The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Mystics and the Time of Copernicus. Involution, Evolution and Creation out of Nothingness. The Number Four, the Sign of Creation.

Today we shall first occupy ourselves with a consideration of what is called the symbolism of numbers. When speaking of occult signs and symbols, it is necessary to mention the symbols that are expressed in numbers, even if only briefly. You may recall my elucidations of the day before yesterday in which I spoke of the numerical proportions in the universe, of the speed with which the single planets move and of the harmony of the spheres that comes about through these different speeds. Even from this you can see that numbers and numerical proportions have a certain meaning for the cosmos and the world. It is in numbers, we might say, that the harmony that wells through space is expressed. Now we shall turn our attention to a more intimate numerical symbolism, the meaning of which we can only touch upon, however. Were we really to immerse ourselves in it, many other things would have to be considered. Anyway, you will receive at least an idea of what is meant when it is said of the old occult Pythagorean School that it stressed the necessity of immersing oneself in the nature of numbers in order to gain an insight into the world.

To think about numbers may appear dry and dreary to many. To those who are affected by the materialistic culture of our times it will appear as mere playfulness if it is believed that, through a consideration of numbers, it is possible to gain knowledge of the nature of things. There was, however, a deep reason for the great Pythagoras to tell his pupils that knowledge concerning the nature of numbers would lead to the essence of things. But do not think it sufficient to reflect on the numbers 1, 3, or 7. Real occult teaching knows nothing of witchcraft and magic, nor of a superstitious meaning of some number. Its knowledge rests on deeper things, and from the short sketch I will give you, you will see that numbers can give you a clue to what is called meditation if you have the key to plunge deeply enough.

The number one must be our starting point. Later, in considering the other numbers, it will become clearer how far the number one symbolizes what I shall say. In all occultism the One has always designated the indivisible unity of God in the universe. God is indicated by the number one. We should not believe, however, that anything is to be gained by becoming engrossed in nothing but this number. You will see later how this absorption should rightfully come about, and it will be far more fruitful if we first consider the other numbers.

Two is called the number of revelation in occultism. This means that whatever appears to us in the world, whatever reveals itself, whatever is not in any way concealed, stands as a duality. Thereby we acquire ground under our feet, whereas with the number one we are groping in the unfathomable. Everywhere in nature you find that nothing reveals itself without being related to the number two. Light alone cannot reveal itself. There must also be shadow or darkness—that is, a duality. There could never be a world filled with manifest light were there not corresponding shadow. Thus it is with all things. It would never be possible for good to manifest if it did not have evil as shadow-picture. The duality of good and evil is a necessity in the manifest world. There are infinitely many dualities. They fit all life, but we must look for them at the right spots.

There is one important duality in life about which men might well reflect. Yesterday, we considered various conditions that a man experienced before he became an inhabitant of our present earth. We saw that on Saturn and on Sun he had a certain immortality in that he directed his body from outside, that he broke off pieces of this body and added new ones, so that he perceived nothing of fading and dying. Human consciousness at that time was not as it is today, but was dull. Men have wrestled through to a consciousness for the first time on our earth. It is here that a man first becomes a being who knew something of himself and could distinguish himself from objects. For this to occur, it was necessary not only that he direct his body from the outside, that he broke off pieces of this body and added new ones, so that he perceived nothing of fading and dying. Human consciousness at that time was not as it is today, but was dull. Men have wrestled through to a consciousness that is bound up with self-consciousness for the first time on our earth. It is here that a man first became a being who knew something of himself and could distinguish himself from objects. For this to occur, it was necessary not only that he direct himself from outside, but he also had to slip into this body, perceive himself therein, and say “I” to it. Only because a man finds himself completely in his body has he been able to achieve his full consciousness. Now, however, he also shares the destiny of his body. Earlier, when he still hovered over it, this was not the case. It was only when a man had achieved this degree of consciousness that he came into relation with death. At the moment when his body falls apart, he feels the suspension of his ego because he identifies himself with his body. Only gradually, through spiritual development, will he again achieve the old immortality. The body is here as the school through which to wrestle through to immortality with self-consciousness. Through death a man acquires immortality on a higher level. As long as he had not experienced death, so long was the world unrevealed to him because duality belongs to the revealed world—death and life.

Thus, we could point out dualities at every step in life. In physics you find positive and negative electricity, in magnetism, forces of attraction and repulsion. Everything appears in duality. Two, duality, is the number of appearance, of manifestation.

There is, however, no revelation save that the Divine holds sway behind the scenes. In this way, behind every duality a unity is hidden. Therefore, three is nothing but two and one, that is, the revelation and the existent divinity backing it.

Three is the number of the Divinity revealing itself. There is a statement in occultism that says that two can never be the number for the Divinity. One is a number for God, and also the three. The one who sees the world as a duality, sees it only in its revelation. Whoever claims that this duality is all is always in the wrong. Let us make this clear to ourselves with an example. Even in places where spiritual science is discussed, sinning often occurs against the statement of true occultism that two is the number of revelation but not the number of fullness or completeness. You will often hear it said in popular occultism by people who do not really know, that all development runs its course through involution and evolution, but we shall see the direction this really takes. First, however let's examine a plant, a fully developed plant with roots, leaves, stems, blossoms, fruit, etc. This is an evolution. But now observe the small seed from which the plant has arisen or can arise. In this tiny seed the entire plant is, in a sense, already contained. It is hidden within it, ensheathed, because the seed is taken from the whole plant, which has laid all its forces into the seed. Here we may therefore make a distinction between two processes—the one in which the seed's forces have unfurled themselves and unfolded into the plant, evolution, and the other in which the plant has folded itself up and, as it were, crept into the seed, involution.

The process that occurs when a being that has many organs so forms itself that nothing of these organs remains visible, so that they contract to a tiny part, is called an involution. The process of expansion and unfolding is an evolution. Everywhere in life this duality alternates but always only within the manifest. You can follow this up not only in the plant but also in higher realms of life. Let us trace in thought, for example, the development of European spiritual life from Augustine to Calvin, that is, roughly through the Middle Ages. You will find in Augustine a kind of mystical inwardness. No one can read the Confessions or his other writings without experiencing the deep inwardness of this man's feeling life. When we advance further, we come across wonderful characters such as Scotus Erigena, a monk from Scotland called the Scottish St. John, who later lived at the court of Charles the Bald. He did not get on well with the Church, and it is told that the brothers of his order tortured him to death with pins. Of course, this is not to be taken literally, but it is true that he was tortured to death. A splendid book was written by him, On the Divisions in Nature which reveals a great profundity of thought even though it is found wanting in many ways from the anthroposophical point of view.

Proceeding further, we find the German mystics in the region of the Rhine, through whom an inner warmth poured itself out over great numbers of people. Not only did the highest of the clergy experience it, but also those who worked on the land and in the smithies. They were all picked up by this current of the time. Further along the way we find Nicolaus Cusanus (1400–64), and so we can follow along in time until the end of the Middle Ages. Always we find that depth of feeling, that inwardness, that spreads itself over all strata of the population.

If we now compare this time with that following it, with the period that began in the sixteenth century and extends into our own, we notice a tremendous difference. At the outset, we find Copernicus who, through a comprehensive idea, effected a renewal of spiritual life, whose thought has become so incorporated into human thinking that whoever believes something else today is counted a fool. We see Galileo, who discovered the law of gravity by observing the swinging of a church lamp in Pisa. Step by step we follow the passage of time up to the present, and everywhere we find the opposite, the strict opposite, of the Middle Ages. Feeling steadily declines and inwardness disappears. The intellect comes steadily to the fore and men become more clever.

Spiritual science explains the difference between these two epochs and shows us that this change had to be. There is an occult statement that says that the period from Augustine to Calvin was one of mystical involution. What does this mean? From the time of Augustine to the sixteenth century there was an outward unfolding of mystical life; it was outside. But something else was also there—intellectual life hidden in germinal form. It was, as it were, like a sun buried in the spiritual earth that unfolded later after the sixteenth century. The intellect was involuted as the plant is in its seed. Nothing can come forth in the world that was not previously in such an involution. Since the sixteenth century, the intellect has been evolving, the mystical life withdrawing. Now the time has come when this mystical life must again appear, when through the Anthroposophical Movement it will be brought to unfolding, to evolution. In this way involution and evolution disclose themselves alternately everywhere in life.

Whoever stops here, however, is taking only the outer aspect into account. To reckon with the whole we must include a third aspect that stands behind these two. What is this third aspect? Imagine yourself facing a phenomenon in the outer world. You reflect over it. You are here, the outer world is there, and from within your thoughts arise. These thoughts were not there previously. When, for example, you form a thought about a rose, this thought first arises in the moment you make a connection with the rose. You were here, the rose there, and now the thought arises in you. When the image of the rose arises, something quite new has come about. This is also the case in other spheres of life. Imagine the artist, Michelangelo, arranging a group of models. Actually, he did this in the rarest of cases. Michelangelo is here, what he renders is there. Something new—the image—arises in his soul. This is a creation that has nothing to do with involution and evolution. It is something entirely new that arises from the intercourse between a being that can receive and a being that can give. Such new creations are always generated through intercourse of being with being, and such new creations are a beginning.

Recall what we considered yesterday, how thoughts are creative, how they can ennoble the soul, indeed, even work later on forming the body. Whatever a being once thinks, the thought creation, the concept creation, works and actively carries on further. It is a new creation, works and actively carries on further. It is a new creation and at the same time a beginning because it gives rise to consequences. If you have good thoughts today, they are fruitful into the remote future because your soul goes its own way in the spiritual world. Your body returns to the elements and decays. Even if everything through which the thought arose disintegrates, the effects of the thought remain.

Let us return to the example of Michelangelo. His glorious paintings have affected millions of people. These paintings, however, will one day fall into dust and there will be future generations who will never see his creations. But what lived in Michelangelo's soul before his paintings took outer form, what at first existed as new creations in his soul, lives on, remains, and will appear in future stages of development and be given form. Do you know why clouds and stars appear to us today? Because there were beings in preceding eras who had thoughts of clouds and stars. Everything arises out of thought creations.

There you have the number three! In revelation things alternate between involution and evolution. Behind this is a deeply hidden creation, a new creation born out of thought. Everything has arisen out of thought, and the greatest things in the world have gone forth from the thoughts of the Godhead. From what, then, do things arise since ideas are new creations? They arise out of nothing! Three different things are here connected: Creation out of nothingness, which always occurs when you have an idea; the manifestation of this creation; the course of its development in time through the two forms, involution and evolution. This is what is meant when certain religious systems speak of the world created out of nothingness. If today people deride this, it is only because they do not understand what is to be found in these documents.

In the world of manifestation, to sum it up once more, everything alternates between involution and evolution. At the root of this is a hidden creation out of nothingness that unites itself with the two (involution and evolution) to form a triad. This is a union of the Divine with the revealed.

So you can see how we can reflect on the number three. We should not take off and spin pedantic thoughts about it, but we must look for the duality and triad that is to be met at every turn. Then we consider the numerical symbols in the right way, in the Pythagorean sense, and can draw conclusions leading from one to the other. We could also say that light and shadow appear in the manifest world, and behind these lies a third, hidden element.

We come now to the number four. Four is the sign of the cosmos or of creation. As far as we can determine with our present organs, the present planetary condition of the earth is its fourth embodiment. Everything that is manifest to us on an earth such as ours presupposes that this creation is the fourth stage. This is but a special case for all creations that appear thus. They all stand under the sign of the four.

The occultist says that men today stand in the mineral kingdom. What does this mean? Because a man understands only the mineral kingdom, he can only control this kingdom. Using minerals, he can build a house, a clock, and other things because they are subject to mineral laws. For various other activities he does not have this capacity. He cannot, for example, form a plant from out of his own thinking. To be able to do this he would himself have to exist in the plant kingdom. Some time in the future this will be the case. Today men are creators in the mineral realm. Three other kingdoms, the elementary kingdoms, have preceded this; the mineral kingdom is the fourth. All told there are seven.

Men stand in the fourth kingdom. Only here do they reach their actual consciousness oriented to the outer world. On the Moon they were still operating in the third elementary kingdom, on the Sun in the second, and on Saturn in the first. In the future on Jupiter, they will be able to create plants as today they are able to construct a clock. Everything visible in creation stands in the sign of the four. There are many planets that are not to be seen with physical eyes, such as those in the first, second, and third elementary kingdoms. Only when such a planet within creation enters the mineral kingdom can it be seen. Four is, therefore, the number of the cosmos or of creation. With the entrance into the fourth condition a being becomes fully visible to eyes that can see external things.

Five is the number of evil. This will become clear to us if we again consider human beings. In their development men have become fourfold beings and thereby beings of the created world. Here on earth, however, the fifth member of their being, the spirit self, will be added. Were they to remain fourfold beings, they would be constantly directed by the gods—toward the good, of course—but they would never develop their independence. They have become free through the gift of their germinal fifth member, but it is also from this that they have received the ability to do evil. No being can do evil who has not arrived at “fivefoldness.” Wherever we meet with evil, such that it can actually adversely affect our own being, there a fivefoldness is at play. This is the case everywhere, including the outside world, but people are unaware of it, and our present materialistic world view has no conception of the fact that the world can be considered in this way. Actually, there is justification for speaking of evil only where fivefoldness appears. When, one day, medicine will make use of this, it will be able to influence beneficially the course of illness. Part of the treatment would be to study the illness in its development on the first and fifth days after its onset, on the separate days at the fifth hour past midnight, and again during the fifth week. Thus it is always the number five that determines when the physician can best intervene. Before that there is not much else he can do than to let nature take its course, but then he can intervene, helping or harming, because what can justifiably be called good or evil then flows into the world of reality. It is possible in many areas to show that the number five has meaning for outer events.

A man's life consists of periods of seven years—from birth until the change of teeth; puberty; seven or eight years later; toward thirty, followed by the seven year periods throughout the rest of his life. When, one day, he will take these periods into account and consider what had best come toward or stand aloof from him, he will come to know much about preparing a good old age for himself. He can thus bring about good or evil for the remainder of his life. In the early periods of life a great deal can be done by observing certain laws of education. Then, however, there comes an important turning point. This also may become a regression if he is turned loose in life with complete confidence too early. The accepted principle of today that sends young people out into life early is harmful; the fifth period should be passed before this happens. Such ancient occult principles are of great importance. This is why, in the past, at the direction of those who knew something of these things, the years of the apprentice and journeyman had to be completed before one could be called a master.

Seven is the number of perfection. Observation of man himself will make this clear. Today he is under the influence of the number five insofar as he can be good or evil. As a creature of the universe he lives in the number four. When he will have developed all that he holds at present as germ within him, he will become a seven-membered being, perfect in its kind. The number seven rules in the world of colour, in the rainbow; in the world of tone it is found in the scale. Everywhere, in all realms of life, the number seven can be observed as a kind of number of perfection. There is no superstition or magic in this.

Now let us look back again to the number one. Because we have considered other numbers, what is now to be said about one will appear in the right light. The essence of the number one is its indivisibility. Of course, it can be subdivided, for example, \(\frac{1}{3}\), \(\frac{2}{3}\), etc. but this can only be accomplished in thinking. In the world, especially in the spiritual world, when you take the two-thirds away, the one-third still remains a part of it. In the same sense it can be said that when some part of God is separated from Him and becomes manifest, the remainder exists as something that still belongs to it. In the Pythagorean sense we can say, “Divide the unity, but never otherwise than to have in your underlying thoughts the remainder connected with what has been separated.”

Take a thin golden plate of glass and look through it. The world will appear yellow because that is the colour that will be reflected. But in white light other colours are also contained. What happens to them? They are absorbed by the object. Hence, a red object appears red because it reflects the red rays and absorbs the rest. It is not possible to separate red from white light without leaving the other colours behind. With this we touch the edge of a world secret. You look at things in a certain way. You see, for instance, a red cloth spread out on the table and visualize at the same time that green is hidden in it. In this way you have accomplished what in the Pythagorean sense is called “The division of the One so that the rest is preserved.” If you carry this out meditatively, if you again and again unite separated parts into a unity, you have brought about a meaningful development through which you can attain spiritual heights.

Mathematicians have an expression for this that holds good in all occult schools:

This is an occult formula that expresses how Oneness can be divided and the parts so arranged that the One results. It indicates that, as occultists, we should not think of Oneness simply as One, but as parts that we add together again.

So, in this lecture we have examined what is called number symbolism and learned that when we meditate on the world from the standpoint of numbers, we can penetrate deep world secrets.

To complete these remarks let it be said once more that in the fifth week, on the fifth day, or in the fifth hour we can find important things that can be missed or made good. In the seventh week, on the seventh day, or in the seventh hour (or in a definite relationship, say, 3 1/2 because seven is also in this number), something can happen through the thing itself. On the seventh day of an illness, for instance, a fever will take on a definite character; this might also occur on the fourteenth day. These things are always based on number relationships that point to the structure of the world.

Those who steep themselves in the right way in what, in the Pythagorean sense, we may call the “study of numbers,” will learn to understand life and the world in this number symbolism. Of this the lecture today was meant to give you roughly sketched thoughts.

I should like to speak to you today about something that to a certain extent falls out of the series of our present course of lectures. In another respect, however, it forms a supplement to them, recapitulating much that has been said and shedding more light on it.

We know indeed that man has only reached his present condition in the course of a long evolution, that he has developed to his present heights through different planetary stages. We know too that he will lift himself to higher stages of evolution in the future. Now we are also aware that when the human being was still in quite a dull state of consciousness on ancient Saturn, there were beings already in existence who stood as high as man stands today. There were beings too who at that time stood far higher than man stands today. We also know that there are beings today who have already attained a stage of evolution which man will only attain in the future. So we can look up to hierarchies—as they are called in occultism—of beings set over man whose various ranks are ranged one above the other.

The beings who stand next above man are called in esoteric Christian terminology “Angels,” Angeloi. The Angels are therefore beings who in the Moon-evolution, the planetary forerunner of our Earth, had already attained human consciousness and who stand today one stage higher than humanity. In the Jupiter-evolution man will himself have the consciousness which is possessed today by the beings whom we call Angels, Angeloi. This then is the first stage of beings standing above man, and from certain other connections we know of the subsequent stages.

Passing upwards beyond the Angels we have the Archangels, Archangeloi; then the rank of the “Original Forces” whom we also call Archai; and then the “Revelations” or Powers, Exusiai; the so-called Mights or Dynameis; the Dominions or Kyriotetes; the Thrones; the Cherubim, and the Seraphim. Then only, beyond the Seraphim, should we speak of what in the Christian sense, one calls the actual “Godhead.” Genuine occultism, true spiritual science, cannot share the usual trivial notion that man can look up direct to the highest Divinity; we have the whole ladder of Beings whom we call Angels, Archangels, and so on, standing between. In a certain respect it is a sign of indolence to say—as we can often hear today—“Well, why do we need the whole succession of beings? Man can quite well come to a direct relationship to the Godhead.” The student of spiritual science cannot share this indolence, for the beings are absolutely real. And today we will say something of their qualities and their tasks.

We will first try to form an idea of the nature of the Angels. We shall most easily form an idea of their consciousness if we think of the physical consciousness of man and how it includes the four kingdoms of nature. He can perceive mineral beings, plant beings, animal beings and the human kingdom itself. We can therefore describe the human consciousness as one having for its contents these four kingdoms perceptible to the outer senses. Everything that man perceives through the senses, no matter what it is, be-longs to one of these four kingdoms. If we now ask: What is the consciousness of the Angels? we receive as answer: In a certain respect it is a higher consciousness since it does not reach down to the mineral kingdom; the Angel's consciousness does not reach down to where the stones, rocks, minerals are. On the other hand it includes plant, animal and human beings together with its own kingdom of Angels which there plays the same role as the human kingdom does for us. We can say then that the Angels are also aware consciously of four kingdoms, the kingdoms of plant, animal, man and the kingdom of the Angels.

That is the peculiarity of the Angel beings: they have no physical body and therefore no organs of the physical body such as eyes, ears, and so on. Hence they do not perceive the physical world. As their lowest being they have the etheric body and hence have a certain relationship with the plants. Their consciousness can descend as low as the plants and they can perceive them. On the other hand, where there is mineral they perceive a hollow space—just as during the devachanic condition, man, as we described, will also perceive as a hollow the space filled up here on earth by a mineral. So that wherever the physical kingdom is here, the Angels perceive a hollow space. On the other hand, their consciousness projects up to where as yet man's consciousness does not reach.

But we know too that men bear a certain relationship to each other; there are those who lead and those who are led. I wish to allude only to children and grown-up teachers: children must be guided until they are as mature as the teachers. Men are growing in their present development into the Jupiter consciousness, which will be similar to what the Angels possess today. The Angels today are therefore actually the leaders of men, their guides, preparing them, and there exists an intimate connection between what gradually develops in man and the task of these Angel beings. What then is forming in man during the rest of his earth existence? It is something of which we have often spoken. We have said that man has a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an ego and that he is now occupied in transforming his astral body so that it gradually becomes spirit-self. He is working on his other members as well, but the essential task of earthly existence consists in the full development of the spirit-self. The Angels have developed it already, they had developed it when Earth-existence began, and thus the Angels in the hierarchies of evolution are the spirits which guide this task of man—the transforming of the astral body into the spirit-self.

Now we ask how they do this.—Let us remember here what happens after a man's death and how he has round him at first what we have called the memory panorama of the just completed life. This lasts for two or three days, it differs somewhat for individual persons. It lasts as a rule for about the length of time that the person could hold out without sleep. Different people vary very much in this: one is accustomed to sleep after every twelve hours and then his eyes close; another on the contrary could keep awake for four to five days. The memory-tableau lasts as long as the person can keep himself from sleeping. Then the etheric body dissolves and only an extract of it remains—the life-fruit of the past life. This is taken with him for the whole of the time that follows, is incorporated into his being and forms the basis for the upbuilding of the physical body in the next incarnation. He is enabled to build up his next body more perfectly, because he can make use of the fruits of his past life. Thus man has this life-essence and forms his next body out of it in the life that follows.

Now we know too that man not only forms this body but that in Devachan he is by no means inactive. It would be a false idea to think that man had only to occupy himself. with himself. The world is not built up on such egotism. In every situation of life the world requires man to share in working on the earth and during his stay in Devachan he shares in work upon the earth's surface. We are aware of the fact that the ground on which we stand today looked quite different a few centuries ago; the earth is continually transformed. At the time when Christ Jesus walked upon earth there were mighty forests here, there were quite other plants and animals. Thus the face of the earth is continuously changed. Just as men labor with physical forces in building cities and so on, so from Devachan they work with those forces which transform the physiognomy of the Earth together with the plant and animal kingdoms. In a new incarnation therefore man meets a ground that presents quite a different picture; he always experiences something new. It is not for nothing that man is born into a new incarnation; he is to experience something new. Man contributes to the transformation of the Earth, but he cannot do it without guidance. He cannot determine the succeeding incarnations, for then he would not need to experience first what is to happen in the future. And the beings who guide man's work of transforming the earth with the forces of Devachan, who create the harmony between the different human individuals and the evolution of the earth as it corresponds to them, these spiritual Beings are the Angels. On the stones, on the solid earthly crust they cannot work, for their consciousness does not extend to the mineral, but it reaches down to the plant kingdom which the earth bears. There they can work, not indeed creatively, but transformingly. Such an Angel being works in fact with every human individual, guiding him in his task of developing the spirit-self in the astral body. In a part of Christian doctrine it speaks of man's Guardian Angel and that is a conception completely corresponding to reality. They are the beings who create the harmony between the human individual and the course of earthly evolution until man will have advanced so far at the end of Earth's evolution that he can release his Angel. He will then himself have the consciousness of an Angel.

Now you will readily understand that the Archangels have a consciousness that no longer reaches down to the plant kingdom but only to the animal kingdom. The plants, so to speak, do not exist for them, the plant kingdom is too subordinate, too insignificant. They still have points of contact with the animal kingdom and can perceive it. They have no etheric body, the astral body is the lowest member of their being. The animal has an astral body and hence the Archangels work in the astral bodies of the animals. In addition they perceive the human kingdom, the kingdom of the Angels and their own kingdom. The Archangel kingdom is that to which they say “I,” as is for man the human “I.” These beings too have an important mission, and since they have a consciousness two stages higher than man, you can understand that the mission must be a very lofty one. The consciousness of the Archangels is so high that they have fully perfected the life-spirit, Budhi, and they can therefore guide and lead in earthly evolution from an insight corresponding to the life-spirit. This is shown in the fact that the Archangels are leaders of whole peoples; what one calls the folk spirit, the common spirit of the people or folk, is in reality one of the Archangels. You will now find it comprehensible that those peoples who were still conscious of such a spiritual connection, did not look up direct to the highest Being, but that they turned their gaze to the Beings nearest to them, who directed and led them.

Let us take the old Hebrew people. They revered as the highest God, Yahve or Jehovah. But for them Yahve belonged to the rank of the Revelations. He was a sublime Being whom they acknowledged as their God. They said, however: He who directs and leads us as the actual arch-messenger of Jehovah is “Michael,” one of the Archangels—his name means “the one who stands before God.” In ancient Hebrew he was also called the “Countenance of God,” because when a member of the Old Covenant looked up to God he felt that Michael stood before Him and was the expression of His being as the human countenance is the expression of man's being. He was therefore called literally the Countenance of God.

When one speaks in occultism of the folk spirit one does not speak of an incomprehensible being difficult to grasp. When in our materialistic age people speak of the folk spirit they really mean nothing, they mean by it an abstract external combination of the characteristics of a folk. In reality there is a spiritual representative, an Archangel, who leads and directs the people as a whole. This Being reaches down into the animal world, and this was felt by the peoples, they felt it out of their instinct. The one folk dwelt here, the other there, and according to the different regions they occupied they had to make use of such and such animals. They felt instinctively that this was allotted to them by their folk-spirit. This spirit worked as far as the animal world, so that the ancient Egyptians, who experienced this very clearly, said: When we consider plant development, then the Angel is working into it; when we consider the animals, these are apportioned to us by the guiding spirit of the whole people. They therefore saw the power which supplied the animals to them as a sacred power and the way in which they treated the animals was an expression of this consciousness. They did not speak of Archangels but they had the same feeling about it, and it was this feeling that the Egyptians united with the animal worship. Moreover, where there was a consciousness of this spiritual connection, these spirits were not represented by pictures of earthly animals, though with animal images, as for instance the Sphinx, winged beasts, and so forth, which you find in the various images of the peoples. It was as if the guiding Archangels shone in, and you can see portrayed in the different animal groups the esoteric expression of the ruling Archangels. Many of the Egyptian idols were based on the conception that the Archangel, the guiding spirit of the people, reached down as far as the animals. This is the special task of the Archangels; there is, however, still another task.

The names “Uriel,” “Gabriel,” “Michael,” are still known to the modern consciousness, but as a legend from the far past, and you need only look in the Book of Enoch to find the names of yet other Archangels. So, for instance, there is “Phanuel,” an important Archangel who has not only the task of guiding some people or nation, but another task too. We are aware that initiation consists of the fact that man strives upwards to an ever higher consciousness, and that even now in the course of earthly evolution he is ascending to an ever higher consciousness. Now the people in the Mystery centres knew well that here too guiding, leading forces were necessary. They therefore brought those who were to be initiated under the protection of the Archangel Phanuel. He was the protector who was called upon by the candidate for initiation.

Other spiritual beings of this rank have yet other tasks. So, for example, the whole course of world evolution is based upon a sum of forces which are guided by certain beings. Thus there is an Archangel, earlier called “Surakiel,” whose task it is to eradicate particularly wide-spread vices of a city or a whole district and to transform them into virtues. To one who knows this connection it is plain that what is called in general by the abstract word “Providence” is really guided. If one has undertaken the study of the spiritual worlds one should not be satisfied with general abstractions, but go into these details. For the highest beings of whom man can form any idea guide the course of world-evolution through such intermediate beings as we have just considered. These can be denoted as the various tasks of the Archangels.

Now we come to the rank of the “Original Forces.” They are still more lofty beings whose consciousness no longer descends to the animals. When the initiate lifts himself to intercourse with the Original Forces, he does not impart to them out of his human consciousness information about the animal forms on the earth. For their consciousness reaches down only to man; then they know the kingdom of the Angels, the kingdom of the Archangels and their own kingdom. To themselves they say “I,” and human beings are the lowest hierarchy which they perceive. For the Original Forces man is the lowest kingdom, just as the stone, the mineral, is the lowest for man. We see from this that they guide the progress of humanity from a very lofty height. People here and there have an inkling that something exists as a kind of “Spirit of the Age,” that differs according to the different epochs. We have often spoken here of the Spirit of the Epochs. We have said, for example, that in the first culture-epoch of the Post-Atlantean Age, that of the ancient Indian people, the Spirit of the Epoch consisted in the fact that men looked back to Atlantean times when they dimly perceived higher kingdoms around them. So the Yoga system arose, by means of which they sought to rise into the higher worlds. The physical plane of external reality had little value for them; it was maya, illusion. It will seem strange to you, but it is actually true, that if the ancient Indian civilization, with its lack of interest in the physical plane, had continued, there would never have been railways, telephones, and such things as exist in the physical world today. For it would not have seemed at all important to occupy oneself seriously with physical laws in order to people the world with all that today represents the achievements of civilization.

Then came the Spirit of the Persian epoch, and man learnt through him to know matter as an opposing element which he must work upon. He united himself with the good Spirit, Ormuzd, against the Spirit of matter, Ahriman. But the Persian had an interest in the physical plane. Then comes the Spirit of that epoch which found expression, on the one hand, in the civilizations of Babylon, Assyria, Chaldea, and on the other hand of Egypt. Human science was founded; it was sought through geometry to make the earth suited to man. One sought to know the meaning of the motion of the stars in astrology, astronomy, and one arranged earthly affairs in conformity with this motion. Eygptian social life was especially directed according to the passage of the stars. What was read there as the secrets of the stars was the basis of human conduct. The ancient Indian sought the way to the Gods by turning his attention completely away from outer reality; the Egyptian studied the laws which rule in order to find how the will and spirit of the Gods were brought to expression in the laws of external nature. That was again a different epoch. So you have for each epoch a definite spirit, and the evolution of the Earth comes about through one Spirit of the Epochs being relieved by another—that is the case in detail. People rise to the conception of Ages, but they do not know that behind this whole progress of the Ages, Spirits of the Epochs stand, nor do they know that to bring to expression the Spirit of their epoch they are only the instruments here on earth of Spirits standing behind them. Just think of Giordano Bruno. If Giordano Bruno had been born in the 8th century, he would not have become what he became in the period ruled by the Epochal Spirit whose expression he then became. He was the instrument of the Time-Spirit, and the same applies to other outstanding human beings. And conversely, the Epochal Spirit would not have been able to find such an expression as it found in Giordano Bruno, if Giordano Bruno had been born in the 8th century. By such things we see how men are the instruments of the Epochal Spirits who are the guiding beings of the great epochs and also of the Spirits of the “meanings and conceptions” of the smaller epochs. They are the Original Forces, they extend their consciousness down to man. They have no directing influence over what brings man together with other nature-kingdoms, for their consciousness does not reach the animal kingdom. How men conduct their lives according to the spirit of the time, how they found states, found sciences, cultivate their fields—everything of human origin, the progress of civilization from beginning to end stands under the guidance of the Original Forces. They lead man in so far as he has to do with others.

I have drawn your attention at various times to the fact that certain beings from each spiritual hierarchy stay be-hind, they have not risen as high as the others, but have stood still, so to speak, in world-evolution. You will be able to realize that there are beings who should have risen during the Moon-evolution to the rank of the Revelations or Powers, but who have only reached the Original Forces. They are different from those who have ascended to that stage in the normal course of evolution. Hence there are on earth Original Forces who are really immature Powers. We are now learning to know from another aspect many things of which we have heard already. Concealed behind the Original Forces, therefore, are some who could actually be Powers, and among the Original Forces who have really no right to be there is that being whom one is right in calling “Satan”—Satan, the “Unlawful Prince of this World.” This is a truth, however, only to those who look at things from the aspect of spiritual science. The Lawful Prince is one of the “Powers,” Yahve or Jehovah; the unlawful belongs to the ranks of the Original Forces. He expresses himself by continually bringing confusion into man's relation to the Time-Spirit, by bringing men to contradict the Epochal Spirit. That is the true nature of the Spirit who is also called the “Spirit of Darkness,” or the Unlawful Prince of our Earth, he who claims to be the actual guide and leader of men. You will now grasp what a deep meaning lies in the fact that the Christ appeared in order through His mission to throw a light upon the whole succeeding evolution, and that He must wage war against this Unlawful Prince of this World. The very deepest wisdom lies behind what is expressed in this remarkable passage in the Gospel.

It stands to reason that a certain view is held not among materialists alone but also by people who are haunted by old conceptions which they misunderstand—for Satan has for a long time been spoken of somewhat scornfully! And even people who are ready to acknowledge the other spiritual beings are not willing to concede reality to Satan; they deny him. This dates back to the Middle Ages when men had very curious views on Satan. They admitted that he was actually a backward Spirit of the rank of the Powers. But where are the Spirits of the Powers? They express themselves in what is revealed in the world as spirit. Satan was called a Spirit of Darkness; people thought: Darkness is a negation of light, light is real, but darkness is not real—and they made that apply spiritually. They ascribed reality to the Spirits who manifest in light, but to Satan who manifests in darkness they denied reality. That is just about as clever as if someone who has listened to a physicist were to say: Cold is only a lack of warmth, it is not real in itself; if we make the warmth less and less, it gets colder and colder, however much warmth we take away; cold is not a reality—so do not let us think of winter! But in spite of cold's being only a negation of warmth, it can nevertheless very well be felt when there is no heating—so is Satan very well a reality even if he is only the negation of light.

We have now raised ourselves to very lofty Spirits, and we come next to the hierarchy who are called “Revelations,” Exusiai. To them, for instance, belongs the being whom we have come to know in other connections as Yahve or Jehovah, together with his companions, the Elohim. The Spirits of Light belong to the order of the Powers or Revelations. We know that Yahve had six companions who separated off the sun. Yahve himself went with the moon which reflected the sun's light to the earth, but he is a companion of the other Elohim. If you now try to determine the consciousness of the Revelations on the analogy of what has gone before, you will realize that they do not concern themselves about the individual. Individual human beings are guided by the Angels, Archangels, Original Forces, up to those we have called Epochal Spirits. The whole structure in which man is embedded, the guidance of the planet and what occurs on it is the affair of the Revelations or Powers. For the whole present evolution of humanity could not have gone on without, on the one hand, the accelerating sun forces, and, on the other, the hindering moon forces. The Revelations or Powers have nothing to do with separate men but with groups of men. They guide the external powers and beings who give the planet its configuration and whom man needs in order that he may go through his evolution.

And so finally we look up to a lofty Being Who surpasses all that we have just described, the Christ Being Himself. Christ brings something to earth which is not concerned with the individual man, but with the guidance of all mankind. And to the Christ man must find his way himself; for it is only the Original Forces who constrain man to find them; to the Christ he must come of his own free will.

Thus we have formed some conception of the lowest ranks of the hierarchies set above man, the Angels, Archangels, and a slight idea too of the Original Forces and Powers. Only with a faint divining could we look up to a still higher Being, the Christ. On another opportunity we can consider what is to be said about the Thrones and so on. Today I wished to relate something of the spiritual structure into which man is interwoven, in so far as Angels, Archangels, Original Forces, and Powers participate in it.

If we pause in our anthroposophical considerations and raise the question of what attracts us to such a spiritual movement as our own, then naturally we can provide an answer from a variety of aspects. One of the most important aspects that engages our feelings most deeply, though not the only one, is the consideration of the life of the human soul between death and a new birth. In fact, the happenings that occur during the long period between death and rebirth are truly not less significant than the events between birth and death. We can consider now only a few of the most important events that we experience. But one may add that in such considerations one has the profound conviction that humanity is approaching a period when it must know and experience something of super-sensible worlds.

Let us broach the matter concretely. When the seer who is able to perceive life between death and rebirth meets the following event, this in itself is sufficient for him to feel it a duty to work towards a cognition of the spiritual world. A person has died. The seer seeks to find him some time after he has passed through the gate of death. In the manner that one can communicate with the dead one may gather the following from him. I am quoting an actual instance, “I have left my wife behind on the earth; I know that she is still there.” Obviously this is not conveyed by means of earthly words. “When I was living with her in the physical world she was always like sunshine to me as I came home from work. I experienced her words like a blessing and I could not have conceived of life without the light-filled presence of my beloved companions. Then I went through the gate of death and left her behind, and now I long to go back. I feel the lack of all I had. Longingly in my soul I seek a path to my life-long companion but I cannot find her. I cannot penetrate into her presence. It is as if she were not there. When from time to time I feel as if she were there, as if I were with her, then she appears unable to speak. It can be compared to two people, one of whom would like the other to say a few words, but the other is dumb and unable to say anything. And so the soul who was a blessing to me during the long span of physical existence has become dumb.”

Now if one investigates the basis of such facts one finds the following answer. In this case there is simply no common language between the one who has died and the one who remains on earth. There is nothing that could permeate the soul with that substance by means of which it would remain perceptible. Because there is no common language, these two souls feel severed from one another. This was not always so.

If we go back in the evolution of mankind, we find that souls possessed a spiritual inheritance that enabled them to remain perceptible, irrespective of whether they were both on the physical plane or one in the physical and the other in the spiritual world. That spiritual inheritance is exhausted today. It is no longer present, and the painful cases just described occurs where the soul of a loved one cannot be found after death because in the soul of the one who has remained on earth there is nothing that can render it perceptible to the one who has died. What can in fact be seen by the dead is spiritual knowledge, feeling and experience. That is the connection of souls here on earth with the spiritual world. If a soul who has been left behind on earth occupies himself with knowledge of the spiritual worlds, allows such thoughts to cross his mind, then these thoughts can be perceived by the one who has died. The religious feelings of the past are no longer sufficient to give the soul what it needs in order to be perceived by the dead.

If he pursues the matter further, the seer discovers that even when these souls have gone through the gate of death, they have but a dim perception of one another. They will only be able to achieve a mutual understanding under considerable difficulty, or not at all, because a common language is lacking.

The seer realizes what anthroposophy is in a deeper sense. It is the language that will be spoken by the living and the dead, by those who live in the physical world and those who dwell between death and rebirth.

Souls who remain behind and have acquired thoughts about the super-sensible worlds can be seen by the dead. If they have radiated love before death, they can also do so after death. This carries the conviction that anthroposophy is a language that renders it possible for those in super-sensible realms to perceive the events of the physical world.

The prospect that stands before humanity is that souls will become even more lonely, will be unable to find a bridge to one another, unless a link is forged from soul to soul by means of spiritual concepts. That is the reality of anthroposophy, for it is not a theory.

Theoretical knowledge is of the least importance. What we take into ourselves is a genuine soul elixir, a real substance. This substance enables the soul who has gone through the gate of death to perceive the soul who has remained behind. In fact, the seer who has gained insight into such a situation, where the one who has died cannot find those he has left behind because that family has not connected itself with spiritual science, knows that he can follow no other course than to speak to his fellow men about spiritual wisdom. He sees the sorrow with which the soul is burdened by such a lack of communication. He knows that the time has come when spiritual wisdom must take hold of human hearts.

Those whose mission to speak about the super-sensible stems from the knowledge of the spiritual worlds, experience it as an urgent necessity that they cannot counter in any way. It would be the greatest sin if they did so. They feel it a necessity to proclaim revelations about the super-sensible worlds.

From what has just been said you can gather the immense seriousness connected with the proclamation of spiritual revelation. There is, however, yet another aspect to the understanding between the living and the dead. In this connection we have not progressed very far as yet but it will come about. In order to grasp how the living will gradually develop an understanding for the dead, let us consider the following.

Man knows little about the physical world. How does he gain knowledge of this world? He makes use of his senses, brings his imagination to bear, has certain sensations conveyed to him by the external world. But that is only the minutest portion of the content of the world. There is something quite other contained in it.

I would like you to realize that there is something of far greater importance than sense reality. I do not mean the super-sensible world, but something other than that.

Imagine for a moment that you are in the habit of leaving home every morning at eight in order to go to work. One day you suddenly notice you are leaving three minutes later. You go through a particular place where there is kind of overhand, the roof of which is supported by pillars. When you arrive there three minutes later than usual you realize that if you have arrived on time, you would have been crushed by the falling roof. Imagine this quite vividly! It does happen that a person misses a train that is later involved in an accident. Had he caught the train he would have been killed. When such things do not occur we pay no attention to them. If you become dramatically aware of such an occurrence, it makes a certain impression on you. Similar things, which fail to strike you in the course of the day, can happen from morning till night. They cannot be surveyed. Such occurrences may appear as “clever conjecture,” and yet they belong to the most important aspects of life.

To take another example, you gain a particular feeling when you consider that a man in Berlin had already got his ticked for the Titanic. He meets a friend who urges him not to sail on the Titanic. The friend succeeds in persuading him not to sail on this ship. The Titanic sinks, and he escapes from death. This makes a lasting impression on the person concerned!

That is a special case, and yet such things are happening all the time without being noticed. When one does become aware of them they make an impression on the heart and mind.

Let us consider this matter from another aspect. How many impressions of heart and mind escape us because we have been protected unawares from danger! If we were aware of the many things from which we are constantly preserved, we would go about the world in a totally different frame of mind. Furthermore, the seer discovers the following possibility. Let us assume that things actually happened in the way described. You arrived three minutes later than usual at that spot. This is the most opportune moment for a person who has died to make himself perceptible to your soul. You may have the feeling, “Where does that come from that arises in my soul?” It need not occur only in such a special case as quoted. It may take manifold forms. A beginning will be made when people become attentive not only to the world of outer reality but also to the sphere of probabilities. The considerable number of herring in the ocean is a reality. They become possible only because a vast quantity of eggs was released. In this way an infinite number of possibilities forms the basis of life.

This makes a profound impression on the seer also when he reaches the boundary of two worlds. He feels, “How infinitely rich in possibilities is the spiritual world. Only a minute part of it becomes a reality in our sense world!” This is accompanied by the feeling, “An enormous amount lies hidden in the very ground of being.” This feeling grows as one occupies oneself with anthroposophy. One develops the feeling that at every point where something happens externally a hidden something lies behind it. Each flower, each breath of air, each stone and crystal hides an endless number of possibilities. Ultimately this feeling will bring about a growing sense of devotion towards what is hidden. As this feeling develops, one will quite naturally become aware that at such moments they can communicate with one who for earthly life is dead. In the future it will occur quite normally that a person will feel that the dead has spoken to his soul. Gradually he will realize from whom the communication comes, that is, who has spoken into him. It is only because people are so little aware of the endless, fathomless realm of possibilities that they cannot hear what the dead would speak to the hearts of the living.

This twofold consideration will indicate the radical change that will be brought about for the whole of humanity by the spreading of anthroposophy. On the one hand, the thoughts of anthroposophists will become perceptible for the dead. On the other, the dead will be able to speak to the hearts of those who have developed a spiritual sensitivity. A bridge will be built between this world and the world beyond. In fact, life between death and rebirth will also be different. This will not be mere theory, but reality. An understanding will be achieved between the so-called living and the dead, who are in fact far more alive. Souls on earth will also feel what is fruitful for the dead. One cannot really make life fruitful for them unless one feels what an immense service one bestows on the dead by reading to them.

Let us consider an extreme case. One will no doubt have come across it in relation to other people. One lives with a sister, parent, a husband or a wife. The more the one feels the urge to connect himself closely to anthroposophy, the more the other develops a strong animosity towards it. How often can one experience this! It may take this form in consciousness, but it need not be so in the soul itself. There something different may take place.

The unconscious works in the astral body. It may be that the more a person slanders and rages against spiritual science, the more deeply in his unconscious he harbors an urge, a longing, to hear about spiritual science.

When we go through the gate of death we encounter truth. There nothing can be concealed. Here on earth one can lie and pretend but after death things take on their true coloring. Things reveal themselves as they really are.

However much one has stupefied oneself and slandered spiritual science during one's lifetime, after death an urge towards it is noticeable. One suffers because this urge cannot be satisfied. But now the living can imagine himself in the presence of the dead, and he can think spiritual thoughts and the dead will understand. Even if the one who died was not an anthroposophist, the dead will nevertheless be able to perceive the living one who occupies himself with spiritual thoughts.

There is a certain inclination on the part of the dead towards the language he used to speak during his lifetime, because during the early phases after death he is still connected with his particular language. It is therefore advisable to clothe one's thoughts in language the dead used to speak. But after five, six, eight years, and on occasion earlier, we find that the language of the spirit is such that the external language presents no obstacle whatever. The one who died can also understand spiritual thoughts in a language that he did not know during his lifetime.

At any rate, the outcome of reading to the dead, even if they were not anthroposophists, has proved itself to be particularly beautiful. It has shown itself to be a special service and one of the greatest deeds of love that can be performed.

In order to reach our aims it is not only a question of spreading anthroposophy externally—this must be done and it is important—but anthroposophy must also be cultivated more quietly within the recesses of the soul. Spiritual positions of responsibility may be created by means of which much can be achieved for the development of the soul after death. Some find it almost impossible to do so.

The seer also sees souls between death and rebirth who are compelled to carry out tasks that they themselves do not understand. For example, the seer may discover souls in that realm who are the servants of the powers of death and disease for a period of time. This does not refer to the regular occurrence of death but to events relating to people being taken away in the flower of youth. Illnesses are of a physical nature. They are caused, however, by powers that play in from super-sensible realms. Epidemic illnesses can be traced back to the deeds of super-sensible beings and certain spirits have the task of bringing about untimely death. We cannot discuss now how this can be substantiated as part of a wise guidance, but it is important to note that certain souls are yoked to such beings. Although the seer must have accustomed himself to a certain equanimity, such situations are painful and shattering to behold. Such souls are compelled to serve and bring death and disease to mankind.

If the seer looks back into the lives of such souls before death, he discovers why they are condemned to serve as servants to the spirits of death and disease. The cause lies in a lack of conscience in such souls during their earthly life. In accordance with the extent of their lack of conscience they condemn themselves to become servants of those evil beings. As truly as cause and effect obtain in the case of impinging billiard balls, so, too, must people who have no conscience become servants of these evil beings. That is indeed shattering!

The seer beholds yet another fact. Souls who are under the yoke of ahrimanic beings have to prepare the spiritual origin of all that occurs on earth as obstacles, as impediments to our deeds. Ahriman also has this task. All obstacles that arise here on earth are directed from the spiritual world. They are servants of Ahriman. Why have such souls condemned themselves to such service? Because during their lives on earth they indulged in love of ease and comfort. If you but consider how widespread love of ease has become, you will find that Ahriman has a considerable number of recruits. Love of ease is uppermost in life today. Modern economists do not only reckon with egoism and competition, but also with the comfort of the human being. Love of ease and comfort are important factors.

Now there is a difference in whether one has such experiences and is able to understand why one has them or whether one experiences them quite unconsciously without realizing why one has to serve such spirits. If one knows why one is yoked to the spirits that bring epidemics about, one also realizes the virtues that have to be developed in the next life in order to work towards a cosmic compensation. If one remains ignorant of the reason, one does in fact create the same karma, but the compensation can only occur in a second incarnation. Actual progress is thereby postponed.

It is important, therefore, that man should learn about such things on earth. One will experience them after death but one learns to orient oneself down here. Here we have yet another fact that makes it essential to bring about a new sense or orientation by spreading spiritual truths. The old means of orientation are no longer available.

We can ask, “Why are we anthroposophists?” We can give an answer out of the spiritual facts themselves that speaks directly to our feelings rather than to our intellect. So anthroposophy becomes increasingly a universal language. It becomes a language that will render it possible to tear down the partition that stands between the different worlds in which we live, one time in a physical body, another without a physical body. Thus the wall between the physical and the spiritual world will crumble when spiritual science really takes hold of the souls of men. We should feel this. It can give us the right inner enthusiasm for spiritual science.

Let me bring another matter to your attention. For the seer there is during the lives of souls between death and rebirth a moment that reveals itself of special importance. It is also of importance for others after death. For some this point lies earlier, for others, later. If one beholds the life of sleep with super-sensible cognition, one sees the human being with his astral body and ego outside the physical body. Looking back, one gains the impression that the physical body is slowly dying.

It is only from the first years of infancy until the child develops an understanding, until the moment that memory begins, that the body during sleep has a blooming, flourishing appearance. A slow withering process in the physical body sets in shortly after life begins. Death is but the final occurrence in this dying process. Sleep is there in order to compensate for the forces that have been exhausted but the compensation is incomplete. Each time there remains a small residue of death forces. When so much residue has been accumulated that the upbuilding forces are unequal to the task, physical death ensues. Therefore, as one considers the human physical body one sees how death gradually fulfills itself. In reality we slowly die from birth onwards. This makes a solemn impression as one becomes aware of the facts.

Between death and rebirth the moment occurs when forces begin to develop in the soul that lead to a next incarnation. Let me attempt to explain what I mean by way of an example. There are a number of books that deal with Goethe's predisposition. One examines Goethe's ancestors in order to ascertain the hereditary origin of this or that quality. The sources are sought within the physical hereditary line of descent. I have no quarrel with the fact that they can be found there, but he who can trace the life of soul between death and rebirth discovers the following.

Let us take the soul of Goethe. For a long time before birth the soul worked on its ancestors out of the super-sensible worlds, and because of its own forces, developed a relationship with its forefathers. The soul even worked to the extent of bringing together those men and women who could provide over a long period of time the appropriate predispositions needed by that individuality. This is not an easy task because many souls are involved in this process. Picture to yourselves that from souls of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries human beings descend. All these souls must already have collaborated, and you will gather from this that such a working together is a matter of great importance. Souls born in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries must already have reached a reciprocal understanding in the sixteenth century in order that the complete network of relationships may come about.

There is much to do between death and rebirth. Not only the objective tasks have to be performed such as the temporary service that has to be given to the spirits of opposition, but we must labor at the forces that in fact enable us to reincarnate. That means that we have to shape the general form archetypally. This makes the opposite impression from what the seer beholds when he observes the sleeping physical and etheric bodies. The physical and etheric bodies in sleep have a withering appearance, but the upbuilding of the archetype and its descent into the physical realm makes a blossoming, flourishing impression.

The important moment between death and rebirth lies at the point between the recollection of the earlier existence and the transition period where man begins to prepare so that his physical organism may come into being. If you now picture to yourselves physical death and compare it with this moment, then you have the opposite pole of physical death. Physical death marks a transition from being into non-being. The moment described above is the transition from non-being into a state of becoming. This moment is experienced quite differently if one understands it than if one does not.

The concept of the polar opposite of death, the moment that arises between death and a new birth, should become feeling within the soul of an anthroposophist. It should not merely be understood intellectually, but should become inner experience. Then we shall be able to sense how much our life is enriched when such thoughts are received by the soul.

There is yet another aspect, namely, that gradually the soul develops a feeling for all that is in the world. If, after having meditated upon the concepts I have just mentioned, one goes for a walk through a forest in the spring, one will find that one is not far removed, providing one is attentive, from experiencing the spiritual beings that weave among the physical phenomena. To experience the spiritual world in reality would not be at all difficult if human beings were not to create their own obstacles. One should attempt to translate what has been received in the form of concepts into a feeling experience, to awaken it vividly within oneself. Such a striving can lead to a beholding of the spirit. The questions I have broached today are intended as a contribution to enliven the impulse toward spiritual science. Whenever one speaks about matters such as these, one feels that it is a mere stammering because our language belongs to the physical world. One has to make a considerable effort, by way of special descriptive means, to evoke at least a limited concept of these matters. But to speak precisely about these matters in this way can release from our hearts what may be termed anthroposophically as potency of feeling.

Spiritual science should become for us that which quickens feeling and life. The acquisition of spiritual concepts should not become a matter of lesser concern. We should gladly pursue it. Yet we should also refrain from considering the concepts as of chief importance, but rather what anthroposophy can make of us as human beings.

In coming together in our group meetings we can speak more precisely about things than is possible in public lectures and written works. Today I would like to present supplementary considerations to add to what is to be found in the books and cycles of lectures.

You can imagine, my dear friends, that life between death and a new birth is as rich and varied as life here between birth and death, and that whenever one describes what happens after death one can obviously only deal with certain aspects. Today I will not touch so much on what is already known, but draw attention to what can shed further light upon it.

If one is able to look into the spiritual worlds where man dwells between death and a new birth, then particularly in our time the necessity of what is intended with our spiritual scientific work is confirmed, that is, the need to give something to the hearts and souls of men by way of spiritual science.

Let us take our starting point from a particular instance. A man died. He loved his wife deeply and was much attached to his family. Spiritual observation showed that he suffered deeply from the fact that when he looked down on the earth he was unable to find the souls of his wife and children. Now in the manner of which the seer can enter into communication with a person after death, the man informed the seer that with his thoughts and with all his feelings he was able to relive the time when he was united with his beloved on the earth. But he added, “When I lived on earth my wife was like sunshine to me. Now I must forego this. I am able to direct my thoughts back to what I have experienced but I cannot find my wife.”

Why is this? For this is not the case with all who pass through the gate of death. If we were to go back several thousand of years, we would find that the souls of men were able to look down from the spiritual world and participate in the affairs of those who remained behind on the earth. Why was this the case for all souls in ancient times before the Mystery of Golgotha? In ancient times, as you know, men so lived on the earth that they still possessed an original clairvoyance. They not only saw the sense world by means of the eyes. They also gazed into the spiritual origins, into the archetypal beings behind the sense world. The capacity to live with the spiritual world during physical existence brought with it the ability of the soul to perceive what it had left behind on the earth after death. Today souls no longer have the faculty of living directly with the spiritual world because the evolution of humanity has consisted in man's descent into physical existence out of the spiritual world. This has resulted in the faculty of judgment and so forth, but it has robbed man of the faculty to live with the spiritual world.

During a period immediately following the Mystery of Golgotha when souls were deeply moved by the Christ impulse, at last a part of mankind was able to regain this faculty to some extent. Now, however, we again live in an age when souls who go through the gate of death and have not concerned themselves with the realities of the spirit lose the connection. Mankind needs a spiritual revelation and we can have a justified conviction that it should permeate human souls. Today the old religious confession does not suffice. Souls who seek to gaze down spiritually from the other world to ours need what they can receive by means of a spiritual scientific understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. It is therefore our endeavor that spirit light may develop in their souls.

The man of whom we have spoken had not concerned himself in any way with thoughts or feelings about the spiritual world. He went through the gate of death but no thoughts of the spiritual world had occupied his mind. He therefore was able to say, “I know by means of my memory that my wife is down there. I know she is there, but I cannot see her, cannot find her.”

Under what conditions would he have been able to find her? At the present time only such souls can be perceived in whom spiritual faculties dwell. Such souls can be seen from the other world, souls in whom thoughts live with understanding for the spirit. As the dead one gazes down, a person who has remained behind on the earth only becomes visible for him when spiritual thoughts live within the soul of that person. The dead person sees these thoughts. Otherwise the person remains invisible and the dead one suffers from the anguish of knowing that the person is there but he is unable to find him. As soon as one succeeds in conveying to such a soul thoughts concerning the spiritual world, however, the soul of the one who remains behind on earth begins to light up, to exist for the dead.

Do not object by saying that it is an injustice that people who have no spiritual thoughts here on earth, and perhaps it is not even their fault, should remain invisible to the dead. If the world were arranged otherwise, man would never seek to strive for perfection. Man has to learn by what he foregoes. Such a soul, as a result of the pain and loneliness it suffers during life between death and rebirth, is given the impulse to receive spiritual thoughts. From this aspect we see that spiritual science is like a language by means of which the living and the dead may understand one another, and can be present for and perceptible to each other.

Spiritual science has yet another mission in connection with bridging the abyss between the living and the dead. When human souls go through the gate of death they enter a realm where the connection with life on earth is maintained by the recollection of what has happened there. I am not repeating what can be found in my written works. What I am now saying is intended as a supplement. For a long period after death man re-experiences what has happened on earth and has to rid himself of the longing for his physical body. During this time he learns to live as a soul-spirit being. Let us vividly imagine how this appears to super-sensible perception. To begin with, the soul has a connection with itself. One sees one's own inner life that has run its course in thoughts, in mental representations, etc. One recalls the relationships one has had with his fellow men.

If one seeks to look down upon it, the earth offers a special aspect. One has the urge to look down. The urge to remember the earth accompanies one throughout the whole of life between death and a new birth. As long as man is called to journey from life to life the consciousness remains that he is destined for the earth, that he must return again and again to the earth if he would develop himself rightly. We can see this with the dead because if he were to lose completely the thoughts that link him to the earth, he would also lose the thought of his own ego. Then he would no longer be aware that he is, and this would result in the most dreadful feeling of anguish. Man must not lose his connection with the earth. The earth must not escape his mental representation, so to speak. In general, too, the earth cannot completely disappear from him. It is only in our period of the materialistic deluge, during which the spiritual revelation has to come so that the link between the living and the dead may be maintained, that souls having no connection with people who have spiritual thoughts and feelings on earth find it difficult to look back.

It is important for the dead that those with whom they were connected on earth carry every evening thoughts of the spiritual world with them into sleep. The more thoughts about the spiritual world we carry with us into sleep, the greater the service we perform for those we have known on earth who have died before us. It is difficult to speak of these connections because our words are taken from the physical plane. In the spiritual world that we bring with us as spiritual thoughts in sleep is the substance by means of which, in a certain sense, the dead can live. One who died and has no one on earth who carries spiritual thoughts with him in sleep is famished and may be compared to one banished to a barren island on earth. The dead person who cannot find a soul in whom spiritual feelings dwell experiences himself as if in a desert void of everything that is needed to sustain life. In view of this, one cannot stress too much the earnestness with which thoughts of spiritual science should be taken in a period like our own, when world-conceptions that are alien to the spirit gain the upper hand more and more.

It was different in past times when an evening prayer was said before going to sleep and its after-effects accompanied one. Today it is more likely than not that a person falls asleep after a meal or some other form of enjoyment without a thought devoted to the super-sensible. In this way we rob the dead of their spiritual nourishment. Such insight should lead to the practice, proven to be effective by many of our friends, that I would like to term, the reading to the dead. To read to the dead is of untold significance.

Let us assume that two people lived side by side here on earth. The one finds his way to spiritual science out of a deep, heartfelt impulse, the other is increasingly repelled by it. In such a case little is achieved in attempting to bring the person to a spiritual concept of the world during life. In fact, one's endeavors in this direction may indeed cause the other to hate it all the more. Now when such a person dies we have the possibility of helping him all the more.

What lives in our soul is exceedingly complex and the area bounded by our consciousness is only a small part of the total content of our soul life. Man does not know much of what lives in his soul and often something is present that he takes for the opposite of what is actually there. Thus it can happen that a person comes to hate spiritual science. He becomes aware of this with his consciousness. In the depths of his soul, however, this can reveal itself as an all the more profound longing for spiritual science. When we have gone through the gate of death we experience the depths of our soul existence that come to the surface. When we meet the dead we have known on earth, they often show themselves to be different from what they were on earth. A person who has hated spiritual science with his normal consciousness but longed for it in the depths of his soul without being aware of it will often display this longing powerfully after death. We can help him by taking a book with a spiritual—scientific content, forming a vivid inner picture of the one who has died, and reading to him as we would to a living person, not with a loud voice, but softly. The dead can understand this. Naturally, those who have made a contact with spiritual science during their lifetime understand it all the more readily. We should not fail to read to the dead or converse with them in thought. I would like to draw attention to a practical matter, namely, that for a number of years after death, for a period of some three to five years, a person can understand the language he has spoken on earth. This gradually wanes, but he preserves an understanding of spiritual thoughts. Then we can also read to the dead in a language that he did not understand on earth but that we have ourselves mastered. In this way we can perform the greatest service to the dead.

It is particularly in such realms that one realized the full significance of spiritual science because it bridges the gulf between the living and the dead. We can imagine that if we succeed in spreading spiritual science on earth in ever wider circles, more and more souls will become conscious of a communion with the dead.

Thus for a period after death man is still directly connected with the earth. Then he has to grow into and become a citizen of the spiritual world. This requires preparation. He first must possess a sensitivity and understanding for the spiritual world. Spiritual investigation observes a considerable difference after death between souls who have cultivated moral feelings and inclinations on earth and those who have failed to do so. A person who has not developed moral feelings on earth becomes a hermit after death. He will be unable to find his way both to other human beings and to the higher hierarchies. Consciousness is not extinguished then, and what awaits man is a sense of utter loneliness. From a certain period called the Mercury period onward man gains the possibility of living together with other beings by virtue of his moral life. We may say therefore that the way a person lives on earth determines his existence in the Mercury sphere, determines whether he experiences a dreadful hermit-like existence or establishes contact with other human souls or the beings of the higher hierarchies.

This is followed by another period during which man must be differently prepared if he does not again condemn himself to loneliness. Loneliness comes to pass if he has not developed any religious feelings here on earth. This period is called the Venus period. There a person who has failed to develop religious feelings experiences himself as blind and dead in relation to everything that surrounds him.

In a subsequent period, so as not to remain insensitive toward the beings of the higher world, a preparation in the complete appreciation of all religions is necessary. That is the Sun period. We prepare for it here on earth by an understanding for all that is human, and for the different religious denominations. In former times in the Sun period it sufficed for one man to belong to the Brahma religion, for another to that of Lao-Tse, and so forth. Today, however, because times have changed men stand opposite one another through their religious creeds and therefore the Sun period cannot be rightly experienced. For this a spiritual sensitivity is needed.

In the Sun period, which man has to traverse between death and a new birth, it is as if one entered into a world where one found a particular place empty or filled, depending on one's preparation. We do not find the place empty if we understand the Mystery of Golgotha. The Christ impulse affords the possibility of understanding every human experience. Christianity is a general religion, valid for all people. Christianity is not limited to a particular folk, race or nationality, as is the case with Hinduism and other national religions. Had the people of middle Europe preserved their old folk religion, we would still today find a Wotan cult, a Thor cult, and so on. But the European people have accepted the Christian creed. One is not a Christian in the true sense because one adheres to one or the other Christian dogma, however, but because one knows that Christ died for the whole of humanity. Only gradually will people learn to live truly as Christians.

In our time most Europeans in India pay mere lip service to their own belief. The attitude that one should develop is that wherever we meet a human being in the face of the earth the Christ impulse can be found. The Hindu will not believe that his god dwells in every man. The Christian knows that Christ lives in every human being. Spiritual science will reveal that the true core of all religions is contained in a rightly understood Christianity, and that every religion, inasmuch as it becomes conscious of its essential kernel, leads to the Mystery of Golgotha.

In considering other initiates or religious founders it is evident that they seek to reveal certain things out of the higher worlds because they have gone through a process of initiation. We do not understand the Christ correctly if we do not clearly see that the Christ has not gone through one or the other form of initiation on earth. He was initiated by virtue of the fact that He was there and united everything within Himself.

When the seer looks at the life of the Buddha and then follows it through in the spiritual world, he realizes more clearly the true nature of the Buddha. This is not so with the life of Christ. The Christ life is such that one must first establish a connection with it on earth in order to understand it in the spiritual world. If one does not gain such a connection and one is nevertheless initiated, one can behold many things, but one cannot see the Christ if one has not first gained a connection from Him on earth.

That is why so few people understand the Mystery of Golgotha. The Christ is a Being who is of equal importance for the most primitive human being and for the highest initiate. The most primitive soul can find a relationship to Christ, and the initiate must also find it. One learns to know many things when one enters into the spiritual world. There is only one thing that does not exist there, one thing that cannot be learned there and that is death. Death exists only in the physical world. In the spiritual world there is transformation but not death. Therefore, all the spiritual beings who never descend to the earth and only dwell in spiritual realms do not go through death.

Christ has become the companion of man on earth and the event of Golgotha, if one understands it as the unique death of a god, is what prevents us from confronting emptiness in the Sun period. The other initiates are human beings who through a number of incarnations have developed themselves in a special way. Christ had never been on the earth before His advent but dwelt in realms where there is no death. He is the only one among the gods who has learned to know death. Therefore, in order to become acquainted with the Christ one has to understand His death, and because this is essential the Mystery of Golgotha can be understood only on earth where death exists. We do not experience the Christ in higher worlds if we have not gained a relationship to Him on earth. We find His place empty during the Sun period. If, however, we are able to take the Christ impulse with us, then the throne in the Sun is not empty. Then we find the Christ consciously.

During our present phase of human evolution it is important that we should find the Christ in the spiritual world at this stage and recognize Him. Why? In the Sun period we have gradually entered a realm in which we are dependent on spiritual light. Previously, before the Sun period, we still experienced the after-effects of the earth, the after-effects of what we have been personally, including our moral and religious feelings. Now we require more than these. Now we require the faculty to see what is in the spiritual world, but this cannot be prepared for on earth. We have to journey through realms of forces of which we cannot know anything here on earth.

As he enters into life through birth, man has not as yet got a developed brain. He first must form it in accordance with the achievements of previous earth lives. For if one needs a particular faculty it is not sufficient that one has acquired it. One also has to know how the requisite physical organ has to be formed.

There exists an important but dangerous leader. Here on earth he remains unconscious, but from the Sun period onward he is necessary. The leader is Lucifer. We would wander in darkness if Lucifer were not to approach us. However, we can only walk beside him if we are guided by the Christ. Together they lead man after the Sun period in subsequent forms of life, that is, through the Mars, Jupiter and Saturn periods. During the times following the Sun period, man is brought together with forces that he requires for his next incarnation. It is sheer nonsense to believe as materialistic science does that the physical body is inherited. Today science cannot see its error but spiritual truths will be acknowledged in the future and the fallacy, too, will be recognized. For nothing can be inherited apart from the basic structure of the brain and the spinal cord, that is, everything that is contained within and bounded by the hard skull cap and the vertebrae of the spinal column. Everything else is conditioned by forces from the macrocosmos. If man were only given what he inherits he would be a totally inhuman lump, so to speak. The inherited part has to be worked through by what man brings with him out of the spiritual world.

Why do I use the terms Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn for the periods after death? When man has gone through the gate of death he expands more and more. In fact, life after death is such that one knows oneself to be spread out over a vast space. This expansion goes so far that one finally occupies the space bounded by the orbit of the moon. Then one grows out to the orbit of Mercury in the occult sense, then out to the orbits of Venus, Sun and Mars. One grows out into the vast celestial spaces. But the spatial togetherness of the many human souls is not significant. When you permeate the whole of the Venus sphere this is also the case for the others, but it does not mean that because of this you are aware of them. Even if one knows that one is not alone, one can still feel lonely.

Finally one expands into the universe in a sphere circumscribed by the orbit of Saturn and beyond. As one grows in this way one gathers the forces needed to build up the next incarnation. Then one returns. One becomes ever smaller until one unites oneself again with the earth.

Between death and rebirth man expands into the whole cosmos and however strange it may appear, when we return to the earth we bring all the forces of the solar system with us into life and unite them with what is inherited out of the physical substances. By means of the cosmic forces we build up our physical body and our brain. Here between birth and death we dwell within the narrow confines of our physical body. After death we live, expanded, into the entire solar macrocosm.

The one person has a deep moral sense, the other less so. The one who on earth had a deep moral sense goes through the spiritual world in such a way that he can experience everything as a sociable being. The power for this flows from the starry realms. Another who is not thus prepared is unable to make any connections and because he did not bring any spiritualized forces with him, he also is unable to receive any moral predispositions. He will journey alone through the various spheres. Such spiritual knowledge throws significant light on everything that a man is and on his relationship to the world.

Kant uttered the saying, “There are two things that fill my mind with an ever new and increasing sense of wonder and devotion: The starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” He thereby expressed something significant. Spiritual science reveals that both are one and the same. What we experience between death and rebirth we bring with us as moral law. We carry the starry heavens through which we journey between death and a new birth into our earthy life where it must become moral law.

Thus spiritual science brings us insight into the magnitude of the human soul and the idea of human responsibility.

The ability to perceive karmic connections in human life demands a clear understanding of laws and conditions of existence with which, generally speaking, the man of modern times is entirely unfamiliar. For into the karmic connections extending from one earthly life into another, spiritual laws are working, spiritual laws which will be totally misconstrued if they are associated in the very slightest degree with causation similar to what is meant when we speak in the ordinary way of ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ in the world.

In order to understand the real nature of karmic connections we must, in the first place, have a clear and exact perception of what is happening within man behind the sphere of his ordinary consciousness. And it is only by observing the being of man as revealed to super-sensible cognition, to Initiation-knowledge, that such understanding can be attained.

Let us therefore consider to-day how the attainment of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition makes it increasingly possible for man to recognise how he lives, as man, within the whole cosmos. This will enable us to continue the study of certain matters that were touched upon in recent lectures and will eventually lead to an understanding of karma.

It has often been said, even in public lectures, that at the stage of Imaginative Cognition a tableau of the present earthly life spreads out before man. A vista of his life lies before him in mighty pictures and he is able to behold things that cannot be yielded by memory in the ordinary sense.

In this vista which opens out as a result of the striving for Imaginative Knowledge, man is, to begin with, entirely within his physical and etheric bodies, but through the appropriate exercises he makes himself completely independent of everything by which impressions are transmitted to him from his physical body. In the activity of Imaginative Cognition man is therefore independent of his sense-impressions, and also of his intellectual knowledge. He lives entirely in the etheric body and the memory-tableau lies outspread before him.

We can therefore say: man is now living in the super-sensible, inwardly detached from his physical body. And in point of fact it would not be so difficult as it actually is for the majority of people to acquire this faculty of Imaginative Knowledge, if only there were a stronger inclination to break through the inner link between the life of soul and the physical body.

It is, of course, comparatively easy to break through the link with direct sense-perception. But remember that a man is also connected with his physical body through the attitude and tenor of soul he acquires in his earthly life. After all, our moods of soul are also dependent upon the physical body, are essentially influenced by the physical body. When a man ascribes one thing or another to his capacities, his talents or other qualities of soul, this is all connected with his experiences in the physical body. If he is to acquire the faculty of genuine Imaginative Knowledge he must free himself from all this; and if he succeeds, even if only for a moment, he knows what Imaginative Knowledge is and the life-tableau begins gradually to unfold.

It is necessary to bear in mind the difference between the condition of being bound up with the physical body and thus living within it, and the condition of being independent of the physical body but for all that remaining within it. There is a real difference, and it is the latter condition that obtains in the activity of Imaginative Knowledge. We remain within the physical body, we do not leave it, but we are nevertheless independent of it.

When you remain with your soul and spirit within the physical body, then you fill the physical body, even if you are not bound up with it. I will illustrate this diagrammatically.—

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Let us think, first, of man's ordinary, everyday condition. Take this (a) to represent the physical body (inner curves), this the etheric body (outer curves) and this the soul and spirit (short branching lines).

The etheric body is connected everywhere with the physical body through the muscles, bones and nerves. These connections are everywhere, proceeding from the etheric body to the physical body. Now picture to yourselves that you have a porous clay vessel and you pour liquid into it. The liquid fills the pores and runs out into the porous clay. But it may also happen that your vessel is not porous and in that case none of the liquid is absorbed; the liquid will then be in the vessel but there will be no channels into the clay walls. In the activity of Imaginative Knowledge man is in this sense within his body but the etheric body does not enter into the muscles, the bones and so forth. This condition can be indicated by (b) in the diagram. Physical body; then etheric body which is now on its own; and within, the soul and spirit. All that has happened is that the etheric body is now inwardly detached. The result of this detachment will of course be perceptible when returning to the previous condition. It is therefore only natural that when a man really tries to make himself free of his physical body but remains within it, as is the case in the activity of Imaginative Cognition, he is aware not only of exhaustion but of actual heaviness. He becomes intensely aware of his physical body because he has now to make his way into it again.

This is the condition obtaining in the activity of Imaginative Cognition but not in that of Inspiration, Inspired Knowledge. In the activity of Inspired Cognition—which begins, as I have described to you, with consciousness that has been emptied of images—man is outside his physical body with the soul and spirit. Thus (c) in the diagram represents the soul and spirit outside the physical and etheric bodies.

The outer configuration must therefore be the same as in sleep. Knowledge through Inspiration is possible only when with his ego and astral body a man can be outside the etheric body.

And now, when he returns into his physical and etheric bodies, he notices the presence there of something else; the physical and etheric bodies are not at all as he is accustomed to know them; something is there within them. This is very important, because knowledge of it gives an indication of the whole process of Initiation.

At first, a certain difficulty is experienced in coming back into the physical and etheric bodies after the state of Inspiration, because there is the feeling of diving down into something quite different.

Remember what I told you yesterday about the backward survey of the memory-tableau. If this memory-tableau is blotted out in the activity of Inspired Knowledge, we perceive what it is that is present there within the physical body. And when the memory-picture of the phase between birth and the 7th year, until the time of the change of teeth, is blotted out, we perceive that within this physical body there was an Angelos, an Angel! We actually behold there a Being of the Third Hierarchy. So that what happens is this. We succeed in getting outside the physical body and then return into it as into our house and home ... and lo! we meet our Angel there when we look back upon the phase of life from birth until the 7th year.

Knowledge of such truths existed in the days of the ancient, instinctive clairvoyance, knowledge which took different forms in the various epochs of evolution; and these truths were taken into account in establishing certain customs and usages.

In olden times men were fully conscious that the giving of names should conform with spiritual realities. Generally speaking, people to-day are indifferent about the kind of names their children receive. For some the only consideration is whether the name has a pretty sound. There is often an element of coquetry in giving a name to a child; people ‘fancy’ the name. But in olden times men were mindful of the child's relation to the spiritual world and chose the name accordingly. In an epoch, for example, when a prophetic being was venerated under the name of ‘Elisha’, girls were sometimes named ‘Elisa-beth’, that is to say, the ‘house of Elisha’. In this way expression was given to the hope that by placing a child in the world with this name, the grace of the prophet would be ensured. And so the names were given with this aim in view.

What were the grounds for this? It was known that when man has been outside his body and then returns into it, he sees himself as the bearer of spiritual Beings. And the whole conception that little children, especially, are guarded by their Angel originates in the fact that when with Initiation-knowledge we look back upon the phase of life from birth to the 7th year, we experience what I described yesterday by saying that when this phase in the memory-tableau is blotted out, the Hierarchy of the Angeloi, that is to say, the deeds and activities of the Moon-sphere shine through.

Again, when we look back upon the phase from the 7th to the 14th years and then return into the body, we find an Archangelos. This Archangel is of course also present within the human being from birth until the 7th year, but we do not find the Archangel when we are looking back only at the phase between birth and the 7th year.

And so when we return into the body after having been outside it, we become aware that there, within the body, are Beings of all the higher Hierarchies. But this form of self-knowledge, the knowledge that the body is the bearer of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies, cannot be acquired in any other way than by having first been outside the body and then returning into it again.

This can be understood only when it is connected with another fact. I have told you that the many stars in the heavens are but the outer signs of colonies of gods. Where the stars sparkle in the heavens there are, in reality, colonies of spiritual Beings. But you must not imagine that these gods have their consciousness only in Venus, or only in the Sun, or in Mercury, or in Sirius. They have their main habitation, the focal point of their existence in these several spheres, and this is true of all spiritual Beings of the cosmos who have anything to do with the earth. But it is impossible to say of their existence in the cosmos that they have their dwelling-place only in Mars, only in Venus, and so forth. Paradoxical as it will seem, I am nevertheless obliged to say that the Divine Beings who belong to the earth and who people Mars, Venus, Jupiter or another of the planets—also the Sun—would be blind if they inhabited only one of these spheres. They would live, they would be active—just as we can walk about and take hold of things even if we have no eyes; but they would not see—I mean, of course, in the way in which Divine Beings ‘see’—they would lack a certain faculty for perceiving what is happening in the cosmos. But this, my dear friends, will lead you to ask: Where, then, is the eye of the gods, where is their organ of perception? This organ of perception is provided by the Moon, our neighbour in the cosmos—in addition to all its other functions. All the Divine Beings belonging to the Sun, to Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, have their eye in the Moon and are at the same time in the Moon.

And now think of some of the things of which we have spoken here from time to time. Take only one fact. The Moon was once part of the earth, and separated from the earth only in the course of time. Before the separation of the Moon, therefore, the eye of the gods was bound up with the earth; the gods beheld the cosmos from the earth. Hence at that time the great primeval Teachers too were able to impart their wisdom to mankind. For in that they were living on the earth, and the Moon was still within the earth, they could gaze into the cosmos with the eye of the gods. When the Moon departed, remembrance of this vision of the gods remained with them for a time; thus they could behold, in remembrance, what was now seen with the eye of man, and could communicate this to the gods. But the primeval Teachers themselves had then to make their way to the Moon, where they are to this day, and to found a colony there in order to be able to see with the eye of the gods.

And now turn your minds to something else. From the Moon, Jahve reigned over the heart and soul of the Jewish people, and those of the primeval Teachers who were still associated with the cult and the teaching of Jahve united with him in the Moon, in order to look out into the cosmos through his eyes. In time to come the Moon will again be united with the earth and then it will be possible for man on the earth to gaze into the cosmos with the eye of the gods. Vision of the cosmos will then be a natural human faculty.

It is only by understanding these things that we can come to know the nature of the universe. For only when man views the universe in this way can he have any true conception of the function of the Moon.

And now we have the reason why freedom, free spiritual activity, can be unfolded in earthly life. As long as the Moon was connected with the earth, as long as the primeval Teachers taught men out of their store of remembrance, and as long as this teaching was preserved in the Mysteries—actually until the 14th century A.D.—all wisdom consisted in what had been seen with the eye of the gods. Only since the period I indicated to you, only since the year 1413, has it become utterly impossible for the earth to see with the eye of the gods. So that with the development of the Consciousness Soul, freedom begins to be within the reach of men.

But in point of fact man is on the earth only in the activity of sense-perception and intellectual knowledge, for the latter is also bound up with the physical body. The truth of the matter is as follows. Let us picture the human being. It is only in his sense and intellectual knowledge that he extends beyond the Hierarchies who are within him. In respect of all that lies behind his intellect, he is filled with the Third Hierarchy; in all that lies behind his feeling, he is filled with the Second Hierarchy; in all that lies behind his willing, he is filled with the First Hierarchy.

We are therefore in very truth within the Hierarchies and it is only in respect of our sensory organs and intellect that we extend beyond their realm. It is actually as though we were swimming, with the head rising a little out of the water. With our senses and our intellect we rise out of the ocean of the activities of the Hierarchies.

All this we find when, having experienced the reality of perception outside the body, we return again into the body. And then we find that in very truth man is the House of the Gods.

Something else will now be clear to you. When the gods desire cosmic vision, they gaze through the eye of the Moon. But when they desire to behold the cosmos from the earth—whereby an entirely different aspect is revealed—then they must look from out of man. The human race is the other eye of the gods!

In very ancient times it was natural for man to be able to see with the eye of the gods because the Moon was within the earth. And he will be able to do so again when in future time the Moon and the earth are re-united. Through Initiation, however, through becoming aware on returning into the body that the gods are present there, and through coming to know these gods, man learns to behold the world through the “eye of man.” Thus Initiation reveals to man what in earlier times was revealed to the gods through the eye of the Moon.

What we do with our everyday consciousness, the intentions we form, and so forth—all this depends upon ourselves; but our karma is shaped and fashioned by the Hierarchies within us. They are the architects and shapers of an entirely different World-Order, a World-Order belonging to the soul, to the moral sphere of life. This is the other aspect of man, the aspect of the Hierarchies who are within him.

As long as we remain at the stage of Imaginative Knowledge we are convinced, as we look back over our own earthly life, that we are a unity; we are also convinced that certain actions in life are free, because they proceed from this unity. With Imaginative Knowledge we perceive little of our karma. When we reach the stage of Inspired Knowledge, however, and then return into the body, we feel ourselves divided into a world of countless Hierarchies. We return into the body and at first do not know our identity. Are we the Angel, are we a Being of one of the Hierarchies, one of the Dynamis, or Exusiai? We are divided into a world of Beings, dazed by the multiplicity of our nature, for we are one with all these Beings.

At this point the appropriate exercises must make a man so inwardly strong that he can assert his unity over against this multiplicity. And then—it is of course all an after-effect of the life between death and rebirth—he perceives how karma is shaped by the interweaving activities of the many Beings within him. Countless Divine Beings take part in the shaping of human karma. It is therefore true to say that man leads an earthly life in the real sense only in respect of his intellectual and sensory activity. In the activity of his life of feeling and of will—yes, and even in a more remote and hidden activity of thought—man shares in the life of the gods. In a hidden thought-activity he shares in the life of the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai; in respect of what is hidden in his life of feeling he shares in the life of the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes; and in respect of his will he shares in the life of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

What we call human destiny is therefore an affair of the gods and as such it must be regarded.

But what does this mean for earthly life? If a man cannot accept his destiny with inner composure, if he rebels against his destiny, if—from his personal point of view of course—he is discontented with it, if he brings his destiny into confusion by subjective decisions, then it is as though he were continually disturbing the gods in the shaping of his destiny. Destiny can of a truth only be lived through in the right way when life is accepted with inner composure and tranquillity. To feel and perceive how destiny works is something that brings with it hard and heavy tests for human nature. If a man can succeed in taking his destiny earnestly, this experience will give him a strong and deep impulse to live in communion with the spiritual world. And life itself will unfold in him a feeling for connections of destiny, of karma.

Men of the modern age have to a great extent lost this sensitivity, this delicacy of perception; their perceptions have become crude. But suppose there is someone who looks back with more delicate perception upon the relationship he had with a human being who was an example to him in his youth—a teacher, perhaps. People do not always feel contemptuous about those who were their teachers; many look back with inner happiness to those who educated them. When this is so, the recollection can deepen into a very intimate experience. It may come to us that between our 7th and 14th years, for example, we always felt obliged to do whatever this revered teacher did; or we may realise that when this teacher told us something we felt as though we had already heard it, as though it were just being repeated. It is actually one of the most beautiful experiences in life when we remember something of this kind, feeling that it was repetition. And then it strikes us that something must underlie this experience. Healthy human reason will tell us that there is nothing to account for it in the present earthly life, and then the same reasoning faculty points us to previous lives. There are indeed many whose attention is directed in this way to earlier lives on earth.

Now what does it mean when we can look back to a teacher with feelings like these? It means that in our present life destiny has led this teacher to us. It is our karma to have such a teacher and it points to a previous earthly life.

As a rule—and this is shown by occult observation—as a rule it is not the case that in the previous earthly life the teacher was also our teacher; the relationship then was quite different. From a teacher we receive thoughts, ideas, even if they are clothed in the form of pictures; in true education we receive thoughts and ideas. When this is the case it points back, as a rule, to a relationship where feelings, not thoughts, were communicated by the person in question; there was less opportunity for receiving thoughts from him, but feelings were communicated—feelings which can be transmitted in so many different ways. And the same may apply to the present and a future earthly life.

Let us suppose that in this present life a man feels drawn by warm, inner sympathy to some other person with whom life does not bring him into specially close contact, whom he merely meets but to whom he is strongly drawn. In such a case it may happen that these feelings of sympathy lead to the other becoming his teacher in a later-life.

What, then, has actually happened? When feelings of sympathy and attraction towards another person unfold in a man, this is the result of what the Beings of the Second Hierarchy—the Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai—unfold in and around the human being.

Then, in the next life, when the influence does not work by way of the feelings but by way of thoughts and ideas, this means that the Beings of the Second Hierarchy have given over what they wrought in a preceding life, to the Beings of the Third Hierarchy, to the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai; and it is they who are now working within the human being.

When, therefore, our karma unfolds from one earthly life to another, this means that actual deeds are passed on from one Hierarchy to another and that in the cosmos, in the spiritual cosmos, something of immense significance is taking place.

In looking at a man's destiny we gaze, as it were through a veil, into a wide vista of cosmic happenings. If we can become conscious of this, the impression will be one of tremendous power. You have only to picture it to yourselves, entering into it with the right feeling and understanding.

Imagine now that you are observing the manifestations of destiny in the life of a human being. This should never be done in a spirit of indifference, for in observing the destiny of a human being we are in truth beholding deeds which have poured from the highest Hierarchy into the lowest Hierarchy, and again from the lowest into the highest Hierarchy. We are gazing upon a weaving activity of life in the ranks of the Hierarchies when we study the destiny of a human being. It is something that must be contemplated with deep piety and veneration, because as we behold this destiny the world of the gods lies manifest before us.

This was the feeling I tried in some measure to convey when I was writing the Mystery Plays. Throughout the Plays you will find scenes that have their setting in earthly life and others that have their setting in the spiritual world. And I have also made it evident how not only the higher Hierarchies but elemental beings, also the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers, mingle in the living, weaving deeds that flow from above downwards and from below upwards when the destiny of man is being fulfilled.

Think of the scenes when Strader and Capesius are within the super-sensible world in quite different forms of existence but for all that the same individuals. This is only the other side of man's life which is just as truly part of him—the side that belongs to the world of the gods and not to the world of the minerals, the animals, the plants, the mountains, the clouds, the trees and so forth. To learn to contemplate the destinies of human beings with reverence and awe—that too is something that the times demand of us. It is a dreadful experience to read biographies from the pens of materialistically-minded authors to-day, for they write without an iota of reverence for the destiny of the one whose life they are narrating. Of a truth it would be well for biographers to realise that when they intrude into the life of a human being, even if only for the purpose of describing it, they are coming into invisible contact with all the Hierarchies.

Deliberations of this kind lead us to the ‘feeling’ side of Anthroposophy. We realise that everything offered to us in Anthroposophy must also move our feelings. For in Anthroposophy it is not merely a question of acquiring knowledge; feelings about the world are quickened within us, feelings which alone can enable us to find our rightful place in life. And without such feelings we cannot truly understand or perceive the laws by which the karma of man is pervaded.

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."

The only meeting with Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900, German philosopher) belongs to the experiences I do not forget again. At that time, he was quite mad. The sight was very important. Imagine a human being, a man who has dealt with the question the whole morning which immediately suggests itself, and who has the wish to rest some time after dinner and to let go on the thoughts sounding in himself: he lay there this way. I had the impression of a healthy man, and, besides, he was already completely mad; he recognised nobody. His forehead was moulded like that of an artist and a thinker, and, nevertheless, it was the forehead of a maniac. A riddle faced me. Human beings of his kind of insanity would have had to look completely different. Only by means of spiritual science, one can explain this unusual.

The etheric body, the carrier of memory, is connected with the physical body during the whole life, but it is connected different with the different human beings. With some, the relation is not very solid, with others very close. Now Nietzsche's etheric body was very movable from the start. Such human beings can have two qualities: the one is an ingenious, easily movable mental force and imagination, the ability to connect widely separated concepts and to get a synopsis of widely divergent perspectives. Such persons are not as easily restrained as others are by the gravity of the physical body in the conditions given by life.

Before Friedrich Nietzsche had done his doctorate, he was appointed professor of Classics in Basel. From his teacher, Professor Ritschl (Friedrich Wilhelm R., 1806–1876), information was gathered. This answered: Nietzsche is able to do everything he wants. Thus, it happened that he did his doctorate when he already held a chair. Nietzsche had an agile mind. Such a human being does not live in ideas, which are palpable. He lives, so to speak, separated like by a wall from the everyday life.

However, something else is connected with such a mental disposition: he is condemned to a certain life tragedy. He hard finds the way to the immediate things of existence, he easily lives in that which cannot be seen by the eyes, be seized by the hands what can be observed in the everyday life but in that which humanity has acquired as spiritual goods. He lives in certain ways like separated by walls from the sufferings and joys of life. His look wanders into the vast, more in that which humanity has gained and created for itself, than in the everyday. Hence, it could occur that Nietzsche was in a special situation towards the civilisation of the nineteenth century.

Someone who surveys the civilisation of the second half of the nineteenth century sees that an immense jerk forward is done in the conquest of the physical world. We take the year 1858/59. It was the year, which brought the work of Darwin (Charles D., 1809–1882, English naturalist) of the origin of species by which the look of the human beings was banished completely in the physical concerning the evolution idea. This year also brought the work by which the matters of our fixed stars and the most distant sky space were conquered: the spectral analysis by Kirchhoff (Gustav Robert K., 1824–1887, physicist) and Bunsen (Robert Wilhelm B., 1811–1899, German chemist). Only since that time, it was possible to say, the substances, which are found on earth, are also found on the other planets. Then appeared the book about aesthetics by Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807–1887, 1846–1857: Aesthetics or the Science of Beauty) which wanted to found the science of beauty bottom up, while one had once explained beauty top down, from the idea. To complete the picture: that work appeared which wanted to force the social life into the only sensuous world, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy by Karl Marx (1818–1883). Briefly, the time in which Nietzsche grew up was the time in which the human beings directed their look completely to the physical world.

Now imagine which forms all that has accepted in the course of the second half of the nineteenth century: think of Haeckel (Ernst H., 1834–1919, German naturalist) and other researchers who only targeted what presented itself to their sensuous eyes; think of everything that natural sciences and technology have performed in the nineteenth century. It appears to us compared with these currents like an escape of humanity to spirituality if at that time wide circles are seized by the philosophy of Schopenhauer (Arthur Sch., 1788–1860). At that time, the mere interest in Schopenhauer's philosophy shows that the human souls escaped to something that should grant spiritual satisfaction. We see one of the great spirits of the nineteenth century, Richard Wagner (1813–1883, composer), attempting to let spirituality flow again into civilisation.

In this cultural trend, Nietzsche positioned himself. How did he do this? The just mentioned persons positioned themselves creatively in it, and creating is something blissful. Working makes the human being young and fresh. This becomes apparent with Haeckel. Somebody who works on the microscope and other instruments and does research can make himself happy and rejuvenate in this work, he is able to do all that also light-heartedly, and he forgets the need for a spiritual world; in him something lives that can animate the human being, creative enthusiasm, which has something divine-spiritual. Nietzsche's destiny was this cultural trend. He was destined to take joy and sorrow from this cultural trend because he was not directly connected with the everyday life. He had the nagging feeling, how can one live with that which the modern civilisation offers? Nietzsche's heart was involved in everything with joy or sorrow. He lived through everything with his soul that happened in the nineteenth century.

We see two spirits intervening early in Nietzsche's life: Schopenhauer whom he got to know not personally who had a deep effect on him by his writings, and Richard Wagner with whom he was tied together by the most tender bond of friendship. Both spirits induced Nietzsche to become engrossed in the riddle of ancient Greece in the beginning of our culture. He had done deep looks in the Greek world, from the oldest time up to those periods which history illumines brighter. The Greek of the oldest time seems to be much closer to divinity than later, when he tries to show pictures of the gods in his pieces of art: he makes them human-like, raises the form of the human being to the ideal image. The Greek was not that way in primeval times. He felt everything vividly flowing into himself what was outdoors what blows in the storm and grumbles with the thunder, what streaks in the flash what as harmonising wisdom has set up the world outdoors. At that time, in his original music the Greek expressed this harmony and created it in his temple dances.

Nietzsche called the ancient Greek the Dionysian human being. The later Greek, the Apollonian human being, reproduced what the original Greek was. He stood there considering and expressed it in his pieces of art. At this development Nietzsche looked like at a riddle, because he had no knowledge of that primeval culture which was the basis of the Greek and even earlier cultures from which it had taken its force. An expression of that primeval culture was also, what was expressed as wisdom in the Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries as myth creation and art. Nietzsche did not know this. He thought that everything was instinct, basic instinct with the ancient Greek. He knew nothing about that wisdom which was fostered by initiates originally in the mysteries, which then flowed into the world, illustrated in pieces of art and mystery plays. Nietzsche was not able to look into these mysteries, but he had a premonition of them. Hence, he felt worried, because he could not find the correct answer to his questions. In that primeval wisdom of the human being to which spiritual science goes back, he would have had to search the answer to his Dionysian human being and his Apollonian human being. He would have to get the solution of the riddle from the Eleusinian and Orphic mysteries. Then he could have seen how art fosters the beholding, and how science and religion look for that which can penetrate the human heart with devoutness.

Religion, art, and science were not yet separated in the old mysteries from each other. They originated from one root. The ancient mysteries are this root. With the leading peoples of antiquity, they were fostered in secret sites efficiently and were developed to ritual acts. The descent of the primeval wisdom was represented to the neophyte in pictures. This remained concealed to Nietzsche; therefore, he could not find the coherence, which he searched. Only tragically, the development of the Greek spiritual life could present itself to him. He stills sees Aeschylus (525–456 BC), who was close to the mysteries, creating his drama penetrated with inner wisdom. However, he also sees Sophocles (497–406 BC) and in particular Euripides (480–406 BC) already creating their dramas which only show the exterior. He recognises that the Socratics find concepts that are far from the world sources and that they place themselves like considering beyond the world content in the universe. It seemed to him in such a way that in Socrates the world itself does no longer pulsate, but only the concepts of it, that he leads the Greek pulsating life to dry, sober abstraction. Nietzsche was painfully affected by the fact that Socrates put up the sentence that virtue is teachable. He understood it in such a way that the old Greek felt what he should do; he did not ask whether it is right or wrong. Only a time estranged to divinity could ask, can one learn what is good? Hence, Nietzsche considered Socrates as the person of the decline of Greek culture.

Schopenhauer appeared to Nietzsche as a human being who had an idea of that what led to the sources of existence. He built the bridge from the abstract world of human mental pictures to the deeper sources of existence pulsating in the will. This satisfied Nietzsche's pursuit of truth. Richard Wagner appeared to him as a person risen from the old Hellenism. It was blissful for Nietzsche to develop according to such an exceptional person who walked along beside him in flesh and blood. A substitute of that which the external world is to the other human beings was this friendship with Richard Wagner.

As a deposit of his world of thought in this time we have the writing The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, appeared in 1872, in which already the whole Nietzsche is included. There is already found the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Further Schopenhauer as Educator. Nietzsche writes empathically about Schopenhauer like someone who writes about his father. Then Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, it is regarded by everybody as the best writing about Richard Wagner.

No time is so closely related to philistines as the time of materialism. In no book, David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874, German theologian) expresses this connection so strongly as in the book The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1835/36). Nietzsche named and shamed this philistine attitude in his writing about David Friedrich Strauss. Nietzsche who longed for the re-erection of the Dionysian human being could be outraged against the philistine attitude of David Friedrich Strauss. David Friedrich Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer is a redeeming essay.

Then he did something as an academician. He had experienced the time without fire and enthusiasm of the academics. If anybody said, there can be new ideas, one can do this or that, then the others came who said: however, history shows us that nothing can develop by leaps and bounds, everything goes on quietly. One was afraid of what one called a leap in history. Nietzsche wrote a book in which he said, pluck up courage, be a human being, do not only look for history, have the courage to be independent and to act independently! Again a releasing book, of a comprising radicalism in its demand for emancipation from history. He expressed that historical mood is an obstacle of everything original in the impulses of the human beings.

Nietzsche lived up to 1876 in such a way. His development was in such a way that he stood far from the events in the world. The easy mobility of his etheric body caused this. In 1876, when Wagner was at the peak of his creating and had realised in the outside world what lived in his soul, Nietzsche discovered, what faces you does not correspond to the picture, which has lived in you.—This was the case simply because he had built something like a wall against the demands of the external realities.

He could not recognise in the outside what he had formed inside as mental pictures. There Nietzsche became confused. What made him confused? Wagner? Not really. Richard Wagner never made him confused, because he did not know the objective Richard Wagner at all. He was confused by his idea, which he had got of Wagner. Now Nietzsche became confused by the whole perspective, which had led him to Wagner. He was confused by any idealism. With the idealistic Wagner, he lost all ideals which humanity can generally spin out. Thus, the feeling originated in him: idealism and all contemplation about the spiritual is a lie, is untruthfulness, illusion. The human beings have deluded themselves about that what is real, while they have made pictures of the real to themselves. Nietzsche began to suffer from himself.

Now he is engrossed in opposite currents of the spiritual life, in the positive natural sciences and the branches, which are built up on these. He becomes acquainted with an interesting spirit, with Paul Rée (1849–1901, German philosopher) who had written a book about moral sensations and the origin of conscience. This work The Origin of the Moral Sensations, 1877) is typical for the last third of the nineteenth century in which is searched and worked according to the methods of natural sciences. It completely gets the origin of moral sensations and conscience out of the impulses and instincts of the human being. Paul Rée makes this wittily. Nietzsche is delighted by this worldview about which he says to himself, there any illusion is overcome, and one can understand human life only from that which is palpable. Now I feel all ideals like masks of desires and instincts. In Human, All Too Human, a book which appears in aphoristic form, he tries to show how basically all ideals do not lead beyond the human being, but are something that is rooted in the all too human, in the feeling and in the everyday. Nietzsche could never find the way to the everyday immediately. He did not know the general-human from practice. He wanted to experience it now from theory with all joys and sufferings. In addition, life praxis became theory to him. This was wonderfully expressed in Daybreak (1881). Everything appears to him not only disproved, but got cold, as put on ice.

With particular satisfaction, Nietzsche now studies Eugen Dühring's (1833–1921) Philosophy of Reality (1878). In it, he delights himself; however, he is not a parroter of it. He writes many, partly extremely disparaging remarks in his personal copy. However, he tries to experience emotionally what is brought forward there as positive science. The French morality authors who aim at assessing moral of life not by standards, but by events become a stimulating reading for him. This becomes his tragedy or also his bliss. These are the essentials that he lives through all that. It works different on him from those who had created these works. He must always ask himself, how does one live with these things?

Now, however, we see significant ideas originating to him from such conditions, ideas from which we must say that Nietzsche knocked at the gate of spiritual science, just as he had once stood before it with his Dionysian human being, guessing the mysteries. The gates were not opened to him. With one of these ideas, one can prove almost how it has originated. In Dühring's book A Course of Philosophy as a Strictly Scientific Worldview and Way of Life you find a strange passage. There Dühring tries to put the question whether it is possible that the same combination of atoms and molecules, which has been there once, returns one day in the same way.

During three weeks in which I have ordered Nietzsche's library, I myself have seen that he had marked this passage in this book and had added remarks. From then on, at first in the subconsciousness, the idea of the so-called everlasting return worked in him. This idea, which he developed more and more, has imprinted itself on Nietzsche's soul in such a way that it became a creed to him; he has familiarised himself with it that it became his tragedy. It expresses that everything that was there once returns in the same combination and with all details repeatedly, even if after long intervals. As well as we are sitting here now, we would come again heaps of times. This was a feeling, which belonged to the tragedy of his soul, the feeling: with all grief which now you experience you will always return.—Thus, we realise that Nietzsche has become the materialistic thinker by Dühring's idea of return—which Dühring rejects. For him there was only this return of the same a consequence of a materialistic idea.

We see Nietzsche's ideas crystallising from the cultural trend of the nineteenth century. Darwinism shows how the evolution of the imperfect to the perfect takes place how evolution advances from the simple living being to the developed human being. As for Nietzsche, it is not speculation; this becomes a source of bliss for him. It is a satisfaction for him to see the world in its development. However, he cannot stop. He says to himself, the human being has become; should he not develop further? Should the development be concluded with the human being if we see that imperfect beings have developed up to the human being? There we must look at the human being as a transition to a super-human.—Thus, the human being became to him a bridge between worm and super-human.

Nietzsche stood with his idea of the everlasting return with his whole feeling and thinking before the gate of the spiritual-scientific truth of reincarnation. He stood also with the idea of the super-human before the gate of spiritual science, which shows us that in every human being something lives that we have to understand as a divine essence of the human being. This essence is a kind of super-human if we are allowed to use the expression. When the human being has gone through many incarnations and has become more and more perfect, he will ascend to even higher degrees of existence.

Nietzsche knew nothing about all these concrete secrets of spiritual science. He knew nothing about that what we know if we look behind the sensuous, palpable. He could only emotionally grasp what lived in his soul, not with his ego. Instead of the portrayals of the spiritual facts that can fulfil us with bliss, instead of the portrayal of that world of facts which shows us how within the planetary development the human being ascends from stage to stage, all that lived with Nietzsche in the feeling, and sounds lyrically from Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885). It is an enthusiastic portrayal of the guessed that he could not behold. Like a question appears to us his hymn on the super-human.

How could this thirsty soul have been satisfied? Only if it had got to know spiritual science as contents. Nietzsche had to bleed out emotionally in his longing for it. Only spiritual science could have brought him what he strove for without being able to grasp it. In the last book, which he wanted to call Will to Power, it is especially clear how he could come to no fulfilment of his soul with the desired spiritual contents. Compare everything that spiritual science says about the higher human being and his affiliation to spiritual worlds with the abstract will to power, which has, actually, no contents. Power is something quite abstract if it is not said what should have power.

Just this posthumous work Will to Power shows Nietzsche's vain and fateful striving that is so great in its notions. Again, you can observe the tragedy, how this striving for an unknown land grows into insanity. Just at the example of Nietzsche, you can see where the civilisation of the nineteenth century had to lead the deeper feeling personalities. Therefore, many people who guessed something beyond the material, the palpable and could not find it because they stopped with this civilisation had to bleed out. That is why Nietzsche's tragedy also shows a big piece of the tragedy of the nineteenth century. This tragedy appears in particular, if we realise how Nietzsche with a boldness which only a human being can have who is not firmly connected with his etheric body, with the inhibitions of the physical body, how Nietzsche criticises Christianity in his Antichrist (1895). For Christianity is that what he says a harsh but comprehensible and extremely urgent criticism. A lot of that which this Antichrist contains is exceptionally worth reading. Nevertheless, the whole standpoint of Nietzsche shows us how a mind must behave to whom all philosophy appears as nihilism, who wants to search the spirit from reality and cannot find this spirit in the modern form of Christianity. It will turn out more and more that humanity recognises the big impulses and the whole deepness of Christianity only by spiritual science, so that one can say, Christianity has been recognised up to now only to a lesser extent. Nietzsche did not have this consciousness; he did not recognise Christianity properly. Why could he not recognise it? Because he could not anticipate the course of development—in the sense of spiritual science. I want to show it with an example.

About 600 years before Christ, Buddha appeared whom one cannot admire and revere enough if one recognises him really. He grows up as a king's son, surrounded by all joys of life. Any grief is kept away from him. It is ensured that he never leaves the gardens of his palace. Nevertheless, once he comes out of the sanctified area of the palaces and temples. He meets an old man, a sick person, a dead person. He sees: age is suffering, illness is suffering, and death is suffering. He recognises that in every rebirth the sufferings must come again. The great truth of the spiritual life reveals itself to Buddha. Therefore, he teaches that one should give up his longing for re-embodiment to be merged in the peace of the spiritual world.

We look at Christ now. We reincarnate in the substances of the earth. Our task is to purify, to internalise and to spiritualise this substance gradually. We carry the fruits of our pilgrimage on earth up to the spirit, and connect them thereby with the spiritual existence. May the earth then be only a vale of tears, which one should leave? No, the earth was blessed, because Christ walked about it, because his body was built from the substances of the earth, and because He permeated the earth with his forces.—The first Christians spoke that way. The human being absorbs something of the Christ principle in every life, purifies himself thereby gradually. Rebirth is not suffering, because only thereby we become able to recognise illness, age, evil as tests, as a means of education of our soul to become good and strong. The soul, which soars this knowledge, is healthy and fosters its surroundings.

Today the fear of hereditary predisposition penetrates humanity. If the human being opened himself or herself to the Christ impulse again, the illnesses would be overcome. On Golgotha, the symbol of death became the symbol of redemption. Being separated from that what one loves is suffering. However, one can be connected with those whom one loves if one is inspired by the Christ principle. One learns bit by bit to experience this union as reality. The Christ principle transforms the sufferings described by Buddha. Overcoming the sufferings one can reach not only by turning away from life, but also by the transformation of the soul. At the sight of the corpse of the crucified, we realise the riddle of the everlasting life going through death.

Nietzsche regards Christianity just as the opposite of that, what lies in its concealed deepness and what should be brought to light by spiritual science. He bleeds out because he could not recognise this. Nietzsche's grief is the deepest, most painful longing for the sources of life. Because his spirit was not firmly tied to his physical body, he does not come to the right solution of the world riddles tormenting him. Thus, it could happen that he did not find the right answer to his question to life which spiritual science could have given him, that he passed by. When the tools of the physical body could no longer serve him, he cast it off, so to speak, he divests himself of the physical body that has become useless for the thinker, and he hovers over it as it were. Thus, he appears to the viewer looking at him as healthy, as someone who only wants to rest from intensive work of thought. In such a way, he lay there like a picture of the tragedy of modern materialistic science, which cannot recognise the spiritual.

If we want to appreciate theosophy at its true value, then we need to be imbued with the fundamental perception that in the theosophical stream we receive a widening of the soul, we feel the heart broadened and uplifted for higher tasks, for participating in the affairs of the universe. No one can have an inkling of this who does not know something about occultism.

The great purpose is often discussed, of leading humanity, through the theosophical movement, towards that point when, in the future, a new race of human beings will arise, when our intellectuality, as it now is, will no longer play the leading role in the world, but will be made fertile by Buddhi. We have to work together with this great world current, and therefore we have a great responsibility towards the theosophical movement. The task of the theosophist extends into the distant future. In this we do not withdraw into some cloud-cuckoo-land; for what we learn about so distant a future is invigorating for us, is something productive for us, that is useful also in everyday things. Anyone who allows these great world perspectives to occupy his mind for even only ten minutes a day, will behave differently from someone who is immersed in everyday matters. He can bring something to contemporary life which is new, productive and original. All progress depends on bringing originality into humanity.

We want to start with something which belongs with the influence of the Devas.¹ Devas are beings who are at a higher stage than man and are able to work on higher levels of existence. Thus we find Devas when we enter the higher planes clairvoyantly. We find Devas on the astral plane, on the Rupa plane, on the Arupa plane, and higher still. What does the influence of the Devas mean for the world in which we ourselves are? We will answer this question by asking another: What is the purpose of our human existence, of this continuing reincarnation? Man would come into this world quite purposelessly, if he learnt no particular lesson, fulfilled no particular task at each coming. Every time [man incarnates] the earth must have changed so much that he meets a situation that he has not encountered before in his earlier incarnations.

A male and female incarnation [together] are occultly reckoned as one incarnation. Between two such connected incarnations lie 2,600 to 3,000 years. The experience, which men undergo during this present stage of earthly evolution are so different in man and woman that it is most necessary for this to be so.

The changes which are brought about in the world between two incarnations of a person are really rather incomprehensible for people outside the theosophical world. Actually, however, people find quite different situations, not only morally, but physically as well. For anyone who looks back occultly, the physical circumstances have fundamentally altered as well, in the last three thousand years. On average, we would encounter our previous incarnations in the time of the ancient Greeks, the Homeric Greeks, 800 B.C. At that time there were quite different geographical and climatic conditions, a basically different plant life and even a different animal world. In these kingdoms, [continual] change is taking place. An outer expression of these changes is the progress of the sun across the vault of heaven. We have twelve signs of the zodiac, and the sun continually moves on from one to another at the vernal equinox. Eight thousand years ago the sun entered the constellation of the Crab for the first time. The time during which the sun traverses a constellation, this time that then elapses, lasts some two thousand six hundred years.² That is also the time between two human incarnations. At about the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, the sun left the constellation of the Ram for that of the Fishes, so that it now stands in the constellation of the Fishes at the spring [equinox].

Those who still had a feeling for occultism knew something about the connection in man's life with these changes in the firmament. Earlier, before the sun entered the constellation of the Ram, the cult of the Bull (Mithras, Apis) prevailed in Asia. Then began the worship of the Ram, which began when the legend of Jason and the Golden Fleece originated. Christ is called the ’Lamb of God.’ Still earlier one finds the Persian symbol of the Twins. That is connected with the [Persian] culture of that time [and its view] of Good and Evil.

If the sun shines on the earth from a different aspect, then the situation there changes too. Hence the entry of the sun into a new constellation also leads each time to a new incarnation. Above, in the heavens, is the progression of the sun, below, on earth, an alteration in climatic conditions in vegetation and so forth.

Who causes this? The theosophist has to ask this because for him there can be no miracles. There are facts on a higher level, but no miracles. Faced with the question of the connection of the human being to the manifestations of the earth, one must adopt a higher vantage point.

After death, man is in Kamaloka. We do not ask: Do the animals and plants have [any] consciousness? Instead we ask: Where is their consciousness located? We know that the animals have their consciousness in Kamaloka, on the astral plane, the plants on the Rupa Plane, and the minerals on the Arupa Plane. Man has his consciousness on the physical plane. Let us suppose that man now comes to Kamaloka. He will then be in the same place as the consciousness of the animals. He then ascends to Devachan, where the plants have their consciousness. At the present stage of evolution, man is not in a position to exercise any influence on the animal kingdom or plant kingdom. However, he does have such an influence in the lower regions of the Devachanic plane, His companions there are all those who possess a Devachanic consciousness; these are powers, beings, who work out of Devachan to promote the growth and welfare of the plant world. The whole life of the plants is controlled from the Devachanic plane. There, man helps create and transform the plants. Powers develop in him there, so that he can really develop an influence on the vegetation. But the Devas are still there to manage this activity. He is guided by them so that he can help in the transformation of the plant world. He makes use in Devachan of the powers he has gathered in incarnation to reshape the plant world. As the life forces alter during man's time in Devachan, so he [helps to] change the vegetation on earth. From Devachan, man actually changes the surroundings that grow about him.

By remaining a long time in Devachan, [man] also helps transform the physical forces. If one goes back a million years in Germany,³ one finds volcanic mountains still there, and the Alps as low undulating hills. The subsequent changes were brought about by man [working] from the Arupa Plane, so that he would meet with suitable physical configurations in Europe, later on. The activity of man in the universe is the inner aspect of what we see outwardly in the environment.

Now we come to what will influence transformation in the world from a still higher plane and in another form.

One often reads about the Logos streaming down from above, and asks oneself how this is [to be conceived], how one can come to a conception of the Logos, to a conception that is something more than a mere word. We will now examine the connection between the Logos and the smallest [particles]. I will give you a description—not speculations—of the results of very ancient occult research, as they have been handed down and worked upon specifically in the occult schools of Germany especially from the fourteenth century onward.

If we meditate on the atom, what strikes us is that it is a very tiny thing. Everyone knows that this small thing called the atom has never been seen through any kind of microscope, no matter how sophisticated. Yet occult books give descriptions and pictures of the atom.⁴ Where were these pictures obtained? How can one, as an occultist, now know anything about the atom?

Now just imagine it to be possible to make an atom grow continually bigger and bigger until it was as big as the earth; one would then discover a very complicated world. One would perceive many movements, different kinds of phenomena, within this small thing. Keep in mind this analogy of the atom being enlarged to the size of the earth. If it were actually possible to enlarge the atom to that extent, we would be able to observe every single process in it. Only the occultist is in a position to enlarge the atom so much and to contemplate its interior.

Let us next look at the range of human motives on earth, beginning with the lowest human levels of development, with the instincts and passions, rising to moral ideals and religious communities, and so on; we will then see that human beings are, as it were, spinning threads between each other, that weave from person to person, forming continually higher associations: the family, the tribe and further ethnic and political groups, finally religious communities. In this, the activity of higher individualities comes indeed to expression. Such associations have sprung up out of the springs and wells of pure universal wisdom, through a religious founder. All religions agree [in the deeper sense], because they have founders who belong to the great Lodge [of the Masters].

There is a particular White Lodge which has twelve members, of whom seven have a special influence, and this seven indeed founded religious groupings. Such were Buddha, Hermes, Pythagoras, and so on. The great plan for the whole of human evolution has actually been spiritually devised in the White Lodge, which is as old as humanity itself. A coordinated plan for the guidance of all human progress confronts us here. All other associations are only subordinate branches; even family groupings, etc, are all linked up in the great plan which leads us up to the Lodge of the Masters. There the plan according to which all mankind develops is spun and woven.

Let us follow all that subsequently happens. Now we must first become acquainted with a particular plan, namely the plan for our earth. Let us contemplate the fourth Round of the earth in which we now are. It is intended to humanise the mineral kingdom. Think how human understanding has already transformed the mineral world, for example, Cologne Cathedral and modern technology. Our humanity has the task of transforming the whole mineral world into a pure work of art. Electricity already points for us into the occult depths of matter.

When, out of his inner being, man has restructured the mineral world, the end of our earth will then have arrived; the earth is then at the end of its physical evolution. The particular plan by which the mineral world will be reshaped exists in the Lodge of the Masters. This plan is already finished; so that if one studies it one can see what is yet to come by way of wonderful buildings, wonderful machines, and so on. When the earth has reached the end of the physical Globe [state] the whole earth will have an inner structure, an inner articulation, given to it by man himself, so that it will have become a work of art, as planned by the Masters of the White Lodge. That accomplished, then the whole earth will pass over into its astral state. That is something like when a plant begins to fade; the physical vanishes, everything goes into the astral. In passing into the astral world, the physical gradually contracts, becomes a shrinking kernel encircled by the astral, going over into the Rupa state and then the Arupa state, until it vanishes in a sleeplike condition.

What then is left of the physical? When the earth has passed over into the Arupa state, there is then still a quite condensed tiny imprint of the whole physical evolution of what was devised in the Masters' plan; like a tiny miniature version of what the mineral earth once was. That is what goes across [from the physical]; the physical is there only as this tiny miniature version of previous evolution, but the Arupa is large. When it passes over out of the Devachan state, it multiplies itself outwardly into innumerable similar things. And when the earth again passes back into the physical state it is then composed of countless tiny globules, each of which is a print of what the earth previously was. All these globules are however differently arranged, although sharing a common derivation. Thus the new physical earth of the fifth Round⁵ will consist of innumerable tiny parts, each of which contains the purpose of the mineral world which the Masters have in plan form in their Lodge. Every atom of the fifth Round [of earth evolution] will contain the whole plan of the Masters. Today the Masters are working on the atom of the fifth Round. Everything which precedes, in humanity, is compressed into a result, that is the atom of the fifth Round.

Therefore, if we examine the atom in its present form and then go back in the Akashic Record, we will then see that today's atom is undergoing a process of growth. It is growing more and more, it is becoming more and more separated [Gap in text] ... and contains the interweaving forces of mankind from the third Round of evolution. In that we can consider the plan of the Masters for the third Earth Round. What is at first entirely external becomes quite inward, and in the smallest atom we see mirrored the plans of the Masters. These tiny particular plans are nothing else than a piece of the whole plan for humanity. If one thus considers that the plan of one Round is the atom of the next Round, then one can see the pattern of the great universal plan. The great universal plan develops in continually higher stages, to beings who have continually higher plans for world development. When we contemplate this plan we arrive at the third Logos. The Logos is thus continually slipping into the atom; first it is outside, and becomes the blueprint for the atom, and then the atom becomes an image of this plan. The occultist simply notes the plan from the Akashic Record for the earlier rounds and so studies the atom.

Now from where do the higher beings obtain this plan? We find an answer to this if we consider that there are still higher stages of evolution where the plans are devised. That is where world evolution is worked out. These higher stages are indicated to us by the Ancients, for instance by Dionysius, the pupil of the Apostle Paul⁶ and also by Nicolaus Cusanus.⁷ His perception was: Higher than all knowledge and perception is the Unperception. But this Unknowing is a higher knowing, and this Unperception is a higher perceiving.

When we stop looking at what we hold in our thinking and concepts of the world, and turn ourselves to what wells up, to our inner powers, then we find something still higher. The Masters can weave the [third] Logos because they have ascended still higher than the nature of thinking. When the higher powers are developed, then, in such beings, thought appears as something different. It is then like a spoken word with us. The thought which constitutes the innermost being for the Masters, can itself be the expression of a higher being, just as the word is the expression of thought [with us]. If we ourselves consider thought as the word of a still higher being, then we come near to the concept of the Logos. Knowledge taken out from thought stands on a still higher level.

When we behold the world we find the atom at the one extreme. It is an image of the plan that proceeded out of the depths of the spirit of the Masters, which is the Logos.

If we now look for the transformation of man himself during the great world epoch- then we are led back again into the world.

Just as man has descended, has plunged down to the physical plane, so is it also with the world as a whole. What man's self has developed lies around him in the world.

But then we are led down to the lower planes, which however, themselves contain the higher planes the Lodge of the Masters.

The Spirit of the Earth is living with the Masters today and this Spirit of the Earth will be the physical clothing of the next planet [the future Jupiter]. The slightest thing we do will affect the smallest atom of the next planet. This feeling gives us first a full connection with the Lodge of the Masters. That should provide a central focus for the Theosophical Society, since we know what the Wise Ones know.

When Goethe speaks of the Spirit of the Earth⁸ he is expressing a truth. The Spirit of the Earth is weaving the clothing of the next planet. ’In life's floods, in the storm of action’ [In Lebensfluten—im Tatensturm] the Spirit [of the Earth] weaves the clothing for the next planetary Godhead.

Supplement: Two years later, on 21st October 1907, again at the time of the General Meeting, Rudolf Steiner spoke once more—in an as yet unpublished lecture—about the atom in the context of how spiritual influence passes from one planet to another, how therefore this will be ’between the [Old] Moon and the Earth and again between the Earth and its successor, the [future] Jupiter.’ This lecture is to be published in German in Volume 101 of Rudolf Steiner's complete works.

The relevant extract runs as follows:

You all know that the earth is guided in a particular way by the so-called White Lodge in which highly developed human individualities and individualities of a still higher kind are combined. What do they do there? They work; they lead the evolution of the earth; while leading this evolution, they are devising a quite specific plan. It is really the case that during the evolution of each planet, a specific plan is worked out by the guiding powers. While the earth is evolving, plans for the atom for the evolution of Jupiter—which succeeds the earth—are drawn up in the so-called White Lodge of the Earth. The plan is worked out in full detail. Therein lies the blessing and salvation of progress—in that it is undertaken in harmony with this plan.

Now, when a planetary evolution comes to its end, thus, when our earth has completed its [present] planetary cycle, then the Masters of Wisdom who harmonise perceptions will be ready with the plan that they have to work out for the Jupiter [cycle]. And now, at the end of such an evolution of planets something very special occurs.

This plan will, through a procedure, be endlessly reduced in size, and endlessly multiplied in number; so that in numerable copies of the whole plan for jupiter are to hand, albeit very much miniaturised. Thus it was on the [Old] Moon, too: the plan of earth evolution existed there. infinitely multiplied and miniaturised. And do you know what they are, these miniaturised plans that have been spiritually developed there? They are the actual atoms which underlie the earth's structure. And the atoms which will underlie the Jupiter [planet] will also be the plan, reproduced in the smallest possible unit—the plan which is now being worked out in the guiding White Lodge. Only he who is aware of this plan can indeed know what an atom is.

If you want to develop your knowledge of this atom, which underlies the earth, you will then, to explore the atom, encounter precisely those mysteries which come from the great Magi of the world.

Naturally, we can now only speak indicatively about these things, but we can at least give something which will impart a concept of what is involved.

The earth is composed of these, its atoms, in a specific way. Everything that is, yourselves included, is composed of these atoms. Hence you exist in harmony with the whole earth evolution, since you carry in you an infinite number of miniaturised [copies] of the plan for earth which was worked out in the past. This plan for the earth could only be evolved in the previous planetary condition of our earth, the [Old] Moon; the guiding beings worked it out in harmony with the whole planetary development through [Old] Saturn, [Old] Sun and [Old] Moon. Now the point in question was to introduce something into this infinite number of atoms which would bring them into the right relationship [with one another], which would arrange them in the right way. To introduce this was only possible for the guiding spirits of the Moon, if, as I have often already said, they managed the evolution of the earth according to a very specific plan.

The way the earth appeared again after the Moon evolution, it was not at first really ’Earth’ but ’Earth plus Sun plus Moon;’ a body such as you would have if you mixed the Earth and the Sun and the Moon together to make one single [heavenly] body. Thus the earth was, at first. Then first the Sun separated itself, taking with it all those forces which were too thin, too spiritual for man, under whose influence he would have spiritualised himself far too quickly. If man had merely stayed under the influence of the forces which were contained in the joint Sun-Moon-Earth body, then he would not have evolved downwards towards physical materiality, and he would not have been able to attain to that consciousness of self, of ego, which he had to attain ...

• 1 . The gods of Devachan, or the heavenly world.
• 2 . Later Rudolf Steiner gave more precise figures for this, according to which the precession of the equinox through the whole zodiac takes 12 x 2 x 160 = 25,920 years, which is a Platonic or world year. Human incarnations are generally connected with these epochs of 2,160 years.
• 3 . It is unusual for Rudolf Steiner to give specific figures for such distant events. If we go back in time beyond the end of the Ice Age (10,000 years ago), there is a great discrepancy between the figures given by modern science and those of spiritual science. For instance, modern science sets the date of the commencement of the Ice Age at one million years ago. Spiritual science, on the other hand, puts the commencement of the Ice Age into the middle of Atlantis—‘The cosmos became calculable for the first time around 13,500 B.C. At that time most of Atlantis was already submerged’ (Blavatsky). The trouble with chronology is that modern science still takes present-day conditions as its norm for calculating (e.g., rate of disintegration of matter) and projects it into the past. Spiritual science, on the other hand, calculates according to cosmic rhythms (progression of the sun through the zodiac).
• 4 . Rudolf Steiner obviously refers here to the representations of atomic structures as they appeared in theosophical literature. Just at the time of these lectures a new edition of Occult Chemistry, written in 1895 by C.W. Leadbeater and Annie Besant had appeared with illustrations. Many of the latter were also depicted in Annie Besant's most popular work: The Ancient Wisdom, 1899. The first to represent atomic forms in this way was the American, Babbit, in his work: The Principle of Light and Colour, 1878, which was referred to in the Besant-Leadbeater study.
• 5 . In explanation of the terms ‘Round,’ ‘Globe,’ etc., see diagram at end of lecture 10, 23rd December 1904.
• 6 . Dionysius is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, Chapter 17, verse 34. Two works appeared under his name at the end of the fifth century in Syria: Concerning the Heavenly Hierarchy and Concerning the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, which were translated from Greek into Latin in the ninth century by John Scotus Erigena.
• 7 . Nicholas of Cusa, 1401–1464, German mystic. Compare: Die Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichen Geisteslebens und ihr Verhaltnis zur modernen Weltanschauung, translated variously as: ‘Mysticism and Modern Thought,’ ‘Mystics of the Renaissance’ and ‘Eleven European Mystics.’
• 8 . In the first part of Faust, Scene I.

[Ladies and gentlemen!]

Before I move on to my next topic, I would like to take up a few remarks that have been made with regard to the recent lecture and the whole approach in general. I would like to take up two facts of recent spiritual development and show what our task here actually is. I would like to show, if this task is grasped, how from the deepest grasp of the mystical and theosophical content of the most diverse - I am not just saying religious systems, but - world teachings, how from this content emerges the actual consciousness that man has to form in the course of his life. I would therefore like to refer to two events in the lives of important people from the last period of the development of spiritual life who, at a certain moment in their lives, recognized that there is a higher, an upward ascent, that knowledge is not something that can be presented to us once and for all in a certain form, but that it is nothing other than the treading of a path that opens up the perspective towards the eternal.

It must have been a great moment when the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte expressed his consciousness in Jena with strong power and deeply penetrating words at the moment when what is called the actual spiritual layer of consciousness was revealed. This is not understood by the historians of philosophy.

I would like to quote here the words he spoke to his disciples at that time: "That which is called death cannot abort my work; for my work is to be completed, and it cannot be completed in any time, therefore no time is appointed for my existence - and I am eternal. By taking on this great task, I have usurped eternity. I lift my head boldly up to the threatening rocky mountains and to the raging torrent of water and to the striving clouds swimming in a sea of fire, and say: "I am eternal, and I defy your power! All of you come down upon me; and you earth and you sky, mingle in the wild tumult! And all of you elements - froth and rage and in the wild battle, crush the last speck of sunlight from the body that I call mine! My will alone with its firm plan shall hover boldly and coldly above the ruins of the universe; for I have seized my destiny, and it is more permanent than you; it is eternal, and I am eternal, like it."

This is one fact that expresses the effect that is exerted on a person who is imbued with the conviction that he has entered infinity with knowledge, a fact that expresses the influence this has on the personality.

The other refers to Goethe, who came to the same inner effect in a different way, who also realized in a flash that in the phenomena of the world we have a book from which the divine can be read. When he stood before the works of art in Italy, he wrote the following words to his friends: "I have a suspicion that they have proceeded according to the very laws that nature follows and that I am on the trail of. But there is something else that I do not know how to express." "These high works of art, like the highest works of nature, were created by people according to true and natural laws. Everything arbitrary and imaginary collapses, there is necessity, there is God." Goethe became aware of God in Italy in 1787, when he stood before the works of art into which the mysteries of ancient secrets had been revealed.

He also realized that only those who have good will and faith can see the divine. He can only recognize it. For the person who has faith, the moment occurs in his life when the field of our life is illuminated in a flash and he enters the path of the eternal. This assurance, which flows from such facts, must guide us if we want to penetrate into what the religions of all times, but also what the other teachings have contributed at a more or less elementary level and what we must know if we truly want to penetrate into the mystical content and reality of Christianity. If we want to penetrate, we must not take anything away from Christianity.

It is not my job to teach religion, nor is it my job to teach theology. My task is only to expose mystical-theosophical teachings. I could not do that if I were not imbued with it - just as it was with Goethe, where he says that only now do I realize the divine in these works of art, only now do I understand the ancient mysteries - if I were not so convinced that in a certain moment something lights up that makes it possible to recognize the eternal, the divine, then I could not speak in this way.

I started from Johann Gottlieb Fichte's awareness of the eternal in an individual human soul, and I can show you the deeper reason in Christianity in no other way than to trace this awareness in a very old time, in the time of the ancient Egyptian religious teachings, and then to show you how these teachings of the ancient Egyptians shine forth in the teachings of the Essaeans, in order to prove that at the moment when the God-Man appeared to men, there could indeed only be men in such a brotherhood who were sufficiently prepared to understand what was about to take place.

John the Baptist, who probably belonged to the Essaean League, was prepared. This can be seen from the words of his sermon: "Repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Prepare the way for the Lord and make his paths straight. - He answers the question: "Are you Christ? I am not Christ. It is he who is coming after me, who was before me, whom I am not worthy to untie his sandals. There is one coming after me who is stronger than I am.

If these words are to point to what appears in Christianity, then we must first get to know the preconditions that were able to open John's eyes. It is not a matter of following the events of history, but of recognizing the divine ideals.

In religious development, death and resurrection confront us first in the Pauline teachings, and they confront us before we get to know the other content of the teachings historically. We can only understand them if we go back to the teachings that were present in the Egyptian priesthood for thousands of years, to those teachings which in Egyptian mystery life also represent nothing other than the overcoming of life through death, that is, in other words, the possibility of understanding death and life as the greatest symbols of becoming, as those symbols that show precisely the deepest existence, the deepest being in the development of the world.

Through the Egyptian Book of the Dead, we also have the opportunity today to penetrate the teachings of the Egyptian mysteries. We know what ideas the Egyptian priests had about the transition from life to death. But we also know that the Egyptian priests tried to arrange the whole human life of those who wanted to enter the path of knowledge in such a way that such a person embarking on the path of knowledge was prepared for those stages of development which the Egyptian Mystery Teacher demonstrates when the disciple passes through the gate of death. The tests that were required are described to us in ancient documents.

I have come to realize from the study of the Egyptian teachings, as far as they can be traced according to our Western knowledge, that we are dealing with an expression for the deepest secrets of human life, for the same secrets that the Greek Mystery Teachings also had. Indeed, it has become clear to me that they are based on practical mystery exercises, which were also practiced in the Egyptian priestly schools.

What is meant by these tests will become clear to us from individual passages that I would like to read to you. It will show you what kind of confession those people had to make, according to the Egyptian priests, in order to enter the higher worlds, in order to climb the higher levels of existence. We will see what preconditions he must have fulfilled.

But intimately linked to all these Egyptian teachings is an idea of the Egyptian priestly view that man himself comes to where he can then be addressed by the gods with the name of the god who is closest to the god Ra. Man is addressed with the name Osiris. Becoming Osiris is what we are told in ancient Egypt. After man has gone through the trials, after he has practically entered the path and ascended, he becomes similar to the god whom the Egyptians regard as the mediator between the highest god, between Ra himself, the expression of the infinite spirit, and the material, the earthly, the human.

Osiris, the son of the supreme god, had to perish according to Egyptian legend. His body had to perish. The pieces are buried here and there, and he sits at the right hand of God. Man is called to undergo the development that makes him Osiris. At the entrance through the gate of death he has to make the confession that enables him to continue along the path that leads him to Osiris.

I would now like to share a few passages from this confession with you. You will see to what great, powerful views these thousand and thousand-year-old mystery teachings lead. [The person to be initiated] calls upon God in order to receive a share in the higher life. There will be words that would go too far to explain. It only depends on the spirit: "Hail to thee, Harmachis Khepra, who gives himself form! Radiant is your rising on the horizon, illuminating the twofold earth with your rays. All the gods are in joy when they see you, king of heaven, with the serpent on your head, the crown of the south and the crown of the north on your forehead, and they sit down opposite you and work at the front of the barque to destroy all your enemies for you."] The barque is the chariot of the sun god. ["The inhabitants of Tiau go to meet your majesty to see this radiant sign. I come to you, I dwell with you, to see your disk every day. May I not be imprisoned, may I not be cast out. May my limbs be renewed"] and so on. ["Great Light, emerged from the Nun! You sustain the existence of mankind through the stream that emanates from you."] - We will also encounter this current in Christian mysticism. - ["Protect Osiris N. in the divine underworld."] Then the name of the person concerned was mentioned. - ["Let him enter the Amenti, let him conquer evil; stand behind him as patron against his sins; place him among the blessed and the exalted."].

[The title of the important 125th chapter is:] "Chapter, to enter the hall of twofold righteousness and to separate man from his sins, that he may behold the face of the gods". The dead man is then immediately introduced in speech: "Blessed be the God, the Lord of twofold justice! I have come to you, my Lord; I have been brought to the sight of your glory. I know thee, I know the names of the forty-two gods who are with thee in the hall of twofold righteousness, who live in the vigilance of sinners and drink of their blood on this day of the weighing of conduct before the "Good Being" (Osiris). Patron of the beloved twins, his eyeballs, Lord of the twofold justice is your name. Shield me! I come to you, and I bring you justice; I keep away unfairness."

Now he is tested to see whether he really knows the names of the 42 gods. After he has undergone purification, he must describe how he came to know the gods.

Now I will show you how he thanks the gods after they have recognized him as worthy. Invisible powers confront him and put his knowledge to the test before he can enter the bosom of Osiris. He has acquired his mystical knowledge through contemplation under the fig tree. "What did you see?" - On entering, he has to say the names to the beings at the gate: "[Arm of Shu, ready for the umbrella of Osiris], "Children of the serpent is [your name]."

[If the deceased has passed the test, then Thoth speaks: "Step forward, you have passed the test. Brod is for you in the Uzat Eye. Osiris N truly lives forever."]

[Gap in transcript] These are prayers as they were tied to this turning point of man and which were imposed on the one who wanted to go the way. He also had to go through the ceremonies of initiation, and prepare himself through his life to understand the true life essence of these teachings.

After I have shown you the ideas that have prevailed in Egypt for thousands of years, after I have shown you that death and life are only two expressions for one and the same thing, after I have shown you that the god Osiris represents nothing other than the goal that man himself has to strive for, after I have shown you that everyone is called to become an Osiris, and everyone is to be brought onto the path of Osiris, I want to jump off to an idea that is formed in the distant Orient, which will show an inner relationship that will present itself as a kind of continuation, as something that leads this down to the earth itself.

In the Egyptian mystery teachings we find within them the conviction that the one who has actually become similar to Osiris, who has passed the test, has the ability to appear as a god himself on earth, and that he has the ability to appear on earth in such a way that when he takes on human form, he is recognized by the secret knowers as a deity in disguise.

Let us skip back in time and think of that great judgment of the dead that was held between Osiris and Ra, let us visualize it and imagine that within this judgment of the dead it was discussed whether a god should not be sent down to bring people a new teaching, a new view, new concepts, new ideas, whether the means should not be resorted to of sending down a god Osiris and letting him become human.

We encounter such an idea in Indian teachings, which first appeared around the sixth century before our era. It is thus discussed in the bosom of the gods whether an enlightened one, an exalted divine being himself, should not descend among men and be born among them. If we are to express this in the words of the Egyptian sages, then we must say that an Osiris should descend and take on human form, a savior, in other words, or as the wisdom teachings of the Indians say, a true physician, one who is truly experienced in medicine, should descend among men and it should be proclaimed that an enlightened one should be born to a queen, Maja by name. This king shall be named Bhagavad>, the glorious one. He will later be recognized as the Savior, the Buddha. It is said that he will be born in the form of a white elephant. According to the ancient wisdom teachings, this is the form in which God can embody himself. He will be a high-minded king, a king of kings. He will leave the region of light to enter this world out of love for all. He will be honored as king of the three worlds.

This prophecy was to be fulfilled for Gautama of the Siddhartha lineage. Brahma himself gave a drop of dew to the divine entering the earthly realm. Kings and priests appear with gifts before the child. Heavenly hosts appear and declare: "The world is at ease, happiness is established in the universe, a master of wisdom is born." - This is what the Indian tale tells us happened when Buddha was born.

And from another side it was said: This child will become Buddha. He is depicted in the temple at the age of twelve. Here the child smiles and remembers his divinity. It is said of him that a king has been born whose kingdom is not of this world. The twelve-year-old Buddha has gone missing. He is found by his relatives in the forest, where he sits among the singers of ancient times, transported to heavenly regions, and as he interprets the ancient holy books to these old sages, they marvel at his wisdom. The awareness of his calling awakens in him.

I read this passage from the second chapter of the Gospel of Luke, verse 40, and others for the reason that you will see for yourself as you follow these verses. "But the child grew and became strong in spirit, full of wisdom; and the grace of God was with him. And his parents went to Jerusalem every year for the Easter feast. And when he was twelve years old, they went up to Jerusalem according to the custom of the feast. And when the days were fulfilled and they returned home, the child Jesus remained in Jerusalem, and his parents did not know it. But they thought that he was among his companions, so they traveled a day's journey, looking for him among friends and acquaintances. And when they did not find him, they went again to Jerusalem to look for him. And it came to pass, after three days, that they found him sitting in the temple in the midst of the teachers, listening to them and questioning them; and all who listened to him were astonished at his understanding and his answers."

The twenty-nine-year-old Buddha is prompted by the sight of human misery, by the sight of suffering and illness, by the sight of evil on earth, to leave his wife and child to see in solitude what path he must walk; and we hear that on his way through solitude he recruits disciples from among those who have already chosen solitude, and that he then speaks a number of beatitudes. We hear from the mouth of the thirty-year-old Buddha: Blessed are the lonely. Blessed are those who are free from all lust. Blessed are those who rise above the thoughts of their own ego. Truly, this is supreme bliss.

Blessed is the mother, blessed is the father, blessed is the wife, cries the crowd in the street. But he says: Blessed are only those who are in nirvana. On the other hand, the Gospel of Luke, chapter 11, verses 25 to 28: "And when they come in, they dwell there, and afterward it is worse with that man than before. And it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the people lifted up her voice, and said unto him, Blessed is the body that bare thee, and the breasts which thou hast sucked. But he said, "Yes, blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it."

We hear from Buddha that he has recruited five disciples. Bathing by the river, he is celebrated by the sons of the gods. He goes under the fig tree. Here he is then [granted] enlightenment, the mystical knowledge that is attained through contemplation.

John 1:45-48: "Philip finds Nathanael and says to him, "We have found him of whom Moses in the law and the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph of Nazareth. And Nathanael said to him, "What good can come from Nazareth? Philip said to him, 'Come and see. Jesus saw Nathanael coming to him and said to him, "Behold, a true Israelite, in whom is no guile. Nathanael says to him, 'How do you know me? ' Jesus answered and said to him, 'Before Philip called you, while you were under the fig tree, I saw you.

The tempter "Mara" approaches Buddha and invites him to worship him by promising him a kingdom. - I do not desire a worldly kingdom, Buddha replies. Mara's daughter appears. Buddha approaches her with the holy books of the Indians. When Mara saw that Buddha confronted him with divine wisdom, he said: My wisdom is gone.

Mark 1:12-14: "And immediately the spirit drove him into the desert. And he was there in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan and being with the beasts, and the angels ministered to him. And after John was delivered up, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God."

Now he recruits disciples. Two brothers are his first disciples, one of whom is one of the most important. - Let us compare John 1, verses 45 to 48 - Five more disciples are now to be found on his teaching tours. - In the first Buddha biography we hear of twelve disciples and his favorite disciple Ananda.

We also hear from the Buddha biography that the Buddha used parables to make the talks understandable, that he expressed all his teachings in such parable speeches. [...] The rain pours down on the righteous and the unrighteous. The Brahmin who does not have enlightenment is like a blind man. He can only be a teacher for the blind.

This includes the words of Matthew 15:12-14: "Then his disciples came to him and said: Knowest thou also that the Pharisees were offended when they heard the word? But he answered and said, "Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be rooted up. Let them go. They are blind leaders of the blind. But if one blind man leads another, they will both fall into the pit."

[Stenographer's note:] A few more Buddha words.

The Buddha's favorite disciple did not want to let a despised girl approach him when she wanted to approach the Buddha. So he replied in the presence of his favorite disciple: "I am not asking about your caste, not about your family, my sister."

Compare this with the passage in John 4:1-7: "Now when the Lord knew that Jesus had come before the Pharisees, making and baptizing more disciples than John (although Jesus himself did not baptize, but his disciples did), he left the land of Judea and went back to Galilee. But he had to travel through Samaria. There he came to a town of Samaria called Shechar, near the field that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Now Jacob's well was there. So Jesus, tired from his journey, sat down at the well; and it was about the sixth hour. A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, "Give me a drink."

Far from there, Buddha sends out his disciples with words that come to us like a kind of Pentecostal sermon within the Buddhist teachings. Buddha himself speaks to his disciples: Each shepherd should speak in his own language. Do not deliver the teaching to scorners and mockers and not to those who are intoxicated with desire.

And Matthew 7, verse 6: "Do not give the sanctuary to the dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet and turn and tear you apart."

Now [Buddha] says in one of his last teachings that he will be with his disciples as long as they spread his teaching. He will be invisibly present to them. The corresponding passages are in Matthew and John.

He prophesies that one will come after him in heavenly glory. And the evil one and his kingdom will then be completely overcome.

We hear that they were united after the Buddha had returned to the divine, after he himself had seen his death approaching and had withdrawn into solitude.

From his wisdom his body became a shining body.

At his death a meteor fell, the earth was on fire, a thunder shook the world. He had descended to hell to comfort those in it. This is a kind of continuation of what the ancient Egyptians have in their passage from life to death.

I had to preface all of this before I can continue. I can't even quite make it clear why I had to make it all clear because the time is already too advanced. I had to show what context was present in the wisdom teachings and religious ideas centuries before our era. I had to show what was positive in them. This way of looking at things will lead us to truly understand what happened at the turn of our era.

[Answer to question:]

[The book "Buddha and Christ"] by Rudolf Seydel is very good, but historical. It brings together essential moments, but doesn't know what to do with them. - There is also a very good book by [Oldenberg].

Today I should like to start by giving a kind of sketch of the human soul, as this human soul stands in relation to the world and to itself. I should like to give this sketch in such a way that it can be said: we are looking at the profile of man as a soul being. So that we understand ourselves just as if we were to look at the physical man—not the soul-being (see Head in diagram 1)—not perhaps seeing him full-face but, let us say, from the right in profile. Let us observe him thus. If we try to sketch in outline anything like this we must naturally always keep in mind that we have to do with imaginative knowledge, that the reality behind the matter therefore is being given in picture form. The picture refers to the matter and is given, too, in such a way that it correctly indicates the matter. Naturally, however, we may not have the same idea of a drawing, a sketch, meant to represent something of a soul and spirit nature as we do of anything that in a naturalistic way is copied from an external perceptible reality. One must be conscious all the time of what I am now saying. I shall therefore omit all that concerns the physical and lower etheric organism of man and try to sketch only what is soul—soul-and-spirit (see diagram 2). As you know from the various descriptions that have been given, the soul-and-spirit stands in a more direct connection with the world of soul-and-spirit than physical man stands in connection with his physical environment. Towards his physical perceptible environment physical man is rather an isolated being; one might even say that physical man of the senses is really shut up within his actual skin.

It is not so where what can be called the men of soul-and-spirit is concerned. There we have to think of a continual crossing of the currents pulsating in the inner depths of man's soul-and-spirit—of all the movements and currents existing in the general, universal world of soul-and-spirit.

If I want first of all to describe from the one side the kind of relation the human soul-and-spirit has to what is of soul-and-spirit in the cosmic environment, I should have perhaps to do it in this way. I should, first of all, have to paint what enters in a soul-spiritual way from the universal, from the infinity of space, like this. Naturally I should have to paint the whole space in a way... but that is not really necessary. I shall only paint man's immediate environment. Thus it is now what we may understand as the surrounding world. (see blue in diagram 2).

Now imagine in this picture form of the soul-spiritual that into which man is placed. Man indeed is not yet there, but indicated in this blue is only the edge of the environment. Imagine this like a surging blue sea filling space. (When I say ‘blue’ sea this must naturally be taken as I have often described it in books available to you, namely, colours are to be grasped in the description of the aura, of the soul-spiritual.) Borne like a wave, swimming, I might say, or hovering, so nothing else is borne up which is of soul-and-spirit. This is what I should now have to represent perhaps in the following way.

Thus, if we pass from the cosmic environment to man, we may be able to think of ourselves and what belongs to the human spirit-and-soul as perhaps hovering in this red.

There we should have first of all part of the soul-spiritual; and if we would make the sketch in accordance with reality it is only the upper part we should have to give in a kind of violet, in lilac graduating into red. This could only be given correctly by toning down the red into violet.

Thus, you see, with this I have given you first what might be called the one pole of man's spirit-and-soul nature. We get the other pole when we can perhaps incorporate in the following way what, adjoining the universal soul-spiritual here, is swimming and hovering towards the human physical face: yellow, green, orange; green running into the blue.

Here you get from the right side what I might call the side view of the normal aura of man. I say expressly a normal aura seen from the right side. What is presented to the view in this figure shows how man is placed into his environment of soul-and-spirit. But t also describes where man, the soul-and-spirit in man, stands in relation to itself. When everything represented by this figure is studied, it can clearly be seen how man is a being bounded an two sides. These two sides where man has his limits are always observed in life; but they are not indicated correctly nor considered in the right way—at least they are not understood. You know how in external science it is said that when man observes the world, when with his science he wishes to gain knowledge of the world, he comes to definite limits. We have often spoken of these limits, of the famous ignorabimus (“we shall never know”) which holds good with scientists and many philosophers. It is said that man comes indeed to certain limits in his cognition, in his conception, of the external world. I have certainly already quoted to you du Bois-Reymond's famous statement that in his seventieth year he made to the Scientific Congress in Leipzig; Human cognition will never penetrate into the regions haunted by matter—this is roughly what he said at the time. Perhaps the more correct way of speaking about the limits to human knowledge would be the following. In observing the world it is necessary for man to hold fast certain concepts which he penetrates neither with his scientific cognition nor with his ordinary philosophical cognition, we need only consider such concepts as that of the atom. The atom, however naturally has meaning only when we cannot actually speak of it, when we cannot say what it is. For the moment we were to begin describing the atom, it would no—longer be an atom. It is simply something unapproachable. And it is thus already matter, actual substance. Certain concepts have to be maintained that can never be approached. It is the same with knowledge of the external world; inaccessible concepts like matter, force and so on, must be maintained. That they should have to be maintained, depends here simply upon the inner light of man's soul-and-spirit stretching out into the darkness. What is stated to be the limit of knowledge can, I might say, actually be seen clearly in the aura.

Here lies a boundary in front of man. His being, what he himself is, is here represented in the aura by what I nave made run from bright green into blue violet (see diagram 2). But by passing over into blue-violet it leaves off being man and becomes the encircling cosmos. There with his being, which is the inner force of his world outlook, man comes to a boundary; there in a sense he reaches nothingness and he has to hold fast to concepts having no content—concepts such as matter, atom, substance, force. This lies in the human organization, it lies in man's connection with the whole cosmos. Man's connection with the whole cosmos actually stands out in front of him. If we describe this boundary in accordance with the ideas of spiritual science, we can do so by saying (diagram 3): this boundary allows man with his soul to come into contact with the universe. If we indicate the direction of the universe in one loop of a lemniscate we can with the other loop show what belongs to man, only what proceeds from man goes out into the universe, into the infinite.

Therefore we must make the line of the loop, the lemniscate, open on one side, closed on the other, and draw it like this—here the line of the loop is closed and here it goes out into infinity. It is the same line that I drew there, only here the arm goes out at this end into infinity (see diagram 4 of lemniscate open to the outside). What I have here drawn as an open lemniscate, as an open loop, is not just something thought out, but something you can actually look upon as flashing in and out of a gentle, very slow movement as the expression of man's relation to the universe. The currents of the universe continually approach man; he draws them towards him, they become intermingled in his vicinity and proceed outward again. Thus this kind of thing streams towards man, interweaves and then goes out again; man is permeated by these currents belonging to the universe, which stop short in front of him.

As you may imagine, through this man is surrounded by a kind of wave-like aura; these currents enter from the universe, form a whirlpool here, and by making this whirlpool in front of him, as it were, salute man. So that here he is surrounded by a kind of auric stream.

This is essentially an expression of man's relation to the cosmos, to the surrounding world of soul-and-spirit. You can, however, find all that you actually experience as lying in your consciousness represented here as a mixture of blue, green and yellow running into orange towards the inside. But that pushes up against here; within the soul part of man this yellow-orange collides with what waves on the blue sea as the soul-and-spirit of the lower man, of the man below. What I have shown here in red passing into orange, belongs to the subconscious part of man, and corresponds to those processes in the physical that take place principally in the activity of the digestion and so forth, where consciousness plays no part. What is connected with the consciousness would be described, where the aura is concerned, in the bright parts that I have applied here. (see diagram 2)

Just as here the soul-spiritual of man meets the soul-spiritual of the surrounding world, so what is within man as his soul and spirit meets his subconscious—that actually also belongs to the universe. I shall have to draw this meeting of the currents so that one of the streams goes out into the infinite; within man I must draw this meeting differently. Here I must also draw a loop line but this must be done so that it runs towards the inside. Now please notice that I am keeping entirely to a looped line but I take the under loop and turn it around so that it goes thus (diagram 6).

Thus, I turn the lower loop around. In contrast to the above diagram 5, where I have made one loop run out to infinity, widen out into the infinite, I now turn back the lower loop; with this I have shown diagrammatically the obstacles, dams, that arise where the spirit and soul here in the inside enter the subconscious spirit-and-soul and therefore also that of the cosmos.

I must therefore describe these obstacles if I draw them as corresponding to what arises in man, in the following way; seven lemniscates with turned back loops—those are the obstacles that correspond to an inner wave in man (diagram 7). If you wish actually to follow up this inner wave, its main direction—but only its main direction—would perhaps take the course of running along beside the junction of man's wrongly named but so-called sensory and motor nerves. This is only said by the way for today I am going to describe the matter chiefly in its soul-spiritual aspect.

By this you can see the strong contrast existing in man's relation to the spirit and soul environment and to himself, namely, to that bit he takes in out of the spirit-soul environment as his subconscious, and what I have had to sketch as the red wave swimming on the universal blue sea of the spirit-soul universe.

We said that this wave here (see right of diagram 2) corresponds to the barrier against which man pushes if he wishes to know about the external world. But there is a limit here too (see left of diagram 2); within men himself there is a barrier. Did this limit, this barrier, not exist you would always be looking down into what is within you, my dear friends. Everyone would look within himself. In the same way that man would look into the external world were the barrier (on the right) not there, if the boundary on the left were not present he would look into himself. If man looked into himself in this present cycle of evolution this would indeed give him little joy, because what he would see there would be a most imperfect, chaotic seething upheaval in man's inner nature—something that certainly could not arouse joy in him. It is, however, that into which imaginative mystics believe they are able to link when they speak of the mysticism that is full of fantasy. All that the mystics of fantasy very largely look upon as a goal worthy of their striving, what, particularly in the case of many such mystics who really believe that in looking within themselves they are able to learn about the universe, what figures with them as mysticism—all that is concealed, entirely concealed, from men by just this dam.¹

Man cannot look into himself. what is formed inside this region (left) is dammed up and reflected, it can t be reflected back into itself; and the expression of this, reflection is memory—remembrance. Every time a thought or an impression that you have received comes back in memory it does so because this damming process begins to work. If you had not this stemming wave, every impression received from outside, every thought you grasp and which permeates you, would be unable to remain with you and would go out into the rest of the soul-spiritual universe. It is only because you have this obstructing wave that you can preserve the impressions you receive.

Through certain processes still to be described you are in a position to call back your impressions. And this is expressed in the functioning of recollection, of memory. You can therefore picture to yourself that you have in you something that here in this diagram is drawn in profile (for so it is drawn; there is in you just such a flat surface); There we find thrown back what should not penetrate. When you are awake you remain united with the external world, otherwise in the waking condition everything would go through you. You would actually know nothing of impressions; you would nave impressions but be unable to keep them.

This is what memory signifies. And the surface of this dam that brings about our memory conceals what the imaginative mystic would like to look at, within himself. One could say of what is underneath that for those who really know these things, the saying holds good that man should never be curious to see what the beneficent Godhead has covered with night and obscurity, but the mystics are fantastic and wish to look down into it. All the same, they cannot do so, however, for they would so bore into and destroy the normal consciousness that the waves of memory would not be thrown back. All that produces our memory, all that is so necessary for external life, conceals from us what the fantastic mystic would like to see but men should not look upon. Beneath recollection, beneath what causes recollection, beneath the surface of recollection, lies an essential part of man. Just like the back of a mirror, the mercury being a mirror, what is in front, what is thus in your consciousness works; it does not go inside but is thrown back and is therefore able to continue there as memory. In this way our whole life is reflected as a memory. And what we call the life of our ego is essentially reflection in memory.

Thus you see that we actually live our conscious life between this wave (right of Diagram 2) and this other wave (left). We should be mere funnels, therefore, letting everything flow through us; had we not this dam as the basis of memory, and we should see into the secrets beyond our boundary of knowledge were we not obliged to place ourselves outside the sphere of perceptible concepts for which we have no content. We should be funnels were we not so organised that we could not produce this dam, organised so that we should not be obliged to set up before us concepts as it were without a content, obscure concepts, we should become loveless beings, empty of love, with dry, stony natures. Nothing, in the world would please us and we should be so many Mephistopheles. Because we are organised so that we are unable to approach what is of soul-and-spirit in our environment with our abstract concepts, with our intellectual powers—to this we owe our capacity to love. For we are not meant to approach what we should love by analysing it in the ordinary sense of the term, nor by tearing it to pieces and treating it as chemicals are treated by the chemist in a laboratory. We do not love when we analyse like a chemist or synthesise chemically. The power of memory, the capacity to love—these are two capacities that correspond at the same time to two boundaries of human nature. The boundary towards within, corresponds to the power of memory; what lies beyond the memory zone is the subconscious within man. The other zone corresponds to the power of love, and whet lies beyond this zone corresponds to what is of the nature of soul-and-spirit in the universe. The unconscious part of man's nature lies beyond this zone as far as what is within man reaches; the soul-spiritual of the universe goes out boundlessly from the other zone into the wide space.

We can therefore speak of the zone of love and the zone of memory and can include man's soul-and-spirit in these zones. We must however seek beyond the one zone above (see right of diagram 2) whet is unconscious, and because it remains unconscious is on that account very closely connected with the bodily nature of man, with his bodily organisation. Naturally things are not in reality so simple as they must be in any representation, because everything is interwoven. What is red here (diagram 2) runs into things and is changed; again, what is green and blue is also changed. Actually, things all intermix with one another: in spite of this, however, the sketch is correct in the main and corresponds with the facts.

But from this we see that for physical life here on earth the spiritual is both strong and conscious. Here (left) the spiritual that actually merges into the universe is unconscious. These two parts of man are very clearly differentiated. The spiritual here (in the middle) is for this reason above all for earthly life a very finely woven spiritual element. Everything here (yellow) is what might be called finely woven light. Were I obliged to show where this finely woven light is in man, I should have to go to what I have been so minutely describing—the human head.

What I have thus described, what I have sketched in yellow, yellow-green, yellow-orange, on the other side, is what I might cell the finely woven spirit light. This has no very strong connection with earthly matter; it has as little connection with earthly matter as is possible. And because it has so little connection it cannot well unite with matter, and thus, for the greater part, remains unconnected with it; to this part matter is given that actually always comes from time to time from man's previous incarnation, and there is but a loose connection between this finely woven soul-spiritual element and what belongs to the body, what has actually been held together out of the foregoing incarnation. Your physiognomy, in its arrangement and characteristics, you carry over, my dear friends, from your previous incarnation. And those who are thoroughly able to explain man actually look through the physiognomy of the head; not through what has its origin in the luciferic within men, but more through the manner in which he adapts himself to the universe.

The physiognomy must be looked upon as though it were stamped into man, not to the extent of being the product of this stamping, but rather one has to see in it the negative of the soul; it is this that is seen in the negative of the face. If you were to make an impression of any face you would actually see there the physiognomy that relentlessly betrays what has been made of the last incarnation. On the other hand, all that I have sketched down there as being only connected with the surging sea of the world of soul and spirit, all that is to be understood as corresponding to man's subconscious or unconscious, is closely related to the bodily nature; it permeates the bodily nature. The bodily nature is united with the spiritual in such a way that the spiritual is wholly incapable of appearing as such.

For this reason were we to look down we should see this seething and merging of the spiritual and the bodily behind the threshold of memory. It is this that pares the head of the next incarnation and seeks to transform what will take definite material form only in the future and will not become head until the next incarnation. For man's head is something that outstrips his stage of development. The head in its development therefore—as you may remember from lectures previously held here—has actually come to an end by man's twenty-seventh, twenty-eighth year. (See NSL 122-123 Historical Necessity and Free Will and R-LII Ancient Myths and Their Meaning). In the form of the head there is already our development of man.

But, strange as it may seem, the rest of man is also a head only it is not so far advanced as the other head. If you picture to yourself a decapitated man, what remains is another head but at a more primitive stage. When further developed it become head, whereas what you have as the human head is the rest of the organism of a previous incarnation. If you picture what in your present organism is discarnated, free of the body, if you think away the head of your present organism, the organism that will become head in the next incarnation (and this organism is but an image, everything physical being an image of something spiritual), if you imagine the spiritual element of what in its external form has not yet appeared in man, then you see this in the Group in our luciferic figure—there you have it!

Now imagine compressed into the human head all the soul-spiritual that is merged into man, and held back in you from the head, all that forms a barrier, that is to say, which man cannot penetrate (see right in diagram 2); then man will not have the old dignified head that he ordinarily has; he will have a bony head, and will be altogether bony, like the figure of Ahriman in our Group. (see Der Baugedanke des Goetheanum.)

What I have here been explaining to you has not only great significance for understanding man, but also great significance for understanding what is going on spiritually in mankind's evolution. If we have not a fundamental comprehension of these things we shall never understand how Christianity and the Christ-impulse have entered human evolution. Neither shall we understand what part is played by the Catholic Church, what part is played by the Jesuits and similar currents, what functions belong to the East, what to the West, if all this cannot be considered in connection with these things.

I shall take upon myself to tell you something of these currents tomorrow, currents such as those of East and West, Jesuitism, and the tendency to put everything into terms of mathematics, which really can only be rightly understood if we take into consideration what lies at the basis of soul-spiritual man.

• 1. Mysterien Wahrheiten und Weihnachtsimpulse. 6 Lectures 24-31, December 1917. (Mystery Truths and the Christmas Impulse), 4 lectures in Magazine, 24-29)