by Rudolf Steiner himself in his last address on September 28, 1924. In the lecture of July 25, 1904, it was stated that according to the Akasha Chronicle, the resurrected Lazarus was the writer of the Gospel of John, the same disciple whom the Lord loved and who stood beneath the cross.
• 2. See “Reincarnation and Karma”, GA 135.
• 4. The songs of Mary by Novalis were recited for the first time by Marie von Sivers at the Christmas celebration of the Berlin branch on December 22, 1908. Therefore, the “a few days later” could have been at the lecture on December 28, 1908, with which the theme was introduced, which was described as a higher chapter of spiritual science, but in which Rudolf Steiner had not allowed notes to be taken. The fact that it is unlikely that it was not spoken about in Berlin, the main place of activity at the time, also speaks for this date. For in Berlin lectures this series of incarnations is mentioned only much later and as already known. 4
• 5. Max Gümbel-Seiling in “Memorial Sheet for Marie Steiner-von Sivers”, Stuttgart 1949.
• 7. See “The Principle of Spiritual Economy in Connection with Questions of Re-embodiment” (1909), GA 109; “The Gospel of Luke” (1909), GA 114; “Esoteric Christianity and the Spiritual Guidance of Humanity” (1911/12), GA 130; “The Gospel of Mark” (1912), GA 139; “The Fifth Gospel” (1913/14), GA 148.
• 8. Friedrich Rittelmeyer in “Meine Lebensbegegnung mit Rudolf Steiner”, Stuttgart (1st edition 1928).
• 9. This name was also given to other people, “so that not everything that is said here or there about the Count of St. Germain in the outer world can also apply to the real Christian Rosenkreutz.” (Neuchâtel, September 27, 1911).
• 10. Marie Steiner told Günther Schubert personally, and he in turn told the editor of this volume. Later, in 1923, Rudolf Steiner spoke of it again in a small circle, cf. M. Kirchner-Bockholt in 'What is happening in the Anthroposophical Society. News for its members' 1963, nos. 48 and 49.
• 11. See “Images of Occult Seals and Columns. The Munich Congress Whitsun 1907 and its Effects», GA 284.

  In the lectures given at the congress and in the following lectures of 1907, there is repeated mention of this path of training and its founder, Christian Rosenkreutz, as the great spiritual leader of the West. It is said: «... he has always lived among us and is still with us today as a leader in spiritual life.” (Munich, June 1, 1907, esoteric lecture, in CW 264)

  The spiritual connection between this individuality and the new building idea, as manifested at the Munich Congress, shone forth again a few years later when Rudolf Steiner, also out of the building project,

  to found a mode of working that he said had as its direct starting point the individuality whom, “since Western times, we have known as Christian Rosenkreutz.” (Berlin, December 15, 1911, in GA 264). This founding attempt had already been solemnly proclaimed at a Knowledge Cult event in Stuttgart on November 27, 1911. Since nothing more is known about this event, we can only assume that the incarnation connection between Lazarus-Johannes and Christian Rosenkreutz was first communicated at that time - shortly after the two lectures on the life and work of Christian Rosenkreutz in the 13th and 14th centuries (September 1911).

• 12. A certain justification for this supposition could be seen in the triptych “Gral” by the painter Anna May, which, according to a statement by Marie Steiner, was created after the lectures in Neuchâtel. The central section shows the events of Golgotha and Joseph of Arimathea collecting the blood of Christ; on the left wing are the figures from the Temple Legend of King Solomon, the Queen of Sheba and Hiram Abiff; on the right wing is the 13th-century initiation of Christian Rosenkreutz, as first described by Rudolf Steiner in Neuchâtel. Rudolf Steiner is said to have given Anna May some information about this. See Margarete Hauschka in “Das Goetheanum” 1975, No. 24 with a black and white illustration of the painting.
• 13. See the last address of September 28, 1924 with the associated additions in “Esoteric Reflections on Karmic Connections” IV. See also the study by Adolf Arenson, “Elias-Johannes-Lazarus” in “Ergebnisse aus dem Studium der Geisteswissenschaft Rudolf Steiners”, Freiburg i.Br. 1980, as well as the article by M. Kirchner-Bockholt in “Was in der Anthroposophischen Gesellschaft vorgeht. News for its Members, 1963, No. 48 and 49.
• 14. Cf. footnote 1 on page 425.
• 15. Related by Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz from his conversation with Rudolf Steiner on March 3, 1925.
• 16. See lecture Berlin, December 14, 1911, and “The Gospel of Mark,” GA 139.
• 17. See “Esoteric Christianity and the Spiritual Guidance of Humanity”, GA 130.

A week ago I commented here on the grievous event of the Goetheanum fire and other current concerns of the Anthroposophical Society. Today I planned to speak about purely anthroposophical matters, but I find it necessary to say a few introductory words about Society problems. I was able to attend at least the second part of yesterday's meeting, and saw how easy it is to misunderstand matters involving the nature of the Society such as were brought up by me last week. It is not a moment too soon to correct these misconceptions. My introductory remarks tonight will nevertheless still have to do with an anthroposophical view of life and perhaps on that account prove worthwhile to this or that listener.

I am mainly interested in going on with yesterday's discussion about judgment-forming in the Society. A challenge was issued, quite independently of anything I said, to the effect that every member should form his own independent judgments about matters affecting the Society. Now of course nothing could be truer. But we need to concern ourselves with the fact that when a challenge of this kind is presented one has to consider the whole context of what is under discussion, no matter how right the isolated statement may be in itself nor how fully I agree with it in principle. Something can be perfectly true but it may not necessarily apply in a given instance. Every truth can be presented as true in itself, but it is colored by the context in which it is brought up, and in the wrong place it can lead to the gravest misconceptions.

Now the point of view on judgment-forming was expressed in connection with my lecture of December 30th last in Dornach, in which I discussed the relationship of the Anthroposophical Society to the Movement for Religious Renewal. The comment was made that members should make their own judgments and not be influenced by mine. Of course they should! But in the form in which this advice was presented, it was and is profoundly at odds with the state of mind that comes from a real grasp of anthroposophy. For the anthroposophical world conception is not based on merely exchanging the view of things prevailing today for a different view similarly arrived at. As becomes evident in the whole posture of anthroposophy, it is not enough to think differently about all sorts of things, but—far more importantly—to think these different thoughts in a different way, to feel them with a different attitude of soul. Anthroposophy requires that thinking and feeling be utterly transformed, not just changed as to content.

Anyone inclined to test the great majority of my lectures in this respect will find that I keep strictly to what I have just expressed, and that it lies in the very nature of an anthroposophical view of the world to present things in such a way that hearers are left wholly free to form their own judgments. If you go through most of my lectures, including those on subjects such as that treated in the lecture of December 30, 1922, you will find their chief content to be simply facts, that they present facts, either those of super-sensible realms, of the world of the senses, or of history, and that their presentation is such that the reader can always draw his own conclusions about them, completely uninfluenced by me. Indeed, one of the lecture cycles held in Dornach even carries the sub-title, “Presentation of Facts on which to base Conclusions,” or the like. Since this is the case, the results are such as to remove any justification for saying that people were told what to think. For one person will draw one conclusion from my lectures, another a quite different one, and each thinks his is the right view of the matter. Each could be right from where he stands, because I never try to pre-determine the outcome, but simply to provide facts on which conclusions can be based. I thus deliberately expose myself to the danger that a series of facts I am presenting can be quite variously interpreted. For my interest is solely in communicating facts, and anybody who wants to look into the matter will find that the only time I express a judgment is when something needs to be corrected or refuted.

This has to be the case. A world view such as that based on anthroposophy must always be keenly conscious of the time context to which it belongs. We are now living in the age of consciousness soul development, a condition of soul wherein the all-important thing is for individuals to draw their own conclusions and learn to give facts an unprejudiced hearing, so that they can then make fully conscious judgments. The style of my presentations springs from an awareness that man has entered upon the development of the conscious soul. This accounts, as I said, for the varying conclusions that can be drawn from my words. I try to present the facts as clearly as possible. But there is never any question of “should” or “shouldn't.” Anthroposophy is there to communicate truth, not to propagandize. This has often been emphasized as, for example, in my refusal to take sides about vegetarianism. When I describe what effects a vegetarian diet has on people and what the effects of meat-eating are, I do so merely to present the facts, to make the truth known. In the age of the consciousness soul, anyone really acquainted with the facts of any case can confidently be left free to form his own judgments. It is essential to an anthroposophical view of things to be really clear on this point.

So, taking my style from the Anthroposophical Society rather than from the Movement for Religious Renewal, I tried in my lecture at Dornach on December 30, 1922, to show what the relationship between the two groups is. On that occasion I followed my general rule of merely presenting facts, and anyone who reads the lecture of that date will see this to be true. What action to take was a matter left to everyone's free weighing. The lecture makes this clear, and I expressed myself on the subject here a week ago as plainly as could be.

The matter of context has to be taken into consideration if one is to make really responsible assertions of an anthroposophical nature. One cannot make the remark that people should form their judgments independently of Steiner at utterances based in the strictest sense on anthroposophy. For except when Steiner is refuting or having to correct a statement, his hearers are even being forced by the way he puts things to form their own judgments; they are given no chance to adopt his.

An overall view of things anthroposophical is far better served by emphasizing this than by what some were emphasizing here yesterday, and the inappropriateness of what was said could encourage many seeds of misunderstanding. It is exceedingly important that I state this here, because it is a matter of anthroposophical principle.

There is a further matter to consider. In forming independent judgments it is not enough to be sure they are one's own. One must be equally sure, before expressing them, that one has taken all the pertinent facts into consideration. Anybody can draw his own conclusions. The point is to arrive at the correct ones when a sufficient overview of the facts of the case permits it or when facts that obviously do not apply have been discarded. I must therefore emphasize—and I bring up these introductory problems in duty bound, not because I have the least desire to do so—that what was said yesterday about all kinds of reports about the Movement for Religious Renewal having been carried to Dornach, so that my words could have been influenced and my opinions shaped thereby, is simply incorrect. The lecture in question was completely unrelated to any such reports, as fair-minded reviewers will see for themselves.

A third item was brought up in connection with my lecture, namely, that one faction was having chances to be heard while the other had none. If I am not mistaken, the Waldorf School faculty was named as a case in point, because I meet regularly with it. The truth is, however, that the matter had never even been discussed with the Waldorf faculty up to the time of giving the lecture. Here again is an example of a judgment made in ignorance of the facts. It might easily be thought that, since I meet frequently with the Waldorf faculty, there had been frequent discussions of the matter. But pedagogical matters naturally form the agenda of such meetings; anthroposophical gossip definitely has no share in them.

As I said, I stress these things in duty bound because they have to do with the nature of anthroposophical work, and we are at the point of at least trying to put that work on a healthy basis in the Society. Of course I was able, right after the founding of the Movement for Religious Renewal, to hand over to appropriate persons the task of giving the Society all the necessary information about it; I didn't have to do this myself. That was apparent to anyone who heard the closing words I spoke on the occasion of launching the Movement for Religious Renewal. It is always a terrible thing for me to be forced to break off communicating facts in order to say the kind of things that I was compelled to say yesterday. But as things are now, the whole weight of everything connected with anthroposophical activities is burdening my soul, and unless something really adequate is done to clear up just those misunderstandings that are escaping notice because they are not as crassly evident as others, our anthroposophical work cannot progress. But the work must progress; otherwise, we would obviously have to leave the situation of the Goetheanum as it is. Resuming work on it depends entirely on strengthening the Society and freeing it of misunderstandings that sap its very lifeblood.

That lifeblood is sapped when, for example, no attention is paid to the principle involved in speaking of ethics in the sense required by the Spirit of the Time for the age of the developing consciousness soul and delineated by me in the Philosophy of Freedom. At the time I wrote it, I did not exactly relish exposing myself to the reproaches certain to issue from narrow-minded quarters because of my repudiation of authoritarian ethics. But every sentence I set down was formulated in the way I am always at pains to do, taking the greatest care to leave the reader free, even in relation to the development of thought and feeling under discussion in the book mentioned. So I must point out how out of place it is to bring up the question of a lecture like that of December 30, 1922, influencing the conclusions drawn by members of the Anthroposophical Society. There might be many other occasions where such a question could be raised. But it creates misunderstandings to raise it in connection with the lecture referred to, and to do so disregards the fact of my sacred concern to avoid influencing people's judgment by what I say on the subject of vitally important aspects of activities within the Society.

So I have again expressed my intention of formulating what I have to say in such a way that nobody's judgment can be influenced. It is therefore unnecessary to warn those who attend my lectures to preserve their freedom of judgment.

Now let me continue in the spirit of my previous comments and go on to consider how a spiritual-scientific judgment is arrived at. I am speaking now of judgments that express spiritual-scientific truths.

It can give one a strange feeling to observe how little aware people are of the seriousness with which the communication of spiritual truths is weighted. All one has to do to form and express judgments about things of the everyday world of the senses is to practice observation or logic at a given moment. Observation and logic are perfectly adequate bases for forming judgments about sense-derived and historical data. In the realm of spiritual science, however, they are not adequate. There, it is not enough to deal just once with forming a particular judgment. What is required is something quite different, something I shall call here a twofold re-casting of a judgment. This re-casting usually takes more than a short period of time; indeed, the period tends to be quite a long one. Let us say that one forms some judgment or other on the basis of methods you are familiar with from descriptions given in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment and in the second part of An Outline Of Occult Science. Following these procedures, one arrives at this or that conclusion about spiritual beings or processes. At this point one is obligated to keep this conclusion to oneself and not to express it. Indeed, one is even obligated to regard it simply as a neutral fact which, for the time being, one neither accepts nor rejects. Then, perhaps even years later, one comes to the point of undertaking the first re-casting of this judgment in one's own soul life; one deepens and in many respects even transforms it. Even though the content of the judgment may remain the same after its re-casting, it will have taken on a different nuance, a nuance of inner participation, perhaps, or of the warmth one has spent on it. In any case, it will incorporate itself in the life of the soul quite differently after this first re-casting than on the previous occasion, and one will then have the feeling of having separated oneself in some way from the judgment. If it has taken a matter of years to accomplish the first re-casting, one cannot, of course, have been turning the judgment over in one's mind every minute of the time. The judgment naturally disappears into the unconscious, where it carries on a life of its own quite independently of the ego. It has to have this independent life. One must stay away from it and let it live all to itself. Thus the ego element is eliminated from the judgment, which is then turned over to an objective faculty in oneself. When one first makes an observation and draws a logical conclusion from it, the ego is invariably involved. But when—possibly after a lapse of several years—a judgment is re-cast for the first time, one has the distinct experience of its emerging from the soul's depths to confront one like any other fact of the surrounding world. All this time it was out of sight. Now one comes across it again, one re-discovers it, and it seems to be saying, “The first time you formed me imperfectly, or even incorrectly, but now I have corrected myself.”

This is the judgment the true spiritual scientist seeks, the kind that develops its own life in the human soul. It takes a lot of patience to re-cast it because, as I have said, the process of re-casting can take years, and the conscientiousness that spiritual science demands means keeping silent while letting things speak.

But now, my dear friends, after re-casting a judgment in this way and experiencing its emergence out of an objective realm, one has the strong feeling that it occupies a place somewhere in oneself despite its objective recovery. So one can still feel that, in view of the responsibility one has to let the thing speak while remaining silent oneself, one should not express this kind of judgment on a spiritual-scientific matter. One therefore waits again, and perhaps again for years, for the second re-casting. As a result, one arrives at a third form of the judgment, and one will find a significant difference between the process that went on in the period between the first forming of the judgment and its first re-casting and the process it underwent between the first and second re-casting. One notices that it was comparatively easy to recall the judgment in the first time-interval described, while in the second it is extremely difficult to summon it up again, into such soul-depths has it descended, depths into which the easy judgments gleaned from the outer world never descend. Re-cast judgments of the kind I mean sink to the deepest levels of the soul, and one finds out what a struggle it costs to recall such a re-cast judgment between its first and second re-casting. By judgment I mean here an overview of the whole area covered by the fact in cases where the facts are of a spiritual-scientific nature. When one then arrives at the third form of the judgment, one knows that the judgment has been in the realm of the thing or process under study. In the period between its first forming and first re-casting it remained within one's own being, but in the second such interval it plunged into the realm of the objective spiritual fact or being. One sees that in its third shape the thing or being itself gives back the judgment in the form of a certain outlook one now has. Only now does one feel equal to communicating this view or judgment of a spiritual-scientific fact. The communication is made only after completing this twofold re-casting and thus arriving at the certainty that one's first view of the matter has pursued a path directly to the facts of the case and returned again. Indeed, a judgment of super-sensible things that is to find valid expression must be sent to the realm where the relevant facts or beings dwell.

No one with a right approach to presentations of basic and significant spiritual-scientific facts will find this hard to understand. Of course, a person who reads lecture cycles just as he would a modern novel will not notice from the way it is presented that the all-important thing, the real proof, lies in this twofold re-casting of a judgment. He will then call such a statement a mere assertion, not a proof at all. But the only proof of spiritual facts is experience, experience conscientiously come by and based on a twofold re-casting of judgments. Spiritual things can be proved only by experiencing them. This does not hold true of understanding them, however. Anyone with a healthy mind can understand any adequate presentation. But to be adequate, it has to have supplied that healthy mind with all the pertinent data, so pertinently arranged that the very manner of the presentation convinces of the truth of a given conclusion.

It makes a strange impression to have people come and say that spiritual-scientific truths ought to be as susceptible of proof as assertions about facts observed in the sense world. A person who makes such a demand shows that he is unfamiliar with the difference between perception of things spiritual and ordinary experience on the physical or historical level. Individuals who acquaint themselves with anthroposophy will notice that the single truths it presents fit into the picture of anthroposophy as a whole, and that this whole in turn supports the further single truths they hear. These further truths then illuminate things heard in the past. An increasing familiarity with anthroposophy is thus constant growth in experiencing its truth. The truth of a mathematical statement can be discerned in a flash, but it is correspondingly lifeless. Anthroposophical truth is a living thing. Conviction cannot be arrived at in a single moment; it is alive, and goes on growing. Conviction about anthroposophy might be compared to a baby just starting out in life, uncertain at first, scarcely more than a belief. But the more one learns, the more certain one's conviction becomes. This growing-up of anthroposophical conviction is actually proof of its inner aliveness.

We see here, furthermore, that what one thinks and feels about the concerns of anthroposophy is not only different from what one thinks and feels in other areas today, but that one must think differently, feel differently, take a different approach than is usual elsewhere. This different approach or attitude is basic to an understanding of anthroposophy, and it forms the basis for an anthroposophical fructification of all the various fields of life and learning.

This fact will have to be kept particularly clearly in mind by scientists coming into the movement. They should not only make it their goal as scientists to develop a different picture of the world than that striven for by external science, but should also be aware that their chief responsibility consists in bringing an anthroposophical frame of mind and an inner aliveness to bear on the various scientific fields they enter. This would keep them from resorting to polemics against other types of science, and instead help them to proceed in the direction of developing aspects of those sciences that would remain undeveloped without anthroposophy. I must stress this in a time of crisis for our Society, a crisis due in no small measure to the way scientists have been conducting themselves in it.

I must add here that the battle over atomism that the journal Die Drei [DIE DREI: an anthroposophical journal.] has been waging can only mean the death of fruitful scientific exchange. This debate should not be carried on with resort to the same kind of thinking practiced by opponents and with a failure to see that in certain vital points their assertions are correct. The all-important thing is to realize that physics is just that field of science that has brought out facts quite ideally suited to serving as the foundation of an anthroposophical outlook, provided one takes physics just as it is, without polemics. As we have seen in the polemical debate in “Die Drei,” polemics unrelieved by an anthroposophical approach can only lead to unfruitfulness.

I had a further reason for stressing this: I want to make it fully clear as a matter of principle that everything that is done in the name of anthroposophy cannot be laid at my door! I respect people's freedom. But when harmful things happen I must be allowed to exercise my own judgment about bringing them up. Complete independence must be the rule in anthroposophical concerns, not opportunism. Least desirable of all is the comradely spirit so frequently met with in discussions about scientific questions.

Now, my dear friends, as I often point out, we have to be clear when we are presenting anthroposophy that we are now living in the age of consciousness soul development. In other words, rational and intellectual capacities have become the most outstanding aspects of man's present state of soul. Ever since the time of Anaxagoras, a philosopher of ancient Greece, we have been sifting every judgment, even those based on external observation, through our intellectuality. If you examine the rationalistic science of today, particularly mathematics, which is the most rationalistic of all, and consider the rationalistic working over of empirical data by the other sciences, you will form some idea of the actual thought-content of our time. This thought-content, to which even the youngest children are exposed in modern schools, made its appearance at a fairly definite point in human evolution. We can pinpoint it in the first third of the fifteenth century, for it was then that this intellectuality appeared on the scene in unmistakable form. In earlier times people thought more in pictures even when they were dealing with scientific subject matter, and these pictures expressed the growth forces inherent in the things they thought about. They did not think in abstractions such as come so naturally to us today.

But these abstract concepts educate our souls to the pure thinking described in my The Philosophy of Freedom. It is they that enable us to become free beings. Before people were able to think in abstractions they were not free, self-determined souls. One can develop into a free being only by keeping the inner man free of influences from outside, by developing a capacity to lay hold on moral impulses with the aid of pure thinking, as described in the The Philosophy of Freedom. Pure thoughts are not reality, they are pictures, and pictures exercise no sort of compulsion on us. They leave us free to determine our own actions.

So, on the one hand, mankind evolved to the level of abstract thinking, on the other to freedom. This has often been discussed here from several other angles.

Let us now consider how things stood with man before earthly evolution brought him to a capacity for abstract thoughts, and so to freedom. The humanity incarnated on the earth in earlier periods was incapable of abstract thinking. This was true of ancient Greece, not to mention still earlier periods. The people living in those early days thought entirely in pictures, and were therefore not as yet endowed with the inner sense of freedom that became theirs when they attained the capacity for pure (that is, abstract) thinking. Abstract thoughts leave us cold. But the moral capacity given us by abstract thought makes us intensely warm, for it represents the very peak of human dignity.

What was the situation before abstract thought with its accompaniment of freedom was conferred on man? Well, you know that when man passes through the gates of death and casts off his physical body, he still retains his etheric body for a few days thereafter and sees his whole life, all the way back to the moment of his first memory, spread out before him in mighty pictures, in an undetailed, comprehensive and harmonious panorama. This tableau of his life confronts a person for several days after he has died.

That is the way it is today, my dear friends. But in the time when people living on earth still possessed a picture consciousness, their experience immediately after death was that of a rational, logical view of the world such as human beings have today, but which those who lived in earlier times did not have in the period between birth and death.

This is a fact that proves a signal aid in understanding human nature. An experience that people of ancient as well as somewhat later periods of history had only after death, that is, a short looking back in abstract thoughts and an impulse to freedom, which then remained with them during their lives between death and rebirth, came, in the course of evolution, to be instead an experience that they had during life on earth. This constant pressing through of super-sensible experience into earthly experience is one of the great secrets of existence. The capacity for abstraction and freedom that presently extends into earthly life was something that came into an earlier humanity's possession only after death in the form of the looking back I have described; whereas nowadays, human beings living on the earth possess rationality, intellectuality and freedom, exchanging these after death for a mere picture consciousness in their reviewing of their lives. There is a constant passing over of this kind going on, with the concretely super-sensible thrusting itself into sense experience.

You can see from this example how anthroposophy obtains the facts it speaks of from observation of the spiritual, and how subjectivity has no chance to color its treatment of a fact. But once we arrive at these facts, do they not affect our feelings and work on our will impulses? Could it ever be said of anthroposophy that it is merely theory? How theoretical it would sound to say merely that modern man is ruled by freedom and abstraction! But how richly saturated with artistic feeling and religious content such a statement becomes when we realize that what gives us modern human beings freedom in our earthly experience and a capacity for abstraction is something that comes to us here on earth from the heavenly worlds we enter after death, but that makes its way to us in a direction exactly counter to the one we take to enter them! We go out through the gates of death into spiritual realms. Our freedom and capacity for abstraction come to us as a divine gift, given to the earth world by the spiritual. This imbues us with a feeling for what we are as human beings, making us warmly aware not only of the fact that we are bearers of a spiritual element, but of the source whence that element derives. We look on death with the realization that what lies beyond it was experienced by people of an earlier time in a way that has now been carried over into the modern experiencing of people here on earth.

The fact that this heavenly element, intellectuality and freedom, has been thus translated into earthly capacity makes it necessary to look up to the divine in a different way from that of earlier ages. The Mystery of Golgotha made it possible to look up in this new way. The fact that Christ came to live on earth enables him to hallow elements of heavenly origin that might otherwise tempt man to arrogance and similar attitudes. We are living in a period that calls on us to recognize that our loftiest modern capacities, the capacity for freedom and pure concepts, must be permeated by the Christ impulse. Christianity has not reached its ultimate perfection. It is great just because the various evolutionary impulses of the human race must gradually be saturated by the Christ impulse. Man must learn to think pure thoughts with Christ, to achieve freedom with Christ, because he will otherwise not have that relationship to the super-sensible world that enables him to perceive correctly what it gives him. Studying ourselves as modern human beings, we realize that the super-sensible penetrates into earthly life through the gates of death in a direction directly counter to that that we take on dying. We go one way as human beings. The world goes the opposite way. With the descent of Christ, the spiritual sun enters from spiritual heights into the earth realm, in order that the human element that has made its way from the super-sensible to the sense world come together with the cosmic element that has taken the same path, in order that man find his way to the spirit of the cosmos. He can orient himself rightly in the world only if the spirit within him finds the spirit outside him. The spirit that an older humanity found living in the world beyond death can be rightly laid hold upon by people living on the earth today only if they are irradiated by the Christ, who descended to earth from that same world whence rationality and intellectuality and freedom made their way into the experience of incarnated human beings.

So we may say that anthroposophy begins in every case at the scientific level, calls art to the enlivening of its concepts, and ends in a religious deepening. It begins with what the head can grasp, takes on all the life and color of which words are capable, and ends in warmth that suffuses and reassures the heart, so that man's soul can at all times feel itself in the spirit, its true home. We must learn, on the anthroposophical path, to start with knowledge, then to lift ourselves to the level of artistry, and to end in the warmth of religious feeling.

The present rejects this way of doing things, and that is why anthroposophy has enemies. These enemies have many strange qualities. I have been talking of such serious matters today that I don't want to end on a serious note, although these matters are a good deal more serious than is generally realized. But we should often consider what a contrast exists between the seriousness of genuine anthroposophical striving and the ideas about it entertained by a good many of our fellow men. Some of them are absolutely grotesque, though others would strike us as simply droll were it not for the fact that we have to put up a defense against them. Sometimes I also find it necessary to turn my own spotlight on the outer world, with everyone free to make of it what he will. So I am going to close today's weighty discussion with a comment that is not to be taken too weightily.

A little while ago, our friend Dr. Wachsmuth brought me in Dornach a rude pamphlet not only attacking anthroposophy, but making me and those close to me its special targets. He said at the time that he wasn't leaving the book with me because it would be insulting even to assume that I would read such a particularly crude piece of invention. I didn't see the book again. Dr. Wachsmuth took it away with him, and I gave it no further thought.

Yesterday I traveled through Freiburg, accompanied by Frau Dr. Steiner and Herr Leinhas. We stopped off for refreshments and were sitting at a restaurant table. Two men were seated at the adjoining one. One of them had a rather bulging briefcase and other such accoutrements. We took no special notice of these people, and they left shortly before we did. After their departure the waiter brought me a book, saying that one of the gentlemen had asked him to give it to me. Herr Leinhas asked who the men were, and was told that one of them was Werner von der Schulenburg. On the book's flyleaf stood the words, “With the author's compliments.”

You see, my dear friends, what can happen. Perhaps this will give you some idea what a conception of tact—not to mention other qualities—exists nowadays among those who parade their enmity.

I have found it quite impossible lately to pay much attention to my enemies. Anyone who has been following my recent activities will have seen how occupied I have been presenting new truths to add to the old. This takes time, which one cannot afford to let anyone interrupt and waste, no matter how savage the attacks become.

I have described to you today how much is involved in arriving at anthroposophical truths. If the Society becomes fully conscious of this, it will find some of the strength it needs for its current reorganization. That, my dear friends, is a vital need. Please do not take it amiss that I have harped on this theme so insistently today.

Previous studies in the Anthroposophical Society here in Prague will have made it clear to you that the evolution of mankind is governed by the spirit—or perhaps it is better to say, by spiritual Beings—and that human souls, themselves filled with spirit, carry over their achievements from one epoch to another, including, of course, whatever burden of guilt they have accumulated in a particular epoch. All these things enable us to gaze deeply into the life of the Cosmos both from the physical aspect and from the aspect of soul and spirit, and only in this way is it possible for us to understand our real nature and being. For without yielding to pride we must acknowledge that in our own human nature we are united with the spiritual fount of the Cosmos and that we can understand our own being and constitution only through a spiritual understanding of the Cosmos.

Now since the Christmas Foundation Meeting it is not only a matter of conducting the affairs of Anthroposophy within the Anthroposophical Society; the conduct of these affairs must in itself be Anthroposophy. And this must also come to expression in the re casting of Anthroposophical work. In these lectures, therefore, I have not been afraid to lead our study from exoteric into more esoteric domains, and in this respect I want to add something to-day to what has already been said—something that provides concrete evidence of how the human soul passes over from one epoch into another. The general principle applies equally to individuals, and through an understanding of the karma of personalities known to us all, light can be shed upon our own karma. To-day, therefore, we will continue our study of karma in more concrete detail.

In the course of these lectures I have mentioned the name of an individual who is a remarkable example of how a certain visionary quality can reveal itself in one who is preeminently a man of will. I have mentioned the name of Garibaldi, the hero of the cause of freedom in Italy, and I have also spoken of certain of his outstanding characteristics. Everything about him gives expression to will, to impulses of will. What a tremendous power of will was in evidence when as a young man during the twenties and early thirties of the 19th century he set out again and again, quite voluntarily, on perilous voyages through the Adriatic, and after having been taken prisoner several times was always able, through his strength and courage, to escape. What a tremendous power of will was at work when, having seen that for the time being there was no field for his activity in Europe, he went over to South America where he became one of the most intrepid fighters in the cause of freedom there. I have spoken, too, of how in the circumstances of his betrothal and marriage he disregarded the usual customs and determined his own life as he saw fit. Then, on his return to Europe, he became the one to whom, in reality, modern Italy owes everything.

When the question was put to me one day: “What could have been the karmic connections of this personality?” two aspects came into consideration. For the finding of karmic connections is by no means a simple but a very complicated task. I have said already that one must often start from details which although clearly in evidence seem to be of minor importance and be led by them to the principles according to which the facts of the one earthly life are carried over into the later life.

The case of Garibaldi is strange in that although at heart and in sentiment he was a republican, through and through a republican, he laid the whole force of his will into the task of consolidating the Italian monarchy under Victor Emanuel. Simply by studying the biography of Garibaldi one can perceive a fundamental contradiction between this inner trend of feeling and his actual deeds. One perceives, too, that he felt a bond with men like Mazzini and Cavour, with whose ideas and convictions he was manifestly at variance and whose trend of thought differed so radically from his own. Then there is the striking fact that Garibaldi was born, in the year 1807, quite near to the birthplaces of the other three: the later King Victor Emanuel, Cavour the statesman, and Mazzini the philosopher. Their birthplaces were really in close proximity. And then one is led to investigate the connection between the karma of such personalities.

The other aspect—a very far reaching one—is the following. In studying Spiritual Science we must always have in our minds that in olden times there were Initiates, seers, men of vision in the widest sense. And the question may be asked: Since these wise men of times gone by must reincarnate, where are they working now, in the modern age? Where are they, these great personalities who worked as Initiates in the past?—They have indeed come again but it must be remembered that when a human being is born in a particular epoch he is obliged to use the body provided by that epoch. The bodies of olden days were more pliant, more flexible, yielding more readily to the spirit; and in earthly existence man must use the body to transform into earthly shape and earthly activity what was imbued into him before he came down to the Earth. Faced with conditions that are so full of riddles, we must remember—and no criticism is here implied—that for centuries now the effect of the whole of education upon the human organism has been such that what was once alive in an Initiate simply cannot come to expression. Much has to remain concealed in the deep substrata of existence. And for this reason, many Initiates of bygone days appear again as personalities who with the concepts and notions prevailing to-day cannot be recognised as former Initiates because they are obliged to use the body which their epoch provides.

Garibaldi is just such an example. If we go far back into the past, we find deep and profound Mysteries, great Initiates, in ancient Ireland. But the Irish Mysteries survived right on into the Christian era. Even to-day there is still much living spirituality in Ireland—not of an abstract, conceptual kind, but alive, spiritually potent. Chaotic as conditions in that country appear to-day, there is in Ireland much real spiritual life. But it is only the very last vestige of what once existed. In Hibernia, in Ireland, there were deep and penetrating Mysteries whose influences still made their way across to Europe in the early centuries of the spread of Christianity. And there one finds an Initiate whose path in the 8th to 9th centuries after the founding of Christianity led him from Ireland to the region corresponding approximately to modern Alsace. Under the stormy conditions then prevailing, this Initiate achieved much for the cause of true Christianity, for which, if the truth be told, Boniface accomplished very little. To this Initiate came three pupils from different quarters of the world—three pupils who entrusted themselves to him. These three pupils came to him—one from far away, another from nearer at hand. But in the Irish Mysteries there was an inviolable decree that an Initiate to whom pupils had entrusted themselves must not abandon them in the later incarnation but must accomplish in earthly life something that will hold them to him, something that establishes a bond between him and these pupils. The Initiate of whom I am speaking was born again as Joseph Garibaldi, with that visionary quality of will which in olden times had been able to express itself in a quite different form from that possible in a body belonging to the 19th century. Garibaldi received only a very inferior education, quite unlike the education that was typical of the 19th century. The three others I have named were the pupils who in the past had come to him from different parts of the world. But the impulse working from the one incarnation over into the other was far deeper and more potent than external principles of action. In comparison with the link stretching across the incarnations between man and man, it is a triviality to contend: I am a Republican, you are a Monarchist. In these things one must realise how greatly earthly Maya, the great illusion, the semblance of being, deviates from the spiritual reality which is in truth the motive power behind the phenomena of existence. And so in spite of the radical difference in sentiment and conviction, Garibaldi could not abandon, for example, Victor Emanuel. Sentiment and conviction in connection with earthly matters and not with human beings belong to the epoch, not to the individuality who passes from one earthly life to another.

I want to give another example, one with which I came into close personal contact. I had a geometry teacher¹ who was of enormous help to me. My autobiography will have indicated to you that geometry is one of the subjects to which I owe most because of the impulses it quickened in me. This geometry teacher himself played a very valuable part in my life. The fact that he was an excellent constructor might well have led to my great affection for him because I myself loved geometrical construction and because he expressed everything with genuine independence of mind and also with all the exclusiveness belonging to geometrical thinking. His mind was focused so exclusively upon geometry that in the real sense of the word he was no mathematician; he was a geometrician and nothing else. In this sphere he was brilliant but it could not be said that he was deeply versed in mathematics. He lived at a time when all descriptive geometry—his special subject—underwent changes. Characteristically, however, he kept to the old forms. But something else about him provided a far more revealing clue for occult investigation: he had what is called a club foot. Now the strange thing is that the force—not, of course, the physical substance—the force which a man has in his feet in one incarnation, the character of his tread, how his feet lead him into wrong-doing or well doing—this force is metamorphosed. Whatever is connected with the feet may live itself out in a subsequent incarnation in the head organisation; whereas what we now bear in our head may come to expression, in the later incarnation, in the organisation of the legs. Metamorphosis takes a peculiar form here. One who is conversant with these things can discern from the style and manner of a man's gait, how he treads with his toes and heels, what quality of thinking characterised him in an earlier incarnation. And one who observes the qualities of a man's thinking—whether his thoughts are quick, fleeting, cursory, or deliberate and cautious—will be able to picture how he actually walked in a previous incarnation.

In the earlier incarnation, a man whose thoughts are fleeting and cursory walked with short, rapid steps, as though tapping over the ground, whereas the gait of a man who thinks cautiously and with deliberation was firm and steady in the earlier life. It is just these apparently minor characteristics that lead further when one is looking for the deeper, spiritual connections and not those of an external, abstract kind. And so when time and time again I called up the picture of this greatly loved teacher, I was guided to his earlier incarnation. With this picture another associated itself—also of a man with a club foot: Lord Byron.² The two men were there before me in this inner picture. And the karma of my teacher, as well as the peculiarity of which I have told you, led me to the discovery that in the 10th or 11th century, both these souls had lived in their earlier incarnations far over in the East of Europe where they came one day under the influence of a legend, a prophecy. This legend was to the effect that the Palladium, which in a certain magical way helped to sustain the power of Rome, had been brought to that city from ancient Troy, and hidden. When the Emperor Constantine conceived the wish to carry Roman culture to Constantinople he caused the Palladium to be transported with the greatest pomp and pageantry to Constantinople and hidden under a pillar, the details of which gave expression to his overweening pride. For he ordered an ancient statue of Apollo to be set at the top of this pillar, but altered in such a way as to be a portrait of himself. He caused wood to be brought from the Cross on which Christ had been crucified and shaped into a kind of crown which was then placed on the head of this statue. It was the occasion for indulging in veritable orgies of pride!

The legend went on to prophesy that the Palladium would be transferred from Constantinople to the North and that the power embodied in it would be vested eventually in a Slavonic Empire. This prophecy came to the knowledge of the two men of whom I have been speaking and they resolved to go to Constantinople and to carry off the Palladium to Russia. They did not succeed. But in one of them especially—in Byron—the urge remained, and was then transformed in the later life into the impulse to espouse the cause of freedom in Greece. This impulse led Byron, in the 19th century, to the very region, broadly speaking, where he had searched for the Palladium in an earlier incarnation.

It is a question, you see, of finding the threads which lead back into earlier ages. On another occasion my attention fell on a personality who lived about the 9th century in the north east of France as France is to-day, and who during the first part of his life was the owner of extensive landed estates. He was, for those times, a wealthy man, and being of a warlike nature he engaged in many rather quixotic military adventures not on a large but on a small scale. When he had reached a certain age, this personality gathered around him people who then accompanied him on a campaign which ended in disaster and brought bitter disillusionment in its train. Without having achieved anything at all, he was obliged to return home. But meanwhile—as was a common practice in those days—another had taken possession of his house, land and people during his absence. On his arrival he found that his own estates were in other hands strange as the story is, it actually happened so and he was obliged thereafter to serve in his own manor as a kind of helot or serf. Many a meeting took place there with people of the neighbourhood, usually by night, and in a rather uncultured, rough and ready way, ideas were elaborated for seizing power—although beyond the fact that such ideas were worked out, nothing could possibly come of them. These ideas for rebelling against the overlords—almost as in the days of Rome—were the subject of much heated and fervid dialectic. Our interest may well be roused by this personality who had been ousted from estates, possessions and authority but who with an inflexible will stirred up the whole district, particularly against the one who had usurped the property. The personality of whom I am speaking was born again in the 19th century, when inwardly, in mind and soul, he became the kind of character one would expect from the circumstances of the earlier incarnation: he became Karl Marx³ the socialist leader. Just think what a light is shed upon world history when one can study it in this way, when one can actually follow the souls passing from one epoch into the other, observing how what these souls bear within them is carried over from epoch to epoch. History and the evolution of mankind are seen in this way in their real and concrete setting.

In Dornach recently I was able to call attention to another connection of karma, one which caused me repeatedly during the War, and especially at the end of the War, to warn people against allowing themselves to be blinded by a certain outstanding figure of modern times. In the Helsingfors⁴ lectures of 1913 I had already spoken of the very limited abilities of the person in question. This was because the connection between Muawiyah,⁵ a follower of Mohammed in the 7th century, and Woodrow Wilson, was clear to me. All the fatalism which characterised the personality of Muawiyah, came out in the otherwise inexplicable fatalism of Woodrow Wilson—in his case, fatalism of will. And if anyone wants to find corroboration, to discover the origin of the well known Fourteen Points, he has only to turn to the Koran. Such are the connections. These things must be kept absolutely free from sympathy or antipathy; it is not a question of criticism but only of the purest objectivity. But this very objectivity leads from one point in history at which a soul has appeared, to another such point. When humanity outsteps in some degree the still surviving heritage of materialism, people will be willing to listen to such things and observe for themselves. And then they will feel quite differently about their place in modern civilisation because they will be able to see it not in a dead but in a living setting. That is the important point. The whole process of historical development will be imbued with life. And if man is to get beyond the blind alley in which he is now standing in his civilisation, he needs the living spirit and not the dead spirit of abstract concepts and ideas.

In their study of history, people will probably be very reluctant to approach the spiritual in the way indicated in my public lecture here a few days ago, but nevertheless they will ultimately be obliged to do so. For ordinary historical study which has only documentary evidence to go upon is full of insoluble enigmas. Things of which the origins cannot be explained are forever cropping up. Why is it so? It is because the origins are not understood, they have been completely obscured. When such things are investigated, a great deal in history becomes living reality. But it also becomes apparent that men themselves have done a great deal to garble and falsify history in important respects.

It will certainly seem strange and perplexing when in connection with a relatively near past, the spiritual investigator is forced to assert that a wonderful work of art has been wiped out of existence by the hostility of a certain stream of spiritual life. In the early centuries of Christendom there was extant in the more southerly regions of European civilisation a literary work of art setting forth the nature of advancing culture immediately after Christianity had taken root in the evolution of humanity in Europe. This work of art—it was an epic drama, a dramatic epos—narrated how since the recent revelation of Christianity man cannot draw near to the true Being of Christ unless he undergoes a definite preparation similar to that given in the Mysteries.

In order to understand the real import of this, the following must be clear to us. To His intimate disciples Christ had made it abundantly clear that He, as a Sun Being, a Cosmic Being, had come down into the one born in the East as Jesus, in the thirtieth year of his life. Jesus of Nazareth was born into a Moon religion. What was the nature of the Jahve, the Jehovah religion, and of the Being Jahve himself? In looking upwards to Jahve, men were gazing, in reality, at the human ‘I,' the ‘I' that is directly dependent upon the physical human configuration that is born with us. But what is born with us, what has taken shape and developed inasmuch as in the mother's body we were moulded into a vessel for the human ‘I' this is dependent upon the Moon forces. Jahve is a Moon God. And in lifting their eyes to Jahve, men said to themselves: Jahve is the Regent of the Moon Beings, from whom proceed those forces which bear man into his physical existence on Earth.—But if Moon forces alone were at work, man would never be able to transcend what is laid into him in the life that belongs to the Earth. This he can no longer do of himself, but in earlier times it was different. If we go back into prehistoric ages we find something very remarkable, something that to the modern mind sounds extremely strange. We find that in the thirtieth year of life, human beings experienced a complete transformation of soul. This was the case in the great majority of people belonging to a certain class. Strange as it sounds to modern ears, it was really the case in an age of which the Vedas are mere echoes. There were men in ancient India to whom the following might happen.—When another man whom they had seen a few years previously came up to them, he might find that although they saw him, they did not recognise who he was; they had forgotten everything that had happened to them during the previous thirty-years, they had forgotten it all—even their own identity. And there was an actual institution—we should call it, as we call every such institution to-day, an official department or board of authorities—to which such a person must apply in order to be informed who he was and where he had been born. Only when, in the Mysteries, these people had been given the necessary training were they able to remember their lives up to the age of thirty. They were men who at a later time, were called the ‘twice born,' who owed the first period of their existence to the Moon forces, the second to the forces of the Sun.

The metamorphosis which in ancient times came about in so radical a way in the course of earthly life, the ‘being born a second time,' was ascribed to the Sun—and rightly so, for the Sun forces have to do with what a human being is able, by dint of his own free will, to make of himself. But as the evolution of humanity progressed, this gradually ceased to be part of the process of development; man no longer brought down into the physical realm any consciousness of having gazed into the cosmic worlds. Julian the Apostate wished to revive the knowledge of these things and had to pay for the attempt with his death. But through the power enshrined in His words, Christ wished to bring to men through morality, through a deepening of the moral and religious life, what nature does not bring. It was Christ Who taught: “When you learn to feel as I feel, when instead of turning your eyes to the Sun you behold what is alive in me—who was the very last to receive the Sun Word in the thirtieth year—then you will find the way to the essence of the Sun once again!” The teachers in the Mysteries during the early period of Christianity knew with certainty that the development of the intellect, of intellectuality, was then beginning; intellectuality does indeed bring man freedom but deprives him of the ancient clairvoyance which leads him into the cosmic spirituality. Therefore these wise men of the old Christian Mysteries instituted teaching which was then set forth in that epic drama of which I spoke. It was the narration of the experiences of a pupil in the Christian Mysteries, who by the sacrifice of intellect at a certain point in his youth was to be led to true Christianity when the realisation had dawned in him that Christ is a Sun Being Who came to dwell in Jesus of Nazareth from his thirtieth year onwards.

This epic was a moving and impressive narration of how a human being seeking the inmost truth of Christianity makes the sacrifice of intellect in early years—that is to say, he vows to the higher Spiritual Powers that intellectuality shall not be his mainstay but that he will so deepen his inner life that he may come to know Christianity not as mere history or tradition but in its cosmic reality and setting, seeing in Christ the Bearer of the spirituality of the Sun. A scene of dramatic grandeur and impressive content was presented by this transformation in a human being by the sacrifice of intellectuality. A human being who, to begin with, received Christianity merely according to the letter of the Gospels—as was customary later on—became one who learned to behold the cosmic realities and Christ's living connection with the Cosmos. The awakening of clairvoyant vision of Christianity as cosmic reality—such was the content of that ancient epic drama. The Catholic Church took care to ensure that every trace of this epic should be exterminated. Nothing has remained—the Catholic Church has had power enough for that. It is only by accident that a transcript has been preserved of which, too, nothing would be known, had it not been from the hand of a personage living at the Court of Charles the Bald—from the hand of Scotus Erigena.

Those who realise the import of these things will not think it so strange when spiritual investigation urges one to speak of this epic story of a man who by vowing to sacrifice intellectuality was transformed in such a way that the heavens were opened to him. But in the form of tradition many a fragment from that ancient epic has survived, in substance largely unchanged, but no longer understood—above all its great setting and its imagery were no longer understood. The content of this work of poetic art became the subject of numerous paintings. These paintings too were exterminated and only traditions survived. Fragments of these traditions were known in a circle to which Brunetto Latini, the teacher of Dante, belonged. From this teacher Dante heard something of the traditions—not of course in precision of detail, but in aftermath—and in his Divine Comedy echoes from that old epic still live on. But the work existed, as truly and as surely as the Divine Comedy itself exists.

Recorded history, you see, does not tally with the realities and a great deal of what was exterminated by enemies will have to be discovered again through spiritual investigation. For it was all to the interests of a certain side to root out every indication that Christ comes from the Cosmos. The birth of Christ which actually took place in Jesus' thirtieth year has been confounded with the physical birth. What then became a Christian doctrine could never have been established had the epic drama of which I have spoken not been exterminated. The time will come when spiritual investigation will have to play a part if human civilisation is to make real progress.

You know the devastating effect of illnesses of the kind which befell someone I once knew well. He held a post of considerable authority but one day he left his home and family, went to the railway station and took a ticket for a far distant place, having suddenly forgotten everything about his life hitherto—his intellect was in order but his memory was completely clouded. When he arrived at his first destination he took another ticket, travelling in this way through Germany, Austria, Hungary, Galicia, and finally, when his memory came back to him, he found himself in an asylum for the homeless in Berlin.

It is in truth the ruin of the whole Ego when a man forgets what he has lived through and experienced. It would also mean the ruin of the Ego of civilisation, the Ego of European humanity, were men to forget completely the things that were part of their historical experience, those things which have been rooted out. Spiritual Science alone can bring back the power of remembrance.

But even to men who, comparatively speaking, are kindly disposed, Spiritual Science still seems strange and foreign. One cannot read without a certain irony what a man, who is in other respects so promising, says about me as the founder of Anthroposophy. In The Great Secret, Maurice Maeterlinck⁶ seems unable to deny that the introductions to my books contain much that is reasonable. He is struck by this. But then he finds things which leave him in a state of bewilderment and of which he can make absolutely nothing.—We might vary slightly one of Lichtenberg's remarks, by saying: “When books and an individual come into collision and there is a hollow sound, this need not be the fault of the books!” But just think of it—Maurice Maeterlinck is certainly a high light in our modern culture and yet he writes the following—I quote almost word for word: ‘In the introductions to his books, in the first chapters, Steiner invariably shows himself possessed of a thoughtful, logical and cultured mind, and then, in the later chapters he seems to have gone crazy' (See note, p109). What are we to deduce from this? First chapter—thoughtful, logical, cultured; last chapter—crazy. Then another book comes out. ‘Again, to begin with, thoughtful, logical, cultured; and finally—crazy!' And so it goes on. As I have written quite a number of books I must be pretty expert at this sort of thing! According to Maurice Maeterlinck a kind of juggling must go on in my books But the idea that this happens voluntarily ... such a case has yet to be found in the lunatic asylums!

The books of writers who think one crazy are really more bewildering still The very irony with which one is bound to accept many things to-day shows how difficult it still is for men of the present age to understand genuine spiritual investigation Nevertheless such investigation will have to come. And in order that we shall not have been found wanting in the strength to bring about this deepening of the spiritual life, the Christmas Foundation Meeting was held as a beacon for the further development of the Anthroposophical Society in the direction I have indicated. The Christmas Foundation Meeting was intended, first and foremost, to inaugurate in the Anthroposophical Movement an epoch when concrete facts of the spiritual life are fearlessly set forth—as has been the case to-day and in the preceding lectures. For if the spirit needed by mankind is to find entrance, a stronger impetus is required than that which has prevailed hitherto.

It has been for me a source of real gladness that in the lectures here, given either to the public or to a smaller circle, the opportunity has been afforded me to lead a little further into the depths of spiritual life. And with this inner gladness let me express my heartfelt thanks for the cordial words addressed to me by Professor Hauffen at the beginning of this evening's session. I thank you for your welcome and for the way in which your souls have responded during my presence here. And you may rest assured that Professor Hauffen's words will remain with me as a wellspring of the thoughts which I shall constantly send you and which will be with you alike when you achieve your aims and when you are working here. Even when we are separated from one another in space we are, as Anthroposophists, together in our hearts, and this should be known and remembered. For many years I have been privileged to speak in Prague of different aspects of the spiritual life and it has always been a source of satisfaction to me. Particularly is it so on this occasion, because the demands made upon your hearts and souls have been relatively new, because this time you have had to receive with an even greater open mindedness what I had to say to you in discharging a spiritual commission. When I say ‘spiritual commission,' let us take these words to imply that in the spirit we remain together. The aim before us will be achieved if friends work together with all their hearts, if, above all, they remain united in Anthroposophical thinking, feeling and willing.

Together with my thanks, please take this as a cordial farewell—betokening no separation but rather the establishment of a spiritual communion. This feeling of communion should flow through every word that is spoken among us. Everything that is said among us should serve to unite us more and more closely. In this sense let me assure you with all my heart that my thoughts will be with you, seeking to find among you one of those places where true Anthroposophical will and the Anthroposophical stream of spiritual life are able to work. And so we will go our ways, but in the body only, remaining spiritually and in our hearts together.

• 1. Gregory VII, Pope from 1053 to 1085.
• 2. Lord Byron, 1788–1824.
• 3. Karl Marx, 1818–1883.
• 4. Helsingfors lecture course: 'The Occult Foundations of the Bhagavad-Gita.' 9 lectures, May/June, 1913.
• 5. Muawiyah, Caliph in Syria from 661 to 680. Founded the dynasty of the Omayyads.
• 6. Maurice Maeterlinck on Rudolf Steiner. See Le Grand Secret, p. 253 (Bibliothèque Charpentier, Paris, 1921). The words referred to are as follows: ‘Steiner ... nous décrit les transformations successives des entités qui deviendront des hommes, et il le fait avec tant d'assurance qu'on se demande, après l'avoir suivi avec intérêt à travers des préliminaires qui dénotent un esprit très pondéré, très logique et très vaste, s'il devient subitement fou ou si l'on a affaire à un mystificateur ou à un véritable voyant. ...’

In the course of our observations about the world and about man, we have seen how he bears within him—if only in picture form—the past of the world, and how it is possible for him, by gradual training, to conjure up these pictures. In our ordinary daytime consciousness there is nothing of all this, but only memories of our experiences during earthly life. When, however, a man applies this ordinary consciousness to following the path I have indicated, then, as his spiritual consciousness grows clearer and clearer, more and more of the past evolution of worlds arises within him. And we have found how this experience of the past has to be renewed between death and rebirth.

We can therefore say: When things that are not perceptible for the senses become so for Imagination, a man looks back beyond the memories of his current life. He looks back on everything that has gone to shape him, on the forces of growth and nourishment which have formed him from within—all of which proceeds from the spirit.

And further, in Inspiration a man looks into pre-earthly existence, but not only into his own. We have seen already how he reaches out beyond the cosmic island of the Earth to the great cosmic ocean in which the stars have their dwelling, and he finds that the stars then become for him the dwelling-places of spiritual Beings.

Then, when Intuition arises, a man gazes back into past lives on Earth. At the same time the whole past life of the world comes into the range of his vision. He is, in actual fact, born out of the whole world; the whole world lives in his physical, etheric and astral bodies, and—during earthly existence—least of all as yet in his Ego. All this is included in a man, working and weaving within him. As human beings we bear within us the whole past evolution of the world, upon which countless generations of the spirit have worked. We bear this divine work in the building up of our organs, and in the forces weaving and living in them; we bear it within us when those organs flower into perception and thought. We carry within us the work that has gone into the whole past evolution of the world. When now, after we have—at least in thought—sharpened our vision into the past, we look out at the world surrounding us here on Earth, we see with ordinary consciousness only as much as the senses offer and whatever our intellect can make of our sense-observations. Behind the realm of sense-perception lies the all-embracing life of the spirit—a life active in all colours and sounds of nature, in everything we experience as warmth or cold, in every aspect of natural phenomena that can affect us as human beings.

Besides the physical nature revealed to the senses, there is a concealed spiritual nature—a hidden spiritual environment. This surrounding spiritual world, of which only the veriest surface is apparent to sense-perception, carries even now in its womb man's future evolution. Just as we bear within us in mighty pictures the entire past and are ourselves the outcome of those pictures, so in the concealed life of nature there works and weaves that which, in its further unfolding as world-evolution, will bring us our future. Thus we can set before us these weighty words: Man bears within him the past of the world; the outer world is the bearer of his future.

These are the two fundamental principles upon which world-evolution and human evolution are founded. And indeed they come to expression in individual human life. There is a great difference between all that tends more towards a man's head-organisation, and all that has more to do with the rest of his body. To put it rather crudely, one might say: Forces work up from the heart towards the head organisation and bring about the particular configuration of the head, with its covering of hard skull. This is filled with the most wonderful construction in all the world—the convolutions and interweavings of the human brain, in which the senses are embedded.

Everything living in these forces, all that flows to a man's head from his breast and heart, is an outcome of the past. This could become what it now is in man only because—as we have already said—innumerable divine generations of the spirit have worked upon it, through the metamorphoses of cosmic-planetary bodies. In my Occult Science I have pointed out how a Saturn-evolution, a Sun-evolution, a Moon-evolution, preceded in turn the Earth-evolution in which we are living and during which the Saturn-, Sun- and Moon-evolutions have been recapitulated. We are now rather past the middle of the actual Earth-evolution, the evolution of man on Earth.

The forces which through long ages have been gradually developing, under the influence of divine generations of the spirit, all live in the physical body of earthly man, and stream from his heart up to his head. All that you bear continually in your physical, etheric, astral and Ego, as a streaming up from the centre of your being to your head, has been prepared and worked upon by generations of Gods through immeasurable periods of time. And the last element which lives in these up-streaming forces—though people to-day are still unconscious of it—is that which expresses itself as a man's karma—the past of his own Ego during his lives on Earth.

We can put it in this way. If we penetrate deeply into these forces of cosmic memory, we come first to karma; then to the various stages of Earth-evolution; after that to the metamorphoses, the planetary transformations which the Earth went through before becoming the actual Earth. Before the Earth could come into being, there had to be a cosmic body, Saturn, consisting only of tenuous warmth. Saturn had then to pass away before rising to a new existence as that Sun of which our Sun, now seen outside in cosmic space, is the residue. At that time the Sun was a cosmic body consisting of air alone; this again had to pass away and give place to a cosmic body consisting of water—the old Moon. Then the Moon in turn gave place to the firm mineral substance of the Earth, on which man, as an earthly being, could begin to evolve.

But just as we have these upward-striving forces, so do we bear within us forces with a downward trend. They have a kind of central point in the heart, and the circulating blood carries both forces to the movements of our limbs. These forces are active in every movement of our hands; when you take hold of anything, or perform any ordinary earthly action, they enter into every move you make. They do not now belong to the past; they belong to the hidden world around us. They will be taken up into the womb of the past—which will become the past only in the future—when a man goes through the gate of death, and exchanges his earthly existence for life among the stars. These are the forces in which a man's future is prepared.

The future comes about through the interplay of these forces with the forces concealed in external nature. Thus the world bears man's future within its own evolution. There is a sharp distinction in him between these upper forces and the lower ones. The knowledge that can be acquired after passing the Guardian of the Threshold bring out this distinction strongly.

For ordinary consciousness, everything below the heart remains unconscious. This does not mean that it is any less fully imbued with consciousness, but this is a consciousness beyond our normal reach to-day. Hence what a man experiences inwardly differs from the content of his consciousness. He is conscious only of what is on the surface, rising like an island out of his other experiences.

When we are able to penetrate further into the human being, we can see how he is still endowed to-day with these subconscious forces. We can then see how a man performs some deed which, for that moment of his earthly life, causes him pleasure and satisfaction—his head is satisfied. He may for some reason have done a thoroughly bad thing, but his head is satisfied, and the implications of his action evade his ordinary consciousness. But although his head may be perfectly satisfied, the hand that carries out the action is subconsciously affected by it—and the subconscious is really another form of consciousness—and his hand quivers. The quivering may be outwardly imperceptible, but in the etheric and astral bodies it becomes an actual trembling. So we can see inwardly how a man may be satisfied in his head with some deed that subconsciously causes a trembling in the astral and etheric organs connected with his arms or legs. In the satisfaction given to the head by a bad deed, consciousness is—we might say—benumbed; but another form of consciousness arises in the depths of a man's being, and there the deed causes a trembling.

In this trembling, future karma is being prepared. It is a trembling in face of the forces concealed in nature, forces of the hidden world. The trembling presages the judgment that will be passed upon the man by the Beings of the stars, when, from this little island of the Earth, he goes out into the wide starry ocean.

To sum this up: Within the human being, in diverse ways, both the past and the future of the world are living—even in the external form of his physical body. A man's head-organisation, that most wonderful, most perfect product of world-evolution, is to a great extent broken up, even spiritually, when he passes through the gate of death. On the other hand, his lower organisation, though merely physical in outward appearance, is in reality a physical picture of that which lives as soul and spirit in the arms and hands, in the whole metabolic-limb system. Through this system, through all you can see as flesh and blood shaped into arms and hands, spiritual forces flow. In a future life on Earth these forces will flow through the organs that bring about the movements of the upper and lower jaw. The bones of the head in their plastic formation will then be the transformed bones of arms and legs—naturally I mean the spiritual part of these, for the physical falls away. That which now constitutes your arms and legs will become in your next incarnation—to speak in terms of forces and dynamics—the configuration of your head. Hence the physical organisation itself affords a reflection of how a man has gone through earthly life. Anyone who studies in the right way the artistic shaping of a man's head can see in the very form of his head how he used his arms and hands in his dealings with other people and with the external world during his previous earthly life. For the deeds of arms and legs in one earthly incarnation live on in the formation of the head in the next incarnation. Ordinary phrenology is superficial in giving all kinds of intellectual interpretations of the shape of the head. But behind this is a deep, occult phrenology which considers the individuality of each man and does not conform to general rules—a phrenology that out of Intuitions is able to discern how the formations of a man's head have been prepared by the outcome of his movements, his behaviour and his actions during a previous life on Earth.

That, then, is how the human being stands before us to-day, and before himself, showing in what he has become how divine generations of the spirit have worked upon him through immeasurable periods of time. Naturally one can only indicate in outline how a man's life to-day illustrates in pictures all that these generations of the Gods have done for him, and for all mankind, through the metamorphoses of Earth-evolution—Saturn, Sun and Moon.

Let us take first three particularly significant impulses in the earthly life of human beings. If one looks quite simply, with ordinary consciousness, at the wonders revealed in the progressive development of the human being from the first days of his life, we can at least gain some idea, some feeling, of the tremendous depths out of which the soul and spirit struggle during those first days and weeks in order to give an increasingly definite form to much that in the infant is still formless; and then gradually to bring under control the chaotic movements of arms and legs. We come to feel that we are being shown how a spiritual activity, present in the endless depths of the hidden life of nature, is expressing itself in the human body. And we can say: There is nothing on Earth so wonderful to watch as the unfolding of the inner human being within the outer, during the development of a child in the very first years of its life. If we know how to watch this with true artistic-religious insight, then all that can be seen there, and the humility we can feel in face of this revelation of the spiritual, surpass all other artistic, scientific or religious impressions that can be received from the outer world.

But let us single out three things in the development of a child. In ordinary life we say: The child is learning to walk. In fact, this is something wonderful. In this learning to walk an extraordinary amount of movement is involved. All the limbs are called into play when, in order to stand erect, the child raises itself out of the position where its spine is parallel with the surface of the Earth. We take this for granted as something obvious, but it marks the moment in the child's life when it is learning to give all its forces a different, orientation on Earth, and, with the help of the symmetry of those forces and its own inner balance, is learning to establish itself within the Cosmos as a whole. At the same time, we are really watching how a human being is growing out of the animal world. For this is a moment that an animal can never experience. It remains essentially with its spine parallel to the Earth; for if it pulls itself upright, as the ape does, this is contrary to its natural organisation.

If we are to form a true conception of man, we must be able to see in the right light this learning to walk on the part of the child. Scientists have compared the bones of the human being with those of the animal, and have found them to be animal bones transformed, and men's muscles to be animal muscles transformed—and so on. Let this be so with every organ; the difference between man and animal will still not be found in this way. The difference can be seen only when we grasp how, in the moment of standing erect, a human being is freeing himself from his connection with the animal at the beginning of his life, and establishing his balance in the whole world. Never during his life would he have been able to acquire the skill for doing this had it not been prepared in the most remote days; the seed for it was already within the being of man during the Saturn-existence. Divine Spirits then laid down the seed of the skill that comes to light when the child learns, as we say, to walk. There were no animals then, for they came later, during the Sun-evolution. Hence the human being, as originally planned, is older than the animals.

All that lies in these invisible forces that enable man to walk leads us back to his origin during the Saturn-existence.

The second faculty arising in the child comes from his new orientation in space; this causes the forces to turn inwards and to appear in a different way. For instance, I take up a piece of chalk; a force comes in an inward direction, discharging itself in the internal organs. This inward-turning force, coming through the limbs from the direction of movement, makes its appearance in the child's development when it learns to speak. First, when the child finds its bearings in space, the forces take an outward direction; the same forces then turn inwards and the child learns to speak.

Science knows only a small part of all this. It knows that a right-handed person has his speech-centre in the left half of the brain, and a left-handed person has it in the right half. Everything in the brain that has to do with the development of speech, however, is first worked into it by the limbs when the child learns to walk, to grasp things, to move around and turn its attention to objects. This springs from the inwardly directed forces, which then go out from the brain into the organs of speech. Here, again, divine-spiritual Beings have been preparing the human organism through countless ages, so that the child should be able to speak. Those divine Beings, who during the Saturn period prepared the human being for walking, then worked during the Sun period to bring about his capacity for speech.

The third gift developed by the child, and by all mankind, through speech—for it could not come before speaking in earthly evolution—was the power to have thoughts. This was prepared by the divine-spiritual Beings during the Moon age. That is how human evolution took its course in the past ages of the world; generations of spiritual Beings have prepared for man his walking, speaking, thinking—through Saturn-evolution, Sun-evolution, Moon-evolution.

In the evolution of the world during the Sun age, animals made their appearance—naturally in a form different from that of to-day. They now have to feed on plants, which at that time they had no need to do, for then they were creatures of the air and consisted of airy substance. It was during the Moon-existence that the plants were added.

Then evolution passed over to Earth-existence, when the human being first developed a visible bodily form in which the forces of walking, speaking and thinking could dwell. At the same time the mineral kingdom arose and became an essential part of his organism. In this way man's past can be described.

If we wish to look at man's future, in the light of present-day conditions on Earth, we must start from his old age, which means describing something that is not at all apparent to-day. When a child begins to walk, speak, think, external signs of this are clear enough, but how the spiritual part of man is intensified in old age is far from evident to anyone without spiritual vision. I spoke of the most wonderful experience of watching the gradual revelation of soul and spirit in the growing body of a young child, and of how, if one sees it in the right way, one can be overwhelmed by the deepest religious feeling in face of all the meaning that this artistic process conveys. But it is also wonderful to see how all that a man has experienced through walking, speaking and thinking during his earthly life disappears into the spiritual. And then to see how his thoughts and words, everything he has worked and struggled for with his hands, is carried back into the life of the spirit when he passes through the gate of death. Just as that which comes to expression in the child's walking, speaking, thinking, points us back to previous stages in the Earth's evolution, to the evolution of Moon, of Sun, of Saturn, so does all that a man has experienced in his thoughts point us first of all to his next earthly life, and then to the great periods in the future evolution of the Earth.

So it is that the thoughts of men point towards the Jupiter stage in the evolution of the world and of man—a stage that can be reached only when the Earth has passed through death and risen to a new planetary existence. For thoughts will not then live in us in their present fluctuating way; they will take definite shape and appear in the very form of man.

To-day we are able to keep our thoughts to ourselves, and on certain occasions our countenance can appear perfectly innocent, although we are inwardly guilty. We shall not be able to do this during the Jupiter-existence. A man's thoughts will then engender the expression of his face. The human form will have lost its mineralised firmness; it will be inwardly flexible and will consist of a quite soft substance. A wrong thought rising up in us will instantly show itself to other people through a change in our expression. Everything in the nature of a thought will at once take shape; a man will then go about in the guise of his own enduring thoughts and temperament. Hence if, during the Jupiter-existence, a man is a regular scoundrel, or has only animal impulses, that is what he will look like. That is the first stage in man's future.

The second stage will exemplify the creative power of speech. To-day speech arises inwardly and is sent out only into the air. In the future, the spoken word will not fade away into the air but will continue to exist, and with it a man will create actual forms. So that in the Jupiter age he will have power to shape himself by his thoughts; in the Venus-existence he will give form to the world around him. If during the Venus-existence—when all substance will be as fine as air—he utters an evil word, something like a repulsive plant-form will come into being. Hence a man will be surrounded by the creations of his own speech. During the Venus existence creative feelings will arise, creative speech, and the feelings that create through the word.

During the last metamorphosis of the Earth, the Vulcan-existence, the activities expressed in our walking and the movements of our arms will develop further. To-day we go to our work and use our arms to carry out actions, but nothing of that is lasting. I go to some place; I have something or other to do. It may of course be something quite complicated—possibly even the waging of war. Then we go away again, and in the outer world none of our actions remain. During the Vulcan-existence, everything will remain. A man will not simply go about and perform actions; everything he does will leave its imprint on the Vulcan-existence. His deeds will be actualised, will become realities.

You see how the Earth-existence makes a radical incision between past and future in the evolution of the world and of man. Everything up to the time of the Earth was brought about by divine generations of the spirit; that which is to follow will be brought about by man himself. That is how freedom enters his life within the cosmos. He is placed into the world by the Gods, and given his free existence. From the Gods he has acquired his capacity for walking, speaking, thinking—even his form; but for the future evolution of the world he will have to bring into this walking, speaking and thinking what he himself is. He is now about to live himself out of the past into the future. Part of the past, it is true, lies in his own karma; part of the future lies in what he is willing to do for his own karma in the future. At present he is serving a kind of apprenticeship between past and future.

All this means that things cannot work out in exact conformity with the originally-intended plan I referred to yesterday. I spoke then of 2,160 years having to pass between two incarnations. But during his earthly life a man is far from absorbing all that he could absorb; hence for many people to-day the interval between death and a new birth proves to have changed—no longer 2,160 years for anyone, but essentially shorter.

Men who have given themselves up entirely to an earthly life, those with certain criminal tendencies, are very poorly equipped for sailing out into the ocean of starry existence; and after a short time between death and rebirth they very soon return to earthly life. Others need a long time in which to purify and perfect what they have made of their soul and spirit during life on Earth. So one can say that those with animal tendencies, who easily succumb to their instincts and desires, soon come back to Earth, while those with a normal spiritual development take longer to return. But there may also be human beings who, through a deeper insight during earthly life into the way things are going at the present time, are able to arouse in themselves a self-sacrificing wish to return as soon as possible in order to contribute to the future course of earthly affairs. For if a man has filled his spirit with love during his life on Earth, he can make the three to six transits, through Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, more quickly. When persons with lower instincts pass through death, they draw back trembling before these circles and do not complete them; they are particularly repelled by the region of the planetoids. To-morrow I shall be speaking of how human beings to-day are enabled to enter various circles by submitting themselves to certain influences in the world, in their personal life, in their national life, and so on.

Those who enter the region of the planetoids rightly will to-day spend seven or eight hundred years between one earthly life and the next. That is normal for people who are not of an actually degraded nature. But through deeper insight into things, and through love of the spiritual world, life between death and a new birth can be consciously shortened. Those who have gained much from their life on Earth can make a comparatively quick return, so that as soon as possible they can work on the transforming of earthly civilisation and culture.

I have had to take you in thought away from the earthly world into that of the stars and their inhabitants, so that, in a way suited to the present time, your attention may be directed away from the world in which human beings are generally engrossed, to a world they have to enter through deeper knowledge, if they wish to experience their future aright. To-day, people in general are little inclined to detach themselves from the claims of the material world and to seek the spiritual directly in the physical world around them. We have no time now to dwell on the obstacles met with when, in psycho-analysis, for example—to which I shall be referring tomorrow—attempts are made to investigate at least the spiritual part of man. It is, however, precisely from observing directly the sense-perceptible that a right path will open out for those who wish now to work entirely within the field of present-day science, if they really seek to discover the spiritual there. It can be done. Definite proof of this is to be found in the booklet just issued by our Institute of Physiology and Biology at Stuttgart. Here Frau Dr. Kolisko has published the results of a beautiful piece of research under the title Physiological and Physical Proof of the Efficacy of the smallest Entities.¹ You know how homeopathy likes to work with highly diluted substances. By this means, by bringing physical substance in a highly diluted form, a way is opened into the spiritual. Frau Dr. Kolisko has now succeeded in showing, by an exact method, that the smallest entities, the highest dilutions, are effective. She has been working most conscientiously for a long time on the lines I have indicated, and she has now succeeded in producing dilutions in the proportion 1:1 trillion.

If any substance is completely dissolved in a glass of water, half of which is then thrown out and the remaining half poured into a full glass of water, we get a dilution of 1:2. When half the water is again thrown out and the remainder poured into a full glass, we get 1:4, and so on. Now in our Biological Institute at Stuttgart, by means of exact scientific methods, a way has been found to produce precise solutions of 1:1 trillion—thus arriving at the so-called higher potencies. The results can be seen in the case, let us say, of antimony, about which I spoke in the medical lecture given during our days here. We find that plant growth, for example, the growth of a grain of wheat, is reduced to its slowest rate at about the twenty-first potency, and brought to its fastest rate at about the twenty-ninth or thirtieth potency. So, you see, a substance has been diluted in fluid to a high potency, and we find that the lower potencies have a different effect upon plant growth while the highest potencies accelerate growth, which means that they give the greatest stimulus to the life-force. In this way it has been found possible to break down the purely material, so that the spiritual can manifest there. For if you split up material substance, not into atoms as atomists would have it, but in such a way as to bring but the activity of its functions and forces, then you are showing willingness, I would say, to go over to the spiritual by permeating matter itself with spirit.

You can imagine now what this means for observing accurately how remedies work on the human organism, for the effect can indeed be seen. The dilution is prepared; you have it in a laboratory flask, and you drop into this potency a grain of wheat; then into the potency in the next flask you drop another grain, and so on—grains and grains of wheat. For in the course of this exact research whole rooms were filled with these germinating grains, showing the effect of each potency on the soil out of which the grains sprout. That is what must be done in science to-day, in order to drive material knowledge on into the realm of the spirit. You know what contention there has been between homoeopaths and allopaths concerning the effectiveness of the smallest entities in the higher potencies. The whole affair up to now has been a question of opinion—the allopaths holding to one view, the homoeopaths to another. Here, however, it is not a case of siding with homoeopaths, but of establishing scientifically the actual facts. In the future it will naturally be known when remedies should be applied in the direct allopathic way, and when in a dilution of the correct potency, so that they may have the desired effect on the patient—particularly on his etheric body, which represents the life-forces. We shall know exactly where to draw the line—here you must give an allopathic treatment, there a homoeopathic one. For just as other scientific experiments are carried out with the utmost exactitude, so in this case Frau Dr. Kolisko has shown in her booklet, with the same exactitude, how the smallest entities really work. What was formerly mere surmise has been raised to the level of an important scientific subject.

But all this points to something further. Just look in this booklet at the accurately worked-out curves which show how the forces of growth go up and down; notice how the curves have to be drawn according to whether the potency is strong or weak, how with certain dilutions there is a minimum of growth, and in more dilute solutions—higher potencies—a maximum; then a return to the minimum, back again to the maximum—and so on. Thus, in the remarkably conscientious tracing of the curves, one gains direct insight into a rhythm working in everything material—a rhythm that is indeed the expression of the spiritual. With human beings, we can turn from the metabolic system to the rhythmical system; it is possible in nature, also, to find in a quite exact, scientific way its rhythmical system. That is precisely what is to be seen in this work, which I believe may prove to be an important landmark, not only in the controversy between homoeopathy and allopathy but in all questions concerning our insight into nature. If the results of this research are estimated rightly, the laws of nature in future will no longer be sought only in the present atomistic way, by measuring and weighing; it will be recognised how in all material things there is a rhythm, and how in the rhythm of events in nature the rhythm of the cosmos is expressed.

I wanted to draw your attention to this as a way leading out from exact science that must be opened up. To-morrow I will go on to show how in psycho-analysis, for example, there is a kind of theoretical aversion towards any real setting out on the path leading from physical nature to the spiritual. But if men are to go forward and not backward in civilisation, they will be obliged to take this path to the spirit.

• 1. This treatise, translated into English, is included in a volume entitled Agriculture of To-morrow, published by Frau Dr. Kolisko in 1939. It is now (1966) out of print, but is obtainable from the Library at Rudolf Steiner House, 35, Park Road, London, N.W.1.

When you remember a dream, it will probably be quite obvious to you that during the dream you merely observed the images weaving before your soul without having a clear awareness of yourself. Self-awareness, then, is not as clear in dreaming as it is in waking consciousness. The images weaving before the soul present two types of scenes. There are either series of images familiar to the dreamer because they relate to recent or not-so-recent events, or scenes where such events are changed in all sorts of ways, their form altered to such an extent that specific occurrences are unrecognizable, and we think we are dreaming of something completely new. We can indeed have dreams that are not connected with any experiences we have had and are therefore completely new. But in each case, we will have had a feeling that a type of living, weaving image has been revealed to the soul. This is what we remember after waking up. Some dreams remain in our memory longer and others seem to vanish as soon as we have to deal with the events of the day.

So today let us examine what we perceive in such weaving dreams. We know what we perceive when we are awake in this world, which we call the physical. But what fills our perception when we dream, as events and material things fill our daytime experience? It is what we call the etheric world, the etheric substance permeating the world with its inner processes and with all that lives in it. That is the essence, as it were, of our perceptions when we dream. But we usually perceive only a very small part of the etheric world when dreaming. The etheric world is inaccessible to us when we are awake and perceive the physical realm; we cannot perceive the etheric substance around us with our physical senses. Likewise we cannot perceive all of it in our ordinary dreams, but only a part of it, namely, our own etheric body.

As you know, we leave our physical and our etheric bodies behind in sleep. In our usual dreams we look back, as it were, from within our astral body and I to what we have left behind in sleep. However, we are then not aware of our physical body and do not use our physical senses. Rather, we look back only at our etheric body. Fundamentally, therefore, processes in our etheric body reveal themselves in certain places, and we perceive them as dreams. In fact, most dreams are nothing else but looking at our etheric body in sleep and becoming aware of some of its exceedingly complex processes.

Our etheric body is very complex and contains all our memories, ready to present them to us when we recall them. Even those things that have sunk down into the depths of the soul, things we are not aware of in waking consciousness, are contained in the etheric body in some way. Our whole life in this incarnation is retained in the etheric body, is really present in it. Of course, this is very difficult to imagine, but it is true nevertheless. Imagine you were to talk all day long, as some people do, and everything you said was recorded on records. When the first record is full, you take a second one, then a third, and so on. The number of records would depend on how much you spoke. Now if someone collected all the records, everything you had said would be nicely preserved on records at the end of the day. Then, if someone played them, everything you said during the day would be heard again. In a similar way, all our memories are retained in the etheric body. Under the special conditions of sleep one part of the etheric body appears before us, as though—to stay with this metaphor—we took one record from the collection and played it; this is the most common kind of dream. Thus our consciousness weaves in our own etheric body.

The same applies to hallucinations affecting our soul. As a rule, such hallucinations arise because the person can see with the ego and the astral body, which are still in the physical body, a section of the etheric body that has become detached. This can happen when a part of your physical body is ill, the nervous system, for example. Your etheric body is then unable to penetrate the physical at the point where the nervous system is diseased; it is cast out there, so to speak. The etheric body itself is not sick, but it has been separated from the physical body in a specific place. If it could remain in the physical body, our normal state of consciousness would prevail, and we would be unaware that our physical body is sick. When the part our etheric body cannot penetrate shines out toward it, we experience this in our consciousness as a hallucination.

This etheric substance, from which dreams or hallucinations develop, surrounds us everywhere in the world. And our own etheric body is like a section that has been cut out of this etheric substance. After passing through the gate of death and discarding our physical body, we pass through this etheric substance and never really leave it on our path between death and a new birth. It is everywhere and we have to pass through it; we are in it. Sometime after death, we discard our etheric body, which dissolves into this surrounding etheric substance. Usually, we cannot perceive this outer etheric substance. That is why we have nothing in the etheric world that could be called perception, parallel to perception in the physical world. Our perceptions of the etheric in our dreams depend completely on us.

True perception of the etheric world after death or here on earth in clairvoyant Imaginations requires greater strength than we usually have between birth and death. We need greater inner strength of soul. We do not perceive the etheric world around us during earthly life because we lack sufficient strength of soul. To perceive the etheric world we must become much more active, work much harder than we do in ordinary life. After death, too, the soul must be filled with much more active strength than in ordinary life to relate to its environment. Otherwise we do not perceive the etheric world, just as we wouldn't perceive anything if we lacked all senses in the physical world. Thus, we need a more active strength of soul to find our way after death and not to be deaf and blind, figuratively speaking, to the world we enter then.

To get a clearer idea of how the soul perceives after death, or after it has developed the faculties to unfold its imagination, let us compare this soul faculty to writing. What you write down expresses something that stands behind your words; still, it is you who put down the letters. You have the power to make what you write true, to make it correspond to an objective state of affairs. If you want to inform a faraway friend about something and write it down for him, it is you who form the words that will tell the friend about the fact when he reads them. Someone may object that this fact does not exist in the world as an objective fact, but is only what someone has written down. This is nonsense, of course. It is possible to describe an objective fact with the letters you wrote. The same applies to imaginative perception in the super-sensible world. You have to be active. You have to set down the signs, the letters that express the objective processes in the spiritual world, and you must be aware that this is what you are doing. Whether you can do that or not depends on whether you have the strength necessary for a living relationship with spiritual reality, whether it inspires you to set down the truth and not falsehoods. But the fact remains: You have to know you are setting it down.

Now, let us return to dreams. When we dream, we usually feel the dream images “weave” and simply unravel on their own. We should think of these dreams as images that float past the soul. Now suppose you were thinking that you yourself place the dream images in space and time just as you set down letters on paper. This is not what we normally associate with dreams or hallucinations, but it is the type of consciousness required for imaginative thinking. You must be aware that you are the determining power in your dreams. You put down one thing after another just as you do when writing something on paper. You yourself are in control. The same power is behind you that makes what you write true. The great difference between dreams or hallucinations and true clairvoyance is that in the latter we are aware that we are the esoteric scribes, as it were. The things we see are noted down as an esoteric script. We inscribe onto the world what we perceive as expression, as revelation, of the world.

Here, people could object that we do not need to write these things down because they are known beforehand. But that is not valid, for in this case it is not we who do the writing but the being of the next higher hierarchy. We give ourselves up to that being, and it becomes the force ruling us. In an inner soul process, we record what holds sway through us. When you look at this esoteric script, you will read what is to be revealed.

That is why I have said so often in public lectures that the development of clairvoyance requires that all perception becomes active and does not remain the passive openness to the world that is appropriate for understanding our physical environment. Gradually, then, we comprehend what we have called “learning the esoteric script,” since the beginning of our anthroposophic work. I have described it in more detail in The Threshold of the Spiritual World.¹ To write the esoteric script into spiritual space and spiritual time our soul must be more active and powerful than it needs to be in everyday life. We need this greater strength when we have passed through the gate of death. If you seek imaginative clairvoyance, you will achieve it gradually through meditation. You will experience and perceive, knowing all the while you are in a world of which our dreams are but a weak reflection. You can live in that world in such a way that you can control your dreams, just as you are in control when you assemble a table or a shoe.

Many people object they have tried to meditate in all kinds of ways but are still not becoming clairvoyant. This lack of clairvoyance simply shows they do not really want the activity and strength I have just described. They consider themselves fortunate because they do not need them. They do not want to develop any active strength of soul, but want to become clairvoyant without having to acquire this strength first. They want the tableau that arises before them through clairvoyance to appear by itself. But that would be nothing but hallucinating or dreaming. To put it bluntly, a dream is a piece of the etheric world that we can take with our etheric feelers and move from one place to another. This has nothing to do with true clairvoyance. In experiencing true second sight we are as active as we are in the physical world in writing on paper. The only difference is that when we want to write in the physical world, we need first to know what it is we want to write down—at least it usually helps if we do. By contrast, in spiritual perception we allow the beings of the spiritual hierarchies to write, and only then, while we are writing, do the things appear that we are to perceive. Real clairvoyance cannot come about without our active involvement in every single aspect of our perception.

We also need the strength that enables us to write in the etheric world when we have passed through the gate of death. The kind of thinking that serves us well in the physical world is of no use for perception after death. A person may be exceedingly clever and smart about things of the physical world, but after death these capacities will be of no help. This kind of thinking is much too weak for writing anything into the etheric world. All ideas we have developed relating to physical things have their origin in this weak thinking, which is useless after death. We need a stronger kind of thinking, one that is inwardly active of its own accord. We need thinking that forms thoughts which do not merely mirror the outer sense world. We must develop this inner capacity to form thoughts independent of anything external that arise, as it were, from the depths of the soul, or we cannot have a corresponding capacity after death.

Now you might object that we could just think up all kinds of things, or create a lot of fantasies that do not reflect anything external, and then we would be well prepared for developing the strength of thinking necessary after death. It could be that someone wants to have a great deal of thinking ability after death and therefore imagines winged dragons, which do not exist, terrifying beasts, and so on. The person imagines all these things so as not to be tied to the apron strings of outer images, and to be able to develop inner strength of thinking in preparation for life after death.

It cannot be denied—people who do this will have greater faculties in the world after death than those who do not. However, they would perceive only false images, distortions, just as people with impaired vision see a distorted image of the physical world and those with damaged hearing have a false impression of its sounds. People who follow this course of action sentence themselves to perceiving nothing but grotesque things in the etheric world, instead of what is truly rooted there.

In past periods of human development, care was always taken to ensure that human beings were given mental images neither borrowed from the physical world nor created in the arbitrary and fantastical manner I have just described. According to the methods available to them, the great founders of our religions handed down images not based on the physical, but on the spiritual world. Thus, by following their religious teachers, people were able to develop mental images that were not tied to the sensory world but were true all the same because they originated in the spiritual world. This is the immensely great education of the human race undertaken by the founders of our religions. They had set themselves the task of giving human beings images that would help them to develop a kind of thinking that would keep them from arriving spiritually deaf and blind in the spiritual world after death. The founders of our religions wanted to be certain that human beings were fully alive, fully conscious, and that their consciousness would not vanish or fade in their hour of death or become a false consciousness then.

As I have often said, we are currently living at a stage of evolution when human beings are meant to come of age, as it were. Religious founders will no longer appear as they formerly did and appeal to our faith. Those times are past, although, of course, they still reach into our time. At present, only a few people are beginning to experience this new existence, so to speak. Most still yearn to cling to the traditional ideas of the ancient founders of religions. But humanity must come of age and what the founders of religions provided for our faith must be replaced by the contribution of modern spiritual science. For this science of the spirit is by nature completely different from those ancient teachings. In order to avoid misunderstandings, we must emphasize that when we speak of the old religious founders we are not including Christ among them. I have often said that Christ's significance does not lie in his teachings, but in what took place through him. The ancient religious founders were in a sense teachers, but Christ's main deed was to imbue humanity with His own power through the Mystery of Golgotha. To this day, this has been extremely difficult for many people to understand. That is why they speak of Christ as only a great cosmic teacher. For those who really understand the full significance of Christ, this is simply nonsense.

Humankind is coming of age through our modern spiritual science, through the concepts, ideas, and images that are linked with our life after death and thus with our entire soul life. For spiritual science can be understood by every person who wants to understand its findings. It strives to give people what each individual soul can truly achieve on its own, not by following the religious founders, as in earlier times. And although it must be individual researchers who make the results of this science of the spirit available today, they do so in a form that can be understood by everyone who wants to. I have often emphasized that it is a complete misunderstanding to say spiritual science must also be believed. When people say this, it is because they are so crammed full with materialistic prejudices that they do not look at what spiritual science really has to offer. As soon as it is examined, everything becomes understandable. One does not need clairvoyance for this; our ordinary understanding is enough to really grasp and comprehend all this gradually—of course, “gradually” will be inconvenient for some people.

In other words, spiritual science appeals to our understanding, making use of the opposite principle to the one used by the ancient religious founders. Their ideas gave something to human souls that awakened them spiritually and gave them strength to perceive in the etheric world, and that also means to lead a conscious life after death. Assimilating modern spiritual science will in turn give our soul the strength to develop the necessary power of thinking after death to consciously perceive its etheric environment. Both people of ancient times who followed their religious founders and modern people who are willing to understand spiritual science will be able to find their way after death.

Only one type of person will have difficulty in finding his or her way after death. In fact, this type will frequently not even experience a life after death, because it will have become so dulled and obscured. This sort of person is the dyed-in-the-wool materialist who clings to images of the physical world and does not want to develop any strength to perceive the world we enter after death. In terms of the soul-spiritual, to be a materialist really means the same as wanting to destroy one's eyes and ears in the physical world, gradually deadening one's senses. It is no different from someone saying, “These eyes—they can't be trusted, they provide only impressions of light. Away with them! These ears—they perceive only vibrations, not the one single truth. Get rid of them! Get rid of the senses, one by one!” To be a materialist in regard to the spiritual world makes as much sense as this attitude in regard to the sensory world. It is basically the same, as will be quite easy to see when we consider the reasoning presented by spiritual science.

Today I have attempted to explain from this perspective what it means to be in the spiritual world. I want to go on to explain a type of dream we will all recognize, because everyone has probably experienced a dream of this kind. I am speaking about dreams where we stand face to face with ourselves, so to speak. As I described earlier, usually the dream fabric unrolls itself before us, so to speak, and we have no clear awareness of ourselves at the time. It is only afterward that we reflect on the dream with self-consciousness.

There are also other dreams where we face ourselves objectively. And beyond simply seeing ourselves, as sometimes happens, we can also have the dream students often have, of sitting in school, trying to work out an arithmetic problem, but unable to solve the equation. Another person comes and easily finds the solution. The student really dreams that this happens. Well, you will understand that it was he himself who came and solved the problem. Thus, it is also possible that we face ourselves in this way without, however, recognizing ourselves. But that is not the important thing. In such a situation the I divides in two, as it were. It would be nice, wouldn't it, if in the physical world as well, the other ego appeared and immediately produced the right answer when we do not know something. Well, it does happen in dreams.

When we are dreaming, we are actually outside our physical and etheric bodies and only in the astral body and ego. While the type of dream described earlier gives us a glimpse of the etheric body, the ones where we face ourselves result from the astral body we took along revealing a part of itself to us and facing us with it. We perceive a portion of ourselves outside the physical body.

We do not perceive the astral body in ordinary life, but we can quite easily see part of it in sleep. It contains things we are not at all aware of when we are awake. I spoke earlier about the nature of the etheric body; it contains everything we have experienced. But now I have to tell you something quite strange—the astral body contains even those things we have not experienced. You see, our astral body is a rather complicated structure. It is in a certain sense built into us out of the spiritual world, and it contains not merely those things we already have in us now but also those we will learn in the future! They are already present there as a disposition. This astral body is much cleverer than we are. Therefore, when it reveals something of itself in our dreams, it can confront us with our self in a form that is much cleverer than we have become through physical life. If you bear this in mind—I say this now only as an aside and not as part of the lecture—it will throw some light on the “cleverness” of animals. They also have an astral body. It can bring out things that do not emerge in the ordinary lives of the animals. Many surprising things can reveal themselves there. For example, the astral body contains, believe it or not, all of mathematics, not only as far as we know it today, but also everything that still remains to be discovered. Nevertheless, if we wanted to read the mathematics contained there and read it consciously, we would have to do so actively by acquiring the necessary faculties.

Thus, it is a revelation of part of our astral body when we come face to face with ourselves in a dream. And many of the things that come to us as inner inspiration spring from these revelations of the astral body. In the same way hallucinations can occur under the circumstances I described earlier. The part of us that is cleverer than we usually are can, through a special disposition in our constitution, take on a voice of its own. Then we can be inspired, which would not happen if we used only our ordinary judgment in our physical body. But it is dangerous to give ourselves over to such things, because we cannot control them until we are able to penetrate them with our judgment. And since we cannot control them, Lucifer has easy access to all these developments, and we cannot keep him from directing them according to his intentions, rather than in accordance with the aims of the proper world order.

When we develop our inner forces, we learn to lead an inner life that makes us clairvoyant in the astral body. But you will see from what I have said that becoming clairvoyant in the astral body requires that we are always aware of facing ourselves, our own being. Just as we do not lead a healthy physical life if we are not fully conscious, so we do not lead a healthy soul life in the super-sensible world if we do not see ourselves at all times. In the physical world we are ourselves; in the higher, spiritual world we have the same relationship to ourselves as we have here to a thought representing a past event. We inwardly look at such a thought and treat it as a memory. As we deal with a thought in this world, so we know in the spirit realm that we are looking at and observing ourselves. Our self must always be present when we experience things in the spiritual world. Basically, this is the only principle applying also to those things over which we have no control. In fact, in the realm of the spirit this principle allows us to master things, to become the controlling power. Our own being is the center of everything. Our own being shows us how we act in the spiritual world, revealing to us who we really are in the spiritual world.

If we are in the spiritual world and perceive something is incorrect, that means we are using the esoteric script incorrectly. Well, if we use the esoteric script incorrectly but perceive ourselves as the center of everything going on, we experience in our own being: You look like this because you did something wrong; now you have to put it right! We can see how we have acted by what we have become. We can compare this to how you would feel here in the physical world if you were not inside but outside yourself. For example, if you said to someone, “It is now half past eleven”—something that is not true—and look at yourself, you see how you stick your tongue out at yourself. You say, “This isn't you!” And then you start to correct yourself and say what is true, “It is now twenty past nine.” At that moment your tongue goes back in. Similarly, you can tell whether you are acting correctly in the spiritual world by looking at yourself.

Such grotesque images may serve to characterize these things, which should be taken much more seriously than everything said about the physical world. The point is to gain an understanding of the super-sensible realm through the power of thinking we already possess in the physical world. That way we free our thinking, which otherwise remains bound to our physical environment.

In earlier times people had a basic, atavistic clairvoyance. It was possible for them to have Imaginations, even Inspirations. But in contrast to this earlier stage, we have now reached an advanced stage and can form ideas about the physical world. When people still possessed an atavistic clairvoyance, they could not think properly. For proper thinking to develop, the strength used earlier in clairvoyance had to be applied to thinking. Some people nowadays develop clairvoyant faculties at certain times in their life by methods other than those described by spiritual science. This is because they have inherited these faculties from earlier times and they have not yet achieved sound judgment in those areas of life where they are clairvoyant. But we are approaching the time when sound judgment must be present before clairvoyance can be developed on the basis of such mature and balanced judgment.

In other words, when people these days show certain psychic abilities, a certain clairvoyance, without having done serious exercises, without having studied spiritual science—which, if applied in the right way, can be the best exercise to bring out the old clairvoyance—this does not mean that they are more advanced than everyone else, but rather that they are lagging behind. Having atavistic abilities today does not mean one has reached the stage of clear thinking. The more advanced soul is clearly the one that comes to sound judgments out of its ordinary understanding—and this ordinary understanding is completely sufficient to grasp spiritual science if one is free of preconceived notions.

We are making a great mistake if we allow atavistic clairvoyant abilities to impress us. We are on the wrong track if we believe such a person's soul is particularly advanced. That this soul shows such abilities means that it has failed to go through certain things that had to be experienced in the age of clairvoyance. Therefore, that soul is now catching up on what was missed earlier. It is quite grotesque when people involved in spiritual science believe that someone who displays a certain clairvoyance without having studied spiritual science must have been someone important in a previous life. Such a person was quite certainly less important than someone displaying sound judgment about things.

Now it is very important that our movement should try to build a certain circle of people who see through these things, who truly and thoroughly understand them and can reach the following insight: We need spiritual science in our time because only by understanding it can we progress.

This is very important. There are, of course, childhood illnesses in all areas of life, and naturally also in spiritual streams entering the world. And one can understand easily enough why spiritual science has childhood illnesses because it tries to give human beings the results that were achieved by clairvoyant consciousness. But you can see how we have to describe this. We have to say that becoming clairvoyant in the way humanity needs it now and in the future does not appeal to people's love of comfort and convenience. It requires a great deal more than just waiting for things to happen. Participation at every moment, self-control and the capacity for self-observation are required to reach the spiritual world. This must be widely understood. It is much easier to wait for clairvoyance to approach us like a dream, streaming to and fro. People want to experience the spirit realm in the same way they experience the world of the senses. This is a remnant from past periods of our history. In ancient clairvoyance, things were experienced in such a way that people did not really “know” them. This is probably why even today people want to experience the spirit realm in such a way that they do not actually “know” it. We do not properly appreciate what we know for sure. When we do arithmetic, for example, we follow certain set methods, without being much involved in what we are doing. When we add up five and seven, we are not really participating in the sense referred to here; we are not fully present in what we do. That is why people do not like it if others have developed their own view of the world. As soon as you can show people something you have come to know without this inner participation, they are happy, exceedingly happy! But when someone demonstrates knowledge of the spiritual world and knows of it in such a way that he is involved, then people say, “Oh, he knows it! That is a completely conscious process and not objective.” But if someone comes along and has had a vision whose origin he cannot explain, people say, “That is objective, completely objective! We can believe this person.”

The most important aspect of our spiritual science is to develop clear ideas. Spiritual science is still relatively new; therefore, now that people's longing for the spiritual world and knowledge of it has awakened, they want to connect with everything still coming up from the old world of clairvoyance. They gather all these old things and believe they are doing something quite special in preserving them.

However, our task is to see clearly in this field! It must be clear to us that there is nothing inferior about giving advice in full consciousness on a matter of spiritual healing. But most people will appreciate indications given by someone “above” the situation, who yields himself to quite obscure feelings and does not “know” things, much more because his statements result in the dark, blissful feeling: This is the result of something unknown! Everywhere we hear people saying that things they can grasp are of no interest to them. They have come for the inexplicable—that is supreme, divine!

Believe me, the individual truths of spiritual science must gradually enter our souls, and at the same time we must have a clear and sure sense for the conditions I have just touched upon. I have spoken about these conditions to show, beginning with the nature of dreams, that true clairvoyance requires the kind of active work by the soul we can compare with writing. I wrote The Threshold of the Spiritual World with the aim of clarifying these matters more and more. Those who understand my book will grasp the vital nerve, the keynote of our movement. I have to emphasize again and again—in spite of having said it frequently over the years—because so much depends on this: Those who really want to gain access to spiritual science have to acquire a healthy sense for the things that truly belong to it. Then we will gradually develop into a Society that can set itself the task of having a genuinely healing effect on everything belonging to cultural life.

Next time, we will continue to talk about what we began today as a description of the world of dreams based on the spiritual world.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner, A Road to Self-Knowledge & The Threshold of the Spiritual World, (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1975).