The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

or:

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

by Hella Wiesberger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the name of that spirit which

---

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

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

In the name of that spirit which

---

in our striving proclaims itself,

---

I appear at this moment

---

before people who from now on want to hear

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[ 1 ] In every man there are latent faculties by means of which he can acquire for himself knowledge of the higher worlds. The mystic, theosophist, or gnostic speaks of a soul-world and a spirit-world, which are, for him, just as real as the world which we see with our physical eyes, or touch with our physical hands. At every moment his listener may say to himself: What he speaks about I too can learn, when I have developed within myself certain powers which today lie slumbering within me. There remains only the question as to how one has to commence in order to develop within oneself such faculties. For this only those can give advice who have already developed such powers within themselves. As: long as the human race has existed, there have always been schools in which those who possessed these higher faculties gave instruction to those who were in search of them. Such are called the occult schools, and the instruction which is imparted therein is called esoteric science, or occult teaching. Such a designation naturally awakens misunderstanding. He who hears it may be very easily misled into the belief that those who work in these, schools desire to represent a special, privileged class, which arbitrarily withholds its knowledge from its fellow-creatures. Indeed, he may even think that perhaps there is nothing really important behind such knowledge. For he is tempted to think that, if it were a true knowledge, there would then be no need to make a secret about it: one might then communicate it publicly and open up its advantages to all men.

[ 2 ] Those who have been initiated into the nature of the occult knowledge are not in the least surprised that the uninitiated should so think. Only he who has to a certain degree experienced this initiation into the higher secrets of being can understand the secret of that initiation. But it may be asked: How, then, shall the uninitiated, considering the circumstances, develop any interest at all in this so-called occult knowledge? How and why ought they to search for something of whose nature they can form no idea? But such a question is based upon an entirely erroneous conception of the real nature of occult knowledge. There is, in truth, no difference between occult knowledge and all the rest of man's knowledge and capacity. This occult knowledge is no more of a secret for the average man than writing is a secret to him who has never learned to read. And just as everyone who chooses the correct method may learn to write, so too can everyone who searches after the right way become a disciple, and even a teacher. In only one respect are the conditions here different from those that apply to external thought activities. The possibility of acquiring the art of writing may be withheld from someone through poverty, or through the state of civilisation into which he has been born; but for the attainment of knowledge in the higher worlds there is no obstacle for him who sincerely reaches for it.

[ 3 ] Many believe that one has to find, here or there, the Masters of the higher knowledge, in order to receive enlightenment from them. In the first place, he who strives earnestly after the higher knowledge need not be afraid of any difficulty or obstacle in his search for an Initiate who shall be able to lead him into the profounder secrets of the world. Everyone, on the contrary, may be certain that an Initiate will find him out, under any circumstances, if there is in him an earnest and worthy endeavour to attain this knowledge. For it is a strict law amongst all Initiates to withhold from no man the knowledge that is due to him. But there is an equally strict law which insists that no one shall receive any occult knowledge until he is worthy. And the more strictly he observes these two laws, the more perfect is an Initiate. The order which embraces all Initiates is surrounded, as it were, by a wall, and the two laws here mentioned form two strong principles by which the constituents of this wall are held together. You may live in close friendship with an Initiate, yet this wall will separate him from you just as long as you have not become an Initiate yourself. You may enjoy in the fullest sense the heart, the love of an Initiate, yet he will only impart to you his secret when you yourself are ready for it. You may flatter him; you may torture him; nothing will induce him to divulge to you anything which he knows ought not to be disclosed, inasmuch as you, at the present stage of your evolution, do not understand how rightly to receive the secret into your soul.

[ 4 ] The ways which prepare a man for the reception of a secret are clearly prescribed. They are indicated by the unfading, everlasting letters within the temples where the Initiates guard the hi4her secrets. In ancient times, anterior to “history,” these temples were outwardly visible; today, because our lives have become so unspiritual, they are mostly quite invisible to external sight. Yet they are present everywhere, and all who seek may find them.

[ 5 ] Only within his soul may a man discover the means which will open for him the lips of the Initiate. To a certain high degree he must develop within himself special faculties, and then the greatest treasures of the Spirit become his own.

[ 6 ] He must begin with a certain fundamental attitude of the soul: the student of Occultism calls it the Path of Devotion, of Veneration. Only he who maintains this attitude can, in Occultism, become a disciple. And he who has experience in these things is able to perceive even in the child the signs of approaching discipleship. There are children who look up with religious awe to those they venerate. For such people they have a respect which forbids them to admit even in the innermost sanctuary of the heart any thought of criticism or opposition. Such children grow up into young men and maidens who feel happy when they are able to look up to anything venerable. From the ranks of such children are recruited many disciples.

Have you ever paused outside the door of some venerated man, and have you, on this your first visit, felt a religious awe as you pressed the handle, in order to enter the room which for you is a holy place? Then there has been manifested in you an emotion which may be the germ of your future discipleship. It is a blessing for every developing person to have such emotions upon which to build. Only it must not be thought that such qualities are the germ of submissiveness and slavery. Experience teaches us that those can best hold their heads erect who have learnt to venerate where veneration is due. And veneration is always in its place when it rises from the depths of the heart.

[ 7 ] If we do not develop within ourselves this deeply-rooted feeling that there is something higher than ourselves, we shall never find enough strength to evolve to something higher. The Initiate has only acquired the power of lifting his intellect to the heights of knowledge by guiding his heart into the depths of veneration and devotion. The heights of the Spirit can only be reached by passing through the portals of humility. You can only acquire right knowledge when you have learnt to esteem it. Man has certainly the right to gaze upon the Reality, but he must first acquire this right. There are laws in the spiritual life, as in the physical life. Rub a glass rod with an appropriate material and it will become electric, that is to say, it will receive the power of attracting small bodies. This exemplifies natural law. And if one has learnt even a little of physics, one knows this. Similarly, if one is acquainted with the first principles of Occultism, one knows that every feeling of true devotion which opens out in the soul, develops a power which may, sooner or later, lead to the Path of Knowledge.

[ 8 ] He who possesses within himself this feeling of devotion, or who is fortunate enough to receive it from his education, brings a great deal along with him, when, later in life, he seeks an entrance to the higher knowledge. But he who brings no such preparation will find himself confronted with difficulties even upon the first step of the Path of Knowledge, unless he undertakes, by rigorous self-education, to create the devotional mood within himself. In our time it is especially important that full attention be given to this point. Our civilisation tends much more towards criticism, the giving of judgments, and so forth, than toward devotion, and a selfless veneration. Our children already criticise far more than they worship. But every judgment, every carping criticism, frustrates the powers of the soul for the attainment of the higher knowledge, in the same measure that all heartfelt devotion develops them. In this we do not wish to say anything against our civilisation. It is in no way a question of passing a criticism upon it. It is just to this critical faculty, this self-conscious human judgment, this “prove all things and hold fast the good,” that we owe the greatness of our civilisation. We could never have attained to the science, the commerce, the industry, the law of our time, had we not exercised our critical faculty everywhere, had we not everywhere applied the standard of our judgment. But what we have thereby gained in external culture we have had to pay for with a corresponding loss of the higher knowledge, of the spiritual life.

[ 9 ] Now the one thing that everyone must clearly understand is that for him who is right in the centre of the objective civilisation of our time, it is very difficult to advance to the knowledge of the higher worlds. He can only do so if he works energetically within himself. At a time when the conditions of outward life were simpler, spiritual exaltation was easier of attainment. That which ought to be venerated, that which ought to be kept holy, stood out in better relief from the ordinary things of the world. In a period of criticism these ideals are lowered; other emotions take the place of veneration, respect, prayer, and wonder. Our own age continually pushes these emotions further and further back, so that in the daily life of the people they play but a very small part. He who seeks for, higher knowledge must create it within himself; he must himself instil it into his soul. It cannot be done by study: it can only be done through life. He who wishes to become a disciple must therefore assiduously cultivate the devotional mood. Everywhere in his environment he must look for that which demands of him admiration and homage. Whenever his duties or circumstances permit, he should try to renounce entirely all criticism or judgment. If I meet a man and blame him for his weakness, I rob myself of power to win the higher knowledge; but if I try to enter lovingly into his merits, I then gather such power. The disciple must continually try to follow out this advice. Experienced occultists are aware how much they owe to the continual searching for the good in all things, and the withholding of all carping criticism. This must not remain only as an external rule of life; rather must it take possession of the innermost part of our souls. We have it in our power to perfect ourselves, and by and by to transform ourselves completely. But this transformation must take place in the innermost self, in the mental life. It is not enough that I show respect only in my outward bearing toward a person; I must have this respect in my thought. The disciple must begin by drawing this devotion into his thought-life, He must altogether banish from his consciousness all thoughts of disrespect, of criticism, and he must endeavour straightway to cultivate thoughts of devotion.

[ 10 ] Every moment in which we set ourselves to banish from our consciousness whatever remains in it of disparaging, suspicious judgment of our fellow-men, every such moment brings us nearer to the knowledge of higher things. And we rise rapidly when, in such moments, we fill our consciousness only with thoughts that evoke in us admiration, respect, and veneration for men and things. He who has experience in these matters will know that in every such moment powers are awakened in man which otherwise remain dormant. In this way the spiritual eyes of a man are opened. He begins to see things around him which hitherto he was unable to see. He begins to understand that hitherto he had only seen a part of the world around him. The man with whom he comes in contact now shows him quite a different aspect from what he showed before. Of course, he will not yet, through this rule of life alone, be able to see what has elsewhere been described as the human aura, because, for that, a still higher training is necessary. But he can rise to this higher training if he has previously gone through a thorough training in devotion. [In the last chapter of the book entitled Theosophie (Berlin, C. A. Schwetschke und Sohn), Dr. Rudolf Steiner fully describes this “Path of Knowledge;” here it is only intended to give some practical details.]

[ 11 ] Noiseless and unnoticed by the outer world is the treading of the “Path of Discipleship.” It is not necessary that anyone should notice a change in the disciple. He does his duties as hitherto; he attends to his business as before. The transformation goes on only in the inner part of the soul, hidden from outward sight. At first the entire soul-life of a man is flooded by this fundamental mood of devotion for everything which is truly venerable. His entire soul-life finds in this fundamental mood its pivot. Just as the sun, through its rays, will vivify everything living, so in the life of the disciple this reverence vivifies all the perceptions of the soul.

[ 12 ] At first it is not easy for people to believe that feelings like reverence, respect, and so forth, have anything to do with their perceptions. This comes from the fact that one is inclined to think of perception as a faculty quite by itself, one that stands in no relation to what otherwise happens in the soul. In so thinking, we do not remember that it is the soul which perceives. And feelings are for the soul what food is for the body. If we give the body stones in place of bread its activity will cease. It is the same with the soul. Veneration, homage, devotion, are as nutriment which makes it healthy and strong, and especially strong for the activity of perception. Disrespect, antipathy, and under-estimation, bring about the starvation and withering of this activity. For the occultist this fact is visible in the aura. A soul which harbours the feelings of devotion and reverence, brings about a change in its aura. Certain yellowish-red or brown-red tints will vanish, and tints of bluish-red will replace them. And then the organ of perception opens. It receives information of facts in its neighbourhood of which hitherto it had no knowledge. Reverence awakens a sympathetic power in the soul, and through this we attract similar qualities in the beings which surround us, which would otherwise remain hidden. [ 13 ] More effective still is that power which can be obtained by devotion when another feeling is added. One learns to give oneself up less and less to the impressions of the outer world, and to develop in its place a vivid inward life. He who darts from one impression of the outer world to another, constantly seeks dissipations, cannot find the way to Occultism. The disciple must not blunt himself to the outer world; but rich inner life will point out the direction in which he ought to lend himself to its impressions. When passing through a beautiful mountain district, the man with depth of soul and richness of emotion has different experiences from the man with few emotions. Only what we experience within ourselves opens up the beauties of the outer world. One man sails across the ocean, and only a few inward experiences pass through his soul: but another will then hear the eternal language of the World-Spirit, and for him are unveiled the mysteries of creation.

One must have learnt to control one's own feelings and ideas if one wishes to develop any intimate relationship with the outer world. Every phenomenon in that outer World is full of divine splendour, but one must have felt the Divine within oneself before one can hope to discover it without. The disciple is told to set apart certain moments of his daily life during which to withdraw into himself, quietly and alone. But at such time he ought not to occupy himself with his own personal affairs, for this would bring about the contrary of that which he is aiming at. During these moments he ought rather to listen in complete silence to the echoes of what he has experienced, of what the outward world has told him. Then, in these periods of quiet, every flower, every animal, every action will unveil to him secrets undreamed of, and thus he will prepare himself to receive new impressions of the external world, as if he viewed it with different eyes. For he who merely desires to enjoy impression after impression, only stultifies the perceptive faculty, while he who lets the enjoyment afterwards reveal something to him, thus enlarges and educates it. But he must be careful not merely to let the enjoyment reverberate, as it were; but, renouncing any further enjoyment, rather to work upon his pleasurable experiences with an inward activity. The danger at this point is very great. Instead of working within one self, it is easy to fall into the opposite habit of afterwards trying to completely exhaust the enjoyment. Let us not undervalue the unforeseen sources of error which here confront the disciple. He must of necessity pass through a host of temptations, each of which tends only to harden his Ego and to imprison it within itself. He ought to open it wide for the whole world. It is necessary that he should seek enjoyment, for in this way only can the outward world get at him; and if he blunts himself to enjoyment he becomes as a plant which cannot any longer draw nourishment from its environment. Yet, if he stops at the enjoyment, he is then shut up within himself, and will only be something to himself and nothing to the world. However much he may live within himself, however intensely he may cultivate his Ego, the world will exclude him. He is dead to the world. But the disciple considers enjoyment only as a means of ennobling himself for the world. Pleasure is to him as a scout who informs him concerning the world, and after having been taught by pleasure he passes on to work. He does not learn in order that he may accumulate learning as his own treasure, but in order that he may put his learning at the service of the world.

[ 14 ] In all forms of Occultism there is a fundamental principle which cannot be transgressed, if any goal at all is to be reached. Every occult teacher must impress it upon his pupils, and it runs as follows: Every branch of knowledge which you seek only to enrich your own learning, only to accumulate treasure for yourself, leads you away from the Path: but all knowledge which you seek for working in the service of humanity and for the uplifting of the world, brings you a step forward. This law must be rigidly observed; nor is one a genuine disciple until he has adopted it as the guide for his whole life. In many occult schools this truth is expressed in the following short sentences. Every idea which does not become an ideal for you, slays a power in your soul: every idea which becomes an ideal creates within you living powers.