The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today we will take as our subject the different ranks of beings to which man belongs. Man, as he is at present is a developing being who was not always as he is now. There are not only stages of development lying before and behind him, but also beings co-existent with him, just as the child today has the old man beside him who is at another stage of development. Today we will deal with seven ranks of beings, and in this connection we must clearly differentiate between receptive and creative beings.

Let us take as an example a colour which we perceive with our eyes, for instance red or green. In this respect we are receptive beings. The colour must however first be produced in order that we may perceive it; we must therefore be confronted with another being who produces the colour, for instance red. Through this we recognise the different stages of beings. If we put together everything which approaches our senses, there must also be a soul to receive it; but conversely something must also be present in order that the sense impressions may be brought to us. There are beings who can manifest. These have a more god-like or deva-character. Beings whose nature is more adapted to receiving have a more element[al] character. God-like beings are of a manifesting nature. Elemental beings are of a receptive nature.

Here, in this domain, we have the creative wisdom which manifests outwardly, and the wisdom which is received by the human soul. Wisdom is in the light and discloses itself in all sense impressions. Behind what is revealed we must assume the revealers, beings of will nature; wisdom is that which is revealed.

Man is both receptive and creative. On the one hand, for instance with regard to all sense impressions, he is receptive, with regard to thinking however he is creative. Nothing gives rise to thoughts unless he first produces perceptions. Thus he is on the one hand a receptive being and on the other hand a creative being. This is an important difference. Let us imagine that man were to be in a position to create everything he perceives, sounds, colours and so on, just as today he creates thoughts. Today he is only creative in one sphere, in thinking, and in order to have perceptions he needs creative beings around him. In bringing forth his own being he was at first creative. In the beginning he himself created his own organism. For this he now needs other beings. Now man must incarnate in a bodily form determined from outside. Here he is closer to the elemental beings than to the sphere of perception and thinking.

Let us imagine for once that man were able to bring forth sounds, colours and other sense perceptions and also his own being. Then we should have the human being as he was before the Lemurian race, who is called the “pure” man. Man becomes impure through the fact that he does not produce his own being, but incorporates something other into his nature. This pure man was called Adam Cadmon. When at the beginning of Genesis the Bible speaks of man, it speaks of this pure human being. This human being had as yet nothing kamic (astral) within him. Desire first appeared after he had incorporated other elements into himself. Thus there arose the second stage of humanity, the kama-rupic man (man with an astral body). The higher animal is to be seen as at a lower stage of this development. Without warm blood no beings can possess an independent Kama-rupa (astral body). All warm-blooded animals are derived from man.

Thus to begin with we have the pure man who up to the Lemurian Age actually led a super-sensible existence and brought forth out of himself everything that lived and was part of him.

Present day cold-blooded animals and the plants have developed in a different way from the warm-blooded animals. Those which exist today are remnants of strange, gigantic beings. Some of these can be verified by science. They are decadent animals which are descended from those which the pure man made use of in order to incarnate in them, so that he might have a body for what is kamic (astral). At first the pure man had found no means of incarnating on the earth. He still hovered above what was manifested. From among these huge, powerful beings (animals) man made use of the most developed in order to incarnate in them. He attached himself to these beings and thereby he was in a position to bring into them his own Kama (astral body). Some of these beings developed further and then became the animals of Atlantis and present day humanity. However it was not possible for all of them to adapt themselves. Those who failed became the lower vertebrate animals; kangaroos for instance are such attempts as proved unsuccessful on the way to becoming man—like pottery vessels which are rejected and left behind.

Now man tried to introduce Kama into the animal forms. Kama is first to be found in the human form, in actual fact in the heart, in the warm blood and in the circulation of the blood. Attempts were made again and again and in this way there was an ascent from stage to stage. We see unsuccessful attempts for instance in the sloths, the kangaroos, the beasts of prey, the monkeys and apes. All these remained behind on the way. The warm-blooded animals are unsuccessful attempts to become human forms endowed with Kama. Everything in them which is of the nature of Kama, man also could have within himself; but he unloaded it into them, for he was unable to use this kind of Kama. There is an important occult axiom: Every quality has two opposite poles. So we find, just as positive and negative electricity complement one another, so we have warmth and cold, day and night, light and darkness and so on. In the same way every Kamic quality also has two opposite aspects. For instance man has cast rage out of himself into the lion, and this, on the other hand, when ennobled by him, can lead him upward to his higher self. Passion should not be annihilated, but purified. The negative pole must be led upwards to a higher stage. This purifying of passion, this leading upwards of its negative aspect was called by the Pythagoreans catharsis. At first man had within him the rage of the lion and the cunning of the fox. Thus the kingdom of the warm-blooded animals is a comprehensive picture of Kama qualities. Today the opinion is commonly held that the ‘Tat twam asi’ (‘That art thou’), is to be understood as something general and undefined, but one must conceive something quite definite underlying it. Thus in the case of the lion man must say to himself: That art thou. We have therefore in the kingdom of the warm-blooded animals spread out before us the kama-rupic human being. Previously there only existed the pure man: Adam Cadmon.

The philosopher of natural science, Oken, who in the first half of the 19th century was a professor in Jena, was acquainted with all these ideas and expressed them in a grotesque way in order to nudge people to attention. Here we find an example which points to a still earlier stage of human development, before man separated off from himself the kingdom of the cold-blooded animals. Oken connected the cuttlefish with the human tongue. In this analogy of the tongue with the cuttlefish one can find an occult significance. Now we also have beings who for the first time are, as it were, being conjured up as by-products. Man has ejected from himself the cunning of the fox and retained its opposite pole. In the fox's cunning however the germ of something else is beginning to develop, for example something similar to the way in which the black shadow of an object has a secondary shadow when light enters it from outside. We incorporated cunning into the fox out of our inner being. Now spirit is directed towards him from the periphery. The beings which in this way work from the periphery into what is kamic are elemental beings. What the fox has received from us, is in him animal; what coming from outside attaches itself to him from the spirit, is elemental being. On the one hand he originated through the spirit of humanity and on the other hand through an Elemental being.

Thus we differentiate: firstly, elemental beings, secondly, the kama-rupic man, thirdly, the pure man, fourthly, the man who in a certain respect has overcome the pure man, who has taken into himself what is outside and around him and is creatively active. He has contacted and taken into himself everything which is around him in earthly existence. This gives him the plans, the directions, the laws which create life. Once man was perfect and he will become so again. But there is a great difference between what he was and what he will become. What is around him in the outer world will later become his spiritual possession. What he has won for himself on the Earth will later become the faculty of being creatively active. This will then have become his innermost being. One who has absorbed all earthly experiences, so that he knows how to make use of every single thing and has thus become a creator, is called a Bodhisattva, which means a man who has taken into himself to a sufficient degree the Bodhi, the Buddhi of the earth. Then he is advanced enough to work creatively out of his innermost impulses. The wise men of the earth are not yet Bodhisattvas.²⁴ Even for such a one there always remain things to which he is still unable to orient himself. Only when one has absorbed into oneself the entire knowledge of the Earth, in order to be able to create, only then is one a Bodhisattva; Buddha, Zarathustra, for example, were Bodhisattvas.

When man ascends still further in evolution, so that he is not only a creator on the Earth, but possesses forces which reach out above the Earth, only then is he free to choose either to use these higher forces or to work further with them on the Earth. In this case he can bring into the Earth something coming from higher worlds. Such an epoch occurred before man began to incarnate, in the last third of the Lemurian Age. The human being had developed his physical, etheric and astral bodies. He had brought these members of his being with him from an earlier Earth evolution. The two next impulses, Kama and Manas, he could not have found on the Earth; they do not lie in its evolutionary sequence. The first new impulse (Kama) was only to be found as a force on Mars. It was added shortly before man incarnated. The second impulse (Manas) came from Mercury in the fifth sub-race of the Atlanteans, with the original Semites. The stimulus of these new principles had to be brought to the Earth from other planets through still higher beings, through the Nirmana-kayas. From Mars they added Kama, from Mercury Manas. The Nirmana-kayas are yet another stage higher than the Bodhisattvas. The latter are able to order evolution which has continuity; but they cannot bring into it what comes from other regions, this can only be done by the Nirmana-kayas. [In] yet another stage higher than the Nirmana-kayas, stand those beings who are called Pitris. Pitris = Fathers. For the Nirmana-kayas can indeed bring something coming from other regions into evolution, but they cannot sacrifice themselves, sacrifice themselves as substance, so that on the following planet they can bring forth a new cycle. This can be done by the Pitris, beings who had evolved on the Moon and had now come over; they became the activating impulse towards Earth evolution. When man has gone through every possible experience, then he is in a position to become a Pitri. The next and even higher stage, the last that it is possible to mention, is that of the Gods themselves.

Thus we have seven ranks of beings: Firstly the Gods, secondly Pitris, thirdly Nirmana-kayas, fourthly Bodhisattvas, fifthly pure human beings, sixthly human beings, seventhly elemental beings. This is the sequence of which Helena Petrovna Blavatsky speaks.

Now we can add the question: What kind of organ is it which has made man kama-rupic? It is the heart with the veins and the blood that pulsates through the body. The heart has a physical part and an etheric part. Aristotle²⁵ speaks about this, for in earlier times it was only the etheric man which was held to be important. The heart has also an astral part. The etheric heart is connected with the twelve-petalled lotus flower. Not all the physical organs have an astral part; for example the gall bladder is only physical and etheric, the astral is lacking.

• 24. See: The Christ Impulse and the Development of the Ego Consciousness, lecture 1, 25.10.1909 and From Buddha to Christ 21.9.1911.
• 25. Here Rudolf Steiner is presumably referring to the minor scientific writings (Parva naturalia) ‘On Youth and Age, Life and Death’.

The lectures printed here were an immediate experience for the speaker and the audience, arising out of the dramatic eurythmy presentation of scenes from Goethe's “Faust”, which brought all the forces of the participants into action, from the development of an understanding of the given riddles to the creation of every scenic detail. The work of the intellect was only the bridge to grasping the essential reality that Rudolf Steiner opened up here, which stands behind the secrets of this work and seeks ways of expression for which the previously known artistic means are no longer sufficient. In eurythmy, Rudolf Steiner had created a means of expression through which the supersensible element can speak its own language: the language of movement, which is the form of expression of those worlds that have not hardened down to the physical. Secret laws of nature can be revealed again through the medium of a new art. And in his wisdom of man, in his science of initiation, Rudolf Steiner has opened the gate through which we can find access to those realms into which the Faustian poetry repeatedly transports us, and which must appear to us throughout as phantasmagoria if we cannot handle the key that opens that gate. Who then understands Faust? Commentaries and learned reflections cannot help us here. They do little more than weigh down, even stifle, the spirit that wants to speak to us through poetry. Although we owe a debt of gratitude to Schröer, because his diligent explanations enable us to refresh many things that would otherwise easily disappear into the depths of our memory, this work often reminds us of the pain we go through when example when reading the “Divina Commedia”, when one's soul is crushed by the commentaries that almost every spirited terzetto is accompanied by: a difficult-to-bear dissection into the pedantic-dry. The distance between text and commentary is not so enormous here. Schröer has an affinity with Goethe and enthusiasm, and so his scholarly work seems not so much drying as conscientious. You can put it aside without annoyance and then experience the text of the Faust poem directly. What is behind the poem speaks to us at first like a hunch. Something seizes us that no learned commentary could explain, that would be word and sound if it did not contain profound truths that are not accessible to us at first. The rushing of undercurrents becomes audible; secrets murmur in our inner ear. We are grateful to Schröer for not having drowned the voice of the deep, for only helping to imprint some mythological or historical elements more precisely on our memory. These explanations have not been able to lead us to the sources that pulsate through the poetry. The sources that Faust presses for, yearns for, so that he risks the salvation of his soul, they, which are supposed to give him back his lost humanity through the potion of life that he wants to drink from them, have not flowed into this scholarly existence either; they have only shaken his soul as a yearning and as a moral impulse. Faust, and through him Goethe, cries out for the sources of life; it is also the cry of today's humanity, which still fully deserves this name, which has not numbed its humanity with the noise of machines and the pressure of soul-crushing mechanics. It should hear this cry in poetry in its harrowing force, let it rummage in itself, react to it. On the stage, however, we usually see a jaded Faust, who talks to us about something that sounds very abstract and does not touch him strongly in his depths, only filled with endless boredom and disgust, which ultimately make him reach for the bottle of brown liquid; that makes him somewhat sentimental. It is hardly possible to feel a real relationship with the experience of the earth spirit. Then a piece of not quite well-founded, unreal, legendary romance takes place on stage, a medieval spook - and Faust only really comes to life when it comes to Gretchen; then he knows where he stands. But his game with her does not last long. He has to get back into the spooky romance. Then follows some remorse at the sight of Gretchen in the dungeon, who has gone mad. But he quickly forgets and wakes up refreshed and strengthened in a flowery meadow.

How harrowing reality and crazy superstition combine here to create an overall effect of inescapable grandeur is rarely thought about. Admittedly, the human aspect of this Gretchen tragedy is so grippingly expressed that it is enough to give the poem lasting value, even if one only perceives the other, the actual driving force in Faust, as an ingredient. But since the other material far outweighs the Gretchen episode in volume, at least when reading the work, where one cannot freely abridge or delete as in a stage presentation, one can still be amazed that the poem has become so established and is recognized for its high cultural value, which elevates it to the first place among the treasures of German intellect. The sparks that fly from the finely polished diamonds of thought, that flash out at us everywhere in the dialogues with Mephistopheles and in Faust's soliloquies, they have, along with the magic of the blossoms and the suffering of Gretchen, , in their colorfulness and luminosity, to save the entire work from obscurity, despite Goethe's own statement that his “Faust” could not become popular: it is too mysterious.

And we have to take this fact into account. Before Rudolf Steiner no one could lead into the deep shafts of Goethe's thought processes, his hunches and intuitions, into the world of those imaginations from which the finely honed words have received their wealth of images and eternal value. He alone makes it possible for us to go deeper into those layers of soul-forming human events from which today's insights derive their substance. They provide the carbon from which, through metamorphosis, the diamond is formed. And just as carbon could not become a diamond unless the sun's rays were captured and stored in it, so too does thought receive its light from the spiritual sun that underlies the archetype.

Rudolf Steiner has opened up the path to these deep shafts of emerging events, the path to the “Mothers”. Unlike Faust, created by Goethe, and like the Faust of legend, we should not seek this path with the means of medieval occultism, which had already become obsolete by the time Faustian figures were struggling between outdated, decadent alchemical research methods and newly emerging exact natural science at the dawn of the modern age. At that turning point in the age, people were working with many aberrant, murky means to penetrate the secrets of life: with faded magic formulas, with incantation experiments, with mediumship, hypnosis, tinctures and ointments that would also entice today's experimental psychologists to enrich their science. Rudolf Steiner showed us other ways to access the sources of life: the paths of pure thought, moral self-education, scientific and artistic work, and the free activity of the I in the service of humanity. But in order to do so, it was necessary to prepare ourselves by doing what has happened in the meantime: the renunciation of the last remnants of atavistic clairvoyance on the part of advanced European people, the immersion in the limits of natural science, the conquest of technology, the temporary severing of the personality from its spiritual source. Now we are standing before another turning point. We are on the verge of losing our personality, of letting mechanics kill the human being. The power of thinking must lead us back to our soulfulness, to the seizing of pictorial contemplation, to the understanding of the spirituality that rules in us and underlies all phenomena of life. In our striving towards the highest goal, the figure of Faust, as portrayed by Goethe, can be our example and incentive. We no longer need to be tempted by the aberrations of medieval sorcery. In spiritual science we are shown a sure path to knowledge.

The tragedy of the medieval occultists, standing at the threshold of modern times, was that through the tradition of the secret schools they still knew about the real spiritual intercourse of the most highly developed people with the intelligences of the cosmos, but they also knew that this path was now closed to them. They could not advance further than to communion with the powers of the intermediate realm. A gradual darkening, a turning away from the strict paths of spiritual research, was often the result of this experimental work with retorts and with the forces of the elements and their animistic natures. The striving went astray, grasped in desperation to the means of despair, chased after mirages. In this sense we have to understand what the soul of Faust was going through. Yet there was a strength in the intensity of striving of these researchers that awakened the I. Through suffering, their consciousness opened ever more to the alert impulses of the I. Through the conquest of matter, the human being strove toward the center of his being, where he would be able to find himself, which could bring him back to life in the spirit. In the smaller dome of the burnt Goetheanum, in which Rudolf Steiner had the representatives of the different cultural epochs of humanity created in image and color, one could also see this figure of Faust, the serious alchemist at the threshold from the Middle Ages to modern times, in a pensive gesture and with a deep gaze, raising his right hand to his face, behind whose eloquent finger gesture the word “I” appears; stretching out his hands to him, the higher, spiritual self of man hovers in the form of an angelic child. Below him looms the skeleton, the other pole of the human ego; above the figure of Faust, the inspiring genius bends towards him.

We cannot approach an understanding of Faust from a narrow-minded perspective; we must gain perspective. The lectures presented here provide us with a basis for understanding Faust. They are not commentaries written in the study, but an introduction to the fields of spiritual science based on a work of poetry inspired by them, the secrets of which can only be properly illuminated through this spiritual science. There is no other way to get to the heart of the Faust problem. And only then will this greatest poetry of the German spirit be able to become popular when spiritual science will have penetrated the cultural life of the people as much as natural science has done in the last few centuries.

Of course, there are many objections that could be raised to publishing a book like this, which seems to consist of fragments. The explanations were given on a case-by-case basis, depending on the work at the Goetheanum; the scenes in which Faust wrestles with the secrets of existence and moves into the supersensible realm were presented. The play was performed in the large carpentry workshop at the Goetheanum, where the columns of the burnt building had been constructed. The conditions were primitive, but the aim was to bring out the spiritual reality on which the play is based. The art of movement known as eurythmy, which is practised at the Goetheanum, was found to be the appropriate means of reproducing those scenes that take place in the supersensible worlds, whether in the upper or lower world. It was as if the Faust poem had been waiting for this form of expression in order to come to life on stage, to transform the otherwise unspeakable into artistic reality. What would otherwise have remained abstract and conventionally stereotyped found in eurythmy the appropriate living language. Rudolf Steiner helped and advised the actors in every detail of the performance. Our suffering consists in the fact that under the prevailing circumstances at the time, only partial performances could be given. However, they serve as a guide for us to grasp the whole. Therefore, we must not anxiously reserve this gift to a small circle. We must pass on to our contemporaries and to the future what we have received here for the formation of knowledge. Unfortunately, these are only inadequately transcribed lectures that arise from an immediately given situation, but they contain what no one else can give and what will further humanity's salvation. The people, whose task it is to conquer the spiritual, should be able to draw from the greatest work of German poetry, which at the same time aims to educate world views, the impulses that will give them strength and courage for their difficult task.

Allow me, dear assembled guests, to say a few words to introduce today's attempt at a eurythmy performance, since it cannot be assumed that all the honored guests and listeners here today have also been to some of the earlier events. And I always send these few words ahead, for the reason that this is about the exploration of a new source of art, and not about what is presented. After all, all art should not require explanation, but should work through direct observation, for direct impression. But here, for the first time, and unlike certain neighboring arts with which it can easily be confused but should not be, here for the first time the human being himself is used as an instrument. The human being places himself at the service of the artistic as a means of expression.

On the stage you will see the human being in motion, movements of the individual limbs as such, movements of people, of personalities arranged in groups in relation to one another, and much more. None of these movements are arbitrary, not even to the extent that they might be reproductions of gestures that people also make when accompanying speech with movements, but rather all of the movements what you see here in the movements is really a mute language, it is taken from the movement patterns that are in the whole human organism, just as the movement patterns in the human larynx and its neighboring organs are.

With a certain sensory-supersensory gaze – to use this Goethean expression – we try to recognize the underlying movement patterns of spoken language. We then try to bring these same movement patterns to external manifestation in this silent language of eurythmy. This is entirely in line with Goethe's view and attitude towards art. And compared to what can be achieved, for example, through the poetic arts with the help of ordinary spoken language, something far more artistic will be achieved in this eurythmy because in spoken language there is always a mixture - otherwise it would not be the servile link in our communication that it must be - there is always a mixture of the mental and the ideal element. But the intellectual, the ideal element is the death of the artistic.

Therefore, poetry that uses ordinary speech is only artistic to the extent that two elements resonate in the poetic language, one of which actually lies below the ordinary life of the soul – I would say a layer deeper than the ordinary life of the soul – and another element lies a layer higher. When the poet shapes what he experiences in his soul, two elements are added to ordinary language: firstly, a musical element and, secondly, a formative aesthetic element. Schiller is more of a musical artist, Goethe more of a plastic artist than a poet.

One can say: the less one listens to the literal content in the artistic sense of poetry, the more one tunes into the musicality that carries and accompanies language in the rhythm, the beat, and also the melody and resonates, the more one can tune in to the other side – if it is present – to the plastic, formative aspect of language, the more one comes to the actual artistry of the poetry. For the literal content is not the artistic content of poetry. The artistic content of poetry is the musical or plastic-forming element of language, which must accompany the literal element, so to speak, like an accompanying element.

Just as in music itself the mere movement is extracted, but translated into the [internalization] of the sound, so in eurythmy everything is extracted from language that is connected with the full development of the human will, so that the whole human being becomes, as it were, the larynx, and groups of people reveal themselves as speech organs on stage. And in this way something is achieved that can truly be integrated into our cultural development as a new artistic element. Perhaps it can best be indicated by saying: our language contains something, the origin of which is best pointed out by drawing attention to when human beings learn language. Just consider, my dear audience, that spoken language is learned by the human being as a child, when the human being has not yet fully awakened to the existence of the soul, when the human being is still dreaming their way into life.

And in fact there is something of dreaming into life in the linguistic element. We also think just as little, by developing the meaning of speech sounds and their composition, about how this is connected with reality, as we ultimately think about the connection with reality when dreaming. This dreamy element is indeed one side of the human soul life. It is, so to speak, an element of the soul below. The more a person develops their sense of ego, the more they also dream their way into ordinary life. And in today's world, it is by no means appropriate to work towards this dream-like quality in the arts.

This dream-like element is a dismissed element of the artistic. In eurythmy, we strive towards something that is an artistic element of the future of our culture. If one can say that the more we train the actual sound-thought element in speech, the more we enter into the realm of the dreamlike, the more our consciousness is attuned, then one must say that eurythmy is what encompasses the opposite of everything dreamlike. Eurythmy is precisely that which is achieved by the fact that the human being awakens more than he does in ordinary life. It is a more intense waking than that which is present in ordinary life as a state of consciousness. In a sense, doing eurythmy is the opposite of dreaming. Dreaming is a lulling of the human being, whereas doing eurythmy is a waking up, a being awakened of the whole human nature. In a dream, if the dream is a healthy one, we do not move, we lie still; and the movements that a person makes in a dream are only apparent. By contrast, the pictorial element, the element of imagination, is predominant in a dream.

Here in eurythmy the opposite is the case: everything dream-like is suppressed, whereas the will element comes to the fore, that which remains unconscious in dreams but is brought out here. But this makes it possible for the human being to strip away all selfishness and to perform movements that, so to speak, harmoniously enter into the whole enigmatic world of law.

And one can imagine, my dear audience, that when you look at the moving human being with this silent eurythmic language, you feel an inkling of the unraveling of natural secrets that cannot be revealed in any other way , also taking into account that Goethean artistic attitude that is so beautifully expressed in those Goethean words: When nature begins to reveal its secret to someone, they feel the deepest longing for its most worthy interpreter: art. If we now consider the whole human being as an element that speaks the silent language of eurythmy, in order to express through its inherent movements what underlies the laws of the whole world – for the human being is a compendium of the whole world, a microcosm – we achieve the highest artistic level.

Therefore, everything arbitrary, everything merely pantomime or mimic is banned in eurythmy. What comes to light here is a general human quality. In a sense, it is not the individual human being who speaks out of his or her ordinary feelings - as in ordinary sign language or dance art - but rather what is in nature itself. The aim is to achieve what Goethe says so beautifully in his book on Winckelmann - where he expresses the highest of his artistic revelation: When the healthy nature of man works as a whole, when he feels himself to be in a great, dignified and valuable whole, then the universe, having reached its goal, wants to exult and admire the summit of its own being and becoming.

The universe itself can speak through the human being. Therefore, there is nothing arbitrary about the movements of eurythmy. They are evoked by sensuous-supersensuous beholding from the movement dispositions of the whole human organism. When two people or two groups of people in completely different places, for example, perform the same motif in eurythmy, there is no more subjectivity, no more individual arbitrariness in it than when two pianists play the same piece of music in their own way. If you still find pantomime in the things, it is because we are still in the early stages of eurythmy. This will be overcome in time.

So you will see, for example, how motifs are presented eurythmically on the one hand, and how these motifs are accompanied musically; because the musical in its continuous regularity is only another expression of what is achieved plastically and flexibly through eurythmy. But you will also see that this same motif, which is expressed through the silent language of eurythmy, can be accompanied in recitation and declamation as a poetic motif. In doing so, you will notice that it is precisely this art of recitation, in imitation of eurythmy, that must in turn go back to the good old forms of recitation and declamation.

Therefore, the art of recitation is not developed here in the way it is today. This can easily lead to misunderstandings and misjudgment in the present day. In the present day, recitation as practised here is perceived as thoroughly unartistic, because the essence of recitation is seen as being to bring out the literal content, that is, the prose content of the poetry. Recitation and declamation are quite different here, for otherwise one could not accompany the eurythmy with declamation or recitation. The musical element, the beat, the rhythm, the melody, that is, what is already eurythmic in the treatment of speech, in speech formation, becomes the essence of the art of recitation when the musical element is most intensely permeated by speech. Therefore, just as eurythmy itself is still being challenged today, so too will the way of reciting – which must be as it is here, if it is to accompany eurythmy – still be challenged.

This is our intention, and so we are trying to present through eurythmy, to achieve through these eurythmic presentations, that which can only be attained outside of thought: the unraveling of the secrets of the world. For the secrets of the world ultimately reveal themselves only through that which human beings can reveal from within themselves. Goethe so beautifully expressed: What would all the millions of suns, stars and planets be worth, if not for the human soul that ultimately absorbs it all? and takes delight in it, enjoys it? If one can say: that which weaves and works in the world can be represented through human creativity, then many of the secrets of the world are revealed without the detour of thought. And that is precisely what eurythmy is intended to achieve.

Now, you will see that the poems we are presenting today, some of which have already been felt in eurythmy in the poetic disposition, can easily be presented in a eurythmic way, for example, by imagining nature as in the “Quellenwunder”, which is presented here.

I would like to say that our eurythmy has three aspects: firstly, as an art it should present itself to the world. Secondly, however, it also has an essentially hygienic element, a health element. If eurythmy becomes more popular in the widest circles, it will be found that by placing the human being in the whole of the laws of the world in a non-selfish way, as is the case in eurythmy, a healing element is brought into play in the human being. And thirdly, it has a pedagogical side.

Ordinary gymnastics – which should not be done away with, but rather supplemented by eurythmy – is focused one-sidedly on the body, taking into account only the physiology, only the physical form. Eurythmy, on the other hand, takes into account the whole human being and aims to express in movement that which works through body, soul and spirit. Thus, in contrast to mere physiological gymnastics, which works on the body, what is expressed through eurythmy is a spiritualized form of gymnastics, alongside the artistic aspect of eurythmy.

In this way eurythmy can truly become a fruitful element in the development of our time. But don't think that we are being immodest when we speak of what we can already do in eurythmy today. We are our own harshest critics and judges. We know that we still have to ask for leniency for our beginnings. We know that it can perhaps only be called an attempt at a beginning. But we are also firmly convinced that if eurythmy is met with interest from our contemporaries, it has an undreamt-of potential for development and that, if it further developed by us, but probably by others, [that] eurythmy will be able to establish itself as a fully-fledged younger art alongside its fully-fledged older sister arts.

In several lecture-courses given over the years in the different Groups and attended by many of the friends here to-day, we have endeavoured to study the Gospels of St. John, St. Luke and St. Matthew and the great event in Palestine, the Mystery of Golgotha, from three different points of view.

One result of these studies should have been to establish in our souls a growing realisation of the greatness of this unique event. We have understood that the reason why there are four Gospels is that their authors, writing as inspired occultists, each wished to describe the great event from a special angle, just as a photograph of an object is taken from a particular side. By combining the pictures, each taken from a different angle, an idea of the reality can be obtained. Each of the Evangelists makes it possible for us to study one aspect in particular of the great event in Palestine.

The Gospel of St. John gives us insight into the great events in Palestine by opening out a vista of the highest human goals and at the same time of the sublime realities of the spiritual worlds.

The Gospel of St. Luke unveils the mysteries connected with the personality of Jesus of Nazareth, with the Solomon Jesus and the Nathan Jesus, until the moment when the Christ descends into him.

The Gospel of St. Matthew, as those of you who heard the lectures will know and others will be able to read, shows how the bodily nature in which the Christ was to incarnate for three years was prepared by mysterious processes connected with the racial stock of the ancient Hebrew people.

In a certain respect the Gospel of St. Mark can lead us to supreme heights in our study of Christianity and give us insight into many matters communicated by the other Gospels but in a less dramatic way. And so this evening I will take the opportunity of saying something in reference to the Gospel of St. Mark.

We must realise how necessary it is to study many subjects with which superficial modern thought has no inclination to concern itself. If we are to understand the Gospel of St. Mark in its depths we must acquaint ourselves to some extent with the very different character of the language in which men expressed themselves at the time when Christ Jesus was on the Earth. Let me try to convey to you what I mean by using contrasts as it were of light and shadow.

We make use of language to express what we want to say and to reveal what lives in our souls. It is in the way in which language is used as a means of expressing the inner life of soul that the several epochs in the evolution of humanity differ radically from one another. If we go back to the ancient Hebrew epoch and to the wonderful modes of expression used in the temple-language, we find that there was a quite different way of clothing the secrets of the soul in words—a way undreamed of nowadays. In the old Hebrew language only the consonants were written, the vowels being inserted afterwards; and when a word was uttered the echoes of a whole world reverberated in it—not, as is the case to-day, some more or less abstract concept. The reason why the vowels were not written was that they were an indication of the speaker's inmost being, whereas the consonants were intended to depict external objects or conditions. For example, whenever an ancient Hebrew wrote the letter B—or what corresponded to our present B—it always evoked in him a sense of warmth and a picture of some outer condition, in this case something in which one could be enclosed, as in a shelter or a house. The sound B could not be uttered without this feeling as an accompaniment. Again, the sound A (ah) could not be uttered without conveying the impression or image of something inwardly powerful, of a radiating force. The content of the soul thus projected into words streamed out into space and into other souls. Language was therefore much more alive, much more related to the secrets of existence than is the case nowadays.

This is one side—the light side I wanted to convey. But there is also the other side—the shadow side—constituted by the fact that in the use of our language we have to a great extent become utterly shallow. Our language expresses only abstractions, generalisations. People no longer have any feeling about this but it could not be otherwise in times when language is used, even for literary purposes, before writers have any spiritual content to convey, when enormous masses of printed matter circulate everywhere, when everyone feels that he must write something and nothing is considered unsuitable as subject-matter. When our Society was founded I discovered that certain authors were attaching themselves to it simply out of curiosity, in the hope of finding material for their novels. Why, they thought, should they not find characters among the Members who could be portrayed in their stories? So it behoves us to realise that our language nowadays has become abstract, commonplace and vacuous and there is neither a sense of its holiness nor, as was once the case, a feeling of responsibility towards its use. That is why it is so extraordinarily difficult to put into modern words the great facts proclaimed by the Gospels. People cannot understand that our modern language is empty when compared, for example, with the fulness of meaning implicit in a word of the ancient Greek language. When we read the Bible to-day we are reading something that in comparison with the original wording has been sifted not once but two or three times, and it is not the best but the worst that has remained. It does, of course, seem natural to quote from modern versions of the Bible, but we go astray most disastrously of all when we quote the Gospel of St. Mark in its modern rendering.

You know that at the very beginning of the Gospel of St. Mark, in Weizsacker's supposedly excellent translation—although as might be guessed from the high reputation it enjoys to-day, it is anything but excellent!—these words are found:

“As it is written in the prophet Isaiah: Behold I send my messenger before you who shall prepare the way before you. Listen how the voice is heard in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”
[The words in the English Authorised Version are: ‘As it is written in the Prophets, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee. The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’]

When we read a passage like this it would be self-deception to pretend that we understand it; if we are honest we shall admit that it is utterly incomprehensible to us. The passage is either of no significance or it says something we cannot understand. The first thing to do, then, is to assemble concepts enabling us to grasp the meaning of this saying of Isaiah. Isaiah was referring to the event which was to be of supreme significance for the evolution of humanity. What has already been said gives some indication of what Isaiah was foretelling in these words.

In ancient days man was endowed with a kind of clairvoyance and through the forces of his soul was able to rise into the divine-spiritual world. When this happened he was not using his Ego, his ‘I’, at the stage of development it had then reached; he was using his astral body which contained the powers of seership, whereas the forces rooted in the Ego were only gradually being awakened by perception of the physical world. The ‘I’ uses physical instruments, but in earlier times, if a man were seeking revelation, he used his astral body, seeing and perceiving through it. The process of evolution itself consisted in the transition from use of the astral body to use of the ‘I’. The Christ Impulse was to be the most powerful factor in the development of the ‘I’. If the words of St. Paul: ‘Not I but Christ in me’ are fulfilled in the ‘I’, then the ‘I’ is able to grow into the spiritual world through its own forces, whereas formerly this was possible only for the astral body.

This, then, is how evolution proceeded: Man once used his astral body as an organ of perception, but the astral body became less and less able to serve that purpose. When the time of Christ's coming was drawing near, it was losing its power to see into the spiritual world. Man could no longer be united with that world through his astral body and the ‘I’ was not yet strong enough to reveal it. That was the state of things when the time of Christ's coming was approaching.

In the course of human evolution the important steps which are eventually to take place have always to be prepared in advance. This was so in the case of the Christ Impulse too; but there was necessarily a period of transition. There could be no sudden change from the time when man felt his astral body becoming unreceptive to the spiritual world, becoming barren and desolate, to a time when the ‘I’ was kindled into activity through the Christ Impulse. What happened was that as the result of a certain influence from the spiritual world a few human beings were able to experience in the astral body something of what was later to be seen and known by the ‘I’. Egohood was prepared for, anticipated as it were in the astral body. It was through the ‘I’ and its development that man became Earth-Man in the real sense. The astral body properly belonged to the evolutionary period of the Old Moon, when the Angels were at the human stage. Man is at the human stage on the Earth. On the Old Moon it was appropriate for man to use his astral body. Everything else was merely preparation for the development of the ‘I’. The earliest stages of Earth-evolution proper were a recapitulation of the Old Moon-evolution, for man could never become fully man in the astral body; on the Old Moon it was only the Angels who could reach the human stage in the astral body. And just as the Christ lived in earthly man in order to inspire his ‘I’, so there were Angels who, having reached the human stage on the Old Moon, prophetically inspired man's astral body as a preparation for Egohood. A time was to come in human evolution on the Earth when man would be ready for the development of the ‘I’. On the Old Moon the Angels had developed to the highest stage, but as we have heard, only in the astral body. Now, in order that man might be prepared for Egohood, it was necessary that in exceptional conditions, and through grace, certain individuals should be inspired to work on the Earth as Angels; although they were men, the reality was that Angels were working in and through them.

This is a concept of great importance, without which there can be no understanding of human evolution in line with that of occultism. It is easy enough to say simply that everything is maya, but that is a mere abstraction. We must be able to say: Yes, a man is standing in front of me, but he is maya—indeed who knows if he is really a man? Perhaps what seems to be a human figure is only the outer sheath; perhaps some quite other being is using this sheath in order to accomplish a task that is beyond man's capacity.—I have given an indication of this in The Portal of Initiation.

Such an event in the history of humanity actually took place when the Individuality who had lived in Elijah was reborn as John the Baptist. An Angel entered into the soul of John the Baptist in that incarnation, using his bodily nature and also his soul to accomplish what no human being could have accomplished. In John the Baptist there lived an Angel whose mission was to herald in advance the Egohood that was to be present in its fulness in Jesus of Nazareth. It is of the greatest importance to realise that John the Baptist was maya and that an Angel, a Messenger, was living in him. This is indeed what the Greek says: Lo, I send my Messenger. The Messenger is an Angel. But nobody pays attention to what is actually said here. A deep mystery, enacted in the Baptist and foretold by Isaiah, is indicated. Isaiah foretold that the future John the Baptist would be maya—in reality he was to be the vehicle for the Angel, the Messenger who was to proclaim what man will become if he takes the Christ Impulse into himself. Angels announce in advance what man will later become. The passage in question might therefore be translated: Lo, the bestower of Egohood sends his Messenger (Angel) before you to whom Egohood is to be given.

Let us now see if we can discover the meaning of the third sentence. We must first try to picture the conditions prevailing in man's inner life when the astral body had gradually lost the power to send out its forces like feelers and to see clairvoyantly into the divine-spiritual world. Formerly, when the astral body was activated, man was able to look into that world, but this faculty was disappearing and darkness spreading within him. He had once been able to expand his astral body over all the beings of the spiritual world, but now he was inwardly desolate, inwardly isolated—the Greek word is ἔρημος. At that time the human soul lived in isolation, in desolation. This is what the Greek text tells us: Lo, a voice seems to speak in the desolation of the soul—call it ‘wilderness’ of the soul if you like—when the astral body can no longer expand into the divine-spiritual world. Hear the cry in the wilderness, in the desolation of the soul!

What is it that is being proclaimed in advance? First of all we must be clear about the meaning of the word Kyrios, when it was used in Hebrew but also still in Greek in reference to manifestations of the soul and spirit. To translate it simply as ‘the Lord’, with the usual connotation, is sheer nonsense. In ancient times everyone using the word Kyrios knew perfectly well that its meaning was connected with the development of man's soul-life and its mysteries. In the astral body, as we know, are the forces of thinking, feeling and willing; the soul thinks, feels and wills. These are the three forces working in the soul but they are actually its servants. In earlier times man was under their domination and he obeyed them, but as his evolution progressed these forces were to become the servants of the Kyrios, the Ruler, the Lord—in short, of the ‘I’. Used in relation to the soul, the word Kyrios actually meant the ‘I’. At this stage it would no longer be true to say: ‘The Divine-Spiritual thinks, feels and wills in me’, but rather: ‘I think, I feel, I will.’ The passage should be rendered more or less as follows.—Prepare yourselves, you human souls, to move along those paths that will awaken the Kyrios, the powerful ‘I’ within you; listen to the cry in the solitude of the soul. Make ready the path (or way) of the ‘I’, the Lord of the soul. Open the way for his forces so that he may no longer be the slave but the Ruler of thinking, feeling and willing. Lo, the power that is the ‘I’ sends his Angel before you, the Angel who is to give you the possibility of understanding the cry in the solitude of the astral soul. Prepare the paths of the ‘I’, open the way for the forces of the ‘I’.—Such is the meaning of these significant words of the prophet Isaiah; they point to the greatest of all events in the evolution of humanity. You will now understand the sense in which he speaks about the future John the Baptist, indicating how man's soul in its solitude longs for the coming of its Lord and Ruler, the ‘I’. Such is the real meaning of this passage and in this sense it is to be understood.

Why was John the Baptist able to be the bearer of the Angel? It was because he had received a particular form of Initiation. Initiations are not all identical in character and individuals who have a definite mission to fulfil must undergo a special form of Initiation. Now the writing of the stars in the heavens is so ordered as to reveal the nature and facts of happenings in the spiritual world. Thus a man may receive the Sun-Initiation, which means that he is initiated into the mysteries of the spiritual world of Ahura Mazdao—the spiritual world of which the Sun is the outer expression. But there are twelve forms of the Sun-Initiation, each of which differs from the other eleven. A man will receive a particular form of Initiation according to the mission he is to fulfil for humanity. His Initiation, though still a Sun-Initiation, may be of such a kind that the forces stream in as they do when the Sun is standing, for instance, in the constellation of Cancer; and these forces will be very different in the case of an Initiation connected with the Sun in Libra. These are the expressions used to indicate specialised Initiations. Individuals chosen for a mission as lofty as that of John the Baptist must receive Initiation in the form that can give the strength necessary for the fulfilment of their mission. And so in order that he might become the bearer of the Angel, John the Baptist received the Sun-Initiation originating from the constellation of Aquarius. The Sun in Aquarius is the symbol for the form of Initiation received by John the Baptist in order that he might become the bearer of the Angel. He received the Sun-forces which flow when the Sun is standing in Aquarius—the Waterman. The sign was the symbol indicating that John the Baptist had received this particular Initiation. In actual fact the name Aquarius, or Waterman, was given to the zodiacal sign because those who had received that Initiation acquired the faculty which enabled John the Baptist, for example, to achieve what he did. When men were plunged under water, their etheric bodies were momentarily loosened and in that condition it was possible for them to perceive what action was of the greatest importance at that particular time. Baptism in the Jordan revealed to those who underwent it the momentous significance of that period in history. It was to this end that John had received the baptismal Initiation and because this was connected with the rays of the Sun streaming from its position in a particular constellation, the constellation too was known symbolically as the Waterman. The name of the constellation was derived from the human faculty connected with it, and not vice versa.

Nowadays many learned ignoramuses try to explain spiritual happenings of this character by bringing Heaven down to Earth, saying that such things are simply indications of the movement of the Sun through the Zodiac. These learned gentlemen, who fundamentally know nothing, explain events in humanity by reference to the heavens. In the case of John the Baptist, actually the opposite was true: the zodiacal sign was used to express something that had occurred on Earth and was then transferred to the Heavens.

John the Baptist could therefore rightly say: ‘I baptise you with water.’ This was the same as saying to his intimate disciples, as he might well have done, that he had received the Aquarius Initiation. The movement of the Sun through the Zodiac as seen with physical eyes is in the direction from Leo to Virgo; the spiritual movement is from Aquarius to Pisces. Consequently John the Baptist was able to proclaim something that would work as the forces of the Sun in Pisces and not in Aquarius; also that the Being who was to come would give a higher kind of Baptism than he himself was able to give. The spiritual Sun progresses from Aquarius to Pisces and when this happens the Aquarius Baptism becomes a Baptism with spiritual water—Pisces, the Fishes. Hence the ancient symbol of fishes for the Being who was the bearer of the Christ. Just as John, through very special influences, had received the Aquarius Initiation, so all the mysteries enacted around and in Jesus of Nazareth belonged to a Pisces Initiation. The Sun had moved forward, spiritually, from one zodiacal constellation to another, indicating that Jesus of Nazareth had passed through a Pisces Initiation.

All this is hinted at in St. Mark's Gospel but such things have to be presented in pictures. Christ Jesus draws to Himself those who are seeking that of which Pisces is the symbol. Hence His first disciples are all of them fishermen. The indication of the Sun's progression into Pisces is clear when we read the words of John the Baptist: ‘I have baptised you with water, but He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit.’ And as Christ passes along the shore of the Sea of Galilee, that is to say, when the Sun has moved so far that its counterpart could be seen rising in Pisces, the fishermen known as Simon and Simon's brother, James and James's brother, are inspired to follow Him.

How can we understand all this? We shall not understand it unless we go more deeply into the linguistic expressions used in those times. Our modern way of expressing ourselves is slovenly and banal. Thus when a human being is standing in front of us, we say: Here is a man—similarly when there are two or three. But what is there in front of us is only maya; if we see a being with two legs and a human face the only way of expressing what we see in our modern language is to say: That is a man. But what does occultism take this ‘man’ to be? In the form in which he stands before us he is nothing but maya—approximately as real as a rainbow in the sky. A rainbow is a reality only as long as the necessary conditions of rain and sunshine are present; as soon as the relation between sunshine and rain changes, the rainbow vanishes. It is exactly the same in the case of a man. He is only a confluence of forces of the Macrocosm; we must look for forces in the heavens, in the Macrocosm. For the occultist, what we assume on Earth to be a man is simply nothingness. The truth is that forces are streaming from above downwards and from below upwards, and they intersect. And just as a particular combination of rain and sun produces a rainbow, so do forces streaming together from above and from below out of the Macrocosm create a phenomenon, an illusory image, which we take to be a man. But the man we see before us is really nothing but maya. Where we think we see a man there are intersecting cosmic forces. You must take this quite seriously. The man as he stands before us is merely a shadow of many forces. But the being who manifests in the man may well be at a different place altogether from the point where the man with his two legs is standing.

Now think of three human beings. One is a peasant in ancient Persia, working his plough in the Persian countryside. He looks like a man, but in reality he is a soul whose forces are sustained by some world from above or from below, and if we are to have real knowledge of him we must ascend to the realm of these forces. The second man is possibly some kind of official in ancient Persia. He too is formed from another world through intersecting forces and again, if we are to know him in the real sense, we must ascend to the realm of those forces. Finally, think of a third Persian, or one of whom we should have to say even more emphatically: he is a veritable illusion, a phantom. To discover the truth about him we should have to ascend to the Sun to find the forces sustaining this phantom figure. There above, among the mysteries of the Sun, we should find what we might call the Golden Star—Zarathustra. Rays are sent down and on the Earth there lives the being we call Zarathustra, though his essential being is not there at all.

The important thing is to realise that in ancient times men were well aware of the significance of names. Names were not given as they are to-day but according to what was really living in a human being, apart altogether from the outer appearance. An old man at the time of Christ would have understood very well what was meant if someone had pointed to John the Baptist, saying: There is the Angel of God! The outer appearance would have been disregarded as a secondary consideration and attention paid only to the inner reality.—And now suppose the same mode of expression had been used in connection with Christ Jesus. What would have been said of Him in times when such things were understood? Nobody would have so much as dreamed of giving the appellation Christ Jesus to the body of flesh moving about the land; the body was regarded merely as the sign that what was streaming down spiritually from the Sun had gathered together at this particular point. And when this body—the body of Jesus—moved from one place to another it was simply that the Sun-force was being made visible. This Sun-force was able of itself to move from place to place, independently of a physical body. Occasionally, Christ Jesus was said to be ‘in the house’, that is to say, in the flesh; but the Being in the flesh also moved about without a body. In the Gospel of St. John, above all, the Evangelist often writes exactly as if the Sun-force were present in a body of flesh when in reality the Christ is moving from place to place purely in the spirit.

That is why it is so important for the deeds of Christ Jesus always to be brought into relationship with the physical Sun—which is the outward expression for the spiritual world when gathered together at the point where the physical body is present. For example, when Christ Jesus performs an act of healing, it is the Sun-force that heals, but the Sun must be in the right position in the heavens. Thus: ‘At even, when the sun did set they brought unto Him all that were diseased ...’ and so on. It was important to indicate that this healing force can flow down only when the physical Sun has set and is working in a purely spiritual way. Again when Christ Jesus needs special power in order to do His works, He must draw it from the spiritual Sun, not from the physically visible Sun. ‘And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, He went out ...’ The path of the Sun and the power of the Sun are expressly indicated, furthermore that it is the Sun-force that is working, that Jesus is simply the external sign and that this path taken by the Sun-force could also become visible to the naked eye. Wherever St. Mark's Gospel speaks of the Christ, what is meant is the Sun-force which, in that epoch of Earth-evolution, worked with special strength upon the land called Palestine. Moreover the Sun-force, gathered into a focus, was moving from place to place, and the body of Jesus was the outward sign making the movement of the Sun-force visible to physical sight. The paths of Jesus in Palestine were the paths of the Sun-force that had come down to the Earth. If you trace the paths of Jesus to form a kind of chart you will have before you the indication of a cosmic happening—the Sun-force had penetrated into the land of Palestine. It is a macrocosmic process—that is the essential point. This is made especially evident by the writer of St. Mark's Gospel, who was well aware that a body which was the bearer of a principle such as the Christ-Principle must be entirely subservient to it. The Gospel therefore directs attention to the world so gloriously proclaimed by Zarathustra—the world which lies behind the material world and influences the life of man. Through Christ Jesus it was again made clear how the forces of this spiritual world work into the Earth. Hence in the body—the body of the Nathan Jesus as we have heard [See Lecture-Course on the Gospel of St. Luke, lectures IV–VII.]—which was influenced in a particular way by the Zarathustra-Individuality, it was inevitable that a kind of repetition should take place of happenings connected with Zarathustra.

We know some of the beautiful legends about Zarathustra. Almost immediately after his birth occurred the first miracle, that known as the ‘Zarathustra smile’. The second miracle was when Duransurun, the King ruling the district where Zarathustra was born, determined to murder the child about whom retrograde Magi had made certain statements. But when the King was on the point of stabbing the child his arm was paralysed. Finding that he could not use his dagger to do away with the child, he ordered him to be taken out into the wilderness and left among the wild beasts. This is the expression used to indicate that already in earliest childhood Zarathustra was destined to see what everyone is bound to see if his gaze has not been cleansed of impurities. Instead of the majestic Group-Souls and the higher spiritual Beings, he sees the emanations of his untamed fantasies. This is what is meant when we are told that Zarathustra was left in the wilderness among the wild beasts, but remained unharmed. This was the third miracle; the fourth was again connected with wild beasts. And always it was the good spirits of Ahura Mazdao who ministered to him.

These miracles are to some extent repeated in St. Mark's Gospel. ‘And immediately the Spirit driveth him into the wilderness’ (the word really means solitude). ‘And he was there in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him.’

It is made clear to us here that the body was being prepared to become a focus of macrocosmic processes. What had happened to Zarathustra had to be repeated in the encounter with the wild beasts. The body became the bearer of macrocosmic processes.

In its very first lines the Gospel of St. Mark presents us with a vista of majestic grandeur and my aim in this lecture has been to show you how this Gospel acquires new life and power if only the words are understood in their right sense—not in that of our commonplace modern speech but in the sense of ancient language, when whole worlds lay behind each word. Our modern language needs to be recast in many ways before it is possible to discover what the words of ancient languages contained. When we say that man lives on the Earth and develops his ‘I’, or that he was present on the Old Moon when it was the Angels who reached their human stage—all this must be borne in mind when we read: Behold, I send my Angel before men. These words cannot be understood without the preliminary knowledge communicated by Spiritual Science.

If people were really honest to-day they would admit that the words at the beginning of St. Mark's Gospel are unintelligible to them. But instead they adopt an arrogant attitude and maintain that Spiritual Science is so much fantasy and puts all kinds of complications into what would otherwise be quite simple. But the fact of the matter is that people to-day have no real knowledge; they no longer recognise the principle adopted, for instance, in ancient Persia, when the sacred records were re-written from epoch to epoch in order to be clothed in a new form suited to every period. In this way the divine Word was recast in the form of the Zend Avesta, then again recast, and what we have to-day is its latest form. The Persian scriptures were, in fact, re-written seven times. One of the tasks of Anthroposophy is to teach men how necessary it is that records in which sacred mysteries are clothed in words should be re-written from epoch to epoch. For if we want to preserve the sublime language of the ancient writings we should not attempt in our re-writing to adhere pedantically to the old words; we should rather try to translate them into words that are immediately intelligible in the present age. An attempt to do this was made in the summer in the lecture-course on Genesis, and you will have realised then how many of the words must be re-cast. The lecture today may have given you some idea of how the same principle applies to the Gospel of St. Mark.

When we study the Gospels in the light of Spiritual Science we find descriptions of momentous, overwhelming experiences. And it is only when Spiritual Science has been studied much more widely than it is to-day, that men will be able to form an adequate idea of what has been poured into these Gospels out of the spiritual experiences undergone by their authors. They will realise then that many things become apparent only when the accounts given in the four Gospels are studied side by side.

Let me first of all call attention to the fact that in St. Matthew's Gospel the account of the Christ Impulse is preceded by references to childhood and a record of the generations of the Hebrew people from their first ancestor onwards. In this Gospel the account of the Christ Impulse takes us to the beginning of the Hebrew people from whom the bearer of the Christ Being is born. In St. Mark's Gospel we meet the Christ Impulse at the very beginning. The whole childhood story is omitted. We are simply told that John the Baptist was the forerunner of the Christ Impulse and the Gospel then begins at once with the description of the Baptism by John in the Jordan. From St. Luke's Gospel we get a different childhood story which traces the ancestry of Jesus of Nazareth much further back, ‘to the very beginning of humanity on Earth; the descent is traced to Adam who, it is then said, ‘was the son of God’. This indicates clearly that the human nature in Jesus of Nazareth is to be traced right back to the time when man was formed from divine-spiritual Beings. Thus St. Luke's Gospel takes us back to an epoch when man must not be regarded as an earthly being incarnated in the flesh, but as a spiritual being born from the womb of divine spirituality. In St. John's Gospel, again without any childhood story or any mention of the destinies of Jesus of Nazareth, we are led in a very profound way to the Christ Being Himself.

In the course of the development of Spiritual Science we have followed a definite path in our study of the Gospels. We began with the Gospel which reveals the very highest insight into the spirituality of Christ—namely, the Gospel of St. John. Then we studied the Gospel of St. Luke, in order to understand how the highest spirituality in human nature reveals itself when man's descent is traced back to the time when he came forth, as earthly man, from the Godhead. Study of St. Matthew's Gospel then helped us to understand the Christ Impulse as proceeding from the ancient Hebrew people. Study of St. Mark's Gospel has been left to the last. To understand the reason for this, many subjects recently touched upon must be connected both with facts already familiar to us and with others that are new. That is why in the last lecture I said something about aspects of human life in connection with the several members of man's being. I shall be speaking in a similar strain to-day, as a kind of introduction to certain aspects of evolution. For it will become more and more necessary to recognise the conditions upon which human evolution depends—indeed not only to recognise but also to heed them.

As they advance into the future men will become more and more independent, more and more individualistic. Belief in external authorities will be increasingly replaced by belief in the authority of a man's own soul. This is a necessary trend of evolution. If, however, it is to bring wellbeing and blessing, man must have knowledge of his own being, and it cannot be said that humanity in general has yet advanced very far in this respect.

What is particularly characteristic of the present day? There is no shortage of ideals and programmes for the good of humanity. Practically every single individual comes forward as a small-scale Messiah and is anxious to create a picture of ideal human happiness. Above all there is no shortage of associations and societies founded for the purpose of introducing into our culture something they consider essential. There is also abundant faith in these programmes and ideals: indeed so convinced of their value are their promoters that it will soon be necessary to set up a kind of Council to establish the infallibility of individuals concerned! All this is deeply characteristic of our age.

Spiritual Science does not stop us from thinking about our future, but indicates certain fundamental laws and conditions which cannot be disregarded with impunity if its impulses are to achieve any positive effect. What does a modern man believe? An ideal takes shape in his soul and he considers himself capable of making it everywhere a reality. He does not pause to reflect that the time may not be ripe for its fulfilment, that the picture he has formed of it may be a caricature or that it can become mature only in a more or less distant future. In short, it is very difficult for a man today to understand that every event must be prepared for and occur at a particular point of time determined by macrocosmic conditions. Nevertheless this is a universal law and holds good for each individual as well as for the whole human race. We can recognise how this law affects an individual when we study his life in the light of Spiritual Science for we can turn to experiences lying very near at hand.

I am not going just to generalise but will keep to what can be observed. Let us suppose that someone conceives an idea which fires him with enthusiasm; it takes definite form in his soul and he is anxious to bring it in some way to fulfilment. The idea comes into his head and his heart urges him to act. In such circumstances a man of to-day will find it almost impossible to wait; he will go all out to bring this idea to fulfilment. Let us suppose that the idea is, in itself, insignificant, or merely a matter of information about scientific or artistic facts. An occultist, who knows the law, will not immediately proclaim his unfamiliar idea to the world. An occultist knows that such ideas live, first of all, in the astral body: the presence of enthusiasm in the soul is sufficient evidence of this, for enthusiasm is preeminently a force in the astral body. Now as a rule it will be harmful if at this stage a man does not let the idea rest as it is but proclaims it at once to his fellow-men or to the world, for the idea must follow a quite definite course. It must take deeper and deeper hold of the astral body and then impress itself into the etheric body like the imprint of a seal. If the idea is of no great importance this process may take seven days—that is the minimum time necessary. And if a man storms around with his idea he is always apt to overlook something very important, namely that after seven days there will be a subtle but quite definite experience. This experience we may have if we pay proper attention. But if a man rushes wildly around trying to launch the idea into the world, the soul will certainly not be alert to what may happen on the seventh day. In the case of an idea of only slight importance we shall always find that on the seventh day we don't really know what to do with it, and it fades away. We may feel ill at ease, perhaps inwardly worried and oppressed with all kinds of doubts, yet in spite of this we find ourselves attuned to the idea. Enthusiasm has changed into an intimate feeling of love: the idea is now in the etheric body.

If the idea is to continue to thrive it must now lay hold of the outer astral substance which always surrounds us. Hence it must pass from the astral body into the etheric body and from there into the outer astrality. For this, seven more days are needed. And unless the man in question is such a novice that when the idea begins to worry him he wants to get rid of it, he will realise, if he pays attention to what happens, that after this period something from without comes to meet his idea; he then recognises that it has been beneficial to wait fourteen days, because now he is not alone with his idea. It is as if he had been inspired from the Macrocosm, as if something had penetrated into his idea from the outer world. He will then for the first time feel in harmony with the whole spiritual world and will realise that it brings something to him when he has something to bring to it. A certain feeling of contentment arises after a period of about twice seven days.

But now the idea has to retrace its path, to pass from the outer astrality back into the etheric body. It has then become concrete and the temptation to communicate it to the world is very great. We must resist this with all our might, for there is now the danger that because the idea still lies in the etheric body, it may pass coldly into the world. If we wait another seven days the coldness leaves it and it is again filled with the warmth of the individual astral body and takes on a personal quality. That to which we gave birth and have allowed to be baptised by the Gods may now be given over to the world as our own. Every impulse in the soul must pass through these last three stages before it becomes fully mature. This holds good for ideas of no great significance.

In the case of an idea of weight and importance, longer periods will be necessary, but always in this rhythm of seven to seven.

You see, then, that what really matters is not, as a modern man thinks, to have an impulse in his soul but to be able to bear this impulse with patience, to let it be baptised by the World-Spirit and to let it live and achieve a state of maturity. Other such laws could be cited for the soul's development is a process full of ordered rhythms. For example, on some particular day—and such days vary greatly—we may feel that we have been blessed by the World-Spirit and ideas surge up from within us. In these circumstances it is a good thing not to lose our head but to recognise that after nineteen days a similar process of fructification may be expected. As I say, the development of the human soul is a process full of regular rhythms. On the whole, man has a healthy instinct not to carry these things to excess or to disregard them entirely. He takes heed of them, especially if he is one who aims at developing higher qualities and who allows them to mature; he heeds these things without being consciously aware of the law. It would be easy to show that in the creative work of artists there is evidence of a certain periodicity, a certain rhythmic process, a rhythm of days or weeks or years. This is particularly apparent in the lives of artists of the first rank—in the life of Goethe, for instance. It can easily be shown that something arises in Goethe's soul, becomes mature only after a period of four times seven years, and then appears in a different form.

In line with the tendency of the times, the general attitude might be: Yes, that is all very well; there may be such laws, but why should people trouble much about them? They will observe them instinctively.—Now that may have been true in the past; but because men are becoming more independent, more and more attentive to their own individuality, they must also learn to develop an inner calendar. Just as there are outer calendars of importance for everyday matters, so in the future, as the intensity of man's soul-life increases, he will have a feeling of ‘inner weeks’, of an inner ebb and flow of life, of inner ‘Sundays’, for the trend of humanity is towards an increasing inwardness. As we move towards the future, much of what man has experienced in the past as a result of the rhythmical periodicity of his life will be experienced later on as a macrocosmic resurrection in the life of soul. It will then seem to be an obvious duty to avoid bringing tumult and disorder into evolution by constantly transgressing the laws of the soul's development. Men will come to realise that the wish to communicate immediately whatever takes root in the soul is only a subtler form of egoism. They will come to feel the spirit working in the soul, not abstractly, as nowadays, but in conformity with law. And when some idea occurs to them, when they may desire to communicate some inner experience to others, they will not set about their fellow-men like raging bulls but listen to what spirit-filled nature has to say in their inmost soul.

What will it mean for men when they come more and more to recognise the spirituality which works in the world in obedience to law and by which they should let themselves be inspired? The vast majority of men to-day still have no feeling for such things. They do not believe that spiritual beings will lay hold of and work within their soul according to law. Even those who sincerely desire to work for cultural progress will for a long time yet regard it as madness to speak of this ordered activity of the spirit. And owing to the antipathy that is so prevalent to-day, those whose belief in the spirit is founded on spiritual-scientific knowledge will find that certain words in St. Mark's Gospel are directly applicable to them, and indeed to the present time:

‘But when they shall lead you, and deliver you up, take no thought beforehand what ye shall speak, neither do ye premeditate: but whatsoever shall be given you in that hour, that speak ye; for it is not ye that speak, but the Holy Ghost’ (xiii, 11).

We must try to understand a passage such as this, which has special significance for our own time because of its place in the whole framework not only of St. Mark's Gospel but in that of the other Gospels as well. Generally speaking, St. Mark's Gospel contains a good deal that is also found in the other Gospels. But there is one very remarkable passage which does not occur in the other Gospels and is particularly noteworthy because of the silly statements that have been made about it by biblical commentators. It is the passage where we are told that after Christ Jesus had chosen His disciples, He went out to preach to the people:

‘And they went into an house. And the multitude cometh together again, so that they could not so much as eat bread. And when his friends heard of it, they went out to lay hold on him, for, they said, he is beside himself’ (iii, 20-1).

When we consider that in the future course of human evolution St. Paul's saying, ‘Not I, but Christ in me’, will become more and more true, that only an Ego which receives into itself the Christ Impulse can work fruitfully, we are justified in regarding the passage as particularly relevant to the present time. The destiny lived through by Christ Jesus during the events in Palestine will be lived through by the whole of mankind in the course of the ages. In the immediate future it will be more and more noticeable that wherever Christ is proclaimed with inner understanding, intense antipathy will be displayed by those who instinctively avoid Spiritual Science. It will not be difficult in the future to see how a prototypal event in Christ's life described in St. Mark's Gospel is coming to expression. Men's attitude to daily life, or the way in which art develops, and more particularly what is so widely accepted as science, will make it clear that what was said of Christ will be said of those who proclaim the Spirit in the truly Christian sense: There are many among them who seem to be beside themselves.

Again and again we must repeat that as time goes on the most important facts of the spiritual life as presented by Spiritual Science will be regarded as fantastic nonsense by the greater part of humanity. And from the Gospel of St. Mark we should draw the strength we need to stand firm in face of opposition to the truths that will be unveiled in the domain of the spirit.

If we have any feeling for the finer variations of style between the Gospel of St. Mark and the other Gospels, we shall also notice that the form in which certain things are presented by St. Mark is different from that to be found in the other Gospels. We become aware that through the actual structure of the sentences, through the omission of certain sentences found in the other Gospels, many things that might easily be taken abstractly are given definite shades of meaning. If we are sufficiently perceptive we shall realise that St. Mark's Gospel contains incisive and very important teaching concerning the ‘I’, concerning the inmost significance of the ‘I’ in man. To understand this we need only look carefully at one passage in the Gospel which has all the peculiar features due to the omission of details that are included in the accounts given in the other Gospels. Here is the passage in St. Mark's Gospel which, if there is a feeling for such details, will indicate its deep significance:

And Jesus went out accompanied by His disciples into the towns that are in the neighbourhood of Caesarea Philippi. And on the way He asked those who were around Him: ‘What do men say of the ‘I’? Whom do men recognise as the ‘I’?’—And those who were around Jesus answered: ‘Men say that in the ‘I’, if the ‘I’ is the true ‘I’, there must live John the Baptist; but others say that this ‘I’ must be filled with Elias, that Elias must live in the ‘I’; others again say that another of the prophets must be regarded in such a way that the ‘I’ says: Not I, but this prophet works in me.’ But He said to those around him: ‘But whom do you say is the ‘I’?’ And Peter answered: ‘We understand the ‘I’ in its essential spirituality to be Thou, the Christ!’ And Christ charged those around Him: ‘Tell nothing of this to ordinary men, for they cannot yet understand this mystery!’ (viii, 27-33)¹

But to those around Him who had been inwardly stirred by His words He began to give this teaching:

That which is the outward, physical expression of Ego-hood in the human being must endure much suffering if the ‘I’ is to live in man. The ancient Masters of humanity and those who have knowledge of the holiest wisdom declare that in the form in which the ‘I’ is present, it cannot function; in this form it must be killed and after a rhythm of three days—a rhythm determined by cosmic laws—it must rise again in a higher form. And they were all amazed that He spoke these words openly before all men ...

At this point I must make a comment. Up to that time such words would have been permissible only in the secrecy of the Mysteries. A secret otherwise strictly guarded in the Mystery-temples was that in the process of Initiation a man must pass through the experience of ‘dying and becoming’ and waken after three days. This is an indication of the meaning of the verses which are to the following effect.—

Peter was amazed, took the Christ apart and intimated to Him that such things should not be spoken of openly. Then Christ Jesus turned about and said: ‘In speaking thus, Peter, the words are being put into your mouth by, Satan. The way in which you speak of this truth now belongs to the past, not to the present. In the past, such a truth was confined to the Temples; but in the future, because of the Mystery of Golgotha, it will be openly announced to all humanity. This is ordained by the divine guidance of world-evolution. Anyone who speaks in a contrary sense is not speaking out of divine wisdom but is distorting the divine wisdom into the form that was fitting only in the past.’

This is more or less how we must understand the above passage in the Gospel of St. Mark. We must realise that according to this Gospel the Christ Impulse means that we are to receive the Christ into the ‘I’, thus fulfilling the words of St. Paul, ‘Not I, but Christ in me’—not an abstract Christ but the Christ who sent the Holy Spirit, the Spirit who works as inspiration in the human soul as described to-day, following the rhythms of an inner calendar.

In pre-Christian times these truths were accessible only to those who were initiated in the Mysteries and had remained for three and a half days in a deathlike condition, after having undergone the tragic sufferings which man must experience on the physical plane if he is finally to attain the heights of spiritual life. Such individuals learnt that the ‘earthly man’ must be discarded and slain, that a higher man must rise from within. This was the experience of ‘dying and becoming’. What could formerly be experienced only in the Mysteries became historical fact through the Mystery of Golgotha, as I have shown in Christianity as Mystical Fact. Henceforward it was possible for all men who felt themselves united with the Mystery of Golgotha to become disciples of this great wisdom. Contemplation of what took place on Golgotha could now lead to an experience that could hitherto have been undergone only in the Mysteries. An understanding of the Christ Impulse is consequently the most important thing which a man can acquire for his earthly being, for the power which, since the coming of the Christ Impulse, must waken in the human ‘I’.

In this present age we can be inspired in a special way by the Gospels. The Gospel of St. Matthew was a particularly valuable source of inspiration for the epoch in which the Christ Event actually occurred. For our own time the same can be said of the Gospel of St. Mark. We know that this is the age of the development of the Consciousness or Spiritual Soul which detaches itself, isolates itself, from its environment. We know too that in our age primary attention should not be paid to racial descent but rather to the living impulse expressed in the words of St. Paul: Not I, but Christ in me.

Our own fifth post-Atlantean epoch can, as I have said, be inspired particularly by the Gospel of St. Mark. By contrast, man's task in the sixth epoch will be to permeate himself wholly with the Christ Being. Whereas in the fifth epoch the Christ Being will be a subject of study, of deep meditation, in the sixth epoch men will be permeated by the Christ Being in all reality. They will find particular help in the Gospel of St. Luke, which reveals the whole origin of Jesus of Nazareth—that is to say, of the Jesus described in St. Matthew's Gospel who leads back to Zarathustra, and the Jesus of St. Luke's Gospel who leads back to the Buddha and Buddhism. St. Luke's Gospel gives a picture of the evolution of Jesus of Nazareth, reaching back to the divine-spiritual origin of man. It will be more and more possible for man to feel himself a divine-spiritual being. To be permeated by the Christ Impulse can hover as an ideal before him but this ideal becomes reality only if, in the light of St. Luke's Gospel, he recognises physical man in the sense-world as a spiritual being having a divine origin.

The Gospel of St. John which may well be a manual of guidance for the spiritual life of man to-day will be the book of inspiration for the seventh post-Atlantean epoch. Men will then stand in need of a great deal which, as spiritual beings, they will have had to master during the sixth epoch. But they will also have to unlearn from its very foundations much of what they believe to-day. Admittedly, this will not be so very difficult because scientific facts will themselves show that many beliefs will have to be discarded.

To-day, for instance, a man would be considered to be ‘out of his mind’ if he were to maintain that the usual distinction made between ‘motor’ and ‘sensory’ nerves is nonsense. Motor nerves, as they are called, simply do not exist; there are only sensory nerves. The so-called motor nerves are sensory nerves, but their function is to make us aware of the corresponding movements in the muscles. Before very long it will be recognised that the muscles are not set in motion by the nerves but by the astral body—moreover by a force in the astral body that is not directly perceived in its real form: for it is a law that what is to produce an effect is not directly perceptible. What gives rise to movement in the muscles is connected with the astral body, in which a sound or tone, a kind of resonance, is produced. Something akin to music pervades the astral body and muscular movement is the expression of this. What happens can be compared with the well-known Chladni sound-figures which are produced when a fine powder or sand is scattered on a metal plate and forms itself into figures when the plate is made to vibrate by drawing a violin bow across it. Our astral body is filled with numbers of such figures or tone-forms which bring it into a particular condition. In a quite simple way you can convince yourself of this by tightening the biceps—the upper-arm muscle—and holding it close to your ear. When you have acquired the knack of making the muscle sufficiently taut and lay your thumb on it you will be able to hear a sound.—This is not meant to be taken as absolute proof but is merely a trivial illustration. We are, so to speak, permeated with music and give expression to this in the movements of our muscles. And we have the ‘motor’ nerves, as they are wrongly called, in order that we may be aware to some extent of the muscular movements. The way in which facts are grouped together in physiology still seems—but only seems—to contradict this.

This is one example of the kind of truths by which people will gradually be convinced that man is indeed a spiritual being, woven into the harmony of the spheres even in his muscles. And Spiritual Science which has to make preparation for a spiritual understanding of the world in the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, will have to concern itself in every detail with the truth that man is a spiritual being. Just as a musical tone rises into a higher sphere when it becomes a spoken human word, so in macrocosmic existence the harmony of the spheres rises to a higher stage when it becomes the Cosmic Word, the Logos.

Now in man's physical organism, the blood, in the physiological sense, is at a higher stage than the muscles. And just as the muscles are attuned to the harmony of the spheres, so is the blood attuned to the Logos and can be experienced more and more strongly as an expression of the Logos—as indeed has been the case unconsciously ever since man was created. This means that on the physical plane man will eventually feel the blood, which is the expression of the ‘I’, to be the expression of the Logos. And in the sixth epoch, when men have learnt to recognise themselves as spiritual beings, they will no longer cling to the fantastic idea that the muscles are moved by ‘motor’ nerves but will recognise that they are moved by the harmony of the spheres which has become part of their own personality.

In the seventh post-Atlantean epoch men will feel their very blood to be permeated by the Logos and will grasp for the first time the real content of what is said in St. John's Gospel. For not until the seventh epoch will the scientific nature of this Gospel come to be recognised. And then it will be felt that the first words of the Gospel ought to stand at the beginning of every book on physiology, that the whole of science should move in the direction indicated by these words. The best thing to say at the moment is that much of this can even to-day be understood, but by no means all; it can hover as an ideal before us.

Everything I have been saying indicates that St. Matthew's Gospel could be a source of inspiration especially for the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, just as that of St. Mark can be for our own. The Gospel of St. Luke will be especially important for the sixth epoch. We must ourselves prepare the conditions that will then prevail, for the seed of whatever the future holds in store must have been planted in the past. If we understand the contents of St. John's Gospel we shall find everything that is to be lived out in the further course of human evolution, everything that is to develop in the seventh epoch up to the time of the next great catastrophe. Therefore it will be particularly important for us to regard St. Mark's Gospel as a book that can give guidance for much that we must practise and also for much that we must guard against. The very sentences of this Gospel are themselves an indication of the significance of the Christ Impulse for the ‘I’ of man.

It is important to realise that our task is to grasp the reality of Christ in the spirit and to be aware of how Christ will reveal himself in future epochs. In my Rosicrucian Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation, an attempt was made to indicate this task by words spoken by the seeress, Theodora. There will be something like a repetition of the event experienced by Paul at the gate of Damascus, but to believe that the Christ Impulse will come into the world again in a human physical body would merely be an expression of the materialism of our times. We can learn from the Gospel of St. Mark how to guard against such a belief, for the Gospel contains a special warning for our own epoch. And although much of the Gospel has a bearing on the past, its verses apply, in the high moral sense I have indicated, to our immediate future. We shall then realise the urgent necessity of the influence that must proceed from Spiritual Science.

If we understand the spiritual meaning of the following passage we shall be able to relate it to our own times and to the immediate future:

‘For in those days shall be affliction, such as was not from the beginning of the creation which God created unto this time, neither shall be again’ (xiii, 19-23).

These words must be applied to man's power of understanding. There is every prospect of affliction in the future, when truth will come to expression in its full spiritual reality.

‘And except that the Lord had shortened those days, no flesh should be saved (that is to say, nothing would have been saved of spiritual nourishment): but for the elect's sake, whom he hath chosen, he hath shortened the days.’

Then come the words:

‘And then, if any man shall say to you, Lo, here is Christ! or lo, he is there! believe him not. ...’

Here the Gospel of St. Mark is pointing to a possible materialistic conception of Christ.

‘For false Christs and false prophets shall rise, and shall show signs and wonders, to seduce, if it were possible, even the elect. But take ye heed: behold, I have foretold you all things!’

So powerful will be the onslaught of materialism that it will be essential for human souls to acquire the strength to stand the test expressed in the words: False Christs and false prophets will arise.—But if it is then said: Here is Christ!—those who have felt the true influence of Spiritual Science will obey the exhortation: If any man shall say to you, Lo, here is Christ—believe it not!

• 1. Dr. Steiner was not quoting any of the usual versions of this passage but giving an extended paraphrase to clarify the points he wanted to make.

The more deeply we penetrate into the occult records of the various ages and peoples, that is to say, into the truly occult records, the more we are struck by one feature of them which meets us again and again. I have already indicated it in discussing the Gospel of St. John, and again on a later occasion in speaking of the Gospel of St. Mark. I refer to the fact that on looking deeply into any such occult record it becomes ever clearer that it is really most wonderfully composed, that it forms an artistic whole. I could show, for instance, how St. John's Gospel, when we penetrate into its depths, reveals a wonderful, artistic composition. With remarkable dramatic power the story is carried up stage by stage to a great climax, and then continues from this point onward with a kind of renewal of dramatic power to the end. You can study this in the lectures I gave at Cassel on St. John's Gospel in relation to the three other Gospels, especially to that according to St. Luke.

Most impressive is the gradual enhancement of the whole composition while the super-sensible is placed before us in the so-called miracles and signs; each working up in ever-increasing wonder to the sign that meets us in the initiation of Lazarus. It makes us realize how we can always find artistic beauty at the foundation of these occult records. I could show the same for the structure of St. Mark's Gospel. When we regard such records in their beauty of form and their dramatic power, we can indeed conclude that just because they are true such records cannot be other than artistically, beautifully composed, in the deepest sense of the word. For the moment we will only indicate this fact, as we may come back to it in the course of these lectures.

Now it is remarkable that the same thing meets us again in the Bhagavad Gita. There is a wonderful intensification of the narrative, one might say, a hidden artistic beauty in the song, so that if nothing else were to touch the soul of one studying this sublime Gita, he still could not help being impressed by its marvelous composition. Let us begin by indicating a few of the outstanding points—and we will confine ourselves today to the first four discourses—because these points are important both for the artistic structure and the deep occult truths that it contains.

First of all Arjuna meets us. Facing the bloodshed in which he is to take part, he grows weak. He sees all that is to take place as a battle of brothers against brothers, his blood relations. He shrinks back. He will not fight against them. While fear and terror come over him and he is horror-stricken, his charioteer suddenly appears as the instrument through which Krishna, God, is to speak to him. Here in this first episode we already have a moment of great intensity and also an indication of deep occult truth. Anyone who finds the way, by whatever path, into the spiritual worlds, even though he may have gone only a few steps—or even had only a dim presentiment of the way to be experienced—such a person will be aware of the deep significance of this moment.

As a rule we cannot enter the spiritual worlds without passing through a deep upheaval in our souls. We have to experience something which disturbs and shakes all our forces, filling us with intense feeling. Emotions that are generally spread out over many moments, over long periods of living, whose permanent effect on the soul is therefore weaker—such feelings are concentrated in a single moment and storm through us with tremendous force when we enter the occult worlds. Then we experience a kind of inner shattering, which can indeed be compared to fear, terror and anxiety, as though we were shrinking back from something almost with horror. Such experiences belong to the initial stages of occult development, to entering the spiritual worlds. It is just for this reason that such great care must be taken to give the right advice to those who would enter the spiritual worlds through occult training. Such a person must be prepared so that he may experience this upheaval as a necessary event in his soul life without its encroaching on his bodily life and health, because his body must not suffer a like upheaval. That is the essential thing. We must learn to suffer the convulsions of our soul with outward equanimity and calm.

This is true not only for our bodily processes. The soul forces we need for everyday living, our ordinary intellectual powers, even those of imagination, of feeling and will—these too must not be allowed to become unbalanced. The upheaval that may be the starting-point for occult life must take place in far deeper layers of the soul, so that we go through our external life as before, without anything being noticed in us outwardly, while within we may be living through whole worlds of shattering soul-experience. That is what it means to be ripe for occult development: To be able to experience such inward convulsions without losing one's outer balance and calm. To this end a person who is striving to become ripe for occult development must widen the circle of his interests beyond his everyday life. He must get away from that to which he is ordinarily attached from morning to night, and reach out to interests that move on the great horizon of the world.

We must be able to undergo the experience of doubting all truth and all knowledge. We must have the power to do this with the same intensity of feeling people generally have only where their everyday interests are concerned. We must be able to feel with the destiny of all mankind, with as much interest as we usually feel in our own destiny, or perhaps in that of our nearest connections of family, nation, or race. If we cannot do this, we are not yet completely ready for occult development.

For this reason modern anthroposophy, if pursued earnestly and worthily, is the right preparation in our age for a true occult development. Let those who are absorbed in the petty material interests of the immediate present, who cannot find sufficient interest to follow the anthroposophist in looking out over world and planetary destinies, over the historical epochs and races of mankind—let them scoff if they will! One who would prepare himself for an occult development must lift up his eyes to the heights where the interests of mankind, of the earth, of the whole planetary system become his own. When a person's interests are gradually sharpened and widened through the study of anthroposophy, which leads even without occult training to an understanding of occult truths, then he is being rightly prepared for an occult path.

In our time there are many who have such interests for the whole of mankind. More often they are not to be found among the intellectuals but are people who appear to lead quite simple lives. Yes, there are many today who have a humble place in life and as if by natural instinct feel this interest in the whole of mankind. That is why anthroposophy is in such harmony with the spirit of our age.

First, then, we must learn of the mighty upheaval of the soul that has to come at the beginning of occult experience. With wonderful truth the Bhagavad Gita sets such a moment of upheaval at the starting-point of Arjuna's experience, only he does not go through an occult training but is placed into this moment by his destiny. He is placed into the battle without being able to recognize its necessity, its purpose, or its aim. All he sees is that blood relations are about to fight against each other. Such a soul as Arjuna can be shaken by that to its innermost core, for he has to say to himself, “Brother fights against brother. Surely then all the tribal customs will be shaken and then the tribe itself will wither away and be destroyed, and all its morality fall into decay! Those laws will be shaken that in accordance with an eternal destiny place men into castes; and then will everything be imperiled—man himself, the law, the whole world. The whole significance of mankind will be in the balance.” Such is his feeling. It is as though the ground were about to sink from under his feet, as though an abyss were opening up before him.

Arjuna was a man who had received into his feeling something that the man of today no longer knows, but that in those ancient times was a primeval teaching of tradition. He knew that what is handed on from generation to generation in mankind is bound up with the woman nature; while the individual, personal qualities whereby a man stands out from his blood connections and his family line are bound up with the man nature. What a man inherits as common, generic qualities is handed on to the descendants by the woman, whereas what forms him into a unique, individual being, tearing him out of the generic succession, is the part he receives from his father. “Must it not then have an evil effect on the laws that rule woman's nature,” says Arjuna to himself, “if blood fights against blood?”

There is another feeling that Arjuna has absorbed, on which for him the whole well-being of human evolution depends. He feels that the forefathers of the tribe, the ancestors, are worthy of honor. He feels that their souls watch over the succeeding generations. For him it is a sublime service to offer up fires of sacrifice to the Manes, to the holy souls of the ancestors. But now what must he see? Instead of altars with sacrificial fires burning on them for the ancestors, he sees those who should join in kindling such fires assailing one another in battle. If we would understand a human soul we must penetrate into its thoughts. Above all we must enter deeply into its feelings because it is in feeling that the soul is intimately bound up with its very life. Now think of the great contrast between all that Arjuna would naturally feel, and the bloody battle of brother against brother that is actually about to take place. Destiny is hammering at Arjuna's soul, shaking it to its very depths. It is as though he had to gaze down into a terrible abyss. Such an upheaval awakens the forces of the soul and brings it to a vision of occult realities that at other times are hidden as behind a veil. That is what gives such dramatic intensity to the Bhagavad Gita. The ensuing discourse is thus placed before us with wonderful power, as developing of necessity out of Arjuna's destiny, instead of being given us merely as an academic, pedantic course of instruction in occultism.

Now that Arjuna has been rightly prepared for the birth of the deeper forces of his soul, now that he can see these forces in inward vision, there happens what everyone who has the power to behold it will understand: His charioteer becomes the instrument through which the god Krishna speaks to him. In the first four discourses we observe three successive stages, each higher than the last, each one introducing something new. Here in these very first discourses we find an accent that is wonderful in its dramatic art, apart from the fact that it corresponds to a deep occult truth. The first stage is a teaching that might appear even trivial to many Westerners in its given form. Let us admit that at once. (Here I should like to remark, especially for the benefit of my dear friends here in Finland, that I mean by “Western” all that lies to the west of the Ural Mountains, the Volga, the Caspian Sea and Asia Minor—in fact the whole of Europe. What is to be called Eastern land belongs essentially in Asia. Of course, America too forms part of the West.)

To begin with then we find a teaching that might easily appear trivial, especially to a philosophical mind. For what is the first thing that Krishna says to Arjuna as a word of exhortation for the battle? “Look there,” he says, “at those who are to be killed by you; those in your own ranks who are to be killed and those who are to remain behind, and consider well this one thing. What dies and what remains alive in your ranks and in those of the enemy is but the outer physical body. The spirit is eternal. If your warriors slay those in the ranks over there they are but slaying the outer body, they are not killing the spirit, which is eternal. The spirit goes from change to change, from incarnation to incarnation. It is eternal. This deepest being of man is not affected in this battle. Rise, Arjuna, rise to the spiritual standpoint, then you can go and give yourself up to your duty. You need not shudder nor be sad at heart, for in killing your enemies you are not killing their essential being.”

Thus speaks Krishna, and at first hearing his words are in a sense trivial, though in a special way. In many respects the Westerner is short-sighted in his thinking and consciousness. He never stops to consider that everything is evolving. If he says that Krishna's exhortation, as I have expressed it, is trivial, it is as though one were to say, “Why do they honor Pythagoras as such a great man when every schoolboy and girl knows his theorem?” It would be stupid to conclude that Pythagoras was not a great man in having discovered his theorem just because every schoolboy understands it! We see how stupid this is, but we do not notice when we fail to realize that what any Western philosopher may repeat by rote as the wisdom of Krishna—that the spirit is eternal, immortal—was a sublime wisdom at the time Krishna revealed it. Souls like Arjuna did indeed feel that blood-relations ought not to fight. They still felt the common blood that flowed in a group of people. To hear it said that “the spirit is eternal” (spirit in the sense of what is generally conceived, abstractly, as the center of man's being)—the spirit is eternal and undergoes transformations, passing from incarnation to incarnation—this stated in abstract and intellectual terms was something absolutely new and epoch-making in its newness when it resounded in Arjuna's soul through Krishna's words. All the people in Arjuna's environment believed definitely in reincarnation, but as Krishna taught it, as a general and abstract idea, it was new, especially in regard to Arjuna's situation. This is one reason why we had to say that such a truth can only be called “trivial” in a special sense. That holds true in another respect as well. Our abstract thought, which we use even in the pursuit of popular science, which we regard today as quite natural—this thinking activity was by no means always so natural and simple.

In order to illustrate what I say, let me give you a radical example. You will think it strange that while for all of you it is quite natural to speak of a “fish,” it was by no means natural for primitive peoples to do so. Primitive peoples are acquainted with trout and salmon, cod and herring, but “fish” they do not know. They have no such word as “fish,” because their thought does not extend to such abstract generalization. They know individual trees, but “tree” they do not know. Thinking in such general concepts is by no means natural to primitive races even in the present time. This mode of thinking has indeed only entered humanity in the course of its evolution. In fact, one who considers why it was that logic first began in the time of ancient Greece, could scarcely be surprised when the statement is made on occult grounds that logical thinking has only existed since the period that followed the original composition of the Bhagavad Gita. Krishna impels Arjuna to logical thought, to thinking in abstractions, as if to a new thing that is only now to enter humanity.

But this activity of thought that man has developed and takes quite for granted today, people have the most distorted and unnatural notions about. Western philosophers in particular have most distorted ideas about thought, for they generally take it to be merely a photographic reproduction of external sense reality. They imagine that concepts and ideas and the whole inner thinking of man simply arises in him out of the external physical world. While libraries of philosophical words have been written in the West to prove that thought is merely something having its origin in the stimulus of the external physical world, it is only in our time that thought will be valued for what it really is.

Here I reach a point that is most important for those who would undergo an occult development in their own souls. I want to make every effort to get this point clear. The medieval alchemists used to say—I cannot now discuss what they really meant by it—that gold could be made from all metals, gold in any desired amount, but that one must first have a minute quantity of it. Without that one could not make gold. Whether or not this is true of gold, it is certainly true of clairvoyance. No man could actually attain clairvoyance if he did not have a tiny amount of it already in his soul. It is generally supposed that men as they are, are not clairvoyant. If that were true they could never become clairvoyant at all, because just as the alchemist thought that one must have a little gold to conjure forth large quantities, so must one already be a little clairvoyant in order to be able to develop and extend it more and more. Now you may see two alternatives here and ask, “Do you think then that we all are clairvoyant, if only slightly, or, do you think that those of us who are not clairvoyant can never become so?” This is just the point. It is most important to understand that there is really no one among you who does not have this starting-point of clairvoyance, though you may not be conscious of it. All of you have it. None of you is lacking in it. What is this that all possess? It is something not generally regarded or valued as clairvoyance. Let me make a rather crude comparison.

If a pearl is lying in the roadway and a chicken finds it, the chicken does not value the pearl. Most men and women today are chickens in this respect. They do not value the pearl that lies there in full view before them. What they value is something quite different. They value their concepts and ideas, but no one could think abstractly, could have thoughts and ideas, if he were not clairvoyant. In our ordinary thinking the pearl of clairvoyance is contained from the start. Ideas arise in the soul through exactly the same process as what gives rise to its highest powers. It is immensely important to learn to understand that clairvoyance begins in something common and everyday. We only have to recognize the super-sensible nature of our concepts and ideas. We must realize that these come to us from the super-sensible worlds; only then can we look at the matter rightly.

When I tell you of the higher hierarchies, of Seraphim and Cherubim and Thrones, right down to Archangels and Angels, these are beings who must speak to the human soul from higher spiritual worlds. It is from those worlds that concepts and ideas come into the human soul, not from the world of the senses. In the 18th century what was considered a great word was uttered by a pioneer of thinking, “O, Man, make bold to use thy power of reason!” Today a great word must resound in men's souls, “O, Man, make bold to claim thy concepts and ideas as the beginning of thy clairvoyance.” What I have just expressed I said many years ago, publicly in my books Truth and Science and The Philosophy of Freedom, where I showed that human ideas come from super-sensible, spiritual knowledge. It was not understood at the time, and no wonder, for those who should have understood it were—well, like the chickens! We must realize that at the moment when Krishna stands before Arjuna and gives him the power of abstract judgment, he is thereby giving him, for the first time in the whole of evolution, the starting-point for the knowledge of higher worlds. The spirit can be seen on the very surface of the changes that take place within the external world of sense. Bodies die; the spirit, the abstract, the essential being, is eternal. The spiritual can be seen playing on the surface of phenomena. This is what Krishna would reveal to Arjuna as the beginning of a new clairvoyance for men.

One thing is necessary for men of today if they would attain to an inwardly-experienced truth. They must have once passed through the feeling of the fleeting nature of all outer transformations. They must have experienced the mood of infinite sadness, of infinite tragedy, and at the same time the exultation of joy. They must have felt the breath of the ephemeral that streams out from all things. They must have been able to fix their interest on this coming forth and passing away again, the transitoriness of the world of sense. Then, when they have been able to feel the deepest pain and the fullest delight in the external world, they must once have been absolutely alone—alone with their concepts and ideas. They must have had the feeling, “In these concepts I grasp the mystery of the worlds; I take hold of the outer edge of cosmic being,”—the very expression I once used in my The Philosophy of Freedom! This must be experienced, not merely understood intellectually, and if you would experience it, it must be in deepest loneliness. Then you have another feeling. On the one hand you experience the majesty of the world of ideas that is spread out over the All. On the other hand you experience with the deepest bitterness that you have to separate yourself from space and time in order to be together with your concepts and ideas. Loneliness! It is the icy cold of loneliness. Furthermore, it comes to you that the world of ideas has now drawn together as in a single point of this loneliness. Now you say, I am alone with my world of ideas. You become utterly bewildered in your world of ideas, an experience that stirs you to the depths of your soul. At length you say to yourself, “Perhaps all this is only I myself; perhaps the only truth about these laws is that they exist in the point of my own loneliness.” Thus you experience, infinitely enhanced, utter doubt in all existence.

When you have this experience in your world of ideas, when the full cup of doubt in all existence has been poured out with pain and bitterness over your soul, then only are you ripe to understand how, after all, it is not the infinite spaces and periods of time of the physical world from which your ideas have come. Now only, after the bitterness of doubt, you open yourself to the regions of the spiritual and know that your doubt was justified, and in what sense it was justified. For it had to be, since you imagined that the ideas had come into your soul from the times and spaces of the physical world. How do you now feel your world of ideas having experienced its origin in the spiritual worlds? Now for the first time you feel yourself inspired. Before, you were feeling the infinite void spread around you like a dark abyss. Now you begin to feel that you are standing on a rock that rises up out of the abyss. You know with certainty, “Now I am connected with the spiritual worlds. They, not the world of sense, have bestowed on me my world of ideas.”

This is the next stage for the evolving soul. It is the stage where man begins to be deeply in earnest with what has today come to be a trivial, commonplace truth. To bear this feeling in your heart will prepare you to receive in a true way the first truth that Krishna gives to Arjuna after the mighty upheaval and convulsion in his soul: The truth of the eternal spirit living through outer transformations. To abstract understanding we speak in concepts and ideas. Krishna speaks to Arjuna's heart. What may be trivial and commonplace for the understanding is infinitely deep and sublime to the heart of man.

We see how the first stage shows itself at once as a necessary consequence of the deeply moving experience that is presented to us at the start of the Bhagavad Gita. Now the next stage.

It is easy to speak of what is often called dogma in occultism—something that is accepted in blind faith and given out as gospel truth. Let me suggest to you that it would be quite simple for someone to come forward and say, “This fellow has published a book on Occult Science, speaking in it about Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions, and there is no way of controlling these statements. They can only be accepted as dogma.” I could understand such a thing being said, because it corresponds to the superficial nature of our age; and there is no getting away from it, our age is superficial. Indeed, under certain conditions this objection would not be without foundation. It would be justified, for example, if you were to tear out of the book all the pages that precede the chapter on the Saturn evolution. If anyone were to begin reading the book at this chapter it would be nothing but dogma. If, however, the author prefaces it with the other chapters, he is by no means a dogmatist because he shows what paths the soul has to go through in order to reach such conceptions. That is the point, that it has been shown in the book how every individual man, if he reaches into the depths of his soul, is bound to come to such conceptions. Herein all dogmatism ceases.

Thus we can feel it natural that Krishna, having brought Arjuna into the world of ideas and wishing to lead him on into the occult world, now goes on to show him the next stage, how every soul can reach that higher world if it finds the right starting-point. Krishna then must begin by rejecting every form of dogmatism, and he does so radically. Here we come up against a hard saying by Krishna. He absolutely rejects what for centuries had been most holy to the highest men of that age—the contents of the Vedas. He says, “Hold not to the Vedas, nor to the word of the Vedas. Hold fast to Yoga!” That is to say, “Hold fast to what is within thine own soul!”

Let us grasp what Krishna means by this exhortation. He does not mean that the contents of the Vedas are untrue. He does not want Arjuna to accept what is given in the Vedas dogmatically as the disciples of the Veda teaching do. He wants to inspire him to take his start from the very first original point whence the human soul evolves. For this purpose all dogmatic wisdom must be laid aside. We can imagine Krishna saying to himself that even though Arjuna will in the end reach the very same wisdom that is contained in the Vedas, still he must be drawn away from them, for he must go his own way, beginning with the sources in his own soul. Krishna rejects the Vedas, whether their content is true or untrue. Arjuna's path must start from himself, through his own inwardness he must come to recognize Krishna. Arjuna must be assumed to have in himself what a man can and must have if he is really to enter into the concrete truths of the super-sensible worlds. Krishna has called Arjuna's attention to something that from then onward is a common attribute of humanity. Having led him to this point he must lead him further and bring him to recognize what he is to achieve through Yoga. Thus, Arjuna must first undergo Yoga. Here the poem rises to another level.

In this second stage we see how the Bhagavad Gita goes on through the first four discourses with ever-increasing dramatic impulse, coming at length to what is most individual of all. Krishna describes the path of Yoga to Arjuna. We shall speak of this more in detail tomorrow. He describes the path that Arjuna must take in order to pass from the everyday clairvoyance of concepts and ideas to what can only be attained through Yoga. Concepts only require to be placed in the right light; but Arjuna has to be guided to Yoga. This is the second stage.

The third stage shows once more an enhancement of dramatic power, and again comes the expression of a deep occult truth. Let us assume that someone really takes the Yoga path. He will rise at length from his ordinary consciousness to a higher state of consciousness, which includes not only the ego that lies between the limits of birth and death but what passes from one incarnation to the next. The soul wakens to know itself in an expanded ego. It grows into a wider consciousness. The soul goes through a process that is essentially an everyday process but that is not experienced fully in our everyday life because man goes to sleep every night. The sense world fades out around him and he becomes unconscious of it. Now for every human soul the possibility exists of letting this world of sense vanish from his consciousness as it does when he goes to sleep, and then to live in higher worlds as in an absolute reality. Thereby man rises to a high level of consciousness. We shall still have to speak of Yoga, and also of the modern exercises that make this possible. But when man gradually attains to where he no longer, consciously, lives and feels and knows in himself, but lives and feels and knows together with the whole earth, then he grows into a higher level of consciousness where the things of the sense world vanish for him as they do in sleep.

However, before man can attain this level he must be able to identify himself with the soul of his planet, earth. We shall see that this is possible. We know that man not only experiences the rhythm of sleeping and waking but other rhythms of the earth as well—of summer and winter. When one follows the path of Yoga or goes through a modern occult training, he can lift himself above the ordinary consciousness that experiences the cycles of sleeping and waking, summer and winter. He can learn to look at himself from outside. He becomes aware of being able to look back at himself just as he ordinarily looks at things outside himself. Now he observes the things, the cycles in external life. He sees alternating conditions. He realizes how his body, so long as he is outside himself, takes on a form similar to that of the earth in summer with all its vegetation. What material science discovers and calls nerves he begins to perceive as a sprouting forth of something plant-like at the time of going to sleep, and when he returns again into everyday consciousness he feels how this plant-like life shrinks together again and becomes the instrument for thinking, feeling and willing in his waking consciousness. He feels his going out from the body and returning into it analogous to the alternation of summer and winter on the earth. In effect he feels something summer-like in going to sleep and something winter-like in waking up—not as one might imagine, the opposite way round. From this moment onward he learns to understand what the spirit of the earth is, and how it is asleep in summer and awake in winter, not vice versa. He realizes the wonderful experience of identifying himself with the spirit of the earth. From this moment he says to himself, “I live not only inside my skin, but as a cell lives in my bodily organism so do I live in the organism of the earth. The earth is asleep in summer and awake in winter as I am asleep and awake in the alternation of night and day. And as the cell is to my consciousness, so am I to the consciousness of the earth.”

The path of Yoga, especially in its modern sense, leads to this expansion of consciousness, to the identification of our own being with a more comprehensive being. We feel ourselves interwoven with the whole earth. Then as men we no longer feel ourselves bound to a particular time and place, but we feel our humanity such as it has developed from the very beginning of the earth. We feel the age-long succession of our evolutions through the course of the evolution of the earth. Thus Yoga leads us on to feel our atonement with what goes from one incarnation to another in the earth's evolution. That is the third stage.

This is the reason for the great beauty in the artistic composition of the Bhagavad Gita. In its climaxes, its inner artistic form, it reflects deep occult truths. Beginning with an instruction in the ordinary concepts of our thinking it goes on to an indication of the path of Yoga. Then at the third stage to a description of the marvelous expansion of man's horizon over the whole earth, where Krishna awakens in Arjuna the idea, “All that lives in your soul has lived often before, only you know nothing of it. But I have this consciousness in myself when I look back on all the transformations through which I have lived, and I will lead you up so that you may learn to feel yourself as I feel myself.” A new moment of dramatic force as beautiful as it is deeply and occultly true!

Thus we come to see the evolution of mankind from out of its everyday consciousness, from the pearl in the roadway that only needs to be recognized, from the particular world of thoughts and concepts that are a matter of everyday life in any one age, up to the point from where we can look out over all that we really have in us, which lives on from incarnation to incarnation on the earth.

To obviate any possible misunderstanding, I want to emphasise that the aim of yesterday's lecture was not that of proving anything in particular but merely to point out that certain observations led spiritual investigators of bygone times to designate by similar names certain processes and objects in space and certain processes and happenings in our own daily and nightly experiences. The main purpose of the lecture was to introduce concepts that will be required in our further studies. The lectures given in this Course must be regarded as a whole, and the early lectures are in the widest sense intended to assemble the ideas and conceptions needed for the knowledge of the spiritual worlds that is to be communicated in those that come later. Today, too, we shall take our start from familiar experiences and pass on gradually to more remote realms of spirit.

We have heard in previous lectures that in respect of his inner being, in respect, that is to say, of his astral body and Ego, man lives during the sleeping state in a spiritual world and on waking returns into his physical and etheric bodies. It will be evident to anyone who observes life that when this transition from the sleeping to the waking state takes place, there is a complete change of experience. What we experience in the waking state denotes no actual perception or knowledge of the two members of our being into which we descend on waking. We come down into our etheric and physical bodies but have no experience of them from within.

What does a man know in ordinary life about the aspects presented by his physical and etheric bodies when seen from within? The essential fact of experience in the waking state is that we view our own being in the physical world from without, not from within. We view our physical body from outside with the same eyes with which we look at the rest of the world. During waking life we never contemplate our own being from within, but always from without. We really learn to know ourselves as men only from outside, regarding ourselves as beings of the sense-world.

There is, of course, an actual state of transition from sleeping to waking life. How, then, would it be if we were really able, on descending into our etheric and physical bodies, to contemplate ourselves from within? We should see something quite different from what we see in the ordinary way: we should know the intimate experiences sought by the mystic. The mystic endeavours to divert his attention entirely from the outer world, to shut out the impressions invading his eyes and other senses and to penetrate into his inmost being. But leaving aside experiences of this kind, we can say that in daily life we are protected from the sight of our inner being, for at the moment of waking our gaze is diverted to the external world around us, to the tapestry presented by the senses—the tapestry of which our physical body, when observed during waking life, is a part. Thus in the waking state the possibility of observing ourselves from within, eludes us. It is as though we had been led unknowingly across a stream: while we sleep we are on this side of the stream, when we are awake, on yonder side. If we were capable of perceiving anything from “this side”, we should be able to perceive our Ego and our astral body as we perceive outer objects in waking life; but again we are protected from perceiving our own inner being in sleep, for at the moment of going to sleep the possibility of perceiving ceases and consciousness is extinguished.

Thus between our inner and our outer world a definite boundary is drawn, a boundary which we can cross only at the moments of going to sleep and waking. But we can never cross this boundary without being deprived of something.

When we cross the boundary on going to sleep, consciousness ceases and we cannot see the spiritual world. On waking, our consciousness is at once diverted to the outer world and we are unable to perceive the spiritual reality underlying our own being. The boundary that we cross, the boundary that causes the spiritual world to be darkened at the moment of waking is something that interpolates itself between our Sentient Soul and our etheric and physical bodies. The veil that covers these two members on waking, the veil that prevents us from beholding the spiritual reality underlying them, is the Sentient Body, which enables us to see the tapestry presented by the outer world. At the moment of waking the Sentient Body is wholly concerned with the outer world of the senses and we cannot look within our own being. This body, therefore, constitutes a frontier between our life of inner experience and what spiritually underlies the world of the senses.

We shall realise that this is necessary, for what a man would see if he were to cross this stream consciously is something that must be hidden from him in the course of his normal life, because he could not endure it; he needs to be prepared for the experience. Mystical development does not really consist in penetrating by force into the inner world of the physical and etheric bodies, but in first making oneself fit for the experience and passing through it consciously.

What would happen to a man who were to descend unprepared into his own inner being? On waking, instead of seeing an external world, he would enter into his own inner world, into that which spiritually underlies his physical and etheric bodies. In his soul he would experience a feeling of tremendous intensity, known to him in ordinary life in a very faint and weakened form only. That is what would come over a man if he were able, on waking from sleep, to descend into his own inner being. An analogy—without attempting to prove anything—will help you to have an idea of this feeling.

There is in man what is called the sense of Shame, the essence of which is that in his soul he wants to divert the attention of others from the thing or quality of which he is ashamed. This sense of shame in connection with something he does not want to be revealed is a faint indication of the feeling which would be intensified to overpowering strength if he were to look consciously into his own inner being. This feeling would take possession of the soul with such power that it would seem to be diffused over everything encountered in the external world; the man would undergo an experience comparable with that of being consumed by fire. Such would be the effect produced by this feeling of shame.

Why should it have this effect? Because at that moment a man would become aware of the perfection of his physical and etheric bodies compared with what he is as a being of soul. It is also possible to form an idea of this by ordinary reasoning. Anyone who with the help of physical science makes a purely external study of the marvelous structure of the human heart or brain, or of each single part of the human skeleton, will be able to feel how infinitely wise and perfect is the arrangement and organisation of the physical body. By taking one single bone, for example the hip bone, which combines the utmost carrying capacity with the least expenditure of effort, or by contemplating the marvelous structure of the heart or brain, it is possible to have an inkling of what would be experienced if one were to behold the wisdom by which this structure was produced and were then to compare with this what man is as a being of soul in respect of passions or desires! All through his life he is engaged in ruining this wonderful physical organism by yielding to his desires, urges, passions and various forms of enjoyment. Activity destructive to the wonderful structure of the physical heart or brain can be observed everywhere in life. All this would come vividly before a man's soul if he were to descend consciously into his etheric and physical bodies. And the soul's imperfection compared with the perfect structure of the sheaths would have an overwhelmingly paralysing effect upon him if he were able to compare what is in his soul with what the wise guidance of the universe has made of his physical and etheric bodies. He is therefore protected from descending into them consciously and is deflected, on waking, by the tapestry of the sense-world outspread around him; he cannot look into his inmost being.

It is the comparison of the soul with what it would perceive if it had sight of what spiritually underlies the physical and etheric bodies that would evoke the intense feeling of shame; preparation for this is made in advance through all the experiences undergone by the mystic before he becomes capable of penetrating into his inmost being. To realise for himself the imperfection of his soul, to realise that his soul is weak, insignificant, and has still an infinitely long path to travel, is bound to arouse a feeling of humility and a yearning for perfection, and these qualities prepare him to endure the comparison with the infinitely wise structure into which he penetrates on waking. Otherwise he would be consumed by shame as if by fire.

The mystic prepares himself by concentrating on the following thoughts: “When I behold what I am and compare it with what the wise guidance of the universe has made of me, the shame I feel is like a consuming fire.” This feeling gives rise outwardly to the flush of shame. This feeling would intensify to such an extent as to become a scorching fire in the soul if the mystic has not the strength to say to himself: “Yes, I feel utterly paltry in comparison with what I may become, but I shall try to develop the strength that will make me capable of understanding what the wisdom of the universe has built into my bodily nature and to make myself spiritually worthy of it.” The mystic is made to realise by his spiritual teacher that he must have boundless humility. It may be said to him: Look at a plant. A plant is rooted in the soil. The soil makes available to the plant a kingdom lower than itself but without which it cannot exist. The plant can bow to the mineral kingdom, saying: I owe my existence to this lower kingdom out of which I have grown. The animal too owes its existence to the plant kingdom and if it were conscious of its place in the world would in humility acknowledge its indebtedness to the lower kingdom. And man, having reached a certain height, should say: I could not have attained this stage had not everything below me evolved correspondingly.

When a man cultivates such feelings in his soul, the realisation comes to him that he has reason not only to look upwards but to look downwards with thankfulness to the kingdoms below him. The soul is then filled with this feeling of humility and realises how infinitely long is the path that leads towards perfection. Such is the training for true humility.

What has been described above cannot of course be exhausted by concepts and ideas; if that were the case the mystic would soon have mastered it. It must be experienced, and only one who experiences such feelings over and over again can imbue his soul with the attitude and mood necessary for the mystic.

Then, secondly, the would-be mystic must develop another feeling which makes him capable of enduring whatever obstacles may lie in his path as he strives towards perfection. He must develop a feeling of resignation in respect of whatever ordeals he will have to endure in order to reach a certain stage of development. Only by proving himself victorious over pain and suffering for a long, long time can he develop the strong powers needed by his soul to overcome the inevitable sense of inferiority in face of what a wise World-Order has incorporated in the etheric and physical bodies. The soul must say to itself over and over again: ‘Whatever pain and suffering still await me, I will not waver; for if I were willing to experience only what brings joy, I should never develop the strength of which my soul is actually capable.’ Strength is developed only by overcoming obstacles, not by simply submitting to conditions as they are. Forces of soul can be steeled only when a man is ready to bear pain and suffering with resignation. This strength must be developed in the soul of the mystic if he is to become fit to descend into his inner being.

Let nobody imagine that Spiritual Science demands that a man living an ordinary, everyday life shall undergo such exercises for they are beyond his power. What is being described here is simply a narration of what those who voluntarily embark upon such experiences can make of the soul, that is to say, they can make the soul capable of penetrating into their own inmost being. In the course of normal life, however, the Sentient Body intervenes between what it is possible for the mystic to experience inwardly and what is actually experienced in the external world. That is what protects a man from descending into his own inner self without preparation and being consumed by a feeling of shame. In the normal course of life a man cannot experience what is thus screened from him by the Sentient Body, for there he has already reached the frontier of the spiritual world. A spiritual investigator seeking to explore the inner nature of man must cross this frontier; he must cross the stream which diverts normal human consciousness from the inner to the outer world. This normal consciousness, while insufficiently mature, is protected from penetrating into man's inner self, protected from being consumed in the fire of shame. Man cannot see the Power which protects him from this experience every morning on waking. This Power is the first spiritual Being encountered by one who is about to pass into the spiritual world. He must pass this Being who protects him from being consumed by the inner sense of shame; he must pass this Being who deflects his inward-turned gaze to the external word, to the tapestry of sense-phenomena. Normal consciousness becomes aware of the effect of this Being, but man cannot see him. He is the first Being who must be passed by one who desires to penetrate into the spiritual world. This spiritual Being who every morning stands before man and protects him while he is still immature from sight of his own inner self, is called in Spiritual Science, the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold. The path into the spiritual world leads past this Being.

Our consciousness has thus been directed to the frontier where we can dimly divine the existence of the Being known to the spiritual investigator as the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold. Here already is an indication that in waking life we do not see our true being at all. And if we call our own being the Microcosm, we must add that we never see the Microcosm in its pure, spiritual form, but only the part that our own being reveals in the normal state. Just as when a man looks in a mirror he sees an image, a picture, and not himself, so in waking consciousness we do not see the Microcosm itself but a reflected image of it. We see the Microcosm in its mirror image.

Do we ever see the Macrocosm in its reality? Again we can take our start from familiar experiences, leaving aside for the moment what a man undergoes in the course of the twenty-four hours of the day. We will think of the very simplest experiences that come to a man in the outer world of the senses. In that world he perceives an alternation between day and night-how the Sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening; he perceives how the sunlight illumines all the objects around him. What is it, then, that man sees from sunrise until sunset? Fundamentally speaking he does not see the objects themselves at all, but the sunlight which they reflect. In the dark we cannot see an object without illumination. Let us take the eye as representative of the other senses. What we see during the day are, in reality, the reflected rays of the Sun. This is how things are from morning until evening. But man has only a very imperfect perception of the cause which enables him to see objects in the outer world at all. If we look at the Sun directly, our eyes are dazzled. The very cause to which we owe the faculty of perceiving the outer sense-world, dazzles us. Thus during the day it is the same with the Sun outside as it is on waking with our own inner self. The forces within ourselves enable us to live and to perceive the outer world, but our attention is diverted from our own inner being to the outer world. It is the same with the Sun; it enables us to perceive objects but dazzles us when we attempt to look at it. Nor during the day can we perceive everything that is connected with the Sun. We see what the Earth reveals to us in the reflected sunlight.

Our solar system is composed not only of the Sun but also of the planets. By day the sight of them is denied us; the Sun dazzles our vision not only of itself but also of the planets. We look out into space knowing that although the planets are there, they evade our observation. Just as by day we are prevented from seeing our own inner self and by night the sight of the spiritual world is denied us in ordinary sleep, so, by day, when our gaze is directed outwards, the causes of our sense-perceptions are hidden from us. What lies behind the Sun and connects it with the other bodies belonging to the solar system, with the Beings whose outer manifestations we call Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and so on—whatever living co-operation there is between the Sun and these heavenly bodies is hidden from us by day. What we perceive is the effect of the sunlight. When we compare this state with the state in which the world around us exists by night, from sunset to dawn, we can perceive in a certain way what belongs to our solar system. We can look up to the starry heavens and among other stars behold the planets at times when they are visible; but while we can see them in the night sky, the Sun itself is invisible. We must therefore say what by day makes the sense-world visible to us, by night takes from us the possibility of seeing it. At night the whole of the sense-world is invisible.

Is it possible to discover, in connection with the nocturnal state, something analogous to the State of the mystic when he descends into his own inner world? In the modern age there is little consciousness of this analogous state, but there is something of the kind. It consists in the fact that, like the mystic, a man develops certain qualities of humility and resignation and other feelings too, the nature of which we can grasp by picturing the simplest of them. Man has these feelings in normal life-in a weak form, like the sense of shame, but nevertheless he has them. By enormously enhancing these feelings he prepares himself to have experiences by night which differ entirely from those of normal consciousness.

We all know that our feelings in spring are different from those we have in the autumn. When buds are bursting in spring and giving promise of the beauty and splendour of summer, the feelings of a healthy soul will not be the same as they are in autumn; with the approach of spring we feel the awakening of hope. The feeling is only slightly developed in an ordinary, normal man, but it is present, nevertheless. Towards autumn, the mood of hope and awakening connected with spring will be transformed into one of sadness, of melancholy; when we see the leaves falling, when we see bare, skeleton-like branches instead of the bright flowering shrubs of summer, our souls are steeped in melancholy; there is sadness in our hearts. In the course of the year, if we move in step with the phenomena of outer Nature, we can experience a cycle in our life of soul. But as these feelings are faint and feeble in normal life, man's sensibility to the transformations that take place from spring to summer and autumn and from autumn to winter is only slight.

Once upon a time—and it is still so today—a pupil of spiritual knowledge who was to take the opposite path to that of the mystic was trained in such feelings; in contrast to the mystic's descent into his own inner being, he was taught to live with the cycle of outer Nature. He learnt to feel with great intensity, no longer faintly as in ordinary life, the awakening of Nature and the sprouting of vegetation in spring; then, when he was able to surrender himself wholly to this experience, the feeling of dawning hope in spring became one of joyful exultation in summer. He was trained to have this experience of exultation. And again, when a man was so far advanced as to experience in complete self-forgetfulness the melancholy of autumn, he could pass on to experience a feeling of winter, intensified into a feeling of the death of all Nature at midwinter.

Such were the feelings awakened in the pupils who had undergone training in the old Northern Mysteries, of which only the external side is still known and that merely as tradition. The pupils were trained by special methods to accompany in their own life of feeling the cycle of Nature throughout the year. All the experiences which came to these pupils, for example on Midsummer Night, were indications of the crescendo of hope to exultation shared with Nature. The festival of Midsummer Night was intended to portray the enhancement of the feeling of awakening in spring to that of joyous exultation in the superabundant life of summer. And at the winter solstice the pupil learnt to experience—as an infinitely enhanced feeling of autumn—the decline and death of Nature.

Such feelings can hardly be felt with equal strength by a man today. As a result of the progress of his intellectual life during recent centuries, present-day man has become incapable of undergoing the intense, overpowering experiences which the best representatives of the original peoples of Middle, Northern and Western Europe were able to endure.

Having undergone such training, the pupils who had thus intensified their inner experiences found themselves possessed of a particular faculty—however strange this may sound—the faculty of seeing through matter, just as the mystic is able to penetrate into his own inner self. They were able to see not merely surfaces of objects but they were able to gee through the objects, and above all, through the Earth.

This experience was called in the ancient Mysteries: seeing the Sun at Midnight. The Sun could be seen in its greatest splendour and glory only at the time of the winter solstice, when the whole external sense-world had so to speak died away. The pupils of the Mysteries had developed the faculty of seeing the Sun no longer as the dazzling power it is by day, but with all its dazzling brilliance eliminated. They saw the Sun, not as a physical but as a spiritual reality, and they beheld the Sun Spirit. The physical effect of dazzling was extinguished by the Earth's substance, for this had become transparent and allowed only the Sun's spiritual forces to pass through. But something else of great significance was connected with this beholding of the Sun. The fact of which only an abstract indication was given yesterday, was then revealed in all its truth, namely, that there is a living interplay between the planets and the Sun inasmuch as streams flow continually to and fro—from the planets to the Sun and from the Sun to the planets. Something was revealed spiritually that may be compared with the circulation of the blood in the human body. As the blood flows in living circulation from the heart to the organs and from the organs back again to the heart, so did the Sun reveal itself as the centre of living spiritual streams flowing to and fro between the Sun and the planets. The solar system revealed itself as a spiritual system of living realities, the external manifestation of which is no more than a symbol. Everything manifested by the individual planets pointed to the great spiritual experience just described, as a clock points to the time of occurrences in external life.

All that man learns to experience by enhancing his sensibility withdraws, as the spiritual aspect of space, from the ordinary sight of day. It is also concealed by the spectacle presented at night. For what does man see at night with his ordinary Faculties when he looks up to the heavens? He sees only the external side, just as he sees only the external side of his own inner being. The starry sky we behold is the body of spiritual reality lying behind it. Wonderful as is the spectacle of the starry sky at night, it is nothing but the physical body of the cosmic spirit, manifesting through this body in its movements and in its outward effects. Once again for ordinary human consciousness a veil is drawn over everything that man would behold were he able spiritually to see through the spectacle presented to him in space. Just as we are protected in ordinary life from beholding our own inner being, we are also protected from beholding the spirit underlying the outer, material world; the veil of the sense-world is spread over the underlying spiritual reality. Why should this be so?

If a man were to have direct vision of the spiritual Macrocosm without the preparation that has been described—it is the opposite process to that undergone by the mystic—a feeling of the most terrifying bewilderment would come over him, for the phenomena are so mighty and awe-inspiring that the concepts evolved in ordinary life would be quite incapable of enabling him to endure this utterly bewildering spectacle. He would be overcome by a tremendous enhancement of the fear he otherwise knows only in a weak form. Just as a man would be consumed by shame if, without preparation, he were to penetrate into his own inner being, he would be suffocated by fear if, while still unprepared, he were to confront the phenomena of the outer world; he would feel as though he were being led into a labyrinth. Only when the soul has prepared itself through ideas and thoughts which lead beyond the realm of ordinary experience can it prepare itself to endure the bewildering spectacle.

Man's intellectual life today makes it impossible for him to undergo what could at one time be undergone by individuals belonging to an original population of Northern and Western Europe through an intensification of the feeling of spring and autumn. Intellectuality was by no means as general in those times as it is today. Men's thinking is utterly different from what it was in those olden days, when it was far less developed. But with the gradual evolution of intellectuality, the capacity for this experience of Nature was lost. It is, however, possible for man to have it indirectly, as if in reflection, when these feelings can be kindled, not by actual experience of the happenings in external Nature but by accounts and descriptions of the spiritual aspects of the Macrocosm.

At the present time, therefore, it is necessary for descriptions to be provided such as those contained, for example, in the book, Occult Science—an Outline, which has just been published. I say this without boasting, simply because circumstances make it necessary. Such descriptions are of realities which cannot be outwardly perceived, which underlie the world spiritually and can be seen by one who has undergone the requisite preparation. Let us suppose that such a book is not read in the way that books of another kind are read today, but that it is read—as it should be—in such a way that the concepts and ideas it presents in an unpretentious form induce in the reader feelings which are experienced in the very greatest intensity. Such experiences are then similar to those that were induced in the old Northern Mysteries.

The book gives, for example, an account of the earlier embodiments of the Earth, and if read with inner participation, a difference of style will be recognised in the descriptions of the Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon conditions. By letting what is there said about Old Saturn work upon us, we shall induce a feeling consonant with the mood of spring, and in the description of the Old Sun-evolution there is something analogous to the emotion of exultation once experienced on Midsummer Night. The description of the Old Moon-evolution may evoke the mood of autumn and the whole style of the description of Earth-evolution proper will induce a mood similar to that prevailing when the time of the winter solstice is approaching. At the right place in the description of Earth-evolution an indication is given of the central experience connected with the mood of Christmas. [* See pp. 216-18 in the 1962-3 edition ofOccult Science—an Outline.]

This knowledge can be given today in the place of experiences which man is no longer capable of undergoing because he has now risen from an earlier life in feeling to intellectuality, to thinking; hence it is through the mirror of thinking that feelings originally kindled by Nature herself must be influenced. This is how writings should be composed if they are to convey what it is the aim of Spiritual Science to convey, and the moods they generate must be consonant with the course of the year. Theoretical descriptions are quite senseless for they simply lead to spiritual matters being regarded just as if they were recipes in a cookery book!

The difference between books on Spiritual Science and other kinds of literature lies not so much in the fact that unusual things are described but mainly in how things are presented. From this you will realise that the contents of Spiritual Science are drawn from deep sources and that in accordance with the mission of our time, feelings must be quickened through thoughts. You will realise then that it is also possible today to find something that can lead again out of the prevailing confusion.

Now when guided by such principles, a man sets out along the path leading into the labyrinth of happenings in the spiritual Macrocosm, this is something that was prophetically foreshadowed among the original peoples of Northern Europe. The faculties enabling them to read the great script of Nature were still active in these peoples at a time when the Greeks had already reached a high stage of intellectuality. It was the mission of the Greeks to prepare what we today must bring to an even more advanced degree of development. A book such as Occult Science could not have been written in the days of ancient Greece, but Greek culture made it possible, in a different way, for one who ventured into the labyrinth of the spiritual Cosmos to find a thread that would guide him back again. This is indicated in the legend of Theseus who took the Thread of Ariadne with him into the labyrinth. Now what is the Thread of Ariadne today? The concepts and mental pictures of the super-sensible world we form in the soul! It is the spiritual knowledge that is made available to us in order that we may penetrate safely into the Macrocosm. And so Spiritual Science which, to begin with, speaks purely to the intellect, can be a Thread of Ariadne, helping us to overcome the bewilderment that might come if we were to enter unprepared into the spiritual world of the Macrocosm.

So we see that if a man wishes to find the spirit behind and pervading the outer world, he must traverse with full awareness a region of which in normal life he is unconscious; he must traverse consciously the very stream which in everyday life takes consciousness from him. If then he allows himself to be affected by feelings kindled by the cyclic course of Nature herself or by concepts and ideas such as those referred to, if, in short, he achieves real self-development, he gradually becomes capable of fearlessly approaching that spiritual Power who is at first invisible. Just as the Inner Guardian of the Threshold is imperceptible to ordinary consciousness, so too is this second Guardian, the greater guardian of the Threshold, who stands before the spiritual Macrocosm. He becomes more and more perceptible to one who has undergone due preparation and is making his way along the other path into the spiritual Macrocosm. He must fearlessly and without falling into bewilderment pass this spiritual Being who also shows us how insignificant we are and that we must develop new organs if we aspire to penetrate into the Macrocosm. If a man were to approach this Greater Guardian of the Threshold consciously, but still unprepared, he would be filled with fear and despair.

We have now heard how with his normal consciousness man is enclosed within the frontiers marked by two portals. At the one stands the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold, at the other, the Greater Guardian of the Threshold. The one portal leads into man's inner being, into the spirit of the Microcosm; the other portal leads into the spirit of the Macrocosm. But now we must realise that from this same Macrocosm come the spiritual forces which build up our own being. Whence comes the material for our physical and etheric bodies? All the forces which there converge and are so full of wisdom, are arrayed before us in the Great World when we have passed the Greater Guardian of the Threshold. We are confronted there not by knowledge only. And that is another point of importance. Until now I have been speaking only of knowledge that can be acquired by man but it does not yet become insight into the actual workings and forces of the Macrocosm. The body cannot be built out of data of knowledge; it must be built out of forces. Once past the mysterious Being who is the Greater Guardian of the Threshold, we come into a world of unknown workings and forces. To begin with, man knows nothing of this realm because the veil of the sense-world spreads in front. But these forces stream into us, have built up our physical and etheric bodies. This whole interplay, the interactions between the Great World and the Little World, between what is within and what is without, concealed by the veil of the sense-world—all this is embraced within the bewildering labyrinth. It is life itself, in full reality, into which we enter and have then to describe.

To-morrow we shall begin by taking a first glimpse into that which man cannot, it is true, perceive in its essence, but which is revealed to him as active workings when he passes through the one or the other portal, when he passes the Lesser and the Greater Guardians of the Threshold.

It will be seen from the last lecture that if we wish to make an impartial study of the facts underlying our present investigation we must transcend those prejudices which might easily arise on matters which I must now describe objectively. So long as one has the slightest tendency to take personally an objective description of a particular race or people, it will be difficult to reach an unprejudiced understanding of the facts presented in this lecture course. For this reason these matters can only be discussed in the light of Spiritual Science. For however deeply one may be involved emotionally in a particular people or race, as Anthroposophists we have an adequate counterpoise in the teaching of karma and reincarnation, when rightly understood. This teaching opens a vista into the future and reveals that our integral Self is incarnated in successive ages in different races and peoples. When we contemplate the destiny of our integral Self we may be sure that we shall share not only the positive or perhaps also the negative aspects of all races and peoples; but we may be sure that in our inmost being we shall also receive the countless blessings of all races and all peoples since we are incarnated in different races at different times.

Our consciousness, our horizon, is enlarged through these ideas of karma and reincarnation. Only through these teachings therefore do we learn to accept what is revealed to us at the present time concerning the mysterious relations of race and nation. If we rightly understand the theme of these lectures we shall harbour no regrets at having incarnated in a particular people or race. But an objective survey of national and racial characteristics may, nonetheless, provoke dissension and disharmony unless it is accepted in the spirit I have already suggested. The aspirant for spiritual knowledge will learn through the teachings of karma and reincarnation how every nation, even the smallest nation, has to contribute its share towards the total evolution of humanity. In the second part of this lecture-course I propose to show—and herein lies its real importance—how the particular influences of the missions of the several peoples are merged in the whole of humanity and how even isolated ethnic groups which are scattered here and there amongst larger national groups have their part to play in the great harmony of human evolution. This, however, will only become apparent to us step by step.

In order to acquire a full understanding of the characteristics of the individual Folk Souls we shall have to select examples which are clearer to us in certain respects than the folk characteristics of our own times. On the other hand, we shall perhaps have to deal with folk characteristics which belong to a more distant epoch, in order to have a yardstick for determining the characteristics and tasks of the different nations. But this will be nothing more than a general outline of the racial or folk characteristics.

In the course of the last lectures we have learned that a race is the product of the cooperative activity of a normal and abnormal Spirit of Form, and a people the product of a normal and abnormal Archangel; and we now understand how the Beings of the spiritual Hierarchies intervene in evolution.

The question now arises; how do the Beings of a higher order work into the external world? It would be as well to begin by acquiring today an understanding of the Hierarchies of which man is the lowest member. You will recall that we placed man on the lowest rung of the Hierarchical ladder. Below him are the three kingdoms of nature, the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms. Above him are the Angels, the Archangels and the Archai or First Beginnings. This is the Hierarchy immediately above man—the third Hierarchy. The second Hierarchy is as follows:

• Spirits of Form—Powers (Exusiai)
• Spirits of Movement—Mights (Dynamis)
• Spirits of Wisdom—Dominions (Kyriotetes)

Then we have the highest of the three Hierarchies—the first Hierarchy:

• Spirits of Will—Thrones
• Cherubim
• Seraphim

Since all spiritual Beings manifest in some form or other and are to be found therefore in the phenomenal world, the realm of Maya or illusion, we must ask ourselves where we must look for them at the lowest stage of manifestation, at the stage of illusion. In his normal perception of Nature and the Spirit man knows only the realm of Maya, the most external manifestation of these spiritual Beings. I propose to illustrate this by means of an example.

Let us suppose a person is traveling on foot over the bare, rugged landscape of Norway. His first impression will be of a rocky expanse spread out before him. He will describe this solid rock formation in terms of his first impression, namely as hard “rocky substance”. But he who penetrates into the being of natural phenomena has a totally different conception of this “rocky substance”. What is the real nature of that upon which we stand and which offers resistance? The external surface of the Earth which man believes to have a real existence does not exist at all, it is an illusion. In reality spiritual forces are at work radiating from below, from within the Earth; they emanate from certain Beings. Thus in a particular locality we see a manifestation of forces emanating from the Earth and raying outward in all directions. But if these forces alone were present, clearly man would not have solid ground under his feet, for of themselves they would project him with maximum velocity into space. He owes his ability to stand on solid ground to the circumstance that other forces stream in from all sides from universal space. Where the forces streaming in from the Universe encounter the forces raying outward from within the Earth there arises, so to speak, a frontier or boundary which is the apparent surface of the Earth. The surface one sees, therefore, is only an illusion; it is a result of the activity of the in-streaming and outward streaming forces which neutralize each other at the apparent surface in question.

The forces raying outward in all directions are the forces of the Thrones, the Spirits of Will. The forces streaming in from the Universe are essentially the forces that proceed from the Spirits of Movement. Thus these two forces meet at this frontier and this interplay of the Thrones with the Spirits of Movement—since the activity of the Thrones is neutralized by the Spirits of Movement—produces the diversified contours of the Earth's surface. What is seen externally as the Earth's surface is wholly unreal; it is simply illusion. In reality it is the product of a balance of forces; an agreement, as it were, is concluded between the Spirits of Will and the Spirits of Movement as a consequence of which the Earth assumes its highly diversified configurations.

Nevertheless through this interplay alone our Earth could not arrive at its present planetary form. The forces of the Spirits of Will and the Spirits of Movement acting and reacting upon each other would not be sufficient for this; the resultant effect would be something totally different. If, for example, only the Spirits of Will were to ray outwards from within the Earth and were opposed by the Spirits of Movement alone, then the Earth would be in a continual state of flux, the ever moving forms could not be brought to rest. In that event, it is true, it would not be as fluid as the ocean in its present state; it would not be of a liquid consistency like water that is ruffled at the slightest breath of wind, but of a viscous, semi-fluid consistency.

If you wish to form an idea of how the Spirits of Will and the Spirits of Movement originally worked in concert, I would like to give you an example and would ask you to follow me on the sketch. In the first place let me draw your attention to the Alps, which today form a solid mountain chain so that the solid barrier of the Alpine Massif divides the Italian peninsula in the South from the rest of Europe. How is one to account for this alpine chain? There was a time in the far distant past when the Alpine Massif did not as yet exist, but to the North and West there were already older eminencies which at that time had already become solidified. Waves of semi-fluid consistency were then thrown up from the South. We may picture the situation somewhat as follows:

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Here at A we have the Bohemian Plateau. Now imagine a huge wave thrown up from the South which divided and spilled over the Bohemian Plateau on the right (to the East) and over the central plateau of France on the left (to the West). In primeval times this mighty wave formed the Alpine Massif. It is possible to arrive at this conclusion without specialist knowledge. Anyone who has once stood on the summit of one of the Alpine peaks and surveyed the unique configuration of the Alpine chain has observed—even if he were unaware of it—what Spiritual Science has long established and which even the present-day geologists have confirmed—that peculiar wave-like formation which dates from the time when the primeval mass of the Earth was still in a semi-fluid condition.

Such would be the configuration of the Earth today through the cooperation of the Spirits of Will and the Spirits of Movement but for the intervention of another activity which is remarkably persistent and which is manifested on the surface of our Earth by the interweaving of the activity of the Spirits of Form with the Spirits of Will (the Thrones) who work in conjunction with the Spirits of Movement. You may picture therefore that these Spirits of Form, dancing as it were upon the waves, brought the ever moving forms to rest and moulded them into form. We can therefore point to the cooperative activity on the part of three different forces which proceed from three kinds of Beings. On the one hand we see the activity of the Spirits of Form who work inward from the cosmic sphere and unfold their activity in the realms of the Spirits of Will below them as well as in that of the Spirits of Movement above them. That which on our Earth appears externally for the most part as a fluid element—not the liquid water we see around us today, but the primal semi-fluid element which was brought to rest by the Spirits of Form—this we must look upon as the most external manifestation of the Spirits of Will. But another element is always associated with this activity. The Spirits of Will (or Thrones) are assisted by the Cherubim or Seraphim. The Cherubim work in the air element, in everything aeriform which permeates the apparent solid substance of the Earth. Air is an illusion behind which stand the mighty Beings we call Cherubim. The Seraphim work in fire, they operate in whatsoever manifests as heat.

Thus we see how the radiations from the centre influence our Earth planet. Our planet therefore is so constituted that the Spirits of Will (or Thrones), the Seraphim and the Cherubim work from the centre. We must look upon our planet in this way: at the meeting-place of the boundaries of air and heat or warmth—for the atmosphere is just as much part of our planet as the water or dry land—a surface is formed. Upon this surface the Spirits of Form literally dance upon the waves and bring them to rest and mould them into form. It was for this reason that they were given their name. Behind them are the Spirits of Movement and in their element again is mingled what we called the Spirits of Wisdom. When therefore we look inward towards the centre of our planet we are aware of the presence of Divine Beings, Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim. When we look outward we perceive first of all beyond the realm of the Spirits of Form who permeate the air and heat with their element, the Spirits of Movement and the Spirits of Wisdom. When we gaze out into the periphery of the Earth, when we lift our eyes to the Cosmic Spheres, all the nature-forces and natural phenomena we encounter there are fundamentally the work of the second Hierarchy. Everything we see when we look into the depths of the Earth we ascribe to the Beings of the first (highest) Hierarchy. It is to the unique cooperative activity of these two Hierarchies that we owe the configuration of our environment.

We have stated that the three elements, water, air and fire are related to the Spirits of Will, the Cherubim and Seraphim. In which of these elements do the Spirits of Form manifest themselves? They are the Beings nearest to us and they “dance upon” the surface of the Earth where we live and have our being. They work inward from universal space, but now unfold their forces in the emanations issuing from the Earth. To us they are concentrated in the rays of the Sun. Light, therefore, is the element in which the Spirits of Form first weave and work. Since, however, the activities of light and everything related thereunto manifest themselves at the frontier where the Spirits of Movement and Spirits of Will work in concert, it is at this meeting-place that solid forms are created. Man has, at first, no organs that would enable him to see what lies beyond these forces of light, which we call the Spirits of Form, no organs with which to perceive that which is woven into the light. Everything which on our Earth determines creation and destruction, all the chemical forces active in the Earth, is still interwoven with light and this is principally the domain in which the Spirits of Movement operate. When man learns to perceive something of that which he otherwise looks upon simply as Maya, in the action of chemical synthesis and analysis, then he hears these Spirits of Movement, he perceives the Music of the Spheres of which the Pythagorean and other occult schools speak. That too is what Goethe describes when he speaks of the Sun, not as the giver of light, but when he says:

The Sun, in ancient guise, competing
With brother spheres in rival song,
With thunder-march, his orb completing
Moves his predestin'd course along.

(Faust. Prologue in Heaven.
Tr. Anna Swanwick)

This Music of the Spheres is still there, but it is inaudible to ordinary consciousness. It is a reality; it approaches all men from without as an astral effect. Man, however, does not hear it. If in relation to this he were to experience an alternation similar to that of light and dark at certain times, then there would also be times when he could hear the Music of the Spheres. It sounds forth both day and night and therefore he can only hear it if he undergoes a certain occult training and development. Whereas the light streams towards us during the day as light and during the night continues to operate as a reservoir of assimilated light, the Music of the Spheres sounds forth continually both day and night. In this situation man is in the same position as the miller who is aware of the sound of his mill wheel only when it is no longer working.

The last of the Beings of the Second Hierarchy are the Spirits of Wisdom, who work from the surrounding Cosmos into the weaving light and into the Music of the Spheres operating throughout the Universe. That is the Life of the universal Ether, raying in on to the Earth. For Life is pouring in on to the Earth from cosmic spaces and is received by living creatures here on Earth. It comes from the Spirits of Wisdom.

Thus we gaze out into cosmic spaces and perceive first of all the Sun in which these threefold forces are concentrated for our spiritual vision. We perceive how instreaming Life, weaving Sound, formative Light, the trinity of the second Hierarchy, are working in from universal space. The highest of the Hierarchies, the Seraphim, the Cherubim and the Thrones, work upwards from below, from the centre of the Earth. The third Hierarchy (the Hierarchy immediately above man) is interwoven with all terrestrial activity and works chiefly in the inner being of organic life. To this Hierarchy belongs, in the first place, the Archai acting as the Time Spirits. These Time Spirits work in the material prepared for them by the higher Hierarchies; they lay the foundation of what we call the history of mankind, the evolution of civilization on Earth. Then in our immediate environment we find the Archangels, the tribal Folk Spirits, and finally the Angels who mediate between the individual human’ beings and the Archangels.

To sum up, therefore: In the forces of Nature upon our planet, in earth, water, air and fire are the Beings of the first or highest Hierarchy who stream forth to meet the activity of the Spirits of Form working in from the cosmic sphere. From outside, the Beings of the second Hierarchy stream in, and in the environment of the Earth are the Beings of the third Hierarchy who, for the moment, are the weakest of the forces. Just imagine for a moment how powerful are the forces of those exalted Beings whom we call the Spirits of Will, who fashion the very ground under our feet. Then we have those forces which stream in from outside, the Spirits of Form who are nearest to us, and who mould the contours of the Earth in their plastic state. And finally we have Angels, Archangels and Archai who work more intimately into human souls. And so in the first (highest) Hierarchy we have those forces of Nature which we recognize as the strongest—the Nature-forces emanating from the centre of the Earth, the forces of the solid Earth beneath us. In the second Hierarchy we have the cosmic forces which live and weave around us in the ether and in the third Hierarchy we have that which lives and weaves in the inner recesses of our soul.

If we observe the cooperative activity of these three Hierarchies and see how they operate in our Earth planet, how they form it out of the totality of the Universe, then we have some indication of what was necessary in order to create our Earth. The Earth had to pass through the planetary epochs of Old Saturn, Old Sun, and Old Moon before it could become our present Earth. If you refer to my books Cosmic Memory and Occult Science, you will find that, even during the earlier incarnations of our Earth, these various spiritual Beings worked together, but that the nature of this cooperative activity was different from that of today. With each new incarnation in the Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth states the cooperative activity of those Hierarchical Beings assumed a different form because in each of these planetary epochs of the Earth the Hierarchical Beings had their specific task to fulfil. We may confidently affirm that each of the conditions through which our Earth has passed and those which still lie before it, represent, and have represented, a particular stage in the process of cosmic evolution.

Since all conceptions change from one planetary condition to another it is extremely difficult to define what were the tasks of the Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon epochs. This is not easy because we must first characterize the mission of our Earth in a very general way. The simplest way to conceive of it is to call to mind the nature of the various forces which manifest themselves in space. Man's inner life consists of thinking, feeling and willing; his outer vehicles consist of the physical body, etheric body and astral body. So that if we take a man of the present day and ignore for the moment his ego, we can envisage him as a tapestry consisting of the physical, etheric and astral bodies into which are woven—as into an outer envelope—thinking, feeling and willing.

Now these forces in man, both in the outer and the inner man, are always related to some earlier mission which was connected with a former incarnation of the Earth. If, for example, we wish to form an approximate idea of the Saturn mission, we may think of it as being related, on the one hand, to the human physical body and, on the other, to the human will. Now if there had been no Saturn incarnation of our Earth, neither the life of will in man, no r his physical body could have attained their present form. A man owes his physical body and life of will to Old Saturn. He is indebted to the Akashic Records for this knowledge. The after-effects of each Earth incarnation, however, are reflected in the forms of the succeeding incarnations. Hence the life of will as we know it today can be traced back to the after-effects of the Saturn element. Consequently the Saturn element is reflected in the inner life of man as will. You will have an idea of the mission of the Old Sun epoch if you study the etheric body and also the later development of the sentient life. You already know that the etheric body can be traced back to the Old Sun. The after-effects however are such that man was able to develop later the inner life of feeling. Finally, we find that the Old Moon condition was related to the astral body of man and the inner life of thought. Thus three successive incarnations of the Earth were necessary in order that these forces of the inner and outer man—physical body, etheric body and astral body; thinking, feeling and willing—could so develop that they are now an integral part of his physical and spiritual life. In order that the task of the three successive incarnations or planetary epochs of our Earth could be fulfilled and that man could be endowed with his present constitutional make-up, those Beings whom we have described as belonging to the Hierarchies were obliged to work together in each of these planetary epochs in a way appropriate to each Earth incarnation.

The mission of Old Saturn therefore had to be fulfilled otherwise man's physical body and the life of will could not have been bestowed upon him. To the Old Sun he owed his etheric body and sentient life, and finally to the Old Moon he owed the astral body and the power of thought. Thus, each of the three preceding incarnations of our Earth were especially devoted to one of the salient aspects of our individual being, our ‘I’. In effect the external physical body which stems from the activity of the Spiritual Beings of Old Saturn, from the Spirits of Will, is simply Will that is externalized. Today the will is an expression of the inner life. These words are carefully chosen; they are no flight of fancy, but fit the facts completely. You can learn much from them. The Earth passed through the Old Sun epoch in order, on the one hand, to lay the foundation of the etheric body through the influence of the Spirits of Wisdom, and, on the other hand, through the continued operation of the element of wisdom, to endow us inwardly with Feeling, the inner element of Wisdom. The mission of Old Moon is associated with the astral body and the inner life of Thought.

The problem, which now confronts us, is this: what particular mission has been chosen by the Spirits of Form who work chiefly on the Earth and fashion it?

Now the task before the Spirits of Will or Thrones who worked chiefly on Old Saturn was to endow man with that element which later, during Earth-evolution, manifests itself as Will. The great task of Old Saturn, then, is to implant the will, the forces of will. When we contemplate this gift to man, we are filled with admiration and reverence for the ruling cosmic Powers. They command our deep respect when we realize that for the skilful interweaving of outer Will, which resides in our physical body, and of inner Will, a special planetary mission was necessary. The whole world of the Hierarchies had to suffer the birth and death of a planet in order to bring about the condition which we experience as the outer and inner element of Will. In the same way, the Old Sun universe was necessary in order to endow us with the etheric body and the element of Feeling, the inner element of Wisdom. And the Old Moon mission was necessary in order to endow us with the astral body and the inner life of Thought. What, then, is the mission of the Spirits of Form? What is the real Mission of the Earth? If one associates the Old Saturn mission with the endowment of the element of Will, the Old Sun mission principally with the endowment of the element of Feeling, and the Moon mission chiefly with that of the element of Thought—with the astral body of man—then the mission of the Earth is to bring about a perfect harmony between these three elements, each of which had been predominant in an earlier incarnation of our Earth. The mission of our Earth is to resolve the conflict between these elements and restore a proper harmony between them. Man is involved in this mission of the Earth in order that he may establish this harmony between thinking, feeling and willing, first of all in his own inner being. At the beginning of the Earth period man was in this respect a patchwork of thought, feeling and will. Everyone who possesses a little self-knowledge can feel that the man of today has not yet achieved inner harmony; he is frequently a victim of conflict and discord. Man is called upon first of all to strike a balance between thought, feeling and will within himself by means of which he himself as an Ego-being can demonstrate and communicate to his fellow men what this harmony signifies.

In occult symbolism this Earth-mission has always been expressed in a special way by means of a geometrical figure. Amongst geometrical figures you will find none which corresponds so exactly to the balance or harmony of these three activities as the equilateral triangle. If you draw an equilateral triangle you will find the three sides are equal, the three angles equal, the vertices are equidistant from each other and all are equidistant from the centre. The centre of an equilateral triangle is a complete symbol of a balance of forces, so that when the occultist looks at an equilateral triangle he perceives in it a symbol of the perfectly balanced cooperation of those elements, each of which held for a time the upper hand in the three earlier incarnations of our Earth. The deeds of the ‘I’ in man signify simply the creation of an active centre in his nature whereby this state of harmony can be prepared from within. Man therefore is called to high destiny on Earth to bring about from within, first of all through his whole being, a balance between what was predominant for a time in earlier planetary epochs in various ways and at various times.

Now that is a very general definition of our Earth mission, but this mission is exactly as I have described it. The secret of this mission is that through this cooperation, through this balance or harmony of the three forces, the inner being really creates something new. A fourth element, which is the element of Love, is thus added to the three preceding elements. Love can only develop in the busy work-a-day world when an absolute harmony exists between the three forces, which in earlier epochs were each in turn, the dominating influence. We shall have more to say about this in the next few days. For the moment you must accept it as a general description.

Thus our planet is the planet of Love and therefore the result of this balance or harmony which is reflected in the cooperation of the three forces is the active spirit of Love, and this spirit of Love is to be woven into the whole of evolution throughout all the successive incarnations of the Earth by the fulfillment of the Earth's mission. In this way the Trinity becomes a Quaternary: the latter begins with its fourth element at the lowest stage, with the most elementary or primitive form of love which is so purged and purified that at the close of the Earth-evolution Love will appear as an element enjoying to the full equal status with the others. To fulfil the mission of balance or harmony ordained for our Earth planet implies, in reality, transforming the Trinity into a Quaternary. To make the Trinity into a Quaternary is therefore an occult formula for the Earth's secret. Inevitably the fourth element is today still very imperfect. But when the Earth shall have fulfilled its mission, it will appear as luminous as the Sacred Triangle which, with its state of perfect balance, shines forth as the highest symbol we possess for our Earth—ideal in so far as we can remember the past of the Earth.

This correspondence between the elements of thinking, feeling and willing is such that the inmost being of man becomes the substance of Love and this is what one may call the really creative, the inwardly creative element in earthly existence. We must therefore describe the Spirits of Form in their totality (because their particular mission is to harmonize the three former conditions) as the Spirits of Love.

In considering Earth-existence in this way we first described thinking, feeling and willing and the working of Love outside our Earth planet and we described as the special task of the Spirits of Form the implanting of Love which results from balance or harmony. This is the whole mission of the Earth. In order to realize this power of Love that shall permeate the Earth, the interplay and interaction of the lowest Hierarchies was necessary. As we began to indicate in our previous study, the network of Love must be woven by these Hierarchies and Love must be woven in such a way that the principal threads are woven by the normal Spirits of Form, for that is their fundamental mission. Then the abnormal Spirits of Form, who are in reality Spirits of Movement, weave into the tapestry that which creates the different races. Then the normal and abnormal Time Spirits weave into it the historical evolution, and the normal and abnormal Archangels the evolution of the individual peoples and languages; and finally the Angels who determine man's rightful place on Earth participate in this activity. In this way the mighty tapestry of Love is being woven. Yet of this tapestry of Love which is being woven as the real mission of Earth only the Maya, the outer reflection, is visible on Earth.

The nearest realm above the physical world in which it is possible to perceive this tapestry is the astral world. In order to see the working of the Hierarchies more and more clearly in the truths underlying our external Maya we must raise our consciousness from the astral plane to the planes of lower and higher Devachan. We then perceive how this tapestry is woven. If we raise our consciousness to the astral plane, the Beings normally working from the depths, namely, the Spirits of Will (Thrones), Cherubim and Seraphim are not yet visible. If we wish to perceive these Spirits at work we must raise our spiritual vision to still higher realms. But already in the astral world we find the abnormal Spirits of Form who, if they had fulfilled their normal evolution, would be working from without. The Spirits of the second Hierarchy, as we already know, ought to work from without, from the celestial spheres, but here they are working from within, from the centre of the Earth. Thus into this tapestry of Love in which the Spirits of Movement, the Spirits of Form and the Spirits of Wisdom are working from without, and the Spirits of Will, the Seraphim and Cherubim from within, there are also other Beings working from within who should really be working from without. They work secretly, however, after the manner in which the silkworm spins its cocoon. What is seen first of all in the astral world are Beings working from the depths. These singular Spirits of Movement who have transposed their sphere and are fallen Spirits, are the first Beings to become visible amongst those spiritual Beings weaving and surging in the spiritual atmosphere of the Earth. These Beings who are the first to become visible on the astral plane, even before the normal Angels, are the Spirits who in a sense falsify clairvoyant perception—despite the fact that they are vitally necessary for the propagation of the races. These Spirits, each of whom has many attendant spirits, because each one begets many spiritually subordinate beings, are surrounded in the spiritual world by a number of spiritual beings who are always subordinate to their respective Hierarchies. The higher Spirits also have their attendant Nature-spirits—the Spirits of Will: the Undines; the Cherubim: the Sylphs; the Seraphim: the Salamanders. The abnormal Spirits of Form who are really Spirits of Movement and who appear as hideous spiritual Beings on the astral plane also have their subordinate spirits. They are the spirits who are actively engaged in whatsoever is associated with the genesis of the human races, in that which in man is associated with the earth-bound, with the propagation of race and the like. These beings, indeed this whole domain is one of the most variegated and dangerous of the astral world and—this is the appropriate moment to call attention to it—it is the one most easily contacted by those who attain to clairvoyant vision by erroneous methods. The hosts of these spirits who are associated with the propagation of the race, who serve that purpose, are those most easily perceived. Many a one who has entered into the occult realm prematurely or in the wrong way has had to pay dearly for it because he encountered this host of spiritual beings without the harmonizing influence of the other spiritual Beings.

Thus we have been able to throw light upon that which weaves on the loom of Reality in order to produce this tapestry from which the pattern of man's psychic life emerges. Tomorrow we will discuss in further detail how this cosmic pattern which we have touched upon today is reflected in the origin and development of races and peoples.

Yesterday I tried to give you a picture of the states undergone by the human being after he passes through the portal of death and arrives in the spiritual world. Let us briefly summon before our soul the picture of the most essential stages. Immediately after passing through the portal of death, the human being first experiences the withdrawing of his ideational world. The ideas, the powers of thought, become objects, become something like active forces spreading out into the universe. Thus man feels at first the withdrawal from him of all the experiences he has consciously undergone during his earth-life between birth and death. But whereas earth-life, as experienced through thinking, withdraws from the human being and goes out into the vast cosmos (a process that occurs a few days after death [See: Rudolf Steiner, Theosophy, Anthroposophic Press, New York.]), man's inner depths send forth a consciousness of all that he has undergone unconsciously during earth-life while asleep. This stage takes shape in such a way that he goes backward and recapitulates his earth-life in a period of one third of its actual duration.

During this time, the human being is intensely wrapt up in his own self. It might be said that he is still intensely connected with his own earthly affairs. He is thoroughly interwoven with what he passed through, while asleep, during the successive nights of his earthly life.

You will realize that the human being, while continuously occupied with his nightly experiences, must necessarily be led back to his self. Just consider the dreams, the only element in man's earth-life that surges up from the sleeping state. These dreams are the least part of his experiences while asleep. Everything else, however, remains unconscious. Only the dreams surge up into consciousness. Yet it could be said that the dreams, be they ever so interesting, ever so manifold, ever so rich in many-hued colors, represent something that restricts the human being completely to his own self. If a number of persons sleep in the same room, each of them has, nevertheless, his own dream world. And, when they tell their dreams to one another, these persons will speak of things that seem to have happened in entirely different worlds. For in sleep, each person is alone within himself. And only by inserting our will into our organism do we occupy the same world situated in the same space as is occupied by others. If we were always asleep, each of us would live in a world of his own.

But this world of our own which we pass through every night between falling asleep and awaking is the world we pass through in reverse, after death, during a period encompassing one third of our life-span.

If people possessed nothing but this world, they would be occupied for two or three decades after death (if they die at an old age) exclusively with themselves. This, however, is not the case. What we experience as our own affairs nevertheless connects us with the whole world. For the world through which each of us passes by himself is interwoven with relations to all those human beings with whom we were associated in life.

This interweaving of relations is caused by the fact that, when looking down from the soul world on the earthly experiences of those persons with whom we were associated in some way, we experience together with them what occurs on earth. Hence anyone willing to try may perceive, if he acquaints himself with spiritual-scientific methods, [See: Rudolf Steiner, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, Anthroposophic Press, New York.] how the dead, immediately after their transition, are helped to participate intensively in earthly events by those of their former companions who are still alive. And so we find that the dead, in the measure in which they shared this or that interest with others, underwent common destinies with others, remain connected with all these earthly interests; are still interested in earthly events. And, being no longer hindered by the physical body, they judge earthly events much more lucidly and sagaciously than men who are still alive. By attaining a conscious relation to the dead, we are enabled to gain, by means of their judgment, an extraordinary lucidity concerning earthly events.

Furthermore, something else must be considered. We can see that certain things existing within earthly relations will be preserved in the spiritual world. Thus an eternal element is intermingled, as it were, with our terrestrial experiences.

Descriptions of the spiritual world often sound almost absurd. Nonetheless, since I am addressing myself presumably to anthroposophists of long standing, I may venture to speak frankly of these matters. In looking for a way to communicate with the dead, it is even possible to use earthly words: ask questions, and receive answers. And now a peculiar fact is to be noticed: The ability lost first by the dead is that of using nouns; whereas verbs are retained by them for a long time. Their favorite forms of expression, however, are exclamatory words; all that is connected with emotion and heart. An Oh!, an Ah!, as expressions of amazement, of surprise, and so forth, are often used by the dead in their language. We must, as it were, first learn the language of the dead.

These things are not at all as the spiritists imagine. These people believe that they can communicate with the dead, by means of a medium, in ordinary earthly language. The character of these communications immediately indicates that we are concerned here with subconscious states of living persons, and not with actual, direct utterances of the dead transmitted through a medium. For the dead outgrow ordinary human language by degrees. After the passing of several years, we can communicate with the dead only by acquiring their language—which can best be done by suggesting, through simple symbolic drawings, what we want to express. Then the answers will be given by means of similar symbolic forms necessarily received by us in shadowy outlines.

All this is described by me for the purpose of indicating that the dead, although dwelling in an element akin to sleep, yet have a vast range of interests and sweep the whole world with their glance. And we ourselves can greatly assist them. This may be done by thinking of the dead as vividly as possible; especially by sending thoughts to them which bring to life, in the most striking way, what we experienced in their company. Abstract concepts are not understood by the dead. Hence I must send out such thoughts as the following: Here is the road between Kristiania and a near-by place. Here we two walked together. The other person, who is now dead, walked at my side. I can still hear him speaking. I hear the sound of his voice. I try to recall how he moved his arms, how he moved his head.—By visualizing, as vividly as possible, what we experienced together with the dead; by sending out our thoughts to the dead whom we conjure up before our soul in a familiar image, we can make these thoughts, as it were, soar or stream towards the dead. Thus we provide the dead with something like a window, through which they can look at the world. Not only the thought sent by us to the dead comes forth within them, but a whole world. They can gaze at our world as if through a window.

Conversely, the dead can experience their present spiritual environment only to the degree in which they formerly reflected, as much as earthly men are capable of doing, on the spiritual world.

You know how many people are saying now-a-days: Why should I worry about life after death? We might as well wait. Once we are dead, we shall see what is going to happen.—This thought, however, is completely misleading. People who have not reflected, while still alive, on the spiritual world, who have lived in a purely materialistic way, will see absolutely nothing after death.

Here I have outlined to you how the dead are living during the period in which—commensurate with their experiences in the sleeping state—they pass through their life in reverse. The human being who has now discarded his physical and etheric body, feels himself to be at this time in the realm of spiritual moon forces. We must realize that all the world organisms—moon, sun and stars—inasmuch as they are visible to physical eyes, actually represent only physical formations of a spiritual element.

Just as the single man, who is sitting here on a chair, consists not only of flesh and blood (which can be regarded as matter), but also of soul and spirit, so the whole universe, the whole cosmos, is indwelled by soul and spirit. And not only one unified spiritual entity dwells therein, but many, innumerably many spiritual entities dwell therein. Thus numerous spiritual entities are connected with the moon, which is seen only externally as a silver disk by our physical eye. We are in the realm of these entities while retracing our earth-life, as has been described, until we arrive again at the starting point. Thus it might be said: Until then we dwell in the realm of the moon.

While we are in the midst of this going backward, our whole life becomes intermingled with certain things, which are brought to an approximate conclusion after we have left the moon realm.

Immediately after the etheric body has been discarded by us in the wake of death, a moral judgment on our worth as human beings emerges from the nightly experiences. Then we cannot do otherwise than judge, in a moral sense, the events through which we pass in reverse. And it is very strange how things develop from this point.

Here on earth we carry a body made of bones, muscles, arteries, and so forth. Then, after death, we acquire a spiritual body, formed out of our moral qualities. A good man acquires a moral body radiating with beauty; a depraved man a moral body radiating with evil. This is formed while we are living backward. Our spirit-body, however, is only partly formed out of that which is now joined to us. Whereas one part of the spirit-body received by us in the spiritual world is formed out of our moral qualities, the other part is simply put on us as a garment woven from the substances of the spiritual world.

Now, after finishing our reverse course and arriving again at the starting-point, we must find the transition to which I alluded in my Theosophy as the transition from the soul world into the spirit realm. This is connected with the necessity of leaving the moon sphere and entering the sun sphere of the cosmos. We become gradually acquainted with the all-encompassing entities dwelling, in the form of spirit and soul, within the sun sphere. This we must enter. In the next few days, I shall discuss to what degree the Christ plays a leading role in helping the human being to make this transition from the moon sphere to the sun sphere. (This role is different after the Mystery of Golgotha from the role He played before the Mystery of Golgotha.) Today we shall describe the passage through this world in a more objective way.—What ensues at this point is the necessity of depositing in the moon sphere all that was woven for us, as it were, out of our moral qualities. This represents something like a small package, which we must deposit in the moon sphere in order that we may enter, as purely spiritual beings, into the pure sun sphere. Then we see the sun in its real aspect: not from the side turned towards earth but from the reverse side, where it is completely filled with spiritual entities; where we can fully see that it is a spiritual realm.

It is here that we give as nourishment to the universe everything that does not belong to our moral qualities, but which has been granted to us by the gods in the form of earthly experiences. We give to the universe whatever it can use for maintaining the world's course. These things are actually true. If I compared the universe to a machine—you know that I do this merely in a pictorial sense, for I am certainly not inclined to designate the universe a machine—then everything brought by us into the sun sphere after depositing our small package in the moon sphere would be something like fuel, apportioned by us to the cosmos as fuel is apportioned to a machine.

Thus we enter the realm of the spiritual world. For it does not matter whether we call our new abode the sun sphere, in its spiritual aspect, or the spiritual world.

Here we dwell as a spirit among spirits, just as we dwelled on earth as a physical man among the entities of the various natural kingdoms. Now we dwell among those entities which I described and named in my Occult Science; and we also dwell among those souls which have died before us, or are still awaiting their coming earth-life. For we are dwelling as a spirit among spirits.

These spiritual entities may belong to the higher Hierarchies or be incorporeal men dwelling in the spiritual world. And now the question arises: What is our next stage?

Here on earth we stand at a certain point of the physical universe. Looking around in every direction, we see what lies outside the human being. That which lies inside him we are utterly unable to see.

Now you will say: What you tell us is foolish. It may be granted that ordinary people cannot see man's inside; but the learned anatomists, who cut up dead people in hospitals, are certainly familiar with it.—They are not familiar with it in the least! For what can be learned about a man in this way is only something external. After all, if we regard a human being merely from the outside, it does not matter whether we investigate his outer skin or his insides. What lies inside the human skin is not that which anatomists discover in an external way, but what lies inside the human skin are whole worlds. In the human lung, for instance, in every human organ, whole universes are compressed to miniature forms.

We see marvelous sights when admiring a beautiful landscape; marvelous sights when admiring at night the starry sky in all its splendor. Yet if viewing a human lung, a human liver, not with the anatomist's physical eye, but with the eye of the spirit, we see whole worlds compressed into a small space. Apart from the splendor and glory of all the rivers and mountains on the surface of the earth, a still more exalted splendor adorns what lies inside of man's skin, even in its merely physical aspect. It is irrelevant that all this is of smaller scale than the seemingly vast world of space. If you survey what lies in a single pulmonary vesicle, it will appear as more grandiose than the whole range of the mighty Alps. For what lies inside of man is the whole spiritual cosmos in condensed form. In man's inner organism we have an image of the entire cosmos.

We can visualize these things also in a somewhat different way. Imagine that you are thirty years old and, looking into yourself with a glance of the soul, remember something which you experienced between your tenth and twentieth year. Here the outer event has been transformed into an inner soul-image. In a single moment, you may survey widely spread experiences undergone by you in the course of years. A world has been woven into an ideational image. Only think of what you experience when brief memory-images of widely spread events passed through by you come forth in your soul-life. Here you have the soul-essence of what you experienced on earth. Now, if viewing your brain, the inside of your eye—the inside of the eye alone represents a whole world—your lung, your other organs in the same way as your memory-images; then these organs are not images of events passed through by you but images—even if appearing in material form—of the whole spiritual cosmos.

Let us suppose that man could solve the riddle of what is contained in his brain, in the inside of his eye, in the inside of his lung; just as he can solve the riddle of the memories contained in his soul-life. Then the whole spiritual cosmos would be opened up to him; just as a series of events undergone in life are opened up to man by a single memory-image. As human beings, we incorporate the whole memory of the world. If you consider these things in the right way, you will understand the following: The human being, who has undergone after death all the states described by me previously, now becomes manifest to the vision of man himself. The human being is a spirit among spirits. Yet, what he sees now as his world is the marvel of the human organism itself in the form of the universe, the whole cosmos. Just as mountains, rivers, stars, and clouds form our surroundings here on earth; so, when dwelling as spirit among spirits, we find our surroundings, our world, in man's wonderful organism. We look around in the spiritual world; we look—if I may express myself pictorially—to the right and to the left: as here we found rocks, river, mountains on all sides, so there above we find the human being, MAN, on all sides. Man is the world. And we are working for this world which is fundamentally man. Just as, on earth, we build machines, keep books, sew clothes, make shoes, or write books, thus weaving together what is called the content of civilization, of culture, so above, together with the spirits of the higher Hierarchies and incorporeal human beings, we weave the woof and weft of mankind. We weave mankind out of the cosmos. Here on earth we appear as finished products. There we lay down the spiritual germ of earthly man.

This is the great mystery: that man's heavenly occupation consists in weaving, in cooperation with the spirits of the higher Hierarchies, the great spiritual germ of the future terrestrial human being. Inside the spiritual cosmos, all of us are weaving, in magnificent spiritual grandeur, the woof and weft of our own earthly existence, which will be attained by us after descending again into earthly life. Our work, performed in cooperation with the gods, is the fashioning of the earthly human being.

When we speak of germs here on earth, we think of something small which becomes big. If we speak, however, of the germ of the physical human being as it exists in the spiritual world—for the physical germ maturing in the mother's body is only an image of the spiritual germ—we must think of it as immense, enormous. It is a universe; and all other human beings are interlinked with this universe. It might be said: all human beings are in the same “place,” yet numerically differentiated. And then the spiritual germ diminishes more and more. What we undergo in the time between death and a new birth is the experience of fashioning a spiritual germ, as large as the universe, of our coming earthly existence. Then this spiritual germ begins to shrink. More and more its essence becomes convoluted. Finally it produces its own image in the mother's body.

Materialistic physiology has entirely wrong conceptions of these things. It assumes that man, whose marvelous form I have tried to sketch for you, came forth from a merely physical human germ. This science considers the ovum to be a highly complicated matter; and physiological chemists investigate the fact that molecules or atoms, becoming more and more complicated, produce the germ, the most complicated phenomenon of all.

All this, however, is not true. In reality, the ovum consists of chaotic matter. Matter, when transformed into a germ, is dissolved; it becomes completely pulverized. The nature of the physical germ, and the human germ particularly, is characterized by being composed of completely pulverized matter, which wants nothing for itself.

Because this matter is completely pulverized and wants nothing for itself, it enables the spiritual germ, which has been prepared for a long time, to enter into it. And this pulverization of the physical germ is brought about by conception. Physical matter is completely destroyed in order that the spiritual germ may be sunk into it and make the physical matter into an image of the spiritual germ woven out of the cosmos.

It is doubtless justified to sing the praises of all that human beings are doing for civilization, for culture, on earth. Far from condemning this singing of praises, I declare myself, once and for all, in favor of it when it is done in a reasonable way. But a much more encompassing, a much more exalted, a much more magnificent work than all earthly cultural activity is performed by heavenly civilization, as it might be called, between death and a new birth: the spiritual preparation, the spiritual weaving of the human body. For nothing more exalted exists in the world order than the weaving of the human being out of the world's ingredients. With the help of the gods, the human being is woven during the important period between death and a new birth.

If yesterday I had to say that, in a certain sense, all the experience and knowledge acquired by us on earth provide nourishment for the cosmos, it must be said again today: After offering to the cosmos, as nourishment or fuel, all the earthly experiences that could be of use to it, we receive, from the fullness of the cosmos, all the substances out of which we are able to weave again the new human being into whom we shall enter at a later time.

The human being, now devoting himself wholly to a spiritual world, lives as a spirit. His entire weaving and being is spiritual work, spiritual essence. This stage lasts for a long time. For it must be repeated again and again: to weave something like the human being is a mighty and grandiose task. Not without justification did the ancient Mysteries call the human physical body a temple. The greater the insight we gain into the science of initiation, into what takes place between death and a new birth, the deeper do we feel the significance of this word. Our life between death and a new birth is of such a nature that we, as spiritual beings, become directly aware of other spiritual beings. This condition lasts for some time. Then a new stage sets in.

What took place previously was of such a nature that the single spiritual beings could really be viewed as individualities. The spiritual beings with whom one worked were met face to face, as it were. At a later stage, however, these spiritual entities—to express it pictorially, because such things can be suggested only in images—become less and less distinct, finally being merged into an aggregation of spirits. This can be expressed in the following way: A certain period between death and a new birth is spent in immediate proximity to spiritual beings. Then comes a time when one experiences only the revelation of these spiritual beings; when they become manifest to us as a whole. I want to use a very trivial metaphor. On seeing what seems to be a tiny gray cloud in the distance, you would be sure that this was just a tiny gray cloud. But, by coming closer, you would recognize it to be a swarm of flies. Now you can see each single fly. In the case of the spiritual beings, the opposite took place. First you behold the divine-spiritual beings, with whom you are working, as single individualities. Then, after living with them more intensively, you behold their general spiritual atmosphere, just as you beheld the swarm of flies in the shape of a cloud. Here, where the single individualities disappear more and more, you live—I might say—in pantheistic fashion in the midst of a general spiritual world.

Although we live now in a general spiritual world, we feel arising out of our inner depth a stronger sense of self-consciousness than we experienced before. Formerly your self was constituted in such a way that you seemed to be at one with the spiritual world, which you experienced by means of its individualities. Now you perceive the spiritual world only as a general spiritual atmosphere. Your own self-consciousness, however, is perceived in greater degree. It awakens with heightened intensity. And thus, slowly and gradually, the desire of returning to earth again arises in the human being. This desire must be described in the following way:

During the entire period which I have described and which lasts for centuries, the human being—except in the first stage when he was still connected with the earth and returned to his starting point—is fundamentally interested in nothing but the spiritual world. He weaves, in the large scale that I have described, the fabric of mankind.

At the moment when the individualities of the spiritual world are merged together, as it were, and man perceives the spiritual world in a general way, there arises in him a renewed interest in earth-life. This interest for earth-life appears in a certain specialized manner, in a certain concrete manner. The human beings begin to be interested in definite persons living below on earth, and again in their children, and again in their children's children. Whereas the human beings were formerly interested only in heavenly events, they now become, after beholding the spiritual world as a revelation, strangely interested in certain successive generations. These are the generations leading to our own parents, who will bear us on our return to earth. Yet we are interested, a long time before, in our parents' ancestors. We follow the line of generations until reaching our parents. Not only do we follow each generation as it passes through time; but—once the spiritual world has been manifested to us as a revelation—we also foresee, as if prophetically, the whole span of generations. Across the succession of great-great-great-grandfathers, great-great-grandfathers, great-grandfathers, grandfathers, and so forth, we can foresee the path on which we shall descend again to earth. Having first grown into the cosmos, we grow later into real, concrete human history. And thus comes the moment when we gradually (in regard to our consciousness) leave the sun sphere.

Of course, we still remain within the sun sphere; but the distinct, clear, conscious relation to it becomes dim and we are drawn back into the moon sphere. And here, in the moon sphere, we find the “small package” deposited by us (I can describe it only by means of this image); we find again what represents the worth of our moral qualities. And this package must be retrieved.

It will be seen in the course of the next days what a significant part is played in this connection by the Christ-impulse. We must embody within us this package of destiny. But while embodying within us the package of destiny and entering the moon sphere, while gaining a stronger and stronger feeling of self-consciousness and transforming ourselves inwardly more and more into soul-beings, we gradually lose the tissue woven by us out of our physical body. The spiritual germ woven by ourselves is lost at the moment when the physical germ, which we shall have to assume on earth, is engendered through the act of conception.

The spiritual germ of the physical body has already descended to earth; whereas we still dwell in the spiritual world. And now a vehement feeling of bereavement sets in. We have lost the spiritual germ of the physical body. This has already arrived below and united itself with the last of those successive generations which we have watched. We ourselves, however, are still above. The feeling of bereavement becomes violent. And now this feeling of bereavement draws out of the universe the needful ingredients of the world-ether. Having sent the spiritual germ of the physical body down to earth and remained behind as a soul (ego and astral body), we draw etheric substance out of the world-ether and form our own etheric body. And to this etheric body, formed by ourselves, is joined—approximately three weeks after the fecundation has taken place on earth—the physical germ which formed itself out of the spiritual germ, as I have previously described.

It was said that we form our etheric body before uniting ourselves with our own physical germ. And into this etheric body is woven the small package containing our moral worth. We weave this package into our ego, our astral body, and also into our etheric body. Thus it is joined to the physical body. In this way, we bring our karma down to earth. First, it was left behind in the moon sphere; for, had we taken it with us into the sun sphere, we would have formed a diseased, a disfigured physical body.

The human physical body acquires individuality only through the circumstance of its being permeated by the etheric body. Otherwise, all physical bodies would be exactly alike; for human beings, while dwelling in the spiritual world, weave identical spiritual germs for their physical body. We become individualities only by means of our karma, by means of the small package interwoven by us with our etheric body which shapes, constitutes and pervades our physical body already during the embryonic stage.

Of course, I shall have to enlarge during the next days on this sketch concerning the human being's transition between death and a new birth. Yet you will have realized what a wealth of experiences is undergone by us: the great experience of how we are first merged into the cosmos and then, out of the cosmos, again are shaped in order to attain a new human earth-life.

Fundamentally, we pass through three stages. First, we dwell as spirit-soul among spirit-souls. This is a genuine experiencing of the spiritual world. Secondly, we are given a revelation of the spiritual world. The individualities of the single spiritual entities become blurred as it were. The spiritual world is revealed to us as a whole. Now we approach again the moon sphere. Within ourselves the feeling of self-consciousness awakens; this is a preparation for earthly self-consciousness. Whereas we did not desire earth-life while being conscious of our spiritual self within the spiritual world, we now begin, during the period of revelation, to desire earth-life and develop a vigorous self-consciousness directed towards the earth.

In the third stage, we enter the moon sphere; and, having yielded our spiritual germ to the physical world, draw together out of all the heaven worlds the etheric substance needed for our own etheric body. Three successive stages: A genuine life within the spiritual world; a life amidst the revelations of the spiritual world, in which we feel ourselves already as an egoistic self; a life devoted to the drawing together of the world ether.

The counterparts of these stages are produced after the human being has moved again into his physical body. These counterparts are of a most surprising nature. We see the child. We see it before us in its physical body. The child develops. This development of the child is the most wonderful thing to behold in the physical world. We see how it first crawls, and then assumes a state of balance with regard to the world. We observe how the child learns to walk. Immeasurably great things are connected with this learning to walk. It represents an entrance of the child's whole being into the state of equilibrium of the world. It represents a genuine orientation of the whole cosmos towards the world's three spatial dimensions. And the child's wonderful achievement consists in the fact that it finds the correct human state of equilibrium within the world.

These things are a modest, terrestrial counterpart of all that the human being, while dwelling as a spirit among spirits, underwent in the course of long centuries. We feel great reverence for the world if we look at it in such wise that we observe a child: how it first kicks its limbs awkwardly in every direction, then gradually learns to control itself. This is the aftereffect of the movements which we executed, during centuries, as a spiritual being among spiritual beings. It is really wonderful to discover in the child's single movements, in its search for a state of equilibrium, the terrestrial after-effects of those heavenly movements executed, in a purely spiritual sense, as spirit among spirits.

Every child—unless some abnormal condition changes the sequence—should first learn to walk (attain a state of equilibrium) and then learn to speak.

Now again the child, by an imitative process, adjusts itself through the use of language to its environment. But in every sound, every word formation shaping itself in the child, we find a modest, terrestrial echo of the experience undergone by us when our knowledge of the spiritual world becomes revelation; when this knowledge is compressed, as it were, into a uniform haze. Then the World Logos is formed out of the world's single being, which we experienced previously in an individualized way. And when the child utters one word after the other, this is the audible terrestrial counterpart of a marvelous world tableau experienced by us during the time of revelation, before we return again to the moon sphere.

And when the child, having learned to walk and speak, gradually develops its thoughts—for learning to think should be the third step in a normal human development—this is a counterpart of the work performed by man while forming his own etheric body out of the world ether gathered from every part of the universe.

Thus, in looking at the child as it enters the world, we see in the three modest faculties needed to gain a dynamic static relationship to the world—learning to maintain equilibrium (what we call learning to walk), learning to speak, learning to think—the compressed, modest, terrestrial counterparts of that which, spread out into grandiose cosmic dimensions, represents the stages passed through by us between death and a new birth.

Only by gaining a knowledge of the spiritual life between death and a new birth, do we gain a knowledge of the mystery coming forth from man's innermost depth when the child, having been born in a uniform state, becomes increasingly differentiated. Hence, by pointing to every single being as a revelation of the divine, we learn to understand the world as a revelation of the divine.

The exercises I have described for attaining inspiration are actually only preliminary exercises for further supersensible cognition. Through them a person is indeed able to view the course of his life in the way I have characterized it; he is able to see the etheric world of facts unfolding in the expanse of earth existence behind man's thinking, feeling and willing. By discarding the picture images achieved in meditation, or in the consciousness following meditation, he also becomes acquainted through this empty consciousness with the etheric substance of the cosmos and the manifestations of the spiritual beings who rule there. When, however, a person becomes familiar in this way with human soul life, the astral organization of man, he realizes first of all how much the physical organism of man owes to hereditary development, that is to say what are the persistent factors in his physical body that have been inherited from his ancestors. Man also gains a glimpse of how the cosmos is active within the etheric organism, and he sees as a consequence what is not subject to heredity but breaks away from it and is responsible for man's individuality. He sees what it is that within his etheric and astral organizations sets him free from his inheritance and ancestors who gave him his physical body.

It is extremely important to distinguish clearly in this way between what is passed on in the continuing stream of physical inheritance from ancestors to descendants, and what, by contrast, is given to individual man by the etheric, cosmic world, for it is this whereby he becomes personalized and individualized and frees himself from his inherited characteristics. It is especially important in education, in pedagogy, to see clearly into these distinctions. Precisely such knowledge as is indicated here can provide teachers with some fundamental principles. I may perhaps refer here to the booklet, which contains a summary by Albert Steffen of the Pedagogical Course that I gave here in Dornach at Christmas a year ago, also to what is contained in the last issue of the English magazine Anthroposophy, (July/August), which contains interesting educational material.

The inspired knowledge developed by means of the exercises I have described only acquaints man with the astral organism within the framework of earth life. He learns to know what he is as a soul-spiritual being developing from birth to the present time. But this insight does not yet enable him to say that his soul-spiritual being begins with earthly life and ends with it. He arrives at the soul-spiritual element in his earth life but does not come so far as to perceive this soul-spiritual element as something eternal, as the eternal core of man's being. For that it is necessary to continue and broaden the exercises for eliminating the meditative pictures from consciousness so much that in doing so the soul becomes ever stronger and more energetic. Progress here really consists in nothing else but continued energetic training. One must struggle again and again with all the strength one can muster to remove from consciousness the pictures produced or created by imagination, so that it becomes empty. Gradually then, through practicing the elimination of the images, the soul's strength increases so much that finally it is powerful enough so that one is able to obliterate the overall picture of the course of one's life since birth, as it has been brought before the soul through imagination.

Mark well, it is possible to continue the exercises for eliminating a content of soul and producing empty consciousness, carrying them so far that the soul becomes strong enough to leave out the course of its own life. At the moment, when one is strong enough to do this, one lives in a consciousness that no longer has before it the physical organism, nor the etheric organism; moreover, one no longer confronts anything of the world absorbed through the physical and etheric organisms. For this consciousness, the sense world with all its sense impressions is no longer present, neither is the sum of all the etheric happenings in the cosmos that one had first gained through imaginative cognition. Everything of this kind has been removed. Thereby a higher degree of inspiration is brought about within the human soul.

What appears then by means of this higher level of inspiration is the condition of soul as it existed in a soul-spiritual world before it descended into a human physical organism through conception, embryonic life and birth. In this way one attains a perception of the soul's pre-earthly existence. One looks into those worlds where the soul existed before it received on earth, I may say, the first atom of physical substance transmitted to it with conception. One looks back into the development of the soul in the soul-spiritual world and learns to know its pre-existent life. Through this experience, a person has grasped one side of the eternal nature of the human soul's essence. When he has done that, he has, in fact, recognized for the first time the true nature of the human ego, of spirit man. This latter is accessible only to this form of inspiration that is capable of disregarding not only its own physical body and its impressions, but also its own etheric body and the latter's impressions as manifested in the course of life.

When one has advanced to this knowledge of the human soul as it existed before birth in its pure soul-spiritual existence, then one can also gain a conception of what thinking, what the forming of concepts really is, as we human beings experience it in the ordinary consciousness of our earth life. Even with the most careful self-examination of which the soul is capable we cannot, by using only the capacities and powers of our ordinary consciousness, grasp the real nature of thinking and the formation of ideas.

If now I am to make clear how the real nature of man's earthly concepts appears to inspired consciousness, I must make use of a picture, but this picture expresses complete reality. Bring to mind a human corpse; it still has the form that the man had in life. All the organs are still shaped the way they were when the person was alive. Even so, in looking at the corpse, we must admit that it is only the remains of what the living man was. When we now make a study of its essential nature, we must conclude that the corpse as it now lies before us can have no original, independent reality. It cannot be thought of as something that comes into being in the same condition as it is as a corpse; it can exist only as the remains of a living organism. The living organism must have been there first. The forms of the corpse, its members, point not only to the corpse itself but to what brought it into being. Anyone who rightly views a corpse in the context of life is directed by it to the living man who produced it. Nature, to which we surrender the corpse, can only destroy it; it cannot build it up as such. If we wish to see the upbuilding forces in the corpse, we must look upon the living man.

On another level, in a similar way, there is revealed to inspired consciousness the essential nature of the thinking or mental picturing that we have in ordinary consciousness. It is actually a corpse; at least, it is something which during earthly life is continually passing over into the corpse-like element of soul. Living thought was present before man came into earth-existence, but instead was a soul-spiritual being in the soul-spiritual world. There, this thinking and conceiving were something quite different; they were living elements within spiritual activities. What we have as our ordinary power of thinking is a remnant of that living spiritual entity that we were before we descended to the earth. It has remained just as a corpse remains of the living physical man. As we are referred back to the living man when we see a corpse, so, if we now look through inspired knowledge at the dying or already dead thoughts or concepts of the soul, we realize that we must treat this thinking as a corpse of the true “thought being,” we see how we must trace this earthly thinking back to a supersensible, life-filled thinking.

It is this that also reveals qualitatively the relationship of a part of our soul life to our purely soul-spiritual existence before birth. Through this, we really learn to know what our ordinary concepts and thinking signify, if we trace them back to their living nature, which is to be found nowhere within earth existence. On earth, it is only expressed in a reflection. This reflection is our ordinary thinking and forming of ideas. Therefore, the abstract character of this ordinary thinking is fundamentally remote from reality, as a corpse is remote from the true human reality. When we speak of the abstractness, of the merely intellectual aspect of thinking, we vaguely feel that the way it appears in ordinary consciousness is not what it should be, that it has its source in something else, which is its true nature. This is what is so very important, namely, that a true knowledge is able, not only in general phrases but in concrete pictures, to relate what man experiences here in his physical body to the eternal core of his being, as it was just done with the thinking and conceiving of ordinary consciousness. Then only will the significance of imagination and inspiration be seen in the right light. For then we comprehend that the dead or dying thinking is basically brought to life again through the exercises undertaken to achieve inspiration; brought to life within physical earth-existence. To acquire inspired knowledge is fundamentally to bring dying thoughts to life again.

Thereby we are not completely transposed into prenatal existence, but rather, through the soul's perception, we gain a true picture of this prenatal existence, of which we know that it did not originate here on earth but that it radiates out of a pre-earthly human existence into man's existence here on earth. We recognize through the picture's nature that it is cognitive evidence of the state of the human soul in pre-earthly existence.

What significance this has for philosophical knowledge will be discussed next.

Just as we are in a position in this way to investigate the true nature of our ordinary thinking, we can also, by means of the supersensible cognition referred to here, bring into view the essential being concealed behind the will. But for this, not only is the higher cognition of inspiration required, but also that of intuition which I described yesterday, when I said that in order to develop it, certain exercises of the will are necessary. If man carries these out, he becomes capable of releasing his own soul-spiritual nature from his physical as well as his etheric organism. He carries it out into the spiritual world itself. It is the ego and the astral organization, his own being, that he carries into the spiritual world. In this way, he learns to know what it signifies to live outside his physical and etheric organisms. He comes to perceive the state the human soul finds itself in when it has cast these aside. But that means nothing less than gaining a preview of what happens to man when he goes through death.

Through death, the physical and etheric organisms are cast off. Thus, laid aside, they can no longer form the covering for man as they have done during earth life. What happens then to the actual core of man's being is something one learns through a preview in intuitive knowledge, when, with one's spirit being, one is outside in the world of spiritual beings instead of within one's physical body. Man actually finds himself in such a condition. Through intuitive knowledge he is in a position to be within other spiritual beings, as otherwise here in earth life he is within his physical and etheric bodies. What he receives through intuition is an experience in a picture of what he has to go through when he passes through the event of death. Only in this way is it possible to gain actual insight into what underlies the idea of the immortal human soul. This human soul—inspired knowledge already teaches this—is on the one side unborn. On the other side, it is undying. Intuition teaches this.

Having thus come to know the true nature of the eternal core of man's being—insofar as it is to lead a life after physical death—one also learns to perceive what lies behind human will. We have just characterized what lies behind human thinking; that is discernible through inspiration. What is concealed behind human willing becomes perceptible, if, through exercises of the will, one brings about intuition. Then the will reveals itself so as to show that behind it something quite different is concealed, of which the will of ordinary consciousness is merely the reflection. It becomes evident that behind willing there is something that in a certain sense is a younger member of the human soul. If we speak of the thinking and forming of ideas as of something that is dying, indeed as something that is already dead, and we view it as the older part of the human soul, then, by contrast, we must speak of willing as the younger part. We can say that willing, that is, the actual soul element behind the will, is related to thinking as a young child is to an old man, except that in man's constitution old age comes after childhood, while in the soul the two exist side by side. The soul bears continually in itself both its old age and its youth—in fact, both its death and its birth.

In contrast to such a knowledge of the soul based on inspiration and intuition, which is quite definite, what one calls philosophy today is something extremely abstract, for this simply describes thinking and willing. Actual knowledge of the soul, on the other hand, reveals that when willing turns old it becomes thinking, and thinking that has become old—indeed that has died—has developed out of will. Thus, one truly becomes acquainted with this life of the soul; one learns to perceive the fact that what is revealed in this earth life as thinking was willing in an earlier earth life, and what is now willing, something still young in the soul, will become thinking in the following earth life.

So, in this way one learns to see into the soul and for the first time to know it as it really is. The will part of the human soul is revealed as something that leads an embryonic life. When we pass over into the spiritual world with what we harbor within ourselves as willing, we have a young soul, which by its own character teaches us that it is actually a child. Even as little as we can assume that a child does not grow on into old age unless it is sick, so little can we assume that what we perceive as a young soul—initiation reveals this to us—dissolves at death, for it has only just reached its embryonic life. Through intuition we learn to know how, in the moment of death, it goes forth into the spiritual world.

That means actually perceiving the eternal core of man's being according to its unbornness and its immortality. By contrast, modern philosophy works only with ideas taken from ordinary consciousness. But what does that mean? As we can see from what has been said, it means that these ideas are dead soul entities.

When philosophy, working with the ideas of ordinary consciousness, wants to consider the thinking part of the soul correctly in order to reach results, it will say, if it is sufficiently free of prejudice to investigate what is actually present in the thinking of ordinary consciousness, that thought cannot of itself explain its own existence, just as it must be said of a corpse that it cannot come from a corpse but must have come from something else. Physiology indicates this through observation. Philosophy, from what comes to light here out of intuition, should draw the conclusion that just because ordinary thinking and the forming of ideas have a dying character it is permitted to deduce from this fact that something else existed earlier. What inspiration discovers through contemplation, philosophy can find through logical conclusions, through dialectics, that is, through an indirect kind of proof.

What would philosophy have to do then if it were to choose to remain within ordinary consciousness? It would have to say, “If I will not lift myself up to some kind of supersensible knowledge I must at least analyze the facts of my ordinary consciousness.” If it does so without prejudice it fords that the thinking and ideas of ordinary consciousness are corpse-like in character. It would have to say, “Because that is something that does not explain its own nature out of itself, I may conclude that its real nature comes earlier.” Of course, this requires an unbiased attitude in analyzing the soul so that thinking may be recognized as possessing something corpse-like. But this impartial attitude is possible. For only a biased attitude discerns something alive in the thinking of ordinary consciousness. Freedom from bias reveals this thinking as something that in its very nature has withered away. This is why I said in the previous lecture that it is quite feasible to grasp the content of natural science with this deadened thinking. That is one side of the matter.

Intellectualized philosophy therefore can only come indirectly to a knowledge of man's eternal essence and indeed, only through recognizing what, in regard to earth life, must be viewed as preceding it. If then such a philosophy not only inquires into thinking, if it desires not only to be intellectual but also includes in its research the inner experience of the will and the other soul forces, which, in the cosmic scheme of things, are younger than thinking, then it can succeed in picturing to itself the kind of interplay through which thinking is linked to willing. Then it can come on one hand to the logical deduction: dying thinking is connected to pre-earthly soul existence. Even though philosophy cannot look upon such an existence and cannot perceive its nature, it can infer that something, although inaccessible and unknown, does exist.

When, on the other hand, philosophy centers its attention on willing or the feelings, and experiences the interplay between thinking and feeling, it will eventually discover not only something dying but incipient in willing. This you can find even in Bergson's philosophy, if you put what he says impartially into the appropriate words. You notice the impulse he himself feels in the way he speaks, the way he philosophizes, and sensing this impulse he attains an awareness of the eternal core of the human soul. But since Bergson refuses to take supersensible knowledge into consideration, he reaches only a knowledge of the soul's essence insofar as it reveals itself in earthly life. Out of his philosophy he cannot derive convincing indications of unbornness and immortality. Yet, on one side, he does characterize thinking—although he gives it a different name—as something old which superimposes itself over sense perceptions as a corpse-like element. On the other side he feels—because of the living way in which he characterizes it—the incipient, “embryonic” quality of the will. He can vividly enter into this and he senses that something eternal is contained within. Nevertheless, in this manner he arrives only at the characteristic of the soul-spiritual core of man in earth life, not at anything beyond.

Thus, we can say that, if they are unbiased, all philosophies using ideas based merely on ordinary consciousness can, through analyzing thought and will, come indirectly to the conclusion that the soul is a being unborn and immortal, but they cannot come to a direct perception of it. This direct perception, which would bring the philosophies of ideas to fulfillment, this perception of the real, eternal being of the soul, can be achieved only through imagination, inspiration and intuition as has been described here. As a consequence, although the subject is still discussed as part of philosophy, it remains true that anything really substantial concerning the soul's eternal nature must rely only on tradition that rests upon the dreamlike knowledge of the past. Philosophers often do not know this and believe that they produce it out of themselves. This content can be permeated by logic and dialectic. But a true renewal of philosophical life depends on the acknowledgment by our present spiritual culture of the existence of a fully conscious imagination, a fully conscious inspiration and a fully conscious intuition, and not only acknowledging the methods for attaining these capacities but putting their results to use in philosophical life. I will try to explain in the next two parts of my lecture how this relates to cosmology and religion.

When you consider that only through a higher form of inspiration can one arrive at the perception of the eternal core of man's being and how it lives in extra-terrestrial existence, then you will say that only through this higher inspiration and through initiation (as I have described it) can the human being really know himself. What plays into his own being out of the cosmos, he can know only through higher inspiration and intuition. Since this is the case, a genuine cosmology, that is, a picture of the cosmos that includes man's total being, can arise only on the level of inspired and intuitive perception. Only then does man gain insight into what is also working in his physical and etheric bodies during earth life.

In these organisms, the soul-spiritual nature of man is not merely hidden; during earth existence, it is actually transformed, metamorphosed in regard to waking, everyday life. As little as a root can reflect the exact form of the plant, so little can an observation of man's physical and etheric organisms reveal the eternal part of him. This is attained only when we look into what lives in man before birth and after death. Only then are we able to relate man's true being, which must be observed outside of earth existence, to the cosmos. This is why modern culture had no way of arriving at a cosmology that includes man during the period when it rejected any kind of clairvoyance. This I have indicated before, but it becomes especially clear from what I have described today. Nevertheless, in earlier times, even as late as the beginning of the last century, but chiefly at the end of the eighteenth century, a “rational cosmology,” as it was called, was developed from the philosophical direction as a part of philosophy.

This rational cosmology, which was supposed to be a part of philosophy, was also formed by philosophers with the aid of nothing but ordinary consciousness. But, if, with ordinary philosophy, one already had the above described difficulties in penetrating to the true nature of the soul, you will understand that it is quite impossible to gain a real content for a cosmology that includes man if one merely wants to stay within the ideas of ordinary consciousness. The contents of rational cosmology that the philosophers have developed even up to recent times, lived therefore in fact on the traditional cosmological ideas attained by humanity when a dreamlike clairvoyance still existed. These ideas can be renewed only by means of what has been described here as exact clairvoyance. In this sphere also, philosophers have not known that they actually borrowed from the old cosmology. Certain ideas occurred to them. They absorbed them from the history of cosmology and believed they had produced them out of themselves. But what they brought forth were merely logical connections, by means of which they assembled the old ideas and produced a new system. In such a way cosmologies arose in earlier times as a part of philosophy. But since one no longer had a living relationship to what one thus absorbed as ideas taken over from ancient clairvoyance, the ideas of the cosmologies became more and more abstract.

Just take a look at the chapters on cosmology in the philosophical books of earlier times and you will find how abstract and basically empty those ideas are that were developed on the subjects of the origin and end of the world, and so on. It is correct to say that they were all brought across from ancient times when they were alive, because man had a living relationship to what these ideas expressed. Gradually they had become unsubstantial and abstract, and people outlined only superficially what a cosmology should contain, a cosmology which extends not only to outer nature but can encompass the whole being of man, reaching to the soul-spiritual nature of the cosmos. In this connection, the extraordinary brilliant Emile Boutroux¹ gave significant indications of how to arrive at a cosmology.

But since he also wanted to build only upon what ordinary consciousness could encompass, he too only arrived at an abstract cosmology.

Thus, cosmologies became more and more devoid of real content, becoming merely a sum of abstract ideas and characteristics. No wonder then that gradually this rational cosmology was discredited. The natural scientists appeared who could investigate nature in the manner that led in recent times to so many scientific triumphs. They could formulate natural laws, postulating an inner ordering of nature from observation and experiment, and from this they put together a naturalistic cosmology. What was thus assembled from the ideas concerning outer nature as a naturalistic cosmology, had, to be sure, a content, the external sensory content. In the face of this, the empty, rational cosmology constructed by the philosophers could not maintain itself. It fell into disrepute and was gradually abandoned. One therefore no longer speaks of a rational cosmology, arrived at merely by logic; one is satisfied now with naturalistic cosmology, which, however, does not encompass man. One can say, then, that it is cosmology in particular that teaches, more than ordinary philosophy, how one must have recourse again to imagination, inspiration and intuition.

Philosophy can at least observe the human soul, and, through unbiased observation of thinking whose dying nature refers to something other than its present state, it discovers that something lies outside all human existence on earth that includes man inwardly; in the same way, philosophy can point beyond death. Therefore, out of conclusions drawn from the soul's rich life of thinking, feeling and will, philosophy can at least make its abstractions rich and varied. This is still possible. But cosmology as a spiritual science can only be established if it is given its content also from spiritual perception. Here one can no longer arrive at a content by deduction. To attain a content, one must borrow it from the old clairvoyant perceptions, as was the case in the ideas adopted from tradition, or one must attain it again by a new method such as has now been presented.

If, therefore, philosophy is still in a position to carry on in accordance with logic, cosmology can no longer do so. As a rational cosmology based only on ordinary consciousness, it has therefore lost its content and with it its standing. If we wish to advance beyond a naturalistic cosmology to a new one that embraces man's totality, we must learn to perceive with the aid of inspiration and intuition that element in man in which the spiritual cosmos is reflected. In other words, cosmology even more than philosophy is dependent upon the acknowledgement by modern culture of the methods employed by spiritual science for attaining fully conscious imagination, inspiration and intuition—and not only acknowledging them but making use of their results to construct with their aid a genuinely real cosmology. What can be said concerning religion from this standpoint will be described in conclusion.

If our religious life is to be founded on knowledge the experience of the spiritual human being among other spirit beings must be brought back to earth and described. In these experiences we are dealing with something that is entirely unlike life on earth; it is utterly different. In them man stands wholly outside this life; therefore, these experiences can only be undergone by those human powers that are entirely independent of his physical and etheric organisms and for this reason certainly cannot lie within ordinary consciousness. Only when this ordinary consciousness advances and develops clairvoyant capacities can it give descriptions of those experiences that a human being has in the purely spiritual world. Therefore, a “rational theology,” a theology that wants to rely upon ordinary consciousness, is in an even worse position than a “rational cosmology.”

Rational cosmology still possesses something, after all, that at least sheds a certain amount of light on man's earthly existence. The reason for this is that in a round-about way, to be sure, the form and life of physical and etheric man are to an extent brought about by spiritual beings. But the experiences that the human being has in the purely spiritual worlds and which exact intuition gets to know, can in no way be discovered with the ordinary consciousness, as is the case of philosophy. They cannot even be guessed at. Today, when people want to arrive at all human knowledge by means of ordinary consciousness, these experiences can only be adopted—this is even more true than in the case of cosmological ideas—from ancient traditions dating from those times when men found their way in dreamlike clairvoyance into the spiritual worlds and carried across into the earthly world what they experienced.

If someone fancies that he could state something about man's experiences in the divine world in the form of ideas based only on ordinary consciousness, he is very much mistaken. Therefore, theology has come increasingly to a point of forming a kind of historic theology, adopting, even more than does cosmology, merely the old ideas of the kingdom of God acquired in earlier clairvoyant vision. These ideas then are made into a system by logic and dialectic. Men believe that here they have something fundamental and original, whereas it is only a subjective system of those who worked on this theology. It is a product of history, poured at times into new forms. But everything that is of real content is borrowed—by those who want only to draw from ordinary consciousness—from tradition, or from history. But for this reason, the formulations of various philosophers—who in earlier times created a rational cosmology and wanted to create a rational theology as well—were through this procedure discredited more than ever. On the one hand, rational cosmology as against naturalistic cosmology fell into discredit. On the other, in the field of religion, rational theology as against purely historic theology was discredited—the historic theology that renounced pure reality—both the direct formulation of ideas about the spiritual world and the experience of it.

This direct relationship, these living connections with experience in the spiritual world, vanished for more recent humanity when, in the Middle Ages, the question arose of proof for the existence of God. As long as a direct relation to experience of the kingdom of God existed, one did not speak of dialectic or logical proofs for divinity. Such proofs, when they were put forward, were in themselves proof that the living relationship to the kingdom of God had died away. Fundamentally, what Scholastic theology said was correct: ordinary reason is not in a position to make pronouncements about the kingdom of God. It can only elucidate the ideas already there, systematize them. It can contribute only something toward making doctrine readily acceptable.

We can observe how in recent times this incapacity of ordinary consciousness to determine anything about the kingdom of God has given rise to two errors. On the one side are the scientists who want to talk about religion, about God, but feel the incapacity of their ordinary consciousness and so formulate merely a history of religion. A religious content cannot at the present time be obtained in this way. Therefore, the existing, or once existing religions are considered historically. What is in fact considered? It is the religious content once provided by the old dreamlike, intuitive clairvoyance. Or, people consider that aspect of the religious life of the present time that has survived as a residue of the old clairvoyant state. This is then called “History of Religion,” and people do completely without producing any genuinely religious life of their own.

Still other people realize that man's clear day consciousness is powerless to determine anything about experiences in the purely spiritual kingdom of God. Therefore, they turn to the more subconscious regions of the human soul, to the world of feeling, to certain mystical faculties, and speak of an immediate, elemental experience of God. This is quite widespread today. It is just the advocates of this kind of experience who are especially characteristic of the spiritual state of mind at the present time. With all their might they shun the possibility of bringing their awareness of God into clear ideas that are logically formed. They give long explanations as to why this instinctive experience of God which, according to their interpretation, is the true religious experience, cannot be logically proved. They conclude therefore that the idea of expressing any religious content in intellectual form must be abandoned. But it must be said that these proponents of a direct awareness of God are the victims of illusions, because what is experienced in any region of the soul can in fact also be expressed in clear ideas. If we were to follow their example and put forward the theory that the religious content is weakened when it is expressed in clear ideas, this would prove nothing but that we should have abandoned all our truly substantial ideas in favor of a series of dreamed-up notions. It is a characteristic feature of present-day religious life that people rely on something which, as soon as it has to be made clear, at once falls into error.

From this it is quite evident that we can succeed in renewing religious life on a basis of knowledge only if we do not reject a method of cognition that can guide us into having a living experience of the spiritual human being and other spiritual beings. We have special need of this method of cognition precisely so that religious knowledge can be placed on a firm foundation. In the realm of religion, ordinary consciousness can at most systematize perceptions, clarify them, or formulate them into a doctrine, but it cannot find them. Without these perceptions, religion is limited to the traditional acceptance of what is derived from quite different soul conditions of humanity in earlier times. It is therefore limited to what would never satisfy a mind trained in modern science.

Therefore, if we are to base our religion upon knowledge, I must repeat for the third time something that I have already expressed today in regard to other areas of culture, but that must be expressed specifically for each separate area. If, out of the spiritual needs of the present time, religious life is to be renewed and undergo vital stimulation, the spiritual life of our age must acknowledge fully conscious imaginative, inspired, and intuitive cognition. Especially for the religious area must this not only be acknowledged but, for a living religious content, our modern spiritual life must also apply these spiritual-scientific results in appropriate ways.

• 1. Emile Boutroux, 1845-1921; especially in his De la Contingence des Lois de la Nature (Concerning the Contingency of Natural Laws).