The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Consider what is to be the subject of today's lecture only as an insertion into the series of lectures this winter. It is perhaps justified precisely by our fateful time, in which the two Central European empires, so closely connected with each other, must approach the great demands of historical becoming in our present and for the future. I also believe I am justified in saying something about the intellectual life of Austria, since I lived in Austria until I was almost thirty years old and had not only the opportunity but also the necessity from a wide variety of perspectives to become fully immersed in Austrian intellectual life. On the other hand, it may be said that this Austrian intellectual life is particularly, I might say, difficult for the outsider to grasp in terms of ideas, concepts, and representations, and that perhaps our time will make it increasingly necessary for the peculiarities of this Austrian intellectual life to be brought before the mind's eye of a wider circle. But because of the shortness of the time at my disposal I shall be unable to give anything but, I might say, incoherent pictures, unpretentious pictures of the Austrian intellectual life of the most diverse classes; pictures which do not claim to give a complete picture, but which are intended to form one or other idea which might seek understanding for what is going on in the intellectual life beyond the Inn and the Erz Mountains.

In 1861, a philosopher who was rarely mentioned outside his homeland and who was closely connected to Austrian intellectual life, Robert Zimmermann, took up his teaching post at the University of Vienna, which he then held until the 1890s. He not only awakened many people spiritually, guiding them through philosophy on their spiritual path, but he also influenced the souls of those who taught in Austria, as he chaired the Real- und Gymnasialschul-Prüfungskommission (examination commission for secondary modern and grammar schools). And he was effective above all because he had a kind and loving heart for all that was present in emerging personalities; that he had an understanding approach for everything that asserted itself in the spiritual life at all. When Robert Zimmermann took up his post as a philosophy lecturer at the University of Vienna in 1861, he spoke words in his inaugural academic address that provide a retrospective of the development of worldviews in Austria in the nineteenth century. They show very succinctly what made it difficult for Austrians to arrive at a self-sustaining worldview during this century.

Zimmermann says: “For centuries in this country, the oppressive spell that lay on the minds was more than the lack of original disposition capable of holding back not only an independent flourishing of philosophy but also the active connection to the endeavors of other Germans. As long as the Viennese university was largely in the hands of the religious orders, medieval scholasticism prevailed in its philosophy lecture halls. When, with the dawn of an enlightened era, it passed into secular management around the middle of the last century, the top-down system of teachers, teachings and textbooks, which was ordered from above, made the independent development of a free train of thought impossible. The philosophy of Wolff – which in the rest of Germany had been overcome by Kant – in the diluted version of Feder, with a smattering of English skepticism, became the intellectual nourishment of the young Austrians thirsting for knowledge. Those who, like the highly educated monk of St. Michael's in Vienna, longed for something higher had no choice but to secretly seek the way across the border to Wieland's hospitable sanctuary after discarding the monastic robe. This Barnabite monk, whom the world knows by his secular name of Karl Leonhard Reinhold, and the Klagenfurt native Herbert, Schiller's former housemate, are the only public witnesses to the involvement of the closed spiritual world on this side of the Inn and the Erz mountains in the powerful change that took hold of the spirits of the otherworldly Germany towards the end of the past, the philosophical century."

One can understand that a man speaks in this way who had participated in the 1848 movement out of an enthusiastic sense of freedom, and who then thought in a completely independent way about fulfilling his philosophical teaching. But one can also ask oneself: Is not this picture, which the philosopher draws almost in the middle of the nineteenth century, perhaps tinged with some pessimism, some pessimism? It is easy for an Austrian to see things in black and white when judging his own country, given the tasks that have fallen to Austria due to the historical necessities – I say expressly: the historical necessities – that the empire, composed of a diverse, multilingual mixture of peoples, had to find its tasks within this multilingual mixture of peoples. And when one asks such a question, perhaps precisely out of good Austrian consciousness, all sorts of other ideas come to mind.

For example, one can think of a German Austrian poet who is truly a child of the Austrian, even the southern Austrian mountains; a child of the Carinthian region, born high up in the Carinthian mountains and who, through an inner spiritual urge, felt compelled to descend to the educational institutions. I am referring to the extraordinarily important poet Fercher von Steinwand.

Among Fercher von Steinwand's poems, there are some very remarkable presentations. I would like to present just one example to your souls as a picture of this Austrian intellectual life, as a picture that can immediately evoke something of how the Austrian, out of his innermost, most original, most elementary intellectual urge, can be connected with certain ideas of the time. Fercher von Steinwand, who knew how to write such wonderful “German Sounds from Austria” and who was able to shape everything that moves and can move human souls from such an intimate mind, also knew how to rise with his poetry to the heights where the human spirit tries to grasp what lives and works in the innermost weaving of the world. For example, in a long poem, of which I will read only the beginning, called “Chor der Urtriebe” (Choir of Primeval Instincts).

In the boundless expanse
of our ancient mother Night,
hark! there seems to be a struggle
of the most mysterious power!
Do we hear foreboding stride?
Has longing awakened?
Has a flash of inspiration ignited?
Do dreams glide through the vastness?
How the forces of the forces intoxicate each other,
blissful exchange!
Sudden hurrying,
quiet lingering,
revelatory listening
alternates with waving
Amazed fear!
The charm of attainment
Rises, to sink,
Sinks, to hate,
White with the pale
Image of the embrace
Hatred not to grasp.
Dark ramifications
Sprouting affections
Seek for tendrils.
Heavy thoughts
Dawn and falter
Over the expanses,
Seem to guess
Or to guide.
What they prepare
Are they the seeds
Of mighty deeds,
Radiant times?
Who felt the stirred up
Creatively!
Who wandered through it,
Blissfully enjoying,
Or untangled it,
Opening up great things!
Up there it moves like a ghostly embrace,
We in warmth,
We also gain,
search and ponder,
see ourselves lifted,
highest endeavor
happily interwoven.
That blows around us,
arises in us:
“It is you, ideas! -—"

The poet sees how, as he seeks to delve into the “choir of primal urges” that are world-creative, ideas come to him. He seeks to rise up to that world that lived in the minds of the philosophers I had the honor of speaking of last week: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. But we may ask ourselves how it was possible for that intimate bond to be woven in Fercher von Steinwand's soul, which must have connected him – and it really connected him – between the urge of his soul, which awakened in the simple peasant boy from the Carinthian mountains, and between what the greatest idealistic philosophers in the flowering of German world view development sought to strive for from their point of view. And so we ask: Where could Fercher von Steinwand find this, since, according to Robert Zimmermann's words, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel were not presented in Austria during Fercher von Steinwand's youth – he was born in 1828 – since they were forbidden fruit during his youth there? But the truth always comes out. When Fercher von Steinwand had graduated from high school and, equipped with his high school diploma, went to Graz to attend the University of Graz, he enrolled in lectures. And there was a lecture that the lecturer reading it on natural law was reading. He enrolled in natural law and could naturally hope that he would hear a lot of all kinds of concepts and ideas about the rights that man has by nature, and so on. But lo and behold! Under the unassuming title “Natural Law,” good Edlauer, the Graz university professor, the lawyer, spoke of nothing but Fichte, Schelling and Hegel for the entire semester. And so Fercher von Steinwand took his course in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel during this time, quite independently of what might have been considered forbidden, and perhaps really was forbidden, according to an external view of Austrian intellectual life. Quite independently of what was going on at the surface, a personality who was seeking a path into the spiritual worlds was therefore immersing himself in this context with the highest intellectual endeavor.

Now, when one sets out to follow such a path into the spiritual worlds through Austrian life, one must bear in mind – as I said, I do not want to justify anything, but only give pictures – that the whole nature of this Austrian spiritual life offers many, many puzzles to those – yes, I cannot say otherwise – who are looking for a solution to puzzles. But anyone who likes to observe the juxtaposition of contradictions in human souls will find much of extraordinary significance in the soul of the Austrian. It is more difficult for the Austrian German to work his way up than in other areas, for example in German, I would say, not so much in education, but in the use of education, in participating in education. It may look pedantic, but I have to say it: it is difficult for the Austrian to participate in the use of his intellectual life simply because of the language. For it is extremely difficult for the Austrian to speak in the way that, say, the Germans of the Reich speak. He will very easily be tempted to say all short vowels long and all long vowels short. He will very often find himself saying “Son” and “Sohne” instead of “Son” and “Sonne”. Where does something like that come from? It is due to the fact that Austrian intellectual life makes it necessary – it is not to be criticized, but only described – that anyone who, I might say, works their way up from the soil of the folk life into a certain sphere of education and intellect has to take a leap over an abyss – out of the language of their people and into the language of the educated world. And of course only school gives them the tools to do so. The vernacular is correct everywhere; the vernacular will say nothing other than: “Suun”, quite long, for “Sohn”, “D'Sun”, very short, for “Sonne”. But at school it becomes difficult to find one's way into the language, which, in order to handle education, must be learned. And this leap across the abyss is what gives rise to a special language of instruction. It is this school language, not some kind of dialect, that leads people everywhere to pronounce long vowels as short vowels and short vowels as long vowels. From this you can see that, if you are part of the intellectual life, you have a gulf between you and the national character everywhere. But this national character is rooted so deeply and meaningfully, not so much perhaps in the consciousness of each individual as, one might say, in each person's blood, that the power I have hinted at is experienced inwardly, and can even be experienced in a way that cuts deep into the soul. And then phenomena come to light that are particularly important for anyone who wants to consider the place of Austrian higher intellectual life in the intellectual life of Austrian nationality and the connection between the two. As the Austrian works his way up into the sphere of education, I would say that he is also lifted into a sphere, in terms of some coinage of thought, some coinage of ideas, so that there really is a gulf to the people. And then it comes about that more than is otherwise the case, something arises in the Austrian who has found his way into intellectual life, something that draws him to his nationality. It is not a home for something that one has left only a short time ago, but rather a homesickness for something from which one is separated by a gulf in certain respects, but in relation to which one cannot, for reasons of blood, create it, find one's way into it.

And now let us imagine, for example, a mind – and it can be quite typical of Austrian intellectual life – that has undergone what an Austrian scientific education could offer it. It now lives within it. In a certain way, it is separated from its own nationality by this scientific education, which it cannot achieve with ordinary homesickness, but with a much deeper sense of homesickness. Then, under certain circumstances, something like an inner experience of the soul occurs, in which this soul says to itself: I have immersed myself in something that I can look at with concepts and ideas, that from the point of view of intelligence certainly leads me here or there to understand the world and life in connection with the world; but on the other side of an abyss there is something like a folk philosophy. What is this folk philosophy like? How does it live in those who know nothing and have no desire to know anything of what I have grown accustomed to? What does it look like over there, on the other side of the abyss? — An Austrian in whom this homesickness has become so vivid, which is much deeper than it can usually occur, this homesickness for the source of nationality, from which one has grown out, such an Austrian is Joseph Misson.

Misson, who entered a religious order in his youth, absorbed the education that Robert Zimmermann pointed out, lived in this education and was also active in this education; he was a teacher at the grammar schools in Horn, Krems and Vienna. But in the midst of this application of education, the philosophy of his simple farming people of Lower Austria, from which he had grown out, arose in him, as in an inner image of the soul, through his deep love of his homeland. And this Joseph Misson in the religious habit, the grammar school teacher who had to teach Latin and Greek, immersed himself so deeply in his people, as if from memory, that this folklore revealed itself poetically in him in a living way, so that one of the most beautiful, most magnificent dialect poems in existence was created. I will just, to paint a picture for you, recite a small piece from this dialect poetry, which was only partially published in 1850 – it was then not completed – just the piece in which Joseph Misson so truly presents the philosophy of life of the Lower Austrian farmer. The poem is called: “Da Naaz,” - Ignaz - “a Lower Austrian farmer's boy, goes abroad”. So, Naaz has grown up in the Lower Austrian farmhouse, and he has now reached the point where he has to make his way into the world. He must leave his father and mother, the parental home. There he is given the teachings that now truly represent a philosophy of life. One must not take the individual principles that the father says to the boy, but one must take them in their spiritual context; how it is spoken about the way one has to behave towards luck when it comes, towards fate ; how one should behave when this or that happens to one; how one should behave when someone does one good; how one should behave towards kind people and how towards those who do one harm. And I would like to say: to someone who has undergone his philosophical studies to the extent that he has become a theologian, this peasant philosophy now makes sense. So the father says to the Naaz when the Naaz goes out:

From the first song.
Teach your children on the road.

Naaz, iazn loos, töös, wos a ta so, töös sockt ta tai Voda.
Gootsnom, wails scho soo iis! und probiast tai Glück ö da Waiden.
Muis a da sogn töös, wo a da so, töös los der aa gsackt sai.
I and my mother were dreaming and dreaming, as you know, seeing nothing else.
What we see, work and worry about,
We do it for the children, what we don't do, is not good enough! —
If we are once a little pressed for time and are short of hands, take it easy, but find us a few decent places for the children, preferably under the shade of trees, where the fish spawn. —
If your luck turns around, so live not all the days,
Stay even, in the middle of the river, don't cut the rope too short.
Luck is round and round, so roll it back again soon.
If good luck and misfortune happen, it doesn't lie in sorrows.
Don't let anything get you down, don't let it get to the clouds.
If we're down, we'll pull through, I hope so, he'll do it again!
Mocka'r and hocka'r and pfnotten and trenzen with the kimt nix außa.
Kopfhängad, grod ols won amt' Heana s Prot häden gfressa:
Töös mochts schlimmi nöd guit, gidanka'r ös Guidi no pessa!
Look at the situation we are in, think about the future!
If you give us something, don't be stingy, take this and that: it's good!
Look, my dear, we realize: a little courtesy is not too much to ask for! —
It's getting more chivalrous, foreign people, it's a saying, a word of honor.
Don't be too proud, don't be afraid of a fool.
Don't open your coat, don't let your luck run out.
There are two weeks below and one above, so give an old one. If no one chips what is also often there, give a groden. Look after your health, health is allways good for the soul. What have we, who have everything in this world, if we are not healthy? Our friends and our comrades in arms! Olli, they may know us – and fools, fools is the best!

Translation:

A lesson from my father for the journey

Ignaz, now listen, what I say to you, your father says to you.
In God's name, because it has to be so, and you should seek your fortune in the wide world,
That is why I have to tell you this, and take to heart what I say to you.
I and your mother are old and have stayed at home; you know that you can't make anything out of that.
You slave away, toil, work hard and weaken yourself with worry. You do this for the sake of your children; what wouldn't you do to keep them from going astray. If you have grown weak and sickly later in life, and hard times come, they will also jump in lovingly, but you can find this in proper, righteous children, helping to provide the things that the state and life demand so that we can have some relief.
If you should ever be lucky, don't live like a cavalier.
Stay as you were, in the golden mean of the middle road, don't stray from the right path in life.
Luck is round like a ball; it rolls away from us just as easily as it comes to us. If something doesn't work out or you experience misfortune, don't talk about it to people. Stay calm; don't let anything show on your face; don't be timid; complain about everything to God only; ask him; I tell you, he makes everything better again! Acting sad, withdrawing, making sour faces, being whiny: none of this achieves anything. |
Hanging your head as if the chickens had eaten your bread:
This does not improve anything bad, let alone make the good even better!
Keep the possessions you take with you; plan for the future a little.
If someone gives you something, accept it without being ungracious and say, “May God reward you!” —
Pay attention, Ignaz; and remember this well: no one has ever been punished for being polite! —
Don't be contrary; being away from home makes people modest; that's a saying and it's true.
Don't be tempted into gambling; don't pay too much attention to the dance floor.
Don't have your cards read; and don't seek your destiny in the dream book.
If two paths go in different directions, and one of them is new, then go the old one.
If one of them is uneven, which is often the case, then go the even one.
Guard your health; of all goods, health is the better one.
Admit it: what in the world do you really possess if you don't have your health?
-----
If you come home one day and no longer find us old people in this little room,
then we will be where your grandfather and grandmother are joyfully awaiting us,
where our benefactors will find us and our deceased relatives. Everyone will recognize us immediately – and this, Ignaz, is a very beautiful thing. Now it says:

From the second song.
How the girl leaves her father's house and gives her father's home sorrow and tears.

Vodar and Muidar said: “Good luck for all we hope for,
We wish you a long life and good health!”
“As you wish,” said Muida and wiped the tears from my eyes,
“If you want respect and honor in this world, that's how we pray."
“People set it up earlier and people later,
I and your dad, we pray, child, that no misfortune befalls you.
Go to your niece and nephew and bring them to the Moata; stop by in Piasenrait, don't stay at the Moam's, you'll find a welcome, see everything beautiful, Naaz, and say hello a lot; When you come, we will be very happy to see you, when you come home!"
The old woman cries and gives him a Guglhupf cake, a soapbox and
, in addition, a white, newly washed cloth.
Hoamlih gives him three more in a paper bag.
The Vada gives him an extra two guilders, more can't be given.
“Money, Naaz, is a piglet that won't be viable at will, Naaz."
The door opens, and Naaz looks around the room,
“Main!” says Muida, ‘that's a terrible thing to say!’
He points to the gun rack hanging just inside the door:
“Gootsnom!” Muida says, makes a cross on his forehead with a damar – and then
-----
“I'm serious, Naaz, now goodbye, take care that all is well, Naaz!
Come on, let's go to the barn, so that we know right away
Where or when or what or said that something has fallen. If you come across the Graanitz, don't take a smudge pot full of ears
Drink from a watered well, it helps for the Hungarian crown!»
Godspeed once more and once more and go out into the world with trepidation.
Hunotmal doesn't ring, they look around and beckon to their father. “Look at your sign,” cries the father of the wide world, ‘it's not valid!” “Go to the Moam,’ cries the old mother, ‘we greet you, don't forget us.’

Narration:
How Ignaz leaves his father's house and his parents see him off.

Father and mother, I bid you farewell and God bless you for all the kindness you have shown me.
I hope with all my heart that you live a long life and stay healthy.
As God wills, says the mother and wipes her eyes with the corner of her handkerchief,
If the Lord calls us from the world, we are prepared for it.
For some people it is given up earlier and for some later.
I and your father pray, Ignaz, that no misfortune befalls you.
We will walk with you for a bit and accompany you to the image of the Mother of God.
Once you are in Piasenrait, stop by at your aunt's. You will be welcomed there.
Tell her all the nice things, Ignaz, and give her our warmest regards.
If she can come, we would be very happy if she visited us.
So speaks the old mother and wraps him a crumpet, a pastry, and also a piece of white bread in a freshly washed 'cloth'. She secretly gives him three shiny new twenties, wrapped in paper. The father gives him a two-guilder piece, more he cannot give. We don't have much money, Ignaz, take what you can with good will.
Before the door opens, Ignaz looks around and takes one last look at the room.
“Oh dear,” says his mother, ‘that's a bad sign, as if you'll never see it again,’
and she dips two fingers into the holy water font hanging next to the door.
In God's name, says the mother, and makes a cross on his forehead with his thumb – and they leave. Now it's getting serious, Ignaz, now God keep you, be well, Ignaz, Let us hear from you from time to time so that we always know how you are doing or if you are sick. When you come to Graanitz, take a handful of earth beforehand,
Austrian for: border. Drink it in diluted wine, it helps against fever.
They say goodbye to you, once and again, and part sadly.
A hundred times is not enough for them to look around and wave their hands.
“Mind your ID,” the father calls from afar, ‘don't lose it.” “Go to your aunt,’ the old woman calls, ‘we send her our regards, don't forget that.’

The entire philosophy of the farming community emerges before the friar, and so vividly that one sees how intimately he has grown with it. But he is also connected to something else: to that which is so fundamentally connected to the Austrian character, to the character of the Austro-German peasantry in the Alps: to the direct, unspoilt view of nature that arises from the most direct coexistence with nature. The description of a thunderstorm is owed to what comes to life again in Joseph Misson. It vividly describes how the Naaz now travels and how he comes to a place where heath sheep graze, which a shepherd, called a Holdar there, knows how to observe closely: how they behave when a thunderstorm is coming. Now he tells himself what he sees there:

When a cloud appears in the west and it doesn't come from below, it means a thunderstorm.
“One,” he thinks, ‘is coming, the other is going, now you have to decide which way you're going.’
Get on a donkey and look – now it thunders!
Immediately again – and how it rumbles over the Beringer!
It roars and rushes powerfully into the wood, that it is completely out!
“Oh, where this breaks out, our heaven be gracious!"
Then the Holdar, takes off his hat and ‘if only,’
he looks at the Guirkan, ‘if only it doesn't scare someone!’
“Just as we are,” he says, ‘two thunderstorms are coming together.’ (This convergence of two thunderstorms is now vividly described.)
And the dog sticks its snout up in the air and sniffs the air.
He points to a swallow, which flies quietly to the barn and drinks.
Then it is quiet and sultry and the air thickens.
The birds fall asleep in the nests and the sheep bow their heads.

Reproduction:
How Ignaz gets caught in the weather and doesn't know whether to

Listen, he says to himself, sit down for a moment and think about which way you will go.
He goes to the heath and looks around – suddenly there is a clap of thunder,
followed by another, and how it rumbles over the mountains!
It creaks and hisses mightily in the wood, as if it were completely dead. Well, may the Lord have mercy on anyone this happens to, says the lad to himself, taking off his coat, saying, looking at the clouds, just hoping it doesn't start raining. It seems to me, he says, like two thunderstorms mixed together. And the dog lifts its muzzle to sniff the air, then, sensing no danger, draws its tail between its legs, goes over to the lad and lies down beside him. Now it is quiet and sultry, and the leaves tremble in the trees, the birds sleep in their nests, and the sheep put their heads together.

The good Naaz is aware of all this, and then the poet, who has meanwhile described how the Naaz entered “a Lucka” - a rock cave, a stone cave - waits there until the worst is over. Then he hangs his boots on the other shoulder and continues on his way. But the adventure with the weather is not over yet. Naaz comes to a little stream; which has of course swelled due to the weather. Naaz sees that:

"Look, the stream is so big, now I can't go around! —
Töös owa», sockt a, «wiat toh wos sain? iozt kan ik nid umi!»
He looks like a fool, the stream is too big, now he cannot cross it.
But something like that, he says, what could it be? Now I cannot cross it!

Now, in such a way, Misson, this man who really created from the depths of the folk tradition, wanted to embody the figure of Naaz. When one takes on such a figure, one sees how deeply, deeply in the subconscious soul, I could say, Austrian nationality sits with those souls who have also worked their way up into a high sphere of education. And one sees from such an example what remains of nationality for the soul in the higher sphere of education when one looks at this Austrian nationality.

One must say: mystics, in the sense that the human soul really delves into its inner life, really tries to understand what lives and moves within man, such mystics are not really found in Austria. Mystics who deal a lot with the human ego cannot flourish there. On the other hand, to feel the mysterious forces of nature in a certain way, more than just poetically, I would say, to feel the gnomes, the goblins, the spirits of nature in their liveliness, also with a certain humor, so that at the right moment you do not feel compelled to admit the full reality, but to feel in the co-experience of nature that which lives and moves in nature as a higher spiritual being – that is Austrian again. Therefore, within the Austro-German national character, it is not easy to find mystics who could be successors of Eckhart, Johannes Tauler.

On the other hand, the remarkable peasant philosopher Conrad Deubler is a truly Austrian figure. He was born in 1814 in Goisern, in the middle of the mountains, and died there in 1884 as an innkeeper. He was and remained a true farmer; but a man who so he has grasped it vividly, has penetrated it with his peasant wisdom, with a certain, I would say, curt peasant wisdom, — Conrad Deubler, such a philosopher could flourish; a philosopher who did not get involved in lengthy justifications, but liked this doctrine, and now he took from the Austrian mind everything to make this teaching appear plausible. From a primitive, elementary, rustic understanding he brought about, I might say, a Darwinian conception adapted to the Austrian peasant, by means of which he was able to carry on a copious correspondence with the great theologian and writer David Friedrich Strauss, with Feuerbach, with Ernst Haeckel, and so on. To grasp the whole expanse of nature with the intellect is more to the taste of the Austrian soul than to mystically immerse oneself in it. Therefore, one finds individual people among Austrian farmers who know every little herb in the mountains, who are also spiritually connected to the inner workings of each little herb, who, for example, engage with philosophers such as Ennemoser and Eckartshausen, who want to give a certain deeper picture of nature in its entirety, and who also want to place the human being in this picture of nature. But within this Austrian peasantry and that which arises from this peasantry, one will not easily find a pure mystic who engages in the contemplation of the human soul, averting his gaze from the external world of the senses. For it is the direct connection with that which makes an impression on the senses that characterizes the Austrian mind in the broadest sense for anyone who sees it – the seeing of more than the sensual, but the direct seeing – the seeing that does not need to reflect, that seeing that, I might say, sometimes skips the mind and goes directly to the heart.

Therefore, it can be said that in Austrian poetry, the soul and the landscape resonate with each other directly, sometimes in a way that is so moving, as in the case of Lena; but in general, this absorption of the whole soul in what can be done directly by a person, what can be accomplished by him without it being related to immediate usefulness, - that is something that belongs to the emotional qualities of the Austrian.

I would like to say, on the one hand, on this side of the Leitha, in the Austrian mountains, in the Austrian regions, there is something that can be depicted in a picture, as I attempted with Joseph Misson. On the other side of the Leitha, you are immediately in touch with the wide-open spaces of the Hungarian steppes; but you also live with what resounds in the sensual, I would say, spiritually, which the sensual tries to exhaust spiritually as much as it can be exhausted. Anyone who has ever crossed over to Hungary and listened to a Hungarian band, with all that these people put of their souls into their simple and wonderful playing, in which pain rages demonically, the lust and the exuberance of life at the same time, understands a poem like that of the Hungarian Szäz, which refers to this direct coexistence with the sensual, but which is felt spiritually, deeply spiritually and emotionally:

Listen, oh listen to the violin's song.
How it laments and how it weeps;
So much sorrow in four strings,
So much pain and grief combined!

Like the nightingales' flutes
In the silent, shadowy forest,
How the sobs of the abandoned orphan

That is lament, that is sorrow,
Which oppresses and yet uplifts,
Which weeps for the past, yet hopefully
Lives for a beautiful future.

Listen, a curse is heard – and swords
Mix clashing into the But a little fiddle bow.

Hear, oh hear the violin sounds,
How it spurs and laughs and cries,
In four strings such feeling,
So much joy and pain combined! —

You have to look very closely to understand the relevant things, you have to look very closely at the intimate interweaving of the senses with the outside world, so that the senses, in their interweaving with the outside world within the sensual, can more easily see the spiritual than when this spiritual awakens intellectually in the mind. It can be said that when it comes to making a judgment directly from the heart, to criticizing or approving the world, the Austrian will, under certain circumstances, have a little confidence in himself. He will also, especially if he has learned something, like to move in abstract terms, he will like to give something to the culture of the head, but above all want to be rooted in the culture of the heart. But the way from the head to the heart, the way from the heart to the head, is just so long, and it is so difficult to find! Often one easily stops in the middle!

It is, in a sense, quite characteristic of what, for example, a good connoisseur of Austrian culture, a contemporary, said about an Austrian personality, the former director of the Burgtheater in Vienna, Max Burckhard: that despite all his energy, the most characteristic thing about this quintessentially Austrian man, Max Burckhard, was that he never really wanted to undergo the transition from feeling to understanding or from understanding to feeling. He wanted to keep them both separate. While Max Burckhard was director of the Vienna Burgtheater, Hermann Bahr recounts, and Wilbrandt's play 'The Master of Palmyra' was to be performed at the Burgtheater, a play that is considered by many to be particularly significant and that for many is something tremendously high-minded, Burckhard did not want to stage the play. He could not understand why something so significant was seen in it; he always rejected it. So it was that well-meaning people, that is, people who meant well by Wilbrandt and the “Master of Palmyra,” managed to at least get Burckhard to attend a lecture on the “Master of Palmyra” in a really high-level society. He knew the piece, of course, but it was not to be read to him, but all the beautiful, aesthetic passages, the treatises were to have an effect on him, which the invited real professors and asthetics had to present about the mastery of this piece. Well, Burckhard was really a very clever man who, when it came down to it, was able to dialectically stand his ground and get into the spiritual ideas. He listened to the lecture. He did not just listen to the lectures of the aesthetes and professors, who said that something had been created “from the depths of human nature that points to the highest regions of spiritual life”. He also listened to how the beautiful characteristics are to be understood according to all chapters of aesthetics. He was silent. He did not allow himself to follow these trains of thought in any way. He could understand them, of course. It would have been easy for him to refute the matter from his point of view, to get involved in it. On another occasion, he might have done so, getting involved in long-winded discussions about the matter. He remained silent, he said nothing. Then ladies, especially the lady of the house, approached him: didn't he at least want to say how he related to all the witty remarks about one of the most witty plays ever written. Was it not the duty of the Burgtheater to perform the epoch-making play? But he did not engage in a discussion. He said: “I'm not putting it on!” And why? Why? They wanted to hear from him, the witty man, how he related to all the things that had been discussed wittily for hours. He just said: “Because it's a Holler!” — “A Holler” is something that means the same in Austria as “quatsch” in Berlin. But he did not engage in a discussion. That is to be taken as characteristic. He relied on his immediate judgment of the heart, on what his mind told him, and he did not find it necessary to engage in discussions of dialectics and so on; his whole criticism was that it is a “Holler”.

And so it is interesting to see, actually, how at a time when the most wonderful and glorious discussions were being held within the rest of the German-speaking world about the significance, nature and essence of drama, discussions in which Goethe and Schiller participated in such a profound way – I am referring in particular to the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century – how in this period a discussion of aesthetics, of the meaning and essence of drama, was also ignited in Austria. But how was the discussion of drama ignited there in Austria? In a very strange way, everything that was presented there for and against this way of thinking ignited in Austria; what was discussed in such a well-known profound way within the Schiller-Goethe circle and the broader circles of the whole of German intellectual life, all of this ignited in Austria in a very peculiar way, namely through dance. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, two types of dance were the subject of a very energetic and significant discussion there. At the turn of the century, Noverre was the master of dance; and his student was then Muzzarelli. Muzzarelli represented a dance, a style of dance, in which the main thing was to make beautiful movements, artificial movements, to intertwine artificial movements through their lines, where the external spatial image of presenting oneself was taken into account. Now, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, an opponent of this 'dance form' emerged in the person of Salvatore Vigano. And for this dance form of Salvatore Vigano, whose wife in particular danced the dance form he represented in a masterly fashion, whole texts were written, which did not apply to any other dance form. Whole stories, whole narratives were clothed in the dance form, so that the situations, the gestures, the form of expression, the events, the content to be told, were expressed. And now one should just delve into the far-reaching, passion-stirring discussions that have arisen about which dance is artistically the right one.

There was the Austrian playwright Ayrenhoff, who had already grown old at the time, the author of a large number of plays, who was completely on the side of the Muzzarelli dance, who spoke out most negatively against Salvatore Vigano and against the impossibility of expressing inner feelings through dance in such an unchaste way. Ayrenhoff could not understand that they even wanted to dance entire pieces, such as 'Richard the Lionheart' or 'The Daughter of the Air'. Ayrenhoff had been educated in the appreciation of beautiful form, of the sweep of lines, and his dramas were also constructed in this way. The sweep of lines in the portrayal of characters, seeing how some situation dissolves into a joke, or the transition of a situation into a joke, that was what mattered. These extraordinary forms were what mattered. He saw this in Muzzarelli's dance as well. And he was an important poet for Austria at that time. His importance can be seen from the fact that he received extraordinary recognition from Frederick the Great, who otherwise had no interest in German literature of the time. And “The Stagecoach”, a comedy by Ayrenhoff, Frederick the Great called “the best comedy that is written at all except the comedies of Moliere”. Yes, Frederick the Great went so far as to once show himself at a parade of the field marshal lieutenant - because that was Ayrenhoff and at the same time a poet - because he, Frederick the Great, was so interested in him.

On the other side, on Viganos' side, was Heinrich Joseph von Collin, who came from Belgium; but in a sense, Belgium belonged to Austria at that time. He had written the tragedy “Regulus,” but also other plays. Collin now advocated expression in dance with great enthusiasm. And he now staged his dramas in such a way that they expressed inwardness in what was being portrayed; that it was not so much about the way situations and jokes followed one another, about the external forms, but rather that the inner nature of the human being was expressed in what happened on stage. And Robert Zimmermann, who is deeply rooted in Austrian intellectual life, has spoken very beautifully of this Heinrich Collin, showing that this Heinrich Collin, who is basically also completely forgotten in Austria, but who But who can lead us deep into the course of Austrian intellectual life, who knew nothing of Fichte, and in his dramas revived the same kind of soul-feeling that lay in Fichte's philosophical representations. To make matters worse, Heinrich Collin's brother, Matthäus von Collin, has explicitly shown how Heinrich Collin knew nothing of Fichte, how he arrived at Fichteanism, but in a poetic way, in his Austrian way, entirely out of a strange parallelism of intellectual life, in the way that I have just described.

Without reflecting on the intuition, without merging into the intuition, Fichte comes back to what I described eight days ago. He says: The outer sense world, that which man lives out in the sensual, outer existence, is the sensualized material of our duty. Now that duty confronts him in such a deeply objective way and at the same time becomes related to the divine weaving and being that permeates the world, Fichte comes to say: one must not think in such a way that external sensual happiness could be bestowed on the one who faithfully fulfills his duty, but — even if this is somewhat one-sided, in the way it is presented, the energy of a certain striving of German idealism expresses itself in it; things must not be taken dogmatically – but what Fichte says is: the one who is completely absorbed in his duty must not claim that the reward for it will somehow be found in the external world of the senses. Therefore, the truly tragic – and this was Fichte's conviction – will appear when duty does not find any reward, but rather finds misfortune in the external world.

Heinrich Collin presents the same tendency in his plays. He wants to embody in a dramatic way the human soul that is built upon itself, that can live within itself without combining the happiness of the sensual world with duty. And so a deeply ethical trait emerges, but one that is intimately connected with the direct contemplation of the world as it presents itself to the senses; one that has even emerged from an aesthetics that has been formed through dance.

This close connection with observation, this life in direct perception and also the placing of what the heart experiences in direct perception, the reluctance to seek the way from the head to the heart, must be seen as one of the characteristics that are really deeply connected with this Austrian intellectual life.

And so many things in this Austrian spiritual life appear to us in such a way that contradictions are present in it, but contradictions that, if one lets them take effect in the right way, seem understandable in people who, within Europe, are placed in difficult tasks, in the mediation of the West with the East, and, I would like to say, must feel this placing in every detail of their way of life.

One can say: Wherever we touch this Austrian intellectual life, it appears to us as follows: the innermost is directly fanned in the outer world, without the mediation of a mystical dialectic. And from this underground, a phenomenon as likeable as the Austrian philosopher Bartholomäus von Carneri can be explained – as I said, I only want to present images. He was born in Trento in 1821, the son of an Austrian civil servant; deformed from birth (he was a twin), he already went through a difficult, painful youth, and then, after he had familiarized himself with the diversity of Austrian intellectual life, he became acquainted with Darwinism. For Carneri, Darwinism is not something that he simply accepts, but rather, for him, Darwinism becomes a life riddle itself. That the world, in the sense of Darwinism, can be explained by the externally observable development, is understandable to him, despite the fact that he has immersed himself deeply in German idealism. But in a certain respect, Darwinism becomes a life riddle for Carneri, the Austrian philosopher: If Darwinism is correct, what about human morality, human ethics? And so Bartholomew of Carneri becomes, one might say, the greatest ethicist, the greatest moral teacher of Darwinism. He interprets Darwinism in such a way that he seeks within the purely natural development, how the forces of nature complicate up to man, so that he still sees a spiritualization in this complication of the forces of nature, as they configure themselves. He does not want a rift between nature and spirit, but he does not want to stop at nature. He wants to chase the spirit out of itself in the configuration of the forces of nature. At the same time, he wants to find the connection between human ethics and human moral life and the explanation of nature in terms of Darwinism. Thus, for Carneri, the necessity to create an ethic arises directly from the world that appears vivid to him through Darwinism. I would like to say that what the human heart wants and needs to set before itself must be directly connected to the secrets and mysteries of nature. And it is particularly interesting to see in Bartholomäus von Carneri how he now strives for a unified world view, for a world view that fully embraces Darwinism in the spirit of the times, in the spirit of nineteenth-century materialism, but can only embrace it if if spirituality springs and can spring everywhere in nature itself, but a spirituality that is grasped directly in feeling, that is not first brought down from some transcendental spheres, as with Fichte, but that appears to him directly during the experience of sensuality. It is remarkable how the characteristic of Austrianism appears precisely in such a personality, in a personality like Carneri, who, however, also wants to place himself uniformly in the world in a different way, who everywhere sets out to show how, on the one hand, nature reaches up to the spirit, and on the other hand, the spirit works down to nature, how a unity lives in everything. Carneri also sought to depict this unity in life. He sought to bring it into life. And so one of the personalities arises, who appeared in particular in the 1860s and 1870s in Austria as fine minds, one of the personalities who were then also politically active. Carneri was on the side of the intellectual Austrian politicians of the 1870s, Plener, Beer, Herbst, Berger and so on. But wherever he spoke – and he often spoke – his words were imbued with a lofty idealism, but precisely with an idealism rooted in Darwinism, which was aware of its roots in Darwinism: I may be an idealist because my ideals come to me directly when I immerse myself in the development of nature.

It is the same spirit, in another field, that then again held sway in Robert Hamerling. In Robert Hamerling, in whom, I might say, the Austrian German found expression in the fact that Hamerling's motto was: “Germany is my fatherland, Austria is my motherland,” which combined good Austrian-ness with good German-ness. In this Hamerling everything that can be called the interpenetration of idealism with direct feeling and with intuition found direct expression. Even in Austria, where people might have been better able to understand it, Hamerling's vividly sensual images, I would say sensually imbued images, were often condemned, for example in his “Ahasver,” also in “Aspasia” and in “King of Sion.” But they did not understand that it was precisely Hamerling's idealism, which I would call Austrian idealism, that needed the sensory image to visualize itself in, so as not to suffer from the division of the world into the sensual on the other. And so for Hamerling the spiritualized sensual, the aesthetic idealism, became the goal toward which he directed his whole feeling, his whole perception and his whole thinking as a vision of the future. And in many respects it is precisely in the case of such intellectuals as Carneri and Hamerling that the difficulties of Austrian intellectual life come to light, difficulties which consist in the fact that one is placed in a multiform surging mass of humanity and has to find one's way. Hence the phenomena that so often occur within Austrian intellectual life, where a clear view of this or that remains with mere description and does not somehow find its way into action and then peter out in a certain pessimism. Hence certain phenomena are only possible in Austrian intellectual life.

Is it not really somewhat strange that there was an Austrian in the first half of the nineteenth century who was born near Znaim, who bore the typically Austrian name Karl Postl, who also became a clergyman at his mother's request, but then, like the Barnabite monk Karl Leonhard Reinhold, also cast off the robe of the order and disappeared? He has disappeared. Then a book appears: “Austria as it Is,” from America; it describes Austrian views. That was in 1828. Then, from this same Karl Postl, who called himself not Karl Postl but Charles Sealsfield, appear, for example, descriptions of the decline of the Native Americans, from which one can see how fundamentally sound this man's direct view of nature is. No one at that time had any idea that the simple Karl Postl from Austria was hidden in this Charles Sealsfield. All the stories that otherwise appear on similar subjects – just see for yourself – are written, so to speak, from the point of view of a certain education, written in a certain way, so that you notice the theory. These Postl stories are written in such a way that the eye immediately grows into what it sees; the whole soul grows together with direct perception. He then spends his lifetime from the age of thirty to the age of sixty in the canton of Solothurn in Switzerland, where he is also buried. He returns and describes the life of Germans in America in such a vivid way that it should still have a significant effect on the soul today, if only it were read.

A specifically Austrian phenomenon is also a personality, whom not only the younger, but perhaps the older members of the audience gathered here have met, those books that are written, as is modestly stated on the title page, “for maidens”; “Weihgeschenk für Jungfrauen” it says. A story, a wonderfully vivid story, steeped in a Goethean, one might almost say, Greek spirit. On the title page it says: “Weihgeschenk für Jungfrauen” by Christian Oeser, “Letters on the Main Subjects of Aesthetics.” Published in the first half of the nineteenth century in the first edition, these books experienced many editions. Those who read them today still get something from them that can expand the heart, that can warm the soul. Christian Oeser - yes, who is Christian Oeser? This Christian Oeser is the same man who, for example, had a drama published in Pressburg in 1839 that nobody knew the author of – “Life and Deeds of Emerich Tököly” “by A. Z.”, that is, from A to Z, so that all the letters between A and Z are included. Those who understood something about dramatic characterization saw in the figure of Tököly a Hungarian Götz. It is a portrayal that can be directly compared to Goethe's “Götz von Berlichingen”, which was born out of the struggles that took place in Hungary shortly before the drama was written and that moved many, many souls and the world. The drama went out into the world, and so did several others by the same author. No one knew who it was from. That remained so. In 1869, the German Schiller Foundation took a decision to pay the then support allowance to a Mrs. Therese Schröer in Vienna. The document with which the allowance was paid stated that it had been learned that the widow of one of the most worthy German writers was not living in circumstances befitting her and his merits, and that she was therefore being paid this annual allowance. It was the widow of Tobias Gottfried Schröer, the author of many plays, who had to remain unnamed, the author also of that “Weihgeschenkes für Jungfrauen”, which is imbued with the spirit of Goethe; a quiet man who was a secondary school teacher in Preßburg, but who, as such, wrestled with the highest problems of human life, who was poor and whom no one knew. Even in his own town no one could or might know that this man was the author of these dramas.

Many similar phenomena could be cited. They show that in order to get to know Austrian intellectual life, one must not consider it in terms of what, I mean, goes as a more or less Catholic, as a more or less Protestant current through the development of the times but how one must grasp this Austrian intellectual life where it works out of the root of the people and where it can appear directly in its great significance. One must not look at Austrian intellectual life through the lens of the fact that Austria is a more Catholic country. On the one hand, this Austrian intellectual life works its way to the roots of the nation, as we have seen with Misson; on the other hand, however, it works its way up to great heights in a remarkable way. Consider, for example, the following phenomena: When the Protestant pedagogue Friedrich Dittes, who was brought from Germany during the so-called Liberal Era of Austrian development and placed at the head of the K.K. When the Protestant pedagogue, who had been brought from Germany during the so-called Liberal Era of Austrian development, looked around for important pedagogues of the immediate past, he, the Protestant pedagogue who had been brought from Germany, found the Austrian Vincenz Eduard Milde to be one of the most important pedagogues of the immediate past. In 1811, Milde published an “educational theory”. In Misson, we have come to know a mind that, clothed in the robes of a religious order, worked its way up to what I would call the management of educational life, and then worked its way back down to the roots of folklore, creating his “Naaz”: peasant philosophy! In Milde we see another priest, a good Catholic; a Catholic in whom Friedrich Dittes, the Protestant pedagogue, finds one of his most important pedagogical predecessors. Spiritual life reaches out across the differences of confession in a wonderful way. Instead of a long further description, I would like to read you just one passage from Milde's theory of education, so that you can see how, in this book, published in 1811, educational work is understood in a soul-drenched way; how, in contrast to on, who worked his way down into the people, to the highest views, the most ideal views of general human activity through pedagogy, the Catholic priest Milde works his way up, how seriously, how dignified, how tremendously deep he takes the pedagogical profession. He describes how the teacher should behave in order to gain the right relationship with the pupil; first:

"1. Through diligent study of anthropology; 2. through reading well-written biographies and truthfully portrayed educational histories; 3. through thoughtful interaction with children, through unnoticed, quiet observation of them, especially of their behavior towards other children; 4. by remembering his own youth, by reflecting on the course, the reasons, the means and obstacles his own education, on the difference between his present and former way of thinking and feeling; 5. by reflecting on the success and failure of his efforts in educating the pupil; 6. by observing the methods of other educators and the success of their way of treating the children”; - finally - ‘7. by observing the course of development of nature left to itself.’

The meaning of life should be built on a healthy anthropology, that is, the study of man. Then the teacher should constantly consult with himself, as it were, meditating, in order to always find the way to the child's soul. A truly soul-filled educational vision is also poured out on this quite remarkable work, which arose, so to speak, in the quiet of Austrian intellectual life through a man who was a clergyman in the outer life, who rose to become Archbishop of Vienna and who, in his way, truly represents that Austrian intellectual life to which one attaches such great importance and to which one must attach such great importance; that Austrian intellectual life that is directed towards the general human and basically maintains the connection with the roots of the people everywhere. Yes, I say, in 1811 a leading work on education appeared in Austria that had a great impact and was also highly praised by the Protestant pedagogue Dittes in the 1860s and 1870s. It was published again very recently by the Austrian pedagogue Franz Tomberger in a short outline. One must only consider what that means. In 1811, it had only been a short time since teachers in very, very remote areas of the Austrian lands, namely the German-Austrian lands, had a very strange position, not only in the village but also in the city. Not only did the teacher not have a school building – in many areas, shortly before this “Erziehungslehre” was published, a school building was a rarity; the students gathered around the teacher, the teacher went from house to house, sometimes he was there, sometimes in the next house; wherever there was space, he taught. But that was not the only thing. For example, paying the teacher a salary, yes, that would not have been understood; that is something that must be given freely! But the teacher only needed to teach the students in winter; in summer, the children were needed outside in the fields anyway. Well, so that he doesn't starve, he is granted the right to herd cows during the summer, to be a “Holdar”. But that did not prevent all that I have just described from happening. And that did not prevent a work on the art of education from appearing after such a relatively short time in Austrian intellectual life that it was not only exemplary but also epoch-making. One has to familiarize oneself with this juxtaposition of contradictions that arise from the difficulties of Austrian life.

But this is also why the Austrian needs what appeared in the most diverse forms in Viennese life in the course of the nineteenth century. Actually, a piece of Viennese life is also what you were able to get to know here in Berlin some time ago, although it had been quite “de-Viennified” to a certain extent, as connoisseurs generally admitted – what you were able to get to know through the performance of “Alpenkönig und Menschenfeind” by Ferdinand Raimund, with the character of Rappelkopf, and, what is also well known from the same author, “Verschwender”. I do not want to speak of a well-known matter, but rather show how Austrian intellectual life can be illustrated here and there, as it were, by the splashing of a wave that makes visible in pictures what lives in Austria. Therefore, I want to speak less about Ferdinand Raimund than about the man who replaced him in the hearts of the Viennese in the 1830s and 1840s, when Raimund had become very much a part of their lives: Nestroy. And Johann Nestroy, as a folk dramatist, is, I would say, truly an Austrian product. Indeed, one has even had to hear from some clever people of the present day that Nestroy is even characterized by his fellow countrymen as not being a real Viennese, because in the early days of his career, in particular, he only told the Viennese rough truths, not only created folk plays where honest people are always right, but where he could really, forgive the harsh expression, give the people a piece of his mind. Plays like these made up the content of his first theatrical career. He actually created a great deal; in thirteen years, he wrote around seventy such farces. But they truly contain that Austrian spirit that those who know it recognize as being truly embodied in Nestroy. It is not true that the Austrians of that time wanted to hear honest portrayals of characters from the theater, of people who recognize the simplicity of life. No, that was then and Nestroy grew out of it – what was demanded was that one could say: Now he has given them what for again, that is, he has really given them a telling-off. And with such a scolding, Nestroy, himself playing at the Vienna Karl Theater, actually entertained the Viennese so much that one can say: one sees in the spirit that lives in these Nestroy folk farces, one might say folk city farces, the Austrian spirit that needs to, in the criticism of life as well as in the jokes about life, in the humor of life, to overcome many a difficulty; who needed to let his soul feel at ease after hard work in a light way, and yet in a way that was not entirely free of sympathy and antipathy. And so Nestroy is truly a typical figure of Austrian urban popular theater around the mid-nineteenth century. He had his view of life and of the events of life expressed by a character in the following manner: “I believe the worst of everyone, even of myself, and I have seldom been mistaken!” With this view of life, he, who was personally kind and loving, and who in personal dealings actually had only kind and loving words, really created character figures that easily illustrate the view of life of the Austrians in Vienna at that time , that Austrianness that wanted to be hard at work, but that wanted to build a philosophy of life from the heart, without much dialectic, that also had to have humor, that also should not exaggerate the seriousness of life too much. There was a lot in the way of facing life. So Nestroy created a character that kept reappearing under this name or under a different name; once he called him “Schnofer!” And this Schnoferl also had an attitude towards life. For example, he once talks about how he fared in life with love: “With love, things went splendidly for me, it was all right, but with dislike, things are always bad!” This same Schnoferl, who, as I said, cannot see the funny side of life, once said about what he saw in his own heart: “The pragmatic story of my heart falls into three miserable chapters: futile musings, failed attempts and worthless triumphs.” Those are the three miserable chapters. Nestroy portrayed such characters with great acuity, so much so that an important Viennese critic once said: “In Nestroy, you could see the demonic expression that could intensify to the point of being devilish when he let his eyes play from the stage into the audience.” And so Nestroy expressed well a certain Austrian view of life in need of humor in the years before 1848, or even from the beginning of the forties.

Then came a time when one could not bear this outpouring of good and evil, this Nestroyan world beyond good and evil, of good, over-good and evil people, for a while. One wanted more honest figures, one wanted to be moved more and sworn at less. One had had enough of swearing for a while, one wanted to be moved. Nestroy didn't really like that, and so he said: Yes, in the past people still knew something about what a life story is; in modern times, if you go by those who now create life stories for the stage, if there are only three jokes in it - in Nestroy's plays there was one joke after another - there are only corpses in their blood, gravediggers and blubberers. He didn't really want to go along with that. But then again, he was able to keep up with the times. And so Nestroy found a peculiar, I would even say humanly free point of view, especially during the difficult year of 1848. He was a liberal man, he was a man who was thoroughly on the side of the progressives, who did not depend on anyone in any direction, but at the same time he found the right words for many a cry for freedom, for those who only go so far. And so he managed to maintain Austrian humor even in these difficult times. Just look at this: in a play that was written during one of Austria's most difficult times, “Freedom in Krähwinkel” – he also played in this play himself – this Austrian describes how the mayor of Krähwinkel imagines freedom. He has the constable Klaus express it: “Freedom is something terrible. The Lord Mayor always says: the ruler is the father, the subject is a little child, and freedom is a sharp knife.” And one of those who, in a Nestroyesque way, understands this a little, who also understands the people of Krähwinkel in their pursuit of freedom, characterizes them in the same way: ”No, I know the people of Krähwinkel. I know the Krähwinkler, you just have to let them run riot; once the rapture is over, we'll catch them with our hand in it, and then we'll really tweak the people's nose.” In the role that Nestroy himself played, to which he gave the name ‘Ultra’, a freedom fighter now appears who is really portrayed in such a way that humor can once again take hold of him. Nestroy spoke the following through the Ultra: “Now that the fight that had broken out has ended happily, he proclaims freedom: 'I proclaim freedom of speech, of the press and other freedoms for Crowwinkel, indifference of all classes, free speech, free elections according to previous opinion, an infinitely broad basis, which will gradually extend in length, and in order to avoid all disputes in this matter, no system at all.” Then Ultra comes – one must always imagine him as presented by Nestroy himself – to an opinion about what reaction actually is. What is reaction? “Well,” says Ultra, ‘as it was on a large scale, so we have had it here on a small scale. Reaction is a spectre, but spectres only exist for the timid: so don't be afraid of it, then there will be no reaction at all.’

But in Nestroy's personality itself there is something like a thoroughly correct placing of his own personality in life. A person like Nestroy was thoroughly a personality who was accessible to the depths of the soul. But what he created, he wanted to create from direct life and for direct life. And so Nestroy is not at all inclined to reflect on the ego. Once, he came into contact with the profound, inestimably esteemed poet Friedrich Hebbel, the great poet Hebbel. But Hebbel and Nestroy were like the north and south poles. Friedrich Hebbel, outwardly impeccable in his suit, correct in every gesture, Nestroy naughty in every gesture, with a rustic suit that he wore with particular dignity! Now Nestroy became acquainted with a play like “Judith and Holofernes”, a play in which Hebbel has actually exhausted the infinite depths of the human soul and embodied them in dramatic form so that one must say: It is truly a wonderful struggle with the existential problems of life, reaching the heights of the human spirit, but not for Nestroy, one might be tempted to say, because it cannot be readily and directly taken humorously. But he took it humorously, precisely as a taunt, saying, “No, that's nothing!” He also thought, “That's a nonstarter!” I'll do a Holofernes now, Judith and Holofernes, that must be the right thing; that's not something that Hebbel did.” But now he wanted to create a character in Holofernes who was so completely turned inward, to his human ego. Nestroy was very good at creating a character who acted entirely out of the abundance of the soul's will and wanted something. But he only wanted into this ego in a genuinely Austrian way, so to speak. Yes, not through speculation, not through dialectics, not even through dramatic dialectics! So he presents himself as a figure of Holofernes, full of ego, full of the power of personality, so strong that he wants to see who is stronger, “I” – or, as he said – “I or I!” – so that he feels doubly. So he wants to wrestle with himself, so that he sees who is stronger, I or I. That becomes Nestroy's Holofernes. But he knows how to position himself in life just right. And when he hears that people say that he denies a purely artistic principle with his plays that are directly inspired by folklore, well, he says that he will not allow such an accusation, because people should consider what it actually means to write folk plays. Anyone who writes popular plays and even wants to compare himself to Goethe is just like someone who makes a Zwetschkenkrampus and wants to act as a rival to Canova. A Zwetschkenkrampus is a figure made out of dried plums on St. Nicholas' Day to look like a clown or Santa Claus.

We also need to be thoroughly familiar with this side of Austrian identity. Because it is deeply, deeply interwoven with what the Austrian soul seeks in a certain view of life, which I would characterize in the following way: Because of the difficulties of his life, the Austrian feels the need to rest in a view of life that makes one forget the seriousness of life and yet, in turn, brings strength in the subconscious soul to be prepared for life. Nestroy is certainly deeper than those who took over from him at the end of the nineteenth century. You cannot compare Nestroy's farces with those of Berg, who certainly wrote more in the same period, but had sunk to a much lower level. But this peculiar view of life, which in turn goes back to a general human one, is part of the overall shaping of this Austrian's soul. And this view of life also shows that in Austria something comes from much deeper human sources and shapes the life of the soul than all that which is usually conceived of as ideas that draw together human development. One must not think of the Austrian as being wrapped up in this or that prejudice, but to get to know him, one must consider Austrian national character. |

I have only been able to present it to your minds in a few images today; I have not really chosen them with the aim of making the Austrian lovable, but simply to describe him as he is. I did not want to summarize anything special, but only to show individual traits, of course very individual lost traits, but which can nevertheless illustrate this or that, illustrate above all how a special note, a special tone, lives in this Austrian character, over the whole of this Austrian culture, from such figures as I have described to you today, to the Magyar Emmerich Madách, the man who created the well-known “Tragedy of Man”. Out of a life of suffering, and truly out of a life of suffering, Madách rose to create a form of human philosophy that suited him. He shows the creation of man, Adam and Eve. He shows how Adam and Eve are placed in the world by the divine creator, perceiving this world as a mystery. Now Lucifer shows them what will follow. Adam is shown how he will live again, how he will return in Egyptian times, how he will live as an Egyptian, as a pharaoh; how Eve will be his slave. The Egyptian culture with all that it can trigger in the soul of the re-embodied Adam is presented by the poet. And further, we are led into the Roman period; Adam is reborn in the time of the Roman Empire. In the time of Christianity, in turn, in the time of the Franco-English culture, in the time of the German culture; at the end of the earth time, he is placed in an embodiment. The whole of human life is led past him.

As one can see, there are many paths that lead up from the depths of joy and suffering that can arise in the Austrian soul, up to the peaks of human world and life views. And it is a special note that one must say: It is precisely through the contemplation of this special note, this special 'tone in Austrian folklore that it already corresponds to an inner necessity that, for example, the German-Austrians were separated for a time from the general German intellectual life. It was precisely through this separation that they developed their innermost selves properly, that they emphasized what was truly their own in the right way. But such a separation does not destroy what connects the peoples. And what we see today, this interaction of the two Central European empires into a great overall concept of Central Europe, into an overall being of Central Europe, is firmly anchored in both the inhabitants of the one and the inhabitants of the other empire, if one looks straight into the depths of the soul. This can be seen in the depths of the national character, for example, where the will of Austria is realized, and again in the heights of Austrian achievement. When, as it seemed, a deep rift had opened up in 1866 between the hearts of the great German Empire and the hearts of the best Austrians, there was not a mood at the height of humanity after that year 1866 that cried out for revenge. There was not a mood that was later in other places, after a people had been defeated, where it was said that one must always and again and again bring the thought of revenge to life in one's soul. No, but an 'Address was delivered to the throne immediately after 1866 in Austria, which contained the words; 'It is not the secret thought of retaliation that guides our steps; a nobler satisfaction is granted to us if we succeed more and more in transforming disfavor and enmity into respect and affection through what we achieve and what we create.

These words also express the bond between the Austrian and German hearts that has been so beautifully realized today. That bond, which is expressed so beautifully in a poem by von Hamerling that truly springs from the Austrian soul: Germany is my fatherland, but in Austria I feel my motherland. I feel a sense of belonging to my mother country. This sense of belonging was so vividly experienced that it can be expressed in a few words that originated in Austria. These are strange words, perhaps not in a completely satisfactory form, but they are words that may be read aloud, especially in our time. I will say afterwards in which period these words were written. In a poem entitled “Austria and Germany” it says:

Let Russia and England prudently confer,
Perhaps not even unhappily find it,
If we here engage in a little battle,
If they try to take away our just rights!

You, German brothers, will not advise here –
The enemy's attack will only unite us
And among us every ambition will fade
Before the: One people in word and deed.

And if one among us has failed,
If discord has existed anywhere in German hearts,
There is only one thing that now inspires us:

What we have in common, our joys and our sorrows!
So let us also have in common:
A German war, if not a German peace!

They could be words written in our time. But they were written in April 1859 by the son of that Tobias Gottfried Schröer I mentioned, by Karl Julius Schröer, who worked in Vienna, having come from Zisleithania, in Austria. He worked in a way that can be said to have been suitable for, on the one hand, connecting the soul with what lives and weaves in the people and, on the other hand, carrying the souls up to the heights of spiritual life – Karl Julius Schröer, who first developed a beneficial activity as director of the Viennese Protestant schools and then as professor of German literature at the Technical University. I myself feel — please excuse this personal remark — deeply connected with this activity, because Karl Julius Schröer was once my dear teacher. This Karl Julius Schröer, on the one hand, he carried his popular research into the really deep foundations of folklore. First of all, he had Christmas plays printed that were performed among the farmers during the Christmas season but that had emerged from the people themselves. Then he was a dialect researcher, a researcher who studied the peculiarities of the Austrian dialect in the Gottschee region in Carniola, among the Germans of Spiš in Slovakia, among the so-called Heanz in western Hungary, who also researched the dialect of Lower Austria and everywhere pointed out the close connection between all Austrian intellectual life and its roots in the folk tradition; and who, on the other hand, carried the soul up to the heights of Goethe's world view through research into Faust, and in this sense again had a beneficial effect on his students. In 1859 this man expressed Austria's unity with Germany in this way. I have quoted his words to show how the Austrian national character leads to that beautiful and glorious ideal towards which we must strive today and which must develop out of the great demands and devoted deeds of our time: a Central Europe in which everything that has long been working together in our hearts will finally be united. And especially by considering the special tone that prevails in Austrian nationality and Austrian intellectual life, one can say that what should be achieved there in separation will be able to combine with the wider Germanic character in a more intimate way for the benefit and blessing of Central European development. And so we see, I would say, even if we look with an understanding of the essence of nationality at what is developing out of blood and suffering and pain in our time as a future ideal for Central Europe, we see that something is developing that must be created by the devoted and courageous deeds of arms, but which is firmly rooted, so firmly rooted that the guarantee of its durability can be seen in the hearts and souls of those who are drawing closer together and have joined forces for common action.

In conclusion, let me say: what is now coming together historically is not only coming together through external necessity, it is coming together through the inner bonds of the souls, the hearts of the peoples of Central Europe.

Ladies and gentlemen present!

In the last two lectures I took the liberty of presenting Heraclitus as the representative of the deepest knowledge, the deepest wisdom, as it was at home in ancient Greece up to the fifth and sixth centuries. And I tried to present what has been handed down to us from him, that wisdom which Aristotle says is not something to be absorbed intellectually, and that within the circle in which this wisdom was cultivated, people allowed themselves to be initiated, that they participated in this experience with their own personal involvement. The purpose of this contemplation of Heraclitus was to show how far a single personality, such as Heraclitus, can come, and how, on the other hand, the teachings of such a personality lead into the deepest spiritual life, against the background of which Heraclitus also had his views.

Now I would like to add, as it were to supplement and confirm what I have said, some sayings, some doctrines of Heraclitus which show us quite clearly how directly from these views - as I took the liberty of developing last time - the whole essence of Heraclitus' world view flowed from the relationships of the external world to human consciousness itself.

I have shown that the essence of the Mysteries consisted first of all in the fact that all the views which the great masses had of the origin and nature of the external world are submerged in that view of man which the man of everyday life takes of his ego; that everything appears in a higher light, that man no longer seeks the light outside in space,

but within himself, that therefore the highest knowledge is no longer external knowledge of the world, but his own self-knowledge, that this "know thyself", which runs through Greek wisdom, is not something secondary, but the foundation stone of all Greek wisdom. Knowledge of God can be found in self-knowledge: That, after all, is the essence of the mystery teachings. If we are ultimately led back to our own self, to the soul as that which we find when we look within ourselves; if it is true that - as in the image of Sais - we find nothing but the human self, then this human self, which [man] believes to be enclosed in his bodily life between birth and death, is not a finite self, but this seemingly finite self, this enclosed self expands into the whole universe, so that it ultimately becomes nothing other than the self.

This is the deeper meaning underlying the mysteries. The cosmologies, the doctrines of the origin of the world, represent nothing other than the human being who is able to develop to the highest rungs of consciousness. If the self really is the ultimate being of the world, then one must say that this self has actually been present in what is called world creation, world development. That which constitutes the human being is not merely a reflection of the real, as is assumed in the theory of knowledge. It is assumed that the being of the world is complete and that the human being is nothing other than a mere mirror image. This [mirror image] ceases immediately when this self no longer appears as an individual being, but as a primordial being that has always been present in the whole process. It [is] therefore what man himself is.

Any external fact appears to the senses in a very specific way. Man's belief clings to sense knowledge. This [splits into individual events, into the individual beings] in space and in time. Now man takes this whole event out of time and immerses it in the fire of his consciousness. Only then does it become what it is in its

nature, so that the process of cognition is not merely something that runs alongside the world process, but something that is within it, that is there before it. Cognition is therefore not a repetition of the world process, but a deepening back into the primordial being of the world, into that which actually underlies the world. So whoever is convinced that he is not merely absorbing, but rather pouring out his own essence, connecting with the essence outside, recognizes himself in the world [...]. But man can only achieve this if he climbs up the various rungs [of spiritual development]. That Heraclitus saw in knowledge nothing other than the highest flowering that the world can bring forth, that he did not regard it as something that could also remain absent, emerges from what has come down to us from him. Knowledge appears to us [normally] as something that has been added to the whole world process by chance. That is not how it appears to Heraclitus. For him, the cognizing human being was the truly existing human being; and when we understand this, Heraclitus' worldview will become completely clear to us.

Until Pfleiderer, his worldview was not clearly recognized because man himself is in a constant state of flux. Pfleiderer could not think otherwise than that Heraclitus was caught up in a contradiction. He regarded the rising and falling, the coming and going, which Heraclitus imagined under the image of fire, as the eternal flow of things. The human ego, the human soul, is woven into the cosmic world process. And yet, says Pfleiderer, it is as if Heraclitus assumed an eternal soul. On the one hand we have the highest world principle, the primordial being, which completely excludes individuality, and on the other hand we have the human being, who nevertheless has a certain immortality. On the one hand we have the great world process in the continuous coming and going, and on the other hand the individual self, which is enclosed between birth and death, but can expand into the divine. The mystic, the initiate, differed from the ordinary person precisely in that the

observation of the world and the observation of one's own self was a contradiction for the latter and not for him. The essence of the Mysteries consisted precisely in the fact that through life within the Mystery world this contradiction ceased to be a contradiction. People were supposed to experience something that made the deep disharmony of the world disappear. The initiation, the participation in the Mysteries, was precisely the way to make the contradiction that clings to the ordinary view of things disappear. Thus for the mystics, for those who allowed themselves to be initiated, the ultimate goal was this: to no longer view in this way that which brings the greatest fear to ordinary people, because it apparently makes the physical sense world, the up and down world, the eternally coming events and deeds disappear as if into nothingness, this phenomenon of death. That was the goal of the mystic. The myst should be brought to the point of learning to understand this most terrible event not as that terrible event, but as a symbol of the deepest realization. So what was the most terrible, the most horrible thing for the ordinary person, he should see as an experience. That is why the god of death, Hades, was also the god of life, Dionysus. Death as a symbol, not as a fact, should be presented to the mystics. This is what hovers over all of Heraclitus' sayings, and they can only be understood from this point of view.

When Heraclitus says: corpses are to be regarded as ordinary things, nothing is to be given to the corpse - this takes you much deeper into the Heraclitean view. In Greek there is a certain temptation to compare the human body with the burial mound, because such a comparison can be brought about by a simple play on words. Som" means "body" and "sema" means "burial mound". This play on words was not only used by Heraclitus, but by all those who had anything to do with Greek wisdom. This word leads us much deeper into the matter. Heraclitus is thoroughly imbued with the view, which runs through the whole of Greek mysticism, that what the wise man calls "soul" rests in the body like the body in the burial mound. With an almost sublime word he says that the gods live that which for the ordinary being is death. The immortals live the death of mortals.

Here, in a saying of Heraclitus, we have another form of ordinary understanding, of ordinary Greek wisdom, which consists in seeing death as a symbol, not as a fact, because all the individual things of the external world lose the meaning they have for the everyday man, submerge into the spiritual world and become something completely different there. The things in their ordinary meaning are killed, die under the hand of the recognizing human being. They appear in their infinite, eternal meaning. That which the ordinary man calls life, that which for him is the most fruitful, the real, ceases to be the real. Thus that which the ordinary man calls life, that which the man calls sensuous reality, can be nothing other than that which first gains life and first causes the sensuous to die. That is why death becomes a symbol for this higher view. Now for Heraclitus another view is connected with this, with which he, I would like to say, at the same time also shows in himself what is the basic conviction of all mysticism, namely that of the infinity of knowledge. Those who cling to the ordinary wisdom of the day usually come to the conclusion that we cannot go beyond the sensual. We cannot penetrate into the fundamental being, into the "thing in itself", says [Kant]. Only a single real look into Heraclitus' basic view can show us that Heraclitus was much further along on this point than the followers of Kant's philosophy around the year 1900. Heraclitus is convinced that he who is really able to walk the path will achieve a deep inner experience as a result, which we also find again in the German mystics and especially in Tauler, that if we penetrate into the very essence of the soul, if we immerse ourselves completely in it, we will come to no limits. There are no limits to knowledge. The external things are closed.

We can only penetrate them according to our senses. However, at a certain depth of our self-knowledge, we can step out to even greater depths. There are no limits to knowledge, because self-knowledge cannot stand still. A God who knew everything, who knew everything, would be an obstacle for the mystic. Therefore, there cannot be an all-knowing and all-wise God. For the mystics, there must be something unfinished, there must be the possibility of becoming even more divine and ever more divine, of ascending to ever higher levels of perfection, of deepening more and more.

In this way, Heraclitus expands the world in the direction of self-knowledge to an infinite depth. This saves Heraclitus from any accusation that he said: "I know everything." - For he was also convinced of the impossibility of ever reaching a limit. This shows that Heraclitus also had the true, great, genuine humility that is the consequence of true, genuine self-knowledge, which can never be something perfect and complete. Thus we see that [there is] never despair of knowledge on the path that constitutes the fundamental nature of all mystical contemplation, but the true, genuine confidence that ever new, ever deeper knowledge can be achieved through continuous deepening. This is what underlies Heraclitus' worldview. And this conviction that comes over a person when he realizes this through continuous deepening into his inner being is what Heraclitus describes by saying that the soul strives more and more to come out of the wet into the dry. The wiser a soul is, the more it moves away from the wet, the drier it is. Wisdom passes through it like lightning.

This shows that Heraclitus had arrived at the point where all external views of the world are remelted in the fire of knowledge, where they begin a higher life. Now what initially appears to us as a contradiction dissolves into a higher harmony. The contradiction that exists [on the one hand] between the cosmological worldview, which sees the world before us in

steady coming and going, in a great world harmony, and [on the other hand] the [individual] human being, which is clamped between birth and death, and which then forms an encroachment into the world of man, is resolved by the fact that the [individual] being is only a truth for the lower levels of cognition and that this ceases for the higher [cognition]. [It also ceases] within the temporal life between birth and death, [when] the light of the eternal [shines] into the temporal life, so that it appears as one and the same with the temporal. When [in this way] individual human life appears as equivalent, as synonymous [with the eternal], then the contradiction ceases. This happens because Heraclitus, on the one hand, has a great harmony and, on the other, dissolves the individual entities as if into an immortal entity, as if into an eternal entity. To recognize is to live, and to live is to overcome a contradiction that exists from the beginning. Whoever believes that he can resolve a contradiction by spintizing the intellect will not get beyond the contradiction, will not be able to grasp the essence of mystical views. The mystic knows that there must first be a contradiction and that life consists in overcoming the contradiction in one's own life. This is what Heraclitus wanted to say with his various scattered sayings. But if we have a background in the Mysteries, we can combine these sayings and then get a coherent world view that shows us how this personality shines far into modern times, and that we can gain a great deal if we immerse ourselves in the philosophy of this wonderful personality, if we raise ourselves up by it.

Now a few words about the Greek mystery teaching after we have gone through Heraclitus, because I have to deal with the Orphic teaching together with the Pythagorean school, which spread at about the same time as the Orphic teaching had reached its height. This Orphic teaching also developed a mysticism, and this appears to us next to the

mysticism of the Pythagoreans like a light next to another light. [We have the Orphics on the one side and the Pythagoreans on the other. We get to know the confluence of these two currents about two hundred years later in the Platonic world views. In this, the two currents flow together.

There suddenly appears to us a higher balance between Pythagorean and Orphic mysticism. Greek mysticism had the goal of transforming the most terrible event, death as a fact [into a] symbol for knowledge that continues to deepen. This was only possible if the mystics were introduced step by step, on the higher levels of knowledge. They were led very slowly. The Pythagoreans also practiced slow guidance. It had to be this way because it was not a matter of logical penetration, but of a lively passage through the individual stages of knowledge.

When we look at the content of [their] worldview, the Orphics appear to us to be on a higher level of scientific development than what is contained in the Greek belief in the gods. When we consider the cosmogony of the Orphics, it initially appears to us as a description of external processes. It appears to us as nothing more than mythology translated into scientific language.

So in the profound Orphic world view we have given a world view which first of all regards time as that which existed in the beginning. So it was time from which everything has its origin. From time sprang the ether and chaos. The ether is roughly what we know from Heraclitus as fire. Chaos is the entire abundance and diversity of the material world.

From the connection of chaos with the ether, i.e. the most unlimited and [the] most solid, becoming thus arises with chaos. Becoming presented under an image is the direct outflow of the most rigid. It presents itself as giving birth, as bringing forth. It arises from the fluid. Becoming from the

limited and unlimited. From the egg, Chaos first gave birth to a male-female being. This brought forth from itself a mere female. And from these two emerged the first of what we encounter in Greek mythology as Uranos and Gaea. Uranos and Gaea are swallowed up by [Kronos], so that Zeus in turn absorbs all the earlier world entities that I have just mentioned, [...] and revives them through himself.

We can only translate this world-creation process into inner processes of consciousness. Thus, with this description of external facts, we have what should initially be held against the mystic. We must realize that for the mystic, time, Kronos, [...] has become a vivid experience as an existing emptiness, as that which is not yet, but which can produce everything from itself.

Unfulfilled time appears as the most congruent image of becoming. For consciousness, this can be translated into a state of consciousness with nothing other than memory, so that under Kronos we have to imagine nothing other than the eternal world memory. If we now translate the individual beings, not the state of consciousness of the individual beings, but if we imagine the humanly overcome being, then we attain a state of consciousness that exists only in memory, that things are behind and next to each other and can only be held in [coming] and going within time by connecting the individual with the other individual to the eternal world memory.

From this eternal world memory arises an eternal separation into the most solid and the most rigid.

Within the memory, no distinction can be made between the ether and chaos. This only happens when it becomes possible to distinguish between the material and the spiritual from the eternal. These two stand opposite each other in such a way that the spirit creates its own dualism. It is a matter of allowing consciousness to separate for itself. This creates the material and the spiritual, and

Through this, man first gains the possibility of recognizing something of the very lowest level of the world. The world is in an eternal becoming, and this is nothing other than the eternal transition from coming into being to passing away, from being to non-being. This eternal emergence of that which is not perceptible to the senses into a sensuous existence is the interplay between spirit and matter.

The highest spirits have made this interplay an integral part of the basic teachings. Let us stop here for a moment with Goethe. He is known to have written something about the metamorphosis of plants and animals. He was of the opinion that the beings of the animal and plant kingdoms come into being through the fact that everything is in a state of eternal transformation. Goethe came to this conclusion because he believed that there is a constant interplay between spirit and matter.

Goethe looks at a seed, a small material grain, it seems, a piece of formless matter, which is nothing more than matter, enclosed between certain boundaries. But is that the truth? The same thing that we have before us today as a small material particle will be before us in a very short time as a fully developed plant, with leaves and flowers. The fully developed plant and the small seed are in reality the same thing, one and the same at two different times. They are different in substance, but one and the same.

What is one and the same? The small seed is the same as the large plant. The whole plant is contained in spiritual form in the seed. The spirit has withdrawn into seclusion. This same spirit, which is sensualized in the plant, was already present. The spirit reveals itself in sensual existence and is later present in the plant.

In our world of the senses there is a continuous multiplicity of the spirit, which hides itself, withdraws into a point of matter and then spreads out again and becomes visible, so that what it previously kept invisible, it presents visibly before us. But only by distinguishing between the two entities of spirit

and matter are we able to penetrate this interplay. Seed and plant would fall apart. We would never be able to say that they are one and the same. We would not understand this. The one who cannot perceive soulfully will say: They have nothing to do with each other. The other will say: The whole plant already lies within the seed as the multiplying spirit, which is once in sensual existence and then withdraws again. Only by peeling apart the whole of reality into spirit and matter and following the interplay are we able to understand the interplay.

Then we have arrived at the state that presents itself to the physicians as a state of becoming and giving birth. This is nothing other than the mystery of the presence of the spirit in the real world. We can imagine this under the symbol of the egg, the thing that can bring forth another thing that is spiritually completely equal to it, but sensually different. Thus the whole manifold world no longer presents itself as it appears to the sensual imagination, but as it appears to the spiritual eye before the soul.

Now we have seen that what penetrates upwards is in the seed, then rises upwards, becomes a plant and has thus assumed sensual existence. If we have a plant before us, then the plant is still something that conceals the spirit, that has more spirit than it shows. A higher being, an animal, shows still more spirit; and even in man a great variety of spirit comes to a directly sensuous existence. But the whole essence of the spirit can only be perceived through spiritual work in self-knowledge, so that that which rests in the seed ultimately stands before self-knowledge in its true unveiled form as its own spiritual entity, and the consciousness that contemplates itself, the soul that faces itself, recognizes nothing other than in a revelatory way that which is generally hidden. The spirit that is in the seed is the same spirit that self-consciously confronts the other being, the male-female being that emerges in the multiplicity of the world.

Comprehending this being is a goal of the mystical worldview. It is to be grasped in such a way that the entire consciousness of the person stepping before it becomes spiritualized, that it becomes spirit, will, that it does not merely enter into the person, but presents itself to us illuminated in the outside world. This is what presents itself to the mystic, who now gives birth to the whole world of his own accord. So it is like Zeus, who represents the highest state of consciousness, who has devoured everything and himself.

So the whole cosmogony was nothing more for the mystic than a point of support for understanding the progress and deepening of man. Yes, but the concept is nothing but its own realization. Yes, there was the conviction that knowledge is not something that is added to the world, but that it is precisely the essence itself. The mystical experiences were to be brought to a higher level, for the mystic says that the spirit is present but not yet sensually present, like the spiritual in the seed, which has not yet spread into the plant, but has already been present as such. This is why all the Greek mystics say that the primordial being should not be sought in the past.

The cosmogony is not constructed in such a way that the primordial being stands there as creator, but appears as something in Greek mysticism that is finally climbed as a stage of cognition, so that the process of cognition within Greek mysticism is not a kind of communion, not a connection of man with the eternal world being, but an actual bringing forth. I emphasize: an actual bringing forth, so that for the Greek mystic the most perfect indeed appears as a sensual creation of the world. Sensual creation and spiritual perfection could coincide for the mystic.

The other side of the mystical world view, which did not seek to penetrate to the primordial being, but endeavored to recognize the world by delving into our inner world, emerges in the Pythagorean. One school endeavored to plant the seed in moist soil. The Pythagoreans did

not plant the seed in the soil, but invented a method of discovering the spiritual plant in the seed itself, without sinking the seed into the soil before bringing it to development. In what way? By bringing the seed [spiritually] to development. In what way they [...] wanted to discover the spirit in the seed, we will look at that next time.

Answer to the question:

The question of "where from" is an inherited question for humans. We ask because we see becoming in the process of becoming. We see the thing becoming more perfect. There can be no doubt that the sensual plant is more perfect than the seed. The later is contained in the earlier, only not in reality, but in a spiritual way. The word "beginning" is something future in the doctrines of the origin of the world. A final reflection of the approach of a perfect kingdom is present in early Christianity. It is the same as the kingdom of Zeus. There can be no cause without a corresponding effect. If we ask: Is the one there earlier than the other, it is only because we consider the one earlier. I add the force that is needed to write with a pencil because I feel it; and this expenditure of force is projected out into the world. I also find forces in the outside world. You humanize the outside world. I really put myself into things, I am really in them. The act that you carry out in your head is the initial force of the world. The "before and after" loses its meaning. The seed can look back to the plant that brought it into existence. Its own cause is already present as its own cause, but not in a sensual but in a spiritual way. Every thing is its own cause and does not have a cause. The effect produces itself. We call it force because it is sensual, dull striving. If we want

to imagine the power in the seed, that is already the plant.

If God were to divide his work into time, he would also have to strive for perfection. Only when he is elevated above time and space is everything there at the same time, then he is perfect. All opposites have a point where they meet. "To whom time is like eternity and eternity like time, he is freed from all conflict" [according to Jakob Böhme]. Eternity broken down into individual moments is time. Time summarized is eternity. The circle is limited, the straight line is unlimited, infinite. The Orphics did not arrive at the concept of numbers like the Pythagoreans.

Why did Plato give his views in conversations? He could not have presented it any other way. If you take Plato's "Phaidon" and follow it properly, you will find that it is a conversation between a Socratic initiate and a Pythagorean. The method of the Mysteries led to expression through conversation.

From all that has been said in the last few days, and especially from what was said yesterday, you will have gathered at about what time we have placed the Genesis story. In fact we have pointed out that the first momentous words of the Bible mark. the moment when we should say in terms of Spiritual Science that the substance constituting the earth and sun, hitherto one body, makes ready to separate. Then follows the separation, and during its course what is described in the opening verses takes place. The biblical description of the creation then goes on to cover all that happens until far on into the Lemurian age, right up to the separation of the moon. What has been described by Spiritual Science as coming after the withdrawal of the moon, that is, at the end of Lemuria and in the beginning of Atlantis, took place after the “days” of creation. We pointed that out yesterday. We also pointed out the deep significance of the statement that man received in his body the imprint of the earth-moon-dust. This coincided with the cosmic event which we have called the advancement of the Elohim to become JahveElohim. We had to think of this advance as more or less coinciding with the beginning of the moon's activity from outside. Thus we must think of the process of the moon's separation, and its activity from without, as associated with that Being who represents the Elohim as one undivided entity, with Him whom we call Jahve-Elohim. The first phase of the action of the moon upon the earth coincides with the imprinting of the earth-moon material into the human body. The human body, which hitherto had consisted solely of warmth, was now endowed with something expressed as follows: And the Lord God ... breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul—or, let us say, a living being.

We must not fail once again to notice the aptness, the grandeur, the power of the biblical words! I have impressed upon you that the proper earthly incarnation of man depended upon his being able to wait in his spiritual nature in spiritual surroundings until suitable conditions were present in the earth itself; so that it was his late assumption of his bodily nature which enabled him to become a mature being. Had he come down into his body earlier, let us say, during the events of the fifth “day,” he could only have become a being resembling physically the beings of the air and of the water. How does Genesis describe the being of man? Wonderfully! The passage is a model of accurate and appropriate wording. We are told that the group-souls who descended into earthly matter on the fifth “day” became living creatures—became what we today call living creatures. Man did not descend at that time. The group-souls who still remained above in the great reservoir of the spirit did not descend until later. And even on the sixth “day” it was the animals nearest to man, the earth-animals proper, which came down first. Thus man was not able to descend into solid matter even during the first part of the sixth “day,” for if he had imprinted the earth-forces into himself at that time he would have become a creature physically resembling the animals. The group-souls of the higher animals descended first and populated the earth, as distinct from the air and the sea. Only after that, little by little, came about conditions favourable to the formation of the prototype of humanity.

How was it achieved? It is conveyed to us in memorable words when we are told that the Elohim set about combining their activities in order to make man after the image I have described to you. This earth-man arose because the Elohim, each with his different capacity, worked together as a group to achieve a common purpose. Man began by being the common purpose of the Elohim as a group.

We must try to get a closer idea of what man was like on the sixth “day.” He was not yet as he is today. The physical body which we find in man today only came later with the inbreathing by Jahve of the breath of life. The event which is described as the creation of man by the Elohim took place before the earth-dust had been imprinted into his bodily nature. What was he like—this man brought into existence by the Elohim, still in the Lemurian age?

Remember what I have often said about the character and nature of the man of today. It is only as regards his higher members that their physical humanity is the same in all men. As regards their sex we must distinguish. The male has a feminine etheric body, and the female a masculine etheric body. How did it come about? This differentiation, this separation into male and female, came about relatively late, after the “days” of creation. There was no such differentiation in the human being who arose on the sixth “day” as the common purpose of the Elohim. At that time all human beings had a bodily nature in common. We can best describe it (so far as representation is possible at all) by saying that the physical body was more etheric and the etheric body somewhat denser than is the case today. A differentiation between physical and etheric, a densification on the side of the physical, only occurred later under the influence of Jahve-Elohim. You will appreciate that we cannot speak of the human creation of the Elohim as separately male and female in the sense of today; the Elohim-man was at the same time both male and female, undifferentiated. Thus man, in the sense expressed by the Elohim in the words Let us make man, was still undifferentiated, still male and female at the same time. Through this deed of the Elohim the bisexual man was created. That is the meaning of the words translated male and female created he them. The words do not refer to man and woman in the sense of today, but to the undifferentiated man, the male-female man.

I am well aware that countless biblical commentators have objected to this interpretation and have sought to throw ridicule on what earlier distinguished commentators have maintained—which is nevertheless the truth. They take exception to the view that the Elohim-man was male-female, and that therefore the male-female is what was made in the image of the Elohim. I should like to ask such commentators on what they base their view. It cannot be upon clairvoyant investigation, for that will never give anything other than what I am saying. If it is upon external investigation, I should like to ask them how, in face of tradition, they justify any other interpretation. At least people ought to be told what the biblical tradition is. When through clairvoyant investigation one first discovers the true facts, then life and light breaks into the text, and minor discrepancies in the tradition no longer matter, because knowledge of the truth enables one to read the text correctly. But it is very different if one approaches the matter from the point of view of philology. One must nevertheless understand clearly that, even as late as the early centuries of the Christian era, there was nothing in the first chapters of the Bible to mislead anyone into reading the text as it is read today. There were no vowels at all, and the text was in such a condition that even the division into separate words had yet to be made. The dots which in Hebrew signify the vowels were only inserted later. Without the preparation which Spiritual Science gives, what claim has anyone to offer an interpretation of the original text, of which he can say conscientiously, and with scholarship, that it is reliable?

Thus in the Elohim-creation we have man at a preparatory stage. All the processes which are included in a term such as “human propagation” were at that time more etheric, more spiritual. They remained at a higher level. It was the deed of Jahve-Elohim which first made man into what he has become today. That had to be preceded by the creation in due order of other, lower beings. Thus the animals became living creatures by what one might almost call a premature act of creation. The same expression nephesch,¹ living creature, is applied to these animals as is ultimately applied to man. But how is it applied to man? At the moment when Jahve-Elohim intervenes and makes man into the man of today, it is said that Jahve-Elohim imprints n'schamah.² It is through having a higher member implanted into him that man himself becomes a living being.

Note what a very fruitful concept the Bible, of all books, introduces into the theory of evolution! Of course it would be foolish not to recognise that, as regards his external form, man belongs to the highest stage of the animal kingdom. This small concession may be made to Darwinism. But the essential thing is that man did not become a living being in the same way as the other, lower beings, whose nature is described as nephesch; man was first endowed with a higher member of his being, a previously prepared soul-spiritual element.

Here we come to another parallel between the ancient Hebrew doctrine and our own Spiritual Science. When we speak of the human soul, we distinguish between sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul. We know that these first arose in their soul-spiritual form during the first three “days” of creation. It was then that their characteristic tendencies were formed. But this inner soul-nature was not clothed in physical form, was not, so to say, impressed into a physical body until much later. Thus we have to understand that first there arises the spiritual, that this spiritual is then invested with the astral and then gradually condenses into the etheric-physical; it is only then that what was previously spiritual is imprinted into the body as the breath of life. Thus what was implanted as a seed into the human being by Jahve-Elohim had already been prepared earlier. It was there in the womb of the Elohim. Now it is imprinted into man, whose bodily nature had been built up from another direction. Thus it is something which enters into man from without. This impress of n'schamah first made it possible to implant in man the predisposition to, the rudiments of, the ego nature. For these old Hebrew expressions nephesch, ruach, n'schamah correspond to our spiritual scientific terms sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul respectively.

Thus this further evolution is very complicated. We must think of all that happened on the six “days” of creation, that is to say, we must think of the work of the Elohim before they advanced to Jahve-Elohim, as having taken place in higher, spiritual realms; and what we can see today in the world as physical man first came about through the deed of Jahve-Elohim.

Of all this which we find in the Bible—and again now in clairvoyant perception—and which first enables us to understand the inner nature of man, the Greek philosophers still had a consciousness derived from their various initiation centres—Plato especially, but even Aristotle still knew something of it. Anyone familiar with the works of Plato and Aristotle knows that in Aristotle there was still an awareness that man first became a living being through the introduction of a higher soul-spiritual member, whereas the lower animals went through different evolutionary processes. Aristotle expressed it somewhat as follows. He says that the lower animals became what they were through other processes of evolution; but that at the time when the forces which are active in the animal were able to become effective, the human soul-spiritual being, which still hovered in higher regions, was not yet allowed to acquire an earthly body, otherwise it would have remained at the animal stage. The human being had to wait; in him the lower, the animal stages, had to be ousted from their sovereignty through the implanting of the human member. To express this Aristotle made use of the word φθειρεσθαι (phtheiresthai). By this he meant to say, “Of course, superficially speaking, man has the same bodily functions as the animal, but in the animal these functions are supreme, whereas in man the bodily functions have been dethroned and have to follow a higher principle.” That is the meaning of the word φθειρεσθαι.

The same truth lies behind the biblical story of the creation. Through the implanting of n'schamah the lower members were dethroned. In the bearer of his ego man has acquired a higher member. But his earlier, more etheric nature was thereby brought down a stage and became differentiated. Man acquired an external, bodily member, and an inner, more etheric member; the one became denser and the other more rarefied. The principle was repeated in man which we have come to recognise as running through the whole of evolution. We saw how warmth condensed to air and rarefied to light, how air condensed to water and rarefied into sound-ether and so on. The same process takes place in man at higher levels. The male-female becomes differentiated into man and woman, and moreover in such a way that the denser physical body appears on the outside, the more rarefied, etheric, invisible body goes inwards. We could also call this the progress from Elohim-man to man the creation of Jahve-Elohim. The man we know today is the creation of JahveElohim, and the sixth “day” of creation corresponds with the Lemurian age, in which we speak of the male-female human being.

Now the Bible speaks of yet a seventh “day” of creation, and we are told that on this seventh “day” the Elohim rested. What does that actually mean? We only understand it aright if we realise that this is the very time when the Elohim rise, when they experience their promotion to become Jahve-Elohim. But we must not conceive Jahve-Elohim as the entire hierarchy of the Elohim united; we must understand that the Elohim give up, so to speak, only a part of their Being to the moon-Being, and hold the rest in reserve; and that in this older part of their Being they continue their own further evolution. So far as this part of them is concerned, their work is no longer devoted to the creation of man. That part of the Elohim which has become Jahve-Elohim continues to work on man. The other part does not work directly upon the earth, it devotes itself to its own evolution. That is what is meant by rest from earthly work, by the Sabbath day, by the seventh “day” of creation.

And now we must call attention to something else of importance. If everything that I have just been saying is correct, then we must regard the Jahve-man, the man into whom Jahve impressed his own Being, as the direct successor of the more etheric, more delicate man who was formed on the sixth “day.” Thus there is a direct line from the more etheric man, who is still male-female—from the bi-sexual man—to the physical man. Physical man is the descendant, in a densified form, of the etheric man. If one wanted to describe the Jahve-man who passes over into Atlantis, one would have to say: “And the man who was formed by the Elohim on the sixth ‘day' of creation developed further into the unisexual man, the Jahve-man.” Those who followed after the seven “days” of creation are the descendants of the Elohim-men, and thus of what came into being during the first six “days.”

Again the Bible is sublime when, in the second chapter, it tells us that the Jahve-man is in fact a descendant of the heavenly man, the man who was formed by the Elohim on the sixth “day.” The Jahve-man is the descendant of the Elohim-man in precisely the same way as the son is the descendant of the father. The Bible tells us this in the fourth verse of the second chapter, which says “Those who are to follow are the descendants, the subsequent generations, of the heavenly man.” That is what it really says. But if you take a modern translation, you find the remarkable sentence: These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. Usually we find the whole hierarchy of the Elohim called “God,” and Jahve-Elohim called “the Lord God”—the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. I ask you to look at this sentence carefully and try honestly to find a reasonable meaning for it. Anyone who claims to do so had better not look on ahead in his Bible, for the word used here is tol'doth,³ which means “subsequent generations”; and the same word is used in the later chapter which tells of the subsequent generations of Noah. Thus here it is speaking of the Jahve-men as the descendants, the subsequent generations, of the heavenly Beings, in the same way as there it speaks of the descendants of Noah. Thus this passage must be translated something like this: “In what follows we are speaking of the descendants of the heaven-and-earth beings who were created by the Elohim and further developed by Jahve-Elohim.” Thus the Bible too looks upon the Jahve-men as the descendants of the Elohim-men. Anyone who wants to presuppose a fresh account of the creation, because it says that God created man, should also look at the fifth chapter, which begins This is the book of the generations (the word used there is the very same as in the other passages—tol'doth), and should assume a third account there—thus making his Rainbow Bible really complete! That way you will get a whole knocked up out of Bible fragments, but will no longer have the Bible. If we could go on longer, we should be able to elucidate what is said in chapter five too.

Thus, when we go deeply into these things, we see that there is full agreement between the biblical account of the creation and what we can establish through Spiritual or Occult Science. This leads us to ask why the Bible account is in a more or less pictorial form. What do these pictures represent? And then we realise that they too are the result of clairvoyant experience. Just as today the eye of the seer gazes in the supersensible upon the origin of our earth existence, so too did those who originally composed the Bible story gaze upon the supersensible. It was by clairvoyant experience that the facts originally given to us were acquired. When we set to work to construct prehistory from the point of view of purely physical observation, we start from the traces of it which are extant and discoverable by external means, and the farther back we go in physical life and physical origins the more hazy the physical forms become. But in this misty element spiritual Beings hold sway. And man himself in his spiritual part was originally within them. And if we pursue our study of its origin as far back as the times described in Genesis, we come to the original spiritual condition of our earth itself. The “days” of creation refer to spiritual stages of development, only to be grasped by spiritual investigation. What the Bible is telling us is that the physical is little by little formed out of the spiritual.

When the seer gazes upon the facts which are described for us in Genesis, he fords to begin with only spiritual processes. The physical eye would see absolutely nothing; it would gaze into a void. But, as we have seen, time goes on. Little by little for the seer the solid crystallises out of the spiritual, just as ice is formed out of water and solidifies. Out of the flowing sea of the astral, of the Devachanic, emerges what can now be seen by the physical eye. Thus, as clairvoyant observation proceeds, within the picture which to begin with has to be understood as purely spiritual, the physical emerges like a crystallisation. It follows that at an earlier time physical eyes would not have been able to discover the human being. Right up to the sixth and seventh “days” of creation, that is, right up to our Lemurian age, man could not have been seen by the physical eye; at that time he only existed spiritually. That is the great difference between a true theory of evolution and a fancy one. The fancy one assumes only a physical process of development. But man did not originate by lower beings evolving to human stature. It is utterly absurd to imagine that an animal form can be transformed into the higher, human form. During the time when the animal forms came into being, forming their physical bodies below, man had already long been in existence, but it is only later that he descends and takes his place beside the animal natures which had descended much earlier. Anyone who cannot look upon evolution in this way is beyond help; he is hypnotised as it were by modern concepts, he is influenced, not by natural scientific facts, but by contemporary opinion.

If we want to connect the coming into being of man with that of all other creatures, we must say that first there appear two branches, the birds and the marine animals;⁴ then, as a special offshoot, come the land animals; the birds and marine animals came into existence on the fifth “day” of creation, the land animals on the sixth. And then came man, only not by producing the same line further, not as a continuation of the series, but by a descent upon the earth. That is the true theory of evolution, and it is contained more exactly in the Bible than in any modern textbook which surrenders to materialistic fantasy.

These are a few fragmentary remarks such as always seem to be required in the last lecture of a Cycle. To follow up adequately every aspect of such a theme as this would take months; there is so very much in this Genesis story of creation. In our Cycles we can never do more than touch upon things, and that is all I have attempted to do this time. I should like to emphasise once more that it has not been so very easy for me to give this particular course; nor will any of my hearers readily realise how difficult it is to reach the depths upon which the Bible story is based, how hard it is to find the true parallel between already ascertained spiritual scientific facts and the corresponding passages in the Bible. If one works conscientiously, the task is an extraordinarily exacting one. It is so often assumed that the eye of the seer reaches with ease everywhere—that one has only to look, and everything follows of itself. An inexperienced person often thinks, when confronted with a problem, that he will easily be able to solve it, whereas the further he probes the more numerous are the difficulties which present themselves. This is so even in ordinary, external research, and when one leaves the physical and plunges into clairvoyant investigation, then the real difficulties begin to show themselves, and with them the feeling of the great responsibility incurred in speaking of these things at all. Nevertheless I think I may say that I have not made use of a single word in the whole of this Cycle which cannot stand, which is not as far as it goes an adequate expression in our own language of the right way to conceive these things. But it was certainly not easy.

There is much that I could still say. Especially something which has been borne in upon us at every stage during these lectures—and that is the need for anthroposophical teaching so to permeate our hearts as to lift us with all the strength of our inner life to ever higher forms of perception, to an ever larger-hearted comprehension of the world. Whether we become better men in the intellectual, feeling and moral spheres—that is the touchstone for the fruitfulness of what we gather in the spiritual-scientific field. To study the parallel between spiritual-scientific investigation and the Bible can be particularly fruitful; for it enables us to experience how we ourselves are the “primal cause,” the “primal state,” as Jacob Boehme would have said, in that supersensible spiritual womb whence also came those very Elohim who developed into Jahve-Elohim, into that higher form of evolution, in order to bring about the great goal of their activity, which we call man. Let us comprehend our origin with due reverence, but also with a due sense of our responsibility. The Elohim and Jahve-Elohim gave their highest forces to the beginning of our evolution. Let us look upon this our origin as laying upon us an obligation to absorb into our human nature more and more of the spiritual forces which in the course of subsequent evolution have entered into the development of the earth.

We have spoken of the influence of Lucifer. Because of this influence something which lay in the womb of that spirituality in which man too originated remained there for the time being; it came forth later in the incarnation of the Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Since that time the Christ has worked in the earth as another divine principle. And contemplation of the great truths of Genesis ought to point us to the duty of taking more and more into our own being the spiritual Being of the Christ; for only by permeating ourselves with the Christ principle shall we be able to fulfil our human task; only so shall we become on the earth more and more what we were predisposed to be in those times with which the biblical story of creation is concerned.

Thus such a series of lectures as this can not only give us knowledge, but can stir forces in our souls. Even if we forget much of its detail, may what we have learnt through a closer examination of the biblical story of creation go on working as power in our souls. I may perhaps be allowed to say this at the close of these lectures, during which we have tried to immerse ourselves in our anthroposophical life. Let us try to take with us the strength which should flow from this teaching. Let us carry it away with us, let us fructify our outside life with this strength. Whatever we may be doing, in whatever worldly profession we may be engaged, this strength can warm and ripen our creative activity as well as intensify our joy, our happiness. No one who has rightly grasped the sublime origin of human existence can go on living without taking this knowledge as a germinal force of blessing and joy for the rest of his life. When you try to carry out deeds of love, let the truth about the mighty origin of men shine forth from your eyes, and thus you will best reveal what anthroposophical teaching is. Our deeds will proclaim its truth, rejoicing those around us, conferring blessing, refreshment and health upon our own spirit, soul and body. We ought to be better, stronger, healthier human beings through having absorbed anthroposophical teaching. May this above all be the effect of this Cycle! It should be a seed which sinks into the soul of the hearer only to spring up again and bear fruit for those around us. Thus we go our separate ways, while our spirits remain united, and we try to work together to translate this teaching into life. Let us permeate ourselves with this spirit, without weakening, until the moment when we are able to meet again not only in the spirit but in the flesh.

• 1. See Figure 12, below.
• 2. See Figure 13, below.
• 3. See Figure 14, below.
• 4. Dr. Steiner draws on the blackboard.

From all that has been said in the last few days, and especially from what was said yesterday, you will have gathered at about what time we have placed the Genesis story. In fact we have pointed out that the first momentous words of the Bible mark the moment when we should say in terms of Spiritual Science that the substance constituting the earth and sun, hitherto one body, makes ready to separate. Then follows the separation, and during its course what is described in the opening verses takes place. The biblical description of the creation then goes on to cover all that happens until far on into the Lemurian age, right up to the separation of the moon. What has been described by Spiritual Science as coming after the withdrawal of the moon, that is, at the end of Lemuria and in the beginning of Atlantis, took place after the “days” of creation. We pointed that out yesterday. We also pointed out the deep significance of the statement that man received in his body the imprint of the earth-moon-dust. This coincided with the cosmic event which we have called the advancement of the Elohim to become JahveElohim. We had to think of this advance as more or less coinciding with the beginning of the moon's activity from outside. Thus we must think of the process of the moon's separation, and its activity from without, as associated with that Being who represents the Elohim as one undivided entity, with Him whom we call Jahve-Elohim. The first phase of the action of the moon upon the earth coincides with the imprinting of the earth-moon material into the human body. The human body, which hitherto had consisted solely of warmth, was now endowed with something expressed as follows: And the Lord God ... breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul—or, let us say, a living being.

We must not fail once again to notice the aptness, the grandeur, the power of the biblical words! I have impressed upon you that the proper earthly incarnation of man depended upon his being able to wait in his spiritual nature in spiritual surroundings until suitable conditions were present in the earth itself; so that it was his late assumption of his bodily nature which enabled him to become a mature being. Had he come down into his body earlier, let us say, during the events of the fifth “day,” he could only have become a being resembling physically the beings of the air and of the water. How does Genesis describe the being of man? Wonderfully! The passage is a model of accurate and appropriate wording. We are told that the group-souls who descended into earthly matter on the fifth “day” became living creatures—became what we today call living creatures. Man did not descend at that time. The group-souls who still remained above in the great reservoir of the spirit did not descend until later. And even on the sixth “day” it was the animals nearest to man, the earth-animals proper, which came down first. Thus man was not able to descend into solid matter even during the first part of the sixth “day,” for if he had imprinted the earth-forces into himself at that time he would have become a creature physically resembling the animals. The group-souls of the higher animals descended first and populated the earth, as distinct from the air and the sea. Only after that, little by little, came about conditions favourable to the formation of the prototype of humanity.

How was it achieved? It is conveyed to us in memorable words when we are told that the Elohim set about combining their activities in order to make man after the image I have described to you. This earth-man arose because the Elohim, each with his different capacity, worked together as a group to achieve a common purpose. Man began by being the common purpose of the Elohim as a group.

We must try to get a closer idea of what man was like on the sixth “day.” He was not yet as he is today. The physical body which we find in man today only came later with the inbreathing by Jahve of the breath of life. The event which is described as the creation of man by the Elohim took place before the earth-dust had been imprinted into his bodily nature. What was he like—this man brought into existence by the Elohim, still in the Lemurian age?

Remember what I have often said about the character and nature of the man of today. It is only as regards his higher members that their physical humanity is the same in all men. As regards their sex we must distinguish. The male has a feminine etheric body, and the female a masculine etheric body. How did it come about? This differentiation, this separation into male and female, came about relatively late, after the “days” of creation. There was no such differentiation in the human being who arose on the sixth “day” as the common purpose of the Elohim. At that time all human beings had a bodily nature in common. We can best describe it (so far as representation is possible at all) by saying that the physical body was more etheric and the etheric body somewhat denser than is the case today. A differentiation between physical and etheric, a densification on the side of the physical, only occurred later under the influence of Jahve-Elohim. You will appreciate that we cannot speak of the human creation of the Elohim as separately male and female in the sense of today; the Elohim-man was at the same time both male and female, undifferentiated. Thus man, in the sense expressed by the Elohim in the words Let us make man, was still undifferentiated, still male and female at the same time. Through this deed of the Elohim the bisexual man was created. That is the meaning of the words translated male and female created he them. The words do not refer to man and woman in the sense of today, but to the undifferentiated man, the male-female man.

I am well aware that countless biblical commentators have objected to this interpretation and have sought to throw ridicule on what earlier distinguished commentators have maintained—which is nevertheless the truth. They take exception to the view that the Elohim-man was male-female, and that therefore the male-female is what was made in the image of the Elohim. I should like to ask such commentators on what they base their view. It cannot be upon clairvoyant investigation, for that will never give anything other than what I am saying. If it is upon external investigation, I should like to ask them how, in face of tradition, they justify any other interpretation. At least people ought to be told what the biblical tradition is. When through clairvoyant investigation one first discovers the true facts, then life and light breaks into the text, and minor discrepancies in the tradition no longer matter, because knowledge of the truth enables one to read the text correctly. But it is very different if one approaches the matter from the point of view of philology. One must nevertheless understand clearly that, even as late as the early centuries of the Christian era, there was nothing in the first chapters of the Bible to mislead anyone into reading the text as it is read today. There were no vowels at all, and the text was in such a condition that even the division into separate words had yet to be made. The dots which in Hebrew signify the vowels were only inserted later. Without the preparation which Spiritual Science gives, what claim has anyone to offer an interpretation of the original text, of which he can say conscientiously, and with scholarship, that it is reliable?

Thus in the Elohim-creation we have man at a preparatory stage. All the processes which are included in a term such as “human propagation” were at that time more etheric, more spiritual. They remained at a higher level. It was the deed of Jahve-Elohim which first made man into what he has become today. That had to be preceded by the creation in due order of other, lower beings. Thus the animals became living creatures by what one might almost call a premature act of creation. The same expression nephesch, living creature, is applied to these animals as is ultimately applied to man. But how is it applied to man? At the moment when Jahve-Elohim intervenes and makes man into the man of today, it is said that Jahve-Elohim imprints n'schamah. It is through having a higher member implanted into him that man himself becomes a living being.

Note what a very fruitful concept the Bible, of all books, introduces into the theory of evolution! Of course it would be foolish not to recognise that, as regards his external form, man belongs to the highest stage of the animal kingdom. This small concession may be made to Darwinism. But the essential thing is that man did not become a living being in the same way as the other, lower beings, whose nature is described as nephesch; man was first endowed with a higher member of his being, a previously prepared soul-spiritual element.

Here we come to another parallel between the ancient Hebrew doctrine and our own Spiritual Science. When we speak of the human soul, we distinguish between sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul. We know that these first arose in their soul-spiritual form during the first three “days” of creation. It was then that their characteristic tendencies were formed. But this inner soul-nature was not clothed in physical form, was not, so to say, impressed into a physical body until much later. Thus we have to understand that first there arises the spiritual, that this spiritual is then invested with the astral and then gradually condenses into the etheric-physical; it is only then that what was previously spiritual is imprinted into the body as the breath of life. Thus what was implanted as a seed into the human being by Jahve-Elohim had already been prepared earlier. It was there in the womb of the Elohim. Now it is imprinted into man, whose bodily nature had been built up from another direction. Thus it is something which enters into man from without. This impress of n'schamah first made it possible to implant in man the predisposition to, the rudiments of, the ego nature. For these old Hebrew expressions nephesch, ruach, n'schamah correspond to our spiritual scientific terms sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul respectively.

Thus this further evolution is very complicated. We must think of all that happened on the six “days” of creation, that is to say, we must think of the work of the Elohim before they advanced to Jahve-Elohim, as having taken place in higher, spiritual realms; and what we can see today in the world as physical man first came about through the deed of Jahve-Elohim.

Of all this which we find in the Bible—and again now in clairvoyant perception—and which first enables us to understand the inner nature of man, the Greek philosophers still had a consciousness derived from their various initiation centres—Plato especially, but even Aristotle still knew something of it. Anyone familiar with the works of Plato and Aristotle knows that in Aristotle there was still an awareness that man first became a living being through the introduction of a higher soul-spiritual member, whereas the lower animals went through different evolutionary processes. Aristotle expressed it somewhat as follows. He says that the lower animals became what they were through other processes of evolution; but that at the time when the forces which are active in the animal were able to become effective, the human soul-spiritual being, which still hovered in higher regions, was not yet allowed to acquire an earthly body, otherwise it would have remained at the animal stage. The human being had to wait; in him the lower, the animal stages, had to be ousted from their sovereignty through the implanting of the human member. To express this Aristotle made use of the word φθειρεσθαι (phtheiresthai). By this he meant to say, “Of course, superficially speaking, man has the same bodily functions as the animal, but in the animal these functions are supreme, whereas in man the bodily functions have been dethroned and have to follow a higher principle.” That is the meaning of the word φθειρεσθαι.

The same truth lies behind the biblical story of the creation. Through the implanting of n'schamah the lower members were dethroned. In the bearer of his ego man has acquired a higher member. But his earlier, more etheric nature was thereby brought down a stage and became differentiated. Man acquired an external, bodily member, and an inner, more etheric member; the one became denser and the other more rarefied. The principle was repeated in man which we have come to recognise as running through the whole of evolution. We saw how warmth condensed to air and rarefied to light, how air condensed to water and rarefied into sound-ether and so on. The same process takes place in man at higher levels. The male-female becomes differentiated into man and woman, and moreover in such a way that the denser physical body appears on the outside, the more rarefied, etheric, invisible body goes inwards. We could also call this the progress from Elohim-man to man the creation of Jahve-Elohim. The man we know today is the creation of JahveElohim, and the sixth “day” of creation corresponds with the Lemurian age, in which we speak of the male-female human being.

Now the Bible speaks of yet a seventh “day” of creation, and we are told that on this seventh “day” the Elohim rested. What does that actually mean? We only understand it aright if we realise that this is the very time when the Elohim rise, when they experience their promotion to become Jahve-Elohim. But we must not conceive Jahve-Elohim as the entire hierarchy of the Elohim united; we must understand that the Elohim give up, so to speak, only a part of their Being to the moon-Being, and hold the rest in reserve; and that in this older part of their Being they continue their own further evolution. So far as this part of them is concerned, their work is no longer devoted to the creation of man. That part of the Elohim which has become Jahve-Elohim continues to work on man. The other part does not work directly upon the earth, it devotes itself to its own evolution. That is what is meant by rest from earthly work, by the Sabbath day, by the seventh “day” of creation.

And now we must call attention to something else of importance. If everything that I have just been saying is correct, then we must regard the Jahve-man, the man into whom Jahve impressed his own Being, as the direct successor of the more etheric, more delicate man who was formed on the sixth “day.” Thus there is a direct line from the more etheric man, who is still male-female—from the bi-sexual man—to the physical man. Physical man is the descendant, in a densified form, of the etheric man. If one wanted to describe the Jahve-man who passes over into Atlantis, one would have to say: “And the man who was formed by the Elohim on the sixth ‘day' of creation developed further into the unisexual man, the Jahve-man.” Those who followed after the seven “days” of creation are the descendants of the Elohim-men, and thus of what came into being during the first six “days.”

Again the Bible is sublime when, in the second chapter, it tells us that the Jahve-man is in fact a descendant of the heavenly man, the man who was formed by the Elohim on the sixth “day.” The Jahve-man is the descendant of the Elohim-man in precisely the same way as the son is the descendant of the father. The Bible tells us this in the fourth verse of the second chapter, which says “Those who are to follow are the descendants, the subsequent generations, of the heavenly man.” That is what it really says. But if you take a modern translation, you find the remarkable sentence: These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. Usually we find the whole hierarchy of the Elohim called “God,” and Jahve-Elohim called “the Lord God”—the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. I ask you to look at this sentence carefully and try honestly to find a reasonable meaning for it. Anyone who claims to do so had better not look on ahead in his Bible, for the word used here is tol'doth, which means “subsequent generations”; and the same word is used in the later chapter which tells of the subsequent generations of Noah. Thus here it is speaking of the Jahve-men as the descendants, the subsequent generations, of the heavenly Beings, in the same way as there it speaks of the descendants of Noah. Thus this passage must be translated something like this: “In what follows we are speaking of the descendants of the heaven-and-earth beings who were created by the Elohim and further developed by Jahve-Elohim.” Thus the Bible too looks upon the Jahve-men as the descendants of the Elohim-men. Anyone who wants to presuppose a fresh account of the creation, because it says that God created man, should also look at the fifth chapter, which begins This is the book of the generations (the word used there is the very same as in the other passages—tol'doth), and should assume a third account there—thus making his Rainbow Bible really complete! That way you will get a whole knocked up out of Bible fragments, but will no longer have the Bible. If we could go on longer, we should be able to elucidate what is said in chapter five too.

Thus, when we go deeply into these things, we see that there is full agreement between the biblical account of the creation and what we can establish through Spiritual or Occult Science. This leads us to ask why the Bible account is in a more or less pictorial form. What do these pictures represent? And then we realise that they too are the result of clairvoyant experience. Just as today the eye of the seer gazes in the super-sensible upon the origin of our earth existence, so too did those who originally composed the Bible story gaze upon the super-sensible. It was by clairvoyant experience that the facts originally given to us were acquired. When we set to work to construct prehistory from the point of view of purely physical observation, we start from the traces of it which are extant and discoverable by external means, and the farther back we go in physical life and physical origins the more hazy the physical forms become. But in this misty element spiritual Beings hold sway. And man himself in his spiritual part was originally within them. And if we pursue our study of its origin as far back as the times described in Genesis, we come to the original spiritual condition of our earth itself. The “days” of creation refer to spiritual stages of development, only to be grasped by spiritual investigation. What the Bible is telling us is that the physical is little by little formed out of the spiritual.

When the seer gazes upon the facts which are described for us in Genesis, he finds to begin with only spiritual processes. The physical eye would see absolutely nothing; it would gaze into a void. But, as we have seen, time goes on. Little by little for the seer the solid crystallises out of the spiritual, just as ice is formed out of water and solidifies. Out of the flowing sea of the astral, of the Devachanic, emerges what can now be seen by the physical eye. Thus, as clairvoyant observation proceeds, within the picture which to begin with has to be understood as purely spiritual, the physical emerges like a crystallisation. It follows that at an earlier time physical eyes would not have been able to discover the human being. Right up to the sixth and seventh “days” of creation, that is, right up to our Lemurian age, man could not have been seen by the physical eye; at that time he only existed spiritually. That is the great difference between a true theory of evolution and a fancy one. The fancy one assumes only a physical process of development. But man did not originate by lower beings evolving to human stature. It is utterly absurd to imagine that an animal form can be transformed into the higher, human form. During the time when the animal forms came into being, forming their physical bodies below, man had already long been in existence, but it is only later that he descends and takes his place beside the animal natures which had descended much earlier. Anyone who cannot look upon evolution in this way is beyond help; he is hypnotised as it were by modern concepts, he is influenced, not by natural scientific facts, but by contemporary opinion.

If we want to connect the coming into being of man with that of all other creatures, we must say that first there appear two branches, the birds and the marine animals;¹ then, as a special offshoot, come the land animals; the birds and marine animals came into existence on the fifth “day” of creation, the land animals on the sixth. And then came man, only not by producing the same line further, not as a continuation of the series, but by a descent upon the earth. That is the true theory of evolution, and it is contained more exactly in the Bible than in any modern textbook which surrenders to materialistic fantasy.

These are a few fragmentary remarks such as always seem to be required in the last lecture of a Cycle. To follow up adequately every aspect of such a theme as this would take months; there is so very much in this Genesis story of creation. In our Cycles we can never do more than touch upon things, and that is all I have attempted to do this time. I should like to emphasise once more that it has not been so very easy for me to give this particular course; nor will any of my hearers readily realise how difficult it is to reach the depths upon which the Bible story is based, how hard it is to find the true parallel between already ascertained spiritual scientific facts and the corresponding passages in the Bible. If one works conscientiously, the task is an extraordinarily exacting one. It is so often assumed that the eye of the seer reaches with ease everywhere—that one has only to look, and everything follows of itself. An inexperienced person often thinks, when confronted with a problem, that he will easily be able to solve it, whereas the further he probes the more numerous are the difficulties which present themselves. This is so even in ordinary, external research, and when one leaves the physical and plunges into clairvoyant investigation, then the real difficulties begin to show themselves, and with them the feeling of the great responsibility incurred in speaking of these things at all. Nevertheless I think I may say that I have not made use of a single word in the whole of this Cycle which cannot stand, which is not as far as it goes an adequate expression in our own language of the right way to conceive these things. But it was certainly not easy.

There is much that I could still say. Especially something which has been borne in upon us at every stage during these lectures—and that is the need for anthroposophical teaching so to permeate our hearts as to lift us with all the strength of our inner life to ever higher forms of perception, to an ever larger-hearted comprehension of the world. Whether we become better men in the intellectual, feeling and moral spheres—that is the touchstone for the fruitfulness of what we gather in the spiritual-scientific field. To study the parallel between spiritual-scientific investigation and the Bible can be particularly fruitful; for it enables us to experience how we ourselves are the “primal cause,” the “primal state,” as Jacob Boehme would have said, in that super-sensible spiritual womb whence also came those very Elohim who developed into Jahve-Elohim, into that higher form of evolution, in order to bring about the great goal of their activity, which we call man. Let us comprehend our origin with due reverence, but also with a due sense of our responsibility. The Elohim and Jahve-Elohim gave their highest forces to the beginning of our evolution. Let us look upon this our origin as laying upon us an obligation to absorb into our human nature more and more of the spiritual forces which in the course of subsequent evolution have entered into the development of the earth.

We have spoken of the influence of Lucifer. Because of this influence something which lay in the womb of that spirituality in which man too originated remained there for the time being; it came forth later in the incarnation of the Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Since that time the Christ has worked in the earth as another divine principle. And contemplation of the great truths of Genesis ought to point us to the duty of taking more and more into our own being the spiritual Being of the Christ; for only by permeating ourselves with the Christ principle shall we be able to fulfil our human task; only so shall we become on the earth more and more what we were predisposed to be in those times with which the biblical story of creation is concerned.

Thus such a series of lectures as this can not only give us knowledge, but can stir forces in our souls. Even if we forget much of its detail, may what we have learnt through a closer examination of the biblical story of creation go on working as power in our souls. I may perhaps be allowed to say this at the close of these lectures, during which we have tried to immerse ourselves in our anthroposophical life. Let us try to take with us the strength which should flow from this teaching. Let us carry it away with us, let us fructify our outside life with this strength. Whatever we may be doing, in whatever worldly profession we may be engaged, this strength can warm and ripen our creative activity as well as intensify our joy, our happiness. No one who has rightly grasped the sublime origin of human existence can go on living without taking this knowledge as a germinal force of blessing and joy for the rest of his life. When you try to carry out deeds of love, let the truth about the mighty origin of men shine forth from your eyes, and thus you will best reveal what anthroposophical teaching is. Our deeds will proclaim its truth, rejoicing those around us, conferring blessing, refreshment and health upon our own spirit, soul and body. We ought to be better, stronger, healthier human beings through having absorbed anthroposophical teaching. May this above all be the effect of this Cycle! It should be a seed which sinks into the soul of the hearer only to spring up again and bear fruit for those around us. Thus we go our separate ways, while our spirits remain united, and we try to work together to translate this teaching into life. Let us permeate ourselves with this spirit, without weakening, until the moment when we are able to meet again not only in the spirit but in the flesh.

• 1. Dr. Steiner draws on the blackboard.

Yesterday we described the spirit of the Apocalypse of John in a general way. We tried to give a few broad outlines showing that in this Apocalypse is described what may be called a Christian initiation. To-day it will be my task to present to you in general the nature of initiation, to describe what takes place in a man when through initiation he is enabled to see for himself those spiritual worlds which lie behind the sense worlds; and further it will be my task to give in broad outline a description of the experiences in initiation. For only by entering a little more closely into the nature of initiation can we gradually understand this significant religious record known as the Apocalypse.

First of all we must again consider closely the two states of human consciousness, the one lasting from morning when a person awakes until evening when he goes to sleep, and the other which begins when he goes to sleep and ends when he awakes. We have often brought to mind that man as we know him in his present form is, to begin with, a fourfold being; that he consists of the physical, etheric and astral bodies and the “I.” To spiritual vision these four principles appear in their external form as if the human physical body is enclosed in the centre like a kind of kernel. During the day this physical body is permeated by the so-called etheric or life-body which projects very slightly round about the head as a luminous halo, but which also completely permeates the head; further down it becomes more cloudy and indistinct and the more it approaches the lower parts of man the less definitely does it show the form of the physical body.

Now these two principles of the human being are during the day enveloped by what we call the astral body, which projects on all sides like an ellipse, in the shape of an egg, and in its fundamental form it has luminous rays which look as if their direction really were from outside inward, as if they would penetrate from outside to the inner part of the man. Within this astral body are outlined a great number of different figures, every possible kind of lines and rays, many like flashes of lightning, many in curious twists; all this surrounds the human being in the most varied manifestations of light. The astral body is the expression of his passions, instincts, impulses and desires, as also of all his thoughts and ideas. The clairvoyant consciousness sees portrayed in this astral body all that one calls soul-experiences, from the lowest impulses to the highest ethical ideals.

Then we have the fourth principle of the human being, which one might sketch as if something were sending in rays to a point lying about one centimetre (3/8 inch) behind the forehead. That would be the diagrammatic representation of the fourfold man. In the course of these lectures we shall see how the several parts are distinguished in the whole.

This is a picture of man during the day from moving when he wakes, until night when he goes to sleep. Now, when he goes to sleep, the physical and etheric bodies remain on the bed and a kind of streaming-out of the astral body takes place. “Streaming-out” does not express it quite exactly; it is really as if a kind of mist formed. So that in the night we see the astral body which has withdrawn from the physical and the etheric bodies like a kind of spiral mist around the man, while the fourth principle of the human being disappears almost entirely towards one side, that is, it disperses and becomes vague. The lower part of the astral body can only just be seen; it is the upper part which is indicated as the “astral body which has withdrawn.”

Yesterday we emphasized what has to happen to a person if he is to receive initiation. If he occupies himself only with the customary activities of the present day he is unable to receive initiation. He must be so prepared that during ordinary daily life he performs the exercises of meditation, concentration, etc., prescribed for him by the schools of initiation. The effect produced by these exercises is, on the whole, the same in all kinds of initiation. They only differ in that the further we go back into pre-Christian schools of initiation, they are directed more to the training of thought, to the exercise of the power of thinking. The nearer we approach to Christian times the more are these exercises directed to train the forces of feeling; and the nearer we come to modern times the more we see how, in the so-called Rosicrucian training—conditioned by the demands and requirements of humanity—a particular kind of will culture, the exercise of the will is introduced. Although the meditations are at first similar to those of pre-Christian schools, there nevertheless prevails everywhere at the basis of the Rosicrucian exercises a particular training of the element of Will. The chief aim is, so to influence a person during the day—even if only for a short time, perhaps five to fifteen minutes—that the effect continues when the pupil falls asleep and the astral body withdraws. This effect was produced by the exercises given in the Oriental Mysteries, in the Egyptian Mysteries, in the Pythagorean schools, and it also resulted from the exercises of meditation based chiefly upon the Gospel of John. The astral body of a man who performs such, shall we say, occult exercises, gradually manifests many different changes at night. It manifests different light-effects; it shows that plastic formation of the organs of which we have already spoken and this becomes ever more distinct. The astral body gradually acquires an inner organization such as the physical body possesses in its eyes, ears, etc.

Yet this would never lead one to see much, particularly in the case of the man of the present day; the pupil, however, has some slight perception when his inner organs have been developed to a certain extent. He begins to become conscious during sleep. A spiritual environment gleams forth from the otherwise universal darkness. He perceives wonderful pictures of plant life; this was more especially the case in ancient times: to-day it takes place more seldom. These are the most primitive achievements of clairvoyance. Where previously there had been only the darkness of unconsciousness there now arises something of a dreamlike plant structure yet living and real. Much of what is described in the mythologies of ancient peoples was seen in this way. When we read in legends that Woden, Willy and Weh found a tree on the seashore and that from it they created man, this indicates that it was first seen in such a picture. In all the mythologies you may perceive this primitive kind of sight, this vision of plants. Paradise is also the description of such a vision, Paradise with its two trees of knowledge and of life. It is the result of this astral vision. It is not without cause that in Genesis itself is indicated that Paradise, together with all that is described in the beginning of the Bible, was seen in this manner. First we must learn to read the Bible, then we shall understand how closely and significantly it portrays this mysterious condition in its descriptions. In former times they did not teach of Paradise, of the beginning of the Bible, as we do now. The early Christians were told that “Adam fell into a sleep,” and that this was the sleep in which Adam, looking back, perceived the visions described in the beginning of Genesis. It is only in our day that the belief has grown that such words as “Adam fell into a sleep” are just an accident. They are no accident. Every word in the Bible has a deep meaning and only he can understand the Bible who knows how to value every single word.

That is the first thing. Then, however, in the pre-Christian Mysteries something special had to take place. When the pupil had performed his exercises for a long period—and this lasted for a very long time—when he had received what was necessary to produce order in the soul., when he had absorbed what we now call Anthroposophy, then he was at last able to participate in the old initiation proper. In what did this old initiation consist?

It is not sufficient that organs be formed in the astral body. They must be imprinted in the etheric body. Just as the letter of a seal is imprinted in sealing wax, so must the organs of the astral body be imprinted in the etheric body. For this purpose the neophyte in ancient initiations was brought into a particular condition. For three and a half days he lay in a death-like condition. We shall see more and more that this condition cannot and may not be brought about in our day, but that there are now other means of initiation. I am now describing the pre-Christian initiation, in which the neophyte was for three and a half days put into a death-like condition by the hierophant. Either he was laid in a kind of small chamber, a kind of grave where he lay in a death-like sleep, or he was bound in a particular position with outstretched hands on a cross, for this facilitated the arrival of the condition aimed at.

From many different lectures we know that death takes place in a man through the etheric withdrawing together with the astral body and the “I,” and only the physical body remaining behind, At death something takes place which otherwise has never occurred between birth and death in the ordinary course of life. The etheric body never, even in the deepest sleep, leaves the physical body, but is always within it. At death it leaves the physical body. Now during the death-like condition part at least of the etheric body leaves the physical body, so that a part of the etheric body which was within it before, in this condition finds itself outside. This is described, as you know, in more exoteric lectures by saying that the etheric body is withdrawn. That is not actually the case, for we can only now make the necessary fine distinctions. In the three and a half days during which the Priest-Initiate carefully watched over the neophyte, only the lower part of the body of the pupil was united with the etheric body. This is the stage when the astral body, with all the organs formed in it, imprints itself in the etheric body. At this moment illumination takes place. When the neophyte was awakened after three and a half days, what is called illumination had come to him, that which had to follow after purification, which consists merely in the development of the organs of the astral body. The pupil was now a “knower” in the spiritual world; what he had previously seen was only a preparatory stage of vision. This world consisting of forms somewhat resembling plants was now supplemented by essentially new structures.

We have now to describe more exactly what the initiate then began to see. When he had been led to illumination it was clear to him when he was awakened, that he had seen something which he had previously never been able consciously to grasp. What then had he seen? What was he able to call up in a certain sense before his soul as an important memory-picture of his vision? If we wish to understand what he had seen we must cast a glance at the evolution of man. We must remember that man has only gradually gained the degree of individual consciousness he now possesses. He could not always say “I” to himself as he does to-day. We need only go back to the time when the Cherusci, the Heruli, etc., lived in the parts now inhabited by the Germans. The different human beings did not then feel themselves as separate human egos, but as members of the tribe. Just as a finger does not feel itself to be something existing independently, so each Cheruscan did not feel that he could unconditionally say “I” to himself; his “I” was the “I” of the whole tribe. The tribe represented a single organism and a group of men who were related by blood had one “I”-soul in common. In those days you yourselves were members of a great community, just as to-day your two arms belong to your “I.” This may be clearly seen in the case of the people dealt with in the Old Testament. Each single member felt himself to be a member of the race. The individual did not speak of himself in the highest sense when he uttered the ordinary “I,” but he felt something deeper when he said “I and the Father Abraham are one.” For he felt a certain “I”-consciousness which descended from Abraham through all the generations to each member of the race. That which was related by blood was included in one “I.” It was like a common group-soul-“I” which included the whole race and those that understood the matter said: That which really forms our inmost immortal being dwells not in the separate members but in the entire race. All of the several members belong to this common “I.” Hence one who understood the matter knew that when he died he united himself with an invisible being which reached back to Father Abraham. The individual really felt that he returned into Abraham's bosom. He felt that his immortal part found refuge, as it were, in the group-soul of the race. This group-soul of the entire race could not descend to the physical plane. The people themselves saw only the separate human forms, but these were to them not the reality, for this was in the spiritual world. They dimly felt that that which flowed through the blood was the Divine. And because they had to see God in Jehovah they called this Divinity “Jahve” or also his Countenance, “Michael.” They considered Jahve as the spiritual group-soul of the people.

The individual human being on the physical plane could not see these spiritual beings. The initiate, on the other hand, who experienced the great moment when the astral body was imprinted in the etheric body, was able to see first of all the most important group-souls. When we look back into ancient periods of humanity we everywhere find that the present “I” has developed from such a group-consciousness, a group-ego; so that when the seer looks back he finds that the individual human beings flow together more and more into the group-souls. Now there are four chief types of group-souls, four prototypes. If we observe all the various group-souls of the different souls we notice a certain similarity but there are also differences. If we classify them there are four groups, four types. The spiritual observer sees them clearly when he looks back to the time when man was not yet in the flesh, when he had not descended to the earth. We must now consider more exactly the moment when from the spiritual regions man descended into flesh. This can only be represented in great symbols.

There was a time when our earth was composed of very much softer material than it is now, when rock and stone were not so solid, when the forms of the plants were quite different, when the whole was as if embedded like a primeval ocean in water-caves, when air and water were not separated, when all the beings now dwelling on the earth, the animals and plants, were developed in water. When the minerals began to assume their present form, man emerged from invisibility. The neophyte saw it in this way: Surrounded by a kind of shell, man descended from the regions which are now the regions of air. He was not yet as physically condensed when the animals already existed in the flesh. He was a delicate airy being even in the Lemurian epoch and he so developed that the spiritual picture presents the four group-souls: On one side something like the image of a Lion, on the other the likeness of a Bull, up above something like an Eagle and below something similar to Man. Such is the spiritual picture. Thus man moves forth from the darkness of the spirit-land. And the force which formed him appears as a kind of rainbow. The more physical powers surround the entire structure of this human being like a rainbow (Rev. 4). We have to describe this development of man in various realms and in various ways. The above description represents the way it appears to the investigator when he looks back and sees how these four group-souls have developed out of the common Divine-human which descends. From time immemorial this stage has been symbolized in the form represented in the second of the so-called seven seals.¹ That is the symbolic representation, but it is more than a mere symbol.

There you see these four group-souls emerging from an indefinite background, the rainbow surrounding it and the number twelve. Now we must understand what this number twelve signifies. When that which has just been described is seen coming forth, there is a clairvoyant feeling that it is surrounded by something of an entirely different nature from that which emerges from the indeterminate spiritual. In ancient times that by which it is surrounded was symbolized by the Zodiac, by the twelve signs of the Zodiac. The moment of entering into spiritual vision is connected with many other experiences. The first thing perceived by one whose etheric body goes forth is that it seems to him as if he grew larger and larger and extended himself over what he then perceives. The moment comes when the initiate says: “I do not merely see these four forms, but I am within them, I have expanded my being over them.” He identifies himself with them. He perceives that which is symbolized by the constellations, by the number twelve. We shall best understand that which spreads itself around, that which reveals itself, if we remember that our earth has passed through previous incarnations. We know that before the earth became earth it went through the condition of Saturn, then through that of Sun, then through that of Moon, and only then did it become our present earth. This was necessary, for only in this way was it possible for the beings we see on the earth around us to come forth as they have done. They had gradually to work through those changing forms.

So when we look back into the primeval past we see the first condition of our earth, that of ancient Saturn which at the beginning of its existence did not even shine. It consisted of a kind of warmth. You would not have been able to see it as a shining globe, but had you approached you would have come into a warmth space, because it then consisted only of warmth.

Someone might now ask: Did then the development of the world begin with Saturn? Have not perhaps other conditions brought about that which became Saturn? Was not Saturn preceded by other incarnations? It would be difficult to go back before Saturn because only with Saturn begins something without which it is impossible to go beyond Saturn, namely, that which we call time. Previously there were other forms of being; that is to say, we cannot really speak of a “before,” because time did not yet exist. Even time had a beginning! Before Saturn there was no time, there was only eternity, duration. All was then simultaneous. Only with Saturn did it come about that events followed one another. In that state of the world where there is only eternity, duration, there is also no movement. For time belongs to movement. There is no circulation, no revolution; there is duration and rest. As one says in Spiritual Science: there is blissful rest in duration. That is the expression for it. Blissful rest in duration preceded that Saturn condition. The movement of the heavenly bodies only entered with Saturn. The path indicated by the twelve signs of the Zodiac was conceived of as signs, and the time during which a planet passed through one of these constellations was spoken of as a cosmic hour; twelve cosmic hours, twelve hours of day and twelve of night! To each cosmic body, Saturn, Sun and Moon, is reckoned a consecutive number of cosmic hours which are grouped into cosmic days; and of these periods of time seven are outwardly perceptible and five are more or less outwardly imperceptible. We distinguish there-fore seven Saturn revolutions or seven great Saturn days and five great Saturn nights. We might also say five days and seven nights, for the first and last “days” are twilight days. We are accustomed to call these seven revolutions, these seven cosmic days, Manvantaras, and the five cosmic nights, Pralayas. If we wish to have it exactly correspond to our reckoning of time, we reckon two planetary conditions together, that is, Saturn and Sun, Moon and Earth; and we then get twenty-four revolutions. These twenty-four revolutions form important epochs in the representation of the world and we picture these twenty-four revolutions ruled by beings in the universe who are represented in the Apocalypse as the twenty-four Elders, the twenty-four rulers of the cosmic revolutions, the cosmic periods. In the seal (shown by Dr. Steiner) they are typified as the cosmic clock. The numbers on the clock are here only interrupted by the double crowns of the Elders to indicate that these are the Time-Kings because they rule the revolutions of the cosmic bodies. The initiate sees this when he first looks back into the picture of the past.

We must now ask: Why does the initiate see this picture? Because in it are represented symbolically in astral pictures the forces which have formed the human etheric body in its present shape, and corresponding with this the physical body. Why this is so you may easily imagine. Imagine a man lying in bed. With his astral body and “I” he leaves the physical body and etheric body. But now the physical and etheric bodies as they are to-day, belong to the present physical human body; and to the present etheric body belong the astral body and the “I.” This physical and this etheric body cannot exist alone. They have become what they are because the astral body and “I” have been membered into them. Only a physical body which contains neither blood nor nerves can exist without an astral body and “I.” That is the reason why the plant can exist without astral body and “I,” because it has neither blood nor nervous system, for the nervous system is connected with the astral body and the blood with the “I.” There is no being having a nervous system in the physical body which is not permeated by an astral body and there is no human being having a blood system in the physical body into which the “I” has not entered. Think of what you do every night. You callously desert your physical and etheric bodies and leave them with the blood and nervous systems to themselves. If it merely depended upon you, your physical body would have to die every night through your deserting your nervous and blood systems; it would die the very moment the astral body and “I ” left the physical and etheric bodies. But the spiritual investigator sees how other beings, higher spiritual beings, then occupy it. He sees how they pass into it and do what man does not do in the night, namely, take care of the blood and nervous systems. These are the same beings, however, who have created man, in so far as he consists of a physical body and etheric body, not only to-day but from incarnation to incarnation. They are the same beings who caused the first rudiments of the physical body to originate upon ancient Saturn and who formed the etheric body upon the Sun. These beings who from the very beginning of the Saturn and Sun periods have ruled in the physical and etheric bodies, now rule every night while man is asleep and basely leaves his physical and etheric bodies, surrendering them to death, so to speak; they penetrate and take care of his blood and nervous systems.

Hence, too, it is comprehensible that at the moment when the astral body touches the etheric body in order to imprint itself in it, man is then pervaded by those forces which have formed him; he then sees the picture of the forces which are symbolized in the seal. That which upholds him in life and connects him with the whole universe flashes out at this moment of initiation. He sees what has formed the two members of his being, the physical body and etheric body, that which preserves their life every night; but he himself has still no share in it for he cannot yet work into these two principles of his being. If it depended upon man, the physical body and the etheric body, which during the night lie on the bed, would be condemned to a plant existence, for he leaves them to themselves. Hence to man the state of sleep is an unconscious condition such as the plant always possesses.

Now what has happened, in the case of an ordinary man, with that which has withdrawn during sleep? What has become of the astral body and the “I”? These also are unconscious during the night. The ordinary man experiences nothing in his astral body during sleep at night. But suppose a person were passing through the seven stages of the John-initiation—those important stages in Christian initiation—he experiences not merely what has been described up to now; quite apart from the fact that when the astral body touches the etheric body he is able to develop clairvoyant power, something else would come about. He becomes conscious of the soul-peculiarities, the human soul-qualities of the astral and devachanic worlds from which his soul is really born. To this picture is added a still higher symbol which seems to fill the whole world. To this symbol of the old initiation there is added for one who passes through the stages of the initiation of John something else which may best be represented by the first seal. The Christian initiation possessed this as the symbol of the old initiation. We are now presenting these things from the standpoint of Christianity, which, however, has to receive then and change them into something different. He sees a spiritual vision (Rev. i, 12) of the Priest-king with the golden girdle, with feet which seem to consist of cast metal, his head covered with hair as of white wool, out of his mouth a fiery sword flaming and in his hand the seven cosmic-stars, Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus.

The form in the centre of the second picture seal was only indicated in the old initiation as the fifth of the group-souls. It is that which only existed germinally in ancient humanity and only came forth as what is described as the Son of Man who rules the stars when he fully appears to man in his true form.

Thus from this symbolical representation we must first of all clearly understand that the separation of the various principles in present-day humanity—physical body and etheric body on the one hand and astral body and “I” upon the other—may be so considered, that each may contribute its part, as it were, to initiation, first of all through the form of initiation when the astral body touches the etheric body, when the four group-souls flash out, and then in the treatment of the astral body so that this too acquires the ability to see. Previously the highest vision in the super-sensible world had only reached as far as a kind of plant experience of the world. Through the Christian initiation a higher stage of initiation is reached in the astral body. Here you have the two things mentioned at the beginning of the Apocalypse described from the principle of initiation itself. The writer of the Apocalypse has, however, described them in the reverse order, and rightly so. He first describes the vision of the Son of Man, the appearance of Him Who is, Who was and Who is to come—and then the other. Both are symbols of what the initiate experiences during initiation.

Thus we have described what happens in certain cases of initiation and what at first is experienced. In our next lecture we shall proceed further to the details of these real, actual experiences and we shall find them reflected in the mighty presentation given in the Apocalypse of John.

• 1. Dr. Steiner is referring to the seven symbolic Seals which had been drawn from his indications. They showed stages of human evolution visible in the astral world to the seer. See Occult Seals and Columns with introduction by Rudolf Steiner.

The Influence of the Sun and Moon Spirits, of the Isis and Osiris Forces. The Change in Consciousness. The Conquest of the Physical Plane.

In the preceding lectures we reviewed in some detail a number of facts concerning the evolution of humanity. I tried to show how man developed in the period of evolution that stretches approximately from the moment when the sun withdrew from the earth to the time when the moon also departed. Today something will be added to these facts, which could be called “facts of occult anatomy and physiology.” In order to understand everything properly, however, today we must throw a little light on certain other facts of the spiritual life, for we must not forget that what is really to be demonstrated is the relation between the Egyptian myths and mysteries, between the whole Egyptian cultural period, and our own time. Therefore it is necessary that we be entirely clear about how evolution progressed further through the various epochs.

Let us again recall what was described as the working of the sun and moon spirits, especially of the Osiris and Isis forces, through whose activities the human body first appeared and was built up. Remember that this occurred in the remote past, that our earth as yet had scarcely crystallized out of the water-earth, and that a great part of what was described actually took place in the water-earth. Man at that time was in a condition that we should bring clearly before our minds so that we may form a clear conception of how things looked to human vision during man's progress through evolution.

I have described how man's lower members, the feet, shanks, knees, etc., appeared as physical forms as early as the time when the sun had shown indications of withdrawing from the earth. But we must always remember what has been said so often: all this would have been visible had there been a human eye to see it. But such an eye did not exist. It appeared only much later. While man was still in the water-earth, he perceived only by means of the organ described as the pineal gland. Perception by means of the physical eye began only after the hip region had been formed. Thus we may say that man already had the lower part of the human form, but possessed nothing whereby he could have seen the body. At that time man could not see himself. Only at the moment when his body, building itself up from below, passed the region of the hips, did man receive the capacity of seeing himself. When he was shaped as far as the sign of the Balance, man's eyes were opened for the first time. Then he began to see himself as in a mist. Then he developed the vision of objects. Until the hip region evolved, all human perception, all seeing, was of a clairvoyant astral-etheric nature. At that time man could not yet see physical things. Human consciousness was still dark and shadowy, though of a dreamy clairvoyant nature.

Then man passed over to that condition of consciousness in which sleeping and waking alternated. When he was awake man saw darkly what was physical, but as though it were wrapped in mist and surrounded by an aura of light. In his sleep man rose to the spiritual worlds and the divine spiritual beings. He alternated between a clairvoyant consciousness, which grew ever weaker, and a day-consciousness, an object-consciousness, which grew stronger and stronger and is the head-consciousness of today. Gradually he lost the capacity of clairvoyant perception, together with the faculty of seeing the gods in sleep. However, the clarity of day-consciousness waxed in the same proportion, and the consciousness of self, the I-feeling, the I-perception, grew stronger.

If we look back into the Lemurian time, into the time before, during, and after the moon's exit from the earth, we find that man then had a clairvoyant consciousness in which he had no inkling of what we today call death. For if, at that time, man withdrew from his physical body, whether through sleep or through death, his consciousness did not diminish. On the contrary, he received a higher consciousness and, in certain ways, one more spiritual than his consciousness when in his physical body. He never said to himself, “Now I am dying,” or, “I am falling into unconsciousness”—that did not exist in those times. Man did not yet rely on his own feeling of self, but he felt himself immortal in the womb of divinity, and for him all that we describe here today were obvious facts.

Let us imagine that we lie down to sleep, that the astral body removes itself from the physical, and that all this happens in the full moon. We have the physical and etheric bodies lying in bed, the astral body hovering above, and all of this in the full moonlight. Now the situation is not so that an astral cloud simply becomes visible there for the clairvoyant. On the contrary, what he actually sees is streams from the astral body into the physical, and these streams are the forces that remove fatigue in the night. They bring to the physical body replenishment for the wear and tear of the day, so that it feels refreshed and quickened. At the same time one would see spiritual streams proceeding from the moon, and these streams are permeated by astral powers. One would see how there actually proceed from the moon spiritual effects that permeate and strengthen the astral body and influence its working on the physical body.

Let us assume that we are men of the old Lemurian time. Then the astral body would have perceived this streaming-in of the spiritual forces, would have gazed upward and said, “This is Osiris who strengthens me, who works on me. I see how his influence goes through me.” We would have felt ourselves sheltered in Osiris during the night; we would have lived, so to say, in Osiris with our ego. We would have felt, “I and Osiris are one.” Had we been able to give words to what we felt at that time, we would have described it approximately thus, when we returned into the physical body, “Now I must descend again into the physical body that waits for me there below; this is a time when I must dive down into my lower nature.” We should have rejoiced when the time came when we could leave the physical body once again, and rise up to rest in the lap of Osiris, or in the lap of Isis, where we again united our ego with Osiris.

As the physical body evolved further, and especially after the development of the upper members, man could see more physically, could perceive the objects in the physical world about him. In the same proportion, however, he had to tarry longer when he descended into his physical body. He took more interest in the physical world. His consciousness grew darker for the spiritual world as his consciousness in the physical body became clearer. He became disaccustomed to the spiritual world. Thus the life of man in the physical world evolved further, and in the conditions that prevailed between death and a new birth consciousness grew darker and darker. In the Atlantean time man lost almost entirely the feeling of being at home with the gods, and when the great catastrophe was past, a great part of mankind had completely lost the natural ability to gaze into the spiritual world at night. But in place of this they gained the capacity of seeing ever more sharply by day, so that the objects around them appeared in ever clearer outlines. We have already pointed out that, among the men who had remained behind, the gift of clairvoyance was still preserved, even into the post-Atlantean cultures. At the time when Christianity was founded, remnants of this clairvoyance still existed, and even today there are occasional persons who have preserved it as a natural gift. But this clairvoyance is entirely different from that which is gained through esoteric training.

Thus night gradually grew dark for man in Atlantis, while day-consciousness began to light up. The night was without consciousness for the people of the first post-Atlantean culture, whom we tried to characterize in all their greatness, in the spirituality that entered through the holy Rishis. In the earlier lectures we examined these people, and now we must describe them from another side.

Let us try to enter into the souls of the pupils of the holy Rishis, into the souls of the people of the Indian culture in general, in the time immediately after the last traces of the great Atlantean water-catastrophes had vanished. A sort of memory of the ancient world still lived in the soul, a memory of that world in which man experienced and saw the gods who worked on his body, a memory of how Osiris and Isis worked on him. Now he had emerged from this world, out of the womb of the gods. Formerly all this had been present to him as the physical is present to him today. Like a memory this passed through the mind of the Indian man of the first post-Atlantean times, to whom the Rishis still could speak of how things actually had been. He knew that the Rishis and their pupils still could see into the spiritual world, but he also knew that for the normal person of the Indian culture the time was past when he could see into the spiritual world.

Like a painful memory of his old true home, this went through the soul of the ancient Indian when he saw himself transplanted into the physical world, which is only the outer shell of the spiritual world. He yearned to be out of this external world. He felt, “Unreal are the mountains and valleys, unreal the cloud-masses in the air, unreal even the firmament. All this is only like a sheath, like the physiognomy of a real being, and we cannot see the reality behind this, the gods and the true form of man. What we see is Maya, is unreal; the real is veiled.” The feeling grew ever keener that man had sprung from the truth and had his real home in the spiritual; that the things of sense were untrue, were Maya, and that the physical world of the senses was the night around him.¹ When one feels so strongly the contrast between the spiritual and the unreal physical, the religious mood will tend to produce little interest in the physical world and to lead the spirit toward what the initiates see, as to which the holy Rishis could give knowledge. The ancient Indian longed to escape from this hard reality, which for him was nothing but illusion, for to him the true was not what his senses perceived, but what lay beyond that. Therefore the first post-Atlantean culture entertained little interest for what occurred externally on the physical plane.

Things were already different among the Persians in the second cultural period, out of which arose Zarathustra, the great pupil of Manu. If we wish to characterize in a few strokes the difference between the Indian and Persian cultures, we may say that a member of the Persian culture felt the physical to be not merely a burden, but a task to be fulfilled. He also looked up into the regions of light, into the spiritual worlds, but he turned his gaze back into the physical world and in his soul he saw how everything divides into the powers of light and the powers of darkness. The physical world became for him a field of work. The Persian said to himself, “There is the beneficent fullness of light, the god Ahura Mazdao or Ormuzd, and there are the dark powers under the leadership of Angramainyush or Ahriman. From Ahura Mazdao comes salvation for men; from Ahriman comes the physical world. We must transform what comes from Ahriman; we must unite with the good gods and vanquish Ahriman, the evil god in matter, by transforming the earth, by becoming beings capable of working upon the earth. By thus vanquishing Ahriman, we make the earth into a medium for the good.” The first step toward redeeming the earth was taken by the members of the Persian culture. They hoped that the earth would become a good planet one day, that it would be redeemed, and that a glorification of Ahura Mazdao, the highest being, would come about.

Thus a man felt who did not gaze up into the sublime heights like the Indian, but planted his feet firmly on this physical earth. A member of the Indian culture, who did not plant his feet in this way, would not have thought thus.

The conquest of the physical plane proceeded further in the third cultural epoch, in the Egyptian-Babylonian-Assyrian-Chaldean culture. At this time, hardly anything remained of the ancient repugnance with which the physical world was felt to be Maya. The Chaldeans looked up to the heavens, and the light of the stars was not merely Maya for them; it was the script that the gods had imprinted on the physical plane. On the paths of the stars the Chaldean priest pursued his way back into the spiritual worlds, and when he was initiated, when he learned to know all the beings who inhabited the planets and the stars, he lifted up his eyes and said, “What I see with my eyes when I gaze up to the heavens is the outer expression of what is given me by occult vision, by initiation. When the initiating priest endows me with the grace of the perception of the divine, then I see God. But all I see externally is not mere illusions; I see in it the handwriting of the gods.”

The initiate felt as we would feel if we had been long separated from a friend, then received a letter from him and recognized his familiar handwriting. We see that it was our friend's hand that formed these signs, and we observe the feelings of his heart expressed in them. Approximately thus felt the Chaldean initiate (and also the Egyptian) who was inducted into the holy mysteries and who, while he was in the mystery temple, saw with his spiritual eye the spiritual beings that are connected with our earth. When he went out again, after seeing all this, and cast his eyes on the world of stars, this appeared to him like a letter from the spiritual beings. He perceived a script of the gods. In the blaze of the lightning, in the rolling of the thunder, in the tempest, he saw a revelation of the gods. The gods manifested themselves for him in all that he saw externally. As we feel about the letter from a friend, so did he feel in regard to the outer world. Thus did he feel when he saw the world of the elements, the world of plants, animals, and mountains, the world of the clouds, the world of the stars. Everything was deciphered as a divine script.

The Egyptian had confidence in the laws that man could find in the physical world, through which man can master matter. By this means arose geometry, mathematics. With the help of this, man could rule the elements because he trusted in what his spirit could find, because he believed that he could imprint the spirit upon matter. Thus he could build the pyramids, the temples, and the sphinxes. This was a mighty step in the conquest of the physical plane that was accomplished in the third cultural period. Man had progressed so far that for the first time he was able rightly to respect the physical plane. The physical world began to mean something to him. But what kind of teachers did he require for this?

Man had always needed teachers. Even the initiates had teachers, as in the old Indian time. What kind of teachers did the initiates need? It was necessary that the initiate should be artificially led to see again, during initiation, what man had been able to see previously in his dark clairvoyant consciousness. The neophyte had to be led back into the spiritual world, into the earlier home of the spirit, so that he could communicate to others what he learned from his experiences. For this he needed teachers. The pupils of the Rishis needed teachers who could show them what happened in ancient Lemuria and Atlantis, when man was still clairvoyant. The same was also true of the Persians.

It was different with the Chaldeans, and even more different with the Egyptians. They also had teachers who aided the pupil to develop his powers so that he could see, through clairvoyant vision, into the spiritual world behind the physical world. These were the initiators, who showed what lay behind the physical. But a new teaching, a wholly new method, became necessary in Egypt. In ancient India man had troubled himself little about how what happened in the spiritual world was imprinted upon the physical plane, about the correspondence between gods and men. But in Egypt something else was needed. It was necessary that through initiation the pupil should see the gods, but also that he should see how the gods moved their hands in writing the starry script, how all physical forms had evolved. The ancient Egyptians had schools entirely on the model of those of the Indians, but they also learned how the spiritual forces were correlated with the physical world. Thus they taught new subjects. In ancient India the pupil was shown the spiritual forces through clairvoyance, but in Egypt he was also shown what corresponded physically with the spiritual deeds. He was shown how every member of the physical body corresponded to some spiritual labor, how the heart, for example, corresponded to some spiritual work. The founder of this school, in which was shown not only the spiritual but also its work upon the physical, was the great initiator, Hermes Trismegistos. It was he, the thrice-great Thoth, who first showed to men the entire physical world as the handwriting of the gods. Here we see how piece by piece our post-Atlantean cultures embodied their impulses in human evolution. Hermes appeared to the Egyptians like a divine ambassador. He gave then what had to be deciphered as the deed of the gods in the physical world.

In all of this we have somewhat characterized the first three cultural epochs of the post-Atlantean time. Men had learned to value the physical plane.

The fourth epoch, the Greco-Latin, is the period when man came even more into contact with the physical plane. In this time man progressed so far that he not only saw the script of the gods in the physical world, but he also inserted his own self, his spiritual individuality, into the objective world. Such artistic creations as we find in Greece were not known earlier. That man could portray himself in sculpture, creating therein something like his physical self—this was achieved in the fourth cultural period.

In this time we see man's inward spiritual elements step out of him onto the physical plane and flow into matter. This marriage between the spiritual and the material may be seen most clearly in the Greek temple. For everyone who can look back and see this temple, it is a wonderful work. The Greeks had the greatest architectonic gifts. Every art has its climax at some point, and here architecture had its high point. Modeling and painting reached their climax elsewhere. Despite the gigantic pyramids, the most wonderful architecture appears in the Greek temple. For what is attained here? A weak echo may be experienced by one who has an artistic feeling for space, who feels how a horizontal line is related to one that moves in the vertical. A number of cosmic truths light up in the soul that can simply feel how the column carries what is above it. One must be able to feel how all these lines were already invisibly present in space. The Greek artist saw the column as though clairvoyantly, and simply filled what he saw with matter. He saw space as altogether composed of life, as something permeated by living forces.

How can the man of today get some impression of the liveliness that this space-filling had? We see a faint reflection of it in the old painters. For example, we can find paintings where angels float in space, and we have the feeling that the angels support each other. Today little remains of this feeling for space. I shall make no objection to Boecklin's colors,² but all occult space-feeling is missing in him. Such a being as we find above his Pietá—you cannot tell if it is supposed to be an angel or some other being—must waken in the observer the feeling that at any minute it may fall on the group below it. This must be emphasized when one tries to explain something of which hardly an inkling can be conveyed today, such as the space-feeling of the Greeks. It must be expressly stated that this was of an occult nature. In a Greek temple it was as if space had given birth to itself out of its own lines. The result of this was that the divine beings for whom the temple was built, and with whom the Greek as a clairvoyant was acquainted, really descended into the temple, really felt comfortable in it. It is true that Pallas Athena, Zeus, etc., were actually within the temples. They had their bodies, their material bodies, in these temples. For since these beings could incarnate only as far as an etheric body, they found their dwelling-place in the physical world in these temples. Such a temple could become their physical body, in which their etheric body felt at home.

One who understands the Greek temple knows that it differs profoundly from a Gothic cathedral. This is not a criticism of the Gothic, for the Gothic cathedral is a sublime work of art. But an understanding person can well imagine of a Greek temple, that even if it stood in a solitude with no people anywhere near, even if it were quite alone, it would be a whole. A Greek temple is complete even when nobody is praying in it. It is not soulless, it is not empty, for the god is in it. It is inhabited by the god.

But a Gothic cathedral is only half complete if there are no worshippers within. One who understands this cannot think of a Gothic cathedral, standing alone, without a congregation of the faithful, whose thoughts stream into it. All the Gothic forms and ornaments belong to what streams from it. No god, no spiritual being, is close to the Gothic cathedral when the prayers of the faithful are not present. Only when the praying congregation is assembled is the cathedral filled with the divine. This is shown in the very word “Dom,”³ for this is connected with the “dom” in Christendom and similar words, which signifies something collective. Even the word “Duma”⁴ is related to this. The Greek temple is not a house for the faithful. It is shaped as a house that the god himself inhabits; it can stand alone. But in the Gothic cathedral one feels at home only when it is filled by the believing throng, when the pious congregation is assembled, when the light of the sun shines through the colored window-panes and the colors are diffused by the fine dust-particles. Then, as often happened, the preacher in the cathedral pulpit would say, “Even as the light is split into many colors, so is the single spiritual light, the divine force, divided among the crowds of souls and split into the diverse forces of the physical plane.” Such words were often heard from the preacher. When perception and spiritual experience flowed together in this way, the cathedral was something complete.

As in the great temple buildings, so was it in everything artistic among the Greeks. The marble of their sculptures took on the appearance of life. The Greek expressed in the physical what lived in his spiritual. Among the Greeks the marriage of the spiritual with the physical was a fact.

The Roman went a step further in the conquest of the physical plane. The Greek had the capacity of embodying the soul-spiritual in his works of art, but he still felt himself as part of a whole, of the polis, the city-state. He did not yet feel himself as a personality. This was also the case in the earlier cultures. The Egyptian did not feel himself as a separate person, but as an Egyptian, as a member of his people. Thus in Greece we find that a man laid little worth on feeling himself to be a person, but it was his greatest pride to be a Spartan or an Athenian. To be a personality, to be something in the world through the self, was felt for the first time in Rome. That a personality could be something for itself was first true for the Roman. The Romans worked out the concept of the citizen, and it was among them that jurisprudence, the science of law, arose. This is correctly regarded as a Roman invention. Only modern jurists, who know nothing of these facts, have had the lack of judgment to assert that law, in this sense, existed earlier. It is nonsense to speak of oriental lawgivers, such as Hammurabi. There were no legal rules earlier; there were only divine commands.⁵ One would have to use harsh words if one were to speak objectively about this kind of science.

The concept of the citizen first became a real feeling in ancient Rome. By that time man had brought the spiritual into the physical world as far as his own individuality. The last Will and Testament was invented in ancient Rome. The will of the single personality had become so strong that even beyond death it could determine what should be done with its property, its own things. The single personal man was now the determining factor. With this deed man, in his own individuality, had brought the spiritual down to the physical plane. This was the lowest point of evolution.

Man stood at his highest in the Indian culture. At this highest point the Indian still moved in spiritual heights. In the second culture, the ancient Persian, man had already descended a little. In the third culture, the Egyptian, still more. In the fourth culture man descended entirely to the physical plane, into matter. There came a point when man stood at the parting of the ways. Either he could sink lower and lower, or he could achieve the possibility of working up again, of fighting his way back into the spiritual world. But for this a spiritual impulse had to appear on the physical plane, a mighty thrust that could lead man back into the spiritual world. This mighty thrust was given through the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth. The divine-spiritual Christ had to come to men in a physical human body, had to go through a physical appearance in the physical world. Now, when man was wholly in the physical world, the god had to descend to him so he might find the way back into the spiritual world. Previously this would not have been possible.

Today we have followed the evolution of the cultures of the post-Atlantean time down to their lowest point. We have seen how the spiritual impulse occurred through the Christ at the lowest point. Now man must rise again, transfigured by the Christ principle. We shall go on to show how the Egyptian culture emerges again in our time, but permeated by the Christ principle.

• 1. For a clear expression of this sentiment, see Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East (New York, Parke, Austin, & Lipscomb; 1917), Vol. 9, p. 104.
• 2. Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901), Swiss painter.
• 3. Dom is the German word for cathedral.
• 4. The Duma was a short-lived parliament in late Czarist Russia.
• 5. Our best modern scholars agree with the views here expressed. See Wigmore, Panorama of the World's Legal Systems (Washington Law Book Company, 1936).

I want to talk to you more in-depth about the previous topic of the day before yesterday, about inner or esoteric development and super-sensible knowledge. It will be quite necessary to treat what we examined then as a prerequisite because we want to build further upon what has touched our soul at that time. You will have understood from what was discussed, that the development of the human being is not something that should be taken as a joke; it is not something that should be taken lightly. Though on the other hand, one has to emphasise repeatedly, that one should not talk about the dangers of occult development in an ordinary, trivial way either. The dangers are great, but the way they are usually talked about is not correct, we have to become very clear about this. Let us just try to imagine more precisely what happens to someone who has developed himself through some kind of exercise, let’s say, by way of the type of exercises mentioned in the last lecture, and let’s compare him with someone who is not involved in such training and follows, just like everyone else, his daily routine. We will arrive at a conscious understanding, if we begin, for example, with what we know about the ordinary state of sleep.

From the previous lecture¹ you’ve learnt what the human astral body actually does at night in the normal state of sleep. While a human being is asleep, the physical body and the etheric body lie in bed—but the so-called “astral body” together with the ego rises out of these and leaves them behind. And when the astral body is not in the physical body, and does not use its tools, the sense organs, to observe and reflect upon the external world, and is not kept busy by the movements and work of the physical body, then the astral body can take on a completely different task. It removes the exhaustion of both.² The removal of this exhaustion is its task. A clairvoyant can see how the astral body throughout the whole night works from the outside on the physical and etheric body to restore them so that in the morning the human being feels the renewal of his strength and feels refreshed. For this reason, sleep is such a good doctor, and if someone doesn’t get healthy and sufficient sleep he loses a lot. Many, many things that seem to be sicknesses, are only disturbances in the physical and etheric body. These disturbances remain if the astral body is unable to remove them. It is, however, able to remove these disturbances when it is not in the physical body as in the awake state, but when it is outside of the body.

Where does the astral body get its strength and abilities, that it uses to 'repair' the physical body? In my last public lecture, I have already compared the exit of the astral body out of the physical and the etheric body, to an amount of water contained in a glass. If you have about 1000 drops of water in this glass which form a body of water, then this is different from taking a thousand small sponges and sponging up every drop of water separately—and so you will have individualised each drop separately. In the same way, this happens with the astral body during the night. If all of you were to fall asleep here now, the same thing would happen as when you were to squeeze out the sponges and create one body of water. Your astral body would raise up and would join with the others. By connecting in this way, human beings come into contact with those harmonic magnificent occurrences in the universe. Our souls return in the night to the harmony of the spheres and from these the astral body with the ego—and this is the soul—acquire the strength needed for the restoration of the physical body.

What will happen to a human being who obtains an occult teacher and undergoes occult training? He is given certain tasks. One can only talk about these roughly. He receives tasks to meditate, concentrate, and so on. What is the purpose of the task assigned to the student by the teacher? The purpose is to slowly enable the astral body to see when it is outside of the physical body at night. The astral body of an ordinary human being is, when outside, unconscious within the astral world, as you would be unconscious in the physical world if you had no sense organs. Without sense organs, the world does not exist for you. The moment a human being receives the instructions to awaken the dormant forces of his soul, his astral body receives spiritual or psychic sense organs, those organs that are called Lotus flowers. These are not flowers any more than the lobes of the lungs³ are wings. Everyone knows that a hawk has wings that look quite different from the lobes of the lungs.

Lotus flowers are organs, that perform a kind of circling motion. One such organ is located underneath the forehead, one centimetre under where the eyebrows meet, in the brain. Focusing intensely on this point and simultaneously speaking a particular word, triggers a kind of flash, an appearance of light, visible to a clairvoyant from the outside. The sense organ begins to carry out a circling motion. It is said that the wheel is turning, it comes to life.

A normal average person does not have such an organ at this location, or there is at most a subtle hint of it. Through the training, the flashing appears when the astral body is outside of the physical one. The impression one gains as a clairvoyant, observing from the outside, is that of a turning wheel. This wheel is called a “swastika”. This sign, like other real symbols, cannot be explained by speculation. They weren’t randomly invented but can really be seen on the spiritual or astral plane. The swastika is a symbol of this sense organ, and all witty explanations in the theosophical literature are nonsense. One must not provide allegorical or symbolic explanations in theosophy. This would be what one must give up first: all speculation. One has to give up all this pondering about how things could be. It is only important to enter into reality itself. Located close to the larynx is the sixteen-petalled Lotus flower, an organ on which human development depends very much. Close to the heart is the twelve-petalled, and further down the ten-petalled Lotus, and so on.

These organs develop through the exercises that the teacher assigns to the student, in the same way as the sense organs of the physical body develop by practice, for example through the influence of light and sound. You can see one as a physical and the other as a spiritual process of exactly the same duration. You must not believe that any riotous processes, magic, or some such things, could lead someone to develop these sense organs. It is only intimate processes, learning by thinking thoughts that have the strength in them to develop such organs. Hereby it is consistently important that the human being learns what these thoughts are, and that he focuses on a particular bodily organ, for example at a point in his brain located one centimetre below the middle of the eyebrows. If a human being now focuses on this point whilst using a specific combination of words, he will awaken certain abilities inside his astral body. It is all systematically and, one could say, technically determined.

Some people don’t find this very relevant for them at all. Repeatedly, one hears phrases that are an absurdity for a true occultist: “I do not need a teacher; I have to find my teacher inside of myself”. Now, in such talks, the greatest egoism can be found—and it is nonsense. If someone would look at geometry from this perspective, what would be the result? Everyone is able to discover all the laws of geometry by way of inner development: he might need many thousand years to discover them, but he is able to find them. But is it really necessary, to discover geometry anew?

Should one not just connect to what mankind in century-long work has discovered, build upon it, and create something useful for humanity that has provided us with so much knowledge? Humanity is entitled to this. What could we spare humanity from, if we would feel devoted love towards the teachers of early mankind! In the same way, we are also not attempting to search for the sake of our own inner development, but as workers performing a great service to mankind. There were always human beings who were pioneers. They are the ones from whom we have to learn, and if we are worried about submitting to their authority then that is loveless nonsense. Working in the spirit of the teachers of mankind, to seek out those who can lead us, is an immediate and absolute necessity for occult teachers and students alike. Those things that the teachers tell us, and that were tested and known for centuries, tease the sense organs out of the astral body.

If someone gives occult advice—a real teacher won’t do this—then it can easily happen that they instruct the student on how he can gain perceptions in the astral world. It can then be perceived that the student begins to work on his astral body and starts to tease out the sense organs but begins to display worse habits and characteristics than prior to becoming an occult student. People were wondering about the fact that in the early times of theosophy many people made incomprehensible mistakes in regard to their character. Even a slight development of the astral body, instigated by the elementary teachings of theosophy, when these became first known publicly, triggered quite curious phenomena. For example, a student, who was a cashier, took off with the money, and another still did quite different things; also, people who were previously very peace-loving became quarrelsome. This is because even with a bit of occult development flowing from the theosophical concepts, if not followed up properly the bad sides of a character issue forth. However, none should be frightened because of this. Attention should simply be paid to such things as they need to be taken seriously. Using our strength of character, we just want to aim at not falling for such temptations. It will be different once a student is approached by real systematic occult training. Then work on the astral body is more extensive, and it becomes quite necessary to offer a substitute source of energy to replenish the physical and etheric bodies.

How can that be replenished which is taken from the physical and etheric bodies? To achieve this, it will be necessary to develop quite specific characteristics in a human being. In human nature and essence, it is possible to develop traits that allow the physical and etheric body to be maintained so they don’t depend on too extensive restoration. Imagine that you do something during the day that contributes to strengthening and restoring the physical and etheric body so that these will be resonating by way of their own purpose and rhythm in harmony with the great universe. Only then will you be able to use the forces for the astral body itself. This must be done, it doesn’t need to be done right away, but the time will come when it must happen. When the teacher says: “You have to concentrate the thinking”—what is meant by that is not only ordinary thinking. When told: “You have to sit down, think any ordinary thought and do not allow any other thoughts to come in, focus on the thought as intensely as possible whilst rejecting all other thoughts—this will require the human being to make a certain inner conquest—and this inner conquest is what counts. The subject is not meant to be interesting and fascinating. For example, it would be easy to focus on Napoleon, but it would be difficult to focus on a matchstick uninterruptedly for an extended period of time. This is the very essence. You will soon notice, how after some time you will reach a certain inner strength and surety. One can already feel, based on an inner experience, whether it has been effective.

Next, one must take the initiative and perform actions that one otherwise would most certainly not have done. It could be something completely unimportant. The importance of an activity is irrelevant, but it must be your own action, derived from your own original initiative. A man I told this to informed me after some time that every day in his office he would take seven steps forwards and seven steps backwards whilst imagining “Evolution and Involution”. Excellent! Not the importance of an action, but that the initiative is uniquely one’s own, is what counts.

I’ve talked to other friends about this and, to give them an example, I mentioned that one could water flowers if one had never done this before. And what did I have to deal with then? When I visited those friends, they were all busy watering flowers! That was the completely wrong thing to do because they weren’t supposed to perform “my” action, but to perform an action that they may not have invented but which is their very own, except for the invention. If this is done over an extended period, you will see its inner effect. It will harmonise and balance everything in the physical and etheric body, so that both resonate by themselves and do not require a lot of restoration work, thus enabling the astral body to withdraw a part of their strength.

Next, the human being must control himself in regard to desire and pain. In ordinary life, he is subjected to the slavery of his feelings. He laughs when someone shares something funny with him, he cries about any sad event. A student, however, has to exercise self-control, he must not allow himself to be dominated, but he himself must control lust and pain. Many think this would make them insensitive, but the opposite is the case. We thus overcome desire and pain, namely, what is egoistical desire and egoistical pain. We must find the way to sort of crawl or put ourselves into other beings, to become empathetic. None should shrink back from this exercise because of a concern about becoming insensitive—everyone will become more sensitive.

The fourth exercise is one I like best to explain by way of a legend. This legend is out of the life of Jesus Christ. Like many others it can’t be found in the Bible, it is Persian.⁴ When the apostles once walked with Jesus Christ across the countryside, they saw the half-decayed carcass of a dead dog lying around. “What nasty carrion”, the apostles said and turned away in disgust. Jesus Christ alone stopped, looked at the carcass, and after a while said: “What beautiful teeth this animal had.”—He noticed in the ugly, decaying carcass still the beautiful teeth. This gives us a hint that we should adopt and must adopt the habit to discover in all ugliness the grain of beauty, in bad the good, and in error the truth. This positive attitude must be practiced for some time, it will lead to inner harmony and inner rhythm.

The fifth exercise is, that the human being should be reasonably unbiased towards everything new that he encounters in the world. It could also be said that one is not allowed to use anything he is used to from the past to influence the future. The words: “I don’t believe this”, must completely disappear from the mind. If someone comes to you and tells you that the church tower has become crooked overnight, you’ll have to find a corner in your heart where you believe it is possible for anything to really happen. This does not mean that you should become uncritical; you should simply consider nothing to be impossible. Whoever can do this, is able to exert influence very effectively on the physical and the etheric body, so they will fall into a rhythm that feeds the astral body during the night with what has been gained for it through meditation and concentration. Because this will lead human beings gradually to the true theosophy, allowing them to gain insight everywhere into why things happen the way they do, and not in a different way. Whoever knows the mechanism of sleep, also knows why such exercises need to be practised.

Once a human being has taken steps on the occult path for some time under appropriate guidance, many things become to him visible, tangible, and able to be experienced that he would otherwise have missed. Don’t believe that the dangers that one encounters are otherwise not there in life. One just doesn’t see them in advance but goes through life without seeing them. One only learns to see what is around us in the spiritual world when one can enter into the higher planes. What man, for example, must encounter and will always encounter at a higher level, what he must cope with, and what he must prepare himself for, is the “Guardian of the Threshold”. Human beings have usually quite strange ideas about him.

What is this “Guardian of the Threshold”?—Today, we want to turn our attention to this experience by skipping many other things. You have to be clear about what a human being normally does during his whole lifetime. Let’s take the “Kamaloka life” in its true sense, the life after death, where the human being still has a certain inclination to the physical-sensory existence, and compare this life with what happens immediately prior to the beginning of the Kamaloka life. A great tableau of memories will be laid out in front of the soul of one who has just departed the physical body. Then the Kamaloka life begins.

This is very strange. For a start, it has the characteristic that the human being relives his life. In fact, he will live his whole previous life backward, by going back through the events, which happened prior to his death until his birth. In this way, one relives all events backward and will be finished with it once one reaches the own birth. One returns to every point that one has lived through. Let’s say, you’ve reached age sixty, and when you were forty years old you slapped someone in the face. When you reach this point in your backward memory experience, you will be drawn towards that human being and you will be marked, so to speak, with something strange: You will suffer the pain you have inflicted. Whilst throughout your life you might have harbored feelings of revenge, now you are feeling what the person felt, on whom you have taken or intended to take revenge. By way of backward experience, you re-live the emotions and feelings you have spread. Everything you will experience there offers you much that obstructs your further development in the history of mankind. Without the implanted mark of pain, you would get further more easily, because this inhibiting marking stays with you as a force. By absorbing those forces in the Kamaloka backward, you will, in the next life again be led by karma to where you will be able to use them to pay off the debt, to put things right, for compensation. Thus, longing develops to redeem where you have failed, and you will be attracted to do this when the human being again lives with you. This is how Karma plays out.

Another example: Four vigilante⁵ Century in Westphalia and survived until the 19^th Century. judges have sentenced someone to death and executed the judgment. Why did this happen? When the life of these four men was traced back, it turned out that in a former life the condemned man was a kind of chief who had sentenced those four men to death. The train of events that brought those five men together actually was created in the Kamaloka life. In this way, a human being always has the opportunity during his Kamaloka life, to accept those forces as inhibiting markings that will lead him again into life to pay off his debts.

After a human being has crossed through Devachan and should again return to the physical life, you will find the converse picture of what happens immediately after death. Now you will have a kind of premonition, a kind of preview of the life you are about to experience. Of course, what someone perceives at that time he will forget unless he is trained in the occult. There are verifiable cases, that human beings were so shocked by the preview that they did not want to enter into this life. It turned out that indeed the etheric body did not completely enter the physical body. In such cases, the etheric body of the head protruded quite a bit outside and caused a very specific kind of idiocy.

Now don’t think that karma plays out in such a way that we would be able to immediately pay off all the debts we have incurred in a previous incarnation, in the next one. It is not that simple. Sometimes one will have to go through many, many incarnations. If you would be able to look back for a moment and see everything, all the marks in your astral body that need to be redeemed, prior to your rising to certain heights of occultism, you would see your whole debt account.

What now confronts the student and must confront him in a symbolic and comprehensible form is what we still have to redeem, what still holds us back: the unredeemed karma. This is the Guardian of the Threshold.

It could also confront us in quite an abnormal way. I am aware of a case, where someone was incarnated at the end of the 18th century with quite an extraordinary greed to undertake certain deeds on the physical plane so that he had to experience a strange fate after death. He died; after a very long time, he left the remainder of his astral body. Usually, the astral body falls off after about a third of the time spent on earth, and remains back as an astral corpse, until it dissolves. Such astral corpses are consistently circling around us and exert a negative influence on people. He was unable to stay for longer in the spiritual world but experienced early, the urge to go down into the physical world again. Now he incurred a misfortune that very rarely happens. It is actually possible, that when a human being returns to physical existence, he finds his astral corpse is still around. This then is very bad for him because his current astral body will be penetrated by his earlier astral body, which is a horrible fate. He now has it consistently next to himself as a “doppelgänger”, and this is the abnormal form of the Guardian of the Threshold, which could occur in special exceptional circumstances.

For one, however, who is on the way to occult development, it is necessary that he, at a particular point in time, sees his ordinary astral body with all the marks of its unresolved karma, and he must try, through existing means, to balance out this unreleased karma. This is the true encounter with the Guardian of the Threshold. All of this has not been told to spook you, but to give you an idea of what is meant by “self-knowledge”, in the true sense of the word. Self-knowledge is two-fold: first, it is the recognition of what the true self must do. Second, it is the knowledge of the higher self. But their knowledge is something quite different. You can read in the Bible: Adam knew his wife.⁶—This is an expression for “fertilisation”. “Know yourself” means: fertilise yourself with the wisdom inside of you, look at the soul as a feminine organ and fertilise yourself. If you want to gain self-knowledge, search inside of you, where you will be able to recognise all your mistakes. If you want to reach knowledge of the higher self, search outside of you, because there knowledge of the world is knowledge of the self. Everything is in the sun because everything is sun. We have to let go of ourselves. I have been told: “You tell us about development and such things, but we want to achieve an uplifting of the soul, of the feelings.” One who speaks like that is his own enemy. Not by gawking into ourselves, but by learning to know the world in all its parts, bit by bit, will we become selfless and able to find self-knowledge and knowledge of God.

There is no phrase worse than that one: “One only has to look within oneself”.—There you will only find the lower self. One should search outside with love and one will discover. I have known people who said: “What do I need? I don’t need anything because I am Atman.” But even if they repeatedly say “Atman, I am Atman” they will not be able to become conscious of it, because they don’t know more about Atman than that it is a five-letter word. This looking within oneself only leads to shutting oneself off. We are nothing but a limb (part) of this world. The finger is only a finger as long as it is part of the organism; if you lose it, it will no longer be a finger.

The finger doesn’t separate itself from the organism, but the human being is so “smart” to believe he could separate himself from Earth, despite the fact that you only have to transport him a few kilometres above Earth, and he will perish. The human being belongs to the sun, according to his etheric and astral body, to a whole world of sun(s). It is the biggest mistake to want to find the self within oneself. Letting go of oneself by immersing oneself in all the details of the world is the right thing. One who fertilises himself with love and humility, will find divine salvation, whilst someone who searches for God inside of himself hardens.

You will see that there is much to learn when one wants to really get to know the esoteric way. It is important to have the right idea about such things. You don’t need to think about this from morning to night, just as it is unnecessary to repeat your own name all the time. It is sufficient to know the thought. There are thoughts without which an esotericist can’t be an esotericist. If he has those thoughts, as in his daily life he has his drives and motives, then these thoughts represent steps for him, that will lead him upwards to the super-sensible plane of knowledge, they will assist him in penetrating into the wisdom of the worlds, knowingly advancing to love.

• 1. Vienna, 6 November 1907. No transcript is available of this lecture.
• 2. Translator’s Note: the physical and the etheric body.
• 3. Translator’s Note: Lobes of the lungs are called “Lungenflügel” in German i.e., wings of the lungs.
• 4. J.W.v.Goethe, Notes and Treatises for the Better Understanding of the West-Easterly Divan, section: General—Lord Jesus, who wanders through the World (Nisami).
• 5. Judges of a Vehmic Court, a form of Court without fixed laws and norms, which occurred in isolation in the 13^th 5
• 6. 1 Moses, Chapter 4, 1, Luther Translation.

When we study the human soul in its development within the physical body between birth and death, we are struck by the fact that in order to have a full and complete earthly existence, the soul must make two attributes or faculties its own.

On the one hand: memory. Just imagine what it would be like if memory were not one of our faculties in earthly existence! And think how different our life of soul would be if we could neither look back over the course of the past day nor recall from unfathomed depths what we have experienced since a certain moment of time after our birth. The cohesion of experience is necessary if there is to be true Ego-consciousness. I have called attention to this fact on many occasions. You all know that memory begins to function at a certain point of time during our earthly life and that experiences occurring before this point of time are sunk in oblivion. We can therefore say that from a certain point of time in our physical earthly life, our life of soul enters into relationship with our bodily life and this enables us, in the present, to remember the experiences through which we have passed.

One of the tasks of earthly life is to unfold the faculty of memory. During our long evolution as beings of the Old Moon incarnation of the Earth, we did not possess memory in the form in which we know it to-day. Memory has only been able to develop since the Earth-organism with its mineral forces has been incorporated in our being. Memory is essentially an outcome of the interaction between the human soul and the physical body. In the spiritual world, memory, as developed in the physical life, has only been needed since the beginning of the Earth-period. Until the time of the Earth-period it was not needed, for the reason that in the power of the dreamy clairvoyance possessed by man during the Old Moon period, he possessed a different faculty—a faculty which was able to take the place of our memory to-day. Suppose that every time you experienced something, the experience was inscribed somewhere in a place remaining accessible to you, and that it was so with every subsequent experience. Under such conditions you would merely have to look at the spot where the experience was inscribed. You would be able to look outwards, because the experiences would be preserved in the outer world. So indeed it was in the time of the Old Moon. All that was experienced in that old dreamlike, clairvoyant consciousness, was engraved, as it were, in a certain delicate ether-substance. All that the Moon-humanity experienced through this dreamy, clairvoyant consciousness was written into the cosmic substance; and the activity of the human soul which might be compared with memory to-day was that the dreamy clairvoyant gaze was directed to the ‘engraving’ in the delicate ether-substance. The Moon-man saw his own experiences in the traces left by them, just as we now see the objects of the outer world. He only needed to look round upon what he had experienced in his dreamlike imaginative life and he found it inscribed in the cosmic substance. This was quite a different mode of ‘living-together’ with the world from that of to-day. Suppose everything that now becomes a thought in your minds were to flash after you like a comet's tail so that you could re-think it. If this were so, you would have transferred into your present life of thought conditions that actually obtained during the period of the old dreamlike consciousness. This condition had necessarily to come to an end because man was to become individual, an individuality. But this is only possible when the experiences through which his soul passes remain his own inner possession, are not immediately inscribed into the cosmic substance but only into his own, delicate ether-substantiality. So long as man lives on the Earth, his etheric body lives and moves within him in his hours of waking consciousness. To this movement, the form of the physical body sets the boundary. It cannot pass beyond the boundary set by the skin. And so through the whole of the life between birth and death, the fine ether-substantiality—within which thoughts, ideas, experiences of feeling and of will circulate—remains rolled up as it were within the confines of the physical body. When the physical body is laid aside at death, the scroll unrolls and is now given over to the cosmic substance. So that after death we begin to look back upon what was engraved in our individual ether-substance which now, after death, is given over to the cosmic ether.

As with memory, which evolves because a force of resistance is offered by the physical body, so too is it with regard to something else of importance for our earthly existence.

Habits are something else which we have to acquire during earthly existence. Neither memory in its present form, nor the capacity to acquire habits were ours during the Old Moon period of existence.¹ If we observe the development of the human being from childhood onwards, we can see how habits are acquired by the constant repetition of actions. Through instructions given during our upbringing, actions steadily repeated become habitual. We are first led to do something which by constant repetition becomes a habit and the habit, once formed, becomes more and more an automatic action of the soul.

The development of habits in the right way during earthly existence is necessary to the unfolding of Ego-consciousness. For what had we in the place of habits during the Old Moon period of evolution? At that time, whenever anything had to be carried out by us or through us, we came under the direct influence of the higher Beings of the spiritual world. We were impelled to action by impulses sent into us from the Beings of the spiritual world. We needed no ‘habits,’ for what we had to do, the Beings of the higher world did, in a certain sense, through us. We were more intimately part of the whole ‘organism’ of the Hierarchies than is the case now, in the Earth period.

But it would never have been possible for us to develop the force of freedom had we remained in this condition where our every action involved an impulse from higher spiritual Beings. The foundations of freedom (free spiritual activity) could only be laid within us by our having been emancipated from the sphere of the Beings of the spiritual worlds and thus—having arrived at the stage of being able to form a habit by the steady repetition of some act—it finally comes from our own being. It is so indeed: the attainment of the possibility of freedom for man is intimately connected with the acquisition of habits.

When we enter physical existence through birth, we come from a world in which, during the Earth period itself, we are living in conditions somewhat similar to those obtaining during the Old Moon period. In the spiritual world, before entering through birth into earthly existence, we live under the strong influence of higher spiritual impulses. In that world there are exalted spiritual Beings who guide us to what we have to do in order so to prepare our earthly existence that it may take its course in accordance with karma. With the entrance into the physical body we are reft away from that world in which there are no habits but only the continuous and unceasing impulses of lofty spiritual Beings. Having entered physical existence, an echo still remains within us of this life in the spiritual world. This echo is expressed in the fact that as children, up to the time of our seventh year, we are governed less by habit than by the power of imitation. We imitate what is done, what goes on around us. This is an echo of our life in the spiritual world. In the spiritual world we had to receive the impulse for every single activity. Therefore it is that as children we react to our immediate impulses, and imitate. Independent activity of the life of soul begins only in the course of time, just as we gradually unfold the capacity to live according to habit. Memory and habit are important constituents of our life of soul, being metamorphoses, transformations of forces of quite a different nature in the spiritual world. Memory is a metamorphosis of the enduring traces of imaginative, dreamlike experiences. Habits arise because we are torn away from the impulses of the higher spiritual Beings.

When we study these things and meditate upon them, we arrive at a concept that is necessary for understanding the very different nature of the world lying beyond the Threshold. Again and again it must be emphasised that the world beyond the Threshold is altogether different from the world this side of the Threshold. Even when we employ words used in connection with the physical world to characterise the spiritual world from any particular point of view, we must constantly remind ourselves that true and adequate ideas of the spiritual world can only be acquired by gradually accustoming ourselves to shaping these ideas of the spiritual world quite differently from those which apply to the physical world. At the same time, however, the study of such things as memory and habit, will help us to unfold insight into the nature of our physical existence.

It is sheer folly to imagine that physical existence is something to be despised. I have pointed out this mistake from many different points of view. Physical existence has its task in human evolution as a whole, just as all other phases of evolution have theirs. It is to our eternal gain that in the course of the evolution of the soul we have a physical body and by means of this physical body pass through certain earthly experiences under the influence of memory and habit. Gradually, by means of repeated earth-lives, we become firmly possessed of these earthly acquisitions. Between death and re-birth, however, we must continually return to the conditions of the Old Moon period of existence. We must surrender as it were the power of memory, as indeed we do directly after death, and give over to the cosmic substance that which we have engraved within our being during earthly existence. And again we must surrender ourselves to the impulses of the higher spiritual Beings in order that by following their impulses we may transform them, in the physical body, into habits.

Here, however, we have reached a point where I will again draw attention to something which on account of its importance can never be over-emphasised.

Memory and habit are acquired during earthly life. Let us first consider memory. Memory may appear to be an acquisition of earthly existence. You know, moreover, that however weak a man's memory may be, it is always possible to develop it. Suppose for a moment that nothing else were to be done in the way of developing the memory than what is absolutely natural, under the influence of the earthly, physical organism which is permeated with mineral substance. If this were the case, memory would unfold in quite a different way. As it is, we do more—as you know, we do much more. It would perhaps be more correct to say that much more is done with us in this matter of training the memory. For one thing we are made to learn by heart, to memorise. At a certain age in our upbringing we are told to learn by heart. There is a difference between acquiring the natural faculty of memory and being set down to do something, else in addition. If we read a poem many times, or if it is often repeated aloud to us, at last we remember it, we know it by heart. Modern methods of education, however, are not content with this. Children are set to work to memorise a poem and are sometimes punished for failing to have committed it to memory when bidden to do so. This is very characteristic of the present phase of evolution.

I must beg you not to misunderstand me. It must not be said that I am denouncing memorising or have demanded its abolition. I am demanding no such thing. Our times are such that certain things must necessarily be memorised, precisely because this present phase of evolution corresponds to a definite phase in the development of the faculty of memory.

But what is it that really happens in the soul when memorising is called to the assistance of the naturally unfolding faculty of memory? It is a case of summoning Lucifer to our aid! It is indeed a Luciferic force which is thus summoned to the aid of memory.

Once more I must beg you not to exclaim: ‘Lucifer! But we must guard against him. From now on our children shall never be allowed to learn by heart!’ Some people have the mistaken idea that they must persistently guard themselves against Lucifer and Ahriman and do everything possible to hold them at a safe distance. But as a matter of fact it is precisely when they are thus on guard that they make it easy for them to approach them!

The Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces have to be reckoned with in cosmic evolution. They must necessarily be part and parcel of world-evolution. The only question is that they shall be kept in their proper place. Consider the special case already mentioned: Why is it that the Luciferic power must be summoned to the aid of memory? In very ancient times of evolution, memory was powerful to an extent undreamed of by men to-day. We, in our day, need a considerable length of time in which to learn a long poem by heart. The ancient Greeks did not need nearly such a long time. Numbers of them knew the poems of Homer from beginning to end. But these ancient Greeks did not memorise in the way we do to-day when we learn something by heart. In those times the power of memory was quite differently constituted.

Now what was really happening in that fourth Post-Atlantean epoch of civilisation? The Græco-Latin age was to a certain extent a recapitulation of the Atlantean epoch itself which has been described in my writings dealing with Atlantis. What had come over from the Old Moon period of evolution as a force enabling man to draw his dreamlike, imaginative experiences after him like the tail of a comet—this force, instead of working outside as a channel of communication with an outer universe, passed into the inner being of man. As a result of this transference from the outer to the inner life, memory in the Atlanteans was like a flashing-up of something which the world at that time gave of itself. In the days of Atlantis there was no need for man to make any great efforts to develop his memory, for it was like an influx into the inner being of a force operating in communication with the outer world. In the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch of civilisation there was a recapitulation of this state of things. In the inner being there was a recapitulation of the operation of a force which in earlier times had worked in constant interplay with the world, without any activity on the part of man himself. Inasmuch as man has passed now into the fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, he must make greater and greater efforts to come into real possession of the power of memory. Because memory has to contribute to man's progress towards individuality and freedom, the power which came spontaneously in the Atlantean age and in its recapitulation, the fourth Post-Atlantean era, has now to be acquired. When something corresponding to an earlier power has to be acquired in a later age, when, for example, memory is helped by means of a force which was formerly there by nature, we always have to do with a Luciferic activity. You see, the memory we now cultivate artificially but which in Greek times was a natural endowment, now becomes Luciferic. This conception of the Luciferic activity helps us to realise the part played by Lucifer in the evolution of mankind. To some extent limits were still set to his working in Greek and Latin times, for he was then still in his right place. Nowadays this is no longer the case. If memory is to be developed in our age, man has to enter into a pact with Lucifer. By dint of his own self-activity man must now do for his memory what was done without any participation on his part during the Græco-Latin era. But for this reason, what happened then without man's participation becomes a Luciferic deed in our age.

The moment, however, a Luciferic activity sets in, the other side of the balance begins to operate: the Ahrimanic impulse. While on the one side we memorise, calling Lucifer to our aid in this respect, on the other side we make more and more use of the Ahrimanic support to memory, namely, we write things down. I have often said that it was a true conception in the Middle Ages which made men speak of printing as one of the ‘black arts.’

This external method of assisting memory is wholly of an Ahrimanic nature. Again, I do not say that it is right to flee from everything that is Ahrimanic, although in this respect it may perhaps be said that precisely among us too much is done in the direction of summoning Ahriman. There is a tendency to have an exaggerated affection for him!

Influences of Lucifer and Ahriman

Man's task is, however, to cultivate the position of balance and not to believe that he can simply escape from the clutches of Lucifer and Ahriman. Calmly and courageously he must admit to himself that both Beings are necessary for world-evolution, that in his own development he needs both Lucifer and Ahriman in his active life, but that the balance must be maintained in every sphere of life.

Our activities, therefore, must be such that the balance is maintained between Lucifer and Ahriman. It was for this reason too that Lucifer and Ahriman had necessarily to play a part in earthly evolution. At the beginning of the Old Testament there is a significant picture of the influx of the Luciferic forces into world-evolution. Luciferic forces enter earthly evolution by way of the woman, and man is beguiled by way of the woman. This biblical picture symbolises the influx of the Luciferic element which occurred in the age of old Lemuria.

Then, during the subsequent Atlantean age, there came the entrance of the Ahrimanic element into earthly evolution. Just as during the fourth Post-Atlantean period human knowledge had to come to an understanding of the Luciferic symbol, so now, during our fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, as I have said before, it was necessary to place before the soul in an adequate but yet sufficiently indicative form—the opposite symbol. The figure of Faust has Ahriman at his side, as Eve has Lucifer. Lucifer approaches the woman, Eve; Ahriman approaches the man, Faust. And just as the man, Adam, was indirectly beguiled through Eve, so here, the woman, Gretchen, is deceived through the man, Faust. The seduction of Gretchen is the result of deception, because Ahriman is at work. Ahriman is the ‘Lying Spirit’ in contrast to Lucifer who is the ‘Tempter.’ This, then, is how they may be described: Lucifer, the Tempter; Ahriman, the Lying Spirit.

Much exists in the world for the express purpose of guarding mankind from temptation by Lucifer: rules of conduct, maxims, moral precepts, instituted customs and so forth. But there is less to help man to protect himself in the right way from falling prey to the Ahrimanic impulse—namely, untruthfulness.

All that is Luciferic in man has to do with the emotions, the passions. On the other hand, the Ahrimanic influence which asserts itself in human evolution has to do with lying, with untruthfulness. And in our age man must be armed not only against the attacks of Lucifer. It is high time for him to forge his armour against the attacks of Ahriman.

One of the motifs in Faust is that man is overcome by Ahriman, to the point of misunderstanding the word. Goethe shows us in this poem how Faust goes through different Ahrimanic dangers. True, the figure of Mephistopheles is a mixture and often a confusion of both Lucifer and Ahriman. But on the whole, as I have just now shown, Goethe is right to have chosen the figure of Ahriman and not that of Lucifer for his drama. Much of Ahriman is to be found in both the first and the second parts of Faust, up to the point where he plays in the misinterpretation of words. At the end of the second part Faust confuses ‘Ditch’ and ‘Grave.’ The Ahrimanic impulse plays even into the misinterpretation of words. Goethe indicates this with extraordinary subtlety, interweaving it most effectively into the play, instinctively rather than consciously realising the nature of the Ahrimanic impulse in what is untrue and distorted. This is a point of great significance.

Now just as memory and habit are metamorphoses of different kinds of activity in the spiritual world, so too, other spiritual faculties we may gain are in their turn metamorphoses of something acquired in physical existence. Let us consider something which first appears in physical existence. Memory and habit have been described as transformations, metamorphoses of the spiritual experiences of earlier times. But what emerges for the first time in the physical world is the relation of our ideas with the facts in the external world. The facts and objects are around us and we make images of them in our conceptions and ideas. The agreement of the images in our thought with the facts or objects or events, we then call physical truth.

When we speak of physical truth, this implies that our conceptions fit the facts of the physical plane. In order that this truth-relationship may arise, it is absolutely necessary to live in a physical body and perceive things in the outer world through the physical body. It would be nonsense to imagine that such a relationship to truth could have existed during the epoch of the Old Moon evolution. It is an acquisition of earthly life. It is only because we live in a physical body that this agreement between ideas and external facts can arise at all. But here Ahriman's field of action is opened up for him. In what sense is it thus opened up before him?

From what has been said we can perceive the interplay between the spiritual and the physical world. Ahriman has his own good task in the spiritual world and must, furthermore, send forces from there into the physical world. But he must not enter the physical world! The fact that this realm is denied him makes it possible for ideas we acquire in the physical body to fit the facts in the outer world. If Ahriman introduces into earthly life activities in which he was engaged during the Old Moon period of evolution, he upsets the agreement of our ideas with the outside facts. He should, if I may be allowed to use the expression, ‘keep his fingers off’ the realm in which man makes his ideas harmonise with the outside facts. But this is precisely what Ahriman does not do. If he did, there would be no lying in the world!

I do not know whether it is necessary to prove that lying undoubtedly does go on in the world! But whenever there is lying, it is a proof that Ahriman is at work in the physical world in an unjustified way. This particular activity of Ahriman in the world is something which man has to overcome. It is, of course, easy to say: Although there is much beauty in the world, there is also much that is the reverse of beautiful. A perfect God would have succeeded in so creating human beings that they would never have taken to lying. A perfect God would have said to Ahriman: In the physical world it is not for you to interfere.—God, however, has not succeeded in warding off Ahriman from the world; therefore He is not so perfect after all.—So it might be said. And, as a matter of fact, there is not only Ahriman to reckon with—Ahriman, who feels a certain satisfaction on account of the evil that is in the world. There are also philosophers whose pessimism is derived from observation of the bad characteristics of humanity. There were pessimists among philosophers in the nineteenth century but there were also those who voiced not merely pessimism but out-and-out woe! That too is a view of the world which actually exists and of which Julius Banzen is a typical representative.

Why, then, has Ahriman been allowed access to the physical world! On previous occasions I have shown how deeply he has entered, taking as an example an occurrence where a pre-arranged programme, strictly adhered to, was witnessed, not by a lay audience, but by thirty Law students and young barristers, men, that is to say, who were being trained to be judges of the actions of human beings. Everything happened according to the scheduled programme. But when, after the event, these thirty young lawyers were asked what had actually happened, twenty-six of them gave an absolutely incorrect account and the remaining four only a very approximately correct one. You can see from this example what kind of relationship actually exists between the ideas in people's mind and the outer physical facts. Thirty people can be present when a certain procedure has been carried through according to a pre-arranged programme and twenty-six of them afterwards give a false account of it. In such a case we see Ahriman at work literally before our eyes. But now, suppose Ahriman were not there at all! If he were not there we should be like innocent lambs, for the impulse would continually be never to form concepts which did not tally with the facts. We should only express what we actually observed as fact—but we should do this of necessity. It would be impossible for us to do anything else and there would be no question of free spiritual activity. In order to be able to speak the truth as free beings, the possibility to he must also be in us. In other words, we must acquire the power to conquer Ahriman within us at every moment.
Ahriman must be there ‘enticing, working, creating, as the devil.’ Ahriman must be there, but the trouble is that men follow him so closely and do not recognise him as the devil who entices, works and creates, and who must be overcome.

To pull long faces and say: ‘That is certainly Ahrimanic. I cannot allow myself to have any, dealings with it,’ means nothing more or less in many cases than a comfortable surrender to Lucifer without freedom. The whole point is that we shall learn to recognise the impulses which must be overcome, wherever they exist. We need Ahriman on the one side and Lucifer on the other in order to set up the balance between them.

• 1. See An Outline Of Occult Science. Rudolf Steiner.

I have often mentioned the fact that we can derive the right impulses from spiritual science only if we make the effort to progress ever further in a positive, concrete understanding of the spiritual beings about whom spiritual science wishes to instruct us. I have emphasized here before that we must of course realize first that human beings consist of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, and so on, and we need to know how these various members are related to one another. But if we are intent upon deriving the right impulses from spiritual science it is not enough to rest content with these abstractions. We need to become thoroughly familiarized with the interrelationships in the cosmos whereby these members of the human entelechy are incorporated into the entire cosmic process.

Our physical bodies incorporate us into the physical world and set us down on the physical plane. They make us resemble our parents and other forbears in the ongoing stream of heredity. They bring this about through the fact that they bear within themselves certain preconditions of similarity to our ancestors. And much else is also responsible for the incorporation of our physical bodies into the physical world. We concerned ourselves yesterday to some extent with an awareness of how human beings who gradually advance to what is known as clairvoyant perception free themselves from their dependence upon their physical bodies as tools for relating to the world.

The next step is then that the etheric rather than the physical body serves as the direct means of interrelationship with the world; imaginative perception takes the place of the mental images and other knowledge acquired with the use of our physical bodies, i.e., with the sense organs and the brain. I tried yesterday to describe in a more pictorial way how changed the soul feels when it progresses from using the physical body to making use of the etheric body.

It is true, of course, that we are always making use of our etheric bodies, except when we are sleeping, but we use them in the sense that they carry on their activity within our physical bodies, so that both the physical and etheric bodies are made use of during our life on the physical plane. But we come to know what the particular characteristics of the etheric body are when it is lifted out of its connection with the physical body and put to use as our sole perceptive instrument. We know that this condition comes about naturally immediately after death, when we have laid the physical body aside. Then, for a short time, we make use of the etheric body, until that too is laid aside.

We have therefore to distinguish the first condition after death, in which we dissolve our bond with the physical body, from the second condition that soon follows it, and brings about the dissolution of our bond with the etheric body.

I have been saying that the physical body binds us to everything that comes to us on the physical plane. What, then, does the etheric body bind us to? It binds us to everything that relates us to the cosmos, to the extraterrestrial, to everything that lives in us that cannot be ascribed directly to any connection with the physical realm. If, for example, a person is born with a physically defective ear, he won't be able to become a musician. But physical defects are due to physical heredity. This is a radical case that illustrates our dependence upon the ongoing heredity process. But we must turn our attention from the capacities to which our physical bodies predispose us to those occasioned by the etheric. These show up more distinctly in particular predispositions of the soul. Only a poor observer can miss the fact of the great differences of soul manifested by individuals. Dull-witted materialists are sometimes little interested in subtle differences of soul; they want to investigate the external form element alone. But alert observers of life are perfectly aware that nobody resembles any other person as far as his individuality is concerned.

People who have entertained theosophical concepts for awhile are satisfied to explain these individual differences by saying that everyone has lived through repeated earth lives and demonstrates in his individual characteristics what he has brought with him from the past. This is right, of course, but it does not suffice for true understanding. Just imagine, for example, a person being born with a sensitive musical ear, but with no opportunity to get a musical education. In such a case his musical ear would go undeveloped. One cannot, of course, be musically educated if one lacks a musical ear, but external opportunity, a person's milieu, must also permit it. There are people who are always satisfied to fall back on the same one-sided explanation of facts, saying that our higher ego, our higher self, takes care of everything. The higher self is actually the world! This may be true, but it is by no means enough to explain everything in the universe. It is true that karma is the cause of our individual predispositions, that our individual differences come from the way we develop in the course of our incarnations. But it is not enough to know that we pass through various earth lives and develop ourselves as individuals; we need to know what enables us to make actual use in life of the capacities developed by us as individuals.

Let us turn our attention to the life between death and a new birth. You are familiar with the content of the published lecture cycle entitled Life between Death and Rebirth, and can gather from it that the various factors preparing us for rebirth, for a new incarnation in a physical body, must be brought together during that life.¹ But it has to be possible in the spiritual world for human beings to find there what they need in order to develop their individual capacities. We can conceive of having had an incarnation during which we laid the foundation for certain developments in the following earth life, but finding no possibility between death and rebirth of bringing to development the potentialities implanted in us for the following incarnation. A plant seed may be full of potential, but unless it is planted in favorable soil it is impossible for its potential to develop. Similarly, we may be ever so full of promise as individuals, but if we are unable to find in the spiritual world factors that nourish us as suitable soil does a plant seed, then the life-conditions needed for the unfolding of the capacities we have developed for a future incarnation cannot be provided.

This can make us aware that the world contains deep hidden secrets that can be discovered if we train the light of spiritual science on the actual facts. A few catchy theories or sayings, such as that we have various incarnations and so on, each as our individuality dictates, from one to the next, are not enough; they do not reach down to what we experience as the riddles of life. The need, as I have reiterated these last few days, is always to find the right perspective. We will encounter much in life that will strike us as profound riddles that need some degree of solution if we are not to feel ourselves helpless strugglers who, though we may see the riddles life presents, cannot cope with them.

There is a riddle I want to bring up here because it deals with the spiritual investigator's connection with the question of what conditions contribute to the development of individuality. I'll characterize it later on. I refer to the riddles we encounter in life with respect to the varying ages at which people die. Let's say one person lives to a great old age, while someone else dies very young. People die, of course, at all the various ages. We can state this thoughtlessly; there is particularly little inclination to be sensitive to a riddle so frequently encountered. But the fact is that the most commonplace matters pose the greatest riddles.

A contemplation of the relationship of the etheric body to the world as a whole brings us closer to this riddle. Everyone knows as a fact of experience that our physical bodies age; we grow older and older physically. And everyone understands what is involved in aging. But where our etheric bodies are concerned the opposite is true: we grow younger, ever younger. When we are very old, our physical bodies are old, but our etheric bodies have grown young. Some of you have already heard of this in my lectures, but I want to discuss it today in a different context. We have to develop our etheric bodies during an incarnation in such a way that when we have come to its close, our astral bodies will be so embedded in these etheric bodies that they feel themselves prepared for their appropriate entrance into the next life. It is really true that when an individual is old and gray and wrinkled, his etheric body burgeons with fresh life, for his astral body must accustom itself at this point to live in an etheric body already teeming with germinal potential. The way the astral body is to permeate and work in the physical body of a child in the following incarnation must already find some degree of expression in its connection with the etheric body grown young.

It is remarkable how the genius of language can reveal some secret or other. As I've mentioned on other occasions, you will find a beautiful passage in Goethe's Faust where the term “growing young” is used in place of “being born,” “growing young” rather than “growing old.” In other words, we start to grow young when we are born.

This is based, of course, on the conception of the soul pre-existing birth. But the forces it will need to enable it to work through the body into which the child is born must have been acquired while the etheric body is growing young in the aging physical body of the previous earth life.

Materialists find special corroboration of their materialistic theories in the fact that even geniuses—or at least those who are regarded as such—sometimes become senile in their old age, and Kant is cited as a particularly relished case. But people who subscribe to this way of thinking do not grasp the fact that the soul can manifest here on the physical plane only through the agency of the physical organs. Kant's brain became unable to serve as the tool of the soul forces he had evolved, and this is why he appeared feebleminded in old age, even though the soul that was preparing to organize the physical body of his next incarnation was actually already living in him. But in the previous earth life this soul was unable to make a suitable instrument of the physical body it inhabited.

If you apply what I have just been saying, you will see that it makes a tremendous, an enormous difference whether an individual dies in extreme old age or as a youngster, perhaps even in childhood. For the etheric body of someone who dies in youth has not yet grown young. If we are speaking of physical human beings we can say that they are growing old, but in speaking of the etheric body we would have to say that it “grows young.” That would be the proper expression for it. The etheric body grows young but it has not yet grown entirely young in those who die at an early age. I once tried to suggest this by saying that when a person dies in childhood or in youth his etheric body has not actually been used up. This etheric body would have lasted him a lifetime; he could have reached sixty years or more with it if he hadn't died young. But the force inherent in such an etheric body remains in existence, just as forces in the physical world do; they are not lost. However, we need to make a closer study of the special, unique attributes of this etheric body.

When a person can live to what is considered a normal old age—say seventy or eighty—his etheric body has grown very young. The whole fruit of his life experience lodges in this young etheric body, is imprinted on and expressed in it, and the astral body then takes possession of it. That happens in the following way. Let us picture the physical body abandoned by the etheric body. So long as the etheric body remains in the physical body, it cannot develop the forces it has acquired in life because it is imprisoned in the physical body. Picture how, in our previous earth life, we acquired this or that capacity. This is to say, we acquired it with the physical body of that incarnation. What we have added to it in the present incarnation has not yet had time to develop organs for its use; we must first create these in our current incarnation for the life to follow. But all this is lodged in the etheric body, which is more elastic, more fluid than the physical. No use can be made of it, however, as long as the etheric body remains bound to the physical body. But when the physical body has fallen away, the etheric body is freed. And now this etheric body brings forth all the fruits of the life we have lived through up to our death. That is also the reason why it presents the whole life-panorama that spreads out before us for a few days, the tableau of finished earth life, so that we may learn and acquire from this panorama everything that can be extracted from our past experiences. And that takes place during the few days during which we have the tableau before us.

Every morning, on awakening, when our astral body enters our physical and etheric bodies, it has to adapt itself to what has evolved out of the physical and etheric bodies of the past incarnation, and there it encounters what we have made of ourselves. The astral body never enters the etheric body in a way that allows it to make use of what the etheric body has developed in the present incarnation. But after death it does so. It is related to the etheric body in a way that lets it feel and perceive and sense the fruits gathered from the life just ended. And when, a few days later, the astral body separates from the etheric, the entire product of that life is contained in the astral body as the result of the astral body's having drawn it out of the etheric body during the days it has spent there. The astral body needs to spend only those few days in the liberated etheric body to live through everything that an incarnation has brought forth. But it takes a long time so to shape what it has thus experienced that a new earth life can be fashioned from it.

It requires a great deal, as you see, to fashion a new life. And if it were left to human wisdom to achieve this fashioning all by itself, the result would certainly be most inadequate. Try to picture yourselves having to shape your entire physical instrument with the content of your consciousness. You would first have to have a thorough understanding of it. But every glance into external science makes it clear how little insight into our physical make-up we possess. But between death and rebirth we possess it sufficiently to be able to fashion our physical body, right down into its most delicate details, in a way that qualifies it to make use of the capacities evolved in the previous incarnation.

If someone were to ask you how a convolution of the brain could be arranged to conform with the capacities acquired in the previous incarnation and you had to decide whether it should be turned or twisted thus or so, you wouldn't be able to say, if you were examined on the subject, that twisting in some particular direction would correspond to a person's having been an orator in his past incarnation, and that that particular twist would produce the right working out in this life of the acquired capacity. How could you conceivably answer out of the consciousness you possess on the physical plane? But we have to answer that question in the life between death and rebirth, for we must endow the new etheric body with the requisite capacity delicately to chisel out our organs. A single word suffices to describe what is needed, but I wanted to evoke a sense of what this word encompasses: wisdom is required, a wisdom human beings really need to have.

Even though Kant grew feebleminded in old age, his soul—which is to say, his astral body as it lived in his newly constituted etheric body—his soul was wise, for it was already in possession of wisdom. But his ego was unable to raise it to a conscious level with the brain. His soul contained the wisdom that was to emerge between death and rebirth and make its contribution to Kant's future incarnation. Kant lived into old age. The older a person grows, physically speaking, the more pronounced is this moment of wisdom.

But in the case of those who die young the situation is different, for the etheric body has not grown young, and there is consequently less earth-acquired wisdom stored up in it. It is earth-acquired wisdom that is involved here. Something else takes its place. Those who die early have old etheric bodies that have not had time to grow young, and these are all the more teeming with will. Direct will-force in all its immediacy, the love element, creative love-force, permeates them. That is the difference between the etheric bodies of the old and young. The former bear more the character of wisdom, the latter of will. The etheric body of a person who dies young streams out love, warm love, a warm etheric love-element, while that of an older person streams out an aura filled with light and wisdom.

We can answer the question that interests us here by asking spiritual science what would happen if, for some reason, everyone were to grow very old, living on to eighty or ninety, if not a single person died young. What would the result be?

In that case, all the etheric bodies deserted by their souls would be imbued with loving wisdom. People living on the earth in the continuity of history would find it possible to learn a great deal during their physical earth lives, for their physical bodies would be wisely fashioned. They would be born somewhat undifferentiated, each similar to all the rest, but they could learn a great deal on the physical plane. They would be delicately and wisely built, and could learn a great deal, since such learning would be connected with an extremely mobile constitution. Due to their extraordinarily sensitive, mechanistically-wisely constituted physical organisms, these people would be in a state of labile balance that could easily shift. A person would learn a great deal, but be terribly nervous, as the current “nervous” age would express it. It would be a humanity tending to fidget and to have a precarious balance, very gifted for learning on the physical plane, but nevertheless very restless and fidgety. We had better say fidgety rather than nervous; why not put it in a way that feels right? In earlier times, even a couple of centuries ago, throughout Europe a person who had strong nerves and could stand a lot was referred to as “nervy” or “nervous.” But nowadays the tone is not set by the same people, so the meaning of the word got turned into the exact opposite.

Now the soul-differentiations we bring with us into an incarnation from the spiritual world would not exist in human development if everybody grew old, if no one were to die young. There would be no talents, no being born with special gifts. People would come into the world more or less like each other, more or less undifferentiated. They would differ from one another and learn different things only as a result of experiencing different conditions on the physical plane, and would be rather similarly adaptable to whatever circumstances they encountered. Special individual needs would be taken care of by karma through the agency of heredity. Beyond this, what we know as predispositions to special soul-qualities would be lacking. People would simply not possess inner differences.

But everything in the world has to be founded on balance, as I've often said, and in these matters too there can be no one-sidedness. Human life must accordingly be built, on the one hand, on the possibility of pouring into the physical body what an individual has stored up as wisdom in the etheric body's growing younger for use in a future incarnation. On the other hand, the will impulses of those who die young are needed. I have shown at hand of many examples how children who die very young have not expended their etheric bodies. Right here at the Goetheanum we ourselves live in the aura of an etheric body out of which those forces that provide artistic stimulus are derived. I explained how a child belonging to the Goetheanum community left his etheric body at his death, and that this etheric body has created an aura that is incorporated into our building. Those able to perceive the nature of the impulses that come from this etheric body find support in them for the artistic impulses to be lived out here.

But this is in general the situation with the etheric bodies of those who die young. They go back; they haven't as yet grown so young as entirely to have worn down the will element; instead, will and creative love-forces accompany them into the spiritual world. And now a continuous interchange has to take place between those etheric bodies that have grown wholly young and those less young. Continuous mutual support is exchanged in the spiritual world between what ascends from the earth in the etheric bodies of the very aged and the etheric bodies of young people, or, indeed, of those in the in-between years. When very young children die, those referred to in Faust as “the midnight-born,” their etheric bodies are very old, quite hoary in fact, but they are endowed with strong will- forces. Etheric bodies of this kind are able to work powerfully on the long-lived etheric bodies of those who grow physically old.

Just think what a brilliant idea it was that made Goethe have the centenarian Faust go to heaven surrounded by the etheric bodies of very young boys, the “midnight-born,” hinting thereby that an exchange of the kind described has to take place!

This interchange is always going on. We can therefore say that there exist in the spiritual world the etheric bodies of human beings who have grown physically old, and various things are taking place in them (see drawing, mauve); then, in red, the etheric bodies of deceased young people, with various things taking place in them as well; and an interchange between them, a process of mutual exchange. And what we encounter in the life between death and rebirth is the result of the situations that develop in this exchange between the etheric bodies of those who died young and those who died old. This interchange is essential; without it, the evolution of humanity on earth could not proceed properly.

The beings who direct this interchange are to be found in the realm of the angel hierarchy, so that we really have to recognize such an interchange between the two kinds of etheric bodies in the spiritual world in which we are immersed. The two kinds of activity coalesce, like two merging rivers. But they are then given proper direction and regulation by angelic beings; that is one of the tasks with which angels are charged. When, therefore, persons are able to come into the world with special talents, this is due not only to the possibility that between death and rebirth wisdom of a materialistic nature that is a fruit of the earth has been imprinted into physical bodies, but that something not as yet fully developed on earth, the product of the etheric bodies of those who died young, has brought about effects present as forces that can be interwoven in the process of fashioning human talents.

You see how spiritual science can bring about a living feeling for things when we really immerse ourselves in its secrets. We learn from spiritual science to lift ourselves in spirit to a contemplation of the mystery of death in an older person. For then we tell ourselves that people grow old in order that human evolution may go forward in the right way for as long as physical bodies are needed as vehicles. We have a premonition, whenever an older person dies, of the fruits that human evolution on earth will bear as a result. And when we give ourselves up to a contemplation of what the future holds, we realize that there has to be a continuous development of talents in mankind's progressive evolution. This person must be gifted in this direction, another in that, with capabilities ranging all the way to the genius level. That could not be the case if nobody were fated to die young. And as we look up to people of special genius, we can attribute their gifts to the fact that some individuals have to die young. To contemplate the mystery of death in the case of young human beings is to realize that early death too is part of the wise design, for it gives rise to seed-forces of soul-endowment needed by the human race for its further progress.

If we can lift ourselves above a personal reaction to death to a contemplation of what is needed by mankind as a whole, we encounter the wisdom involved in the deaths of both young and old. It is important to realize that a truly genuine and earnest study of spiritual science does not remain mere theory, but that a proper grasp of theories leads to attitudes and feelings that enable us to achieve greater harmony in our lives than we could achieve if we didn't have it. We need spiritual science to develop the deeper insight that can lead to a perception of the consonance that lies behind life's otherwise unbearable dissonances.

We learn, too, to understand the sacrifices that we have to make in life and the things that pain us, if we know that the entire universe can be rightly maintained only by developments that cannot help but cause us sorrow. We simply have to make the effort to sense that the many hundreds of geniuses: Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe, Michelangelo, Raphael, and so on, are essential to mankind's progressive evolution, and would not have existed as such had the ground not been prepared by people dying young. This has nothing to do with the individual. Those who die young and thus sacrifice their etheric bodies in their youth provide the entire cosmos with a fruitful soil for the growth and maturing of human soul-capacities.

We become united with the universe when, instead of taking an abstract approach to spiritual science, it becomes for us a seeking out of impulses that flow into us as soul-warmth, reconciling us with the world, moving us to our depths as they show us that, though we human beings have to undergo painful experiences, we suffer them for the sake of harmony in the entire universe.

It is not always easy to withdraw our attention from individual life to focus on the life of the whole world. But the fact that achieving this goal is difficult is also the reason why it strengthens us. And as we develop a feeling for community from our suffering, that sense of the totality of the cosmic order becomes ever more intense and lays ever more profound hold on our innermost souls. And we prepare ourselves in doing this to become participants in the universal order of a kind the gods make use of.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner, Life between Death and Rebirth, (Hudson, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1987).

We have often turned our gaze back to the views of older times, and we want to do so again today, with the aim of gaining some insights into history and the development of humanity. If we go back thousands of years in human development, for example to the times that we, in our terminology, refer to as the ancient Indian cultural period, we find that people's way of looking at things was quite different then than it is in our time, even if we take a period that is very far removed from that time. If we go back to those older times, we know that people simply did not see nature as we see it today. They perceived spiritual beings directly in everything, in the individual elements of the earth's surface, in mountains and rivers, but also in everything that immediately surrounds the earth, in clouds, in light, and so on. It would have been inconceivable for a person of those ancient times to speak of nature as we do. For he would have felt as we would feel if we were to sit opposite a collection of corpses and then say that we were among human beings. What presents itself to man as nature today, millennia before our era, man would have felt only as the corpse of nature. For in everything that surrounded him, he perceived the spiritual and soul-like.

We know that when today's humanity hears from poetry or from the messages of myths and legends how it was once believed that spiritual-soul qualities can be found in the source, in the flowing river, in the interior of the mountains, and so on, it believes that the ancients let their imagination run wild and that they were inventing. Well, that is a naive point of view. The ancients did not make things up at all, but they perceived the spiritual and soul just as one perceives colors, as one perceives the movements of tree leaves, and so on. They perceived the spiritual and soul directly, and they would have thought of what we call nature today as merely the corpse of nature. But in a certain sense, some individuals among these ancients strove to gain a different way of looking at things than that which was the general one.

You know, today, when people strive to gain a different view from the usual one, and when they are at all capable of doing so, they become 'studied people', they receive concepts that go beyond what they otherwise see only externally. Then they absorb science, as it is called, into themselves. This science did not exist in the times of which we are now speaking. But there were individuals who aspired to go beyond the general observation, beyond what one knew in everyday life. They just did not study as it is done today. They did certain exercises. These exercises were not like those we speak of today in anthroposophy, but they were exercises that were more closely tied to the human organism in those older times. For example, there were exercises through which the breathing process was trained to do something other than what it is by nature. So they did not sit in laboratories and do experiments, but they did, so to speak, experiments on themselves. They regulated their breathing. For example, they inhaled, held back their breath and tried to experience what happened inside the organism when the breath was altered in this way. These breathing exercises should not be copied today. But they were once a means by which people believed they could come to higher knowledge than they could come to if they simply observed nature with their ordinary perceptions, if they saw external natural things as we see them, but also saw the spiritual and soul-like in all natural things.

When people devoted themselves to such exercises, the nature of which, although in a weakened form, has been preserved in what is described today as yoga exercises from the Orient, when they thus changed their breathing in relation to ordinary breathing, then the spiritual-soul aspect disappeared from the view of the surroundings, and it was precisely through such breathing that nature became for these people as we ourselves see it today. So, in order to see nature as we see it today, such people first had to do exercises in those ancient times. Otherwise, spiritual-soul entities would have leapt out of all the beings around them for them to see. They drove away these spiritual-soul entities by changing their breathing process.

Thus they — if I use the term that is current today for those who aspire so high above the general contemplation — as “learned men” no longer aspired to have nature around them as ensouled and spiritualized, but to have it around them in such a way that they perceived it as a kind of corpse. One could also say that these people felt, as they looked out into nature, as if they were in a surging, billowing, soul-spiritual universe, but they felt within it as a person of the present day would feel when dreaming in vivid images and could hardly wake up from these dreams. That is how they felt. But what did these individuals — let us call them the scholars of that ancient time — achieve when, through such special exercises, they distinguished themselves from this living surging and killed it in contemplation, so that they really felt that they now had a dead, corpse-like thing around them? What did they strive for as a result?

They strove for a stronger sense of self. They strove for something through which they experienced themselves, through which they felt themselves. Today's man says every moment: “I am”. “I” is a word that he uses very frequently from morning till night, because it is natural to him, it is self-evident to him. For these ancient people, it was not a matter of course in their ordinary daily experience to pronounce the “I” or even the “I am”. They had to acquire this. To do so, they first had to do such exercises. And by doing these exercises, they came to such an inner experience that they could say with a certain truth: “I am”. Only by doing this did they come to the awareness of their own being.

So what we take for granted only became an experience for these people when they made an effort in an inner breathing process. They first had to, so to speak, kill the environment for contemplation, to awaken themselves. This is how they came to the conviction that they themselves are, that they could say “I am” to themselves. But with this “I am” they were given something that we take for granted again today. They were given the inner development of the intellectual. Through this they developed the possibility of having an inner, secluded thinking.

If we go back to times when the old oriental views set the tone for civilization, it was the case that people felt a souled nature in their everyday lives, but had a very weak sense of self, almost no sense of self at all, did not at all summarize this sense of self in the conviction “I am,” but that individual people who were trained by the mystery schools were led to experience this “I am.” But then they did not experience this “I am” in the way we take it for granted today, but in the moment when they were brought to it through their breathing process, to be able to say “I am” at all out of inner conviction, out of inner experience, they experienced something that even today's man does not really experience at first.

Think back to your childhood: you can only think back to a certain point, then it stops. You were once a baby, but you have no memory of what you experienced as a baby. Your ability to remember ends at some point. You were certainly already there, crawling around on the ground, being caressed by your mother or father. You may have wriggled and moved your hands, but you do not know in your ordinary consciousness what you experienced inwardly at that time. Nevertheless, it was a more active, more intense soul life than later on. For this more intense soul life, for example, has shaped your brain plastically, has permeated your rest of the body and shaped it plastically. There was an intense soul life present, and the old Indian felt transported into this soul life at the same moment that he said to himself, “I am”.

Imagine very vividly what that was like. He did not feel in the present moment when he said to himself “I am”; he felt transported back to his babyhood, he felt the way he felt in his babyhood, and from there he spoke to his whole later life. He did not have the feeling that he now But this was only drawn into this inner being after it had previously lived in the spiritual-soul world. That is, by first transporting himself back to his babyhood through his breathing process, this old Indian yogi became aware of the time before his existence on earth. It seemed to him like a memory. Just as if a person today remembers something that he experienced ten years ago, it was like the occurrence of a memory in the moment when the “I am” shot through the soul, when in this ancient Indian time a person strengthened himself inwardly by breathing exercises and killed the outside world around him, but made it alive, which was not his outside world now, but what the outside world was before man descended into the physical world.

In those days, if I may use a modern expression, which of course sounds infinitely philistine when I use it for those ancient times, one was really lifted out of one's present earthly existence and into the spiritual-soul existence through the study of yoga. One owed one's elevation into the spiritual-soul worlds to one's studies at that time. One had a somewhat different consciousness than we have today. But precisely when one was a yogi in the former sense, one could think – the other people could not think, the other people could only dream – but one thought into the supersensible world, from which one had descended into earthly existence.

This is also a characteristic of the time of the earth's development, which, if we characterize it somewhat roughly, preceded, for example, the Greco-Roman conceptions in the fourth post-Atlantean period. There, the “I am” had already penetrated more into people in their ordinary everyday consciousness. Admittedly, the verb in language at that time still contained the I; it was not yet as separate as it is in our language, but nevertheless there was already a distinct I-experience. This distinct I-experience was now a natural, self-evident fact of the inner life. But in contrast to this, outer nature was already more or less dead. The Greeks, after all, still had the ability to experience the two aspects side by side, and without any special training. They still clearly experienced the spiritual and soul-like in the source, in the river, in the mountain, in the tree, albeit weaker than people of older times. But at the same time, they could also perceive the dead in nature and have a sense of self. This gives the Greeks their special character. The Greek did not yet have the same view of the world as we do. He could develop concepts and ideas about the world like ours, but at the same time he could take those views seriously that were still given in images. He lived differently than we do today. For example, we go to the theater to be entertained. In ancient Greece, people only went to the theater for entertainment in the time of Euripides, if I may put it this way – hardly in the time of Sophocles, and certainly not in the time of Aeschylus or in even older times. In those times, people went to dramatic performances for different reasons. They had a clear sense that spiritual and soulful beings live in everything, in trees and bushes, in springs and rivers. When you experience these spiritual and soulful beings, you have moments in life when you have no strong sense of self. But if you develop this strong sense of self, which the ancients still had to seek through yoga training, and which the Greeks no longer needed to seek through yoga training, then everything around you becomes dead, then you only see, so to speak, the corpse of nature. But in doing so, you consume yourself. They said to themselves: Life consumes the human being. The Greeks felt that merely looking at dead nature was a kind of mental and physical illness. In ancient Greek times, people felt very strongly that the life of the day made them ill, that they needed something to restore their health: and that was tragedy. In order to become healthy, because one felt that one was consuming oneself, that one was making oneself ill in a certain sense, one needed, if one wanted to remain fully human at all, a healing, therefore one went to tragedy. And tragedy was still performed in Askhylos' time in such a way that one perceived the person who created the tragedy, who shaped it, as the physician who, in a certain sense, made the consumed person healthy again. The feelings that were aroused – fear and compassion for the heroes who appeared on stage – had the effect of a medicine. They penetrated the human being, and by overcoming these feelings of fear and compassion, they created a crisis in him, just as a crisis is created in a pneunomia, for example. And by overcoming the crisis, one becomes healthy. So the plays were performed to make people who felt used up as people well again. That was the feeling that was attached to tragedy, to the play, in the older Greek era. And this was because people said to themselves: When you feel your ego, the world is divested of its gods. The play presents the god again, because it was essentially a presentation of the divine world and of fate, which even the gods must endure, thus a presentation of what asserts itself behind the world as spiritual. That was what was presented in the tragedy.

Thus, for the Greeks, art was still a kind of healing process. And in that the first Christians lived according to what was given in the embodiment of Christ in Jesus and what can be contemplated and felt in the Gospels – the death of Christ Jesus, to suffering and crucifixion, to resurrection, to ascension – they felt, to a certain extent, an inner tragedy. That is why they also called Christ, and he was increasingly called the physician, the savior, the great physician of the world. In ancient times, the Greeks sensed this healing quality in his tragedy. Humanity should gradually come to experience and feel the historical, the historically healing in the sight, in the emotional experience of the mystery of Golgotha, the great tragedy of Golgotha.

In ancient Greece, especially in the time before Aeschylus, when what had previously been celebrated only in the darkness of the mysteries had already become more public, people turned to tragedy. What did people see in this older tragedy? The god Dionysus appeared, it was the god Dionysus who worked his way out of the forces of the earth, out of the spiritual earth. The god Dionysus, because he worked his way out of the spiritual forces and up to the surface of the earth, shared in the suffering of the earth. He felt, as a god, in his soul, not in the way it was in the Mystery of Golgotha, also in his body, what it meant to live among beings that go through death. He did not experience death in himself, but he learned to look at it. One sensed that there is the god Dionysus, suffering deeply among human beings because he had to witness all that human beings suffer. There was only one being on the stage, the god Dionysus, the suffering Dionysus, and around him a chorus that spoke and recited so that people could hear what was going on in the mind of the god Dionysus. For that was the very first form of the drama, of the tragedy, that the only really acting person who appeared was the god Dionysus, and around him the choir, which recited what was going on in Dionysus' soul. Only gradually did several persons develop out of the one person who represented the god Dionysus in the older times, and then the later drama out of the one play. Thus the god Dionysus was experienced in the image. And later, as an historical fact in the evolution of humanity, the suffering and dying God, the Christ, was experienced in reality. Once as an historical fact, this was to take place before humanity so that all people could feel what had otherwise been experienced in Greece in the drama. But as humanity lived towards this great historical drama, the drama, which was so sacred in the old grienzeit that one felt in it the saviour, the miracle-working human medicine, was, more and more, I would say, thrown down from its pedestal and became entertainment, as it is already the case with Euripides.

Humanity lived contrary to the times in which it needed something other than being shown in pictures the spiritual and soul world, after nature had been de-animated for viewing. Humanity needed the historical mystery of Golgotha. The ancient yoga student of the Indian times had taken in the breath, held back the breath, so to speak, in his own body, in order to feel in this breathing: In you lives the divine I-impulse. - The human being experienced God in himself through the breathing process as a yoga student. Later times came. Man no longer experienced the divine impulse in himself through the breathing process. But he had learned to think, and he said: Through the breath the soul came into man. - The old yoga student went through that. The later human being said: #SE211-056 he became a soul. The older yoga student experienced it, the later human being said it. And by saying this in ancient Hebrew, one already experienced in a certain sense abstractly what one had previously experienced concretely. But one did not look in ancient Hebrew either, but in ancient Greek. One always takes place in one part of the earth, the other in another part of the earth. One no longer experienced the God within oneself as the old YOGA student did, but one experienced in the image the existence of God in man. And this experience in the image of the existence of God in man was certainly present in the older Greek drama. But this drama now became a world-historical event. This drama became the Mystery of Golgotha. But now the image was also abandoned. The image became a mere image, just as the breathing process was merely described in thoughts. The whole human soul became different.

Man saw the external world dead, and that was the elementary, the natural thing for him, that he saw the external world dead. He saw it without a god. He saw himself as an external world, as a physical external world, deified. But he had the consolation that once in this deified world the real God had come down, the Christ, and had lived in a human being, and through the resurrection as the Christ impulse had passed into the whole of earthly evolution. And so man could now develop a certain view in the following way. He could say to himself: I see the world, but it is a corpse. He did not say it to himself, of course, because it remained in the unconscious; man does not know that he sees the world as a corpse. But gradually the corpse formed in his view on the cross, the dead Christ Jesus. And if you look at the crucifix, at the dead Christ Jesus, then you have nature. You have the image of nature, of that nature in which man is crucified. And if you look at the one who rose from the grave, who was then experienced by the disciples and by Paul as the Christ living in the world, then you have what was seen in all of nature in older times. Of course, in a multitude, in many spiritual beings, in gnomes and nymphs, in sylphs and salamanders, in all possible other entities of the earth hierarchies, one saw the divine-spiritual; one saw nature spiritualized and ensouled. But now, through the burgeoning of intellectualism, there arose the urge to summarize what is scattered in nature. It was summarized in the dead Christ Jesus on the cross. But in Christ Jesus one sees everything that was lost in external nature. One sees all spirituality by looking at the fact that the Christ, the Spirit of God, rose from this body, having conquered death, and that every human soul can now partake of His essence. Man has lost the ability to see the Divine-Spiritual in the sphere of nature. Man has gained the ability to recognize this Divine-Spiritual in Christ in view of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Such is evolution. What mankind has lost, it has been given back to it in Christ. In what it has lost, it has gained selfishness, the possibility of feeling itself. If nature had not become dead to human contemplation, man would never have come to the experience of “I am”. He has come to the experience “I am”; he could feel himself, inwardly experience himself, but he needed a spiritual outer world. That became the Christ. But the “I am”, the egoity, is built on the corpse of nature.

Paul sensed this. Let us imagine Paul's perception for a moment. All around, the corpse of what people had once seen in ancient times. They saw nature as the body of the divine, the soul-spiritual. Just as we see our fingers, so did these people see mountains. It did not occur to them to think of the mountains as inanimate nature, any more than it occurs to us to think of the finger as an inanimate limb; rather, they said: There is a spiritual-soul element that is the earth; it has limbs, and the mountain is such a limb. — But nature became dead. Man experienced the “I am” within. But he would only stand there as a hermit on the de-spiritualized, de-souled earth if he could not look to the Christ. But this Christ, he must not look at him merely from the outside, so that he remains external; he must now take him up into the I. He must be able to say, by rising above the everyday “I am”: Not I, but the Christ in me. If we were to schematically depict what was there, we could say: Man once sensed nature (green) around him, but this nature everywhere ensouled and spiritualized (red). This was in an older period of human history.

In later times, man also felt nature, but he felt the possibility of perceiving his own “I am” (yellow) in the face of nature, which had now become soulless. But for this he needed the image of the God present in man, and he felt this in the God Dionysus, who was presented to him in Greek drama.

In even later times, human beings again felt the soulless nature (green) within themselves, the “I am” (yellow). But the drama becomes fact. On Golgotha, the cross rises. But at the same time, what man had originally lost arises within him and radiates (red) from his own inner being: “Not I, but the Christ in me.”

What did the man of ancient times say? He could not say it, but he experienced it: Not I, but the Divine-Spiritual around me, in me, everywhere. Man has lost this “Divine-Spiritual everywhere, around me, in me”; he has found it again in himself and in a conscious sense he now says the same thing that he originally experienced unconsciously: Not I, but the Christ in me.

The primal fact, unconsciously experienced in the time before man experienced his ego, becomes a conscious fact, an experience of Christ in the human heart, in the human soul.

Do you not see, when you draw such a trivial diagram, the form that the reality must take in ideas? Do you not see the whole world filled with the spirit of Christ, which arises from within the human being, and draws from the cosmos into the human being? And when you realize what significance sunlight has for human beings, how human beings cannot live physically without sunlight, how light surrounds us everywhere, then you will also be able to understand when I tell you that in those older times of which I have spoken today, human beings certainly felt themselves to be light in the light. They felt they belonged to the light. He did not say 'I am', he perceived the sunbeams that fell on the earth, and he did not distinguish himself from the sunbeams. Where he perceived the light, he also perceived himself, because that is where he felt himself. When the light arrived, he felt himself on the waves of light, on the waves of the sun, the sun.

With Christ, this became effective in his own inner being. It is the sun that enters one's own inner being and becomes effective in one's own inner being. Of course, this comparison of Christ with light is mentioned many times in the Bible, but when anthroposophy wants to draw attention to the fact that one is dealing with a reality, today most people rebel who have “divinity” listed as their faculty in the university directories. They actually reject knowledge of these things. And it is a deeply significant fact that there was once such a theologian in Basel who was also a friend of Nietzsche: Overbeck, who wrote the book on the Christianity of today's theology. With this book, he actually wanted to state as a theologian that one still has Christianity, that at that time, in the 1870s, there was still this Christianity, but that much had already become unchristian, and that in any case, theology was no longer Christian. This is what Professor Overbeck, of the Faculty of Theology at Basel, wanted to prove with his book on the Christianity of today's theology. He was highly successful. And anyone who takes the book seriously will come to the conclusion that there may still be some Christianity today, but modern theology has certainly become unchristian. And there may still be some Christianity today, but when theologians begin to talk about Christ, their words are no longer Christian. These things are just not usually taken seriously enough. But they should be taken seriously, because if they were taken seriously, then one would not only see the necessity of today's anthroposophical work, but one would also see the full significance of anthroposophy. And above all, people would be aware of their responsibility towards contemporary humanity with regard to something like anthroposophical knowledge. For this anthroposophical knowledge should actually underlie all knowledge today. All knowledge, especially social knowledge, should be derived from this anthroposophical knowledge. For by learning that the light of Christ lives in them - Christ in me - by fully experiencing this, they learn to see themselves as something other than what one gets when one sees man only as a corpse of nature. But it is from this view that man belongs to nature that has become a corpse that our antisocial, unsocial present has emerged. And a real view, which in turn can make people brothers and sisters and bring real moral impulses into humanity, can only come about if man penetrates to an understanding of the word: Not I, but the Christ in me — when the Christ is found as an effective force precisely in the dealings from person to person. Without this realization we make no progress. We need this realization, and this realization must be found. If we advance as far as it, then we will also advance beyond it, and our social life will be thoroughly imbued with the Christ.