The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Address by Rudolf Steiner at the General Assembly of the German Section of the Theosophical Society, Berlin, December 15, 1911 (morning)

Foreword by Marie Steiner to the private reproduction published by her in 1947 and entitled “A Future Impulse Given by Rudolf Steiner and What Came of It Initially”:

In view of the gravity of the times and the little that remains of our lives, it seems an urgent duty to salvage what can still be saved from Dr. Steiner's impulses and words. This includes some of the things he only spoke about in intimate circles in serious conversation at certain turning points in events about the further tasks and work goals of the movement he inaugurated. Transcripts are available, but not complete and comprehensive. Even if they contain gaps and perhaps some finer nuances are not captured in them, one can still well feel how varied the language is, corresponding to the assigned task, in each case vividly contoured and firm, or dissolving, letting a light shine through the language, which still has to be half-veiled because words are not enough. It covers it like a soft shroud, but through which the impulses can work that point to the future. He repeatedly placed in our souls the guiding forces for later action, seeds of the future that could unfold after surviving the sleep of the soul; all too often they were buried by the hustle and bustle of everyday life or swept away by the whirlwind of events. Among the souls that had been blessed with such seeds of the future, there were certainly some from which they would one day arise to new life and struggle; but there were also some that would be like the stony ground of the gospel parable, offering no nourishment to them at first. Not only nature, but also souls are subject to organic laws. Some of the spiritual influences that fall on them harden or corrupt them, while others prove to be full of germinating power and transform themselves into new forms of existence. The passage through death and the submergence into chaos, with its whirling, churning forces, guarantees the later resurrection of the spiritual impact through metamorphoses to higher levels of existence. In microcosm as in macrocosm, in earthly as in planetary existence, the law of transformation to new forms of existence prevails. By following this path and, depending on race and nationality, picturing and explaining it, religions have always climbed higher levels of knowledge, spanning the globe and, in keeping with the times, shining a light into the hidden depths. When a certain high point of this development had been reached and at the same time the danger of philosophical abstraction had arisen, when the old images and signs were no longer sufficient to capture the newly pulsating life, the Christian impact occurred, bringing the great turning point. But when it emerged from the darkness of the catacombs into the outer world, the danger of its consolidation into dogmas also began, and the driving living forces sought new paths. They found them in the secret societies that did not want to bow to the authority of the princes of the church and the decisions of the councils; now they were persecuted as heretics themselves. Their content, veiled from the outside world, was expressed in signs and symbols. They gave art a new slant, which first appeared in Gothic architecture; organic growth of the plant - to which stones were added. The new life also flowed into the names; these contained what the soul was to absorb as guiding forces in order to develop healthily before it achieved independence. But the education of humanity to independence, into which the newly awakened ego power had to pour, first demanded the passage through abstract intellectualism, which separated the souls from their spiritual source for a time, so that, passing through the cold of isolation, grasping the higher ego, they would be able to find themselves in the spirit. Knowledge of nature, divorced from spirit, no longer gives the soul the power to rise up. In order for this to be experienced and recognized, spirits had to break worlds. We now stand in the midst of shattered worlds; a new search for the solution to the riddle of fate has begun. Rudolf Steiner's life's work can provide answers to this searching and questioning. He mastered the scope of today's exact science; he can also reveal to us the spirit that is hidden behind it and was once shrouded in the old names. Through him we are able to divine the impelling forces that lie behind the names. Lifelines had been handed to us for the inevitably approaching shipwreck, but we were not mature enough to grasp and use them. The souls were not awake enough, were still caught up in the old ideas. The attempts made in social terms met with the strongest resistance from the outside world. We can be seized by a tremendous pain when we see how little we were able to make the teaching fruitful and be suitable instruments for the fire spirit of the helper sent in times of need. Standing on the ruins of shattered worlds, we must now try to bring the preserved and insufficiently fiery word to consciousness through the remaining traces of writing; by individual work, raising it to the human ego. Rudolf Steiner tried to lead us to freedom not only through the paths of philosophy and science, but also through education within the esoteric life, which would gradually transform the old relationship of dependency on the teacher into the impulse of freedom and responsibility before the spirit. Souls that feel anchored in the spirit must be tested. Such a self-sought test always precipitates karma; what would still prefer to remain hidden from itself must also come to light. Such tests often caused the failure of experiments by spiritual powers, brought about for profound cosmic reasons, which aimed to raise human development to a higher level. This was the case with the French Revolution, and also before the world wars of our century.

Rudolf Steiner first spoke of such future tasks to a very small circle of his students and tried to direct their souls to the significance of those distant tasks that must arise from human will freed from selfishness. He repeated these words before a larger circle at the General Assembly on December 15, 1911. This did not take place during the proceedings of the General Assembly itself; he declared that it was happening outside of its program. He began this address in a particularly solemn and impressive manner. This is perhaps the reason why the first part of the address is only noted down and not reproduced in his words. He emphasized that the content of this lecture was completely independent of everything that had been given before. It was, so to speak, a direct communication from the spiritual world. It is like a call that is brought to humanity, and then they wait to see what echo comes back to them. As a rule, such a call is made three times. If the call goes unheard the third time, it is taken back to the spiritual world for a long time. This call has already been made to humanity once, but unfortunately it found no echo. This is the second time. These are purely spiritual matters. With each unsuccessful time, the conditions and circumstances become more difficult. Continuing with what is preserved as a set of keywords in the postscript, he said:

My dear friends!

It is my duty at this moment to carry an intention from the inner circle of those who already know about it out into your wider circle. And before that happens, let me say a few words in advance. It should be emphasized, however, that what is said now has no connection with what has preceded in this General Assembly, or what otherwise somehow relates to the previous negotiations - which does not preclude, if there is a tendency to do so, to take it into account in later negotiations.

If we look around the world today, we will have to say: The present world is actually full of ideals. And if we ask ourselves, “Is the representation of these ideals on the part of those who believe in them and place themselves at the service of these ideals sincere and honest?” we will have to answer “Yes, that is the case!” in very many cases. It is the case precisely with that faith and devotion of which individuals are capable. If we now ask: “How much is usually demanded when such a representation of ideals is brought into being by someone or something, be it an individual or a society?” then, based on our observations of life, we will have to answer: “In most cases, everything is demanded, so to speak; but above all, it is demanded that the ideal that has been set up receive absolute, unconditional recognition.” And it is almost always the case that the very basis for the creation of such an ideal is the demand for the most absolute assent. And usually the failure of such assent is expressed in some disparaging criticism of the non-assenter.

These words are intended to characterize how the principle of the integration of people has emerged in a completely natural way in the course of human development, and no doubt is to be cast on the justification of such a principle at this moment. But here an opportunity is to be presented to you to add something to all that has been striven for in the world within the framework of the organization of people, societies, associations and so on, something that actually cannot be expressed in words, since what can be said can never be decisive for the correctness of such a thing. According to what a person is able to think, he can, at the moment when he expresses what he has thought, be forced by the very act of expression to fall into contradiction with reality. At this very moment, many things must be said that do not agree with much of what is valid in the world. So it must be said: It is possible that the confession of a thing can no longer be true when this confession is uttered. I would like to give a simple example from which you can see that there may be a danger of simply becoming untrue by uttering a thing. And I would like the simple, straightforward example I give to be understood in accordance with the Rosicrucian principles since the 13th century.

Let us assume that someone expresses their state of the immediate present by saying, “I am silent.” This is something that absolutely cannot be true, that they are not speaking the truth. But then, my dear friends, I ask you to realize that there is the possibility of negating this thing itself by literally confessing it. For from what is expressed here by the simple example of “I am silent”, you can conclude that it is applicable to countless things in the world and can happen again and again.

But what follows from such a fact? It follows that when people want to join together in any way to represent this or that, they are in an extraordinarily difficult position, that people cannot join together with the most precious thing they have, except when the reasons why they join together are such that they do not belong to the world of the senses but to the supersensible world. And when we understand what we have been able to assimilate over time from all that has been brought forth from modern occultism, we will realize that it is an absolute necessity for the near future to advocate certain things of this occultism, to carry them before the world. Therefore, in contrast to all the principles of societies and all the organizations that have been possible up to now, an attempt must be made with something completely new, with something that is born entirely out of the spirit of the occultism that is so often spoken of in our circle. But this can only be done by turning our attention for a change to something positive, something that already exists in the world as a reality and can be cultivated as such. But in our sense, realities are only those things that primarily belong to the supersensible world. For the whole sensual world presents itself to us as an image of the supersensible world. Therefore, an attempt will be made that is such as it must be made from the supersensible world: the attempt not to found a community of people, but to endow it.

I have emphasized the difference between founding and establishing on another occasion; it was many years ago. It was not understood at the time and since then hardly anyone has thought about this difference. Therefore, those spiritual powers that are represented by the symbol of the Rose Cross have so far ignored the fact that this difference has been carried out into the world.

But recently, and this time in an energetic way, an attempt must be made to see if it is possible to achieve success even with a community that is not founded but established. If this success is not achieved, well, then it has failed again for a while. Therefore, it shall be proclaimed to you at this moment that among those people who will find each other in the appropriate way, a way of working is to be founded that, through the manner of the foundation, has as its direct starting point the individuality that we have been designating as Christian Rosenkreutz since ancient times in the West. What can be said about this foundation today remains preliminary. For what has been founded so far relates only to one part of this foundation, which is to enter the world in a comprehensive sense when the opportunities arise. What has been founded so far relates to one department, to one branch of this foundation, namely to the artistic representation of Rosicrucian occultism.

The first point I have to communicate to you is that under the direct patronage of that individuality, whom we refer to by the name he gave to the outer world during his two incarnations, that under the patronage of this individuality, a working method is to be brought into being as a foundation. This method will initially be characterized by the fact that for some time, for the time being, it will bear the provisional name: “Society for Theosophical Art and Art”. This name is not the final one; a definitive name will take its place when the first preparations for launching this foundation into the world can be made in an appropriate manner. However, that which is to comprise the “theosophical art” is still completely in its infancy, because it is only now that the preparations for it are being made that could lead to an understanding of what is meant by it. But what can be grasped by the concept of the theosophical art has already begun in many ways through our attempts at the performances in Munich, and above all has made a significant start through the attempt at our site in Stuttgart and a further significant start in relation to the understanding of such a thing precisely through the establishment of the Johannes-Bauverein. All this is something that has been started. In this respect there is something that, having been tried out to a certain extent, may be sanctioned.

It is a matter of awakening a purely spiritual task within the working group, a task that will be exhausted in a spiritual way of working and in what results from such a spiritual way of working. And it is a matter of no one being able to become a member of this working group from any other point of view than solely through the fact that he has any will to use his powers for the positive side of the matter. You may say: I am speaking in many words that may not be fully understood. That must be the case with something like what it is about here, because the matter must be grasped in its direct life.

Now, what has already been achieved within this foundation is actually the fact that, according to purely occult principles, an initially very small, tiny circle has been created, which should see its obligation as being to contribute to what this is all about. This tiny group is initially designed to make a start on this foundation, in order to, in a sense, separate what our spiritual movement is from myself and give it its own, self-established existence, a self-established existence!

So that initially this small group comes before you with the sanction that it has received its task as such, by virtue of its own recognition of our spiritual current, and that it sees in a certain sense the principle of the sovereignty of spiritual striving, the principle of federalism and the independence of all spiritual striving as an absolute necessity for the spiritual future, and to carry it into humanity in the way he considers appropriate. Therefore, within the foundation itself, I will only be considered the interpreter, first of all, of the principles that, as such, only exist in the spiritual world, and of what is to be said in this way about the intentions that underlie the matter.

In contrast, a curator is initially appointed for the external care of this foundation. And since the offices that will be created first are associated with nothing more than duties, no honors, no dignities, it is impossible that any rivalries or other misunderstandings can arise immediately with the correct understanding of the matter. It will therefore be a matter of the foundation itself initially recognizing Fräulein von Sivers as curator. This recognition is no

different from that which is interpreted from within the foundation itself; there are no appointments, only interpretations: Fräulein von Sivers is interpreted as curator of the foundation. And it will be her task in the near future to do whatever can be done in the spirit of this foundation to recruit a corresponding circle of members for it - not in an external sense, but only in such a way that she will attract to herself those who have the sincere will to participate in this way of working.

In a broader sense, a number of side branches will be created within this one branch of our foundation. And individual personalities who have proven themselves within our spiritual movement will be appointed as leading personalities of these side branches, insofar as they already exist. This too is an interpretation for the time being, in the sense that the office of leadership of such an individual side branch is transferred to a personality. It is interpreted that there will be an archdeacon for each of these individual sub-branches. We will have a sub-branch for general art. It has been publicly announced that Fräulein von Eckardtstein has been appointed archdeacon for general art in a small circle – and this was done in express recognition of what this personality has done for this general theosophical art over the last few years. Furthermore, it was provisionally announced that the curator Fräulein von Sivers would be archdeacon for literature. It was also announced that our friend Dr. Felix Peipers would be archdeacon for architectural art; our friend Mr. Adolf Arenson would be archdeacon for musical art; and our friend Mr. Hermann Linde would be archdeacon for painting.

The work in question is essentially inward-looking, and for the first time what is to be presented to the world is work done in absolute freedom, particularly by these individual personalities. It will be necessary for those who belong to this way of working to come together in a certain way; this coming together will have to take place in a very different way than has been the case so far with any kind of organization. And we will need a supervisor of this union. To supervise this union, the position of conservator is created, which is initially given to Miss Sophie Stinde. The way in which the union is to take place will be linked to this union itself. All this still requires work in the near future; it will still have to be done. But in order for the type of union, in other words the principle of the organization, to take place, to be able to enter the world, we necessarily have a seal curator. Miss Sprengel has been appointed as the seal curator, while Dr. Carl Unger will be the secretary.

This is, for the time being, the small, tiny circle involved. Do not regard it as something that immodestly wants to step into the world and say, “There I am,” but regard it as something that wants to be nothing more than a germ around which the matter itself can organize itself. It will initially organize itself in such a way that by the coming Epiphany a number of members of this community will have been identified; that is, by then a number of members will have received the message that they are initially being asked to get their connection ready. So that for the very beginning the greatest possible freedom in this respect is to be secured by the fact that the will to become a member can come from no one other than the person concerned who wants to become a member. And the fact that he is a member is brought about by the fact that he is first recognized as such a member. This only applies to the very near future, only for the time until the next Epiphany, January 6, 1912.

So in this matter we have something before us that, through its very nature, betrays itself as something that flows out of the spiritual world. It will continue to present itself as flowing out of the spiritual world in that membership will always be based solely on the representation and recognition of spiritual interests and on the exclusion of everything, absolutely everything personal.

There is a deviation here from older occult principles, which is made in this proclamation, and this deviation consists precisely in the fact of this proclamation. Therefore, no use will be made of that claim, which might exist with a person if he were to say, by referring this to the present: “I am silent.” The matter is indeed proclaimed; and in full awareness that it is proclaimed, this should happen. But the moment someone shows that they do not understand today's proclamation in any way, it goes without saying that it cannot be suggested to them in any way to belong to such a way of working - I am not saying to a society or the like. Because there can be nothing other than the absolutely free will to belong to such a circle, to such a way of working. But you will see that if such a thing should come about - if, that is, our time, with its peculiarities, should allow such a thing to come about - then work can really be done in the sense of recognizing the spiritual principle; the principle that not only all nature and all history, but also all human activity entering the world, is based on the spiritual, supersensible world. And you will see that it will be impossible for any decent person to belong to such a community if he does not agree with this community as such. If you think that what has been said is rather strange, then please accept it as having been said with full

is that everything that belongs to the laws, to the eternal laws of existence, is observed. And it is also part of the eternal laws of existence that the principles of becoming are taken into account. My dear friends, you can sin against the spirit of what is supposed to happen here if you now go out into the

go out into the outside world and say, “This or that has been established.” Not only has nothing been established at all, but the fact is that it will not be possible to give a definition of what is to be done at any given hour, because everything is supposed to be in a state of continuous becoming. And what is actually to happen as a result of what has been said today cannot be described now, no definition or description can be given now, and anything that would be said about it would be untrue at this moment. For what is to happen is based not on words, but on people, and not even on people, but on what these people will do. It will be in a living river, a living becoming. And so today, too, nothing more is established as a principle than the one principle that consists of: recognition of the spiritual world as the fundamental reality.

All further principles are to be created in the process of development. Just as a tree in the next moment is no longer what it was before, but has begun to grow anew, so this matter is to be like a living tree. Never should that which this matter is to become be in any way compromised by that which it is. If someone were to define what has been designated as a beginning, as this or that reason, this or that thing out there in the world, then he would immediately succumb to the same untruth that lies in the expression “I am silent” when it refers to the state in which he is and uses the words “I am silent”. So anyone who uses these or those words in any way to characterize the matter is saying something that is not right in all circumstances. So first of all it is only important - because everything will be in the process of becoming - that the personalities who want something like this come together. It is only important that those personalities who want something like this come together. Then the matter will continue! From all that has been said, you can see that the matter will then continue. It will differ in its deepest principle from that of the Theosophical Society. For not a single one of the characteristics that have been expressed today can apply to the Theosophical Society.

I had to speak about this matter for the simple reason that those things which are organically connected with this foundation have already come before the public of our Theosophical Society, and because through this foundation – in the sense of intentions which truly do not lie in the physical world and which truly have nothing to do with Ahriman - an ideal-spiritual counterweight must be created against everything that is connected with a foundation in the outer world. Only in this respect can a relationship be seen with what is already there, so that this branch of our foundation, the branch for theosophical art, should achieve something that is a counterweight to what is linked to Ahriman on the physical plane.

It is hoped that an excellent example will be set by the existence of this branch of our foundation - and the other branch will serve in a corresponding way - because what is to figure as art within the theosophical movement, if we use that expression today, must actually flow into our culture from spiritual worlds. It must be the case that spiritual life is the basis of everything we do. It will be impossible to confuse this spiritual movement with any movements that come from the outside world and also call themselves a “theosophical movement” and want to participate. It is essential that the spiritual is the basis of everything we do. This was indeed attempted at the festival in Munich, in the building of the Lodge in Stuttgart – within the limits of what is possible under present conditions – but everywhere it was attempted in such a way that the spiritual moment was the determining factor. That is the conditio sine qua non, the condition without which nothing should happen (gap in the transcripts).

Those who have already gained some insight into what is at stake will understand me in this regard. These words are said less because of the content than because of the guidelines that were to be given.

Postscript by Marie Steiner to the reproduction she edited:

When no further nominations were announced after the end of the year and the next Epiphany, a member of the audience asked Rudolf Steiner when this would happen. He replied: “The fact that this has not happened would also be an answer.

The year 1912/13 was overburdened by the disputes with Annie Besant, her proclamation of the new Messiah and her “Star of the East” now also active in Germany.

The followers of the Western spiritual movement inaugurated by Rudolf Steiner demanded that the president make a precise statement in the disputes that were taking place, in accordance with the agreements reached in Munich and Budapest, instead of her evasion, her hiding and acting behind her back. This demand was taken up by the “Bund”, which was founded around 1912 with members from many countries, and in 1913 the Anthroposophical Society was founded after the expulsion of the German section by the president of the Theosophical Society.

Meanwhile, the nomination of the intimate circle had led to further work in some areas: in the Johannesbau Association, in the completion of the Stuttgart Society House, and in the so-called Art and People's Rooms in Munich and Berlin, an initiative started by Miss Sophie Stinde. The most outstanding spiritual publication was the Soul Calendar, the result of a collaboration between Dr. Steiner and Fräulein von Eckardtstein; the wonderfully transparent nuances of the language here really do allow spirit and soul to flow into each other and become one with nature. Many other things sought a quiet unfolding into the future. But the world war came, and with it the associated upheavals, which deeply affected the external circumstances of life and the mutual relationships of the members belonging to the most diverse nations in Dornach.

They tried to overcome the surging of the blood as best they could, but every now and then there were shocks and derailments.

The most exciting crisis for Dornach was that of the summer of 1915. Dr. Gösch, a typical pathologist and representative of psychoanalysis, came to the fore. He persuaded himself that the Seal-keeper had opened his eyes to promises that Dr. Steiner made and did not keep. He set this out in a brochure using psychoanalytical methods. At the same time, he wrote a letter to Dr. Steiner in which he developed his theories on the basis of the “revelations” made to him by the Keeper of the Seal. The Keeper of the Seal could not have understood the task assigned to her by this name other than in a very personal sense. She felt that she was the inspirer of the spiritual teaching given by Dr. Steiner to humanity. Since she had also played the role of Theodora in Rudolf Steiner's mystery dramas in Munich, she drew from this the conclusion that the marriage vows given to her were symbolically given and that she had been waiting for their fulfillment for “seven years”. Her many accusatory letters, revolving around this point, gave Dr. Gösch the opportunity to compile a psychoanalytical treatise in the Freudian sense to elucidate her case. He himself had been given Freudian treatment for a long time due to his morbid nervous condition, which had deeply infected his being. His open letter of accusation has now given rise to numerous, strictly and precisely conducted negotiations within the Society, through which the membership should gain clarity about this case. Transcripts of these are available and also provided the basis for the book published as a special edition of the journal “Anthroposophie” in Stuttgart: “Anthroposophie und Psychoanalyse”.

We shall mention here only what relates to the case of Sprengel – alias Proserpina – alias Theodora – alias Siegelbewahrer (Keeper of the Seals), and which in her case took on such a mystically personal form as megalomania. Of course, even before the war she had already shown symptoms of self-arrogance. This unfortunate megalomania put paid to the possibility of further nominations to the circle of eight personalities. One stone had been lost through egoistic arrogance and a descent into mysticism.

The Keeper of the Seal broke the seal in the most ordinary human sense. The necessity of involving women as active collaborators in the cultural tasks of the future is undeniable and will have to be achieved despite the failure of these efforts in individual cases. This is what happened to us with the Keeper of the Seal.

Dr. Steiner expressed himself about this case in a speech during the so-called crisis of 1915 in the following way:

The circle of nominees, as an inner esoteric matter, was shattered; outside the world war raged; in Dornach, despite the external circumstances, the practical work continued no less intensively. With the conscription of so many artists and helpers, the burden of the work fell heavily on the women. Only a few men had been able to stay behind, including Hermann Linde. But the women stood their ground. From early morning, the hammering and chiseling could be heard in the construction of the precious wood, which grew out of the concrete substructure, up to the vaulting domes. The organically moving forms grew out of the outer and inner walls, warmed and undulated by the human hand that furrowed them. In the interior, the columns rose with their bases and capitals, their architraves, at the end of which the two domes joined together, thus separating and connecting the symbolism of the soul's experience from that of the cosmos at the same time.

The painters and their helpers were grouped around Hermann Linde. Dr. Steiner had designed the motifs for the painting of the domes, and we have these images in the reproductions by Alinari. With diligence and zeal, new grounding possibilities were tried out, through which the effect of the plant colors could unfold into radiant luminosity; a group of helpers eagerly ground the plants from which the new colors for the dome painting were to be created. The programs designed for the weekly eurythmy performances provided an opportunity to develop personal imagination and to train in the templates designed by Dr. Steiner for this purpose.

In Germany, the field of work assigned to the circle-bursting seal keeper had very soon found a more than adequate replacement in the person of Miss Bertha Meyer. During the months we spent in Germany during the war, she was often able to come from Bremen to Berlin to perfect her knowledge of the art of jewelry, in which she had a technical command, through the advice of Dr. Steiner. The extensive gem collection of a member who had returned from the Orient provided a happy opportunity for new inspiration. Stones were selected from it whose luminosity and inner substance were to be particularly emphasized by a setting corresponding to their nature and material. It was a strange experience to let your hand glide through their abundance and to feel the penetration of their powers into your own etheric body through the cool trickling of the stones. This grasp into the coolness of the stone kingdom and the almost exciting glow of the metal melting in the fire, especially of gold, brought the elementary nature of the forces of nature forcefully to consciousness.

The seals sketched by Dr. Steiner for the mystery plays provided the basis for the spiritual study of this predestined keeper of the seals, who left us so many exemplary works of art. Death snatched her from us at the moment when a place for her work, a 'Kleinodienschule', could have been established in Dornach. The formative forces of eurythmy, which is carried and moved by the etheric impulses, and of the musical art that seeks new paths in connection with it, also tested themselves through these seals. They now wanted to go beyond the inner experience of major and minor, beyond the fifth, to catch a glimpse of the original forces in the tone to which they owe their existence, thus feeling their way towards the lost word.

The new architectural style created by Dr. Steiner, which had absorbed the movement of the plant kingdom and did not close itself off from the outside world but opened itself wide to it, had to remain true to this principle in the treatment of his glass windows as well. A flood of colors had to stream into the room; their basic tone, differentiated according to the rainbow but each kept uniform, brought the floating and weaving of the intersecting light colors into the room. The delicacy of the nuances was intensified by the different densities of the glass that resulted from the grinding and etching of the motifs into the glass material; their spiritual content related to the path of initiation of the human being into the future. While the motifs of the large and small dome traced the macrocosmic and microcosmic path of human development to its self-fulfillment.

The art of black and white in a newly defined line by Dr. Steiner developed alongside that of penetrating into the world of creative colors. And all these artistic possibilities, arising from the most diverse elements, came to life in the art of the spoken word, of speech formation, which allowed the original forces of the lost “word” to be sensed and grasped to a certain extent. Through the little that has been achieved in this way, through rigorous work, something of what Dr. Steiner had described as the task of the spiritual movement he had inaugurated could be realized: to allow the forgotten spiritual current surrounding Goethe and Schiller to flow again into culture in a new and living way.

We have lived in the abundance of the impulses we have received. He himself was snatched from us by death in 1925. With death, he had to pay for the immeasurable wealth of his gifts. We have been invigorated and sustained by his inspiring spiritual power. Through suffering and trial, through stupefaction and moral obscurity, we must now seek the paths to inner freedom and independence, for which he wanted to awaken an understanding in us. May we be granted to find it.

Today our lecture will again be preceded by the recitation of a poem intended to illustrate various matters that I shall discuss today and tomorrow. This time we are dealing with a poem by one whom we may call a non-poet because, as compared with his other spiritual activity, this poem appears as a by-product, written for an occasion. It is, therefore, a soul manifestation that in a sense did not proceed from the innermost impulses of the soul. Precisely this fact will bring clearly to light a number of points connected with our subject. The poem is by the philosopher, Hegel, and concerns certain phases of mankind's initiation.

Eleusis

To Hölderlin

Peace, all around me and within! The tireless cares
Slumber, of busy men. They give to me
Leisure and liberty. Oh night, I thank thee, thou
That set'st me free! With shimmering haze of white
The uncertain confines of the distant hills
Are shrouded by the moon; and, from between,
With kindly twinkle glitters one bright strip
Of yonder lake.
The tedious clatter of the day recedes,
As memory had laid long years between.
Thy image, now, beloved, rises up
With joys of bygone days. Yet soon these yield
To sweeter hopes of new and speedy meeting:
I paint the scene already—the eager step,
The warm embrace: and that, more intimate,
When each probes each with questions, to espy
What new things time has wrought within his friend
Of feeling, view and utt'rance; the glad certitude
That the old covenant maintains its faith,
Even truer, firmer, riper than before;
That covenant, not sealed by any oath:

To live unto free truth alone;
And never, never to make truce
With that convention which would regulate
The feelings and opinions.
Now must the thought, that bore me once o'er streams and mountain heights
To you on wings, confer with dull reality.
Yet soon a sigh betrays their quarreling, and with it flees
Away the dream of sweet imaginings.

My eyes are lifted to the vault of the eternal heavens,
To ye, ye radiant, starry host of height;
And, every hope and every wish effacing,
Forgetfulness rains down from your eternity.

My mind doth lose itself in gazing:
Gone is what I called mine:
I yield myself to the immeasurable;
I am in him, am All, am nothing else.

Returning thought, in fearsome alienation,
Recoils before the infinite, and fails, astounded,
To fathom such a vision's depths.
But fancy to the mind draws down the eternal,
And marries it to form. All hail to you!
Exalted spirits! Lofty shadows!
From whose clear brows fulfillment radiates.
Be not afraid!
This dazzling brightness that enwraps you round;
I feel I too have here my home.

Ha! Did the gates start of thy sanctuary,
Ceres? Oh, thou who in Eleusis throned'st!
Enthused, intoxicate, I feel
Thy awesome presence near
Would comprehend thy revelations.

Would read the symbols' lofty purport, and o'erhear
The festal choirs of the gods,
The dooms they utter from their council-seats!

But silenced are thy halls today, oh Goddess!
Fled is the conclave of the gods to high Olympus,
Far from their profanated altar-places;
Spurning the grave of desecrate mankind,
Fled is that genius of innocency

Whose spell once lured them: mute the wisdom of thy priests.
No single note of all the sacred rite
Escaped to reach us; and in vain the searchers delve,
Moved more by curiosity than love
For wisdom. Her they possess indeed! Disdaining thee.
In hopes to master her, they burrow after words
To find the imprint of thy lofty mind.
Tis vain! They grasp but a handful of dust and ashes,
To which they nevermore shall conjure back thy life!
Yet in the rotting, soulless mould they take their pleasure,
Aye dead themselves, and with the dead content!

Of thy high banquets there remains no token;
Of all the pictured forms not any fleeting trace.
Too holy for the children of thy mysteries
The depths of that unutterable feeling,
The rich contents of that exalted lore,
To be entrusted to a barren symbol.
Even thought itself can compass not the soul,
Who, beyond time and space, aspectant of infinity,
Rapt, self-oblivious, back to consciousness once more
Awakes. And, would he tell to others what he knows,
Though spoke with angels' tongues, the words were all too poor.
And horror seizes him, that holiest thing,
Even in thought belittled, by his words
To make so little, that the very speech seems sin.
And shuddering, he closes up his lips.
This vow, the initiate laid upon himself, wise law
Laid upon meaner spirits: never to make known
What, on a holy night, they saw and felt and heard.
Lest even the nobler sort should find their barking folly
Trouble his devotion, and their wordy trash
Stir him to wroth even with the holiest,—lest it should be
So trampled in the mire,—so mere a thing of rote
That it became the plaything of the sophists
A ware word-mongers hawk about and chaffer,
Dispensing penny-wise;

A cloak for clever-tongued hypocrisy,—a birch, perchance,
To school the merry child,—and at the end, so void,
So utterly empty, that its sole life's root
Is in its echo upon alien tongues.
Thy sons, oh goddess, did not vainly flaunt
Thy honor in the streets and market-place, but bore it
Locked in their bosom's inmost shrine.
Therefore thou livest not within their mouths:
Thee with their lives they worshipped; in their deeds thou livest still.

This night, too, holy one! I have beheld thee,—
Thee, whom in thy sons' lives I oft times found revealed,
And felt unseen, as soul of all their deeds.
Thou art that lofty purpose, that firm faith
Of Godhead, which—though all the world should fall—nor swerves nor shakes.

In the last two lectures it was stated that in studying the soul life we find it filled out up to its boundaries principally by reasoning and the experiences of love and hate, the latter, as we showed, being connected with desire. Now, it might seem as though this statement ignored the most important factor, the very element through which the soul experiences itself most profoundly in its inner depths, that is, feeling. It might seem as though the soul life had been characterized precisely by what is not peculiar to it, and as though no account had been taken of what surges back and forth, up and down in the soul life, investing it with its character of the moment, the life of feeling.

We shall see, however, that we can best understand the dramatic phases of the soul life if we approach the subject of feeling by starting from the two elements mentioned. Again we must begin with simple facts of the soul life, and these are the sense experiences that enter through the portals of our senses, penetrating the soul life, and there carrying on their existence. On the one hand, the waves of the soul life surge to the portals of the senses and thence take back into it the results of the sense perceptions, which then live on independently in the soul. Compare this fact with the other one: that everything comprised in the experiences of love and hate, deriving from desire, also arise in the inner soul life itself, as it were. Desires seem to arise in the center of the soul life, and even to a superficial observer they appear to lead to love and hate.

Desires themselves, however, are not originally to be found in the soul. They arise at the portals of the senses. Consider that first of all. Think of the everyday life of the soul. In observing yourself thus you will notice how the expressions of desire arise in you through contact with the outer world. So we can say that by far the greatest portion of the soul life is achieved at the boundary of the sense world, at the portals of the senses.

This must be thoroughly understood, and we will best be able to grasp it by representing in a sort of diagram what we recognize as fact. We will be able to characterize the intimacies of the soul life by imagining it as filling out a circle.

Let us imagine, then, that the content of the soul life is represented by what the circle encloses, and further imagine our sense organs as a sort of portals, as openings leading to the outer world, in the manner set forth in the lectures on Anthroposophy. If we now consider what is to be observed only within the soul, we should have to represent it graphically by showing the flood surging from the center in all directions and expressing itself in the phenomena of love and hate. Thus the soul is entirely filled by desires, and we find this flood surging right up to the portals of the senses.

The question now arises as to what it is that we experience when a sense experience occurs. What takes place when we experience a tone through the ear, a smell through the nose? Let us for the moment disregard the content of the outer world. Call to mind once more, on the one hand, the actual moment of sense perception, that is, the intercommunication with the outer world. Relive vividly the moment during which the soul experiences itself within, so to speak, while having a color or tone experience of the outer world through the portals of the senses. On the other hand, remember that the soul lives on in time, retaining as recollected visualizations what it acquired through the sense experience in question. Here we must sharply differentiate between what the soul continues to carry along as permanent experience of the recollected visualizations and the experience of the activity of the sense perception, otherwise we should stray into thought processes like Schopenhauer's.

Now we ask, “What happened in that moment when the soul was exposed to the outer world through the portals of the senses?” When you consider that the soul, as experience directly reveals, is really filled with the flood of desires, and you ask what it actually is that flows to the portals of the senses when the soul lets its own inner being surge there, you find it to be the desires themselves. This desire knocks at the gate; at this moment it actually comes in contact with the outer world, and while doing so it receives a seal imprint, as it were, from the other side. When I press a seal with a crest into wax, what remains of the seal in the wax? Nothing but the crest. You could not maintain that what remains does not tally with what had acted from without. That would not be unprejudiced observation, but Kantianism. Unless you are discussing external matter you cannot say that the seal itself does not enter the wax, but rather, you must consider the point at issue: the crest is in the wax. The important thing is what opposes the crest in the seal and into which the crest has stamped itself. Just as the seal yields nothing out of itself but the crest, so the outer world furnishes nothing but the imprint. But something must oppose the seal if an imprint is to come about. You must therefore think of it so that in what opposes the sense experience an imprint has formed from without, and this we carry with us, this imprint come into being in our own soul life. That is what we take along, not the color or the tone itself, but what we have had in the way of experiences of love and hate, of desires.

Is that altogether correct? Could there be something directly connected with a sense experience, something like a desire that must press outward? Well, if nothing of the sort existed you would not carry the sense experience with you in your subsequent soul life; no memory visualization would form. There is, indeed, a psychic phenomenon that offers direct proof that desire always makes contacts outward from the soul through the portals of the senses, whether the perceptions be those of color, smell, or hearing; that is the phenomenon of attention. A comparison between a sense impression during which we merely stare unseeing and one to which we give our attention shows us that in the former case the impression cannot be carried on in the soul life. You must respond from within through the power of attention, and the greater the attention, the more readily the soul retains the memory visualization in the further course of life.

Thus the soul, through the senses, comes in touch with the outer world by causing its essential substance to penetrate the outermost bounds, and this manifests itself in the phenomenon of attention.

In the case of direct sense experience the other element pertaining to the soul life, reasoning, is eliminated. That is exactly what characterizes a sense impression; the capacity for reasoning as such is eliminated. Desire alone prevails, for the sense impression of red is not the same as the sense perception of red. A tone, a perception of color or a smell to which you are exposed, comprises only a desire, recorded through attention; judgment is suppressed in this case. Only one must have clearly in mind the necessity of drawing a sharp boundary line between sense perception and what follows it in the soul.

If you stop at the impression of a color you are dealing with just that—a color impression without judgment. Sense impressions are characterized by an operation of the attention that rules out a verdict as such, desire alone holding sway. When you are exposed to a color or a tone, nothing remains in this condition of being exposed but desire; judgment is suppressed. The sense impression of red is not the same as the sense perception of red. In a tone, in the impression of a color, in a smell to which you expose yourself, only desire is present, recorded by attention. Attention, then, manifests itself as a special form of desire. But at the moment when you say “red is ...” you have already judged: reasoning has come into play. One must always remember to make that distinction between sense perception and sense sensation. Only when you stop at the impression (say, of a color) are you dealing with a mere correspondence between the desire of the soul and the outer world.

What takes place at this meeting of desire in the soul and the outer world? In distinguishing between sense perceptions and sense sensations we designated the former as experiences encountered at the moment of being exposed to them, the latter, as what remains. Now, what do we find a sense sensation to consist of? A modification of desire. Along with the sense sensation we carry what swirls and surges as a modification of desire, the objects of desire.

We have seen that sense sensation arises at the boundary between the soul life and the outer world, at the portals of the senses. We say of a sense experience that the force of desire penetrates to the surface. But let us suppose that the force of desire did not reach the boundary of the outer world but remained within the soul, that it wore off within the soul life itself, as it were, that it remained an inner condition, not penetrating to a sense portal. What would happen in that case? When the force of desire advances and is then compelled to withdraw into itself, inner sensation,¹ or feeling arises. Sense sensation, or outer sensation, comes about only when the withdrawal is effected from without through a counterthrust at the moment of contact with the sense world. Inner sensation (feeling) arises when desire is not pushed back by a direct contact with the outer world but when it is turned back into itself somewhere within the soul before reaching the boundary. That is the way inner sensation, feeling, arises. Feelings are, in a way, introverted desires, desires pushed back into themselves. Thus inner sensation, feeling, consists of halted desires that have not surged to the soul's boundary but live within the soul life, and in feeling, too, the soul substance consists essentially of desire. So feelings as such are not an additional element of the soul life, but substantial, actual processes of desire taking place in the soul life. Let us keep that in mind.

Now we will describe a certain aspect of the two elements of the soul life, reasoning, and the experiences of love and hate originating in desire. It can be stated that everything in the soul arising from the activity of reasoning ends at a certain moment, but also, all that appears as desire comes to an end at a certain moment as well. When does the activity of reasoning cease? When the decision is reached, when the verdict is concluded in the series of visualizations that we then continue to carry with us as a truth. And the end of desire? Satisfaction. As a matter of fact, every desire seeks satisfaction, every reasoning activity, a decision. Because the soul life consists of these two elements—love and hate, and reasoning, imbued with a longing for satisfaction and decision respectively—we can deduce the most important fact connected with the soul life, that it streams toward decisions and satisfaction.

Could we observe man's soul life in its fullness we should find these two currents striving for decisions and satisfaction. By studying his life of feeling we find the origins of many feelings in a great variety of satisfactions and decisions. Observe, for example, those phenomena within the life of feeling that come under the head of concepts like impatience, hope, longing, doubt, even despair, and you have points of contact between these terms and something spiritually tangible. You perceive that the origins of soul processes like impatience, hope, longing, and so forth, are nothing but different expressions of the constantly flowing current in its striving for satisfaction of the forces of desire and for decisions through the forces of visualization. Try to grasp the essence of the feeling of impatience. You will sense vividly that it contains a striving for satisfaction. Impatience is a desire flowing along with the current of the soul, and it does not cease till it terminates in satisfaction. Reasoning powers hardly come into play there.

Or take hope. In hope you will readily recognize the continuous current of desires, but of desires that, unlike those of impatience, are permeated by the other element of the soul life, that is, a tendency of the reasoning powers toward a decision. Because these two elements precisely balance in this feeling, like equal weights on a scale, the feeling of hope is complete in itself. The desire for satisfaction and the prospect of a favorable decision are present in exactly equal measure.

A different feeling would arise were a desire, striving for satisfaction, to combine with a reasoning activity incapable of bringing about a decision. That would be a feeling of doubt.

Similarly, we could always find a curious interplay of reasoning and desire in the wide realm of the feelings, and if there remain feelings in which you don't find these two elements, seek further till you do find them. Taking reasoning capacity as one side of the soul life, we find that it ends with the visualization, but the value a visualization has for life consists in its being a truth. The soul of itself cannot judge truth; the basis of truth is inherent. Everyone must feel this if he compares the characteristics of the soul life with what is to be acquired through truth.

What we are wont to call reasoning capacity in connection with the soul life could also be designated reflection; yet by reflecting we do not necessarily arrive at the right decision. The verdict becomes correct through our being lifted out of our soul, for truth lies without, and the decision is the union with truth. For this reason decisions are an element foreign to the soul.

Turning to the other element, surging in as from unknown sources toward the center of the soul life and spreading in all directions, we find the origin of desire again to lie primarily outside the soul life. Both desires and judgments enter the soul life from without.

Within the soul life, then, satisfaction and the struggle for truth up to the moment of decision run their course, so it can be said that in relation to reasoning we are fighters within the soul life, in relation to desires, enjoyers. Decisions take us out of our soul life, but regarding our desires we are enjoyers, and the end of desires, satisfaction, lies within. In the matter of judgment we are independent, but the reverse is true of desires. In the latter case the inception does not occur in the soul, but satisfaction does. For this reason feeling, as an end, as satisfaction of desire, can fill the whole soul.

Let us examine more closely what it is that enters the soul as satisfaction. We have explained that sensation is fundamentally a surging of desire right up to the boundary of the soul life, while feeling remains farther within, where desire wears off. What do we find at the end of desire, there where the soul life achieves satisfaction within itself? We find feeling. So when desire achieves its end in satisfaction within the soul life, feeling comes into being. That represents only one category of feelings, however. Another arises in a different manner, namely, through the fact that actually interrelationships exist in the depths of the soul life between the inner soul life and the outer world.

Considered by itself, the character of our desires expresses itself in the fact that these are directed toward external things, but unlike sense perceptions they do not achieve contact with them. Desire, however, can be directed toward its objective in such a way as to act from a distance, as a magnetic needle points to the pole without reaching it. In this sense, then, the outer world enjoys a certain relationship to the soul life and exercises an influence within it, though not actually reaching it. Feelings can therefore also arise when desire for an unattainable object continues. The soul approaches an object that induces desire; the object is not able to satisfy it; desire remains; no satisfaction results.

Let us compare this condition with a desire that achieves satisfaction; there is a great difference. A desire that has ended in satisfaction, that has been neutralized, has a health-giving influence on the soul life, but an unsatisfied desire remains imprisoned in itself and has a deleterious effect on the health of the soul. The consequence of an unsatisfied desire is that the soul lives in this unsatisfied desire, which is carried on because it was not fulfilled and because in the absence of its object a living relationship is maintained between the soul and what we may call a void. Hence, the soul lives in unsatisfied longing, in inner contexts not founded on reality, and this suffices to produce a baneful influence upon the health of the physical and spiritual life with which the soul is bound up. Desires that remain should be sharply distinguished from those that are satisfied. When such phenomena appear in obvious forms they are readily distinguished, but there are cases in which these facts are not at all easy to recognize.

Referring now only to those desires that are wholly encompassed by the soul life, let us suppose a man faces an object; then he goes away and says the object had satisfied him, that he liked it; or else, it had not satisfied him and he disliked it. Connected with the satisfaction is a form of desire, no matter how thoroughly hidden, which was satisfied in a certain way, and in the case of the dislike the desire itself has remained. This leads us into the realm of aesthetic judgment.

There is but one variety of feelings, and this is significantly characteristic of the soul life, that appears different from the others. You will readily understand that feelings, either satisfied or unsatisfied desires, can link not only with external objects but with inner soul experiences. A feeling of the kind we designated “satisfied desire” may connect with something reaching far into the past. Within ourselves as well we find the inceptions of satisfied or unsatisfied desires. Distinguish, for a moment, between desires provoked by external objects and those stimulated by our own soul lives. By means of outer experiences we can have desires that remain with us, and in the soul as well we find causes of satisfied or unsatisfied desires. But there are other tiny inner experiences in which we have an unfulfilled longing. Let us assume that in a case where our desires face an outer object our reasoning powers prove too weak to reach a decision; you might have to renounce a decision. There you have an experience of distress brought about by your feeling of dissatisfaction.

There is one case, however, in which our reasoning does not reach a decision, nor does desire end in satisfaction, and yet no feeling of distress arises. Remember that when we do not reason in facing the objects of daily life through ordinary sense experiences we halt at the sense phenomena, but in reasoning we transcend the sense experience. When we carry both reasoning and desire to the boundary of the soul life, where the sense impression from the outer world surges up to the soul, and we then develop a desire, permeated by the power of reasoning that stops exactly at the boundary, then a most curiously constituted feeling arises.

Let this line represent the eye as the portal of sight. Now we let our desire (horizontal lines) stream to the portal of sense experiences, the eye, in the direction outward from the soul. Now let our reasoning powers (vertical lines) flow there as well. This would give us a symbol of the feeling just mentioned, a feeling of unique composition.

Remember that ordinarily when reasoning power is developed the fulfillment of psychic activity lies not within but outside the soul. Then you will appreciate the difference between the two currents that flow as far as the outer impression. If our reasoning power is to decide something that is to proceed as far as the boundary of the soul, the latter must take into itself something concerning which it can make no decisions of its own initiative, and that is truth. Desire cannot flow out; truth overwhelms desire. Desire must capitulate to truth. It is necessary, then, to take something into our soul that is foreign to the soul as such: truth.

The lines representing reasoning (cf. diagram) normally proceed out of the soul life to meet something external, but desire cannot pass the boundary where either it is hurled back or it remains confined within itself. In the present example, however, we are assuming that both reasoning and desire proceed only to the boundary, and that as far as the sense impression is concerned they coincide completely. In this case our desire surges as far as the outer world and from there brings us back the verdict.

From the point where it turns back, desire brings back the verdict. What sort of a verdict does it bring back? Under these conditions only aesthetic verdicts are possible, that is, judgments in some way linked with art and beauty. Only in connection with artistic considerations can it happen that desire flows to the boundary and is satisfied, that reasoning power stops at the frontier and yet the final verdict is brought back.

When you look at a work of art, can you say that it provokes your desire? Yes, it does, but not through its own agency. When that is the case, which is possible, of course, the arrival at an aesthetic decision does not depend upon a certain development of the soul. It is quite conceivable that certain souls might not respond in any way to a work of art. Naturally, this can happen in connection with other objects as well, but then we find complete indifference, and in that case the same process would take place when looking at a work of art as when confronting any other object. When you are not indifferent, however, when your soul life responds appropriately to the work of art, you will notice a difference. You let reasoning and desire flow to the boundary of the soul life, and then something returns, namely, a desire expressing itself in the verdict. That is beautiful. To the one, nothing returns, to the other, desire returns, but not desire for the work of art, but the desire that has been satisfied by the verdict. The power of desire and the power of reasoning come to terms in the soul, and in such a case where the outer world is the provoker only of your own inner soul activity, the outer world itself can satisfy you. Exactly as much returns to you as had streamed forth from you.

Note that the actual presence of the work of art is indispensable, because the soul substance of desire must certainly flow to the frontier of the senses. Any recollection of the work really yields something different from the aesthetic judgment in its presence.

Truth, then, is something to which desires capitulate as to a sort of exterior of the soul life. Beauty is something in which desire exactly corresponds to reasoning. The verdict is brought about by the voluntary termination of desire at the soul's boundary, the desire returning as the verdict. That is why the experience of beauty is a satisfaction that diffuses so much warmth. The closest balance of the soul forces is achieved when the soul life flows to its boundary as desire and returns as judgment. No other activity so completely fulfills the conditions of a healthy soul life as devotion to beauty.

When a longing of the soul surges in great waves to the frontier of the senses and returns with the verdict, we can see that one condition of ordinary life can better be met through devotion to beauty than in any other way. In seeking the fruits of thought we are working in the soul with a medium to which the power of desire must constantly surrender. Naturally, the power of desire will always surrender to the majesty of truth, but when it is forced to do so, the inevitable consequence is an impairment of the soul life's health. Continual striving in the realm of thought, during which desires must constantly capitulate, would eventually bring about aridity of the human soul, but reasoning that brings satisfied desire and judgment in equal measure provides the soul with something quite different.

Naturally this is not a recommendation that we should incessantly wallow in beauty and maintain that truth is unhealthy. That would be setting up the axiom that the search for truth is unhealthy: let us eschew it; wallowing in beauty is healthy: let us indulge in it. But the implication of what has been said is that in view of our search for truth, which is a duty, a necessity, we are compelled to fight against the life of desires, to turn it back into itself. Indeed, in seeking truth we must do this as a matter of course.

More than anything else, therefore, this search inculcates humility and forces back our egotism in the right way. The search for truth renders us ever more humble. Yet if man were merely to live along in this way, becoming more and more humble, he would eventually arrive at his own dissolution; the sentience of his own inner being, essential to the fulfillment of his soul life, would be lacking. He must not forfeit his individuality through the constant necessity surrendering to truth; this is where the life of aesthetic judgment steps in. The life of aesthetic judgment is so constituted that man brings back again what he has carried to the boundary of the soul life.

In that life it is permissible to do what is demanded in the light of truth. What is demanded by truth is that the decision be reached independently of our arbitrary choice. In seeking truth we must surrender ourselves completely, and in return we are vouchsafed truth. In coming to an aesthetic decision, in seeking the experience of beauty, we also surrender ourselves completely; we let our souls surge to their boundaries, almost as in the case of a sense sensation. But then we ourselves return and this cannot be decided, cannot be determined from without. We surrender ourselves and are given back to ourselves. Truth brings back only a verdict, but an aesthetic judgment, in addition, brings back our self as a gift. That is the peculiarity of the aesthetic life. It comprises truth, that is, selflessness, but at the same time the assertion of self-supremacy in the soul life, returning us to ourselves as a spontaneous gift.

In these lectures, as you see, I must present matters ill adapted to definitions. We are merely endeavoring to describe them as they are by delimiting the soul life and studying it.

In the lectures on Anthroposophy given last year we learned that in the downward direction corporeality borders on the soul life. At this border we endeavored to grasp the human being and thereby the human body, together with all that is connected with its constitution. The ultimate aim of these lectures is to provide rules of life, life wisdom, hence a broad foundation is indispensable.

Today, we gained an insight into the nature of desires as they surge in the depths of the soul life. Now, in the previous lectures we learned that certain experiences allied to feeling, like boredom, depend upon the presence of visualizations out of the past, like bubbles that lead their own lives in the soul. At a given moment of our existence much depends upon the nature of the lives they lead. Our frame of mind, our happiness or distress, depends upon the manner in which our visualizations act as independent beings in the soul, upon the significance of boredom, and so forth. In short, upon these beings that live in our souls depends the happiness of our present lives.

Against certain visualizations that we have allowed to enter our present soul lives, we are powerless; facing others, we are strong according to our ability to recall visualizations at will. Here the question arises as to which visualizations are readily recaptured and which not. That is a matter that can be of immense importance in life. Furthermore, can anything be done at the inception of visualizations to render them more or less readily available? Yes, we can contribute something. Many would find it profitable and could lighten the burden of their lives enormously if they knew how to recapture their conceptions easily. You must give them something to take along, but what? Well, since the soul life is made up of desire and reasoning, we must find it within these two elements.

Of our desire we can give nothing but desire itself. At the moment when we have the conception, the moment when it flows into us, we must give as much of our desire as possible, and that can only be done by permeating the conception with love. To give part of our desire to the conception will provide a safe-conduct for our further soul life. The more lovingly we receive a visualization, the more interest we devote to it, the more we forget ourselves and our attributes in meeting it, the better it is permanently preserved for us. He who cannot forget himself in the face of a conception will quickly forget the conception. It is possible to encompass a conception, as it were, with love.

We still have to learn, however, how our reasoning can act upon conceptions. A conception is more readily recalled by our memory when received through the reasoning force of our soul than when it has simply been added to the soul life. When you reason about a visualization entering the web of your soul, when you surround it with reasoning, you are again providing it with something that facilitates the memory of it. You see, you can invest a conception with something like an atmosphere, and it depends upon ourselves whether a conception reappears in our memory easily or not. It is important for the health of the soul life to surround our visualizations with an atmosphere of reasoning and love.

In this connection we must also give due consideration to the ego conception. Our entire continuous soul life bears a constant relationship to our central visualization, the ego conception. If we follow the path indicated today, we shall in the next lecture discover how to correlate the directions of memory and ego experience.

At bottom, the main tendency of the soul is desire. This being the case, anyone knowing that through esoteric development the soul's aims must be raised may be surprised to learn that in a certain sense desire must be overcome. “Overcoming desire in the soul,” however, is not an accurate way of putting it. Desire arises in the soul from unknown depths, yes, but what surges in with it? Of what is it the expression? If we would fathom these depths, we must temporarily interpret them in an abstract way as something that corresponds on a higher plane to desire, something proceeding from our own being as will. When, for the purpose of higher development, we combat desire, we are not combatting will but merely certain modifications, certain objects of desire. Then pure will holds sway. Will coupled with an object, with the content of desire, is covetousness. Through reasoning, however, we can arrive at the conception of wanting to rid ourselves of desire, so that a will of that sort, disencumbered of objects, is in a certain way one of our highest attributes. Don't confuse this with concepts like “the will to live.” That is a will directed at an object. Will is pure and free only when not modified into a definite desire; in other words, only when it leads in the opposite direction.

When the life of the will surges into our feelings, we have an excellent opportunity to study the relation of will to feeling. Fantastic explanations of will are possible. One could maintain that will must necessarily lead to a certain object. Such definitions are wholly unjustifiable, and people who propound them would often do better to devote themselves to the genius of language. Language, for example, offers an inspired word for that inner experience in which will is directly converted into feeling. If we could observe within ourselves a craving of the will in the process of wearing off, we could perceive, in facing an object or a being, a surging of the will up to a certain point, where it then holds back. That produces a profoundly unsatisfied feeling toward that being. This sort of will certainly does not lead to action, and language offers the inspired term Widerwille.² That is a feeling, however, and therefore the will, when recognizing itself in the feeling, is in fact a desire that leads back to itself, and language actually has a word that directly characterizes the will as a feeling.

This shows us the fallacy of a definition implying that the will is only the point of departure of an act. Within the soul life we find on all sides a surging differentiated will: desire; therein are seen the various expressions of the soul.

• 1. Empfindung, in addition to meaning “sensation” (as here translated) can also be synonymous with Gefühl (“feeling”), as is here the case. In order to avoid confusion, the word “inner” is added; indeed, in all subsequent recurrences it appears in the German text as well (innere Empfindung).
• 2. Literally, anti-will, or counter-will. Widerwille is a commonly used word meaning distaste, antipathy, disgust. The English language, unfortunately, lacks this particular “inspired term.”

There is no doubt that the Spiritual Science we have been studying for many years is beginning to make more and more headway in the world and to find increasing understanding in the hearts and minds of our contemporaries. It might be useful occasionally to speak of how the ideas of Spiritual Science are being made known and many of you would be glad to know what effect the spiritual nourishment you have yourselves received has had upon others at the present time. It is only now and then that I can speak of this spread of spiritual-scientific thought in the outer world, but it will be some satisfaction to you to know that we can see how the spirit inspiring us all is finding entry in various countries. I could see, for instance, that our ideas were beginning to find a footing when I was lecturing in the south of Austria, in Trieste, recently. Then, when I gave a course of lectures in Copenhagen¹ only a few days ago, there too it was evident that the spirit we are trying to cultivate under the symbol of the Rose Cross is gaining more and more ground. Signs such as these make it clear that there is a need and also a longing for what we call Spiritual Science.

It is fundamental to the spirit informing our Movement that we should refrain from any agitation or propaganda and far rather pay heed to the great, all-embracing wisdom needed by the hearts and souls of modern men if they are to feel any security in life to-day. It is our duty to make these spiritual thoughts into real nourishment for our souls. You will certainly have understood enough of the great law of Karma to know that it is by no chance or accident that an individual feels urged to come down into the physical world at this particular time. The souls of all of you here have felt the longing to incarnate in a physical body at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century because of a desire to experience what can be achieved in the present physical environment.

Let us look at our own epoch and see how its spiritual aspect appears to souls which, like yours, have been born into it. At the turn of the century conditions were very different from what they had been fifty or sixty years earlier. Human beings who—like all of you here—are growing up at the present time, attempt now and then to hear about the spiritual guidance and leadership of the world, about the spiritual forces and influences pervading the external world in the different kingdoms of nature and penetrating into the souls of men. But for the last fifty years a soul longing and searching for spiritual nourishment has found very little. This longing has been present in the depths of men's souls, although it may have been a very faint voice, easily silenced. Nevertheless the longing is there and everyone is seeking for spiritual nourishment, whatever his position in life and whatever use he may make of his faculties. No matter in what department of science you may be working to-day, you learn only external, material facts; they can be utilised very cleverly and ingeniously to advance modern culture but they are no help at all towards understanding what the spirit may reveal. No matter whether you are an artist or are engaged in some practical work, you will find little that can pass into head or hand to give you not only energy and impetus for your work but also security and comfort in life. By the beginning of the nineteenth century people had forebodings that in the near future very little spiritual nourishment would be left. During the first half of the century, when vestiges of an old spiritual life were still present, although in a different form, many people felt that there was something in the air presaging the complete disappearance of the ancient treasures of the spirit handed down by tradition from olden times. Yet it is precisely the legitimate progress of culture during the nineteenth century that will completely wipe out the spiritual traditions handed down from the past.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, many voices are to be heard speaking in this strain and I will quote one example of a man who lived during that period and had a wide knowledge of the old form of theosophy, but who also knew that owing to the course of events in that century it was bound to disappear; at the same time he was convinced that a future must come when there would be a revival of this old theosophy but in a new form. I am going to read you a passage written towards the end of the first half of the nineteenth century, in 1847. Its author was a thinker of a type no longer in existence to-day—men who were still sensitive to the last echoes of those old traditions which have now been lost for a considerable time.—

‘It is often difficult to learn among the older theosophists what the real purpose of theosophy is ... but it is clear that along the paths it has taken hitherto, theosophy can acquire no real existence as a science nor achieve any result in a wider sphere. Yet it would be very ill-advised to conclude that it is a phenomenon scientifically unjustifiable and also ephemeral. History itself decisively disproves this: it shows how this enigmatic phenomenon could never make itself really effective in the world but for all that was continually breaking through and was held together in its manifold forms by the chain of a never-dying tradition. ... At all times there have been very few in whom this insistent speculative need has been combined with a living religious need. But theosophy is for these few alone. ... The important thing is that if theosophy ever becomes scientific in the real sense and produces obvious and definite results, these will gradually become the general conviction, be acknowledged as valid truths and be universally accepted by those who cannot find their way along the only possible path by which they could be discovered.

But all this lies in the womb of the future which we do not wish to anticipate. For the moment let us be thankful for the beautiful presentation given by Oetinger, which will certainly be appreciated in wide circles.’

This shows what a man such as Rothe of Heidelberg felt about the theosophical spirit in 1847. The passage is from his Preface to a treatise on Oetinger, a theosophist living in the second half of the eighteenth century.

What, then, can be said about the spirit of theosophy? It is a spirit without which the genuine cultural achievements of the world would never have been possible. Thinking of its greatest manifestations, we shall say: Without it there would never have been a Homer, a Pindar, a Raphael, a Michelangelo; there would have been no depth of religious feeling in men, no truly spiritual life and no external culture. Everything that man creates he must create from out of the spirit. If he thinks that he can create without it he is ignorant of the fact that although in certain periods spiritual striving falls into decline, the less firmly rooted a thing is in the spirit the more likely it is to die. Whatever has eternal value stems from the spirit and no created thing survives that is not rooted in it. But since everything a man does is under the guidance of the spiritual life, the very smallest creation, even when used for the purposes of everyday life, has an eternal value and connects him with the spirit. We know that our own theosophical life has its source in what we have called the Rosicrucian stream; and it has often been emphasised that since the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Masters of Rosicrucian wisdom have been preparing conditions that began at the end of the nineteenth century and will continue in the twentieth. The future longed for and expected by Rothe of Heidelberg is already the present and should be recognised as such. But those who caused this stream to flow into souls, at first in a way imperceptible to men, have been preparing conditions for a long, long time. In a definite sense what we have called the Rosicrucian path since the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is present in our Theosophical Movement in a more conscious form; its influence has flowed into the hearts and minds of the peoples of Europe and sets its stamp upon them.

From what has happened in European culture, can we form an idea of how this spirit has actually taken effect? I said just now that it has worked as the true Rosicrucian spirit since the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; it was always present although only at that time did it assume Rosicrucian form. This Rosicrucian spirit goes back to a very distant past—it had its Mysteries even in Atlantean times. The influence has been taking effect for long ages, becoming more and more conscious as it streamed into the hearts and souls of men.

Let us try to form some idea of how this spirit made its way into humanity. We meet together here and our studies help us to perceive ways in which the human soul develops and gradually rises to regions where it can understand the spiritual life, and perhaps actually behold it. Many of you have for years been trying to let concepts and ideas which mirror the spiritual life stream into your souls as spiritual nourishment. You know how we have tried to acquire some understanding of the riddles of the world. I have often described the different stages of the soul's development and how it can rise to the higher worlds; how a higher part of the Self must be distinguished from a lower part; how man has come from other planetary conditions, having passed through a Saturn-, a Sun- and a Moon-evolution, during which his physical, etheric and astral bodies were formed; and how finally he entered into the period of Earth-evolution. I have told you that there is something within us that must receive its training here on the Earth in order to rise to a higher stage. We have also said that the development of certain beings—the Luciferic beings—was retarded during the Old Moon-period and they later approached man's astral body as tempters, and also in order to impart to him certain qualities. I have often told you too how man must overcome certain tendencies in his lower self and through this conquest rise into the spheres to which his higher Self belongs, into the higher regions of the spiritual life. Words of Goethe must be remembered:

And as long as thou knowest it not,
This Dying and Becoming,
Thou art but a troubled guest
Upon the dark Earth!

The degree of development that is possible to-day and can give strength, assurance and a genuine content to life is within our reach if we acquire knowledge of the manifold nature of man and realise that his constitution is not a haphazard medley but consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. We have formulated definite ideas, for example of the temperaments, by studying the process of education and the development of the physical body up to the seventh year, of the etheric body up to the fourteenth and of the astral body up to the twenty-first year. By studying the mission of Truth, of Prayer, of Anger, our ideas of the three bodies, of the sentient soul, intellectual or mind-soul and consciousness—or spiritual soul, do not remain mere abstractions but impart meaning, clarity and content to our existence.

In this way we have achieved some understanding of the riddles of the world. And although there are large numbers of people outside our circle who still, consciously or unconsciously, persist in materialism, there are nevertheless many souls who feel it necessary to their very existence to listen to expositions of the kind we have been able to give. Many of you would not have been present among us for years, sharing our experiences and activities if it were not a necessity of your very lives. Why are there souls to-day who understand these things and for whom the ideas and concepts developed here become a guide on their life's way? The reason is this.—Just as you have been born into the modern world with these longings, so our forbears in Europe—and this means very many of those present here to-day—were born during past centuries into a world and environment very different from those of the nineteenth century. Let us cast our minds back to the sixth, seventh or even the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of our era when many of those present here were incarnated, and think of the sort of things that souls then living might have experienced.

In those times there was no Theosophical Society where subjects such as those with which we are concerned were studied; the influence of the environment upon the souls of men took a very different form. People did not travel about giving lectures on spiritual-scientific subjects, but minstrels went from village to village, from city to city, proclaiming the spirit. These minstrels did not speak about theosophy, about the lower and higher Ego, about man's physical, etheric and astral bodies and so on. As they moved around the land their mission was to speak of the spirit in the way it was wont to be proclaimed at that time. The following story was told all over Middle and Eastern Europe.—

Once upon a time there was a King's son. During a ride one day he heard moans coming from a ditch, and following the course of the ditch in order to discover the source of the moans, he found an old woman. He dismounted, climbed down into the ditch and helped the old woman who had fallen into it, to get out. Then he saw that she had injured her leg and could not walk. He asked her how the accident happened and she told him: ‘I am old and I have to get up soon after midnight to go to the city and sell my eggs; on the way I fell into this ditch.’ The King's son said to her: ‘You cannot get home by yourself so I will put you on my horse and take you.’ This he did, and the woman said to him: ‘Although you are of noble birth, you are a kind and good man; and because you have helped me I will give you a reward.’ He guessed now that she was not an ordinary woman, for she said: ‘You shall have the reward which your kind soul has earned. Do you want to marry the Flower-Queen's daughter?’ ‘Yes!’ he replied. She went on: ‘For that you will need something that I can easily give you,’ and she gave him a little bell, saying: ‘If you ring this bell once the Eagle-King will come with his hosts to help you in the predicament in which you find yourself; if you ring twice the Fox-King will come with his hosts to help you in the predicament in which you find yourself; and if you ring three times the Fish-King will come with his hosts to help you in the predicament in which you find yourself.’—The King's son took the little bell and returned home, announced that he was going to search for the Flower-Queen's daughter, and rode off. He rode a long, long way but nobody could tell him where the Flower-Queen lived with her daughter. By this time his horse was completely exhausted and could carry him no longer so that he was obliged to continue his journey on foot. He came across an aged man and asked him where the Flower-Queen lived. ‘I cannot tell you,’ the aged man replied, ‘but go on and on and you will find my father who may perhaps be able to tell you.’ So the King's son went on, year after year, and then found another, still more aged man. He asked him: ‘Can you tell me where the Flower-Queen lives?’ But the aged man replied: ‘I cannot tell you, but you must go on and on for many more long years and you will find my father who will certainly be able to tell you where the Flower-Queen lives.’—So the King's son went on and at last found an old, old man and asked him if he could tell him where the Flower-Queen lived with her daughter. The old man replied: ‘The Flower-Queen lives far away, in a mountain which you can see from here in the distance. But she is guarded by a fearsome Dragon. You cannot get near at present for this is a time when the Dragon never sleeps; he sleeps at certain times only and this is one of his waking periods. But you must go a little further, to another mountain, and there you will find the Dragon's mother; through her you will attain your goal.’ So he went on and found the Dragon-mother, the very archetype of ugliness. But he knew that whether he could find the Flower-Queen's daughter would depend on her. Then he saw seven other dragons around her, all eager to guard the Flower-Queen and her daughter who had been long imprisoned and were destined to be set free by the King's son. So he said to the Dragon-mother: ‘I know that I must become your servant if I am to find the Flower-Queen.’ ‘Yes’, she said, ‘you must become my servant and perform a task that is not easy. Here is a horse which you must lead to pasture the first day, the second day and the third. If you can bring it home in good condition you may possibly achieve your object after three days. But if you fail, the dragons will devour you—we shall all devour you.’ The King's son agreed to this and the next morning he was given the horse. He tried to lead it to pasture but it soon disappeared. He searched for it in vain and was in despair. Then he remembered the little bell given him by the old woman, took it out and rang it once. A host of eagles gathered, led by the Eagle-King, looked for the horse and found it, so that the King's son was able to take it back to the Dragon-mother. She said to him: ‘Because you have brought the horse back I will give you a cloak of copper so that you can attend the Ball tonight at the court of the Flower-Queen and her daughter.’ Then, on the second day, he was again given the horse to take to pasture, but again it disappeared and he could not find it. So he took out the bell and rang it twice. Immediately the Fox-King appeared with a host of his followers; they looked for and found the horse and the King's son was again able to take it back to the Dragon-mother. She then said to him: ‘To-day you shall have a cloak of silver so that you can attend the Ball to-night at the court of the Flower-Queen and her daughter.’ At the Ball the Flower-Queen said to him: ‘On the third day ask for a foal of that horse and with it you will be able to rescue me and we shall be united.’ Then, on the third day, the horse was again handed to him to lead to pasture, and again it soon disappeared, for it was very wild. So he took out the bell and rang it three times, whereupon the Fish-King appeared with his followers, found the horse, and for the third time the King's son brought it home. He had now successfully performed his task. The Dragon-mother then presented him with a mantle of gold as his third garment in order that on the third day he might attend the Flower-Queen's Ball. He was also given as a fitting reward the foal of the horse he had cared for. With it he was able to lead the Flower-Queen and her daughter to their own castle. And around the castle, since there were others who wanted to steal her daughter, the Flower-Queen caused a thick hedge to grow to prevent the castle from being invaded. Then the Flower-Queen said to the King's son: ‘You have won my daughter and henceforth she shall be yours, but only on one condition. You may keep her for half the year but for the other half she must return beneath the surface of the earth and be restored to me. Only on this condition can you be united with her.’ So the King's son won the Flower-Queen's daughter and lived with her for half the year, while for the other half she was with her mother.—

This story, as well as others like it, was listened to by many people in those days. They listened and drank in what they heard but did not, like many modern theosophists, proceed to invent allegories, for symbolic or allegorical interpretations of such matters are valueless. People listened to the stories because they were a source of delight to them and a warm glow pervaded their souls as they listened. They wanted nothing more than this as they listened to the story of the Flower-Queen and the King's son with his bell and his wooing of the Flower-Queen's daughter.

There are many souls alive to-day who in those days heard such tales with inner delight, and the effects lived on in them. Their feelings and perceptions were converted into thoughts and experiences and their souls were transformed by new forces. These forces have changed into the longing for a higher interpretation of the same secrets, a longing for Spiritual Science. In those days the wandering minstrels did not go about saying that man strives towards his higher self and to that end must overcome his lower self which holds him back. They gave their message in the form of a story about a King's son who rode out into the world, heard moans coming from a ditch and thereupon performed a good deed. To-day we speak simply of a good deed, a deed of love and sacrifice. In earlier times the deed was described in pictures. To-day we say that man must develop a feeling for the spirit which will awaken in him an inkling of the spiritual world and create powers through which he can establish relationship with it. In earlier times this was expressed in the picture of the old woman who gave the King's son a bell which he rang. To-day it is said: Man has taken into himself all the kingdoms of nature and unites in harmony everything that lies outspread before him. But he must learn to understand how what is outspread in the external world lives within him and how he can overcome his lower nature, for only if he can bring what is at work in the kingdoms of nature into the right relationship with his own being can it come to his aid.

We have spoken often enough of man's evolution through the periods of Saturn, Sun and Moon and of how he left behind him the other kingdoms of nature, retaining within himself the best of each in order that he might rise to a higher stage. To what stage has he evolved? To indicate what lives in the human soul Plato had already used the picture of the horse on which man rides from one incarnation to another. In the times of which we have been speaking the picture used was that of the bell which was rung to summon the representatives of the kingdoms of nature—the Eagle-King, the Fox-King and the Fish-King—in order that the being destined to become the ruler of these kingdoms might establish the right relationship with them.

Man's soul is unruly and can be brought into the right relationship with the kingdoms of nature only when it is tempered by love and wisdom. In earlier times this truth was presented in pictorial form and the soul was helped to understand what we to-day express differently. Men were told that the King's son rang the bell once and the Eagle-King appeared; twice and the Fox-King appeared; three times and the Fish-King appeared. It was they who brought back the horse. In other words: the tumults which rage in the human soul must be recognised; when they are recognised the soul can be freed from lower influences and brought into order.

In the modern age we say that man must learn how his passions, his anger and so on, are connected with his development from one seven-year period to another. In other words, we must learn to understand the threefold sheaths of the human being. In earlier times a wonderful picture was placed before men: the King's son was given a mantle, a sheath, every time he rang the little bell—that is to say, when he had subjugated one of the kingdoms of nature. To-day we speak of studying the nature of the physical body; in earlier days a picture was used—of the Dragon-mother giving the King's son a cloak or mantle of copper. We study the nature of the etheric body; in earlier times it was said that the Dragon-mother gave the King's son a silver cloak on the second day. We speak of the astral body with its surging passions; in earlier times it was said that on the third day the Dragon-mother gave the King's son a cloak of gold. What we learn to-day about the threefold nature of man in the form of concepts was conveyed through the picture of the copper, silver and golden cloaks. Instead of the pictures of the copper, silver and golden cloaks we speak to-day in terms which convey an understanding of how the solid physical body is related to the other sheaths of the human being as copper ore is related to silver and gold.

We speak to-day of seven classes of Luciferic beings whose development was retarded during the Moon-evolution and who set about bringing their influence to bear upon man's astral body. The minstrels said: When the King's son came to the mountain where he was to be united with the Flower-Queen's daughter, he encountered seven dragons who would have devoured him if he had not accomplished his task. We know that if our evolution does not proceed in the right way it will be corrupted by the forces of the sevenfold Luciferic beings. We say nowadays that by achieving spiritual development we find our higher Self. The minstrels said: The King's son was united with the Flower-Queen. And we say: A certain rhythm must be established in the human soul. You will remember that a few weeks ago I said that when an idea has arisen in the soul we must allow time for the idea to mature, and it will then be possible to detect a certain rhythm in the process. After seven days the idea has penetrated into the depths of the soul; after fourteen days the maturing idea can lay hold of the outer astral substance and allow itself to be baptised by the World-Spirit. After twenty-one days the idea has become still more mature. And only after four times seven days is it ready to be offered to the world as a gift of our own personality. This is the manifestation of an inner rhythm of the soul. A man's creative faculty can work effectively only if he does not try immediately to force upon the world something that occurs to him but is aware that the ordered rhythm of the external world repeats itself in his soul, that he must live in such a way that the Macrocosm is reflected in the Microcosm of his own being. The minstrels said: Man must bring the forces of his soul into harmony, must seek the Flower-Queen's daughter and enter into a union with her during which he spends half of the year with his bride and for the other half leaves her to be with her mother who lives in the depths. This means that he establishes a rhythm within himself and the rhythm of his life takes its course in harmony with the rhythm of the Macrocosm.

These pictures—and hundreds like them could be mentioned—stimulated the soul through the thought-forms they created; and the result is that souls living to-day have become sufficiently mature to listen to the different kind of presentation given by Spiritual Science. But before this could happen man had perforce to experience a sense of deprivation and intense longing. The spiritual longings of the soul had first to be engulfed in the physical world. This did in fact happen in the first half of the nineteenth century; and then, in the second half of the century, came the materialistic culture with its devastating effect upon spiritual life. But the longing grew all the stronger and the ideal of the spiritual-scientific Movement became all the more significant. In the first half of the century there were only few who in a kind of silent martyrdom felt that ideas once conveyed in the form of pictures in narratives still survived but only in a state of decline.

In the soul of a man born in the year 1803, echoes of the old wisdom of past times were still reverberating. Something closely akin to theosophical ideas was a living reality in him. His soul was completely engrossed in what we to-day call the spiritual-scientific solution of the riddle of world-existence. His name was Julius Mosen. His soul was able to survive only because for most of his life he was bedridden. Soul and body could not adjust themselves to each other because owing to the way in which Mosen had grasped these ideas without being able to penetrate them spiritually, his etheric body had been drawn out of his physical body which was paralysed as a result. His soul had nevertheless risen to spiritual heights. In 1831 he wrote a remarkable book, Ritter Wahn. He had learnt of a wonderful legend still surviving in Italy, an old Italian folk-legend. As he studied it he became convinced that it enshrined something of the spirit of the universe, that those who created its imagery were filled with the living spirituality of the World Order. The result was that in 1831 he wrote a truly wonderful work—which, needless to say, has been forgotten, in common with so much that is the product of spiritual greatness.

Ritter Wahn sets out to conquer death and on his way he comes across three old men—Ird, Time and Space. Julius Mosen hit on the German word Ird to translate the Italian il mondo, because he knew that there was something particularly significant in it. Ird, Time and Space are the names of the three old men who, however, can be of no use to Ritter Wahn because they are themselves subject to death. Ird denotes everything that is subject to the laws of the physical body, and so to death; Time, the etheric body, is by its very nature transitory; and the third, the lower astral body, which gives us the perception of Space, is also subject to death. Our individuality passes from incarnation to incarnation; but according to the Italian folk-legend, Ird, Time and Space represent our threefold sheath.

Who is ‘Ritter Wahn?’ Each of us, passing from incarnation to incarnation, looks out upon the world and faces maya, the great Illusion; each of us, in that we live a life in the spirit, goes forth to conquer death. On this quest we meet the three old men who are our three sheaths. They are indeed very old! The physical body has existed since the evolutionary period of Old Saturn, the etheric body since the period of Old Sun, and the astral body since the period of Old Moon. The Ego, the ‘I’, has been embodied in men in the course of the Earth period itself. Julius Mosen depicts Ritter Wahn seeking to overcome death. He uses the Platonic image of a rider on horseback—an image that was known all over Middle Europe and still farther afield. Ritter Wahn rides out in an attempt to conquer the heavens with materialistic thinking—like those who cling to the sense-world and are imprisoned in illusion and maya. But when through death they enter the spiritual world, what happens is faithfully described by Julius Mosen. Such human beings have not lived out their lives to the full and long to come down again to the Earth in order that their souls may continue to evolve. So Ritter Wahn returns to the Earth. He sees the beautiful Morgana, the soul, which is destined to be stimulated by whatever is earthly and—like the Flower-Queen's daughter—represents the union with what man can acquire only through schooling on Earth. He falls a victim to death through being again united with the Earth and the beautiful Morgana. This means that he passes through death in order that he may raise his own soul, represented by Morgana, to higher and higher stages during each succeeding incarnation.

It is from pictures like these which carry the stamp of their thousands of years’ life that ideas stream into artists of the calibre of Julius Mosen. In his case they were given expression by a soul too great to live healthily in a physical body during the approaching age of materialism and Julius Mosen had consequently to endure the silent martyrdom imposed on him by his passionate soul.—Such was the impulse at work in a man living in the first half of the nineteenth century. It will become active again but in such a way as to kindle human powers and forces; and it will enable us to have some understanding of what is meant by the spirit of Rosicrucianism—the spirit that must make its way into the souls of men.

We can now surmise that what we ourselves are cultivating has always existed. Were we to imagine that anything in the world can prosper without this spirit working in men we should be succumbing to the delusions suffered by Ritter Wahn.

Whence came the minstrels of the seventh, eighth or even thirteenth centuries, wandering as they did through the world to create thought-forms that would enable souls in our own day to have a different kind of understanding? Where had these minstrels learnt how to bring such pictures to men? They had learnt from the centres we think of to-day as the Rosicrucian schools. They were pupils of Rosicrucians. Their teachers said to them: You cannot now go forth into the world and clothe your message in concepts and ideas, as will have to be done later on; you must speak of the King's son, of the Flower-Queen and of the three cloaks, in order that from these pictures thought-forms may come into being and live in the souls of men. And when these souls return to Earth they will understand what is needed for their further progress.—Messengers are continually sent out from the centres of spiritual life in order that in every age what lies in the depths of the spirit may be made accessible to men.

It is a superficial view to believe that such tales can be invented by human fancy. The old tales which give expression to the spiritual secrets of the world came into being because those who composed them gave ear to others who were able to impart the spiritual secrets. Consequently we can say with truth that the spirit of all humanity, of the Microcosm and the Macrocosm, lives in them.

The minstrels were sent out to tell their stories from the same centres whence we to-day draw the knowledge on which the culture needed by humanity is based. Thus it is that the spirit in which mankind is rooted moves on from epoch to epoch. The Beings who in pre-Christian times imparted instruction to individuals in the temples, teaching them what they had themselves brought over from former planetary evolutions—these Beings placed themselves under the leadership of Christ, the unique Individuality who became the great Teacher and Guide of mankind. Stories which have come down through the centuries and have inspired in the whole of Western culture thought-forms expressing in pictures the same teaching about Christ as we give to-day, make it quite clear that in the period after the Mystery of Golgotha the spiritual leadership of mankind, working through its centres of learning, was vested in Christ. All spiritual leadership is connected with Him. If we can make ourselves conscious of this fact we shall be turning our gaze to the light we need in order to understand the longings of human souls incarnated in the nineteenth century.

If we think deeply about souls who reveal the longings of earlier times, we shall recognise with a sense of profound responsibility that they waited for us to bring their longings to fulfilment. Julius Mosen, the author of Ritter Wahn and Ahasver, and others like him, were the last prophets of the West because the teachings once given by messengers from the holy temples in the form of pictures to prepare souls for later ages, were living realities to them. And their yearning is indicated in words written by Rothe of Heidelberg in 1847: ‘... if theosophy ever becomes scientific in the real sense and produces obvious and definite results, these will gradually become the general conviction, be acknowledged as valid truths and be universally accepted by those who cannot find their way along the only possible path by which they could be discovered ...’ At that time a man who had these yearnings—thinking not only of himself but also of his contemporaries—could only say with resignation that all this lay in the womb of the future which he had no wish to anticipate. In 1847, men who were cognisant of the secrets of the Rosicrucian temples had not yet spoken in a way that could be generally understood. But what lies in the womb of the future can become living power if there are enough souls who realise that knowledge is a duty—a duty because we must not give back undeveloped souls to the World-Spirit. Were we to do that we should have deprived the World-Spirit of forces implanted in us. If there are souls who recognise their duty to the World-Spirit and endeavour to understand the riddles of the world, the hopes cherished by the best men of earlier times will be fulfilled. They looked to us, who were to be born after them, and longed that theosophy should become scientifically acceptable and lay hold of the hearts of men. But these hearts must exist! And that depends upon people who have identified themselves with our spiritual-scientific Movement being convinced of the need for spiritual illumination of the riddles of existence. It depends upon every single soul among us whether the longings of which I have spoken prove to have been empty dreams on the part of those who had hoped for the best in us or to have been dreams now brought to fulfilment.

When we see the barrenness of science, art and every domain of social life we must tell ourselves that we need not succumb to it but that there is a way out. For again an age has dawned when voices from the holy temples are speaking—not in pictures and stories but proclaiming truths which many people still regard as theories but which can and must become sources of life and nourishment to the soul. Each individual can resolve with the highest powers of his soul to receive this source of life.

This is what we must impress upon our souls as the epitome of the meaning and spirit of the guidance of mankind. If we allow this thought to be active in our souls it will be an impulse in us for many months. We shall find that it can grow into an impressive structure—quite independently of the words used to express it. My words may well be imperfect but it is the reality in the thought that matters, not the form in which it is expressed. This reality can live in every single soul. The totality of truth is present in every soul as a seed and can be brought to blossom if the soul devotes itself to the development of that seed.

• 1. The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind. (Obtainable from Rudolf Steiner Press.)

When we discuss, in connection with spiritual-science, other spiritual worlds besides our physical world, and declare that the human being sustains a relationship, not only to this physical world, but also to super-sensible realms, the question may arise as to what is to be found within the human soul—before one achieves any sort of clairvoyant capacity—which is super-sensible, which gives an indication that the human being is connected with super-sensible worlds. In other words, can even the ordinary person, possessed of no clairvoyant capacity, observe something in the soul, experience something, which bears a relationship to the higher realms? In essence, both today's lecture and that of tomorrow will be devoted to the answering of this question.

When we observe the life of the human soul, it manifests three parts in a certain way independent of one another and yet, on the other hand, closely bound together.

The first thing that confronts us when we direct attention to ourselves as souls is our conceptual life, which includes also in a certain way our thinking, our memory. Memory and thought are not something physical. They belong to the invisible, super-sensible world: in man's thought-life he has something which points to the higher worlds. What this conceptual world is may be grasped by each person in the following way. We bring before him an object, which he observes. Then he turns away. He has not immediately forgotten the object, but preserves within himself a living picture of it. Thus do we have concepts of the world surrounding us, and we may speak of the conceptual life as a part of our soul life.

A second part of our soul life we can observe if we inquire whether we do not possess within us something else related to objects and beings besides our concepts. We do, indeed, have something else. It is what we call feelings of love and hate, what we designate in our thinking by the terms sympathy, antipathy. We consider one thing beautiful, another ugly; perhaps, we love one thing and hate another; one we feel to be good, the other evil. If we wish to summarize what thus appears in our inner life, we may call it emotions of the heart. The life of the heart is something quite different from the conceptual life. In the life of the heart we have a far more intimate indication of the invisible than in the life of concepts. It is a second component of our soul-organism, this life of emotions. Thus we have already two soul-components, our life of thought and of emotion.

Of a third we become aware when we say to ourselves, not only that we consider a thing beautiful or ugly, good or evil, but that we feel impelled to do this or that, when we have the impulse to act. When we undertake anything, perform a relatively important act or even merely take hold of an object, there must always be an impulse within us which induces us to do this. These impulses, moreover, are gradually transformed into habits, and we do not always need to bring our impulses to bear in connection with everything that we do. When we go out, for instance, intending to go to the railway station, we do not then purpose to take the first, second, and third steps; we simply go to the station. Back of all this lies the third member of our soul life, our will impulses, as something ranging wholly beyond the visible.

If we now connect with these three impulses characteristic of the human being our initial question, whether the ordinary man possesses any clue to the existence of higher worlds, we must take cognizance of dream life, how this is related to the three soul elements: the thought impulse, the emotions, the impulse of will.

These three components of our soul life we can clearly differentiate: our thought life, our emotions, and our will impulses. If we reflect somewhat about our soul life, we can differentiate among these three single components of the life of the soul in our external existence. Let us first take the life of concepts. The thought life follows its course throughout the day—if we are not actually void of thought. Throughout the day we have concepts; and, when we grow tired in the evening, these concepts first become hazy. It is as if they became transmuted into a sort of fog. This life becomes feebler and feebler, finally vanishing altogether, and we can then go to sleep. Thus this conceptual life, as we possess it on the physical plane, persists from our waking till our falling asleep, and disappears the moment we fall asleep. No one will suppose that, when he is really sleeping—that is, if he is not clairvoyant during sleep—his thought life can nevertheless continue just as while he is awake. The life of thought—or the conceptual life—which occupies us fully from our waking till our falling asleep, must be extinguished, and only then can we go to sleep.

But the human being must recognize that the concepts he has, which have so overwhelmingly taken possession of him during the day, and which he always has unless he merely drowses along, are no hindrance to his falling to sleep. That this is so is best seen when we surrender ourselves to particularly vigorous concepts before falling asleep—for instance, by reading in a very difficult book. When we have been thinking really intensely, we most easily fall asleep; and so if we cannot go to sleep, it is good to take up a book, or occupy ourselves with something which requires concentrated thinking—study a mathematical book, for instance. This will help us to fall asleep; but not something, on the other hand, in which we are deeply interested, such as a novel containing much that captivates our interest. Here our emotions become aroused, and the life of the emotions is something that hinders us from falling asleep. When we go to bed with our feelings vividly stirred, when we know that we have burdened our soul with something or when there is a special joy in our heart which has not yet subsided, it frequently happens that we turn and toss in bed and are unable to fall asleep. In other words, whereas concepts unaccompanied by emotions weary us, so that we easily fall asleep, precisely that which strongly affects our feelings prevents us from falling asleep. It is impossible then to bring about the separation within ourselves which is necessary if we are to enter into the state of sleep. We can thus see that the life of emotions in us has a different relationship to our whole existence from that of our life of thought.

If we wish, however, to make the distinction quite correctly, we must take cognizance of something else: that is, our dreams. It might be supposed at first that, when the variegated life of dreams works upon us, this consists of concepts continuing their existence into the state of sleep. But, if we test the matter quite accurately, we shall observe that our conceptual life is not continued in our dreams. That which by its very nature wearies us does not continue during our dreams. This occurs only when our concepts. are associated with intense emotions.

It is the emotions that appear in dream pictures. But to realize this it is necessary, of course, to test these things adequately. Take an example:—Someone dreams that he is young again and has one experience or another. Immediately thereafter the dream is transformed and something occurs which he may not have experienced at all. Some sort of occurrence becomes manifest to him which is alien to his memory, because he has not experienced this on the physical plane. But persons known to him appear. How often it occurs that one finds oneself during dreams involved in actions in connection with which one is in the company of friends or acquaintances whom one has not seen for a long time. But, if we examine the thing adequately, we shall be forced to the conclusion that emotions are back of what emerges in dreams. Perhaps, we still cling to the friend of that time, are not yet quite severed from him; there must still be some sort of emotion in us which is connected with him. Nothing occurs in dreams that is not connected with emotions. Accordingly, we must draw a certain conclusion here—that is, that when the concepts which our waking life of day impart to us do not appear in dreams, this proves that they do not accompany us into sleep. When emotions keep us from sleeping, this proves that they do not release us, that they must be present in order to be able to appear in dream pictures. It is the emotions which bring us the dream concepts. This is due to the fact that the emotions are far more intimately connected with man's real being than is the life of thought. The emotions we carry over even into sleep. In other words, they are a soul element that remains united with us even during sleep. In contrast with ordinary concepts, the emotions are something that accompanies us into sleep, something far more closely, more intensely, connected with the human individuality than is ordinary thinking not pervaded by emotion.

How is it with the third soul component, with the impulses of will? There also we can present a sort of example. Of course, this can be observed only by persons who pay attention to the moment of falling asleep in a rather subtle way. If a person has acquired through training a certain capacity to observe this moment, this observation is extremely interesting. At first, our concepts appear to us to be enveloped in mist; the external world vanishes, and we feel as if our soul being were extended beyond our bodily nature, as if we were no longer compressed within the limits of our skin but were flowing out into the elements of the cosmos. A profound feeling of satisfaction may be associated with falling asleep. Then comes a moment when a certain memory arises. Most likely, extremely few persons have this experience, but we can perceive this moment if we are sufficiently attentive. There appear before our vision the good and also the evil impulses of will that we have experienced; and the strange thing is that, in the presence of the good impulses, One has the feeling: "This is something connected with all wholesome will forces, something that invigorates you." If the good will impulses present themselves to the soul before the person falls asleep, he feels so much the fresher and more filled with life-forces, and the feeling often arises: "If only this moment could last forever! If only this moment could endure for eternity!" Then one feels, in addition, how the bodily nature is deserted by the soul element. Finally there comes a jerk, and he falls asleep. One does not need to be a clairvoyant in order to experience this, but only to observe the life of the soul.

We must infer from this something extremely important. Our will impulses work before we fall asleep, and we feel that they fructify us. We sense an extraordinary invigoration. As regards the mere emotions, we had to say that these are more closely connected with our individuality than is our ordinary thinking, our ordinary act of conceiving. So we must now say of that which constitutes our will impulses: "This is not merely something that remains with us during sleep, but something which becomes a strengthening, an empowering, of the life within us." Still more intimately by far are the will impulses in us connected with our life than are our emotions; and whoever frequently observes the moment of falling asleep feels in this moment that, if he cannot look back upon any good will impulses during the day, the effect of this is as if there had been killed within him something of that which enters into the state of sleep. In other words, the will impulses are connected with health and disease, with the life force in us.

Thoughts cannot be seen. We see the rose bush at first by means used in ordinary physical perception; but, when the beholder turns aside or goes away, the image of the object remains in him. He does not see the object but he can form a mental image of it. That is, our thought life is something super-sensible. Completely super-sensible are our emotions; and our will impulses, although they are transmuted into actions, are none the less something super-sensible. But we know at once likewise, when we take into consideration everything which has now been said, that our thought life not permeated by will impulses is least closely connected with us.

Now, it might be supposed that what has just been said is refuted by the fact that, on the following day our concepts of the preceding day confront us again; that we can recollect them. Indeed, we are obliged to recollect. We must, in a super-sensible way, call our concepts back into memory.

With our emotions, the situation is different; they are most intimately united with us. If we have gone to bed in a mood of remorse, we shall sense upon awaking the next morning that we have waked with a feeling of dullness—or something of the sort. If we experienced remorse, we sense this the next day in our body as weakness, lethargy, numbness; joy we sense as strength and elevation of spirits. In this case we do not need first to remember the remorse or the joy, to reflect about them; we feel them in our body. We do not need to recollect what has been there: it is there, it has passed into sleep with us and has lived with us. Our emotions are more intensely, more closely, bound up with the eternal part of us than are our thoughts.

But any one who is able to observe his will impulses feels that they are simply present again; they are always present. It may be that, at the moment of waking, we note that we experience again in its immediacy, in a certain sense, what we experienced as joy in life on the preceding day through our good moral impulses. In reality nothing so refreshes us as that which we cause to flow through our souls on the preceding day in the form of good moral impulses. We may say, therefore, that what we call our will impulses is most intimately of all bound up with our existence.

Thus the three soul components are different from one another, and we shall understand, if we clearly grasp these distinctions, that occult knowledge justifies the assertion that our thoughts, which are super-sensible, bring us into relationship with the super-sensible world, our emotions with another super-sensible world, and our will impulses with still another, even more intimately bound up with our own real being. For this reason we make the following assertion. When we perceive with the external senses, we can thereby perceive everything that is in the physical world. When we conceive, our life of concepts, our thought life, is in relationship with the astral world. Our emotions bring us into connection with what we call the Heavenly World or Lower Devachan. And our moral impulses brings us into connection with the Higher Devachan, or the World of Reason. Man thus stands in relationship with three worlds through the impulses of thought, emotion, and will. To the extent that he belongs to the astral world, he can carry his thoughts into the astral world; he can carry his emotions into the world of Devachan; he can carry into the higher Heavenly World all that he possesses in his soul of the nature of will impulses.¹

When we consider the matter in this way, we shall see how justified occult science is in speaking of the three worlds. And, when we take this into consideration, we shall view the realm of the moral in an entirely different way; for the realm of good will impulses gives us a relationship to the highest of the three worlds into which the being of man extends.

Our ordinary thought life reaches only up to the astral world. No matter how brilliant our thoughts may be, thoughts that are not sustained by feelings go no further than into the astral world; they have no significance for other worlds. You will certainly understand in this connection what is said in regard to external science, dry, matter-of-fact external science. No man can by means of thoughts not permeated by emotion affirm anything regarding other worlds than the astral realm. Under ordinary circumstances, the thinking of the scientist, of the chemist, the mathematician, runs its course without any sort of feeling. This goes no further than just under the surface. Indeed, scientific research even demands that it shall proceed in this way, and for this reason it penetrates only into the astral world.

Only when delight or repugnance are associated with the thoughts of the research scientist is there added to these thoughts the element needed in order to penetrate the world of Devachan. Only when emotions enter into thoughts, into concepts, when we feel one thing to be good and another evil, do we combine with thoughts that which carries them into the Heavenly World. Only then can we get a glimpse into deeper foundations of existence. If we wish to grasp something belonging to the world of Devachan, no theories help us in the least. The only thing that helps us is to unite feelings with our thoughts. Thinking carries us only into the astral world.

When the geometrician, for example, grasps the relationships pertaining to the triangle, this helps him only into the astral element. But, when he grasps the triangle as a symbol, and derives from it what lies therein as to the participation of the human being in the three worlds, something regarding his threefoldness, this helps him to a higher level. One who feels in symbols the expression for the soul force, one who inscribes this in his heart, one who feels in connection with everything that people generally merely know, brings his thoughts into connection with Devachan. For this reason, in meditating we must feel our way through what is given us, for only thus do we bring ourselves into connection with the world of Devachan. Ordinary science, therefore, void of any feeling of the heart, can never bring the human being, no matter how keen it may be, into connection with anything except the astral world.

Art, music, painting and the like, on the other hand, lead man into the lower Devachan world. To this statement the objection might be raised that, if it is true that the emotions really lead one into the lower Devachan world, passions, appetites, instincts, would also do this. Indeed, they do. But this is only an evidence of the fact that we are more intimately bound up with our feelings than with our thoughts. Our sympathies may be associated with our lower nature also; an emotional life is brought about by appetites and instincts also, and this leads into lower Devachan. Whereas we absolve in Kamaloka whatever false thoughts we have, we carry with us into the world of Devachan all that we have developed up to the stage of emotions; and this imprints itself upon us even into the next incarnation, so that it comes to expression in our Karma. Through our life of feeling, so far as this can have these two aspects, we either raise ourselves into the world of Devachan, or we outrage it.

Through our will impulses, on the contrary, which are either moral or immoral, we either have a good relationship with the higher world or we injure it, and have to compensate for this in our Karma. If a person is so evil and degenerate that he establishes such a connection with the higher world through his evil impulses as actually to injure this, he is cast out. But the impulse must, nevertheless, have originated in the higher world. The significance of the moral life becomes clear to us in all its greatness when we view the matter in this way.

Out of the worlds with which the human being is in such a close relationship through his threefold soul nature and also through his physical nature—out of these realms proceed those forces which can lead man through the world. That is, when we observe an object belonging to the physical world, this can occur only through the fact that we have eyes to see it with: it is thus that the human being is in relationship with the physical world. Through the fact that he develops his life of thought, he is in relationship with the astral world; through the development of his life of feeling, he is connected with the world of Devachan; and through his moral life with the world of upper Devachan.

The human being has four relationships with four worlds. But this signifies nothing else than that he has a relationship with the Beings of these worlds. From this point of view it is interesting to reflect upon man's evolution, to look into the past, the present, and the immediate future.

From the worlds we have mentioned there proceed those forces which penetrate into our lives. Here we have to point out that, in the epoch which lies behind us, human beings were primarily dependent upon influences from the physical world, primarily capacitated to receive impulses out of the physical world. This lies behind us as the Graeco-Latin epoch. During this epoch Christ worked on earth in a physical body. Since the human being was then capacitated primarily to receive the influences of the forces existing in the physical world, Christ had to appear on the physical plane.

At present we live in an epoch in which thinking is primarily developed, in which man receives his impulses out of the world of thought, the astral world. Even external history demonstrates this. We can scarcely refer to philosophers of the pre-Christian era; at most, to a preparatory stage of thinking. Hence the history of philosophy begins with Thales. Only after the Graeco-Latin epoch does scientific thinking appear. Intellectual thinking comes for the first time about the sixteenth century. This explains the great progress in the sciences, which exclude all emotion from the activity of thought. And science is so specially beloved in our day because in it thought is not permeated with emotions. Our science is void of feeling, and seeks its well-being in the utter absence of sentiments. Alas for one who should experience any feeling in connection with a laboratory experiment! This is characteristic of our epoch, which brings the human being into contact primarily with the astral plane.

The next age, following our own, will already be more spiritual. There the sentiments will play a role even in connection with science. If any one shall then wish to stand an examination for admission to some scientific study, it will be necessary for him to be able to sense the light that exists behind everything, the spiritual world which brings everything into existence. The value of scientific work in any test will then consist in the fact that one shall observe whether a person can develop in the test sufficient emotion; otherwise he will fail in the examination. Even though the candidate may have any amount of knowledge, he will not be able to pass the examination if he does not have the right sentiments. This certainly sounds very queer but it will be true, none the less, that the laboratory table will be raised to the level of an altar, at which the test of a person will consist in the fact that, in the electrolysis of water into oxygen and hydrogen, feelings will be developed in him corresponding with what the Gods feel when this occurs. The human being will then receive his impulses from an intimate connection with the lower Devachan.

And then will come the age that is to be the last before the next great earth catastrophe. This will be the age when man shall be related with the higher world in his will impulses, when that which is moral will be dominant on the earth. Then neither external ability nor the intellect nor the feelings will hold the first rank, but the impulses of will. Not man's skill but his moral quality will be determinative. Thus will humanity, upon arriving at this point of time, have reached the epoch of morality, during which man will be in a special relationship with the world of higher Devachan.

It is a truth that, in the course of evolution, there awaken in the human being ever greater powers of love, out of which he may draw his knowledge, his impulses, and his activities.

Whereas at an earlier period, when Christ came down to the earth in a physical body, human beings could not have perceived Him otherwise than in a physical body, there are actually awaking in our age the forces through which they shall see the Christ, not in His physical body, but in a form which will exist on the astral plane as an etheric form. Even in our century, from the 1930's on, and ever increasingly to the middle of the century, a great number of human beings will behold the Christ as an etheric form. This will constitute the great advance beyond the earlier epoch, when human beings were not yet ripe for beholding Him thus. This is what is meant by the saying that Christ will appear in the clouds; for this means that He will appear as an etheric form on the astral plane.

But it must be emphasized that He can be seen in this epoch only in the etheric body. Any one who should believe that Christ will appear again in a physical body loses sight of the progress made by human powers. It is a blunder to suppose that such an event as the appearance of Christ can recur in the same manner as that in which it has already taken place.

The next event, then, is that human beings will see Christ on the astral plane in etheric form, and those who are then living on the physical plane, and who have taken in the teachings of spiritual-science, will see Him. Those, however, who are then no longer living, but who have prepared themselves through spiritual-scientific work will see Him, none the less, in etheric raiment between their death and rebirth. But there will be human beings also who will not be able to see Him in the etheric body. Those who shall have scorned spiritual-science will not be able to see Him, but will have to wait till the next incarnation, during which they may then devote themselves to the knowledge of the spirit and be able to prepare themselves in order that they may be able to understand what then occurs. It will not depend then upon whether a person has actually studied spiritual-science or not while living on the physical plane, except that the appearance of the Christ will be a rebuke and a torment to these, whereas those who strove to attain a knowledge of the spirit in the preceding incarnation will know what they behold.

Then will come an epoch when still higher powers will awake in human beings. This will be the epoch when the Christ will manifest Himself in still loftier manner; in an astral form in the lower world of Devachan. And the final epoch, that of the moral impulse will be that in which the human beings who shall have passed through the other stages will behold the Christ in His glory, as the form of the greatest "Ego," as the spiritualized Ego-Self, as the great Teacher of human evolution in the higher Devachan.

Thus the succession is as follows: In the Graeco-Latin epoch Christ appeared on the physical plane; in our epoch He will appear as an etheric form on the astral plane; in the next epoch as an astral form on the plane of lower Devachan; and in the epoch of morality as the very essence and embodiment of the Ego.

We may now ask ourselves for what purpose spiritual-science exists. It is in order that there may be a sufficient number of human beings who shall be prepared when these events take place. And even now spiritual-science is working to the end that human beings may enter in the right way into connection with the higher worlds, to the end that they may enter rightly into the etheric-astral, into the aesthetic-Devachanic, into the moral-Devachanic. In our epoch it is the spiritual-scientific movement that aims, in a special way at the goal of having the human being capable in his moral impulses of entering into a right relationship with the Christ.

The next three millennia will be devoted to making the appearance of the Christ in the etheric visible. Only to those whose feelings are wholly materialistic will this be unattainable. A person may think materialistically when he admits the validity of matter alone and denies the existence of everything spiritual, or through the fact that he draws the spiritual down into the material. A person is materialistic also in admitting the existence of the spiritual only in material embodiment. There are also Theosophists who are materialists. These are those who believe that humanity is doomed to the necessity of beholding Christ again in a physical body. One does not escape from being a materialist through being a Theosophist, but through comprehending that the higher worlds exist even when we cannot se them in a sensible manifestation but must evolve up to them in order to behold them.

If we cause all this to pass before our minds, we may say that Christ is the true moral impulse which permeates humanity with moral power. The Christ impulse is power and life, the moral power which permeates the human being. But this moral power must be understood. Precisely as regards our own epoch it is necessary that Christ shall be proclaimed. For this reason Anthroposophy has the mission also of proclaiming the Christ in etheric form.

Before Christ appeared on earth through the Mystery of Golgotha, the teaching about Him was prepared in advance. At that time, likewise, the physical Christ was proclaimed. It was primarily Jeshu ben Pandira who was the forerunner and herald, a hundred years before Christ. He also had the name Jesus, and, in contrast to Christ Jesus, he was called Jesus ben Pandira, son of Pandira. This man lived about a hundred years before our era. One does not need to be a clairvoyant in order to know this, for it is to be found in Rabbinical writings, and this fact has often been the occasion for confusing him with Christ Jesus. Jeshu ben Pandira was at first stoned and then hanged upon the beam of the cross. Jesus of Nazareth was actually crucified.

Who was this Jeshu ben Pandira? He is a great individuality who, since the time of Buddha—that is, about 600 B.C.—has been incarnated once in nearly every century in order to bring humanity forward. To understand him, we must go back to the nature of the Buddha.

We know, of course, that Buddha lived as a prince in the Sakya family five centuries and a half before the beginning of our era. The individuality who became the Buddha at that time had not already been a Buddha. Buddha, that prince who gave to humanity the doctrine of compassion, had not been born in that age as Buddha. For Buddha does not signify an individuality; Buddha is a rank of honor, This Buddha was born as a Bodhisattva and was elevated to the Buddha in the twenty-ninth year of his life, while he sat absorbed in meditation under the Bodhi tree and brought down from the spiritual heights into the physical world the doctrine of compassion. A Bodhisattva he had previously been—that is, in his previous incarnations also—and then he became a Buddha. But the situation is such that the position of a Bodhisattva—that is of a teacher of humanity in physical form—became thereby vacant for a certain period of time, and had to be filled again. As the Bodhisattva who had incarnated at that time ascended in the twenty-ninth year of his life to the Buddha, the rank of the Bodhisattva was at once transferred to another individuality. Thus we must speak of a successor of the Bodhisattva who had now risen to the rank of Buddha. The successor to the Gautama-Buddha-Bodhisattva was that individuality who incarnated a hundred years before Christ as Jeshu ben Pandira, as a herald of the. Christ in the physical body.

He is now to be the Bodhisattva of humanity until he shall in his turn advance to the rank of Buddha after 3,000 years, reckoned from the present time. In other words, he will require exactly 5,000 years to rise from a Bodhisattva to a Buddha. He who has been incarnated nearly every century since that time, is now also already incarnated, and will be the real herald of the Christ in etheric raiment, just as he proclaimed the Christ at that time in advance as the physical Christ. And even many of us will ourselves experience the fact that, during the 1930's, there will be persons—and more and more later in the century—who will behold the Christ in etheric raiment.

It is in order to prepare for this that spiritual-science exists, and every one who' works at the task of spiritual-science shares in making this preparation.

The manner in which humanity is taught by its Leaders, but especially by a Bodhisattva who is to become the Maitreya Buddha, changes greatly from epoch to epoch.

Spiritual-science could not have been taught in the Graeco-Latin epoch in the manner in which it is taught today; this would not have been understood by any one at that time. In that period, the Christ Being had to make manifest in physically visible form the goal of evolution, and only thus could He then work. Spiritual research spreads this teaching ever increasingly among human beings, and they will come to understand more and more the Christ Impulse until the Christ Himself shall have entered into them.

Today it is possible by means of the physically uttered word, in concepts and 'ideas, by means of thinking, to make the goal understandable and to influence men's souls in a good way, in order to fire them with enthusiasm for aesthetic and moral ideals. But the speech of today will be replaced in later periods of time by forces capable of a mightier stimulation than that which is possible at present by means of speech alone. Then will speech, the word, bring it about that there shall dwell in the word itself powers which shall convey feelings of the heart from soul to soul, from master to pupil, from the Bodhisattva to all those who do not turn away from him. It will then be possible for speech to be the bearer of aesthetic feelings of the heart. But the dawn of a new epoch is needed for this. In our time it would not be possible even for the Bodhisattva himself to exert such influences through the larynx as will then be possible.

And during the final period of time, before the great war of all against all, the situation will be such that, as speech is at present the bearer of thoughts and conceptions and as it will later be the bearer of the feelings of the heart, so will it then carry the moral element, the moral impulses, transmitting these from soul to soul. At present the word cannot have a moral influence. Such words can by no means be produced by our larynx as it is today. But such a power of spirit will one day exist. Words will be spoken through which the human being will receive moral power. Three thousand years after our present time will the Bodhisattva we have mentioned become the Buddha, and his teaching will then cause impulses to stream directly into humanity. He will be the One whom the ancients foresaw: the Buddha Maitreya, a Bringer of Good.

He has the mission of preparing humanity in advance so that it may understand the true Christ Impulse: He has the mission of directing men's eyes more and more to that which men can love, to bring it about that what men can spread abroad as a theory shall flow into a moral channel so that at length all that men can possess in the form of thoughts shall stream into the moral life. And, whereas it is still entirely possible today that a person may be very keen intellectually but immoral, we are approaching a time when it will be impossible for any one to be at the same time intellectually shrewd and immoral. It will be impossible for mental shrewdness and immorality to go hand in hand.

This is to be understood in the following way. Those who have kept themselves apart, and have opposed the course of evolution, will be the ones who will then battle together, all against all. Even those who develop today the highest intelligence, if they do not develop further during the succeeding epochs in the heart and in the moral life, will gain nothing from their shrewdness. The highest intelligence is, indeed, developed in our epoch. We have reached a climax in this. But one who has developed intelligence today and who shall neglect the succeeding possibilities of evolution, will destroy himself by his own intelligence. This will then be like an inner fire consuming him, devouring him, making him so small and feeble that he will become stupid and be able to achieve nothing^—a fire that will annihilate him in the epoch wherein the moral impulses will have reached their climax. Whereas a person can be very dangerous today by means of his immoral shrewdness, he will then be without power to harm. In place of this power, however, the soul will then possess in ever increasing measure moral powers—indeed, moral powers such as a person of the present cannot in the least conceive. The highest power and morality are needed to receive the Christ Impulse into ourselves so that it becomes power and life in us.

Thus we see that spiritual-science has the mission of planting in the present stage of the evolution of humanity the seeds for its future evolution. Of course, we must consider in connection with spiritual-science also that which must be considered in connection with the account of the whole creation of the world: that is, that errors may occur. But even one who cannot as yet enter into the higher worlds can make adequate tests and see whether here and there the truth is proclaimed: here the details must be mutually consistent. Test what is proclaimed, all the individual data which are brought together regarding the evolution of the human being, the single phases in the appearing of the Christ, and the like, and you will see that things mutually confirm one another. This is the evidence of truth which is available even to the person who does not yet see into the higher worlds. One can be quite assured: for those who are willing to test things, the doctrine of the Christ reappearing in the spirit will alone prove to be true.

• 1. See also—Rudolf Steiner: Macrocosm and Microcosm

When we discuss, in connection with Spiritual Science, other spiritual worlds in addition to our physical world, and declare that the human being sustains a relationship, not only to this physical world, but also to super-sensible realms, one may ask what is to be found within the human soul—before one achieves any sort of clairvoyant capacity—which is super-sensible, which gives an indication that the human being is connected with super-sensible worlds. In other words, can even the ordinary person, with no clairvoyant capacity, observe something in the soul, experience something, which bears a relationship to higher realms? In essence, both today's lecture and tomorrow's will endeavour to answer this question.

When we observe the life of the human soul, it manifests three parts in a certain way independent of one another and yet, on the other hand, closely bound together.

What first confronts us when we direct attention to ourselves as souls is our conceptual life, which includes also in a certain way our thinking, our memory. Memory and thought are not physical. They belong to the invisible, super-sensible world: in man's thought-life he has something which points to higher worlds. What this conceptual world is may be grasped in the following way. We bring before someone an object, which he observes. Then he turns away. He has not immediately forgotten the object, but preserves within himself a living picture of it. Thus we have concepts of the world surrounding us, and we may speak of the conceptual life as a part of our soul life.

We can observe a second part of our soul life if we inquire whether we do not possess within us something related to objects and beings in addition to our concepts. We do, indeed, have something else. It is what we call feelings of love and hate, what we designate in our thinking by the terms sympathy, antipathy. We consider one thing beautiful, another ugly; perhaps, we love one thing and hate another; one we feel to be good, the other evil. If we wish to summarise what thus appears in our inner life, we may call it stimulation of the feelings. The life of the heart is something quite different from conceptual life. In the life of the heart we have a far more intimate indication of the invisible than in the life of the concepts. Here is a second component of our soul-organism, this life of emotions. Thus we have already two soul-components, our life of thought and of emotion.

Of a third we become aware when we say to ourselves, not only that we consider a thing beautiful or ugly, good or evil, but that we feel impelled to do this or that, we have an impulse to act. When we undertake anything, perform a relatively important act or even merely take hold of an object, there must always be an impulse within us which induces us to do this. These impulses, moreover, are gradually transformed into habits, and we do not always need to bring our impulses to bear in connection with everything that we do. When we go out, for instance, intending to go to the railway station, we do not then purpose to take the first, second, and third steps; we simply go to the station. Behind all this lies the third member of our soul life, our will impulses, as something ranging wholly beyond the visible.

If we now connect with these three impulses characteristic of the human being our initial question, whether the ordinary man possesses any clue to the existence of higher worlds, we must take cognizance of dream life, and how this is related to the three soul elements: the thinking, feeling and willing.

These three components of our soul life can be clearly differentiated: our thought life, our emotions, and our will impulses. If we consider our soul life, we can differentiate these three single components of the life of the soul in our external existence. Let us first take the life of concepts. The life of thought follows its course throughout the day—if we are not actually void of thought. Throughout the day we have concepts; and, when we grow tired in the evening, these concepts first become hazy. It is as if they became transmuted into a kind of fog. They become hazier and hazier, finally vanishing altogether, and we can then go to sleep. Thus this conceptual life, as we possess it on the physical plane, persists from our waking till our falling asleep, and disappears the moment we fall asleep. No one will suppose that, when he is really sleeping—that is, if he is not clairvoyant during sleep—his thought life can nevertheless continue just as while he is awake. The life of thought—or the conceptual life—which engrosses us fully from our waking till our falling asleep, must be extinguished, and only then can we go to sleep.

But the human being must recognise that the concepts he has, which have so overwhelmingly taken possession of him during the day, and which he always has unless he merely drowses along, are no hindrance to his falling asleep. That this is so is best seen when we surrender ourselves to particularly vigorous concepts before falling asleep—for instance, by reading a very difficult book. When we have been thinking really intensely, we most easily fall asleep; and so if we cannot go to sleep, it is good to pick up a book, or occupy ourselves with something which requires concentrated thinking—study a book of mathematics, for instance. This will help us to fall asleep; but not something, on the other hand, in which we are deeply interested, such as a novel containing much that captivates our interest. Here our emotions become aroused, and the life of the emotions is something that hinders us from falling asleep. When we go to bed with our feelings vividly stirred, when we know that we have burdened our soul with something or when there is a special joy in our heart which has not yet subsided, it frequently happens that we turn and toss in bed and are unable to fall asleep. In other words, whereas concepts unaccompanied by emotions weary us, so that we easily fall asleep, precisely what strongly affects our feelings prevents us from falling asleep. It is impossible then to bring about the separation within ourselves which is necessary if we are to enter into the state of sleep. We can thus see that our life of emotions has a different relationship to our whole existence from that of our life of thought.

If we wish, however, to make the distinction quite clearly, we must take into account something else: that is, our dreams. It might be supposed at first that, when the variegated life of dreams works upon us, it consists of concepts continuing their existence into the state of sleep. But, if we test the matter quite accurately, we shall observe that our conceptual life is not continued in our dreams. That which by its very nature wearies us does not continue during our dreams, except when our concepts are associated with intense emotions.

It is the emotions that manifest in dream pictures. But to realise this it is necessary, of course, to test these things adequately. Take an example: someone dreams that he is young again and has some experience or other. Immediately the dream is transformed and something occurs which he may not have experienced at all. A kind of event is manifest to him which is foreign to his memory, because he has not experienced it on the physical plane. But persons known to him appear. How often it happens that one finds oneself during dreams involved in actions in the company of friends or acquaintances whom one has not seen for a long time. But, if we examine the thing adequately, we shall be forced to the conclusion that emotions are behind what emerges in dreams. Perhaps, we still cling to the friend of that time, are not yet quite severed from him; there must still be some kind of emotion in us which is connected with him. Nothing occurs in dreams that is not connected with emotions. Accordingly, we must draw a certain conclusion here—that is, that when the concepts which our waking life of day impart to us do not appear in dreams, this proves that they do not accompany us into sleep. When emotions keep us from sleeping, this proves that they do not release us, that they must be present in order to be able to appear in dream pictures. It is the emotions which bring us the dream concepts. This is due to the fact that the emotions are far more intimately connected with man's real being than is the life of thought. We carry them over into sleep. In other words, they are a soul element that remains united with us even during sleep. In contrast with ordinary concepts, the emotions accompany us into sleep; they are far more closely, more intensely, connected with the human individuality than is ordinary thinking, when it is not pervaded by emotion.

What about the third soul component, the will impulses? There also we can give an example. Of course, this can be observed only by persons who pay attention to the moment of falling asleep in a rather subtle way. If someone has acquired through training a certain capacity to observe this moment, he will find it extremely interesting. At first, our concepts appear to us to be enveloped in mist; the external world vanishes, and we feel as if our soul-being were extended beyond our bodily nature, as if we were no longer compressed within the limits of our skin but were flowing out into the elements of the cosmos. A profound feeling of satisfaction may be associated with falling asleep. Then comes a moment when a certain memory arises. Most likely, extremely few people have this experience, but we can perceive this moment if we are sufficiently attentive. There appear before our vision the good and also the evil will impulses that we have experienced; and the strange thing is that, in the presence of the good impulses, one has the feeling: ‘This is something connected with all wholesome will forces, something that invigorates you.’ If the good will impulses present themselves to the soul before the person falls asleep, he feels so much the fresher and more filled with life-forces, and the feeling often arises: ‘If only this moment could last forever! If only this moment could endure throughout eternity!’ Then one feels, also, how the bodily nature is deserted by the soul element. Finally there comes a jerk, and he falls asleep. One does not need to be a clairvoyant in order to experience this, but only to observe the life of the soul.

We must infer from this something extremely important. Our will impulses work before we fall asleep, and we feel that they fructify us. We experience extraordinary invigoration. With regard to the mere emotions, we had to say that these are more closely connected with our individuality than our ordinary thinking, our ordinary act of conceiving. So we must now say of our will impulses: ‘This is not merely something that remains with us during sleep, but something which becomes a strengthening, an empowering, of the life within us.’ The will impulses are far more intimately connected with our life than are our emotions; and whoever frequently observes the moment of falling asleep feels in this moment that, if he cannot look back upon any good will impulses during the day, it is as though something of what enters into the state of sleep had been killed within him. In other words, the will impulses are connected with health and disease, with the life force in us.

Thoughts cannot be seen. We see the rose bush at first through ordinary physical perception; but, when the beholder turns aside or goes away, the image of the object remains in him. He does not see the object but he can form a mental image of it. That is, our thought life is somewhat super-sensible. Completely super-sensible are our emotions; and our will impulses, although they are transmuted into actions, are none the less super-sensible. But we know at once likewise, when we take into consideration everything which has now been said, that our thought life not permeated by will impulses is the least closely connected with us.

Now, it might be supposed that what has just been said is refuted by the fact that, on the following day our concepts of the preceding day confront us again; that we can recollect them. Indeed, we are obliged to recollect. We must, in a super-sensible way, call our concepts back into memory.

With our emotions, the situation is different; they are most intimately united with us. If we have gone to bed in a mood of remorse, we shall sense upon awaking the next morning that we have woken with a feeling of dullness—or something of the sort. If we experienced remorse, we sense this the next day in our body as weakness, lethargy, numbness; joy we sense as strength and elevation of spirits. In this case we do not need first to remember the remorse or the joy, to reflect about them; we feel them in our body. We do not need to recollect what has been there: it is there, it has passed into sleep with us and has lived with us. Our emotions are more intensely, more closely, bound up with the external part of us than are our thoughts.

But anyone who is able to observe his will impulses feels that they are simply present again; they are always present. It may be that, at the moment of waking, we note that we experience again in its immediacy, in a certain sense, what we experienced as joy in life on the preceding day through our good moral impulses. In reality nothing so refreshes us as that which we cause to flow through our souls on the preceding day in the form of good moral impulses. We may say, therefore, that what we call our will impulses are the most intimately bound up with our existence.

Thus the three soul components are different from one another, and we shall understand, if we clearly grasp these distinctions, that occult knowledge justifies the assertion that our thoughts, which are super-sensible, bring us into relationship with the super-sensible world, our emotions with another super-sensible world, and our will impulses with still another, even more intimately bound up with our own real being. For this reason we make the following assertion. When we perceive with the outer senses, we can thereby perceive everything that is in the physical world. When we conceive, our life of concepts, our thought life, is in relationship with the astral world. Our emotions bring us into connection with what we call the Heavenly World or Lower Devachan. And our moral impulses brings us into connection with the Higher Devachan, or the World of Reason. Man thus stands in relationship with three worlds through the impulses of thinking, feeling and willing. To the extent that he belongs to the astral world, he can carry his thoughts into the astral world; he can carry his emotions into the world of Devachan; he can carry into the higher Heavenly World all that he possesses in his soul of the nature of will impulses (See also Macrocosm and Microcosm).

When we consider the matter in this way, we shall see how justified occult science is in speaking of the three worlds. And, when we take this into consideration, we shall view the realm of morality in an entirely different way; for the realm of good will impulses gives us a relationship to the highest of the three worlds into which the being of man extends.

Our ordinary thought life reaches only up to the astral world. No matter how brilliant our thoughts may be, if they are not sustained by feelings they penetrate no further than the astral world; they have no significance for other worlds. You will certainly understand in this connection what is said in regard to external science, dry, matter-of-fact external science. No man can by means of thoughts not permeated by emotion affirm anything regarding other realms than the astral. Under ordinary circumstances, the thinking of the scientist, the chemist, the mathematician, proceeds without any accompanying feeling. It goes no further than just under the surface. Indeed, scientific research even demands that it shall proceed in this way, and because of this it penetrates only into the astral world.

Only when delight or repugnance are associated with the thoughts of the research scientist is there added to these thoughts the element needed in order to penetrate the world of Devachan. Only when emotions enter into thoughts, into concepts, when we feel one thing to be good and another evil, do we combine with thoughts which carries them into the Heavenly World. Only then can we get a glimpse into deeper layers of existence. If we wish to grasp something belonging to the world of Devachan, theories are no help to us at all. The only thing that helps us is to unite feelings with our thoughts. Thinking carries us only into the astral world.

When the geometrician, for example, grasps the relationships pertaining to the triangle, this lifts him only into the astral element. But, when he grasps the triangle as a symbol, say of the participation of the human being in the three worlds, of his threefoldness, this helps him to a higher level. One who sees in symbols the expression of the soul force, who inscribes this in his heart, who feels in connection with everything that people generally merely know, brings his thoughts into connection with Devachan. For this reason, in meditating we must feel our way through what is given us, for only thus do we bring ourselves into connection with the world of Devachan. Ordinary science, therefore, void of any feeling, can never bring the human being, no matter how keen, into connection with anything except the astral world.

On the other hand, art, music, painting and so on, lead man into the lower Devachan world. To this statement the objection might be raised that, if it is true that the emotions really lead one into the lower Devachan world, passions, appetites, instincts, would also do this. Indeed, they do. But this only shows that we are more intimately bound up with our feelings than with our thoughts. Our sympathies may be associated with our lower nature also; an emotional life is aroused by appetites and instincts also, and this leads into lower Devachan. Whereas we absolve in Kamaloka whatever false thoughts we have, we carry with us into the world of Devachan all that we have developed up to the stage of emotions; and this imprints itself upon us even into the next incarnation, so that it comes to expression in our karma. Through our life of feeling, so far as this can have these two aspects, we either raise ourselves into the world of Devachan, or we offend it.

Through our will impulses, on the contrary, which are either moral or immoral, we either have a good relationship with the higher world or we injure it, and have to compensate for this in our karma. If a person is so evil and degenerate that he establishes such a connection with the higher world through his evil impulses as actually to injure it, he is cast out. But the impulse must, nevertheless, have originated in the higher world. The significance of the moral life becomes clear to us in all its greatness when we view the matter in this way.

From the worlds with which the human being is in such a close relationship through his threefold soul nature and also through his physical nature—from these realms proceed those forces which can lead man through the world. That is, we cannot observe an object belonging to the physical world, without eyes to see it with: this is the human being's relationship with the physical world. Through his life of thought, he is in relationship with the astral world; through his life of feeling, he is connected with the world of Devachan; and through his moral life with the world of upper Devachan.

Man has four relationships with four worlds. But this signifies nothing else than that he has a relationship with the Beings of these worlds. From this point of view it is interesting to reflect upon man's evolution, to look into the past, the present, and the immediate future.

From the worlds we have mentioned proceed those forces which penetrate into our lives. Here we have to point out that, in the epoch which lies behind us, human beings were primarily dependent upon influences from the physical world, primarily capacitated to receive impulses out of the physical world. This lies behind us as the Greco-Roman epoch. During this epoch Christ worked on earth in a physical body. Since the human being was then enabled primarily to receive the influences of the forces existing in the physical world, Christ had to appear on the physical plane.

At present we live in an epoch in which thinking is mainly developed, in which man receives his impulses out of the world of thought, the astral world. Even external history demonstrates this. We can scarcely refer to philosophers of the pre-Christian era; at most, to a preparatory stage of thinking. Hence the history of philosophy begins with Thales.³⁶ Only after the Greco-Roman epoch does scientific thinking appear. Intellectual thinking develops for the first time about the sixteenth century. This explains the great progress in the sciences, which exclude all emotion from the activity of thought. And science is so specially beloved in our day because in it thought is not permeated with emotions. Our science is void of feeling, and seeks its well-being in the utter absence of sentiments. Alas for one who should experience any feeling in connection with a laboratory experiment! This is characteristic of our epoch, which brings the human being into contact primarily with the astral plane.

The next age, following our own, will already be more spiritual. There the emotions will play a role even in connection with science. If anyone shall then wish to sit an examination for admission to some scientific study, it will be necessary for him to be able to sense the light that exists behind everything—the spiritual world which brings everything into existence. The value of scientific work in any test will then consist in whether a person can develop in the test sufficient emotion; otherwise he will fail in the examination. Even though the candidate may have any amount of knowledge, he will not be able to pass the examination if he does not have the right sentiments. This certainly sounds very queer but it will be true, nonetheless, that the laboratory table will be raised to the level of an altar, at which the test of a person will consist in the fact that, in the electrolysis of water into oxygen and hydrogen, feelings will be developed in him corresponding with what the gods feel when this occurs. The human being will then receive his impulses from an intimate connection with the lower Devachan.

And then will come the age that is to be the last before the next great earth catastrophe. This will be the age when man will be connected with the higher world in his will impulses, when morality will be dominant on the earth. Then neither external ability nor the intellect nor the feelings will hold the first rank, but the impulses. Not man's skill but his moral quality will be determinative. Thus, humanity will have reached the epoch of morality, during which man will be in a special relationship with the world of higher Devachan.

It is a fact that, in the course of evolution, ever greater powers of love will awaken in the human being, out of which he may draw his knowledge, his impulses and his activities.

Whereas at an earlier period, when Christ came down to the earth in a physical body, human beings could not have perceived Him otherwise than in a physical body, in our age the forces are actually awaking through which we will see the Christ, not in His physical body, but in an etheric form which will exist on the astral plane. Even in our century, from the 1930's on, and ever increasingly to the middle of the century, a great number of human beings will behold the Christ as an etheric form. This will constitute the great advance beyond the earlier epoch, when human beings were not yet ripe for beholding Him thus. This is what is meant by the saying that Christ will appear in the clouds; He will appear as an etheric form on the astral plane.

But it must be emphasised that He can be seen in this epoch only in the etheric body. Anyone who believes that Christ will appear again in a physical body loses sight of the progress made by human powers. It is a mistake to suppose that such an event as the appearance of Christ can recur in the same manner as that in which it has already taken place.

The next event, then, is that human beings will see Christ on the astral plane in etheric form, and those who are then living on the physical plane, and who have absorbed the teachings of Spiritual Science, will see Him. Those, however, who are then no longer living, but who have prepared themselves through Spiritual-Scientific work will see Him, nonetheless, in etheric raiment between their death and rebirth. But there will be human beings also who are not yet ready to see Him in the etheric body. Those who have scorned Spiritual Science will not be able to see Him, but will have to wait till the following incarnation, when they may then devote themselves to spiritual knowledge and so be able to prepare themselves to understand what then occurs. It will not depend then upon whether a person has actually studied Spiritual Science or not while living on the physical plane, except that the appearance of the Christ will be a rebuke and a torment to them, whereas those who strove to attain a knowledge of the spirit in the preceding incarnation will understand what they behold.

Then will come an epoch when still higher powers will awaken in human beings. This will be the epoch when the Christ will manifest Himself in a still loftier-manner; in an astral form in the lower world of Devachan. And in the final epoch, that of the moral impulse, the human beings who have passed through the other stages will behold the Christ in His glory, as the form of the greatest ‘Ego’, as the spiritualised Ego-Self, as the great Teacher of human evolution in the higher Devachan.

Thus the succession is as follows: in the Greco-Roman epoch Christ appeared on the physical plane; in our epoch He will appear as an etheric form on the astral plane; in the next epoch as an astral form on the plane of lower Devachan; and in the epoch of morality as the very essence and embodiment of the Ego.

We may now ask ourselves for what purpose Spiritual Science exists. It is so that there may be a sufficient number of human beings who will be prepared when these events take place. And now already Spiritual Science is working to the end that human beings may enter in the right way into connection with the higher worlds, so that they may enter rightly into the etheric-astral, into the aesthetic-Devachanic, into the moral-Devachanic. In our epoch it is the Spiritual-Scientific movement whose special aim is to enable the human being in his moral impulses to develop a right relationship with the Christ.

The next three millennia will be devoted to making visible the appearance of the Christ in the etheric. Only to those whose feelings are wholly materialistic will this be unattainable., A person may think materialistically when he admits the validity of matter alone and denies the existence of everything spiritual, or through the fact that he draws the spiritual down into the material. A person is materialistic also in admitting the existence of the spiritual only in material embodiment. There are even theosophists who are materialists. These believe that humanity is doomed to the necessity of beholding Christ again in a physical body. One does not escape from being a materialist through being a theosophist, but through comprehending that the higher worlds exist even when we cannot see them in a sense manifestation but must develop ourselves to the stage when we can behold them.

If we allow all this to pass through our minds, we may say that Christ is the true moral Impulse, permeating humanity with moral power. The Christ Impulse is power and life, the moral power which permeates the human being. But this moral power must be understood. Precisely in our own epoch it is necessary that Christ shall be proclaimed. For this reason Anthroposophy has the mission also of proclaiming the Christ in His etheric form.

Before Christ appeared on earth through the Mystery of Golgotha, the teaching about Him was prepared in advance. At that time, also, the physical Christ was proclaimed. It was primarily Jeshu ben Pandira who was the forerunner and herald, a hundred years before Christ. He also had the name Jesus, and, in contrast to Christ Jesus, he was called Jesus ben Pandira, son of Pandira. This man lived about a hundred years before our era. One does not need to be a clairvoyant in order to know this, for it is to be found in Rabbinical writings, and this fact has often been the occasion for confusing him with Christ Jesus. Jeshu ben Pandira was at first stoned and then hanged upon the beam of the cross. Jesus of Nazareth was actually crucified.

Who was this Jeshu ben Pandira? He is a great individuality who, since the time of Buddha—that is, about 600 BC. has been incarnated once in nearly every century in order to bring humanity forward. To understand him, we must go back to the nature of the Buddha.

We know, of course, that Buddha lived as a prince in the Sakya family five centuries and a half before the beginning of our era. The individuality who became the Buddha at that time had not already been a Buddha. Buddha, that prince who gave humanity the doctrine of compassion, had not been born in that age as Buddha. For Buddha does not signify an individuality; Buddha is a rank of honour. This Buddha was born as a Bodhisattva and was elevated to the Buddha in the twenty-ninth year of his life, while he sat absorbed in meditation under the bodhi tree and brought down from the spiritual heights into the physical world the doctrine of compassion. A Bodhisattva he had previously been—that is, in his previous incarnations—and then he became a Buddha. But the situation is such that the position of a Bodhisattva—that is of a teacher of humanity in physical form—became thereby vacant for a certain period of time, and had to be filled again. As the Bodhisattva who had incarnated at that time ascended in the twenty-ninth year of his life to the Buddha, the rank of the Bodhisattva was at once transferred to another individuality. Thus we must speak of a successor of the Bodhisattva who had now risen to the rank of Buddha. The successor to the Gautama-Buddha-Bodhisattva was that individuality who incarnated a hundred years before Christ as Jeshu ben Pandira, as a herald of the Christ in the physical body.

He is now the Bodhisattva of humanity until he in his turn advances to the rank of Buddha after 3,000 years, reckoned from the present time. In other words, he will require exactly 5,000 years to rise from a Bodhisattva to a Buddha. He who has been incarnated nearly every century since that time, is now also already incarnated, and will be the real herald of the Christ in etheric raiment, just as he prophesied the physical appearance of the Christ.

And even many of us will ourselves experience the fact that, during the 1930's, there will be persons—and more and more, later in the century—who will behold the Christ in etheric raiment.

Spiritual Science exists to prepare for this and everyone who works at the task of Spiritual Science shares in making this preparation.

The manner in which humanity is taught by its Leaders, but especially by a Bodhisattva who is to become the Maitreya Buddha, changes greatly from epoch to epoch.

Spiritual Science could not have been taught in the Greco-Roman epoch as it is taught today; this would not have been understood by anyone at that time. In that period, the Christ Being had to make manifest in physically visible form the goal of evolution, and only thus could He then work. Spiritual research spreads this teaching ever increasingly among human beings, and they will come to understand more and more the Christ Impulse, until the Christ Himself enters into them.

Today it is possible by means of the physically uttered word, in concepts and ideas, by means of thinking, to make the goal understandable and to influence men's souls in a good way, in order to fire them with enthusiasm for aesthetic and moral ideals. But the speech of today will be superseded in later periods of time by forces capable of a mightier stimulation than is possible at present by means of speech alone. Then will speech, the word, release powers conveying feelings of the heart from soul to soul, from master to pupil, from the Bodhisattva to all those who do not turn away from him. It will then be possible for speech to be the bearer of aesthetic feelings. But the dawn of a new epoch is needed for this. In our time it would not be possible even for the Bodhisattva himself to exert such influences through the larynx as will then be possible.

And during the final period of time, before the great War of All against All, the situation will be such that, as speech is at present the bearer of thoughts and conceptions and as it will later be the bearer of emotions, so will it then carry the moral element, the moral impulses, transmitting these from soul to soul. At present the word cannot have a moral influence. Such words can by no means be produced by our larynx as it is today. But such a spiritual power will one day exist. Words will be spoken through which the human being will receive moral power. Three thousand years after our present time the Bodhisattva we have spoken of will become the Buddha, and his teaching will then cause will impulses to stream directly into humanity. He will be the one whom the ancients foresaw: the Buddha Maitreya, a Bringer of Good.

He has the mission of preparing humanity in advance so that it may understand the true Christ Impulse. His mission is to direct men's gaze more and more to what they can love, to bring it about that what they can spread abroad as a theory shall flow into a moral channel so that at length all that men can possess in the form of thoughts shall stream into the moral life. And, whereas it is still entirely possible today that a person may be very able intellectually but be immoral, we are approaching a time when it will be impossible for anyone to be at the same time intellectually shrewd and immoral. It will be impossible for mental shrewdness and immorality to go hand in hand.

This is to be understood in the following way. Those who have kept themselves apart, and have opposed the course of evolution, will be the ones who will then battle together, all against all. Even those who develop today the highest intelligence, if they do not develop further during the succeeding epochs in feeling and morality, will gain nothing from their cleverness. The highest intelligence is, indeed, developed in our epoch. It has reached its climax. But a man who has developed intelligence today and who neglects the possibilities of further evolution, will destroy himself by his own intelligence. This will then be like an inner fire consuming him, devouring him, making him so small and feeble that he will become stupid and be able to achieve nothing—a fire that will annihilate him in the epoch wherein the moral impulses will have reached their climax. Whereas a person can be very dangerous today by means of his immoral shrewdness, he will then be without power to harm. Instead of this power, the soul will then possess in ever increasing measure moral powers—indeed, moral powers such as a modern man cannot in the least conceive. The highest power and morality are needed to receive the Christ Impulse into ourselves so that it becomes power and life in us.

Thus we see that Spiritual Science has the task of planting in the present stage of the evolution of humanity the seeds for its future evolution. Of course, we must take into account in connection with Spiritual Science also what has to be considered in connection with the whole of creation—that is, that errors may occur. But even one who cannot as yet enter into the higher worlds can make adequate tests and see whether here and there the truth is proclaimed: the details must be compatible. Test what is proclaimed, all the individual data which are brought together regarding the evolution of the human being, the separate appearances of the Christ, and the like, and you will see that things mutually confirm one another. This is the evidence of truth which is available even to the person who does not yet see into the higher worlds. One can be quite assured: for those who are willing to test things, the doctrine of the Christ reappearing in the spirit will alone prove to be true.

• 36. Thales: 640 to circa 543 BC., first Greek philosopher.

In a series of lectures the fact has now been brought home to us that behind all that we call Maya or the great illusion, there is the Spiritual. Let us once again ask ourselves in what way it has been made evident that the spiritual is to be discerned behind everything perceptible to our senses and our physically limited view.

In order to describe this spiritual essence we were obliged in the last lecture to sweep the nearest external phenomena away from our field of vision and pierce through to such qualities of the reality as those described as the willingness to sacrifice, and the virtue of bestowal or renunciation, in fact, to those virtues with which we can only become acquainted by looking into our own souls, and which we can only fully comprehend by means of our own souls. Now if we are really to attribute such virtues as these to what we have to think of as the reality—we might almost say the ‘true’—behind the world of illusion, we must admit that in this world of true existence, in this world of reality, there lives that which fundamentally, as regards its qualities, can only be compared with the qualities we primarily perceive in our souls. For instance if we have to characterise that which is outwardly expressed in the phenomena of heat, presenting it in its true character of sacrificial service, as the flowing sacrifice in the world, it means precisely that we must reduce the elements of heat back to the spiritual, to the incorporeal, doing away, as it were, with the outer veil of existence, showing that which in the external world is similar to what we recognise as the spiritual in ourselves.

Now before we carry these observations further, another idea is necessary. That is the following. Does all that we have in this world of Maya or illusion really vanish into a sort of nothingness? Is everything around us in this world of sense, the world of our external comprehension which to us appears as the real or part of the real—is all this actually nothing?

It would indeed be quite a good comparison if we were to say that the world of truth, the world of reality, is at first concealed, as the inner forces of a lake or even of the ocean are concealed in the body of water, and that the world of Maya might be compared with the rippling play of the waves on the surface. That would be a good comparison; for it shows exactly that there is in the depths of the ocean something that causes the movement of the waves above, something that is the substantiality of the water and the configuration of its force. So that whether we select this example or any other is a matter of indifference, we may very well put the question:--Is there in the wide realms of our Maya or illusion, anything that is real? In this lecture we shall follow the same system as in the last. We shall slowly approach what we wish to bring before our mind, by starting with the inner experience of our soul; and indeed, as we have moved forward spiritually through the Saturn, Sun and Moon-existence, and have now approached that of the earth, we shall start from more intimate, we might almost say more common soul-experience than those referred to in our last lecture. We then started from the hidden depths of the soul-life, from what arises in the astral body. There we felt longing arising within it, and we saw how the longing works in the nature of man, actually leading the life of the soul to find satisfaction only in the advance of that world of ideas which we have been able to grasp as the inner movement of that life. We thus found the way from the microcosmic soul to that cosmic creating which we ascribed to the Spirits of Movement. To-day we shall begin with a still more intimate experience of the soul, one indeed to which attention was already drawn in ancient Greece, which in its reality is even to-day of profound significance. It is indicated in the words: all philosophy, and all striving for a certain kind of human knowledge, must come from Wonder. This is really the case. Any man who has devoted a little reflection and thought to the whole sequence in experience in his own soul, as to how he was brought to any particular learning, will come to know that a sound way to learning is always to start from wonder, from astonishment at something. This wonder, this astonishment, from which every form of learning must proceed, belongs precisely to those experiences of the soul which we described as bringing sublimity and life into anything, however dry. What kind of learning would it be which found a place in our soul, without proceeding from wonder! It would truly be a learning swamped in prosiness and pedantry. That process in the soul which leads from wonder to the bliss we feel when our riddles are solved, which first arises from wonder, in that alone constitutes the sublimity and vital power of the process of acquiring knowledge. We should be able actually to feel the dryness and withering of any knowledge not originating in these two movements of the mind. Sound knowledge is framed in wonder and the bliss of solved riddles: Any other kind of knowledge may be acquired externally and established by man through any kind of reasoning. But a knowledge not framed by these two feelings, does not spring from the soul of man in real earnest. All the fragrance of knowledge created by the atmosphere of vital power, proceeds from these two, from wonder and the bliss of is satisfaction.

But what is the origin of wonder itself? Why is it that wonder, astonishment at anything external, arises in our souls? It arises, because, when we first meet with a being, a thing or a fact, it appears strange to us. This strangeness is the first element leading to wonder and astonishment. But we do not feel this for everything that is strange to us; but only for that to which we feel ourselves in a sense related, so related that we say: ‘In this being or thing there is something that is not as yet in me, but which may fill me.’ So that we can feel related to a thing yet strange, which at first we must grasp through wonder and astonishment, our inner ‘wondering’ is our perception of the quality of an outer ‘wonder’ to which a man at first as far as his own perception goes, considers himself in no wise related. That however depends on himself, or at least it need only do so. And he should not adopt a challenging attitude towards what appears to him as ‘a wonder’ unless he can in a certain way make claim to explain it because it is related to him. Why else should people who start from purely materialistic or purely intellectual concepts deny what others designate as a ‘wonder’, when they have no direct proof that a fabrication, a falsehood, is brought forward? Even philosophers to-day are obliged to admit that it can never be proved by any of the phenomena known to man, that the Christ incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth did not rise again. Proof can be brought against this assertion; but what is the manner of these proofs? Logically they are not tenable! Even enlightened philosophers now admit that. For all the reasons brought against it from the materialistic side—as for instance, the statement that no man has yet been seen to have risen like Christ—all these reasons are on the same level as the argument of a man who had never seen anything but fish and therefore wished to prove the non-existence of birds. It is impossible logically to prove by the existence of one class of beings, that others do not exist. Just as little is it possible through the experience a man may have on the physical plane to disprove, what must at first be described as a ‘miracle’, anything connected with the event of Golgotha. But if something is communicated to a person, which although it may be true, he must call a miracle and he says that he cannot understand it, he does not thereby contradict what we have said about the idea of wondering; for his attitude shows clearly that this fundamental basis of all knowledge is already established in him. He demands that what he has been told should find an echo in himself. He wishes it to become its own property intellectually and as he believes that he cannot have that, and it is not related to him, he challenges it. Even if we ourselves arrive at the concept of the miraculous, we should see that astonishment or marvel, upon which is based all the ancient Greek philosophy, is aroused by a man finding himself confronted with something strange to him, but to which at the same time he recognises a relationship. Let us try to create a connecting link between this idea and those brought before our minds in the last lecture.

We have said that a particular advance in evolution was brought about through the willingness of certain Beings to sacrifice, and their sacrifices being rejected and thrown back, and we learnt to recognise in the rejected sacrifice one of the principle factors in the ancient Moon-evolution. One of the most vital points in that evolution is the fact that during that period sacrifice was to be offered by certain Beings to Entities even more exalted, and that it was renounced by them; so that, as it were, the smoke of the sacrifice offered by the ancient Moon-Beings pressed through to the Higher Entities but was not accepted by them; and that this was sent back as substance into the Beings who had desired to offer it up. We also saw that much of the peculiar character of the Beings belonging to ancient Moon was caused by their feeling within them what they had wished to send up to the Higher Entities as sacrificial substance. We saw, indeed that this, which aspired, but was unable to ascend to the Higher Entities, remained behind within the Beings themselves—thereby was developed in certain Beings—in the Beings of the rejected, the force of Longing. We have still, in all that we sacrifice in our own souls as longing, a legacy from the bygone events on ancient Moon when those Beings found their sacrifice rejected. In a spiritual sense the whole character of the ancient Moon-evolution, its whole spiritual atmosphere, may be described in many respects by saying that Beings were present there who desired to offer sacrifice, but found that this sacrifice was not accepted because the Higher Entities resigned it. The peculiar feature of the spiritual atmosphere of ancient Moon was; the rejected sacrifice. And the rejection of the sacrifice offered by Cain, which symbolically represents one of the starting points of the evolution of earthly humanity, appears as a kind of recapitulation of this peculiar feature of the ancient Moon evolution taking place in the soul of Cain, who sees that his sacrifice is not accepted. This is something which reveals to us a pain, which gives birth to Longing, just as was the case with the Beings belonging to the old Moon-existence. We saw in the last lecture, that between this rejected sacrifice and the longing arising in these beings through its rejection, an adjustment was produced through the appearances on the old Moon of the Spirits of Movement. They created a possible way by which the longing arising in the Entities of the rejected sacrifice, could in a sense be satisfied. You must picture the position very clearly in your minds. You have the exalted Beings to whom sacrifice is about to be made; the substance offered in sacrifice to them rejected; and the longing thereby arising within the Beings who desired to offer and now feel: ‘Had I been able to accomplish my sacrifice, the best part of my own being would be living in those exalted ones; but now lam shut out from them, I am here while they are yonder!’ The Spirits of Movement, however, and this can be taken almost literally, bring the Beings in whom the rejected sacrifice is as a longing after the Higher Beings, into such a condition that they can approach them from many different sides. That which remains in them as the sacrifice which could not be offered, can at any rate now be adjusted, through the wealth of impressions received from the Higher Beings, who are as it were, encircled by the substance of the rejected sacrifice. So is adjusted what could not be harmonised, because of the rejection of the sacrifice, inasmuch as a relation is established between these beings and the Higher Entities which conveyed the impression of a presented sacrifice. We can form a clear idea of what this implies, if we think symbolically of the more exalted Entities united as a Sun, and then, in one position, as a planet, the less exalted gathered together. Now suppose that the Beings of the lesser planet wished to make sacrifice to the greater planet—to the Sun [Editor's Note: The Sun was once a planet]—and that the Sun refused to accept it and threw it back; the substance of the sacrifice must remain in the Beings whose sacrifice was not accepted. Then in their loneliness, their isolation fills their Being with longing. Now the Spirits of Movement bring them into the periphery of the more exalted Entities; this makes it first possible for them, hi place of the direct upward flow of their sacrificial substance, to set that substance itself in motion and thereby to bring it into connection with the Higher Entities. This is exactly like a man who cannot be contented within himself by means of a single great satisfaction, but experiences a number of partial satisfactions; the result of these different experiences being to set all his feelings in motion. This was gone into more minutely in the last lecture. We saw that as the Beings were unable to feel an inner connection with the Higher Beings through the sacrifice, impressions came to them outside in the place of this, by which we saw that they were still able to obtain a certain satisfaction.

But it is an undeniable fact that that which was to have been offered up would have continued its existence within the Higher Entities in a different fashion from its state within the lower Beings. The actual conditions necessary to that existence are in those Higher Beings. It became necessary, therefore, for different conditions of existence to arise in the lower Beings. This again can be symbolically expressed. If a planet were able to pour all its contents into the Sun and these were not rejected, the essence of that planet would find different conditions of existence within the Sun from those it would have met with in the planet outside if the Sun had thrown it back: an estrangement of what we must call the contents of the sacrifice takes place, it is alienated from its origin.

Now bear in mind the thought that certain Beings are compelled to retain within them something which they would gladly have offered up in sacrifice, and concerning which they both feel and perceive that it could only attain its real meaning, if it could be offered up.

If you can picture the feelings of such Beings, you will have an idea of what may be called: ‘The exclusion of a certain number of Cosmic Beings from their actual meaning, their great Cosmic purpose.’ Certain Beings have within them something, which, speaking symbolically, could only fulfil its purpose elsewhere. The consequence of this is that the ‘displacement’—if we may once more speak symbolically—of the rejected incense, of the rejected sacrificial substance, excludes it at first from the rest of the Cosmic process.

If you grasp these thoughts with your feeling—not with your reason, for that does not extend to matters such as these—you will perceive that this represents something like a rending away from the universal Cosmic process. To the Beings who rejected the sacrifice it is only something they put away from them; to the other Beings, those within whom the sacrificial substance is retained, this is a something on which an alien character is imprinted from the outset. Thus there are Beings in whose substance this alien stamp is imprinted from the beginning. If we can present these things to our soul through inner feeling, we are reminded of something in which an alien character is inherent from the beginning:—that is Death! Death is none other than that which necessarily enters the universe with the rejection of the sacrificial substance of those Beings who then had to retain it within themselves. Thus we advance from Resignation, from Renunciation—which we encounter at the third stage of evolution; to that which comes into existence through the renunciation by the Higher Entities of Death.

In its true significance death is neither more nor less than the attribute of the inner contents of certain Beings, contents which are shut out and not in their proper place. Even when death comes to a man in a concrete form it is fundamentally the same thing. For when we look at a corpse left behind in the world of Maya, we know that it consists of nothing but matter which at the moment of death, was shut out from the Ego, astral body, and etheric body, alienated from that within which alone it had a meaning. The physical body without the etheric body, astral body, and Ego has no meaning, it is purposeless; at that moment it is excluded from its purpose. That which we can no longer perceive when a man dies, is then for us in the macrocosm. On account of the Cosmic Beings who belong to higher spheres having rejected what was to have been brought to them in sacrifice, the rejected sacrificial substance within the Beings to whom it was thrown back lapses into death, for death signifies the exclusion of any Cosmic substance or Cosmic Being from its actual purpose.

We have now come to a spiritual characteristic of what we call the fourth element in the Universe. If (1) fire represents the purest sacrifice—and where-ever we encounter fire or heat, behind it there is its spiritual counterpart: Sacrifice—if (2) behind all the air spread out around our earth there really lies the virtue of giving, a really flowing virtue; if (3) we may describe flowing water or the element of fluidity as spiritual resignation or renunciation, so must we describe the element of Earth, (4) which alone can be the bearer of death—for death would not exist without it—as that which was severed from its purpose by renunciation. Now we have something in a concrete form, showing how the solid was formed from the fluidic. For this too reflects a spiritual process, in a certain sense. Suppose ice forms in a pond; the water then becomes solid. The real reason of this is that the water in becoming ice is cut off from its purpose. This gives us the process of solidification, the spiritual process of the Earth's becoming; for as far as the distinguishing marks of the four elements are concerned, ice too is earth, and fluid alone is water. Earth is the element in which death appears and may be experienced.

We began by putting the question as to whether anything real could be found in our world of illusion and Maya, whether there is anything in it corresponding to a reality. I want you to hold clearly to the idea we have just been considering. At the beginning of this course I told you that the concepts to be considered were somewhat complicated. It will therefore be necessary that we should not only try to understand them, but also to meditate upon them; for only then will they be clear to us. Now let us take this conception of the relation of death to the earth; for it presents a truly remarkable aspect. Whereas concerning all our other concepts we could say that there was nothing real in all the world of Maya around us, but that the reality must be looked for in the spiritual behind it—we have now ascertained that within the world of Maya there is that, which, precisely because it is divided from its purpose, because it ought to be in the spiritual world may be called death. Thus something is cut off in Maya, which actually ought not to be there. In the whole wide realm of Maya or the great illusion, we have nothing but deception and illusion before us. Yet there is something there which corresponds to a reality, because it is cut off from its true meaning in the spiritual; and as soon as it enters Maya it encounters annihilation and death. That declares to us nothing less significant than the great occult truth: ‘In the whole world of Maya one thing only shows itself in its reality—Death!’ All other phenomena must be traced back to their reality; all other phenomena entering into Maya have reality behind them; death is the single reality in Maya for it consists in the fact that something was cut off from reality and taken into Maya. That is why death is the one and only reality in Maya. And now if we turn from the universal Maya to the great principles of the world, a very important and essential consequence of this statement presents itself to occult science from yet another side, that in our world of Maya, Death is the only reality. We can begin by considering the beings of the other kingdoms surrounding us. We may ask: do minerals die? To the occultist there could be no sense in saying that minerals die. It would he just the same as saying that our fingernails die when we cut them. The finger-nail is nothing which s complete being has claim to existence; but it is part of us, and when we/cut it off we separate it from ourselves, tear it away from the life it has in connection with us. In reality it dies only when we ourselves die. In the same sense, according to occult science, the minerals do not die. They are merely members of one great organism, just as a finger-nail is a member of our own, and although a mineral may appear to perish, it is in reality only severed from this great organism, just as the piece of finger-nail is severed from our organism when we trim it off. The destruction of a mineral is no death for the mineral has no life in itself, but only in the great organism of which it is a member. The plant as such is not independent; it is a member—not of one great organism, like the mineral—but of the whole organism of the earth. To occult observation there would be no sense in speaking of individual plant-organisms, only of the organism of the earth of which the plants everywhere form part. And when we put them to death it is just as when we cut away one of our finger-nails. We cannot say that the finger-nail has died. Just as little can we say that of the plants; for they belong to a great organism that is identical with the whole earth, and that is an organism which falls asleep in spring, sending forth the plants as its organ towards the Sun; and in Autumn it takes them back into itself when it gathers their seeds into itself. There is no sense in considering the plants as independent, for the whole earth organism does not die when its separate plants fade—just as we ourselves do not die when our hair goes grey, although we cannot restore it its natural colour even if we dye it.

We are, however, in a different position from the plants. But the earth may in this respect be compared to a man who could restore his grey hair to its natural colour. The earth does not die; what is observed in the fading of the plants is a process that takes place on the surface. So we can never say that the plants really die. And even of the animals we cannot actually say that they die, as we die. For in reality a separate animal does not exist; what really exists is its group-soul, which is in the super-sensible world. The reality of the animals is only to be found on the astral plane as group-soul, and the individual animal is condensed out of that. The death of an animal means the casting off a member of the group-soul, which replaces it by another.

Thus what we encounter at death in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms is only apparent death, only in the world of Maya is that ‘death’. In reality man alone dies, for he has developed his individuality so far that it descends into his physical body, in which during the earth-existence he must become real. In reality death has only meaning for the Earth-existence of man.

If we grasp this we must say: Man alone can truly experience death. Thus for man there is, as we learn through occult research, a real overcoming of death, a real victory over death. For every other being death is only apparent, and does not in reality exist. If again we were to ascend higher—from man to the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies—we should find that they do not know death in the human sense; so that in reality actual death, that is death on the physical plane, comes only to those beings who have to acquire something on that plane. Now man has to acquire his ego-consciousness there. Without death he could never find it. Neither with respect to the beings below man in rank, nor to those higher than man, is there any meaning in speaking of actual death. But on the other hand as regards the Being whom we call the ‘Christ-Being’ it must clearly be impossible to obliterate his most significant earth deed. For indeed we have seen that the most essential event to be considered in connection with the Christ-Being is the Mystery of Golgotha; that is, the conquest of death by life. But where can this conquest of death alone be accomplished? Can it be accomplished in the higher worlds? No! For even as regards the lower beings referred to as the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms—as they have their beings in the higher, super-sensible worlds—we cannot speak of death. And in the course of our studies this winter we shall further show that neither among the Higher Beings can there be a question of death; only of change, metamorphosis, transformation. Only with regard to man can we speak of the incision into life that we call ‘death.’ Man can only experience this death on the physical plane. If man had never descended to the physical plane, he would know nothing of death; for no being who has not trodden the physical plane knows anything about death. In other worlds there is no such thing as that which we call death, nothing but transformation, metamorphosis. Would Christ undergo death He must descend to the physical plane! There alone could He experience it.

Thus we see that even in the historical development of man, the realities of the higher worlds play their part in Maya, in a remarkable way. Whereas concerning every other historical event we can only interpret it correctly by saying: ‘This historical event took place here on the physical plane, but the cause of it is up above in the spiritual world, we must look for that’; we cannot say of the event of Golgotha, ‘this event is here below on the physical plane and something corresponding to it exists in the higher worlds’. Christ Himself belongs to the higher worlds and came down to the physical plane. But there is no prototype above of what was accomplished on Golgotha, such as we must look for with respect to other historical events. That was enacted on the physical plane alone! Among the many proofs of this fact which occult science is able to provide, is the following: That the event of Damascus will, in the course of the next three thousand years, as we have often said, be renewed for an ample multitude of mankind. This means, that capacities will be developed in man which will enable him to perceive the Christ as an etheric figure of the astral plane, as Paul saw Him on the road to Damascus. The event on of man gradually becoming able to perceive the Christ by means of the higher faculties which will be developed in the next three thousand years, has its beginnings in the 20th century. From now on these capacities will gradually spread, and in the course of that span of time a vast number of persons will know, by personal vision into the higher worlds, that Christ is a reality; that He lives; they will learn to know Him in the life He lives now. And not only will they know the nature of His present life, but they will also be convinced just as Paul was—that He died, and rose again. But the foundation for this cannot be laid in the higher worlds: it must be laid on the physical plane. Thus if anyone comes to have an understanding of these things, if even at the present time he understands that the development of Christ Himself is progressing—and that at the same time certain human capacities are also developing, if his understanding of modern Anthroposophy has taught him this, then there is nothing to prevent him, when he has passed through the portal of death, from taking part in this event when it actually appears as a first shining forth of Christ in the world of man. So that a man who prepares himself in his physical body to-day for this event, may be able to experience it in the intermediate life, between death and re-birth. But those who do not prepare for it, who acquire no understanding in this incarnation, will, in the life immediately following this—the life between death and re-birth--know nothing of what is taking place with respect to the Christ for the next three thousand years from our present century. They will have to wait until they are again incarnated and then make necessary preparations on the earth. The death at Golgotha, which is enacted on earth as the origin of all the subsequent Christ development can only be understood in the physical body. Of all the facts important to our higher life, this alone is comprehensible in the physical body. It is then further developed and perfected in the higher worlds, but we must first have understood it while in the physical body. Just as the Mystery of Golgotha could never have taken place in the higher worlds and has no prototype there, but is an event which—since it includes death--is confined to the physical plane, so, too must the comprehension of it be acquired on this plane. Indeed, it is one of the tasks of man on earth to acquire this understanding first in some one of his incarnations.

So that we must say: we have found pre-eminently on the physical plane something which displays an undeniable reality, a direct truth. What then is real on the physical plane? On the physical plane so that we can stand by it, we have a reality, death—death in the world of man, not in the other kingdoms of nature. When we wish to study the historical events that occur in the course of the earth's development, we must look for a spiritual prototype for each one of them—but not for the Mystery of Golgotha! There we have something which in itself directly belongs to the world of Reality!

Now it is extremely interesting that another aspect of what has just been said, can also be seen. It is really remarkably significant to observe that this event of Golgotha as a real event is to-day denied, and that people say—speaking of external history—that it cannot be proved by any historical connection. Among vital historical facts there is hardly one so difficult to prove on external realistic, historical grounds, as the Mystery of Golgotha. Just think how easy it is in comparison with this to work on historical ground if we wish to prove the existence of a Socrates, a Plato, or any of the Greek heroes, in so far as they were of significance to the progress of man in the external world, and how up to a certain point it is perfectly justifiable to say that ‘no history can assert that there ever was a Jesus of Nazareth!’ This statement cannot be contradicted historically! This cannot be dealt with like other historical facts. It is very remarkable that this Event, which occurred on the external physical plane, has this in common with all super-sensible facts: they cannot be ‘proved’. Much the same people who deny the existence of a super-sensible world lack the capacity for grasping this fact, which is not super-sensible. Its existence can be surmised by its effects. But, these people think that effects such as these might also appear, even without the real event having occurred in history; and they attribute these effects to sociological relations. To one who knows the inner course of the world's development, the idea that effects such as these produced by Christianity could be brought about without having a power behind them, is just as wise as it would be to say cabbages could grow in a field without having been sown there I Indeed we might go yet further, and admit that it was not possible for those who took part in the final shaping of the Gospels to prove, the historical event of the Mystery of Golgotha—as historical event—on historical grounds! For it took place leaving hardly any trace perceptible to outer observation. Do you know how those who took part in the later compiling of the Gospels convinced themselves as to these events, with the exception of the writer of the John-Gospel, who was an immediate contemporary? They could not above all convince themselves by historical documents, for they had nothing but oral traditions and the Mystery-Books, as is set forth in Christianity as a Mystical Fact. They were able to convince themselves of the actual existence of Christ Jesus by the constellations, for they were then still very learned as to the connection between the Macrocosm and the Microcosm. They knew how to set up a map of the heavens for that point of the world's history (as can still be done to-day); and they concluded: if the stars were in such and such a position, then He whom they call the Christ must have lived on earth at that time. In this very way the writers of the Gospel of Matthew, Mark and Luke convinced themselves of the historical happenings; they obtained the rest clairvoyantly. But first they convinced themselves in the same way as we can make sure to-day that any particular event will happen on the earth; by the position of the constellations in the Macrocosm. Anyone who knows anything of this cannot but believe in them. It is a fruitless task to prove the inaccuracy of what is brought against the historical status of the Gospels. Rather should we, as anthroposophists, understand that we must take a very different stand: one which is only possible through an insight into occult science.

With reference to this I should just like to mention a point I already endeavoured to establish elsewhere. That is, that the realities of which Anthroposophy speaks cannot be injured by any objections, however correct these may be in themselves; no matter how correctly people may argue from the knowledge they themselves may possess. Anthroposophy cannot be contradicted. In the lecture I gave here, entitled: ‘How can Theosophy be established?’ I made use of the example of the little boy in a village whose duty it was to fetch rolls for the family breakfast. Now in that village each roll cost two kreuzers and he was always given ten kreuzers. The baker gave him a number of rolls, and being no great arithmetician, he did not trouble to count them, but brought them home. But a foster-son entered the family and was sent for the rolls instead of the other boy. This lad was a good reckoner and he said to himself: ‘I have been given ten kreuzers, each roll costs two kreuzers, therefore I must bring home five rolls’; off he went, bringing back six rolls. He said to himself: ‘This must be wrong, I ought not to have so many, and as my reckoning is correct, tomorrow I must only bring back five rolls’. The next day he took the ten kreuzers, and again he received six rolls. The reckoning was correct—only it did not correspond with the reality; for that was a different matter. The reality was that it was the custom in that place to give six rolls instead of five to anyone who spent ten kreuzers. The boy's argument was quite correct; but did not accord with reality.

In like manner the cleverest thought-out objections to Anthroposophy may all agree with each other, yet need have nothing to do with the reality; for ‘reality’ may be based on very different foundations. The example quoted is quite practical, and serves to explain, even scientifically, what is correctly calculated, and what is actual fact.

We have tried to trace the world of Maya back to the realities and in doing so we have shewn that all Fire is sacrifice, everything of the nature of Air is the generous flowing virtue of giving, and Fluid the results of renunciation and resignation. To these three truths we have to-day added the fact that the true essence of the earth or solid matter is death, like the cutting off of any substance from its cosmic purpose. Because this has occurred death itself has entered the world of Maya or illusion as a reality. Even the Gods themselves could not taste death at all without descent into the physical world in order to comprehend death in the physical world, the world of Maya, or illusion. This is what I wished to add to-day to the concepts we have already formed. But once more let it be said that if we wish to arrive at a clear understanding of these concepts which are so necessary, and if we are thoroughly to enter into the various ideas in St. Mark's Gospel, the only possible way of doing so is by careful meditation and by bringing these things again and again before the soul. The Gospel of St. Mark can only be understood if based on the greatest and most significant cosmic conceptions.

Thus the fact has now been brought home to us in a series of lectures that behind all that we call Maya or the great illusion, there is the Spiritual. Let us once again ask ourselves in what way it has been made evident that the spiritual is to be discerned behind everything perceptible to our senses and our physically limited grasp of the world.

In order to describe this spiritual element we were obliged in the course of the last lectures to sweep the nearest external phenomena away from our field of vision and pierce through to such qualities of reality as those described as the willingness to sacrifice, and the virtue of bestowal or renunciation, in fact, to those virtues with which we can only become acquainted by looking into our own souls, and which we can only fully comprehend by means of our own souls. Now if we are really to attribute such virtues as these to what we have to think of as the reality—we might almost say the “true”—behind the world of illusion, we must admit that in this world of true existence, in this world of reality, there lives that which fundamentally, as regards its qualities, can only be compared with the qualities we primarily perceive in our souls. For instance if we have to characterise that which is outwardly expressed in the phenomena of heat, presenting it in its true character of sacrificial service, as the flowing sacrifice in the world, it means precisely that we must reduce the element of heat back to the spiritual, to the incorporeal, doing away, as it were, with the outer veil of existence, showing that which in the external world is similar to what we recognise as the spiritual in ourselves.

Now before we carry these observations further, another idea is necessary. That is the following. Does all that we have in this world of Maya or illusion really vanish into a sort of nothingness? Is everything around us in this world of sense, the world of our external comprehension which to us appears as the real or part of the real—is all this actually nothing?

It would indeed be quite a good comparison if we were to say that the world of truth, the world of reality, is at first concealed, as the inner forces of a lake or even of the ocean are concealed in the body of water, and that the world of Maya might be compared with the rippling play of the waves on the surface. That would be a good comparison; for it shows exactly that there is in the depths of the ocean something that causes the rippling of the waves above, something that is the substantiality of the water and the configuration of its force. So that whether we select this example or any other is a matter of indifference, we may very well put the question:—Is there in the wide realms of our Maya or illusion, anything that is real? To-day we shall follow the same system as in the last lectures. We shall slowly approach what we wish to bring before our mind, by starting with inner experiences of our soul; and indeed, as we have moved forward spiritually through the Saturn-, Sun- and Moon-existence, and have now approached that of the Earth, we shall start from more intimate, we might almost say more common soul-experiences than those referred to in our last lecture. We then started from the hidden depths of the soul-life, from what arises in what we call the “astral body.” There we felt longing arising within it, and we saw how the longing works in the nature of man, actually leading the life of the soul to find satisfaction only in meeting that picture-world which we have been able to grasp as the inner movement of that life. We thus found the way from the microcosmic soul to that cosmic creating which we ascribed to the Spirits of Movement. To-day we shall begin with a still more intimate experience of the soul, one indeed to which attention was already drawn in ancient Greece, which in its reality is even to-day of profound significance. It is indicated in the words: all philosophy, and all striving for a certain kind of human knowledge, proceeds from Wonder. This is really the case. Any man who has devoted a little reflection and thought to the whole process in experience in his own soul, as to how he was brought to any particular learning, will come to know that a sound way to learning is always to start from wonder, from amazement at something. This wonder, this amazement, from which every form of learning must proceed belongs precisely to those experiences of the soul which we described as bringing sublimity and life into anything, however dry. What kind of learning would it be which found a place in our soul, without proceeding from wonder! It would truly be a learning swamped in prosiness and pedantry. That process in the soul which leads from wonder to the bliss we feel when our riddles are solved, which has raised itself above wonder, that alone constitutes the sublimity and vital power of the process of acquiring knowledge. We really ought to be able to feel the dryness and withering of any knowledge not originating in these two movements of the mind. Sound knowledge is framed in wonder and the bliss of solved riddles; any other kind of knowledge may be acquired externally and established by man through some kind of reasoning. But a knowledge not framed by these two feelings, does not spring from the soul of man in real earnest. All the fragrance of knowledge that is created by the atmosphere of the life element in knowledge, proceeds from these two, from wonder and the bliss of its satisfaction. But what is the origin of wonder itself? Why is it that wonder, amazement at anything external, arises in our souls? It arises, because, when we first meet with a being, a thing or a fact, it appears strange to us. This strangeness is the first element leading to wonder and amazement. But we do not feel this for everything that is strange to us; but only for that to which we feel ourselves in a sense related, so related that we say: “In this being or thing there is something that is not as yet in me, but which may pass over into me.” So that we can feel related to a thing yet strange, which at first we must grasp through wonder and astonishment, our inner “wondering” is our perception of the quality of an outer “wonder” to which a man at first as far as his own perception goes, considers himself in no wise related. That, however, depends on himself; or at least it need only do so. And he would not adopt a challenging attitude towards what appears to him as “a wonder” unless he were in a certain way to demand that it should disclose itself to him because it is related to him. Why else should people who start from purely materialistic or purely intellectual concepts deny what others designate as a “wonder,” when they have no direct proof that a fabrication, a falsehood, is brought forward? Even philosophers to-day are obliged to admit that it can never be proved by any of the phenomena known to man, that the Christ incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth did not rise again. Proof can be brought against this assertion; but what is the manner of these proofs? Logically they are not tenable! Even enlightened philosophers now admit that. For all the reasons brought against it from the materialistic side—as for instance, the statement that no man has yet been seen to have risen like Christ—all these reasons are on the same level as the argument of a man who had never seen anything but fish and therefore wished to prove the non-existence of birds. It is impossible logically to prove by the existence of one class of beings, that others do not exist. Just as little is it possible through the experiences one may have of men on the physical plane to deduce something—which in the first place is described as a “miracle,” concerning the event of Golgotha. But if something is communicated to a person, which although it may be true, he must call a miracle and he says that he cannot understand it, he does not thereby contradict what we have said about the idea of wondering; for his attitude shows clearly that this starting point of all knowledge is already established for him. He demands, in fact, that what he has been told should find an echo in himself. He wishes it to become its own property intellectually and as he believes that he cannot have that, and it is not related to him, he challenges it. Even if we ourselves arrive at the concept of the miraculous, we should see that amazement or marvel, upon which is based all philosophy in the sense of ancient Greece, is aroused by a man finding himself confronted with something strange to him, but to which at the same time he recognises a relationship. Let us try to create a connecting link between these ideas and those brought before our minds in the last lecture.

We have shown that a particular advance in evolution was brought about through the willingness of certain Beings to sacrifice, but that their sacrifices were rejected and thrown back, and we learnt to recognise in the rejected sacrifice one of the principal factors in the ancient Moon-evolution. One of the most important points in that evolution is the fact that during that period sacrifice was to be offered by certain Beings to Beings even more exalted, and that it was renounced by them; so that, as it were, the smoke of the sacrifice offered by the ancient Moon-Beings pressed up to the higher Beings but was not accepted by them; and that this was sent back as substance into the Beings who had desired to offer it up. We also saw that much of the peculiar character of the Beings belonging to ancient Moon consisted in their feeling within themselves what they had wished to send up to the higher Beings as sacrificial substance. We saw, indeed, that this, which aspired, but was unable to ascend to the higher Beings, remained behind within the Beings themselves—and that thereby was developed in certain Beings, in the Beings of the rejected, the force of Longing. We have still, in all that we experience in our own souls as longing, a legacy from the bygone events on ancient Moon when those Beings found their sacrifice rejected. In a spiritual sense the whole character of the ancient Moon-evolution, its whole spiritual atmosphere, may be described in many respects by saying that Beings were present there who desired to offer sacrifice, but found that this sacrifice was not accepted because the higher Beings resigned it. The peculiar feature of the spiritual atmosphere of ancient Moon was: the rejected sacrifice. And the rejection of the sacrifice offered by Cain, which symbolically represents one of the starting points of the evolution of earthly humanity, appears as a kind of recapitulation of this peculiar feature of the ancient Moon evolution taking place in the soul of Cain, who sees that his sacrifice is not accepted. This is something which reveals to us a sorrow, a pain which gives birth to longing, just as was the case with the beings belonging to the old Moon-existence. We saw in the last lecture, that between this rejected sacrifice and the longing arising in these beings through its rejection, an adjustment was produced through the appearance on the old Moon of the Spirits of Movement. They created a possible way by which the longing arising in the Beings of the rejected sacrifice, could in a sense be satisfied. You must picture the position very clearly in your minds. You have the exalted Beings to whom sacrifice is about to be made; the substance offered in sacrifice to them rejected; and the longing thereby arising within the Beings who desired to offer and now feel: “Had I been able to accomplish my sacrifice, the best part of my own being would be living in those exalted ones; but now I am shut out from them, I am here while they are yonder!” The Spirits of Movement, however, and this can be taken almost literally, bring the Beings in whom the rejected sacrifice glows as a longing for the higher Beings, into such positions that they can approach them from many different sides. That which remains in them as the sacrifice which could not be offered, can at any rate now be adjusted, through the wealth of impressions received from the higher Beings, who are as it were, encircled by the Beings of the rejected sacrifice. So is adjusted what could not be harmonised, because of the rejection of the sacrifice, inasmuch as in the position of these Beings to the higher Beings a relation is established between them which conveys the impression of a presented sacrifice. We can form a clear idea of what this implies, if we think symbolically of the more exalted Beings united as a Sun, and then, in one position, as a planet, the less exalted gathered together. Now suppose that the Beings of the lesser planet wished to make sacrifice to the greater planet—to the Sun, and that the Sun refused to accept it; the substance of the sacrifice must remain in the Beings whose sacrifice was not accepted. Then in their loneliness, their isolation fills their being with longing. Now the Spirits of Movement bring them into the periphery of the more exalted Beings; this makes it first possible for them, in place of the direct upward flow of their sacrificial substance, to set that substance itself in motion and thereby to bring it into connection with the higher Beings. This is exactly like a man who cannot be contented within himself by means of a single great satisfaction, but experiences a number of partial satisfactions; the result of these different experiences being to set all his feelings in motion. This was gone into more minutely in the last lecture. We saw that as the Beings were unable to feel an inner connection with the higher Beings through the sacrifice, impressions came to them outside in the place of this, by which we saw that they were still able to obtain a certain satisfaction.

But it is an undeniable fact that that which was to have been offered up would have continued its existence within the higher Beings in a different fashion from its state within the lower Beings. The actual conditions necessary to that existence are in those higher Beings. It became necessary, therefore, for different conditions of existence to arise in the lower Beings. This again can be symbolically expressed. If the whole substance of a planet could flow into the Sun and it were not rejected, the Beings of that planet would find different conditions of existence within the Sun from those they would have met with in the planet outside if the Sun throws them back: an estrangement of what we must call the “contents of the sacrifice” takes place, it is alienated from its origin.

Now bear in mind the thought that certain Beings are compelled to retain within them something which they would gladly have offered up in sacrifice, and concerning which they both feel and perceive that it could only attain its real meaning, if it could be offered up.

If you can picture the feelings of such Beings, you will have an idea of what may be called: “The exclusion of a certain number of Cosmic Beings from their actual meaning, their great cosmic purpose.” Certain Beings have within them something, which, speaking symbolically, could only fulfil its purpose elsewhere. The consequence of this is that the “displacement”—if we may once more speak symbolically—of the rejected incense, of the rejected sacrificial substance, excludes it at first from the rest of the cosmic process.

If you grasp these thoughts with your feeling—not with your reason, for that does not extend to matters such as these—you will perceive that this represents something like a rending away from the universal cosmic process. To the Beings who rejected the sacrifice it is only something they put away from them; to the other Beings, those within whom the sacrificial substance is retained, this is a something on which an alien character is imprinted. Thus there are Beings in whose substance this estrangement from its origin is imprinted. If we can present these things to our soul through inner feelings, we are reminded of something in which an alien character is inherent: that is Death! Death is none other than that which necessarily enters the universe with the rejection of the sacrificial substance of those Beings who then had to retain it within themselves. Thus we advance from the resignation, the renunciation of what has been rejected by the higher Beings—which we encounter at the third stage of evolution—to Death.

In its true significance death is neither more nor less than the nature of essential contents, contents which are shut out and not in their proper place. Even when death comes to a man in concrete form it is fundamentally the same thing. For when we look at the corpse left behind in the world of Maya, we know that it consists of nothing but matter which at the moment of death was shut out from the Ego, astral body, and etheric body, alienated from that within which alone it had a meaning. The physical human body without the etheric body, astral body, and Ego has no meaning, it is purposeless; at that moment it is excluded from its purpose. That which we can no longer perceive when a man dies, is then for us in the macrocosm. On account of the Cosmic Beings who belong to higher spheres having rejected what was to have been brought to them in sacrifice, the rejected sacrificial substance within the Beings to whom it was thrown back lapses into death, for death signifies the exclusion of any cosmic substance or cosmic being from its actual purpose.

We have now come to a spiritual characteristic of what we call the fourth element in the Universe. If fire represents the purest sacrifice—and wherever we encounter fire or heat, behind it there is its spiritual counterpart: Sacrifice—if behind all the air spread out around our earth there really lies the virtue of giving, a really flowing virtue; if we may describe flowing water or the element of fluidity as spiritual resignation or renunciation, so must we describe the element of Earth, which alone can be the bearer of death—for death would not exist without it—as that which has been severed from its purpose by renunciation. Now we have something in a concrete form, showing how the solid is formed from the fluidic. For this too reflects a spiritual process, in a certain sense. Suppose ice forms in a pond; the water then becomes solid. The real reason of this is that the water in becoming ice is cut off from its purpose. This gives us the spiritual process of solidification, the spiritual process of the Earth's becoming; for as far as the distinguishing marks of the four elements are concerned, ice too is earth, and fluid alone is water. Earth is the element in which death appears and may be experienced.

We began by putting the question as to whether anything real could be found in our world of illusion and Maya, whether there is anything in it corresponding to a reality. I want you to hold clearly to the idea we have just been considering. At the beginning of this course I told you that the concepts to be considered were somewhat complicated. It will therefore be necessary that we should not only try to understand them, but also to meditate upon them; for only then will they be clear to us. Now let us take this conception of death, that is, of the earthly; for it presents a truly remarkable aspect. Whereas concerning all our other concepts we could say that there was nothing real in all the world of Maya around us, but that the reality must be looked for in the spiritual behind it—we have now ascertained that within the world of Maya there is that, which, precisely because it is divided from its purpose, because it ought to be in the spiritual world, may be called death. Thus something is cut off in Maya, which actually ought not to be there. In the whole wide realm of Maya, or the great illusion, we have nothing but deception and illusion before us. Yet there is something there which corresponds to a reality, because it is cut off from its true meaning in the spiritual; and as soon as it enters Maya it encounters annihilation and death. That declares to us nothing less significant than the great occult truth: “In the whole world of Maya one thing only shows itself in its reality—Death! All other phenomena must be traced back to their reality; all other phenomena entering into Maya have reality behind them; death is the single reality in Maya for it consists in the fact that something was cut off from reality and taken into Maya, That is why death is the one and only reality in Maya. And now if we turn from the universal Maya to the great principles of the world, a very important and essential consequence of this statement, that in our world of Maya, Death is the only reality, presents itself to occult science.

We can approach what I want to say from yet another side. We can begin by considering the beings of the other kingdoms surrounding us. We may ask: do minerals die? To the occultist there could be no sense in saying that minerals die. It would be just the same as saying that our finger-nails die when we cut them. The finger-nail is nothing which as complete being has claim to existence; but it is part of us, and when we cut it off we separate it from ourselves, tear it away from the life it has in connection with us. In reality it dies only when we ourselves die. In the same sense, according to occult science, the minerals do not die. They are merely members of one great organism, just as a finger-nail is a member of our own, and although a mineral may appear to perish, it is in reality only severed from this great organism, just as the piece of finger-nail is severed from our organism when we cut it off. The destruction of a mineral is no death; for the mineral has no life in itself, but only in the great organism of which it is a member. The plant as such is not independent; it is a member—not of one great organism, like the mineral—but of the whole organism of the earth. To occult observation there would be no sense in speaking of individual plant-organisms, only of the organism of the earth of which the plants everywhere form part. And when we bring them to their “death” it is just as when we cut away one of our finger-nails. We cannot say that the fingernail has died. Just as little can we say that of the plants; for they belong to a great organism that is identical with the whole earth, an organism which falls asleep in spring, sending forth the plants as its organs towards the Sun; and in autumn it takes them back into itself when it gathers their seeds into itself. There is no sense in considering the plants as independent, for the whole earth organism does not die when its separate plants fade—just as we ourselves do not die when our hair goes grey, although we cannot restore its colour by natural means.

We are, however, in a different position from the plants. But the earth may in this respect be compared to a man who could restore his grey hair to its natural colour. The earth does not die; what is observed in the fading of the plants is a process that takes place on the surface. So we can never say that the plants really die. And even of the animals we cannot actually say that they die, as we die. For in reality a separate animal does not exist; what really exists is its group-soul, which is in the super-sensible world. The reality of the animals is only to be found on the astral plane as group-soul, and the individual animal is condensed out of that. The death of an animal means the casting off a member of the group-soul, which replaces it by another.

Thus what we encounter at death in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms is only apparent death, only in the world of Maya is that “death.” In reality man alone dies, for he has developed his individuality so far that it descends into his physical body, in which during the earth-existence he must become real. In reality death has only meaning for the Earth-existence of man.

If we grasp this we must say: Man alone can truly experience death. Thus for man there is, as we learn through occult research, a real overcoming of death, a real victory over death. For every other being death is only apparent, and does not in reality exist. If again we were to ascend higher—from man to the Beings of the Hierarchies—we should find that they do not know death in the human sense; so that in reality actual death, that is death on the physical plane, comes only to those beings who have to acquire something on that plane. Now man has to acquire his ego-consciousness there. Without death he could never find it. Neither with respect to the beings below man in rank, nor to those higher than man is there any meaning in speaking of actual death. But on the other hand as regards the Being whom we call the “Christ-Being it must clearly be impossible to obliterate his most significant earth deed. For indeed we have seen that the most essential event to be considered in connection with the Christ-Being is the Mystery of Golgotha; that is, the conquest of death by life. But where can this conquest of death alone be accomplished? Can it be accomplished in the higher worlds? No! For even as regards the lower beings referred to as the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms—as they have their true being in the higher, super-sensible worlds—we cannot speak of death. And in the course of our studies this winter we shall further show that neither among the Higher Beings can there be a question of death; only of change, metamorphosis, transformation. Only with regard to man can we speak of the incision into life that we call “death.” Man can only experience this death on the physical plane. If man had never descended to the physical plane, he would know nothing of death; for no being who has not trodden the physical plane knows anything of death. In other worlds there is no such thing as that which we call death, nothing but transformation, metamorphosis. Would Christ undergo death He must descend to the physical plane! There alone could He experience it.

Thus we see that even in the historical development of man, the reality of the higher worlds plays its part in Maya, in a remarkable way. Whereas concerning every other historical event we can only interpret it correctly by saying: “This historical event took place here on the physical plane, but the cause of it is up above in the spiritual world, we must look for it there”; we cannot say of the event of Golgotha, “this event is here below on the physical plane and something corresponding to it exists in the higher worlds.” Christ Himself belongs to the higher worlds and came down to the physical plane. But there is no prototype above of what was accomplished on Golgotha, such as we must look for with respect to other historical events. That was enacted on the physical plane alone! Among the many proofs of this fact which occult science is able to provide, is the following: That the event of Damascus will, in the course of the next three thousand years, as we have often said, be renewed for a sufficiently great number of mankind. This means, that capacities will be developed in man which will enable him to perceive the Christ as an etheric figure on the astral plane, as Paul saw Him on the road to Damascus. The event of man's gradually becoming able to perceive the Christ by means of the higher faculties which will be developed in the next three thousand years, has its beginnings in our twentieth century. From now on these capacities will gradually arise, and in the course of that span of time a vast number of persons will know, by personal vision into the higher worlds, that Christ is a reality; that He lives; they will learn to know Him in the life He lives now. And not only will they know the nature of His present life, but they will also be convinced just as Paul was—that He died, and rose again. But the foundation for this cannot be laid in the higher worlds: it must be laid on the physical plane. Thus if anyone comes to have an understanding of these things, if even at the present time he understands that the development of Christ Himself is progressing—and that at the same time certain human capacities are also developing, if his understanding of modern Anthroposophy has taught him this, then there is nothing to prevent him, when he has passed through the portal of death, from taking part in this event when it actually appears as a first shining forth of Christ in the world of man. So that a man who prepares himself in his physical body to-day for this event, maybe able to experience it in the intermediate life, between death and re-birth. But those who do not prepare for it, who acquire no understanding in this incarnation, will, in the life immediately following this—the life between death and re-birth—know nothing of what is taking place with respect to the Christ for the next three thousand years from our present century. They will have to wait until they are again incarnated and then make necessary preparations on the earth. The death at Golgotha, which is enacted on earth as the origin of all the subsequent Christ development can only be understood in the physical body. Of all the facts important to our higher life, this alone is comprehensible in the physical body. It is then further developed and perfected in the higher worlds, but we must first have understood it while in the physical body. Just as the Mystery of Golgotha could never have taken place in the higher worlds and has no prototype there, but is an event which—since it includes death—is confined to the physical plane, so, too must the comprehension of it be acquired on this plane. Indeed, it is one of the tasks of man on earth to acquire this understanding in some one of his incarnations.

So that we must say: we have found pre-eminently on the physical plane something which displays an undeniable reality, a direct truth. What then is real on the physical plane On the physical plane, so that we can recognise it as real, we have a reality, death—death in the world of man, not in the other kingdoms of nature. When we wish to study the historical events that occur in the course of the earth's development, we must look for a spiritual prototype for each one of them—but not for the Mystery of Golgotha! There we have something which in itself directly belongs to the world of Reality!

Now it is extremely interesting that another aspect of what has just been said, can also be seen. It is really remarkably significant to observe that this event of Golgotha as a real event is to-day denied, and that people say—speaking of external history—that it cannot be proved by any historical connection. Among vital historical facts there is hardly one so difficult to prove on external realistic, historical grounds, as the Mystery of Golgotha. Just think how easy it is in comparison with this to work on historical ground if we wish to prove the existence of a Socrates, a Plato, or any of the Greek heroes, in so far as they were of significance to the progress of man in the external world, and how up to a certain point it is perfectly justifiable to say that “no history can assert that there ever was a Jesus of Nazareth!” This statement cannot be contradicted historically! This cannot be dealt with like other historical facts. It is very remarkable that this Event, which occurred on the external physical plane has this in common with all super-sensible facts: they cannot be “proved.” Much the same people who deny the existence of a super-sensible world lack the capacity for grasping this fact, which is not super-sensible. Its existence can be surmised by its effects. But, these people think that effects such as these might also appear, even without the real event having occurred in history; and they attribute these effects to sociological relations. To one who knows the inner course of the world's development, the idea that effects such as those produced by Christianity could be brought about without having a power behind them, is just as wise as it would be to say cabbages could grow in a field without having been sown there! Indeed we might go yet further, and admit that it was not possible for those who took part in the final shaping of the Gospels to prove the historical event of the Mystery of Golgotha—as historical event—on historical grounds! For it went by leaving hardly any trace perceptible to outer observation. Do you know how those who took part in the later compiling of the Gospels convinced themselves as to these events, with the exception of the writer of the John-Gospel, who was an immediate contemporary? They could not above all convince themselves by historical documents, for they had nothing but oral traditions and the Mystery-Books (as is set forth in Christianity as Mystical Fact). They were able to convince themselves of the actual existence of Christ Jesus by the star-constellation, for they were then still very learned as to the connection between the Macrocosm and the Microcosm. They knew how to set up a map of the heavens for that point of the world's history (as can still be done to-day); and they concluded: if the stars were in such and such a position, then He whom they call the Christ must have lived on earth at that time. In this very way the writers of the Gospel of Matthew, Mark and Luke convinced themselves of the historical event; they obtained the rest clairvoyantly. But first they convinced themselves in the same way as we can make sure to-day that any particular event can happen on the earth; through the constellations in the Macrocosm. Anyone who knows anything of this cannot but believe in them. It is a fruitless task to prove the inaccuracy of what is brought against the historical status of the Gospels. Rather should we, as anthroposophists, understand that we must take a very different stand: one which is only possible through an insight into occult science.

With reference to this I should just like to mention a point I already endeavoured to establish elsewhere. That is, that the realities of which Anthroposophy speaks cannot be injured by any objections, however correct these may be in themselves. No matter how correctly people may argue from the knowledge they themselves may possess, that does not disprove Anthroposophy. In the lecture I gave entitled: “How can Theosophy be established?” I made use of the example of the little boy in a village whose duty it was to fetch rolls for the family breakfast. Now in that village each roll cost two kreuzers and he was always given ten kreuzers. The baker gave him a number of rolls, and being no great arithmetician, he did not trouble to count them, but brought them home. But a foster-son entered the family and was sent for the rolls instead of the other boy. This lad was a good reckoner and he said to himself: “I have been given ten kreuzers, each roll costs two kreuzers, therefore I must bring home five rolls;” off he went, bringing back six rolls. He said to himself: “This must be wrong, I ought not to have so many, and as my reckoning is correct, tomorrow I must only bring back five rolls.” The next day he took the ten kreuzers, and again he received six rolls. The reckoning was correct—only it did not correspond with the reality; for that was a different matter. The reality was that it was the custom in that place to give six rolls instead of five to anyone who spent ten kreuzers. The boy's argument was quite correct; but did not accord with reality.

In like manner the cleverest thought-out objections to Anthroposophy may all agree with each other, yet need have nothing to do with the reality; for “reality” may be based on very different foundations. The example quoted is quite practical, and serves to explain, even scientifically, what is correctly calculated, and what is actual fact.

We have tried to trace the world of Maya back to reality and in doing so we have shown that all Fire is sacrifice, everything of the nature of Air is the generous flowing virtue of giving, and Fluid the result of renunciation and resignation. To these three truths we have to-day added the fact that the true nature of the Earth or solid matter is death, the cutting off of any substance from its cosmic purpose. Because this severing has entered, death itself enters the world of Maya or illusion as a reality. Even the Gods themselves could not taste death at all without descent into the physical world in order to comprehend death in the physical world, the world of Maya, or illusion. This is what I wished to add to-day to the concepts we have already formed. But once more let it be said that if we wish to arrive at a clear understanding of these concepts which are so necessary, and if we are thoroughly to enter into the various ideas in St. Mark's Gospel, the only possible way of doing so is by careful meditation and by bringing these things again and again before the soul. The Gospel of St. Mark can only be understood if based on the greatest and most significant cosmic conceptions.

Yesterday we were considering the successive moods of soul that have to be attained if human thinking—if what is ordinarily called knowledge—is to enter the realm of reality, and we came to a condition of soul that we named surrender. In other words, a thinking that has risen to the conditions of soul we described before—a thinking, that is, which has become possessed of wonder, and has then learned what we called reverent devotion to the world of reality and finally what we called knowing oneself to be in wisdom-filled harmony with the phenomena of the world—if such a thinking be not able then to rise still further and enter the region we have described as a condition of surrender, it cannot come to reality. Now this surrender is only to be attained by making the resolute endeavour again and again to face for ourselves the inadequacy of mere thought. We have to take pains to stimulate and strengthen within us a mood that may be expressed as follows. It must be as though we were constantly saying to ourselves: I ought not to expect that my thinking can give me knowledge of the truth, I ought rather solely to expect of my thinking that it shall educate me. It is of the utmost importance that we should develop in us this idea, namely, that our thinking educates us. If you will really take this point of view as a practical rule of life you will find that there are many occasions when you are led to quite different conclusions from those that seem at first sight to be inevitable.

I daresay there are not many of you who have made a thorough study of the philosopher Kant. It is not necessary. I only want here to refer to the fact that in Kant's most important and revolutionary work, “The Critique of Pure Reason,” you will always find proofs adduced both for and against a proposition in question. Take, for example, a statement such as the following. “The world once had a beginning in time.” You will find that Kant puts, perhaps on the other side of the same page, the statement: “The world has always existed, from all eternity.” And then he proceeds to adduce valid proofs for both statements, notwithstanding that the one obviously expresses the very opposite of the other. That is to say, Kant proves in the same manner that the world has had a beginning and that it has had no beginning. He calls this method of reasoning “Antinomy” and thinks it is itself an evidence that the human faculty of knowledge has boundaries, seeing that man is forced thereby to arrive at contradictory conclusions. And, of course, he is right, so long as one expects by thinking to come to conformity with some objective reality. So long as we give ourselves up to the belief that by thinking or by the elaboration of concepts or, let us say, by the elaboration in thought of experiences we have in the world, we can come to reality, so long are we indeed in desperate case, if someone comes forward and shows us that a particular statement and its exact opposite can equally well be proved. For if this is so, how are we ever to arrive at Truth? If, however, we have learned that where the situation demands a decisive pronouncement, thinking can come to no conclusion about reality, if we have persistently educated ourselves instead to look upon thinking as a means to become wiser, as a means to take in hand our own self-education in wisdom, then it does not disturb us at all that at one time one thing can be proved and at another time its opposite can be proved. For we very soon make the following discovery. The fact that the elaboration of concepts does not, so to say, expose us in the least to the onset of reality, is the very reason why we are able to work with perfect freedom within the sphere of concepts and ideas and to carry on our own self-education by this means. If we were perpetually being corrected by reality, then the elaboration of concepts would not afford us a means of educating ourselves in this manner in perfect freedom. I would like to ask you to give careful consideration to this fact. Let me repeat it. The elaboration of concepts affords us a means of effective and independent self-education, and it can only do so because we are never disturbed in the free elaboration of concepts by the interference of reality.

What do I mean when I say we are not disturbed? What sort of disturbance could reality make in the free elaboration of concepts? We can picture to ourselves a little what such a disturbance would be like if we contrast—purely hypothetically for the moment, though, as we shall see later, it does not need to remain entirely in the realm of hypothesis—our human thinking with divine thinking. For we can say, can we not, that it is impossible to conceive of divine thinking as having nothing to do with reality. When we try to picture the thinking of the Gods, we can only conceive of it—still speaking for the moment purely hypothetically—as intervening in reality, as influencing reality. And this leads inevitably to the following conclusion. When a human being makes a mistake in his thinking, then it is a mere logical mistake, it is nothing worse. And when, later on, he comes to see that he has made a mistake he can correct it; and he will at the same time have accomplished something for his self-education, he will have grown wiser. But now take the case of divine thinking. When divine thinking thinks correctly, then something happens; and when it thinks falsely, then something is destroyed, something is annihilated. So that if we had a divine thinking, then with every false concept we should call forth a destructive process, first of all in our astral body, then in our etheric body and thence also in our physical body. If we had active divine thinking, if our thinking had something to do with reality, then a false concept would have the result that we should, as it were, stimulate inside us a drying up process in some part or other of our body, a hardening process. You will agree, it would be important to make as few mistakes as possible; for it might not be long before we had made so many mistakes that our body would have become quite dried up and would fall to pieces. We should, in fact, soon find it crumble away if we transformed into reality the mistakes in our thinking. We actually only maintain ourselves in real existence through the fact that our thinking does not work into reality, but that we are protected from the penetration of our thinking into reality. Thus we can make mistake after mistake in our thinking. If later we correct these mistakes we have thereby educated ourselves, we have grown wiser, and we have not at the same time committed devastation with our mistakes. As we strengthen ourselves more and more with the moral force of such a thought as this we learn to know the nature of the “surrender” of which I spoke and we come at last to a point where we do not at critical moments of life, turn to thinking, in the hope to gain knowledge and understanding of external things.

That sounds strange, I know, and at first sight it seems as though it would be quite impossible. How can we refuse to have recourse to thinking? And yet, although it is impossible to take such a line absolutely, we can take it under certain conditions. Constituted as we are as human beings in the world, we cannot on every occasion suspend judgment on the things of the world. We have to judge and form opinions—we shall see in the course of these lectures why that is so—we have to act in life and cannot always wait to penetrate to the depths of reality. We must judge—but we should educate ourselves to exercise caution in accepting as finally true the judgments and opinions we form. We should, as it were, be continually looking over our own shoulder and reminding ourselves that where we are applying our keenest intellect, just there we are treading on very uncertain ground and are perpetually liable to make mistakes. That is a hard saying for cocksure people! They think they will never get anywhere at all if they are to doubt whether the opinion they form on some event is conclusive. Observe a little and you will see that very many people, when some statement is made, think it necessary at once to say: “But what I think is this”—or when they see something, to say: “I don't like that!” or “I like it!” This kind of attitude must be given up by anyone who does not rest content to go through life with easy self-assurance; it must be given up if we want to set the course of our inner life in the direction of reality. What we have to do is to cultivate an attitude of mind which may be characterised in the following words: “Obviously I have, of course, to live my life, and this means I must form judgments and conclusions. I will, therefore, employ my power of judgment in so far as the practice of life makes this necessary, but I will not use it for the recognition of truth. For that I will be for ever looking cautiously over my shoulder, I will always receive with some degree of doubt every judgment that I happen to make.”

But how are we then to arrive at any thought about truth, if not by forming judgments in the ordinary way? We have already indicated yesterday the right attitude of mind, when we said that we ought to let the things speak, let the things themselves tell their secrets. We have to learn to adopt a passive attitude to the things of the world, and let them speak out their own secrets. A great deal of error would be avoided if men would do this. We have a wonderful example in Goethe, who, when he wants to investigate truth, does not allow himself to judge but tries to let the things themselves utter their own secrets. Let us suppose we have two men, one who judges and the other who lets the things tell their own secrets. We will select a very clear and simple example. One man sees a wolf and describes it. He finds that there are other animals besides which look like this wolf, and he arrives in this manner at the general concept “wolf.” And now he can go on to form the following conclusion. He can say to himself: In reality there are many individual wolves; the general concept of “wolf” which I make in my mind, wolf as such, does not exist; only individual wolves exist in the world. Such a man will easily state it as his opinion that we have really only to do with individual wolf beings, and the general concept of wolf which one holds as an idea is not anything real. There you have a striking example of a man who merely judges and forms opinions. This is the kind of conclusion he develops. And how about the man, on the other hand, who lets reality speak for itself? How will he think of that invisible quality of wolf which is to be found in every single wolf and which characterises all wolves alike? He will look at it in this way. He will say to himself: Let me consider a lamb and compare it with a wolf. I am not going to formulate any judgment on the matter, I am simply going to let the facts speak. And now, let us imagine this man has the opportunity to see with his own eyes how the wolf eats up the lamb. He sees the event take place before him. Then he would have to say to himself: “The substance which before was running about as lamb is now inside the wolf, it has been absorbed into the wolf.” It needs no more than the perception of this fact to see how real the wolf nature is! For if we were to rely on what we can follow with our external senses we might easily be led to the conclusion that if a wolf were deprived of all other food and were to eat nothing but lamb he must gradually—for the metabolism that goes on inside him will produce this result—he must gradually come to have in him nothing but lamb substance. As a matter of fact, however, he never becomes a lamb, he remains always a wolf. That shows quite unmistakably, if one judges the matter rightly, that the material part of the wolf has been quite erroneously assumed to constitute “wolf” as such. When we let ourselves be taught by the external world of facts, then it shows us that besides what we have before us as material substance in the wolf there is something else, something we cannot see and that yet is real in the highest degree. And this it is which brings it about that when the wolf eats nothing but lamb he does not become lamb but remains wolf. All of him that is merely perceptible to the senses has come from lambs.

It is difficult sometimes to draw a sharp line of demarcation between judging and letting ourselves be taught by reality. When, however, the difference has once been grasped and when judgment is only employed for the ends of practical life, while for an approach to reality the attitude is taken of allowing ourselves to be taught by the things of the world, then we gradually arrive at a mood of soul which can reveal to us the true meaning of “surrender.” Surrender is a state of mind which does not seek to investigate truth from out of itself, but which looks for truth to come from the revelation that flows out of the things, and can wait until it is ripe to receive the revelation. An inclination to judge or form opinions wants to be continually arriving at truth at every step; surrender, on the other hand, does not set out to force an entrance, as it were, into this or that truth, rather do we seek to educate ourselves and then quietly wait until we attain to that stage of maturity where the truth flows to us from the things of the world, coming to us in revelation and filling our whole being. To work with patience, knowing that patience will bring us further and further in wise self-education—that is the mood of surrender.

And now we must go on to consider the fruits of this surrender. What do we attain when we have gone forward with our thinking from wonder to reverence, thence to feeling oneself in wisdom-filled harmony with reality and finally to the attitude of surrender—what do we attain? We come at last to this. As we go about the world and observe the plants in all their greenness and admire the changing colours of their blossoms, or as we contemplate the sky in its blueness and the stars with their golden brilliance—not forming judgments but letting the things themselves reveal to us what they are—then if we have really succeeded in learning this “surrender,” all things in the world of sense become changed for us, and something is revealed to us in the world of the senses, for which we can find no other word than a word taken from our own soul life.

Suppose this line (a—b) represents the world of the senses as it shows itself to our view. Suppose you are standing here (c) and you behold the world of the senses spread out before you like a veil. This line (a—b) is intended to represent the tones that work upon your ear, the colours and forms that work upon your eye, the smells and tastes that work upon your other organs, the hardness and softness, etc., etc.—in short, the whole world of the senses. In ordinary life we stand in the world of the senses and we apply to it our faculty of judgment. How else do all the sciences arise? Men approach the world of the senses and by many kinds of methods they investigate the laws that prevail there. You will, however, have gathered from all that we have been saying that such a procedure can never lead one into the world of reality, because judgment is not a leader at all; it is only by educating one's thinking, it is only by following the path of wonder and of reverence, etc., that one can ever penetrate to the world of reality. Then the world of the senses changes and becomes something entirely new. And it is important that we should make discovery of this if we would gain any knowledge of the real nature of the sense world.

Let us suppose that a man who has developed this feeling, this attitude of surrender, in a rather high degree, looks out over the fresh bright green of a meadow. At first sight he cannot distinguish the colours of any individual plants; the whole presents a general appearance of fresh green. Such a man, if he has really brought the attitude of surrender to a high degree of development, will perforce feel within him at the sight of the meadow an inner sense of balance; he cannot help being moved to feel this mood of balance—a balance that is not dead but quick with life, we might compare it to a gentle and even flow of water. He cannot help but conjure up this picture before his soul. And it is the same with every taste, every smell and every sense-perception; they inevitably call up in his soul a feeling of inner movement and activity. There is no colour and no tone that does not speak to him; everything says something, and says it in such a way that he feels bound to give answer with inner movement and activity—not with judgment or opinion but with movement, active, living movement. In short, a time comes for such a man when the whole world of the senses flings off, as it were, its disguise and reveals itself to him as something he cannot describe with any other word than will. Everything in the world of the senses is will, strong and powerful currents of will. I want you to mark this particularly. The man who has attained in any high degree to surrender, discovers everywhere in the world of the senses ruling will. Hence it is that a man who has developed in himself even a small measure of this quality of surrender, feels pain if he suddenly sees a person coming towards him wearing some startling new fashion of colour. He cannot help experiencing this inner movement and activity in response to what approaches him from outside; he is sensible of will in everything and he feels united with the whole world through this will. The world of the senses thus becomes, as it were, a sea of infinitely differentiated will. And this means that while other-wise we only feel it as spread out around us, this world of the senses begins to have for us a certain thickness or depth. We begin to look behind the surface of things, we begin to hear behind the surface of things—and what we see and hear is will, flowing will. For the interest of those who have read Schopenhauer I will here remark that Schopenhauer divined this ruling will in a one-sided way in the world of sound; he described music as differentiated workings of will. But the truth is that for the man who has learned surrender, everything in the world of the senses is Ruling Will.

And now when a man has learned to detect everywhere in the world of the senses this ruling will he can go further, he can penetrate to secrets that lie hidden behind the world of the senses and that are otherwise inaccessible to him.

If we would understand aright the nature of the next step we must ask ourselves the question: How is it we gain any knowledge at all of the sense world? The answer is simple: By means of our senses. By means of the ear we acquire knowledge of the world of sound, by means of the eye knowledge of the world of colour and form, and so on. We know the sense world through the medium of our sense organs. A man who confronts this world of the senses in an ordinary everyday manner receives impressions of it and then forms his judgments. The man who has learned surrender receives impressions in the first place through his senses; and then he feels how there streams across to him from the objects active, ruling will; he feels as if he were swimming, together with the objects, in a sea of ruling will. And when a man has come to this point and feels the presence and sway of will in the objects before him, then his own evolution drives him on of itself to the next higher stage. For then, having experienced all the previous stages leading up to surrender—the stages we have called feeling oneself in harmony with the wisdom of the world, and before that reverence, and before that wonder—then, through the penetration of these conditions into the last gained condition of surrender, he learns how to grow together with the objects with his etheric body also, which stands behind the physical body. He grows together with the objects with his physical body, that is with his sense organs, in the active ruling will. When we see, hear, smell, etc., then as men of surrender we feel the ruling will streaming into us through our eyes and ears, we feel ourselves in true correspondence with the objects. But behind the physical eye is the etheric body of the eye, and behind the physical ear is the etheric body of the ear. We are filled through and through with our etheric body. And just as the physical body grows together with the objects of the sense world when man penetrates to the ruling active will, so too can the etheric body. And when this takes place man finds that he has an altogether new way of beholding the world. The world has undergone a still greater change for him than was the case when he penetrated through sense appearance to the ruling will. When our etheric body grows together with the objects of the world, then we have the impression that we cannot let these objects remain as they are in our ideas and in our conceptions and thoughts. They change for us as soon as we come into relation with them. Suppose a man who has already experienced the mood of surrender in his soul is looking at a green leaf, full of sap. He turns the eye of his soul upon the object before him, and at once he finds he cannot leave it as it is, this juicy green leaf; the moment he beholds it he feels that it grows out beyond itself, he feels how it has in it the possibility to become something quite different. You know that a green leaf, as it grows gradually higher and higher up in the plant, turns at last into the coloured flower-leaf or petal. The whole plant is really no more than a transformed leaf. You may learn this from Goethe's researches into nature. So when the student beholds the leaf he sees that it is not yet finished, that it is trying to grow out beyond itself; he sees, in short, more than the green leaf gives him. The green leaf stimulates him to feel within him something of a budding and sprouting life. Thus he grows together—quite literally—with the green leaf, feeling in himself, too, a budding and a sprouting of life. But now suppose he is looking at the dry and withered bark of a tree. If he is to grow together with that he cannot do otherwise than be overcome with a feeling of death. In the withered bark he sees—not more, but less than is there in reality. If anyone looks at the bark from the point of view of external appearance alone he can admire it, it can give him pleasure, in any case he does not see in the dead bark something that shrivels him, piercing him, as it were, in the soul and filling it with thoughts of death.

There is nothing in the whole world that does not, when the etheric body grows together with it, give rise to feelings either of growing, sprouting, becoming, or of decaying and passing away. Everything shows itself in one or other aspect. Suppose, for example, a man who has attained to surrender and has then progressed a further step turns his attention to the human larynx. He will have a strange impression. The larynx will appear to him to be an organ that is quite in the beginning of its evolution and has a great future before it. From what the larynx itself tells, he will feel that it is like a seed, not at all like a fruit or like a withered object, but like a seed. He knows quite clearly from what the larynx itself brings to expression that a time must come in human evolution when the larynx will be completely transformed, when it will be of such a nature that whereas now man only utters the word, he will one day give birth to man. The larynx is the future organ of birth, the future organ of procreation. Now man brings forth the word by means of the larynx, but the larynx is the seed that will in future times develop to bring forth the whole human being—that is, when man is spiritualised. The larynx expresses this quite directly when one lets it tell what it is. Other organs of the human body show us that they have long ago passed their zenith, and we see that they will in future times be no longer present in the human organism.

Such a vision is compelled to behold everywhere on the one hand a growing, a coming into being, and on the other hand a dying away. It sees both as processes going on into the future. Budding, sprouting life—death and decay; those are the two things that we find intermingled with one another all around us when we attain to this union of our etheric body with the world of reality. In connection with this power of vision man has to undergo, when he is a little further on, a very hard test. For with each single being that he meets and that makes itself known to him he will always find that while some parts of the being arouse in him the feeling of budding and sprouting life, other contents or parts give him the feeling of death. Everything that we see behind the world of the senses makes itself known to us as proceeding from one or other of these two fundamental forces. In occultism what we behold in this way is called the world of coming into existence and of passing away. And so, when we confront the world of the senses we are looking into the world of arising and passing away, and what lies behind is Ruling Wisdom.

Behind Will is Wisdom! I say expressly ruling wisdom, for the wisdom man brings into his ideas is as a rule not active at all, but a wisdom that is merely thought. The wisdom man acquires when he looks behind the active will is united with the objects; and in the kingdom of objective things, wherever wisdom rules, it does really rule and the effects of its working find actual expression. When it, so to speak, withdraws from reality, then begins the dying process; where it flows into reality, there you find a coming into existence, there you find budding, sprouting life. We can mark off these worlds in the following way (see diagram 1). We look at the sense world and we see it first as A, and then we look at B which is behind the sense world—the world of ruling wisdom. From out of this world is taken the substance of our own etheric body, what we behold outside us as ruling wisdom—that we behold, too, in our etheric body. And in our physical body we behold, not merely what sense appearance shows, but also ruling will, for everywhere in the sense world we see ruling will.

Yes, the strange thing is that if we have attained to surrender, then when we meet another man and look at him, his colour, whether it be inclined to red or yellow or green, does not seem to us merely red or yellow or green, but we grow together for example, with the rosy-cheekedness of his countenance. We feel the ruling will there, and all that lives and weaves in him, as it were, shoots across to us through the medium of the colour in his cheeks. People who are naturally inclined to observe and note rosy cheeks will say that a rosy-cheeked person is alone healthy. We approach our fellow-man in such a way as to see in him the ruling will. And we may now say, turning to our diagram, that our physical body, which we will denote by this circle here, is taken from the world A, the world of ruling will. Our etheric body, on the other hand, which I will denote with this second circle, is taken from the world of ruling wisdom, the world B. Here you have, then, the connection between the world of ruling wisdom that is spread around us, and our own etheric body—and the world of ruling will that is spread around us, and our own physical body. Now in ordinary life man does not know of these connections, the power to do so is taken from him. The connections are there all the time, but they are, as it were, withheld from man, he can have no influence upon them. How is this?

As a matter of fact there are opportunities in life where our thoughts and whatever we develop in the way of judgments and opinions are not so harmless for our own reality as they are in everyday existence. In the ordinary everyday waking condition, good Gods have seen to it that our thoughts have not too bad an influence on our own reality; they have withheld from us the power our thoughts might otherwise exercise upon our physical body and etheric body; and it would really go very hardly with us in the world if it were not so If thoughts—let me emphasise once more—were to signify in the world of man what the thoughts of the Gods do in reality signify, then man would evoke inside him with every error in thought a slight death process, and little by little he would be quite dried up. And as for an untruth! If with every lie he told man had to burn up the corresponding bit of his brain—as would have to happen if man had power to work into the world of reality—then we should soon see how long his brain lasted! Good Gods have withheld from our soul the power over our etheric body and physical body. But that cannot be so all the time. For were we never to exercise any influence from our soul upon our physical and etheric body then we should quickly come to an end of the forces that are in these bodies, we should have a very short life. For in our soul, as we shall see in the course of these lectures, are contained the forces that must flow ever and again into the physical and etheric body, the forces we need in our etheric body. This inflow of forces takes place at night when we are asleep. In the night there flow to us from the universe, coming to us by way of our ego and astral body, the currents that we need to dispel fatigue. There you have in actual fact the living connection between the worlds of will and of wisdom and the physical and etheric bodies of man. For into these worlds vanish during sleep the astral body and ego. They enter into these worlds and build there centres of attraction for substances which have then to flow out of the world of wisdom into the etheric body and out of the world of will into the physical body. This must go on in the night. For if man were present in his consciousness, this instreaming could not happen rightly. If ordinary man were conscious during sleep, if he were present with all his errors and vices, with all the bad things he has done in the world, then this would create a strange apparatus of attraction in those other worlds for the forces that are to stream in. Then tremendous disturbances would be set up in the physical and etheric bodies by the forces man's ego and astral body would send into them out of the world of ruling wisdom and the world of ruling will.

Therefore have good Gods made provision that we cannot be present when the right forces must stream into our physical and etheric body by night. For the good Gods have dulled the consciousness of man during sleep, that he may not be able to spoil what he undoubtedly would spoil by his thoughts were he conscious. It is on this account that we have to undergo great pain when we are on the path of knowledge and are making the ascent into the higher worlds; if we are in real earnest it must necessarily bring us great pain. You will find in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, a description of how the life of man by night, the sleeping life, is, so to speak, made use of, to help man to rise from the world of external reality into higher worlds. When man begins from out of the world of Imagination to light up his sleep consciousness, when he begins to lighten it with knowledge and experiences, then it is important for him to make sure that he himself gets out of the way and so shuts out of his consciousness all that might cause disturbance to his physical and etheric bodies. It is an absolute necessity, in making the ascent into higher worlds to get to know oneself thoroughly and exactly. When we really know ourselves we cease as rule to love ourselves. Self-love comes to an end when we begin to have self-knowledge; and this self-love—which is always present in a man who has not attained to self-knowledge, for it is an illusion to imagine we do not love ourselves; we love ourselves more than anything else in the world—this self-love must have been overcome if we are to be able to shut ourselves out of our consciousness. We must, in actual fact, come to the point where we say to ourselves: As I am now, I must eliminate myself. We have already gone a long way in this direction in that we have attained to self-surrender. But we must now not love ourselves at all. We must have the possibility at every moment to feel—I must put myself right on one side; for if I do not shut out completely all those things in me that otherwise I quite like to feel in me, errors, trivialities, prejudices sympathies, antipathies—if I do not put these right away then my ascent into higher worlds cannot be made aright.

Because of these errors, disturbing forces will mix with the inflowing stream from higher worlds that has to enter into me to make clairvoyance possible. And these forces will stream into my physical and etheric bodies, and as many as are the errors, etc., so many will be the disturbing processes set up. As long as we are not conscious in sleep, as long as we are not capable of rising into the world of clairvoyance, so long do good Gods protect us and not let these currents from the world of will and the world of wisdom flow into our physical and etheric bodies. But when we carry up our consciousness into the world of clairvoyance, then no Gods are protecting us—for the protection they give consists in the very fact that they take away our consciousness—then we must ourselves lay aside all prejudice, all sympathy, all antipathy, etc. All these things we must put right away from us; for if we have anything left of self-love, or of desires that cling to the personal in us, or if we are still capable of making any judgment on personal grounds, then all such things can work harm to our health—namely, to our physical body and etheric body—when we follow the path of development into higher worlds.

It is exceedingly important that we should be clear about these things. And it is easy to perceive the significance of the fact that in ordinary day life man is deprived of all influence upon his physical and etheric body, his thoughts, in the manner in which he grasps them when he is within these bodies have nothing whatever to do with reality, they are quite ineffective and consequently unable to form any judgment about what is real. By night they would be able to do so. Every false thought would work destructively on the physical and etheric bodies. If we were conscious in the night we should see before us what I have just been describing to you. The world of the senses would appear to us as a sea of ruling will, and behind it would appear the wisdom—the wisdom that builds the world, beating through this will, as it were lashing it up and down into great waves, and with every beat of the waves evoking continually processes of coming into existence and of passing away, processes of birth and of death. That is the true world, into which we have ultimately to look, the world of ruling will and the world of ruling wisdom, and the latter is also the world of perpetual births and perpetual deaths. That is the world that is our world, and it is of immense importance for us to recognise it. For if we once recognise it we begin to discover in very truth a means for attaining to a greater and greater height of surrender; because we feel ourselves interwoven in perpetual births and perpetual deaths, and we know that with every deed we do we connect ourselves in some way with a coming into existence or with a passing away. And “good” will begin to be for us not merely something of which we say: That is good, I like it, it fills me with sympathy. No, we begin to know that the good is something that is creative in the World-All, something that always and everywhere belongs to the world that is arising and coming into being. And of the “bad” we begin to feel how it shows itself everywhere as an outpouring of a process of death and decay. And here we shall have made an important transition to a new world-conception, where one will not be able to think of evil in any other way than as the destroying angel of death, who goes striding through the world, nor of good in any other way than as the creator of continual cosmic births, in great and small. And it is for Spiritual Science to awaken in man a sense of how through this spiritual world-conception he can deepen his whole outlook on life, as he begins to feel that the world of good and the world of bad are not merely as they appear to us in external maya, where we stand before them with our power of judgment and find only that the one is pleasing to us and the other displeasing; no, the world of good is the creative world and the bad is the destroying angel who goes through the world with his scythe. And with every bad thing we do we become a helper of the destroying angel, we ourselves take his scythe and share in the processes of death and decay. The ideas that we receive from a spiritual foundation have a strengthening influence upon our whole outlook on life. This strength is what men should now be receiving that they may carry it into the evolution of the future; for indeed they will need it. Hitherto good Gods have taken care of man but now the time has come in our fifth Post-Atlantean epoch when destiny, and good and evil will more and more be given over into his own hands. Therefore it is necessary to know what good and evil mean, and to recognise them in the world—the one as a creative and the other as a death-dealing principle.

In the development of the individual human being as well as of the whole of humanity, we must always look for something that is not too simple, not too straightforward, otherwise we cannot really understand the complicated processes of life as they occur before our eyes every day. Even in the individual human being, we must be clear that, so to speak, two developmental currents converge. You will recall that we distinguish individual periods in the life of an individual human being (this is explained in the little booklet 'The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science'), for example, the period from physical birth until about the 7th year, year, into the time of the change of teeth, then from the 7th to about the 14th year, then again from about the 14th to the 21st year, so these are periods that run from seven to seven years approximately. This division of human life into such individual periods is fairly regular in the first half of a normal life. This division, this structuring into seven-year periods, becomes irregular in the second, descending half of life. This is because, in the first half of our lives, we are actually living out those laws and facts that have been a kind of repetition of the regular course of human development since time immemorial, whereas in the second half of our lives we are not yet living out something that has already happened in the outer world, but rather something that will only happen in the future. Therefore, in the future, the second half of a person's life will become much more regular than it is today, more and more regular. But that is only said to point out that such a regular development takes place in human life. We know that it expresses itself in such a way that we can say: Up to the age of seven, the human being is still in an etheric, in an etheric shell. In relation to his etheric body, he is only born at the age of seven, so to speak. In relation to his astral body, he is born around the age of fourteen, and so on. What we are indicating here is actually one current of human development; it is the more external developmental current. Besides this developmental stream, there is also an inner stream, which to a certain extent runs independently of the outer stream. The inner stream includes everything that we actually have in the deeper processes, causes and effects of our karma, which continues from incarnation to incarnation.

When we say that a person develops in a very definite way up to the age of seven, fourteen, or twenty-one, then we must realize that this applies more or less, and indeed on average, to all people. We can consider these rules, which are given for example in the small writing mentioned, to be correct for all people. These rules are correct for the education of a person in our time who has few talents and abilities, but they are also correct for geniuses, for all people, because they are a law according to which the human being develops. What lies in this line of development therefore applies more or less to all people, but it is not unimportant what these people have gone through in their previous embodiments. One person has experienced many clever, beautiful, and good things. His abilities are shaped by this, his destiny is shaped by this; the actual inner core of the person is shaped by this, and this is now individual for each person. What runs alongside the outer one like an inner developmental current is, so to speak, what constitutes the particular shade of a person's nature. As a result, it may happen that, although the general division into seven-year periods applies to all human beings, the secrets of development are different for different people. Someone may come into the world with great, developed abilities. In that case, although he will also have to wait until his seventh year for the complete formation of the form of his physical body, and until his fourteenth year for the complete development of his etheric body, yet what works within is quite different from that in someone with fewer abilities.

Thus two lines of development run parallel to each other, and from this we can now also see how, so to speak, certain conflicting states of mind can arise in a person. In terms of outer development, one cannot think otherwise than that, in line with spiritual science, up to the age of 14, let us say, the abilities of the etheric body develop. At the age of 14 or 15, his astral body is actually released and born. It may then be that we are dealing with an individuality, that is, with someone who comes from previous embodiments and who has strong, great inner soul abilities. We are thus assuming the case of a person who, through his karma, through his earlier development in previous lives, has strong inner abilities. In order to live out these abilities in the world, one needs the forces, the organs of each human shell. Now, let us assume that we neglect to educate the person who has such abilities so that he can live them out through the astral body in particular. We neglect the development of his astral body in the right time. What will happen then? In order to understand what will happen, let us imagine something specific.

Let us assume that we have such a child. It grows up. We take care to ensure that it develops regularly up to the age of seven, we make sure that it eats and drinks well, that it becomes chubby. This is taken care of quite well. The child looks well-fed. We continue to ensure that the child is well-fed from the age of seven, but now we begin to disregard the rules by which the education of the child from the age of seven should reasonably be governed. We now begin to disregard these rules and make the mistake, for example, of succumbing to materialistic prejudices and saying that we want to see to it that the child comes to intellectual judgment as early as possible, that he learns to have his own judgment as early as possible. This is the case today because of our materialistic way of thinking. I have often given this example.

While between the ages of seven and fourteen particular attention should be paid to developing memory, the focus is on teaching arithmetic. Whereas in the past children were taught 2 × 2 = 4 and similar facts before they had understood the concepts, today we say that children should not be taught anything that they merely learn by rote; they should only be taught things about which they can form an opinion. They work with red and white balls. Instead of accustoming the child to authority, which should be the source of truth for the child between the ages of 7 and 14, they teach the child to become precocious in judgment. While the child of this age should feel: “I must believe what the revered authority says,” the child is made to feel – the fact that the child needs to have parents and teachers whom it looks up to with heartfelt reverence and from whom it accepts truth out of a sense of self-evident authority is neglected.

Let us assume that we disregard this, that the word authority must be sacred for the period between the ages of seven and fourteen. If we disregard such important laws between the ages of seven and fourteen, then from the age of fourteen or fifteen a properly developing astral body cannot arise out of an inadequately developed etheric body. And now let us assume that we are dealing with a person who has brought special powers with him from previous lives, good and strong abilities, but for which he needs an astral body that can be ignited by high ideals. It depends, for example, on the astral body that one can flare up with righteous anger when one sees an injustice in one's surroundings, long before one can judge it in independent, clear thinking. Such qualities of a healthy astral body would have to be present, according to the nature of the person concerned, because he needs them so that what lives in him after his previous incarnations can come out. Now let us assume that we have neglected the principles that must be observed in order for the astral body to be born capable of devotion and enthusiasm at the age of 14 or 15. Then, despite significant talents, great abilities brought from earlier, the possibility of developing these talents is still lacking because the astral body does not allow these talents to emerge. It does not have those forces, those currents, which the I, which passes from embodiment to embodiment, must use to unfold its abilities. Now we have an I that could develop high abilities; but the organs of the astral body, through which this I could express its abilities, are crippled. The developmental current that regulates the progress of the sheaths has not come into its own.

Anyone who observes life, especially in our terribly materialistic time, will find that the case I have just described is actually true of life countless times. Countless times in life it happens that someone who can see through life – trained in occult development can see through it – sees with a bleeding heart: There is something in the individuality that cannot get out because the other developmental current has not been properly taken care of by the corresponding point in time. Then, at the very point in time when the non-existent organs would be needed, the characteristic phenomena arise, which are referred to as “youthful insanity” or “dementia praecox”. All kinds of evil, bad passions arise, aberrations of the most terrible kind. Where do these aberrations come from? They do not come simply from the fact that the person in question also has tendencies that incline towards evil, but from the fact that in the present incarnation he does not have the organs to develop his good tendencies. It may be a blessing for him that these inclinations of the ego destroy, tear apart the cover, in order to create a better possibility for his development in a following embodiment. However strange this may appear, it must be taken into account, because often the development is considered far too straightforward, even by people who come to spiritual science.

Inner evolution and outer possibilities for development must coincide. This is the case for the individual human being, and it is also true for the development of an entire era. I have given you only a radical example to make it easier for you to understand what exists in many cases. It will not always appear in this radical way, but it does appear quite often in our time in the form of discontented moods, hopelessness, and not knowing what to do with oneself, especially in the period from the 14th to the 21st year. Then it remains and cannot be remedied in life. Then it remains as an inner mood of hopelessness, aimlessness, pessimism and dissatisfaction. And in this milder form it would occur more and more frequently if humanity were not to be led onto a different path by a spiritual, spiritual-scientific world view, in that materialistic thinking has made itself felt more and more in the deepest thoughts and feelings of human beings.

When one hears what has just been said, then, as a spiritual researcher, one must say: spiritual science, if one has understood just a little of it, must appear to one as something that one does not pursue as a hobby because one likes it, because one finds subjective satisfaction, bliss through it, but rather, when one has approached its deeper sides a little, one must pursue spiritual science as a duty, as a duty towards all humanity. — For those worldviews that are prevailing today lead to an ever-decreasing understanding of life. One will understand non-life ever better. And in order to understand non-life more and more, materialism was necessary for a time. Out of a mere understanding of life, one would never have been able to build steamships, railways, tunnels. Nor could one have hoped to lead our external, physical science as far as it is today, and to make further progress in this field.

People had to be led in such a way that they absorbed, as it were, into their souls such world views that could correctly express all types of cultures as special directions of the conception of existence.

No one may say: Was it not unjust that people had to absorb materialistic views over the past centuries? No, one cannot say that. It is the same souls that, after having had to endure the influence of materialism, will in future be led to spiritual life again in other incarnations.

But everything must happen in its time, at the right time. You only have to consider that certain things can be very good, quite excellent, if they are done by day. If the same things are to be done by night, then they are just bad. There is a time for everything, and so it is also in the great development of humanity, in the development of humanity. What was good in past centuries would be a terrible sin against humanity if it were to be maintained for the next centuries. Today we have arrived at the point in time when, in place of materialistic thinking, thinking and looking must come that lead into life in the spirit itself. What has been done in the past according to materialism must be followed by a spiritual world view, and people must be found who will do something to bring this spiritual world view into the human race and its history. They should know: If what one might call a spiritual world view does not arise at this time to complement the materialistic world view, then humanity will miss out on the right moment. But there are many other ways in which we could miss out on the most important things in our time. And we understand how it is that we can miss the most important things in our time when we now consider these two developmental trends, which were previously indicated for the individual, in the context of humanity as a whole.

The human being goes from incarnation to incarnation, from embodiment to embodiment. But he does not go from one embodiment to another in vain. Why does man always descend from spiritual heights to earth again and again? Why is not one incarnation on earth sufficient? The reason for this is that the earth itself changes over long periods of time, in relation to everything that is physical on it, and in relation to everything that is spiritual and soul-like on it. Compare the outward appearance of the earth, what has grown here, and what was here already 2000 to 3000 years ago. Compare the soil as it looked around Pforzheim then with how it looks today. Even ordinary natural science can provide information about what the soil looked like here 2000 years ago. But also compare what a person learned in his childhood and youth then with what he learns today, and you will have to say to yourself: The physical and spiritual life on earth is changing. The earth was quite different 2000 to 3000 years ago and has always been and will always be changing. The earth is constantly changing. And every time we descend to the earth, we encounter new conditions, we can learn new things, experience new things and live new things, combine them with our being and carry new experiences up into the spiritual world. Therefore, because we are to absorb the experiences of the earth in successive periods, we are born in successive lives on earth. We tune in to what external life can give us in the course of successive periods and what we are to learn within this life on earth. These must be in harmony.

Let us take the example of any soul that would live today. He has already lived in the time of ancient Egypt, in the time of ancient India. All the souls sitting here today have lived on earth countless times, have lived here in different circumstances and are living again today because what they learned and experienced at the time is no longer there on earth today, and new things can be experienced and learned today. Let us assume that a person, for example, in ancient Egypt, did not apply his incarnations correctly, did not extract what could be extracted on Earth at that time. Let us assume that people, as they were still isolated in ancient Egypt according to the karma of the Earth and the individual karma, had failed to unite with their soul that which could be experienced in ancient Egypt. That would not have prevented them from dying in ancient Egypt at the appropriate time. But it would have prevented them from bringing with them, when they were born the next time, what they then needed to be fully-fledged human beings. They cannot acquire this so easily in the following incarnations. But in order to avoid having stunted souls, one needs in a later incarnation what one was able to acquire in the previous incarnation from the earth conditions at that time in terms of abilities and powers. There are things that, if you have missed them, you can no longer catch up on. Perhaps you will say: Now he is painting a pretty picture for us! We cannot know whether we have missed out on something incredibly important in previous embodiments. That would be a truly bleak prospect, because we may have missed out on something terrible in previous incarnations, and then nothing would help us now! What good does it do us, for example, if we now want to turn to spiritual science as much as we can and use our current incarnation as well as possible? We may not even be able to do it, precisely because we missed something very important in our previous incarnations!

So it seems as if this truth that I have just expressed could cast a terrible perspective into your soul, making you feel desolate. Because if you can no longer make up for what you have once missed, then I have to say that no matter how hard I work on my soul, it will no longer help, because I can no longer make up for what I have missed, which I could only have poured into this soul, perhaps in ancient Indian or Egyptian times.

This bleak prospect would only apply if the conclusion drawn from it were the right one. But it is not the right conclusion, because the matter is different. It is absolutely true that what our soul would not have acquired in the ancient Egyptian, Indian, Persian, Greek times, it could no longer make up for today, that would be impossible. The only thing is that at present, in our time, there are the first incarnations of man at all in which one can consciously, through one's own fault, miss something in this direction. And that will continue for some time. And now there can also be an explanation for why spiritual science is only now beginning to come into the world: because only now are people beginning to have the opportunity to miss out on something. Now these truths must begin to reach people, because now people are beginning to have incarnations in which, if they are not properly applied, it would be more difficult to make up for what has been missed in later earthly conditions. And now it is also the case that people, if they only want to, can access the spiritual scientific explanation of reincarnation and karma and other spiritual scientific truths, so that they do not need to burden themselves with this guilt. Spiritual science will do everything in the coming centuries and millennia to ensure that people have the opportunity to use these incarnations in the right way and do not need to take on this guilt. It does not matter so much for a single incarnation, but if in our age, which has just begun and will last 2000 to 3000 years, two to three incarnations are used in such a way that one has not extracted the right thing from what one can gain on earth, then one will have missed something important in the following times. That is why spiritual science is now emerging and telling people how important it is to use their incarnations in the right way.

Now we ask ourselves: But why could not people in earlier times make these mistakes? The reason is that man has developed from incarnation to incarnation in such a way that in the distant past he himself was a comrade of the spiritual worlds. What our abilities are today, especially the limitation of our senses to the physical world, was not always there. In earlier times, man had a dim clairvoyance; he could see into the spiritual worlds. And this clairvoyance was always stronger the further back we go. In those times, man knew: I come from the spiritual world. And he not only had this abstract knowledge, but he also knew what it looks like in that world, he knew the laws of the spiritual world. He fulfilled these laws as if by instinct; instinctively. Because they were still connected to the spiritual world, our souls essentially used their incarnations properly. Because people were still connected to the divine spiritual worlds, the knowledge continued to work in them and they instinctively did the right thing under the influence of the old knowledge. It is only in our time that we live in an age where, so to speak, the gates to the spiritual world are closed, where man between birth and death is completely dependent on perceiving only in this sensual-physical world.

This age, in which the old clairvoyance has disappeared, through which people received knowledge as if from heaven, this age began – we can state the date fairly accurately – 3101 years before the Christ walked on earth. In former times there were such ages in which men, even if they did not have today's strong self-confidence, could still see into the spiritual worlds, even further back, they could see clearly into the spiritual worlds. We come to an age before the year 3101 in which men had a rather clouded but still knowledge of the spiritual world. This epoch is called Dvapara Yuga. This Dvapara Yuga or iron epoch extends over the older Egyptian-Babylonian-Chaldean and Persian times. Then still further back, in even older times, we find an even deeper insight into the spiritual world among people in the Treta Yuga or silver epoch. And then we come up to just after the Atlantic catastrophe, when those people who were incarnated at that time were still able to see into the spiritual worlds in such a way that they felt they were companions of those beings that you can only recognize today in the state between death and a new birth. That is then the Krita Yuga, which begins there.

In the year 3101 BC, the age begins in which, little by little, all possibilities for people to look into the spiritual world through external natural, normal forces gradually cease. In this age - from 3101 BC to the present day - there were only old inherited remnants of dull, dim clairvoyance in some people. In this age, one could only regularly ascend into the spiritual worlds through real esoteric training. But the normal abilities of the human being developed in such a way that they only extended to the external physical world. This age is called, in an oriental expression, the Kali Yuga, the dark age, because man no longer sees into the spiritual world through his natural abilities. The Kali Yuga is therefore this age, which began around 3101 BC, and which has led people more and more to the physical plane.

The most important events that take place on the spiritual plane are not usually noticed by people because they are not sufficiently aware of them. Important things are happening in our age. The most important thing is that the Kali Yuga expired in 1899. That is to say, the age of human development has expired that was intended to lead human abilities to the observation and perception of the physical plane. And now, since 1899, an age is beginning in which, over a period of about 2500 years, other abilities will slowly be developed in human souls as normal abilities. We are already living in an age in which other abilities are being developed. Kali Yuga has come to an end, and people are living towards an age in which — without them being able to do anything for or against it — certain new abilities will develop naturally in the soul, different from those that developed during Kali Yuga.

What are these abilities? Under the influence of the Kali Yuga, those powers of man became stronger and stronger that make man an inventor, a discoverer, a processor of the physical forces of the physical plane. This is, of course, continuing, because the abilities that have once been acquired are, of course, not lost again. So one should not say that the ability to work with natural forces now ceases. But other abilities are added. In addition to what the human being acquired during the Kali Yuga, there is a special ability to see naturally in the etheric plane. This means that the age is now beginning when certain clairvoyant abilities will awaken as normal abilities in human souls, first in a few, then in more and more human souls. We must therefore distinguish these from those acquired by those who apply the methods of spiritual training to themselves, although these are much higher abilities. In every age, their abilities will go beyond what is intended as normal for humanity. But now an age is beginning in which the ability to see not only the physical, but also that which underlies the physical as the etheric, will be awakened as a normal one. That is to say, there will come souls with such abilities, and in a time that is already here, that has already begun, only they will come more and more frequently. Now, for the time being, they are still quite rare on earth. But these abilities will begin to spread more and more among people. They will be clearly evident in the years 1930 to 1940. This will be an important epoch, for then people's new abilities will be seen to emerge. Whereas today a person only sees the physical body, then he will also gain the ability to see some essential parts of the etheric body at first, but then more and more of it. This will happen. The way humanity is developing in the near future is such that there will be people, and more and more of them, finally a large number of people – actually it is intended for all of humanity – who will not only see the physical body of the human being, but this physical body as if enclosed in an etheric, as if with etheric rays and an etheric aura. That is one thing they will see. The other thing is that it will be quite strange to them: there will be images in front of them, and all kinds of things will show up in these images. At first people will not notice what it is all about, then they will think it is pathological, but then more and more people will notice that such an image is an event that takes place in two to four days and that is reflected ethereally beforehand. These abilities will already develop in the first half of our century.

There are two possibilities. One is that people today will stop at what they have acquired from the Kali Yuga through their thinking, feeling and perceiving. Those who, with their world view, their philosophy, their thinking and perceiving, stop at what they have learned up to now will very soon be finished with their judgments of fellow human beings who see such things. They will say that they are fools who are beginning to go mad, who see all kinds of deceptive things that do not exist. But there will be other people who will have heard from spiritual science that these are realities. And this will be emphasized again and again in the coming decades and centuries. They will have heard that there is such a thing as reality, and they will find the right relationship to these newly emerging abilities.

What do we do by doing spiritual science? So we are not doing something that satisfies our curiosity and is therefore our favorite pastime, but we are doing something that prepares people for what must and will come. And this, what will come, that one would simply not be able to understand when spiritual science would not exist. Mankind would lose what is to be won. And that could very well be if it should happen that spiritual science would be completely forbidden on Earth, if it could happen that all those who work for spiritual science would perhaps be starved, perhaps pushed out of their positions and left to starve. Then humanity would completely lose the opportunity to understand what will come as a natural development. If that should happen, human development would become barren and wither. It would have to continue without this impact and would wither and become barren. That is what makes spiritual science a responsible duty.

If we look at it this way, we can also ask: in what way, for example, will the effect just described become apparent? Well, the souls that are sitting here now will be embodied again in an age in which the soul abilities just described will already have been present in human souls for a long time. What will that bring about? With those abilities something else will come. It will come about that the person will be able to look back into the present incarnation. A natural ability will arise with those abilities that have just been described – belonging to them – a memory not only of the life between death and birth, but of the previous life, as a natural quality. But now it will be a matter of developing something in the present or following incarnation that can be remembered. What we do for the day, for what will have long since perished by the time we are born again, will not initially be something that can be remembered. What can be remembered will only be what has taken place in the central power of our inner being, in our I. One cannot then remember what happened as everyday occurrences. That which remains from the present incarnation until the following one must already be grasped and felt in the I. But it is true that most people do not yet have the inclination to penetrate so deeply into their inner being that they feel themselves to be an I. For, as Fichte said, most people still consider themselves to be a piece of cinders in the moon rather than an ego! But if we do not cultivate this ego, if we do not learn to recognize it through spiritual science, if we do not learn to feel it, then it is not there at all as inner soul-good. First we must create that which we are then to remember in the next incarnation.

In this way, spiritual science, by teaching man to know, creates the elements of the world that find their best expression in his I, and as facts creates that which he is to remember in his next incarnation. If a person does not apply what is offered to him in the right way, then in the next incarnation he has the ability to remember, but nothing can occur to him as the object of his memory, because he has not created anything to remember.

It is one of the greatest torments that a person can have: to have an ability and to possess nothing with which to exercise it. One will want to look back into earlier incarnations, because one will have the ability to do so, but find no object within oneself that one can bring into this power of remembrance. There will be a terrible thirst to look back into earlier incarnations. But it will be like an inner torment, an inner desire to look back, and one will see nothing because one has created nothing that one could see. So we work out in the present incarnation what is to be created as a fact, as an object for remembrance, for we attain the ability of remembering the past through the natural course of human development.

Here we have two currents again. An outer one: people acquire abilities; and an inner one: people must do what they can apply these abilities to. Everywhere we find these two currents. But the most important thing that acts as a force, as an impulse, is that people, by living their way up into this time, by getting the new ability to see the ethereal, will have a great, a greatest experience in connection with this in the course of the first half of the 20th century.

Back then, when the Kali Yuga had lasted about 3100 years, people had arrived at a state where they had to say to themselves: We can no longer look up into the spiritual realms of heaven. The gates are closed to the spiritual world. But then came first the Baptist John, then came the Christ, and they showed men that on the physical plane, through a corresponding inner development, that which is the central power of the soul, which is I, can be awakened and that through this the spiritual can be understood. The God descended as the Christ to the physical plane because human abilities had become such that they could only understand things on the physical plane. The Christ made this sacrifice to descend to the physical plane because the gods, who had not descended to it, were no longer comprehensible to people who had now developed the ability to stand only on the physical plane.

Now, however, abilities are developing again to see the supernatural, to see the ethereal. As a result, around the period from 1930 to 1940, a number of people who will be the first pioneers of this ethereal clairvoyance will see what the Christ is in this our time. Christ only lived on our Earth once in a physical body. However, our Earth has changed since that time. If someone became clairvoyant in the time before Christ's birth and looked into the world of spiritual beings and phenomena that directly surround our Earth, they did not find anything that they found after the event of Golgotha had taken place, when the Christ descended to Earth. One personality knew this exactly. There was a personality who knew from his teaching: When people become clairvoyant, they see something not yet on earth, but which will be in the spiritual atmosphere of the earth in the future, once the Christ has descended from the sun. This personality said to himself: We will experience on earth the great moment when the Christ will appear spiritually to people who are becoming clairvoyant, because he will then have descended to earth and will also be spiritually visible in its atmosphere. This personality knew this, but he had not yet reached the point where he could gain the faith from the events in Palestine that this expected being, the Christ, had already existed in Jesus of Nazareth. He could not recognize the Christ Jesus, he did not recognize him. Then the time came, when the event of Golgotha had long since passed, in which this personality became clairvoyant: Then she saw the Christ in the etheric body. Now she could see something in the earthly environment! Now this personality knew that the Christ was there. The physical reality, the physical vision did not convince him, this person, but the clairvoyant perception of the Christ in the etheric body did convince him. This personality was Paul. He was the first to see the Christ clairvoyantly in his etheric body at the event of Damascus, as He has been seen ever since the event of Golgotha by those who elevate themselves to clairvoyance.

This is even the most important event that is granted to the clairvoyantly trained today: that he sees the Christ in the spiritual atmosphere of the earth. Because this ability will now occur in a larger number of people during that period, this number of people will then have the direct vision of the Christ, of the Christ in his etheric body, through natural vision, with which people will then deal as with a physical personality. The Christ will not descend to a physical body a second time, but people will ascend through their abilities into the etheric, in which He is now revealing Himself. The Christ will have come to them again in the realm of their expanded experience.

This is the return of the Christ, beginning approximately in the years 1930 to 1940 of our era. This event could pass unnoticed by people if they do not prepare to understand this great event. Humanity has to prepare itself spiritually for this future event. It should not pass unnoticed by humanity. If it were to pass unnoticed, humanity would become desolate and wither.

What I have now expressed will be proclaimed in the next two decades from this and that place, expressed in this or that form, because it is an extremely important truth, a truth that should prepare people for the most important events of our time. The times are fulfilled again, that the most significant is to happen. But in our time a materialism of most terrible kind lives, and it can happen that even those who hear and receive these teachings are tempted by the materialistic attitude and seduced by the materialistic attitude to the belief that Christ only appears again when he appears in a fleshly body. That would be a materialistic belief, only those can believe that who in truth have not risen to the contemplation that the spiritual is more real than the physical. Now, materialism could lead people into this temptation, to confuse the return of Christ in the real etheric body, visible to the higher developed abilities of people, with a carnal physical return. But if that were to happen, it would be another great misfortune for humanity. But there are enough individuals in our time, enough personalities, who will use this and who, either by falling victim to an illusion, to self-deception, or by falling victim to their own evil instincts, will present themselves as false Christs, as Christs in the flesh.

False Christs will appear in this age, in which humanity is to see the true Christ in the etheric body. But anthroposophists are called upon to be able to distinguish between the spiritual and the material and to be firmly armed against all assertions, wherever they may come from, that a Christ would come in the flesh. Anthroposophists are called upon to recognize that this would be materialism, the worst tempter, which could arise at one of the most important events in the development of humanity, at the event that we call the return of Christ, and at which it will have to be proven whether people have already come so far as not just to speak of the spirit, but to be able to recognize the nature of the spirit as something higher than the nature of matter.

It remains to be seen whether people will be ready to recognize the Christ in all His significance, precisely because He shows Himself to them as a spiritual being. This will be the greatest test for people, that the greatest impulse on our earth will show itself to them and say: You can only recognize me if you not only talk about the spiritual, but know that the spiritual is more real, more real, more valuable than the merely carnal material. - That is part of what we are to take into our feelings in order to be able to meet the coming decades, which we are heading for, in the appropriate way. This event will be important not only for those who will still be in the physical body, but also for those souls who will already be between death and a new birth. For that will be just as important for the so-called dead as death on Golgotha was not only important for the contemporary people in the physical body, but also for the souls who were in Kamaloka or Devachan. Symbolically speaking, it was said that the Christ also descended to those who were in the other world: “descended to hell”. The great test of spirituality in our century will be important for those on the physical plane, as well as for those on the spiritual plane, the so-called dead.

If you recollect what was to a certain extent the climax and principal goal of our last lecture, you will be able to place before your souls how completely different the human entity was as regards his innermost self before the Mystery of Golgotha from what it was after that event. I did not try to put general characteristics before you, but examples from spiritual science, examples that showed us souls of olden times and souls belonging to modern times, characteristic examples by means of which we can see how certain souls of former times appear again, transformed and metamorphosed. The reason for such a great change will become evident only from the study of the whole course of these lectures. But at present one thing only may be pointed out by way of introduction, which has often been referred to in our lectures when they touched on similar subjects, namely, that the full consciousness of the human ego, which it is the mission of the earth planet to develop and bring to expression, actually made its appearance only through the Mystery of Golgotha.

It is not perhaps quite accurate, though not far wrong, to say that if we go very far back in evolution, human souls were not yet truly individualized; they were still entangled in the group-soul nature. This was particularly the case with the more prominent among them, so we may say that such natures as Hector or Empedocles were typical group-soul representatives of their entire human community. Hector grew out of the soul of Troy. He stands as an image of the group soul of the Trojan people in a particular form, specialized but nevertheless just as rooted in the group soul as Empedocles. When they were reincarnated in the post-Christian era, they had to face the necessity of experiencing the ego-consciousness. This passing over from the group-soul nature to the experience of the individual soul causes a mighty leap forward. It causes souls so firmly embedded in the group-soul nature as Hector to appear like Hamlet, i.e. wavering and uncertain, as though incapable of dealing with life. On the other hand it causes a soul like that of Empedocles, when it reappears in post-Christian times as the soul of the Faust of the sixteenth century, to become a kind of adventurer who is brought into various situations from which he was only with difficulty able to extricate himself, and who is misunderstood by his contemporaries and even by posterity.

Indeed, it has often been emphasized that in developments such as those here referred to, all that has taken place since the Mystery of Golgotha is not particularly meaningful. As yet everything is only at the beginning; only during the future evolution of the earth will the great impulses that may be ascribed to Christianity make themselves felt. Over and over again we must emphasize the fact that Christianity is only at the beginning of its great development. If we wish to play a part in this great development, we must enter with understanding into the ever increasing progress of the revelations and impulses which originated with the founding of Christianity. Above all we are required to learn something in the immediate future; for it does not take much clairvoyance to see clearly that if we wish for something definite to enable us to make a good beginning in the direction of an advanced and progressive understanding of Christianity, we must learn to read the Bible in quite a new way. There are at present many hindrances in the way, partly because of the fact that in wide circles biblical study is still carried on in a sugary and sentimental manner. The Bible is not made use of as a book of knowledge, but as a book of common use for all kinds of personal situations. If anyone has need of it for his own personal encouragement, he will bury himself in one or the other chapter of the Bible and allow it to work on him. This seldom results in anything more than a personal relationship to the Bible. On the other hand, the scholarship of the last decades, indeed that of virtually the whole nineteenth century, increased the difficulty of really understanding the Bible by tearing it apart, declaring that the New Testament is composed of all kinds of different things that were later combined, and that the Old Testament also was composed of many different parts which must have been brought together at different times. According to this view, the Bible is made up of mere fragments which may easily produce the impression of an aggregate, presumably stitched together in the course of time. This kind of scholarship has become popular; very many people, for example, hold that the Old Testament is combined out of many single parts. This opinion disturbs the serious reading of the Bible that must come in the near future. When such a serious way of reading the Bible is adopted, all that is to be said about its secrets from the anthroposophical viewpoint will be much better understood.

For example, we must learn to take as a whole the Old Testament from the beginning up to the point where the ordinary editions of the Bible end. We must not let ourselves be led astray by all that may be said against the unity of the Old Testament. Then, if we do not merely read it in a one-sided way seeking for personal edification, and do not read one part or another from any particular point of view, but allow the Old Testament, just as it is, to influence us as a whole, combining our consideration of the contents with all that must come into the world precisely from our anthroposophical development of the last few years—if we unite all this with a certain artistic spiritual feeling so that we gradually come to see the artistic sequence, how the threads interweave and are disentangled, not as if it had been composed in an external kind of way, but with deep artistry, then we shall gradually perceive what a mighty, inwardly spiritual dramatic power lies in the whole structure and composition of the Old Testament. Only then do we appreciate the glorious tableau as a uniform whole, and we shall no longer believe that one piece in the middle comes from one source and one from another. We shall then perceive the unitary spirit of the Bible. We shall see how from the first day of creation the continuity of progress is under the control of this unitary spirit from the time of the patriarchs through the time of the judges, and through that of the great Jewish prophets and kings until the whole soars to a wonderful dramatic culmination in the book of the Maccabees,¹ in the sons of Mattathias, the brothers of Judas who fought against the king of Antioch. In the whole there lives an inner dramatic force that reaches a certain culminating point at the end. We shall then feel that it is not a mere phrase when we say that a man who is equipped with the occult method of observation is seized by a peculiar feeling when he comes to the end of the Old Testament and has in front of him the seven sons of the Maccabean mother and the five sons of Mattathias. Five sons of Mattathias, with the seven sons of the Maccabean mother making the remarkable number twelve, a number we notice everywhere when we are led into the secrets of evolution.

The number twelve appears at the end of the Old Testament as the culminating point of the whole dramatic presentation. First this feeling comes upon us when the seven sons of the Maccabees die a martyr's death, how one by one they rise up and one by one are martyred. Observe the inner dramatic power shown here, how the first victim only hints at what comes to full expression in the seventh in his belief in the immortality of the soul, how he hurls these words at the king, “You reprobate, you refuse to hear anything about the Awakener of my soul.” (II Maccabees, Chap. 7.) If we allow the dramatic crescendo of power from son to son to affect us, we shall see what forces are contained in the Bible. If we compare the sugary sentimental method of study prevalent hitherto with this dramatic, artistic penetration, the Bible is of itself able to arouse religious ardor. Here, through the Bible, art becomes religion. And then we begin to notice very remarkable things. Most of you may perhaps remember, for it happened in this very place, that when I gave here the course on St. Luke's Gospel the whole magnificent figure of Christ Jesus sprang forth from the fusion of the two souls, the souls of the two Jesus children. The soul of the one was none other than the soul of Zarathustra, the founder of Zoroastrianism. You may still have before your spiritual eyes the fact that in the Jesus boy described in the Gospel of St. Matthew is the reincarnated Zarathustra.

What kind of fact do we have here? We have the founder of Zoroastrianism, the great initiate of antiquity, of the primeval Persian civilization, who passed through human evolution up to a certain point and appeared again among the ancient Hebrew people. Through the soul of Zarathustra, we have a transition from the ancient Persian to the element of the ancient Hebrew people. Yes indeed, the external, that which takes place in the history of the world and in human life, is really only the manifestation, the externalization of inner spiritual processes and of inner spiritual forces. What external history relates can therefore be studied by considering it as an expression of the inward and spiritual, of the facts which move in the spiritual realm. Let us place before our souls the fact that Zarathustra passed over from Persia into the old Hebrew element. Now let us consider the Old Testament—we really only need to study the headings of the chapters. That the matter stands with Zarathustra as I then related is the result of clairvoyant research: it results if we follow his soul backward in time. Now let us contrast this result not only with the way the Bible represents it, but also with the results of external investigation.

The ancient Hebrew people founded their kingdom in Palestine. That original kingdom was divided. First it passed into Assyrian captivity, then into the Babylonian. The ancient Hebrew people were subjugated by the Persians. What does all this mean? World historical facts do indeed have a meaning; they correspond with inner processes, spiritual soul-processes. Why did all this take place? Why were the ancient Hebrew people guided in such a way that they passed over into the Chaldean, into the Assyrian-Babylonian element, and were set free again by Alexander the Great?² To put it briefly, it is because this was merely the external transition of Zarathustra from the Persian to the Jewish element. The Jews brought him to themselves. They were guided to him, even being subjugated by the Persian element, because Zarathustra wanted to come to them. External history is a wonderful counterpart of these processes, and anyone who observes these things from the point of view of spiritual science knows that external history was only the body for the transition of the Zarathustra element from the old Persian element, which at first actually included the old Hebrew element. Then, when the latter had been sufficiently permeated by the Persian element, it was lifted out of it again by Alexander the Great. What then remained was the milieu necessary for Zarathustra; it had passed over from one people to another.

When we glance over this whole age—we can naturally emphasize only a few single points—we see it reaching its apex in the old Hebrew history, through the period of the kings, the prophets, the Babylonian captivity, and the Persian conquest up to the time of the Maccabees. If then we really wish to understand the Gospel of St. Mark, which is ushered in by one of the prophetic sayings of Isaiah, we cannot fail to be struck by the element of the Jewish prophets. Starting from Elijah, who reincarnated as John the Baptist, we could say that these prophets appear to us in their wonderful grandeur. Let us leave out of consideration for the moment Elijah and his reincarnation as the Baptist, and consider the names of the intervening prophets. Here we must say that what we have obtained from spiritual science allows us to observe these Jewish prophets in a very special way. When we speak of the great spiritual leaders of the earth in ancient times, to whom do we refer? To the initiates, the initiated ones. We know that these initiates attained their spiritual height precisely because they went through the various stages of consecration. They raised themselves stage by stage by means of cognition to spiritual vision, and thus to union with the true spiritual impulses in the world. In this way they were able to embody in the life of the physical plane the impulses they themselves received in the spiritual world. When we meet with an initiate of the Persian, Indian, or Egyptian people our first question is, “How did he ascend the ladder of initiation within his own national environment? How did he become a leader, and thus a spiritual guide of his people?”

This question is everywhere justifiable, except when we come to the prophets. At the present time, there is certainly a sort of theosophical tendency to mix everything together and speak about the prophets in the same way as we speak of other initiates. But nothing can be known by doing this. Let us take the Bible (and recent historical research shows that the Bible is a true and not an untrue document); consider the prophets from Isaiah to Malachi, through Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, and study what it relates of these figures. You will find that you cannot bring these prophets into the general scheme of initiation. Where does the Bible relate that the Jewish prophets went through the same kind of initiation as other initiates belonging to different peoples? It is said they appeared when the voice of God stirred in their souls, enabling them to see in a different way from ordinary men, making it possible for them to make indications as to the future course of the destiny of their people and the future course of the world's history. Such indications were wrung from the souls of the prophets with elemental force. It is not related of them, in the same way as it is related of other prophets, how they went through their initiation. The spiritual vision of the Jewish prophets seems, so to speak, to spring from their own genius, and this they relate to their own people and to humanity. It was in this same way that they avowed their prophesies and acknowledged their prophetic gifts. Just consider how a prophet, when he has something to announce, always makes a point of proclaiming that God has communicated through some mediator what is to happen—or else that it came to him like a direct elemental truth. This gives rise to the question, leaving Elijah and his reincarnation as the Baptist out of consideration, “What position do these Jewish prophetic figures occupy, who externally are placed side by side with the initiates of other nations?” If you investigate the souls of these prophets in the light of spiritual science or occultism, you come to something very remarkable. If you make the effort to compare what history and religious tradition relate with what I am about to communicate to you as the result of my spiritual investigation, you will be able to verify this.

We find that the souls of the Hebrew prophets are reincarnations of initiates who had lived in other nations, and who had attained certain stages of initiation. When we trace backward one of these prophets, we arrive at some other people and find an initiated soul who remained a long time with this people. This soul then went through the portal of death and was reincarnated in the Jewish people. If we wish to find the earlier incarnations of the souls of Jeremiah, Isaiah, Daniel, and so on, we must seek them among other peoples. Trivially speaking, it is as though there were a gradual assembling of the initiates of other peoples among the Jewish people, where these initiates appear in the form of prophets. This is why these prophets appear in such a way that their gift of prophecy appears to proceed elementally from out of their own inner being. It is a memory of what they acquired here or there as initiates. All this emerges, but not always in the harmonious form it had in earlier incarnations, for a soul that had been incarnated in a Persian or Egyptian body would first have to accustom itself to the bodily nature of the Jewish people. Something of what was certainly in this soul could not come forth in this incarnation. For it is not always the case that what a man has formerly acquired reappears in him as he progresses from incarnation to incarnation. Indeed, through the difficulties caused by the bodily nature, it may come forth in an inharmonious way, in a chaotic manner.

Thus we see that the Jewish prophets gave their people many spiritual impulses, which are often disarrayed, but nonetheless grandiose recollections of former incarnations. That is the peculiarity to be observed in the Jewish prophets. Why is this? It is because in fact the whole evolution of humanity had to go through this passageway, so that what was achieved in its parts over the whole world should be brought together in one focal point, to be born again from out of the blood of the people of the Old Testament. So we find in the history of the old Hebrew people, as in that of no other, something that may be found also in tribes but not in peoples that had already become nations—a state of homogenity, the emphasizing of the descent of the blood through the generations. All that belongs to the world-historical mission of the Old Testament people depends upon the continuity of the stream of blood through the generations. Hence anyone who had a full right to belong to the Jewish people was always called a “son of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” meaning a son of that element that first appeared in the blood of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It was in the blood that flowed through this people that the elements of initiation of other peoples were to reincarnate. Like rays of light coming from different sides, streaming in and uniting in the center, the incarnating rays of the various peoples were collected together as in one central point in the blood of the old Hebrew people. The psychical element of human evolution had once to pass through that experience. It is extremely important to keep these occult facts in mind, for only thus can we understand how such a Gospel as that of St. Mark is from its beginning based upon the element of the Old Testament.

But now what occurs at this gathering, as we might call it, of the initiation elements of the various peoples in this one center? We have yet to see why it took place. But if we now take the whole dramatic progress of the Old Testament into consideration, we shall see how the thought of immortality is gradually developed in the Old Testament through the taking up of the initiation elements of the different peoples and how it appears at its very summit precisely in the sons of the Maccabees. But we must now allow this to influence our souls in its full original significance, enabling us to envision the consciousness man then had of his connection with the spiritual world. I wish to draw your attention to one thing. Try to follow up the passages in the Old Testament where reference is made to the divine element shining into human life. How often it is related, for example in the Book of Tobit (Tobit, Chapter 5), when something or other is about to happen—as when Tobit sends his son to carry out some business or other—the archangel Raphael appears to him in an apparently human form.³ In another passage other beings of the higher hierarchies appear. Here we have the divine spiritual element playing into the world of man in such a way that man sees the divine spiritual element as something external, met with in the outer world. In the Book of Tobit, Raphael confronts the person he has to lead in just the same way as one man encounters another when he approaches him externally. We shall often see if we study the Old Testament that connections with the spiritual world are regulated in this manner, and very many passages in the Old Testament refer to something of this kind. But as we proceed, we observe a great dramatic progression, finally reaching the culminating point of that progression in the martyrdom of the seven sons of the Maccabees who speak out of their souls of a uniting, a reawakening of their souls in the divine element. The inner certainty of soul about their own inner immortality meets us in the sons of the Maccabees and also in Judas and his brothers who were to defend their people against the king of Antioch. There is an increased inner understanding of the divine spiritual element, and the dramatic progress becomes ever greater as we follow the Old Testament from the appearance of God to Moses in the burning bush, in which we see God approaching man externally, to the inner certitude springing up in the souls of the sons of the Maccabees, who are convinced that if they die here they will be reawakened in the kingdom of their God through what lives within them.

This shows a mighty progression, revealing an inner unity in the Old Testament. Nothing is said at the beginning of the Old Testament concerning the consciousness of being accepted by God, of being taken away from the earth and being part of the Divinity. Nor are we told whether this member of the human soul that is taken up by God and embodied in the divine world is really raised. But the whole progress was so guided that the consciousness develops more and more, so that the human soul through its very essence grows into the spiritual element. From a state of passivity toward the God Yahweh or Jehovah, there gradually comes into being an active inner consciousness of the soul about its own nature. This increases page by page all through the Old Testament, though it was only by slow degrees that during its progress the thought of immortality was born. Strange to say, the same progress may also be observed in the succession of the prophets. Just observe how the stories and predictions of each successive prophet become more and more spiritual; here again we find the dramatic element of a wonderful intensification. The further we go back into the past, the more do the stories told relate to the external. The more we advance in time, the more we discover the inner force, the inner certainty and feeling of unity with the divine spiritual, referred to also by the prophets. Thus there is a continual enhancement until the Old Testament leads on to the beginning of the story of the New Testament, and the Gospel of St. Mark is directly linked with all this.

For at the very beginning, the Gospel tells us that it intends to interpret the event of Christ Jesus entirely in the sense of the old prophets, so that it is possible to understand the appearance of Christ Jesus by keeping before us the words of Malachi and Isaiah respectively, “Behold I send my messenger before you who is to prepare the way. Hear how there is a cry in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord and make his paths level.’ ” Thus there is a prevailing tone running through the history of the Old Testament pointing to the appearance of Christ Jesus. It is further related in St. Mark's Gospel—indeed we may distinctly hear it in the words if we so desire. In the same way that the ancient prophets spoke, so essentially does the Baptist speak. How comprehensive and grandiose is this figure of the Baptist if we interpret him in the way the ancient prophets spoke of a divine messenger, of one who in the solitude would show the path that Christ Jesus had to pursue in cosmic evolution. Mark's Gospel then goes on to say, “Thus does John the Baptist appear in the solitude and proclaim baptism for the recognition of human sinfulness.” For in this way should the words rightly be translated. So it is said, “Direct your gaze to the old prophetic nature, which has now entered into a new relation with the Divinity and experienced a new belief in immortality. And then behold the figure of the Baptist, how he appeared and spoke of the kind of development through which we may recognize the sinfulness of man.” Thus is the Baptist directly referred to as a great figure.

But how about the wonderful figure of Christ Jesus Himself? Nowhere else in the world is He presented in so simple and at the same time so grand and dramatic an ascending gradation as in Mark's Gospel. Direct your spiritual gaze at this in the right way. What are we told at the beginning of the Gospel? We are particularly told to turn our attention to the figure of the Baptist. You can understand him only when you take into account the Jewish prophets, whose voice has become alive in him. The whole Jewish nation went up to be baptized by him. This means that there were many among them who recognized that the old prophets spoke through John the Baptist. That is stated at the beginning of the Gospel. We see John standing before us, we hear the voice of the old prophets coming to life in him, and we see the people going out to him and recognizing him as a prophet come to life again. Let us confine ourselves for the moment to the Mark Gospel. Now the figure of Christ Jesus Himself appears. Let us now also leave out of account the so-called baptism in the Jordan, and what happens after that, including the temptation, and fix our attention on the dramatic intensification we meet with in the Mark Gospel.

After the Baptist is introduced to us, and we are shown how the people regard him and his mission, Christ Jesus is Himself introduced. But in what manner? At first we are told only that He is there, that He is recognized not only by men, but He is also recognized by beings other than man. That is the point to be borne in mind. Around Him are those who wish to be healed from their demonic possession, those in whom demons are active. Around Him stand men in whom not merely human souls are living, but who are possessed by super-sensible spirits who work through them. And in a significant passage we are told that these spirits recognize Christ Jesus. Of the Baptist we are told that men recognized him and went out to be baptized by him. But Christ is recognized by the super-sensible spirits, so that He has to command them not to speak of Him. Beings from the super-sensible world recognize Him, so it is said; that being is entering who is not only recognized by men, but His appearance is recognized and considered dangerous by super-sensible beings. That is the glorious climax confronting us directly in the beginning of the Gospel of Mark. On the one side is John the Baptist, recognized and honored by men; and on the other He who is recognized and feared by super-sensible beings—who nevertheless have something to do with the earth—so that they realize that now they must leave. Nowhere else is such an upward dramatic progression presented with such simplicity.

If we keep this in sight, we feel certain things as necessary which usually simply pass unobserved by human souls. Let me draw your attention to a particular passage which, because of the greatness and simplicity of Mark's Gospel, may best be observed in this Gospel. Recall the passage in which the choosing of the Twelve is spoken of at the beginning of the Gospel, and how, when the naming is referred to, it is said that He called two of His apostles the “sons of thunder” (Mark 3:17). That is a fact that must not pass unnoticed; we must pay attention to it if we wish to understand the Gospel. Why does He call them “sons of thunder?” Because He wishes to implant into them an element that is not of the earth so that they may become His servants. This element comes from outside the earth because this is the Gospel that comes from the world of angels and archangels. It is something new; it is no longer enough to speak of man. He speaks now of a heavenly super-sensible element, the ego, and it is necessary to emphasize this. He calls them sons of thunder to show that those who are His followers are related to the celestial element. The nearest world connected with our own is the elemental world, through which what plays into our world can first be explained. Christ gives names to His disciples which indicate that our world borders on a super-sensible one. He gives them names in accordance with the characteristics of the elemental world. It is just the same as when He calls Peter the “rock-man” (Mark 3:16). This again refers to the super-sensible. Thus through the whole Gospel the entrance of the angelic as an impulse from the spiritual world is proclaimed.

In order to understand this we only need to read correctly, and assume that the Gospel is at the same time a book from which the deepest wisdom can be drawn. All the progress that has been made consists in this: souls are becoming individualized. They are connected with the super-sensible world not only indirectly through their group-soul nature, but they are also connected with it through the element of the individual soul. He who so stands before humanity that He is recognized by the beings of earth and is also recognized by super-sensible beings needs the best element of human nature to enable Him to sink something of the super-sensible into the souls of those who are to serve Him. He requires such men as have themselves made the furthest progress in their souls according to the old way. It is extremely interesting to follow the soul-development of those whom Christ Jesus gathered around Him; the Twelve whom He particularly called to be His own, who, in all their simplicity, as we might say, passed in the grandest way through the development which, as I tried to show you yesterday, is gained by human souls in widely varied incarnations.

A man must first become accustomed to being a specific individuality. This he cannot easily do when he is transferred from the element of the nation in which his soul had taken root into a condition of being dependent upon himself alone. The Twelve were deeply rooted in a nationality which had constituted itself in the grandest form. They stood there as if they were naked souls, simple souls, when Christ found them again. There had been a quite abnormal interval between their incarnations. The gaze of Christ Jesus could rest upon the Twelve, the reincarnated souls of those who had been the seven sons of the Maccabean and the five sons of Mattathias, Judas and his brothers; it was of these that the apostolate was formed. They were thrown into the element of fishermen and simple folk. But at a time when the Jewish element had reached its culminating point they had been permeated by the consciousness that this element was then at the peak of its strength, but strength only—whereas, when the group formed itself around Christ, this element appeared in individualized form. We might conceive that someone who was a complete unbeliever might look upon the appearance of the seven and the five at the end of the Old Testament, and their reappearance at the beginning of the New Testament, as nothing but an artistic progression. If we take it as a purely artistic composition, we may be moved by its simplicity and the artistic greatness of the Bible, quite apart from the fact that the Twelve are the five sons of Mattathias and the seven sons of the Maccabean mother. And we must learn to take the Bible also as a work of art. Then only shall we develop a feeling for the artistic element in it, and acquire a feeling for the realities from which it springs.

Now perhaps your attention may be called to something else. Among the five sons of Mattathias is one who is already called Judas in the Old Testament. He was the one who at that time fought more bravely than all the others for his own people. In his whole soul he was dedicated to his people, and it was he who was successful in forming an alliance with the Romans against King Antiochus of Syria (I Maccabees, Chap. 8). This Judas is the same who later had to undergo the test of the betrayal, because he who was most intimately bound up with the old specifically Hebrew element, could not at once find the transition into the Christian element, needing the severe testing of the betrayal. Again, if we look at the purely artistic aspect, how wonderfully do the two figures stand out: the grand figure of the Judas in the last chapters of the Old Testament and the Judas of the New Testament. It is remarkable that in this symptomatic process, the Judas of the Old Testament concluded an alliance with the Romans, prefiguring all that happened later, namely the path that Christianity took through the Roman Empire, so that it could enter into the world. If I could add to this something that can also be known but that cannot be given in a lecture to an audience as large as this, you would see that it was precisely through a later reincarnation of Judas that the fusion of the Roman with the Christian element occurred. The reincarnated Judas was the first who, as we might say, had the great success of spreading Romanized Christianity in the world. The treaty concluded by the Judas of the Old Testament with the Romans was the prophetic foreshadowing of what was later accomplished by another man, who is recognized by occultists as the reincarnation of that Judas who had to go through the severe soul-testing of the betrayal. What through his later influence appears as Christianity within Romanism and Romanism within Christianity is like a renewal of the alliance concluded between the Old Testament Judas and the Romans, but transferred into the spiritual.

When we have such things as these before us, we gradually come to the conclusion that, considered spiritually and leaving everything else aside, human evolution is itself the greatest work of art that has ever existed; only we must have the vision to see it. Ought it therefore to be regarded as so unreasonable to look at the human soul in this way? I think if we contemplate one or the other of these dramas with their clear raveling and unraveling, while lacking the capacity for perceiving its structure, we shall see nothing but a sequence of events following one after another. External history is written somewhat in this way. Seen thus, human evolution does not appear as a work of art; nothing emerges but a succession of events. But mankind is now at a turning point when it must interpret the inner progressive shaping of events, their raveling and unraveling in the evolution of humanity. Then it will appear that the evolution of humanity clearly and distinctly shows how individual figures appear at definite times and give impulses while entangling or unraveling the plot. We only learn to understand how man is inserted into human evolution when we come to know the course of history in this way. But because it is all raised from the condition of a mere joining together to that of an organism, and then to more than an organism, everything must really be put in its proper place and the distinctions made that in other domains are taken for granted. It would not occur to any astronomer to equate the sun to the other planets. He would as a matter of course keep it separate and single it out as a separate entity within the planetary system. In the same way, a man who sees into human evolution places a “sun” as a matter of course among the great leaders of humanity. Just as it would be utter nonsense to speak of the sun of our planetary system as being on a par with Venus, Jupiter, or Mars, so it would be nonsense to speak of Christ in the same way as the Boddhisattvas or other leaders of humanity. This should be so obvious that the very idea of a reincarnation of Christ would be ridiculous, and such an assertion could not be made if things were simply looked at as they are. But it is necessary really to go into the questions and grasp them in their proper form, and not to accept the dogma of any sectarian belief. When we speak of Christology in a true cosmological sense, it is not necessary to show a preference for the Christian above any other religion. That would be the same as if some religion in its sacred writings stated that the sun was the same as the other planets, and then someone came along and said, “No, we must place the sun higher than the other planets, and some people opposed this by saying, “But this is favoritism toward the sun!” This is not favoritism, it is only recognizing the truth.

So it is also in the case of Christianity. It is simply a question of recognizing the truth, a truth that every religion on the earth today could accept if it chose to do so. If other religions are in earnest in their tolerance for all other religious creeds and do not use that tolerance as a pretense, they will not object that the West has not adopted a national god, but a God in whom no nationality plays a part, a God who is a cosmic being. The Indians speak of their national gods. As a matter of course their ideas differ from those of people who have not adopted a Germanic national god, but accept as a God a Being who was, to be sure, never incarnated in their own land, but in a distant land and in a different nation. We might perhaps speak of a Western-Christian principle in opposition to an Indian-Eastern one, if we wished to put Wotan above Krishna. But that is not the case with Christ. From the beginning He belonged to no nation but stood for the truth of the most beautiful of the spiritual scientific principles, “to recognize the truth without distinction of color, race, nationality, etc.”

We must acquire the capacity to look at these things objectively. Only when we recognize the Gospels by recognizing what underlies them shall we truly understand them. From what has been said today about the Mark Gospel in its sublime simplicity and its dramatic crescendo from the person of John the Baptist to that of Christ Jesus, we can see what this Gospel actually contains.

• 1. The two books of the Maccabees are to be found in the Apocrypha, but not in the King James Version of the Bible. The heroic deeds of Judas Maccabaeus are recorded in Book 1, and the story of the martyrdom of the sons of the widow in Book 2.
• 2. The Israelites in Babylon were of course allowed by Cyrus to go home after his conquest of that city, and his Persian successors followed the same policy (II Chron. 36:22, Ezra 1. See also the rest of the book of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Haggai, especially for the rebuilding of the temple). However, if the paragraph is taken as a whole, it seems evident that Steiner was thinking of the general dispersion of the Jews in the Hellenistic world in the centuries following the conquests of Alexander, a dispersion that in the end provided a suitable milieu for the reborn Zarathustra. As far as is known to history, Alexander himself did not play any significant part in the liberation of the Jews. (Editorial note.)
• 3. The reference is to the wonderful journey by Tobias, the son of Tobit, who goes to a far land to bring back a wife after he has freed her from a demon. He does this with the aid of Raphael who also shows him how to cure his father of blindness.