The Rudolf Steiner Archive

It is a one-sided view of the world to consider it, like Hegel, as permeated by what one might call cosmic thought. It is equally one-sided to consider, like Schopenhauer, that Nature has a basis of free-will. These two particular tendencies apply to western human nature, which leans more towards the side of thought. Hegel's philosophy has another form in the eastern view of the universe. In Schopenhauer's there is a tendency which really suits the oriental, and is shown by the fact that Schopenhauer has a particular preference for Buddhism, and the oriental view in general.

But really every such method of observation can be judged only if surveyed from the point of view which is given by Spiritual Science. From this point of view such a grouping together of the world under the heading either of thought of will appears to be something abstract, and, as we have often said, the more modern development of man still leans towards such abstractions. Spiritual Science must bring man back again to a concrete view of the world, in agreement with reality. And it is precisely to such a view that the inner reasons for the presence of these one-sided philosophies will appear. What such men as Hegel and Schopenhauer, who are after all great and important intelligences, see, is of course visible in the world; but it must be seen in the right way.

Now let us today, to begin with, understand clearly that we, as human beings, experience thought in ourselves. When a man speaks of his thought-experiences, it means that he has this thought-experience direct. He could naturally not have it unless the world were filled with thought. For how should a man, who perceives the world by his senses, be able to think, as a result of this sensory perception, unless the thought were already in the world?

But as we know from other studies, the organization of the human head is constructed in such a way as to be specially capable of taking in thought from the world. It is formed indeed from thought. It points at the same time to our previous existence on earth. We know that the head is really the result, the metamorphosed result of the previous life, while the organization of the human limbs points to a future life on earth. Roughly speaking, we have our head because our limbs have been metamorphosed from the previous life into the head. The limbs we now have, with everything belonging to them, will be metamorphosed into the head we shall carry in our next earth-life. At present, in our life between birth and death, thoughts function in our head. These thoughts, as we have also seen, are the reshaping of what functioned as will in our limbs in our previous existence. And again, what functions as will in our present limbs will be reshaped and changed into thoughts in our next life on earth.

The will thus appears as the seed, as it were, of thought. What is at first will becomes thought later on. If we look at ourselves as human beings with heads, we must look back to our past, for in this past we had the character of will. If we look into the future, we must take into account the character of will in our present limbs and must say: This is what in future will become our head: thinking man. But we continually carry both these in us. We are created out of the universe because thought from a previous age is organized in us in conjunction with will, which leads over into the future.

Now that which thus arranges the composition of man in this way becomes particularly observable if considered from the point of view of spiritual-scientific research.

The man who can develop himself so far as to have knowledge of Imagination, of Inspiration and of Intuition sees not merely the head of a human being, but he sees objectively the thinking man which his head makes him. He looks, as it were, in the direction of the thoughts. So that we may say with those abilities which man normally requires between birth and death, the head appears in the shape and form in which we see it. Through developed knowledge of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition the strength of thought, which is after all the basis of the head's organization, that which comes down from earlier incarnations, becomes visible—if we use the term metaphorically. How does it become visible? In such a way, dear friends, that we can only use the expression: it becomes as if it gave forth light.

Certainly, when people, who want to keep to the materialistic point of view, criticize these things, one sees at once how little the present generation is capable of understanding at all what they mean. I have in my Theosophy and in other writings, points out sufficiently clearly that it is not a question of thinking in terms of a new physical world, a new edition of it, as it were, if we contemplate thinking man in Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition; on the contrary, this experience is exactly the same as one has in regard to light in the physical external world. Put accurately it is like this: Man has a certain experience in connection with external light. He has the same experience, in imagination, in connection with the thought-element of the head. Thus the thought-element (See Diagram 1) viewed objectively, is seen as light, or better, experienced as light. Being thinking men, we live in light. We see the external light with physical senses; the light which becomes thought we do not see, because we live in it, because as thinking men, it is ourselves. You cannot see that which you yourselves are. If you emerge from this thought and enter upon Imagination and Inspiration, you put yourself opposite to it and can see the thought-element as light. So that in speaking of the whole world, we may say: We have the light in us; only it does not appear to us as light because we live within it, and because while we use the light, while we have it, it becomes thought within us. You control the light, as it were, you take up the light in yourself which otherwise appears outside you. You differentiate it in yourself. You work in it. This is precisely your thinking, it is a working in light. You are a light-being. You do not know it, because you live within the light. But your thinking which you unfold, is living in the light. And I you look at thought from the outside, you see, altogether, light.

Think now of the Universe (Circle.) You see it radiated with light—by day of course; but in reality you are looking at this Universe from the outside ... we now do the opposite. First we had the human head (Thought in the diagram), which contains thought in its development. Seen from outside, it has light. In the Universe we have light which is seen by the senses. If we come out of the Universe, and regard it from outside, what does it look like then? Like a web of thoughts. The Universe from within—light; from outside—thought. The head from within—thought, from outside—light.

This is a way of viewing the cosmos which can be extremely useful and suggestive to you, if you wish to make use of it, if you really penetrate into such things. Your thought and whole soul-life will become much more active than it otherwise is, if you learn to put this thought before you: if I were to come out of myself—as indeed a person who goes to sleep I continually do, and look back at my head, at myself therefore as a thinking man, I should see myself radiating forth light. If I were to leave the light-flooded world, and look at it from outside, I should see it as a picture of thought, as a thought-being. You observe, light and thought go together; they are identical, but seen from different sides.

Now the thought that is in us is really a survival from earlier times, the most mature thing in us, the result of former lives on earth; what formerly was will has become thought, and thought appears as light. As a consequence you will find: where light is, there is thought—but how? In thought or put differently, in light, a previous world continually dies.

That is one of the world-secrets. We look out into the Universe. It is full of light, in which thought lives. But in this thought-filled light there is a dying world. The world is continually dying in light.

When someone like Hegel regards the world, he really looks at the perpetually dying part of it. Those who have this particular tendency, become, for the most part, men of thought. And in dying the world becomes beautiful. The Greeks, who were really people of innate human nature, had their external pleasure when beauty shone in the dying world. For the world's beauty shines in the light in which it dies. The world does not become beautiful if it cannot die, for in dying the world becomes luminous. So that it is really beauty which is created from the radiance of the continuously dying world. Thus we regard the world quantitatively. The modern world began with Galileo and others to consider the world quantitatively, and our Scientists today are particularly proud when they can put natural phenomena into terms of lifeless mathematics. It is true Hegel used more pregnant concepts than the mathematical ones to understand the world; but what attracted him most was maturity and decay. Hegel's attitude to the world was like that of a man in front of a tree laden with blossom. At the moment when the fruit is about to develop, but is not yet there, when the blossom is at its fullest, there works in the tree that power of light, which is light-borne thought. That was Hegel's position. He looked at the blossom at its maximum, at that which becomes most completely concrete.

Schopenhauer was different. In order to test his influence, we must look at the other side of human things, at the beginnings. It is the will-element which we carry in our bodies. And we experience this—I have often pointed out—just as we experience the world in sleep. It is unconscious in us. Can we look at this will-element from outside, as we look at thought? Let us take the will developing in some human limb or other, and let us ask ourselves: if we were to look at this will from the other side, from the standpoint of Imagination, of Inspiration, and of Intuition, what then happens? What is the parallel here to seeing thought as light? What do we regard the will if we look at it with the trained power of sight, with clairvoyance? Yes: if we do this, we also get something which we can see from outside. If we look at thought with the power of clairvoyance, we perceive light. If we look at will with the power of clairvoyance, it becomes always thicker and thicker till it becomes matter. You have no other option, if you agree with Schoenhauer, but to believe that man is really a being of will. Had Schopenhauer been clairvoyant, this being of will would have confronted him as a matter-machine, for matter is the outer side of will. Within, matter is will, as light is thought. From outside, will is matter, as thought is outwardly light. For this reason I pointed out tin former addresses: If man dives down mystically into his will-nature, then those who only toy with Mysticism and really only strive after a sensuous experience of their Ego and of the worst egoism, believe they will find the spirit. But if they went far enough with this introspection, they would discover the true material nature of man's interior. For it is nothing less than a diving down into matter. If you dive down into the will-nature, you will find the true nature of matter. The scientific philosophers of today are only telling fairy-stories when they talk about matter consisting of molecules and atoms. You find the true nature of matter by diving down mystically into yourself. There you find the other side of will, and that is matter. And in this matter, that is in Will, is revealed finally the continually beginning, continually germinating world.

You look out onto the world. You are surrounded with light, and the light is the death-bed of a previous world. You tread on hard matter, the strength of the world bears you up. In light shines beauty in the form of thought, and in the gleam of beauty the previous world dies. The world discloses itself in it strength and might and power, but also in its darkness. The world of the future discloses itself in darkness, in the elements of material will.

If physicists were for once to talk sense, they would not produce speculations about atoms and molecules, but they would say: The visible world consists of the past, and carries in it not molecules and atoms, but the future. And you would be right in saying of the world that the past appears to us in the present, and the past wraps up everywhere the future, for the present is only the total effect of past and future. The future is what lies in the strength of matter. The past is what shines in the beauty of light, which includes, of course, sound and warmth.

And thus man can understand himself only if he takes himself as a seed of futurity, enclosed in the past, in the light-aura of thought. We might say that looked at spiritually man is the past in so far as he shines in his beauty-aura, but in this past-aura is incorporated a darkness mingling with the light, which rays forth out of the past, a darkness which carries over into the future. Light shines out of the past; darkness leads into the future. Light is nature in terms of thought, darkness is nature in terms of will. Hegel leaned toward the light that develops in the processes of growth and in the ripest blooms. Schopenhauer, as philosopher, is like a man standing in front of a tree, who has really no joy in the magnificence of its flower, but has an inner urge to wait till the seeds of the fruit bursts forth. That pleases him, that the power of growth is there, it stimulates him and makes his mouth water to think peaches are going to grow out of the peach-blossom. He turns from light-nature to light. What stirs him, viz., what develops from the light-nature of the bloom as the stuff that he can roll round with his tongue, or the future fruit, is as a matter of act the double nature of the world. To see the world properly you must see it in its double nature, for only then do you realize the concreteness of the world, whereas otherwise you see only its abstractness. When you go out and look at the trees in blossom, you are really living on the past. You look at nature in spring and you can say: What the gods have done to the world in past ages is revealed in the beauty of spring blossom. You look at the fruitful autumn world and say: There begins a new act of the gods, there falls something which however has the power of further development, of development into the future.

Thus it is a question not merely of making for oneself a picture of the world through speculation, but of taking in the world with the whole man. One can in actual fact comprehend the past in plum blossom, and eel the future in the plum. The taste of it on the tongue is closely connected with that out of which one rises again, like the Phoenix from his ashes—into the future. There you comprehend the world in feeling, and it was in this way that Goethe really pondered on everything he wanted to see and feel in the world. For instance he considered the green plant-world. He had not, of course, the advantages of modern Spiritual Science, but in considering the greenness of the plant-world, which had not quite reached the stage of bloom, he had after all the element that has come down from the past into the present; for in the plant the past appears already in the bloom; but what is not quite so much of the past is the leaf's greenness.

The greenness of Nature is that which, as it were, has not yet decayed, which is not so much in the grip of the past. It is this which unfolds itself as green. (See Diagram 2) But that which points to the future is what emerges from the darkness. There where the green is graded off to the bluish tone, there is that which proves itself to be of the future (blue.) On the other hand, there where we are directed to the past, where the ripening force is, which brings things to flower, there is warmth (red,) where light not only shines forth, but inwardly fills itself with force, where it becomes warmth. Now one ought really to draw the whole thing so that one says: You have the green, the plant-world (thus would Goethe feel, even if he has not transformed it into Spiritual or Occult Science;) bordering on it you have the darkness, where the green is darkened into blue. The part that increases its light and becomes filled with warmth, would close again towards the top. But you yourself—as man—are there, there you have within you what you have externally in the green plant-world; there you are, as human etheric body, and I have often said, peach-coloured. And that is the colour which appears here when the blue crosses over to the red. That is our own colour. So that, looking out on the coloured world, one can say: There one is oneself in the peach-colour, and has the green opposite; one has on the one hand the bluish, the dark, on the other side the light colour, the reddish-yellow. But because one is inside the peach-colour, because one lives in it, one can in ordinary life perceive it as little as one perceives thought as light. One does not perceive or observe one's own experience, and therefore one overlooks the peach-colour and sees only the red which one enlarges on the one side, and the blue which one enlarges towards the other side; and thus we see such a rainbow-spectrum. But this is only a deception. You would get the real spectrum if you bent this colour-strip into a circle. In actual fact one does bend it just because as human being one stands within the peach-colour, and so sees the coloured world only from blue to red and from red to blue through green. Were you to have this aspect, precisely then every rainbow would appear as a self-contained circle, as a circular section of a cylinder.

I mention this last only to call your attention to the fact that a philosophy of Nature such as Goethe's is at the same time a spiritual philosophy. In approaching Goethe, the researcher of Nature, we may say that he has as yet no Spiritual Science, but his view of Natural Science was such that it was quite on the lines of Spiritual Science. The essential thing for us today is that the world, including man, is an inter-penetration of thought-light, light-thought with will-matter, matter-will; and the concrete element in it is built up in the most various ways, or permeated with the content of thought-light, light-thought, matter-will and will-matter.

You must look at the Cosmos qualitatively in this way, not merely quantitatively, to get the truth of it. Then also there creeps into this Cosmos a continuous dying away, a dying of the past in light, and a opening up of the future in the darkness. The old Persians, when they felt the past decaying in light, with their instinctive clairvoyance, they called it Ahura Mazdao, and when they felt the future in the darkening will, they called it Ahriman.

And now you have these two world-entities, light and darkness—the living thought, the decaying past, in light, and the growing will, the coming future, in darkness. If we get so far that we regard thought no longer merely in its abstractness, but as light, that we regard the will no longer merely in its abstractness, but as darkness, in its material nature; if we get so far as to be able to regard the warmth-content, for example, of the light-spectrum, as being connected with the past, and the material side, the chemical side of the spectrum as being connected with the future, we pass over from the purely abstract to the concrete. We are no longer such dried-up, pedantic thinkers, merely working with the head; we know that what does work in our heads is really the light that surrounds us. And we are no longer such prejudiced people as to have only pleasure in light: we know also that in the light is death, a dying world. We can sense the world-tragedy in the light. We can also get from the abstract thought to the rhythm of the world. And in darkness we see the seeds of the future. We find indeed therein the impetus for such passionate natures as Schopenhauer. In short, we penetrate from the abstract into the concrete. World-pictures rise before us instead of mere thoughts or abstract will-impulses.

In the next lecture we shall seek—in what has developed concretely for us so remarkably,—thought into light and will into darkness—we shall seek the origin of good and evil. We shall penetrate from the world within into the Cosmos and there seek not only in an abstract or religious-abstract world the causes of good and evil, but we shall see how we break through to a knowledge of good and evil, after having made a beginning by realizing thought in its light, and having felt will in it darkness.

We will begin by making a preliminary survey of our educational task; and to this I would like to give you a kind of introduction to-day. Of necessity our educational task will differ from those which mankind has set itself hitherto. Not that we are so vain or proud as to imagine that we, of ourselves, should initiate a new world-wide order in education, but because from anthroposophical spiritual science we know that the epochs of human evolution as they succeed each other must always set humanity fresh tasks. The task of mankind in the first Post-Atlantean epoch was different, it was different again in the second, and so on down to our fifth Post-Atlantean epoch. And we must realise that, in actual fact, what has to be accomplished in any one epoch of human evolution does not enter into the consciousness of mankind until some time after this epoch has begun.

The epoch of evolution in which we live to-day began in the middle of the fifteenth century. And only now is there coming forth, from spiritual depths as it were, a perception of what has to be done in this epoch, particularly in the realm of education.

Hitherto, even with the best will in the world, men's work in education has been done in the light of the old education; I mean in the sense of the education of the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch. Now much will depend on our placing ourselves in the right relation to our task at the outset. We must learn to understand that we have to give a very definite guidance to our age—guidance which is of importance, not because it is considered valid for the whole evolution of humanity, but because it is valid just for this age of ours. For, amongst other things, materialism has brought it about that men have no idea of the particular tasks of a particular age. Please do understand this at the very beginning: particular epochs have their own particular tasks.

You will have to take over children for their education and instruction—children who will have received already (as you must remember) the education, or mis-education given them by their parents. Indeed our intentions will only be fully accomplished when we, as humanity, will have reached the stage where parents, too, will understand that special tasks are set for mankind to-day, even for the first years of the child's education. But when we receive the children into the school we shall still be able to make up for many things which have been done wrongly, or left undone, in the first years of the child's life. For this we must fill ourselves with the consciousness through which alone we can truly teach and educate.

In devoting yourselves to your task do not forget that the whole civilisation of to-day, even into the sphere of the most spiritual life, is founded on the egoism of humanity. In the first place, consider with an open mind that domain of spiritual life which receives men's reverence to-day—the domain of religion. Ask yourselves if our present civilisation, particularly in the religious sphere, is not so constituted, as to appeal to man's egoism. It is typical of all sermons and preaching of our time that the preacher tries to reach men through their egoism. Take for example that question which should concern people most deeply—the question of immortality. You will see how almost everything to-day, even in sermons and exhortations, is directed by the preachers to appeal to man's egoism in the super-sensible sphere. Egoism impels man to cling to his own being as he passes through the gate of death, to preserve his Ego. This is a form of egoism, however refined. And to-day every religious denomination appeals largely to this egoism when treating of immortality. Hence official religion mostly forgets one end of our earthly existence in addressing man, and takes account only of the other. It fixes its gaze on death and forgets birth. Though these things may not be openly acknowledged, they are nevertheless underlying tendencies.

We live in a time when this appeal to human egoism must be combated in every domain, if the life of mankind is not to decline further and further on its present downward course. We must become more and more conscious of the other end of man's development on earth, namely birth. We must consciously face this fact: that man evolves through a long period between death and a new birth and that then, within this evolution, he reaches a point where he dies, as it were, for the spiritual world—where conditions of his life in the spiritual world oblige him to pass over into another form of existence. He receives this other form of existence in that he lets himself be clothed with the physical and etheric body. What he has to receive by being clothed with the physical and etheric body he could not receive if he were simply to go on evolving in a straight line in the spiritual world. Hence although from his birth onwards we may only look upon the child with physical eyes, we will all the time be conscious of the fact—“this too is a continuation.” And we will not only look to what human existence experiences after death, i.e. to the spiritual continuation of the physical; but we will be conscious that physical existence here is a continuation of the spiritual, and that we, through education, have to carry on what has hitherto been done by higher beings without our participation. This alone will give the right mood and feeling to our whole system of teaching and education, if we fill ourselves with the consciousness: here, in this human being, you, with your action, have to achieve a continuation of what higher beings have done before his birth.

In this age when men have lost connection with the spiritual worlds in their thought and feeling, we are often asked an abstract question which in the light of a spiritual conception of the world has no real meaning. We are asked how so-called pre-natal education should be conducted. There are many people to-day who take things abstractly, but, if one takes them concretely,' then in certain domains one simply cannot continue asking questions in an arbitrary manner. I once gave this example: on a road we see tracks. We can ask: Why are they there? Because a carriage has been driven over the road. Why was the carriage driven? Because its occupants wanted to reach a certain destination. Why did they want to reach a certain destination? The asking of questions must come to a stop somewhere in reality. If we remain in abstractions we can continue for ever asking: Why? We can go on turning the wheel of questions without end. Concrete thought will always find an end, but abstract thought goes on running round like a wheel for ever. And so it is with the questions that are asked about domains that do not lie so close at hand. People begin thinking about education and then they ask about pre-natal education. But, my dear friends, before birth the human being is still in the protection of Beings who stand above the physical. It is to them that we must leave the immediate and individual relationship between the world and the human being. Hence a pre-natal education cannot be addressed to the child itself. It can only be an unconscious result of what the parents—especially the mother—achieve. If until birth the mother behaves in such a way that she brings to expression in herself what is morally and intellectually right, in the true sense of the word, then of its own accord what the mother achieves in this continuous self-education will pass over to the child. The less we think of beginning to educate the child before it sees the light of the world and the more we think of leading a right and proper life ourselves, the better will it be for the child. Education can only begin when the child becomes a true member of the physical world—and that is when he begins to breathe the external air.

Now when the child has come forth on to the physical plane, we must realise what has really happened for him in the transition from a spiritual to a physical plane. Firstly, we must recognise that the human being is really composed of two members. Before the human being comes down to earth a union is entered into between the spirit and the soul—meaning by spirit what for the physical world of to-day is still entirely hidden, and what in Spiritual Science we call Spirit-Man, Life-Spirit, Spirit-Self. These three members of man's being are present in a certain way in the super-sensible sphere to which we must now work our way through. And between death and a new birth we do already stand in a certain relationship to Spirit-Man, Life-Spirit, Spirit-Self. Now the force which proceeds from this trinity permeates the Soul element in man: Consciousness Soul, Intellectual or Mind Soul, and Sentient Soul. And if you were to observe the human being when, having passed through the existence between death and a new birth, he is just preparing to descend into the physical world, then you would find the spiritual which we have just described united with the soul. Man descends, as it were, as Spirit-Soul or Soul-Spirit from a higher sphere into earthly existence. He clothes himself with earthly existence.

In a similar way we can describe the other member of man's being which unites itself with the one just described. We can say: down there on the earth the Spirit-Soul is met by what arises through the processes of physical inheritance. And now the Soul-Spirit or Spirit-Soul meets with the Life-Body in such a way that two trinities are united with two other trinities. In the Spirit-Soul: Spirit-Man, Life-Spirit and Spirit-Self are united with that which is soul, namely: Consciousness-Soul, Intellectual Soul and Sentient Soul. These two trinities are united with one another, and descend into the physical world where they are now to unite with the Sentient or Astral body, Etheric body and Physical body. But these in turn are united—first in the body of the mother and then in the physical world—with the three kingdoms of the physical world: the mineral, the plant and the animal kingdoms. So that here again, two trinities are united with one another.

If you regard with an open mind the child who has found his way into earthly life, you will observe that here in the child, Soul-Spirit or Spirit-Soul is as yet dis-united from the Life-Body. The task of education conceived in the spiritual sense is to bring the Soul-Spirit into harmony with the Life-Body. They must come into harmony with one another. They must be attuned to one another; for when the child is born into the physical world, they do not as yet fit one another. The task of the educator, and of the teacher too, is the mutual attunement of these two members.

Let us now consider this task more concretely. Amongst all the relationships which man has to the external world, the most important of all is breathing. We begin breathing at the very moment we enter the physical world. Breathing in the mother-body is still, if I may put it so, a preparatory breathing: it does not yet bring the being into a complete connection with the external world. The child only begins to breathe in the right sense of the word when he has left the mother-body. Now this breathing signifies a very great deal for the human being, for in this breathing there dwells already the whole threefold system of physical man. You know that amongst the members of the threefold physical human system we reckon, in the first place, the digestion and metabolism. But the metabolism, the assimilation, is intimately connected at one end with the breathing. The breathing process is connected with the blood circulation through metabolism. The blood circulation receives into the human body the substances of the external world which are introduced by another path, so that on the one hand the breathing is connected with the whole metabolic system or digestive system.

On the other hand the breathing is also connected with the nerve-sense life of man. As we breathe in, we are continually pressing the cerebro-spinal fluid into the brain: and, as we breathe out, we press it back again into the body. Thus we transplant the rhythm of breathing to the brain. And as the breathing is connected on the one hand with digestion and assimilation, so on the other hand it is connected with the life of nerves and senses. We may say: the breathing is the most important mediator between the outer physical world and the human being who is entering it. But we must also be aware that this breathing cannot yet, by any means, function so as fully to maintain the life of the body. This applies particularly to the one side of breathing. At the beginning of his physical existence man has not yet achieved the right harmony, the right connection between the breathing process and the nerve-sense process. Observation of the nature of the child will show us that he has not yet learnt to breathe in such a way that breathing maintains the nerve-sense process rightly. In this lies the finer characterisation of what we really have to do with the child. We must first gain an Anthropological-Anthroposophical understanding of the human being. Thus, the most important measures in education will consist in paying attention to all that rightly organises the breathing process into the nerve-sense process. In the higher sense the child has to learn to take up into his spirit what is bestowed on him in that he is born to breathe.

This part of education will, you see, tend to the side of the soul and spirit. By harmonising the breathing with the nerve-sense process we draw all that is soul and spirit into the physical life of the child. To express it roughly we may say: the child cannot yet breathe in the right inner way, and education will have to consist in teaching the child to breathe rightly.

But there is yet another thing which the child cannot do rightly, and this must be taken in hand, in order that a harmony may thereby be created between the two members of the child's being—between the bodily corporeality and the Spirit-Soul. What the child cannot do properly at the beginning of his existence is this: he cannot yet accomplish the alternation between waking and sleeping in the way proper to man. It will strike you that what we have to emphasise from the spiritual side generally appears to be in contradiction to the external world-order. Externally speaking it is of course possible to say: “But the child can sleep perfectly well: indeed he sleeps far more than the human being at a later stage of life. The child sleeps his very way into life.” Nevertheless, what inwardly underlies sleeping and waking, this the child cannot yet do. The child experiences all sorts of things on the physical plane. He uses his little limbs: he eats, drinks and breathes. He alternates between sleeping and waking, but he is not able to carry into the spiritual world in sleep all that he experiences on the physical plane—all that he sees with his eyes, and hears with his ears, and does with his little hands, and the way he kicks and tosses with his little legs. All this he is not able to carry into the spiritual world and work upon there, carrying the results of this work back again on the physical plane. The child's sleep is characterised by the very fact that it is a different sleep from that of the grown-up person. What distinguishes the sleep of the adult is that his experiences during waking life are then worked upon, are metamorphosed. The child is not yet able to carry into his sleep what he has experienced between waking and falling asleep again. Thus in sleep the child still lives his way into the universal world order without being able to take with him what he has experienced externally in the physical world. It is this that a rightly guided education must accomplish: it must enable the human being to carry over his experiences on the physical plane into what the Soul-Spirit or Spirit-Soul is engaged upon during sleep. We, as teachers and educators, cannot really teach the child anything about the higher world. For what enters the human being from the higher world enters in during the time between falling asleep and waking again. All we can do is to use the time which the human being spends on the physical plane in such a way that he gradually becomes able to carry over into the spiritual world what we have done with him here; and that, in carrying it over, he can receive and bring back with him power from the spiritual world which will help him to be a true human being in physical existence.

Thus you see that all our activity of teaching and education is first directed to a very lofty domain—namely to the teaching of right breathing, and to the teaching of the right rhythm in the alternation of sleeping and waking. Needless to say, my dear friends, in our educational practice there will be no question of direct training of the breathing, or of direct training of sleeping and waking. All this will only be in the background. What we have to learn will be concrete measures of educational practice. But we must be conscious of what we are doing, right down to the foundations. When we teach this subject or that, we must be fully aware that we are working either in the one direction to bring the Spirit-Soul more into the earthly Body, or in the other direction to bring the bodily nature into the Spirit-Soul. Do not let us underestimate the importance of what has now been said. For you can only become good teachers and educators if you pay attention not merely to what you do, but also to what you are. It is really for this reason that we have Spiritual Science with its anthroposophical outlook: to perceive the significance of the fact that man is effective in the world not only through what he does, but above all through what he is. Truly, my dear friends, it makes a very great difference whether one teacher of the school or another comes through the classroom door to any group of children. There is a big difference; and the difference is not merely that the one teacher is more skilful in his practice than the other. No, the main difference—the one that is really influential in teaching—lies in what the teacher bears within him, as his constant trend of thought, and carries with him into the classroom. A teacher who occupies himself with thoughts of the evolving human being will work very differently upon his pupils from a teacher who knows nothing of all these things, and never gives them a thought. Once you begin to know the cosmic significance of the breathing process and of its transformation through education, and the cosmic significance of the rhythm between sleeping and waking—what is it that happens? The moment you have such thoughts something in you is combating your purely personal nature. The moment you have such thoughts the very basis of this spirit of personality is of less effect. In that moment all that enhances a personal spirit is damped down, all that man possesses through the fact that he is a physical man. If you have quenched this personal spirit, then, as you enter the classroom, it will come about through inner forces that a relationship is established between the pupils and yourself.

Now it may be that at first external facts will contradict this. You enter the school and perhaps you find yourself faced with scamps, both boys and girls, who make fun of you. Now you must be so strengthened with such thoughts as we shall here cultivate, that you do not pay any attention to their ridicule but accept it as something perfectly external. Accept it, shall I say, like the external circumstances that when you go out without an umbrella it suddenly begins to rain. Undoubtedly this is an unpleasant surprise. But we usually make a distinction between being ridiculed and being taken by surprise in a shower when we have no umbrella. This distinction must not be made. We must evolve thoughts so strong that the distinction is not made—that we take ridicule like a good shower of rain. If we are permeated by these thoughts and have real faith in them then (perhaps after a week, or a fortnight, or maybe longer still), we shall certainly find that however much the children may laugh at us, we have nevertheless established a relationship with them such as we would wish.

Through what we make of ourselves we must come to this relationship, even in the face of difficulty and resistance. And we must above all become conscious of this first of educational tasks: that we must first make something of ourselves, so that a relationship in thought, an inner spiritual relationship, may hold sway between the teacher and the children. So that we enter the classroom with the conscious thought: this spiritual relationship is present—not only the words, not only all that I say to the children in the way of instruction and admonition, not only my skilfulness in teaching. These are externals which we must certainly cultivate, but we shall only cultivate them rightly if we establish the importance of the relation between the thoughts that fill us and the effects of our teaching on the children, in body and soul.

Our whole conduct and bearing as we teach will not be complete unless we keep this thought in our minds: the human being was born. Thereby the possibility was given him to do what he could not do in the spiritual world. We have to teach and educate first of all so as to give the breathing its right harmony in relation to the spiritual world. The human being could not accomplish the rhythmical alternation between waking and sleeping in the same way in the spiritual world as in the physical world. By education, by teaching, we must regulate this rhythm in such a way that the bodily nature in the human being becomes properly membered with the Soul-Spirit. Needless to say, this is not something that we should have before us as an abstraction, and apply it as such directly to our teaching, but this thought about the human being must be our rule and guide.

This is what I wanted to give you in this present introduction. To-morrow we will begin with the subject of education proper.

THE process that I have described to you as the division of the sexes was of such a nature that the two sexes are to be thought of as still united in that animal-man of the Moon and also in his descendants in the Moon recapitulation of the Earth. Then there really took place a kind of cleavage of the human body. This cleavage came about through densification; not until a mineral kingdom had been separated out as it is today could the present human body arise, representing a single sex. The Earth and the human body had first to be solidified to the mineral nature as we know it. In the soft human bodies of the Moon and of the earlier periods of the Earth human beings were of dual-sex, male-female.

Now we must remind ourselves of the fact that Man in a certain respect has preserved a residue of the ancient dual sex inasmuch as in the present man the physical body is masculine, the etheric body feminine, and in the woman it is reversed; for the physical feminine body has a masculine etheric body. These facts open up an interesting insight into the soul life of the sexes; the capacity for sacrifice in the service of love displayed by the woman is connected with the masculinity of the etheric body, whereas the ambition of the man is explained when we realise the feminine nature of his etheric body. I have already said that separation into the human sexes has arisen from the intermingling of the forces sent to us from the sun and the moon. Now you must be clear that in the man the stronger influence on the etheric body emanates from the moon and the stronger influence on the physical body from the sun. In the woman the opposite is the case, the physical body is influenced by the forces of the moon and the etheric body by those of the sun.

The continual change of mineral substances in man's present body could not take place until the mineral realm had taken shape; before this there was quite a different form of nourishment. During the Sun-period of the Earth all plants were permeated by milky juices. Man's nourishment was then actually effected by his imbibing the milk-juices from the plants as today the child draws its nourishment from the mother. The plants which still contain milky juices are the last stragglers from that time when all the plants supplied these juices in abundance. It was not till a later time that nourishment took on its present form.

To understand the significance of the separation of the sexes we must be clear that upon the Moon and during its recapitulation on the Earth all the beings looked very much alike. Just as the cow has the same appearance as her “daughters,” as all other cows, since the Group-soul lies behind, so could men scarcely be distinguished from their forefathers, and this continued till long into the Atlantean Age. Whence arises the fact that human beings no longer resemble each other?

It comes from the rise of the two sexes. From the original dual sex-nature the tendency had continued in the female being to produce similarity in the descendants; in the male the influence worked differently, it tended to call forth variety, individualisation, and with the flowing of the male force into the female, dissimilarity was increasingly created. Thus it was through the male influence that the power of developing individuality came about.

The ancient dual sex had yet another peculiarity. If you had asked one of the old dwellers on the Moon about his experiences, he would have described them as identical with those of his earliest ancestors; everything lived on through the generations. The gradual rise of a consciousness that only extends from birth to death came about by the individualising of the human race, and at the same time arose the possibility of birth and death, as we know them today. For those ancient Moon beings with their floating, swimming motion, were suspended from the environment with which they were united by the “strings” conducting the blood. Thus if a being died it was not a death of the soul, it was only a dying off of a sort of limb, while the consciousness remained above. It was as if your hand, for instance, should wither on your body and a new hand grow in its place. So these human beings with their dim consciousness only experienced dying as a gradual withering of their bodies. These bodies dried up and new ones continually sprang forth; consciousness, however, was preserved through the consciousness of the group-soul, so that really a kind of immortality existed.

Then arose the present blood, which was created in the human body itself, and this went hand in hand with the rise of the two sexes. And with it the necessity of a remarkable process came about. The blood creates a continuous conflict between life and death, and a being who forms red blood within himself becomes the scene of a perpetual struggle, for red blood is continually consumed and changed into blue blood, into a substance of death. Together with man's individual transformation of the blood arose that darkening of the consciousness beyond birth and death. Now, for the first time, with the lighting up of the present consciousness, man lost the ancient dimly sensed immortality, so that the impossibility of looking beyond birth and death is intimately connected with the division of the sexes. And something else too is connected with this.

When man still possessed the Group-soul, existence went on from generation to generation, no interruption was caused through birth and death. Then this interruption appeared and with it the possibility of reincarnation. Earlier, the son was but a direct continuation of the father, the father of the grandfather, consciousness did not break off. Now there came a time when there was darkness beyond birth and death, and a sojourn in Kamaloca and Devachan first became possible. This interchange, this sojourn in higher worlds, could only come about at all after individualisation, after the expulsion of Sun and Moon. Only then appeared what today we call incarnation, and at the same time this intermediate state, which again will one day also come to an end.

Thus we have reached the period in which we have seen the earlier dual-sexed organism, representing a kind of group-soul, divide into a male and a female, so that the similar is reproduced through the female, what is varied and dissimilar through the male. We see in our humanity the feminine to be the principle which still preserves the old conditions of folk and race, and the masculine that which continually breaks through these conditions, splits them up and so individualises mankind. There is actually active in the human being an ancient feminine principle as group-soul and a new masculine principle as individualising element. It will come about that all connections of race and family stock will cease to exist, men will become more and more different from one another, interconnection will no longer depend on the common blood, but on what binds soul to soul. That is the course of human evolution.

In the first Atlantean races there still existed a strong bond of union and the first sub-races grouped themselves according to their colouring. This group-soul element we have still in the races of different colour. These differences will increasingly disappear as the individualising element gains the upper hand. A time will come when there will no longer be races of different colour; the difference between the races will have disappeared, but on the other hand there will be the greatest differences between individuals. The further we go back into ancient times the more we meet with the encroachment of the racial element; the true individualising principle begins as a whole only in later Atlantean times. Among the earlier Atlanteans members of one race actually experienced a deep antipathy for members of another race; the common blood caused the feeling of connection, of love; it was considered against morality to marry a member of another stock.

If, as seer, you wished to examine the connection between the etheric body and the physical body in the old Atlanteans you would make a remarkable discovery. Whereas in the man of today the etheric head is practically covered by the physical part of the head and only protrudes slightly beyond it, in the old Atlantean the etheric head projected far out beyond the physical head; in particular it projected powerfully in the region of the forehead. Now we must think of a point in the physical brain in the place between the eyebrows, only about a centimetre lower, and a second point in the etheric head which would correspond to this. In the Atlantean these two points were still far apart and evolution consisted precisely in the fact that they continually approached each other. In the fifth Atlantean period the point of the etheric head drew in to the physical brain and by reason of these two points coming together there developed what we possess to-day: calculation, counting, the capacity of judging, the power of forming ideas in general, intelligence. Formerly the Atlanteans had only an immensely developed memory, but as yet no logical intellect. Here we have the starting point for the consciousness of the “ego.” A self-reliant independence did not exist in the Atlantean before these two points coincided, on the other hand he could live in much more intimate contact with nature. His dwellings were put together by what was given by nature; he moulded the stones and bound them together with the growing trees. His dwellings were formed out of living nature, were really transformed natural objects. He lived in the little tribes that were still preserved through blood relationship, whilst a powerful authority was exercised by the strongest, who was the chieftain. Everything depended on authority, which however was exercised in a way peculiar to those times.

When man entered on the Atlantean Age, he could as yet utter no articulate speech; this was only developed during that period. A chieftain could not have given commands in speech, but on the other hand these men had the faculty of understanding the language of nature. Present day man has no idea of this, he must learn it again. Picture, for instance, a spring of water which reflects your image to you. As occultist a peculiar feeling emerges in your soul. You say—My image presses towards me out of this spring, to me this is a last token of how on old Saturn everything was reflected out into space. The memory of Saturn arises in the occultist when he beholds his reflection in the spring. And in the echo which the spoken sound gives back arises the recollection of how on Saturn all that resounded into cosmic space, came back as echo. Or you see a Fata Morgana a mirage in the air, in which the air seems to have taken up whatever pictures are imprinted in it and then reflects them again. As occultist you see here a memory of the Sun-period, when the gaseous Sun took in all that came to it from cosmic space, worked it over, and then let it stream back, giving it its own sun-nature at the same time. On the Sun planet you would have seen how things were prepared as Fata Morgana, as a kind of mirage within the gases of the Sun condition. Thus without being a magician one learns to grasp the world from many aspects and that is an important means towards developing into higher worlds. In ancient times man understood nature to a high degree.

There is a great difference between living in an atmosphere like the present and such as it was in Atlantis. The air was then saturated by immense vapour masses; sun and moon were surrounded by a gigantic rainbow halo. There was a time when the mist-masses were so dense that no eye could have seen the stars, when sun and moon were stiff darkened. Only gradually they became visible to man. This coming into sight of sun, moon and stars is magnificently described in records of the Creation. What is described there has really taken place, and much more besides.

The understanding of surrounding nature was still very vividly present in the Atlantean. All that sounds in the rippling of the spring, in the storm of winds, and is an inarticulate sound to you today, was heard by the Atlantean as a speech he understood. There were at that time no commandments, but the Spirit pierced through the vapour-drenched air and spoke to man. The Bible expresses this in the words “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” The human being heard the Spirit from surrounding objects; from sun, moon and stars the Spirit spoke to him and you find in those words—in the Bible a plain expression for what took place in man's environment.

Then came the time in which an especially advanced portion of the human race, who lived in a region which today is on the bed of the ocean in the neighbourhood of present Ireland, first experienced that definite union with the etheric body and thus an increase of the intelligence. This portion of humanity began to journey eastwards under the guidance of the most advanced leader while gradually immense volumes of water submerged the continent of Atlantis. The advanced portion of these peoples journeyed right into Asia, and there founded the centre of the civilisation that we call the Post-Atlantean Culture. From this centre civilisation radiated out; it proceeded from the groups of people who later moved farther to the east. There in Central Asia they founded in India the first civilisation, which still had an echo of the culture attained in Atlantis. The ancient Indian had not yet such a consciousness as we have today, but the capacity for it arose when these two points of the brain of which I have spoken coincided. Before this union there still lived a picture-consciousness in the Atlantean, through which he saw Spiritual beings. In the murmuring of the fountain he not only heard a clear language, but the Undine, who has her embodiment in the water, rose for him out of the spring: in the currents of air he saw Sylphs; in the flickering fire he saw the Salamanders. All this he saw and from it have arisen the myths and legends which have been preserved with most purity in the parts of Europe where there remained remnants of those Atlanteans who did not reach India. The Germanic Sagas and Myths are the relics of what was still seen by the old Atlanteans within the vapoury masses. The rivers, the Rhine, for instance, lived in the consciousness of these old Atlanteans as if the wisdom, which was in the mists of ancient Nivelheim had been cast down into their waters. This wisdom seemed to them to be in the rivers, it lived within them as the Rhine Nixies or similar beings.

So here in these regions of Europe lived echoes of the Atlantean culture, but over in India another arose, that still showed remembrances of that picture world. That world itself had sunk from sight, but the longing for what was revealed in it lived on in the Indian. If the Atlantean had heard the voice of Nature's wisdom, to the Indian there remained the longing for the oneness with Nature, and thus the character of this old Indian culture is shown in the desire to fall back into that time where all this was man's natural possession. The ancient Indian was a dreamer. To be sure, what we call reality lay spread all around him, but the world of the senses was “Maya” in his eyes. What the old Atlantean still saw as hovering spirits was what the Indian sought in his longing for the spiritual content of the world, for Brahma. And this kind of going back towards the old dream-like consciousness of the Atlantean has been preserved in the Oriental training to bring back this early consciousness.

Farther to the north we have the Medes and Persians, the original Persian civilisation. Whereas the Indian culture turns sharply away from reality, the Persian is aware that he must reckon with it. For the first time man appears as a worker, who knows that he is not merely to strive for knowledge with his spiritual forces, but that he is to use them for shaping the earth. At first the earth met him as a sort of hostile element which he must overcome, and this opposition was expressed in Ormuzd and Ahriman, the good and the bad divinity, and the conflict between them. Men wished more and more to let the spiritual world flow into the terrestrial world, but as yet they could recognise no law, no laws of nature within the outer world. The old Indian culture had in truth a knowledge of higher worlds, but not on the grounds of a natural science, since everything on the Earth was accounted Maya; the Persian learnt to know nature purely as a field of labour.

We then come to the Chaldean, the Babylonian and the Egyptian peoples. Here man learnt to recognise a law in nature itself. When he looked up to the stars he sought behind them not the gods alone, but he examined the laws of the stars and hence arose that wonderful science which we find among the Chaldeans. The Egyptian priest did not look on the physical as an opposing force, but he incorporated the spiritual which he found in geometry into his soil, his land; outer nature was recognised as conforming to law. The external star-knowledge was inwardly united in Chaldean-Babylonian-Egyptian wisdom with the knowledge of the gods who ensoul the stars. That was the third stage of cultural evolution.

It is only in the fourth stage of post-Atlantean evolution that man advances to the point of incorporating in civilisation that which he himself experiences as spiritual. This is the case in the Greco-Latin time. Here in the work of art, in moulded matter man imprints his own spirit into substance, whether in sculpture or in the drama. Here too we find the first beginnings of human city planning. These cities differed from those of Egypt in the pre-Grecian age. There in Egypt the priests looked up to the stars and sought their laws, and what took place in the heavens they reproduced in what they built. Thus their towers show the seven-story development which man first discovered in the heavenly bodies; so too do the Pyramids show definite cosmic proportions. We find the transition from priest-wisdom to the real human wisdom wonderfully expressed in early Roman history by the seven Kings of Rome. What are these seven kings?

We remember that the original history of Rome leads back to ancient Troy. Troy represents a last result of the ancient priestly communities who organised states by the laws of the stars. Now comes the transition to the fourth stage of culture. The ancient priest-wisdom is superseded by human cleverness, represented by the crafty Odysseus. Still more plainly is this shown in a picture which can only be rightly understood in this way and which represents how the priest-wisdom has to give way before the human power of judgment. The serpent can always be taken as symbol of human wisdom, and the Laocoon group depicts the overthrow of the priestly wisdom of ancient Troy through human cunning and human wisdom symbolised in the serpents.

Then by the directing authorities who work through millennia the events were outlined that had to happen and in accordance with which history must take its course. Those who stood at the foundation of Rome had already foreordained the sevenfold Roman culture as it stands written in the Sibylline Books. Think it out: you find in the names of the seven Roman kings reminiscences of the seven principles. That goes so far in fact that the fifth Roman king, the Etruscan, comes from without; he represents the principle of Manas, Spirit-Self, which binds the three lower with the three higher. The seven Roman kings represent the seven principles of human nature, spiritual connections are inscribed in them. Republican Rome is none other than the human wisdom, which replaced the ancient priestly wisdom. Thus did the fourth epoch grow within the third. Man sent forth what he had in his soul into the great works of art, into drama and jurisprudence. Formerly all justice was derived from the stars. The Romans became a nation of law-givers because there men created justice, “jus,” according to their own requirements.

We live ourselves in the fifth period. How does the meaning of the totality of evolution come to expression in it? The old authority has vanished, man becomes more and more dependent on his own inner nature, his external acts bear increasingly the stamp of his character. Racial ties lose their hold, man becomes more and more individualised. This is the kernel of the religion which says “He who doth not leave father and mother, brother and sister cannot be my disciple.” This means that all love which is founded on natural ties alone is to come to an end, human beings must stand before one another, and soul find soul.

We have the task of drawing down still further on to the physical plane that which flowed from the soul in Greco-Latin times. Man becomes in this way, a being who sinks deeper and deeper into materiality. If the Greek in his works of art has created an idealised image of his soul-life and poured it into the human form, if the Roman in his jurisprudence has created something that still further signifies personal requirements, then our age culminates in machines, which are solely a materialistic expression of mere personal human needs. Mankind sinks lower and lower from heaven, and this fifth period has descended deepest, is the most involved in matter. If the Greek in his creations has lifted man above man in his images (for Zeus represents man raised above himself), if you find still left in Roman jurisprudence something of man that goes out beyond himself (for the Roman placed more value on being a Roman citizen than on being a person and an individual) then in our period you find people who utilise spirit for the satisfying of their material needs. For what purpose is served by all machines, steamships, railways, all complicated inventions? The ancient Chaldean was accustomed to satisfy his need of food in the simplest way; today an immensity of wisdom, crystalised human wisdom, is expended on the stilling of hunger and thirst. We must not deceive ourselves about this. The wisdom that is so employed has descended below itself right into matter.

All that man had earlier drawn down from the spiritual realms had to descend below itself in order to be able to mount upwards again—and with this our age has received its mission. If in man of an earlier time there flowed blood which bound him with his tribe, today the love which still flowed in the earlier blood shows greater and greater cleavage; a love of a spiritual kind must take its place and then we can ascend again to spiritual realms. There is good reason for us to have come down from spiritual heights, for man must go through this descent in order to find the way up to spirituality out of his own strength. The mission of Spiritual Science is to show mankind this upward path.

We have followed the course of mankind as far as the time in which we ourselves stand; we must now show how it will evolve further, and how one who passes through an initiation can even today forestall a certain stage of humanity on his path of knowledge and wisdom.

In such a document as St. John's Gospel everything is significant and important, and it is very accurately expressed. For example, why does the Holy Spirit appear in the form of a dove? If we were to explain all that is connected with this we should need a number of lectures; but we can gain at least an idea of it if we study the evolution of humanity from still another point of view. In our earlier lectures we made a statement which: for a natural scientist of the present day, would seem to be outrageous: that man was already there at the beginning of the evolution of the Earth, and that he has participated in the whole of the development of the Earth. Of course it must not be forgotten that in former times man was quite differently organised and constituted from what he is to-day. Even the Atlantean had quite a different appearance from the men of the present day. The difference was still greater in the man of the Lemurian epoch; and still greater in the men of the period when the Sun and Moon were still united with our planet.

In order to enter into the ideas of Spiritual Science on the subject of evolution, we must start out from something that lies close at hand. The human being now living on the Earth are not all at the same stage of evolution; besides the peoples which have reached a high level of culture there are children of nature who have remained behind in civilisation. In present-day natural science the view has developed—and it is held with great tenacity, although new facts speak against it—that the more highly developed peoples have originated from those which have remained behind in evolution; but this view is not in accord with the results of spiritual research. Let us take, for example, the peoples with which we became acquainted when America was discovered. Let us briefly describe an episode which enables us to look into the mental and spiritual life of these peoples. As is well known, the whites had pushed the native Indians further and further into the interior of the country, and had not kept their promise to give them other hunting-grounds. One of the Indian chiefs once said to the leader of the European invaders: “You pale faces have taken from us our lands and have promised to give us others. But the white man has broken his word to the brown man, and we also know why. The pale man has small signs in which are magical beings, and in these he seeks to find the truth. But what he there finds is not the truth; for it is not good. The brown man does not try to find the truth in those little magical signs. He hears the “great Spirit” in the rustling of the trees in the forest and in the rippling of the brook. In lightning and thunder the Great Spirit announces to him what is right and what is not right.” The American Indians are a primitive people which has remained very far behind; their religious views are also very primitive, but they have preserved their belief in a monotheistic Spirit, which speaks to them from all the sounds of Nature. An Indian is in such close touch with nature that he still hears in all its manifestations the voice of the great creative Spirit; whereas the European is so deeply immersed in his materialistic culture that he can no longer hear the voice of nature. Both peoples have the same origin, both spring from the population of Atlantis, which had a monotheistic faith that originated from a spiritual clairvoyance. But the Europeans have risen to their present stage of culture, while the Indians stood still and then degenerated. We have always to bear this process of evolution in mind. It may be represented in the following way. In the course of millennia our planet changes, and this change makes the evolution of humanity possible. The offshoots, which no longer fit into the conditions, become decadent. Thus we have a main stem of evolution and side branches which degenerate.

If we go back from the point in Atlantis when the Europeans and North American Indians were still united with one another, we arrive at a period when the human body was still comparatively soft, of jelly-like substance. There again we see beings branch off and stand still. These bodies develop further, but in a descending line; and out of them originate the apes. We cannot say that man originates from the ape, but both, man and ape, spring from a form which was common to both but was quite different in shape from either the present ape or the present man. The branching off took place at the point where it was possible for this original form to ascend on the one hand and to descend on the other and become a caricature of man. We will only follow the theory of the origin of species as far as is necessary to find the connection with what has been said in former lectures.

Among the old Atlanteans the etheric body was still partly outside the physical body. To-day the astral body is still outside the physical body during sleep; it is only during sleep, therefore, that man is now able to conquer the tiredness of the physical body, because his astral body is then outside the physical body and is thus able to work upon it. Further influences on the physical body are now no longer possible, but remnants of these influences can still be seen in such phenomena as reddening with shame, growing pale with fear and terror, etc. But the further we go back in the Atlantean Epoch and the more the etheric body was outside the physical body, the more was it in a position to transform and mould the physical body. The mastery of the etheric body over the physical was so complete in former times because the physical was much more mobile and plastic than it is now. At a period in human evolution when the physical body only had the first beginnings of the bony skeleton; the power of the etheric body over the physical body was so great that man was able to lengthen an arm or a hand at will, or to stretch forth fingers out of them at will, etc. This seems absurd to the man of the present day. It would be quite incorrect to think of the Lemurian man as being like the present man. The Lemurian did not walk about on his legs like a man of the present day; he was more or less a being of the air, and all the organs which are now possessed by the man of the present day were then only germinal or rudimentary. He was able to change his shape, to metamorphose himself. It is quite a mistake to imagine that the Lemurians were similar to the men of the present day, more uncouth, perhaps, but still similar.

In the Atlantean Epoch, also, the human body could still be moulded and its form changed from within by the will. This, as we have already said, was because the etheric body was still partly outside the physical body. The etheric body, therefore, worked upon the outer form, and the beings which did not work in the right way on their body have developed into the animals we now call apes. That was the way in which these caricatures of the present human beings originated; they originated from us, not we from them. We may now enquire: why did the apes split off; why did a part stop at a lower stage as soulless beings (we mean the higher soul, not the astral body)? Man adapted himself to the body, but the apes were unable to do this; their physical body hardened, whereas man was able to keep his physical body soft and plastic.

We have to imagine man at the beginning of earthly evolution in a delicate etheric body, which he continually remoulded and transformed. A clairvoyant would have perceived men at that time in the form of a globe. The accompanying sketch will help to explain the genealogical tree of evolution. It was fairly late in the Atlantean Epoch when the species of animals branched off which later became the present apes. Earlier in the Atlantean Epoch certain higher animals branched off; and in the earliest times of Atlantis certain lower mammals. At that time man was at that stage of evolution of a mammal, but mammals stopped at this stage while man developed further. In still earlier times man was at the stage of a reptile. His body was quite different from the body of a present reptile; but the corporeal development of the reptile has degenerated. Man developed as inner members further; but the reptile stopped; it is a backward brother of man. The creatures which later became the birds, branched off still earlier, and earlier than that, man was at the stage represented by the fish at the present time. At that time there was on the Earth nothing higher than complicated fish-forms. In primeval times man was at the stage of the invertebrates, and in the very oldest times there branched off, and have come down in this form to our times, the unicellular beings Haeckel calls Monera, which are brothers of man who branched off in the most ancient times. If we were to elaborate this genealogical tree of man, it would coincide with the one Haeckel describes in his works. We might take over Haeckel's genealogical tree without further ado; the only difference is that Haeckel starts with the development of the lowest animal forms and then carries the development up to man; whereas we see men already in the very first form and consider the animal kingdom only as a branching off at different stages,—as degenerated human beings. Man is actually the firstborn of the Earth; he has developed himself further in a straight line and has left the other beings behind at the various stages.

If we observe the time when the birds and reptiles branched off, we see that at that time there were actually physical human forms which looked like the later birds and some which looked like the later reptiles. The seer can look back into that distant time when the spiritual being of man had not yet taken possession of his body; he sees the group-soul of man which floats round the bird-like body. At this point those spiritual beings stop, who had no need to descend to the physical plane, and after they had come down to this stage of evolution in the physical world, they developed up again to the spiritual. These are the beings of the astral plane (the world of the Holy Spirit) which kept the air as their kingdom, just as man takes possession of the physical earth as his kingdom. We must conceive of these beings also in the form of the bird, if they are to make themselves physically visible. Hence the writer of St. John's Gospel had to represent the Holy Spirit who descended into the spiritual soul of Jesus and filled it as the Spirit Self, under the symbol of a dove. When we consider this symbol in connection with the evolution of humanity it proves to be very profound.

We will now bring what is written in St. John's Gospel into connection with the earthly evolution of humanity from another point of view. For this purpose we will recapitulate very briefly a conception which was put before the pupils in the Rosicrucian School. At a certain stage in his development the pupil was told the following:—Observe the plant and compare it with man. The plant turns its root downward, to the centre of the Earth, the seat of its ego. Its organs of reproduction it turns chastely towards the sun, towards the light. It opens its flowers in the light of the sun and lets it ripen the fruit. In Spiritual Science this fertilising action of the light is described as the touching with the Sun's sacred lance of love. It opens the flowers and brings about the fruitfulness of the Earth. The part which the plants sinks into the Earth, the root,—this corresponds to the head of man. Man turns his head to the sun, to the light; and what the plant turns towards the light, its organs of reproduction,—these he turns towards the earth, Man presents the reverse picture to the plant; and the animal stands half way between the two. We represent the plant as being turned vertically towards the earth, man as turned vertically away from the earth, the animal horizontal,—in this way we get the form of the cross. Plato expressed this when he said: “The World-Soul is crucified on the ancient World-Cross.” The Cross is a cosmic symbol that has been placed in the evolution of the world.

A feeling of reverent awe filled the pupil when he was able thus to look into the development of the world. In the plant, therefore, we see a brother from the far-distant past. Originally man, too, was an etheric being of plant-like nature; at that time the substance of man's body was plant-like. If man had not transformed the plant-like substance into flesh, he would have remained chaste and pure like the plant, he would not have become acquainted with passion and desire. But this condition could not be maintained; for had it remained thus, man would not have wakened to self-consciousness; he would have remained in the dreamy life in which the plant still lives to-day. Man had to be filled with passions and desires; he had to be brought to a life in flesh. His organs were not all changed into fleshly substances at the same time; the 0rgans which express the lowest impulses were drawn last into fleshly evolution, and they are already in a state of decadence. The organs of reproduction preserved their plant-like character longest. Old legends and myths still tell us of hermaphrodites; those were beings who did not possess sexual organs of flesh and blood, but these organs consisted of plant-like substance. Many people think that the fig-leaf which the first human beings had in Paradise is an expression of shame. No! in this story is preserved the remembrance of the fact that instead of fleshly organs of reproduction men then had reproductive organs of a plant-like nature.

And now let us turn our gaze into the future. The organs in the human body which are still lower organs, the organs which were incorporated last in the flesh, will also be the first to fall away again, to disappear, to dry up in the human body. Man will not stop at his present stage of development; just as he descended from the chaste purity of the plant into the sensuality of the world of passionate desire, so will he rise again out of this sensuality with purified substance to a chaste condition.

Certain organs in the human body are degenerating and falling into ruin, others have reached the zenith of their capacity of development, others, again, are only beginning their evolution . The organs of reproduction belong to the first class, the brain to the second, the heart and larynx and everything connected with the forming of the word belong; to those which are only in their germinal state. From these last organs will be developed that which will take on the functions of the organs of reproduction and will go far beyond them. They will become voluntary organs in the highest sense. We pointed out, even in the first lecture of this course, that through his speech man produces forms in the air, and that in the future the word will be creative. Man will by than have returned to the chasteness and purity which the plant has preserved; but it will be a conscious chasteness. The occult investigator can also observe that the heart is only at the beginning of its evolution, it is by no means the pump which it is represented to be by the materialistic thinker; it is a mistake to think that the heart is the cause of the circulation of the blood. Strange as it may sound, the movement of the heart is the consequence of the circulation of the blood. In the future, when man has reached a higher stage of evolution, the heart will also be subject to his conscious will. The foundations of this are already there, in the transverse fibres which the heart possesses in common with all voluntary muscles. Man will then create his like consciously by the word; the substance in the human being will then be chaste and purified, and what at a lower stage was stretched out as the chalice of the flower towards the sun and received the sunbeam as the arrow of love, will at a higher stage of future humanity be again turned towards the cosmos, as chalice which will be fertilised from the Spiritual. This is represented in the Holy Grail, the shining chalice, the attainment of which floated as a shining goal before the knight of the Middle Ages.

Let us now consider the plant and its relation to the earth. The plant possesses physical body and etheric body only, and for this reason it is only possible for the plant to have the degree of consciousness which man possesses during the night in sleep. The consciousness of the plant is concentrated in the centre of the earth. The plants are so closely bound up with the earth that they must be regarded as belonging to it; Just as the human hair belongs to the human body. The separate plants do not possess an astral body of their own, they are embedded in the astral body of the earth, which is correlated to that of the sun. In the higher organism of the earth we find a process which is similar to the alternation of consciousness in man between sleeping and waking. In consequence of this the plants grow in spring and summer; they germinate, grow, and extend their flowers towards the sun. In autumn and winter the astral body of the sun withdraws from the earth; the astral body of the earth is then left to itself; it creeps away to the centre of the earth, and the vegetation rests. The seer can observe this relation between the two astral bodies quite well, and as this withdrawal of the astral body results in a stoppage in the vegetation and in outer activity, man had to receive an astral body of his own in the course of his evolution, for only in this way could he achieve a continuous consciousness.

In former lectures we have considered the significance of Christ for the evolution of humanity; we will now pass on to the study of the significance of this Spirit for the cosmic evolution. The Beings who, at the very beginning of the evolution of the Earth, had already the state of perfection which humanity will only achieve at the end of earthly evolution, have their seat in the Sun. Christ belongs to these Beings as a cosmic- force. His astral body, therefore, was united with the astral body of the Sun at the beginning of our present earthly evolution. He had His seat in the Sun. When the personality of Christ came to the Earth, the astral body of this cosmic force of the Christ Spirit sank down to the Earth at the same time, and ever since the incarnation of Christ on the Earth His astral body has been continually united with the astral body of the Earth. Through the appearance of Christ on Earth the astral body of the Earth has received from the Sun an entirely new substance. If at the time of Christ a Being had looked towards the Earth from another planet, he would have seen the addition of this new substance to the astral body of the Earth in the change of the colour radiating from the astral body. Through the union of His astral body with that of the Earth, the Sun Spirit Christ became the Spirit of the Earth as well. The Christ is therefore Sun Spirit and at the same time Earth Spirit. From the time when Christ walked the earth He has remained continuously united with the earth; He has become the planetary Spirit of the Earth. The Earth is His body, and He guides the evolution of the Earth. He accomplished this union upon Golgotha, and the Mystery of Golgotha is the symbol of what took place at that time for the evolution of the Earth.

Four chief races peopled the surface of the earth; they divided it among them: the white, yellow, red, and black races. But the atmosphere which surrounds the earth is one and undivided. This is referred to in John 19:23: “Then the soldiers, when they had crucified Jesus, took his garments, and made four parts, to every soldier a part; and also his coat. Now the coat was without seam, woven from the top throughout”. The garments of Christ are the symbol for the surface of the earth; the coat, on the other hand, woven in one piece, symbolises the air which, undivided and Indivisible, surrounds the earth on all sides. Here, again, it must be emphasised that this symbol is also at the same time an historical fact.

We are now in a position to understand the following statement of the Master. He said “He that eateth bread with me hath lifted up his heel against me.” (John 13:18) [Luther's version reads: “He that eateth my bread treads upon me with his feet”] If Christ is the planetary Spirit of the Earth, if the Earth is His body, is it, then, not justified to say that men eat His flesh and drink His blood and tread upon Him with their feet? When this Spirit points to the fruits which come from the Earth, can He not then say: “This is my body,” and when He points to the pure saps flowing though the plants, can He not say: “This is my blood” And when men walk about on the body of the planetary Spirit, do they not tread upon Him with their feet? He did not say this in a bad sense, but to indicate the fact that the Earth is the true body of Christ. This passage in the Gospel is also to be taken literally, and the remembrance of this great truth is to be preserved to succeeding times through the Mystery of the Holy Supper. The profound meaning of the Holy Supper can only be appreciated by one who is able to perceive the value of this mighty event to the whole of cosmic evolution. He sees the force of Christ spring up in the plants which the Earth puts forth in spring and holds up towards the Sun: he knows that the event of Christ becoming man is not only a human event, but that it is a cosmic event.

The Genesis of the Trinity of Sun, Moon, and Earth. Osiris and Typhon.

Up to this point in these lectures we have tried to construct a picture of the earth's evolution in connection with the evolution of man, because we had to demonstrate how the earth's past, how the facts of its evolution, were reflected in the knowledge displayed by the various cultural periods of the post-Atlantean time. The deepest experiences of the pupils of the Rishis were characterized, and it was shown how these inner experiences of the neophyte portrayed, in inward clairvoyantly-perceived pictures, the relationships and events that prevailed in the primeval earth, when sun and moon were still contained in it. We also saw what a high stage of initiation such a pupil had to reach in order to build for himself such a world-conception, which appears as a recapitulation of what occurred in the remotest past. We also saw what the Greeks thought when, in the campaigns of Alexander, they became acquainted with what was experienced by such an Indian neophyte, in whose soul arose the picture of the divine-spiritual creative force that began to express itself in the primeval mist when sun and moon were still united with the earth. This picture, the Brahman of the Indians, which was later called I-Brahma (Aham Brahma) and which appeared to the Greeks as Heracles—this picture, we sought to bring before our souls as an inner recapitulation of the facts that actually occurred in the past.

It was also emphasized that the succeeding evolutionary periods of the earth were reflected in the Persian and Egyptian cultures. What occurred in the second epoch, when the sun withdrew from the earth, appeared in pictures to the Persian initiates. All that happened as the moon gradually withdrew became the world-conception and the initiation-principle of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Babylonians, Assyrians.

Now, in order to look quite clearly into the soul of the ancient Egyptian, which is the most important thing for us—and considering the Persian initiation only as a sort of preparation—we must examine a little more narrowly just what happened to our earth during the periods when the sun and moon were separating from it. We shall sketch how the earth itself gradually evolved during these times. We shall disregard the great cosmic events and direct our attention to what happened on the earth itself.

If again we look back on our earth in its primeval condition, when it was still united with sun and moon, we do not find our animals or plants, and especially not our minerals. At first the earth was composed only of man, only of the human germs. Of course it is true that the animal and plant germs were laid down on the old Sun and the old Moon, and that they were already contained in the earliest condition of the Earth, but in a certain way they were still slumbering, so that one could not perceive that they would really be able to bring forth anything. It was only when the sun began to withdraw that the germs that later became animals first became capable of germinating. Not until the sun had completely withdrawn from the earth, leaving earth and moon alone, did the same thing happen to the germs that later became plants. The mineral germs formed themselves gradually, only when the moon had begun to withdraw. We must keep this clearly in mind.

Now, for once, let us look at the earth itself. When it still had sun and moon within itself, the earth was only a sort of etheric mist of vast extent, within which the human germs were active, while the germs of the other beings—animals, plants, and minerals—slumbered. Since only human germs were present, there were no eyes to behold these events externally, hence the description given here is visible only for the clairvoyant vision in retrospect. It is given on the hypothesis that it is what one would have seen had one been able at that time to observe from a point in universal space.

On ancient Saturn, too, a physical eye would have seen nothing. In that primeval condition, the earth was merely a vaporous mist that could be felt physically only as warmth. Out of this mass, this primeval etheric mist, there gradually took shape a shining ball of vapor, which could have been seen had a physical eye been present. Could one have penetrated this with a feeling-sense, it would have appeared as a heated space, somewhat like the interior of an oven. But soon this mist became luminous, and this ball of vapor that thus took shape contained all the germs of which we have just spoken. We must be quite clear that this mist was nothing like a fog or cloud-formation of today; rather did it contain in solution all the substances which at present are solid or liquid. All metals, all minerals, everything, were then present in the mist in transparent and translucent form. There was a translucent vapor, permeated by warmth and light. Think yourself into this. What had grown out of the etheric mist was a translucent gas. This grew brighter and brighter, and through the condensation of the gases the light grew ever stronger, so that ultimately this vapor-mist appeared like a great sun that shone out into world-space.

This was the period when the earth still contained the sun, when the earth was still irradiated by light and rayed its light into world-space. But this light made it possible, not only that man should live with the earth in that primeval condition, but that in the fullness of the light there should also live all those other high beings who, although not assuming a physical body, were connected with the evolution of man: Angels, Archangels and Principalities. But not only were these present. In the fullness of the light lived still higher beings also: the Powers, or Exusiai, or Spirits of Form; the Virtues, or Dynameis, or Spirits of Motion; the Dominions, or Kyriotetes, or Spirits of Wisdom; those spirits who are called the Thrones, or Spirits of Will; finally, in looser connection with the fullness of the light, more and more detaching themselves therefrom, the Cherubim and Seraphim. The earth was a world inhabited by a whole hierarchy of lower and higher beings, all sublime. What radiated out into space as light, the light with which the earth-body was permeated, was not light only but also what was later the mission of the earth: It was the force of love. This contained the light as its most important component. We must imagine that not only light was rayed forth, not physical light alone, but that this light was ensouled, inspirited, by the force of love. This is difficult for the modern mind to grasp. There are people today who describe the sun as though it were a gaseous ball that simply radiates light. Such a purely material conception of the sun prevails exclusively today. The occultists are the only exception. One who reads a description of the sun today as it is represented in popular books, in the books that are the spiritual nourishment of countless people, does not learn to know the true being of the sun. What these books say about the sun is worth about as much as if one described a corpse as the true being of man. The corpse is no more man than what astrophysics says of the sun is really the sun.

Just as one who describes a corpse leaves out the most important thing about man, so the physicist who describes the sun today leaves out the most important thing. He does not reach its essence, although he may believe that with the help of spectroanalysis he has found its inner elements. What is described is only the outer body of the sun.¹ In every sunbeam there streams down on all the inhabitants of the earth the force of those higher beings who live on the sun, and in the light of the sun there descends the force of love, which here on earth streams from man to man, from heart to heart. The sun can never send mere physical light to earth; the warmest, most ardent, feeling of love is invisibly present in the sunlight. With the sunlight there stream to earth the forces of the Thrones, the Cherubim, the Seraphim, and the whole hierarchy of higher beings who inhabit the sun and have no need of any body other than the light. But since all this that is present in the sun today was at that time still united with the earth, those higher beings themselves were also united with the earth. Even today they are connected with earth-evolution.

We must reflect that man, the lowest of the higher beings, was at that time already present in the germ as the new child of the earth, borne and nourished in the womb by these divine beings. The man who lived in the period of earth-evolution that we are now considering, had to have a much more refined body, since he was still in the womb of these beings. The clairvoyant consciousness perceives that the body of the man of that time consisted only of a fine mist-form or vapor-form; it was a body of air or gas, a gas-body rayed through and entirely permeated by light. If we imagine a cloud formed with some regularity, a chalice-like formation expanding in an upward direction, the chalice glowing with inner light, we have the men of that time who, for the first time in this earth-evolution, began to have a dim consciousness, such a consciousness as the plant-world has today. These men were not like plants in the modern sense. They were cloud-masses in chalice-like form, illuminated and warmed by the light, with no firm boundaries dividing them from the collective earth-mass.

This was once the form of man, a form that was a physical light-body, participating still in the forces of the light. Because of the refinement of this body there could descend into it not only an etheric and an astral body, not only the ego in its first beginnings, but also the higher spiritual beings who were connected with the earth. Man was, as it were, rooted above in the divine spiritual beings, and these permeated him. It is really not easy to portray the splendor of the earth at that time. We must picture it as a light-filled globe, shone round by light-bearing clouds and generating wonderful phenomena of light and color. Had one been able to feel this earth with his hands, he would have perceived warmth-phenomena. The luminous masses surged back and forth. Within them were all the human beings of today, woven through by all the spiritual beings, who rayed forth light in manifold grandeur and beauty. Outside was the earth-cosmos in its great variety; inside, with the light flowing about him, was man, in close connection with the divine-spiritual beings, raying streams of light into the outer light-sphere. As though by an umbilical cord that sprang from the divine, man hung upon this totality, on the light-womb, the world-womb of our earth. It was a collective world-womb in which the light-plant man lived at that time, feeling himself one with the light-mantle of the earth. In this refined vaporous plant-form, man hung as though on the umbilical cord of the earth-mother and he was cherished and nourished by the whole mother earth. As in a cruder sense the child of today is cherished and nourished in the maternal body, so the human germ was cherished and nourished at that time. Thus did man live in the primeval age of the earth.

Then the sun began to withdraw itself, taking the finest substances with it. There came a time when the high sun-beings forsook men, for all that today belongs to the sun forsook our earth and left the coarser substances behind. As a result of this departure of the sun, the mist cooled to water; and where there was formerly a mist-earth, now there was a water-sphere. In the middle were the primeval waters, but not surrounded by air; going outward, the waters changed into thick, heavy mist, which gradually became more refined. The earth of that time was a water-earth. It contained various materials in a soft state, which were enveloped by mists that became ever finer until, in the highest spheres, they became extremely rarefied. Thus did our earth once appear and thus was it altered. Men had to sink the formerly luminous gas-form into the turbid waters and incarnate there as shaped water-masses swimming in the water, as previously they had been air-forms floating in the air. Man became a water-form, but not entirely. Never did man descend entirely into the water.

This is an important moment. It has been described how the earth was a water-earth, but man was only partially a water-being. He protruded into the mist-sheath, so that he was half a water, half a vapor-being. Below, in the water, man could not be reached by the sun; the water-mass was so thick that the sunlight could not penetrate it. The light of the sun could penetrate into the vapor to some extent, so that man dwelt partly in the dark light-deprived water and partly in the light-permeated vapor. Of one thing, however, the water was not deprived, and this we must describe more minutely.

From the beginning, the earth was not only glowing and shining, but was also resounding, and the tone had remained in the earth, so that when the light departed the water became dark, but also became drenched with tone. It was the tone that gave form to the water, as one may learn from the well-known experiment in physics. We see that tone is something formative, a shaping force, since through tone the parts are arranged in order. Tone is a shaping power, and it was this that formed the body out of the water. That was the force of tone, which had remained in the earth. It was tone, it was the sound that rings through the earth, out of which the human form shaped itself. The light could reach only to the part of man that protruded out of the water. Below was a water-body; above was a vapor-body, which the external light touched, and which, in this light, was accessible to the beings who had gone out with the sun. Formerly, when the sun was still united with the earth, man felt himself to be in their womb. Now they shone down on him in the light and irradiated him with their power.

We must not forget, however, that in what remained behind after the separation of the sun other forces, the Moon-forces, were present. The earth had to separate these forces from itself.

Here we have a period during which only the sun was withdrawn, when the plant-man had to descend gradually into the water-earth. This stage, at which man had then arrived in his body, we see preserved today in a degenerated form in fishes. The fishes that we see in the water today are relics of those men, although naturally in a decadent form. We must think of a goldfish, for example, in a fantastic plant-form, agile, but with a feeling of sadness because the light had been withdrawn from the water. It was a very deep longing that arose. The light was no longer there, but the desire for the light called up this longing. There was a moment in the earth's evolution when the sun was not yet entirely outside the earth; there one can see that form still permeated with light—man with his upper part still at the sun-stage, while below he is already in the shape preserved in the fishes.

Through the fact that man lived in darkness with half his being, he had in his lower parts a baser nature, for in the submerged parts he had the Moon-forces. This part was not petrified like lava, as in the present moon, but these were dark forces. Only the worst parts of the astral could penetrate here. Above was a vapor-form, resembling the head parts, into which the light shone from outside and gave him form. So man consisted of a lower and an upper part. Swimming and floating, he moved about in the vaporous atmosphere. This thick atmosphere of the earth was not yet air; it was vapor, and the sun could not penetrate it. Warmth could penetrate, but not light. The sun-rays could not kiss the whole earth, but only its surface; the earth-ocean remained dark. In this ocean were the forces that later went out as the moon.

As the light-forces penetrated into the earth, so also did the gods penetrate. Thus we have, below, the godless, god-deserted mantle of waters, permeated only by the force of tone, and, all around this, the vapor, into which extended the forces of the sun. Therefore in this vapor-body, which rose above the surface of the water, man still participated in what streamed to him as light and love from the spiritual world. But why did the world of tone permeate the dark watery core? Because one of the high sun-spirits had remained behind, binding his existence to the earth. This is the same spirit whom we know as Yahweh or Jehovah. Yahweh alone remained with the earth, sacrificing himself. It was he whose inner being resounded through the water-earth as shaping tone.

But since the worst forces had remained as the ingredients of the water-earth, and since these forces were dreadful elements, man's vapor-portion was drawn ever further down, and out of the earlier plant-form a being gradually evolved that stood at the stage of the amphibian. In saga and myth this form, which stood far below later humanity, is described as the dragon, the human amphibian, the lindworm. Man's other part, which was a citizen of the realm of light, is presented as a being which cannot descend, which fights the lower nature; for example, as Michael, the dragon-slayer, or as Saint George combating the dragon. Even in the figure of Siegfried with the dragon, although transformed, we have pictures of man's rudiments in their primeval duality. Warmth penetrated into the upper part of the earth and into the upper part of physical man, and formed something like a fiery dragon. But above that rose the ether body, in which the sun's force was preserved. Thus we have a form that the Old Testament well describes as the tempting serpent, which is also an amphibian.

The time was now approaching during which the basest forces were hurled out. Mighty catastrophes shook the earth, and for the occultist the basalt formations appear as remnants of the cleansing forces that rocked the globe when the moon had to separate from the earth. This was also the time when the water-core of the earth condensed more and more, and the firm mineral kernel gradually evolved. On the one hand, the earth grew denser through the departure of the moon; on the other the upper parts gave off their heavier, coarser substances to the lower. Above, there arose something which, although still permeated by water, became more and more similar to our air. The earth gradually acquired a firm kernel in the middle, around which was the water everywhere. At first, the mist was still impenetrable for the sun's rays, but by relinquishing its substances the mist grew thinner and thinner. Later, much later, air developed out of this, and gradually the sun's rays, which earlier could not reach the earth itself, were able to penetrate it.

Now came a stage that we, must picture correctly. Earlier, man dived down into the water and extended up into the mist. Now, through the condensation of the earth, the water-man slowly acquired the possibility of solidifying his form and taking on a hard bony system. Man hardened himself within himself. Thereby he transformed his upper part in such a way that it became suited for something new. This new thing, which previously was impossible, was the breathing of air. Now we find the first beginning of the lungs. In the upper part there has previously been something that took up the light, but could do nothing more. Now man felt the light again in his dull consciousness. He could feel what streamed down in it as divine forces coming toward him. In this transitional stage man felt that what streamed down upon him was divided into two parts. The air penetrated into him as breath. Previously only the light had reached him, but now the air was inside him. Feeling this, man had to say to himself, “Formerly I felt that the force that is above me gave me what I now use for breathing. The light was my breath.”

What now streamed into him appeared to man as two brothers. Light and air were two brothers for him; they had become a duality for him. All earthly breath that streamed into man was at the same time an annunciation that he had to learn to feel something entirely new. As long as there was light alone, he did not know birth and death. The light-permeated cloud transformed itself perpetually, but man felt this only as the changing of a garment. He did not feel that he was born or that he died. He felt that he was eternal, and that birth and death were only episodes. With the first drawing of breath, the consciousness of birth and death entered into him. He felt that the air-breath, which had split off from its brother the light-ray, and which thereby had split off also the beings who earlier had flowed in with the light, had brought death to him.

Formerly, man had the consciousness, “I have a dark form, but I am connected with the eternal being.” Who was it that destroyed this consciousness? It was the air-breath that entered into man—Typhon. Typhon is the name of the air-breath. When the Egyptian soul experienced within itself how the formerly united stream divided itself into light and air, the cosmic event became a symbolic picture for this soul—the murder of Osiris by Typhon, or Set, the air-breath.

A mighty cosmic event is hidden in the Egyptian myth that allows Osiris to be killed by Typhon.² The Egyptian experienced the god who came from the sun and was still in harmony with his brother, as Osiris. Typhon was the air-breath that had brought mortality to man. Here we see one of the most pregnant examples of how the facts of cosmic evolution repeat themselves in man's inner knowledge.

In this way the trinity of sun, moon, and earth came into being. All of this was communicated to the Egyptian pupil in deep and consciously formed pictures.

• 1. This sentiment as to the sun is eloquently expressed in English by D. H. Lawrence in his Apocalypse (New York, Viking, 1932), pp. 41-46.
• 2. Fairly complete versions of this myth may be found in Padraic Colum: Orpheus Myths of the World (New York, Macmillan, 1930) and in Lewis Spence: Mysteries of Egypt (London, Rider & Co., 1929).

Today I shall add to what has been said over the past few days, both, before and after Christmas, about the Being of Christ. Our angle of approach to the question of Christ will be to relate it in a brief sketch chiefly to the world-wide social question. Mankind has at the present time an urgent need to reach a global understanding. Yet whatever sphere of life we turn to, we find precious little of any such understanding. The need for an understanding is there. What is not there is any talent on the part of human beings to come to such an understanding. We see how attempts are made to consult one another about important aspects of life. We see congresses taking place everywhere. With regard to the matters being discussed at these congresses, what is to be found in the depths of human souls is quite different from the words which are exchanged there. In the words exchanged at these congresses there are appearances which are deceptive. These appearances are supposed to give the impression that individual human beings everywhere desire to come to terms with one another, or something similar. But such coming to terms cannot be achieved anywhere, because it is not actually individual human beings who are speaking with one another but members of various nations. Only the external appearance makes it seem as though individuals were speaking with one another. What is actually speaking through each one are the very varied beings of the different nations. And since it is in the very nature of human beings these days to notice only the verbal content of words and not the source of the words—not the soil in which they are rooted—since human beings fail to discern these fundamental aspects of life, it is simply not noticed that it is the folk daemons who are speaking with one another, rather than human being with human being.

We would be hard put to it to find clearer proof of the fact that Christianity is today not realized in the world. Christianity is not realized, for fully to understand Christ means: to find man as man within oneself. Christ is no folk god, no god of any race. Christ is not the god of any group of human beings. He is the god of the individual, in so far as the individual is a member of the human race as a whole. Only when we can understand the Christ-being, through all the means available to us, as the God of mankind, only then will Christ come to have what will certainly be the greatest possible social significance for the globe as a whole.

We have to understand very clearly that there are things which hold sway in the depths of the soul, things which do not find their way into those words that remain stuck in empty phrases as a result of the differences between the folk daemons. Out of the situation in which people are content to reside at present, it is not possible to bring about what can actually only be brought about today out of the profound depths of man's being. Today what is needed is profundity, a willingness to enter into the profound depths of man's being, if forces of advance, forces of fruitful progress are to enter into earth evolution. What can be heard today in every corner of the earth does not to any extent even touch the surface of all that is rooted in the human being. What ought now to enter into mankind is the quest for what is most profoundly rooted in the being of man.

Let us now show in a few simple outlines the main differences that exist in people's attitudes to what could lead to a recognition and an understanding of the question of Christ. I have often drawn the distinction for you between people of the West, people of the East, and people of the middle region between West and East. This distinction can be viewed from very varied standpoints. Justice can only be done to it if it is considered without any kind of prejudice and with the utmost impartiality, if we refrain from looking with sympathy or antipathy at one or other of these divisions, perhaps because we happen to belong to one or the other of them ourselves. Today all the people of the world must work together in order to bring forth true unity in Christ. It can certainly be said that in the most varied parts of the world, in the very depths of mankind, the impulse exists towards finding this unity. But the search must take us into the profound depths.

Turning first to what appears now in the civilizations of the West, we discover that the essential element in these western civilizations finds an expression in the type of spirituality which is valid today. This special spirituality of today has the characteristic of taking the form of abstractness; it celebrates its greatest triumphs in ideas and abstractions. These ideas, these abstractions, are most suited to gaining a knowledge of nature as it appears to our senses, and a knowledge of that aspect of social life which has to take place as a result of the forces of the sense-perceptible world. With these forces, which I shall call the western forces, it is quite possible to penetrate into the depths of the human being and of the universe. Above all, these forces of the West have provided the foundation for scientific thinking and have sought those impulses of social life which derive from scientific thinking and which mankind will need in the future in order to shape life on earth in a possible way. What follows will show this to be so. By no means all the treasures of western spiritual life have been brought to the surface.

To start with, it is perfectly true that today's natural science could only be founded on those fundamental forces of man's being which can be most adequately expressed in the spirituality of abstractness and ideas. But it is also true that in everything that has been revealed there is another essential element as well. What has been revealed in the thought processes of natural science, and the social thought processes that go with it, can indeed be taken right up to the spiritual realm. A progression can be made from the laws of nature to a recognition of the spiritual beings within nature. These beings of nature are divine and spiritual. And if Christianity is to be understood in a way that befits mankind's most current needs, it will have to be permeated with that very spirit which has so far only poured itself out into natural science and its social consequences through the forces of the West. Any world conception gained out of these forces of the West can only be satisfying if it can be expressed in clearly defined, sharply contoured concepts and ideas. Human beings will need such clear, sharply defined concepts for the future of the earth. They will have to learn to present the highest spiritual content to mankind in terms which are every bit as clearly defined as are the natural and social concepts arising out of the forces of the West.

Let us turn now to the forces of the East. Here, what is made clearest to us is the following: If, out of the forces of the East, we want to attempt to describe Christianity, or indeed anything divine and spiritual, in sharp, clearly-defined terms, our efforts will be invain. Starting with Russia and going eastwards through Asia, the whole of the East brings forth forces in its peoples which are not capable of rising up to spiritual, divine realms in sharply defined concepts. The forces here are suitable for rising up to the spirit out of the depths of feeling.

In order to describe Christianity in a manner befitting the West we need philosophy, we need a concept of the world which is clothed in modern thought forms. But to describe Christianity with the forces of the East we cannot find such thought forms if we remain at the level of outer nationality. If we remain in the external, sense-perceptible world we have to grasp other means. For instance, we have to describe the feelings which are found as soon as we start going further and further eastwards, even in the regions of central Europe bordering on the East. Look at the living rooms of simple people and see the altar with the Mother of God in the corner. See how the image of the Mother of God is greeted by visitors as they arrive. Everywhere the first greeting is for the Mother of God, and only then are greetings exchanged with the people in the room. This is something that emanates from all the forces of the human being, with the exception of those of abstract ideas. There exists a radical contrast between West and East in the inmost feelings for what is divine and spiritual. Yet all these forces are root forces which can develop further, which can put forth leaves and shoots and finally bear fruit, if only they can come to a fundamental understanding of themselves.

The West is capable of reaching a conception and a feeling of the Father God in a manner which befits the new human spirit, a conception and a feeling beside which those other divine spiritual beings, the Son and the Spirit, can stand. But above all it is the task of the West to contribute to the world concepts and feelings about the Father God which are different from those possible in earlier times, when only vague presentiments could be achieved in this respect. On the other hand, if the forces mainly present in the East are developed—the forces which can only be described suitably in what might be called a non-intellectual way with the help of external gestures—if these forces are developed with the feelings and will impulses they entail, and if they take up also the forces streaming towards them from the West, they will be able to come to a fitting concept and a fitting feeling of the Son God. In this way mankind's development into the future can only be rightly understood when the things that are achieved in the different regions of the earth are taken to be contributions to a total outcome.

Especially the more outstanding spirits in the West—though mostly they are not aware of this themselves—may be seen to be struggling for a concept of the Father God, a concept arising from the foundations of natural science. And in the East we see in the external gestures of the people, in what comes out of their feelings and their will, how they are wrestling for an understanding of the Son God, the Christ. The middle region stands between these two extremes. This is shown clearly by what has been developing more recently in the culture of the middle region. It is characteristic of modern theology in Central Europe that it is uncertain in its understanding of the Father and also in its understanding of the Son, the Christ. Endeavours to find such an understanding are taken immensely earnestly. But this very earnestness has caused the endeavours to be split in two separate directions. On the one hand we see knowledge developing, and on the other we see faith. We see how knowledge is to contain only what applies to the sense-perceptible world and everything that belongs to it. And we see how faith, which must not be allowed to become knowledge, is allotted everything that makes up man's relationship to what is divine and spiritual. These divergent endeavours express the quest, a quest which cannot achieve an adequate concept and feeling for either the Father God or the Son God without joining forces with the other regions of the earth, with East and West.

How such a global working together in the spirit should take place can be seen especially in the beginnings made by the Russian philosopher Vladimir Soloviev.¹ This Russian philosopher has taken western thought forms into his own thinking. If you are thoroughly familiar with the thought forms of the West, you will find them everywhere in Soloviev's work. But you will find that they are handled differently from the way in which they are handled in the West. If you approach Soloviev with a thinking prepared in the West you will have to relearn something—not about the content of thoughts, but about the attitude of the human being towards the content of thoughts. You will have to undergo a complete inner metamorphosis.

Take what I regard as one of the cardinal passages in Soloviev's work, a passage he has invested with a great deal of human striving towards a knowledge of man's being and his relationship with the world. He says: Human beings must strive for perfection. This endeavour is expressed in the way they strive for the truth. By uniting truth ever more and more closely with their souls they will become ever more and more perfect. Without this movement towards perfection human life would be worthless. Human beings must have the prospect of reaching the highest pinnacles of perfection through truth, as otherwise their lives would be null and void. At the same time they must have a part in immortality, for a striving for perfection destined only to be forfeited in death would be a fraud of universal proportions.

This is expressed by Soloviev in words and thought forms which imitate those of the West, or rather the thought forms are borrowed and the word forms imitated. But the way in which it is expressed, and the way the impulse to express it is present—this is impossible in the West. You will not find it expressed in this way by any western philosopher. Just imagine Mill or Bergson saying such a thing! It is unimaginable. These are the things for which we must develop a sense nowadays. We must develop a sense for the living sources from which words flow. The content of words is growing ever more insignificant in comparison with world concepts. A sense for the living source of things is what has real significance.

We can today only imagine a person to be capable of speaking in the way Soloviev does if he still has a true experience of what every one of his compatriots does before the icon of the Mother of God. Such a person must stand immersed in his people, a people capable of bringing proof without having to base it on abstract, logical foundations, a people for whom proofs based on mere abstract logic are less important than those which come out of the whole human being.

We feel in these words of Soloviev how, coming from the East, what is said comes out of the total being of man, not just out of mere intellectual human understanding. Because Soloviev speaks and thinks and feels out of the very foundations of his people, the whole of his world conception tends in the direction of the Christ. Because he has also taken on, as something from outside, the thought forms of the West, his world conception at the same time tends in the direction of the Father God as well as the Christ. Thus we discover in him something which it is almost impossible to find anywhere in the present, and that is a fundamental, clear distinction in the feelings of a human being between the way to the Father God and the way to Christ, the Son God. In a spirit such as Vladimir Soloviev we find a hint of what must come about in the future. For what must come about is a working together of the different regions of the earth, and this cannot come about if any one region imagines itself to be in possession of the whole.

Mankind came forth out of a unity. If we go back into the obscure, remote antiquity of human evolution we come to an archetypal wisdom which was still instinctive and which, because of this, still filled the whole human being. Throughout the whole of the earth people communicated with one another, not yet by means of the logical content of language but externally, by means of the then still existing inner capacity to communicate in gestures, of which today we no longer have the faintest idea. People communicated with one another by means of something which today, if at all, remains only in those remnants of the treasure-house of language which we call interjections. Naturally, if you exclaim: Whew! or sigh: Oh! you will be understood world over. This kind of understanding resembles the communication that took place at the time of instinctive archetypal wisdom. Today we no longer know how to feel in language as a whole what the archetypal wisdom felt in it. All that remains for us is our feeling or the interjections which, of course, we only use occasionally. In parenthesis let me add that it is quite in keeping that, out of people's dissatisfaction arising from the whole chaos of our spiritual life, authors are starting to write novels in interjections. This does happen nowadays. I am not quoting, but simply mention that you can find prose passages today which read: Ah! Oh! Wow! Eh! Then the writer begins: Once there was—and then come more interjections. Some recent novels are tending in this direction. As symptoms they are not without significance. As I said, this just in passing.

We have lost the ability to invest the whole of language with what we today only invest in interjections. Consider the following: ‘Anthropos’ means man, human being. ‘Anthropoid’ means man-like, that is, the higher animals. The final syllable, ‘oid’, is connected with the word which means ‘like, similar to’. Now there is a remarkable connection between Greek and, for instance, German. In German the final syllable meaning ‘like’ is ‘ig’. This is pronounced ‘ich’. If we speak this final syllable by itself, we have the German word for ego, for our own being. This is one kind of etymological truth. The ‘ich’ in the human being is what strives in its totality to become like the universe. ‘Ich’ is like, is similar to, everything; microcosm compared with macrocosm. Of course to go into things in this way cannot be done in the superficial manner in which etymology and linguistics are conducted nowadays. One has to go down to a more profound level and gain a sense for the way in which the sounds are connected with one another.

I brought this up merely to show one of the facets of what we must do to enter into language in search of a far more alive content than exists nowadays in the languages of the world. We must strive not to take words merely as words but to seek out their living roots. We must learn to understand that two people can say the same thing and yet mean something quite different, depending on the way of life from which it stems. We shall need such a deepening of our feelings in order to enter into the kind of global working together which will be necessary if mankind is to set out once more on the upward path.

It is not enough to address Christ as: Lord, Lord! Christ must become something which fills the whole human being. This can only happen if we support our understanding with something which comes to meet us when we look towards the archetypal wisdom of the world and remind ourselves that that wisdom made mankind into a totality. It was, though, a totality in which all individuality was lost. But evolution progressed. Human beings became ever more individualized. They felt more and more that they were approaching the point at which each one feels separated from all the others, for that alone guarantees the experience of freedom. So something had to be poured out into human evolution which might once more bring unity to the whole earth. This was the Christ-being. The Christ-being will only be fully understood when we gain from it a feeling for the impulse to bring about a social unity of human beings over the whole earth. Or looked at the other way round: Only the Christ-being, fully understood, can lead to a right social impulse throughout the world.

We look to the archetypal wisdom, which developed out of instinctive foundations to a certain high degree of vision—not our vision but an ancient vision. We find this vision in its final phase expressed in the archetypal symbol of what the three wise men, the three Magi from the East, brought to Christ Jesus. What led them to Christ Jesus was the most ancient and, at that time, the highest wisdom of mankind. And at the same time we are told by another evangelist how the individual human being, out of the inmost forces of his soul, as though in a dream—for the individual is alone when he dreams, even though he may be in company with others—is also led to Christ Jesus, how the shepherds in the field, dreaming in their solitary souls, are led to Christ Jesus: the first beginning of a new age. By the fourth century AD mankind had lost the wisdom of the Magi from the East. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha the highest archetypal wisdom—about to fade—meets and mingles with something that appears at first utterly devoid of wisdom, something which must be developed ever further, until in the end it can take root in every individual human being, uniting all mankind.

In his youth, Augustine² endeavoured to save the last remnants of the wisdom brought to Christ Jesus by the Magi from the East. But Augustine had already received it in a form to which he could not confess in the long run. It was even then too degenerate. So he had to turn to what had been present at the beginning of evolution, to what will have to progress ever further and further, to what must be sought in order that mankind may once again find unity over the whole face of the earth.

If we pursue these hints—for that is all they are for the moment—in the right way, they will give us forces which will lead ever more profoundly into an understanding of the Christ-being, to an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. This is what I wanted to add to what we have been saying about the Being of Christ.

• 1 . Vladimir Soloviev, 1853-1900. The quotation in German is from Die geistigen Grundlagen des Lebens, Part One (The Spiritual Foundations of Life), Selected Works translated by H Kohler, Stuttgart 1922.
• 2 . See Lecture One, Note 4

During these three days, we shall deal with a specific “topic.” We shall speak about the paths that the human soul can take in the present in the sense of a spiritual-scientific worldview, and about the goals of theosophical life. Today's lecture will provide a kind of introduction to this. Tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, we will then penetrate to the very heart of our consideration. Today, we want to take the standpoint more from the outside, so to speak, and first ask ourselves the questions: Is what we feel as a spiritual-scientific world view something that has been brought about by the will of individuals, or is it rooted in the soul of the time itself? Do we have something before us that is connected with the deepest needs of our epoch? We can best approach an answer to this question if we realize that all those who come to spiritual science from the most diverse walks of life, whether rich or poor, strong or weak, are seeking souls. They are all seeking souls who do not always know exactly what they are seeking, but feel that they are seeking something. They are often souls who have taken the most diverse paths and allowed themselves to be affected by what the present can give. Souls that have sought to satisfy their longings in this or that field of art, souls that have looked around in what science can give; souls that have felt, more or less darkly, more or less brightly after much laborious seeking, that they cannot find in the present what coincides with the soul's seeking. Such souls are often touched by what the spiritual-scientific movement can give, and they say: Yes, here lives an impulse that is different from anywhere else, different from what comes from the life around me.

What do such souls feel, or what might they feel when they come into contact with what today we might call Theosophy? We must not believe that these seeking souls who find their way to spiritual science are the only ones who seek. They are chosen, or they choose themselves from a great multitude of seeking souls. Those who listen to what is spoken from the deepest need of our time will see that there are many souls who say: “We long for means to solve the great riddles of the world, and we cannot find that all that tradition has brought, all that modern science has to say, can solve these riddles.

Let us listen for a moment to what these souls, the best among them, have to say. They say something like the following, and in these words, which flow from hundreds of thousands of such searching souls, we encounter something like the yearning heart of our time: We look back into distant times and see how from century to century, from millennium to millennium, different ideas about God and nature have followed one another, how they have replaced one another and led to the struggle between their representatives. Much has come down to us. Millions of people profess such beliefs, adhere to them in sincere truthfulness, but just as many can no longer profess what has been handed down out of such a sense of truth. They feel compelled out of love for the truth to let go of the old views.

What was it like in the dim and distant past? There, for example, people looked at the river that went from the heights to the plains, saw the beneficial effect of this river and asked themselves: What speaks to us from the roar of this river? What is it that works in this river? And they found in it something that they also found in themselves. They found that it was based on a spiritual something, a divine being, and they found in the flowing stream a divine-spiritual power that rewarded, that gave man what he needed for his good. In the blowing of the wind, in the rolling of the thunder, in the flashing of the lightning, they found a spiritual activity similar to that which underlies the flowing of the stream, the rushing of the sea surf. They saw in it something of which they said: “The murmuring of the brook, the raging of the storm, is akin to what lives in my soul. They may speak differently, but there is something similar there, and I feel that I can understand it.

Those to whom Moses brought down the tablets of the law felt the same way. They felt that a being was speaking to them from them, infinitely greater than the father of a family, but still related to what spoke from the thunder and what spoke from the venerable head of the family. They felt the spirit. They sensed a living bond between what lived in them as pain and joy and the outside world. A bond that this man of the past could understand.

That is how the best speak. And if you go where serious science speaks, not trivial superficiality, you can hear the following: Our ancestors looked up to spiritual powers. They not only saw trickling water, blowing wind, and the fire of lightning. They also saw spiritual beings in these natural forces, gnomes, undines, sylphs, salamanders. However we may feel about these people, they found understanding among their contemporaries, those people who projected their beliefs into the outside world, from which they drew strength and stability.

And now the best of these seeking souls add: We can no longer believe in gnomes, undines, sylphs, salamanders, in spiritual beings of nature. For we have been taught that iron laws operate down to the smallest atom. And we must think of the outer world as a construction of it. We can no longer animate it as our ancestors did, we can no longer perform sacrificial ceremonies and cultic acts that send up our voices, we can no longer say when pain overwhelms us: take comfort, for life in the spiritual world will give you all the more comfort. — And a great number of people say: our whole world has become different. We no longer build on what was built on in the past. If, for example, a rusty iron had been driven into a person's arm in the past, they would have sought comfort in spiritual beings. Today we do better to go to the doctor and use external medicine. Today we treat with what lives in the soul what used to be treated with what lives in the soul.

It is countered: But we cannot be without faith in a spirit, we cannot do without it. A spirit rules in all laws, works in thunder as in the atom. And it takes only someone to be beyond the worst trivialities of materialism in order not to be able to close themselves off from this insight. When the word spirit is spoken by seeking souls, what is meant by that? What is spirit? Where does it have its roots? How does man come to have an idea of spirit?

A strange view is being propagated today. In America, people are talking about a new religion. This religion only wants to recognize a God who works in the laws of nature, right down to the atom. No one today can imagine a God who has a human form, says the representative of this doctrine, but we cannot do without a divine spirit. And so this personality comes up with a strange saying: the laws of chemistry are not enough. But where can we find the content for an idea of God? — And so we hear the following: We must think of the spirit that rules in the laws of nature as being endowed with the noblest qualities of the human soul. — So one is not willing to imagine a God who is endowed with human qualities, but one would still like to have something that gives this idea of God a content.

And here we have the result: We cannot help it, we cannot take the content of the idea of God from anywhere other than from within man. — And further, the representative of this world view points out that in earlier times divine beings were worshiped who were inspirers who filled man with their power and pushed him towards a task. Now, of course, we can no longer believe that there are supernatural entities that act as inspirers. But the future will worship advanced helpers, richer spirits who have something to give to the poorer ones.

You see, feelings will nevertheless be set up in place of the former, which cling to those who can give comfort. After every earthquake, for example, there will be those who give comfort to the many who have lost their loved ones. Human love will exist when there are no longer supersensory helpers.

Do you not see that there is a strange contradiction here too? We are supposed to look to those who give comfort. But where do they get from within their soul what they need to be able to give comfort and love? We find that the best people search, but that the soul must feel confronted with a void.

And what about science? Is comfort found there in what science has brought us? We want to fully acknowledge the beneficial effects of science, but there is one thing we must not forget. How much of the purely physical pain that man has had to endure since ancient times is alleviated? Humanity has certainly not become stronger and healthier since then. Of course, there are many remedies that provide relief. But attention must be called to a contradiction here. External science believes that nothing can be lost. For example, when rubbing, the force becomes effective as warmth. What disappears reappears as a different force. Anesthetic agents relieve pain, and people talk as if the pain has disappeared. Here there is a contradiction with that simple law. If the pain disappears, it still reappears in a different place. No matter how much external pain is alleviated, it turns into mental anguish. And man does not know that this is connected with the alleviation of external pain. This does not prevent us from doing what our insight suggests to alleviate external pain, but we must learn to recognize the connections and not indulge in illusions in the spiritual realm.

The seeking souls have no inkling that the human being, placed as he is today in the outer life, for example in the powerfully developing fields of industry and technology, can indeed be enraptured by what presents itself to his eyes. But those who look more deeply know: This intoxication, this enthusiasm, comes at a price. They know that souls are becoming more and more barren and desolate, feeling less and less the answer to the riddles of existence. Certainly we should bring into all areas what can alleviate external suffering, but we should not forget that even if we satisfy the outer physical body, we can leave the soul more and more starved, causing the soul more and more suffering through unfulfilled longing. This is the mood that overcomes those who not only look lovingly at the hustle and bustle of human life, but who also see the course that the future will take.

Much is said about the goals that man can set for himself. In the intoxication that overcomes his soul when the whirlpool of today's outer life takes hold of him, he does not realize that this soul must remain a searching one. And why? Let us place before our soul only the deepest background of all the contradictions in today's perception. If we cut our finger and heal it with the best means at our disposal, we know that the same natural laws prevail in it as in the surrounding world. We are formed out of the whole of nature, out of the laws that prevail around us. But at the same time, we feel the need to see something else in us. We see that spirit flashes from a person's eye, that spirit speaks from their hand, that spirit resounds from their voice. And in recognizing this, we also feel that we are still the bearers of the spirit. We feel that we have arisen out of our environment, but not out of it alone. What governs this environment? Physical laws, chemical laws, what are known today as ironclad laws of nature. That is not enough to explain the spirit. What physics, chemistry, biology give is not enough for that.

Where does that which can be addressed as spirit have its root? It is within us, in ourselves, but homeless, rootless. We can understand the chemical composition of blood, can grasp exactly the combustion process that takes place in us, and everything that is subject to physical and chemical laws in the external world. But as soon as we see the outer nature in a spiritless way, everything is rootless. We cannot say: just as blood is subject to the laws of blood circulation, so some spiritual substance follows the laws of the environment. A spirit cannot be found in it, says the seeking and erring soul of the present time. From there the answer to the questions that torment me cannot come. From where will it come to me?

Now we see where the problem lies. We see that our ideas about the external world are becoming increasingly clear. But now the human being wants to root himself with his spirit, with his soul, in something. The soul cannot help but want that. It cannot flee from itself into a barren physical-chemical existence. That is where the conflict arises. The soul has the need to imagine a spiritual being, but nowhere in the outer world can it find what corresponds to its present ideas about a spiritual being. This gives rise to a deep falsehood. Modern man cannot believe in sylphs, salamanders, undines and gnomes. But what could give him satisfaction is not available. The soul stands there without content.

The more deeply this is felt, the more untrue it becomes to speak only of spirit. Either one finds spirit, or one has to insert it artificially. It may seem to some that what has just been said is too far removed from daily feeling. But everywhere we will find souls whose pain stems from this. What spiritual science brings wants to meet this great quest. Its endeavour is to build a bridge between the soul itself and that which is outside, whether the soul listens to the raging of the storm or watches the lovely movements of the sea waves. Man is no longer able, on the basis of human qualities, to idealize gods that are active behind air and water. We have to refrain from seeing an anthropomorphic image of ourselves in what we call divine beings. That is the realization of today. But the other thing is the powerlessness of the seeking soul. From one side it is told: If you want to find a god, you must not endow it with human qualities. On the other hand, it turns out that we are not able to create a substitute for ourselves. Because these searching souls lack something that would justify this self-evident fact, they are at a loss. Where can they find the firm ground that gives them security?

This is only possible because man is again acquiring the right to research the spiritual, to look deeper into his inner being. What was once enough for man is now not enough. Spiritual science says to modern man: You have taken the wrong path. Are the qualities that man has found so far all there are? Is there no deeper substratum? Do we not find something hidden from view that we can say: Yes, this could be related to what I feel to be the divine?

There must be something that is more deeply rooted than anything that man has known about himself so far, that gives him the right to transfer human-soul qualities to the divine. But how to find the way to the hidden foundations within ourselves?

Here spiritual science points us to paths that only a few people have taken in the past. Today, many need guidance along these paths. There are two paths: firstly, the path of mysticism and, secondly, the path of occultism in the true sense of the word.

Let us consider these two paths. What is the path of mysticism? To understand this, we need only take a moment to consider our own souls. You all know that in spiritual science we speak of the fact that a person is not the same being in sleep as they are when awake. When falling asleep, the inner being of the person emerges, and when waking up, it descends again into the physical body and the etheric body. In general, people do not notice that something special is happening in the process. Do we ever see what descends from within? A tremendous change takes place in a person at that moment. When he descends, he does not see his etheric body and his physical body from within. Otherwise he would see that his corporeality is illusion and maya. As ordinary people, we see the environment and that part of ourselves that we can see from the outside. What works and lives in him, the human being sees nothing of that. He sees only the outside, which he also sees in stones and minerals. For his gaze is distracted to the outer world as soon as he descends into his lower bodies. Those who have striven for a conscious awakening were the mystics. They experienced a conscious descent into the outer man. All the images of the inner life known to the mystics are what the human being can see when he turns his gaze away from the outer world, from what otherwise captures his gaze. The mystic experiences what the human being is when he looks at himself from within. He does not see, for example, how the blood circulates, but he sees that the blood is the carrier of divine activity; he sees that the blood is a shadow of spiritual reality. That is what the mystic experiences: the spiritual motor of his own being instead of the external Maya.

What the mystics tell us is true. Listen to what they report: This descent is associated with what we call trials and temptations, the awakening of selfish instincts. Read the descriptions of what the soul is capable of unfolding in terms of base instincts. We have to go through a whole layer of passions, desires, selfish impulses that we hardly thought we were capable of anymore. All this must be overcome if we want to penetrate into the deep layers of our own being. It is wisely arranged that our gaze is initially diverted from our own inner being, because man is not mature enough to consciously descend into his own inner being. He must fight everything that rears up in him when he has embarked on the path of overcoming his own egoism. Only then does he find the true human being, who is concentrated in the smallest space, in the I-point. Only then are we completely within ourselves, recognizing ourselves in good and evil, seeing what the human being really is when he is beyond the layer formed by his instincts and desires, and when he has outgrown all that has been instilled in him by education and convention. We have to go through this layer if we want to penetrate into our inner selves.

There is yet another way to recognize the spirit and ourselves. It is not easy to enter and is protected from the immature, because it also contains its dangers. In addition to the important moment of waking up, there is also the moment of falling asleep, which is equally significant for the contemplation of the human being. Let us examine it more closely. At the moment of falling asleep, the human being passes into the spiritual world, into the world beyond physical reality. His consciousness ceases, it fades away. The normal person has no spiritual world around him in a conscious way. If he were to enter the spiritual world in an immature state, he would experience to the utmost degree what in the physical world is blindness. He would be blinded by the direct vision of the spiritual poured out through the outer world.

Again it is necessary to make man so strong that he will not be blinded by this spirit poured out through the outer world. This is done through the occult path. Through this path he finds his ego, not crowded together in the narrowest part of his own inner being, but poured out over the whole outer world, one with that outer world. That is the occult path.

When man learns to go both ways, the mystical path and the occult path, a significant fact comes to his attention. Let him seek out the point where he is most compressed, most crowded in his own interior, and let him be poured out over the whole outside world, then he experiences the one great, the mighty. What you experience when you descend into the depths of your own self and when you pour yourself into the infinite is the same: mysticism and occultism go in opposite directions and lead to the same goal. Man discovers something that has slumbered in him, that is enchanted in the outer world, that can be found in the depths of his own soul and outside in the world of appearances. He finds that which lives as spirit behind the phenomena, and he finds the spiritual in himself when he has connected with the mystical path of knowledge and with the occult path of knowledge. That is the bridge by which the abyss can be bridged, which the seeking soul of today faces when it realizes that it itself is something different from the world of appearances outside and cannot connect with its qualities to what surrounds it outside.

Today there is the possibility of finding a way that shows how what lives in us is the same as what lives in the outside world. The seeking souls who are outside of our aspirations do not yet know it. The spiritual science shows the way. The theosophical world view aims to be a signpost for this goal. It will provide answers to the questions posed by the bleeding, struggling souls of today. These questions will resound to the windows of the present, and spiritual science will provide the answer. This gives it its inner justification and shows that it has not arisen arbitrarily from a few minds, but from the needs of the time. Spiritual science will again indicate means and ways to find harmony between what lives in the environment and what lives in the human soul. It will lead us to recognize the laws governing nature not as empty abstractions, but as thoughts of divine spiritual entities. In this way, it will rediscover the spirit in the outer world. The fact that the soul cannot do this today is what accounts for its emptiness and desolation. It can only find consolation, help and strength by seeking the paths and goals of the spiritual human being. This shows how deeply justified this spiritual-scientific endeavour is.

If we understand spiritual science in its deepest sources, we will give the soul the nourishment it craves, we will open up sources of spiritual activity for it, and, because everything external is an expression of the spiritual, in the course of time also health. From the yearning and searching of today, spiritual science will be given its goals.

According to incomplete, summary notes

Dear attendees, there is no need to dwell on the reasons why these two lectures are dedicated to the consideration of German intellectual life in these fateful times. Our feelings must naturally be directed towards what the German people have to defend, locked inside a great fortress. Not only do our enemies today talk about their own bravery in such a way that they not only count on their weapons, but also on the hunger over which they believe they have power. They are also trying hard to persuade themselves and others that the German people have a spiritual essence within them that is not worth preserving. We are like being locked in a fortress, not only surrounded by the roar of weapons, but also, in a cowardly manner, by hunger. The question arises as to what the German essence, the German spirit is, which is to be defended in the face of the changing winds. It goes without saying that spiritual science can only be expressed as a result, as an attitude. What was most attacked before spiritual science emerged in modern culture was something that modern culture had more or less lost. The concept of the folk soul is not abstract for certain character peculiarities, but it is a real entity for the spiritual eye, so that, as we allocate the entity of outer nature to the four realms, we recognize beings with individuality in spiritual science, beings with individuality. Therefore, we speak of different folk souls of the individual peoples, as one speaks of what is in reality of the outer senses. Only when one tries to see the German national soul within the German nation does one get a true idea of spiritual science. However, one must then also speak of the soul of the individual. Psychology speaks of it, but in such a way that it sees a chaotic jumble of will impulses and thoughts. Spiritual science cannot speak in this way.

The world will increasingly recognize that a genuine scientific consideration of the soul must take into account the threefold nature of the soul. Just as a physicist distinguishes the rainbow shades of yellowish-reddish, green, and blue-violet in light, so too, in the same genuine scientific sense, spiritual science will have to acknowledge that the soul expresses itself in three forms: as a sentient soul, inasmuch as it encompasses everything instinctual that does not arise from the brightness of thought, as in the reddish-yellowish. In green, the soul of reason reveals itself. As the blue-violet is in the light, so is the human soul, which can be called the soul of consciousness. This distinction is not arbitrary, but arises from a closer examination of what it means to be human, what is connected to the human spirit through the noblest core, what goes through birth and death, the eternal, where it all leads to, what is in the subconscious, even in the dream-like: the eternal core of being. The intellectual soul stands in the midst of the soul's nuances, like the color green in the midst of light. Through ideas and concepts, it is connected to the eternal and pours out onto the outside with the temporal and the transitory. In the present, it lives out with all the qualities that keep the human being firmly grounded, but which are also the temporary ones that only reveal themselves between birth and death. This structure is something truly real. The light lives in all color nuances, and so the human ego lives as the actual self-grasping in all three soul nuances.

The folk souls in the sense of spiritual science differ in such a way that one folk soul, for example, preferably takes hold of the individual in the scale of feeling. Of course, the individual human being can rise above the popular to the general human. What I say applies as long as he experiences himself in his nationality. The way in which the human being stands in his nation offers, as it were, a relationship between the sentient soul and the national soul. What works in will take hold of the drives and passions. We have this in the Italian nationality. In a second case, when the national soul works in the intellectual soul, permeating the views, thinking, concepts and ideas of individual nationalities, we can observe this within the French nationality. And where the national soul works in the consciousness soul, which is currently the most transient and is completely bound to the physical world, we can observe this in the British people at the present time.

I am aware that what I am saying is not based solely on observations of the present. Many here know that I have been saying this for years. On the other hand, I know that it will gradually become part of human knowledge, just as light in its various colors is part of physical science. Since a direct relationship to the folk soul is expressed in all three soul-members, to the whole rule and weave of the soul within the human being, we have considered the relationship of the individual German, insofar as he belongs to Germanness, to his folk soul. In this way, one can gain insights into the peculiar national cultures of the individual peoples. One can say even more for the sake of enlightenment.

The Western nations had a special link to the collective soul of the folk soul. They added this to the culture in such a way that they participate in a folk age that is different from that of the Germans. They tie in with what comes from Greco-Roman and earlier cultures. So they tie in with what emerged as a current from ancient times, which appears as an immature age of nations compared to the German one, where the individual grasps himself as a special thinker, where he does not listen to mythologies, to something coming from outside, but seeks to arrive at a worldview through his own judgment. The German entered European culture in manhood. Thus, one people can be understood while another people is going through a completely different age. One must know that all peoples went through a clairvoyant age before that. I have mentioned how Ludwig Laistner has not yet fully recognized that all myths, all pictorial narratives, come from a time when people still had clairvoyance, not a dream state, but not fully awake, a state that shows reality, but in images. What the Greeks, the Romans, the peoples of Europe depict in their myths and legends is only one expression of what the individual peoples have really experienced. This has already been done in the “Riddles of the Sphinx”. It depends on how a people goes through the transition from ancient clairvoyance to later clairvoyance, one could say to scientific knowledge. We find everywhere that the world view of the German goes into the whole disposition, while the others were still in a less mature state of mind when they came out of ancient clairvoyance. Their world view has formed itself as if [instinctively]. Their self was not fully present. Even Christianity is still felt as if it were brought from outside. When one sees pictures, one says, they are there, so say these peoples, the world view is there.

The German people are different. They confront us as they experience the great clash with the Romance peoples of the south; there they are already beyond the stage that we have in the oldest stories, myths, the personality is what is emphasized. We feel in the “Nibelungenlied” that everything depends on the human personal qualities playing out, courage and so on, what the human being can suffer. The other people are confronted with what they are looking at. In the “Nibelungenlied”, the German is personally linked to what he has had depicted. When the “Nibelungenlied” was already overcome, a figure from it was used by Richard Wagner; Brünhilde, Hagen, Siegfried. In the “Nibelungenlied” we see how the Central European Germanic peoples connected with other cultures. It was necessary for the Germanic peoples to form a worldview through their own efforts. It had to differ from that which was unfolding all around them. What appeared at the height of Italian art in Dante must be compared with Wolfram von Eschenbach's “Parzival”. In Dante's “Divine Comedy”, a sum of images leads up, connected at the top with medieval scholasticism. And how Dante's personalities are shaped by the passions. How isolated Dante's “Divine Comedy” is from the human. In “Parzival,” the portrayal of the human soul is such that the soul itself is present with everything that lives in it, that the soul only progresses through that with which it lives in its most intimate. Then we see that the German spirit cannot go to a worldview that is presented to it as a revelation, but that it wants to have it as an intimate experience of the soul, as every concept wants to be experienced.

One must see in the time of German mysticism, Meister Eckhardt, Tauler, how they describe the coexistence of the individual human souls with the spirit. It is, as it were, a dialogue between the individual German and the spirit of the people, in which the soul is present with all its sufferings and bliss. The soul must become very still, throw out what it is itself, and be only in its secret closet, then it is with its God, experiences what pervades it as the divine. The mood that it can undergo is wonderful, what rules and moves in the universe, when it lets God rule in it. Later, in Angelus Silesius, this intimate togetherness is expressed in dogmatic sayings. He mentions:

I neither die nor live. God himself dies in me,

And what I am to live, he also lives for and for.

I die and live God: if I want to live for him forever,

Then I must also give up the ghost for him forever.

The soul is filled with the divine spiritual, but since God cannot die, death is only an appearance. Thus, someone like Jakob Böhme, who is very popular in German spiritual life, feels the soul, which does not pass through the vital organs but is the eternal core of being within the body, still fully conscious in the body.

Dying is a new birth: “He who does not die before he dies, will perish when he dies,” that is, he who does not turn his attention to what passes through the portal of death. Wherever we look, we can see the German spirit's world view in such a way that nothing shines forth from the old point of view into the time when he wants to gain a new world view. His self is firmly established in carrying all his strength and efficiency into the outer world of sense. We see, when in the Romanic culture the nations accepted Christianity, how a strong ascetic current emerges, how the human self separates, its thinking separates. But the German cannot so easily cast aside what is his own self, and so he will carry this into many views of the spiritual and divine in nature, just as in the Song of the Nibelungs, lamentation is derived from bliss and sorrow from suffering. Nature cannot fully satisfy the soul; if it does not see the supersensible in it, it must appear tragic until one sees through the veil of nature that by which one does not perish. Therein lie the roots of German spiritual life.

What was produced later produced the flower in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which leads to a worldview. Always in the national, not in the individual, we see everything in Italy coming out in relation to the passions, in France that which stimulates the mind, that which encourages abstract ideas-tendencies. All schematizing, all bringing into a system, behind which the self runs. They say there that rhymeless verses are not poetic, that there is no rounding off. It is the same everywhere, especially in relation to rationalism. It is the same in all fields, one cannot see beyond it, one must elevate oneself with the self to what is schematized. The German essence should live intimately in what it unfolds as experience up to the supersensible. In alliteration, the soul's immediate feeling passes over, there it is striven for by the intimate progression of the soul itself, not by rhyme.

Within British nationality, that which relates to the transitory, to the external sense world, would be. It is empiricism, as rationalism is in French nationality. Idealism is basically the original field, which becomes the direct roots of German intellectual life. From this it can be understood how Darwin's system of nature was able to pursue the purely material from the British mind, as with the philosopher Locke, and to glimpse the religious aspect alongside it, without grasping it through experience, as the German mind does.

The English mind was prevented from making the same radical mistake by its adherence to matter that Haeckel made out of the merits of the German mind: to make a monistic world view out of Darwin's system of nature. Little by little, spiritual science must unfold in such a way that it not only has idealism, but also imbues it with spiritual weaving. It is uncomfortable to live up to the great German philosophers in terms of what they experienced at the full sap of their thoughts. One sees how this includes the fruit of real, actual spiritual realizations. The German spirit has advanced from the root to the flower, which includes the hope that the fruit, the spiritual realization, will come from it. This German spiritual insight will still have much to say about the development of the world as a whole. It concerns us, and it is this that will have to be defended against the enemies who rail and revile, who go so far as to fall prey to mental illness over the German essence.

In the prime of German intellectual life stands Lessing. I would like to draw your attention to his testament, “The Education of the Human Race.” He sees himself forced to assume that the soul must pass through life not just once, but repeatedly. Clever people say that Lessing was already growing old at the time. One can move from Lessing to Herder, who, in opposition to Voltaire's rationalism that ideas should live out in history, said that it is not ideas, but behind them are weaving, real entities, concrete spirit. He already points to spirit-cognition, says that the culture of the earth will not perish before enlightenment has occurred.

One flowering of this intimate coexistence of the individual soul with the spiritual, of the striving for a worldview from within the real personality, is “Faust”, which no other nation can match. It is not artistically rounded off, and the second part is aesthetically contestable in many ways. But the striving for a popular worldview becomes in it a continuous experience of the self, of the I. Faust strives to go beyond what can be given from the outside, to enter into dialogue with the concrete spirit. He really has it around him in all reality, and when he wants to lead it to the sources of life, his counterpart Mephisto comes to meet him. Faust calls out to him: “In your nothingness, I hope to find the All”. This is a truly German saying, it does not lead to nothingness, but to the source of existence. Through pain and suffering, Faust seeks what is inadequate for the merely external. Those who immerse themselves in the intimate striving of the German spirit are left with the impression of madness, as expressed by the world in a journal that has indeed gone mad: “Robbery was the slogan of the German race at all times”.

That is how far the European world has come in its judgment of the German spirit with the unilluminated intellectual! Hebbel said: “Everyone basically hates the German essence - that was a long time ago - as the bad hate the good. If they would succeed in eradicating it, they would have to scrape it out of the grave with nails afterwards.”

The moods that are now coming from abroad as pathological phenomena have long since been formed as intellectual currents from the passions present in the nationalities, to which only one image of the soul is assigned, while the German must sacrifice the whole soul on the altar of intellectual existence. Only the sacrificed soul gives back what arises from the sacrificial fire. The others seek only through individual shades of the soul. This may now be emphasized, where the German essence is so reviled.

Is there not some truth in the words of someone who says: “Germany made [the most significant revolution of modern times], the Reformation.” This is a proud word about the German essence, which relates to the others as higher mathematics relates to elementary mathematics. It was said in Paris in 1870 by Ernest Renan. In the same letter, when compared with it, one can see what a contrast there is between what Central Europe strives for in terms of world view and how it wants to live it out, and how it is in the West, even when tackling the highest problems such as “The Life of Jesus”.

We always have to hear that Central Europe wanted the war. But let us listen from France to Germany. He – Renan – believes that the Germans should be careful not to take land from the French, and that the French would then improve and realize that they had started the war unjustly. David Friedrich Strauß, to whom the letter was addressed, replied that Renan should forgive him, but that he could not see Gaul as a penitent Magdalene. Renan then says that there is a current in France that says that if France's integrity is saved, we – the French – will make up for the mistake of the previously stolen Alsace-Lorraine, not through revenge; it is different if they have to cede Alsace-Lorraine, then there will be hatred, and the eternal goal will be the destruction of the German race.

Rationalism is capable of saying: just as in higher mathematics, annihilation follows from the alliance with anyone who offers himself. Such logic is a bitter pain, a contradiction that mocks everything that is natural feeling. There is no need to sing the praises of self in order to characterize what has become of the German people through the pursuit of an intimate worldview.

In the West and Northwest, among the British people, there is no understanding; it is impossible for them to even absorb the basic nerve of the German being, nor in the East. Slavophilism has developed there, and it is imbued with the idea that what lives in the West as culture is rotten and must be replaced by what it itself has. And we are in the West of Russia! The individual Russian person is so attached to his or her national soul that it does not yet have an effect on them, that it has not yet taken hold of either the individual soul nuance or the whole self, but rather it hovers like a cloud over what the individual person experiences. The individual soul is not yet reached by it.

In what Italian culture produces in the way of emotional culture, in French rationalism, in British empiricism, we can see the popular soul coming to life. With the Russian people, it hovers over the experience, which is why the Orthodox religion, which has become completely rigid, is allowed to spread over the individual, who bows down under it but is not seized by it. He does not strive to receive spiritual life, but humbles himself under the yoke, bending from the outside. It is a saddening impression to attend such an Orthodox service at the Österfeiern, as the individual behaves quite impersonally towards what is happening, taking in nothing personal. It is precisely in this that superiority to the West is sought. In what is produced as a necessary result of the whole Central European spirit, salvation could be found there in the east, but in Slavophilism they resist developing the mind, absorbing something of what should have been incorporated into the soul of the Russian people. Those who have risen above the level of brutal Slavophilism, who have brought the torch of war and brutal warfare, have realized this.

One of these discerning minds was Solowjow. He is not a Faustian soul, but wants to look up in humility. Therefore, what remains in him is what lives in the individual Russian soul, an anarchy of the soul. We can follow it up to Solowjow, despite his tremendous greatness. [...] Solowjow had to ask himself: What can we offer from here in Central Europe? There is a deep misunderstanding between the East and Central Europe. Why is Central Europe hated by Eastern Europe? He says: When Europe looks at our pretensions and demands, it is heard that it is something great, but what we can offer from the substance of our people, we can only babble phrases.

Even where the German spirit is fully experienced, there is everywhere such hatred, which had been preparing for a long, long time, as it is now, one can say, in a morbid way. What presents itself as a sign in this fateful time is an admonition to the German soul to become truly aware of its mission. This war can be a kind of warning for many. We will have to unlearn many things if we are to become aware of the German spirit.

It was possible that this man was admired as one of the reconciling spirits between Germany and the West. The novel was celebrated as a work of art, as if born out of the spirit of music itself, according to the critic Stefan Zweig of the “Berliner Tageblatt”. Then people were amazed that Romain Rolland joined the chorus of vilification against Germany. There we see how the events that are now unfolding have been prepared.

One can only say that from all that this time will and must bring, from the sum of blood, suffering, death, but also of courage and bravery, a warning must arise for everyone to become aware of what that body, which can be called the German people, holds in its striving to grasp the spiritual world, to grasp that which can enlighten people about their destiny. Nothing can be emphasized sharply enough in the present to lead to a deepening of that which has emerged from the roots over the centuries to flourish, and which now gives the hope of also bearing fruit. Anyone who takes spiritual science concretely and not just as an abstract hope can say that the individual person can die, but that a nation must not die before it has fulfilled its task. It is therefore feelings of hope and confidence that this event can awaken in us if we immerse ourselves more and more in the roots and blossoms of German intellectual life.

I will not choose my words to summarize, but rather a poem from the collection of an Austrian poet, Fercher von Steinwand, “German Sounds from Austria”: “Kyffhäuser Guests”. Each person in this poem expresses in his own way how the German spirit works, but one person expresses very deeply and powerfully what the German people can express when they draw from the roots and blossoms of the German spirit: what springs from the riddles of this earth,

what finds hearts, what masters minds,
What flows eternally speaking from the stars
And discloses an inimitable God;
What seemingly has been lost from time and world
And yet shoots around us in a thousand streams:
That is the primal power inherent in the German spirit,
To speak this out clearly, he has consciously sworn!

What should not all be reconciled, balanced, reconciled! We have suffered long enough from this tolerance and leniency, we have imagined to our heart's content that we would not be so disunited at heart and that we only needed to come to an understanding, and we have spent the noble time with useless attempts at unification and concordats. But the fanatic is right: “How does Belial get along with Christ?” The pious zealot never let up for a moment in his vigorous fight against the stormy spirit of the new age, and knew no other goal than its “extermination”. Just as the Emperor of the Heavenly Empire only thinks of “exterminating” his enemies, the English, so he also wanted to know of no other battle than a decisive one to the death. We used to let him rage and rave and saw nothing in him but a ridiculous fanatic. Were we right to do so? As long as the rabble-rouser always loses his cause before the healthy common sense of the people, even if the reasonable person does not rebuke him in particular, we could confidently leave the judgment of the excommunicators to that sense and also followed this confidence in general. But our forbearance lulled us into a dangerous slumber. The bluster did us no harm, but behind the bluster was the believer and with him the whole host of the God-fearing, and - what was the worst and strangest thing of all - we ourselves were behind it too. We were, it is true, very liberal philosophers and thought nothing of thinking: thinking was everything in everything. But what about faith? Should it give way to thinking? Far be it! The freedom of thought and knowledge in all its honor, but no hostility could be assumed between faith and knowledge! The content of faith and that of knowledge is one and the same content, and anyone who violates faith does not understand himself and is not a true philosopher! Did not Hegel himself make it the “purpose of his religious-philosophical lectures to reconcile reason with religion” (Phil. d. Rel. II, 355); and should we, his disciples, want to take something away from faith? Far be it from us! Know, you faithful hearts, that we are completely in agreement with you in the content of faith, and that we have only set ourselves the beautiful task of defending your faith, which is so misunderstood and challenged. Or do you still doubt it? See how we justify ourselves before you, read our conciliatory writings on “Faith and Knowledge” and on “The Piety of Philosophy towards the Christian Religion” and a dozen similar ones, and you will have no more doubts against your best friends!

Thus the good-hearted, peaceful philosopher threw himself into the arms of faith. Who is so pure of this sin that he could pick up the first stone against the poor philosophical sinner? The somnambulistic sleep period full of self-deception and deception was so common, the urge and drive for reconciliation so universal, that only a few remained free of it, and these few perhaps without true justification. This was the era of peace in diplomacy. Nowhere was there real enmity, and yet everywhere there was a striving to outsmart and outdo one another, to provoke and to compensate, to talk and talk, a sugary peacefulness and a friendly mistrust, as diplomacy of that time, that subtle art of disguising the seriousness of one's intentions with superficial banter, has been able to find such phenomena of self-deception and deception a thousand times over in all areas. “Peace at any price” or rather “equilibrium and compatibility at any price” was the paltry heart's desire of these diplomats. This would be the place to sing a song about this diplomacy, which has made our whole life so energyless that we still stagger around in a drowsy trust in those skilled magnetizers who lulled our and their own reason, if it were not - forbidden.

But above all, we are only concerned here with the kind of diplomacy that seems destined to deal the final blow to a book whose advertisement was to be introduced by the above remarks.

“The Trumpet of the Last Judgment over Hegel the atheist and Antichrist. An ultimatum.”

A pamphlet of eleven pages has just been published under this title by Wiegand, the author of which is not difficult to identify for those who know his last literary achievements and, precisely from this, his scientific standpoint.¹ A delicious mystification of this book! A man of the most devout piety, whose heart is filled with resentment against the wicked horde of young Hegelians, goes back to the origin of the latter, to Hegel himself and his teacher, and finds - horror of horrors! - the whole revolutionary malice that now gushes forth from his vicious

in the hardened, hypocritical sinner, who had long been considered a stronghold and shield of the faith. Full of righteous anger, he tears the priestly vestments from his body, puts a paper cap painted with devils and flames on his shaven head, like the priests in Kostnitz did to Huss, and chases the “arch-heretic” through the streets of the astonished world. No one has yet revealed the philosophical Jacobin with such dauntless and comprehensive skill. It is unmistakably an excellent move on the part of the author to put the radical attack on Hegel into the mouth of a decided servant of God. These servants have the merit of never having allowed themselves to be blinded, but rather of having correctly sensed in Hegel their arch-enemy and the Antichrist of their Christ. Unlike those “well-meaning” people who did not want to spoil their faith or knowledge, they did not give in to gullible trust, but rather kept a close eye on the heretic with inquisitorial severity until they caught him. They did not allow themselves to be deceived – as the most stupid are usually the most cunning – and can therefore rightly claim to be the best experts on the “dangerous sides” of Hegel's system. “You know the archer, seek no other!” The wild animal knows very well that it has most to fear from man.

Hegel, who wanted to elevate the human spirit to the almighty spirit and did so, and who impressed upon his students the doctrine that no one should seek salvation outside of and above himself, but that he is his own savior and savior, never made it his particular calling to cut out of each of his students the egoism that resisted the liberation of the individual in a thousand different forms, and to wage a so-called “small war”. He was also criticized for this omission in the form of accusations that his system lacked all morality, which was probably intended to say that he lacked the beneficial paranesis and pedagogical fatherliness that form the pure heroes of youth. The man who has been given the task of overthrowing an entire world by building a new one that leaves no room for the old one should, like a schoolmaster, pursue the young people on all the secret paths of their malice and preach morality to them, or angrily shake the rotten huts and palaces that must sink anyway as soon as he throws the whole heaven down on them, along with all the well-fed Olympians! This is what the petty fears of creatures can only wish for, because they lack the courage to shake off the tangle of life from themselves, not the courageous human being, who only needs one word, the Logos, and in it has everything and creates everything from it. But because the mighty creator of the word, because the master, only occasionally omitted the details of the world, whose totality he had overthrown, because in his divine wrath over the whole he betrayed and felt less anger over this and that, because he hurled the god from his throne one, regardless of whether the whole host of angels with trumpets would then be scattered into nothingness: that is why details and this and that have risen again, and the disregarded angels are blowing their lungs out into the “trumpet of the last judgment”. So after the death of the “king”, a bustle arose among the “carts”. Hadn't the dear little angels been left behind? “The rascals are really too appetizing!” It would be wonderful to compare them to them. If only they would make themselves a little more worldly, a little more reasonable!

You sway back and forth, so lower yourselves,
Move your fair limbs a little more worldly;
Truly, you look quite beautiful in earnest.
But I would like to see you smile just once;
That would be an eternal delight to me. I mean like when lovers look,
A little tug at the mouth and it's done. I like you best, you tall fellow, you.
The priest's expression does not suit you at all,
So look at me a little lustfully!
You could also go more decently - naked,
The long pleated shirt is unseemly
They turn - to be seen from behind!
The rascals are quite too appetizing!

The desire for the positive took hold of those to whom the commandment of the world spirit was given to continue Hegel's work in detail, as he himself exhorted them to do, for example at the end of his History of Philosophy: “I wish that this History of Philosophy may contain a call for them to grasp the spirit of the time, which is natural in us, and to bring to light from its naturalness, that is, from its closedness and lifelessness, and - each in his own place - to bring it to light with consciousness.» For his part, however, as a philosopher, he refused to help the world out of its temporal plight. “How the temporal, empirical present finds its way out of its dilemma, how it shapes itself, is up to it, and is not the immediate practical concern of philosophy.” (Philosophy of Religion II. $. 356.) He spread the heavens of freedom over it and was now allowed to “leave it to it” whether it wanted to direct its sluggish gaze upwards and thus do its part. It was different with his disciples. They already belonged to this “empirical present, which has to find its way out of its conflict”, and had to help it, the first enlightened ones. But they “whined” and became diplomats and peace brokers. What Hegel had torn down in the main, they thought they could rebuild in detail; for he himself had not always declared himself against the individual and was often as obscure in detail as Christ. It is good to mumble in the dark: there is much that can be interpreted into it.

We are fortunate that the dark decade of diplomatic barbarism is over. It had its good points and was - inevitable. We first had to clarify ourselves and absorb the whole weakness of the old in us, in order to learn to despise it as our property and our own self quite energetically. From the mud bath of humiliation, in which we are defiled with the impurity of stability of every kind, we emerge strengthened and call out, revitalized: “The bond between you and us be torn! War to the death! Those who still want to negotiate diplomatically, who still want “peace at any price”, should beware of getting caught between the swords of the combatants and becoming a bloody victim of their “well-meaning” half-heartedness. The time of reconciliation and sophistry against others and ourselves is over.

The trumpeter sounds the full battle cry in his trumpet of the Last Judgment. It will still strike many a sleepy ear, where it will ring out but not awaken; many a person will still think that he can remain behind the front lines; many a person will still think that it is only useless noise being made, and that what is being issued as a war cry is actually a word of peace: but it will no longer help. When the world is at war with God, and the roaring thunder of battle breaks out against the Olympian himself and his hosts: then only the dead can sleep; the living take sides. We want no more mediation, no more conciliation, no more diplomatic “whining”; we want to be the godless, forehead to forehead with such God-fearing people, we want to let them know how we stand with each other. And herein, I repeat, in this decisiveness of enmity, the God-fearing zealots deserve precedence; they have never made friends out of a true instinct. The revelation of Hegel's arch-heresy could not have been introduced in a more skillful and just form than the author has done, by letting the faithful zealots sound the trumpet of the Last Judgment. They do not want a “comparison of equity”, they want a “war of extermination”. This right shall be theirs.

But what can the God-fearing find wrong with Hegel – and with this question we will enter the book itself? The God-fearing? Who threatens them more with destruction than the destroyer of fear? Yes, Hegel is the true herald and creator of courage, before which cowardly hearts tremble. Securi adversus homines, securi adversus Deos, is how Tacitus describes the ancient Germans. But their security against God had been lost in the loss of themselves, and the fear of God took root in their contrite hearts. They have finally found themselves again and conquered the shivers of fear; for they have found the word that henceforth can no longer be destroyed, that is eternal, even though they themselves may still struggle and fight against it until each one of them becomes aware of it. A truly German man - securus adversus Deum - has spoken the liberating word, the self-sufficiency, the autarchy of the free man. We have already been delivered from many kinds of fear and respect by the French, who first proclaimed the idea of freedom with world-historical emphasis, and have allowed it to sink into the nothingness of ridicule. But have they not reappeared with the hideous heads of the snake, and does not a hundredfold fear still darken the bold self-confidence? The salvation which the French brought us was as little thorough and unshakable as that which once came from Bohemia in the Hussite storm, giving the signal for the flames of the later German Reformation. The German alone and he alone demonstrates the world-historical calling of radicalism; only he alone is radical, and he alone is so – without wrong. No one is as inexorable and ruthless as he is; for he does not merely overthrow the existing world in order to remain standing himself; he overthrows – himself. Where the German outlines, there a god must fall and a world must perish. For the German, the destruction and crushing of the temporal is his eternity. Here there is no more fear or despair: he not only drives away the fear of ghosts and this or that kind of reverence, he exterminates all and every fear, reverence itself and the fear of God. Flee, you fearful souls, from the fear of God to the love of God, for which you do not even have a proper word in your language and consequently also in your national consciousness: he no longer suffers at your request, for he makes your God a corpse, and he thereby transforms your love into abhorrence.

In this sense, the “Trombone” also blares out, and contains the true tendency of the Hegelian system, with Old Testament formulas and sighs, so that “the modern doubts, transactions and anxious crusades, which are still based on the assumption that error and truth can be mediated, come to an end.” “Away,” cries the trombonist, filled with rage against all thought, ”away with this mediating rage, with this sentimental jelly, with this world of rogues and lies: only one thing is true, and when one and the other are put together, the other falls into nothingness of its own accord. Don't come to us with this anxious, worldly-wise timidity of the Schleiermacher school and positive philosophy; away with this stupidity, which only wants to mediate because it still loves error inwardly and does not have the courage to tear it out of its heart. Tear it out and throw it away, this double-tongued, to-and-fro-driving, flattering and mediating serpent's tongue; let your mouth, your heart and mind be sincere and one and pure, etc.” Away, then, with the tough and intellectually paralyzing, albeit ingenious diplomacy!

The trombonist, a true servant of God, as he should be, spurns his motionless God as surely as the Turk spurns his Allah, every support against the blasphemer Hegel, and also against the pious. This digression is dedicated to the preface, in which the “older Hegelians” are first greeted with the words: “they always had the word of reconciliation on their lips, but the poison of the adder was on their lips”. Now “the mirror of the system is to be held up to them, and they, Göschel, Henning, Gabler, Rosenkranz and so on, are obliged to answer, because they owe it to their - government. The time has come when further silence is a crime. A “philosophical school” has also formed, which wanted to create a “Christian and positive philosophy” and refute Hegel philosophically, but it also only loved its own ego, it has offended against the foundations of Christian truth, and in addition it has had as little success and effect among the faithful as among the unbelievers. When we complain and governments look for a doctor, has one of the positives found himself as a doctor, have the governments entrusted one of them with the cure? No! Other men are needed! A Krummacher, a Hävernick, Hengstenberg, a Harleß have had to stand before the breach! A third class of opponents of Hegel's philosophy, the Schleiermacherians, are finally also disavowed. “They themselves are still exposed to the temptations of evil, since they love to create the appearance that they themselves are philosophers. And yet they cannot even show the worldly envious people samples of these images. The word is for them: I know your works, that you are neither cold nor warm. Oh, that you were cold or warm! But because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor warm, I will spew you out with my mouth.” The trumpeter recognizes their zeal for “church life”, but it is not “serious, thorough, comprehensive and zealous enough” for him, and they have also not opposed Bruno Bauer (the Protestant Church of Prussia and science) with anything that could refute his blasphemous claims (p. 30). Finally, Leos, the man who “first had the courage to speak out against this godless philosophy, to formally accuse it and to alert the Christian-minded governments to the urgent danger that this philosophy poses to the state, the church and all morality,” is remembered. 'But he too is criticized because he was not ruthless enough, and because his works are still “permeated with some worldly leaven”, which is proved to him with much sophistry. The conclusion, as is fitting, is psalm-like anathemas against the godless.

The “Introduction” now reveals the actual intention of the grim man. “The hour has come for the most evil, the proudest, the last enemy of the Lord to be brought to his knees. But this enemy is also the most dangerous. The French – the people of the Antichrist – had, with shameless public display, in broad daylight, in the market square, in the face of the sun, which had never seen such an outrage, and before the eyes of Christian Europe, pushed the Lord of Eternity down to nothingness, as they murdered the Anointed of God , they had committed idolatrous adultery with the harlot, Reason; but Europe, full of holy zeal, strangled the abomination and joined together in a holy league to bind the Antichrist in chains and to restore to the true Lord his eternal altars. Then came – no! – then was called, then cherished and cared for, then protected, honored and paid the enemy, whom one had defeated outside, in a man who was stronger than the French people, a man who restored the decrees of that hellish Convention to the force of law, gave them new and firmer foundations, and introduced them under the insinuating title of philosophy, which is particularly seductive to German youth. Hegel was appointed and made the center of the University of Berlin. - It was now no longer believed that the horde with which the Christian state has to contend in our day pursues a different principle and professes different doctrines than those established by the master of deception. It is true that the younger school is significantly different from the older one that the master collected: it has thrown away shame and all divine content, it fights openly and without restraint against state and church, it throws down the sign of the cross as it wants to shake the throne - all attitudes and hellish deeds that the older school did not seem capable of. But it seems only so, or it was perhaps only accidental bias and narrow-mindedness, if the earlier students did not rise to this diabolical energy: in principle and in the matter, that is, if we go back to the principle and the actual doctrine of the master, the later ones have not established anything new, they have rather only taken away the transparent veil in which the master sometimes wrapped his assertions and uncovered the nakedness of the system – shameless enough!

It would now be our task to examine the Hegelian system's accusation of the book's actual content in more detail. However, it is precisely in such a way that it must come to the reader's attention without being wasted and not getting bogged down in a review, and moreover we know of nothing else to criticize in it, except that the author's memory does not seem to have had access to all the useful passages of Hegel's works. Since, as announced on page 163, this work is to be followed by a second section that is to show “how Hegel, from the outset, allows religion to arise from the inner dialectic and development of self-consciousness as a special phenomenon » and in which at the same time «Hegel's hatred of religious and Christian art and his dissolution of all positive state laws will be presented»: so the opportunity is still completely open to make up for what has been missed. So the reader - and anyone who takes a lively interest in the issues of the day cannot afford to ignore this book - may be content with an overview of the 13 chapters. 1. The religious relationship as a substantial relationship. The trombonist claims that Hegel “has drawn a double veil over his work of destruction”, one of which consists of the fact that he speaks of God countless times and it almost always seems as if he understands by God that living God who was there before the world was and so on, and through a second veil he the appearance that religion is conceived in the form of the substantiality relationship and as dialectic, in which the individual spirit surrenders itself, sacrifices itself to the general, which as substance or - as it is still more often called - as absolute idea has power over it, abandons to it its particular individuality and thus unites itself with it. The more powerful minds (Strauss and so on) have given themselves up to this more dangerous semblance. “But,” it is finally said, “more dangerous than this semblance is the matter itself, which immediately confronts every knowledgeable and open eye, if it only makes a moderate effort: the conception of religion according to which the religious relationship is nothing is an inner relation of self-consciousness to itself, and all those powers which still seem to be distinguished from self-consciousness as substance or as absolute idea are nothing but its own moments, only objectivized in the religious conception. Hereafter the contents of the first chapter are evident. -2. The spectre of the world spirit. 3. Hatred against God. 4. Hatred against the existing. 5. Admiration of the French and contempt for the Germans. This does not contradict the praise we gave the Germans above, any more than the passage overlooked by the author, Geschichte der Philosophie III, p. 328. 6. Destruction of religion. 7. Hatred of Judaism. 8. Preference for the Greeks. 9. Hatred of the church. 10. Contempt for the Holy Scripture and sacred history. 11. Religion as a product of self-awareness. 12. Dissolution of Christianity. Hatred of thorough scholarship and writing in Latin. (A strange addition, as the trombonist thinks.)

The second section, for which the author is to be wished all the more help from his extensive memory, since he is not lacking in other talents, is to be discussed immediately after its publication and then perhaps some of the present one will be added.

Why, it may be asked, do we take this book so confidently for a masquerade? Because no God-fearing person can be as free and intelligent as the author is. “He who cannot have himself for the best is probably not one of the best!”

Published in: “Telegraph für Deutschland.” (Edited by Dr. Karl Gutzkow.) No. 6-8. Hamburg, January 1842, and signed on page 31 with the name “Stirner.”

• 1. What he motivates in the address to “his brothers in Christ”: “We will still remain in obscurity, so that it does not seem as if we were striving for a different honor than the heavenly crown. When the struggle, which we hope to soon end, is over, when the lie has received its punishment, then we will also greet them personally and embrace them warmly at the place of election."

You will have gathered from yesterday's study how important it is to develop a feeling of fellowship, which means overcoming all regard for your own Ego if you wish to penetrate more deeply into the spiritual life. For example, anyone who aspires to occult development must among other things get rid of the following form of egoism. He must not say: “What good is it for me to hear about occult things from others when I cannot see them for myself? That implies a lack of trust. He must trust a person who has reached a certain stage of development. People work together, and if someone has achieved more than others, he will not have achieved it for himself alone but for all the others, and they are called upon to listen to him. By this means his own powers are enhanced, and his hearers, through the very fact of having first given him their trust, will gradually become able to gain knowledge for themselves. You should not want to take a second step before the first.

There are three paths of occult development: the Eastern, the Christian-Gnostic and the Christian-Rosicrucian, or simply the Rosicrucian. They are distinguished above all by the extent to which the pupil surrenders himself to his teacher. What, then, happens to a man who enters on occult development? What are the necessary preconditions for it?

Let us first consider the life of an ordinary man nowadays. From early till late he is occupied with his work and his daily experiences; he makes use of his intellect and his outer senses. He lives and works in what we call the waking state. But that is only one state; between waking and sleeping there is another. In this state he is aware of pictures, dream pictures, passing through his soul. These pictures are not directly related to the external world and ordinary reality. We may call this the dream-state, and it is interesting to study how it takes its course. Many people suppose that dreams are nonsense, but this is not so. Even with people today dreams have a meaning, but not that of experiences in waking life. When we are awake, our mental pictures always correspond to definite facts and experiences; in our dreams they do not. For instance, you may dream that you hear the clatter of horses' hooves, and when you wake up you realise that you were hearing the ticking of the clock by your bedside. Dreams are symbolic pictures. You may have a dream which tells a whole story. A student, for instance, may dream about a duel and all its preliminary details, from the request for pistols to the report of the shot which wakes him—and then he realises that he has knocked down the chair that stood by his bed. Or again, a peasant woman may dream that she is on her way to church; she enters; she hears the priest utter lofty sayings, with his arms moving; suddenly his arms turn into wings and then the priest starts to crow: she wakes up and hears the cock crowing outside!

You can see from these examples that in dreams we live in a very different sort of time from that of our waking consciousness. The actual cause of the dream I have quoted was the last event in point of time. The reason is that such a dream flashes through the soul in a moment and has its own inner time. You must picture it in this way: when you wake up and remember all the details, you extend this inner time yourself, so that the events seem to have occurred in that extended period. This will also help you to get some idea of how time appears in the astral world. A small experience thus creates a long dramatic course of events. The dream flashes through the soul in a moment and in a flash arouses a whole series of pictures. In this way you yourself transpose time into the dream.

Inner conditions may also be represented symbolically in dream: for instance, you may have a headache and dream that you are in a cellar with a lot of cobwebs. Or the beating of your heart or a feeling of being hot may be represented in a dream by a fiery stove. Some people who possess a particular inner sensitivity may have a different experience: they may dream, for instance, that they are in an unhappy situation. Here the dream is prophetic—a symbol of some latent illness which will come out in a few days' time. Many people even dream of the remedy for such an illness. In short, our manner of perception in dreams is quite different from that of ordinary life.

The third state is that of dreamless sleep, sleep without consciousness, when nothing comes before the soul. Now if you begin to be aware of higher worlds as a result of inner development, the first indication you will notice is that your dreams become more regular and meaningful. Above all, you will gain knowledge through your dreams, provided only that you pay careful attention to them. Later, you may notice that your dreams become more frequent, until you come to feel that you have been dreaming all night through. Again, you may notice that your dreams are concerned with things which do not exist at all in the outside world and which you cannot possibly experience physically. You will find that in your dreams you no longer see things which originate in the outer world or symbolic conditions such as those I described above, but, as I have just said, you will experience pictures of things which have no existence in the sense-world, and you will then notice that your dreams are saying something important. For instance, you may dream that a friend of yours is in danger from fire and you may see him getting nearer and nearer to the danger. The next day you may learn that this friend was taken ill during the night. You did not actually see him falling ill; you saw a symbolic picture of it. Thus your dreams may be influenced from higher worlds, so that you experience something which does not exist in the physical world; that is how impressions from higher worlds pass over into dreams. This is a very important bridge to higher occult development.

Someone might say that all this was only dreamt—how can any significance be read into it? But that is a wrong approach. Take the following example: it is said that Edison³⁷ once dreamt how to make an electric light bulb; he remembered the dream and made the light bulb in accordance with it. Suppose someone had then come along and said: “The lamp is no good—it was only a dream.” You can see that what matters is not the mere fact of dreaming but whether the dream has significance for life. Quite often dreams of this sort go unheeded because we fail to notice them. That is wrong; it is just these delicate points that we should attend to; then we shall make progress.

Later comes a stage when the nature of reality is disclosed to the pupil in dream, and he can then test the dream by the reality. When he has advanced so far that he has the whole picture-world present before him in daylight and not only during sleep, he is then able to analyse with his intellect whether what he sees is true. This means that it is wrong to use dream-pictures as a foundation for wisdom; the pupil must wait for them to enter into his daytime experience. If he exercises conscious control over them, a stage is soon reached when the pupil not only sees what is physically present but can truly perceive the astral element in a man, his soul and his aura. He then learns to understand what the shapes and colours in the astral body signify—what passions, for example, they express. So he learns gradually to spell out, as it were, the soul-world. But he must always realise that everything there is symbolical.

Here it might be objected that if you see symbols only, some particular event might be symbolised by all sorts of images, and you could never be sure that a given image has a consistent meaning. But when you reach a certain stage, one image always does stand for one thing, just as in the ordinary world one object is always represented by the same mental concept. For instance, you will find that a given passion is always represented for everyone by the same image. The important thing is to learn how to read the images correctly.

Now you can understand why the sacred books of all religions tend to speak almost entirely through symbolic images. Wisdom, for example, may be described as light: the reason is that to anyone who is occultly developed the wisdom of man and other beings always appears as astral light. Passions appear as fire. The ancient religious documents do not tell only of things on the physical plane, but also of events on higher planes; they owe their origin to seers and are concerned with higher worlds; hence they have to speak to us in pictures. Everything narrated from the Akashic Record³⁸ has for the same reason been presented in pictures of this kind.

The next condition experienced by the pupils is called “continuity of consciousness”. When an ordinary person is completely withdrawn from the sense-world in sleep, he is unconscious. This is no longer so with a pupil who has reached the stage just mentioned. By day and by night, with no interruption, he lives in a state of fully clear consciousness, even when his physical body is at rest.

After some time the pupil's entry into a new but quite specific state of consciousness is marked by the fact that sounds and words are added to the images. The images speak to him in an intelligible language. They tell him what they are, without any possibility of deception. These are the sounds and speech of Devachan, the Music of the Spheres. Everything speaks forth its own name and its relation to other things. This comes in addition to astral sight, and it marks the seer's entry into Devachan. Once a man has reached this Devachanic state, the lotus-flowers, the Chakrams or wheels begin to revolve at specific places in the astral body, turning like the hands of a clock from left to right. These are the sense-organs of the astral body, but their mode of perception is an active one. The eye, for example, is at rest; it allows the light to enter and only then perceives it. The lotus-flowers, on the other hand, perceive only when they are in motion and take hold of an object. The vibrations caused by the revolving lotus-flowers bring them into contact with the astral substance, and that is how perception on the astral plane occurs.

What are the forces which activate the lotus-flowers, and where do they come from? We know that during sleep the exhausted forces of the physical and etheric bodies are restored by the astral body; by its inherent regularity it can make up for irregularities in the physical and etheric bodies. It is these forces, normally used for overcoming fatigue, which animate the lotus-flowers. When a man enters on occult development, he is thus really withdrawing certain forces from his physical and etheric bodies. If these forces were to be withdrawn permanently from the physical body, the man would fall ill; he would find himself utterly exhausted. If therefore he does not want to injure himself, morally as well as physically, he must find something to replace these forces.

He must remind himself of the general rule: Rhythm restores power. Here you have an important occult principle. Most people today lead lives devoid of any regular rhythm, especially as regards their thoughts and their behaviour. Anyone who allowed the distractions of the outer world to gain a hold on him would be unable to avoid the dangers to which his physical body would be exposed in the course of his occult development by the withdrawal of these forces of renewal. Hence he has to strive to introduce a rhythmic element into his life. Of course he cannot arrange his days so that each day passes exactly like another. But he can at least pursue certain activities regularly, and indeed anyone who wants to develop on the occult path will have to do this. Thus he should, for example, do certain exercises of meditation and concentration at a chosen time every morning. He can also bring rhythm into his life if in the evening he reviews the events of the day in reverse order. If he can bring in further regularities, so much the better: in that way his life will take its course in harmony with the laws of the world. Everything in the system of nature is rhythmical—the course of the Sun, the passage of the seasons, of day and night, and so on. Plants, too, grow rhythmically. It is true that the higher we go in the kingdoms of nature, the less rhythm we find, but even in animals a certain rhythm can be observed: for instance, animals mate at regular times. Only man now leads an unrhythmical, chaotic life: nature has deserted him.

Man's task, therefore, is deliberately to infuse some rhythm into this chaotic life, and he has available certain means through which he can bring this harmony and rhythm into his physical and etheric bodies. Both these bodies will then gradually develop such rhythms that they will correct themselves when the astral body withdraws. If they are forced out of their proper rhythm during the day, they will of their own accord regain the right kind of movement when they are at rest.

The means available consist in the following exercises, which must be practised in addition to meditation:

I. Thought control. This means preventing, at least for a short time every day, all sorts of thoughts from drifting through the mind, and bringing a certain ordered tranquillity into the course of thinking. You must take a definite idea, set it in the centre of your thinking, and then logically arrange your further thoughts in such a way that they are all closely linked with the original idea. Even if you do this for only a minute, it can be of great importance for the rhythm of the physical and etheric bodies.

II. Initiative in action. You must compel yourself to some action, however trivial, which owes its origin to your own initiative, to some task you have laid on yourself. Most actions derive not from your own initiative but from your family circumstances, your education, your calling and so on. You must therefore give up a little time to performing actions which derive from yourself alone. They need not be important; quite insignificant actions fulfil the same purpose.

III. Tranquillity. Here the pupil learns to regulate his emotions so that he is not at one moment up in the skies and at the next down in the dumps.³⁹ Anyone who refuses to do this for fear of losing his originality in action or his artistic sensibility can never go through occult development. Tranquillity means that you are master of yourself in the most intense pleasure and in the deepest grief. Indeed, we become truly receptive to the joys and sorrows of the world only when we do not give ourselves over egotistically to them. The greatest artists owe their greatest achievements precisely to this tranquillity, because through it they have opened their eyes to subtle and inwardly significant impressions.

IV. Freedom from prejudice. This, the fourth characteristic, sees good in everything and looks for the positive element in all things. Relevant to this is a Persian legend⁴⁰ told of Christ Jesus. One day Christ Jesus saw a dead dog lying by the wayside; he stopped to look at the animal while those around him turned away in disgust. Then Jesus said: “What beautiful teeth the dog has!” In that hideous corpse he saw not what was ugly or evil but the beauty of the white teeth. If you can acquire this mood, you will look everywhere for the good and the positive, and you will find it everywhere. This has a powerful effect on the physical and etheric bodies.

V. Faith. Next comes faith, which in its occult sense implies something rather different from its ordinary meaning. During occult development you must never allow your judgment of the future to be influenced by the past. Under certain circumstances you must exclude all that you have experienced hitherto, so that you can meet every new experience with new faith. The occultist must do this quite consciously. For instance, if someone comes up to you and tells you that the church steeple is crooked and at an angle of 45 degrees, most people would say that is impossible. The occultist must always leave a way open to believe. He must go so far as to have faith in everything that happens in the world; otherwise he bars the way to new experiences. You must always be open to new experiences; by this means your physical and etheric bodies will be brought into a condition which may be compared with the contented mood of a broody hen.

VI. Inner Balance. This is a natural outcome of the other five qualities. The pupil must keep the six qualities in mind, take his life in hand, and be prepared to progress slowly in the sense of the proverb about drops of water wearing away a stone.

Now if anyone acquires higher powers through some artificial means without attending to all this, he will be in a bad way. In ordinary life today the spiritual and the physical are intermingled, somewhat like a blue and yellow liquid in a glass of water. Occult development sets going a process rather like the work of a chemist who separates the two liquids. Soul and body are separated in a similar way, and the benefits of the mingling are lost. An ordinary person, because the soul stays in close relation to the body, is not subjected to the more grotesque passions. But as a result of the separation I have been talking about, the physical body, with all its attributes, may be left to itself, and this can lead to all manner of excesses. Thus a man who has embarked on occult development, but has not taken care to cultivate moral qualities, may manifest certain traits which as an ordinary man he had long ago ceased to exhibit. He may suddenly become a liar, vengeful, quick to anger; all sorts of characteristics which had previously been toned down may appear in a violent form. This may happen even if someone who has neglected moral development becomes unduly absorbed in the teachings of Theosophy.

We have seen that a man must first pass through the stage of spiritual sight and only then comes to the stage of spiritual hearing. While he is still at the first stage he has of course to learn how the images are related to their objects. He would find himself plunged into the stormy sea of astral experiences if he were left to fend for himself. For this reason he needs a guide who can tell him from the start how these things are related and how to find his bearings in the astral world. Hence the need to find a Guru⁴¹ on whom he can strictly rely. In this connection three different ways of development can be distinguished.

1. The Eastern way, also called Yoga. Here, an initiated man living on the physical plane acts as the Guru of another, who entrusts himself to his Guru completely and in all details. This method will go best if during his occult development the pupil eliminates his own self entirely and hands it over to his Guru, who must even advise him on every action he may take. This absolute surrender of one's own self suits the Indian character; but there is no place for it in European culture.

2. The Christian way. Here, in place of individual Gurus, there is one great Guru, Christ Jesus Himself, for everyone. The feeling of belonging to Christ Jesus, of being one with Him, can take the place of surrender to an individual Guru. But the pupil has first to be led to Christ by an earthly Guru, so that in a certain sense he still depends on a Guru on the physical plane.

3. The Rosicrucian way, which leaves the pupil with the greatest possible independence. The Guru here is not a leader but an adviser; he gives directions for the necessary inner training. At the same time he takes good care that, parallel with the occult training, there is a definite development of thinking, without which no occult training can be carried through. This is because there is something about thinking which does not apply to anything else. When we are on the physical plane, we perceive with the physical senses only what is to be found on that plane. Astral perceptions are valid for the astral plane; devachanic hearing is valid only in Devachan. Thus each plane has its own specific form of perception. But one activity—logical thinking—goes through all worlds. Logic is the same on all three planes. Thus on the physical plane you can learn something which is valid also for the higher planes; and this is the method followed by Rosicrucian training when on the physical plane it gives primary attention to thinking, and for this purpose uses the means available on the physical plane. A penetrative thinking can be cultivated by studying theosophical truths, or by practising mental exercises. Anyone who wishes further training for the intellect can study books such as Truth and Science, and The Philosophy of Freedom, which are written deliberately in such a way that a thinking trained by them can move with certainty on the highest planes. Even a person who studies these books and knows nothing of Theosophy might find his way about in the higher worlds. But, as I have said, the teachings of Theosophy act in the same way.

Here, then, the Guru is only the friend and adviser of the pupil, for by training his reason the pupil will be training the best Guru for himself. But he will of course still need a Guru to advise him on how to make progress in freedom.

Among Europeans, the Christian way is best suited to those whose feelings are most strongly developed. Those who have more or less broken away from the Church and rely rather on science, but have been led by science into a doubting frame of mind, will do best with the Rosicrucian way.

• 37. Thomas Alva Edison, 1847–1931.
• 38. “Everything that has been recounted from the Akasha Chronicle”. The reference is to the communications “From the Akasha Chronicle” published by Rudolf Steiner in his journal, Lucifer-Gnosis, from July 1904 to May 1908. Collected edition, Dornach, 1964. English translation published in America with the title: Cosmic Memory: Prehistory of Earth and Man.
• 39. “at one moment up in the skies and at the next down in the dumps”. From Klärchen's song in Goethe's Egmont, 3, 2.
• 40. “a Persian legend.” See Goethe: Notes and comments for a better understanding of the West-Östlichen Divan, “Allgemeines”.
• 41. Guru. In oriental Initiation, he who guides the pupil's occult development; leader on the path of knowledge.