The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Only if it is regarded as a time of trial and testing can anything propitious emerge from the period of grave difficulty through which humanity has been passing. I cannot help thinking to-day of the lectures given in this very town many years ago, before the war, and those of you who have studied what was then said, will have realised that certain definite indications were given of the terrible times ahead. The lectures dealt with the Folk-Souls of the European peoples (The Mission of Folk-Souls. Eleven lectures, Christiania 7th—17th June, 1910), and as a reminder of them—in order, too, that you may realise their purport more clearly—I would like, by way of introduction, to speak of a certain interesting episode.

In the year 1918 I had a conversation in Middle Europe with someone who in the autumn of that year played a brief but significant part in the catastrophic events which were then assuming a particularly menacing form. Those who were able to follow the course of events, however, realised already in the early months of that year that this particular man would be in a key position when matters came to a point of decision. As I say, I had a talk with him in the month of January, 1918, and in the course of our conversation he spoke of the need for a psychology, for teaching on the subject of the Folk-Souls of the European peoples. The chaos into which humanity was falling would make it essential—so he said—for those who desired to take the lead in public affairs to understand the forces at work in the souls of the peoples of Europe. And he expressed deep regret that there was really no possibility of basing the management of public affairs upon any knowledge of this kind. I answered that I had given lectures on this very subject and I afterwards sent the volume to him, having added a foreword dealing with the situation as it then was—in January, 1918. I tell you this merely in order to indicate the real purport of the lectures. Their aim was to give true guiding lines for counteracting the forces which were leading straight into confusion and chaos. And it was for the same reason that I again made use of them in the year 1918, in the way I have indicated. But it was all quite useless, in spite of the preface dealing with the necessities of the situation that had later arisen, because ripeness of insight was required to understand the strength of the forces leading to decay, and although this ripeness of insight would have been within the reach of many leading men, they were not willing to strive for it.

And it is the same to-day. People are still terribly afraid to envisage, in their true form, the forces that are leading straight into chaos. Instead of facing these forces of decay, they prefer to spin all kinds of fantastic notions, believing that if they take refuge in them, life will go on quite peacefully. But those who will have nothing to do with this kind of thinking and who face the realities of the situation, hold no such belief. Far from it.

Precisely here in Norway destiny made it necessary to speak of the relations between the European Folk-Souls, and indeed I have been speaking of the same theme, with its different ramifications, more or less in detail for many years. I have said more than once that a time will come in European affairs when much will depend upon whether Norway can count among its people, men who will range themselves on the side of true progress and devote their powers to furthering it. The geographical position of Norway renders this imperative and indeed possible. Up here there is a certain detachment from European conditions and this can help many things to ripen. But this ripeness must unfold, gradually, into fruit—into a true and quickened spiritual life.

In the years that have passed since we were last together, you yourselves have had many experiences in connection with the great European War, but only those who lived in the very midst of things were able to realise their full significance. It is difficult to find words of human language that can give any adequate idea of the awful catastrophes. One is tempted to use the word ‘senseless’ about it all, because nearly everything, in the domain of the public affairs of Europe up to the beginning of the twentieth century resulted in some form of senselessness. What went on between the years 1914 and 1918 was a kind of madness, and since then matters have not greatly improved although it may perhaps be said that the senseless actions of the materialistic world are not so outwardly patent as they were during the actual years of the war.

To-day it ought to be realised much more fully than it is, that Europe is bound to come to grief if attention is not turned to the spiritual foundations of human life, if merely for purposes of convenience men brush aside all that is said with the intention of helping humanity to emerge from the chaos of anti-spirituality. The fact that my lectures on Folk-Psychology were ignored by one who held a leading position during this period of senseless action, seemed to me to be deeply symptomatic. And it is still the same to-day. Everything is brushed aside by those who have any influence in public life.

It is a pity that the significance of certain words spoken by an Anglo-South African statesman has not been grasped in Europe. The words were not spoken from any great depth, but none the less they indicated a certain feeling for the way in which affairs are shaping at the present time. This statesman said that the focus of world-history has shifted from the North Sea to the Pacific Ocean—that is to say from Europe in general, to the Pacific Ocean. And this too may be added:—That for which, up till now, Europe was a kind of centre, has ceased to exist. We are living in its remains. It has been superseded by great world-affairs as between the East and the West. What is going on now, all unsuspectingly in Washington, is nothing but a feeble stammering, surging up from depths where mighty, unobserved impulses are stirring.

There will be no peace on the Earth until a certain harmony is established between the affairs of East and West, and it must be realised that this harmony has first to be achieved in the realm of the Spirit. However glibly people may talk in these difficult times about disarmament and other ‘luxuries’ of the kind—for luxuries they are, and nothing more—it will amount to no more than conversation, as long as the Western world fails to discover and bring to light the spirituality that is indeed contained, but allowed to lie fallow in the culture which has been developing since the middle of the fifteenth century. There is a store of spiritual treasure in this culture, but it lies fallow.

Science has acquired a magnificent knowledge of the world and we are surrounded on all hands by really marvellous technical achievements. It is all splendid in its way, but it is dead—dead as compared with the great currents of human evolution. And yet in this very death there lies a living spirituality which can shine into the world even more brilliantly than all that was given to man by oriental wisdom—although that must never be belittled. Such a feeling does in truth exist in all unprejudiced observers of life.

We do right to turn to the great wisdom-treasures of the East—of which the Vedas, the wonderful Vedanta philosophy and the like are but mere reflections; and we are rightly filled with wonder by all that was there revealed from heavenly heights. It has gradually fallen into a certain decadence, but even in the form in which it still lives in the East, it arouses the wonder and admiration of anyone who has a feeling for such things.

In vivid contrast to this there is the purely materialistic culture of the West, of Europe and America. This materialistic culture and its equally materialistic mode of thinking must not be disparaged, yet it is, after all, rather like a hard nutshell—a dying nutshell. But the kernel is still alive and if it can be discovered its radiance will outshine all the glory of oriental wisdom that once poured down to man. Let there be no mistake about it—as long as the dealings of Europeans and Americans with Asia are confined to purely economic and industrial interests, so long will there be distrust in the hearts of Asiatics. People may talk as much as they like about disarmament, about the desirability of ending wars... a great war will break out between the East and the West, in spite of all disarmament conferences, if the people of Asia cannot perceive something that flows over to them from the Spirit of the West. Western spirituality can shine over to Asia and if it does, Asia will be able to trust it, because with their own inherent, though somewhat decadent spirituality, the Asiatic peoples will be able to understand what it means. The peace of the world depends upon this, not upon the conversations and discussions now going on among the leaders of outer civilisation.

Everything depends upon insight into the Spirit that is lying hidden in European and American culture—the Spirit from which men flee, which for the sake of ease they would fain avoid, but which alone can set the feet of humanity on the path of ascent. People like to put their heads in the sand, saying that things will improve of themselves. No, they will not. The hour of a great decision has struck. Either men will resolve to bring forth the spirituality of which I have spoken, or the decline of the West is inevitable. Hopes and fatalistic longings for things to right themselves are of no avail. Once and forever, man has passed into the epoch when he must manipulate his powers out of his own freewill. In other words: it is for men themselves to decide for or against spirituality. If the decision is positive, progress will be possible; if not, the doom of the West is sealed and in the wake of dire catastrophes the further evolution of humanity will take a course undreamed of to-day. Those who would strive for true insight into these matters should not, nay dare not, neglect the study of the life of soul in mankind at large and in the different peoples, especially of East and West.

In these preliminary remarks I have tried to convey that if in this particular corner of Europe, qualities to which the Scandinavian Spirit is peculiarly adapted, can be unfolded, insight can ripen and work fruitfully upon the rest of the Western world. Indeed it will only be possible for a spiritual Movement to be taken seriously when with inner understanding men are prepared to ascribe to it a mission of the kind here indicated.

Modern thought studies everything in the universe beyond the Earth in terms of mathematics and mechanics. We look at the stars through telescopes, examine their substance by means of the spectroscope and the like, reducing these observations to rules of calculation, and we have finally arrived at a great system of ‘world-machinery’ in which our Earth is placed like a wheel. Fantastic notions are evolved about the habitableness of other planets, but no great significance is attached to them because we fall back upon mathematical formulae when it is a question of speaking of extra-terrestrial space. Man has gradually come to feel himself living on Earth just as a mole might feel in his mound during the winter. There is an idea that the Earth is rather like a tiny mole-hill in the universe. There is also a tendency to look back with a certain superciliousness to ‘primitive’ periods of culture, for instance to the culture of ancient Egypt, when men did not speak of the great mechanical processes in the Universe but of divine Beings outside, in space and beyond space—Beings to whom man was known to be related just as he is related to the beings of the three kingdoms of Nature on Earth.

The ancient Egyptian traced the origin of the spirit and soul of man to the higher Hierarchies, to super-sensible worlds, just as he traced the origin of his material, bodily nature to the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. In our age, people speak of what is beyond the Earth out of a kind of weak and ever-weakening faith that much prefers to avoid scientific scrutiny. Science speaks only of a great system of world-machinery which can be expressed in terms of mathematics. Earthly existence has finally come to be regarded as confined within the walls of a little mole-hill in the universe.

Yet there is a profound truth, namely this: When man loses the heavens, he loses himself. By far the most important elements of man's being belong to the universe beyond the Earth and if he loses sight of this universe he loses sight of his own true being. He wanders over the Earth without knowing what kind of being he really is. He knows, but even then only from tradition, that the word ‘man’ applies to him, that this name was once given to him as a being who stands upright in contrast to the quadruped animals. But his scientific view of the world and technical culture no longer help him to discover the true content of his name, for that must be sought in the universe beyond the Earth, and this universe is considered to be nothing but a great system of machinery. Man has lost himself; he has no longer any insight into his true nature.

A feeling of sadness cannot but overtake us when we realise that the heights of culture to which the West has risen since the middle of the fifteenth century have led man to wrench himself from his true nature and to live on the Earth divested of soul and spirit.

In the lecture to educationists yesterday, I said that we are prone to speak of only one aspect—and even that merely from tradition—of the eternal being of man. We speak of eternity beyond death but not of the eternity stretching beyond birth, nor of how the human being has descended from spiritual worlds into material, physical existence on the Earth. And so we really have no word which corresponds, at the other pole, to ‘deathlessness’ or immortality. We do not speak of ‘unborn-ness’ (Ungeborenheit) but until it becomes a natural matter of course to speak of deathlessness and unborn-ness, the true being of man will never be understood.

The meaning attaching to the word ‘deathlessness’ nowadays is very far from what it was in times when men also spoke of ‘unborn-ness.’ Innumerable sermons are preached to-day, and with a certain subjective honesty, on the eternal nature of the human soul. But get to the root of these sermons and see if you can discover their fundamental trend. They speculate strongly upon the egotism of human beings, upon the fact that man longs for immortality because his egotism makes the idea of annihilation at death distasteful to him. Think about all that is said along these lines and you will realise that the sermons are directed to the egotism in the members of orthodox congregations. When it comes to the question of pre-existence, of the life before birth, it is not possible to reckon with human egotism. Nothing in the egotistical souls of men arises in response to teaching about the life before birth, because no interest is taken in it. The attitude is more or less this: If indeed there was a life before birth, we are experiencing a continuation of it. One thing is certain! we are in existence now. What, then, is the object of speaking of what went before? It is, in short, only egotism that makes man hold fast to the teaching that death does not bring annihilation. And so, in speaking of the life before birth, one has to appeal to selflessness, to the quality that is the very reverse of egotism. It is, of course, quite right to speak also of the life after death, although the appeal there is to the egotism of the soul. That is the great difference.

It is clear from this that egotism has laid hold of the very depths of the human soul. The anathema placed upon the doctrine of pre-existence is a consequence of the egotism in the soul. It behoves all who are earnest in their striving for spiritual insight to understand these things. Man must find himself again and be true to the laws of his innermost being. Interest must be awakened in the whole nature of man, instead of being confined to his outer, physical sheaths. But this end cannot be achieved until man is regarded as belonging not only to the Earth—which is conceived as a little mole-hill—but to the whole Cosmos, until it is realised that between death and a new birth he passes through the world of stars to which here on Earth he can only gaze upwards from below. And the living essence, the soul and the spirit of the world of stars must be known once again.

The first thing we observe about a human being is his outer, physical structure, but the essential principle, namely its form, is generally disregarded. Form, after all, is the most fundamental principle so far as physical man is concerned. Now when we embark upon a theme like this—which has been dealt with from so many angles in other lectures—it will be obvious at once that only brief indications can be given. Knowing something of the spiritual teachings of Anthroposophy, however, you will realise that what I shall now say is drawn from a deeper knowledge of the world and is something more than a series of unsubstantiated statements.

The human form is a most marvellous structure. Think, to begin with, of the head. In all its parts, the head is a copy of the universe. Its form is spherical, the spherical form being modified at the base in order to provide for the articulation of other organs and systems. The essential form of the head, however, is a copy of the spherical form of the universe, as you can discover if you study the basic formation of the embryo.

Linked to the head-structure is another formation which still retains something of the spherical form, although this is not so immediately apparent—I mean the chest-structure. Try to conceive this chest-structure imaginatively; it is as if a spherical form had been compressed and then released again, as if a sphere had undergone an organic metamorphosis.

Finally, in the limb-structures, we can discover hardly anything of the primal, embryonic form of man. Spiritual Science alone will make us alive to the fact that the limb-structures too, still reveal certain final traces of a spherical form although this is not very obvious in their outer shape.

When we study the threefold human form in its relation to the Cosmos, we can say that man is shaped and moulded by cosmic forces but these forces work upon him in many different ways. The changing position of the Sun in the zodiacal constellations through the various epochs has been taken as an indication of the different forces which pour down to man from the world of the fixed stars. Even our mechanistic astronomy to-day speaks of the fact that the Sun rises in a particular constellation at the vernal equinox, that in the course of the coming centuries it will pass through others, that during the day it passes through certain constellations and during the night through others. These and many other things are said, but there is no conscious knowledge of man's relationship to the universe beyond the Earth. It is little known, for example, that when the Sun is shining upon the Earth at the vernal equinox from the constellation of Aries, the solar forces streaming down into human beings in a particular part of the Earth are modified by the influences proceeding from the region in the heaven of fixed stars represented by the constellation of Aries. Neither is there any knowledge of the fact that these forces are peculiarly adapted to work upon the human head in such a way indeed, that during earthly life man can unfold a certain faculty of self-observation, self-knowledge and consciousness of his own Ego.

During the Greek epoch, as you know, the Sun stood in the constellation of Aries at the vernal equinox. In the Greek epoch, therefore, Western peoples were particularly subject to the Aries forces. The fact of being subject to the Aries forces makes it possible for the head of man to develop in such a way that Ego-conscious-ness, a faculty for self-contemplation, unfolds.

Even when the history of the zodiacal symbols is discussed to-day, there is not always knowledge of the essentials. Historical traditions speak of the zodiacal symbols—Aries, Taurus, Gemini, and so forth. In old calendars we frequently find the symbol of Aries, but very few people indeed realise the point of greatest significance, which is that the Ram is depicted with his head looking backwards. This image was intended to indicate that the Aries forces influence man in the direction of inwardness—for the Ram does not look forward, nor out into the wide world—he looks backwards, upon himself; he contemplates his own being. This is full of meaning. Once again, and this time in full consciousness not with the instinctive—clairvoyance of olden times—once again we must press forward to this cosmic wisdom, to the knowledge that the forces of the human head are developed essentially through the forces of Aries, Taurus, Gemini and Cancer, whereas the forces of the chest-structure are subject to those of the four middle constellations—Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio. The human head receives its form from the in-working forces of Aries, Taurus, Gemini and Cancer—forces which must be conceived as radiating from above downwards, whereas the zodiacal forces to which the chest-organisation of man is essentially subject (Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio), work laterally.

The other four constellations lie beneath the Earth; their forces work through the Earth, not directly down upon it as those of Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, nor laterally as those of Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, but from below upwards. They work upon the limb-structures, and in such a way that the spherical form cannot remain intact. These are the constellations which in the instinctive consciousness of olden times, man envisaged as working up from beneath the Earth. When the constellations lie beneath the Earth, they work upon the limb-structures. And in days of yore there was consciousness of the fact that the forces by which the limbs are given shape are connected with these particular constellations.

The spherical form of the head—this was known to be connected with Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer; the forces working in the limbs were also conceived of as fourfold. Now it must be remembered that this knowledge was the outcome of ancient clairvoyance, hence the terms employed are concerned with conditions of life prevailing in those days. Thus, according to the wisdom of the stars, a man might be a hunter—one who shoots; the constellation which stimulated the corresponding activity in his limbs, making him a hunter, received the name of Sagittarius, the archer. Or again, a man might be a shepherd, concerned with the care of animals in general. This is implied in Capricorn, as it is called nowadays. In the true symbol, however, there is a fish-tail form. The Capricorn man is one who has charge of animals, in contrast to the hunter, the Sagittarius man.

The third constellation of this group is Aquarius, the water-carrier. But think of the ancient symbol. The true picture of this constellation is a man walking over hard soil, fertilising or watering it from a water-vessel. He represents those who are concerned with agriculture—husbandmen. This was the third calling in ancient times when there was instinctive knowledge of these things: huntsman, shepherd, husbandman.

The fourth calling was that of a mariner, In very early times, ships were built in the form of a fish, and later on we often find a dolphin's head at the prow of vessels. This is what underlies the symbol of Pisces—two fish forms intertwined—representing ships trading together. This is symbolical of the fourth calling which is bound up with activities of the limbs—the merchant or trader.

We have thus heard how the human form and figure originate from the Cosmos. The head is spherical; here man is directly exposed to the forces of the heavens of the fixed stars or their representatives the zodiacal circle. Then, working laterally, there are the forces present in the chest-organisation which only contains the human figure in an eclipsed and hidden form—Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio. And lastly there are the forces which do not work directly but by a roundabout way, via the earthly activities, through the influence upon man's calling. (For example, the archer—Sagittarius—is also portrayed as a kind of centaur, half horse, half man, and so forth).

Again in our time we must strive for a fully conscious realisation of man's place in the Cosmos. The form and shape of his physical body are given by the Cosmos. The upper part of his structure is a product of the Cosmos; the lower part a product of the Earth. The Earth covers those constellations which have a definite connection with his activities in life. Not until man's connection with the whole Cosmos is thus recognised and acknowledged will it be possible to understand the mysteries of the human form and its relation to earthly activities. And at the very outset the human form leads us to the zodiacal constellations.

This teaches us that to work as a husbandman, for instance, is by no means without significance in life. In the following lectures we shall hear how these things apply in modern times, but we shall not understand them until we realise that just as in earthly life between birth and death, man belongs to the powers of the Earth, so between death and a new birth he belongs to the Heavens; the powers of Heaven shape his head and it is left to the forces of Earth to shape and mould his limbs.

In the same way too, we may study man's stages or forms of life. For think of it—in the life of man there are also the same two poles. There is the head-life and the life that expresses itself in his activities, through the limbs more particularly. Between these two poles lies that part of his being which manifests in the rhythms of breathing and the circulation of the blood. At the one extreme we find the head-organisation; at the other, the limb-organisation.

The head represents the dying part of man's being, for the head is perpetually involved in death. Life is only possible because through the whole of earthly life, forces are continually pouring from the metabolic process to the head. If the head were to unfold merely its own natural forces, they would be the forces of death. But to this dying we owe the fact that we can think and be conscious beings. The moment the pure life-forces flow in excess to the head, consciousness is prone to be lost. Basically speaking, then, life makes for a dimming of consciousness; death pouring into life makes for a lighting-up of consciousness. (See Fundamentals of Therapy, by Rudolf Steiner and Dr. Ita Wegman, Chapter I, pages 14—15.) If only very little of what is rightly located in the stomach, for example, were to pass up to the head, the head would be without consciousness—like the stomach. Man owes the consciousness of his head merely to the circumstance that the head is not permeated with life in the same way as the stomach. Lowered consciousness means that the forces of nourishment and of growth are acting with excessive strength in the head. On the one side, man is a dying being; on the other, a being who is continually coming to birth. The dying part—which, however, determines the existence of consciousness—is subject, in the main, to the forces working down upon the Earth from the outer planets: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars. That man is an integral part of the universe is not only due to the working of the fixed stars, but also to the working of the planetary spheres.

Saturn, Jupiter, Mars—the so-called outer planets—contain the forces which work chiefly towards the pole of consciousness in man. The forces of the inner planets—Venus, Mercury, Moon—work into his metabolic system and limb-structures. The Sun itself stands in the middle and is mainly associated with the rhythmic system.

Moreover the three first-mentioned are the three stages of life which rather represent the damping-down and suppression of life which is necessary for the sake of consciousness. Through this, we, in our earthly life, are liken to heaven, related to more distant planetary realms beyond. On the other hand, through the essentially thriving principle of life itself in us—that is through the forces of metabolism, the motor forces of the limbs—we are related to the nearer planets: Mercury, Venus and Moon. The Moon, after all, is directly connected with the most thriving, with the most rampant life of all in man, namely the forces of reproduction.

When we study the human form, we are led to the spheres of the fixed stars, that is to say, to their representatives, the zodiacal constellations. When we study the life of man, to discover where it is a more thriving and where a more declining life, we are led to the planetary spheres.

In the same way we can study man's being of soul and of spirit. This shall be done in the following lectures. To-day I only wanted to indicate very briefly that it must become possible for man once again to regard himself not merely as an earthly being, connecting his form and his life simply and solely with earthly forces of heredity, digestion, the influences of autumn, spring, wind, weather and the like. He must learn to relate both his life and his form to the universe beyond the Earth. He must find what lies beyond the earthly realm—and then he will discover his true being, he will find himself.

It would augur dire misfortune for the progress of Western humanity if the conception of the Cosmos as a great system of machinery to which the scientific view of the world since the middle of last century has led, were to remain, and if man were to wander on Earth knowing nothing of his true being. His true being has its origin and home in the Universe beyond the Earth, therefore he can know nothing of himself if he sees only what is earthly and thinks that what is beyond the Earth can be explained in terms of mathematics and mechanics. In deed and truth, man can only find himself when he realises his connection with the universe beyond the Earth and incorporates its forces into his moral and social life—indeed this must be, if moral and social life are to thrive. No real wisdom can arise in moral and social life unless a link is forged with cosmic wisdom. And that is why it has been imperative to infuse something of Anthroposophy into the domain of moral and social life too, for we believe that these impulses can lead away from the forces of decline to the forces of upward progress.

We have heard how in accordance with anthroposophical knowledge, the being of man must be viewed in relation to the whole universe. We considered the human form and figure and its relation to the fixed stars, or rather to the representative of the fixed stars—the Zodiac. We heard how certain forces proceed from the constellations of these stars when combined with the Sun forces, and how the shape and structure of the human head and the organs connected with it, are related to the upper constellations of the Zodiac: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer. The structure of the human chest-organisation is connected with the middle constellations; Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio. Finally the metabolic-and-limb system is connected with the lower constellations: Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces—that is to say with their forces when they are, in a sense, covered by the Earth. So that we can say: The fixed stars—for the Zodiac is only the representative of the fixed stars—work upon the human form and structure.

The planetary spheres work upon man's stages or forms of life. It must indeed be quite clear to us that man has various kinds of life in him. We should not be able to think, the head would not be an organ of thought, if life were as rampant there as it is in the metabolic system, for example. When metabolism becomes too strong in the head, consciousness is extinguished; we lose our consciousness of self.

From this it may be concluded that for consciousness, for mental presentation, a damped-down, suppressed life, a declining life is necessary; while a thriving life, vehement and intense, is necessary for what works more from out of the unconscious, to become will.

We have therefore among the various stages of life some which tend towards self-extinction, and some in which strong, intense organic activity manifests, as in a child, in whom thought is not yet operating. We have this child-like life continually within us; but into this child-like life, the life that is involved in a gradual process of death, inserts itself.

These different stages of life are connected with the planetary spheres. Whereas the fixed stars work in man through his physical forces, the planetary spheres work through his etheric forces. The planetary spheres, therefore, work upon man in a more delicate way. But the human physical body has already received its form, its shape from the fixed stars, not from anything earthly; and its stages of life from the planetary spheres.

We have thus considered the form of man's physical body, the life-stages of his ether-body. We can now proceed to consider his life of soul-and-spirit. But here our mode of study must be different. What is it that our physical and our ether-body provide for us in waking life? They provide what we perceive through our senses and what we can work over in our thoughts. We are only really awake in our acts of sense-perception and when we work over them in thought.

On the other hand, consider the life of feeling. It is obvious, even to superficial study, that feeling does not indicate a state of awakeness as complete as that of thinking and sense-perception. When we wake in the morning and become aware of the colours and sounds of the outside world, when we are conscious of the conditions of warmth around us, we are fully awake and then, in our thoughts, we work over what is transmitted by the senses. But when feelings rise up from the soul, it cannot be said that we are conscious in them to the same extent. Feelings link themselves with sense-perceptions. One sense-impression pleases us, another displeases us. Feelings also intermingle with our thoughts. But if we compare the pictures we experience in dreams with what we experience in our feelings, then the connection between dream-life and the life of feeling is clearly noticeable.

Dreams have to be grasped by the waking life of thought if they are to be valued and understood aright. But feelings too must be observed, as it were, by our thought-life if we are to understand them. In our feelings we are, in reality, dreaming. When we dream, we dream in pictures. When we are awake, we dream in our feelings. And in our will we are asleep, even when fully awake. When we raise an arm, when we do this or that, we can perceive what movements the arm or hand is making, but we do not know how the power of the will operates in the organism. We know as little about that as about the conditions prevailing from the time we fall asleep until we wake up. In our willing, in our actions, we are asleep, while in our sense-perceptions and our thoughts, we are awake. So we are not only asleep during the night; we are asleep, in part of our being, during waking life too. In our will we are asleep and in our feelings we dream. What we experience during actual sleep is withdrawn from our consciousness. But in essence, the same is true of feeling and willing. It is therefore obviously important to realise what it is that the human being experiences in these realms of which ordinary life is quite unaware.

You know from many anthroposophical lectures that from the time of going to sleep until that of waking, the Ego and astral body are outside the physical body and the ether-body. Now it may be of very great importance to learn about just those experiences which the Ego and the astral body pass through from the time of falling asleep to that of waking up. When we are awake, we are confronted by sense-perceptions of the material world. To a certain extent we reach out and encounter them; but with our sense-perceptions, our waking thoughts, we reach no further than the surface of things.

Of course someone may object, saying that he can get further than the surface of things, that if he cuts a piece of wood which is there before him as a sense-perception, then he has penetrated inside it. That is a fallacy, however, for if you cut a piece of wood, you have again only a surface, and if you cut the two pieces again, still you have only surfaces; and if you were to get right to the molecules and atoms, again you would have only surfaces. You do not reach what may be called the inner essence of things, for that lies beyond the realm of sense-perception. Sense-perceptions can be conceived as a tapestry spread out around us. What lies this side of the tapestry we perceive with our senses; what lies on the other side of the tapestry we do not perceive with the senses. We are in this world of sense from the time we wake up until we fall asleep. Our soul is filled with the impressions made upon us by this world of sense. Now when we pass into sleep, we are not in the world this side of the senses, we are then in reality inside things, we are on the other side of the tapestry of sense-perceptions. But in his earthly consciousness, man knows nothing of this and he dreams of all sorts of things lying beyond the realm of sense-perception. He dreams of molecules, of atoms; but they are only dreams—dreams of his waking consciousness. He invents molecules, atoms and the like, and believes them to be realities. But study any description of atoms, even the most recent... you will find nothing but minute objects which are described according to the pattern of what is experienced from the surface of things. It is all a tissue woven from the experiences of waking consciousness on this side of the tapestry of sense.

But when we fall asleep, we emerge from the world of sense and penetrate to the other side. And whereas we experience Nature here with our waking thoughts, in yonder world, from the time of falling asleep until the time of waking, we live in the world of Spirit, that world of Spirit through which we also pass before birth and after death. In his earthly development, however, man is so constituted that his consciousness is extinguished when he passes beyond the world of sense; his consciousness is not forceful enough to penetrate to the spiritual world. But what Spiritual Science calls Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition—these three forms of super-sensible cognition—give us knowledge of what lies on the other side of the tapestry of sense. And what we discover first, is the lowest stage of the world of the Hierarchies.

When we wake from sleep we pass over into the world of animals, plants, minerals—the three kingdoms of Nature belonging to the world of sense. When we fall asleep, we pass beyond the world of sense, we are transported into the realm of the first rank of Beings above man—the Angels. And from the time of falling asleep until waking, we are connected with the Being who is allotted to man as his own Angel, just as through our eyes and ears we are connected with the three kingdoms of Nature here in the world of sense. Even if at first we have no consciousness of this connection with the world of the Angels, it is nevertheless there. This connection extends into our astral body.

If, living in our astral body during sleep, we were suddenly to wake up, we should contact the world of the Angels, in the first place the Angel who is connected with our own life, just as here in the earthly world we are in contact with animals, plants, and minerals.

Now even in the earthly world, in the world of sense, if a man is attentive and deliberately trains his thinking, he sees much more than when he is unobservant and hasty. His connection with the three kingdoms of Nature can be intimate or superficial. And it is the same with regard to the world of spiritual Beings. But in the world of spiritual Beings, different conditions prevail.

A man whose thoughts are entirely engrossed in the material world, who never desires to rise above it, or to acquaint himself with moral ideas extending beyond the merely utilitarian, who has no desire to experience true human love, who in his waking life has no devotion to the Divine-Spiritual world—on falling asleep, such a man has no forces which enable him to come into contact with his Angel. Whenever we fall asleep, this Angel is waiting as it were for the idealistic feelings and thoughts which come with us, and the more we bring, the more intimate becomes our relation to the Angel while we are asleep. And so throughout our life, by means of what we cultivate over and above material interests, we garner, in our waking life, forces whereby our relation to the Angel becomes more and more intimate.

When we die, all sense-perceptions fall away. The outer world can no longer make any impression upon us, for this must be done via the senses, and the senses pass away with the body. In like manner, the thinking that is connected with sense-perception is extinguished, for its realm is the ether-body. This ether-body only remains with us for a few days after death. We see it at first as a tableau—a tableau which under certain circumstances can be glimpsed during life but which will inevitably arise before us after death.

This ether-tissue dissolves away into the universe, just as the ordinary thoughts acquired from the world of sense pass away from us. They do not remain. All purely utilitarian thoughts, all thoughts connected with the material world, drift away from us when we pass through the Gate of Death. But the idealistic thoughts and feelings, the pure human love, the religious feelings which have arisen in our waking life and have united us with our Angel, these accompany us when we pass through death.

This has a very important consequence during the period lying between death and a new birth. Even during earthly life we are connected with the higher Hierarchies and it is correct to say that when we fall asleep and our idealistic experiences reach to the Angel, this Angel is in turn connected with the Archangels, the Archangels with the Archai, and so on. Our existence continues in a rich and abundant world of Spirit. But this spiritual world has no special significance for us between birth and death. This world of the higher Hierarchies acquires its real significance for us when it becomes our environment between death and a new birth. The more we have delivered over to our Angel, the more conscious life is this Angel able to infuse into us after death when we are beings of soul-and-spirit, the more gifts are bestowed by the Hierarchies upon the conscious life of soul. What our Angel unfolds, together with the higher Hierarchies (that is to say, what the Beings of the First Hierarchy unfold together with higher Hierarchies through our Angel) is for our consciousness in the spiritual world between death and rebirth what our eyes and ears are in the physical world. And the more idealistic thoughts and feelings, human love and piety we have brought to our Angel, the clearer does our consciousness become.

Now between death and a new birth there comes a time when the Angel has a definite task in connection with us. The Angel has now to achieve a more intimate relation with the hierarchy of the Archangels than was formerly the case. I have described the time through which man lives between death and a new birth from many different points of view, notably in the Lecture-Course given in Vienna in 1914, entitled The Inner Nature of Man and the Life between Death and a new Birth. I will now describe certain other aspects.

When a somewhat lengthy period has elapsed after death, the important moment comes when the Angel must as it were deliver up to the Archangels what he has received from us through the ‘idealistic’ experiences described. It is as though man were placed before the world of the Archangels, who can then receive these experiences he has unfolded in his soul and Spirit during his life between birth and death. There are great differences among human souls living between death and a new birth. In our epoch there are persons who have brought very little in the way of idealistic thoughts and feelings, of human love, of piety, when the time comes for the Angel to pass on to the Archangel for the purposes of cosmic evolution, what has been carried through death. This activity which unfolds between the Angel and the Archangel must, under all circumstances, take place. But there is a great difference, dependent upon whether we are able to follow consciously, by means of the experiences described, what takes place between the Angels and the Archangels or whether we only live through it in a dull, dim state, as must be the lot of human beings whose consciousness has been purely materialistic. It is not quite accurate to say that the experiences of such human beings are dull or dim. It is perhaps better to say: they experience these happenings in such a way that they feel continually rejected by a world into which they ought to be received, they feel continually chilled by a world which should receive them with warmth. For man should be received with loving sympathy into the world of the Archangels at this important moment of time; he should be received with warmth. And then he will be led in the right way towards what I have called in one of my Mystery Plays: “The Midnight Hour of Existence.”

Man is led by the Archangels to the realm of the Archai where his life is interwoven with that of all the higher Hierarchies, for through the Archai he is brought into relation with all the higher Hierarchies and receives from their realms the impulse to descend to the Earth once again. The power is given him to work as a being of soul-and-spirit, to work in what is provided, later on, in material form, by the stream of heredity.

Before the Midnight Hour of Existence man has become more and more estranged from earthly existence, he has been growing more and more into the spiritual world—either being received lovingly (in the sense described above) by the spiritual world, being drawn to it with warmth, or being repelled, chilled by it. But when the Midnight Hour of Existence has passed, man begins gradually to long for earthly life and once again, during the second part of his journey, he encounters the world of the Archangels. It is really so: Between death and a new birth, man ascends, first to the world of the Angels, Archangels, Archai, and then once again descends; and after the world of the Archai his most important contact is with the world of the Archangels.

And now comes another important point in the life between death and a new birth. In a man who has brought through death no idealistic thoughts or feelings, no human love or true piety, something of the soul-and-spirit has perished as a result of the antipathy and chilling reception meted out by the higher world. A man who now again approaches the realm of the Archangels in the right way has received into him the power to work effectively in his subsequent life on Earth, to make proper use of his body; a man who has not brought such experiences with him will be imbued by the Angels with a longing for earthly life which remains more unconscious. A very great deal depends upon this. Upon it depends to what people, to what language—mother-tongue—the man descends in his forthcoming earthly existence. This urge towards a particular people, a particular mother-tongue may have been implanted in him deeply and inwardly or more superficially. So that on his descent a man is either permeated with deep and inward love for what will become his mother-tongue, or he enters more automatically into what he will have to express later on through his organs of speech.

It makes a great difference in which of these two ways a man has been destined for the language that will be his in the coming earthly life. He who before his earthly life, during his second passage through the realm of the Angels, can be permeated with a really inward love for his mother-tongue, assimilates it as though it were part of his very being. He becomes one with it. This love is absolutely natural to him; it is a love born of the soul; he grows into his language and race as into a natural home. If however a man has grown into it the other way during the descent to his next earthly life, he will arrive on the Earth loving his language merely out of instinct and lower impulses. Lacking the true, inward love for his language and his people, he will be prone to an aggressive patriotism connected with his bodily existence. It makes a great difference whether we grow into race and language with the tranquil, pure love of one who unites himself inwardly with his folk and language, or whether we grow into them more automatically, and out of passions and instincts express love for our folk and our language. The former conditions never come to expression in chauvinism or a superficial and aggressive form of patriotism. A true and inward love for race and language expresses itself naturally, and is thoroughly consistent with real and universal human love. Feeling for internationalism or cosmopolitanism is never stultified by this inner love for a language and people. When, however, a man grows into his language more automatically, when through his instincts and impulses he develops an over-fervid, organic, animal-like love for language and people, false nationalism and chauvinism arise, with their external emphasis upon race and nationality.

At the present time especially, it is necessary to study from the standpoint of life between death and a new birth what we encounter in the outer world in our life between birth and death. For the way we come down into race and language through the stream of heredity, through birth, depends upon how we encounter, for the second time, the realm of the Archangels.

Those who try to understand life to-day from the spiritual vantage-point, know that the experience arising in the period between death and a new birth when man comes for the second time into the realm of the Angels, is very important. All over the Earth to-day the peoples are adopting a false attitude to nationality, race and language, and much of what has arisen in the catastrophe of the second decade of the twentieth century in the evolution of the Western people, is only explicable when studied from such points of view. He who studies life to-day in the light of anthroposophical Spiritual Science must assume that in former earthly lives many men became more and more deeply entangled in materialism. You all know that, normally, the period between death and a new birth is lengthy. But especially in the present phase of evolution, there are many men whose life between their last death and their present birth was only short, and in their former earthly life they had little human love or idealism. Already in the former earthly life their interests were merely utilitarian. And as a result, in their second contact with the realm of the Angels between death and a new birth, the seeds were laid for all that arises to-day in such an evil form in the life of the West.

We shall have realised that man can only be understood as a spatial being when it is known that his form and structure derive from the realm of the fixed stars and his life-stages from the planetary spheres. As a spatial being, man draws the forces that are active in him, not only from the Earth but from the whole Cosmos. Now just as it is necessary to go beyond what is earthly in order to understand man as a spatial being, so it is necessary to go beyond life between birth and death in order to understand social life, racial life on the Earth.

When we carefully observe the life of to-day we find that although men claim their right to freedom so vociferously, they are, in reality, inwardly unfree. There is no truly free life in the activities which nowadays manifest such obvious forces of decline; instincts and lower impulses are the cause of the misery in social life. And when this is perceived we are called upon to understand it.

Just as a second meeting with the Archangels takes place, so when man once again approaches earthly life, he enters into a more intimate union with his Angel. But at first he is somewhat withdrawn from the realm of the Angels. As long as he is in the realm of the Archangels, his Angel too is more strongly bound with this realm. Man lives as it were among the higher Hierarchies and as he draws near to a new birth he is entrusted more and more to the realm of the Angels who then lead him through the world of the Elements, through fire, air, water and earth, to the stream of heredity. His Angel, leads him to physical existence on Earth. His Angel can make him into a man who is in a position to act freely, out of the depths of his soul-and-spirit, if all the conditions described have been fulfilled by the achievements of a former earthly life.

But, the Angel is not able to lead a man to a truly free life, if he has had to be united automatically with his language and his race. In such a case the individual life also becomes unfree. This lack of freedom shows itself in the following way. Instead of forming free concepts, such a man merely thinks words. He becomes unfree because all his thinking is absorbed in words. This is a fundamental characteristic of modern men.

Earthly life in its historical development, especially in its present state, cannot be understood unless we also turn with the eyes of soul, to the life which runs its course between death and a new birth, to the world of soul-and-spirit.

To understand the human form, we must turn to the heaven of the fixed stars; to understand the stages of life in man we must turn to the planetary spheres. If we wish to understand man's life of soul-and-spirit, we must not confine our attention to the life between birth and death, for as we have seen, this life of soul-and-spirit is rooted in the world of the higher Hierarchies and belongs to the higher Hierarchies just as the physical body and ether-body of man belong to the physical and etheric worlds.

Again, if we wish to understand thinking, feeling and willing, then we must not merely confine our attention to man's relation to the world of sense. Thinking, feeling and willing are the forces through which the soul develops. We are carried as it were through the Gate of Death by our idealistic thoughts—by what love and religious devotion have implanted in these thoughts. Our first meeting with the Archangels depends upon how we have ennobled our thinking and permeated it with idealism. But when we have passed through the Midnight Hour of Existence, our thinking dies away. It is this thinking which now, after the Midnight Hour of Existence, is re-moulded and elaborated for the next earthly life. And the forces which permeate our physical organs of thinking in the coming earthly life are shaped by our former thinking. The forces working in the human head are not merely forces of the present life. They are the forces which have worked over into this life from thinking as it was in the last life, and give rise to the form of the brain.

On the other hand, it is the will which, at the second meeting with the Archangels, plays its special part in man's life of soul-and-spirit. And it is the will which then, in the next life on Earth, lays hold of the limb-and-metabolic organism. When we enter through birth into earthly life, it is the will which determines the fitness or inadequacy of the limbs and the metabolic processes.

Within the head we really have a physical mirror-image of the thoughts evolved in the previous life. In the forces of the metabolism and limbs we have the working of the newly acquired forces of will which, at the second meeting with the Archangels, are incorporated into us as I have described—either in such a way that they are inwardly active in the life of soul, or operate automatically.

Those who realise how this present life which generates such forces of decline in humanity of the West, has taken shape, will look with the greatest interest towards what was active in man between death and a new birth during the period of existence preceding this present earthly life. And what they can learn from this will fill them with the impulse—now that the dire consequences of materialism are becoming apparent in the life of the peoples—to give men who already in their last incarnation were too materialistic, that stimulus which can lead once again to a deepening of inner life, to free spiritual activity, to a really intimate, and natural relation to language and race which does not in any way run counter to internationalism or cosmopolitanism.

But first and foremost our thinking must be permeated with real spirituality. In the Spirit of modern man, there are, in reality, only thoughts. When man speaks to-day of his Spirit, he is actually speaking only of his thoughts, of his more or less abstract thinking. What we need is to be filled with Spirit, the living Spirit belonging to the world lying between death and a new birth. In respect of his form, his stages of life, his nature of soul-and-spirit, man must regard himself as belonging to a world which lies outside the earthly sphere; then he will be able to bring what is right and good into earthly life.

We know how the Spiritual in man is gradually absorbed by other domains of earthly existence, by political life, by economic life. What is needed is a free and independent spiritual life; only thereby can man be permeated with real spirituality, with spiritual substance, not merely with thoughts about this or that. Anthroposophy must therefore be prepared to work for the liberation of the spiritual life. If this spiritual life does not stand upon its own foundations, man will become more and more a dealer in abstractions, He will not be able to permeate his being with living Spirit, but only with abstract Spirit.

When a man here, in physical life, passes through the Gate of Death, his corpse is committed to the Earth, or to the Elements. His true being is no longer within this physical corpse. When a man passes through birth in such a way that through the processes described he has become an ‘automaton’ in his relation to his nation, language and conduct—then his living thinking, his living will, his living nature of soul-and-spirit die when he is born into the physical world and within physical existence become the corpse of the Divine Being of soul-and-spirit.

Our abstract, rationalistic thinking is verily a corpse of the soul-and-spirit. Just as the real human being is no longer within the physical corpse, so we have in abstract thinking, a life of soul that is devoid of Spirit—really only the corpse of the Divine-spiritual. Man stands to-day at a critical point where he must resolve to receive the spiritual world once again, in order that he may pour new life into the abstract thinking that is a corpse of the Divine-Spiritual, opening the way for instincts, impulses and automatism.

What I said at the end of my lecture to students here (On the Reality of Higher Worlds. 25th November, 1921.) is deeply true: If he is to pass from a decline to a real ascent, man must overcome the abstraction which, like a corpse of the soul is present in the intellectualistic and rationalistic thinking of to-day.

An awakening of the soul and spirit—that is what is needed! The social life of the present day points clearly to the necessity for such an awakening. Anthroposophy has indeed an eternal task in regard to that living principle in man which must continue beyond all epochs of time. But Anthroposophy has also a task to fulfil for the present age, namely to wean man from externalisation, from the tendency to paralyse and kill the Divine-Spiritual within him. Anthroposophy must bring back this Divine-Spiritual life. Man must learn to regard himself not merely as an earthly but as a heavenly being, realising that his earthly life can only be conducted aright if the forces of heavenly existence, of the existence between death and a new birth, are brought down into this earthly life.

We shall continue for a time to study the laws prevailing in the development of human karma, and I shall say something to-day about the inner aspect of the shaping of karma, of the part of karma that is connected especially with the moral, ethical and spiritual life.

You must remember that directly we look beyond the physical world—and this is always so in studying karma—the karmic connections are spiritual. Even when they take effect in the physical, for example in illness, whatever is karmic in an illness has a spiritual cause. So that under all circumstances we come to the spiritual whenever we approach the study of karma. To-day, however, we shall turn our attention more particularly to the ethical aspect of karma, to the workings of karma in the life of soul.

I have already told you that the forming of karma is connected with those Beings who in very ancient times of evolution were actually present on the earth and who departed from the earth at the time of the separation of the moon, taking up their abode in the cosmos as Moon-inhabitants, Moon Beings.

What we call Moon—of which the physical part as ordinarily described is no more than an indication—must be regarded as the bearer of certain spiritual beings, the most important of whom once lived on earth as the great primeval Teachers. It was they who established among men on earth that ancient wisdom of which I have so often spoken. These Beings were on the earth before the separation of the moon. In those times they infused the primeval wisdom into man who acquired it through a kind of inner illumination. And the way in which these Beings worked was altogether different from the way in which men can work on the earth to-day.

The activity of these ancient, primeval Teachers among men must in truth be described as a kind of magic, taking effect inasmuch as the influence of the human will upon happenings in the external world was infinitely greater than is possible to-day. Nowadays the will can work on the external world only through physical means of transmission. If we want to push some object we must put our will into operation through the arms and hands. But in the days of the primeval Teachers the human will still had a direct and immediate action upon processes in the outside world, upon the very processes of nature. It was a kind of action that we should now call magical. But in point of fact the last vestiges of this power of the human will persisted until comparatively recent times. Rousseau, for example, tells us that in certain warmer regions he was able to paralyse and even kill toads which came near him, simply by fixing them with his gaze. This power of the human will which in warmer climates persisted until the 18th century, has diminished through the course of the ages and has now vanished. But in ancient Egypt man was still able to influence and promote the growth of plants through his will. And when the primeval Teachers were on the earth, even inorganic processes of nature could be brought under the sway of the human will.

These things of course depended upon a true, instinctive insight into the connections of world-existence which remain completely hidden from the crude, material science of modern times. It is evident, however, that the influence of warmth upon the working of the human will must be taken thoroughly into account, for Rousseau, who was able, in warmer regions, to kill toads with his gaze, subsequently tried in Lyons to stare at a toad in the same way, supposing that it would at least be paralysed. But the toad was not paralysed; on the contrary it fixed its eyes upon him and he himself became partially paralysed and had to be restored to life by snake-poison administered by a doctor.

This way of activating the will is of course dependent upon an instinctive knowledge of the whole environment of man.

Out of their own spiritual foundations the primeval Teachers possessed a totally different, far deeper and more penetrating knowledge of nature than is within the reach of man to-day. They were endowed with powers which cannot be comprised in natural laws. Nor was this necessary when the primeval Teachers were working on the earth, for nothing in the least resembling modern natural science was then in existence. It would have seemed utterly pointless and nobody would have understood its purpose. For in those days all such activity was founded upon a far deeper, more inward knowledge and understanding than is possible to-day.

These primeval Teachers transferred the scene of their work from the earth to the moon and as everything in the cosmos is interconnected, a mighty task is now allotted to them within the nexus of cosmic happenings. They are Beings who have a great deal to do with karma, with the forming and shaping of human karma. For an essential part of the weaving of karma is to be observed when, after having laid aside his etheric body a few days after death, the human being lives through his sleeping life (not his waking life) backwards. When he passes through the gate of death he has, first of all, a clear retrospective vision of what he has experienced in life—a grand and majestic panorama in pictures. After a few days this panorama slowly fades away as the etheric body dissolves in the cosmic ether, and then an actual journey backward begins.

Earthly existence flows in such a way that although we grasp it in remembrance as a unity, this is an illusion. Life does not flow onwards uninterruptedly. We live through the day consciously, the night unconsciously; the day consciously, the night unconsciously, and so on.

When in remembrance man thinks back over his life, he forgets that the nights are always there between the days. During the nights a very great deal happens to the soul, to the astral body and ego, only man knows nothing about it. What happens to him while he is unconscious during the nights in earthly existence, this he lives through in a backward course after death, so that time actually seems to him to be flowing backwards; in full consciousness he lives backward through the nights.

As approximately a third of life is spent in sleep, this backward journey is also lived through in a third of the time of the earthly life. If, therefore, a man has reached the age of 60, some 20 years have been spent in sleep and the backward journey lasts for about 20 years. Then he enters the Spirit-land proper, into a different form of existence. This backward journey, this vision of what has happened during the nights, is lived through after death in such a way that the great and significant difference between its experiences and those of ordinary sleep is strikingly apparent.

With the exception of the dreams rising out of sleep which do not, after all, reproduce the experiences of earthly life very faithfully but in an illusory, fantastic shape—with the exception therefore of the dreams welling up from the night-life, the human being has little consciousness of all the manifold happenings in which he is involved. In earlier lectures here I have described what happens to the human being during sleep; but after death he experiences it with extraordinary clarity and definition. This life in the soul-world after death is much richer in impressions than earthly life. The pictures a man experiences and how he himself is involved in them—all this comes to him with extraordinary intensity; there is nothing dreamlike about it. It is experienced, if I may put it so, as a kind of photographic negative. If you caused suffering to some person during your earthly life, you experienced this infliction of suffering as it proceeded from yourself. You experienced what proceeded from yourself, was done by yourself. But journeying backward after death you do not feel what you experienced during earthly life, but you slip as it were into the other person and feel what he experienced as the result of your action.

To take a drastic example.—If you gave someone a box on the ears, you do not experience what you felt in earthly life as you planned and carried out this act, but on the backward journey you experience, instead, the feelings of the other person whose ears you boxed. You live through it as your own experience, and indeed with extraordinary concreteness, with greater intensity. No impression on earth is as powerful as the impressions along this backward course after death for a third of the time of the earthly life. During this period the whole karmic fulfilment of what was done in life is experienced—from the standpoint of the other man. You live through the whole karmic fulfilment, but not, of course, as earthly experience—that will come in the subsequent life on earth. Even though it is not as intense as regards the action as it will be in a later incarnation, you experience the impression more strongly than could be the case in any earthly life.

This is a very striking fact. It is the intense reality of the experiences that is so remarkable.

But even if the human being were able to unfold in his ego and astral body the degree of strength that is his when he passes through the gate of death, he would experience this whole backward journey at most as a very vivid dream. And he might expect it to be so if, after death, he were merely to look at the earthly life and what it has made of him. But this backward journey is not a vivid dream; it is an experience of far greater intensity than any experience in earthly existence. Only now there is no physical body, no etheric body, through which man's experiences are mediated to him on earth.

Just think what you would experience on earth with your ordinary consciousness if you had no physical body and no etheric body. You would flit over the earth with now and again a dream arising; then you would sleep again, and so it would continue.

It is easy to conceive that after his earthly life a man who had reached the age of 60 lives through a dream continuing for 20 years; but what he lives through is by no means a dream, it is an experience of the greatest intensity. What makes this possible? It is because the moment a human being has passed through the gate of death, has laid aside his etheric body and begins his backward journey, the Moon Beings draw near him and with their ancient magical powers they pass into him, into his experiences, and impregnate his pictures with cosmic substance.

If I may use an analogy, what happens is just as if I were to paint a picture. In the first place it is simply a picture and doesn't cause actual pain—provided it is not too hideous—and even then the impression is only a moral or aesthetic one. It hurts nobody. But suppose I were to paint a picture, let us say, of three of you here and the picture were permeated with some magic power causing these three to step from the picture and carry out everything they had planned against others. You would react with more force and vigour than anthroposophists are wont to reveal! So it is after death. The experiences are full of living force, living activity, because these Moon Spirits permeate the pictures with their own substantiality; they saturate these pictures with a super-reality of being.

After death, therefore we pass through the region of the Moon Beings and what we experience as the balancing-out of our own deeds is stamped with mighty force in the cosmic ether. This backward journey—when it is described not merely in principle as in the book Theosophy, but when one tries to describe it as concretely as I want to do now—this backward journey after death is extraordinarily interesting and a highly important section of life.

In our time the experiences that may come to a human being during this period after death are particularly complicated. Just think how essentially the whole constitution of soul of these Moon Beings differs from that of the inhabitants of the earth. These Moon Beings with whom we have so much to do after death once imparted to men that primeval wisdom which in our time has completely faded away. As I have often explained, men could not have attained their freedom if the mighty wisdom of these primeval Teachers had remained. It has faded away and been replaced by something else, namely, abstract thinking. The human being to-day thinks in concepts which no longer have any very real relationship with the spiritual world. Let me repeat an example I gave on another occasion.—Aristotle has bequeathed to us ten concepts which were really a survival of ancient wisdom: Being, Quantity, Quality, Relation, Position, Space, Time, Possession, Action, Suffering. He called them the ‘Categories’. They are ten simple concepts. These ten concepts are generally enumerated in our text-books of Logic. In classical schools they have to be learned by heart; professors of philosophy are familiar with them. But nothing more is known than just the ten concepts by name: Being, Possession, Position, Space, Time, and the rest. To what does such knowledge amount? These ten concepts seem tedious and dry to a modern man. But to one who perceives their significance they are no more tedious than are the 22 or 23 letters of the alphabet: a, b, c, d, e, f, g, ...

Just think of it.—If you knew nothing more about the alphabet than a, b, c, d, e, f, g, up to z, if you knew this and nothing more, what would you make of Goethe's Faust? You would open the book and find these 22 signs scattered about in manifold permutations and combinations. Faust contains nothing but these 22 signs inter-connected in different ways. And if you knew nothing more, if you had never learnt to read but merely opened the book and saw these signs, just think how different it would be from what it is now, when you can take Faust and read it. That is a different matter altogether! No book in the world contains anything except these 22 signs and yet just think what you can make of them! The whole world of the mind is open to you because by juggling with these 22 letters you can apply them.

But the logicians who have accepted the ten Categories to-day: Being, Quantity, Quality, Relation, Space, Time, Position, Possession, Action, Suffering—these men know as little to what these Categories really apply as someone who has never learnt to read and simply recognises a, b, c, d, e, f, knows of all the books of the world. It is exactly the same thing. For these ten concepts of Aristotle's Logic have to be understood in such a way that they can be applied in manifold permutations, just as the letters are manipulated in the physical world by multifarious combinations and permutations. Then, with these ten concepts we read in the spiritual world. They are the letters.

But in our time the concepts are known by name and that is all—which is equivalent to knowing nothing more of the alphabet than the letters in their sequence. Think what you would miss if you could not read but only knew a, b, c, d! Correspondingly, men miss everything that is in the spiritual world if they are unable to manipulate and apply the ten concepts of Aristotle in all manner of ways, in order to read in the spiritual world.

In this connection something very droll has been happening among philosophers for a long time. About the middle of the Middle Ages there lived a very astute and clever man, by name Raymond Lully. From tradition he still knew something about this permutation of the categories of logic, of the fundamental concepts of logic, and he gave out what he knew—clothing it in the form of pictures as was customary in those times. What he really wanted to say, or rather, what he would have said if he had expressed the reality, was this: My contemporaries are all blockheads, because they only know a, b, c, d; they do not know how to read with the fundamental concepts, the root concepts. A man must understand in his head how to combine these fundamental concepts as letters are combined into words and sentences. Then he can read in the spiritual world.—Raymond Lully did not say this in such direct words for that was not the custom in his days. He said: Write the fundamental concepts on slips of paper, then take a kind of roulette, spin it and the concepts will be thrown about among each other; and then read. Then there will be results.

This, however, was only an analogy, for he did not really mean anything like a dead, mechanical roulette; he meant the spiritual head which must manipulate and combine these concepts. But those who heard of it took the analogy literally and have laughed about it ever since, considering it to be a piece of childishness on the part of Raymond Lully. The childishness, however, is purely on the side of modern philosophy which does not understand what was meant.

Practically everything that in olden days was brought to humanity by the primeval Teachers whom we know as the Moon Beings, has been lost. But during his backward journey in the first period after death the human being becomes acquainted in a very special way with this knowledge. He knows then how these ancient Sages thought, what kind of wisdom they possessed. Hence the graphic, concrete reality of his experiences during this period.

But in our time things have become complicated and confused owing to a kind of lack of understanding. Human beings, who since the fading of the primeval wisdom have been living here on earth with their abstract concepts, have not the power to understand the inner soul-constitution of these primeval Teachers since they entered the Moon-existence.

When a modern scholar is passing through this period of his life after death, be speaks a very different language from these primeval Teachers who, as I shall describe to you in more detail, have a very great deal to do with the shaping of karma. These primeval Teachers and the men of to-day who die imbued with modern culture and the fruits of modern civilisation do not really understand one another.

It is extremely difficult to form a clear conception of these things, for observation of what is happening to human beings in this connection is by no means easy. But in characteristic cases observation is possible: for instance, one can study two men who died not so very long ago and who have gone their way backward after death, two men who were steeped in modern culture and who nevertheless were very different from each other.

We can take a man who was brilliant in his own way, a scientist of average calibre like Du Bois-Reymond, or someone of the same type, and observe his backward journey after death. Another personality, too, can be observed in the same way. A very interesting personality as regards this backward journey through the soul-land is the one who hovered before me while I was composing my Mystery Plays and who took shape in the character of Strader. Strader in the Mystery Plays is an image of an actual person who in his youth entered the monastic life but subsequently abandoned it and worked in the field of rationalistic philosophy as a professor in a University. This man—he was responsible for a number of writings—has all the abstraction of a modern thinker, but his thoughts are extraordinarily penetrating, full of warmth and vigour. It does one good to find this quality of heart in a modern thinker.

The full-blooded vigour of Hegel, for example, who could present the highest abstractions with tremendous depth of emotion but also with utmost concreteness, is of course no longer possible to the same extent in a man of to-day. Hegel was a thinker who was able to imbue concepts and ideas with such concrete reality that he could, so to speak, hack wood with them. But the man to whom I am now referring revealed something of the same heart-quality in handling abstract concepts. As I said, his life hovered before me when I was shaping the figure of Strader in the Mystery Plays.

When this man died his backward journey was particularly interesting to me. A fact to be taken thoroughly into account was that all his thinking had a certain theological bent. Like that of a modern scientist, or at least a natural philosopher, it was entirely abstract, but all the time there was this nuance of theology (coming of course from earlier incarnations) and his thinking was lit by a gleam of consciousness that it is possible to speak, at least, of the reality of a spiritual world.

Hence this man's thinking has more affinity with the soul-constitution of the Moon Beings than has the thinking of an average scientist like Du Bois-Reymond, for example. When such men are passing through the soul-world, through the Moon sphere, one can perceive a marked lack of understanding—it is like someone who lives in a foreign country and never learns the language; the others do not understand him and he does not understand them. This, broadly speaking, is the fate of a man who is a typical product of modern civilisation when he enters upon this backward journey after death.

But it was rather different in the case of this personality, the prototype of Strader.—I have to resort to earthly language although it is utterly inadequate when applied to what I am here describing.—When, after death, this personality was journeying backward through the course of his life, it could be observed that the Moon Beings took a certain interest in the way he was bringing his thoughts, his abstract thoughts, into the soul-world. And he, in his turn, experienced a very remarkable awakening, an awakening in which he seemed to be saying to himself: ‘Ah, now I see that all I fought against is, in reality, quite different.’ (He had fought against many things that were traditional).—‘I see now that it only gradually came to be what it is, because the ancient truths have become abstract words. I was often fighting against windmills; now, however, I see realities.’

Something of extraordinary interest is happening here—and a whole number of such men in modern life might be cited as examples. There is something extremely interesting in this backward journey after death where the foundations of karma are laid.

An even more striking figure in this connection is the philosopher Jacob Frohschammer, who wrote Die Phantasie als Weltprinzip (Imagination as a World-Building Principle). I have often mentioned him. There was still a great deal of inner substance in his abstract concepts, but, like the man just described, he was an abstract thinker. He could, however, so little tolerate the abstractions of modernism—I do not now mean ‘modernism’ in the terminology of Roman Catholicism—that he simply refused to acknowledge concepts as world-building forces; he would acknowledge only imagination. He said: imagination is working everywhere; the plants grow, the animals exist and so forth, through imagination. In this respect Frohschammer's book is extraordinarily interesting.

It is wonderful to observe how such a personality, who has still retained much of what was alive in cultural life before the modern, abstract way of thinking became customary, is able to blend with the substance of the Moon Beings. Investigations of this kind are profoundly interesting because a closer insight into the laws of the evolution of karma grows out of them. And when one is drawn by a certain sympathy to such a personality—as I myself was drawn to the prototype of Strader in the Mystery Plays—it is the warmth of soul by which one is united with him that makes it possible to share the experiences of this very significant journey after death.

The fact that the impressions are so strong for the man who is passing through these experiences has an after-effect, too, upon the person who is following them with knowledge. And that in itself is a very remarkable thing. For it becomes evident how much more impressive are the experiences after death than those of earthly life. I ask myself to-day in all earnestness: If I should wish to add a fifth Mystery Play to the four already written, would it be possible for me again to include the figure of Strader, now that for some considerable time I have watched these pictures of what Strader's prototype experienced after death? ... It would be quite impossible, because the moment I want to present the earthly figure, where the impressions are far less intense, the pictures of the impressions experienced by Strader's prototype after death are there before me. And they are far, far stronger; they blot out what was there during the earthly life.

I can observe this quite clearly in myself. As you may imagine, I took an extraordinary interest in the life of this man, for he was the prototype of Strader. He has since died and the impressions coming to him, after death, are incomparably more interesting to me than anything I can find out or describe about him while he was alive.

When I think about my Mystery Plays I realise that because of the vivid impressions of this prototype of Strader in the life after death, the character of Strader is the one that fades away from me most completely of all. This does not apply to the same extent to the other characters in the Plays. You see there how what is here on earth aligns itself in true observation with what is beyond the earth, and how the effect of such things enables one to realise the tremendous intensity of the life after death on this backward journey. The sheer intensity of it blots out the impressions of earthly life.

Still more can be said about these matters. I am not speaking here of anything that has been invented, but of realities. We may know a man very well in his earthly life and then experience what he has to undergo in the backward journey after death. Everything takes a different form because of the intensity of the pictures. If we have been exceedingly interested in a man's earthly life—as I was in that of a man who died a number of years ago—then our whole relation to the earthly life changes; it has an entirely different character when we subsequently share in the experiences of the personality in question during the backward journey after death. And many things in the earthly relationships are only now revealed in their whole truth.

This is all the more the case when the relationships in the earthly life were not of a spiritual nature; when they were, when they were essentially spiritual, there is, as it were, a continuous, onflowing development. If, however, there had been, for example, a human relationship without agreement in ideas and thoughts, then in certain circumstances this relationship may be transformed after death into something quite different, into an entirely different life of feeling and the like. The cause of this change is the vividness of the pictures which then appear.

I am describing these things in order to call up before you a concrete image of types of realities differing from those of earthly existence. There are many different types of realities. And when, so to speak, the deeds of the Moon Beings flow into the pictures which a man himself shapes, this reality is such that it appears even more wonderful than the subsequent reality when the man is passing through the spiritual world proper and in union with the Hierarchies is concerned with the elaboration of the results of his earthly life; this state of existence runs a much simpler course because it is a kind of continuation. But the radical transformation of the human being after death, due as it is to the fact that he enters into relation with Beings who left the earth long ago and founded a kind of Moon colony in the cosmos—this is something that with tremendous forcefulness discloses to us a reality which, because it follows immediately after the life on earth, is closely related to and yet essentially different from earthly reality.

When human beings cling too strongly to earthly things it may be difficult for them to find their bearings in the sphere of the Moon Beings. Something happens then which I will describe in the following way. Picture to yourselves the earth here, the moon there.—Now the active moon-influences which are, in reality, reflected sun-influences, penetrate just so far into the earth ... At this point they cease. The moon-influences do not penetrate very deeply into the earth, actually only as far as the roots of the plants spread in the soil. The moon-influences are not really active below the stratum of the roots of plants. There is only a shallow layer up here where the moon-influences are held fast. Sun-influences, of course, penetrate deeply into the earth. The warmth of the sun in the summer is preserved; when you lay potatoes in the soil the sun's warmth is still there during the winter. The sun-influences penetrate deeply into the earth, the moon-influences only as far as the level of the roots of plants ... a shallow layer.

The moon-influences, rising up like mist from this shallow layer, may cause human beings who have to pass after death into the Moon sphere—the soul-world—but are unable to understand the Moon Beings, to be trapped by this shallow stratum of moon-influences and they can actually be seen by sensible-super-sensible perception wandering about as ghosts, as spectral shades.

The legends and poems which tell of these things are based upon reality, but in order to form a sound judgment in this domain we must be entirely free from superstition, we must proceed with critical deliberation and accept only what can be put to the test.

In this backward journey after death which lasts for a third of the time of the earthly life, karma is prepared. For the Moon Beings mingle in these ‘negatives’ of a man's deeds, also of his deeds in the life of thought. The Moon Beings have a good memory and they inscribe into the cosmic ether every experience they share with the human being.

We pass through the life between death and a new birth and then, on the return journey when we come back once more into the Moon sphere we find everything inscribed there. And we bear it all with us into our life in order to bring it to fulfilment by means of our earthly will.

This, my dear friends, is what I wanted to place before you to-day as a theme of study.

For those of you who are able to be here today I wish to give a kind of interlude in the studies we have been pursuing for some time. What I shall say today will serve to illustrate and explain many a question that may emerge out of the subjects we have treated hitherto. At the same time it will help to throw light on the mood-of-soul of the civilisation of the present time.

For years past, we have had to draw attention to a certain point of time in that evolution of civilisation which is concentrated mainly in Europe. The time I mean lies in the 14th or 15th century or about the middle of the Middle Ages. It is the moment in the evolution of mankind when intellectualism begins—when men begin mainly to pay attention to the intellect, the life of thought, making the intellect the judge of what shall be thought and done among them.

Since the age of the intellect is with us today, we can certainly gain a good idea of what intellectualism is. We need but experience the present time, to gain a notion of what came to the surface of civilisation in the 14th and 15th century. But as to the mood of soul which preceded this, we are no longer able to feel it in a living way. People who study history nowadays generally project what they are accustomed to see in the-present time, back into the historic past, and they have little idea how altogether different men were in mind and spirit before the present epoch. Even when they let the old documents speak for themselves, they largely read into them the way of thought and outlook of the present.

To spiritual-scientific study many a thing will appear altogether differently. Let us turn our gaze for example to those historic personalities who were influenced on the one hand from the side of Arabism, from the civilisation of Asia—influenced by what lived and found expression in the Mahommedan religion, while on the other hand they were influenced by Aristotelianism. Let us consider these personalities, who found their way in course of time through Africa to Spain, and deeply influenced the thinkers of Europe down to Spinoza and even beyond him. We gain no real conception of them if we imagine their mood of soul as though they had been like men of the present time with the only difference that they were ignorant of so and so many things subsequently discovered. (For roughly speaking, this is how they are generally thought of today). The whole way of thought and outlook, even of the men who lived in the above described stream of civilisation as late as the 12th century A.D., was altogether different from that of today.

Today, when man reflects upon himself, he feels himself as the possessor of Thoughts, Feelings, and impulses of Will which lead to action. Above all, man ascribes to himself the ‘I think,’ the ‘I feel’ and the ‘I will.’

But in the personalities of whom I am now speaking, the ‘I think’ was by no means yet accompanied by the same feeling with which we today would say ‘I think.’ This could only be said of the ‘I feel’ and the ‘I will.’ In effect, these human beings ascribed to their own person only their Feeling and their Willing. Out of an ancient background of culture, they rather lived in the sensation ‘It thinks in me’ than that they thought ‘I think.’ Doubtless they thought ‘I feel,’ ‘I will,’ but they did not think ‘I think’ in the same measure. On the other hand they said to themselves—and what I shall now describe was an absolutely real conception to them:—In the Sublunary Sphere, there live the thoughts. The thoughts are everywhere within this sphere, which is determined when we imagine the Earth at a certain point, and the Moon at another, followed by Mercury, Venus, etc. They not only conceived the Earth as a dense and rigid cosmic mass, but as a second thing belonging to it they conceived the Lunar Sphere, reaching up to the Moon. And as we say, ‘In the air in which we breathe is oxygen,’ so did these people say (it is only forgotten now that it ever was so):—‘In the Ether which reaches up to the Moon, there are the thoughts.’ And as we say ‘We breathe-in the oxygen of the air,’ so did these people say—not ‘We breathe-in the thoughts’—but ‘We perceive the thoughts, receive them into ourselves.’ They were conscious of the fact that they received the thoughts.

Today, no doubt, a man can also familiarise himself with such an idea as a theoretic concept. He may even understand it with the help of Anthroposophy, but as soon as it becomes a question of practical life he forgets it. For then at once he has this rather strange idea, that the thoughts spring forth within himself—which is just as though he were to think that the oxygen he receives in breathing were not received by him but sprang forth from within him.

For the personalities of whom I am now speaking, it was a profound feeling and an immediate experience: ‘I have not my own thoughts as my own possession. I can not really say, I think. Thoughts exist, and I receive them unto myself.’

Now we know that the oxygen of the air circulates through our organism in a comparatively short time. We count these cycles by the pulse-beat. This happens quickly. The men of whom I am now speaking did indeed imagine the receiving of thoughts as a kind of breathing, but it was a very slow breathing. It consisted in this: At the beginning of his earthly life, man becomes capable of receiving the thoughts. As we hold the breath within us for a certain time—between our in-breathing and out-breathing—so did these men conceive a certain fact, as follows: They imagined that they held the thoughts within them, yet only in the sense in which we hold the oxygen which belongs to the outer air. They imagined that they held the thoughts during the time of their earthly life, and breathed them out again—out into the cosmic spaces—when they passed through the gate of death.

Thus it was a question of in-breathing—the beginning of life; holding the breath—the duration of earthly life; outbreathing—the sending-forth of the thoughts into the universe.

Men who had this kind of inner experience felt themselves in a common atmosphere of thought with all others who had the same experience. It was a common atmosphere of thought reaching beyond the earth, not only a few miles, but as I said, up to the orbit of the moon.

This idea was wrestling for the civilisation of Europe at that time. It was trying to spread itself ever more and more, impelled especially by those Aristotelians who came from Asia into Europe along the path I have just indicated. Let us suppose for a moment that it had really succeeded. What would then have come about?

In that case, my dear friends, that which was destined after all to find expression in the course of earthly evolution, could never have come to expression in the fullest sense: I mean, the Spiritual Soul. The human beings of whom I am now speaking, stood in the last stage of evolution of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul. In the 14th and 15th century, the Spiritual Soul was to arise—the Spiritual Soul, which, if it found extreme expression, would lead all civilisation into intellectualism.

The population of Europe in its totality, in the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries, was by no means in a position merely to submit to the outpouring of a conception such as was held by the men whom I have now described. For if they had done so, the evolution of the Spiritual Soul would not have come about. Though it was determined in the councils of the Gods that the Spiritual Soul should evolve, nevertheless it could not evolve out of the mere independent activity of European humanity even in its totality. A special impulse had to be given towards the development of the Spiritual Soul itself.

And so, beginning in the time which I have now described, we witness the rise of two spiritual streams. The one was represented by the quasi-Arabian philosophers who, working from the West of Europe, influenced European civilisation very strongly—far more so than is commonly supposed. The other was the stream which fought against the former one with the utmost intensity and severity, representing it to Europe as the most heretical of all.

For a long time after, this conflict was felt with great intensity. You may still feel this if you consider the pictures in which Dominican Monks, or St. Thomas Aquinas alone, are represented in triumph—that is to say, in the triumph of an altogether different conception which emphasised above all things the individual and personal being of man, and worked to the end that man might acquire his thoughts as his own property. In these pictures we see the Dominicans portrayed, treading the representatives of Arabism under foot. The Arabians are there under their feet—they are being trodden underfoot.

The two streams were felt in this keen contrast for a long time after. An energy of feeling such as is contained in these pictures no longer exists in the humanity of today, which is rather apathetic. We need such energy of feeling very badly, not indeed for the things for which they battled, but for other things we need it.

Let us consider for a moment what they imagined. The in-breathing of thoughts as the cosmic ether from the Sublunary Sphere—that is the beginning of life. The holding of the breath—that is the earthly life itself. The out-breathing—that is the going-forth of the thoughts once more, but with an individually human colouring, into the cosmic ether, into the impulses of the sphere beneath the Moon, of the Sublunary Sphere.

What then is this out-breathing? It is the very same, my dear friends, of which we speak when we say: In the three days after death the etheric body of man expands. Man looks back upon his etheric body, slowly increasing in magnitude. He sees how his thoughts spread out into the cosmos. It is the very same, only it was then conceived—if I may say so—from a more subjective standpoint. It was indeed quite true, how these people felt and experienced it. They felt the cycle of life more deeply than it is felt today.

Nevertheless, if their idea had become dominant in Europe, only a feeble feeling of the Ego would have evolved in the men of European civilisation. The Spiritual Soul would not have been able to emerge; the Ego would not have grasped itself in the ‘I think.’ The idea of immortality would have become vaguer and vaguer. Men would increasingly have fixed their attention on that which lives and weaves in the far reaches of the Sublunary Sphere as a remnant of the human being who has lived here on this earth.

They would have felt the spirituality of the earth as its extended atmosphere. They would have felt themselves belonging to the earth, but not as individual men distinct from the earth. Through their feeling of “It thinks in me,” the men whom I described above felt themselves intimately connected with the earth. They did not feel themselves as individualities in the same degree as the men of the rest of Europe were beginning to feel themselves, however indistinctly.

We must, however, also bear in mind the following. Only the spiritual stream of which I have just spoken, was aware of the fact that when man dies the thoughts he received during his earthly life are living and weaving in the cosmic ether that surrounds the earth. This idea was violently attacked by those other personalities who arose chiefly within the Dominican Order. They on their side declared that man is an individuality, and that we must concentrate above all on his individuality which passes through the gate of death, not on what is dissolved in the universal cosmic ether. This was emphasised paramountly, albeit not exclusively,—emphasised representatively, I would say,—by the Dominicans. They stood up sharply and vigorously for the idea of the individuality of man, as against the other stream which I characterised before. But precisely as a result of this a certain condition came about. For let us now consider these representatives—shall we say—of individualism.

After all, it was the individually coloured thoughts which passed into the universal ether. And those who fought against the former stream—just because they were still vividly aware that this was being said, that this idea existed,—were troubled and disquieted by what was really there.

This anxiety, notably among the greatest thinkers,—this anxiety as a result of the forces expanding and dissolving and passing on the human thoughts to the cosmic ether,—did not really come to an end until the 16th or 17th century.

We must somehow be able to transplant ourselves into the inner life of soul of these people,—those especially who belonged to the Dominican Order. Only then do we gain an idea, how much they were disquieted by what was really left as an heritage from the dead,—which they, with their conception, no longer could nor dared believe in.

We must transplant ourselves into the hearts and minds of these people. No great man of the 13th or 14th century could have thought so dryly, so abstractly or in such cold and icy concepts as the men of today. When the men of today are standing up for any ideas or theories, it seems as though it were a recognised condition for so doing that one's heart should first be torn out of one's body. At that time it was not so. At that time there was deep feeling, there was heartiness in all that men upheld as their ideas. But in a case such as I am now citing, this heartiness also involved the presence of an intense inner conflict.

That philosophy, for instance, which proceeded from the Dominican Order was evolved under the most appalling inner conflicts. I mean that philosophy which afterwards had such a strong influence on life—for life at that time was still far more dependent on the authority of individual men. There was no such popular education at that time. All culture and education—all that the people knew—eventually merged into the possession of a few. And as a consequence, these few reached up far more to a real philosophic life and striving. And in all that then flowed out into civilisation, these inner conflicts which they lived through, were contained.

Today one reads the works of the Schoolmen and is conscious only of the driest thoughts. But it is the readers of today who are dry. Those who wrote these works were by no means dry in heart or mind. They were filled with inner fire in relation to their thoughts. Moreover, this inner fire was due to the striving to hold at bay the objective influence of thoughts.

When a man of today thinks on philosophic questions or questions of world-outlook, nothing is there, so to speak, to worry him. A man of today can think the greatest nonsense—he thinks it in perfect calm and peace of mind. Humanity has already evolved for so long within the Spiritual Soul, that no such disquieting occurs, as would occur, for instance, if individuals among us felt how the thoughts of men appear when they flow out after death into the ethereal environment of the earth. Today, such things as could still be experienced in the 13th or 14th century, are quite unknown. Then it would happen that a younger priest would come to an older priest, telling of the inner tortures which he was undergoing in remaining true to his religious faith, and expressing it in this wise: ‘I am pursued by the spectres of the dead.’

Speaking of the spectres of the dead, they meant precisely what I have just described. That was a time when men could still grow deeply into what they learned. In such a community—a Dominican community for instance,—they learned that man is individual and has his own individual immortality. They learned that it is a false and heretical idea to conceive, with respect to Thought, a kind of universal soul comprising all the earth. They learned to attack this heresy with all their might. And yet, in certain moments when they took deep counsel with themselves, they would feel the objective and influential presence of the thoughts which were left behind as relics by the dead. Then they would say to themselves, ‘Is it quite right for me to be doing what I am doing? Here is something intangible, working into my soul. I cannot rise against it—I am held fast by it.’

The intellects of the men of that time,—of many of them at any rate,—were still so constituted that they were quite generally aware of the speaking of the dead, at least for some days after death. And when the one had ceased to speak, another would begin. With respect to such things too, they felt themselves immersed in the all-pervading spiritual—or at the very least, ethereal—essence of the universe.

Coming down into our own time, this living feeling with the Universal All has ceased. In return for it we have achieved the conscious life in the Spiritual Soul, while all the spiritual reality that surrounds us (surrounds us as a reality, no less so than tables or chairs, trees or rivers) works only upon the depths of our subconsciousness. The inwardness of life, the spiritual inwardness, has passed away. It must first be acquired again by spiritual-scientific knowledge livingly received.

We must think livingly upon the knowledge of spiritual science, and we shall do so if we dwell upon such facts of life as lie by no means very far behind us. Imagine a Scholastic thinker or writer of the 13th century. He writes down his thoughts. Nowadays it is easy work to think, for men have grown accustomed to think intellectualistically. At that time it was only at the beginning, and was still difficult. Man was still conscious of a tremendous inner effort. He was conscious of fatigue in thinking even as in hewing wood, if I may use the trivial comparison. Today the thinking of many men has become quite automatic. We of today are scarcely overcome by the longing to follow up every one of our thoughts with our own human personality! We hear a man of today letting one thought arise out of another like an automaton. We cannot follow, we do not know why, for there is no inner necessity in it. And yet so long as a man is living in the body he should follow up his thoughts with his own personality. Afterwards they will soon take a different course; they will spread out and expand, when he is dead.

So could a man be sitting there at that time, defending with every weapon of sharp incisive thought the doctrine of individual man, so as to save the doctrine of individual immortality. So could he be rising in polemics against Averroes, or others of that stream of thought which I described at the beginning of this lecture. But there was another possibility. For especially in the case of an outstanding man like Averroes, that which proceeded from him, dissolving after his death like a kind of spectre in the Sublunary Sphere, might well be gathered up again by the Moon itself at the end of that Sphere, and remain behind. Having enlarged and expanded, it might even be reduced again, and shape and form be given to it, till it was consolidated once again into a being built, if I may say so, in the ether. That could well happen. Then would a man be sitting there, trying to lay the foundations of individualism, carrying on his polemic against Averroes; and Averroes would appear before him as a threatening figure, disturbing, putting off his mind.

The most important of the Scholastic writings which arose in the 13th century were directed against Averroes who was long dead. They made polemics against the man long dead, against the doctrine which he had left behind. Then he arose to prove to them that his thoughts had become condensed, consolidated once again and thus were living on.

There were indeed these inner conflicts, before the beginning of the new age of consciousness. And they were such that we today should see once more their full intensity and depth and inwardness. Words after all are words. The men of later times can but receive what lies behind the words, with such ideas as they possess. But within the words there were often rich contents of inner life. They pointed to a life of soul such as I have now described.

These, then, are the two streams, and they have remained active, fundamentally speaking, to this day. The one—albeit now only working from the spiritual world, yet all the stronger there,—-would fain impress it upon man that a universal life of thoughts surrounds the earth, and that in thoughts man breathes-in soul and spirit. The other stream desires above all to point out that man should make himself independent of such universality. The former stream is more like a vague intangible presence in the spiritual environment of the earth, perceptible today to many men (for there are still such men) when in peculiar nights they lie there on their beds and listen to the void, and out of the void all manner of doubts are born in them as to what they are asserting today so definitely and so surely in their own individuality.

Meanwhile in other folk, who always sleep soundly because they are so well satisfied with themselves, we have the unswerving emphasis on the individual principle.

This battle, after all, is smouldering still at the very foundations of European culture. It is there to this day; and in the things that are taking place outwardly at the surface of our life, we have after all scarcely anything else than the beating of the surface-waves from that which is still present in the depths of souls,—a relic of the deeper and intenser inner life of yonder time.

Many souls of that time are here again in present earthly life. In a certain way they have conquered what then disquieted them so much in their surface consciousness—disquieted them at least in certain moments of their surface consciousness.

But in the depths it smoulders all the more, in many minds and hearts today. Spiritual science, once again, is here to draw attention also to such historic facts as these.

But we must not forget the following. In the same measure in which men become unconscious, during earthly life, of what is there none the less, namely the thoughts in the ether in the immediate environment of the earth—in the same measure, therefore, in which they acquire the ‘I think’ as their own possession—their human soul is narrowed down. Man passes through the gate of death with a contracted soul.

The narrowed soul has carried untrue, imperfect, inconsistent earthly thoughts into the cosmic ether, and these work back again upon the minds of men. Thence there arise such social movements as we see arise today. We must understand these too as to their inner origin. Then we shall recognise that there is no other cure, no other healing for these social ideas, destructive as they often are, than the spreading of the truth about the spiritual life and being.

Call to mind the lectures we have given here, especially the historic ones taking into account the idea of reincarnation and leading to so many definite examples. These lectures will have shown you how things work beneath the surface of external history. You will have seen how that which lives in one historic age is carried over into a later one by men returning into earthly life. But everything spiritual plays its part, between death and a new birth, in moulding what is carried by man from one earth-life into another.

Today it would be good if many souls would attain for themselves that objectivity to which we can address ourselves, awakening an inner understanding, when we describe the men who lived in the twilight of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul age.

Some of the men who lived at that time are here again today. Deep in their souls they underwent the evening twilight of an age, and through the constant attacks they suffered from the spectres of which I have now spoken, they have, after all, absorbed deep doubts as to the unique validity of what is intellectualistic.

This doubt can well be understood. For about the 13th century there were many men—men of knowledge, who stood in the midst of the life of learning, almost entirely theological as it then was—men for whom it was a deep conscience question: What will now become?

Such souls had often carried with them into that time mighty contents from their former incarnations. They gave it an intellectualistic colouring; but they felt this all as a declining stream. While at the rising stream—pressing forward as it was to individuality—they felt the pangs of conscience. Until at length those philosophers arose who stood under an influence which has really killed all meaning. To speak radically, we will say: those who stood under the influence of Descartes! For many, even among those who had their place in the Scholasticism of an earlier time, had already fallen into the Cartesian way of thought. I do not say that they became philosophers. These things underwent many a change. When men begin to think along these lines the strangest nonsense becomes self-understood. To Descartes, as you know, is due the saying ‘I think, therefore I am.’

Countless clever thinkers have accepted this as true: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Yet the result is this: From morning until evening I think, therefore I am. Then I fall asleep. I do not think, therefore I am not. I wake up again, I think, therefore I am. I fall asleep, and as I now do not think, I am not. This then is the consequence: A man not only falls asleep, but ceases to be when he falls asleep. There is no less fitting proof of the existence of the spirit of man than the theorem: ‘I think.’ Yet this began to be the most widely accepted statement in the age of evolution of Consciousness (the age of the Spiritual Soul). When we point to such things today, it is like a sacrilege—we cannot help ourselves!

But over against all this, I would now tell you of a kind of conversation. Though it is not historically recorded, by spiritual research it can be discovered among the real facts that happened. It was a conversation that took place between an older and a younger Dominican, somewhat as follows:—

The younger man said, ‘Thinking takes hold of men. Thought, the shadow of reality, takes hold of them. In ancient times, thought was always the last revelation of the living Spirit from above. But now, thought is the very thing that has forgotten that living Spirit. Now it is experienced as a mere shadow. Verily, when a man sees a shadow, he knows the shadow points to some reality. The realities are there indeed. Thinking itself is not to be attacked, but only the fact that we have lost the living Spirit from our thinking.’

The older man replied, ‘In Thinking, through the very fact that man is turning his attention with loving interest to outer Nature, (while he accepts Revelation as Revelation and does not seek to approach it with his thinking),—in Thinking, to compensate for the former heavenly reality, an earthly reality must be found once more.’

‘What will happen?’ said the younger man. ‘Will European humanity be strong enough to find this earthly reality of thought, or will it only be weak enough to lose the heavenly reality?’

This dialogue truly contains all that can still hold good with regard to European civilisation. For after the intermediate time, with the darkening of the living quality of thought, mankind must now attain the living thought once more. Otherwise humanity will remain weak, and with the reality of thought will lose its own reality. Therefore it is most necessary, since the entry of our Christmas impulse, that we in the Anthroposophical Movement speak without reserve in forms of living thought. For otherwise it will come about, more and more, that even the things we know from this source or from that—as for instance, that man has a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body,—will only be taken hold of with the forms of dead thinking.

These things must not be taken hold of with the forms of dead thinking. For then they become distorted, misrepresented truth, and not the truth itself.

So much I wanted to describe today. We must attain a living, sympathetic interest, a longing to go beyond the ordinary history and to attain that history which must and can be read in the living Spirit, which history shall more and more be cultivated in the Anthroposophical Movement. Today, my dear friends, I wished to place before your souls, as it were, the concrete outline of our programme in this direction.

Much has been said today in aphorism. The inner connection will dawn upon you if you attempt, not so much to follow up with intellect, but to feel with your whole being, what was desired to be said today. You must attempt to feel it knowingly, to know it feelingly, in order that not only what is said but what is heard within our circles may be sustained more and more by real spirituality.

We need education to spiritual hearing, spiritual listening. Only then shall we develop the true spirituality among us. I wanted to awaken this feeling in you today; not so much to hold a systematic lecture, but to speak to your hearts, albeit calling to witness, as I did so, many a concrete spiritual fact.

The aim of everything we have been considering during the last three days, my dear friends, has been to point the way in which the human being can once more be converted, as it were, from an earth citizen to a citizen of the cosmos, how the horizon of his life can be expanded to the reaches of the universe, and how thereby his earthly life, too, can be enriched, not only as regards such expansion, but in the intensity of his inner impulses as well.

Yesterday I told you how a genuine spiritual approach can disclose the true nature of the planets: that they are not the mere physical bodies of which modern astronomy tells us, but rather that they can enter our consciousness as manifestations of spiritual beings. In this connection I spoke of the moon and of Saturn. It is not possible in the allotted time to consider each separate planet, nor is it necessary for our present purposes. My aim was merely to point out how our whole frame of mind can be expanded from the earth to cosmic space. But only in this way does it become possible to feel the outer world as part of ourself, in the same way as we do all that takes place inside our skin—our breathing, circulation, and so forth.

Present-day natural science considers our earth merely a dead mineral body. In our civilization it never occurs to a man who is studying some aspect of cosmology, for example, that there is no element of reality in what he has in mind. The present frame of mind is astonishingly obtuse in the matter of a feeling for reality. People cheerfully call a saline crystal “real,” and also a rose, without in any way differentiating these realities from each other. Yet a saline crystal is a self-contained reality bounded within itself, while a rose is not. A rose can have no existence other than in connection with the rosebush. A rose—I refer to the flower—cannot come into being of itself. So if we imagine the flower of a rose at all—even if it fills us with delight to see this conception realized—we have an abstraction, for all that we can touch it: we have not the reality represented by the rosebush. Nor is there any true reality in that earth of primitive rock, slate, limestone, etc., described by modern external science for there is no such earth as that: it is purely fictitious. Has not the earth produced substantial plants, animals, human beings? That is all part of the earth, just as much as is the crystalline slate of mountain ranges; and if I only consider an earth consisting of stone I have no earth at all. Nothing that external natural science deals with today in any branch of geology is a reality.

So what we should do in this our last lecture is to proceed not only logically but realistically. The obvious errors in the general knowledge of today are not very formidable obstacles because they can readily be refuted. The worst evil in present-day knowledge and cognition is what appears to be absolutely irrefutable. You see, the calculation of everything in the modern science of geology that pertains, for instance, to the origin of the earth, so and so many million years ago, calls for mental brilliance and exact knowledge. True, these calculations disagree by a trifle: some call it twenty million years, others two hundred million; but people of today take such figures in their stride—in other fields as well. {In the matter of post-war inflation, for example, the situation reached a point in 1923 at which 2 billion Marks had the value of 1 pre-war Mark.} In spite of all this, however, the method employed for such computations really calls for the greatest respect. It is exact, it is accurate—but in what way? It is comparable to the following procedure: I examine a human heart today, and then again in a month. By some sort of more sensitive examination I discover changes in this human heart, so I know how it has altered in the course of a month. Then I observe it again after the lapse of another month, and so forth; that is, I apply the same method to the human heart that geologists use to calculate geologic epochs by millions of years: they compute the little changes by the variations of deposits in the strata, and so forth, in order to arrive at the time lapses. But what am I going to do with the conclusions arrived at concerning the changes in the human heart? I can apply that method to these changes and figure out how this human heart looked three hundred years ago and how it will look in another three hundred years. The calculation may be quite correct, only this heart was not in existence three hundred years ago, nor will it be three hundred years hence.—Similarly, the most brilliant and exact methods of computation tempt the present science of geology into setting forth how the earth looked three million years ago, when there was no trace of Silurian or other strata. Again, the figures can be perfectly correct, but the earth was not in existence. The physicists today calculate the changes that will occur in various substances in twenty million years. In this direction American scientists have done some extraordinarily interesting research and have told us, for instance, how albumen is going to look then—only the earth will no longer be in existence as a physical cosmic body.

Logical methods, then—exactitude—these really constitute the greatest danger, because they are incapable of refutation. Given the correct method, a statement of what the heart looked like three hundred years ago, or how the earth appeared two hundred million years ago, cannot be disproved, nor would it be of any avail to occupy oneself with such refutations: what we need is a realistic way of thinking, a realistic way of looking at the world.

The indispensable factor in every domain of spiritual science is just such a universal grasp of reality; and by means of such methods as I have described—inner, intimate methods that lead to an acquaintance with the population of the moon and that of Saturn—one learns as well, not only the relation of the earth to its own beings, but the relation of every being of the universe to the being of the cosmos. Everywhere in the world matter contains spirit, for matter is, of course, only the expression of spirit. At every point imagination, inspiration, and intuition find the spirit in the sensible, in the physical—not as enclosed in sharp contours, but as incessant mobility, as perpetual life. And just as there is no reality in the stone formations offered us by geology—for it is a matter of seeking the earth, including its production of plants, animals and physical men—so, if it is to be grasped in its all-embracing entirety, the earth must be understood as the outer, physical configuration of spirit.

Through imagination we learn first how the spirit principle of the earth differs from that of the human being, if I may so express it. In confronting someone, I perceive many different expressions of his being: I notice how he walks, I hear how he speaks, I see his physiognomy and the gestures of his hands and arms; but all this impels me to seek a homogeneous psycho-spiritual principle dominating him. And just as here one instinctively searches for a unified psycho-spiritual principle in the self-enclosed human being, so imaginative cognition, in contemplating the earth, finds not an undivided earth-spirit principle, but a multiplicity of manifold variety. It is therefore wrong to infer by analogy, for example, a homogeneous spirit principle in the earth from the spirit principle of man; for true vision reveals a multiplicity of earth spirituality, of spiritual beings, as it were, that dwell in the kingdoms of nature. But these spiritual beings are passing through a life: they are in a process of becoming.

Now let us see what this imagination perceives during the course of a year in the way of earth activity when it is supplemented by inspiration, and we will direct our soul's gaze first to the winter. Outwardly, frost and snow cover the ground, and the germs of the earth beings, of the plants, so to speak, are received back into the earth. All that is connected with the earth as germination—we can here ignore the world of animals and men—is withdrawn by the earth into itself. In addition to the familiar burgeoning life of spring and summer, winter shows us dying life. But what does this dying life of winter mean in a spiritual sense? It means that those spiritual beings whom we call elemental spiritual beings—beings that constitute the life-giving principle proper, especially in plants—withdraw into the earth itself and become intimately connected with it. Such is the imaginative aspect of the earth in winter: it takes into its body, as it were, its spiritual elemental beings and shelters them there. In winter the earth is at its most spiritual; that is, it is most fully permeated by its elemental spirit beings.

Like all super-sensible observation, all this passes over into feeling, into sensibility, in him who envisions it. As he feelingly observes the earth in winter and sees the snow on the ground, he knows that this makes a covering for the earth's body so that within it the elemental spirit-beings of earth life themselves may dwell. With the coming of spring the relation of these beings to the earth is transformed into a relation to the cosmic environment. Everything in these beings that during the winter had produced a close relationship with the earth itself becomes related to the cosmic environment in spring: the elemental beings seek to escape out of the earth; and spring really consists of the earth's sacrificial devotion to the universe in letting its elemental beings flow out into it. In winter these elemental beings need repose in the bosom of the earth; in spring they need to stream up through the air, through the atmosphere—to be determined by the spiritual forces of the planetary system, namely, of Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and so on. Nothing that can act upon the earth spirits from the planetary system does so in winter: this commences in the spring. And here we can observe a more spiritual cosmic process, and compare it with a corresponding but more material one in the human being: our breathing process. We inhale the outer air, hold it in our own body, then exhale it again. In-breathing, out-breathing—that is one component of human life.

Now, in the winter the earth has inhaled its whole spirituality, and with the commencement of spring it starts to exhale it again into the cosmos. In the very old periods of human evolution, when there still existed a sort of instinctive clairvoyance, men felt this; and therefore they felt it to be in conformity with earth existence to celebrate the Christmas Festival during the winter solstice. Then the earth was at its most spiritual—that was the time when it could hold the mystery of the Christmas Festival. The Redeemer could unite only with an earth that had drawn all its spirituality into itself. But for the festival intended to induce a feeling in man that he belongs not only to the earth but to the whole universe, that as an earth citizen his soul can be awakened through cosmic agencies, for this festival of resurrection only that season could serve which carries all the spirituality of the earth out into the cosmos. That is why we find the Christmas Festival linked with phenomena pertaining to the earth, with the dark of winter, with a sort of earth sleep, while on the other hand we see the Easter Festival so fitted into the course of the seasons that we determine it not by earthly but by cosmic events: the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring. It was the stars that in former times had to tell men when Easter should be celebrated—the time when the whole earth opens itself to the cosmos. One resorted to the cosmic script: man had to become aware that he is an earth being, and that at the Spring Festival of Easter he has to open himself to cosmic reaches.

It positively hurts to hear people discussing such glorious thoughts of a bygone age as they have been doing now for twenty or twenty-five years: well-meaning people who do not want the Easter Festival to be so movable. At the very least, they say, it should be held on the first Sunday in April; they want it all quite external and abstract. I have had to listen to arguments pointing out that it creates confusion in commercial ledgers to have Easter so movable, and that business could be carried on in a much more regular way if the date of Easter were strictly assigned. It is really distressing to see how world-alien our civilization has become—this civilization that fancies itself practical. A suggestion such as the one just mentioned is as unpractical as can be, because our civilization can establish something that may be practical for a day, but never for a century. In order to be practical for a century, the matter in question must be in harmony with the universe. But herein the cycle of the seasons must ever be able to point man to his inner life in conjunction with the entire cosmos.

Advancing from spring toward summer, the earth more and more loses its inner spirituality. This spirituality, these elemental beings, pass from the terrestrial to the extra-terrestrial realm and come wholly under the influence of the cosmic planetary world; and in a former epoch this was celebrated in the great and profound rites performed in certain Mysteries at the height of summer, the season in which we have instituted the Festival of St. John. This was the time when the initiates of yore, the Mystery priests of those sanctuaries where the St. John Festival was celebrated in its original significance, were deeply permeated with the contemplation: That which in the winter time, during the winter solstice, I had to seek by gazing into the interior of the earth through the blanket of snow that became transparent for me, that I will now find by directing my vision outward; and the elemental beings that during the winter were determined by what pertains to the inner earth, these are now determined by the planets. From the beings which in winter I had to seek in the earth I gather, at the height of summer, knowledge of their experiences with the planets.—And just as we experience our respiratory process unconsciously, simply as something inwardly a part of our existence, so man once experienced his existence as part of the course of the seasons in the spirituality that pertains to the earth. In winter he sought his kindred elemental nature-beings in the depths of the earth, in midsummer he sought them high in the clouds. In the earth he found them inwardly permeated and saturated with their own earth forces coupled with what the moon forces have left behind in the earth; and in the summertime he found them given over to the vast universe.

And when summer begins to wane after the St. John season, the earth starts inbreathing its spirituality again; and once more the time approaches for the earth to harbor its spirituality within.

We are nowadays little inclined to observe this in-and out-breathing of the earth. Human respiration is more a physical process; the breathing of the earth is a spiritual process—the passing out of the elemental earth-beings into cosmic space and their re-immersion in the earth. Yet it is a fact that just as we participate, in the tenor of our inner life, in what goes on in our circulation, so, as true human beings, we take part in the cycle of the seasons. As the blood circulation inside us is essential for our existence, the circulation of the elemental beings between earth and the heavens is indispensable for us as well; and only the bluntness of their sensibility prevents men today from glimpsing the factors within themselves that are conditioned by this external course of the year. {See: Rudolf Steiner, Calendar of the Soul, Anthroposophic Press, New York.} But the very necessity which in the course of time will compel men to learn to receive the ideas of spiritual science, of super-sensible cognition—the necessity to develop the inner activity indispensable for a full realization of what spiritual-scientific revelations entrust them with—this in itself will sharpen and refine their capacity for sentient receptivity.

This, my dear Friends, is what you really should await as a result of deep absorption in that super-sensible cognition aimed at by anthroposophy. You see, if you read a book or a lecture cycle on anthroposophy just as you read any other book—that is, as abstractly as you read other books—there is no point whatever in reading anthroposophic literature at all. In that case I should advise reading cookery books or technical books on mechanics: that would be more useful; or read about How to Become a Good Business Man. Reading books or listening to lectures on anthroposophy has sense only when you realize that to receive its messages a frame of mind is called for totally different from the one involved in the gleaning of other information. This is confirmed even by the fact that those who today fancy themselves particularly clever consider anthroposophic literature quite mad. Well, they must have a reason for this view, and it is this: Everybody else describes things quite differently, presents the world in an entirely different way; and we cannot stand these anthroposophists who come along and change it all around.

And indeed, the conclusions reached by anthroposophy and appearing in the world today are very different from what emanates from the other quarters; and I must say that a certain policy adhered to by some of our friends, namely, that of making anthroposophy generally palatable by minimizing the discrepancies between it and the trivial opinions of others—such efforts cannot be approved at all, though they are frequently met with. What is needed is a totally different attitude, a different orientation of the soul, if the message of anthroposophy is to be considered plausible, comprehensible, understandable, intelligent—instead of mad.

But given this different orientation, not only the human intellect but the human Gemüt will in a short time undergo a schooling that will render it more sensitive to impressions: it will no longer feel winter merely as the time for donning a heavy coat, or summer as the signal for shedding various articles of clothing; but rather, it will learn to feel the subtle transitions occurring in the course of the year, from the cold snow of winter to the sultry midsummer of earth life. We shall learn to sense the course of the year as we do the expressions of a living, soul-endowed being. Indeed, the proper study of anthroposophy can bring us to the point at which we feel the manifestations of the seasons as we do the assent or dissent in the soul of a friend. Just as in the words of a friend and in the whole attitude of his soul we can perceive the warm heartbeat of a soul-endowed being whose manner of speaking to us is quite different from that of a lifeless thing, so nature, hitherto mute, will begin to speak to us as though out of her soul. In the cycle of the seasons we shall learn to feel soul, soul in the process of becoming; we will learn to listen to what the year as the great living being has to tell us, instead of occupying ourself only with the little living beings; and we shall find our place in the whole soul-endowed cosmos.

But then, when summer passes into autumn, and winter approaches, something very special will speak to us out of nature. One who has gradually acquired the sensitive feeling for nature just described—and anthroposophists will notice in due time that this can indeed be brought about in the soul, in the Gemüt, through anthroposophical endeavor—such a one will learn to distinguish between nature-consciousness, engendered during the spring and summer, and self-consciousness proper which thrives in the fall and winter. What is nature consciousness? When spring comes, the earth develops its sprouting, blossoming life; and if I react to this in the right way, if I let all that the spring really embraces speak within me—I need not be conscious of it: it speaks to the unconscious depths of a consummate human life as well—if I achieve all this I do not merely say, the flower is blooming, the plant is germinating, but I feel a true concord with nature and can say, my ego blooms in the flower, my ego germinates in the plant. Nature-consciousness is engendered only by learning to take part in all that develops in the burgeoning and unfolding life of nature. To be able to germinate with the plant, to blossom with the plant, to bear fruit with the plant, that is what is meant by “passing out of one's own inner self” and by “becoming one with outer nature.” Truly, the term “to develop spirituality” does not mean to become abstract: it means to be able to follow the spirit in its being and expansion. And if, by participating in the germinating, the flowering, and the bearing fruit, man develops this delicate feeling for nature during the spring and summertime, he prepares himself to live in devotion to the universe, to the firmament, precisely at the height of summer. Every little firefly will be for him a mysterious revelation of the cosmos; every breath in the atmosphere in midsummer will proclaim the cosmic principle within the terrestrial.

But then—if we have learned to feel with nature, to blossom with the flowers, to germinate with the seeds, to take part in the bearing of fruit—then, because we have learned to dwell in nature with our own being, we cannot help co-experiencing the essence of the fall and winter as well. He who has learned to live with nature in the spring learns also to die with nature in the autumn. Thus we attain again by a different way to those sensations that once so intensely permeated the soul of the Mithras priest, as I have described. He sensed the course of the seasons in his own body. That is no longer possible for present-day mankind; but what will become more and more incumbent upon humanity in the near future—and herein anthroposophists must be the pioneers—is to experience the cycle of the seasons: to learn to live with the spring and to die with the autumn.

But man must not die: he must not let himself be overpowered. He can live united with burgeoning, blossoming nature, and in doing so he can develop his nature-consciousness; but when he experiences the dying in nature the experience is a challenge to oppose this dying with the creative forces of his own inner being. Then the spirit-soul principle, his true self-consciousness, will come to life within him; and by sharing in nature's dying during the fall and winter he will become in the highest degree the awakener of his own self-consciousness. In this way the human being evolves: he transforms himself in the course of the seasons by experiencing this alternation of nature-consciousness and self-consciousness. When he takes part in nature's dying, that is the time when his inner life force must awake; when nature draws her elemental beings into herself the inner human force must become the awakening of self-consciousness.

Michael forces! Now we feel them again. In the old days of instinctive clairvoyance the picture of Michael's combat with the Dragon arose from quite different premises. Now, however, if we vividly comprehend the idea embraced in nature-consciousness—self-consciousness: spring-summer—autumn-winter, the end of September will once more reveal to us the same force that points us to the victorious power which should evolve on this grave if we take part in the dying of nature: the victorious power that fans the true, strong self-consciousness of man into bright flame. Here we have again Michael vanquishing the Dragon.

It is indispensable that anthroposophical knowledge, anthroposophical cognition, should stream into the human Gemüt as a force. And the way leads from the dry and abstract, although exact conceptions of today to that goal where the living enlightenment taken into our Gemüt once more confronts us with something as full of life as was in olden times the glorious picture of Michael in battle with the Dragon. This infuses into our cosmogony something very different from abstract concepts; and furthermore, do not imagine that such experience is without consequences for the totality of man's life on earth!

I have frequently set forth in our meetings here in Vienna how we can enter and feel at home in the consciousness of immortality, in the awareness of prenatal existence. At this meeting I wanted particularly to show you how we can gather into our Gemüt the spiritual forces from the spiritual world, in the wholly concrete sense. It is truly not enough to talk in a general, pantheistic, or other vague way about spirit underlying all matter. That would be just as abstract as it would to be satisfied with the truism: Man is endowed with spirit. What possible meaning could that have? The term spirit takes on meaning only when it speaks to us in concrete details, when it keeps revealing itself to us concretely, when it can bring us comfort, uplift, joy. The pantheistic “spirit” in philosophical speculations means nothing whatever. Only the living spirit, that speaks to us in nature in the same way as the human soul in man speaks to us, can enter the human Gemüt in a vitalizing and exalting way. But when this does occur our Gemüt will derive powers from the enlightenment transformed in it, precisely those powers that are needed in our social life. During the last three or four centuries mankind has simply acquired the habit of considering all nature, and human existence as well, in intellectual, abstract conceptions; and now that humanity is confronted with the great problems of social chaos, people try to solve these, too, with the same intellectual means. But never in the world will anything but chimeras be brought forth in this way. A consummate human heart is a prerequisite to the right to an opinion in the social realm; but this no man can possess without finding his relation with the cosmos, and in particular, with the spiritual substance of the cosmos.

When the human Gemüt will have received into itself spirit-consciousness—the spirit-consciousness engendered by the transition from nature-consciousness (spring-summer) to self-consciousness (autumn-winter)—then will dawn the solution, among others, of the social problems of the moment. Not the intellectual substance of such problems as the social question, but the forces they need, depend in a deep sense upon the contingency of a sufficient number of men being able to make such spiritual impulses their own.

All this must be brought to our Gemüt if we would consider adding the autumn festival, the Michael Festival, to the three we have: the festivals of Christmas, Easter and St. John, that have become mere shadows. How wonderful it would be if this Michael Festival could be celebrated at the end of September with the whole power of the human heart! But never must it be celebrated by making certain arrangements that bring about nothing but abstract Gemüt sensations: a Michael Festival calls for human beings who feel in their souls in fullest measure everything that can activate spirit-consciousness.

What does Easter represent in the year's festivals? It is a festival of resurrection. It commemorates the Resurrection realized in the Mystery of Golgotha through the descent of Christ, the Sun-Spirit, into a human body. First death, then resurrection: that is the outer aspect of the Mystery of Golgotha. One who understands the Mystery of Golgotha in this sense sees death and resurrection in this way of redemption; and perhaps he will feel in his soul that he must unite in his Gemüt with Christ, the victor over death, in order to find resurrection in death. But Christianity does not end with the traditions associated with the Mystery of Golgotha: it must advance. The human Gemüt turns inward and deepens more and more as time goes on; and in addition to this festival that brings alive the Death and Resurrection of Christ, man needs that other one which reveals the course of the year as having its counterpart within him, so that he can find in the round of the seasons first of all the resurrection of the soul—in fact, the necessity for achieving this resurrection—in order that the soul may then pass through the portal of death in a worthy way. Easter: death, then resurrection; Michaelmas: resurrection of the soul, then death. This makes of the Michael Festival a reversed Easter Festival. Easter commemorates for us the Resurrection of Christ from death; but in the Michael Festival we must feel with all the intensity of our soul: In order not to sleep in a half-dead state that will dim my self-consciousness between death and a new birth, but rather, to be able to pass through the portal of death in full alertness, I must rouse my soul through my inner forces before I die. First, resurrection of the soul—then death, so that in death that resurrection can be achieved which man celebrates within himself.

I trust these lectures have contributed a little toward bridging the gap between the purely mental enlightenment anthroposophy has to offer, and what this anthroposophy can mean to the human Gemüt. That would make me very happy; and I should be able to look back affectionately on all that we have been privileged to discuss in these lectures, which were truly not addressed to your mind but to your Gemüt, and through which, in a manner not customary nowadays, I wanted to point out, among other things, the social stimulus so sorely needed by mankind today. Humanity will become attuned to such social impulses only by an inner deepening of the Gemüt. That is what fills my soul, now that I must bring these lectures to a close. It was from an inner need of my heart that I delivered them to you, my dear Austrian friends.

If we look back on the descriptions given yesterday, we shall be aware that man, living through successive times after death—and we have to use the word “time” in relation to physical conditions—comes first of all to the realm of the Moon Beings, and then passes on to that of the Sun Beings. The Moon Beings still belong to earthly-existence in a certain sense and the experiences a man goes through under their influence in the soul-world are indeed cosmic memories of earthly existence. He has experiences also of his own earthly life, though now in a backwards direction, and these are united with the judgments of the Cosmos, as I called them yesterday. These cosmic judgments are made known to men after death through the Moon Beings. We then come under the influence of these Beings, and it is they who cause the judgments to flow into us, in the same way as those that flow into us, here on Earth, from minerals, plants and animals. So we can say: On entering spiritual-cosmic existence after death, a man gains his first glimpse into such cosmic perceptions as still proceed from Beings once connected with the Earth. We have already had occasion to speak of how these Beings, before taking up their abode in the cosmic stronghold of the Moon, were Teachers of human beings in the ancient Mysteries. Hence, what a man once experienced on Earth, in primeval times, he now experiences when journeying through the soul-world, under the influence of those Beings who have been raised—we might perhaps say—to become inhabitants of the Moon. We can truly speak of them in this way if sufficient consideration is given to what was said in my last lecture. These inhabitants of the Moon, under the leadership of the one-time Teachers of mankind, judge quite differently from the way things are judged by people on Earth. For people on Earth, in their life between birth and death, are now approaching a stage completed by the Moon-dwellers in long past ages.

Reckoning by earthly years, we must say that the inhabitants of the Moon, when on Earth, accomplished quite 15,000 years ago what human beings still have to do. More than 15,000 years have passed since these Moon inhabitants acquired the power of making judgments which bring together the naturalistic and the moral.

We on Earth keep our naturalistic judgments separate, and when giving an opinion about a stone or an animal we leave morality aside. We say: “Nature follows only an amoral necessity.” But this is not true of the world as a whole. Even though we may consider that moral judgments are not applicable to individual animals, or to plants, or to minerals above all, in their separate forms of existence, yet the very fact of their creation, of their being in the world at all, is entirely the result of cosmic moral judgment.

Now these Moon-dwellers already judge in terms of cosmic morality. Therefore, when we have passed through the gate of death and are together with them, we must listen to all the Cosmos has to say about what we have thought, wished, felt, willed and done on Earth. Our entire earthly life is exposed to the light of cosmic judgment, and we learn the value our deeds have for the whole great universe.

From these lessons we develop the impulse to complete, to correct, or in some way to set right, during our next life on Earth, whatever we have done either to help or to hinder the evolution of the world. And so, while thus under the influence of the Moon Beings, we take up the impulses for our future destiny—for our karma, as oriental wisdom has always called it. These impulses are thus absorbed while the human being is still under the influence of dwellers in the Moon, who are able to tell him how much his earthly deeds and thoughts are worth for the Cosmos.

The spiritual Beings of the higher world, in whose neighbourhood a man lives while under the influence of the Moon-dwellers, are those grouped together in my Occult Science as the Hierarchy of Angels, Archangels, Archai. Of the ranks of Beings whose realm a man enters after death, they are the first who do not have to live through a phase of earthly embodiment. On their side, they stand in close connection with the Beings of the still higher Hierarchies. But it is with this Hierarchy of Angels, Archangels and Archai that a man is essentially concerned during his Moon existence after death, while the higher Hierarchies are still beyond his ken.

The judgments of the Angels are especially important for the deeds of individual men, and it is thus from the Angels that a man learns the value his deeds have in the Cosmos as a whole. From the Archangels he learns more about the value of what he has done in connection with the language he speaks, with the people to whom he belongs, and from this source also come impulses which work into his further destiny, his karma. From the Archai he learns what value his actions during a given period on Earth will have for the time when he has to descend once more from spiritual heights into earthly existence.

By means of all that a man can achieve in this way if—and I beg you to bear the following in mind—he has rightly prepared himself for life after death through the impulses he is able to receive on Earth, and particularly (as we shall see later) through his attitude towards the great leaders of mankind, he can then find the way over from the sphere of the Moon-dwellers to the sphere of the Sun-dwellers.

The inhabitants of the Moon we already know as those Beings who once dwelt on Earth and were in close connection with it. In a very, very much earlier age this was true also of the inhabitants of the Sun; they, too, participated in earthly affairs.

On coming to the realm of the Moon-dwellers it is quite clear to a man that he is meeting Beings who once dwelt with him on Earth. And when he enters the realm of the Sun Beings, something like a powerful cosmic memory of a primeval age comes over him—an age which in Occult Science you will find described from another point of view. He is taken possession of by something like a memory of an infinitely ancient time, when the Sun, with its inhabitants, was still one with the Earth. After death, therefore, we make our way through the spiritual Cosmos by growing into, as it were, two spiritual cosmic regions where we meet those Beings with whom, at one time, when we lived on Earth as quite different beings, we were closely associated.

So it is that by going through these experiences between death and a new birth we look back in grand, mighty memories on the evolution of the Earth in the Cosmos. Whereas a man, while here on Earth, goes through only part of human evolution, between death and rebirth he goes through part of cosmic evolution, part of the evolution of the universe. Those Beings who inhabit the Sun are such that in far distant times they had already risen above the experiences possible for earthly beings, and above those possible for the Beings of the Moon.

On reaching the realm of the Sun Beings, a man enters a sphere of the highest wisdom, where he can live only if on Earth he has prepared himself sufficiently for it.

Now I said yesterday that on passing from the soul-world into the land of spirit, or, as we must express it to-day, from the sphere of the Moon-dwellers to that of the Sun-dwellers, a man proceeds more slowly in his journeyings through the Cosmos. Whereas the circling of the Moon takes about a third of his earthly lifetime, the next rounds, the circling of Mars, of Jupiter, and of Saturn—I mentioned yesterday how these rounds are not completed—takes a more leisurely course, twelve times slower than the circling of the Moon.

If now we reckon up the actual time, we arrive at the following result. We must start from the original plan decreed for human beings by the Cosmos. Then we find that a man goes through the Moon period in a third of the time he has spent on Earth. If we allow for the fact that at the beginning of life more time is spent in sleep, and add on the time given to sleep in later life, we find that a man needs approximately thirty years to accomplish the first cycle, that of the Moon. Each of the following cycles takes twelve times as long, or 36o years for each cycle. If we follow a man in his further journeying through the worlds, we find him going through three cycles. He does not reach Saturn, but has to go through the cycles in the way originally decided. He then has to go backwards through the three again. Thus he completes three cycles in an outward direction and, on returning towards his next earthly life, another three backwards, making six in all. We then have the time originally intended for man. I shall still have to speak of how things are different for human beings to-day; but according to the original cosmic decrees, the time was 2,160 years.

What do these 2,160 years signify? You have only to recall that the position of the Sun at the vernal equinox moves forward year by year. In recent centuries it has advanced from the Ram to the Fishes, and approximately in 25,920 years—or close on 26,000 years—the Sun travels round the whole zodiacal circle, and the twelfth part of this is 2,160 years. In 2,160 years the Sun progresses from one sign of the Zodiac to the next. It was originally decreed that a man should return to Earth when the Sun had thus moved on.

When we consider the inner reasons for this number, and compare it with what from I said from another point of view in Occult Science, those who have read the book will remember that the time taken by the Sun to pass from one sign of the Zodiac to the next was given there as the original length of the interval between a man's incarnations. If we look at this from two sides—more outwardly, from the cosmic aspect, as in Occult Science, and then from the side of man's inner life that we are dealing with to-day—the two numbers are identical. Such things should be noticed; and it will be found that whenever in Spiritual Science a correct judgment is made from one point of view, and then another correct judgment from a quite different point of view, the two judgments are inwardly in agreement.

Anyone judging Spiritual Science from the ordinary standpoint of to-day will quite possibly ask: “What is there to support this Spiritual Science of yours? Our natural science rests upon observation, experiment; that is the firm ground from which we start.” But one might just as well say: “As earthly man I stand on firm ground, and a rock, too, has solid ground beneath it—like everything else on Earth. As for you astronomers—it is really fantastic for you to tell us that the Earth is floating freely in celestial space. If you want to be reasonable, you must say that the Earth, like any great mass of rock, is somewhere resting on firm ground.” That is virtually the same as accusing Anthroposophy of having no firm ground to stand on. Naturally, people would appear foolish, even to themselves, were they to say that the Earth has something to rest on, but they do not see how foolish it is not to realise that Spiritual Science, which is carried by its own inner resources, just as the heavenly bodies move by their own impulses, cannot rest on the ground of experiment and explanation. Were they only to be consistent in their judgments, they would see how, in the Spiritual Science intended here, every step is made with the utmost exactitude, and full accountability is taken for every statement concerning the world and the beings of the world.

Thus, after death, a man enters a world which he at first experiences in common with souls who, like himself, have entered the spiritual worlds through the gate of death after an earthly life. A man thus grows familiar with the sphere of disembodied human beings and continues with them the earthly relations experienced spiritually at night.

But we have also seen how a man finds himself in the company of other spiritual Beings, the inhabitants of the Moon who were once dwelling with him on the Earth, and how, afterwards, he ascends to the community on the Sun. These Sun-dwellers also were once inhabitants of the Earth together with human beings, though in times far more remote. Here a man's first meeting is with the Beings who constitute the second Hierarchy, described in my Occult Science as Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes. These are the Beings with whom he has to work in order that he may be able to manifest in his next earthly life the cosmically elaborated karma derived from his earlier lives on Earth.

Having passed through the realm of the Moon-dwellers, a man knows—not with earthly thoughts but with cosmic ones—what in a cosmic sense he has done wrong; he realises the worth for cosmic evolution as a whole of all he has done, thought and felt. But he cannot prepare his new earthly life with cosmic thoughts alone. Therefore in the Moon-sphere he comes to know what he is destined to be in his next earthly existence, though the actual preparations for it cannot be made at that stage. For this, he has to rise to the sphere of the Sun, where live the Beings who, no longer having to concern themselves with earthly existence, are occupied with the affairs of our whole planetary system.

So a man's experience of the Cosmos embraces two spiritual regions, together with the spiritual Beings dwelling in them. It embraces the soul-world of the Moon-dwellers, and the more extensive population of the spirit region. Whereas the Moon-dwellers, because they were closely connected with the Earth in comparatively recent times, have united their interests with the peoples of the Earth, and while the Moon is in a sense only a cosmic colony, occupied with and orientated towards earthly affairs, the Sun-sphere, whose dwellers live under the leadership of the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes, is a cosmic whole, concerned with the affairs of the entire planetary system—Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus and so on, including the Earth and the Moon.

On coming into this vast sphere of the Sun, where our interests are substantially widened, we are able to work with the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes on preparing the spirit-germ of a physical body which can then be born for us from human parents. No parents could ever produce a suitable physical body were it not prepared during long periods through work carried out in co-operation with the highest, most sublime spiritual Beings in the spiritual Cosmos. Our essential work there—a work far greater and more comprehensive than anything achieved during our little life on Earth—is to concern ourselves, together with Beings of a higher degree, with all that takes place among these Beings as spiritual events, just as here there are natural events; with all that takes place in them as art of the spirit, just as here we have the art of nature. All this finally enables us to bring together what has thus been worked upon into a great, spiritual, archetypal picture which is the spirit-germ—as it were the fore-shadowing—of what will later be born on Earth as our physical body.

When a man, having completed the three circles, starts on the return journey, his interest in earthly affairs revives. Then—still many years before birth—he looks down on the successive generations in earthly evolution, at the end of which will stand his father and his mother. As soon as he makes this complete change of direction in the Cosmos, he begins to focus his attention upon the Earth. He watches many preceding generations of his ancestry, one after another, until, centuries later, his parents are born. To them he can send down the potent, far-reaching spirit-germ, diminished in size, of his future physical body, so that this spirit-germ can be united with the physical embryo in the body of the mother.

The spirit-germ is at first majestic and great, like the Cosmos itself. While a man is making his return journey to the physical world, and watching the generations through which his parents descend, and while from the spiritual world he is actively concerned with this sequence of generations, the germ becomes smaller and smaller—until at last it arrives back in the Mars-sphere, the actual sphere of the Sun, and then, passing quickly through the Moon-sphere, it descends to its next life on Earth.

Some time before the man himself descends as a being of soul, he sends down in advance this spirit-germ, so that what he has prepared for his physical body enters the physical world before him. On completing his work for the new earthly life, he is able to enter into a different relation with the cosmos—a relation indeed to the whole cosmic ether. And, as the final act in his descent, he draws from spiritual worlds, out of the whole world-ether, the forces to form his etheric body.

When a man has already sent down the spirit-germ for his physical body—that is, when the spirit-germ has at last descended to the parents at the end of its long journey down from the spiritual world—the man himself, still in the spiritual world, gathers ether around him there, and for a short time becomes a being of Ego, astral body and ether, the ether having been drawn together from the world-ether. It is not until after conception, during the third or fourth week of the embryonic period, that the human being unites himself with the organism that has been formed by combining the spirit-germ with the physical germ, and bestows upon it the etheric body drawn from the world-ether. Man then becomes a being composed of physical body, an etheric body drawn together in the last moments of his cosmic existence, and the astral body and Ego which have gone through the life between death and rebirth.

Thus, after experiencing the purely spiritual, a man descends to yet another existence in the physical world.

From what has been said you will have gathered that while passing through life in the world between death and a new birth, we experience in memory past ages of the Earth's evolution—the evolution of worlds, one might call it. The world-memories thus lived through become a man's deeds, for he does something with these memories, in cooperation with the higher Beings of whom I have already spoken and will speak further. What he carries out, while active in memory and remembering in activity, gives a significant perspective into the past of the Earth and of the world.

The experiences he goes through while in connection with the inhabitants of the Moon conjures up in his soul a time during which he passed through earlier lives on Earth in a similar relation to them as now. He surveys a series of earthly lives resembling those of the present. He then looks further back to a time when, even while on Earth, he was more closely connected with the present dwellers on the Moon; to a time from which he is separated by what geologists call the Ice Age. He looks back to a phase in earthly evolution you will find described in my books as the Atlantean age. But he penetrates still further back to what is called the age of Lemuria, when man is still to be found on Earth, though under quite different conditions. He was not yet so closely bound to the Earth that he trod it with his feet; he lived more as an etheric being in the environment of the Earth, in its atmosphere. This he could do because at that time the atmosphere consisted mainly of a watery solution that has now been distributed between seas and continents, together with solutions of other substances that have since become the solid earth of to-day. Hence he lived more in the Earth's circumference during the age—here again names are unimportant—called the Lemurian, which corresponds to what natural scientists call, with some justification, the oldest period of the Earth.

We then look back to an age when man was still associated with the Sun Beings, with the inhabitants of the Sun, before in the course of cosmic evolution the Sun separated from the Earth. This does not mean looking back to an age when, as described in Occult Science, the Earth itself went through its Sun period—the second age in the evolution of the Earth—but to the recapitulation in earthly existence of that cosmic age. But this recapitulation does come into view. And so a man's knowledge, when supplemented by what he is able to experience between death and a new birth, becomes cosmological knowledge. Earth-evolution advances through repeated stages, in conjunction with the results of human deeds carried out together with higher Beings. The Earth's past, in its connection with the whole planetary system—Sun, Moon, and all the planets dependent on them—becomes apparent in the deeds of men. Out of it a man shapes the part of the future for which he is responsible—his next earthly life. At the same time, however, he is involved in the preparation of future worlds, the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan existences, for into each of these in turn the Earth existence will eventually be transformed.

If we look deeply into such matters, we can understand how ancient cosmic times were part of the world-evolution of the Earth. We look back indeed into an age when the Moon-dwellers of to-day provided the instructors of mankind. Then, together with the latest great instructors, they withdrew into the cosmic stronghold of the Moon.

Over and over again on Earth, however, men were born with the capacity to remain throughout their karmic life in close connection with the experiences of those who now dwell on the Moon. Born again and again in the course of world-evolution, they were like ambassadors of the great community within the Moon. They appeared among the people of the Earth during the first, second and third postAtlantean culture-epochs and in the East they developed a lofty civilisation. These ambassadors of the Moon were called Bodhisattvas. They dwelt on Earth as men, but in them lived on the spiritual teaching that had been given directly by the great Moon teachers on Earth.

Now there are often times in the universe when the inhabitants of the Moon, because they are more nearly connected with the inhabitants of the Sun than with those of the Earth, develop a particularly intimate relation with these Sun-dwellers, so that, indirectly, through the Moon ambassadors—called in the East the Bodhisattvas—the wisdom of the Sun was able to reach men on Earth in the older oriental civilisations. Because of the progress made in the evolution of the Earth, it then became necessary that earthly civilisation should no longer be nourished, as it were, by the Moon Beings only. The whole evolution of the Earth would have had to take a course different from the one prescribed by cosmic wisdom, if only the Moon ambassadors had figured in it. For this reason there came about the great, momentous event we call the Mystery of Golgotha.

Whereas in more ancient times it was the Moon ambassadors who, to a certain extent, brought the Sun wisdom to Earth, it was the Leader of the Sun Beings Himself, foremost in the ranks of Sun Spirits, who, through the Mystery of Golgotha, came down to Earth into the body of the man Jesus. Through this, quite different conditions arose for the evolution of the Earth. The wisdom of the Sun-dwellers was brought into it as impulse by Christ Jesus; and under this impulse the further course of Earth-evolution must therefore proceed.

At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, so much Moon wisdom was still spread over the whole Earth that as Gnosis, as Pistis Sophia—which was old Moon wisdom—it was able to understand the nature of the Christ. Gnosis was essentially an endeavour to grasp His whole spiritual significance. But Gnosis has been entirely rooted out. In the phase of evolution which led to a temporary lack of understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, the first act was the rooting out of the Gnosis—down, almost, to the very writings of its opponents.

Imagine that nothing were left of our present Anthroposophy except what its opponents have written about it, and this will give you some idea of what people know of Gnosis from external sources. Their knowledge is limited to the opinions of its opponents, perhaps to some acquaintance with the Pistis Sophia and so on, which they don't understand. That is all they know of the Gnosis, which is indeed a gift of the Moon, out of the past, to the first centuries of Christianity—particularly the first four centuries, for after that it was no longer understood. It was what could be said out of the old Moon wisdom, out of the Moon Logos, to the Sun Logos who had come to Earth—said, that is, to the Christ. Anyone aware of this can really understand the Gnosis, which has been greatly misjudged, and of which such strange things are said to-day.

It is not possible, however, for matters to remain thus, for the evolution of the Earth must continue. We have to progress from the old wisdom of the Moon to a new Sun wisdom, for which we must learn to have an immediate understanding. To-morrow I shall have to describe how it was essentially the old Moon wisdom—after it had come virtually to an end—which still spoke to human beings through a form of Yoga breathing, through a changed breathing process. It was a striving after the old wisdom of the Moon.

This Yoga cult is no longer suitable for Western people; they must attain to Imagination. For civilisation in general, that is the necessary next step—the endeavour to come to Imagination. But there are all sorts of obstacles, and this means that the evolution of human civilisation can advance only if a new impulse from the spirit is accepted. This depends on intimate human destinies. When Bodhisattvas appeared, they never found people generally hostile. Those ancient times may often appear to us outwardly as gruesome and terrible, but it was always possible to meet with good will when bringing impulses from the spiritual worlds. Hence the Bodhisattvas found men ready to receive the old Moon Logos—the reflection, that is, of the Sun Logos. But it will never again be possible to speak to mankind in that old way.

The old Moon wisdom, the old Moon Logos, however, cannot cease—like everything else, it has to progress. But it will have to be understood through the Sun Word, which, having lost its last legacy in the Gnosis, must be re-discovered. It will be impossible to speak to people in the true language of the Sun until they bring good will to meet it. Until they do so, they will wait in vain for the coming of a successor to the Bodhisattvas of old, for that depends upon whether human beings welcome him with understanding.

To-day there is a deep rift between the humanity of the East and the humanity of the West. And those who do not go deeply enough into these matters cannot see how East and West are divided, and how the East is waiting for the new Bodhisattva to bring them in his own way something of which the West has only the vaguest idea. The nationalistic struggles of to-day have not yet been sufficiently overcome throughout the Earth by the universal consciousness which must flow essentially from the Christ impulse. Men will never discover how to rise to this common humanity, this genuine Christ impulse, and will never be able to understand what a potential Bodhisattva would have to say, until they have developed enough spiritual longing in them to create a bridge for a world-wide understanding between East and West.

I am touching here on a theme we must go further into tomorrow—a theme that will show how different the present time is from the days when man waited expectantly for the coming of a Bodhisattva. Now, before the Bodhisattva can speak to men, he has himself to wait until they are ready to understand the words he will use, for men have now entered the epoch of freedom.

This entry into the epoch of freedom, in relation to our present theme, will be a subject for tomorrow. But all that mankind has to go through, in order to find the innermost impulse in the spiritual world above, is connected with many apparently insignificant cultural systems and symptoms of our civilisation.

Forgive me for intermingling the great with the trivial, but trivial symptoms can sometimes throw light on the great. A few days ago I said that in this region, where Imaginations take so firm a hold on the spirit, we get the disturbance of motor-cars. I added that I was not saying anything against motor-cars, for in Anthroposophy we cannot express reactionary views, and when necessary I am obviously very fond of travelling by car myself. One must take the world as it is. But anything one-sided must always be balanced by its opposite. Thus there is no harm in motoring—provided we take it, and everything of that kind, with a heart attuned to the spiritual world. Then, if other things besides cars come to disturb us, we shall be able to press on by dint of our own strength and freedom, for freedom had to come, and it must lead us back to the Bodhisattva.

Human beings will be able to help themselves, where things are concerned that do us good service mechanically. It can truly be said that men will be able to help themselves in face of what comes upon them in the way of cars, typewriters, and so on.

With gramophones, however, it is different—forgive me for concluding on such an apparently trivial note. With gramophones, art is being thrust down into a machine. When people develop a passion for such a thing—which is really a mechanising of what comes down to us as a shadow of the spiritual—when they show enthusiasm for the kind of thing represented by gramophones, then in this connection they no longer have the power to help themselves. At this point the Gods have to help.

Now the Gods are merciful, and to-day our hope for the future progress of human civilisation must be that the Gods in their mercy will themselves come to the rescue where—as in the case of the gramophone—men's taste has gone astray.

Yesterday I wanted to show how we must come to an education, steeped in artistic form. I drew attention to how in earlier times the teacher took his start from the artistic, which he did in higher education by treating as arts what today has become entirely abstract and scientific, namely, grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. This was done in such a way that the young human being started by recognizing in his teacher: This man can do something which I cannot do. And through this alone the right relationship was established between the younger and the older generations. For this relationship, my dear friends, can never develop along the path of intellectuality. As soon as one stands consciously on the ground of the intellect or without the ideas inwardly revealed in the intellectual or mind soul, there is no possibility of differentiating between human beings. For human nature is so constituted that when it is a matter of making something clear through the consciousness soul, everyone thinks that the moment he has concepts he is capable of discussing them with anyone. Thus it is, with the intellect. For the intellect neither man's maturity nor his experience comes into consideration; they only do so when it is a question of ability. But when their elders have ability the young quite as a matter of course pay tribute to maturity and experience.

Now, in order to understand these things thoroughly we must consider from a different point of view the course taken by mankind's evolution. Let me tell you what spiritual science has discovered about the course of history, with regard to the intercourse between men.

External documentary history can go back only a few thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha and what is to be found can never be estimated rightly because spiritual achievements, even in the time of ancient Greece, cannot be grasped by modern concepts. Even for the old Grecian times quite other concepts must be used. Nietzsche felt this. Hence the charm of his brief, unfinished essay on Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, where he deals with philosophy in connection with the general development of Greek culture up to the time of Socrates. In Socrates he saw the first flicker of pure intellectuality; everything philosophical in the tragic age of Greek development proceeded from wide human foundations for which, when expressed in concepts, these were only the language through which to convey what was experienced. In the earliest times philosophy was quite different from what it later became. But I only want to mention this in passing.

I really want to point out that with spiritual Imagination, and especially with Inspiration, we can look back much further into human evolution and, above all, into men's souls. Then we find when we go very far back, some seven or eight thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha, that the young had a natural veneration for great age. This was a matter of course. Why? Because what exists today only in earliest youth existed then for the whole evolution of man.

If we look at the human being with less superficiality than is often done today, we find that the whole evolution of the human soul changes at about the change of teeth, during the sixth, seventh or eighth year. Man's soul becomes different, and again it changes at the time of puberty. I have discussed this fully in my book The Education of the Child from the Standpoint of Spiritual Science. On occasion it is noticed that man's soul becomes different in the seventh year and again in the fourteenth or fifteenth. But what people no longer notice is that changes still take place at the beginning of the twenties, at the end of the twenties, in the middle of the thirties, and so on.

Whoever is able to observe the life of soul in a more intimate way knows such transitions in man, that human life runs its course in rhythms. Try to perceive this, let us say, in Goethe. Goethe records how he was cured of certain childlike religious ideas by the Lisbon earthquake, thus about the time when he was changing his teeth, and how puzzling everything was for him. He tells how as a small child he began to reflect: Is there a good God ruling the world, when one sees that countless people have been swept away through these terrible fiery forces in the earth?—Especially in these decisive moments of his life, Goethe was prone to let external events work upon his soul so as to be conscious of its changes. And he says concerning this period of his life that he became a strange kind of pantheist, how he could no longer believe in the ideas imparted by the older people in his home and by his parents. He tells how he took his father's music-stand on which he set out minerals, placing on top a little candle that he lit by holding a burning-glass to catch the first rays of the morning sun. In later life he explained that he had wanted to bring an offering to the great God of Nature by lighting a sacrificial fire, kindled from Nature herself.

Take the first period of Goethe's life, then the following one, and so on till you piece together this whole life out of parts of about the length of his childlike episode, and you will find that with Goethe something always happened during such times fundamentally to change his soul. It is extraordinarily interesting to see that the fact of Schiller's urging Goethe to continue Faust only found fruitful soil in Goethe because at the end of the eighteenth century, he happened to be at a transitional period of this kind. It is interesting too that Goethe re-wrote Faust at the beginning of a following life-period. Goethe began Faust in his youth in such a way that he makes Faust open the book of Nostradamus. There we have the great scene:

“What powers celestial, lo! ascend, descend
Each unto each the golden vessels giving!”

But turn the page and there we find:
“Thou, Spirit of the Earth, to me art nearer.”

Goethe rejects for Faust the great tableau of the macrocosm and allows only the earth-spirit to approach him. And when at the beginning of the nineteenth century he was persuaded by Schiller to revise Faust he wrote the “Prologue in Heaven.” Anyone who observes his own life inwardly will discover that these changes hold good. Nowadays we only notice them when we deliberately train ourselves to look deeply into our own life.

In ancient times, six thousand, seven thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha, these changes were so noticeable that they were experienced in the life of soul as the change of teeth or puberty is today. And, indeed, approximately up to the middle of life, up to the thirty-fifth or thirty-sixth year, life was on the up-grade. But then it began to decline. People experienced the drying-up of life. But while certain products of metabolism become deposited through sluggishness in the organism and the physical organism becomes increasingly heavy and lethargic, it was also felt that up to the greatest age the soul and spirit were on the ascent, how the soul is set free with the drying up of the body. And people in olden days would not have spoken with such ardour of the patriarchs—the word itself only arose later—had they not noticed externally in men: True, he is getting physically old, but he has to thank his physical aging for lighting-up his spirit. He is no longer dependent on the body. The body withers, but the soul becomes free.

In this modern age it is most unusual that such a thing happens, for instance, as occurred at the Berlin University. Two philosophers were there, the one was Zeller—the famous Greek scholar—and the other Michelet. Zeller was seventy years old and thought he ought to be pensioned off. Michelet was ninety and lectured with tremendous vivacity. Eduard von Hartmann told me this himself. Michelet is supposed to have said: “I don't understand why that young man doesn't want to lecture any more.” Michelet was, as I said, ninety years old!

Today people seldom keep their freshness to such a degree. But in those times it was so, especially among those who concerned themselves with spiritual life. What did the young say when they looked at the Patriarchs? They said: It is beautiful to get old. For then one learns something through one's own development that one cannot know before. It was perfectly natural to speak in this way. Just as a little boy with a toy horse wants to be big and get a real horse, so, at that time, there was the desire to get old because it was felt that something is then revealed from within.

Then came the following millennia. It was still experienced up to a considerable age, but no longer as in the old Indian epoch—in the terminology of my Occult Science. At the zenith of Greek culture, man still had living experience of the change occurring in life in the middle of the thirties. Men still knew how to distinguish between body and spirit, and said: At the age of thirty, the physical begins to decline, but then the spiritual begins to blossom forth. This was experienced by the soul and spirit in the immediate presence of men. The original feeling of the Greeks was based upon this, not upon that phantasy of which modern science speaks. To understand the fullness of Greek culture, we should bear in mind that the Greeks were still able in consciousness to come to thirty, five-and-thirty, six-and-thirty years, whereas a more ancient humanity grew in consciousness to a far greater age. Herein consists the evolution of humanity. Man has more and more to experience out of Nature unconsciously what is for a later time; this requires him to experience it consciously for consciously it must again be experienced. Whoever observes himself can recognize the seven-yearly changes; the length of time is not pedantically exact, but approximate. A man who looks back to the period of his forty-ninth, forty-second, thirty-fifth years can recognize quite well: At that time something happened in me by which I learnt something which out of my own nature I could not previously have done, just as I should not have been able to bite with my second teeth before I had them. To experience life concretely is something that has been lost in the course of man's evolution. And today if anyone does not inwardly train himself to observe, these epochs from the thirtieth year onwards are completely blurred. Comparatively speaking, an inner transformation can still be noticed at the beginning of the twenties—even up to the end of the twenties, though it is then rather less noticeable. But with the present human organization man receives something from his natural evolution only up to his twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh year, and this limit will recede more and more. In earlier times men were not free in their organization, destined as they were to have these experiences out of their own nature. Freedom has become possible only by the withdrawal of Nature. To the extent Nature ceases freedom becomes possible. Through his own striving, through his own powers, man must arrive at finding the spiritual, whereas formerly, the older he became the more did the spiritual thrive.

Today emphasis is no longer placed on what the old become merely by growing older. Intellectualism is left which, between the eighteenth and nineteenth years, can develop so that from then onwards one can know with the intellect. But as far as intellectuality is concerned, one can at most reach a greater degree of proficiency but make no qualitative progress. If one has fallen a victim to the desire to prove or to refute everything intellectually, one cannot progress. If someone puts forward what is the result of decades of experience but wants to prove it intellectually, an eighteen-year-old could refute him intellectually. For whatever is possible intellectually at sixty is equally possible at nineteen, since intellectuality is a stage during the epoch of the consciousness soul which in the sense of deepening is of no help to progress, but only to proficiency. The young may say: “I am not yet as clever as you are; you can still take me in.” But he will not believe the other to be his superior in the sphere of intellect.

These things must be emphasized to become intelligible. I do not wish to criticize. I am saying this only because it is part of the natural evolution of humanity; we should be clear about the following characteristic of our age, namely, that if man does not strive out of inner activity for development and maintain it consciously, then with mere intellectualism at his twentieth year he will begin to get rusty. He then receives stimuli only from outside, and through these external stimuli keeps himself going. Do you think that if things were not like that people would flock to the cinema? This longing for the cinema, this longing to see everything externally, depends on the human being becoming inwardly inactive, on his no longer wanting inner activity.

The only way to listen to lectures on Spiritual Science, as meant here, is for those present to do their share of the work. But today that is not to people's liking. They flock to lectures or meetings with lantern slides so that they can sit and do as much as possible without thinking. Everything just passes before them. They can remain perfectly passive.

But our system of teaching is ultimately of this character, too, and anyone who on educational grounds objects to the triviality of the modern object lesson is said to be behind the times. But one has to oppose it, for man is not a mere apparatus for observing, an apparatus that wants simply to look at things. Man can live only by inner activity. To listen to Spiritual Science means to invite the human being to co-operate with his soul. People do not want this today. Spiritual Science is an invitation to this inner activity, that is to say, it must lead all studies to the point where there is no more support in external sense-perception because then the inner play of forces must begin to move freely. Not before thinking moves freely in this inner play of forces can Imagination be reached. Thus the basis for all Anthroposophy is inner activity, the challenge to inner activity, the appeal to what can be active when all the senses are silent and only the activity of thinking is astir.

Here there lies something of extraordinary significance. Just suppose you were capable of this. I will not flatter you by saying that you are. I only want to ask you first to assume that you are capable of it, that you can think in such a way that your thoughts are only an inner flow of thoughts. What I called pure thinking in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity was certainly not well named when judged by outer cultural conditions. For Eduard von Hartmann said to me: “There is no such thing, one can only think with the aid of external observation.” And all I could say in reply was: “It has only to be tried and people will soon learn to be able to make it a reality.” Thus take it as a hypothesis that you could have thoughts in a flow of pure thought. Then there begins for you the moment when you have led thinking to a point where it need not be called thinking any longer, because in a twinkling—in the twinkling of a thought—it has become something different. This rightly named pure thinking has at the same time become pure will, for it is willing, through and through. If you have advanced so far in your life of soul that you have freed thinking from outer perception, it has become at the same time pure will. You hover with your soul, so to speak, in a pure flight of thought. But this pure flight of thought is a flight of will. Then the exercise or the striving for the exercise of pure thought begins to be not an exercise in thinking only but also an exercise of the will, indeed an exercise of the will that goes right to the center of the human being. For you will make the following remarkable observation. It is only now, for the first time, that you can speak of thinking, as it is in ordinary life, as an activity of the head. Before this you really have no right to speak of thinking as an activity of the head, for you know this only as external fact from physiology, anatomy, and so on. But now you feel inwardly that you are no longer thinking so high up, you begin for the first time to think with the heart. You actually interweave your thought with the breathing process. You actually set going of itself what the Yoga exercises have striven for artificially. You notice that as thinking becomes more and more an activity of the will it wrenches itself free first from the breast and then from the whole human body. It is as though you were to draw forth this thinking from the extremity of your big toe! And if with inner participation you study what has appeared with many imperfections—for I make no claims for my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity—if you let it work upon you and feel what this pure thinking is, you will experience that a new man is born within you who can bring out of the spirit an unfolding of the will.

Does man know before this that he has a will? He really has no will, for he is given up to instincts connected with his organic development. He often dreams that he does this or that out of an impulse of the soul, but he really does it because of the good or bad condition of his stomach. But now you know that you have permeated the physical organism with what fills it with consciousness. You do not need to be a clairvoyant for this. All you need do is to be interested in the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and let it work upon you. For this Philosophy of Spiritual Activity cannot be read as other books are today. It must really be read so that once you get into the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity you have the feeling that it is an organism, one member developing out of another, that you have found your way into something living. People immediately say: Something is going to get into me which will take away my freedom. Something is entering me that I do not want to have.

People who entertain such thoughts are like those who were to say that if the human being at two or three years has to get used to speaking a certain language, he will thereby lose his freedom. The human being ought to be warned against language for he will no longer be free when brought into this chance association of ideas. He ought to be able to speak at will now Chinese, now French, now German. Nobody says this because it would be too absurd, and life itself refutes such nonsense. On the other hand there are people who either hear or see something of Eurythmy and say that it, too, rests upon the chance association of the ideas of individuals. But one should be able to assume that philosophers would say: One must look into this Eurythmy and see if in evoking gestures we may not have the foundations of a higher freedom and find that it is only an unfolding at a higher level of what is in speech.

So one need not be surprised—for really nothing that goes beyond intellectualism is regarded without prejudice today—that people get goose-flesh when one tells them that a certain book must be read quite differently from other books, that it must be read in such a way that from it something is really experienced. What is it that must be experienced? It is the awakening of the will out of the spiritual. In this respect my book was intended as a means of education. The intention was not only to give it content but to make it work educationally. Hence you find in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity an exposition on the art of forming concepts, a description of what takes place in the soul when one does not keep with one's concepts to the impressions from outside, but lives within the free flow of thoughts.

That, my dear friends, is an activity which aims at knowledge in a far deeper sense than the external knowledge of Nature, but it is at the same time artistic, wholly identical with artistic activity. So that the moment pure thinking is experienced as will, man's attitude becomes that of an artist.

And this, my dear friends, is like-wise the attitude we need today in the teacher if he is to guide and lead the young from the time of the change of teeth to puberty, or even beyond puberty. The mood of soul should be so that out of the inner life of soul one comes to a second man, who cannot be known as is the outer physical body, which can be studied physiologically or anatomically, but who must be livingly experienced and may rightly be called, in accordance with the real meaning of the terms, “life body” or “ether body”. This cannot be known through external perception but must be inwardly experienced. To know this second man a kind of artistic activity must be unfolded. Hence there is this mood in the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity which most people never discover—everywhere it touches the level of the artistic. Only most people do not discover this because they look for the artistic in the trivial, in the naturalistic and not in free activity. Only out of this free activity can education really be experienced as art, and the teacher can become an artist in education when he finds his way into this mood. Then in our epoch of the consciousness soul all teaching will be so arranged as to create an artistic atmosphere between teacher and pupil. And within this artistic atmosphere there can develop that relation between led and leader which is an inclining towards the leader, because he can do something which he is able to show forth artistically, and one feels that what he can do one would like to be able to do oneself. Thus no opposition is aroused because it is felt that one would destroy oneself by opposing.

Because of the way writing is taught today, it often happens that even as a child—for in the child there is always a being who is cleverer than the teacher—one asks: Why should I be bothered to write? I have no kind of relationship to writing—which is really what the North American Indians felt when they saw European script. They felt the black signs to be witchcraft. The feeling of the child is very similar. But let us awaken in the child what it means to look at black, red, green, yellow, white. Let us call up in him what it is when we surround a point by a circle. Let us call up the great experience contained in the difference there is when we draw two green circles and in each of them three red circles, then two red and in each of them three green, two yellow with three blue ones in them, then two blue containing three yellow circles. We let the children experience in the colors what the colors as such are saying to the human being, for in the world of color lives a whole world. But we also let the children experience what the colors have to say to one another, what green says to red, what blue says to yellow, blue to green and red to blue—here we have the most wonderful relation between the colors. We shall not do this by showing the child symbols or allegories, but we shall do it in an artistic way. Then we shall see how out of this artistic feeling the child gradually puts down figures out of which the letters then develop as writing once developed from picture-script. How foreign to the child today are B, G, or any other sign that has developed through inner necessity to its present form. What is a G, K, or U to a seven-year old? He really has not the slightest kinship with it. it has taken the human being thousands of years to acquire this relationship. The child must acquire an aesthetic relation to it. Everything is exterminated in the child because the written characters are not human; and the child wants to remain human.

In order to understand youth in its relation to the older generation we must go right into the art of education. The cleft between age and youth must be bridged not by hollow phrases but by education that is an art, education which is not afraid to find its support in real spiritual-scientific knowledge. That is why I said a few days ago: Where does this art lead to? It leads to experience of the real spiritual. And where goes what the age has gradually developed in such a way that it believes it must be given as a matter of course to the young? Where does that lead? It does not lead to the Spirit but to that which is devoid of Spirit. It is regarded a sin to bring the Spirit into what goes by the name of knowledge and science.

Science does not leave the human being alone even in earliest childhood. It cannot very well be otherwise. For the teacher is so drilled in systematized botany (and many books are entirely given over to systematized botany) that he believes he is committing a sin if he speaks to the children about botany in a way that is not scientific. But what is found in a botanical textbook cannot mean anything to a child before he is ten, and it is not until he is at least eighteen or nineteen that it can acquire any real significance for him.

Such is the situation. Now I have no intention of creating another intellectual theory about education. The aim is to create an artistic atmosphere between the older and the younger. But when this comes about, something happens which must occur if young people are to grow into the world in a healthy way. What the human being of today grows into can be described quite concretely. Between the ninth and tenth years an undefined feeling lives in the soul of every human being who is not a psychopath. There need not necessarily exist either a clear or unclear concept of this. But it begins to live within the human being from his ninth or tenth year. Up till then what is called the astral body alone is concerned with man's life of soul. But from that time onwards the force of the ego nature first begins to stir. It is not formulated in concepts. But in the life of feeling, deep within the soul, there lives unconsciously a question in the heart of the growing human being. This question takes different forms in different people. But a question arises which put in the form of a concept might be expressed as follows: Up to now the astral body has believed in other human beings; now I need something that somebody says to me so that I may believe in him or in others in my environment. Those who as children have most resisted this are those who need it most. Between the ninth and tenth years the human being, to strengthen his ego, begins to be dependent on an older person in whom he can trust—without this trust needing to be drummed in—in whom he can believe with the help of the artistic atmosphere that has been created. And woe betide it if this question which may still be one for many children up to their sixteenth or seventeenth year and sometimes even to the years I mentioned yesterday, the eighteenth or nineteenth—woe betide it if nothing happens to enable this question of the young to be answered by the old so that the young say: I am grateful that I have learnt from the old what I can learn only from the old; what he can tell me, he alone can tell me, for it will be different if I learn it when I am old.

Through this can be created something in an educational way which, applied in the right way, can be of the greatest significance for the epoch of the consciousness soul, which, in fact, in the earliest times of the Patriarchs, was already alive between young and old. Then, every young person said to himself: The old man with his snow-white hair has experiences which can only come when one is as old as he. Before then the necessary organs are not there. Therefore he must tell his experiences to us. We are dependent on what he relates because he alone can relate it. Certainly I shall one day be as old as he. But I shall not experience what he tells for thirty-five or forty years. The times will have progressed by then and I shall experience something different. But what I want to learn is only to be learnt from him.

Here is something in the spiritual realm which may be compared with feeding at the mother's breast. Just as the infant might say: “I too shall one day give the breast to a child, but now it is my mother who must give it to me”—so it is in the spiritual life. In the foundations of the spirit life of the world it is as though a chain were there, reaching from the past over into the future, which must be received by each generation into itself, must be carried onwards, re-forged, perfected. This chain has been broken in the age of intellectualism. This was generally felt among those growing up about the turn of the nineteenth century. Try to feel that you did experience something of the kind, even if at the time you were not able to express it. Try to sense that by feeling this, you were feeling about it in the right way. And if you sense this you will realize the true significance of the youth movement today, the youth movement which has, and must have, a Janus-head, because it is directed towards experience of the spiritual—an experience of the spiritual which carries thought so far that it becomes will, that it becomes the innermost human impulse.

We have been seeking now for will at its abstract pole where it is thought. In the days to follow we will seek it in the deeper spheres of man's being.

Goethe, who had such a penetrating insight into so many things, once said the following remarkable words about the fate of the Bible in more recent times: For many centuries, people did not actually get their hands on the Bible, but only got to know it indirectly. When wider circles began to take an interest in the Bible, people were more inclined to think critically about the Bible and its origin and much less to delve directly into its content and its effect, so that actually, as Goethe says, since the acquaintance with the Bible in wider circles, much less has been spoken out of the spirit of this document than has been spoken about it.

What Goethe felt a hundred years ago has intensified significantly over the course of this century. In research, it has become increasingly rare to immerse oneself in the spirit of this religious scripture without prejudice; instead, critical research is increasingly conducted to determine how the individual parts correspond, when and how each part originated, and what the external history of this work is. People are paying less and less attention to the spiritual content.

At the same time, Goethe remarks that basically the Bible is the book of books; so says Goethe, this so-called pagan. Yes, he says that it is not going too far to say that everything that lives in our attitudes and feelings, in our perceptions and ideas, in our way of thinking today, is based on the Bible. It is particularly noteworthy that even that in our civilization which has seemingly made us independent of the Bible is nevertheless, if you follow things closely, a result of the Bible. It is so easy to believe that modern science since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is merely an opponent of the Bible. But the power of thought, the direction of imagination, even if seemingly contrary to the Bible, are taken from the depths of the Bible.

Copernicus may have explored the heavens in a way that seemingly contradicted the Bible, but he drew the power of thought from the Bible. Yes, the thought forms of modern monism, of materialism, have gained their strength from the Bible. Those social parties that radically oppose biblical faith have also — this is recognized by anyone who understands the psychology of the soul — drawn the strength of thought and feeling from the Bible. This is most the case with so-called biblical criticism, which, after all, most strongly opposes the Bible. They have gone through this in the culture of the Bible. If one follows this intimate historical course of the new time, one could say in view of this:

Your good nature, in foreign veins,
will soon quarrel with you.

Goethe said this with reference to one of his students who, in certain views, opposed Goethe and became his critic. Thus, it is the thoughts that have taken root in people over the centuries in our Western culture that have made our thinking, feeling and willing strong, the thoughts of our ancestors that struggle with the ancestors in the veins of their descendants.

Among the parts of the Bible that have suffered the most from modern thinking is the Gospel of John, which for centuries was considered the most vivid source of Christianity. This is far less appreciated by modern Bible criticism than the first three, so-called synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. The Bible critics try, to the best of their ability, to test the books of Scripture for their historical value. They say that if you examine the first three Gospels, which, if you ignore the details, agree, you will find a picture of Christ Jesus that turns out to be credible. If you add the Gospel of John, there are so many contradictions to the first three Gospels that it is impossible to reconcile it with the first three Gospels. The first three Gospels report historical facts that give a vivid picture of the one who walked around in Palestine. The fourth evangelist, they say, cannot be regarded as a presenter of historical truths. He is rather an enthusiast for the personality of Christ Jesus. His aim was to compose a significant hymn to Christ Jesus, to express in lyrical form what he felt to be the truth about this revered personality, and to merely wrap this in historical facts.

Thus, to many, the fourth gospel does not appear as a historical document, but as a teaching in which one can be edified, like a poem, but which is not suitable to say something about the one who was the founder of the Christian religion on earth. As this view became more and more widespread in the course of the nineteenth century, the scholar Bunsen said in the 1850s: If it were really the case that the Gospel of John could not be taken as a historical document, then it would be bad for historical Christianity.

It cannot be denied that in the first three gospels, Jesus is presented even more humanly than the personality that gradually unfolds in its greatness, but that in the fourth gospel, an accomplished being , who has descended from invisible heights, who has nothing more to learn from his surroundings, who is endowed with grace and truth from the very beginning, who himself carries the fullness of the Godhead within himself.

The first three gospels contain beliefs and doctrines. In the fourth gospel, the essence of Christ Jesus apparently speaks mostly of itself, of what he is supposed to be to humanity and his disciples. These are differences that everyone notices. Those who notice them are pushed to the question: How does this fourth gospel relate to the other three gospels? We must realize that these contradictions have actually always been present, but that through the centuries the wisest people have not taken offense at them. Anyone who does not subscribe to the view that only in the nineteenth century did people become wise knows that in the most ancient times the wisest people endeavored to establish a harmony between the Gospels and also thought that they had succeeded.

Every age understands every thing in the way that the age itself is characterized. In other ages, there was not this exclusively materialistic way of thinking, which has even crept into the criticism of religious writings. Another age did not have that preference for the “simple man from Nazareth”. The urge has arisen more and more to push Christ Jesus down to the level of humanity, to say more and more, “In Him there is indeed an ideal figure, but He is still human.” To measure Him against other people has increasingly become the thinking habit of our time. Other ages have not had this urge; throughout centuries of Christian development there was a different ideal, a different aspiration. In an inaccessible distance stood the Christ Being. All human learning, all depth of wisdom, all depth of feeling and sensing sought to lift themselves up to those heights where one could sense something of that Being. It was believed that only the purest, most refined knowledge could approach this Being. The urge of the older times was to lift oneself up in knowledge and feeling in order to sense the height of that being. Thus nothing other than the spirit of the age in which one thinks, feels and searches is reflected in the conception of the Gospels.

We are now once again in an epoch that wants to elevate people to a higher world. But even though it is only at the beginning, this epoch knows its goal precisely and also knows how to pursue it in detail. The aim of Theosophy is to grasp and understand the Gospel of John. It could well be that the Gospel of John will celebrate a kind of resurrection through the means of this research. Through spiritual research, we will come to understand the evangelist again, who so sublimely presents the essence of Christ Jesus. If we first immerse ourselves in the content using the means of spiritual research, this gospel indeed presents itself as the deepest book of humanity. This gospel has been taken as a book of life throughout many centuries. Perhaps it can become a book of life again.

Let us try to consider some of the things that arise for those who seek to understand in this area. It turns out that the Gospel of John is a writing that is in wonderful congruity with the Old Testament. The Gospel of John begins with the beginning of things, as does the Old Testament. There, the gods create heaven and earth from what was chaos at the beginning. The Gospel of John also begins with the words: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)

Thus both documents refer us to the beginning. In both cases, humanity's gaze is directed towards the same thing. There is a congruence here, but one that nevertheless reveals a remarkable difference. In the Gospel of John, there is something actually new. In the Old Testament, we are transported to the starting point of humanity. In grand and powerful images, the genesis of the world is shown, up to the human being, who appears to us as the companion of other beings in the world of minerals, plants and animals, presented as an external, visible being. His development is traced back to the development of a people, the Jewish people. It is not a particular human becoming that is described, but rather humanity as it arises in the world, and then ascends to a people. A people is described as a whole. Only those who appreciate the guiding thread in the right way understand the Old Testament correctly. The meaning of the Old Testament lived in the soul of every single Jew. The individual human being feels himself as a member of the whole people. When the Jew wanted to express his innermost feelings, he spoke of his common bond with Abraham. When he wanted to speak of his transcendental nature, which extends beyond death, he spoke of his transcendental self going to Abraham's bosom. He did not feel the separate self, but rather the great national self, and that the common blood connected him with the nation, which leads up to the father Abraham. When he looked up to the Highest, he looked up to a Being Who revealed Himself through the blood of the whole people. Not only was the memory of the patriarch Abraham sacred to him, but also the feeling of unity with him. Further up, the beginning of the world was taken up, how one blood flowed in a coherent human whole and how the cosmic order, God Himself, permeates and spiritualizes such a group of people.

Let us contrast this with the Gospel of John. This also takes as its starting point the beginning of our entire development. However, it does not begin where the Old Testament begins, but rather, in a certain way, before that. The Old Testament places the emergence of the material world, of what can be seen, of what is there for the outer senses, at the very beginning. “And God said, ‘Let there be light!’” (Genesis 1:3) The author of the Gospel of John takes us further back, to an even earlier time, to a point when nothing material yet existed, when only the spiritual was there: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God” (John 1:1), which is nothing other than the spiritual, of which all material things are the manifestation. He says: It is true that the visible world began as it is described in the Old Testament. But it was preceded by a spiritual world. All the laws that were lived out in that primeval beginning are expressed not in any individual, but in the common blood that connects him to the whole people. If we go back to the spirit that precedes this sensual beginning of the world, we also come to that in man which is exalted above all sensuality, above all national context and to that which is found in every human being, in every human individuality. If we put ourselves in the place of the Jew for the God principle, we find: He felt united with the father Abraham when he traced back the whole line of blood.

In John, we find a tremendous advance in relation to this view. What does the Christ of John's Gospel say? In what he says, there is tremendous progress compared to the spirit of the Old Testament. If you examine what appears to us as the deepest human essence, then you need not go beyond the individual human being. The individual human being can stand alone, by himself; he finds the Father within himself, that from which he emerged.

I, my innermost being, I and the Father are one. (John 10:30)

This is the meaning of the herald's call, the revelation of the individual human being. How did Christ Jesus relate to the Jews who went up to the Father Abraham? He said exactly: This human ego lives in you; when you find the human “I” or “I am” in yourselves, the power of individuality, then everyone may say: There is something living in me that is out of time.

Before Abraham was, the I AM was.

What can be experienced in the innermost core of a person's being is more eternal than anything that can be experienced in the external world. We no longer go up to Abraham; we go up to that which will be eternal in us.

I and the Father are one.

Every single person finds access to the eternal through themselves. Thus we ascend to the very beginning of that which lives eternally in each individual.

Thus, the Gospel of John is the significant continuation of what is written in the Old Testament. It presents itself as a revelation of what was before the very beginning of what is presented in the Old Testament. To understand what is meant in the Gospel of John, we have to engage with the use of words. What is meant by the Logos, the Word? One scholar says of the beginning of the Gospel of John that it is not found in the other gospels. They simply tell, albeit steeped in miracle stories, what happened externally. It is said that the writer of the fourth gospel, on the other hand, was a philosopher. John must have known Philo. It can be said of him that he expresses similar speculations to those in the Gospel of John. He also says that the Word stands between the Creator of the world and man. From Alexandrian and Greek education, John drew the elements of his writing. From this, John had conceived that he would tell the story in the Gospel in such a way that the Christ is the Word made flesh. This had not occurred to any other evangelist.

Let us read the beginning of the Gospel of Luke with this in mind:

Since many have undertaken to set in order an account of the same words that have been handed down to us, as they were delivered to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word,

Here stands the exact same word or logos. It is said that one wants to retell it to those who have been “servants of the word”. In truth, something else is also there: “as those who have been eyewitnesses and servants of the word know”. — In Luke, there is also a way of speaking that John speaks of the word. He also says that those who know something from the beginning have been eyewitnesses of the word. Among the initiates, it was common at the time to speak of the being that lived in Christ as the Word and to call themselves servants of the Word. The author of the Gospel of John adopted the term “the Word” from the language of the initiates. Only spiritual science can explain what is actually meant by the “Word”. To understand this, we must consider the nature of man in terms of theosophy.

What is known from the external senses is only a part of the human being. Wherever spiritual science or theosophy has been present, there has been exactly the same division of the human being as is taught now. Spiritual science speaks of a second part of the human being, the etheric or life body. It says that the human physical body consists of the same substances as all of nature. But in the human body, these substances are combined in such a way that, if they followed their own laws, the physical body would disintegrate. However, the etheric body prevents this decay. The moment the ether body leaves the physical body, the physical body follows its own laws and decays. The fact that this does not happen during a person's lifetime is due to the fact that the physical body is imbued with the ether or life body.

If we consider that when we look at a person, we are not just looking at their physical and etheric bodies, but also at something that is much closer to them than their physical and etheric bodies, that they are permeated by a sum of pleasure and pain , joy and pain, drives and passions, wishes and desires, we have in it what spiritual science calls the astral body, the third part of the human being, which is much more original than the ether body and the physical body. Just as ice forms out of water, water in a different form, so the ether body and the physical body are a condensed astral body. Spiritual science shows that the etheric and physical bodies are denser astral bodies. The astral body is the cause of the etheric body and the physical body. The human being shares the physical body with all visible beings of nature, with minerals, plants and animals. The etheric body is shared with plants and animals, and the astral body with animals. But there is one thing that human beings have alone that makes them the crown of all beings. Everyone can only say a name to themselves, and that is the name 'I'. No one can pronounce the name 'I' if it is meant to refer to someone else. Everyone can only say this name to themselves. This is where the actual center of a person's nature is revealed; so that spiritual science imagines the human being as having four parts, with the 'I am' as the fourth. This is a power and entity of its own. Jean Paul describes in his biography how the thought first occurred to him: You are an I. He said: “There I looked into the most hidden sanctuary of my soul.” All religions based on spiritual wisdom have sensed this fact. The Hebrew people have also sensed it. Yahweh or Jehovah is nothing other than the “I am”. (Ex 3:14) He is the “I am” and points to the innermost core of human nature. In this ancient Hebrew people, the “I am” or Jehovah was felt to be something that expressed itself in the whole group. They applied this name to that which flowed down through the whole stream of Abraham's blood.

This “I am” – how was it seen? In those places of ancient times, which were called mystery schools, one can say that they were both church and school at the same time. In the mysteries, the mystery students sought to rise to the nature of the “I am”. There they were led from the sensual into the spiritual. A complete renewal of this fourth link of the human being occurred through the appearance of Christ Jesus. The term for this “I am” is the Logos or the Word. From the invisible worlds, the spiritual in the I announced itself, revealed itself in the I, permeated the I.

In terms of their physical body, human beings are an extract of the entire mineral world. This is why we call human beings a microcosm. Their etheric body is an extract of the life forces that live outside in the plant and animal kingdoms. Their astral body is an extract of all the astral forces that live in animals. The I is not related to the surrounding mineral, plant and animal world, but only to the invisible, divine spiritual world. It is an extract of the spiritual, a drop of the substance of the divine. A drop from the ocean of the divine is the I. Thus the Divine penetrates into man and sends its drop into the innermost part of man, and the expression of this Divine is the “I am”. This drop of the divine nature is even older than the astral body. It was in the bosom of the Divine before our astral body came into being.

“In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1), or the “I am”, that innermost power of the human being that represents the eternal. People should become educated so that everyone can find the drop of divinity within themselves if they seek this community within. Man should become educated so that he can find communion with God as an individual individuality within himself.

The knowledge of the Word penetrated into the world, it shone into the darkness of the astral, etheric and physical bodies. Only a few who were not born of the flesh understood it. They could reveal themselves as children of God. But now the eternal, all-embracing aspect of human nature, which was before Abraham, entered in, which every human individuality has. This supersensible power has become flesh in Christ Jesus. Thus, Christ Jesus is the power in the evolution of humanity that wants to lead humanity to the realization of its innermost being, of its “I am”. From this point of view, the Gospel of John and especially that most profound chapter in which so much is said about the “I am” becomes understandable. He says explicitly: “All I say of the ‘I am,’ I do not say of myself” (John 14:10), but He says that when people recognize the power of the “I am,” then they have something higher than all other powers. When you express the “I am,” you speak of the power that also lives in the Light of the world. “I am” lives in everything; it is what permeates the entire being of the earth in all realms. You can only properly explore what the earth gives you as food if you understand the ‘I am.’

I am the bread of life (John 6:48),
I am the vine (John 15:5),
I myself am planted by the Father, and the Father is the vinedresser (John 15:1).

Thus this chapter of John's Gospel presents itself as something that must give people strength and life. These powers are rooted in the Father, the spirit of the world: “I and the Father are one.” (John 10:30)

If we go far back in time, we come to times when blood ties played an increasingly important role. They were the basis of what we call love. Love existed only between those in whose veins related blood flowed. In those days, close marriage prevailed. Later, distant marriage replaced close marriage. At that time, only shared blood brought about love. As humanity developed through later eras, the peoples became more and more mixed. The Jewish people felt even more the togetherness of the common blood. But in those days, when Christianity arose, the time began when the peoples were mixed up. That was also the beginning of the time of a new love that is not based on blood. Christ Jesus said: “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.” (Matthew 10:37). “If anyone comes to me and does not hate (leave) his father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, he cannot be my disciple.” This saying must be interpreted in such a way that at the beginning of the development of the earth, those who were related loved each other; but at the end of the development of the earth, people will love and recognize each other in soul love. That brotherly love that goes from soul to soul, that comes from the spirit, that is the love that takes its starting point from the power of Christ Jesus, which will gain more and more ground in humanity. Where the same blood flowed, there one felt as a member of a group ego. At the end of human development, one will feel as a member of the whole of humanity. One will then seek the “I am” not in the blood of the tribe or people, but in the spirit and in the truth. The Old Testament worships the God in the foundations of nature; in the New Covenant, God will be worshipped in that which is prior to nature, in the spirit and in truth. Even for those who were intimately connected with the Lord, it was not readily understandable how that other love should take the place of the love of blood. Only the Lord's favorite disciple understood this. The other evangelists still tell the whole line of descent to the father Abraham. But the one who came into the world as the being that was embodied in Christ Jesus, he could say: “Before Abraham was, the I AM was.” (John 8:58) That the favorite disciple had understood. He goes up to the extra-temporal in his presentation. There is no external contradiction between the Gospel of John and the other Gospels. It is only the difference between a subordinate and a higher point of view. We are dealing here with different perspectives. If we know this, then we also understand the old Bible interpreters. They knew that one can describe the truth from different points of view.

We so often find the expression “one” and “we” in today's scientific writings: “one cannot see this,” “we cannot see this,” and so on. These “one”s and “we”s take the standpoint of the blind man who wants to judge what can be seen or not seen. Man can judge only what he knows, but not what he does not know. The higher man rises in the spiritual world, the deeper he also looks into the spiritual world. John's perspective may differ from that of the other evangelists, but not the content.

The task of Theosophy is to reawaken understanding of this neglected gospel and to show people its power. Because this gospel has the greatest power, it will also play the greatest role in the future of humanity. Those who delve into the gospel of John will find something that lifts them above all the doubts of science.

In modern times, the world has divided into two halves: the world of nature and the world of moral life. The law of nature is seen as something special, and the moral law as something special. This dichotomy in particular will not be able to exist in the long term. Man had to seek something deeper, something that encompasses both. He must not feel a dichotomy between inside and outside. He no longer feels this dichotomy if he understands the innermost core of the Gospel of John. We find the origin of the world within ourselves through the development of our innermost self. We come to something that encompasses the laws of nature and our innermost being. What the “I am” reveals to us was there as the original spiritual before the external world. The Logos, the Word was there before the outer world. — Thus there is a reconciliation between the external and the innermost nature of man. Especially the chapter of John's Gospel, where the “I am” is spoken of, will be an invincible conqueror of human nature. Only man has lost the thread of recognizing the purely spiritual in it.

Theosophy will again attempt to understand what was said by the one who gave the Gospel of John to mankind. When the revealed word is understood, all natural laws will be recognized as the revealed word, but the inner moral law will also appear as the revealed word. Whether one calls himself an idealist or not, if one judges the document of the spirit only according to what the senses see, then a materialistic attitude lives in us. This has been felt by deeper minds, and they sensed and longed for a time when humanity would learn to understand such things again, for example, Goethe and also Carlyle, who said: “We see in this day and age how external institutions have turned away from the spirit that originally emerged from the grasp of the spirit (religion), and how the spiritual seeks a refuge in the individual soul, or, where it does not find it, how it seeks it in external organizations and founds sect after sect and so on, in order to seek again ways to the original spirit.

But the future of humanity and of Christianity lies in learning to understand again a document such as the Gospel of John. We can follow different points of view in their relationship to the teachings about the world in the religious scriptures as humanity develops.

The first point of view is that of naive belief. The second is the point of view of clever people. When we arrive at the third point of view, people interpret the document of humanity in a mystical sense; they understand it as allegories, as symbols.

The fourth point of view is where we learn to recognize spiritual facts in their unambiguous nature through theosophy. Then one encounters such a document with the deep reverence that its inner greatness demands. This is how one will understand the Gospel of John in the future. In the future, spiritual science will again point the way to the true understanding of the Gospel of John and to the true form of Christianity.

My dear attendees! If it is beyond doubt that we can learn something essential about the human being by observing humanity in its historical development, then it may well be said that, on the other hand, we can also learn something essential about the human soul by observing the religious life of humanity in human history. And if observations are to be made about the soul of human life, about the various religions, in the context of a cultural endeavor that is referred to as spiritual science – or as theosophy, as our time tends to call it – then it can only be done by considering the process of progress in religious life.

In the spiritual-scientific sense, we speak of a wisdom core of religions and are well aware that the religious element itself, that which can be designated as a religion, must not be confused with the wisdom core in the religions. This is the subject of Theosophy, which penetrates into the spiritual world with the opened eye of the seer.

Religious life unfolds the development of the soul through which we incline towards the spiritual world, the fire of the soul, the soul's perception of the spiritual world. This is what we have in mind. And we also have in mind what is going on in the spiritual world, what it contains. It is therefore the task of theosophy to speak about the content of wisdom. We do not want to speak about the content of the different religions, especially because even in theosophical circles misunderstandings upon misunderstandings have arisen among those who speak of a certain unity in religions.

It has become a catchword for many that the same wisdom and truth are contained indiscriminately in all religions. No attention is paid to the fact that humanity is in a state of constant development, and although human striving always includes a certain core of wisdom, one cannot speak in the abstract of unity in all religions because it is in a state of constant development.

We will start from a saying of Goethe's to further elaborate on this topic. Goethe, who knew how to grasp the essence of things in such a penetrating way, was the one who spoke of the fact that the one principle of action, which underlies the plant leaf, for example, runs through the whole plant as a unified whole. If you follow the plant up to the flower and the fruit, you will find that the leaves are formed everywhere as a unified plant organ. You find this in all the different plant forms.

But Goethe did not claim that it makes no difference whether one speaks of the green leaf or the flower leaf. Step by step, like the rungs of a ladder, the plant develops from leaf to leaf to the height of the flower.

In a similar way, we can speak of the unified core of religions, which runs from the distant past to our times, developing from the preceding to the succeeding, as in the plant from leaf to fruit. This is said by way of introduction to our topic.

If we want to look at development in a unified way, we have to go back to a very distant past to find a starting point. Everywhere we see the human being as a being that is connected to what is hidden behind the world of the senses. Therefore, we can never find the starting point if we base our search on material considerations. According to these, we would have to start from low forms of existence. We do not want to talk about this external doctrine of evolution today. It is not the one that corresponds to the results of spiritual science.

With its means, spiritual science also goes back to the distant past, but it sees not only the material, but also the spiritual and soul. While the natural scientist characterizes from the imperfect ancestral forms of man, the spiritual scientist can recognize — we can only touch on this today so as not to stray too far from our topic — that the further we go back in human development, the more we find that the soul of man shows completely different inner experiences. Man's primeval ancestor was much closer in soul and spirit to the world to which the modern man seeks to rise in his spiritual and religious feelings.

If we want to understand this relationship today, we have to recognize that prehistoric man, before he had clothed himself with the material shell, had developed as a spiritual-soul being from his spiritual-soul ancestors, that before he entered the physical world he was in the spiritual-soul world, and that in a relatively recent time he was closer to the beings from whose womb he sprang than he is at present.

The soul of the normal human being today depends on a physical and sensual environment. If it wants to recognize something, it does so through the intellect; it recognizes what the eyes can see, the ears can hear, and the hands can grasp. This external way of perceiving has only developed out of other forms of knowledge, out of a different kind of perception, out of the dark clairvoyance of primitive man. At this point, I must say something that may seem grotesque to those who have not yet delved deeply into the theosophical tenets; but what will soon become self-evident upon deeper penetration into them, as self-evident as the results of natural science.

We can go back to the area of our Earth where our ancestors lived and which science is also beginning to study, to the land that once existed between present-day Europe, Asia and Africa on the one hand and the American continent on the other, and from which the present-day Atlantic Ocean takes its name, the land of the Atlanteans, of which the Greek philosopher Plato also gives an account. We find that our ancestors lived in a form that was such that no remains could remain that paleontology could explore.

Today, when man reflects on his relationship to the outside world, we find that he lives in two sharply distinct states of consciousness. One fills his soul from morning, when he wakes up, until evening, when he falls asleep, the other from then until the next morning. The sensory impressions of the day gradually sink into the darkness of unconsciousness in the evening. In the morning, it is not at all the case that what is newly created again enables him to use the sense organs and the mind that is connected to the brain organ, but the altered form in which these are present brings with it the unconsciousness of the night and the consciousness of the day.

It was not like that for our Atlantic ancestors. It was quite different for them. When a person fell asleep at night – as I said, I am well aware that this must sound grotesque to material thinking – it was not the colorful, light-filled carpet of the sensory world that was transformed into unconsciousness, but rather the person lived themselves into a world of spiritual and soul perception, in which they had experiences. And just as people today speak of the world of the senses in minerals, plants, animals and their own kind in their environment, so did the Atlanteans speak of a spiritual world that they perceived at night. However, their perception during the day was not the same as it is today. When they woke up, everything was shrouded in mist, with objects showing few sharp contours. At that time, the consciousness of day and night was less distinct. Therefore, the word religion could not have had the same meaning for our Atlantic ancestors as it has today: the connection of the human soul with the invisible world. For them, the spiritual world was perception. The soul knew from experience: there is a spiritual world. It knew: I came from this spiritual world, descended into physical embodiment. Religion was there as an experience.

Now great upheavals occurred, not only those which science describes as the Ice Age, but which religion calls the Flood, although the truth about these events is much less accurately described in the former than in the latter. The face of the earth changed little by little. Europe, Asia and Africa on the one hand, and America on the other, developed.

Today we will only consider the stream of emigration that is of interest to our topic, which moved from west to east, gradually populating Europe, Asia, Africa and America, and creating the post-Atlantic cultures. Through leading personalities, the most valuable part of the Atlantic culture was established, in a completely different form than today's history teaches. Spiritual research shows us how the best was brought by great leaders to the center of Asia, from which the various colonies that underlie the various post-Atlantic cultures emanated.

The first major cultural influence went to northern India. The best of the traditions of those insights into the spiritual world, which were experiences of the Atlanteans, were given to the post-Atlantean population in the way that the individual peoples needed it. It was significant, highly developed people who founded the culture in India. We call these great founders the ancient Rishis, and we speak with tremendous reverence of these holy Indian Rishis.

But now, in order to get an idea of what they taught in times that preceded all Indian writing, we have to have some concept of the mood of this people. We speak of the ancient times of Indian culture. You may know that wonderful works of culture, full of the greatest wisdom and poetry, have been preserved in the Vedas. They are wonderfully beautiful, but they are only a faint echo of what the holy rishis originally taught; for only spiritual science can teach that. We have an echo of it in the Vedas, beautiful enough, but it does not come close to what the first great post-Atlantic teachers of humanity taught. What was the mood of the Indian people, these post-Atlantic people who had moved to India?

Those people who had most clearly preserved the memory of what could be experienced in the Atlantic period with the soul of a different nature had gone to India, the memory that man had reached into the spiritual world and had his real home there. This idea was lost when man was driven out into the physical world. There he had acquired logical thinking, but he had had to give up the old clairvoyance. Only the memory remained; with this in their soul these people looked at the surrounding physical world. The basic feeling was therefore that they had to leave the old clairvoyance. They looked up at the magnificent starry sky, at the sun, at the moon; the old Indian looked at the mountains, the blue vault of heaven, everything that makes up the beauty of the physical world, and at first none of this seemed to him to be a substitute for what the soul had once experienced in the spiritual realm. “Truth,” said the old Indian to himself, ‘exists only in the spiritual world; here in all the glories of the sensual world there is only Maya, only a veil that weaves itself over the spiritual world.’

Then it was natural for him when the Rishis came and told him that if man develops the potential of a spiritual eye or spiritual ear that is present in his soul, he can see into the spiritual world again. This development, which is similar to the appearance of light through an operation for those born blind, this development of the spiritual organs was called yoga development. This is what the holy rishis pointed out. They were the comforters of ancient India. They brought comfort from Maya and illusion.

This was the first religious wisdom in the post-Atlantean era. We must point out one particular point: the ancient holy rishis said: Even if you look at the starry sky, at the sun and moon, at the mountains and forests, everything is spiritual behind them. There are spiritual depths and spiritual beings behind them; only the spiritual eye and spiritual ear can perceive them. In death, man enters this spiritual world; but in the future, as they already taught, something of what is hidden behind all that is material and visible to our eyes will also appear within this material world, and will work as the forces through which all material things on earth can become visible. Beyond what we can tell, beyond the seven Rishis, there was still another entity; in ancient India it was called Vishva Karman. The old Rishis pointed to it by saying: “Look up at the sun, and in the light and rays flowing down, you see the source of all earthly growth.” Just as it is with man, that what you see with your eyes is only his physical body, the expression of an invisible, hidden within him, so in the whole world the physical is the expression of everything superphysical. With the light of the sun, spiritual energy also penetrates the earth. The outer physical garment is the sun of the spiritual, of Vishva Karman. There will come a time - so they said to the intimate disciples - when this central being of the sun will show itself in a completely different form. That was what grew out of the Indian mood.

Let us now turn to the second period of post-Atlantean culture, to ancient Persian culture. What is called historical in this context is only a later echo. In much earlier times, there was already something there that could connect people to the spiritual world. These Persian people had very different needs from the Indian people. The Indian culture was introspective and turned its gaze away from the world of the senses; it had no interest in the achievements of the senses. But it was the mission of the Persian people to conquer these. The first race to take an interest in the external world was the ancient Persian people, on whom the historical one is based. If the Indian culture had remained alone, we might have received wonderful achievements in... /gap; but all that industry and trade have gained for the good of humanity would not have come to us. This was the real mission of the Persians. They were the first to lay hands on the physical earth; the first traces of agriculture appeared.

These people also needed another proclamation. It received the same through that great individuality who is called Zarathustra or Zoroaster. We do not mean the personality that history designates and, in its manner, applies to a series of similar personalities following one another, and relatively late ascribes to the historical Zoroaster. Also... /gap] already names this leader of Persian culture 5000 years before the Trojan War. But we have to look even further back for this second founder of the post-Atlantic culture, who works for it just as the Rishis worked for the first. Only he had to speak quite differently. The Persian people had in their soul an inclination towards the physical world, therefore they were also exposed to its temptations and inclined to consider the external sensual as the only thing, not recognizing that behind it there is also a spiritual.

The ancient Persian people had little of the traditions that the Indian people possessed. Zarathustra also had to speak of the Sun in a similar way to the Rishis, of the Sun behind which is the Vishva Karman; but it had to be done much more vividly. He told them something like this: In that which appears to you as sunlight, there lives something that also lives in you as the excellent, that which you sense in the soul as your own inner being. The sun is the garment of a being of which there is something similar in your own life. — This inner essence of the physical was called the aura, and that which, as spirit, underlies the physical sun, he called the great aura, or Ahura Mazdao, from which the name Ormuzd was then derived. This is the god who lives in the sun and of whom an image lives in the human soul. Zarathustra pointed to him as the helper of man. When man lays hands on the physical world, cultivates it, draws fruit from it and gains nourishment from it, Ormuzd is the helper. He is your helper – this is how Zarathustra characterized the great sun spirit for his followers; and the spirit that deceives people, so to speak, about the fact that there is a spiritual aspect behind this material world, that incites people not to believe in it, he called the enemy of man: Ahriman, that is the opponent of the great sun aura.

In this way, he pointed out that a spiritual underlies all that is sensual. He pointed out that man is placed in the midst of this battle between light and darkness; that man is called to be a servant of the spirit of light by transforming the earth into an image of spiritual wisdom. He pointed to the physical world as something that not only hid but proclaimed the spiritual world. Zarathustra taught: But you must not seek for the spirit that is your helper only behind the world of sense; it is contained in all sense-world and when the time is ripe for it to show itself, to become manifest in a way that man can grasp and visualize, then it will appear. That was his teaching and he proclaimed it with wonderful words. Only a stammering is it, what one of it about so rendered:

I will speak, listen and hear me, you who long for it from far and near; I will speak, because he will be revealed in days to come. No longer shall the false teacher instill deception into the souls of men, the evil one who has confessed bad faith with his mouth. I will speak of that which is highest in the world, that which has taught Vishva Karman, the greatest of mankind. And he who does not want to hear my words will experience evil when in the course of time the spiritual will be proclaimed on earth.

We then come to the later post-Atlantean cultures and proceed to the third post-Atlantean – the Egyptian culture, in the time in which the ancient Egyptian culture flourishes. Today, we can only give a very small excerpt of it in terms of its spiritual and psychological content. For this culture, the question arose religiously: How does the individual soul that dwells in us, that has arisen from the spiritual and psychological home, relate to the spiritual that permeates the world?

In ancient times, man still partially reached into the spiritual world; now, however, man increasingly prefers to gain what external culture brings, and so we see in the third cultural epoch, in the Chaldean-Babylonian-Assyrian on the one hand and in the Egyptian on the other, how a further conquest of the physical world took place. We see how man no longer looked up at the starry sky to say: Maya lives in this one and behind the stars the actual spiritual, the Brahman —, but now people looked carefully at the course of the stars, and a wonderful science arose. In the movement of the stars, in their figures, man recognized an external realization of the intentions of the spiritual beings. Man gained interest in the sensory world in order to experience the divine through it. Now the sensory world had become the physiognomic expression of the divine for him. Thus, with geometry, the earth was also conquered. From the spiritual heights, man penetrated more and more into the sensory world with his knowledge. As a result, he became increasingly estranged from the spiritual world. The consequence was that completely different views had to arise about the connection between man and the spiritual.

The relationship between the human soul and the spiritual world is depicted in the Egyptian religion in the Osirissage. This recounts that Osiris ruled in the world. However, he was too good for his rule to remain on earth, so he was overcome by his hostile brother Typhon and placed in the coffin. His wife Isis could no longer save him and instead raised his son Horus. Osiris ascended into the spiritual world. The legend thus reports: This divine figure once lived on earth as a companion of men, but then had to withdraw into the spiritual world. This world was then given a kind of representative in the child Horus. — The ancient Egyptian was told that when he passed through the gate of death, he would not only be united with Osiris, but his soul itself would become Osirian, itself an Osiris, woven together with him. Man becomes spiritualized, becomes Osirian himself. If man had to say to himself: I belong with my innermost being to the spiritual world —, then he had to say to himself again: veiled is my connection with the spiritual world; but when it is taken from me, the veil, then I will be reunited with the spiritual world; because when the attempt was made with Osiris to put him in a box, he was transported to the spiritual world.

The Egyptian was aware that a Divine-Spiritual being lived in his soul, and that he could only be united with it after death. Only then would he become Osiris himself. The being that will be united with you as Osiris cannot take shape in this world, but it will take shape one day and exist in the physical world.

Thus we see in this third epoch how the prophecy continues. What the Rishis indicated to the Indians as Vishva Karman, what Zarathustra indicated to the Persians as Ahura Mazdao, that saw in Osiris the confessor of the Egyptian religion and predicted that this being would one day appear.

Let us now take a look at the fourth epoch, the Greco-Latin or Greco-Roman epoch. The conquest of the physical world goes even further there. Man has come so far that he is able to form a kind of marriage between what is experienced in the spirit and what becomes an event in the outer physical world. We see this in art, which is something for humanity, which is a reflection of the spiritual in all parts of matter at the same time. In Greek art, we see the spiritual connected to the external material as in a marriage. The greatness of the Greek temple is based on this. It is the direct imprint of what lived in the soul of the people of that time.

We can understand this principle of Greek art by observing the difference between a Greek temple and a Gothic cathedral. What is the difference? A lonely building, with the image of a god, far and wide no people, and yet a complete totality. This is how we find the Greek temple; its architecture speaks to us, and we say: It is the house of the god who dwells within, even when there are no people there. No people are needed in this temple.

With the Gothic church it is quite different. This is not meant as a criticism; each thing is in the right proportion to its purpose. With its pointed arches, its entire composition is only complete when the faithful multitude is inside. That is part of it. Such a comparison can truly symbolize how that marriage in Greek art between matter and spirit has been consummated.

And if we look at the Roman world, we see how the individual personality expresses the learning of the value of the physical world. And we can go even further back, to the Greek polis, to see how the concept of citizenship arose, which actually only comes to full expression in the Roman world and which can only be clearly recognized by going back comparatively to what the ancient Indian felt. While for him what was in the physical world was only a shadow of the real world and reality only existed in union with Brahman, just as for the Egyptian with Osiris - the Roman wanted to stand firmly in this physical world by feeling like a citizen.

An ancient Indian could never have understood a deity dwelling in the physical body, because the physical world was a shadow image of the spiritual one for him. The human personality only became fully understandable in the fourth epoch; therefore the predestined entity could only enter at this time. It was none other than the Christ, of whom the Rishis had spoken as the Vishva Karman, who at that time was only comprehensible in the spiritual world and who, in the epoch in which the physical world was most conquered, was realized here as a human being among humans.

This was prepared by the fact that people were sharply reminded of what constitutes the innermost nature of the person who actualizes such an entity. Hence the words: “If you do not believe Moses and the prophets...” (John 5:46-47, Luke 16:31). And anyone who understands John knows that in the “I am that I am” (Ex 3:14), the “ejeh asher ejeh” of Moses, nothing else should be proclaimed as the Christ, not should be talk not of the God of Yahweh, but of the prediction of the Christ: You shall acknowledge a God who can be grasped in the sensual world, who lives and weaves in everything around you, in lightning and thunder, in plants and minerals, in the whole world around you — If you want something that can be understood by you, how it lives and weaves, then you have to listen to that peculiar sound where the soul speaks to itself: “I am,” then you have to listen to your ego - that is the best expression at the same time for the image of the Godhead. What lives in every human being also lives as the all-pervading God; this also appeared in the greatest human being who walked the earth, the Christ. This divine essence appeared in the fourth cultural epoch.

Thus we see how the wisdom of the religions weaves and strives forward, like the leaf to the petal that holds the fruit, so we see that what the ancient Rishis taught is becoming more and more mature until it appears as the fruit in the man of God who walks the earth; and we see the necessity of progress in it. We see how, in certain respects, Christianity does indeed contain the same as the other religions; how it contains the unified, but again in a different form. Therefore, he is wrong who says that it depends on the same teaching being in it as in the other religions. As long as it depends on the content of the teaching, one can say that. But where the spiritual world-view is proclaimed as a teaching, as the ancient Rishis had to do, as Zarathustra and the leaders of the Egyptian Hermes religion, the leaders of the mysterious mysteries did, we have the same thing that we also prove in the commandments of Christ, yes! But to recognize that which the other religions only spoke of, that this is the Christ; to understand, to grasp a spiritual phenomenon as a personality, to understand the Christ, not just the teaching, that is what makes Christianity different.

When religions speak of the Logos that can be taught, Christianity must speak of the human Logos who has become the bearer of the religion. What previously could only be taught was now lived. The life itself of this teaching is the essence of Christianity. So those religious leaders could say of themselves: “I am the goal and the way.” Those leaders, a Zarathustra, a Moses could have said: “I am the way and the truth” — but only Christ could say: “I am the way, the truth and the life.” (John 14:6)

The wisdom at the core of all religions has become fruit in Christianity and thus seed. As we have now sought the origin of Christianity in the religions, tomorrow we want to talk about the future of Christianity, because it is as true that it contains the fruit of all other religions as it is that it contains the seed for a great development, because although almost two millennia have passed since the appearance of the personality of Christ on earth, we are only at the beginning of Christianity.

Thus we see how, in our age, people have gradually sought a connection with the Divine-Spiritual and look into what all peoples have felt to be the wisdom core of their religion. We recognize why this contains the power and strength that gives people the hope of achieving their goal.

Anyone who looks into the spiritual life of people in this way dares to add to the words of a great poet, Goethe's beautiful words:

Soul of man, how art thou like the water, Fate of man, how art thou like the wind,

evoking the idea that the life of the soul surges up and down like the waves of water whipped by the wind.

But he who contemplates the power that is in the life that flows through men adds: it is true that the wind whips the waves; but it is also true that the wind, the air, is permeated by light, and the light-filled air contains the element that conjures all sprouting life out of the earth. It is true that water, permeated by warmth, is driven up and becomes a cloud and comes down again as rain.

Man's soul is like water. It comes from heaven and rises to heaven. But it is also true that the blessing of prosperity comes from the fact that water, permeated by fire, has a blessing effect, and that in the same way, man's soul can be aglow with that fire of the ego, which feels akin to the light that rules through destiny and is comparable to the wisdom that permeates the world. Then the world of the soul will be filled with the feeling of divine wisdom. Thus the soul is something that may indeed fluctuate up and down, but is certain of its destiny and of its inner strength.

Dear attendees! Anyone who takes a look at our spiritual life will realize how deeply the mystery associated with the name of Christ Jesus is intertwined with our present education. And it may well be said that all questions touching the present time are the consequence of the Christ or Jesus problem, one of the most significant problems of all. We have even seen that even men of our time who believe they are above what they call the religious prejudices of Christianity are intensively occupied with this problem. For example, there is the fact that interest in this mystery has been shown from more or less monistic sides. The only question that arises is that it has been tried to solve this mystery in the most diverse, the most profound and sometimes also the most superficial way at all times since Christianity has existed.

Since we have to start from a very specific point of view, namely that of spiritual science, let us first visualize the underlying reasons for the particular coloration that our present age gives to this riddle. We must then see – and this is particularly indicative of our present time – that in souls, in hearts, an enormous contradiction is emerging: on the one hand, there is the need, the intense longing to know something about those questions that have occupied the human mind since time immemorial; on the other hand, there is the cleft, the chaos that emerges. While one feels too soft or too weak to really attack this problem in all its depths, there are again experts in this field who deal with it in the most detailed way, expecting some new revelation, some new event in relation to this problem.

The peculiarity of this question is already included in the two names that come to mind: “Christ” and “Jesus”. And if we just take a brief look at what has happened over the centuries, from the time of the evangelists, the first Christians, and across the centuries, we encounter the question: How can man form a conception that the divine essence of Christ can embody itself in a human being, in a human body? How is it possible that the divine nature has accomplished in a human body what is called redemption? In short, we can say that what has occupied humanity so powerfully at all times is the question: How could Christ appear on earth, how did that very union of the two natures, of the God Christ and the man Jesus, come about? But the closer we get to the present, the more and more the question takes on a different form. The question takes on a form - that is the remarkable thing - that is completely adapted to the respective cultural view that humanity has struggled to achieve. When we look at the present, we find the opposite pole, the complete opposite of what was recognized at the very beginning of Christianity in relation to the Christ-question.

One could point to hundreds and hundreds of cases similar to the one I am about to mention. In a Swiss journal of 1861, a man who was close to Christianity says the following: If I were compelled by anything to admit that Christ rose bodily, that the resurrection is at all possible in an evangelical sense, then I would have to admit everything that, not corresponding to my own worldview, would somehow confront me; then I would have to find that my whole worldview has a crack. How many people of the present day, including religious scholars and theologians, would have to make the same confession! If they thought about it, they would come to the conclusion that they would have to confess the same thing.

Let us contrast this confession with what Paul said when he said:

If Christ is not risen, then your works are in vain and so is your faith.

If you look at what Paul says, you have to admit that the most essential thing that permeates him is the fact that the Christ has risen. You have to admit that Christianity loses its meaning altogether if the mystery of the resurrection is removed, if what happened for the development of humanity is removed. Paul regarded the resurrection as the most essential thing, as the fundamental nerve of the Christian world view. And in our time it has come to this - this is deeply significant - that certain people say to themselves, if they had to acknowledge the resurrection, then their whole world view would be split.

It does not exactly touch someone sympathetically, to whom one has not yet plastered over these things, to find the fundamental question of Christianity – because that is what it is – presented to the soul in this form. But theosophy does not have the task of whitewashing things, so to speak, but rather of characterizing them according to their true names. In a sense, time cannot, out of itself, [out of its nature]; the general character of the formation of time is also expressed in the conception of the Christ-question. We see the Christ-question transformed into a Jesus-question in the nineteenth century; we see how, through the progress of science, it is becoming less and less possible for man to see in the man Jesus of Nazareth a divine-spiritual being, as it could be seen in ancient times. As the gospels became more and more accessible through the spread of education, people read deeply into them, and their souls were, as it were, drawn up to something divine. Then a gradual transition took place from the most paradoxical ideas about the Christ Jesus to what many theologians now profess, namely, that one has to assume that Jesus was only an exceptionally outstanding personality in world development, so that what man regards as the highest ideal was present in him to a great extent. One sees in him only a human being, albeit raised to a higher level.

Naturally, all possible shades of opinion are to be found in the conceptions of Christ Jesus. Thus, in the eighteenth century, we are confronted with the fact that people only put into the Christ Jesus problem what they could imagine, what they could think. Thus, to the Enlightenment thinker Reimarus, Christ Jesus appears hardly as anything more than an especially outstanding human being. [In contrast, Lessing had a substantially different spiritual image within himself.] He once said that he wished he could still live to see someone come along who would thoroughly refute what is being spread about Christ Jesus. Everything [at that time] was based on the criticism of the Gospels, especially on the contradictions, and specifically on those that come to light when comparing the different resurrection accounts. The obvious conclusion was that the reporters had passed on something that was not real – but this is by no means a fact.

If witnesses are heard in any matter who give different testimony, this is by no means proof against the fact itself. If we now imagine a world court case and ask: Are these witnesses credible? this is not correct. Rather, another question is the only decisive and important one: Who won the trial? Undoubtedly, Christianity, which was based on the fact of the resurrection, has carried the victory in world history. So the fact is that even if the witnesses testified differently, the trial itself is decided.

Then the time drew nearer and nearer when the matter was so arranged that every possibility of thinking of something superhuman in it disappeared, or, to speak with the spirit of that age: The time is drawing ever nearer when it will be impossible to think and speak of the resurrection in the same way as we originally did. Therefore, in the nineteenth century, the first concern of religious history was to get a picture of the man Jesus from the Gospels. We do not need to discuss here what has been done with the Gospels, how attempts have been made to compile the synoptic material in order to arrive at an approximately uniform overall picture, or how attempts have even been made to exclude altogether the Gospel that has the most supersensible content, the Gospel of John, on the grounds that it is a hymn to the individuality of Jesus of Nazareth. But there were also other researchers in the nineteenth century who said that if the Gospel of John were no longer recognized, then the whole of Christianity would have to be abandoned. One scholar, who is now considered outdated but who was once highly regarded, emphasized the facts of the Gospel of John. But all efforts were aimed at credibly presenting the man Jesus to the soul; however, from the outset, much had to be excluded that was indeed in the Gospels but that could no longer be believed in the nineteenth century. So a lot of facts, such as miracles and so on, were taken away and any possibility of admitting anything non-natural ceased.

It was therefore of particular significance when a theologian of the nineteenth century, Franz Overbeck, who lived in Basel, wrote a very remarkable book entitled “On the Christianity of Today's Theology”. This book is remarkable not only for its content, but it is significant for anyone interested in such things as an expression of the confession of a man who, as a theologian, had to struggle with the fact that he had to stand before his students with such feelings in his soul. Overbeck had to wrestle with this fact until it finally pushed him to express what lived in his soul. Anyone who understands such things will truly see a stormy destiny in following the strange life of the Basel native Overbeck, who basically answered the question, “Can theology today still be called Christian at all if it is also a science?” only with “no”. As a theologian, he sought to prove that theology as a science could not be Christian at all, because any science - according to Overbeck - must do away with and break with much of what is the basic meaning of any religion; the moment a pre-Christian religion came into contact with science, it underwent a process of decomposition, and so it happened with Christianity: science destroys Christianity under all circumstances and must always be an opponent of it.

When this is stated, it may not go deep to the heart, and in a certain respect it may be easily accepted by the layman. But when one is confronted with an era that urges such a significant theologian to make such a confession, one must feel how deeply the corresponding question [about the relationship of Christ to Jesus], the Christ-Jesus problem, actually goes to the root of our current development. And Overbeck says something else, namely, roughly the following: Whatever thoughts and scientific reasons we can muster about the Christian worldview must seem terribly small and inadequate to support the Christian creed. In the early days, Christians lived with the idea that a new world was coming, but soon a different time came, and it was no longer the doctrines of the Church Fathers that fertilized Christianity. At first there was hope for heaven to come to earth, but then finally the feeling that this world could never satisfy the human heart; an ascetic mood became apparent.

Today we see that people place some value on scientific truths – these are self-evident, they conquer the world of the outer senses, and so we see the driving force of religious belief slumbering in people. Who would not want to admit that this is deeply, deeply characteristic of our time? Is it not moving, distressing, that that which gave thousands upon thousands consolation and hope should increasingly lose its power? Let us face a fact: in 1873 an attempt was made in France to count those who were still touched by Christ, and it was found that one-third of the total population still believed in him. Today, it is estimated that only about one-fifth of London's total population is still imbued with Christianity. What does it matter that those who are quickly satisfied with themselves say, “What do we need a new foundation for? The old is enough for us.” Those who think only of themselves and are satisfied with that may speak thus; but those who think of humanity and see how the best truth-seekers can no longer find support will have to admit that the times are serious and that it is understandable when people long for a renewal of the old.

And so it gradually happened that on a theological basis a man named Jesus of Nazareth arose, from whom all the supernatural had been removed. In the nineteenth century, there was also a reaction of a strange kind. One could say: in order to deal with the Christ problem, which had been completely lost sight of in the Jesus problem, people sought to hold on to the Christ nevertheless, to recognize him. But in doing so, he was made into a being who basically lacks true reality. It has led to the Christ being made into a mystical being who does not need to be bound to what the evangelists tell – they tried to hold back the gospels [so to speak]. It would lead to chaos if one wanted to cover all the trends of the last few decades – at any rate, we are dealing with a crisis.

For those who have followed this development, there is something easy to grasp. The combination of mystical insight with all that has been brought to light by gospel research represents the last phase of this development. Something emerged that can be described as the connection between these two currents, and the result was that people even doubted whether a Jesus had lived at all. It is entirely in keeping with the style of our time that, once the mere external, historical yardstick was applied to Jesus, the question arose: Is there anything left at all in the Gospels that provides us with proof that a Jesus lived? — But one has no right to deny that a Jesus existed, because with a certain justification one is led to the conclusion that the existence of Jesus is clearly provable. However, for anyone familiar with today's historical research and aware of the current state of Jesus research, proof of the existence of Jesus cannot be provided because it is possible – if one wants – to challenge the documents of the Gospels. And one would have to be reckless not to admit that this challenge has quite significant reasons.

But what does all this show us? It shows us that we are in a state of crisis in the whole field [of Jesus research]. However, a new world view has also become part of the present education, which initially knows how to plausibly demonstrate that it has different sources of truth than those that have been available so far - I am referring to Theosophy or spiritual science. Even if Theosophy has something to say about Christianity and its origin, it could still be necessary for religion and religious research to deal with what Theosophy says about Jesus Christ. It is therefore important to know that both sides start from some elementary, fundamental events that have happened and cannot be denied.

The thing that our present education must undoubtedly take the greatest umbrage at is the story of the resurrection, that something has occurred that can no longer be understood today, namely that there was a victory of life over death. From a theosophical point of view, something can only be said about this if one considers the most obvious thing, namely the scene of one's own heart and soul. And what does this scene show us? It shows us something that cannot be admitted by the prevailing education; it shows us how the possibility exists for man that an inner miracle takes place at some time in his life. If we can call a miracle that which can be characterized as being in contrast to what is connected to the intellect, then it is a fact that such a miracle can take place in the human soul. And for every soul in which this miracle has taken place, it is inwardly clear that miracles exist.

It is a fact that there is an inner, mystical experience in which something enters the human soul that has no connection with the soul in the natural course of life. To understand this, one must follow the natural course of a person's life. It shows that, alongside all the external facts of life, we are constantly dealing with a deep inner life - we are dealing with the fact that the course of life shows itself in the human soul. Let us take a soul that belongs to the struggling souls in life - not a scientific one. Let us take a human soul that is dealing with the existential issues of life, that experiences inner tragedy, pain and suffering, but also bliss and salvation. Let us take such a human soul that has been living in such moods for years, and let us imagine that someone has not seen this person for ten years. He would make a remarkable discovery, namely that this struggle of the soul expresses itself in changes in the physiognomy, gestures and so on. The spiritual struggle expresses itself in the body. What takes place within a person also works on the transformation of the human exterior.

But what is much more interesting is the following: anyone who struggles in this way senses that when an answer or a solution to certain riddles has occurred, they are in a different state of mind. And the characteristic feature is that when the solution has occurred, the transformation of the physiognomy stops and the expression remains constant. As long as the struggle lasts, furrows form. But this too has an end; it is as if the human body reaches the limit of its elasticity. When the human being reaches this limit, the physical transformation finally ceases. The forces of consciousness transform, the soul forces. First they work on the body, and then, when this is no longer possible, they consciously work their way into themselves. It has been established that these human soul forces work inwardly throughout the whole of human life, and it has been shown that sometimes something of what is working in the depths of the soul also rises up into consciousness, and this shows itself in particularly strange dreams. This means that the dream images reveal something of what is going on in the soul.

Let us take a typical dream from the life of a friend close to me. When he was a young person attending secondary school, he had to do a drawing in the last grade, and because they knew he had talent, they gave him an especially difficult template, and that is precisely why the work progressed rather slowly. The end of school was approaching, and the student realized that it would be impossible for him to finish on time, since only a small part had been drawn. He felt anxious about this, but at the end of school his performance was still enough for the teachers, because they realized that he had only progressed slowly due to his great talent. The man grew older, became a draftsman, and strangely enough, this school experience came back to him in his dreams at certain intervals, and he experienced everything exactly as it had happened once, only the fear that he would not be able to finish was much, much greater in the dream. It happened that the dream came back regularly for days in a row, then it stopped for years and then came back.

The full significance of this dream experience can only be understood by comparing it with life. It turned out that every time this dream experience occurred, this person recognized an increase in his abilities. He could do more in terms of observing forms and expressing them through his hand; he experienced noticeable progress every time. Man works spiritually and mentally like this draftsman, and from time to time his soul work is revealed in 'dream' - in that strange state that exists between consciousness and unconsciousness, in that transition from the subconscious to the conscious. We see this throughout life.

We have an important point in human life, up to which one remembers in the course of life. Everyone must say: I remember up to a certain point in time, but what lies before that point in time is completely unconscious to me, and I only know something about it through the reports of others. This point in time is the one at which we have appropriated the word “I” for ourselves. But what happened before that moment? Let us look at the child, with its clumsy movements and actions. We know that the most important organ in the human being, the brain, is still completely undeveloped when the child comes into existence, and it is only during life on earth, until the child learns to say “I”, that it works on the organs of thought. We are therefore dealing with a spiritual-natural consciousness that is completely independent of the human being, with a supersensible-spiritual activity that represents the starting point of that cerebral activity. The following example characterizes that supersensible, spiritual element in man.

It is common knowledge that Nietzsche ended in madness. In the last period before the outbreak of madness, he wrote “captious” letters to acquaintances, including the Basel theologian Overbeck mentioned earlier. When Overbeck received one of these letters at the end of the 1880s, he knew that he could no longer delay in picking up his friend Nietzsche from Turin, where he was staying. The following now appears important as an example of what I have mentioned: When Nietzsche met Overbeck, he had no attention for what surrounded him; he let himself be done with whatever was wanted and showed absolutely no interest. Only when he heard the name of the personality standing before him, who was the same person who had been his colleague for years, did it flash through him: “That's the psychiatrist I was with back then.” And Nietzsche, to Overbeck's greatest astonishment, began to continue a conversation at the point where it had been interrupted seven years ago. A person who has no attention for the outside world continues a conversation at the point where it was interrupted seven years ago! Overbeck had forgotten that conversation in the meantime, but he remembered it immediately. And it is remarkable: when Nietzsche was brought to Jena and Overbeck visited him in the insane asylum, one could not talk with him about what was going on around him — only about what he had thought, devised, mentally struggled with and experienced years before; only about that could one talk with him.

But what does this show us? It shows us that there is a supersensible body within the physical body. If one builds on facts, then what is at issue here must be recognized as highly important. Man can only enter into connection with the objective external world through his physical organs. Nietzsche's organs were destroyed, and therefore he could no longer do this; only the central spiritual core within the physical body was unaffected. This one example could be multiplied a hundredfold. The existence of this central spiritual core in the physical body cannot be denied, and it is a fact that under certain circumstances man is able to see into the supersensible world. When we place thoughts that are symbolic through the strong will into the center of consciousness in such a way that all attention is focused on them and nothing is distracted, when we only look at them and repeat them over and over again - for a year, and if a year is not enough, then for ten years: a result will eventually emerge. The soul manages to bring everything up from the depths; she looks into everything.

This supersensible state cannot be reached with the help of ordinary tools, but only through intimate soul work. When a person has concentrated all thoughts and worked with them long enough in this way, he finally comes to a point where he says to himself: Yes, I am now experiencing something within me that I am quite sure is something supernatural. But strangely, I cannot think it in the way I usually think things. - Man then feels something that only comes to the consciousness of those who experience it, because in this moment of transcending the resistance of his physical body, the brain is no longer capable of expressing what has been experienced. Man recognizes: That which he was accustomed to feeling in the soul wants to transgress into consciousness. But he senses: the bodily tools were indeed suitable for the natural life up to now, but now I am experiencing something for which my brain is not yet sufficiently developed. Man then perceives the duality of the spiritual-soul being. He then experiences further how that which was initially weak finally begins to work perceptibly and tangibly on the brain, on consciousness, on the body.

I have now described this process of development to you. It is not a matter of something arbitrarily conceived, not a theory, but a fact that every true seeker of the spirit can experience. But what does the seeker of the spirit experience? He experiences what I have termed the “miraculous fact”. Something extra-worldly enters into the soul, to which man had no relationship before. One could describe what enters as a higher human being in the human being, as something that joins the spiritual that was already there before. Now a question might arise: Yes, but only a small circle of people experience something like that, only the spiritual seeker experiences something like that, who undertakes these exercises with the soul. — But what has just been described can be experienced by every soul, albeit in the most diverse shades, in the most diverse gradations, corresponding to the individuality of the person concerned. When we read the descriptions of those people whom we call the Christian mystics, we sense that these mystics did not experience what I have just described, but that something of a different nature has entered into these souls, something other than the existing spiritual - this transformation is called 'resurrection'.

Anyone who immerses themselves in the descriptions of the gospels with the necessary devotion will experience what I have described to a greater or lesser extent. But everyone can experience it - apart from studying the Gospels - feel that there is a feeling in the soul that cannot be found in the natural course of life in the soul. However, the Bible is the easiest way to bring a supersensible spiritual world into the horizon of consciousness. If one admits this miracle fact, then humanity provides a necessary supplement to it, and this arises from Theosophy itself. If we look back at what was said about the central core of spirit, we see that this central core of spirit cannot be traced back to the mere beginning, to the origin of the body, because this central core of spirit is completely independent of the beginning of life, of the brain activity of the human being. Rather, it must be traced back to an earlier human life, so that we must speak of repeated lives on earth. What we have come to know as the central core of the spirit, as supersensible life, asserts itself through death, and with this point of view we stand on the ground of spiritual science.

This view of repeated earthly lives has already been incorporated into our newer culture. Lessing was compelled to speak of the repetition of life out of an inner necessity. He said: “If one considers the entire human development, it appears to one as an all-embracing education of mankind.” It would have seemed senseless to Lessing if a soul that had ended completely [with death] had lived. Lessing thought that the soul takes with it what it possesses in the way of training, [then comes back to earth with it and so on. In this way a unified organism would be created: the soul, which is in a state of development, does not die], but lives on and on, lives forever. The nineteenth century, however, had little interest in elaborating on this fact. But this fact emerges with necessity. When a few decades ago a prize was offered for the best literary work on the subject of 'The Immortality of the Soul', the first prize was awarded to a work entitled 'The Immortality of the Soul on the Basis of Repeated Life on Earth'. This is proof that even then there were people who were drawn to this view of repeated lives on earth.

If we consider the development of humanity, it turns out that only from a certain point in time was it possible for the human soul to experience that inner miracle, that certainty, which [initially] comes to the soul as a question. We can distinguish two great epochs: the old, pre-Christian times, when man had not yet come to the consciousness of his ego, and the time after Christ, when man enters the world with the full maintenance of his self-conscious ego. Just as human descent can be traced back to a primal being, so too must that which can prove to be an inner resurrection for each individual in the soul be traced back to a progenitor for this inner miracle. Just as resurrection takes place for the individual, so it must also have taken place for humanity, and Theosophy shows us clearly: What makes the individual a different person also made the man Jesus of Nazareth a different person.

Just as we live with our central spiritual core, to which no boundary is drawn by death, so the world with its central spiritual core is subject to its own law. Therefore, according to theosophy, the resurrection for the whole of humanity is virtually the same miracle as the inner miracle for the individual. After [Jesus'] physical body was hung on the cross, the spirit [of the Christ] lived on. Let us consider Paul's words in the Gospel, that the Christ died for humanity and was resurrected on the third day, and that he then appeared first to Peter, then to more than five hundred people, and finally to himself. He did not appear to Paul in his original Jesus form, but in a spiritual form, which he had to recognize as the Christ form, which was such that the conviction asserted itself from within: the Christ lives! We cannot speak of the resurrected Christ in any other way than to say that that which lived in him spiritually, independently of the physical body, was not truly dead in death, but continued to be there, to live on.

It would take us too far afield today if I were also to explain to you what happened to the body. The important thing is that Scripture clearly and unambiguously points this out to us: from the moment of the resurrection onwards, we are dealing with the emergence of a new spiritual power that was not present before, with an outpouring of the spirit. And this inward miracle leads back to the resurrection from the dead, to the continuing life of the Christ, who was crucified as Jesus of Nazareth. Christ has made possible a new relationship with the spiritual world for humanity; thus the miracle of the cross is the progenitor of all miracles that take place in human life. In this way, spiritual science shows us a path to Christ; it shows us that the Christ is necessary for humanity. Only a timid mind could sense danger in such a path to Christ, because every path to Christ that is based on truth must and will be welcome (to those seeking the Christ).