The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The phenomena of hypnotism and suggestion, in which research is currently taking a lively interest, are of such a nature that the representatives of the most diverse intellectual fields feel the need to deal with them. Hypnosis seems to provide the physician with a means of distinguishing functional from organic diseases, and at the same time the possibility of curing the former by suggestive intervention. The legal scholar will not be able to avoid taking into account the effect that auto-suggestion and external suggestion have on a person in questions in which free will and personal responsibility come into consideration. Judicial practice will always have to be mindful of the fact that suggestive influence can cause the statements of both the accused and the witnesses to take on a form that deviates more or less from the truth. In the field of religious and cultural history, many things can be better explained with reference to hypnotism than without it. That from here an explanatory light also falls on the phenomena of artistic imaginative activity seems to me undoubted. And this brings me in an informal way to that science which is interested in the question of hypnotism above all other fields, namely psychology. I must agree with Hans Schmidkunz (Psychologie der Suggestion,.5) when he seeks here an important addition to our existing psychology. And it is highly regrettable that a researcher like W. Wundt is guilty of the most incredible distortions of individual assertions in Schmidkunz's book in his assessment of it. Wundt has rendered great services to psychology through his experimental investigations and has earned a high reputation among his philosophizing and philosophically educated contemporaries. We do not wish to deny the former, nor rebel against the latter, when we count his recently published work on "Fypnotism and Suggestion" among those that create confusion rather than enlightenment in the field of psychology. The one-sided, in a certain sense purely mechanical way in which Wundt views the life of the soul makes him completely misjudge the value which, for example, the assumption of a double consciousness (superconscious and subconscious) has for the elucidation of the facts in question. He finds in it "a pronounced example of that kind of psychological pseudo-explanation which consists in introducing a new name for the things to be explained" (p. 36). Wundt overlooks the fact that such theories, even if they are not called upon to speak the last word about the facts, nevertheless keep the real moments that continually flow into one another in reality conceptually sharply apart, which is the first step towards a real explanation. Wundt's own views seem completely inadequate to me. He wants to derive all the facts under consideration from a functioning of the ordinary mechanism of imagination that differs only gradually from the normal one. But I cannot see how this can explain the behavior towards the outside world that we observe in hypnosis. It only seems comprehensible to me if in hypnosis such a modification of our conscious functions occurs that we enter into an interaction with our surroundings which is one step closer to the purely physical relationship than that of our ordinary mental life. This interaction is concealed by our higher spiritual life like a weaker light by a stronger one; but it makes itself felt when the normal consciousness is obscured. In the latter case we descend one step on the ladder of world effects; we are in intimate contact with purely physical nature. The processes of the latter affect us without passing through our higher consciousness. Without giving the matter this turn into the universal philosophy of nature, we will not get any further.

I would like to summarize my view of Wundt's writing as follows. When I consider the concept that this psychologist has of consciousness, it does not seem to correspond at all to what emerges from an exhaustive immersion in the life of the human soul. If Wundt's concept of consciousness were correct, then man would always be in hypnosis, and our states of consciousness would be suggested to us by the mechanically operating mechanism of imagination. It is only because Wundt's psychology does not rise above that level of consciousness which receives its content more or less by way of suggestion that it does not see the profound difference between a suggested and a mass of imagination received by the waking consciousness.

In physiological terms, I find the explanation most acceptable that they serve subcortical brain centers to mediate those functions which take place in the state of hypnosis, and this by switching off the cerebral cortex, which is only active during waking consciousness.

In addition to Wundt's work, I have a number of others on the same subject. If you are looking for an easy-to-follow guide through the entire field of these phenomena, I recommend H. Schmidkunz: "Der Hypnotismus".¹ Appearances, application, views and dangers of hypnotism are clearly presented by a knowledgeable hand. An inserted somnambulistic case history and an excellent chapter on the history of hypnotism further enhance the value of this book, which is excellent in every respect, Anyone who wants to learn about a typical case of hypnosis (with four modifications of consciousness) and the views of an eminent clinician on this field must consult the book by v. KrafftEbing ² reach. In the "Zeitfragen des christlichen Volkslebens" is by C. Ziegler ³ A treatise appeared which takes the standpoint of the so-called "great hypnotism" of the Paris school. The latter (with Charcot at its head) sees only special cases of hysteria in the phenomena in question. The author's view is somewhat clouded by this, but the book seems to me to be worth reading because of the good compilation of the phenomena. I have similar things to say about a brochure by Dr. Karl Friedr. Jordan.⁴ What is confusing here is the fact that the author is a follower of Prof. Gustav Jäger's theory of the life agent. According to Jordan, a quantity of this agent in excess of the usual amount flows from the hypnotist to the person being hypnotized and causes the somnambulistic state in the latter. Leaving aside this view, which is not supported by observation, this book also provides a good summary of what is relevant to hypnotism.

A study on hypnotism by Otto von Berlin seems to me to be confused and unclear.⁵ It is, however, to be taken more seriously than the latest publication by Dr. F. Wollny.⁶ We are dealing here with a very strange gentleman. Wollny senses secret societies which have the power to exert a magnetic influence on the individual as well as on whole masses of people and to induce them to all kinds of actions. The author has already expressed the same in a number of earlier writings, and has even made a petition to the imperial authorities to prosecute the alleged mischief. I believe that Wollny suffers from the kind of partial insanity that we often have occasion to observe. His writing is therefore only of pathological interest.

Following on from these remarks, I would like to say a few words about a question which, with regard to the experience of hypnotism, interests the philosophical thinker above all others. things. I mean that of the relation of suggestion to the conviction gained by logical means. There can be no doubt that, despite the qualitative difference between the hypnotic and the normal consciousness, auto-suggestion and external suggestion also play a great part in the latter, and that a large part of what we believe and consider to be true has taken root in us in a suggestive way. However, a complex of ideas that has come about through suggestion must never claim the value of a conviction. It is therefore all the more important to keep the designated areas strictly separate. After all, only that which is a logically acquired conviction can have scientific significance.

How does a judgment come about? We would never be able to connect ideas logically if the real unity of the universe did not appear to us as a multiplicity of ideas. The reason for the latter lies in our mental organization. If we were organized differently, we would see the entire (physical and spiritual) cosmos with a single glance. There would be no scientific thinking. The latter consists precisely in uniting the separate elements of the world through conscious activity. Through the development of this activity we approach more and more that overview of the world with a single glance. If this unification is to be a truly logical one, then two things are necessary. Firstly, we must see through the elements of world phenomena in their separate state exactly according to their content; secondly, from this content we must find the way in which we can objectively integrate the separate details into the unified whole of the world. Only if the world elements given to us behave completely passively in this unification and this only comes about through our "I" can the result be given the name of a conviction.

But there is no question that the same union of ideas which is brought about by our "I" can also take place independently of it merely through the attraction of the ideas themselves. This will happen if the "I" is switched off in some way, put into inactivity. The human psyche unites two moments: it takes in the world as a multiplicity, as a sum of details, and at a higher level it combines them again into the unity from which they originate. Because they belong to such a unity, they will strive for unification even if they are present in consciousness and the "I" does not confront them as a regulating factor. If this is the case, then we are dealing here with suggestion in the broadest sense. For a monistic view of the world, the latter is completely understandable. What is rooted in a unity strives for connection when it appears somewhere as a multiplicity. Since the totality of a person's life phenomena is always the result of the forces active in his consciousness, it can assert itself in two ways. If the process of imagination is regulated by the "I", then the phenomena of the personality can only be derived from its activity; if, on the other hand, the "I" is extinguished, then the cause of what takes place in and with the personality must be sought outside it. Every complex of imagination or every action of the latter kind is to be regarded only as a suggestion. There is only a gradual difference between the person acting in deep hypnosis and the scholar whose method is not based on considerations of his own "I" but on those of the head of the school. Only he who sees through the connections of the world in such a way that his judgment becomes completely independent of any external influence, raises the content of his imagination above a sum of suggestions. We can tell how so many people will act or think in a given case because we know the suggestions under whose influence they are. A person living under the influence of a suggestion is integrated into the chain of lower natural processes, where the causes of a phenomenon must always be sought not in it but outside it. Only the "I-consciousness" lifts us out of this chain, breaks the connection with the rest of nature in order to close it again within consciousness. To have given this central position to the "I" in the field of science is a merit of Joh. Gottlieb Fichte that cannot be appreciated enough. In this thinker, the development of human reason made a leap forward that cannot be compared with anything else. It is characteristic of contemporary German philosophy that it has no idea of this leap. The man who rises to the understanding of Fichte must experience a change in himself, like a man born blind who is given sight by an operation. All aberrations, both those of spiritualism and those of physiological psychology, can only be judged by those who know Fichte. It would never occur to Du Prel to place the action of a somnambulistic person higher than that conditioned by "ego-consciousness" if he had grasped the latter in a more intimate view. He would then know that everything that is not conditioned by the "I" is one step closer to physical nature than that which is. By making the suggestions of the consciousness alienated from the "I" the content of their teachings, the spiritualists make a mockery of science, since this can only consist of the judgments carried out by the "I". They place themselves on the same level as the believers in revelation, who also make the suggested contents of the imagination from outside the content of their views. It is quite characteristic of the dullness and cowardice of thinking reason in our time that the tendency to gain a view of the world with the exclusion of thought appears every moment.

• 1. Der Hypnotismus in gemeinfaßlicher Darstellung. With a somnambulistic case history. By Dr. Hans Schmidkunz. Stuttgart 1893 (VI, 266 p.).
• 2. An experimental study in the field of hypnotism together with remarks on suggestion and suggestion therapy. By Dr. R. v. Krafft-Ebing. 3rd ed. Stuttgart 1893 (108 pp.).
• 3. Der Hypnotismus. By C. Ziegler (Zeitfragen des christlichen Volkslebens, XVI, 1). Stuttgart 1892 (63 pp.).
• 4. The riddle of hypnotism and its solution. By Dr. Karl Friedr. Jordan. 2nd ed. Berlin 1892 (IV, 79 p.).
• 5. Kaleidoscopic study on hypnotism and suggestion. By Otto von Berlin. Freiburg 1892 (73 p.).
• 6. In Sachen der Hypnose und Suggestion. A Vademecum for Herm Prof. Wundt. By Dr. F. Wollny. Leipzig 1893 (24 pp.).

For those who think of music from the aesthetic point of view, there is something puzzling about it; for simple human feeling it is a direct experience which penetrates the soul; and for those who want to understand how it produces its effects, it is a rather difficult problem.

Compared with other arts—sculpture, painting, poetry—music has a special character. All the other arts have some kind of model in the external world. The sculptor works from a model, and if he creates a statue of Zeus or Apollo, it takes an idealised human form. It is the same with painting—and today the tendency is to give an exact impression of what the senses perceive. Poetry, similarly, tries to deal with some aspect of the real world. But if one tried to apply this theory to music, one would get nowhere—for how could one copy, for example, the song of birds!

What is the origin of musically-shaped sounds? How are they related to anything in the objective world?

It is precisely in connection with this art of music that Schopenhauer has advanced some interesting views; in a certain respect they are indeed clear and striking. He assigns to music a quite special place among the arts, and to art itself a quite special value in human life. His philosophy has a fundamental ground-note which may be expressed as follows:

Life is a sorry business, and through thinking I try to make it bearable. Pervading everything in the world is a blind, unconscious Will. It shapes the stone and then the plant—but always, in all its manifestations, with a restless yearning for something higher. The savage feels this less than does the genius, who experiences the painful cravings of the Will in the highest, most intense, degree.

Besides the activity of the Will—Schopenhauer continues—man has the faculty of forming mental images. These are like a fata morgana, like pictures in the mist, like the spray thrown up by the waves of the Will. The Will surges up to shape these illusory pictures. When in this way man perceives the working of the Will, he is less than ever satisfied; but a release from the blind driving-force of the Will comes to us through art. Art is something through which man can escape from the restless craving of the Will. How does this happen?

When man creates a work of art, it springs from his image-forming faculty; but genuine art, Schopenhauer insists, is not merely a copy of external reality. A statue of Zeus, for example, is not produced by copying; the sculptor draws for his model on the characteristics of many men, and so he creates the archetypal image, which in nature is distributed among numerous separate individuals.

So the artist surpasses nature. He extracts her archetypal essence, and this is what the true artist renders. By penetrating into the creative depths of nature, he creates something real and achieves a certain release for himself.

So it is with all the arts except music. All the other arts have to work through images and produce only pictures of the Will. But musical sound is a direct expression of the Will itself. The composer listens to the pulse-beat of the Will, and renders it in the sequence of musical sounds. Music is thus intimately related to the working of the Will in nature, to “things in themselves”; it penetrates into the elemental archetypal being of the cosmos and reflects the feeling of it; that is why music is so deeply satisfying.

Schopenhauer was no occultist, but in these matters he had an instinctive apprehension of the truth.

Why does music speak so intimately to the heart, and so widely, and why is its influence so powerful, even in early childhood? For answers to these questions we must turn to the realm where the true models for music are to be found.

When a composer is at work, he has nothing to copy from; he has to draw his music from out of his own soul. Whence he derives it we shall find out if we turn our attention to the worlds which are not perceptible to the ordinary senses.

Human beings are so made that it is possible for them to release in themselves faculties which are normally asleep; in the same way that someone born blind may be given sight by an operation, so can a man's inner eyes be opened, enabling him to gain knowledge of higher worlds. When a man develops these slumbering faculties through concentration, meditation and so on, he advances step by step. First of all he experiences a special configuration of his dream life. His dreams take on a much more orderly character; on waking, he feels as though he were rising from out of the waves of an ocean in which he had been submerged, a world of flowing light and colour. He knows that he has experienced something; that he has seen an ocean of which he had no previous knowledge. Increasingly his dream-experiences gain in clarity. He remembers that in this world of light and colour there were things and beings which differed from anything physical in being permeable, so that one can pass right through them without meeting any resistance. He comes to know beings whose element, whose bodies, the colours are. Gradually he extends his consciousness over this world, and on waking he remembers that he has been active within it.

The next step occurs when he—as it were—carries this world back with him into waking life. Then he sees the astral bodies of other men and of much else, and he experiences a world which is much more real than the physical one—a world which in relation to the physical world appears as a densification, a crystallisation, from out of the astral world.

Now it is also possible to transform into a conscious condition the unconscious state of dreamless sleep. The disciple who attains to this stage learns to extend his consciousness over those parts of the night which are not filled with dreams, but are normally spent in complete unconsciousness. He then finds himself conscious in a world of which previously he knew nothing, a world which is not intrinsically one of light and colour; it first announces itself as a world of musical sound. The disciple acquires the capacity to hear spiritually; he hears sequences and combinations of sounds which are not audible to the physical ear.

This world is called the devachanic world (Deva=spirit, chan=home). One must not think that when a man enters this world and hears its tones resounding, he loses the world of light and colours. The world of tones is shot through with light and colours, but they belong to the astral world. The essential element of the devachanic world is the endlessly flowing and changing ocean of musical tones. When continuous consciousness extends to this world, its tones can be brought over, and it is then possible to hear also the ground-tones of the physical world. For every physical thing has its ground-note in the devachanic world, and in every countenance devachanic ground-notes are figured forth. It was on this account that Paracelsus said: “The kingdoms of nature are the letters of the alphabet, and Man is the word formed from them.”

Whenever anyone falls asleep, his astral body goes out from his physical body; his soul then lives in the devachanic world. Its harmonies make an impression on his soul; they vibrate through it in waves of living sound, so that every morning he wakes from the music of the spheres, and out of this realm of harmony he passes into the everyday world. Just as the human soul has a sojourn in Devachan between incarnations, so we can say that during the night the soul rejoices in flowing tones of music: they are the very element out of which it is itself woven and they are its true home.

The composer translates into physical sounds the rhythms and harmonies which at night imprint themselves on his astral body. Unconsciously he takes his model from the spiritual world. He has in himself the harmonies which he translates into physical terms. That is the secret connection between the music which resounds in the physical world and the hearing of spiritual music during the night. But the relation of physical music to this spiritual music is like that of a shadow to the object which casts it. So the music of instruments and voices in the physical world is like a shadow, a true shadow, of the far higher music of Devachan. The primal image, the archetype, of music is in Devachan; and having understood this, we can now examine the effect of music on human beings.

Man has his physical body, and an etheric model for it, the ether-body. Connected with his ether-body is the sentient body, which is a step towards the astral. Inwardly bound up with him, as though membered into him, is the Sentient Soul. Just as a sword and its scabbard form a single whole, so do the Sentient Soul and the sentient body. Man has also the Intellectual Soul, and as a still higher member the Spiritual Soul, which is linked with the Spirit-self, or Manas. In completely dreamless sleep the higher members, and so also the Sentient Soul, are in the devachanic world. This is not like living in the physical realm, where everything we see and hear is outside ourselves. The beings of Devachan interpenetrate us, and we are within everything that exists there. In occult schools, accordingly, this devachanic-astral realm is called the world of interpenetrability. Man is played through by its music.

When he returns from this devachanic world, his Sentient Soul, his Intellectual Soul and his Spiritual Soul are permeated with its rhythms; he carries them down into his denser bodies. He is thus able to work from out of his Intellectual Soul and his Sentient Soul on to his ether-body, and to carry the rhythms into it. As a seal stamps itself on the wax, so the astral body imprints the devachanic rhythms on the ether-body, until the ether-body vibrates in harmony with them. Ether-body and astral body bear witness in their own being to the spiritual tones and rhythms. The ether-body is lower than the astral body, but in activity it is superior.

From out of his Ego man works on his bodies in so far as he transmutes the astral body into Manas, the ether-body into Buddhi, the physical body into Atma. Since the astral body is the most tenuous, the transmutation of it calls for the least strength. Man can work on his astral body with forces drawn from the astral world. But to work on his etheric body he has to call on forces from the devachanic world, and for working on his physical body he needs forces from the higher devachanic world. During the night he draws from the world of flowing tones the strength to carry them over into his sentient body and his etheric body. Although on waking in the morning he is not conscious of having absorbed this music of the night, yet on listening to music he has an inkling that these impressions of the spiritual world are within him.

When a man listens to music, the seer can observe how the rhythms and colours flow into and lay hold of the firmer substance of the ether-body, causing it to vibrate in tune with them, and from the harmonious response of the ether-body comes the pleasure that is felt. The more strongly the astral body resounds, the more strongly do its tones echo in the ether-body, overcoming the ether-body's own natural rhythms, and this gives feelings of pleasure both to a listener and to a composer. In certain cases the harmonies of the astral body penetrate to some extent into the sentient body, and a conflict then arises between the sentient body and the ether-body. If the tones set up in the sentient body are so strong that they master the tones of the ether-body, the result is cheerful music in a major key. A minor key indicates that the ether-body has prevailed over the sentient body; and the painful feeling that ensues gives rise to the most serious melodies.

So, when someone lives in the experience of music, he is living in the image of his spiritual home. It naturally elevates the soul to feel this intimate relationship to its primal ground, and that is why the simplest souls are so receptive to music. A man then feels himself truly at home, and whenever he is lifted up through music he says to himself: “Yes, you come from other worlds, and in music you can experience your native place.” It was an intuitive knowledge of this that led Schopenhauer to assign to music a central place among the arts, and to say that the composer discerns with his spiritual ear the pulse-beat of the Will.

In music, man feels the echo of the inmost life of things, a life related to his own. Because feelings are the most inward part of the soul, and because they are related to the spiritual world and are indwelt by musical sound—that is why man, when he listens to music, lives in the pleasure of feeling himself in harmony with its tones, and in touch with the true home of his spirit.

How are we to conceive of the astral world? The three different worlds of which occultism speaks are as follows:—

1. The physical world.
2. The astral world (Purgatory)
3. The spiritual world, or Devachan in Sanscrit terminology (The Christian Heaven)

There are yet other worlds above and beyond these three but they will not concern us in these lectures. They are, moreover, beyond all human conception. Even the highest Initiates can have but a faint presentiment of them. We will concern ourselves here with planetary evolution within the confines of our solar system.

The physical world encloses us in the narrow span of material existence between birth and death. Between two incarnations we live and move in the astral and devachanic worlds. The kernel of man's being is immutable, reincarnating perpetually but not eternally. The rhythm of incarnation and reincarnation had a beginning and will have an end. Man comes from other-where and passes other-where.

The astral world is not a place but a state, a condition of existence. It surrounds us and we are immersed in it while we live on Earth. We live in it as beings born blind who guide themselves by touch. If sight is opened up for them by operation they see for the first time the forms and colours with which they have always been surrounded.

Thus does the astral world open up to clairvoyant sight. It is another state of consciousness. In Goethe's scientific works there is a wonderful passage on the essence of the light as the language of Nature:

“It is useless to attempt to express the nature of a thing abstractedly. Effects we can perceive, and a complete history of those effects would, in fact, sufficiently define the nature of the thing itself. We should try in vain to describe a man's character, but let his acts be collected and an idea of the character will be presented to us.

“The colours are acts of light—its active and passive modifications: thus considered, we may expect from them some explanation respecting light itself. Colours and light, it is true, stand in the most intimate relation to each other, but we should think of both as belonging to Nature as a whole, for it is Nature as a whole which manifests itself by their means in an especial manner to the sense of sight.

“The completeness of Nature displays itself to another sense in a similar way. Let the eye be closed, let the sense of hearing be excited, and from the lightest breath to the wildest din, from the simplest sound to the highest harmony, from the most vehement and impassioned cry to the gentlest word of reason, still it is Nature that speaks and manifests her presence, her power, her pervading life and the vastness of her relations; so that a blind man to whom the infinite visible is denied, can still comprehend an infinite vitality by means of another organ.

“And thus as we descend the scale of being, Nature speaks to the senses—to known, misunderstood, and unknown senses: so speaks she with herself and to us in a thousand modes. To the attentive observer who is nowhere dead nor silent, she has even a secret agent in inflexible matter, in a metal, the smallest portions of which tell us what is passing in the entire mass.” [Theory of Colours. Preface.]

Let us endeavour to form some conception of the astral world. We must accustom ourselves to quite a different mode of vision. To begin with, everything is confused and chaotic.

The first thing to realise is that in the astral world, everything that exists is revealed as it were in a mirror, inversed. In the astral light the cipher 365 must be read backwards: 563. If an event unfolds before us, it is perceived in inverse sequence. In the astral world the cause comes after the effect, whereas on Earth, the effect follows the cause. In the astral world, the aim appears as the cause—proving that the aim and the cause are identical, acting in an inverse sense according to the sphere of life in which we are functioning. The teleological problem which no metaphysician has been able to solve by dint of abstract thought is thus solved by clairvoyance.

Another result of this inverse unraveling of things in the astral world is that it teaches man to know himself. Feelings and passions are expressed by plant and animal forms. When man begins to behold his passions in the astral world he sees them as animal forms. These forms proceed from himself, but he sees them as if they were assailing him. This is because his own being is objectivised—otherwise he could not behold himself. Thus it is only in the astral world that man learns true self knowledge in contemplating the images of his passions in the animal forms which hurl, themselves upon him. A feeling of hatred entertained against another being appears as an attacking demon.

This astral self-knowledge occurs in an abnormal way in those who are troubled with Psychical illnesses which consist in constant visions of being pursued by animals and menacing entities. The sufferers are seeing the mirror images of their emotions and desires.

No psychical trouble arises in true initiation, but the premature and sudden flashing-up of the astral world may give rise to insanity. In clairvoyance, man is liberated from his physical body. Hence the dangers that may threaten the mind and brain of one who attempts this kind of training without being absolutely balanced.

The Rosicrucian initiation involved a discipline which was directed to making man objective to himself, to producing, as it were, an objective self. We must begin by seeing ourselves objectively. This outer personification of the self makes it possible for the astral body to go forth from the physical body.

What happens at the moment of death? After death, the etheric body, the astral body and the Ego of man have left the physical body. The corpse alone remains in the physical world. A short time after death the etheric and astral bodies unite. The etheric body imprints in the astral body the memory of the life just passed; then the etheric body slowly dissolves and the astral body passes alone into the astral world.

The astral body then contains all the desires generated by life and, being bereft of the physical body, has no means of satisfying them. This gives rise to a sensation of devouring thirst—the basis of the imagination of the punishment of Tantalus in Greek Mythology. There is also the impression of being immersed in fire—Gehenna or Purgatory. The idea of the fire of Purgatory which is laughed at by materialists is a true expression of the subjective state of man after death. By contrast, unsatisfied thirst for action produces the sensation of cold in the soul. It is this cold—born of action unrealised on Earth—that is said to be sensed by the spirits in mediumistic séances. The soul living in the astral body must learn to break free from the forces of the physical organs and acquire a new organism for existence in the astral world.

The soul now begins to live through the past life in backward order, beginning at death and going back to birth. Not until the life has been lived through in this purifying fire to the point of birth is the soul ready to pass into the spiritual world—into Devachan. Such is the import of Christ's words to His disciples: “Verily, verily I say unto you, unless ye become as little children, ye cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

Man is impelled by desire when he is descending to earthly incarnation. Not for nothing is desire for the Earth born in man. The end and aim is that he shall learn.

We learn through all our experiences and they enrich our store of knowledge. But in order that man may learn on the Earth, he must be allured by, [or] involved in enjoyment.

When the soul is experiencing the past life in the astral world after death, in backward order, there must be abnegation of enjoyment, while the essence of the experience itself is retained. The passage through the astral world is thus a purification whereby the soul learns to forego all taste for physical pleasures.

Such is the purification of the Hindu Kamaloca, of the ‘consuming fire.’ Man must grow accustomed to existence without a physical body. Death gives rise, at first, to the impression of an immeasurable void.

In cases of violent death and of suicide, the impressions of emptiness, thirst and burning are much more terrible. An astral body that is not prepared for existence outside the physical body, separates with great travail, whereas in natural death the detachment of the matured astral body takes place easily and smoothly. In the case of violent death that is not caused by the will of man, the process of separation is less distressing than in the case of suicide.

During life itself a kind of spiritual death may occur, caused by a premature separation of the Spirit from the body. The astral world is confused with the physical world. Nietzsche is an example of this. In his book Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche has all-unconsciously transferred the astral into the physical world. The result is a confusion and chaos of ideas, culminating in error, insanity and death.

The dim, dreamy life of many mediums is an analogous phenomenon. The medium invariably loses his orientation between these different worlds and is unable to distinguish the true from the false.

A lie in the physical world becomes an agent of destruction in the astral world. A lie is a murder in the astral world. This phenomenon is the origin of black magic. The earthly commandment, Thou shalt not kill, may therefore be translated into Thou shalt not lie, in reference to the astral world. The lie is nothing but a word, an illusion. It may do untold harm, but nothing is actually destroyed. In the astral world, every feeling, every idea is a visible form, a living force. The astral lie brings about an impact between the false and true forms, resulting in death.

The white magician would impart to other souls the spiritual life he bears within him. The black magician has the urge to kill, to create a void around him in the astral world because this void affords him a field in which his egoistic desires may disport themselves. He needs the power which he acquires by taking the vital force of everything that lives, that is to say, by killing it.

That is why the first sentence on the tables of black magic is: Life must be conquered. For the same reason, in certain schools of black magic the followers are taught the horrible and diabolical practice of gashing living animals with a knife at the precise part of the body which will generate this or that force in the wielder of the knife. From the purely external aspect, there are certain points in common between black magic and vivisection. On account of its materialism, modern science has need of vivisection. The anti-vivisection movements are inspired by deeply moral motives. But it will not be possible to abolish vivisection in science until clairvoyance has been restored to medicine. It is only because clairvoyance has been lost that medicine has had to resort to vivisection. When man has regained conscious access to the astral world, clairvoyance will enable doctors to enter spiritually into the inner conditions of diseased organs and vivisection will be abandoned as worthless.

Knowledge of life in the astral world leads us to a conclusion of fundamental importance, namely that the physical world is the product of the astral world.

The epidemics which raged notably in the Middle Ages are one example among thousands of the relation of human sins to astral events, as well as of the repercussion in the astral world of sins committed in earthly life. Leprosy was the result of the terror caused by the invasions of the Huns and hordes of Asiatic peoples. The Mongolians, the descendants of the Atlanteans, bore within them the germs of degeneracy. This contact with the European populace produced, in the first instance, the moral malady of fear in the astral world; the substance of the astral body decomposed and this field of astral decomposition became a field for the development of bacteria, giving rise, on Earth, to diseases such as leprosy.

All that we throw out of ourselves into the astral world at one time will reappear in times to come, on the physical plane. What we sow in the astral world we reap on Earth in future times. We are reaping today the fruits of the narrow, materialistic thoughts strewn by our ancestors in the astral world.

This will make us realise how essential it is to nourish ourselves with occult truths. If science would accept the truths of occultism—merely as hypotheses to begin with—the very world would change. Materialism has cast man into such depths that a mighty concentration of forces is necessary to raise him again. He is subject to illnesses of the nervous system which are veritable epidemics of the life of the soul.

What on the Earth we call feeling comes back again to Earth in the form of actuality, event, fact. The nerve-storms that exhaust man have their origin in the astral world.

It is for this reason that the Occult Brotherhoods decided to demonstrate and reveal the hidden truths. For humanity is passing through a crisis and must be helped to regain health and equilibrium. Only by virtue of spirituality can this health and equilibrium be restored.

Anyone who takes the time to study the four documents about the event in Palestine will soon discover the difference between the first three gospels and the fourth, the Gospel of John. In the first three gospels, the external events are brought closer to people in their minds; in the Gospel of John, more attention is paid to feelings. An infinite inwardness inspired the author, a compassion and empathy for what he felt towards Christ Jesus is expressed here. The personality of the author felt most intensely what took place in Palestine.

This feeling of the author was also complicit in the assertion that, from the critical point of view of a materialistic science, this gospel could be said to be the least truthfully rendered. It was therefore not understood as a historical fact, but as a powerful poem full of deep poetry, as a hymn to Christ Jesus, this powerful, towering personality. But also the spirit of the age in the sense of materialistic thinking contributed to making the first three synoptic Gospels appear closer and more natural to the human mind and feeling of today. The Gospel of John does not fit in well with this, since its Christ cannot be compared with any personality.

This is more readily possible with the first three, and how well our time has profited from the fact that the personality of Christ Jesus as a man among men could be presented as equal to others, like Socrates, Plato and other great men. The “simple man of Nazareth,” how our time likes this saying and how it uses it to try to lower the Christ personality to the human level! This judgment of taste is based on the suggestion of critical science.

In contrast to this is theosophy or spiritual science; it wants to be nothing more than the instrument for understanding these religious documents. Theosophy is completely without preconditions. Today, science does not take the same position as it did 300 years ago, when the teachings of Aristotle applied, and no one looked at nature! [Then] came the great Kepler, and humanity learned to see! On the one side were now the Aristotelians, on the other the unconditional naturalists, and indicative is the statement of the Aristotle student in an argument about the exits of the nerve cords, he believed more in Aristotle than in nature! At that time they had not yet developed the intuitive perception of what lies behind material things, which spiritual science is now trying to emphasize again, not with physical instruments but through spiritual faculties. Theosophy takes the path of first 'looking' and then studying the old records, and it always turns out that both give the same result: what has been seen is proved by the books!

This view will become more and more accepted, however much science may resist it. So we will also examine without prejudice what the matter is with the Gospel of John. It is something like Euclid's geometry; the student listens to the teaching, and through realization it finally becomes his spiritual property and complete fact. In this way, too, we will see how the Gospel of John agrees with what spiritual science has to say about it.

What is the theosophical view of man? We see how man possesses a fourfold nature: first, the physical body; then the etheric body with the principle of growth and reproduction, of fighting against decay. Further, the astral or desire body, the seat of sensations and feelings. When we see the person before us, we recognize that he consists of a sum of pleasure and suffering, of joy and pain. But if we go deeper, we realize that there is a name that is unique in the designation of man. This is the name “I”. Anyone can call an object by the same name, but the name “I” can only be spoken by each person when they mean their innermost being, their self, their individuality. In this sense, the “I” cannot reach our ears from the outside.

So how does the spiritual researcher view the world of matter? Everything physical has its origin in the spiritual. All matter is born of spirit, is condensed spirit, just as ice is condensed water. It is the same with the spiritual realm. It is in our midst. Everything is only the external expression of the spiritual. The physical human being is born out of the spirit. The ego is the divine spark that has flowed out of the spiritual ocean like a drop into man.

Thus we see how, starting from the physical body, the other forms become ever more refined and ethereal. We see how the spirit underlies everything. This spirit, which walks through the world as an infinite being, out of which the physical is born. This spirit, underlying all existence, is described by Christian science as the Logos or the Word, the divine creative Word. Just as certain figures appear on a pure, shiny brass plate when dust particles are stroked with a violin bow, so too can the Logos be described as the creator of everything in the world of phenomena. If we go back to primeval times, we will find the Logos working in all physical bodies, first in the etheric body, then in the astral body, and we see how human beings will emerge from this light. It is only through light that human beings are possible; without light there is no knowledge, no spiritual striving. Only the divine spirit brings about the world realm.

The youngest child of the divine spirit is the “I” in man. This “I” is at first unconscious of its origin, of its divine essence. In the beginning we do not recognize divine wisdom. Christian wisdom therefore refers to it as darkness. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God was the Word. And the Word was the light of men, shining in the darkness, but the darkness comprehended it not.

This light, which underlies all bodies, is referred to as the life of the Logos. In the beginning, there was the Logos, from which everything came into being; the life of the Logos becomes light and the light shines in the unconscious human nature.

We have seen how the fourfold human nature arises from direct contemplation of the spiritual world. The author of the Gospel of John was an awakened person, a great initiate who is never referred to as anything other than “the disciple whom the Lord loved” (John 21:20). In him, the entire soul content of Christ continued to work; the entire depth of Christ's appearance was reflected in this disciple and allowed him to look deeply into the spiritual world. He recognized what was hidden behind the personality of Christ, that the highest being that had ever walked on earth was embodied in Jesus of Nazareth.

Until Christ came, man was unconscious of his divinity. Only Christ gave him the sense of “his fulness...” (John 1:16). Everything in the Gospel of John is written from the knowledge of the deepest secrets, for example, the eleventh chapter, the resurrection of Lazarus. Everyone senses that something profound underlies this process. After this act had happened, it was said: “This man does great signs.” (John 11:47) Something happened that made people tremble before the power of Jesus Christ's personality. This is an act of initiation, the first initiation that Christ performed, which is clear from the words: “The disease is not unto death, but that God may be made visible.” (John 11:4) He wanted to show that He is the life and the light, and this light should also illuminate Lazarus and lead him to awakening, since he was a friend of the Master. This was to be shown in the Lazarus process.

There have always been people in whom the great event arises, in whom the world of light becomes reality; the world of the spirit approaches them, their spiritual ear and eye is unlocked and opened to spiritual things. The method of initiation is shown in the ancient mysteries. They distinguish three degrees. The first degree is that of sense-free thinking. The senses must be eliminated and only objective observation of things may take place. Second degree: purification or cleansing. The astral experiences of feeling and sensation are transformed; with new organs one can look into the astral world: spiritual ears and eyes.

The third degree is that of enlightenment. When the initiate returns to the physical world after three and a half days, he always has the spiritual world before his eyes, he is born anew. During the three days, the etheric and astral bodies were driven out of the physical body and afterwards the etheric body felt this imprint of the higher worlds throughout the rest of its life.

The first initiation by Christ was the resurrection of Lazarus. Through Christ a new kind of initiation had been introduced by impressing the whole spiritual truth of Christ upon the one being initiated. From this it can be seen how this event of the resurrection of Lazarus has a much deeper meaning than the usual view. It is only in this sense that Goethe's words can be applied: “For as long as you do not have this dying and becoming, you are only a dull guest on the dark earth!”

Deep silence had to prevail about what happened in the sacred mysteries. The betrayal of the mysteries' processes resulted in death. This may also explain the death of Socrates. Aeschylus could only save himself from death by fleeing to the temple. This was done because at that time humanity was not considered ready for initiation. Christ publicly performed the initiation out of infinite compassion for humanity. Thus, what has become known as the theosophical view has also been taken out of the mysteries.

It is only a question of how these initiation abilities are acquired and what the path to them is. In the Christian method of initiation, man must pass through seven stages, as shown in the following consideration.

First: the plant takes root in the dead mineral, in the mineral kingdom; the plant could not be as it is today if the mineral kingdom had not provided the material for its construction. It will therefore bow down in gratitude to the mineral, without which it could not exist. In the same way, the animal will bow down to the plant from which it gets the nourishment for its own development. It is the same with humans. They must bow down humbly to the natural kingdoms below them, for they are the product of them. Those who have reached a higher level of development must always remember that they were once at every lower level. Thus they will be imbued with universal humility, and then one day the image will arise before them that John presented in the 13th chapter as Christ washing the disciples' feet: “The servant is not greater than the master” (John 13:16).

The second step is that of purification and cleansing. He grasps everything with the mind and distinguishes between reality and illusion. He learns to experience what constitutes a person's perception in reality; one learns to evaluate all facts of experience from the right point of view. Come what may, always stand upright in life. Image of the scourged Jesus.

In the third stage, the person being initiated also learns to control their feelings; they learn the ability to persevere even when what is most sacred and sublime to them is met with ridicule and scorn. Crowning of Thorns. Image of the Crowned Christ.

Fourth stage: the crucified Christ. One feels one's own body as something alien, something external. He becomes strong in spirit through this experience; he feels the crucified Christ as an actual experience. Here also the Simon Peter test approaches him, also the blood test.

The fifth stage is mystical death. Everything around him is absorbed, a lethargic state sets in, a complete calm. An equanimity of his mental state towards all external appearances.

The sixth stage is referred to as the entombment; he feels at one with the earth, he is reborn in spirit.

The seventh stage cannot be explained with physical senses, it is the union with the divine, a purely spiritual process, the ascension.

We see how the entire Christ event takes place within the initiate, how he inwardly passes through all the phases of this event in reality. The whole outer Christ event with all its historical details is taken up inwardly. We no longer need any outer proof, just as it happens to us in the Damascus event of Paul, who had taken up the spiritual Christ within himself.

The eyes are formed by the light for the light; without light there is no eye, and without the historical Christ there can be no inner experience of Christ. Thus the Christ event is experienced, but there are initiates of different degrees. Different images arise for the initiates, depending on their point of view. The apostles were also such initiates. The higher their spiritual level, the deeper they could penetrate into the mysteries of the Christ event.

Thus we see John, the apostle whom the Lord loved, as an initiate who had felt Christ most deeply. Goethe says: “If the eye were not sun-like, the sun could never behold it. If there were not in us the power of God himself, how could we be enraptured by the Divine!” One should not only read the Gospel of John, but really experience it, then this Christ event will also shine for us.

The spiritual content of the gospel should become more and more accessible to people through the theosophical movement in our time. And this is all the more necessary as the biblical records, especially in our time, are beginning to be more and more fragmented and frayed by historical-scientific research, which is a good thing in and of itself. Modern man has lost sight of spiritual realities.

The external historical research in our days has come to the conclusion that the three synoptic gospels must be understood in a certain way as historical events. In view of the contradictions present in them, this research seeks to make it credible that they came about because these gospels were not written by eyewitnesses, but that the stories were passed from mouth to mouth and only later written down. According to one assumption, the Synoptics should come from an Aramaic source and be oral messages about the events in Palestine. The one who wrote the Gospel of John should not want to give a historical event, but only a confession presented in external images.

But the gospels will be lost to humanity if criticism continues on this path. Only through spiritual research can we find the true facts. This research does not ask for some fantastic Aramaic source, but for the real sources from which the gospels emerged.

Only by examining these can we achieve a deeper understanding. We must turn not to any external documents, but to the mysteries of the past if we are to understand the Gospels. In these mysteries there was something that could be called an initiation ceremony. The person's need for development was known to the Hierophant, and the methods used to lead him into the spiritual world were not as well known and described in ancient times as they are in our days. People were at a different level of development then, and therefore needed different methods than the ones we use. Careful instruction preceded every initiation for years. The content of the instruction given in the Egyptian and Pythagorean places of initiation was somewhat similar to what we today call

The first degree, which followed the preparation, was called “imagination” or “knowledge”. The second degree was called “enlightenment” or “inspiration” and the third “completion through ‘intuition’ or ‘direct spiritual vision’.

These three degrees were not intimate inner experiences as in later times, but purely external actions in which the inner development was reflected. The disciple was prepared by certain sensual models, great symbolic figures that were shown to him in the mystery temples and that were supposed to have a certain magical effect on him. He was also to experience certain dramatic situations and undergo certain physical trials that were intended to awaken and release forces that were still dormant in his soul. These symbolic figures and dramatic situations were intended to make him aware of all the temptations that a person can encounter in the world and show him how far a person can fall if left to his own devices. To escape this, the soul must free itself from everything that binds it. By observing external, often quite drastic situations, the student should be cleansed of all his “urges, desires and passions.” And through this catharsis or cleansing, all that is noblest in the soul should be drawn from the innermost part of the soul. After that, he was ready to enter the first degree, the world of imagination.

This catharsis was all the more necessary because otherwise the pupil would have been exposed to all the dangers in the new world that was opening up to him. The external world was no longer the same, he could no longer live on the account of his surroundings. He could no longer have the help of all these precepts and generally accepted views that build a society, a family. Horrifying images arose in his soul. If he had not been given some firm principles and supporting thoughts through education, he could have fared very badly. From the depths of his soul, quite objective images of all the instincts and desires that he carried within him arose – not only those of which he was aware, but also others that he did not even know. Their effect could make him worse than before if he had not first undergone a process of purification that penetrated to the very core of his soul, a catharsis. In this way, the disciple was slowly led through a number of external means to the second and then to the third degree.

What interests us most is the last degree of initiation, which was the same in the most diverse mysteries. Let us now first look back at the Egyptian mysteries. There we find that the disciple was placed in a lethargic state for a period of three and a half days, during which time he neither saw nor heard with his external senses. He lay as if dead in his coffin or on a cross. During ordinary sleep, as we know, the etheric body remains in the physical body, while the astral body and the ego are drawn out. But in the cataleptic state, the etheric body unites with the other two, and the physical body is left alone. So it was a literal killing of the father principle and a union with the mother principle. This enabled the disciple to have experiences in the spiritual world that underlies the physical, that is, the etheric world, and then, based on his own experience, he could speak of it as its messenger.

But the etheric body was not allowed to move too far away from the physical body, because then it could happen that it could not be recalled at all. The hierophant had to watch over this and recall the disciple at the right time. The disciple then returned to the world with the memory of everything he had experienced, and was then able to put into words what he had seen and heard, and become a witness of the spiritual world. This happened during the Egyptian initiation.

The last act of the initiation took place in a different way in the countries that spread like a broad belt from the Persian Gulf, the Black and Caspian Sea to the west to France and Great Britain. Here it was the Zoroaster religion that left its mark on the peoples. After the disciple had undergone the first two degrees in the Druid or Drotten mysteries, for example, and had been instructed in the mysteries, he was finally introduced to the actual world of ethereal processes, to the spiritual world that surrounds us. The events that are reflected in the cosmos could have a direct effect on him there. Meanwhile, everything that had moved in him before was silenced and poured out into the whole cosmos. [While in the Egyptian initiation the disciple completely stepped out of the context of the outer world and stepped completely into his soul, descended to Persephonaia, the disciple of the Drotten Mysteries was moved up into the cosmic worlds and could pour out his being up to the twelvefold, up to the Zodiac. He knew that the things spoke differently, depending on whether this or that constellation was above the others. Herein lay the difference with the Egyptian initiation. This path was adapted to the different constitution of the people.]

Destined for different peoples, these paths - both the outer and the inner one - led to the same result. In the Christ, they were to unite, flow together into a single path and form the unified Christian initiation. Therefore, anyone who reads the Gospel correctly will find the most important mysteries in it. The Christ Himself had initiated Lazarus and brought him the last act of the Egyptian initiation drama, but He also had him live through the most important part of the Nordic initiation. This can be seen from a passage in the Gospel of John, where something is related that the evangelist could not have seen with his physical eyes, and that only someone who had been initiated by the Christ Himself could have related. “The next day,“ it says, ‘John the Baptist and two of his disciples were standing there with him, and he saw Jesus coming and said, ’Behold the Lamb of God,' and the” - others - “two disciples heard him speak and followed Jesus. Then Jesus turned around... ‘and so on, whereupon the evangelist adds: ’And it was in the tenth hour.”

How should we understand this? Spiritual research is much more realistic than historical research, which, for example, interprets this passage to mean that the evangelist was standing nearby and observed all this. But that is not correct. The words “It was the tenth hour” indicate that the author of the Gospel of John was clairvoyant, so that the positions of the constellations affected him. He was far away, but a certain constellation made it possible for him to turn his clairvoyant gaze to this event. It is impossible to explain this addition in any other way - “It was the tenth hour. Only at this hour was a certain constellation such that he could see this clairvoyantly.

There is nothing in the Gospels that is not based, and the more closely you examine them, the clearer they become. And if we could imbibe the general sense of the incredible depth of the Gospels, we would have gained a great deal.

Now, however, Lazarus and the man who wrote the Gospel of John are the same person. The fact that he becomes clairvoyant through the influence of the constellations indicates that he has undergone the Nordic initiation, and by being raised from the dead he is also an Egyptian initiate. Partly because of this double initiation, and partly because Jesus himself had initiated him, his gospel has such a particularly great significance. The evangelists have all described in their own special way the initiation drama as it takes place in the various temples. Through preparatory scenes and symbolic images, which were different in the various temples, the disciples were introduced to the spiritual world.

But there was something else taught as well. What was depicted in the mysteries, it was taught, should become a reality in the outer physical world. The drama of initiation was to be relived by a son of God, and it was by this very fact that he would be recognized. When Ahura-Mazdao descends and incarnates as a human being, he will experience in real life everything that had previously only been enacted inside the temple. When this happens, the Son of God has come to us. The evangelists knew that this fact had occurred with Christ Jesus. They knew that the mysteries enacted inside the temple had become reality through the event in Palestine. That is why they were also able to describe the initiation ceremony. At the same time, they described it as it had actually occurred. For the event in Palestine coincides with the ancient mysteries and reflects them. It is here, in the ancient mysteries of the past – and not in some Aramaic documents – that we must seek the real source of the Gospel.

The evangelists understood and recognized that once upon a time a man lived on earth whose whole outer life was in everything an image of what was proclaimed in the temples, and that is why they were able to write about it at the same time as they described the ancient methods of initiation.

Writing a biography in the same sense as in modern times was not the point here. You can never find the essence of a person's life in letters and notes that the people concerned have carelessly left behind and that are the main things people look for nowadays. That is not how the story of Jesus was written in those days. The evangelists followed a better method. For them, the essential thing was the events of his life that corresponded to the initiatory drama, and that he, as an historical personality, had really lived through this. For them, he was the greatest of the initiates because he had been awakened to life by virtue of his own divine self, not by the hierophant in an underground temple.

All this was grasped by the three first evangelists and described in connection with their various initiations. Lazarus, who had been initiated by the Christ Jesus himself, had experienced everything as a spiritual eyewitness, and therefore he, who knew best the innermost causes of the great drama, could give the most intimate descriptions of it. He did not need Egyptian documents; the document he followed was given to him by the Christ Jesus himself. We find, therefore, that the Gospels give us, on the one hand, historical reality and, on the other, pictures of the initiation dramas of the mysteries.

When Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, he was actually performing an initiation ceremony before [all] the people, and in this fact we have the reason for the fierce persecution by the Jewish authorities. Otherwise it is impossible to understand why they wanted to kill him precisely because he had raised a man who was thought to be dead, yes, why they even wanted to kill the one who had been raised. “This man does many signs,” they said among themselves, “we cannot live with him.” Conservative as they were with regard to their old teaching, they wanted to keep the secrets of the mysteries.

Until now, only a few had known the way to the spiritual world, but now the secrets of the temple had been brought to light. [Now it should be possible to relive the initiation process. The process should be presented to the whole world. First in an exemplary way through the resurrection of Lazarus, then on the cross.] Outside the temple, the great initiation drama had taken place, and in the sight of the people, the initiate had been called to life; this was clear to all who understood what had happened. In the eyes of the conservatives, it was a betrayal of the mysteries and should be punished by death. It was therefore not surprising that the priests said that they could not live with this man.

[One might object: If the initiation process involves dangers, was it allowed to be published? As it had happened, yes. — If it had only been described up to the Lazarus event, it would have been dangerous; but after the twelfth chapter comes the account of what had to happen so that the public would not be endangered.

If we understand the whole Gospel of John, we find in it what made it possible to hint at the initiation process.

What we are about to consider now is completely outside the scope of anthroposophical considerations. It is only indirectly related to it, and is intended to be a purely philosophical consideration. The direct connection is that it is often claimed that anthroposophical spiritual science cannot stand up in the forum of science, that it appears like pure dilettantism that a serious philosopher should not engage with. It will now be shown that it is not anthroposophy that is amateurish, but philosophy.

At present, philosophy is a wholly unsuitable instrument for elevating oneself to anthroposophy. Let us first orient ourselves in philosophy. Let us see how philosophy has developed historically. Then we want to subject the hereditary evil to a certain consideration. We want to show how philosophy today suffers from the fact that at a certain time all philosophical thinking became entangled in a spider's web, and is therefore incapable of gaining a broader perspective in relation to reality.

We must face the fact that all the history of philosophy begins with Thales. In more recent times, attempts have been made to extend philosophy backwards, that is, to go beyond Greek philosophy. People speak of Indian and Egyptian philosophy. Those who do not construct an arbitrary concept of philosophy say that an important period did indeed begin with Thales. If we ask what it is that intervenes in human evolution, what was not there before, we must say: it is conceptual thinking. It was not present before. This is characteristically different from everything that was there earlier. In the past, only what the seer had seen was said. In Plato, the gift of prophecy still predominates. The first conceptual thinker, whose system is no longer based on the old gift of prophecy, is Aristotle. In him we have the purely intellectual system. Everything else was preparation. The gift of living and thinking in pure concepts begins to find its most outstanding expression in Aristotle. It is no mere coincidence that Aristotle is called the “father of logic”. To the seer, logic is revealed at the same time as seeing. But to form concepts, one needed not only his logic, but also the fact that in the following period the revelations of Christianity were re-shaped into thought formations with Aristotelian logic.

This Aristotelian thinking spread both to the Arab cultural area in Asia, to Spain and to Western Europe, as well as to the south of Europe, where Christianity was influenced by Aristotelian thinking. Anyone observing the 7th to 9th centuries can see that Christian teachers, like anti-Christian elements, expressed their teachings in Aristotelian form, and this remained so until the 13th century.

We will see in a moment what the focus of Aristotelian thought is. In the middle of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas spread the so-called Thomistic philosophy; it is based on Christian revelation and Aristotelian logic. The Christian teachings were not taught in a strictly adhered form of thought, but it was intended to show that these teachings could also be defended in Aristotelian forms of thought, against the Arabs and their students, such as Averroes, who also thought in these forms of thought. They wanted to show how one could use the correctly understood Aristotle not for Arab teachings, but for Christianity. They wanted to refute the objections of the Arab thinkers; hence the zealous study of Thomas Aquinas. At that time, Aristotle dominated all of science, including, for example, medicine.

Now we have to characterize what the earlier scholasticism had of Aristotle. The thinking at that time was quite different from today's. If you compare it with what was done at that time, you have to say: in terms of content, life was poor then. The tremendous inventions were only made later. The essential thing about that time is the strictly trained thinking. Today people laugh at the strict definitions of scholasticism. But when you compare it to today's arbitrary understanding of all concepts, then you first feel the benefit of that view that there must be an understanding of the concepts. It takes a long time to define the concepts, but then you are working on solid ground.

In order to be able to orient ourselves further, we have to go into a few of Aristotle's concepts. He was a good interpreter for Christianity, even from the point of view of anthroposophy. A few concepts should show how sharply Aristotle thought. Aristotle distinguishes knowledge according to sense and intellect. The senses perceive this rose, this person, this stone. Then the intellect enters. It breaks down into an understanding of matter and form. All things contain matter and form. These two concepts take us a long way. Aristotle sees matter and form in every single natural thing that the senses perceive: consider a wolf. It eats nothing but lambs; then it consists of the same matter as the lambs, but a wolf will never become a lamb. What makes the two different is the form. We have the form of the lamb and the wolf. He identifies the underlying form with the genus lamb and the genus wolf. Aristotle makes a clear distinction between the genus and the generic concept. When we are confronted with a flock of lambs, we form the generic concept. What our concept determines in its form is an objective thing outside us, just as if we were to imagine the prototypes of the forms spreading invisibly throughout the world, spurting out the individual genera into which the indifferent matter is poured. Everything around us is based on the generic; for Aristotle, the material is indifferent.¹

With the scholastics, Albertus Magnus, we find what underlies the external entities. The earlier scholastic distinguishes universals before things, in things and after things. Albertus Magnus says about this: the universals before the thing are the thoughts of the divine entities. There we have the genus. These thoughts have flowed into the things. When man encounters things, he forms the universals according to the thing, which is the conceptual form. In this whole description of the development of thinking, there is only talk of sensible things. He identifies the outer sense with the “sense”. Everything else that is there is a concept to him. The generic concept is not identical to the genus. The whole thing is because people had lost the ancient gift of seeing, so that a philosophy could arise.

An old sage would not have understood at all how to make distinctions in this way, because he would have said: With the gift of prophecy, one can perceive the genus. It was only when the gift of prophecy dried up that the actual science emerged. It was only when man was left to his own devices that the necessity arose to develop a thinking art. Scholasticism arose under the influence of this important principle. In ancient times, the spiritual worlds were still accessible to man. Now the scholastics could refer all the more to Aristotle, because he spoke of the gift of prophecy: Ancient reports tell us that the stars are gods, but the human intellect can no longer make anything out of them. But we have no reason to doubt it.

Scholasticism replaced what was seen with revelation. It placed what was to be taught in the once inspired word. At first, humanity must become accustomed to developing the theory of thought in relation to external things. Where would it end if it were to roam into all possible supersensible things? We want to deny ourselves that; we want to educate ourselves in the things that are around us. So says Thomas Aquinas. When objects come to us, they are given to us for the senses. Then we are compelled to form concepts of them. Behind the things, divine powers rest, which we do not dare approach. We want to educate ourselves from thing to thing. Then, by strictly adhering to the sensual, we finally come to the highest concepts. So we adhered to two things: to the revealed teaching material, which is given in the scriptures, to which thinking does not approach. It has been taken over by the seers. Furthermore, they adhered to what was being worked out in the sensory reality. With this, we only just reach the Bible and Revelation. For a time, the higher world is withdrawn from human thought. But there is no final renunciation of the supersensible worlds. When man has conquered the sensual world, he can get a presentiment of the supersensible worlds. Man can free himself from the physical body and have revelation directly. But first the intellect must be trained. When the human being forms concepts about external things, these concepts depend on the human organization in form, but not in content. In scholastic epistemology, it is never considered that something unrecognized may remain. The objective enters into knowledge; only the form in which concepts are formed depends on the organization of the human mind.

This earlier scholasticism is called realism. It believed in the reality of content. Scholasticism then became nominalistic. People have lost touch with the objective external world. They said: the mind forms concepts; they are not real. The concepts became mere names; they were only abstractions. What is to be achieved with the concept is lost. Therefore, the nominalists had to say to themselves: Sensual reality is spreading before us. We summarize it as our minds will. Nothing real corresponds to our concepts. One must guard the actual revelation against human thinking and renounce all understanding. This view reached its climax in Zuther's saying that human reason is powerless, the deaf, blind, foolish fool who should not presume to approach the teaching material.

This is an important turning point. Luther condemns Aristotle. From this point on, the suggestion that gave birth to Kantianism goes. Kant was a Wolffian until the end of the sixties, like almost all philosophers at the time. Wolff taught: Reason is able to make something out about the supernatural worlds. He distinguishes between rational and empirical science. It is possible to gain a certain amount of human knowledge. The a posteriori knowledge has only relative validity.

[Gaps and deficiencies in the transcript. For a description of Wolff's philosophy, see the lecture of March 14, 1908 in this volume.]

At first, Kant also followed in Wolff's footsteps. Hume disturbed him. Hume developed skepticism. He said that no wall should be built between a priori and a posteriori knowledge. All knowledge is knowledge of habit; there is no rational knowledge. Kant awoke from his dogmatic slumber. But he could not completely go along with it. He said: Hume is right; we gain everything from experience. Only mathematics is an exception; what it says has absolute validity. He therefore advocates two things. First, there are absolutely certain judgments a priori. Second, all knowledge must be gained from experience. But experience is governed by our judgments. We ourselves give laws to experience. Man confronts the world with his organization of thought. All experience is governed by our form of knowledge. Thus Kant linked Hume with Wolff.

Now man is ensnared in this philosophical web. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel are exceptions. Individual natural scientists also follow this path. Helmholtz says: What man has before him is spun out of his organization. What we perceive of the thing is not even an image, but only a sign. The eye makes only perceptions on the surface. Man is completely ensnared in his subjectivity. The thing in itself remains unknown. – It had to be so. Nominalism has lost the spiritual behind the surface. The human interior has been enervated. The inner working becomes purely formal. If man wants to penetrate behind reality, his inner being gives him no answer. The whole of 19th-century philosophical thinking does not find its way out of this. Hartmann, for example, does not go beyond the idea. A simple comparison can clarify this. A seal contains the name Müller. Nothing, not even the smallest material thing, can come from the brass of the seal into the sealing wax. Consequently, nothing objective can come from the seal; the name Müller must form itself out of the sealing wax. The thinker is the sealing wax. Nothing passes from the object to the thinker. And yet the name Müller is in the sealing-wax. Thus we take the content out of the objective world, and yet it is the true content that we take out. If one takes only the material, it is true: nothing passes from the seal to the stamp and vice versa. But as soon as one sees the spirit, the higher principle, which can embrace the objective and the subjective, then the spirit passes in and out into the subjective and the objective. The spirit carries everything over from objectivity into subjectivity. The ego is objective and subjective in itself. Fichte showed that. -²

The entire epistemology of the 19th century resembles a dog chasing its own tail. You end up with: I have created everything. The world is my imagination. Everything has spurted out of my inner being. I also have the right to kill everything.

Kant uses very convoluted terms. Kant says: I have destroyed knowledge to make room for faith. He has limited knowledge and established a practical faith because everything is spun out of the subjective.

Kantianism is the last result of nominalism. Today the time for it has expired. Man must train his thinking again in reality in order to form real concepts; then we can recognize the supersensible truths again. The scholastic attitude is time-bound, the spiritual had to be withdrawn from thinking for a time. Now the revealed teaching material must again become teaching material to be examined. We must again examine everything with reason. It is a light with which one can penetrate everywhere. One can investigate, understand, grasp everything. Reason is the lowest form of clairvoyance, but it is a seeing, hearing, and intelligent power. Thus we extricate ourselves from the net. Philosophy must free itself from this net and allow itself to be fertilized by logic to achieve true thinking.

• 1. See note
• 2. The rest of the lecture was only recorded by the transcriber in fragmentary notes, as the following sentences show.

The legends of the gods and heroes of the Nordic peoples are based on profound occult facts. Even within Europe, there were occult lodges of the white brotherhood in ancient times. From Scotland up to northern Russia. They were called “Trotten Lodges” or “Druid Lodges.” The development of the spiritual life of the ancient peoples was entrusted to these lodges. Druid comes from Drus [...]. The legend that Boniface cut down the oak when he brought Christianity is a beautiful parable for the fact that the old highly religious Druid religion was overcome by Christianity. Six to seven hundred years before the birth of Christ, the old religion began to decline. The last part moved south. The ancient Truscans, from whom the Etruscans later emerged, settled in Italy; further east, another branch moved to ancient Greece. If we take the matter of the northern population as a whole, we find a deep connection in the spiritual realm, between the west and the east.

Let us take a look at Buddhism. This highly spiritual religion hardly found any lasting place in its native country India; it was soon absorbed by Brahmanism; on the other hand, it took root in the peoples descended from the Atlanteans, the Mongols.

The ancient Germans also descend from Atlantis. The similarity of the religions is evident from the names. The Nordic god “Wotan” is equivalent to “Buddha”. The ancient religion comes from Atlantis. It was well aware of the lost continent. The last echoes of the old Druid religion died out under the reign of Queen Elizabeth; the last Druid lodges were abolished.

The old teaching knew two traditions. In the south, the tradition of the Lemurian race that perished in the fire was alive, in the north, the memory of Atlantis that perished in the water. The former was symbolized in the saga by “Muspelheim”, the warm sunny land, and the second by “Nifelheim”, the land of fog. It is also very interesting to trace the relationship between the ancient Egyptians and the Nordic peoples. We can follow it in the religions. Osiris is dismembered by his brother and the pieces scattered, from which the earth then arises. In Egypt you find many Osiris graves, where the pieces of the Osiris body were buried, as it were. In the Book of the Dead, Osiris - the higher self - is addressed directly: “The Osiris and so forth. The task of the priesthood was to awaken the dead Osiris in man.

In the North, we have the giant Ymir. He is slain, and from his parts the earth is created. His hair makes the forests, his bones the rocks, his blood the rivers, and so on, all his limbs are divided. We recognize that this myth has been drawn from the same source as the worship of Osiris.

The Edda is an echo of the immigration of Atlantis. “Edda” and “Veda” are the same word. Thus we recognize the connection between all ancient and old religions.

The entire history of Europe is preserved in the heroic sagas. All the sagas can be traced back to the great Nordic initiate “Sig”, who was initiated for Europe. Siegfried, Sieglinde, Sigurd are all names that point back to him. In terms of depth, the Nordic tradition surpasses even that which comes from India. What strikes us about all the sagas is the prophetic and tragic element that runs through everything. Everything points to what is to come. We see this in the Twilight of the Gods. It was known that the gods they worshipped would not find lasting worship. They said to them: “You are there for the north, but another will come after you who is higher than you.

The story of Siegfried clearly shows what is meant by initiation. He killed the lindworm, bathed in its blood, became invulnerable – all things that symbolize initiation. The initiate is invulnerable – only one spot between the shoulder blades was vulnerable, and that is the spot where Christ carried his cross and thus also made this spot invulnerable. Siegfried had to be replaced by Christ. This is depicted in the Nibelungen. We see the transition of the two currents in the Middle Ages, which finally merged: the old pagan current and the new Christian current. The old pagan current leads directly back to the downfall of Atlantis. It was replaced by the Franks and led over into the Christian current. The Nibelungs come from the Land of the Fogs, the land surrounded by water and fog. The hoard of the Nibelungs is sunk into the Rhine. For the peoples, the Rhine belonged to the great waters that had engulfed Atlantis with the golden city and all its treasures.

Then we see King Arthur's Round Table. It represents the 'White Lodge of ancient paganism'. The contrasts in the Middle Ages become more and more pronounced, in the form of the 'Ghibellines' = Nibelungs - the imperial party - and the 'Wibelungen' = Welfs, the party of the Pope, of Christianity.

What came to Europe from Christianity did not come only from Christian monks, but also from Oriental brotherhoods. The great spiritual brotherhood of the 'White Lodge', the 'Gral Lodge', brought the deepest part of Christianity. Barbarossa wants to get the Grail. He does not reach his goal, but drowns on the way. He was far ahead of his time and therefore could not yet fulfill his task. Now he waits in the Kyffhäuser until the spirit of his people has progressed so far that he can lead them further. Development had not yet reached its low point. There are those who cannot go down as deeply, they have to wait until the others have come through the depths to their point of view, then they can move on with them. So Barbarossa sits and waits. The ravens are to bring him word when the time has come. The ravens are the initiates of the first degree; they are scouts, they bring tidings from the world of the spirit.

The emperor – the warriors – have not found the initiation. Who is suited to seek it? This type is represented by a great, noble, inward-looking mind. The pure fool: Parzival. The Holy Grail did come to the land in the time of Barbarossa, but it was only sensed in dullness. Parzival sees it, but out of ignorance, out of misunderstanding the prohibition of questioning, he misses the question. Now he must go through all the degrees of initiation. He must prove himself as a child of his time, in the worldly knighthood. He goes through doubt: [“Is doubt the birth of hearts?”] Finally, after going through everything, he comes to the Grail. There the entire initiation is symbolically represented. His successor was Lohengrin.

In the history of the Middle Ages, we saw the flourishing of a great cultural movement. Thriving cities emerged, and in them the creative, industrious, but more self-contained bourgeoisie. From Scotland to Novgorod, a circle of flourishing cities emerged. This represents a great step forward in the development of the world. This development of the bourgeoisie corresponds to the female side of man. The masculine seeks its own in the outside world, represented by [gap in the transcript]

The inner being of man is feminine and must be fertilized by the great “White Lodge”. This is presented to us in the Lohengrin saga. The blossoming city-being is represented by Elsa of Brabant. She calls on Lohengrin, the knight of the Holy Grail, for her protection, marries him and loses him again because she asks about his origin.

There is a sacred law among the initiates that one must not ask about their physical origin.

Lohengrin's messenger is the swan. This is the third degree of chelaship, which is designated as follows: They know the name of all things.

Wolfram von Eschenbach, who died in 1225 and to whom we owe the Parzival saga, could neither read nor write. And Jacob Boehme, the poor cobbler, will not have occupied himself with reading books either; but that is no reason why he should not have left us such spiritual truth and wisdom. Walter von der Vogelweide boasted that he was something very special because he could read and write [...]; in the Middle Ages, that was a very rare skill.

All these northern sagas of gods and heroes contain the basis of occultism, which the great initiate Sig proclaimed. “Wotan” underwent four initiations to prepare the fifth sub-race of the fifth root race, which had the task of merging the Greek and Celtic races. The fourth sub-race found its greatness in the south. Here in the north, a corresponding countermeasure was taken. Four stages had to be gone through here first, while high culture was already developing down in the south. From the south came Christianity. In the north, four elementary classes of “Wotan” were gone through so that one would be able to receive Christianity.

“Wotan”, “Wille”, “We” – the trinity.

Creative power, will and we – the power of the mind was developed, the tragic trait that runs through everything.

What did the ancient Germans learn from the Druids? One example: imagine yourself on the moon. There, the lower three kingdoms were not what they are now on Earth. The mineral kingdom had not yet solidified, it was still alive, mobile, best compared to a spinach mass or rather to peat than to rock. There were no stones back then. Life had not yet escaped from it. The same applied to the plant kingdom. The plants of that time could only grow on living things. So living things grew on living things. Now some beings have not achieved the goal that was set on the moon. There are still plants that are unable to sustain their life from dead soil; they can only grow on living things; they are called parasite plants. These include, among others, mistletoe, which can only grow on trees; it is a moon plant. Mistletoe juice is antagonistic to the earth, which is why it is or was used as a poison in medicine.

From the above, we see that on the moon the three kingdoms were not yet completely separated from each other. The mineral kingdom was plant-like, and the plant kingdom was between the plant and animal kingdoms. When certain plants were touched, they produced sounds.

The earth sun is

All these things can only be recognized by those who are familiar with the conditions on earth. At the time of the ancient Druids, these things were told to us as fairy tales by the Druid priests. This is how we have been prepared to understand Theosophy today.

The initiates speak to the souls, not to the respective people.

Thus, today's theosophy prepares us again for the reality of later ages.

Various things, presumably from a question and answer [with comments by the transcriber]

Richard Wagner intuitively grasped the great realities and reflected them in his great operas. Various attempts have been made by the spiritual currents to bring these realities to the attention of mankind today. Just as Richard Wagner was inspired as an artist, so the attempt has been made to make the truth clear to the consciousness of the mind. Nietzsche was chosen as the tool for this. His brain did not hold up. He had to atone for the attempt with death. [...] The European race was too thick-skinned. None of it was of any use until Helena Petrovna Blavatsky got it through. - We were dealing with Kali Yuga, the dark age. We are in the middle of the fifth root race and have passed the low point. Jesus Christ: When Christianity emerged, Jesus of Nazareth was a highly developed chela, third degree, the swan. For him, the whole world is what the human ego is for the ordinary person, that is, he knows the true divine in every thing. He knows the whole world inwardly. Every thing tells him its true name.

[In response to a request for further clarification, Dr. Steiner tried to make it clear to us:] As I speak to you, I move the air, the sound waves reach your ear and you absorb the words in your soul. The air is in perpetual motion, the auditory nerves catch the sound. Now imagine the air with its different vibrations, because each word produces different vibrations [...]. Now imagine that from the beginning, when a thing was created, a word was spoken for every thing, and that the air waves that formed this word were made firm, made rigid. Imagine that my words were made rigid, then they would fall visibly on the floor here. That was indeed the case with creation.

Christ can be found in the astral world. Master Jesus teaches how to find Christ. Christ will come again as a spiritual man when he will incarnate again in the sixth root race.

He will have a forerunner, John the Baptist. The sun was in Aries in the spring at the time of Christ, hence Christ = the Lamb. But it is slowly moving forward. It used to be in the sign of Taurus, hence the service of Taurus; even earlier in Gemini, Perse - Ormuzd and Ahriman. A solar period lasts two thousand six hundred years. Now it is coming to Pisces. In the Middle Ages, reference was made to the Age of Pisces. An element, a sea of spiritual life was to come. Later comes Aquarius, after two thousand six hundred years. The Templars taught that John would return - John the Baptist

My experience in reading this writing

A discussion of ¹ with the anthroposophy of Alois Mager could be of profound interest to me. This prompts me to write down here, as a kind of soliloquy, the thoughts that have arisen in me while I was studying Mager's writing “Theosophy and Christianity”. (I must confess that I have only now found the time to read the writing, which was published as early as 1922).

There are few people who believe that one can be fair to an opponent. But regardless of the reasons that such people have for their opinion, it seems to me that there are few conditions for me to be unfair to Alois Mager from the outset, even if he appears as my opponent.

He belongs to an order that I hold in high esteem and love.

Not only do I have many memories of noble, lofty, and far-reaching intellectual achievements that can be attributed to the order in general, without going into the work of the individual members of the order to whom this achievement is owed; but I have also had the good fortune to know and esteem individual members of the order. I have always had a sense for the spirit that prevails in the writings on science by such personalities. While I feel that much of what comes from other contemporary scientific works is foreign to me, there is not a little that comes from this side that touches my soul without any foreignness, even when the content seems to me to be incorrect, one-sided, or prejudiced.

And so I was also able to take up with much sympathy what Alois Mager wrote without reference to anthroposophy. This applies to his thoughts on the life of the soul in the presence of God, which are deep in mind and spirit, in particular.

I expected Alois Mager to be an opponent. For I know that from the side to which he belongs, either only silence about my anthroposophy can come, or opposition. Anyone who has illusions about this knows little about the world.

But what Mager presents had to seem significant to me.

And I would like to write down here the thoughts that have come to me about this, like a soliloquy.

The essay “Theosophy and Christianity” discusses in four chapters, essentially the Anthroposophy I have described. Mager admits this. On page 31f. we find the words: “I consider it futile to broadly present the goals and teachings of neo-Indian theosophy. We must devote a separate treatise to Steiner's Anthroposophy and its relation to science. There the essentials of Theosophy will be discussed as well.

The first chapter, “Theosophy in the Past and Present,” contains a spirited argument that what Mager calls Theosophy was revealed in a great spiritual way in the non-Christian world in Plotinus and Buddha. Mager sees the search of the human soul to come into contact with the divine in a way that naturally follows from the nature of this soul, most vividly realized in the two minds mentioned. For, what appears on Christian ground in this way, Mager does not judge, of course, as coming naturally from the nature of the soul, but as a result of the prevailing divine grace.

It seems unnecessary to me to point out here that, especially in earlier times, the state of soul indicated, even if not in the scientific formulation of Plotinus or in the religious depth of Buddha, was much more present in the spiritual life of humanity than Mager assumes when he orients his whole presentation towards the two personalities.

But what strikes me most is this: Mager wants to judge the anthroposophy I have presented. He wants to discuss what part of humanity is actually seeking by taking the anthroposophical path of the soul among many others. He wants to develop the content of what is alive in anthroposophy, otherwise what should give meaning to his investigation. Now the whole essence of what I have called anthroposophy is immediately distorted if, in order to explain its content, one refers to earlier descriptions of the spiritual worlds.

I have said that I am recording these thoughts as a soliloquy. I do this in order to be able to present unreservedly what only I myself can know with complete certainty from the subjective experience of the matter immediately, but which I must know in just this way.

And here I cannot do otherwise than to emphasize again and again that everything essential to my anthroposophy comes from my own spiritual research or insight, that I have borrowed nothing from the historical record in the matter or in the substantiation of the matter. If something I had found myself could be illuminated by being shown in some form or other as already existing elsewhere, then I did so. But I never did it with anything but what had been given in my own view before. Nor did I have any other method while I was referring to the theosophical society's own writings in my own writings. I presented what I had researched and then showed how one or the other appears in those writings.

Only the terminology has been borrowed from what already existed, where an existing word made such borrowing desirable in terms of its content. But this has as little to do with the essential content of anthroposophy as the fact that language is used to communicate what has been self-explored has to do with the independence of what is said. One could, of course, also assume that a well-known linguistic expression is borrowed when one uses it in a presentation of something completely new.

In the strictest self-knowledge, I have repeatedly asked myself whether this is the case, whether I can speak with my own exact knowledge when I say that what I present as a spiritual view comes from my directly experienced view, and that the historical given plays no role in this. In particular, it was always important to me to be clear about the fact that I did not take any details from what had been handed down historically and insert them into the world of my views. Everything had to be produced within the immediate life of contemplation; nothing could be inserted as a foreign entity.

In wanting to bring this into clarity within myself, I have avoided all illusions and sources of illusion with the greatest effort of consciousness. After all, one may rely on a clarity of self-awareness that knows how to distinguish between what is experienced in consciousness in direct connection with the objective being and what emerges from some uncontrollable depths of the soul through something read or otherwise absorbed.

I now believe that anyone who really engages with the presentation in my writings should also be able to see through my relationship to spiritual observation as a result. Alois Mager does not do this. For if he had tempted correctly, he would not have presented the content of anthroposophy with reference to Plotinus and Buddha first, but would have shown first how this content arises from the continuation of the development of modern consciousness on the basis of the spirit of science.

But what led Mager to write his first chapter leads him in the sequel (page 47) to say: “What strikes us most and most irrefutably about Steiner's Anthroposophy is that it is composed of pieces of thought and knowledge from all peoples and all centuries. Greek mythology, which Steiner became acquainted with at the gymnasium, provides him with the Hyperboreans, Atlanteans, Lemurians, and so forth. He borrowed from the oriental mystery religions, from the Gnostic and Manichaean teachings. The Kant-Laplacean Urn Nebula served as a model for his spiritual primeval world being...

This conclusion drawn by Mager about my anthroposophy is a complete objective untruth, in view of the true facts. It is dismaying to see that a fine mind, which wants to apply the means of its objective search for truth correctly in order to arrive at a true-to-life context, misses the truth and presents an illusion as reality.

This sense of dismay overshadows all the other feelings I have about Mager's writing, for example that it is antagonistic towards me, that it becomes quite strangely unjust in many places and so widens.

My consternation is heightened when I come across another objective untruth. In the second chapter, “Anthroposophy and Science”, Mager gives a commendable account of anthroposophical ideas, considering the brevity of the presentation to which he is obliged. Indeed, he proves himself to be a good judge of certain impressions that are given to spiritual perception as a finer materiality, for example, between the material and the soul. One can see that he has many qualities that enable him to engage with anthroposophy, if it were not for the inhibitions that come from other sides.

But now, in this chapter, there is another objective untruth. Mager first tries to put my way of spiritual thinking on the same level as spiritistic or vulgar occult practices. He even uses Staudenmaier's book “Magic as Experimental Science” for this purpose, which a sense of spiritual differences should have protected him from.

But now he comes to the following assertion: “The world view that Steiner presents to us, which at first glance appears imposing and seemingly complete, is not the result - as a philosophical world view is - of rational, scientific knowledge, but is gained through spiritual vision, anthroposophical clairvoyance” (page 45). “Steiner has all the knowledge he ever sipped and caught in his life, as he floated and wandered through all fields of knowledge, with an incomparable skill in clairvoyant threads into a bizarre unity.” Mager presents everything as if I had given my ideas about the spiritual world on the basis of an unchecked, unscientifically applied clairvoyance.

Is there nothing to be said against such an assertion, considering what can be found in my writings about Goethe, in my “Theory of Knowledge of Goethe's World View”, in “Truth and Science”, in my “Philosophy of Freedom” ? I have presented this as a philosophical primal experience, that one can experience the conceptual in its reality, and that with such an experience one stands in the world in such a way that the human ego and the spiritual content of the world flow together. I have tried to show how this experience is just as real as a sensory experience. And out of this primal experience of spiritual knowledge, the spiritual content of anthroposophy has grown. I endeavored step by step to use 'intellectual, scientific knowledge' with the precision that I acquired in the study of mathematics to control and justify the spiritual view and so on. I only worked in such a way that the spiritual view emerged from 'intellectual, scientific' knowledge. I have strictly rejected all spiritualism and all vulgar occultism.

Again, Mager's scientific approach does not lead to an understanding of the true facts, but to the assertion of objective untruths about anthroposophy and my relationship to it.

Indeed, one is bound to be dismayed when one sees that an 'investigation' into anthroposophy gradually erodes the very soil in which anthroposophy is to be found.

The anthroposophical spiritual researcher sees through the reasons for such mental states, which cannot come to objective facts, from his insights; but Mager is not to be presented here from the point of view of anthroposophy, but merely from the point of view of ordinary consciousness, which he indeed wants to assert in his writing.

I ask now: can it still be fruitful to deal with what an opponent presents, when one sees that everything falls to nothing, that he presents to the world about Anthroposophy? Can one discuss assertions that cannot possibly refer to Anthroposophy because they not only paint a distorted image of it, but a complete opposite?

(It is no wonder that Mager is unjust to me even in small matters. A clear misprint in one edition of my Theosophy, where the numbering of “mind soul” and “sentience soul” is incorrect – despite the fact that what comes before and after makes it quite clear that this is a misprint — he uses it to make the following comment: “It is characteristic of Steiner's scientific method that he places the intellectual soul before the sentient soul here, which contradicts his usual presentation.”

In view of what has been presented, there is no opportunity to enter into a discussion about whether, in Mager's description of Aristotle's psychology in the third chapter, “Soul and Soul Migration”, which Mager even finds quite stimulating, there is the seed for transforming ideas about the soul from what can be observed externally to what is seen spiritually internally; whether, then, the path from Aristotelian intellectualism to anthroposophy does not emerge as a more straightforward one.

In fire we recognize the expression of the God-power, which sustains and quickens all, which creates all, but also destroys all. Where it expresses itself as fire, there it works as a destructive force. Therefore men also saw in the lightning, which kindles the fire, the sign by which the Godhead manifests its power. That is why the symbol of lightning was given to Jupiter in his hand, and the symbol of a hammer to the god Thor, to show that he proclaims his power to men in thunder and lightning. Where the power of fire does not express its destructive and consuming force, but appears in a subdued form, it is the life-giving power that expresses itself in all that lives, in the plant, animal and human kingdoms, as warmth. It is this warmth that sustains all life and that always gives rise to new life, that reveals life. What grows and thrives, what sprouts and blossoms, is enabled to do so by warmth.

It is the mitigated power of fire, the moderate power of God, which withholds some of its power and gives some of it to call the world of phenomena into existence. In order for man to bring forth something new in his environment - through his work, through art and technology - he must learn to tame the fire in such a way that it becomes warmth, and thus transform the mineral kingdom. While fire itself has a destructive effect, warmth has a revitalizing effect. At first, man learned to control fire and use it to work with the mineral world. But it was a far greater achievement when man harnessed the warmth radiated by fire. The harnessing of warmth and the resulting transformation of the mineral world represented one of the greatest cultural advances. Through fire, man had learned to transform the solid into the liquid, and had thus become a master in the processing of ore. A further advance was that he learned to transform the liquid through heat into the gaseous – water into steam – and to utilize the steam. The entire subsequent cultural epoch was based on this utilization of steam. Another step in human development was that man learned to transform fire into light and to use this light to explore nature in his service. Light is also an expression of fire, but of the tamed power of fire. Yet even greater effects can be produced by light than by heat. While heat only affects the immediate vicinity, light affects the entire space.

The range of the effect is much greater with light than with heat. We know about the existence of long-vanished celestial bodies because their light, which they emitted many years ago when they were still physically present, is visible to us today. Fire contains both light and heat, and man can coax out both and make use of them, just as both show their beneficial effects in the world. We live through warmth and live in light. Nothing living could flourish permanently in the dark. Both light and warmth are necessary for our existence. These are the two poles in which the divine power of fire shows itself as an invigorating power in the world. As warmth, it works within beings, as light, it surrounds them from the outside.

The emotional expression of fire in the human and animal kingdom is passion, Kama. He must learn to transform this passion, which is indeed the power that enables him to become independent, so that it becomes warmth of soul within him. As warmth of soul it becomes invigorating in him, while as passion it has a destructive effect in him. This warmth of soul, however, which manifests itself as love, not only gives him the strength to live independently, but also to have a life-giving effect on the rest of humanity. In love, he radiates his inner being, his inner strength. It is this that connects him with people and also with God, while passion separates him from people and from God. Just as the physical expression of the power of God can be recognized in fire, so love, the life of the Godhead, descends through the warmth of the soul into the physical human being. The power of the Budhi, the Christ power, the power of the second Logos, is absorbed in man himself, while the will, which is first expressed in passion - as in fire in nature - is the power of the first Logos. Thus man lives in his will in the power of the first Logos. But while the first Logos lives on the plane of Nirvana, this will expresses itself in its passion at first as the greatest turning away from the Divine. Through love it turns to the Divine, and thereby the Divine streams towards it from the plane of Budhi. There it is imbued with the Divine warmth which lives on the plane of Budhi with the power of the second Logos. Love is the power that leads man from the lowest point of his estrangement from the Divine up again into the Divine. After man has united with the Deity living on the Budhiplan through love, this love works in him in such a way that the other pole of passion is also expressed: love leads him to knowledge. You radiate from above the light of divine wisdom. Through love, the human being unites with divine love, but this union has the consequence that he is enlightened by God with his light, the light of the knowledge of God's wisdom. This resides on the Devachan plan, it is what emerges from the love of God, which resides on the Budhiplan.

And while man rises through love to the buddhic plane, he rises through knowledge to the devachan plane, the world of the second Logos. First, through love, there must be a complete reversal of man, his passion, which was expressed in the astral, must become love, which is expressed in the Budhi element, then his thinking, which lived on the lower layers of the mental plane, is raised to the realization of the upper parts of the devachan plane.

Only then can he participate in the works of the Godhead and its various aspects. He must learn to acquire love and wisdom in order to understand the will of the deity, which is revealed in life, and the thought of the deity, which is expressed in living forms. First he penetrates into this divine thought, which then appears to him in the devachanic world. It is the wisdom of God that shines forth to meet him. Resting in this divine thought, he first finds the way into the essence of the deity. He is enabled to do so by the power of thought given to him by the third Logos. From this power he is able to penetrate further and understand the world in which the second Logos comes to revelation, in the astral world, where the essence of the second Logos is revealed. The second Logos is the revelation of divine life; this reveals itself to man in the soul, in the astral, just as the wisdom of the third Logos reveals itself to him in the mental. Only through the realization of the wisdom of God and through the assimilation of the revelation of the life in the soul can he now become conscious of the Divine Will, the elemental power of the Divine Life in the physical world. There he unites again with this elemental power, as before this power had united with him.

The power of God descended through life, through the manifestation of life in numbers - by dividing its power into different powers - through the light that was to bring enlightenment to mankind, and through the warmth that was to invigorate it. Finally, it expressed itself as fire in all its power to be recognized by man, and imparted to him a part of its power in passion so that he might gain independence.

— In life was the power of the first Logos.
— In number was the power of the Son, who emerged from the first Logos through revelation, the power of the Word, rhythm, harmony.
— In light was the power of the Spirit, of God-consciousness, which now streamed into the world and had a shaping-creating effect.

The light lured the figures out of the darkness. Then life poured all its power into the world of figures through fire – which became self-heating and passion in the animal and human realm, and led man to independence. Now he could begin the ascent, the return to the Godhead, to the primal source from which he had gone out. But for this, the power of God had to reach out to him again and again to draw him up. Through the first Logos, self-will was given to him in passion; now the second Logos poured into him self-warmth and love. The power of the first Logos, which had been expressed in him as fire and passion, now passed over into the power of the second Logos; and then the power of the third Logos united with him in wisdom, knowledge, and light, and led him together with it through light and knowledge.

Thus man could now live in the power of the third Logos, in thought, in divine wisdom. This divine wisdom must increasingly attract the divine life in him, then he learns to shape his thoughts vividly, then he can bring forth forms on the astral plane, just as he now brings forth thoughts on the mental plane.

A further ascent of man is that he then unites with the divine will and expresses it in the animation and transformation of the physical plan.

Thus, divinity and humanity are closely interwoven and intertwined. When the powers of God descend into man, a force must connect with the power of God in order to then descend again into nature in union with the divinity.

Descent of the One Life in Revelation: the number – ascent from expression to unity

Life – warmth
Number – light
Expression of unity: fire.

Connection of the human with the divine.

The ascent of man and union with the divine and the effect of the divine in man:

While life lives as the highest pole of the Godhead on the physical plane, warmth lives as the lowest expression of the Godpower on the Budhi plane. The number or revelation lives on the astral plane and thus complements the light that lives on the devachan plane. Through this concatenation of life in its expressions of power and in the worlds in which it works, everything around us in the cosmos and in man comes into being. We must understand the laws of life in order to penetrate into them. But it is love that leads us to the knowledge of these laws – for love is the power given to man to enable him to rise to divinity.

In order for humanity to become independent, the Father-power of the Godhead gave them a part of their own will in the inner fire, the passion. So that man could direct and guide this passion so that it would not become a consuming fire, he sent them his son, Christ, who brought love into the world to transform passion into life. But He sent the Spirit, the Paraclete, to lead them through love to knowledge, to light.

Only then, after humanity had been illuminated by the Spirit, could it recognize the life of the Son, could it understand the revelation of the Godhead. And only after it had united with this revealing love could it lead the Son to the Father, to the union with the will-to-live, the creative power. Thus the Godhead works in him as Father, Son and Spirit; but through the light of knowledge he first unites with the Spirit, then through love with the Son and through the will with the Father.

Through Christ, the power of love came into the world, which was to fulfill and purify the ego of man, which first revealed itself in passion, so that he could absorb the power of the spirit and penetrate to knowledge. But through this knowledge he will unite completely with love - and through love with the divine will. Therefore Christ had to lower his spirit upon mankind, as it happened at Pentecost. Since His appearance He has always permeated humanity with His spirit, and this spirit teaches them to find the way to Him and to the Father. In the middle of the Lemurian race, passion first descended into man with its own warmth. In the fourth sub-race of the fifth root race, love descended to purify passion, and from then on this love sent its spirit into humanity.

This descent of the spirit must continue until people, through knowledge, find their way back to love, as love had guided them to knowledge before. When Christ appeared, it was the beginning of the transition from love to knowledge.

Our time is the time when knowledge must pass over into love again. Parzival denotes the completion of the path through love of knowledge. Lohengrin denotes the beginning of the path through knowledge to love. We live in the completion of the path.

And just as Christ Jesus once brought love and, through love, light, so now light brings us love again. Lucifer appears in humanity to lead it back to Christ. And the new Christ will arise when humanity has learned to walk in the light of knowledge. Then Christ will arise. He was born in the fourth sub-race, and will arise in the sixth sub-race.

Then love in humanity will be brought to perfection and humanity will be uplifted to the power of the Father. Regarding the time in which we live, Christ Jesus said: “I will send you the Spirit of truth; he will guide you into all truth, and the truth will set you free. He is the Spirit of Truth who is now working among people and wants to lead them to spiritual freedom by freeing the spirit from the fetters of the physical. He gives the human spirit the strength to recognize, behind the physical world of appearance, the world in which it has its origin, its home. And thanks to this knowledge of the spiritual world, love for the spiritual world is kindled in him, and he unites with the power that works in the world as love, with Christ. And again it is this love that gives him the strength to unite with the life itself from which love emerged, with the divine will.

There the human being finds perfect union with the divine and perfect freedom from everything that fettered him; the completion of his freedom is perfect union with the Godhead.

In the wisdom schools of Plato and Pythagoras, students were only allowed to penetrate to the higher sources of knowledge after studying mathematics. Eternal wisdom was only revealed through pure selflessness, and mathematics was the only science that could educate people to this, because it serves no purpose, no selfish satisfaction, and only teaches the pure relationships, the pure laws of the basic forms.

Man's development is a descent from the All-Unity to the particular and a gradual ascent in conscious freedom to the realization of his connection with the All and return to the General. Therefore, from the mental point of view, the dead stone is a model of the higher for man. In it the great connection is still preserved; in it only the law of causality is effective; what sets it in motion, it gives to the outside world. It extends from the mental into the physical, for pure thought is enclosed within it. Its life is only form. Thus the sun, which as a physical image of the Logos is at home in the mind, and the whole mineral kingdom can be regarded as a great laboratory of physical and chemical forces.

With the plant, which has its origin one stage lower, in the astral, life begins and with it the process of isolation. It draws nourishment into itself from outside in order to increase in size; it wants to grow and spread. It is the beginning of egoism. However, the plant can develop one stage higher; it develops from the astral through the physical realm up to the etheric sphere. The animal that arises in the etheric sphere already feels, it not only wants food to grow, it wants to take from the outside world that which creates pleasure for itself and appropriate it. It feels life as pleasure and suffering; it rises and develops to the astral.

And man as such, who has his origin in the physical and, as a creature of nature, has reached the point of perceiving the outside world and perceiving himself as an individual, is at his lowest in his egoism, yet he can elevate himself in thought to the mental sphere, although he can only perceive in the physical, because he lives with his brain and his visible body in the mineral kingdom. But he carries all the elements of the universe within him, he has passed through all the realms, and the powers of all rest in him as principles; he can consciously develop them from within himself. What we see is the physical body, it belongs to the mineral kingdom, but through prana, the life principle, it also lives in the etheric sphere of the plant world, it has its etheric body; and further, it also lives through sensation in the astral world, in its astral body, and through rational perception in the mental world, through the kama-manas principle. In the lower world, man possesses four bodies with the principles. But he is also connected to the higher world, since he has his origin there. He can develop his mental body and advance from the conception of the individual and the many to the idea of the type; he can develop the causal body and ascend to the higher world of the trinity of manas-budhi-atma. In the sphere of Budhi he will form his thoughts out of astral matter, he will be able to create the Mayavi-rupa body, he will live and work out of his causal soul, be a creator himself and become one again with the totality.

This upper trinity, to which man must develop, is, however, in truth deeply hidden within him, it underlies his being; he must liberate it in succession – “As above, so below”. The multiplicity that we see is nothing other than the principle of unity, the Logos, which has dissolved into multiplicity. Disharmony can only arise in multiplicity because the many separateness, which are all parts of the spirit, can come into conflict with each other. When this multiplicity reunites to form a whole, our cosmos becomes a whole again, it becomes the Logos again, harmony. “As above, so below!” – Atma, the highest principle in our cosmos, in our mineral kingdom, to which we count the stars with their orbits and all the stars and all the forces in nature, has at the same time penetrated the deepest into matter; our physical organs are essentially animated and held together by Atma. Atma as the highest principle has its counterpart in the physical realm.

The Budhi principle has only penetrated into the etheric and astral spheres, forming the essence of the plant and animal world, their etheric and astral bodies. When man, originally still in connection with the divine geniuses, forming a whole with them, separated into an individual being in the astral sphere and attained to ego-consciousness through imagination, then Manas, the third principle, descended into the astral sphere: united with Kama, enclosed in the brain of man, he formed his Kama-Manas body. Man has passed through all realms on the descending arc of his development. We carry Atma as a mineral cosmos within us; it is our physical body; Budhi as a living, sentient cosmos in our prana and kamakörper; and Manas, in its connection with Kama, forms our Kama-Manas-body. He is the fourth principle in the lower world and at the same time forms the transition to the higher mental world. It is the connecting bridge to it. When freed from all lower sheaths, manas reunites with budhi in selfless radiance into the universal.

Of all the entities, the human being is most deeply immersed in egoism and a separate existence. He has absorbed everything and carries the whole trinity of Atma-Budhi-Manas within himself. In the mineral kingdom, Atma is spread out; it rests in its entirety in the rock, which is still directly connected to the cosmos. In the plant and animal world, dualism is already present; Budhi penetrates into the etheric and astral worlds, and the plant and animal world is built from life and sensation. Manas, wisdom, hovers above them and brings about the wisdom that is expressed in nature, in the wonderful conformity to law of the structure of all animals' rational actions. But man draws Manas into himself. Wisdom can no longer affect him from the outside. Bound up with Kama, enclosed in his mental body, wisdom is clouded for him. Man is a condensation into the single form of chemical-physical processes that take place in the mineral cosmos. Man is also active in the astral world through his feelings, desires and passions. He ceaselessly creates astral beings in that sphere, which have a truly living, material existence there, because the matter of the astral world consists of surging sensations such as envy, hatred, goodwill, anger and so on. There, the beings created by human feelings lead their special existence as elemental beings; there are also beings from other worlds that require the astral sphere for their development, and then there are the astral bodies of the souls awaiting their human incarnation. Furthermore, there are the devas, who also come from other worlds and often seek to influence people. There are the four Deva-Rajas, who form the physical bodies according to the astral scheme from the four elements of fire, water, air and earth, which the Lipikas, the lords of karma, have formed from the mental substance of the individuality.

The higher development of man depends on conscious concentration and meditation, which must be practiced daily and carried out according to certain rules. By detaching himself daily, in the morning hours, even if only for five minutes, from all impressions of the outside world and directing all his concentration to a revealed thought of eternity, he will gradually connect with the cosmos and take part in its rhythmic movement. Through this consistent daily retreat from the transitory world of appearances, for the short time of his meditation, man gradually ascends to the Arupa sphere. By thinking through a sentence that contains an eternal universal truth, so that it takes on life, the human being draws out its entire content and absorbs it. The control of thought and meditation, strictly practiced daily, must not serve the individual's own education and expansion of the mind; it must be done with the awareness that in doing so we are helping and working with the development of our cosmos. All our uncontrolled, “real” thinking constantly disturbs this regular process. The person who wants to develop his astral senses must also learn to control his feelings and awaken in himself a sense of reverence for the wisdom of highly developed beings; and he must cultivate a devotional surrender, in proper appreciation of the distance to that higher wisdom. Every evening, the person practicing meditation should review the past day, look upon failures without regret or remorse, and learn from them in order to benefit from the experiences and improve. Meditation should not be forced; it should not separate the person from their surroundings or change their usual existence. On the contrary, the person should surrender to their nature without worry. He will learn more from the collection and overview at the end of the day than if he tried to force himself to become a better person.

If man wants to ascend to higher development, where the first Logos flows into the second, he must become a chela and develop the qualities of a chela within himself. He must gradually develop four main qualities within himself:

First: the power of discrimination, the distinction between the permanent and the transitory; that is, man must learn to recognize in the transitory, in that which he perceives, the formative power that is permanent. All things that our senses perceive have an inherent power that seeks crystallization, just as salt, which is dissolved in warm water, [forms crystals when the water cools]. The arable soil is ground crystal, the seed contains the power to become a plant and fruit, and the vertebral bone has the potential to develop into a skullcap. Thus the lancelet, which consists only of the spinal column, is a miniature image of the first living, sentient form in which the Logos manifested itself. The enormous first fish, which consisted only of a gelatinous mass, is the ancestor that carried in its vertebrae the possibility for the development of amphibians, fish, mammals and humans. Thus, the physical human being is to be understood only as a temporary phenomenon that changes its mineral substances daily and whose sense organs will not remain as they are today, but will adapt to the higher human stages of development and carry the power of transformation within themselves.

The second quality to be developed is the appreciation of what is lasting. Knowledge becomes perception. We learn to value what is lasting more highly than what is passing, which increasingly loses its value in our estimation. And so the developing chela is led by the development of the first two qualities to the third by itself, to the development of certain soul abilities.

a) Thought control.

The chela must not allow himself to look at things from only one point of view. We grasp an idea and consider it to be true, while in fact it is only true from that one aspect or point of view; we must later also look at it from the opposite point of view and hold up the reverse side to every obverse. Only in this way do we learn to control one thought with another.

b) Control of actions.

Man lives and acts in the material world and is placed in the temporal. He can only comprehend a small part of the world of phenomena and is bound by his activity to a certain circle of the transitory. Daily meditation helps the chela to focus and control his actions. He will consider only the enduring in them and place value only on the action with which he can helpfully serve the higher development of his fellow human beings. He will lead the abundance of the phenomenal world back to the highest unity.

c) Tolerance.

The chela will not allow himself to be dominated by feelings of attraction and repulsion. He will seek to understand all - criminals and saints - and although he experiences emotionally, he will judge intellectually. What is correctly recognized as evil from one point of view can be judged as necessary and logical from a higher aspect.

d) Tolerance.

Accepting good and bad fortune with equanimity, not letting them become determining powers that can influence us. Not letting joy and pain push us out of our direction. Keeping oneself free from all external influences and influxes and asserting one's own direction.

e) Faith.

The chela should have a free, open, unbiased heart for the higher spiritual. Even where he does not immediately recognize a higher truth, he should have faith until he can make it his own through knowledge. If he wanted to proceed according to the principle of “testing everything and keeping the best,” he would apply his judgment as a standard and place himself above the higher spiritual, closing himself to its penetration.

f) Equilibrium.

The last soul ability would result as the outcome of all the others as equilibrium, as a sense of direction, soul balance. The chela gives direction to himself.

And so he would now have to develop the fourth quality within himself: the will to freedom, to the ideal. As long as we still live in the physical, we cannot attain full freedom, but we can develop the will to freedom within us, strive towards the ideal. We can free ourselves from external circumstances and no longer react to external impulses, but make the law within us, the enduring, the guiding principle of our thinking and acting, living not in the passing personality, but in our individuality, which is enduring and strives for unity.