The Rudolf Steiner Archive

As the last time we were able to meet together here, we put forward certain considerations connected mainly with special experiences,¹ we will turn our attention today to a more general outlook of spiritual science. I should like to start from something which you have all known fundamentally for a long time: that all spiritual-scientific observation is won by acquiring knowledge, not with the help of the instrument of the Physical body, but by liberating the soul and spirit from the physical instrument, so that, as soul and spirit they enter into direct union with the spiritual worlds.

Direct union with the spiritual worlds is broken in ordinary life and knowledge, because we must always employ the instrument of our physical body in the waking state whenever we wish to enter into relationship with the world, and in the sleeping state all our will is concentrated on our connection with the body, so that desire for the body spreads like a cloud in our soul and spirit during sleep, and hinders us in this state, and in ordinary life - from experiencing anything in the spiritual worlds, in which we indeed are.

Now it is essential that anyone occupying himself with spiritual science should recognise exactly the value of spiritual scientific activity as such, and its relation to the personal strivings, which through meditation and concentration of thought, feeling, and will-impulses, or in any other manner, lead man into the spiritual world. We must be clear about this above all for it is a deep and significant truth: that the unity which surrounds us in the ordinary world, does not exist in the same way in the spiritual world. I have already pointed out that this unity is founded within the whole structure of the psycho-spiritual human being. How most people strive again and again after this, asking: What is the unity of the world? How they only find satisfaction when they can lead everything back to one Principle!

As a matter of fact, the external world meets us most eminently as a whole, as a unified formation; and those people who to a certain degree are dominated by the ‘craze’ for unity, arrive at all possible abstractions in thought, while seeking the unitary principle of the world.

Such personalities are typical, they are like an old gentleman who met me one evening, and told me with the intense pleasure of a discoverer: At last he had found a unitary principle by which he could explain all the phenomena in the world. He was of the opinion, in his pleasure, that this unitary principle could be uttered in ten to twelve words, and he was so joyful over the matter, that he said: Now I can explain the whole cosmos. He would explain heaven, earth, and hell out of this unitary principle.

A little while ago, I was forced to recall this episode which occurred many years ago, when someone wrote to me urgently requesting a talk with me, because he had made the acquaintance of a man who was able to bring forward another such completely satisfactory view of the world in five minutes. I need hardly mention that a really earnest spiritual movement can have no time for such talks. But people who are thus possessed by this Unity-Demon, which is at the same time a kind of Easy-going Demon, are especially numerous in our day.

Because of this, we must put first, and take in the deepest sense, what is expressed in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds: that as soon as we cross the threshold of the spiritual world, we are really led into a threefold experience. I have especially emphasised in this book, that the soul is as if split into three, and when the soul crosses the threshold of the spiritual world, nothing is left which makes it possible for one to believe in this Unity-demon, this comfort-loving Unity-demon.

Indeed, we feel, as soon as the threshold of the spiritual world is crossed, that we really enter with the whole of our being into three worlds. And we must not lose sight of the fact that after crossing this threshold, we have distinctly the experience of three worlds. In reality, we already belong to three worlds through the whole formation of our physical body. I might say that the co-operation of three worlds, which are relatively strongly independent of one another, is necessary for this wonderful structure ‘man’ which we encounter in the physical world. And if we consider the formation of our head, the formation of everything that belongs to the head, we must, even if we are merely speaking of the physical head, be clear that the formative forces of our head, and also the beings active and creative in these formative forces, belong to suite another world from that of the formative forces of our breast, for instance, and the formative forces of everything belonging to our heart, inclusive of the arms and hands. It is to a certain extent as if the formative forces of these material parts of man belonged to quite another world than the formative forces of his head. And again, the organs of the lower body and the legs belong to quite another world than the two other members we have named.

Now you can ask: What significance has all this? It has a great significance, for fundamentally speaking, in our present cycle of humanity, one only gets the pure, true and real results from spiritual science if the soul and spirit-nature is raised out of the head. So that this (c.f. diagram) is to some extent the clairvoyant aspect of a man, which, seen from the spiritual-scientific point of view has to be so regarded, that the spirit-soul part is here seen to be especially lifted out, and is at the same time, joined to the forces of the cosmos, as if by a spiritual electric attraction.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

Thus all the parts a man—the ego and astral body down to the etheric body, must be drawn out. This withdrawal is of course connected with the evolution of the so-called Lotus-flowers. But the forces which set the lotus-flowers in motion lie in this part of the spirit-soul nature of man which is, or can be withdrawn.

The clairvoyance thus attained is a HEAD-CLAIRVOYANCE, and this can be a result of spiritual science in our time, for the revelations of head-clairvoyance are of service to humanity. Of a quite other kind is the clairvoyant results attained by raising the spirit-soul nature of the organ of the heart, arms and hands. This raising or up-lifting of these organs distinguishes itself inwardly and significantly from what takes place through what I might call “HEAD-CLAIRVOYANCE”. The up-lifting of the material heart-organ is brought about more through meditation which is related to the life of will; it is effected through humble surrender to the march of events. Whereas head-clairvoyance is effected more through thoughts, but also through ideas having an imaginative character, tinged with feeling.

It is generally the case that with reference to these two kinds of clairvoyance, the heart—or breast-clairvoyance—develops along with head-clairvoyance in the degree to which it should. Breast-clairvoyance leads more to the development of the will, to a connection with the actions of spiritual beings of the lower hierarchies, such as those incorporated in the various kingdoms of the earth; whereas head-clairvoyance leads more to vision, knowledge, perception in those higher worlds, in the sense that knowledge of these higher powers is necessary for the satisfaction of certain needs of knowledge, which must appear ever more and more in present humanity. The more we approach the future of our evolution on earth, the less will humanity be able to live, without their soul-life drying up, if they do not receive into their cognition the results of this clairvoyance.

Again a third kind of clairvoyance is that which arises, when what we call the spiritual-psychic part of man is loosened, and thus raised out of the rest of his being. Here in the lower part of the diagram I indicate the outward thrusting tendency. Even if the expression is not altogether aesthetic, yet I may perhaps venture to call this kind of clairvoyance, ‘Stomach clairvoyance.’

Whereas head-clairvoyance, for our cycle of humanity, leads in the most eminent sense to the attainment of results independent of man, stomach-clairvoyance leads to results connected especially with What transpires in man himself. That which takes place in man himself must naturally also be an object of investigation. In the sphere of physical investigation, there are also men who occupy themselves with anatomy and physiology. We should not think that this stomach-clairvoyance has not a certain value, in the highest sense of the word. It naturally has a value. But one must realize, that stomach clairvoyance can inform man but little of that which occurs impersonally in cosmic events; but that it informs him essentially about what man is, of what goes on—I might say—inside his skin.

With reference to what is moral and ethical, head-clairvoyance is relatively the most important. Hence I must ever speak of its opposites. Between the two stands breast-clairvoyance; between that of the head and of the stomach. As regards what is ethical, these two can be inwardly quite well distinguished. People who strive to come to a perception of higher worlds, in an impersonal way, as indicated in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, those who are not daunted at traveling this uncomfortable but secure path, will develop something impersonal in themselves, with reference to their clairvoyance, above all they will develop a high interest for objective world-knowledge, for what occurs in the world of cosmic and of historical events.

This head-clairvoyance speaks preferably of man himself, especially in that it draws attention to how he is placed within the process of cosmic and historical development, it notes what man himself is in the entirety of this cosmic process: What arises as head-clairvoyance will always have what I must call a universal scientific character; it will contain information which has importance—I beg you to note this word—for all mankind, not merely for one man or another.

Stomach-clairvoyance will be permeated especially with all kinds of human egoism, and will very easily mislead the clairvoyant in question to occupy himself much with the occult bases of his own destiny, of his personal worth and character. This results as a self-understood tendency from what is called stomach-clairvoyance.

Now a clear distinction has to be made between these two kinds of clairvoyance with reference to their intuitive nature. Whoever strives in the sense of what is given in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds to become free in soul and spirit from the perceptive-apparatus of the head, who can thus to a certain extent loosen the spiritual-psychic part of the head from the physical instrument, and is able to place himself with this spiritual-psychic head-part in the spiritual world, will have extreme difficulty in getting beyond shadowy-clairvoyant experiences. Such a passing out from the head is at first bound up with experiences which really have not even the colour, the substantiality of vivid memories, therefore they seem inwardly to be very colourless, and only after one goes ever further and further in the efforts which lie on this path, does the shadowy character of these experiences disappear, and their colourless, shadowy experiences become tinged with colour and sound, for the process carried out is this, that we first move out of our head, and are then really in a world which we have difficulty in perceiving.

For while we gradually and slowly acquire the possibility of living outside our head, these inner forces of life grow stronger, and the consequence is, that the forces streaming in from the whole orbit of the cosmos are drawn together. Picture to yourselves that forces must be drawn together from out the whole orbit of the cosmos—and when we draw together all the forces from the entirety of the orbit of the cosmos, we get that tinging with colour and sound I have mentioned. Think how we might picture this. You have here a surface (a), highly coloured, a spherical surface. Now think of this spherical surface as extended over a larger surface (b.c.). The colour will then become paler—and if we extend it still further, the colour will become ever paler and paler, if we contract this surface, then supposing it to be a pale yellow here (at the extremity,) it would become a strong, saturated yellow, because the colour is then more concentrated.

Now head-clairvoyance confronts the whole cosmos. And, spread out over the whole cosmos is that which man mast first concentrate and unite by means of his life-forces into what he himself is clairvoyantly, as being; so that only by a laborious process of inner development he gradually gives a tinge of colour to the shadowy nature of his experiences. And when for a long, long time he has taken the trouble to experience that general experience which only gives him the sensation of being outside the body; and when he has been aware of this general experience for a long time, and has gained the feeling more and more of a more intense, though not yet a coloured and resounding inner experience, then the regions of the cosmos gradually draw near to this head-clairvoyance.

This is a matter for slow, selfless development. It must be especially stated, that a STUDY OF SPIRITUAL SCIENCE is indispensable to this development. It must be emphasised again and again, that when it is given out, spiritual science, can indeed be understood. It cannot be emphasised often enough that one need not be a clairvoyant to understand spiritual science. One must of course be clairvoyant to arrive at results, but once they are there, one need not be clairvoyant. UNDERSTANDING of spiritual science must precede personal vision. Here one can say: the opposite path is correct to that which is correct in the physical-sensible world. In the physical-sensible world, we first have correct perceptions, then we pass over to a thoughtful consideration of these, and we then form our scientific judgments. This must be reversed in the ascent to the spiritual world. There, we must first develop ideas—we must make every effort to live into spiritual science objectively; otherwise we can never be certain that any observation we make in the spiritual world is interpreted by us in the right sense. Hence knowledge must precede vision, and this is what is so infinitely disagreeable to many; the fact that they have to study spiritual science. Many consider this an incomprehensible demand. For it is relatively easy to have perceptions; but to interpret them aright—for this it is necessary that one enters rightly,—objectively, selflessly—into spiritual science.

Now just the opposite is the case in what we have called: stomach-clairvoyance. In this, we start from that spiritual-psychic principle which first worked on the bodily, physical nature; for spirit lies at the basis of everything that exists in the world. If we have eaten let us say a piece of cabbage—we are mostly vegetarians here—and it is then worked over in our organism, one has then not merely to do with the physical-chemical process, carried out by the stomach with its forces and juices, but behind all these the etheric body, astral body, and ego are active. All these processes have spiritual processes behind them. It would be quite false to believe that any material processes exist which have not a spiritual process behind them. Picture this to yourselves: Suppose you lie down after a more or less opulent mid-day meal, and become clairvoyant, but clairvoyant in such a way, that the spiritual-psychic part of the digestive organs rise up especially out of the organs of digestion. Then, while your stomach and the other organs digest correctly, you live with your spiritual-psychic nature in the spiritual-psychic realm, and whereas you usually remain unconscious of the spiritual process carried out in your etheric body, astral body, and ego, this enters your consciousness if you are clairvoyant and then, because you experience yourself in this spiritual-psychic realm, you can see all this working, constructing, and creating of the spiritual-psychic force during digestion; you see it as it projects itself out into the world, and it appears to you reflected in pictures in the external ether. Then you get the most beautiful clairvoyant forms, because you have not now to draw the colours so much out of the cosmos, but because you have the whole process concentrated within your own skin. So that something wonderful takes place around you in the most glorious most magnificent sequences of colour and form, which need be nothing else than the process of digestion or some other bodily process transpiring in the spiritual organs of man.

This kind of clairvoyance is distinguished from the other, especially through the fact, that whereas the other clairvoyance starts from shadow forms, and only laboriously acquires a tinge of colour and tone, this starts off with the most magnificent grandeur possible. One can equally well express it as a law: if clairvoyance begins with magnificent forms, especially with coloured forms, then it is a clairvoyance that relates to processes which transpire within the personality. I emphasise this, because it can be of value for the investigation of the spiritual world. Just as anatomy and physiology investigate the digestive and other processes, so clairvoyance is also of great value to investigate in this way the spiritual nature standing behind human processes. But it would be bad, if one gave oneself up to any deceptions, if one cherished illusions, and did not interpret things in a right manner.

If one believed that such a clairvoyance, appearing without the necessary preparation, could give more than what takes place in man and is projected into the objective world, if one believed that through such a clairvoyance, one could approach the creative world-powers, the dominant spiritual forces, one would greatly err. Just as little as the riddles of the world can be solved by the investigation of human digestion, just so little can the riddles and secrets of the cosmos be approached by developing this stomach clairvoyance.

Thus you see how much belongs necessarily to our gaining a really right orientation to the world we enter through the freeing of our spiritual-psychic powers. No one need have any aversion to stomach-clairvoyance through the observations which have been made. But each one should be quite clear how such clairvoyance is related to what real spiritual clairvoyance can become, and how one should hold oneself far removed from any over valuation of what is gained through a clairvoyance that can only have a personal content. Only when in things which have a personal content, we look away from what is personal, and observe them in the way the anatomist or physiologist considers, the objects he studies with the help of the microscope, or learns through his investigations,—only then have these things a special value. In any case no religious feelings should be connected with these things even in the remotest degree; they can only be connected with the results of head-clairvoyance. Man becomes ever more correct in regard to the other clairvoyance, the more he fulfills the demand, that it should be dealt with in every case only in an objectively scientific sense, as are the results of anatomy or physiology.

Not everything which is found along the path of clairvoyance, is—I venture to use this radical expression—worthy of veneration; but all is worthy of being learnt. That is what we must keep in mind. I have already said: that for our cycle, it is especially important to incorporate the results of head-clairvoyance with the general spiritual civilisation of man; this is really important. Today, I will mention one side of the matter with reference to this. We are living at a time, in which humanity must prepare gradually to transcend mere philosophical Idealism, and pass on to a true consciousness of the spiritual worlds, of the general spiritual world in which we live just as we live in the physical world.

Now let us start from an experience of head-clairvoyance, which we shall easily understand if we have entered but a little into the things said in the Munich Cycle (footnote, Secrets of the Threshold;) held recently and which were dealt with further in my book The Threshold of the Spiritual World. I especially mentioned there, that our thinking undergoes a transformation the moment we make ourselves free; especially when with reference to our thoughts we free ourselves from the physical instrument of the head. I expressed it grotesquely at the time by saying, if we became free in this manner, our thoughts have no longer the character which they have in ordinary, everyday life. In ordinary, everyday life we must have the feeling—unless we are demented—that we are Master of our thought-world, that if we have two thoughts, it is WE OURSELVES who unite or separate these thoughts.

When we remember something, we are conscious: we pass over with our inner life from a present experience to a past experience. We always have the feeling; it is we ourselves who stand behind the web and woof of our thoughts. ... This ceases the moment we make the spiritual psychic principle free in our head, when we develop a thinking freed from the body. On that occasion, I put it as follows, I said: It is as if we put our head in an ant's nest, and a peculiar whirling then arises. This is how thoughts begin to play one into the other. If in ordinary life, we have two thoughts, and unite them, as for example, the thoughts ‘rose’ and ‘red’, we know that we are master in our own thought-world, able to unite the two ideas: the rose is red. This is not the case when we are outside our bodies. Life enters our thoughts, the thought's own life. Each thought becomes a being. One thought runs towards another, the other runs away from it.

So the thought-world acquires a life of its own. Why does it acquire a life of its own? What we experience in the ordinary thoughts of the everyday are only images, shadows of thoughts. You can read this in my book Theosophy. As soon as we develop body free thoughts, each thought becomes like a husk, and an elemental being slips into the husk. The thought is no longer in our power; we put it out, like a feeler, it goes forth into the world, and an elemental being slips into it ... Our thoughts are filled in this way with elemental beings ... and these whirl and struggle in us. So that we can say: If we stretch the spiritual-psychic part of our head into the spiritual world, (it is outside us only, because we are situated within the physical head), if we thus stretch it into the spiritual world, we no longer experience such thoughts as we experience in the physical world, but we experience the LIFE OF BEINGS. We plunge our head just as I have said into an ant's nest—We experience the life of beings.

This is fundamentally the case right up to the highest hierarchies, and if we wish to experience angel, archangel, or even archai, it must be the same, we must live in our thoughts in the way described and in the beings in them. We send our thoughts out, and a being slips in, and is active in them. If we perceive the beings of Venus, or Saturn, it is as I have said, we let our thoughts slip our, and the Venus, and Saturn beings slip in. We ought not to be the least afraid of having thoughts of the Hierarchies in us, but twist accustom ourselves to live with our heads in the higher Hierarchies. We must say to ourselves: Our thinking ceases, and our head becomes the stage for the activities of the higher hierarchies.

Now, in the philosophy of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel thought has been developed up to the purest thought-clarity. In this philosophy is really contained that to which thought could rise at the beginning of the 19th Century. The task of raising thought to this height was then fulfilled. The next task is however that man should go beyond this, and really enter into this whirling, weaving life of thought. We are living at a time when man is called to do this: to perceive the higher Hierarchies. We have to be taken up by the world of the higher Hierarchies, and we must strip off the fear of thus living and weaving in the higher Hierarchies.

The life of the 19th Century was quite filled by this fear, this horror of life in the higher Hierarchies. Human beings carried this so far, they did not know it, but fundamentally they carried it so far, that they prayed: O, my dear Ahriman, guard me lest my life in thought is claimed by the activity and life of the higher Hierarchies; otherwise, some devilish Saturn or Sun-being might enter into them:—You say: Surely no one thought like this in the 19th Century; but I can prove to you that people did think like this.

Ludwig Feuerbach, a philosopher of the 19th Century who especially combated the idea of immortality, opposed all belief in a super-sensible world, because he held this to be the belief of phantastic, mystical dreamers, and considered it harmful for the whole of mankind. Ludwig Feuerbach wrote the following sentences; I beg you to inscribe them particularly well in your souls;

“The active man, busy with the affairs of human life, has no time to think of death, and hence, no need for immortality; if he thinks of death, he only sees in it the warning to arrange wisely his allotted span of life, not to waste precious time on unworthy objects, but to apply it to the fulfillment of the tasks he has set himself to do.”—

“If far from the earth in heaven, on Uranus, or Saturn, or elsewhere, man first found his fulfillment, then there would be no science, or philosophy at all. Instead of what is generally deduced, abstract truths and beings would form the content of our spirit, instead of thoughts, cognitions and ideas, these pure spiritual entities and objects which would then inhabit our head would be our heavenly brothers, Saturn and Uranus-beings would then be the inhabitants of our head. Instead of mathematics, logic metaphysics, we should have in us the most exact likeness of these heavenly inhabitants. These heavenly beings would insert themselves especially between us and the subjects of our knowledge and thought, they would obstruct our vision of every object, and bring about an eternal, complete eclipse of the sun in our spirit.”

The ‘Sun’ for Feuerbach is: his thought.

Thus he has a complete picture of what would happen. He has however such an unholy horror of it, that he prays to the good Ahriman to reserve him from Saturn and Uranus dwellers becoming inhabitants of his head.

“They would be nearer and more closely related to us than thoughts, ideas, and concepts, for they are not purely spiritual or abstract entities like these, but sense-like spiritual beings, beings who merely express the nature of the force of imagination. Our whole spirit would then be but a dream, a vision of a more beautiful future. Therefore those whom the gravity of understanding hinders from floating around on the surface of the unlimited ocean of imagination will realise that in the depths of our spirit, the living light of the Angels and of all similar heavenly beings is extinguished, as in an atmosphere, un breathable by them.”

If these beings then were to enter into our thoughts, our spirit would be a dream—thus writes Feuerbach. He only feels secure when in the region of thoughts, and if the life of the Angels, or other heavenly Entities were to enter these thoughts, he would feel insecure. This is the prayer to Ahriman: that he might guard man from a knowledge of the spiritual worlds. This happened in the forties of the nineteenth century through Ludwig Feuerbach, the enemy of any spiritual view of the world. What does this signify? It signifies nothing else than that the time is ripe for us to raise ourselves to the spiritual worlds; we have but to take in earnest what this man puts before us, we have then found the way into the spiritual worlds. We only need not fight it by a union with Ahriman. Thus you see: It is not the fault of heaven that spiritual science has not penetrated the culture of our time, for it has penetrated the heads of its opponents. Spiritual science wants to enter the world; The fault therefore does not lie with the heavens. The Gods are giving wisdom to man: Spiritual science has come. As human beings under the leadership of Ahriman has resisted it, it is now up to us not to resist any longer, but to have the courage to accept spiritual science, with full, true, earnestness.

One must say this to oneself as regards this development of the 19th Century; One must say: It is as if laid down afore time in the spiritual world, that a spiritual age would come after a materialistic age, and it is for humanity now to open its mind, and its feeling, to receive this spiritual world into itself. That point of view which is so eminent a materialistic view and found in Ludwig Feuerbach, its characteristic, clever, and infinitely philosophically-endowed advocate, is like an attack, a revolt against what is to enter humanity. Spiritual forces come down from above, the forces of understanding, of knowledge have really to rise up from below. The expression which Ludwig Feuerbach discovered for himself is a most characteristic one, that: the solar eclipse of the soul would have to follow, if thoughts ceased to be thoughts, if the beings of Uranus, Venus and Saturn, and so on, played into them ... that is if the higher Hierarchies played into them. A solar-eclipse of the spirit would then take place; these people have an unholy fear of this. This solar eclipse of the spirit is not brought about however by heavenly Beings, who desire especially to bring their light to man. The darkness has been caused by human beings, by their uniting with Ahriman; and because they have spread a cloud of fear around them like an aura, they have sought to bring off their attacks against the penetration of the spiritual world. It is clear from this, that the darkening has proceeded from man, and we must acknowledge that darkness has laid hold of humanity more and more—a darkening of a free knowledge, an opposition to the light of the spirit.

This is something humanity has itself prepared, and one can see how in the course of the 19th Century, a certain love of all short-sighted, inconsequent thoughts appeared, and a love for everything that did not have to be thought out to an end. A preference and sympathy arose for all those things for which man will not have finally to give account. People loved ever less and less an unprejudiced, impartial, knowledge and thinking, and it is therefore not surprising when this love of the nebulous, of the unclear, of the unfinished in thought gradually assumed an ever more morally assailable character in public life. In so far as this character was countenanced, sympathy for the life of thought became dull; and then passed over into a general attitude. Through this an opposing force in chief was installed more especially against a spiritual science which strove for clarity on all sides.

Spiritual science has true sympathy and love above all for consequent, finished, thoughts, not for half-thoughts; it never holds with what is unclear and dark, but must ever reach out to that which spreads light widely, not to that which sends an apparent light into narrow places only. In this connection, we have still to fight our way through many things.

These are points I wished to bring forward in our studies today, in order to show how in the course of the century, thoughts through Ahriman gave occasion for the denial of the spiritual worlds, but how these worlds have themselves worked within the thoughts of him who denied them because—the time had come ‘The time has come’: this saying from Goethe's Fairy Tale is here in its right place.

It must be substantiated in the near future.

• 1. “The Problem of Death in Connection with the Artistic grasp of Life” February 5–7, 1915

It is impossible to educate or teach without a spiritual grasp of the whole human being, for this whole human being comes into consideration even far more prominently during the time of a child's development than later on. As we know, this whole human being comprises within itself the ego, the astral body, the etheric body, and the physical body. These four members of the nature of man are by no means going through a symmetrical development, but rather they develop in very different ways; and we must distinguish accurately between the development of the physical and of the etheric body, and that of the astral body and of the ego. The outer manifestations of this differentiated development express themselves—as you know from the various elucidations—in the change of teeth and in that change which in the male appears as the change of voice at puberty, but which also proclaims itself clearly in the female, though in a different way. The essence of the phenomenon is the same as with the male in the change of his voice, only in the female organism it appears in a more diffused form, so that it is not merely observable in one organ as in the case of the male organism, but it extends more over the entire organism.

You know that between the change of teeth and the change of voice, or puberty, lies that period of teaching with which we have principally to do in the grade-schools; but the careful educator, in teaching and educating, must pay close attention as well to the years following the change of voice, or its analogy in the female organism.

Let us call to mind what the change of teeth signifies. Before the change of teeth—that is, between birth and the change of teeth—the physical body and the etheric body in the child's organism are strongly influenced by the nervous-sensory system, that is, from above downward. Up to about the seventh year the physical body and the etheric body are most active from the head. In the head are concentrated, as it were, the forces that are particularly active in these years—that is, in the years when imitation plays so important a role. And what takes place in the formative process in the remaining organism of trunk and limbs is achieved through the emanation of rays from the head to this remaining organism, to the trunk and the limb organism, from the physical body and the etheric body. That which here radiates from the head into the physical and etheric bodies of the whole child, right into the tips of his fingers and toes—this that radiates from the head into the whole child is soul-activity, even though it has its inception in the physical body: the same soul-activity that is later active in the soul as mind and memory. Later on this soul-activity appears in such a form that after the change of teeth the child begins to think, and that his memories become more conscious. The whole change that takes place in the soul-life of the child shows that certain psychic powers previously active in the organism become active as soul-forces after the seventh year. The whole period up to the change of teeth, while the child is growing, is a result of the same forces which after the seventh year appear as mental forces, intellectual forces.

There you have a case of actual co-operation between soul and body, when you realize how the soul emancipates itself in the seventh year and begins to function—no longer in the body but independently. Now those forces which in the body itself come newly into being as soul-forces begin to be active with the seventh year; and from then on, they operate through into the next incarnation. Now that which is radiated forth from the body is repulsed, whereas the forces that shoot downward from the head are checked. Thus, at this time of the change of teeth the hardest battle is fought between the forces tending downward from above and those shooting upward from below. The physical change of teeth is the physical expression of this conflict between those two kinds of forces: the forces that later appear in the child as the reasoning and intellectual powers, and those that must be employed particularly in drawing, painting, and writing. All these forces that shoot up, arising out of the conflict, we employ when we develop writing out of drawing; for these forces really tend to pass over into plastic creation, drawing, and so forth. Those are the forces that come to an end with the change of teeth, that previously had modelled the body of the child: the sculpture-forces. We work with them later, when the change of teeth is completed, to lead the child to drawing, to painting, and so on. These are in the main the forces in which the child's soul lived in the spiritual world before conception; at first their activity lies in forming the body, and then from the seventh year on they function as soul- forces. Thus, in the educational period following the seventh year, during which we must work with the forces of authority, we simply see that manifesting itself in the child which formerly he practiced unconsciously as imitation, when these forces still influenced the body unconsciously. If later the child becomes a sculptor, a draftsman, or an architect—but a real architect who works out of the forms—this is because such a person has the capacity for retaining in his organism, in his head, a little more of those forces that radiate downward into the organism, so that later on as well these forces of childhood can radiate downward. But if they are entirely used up, if with the change of teeth everything passes over into the psychic, children result who have no talent for architecture, who could never become sculptors.

These forces are related to the experiences between death and a new birth; and the reverence that is needed in educational activity, and that takes on a religious character, arises if one is conscious that when, around the seventh year, one calls forth from the child's soul these forces that are applied in learning to draw and to write, it is actually the spiritual world that sends down these forces. And the child is the mediator, and you are in reality working with forces sent down from the spiritual world. When this reverence permeates the instruction it truly works miracles. And if you have this reverence, if you have the feeling that by means of this telephone which transcends time you are in contact with the forces developed in the spiritual world during the time before birth—if you have this feeling that engenders a deep reverence, then you will see that through the reality of such a feeling you can accomplish more than through any amount of intellectual theorizing about what should be done. The teacher's feelings are the most important means of education there is, for this reverence can have an immeasurable formative influence upon the child.

Thus, we find in the change of teeth, when the child is entrusted to us, a process that directly represents a transfer through the child of spiritual forces out of the spiritual world into the physical world.

Another process takes place in the years of puberty, but it is prepared gradually through the whole cycle from the seventh to the fourteenth or fifteenth year. During this period something comes to light in those regions of the soul-life not yet illuminated by consciousness—for consciousness is still being formed, and something of the outer world which remains unconscious is constantly radiating into those regions not yet illuminated by consciousness—that only gradually becomes conscious, but that from birth has permeated the child from the outer world, that has co-operated in building the child's body, and that has entered into the plastic forces.

Those, again, are different forces. While the plastic forces enter the head from within, these forces now come from without. They are dammed up by the plastic forces and then descend into the organism. They co-operate in what takes place, beginning with the seventh year, in connection with the building of the child's body. I can characterize these forces in no other way than as those active in speech and in music. These forces are derived from the world.

The musical forces derive more from the outer world, the extra-human world, from the observation of processes in nature, particularly their regularities and irregularities. For all that takes place in nature is permeated by a mysterious music: I In- earthly projection of the “music of the spheres.” In every plant, in every animal, there is really incorporated a tone of the music of the spheres. That is also the case with reference to the human body, but it no longer lives in what is human speech—that is, in expressions of the soul—but it does live in the body, in its forms and so forth. All this the child absorbs unconsciously, and that is why children are musical to such a high degree. They take all that into their organism. While that which the child experiences as forms of movement, lines and plastic elements in his surroundings is absorbed by him and then acts from within, from the head, all that is absorbed by the child as tone-texture, as speech-content, comes from without. And this again, that which comes from without, is opposed by the gradually developing spiritual element of music and speech—only somewhat later: around the fourteenth year. This also is dammed up again now, in the woman in the whole organism, in the man more in the region of the larynx, where it causes the change of voice. The whole process, then, is brought about by the fact that here an element of the nature of will expresses itself from within in conflict with a similar element coming from without; and in this conflict is manifested that which at puberty appears as the change of voice. That is a conflict between inner music-speech forces and outer music-speech forces. Up to the seventh year, man is essentially permeated more by plastic and less by musical forces—that is, less by the music and speech forces that glow through the organism. But beginning with the seventh year what proceeds from music-speech becomes particularly active in the etheric body. Then this condition is opposed by the ego and the astral body: an element of the nature of will struggles from with-out against the similar one from within, and this appears at puberty. It is manifest even externally by the pitch of the voice that a difference exists between the male and the female. Only partially do the pitches of the voices of men and of women over lap: the woman's voice reaches higher, the man's goes lower—down to the bass. That corresponds with absolute accuracy to the structure of the remaining organism that forms itself out of the conflict of these forces.

These things show that in our soul-life we are concerned with something which at certain definite times co-operates also in the up-building of the organism. All the abstract discussions you find in modern scientific books on psychology, all the talk about psycho-physical parallelism, are merely testimony to the inability to grasp the connection between the psychic and the physical. For the psychic is not connected with the physical in the manner set forth in the senseless theories thought out by the psycho-physical parallelists; but rather we have to do with the recognition of this wholly concrete action of the psychic in the body, and then in turn with the reaction. Up to the seventh year what is plastic-architectonic works together with what is active in music-speech; only this changes in the seventh year, so that from then on the relation between music-speech on the one hand and the plastic-architectonic on the other is merely a different one. But through the whole period up to puberty this co-operation takes place between the plastic-architectonic, which emanates from the head and has its seat there, and speech-music, which comes from without, uses the head as a passage, and spreads itself into the organism.

From this we see that human language as well, but particularly music, co-operates in the formation of man. First it forms him, then it is dammed up as it halts at the larynx; now it does not enter the gate as it did before. For before, you see, it is speech that changes our organs, even down into the bony system; and anyone who observes a human skeleton from a psycho-physical thoughts of our present-day philosophers--and considers the differentiation between the male and the female skeleton sees in the skeleton an embodied musical achievement performed in the reciprocal action between the human organism and the outer world. Were we to take a sonata, and could we preserve its structure through some spiritual process of crystallization, we would have, as it were, the principal forms, the scheme of arrangement, of the human skeleton. And that will incidentally attest the difference between man and the animals. Whatever the animal absorbs of the music-speech element—very little of the speech, but very much of the musical—passes through the animal, because in a sense the animal lacks man's isolation that later leads to mutation. In the shape of an animal skeleton we find a musical image too, but only in the sense that a composite picture of the different animal skeletons, such as one can gain, for instance, in a museum, is needed to yield a musical coherence. An animal invariably manifests a one-sidedness in its structure.

Such things we should consider carefully in forming our picture of man: they will show us what feelings we should develop. As our reverence grows through feeling our connection, through fostering our feeling of contact, with pre-natal conditions, we acquire greater enthusiasm for teaching, by occupying ourselves intensely with the other forces of man. A Dionysian element, as it were, irradiates the music-speech instruction, while we have more of an Apollonian element in teaching the plastic arts, painting and drawing. The instruction that has to do with music and speech we impart with enthusiasm, the other with reverence.

The plastic forces offer the stronger opposition, hence they are held up as early as the seventh year; the others act less vigorously, so they are held up only in the fourteenth year. You must not interpret that to mean physical strength and weakness: it refers rather to the counter-pressure that is exerted. Since the plastic forces, being stronger, would overrun the human organism, the counter-pressure is stronger. Therefore, they must be held up earlier, whereas the music-forces are permitted by cosmic guidance to remain longer in the organism. The human being is permeated longer by the music forces than by the plastic ones.

If you let this thought ripen within you and bring the requisite enthusiasm to bear, conscious that by developing an appreciation for speech and music precisely during the grade-school period, when that battle is still raging and when you are still influencing the corporeality—not just the soul—then you are preparing that which man carries with him even beyond death. To this we contribute essentially with everything we teach the child of music and speech during the grade-school period. And that gives us a certain enthusiasm, because we know that thereby we are working for the future. On the other hand, by working with the plastic forces we make contact with what lived in man before birth or conception, and that gives us reverence. In that which reaches into the future we infuse our own forces, and we know that we are fructifying the germ of music-speech with something that will operate into the future after the physical has been stripped off. Music itself is a reflection of what is spheric in the air—only thus does it become physical. The air is in a sense the medium that renders tones physical, just as it is the air in the larynx that renders speech physical. That which has its being as non-physical in the speech-air, and as non-physical in the music-air unfolds its true activity only after death. That gives us the right enthusiasm for our teaching, because we know that when working with music and speech we are working for the future. And I believe that in the pedagogy of the future, teachers will no longer be addressed as they usually are today, but rather in ideas and concepts that can transform themselves into feelings, into the future. For nothing is more important than that we be able, as teachers, to develop the necessary reverence, the necessary enthusiasm. Reverence and enthusiasm—those are two fundamental forces by which the teacher-soul must be permeated.

To make you understand the matter still better I should like to mention that music has its being principally in the human astral body. After death man still carries his astral body fur a time; and as long as he does so, until he lays it aside completely—you are familiar with this from my book Theosophy — there still exists in man after death a sort of memory—it is only a sort of memory—of earthly music. Thus, it comes about that whatever in life we receive of music continues to act like a memory of music after death—until about the time the astral body is laid aside. Then the earthly music is transformed in the life after death into the “music of the spheres,” and it remains as such until some time previous to the new birth. The matter will be more comprehensible for you if you know that what man here on earth receives in the way of music plays a very important role in the shaping of his soul-organism after death. That organism is molded there during this period. This is, of course, the kamaloka time; and that is also the comforting feature of the kamaloka time: we can render easier this existence, which the Roman Catholics call purgatory, for human beings if we know that. Not, to be sure, by relieving them of their perception: that they must have; for they would remain imperfect if they could not observe the imperfect things they have done. But we furnish the possibility that the human being will be better formed in his next life if during that time after death, when he still has his astral body, he can have many memories of things musical. This can be studied on a comparatively low plane of spiritual knowledge. You need only, after having heard a concert, wake up in the night, and you will become aware that you have experienced the whole concert again before waking. You even experience it much better by thus awaking in the night after a concert. You experience it very accurately. The point is that music imprints itself upon the astral body, it remains there, it still vibrates; it remains for about thirty years after death. What comes from music continues to vibrate much longer than what comes from speech: we lose the latter as such comparatively quickly after death, and there remains only its spiritual extract. What is musical is as long as the astral body. What comes from speech can be a great boon to us after death, especially if we have often absorbed it in the form which I now frequently describe as the art of recitation. When I describe the latter in this way I naturally have every reason to point out that these things cannot be rightly interpreted without keeping in view the peculiar course the astral body takes after death: then the matters must be described somewhat as I have described them in my lectures on eurythmy. Here, you see, we must talk to people in the most primitive language, so to speak; and it is really true that, seen from the point of view beyond the Threshold, people are actually all primitive: only beyond the Threshold are they real human beings. And we can only work ourselves out of this primitive-man state by working ourselves into spiritual reality. This is also the reason for the constantly increasing fury against the endeavors of Anthroposophy to show the path to a spiritual reality.

Now I would call your attention to something that is very much in the foreground in the art of pedagogy and that can be pedagogically employed—namely, that in the first conflict which I described in connection with the adolescent child, the outer expression of which is the change of teeth, and in that later struggle whose equivalent is the change of voice, there is to be considered something peculiar that gives to each its special character: everything that up to the seventh year descends from the head appears as an attack in relation to that which meets it from within and which builds up. And everything is a warding off that acts from within toward the head, that rises upward and opposes the current emanating from the head and descending.

In the case of music in turn the conditions are similar; but here that which comes from within appears as an attack, and that which descends from above through the head-organism appears as the warding off. If we had not music, frightful forces really would rise up in man. I am completely convinced that up to the sixteenth or seventeenth century traditions deriving from the old Mysteries were active, and that even then people still wrote and spoke under the influence of this after-effect of the Mysteries. They no longer knew, to be sure, the whole meaning of this effect, but in much that still appears in comparatively recent times we simply have reminiscences of the old Mystery-wisdom. Hence, I have always been deeply impressed by the passage in Shakespeare :*

“The man that hath no music in himself,
Is fit for treason, murder and deceit!
Let no such man be trusted.”

Merchant of Venice, V, 1.

“The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted.”

Translator's Note: The third line of the German translation of this passage reads: “Is fit for treason, murder and deceit”, and thus it is quoted by Dr. Steiner. Thus, must be kept in mind to understand what follows.

In the old Mystery-schools the pupils were told: that which acts in man as an attack from within and which must be continually warded off, which is dammed back for the nature of man, is “treason, murder and deceit,” and the music that is active in man is that which opposes the former. Music is the means of defense against the Luciferic forces rising up out of the inner man: treason, murder and deceit. We all have treason, murder and deceit within us, and it is not for nothing that the world contains what comes to us from music-speech quite aside from the pleasure it affords. Its purpose is to make people into human beings. One must, of course, keep in mind that the old Mystery- teachers expressed themselves somewhat differently: they expressed things more concretely. They would not have said “treason, murder and deceit” (it is already toned down in Shakespeare) but would have said something like “serpent, wolf and fox.” The serpent, the wolf and the fox are warded off from the inner nature of the human being through music. The old Mystery-teachers would always have used animal forms to depict that which rises out of the human being, but which must then be transformed into what is human. Thus, we can achieve the right enthusiasm when we see the treacherous serpent rising out of the child and combat it with music-speech instruction, and in like manner contend with the murderous wolf and the tricky fox or the cat. That is what can then permeate us with the intelligent, the true sort of enthusiasm—not the burning, Luciferic sort that alone is acknowledged today. We must recognize, then: attack and warding off.

Man has within him two levels where the warding off occurs. First, within himself, where the warding off appears in the change of teeth in the seventh year; and then again, in what he has received from music and speech, through which is warded off that which tends to rise up within him. But both battlefields are within man himself, what comes from music-speech more toward the periphery, toward the outer world, the architectonic- plastic more toward the inner world. But there is still a third battlefield, and that lies at the border between the etheric body and the outer world. The etheric body is always larger than the physical body; it extends beyond it in all directions; and here also there is such a battlefield. Here the battle is fought more under the influence of consciousness, whereas the other two proceed more in the subconscious. And the third conflict manifests itself when everything has worked itself to the surface that is a transformation of what takes place on the one hand between the human being and what is plastic-architectonic, and on the other between him and what is music-speech, when this amalgamates with the etheric body, thereby taking hold of the astral body, and is thus moved more toward the periphery, toward the outer border.

Through this originates everything that shoots through the fingers in drawing, painting, and so on. This makes of painting an art functioning more in the environs of man. The draftsman, the sculptor, must work more out of his inner faculties, the musician more out of his devotion to the world. That which lias ils being in painting and drawing, to which we lead the child when we have it make forms and lines, that is a battle that lakes place wholly on the surface, a battle that is fought principally between two forces, one of which acts inward from without, the other on I ward from within. The force that acts outward from within really tends constantly to disperse the human being, tends to continue the forming of man—not violently but in a delicate way. This force—it is not so powerful as that, but I must express il more radically so that you will see what I mean—this force, acting outward from within, tends to make our eyes swell up, to raise a goiter for us, to make the nose grow big and to make the ears bigger: everything tends to swell outward. Another force is the one we absorb from the outer world, through which this swelling up is warded off. And even if we only make a stroke—draw something—this is an effort to divert, through the force acting from the outer world inward, that inner force which tends to deform us. It is a complicated reflex action, then, that we as men execute in painting, in drawing, in graphic activity. In drawing or in having the canvas before us, the feeling actually glimmers in our consciousness that we are excluding something that is out there, that in the forms and strokes we are setting up thick walls, barbed wire. In drawing we really have such barbed wire by means of which we quickly catch something that tends to destroy us from within and prevent its action from becoming too strong. Therefore, instruction in drawing works best if we begin its study from the human being. If you study what motions the hand tends to make—if, say, in eurythmy instruction you have the child hold these motions, these forms that he wants to execute—then you have arrested the motion, the line, that tends to destroy, and then it does not act destructively. So when you begin to have the eurythmic forms drawn, and then see that drawing and also writing are formed out of the will that lives there, you have something which the nature of man really wants, something linked with the development and essence of human nature.

And in connection with eurythmy we should know this, that in our etheric body we constantly have the tendency to practice eurythmy: that is something the etheric body simply does of its own accord; for eurythmy is nothing but motions gleaned from what the etheric body tends to do of itself. It is really the etheric body that makes these motions, and it is only prevented from doing so when we cause the physical body to execute them. When we cause them to be executed by the physical body these movements are held back in the etheric body, react upon us, and have a health-giving effect on man.

That is what affects the human being in a certain hygienic- therapeutic as well as didactic-pedagogic way, and which outwardly gives the impression of beauty. Such things will be understood only when we know that something which is trying to manifest itself in the etheric organization of man must be stopped at the periphery by the movements of the physical body. In one case, that of eurythmy, an element more connected with the will is stopped; in the other, in drawing and painting, an element more closely allied with the intellect. But fundamentally both processes are but the two poles of one and the same thing.

If we now follow this process too with our feeling and incorporate it in our sensitive teaching ability, we have the third feeling that we need. That is the feeling which should really always penetrate us especially in grade-school instruction: that, when a human being is placed in the world, he is really exposed to things from which we must protect him through our teaching. Otherwise he would become one with the world too much. Man really always has the tendency to become psychically rickety, to make his limbs rickety, to become a gnome. And in teaching and educating him we work at forming him. We best obtain a feeling for this forming if we observe the child making a drawing, then smooth this out a bit so that the result is not what the child wants, but not what we want either, but a result of both. If I succeed, while smoothing out what the child wants to scribble, in merging my feelings with those of the child, the best results obtain. And if I transform all that into feeling and let it permeate me, the feeling arises that I must protect the child from an over-strong coalescence with the outer world. We must see that the child grows slowly into the outer world and not let him do so too rapidly. That is the third feeling that we as educators must cherish within us: we constantly hold a protecting hand over the child.

Reverence, enthusiasm, and the feeling of protection, these three are actually the panacea, as it were, the magic formula in the soul of the educator and teacher. And if one wished to represent, externally, artistically, something like an embodiment of art and pedagogy in a group, one would have to represent this:

Reverence for what precedes the child's existence (before birth);

Enthusiastic looking forward to what follows it (after death);

Protecting gesture for what the child experiences (during life).

Rudolf Steiner accompanied each of these three sentences with a gesture.

This work of art would also best represent the external manifestation of the teacher-character.

When one says something thus derived out of the intimacies of the world-mysteries one always feels it as unsatisfactory when uttered in conventional speech. But if one must say such things by means of external speech one always has the feeling that a supplement is necessary. What is spoken rather abstractly always feels the urge to pass over into the artistic. That is why I wanted to give you that hint in closing.

The fact is, we must learn to bear something of mankind's future frame of mind within us, consisting of the knowledge that the possession of mere science makes the human being into something which will cause him to regard himself as a psycho-spiritual monster. He who is a scientist pure and simple will not have the impulse—not even in the forming of his thoughts—to transform the scientific into the artistic. But only through the artistic can one comprehend the world. Goethe's saying always remains true:

“He to whom Nature begins to reveal her manifest secret feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy exponent — Art.”

As educators we should have the feeling: as far as you are a scientist only, you are in soul and spirit a monster. Not until you have transformed your psycho-spiritual-physical organism, when your knowledge takes on artistic form, will you become a human being. Future development will in the main lead from science to artistic grasp, from the monster to the complete human being. And in this it is the pedagogue's duty to co-operate.

My dear Friends,

We must now go on to consider the question of how our dramatic performances can contribute to the artistic life of the community. We have spoken of what the actor should know and practise; how is all this to reach the public? How are we to ensure that our endeavours to give artistic form both to the whole picture of the stage and to the acting, shall awake an understanding for dramatic art?

In order to answer this question, it will be necessary to say a little more about the training that a school of dramatic art should give. Such a school will have to develop in the students a thorough and penetrating understanding of mime, and of gesturing in all its forms. We have already spoken of these in more general terms; but only when the actor becomes alive to the necessity for a fuller and more detailed understanding of mime and gesture, can we hope—I will not say to educate the public (the description of people as ‘educated’ has by now come to have very little meaning), let me rather say, only then can we hope to evoke in the public a true appreciation of art.

Let us therefore today continue our study of mime and gesture, going further into the kind of practical details that the professional actor needs to master. And here again I shall want you to take what I say not as rules but as examples, in the sense that I have explained.

We will begin with an expression in mime that is quickly recognisable and that is bound to follow at once on the emotion producing it. I mean, the mime for the emotion of anger.

We must first make sure that we understand how the emotion of anger works. When a person becomes angry, his muscles immediately grow taut, and then, after a little, slacken again. In real life, it is only the first part of the process that need claim our attention; but when we are studying how to act anger on the stage, we must see that the process is revealed in its entirety—first, tension; then, relaxation. And now, suppose we have a student who is to learn the mime and gesture that are relevant for the expression of anger, how is he to set about it?

When he has worked sufficiently at the cultivation of his feeling for the individual sounds (for that will always be the first thing to be studied in a school of dramatic art), then we can take with him some passage in a play where a character manifests anger, and let the passage be spoken for him by the reciter. I have explained to you before that this is always the best way for a student to learn gesturing; only later on should he unite gesture and word. The reciter, then, will speak the passage as it should be spoken. The student, who will of course be following carefully the content of the words, will have to accompany them the whole time with an i e feeling. As he listens, he lets the i e feeling ‘sound’ in him, inwardly—i e, i e. This will of itself give rise to an inner experience, which he will then go on to express instinctively in some movement or other—with arms or hands, or with clenched fists; first tightening the muscles (i) and then again letting them go slack (e): i e, i e, i e.

Please note that a physiological expression must always, without exception, be associated with a feeling for sound. It should be a strict rule for the student never in his practising to make any bodily movement or action without its being accompanied by a particular sound-feeling.

Suppose we want to present a person who has been passing through some deep experience of sorrow or of terror. The emotional experience is in a sense past and over, but it has left its mark upon him; how is this to be shown? The actor will have to come on to the stage with relaxed muscles; that should be his physiological condition. And invariably, as he practises, he will have to accompany the slackness of the muscles with the e mood.

Or again, consider how one would have to act someone who is anxious and troubled. Perhaps he comes on to the stage in this condition; or it may be that in the course of the scene he is distressed at something that is said to him. In either case, one should try to bring a light sound of ö (French eu in ‘feu’) into his speaking. This will mean that wherever we have to do with this feeling of trouble and concern, whether the person in question brings it with him or feels it arise in him through words he hears another speak, the actor will try to develop the mime in the ö mood—letting his hands fall slowly to his side and his eyelids droop. When I advise details of this kind, you must always remember that they are not intended to curtail the freedom of the individual artist; he is left to find his own way of carrying them out.

If the person in question is very sorely troubled or is thrown into a condition of acute concern, then his lips will want to close up and his tongue to cleave to the roof of his mouth when he has to speak. And if later on he has to speak again in reply to what another has said, he will continue to utter his words, wherever possible, with lips pressed together. That will have a wonderful effect; you will find that his words have just the right colouring. If you bring on the stage two interlocutors, the first saying something that grieves and troubles the second, and the second answering in such a way that he produces even his a sounds with compressed lips, then the impression that the audience instinctively receive of the effect that the words of the one are having upon the other, cannot fail to be of the right colouring.

Take an extreme case. One of them says: ‘Your brother has died.’ The other exclaims: ‘My brother! It can't be true!’ If the lips are at the same time pressed as near together as possible, the words will have their right colouring.

If it is found necessary, as will certainly be the case with a prolonged condition of care and anxiety, to help out the mime with a made-up pallor, then the make-up should be accompanied throughout by this kind of speaking, where the lips are all the time held more closely together than usual. A made-up pallor should, in fact, never appear on the stage without this mime.

It is, you must know, most important for the actor to realise that there are certain expressions of emotion that have to be represented with particular care upon the stage—not always as in real life. Sighing and groaning, for instance, can certainly play a part in the mime and gesture of the stage. They should never be practised by themselves; the student should be listening to a recited passage that displays pain or anxiety, a passage, however, that contains the implication that the sufferer is wanting to get over it. For when a person is completely overwhelmed with pain and sorrow, he does not groan or sigh; whereas one who would fain be rid of his suffering, one who is open to being comforted—he will sigh and groan. In real life this distinction may not always hold good; in art, however, it has to be strictly adhered to. If we mean our acting to have style, then groans and sighs can be allowed only when the person presented is going to find relief from his pain, to the extent anyway of being able to speak; he must not be struck dumb with sorrow. When therefore we have to reply on the stage to words that convey some shattering tidings, we should begin with groans and sighs—which we have also learned to produce with style. That will as it were open the way for us to speak.

Whenever some emotion has to be expressed, the student should on every single occasion practise with it some bodily movement or action which again must invariably have its connection with formed speech. Suppose, for example, you are listening to a speech that is sad and sorrowful. As you listen, you will move your head, being careful, however, to do so without changing countenance. Head movements, with the countenance in repose—that will be right for listening to a sorrowful passage. For then something else follows of itself. The diaphragm, with all that is below it, comes also into movement, begins to make movements that are a kind of reaction to the movements of the head. It comes about quite naturally; the correct head movement will ensure that the diaphragm and abdomen are set in motion in the right way. And never allow yourself to forget that every such bodily movement has always to be practised to the accompaniment of formed speech. This then will be the posture for an actor who is listening to the recital of a sorrowful passage: he will listen with full consciousness, shaking his head, but keeping his features still.

But now, let us say, you listen to a passage that leaves you cold, that has no interest for you. You will not move your head at all, you will simply stare with complete unconcern. It is not too much to say, for it is an established fact, that listening in this way with the countenance in repose and the head also quite still, as though one were on the point of falling asleep, gives rise to a slight glandular secretion, such as happens normally with a phlegmatic who is true to his temperament. This mime can indeed be a great help to you when you have to play the part of a phlegmatic, whilst the mime I gave before will help you to act a melancholic.

We have thus here definite suggestions for the acting of these two temperaments. An actor preparing himself for the presentation of melancholic characters should listen to sorrowful passages, keeping his face quiet and making movements with his head, letting these then call forth their natural reaction in his body. And one who wants to prepare himself for acting a phlegmatic part should assume the physiognomy of beginning to fall asleep—keeping his face in repose, letting his eyelids and nostrils droop, and with the upper lip unmoved by any kind of voluntary effort. As he listens in this attitude, that fine glandular secretion which always goes with a phlegmatic temperament will begin to take place in him. Things like this will help you to see the spirit that should animate all your work.

Suppose now you want to prepare a student for the part of a naive and sanguine character. You will have some sensational announcement read out to the actress or actor (for there can also be sanguine men!) and get her or him to make, while listening, powerful facial movements, movements also with the arms. Such gestures will lead instinctively into the impetuous and voluble kind of speaking that your student will need to develop.

Should you want to prepare an actor to present a choleric, you will choose for him a passage where the speaker is pouring out abuse. You will find plenty of such passages in Shakespeare. The student, as he listens, will have to knit his brows and clench his fists. He should also plant himself firmly on the ground with all his muscles tense. From knees downwards, the muscles of his calves should be held taut; and he should all the time be conscious of standing on the floor with the whole sole of his foot. Then he will be ready for the part.

For the practice of other arts, everyone knows we have to acquire a technique; and it is no different with the art of the stage. We have to acquire a technique that can start us off on the right road. And here I would like to draw your attention to two things in life that the science of today leaves unexplained. There are of course a great many things that science is unable to explain (do we not hear on every hand of the ‘boundaries of knowledge’?), but these are two that concern us in our present study. I mean laughing and weeping. Before these, there is for present-day science a ‘boundary of knowledge’ ; how laughing and weeping come about in man is admittedly an unsolved problem.

There is, however, no need for the problem to remain unsolved. Take weeping. What does weeping signify? Weeping always goes back to this: somewhere or other the ether body is taking hold too strongly of the physical body. When man finds this condition painful, he tries to call back the force that is working from the ether body into the physical body, and raise it in the direction of the astral body.

Ego Astral Body
Ether Body
Physical Body

He thus pours a counter-force into the astral body. The ether body is of course connected with the fluid element in man. So now you can see what happens. The ether body exerts its force in the direction, not of the physical but of the astral body; and the result of this, the projection of it in the physical, is that tears are released, the man weeps. And it is on this account that the shedding of tears brings relief.

Try now to let ä ring out clearly, try to enter deeply into the experience of ä. You will then gradually acquire a play of countenance that will need but a few little drops of water placed here (on the eyes) for it to be weeping. Yes, it will then be weeping; no need at all for real tears to well up from within Having made yourself completely at home in this play of countenance and become increasingly conscious of what your nose and eyes are doing when you say ä, then if you take from a cup a few drops of water and place them on your eyes, you are weeping. You are acting weeping to perfection.

We are here touching an important point. It is by no means our aim that sentimental spectators shall be able to say what I have heard said again and again of Eleanora Duse (but it was not true), that she wept on the stage. She shed real tears, so people said; and the statement was supposed to evoke one's enthusiasm for such an achievement. Similarly one has also frequently heard it asserted that Eleanora Duse, who was by nature quite pale, could raise a blush on the stage. Apparently she did blush; people only did not notice that she turned at the same time! Her face had been made up light on one side and darker on the other. It argues a little want of respect and proper appreciation to take for real some stage technique that can so successfully create an illusion. For illusions of this kind have to be consciously planned; one has to undergo a training for them—in this instance, by surrendering oneself wholly to the ä sound.

Going on now to consider laughter, we find that where laughter occurs, something is lodged in the astral body that should have been grasped by the ego. It has strayed into the astral body, because man was not fully master of the impression. Say, a person looks at a caricature: perhaps he sees tiny little legs and an enormous head. What is he to make of it? He cannot quite master the impression; it is not what he generally sees in life. The impression slips down into the astral body—leaves the ego and enters the astral body. The person then tries to evoke a reaction from ether body and physical body. We have here, you see, a process that goes in the opposite direction. Something is present in the astral body, and the ether body wants to bring it down into the physical body. That is what laughter consists in. Something is being experienced in the astral body that the person cannot quite grasp; and laughter is the endeavour to show it up as foolish or ridiculous or the like by bringing it right down into the physical body.

To produce laughter on the stage we must first of all make sure of the right mood, and then try to hold it. Let us set down once more the vowels in their sequence, beginning this time with u, the vowel that is nearest the front of the mouth: u ü ö ä o i e a. Take the o, and go past the i to e: o e. Or take the ä, and go over to a: ä a. The latter gives the mood rather less clearly; it comes out very clearly in the o e: o e, o e, o e, o e. And now take the passage that is to make you laugh, and try to bring this mood into it. First listen, that is, to the speaker saying the words that are to provoke laughter, accompanying his words all the time with o e, o e; then break out into laughter, and your laughter will be the very best stage laughter that can be had. The mime is created out of the formed speech.

Suppose you want to reveal in your countenance that you are giving your whole attention. You let a passage be read out to you that is of a kind to demand close attention. As you listen, you gaze steadily before you, holding within you all the time the mood of a a a. Then you gradually carry this mood up into your eyes, as though you wanted your eyes too to say a. You press up into that fixed gaze of yours the feeling that you have in the uttering of a. Your face will then show just the right expression for attentiveness.

And now imagine another situation. Suppose an author has introduced into a comedy he is writing, an incident that did actually take place once in Austria. A party of people were met together in Reichenau and, being in a rather giddy mood, made up their minds to settle the question once and for all as to whether or no it were true, as some averred, that the editor of the Wiener Fremdenblatt, who was by the way a relative of the poet Heine, was a silly fool. They decided to send him an absurd telegram, and then to look in the paper next day to see whether he had been so stupid as to insert it, or just clever enough to take no notice of it. A little incident that would lend itself well as material for comedy! The telegram ran: The municipality of Reichenau has come to the decision to remove the Raxalp in order to give the resident Archduke an unimpeded view of the Styrian countryside. On the following day the telegram appeared word for word in the Wiener Fremdenblatt.¹ Some of the party had wagered it would not appear; but others had been quite sure that Heine was stupid enough to accept it, and it was they of course who won the wager.

And now suppose this little story is read out to you. You will have good reason to be surprised when you hear how it ends. You will in that case open your eyes as wide as ever you can, and intone i i i; then stop and with that whole i-intonation concentrated in one powerful impression, let the feeling that it leaves in you steal up into your eyes: i. Sure enough, your countenance will have the right look; it will bear the expression of dumbfounded amazement.

Or again, let us say you are listening to a tale that is terrifying. Close your eyes, and intone u; stop, take the intoned u up into your eyes: u. Nothing could give your face the expression of terror so well as this. Carry the intonation of u into the closed eyes, and your whole countenance will bespeak terror. In this mime that results from u being pushed up into the closed eyes, you have a singularly good opportunity to observe how it is in the forming of the speech that you can call up the right play of countenance.

Many of our inner experiences are connected with something outside us. And so if we want, for instance, to express contempt for some person or object, it will be from a consonant that we shall learn the right mime. Have an appropriate passage read out to you and, as you listen, intone n n n n n n. When you have practised this sufficiently for the right play of feature to appear in your countenance, then you will be able to bring that mime into your speaking, so that when you speak the words of contempt you will speak them as they should be spoken. But you have always, let me say again, to start from speech; it all follows from a right forming of speech.

Suppose you want to express dejection. It is perfectly easy to learn, but it has to be learned. You have a passage read out that brings this mood to expression, and you intone the consonant w (v), combining with it as light a touch as possible of the e sound: w w w w . Then you fall silent, but remain in the gesture that is left in you by the experience; your gesture will be eloquent of despondency.

If you want to express rapture, then you must try to attain a pure out-breathing, as we have it in h. You could begin by saying the word Jehova. Then, gazing upwards and with arms also raised, let the ho become sheer out-breathing. There you have the gesture for rapture: arms reaching upwards, eyes also gazing upwards. (With many people you will find that even the lobes of the ears are lifted and the nostrils opened wide; one can, however, leave that to the unconscious.) And all the time you will be intoning h, doing your best to bring it at last to mere out-breathing, as pure as ever you can make it. So long as the h is in combination with the vowel, it is not yet pure. That is why I say, you have to make strenuous effort to attain it: Jehova, ho ho ... ho ... h ... You did not hear anything then, but I was doing it, the pure out-breathing And you will have noted the change that comes over the upward gaze as soon as ever one passes from the intoning with vowel accompaniment to the out-breathing pure and simple. That, then, is rapture.

Now for another mime and gesture that can also quite well be learned, and used always to be taught in the older schools of dramatic art. For we ought not to despise what was good in the earlier days; it has only to be evoked now in a new way; it has to be evoked out of speech—that is what is new about it. Imagine you intone a o, a o. While you intone, you contract your brow into vertical wrinkles and open your eyes as wide as ever you can: a o. And now drop the intoning, and you will have the right expression in mime and gesture for careful reflection and concern. This will only reveal itself fully when you have ceased intoning and carry in you the after-effect of the well-formed speech. But you must begin with the intoning, and then let the intoning pass over into your whole bearing and countenance.

I know well what the natural rejoinder will be to detailed advice of this kind: But if we have first to learn all this, whenever shall we come to the point of being ready for the stage? You will find, however, that all the methods I am advocating will, if properly carried out, prepare you for the stage in a shorter time than is taken by the training given in present-day schools of dramatic art. As a matter of fact, hardly any of those who appear on the stage have attended these schools; since, generally speaking, students who have been trained in them do not turn out to be the best actors, any more than the best painters or sculptors are to be found among those who have been professionally trained. For as a rule the methods used in art schools are rather uninspiring. Students who have real talent soon grow impatient and take themselves off to pursue art on their own account. But with regard to the exercises and so on that I have been recommending—once you begin to know them and study them, you will find they are not, after all, so alarmingly complicated.

And now I have something to say on more general lines in reference to a school of dramatic art. It is of great importance that an actor should have a good knowledge of eurhythmy. Not in order to perform it, for eurhythmy is an art that is performed on the stage on its own account. But to the full training of an actor, all the other arts have to make their contribution, and so too eurhythmy I do not mean that an actor should let his acting run on here and there into eurhythmy The result would be most inartistic. Eurhythmy can only be artistic when it is allowed to work in its own way—that is, to the accompaniment of recitation or of music. We must, you know, have a feeling for what it is in eurhythmy that makes it an art. Eurhythmy gives what cannot come to expression in music alone or in recitation alone; it takes these further, continues them. No one could feel it to be true eurhythmy if done to the accompaniment of singing. In singing, music has flowed over into speech. The eurhythmy would merely disturb the singing, and the singing the eurhythmy. Eurhythmy can be accompanied by recitation, which itself has nothing to do with bodily movement; for in recitation gesture has become inward. Eurhythmy can also be accompanied by instrumental music. But not by singing, if one wants to let eurhythmy work in a way that corresponds with its true ideal.

Not therefore directly, but indirectly eurhythmy can be of the very greatest significance for the actor. For what have we in eurhythmy 9 In eurhythmy we have the full, the macrocosmic gesture for vowel and consonant. I (arm stretched straight out); a still more intensely pointed i (fingers also stretched). And now try to continue inwards the feeling you have in making the eurhythmy for i. I do not mean merely the feeling of having one's arm and hand in that position; the i lies in the feeling that is experienced in the muscle. Try to hold this feeling fast, within you; let it be for you as though a sword were being thrust straight down into your body. And now, still continuing this feeling, try to intone i. Then the right nuance for your i will come to you from the eurhythmy; your i, as you speak it, will have the necessary purity. And it will be the same with the other vowels and consonants. Continue their eurhythmy inwards; fill yourself with the ghost of the eurhythmic form, with its mirrored reflection, and while still feeling the form there within you, intone. In this way you will come to speak your vowels and consonants in their purity. So much for an advice of a more general kind concerning your training.

If you will continue to keep all these things in mind, you will at length acquire a true understanding for what is essential in speech. For it is not enough for an actor to know his part. He must of course do that; but what matters above all is that he shall have the right thoughts and feelings concerning his calling. Otherwise he cannot really be an actor. No one can be an artist in any sphere who has not a true and worthy conception of the art he is following.

By entering with your whole heart into such a training as I have here been indicating, you will come to have a pure—let me say, a religious—understanding of what speaking really is; and not only of speaking, but also of the mime and gesture that are connected with it. And that is what is needed. For such a conception of speech will, more than anything else, give you a strong and clear feeling of the place of man in the universe. Gradually you will come to appreciate man's true dignity and worth, beholding how he stands at the very centre of the world-all.

Look at the animals. They too make sounds. Think of the lion's roar, of the lowing of the cow, or of the bleating of sheep and goat. The sounds uttered by these animals have the character of vowels. They are expressing what is within them—all the animals that lift up their voice in this manner. And then, as you go about Nature's world, you will also hear quite different forms of utterance, such as, for example, the sounds that are made by cicadas and other insects, where the sound is produced by the movements of certain limbs or organs. There you have sounds that show a decided consonantal character. And then at last you come to that wonderful development of sound that means so much to man—the song of the birds! In the singing of the birds you have music. So that while you hear vowels from the higher and consonants from the lower animals, the birds give you the possibility to hear music in the animal world.

But now what about that sound you hear when you go out into the country and listen to the cicadas or other insects? Go close up to one of them and watch it. Out of the question for you to have the impression that the cicada is wanting to say something to you with this consonantal sound that it produces ! You have before you the simple fact of an insect in action—that is all! And then what are we to say of the animals that low or bleat or roar? Such sounds do no more than express self-defence, or resistance, or again a sense of well-being; they are far from revealing any inner experience of soul. Finally, in the singing of the birds, you can distinctly feel that the music does not live inside them. The simple and natural feeling about the singing of the birds, you have when you compare the one or the other variety of it with the corresponding flight, with the beating of the wings. For it is true, there is a harmony between the external movements the bird makes in flight and the music it produces with its voice.

And now, turn right away from the animal world and listen to the inwardness, to the artistic forming of inner experience, that reaches you through the vowels as spoken by man! Listen again to the experience in and with the external world that reaches you through the consonants as spoken by man. Listen, I say, to human speech, listen to it also in its connection with mime and with gesture; and it will not fail to beget in you a right and true feeling for the significance of man in the universe. For verily it stands there revealed before you in what speech can become in man.

Then your heart and soul will receive the right orientation, and the way will lie open for you to enter further into the more esoteric aspect of our theme. And this is what we shall be doing in the remaining lectures.²

• 1. The Vienna Visitors' Gazette.
• 2. The last sentence was greeted with enthusiastic applause. The course had been previously announced as ‘from the 5th to the 15th September ’.

It is not possible, naturally, to educate or give instruction if in our education and instruction we are not able to sense inwardly the whole human being. For during the period of a child's development this whole man needs to be considered far more than later on. We know this whole man embraces the ego, the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body. These four members of our human nature are of course not subject to uniform development but unfold in quite different ways. We must distinguish accurately between the development of the physical and the etheric bodies and that of the astral body and ego. The outer signs of this differentiated development are furnished—as you know from the various hints I have given here or there—by the change of teeth and by that alteration in the human being which is announced by the change of voice accompanying sexual maturity in the male, appearing as clearly but in a different way in the female. The nature of this phenomenon in the female organism is fundamentally the same as in the man's change of voice, but it emerges in a broader way, not perceptible in a single organ only, as with the man, but spread more over the entire organism. You know that between the change of teeth and the change of voice or puberty lies the period of instruction with which we have to do preferably in elementary education. But the years that follow the change of voice (or what corresponds to it in the female organism) must also be given our close attention in education and teaching.

Let us call to mind what the change of teeth signifies. The change of teeth is the outer expression for the fact that in the child's organism up to then—that is, between birth and the second dentition—the physical and etheric bodies have been influenced strongly by the nerve-sense system, operating from above downward. The physical body and the etheric body are influenced most powerfully from the head until about the seventh year. These forces—particularly active through the years in which imitation plays such a major role—are concentrated so to speak in the head. And what happens formatively in the rest of the organism, in the trunk and limbs, takes place through rays proceeding from the head downward to the organism of trunk and limbs, to the physical and etheric bodies. What streams from the head into the whole of the physical and etheric bodies of the child, reaching the tips of his fingers and toes, this is soul activity, notwithstanding the fact that it proceeds from the physical body. It is the same soul activity that works in the soul later as intelligence and memory. It is only that later, after the change of teeth, the child's thinking begins to use his memories more consciously. The thorough modification of the child's soul life demonstrates that certain psychic forces, working earlier within the organism, are from his seventh year onward active in the child as forces of soul. The whole period up to the change of teeth, while the child is growing, is effected by the same forces that appear after the seventh year as forces of intelligence, as intellectual forces.

Here we have an interplay between soul and body that is quite real—by which the soul, on reaching the age of seven, emancipates itself from the body, is active no longer in the body but for itself. In the seventh year forces begin to be active, arising in the body anew as soul-forces, to work on and on into the next incarnation. Then it is that what streams upward from the body is thrust back, and conversely the forces shooting downward from the head are held in check. Thus during the time the teeth are changing, the most active of battles is taking place between forces striving downward from above and others springing upward from below. The change of teeth is the physical expression for this struggle between the two sets of forces—those that later appear in the child as his powers of understanding and intellect, and those that need to be used especially in drawing, painting and writing. We put all of these up-welling forces to use when we develop writing out of drawing, for what these forces really strive for is to pass over into sculptural activity, drawing, etc. These are the forces that have their termination at the change of teeth, having previously shaped the body of the child, the sculptural forces which we use later, when the second dentition is completed, to introduce the child to drawing and painting, etc. In the main these are forces planted in the child from the spiritual world in which the child's soul lived before conception. They are active first as bodily forces shaping the head and then from the seventh year onward as soul forces. Thus in the period after the seventh year we simply draw forth from the child for our authoritarian purposes, what the child had previously made unconscious use of in imitation, inasmuch as these forces had taken their course unconsciously within the body. If later on the child turns out to be a sculptor, a draughtsman or an architect (but a proper architect, one who works with forms), the reason is that such a man has the predisposition to retain in his organism somewhat more of the down-raying forces, to retain rather more of them in the head, so that later on these childhood forces are still raying downward. However, if they are not sustained, if with the change of teeth everything translates into the soul sphere, then we have children who have no talent for drawing, for the sculptural or for architecture—who could never become a sculptor.

The secret is this: such forces are related to what we have experienced between death and our new birth. We acquire the reverence we need in our teaching activity, something that can have a religious quality, if we raise this to consciousness: the forces I draw forth from the child around his seventh year, which I make use of when he learns drawing or writing—these are really furnished me by heaven. It is the spiritual world that sends these forces down—the child is the medium—and I am in fact working with forces directed down from the spiritual world. This reverence before the divine-spiritual, when it permeates my teaching, is actually a wonder-worker in teaching. If I have the feeling that I am in contact with forces that are unfolding down from the spiritual world, from the time before birth, if I have this feeling, it generates a deep reverence. And you will see that the presence of this feeling will accomplish more than all the intellectual speculation as to what you should do. The feelings that a teacher has are his most important teaching tools. And this reverence is something that works on the child with enormous formative effect.

Thus in what is happening to the child at the change of teeth we have something that is a direct transference of spiritual forces from the spiritual world through the child into the physical world.

Another process takes place during the years of puberty, although it has been preparing itself slowly throughout the cycle of years from seven to fourteen or fifteen. During this time something is stirring to life in the regions of the soul which are not already irradiated by the consciousness—for the consciousness is only now forming itself, and something is streaming into us continuously from the outer world unconsciously—something that is gradually emerging into consciousness wakens to life now, something that has irradiated the child from the outer world since his birth, that has collaborated in the building up of the child's body and has entered into the child, into his formative forces.

These are different forces again. Whereas the formative forces enter the head from within, these forces come now from outside and proceed from there down into the organism. These forces, working from the outer world through the head and into the body, forcing their way through the formative forces and sharing in what happens as the child's body is built up from the seventh year onward—I cannot characterize these otherwise than to say, they are the same forces that are active in speech and in music. They are forces taken in from the world.

Such forces as are of a musical kind are taken up more from the outer world, from the world outside of man, from the observation of nature and its processes, above all from observation of its rhythms and a-rhythms. A secret music pours through every natural occurrence—the earthly projection of the music of the spheres. In truth, a tone of this spheric harmony is incorporated in every plant, in every animal. This is true as well of the human body, but it lives no longer in human speech—that is to say, not in the expressions of the soul—yet most certainly in bodily structures and functions. All of this the child is taking in unconsciously, and for this reason are children musical to such a high degree. All of this they are taking up into their bodily organism. Whatever they experience of formed movement, of the linear, of the sculptural, this comes from within, proceeding from the head. Whatever, on the contrary, is taken up by the child as a configuration of tones or the content of language, this comes from outside. And against what is coming from outside works—but now somewhat later, around the 14th year—the spiritual element of music and language, developing gradually from within outward. This is compacted now, in the female in her entire organism, in the male more in the region of his larynx, bringing about the change of voice. All of this is caused by an element from within, bearing more the character of will, that is living itself out in battle with a willed element from outside. This struggle finds expression in the change of voice and what otherwise emerges at puberty. This is a battle between inner forces of music and language and outer musical-1inguistic forces.

The human being is basically up to the seventh year permeated more by the formative and less by musical forces, that is to say less by forces of music and language glowing through his organism. From the seventh year on, however, the activity of music and speech becomes particularly strong in the etheric body. Then the ego and astral body turn against this; a willed element from outside battles with a willed element from within, and this comes to visibility at puberty. The difference that exists between male and female has another outer manifestation in the difference of vocal pitch. The voice levels of a man and woman coincide only in part; the voice of the woman reaches higher, that of a man descends deeper into the bass. This corresponds precisely to the structure of the rest of the organism, formed out of the struggle between these forces.

These matters witness that in the life of the soul we have to do with something that also has a Share in the build-up of the body, but for quite definite purposes. All the abstract chatter you find today in books on psychology or in psychological discussions based on contemporary science, all the high-flown words about psychosomatic parallelism, are no more than a testimonial to the ignorance of our philosophers, who know nothing of the real relationship between the psychic and the bodily. For the soul is not related to the body in accordance with the nonsensical theories thought out by the psychosomatic parallelists. We are concerned with an influence of the soul in the body that is quite concrete, and then again with the reaction. Of the latter we are about to speak. Up to the seventh year the formative-structural works in collaboration with the musical lingual. This changes in the seventh year only insofar as from then on the relation between the musical-lingual on the one hand and the formative-structural on the other is a different one. But through the whole period of human life up to puberty such cooperation takes place between the formative-structural, proceeding from the head and having there its seat, and the musical-lingual, proceeding from the outer world, coming from outside, using the head as a point of entry to disperse itself throughout the organism.

From this we see that human speech too, but above all the musical element collaborates in the shaping of the human being. At first it helps form the man, and afterwards it stems itself, pausing at the larynx; it does not pass through this gate as before. Up to now it has been language which modified our organs, as deeply as into the skeletal system. A person who views a human skeleton with a true psycho-physical eye (and not with the purblind psycho-physical eye of today's philosophers) and focusses on the differentiation between a male and female skeleton, will see in the skeleton an incorporated musical achievement, played out in the interaction between the human organism and the outer world. The human skeleton can be understood figuratively thus: as if someone were to play a sonata and were then to preserve it by some sort of spiritual crystallisation process—in this way we would get the principle forms, the arrangement of forms in the human skeleton! This would also demonstrate for you the difference between man and animal. In an animal what is taken in of the lingual-musical element (very little of the lingual but very much of the musical) passes right through the animal, since it lacks in a certain way the human isolation that leads then to the change of voice. In the skeletal form of the animal we have a musical imprint too, but it is such that a musical coherence would be provided only if various skeletons were placed together as in a museum. The animal always manifests a one-sidedness in its structure.

These are matters we should consider carefully; they show us what feelings we should develop. If our reverence grows, as we cultivate our connection and intercourse with pre-natal forces, (as we have already characterized this) so do we gain more animation and enthusiasm in our teaching through immersing ourselves in the other human forces. A Dionysian element irradiates our musical and language instruction, while we acquire more of an apollonian element as we teach the plastic arts, painting and drawing. The instruction that has to do with music and speech we give with enthusiasm, the other with reverence.

The formative forces offer the stronger resistance; hence they are arrested as early as the seventh year. The other forces, counteracting more weakly, are not retarded before the fourteenth year. This you must not take to mean physical strength or weakness; meant is the answering pressure that is called forth. Since the formative forces, being stronger, would overrun the human organism, the counter pressure is greater. For this reason they must be arrested earlier, whereas the other forces are allowed to remain longer in the organism by a higher guidance. The human being is permeated longer by the musical than by the formative forces.

If you allow this insight to ripen in you and have the necessary enthusiasm for it, then you will be able to say: with what you permit to resound in the child in the way of language and music, precisely in the elementary school years, when that battle is still present and you are working also upon his bodily nature and not merely on his soul—with this you are preparing what will work beyond death, what man carries with him beyond death. In essence it is to this we are contributing through everything we impart to the child in the way of music and language during the elementary years. And because we know we are working into the future in this way, this provides us with a certain enthusiasm. If we are dealing with the formative forces, on the other hand, then we are in touch with what already lay in the human being before birth, before conception; this gives us reverence. But with the other forces we are working into the future; we are combining our own forces with these, knowing that we are fertilizing the musical-linguistic germ with something that, after the physical aspects of language and music have been laid aside, works over into the future. Music is physical by being a reflection of the spheric in the air. The air serves as medium for the tones to become physical; the air in the larynx in turn renders speech physical. But it is the non-physical in the air of speech, the non-physical in the air of music, that unfolds its true effect only after death. We gain a certain enthusiasm for our teaching by this, knowing that these are the means by which we weave the future.

I believe the future of education will consist in this: teachers will no longer be spoken to in the manner of today, but only in ideas and inner pictures that are capable of translation into feelings. For nothing will be of greater importance than this, that we are able as teachers to develop in ourselves the necessary reverence and the necessary enthusiasm, so that we may teach with reverence and enthusiasm. Reverence and enthusiasm—these are the two hidden, fundamental forces that must lend spirit to the teacher's soul.

To help you understand the matter still better, I should just like to mention that the musical element is at home particularly in the astral body. After death a man still bears his astral body for a time; as long as he does so, until he lays it aside—you are familiar with this from my book Theosophy—there still exists in man after death a kind of recollection TIT is no more than a memory) of earthly music. Thus it is that the music a man absorbs during his life works on after death as a musical memory, and endures roughly until the time he lays his astral body aside. Then in the life after death the earthly music is transformed into the music of the spheres and remains as spheric music until some time before the new birth. It will bring the matter closer to your understanding, if you know that the music a person takes in here on earth plays a powerful role in fashioning his soul-organism after death. This is fashioned during the period of kamaloca. This is the positive side of kamaloca, and if we know this we are essentially in a position to ease for people what the Catholics call the fires of purgatory. Not, certainly, by removing their contemplation of it; this they must have, or they would remain imperfect, not perceiving the imperfect things they have done. But we introduce a possibility that the human being will be better formed in his next life, if he can have many memories of musical experiences during the time after death when he still has his astral body. This can be studied on a relatively inferior plane of spiritual experience. You need only wake up during the night after hearing a concert; you will become aware that you have experienced the whole concert once more before waking. Indeed, you experience it still better now, on awaking in the night after the concert; the experience is most accurate. Thus is the musical impressed into the astral body, where it remains in vibration; some thirty years after death it is still there. A musical impression remains active much longer than a vocal one. The spoken word, as such, we lose relatively soon after death; only its spiritual distillation remains behind. The musical is preserved as long as the astral body maintains itself.

The spoken word can be of great benefit to us after death, particularly if we have taken it in often in the form I now frequently describe as the art of recitation. I have naturally every reason to point this out, when in describing the art of recitation I say that these things cannot be grasped properly unless we take into account the typical course of the astral body after death. But we need to describe things the way I do in lectures on eurythmy. We have to talk to people as if speaking the most primitive of languages. And it is truly so—from the standpoint of the other side of the threshold, men here are actually like savages; only beyond the threshold are men really men. We only work our way out of our primitive standpoint when we work our way into the spiritual. To this we can attribute the fury of primitive people against our efforts, which is becoming increasingly evident.

Now I would like to draw your attention to a fact that must have our particular concern in an art of education and can be worked on there. In the struggle I first described, whose outer expression is the change of teeth, and in the later battle whose equivalent is the change of voice, a certain characteristic is to be noted: everything which proceeds downward from the head in the period before the seventh year takes the form of an attack on what is coming to meet it from within in the nature of up-building forces. And everything that works outward from within, rising up towards the head to counter the stream originating there, acts like a defence against this descending stream. The one has the appearance of an attack, the other, working from within outward, gives the appearance of a defence.

It is analogous again with the musical. What emerges from within has the appearance of an attack, and what passes through the head organisation from above on its way downward shows itself as defence. Were we not to have music, then truly frightful forces would rise up in a human being. I am fully convinced that up to the 16th and 17th centuries traditions from the ancient mysteries were at work, and that people in these times still wrote and spoke subject to the after effects of the mysteries, but no longer knowing the full significance of these traditions; also that in much appearing in relatively later times we simply have recollections of ancient mystery knowledge. Thus I have always been particularly moved by the words of Shakespeare: The man that hath no music in himself...is fit for treason, murder and deceit...let no such man be trusted.¹ It was imparted to pupils in the ancient mystery schools: what acts as an attack from within man, what must be warded off continuously, what is damned back for the sake of man's human nature—that is treason, murder and deceit, and it is the music working in man that counteracts it. Music is the means of defence against the Luciferic forces rising up out of the inner man: treason, murder, deceit. We all have treason, murder and deceit within us, and it is not for nothing that the world contains the musical-lingual element, apart from the pleasure it affords man. The world includes this element in order that man may become Man. We must naturally keep in mind that the teachers in the ancient mysteries spoke rather differently. Their expressions were more concrete. They would not have said: treason, murder, deceit (in Shakespeare this has already been toned down), but rather: serpent, wolf and fox. The serpent, the wolf, the fox—these are repelled from man's inner nature by the musical element. The teachers in the ancient mysteries would always have used animal forms to describe what is rising up out of man, what must first be transformed to become human. And thus it is that we gain the right sort of enthusiasm, when we see the treacherous serpent rising up out of the child and combat it with our instruction in music and language, or similarly deal with the murderous wolf and the deceitful fox or cat. This is what can permeate us with a proper, reasoned enthusiasm—not with the glowing, Luciferic enthusiasm that alone is acknowledged today. In sum, we must come to know: attack and defence.

There are two levels in man on which this warding-off takes place. The defence is first in himself, finding visibility in the seventh year with the change of teeth. Then further, through what he has taken in of music and language, is warded off what is trying to rise up in him. Both battlefields are within man, the musical-lingual more towards the periphery, toward the outer world, the architectonic—formative more toward the inner man, toward the inner world. But there is a third battlefield as well, and that lies on the boundary between the etheric body and the outer world. The ether body is always larger than the physical body, reaching out beyond it on all sides. There we find another such battlefield. Here the battle is taking place more under the influence of the consciousness, whereas the other two are fought more in the unconscious. The third and more conscious battle manifests when everything that has been converted in the interplay between man and the formative-architectonic on the one hand, between man and the musical-lingual on the other hand, works itself out, when this lives itself into the etheric body and thereby takes hold of the astral body, thus to be displaced more toward the periphery or outer boundary. This is where that which pours through the fingers when we draw or paint, etc. has its origin. This is what makes the art of painting one that operates more in the environment of man. The man who draws or sculpts must work more out of an inner disposition, the musician more out of a devotion to the world. That which lives itself out in painting and drawing, for which we train the child when we have him draw forms or lines, that is a battle taking place wholly on the surface, a battle in essence between two forces, the one working inward from outside, the other working outward from within. The force working outward from within actually tends to dissipate a person constantly, it tends to prolong the formative activity in him, not strongly but in a delicate way. This force has the tendency (I must express this more drastically than it really is, but in this exaggeration you will see what I mean), this force working outward from within would make our eyes bulge, give us the goitre, make our nose puff out and our ears grow—everything would swell outward. But another force is present, one which we suck in from the outer world, by which this swelling is counteracted. And if we make no more than a line—draw something—this is a striving, using a force working in from the outer world, to counter the force from within that is trying to deform us. This is a complicated reflex motion we execute as men in painting, in drawing, in graphic activity. When we draw or set up a canvas before us, a feeling is actually glimmering in our consciousness: you are not letting something outside of you in, you are making thick walls—or barbed wire—out of your forms and strokes. In drawings we actually have such barbed wire, by which we constrain something that tends to destroy us from within, retarding its influence. For this reason our drawing classes will have their best effect, if our study of drawing begins with man. If you study the kinds of movement the hand tends to make, if you have a child in a eurythmy class contour these forms or movements that he wants to make of himself, then you have controlled the line that would work destructively and its effect is no longer destructive. If you begin by having the children draw eurythmic gestures and then let drawing and finally writing develop their forms from these, then you have something that man's nature really wills, something related to the being and becoming in human nature. This too we should know when we do eurythmy: there is always in the etheric body a tendency to do eurythmy. This is simply something the etheric body does of its own accord. Eurythmy is no more than a reading of all of its movements from what the etheric body wants to do; these are actually the movements it is making, and it is only inhibited when we cause these movements to be executed by the physical body. By allowing the physical body to execute them, these movements are checked in the etheric body, but react upon us again, this time with a health-giving effect.

This has a certain visible effect on man, both in a hygienic- therapeutic and a didactic-pedagogical way. But such things can only be understood if we know that something, striving to manifest in the etheric body of man, must be restrained at the periphery by the movements of the physical body. In one case an element pertaining more to the will is restrained through eurythmy, in the other case a more intellectual element through drawing and painting. But fundamentally speaking, these are merely the two poles of one and the same process.

If now we feel our way into this process and incorporate it into our sensitive capacity as teacher, then we arrive at the third feeling we have need of. This feeling should really permeate us through the whole of our elementary school teaching, namely that the human being on entering the world is exposed to things from which we must actually be shielding him through our teaching.

Otherwise he would flow out too actively into the world. In fact, a man always has the tendency to become rachitic in soul, to make his limbs rachitic, to become a gnome. While we instruct and educate him, we are forming him. We sense this formative activity best when we follow the way a child makes a form drawing and then smooth it out somewhat, so that the result is not what the child wants and also not what I want, but the product of both. If I am able to do this—to improve what the child lets happen through his fingers, yet having my feeling, my sympathy flow into it and live with the child—then the best will come of it. If I now transform this into a feeling and permeate myself with it, its result is a shielding of the child from being drawn too strongly into the outer world.

We have to let the child grow slowly into the outer world; we dare not let this happen too quickly. We hold a protective hand over the child at all time; this is the third feeling.

Reverence, enthusiasm and a sense of guardianship—these three things actually form the panacea, the universal remedy in the soul of the teacher and educator. And if we wanted to create something externally, artistically, that as a group¹ would incorporate art and education, then we should have to create this:

Reverence for what has preceded the child's earthly existence. Enthusiasm in regarding what is to follow the child's life. A protective gesture over all that the child is experiencing.²

By such a fashioning of the teacher's nature, its outer manifestation would also come to its best expression.

In speaking of such matters, drawn from the intimacies of world-mysteries, we sense how unsatisfactory it must always be to make use of conventional language. If we are forced to say such things in ordinary language, then we have the feeling a supplementation is needed. Something is always there that would shift over from the more abstract lingual form to the artistic. For that reason I wanted to make this final point.

This is something we must learn. We have to learn to carry in us something of that future conviction, which will consist in this: the possession of science alone turns a man into something like a dwarf in soul and spirit. No one who is merely a scientist will have the urge to transform the scientific into the artistic, even in the shaping of his thoughts. But only through the artistic do we grasp the world. And we can always say, the man to whom nature reveals her secrets feels a hunger for art.

You should have the feeling, that insofar as you are simply a scientist you are a moon-calf. Only when you transform your organism of soul, spirit and body, only when your knowledge assumes an artistic form, do you become a man. In essence, developments in the future—and in these education will have to play its part—will lead from science to an artistic grasp of the world, from the moon-calf to the full human being.

• 1. This is not an exact quotation, but altered slightly to correspond with the teachings of ancient mystery schools
• 1. cf. in this regard the Group statue at the Goetheanum. Tr.
• 2. Rudolf Steiner accompanied each of these sentences with a gesture. An indication for the first is missing; for the second a guiding, pointing hand; for the third both hands raised with finger-tips inclined toward each other.

On our Earth, there was a repetition of the previous planetary conditions. In the state of the Sun, Moon and Earth, man could not develop the powers of his soul. In the lunar and terrestrial state, the substances were too poor; the moon had to come out of the earth first, only then was it possible for man to build his body out of the earth. In the end, the tired earth will be reunited with the sun. The moon will disintegrate into atoms. On the moon, the animal developed. Man on earth must overcome this stage again.

The Christ is a high being, towering above all beings connected with the earth. The appearance of the Christ was a cosmic event. He is the spirit of the sun and of the earth. He emerged from the sun and created the earth through his word. It is his body. He could therefore say: Those who eat my bread trample me underfoot.

According to esoteric Christianity, the Christ appeared under the sign of the Lamb, Aries. The Revelation of John is set in signs: he saw into the future. In occultism, everything has a sign.

The sun sign.

Man will control the beam of light.

Sign of the solar demonic cult: Sign of an evil spirit, the beast with two horns.

The number of the evil beast is 666.

taw = 400.
resch = 200.
waw=6
samech = 60]

Sorat is the name of the evil beast.

The Apocalypse contains theosophy; no ordinary wisdom is deep enough to comprehend such wisdom.

The effect of the Lamb is the training of the will, because the way to the will of the world is found. The trained will must rise to the great will that rules the sun and stars.

The philosopher's stone is found through the training of thinking, feeling and willing through imagination and inspiration. Only today is the truth of this penetrating into the public domain. One always heard of alchemists who wanted to make gold. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the secrets of the alchemists were betrayed, and making gold fell into disrepute.

Man breathes in pure air to transform his blue-red blood into life-blood; he breathes in oxygen and transforms it into toxic carbon, which kills. In the case of plants, it is the other way around. They breathe in carbon and transform it into oxygen, so man and plant complement each other. Although plants also consume five percent oxygen, this is relatively little compared to the oxygen they release. The plant uses the carbon to build its own body.

By regulating the breathing process, humans develop an organ that allows them to do the work that plants now do. They breathe in oxygen and retain the carbon, and then they develop a substance, light and fluid, diamond-like, from which they build themselves up like plants. Through this rhythmic 'breathing process', the human being learns to free himself from the unchaste flesh. The animal is the plant nature permeated by desire. When the human being works on himself in the way described, he produces what is called the philosopher's stone, the fourth stage of the Rosicrucian training:

1. Study.
2. Imaginary Knowledge.
3. Reading of Occult Writing.
4. Rhythmic Breathing Process (Philosopher's Stone).
5. Correspondence between Microcosm and Macrocosm.
6. Living in the Macrocosm.
7. Godliness.

Every part of the human organism corresponds to something in nature, in the world. A saying of Paracelsus: “The world is a stretched-out human being, the human being a contracted world”.

At the time when Mars exerted its influence on Earth, the heart was formed; Leo corresponds to it. The heart would increase in a predatory way if it were left to itself. In the past, man moved in a swimming and floating manner; the hands have become his organs of labor and are under the spiritual influence of Venus. What is inside is outside. All compositions are letters and words, a correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm. Through schooling, the human being lives himself into the macrocosm. The heart illuminates the inner spiritual being. If one could descend into the interior, one would see, for example, the group soul of the lion. The blood flow becomes different when the human being breathes differently. When the heart is transformed, it comes into a living relationship with the spiritual world. As the human ego develops, it learns to study individual limbs and to know the macrocosm; one learns to experience within oneself what happened at the time of the beginning of the earth. Everything is connected internally.

At the seventh level, one senses the forces of divinity wafting through the world. The gods had divinity at the beginning of our development, and man will have it at the end. He will develop the chalice of the Holy Grail.

Everything emerged from the Word; the world came into being through the Word, the Logos. Man is the Word of Christ made flesh. In Him the evangelists understood the Word. And He will return when the time for Him is prepared. John, His herald, appears when the days are at their longest. He must set when the spiritual sun appears.

The course of development is expressed in the first fourteen sentences of the Gospel of John. The Rosicrucian training begins to have its significance, it was spread in the thirteenth century. The other training is no longer easily applicable.

Impatience slows development of the organs one needs to see into higher worlds. For many pupils already have spiritual organs developed before they know about them or know how to use them. It's like a sleeper who hears nothing because the ego and astral body have left his ears.

When we look at a rose its red color, form, etc. has a destructive effect on our retina. The rose sensation runs along our nerves and has a destructive effect on them. The astral body throws what the retina receives into the etheric body that thereby gets many impressions from outside daily.

What tears down the physical body builds things up in the etheric body. The latter builds itself up through impressions and experiences from outside. The astral body is also destroyed by outer impressions and then the I is supposed to build things up again. The astral body is harmoniously organized when it comes to a new incarnation and is then made disharmonious. That's the occult explanation for the fact that most children cry after they're born. Their astral body feels that entry into life destroys its harmony and it feels this as pain. This harmony can only be restored by the I, through the creation of thought pictures that the I throws into the etheric body via the astral body, and that are viable. Most of the impressions that we send to our etheric body in ordinary life are worthless as far as their vitality is concerned. We should create mental images that are clear and rightly structured and therefore are able to live. For instance, what the eyes receive from outside they throw onto the etheric body, on which the picture arises. The I then works on the etheric body from the other side via the astral body by forming a thought in this that it throws on the etheric body as an impression; and the main thing is that they should be the right, viable thoughts. These viable thoughts form our spiritual organs that'll make us clairvoyant. Just as Gods created our physical body harmoniously so that each organ and limb is at the right place, so we must form our astral and etheric bodies harmoniously and make our thoughts viable. This doesn't have to take long. An experienced esoteric often only needs a minute to harmonize his impressions again. One creates such organ-forming, vital impressions in one's etheric body through meditation, by immersing oneself in certain concepts, in eternal thoughts.

For instance, it's important for every pupil to meditate on the wisdom concept. This doesn't mean that he should form a firmly outlined, intellectual definition of wisdom. He should have mobile views about it that are easy to change. Wisdom and cleverness or erudition are very different things. Some beings don't think and yet are very wise. They execute plans very wisely, although they were created by other beings. There are also men who aren't clever or erudite but are wise. Now if one meditates on the wisdom concept in the right way some wisdom will flow into us, enlightenment from higher worlds will come to us.

A second concept that one should meditate on is love. What the average person calls love is often nothing but crass egotism. True love is always productive, as when an artist devotes himself creatively to his work. The Gods created our earth out of love as they devoted themselves entirely to the creation that they sweat out of themselves, as it were. What can unite love and wisdom is that I that always works at itself, that must always be egofied anew, as Fichte puts it. One only understands Fichte's philosophy rightly if one sees that the I must always create itself anew, must know itself anew. That's also what Meister Eckhart means when he says: What good is it to be a king if one isn't aware that one is one.

All things on higher planes throw shadows onto lower ones, and so I, wisdom and love work as thinking, feeling and willing on the next, lower plane. One who thinks intentively about it will realize that the I is changed into thinking, wisdom passes over into feeling, and productive love becomes will, that is the impulse to creativity, to devotion. To complement these three points and the triangle it's good to meditate on four other points and a square. Choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholic beings create an etheric body for a man when he presses towards a new incarnation. Each man gets something from each of these beings, although one or the other usually predominates. This dominant temperament becomes manifest in a man's whole behavior, especially when he is young. For instance, phlegmatic beings are enemies of the philistine, petty things that a man would get into if he got too much from the melancholic beings. Choleric beings also become manifest in fire, sanguine ones in air, phlegmatics in water and melancholic beings in earth. Our earth is the outer expression for melancholy that has become physical. If one meditates on all of this one will someday lose consciousness of the outer world and will then know what eternity is and that birth and death are only changes. The etheric body will light up from the other side through the I and we'll see the effects of the eternal, live thoughts that we imprinted on it, namely, the clairvoyant organs that we can now use. If we're impatient and try to speed up this process the I illumines the etheric body, but we only see the outer impressions that were put into it, distorted pictures that are often horrible, or else beautiful, deceptive pictures. Therefore it's advisable to use the greatest care and patience in creating well formed, proper spiritual organs, for we're creating our future, our new earth with them. The Gods meditated our present planet, and what we create should be just as full of wisdom.

Every perusal of art also strengthens clairvoyant organs. For instance, when we look at a statue it's good to feel the forms and lines in one's thoughts. This strengthens our creative capacities.

We must take esoteric life seriously, and so an esoteric class must always be something sacred for us. We should never take it to be something ordinary. Probably not all of us were aware of the seriousness that is necessary when we asked to be admitted to this esoteric circle. But now we should place this ever more before our souls and strive for a connection with the spiritual worlds so that we don't fall back into everyday life again.

One should always look upon the exercises that are given to us as ones that come from the masters. An esoteric should watch himself and his feelings and to especially focus on self-knowledge. Most people—and we are probably among them—are living in big delusions about themselves. We must especially pay attention to egoism. We often imagine that we're doing something selflessly, or we feel hatred and envy towards someone that we haven't become aware of yet. Then as esoterics we think that we must tell him the “truth,” and that we don't have to take this or that from him. As soon as such feelings arise in us, one should realize that one is living under big delusions whose deeper cause is always egoism. Such feelings always become manifest together with a feeling of warmth that goes through the etheric body's warmth ether and works right into the physical body through the blood. Such feelings always have a harmful effect on men and world evolution.

The hierarchies who direct karmic connections work in such a way that they appoint special beings who destroy certain upbuilding effects in us, and therewith have a destructive effect on the soul and indirectly on the body. These are Luciferic beings who are appointed for this kind of work.

When we have correct self-knowledge and see our own badness, an ice-cold feeling goes through us instead of the aforementioned feeling of warmth that satisfies us. All the passions and desires that get satisfied in us express themselves in the described feeling of warmth, in contrast to the feeling of coldness that appears in true self-knowledge.

The Luciferic beings that thereby approach a pupil destructively reveal themselves to a clairvoyant as certain hosts, whose leader is Samael. These beings who don't look human at all are always perceptible for a spiritual eye. If on awakening, we have a feeling of disgust, as is often the case in an esoteric pupil, then such a feeling can almost always be ascribed to the egoism that often sits unrecognized deep in subconscious soul depths.

We must also direct our attention to everything that's connected with untruthfulness. Thanks to our education, we don't tell any big lies, but we always have the inclination to seem to be better than we really are. Or if the truth could endanger us, we prefer to keep quiet about it and to conceal the facts. This kind of thing also has a harmful effect on world events and therewith on the men themselves. Such untruths work on our astral body and then on our light ether. From there such harmful influences work on the physical body, especially on the nervous system. The Luciferic beings who are connected with this and whose leader is Azazel look partly like men, mostly a head with raven's wings.

One who tends to be untruthful will usually be able to feel a choking, scratchy sensation in the throat, and he often feels as if he was being pinched with pincers and tormented with a thousand arms. One who observes himself exactly will then notice how deeply he's still entangled in lies and dissimulations.

Then we should also become aware of a certain indifference and dullness with respect to spiritual worlds and their influences. Many pupils listen to an esoteric lecture, but what's given finds no echo in them. They can't lift themselves spiritually above everyday life or occupy themselves with spiritual thoughts. Others only want to see something in spiritual worlds out of curiosity, and meditate blind—to this end, without wanting to devote themselves to regular study, for that's too inconvenient for them. This has a harmful effect on the ego, from there on the astral body, then on the etheric body and namely on the part we call chemical ether, and from there on the physical glands and fluids.

There's a difference between esoterics and nonesoterics in their relation to Lucifer's hosts. For instance, Azazel and his hosts want to produce good effects on the latter, since they only work on them in a complementary way, as it were, and not to make them sick. But esoteric pupils are expected to be fully aware of their responsibility towards the world and themselves. That's why a dull esoteric can easily have the feeling on waking in the morn that he's drowning, especially if he abandons himself to ordinary sense life. And so an esoteric must constantly watch himself, and it doesn't hurt if he sometimes becomes a brooder about himself. Then he'll understand what the masters of wisdom bring home to him at the close of each class:

In the spirit lay the germ of my body.
And the spirit has imprinted in my body
The eyes of sense,
That through them I may see
The lights of bodies.
And the spirit has imprinted in my body
Reason and sensation
And feeling and will,
That through them I may perceive bodies
And act upon them.
In the spirit lay the germ of my body.
In my body lies the germ of the spirit.
And I will incorporate into my spirit
The super-sensible eyes
That through them I may behold the light of spirits.
And I will imprint in my spirit
Wisdom and power and love,
So that through me the spirits may act
And I become a self-conscious organ
Of their deeds.
In my body lies the germ of the spirit.

Great seriousness should reign in esoteric life. An esoteric lesson should be something sacred, something that we're entrusted with, and we should never take it to be something ordinary. Probably none of us were aware of the necessary seriousness when we asked to be taken into this esoteric circle. We should place this seriousness before our soul ever more now and try with all of our might to make a connection with the spiritual world, that we can do through an esoteric training, so that we don't fall back into everyday life. One should look upon all exercises that are given to us as ones that come from the masters of wisdom and of the harmony of feelings. In esoteric life one should pay particular attention to egoism. We often tell ourselves that we're doing something selflessly, or we're unaware that we hate or envy someone, and as an esoteric we think that we should tell him the truth or should not have to take this or that from him. When such feelings arise we should realize that we're living in great delusions that are always caused by egoism. Such feelings always become manifest with a feeling of warmth that goes through the warmth ether part of our life body and also works on the physical body through the blood.

We must realize that such feelings have a harmful effect on world evolution. The hierarchies who have the task of regulating karmic connections then get Luciferic beings to destroy these effects by working harmfully right down into the physical body.

An icy cold feeing goes through us when we see our wickedness, whereas we get a warm feeling from satisfied passions when we don't have self-knowledge. A clairvoyant can see them in mostly human shapes.

A man is often more untruthful than he realizes. Many say: I don't really have any dishonesty in me, I have discarded that entirely. But this dishonesty is often so slight that we're usually not aware of it. Say that we read that there's going to be a theosophical lecture in some city and we decide to go there We don't stop to think that a dear friend lives in that city whom we would like to see again, or that there'll be a party there that we want to go to. We think that we only want to go there because of the lecture, whereas there are other reasons.

Our education may have gotten us to the point where we don't tell any big lies, but we may still have the desire to appear better than we are or to conceal the truth if it would make us look bad. All of this has a harmful effect on all world events. Such dishonesties work on our astral body, then on the life body's light ether and then on our physical nerves.

Azazel makes us aware of all such dishonesties. He and the beings he leads mostly have human heads with raven's wings. With egoism, envy, and hate when we wake up we have a feeling of disgust that must be ascribed to our doppelganger's action, whereas one who tends towards dishonesty wakes up with a choking, scratchy feeling in his throat. He'll feel as if he was being pinched by pincers and tortured by a thousand arms. Azazel and his hosts do that. And if we sense his action in the way indicated, it should make us realize how deeply entangled in lies and dissimulations we still are.

A third thing is indifference and dullness with respect to spiritual worlds. Many pupils listen to an esoteric lesson, but what's given doesn't find an echo in them. They can't get away from ordinary, daily life. They can't raise themselves spiritually or occupy themselves with spiritual thoughts. Others are curious and would like to see or experience something in the spiritual world, and they mediate without studying regularly because they're too lazy to do so. This works directly on the ego, from there on the astral body, then on the life body's chemical ether and then on the body's glands and fluids. Azael is at work in this. Azael and his hosts only want to bring about good effects in nonesoterics by working on them in a supplementary way, and not so that he makes them sick. The effects go deeper in an esoteric, and he's always supposed to be aware of his complete feeling of responsibility towards himself and the world.

On awakening, a dull esoteric will feel like he's drowning in a flood, which feeling will be all the stronger the more he gives himself up to everyday sensory life.

An esoteric should always be watching himself. It doesn't hurt if he sometimes broods about himself. That's the only way he'll understand what's suggested to us at the end of every esoteric lesson by the masters of wisdom and of the harmony of feelings:

In the spirit lay the germ of my body.
And the spirit has imprinted in my body
The eyes of sense,
That through them I may see
The lights of bodies.
And the spirit has imprinted in my body
Reason and sensation
And feeling and will,
That through them I may perceive bodies
And act upon them.
In the spirit lay the germ of my body.
In my body lies the germ of the spirit.
And I will incorporate into my spirit
The super-sensible eyes
That through them I may behold the light of spirits.
And I will imprint in my spirit
Wisdom and power and love,
So that through me the spirits may act
And I become a self-conscious organ
Of their deeds.
In my body lies the germ of the spirit.

It is the desire and intention of the Anthroposophical Movement founded by Rudolf Steiner to meet man's hunger for the spirit and for freedom from the fetters of a soul-destroying materialism, to guide him also to some solution of the riddles of the great world in which he lives. Among those who have looked to the Movement for help have been actors, who have suffered under the conditions and methods of the modern stage and have not been able to find an answer to the problems that vexed and harassed them in the pursuance of their art and in their endeavours after deeper knowledge and understanding. Some of these came to Rudolf Steiner, and he responded to their call. He gave for them this course of lectures on the Arts of Speech and Drama which is now appearing in a second edition. The actors had to wait a long time for the lectures while still more urgent problems were demanding his attention.

Rudolf Steiner saw in art a redemptive and healing power for man's life of soul, that cannot be too highly valued; and he was untiring in his efforts to plant and foster there seeds for the future. Right through all the activities he undertook for the spiritual and social life of mankind, his work in the field of art was never interrupted; it reached a kind of zenith in his own Mystery Plays. In eurhythmy he gave a new art that has power in it to animate and fructify all the other arts. And in the very last days of his outer activity, full as they were to overflowing, he added also these lectures on the Arts of Speech and Drama. The interest and eagerness with which the announcement of the course was greeted made it impossible to limit the audience to actors alone, as had been at first intended. No sooner, in response to urgent entreaty, had a few exceptions been made, than a whole stream of people began asking to be allowed to take part. Had the original plan been adhered to, the lectures would perhaps have had a different, a rather more professional character. The fact that they were delivered to a wider audience may however have helped to give them a certain large and universal quality and afforded occasion for some of the humorous and topical allusions.

Although the shorthand report of the lectures was imperfect, there was an urgent call for it to appear in print in order that the suggestions contained therein might be taken up and worked out. And publication having once been decided upon, obviously the only thing to do was to retain the spoken word in all the freshness and directness in which it was heard. The reader is asked to remember that the words were spoken right out of the immediate situation, and to make allowance for the quick responses in feeling and the silent questionings that they met with in the hearers. Obviously, the content of the lectures would have been given a different form had it been intended from the first for publication.

Many may be disinclined to enter upon a study of the advice given here, because a particular philosophy lies behind it,—and that for them is taboo! Anthroposophical terminology will even be found to occur in the explanations. Yes, it will certainly mean that one is under the necessity of forming for oneself a picture of man in body, soul and spirit; and for this one will have to undertake study. A plentiful supply of literature exists on the subject. Besides Rudolf Steiner's more general works on Spiritual Science, his many lectures on education will be found particularly helpful. The opinion prevails today, however, that art and a philosophy of life do not go well together. And yet every art, in the time of its full flowering, has had as its content a living philosophy, a living conception of the world. And this is what we need today if the decadent tendencies of a worn-out civilisation are to be overcome. To understand what is offered to us in these lectures on the Arts of Speech and Drama, we must be ready to affirm the cosmic spirituality that lies hidden behind the world of appearances; and if we want to go further and put into practice what we have learned from the lectures, we shall find we need to have real experience of this hidden cosmic substantiality. Prejudice should not be allowed to stand in our way, nor any aversion to the things of the spirit,—which in the last resort is bred of fear. Provided our vision is free and unclouded, we shall be able to recognise in the sounds of speech our divine teachers, and to know the very breath of man as cosmic substance actively at work within him. These are the materials, these are the instruments, for the artist in speech. Through them he can indeed come to know himself anchored in the spirit, and can then follow the spirit on its path into matter and into the course of history. He will see drama coming to birth in long-past times in the original Mystery Play; he will see it shaping the souls of men, inspiring them, stirring them to their very depths, and purifying them. And he will see how drama afterwards loses its way in the low levels of the ebb-tide of civilisation. And then he will come to recognise that it is for him, strengthened as he is in soul, and awakened in his ego-consciousness thanks to the gifts and achievements of long epochs of cultural development—it is for him now to restore to drama its character as of a Mystery. And speech, as it gradually reveals its hidden depths to bis consciousness, will be his guide, will verily show him the way.

Dornach, September 1941.
MARIE STEINER

We will continue our study of particular karmic questions in relation to human life. What does occult science have to say about the origin of conscience? At our present stage of evolution conscience appears as a kind of inner voice telling us what to do and what to leave undone. How did such an inner voice come into being?

It is interesting to inquire whether in the historical evolution of mankind there has always been something comparable to what we call conscience. We find that in the earliest times, language had no word for it. In Greek literature it appears quite late, and in the language of the earlier Greeks no word for it exists. The same thing is true of the early periods of other civilisations. We may conclude, then, that the idea of conscience, in a more or less conscious form, came only gradually to be recognised. Conscience has developed fairly late in human evolution, and we shall see presently what our ancestors possessed in place of it.

How, then, has conscience gradually developed? On one of his journeys Darwin²⁷ came across a cannibal and tried to convince him that it is not a good thing to eat another human being. The cannibal retorted that in order to decide whether eating a man is good or bad you must first eat one yourself. In other words, the cannibal had not reached the point of judging between good and bad in terms of moral ideas, but in accordance simply with the pleasure he experienced. He was in fact a survival from an earlier stage of civilisation which was at one time universal. But how does a man like this cannibal come to distinguish between good and bad? He went on eating his fellow-men until one day he was due to be eaten himself. At that moment he experienced the fact that it could really happen to him. He felt that there was something wrong about this, and the fruits of this experience remained with him in Kamaloka and Devachan. Into his next incarnation he brought a dim feeling that what he had been doing was not quite right. This feeling became more and more definite in the course of further incarnations; he also came to take heed of the feelings of others, and thus he gradually developed a certain restraint. After various further incarnations the feeling became still more definite and gradually the thought emerged: Here is something one should not do. Similarly, a savage at a primitive stage would eat everything indiscriminately, but when he got [a] stomach-ache he came to realise by degrees that there were some things he could eat and some he could not. This kind of experience became gradually more and more firmly rooted, and finally it developed into the voice of conscience.

Conscience is therefore the outcome of experiences spread over a number of incarnations. Fundamentally, all knowledge, from the highest to the lowest, is the outcome of what a man has experienced; it has come into being as a result of trial and error.

An interesting fact is relevant here. Only since Aristotle has there been a science of logic, of logical thought. From this we must conclude that accurate thinking too, was born at a certain time. This is indeed so: thinking itself had first to evolve, and logical thinking arose in the course of time from fundamental observation of how thinking can go wrong. Knowledge is something mankind has acquired through many incarnations. Only after long trial and error could a store of knowledge be built up. All this illustrates the importance of the law of karma; here we have another example of something which has developed out of experience into a permanent habit and inclination. A motive such as conscience binds itself to the etheric body, becoming in time a permanent characteristic of it because the astral body has been so often convinced that this or that would not do.

Another interesting karmic relationship is between an habitually selfish attitude and a loving sympathy with others. Some people are hardened egoists—not only in their acquisitiveness—and others are unselfish and sympathetic. Both attitudes depend on the etheric body and may even find expression in the physical body. People who in one life have been habitually selfish will age quickly in their next life; they seem to shrivel up. On the other hand, if in one life you have been ready to make sacrifices and have loved others, you will remain young and hale. In this way you can prepare even the physical body for the next life.

If you recall what I said yesterday, you will have in mind a question: How is it with the achievements of the physical body itself? Its deeds become its future destiny; but what is the effect of any illnesses it may have had in this life?

The answer to this question, however strange it may sound, is not mere theory or speculation, but is based on occult experience, and from it you can learn the mission of illness. Fabre d'Olivet,²⁸ who has investigated the origins of the Book of Genesis, once used a beautiful simile, comparing destiny with a natural process. The valuable pearl, he says, derives from an illness: it is a secretion of the oyster, so that in this case life has to fall sick in order to produce something precious. In the same way, physical illnesses in one life reappear in the next life as physical beauty. Either the physical body becomes more beautiful as a result of the illness it endured; or it may be that an illness a man has caught from infection in his environment is compensated by the beauty of his new environment. Beauty thus develops, karmically, out of pain, suffering, privation and illness. This may seem a startling connection, but it is a fact. Even the appreciation of beauty develops in this way: there can be no beauty in the world without pain and suffering and illness. The same general law holds for the history of man's evolution. You will see from this how wonderful karmic relationships really are, and how questions about evil, illness and pain cannot be answered without knowledge of the important inner relationships within the evolution of humanity.

The line of evolution goes back into ancient, very ancient times, when conditions on Earth, and the Earth itself, were quite different. There was a time when none of the higher animals existed; when there were no fishes, amphibians, birds or mammals, but only animals less developed than the fishes. Yet man, though in a quite different form, was already there. His physical body was still very imperfect; his spiritual body was more highly developed. He was still enclosed within a soft ethcric body, and his soul worked on his physical body from outside. Man still contained all other beings within himself. Later on he worked his way upwards and left behind the fish form which had been part of himself. These fish forms were huge, fantastic-looking creatures, unlike the fishes of today. Then again man evolved to a higher stage and cast out the birds from himself. Then the reptiles and amphibia made their way out of man—grotesque creatures such as the saurians and water-tortoises, which were really stragglers from an earlier group of beings, even further removed from man, whose evolution had lagged behind. Then man cast out the mammals from himself, and finally the apes; and then he himself continued to advance.

Man has therefore always been man and not an ape; he separated off the whole animal kingdom from himself so that he might become more truly human. It was as though you gradually strained all the dye-stuffs out of a coloured liquid and left only clear water behind. In older days there were natural philosophers, such as Paracelsus and Oken,²⁹ who put this very well. When a man looks at the animal world, they said, he should tell himself: “I carried all that within myself and cast it out from my own being.”

Thus man once had within himself a great deal that was later externalised. And today he still has within him something that later on will be outside—his karma, both the good and the evil. Just as he has separated the animals from himself, so will he thrust good and evil out into the world. The good will result in a race of men who are naturally good; the evil in a separate evil race. You will find this stated in the Apocalypse, but it must not be misunderstood. We must distinguish between the development of the soul and that of races. A soul may be incarnated in a race on the down grade, but if it does not itself commit evil, it need not incarnate a second time in such a race; it may incarnate in one that is ascending. There are quite enough souls streaming in from other directions to incarnate in these declining races.

But what is inward has to become outward, and man will rise still higher when his karma has worked itself out. With all this something of extraordinary interest is connected. Centuries ago, with the future development of humanity in view, secret Orders which set themselves the highest conceivable tasks were established. One such Order was the Manichean, of which ordinary scholarship gives a quite false picture. The Manicheans are supposed to have taught that a Good and an Evil are part of the natural order and have always been in conflict with one another, this having been determined for them by the Creation. Here there is a glimmer of the Order's real task, but distorted to the point of nonsense. The individual members of the Order were specially trained for their great work. The Order knew that some day there will be men in whose karma there is no longer any evil, but that there will also be a race evil by nature, among whom all kinds of evil will be developed to a higher degree than in the most savage animals, for they will practise evil consciously, exquisitely, with the aid of highly developed intellects. Even now the Manichean Order is training its members so that they may be able to transform evil in later generations.

The extreme difficulty of the task is that these evil races will not be like bad children in whom there is goodness which can be brought out by precept and example. The members of the Manichean Order are already learning how to transform quite radically those who by nature are wholly evil. And then the transformed evil will become a quite special good. The power to effect this change will bring about a condition of moral holiness on Earth. But this can be achieved only if the evil has first come into existence; then the power needed to overcome the evil will yield a power that can reach the heights of holiness. A field has to be treated with manure and the manure has to ferment in the soil; similarly, humanity needs the manure of evil in order to attain to the highest holiness. And herein lies the mission of evil. A man's muscles get strong by use; and equally, if good is to rise to the heights of holiness, it must first overcome the evil which opposes it. The task of evil is to promote the ascent of man. Things such as this give us a glimpse into the secret of life. Later on, when man has overcome evil, he can go on to redeem the creatures he has thrust down, and at whose cost he has ascended. That is the purpose of evolution.

The following point is rather more difficult. The shell of a snail or mussel is secreted out of the living substance of the animal. The shell which surrounds the snail was originally inside its body its house is in fact its body in a more solid form. Theosophy tells us that we are one with all that surrounds us: this means that man at one time contained everything within himself. The Earth's crust, in fact, had its origin in man, who in the far past crystallised it out from within himself. Just as the snail at one time had its house within itself, so man had all other beings and kingdoms, minerals, plants and animals, within himself, and can say to them all: The substances were within me; I have crystallised out their constituent parts. Thus when man looks at anything outside himself, it becomes intelligible for him to say: All that is myself.

Even more subtle is a further idea. Imagine that ancient condition of humanity when nothing had yet been separated off from man. Man was there, and he formed mental pictures but they were not objective—not, that is, caused by external objects making an impression on him—they were purely subjective. Everything had its origin in man. Our dreams are still a legacy from the time when man, as it were, spun the whole world out of himself. Then he was able to look on the world over against himself. We as human beings have made everything, and in the rest of creation we can see our own products, our own being which has taken solid form.

Kant³⁰ speaks of the thing-in-itself as something unknowable by man. But in fact there are no limits to knowledge, for man can find, in everything he sees around him, the traces of his own being, left behind.

All this has been said in order to show you that nothing can be truly understood if it is looked at from one side only. Everything which appears to us in one condition was quite different in earlier times; only by relating the present to the past can it be understood. Similarly, if you do not look beyond the physical world of the senses, you will never understand illness, or the mission of evil. In all such relationships there is a deep meaning. Evolution had to take its course in this way, through a process of splitting off, because man was to become an inward being; he had to put all this out of himself in order that he might be able to see his own self. So we can come to understand the mission of illness, of evil, and even of the external world. We are led to these great interconnections by studying the law of karma.

We will now deal with several particular questions about karma which are often asked. What is the karmic reason that causes many people to die young, even in childhood? From individual instances known to occult science we may come to the following conclusion. If we study a child who has died young, we may find that in his previous life he had good abilities and made good use of them. He was a thoroughly competent member of society, but he was rather shortsighted. Because with his weak eyes he could not see clearly, all his experiences acquired a particular colouring. He was wanting in a small matter which could have been better, and because of his weak eyes he always lagged behind. He could have achieved something quite remarkable if he had had good sight. He died, and after a short interval he was incarnated with healthy eyes, but he lived only a few weeks. By this means the members of his being learnt how to acquire good eyes, and he had gained a small portion of life as a corrective of what had been lacking in his previous life. The grief of his parents will, of course, be compensated for karmically, but in this instance they had to serve as instruments for putting the matter right.

What is the karmic explanation of children born dead? In such cases the astral body may well have already united itself with the physical body, and the two lower members may be properly constituted. But the astral body withdraws, and so the child is born dead. But why does the astral body withdraw? The explanation lies in the fact that certain members of man's higher nature are related to certain physical organs. For instance, no being can have an etheric body unless it possesses cells. A stone has no cells or vessels, and so it cannot have an etheric body. Equally, an astral body needs a nervous system: a plant has no nervous system and therefore cannot have an astral body. In fact, if a plant were to be permeated by an astral body it would no longer be a plant, but would have to be provided with cells if it were to be permeated by an etheric body.

Now if the Ego-body is gradually to find a place for itself, there must be warm blood in the physical body. (All red-blooded animals were separated off from man at the time when the Ego-condition was being prepared for man.) Hence it will be seen that the physical organs must be in proper condition if the higher bodies are to dwell within them. It is important to remember that the form of the physical body is moulded by purely physical inheritance. It may also happen that the way in which the various bodily fluids are combined is at fault, although parents are well-matched in soul and spirit. Then the incarnating entity comes to a physical body which cannot house the higher members of its being. Thus for example the physical and etheric bodies may be properly united; then the astral body ought to take possession of the physical body, but the organism at its disposal is not in a suitable condition, and so it has to withdraw. The physical body remains, and is then still-born. A still-birth may thus be the outcome of a faulty mixture, on the physical level, of the fluids of the body, and this, too, will have a karmic connection. The physical body can thrive only in so far as the higher principles can live within it.

How are karmic compensations accomplished? If someone has done something to another person, there will have to be a karmic adjustment between them, which means that the persons concerned must be born again as contemporaries. How does this happen? What are the forces that bring the two persons together?

The way it works out is as follows. A wrong has been done; the victim has suffered it; the person who did it passes into Kamaloka, but first he has to witness the occurrence in the retrospective tableau of his past life. The injury he has inflicted does not then cause him pain, but in Kamaloka, as he relives his life backwards, the event comes before him, and now he has to suffer the pain he caused. He has to feel it in and through the very self of his victim. This experience imprints itself like a seal on his astral body. He takes with him a portion of the pain, and a definite force remains in him as the outcome of what he has experienced in the other man's being. In this way any pain or pleasure he has to live through turns into a force, and he carries a great number of such forces with him into Devachan.

When he returns to a new incarnation, this is the force that draws together all the persons who have had experiences in common. During the Kamaloka period they lived within one another, and they incorporated these forces into themselves. Hence within one physical human being there may be three or even more “Kamaloka men”, in order that the situation involving them may be lived out.

An example known to occult science will make this clear. A man was condemned to death by five judges. What was really happening there? In a previous life the man had killed these other five men and karmic forces had brought all six together for a karmic adjustment. This does not produce a never-ending karmic chain; other relationships come in to change the further course of events.

Spiritual forces, you see, are thus secretly at work to bring about the complicated patterns of human living. Further important aspects of the subject will become clear during the next few days, when we go on to study the whole evolution of Earth and Man.

• 27. Charles Darwin, 1809–1882.
• 28. Antoine Fabre d'Olivet, 1768–1825, author of La Langue hebraique restituee, 1816.
• 29. Lorenz Oken, 1779–1851, natural scientist and philosopher.
• 30. Immanuel Kant, 1724–1804.