The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the year 1902, Rudolf Steiner definitely resolved to become the Herald of Spiritual Science, and to proclaim its message to a materialistic world; by so doing he laid himself open to its scorn, ridicule, and enmity. The most gifted and talented man of his time; one who shunned every mark of approbation and willingly renounced every claim to the highest worldly honours, which honours were within his easy reach. This he did, in order that he might devote himself to the consummation of a momentous forward movement, destined to lead mankind to a reasoned and proper conception of spiritual verity. Thus might the impulse given to thought and will, enable humanity to span that dread abyss in which, even yet, Nietzsche (the great apostle of consistent materialistic philosophy) must sink, and with him a countless number of his lesser followers, who can find no way whereby they may save themselves from spiritual dissolution.

To such as these, Rudolf Steiner became at once the saviour and the helper; it was for them and for mankind that he decided upon this altruistic deed, which in itself implied a bold courageous upward sweep in the path of human progress.

This wholly unselfish action, however, called for determination, inflexibility of will, and a moderate and rational apprehension of spiritual reality, permeated throughout with a profound sense of its fundamental substantiality. But here was no worn-out intellectual faculty, no ecstasy, no mystic intoxication with Eastern tinge—austere, resolute and calm, he went his way, ever imparting spiritual enlightenment.

Rudolf Steiner made no concessions when offering spiritual blessings; but on the other hand he never wearied of expounding once again from the beginning, in each city where he lectured, those basic principles upon which he built a solid mental structure, to conform with the demands and claims arising from modern intellectual power and discernment. While insisting upon due and proper consideration, he freely acknowledged the right to challenge and to question. He praised the achievements of Natural Science, and recommended the employment of its methods in the Science of the Spirit. He cursed the ignoramus and the extreme Kantian line of thought, and refused to accede to limits of knowledge already prescribed and confined.

No wonder that the hatred of the spiritual despots of our time, tyrants in many and varied ways, was piled mountain-high—for everywhere he brought that new animating, revivifying life, which would yet become all-potent in the future. He that would bring this life to humanity, must himself endure martyrdom, and stand as if held fast between envy, ill-will, and abuse, on the one hand—and insuperable inertia, or fool-hardy levity, and immaturity on the other. In truth,—a daily torment this bearing up against the ever-breaking waves of an hostile, or an aid-imploring clinging humanity, always in renewed and never ceasing exhausting activity. He who takes that step which anticipates future progress in evolution must bring upon himself such martyrdom; but the power, of love helps enormously in carrying the burden, while the capacity for endurance increases with the measure of the overflowing fullness of work accomplished.

Berlin was the first radiating point from which centre the lecture activities of Rudolf Steiner were spread outwards. The discourses were to serve in opening up a way toward the understanding of all that he purposed to present to the world, under the title of Spiritual Science. That which he gave in less detailed and isolated lectures in other towns in Germany, could be dealt with here in the form of a compact course, having the character of a systematic introduction to Spiritual Science; it was also planned that part of these lectures should periodically recur, even though the public could not be counted upon to respond in large numbers.

I will now give a summary of these discourses which were held at the ‘Architektenhaus’ (Hall of Architecture) in Berlin; as they are of historical interest. We commenced in a small hall, shortly however to pass on to one of intermediate size, and from there to one still larger. During the last year of the War, the Architektenhaus was commandeered by the War Department, and then the lectures had to be held, partly in the ‘Scharwenka-Saal’, and partly in the ‘Oberlicht-Saal’ of the ‘Philharmonie’ (Philharmonic Hall). When we at last came to the large hall of this latter building, the ‘Köthener-Strasse’ (Koethener Street) had to be closed to wheeled traffic, because of the enormous concourse of people. Here we found the opposing factions so well organized, that it seemed as if preparations might be afoot, with the object of bringing Rudolf Steiner's public lecture activities to a premature and violent conclusion.¹

From the very beginning Rudolf Steiner had chosen the word ‘Anthroposophy’, to designate the matter and the theme which was his to impress upon the world; in public, however, he generally used the more simple term, Spiritual Science. After he had decided to give way, under the pressure of Theosophical Circles, and to undertake the leadership of the German Theosophical Society, he did all that lay within his power to win back for the name of Theosophy, that esteem and respect of which it was in danger of being deprived, owing to the want of maturity of that body; and his endeavours in this direction were clearly marked. It is a fact, that the burden thrust upon him due to the misuse of this name, was increased by the regrettable attitude, and the alienation of certain people; albeit these acts were condemned by many friends. Rudolf Steiner shouldered every burden which fate laid upon him, when by so doing he could serve the spirit; he regarded only the task, and the love to labour, and took no heed of the cold indifference of humanity.

As far back as the year 1900 he drew the attention of various literary societies in Berlin to his efforts in furthering the cause of spiritual revival; this he did, in the beginning, through lectures upon Goethe's fairy-tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. From October, 1901, to March, 1902, he spoke concerning German Spiritual Life in the Nineteenth Century. The impulse to thought thus created was continued by means of a series of lectures during 1902 to 1903 entitled Zarathustra to Nietzsche, treating of the evolution of man's spiritual life from the oldest times to the present day. It was Zarathustra who gave the initial impulse to that current of thought which urged humanity to call upon the active power of the spirit, that through its aid it might strive to overcome all that is material, and thus cause the physical element to become subservient to its needs.

Rudolf Steiner drew attention to the task allotted to German patriotism in the totality of human spiritual evolution, as the bearer and upholder of the ‘Principle of True Self’ (Ich-Prinzips), so deeply merged in all that is of the spirit. He stated that the true ‘Ich’, the Ego (endowed with the soul's achievements) must be made both the receptacle and the radiating point of the divine essence. He pointed to the hidden choked up stream of German spiritual life, which although predisposed within itself, was thrust aside by a materialistic culture, and the new imperial idea of Might and Power. He recalled with sorrow and anxiety those words of Nietzsche's—‘Extirpation of the Spirit from Germany, in favour of the Empire’, and declared that what Germany awaits, and what it would so gladly welcome, is the beneficence and the blessings of the Spirit. Already at that time Rudolf Steiner spoke quite unequivocally regarding the necessity of clearly differentiating between the Western and the Eastern spiritual paths. Humanity owes, indeed, a great and inestimable debt of gratitude to the Orient, for the gift of that wondrous knowledge which has come to it from the East.

The Mystery of Golgotha forms a ‘Turning-Point’. Mankind with its eyes upon modernity can never hark back to those conditions which were there before that decisive juncture, that divine source of knowledge and of upward progress; the world must learn to understand the need for the transient darkness and the gloom.

It is during that period when, by slow degrees, the personality is striving to cast aside its earthly factors and to detach them from all that is real and of the spirit, that it must learn to know itself, must grasp its essence; it dare not become obdurate, and thus descend to dust and annihilation. The very act of forcing a way through the material quality brings about the moment when it shall realize it is once more upon the further shore. Hence, the personality which has indeed made ready to pass through death's portal and onward to resurrection, finds, at last, that it is again in the true Ego, the veritable ‘I’—a spiritually conscious and individualized member of the cosmos—a part of the whole, and yet ‘I’. Once freed from all earthly nature, the material element falls away, even as an amputated limb from the human organism. When truly at one with the great cosmos it expands beyond all previous limitations, outward into the realms of the spirit. It was in order that such things might come to pass—yes—that man's freedom and self-determination could be won by effort and by travail, that the Mystery of Golgotha—God's own sacrifice—was needful and must be consummated.

No power on earth can ignore this fact nor stem the tide of evolution. Happenings which appear at first sight to be hindrances and restraints, do but serve to aide us in our onward progress. The power to differentiate between good and evil is the first step toward man's freedom; the narrow confines imposed upon him by materialism have placed him in the position of being unable to grasp the meaning of this earthly life, and to realize his true personality; but now he must rise above his limited conceptions and the achievement lies in the province of his conscious will. The Deity has, as it were, relinquished the guidance, and the control. Man must decide whether the Divine Will shall quicken within him or whether he shall give himself over to disavowal and negation. Here, then, humanity comes upon a new ‘Turning-Point’, and its present task is to make ready, so that it may be met with open eyes, and not blindly and in ignorance. Such was the work to which Rudolf Steiner found himself committed.

In the Anglo-Indian theosophical movement there was a certain risk attached to the revival of the Yoga-Exercises by the uninitiated, for these were suited to another period, and a differently constituted human organism. Again, in reviving the mysticism of the Middle Ages lay a danger that there might be a turning away from true life, and an increased egotism in a soul which had yielded itself to selfishness. Both these currents of thought failed to take into consideration the requirements of the times and the laws of evolution. The future and the salvation of humanity lies in the understanding of the real significance of the Mystery of Golgotha, and in extending and strengthening the power of human consciousness in order that it shall advance beyond the narrow limits of man's present intellectual powers, and not in its repression and constraint. Those who opened their hearts to words such as these, were certainly not to be found among the celebrities of science; they were modest, unassuming people, knowing of no course which they might follow that was suited to the times, and who, therefore, gave themselves over to the study of Oriental Wisdom, in that form in which it was presented by the Theosophical Society. These people approached Rudolf Steiner with a request that he should become the teacher and leader of their association; but he definitely declined to consider their appeal. Never, so he said, would he do otherwise than point out the difference between the two paths, and advocate the necessity for the development of Western methods, suitable to modern requirements. No longer can there be a mere reaching back, in order to obtain primeval wisdom; forward progress must be made with true regard to all that has been acquired since those ancient times, through intellectual achievement, and must in future follow that path marked by history, wherein the essentials of development in the unfolding of the human spirit are clearly indicated.

Although the wisdom of the East deserves our warmest feelings of admiration and wonder, nevertheless, the fundamental principle underlying its historical onward progress does not appear as a vital factor; this element must now be introduced by the West, to which task it should regard itself as directly committed. The Mystery of Golgotha is the central point, that mystery which is neither recognized nor understood by the Orientals nor by the New-Theosophists. As far back as the Autumn of 1900, I have heard such words from the lips of Rudolf Steiner, when harassed by the importunity of ardent followers of the Theosophical school of thought. Those who listened with understanding, fully realized that here, indeed, was an inflexible will, and the expression of an urgent historical need. One could not help but wonder that people really existed, who would attempt adverse argument and persuasion. It was, however, on account of this attitude that Rudolf Steiner gave a course of interesting lectures on Mysticism at the Beginning of Modern Spiritual Life, which were followed, in the Autumn of 1901, by others entitled Christianity as a Mystical Fact.

Soon after the commencement of these discourses, I had an opportunity of becoming acquainted with the most distinguished among the Theosophical Leaders. I had joined the Theosophical Society and was requested to undertake some special work at Bologna, the representative of the Anglo-Indian movement having founded a branch in Italy. In the spring of 1902, during a period of three weeks, I translated from English into Italian the lectures of the Indian Theosophist, Jinarajadasa, who has since been nominated as the future President of the Theosophical Society. While thus engaged, I frequently found it difficult to write and to voice the ideas which I had to express, concepts that were oft-times entirely at variance with my own inner reasoned feelings. I stood aghast before the sentences, so material was their essence and their spirit. At such times, my thoughts would hark back to the words of Rudolf Steiner, regarding the vital difference between Western and Eastern mysticism; but I knew that the truth and the solution lay in the Christ-Mystery, of which he had both inner knowledge and understanding. Veritable primeval wisdom contains the heart and principle; while in the ever onward progress of man's evolution are found the metamorphoses—death and resurrection—where, then, is the point of juncture?—IN THE CROSS—and it is Rudolf Steiner who reveals its secret.

About this time a memorable incident occurred, namely, the German Theosophists invited me to go to Berlin, in order to take over the work of their retiring representative. After some hesitation I decided to accede to their request. Shortly after this event came the joyful news that Rudolf Steiner had yielded to the pressure of the Theosophists, and had accepted the directorate of a new section which was about to be formed; this he had done, however, under the specific condition that he should introduce into the movement that current of thought which he himself advocated. There was indeed universal rejoicing; and the General Secretary of the Theosophical Society in England—a good German scholar—who highly esteemed Steiner's two works—Mysticism at the Beginning of Modern Spiritual Life and Christianity as a Mystical Fact—expressed himself as completely in accord with the new programme. This illustrious scholar, Dr. Bertram Keightley, who is Professor at the University of Lucknow, has since that time, become a member of the Anthroposophical Society.

Thus it was that the work began, environed by the activities of the Theosophical Society and undertaken with the greatest loyalty in respect to that body. The subject matter of the public lectures delivered at the Architektenhaus in Berlin in 1903 was as follows:

19 March—Theosophy, and the onward progress of Religion. (The Tower of Babel.)
26 March—The Cardinal Teachings of Theosophy. (Reincarnation and Karma.)
2 April—Theosophy, and the Modern Scientific Spirit.

In the spring of 1904, also in the Architektenhaus, Rudolf Steiner spoke concerning certain subjects which contained within them the germ of his later pioneer work in social and pedagogical spheres; these were included under the title, Psychic Teachings in Theosophy, as follows:

16 March—I. Body and Soul. How can we study the life of the Soul? Religion, Science, and the Soul Question.
23 March—II. The Soul and Human Destiny. What are Desire and Suffering? What is Destiny? Has man earned his fate? Optimism and Pessimism. Genius and Insanity.
30 March—III. Soul and Spirit. Immortality. Hypnotism and Clairvoyance. Spiritual Healing. Education in the light of Spiritual Cosmic Conception.

Another series of lectures took place in Vereins Haus, at 118 William Street (Wilhelmstrasse), Berlin; in these discourses Rudolf Steiner endeavoured to throw light upon that border-land existing between the perceptual and superperceptual worlds; a subject which has claimed the attention of science and in which lie concealed so many dangers for the uninitiated. The dates and titles of these discourses are given below:

Regarding the above, I find among my notes the following entry: ‘The two latter themes were subsequently used as subject matter for lectures which were held in the “Architektenhaus” from April onwards, every second Monday in the month; a further series which took place in the same building during the autumn of 1904, were especially directed towards the development and extension of the scientific rudiments of Theosophy.' The subjects were:

In the spring of 1905 Rudolf Steiner set forth and expounded his views before various Faculties; his introductory lecture held on 4th May, was on Schiller and the Present; those which followed were:

A series of lectures which were started in October, 1905, commenced with ‘Haeckel, “The Riddle of the Universe” and Theosophy’. It was indeed essential that Rudolf Steiner should take Haeckel as the starting-point for these discourses, because he was of opinion that in virtue of the outstanding nature of his achievements in the sphere of natural science, Haeckel was worthy and entitled to become a decisive spiritual power in our present philosophical outlook, [would he but apprehend and acknowledge the divine spirit latent within his works—and at this point lay the parting of their ways (Ed.)]. On the other hand, Steiner repudiated entirely the claims made by the courageous and ingenious Haeckel, who was already venturing to encroach and become active in the domains of Philosophy, and the formation of world opinion. Here must the bolt be shot and the mischief averted. This Rudolf Steiner did with the greatest energy and consistency, but it did not prevent him from expressing himself in words conveying the warmest appreciation whenever he could perceive the positive element in Haeckel's works.

Never have I found this side of Rudolf Steiner's nature rightly understood; people always seemed wilfully to regard it as inconsistent that the same man should at one time praise, and at another find fault; but this he did with whole-hearted enthusiasm on the one hand, or with merciless severity and logic on the other, the while, however, he never allowed his personal feelings to influence either his praise or his censure. He rose above all such bias, and was ever delighted to observe productive and creative capacity in others. He enraptured those who heard him when he expressed his approval through the warmth of his approbation; but, when he made reference to that which was harmful and pernicious, he evoked surprise by the unexpected keenness and rigour of his demonstrations and reasoning. He ever maintained the greatest affection for Ernest Haeckel, and it was a delightful experience to be present when these two met—the youthful freshness of Haeckel, his elasticity of tread—the waving of the broad-brimmed, wide-awake hat—his beaming childlike blue eyes—all in one who judged by years, should have been already numbered with the aged. Haeckel was no mere philosopher, but a man of deeds with a penetrating flashing glance as of one profoundly observant. He was ever moved by an impetuous warmheartedness, his true being filled with loving patience and tolerance; he was a factor in the world's history, and his influence will continue to be felt in days yet to come.

• 1. This is no exaggeration, for about this time, and at Munich, an attempt was actually made upon his life by the Communist Party. [Ed.]

If we would penetrate into the mysteries of human life we must fix our attention on a great law of existence, I mean what is called the cyclic law. As a rule it is better to explain and describe than to define. In this case also I prefer to explain by definite concepts what is meant by the cyclic course of life, for alongside the actual reality a definition must always appear scanty and lacking in substance. A philosophic school in Greece, wishing to gain insight into the nature of definitions, once set out to give a definition of man. As you know, definitions are intended to provide concepts corresponding to the phenomena of experience, but those having logical insight cannot help feeling the poverty and unfruitfulness of this process. The members of the Greek school eventually agreed to define man as a featherless biped. While this particular definition sounds rather like a silly epigram it does represent the nature of man in certain respects. The next day one of the members of this school brought in a plucked hen and said to the company, “According to your definition this is a man.” A silly way to show the unreality of attempts to define things. Being concerned with realities we will proceed then to describe things in their essential characteristics.

To begin, we will consider a cycle familiar in everyday life, that of our waking and sleeping. What does it really signify? We can only understand the nature of sleep if we realize that in the present epoch the soul activity of man's waking life brings about a continual destruction of delicate structures in the nervous system. With our every thought and with every impulse of will that arises in us under the stimulus of the outside world, we are destroying delicate forms in our brain. In the near future it will more and more be realized how sleep has to supplement our waking day life. We are approaching the point where natural science will join with spiritual science in these matters. Natural science has already produced more than one theory to the effect that our waking life brings a kind of destructive process to nerves and brain. Owing to this fact we have to allow the corresponding reverse process, the compensation, to take place during sleep.

While we are asleep forces are at work in us that do not otherwise manifest themselves, of which we remain unconscious. They are busy reconstructing the finer nerve structures of our brain. Now it is this very destruction that enables us to have processes of thought, and to acquire knowledge. Ordinary knowledge would not be possible if processes of disintegration did not take place in us during our waking hours. Thus, two opposite processes are at work in our nervous system—while we are awake a process of destruction, during sleep a repairing process. Since it is to the destructive process that we owe our consciousness, it is that process we perceive. Our waking life consists in perceiving disintegrating processes. During sleep we are not conscious because no destructive process is at work in us. The force, which at other times creates our consciousness, is in sleep used up in constructive work. There you have a cycle.

Let us now consider what happens during sleep. Because of this alternating cycle of build-up and break-down processes we see why it is so dangerous to health to go without proper sleep. Certainly man's life is so arranged that the danger is not immediately apparent, because what is present in him at any one time has been built up in him for a considerable time before. Thus, the abnormal processes cannot affect his nature as deeply as we might imagine. We could expect people who suffer from sleeplessness to go to pieces quickly, but they do not collapse nearly so quickly. The reason for this is the same as that which holds for people both blind and deaf, like the famous Helen Keller, whose intellect can nevertheless be developed. In the present age this should theoretically be impossible, for what constitutes the greater part of our intelligence enters the brain through eyes and ears. The reason for Miss Keller's intellectual development is that, though the portals of her senses are closed, she has inherited a brain that has the potentiality for development. If man were not an hereditary being such a case as hers would not be possible. Which is to say, if man did not have a much healthier brain through heredity than we generally give him credit for, sleeplessness would in a very short time completely undermine his health. But people mostly have so much inherited strength that insomnia can persist for a long time without seriously injuring them. It remains true, however, that the cycle of construction with its resulting unconsciousness in sleep, and destruction with its consciousness in waking life, fundamentally takes place.

In the totality of human life we perceive not only these smaller cycles but larger ones as well. Here I will call your attention to a cycle I have often mentioned before. Anyone who follows the course of life in the Western world will observe a quite definite configuration of the spiritual life of mankind in the period from the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the last third of the nineteenth. In ordinary life these developments are observed much too vaguely and inaccurately, but if we look into them deeply enough we shall see how, in all directions since the last third of the nineteenth century, there have been signs of an altogether different form of Western spiritual life. Of course, we are at the beginning of this new trend so people do not notice it in its full significance. Just imagine someone trying to speak before such an audience as this, say for instance in the 40's or 50's of the nineteenth century, about the same things I am putting before you here. It is quite unthinkable. It would be absurd. It would have been out of the question to speak of these things as we do now, at any time from the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the last third of the nineteenth. This was the period when the natural scientific mode of thought, the way of thinking that produced the great materialistic achievements, reached its height. The stragglers of scientific intellectualism will go on adhering to it for some time to come, but the actual epoch of materialism is past.

Just as the era of scientific thought began about the fifteenth century, so the era of spiritual thought is now beginning. These two sharply differentiated epochs meet in the very time in which we are living. It will more and more become evident how the new mode of thought has to come in touch with the reality of things. Thought will become very different from the thought of the last four centuries, though the latter had to be so in its time. During this period man's gaze had to be directed outward into the far spaces of the universe. I have often spoken of the great significance for Western spiritual evolution of that moment when Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Giordano Bruno together burst open the blue vault of heaven. Until their time it was believed that the blue cup of the heavens was suspended over our earth. These great thinkers declared that this hollow cup did not really exist. They taught mankind to look out into the infinite distances of cosmic space.

Now what was it that was so significant about Bruno's deed in explaining to men how the blue sphere they had set as the boundary of their power of sight was not really there; when he said, “You have only to realize that it is you yourselves who project it out into space?” The important point was that it marked the beginning of an epoch, which came to an end with the discovery that by means of the spectroscope one could investigate the material composition of the farthest heavenly bodies. A marvelous epoch, this epoch of materialism! Now we are at the starting point of another epoch, one that has its origin in the same laws of growth as the preceding one but that nevertheless is to be the epoch of spirituality. Just as the epoch of natural science was prepared by Bruno's work in breaking through the limits of space, so will the firmament of time be broken through in the age now beginning. Mankind, imagining life to be enclosed between birth and death, or conception and death, will learn that these are only boundaries set by the human soul itself. Just as in earlier times men had themselves set as the boundary of their senses a blue sphere above them, and then of a sudden their vision expanded into the infinite spheres of space, so will the boundaries of time be broken through, those of birth and death. Set free of these there will lie before man's gaze in the infinite sea of time all the changes in the kernel of man's being as he follows it through its repeated incarnations. Thus a new age is beginning, the age of spiritual thought.

Now if we can recognize the occult basis of these transitions from one age to another, where shall we see the cause of this change in human thought? It is not anything that philosophy or external physiology or anatomy can find of their own accord. Yet it is true that forces that have entered the active souls of men and are being used today to gather spiritual knowledge—these same forces, during the last four centuries, have been working at man's organism as constructive forces. Throughout the period from Copernicus to the last third of the nineteenth century mysterious forces were at work in man's bodily organism just as constructive forces work in his nervous system during sleep. These forces were building up a definite structure in certain parts of the brain. The brains of Western people are different from what they were five centuries ago. What is under man's skull today does not have the same appearance as it had then, for a delicate organ has been formed which was not there before. Even though this cannot be proved externally, it is true. Under the human forehead a delicate organ has developed, and the forces building it have now fulfilled their task. In the coming cycle of history we are now approaching it will become evident in more and more people. Now that it is there, the forces that built it are liberated. With these very forces Western humanity will be gaining spiritual knowledge. Here we have the occult physiological foundation of the matter. Already we are beginning to work with these forces that men could not use during the last four hundred years because they were spent in building up the organ needed to allow spiritual knowledge to take its place in the world.

Let us imagine a man of the seventeenth or eighteenth century. As he stands there before us we know that certain occult forces are at work behind his forehead, transforming his brain. These forces were perpetually at work in all the people of the West. Now let us assume that this man had managed to suspend these forces for a moment, made them cease their work. The same thing would have happened to him—and it did happen in certain cases—as takes place when in the middle of his sleep a man suspends the forces that ordinarily work at building up the nerve structures of the brain; he lets them run loose. It is possible to experience moments when we seem to waken in sleep, and yet do not waken, for we remain motionless, we cannot move our limbs, we have no external perception. But we are awake. In the moments of free play of those regenerating forces we can use them for clairvoyant vision; we can see into the spiritual worlds. A similar thing happened if a man two hundred years ago suspended the constructive activity on his brain. From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century he saw what was working into his brain from the spiritual worlds, so that from the twentieth century onward men might raise themselves to spiritual vision.

There were always isolated persons who had such experiences; experiences of truly catastrophic force, indescribably impressive. There were always people who for moments lived in what was working in from the super-sensible to bring forth in the sense world what did not exist in former cycles of evolution, the finer organ in the frontal cavity. Such men saw the Gods; spiritual beings at work in the building process of the human organism. In this we see clairvoyance described from a fresh aspect. We can bring about such moments during sleep by practicing the exercises I have given in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, and thereby gain glimpses of spiritual life such as are described in my book, A Road to Self-Knowledge. Thus it is possible during a given cycle of evolution for the forces at work preparing the future to become free for a moment and become clairvoyantly visible.

We may give a name to these forces—for what are names? We can call them the forces of Gabriel. But the point is to gain a moment's insight into the super-sensible where we perceive a spiritual Being working from those worlds into the human organism. A sum of forces, in fact, directed by a Being, Gabriel, of the hierarchy of the Archangels. From the fifteenth to the last third of the nineteenth century the Gabriel force was at work on man's organism, and because of this the power to understand the spiritual slept for awhile. It was this sleep of spiritual understanding that brought forth the great triumphs of natural science. Now this force is awakened. The spiritual has done its work; the Gabriel forces have been liberated. We can now use them, for they have become forces of the soul. Here we have a cycle of somewhat greater significance than that of waking and sleeping.

There are, however, even mightier cycles in human evolution. We may note how self-consciousness, the pride of mankind in this era of our post-Atlantean age, was not always there but had to be developed gradually. Today the word evolution is often heard, but people seldom take it in real earnest. We can sometimes have strange experiences of people's naïveté in regard to what surrounds them, so simply do they allow many things to play up from their subconsciousness into their conscious life and do not easily reach the point of attributing a super-sensible origin to what enters their known world from the unknown. In the last few days I have again come across a curious instance of the logic that stops halfway. We can well understand why the anthroposophical outlook meets with so much resistance when we bear in mind that a certain special habit of thought is needed to understand anthroposophy. I mean the habit of never stopping halfway along any line of thinking. I have here a Freethinker's Calendar, published in Germany. The first edition came out last year. In it a perfectly sincere person attacks the custom of teaching children religious ideas. He points out that this is contrary to the child's nature, since he himself has observed that when children are allowed to grow up on their own they develop no religious ideas. Therefore it is unnatural to inculcate these ideas into children. Now we can be certain that this Calendar will reach hundreds of people who will imagine that they understand how senseless it is to teach children religion. There are many such arguments today, and people never notice their complete lack of logic. In reply we need only ask, “If children for some reason have lived all their lives on an island alone and have not learned to speak, ought we therefore to refrain from teaching them to speak?” That would be the same kind of logic. Of course, people will not admit it is the same since they found it so profound in the first instance. It is curious to observe things like this on the broad horizon of external life today; things that represent some after-play from the materialist age that is passing.

I have here another example, some remarkable essays recently published by Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States of America. There is one on the laws of human progress. He points out how men are influenced by the dominant thought of their age; how in Newton's time, when everything was permeated with the idea of gravity, the effects of Newton's theories could be felt in social concepts, even in political terminology, though actually these theories are only applicable to the heavenly bodies. The idea of gravity was especially extended in its influence. All this is true. We need only read the literature of Newton's time to find everywhere words like “attraction” and “repulsion.” Wilson develops this point very ingeniously. He says how unsatisfactory it is to apply purely mechanical concepts, as of celestial mechanism, to human life and conditions. He shows how human life at that time was completely imbedded in these ideas and how widely they influenced political and social affairs, and he rightly denounces this application of purely mechanical laws in an age when Newtonism drew all thought under its yoke. “We must think along different lines,” says Wilson, and then proceeds to construct his own concept of the state. Now he does it in such a way that, after all he has said about Newtonism, he himself allows Darwinism to speak through every page of his writing. In fact, he is naive enough to admit it. He says the Newtonian concepts were not sufficient, we must apply the Darwinian laws of the organism. Here we have a living instance of the way people march through the world today with half thought-out logic because in reality the laws derived purely from the living organism are also insufficient. We need laws of the soul and spirit. Thus we understand how objections are piled up against anthroposophical thought, for this requires an all-pervading thinking, a logic that penetrates to the core and does not stop halfway. This is just the virtue of the anthroposophical outlook. It forces its devotees to think in an orderly manner.

So we must think of evolution in the spiritual sense, not in Wilson's Darwinistic sense. We must realize that the self-consciousness that today is the essential characteristic of mankind, this firm rooting in the ego, has only gradually developed. This too had to be prepared, just as our spiritual thinking was being prepared in the last four centuries. Spiritual forces had to work down from the super-sensible worlds in order to develop what afterward found expression in the self-conscious life of men. In this connection we can speak of a break in evolution, with a preceding and a succeeding epoch. We will call the latter the age of self-consciousness.

This period is preceded in the cyclic interchange by one in which the organ of self-consciousness was being built into man from the super-sensible worlds. What now works as a soul force in self-consciousness was then working unrecognizably in the depths of human nature. The junction of these two great epochs is an important point in evolution. Before this time most people had no self-consciousness at all. Even in the most advanced it was comparatively weak. People then did not think as they do today, with the awareness, “I am thinking this thought.” Their thoughts rose up like living dreams. Nor did their impulses of will and feeling enter their consciousness as they do today. They lived more of an instinctive life in their souls. From the spiritual worlds, however, beings were working into man's organism, preparing it for a later time when it would be capable of self-consciousness. Meanwhile people had to live quite differently then, even as external experience is quite different between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries A.D. from what it will become later on. So we must say that until the period when self-consciousness entered the human soul everything that could prepare the way for it had been flowing into the life of man.

Thus, for example, in the region where self-consciousness was first to make its appearance, men were strictly divided into castes. They respected this division. A man born in a lower caste felt it as his highest endeavor so to order his life within that caste that he might raise himself in later incarnations into higher ones. It was a mighty driving force in the evolution of the human soul. Men knew that by developing their soul forces they were making themselves fit to rise into a higher caste in their next life. So too they looked up to their ancestors and saw in them what is not bound to the physical body. They revered their ancestors, feeling that although they had died their spiritual part remained, working on spiritually after death. This ancestor worship was a good preparation for the mighty goal of human nature because in it they could see what is now living already in us—the self-conscious soul, which is not bound to the physical body and passes through the gates of death into the spiritual worlds.

Just as during four centuries the kind of education that forced men to think out natural science was the best education toward spirituality, so in that ancient time mankind was best educated by the inspiration of great reverence for their castes and their ancestors. Men developed a strong liking for the system of castes. In that pious reverence they had something that worked into their lives with great power and deeply affected them. Spiritual beings were working into it, preparing for the future possibility for a man to say with every thought, “I think,” with every feeling, “I feel,” with every impulse of will, “I will.”

Now let us imagine that toward the end of that ancient epoch some mighty shock or upheaval in a man's life caused all the forces active then to suddenly cease binding him, suspending their action for a moment. Then he would experience what we can experience in sleep when for a moment we withdraw the constructive forces and become clairvoyant. Or what men of the eighteenth century could experience by suspending the forces then at work on their brain structure. If in that ancient time a man withdrew his understanding and feeling for the fires of sacrifice and reverence for his ancestors, if he experienced such a shock, he could for a moment use those forces to gaze into the super-sensible worlds. He could then see how the self-consciousness of man was being prepared from the spiritual world. This is what Arjuna did when at the moment of battle he experienced such a shock. The usually constructive forces stood still in him, and he could look upward to the divine being who was preparing the way for self-consciousness. This divinity was Krishna.

Krishna then is that being who has worked through centuries and centuries on the human organism, to make man capable—from the seventh and eighth centuries B.C. onward—of entering gradually the epoch of self-consciousness. What kind of impression does he make, this master-builder of the human ego-nature? He has to speak to Arjuna in words saturated through and through with self-consciousness.

Thus from another side we understand Krishna as the divine architect of what prepared and brought about self-consciousness in man. The Bhagavad Gita tells us how under special circumstances a man could come into the presence of this divine builder of his nature. There we have one aspect of Krishna's nature. In the succeeding lectures we shall learn to know yet another aspect.

In my last lecture, I said that one root of the scientific world conception lay in the fact that John Locke and other thinkers of like mind distinguished between the primary and secondary qualities of things in the surrounding world. Locke called primary everything that pertains to shape, to geometrical and numerical characteristics, to motion and to size. From these he distinguished what he called the secondary qualities, such as color, sound, and warmth. He assigned the primary qualities to the things themselves, assuming that spatial corporeal things actually existed and possessed properties such as form, motion and geometrical qualities; and he further assumed that all secondary qualities such as color, sound, etc. are only effects on the human being. Only the primary qualities are supposed to be in the external things. Something out there has size, form and motion, but is dark, silent and cold. This produces some sort of effect that expresses itself in man's experiences of sound, color and warmth.

I have also pointed out how, in this scientific age, space became an abstraction in relation to the dimensions. Man was no longer aware that the three dimensions—up-down, right-left, front-back—were concretely experienced within himself. In the scientific age, he no longer took this reality of the three dimensions into consideration. AS far as he was concerned, they arose in total abstraction. He no longer sought the intersecting point of the three dimensions where it is in fact experienced; namely, within man's own being. Instead, he looked for it somewhere in external space, wherever it might be. Thenceforth, this space framework of the three dimensions had an independent existence, but only an abstract thought-out one. This empty thought was no longer experienced as belonging to the external world as well as to man; whereas an earlier age experienced the three spatial dimensions in such a way that man knew he was experiencing them not only in himself but together with the nature of physical corporeality.

The dimensions of space had, as it were, already been abstracted and ejected from man. They had acquired a quite abstract, inanimate character. Man had forgotten that he experiences the dimensions of space in his own being together with the external world; and the same applied to everything concerned with geometry, number, weight, etc. He no longer knew that in order to experience them in their full living reality, he had to look into his own inner being. A man like John Locke transferred the primary qualities—which are of like kind with the three dimensions of space, the latter being a sort of form or shape—into the external world only because the connection of these qualities with man's inner being was no longer known.

The others, the secondary qualities, which were actually experienced qualitatively (as color, tone, warmth, smell or taste,) now were viewed as merely the effects of the things upon man, as inward experiences. But I have pointed out that inside the physical man as well as inside the etheric man these secondary qualities can no longer be found, so that they became free-floating in a certain respect. They were no longer sought in the outer world; they were relocated into man's inner being. It was felt that so long as man did not listen to the world, did not look at it, did not direct his sense of warmth to it, the world was silent. It had primary qualities, vibrations that were formed in a certain way, but no sound; it had processes of some kind in the ether, but no color; it had some sort of processes in ponderable matter (matter that has weight)—but it had no quality of warmth. As to these experienced qualities, the scientific age was really saying that it did not know what to do with them. It did not want to look for them in the world, admitting that it was powerless to do so. They were sought for within man, but only because nobody had any better ideas. To a certain extent science investigates man's inner nature, but it does not (and perhaps cannot) go very far with this, hence it really does not take into consideration that these secondary qualities cannot be found in this inner nature. Therefore it has no pigeonhole for them. Why is this so?

Let us recall that if we really want to focus correctly on something that is related to form, space, geometry or arithmetic, we have to turn our attention to the inward life-filled activity whereby we build up the spatial element within our own organism, as we do with above-below, back-front, left-right. Therefore, we must say that if we want to discover the nature of geometry and space, if we want to get to the essence of Locke's primary qualities of corporeal things, we must look within ourselves. Otherwise, we only attain to abstractions.

In the case of the secondary qualities such as sound, color, warmth, smell and taste, man has to remember that his ego and astral body normally dwell within his physical and etheric bodies but during sleep they can also be outside the physical and etheric bodies. Just as man experiences the primary qualities, such as the three dimensions, not outside but within himself during full wakefulness, so, when he succeeds (whether through instinct or through spiritual-scientific training) in really inwardly experiencing what is to be found outside the physical and etheric bodies from the moment of falling asleep to waking up, he knows that he is really experiencing the true essence of sound, color, smell, taste, and warmth in the external world outside his own body. When, during the waking condition, man is only within himself, he cannot experience anything but picture-images of the true realities of tone, color, warmth, smell and taste. But these images correspond to soul-spirit realities, not physical-etheric ones. In spite of the fact that what we experience as sound seems to be connected with certain forms of air vibrations, just as color is connected with certain processes in the colorless external world, it still has to be recognized that both are pictures, not of anything corporeal, but of the soul-spirit element contained in the external world.

We must be able to tell ourselves: When we experience a sound, a color, a degree of warmth, we experience an image of them. But we experience them as reality, when we are outside our physical body. We can portray the facts in a drawing as follows: Man experiences the primary qualities within himself when fully awake, and projects them as images into the outer world. If he only knows them in the outer world, he has the primary qualities only in images (arrow in sketch). These images are the mathematical geometrical, and arithmetical qualities of things.

It is different in the case of the secondary qualities. (The horizontal lines stand for the physical and etheric body of man, the red shaded area for the soul-spirit aspect, the ego and astral body.) Man experiences them outside his physical and etheric body,⁵³ and projects only the images into himself. Because the scientific age no longer saw through this, mathematical forms and numbers became something that man looked for abstractly in the outer world. The secondary qualities became something that man looked for only in himself. But because they are only images in himself, man lost them altogether as realities.

As few isolated thinkers, who still retained traditions of earlier views concerning the outer world, struggled to form conceptions that were truer to reality than those that, in the course of the scientific age, gradually emerged as the official views. Aside from Paracelsus,⁵⁴ there was, for example, van Helmont,⁵⁵ who was well aware that man's spiritual element is active when color, tone, and so forth are experienced. During the waking state, however, the spiritual is active only with the aid of the physical body. Hence it produces only an image of what is really contained in sound or color. This leads to a false description of external reality; namely, that purely mathematical-mechanistic form of motion for what is supposed to be experienced as secondary qualities in man's inner being, whereas, in accordance with their reality, their true nature, they can only be experienced outside the body. We should not be told that if we wish to comprehend the true nature of sound, for example, we ought to conduct physical experiments as to what happens in the air that carries us to the sound that we hear. Instead, we should be told that if we want to acquaint ourselves with the true nature of sound, we have to form an idea of how we really experience sound outside our physical and etheric bodies. But these are thoughts that never occurred to the men of the scientific age. They had no inclination to consider the totality of human nature, the true being of man. Therefore they did not find either mathematics or the primary qualities in this unknown human nature; and they did not find the secondary qualities in the external world, because they did not know that man belongs to it also.

I do not say that one has to be clairvoyant in order to gain the right insight into these matters, although a clairvoyant approach would certainly produce more penetrating perceptions in this area. But I do say that a healthy and open mind would lead one to place the primary qualities, everything mathematical-mechanical, into man's inner being, and to place the secondary qualities into the outer world. The thinkers no longer understand human nature. They did not know how man's corporeality is filled with spirit, or how this spirit, when it is awake in a person, must forget itself and devote itself to the body if it is to comprehend mathematics. Nor was it known that this same spirituality must take complete hold of itself and live independently of the body, outside the body, in order to come to the secondary qualities. Concerning all these matters, I say that clairvoyant perception can give greater insight, but it is not indispensable. A healthy and open mind can feel that mathematics belongs inside, while sound, color, etc. are something external.

In my notes on Goethe's scientific works⁵⁶ in the 1880's, I set forth what healthy feeling can do in this direction. I never mentioned clairvoyant knowledge, but I did show to what extent man can acknowledge the reality of color, tone, etc. without any clairvoyant perception. This has not yet been understood. The scientific age is still too deeply entangled in Locke's manner of thinking. I set it forth again, in philosophic terms, in 1911 at the Philosophic Congress in Bologna.⁵⁷ And again it was not understood. I tried to show how man's soul—spirit organization does indeed indwell and permeate the physical and etheric body during the waking state, but still remains inwardly independent. If one senses this inward independence of the soul and spirit, then on also has a feeling for what the soul and spirit have experienced during sleep about the reality of green and yellow, G and C-sharp, warm and cold, sour or sweet. But the scientific age was unwilling to go into a true knowledge of man.

This description of the primary and secondary qualities shows quite clearly how man got away from the correct feeling about himself and his connection to the world. The same thing comes out in other connections. Failing to grasp how the mathematical with its three-dimensional character dwells in man, the thinkers likewise could not understand man's spirituality. They would have had to see how man is in a position to comprehend right-left by means of the symmetrical movements of his arms and hands and other symmetrical movements. Through sensing the course taken, for example, by his food, he can experience front-back. He experiences up-down as he coordinates himself in this direction in his earliest years. If we discern this, we see how man inwardly unfolds the activity that produces the three dimensions of space. Let me point out also that the animal does not have the vertical direction in the same way as man does, since its main axis is horizontal, which is what man can experience as front-back. The abstract space framework could no longer produce anything other than mathematical, mechanistic, abstract relationships in inorganic nature. It could not develop an inward awareness of space in the animal or in man.

Thus no correct opinion could be reached in this scientific age concerning the question: How does man relate to the animal, the animal to man? What distinguishes them from one another? It was still dimly felt that there was a difference between the two, hence one looked for the distinguishing features. But nothing could be found in either man or animal that was decisive and consistent. Here is a famous example: It was asserted that man's upper jawbone, in which the upper teeth are located, was in one piece, whereas in the animal, the front teeth were located in a separate one, the inter-maxillary bone, with the actual upper jawbone on either side of them. Man, it was thought, did not possess this inter-maxillary bone. Since one could no longer find the relationship of man to animal by inner soul-spirit means, one looked for it in such external features and said that the animal had an inter-maxillary bone and man did not.

Goethe could not put into words what I have said today concerning primary and secondary qualities. But he had a healthy feeling about all these matters. He knew instinctively that the difference between man and animals must lie in the human form as a whole, not in any single feature. This is why Goethe opposed the idea that the inter-maxillary bone is missing in man. As a young man, he wrote an important article suggesting that there is an inter-maxillary bone in man as well as in the animal. He was able to prove this by showing that in the embryo the inter-maxillary bone is still clearly evident in man although in early childhood this bone fuses with the upper jaw, whereas it remains separate in the animal. Goethe did all this out of a certain instinct, and this instinct led him to say that one must not seek the difference between man and animal in details of this kind; instead, it must be sought for in the whole relation of man's form, soul, and spirit to the world.

By opposing the naturalists who held that man lacks the inter-maxillary bone Goethe brought man close to the animal. But he did this in order to bring out the true difference as regards man's essential nature. Goethe's approach out of instinctive knowledge put him in opposition to the views of orthodox science, and this opposition has remained to this day. This is why Goethe really found no successors in the scientific world. On the contrary, as a consequence of all that had developed since the Fifteenth Century in the scientific field, in the Nineteenth Century the tendency grew stronger to approximate man to the animal. The search for a difference in external details diminished with the increasing effort to equate man as nearly as possible with the animal. This tendency is reflected in what arose later on as the Darwinian idea of evolution. This found followers, while Goethe's conception did not. Some have treated Goethe as a kind of Darwinist, because all they see in him is that, through his work on the inter-maxillary bone,⁵⁸ he brought man nearer to the animal. But they fail to realize that he did this because he wanted to point out (he himself did not say so in so many words, but it is implicit in his work) that the difference between man and animal cannot be found in these external details.

Since one no longer knew anything about man, one searched for man's traits in the animal. The conclusion was that the animal traits are simply a little more developed in man. As time went by, there was no longer any inkling that even in regard to space man had a completely different position. Basically, all views of evolution that originated during the scientific age were formulated without any true knowledge of man. One did not know what to make of man, so he was simply represented as the culmination of the animal series. It was a though one said: Here are the animals; they build up to a final degree of perfection, a perfect animal; and this perfect animal is man.

My dear friends, I want to draw your attention to how matters have proceeded with a certain inner consistency in the various branches of scientific thinking since its first beginnings in the Fifteenth Century; how we picture our relation to the world on the basis of physics, of physiology, by saying: Out there is a silent and colorless world. It affects us. We fashion the colors and sounds in ourselves as experiences of the effects of the outer world.

At the same time we believe that the three dimensions of space exist outside of us in the external world. We do this, because we have lost the ability to comprehend man as a whole. We do this because our theories of animal and man do not penetrate the true nature of man. Therefore, in spite of its great achievements we can say that science owes its greatness to the fact that it has completely missed the essential nature of man. We were not really aware of the extent to which science was missing this. A few especially enthusiastic materialistic thinkers in the Nineteenth Century asserted that man cannot rightly lay claim to anything like soul and spirit because what appears as soul and spirit is only the effect of something taking place outside us in time and space. Such enthusiasts describe how light works on us; how something etheric (according to their theory) works into us through vibrations along our nerves; how the external air also continues on in breathing, etc. Summing it all up, they said that man is dependent on every rise and fall of temperature, on any malformation of his nervous system, etc. Their conclusion was that man is a creature pitifully dependent on every draft or change of pressure.

Anyone who reads such descriptions with an open mind will notice that, instead of dealing with the true nature of man, they are describing something that turns man into a nervous wreck. The right reply to such descriptions is that a man so dependent on every little draft of air is not a normal person but a neurasthenic. But they spoke of this neurasthenic as if he were typical. They left out his real nature, recognizing only what might make him into a neurasthenic. Through the peculiar character of this kind of thinking about nature, all understanding was gradually lost. This is what Goethe revolted against, though he was unable to express his insights in clearly formulated sentences.

Matters such as these must be seen as part of the great change in scientific thinking since the Fifteenth Century. Then they will throw light on what is essential in this development. I would like to put it like this: Goethe in his youth took a keen interest in what science had produced in its various domains. He studied it, he let it stimulate him, but he never agreed with everything that confronted him, because in all of it he sensed that man was left out of consideration. He had an intense feeling for man as a whole. This is why he revolted in a variety of areas against the scientific views that he saw around him. It is important to see this scientific development since the Fifteenth Century against the background of Goethe's world conception. Proceeding from a strictly historical standpoint, one can clearly perceive how the real being of man is missing in the scientific approach, missing in the physical sciences as well as in the biological.

This is a description of the scientific view, not a criticism. Let us assume that somebody says: “Here I have water. I cannot use it in this state. I separate the oxygen from hydrogen, because I need the hydrogen.” He then proceeds to do so. If I then say what he has done, this is not criticism of his conduct. I have no business to tell him he is doing something wrong and should leave the water alone. Nor is it criticism, when I saw that since the Fifteenth Century science has taken the world of living beings and separated from it the true nature of man, discarding it and retaining what this age required. It then led this dehumanized science to the triumphs that have been achieved.

It is not a criticism if something like this is said; it is only a description. The scientist of modern times needed a dehumanized nature, just as chemist needs deoxygenized hydrogen and therefore has to split water into its two components. The point is to understand that we must not constantly fall into the error of looking to science for an understanding of man.

• 53. One can find the basic reality explained in the chapter “Sleep and Death” in An Outline Of Occult Science and in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1983).
• 54. Paracelsus, Theophrastus von Hohenheim: Einsiedein, Kanton Schwytz 1493–1541 Salzburg, Md. Ferrara, Professor in Basel. Accomplished physician, scientist, and philosopher. Wrote about chemistry, medical science, biology, astronomy, astrology, alchemy, and theology. The myths about Paracelsus as goldmaker, magician, or charlatan were made up after his death and distorted the picture of his character. Most complete work published by Karl Sudhoff (fourteen volumes). See Riddles of Philosophy.
• 55. Helmont, Johann Baptist van: Brussels 1577–1644. Physician and iatrochemist. He managed the differentiation and separation of gases (hydrogen, carbon). He coined the name “gas” for the airy state.
• 56. See Steiner, Goethe the Scientist. Especially see Chapters 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15.
• 57. Lecture of April 8, 1911, at the 9th International Philosophical Congress, “The Psychological Foundations of Anthroposophy,” in Rudolf Steiner, Esoteric Development, Spring Valley, NY: 1982), pp. 25–55.
• 58. See Steiner, Goethe the Scientist.

The Symbolism of Certain Animal Forms and Their Relation to the Elements: Snake, Fish, Butterfly, Bee.

Yesterday, we stopped with the indication about Noah's Ark, stating that in the proportions of its height, breadth and length were expressed the proportions of the human body. Now, in order to understand the meaning of this Ark mentioned in the Bible (I Moses 6, 15), we must deepen our knowledge of various things. We must at first make clear to ourselves what it means that a vessel through which man should be rescued has definite dimensions. It will then be necessary to occupy ourselves with that time of man's development in which the actual happenings to which the Noah story refers took place.

When people who understand something of occultism produced some object in the outer world, a quite definite purpose for the soul was always connected with it. Recall the Gothic churches, those characteristic buildings that arose in the beginning of the Middle Ages and spread from Western to Middle Europe. These churches have a definite architectural style, which expresses itself in the arch that consists of two parts joining in a point above. This architectural feature permeates the whole as atmosphere—that peculiar arching consisting of two parts tapering up to a point, the whole reaching upward, the columns with a definite form, etc. It would be quite wrong to assert that such a Gothic cathedral simply came to be out of outer needs, out of a certain longing perhaps, to create a House of God that should express or mean this or that. Something much deeper underlay this. Those who indicated the first ideas for these Gothic buildings were adepts in occultism. They were, to a certain degree, initiates. It was their purpose to see that whoever entered such a House of God was to receive quite definite soul impressions. When one sees these peculiar archings, when one views the inner space in which the columns rise as trees rise in a grove, such a House of God works upon the soul quite differently than does a house, for instance, that is carried by old columns, that has an ordinary Roman or Renaissance cupola. Of course, man does not become conscious of the fact that such forms produce quite definite effects; they occur in the unconscious. He cannot be rationally clear about what is happening in his soul. Many people believe that the materialism of our modern time arises because so many materialistic writings are read. The occultist, however, knows that this is only one of the lesser influences. What the eye sees is of far greater importance, for it has an influence on soul processes that more or less run their course in the unconscious. This is of eminently practical importance, and when spiritual science will one day really take hold of the soul, then will the practical effect become noticeable in public life. I have often called attention to the fact that it was something different from what it is today when one in the Middle Ages walked through the streets. Right and left there were house façades that were built up out of what the soul felt and thought. Every key, every lock, carried the imprint of him who had made it. Try to realize how the individual craftsman felt joy in each piece, how he worked his own soul into it. In every object there was a piece of soul, and when a person moved among such things, soul forces streamed over to him. Now compare this with a city today. Here is a shoe store, a hardware store, a butcher shop, then a tavern, etc. All this is alien to the inner soul processes; it is related only to the outer man. Thus, it generates those soul forces that tend towards materialism. These influences work much more strongly than do the dogmas of materialism. Add to these our horrible art of advertising. Old and young wander through a sea of such abominable products that wake the most evil forces of the soul. So likewise do our modern comic journals. This is not meant to be a fanatical agitation against these things, but only indications about facts. All this pours a stream of forces into the human soul, determining the epoch that leads the person in a certain direction. The spiritual scientist knows how much depends upon the world of forms in which a man lives.

Toward the middle of the Middle Ages there arose along the Rhine that remarkable religious movement called Christian Mysticism. It is linked up with such leading spirits as Master Eckhart, Tauler, Suso, Ruysbroeck, and others. This was a tremendous deepening and intensification of the human feeling life because these preachers did not stand alone but had a faithful audience at that time. The name parson (Pfaff—a derogatory expression for “parson”), in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries did not have the meaning it has today, but was something to be esteemed. Plato used to be called “the great parson”. Because there emanated such a deepening from these great souls, the Rhine was named at that time, “Europe's Great Parson Street”. Do you know where these soul forces were bred that were searching for an inner union with the godly forces of being? They were brought forth in the Gothic cathedrals with their pointed arches, pillars and columns. This had educated these souls. What the human being sees, what is poured into his environment, becomes a force in him. In accordance with it, he forms himself.

Let us put this before our souls schematically against the background of human development. At a given time an architectural style is created, born out of the great ideas of initiates. Human souls take up the force of these forms. Centuries go by. What the soul has absorbed through its contemplation of building forms appears in the mood of his soul. Ardent souls will then come into existence, souls who look up to the heights. Even when the course was not always quite as I have described it, still like effects showed themselves often in human development.

Now let us follow these people some millennia further. Those who absorbed the forces of the forms of these buildings into their souls show the expression of their inner soul configurations in their countenances. The entire human shape forms itself through such impressions. What was built thousands of years ago, appears to us in human countenances thousands of years later. Thus, one recognizes why such arts were practiced. Initiates look out into the far future and see how human beings are meant to become. Hence it is that at a definite time, they form external building styles, outer art forms, on a large scale. So it is that the germ of future human epochs is laid.

When you rightly keep all this in mind, you will understand what occurred at the end of the Atlantean epoch. Air did not exist as it does today; the distribution of air and water was quite different from what it is today. Masses of mist surrounded Atlantis. When you picture to yourself how mist rises, how clouds form, and rain falls, then you have in miniature what happened over enormous expanses of Atlantis during millennia. With the change in the outer living conditions of man, he, too, changed. Formerly then, a country covered with thick mist masses had people living in it who had a kind of clairvoyance. Gradually the rain storms came; gradually the people accustomed themselves to an entirely new way of life, to a new perception, a new awareness. The human bodies had to change. You would be amazed if you were to see pictures of the first Atlantean people. How different they were from people today! Do not believe, however, that this change occurred by itself. Through long periods of time the human souls had to work on these human bodies and bring about effects such as were described by the simple example given of the effects of architectural forms on the feeling life of the soul that later appeared in their countenances.

How was it when the Atlantean epoch passed over into the post-Atlantean epoch? At first, the human soul underwent change and, in accordance with this, the body shaped itself. Let us go into this more deeply! Let us picture an old Atlantean. He still had clairvoyant consciousness and was thus connected with the environment in which he lived, with the mist-filled atmosphere. Because of this atmosphere, things did not show themselves to him with firmly marked contours. Actually, they were rather colour pictures that emerged for him; his perceptions were floods of surging interweaving colours. Into this, outlines gradually appeared. Objects revealed themselves like lanterns in the mist, encircled by rainbow colours, and his spiritual capacities developed accordingly. Had this condition continued, it would have been impossible for man to acquire his present body. Objects had to take on their present contours, the air became free of water. This process went on for thousands of years. Only gradually did things take on distinctness. The human soul had to receive other impressions, new impressions, and form its body correspondingly, for in accordance with what you think and feel is your body formed. What kind of form had the soul to experience when it escaped from the Atlantean watery landscape into the new airy landscape? For the present body to shape itself, the human being had to be surrounded by a form of definite length, breadth, and depth. As a matter of fact, this form was given to him so that the body could form itself thereby. Just as the mood of the mystics modeled itself out of the shape of the cathedral, and as the initiate would be able to indicate which countenances had shaped themselves accordingly, so did the human beings gradually transform themselves since, as a matter of fact, they lived in vessels, under the influence of great initiates, which had been built according to these measurements. Before the time of our present humanity there was a kind of water or sea-life that was lived in vessels, in which humanity gradually accustomed itself to life on land. The life of the Atlanteans was for the most part a life in vessels. Not only were they surrounded by a watery, misty air, but a large part of Atlantis was covered by the sea. This is the deep mystery of Noah's Ark. What is to be found in the original religious documents has an immense depth. A radiance of wisdom and limitless sublimity surrounds these primal records when we immerse ourselves deeply in them.

In Genesis you find the symbol of the snake. In the Roman catacombs you come upon the picture of the fish, which tradition tells us signifies the Christian or the Christ. If someone were to reflect on these symbols, he could, of course, find much that is ingenious, but this would only be speculation. We want to deal only with realities since these things, too, are given us out of the spiritual and astral worlds. If you will follow me for a few moments into the history of man's evolution, you will see what truths are contained in both these symbols.

Let us recall once again that the earth has had as many different embodiments as man. The human form was always present during the different earth incarnations—on Saturn, Sun and Moon. His ego, however, was acquired for the first time on the earth. Now we must turn our attention briefly to the appearance of the earth as it was in its first incarnation, while it was still Saturn. At that time rocks or fields for tilling did not yet exist. The human physical body existed but in a finer state. It was only gradually that it condensed to its present fleshy form.

When you examine the materials around you today, you will find that they exist in various conditions. First, there is the solid, called Earth in occultism; then the fluid, called Water in occultism—not only the water on earth is meant, but all that is fluid. Then all the gaseous matter, called Air in occultism. There is one still finer condition, Fire. Of course, physicists of today do not accept this, but the occultist knows that Fire can be compared with Earth, Water and Air, that Fire is the first etheric condition, that it is finer than Air. Where you find Fire or Warmth, something is present that is still finer than Air. Were we to picture a substance finer than Warmth, we would come to Light. What we, in the occult sense, term Earth, Water, and Air was not yet in existence on Saturn. These bodily states arose on the Sun, Moon, and Earth. The densest condition on Saturn was Warmth or Fire. Man lived within it, his body actually a kind of reflected image. To present this in greater detail would take us too far afield.

Saturn changed into the Sun. Air was added to Fire and was the densest condition on the Sun. When the physical body had reached the airy stage, it was impregnated with the etheric body. There were no other beings but Air beings. As man, one would have been able to penetrate these Air beings because they were just as penetrable as air is today. They could be compared with a Fata Morgana, so light and fleeting were they. To be sure, the air on the Sun was somewhat denser than our present air. The watery condition first arose on the Moon, and all that lived on this Moon was but a condensation of Water. Jelly fish and slimy creatures such as are still to be seen today give us a notion of these water beings. Only physical bodies of this kind were capable of taking up an astral body.

The development gradually proceeded. At the end of the Moon period certain watery parts had densified sufficiently so that a kind of firm ground like turf, slime or spinach was formed. The greatest densification resembled the wood of our present day trees. Then the Moon transformed itself into our present earth; the condition of the solid, the mineral, was added. The outer sheath became firm; accordingly and gradually all beings became denser and firmer. Gradually, man developed into a being of flesh—at first on Saturn a Warmth being, an Air being on the Sun, a Water being on the Moon, and finally, on Earth he became a being of flesh.

Let us now consider the meaning of this development. On Saturn the germinal foundation for the physical body was formed; on the Sun the etheric body was added; on the Moon the astral body. But something additional happened on the Moon. The human being who remained on the Old Moon was then much lower in his development than he is today because the astral body in the Moon period was full of raging passions. Only later, when the ego was added, was the astral body purified. For this a planetary development was necessary. The Moon had again to fall back into the Sun, the bad lunar men had again to unite with the Sun beings. Thus, when the Earth began, the ancient Sun and Moon were again one body. It was the high beings who inhabited the Sun who had to cast out the Moon, and as a result the Moon became a dense mass with all its various impulses. Now all the bad beings who had been expelled with the Moon had to be rescued again, and so the reunion of the Moon with the Sun took place. What would have happened if this reunion had not occurred, if each had gone its own way? Then it would have been impossible for man to appear in his present form, nor would the Sun beings have progressed to what they are today. Had the Old Moon gone its own way alone, and not been enabled through reunion with the Sun to draw on new forces, then the highest being that could ever have been created on the Moon would have resembled a snake. The Sun beings, on the other hand, who were so spiritual that they had no physical body but possessed an etheric body as their lowest member, would have received a physical body whose highest form would have been that of a fish. Naturally, the fish-form would have been only the outer expression for souls who reached a much higher stage of development, just as our present fish group soul is something exalted.

The Moon fell back again into the Sun, and later our earth threw out the present moon, which took with it the worst substances. Thereby it became possible for the beings of our earth to develop themselves beyond the snake stage to that of the human. It was the Sun beings who bestowed upon the beings of our earth the strength to lift themselves above the snake. The material purity of the Sun condition of those high beings expresses itself in the fish form, for this is the highest material form that the old Sun nature could have attained.

The Christos is the Sun Hero who has transplanted all the strength of the Sun upon the Earth. Now you will be able to understand with what deep intuition esoteric Christianity conceived of the fish form, because it signifies the outer symbol of the Sun power, of the forces of the Christ. To be sure, the fish is outwardly an incomplete being but it has not descended so deeply into matter and it is penetrated to a small extent by egotism. The occultist says that the snake is the symbol for the earth as it developed itself out of the Moon. The fish is the symbol for spiritual being as it has developed itself out of the Sun. Our earth, as it stands before us with its solid substances, has its lowest being in the snake. What separated itself as watery substance, as pure water, could manifest itself as fish. To the occultist the fish is something that has been born out of the water.

What is it that, in a similar way, has been born out of air, or out of fire? These are regions that are hard to explain, but at least some indications can be given here.

What were things like on the earth when it had just developed from the Saturn to the Sun stage? Man was then a kind of air being. Death and dying, as understood at present, he did not know because he could transform himself. Let us make it clear to ourselves how man arrived at his present consciousness of death and dying. Man's soul was in the atmosphere of the Sun but it was related to what was there below as body. In our time man's astral body, even when it has slipped out at night, belongs to the physical body, and it was the same on Saturn and Sun except that it never slipped in. At the beginning of the Sun stage the body was below; above was something that as soul belonged to a definite body, that directed this body, that had spiritual consciousness. The body of this soul was subject to other laws of growth and dying off than is the case today. It lost certain parts, but it added new parts. For long stretches of time the soul lived on unchanged while the body changed. To be sure, when the Sun was in a certain condition, man identified himself in a certain way with his body. His body transformed itself into alternate conditions. At first a body of definite form was produced, then this form transformed itself into another, again into another, and then into a fourth. After its last change it came back to its first condition. The human being retained the same consciousness while these forms changed. When the first bodily condition arose again, when the human being came back to the first form, after he had lived through the other three, he then felt himself renewed. This transformation has been preserved for us in the butterfly that develops itself through four forms: egg, larva, pupa, and butterfly. This is the hieroglyph, the sign for the airy condition of the human being on the Sun. In the butterfly today, under our completely changed conditions, this state is, of course, a kind of decadence. The human being evolved beyond this state, but for the occultist the butterfly is the symbol for it. He designates it as the air being, just as he designates the snake as earth being, and the fish as water being. Why the birds are not designated as air beings will be dealt with at some other time.

Now let us go back to the first Saturn condition when the human being was a soul-spiritual being that always had the same body, that knew itself immortal on a lower level and continually changed his body. This condition, too, has been preserved for us in a peculiar being that, when considered as a whole group soul, stands in a certain way higher than man. This is the bee. When you study the whole hive, you have something totally different from the single bee. The whole beehive has a spiritual life that in some ways corresponds to life on Saturn on a lower stage, and that will be reached on Venus on a higher level. The body of the bee, however, has stayed on the old Saturn level. We must indeed distinguish the soul of the whole beehive as no ordinary group soul but a being in itself, and the single bee as having preserved the form that the human body passed through on Saturn. Because the bee is retarded as outer being, it could win a higher spiritual consciousness. Hence the wonderful social composition of the beehive! The bee is the symbol of the spiritual man who does not know mortality. When man was of such spirituality, our planet was in a fiery state. When, as Venus, it will again be quite fiery, man will again be a spiritual being. Thus, in the bee you have the being that is the fire being for the occultist.

It will be interesting to mention here a parallelism about which ordinary science has little to say. What does the man of today have in him of Saturn's warmth? His blood-heat. What at that time was distributed over the whole of Saturn has in a measure freed itself and today forms the warm blood of man and animal. When you investigate the temperature of a beehive, you find it to be about the same temperature as that of human blood. The whole beehive develops a temperature comparable to that of blood because, in accordance with the nature of its being, it goes back to the same source as does the human blood.

So, the occultist designates the bee as born out of warmth. He designates the butterfly as air being and the snake as earth being. Again you see from these considerations how deeply symbols and occult signs are connected with what we know of the evolutionary history of the planets and of man.

Today we are to speak about the subject of asceticism. This subject is one that is judged differently from various sides. In asceticism, a spiritual current is usually already seen that, in what it represents in itself, already shows a kind of illness and that cannot at all proceed from healthy foundations of existence. But asceticism is an effective means of perfecting life, of reaching higher levels of existence. Sometimes asceticism is also seen as a withdrawal of human energies that could be used for existence; thus moderation and asceticism are considered to be more or less synonymous. The word is well suited to asceticism:

Confused by the hatred of the parties,
its image in history fluctuates.

Asceticism was something quite different in ancient Greece than it was in the Middle Ages. The nuance established by the Middle Ages for asceticism is indeed a questionable one. But spiritual science or theosophy has every interest in putting asceticism in its true light.

Asceticism in the sense in which it was meant in ancient Greece and wherever the word was understood in its general meaning has something to do with what underlies Theosophy. Asceticism is something that can lead to the highest heights of existence, but taken to an extreme, it can become idleness or even worse. “Asceticism” means ‘exercising one's powers’ so that one is able to develop and exercise one's highest abilities. ‘Askesis’, the Greek word, is related to ‘athlete’ and means ‘to make oneself strong’. In that the word indicates this in its original meaning, it has to do with the basis of spiritual research in Theosophy. And now we want to go into the distinguishing feature of asceticism in relation to many other scientific currents.

The theosophist has a different concept of knowledge than that which many other people have of knowing the world and what underlies it. With the senses one can know the external world, says the intellect; but one cannot explore everything about it, it exceeds the limits of its knowledge. Speaking in this sense means professing the opposite of what theosophy is; it says: reality is unlimited! It would even be able to give man a new sense, a physical sense, of reality if necessary. There are no limits to being, being is infinite. Man's soul is indeed limited in time to one stage of development, but it is up to man to expand this soul within it.

Man must not presume to want to exceed the limits of his knowledge, as science says against it. But spiritual science says: Try to expand your spiritual knowledge, your spiritual-scientific knowledge, as much as possible. The goal is the development of the soul, of the cognitive abilities of the human being. It must be admitted that there is something in the soul, something germinal in it. A person should not say, “This is how I am,” and be satisfied with it, but should say, “This is how I am now, and I will achieve new forms of existence to practice my powers.” This is asceticism.

Asceticism is something that enriches the human soul and makes a person stronger, opening up true and new realms of reality to them. Usually, asceticism is described as someone who practices it appearing gaunt and hollow-eyed, being idle, hating life and being disgusted by all the joys and demands of life. But an ascetic, properly understood, is akin to an athlete; true asceticism is elevation, expansion, enrichment of the true essence of man. Spiritual science or theosophy makes its knowledge and research accessible to a larger circle of people today. But you need not think that everyone must therefore also do the exercises - meditation and concentration and so on - and that the result will be the same for everyone as for the blind person who would have to be operated on, the opening of the eyes. Not everyone needs to do this, and not everyone will experience it; and not everyone can or needs to become a researcher in the spiritual world. But he, for his work in the spiritual world, needs the clairvoyant consciousness. To understand the messages of the researcher, none of this is necessary, one should just take them in impartially and examine them seriously. Everyone should test them against their own logic and sense of truth, which every person carries within them as a natural thing that they can rely on; this will then teach them to reject what a charlatan says and to agree with what a true spiritual researcher says; it will also teach them to distinguish one from the other.

It often happens that messages from the spiritual world arouse interest among listeners, especially those that deal with the subject of what kind of exercises and so on are necessary to enter the spiritual world. We will now begin with such a description today; how far one can follow it will be best seen from the subject itself.

The asceticism that is concerned with living in the spiritual world – and this is the only thing that matters for spiritual science – endeavors to develop abilities and perceptions in people that are silent in ordinary human life. Consider that you perceive from morning till evening through stimulation from the outside world; so you have a consciousness of yourself and of what is around you. In the evening, when you are tired, your soul can no longer perceive, your consciousness is silent, it falls silent. While you sleep, you are in the spiritual world, but you know nothing of it; why? Because today's man needs those external stimuli to see, which, as it were, entice perception. If he could give himself this push, which the objects give him as an external stimulus, this impetus from within, then man would have within him a stronger inner power than that which drives him from outside to perceive. But then he could also perceive in a world to which he drives himself from within, while he must perceive through external stimuli.

Let us assume that the former would be the case and that man would be blind and deaf to external stimuli, but would be able to receive the impulse to perceive within himself through invisible senses; then man would have awakened inner spiritual abilities in himself. But this can also happen in another way, namely in the sense in which we speak of asceticism in spiritual science. That is, a person commands himself through strong inner strength that he does not want to see or hear the external world; it sinks away for him, but not through fatigue, but through his arbitrariness. It is an inner world that then emerges, the outer one sinks.

Now let us turn to what man must do to achieve this. The preparation for this consists in his devoting himself to certain exercises. True asceticism has nothing to do with external means; what happens is an intimate, albeit energetic, process of the innermost of man's spiritual powers. The first thing he has to acquire is an especially heightened, intensified power of imagination! This occurs when a person stimulates his inner powers in such a way that he awakens within himself what had previously been dormant forces within him. ...

(As an example of this, Dr. Steiner cites the dialogue that one can imagine between the secret teacher and the mystery student when the student is being instructed in the contemplation of plants and humans.

Not to forget, however, that this dialogue never took place in this way.

(Description of the dialogue.)

This is to tell us: Man can stray, but the plant leads a pure chaste existence. The chaste red plant sap and the passionate human red blood. These thoughts must be transformed into an image and tried to visualize as a real ideal of man. Through this exercise, man will then gradually reach a stage of development through his own arbitrariness, as the plant has already reached a lower stage today. Goethe expresses this beautifully:

But if you do not have
this dying and becoming,
you are only a dull guest
on the dark earth.

In order to understand this ascent of man over himself, man must overcome something in himself, so as not to let it gain mastery over himself in self-aggrandizement. The disciple was told: Imagine that which should die as a withered piece of wood in the shape of a cross, and that which should come to life when man has conquered that which is expressed by his red blood, as a symbol of the purified plant-juice, think of it as the red rose. Imagine this vividly before your soul, surround the wood of the cross with living red roses, and you have before you the “Rose Cross”. Feel this mighty symbol deeply in your soul, do not just stare at it rigidly, but put into it all your perceptions and feelings, put them all into it as they fill you with devotion and devotion; when you compare the whole path of development through plants and humans up to the ideal of man in whom the red blood again flows pure and chastened, as in the red plant-juice in the petals of the red rose, feel and see this symbol, so that the Rosicrucian symbol becomes not merely an idea, a symbol, but a living power. Let all your feelings come to life in you as you contemplate and imagine, and let your heart warm as you do so, let this symbol come to life in you!

It is not an object that can be awakened by external perception and stimulation of the senses, nothing that can be seen in external reality, something that cannot awaken an external image in us. Hundreds and hundreds of such symbols could be cited from spiritual science or theosophy. But it is precisely such symbols, which do not come from external reality, that make man strong inwardly, that steel his will so that he can perceive a new world around him. The aim of such asceticism is the inner development of the human being's powers. We have characterized and shown what true asceticism is by the above example, and how through it man can become a citizen of the higher worlds. Asceticism is that which truly opens up a new, spiritual world to man and through which much can be communicated to him from it. At first, man should learn to hear the communications of the secret researcher and not immediately practice them himself. It is better if he first seeks to understand with his logic what the secret researcher says as a message from the spiritual world. So what we call asceticism leads us up into the spiritual worlds; and now let us see how humanity can relate to it. At first there will be those who say that these are fantasists, dreamers; and they will reject these explanations; but they will not always be wrong with us; because those who speak thus should say to themselves, one must first examine before one rejects. And we must say to ourselves that we must first know the reason why they reject, and we must have patience and consider that it is indeed a new world that is being shown to people. Wherever something like this is given, there is something that flows into us; we are to acquire new concepts, new ideas, which is not easy for everyone. For example, someone who initially only has a certain amount of abilities in his or her self cannot absorb this new, spiritual knowledge; for him, absorbing it would be like overeating in a spiritual sense. For him, to reject it is nothing more than his ego showing that he is incapable of absorbing it at first. It is instinct and self-preservation that tempt such people to reject spiritual science. These truths would extinguish their inner being; that is the one extreme where those poor egos of the present reject the truths of the spiritual researchers.

Others have a tendency to absorb everything that comes up and can be heard, but they also lack the will to penetrate it with understanding. Out of laziness, they don't want to make an effort, but they have an inclination to absorb, but they don't have the will to grasp what they hear with their will. But only then can harmony arise between the listener and what is heard; because only through receiving and processing does understanding arise. So one part is organized in such a way that it is unable to expand its spiritual abilities; it must reject the truths of Theosophy out of a sense of self-preservation. Others come from a sense of sensationalism, which is even less good; if one only wants to receive and not understand, that gives rise to blind faith in authority. One then hears them say: He said it, and so it must be true! But the one about whom this is said would rather be considered an authority less often, but in return be better understood.

(Example: What Lessing says about Klopstock).

The same applies to the secret researcher: he does not want to be praised at all and much rather not revered as a master personality, but to be understood and tested! For it is true, as has already been mentioned elsewhere, that if one wants to examine comfortably and not logically, it is then dangerous for the teacher to make the communications from the spiritual world to such people, for they can no longer distinguish truth from humbug and deception. There is only one way for the layman or the disciple to find the truth, and that is to examine everything with the strictest logic.

Now, we want to draw the attention of those who just want to absorb everything and who say, “the master said it,” to the danger of just blindly believing and not checking; you lose the strength and the educational result of the truth itself. For what truth is for man, its immense significance lies precisely in the fact that it is established in the innermost being of man. I know that three times three is nine; and if a million people come and claim that it is ten! This makes truth that great, that powerful educational tool, that the guiding principle for it lies within man, in his own inner being. This is why man makes something else the guiding principle of his inner being when it is not only about what comes from external sense perceptions.

But whoever only wants to hear new things abandons the educational means of truth, whereby truth is that strict means of education. Those who allow themselves to be overfed with truths allow the lack of judgment to take root in their habits; they allow someone else to be their judge of truth, thereby losing their sense of truth and falling into a habitual attachment to and love of untruthfulness. Out of laziness, true people can develop a tendency towards dishonesty, lying, dishonesty. Man must realize that truth research is a duty; but this realization must spur him on to examine logically and rationally everything he is taught from the spiritual world. What people who are too lazy to examine do to themselves can be compared, in a very good sense, to drowning. The person in question loses their self; this kind of reception of spiritual truths is drowning.

Now we want to discuss another thing that is even closer to what we call askesis or spiritual exercise. What does this askesis present itself as? We work on ourselves in order to become stronger for the world. Askesis is the practice of those powers that are not used at the present moment. Askesis can thus be compared to a healthy maneuver. The powers that are to be applied in an emergency are tested, tried and steeled there. Just as a military maneuver is related to war, so is asceticism related to the application of these forces themselves. The purpose of practicing the forces is for the sake of developing the forces; and the development of the forces must be done for the sake of growing the forces, so that they are there when you need them; therefore, you have to train them beforehand. You have to practice them before you need them, otherwise you won't have them when you need them. Example: If you train to be a singer, you have to practice a lot before you can perform and sing. Those who want to practice asceticism must practice and renounce the immediate use of their strength. You have to approach true asceticism as something that you only do to practice.

This kind of asceticism can be compared with something else: with children's play; they also practice their strengths now on objective things, which, so to speak, they are not yet touched by, but they practice them in preparation to have them and to be able to develop them in the time when the seriousness of life approaches them. To make one's powers pliable, flexible and mobile is the meaning of asceticism in relation to higher worlds and levels of knowledge; to develop these powers into abilities is the purpose of true asceticism.

In the development of spiritual abilities, something else comes into consideration. Through certain exercises, through meditation, through the presentation and contemplation of the Rosicrucian, man can strengthen his abilities and can also achieve certain visionary, clairvoyant abilities; powerful images and so on can be awakened in him, visionary clairvoyance is attained. Now the special thing occurs that the development of such powers can become dangerous if they are not directed towards something real, that is why study is such a necessary and important part of the student's task. One should not develop inner abilities without at the same time devoting oneself to an external, logical, rational understanding of the knowledge of the higher worlds. When a person becomes clairvoyant, a strong awareness must arise in him at the same time, and this is where the inner ability must be directed. Otherwise there is danger for the person. If a person has not previously acquired knowledge logically before entering the spiritual world, then the person does not know what to do with the inner ability. It is then a case of illusory images, of filling oneself with clairvoyant abilities; the process is then like an internal burning. For the awakening of such abilities is linked to the fact that the person feels the transition of abilities into passions, instincts, desires and so on. This is the other danger to which those who practice asceticism and who want to develop themselves in this way into the higher worlds, but without study, are exposed.

These are the two dangerous pitfalls – drowning, self-destruction, and burning to death – that await those who do not properly and thoroughly practice the ascent to the spiritual world and do not strictly follow the instructions.

Some will say, yes, meditation and all that stuff, that's fatal, I don't do that; but not eating meat, not drinking wine, I could dare to do that. But doing that is not so easy and not so simple and not successful either. Because only for the one who has already prepared his soul through spiritual work, for him the external measures and means are allowed as a relief for the journey. One must realize that they are only a relief, never anything else. Our body forms a resistance for our soul, and man would be able to do many things if he did not have this cumbersome body. Through external measures and aids, man can make this body more docile; he can prepare it as a better servant of the soul. A meat-free diet makes the body more docile in this respect and also more efficient.

In our time of true health fanaticism, where sunbathing and all kinds of other natural remedies are used, it happens that precisely those who are passionate about sunbathing, when they have to spend a quarter of an hour in the sun or stay in it, sigh and moan: “Oh, it's unbearable!” But anyone who practices true asceticism can also take a good walk in the sun, because it teaches people to endure life. Preparing oneself, making oneself capable of living, that is true asceticism!

Nothing can be achieved by external means alone. This only weakens the body – that is, if one only applies external means one-sidedly and does not regard them as adjuvants – because the body should be attuned to the soul. If the soul is lazy, so is the body. Otherwise the disharmony is too great. Those who apply and want to apply only external means to penetrate the spiritual world are preparing their body for a soul that they should first create. The soul must develop in parallel with the body.

Here we have reached the limits of our consideration, where asceticism can lead to the soul and body becoming unhealthy. You have to take care of your body and soul when you start practicing, because higher cognitive abilities are developed that then become realities in our soul; and every reality affects our body and soul. What can be achieved through true asceticism is a reality. A robust person must have a strong connection with the physical world; because there is a certain connection between the external world and the human being. — Example: What Fichte says about ideals, namely that those who have them know very well that they cannot be applied directly in the world, but are nevertheless their driving force.

A person who is whole within himself is also healthy when there is harmony between him, his inner self and the outer world. Based on this feeling, many people reject what they are not attuned to, for example, Theosophy. When a person takes in something and is not attuned to it and does not process it, then disharmony arises; this then takes hold of the physical body and what was previously only described as untruthfulness and so on, as the drowning of the soul, that is what then also makes the body sick. We must bear in mind that messages from the external world do not affect us so strongly that they cause such physical disharmony in the body; but messages from the spiritual world are realities, and therefore they affect the physical body; for everything physical is, after all, only an expression of the spiritual. This means that we make ourselves physically ill through the wrong reception and application of spiritual truths from the spirit.

This is even worse if the soul has been enriched by clairvoyant abilities without logical study; then the person burns inwardly, and this is transferred all the more as a consuming fire to the outer body, and the body becomes diseased. Therefore, man must strive to remain in balance with soul and body and their inner powers. Study and attainment of inner abilities must go hand in hand. If this is not the case, the consequence is otherwise the soul burning within and a morbid exterior. With correct asceticism, the organism becomes supple and flexible; but if a person digresses in either direction, then through asceticism, misunderstood or misapplied, the person will fall into and pass over into mental and physical illness. This is the great responsibility for those who make communications from spiritual science. And the leaders of the movement must always be aware of the existence of this responsibility in the most serious sense. The greatest caution and care is therefore required when accepting each disciple. But this responsibility must not deter anyone who is called to show the way, to give advice, nor deter anyone from coming. For the saying of Heraclitus applies to every soul, and with this I will conclude:

You cannot fathom the soul's limits,
even if you were to wander through all the streets and squares.

Rudolf Steiner: There are still a number of questions that were left over from the last time we met here. There are about twenty questions. We will have to take another opportunity to address these twenty questions, some of which are interesting. But I have been asked - and that is why we want to stay a few more minutes - to answer those of these twenty questions today that come from those present who have to leave tomorrow or in the next few days. So I would ask you to point out which questions are urgent.

Audience: I would like to hear about marriage in the light of spiritual science.

Rudolf Steiner: This question really suffers from a certain vagueness because it is not clear what the questioner would actually like to know. Marriage is certainly a phenomenon, an appearance within the whole of social life; it has developed with social life, and in the course of time it has actually taken on the most diverse forms, especially the most diverse meanings, so that one could talk about it: What is marriage in today's rationalistic social life? — or: What is marriage for Catholics? — and so on. So I don't know what the question is actually supposed to mean. Because, right, there is no need to talk about the essence of marriage as such from the point of view of spiritual science. I can't really imagine what it means. The gentleman who asked the question was surprised that nothing about marriage from a social point of view was included in our lecture programs, in our course programs. It could have been, of course, that marriage would have been touched upon in the context of the social lectures. But that is not the case. The fact is that for the time being other social questions are much more pressing than those that are usually linked to the marriage problem today.

For some time now, psychological and anthropological questions, and so on, have been linked to the marriage problem, and when one talks about such a problem at all, it is of course necessary to approach it from some particular angle. One can hardly talk about the problem of marriage without having, for my part, talked about the problem of love. When one talks about the problem of love, the problem of marriage can arise as a consequence. But it is actually hardly possible to talk about such a problem in isolation, because, firstly, what I have said comes into consideration, and, secondly, one must bear in mind that when they ask such a question, most people have something normative in mind, something standardizing, whereas since the middle of the 15th century, people have really become more and more individual beings. So for the immediate psychological understanding of the marriage problem, it is clear that marriage is initially related to the human being himself, to the human soul life, and like any other relationship from person to person, it can also take on a very individual character. And to construct general theories about things of such an individual character would lead us into an abstract discussion, which, when such intimate, individual matters are considered, would basically always miss the point, would not reflect reality.

Now, of course, the problem of marriage can also be viewed from a social point of view. I did that years ago when a member of our Anthroposophical Society organized a printed survey in which he asked people to answer the question about the marriage problem from the point of view of the state. Yes, if you start from such a point of view, then you can talk about it. Then you can state very precisely that we live in a (we do not want to say state community, but that we live in a social community, that this social community has a very definite interest in the child that comes from the marriage or the children that come from the marriage, and that actually for the social community the child problem exists as a special problem. Here one can point out that marriage must be thought of in terms of the next generation and that, in the face of this thinking of marriage in terms of the next generation, individual aspirations must indeed take a back seat, so that the person should feel that they are a member of their social community and cannot then arrange their marriage in a way that suits them personally.

These things are such that they lead into the most individual and that, when they are treated, they actually always lead into a normalizing way of looking at things, which actually destroys the realities in the process. What does one want, after all, when asking such a question? One usually wants to have instructions for life. And it is not the business of spiritual science to give such instructions for life. The task of spiritual science, ladies and gentlemen, is to fill the human being with spiritual and mental content so that he becomes a whole person. And then, when he becomes a whole person, when his soul is filled with what spiritual science can give him, when spiritual science brings from the depths of his soul to the surface all the soul abilities, power impulses in him, so that the human being is able to place himself in life and find his way in life, then that which should not be standardized, but rather what should arise between human being and human being, will also arise.

If you read my “Philosophy of Freedom”, you will find, above all, that it amounts to shaping the human being from within in such a way that he receives the necessary and right impulses for shaping his life, so that he does not want to be regulated from the outside by any dogmatic commandments. This is what must always be taken into account, even when posing such a question. It will be seen that the one who follows the path of spiritual science will find the way in the individual in the right way. To set up theories about these things in general cannot be the task of spiritual science, because that would mean forcing people into a system, into a mold. But to provide templates, general abstractions, that cannot be the task of spiritual science, because it can no longer be the task of our present life either. The task of spiritual science is to place the human being on his or her own individual ground and to make him or her resilient and full of life there.

That is what I have to say about it. It probably does not meet what you meant. But it is this question exactly the same as when someone asks how to act in the sense of spiritual science when choosing a career. Of course, one can say all sorts of nice things about choosing a career, but one cannot say it in general, because it always depends on the individual circumstances.

Audience: Where does the sensation of a sour taste come from after a harrowing experience?

Rudolf Steiner: If we consider the interactions that take place between the soul and spiritual and the physical aspects of the human being, as presented in the various lectures here, then it is indeed the case that some soul-shattering event can permeate the human organism with such intensity that it triggers physical processes that are not perceived directly in ordinary, normal life. When a shattering event occurs, it is not only that something happens in our soul, but the shock to the soul has its organic, its physical parallel manifestation, and in a very specific way. One must only be clear about how complicated this human organization actually is.

In one of my lectures, I pointed out that the sense of balance, sense of movement and sense of life emancipate themselves from within the human being, while at the same time the senses of taste, smell and touch develop, and that when the senses are penetrated, the experiences of smell, taste and touch can precede what we would experience through the senses of balance, movement and life. And I have shown that if you stop halfway, instead of penetrating to the core, you enter into a nebulous mysticism. This can admittedly be very beautiful, very significant, but essentially it is the case that in this inward journey, which stops halfway, you actually stop in the regions of taste, smell and tactile experience. One need only read the sayings, such as the sayings of the poets of the saints, of Mechthild of Magdeburg, for example, and one will be able to grasp, I would say spiritually with hands, how an inward sense of taste, smell, and touch comes about in very beautiful experiences through what I have just described. Now, when a harrowing experience occurs, it usually has to do with the fact that the spiritual-soul, which we call the I and the astral body in our way of expressing it, but which is precisely the carrier of that which has an inward effect on the human being, that this spiritual-soul, as in sleep, tears itself out of the organism. Of course, such shocks to the soul can cause a state of unconsciousness, which is simply due to the fact that the astral, the soul, does not control the etheric and physical bodies because it does not intervene in the right way. Now imagine the process as a living thing. A shock occurs; the astral body and the ego are loosened. They are loosened, but the person still holds on. That is, the astral body and the ego strive to go out, but are held back, and so a continuous swinging back and forth occurs. In this to and fro swinging, the experiences occur that take place in the area in front of the actual interior of the human being, where the senses of taste, smell and touch are located. If a taste, a taste illusion, is then also subjectively experienced, that is, an irritation of the taste organism during this to and fro swinging, then this is a completely natural phenomenon.

A participant asks about the terms salt, mercury and sulfur.

Rudolf Steiner: It has already been said quite correctly that if one wants to penetrate into such concepts as those used by Paracelsus, and also the concepts of sulfur, mercury, salt used by others, one must of course completely disregard modern chemistry. One must also bear in mind that at the time of Paracelsus, this modern chemistry as such did not actually yet exist. The whole way of thinking was different back then. It is interesting to note how modern historians, when they go back to older times, as a Nordic chemist who recently wrote the history of alchemy did, write that only the personalities of the 13th to 15th centuries could make sense of the processes described, but not the modern chemist, who cannot make sense of what is being dealt with at all. This is because the whole way of thinking was different. The thinker before the emergence of modern chemistry did not have the concept of matter at all as we have it today. He followed more the process of how one state developed into another. So he asked more about what the relationship of one state to another is in the material world. So for the external world, for the non-human world, for the outer, organic world, one would have to say the concepts of earthy, watery, airy, fiery or warm. By this one did not mean the substances as they are understood today, but one meant the state of the earthy, the liquid - water was the liquid as such - and so on. And one had a certain feeling for it, in that one distinguished the earthy, the watery, the airy, the fiery, so that the whole context, which one brought into the state of the world, related to the extra-organic, namely to the extra-human. And for the human being, it was not assumed at all that the same kind of state was present in the organism, but rather a different kind of state was assumed. According to the ideas that were held at the time, it was not easy to say how the airy or the earthy occurs in the human being. One saw the human being as a, I would say, self-constructed constitution and attributed what the human being was, for example, as a thinker, to certain conditions of his physical organism. One simply said to oneself: Something is happening physically in the human being by being a thinking being or by being in the state of thinking. This event was seen in a certain congruence or similarity to the solidification of the earthly. It was imagined that the state in which the earthly, the whole earthly, was once in times past, had not yet reached the solid state of the earth, that the solid state of the earth had, so to speak, just solidified from a less dense state. But this same process of solidification, which was thought of in terms of the non-human, was not attributed to the human as such. Instead, when the human was in a state of thinking, a process was ascribed to the human, which was described as the formation of salt, so that these were parallel processes for the external and for the internal: earthification - salt formation in man; cosmic thought formation, the emergence of the solid, that is, the earthy - planetary inner-human thought formation, the corresponding physical process, oversalting. And so everything that was understood by salt was imagined to be related to what is physically present in man when he thinks, when he reveals himself as a thinking being.

Of course, in a sense, what was initially attributed to man was transferred by analogy to the processes that were behind the actual solidification of the planet, the formation of external salt. Some of these expressions have remained to this day. They are still used, but their historical origin is no longer known.

In so far as physical processes take place in man as a sentient being, or, to sum up, if we take the sum of all those processes in man - which are manifest as physical processes - that are the bearers of emotional life, then we have the mercurial in man. And if we consider everything in man that is the bearer of the life of will, then we have the sulphurous in man.

And so such personalities thought of the human constitution, the human organism, as consisting of these three interlocking processes: the salt-like, which to a certain extent kills people, parallel to the thought process - because the fact that we are thinking beings means that we are in a state is related to that which constantly leads us to death, that is, deposition processes, salt formation processes; then the sulfur process, which is, in a sense, what awakens the human being, what constantly permeates him with a new sulfur-like element that inhibits consciousness. And that which rhythmically balances between the two is the mercurial.

When going back to earlier times, one has to simply get involved in thinking no longer with the thought forms of today's science, but with the thought forms that were present earlier, but which were actually based on a very different state of mind than ours today. We can only artificially put ourselves back into the state of mind from which such ideas arose. It is not enough to take up terms such as Mercur, Sal, Sulfur and so on from Paracelsus or Basilius Valentinus and simply look them up in our textbooks or in the encyclopedia. Rather, it is necessary to put oneself back into a completely different way of thinking. Only then can one begin to talk about these things.

Are there any more questions that need a quick answer?

Participant: Isn't the Song of Solomon a song that represents an initiation? I came up with this during my Hebrew studies by trying to approach the text based on Ritter's original texts. Theology offers various answers, but they are unsatisfactory. It seems to me that the Biblical text is deliberately confused so that the esoteric meaning is no longer apparent to the general reader. Is not the Song of Songs a work of initiation?

Rudolf Steiner: You see, in general, when dealing with such matters, one must follow the principle that I have already mentioned here on another occasion: to interpret, but not to underlay, that is, not to look for false things and the like in the texts in question. With such old works as the Song of Solomon, it really does depend on our first completely putting ourselves back into the way of thinking and the state of mind out of which something like this arose. I just mentioned the example a moment ago: If one wants to read the writings of the alchemists, one has to put oneself back into the whole state of mind out of which these people thought about matter and processes – and that is not so far back. For example, it is quite clear that what Professor Beckh said about the oriental texts here recently is true in a sense that cannot be sufficiently taken into account by the translator today. First of all, it must be clear that the abstractness, I would even say rarity of the content of our ideas is basically not that old. If you have lived in the country and know the language of the peasants, you will know that even the language of the peasants had something that did not distinguish material processes from spiritual processes, as the intellectual life of today's civilization does; things were thought more interrelated. Now that has more or less ceased, it is disappearing rapidly, giving way to a general materialism.

Just think of what today's educated person says when they say “night's sleep”. Of course, they have vague ideas, but please analyze the actual content of the ideas you have when you say “night's sleep”. You will certainly pick out one or the other from your consciousness, then glue all sorts of things together and thereby have the concept of “night's sleep” as a modern educated person. But when the farmer spoke of the night's sleep, he spoke of something very limited and specific, only it was not thought of materially or spiritually or mentally, but it was both at the same time. When he spoke of the night's sleep, he rubbed out what he had in his eyes in the morning, and he called that the night's sleep. In this material fact he had at the same time everything that he thought when he said the word “night's sleep” and what he thought of as having been, so to speak, coagulated out of what he had experienced during the night. And that he could then wipe out of his eyes. He had an idea in which the material and the soul were one.

I still remember that in my childhood, when I had such language around me, an expression was used very often when someone forgot to turn off the light in the morning and it had already become light; people would say: You're burning the day's eyes out! — There you have an idea that is given in very concrete images. You wouldn't use some abstractions for something like that: You burn out the eyes of the day. It is something where you have more of a spiritual, but characterizing, material image and have learned the use of language from it. This is something that still lives among us today.

If we go back to ancient epochs, we have to think in very different mental states. And when we now come back to the time when the Song of Solomon was written, when everything was only a derivative of the mystery culture, we have to be aware that something that is translated with our present-day means may have an erotic touch, that within the state of mind of that ancient time it was quite something else. There is no doubt that, to a certain extent, a kind of dichotomy has taken place. Certain word meanings were originally unified, encompassing the spiritual and the physical. Then the spiritual became abstract; I would say it was bifurcated on one side, the physical on the other. This is particularly the case with erotic ideas. Eroticism is basically something that, as we understand it today, makes no sense at all for the time from which the Song of Solomon originates, not the slightest sense, because the ideas on this side were not yet as well-founded as they are today. In this respect, the strangest things are happening in our time. People come and explain to you, for example, about all kinds of sexual sins of children, and when you ask them how old the child is, it turns out to be three years old. This is, of course, complete nonsense, because talking about sexuality before the change of teeth is utter nonsense. The facts are quite different, and only our present time, which, as a certain phase of analytical psychology shows, can only develop in a very one-sided way, attributes these things to everything because it cannot see the real, true conditions.

So we must be careful not to translate something like the Song of Solomon into our abstract language. We can certainly allow it its abundance, but we must be clear that the state of mind of people in those days was different, and that the state of mind of today's people, because they throw everything into one big pot in this direction, is perhaps an erotic product. The state of mind of that era led to completely different regions. In some circles, it is a popular notion to explain the whole mystery, for example, in erotic terms. Of course, this is completely unfounded, because it is completely amateurish and has no idea what the state of mind of people in earlier times was. Therefore, it must always be said: In order to understand such things, it is essential to be able to put oneself in the shoes of the corresponding epoch. This also applies, for example, to our Gospels. Because what we have in terms of translations of the gospels does not at all reflect what is in the gospels, because the translations were basically created from a completely different state of mind and because one has to go back to the state of mind from which these writings were created.

That is what I can say about it. Of course, there is no time to go into details. I will answer the remaining eighteen questions in the next few days.

Last time an imagination was placed before our soul that liberated forces that can be of help to us on our occult path. Today two inspiring thoughts shall appear before your soul that can be effective in the same way. The essential thing about such thoughts and questions is that we let them rest in our soul for awhile, that we let them speak to us without doing much with them.

People have occupied themselves with these thoughts a great deal, but in a quite different way, so that they've led men to impossible commentaries and disputes. Grasped esoterically, they're of help to occult pupils. The first of these inspiring thoughts is the “motherless human being” who's called Adam in Genesis. Everything that comes to meet us in the way of a human being is unthinkable if he's not born from a mother. Adam is the only motherless human being; only father forces were active in him. Of course we mustn't place him before our soul as a sensorial, physical man, or when Yahweh created the first earth man in his etheric body present physical conditions didn't exit on our earth planet; and namely he created him out of the earth-planet's substances, as the Bible indicates. These substances or earth forces are still present in every man today, so that we can say: Yahweh is the father of us all, and the planet is our mother.

So father forces continue to work in men today; they are an earth-bound, planetary force. They work in everything that's on earth, and so also in men. For after the conception of a child, the mother's forces work on it, but so do the father forces; they go into the child from the earth via the father and form the upbuilding forces there that are most strongly active up to age 33.

Let's make it clear to ourselves: what happens at the birth of a new human being? The mother bears one part in her, but the other part is super-sensible—invisible and is connected with the father. Place yourself meditatively into this thought of a motherless human being, try to grasp it purely spiritually, and place a second picture beside it: that of the fatherless Christ.

Whereas planetary forces coming from the father are mainly active until the Mystery of Golgotha, forces of the cosmos, mother forces are added since then by Christ Jesus. We know that this most important of all earth events falls in the fourth cultural age of the post-Atlantean epoch. This was preceded by the Egyptian age in which the perfected Isis culture was cultivated in the Egyptian mysteries. Egyptians revered the nature forces that come to expression in all minerals, animals and plants in the figure of Isis. But an Egyptian soul looked at man sorrowfully and told himself that he wasn't aware of these nature forces in him, and that's why he thought that Isis was veiled. He said that no mortal was allowed to lift her veil to press towards her. What does this mean? Nothing else than that the Goddess lives in the astral world and not in the physical one, and that only someone who's gone through the portal of death can know her; no living person could lift her veil. That is, the effect of the Isis forces was denied to live people. And what were these Isis forces? They were pure mother forces that a man could only be given in the spiritual world before the Mystery of Golgotha, that is, when he had gone through the portal of death.

People in the Egyptian mysteries knew about this. Over Isis' picture were the words: I am the I am, that I was and that I will be—the same Eyeh asher eyeh that spoke to Moses out of the burning bush. An Egyptian could only get a presentiment of the Mystery of Golgotha, through which pure mother forces would also act upon living men. Pure mother forces—out of the cosmos—can only work in men on earth now because Christ Jesus, the fatherless human being, has completely connected himself with the earth after he went through the portal of death.

Let our modern scholars laugh when they look at the Egyptians' worship of animals. It can only fill us with the deepest reverence, for we know that what's concealed behind it is the veneration of these nature forces that were locked up for men. We look at the great wisdom that underlies all these mysteries with great wonder.

Let's ask ourselves how these two forces are active in men. The father force that's transmitted from the earth to a child via his father works in an upbuilding and strengthening way until age 33. Although the mother force that strives downwards is already at work in man, the father forces are stronger up to this time. If only the forces striving downward, Christ forces, would rule a man, he wouldn't incarnate on earth. Whereas if only the forces that strive up, the planetary ones, would rule him he would always live on earth; then there would be no death.

The sacred center of forces that was Isis in the Egyptian mysteries is the Maria-Sophia in John's Gospel in Christianity. It was only the union of ascending and descending forces that took place in the Mystery of Golgotha that enabled a man to also feel the activity of mother forces between birth and death. Christ Jesus couldn't get older than 33. From an occultist's standpoint, a man is only carrying his body with him like a corpse by the time he's 33. Of course, the effect of the forces and their change doesn't appear all at once, but happens gradually. The mother and father forces are both in man from the beginning, except that the upbuilding earth forces predominate. During the father forces period, the life we lead is conditioned by our preceding life. But from the time when the dying mother forces predominate, we create karma for the next life through this spiritual force. The father or upbuilding nature force works in us without our help, whereas to become aware of the effect of the mother force, we must strive and work in spiritual things ourselves. We must become aware of this sublime force, for it's the force that streams into us directly from Christ.

As so often before, we now get an inkling of the deep meaning in the Rosicrucian verse: We're born from the Gods—Ex Deo nascimur. The Adam force of the motherless man works on the physical body in an upbuilding and preserving way. Whereas what's working since the Mystery of Golgotha is the fatherless man, Christ Jesus, the dying force, the force that leads to the dying of the physical body here on earth and that awakens spiritual life if we devote ourselves to it consciously. In Christ we die, that is, die with all of our physical concepts and the lower ego that was built up for us while the Adam forces were active. And then we'll really experience the last line of the Rosicrucian verse: We're born again in the Holy Spirit.

[ 1 ] My first work of lecturing within the circles which grew out of the Theosophical Movement had to he planned according to the temper of mind of the groups. Theosophical literature had been read there, and people were used to certain forms of expression. I had to retain these if I wished to be understood.

[ 2 ] But with the lapse of time and the progress of the work I was able gradually to pursue my own course, even in the forms of expression used.

[ 3 ] For this reason, in the reports of lectures belonging to the first years of the anthroposophical activity, there is spread before one a true inner and spiritual picture of the path by which I moved in order to extend the knowledge of the spirit, stage by stage, so that from what lay close at hand the remote might be grasped; but one must also take this path truly according to its inwardness.

[ 4 ] The years, approximately, from 1901 to 1907 or 1908 were a time in which I stood with all the forces of my soul under the impression of the facts and Beings of the spiritual world coming close to me. Out of the experience of the spiritual world in general there grew the special sorts of knowledge. One experiences very much while composing such a book as Theosophy. At every step my endeavour was to remain always in touch with scientific knowledge. With the expansion and deepening of spiritual experience, this endeavour after such a contact takes on special forms. My Theosophy seems to fall into an entirely different tone at the moment when I pass from the description of the human being to a setting forth of the “Soul-World” and the “Spirit-Land.”

[ 5 ] While describing the human being I proceed from the results of physical science. I seek so to deepen anthropology that the human organism may appear in its differentiation. Then one can see in this how, according to its several kinds of organization, it is in different ways bound up with that penetrating it from the beings of the spheres of soul and spirit. One finds the vital activity in one form of organization; then the point of action of the etheric body becomes visible. One finds the organs of feeling (Empfindung) and of perception (Wahrnehmung); then the astral body is indicated through the physical organization. Before my spiritual perception there stood spiritually these members of man's being: etheric body, astral body, ego, etc. In setting these forth I sought to connect them with the results of physical science. Very difficult for one who wishes to remain scientific is the setting forth of the repeated earthly lives and of the destinies which are thereby determined. If one does not wish at this point to speak merely from spiritual perception, one must resort to ideas which result, to be sure, from a fine observation of the sense world, but which men fail to grasp. To such a finer manner of observation man shows himself to be, in organization and evolution, different from the animal kingdom. And if one observes this difference, life itself gives rise to the idea of repeated earthly lives; but people do not actually observe this. So such ideas seem not to be taken from life but to be conceived arbitrarily or simply taken out of more ancient world-conceptions.

[ 6 ] I faced these difficulties in full consciousness. I battled with them. And anyone who will take the trouble to review the successive editions of my Theosophy and see how I recast again and again the chapter on repeated earthly lives, for the very purpose of attaching the truths of this to those ideas which are taken from observation of the sense-world, will find what pains I took to adjust myself rightly to the recognized scientific methods.

[ 7 ] Even more difficult from this point of view were the chapters on the “Soul-World” and the “Spirit-Land.” To one who has read the preceding discussions only to take cognizance of the content, the truths set forth in these chapters will seem to be mere assertions arbitrarily uttered. But it is different for one whose experience of ideas has received an access of strength from the reading of that which is linked up with the observation of the sense-world. To him the ideas have released themselves from their bondage to sense and have taken on an independent inner life. Now, therefore, the succeeding process of soul can become an inner possession. He becomes aware of the life of released ideas. These weave and work in his soul. He experiences them as he experiences through the senses colours, tones, and sensations of warmth. And as the world of nature is given in colours, tones, etc., so is the world of spirit given to him in the experienced ideas. Of course, any one who reads the first discussions of my Theosophy without the impression of inner experience, so that he does not become aware of a metamorphosis of his previous ideal experience, – whoever, in spite of having read the preceding, goes on to the succeeding discussions as if he had begun to read the book at the chapter “The Soul-World” – such a person must inevitably reject it. To him the truths appear to be assertions set up without proof. But an anthroposophic book is designed to be taken up in inner experience. Then by stages a form of understanding comes about. This may be very weak. But it may – and should – be there. The further deepening confirmation through exercises described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment is simply a deepening confirmation. For progress on the spiritual road this is necessary; but a rightly understood anthroposophic book should be an awakener of the spiritual experience in the reader, not a certain quantity of information imparted. The reading of it should not be a mere reading; it should be an experiencing with inner commotions, tensions, and releasings.

[ 8 ] I am aware how far removed is that which I have given in books from sufficing by its own forces to bring about such an experience in the mind of the reader. But I know also that in every page my inner endeavour has been to reach the utmost possible in this direction. I do not, as regards style, so describe that my subjective feelings can be detected in the sentences. In writing, I subdue to a dry, mathematical style what has come from warm and profound experience. But only such a style can be an awakener; for the reader must cause warmth and experience to awaken in himself. He cannot simply allow these to flow into him from the one setting forth the truth, while the clarity of his own mind remains obscured.

In the picture of the fight of Michael with the Dragon one thing is clearly and strongly present; that is, the consciousness that man himself must give to his inner life of soul the direction and guidance that Nature cannot give. Our present-day thinking is inclined to mistrust such an idea. We are afraid of becoming estranged from Nature. We want to enjoy her in all her beauty, to revel in her abundance of life, and we are loath to let ourselves be robbed of this enjoyment by admitting that Nature has fallen from the Spiritual. In our striving for knowledge moreover we want to let Nature speak. We fear to lose ourselves in all kinds of fantasy, should we allow the Spirit, that transcends the perception of external Nature, to have a voice concerning the reality of things.

Goethe had no such fear. He found nowhere in Nature any estrangement from the Spirit. He opened his heart to her beauty, to the inner power and might of all that she revealed. In the life of man he felt the presence of much that was inharmonious, much that grated and jarred, or that gave rise to doubt and confusion. And he felt an inner urge and impulse to live in communion with Nature, where the eternal laws of sequence and compensation prevail. Some of his most beautiful poems have sprung from such a life with Nature.

Goethe was however at the same time fully conscious of how the work of man must fulfil and complete the work of Nature. He felt all the beauty of the plants. But he felt too something incomplete in that life which the plant displays before man. In that which weaves and works unseen within the plant, there lay for him far more than manifests itself to the eye within the bounds of visible form. For Goethe, what Nature attains is not the whole. He felt as well what we may call the purposes of Nature. He did not let himself be deterred by the fear of personifying Nature. He knew well that he was not as it were dreaming such purposes into the life of the plant out of any subjective fancy, he beheld them there quite objectively, just as truly as he could behold the colour of the flowers.

This is why he was so indignant when Schiller designated as ‘idea’ and not ‘experience’ the picture Goethe had sketched with a few strokes for his poet friend of the inner striving of the plant towards life and growth. Goethe's reply was that if that were an idea, then he could see ideas with his eyes just as well as he could perceive colours and shapes.

Goethe was conscious of how there is in Nature not only an ascending but also a descending life. He felt the growth from the seedling to leaf and bud and blossom and fruit; but he felt too how all in turn withers, decays, dries up and dies away. He felt the Spring: but he felt also the Autumn. In Summer he could partake with his own inner sympathy in the unfolding of Nature, but in Winter he could also partake in her death with the same openness of heart.

We may not find in Goethe's works a clear expression in words of this twofold experience with Nature, but we cannot fail to be sensible of it in his whole manner of thought. It is as it were an echo of the experience of Michael's fight with the Dragon. Only, the experience is lifted in Goethe to the consciousness of a later age.

The nineteenth century has not given us any further development of thought on these lines. The new perception of the Spirit that is now being attained must set itself to strive after a continuation and development of Goethe's understanding of Nature.

Our experience of Nature is incomplete as long as we partake in our inner being with her ascending life alone—seed, shoot, leaf, bud, blossom, and fruit. We need to have a feeling also for the withering and dying away. Nor shall we thereby become estranged from Nature. We have not to shut ourselves up from her Spring and her Summer, we have but to enter as well into her Autumn and her Winter.

Spring and Summer require of man that he give himself up to Nature; man lives his way out of himself and into Nature. Autumn and Winter would have man withdraw into his own human domain and set over against the death and decay of Nature the resurrection of the forces of soul and spirit. Spring and Summer are the time of man's Nature-consciousness; Autumn and Winter are the times when he must experience his own human self-consciousness.

As Autumn approaches, Nature withdraws her life into the depths of the Earth; she takes away all sprouting and blossoming far from the sight of man. What she leaves to his view bears within it no fulfilment; therein lies hope, hope for a new Spring to come. Nature leaves man alone with himself.

Then begins the time when it rests upon man to prove by his own forces within him that he is quick and alive and not dead. Summer said to man: I receive your Ego, your ‘I’; I let it bloom in my bosom with the flowers. Autumn begins now to say to man: Descend into the depth of your soul, there to find the forces whereby your ‘I’ may live, the while I hold my life hidden in the depths of the Earth. Goethe resented Haller's thought:

Ins Innere der Natur dringt kein erschaffener Geist;
glückselig, wem sie nur die äussere Schale weist.²

Goethe's feeling was:

Natur hat weder Kern noch Schale;
alles ist sie mit einem Male.³

Nature has need of death for her life; man can also live this dying through with her. Thereby he enters only more deeply into the inner being of Nature. In his own organism man experiences his breathing process and his blood circulation. They are for him his life. The germinating life of the Spring is in reality as near to man as his own breathing, it entices him out into Nature-consciousness. So too the death and decay of Autumn is in reality no further away from man than his own blood; it steels self-consciousness within him.

The Festival of Self-consciousness, bringing man near to his true humanity—wherever the leaves are falling, there it is solemnized, man only needs to become conscious of it. It is the Festival of Michael, the Festival of the Beginning of Autumn. The picture of “Michael Triumphant” can be there; it can live in man. In Summer man is received lovingly into Nature; but if he would not be deprived of the centre and balance of his being, he must not lose himself in her but be able to rise up in Autumn in the strength and might of his own spirit-being. Then will the picture of Michael Triumphant live within him.

• 2. No created spirit can penetrate the inner being of Nature: happy is he to whom she shows even the outer shell.
• 3. Nature hath neither shell nor kernel; Nature is all, and all in one.

What is said here about Spengler's book will have to be the view precisely of those who see in him an eminently representative expression of the modern soul-constitution among men of the Occident. Spengler thinks through to the end what others leave one half or one quarter done. This thinking cannot find the spiritual development-forces which work in mankind from the beginning of earth existence until far into the future. These forces live themselves out in the various cultures, so that each culture goes through childhood, maturity, and decay, then finally succumbs to death. But within each culture there is formed a seed which blossoms in the next culture and in this blossoming leads humanity through a stage of development which is necessary to it. Those abstract thinkers are wrong who see in this development only progress to ever higher stages. Many a later thing appears to a sound appraisal to be a step backward. But these steps are necessary because they lead humanity through experiences which must be gone through.

Hegel's idea, that history manifests humanity's progress in the consciousness of freedom, is certainly abstract. But at least it is a significant attempt to find a thread running through history. If you try to find for the abstract idea some content which pierces the multiplicity of human history, you need spiritual perception. Intellectualistic thinking is not adequate for this.

If this thinking remains honest, it must limit itself to describing the physiognomies of the cultures. It cannot see through the physiognomies into the souls of the cultures. But just in what reveals itself only behind the physiognomy lies the seed which leads over from one culture into another.

In this respect Spengler's work is cruelly honest. He limits himself to the physiognomies of cultures. “There are truths for the spirit: there are facts only in reference to life. Historical contemplation, which I call physiognomic time-beat, is the resolution of the blood, human knowledge expanded over the past and future, the born insight into persons and situations, into events, into what was necessary, into what had to be. It is not the mere scientific knowledge and criticism of data. For every true historian scientific experience is irrelevant or superfluous.” A man must speak this way when he completely immerses himself in intellectualistic thinking and looks honestly at historical evolution. Such a man can go no further into historic forces; but if sharp intellectuality guides his physiognomic time-beat he can depict brilliantly the various cultures.

An example of this brilliance is the chapter on “Problems of the Arabian Culture” which Spengler placed at the center of his World-historic Perspectives. The essence of the world-conceptions which, centuries before the appearance of Christianity, emerged from the womb of oriental life, is here described in a penetrating, sharp-eyed, erudite way. The concept of the “Magian” philosophy is worked out in clear contours. You see how an ancient world, in which men were limited to one locality and were placed among kinfolk so that they felt themselves to be members of the clan, is stripped away from a later world, which leads men into communities where they are held together by the consciousness of a spirit above the earthly order. In place of the god who can be thought of only in the particular spot where the clan lives, there arises the god who is independent of place and lives in the souls of the men who acknowledge him. For a local clan-god one can make no attempts at conversion. Another clan worships the god who reveals himself in another place and in other cults. It would be senseless to try to carry over to another place what bears the character of one place. For local gods there are no missionaries. These first appear when the soul raises itself to the “higher” god whose spiritual force streams into the soul. For this streaming-in one tries to win as many souls as possible.

Thus humanity enters the stage of the Magian religions. Man on earth feels himself as the sheath of the unitary world-spirit which should live in all souls. The human ego is not yet placed entirely on its own feet. It is the sheath of the world-being. This thinks in man, acts through man. This is the characteristic trait of the Magian religious feeling.

In Asia Minor this feeling appears in different peoples. Jesus, in Spengler's opinion, stands in the midst of it. Occidental Christianity arises through the fact that this Magian feeling streams into the Greek and Roman World and takes on its forms. Thus what is essentially oriental Magianism lives on in the outer forms which, in Greece and Rome, arose out of cults which themselves had no Magian orientation. In his book Spengler expresses the abstract thought through which he tries to grasp this: “In a rock-stratum are embedded crystals of a mineral. Clefts and cracks occur, water filters in, and the crystals are gradually washed out so that in due course only their hollow mold remains. Then come volcanic outbursts which explode the mountain: molten masses pour in, stiffen, and crystallize out in their turn. But these are not free to do so in their own special forms. They must fill up the spaces that they find available. Thus there arise distorted forms, crystals whose inner structure contradicts their external shape, stones of one kind presenting the appearance of stones of another kind. The mineralogists call this phenomenon pseudomorphosis. I call historical pseudomorphosis those cases where an older alien culture lies so massively over the land that a young culture, born in this land, cannot get its breath and fails not only to achieve pure and specific expression-forms, but even to develop fully its own self-consciousness.”

Thus in the western Christianity of the first centuries Magian Arabism lives itself out as a pseudomorphosis. It takes on the forms of the Greek and Roman World. “Actually, Augustine was the last great thinker of Early Arabian Scholasticism, anything but a Western spirit. Not only was he at times a Manichaean, but he remained so even as a Christian in some important characteristics, and his closest relations are to be found amongst the Persian theologians of the later Avesta, with their doctrines of the Store of Grace of the Holy Ones and of absolute guilt.”

Thus does the matter appear to one who observes the physiognomy of Arabism and pursues it with a clear eye down to the personalities in whom it can still be traced. But the soul is not perceived here, the soul which does not only stream into a strange environment as a pseudomorphosis but experiences this environment, shows itself to be a germ which comes to birth in new forms. The abstract mineral metaphor is not enough. The soul of a culture lives and perceives its environment. Out of this perceiving it unfolds, not a pseudomorphosis, but a transformed impulse. The characteristic thing in Augustine is not his Manichaeanism nor his relation to Persian theologians, but his elemental self-perception which makes itself a part of Christian Rome and thereby forms a concept of grace and guilt. This concept is distorted when one points only to physiognomic similarity to oriental views. On Augustine's physiognomy there is no living-on of the Orient, transformed and grown older; rather is this physiognomy like that of a son who bears the features of the father, but has a soul of his own.