The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Last time we sketched out a mental picture of the moment indicated by those meaningful words of the Bible: And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. They allude to an event which we can see as the recapitulation at a higher level of an earlier stage of evolution. I must keep on using the illustration of the man who on awakening calls up in his mind a certain content; it is in some such way that what had slowly and gradually been built up during the course of the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions springs to life again from the soul of the Elohim in a new form, a modified form. In fact all that is narrated in the Bible of the six or seven “days” of creation is a reawakening of previous conditions, not in the same but in a new form.

The next question which we have to ask ourselves is this—what kind of reality are we to attribute to the account of what happened in the course of these six or seven “days?” It will be clearer if we put the question in this way. Could an ordinary eye, in fact could any organs of sense such as we have today have followed what we are told took place during the six days of creation? No, they could not. For the events there described really took place in the sphere of elementary existence, so that a certain degree of clairvoyant knowledge, clairvoyant perception, would have been needed for their observation. The truth is that the Bible tells us of the origin of the sensible out of the super-sensible, and that the events with which it opens are super-sensible events, even if they are only one stage higher than the ordinary physical events which proceeded from them and are familiar to us. In all our descriptions of the six days' work of creation we are in the domain of clairvoyant perception. What had existed at an earlier time now came forth in etheric, in elementary form. We must get a firm grasp of that, otherwise we shall be all at sea over the true meaning of the impressive words of Genesis. Thus we must expect to see all that had gradually evolved during the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions emerging in a new form.

Let us begin by asking ourselves what were the special characteristics of each of these three planetary forms? On Saturn everything was in a kind of mineral condition—you can read about it in my Occult Science. What was there as the first rudiment of man, which really constituted the whole substance of Saturn, was in a kind of mineral form. But in saying this we must not think of the mineral of today, for Saturn had nothing in it either of liquid or of solid; Saturn was nothing but interweaving warmth. But the laws which prevailed in this planet of warmth, and which brought about and organised the complicated differentiations within it, were the very same laws which obtain today in the solid mineral kingdom. So that when we say that both Saturn and man himself were in a “mineral” condition we must remember that it was not the mineral of today, but a state of inweaving warmth governed by mineral laws.

Then comes the Sun condition of the planet. Here we must never forget that there was as yet no separation of the part which later became the earth. What today has become sun and earth was then a common body, a single cosmic body. In contrast to the earlier Saturn, a denser, gaseous element developed in the Sun, so that in addition to the interweaving warmth we have a transfluent gaseous or airy element, setting hither and thither in accordance with its own laws. But at the same time we have a new formation in the ascending mode, a kind of rarefaction of warmth towards the luminous, a radiation of light into space. Our planetary evolution, as I have called it, advanced during the Sun period to the stage of the plant. Again we must not imagine that there were plants on the old Sun in their present form; it is only that the same laws were at work there in the elements of warmth and air as rule in the plant kingdom today, those laws which determine that the root shall grow downward and the blossom upward. Obviously there could be no solid plants; one must think of the forces which send blossoms up and roots down, weaving in an airy structure, so that the Sun flashes forth blossoms of light in an upward direction. Imagine a gaseous sphere, and within it weaving and sprouting light, living light, which causes the gaseous vapour to shoot and sparkle in radiant blossoms, while at the same time below there is an effort to check these luminous outbursts, an effort to make the Sun cohere round its centre. Then you have the inweaving of light, warmth and air in the ancient Sun evolution. The laws of the mineral kingdom are repeated and the laws of the plant world are added, and so much of man as is already there has itself only reached a plantlike condition.

Where today should we find anything in the least comparable to that plantlike weaving in the air-warmth-light sphere of the Sun? With the senses of today we should search the whole of cosmic space in vain. At a certain period of the Sun evolution these conditions did obtain, even physically—that is to say, physically to the density of air. Today they cannot exist physically at all. The form of activity which at that time actually existed in the physical mode can only be found today by directing a faculty of clairvoyant perception towards that region of the super-sensible world where are the spiritual Beings who lie behind our external physical plants, those Beings whom we have learnt to know as the group-souls of the plants. Today they can only be found by clairvoyant consciousness in spiritual realms. The group-souls of the plants do not subsist in individual plants, such as we see growing out of the soil, but there is one group-soul for each species of plant, such as the rose, the violet, the oak, and so on. For the poverty-stricken, abstract thinking of today, plant species are just abstractions, notions. They were already so in the Middle Ages; and it was because at that time men no longer knew anything of what weaves and activates in the spiritual as the basis of the physical, that there arose the well-known conflict between realism and nominalism—the dispute as to whether species were merely names, or whether they were real spiritual entities. For clairvoyant consciousness there is no sense whatever in this dispute, for when it directs its attention towards the plant-covering of our earth, it pierces through the outer forms to the spirit region where the group-souls of the plants actually live as real Beings. And these group-souls are one and the same reality as what we call species. At the time when the air, warmth and light sphere of the Sun was in its full splendour, when light, playing in the surface of the airy globe, threw off the sparkling blossoms of plant existence, these physically gaseous forms were actually the same as the plant species which can still be found today, though only in spiritual realms. Let us hold firmly in mind, then, that the plant “species” which cover our earth today with foliage and blossom, with trees and shrubs, pervaded the Sun actually as group-souls or species.

So far as man had evolved at that time, he too was to be found in a plantlike condition. He was unable to awaken mental images within himself, unable to awaken in consciousness what went on around him, any more than the plants today can do so. Man was himself living a plant existence, and his bodily form was among those light forms in continuous play in the gaseous globe. The emergence in the cosmos of even the most primitive forms of consciousness involves very special concomitant conditions. So long as our terrestrial substance was still united with the solar substance, so long as the sunlight did not fall upon the terrestrial globe from without, nothing of what we term consciousness could develop in it; nor could an astral body, which is the basis of consciousness, penetrate the physical and etheric bodies. For consciousness to arise, a separation or fission had to take place, something had to be split off from the Sun. And that happened during the third stage of our earth's evolution, during the Moon epoch. After the Sun condition came to an end, and had passed through a kind of cosmic night, the whole formation appeared again; but now it had become sufficiently mature to manifest as a duality, sufficiently mature for all the Sun elements in it to withdraw into a separate cosmic body, leaving behind the Moon, upon which the elementary conditions of only water, air and warmth were to be found. The Moon was the earth of that time, and it was only because the beings living upon it could receive the forces of the sun from without that they could take into themselves astral bodies and so develop consciousness, reflect in inner experience what went on around them. An animal nature, an inwardly living animal nature, a nature capable of consciousness, is dependent for its existence upon separation between sun and earth elements. The animal nature first appeared during the Moon evolution, and man himself—the body of man—was then developed to the animal stage. You will find this more closely described in my Occult Science. Thus we see that the three epochs which precede that of our own earth, and condition it, are linked together by certain laws. And on the Moon a fluid element is added to the gaseous—a watery element on the one hand, and an element of sound on the other, such as I described yesterday when speaking of the rarefaction of light. That is a very summary account of the course of evolution.

Now what had taken place during these three epochs emerged again in the recollection of the Elohim—at first, as I said yesterday, in a state of confusion which is described in the Bible by the words tohu wabohu. The stream of forces which moved from the centre to the periphery and from the periphery back again to the centre at first embraced the interactivity of all three elementary conditions—air, warmth and water. These three elements were now undifferentiated, though previously the gaseous and the warmth elements on the Sun, and the three forms, warmth, gas and water, on the Moon, had been distinct from one another. Now, during the tohu wabohu, they were all in motley confusion, gushing into and out of one another, so that in the early stages of earth development it was impossible to distinguish between what was watery, what was gaseous, what was warmth. They were all mixed up.

The first thing which then happened was that the element of light broke into all this; and out of the psychic or spiritual activity which I have described as cosmic musing there then came to pass a separation of gaseous from fluid. I will ask you to hold very clearly in your minds this moment which followed the coming into being of light. In dry prose, what happened was this: after the light had penetrated into the tohu wabohu, the Elohim caused what had once before in the past been the gaseous element to separate from what in the same way had been the watery element, so that it was again possible to differentiate between the gaseous and the watery. Thus in the chaotic mass compounded of the three elementary states, a separation came about, but in such a way that elements of two different natures emerged—one of the nature of air, with a tendency to expand in all directions, the other of the nature of water, with the tendency to cohere. But the two were not yet in a condition comparable to the air or water of today. The “water” was very much denser—we shall presently see why this was so. On the other hand, to get an idea of the constitution of “air” at that time, we cannot do better than look up from the earth to where, in the region of air, the water turns to vaporous formations, and has the tendency to rise into clouds, only to fall again later as rain. Thus the one element was an ascending, the other a descending one. There was a quality of water in both of them, but the one kind of water had the tendency to become vaporous, to rise upward as cloud, and the other the tendency to pour downward and assume a level surface. Of course, that is only a comparison, for what I have been describing took place in the elementary world

Through their cosmic musing the Elohim brought it about that a separation took place in the tohu wabohu between two elementary conditions. The one had the tendency to press upward, to become vapour; that is, the watery transforming itself to the gaseous; the other had the tendency to discharge itself downward; that is, the watery condensing and cohering. That is the course of events which is expressed in modern languages in words somewhat like this: “The Gods made a something between the waters above and the waters below.” I have just described to you what the Elohim did. Within the “waters” they brought it about that one element had the tendency to spread outwards, to expand, the other to contract towards a centre. The something between is nothing tangible, it is just a way of saying that a separation has been brought about between the two forms of energy which I have just described. You could also put it this way, that the Elohim so acted on the waters that on the one side they took an upward direction, showed a tendency to cloud-formation, a tendency to stream out into space; on the other side they showed a tendency to accumulate upon the surface of the earth. The “partition” was really more like a notional one, and the word in Genesis which expresses this process of separation must be so understood. You know that the Vulgate uses the word “firmament”¹ for this. The Hebrew word is rakia. This word means something which should not be interpreted in a phenomenal sense—it simply means the separation of two directions of force.

With that we have reached what is described in Genesis as the second “day”; and if we want to put it into our own words, we should have to say, “within the vortex of elementary states the Elohim first separated the airy from the fluid nature.” That is a quite exact rendering of what is meant; the Elohim separated what tends to become air, which of course includes watery vapour, from what tends to contract and become denser. That is the second “day” of creation.

We go on to the next “day”! What happens now? What has been sent outwards, what radiates out and tends to form clouds, has reached a stage which in a certain way is a recapitulation of an earlier condition; it is a repetition in a denser form of what took place on the Sun. That which has a tendency to contract, which in a way repeats the condensation to water on the Moon, is now further differentiated, and this further separation constitutes what comes to pass on the third “day” of creation. We may say that on the second “day” the Elohim separated the airy from the watery. In the same way on the third “day” they separate, within the watery element, what we today know as water, from something which had not been there before, something which was a further densification—the solid element. It is only now that the solid comes into existence. During the Moon evolution this solid, earth element was not in existence. Now it is precipitated out of the watery element. Thus on the third “day” of creation we have a process of condensation, and we have to say that, as the Elohim on the second “day” separated out the airy element from the watery, so now on the third “day” within what was in effect the Moon-substance, they separate off a new watery element from the earth element, which now emerges as something completely new. Everything which I have hitherto described had already existed before, though in another form. The first thing which is entirely new is the earth element, the solid, which appears now on the third “day.” This earth element, separated out from the water, this is the new arrival. But this also makes it possible for what was already there to assume a new form.

What is it which now first begins to form? It is something which had already taken shape on the Sun, it is what we have described as the sprouting plant nature in the tenuous airy element of the Sun—which had then reappeared on the Moon in the watery element—though of course there were still no plants in the sense of today. And it is only on the third “day” that there is a recapitulation of this in the earth element. What is first repeated in the earth element as the plant nature is wonderfully described in the Bible. I will deal later with the question of how we should understand the “day” of creation; for the moment I am concerned with the irruption of light and of air from without, of the separation of water from solid. The solid now brings forth a recapitulation of the plant nature out of itself. That is very clearly described in the Bible, when it says that after the Elohim had separated the earth from the water, the plant life springs forth from the earth. Thus the sprouting of plant life on the third “day” of creation is a recapitulation in the solid element of what had already existed during the Sun evolution; it is as it were a cosmic memory. In the cosmic musing of the Elohim there arose the plant life which had been present on the Sun in gaseous form, but which emerges now in the solid state.

Everything repeats itself in a new form. The plant life is still in a state which is not individualised as on our earth today. I have expressly called attention to the fact that separate plants such as we see around us in the sense-world today were not to be found on the Sun, nor on the Moon, nor even on the earth at the moment when the plant nature emerges again in the earth element. What were there were the group-souls of the plants, what we today call the species, which to clairvoyant consciousness were no abstractions, but something actually present in the spirit realm. At that time there was a re-emergence in a super-sensible realm of what we call plant species. And that is what the Bible says. It is strange how little Biblical commentators are able to make of the words And the earth brought forth grass and herb yielding seed after his kind. One ought to say, instead of after his kind, “in the mode of species.” What it means is that the plant nature was there in the form of group-souls, in the form of species; there were no individual plants such as there are today. You will not understand the description of the springing-up of plant life on the third “day” of creation unless you think of the group-soul nature. You must clearly understand that no plants, as we understand the term today, sprang up at that time, but that out of a psychic activity, out of a cosmic, musing activity, sprouted species, in other words the group-souls of the plant kingdom.

Thus, when on the third “day” of creation we are told that the Elohim separated out from the fluid the solid, the fourth elementary condition, we find that in this “solid” state—which of course in its original elementary form would not yet have been visible to an external eye, but only to clairvoyant sight—there was a reappearance of the forms of the plant species.

This was not yet possible as regards the animal nature. We have already described how the animal nature made its first appearance during the Moon evolution, after a duality had come into being, after the sun had begun to operate from without. Hence a repetition of this event (the separation of the moon) had to take place before evolution could advance from the plant to the animal nature. Therefore after the third “day” it is pointed out how in the environment of the earth the sun, moon and stars now come into activity; how there begins to take effect something which radiates from without, which sends in its forces from without. Whereas hitherto we have seen the effect of a sprouting activity within the planet itself, now, in addition to this, we see something which comes from the heavenly spaces, radiating inwards. In other words, in addition to the forces of the earth itself, which could only recapitulate what it had produced as a unitary body at an earlier stage, the Elohim in their cosmic musing brought into action the forces which streamed down upon the planet from outer space. Cosmic existence was added to earthly existence. To begin with, let us see nothing but this in what is described as taking place on the fourth “day.” What was the result of this irradiation from without? It enabled processes to be recapitulated—though in a different form—which were already to be found in the Moon evolution. During the Moon evolution there had developed as much of an animal nature as could live in the elements of air and water. It was only now that this could reappear. Therefore Genesis tells us, in wonderful accord with the facts, how on the fifth “day” of creation the teeming multitude in air and water comes into existence. It describes a recapitulation of the Moon epoch, now in a new form, at a higher level, in the earth element.

My dear friends, at the contemplation of such things this ancient record fills us with awe; it is wholly in the spirit of our anthroposophical outlook that we are able to feel the deepest reverence for it. What is experienced by clairvoyant consciousness is recorded in this document in impressive words, in words full of power; we find there again what we already know—that after the irradiation from without had taken place, a recapitulation became possible of what had existed in the airy and the watery elements of the Moon evolution. In the light of such a soul-stirring discovery how can we attach any importance to intellectual criticisms of these things? What nonsense it makes of the argument that this document was written in primitive times, when human knowledge was still at a very childish level! A fine “childish level,” when we rediscover in it the highest knowledge to which we can raise ourselves! Must we not ascribe to those who have handed down to us this ancient record the same spirituality which alone today enables us to rise to this revelation? Does not this document, bequeathed to us by those ancient seers, bear witness for them? The content of this record itself testifies that its writers were inspired. Truly we need no historical proof, the words furnish their own proof.

When we understand the matter in this way we realise that it was only after the fifth “day” of creation that anything new could happen. For all the necessary recapitulation had now taken place. Now the earth itself, which had emerged as a new element, could be populated with animal life, and with whatever might develop as new formation. Hence we find described in impressive detail how creatures appeared on the sixth “day” whose existence was bound up with the new element of earth. Up to the fifth “day” we have a recapitulation at a higher stage in a new form of what had gone before, but on the sixth “day” the earth-nature comes into its own for the first time, and something is added which has only been made possible by the earth conditions.

I have now given you an outline of the six “days” of creation. I have shown you how those who shrouded their deep wisdom in this narrative must have been fully conscious of what was emerging as new. Further, they must have been fully aware that it was only within this earth element that what constituted the very core of man's being could enter in. We know that all that man went through during the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions amounted to preparatory stages for the real human incarnation. We know that during the Saturn period the first rudiments of a physical body had been laid down in man; during the Sun evolution the rudiments of an etheric or life body were added; during the Moon evolution the rudiments of an astral body. What was recapitulated up to the end of the fifth day contained an element of astrality. Everything which has being has astrality. To infuse the ego, the fourth member of human nature, into a being in this whole evolutionary complex was not possible until the conditions for the earth had been fully created. So the Elohim prepared the earth by recapitulating the earlier stages at a higher level throughout the five “days” of creation. It was only then, only because the recapitulation had taken a new form, that they had at their disposal a fit vessel, a vessel into which they could impress the human form; and that was the consummation of the whole of evolution.

Had a mere repetition taken place, evolution as a whole would only have been able to advance to the animal, to the astral stage. But because all the time, from the beginning and throughout the periods of recapitulation, something was being infused into evolution which finally revealed itself as earth, at last there came something into which the Elohim could pour all that was in them. I have already described how it lived in them—it was just as if there were seven men in a group, each one of whom has learnt something different, each of whom has a different capacity, but all of whom are working towards a common end. They all wish to make one and the same thing. Each has to contribute what best he can. Thereby a work in common arises. No single individual has the skill to produce this object alone, but together they are able to achieve it. We could say that their product bears the impress of the joint idea they had formed of their work. We must bear in mind throughout this special characteristic of the seven Elohim, that they all worked together in order to bring about at last their crowning achievement—in order at last to pour human form into what had been brought about by a recapitulation of earlier conditions, because the whole bore the stamp of something new.

Hence suddenly we begin to hear quite a different language in the Genesis account. Earlier it says “the Elohim created,” or “the Elohim spoke.” There we have the feeling that we are dealing with something already determined. Now, when the consummation of earth existence is about to be achieved, we read: Let us make man. That sounds as if the Seven were taking counsel together, as one does when one is trying to bring to fulfilment a work in common. And so, in what emerges as the final consummation of the work of evolution, we have to see a product of the combined effort of all the Elohim; we have to see that they all contribute, each as he is able, to this their work in common, and that at length the human etheric form appears as an expression of the capacity and skill acquired by the Elohim during the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions.

In saying this we have drawn attention to something of immense importance. We have touched on the question of what we may call human worth. In many epochs the impression made upon religious minds by certain words brought their consciousness far nearer to the truth than is the case today. It was so in the case of the Hebrew seer. When he looked up to the seven Elohim, what he experienced obliged him to say to himself, in all humility and reverence, that man must be something mighty in the world, if the differing activities of seven Beings had to combine in order to bring him into existence. The human form on earth is a goal of the Gods! I ask you to feel the immense significance of this statement, and you will say to yourselves that each one of us has a tremendous responsibility for the human form, has an obligation to make it as perfect as possible. Perfection became a possibility from the moment when the Elohim resolved to bend all their united capacities towards the achievement of the one goal. This divine heritage has been entrusted to man, in order that he may develop it ever higher and higher into far distant times. Our study of cosmic evolution in relation to the tremendous opening words of the Bible must lead us in all humility, but also in strength, to a consciousness of this goal to be achieved. It is our origin that these words unveil. At the same time they point us to our goal, our highest ideal. We feel ourselves to be of divine origin; but we feel too what I tried to show in my Rosicrucian Drama, at the point where the initiate passes a certain stage, and feels himself in the resounding “O Man, experience thyself!” To be sure, he feels his human weakness, but he also feels his divine goal. He is no longer lost, no longer inwardly shrivelled, but on the contrary he feels uplifted; in the moment of experiencing his true Self he feels that he is being experienced. When he is able to experience himself in that other Self, something streams through him which is akin to his soul, because it is his own divine destination.

• 1. So does the English Authorised Version, which reads as follows: Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

In the course of these lectures we have described how the earlier, preparatory stages of the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions have entered into the development of our earth. We must of course always bear in mind that what concerns us most of all, what is most important, is the development of man himself. We know that man is, so to say, the first-born of our whole planetary evolution. If we look back to Saturn, we are struck by the fact that in this state of weaving warmth we can speak only of the first rudiments of physical man, and that as yet nothing of what surrounds us today in animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms existed. These were added after the human kingdom was already there. Hence we have to ask ourselves how the story of creation according to Genesis is to be reconciled with the facts of human evolution.

We shall soon see that everything which today we seek to learn through spiritual investigation is fully confirmed. On a superficial reading of Genesis it might seem that man emerged for the first time as if suddenly fired from a pistol on the sixth day. Yet we know that the human kingdom is the all-important one, that the other kingdoms are, as it were, by-products of human incarnation. So we ask ourselves where the human being is to be found in the days before the sixth. If the earth develops as a kind of recapitulation of the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions we should expect to find the human being there all the time, we should expect to find him long before the sixth day. How is it that we find no earlier mention of man in the Genesis account?

First of all, let us observe that Genesis, when beginning to speak of the creation of man, uses the word “Adam,”¹ and in the ancient Hebrew priestly language the word “Adam” does correspond more or less to our word “man.” But we must learn to understand more exactly what “Adam” means. The word called forth in the soul of the Hebrew sage a mental picture which can perhaps be rendered in English as “the earthy one.” Thus man is pre-eminently the earth being, the consummation of all earth existence, the final fruit of earth incarnation. But everything which comes finally to maturity in the fruit is already inherent in the nature of the plant. We shall not discover man in the earlier “days” of creation, unless we are clear that in reality it is not the physical man that precedes the soul-spiritual, but vice versa. We have to think of the physical, earthly man of today much in the same way as we think of a small quantity of water which we cool down and allow to solidify into ice. We have to think of the soul-spiritual man as solidifying, condensing to earthly man, through the work of the Elohim on the sixth day of creation, just as water freezes into ice. Thus progress up to the sixth day consisted in a condensation of the soul-spiritual part of man to the solid earth man. On the preceding “days” we must not expect to find man in the region of what has been cast off and is developing supersensibly according to appropriate physical laws; we must expect to find him in a soul-spiritual condition. Thus when we say in the words of Genesis that on the first day there were present the inner mobile energy and the outwardly manifest, we should not on that first day expect to find man in the earth element, but as a soul-spiritual being in the periphery of the earth. As a soul-spiritual being he is being prepared for his earthly existence.

Today I want to correlate some of the findings of Spiritual Science with the Genesis account. When Genesis tells us that through cosmic musing the two complexes of inner stimulation and outward manifestation arise, what is it which is being prepared in the very first rudiments of man? When the spirit of the Elohim weaves and broods through these complexes, what part of man is in course of preparation? It is what in spiritual scientific terminology we call the sentient soul, which today we have to look upon as something inward. That is what is being prepared on the first day of creation up to the point where it says: Let there be light; and there was light. Within all this there lies in the spiritual periphery the sentient soul of man. To put it more clearly, we look for the sentient soul to begin with in the circumference of the earth, and we place it in the time usually described as the first “day” of creation. Thus in the circumference of the earth, where the Elohim and the Beings ministering to them unfold their work, we have to see a human soul-spiritual present in the spiritual atmosphere somewhat in the same way as today we see clouds in the airy atmosphere; and this is the human sentient soul. Then the evolution of man makes a further advance. On the second “day” of creation we have in the circumference of the earth the refining of the sentient soul into the intellectual or mind-soul. When the sound-ether strikes into the developing earth, when the upper masses of matter separate from the lower, there is, as part of the upper sphere, weaving in the upper sphere, a man consisting entirely of the rudiments of the sentient and the intellectual or mind-soul.

Then on the third “day” we have to think of man as advancing to the stage of the consciousness soul. On this third day, down below on the earth under the influence of the life-ether, verdant life unfolds in species form; the earth brings forth the foundations of plant life—of course, only supersensibly perceptible—and up above in the ether there weaves what we call the consciousness soul, together with the sentient and the intellectual or mind-souls.

Thus the soul-spiritual man hovers in the periphery of the developing earth. He is as it were within the substance of the several spiritual Beings. So far he has no independent existence. It is as if he were being fashioned as an organ within the Elohim, the Archai and so on—as though he were in their bodies as part of them. Hence it is natural that it is of these Beings that we are told, for at this stage of earth development, they alone are actual individualities! To describe their lot is to describe the lot of the rudimentary human beings as well. But you can easily see that if man is one day to people the earth, something like a gradual densification of the human being has to come about. This soul-spiritual element must gradually be clothed in a body. At the end of what is called in the Bible the third “day” of creation we have the rudiments of a soul-spiritual man which today we should call the consciousness soul, intellectual or mind-soul, and sentient soul. These have to be provided with an outer garment. Within this soul-spiritual, man has next to acquire the garment of the astral body.

Let us try to realise what this means. When today can we study the laws of the astral body, isolated from the physical body? Our astral bodies are separated from us when we are asleep, though the astral form is now quite different from what it was in the time of which Genesis speaks. When man sleeps he leaves his etheric and physical bodies lying in bed, and he himself is in his astral body, which hides within it his ego.

Remember the many things which I have told you in the course of years about the peculiar life of the astral body during sleep. From my Occult Science you will recall that when the astral body is outside the physical and etheric bodies, currents go out from it, it begins to make connections with its cosmic surroundings. When in the morning you come back from the sleeping to the waking state you have absorbed strengthening forces from the whole cosmos. During the night our astral body has been united, through its effluence, with the entire cosmos. It has been united with all the planetary Beings associated with our earth. It has radiated its effluence to Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and so on, and in these planetary Beings are the strengthening forces which give to the astral body what it needs to enable us on its return to continue our waking life in the physical and etheric bodies. During the night our astral bodies are diffused and enlarged to a cosmic existence. The clairvoyant sees the astral body quit the physical body when the human being falls asleep. But in point of fact that is an inadequate description. The astral body winds its way in spiral form out of the physical body. It moves as a cloud in spiral form. What we see is only the beginning of the currents which emanate from the astral body. They go out into cosmic space and gather forces, they drink in the forces of the planets. And if anyone tells you that the astral body is what can be seen by a clairvoyant hovering like a cloud in the vicinity of the physical body, it is not true. During the night the astral body is poured out over the whole of our solar system. During sleep it is united with the planetary Beings. That is the very reason why we call it the astral body. None of the interpretations of the term “astral body” coined in the Middle Ages is correct. We speak of the astral body because during sleep it is in inner union with the starry world, the astral world, because it rests in the world of the stars and absorbs their forces.

When you grasp this fact, which is confirmed by spiritual investigation, you will say to yourselves: “Then surely the first influences which formed this astral body must have streamed to man from the astral world, the world of the stars, and the world of the stars must have been present in the developing earth!” Thus when we say that on the fourth day of creation what had hitherto been soul-spiritual clothed itself in the laws and forces of the astral body, then on that same fourth day the stars, the astra, must have unfolded their activity in the periphery of the earth.

And the Genesis account confirms this. In the passage on the fourth day of creation, Genesis gives a description of the clothing of man—man still in the spiritual or astral periphery of the earth—with the astral body, with the activity of the starry world, which belongs primarily to our earth. And this description agrees with what we should express as “the human astral body is formed in accordance with its laws.” Thus here too we find a deeper meaning in complete harmony with what clairvoyant investigation has today to tell of modern man. We shall see that at the time of which Genesis speaks the astral body was not the same as our own astral bodies are during the night; but its laws were the same, and the activity which it developed was the same.

We shall expect that during the next period, which Genesis calls the fifth “day” of creation, a still further densification will take place. Man still remains a super-sensible etheric being. But a further densification does take place within the etheric. Man still does not make contact with the earth, he still belongs to the more spiritual-etheric circumference of the earth. Here we touch upon something which it is extraordinarily important for us to understand for the sake of the whole development of man in his relationship with the earth. When we turn to the kingdom next to man, to the animal kingdom, a question may arise which we have often touched upon before as to why animals become animals, and man becomes man. That man has evolved from the animal kingdom, as the crude materialism of today imagines, could not even be accepted by superficial ratiocination if it really understood itself. But nevertheless if we study the course of the earth's development, we have to admit that animals made their appearance before man became visible as an earth being. Before man could become man upon the earth, appropriate conditions had to be prepared for his densification. Suppose that man had become dense enough to become an earth being, such as he is today, on the fifth day of creation! If he had descended to the solid earth at that time, he could not have acquired the form and substance which in fact he did acquire. Earth conditions were not yet ripe enough to give man this form. Man had to wait in the spiritual realm and to allow the development of the earth to proceed by itself, because it could not yet give him the conditions suited to his earthly life. Man had first to mature within a psycho-spiritual sphere, a more etheric sphere. Had he not delayed his descent to the earth, he would have had to assume an animal form. It is in fact because the soul-spiritual being, the group-soul, of these animal forms, descended when the earth was not yet ready for the human form, when it could not provide the necessary conditions for the earthly human form, that animals became animals. Man had to wait above in the spiritual realm. The beings which became animals descended too soon for human incarnation. At the time of the fifth day of creation the earth was filled with air and water. Man could not fashion an earthly body for himself by descending into that condition. The animals, the group-souls of the animals, who did descend into it became beings of the air, and beings of the water. Thus while these group-souls were clothing themselves in bodies derived from the substances of air and water, man had to wait in the spiritual realm, in order to be able later to assume human form.

What would have happened if man had descended into dense matter on the fifth day? His physical humanity would not have had the forces bestowed upon it which came to him through the elevation of the Elohim into a unity. We have already spoken of this unifying of the Elohim and have said that Genesis indicates it in a most wonderful way by speaking first of the Elohim and later of Jahve-Elohim We have said that the characteristic of the Elohim was that they wove in the element of warmth. Warmth was their element; it was, as it were, the body through which they manifested themselves. When at the end of the period of development described in Genesis the Elohim had advanced so much further that we can speak of a unitary consciousness, a Jahve-Elohim, a change in their nature was involved. This change followed the same principle as changes in other hierarchical Beings You will remember that I spoke of the “body” of the Thrones. We have said that at the beginning of our planetary evolution their body was sacrificed to the warmth-element of Saturn. We have also said that during the Sun evolution the body of the Thrones was to be found in the element of air and in the Moon evolution in the element of water, and on the earth in the earth-element, the solid. For the Thrones this condensation of their nature further and further from the state of warmth to that of earth betokened a kind of promotion.

What was it that had to take place in order that the Elohim likewise should rise to a higher stage as the fruit of their creative activity? In accordance with the laws which govern such things they had to progress to the next degree of densification. Just as in primeval times, in the transition from Saturn to Sun, the Thrones progressed from the state of warmth to that of air, so we should expect the Elohim too, in attaining their unified consciousness, to progress from warmth to air. That, however, did not happen on the fifth day, but only at the end of the series of events described in the Genesis account of the creation. Had man been permitted to descend into the finer element of air on the fifth day, it would have happened to him as to the other beings who sought their bodily nature in the element of air. They became animals of the air, because they could not be given the requisite strength, the power of the Elohim risen to the stage of Jahve-Elohim, to enable them to fulfil the meaning of earth existence. Thus man had to wait. He was not permitted to adopt the air as his element. When the creatures of the air descended, he had to wait until the Elohim had become Jahve-Elohim. Only then could he be given the Jahve-Elohim strength. He had to be bodied forth in the weaving of Jahve-Elohim, in the air, but he was not to take this elementary airy existence into himself until he could receive it from Jahve-Elohim. This the Genesis account conveys in a very subtle way; what it virtually says is that man grew ripe in a more spiritual-etheric existence, and only sought denser embodiment after the Elohim had advanced to the stage of Jahve-Elohim, after Jahve-Elohim was able to form the earthly nature of man by breathing into him the air. It was the efflux of the Elohim themselves, now grown to Jahve-Elohim, which streamed into man with the air.

There again we have a description in Genesis which wonderfully accords with the spiritual investigation of today. And in Genesis we find a theory of evolution compared with which the proud doctrines of today are mere fantasy. For Genesis guides us to the inwardness of creation, shows us what has to take place in the super-sensible before man can advance to sensible existence.

Thus while the other beings had already condensed physically in the region of air and water; man had still to remain in etheric existence, and it was in fact his condensation to the stage of the etheric body that took place in the period alluded to as the fifth day of creation. On the fifth day we still do not find man among the physical earth beings. It is not until the sixth day that we find man actually among the earth beings. It is then that he is received by the developing earth; what we call the physical body came into existence on the sixth day of creation.

But we must still emphasise that it would be quite wrong to believe that you would have been able to see with your eyes or touch with your hands the man who came into existence on the sixth day. If a man with the eyes of today had been at all possible at that time, he would not have been able to perceive the man who then came into existence. The man of today is too much inclined to think materialistically. Hence he at once thinks of the newly created man on the sixth day as a being just like himself. Man was certainly there in a physical form—but then even the vibrations of heat are physical. If you come into a space and find there differentiated currents of warmth not so dense as gas, you must still call that physical existence, and there was such physical existence on Saturn, even though only in the form of warmth. Thus man on the sixth day was not to be found in solid fleshly form. He was to be found in physical form, as an earth being, but only in the first manifestation of the physical, as a man of warmth. When that event occurred, so beautifully expressed in the words And God said, Let us make man, anyone sensitive to warmth would have perceived certain differentiations in the substance of warmth. If he had walked over the earth, which was at that time covered with vegetation and animal life in air and water—all at the species stage—he might have said to himself: “Strange! in certain places I get impressions of warmth—not of anything that has reached a gaseous condition—pure warmth-impressions.” There are differentiations of warmth in the periphery of the earth, beings of warmth flit hither and thither. Man was as yet not a gaseous being; he consisted only of warmth. Try to think away all the solid part of you, all the fluid, all the gaseous element, and to imagine only that part of the man you are today which pulsates in the warmth of your blood. Imagine your blood-heat apart from anything else, and then you have what came into being when the Elohim spoke the creative word: Let us make man. And the next stage of densification did not come until after the days of creation; the influx of what Jahve-Elohim was able to give, the inbreathing of air, did not take place until after the sixth day of creation.

Man will not understand his own origin until he makes up his mind to think of his descent as follows. At the beginning of the development of the earth there was a soul-spiritual condition; then came an astral condition; then an etheric condition, and then came the physical states, first warmth and then air. Even as regards the point of time when, after the six “days” of creation, we are told And the Lord God ... breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, unless we think of man at that moment as consisting only of warmth and air—so long as we believe that a man of flesh and blood was already there—we have not understood our own origin. The coarser is derived from the finer, not the finer from the coarser. It is alien to present-day consciousness to think in this way, but it is the truth.

When we have grasped this, then we shall understand why it is that in so many accounts of the creation the incarnation of man is represented as a descent from the periphery of the earth. When the Bible itself, after the “days” of creation, speaks of Paradise we must look for the deeper meaning behind this, and only Spiritual Science will enable us to understand the truth. To anyone who knows the truth, it is really very odd that the commentators should have argued as to whether Paradise was situated on earth at this spot or that from which mankind spread abroad. It is only too clear in many accounts of creation—including the one in the Bible—that Paradise was not situated upon earthly soil, that it was lifted above the earth, was so to say in the heights of the clouds, and that while man lived in Paradise he remained a being of warmth and air. At that time man did not actually walk about the earth on two legs; that is a materialistic fantasy. Thus even after the end of the “days” of creation, we have to think of man as a being belonging not to the ground, but to the periphery of the earth.

How then was he brought down to the surface of the earth? How did the further densification from the condition into which Jahve-Elohim had placed him come about? Here we come to something described pretty fully in my Occult Science; we come to what we call the Luciferic influence. To express more precisely what we mean by this, we must imagine that the Beings whom we have described as Luciferic practically poured themselves into the human astral body, so that after man had been built up through all the forces we have hitherto described, he received into himself the Luciferic influence. We shall understand what this means if we say that man's life of wish, of desire, everything anchored in the astral body, became permeated with the Luciferic element, hence became more violent, more passionate, more urged by greed, more self-centred; in short what we today call egotism, the inclination to be self-absorbed and self-isolated, the preoccupation with securing one's own inner comfort—all that entered into man with the Luciferic influence. Everything good or bad which can be classed as a permeation by inner comfort or satisfaction entered into man with the Luciferic influence. It was, to begin with, an alien influence. Out of the astral body as it had been hitherto, as it had been formed by the currents which streamed into it, another astral body now came into existence, one permeated by the Luciferic influence. The result was that the body of warmth and air contracted, condensed further. It was only then that the man of flesh came into being. It was only then that this further densification occurred. The man of pre-Luciferic times was to be found in the elementary existence of warmth and air; the Luciferic influence insinuated itself into the fluid and solid part of man, it lives in all that is solid and liquid. It is not at all a figure of speech, but literally describes the situation when I say that through the contraction of the human body brought about by the Luciferic influence man became heavier, sank down out of the periphery to the surface of the earth. That was the expulsion from Paradise. Man acquired for the first time the force of gravity. It was the Luciferic influence which brought him down to earth, whereas he had hitherto dwelt in its periphery. Thus the Luciferic influence has to be reckoned among the real formative forces of man.

We find then a remarkable parallelism between descriptions derived solely from spiritual investigation and those in the Bible. Notice nevertheless how in my Occult Science I deliberately kept out all the things that would have occurred to one so easily if one had wanted to introduce anything out of the Genesis account. In the description given in Occult Science I was careful to guard against that. I relied solely upon spiritual investigation. Now in a certain passage of that book we come to a description of the Luciferic influence given from quite a different aspect. But when we have come to that, we have reached the very period of time which is described in the Bible as man's temptation by the serpent, by Lucifer. We discover the parallel subsequently. Just as gravity, electricity and magnetism are forces which in a coarser way play their part today in the formation of our earth, so also the development of the earth could not have gone forward without the Luciferic influence. We have to reckon it as one of the essential earth-building forces. Hence oriental accounts of the creation, though not with such delicacy as that of the Bible, have also placed Paradise in the periphery of the earth and not on the earth's surface, and they conceive of the expulsion from Paradise as a descent from the periphery to the earth itself. Here also, if we know how to interpret what is said, we find complete agreement between spiritual investigation and the Bible.

But now let us consider yet another event. We have stressed the point that things are not so easy for the spiritual investigator as they are for the sort of science which works on the rough principle that “in the night all cows are grey,” and traces back the most varied events to the same cause. The spiritual investigator has to see in cloud formation something quite different from the formation of water on the surface of the earth. We have spoken of the Cherubim as the directing powers in cloud formation, and of the Seraphim as the directing powers in the lightning flash that issues from the clouds. If now we look upon the expulsion from Paradise as really referring to a descent from the periphery, we are describing almost word for word how man fell through his own weight, and how he had to leave behind him the forces and the Beings who form the clouds and the lightning—the Cherubim with the flaming sword. Man falls from the earth's periphery, out of the region where the Cherubim hold sway with their fiery swords of lightning. There we have a spiritual scientific version that confirms almost word for word the account of the expulsion from Paradise according to which the Godhead placed the Cherubim with the flame of the whirling sword before the gate of Paradise. When you realise this it becomes almost palpable that those ancient seers who gave us Genesis gazed with full powers of seership into the life of man weaving in the etheric heights, before he fell from the regions where the Seraphim and the Cherubim hold sway. So realistic are the Bible descriptions! They are not just similes or crude symbolism; they are the direct findings of clairvoyant consciousness.

Men today misunderstand the conceptions of ancient times. The Bible is criticised on all hands as if it were naively saying: “Paradise was a large garden planted with beautiful trees; lions and tigers roamed about, mingling with the human beings.” Well, it is easy to criticise, and one flippant critic has gone so far as to ask what would have happened to a man who was naive enough to stretch out his hand to one of these lions. If someone first invents a fantastic picture of something never intended by Genesis, it is easy to criticise it. This kind of outlook has only arisen in recent centuries. A Schoolman of the twelfth century would be astonished, if he could come back, to hear what he himself is supposed to have said about the Bible. It would never have occurred to a Schoolman to have such notions about the Bible as are prevalent today. Men could soon find this out if they really wanted to learn. If we studied Scholasticism properly we should soon see, what is clearly expressed in its writings, that it had an entirely different outlook. Even if there was no longer any consciousness that the Bible is a record of clairvoyant investigation, there was nevertheless still something very different from the materialistic and crude exegesis that came in with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It would never have occurred to anyone in the early centuries of the Middle Ages to think like that. Today it is very easy to criticise the Bible, as long as one ignores the fact that the ideas under attack were only born a few centuries ago. Those who inveigh against the Bible the most vehemently are fighting a fantastic invention of the human mind, not the Bible; they are shadow-boxing. It is the task of Spiritual Science, by communicating its findings, to point once more to the true meaning of the Bible, and so clear the way for the tremendous impact it should make upon our souls when we learn to understand what resounds to us so impressively from ancient times.

• 1. In the English Authorised Version the word “Adam” does not appear until Ch. II, v.19—but in Hebrew the same word is used for “man” (as in Ch. I, v.26, onwards).

Last time we sketched out a mental picture of the moment indicated by those meaningful words of the Bible: And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. They allude to an event which we can see as the recapitulation at a higher level of an earlier stage of evolution. I must keep on using the illustration of the man who on awakening calls up in his mind a certain content; it is in some such way that what had slowly and gradually been built up during the course of the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions springs to life again from the soul of the Elohim in a new form, a modified form. In fact all that is narrated in the Bible of the six or seven “days” of creation is a reawakening of previous conditions, not in the same but in a new form.

The next question which we have to ask ourselves is this—what kind of reality are we to attribute to the account of what happened in the course of these six or seven “days?” It will be clearer if we put the question in this way. Could an ordinary eye, in fact could any organs of sense such as we have today have followed what we are told took place during the six days of creation? No, they could not. For the events there described really took place in the sphere of elementary existence, so that a certain degree of clairvoyant knowledge, clairvoyant perception, would have been needed for their observation. The truth is that the Bible tells us of the origin of the sensible out of the supersensible, and that the events with which it opens are supersensible events, even if they are only one stage higher than the ordinary physical events which proceeded from them and are familiar to us. In all our descriptions of the six days' work of creation we are in the domain of clairvoyant perception. What had existed at an earlier time now came forth in etheric, in elementary form. We must get a firm grasp of that, otherwise we shall be all at sea over the true meaning of the impressive words of Genesis. Thus we must expect to see all that had gradually evolved during the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions emerging in a new form.

Let us begin by asking ourselves what were the special characteristics of each of these three planetary forms? On Saturn everything was in a kind of mOccult Science. What was there as the first rudiment of man, which really constituted the whole substance of Saturn, was in a kind of mineral form. But in saying this we must not think of the mineral of today, for Saturn had nothing in it either of liquid or of solid; Saturn was nothing but interweaving warmth. But the laws which prevailed in this planet of warmth, and which brought about and organised the complicated differentiations within it, were the very same laws which obtain today in the solid mineral kingdom. So that when we say that both Saturn and man himself were in a “mineral” condition we must remember that it was not the mineral of today, but a state of inweaving warmth governed by mineral laws.

Then comes the Sun condition of the planet. Here we must never forget that there was as yet no separation of the part which later became the earth. What today has become sun and earth was then a common body, a single cosmic body. In contrast to the earlier Saturn, a denser, gaseous element developed in the Sun, so that in addition to the interweaving warmth we have a transfluent gaseous or airy element, setting hither and thither in accordance with its own laws. But at the same time we have a new formation in the ascending mode, a kind of rarefaction of warmth towards the luminous, a radiation of light into space. Our planetary evolution, as I have called it, advanced during the Sun period to the stage of the plant. Again we must not imagine that there were plants on the old Sun in their present form; it is only that the same laws were at work there in the elements of warmth and air as rule in the plant kingdom today, those laws which determine that the root shall grow downward and the blossom upward. Obviously there could be no solid plants; one must think of the forces which send blossoms up and roots down, weaving in an airy structure, so that the Sun flashes forth blossoms of light in an upward direction. Imagine a gaseous sphere, and within it weaving and sprouting light, living light, which causes the gaseous vapour to shoot and sparkle in radiant blossoms, while at the same time below there is an effort to check these luminous outbursts, an effort to make the Sun cohere round its centre. Then you have the inweaving of light, warmth and air in the ancient Sun evoluticn. The laws of the mineral kingdom are repeated and the laws of the plant world are added, and so much of man as is already there has itself only reached a plantlike condition.

Where today should we find anything in the least comparable to that plantlike weaving in the air-warmth-light sphere of the Sun? With the senses of today we should search the whole of cosmic space in vain. At a certain period of the Sun evolution these conditions did obtain, even physically—that is to say, physically to the density of air. Today they cannot exist physically at all. The form of activity which at that time actually existed in the physical mode can only be found today by directing a faculty of clairvoyant perception towards that region of the supersensible world where are the spiritual Beings who lie behind our external physical plants, those Beings whom we have learnt to know as the group-souls of the plants. Today they can only be found by clairvoyant consciousness in spiritual realms. The group-souls of the plants do not subsist in individual plants, such as we see growing out of the soil, but there is one group-soul for each species of plant, such as the rose, the violet, the oak, and so on. For the poverty-stricken, abstract thinking of today, plant species are just abstractions, notions. They were already so in the Middle Ages; and it was because at that time men no longer knew anything of what weaves and activates in the spiritual as the basis of the physical, that there arose the well-known conflict between realism and nominalism—the dispute as to whether species were merely names, or whether they were real spiritual entities. For clairvoyant consciousness there is no sense whatever in this dispute, for when it directs its attention towards the plant-covering of our earth, it pierces through the outer forms to the spirit region where the group-souls of the plants actually live as real Beings. And these group-souls are one and the same reality as what we call species. At the time when the air, warmth and light sphere of the Sun was in its full splendour, when light, playing in the surface of the airy globe, threw off the sparkling blossoms of plant existence, these physically gaseous forms were actually the same as the plant species which can still be found today, though only in spiritual realms. Let us hold firmly in mind, then, that the plant “species” which cover our earth today with foliage and blossom, with trees and shrubs, pervaded the Sun actually as group-souls or species.

So far as man had evolved at that time, he too was to be found in a plantlike condition. He was unable to awaken mental images within himself, unable to awaken in consciousness what went on around him, any more than the plants today can do so. Man was himself living a plant existence, and his bodily form was among those light forms in continuous play in the gaseous globe. The emergence in the cosmos of even the most primitive forms of consciousness involves very special concomitant conditions. So long as our terrestrial substance was still united with the solar substance, so long as the sunlight did not fall upon the terrestrial globe from without, nothing of what we term consciousness could develop in it; nor could an astral body, which is the basis of consciousness, penetrate the physical and etheric bodies. For consciousness to arise, a separation or fission had to take place, something had to be split off from the Sun. And that happened during the third stage of our earth's evolution, during the Moon epoch. After the Sun condition came to an end, and had passed through a kind of cosmic night, the whole formation appeared again; but now it had become sufficiently mature to manifest as a duality, sufficiently mature for all the Sun elements in it to withdraw into a separate cosmic body, leaving behind the Moon, upon which the elementary conditions of only water, air and warmth were to be found. The Moon was the earth of that time, and it was only because the beings living upon it could receive the forces of the sun from without that they could take into themselves astral bodies and so develop consciousness, reflect in inner experience what went on around them. An animal nature, an inwardly living animal nature, a nature capable of consciousness, is dependent for its existence upon separation between sun and earth elements. The animal nature first appeared during the Moon evolution, and man himself—the body of man—was then developed to the animal stage. You will find this more closely described in my Occult Science. Thus we see that the three epochs which precede that of our own earth, and condition it, are linked together by certain laws. And on the Moon a fluid element is added to the gaseous—a watery element on the one hand, and an element of sound on the other, such as I described yesterday when speaking of the rarefaction of light. That is a very summary account of the course of evolution.

Now what had taken place during these three epochs emerged again in the recollection of the Elohim—at first, as I said yesterday, in a state of confusion which is described in the Bible by the words tohu wabohu. The stream of forces which moved from the centre to the periphery and from the periphery back again to the centre at first embraced the interactivity of all three elementary conditions—air, warmth and water. These three elements were now undifferentiated, though previously the gaseous and the warmth elements on the Sun, and the three forms, warmth, gas and water, on the Moon, had been distinct from one another. Now, during the tohu wabohu, they were all in motley confusion, gushing into and out of one another, so that in the early stages of earth development it was impossible to distinguish between what was watery, what was gaseous, what was warmth. They were all mixed up.

The first thing which then happened was that the element of light broke into all this; and out of the psychic or spiritual activity which I have described as cosmic musing there then came to pass a separation of gaseous from fluid. I will ask you to hold very clearly in your minds this moment which followed the coming into being of light. In dry prose, what happened was this: after the light had penetrated into the tohu wabohu, the Elohim caused what had once before in the past been the gaseous element to separate from what in the same way had been the watery element, so that it was again possible to differentiate between the gaseous and the watery. Thus in the chaotic mass compounded of the three elementary states, a separation came about, but in such a okay that elements of two different natures emerged—one of the nature of air, with a tendency to expand in all directions, the other of the nature of water, with the tendency to cohere. But the two were not yet in a condition comparable to the air or water of today. The “water” was very much denser—we shall presently see why this was so. On the other hand, to get an idea of the constitution of “air” at that time, we cannot do better than look up from the earth to where, in the region of air, the water turns to vaporous formations, and has the tendency to rise into clouds, only to fall again later as rain. Thus the one element was an ascending, the other a descending one There was a quality of water in both of them, but the one kind of water had the tendency to become vaporous, to rise upward as cloud, and the other the tendency to pour downward and assume a level surface Of course, that is only a comparison, for what I have been describing took place in the elementary world

Through their cosmic musing the Elohim brought it about that a separation took place in the tohu wabohu between two elementary conditions. The one had the tendency to press upward, to become vapour; that is, the watery transforming itself to the gaseous; the other had the tendency to discharge itself downward; that is, the watery condensing and cohering. That is the course of events which is expressed in modern languages in words somewhat like this: “The Gods made a something between the waters above and the waters below.” I have just described to you what the Elohim did. Within the “waters” they brought it about that one element had the tendency to spread outwards, to expand, the other to contract towards a centre. The something between is nothing tangible, it is just a way of saying that a separation has been brought about between the two forms of energy which I have just described. You could also put it this way, that the Elohim so acted on the waters that on the one side they took an upward direction, showed a tendency to cloud-formation, a tendency to stream out into space; on the other side they showed a tendency to accumulate upon the surface of the earth. The “partition” was really more like a notional one, and the word in Genesis which expresses this process of separation must! be so understood. You know that the Vulgate uses the word “firmament”¹ This word means something which should not be interpreted in a phenomenal sense—it simply means the separation of two directions of force.

With that we have reached what is described in Genesis as the second “day”; and if we want to put it into our own words, we should have to say, “within the vortex of elementary states the Elohim first separated the airy from the fluid nature.” That is a quite exact rendering of what is meant; the Elohim separated what tends to become air, which of course includes watery vapour, from what tends to contract and become denser. That is the second “day” of creation.

We go on to the next “day”! What happens now? What has been sent outwards, what radiates out and tends to form clouds, has reached a stage which in a certain way is a recapitulation of an earlier condition; it is a repetition in a denser form of what took place on the Sun. That which has a tendency to contract, which in a way repeats the condensation to water on the Moon, is now further differentiated, and this further separation constitutes what comes to pass on the third “day” of creation. We may say that on the second “day” the Elohim separated the airy from the watery. In the same way on the third “day” they separate, within the watery element, what we today know as water, from something which had not been there before, something which was a further densification—the solid element. It is only now that the solid comes into existence. During the Moon evolution this solid, earth element was not in existence. Now it is precipitated out of the watery element. Thus on the third “day” of creation we have a process of condensation, and we have to say that, as the Elohim on the second “day” separated out the airy element from the watery, so now on the third “day” within what was in effect the Moon-substance, they separate off a new watery element from the earth element, which now emerges as something completely new. Everything which I have hitherto described had already existed before, though in another form. The first thing which is entirely new is the earth element, the solid, which appears now on the third “day.” This earth element, separated out from the water, this is the new arrival. But this also makes it possible for what was already there to assume a new form.

What is it which now first begins to form? It is something which had already taken shape on the Sun, it is what we have described as the sprouting plant nature in the tenuous airy element of the Sun—which had then reappeared on the Moon in the watery element—though of course there were still no plants in the sense of today. And it is only on the third “day” that there is a recapitulation of this in the earth element. What is first repeated in the earth element as the plant nature is wonderfully described in the Bible. I will deal later with the question of how we should understand the “day” of creation; for the moment I am concerned with the irruption of light and of air from without, of the separation of water from solid. The solid now brings forth a recapitulation of the plant nature out of itself. That is very clearly described in the Bible, when it says that after the Elohim had separated the earth from the water, the plant life springs forth from the earth. Thus the sprouting of plant life on the third “day” of creation is a recapitulation in the solid element of what had already existed during the Sun evolution; it is as it were a cosmic memory. In the cosmic musing of the Elohim there arose the plant life which had been present on the Sun in gaseous form, but which emerges now in the solid state.

Everything repeats itself in a new form. The plant life is still in a state which is not individualised as on our earth today. I have expressly called attention to the fact that separate plants such as we see around us in the sense-world today were not to be found on the Sun, nor on the Moon, nor even on the earth at the moment when the plant nature emerges again in the earth element. What were there were the group-souls of the plants, what we today call the species, which to clairvoyant consciousness were no abstractions, but something actually present in the spirit realm. At that time there was a re-emergence in a supersensible realm of what we call plant species. And that is what the Bible says. It is strange how little Biblical commentators are able to make of the words And the earth brought forth grass and herb yielding seed after his kind. One ought to say, instead of after his kind, “in the mode of species.” What it means is that the plant nature was there in the form of group-souls, in the form of species; there were no individual plants such as there are today. You will not understand the description of the springing-up of plant life on the third “day” of creation unless you think of the group-soul nature. You must clearly understand that no plants, as we understand the term today, sprang up at that time, but that out of a psychic activity, out of a cosmic, musing activity, sprouted species, in other words the group-souls of the plant kingdom.

Thus, when on the third “day” of creation we are told that the Elohim separated out from the fluid the solid, the fourth elementary condition, we fmd that in this “solid” state—which of course in its original elementary form would not yet have been visible to an external eye, but only to clairvoyant sight—there was a reappearance of the forms of the plant species.

This was not yet possible as regards the animal nature. We have already described how the animal nature made its first appearance during the Moon evolution, after a duality had come into being, after the sun had begun to operate from without. Hence a repetition of this event (the separation of the moon) had to take place before evolution could advance from the plant to the animal nature. Therefore after the third “day” it is pointed out how in the environment of the earth the sun, moon and stars now come into activity; how there begins to take effect something which radiates from without, which sends in its forces from without. Whereas hitherto we have seen the effect of a sprouting activity within the planet itself, now, in addition to this, we see something which comes from the heavenly spaces, radiating inwards. In other words, in addition to the forces of the earth itself, which could only recapitulate what it had produced as a unitary body at an earlier stage, the Elohim in their cosmic musing brought into action the forces which streamed down upon the planet from outer space. Cosmic existence was added to earthly existence. To begin with, let us see nothing but this in what is described as taking place on the fourth “day.” What was the result of this irradiation from without? It enabled processes to be recapitulated—though in a different form—which were already to be found in the Moon evolution. During the Moon evolution there had developed as much of an animal nature as could live in the elements of air and water. It was only now that this could reappear. Therefore Genesis tells us, in wonderful accord with the facts, how on the fifth “day” of creation the teeming multitude in air and water comes into existence. It describes a recapitulation of the Moon epoch, now in a new form, at a higher level, in the earth element.

My dear friends, at the contemplation of such things this ancient record fills us with awe; it is wholly in the spirit of our anthroposophical outlook that we are able to feel the deepest reverence for it. What is experienced by clairvoyant consciousness is recorded in this document in impressive words, in words full of power; we find there again what we already know—that after the irradiation from without had taken place, a recapitulation became possible of what had existed in the airy and the watery elements of the Moon evolution. In the light of such a soul-stirring discovery how can we attach any importance to intellectual criticisms of these things? What nonsense it makes of the argument that this document was written in primitive times, when human knowledge was still at a very childish level! A fine “childish level,” when we rediscover in it the highest knowledge to which we can raise ourselves! Must we not ascribe to those who have handed down to us this ancient record the same spirituality which alone today enables us to rise to this revelation? Does not this document, bequeathed to us by those ancient seers, bear witness for them? The content of this record itself testifies that its writers were inspired. Truly we need no historical proof, the words furnish their own proof.

When we understand the matter in this way we realise that it was only after the fifth “day” of creation that anything new could happen. For all the necessary recapitulation had now taken place. Now the earth itself, which had emerged as a new element, could be populated with animal life, and with whatever might develop as new formation. Hence we find described in impressive detail how creatures appeared on the sixth “day” whose existence was bound up with the new element of earth. Up to the fifth “day” we have a recapitulation at a higher stage in a new form of what had gone before, but on the sixth “day” the earth-nature comes into its own for the first time, and something is added which has only been made possible by the earth conditions.

I have now given you an outline of the six “days” of creation. I have shown you how those who shrouded their deep wisdom in this narrative must have been fully conscious of what was emerging as new. Further, they must have been fully aware that it was only within this earth element that what constituted the very core of man's being could enter in. We know that all that man went through during the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions amounted to preparatory stages for the real human incarnation. We know that during the Saturn period the first rudiments of a physical body had been laid down in man; during the Sun evolution the rudiments of an etheric or life body were added; during the Moon evolution the rudiments of an astral body. What was recapitulated up to the end of the fifth day contained an element of astrality. Everything which has being has astrality. To infuse the ego, the fourth member of human nature, into a being in this whole evolutionary complex was not possible until the conditions for the earth had been fully created. So the Elohim prepared the earth by recapitulating the earlier stages at a higher level throughout the five “days” of creation. It was only then, only because the recapitulation had taken a new form, that they had at their disposal a fit vessel, a vessel into which they could impress the human form; and that was the consummation of the whole of evolution.

Had a mere repetition taken place, evolution as a whole would only have been able to advance to the animal, to the astral stage. But because all the time, from the beginning and throughout the periods of recapitulation, something was being infused into evolution which finally revealed itself as earth, at last there came something into which the Elohim could pour all that was in them. I have already described how it lived in them—it was just as if there were seven men in a group, each one of whom has learnt something different, each of whom has a different capacity, but all of whom are working towards a common end. They all wish to make one and the same thing Each has to contribute what best he can. Thereby a work in common arises. No single individual has the skill to produce this object alone, but together they are able to achieve it. We could say that their product bears the impress of the joint idea they had formed of their work. We must bear in mind throughout this special characteristic of the seven Elohim, that they all worked together in order to bring about at last their crowning achievement—in order at last to pour human form into what had been brought about by a recapitulation of earlier conditions, because the whole bore the stamp of something new.

Hence suddenly we begin to hear quite a different language in the Genesis account. Earlier it says “the Elohim created,” or “the Elohim spoke.” There we have the feeling that we are dealing with something already determined. Now, when the consummation of earth existence is about to be achieved, we read: Let us make man. That sounds as if the Seven were taking counsel together, as one does when one is trying to bring to fulfilment a work in common. And so, in what emerges as the final consummation of the work of evolution, we have to see a product of the combined effort of all the Elohim; we have to see that they all contribute, each as he is able, to this their work in common, and that at length the human etheric form appears as an expression of the capacity and skill acquired by the Elohim during the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions.

In saying this we have drawn attention to something of immense importance. We have touched on the question of what we may call human worth. In many epochs the impression made upon religious minds by certain words brought their consciousness far nearer to the truth than is the case today. It was so in the case of the Hebrew seer. When he looked up to the seven Elohim, what he experienced obliged him to say to himself, in all humility and reverence, that man must be something mighty in the world, if the differing activities of seven Beings had to combine in order to bring him into existence. The human form on earth is a goal of the Gods! I ask you to feel the immense significance of this statement, and you will say to yourselves that each one of us has a tremendous responsibility for the human form, has an obligation to make it as perfect as possible. Perfection became a possibility from the moment when the Elohim resolved to bend all their united capacities towards the achievement of the one goal. This divine heritage has been entrusted to man, in order that he may develop it ever higher and higher into far distant times. Our study ofcosmic evolution in relation to the tremendous opening words of the Bible must lead us in all humility, but also in strength, to a consciousness of this goal to be achieved. It is our origin that these words unveil. At the same time they point us to our goal, our highest ideal. We feel ourselves to be of divine origin; but we feel too what I tried to show in my Rosicrucian Drama, at the point where the initiate passes a certain stage, and feels himself in the resounding “O Man, experience thyself!” To be sure, he feels his human weakness, but he also feels his divine goal. He is no longer lost, no longer inwardly shrivelled, but on the contrary he feels uplifted; in the moment of experiencing his true Self he feels that he is being experienced. When he is able to experience himself in that other Self, something streams through him which is akin to his soul, because it is his own divine destination.

• 1. So does the English Authorised Version, which reads as follows: Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. See Figure 5, below.

In the course of these lectures we have described how the earlier, preparatory stages of the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions have entered into the development of our earth. We must of course always bear in mind that what concerns us most of all, what is most important, is the development of man himself. We know that man is, so to say, the first-born of our whole planetary evolution. If we look back to Saturn, we are struck by the fact that in this state of weaving warmth we can speak only of the first rudiments of physical man, and that as yet nothing of what surrounds us today in animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms existed. These were added after the human kingdom was already there. Hence we have to ask ourselves how the story of creation according to Genesis is to be reconciled with the facts of human evolution.

We shall soon see that everything which today we seek to learn through spiritual investigation is fully confirmed. On a superficial reading of Genesis it might seem that man emerged for the first time as if suddenly fired from a pistol on the sixth day. Yet we know that the human kingdom is the all-important one, that the other kingdoms are, as it were, by-products of human incarnation. So we ask ourselves where the human being is to be found in the days before the sixth. If the earth develops as a kind of recapitulation of the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions we should expect to find the human being there all the time, we should expect to find him long before the sixth day. How is it that we find no earlier mention of man in the Genesis account?

First of all, let us observe that Genesis, when beginning to speak of the creation of man, uses the word “Adam,”¹ and in the ancient Hebrew priestly language the word “Adam” does correspond more or less to our word “man.” But we must learn to understand more exactly what “Adam” means. The word called forth in the soul of the Hebrew sage a mental picture which can perhaps be rendered in English as “the earthy one.” Thus man is pre-eminently the earth being, the consummation of all earth existence, the final fruit of earth incarnation. But everything which comes finally to maturity in the fruit is already inherent in the nature of the plant. We shall not discover man in the earlier “days” of creation, unless we are clear that in reality it is not the physical man that precedes the soul-spiritual, but vice versa. We have to think of the physical, earthly man of today much in the same way as we think of a small quantity of water which we cool down and allow to solidify into ice. We have to think of the soul-spiritual man as solidifying, condensing to earthly man, through the work of the Elohim on the sixth day of creation, just as water freezes into ice. Thus progress up to the sixth day consisted in a condensation of the soul-spiritual part of man to the solid earth man. On the preceding “days” we must not expect to find man in the region of what has been cast off and is developing supersensibly according to appropriate physical laws; we must expect to find him in a soul-spiritual condition. Thus when we say in the words of Genesis that on the first day there were present the inner mobile energy and the outwardly manifest, we should not on that first day expect to find man in the earth element, but as a soul-spiritual being in the periphery of the earth. As a soul-spiritual being he is being prepared for his earthly existence.

Today I want to correlate some of the findings of Spiritual Science with the Genesis account. When Genesis tells us that through cosmic musing the two complexes of inner stimulation and outward manifestation arise, what is it which is being prepared in the very first rudiments of man? When the spirit of the Elohim weaves and broods through these complexes, what part of man is in course of preparation? It is what in spiritual scientific terminology we call the sentient soul, which today we have to look upon as something inward. That is what is being prepared on the first day of creation up to the point where it says: Let there be light; and there was light. Within all this there lies in the spiritual periphery the sentient soul of man. To put it more clearly, we look for the sentient soul to begin with in the circumference of the earth, and we place it in the time usually described as the first “day” of creation. Thus in the circumference of the earth, where the Elohim and the Beings ministering to them unfold their work, we have to see a human soul-spiritual present in the spiritual atmosphere somewhat in the same way as today we see clouds in the airy atmosphere; and this is the human sentient soul. Then the evolution of man makes a further advance. On the second “day” of creation we have in the circumference of the earth the refining of the sentient soul into the intellectual or mind-soul. When the sound-ether strikes into the developing earth, when the upper masses of matter separate from the lower, there is, as part of the upper sphere, weaving in the upper sphere, a man consisting entirely of the rudiments of the sentient and the intellectual or mind-soul.

Then on the third “day” we have to think of man as advancing to the stage of the consciousness soul. On this third day, down below on the earth under the influence of the life-ether, verdant life unfolds in species form; the earth brings forth the foundations of plant life—of course, only supersensibly perceptible—and up above in the ether there weaves what we call the consciousness soul, together with the sentient and the intellectual or mind-souls.

Thus the soul-spiritual man hovers in the periphery of the developing earth. He is as it were within the substance of the several spiritual Beings. So far he has no independent existence. It is as if he were being fashioned as an organ within the Elohim, the Archai and so on—as though he were in their bodies as part of them. Hence it is natural that it is of these Beings that we are told, for at this stage of earth development, they alone are actual individualities! To describe their lot is to describe the lot of the rudimentary human beings as well. But you can easily see that if man is one day to people the earth, something like a gradual densification of the human being has to come about. This soul-spiritual element must gradually be clothed in a body. At the end of what is called in the Bible the third “day” of creation we have the rudiments of a soul-spiritual man which today we should call the consciousness soul, intellectual or mind-soul, and sentient soul. These have to be provided with an outer garment. Within this soul-spiritual, man has next to acquire the garment of the astral body.

Let us try to realise what this means. When today can we study the laws of the astral body, isolated from the physical body? Our astral bodies are separated from us when we are asleep, though the astral form is now quite different from what it was in the time of which Genesis speaks. When man sleeps he leaves his etheric and physical bodies lying in bed, and he himself is in his astral body, which hides within it his ego.

Remember the many things which I have told you in the course of years about the peculiar life of the astral body during sleep. From my Occult Science you will recall that when the astral body is outside the physical and etheric bodies, currents go out from it, it begins to make connections with its cosmic surroundings. When in the morning you come back from the sleeping to the waking state you have absorbed strengthening forces from the whole cosmos. During the night our astral body has been united, through its effluence, with the entire cosmos. It has been united with all the planetary Beings associated with our earth. It has radiated its effluence to Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and so on, and in these planetary Beings are the strengthening forces which give to the astral body what it needs to enable us on its return to continue our waking life in the physical and etheric bodies. During the night our astral bodies are diffused and enlarged to a cosmic existence. The clairvoyant sees the astral body quit the physical body when the human being falls asleep. But in point of fact that is an inadequate description. The astral body winds its way in spiral form out of the physical body. It moves as a cloud in spiral form. What we see is only the beginning of the currents which emanate from the astral body. They go out into cosmic space and gather forces, they drink in the forces of the planets. And if anyone tells you that the astral body is what can be seen by a clairvoyant hovering like a cloud in the vicinity of the physical body, it is not true. During the night the astral body is poured out over the whole of our solar system. During sleep it is united with the planetary Beings. That is the very reason why we call it the astral body. None of the interpretations of the term “astral body” coined in the Middle Ages is correct. We speak of the astral body because during sleep it is in inner union with the starry world, the astral world, because it rests in the world of the stars and absorbs their forces.

When you grasp this fact, which is confirmed by spiritual investigation, you will say to yourselves: “Then surely the first influences which formed this astral body must have streamed to man from the astral world, the world of the stars, and the world of the stars must have been present in the developing earth!” Thus when we say that on the fourth day of creation what had hitherto been soul-spiritual clothed itself in the laws and forces of the astral body, then on that same fourth day the stars, the astra, must have unfolded their activity in the periphery of the earth.

And the Genesis account confirms this. In the passage on the fourth day of creation, Genesis gives a description of the clothing of man—man still in the spiritual or astral periphery of the earth—with the astral body, with the activity of the starry world, which belongs primarily to our earth. And this description agrees with what we should express as “the human astral body is formed in accordance with its laws.” Thus here too we find a deeper meaning in complete harmony with what clairvoyant investigation has today to tell of modern man. We shall see that at the time of which Genesis speaks the astral body was not the same as our own astral bodies are during the night; but its laws were the same, and the activity which it developed was the same.

We shall expect that during the next period, which Genesis calls the fifth “day” of creation, a still further densification will take place. Man still remains a supersensible etheric being. But a further densification does take place within the etheric. Man still does not make contact with the earth, he still belongs to the more spiritual-etheric circumference of the earth. Here we touch upon something which it is extraordinarily important for us to understand for the sake of the whole development of man in his relationship with the earth. When we turn to the kingdom next to man, to the animal kingdom, a question may arise which we have often touched upon before as to why animals become animals, and man becomes man. That man has evolved from the animal kingdom, as the crude materialism of today imagines, could not even be accepted by superficial ratiocination if it really understood itself. But nevertheless if we study the course of the earth's development, we have to admit that animals made their appearance before man became visible as an earth being. Before man could become man upon the earth, appropriate conditions had to be prepared for his densification. Suppose that man had become dense enough to become an earth being, such as he is today, on the fifth day of creation! If he had descended to the solid earth at that time, he could not have acquired the form and substance which in fact he did acquire. Earth conditions were not yet ripe enough to give man this form. Man had to wait in the spiritual realm and to allow the development of the earth to proceed by itself, because it could not yet give him the conditions suited to his earthly life. Man had first to mature within a psycho-spiritual sphere, a more etheric sphere. Had he not delayed his descent to the earth, he would have had to assume an animal form. It is in fact because the soul-spiritual being, the group-soul, of these animal forms, descended when the earth was not yet ready for the human form, when it could not provide the necessary conditions for the earthly human form, that animals became animals. Man had to wait above in the spiritual realm. The beings which became animals descended too soon for human incarnation. At the time of the fifth day of creation the earth was filled with air and water. Man could not fashion an earthly body for himself by descending into that condition. The animals, the group-souls of the animals, who did descend into it became beings of the air, and beings of the water. Thus while these group-souls were clothing themselves in bodies derived from the substances of air and water, man had to wait in the spiritual realm, in order to be able later to assume human form.

What would have happened if man had descended into dense matter on the fifth day? His physical humanity would not have had the forces bestowed upon it which came to him through the elevation of the Elohim into a unity. We have already spoken of this unifying of the Elohim and have said that Genesis indicates it in a most wonderful way by speaking first of the Elohim and later of Jahve-Elohim We have said that the characteristic of the Elohim was that they wove in the element of warmth. Warmth was their element; it was, as it were, the body through which they manifested themselves. When at the end of the period of development described in Genesis the Elohim had advanced so much further that we can speak of a unitary consciousness, a Jahve-Elohim, a change in their nature was involved. This change followed the same principle as changes in other hierarchical Beings You will remember that I spoke of the “body” of the Thrones. We have said that at the beginning of our planetary evolution their body was sacrificed to the warmth-element of Saturn. We have also said that during the Sun evolution the body of the Thrones was to be found in the element of air and in the Moon evolution in the element of water, and on the earth in the earth-element, the solid. For the Thrones this condensation of their nature further and further from the state of warmth to that of earth betokened a kind of promotion.

What was it that had to take place in order that the Elohim likewise should rise to a higher stage as the fruit of their creative activity? In accordance with the laws which govern such things they had to progress to the next degree of densification. Just as in primeval times, in the transition from Saturn to Sun, the Thrones progressed from the state of warmth to that of air, so we should expect the Elohim too, in attaining their unified consciousness, to progress from warmth to air. That, however, did not happen on the fifth day, but only at the end of the series of events described in the Genesis account of the creation. Had man been permitted to descend into the finer element of air on the fifth day, it would have happened to him as to the other beings who sought their bodily nature in the element of air. They became animals of the air, because they could not be given the requisite strength, the power of the Elohim risen to the stage of Jahve-Elohim, to enable them to fulfil the meaning of earth existence. Thus man had to wait. He was not permitted to adopt the air as his element. When the creatures of the air descended, he had to wait until the Elohim had become Jahve-Elohim. Only then could he be given the Jahve-Elohim strength. He had to be bodied forth in the weaving of Jahve-Elohim, in the air, but he was not to take this elementary airy existence into himself until he could receive it from Jahve-Elohim. This the Genesis account conveys in a very subtle way; what it virtually says is that man grew ripe in a more spiritual-etheric existence, and only sought denser embodiment after the Elohim had advanced to the stage of Jahve-Elohim, after Jahve-Elohim was able to form the earthly nature of man by breathing into him the air. It was the efflux of the Elohim themselves, now grown to Jahve-Elohim, which streamed into man with the air.

There again we have a description in Genesis which wonderfully accords with the spiritual investigation of today. And in Genesis we find a theory of evolution compared with which the proud doctrines of today are mere fantasy. For Genesis guides us to the inwardness of creation, shows us what has to take place in the supersensible before man can advance to sensible existence.

Thus while the other beings had already condensed physically in the region of air and water; man had still to remain in etheric existence, and it was in fact his condensation to the stage of the etheric body that took place in the period alluded to as the fifth day of creation. On the fifth day we still do not find man among the physical earth beings. It is not until the sixth day that we find man actually among the earth beings. It is then that he is received by the developing earth; what we call the physical body came into existence on the sixth day of creation.

But we must still emphasise that it would be quite wrong to believe that you would have been able to see with your eyes or touch with your hands the man who came into existence on the sixth day. If a man with the eyes of today had been at all possible at that time, he would not have been able to perceive the man who then came into existence. The man of today is too much inclined to think materialistically. Hence he at once thinks of the newly created man on the sixth day as a being just like himself. Man was certainly there in a physical form—but then even the vibrations of heat are physical. If you come into a space and find there differentiated currents of warmth not so dense as gas, you must still call that physical existence, and there was such physical existence on Saturn, even though only in the form of warmth. Thus man on the sixth day was not to be found in solid fleshly form. He was to be found in physical form, as an earth being, but only in the first manifestation of the physical, as a man of warmth. When that event occurred, so beautifully expressed in the words And God said, Let us make man, anyone sensitive to warmth would have perceived certain differentiations in the substance of warmth. If he had walked over the earth, which was at that time covered with vegetation and animal life in air and water—all at the species stage—he might have said to himself: “Strange! in certain places I get impressions of warmth—not of anything that has reached a gaseous condition—pure warmth-impressions.” There are differentiations of warmth in the periphery of the earth, beings of warmth flit hither and thither. Man was as yet not a gaseous being; he consisted only of warmth. Try to think away all the solid part of you, all the fluid, all the gaseous element, and to imagine only that part of the man you are today which pulsates in the warmth of your blood. Imagine your blood-heat apart from anything else, and then you have what came into being when the Elohim spoke the creative word: Let us make man. And the next stage of densification did not come until after the days of creation; the influx of what Jahve-Elohim was able to give, the inbreathing of air, did not take place until after the sixth day of creation.

Man will not understand his own origin until he makes up his mind to think of his descent as follows. At the beginning of the development of the earth there was a soul-spiritual condition; then came an astral condition; then an etheric condition, and then came the physical states, first warmth and then air. Even as regards the point of time when, after the six “days” of creation, we are told And the Lord God ... breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, unless we think of man at that moment as consisting only of warmth and air—so long as we believe that a man of flesh and blood was already there—we have not understood our own origin. The coarser is derived from the finer, not the finer from the coarser. It is alien to present-day consciousness to think in this way, but it is the truth.

When we have grasped this, then we shall understand why it is that in so many accounts of the creation the incarnation of man is represented as a descent from the periphery of the earth. When the Bible itself, after the “days” of creation, speaks of Paradise we must look for the deeper meaning behind this, and only Spiritual Science will enable us to understand the truth. To anyone who knows the truth, it is really very odd that the commentators should have argued as to whether Paradise was situated on earth at this spot or that from which mankind spread abroad. It is only too clear in many accounts of creation—including the one in the Bible—that Paradise was not situated upon earthly soil, that it was lifted above the earth, was so to say in the heights of the clouds, and that while man lived in Paradise he remained a being of warmth and air. At that time man did not actually walk about the earth on two legs; that is a materialistic fantasy. Thus even after the end of the “days” of creation, we have to think of man as a being belonging not to the ground, but to the periphery of the earth.

How then was he brought down to the surface of the earth? How did the further densification from the condition into which Jahve-Elohim had placed him come about? Here we come to something described pretty fully in my Occult Science; we come to what we call the Luciferic influence. To express more precisely what we mean by this, we must imagine that the Beings whom we have described as Luciferic practically poured themselves into the human astral body, so that after man had been built up through all the forces we have hitherto described, he received into himself the Luciferic influence. We shall understand what this means if we say that man's life of wish, of desire, everything anchored in the astral body, became permeated with the Luciferic element, hence became more violent, more passionate, more urged by greed, more self-centred; in short what we today call egotism, the inclination to be self-absorbed and self-isolated, the preoccupation with securing one's own inner comfort—all that entered into man with the Luciferic influence. Everything good or bad which can be classed as a permeation by inner comfort or satisfaction entered into man with the Luciferic influence. It was, to begin with, an alien influence. Out of the astral body as it had been hitherto, as it had been formed by the currents which streamed into it, another astral body now came into existence, one permeated by the Luciferic influence. The result was that the body of warmth and air contracted, condensed further. It was only then that the man of flesh came into being. It was only then that this further densification occurred. The man of pre-Luciferic times was to be found in the elementary existence of warmth and air; the Luciferic influence insinuated itself into the fluid and solid part of man, it lives in all that is solid and liquid. It is not at all a figure of speech, but literally describes the situation when I say that through the contraction of the human body brought about by the Luciferic influence man became heavier, sank down out of the periphery to the surface of the earth. That was the expulsion from Paradise. Man acquired for the first time the force of gravity. It was the Luciferic influence which brought him down to earth, whereas he had hitherto dwelt in its periphery. Thus the Luciferic influence has to be reckoned among the real formative forces of man.

We find then a remarkable parallelism between descriptions derived solely from spiritual investigation and those in the Bible. Notice nevertheless how in my Occult Science I deliberately kept out all the things that would have occurred to one so easily if one had wanted to introduce anything out of the Genesis account. In the description given in Occult Science I was careful to guard against that. I relied solely upon spiritual investigation. Now in a certain passage of that book we come to a description of the Luciferic influence given from quite a different aspect. But when we have come to that, we have reached the very period of time which is described in the Bible as man's temptation by the serpent, by Lucifer. We discover the parallel subsequently. Just as gravity, electricity and magnetism are forces which in a coarser way play their part today in the formation of our earth, so also the development of the earth could not have gone forward without the Luciferic influence. We have to reckon it as one of the essential earth-building forces. Hence oriental accounts of the creation, though not with such delicacy as that of the Bible, have also placed Paradise in the periphery of the earth and not on the earth's surface, and they conceive of the expulsion from Paradise as a descent from the periphery to the earth itself. Here also, if we know how to interpret what is said, we find complete agreement between spiritual investigation and the Bible.

But now let us consider yet another event. We have stressed the point that things are not so easy for the spiritual investigator as they are for the sort of science which works on the rough principle that “in the night all cows are grey,” and traces back the most varied events to the same cause. The spiritual investigator has to see in cloud formation something quite different from the formation of water on the surface of the earth. We have spoken of the Cherubim as the directing powers in cloud formation, and of the Seraphim as the directing powers in the lightning flash that issues from the clouds. If now we look upon the expulsion from Paradise as really referring to a descent from the periphery, we are describing almost word for word how man fell through his own weight, and how he had to leave behind him the forces and the Beings who form the clouds and the lightning—the Cherubim with the flaming sword. Man falls from the earth's periphery, out of the region where the Cherubim hold sway with their fiery swords of lightning. There we have a spiritual scientific version that confirms almost word for word the account of the expulsion from Paradise according to which the Godhead placed the Cherubim with the flame of the whirling sword before the gate of Paradise. When you realise this it becomes almost palpable that those ancient seers who gave us Genesis gazed with full powers of seership into the life of man weaving in the etheric heights, before he fell from the regions where the Seraphim and the Cherubim hold sway. So realistic are the Bible descriptions! They are not just similes or crude symbolism; they are the direct findings of clairvoyant consciousness.

Men today misunderstand the conceptions of ancient times. The Bible is criticised on all hands as if it were naively saying: “Paradise was a large garden planted with beautiful trees; lions and tigers roamed about, mingling with the human beings.” Well, it is easy to criticise, and one flippant critic has gone so far as to ask what would have happened to a man who was naive enough to stretch out his hand to one of these lions. If someone first invents a fantastic picture of something never intended by Genesis, it is easy to criticise it. This kind of outlook has only arisen in recent centuries. A Schoolman of the twelfth century would be astonished, if he could come back, to hear what he himself is supposed to have said about the Bible. It would never have occurred to a Schoolman to have such notions about the Bible as are prevalent today. Men could soon find this out if they really wanted to learn. If we studied Scholasticism properly we should soon see, what is clearly expressed in its writings, that it had an entirely different outlook. Even if there was no longer any consciousness that the Bible is a record of clairvoyant investigation, there was nevertheless still something very different from the materialistic and crude exegesis that came in with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It would never have occurred to anyone in the early centuries of the Middle Ages to think like that. Today it is very easy to criticise the Bible, as long as one ignores the fact that the ideas under attack were only born a few centuries ago. Those who inveigh against the Bible the most vehemently are fighting a fantastic invention of the human mind, not the Bible; they are shadow-boxing. It is the task of Spiritual Science, by communicating its findings, to point once more to the true meaning of the Bible, and so clear the way for the tremendous impact it should make upon our souls when we learn to understand what resounds to us so impressively from ancient times.

• 1. In the English Authorised Version the word “Adam” does not appear until Ch. II, v.19—but in Hebrew the same word is used for “man” (as in Ch. I, v.26, onwards).

In our description of the evolution of man we have now reached the point when, after the epoch characterized by the sounding of the seven trumpets, the earth with all its beings passes into another condition, when the physical dissolves, so to speak, and changes into spiritual, but first into astral. An astral earth arises and into it pass all the beings who are ripe for it, that is, who have become capable of overcoming even their material part, and using it in the service of the spiritual. On the other hand, those who are unable to spiritualize the bodily, material part, who cling to the material, are thrown out and form a sort of secondary earth, the study of which is very instructive for gaining knowledge of the future destiny of humanity. But to this end it is necessary that we clearly understand what has become, during this astralizing of our earth, of those who have reached the necessary degree of maturity, who have taken the Christ-principle into themselves and allowed it to become active. We shall now occupy ourselves with what can develop out of man.

We shall best understand this if we have the patience again to consider what man has become and what possibilities of development lie within him for the future. At present man consists of four principles. The first is the so-called physical body; this is the principle man has in common with all the present creations of the mineral kingdom; this part of man one can see with the eyes and grasp with the hands; it is the lowest principle of human nature, which alone remains as the corpse at death. But this physical body would every moment have the same fate as the corpse at death, it would fall to pieces were it not permeated by what we call the etheric body or life body. This etheric body man no longer has in common with the mineral kingdom, he has it in common with the beings of the earthly vegetable kingdom. In every man the etheric body is a combatant which between birth and death holds together the parts of the physical body which continually have the tendency to disintegrate. What is the physical body of man, in reality? It is that which, when death has destroyed the form, after a short time becomes ashes. It is a little heap of ashes, so wonderfully arranged in the life body that the whole man makes the impression he now does upon those who look at him. The second principle, then, is the ether or life body. The third principle, which man has in common with the animals, is the so-called astral body, the vehicle of instincts, desires, passions, thoughts, ideas, etc., all that is usually called the soul in main. Finally we have the fourth principle in human nature, that which makes man the crown of earthly creation, which makes him stand out above all the other beings, and enables him to develop as “I,” as an individual self-conscious being in earthly existence. In the future the evolution of man will unfold in such manner that he will gradually work from his

“I” upon the lower principles, so that the “I” becomes their ruler. When the “I” has thoroughly worked upon the astral body and taken possession of it, so that in this astral body there are no more unconscious and unguarded impulses, instincts and passions, then the “I” will have developed what we call Spirit Self or Manas. Spirit-Self is none other than the astral body, only the astral body is the third principle before it is transformed by the “I.” When the “I” transforms the etheric body also, Life-Spirit or Budhi is produced; and when in the remotest future the “I” transforms the physical body so that this is completely spiritualized by the “I” itself (this is the most difficult work, because the physical body is the densest), then the physical body develops into the highest principle of human nature, namely, Atma or Spirit-Man. Thus, if we conceive of man in his seven-fold nature, we have the physical body, the etheric body or life-body, the astral body and the “I.” Further, we have that which man will develop in the future; Spirit-Self or Manas, Life-Spirit or Budhi and Spirit-Man or Atma. That is the sevenfold being of man. However, he will only develop these higher principles in the far-distant future. It is not yet in man's power while on the earth to work so far upon himself as to bring all these higher spiritual parts to full development.

If we consider the sevenfold man in this way we shall, however, not fully comprehend the man we see before us to-day. It is indeed true that if we survey man as a whole we may speak of these seven principles, but if we wish to understand the present man we must be more exact. You will remember that the physical body was developed on Saturn, the etheric body on the Sun, the astral body on the Moon, and that the Ego is to be developed on the Earth. It has already developed to a certain high degree.

We must now observe this earthly evolution of man somewhat more closely. The greater portion of humanity will only have gained the power to work quite consciously in the Spirit-Self, in the transformed astral body, at the close of the earth evolution. On the other hand, during our earthly evolution man had to pass through a kind of preparation which made it possible for him to work half-consciously and half-unconsciously, as it were, on his three lower principles.

This half-conscious and half unconscious work began in the Lemurian epoch, to which we have already referred. At that time the “I” began to work in a very dim consciousness, and at first, in fact, on the astral body. If therefore, you follow the earth development from the Lemurian epoch into the first portion of the Atlantean, you will find the “I” worked at first in a very dim consciousness, half unconsciously only on his astral body. That which then appeared on the earth as the product of the transformation of the astral body, we call sentient-soul. Then during the Atlantean epoch, when the air was filled with dense volumes of water-vapour, the “I” worked in dim consciousness on the etheric body and produced what we call intellectual-soul or mind-soul; and from the time when, from the country in the neighbourhood of the present Ireland, the great impulse came which drove the peoples from the West towards the East and led beyond the great Atlantean flood to our new culture, from the beginning of the last third of the Atlantean epoch, the “I” worked unconsciously on the physical body. It worked into what one calls the consciousness-soul, that which gave man the foundation to work out of the group-soul nature a more or less self-conscious “I” which first received the great impulse towards complete individuality with the appearance of Christ Jesus. Then only did we really become capable of what one may call working more or less consciously on the astral body. Really only since the advent of the Christ impulse on earth have we begun to work consciously on our astral body. So that if we speak of man to-day we have to say that he has developed physical body, etheric body, astral body, then sentient-soul (the astral body which was formerly transformed in dim consciousness); the intellectual-soul (the etheric body which was dimly trans-formed in the Atlantean epoch); and the consciousness-soul (the physical body which was dimly transformed in the later portion of the Atlantean epoch), so that he gradually matured to where he could develop Spirit-Self (Manas) as far as it can be observed in man to-day.

All men now possess the rudiments of the Spirit-Self, but one has more, another less. Many will still have to go through many incarnations before they have developed the Spirit-Self far enough to become aware of what they are working upon within their human nature. But when the earth has reached its goal, when the seventh trumpet begins to sound, the following will he observed: that which exists of the physical body will be dissolved like salt in warm water. The human Spirit-Self will be developed to a high degree, so that man will repeat again and again the words of Paul, “Not I, but Christ in me does everything.” This will enable him to dissolve the physical nature and make the ennobled etheric into a being which can live in the astralized earth. Thus man, a new being, will live over into this spiritualized earth.

We might say that the important stage of passing over into the earth which has become spiritualized, is wonderfully expressed in the Bible where it says that everything which man now accomplishes within himself in the physical body during the earth period is like a sowing whose fruit will appear when the earth has become spiritual. “And that which thou sowest is not the body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat or of some other grain. But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body” (1 Cor. xv. 37), That is, the body which is the expression of the soul of the individuality. “There are also celestial bodies and bodies terrestrial, but the glory of the celestial body is one, and the glory of the terrestrial body is another.” The earthly bodies will be dissolved, the celestial will appear as the luminous expression of what the soul is. “It is sown corruptible and will rise incorruptible.” The incorruptible body will then be resurrected. “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.” Paul calls the etheric or life-body, spiritual body, after the physical has dissolved and the etheric passes into the astral earth. Paul here sees beforehand the incorruptible spiritual body, as he calls it.

And now let us consider what it is that man will embody as the expression of his capacity for receiving the Christ. It is the same that hovered before Paul in spirit, and that he calls “the last Adam,” while he calls the first man who entered into existence in a physically visible body “the first Adam.”. At the end of the Lemurian epoch we already find various animals below, but man is not yet visible to external eyes; he is still etheric. He condenses, and absorbs mineral constituents and appears in his first form; the physical man gradually appears, just as water condenses into ice, Physical evolution then proceeds so far that what is earthly can dissolve and eventually disappears. Hence the man who has the etheric body appears as the last Adam. The first Adam has the capacity of seeing the earth in the physical body through the physical senses; the last Adam, who assumes a spiritual body, is an expression of the inner capacity for receiving the Christ. Hence Christ is called by Paul the last Adam. This comprises the whole of human evolution; in spirit we see what man will become in the future, whereas before we saw how he descended to the earth.

Now to understand the following we must look a little more deeply into the mysteries of becoming man. If you could observe man before his body became physical, that is to say, when he was still invisible to physical eyes, when he first descended from the etheric, so to speak, by becoming first an airy, watery structure, then a cartilaginous structure—if you could follow him thus you would see that our earth was also quite different. In the time before the descent of man there was really no mineral kingdom. The earth only possessed the heritage of the Moon. The lowest kingdom was the vegetable kingdom, and the earth was much softer. The distribution of the watery and gaseous substances was quite different. If you had looked at the earth before man had descended from the surrounding atmosphere to the solid ground it would not have appeared to you as the abstract product described in modern geology, etc.; one might say that our earth as a whole was at that time more like an organism. It was permeated with all kinds of ordered currents, and was more like a living being than it is now. And man, who existed in that ancient time more as a spiritual etheric being, was not born as he is to-day, but he was, so to say, brought forth out of mother earth herself. It was mother earth herself that produced man, that still spiritually

etheric being. Before man separated front the whole earth, he was a being who was really bound up with the whole earth. imagine a body which is soft, and in it hardened parts appear; this will give you a picture of how men were at that time born from mother earth. They were connected with the earth by all kinds of currents, and remained connected with it. Hence man had an entirely different life; for example, the circulation of the blood, which is now confined within the limits of its skin, extended everywhere into the surrounding earth—it existed in the form of natural forces. If we wished to draw a picture of what it was like at that time we should have to say: there arose within the earth—not perceptible to physical eyes, but to spiritual vision—a part which was raised and could be distinguished from the rest of the environment; but the forces in it were connected by innumerable threads with the rest of the whole earth. That was the beginning of a physical human being. There was a time when the human beings were connected in this way by threads with the rest of the earth.

As we have said, we are now touching upon an important and deep mystery, the last traces of which may be seen in the fact that when man is born at the present time, the connection with the maternal organism made by the umbilical cord is severed. This connection with the organism of the mother is the last remains of the connection man had with mother earth. And just as to-day man is a son of man, born from man, he was once a son of earth, born from the earth, when the earth was still a living being. He became independent through the umbilical cord—by which he was connected with the whole earth—being severed, so to speak; he thereby became a being born from his like. We must clearly understand that the paths of the blood now existing in man are nothing more than continuations of currents which in the ancient condition of the earth permeated the whole earth, it is the same with the nerves. All the nerves extended into mother earth. These are now sundered, as it were, from that which streamed through the whole earth as nerves. And the other parts of the human being in the same way. Man is born out of mother earth. That which is now enclosed within the skin has been drawn into him from the whole earth. The being of man is taken from the earth, the forces of the whole earth are in him. Before he became a son of man, he was a son of earth. The name Adam really means son of earth. All these ancient names point to important secrets. But when we are aware of this we shall understand that before the visible man appeared on the earth, the latter already contained within it all the forces of this visible man. Before man became a human being the earth was the bearer of all the human forces. Thus the earth is the mother of the human race. Just as little as you can imagine that man could ever grow out of the present stony earth, just as little could he spring forth from the earth, unless it were a living being. What we have just briefly indicated took place in the Lemurian epoch.

This earth was extremely important to man, for in its original form it contained all that man later possessed within him. In one part the heart was prepared, in another the brain; in our earth every nerve fibre was prepared. And just as our inner being was prepared in the earth, in the same way, in that which we shall have developed as our new body when the earth has reached its goal, do we carry within us the form which the future planet, the future embodiment of our earth must assume. To-day man works upon his soul; in this way he makes his body more and more like the soul, and when the earth has arrived at the end of its mission his body will have become an outward image of the soul which has taken Christ into itself. Such a man will survive and implant in the next embodiment of our earth the forces he has thus developed. Jupiter will have an appearance such as men are able to bring about by constructing it out of their own bodies. This Jupiter will, to begin with, receive its form from that which man has made for himself. Imagine that all the bodies you have fashioned are united in a single cosmic globe; that will be Jupiter. In your soul you have the germs of the future form of Jupiter, and of the forces it will contain. And out of Jupiter will be born the Jupiter beings. Thus man is now preparing for the birth of the Jupiter bodies.

What, therefore, must man do in order to give a worthy form to the future embodiment of our earth? He must take care that the work he can now do consciously is done in the Christine way, so that the etheric body which will be an image of this work will enter worthily into the spiritualized earth. All the parts of this body will be just as man has made them. He will bring into this spiritual earth what he has made of his physical body, and this will be the foundation for his future evolution. Just as your present soul develops in your present body, which you have inherited from the Moon, the future soul will develop in that which you yourselves make out of your own body. Hence the body is described as that which envelops the soul, which clothes the “I,” which is inhabited by the “I,” as the temple of the selfhood within, the temple of the Divinity dwelling in man, the temple of God. When, therefore, you form this body, you are building a future temple, that is to say, the new incarnation of the earth. You build up Jupiter in the right way by shaping the human body in the right way.

What, therefore, must appear when the earth has reached its goal? A temple of the soul harmonious in all its measurements. Hence the Initiate is commissioned to examine this temple which man will then have built. When this temple of God is measured it will be made manifest whether the soul has done what is right. “And there was given use a reed like unto a rod, and the angel said: Rise, and measure the temple of God, and the altar, and them that worship therein. But leave out the outer court” (Rev. xi. 1). This means, all that was there as a preparation must be thrown out of the temple. Man had first to have physical body and etheric body before he could work on them. These bodies are the outer court, and must fall away, they must be thrown out. That alone which man has made does he keep. That is the temple in which are to live the new beings in the Jupiter period.

We shall live, then, in an earth which has become spiritual. We see how the pattern of this Jupiter period is already being prepared. We see foreshadowed how men bring with them the fruits of their earth existence. And now we must clearly under-stand that all that was there before reappears in this spiritual condition on the earth, in a higher state of evolution. Most prominent are the bearers of the spiritual currents upon which the earth is founded, and from which it has proceeded. The bearers of these currents appear in living form. If we follow Christian tradition we shall see in Elias and Moses the personal representatives of what we found in yesterday's lecture in the two pillars. In Christian esotericism Elias and Moses are looked upon as those who give the teachings of the two pillars. Elias was the one who brought to man the knowledge and message of the one pillar, the pillar of strength, Moses the one who brought the message of the pillar of wisdom. Moses means wisdom or truth, and Elias means the directing force, that which gives the impulse—it is difficult to express the words in ordinary language. Thus we see these two appear in the spiritualized earth und, indeed, at the stage of evolution they will then have reached. In the Transfiguration of Christian tradition Christ appeared between Moses and Elias, and this entire procedure appears again at the end of the earth evolution in such a way that the sun, the spiritual sun of love, the manifestation of the earth mission of love appears supported by Sun-Mars, and Moon—Mercury, by Elias and Moses. Just as yesterday we saw the two pillars which at first appear before the Initiate as the symbols of strength and wisdom, and above the sun of love, so we may now picture the evolution of the earth a stage further, and the one pillar will appear in its living nature, in its personal form, as Elias, and the other as Moses, and what is above, as the veritable Christ-principle.

If we now turn our attention away from the earth itself and what is upon it, and consider it in connection with the whole space of heaven, we shall find we have arrived at a very important matter at the time of which we are now speaking. Earth and Sun comprised one body. The earth has developed out of the sun, and the moon has split off. We have said that this had to take place to obtain the right speed of evolution. But now, when man has passed through these stages of development, after he has spiritualized himself, he is ready to unite again with the forces upon the sun, he can proceed at the same tempo as the sun. An important cosmic event now takes place; the earth reunites with the sun. While that of which we have spoken is taking place, the earth unites with the sun. We said that the sun-spirits descended to the earth at the event of Golgotha, that this Christ-principle will be the means of bringing evolution to the point we have described. The earth will then be ready to unite with the sun; and that which was necessary in order that evolution should not proceed too quickly, namely, the moon, will be over-come, for man will no longer need it. The forces of the moon will be overcome. At this stage man can unite with the sun; he will live in the spiritualized earth and at the same time be united with the force of the sun; and he will be the conqueror of the moon. This will be seen on examination to be represented by the symbolical figures of the fifth seal; the woman who bears the sun within her and has the moon under her feet. [The fifth seal in Dr. Steiner's Seals and Symbols].

Thus we have arrived at the moment when man is spiritualized, when he reunites with the forces of the sun, when earth and sun form one body and the moon forces are overcome. Now, we must remember that only the most advanced beings, who have been impregnated by the principle of Christ, have passed through this development. They have reached thus far; but those who have hardened in matter have fallen away and formed, so to speak, a kind of secondary planet of hardened, flesh-like matter. Now remember what man looked like to astral vision before he descended to the earth as a physical being. We pointed out that he appeared in the four types of his group-soul, in the form of the Lion, the Eagle, the Bull and the Man. These four types of the group-soul meet us, so to speak, before man descends into the physical, before he is individualized. These four typical forms which man had before he entered into the physical body are invisible in the present physical human being. They arc in the soul-force, pressed, as it were, into the human form like india-rubber. It is, in fact, the case that when man loses control over himself, when his soul becomes silent either by going to sleep, or otherwise falling into a more or less unconscious condition, then one still sees to-day how the corresponding animal type comes out. But, on the whole, man has overcome this animal type by having descended to the physical plane. When did he receive the power to overcome in the astral world the animal type?

Now you will remember that we spoke of the seven ages of the Atlantean evolution. These seven ages comprise the first four and the last three. In the first four man was completely group-soul. Then in the fifth age the first impulse to the “I-soul” originated. Therefore we have four stages of development in Atlantis during which man first progresses as group-soul, and each of the first four Atlantean races corresponds to one of the typical animal forms—lion, eagle, bull and man. This passes over into the human stage in the fifth age. These typical forms are then lost. Now imagine that in the present epoch man permeates himself with the Christ-principle and thereby conquers his animal nature more and more; but if he does not permeate himself with the Christ-principle, he does not over-come the animal nature. The four typical heads, lion, eagle, bull and man, remain, so to speak, as something which assumes its form again as soon as it has the opportunity, and in addition come three others, those of the last three races of the Atlantean epoch, when man had already begun to be man. These three also remain if man does not work in his soul so that this animal nature disappears. How then will a man appear on the spiritualized earth who during our epoch has not taken into himself the Christ-principle? He will appear in materiality; he will reappear in the shapes from which he has come. He has had these animal forms and has passed through three others as well. He has left unused that which could have overcome the animal nature. The animal nature springs forth again, and, indeed, in seven forms. As once in Atlantis there emerged the four heads, the animal man, so out of the transformed earth, the astralized earth, seven such typical heads will again emerge, and the drama that took place at that time will again be enacted. The germ of the spiritual man was there, but he could not yet develop an individual form; he developed the four animal heads. The embryo human being of that epoch is also represented by the woman who brings forth man. The man of the future is also represented by the woman who gives birth to the spiritual man. But that which has remained in the flesh is represented on the secondary earth by the animal with seven heads, just as there were four heads in the period before man had the possibility of overcoming the animal nature, so those who have remained in the animal nature will appear as one entity, as the beast with the seven heads. Thus in the future, after the earth has united with the sun, while the spiritualized earth is above, there actually appears below, all that has not taken into itself the spiritual principle. The animal heads reappear which were there formerly, except that now they are out of their time. They are now the “adversary;” previously they were in the right period, the period of preparation. Thus we see that as at that time there arose from the physical, there now arises from the astral sea—the sun is also astralized—the monster with the seven heads, the seven-headed beast. All that was deposited in man by the etheric body is called in the mystery language—which the Apocalyptist also uses—a head, because when seen clairvoyantly it produces a typical form of head, e.g. a lion's head.

The etheric forces have to work upon it. If we follow the Atlantean evolution we find that the etheric body was still outside the head. That disposition in man due to the etheric is called in the language of the Apocalyptic mysteries “head.” This, therefore, refers to what is seen by clairvoyant vision chiefly as a head. But that which is brought about physically in man through some part of the etheric body is called a “horn.” Thus in the language of the mysteries a horn is a very mysterious thing. For example, that which has been brought about physically in man through his having passed through that race of the Atlantean epoch in which the lion was the typical group-soul, is called a horn. Thus the physical part which comes from some member of the etheric body is called a horn. A horn is the organ which is the external physical expression for something etheric. I will now speak to you in a concrete manner. All the physical organs of man are really densified etheric organs, they have proceeded from the condensed etheric body. Let us consider the human heart; to-day it is a physical organ, but it has condensed from an etheric organ. This present human heart received its rudiments when man went through the group-soul nature designated as the lion. Thus the heart is the horn of the lion head, for when the etheric body had progressed so far that man appeared with the group-soul symbolized by the lion's head, the rudimentary foundations were formed for that which later developed into the human heart. From this germ of the lion-man originated the present human physical heart. While, therefore, we trace back the origin of the etheric body to the changing of one head into another, to the addition of one head to another, we understand the human physical body as the addition of one horn to another. The human etheric body actually consists of “heads,” the human physical body of “horns.” That is the language of the mysteries. All the organs of man have developed out of the etheric body, they are, therefore, nothing but horns.

We have now to reflect upon all that we have heard; for this is something of which even the Apocalyptist says: “Here is wisdom.” We shall only understand this wisdom, which the writer of the Apocalypse has put into the appearance of the seven-headed beast with ten horns, if we carefully ponder over what “horn” really is in relation to “head” in the language of the mysteries. We shall see that the beings who have kept these seven heads, because they have remained behind in evolution, have, in fact, acquired in the abyss a physical body which consists of ten hardened members of the physical body.

To understand the world without understanding Man is impossible. That is the net result to be derived from our studies here. And for that very reason I wish today to contribute a little more to the understanding of Man. Let us then start from the disparity between the organisation of the head and that of the limb man—a subject on which we have already frequently spoken here.

First of all I would remind you that the head-organisation, as it meets us in the life between birth and death, is the outcome of all those formative processes which have been undergone from the last death to the earthly embodiment of this present life. From this we must conclude that everything connected with the head-organisation does not, in its conformity to law, follow those rules and forces to which we are adapted as earthly beings. Through the bodily organisation which we receive in this particular incarnation we are adapted to Earth-life. We have spoken a little of how this is manifested. We complete one revolution, of taking nourishment and digesting it, every 24 hours. Thereby we are adjusted with respect to the cycle of nourishment and digestion to the movement of the Earth in 24 hours. Something is accomplished in us, as it were, resembling what takes place in the processes of the Earth within the Universe. Our head, however, we virtually bring with us in its organisation at birth; therefore the head is primarily adjusted not to earthly relationships, but to such as are really from beyond the Earth. The head therefore is in a peculiar position in relation to the rest of man. A comparison may serve to make clear the position of man's head during the early epochs of his Earth-life.

Suppose we were on board a ship. The ship makes various movements in different directions. If we have a compass, we see that the set of the magnetic needle does not follow the movement of the ship, but points always to the magnetic North Pole. It is independent of the movements of the ship. The ship's movements can indeed be themselves regulated by the constant position of the magnetic needle. In a sense it is the same with the human head. Man does many things in the physical world with the rest of his organism: the head in a sense has no part in what he does in earthly life. It is always organised with its inborn forces in accordance with the extra-earthly. It is a very important fact that we have in the human head something organised in this way for the extra-earthly. Nevertheless there is always an interaction between the organisation of the head and that of the rest of man. This interaction is only gradually brought to completion in the course of the time that passes between birth and death. The head, as we receive it from the super-earthly worlds at birth, is organised primarily for the life of ideation. It is in a sense so constructed that the life of ideas can use it as an instrument. If it were to develop only on the basis of the forces which it receives on leaving the super-earthly worlds, it would develop solely as an organ of ideation or thought; our connection with the world through the head-organisation would in course of time be entirely lost. We should, as it were, so pass through earthly life with our consciousness as to develop by means of the head ideas only—that is, no more than pictures of earthly life. We should become more and more conscious of extending beyond our organisation which is connected with the Earth-being, of extending beyond it with our head; as though through our head we were beings who were strange to the Earth and developed only pictures of all that is connected with earthly life.

This is not so, and precisely for the reason that the rest of the organism sends its forces into the head. If we enquire into the quality of these forces, which from childhood onwards are more and more directed from the rest of the organism into the head, if we wish to describe them, we must look for them particularly in the forces of the Will. The rest of the organism is continually impregnating the Thought-nature of the head with Will-forces. Thus we can say, in effect, speaking diagrammatically, that we acquire the head as the bearer of ideas, as the result of the foregoing incarnation; while the Will-forces are sent into it from the rest of the organism. What has just been said takes place not only in the life of soul, but shows its effects in the bodily life also.

As head-man we are born in this earthly world as beings of thought and ideation, and the forces of ideation are at first very powerful. They ray out from the head into the rest of the organism, and it is they which during the first seven years of life enable the forces which manifest in the second dentition to work out of the rest of our organism, these same forces consolidate in us also the life of Thought, which is not consolidated until we acquire the second teeth. They are the actual forces which produce the teeth; so that when we have the teeth, these forces are set free, and can assert themselves in the life of ideas. They can then form ideas, and in a corresponding way build the power of memory. Clearly outlined ideas can begin to find a place in our thought. As long however as we are employing the forces in the formation of the teeth, they cannot show themselves as true consolidating forces in the life of ideas.

As we grow beyond the seventh or eighth year, the Will which is essentially bound up with the lower man and not with the head, begins to manifest, and now comes the time when it would, as it were, shoot its forces up into the head. This cannot however come about so easily; for our head, which is organised for the extra-earthly, would not be able to receive these strong forces which the metabolic system, as vehicle of the Will, wishes to send forth to it. These forces must first be stemmed; they must make a halt until sufficiently filtered, toned down, given more of a ‘soul’ character, to make their influence felt in the head. This halt is made at the end of the second septennial period. When the Will-forces are arrested in the organisation of the larynx—for that is the way they manifest; in the male organisation they suddenly break forth in the change of voice. In the female organisation they manifest differently. These are the Will-forces coming to a standstill, as it were, before they reach the head. Thus we may say that at the end of our second septennial period, the Will-forces are arrested in the speech organisation. At that time they are sufficiently filtered and “souled” to make their influence felt in the head-organisation. Having reached the age of puberty, and the change of voice which runs parallel with it, we have reached the point when the faculty of thought and ideation can work together with the Will in the head.

Here we have an example of how with our Spiritual Science we can point concretely to events. The abstract philosophies which make their influence felt in modern times—Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea for instance—all remain in the abstract. Schopenhauer took pains to describe the world in its ideal character on the one hand, and its will character on the other; but he remains, as it were, in the mere abstract. So also does Eduard von Hartmann. They all remain in the abstract. To be concrete is to observe how, through these two halts—at the first and second septennial periods—in quite definite and distinct ways Idea and Will meet in the cosmic system of the human head. The essential thing is that we can point to that which is of the soul and spirit and show how it manifests and reveals itself in the outer physical world. So too, we see the forces of the head, which are sent forth to the body and manifest therein in the forming of the teeth, work together with the forces of the body sent to the head, which prepare themselves, by what they undergo in the formation of speech, to become true soul-will. In the formation of speech they are arrested and held back and only then do they press forward into the head.

Thus we must understand Man in his process of formation, and look at what actually goes on with him. I have said that the human head is no more adjusted to the earthly relations of man than is the magnetic needle to the movements of the ship. The needle is independent of them, and the human head is in the same way independent of the earthly connection.

Here we have something which gradually leads to the physiological concept of freedom. Here we have the physiology of what I have set forth in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, namely, that one can only understand freedom by grasping it in sense-free thinking—that is to say, in the processes taking place in man when he directs pure thinking by his Will and orientates it in accordance with certain defined directions.

We see how man comes step by step to study rightly the mutual relationship of the soul-and-spirit and the physical-corporeal, and how the process of speech-formation can be really understood by conceiving of it as a product of two sources from which the human being is supplied—the sources which are in the head-man on the one hand and in the limb-man on the other.

We can now experience more fully how impossible it is to say that some kind of communication of the will is carried from the brain through the motor nerves. The brain only derives its full power of volition from the rest of the organism. Of course you are not to imagine this as if you could draw it in a diagram, for the process of speech-formation not only was prepared earlier, but is something which goes through the whole of life and only appears in its most characteristic feature in the special time of transition. Thus we must understand clearly how man is adapted to an earthly as well as an extra-earthly life.

He is so adapted to earthly life that certain forces which the animal brings to their conclusion, man does not bring to a conclusion in his purely natural organisation. The animal is, as it were, born ready-equipped for all its functions. Man has to be taught to acquire these functions for himself. What thus takes place in man is really only an outer expression of something that takes place in him organically If we study the metabolism of the animal correctly, we find that it goes further than that of man. The metabolism of man must be held back at an earlier halting place. What in the animal is carried to a certain stage—must in man be arrested at an earlier stage. Superficially expressed, man does not carry digestion so far as the animal; the digestive process ceases earlier. He retains, through the arrested digestion, forces which become the vehicle for what he sends to the head through the Will.

As you see, human nature is complicated; and if one does not wish to take the trouble really to study its complications—why then, one arrives at a science such as we have in the external science of today! One does not arrive at the real nature of Man. The essential nature of Man will only be revealed when Spiritual Science is allowed to illuminate natural science. If however, it is with Man as I have described, and the connection between Man and the extra-human world outside him is as we have described it in these studies, then you will see that the extra-human world can only exist for Man if it has a certain resemblance to him, to his organisation. We have seen that as limb-men we are adapted to earthly relationships, but that through the head-organisation we have removed ourselves as it were out of earthly relations, like the ship's compass on the ship. Now something of this kind must take place also in the extra-human world. There must, for instance, be adaptation to the human limb-nature. Something must lift itself out beyond, there must be something that does not belong.

How does modern natural science study Man? It studies him as though he had no head. Of course it studies the head too, but how? As a kind of appendage to the rest of his organism. What natural science produces for the comprehension of human nature is only calculated to explain the part outside the head, not the human head itself; that must be explained from the spiritual world.

I might have used the following comparison. I might have said—I have already spoken of it recently—that the human head sits upon the rest of the human organism as people sit in a railway carriage. They take no personal part in the movement. They sit still and allow the carriage to move. In the same way, the human head sits at ease. It regards the rest of the organism which is adapted to the outer world, as its coach, and allows itself to be carried. It is itself organised for a very different world. And this is how it must be in the outer world also. A natural history of man, such as we have today, really speaks of a headless man, it does not understand his true nature at all. And an astronomy constructed on the same principles would not correspond to the whole extra-earthly world, but only to a certain part of it; the other part that is withdrawn from this main part, is not considered at all. As a matter of fact the trend of natural science for the last three or four centuries has been such that it has developed the movements of the Universe, disregarding a certain content of this Universe, just as the rest of natural science disregards the human head. Therefore astronomy has derived forms of movements such as ‘The Earth revolves in an elliptical path round the Sun’, which are as little correct for the Universe as the natural science of today is for the whole being of Man. They do not correspond to the actual facts. Hence we must so often point out that the Copernican view must be fructified by Spiritual Science. Many mystics, and theosophists too, are fond of preaching: ‘The world of senses around us is Maya.’ But they do not draw the ultimate logical conclusion, otherwise they would have to say: ‘Even the world of the Copernican system, this movement of the Earth around the Sun is maya, is an illusion, and must be revised.’ For we must realise that within it is something which can no more be recognised on the basis of the hypothesis employed by Copernicus, Galileo—or even Kepler—than the whole nature of Man can be understood from the principles of modern science.

Now when we come to treat of a subject like this, we must at the same time point to something which has already taken place in human evolution. If we call to mind what we have often said—that in olden times there was a kind of primeval wisdom of which man had but a dreamy atavistic consciousness, but which in its content far surpassed what we have since acquired—if we remember all this, we shall not find it difficult to bear in mind also that the idea of the world which was held in olden times was quite different from any cosmology possible today. For what was the cosmology of our forefathers—that is, of ourselves in our former Earth-lives? What was it?

The cosmology that man had in those times consisted far more than it does now in what man brought into the world at physical birth. We may still find in children, if we understand how to observe them aright, something like a picture of the world in which man lived before descending to physical life. In later life however, and indeed very early in later life, this picture vanishes. In olden times this picture endured. What existed in earlier epochs of spiritual evolution as an astronomical description of the solar or planetary system and its relation to man, was something man felt within him, although he experienced it in a dream-like state. Today we look back upon those times of our ancestors with a certain arrogance, yet they were times when we really knew there was something within ourselves that had connection with Mars, Mercury, and so on. That was part of the inner consciousness of the human being. It disappeared however as man developed further. In primeval times he saw only the outer constellation, but felt within himself an inner constellation, an inner cosmic system. Not only did he perceive a cosmic system outside him; but in his own head, which today is merely the vehicle of the—shall I say—indefinite life of ideas, there within, shone the Sun, with the planets circling round. In his head man carried this cosmic picture, and it had an inner force which worked upon the rest of the organism and influenced what he received at birth, or rather at conception, from the Earth-forces; that too was influenced, so that the rest of man was also drawn into this adaptation to the planetary forces.

And now we can carry the thought a little further. Man is born into this world, and as a heritage he receives—let us say—in the first place, the power to acquire his teeth, the milk-teeth. These are completed approximately in the circle of the first year. The second teeth need seven times as long; they are brought forth by the human organism itself. This points in the deepest sense to the fact that a certain rhythm which we bring with us at birth and which relates to the yearly revolution is slowed down by seven times in our earthly life. By seven times is the yearly revolution slowed down, and this is expressed in the fact that man has introduced into his division of time the relation of one to seven—day and week. The week is seven times as long as the day. This is an expression of how something takes its course in man which goes seven times slower than what he brings into physical existence at birth. Man will not understand the actual processes in the human being until he is able to see quite clearly and exactly how something within him which, as it were, was brought in from conditions outside the Earth, has to be slowed down by seven times during the earthly period.

The ancient Mystery teaching spoke much of these facts. If I were to express in our language what the old Mystery teachings—the ancient Hebrew Mystery teaching, for example—said from their atavistic knowledge of these matters, I should have to put it in this way.—The old Hebrew teachers explained to their pupils: Jehovah, who is the true Earth God, who added the Earth-organisation to that of Saturn, Sun and Moon—Jehovah has the tendency to slow down seven times what comes from the Moon-organisation. In relation to the course of the Earth something in the human being wants to go at accelerated speed. I might even say that the old Hebrew Mystery teacher said to his pupils: Lucifer runs seven times as fast as Jehovah. This points to two movements, two currents in human nature. These two currents also exist in extra-earthly nature—only there they are present in a somewhat different form. The thought however, which we here approach, is one not very easy to understand. We can perhaps gain insight into it by starting from social relationships, and then coming back to the cosmic-tellurian relationships.

I have often spoken in public lectures of something I should like to express here. When we contemplate the misery of the present time, we find the peculiar fact that the whole intelligence of modern humanity has developed in a way that is quite estranged from reality. It is a peculiar fact that, in practical life, we find more inefficient people than efficient. This is patent, for instance, as I have shown, in the fact that in the nineteenth century there was much discussion concerning the effect of the gold-standard upon international economic relations. You can go through the Parliamentary reports of that century, and try to form an idea from them of what people then thought would be the result of mono-metalism, the gold-standard. They regarded it as something which would make free trade possible unhindered by imposition of duty. Throughout the united economic domains of the world this was predicted wherever the gold-standard was extolled. What has actually come about? The imposition of duty. Little by little the actual relations have developed in such a way that everywhere duties have been imposed. That is the actual outcome.

Judging superficially one might say: Well, those people must have been very stupid! But they were not at all stupid; among those who had pledged themselves to the promotion of free trade by the gold-standard, were very able and clever persons, but they had no sense of reality, they reckoned only according to logic. They could not dive into the true relationships, any more than can our modern scientists comprehend the organisation of the heart, liver, spleen and so on. They make abstract theories and hold on to them; although they are materialists they remain rooted in the abstract. That is why such an occurrence is possible as that related in the following anecdote, which is founded on fact and is really very illuminating.

In a certain Academy of science there was a physiologist, a learned man, who developed a theory as to the varying length of time particular birds can fast. He made out a beautiful schedule. He had large cages of birds placed in his corridor and he starved those birds to ascertain how long they could live without food. He registered the times and obtained some lovely big numbers as a result. He elaborated these in a paper which he read at an Academical Meeting. Now in the same house there lived on the floor above another physiologist who did not apply the same methods. After the learned treatise had been read, he rose and said: ‘I must unfortunately object that these figures are not correct, for I had such pity on the poor birds that I fed them in passing.’ Now things do not always have to happen just like this! This is an anecdote. But it is founded on fact; and really much of the material underlying our exact science has been obtained in a like way. Someone in the background has ‘fed the birds’ instead of their having starved as long as the schedule showed. If one has a sense for reality, one cannot very well work with statistical methods of that kind; they do not hold out much promise. But this sense for reality is wholly lacking in modern humanity. Why is this so? It is due to a certain necessity of the evolution of humanity; and we can understand the matter as follows:

Picture it to yourselves in this way. The man of ancient times looked into this outer world. By means of all that he bore within him, he viewed the relationships and connections of the world outside. He formed also his theory of the stars from out of his own inner stellar system. He had ‘a sense for reality’ and he carried it in his senses. This sense for reality has disappeared in the course of man's evolution. It will have to be developed again, it will have to be developed to the same degree inwardly as it formerly was outwardly. We must really cultivate this sense for reality in our inner being by the training we receive in Spiritual Science; only then shall we be able to develop it in the world outside. If man were to keep straight on in the path in which he has been evolving with modern intellectuality, he would at length be quite unable to perceive what is going on around him, and then it could easily happen that while the cry is heard, ‘Free Trade is coming!’ in reality it will be Customs restrictions that are being established. This is continually happening in the various domains of so-called practical life. What happened then in a big thing happens today in small things everywhere. The ‘practical’ man predicts one thing, the opposite happens. It would be interesting to keep an account of what ‘practical’ men have predicted as ‘certain to happen’ during the last years of the war. Always the opposite came about, especially in the later years, precisely because there was no longer any sense for reality among the people. This sense however, can arise in no other way than by developing it first within. In future times no one will be considered a practical man or a thinker attuned to reality, who disdains to educate himself in his inner being through Spiritual Science, in a manner that cannot be done through the outer world today. We must carry into the world outside what we develop within. Hence the necessity for Spiritual Science; for people cannot arrive at the relation of the heart to the liver if they do not first acquire the method for it by means of a training in Spiritual Science. In earlier times people could say: the heart is related to the liver somewhat as the Sun to Mercury in the outer world; and man knew something of how this relationship of Sun to Mercury was drawn from the super-sensible world into the sense world. This is now no longer understood, nor can it ever be thoroughly understood if the foundation, the basic impulse for this comprehension, be not acquired from within. It is not through clairvoyance alone that man can make it his own. By clairvoyance the facts of Spiritual Science are investigated; but man acquires this sense when he enters with his whole thought and feeling into what has already been discovered by clairvoyant methods, and regulates his life accordingly. That is the essential point. What is of moment is to study the conclusions of Spiritual Science, not to satisfy a curiosity for clairvoyance. That must be emphasised again and again. For in the whole development of human culture, this application of the methods of Spiritual Science to outer life and to the knowledge of the great world, the world outside man, is of quite special importance.

When we consider what we thus have to look upon as the original head-organisation, when we consider it in the course of our life, we see how it gradually becomes permeated with all in our organisation that is adapted to the world outside. Thus we must learn to understand the world outside man from man's own organism, from the human limb-organisation; and there, only such things as I have already hinted at can help us. I have shown the contrast that exists between the waking and sleeping conditions of man. These are contrasting conditions, and when one condition is passing over into the other, that is to say, when we wake up and when we go to sleep, then we pass through a zero-point of our existence. The moment of awaking and the moment of falling asleep must have something to do with one another.

This indicates that if we try to turn the day-course of man into a geometrical figure, we can employ neither a circle nor an ellipse; for if we were to ascribe to the sleep condition one part of the ellipse, the conditions of awaking and falling asleep should fall apart; and this they cannot do. We shall see how even in outer appearance they present a similarity; they cannot fall apart. Thus we cannot draw the geometrical figure which is to correspond with man's daily round in a circular form nor in an elliptic form. We can only draw it as a looped line, a lemniscate. When we say: Man falls asleep out of the waking condition into the sleep condition, then with the lemniscate it is possible to show him coming out of sleep again through the same condition; and we have a curve, a line which truly corresponds to the daily course of human life. There is no other line for the daily course of life than the lemniscate, for no other line would lead the awaking through the same point as the falling asleep.

There is more than this. If we give attention to human evolution in childhood especially, we have to say: we wake up virtually the same as we went to sleep. We wake up the same in respect of the principal alternating conditions of

waking and sleeping. But if we rightly observe life, we cannot exclude the sleeping condition from human life as a whole. We instruct our children during the day. Out of all we bring to the child, much of it is not his at once, but becomes so only the next day, after the Ego and astral body have passed through the night-condition; only then does the child duly receive what we have given him by day. We must always have this in mind and regulate our teaching and education accordingly. Thus in regard to the alternating condition of day and night, we can say: we sleep, and on awaking come to the same place where we fell asleep; but in regard to human evolution, we shall have to say: we press forwards a little. We progress in another direction.

Hence we may not draw the line quite as a lemniscate; but in such a way that we come out a little further on, and so attain a progressive lemniscate. (A).

Thus when we observe the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping, and continue the evolution, we obtain a spiral. This spiral is ultimately connected with our evolution, and our evolution again is connected with the whole cosmic system. Therefore we must seek this same line as the basis of the movements of the Universe. If, instead of abstract geometry, man had applied concrete geometry to celestial space, the concrete geometry that proceeds from a study of the whole man, he would have arrived at something different. For in the ancient wisdom one had this line (A). And one did not speak of Mars as moving along any other kind of line than this one. Gradually it was all forgotten. Man calculated instead of knowing. What was the result? It was a line which goes forward like this (B). But in that line one can get no further.

So man took this line and set circles upon it (C) and acquired the epicycloid theory.

The Ptolemaic theory is the last remnant of the old primeval wisdom. On its foundation Copernicus made a further simplification, and modern astronomy still speculates on that today—but in such a way that it much prefers to consider ellipses and circles than that inwardly curving line which presents a continuous spiral. Then people wonder that the observations do not agree with the calculations, and that fresh corrections have to be made continually.

Reflect how the whole theory of Relativity has been constructed on an error in Mercury's time of rotation. Only, the correction was attempted in a different way than would have been the case if one had gone back to Man's relation to the whole Cosmos. Of this more in the next lecture.

Our consideration during my presence this time will be to contemplate the vital earnestness embedded in anthroposophical knowledge needed for the great task of our time. When we say “with regard to the great task of our time” we don't need to think of something drifting over our heads which has been organized by some person in authority but we should be clear today that whatever weaves between people in everyday life contains, or is permeated to some extent, with something which belongs to the great task of our time. This should obviously be one of the primary implications of the Anthroposophic world view moving through our souls. This Anthroposophic world view directs us towards recognizing the existence of the spirit within everything, not existing somewhere in abstract heights, but living within the existence surrounding our everyday lives. This is what we must learn to apply to the great task of life and to every small daily experience and action.

When we consider life today from this angle we can ask ourselves: what are the components of life surrounding us from the reference point of spirituality? We have the remnants of ancient knowledge in various forms which was passed traditionally by word of mouth to adherents gathered in communities and their faith in the everlasting nature of the human being. In the most varied forms, most differentiated nuances, this most varied knowledge of this faith was brought to people. Humanity lived within this faith with the belief that all their soul needs were satisfied through this way. Besides this belief of confessions respective to their followers of that time, we have a popular addition today which originated from science, attributed to the present educational institutions. This science was gradually skilled by only considering sense-physical matter, at most penetrating it with inadequate spiritual suggestions, the latter now on the wane. The tendency is increasing towards regarding science as the only physical sense perceptible observation which at best can be combined with the mind.

Wherever we look at today's civilized world we get the impression that people create from two sources: on the one hand out of what is taught as so-called serious, exact knowledge, accepted on authority because on authority everyone accepts knowledge if they have not themselves worked within the subject of the knowledge in question, and therefore this knowledge is mostly accepted. Besides this, people surrender to their popular publications regarding how they should think about facts regarding astronomy, physics and chemistry, about biology, zoology, mineralogy, botany, history and so on, and more besides, submitting to it all and agreeing to be informed in such a way that they can say: All this must be true because it originates from the people who are in control of things through familiar instances of authority and so we accept whatever else flows from their various declarations. Proposing the creation of a bridge between the two is kicked out, because these declarations mostly instruct people to keep knowledge and faith separate and in no way try and merge them. Rising out towards a conscious penetration of these facts is rarely found. Efforts are necessary throughout to recognize scientific authorities arriving through the usual channels to presenting exact knowledge. However, one is inclined not to research these things in order to prove how they really relate to their creation through their scientific methodology.

On the other hand one is disinclined to research the origins of knowledge propagated through tradition which today is offered by official representatives. Awakening fully consciously towards what actually is presented rarely happens. When it does happen it very seldom results in seeing the issue in its true light. Should we accept it offends someone if we oppose what is termed dogma within the Catholic or Protestant denomination, regarding this dogma as “nonsense,” then we are opposing it for the sake of it and at the same time rejecting traditional confession, without finding the possibility to replace it with an alternative.

An example of dogma—I want to refer to a central dogma—is for instance that of the Trinity, the threefold personality of the godly Being. Whoever finds a dogma such as this presented through the denominations, finds it easy to some extent to oppose it according to today's scientific way of thinking. This expression can easily be revealed as “nonsense” in such a dogma. Whoever does go back to the way such a dogma was created will find that dogmas of common confessions have for a long time been propagated within humanity and that the point of origin of these dogmas, often characterized as humanity's earlier evolutionary steps according to instinctive clairvoyance, atavistic clairvoyance, are there, by looking into the spiritual world. Out of such clairvoyance these dogmas have emerged and one can say that something like the Trinity dogma has emerged out of deep, thorough insights within the structure of world existence. At one time this dogma of the Trinity was a deeply recognized truth. It presented a deep insight into the relationship of reality. However this was during ancient times when within the soul's abilities the powers of an instinctive clairvoyant knowledge fitted within such a dogma. This dogma then spread itself. It no longer fits into the current teachings of human soul forces. As a rule each person who has experienced this dogma from its origins has since then gone through several earthly incarnations. Souls had various experiences during these incarnations. In the outer world this dogma has been retained, transmitted from one generation to the next. Today it has taken on a form through words used to proclaim it which no longer can be understood. Now these souls are born again and come across this dogma in church. There is no human relationship between on the one side what the confession of the human soul is met with and on the other side what the soul from within itself strives to experience and to know. What works so badly at present is not that the dogmas are false but that the dogmas are in a form trapping the truth which in today's time are obsolete and thus the dogmas no longer offer what the soul of today needs. Thus we can say: these dogmas are preached today as if breathed by the wind.—Even those who inwardly confess to them do not apply these confessions as soul truths because they don't understand them for the most part. By accepting something which is not understood, creates an inner falsehood. As a result of this inner untruth so much damage has been done through the falsehoods in the world.

The results of untruthfulness within humanity in the last few years have really been immeasurable. Basically it shouldn't surprise us that this is so, from the simple basis that when the soul lives in falsehood the ego can be recognised as not having any sense of truthfulness in outer life. This should be kept in mind by all those who believe today that they should uphold traditional declarations. This is quite a serious situation with which we need to deal in this area.

Regarding dogmas, one could say the souls who have experienced various earthly lives where these dogmas were current, have grown out of them since they were formulated. Just as I have mentioned in the last two lectures that we need to be serious about these things, so we must during the examination of repeated earthly lives be serious. Vitally serious.

Just look from the same point of view at what humanity is given today through physical science. Here knowledge is being formed from purely physical sense perceptions. This has to be joined with what lives in the soul which has to fill itself with something which is merely sense perceptible material.

Examine how a living person stands within his or her life. They carry within them a soul which has gone through earthly lives and now don't find any connection to outer religious declarations. They connect however in certain areas of their life with what today is recognized as scientific. The question must be asked: What happens in the human soul when it connects with this recognised, merely physical sensory aspect of observable science? The soul, now integrated in the physical organism, had during an earlier incarnation incorporated quite a different relationship to nature, to the environment and the relevant world which cannot today be found in this knowledge. Only relatively few presently incarnated souls can be discovered who were not sufficiently incorporated in their former life in such a way as to relate to a definite knowledge containing spiritual imaginations, as I mentioned about natural phenomena, by incorporating a spiritual element. The sheer abstract science which has developed over the last three to four centuries didn't exist before. Not so very far back the kind of natural science existing then was such, even though it contained a sense perceptible element, it also contained within it something permeated by the spiritual. As a result many people who don't accredit it with anything special, presently with physical sense perceptible science don't find anything satisfactory about science, so they leave it lying and don't bother about it, or go digging and researching all kinds of tomes, what Basilius Valentinus or some or other person had handed out for natural science. It is true that all kinds of spirituality lived within the imagination about nature it at that time, but today, deep respect is only stirred within those who engage with it and just because it is not understood it is regarded most profound.

The important thing here is that even today's incarnated soul has no real relationship with ancient wisdom and with what goes on through the rest of life which is already fed, even grafted in school, in some or other form coming from sense perceptible observations. What is really presenting itself here if one considers the inner aspect?

Within our body we have the soul which has been in previous lives yet we come to some extent into our body without having any relationship to what the soul had experienced in a previous life. Throughout various earthly lives—as a necessity for the development of freedom—the soul developed in such a way that it was emptied of all it had absorbed before, in order not to have a relationship any longer to anything taken up earlier and thus have available capacity for what is actually living in the world at present. Our soul no longer brings with it anything from former earthly lives. We do bring results of our moral qualities with us but basically not what has lived in us from earlier earthly lives from which any kind of innate knowledge of world secrets could result. Today souls do not enter bodies in the same way it happened in Greek times. Souls who incarnated during the Hellenistic time entered life with still some old empowered knowledge which enlivened the body with soul spiritual life forces. Today this is not the case. Today the soul enters the body in a way which is consumptive. To an ever increasing degree this is the case; the souls which are born today has some destructive influence and lame the body, gradually dragging death forces through it. If evolution is to continue this way it will lead to the undermining and decline of earthly life. People would become weaker and weaker in their will forces. People will appear less and less able to have a grasp for detecting active impulses. People will gradually go through life like automatic detectors. How sad this is that we have to see the future in this way, and how seldom it happens that people are inwardly fired up through lively ideas. How often we find that people at present can be said to suffer from a soul sclerosis, turning out dead ideas and only allowing their minds to accept tradition and thus becoming machines.

It is really like this: if we go with an unprejudiced attitude through life and observe how people are placed in life, we can basically not differentiate, one person from another, amongst dozens of them. We can actually not tell them apart. We talk to A, to B, and then with C and they all say the same thing. Each one individually believes in having said something particular, but we can't find any particular difference between them, they all say the same thing. We actually only have one kind of human being in a variety of copies, and we can ask ourselves: Are we not being deceived—isn't what we talked about today the same as yesterday's conversation?—This corresponds completely to the observation of consecutive earthly lives in relation to our present earthly life. The soul no longer brings with it what it had in earlier lives, which went from one earthly life to the next and ever again appear, although with a decreasing power which is like an innate wisdom. That is no longer there. When we consider such souls and their connection to the external, sense perceptible scientific observation, then we see they are packed with transitory wisdom; with a wisdom which when expressed in imaginative ideas, is regarded as transitory. In order to conceal this fact by a terrible illusion, the old “Law of conservation of matter” in the nineteenth century was reinvented by the “Law of the conservation of energy.” This law was made up to conceal that there is nothing which can be conserved in nature, that everything is transient, even matter and energy. Nothing is left over for the soul when it is reincarnated in the future as a human machine; the soul being crammed with sensory observation and scientific material, because this fails to exercise anything alive and gives no fructifying power to the soul.

The soul born today comes over from an earlier earthly life, eager to be fructified by something which in turn will help it progress in its next earthly life. However the absorption of knowledge stemming only from the perishable offers a soul death; murders the soul. This is something which must be considered in all earnestness today, when the idea continues that non-understanding can relate to obsolete dogma, that only laming, deadening can come through non-spiritually penetrated scientific knowledge, and that the soul must experience a second death, suffer a soul death. It depends on individuals and on humanity, to rejuvenate their souls. Humanity dare not choose some comfortable passive attitude and say: I am an everlasting being, and the everlasting kernel of my being will preserve me forever through all circumstances.—This doesn't correspond to the effect of reality. The everlasting kernel within human beings exists of course but it has to be fructified in this decisive age if it doesn't want to be destroyed. There is no other way to keep the soul alive than to break free of mere sensory scientific observations and to justify a true spiritual science and to see how in all sensory observations the spirit is alive even in relation to physical facts. It comes down to not only registering purely sensory material but to promote what lives in everything that is sensory and penetrate it with spiritual imagination which actually lives within it and must not be excluded. As a result the souls coming out of a previous earthly life can take up this spirit-filled natural science, become fructified and thereby enable their vitality to be carried forward to the next incarnation. The continued existence of the soul, its health, in fact the continued existence of the soul life itself, the aversion to the soul death of humanity depends upon the spiritualization of our natural knowledge!

From of these facts and not out of any kind of prejudice today we are required to spiritualize natural science. When so many human beings turn against this spiritualization then this attitude, while ignorant about the actual meaning of these facts, are spurred on by minds we all well know about, in order to assert themselves so much more in their human nature, thus reducing what souls bring with them from earlier incarnations. Out of the entire grain of our present lives where the spiritual is being composed out of not only spiritual science but also sense perceptible knowledge, it is apparent in the most absurd sense that repeated antagonistic acts are against the intention to spiritualize natural science. It can't be stressed often enough how necessary it is in our time to deeply and inwardly understand such things—and if I dare use such a word—modify such facts. We can't take this seriously enough that today there's a rejection of spiritually permeated scientific knowledge, whether it comes across in the manner which I've heard mentioned—I don't know to what extent it is connected to the truth—through a decision by colour supporting students who boycotted lectures in the last weeks or if it appears in some other form. Today one can collect a whole jolt of writings opposing spiritual science. Dark, unsavoury streams validate that these things like to slumber and yet relatively soon they will become strongly apparent. Today it is much more comfortable to be unaware of things than being aware of them. However we no longer stand at a point where we can undo the past and remain uncommunicative to the world. This can no longer be allowed. The only way now is forwards. However this forward striving is connected to an active participation which can take on ever more evil forms—one can no longer call them discussions, but let us do so—“discussions” of the time. Only if we succeed from a strong basis, only if each one does his or her part and can come together, representing spiritual science and not be shy, everywhere unreservedly characterize it in an unconcealed manner where hidden aspects let hostility rise against spiritual science, only then can we hope to survive. It deals far less with only the literal interpretation of hostility against spiritual science, being caught up and acting defensively against it. It is certainly in one way or another necessary but it is not enough. Ultimately it is only a secondary appearance—when out of foolish misleading or misunderstanding ill-willed hostility rises against spiritual science. This is to some extend something secondary which naturally needs to be placed in the right light. Secondary it's obvious—I have recently mentioned it in an open lecture—what such people like Frohnmeyer have to say regarding the main statue group in Dornach, which can be experienced as a Christ figure: “In Dornach can be found a `Statue of the ideal human being' with above a `luciferic' trait and below one with animal characteristics.”—It is certainly necessary to point this out but ultimately not only to merely defend spiritual science but from a far deeper, more meaningful foundation. Whoever is capable of presenting such a terrible falsehood in the world, damages humankind in everything which is written and spoken, where it works instructively on mankind. Not only is it most significant that such a bludgeon of a lie is spoken but it is most significant that a person today is capable of such a strong lie as a symptom of paths mankind followed earlier. Attacks on spiritual science are recognisable according to how today's sense of truth is grasped. As a result, wider field work should be carried out in the spiritual realm. This is what it comes down to. We dare not shrink back from encountering this lack of a sense of truth on all fronts. Humanity must learn to understand that only with a real sense of truth can one work into the future when the soul has to find the way through this incarnation into the incarnation of the next age. Today this doesn't involve some kind of formality but actually the real life of the soul through consecutive earthly lives. If you search you will find the connection between every earlier characterized falsehood in thinking—in outer encountered confessions of the soul, without an inner connection with the truth—and the falsehood of the outer world. Actually it is quite an amazing phenomenon that such falsehoods come to the fore so strongly particularly in those—which doesn't mean I want to say they are not present in colleagues of other faculties—who pose as teachers of mankind, who should be the great Keepers of the Seals of religious truths.

This is the primary responsibility of today's humanity who strives for some kind of relationship with a spiritual life: to seek out cultural historical falsehoods. It is extraordinary how deeply these cultural historical falsehoods are taken up. They are a characteristic of our time. From out of politics where it has sown its foul marsh plants it has finally penetrated into other areas. Already the condition has arisen that people can hardly differentiate between truthfulness and falsehood in relation to certain phenomena of life. You see, step by step a certain life phenomenon plays into falsehood in daily life which plays a role in both daily life as well as in the greater affairs of life. Finally falsehood today itself has sprung from the same tendency, unconcerned whether it appears amongst enlightened men—certainly lit by a strange light—who gather in Geneva, or whether it appears in various bourgeois and proletarian coffee-gossipers. Whatever has lived as spirit in Geneva's various bourgeois and proletarian coffee-gossiping found it a popular falsehood, and I might mention in parenthesis—those present should not take it as evil—those who are within the Anthroposophical movement haven't quite been ratted out. This untruthfulness is a cultural phenomenon of the present and needs to be examined. Above all it should in no circumstances be excused but should be characterized before the contemporaries are revealed. We repeatedly experience that when something appears out of a pressing urgency and point to these things, that individuals within the anthroposophical movement, while finding these things uncomfortable, while they must live within this falsehood and as a result experience the characteristics of falsehood and find if highly uncomfortable some way or another, always take this characteristic of untruth as evil.

These things I have spoken about today should be thought about in relation to my two or three previous lectures related to the reincarnation of souls into today's civilised world, as well as to the interests present in part of humanity, that decisive element which wants to connect with humanity in the present age, and not to allow it to come close to humanity, can give an understanding of the immense seriousness of the task of our time within which we stand.

These present tasks are permeated with the deepest earnestness. Because of this, because it is so essential to examine these points of view on our home ground, I had spoken about things in conclusion and how painful it is for me that today so much time is taken into account without the simultaneous possibility of continuing the earlier anthroposophical work, as it was accessible just before this need—a requirement it is indeed—to work through these things which have often been spoken about and even today do actually exist. If we should want to place ourselves really in the right relationship with these things then it is necessary, imperative from out of the spiritual beings of present tasks.

Today we must make it increasingly clear: Our friends have engaged themselves in the anthroposophical movement in manifold ways since its inception at the start of the twentieth century. The anthroposophical movement is something which is not only a reality on the physical plane but which forms an uninterrupted ingredient of the spiritual worlds, a direct part of the spiritual world. Obviously outer practical participation is also a part of the spiritual worlds but not in the sense as it is within the anthroposophical movement. Regarding this, I want to say a few words.

The anthroposophical movement continues in its spiritual aspects whether the people representing it are hardworking or lazy; whether they make the effort to work progressively or against progress, going forward quicker or slower, yet they remain present in their spiritual reality. Because it has become necessary to bring about practical things in life which have grown out of the demands of the present, it appears different with these things. These things must be done at their allotted time, because it is impossible to cope with them when they are not completed at the right time. For things in practical life it can be so that when done in a slow trot, they simply happen too late. Within the anthroposophical movement one has in many cases become accustomed to things happening slowly or quickly. It is becoming more often the practice that what has been acquired here is being applied to things where the same practice is unsuitable. This is precisely what lies at the foundation of what I have recently wanted to characterise, by my indication to create a renewed possibility for that from which everything finally flows namely the anthroposophical movement, and maintaining it as such. How long have I already pointed out that it is not possible to have personal interviews now? Yes my dear friends, we have in the last days of the past week—very few people really work in practical matters—we have filled our days until three in the morning. People still turn indignant when their wishes are not taken into account after a personal meeting. However I'd like to know where the time should come for that. It has to be understood. For this reason no kind of casual manner should exist in anthroposophical life—just the opposite—a life enforcing strength comes from the anthroposophical life. As you are guaranteed that such empowerment comes from anthroposophical life, then other necessities will impact on practical life by themselves. Above all else this re-strengthening must come. This empowerment must come in such a way as to drive out all dreaminess from the soul. Whatever is brewing in some or other island of life, not bothered by what is going on in life today, is exactly what lames the pursuit of real tasks. These tasks are paralyzed when people on the one hand remain blind, sleepy towards what is happening in outer events around them and on the other, their salvation, even though this is more the lust of their soul becoming involved in all kinds of alien mystical problems on their island of life.

I'm touching on something extraordinarily important, something which is a direct application of ideas regarding the great tasks of our time and our own movement.

Every one of us must work together towards the enlivening of the anthroposophical movement. We can only work towards the strengthening of the anthroposophical movement when we cultivate a free and open insight for what causes decline in the greatest part of our cultural life. Anthroposophists for the most part don't worry about the appearances of decline. They don't get anything out of turning to the force permeating our civilization today which steers it towards the abyss. Despite it not wanting to be heard on the one side, on the other side it is again forgotten, I have to ever again point out that things do not improve on their own. Today's contemplative brooding, which is a kind of transcendental demonstration with many, is something which harms us tremendously. Instead of shaking up the will and saying to yourself: `I will do this'—contemplation persists whether here or there the relationships are such that something could be done.

My dear friends, at the beginning of the (20th) century the way the anthroposophical movement was thought about is not the way you would think about it today. Clever people who appeared at that time would have stipulated how things must work, and the cleverer ones would have distinguished between Schwabing and Munich, and everyone could hear the grass grow which indicated who could procure which area. Then some came who had discovered extraordinary relationships in Hannover and Frankfurt. This was encountered all over the place. If someone had really listened then no one would have taken a single step. At the time it was already a wicked thing but today, where much is dealt with in everyday practical life, it is even more evil because today it is not about tracking down such grass growing but that we engage our will forces to do something, to really work. It is of course tremendously easy to say: `I sense the transcendental atmosphere of this or that place, that one could do this or that ...' It is much easier than doing something. One should hardly ever apply the external and as far as possible bring about the inner approach. This is something which of course can't be stressed enough.

With anthroposophical seriousness encouraged, the real power can be cultivated in our relationship to external things and these must be encountered with real interest. We need to know after all what is going on in the world—and there are many things that do advance. Yet in our circles it is amazing how few are concerned with what is happening.

I want to highlight a deplorable fact. This fact has many causes but there is only enough time today to list a few. Clearly the subscription to our magazine for three-foldness hasn't increased by a single one. In addition our membership comprises thousands and thousands of members. It is really very sad that such a fact must be recorded. Yet this is a fact and this is only one of them. Do you believe that it is quite true to say that the opponents are the other guys and they are at their posts everywhere? These machinations are spreading around us. I say these things not without care and not without caution for what we should incur today, when we don't summon all the individual strengths we have. We need them. We must be steeped in so much anthroposophy that we can get to it or we will be too late. On the other hand I don't see that what has to be undertaken is being done, to then only lapse by saying that we got to it too late.

There is much beauty in the advancing, above all in the participation, of some students in our striving. From this very area the most fruit can develop when these things are met with real, true understanding but we must be clear about how these things should be met. Nebulous mysticism is out of the question. It depends on how something is met out of one's inner life's diligence.

So this and much more can be said today but I think that whatever else you need can be discover within yourselves when you develop a train of stimulated thought and take it further. In order for you to develop further is the issue I want to pose as my preliminary wish at the conclusion of this last agreement. Now the times are such that I can't express such a wish in what is to be fulfilled in years to come but that I can only look for the weeks when I can be here again. Basically the situation is like this, that we really use our time, that actually not a single week can be lost because we have not used it.

Therefore my dear friends, I would like to say two things in conclusion: first I want to express the wish that what I have said today must be understood until our next meeting, and secondly, that our next meeting can take place as a result of things which have been aligned with this wish. With this in mind I wish you farewell!

Published in Anthroposophy Today, No. 4, Winter 1975 and/or 1987. It is the second of twelve lectures in the volume The Sun Mystery ... Death, Resurrection, and is also known as Mystery of Golgotha and its Relation to the Sleep of Man.

Spiritual Science cannot hand people something which, once assimilated, is enough for the rest of life. I have often pointed out that there exists no short summary of a world view which can be kept at hand in one's pocket. In place of ready formulas, science of the spirit provides something with which the human soul must repeatedly unite itself, which must be repeatedly inwardly assimilated and digested. External truths such as those provided by natural science we can, if we have a good memory, take in and then possess them once and for all. That is not possible with spiritual-scientific truths, the reason being that the truths of natural science are lifeless concepts. The laws of nature are dead once they have been formulated into concepts, whereas spiritual-scientific truths are living concepts; if we condemn them to lifelessness because we accept them as if they were external truths, then they provide no nourishment; then they are stones the soul cannot digest.
—Rudolf Steiner, Aspects of Human Evolution, Lecture VIII, Berlin 24 July 1917

Waking life is the state of consciousness that is most familiar to mankind, but within this sphere the problems of existence are not unveiled. If this waking consciousness, as it serves us for ordinary life and knowledge, could solve the problems of life without further ado, such problems would no longer exist. Their solution would be a matter of course. Human beings would never come to the point of questioning. The fact that someone asks about the deeper foundations of life and, while not perhaps coming to the point of definitely formulating questions as to the problems of life yet retains the longing to know something that ordinary consciousness cannot yield, proves that from the deepest foundations of the human soul, though in a more or less unconscious way, something arises which indeed belongs to the human being, but which must first be sought if it is to rise up into the light of consciousness.

This leads those who do not observe life sufficiently closely into speculation and into the forming of all kinds of philosophies which eventually prove to be unsatisfying. But anyone who observes the phenomena of life with a certain impartiality will soon realise that, in the sleeping condition, as opposed to the waking condition of consciousness, something is concealed, and that an understanding of life may result from an understanding of the sleeping condition.

We have often spoken of these things, but it is necessary to return to them again and again, for Anthroposophy can only be understood when the attempt is made to approach facts from the most varied points of view.

Out of the state of sleep there emerges first the life of dreams. This dream life consists of pictures, and if one pays attention to this life of dreams, it is easy to observe that its pictures are related to ordinary life and consciousness. Even if it can often be said that things are dreamed of in a way in which the dreamer has never experienced them, I would answer: the parts out of which the dream is made up, the details of the pictures, are all the same taken from ordinary consciousness.

It is different with regard to the dramatic element of the dream, to the way in which the dream, as it grows in intensity, evokes feelings of anxiety, of joy, of compulsion. The meaning of the course taken by these dream pictures lies more deeply within human nature, and we can understand this when we consider the following example. A man may dream, for instance, that he is walking along a road and comes to a mountain. He passes into a cave in the mountain. At first it is dusk, and then it gets darker. An unknown impulse urges him to go farther; he has a sense of uneasiness and this increases till he stands there in a state of terror, let us say, of falling into some inner chasm or the like. He may then wake up in this feeling of terror, for it has lasted until the time of waking.

Again, we may dream that we are standing somewhere and a man is approaching us from a distance. He comes nearer and nearer, and when he is quite close it appears that he is preparing to make an attack. There is an experience of increasing anxiety. The other man comes still nearer and the harmless instrument which he had shown us from afar changes into a murderous weapon. The dream transforms things in this way. Anxiety becomes terror, and once more we awake full of this terror which continues into waking life.

Here we have two entirely different pictures. In the first dream we have a series of pictures which led us into the mountain cavern, and in the second a series of pictures connected with an approaching enemy. The soul-experience has been the same although the picture sequence has been quite different. What the soul has lived through is something entirely different from what is consciously experienced on waking. The pictures in themselves are not the essential thing. The point is the inner drama through which the soul passes; how there was first an impulse—or something that approached the soul in the place of an impulse—how this passed over into feelings of anxiety and terror, and how at last the dreamer came to the point of rousing himself out of sleep and returning to ordinary consciousness. Forces that increase in intensity are there behind the dream and these forces clothe themselves in pictures. The forces are not perceptible but they are the essential factor.

I might multiply these two picture sequences many times, for the same soul content may be clothed in 10, 20 or a hundred different pictures. Thus we must say that here is something that takes place in the soul which the human being does not observe and of which the person knows nothing. Only the pictures are known. These pictures are experienced in dream consciousness, but the essential thing is the process of intensification: first anxiety, then greater anxiety, and lastly actual terror. The dream pictures are more or less taken from ordinary life—the mountain, the cavern, the approaching enemy, his weapon—all these are borrowed from life. The pictures derive their content from life, but this is only the clothing.

But now when, through what I have often described as Imaginative consciousness, we have the power to remain behind this clothing, building no pictures of this kind, but remaining with Imaginative consciousness within the forces of the soul which have given rise to the anxiety, fear and terror, then something quite different happens.

When a person sleeps, the astral body and Ego are outside the physical and etheric bodies. In normal circumstances when human beings awake, they re-enter the etheric and physical bodies very rapidly; but when, in somewhat abnormal circumstances, someone does not immediately penetrate into the physical body, but before entering it penetrates more intensely into the etheric body, then these pictures are formed out of life. For in ordinary consciousness there is no conceptual activity in actual sleep. The dream pictures arise only at the moment when someone is penetrating into the body and passing through the etheric body, or at the moment of falling asleep when, on leaving the physical body, the sleeper lingers in the etheric body. These dream pictures taken from ordinary life are formed only in the intermediate conditions. Imaginative consciousness, however, enables human beings to live in those forces of the soul which stand behind the dream while the person is wholly outside the body. The individual lives then in a different world of reality, a world which is passed through between falling asleep and awaking. Between falling asleep and awaking human beings live in this world without consciousness. You can picture this to yourselves as though a man sank under water, and there, losing all consciousness, can only regain it when the waters bear him to the surface and make him free again. The same thing that there takes place in a physical sense takes place in the soul when people sleep. They dive down into the spiritual world and there lose consciousness. They pass out of the body with their soul and lose consciousness. On waking they rise up again and regain consciousness, and this re ascent is the entrance into the body. When, as has been said, someone does not enter the body immediately, but becomes aware of the passage through the etheric body, there arise the pictures of the dream. But when we reach a stage where the appearance of such dream pictures is no longer allowed and, existing wholly outside the physical body in the spiritual world, we perceive pictures, these are no longer arbitrary pictures but are such as you will find in the description of world-evolution in my Occult Science. All such descriptions as those given in Occult Science originate in the way just characterised.

If it is asked what is to be found in Occult Science, the answer must be: ‘Thoughts are there’. These thoughts can be studied. I have emphasised again and again that the healthy human intellect can reflect upon these thoughts. Thoughts are there, but they are not ordinary thoughts: they are thoughts which are creatively active in the cosmos. Human beings can live in these thoughts when they stand on the other side of the threshold leading into the spiritual world. They can live in these thoughts which are active in the cosmos. This is the first thing that they will find when they enter the super-sensible world.

Picture to yourselves someone asleep. During sleep, processes of the greatest intensity and far-reaching effect take place in the soul. Nothing is known of all this because in sleep the person is without consciousness. In the morning the person re-enters the physical body, diving down instantaneously into it. The eyes are used to perceive light and colour, the ears to hear sounds, and so on. The person becomes conscious. But there is this intermediate state where, before entering directly into the physical body, the person enters the etheric body. Then the dream arises. But should that person become conscious before penetrating into the etheric body, he or she would then be conscious in the outer ether which fills the whole cosmos; there would be consciousness of what is described in Occult Science.

If, for example, you were to become conscious in the middle of the night without returning to your physical body, so that this physical body rose up before you and you were to look upon it—for it would then be visible—you would become conscious of this cosmology, of what I have described in Occult Science. What is there described may be called the formative forces of the cosmos, or cosmic thoughts. Just as people have their own thoughts in waking life, they can now say: ‘The Earth has originated in such and such a way; it has passed through a Moon condition, a Sun condition and a Saturn condition’—as I have described in Occult Science.

This kind of perception in the spiritual world is only one of three existing kinds. When human beings consider their waking condition of consciousness, they know that in this consciousness they can distinguish between thinking, feeling and willing. But just as the waking consciousness has these three states, so also the night consciousness, which in an ordinary way is an unconscious condition so far as the human being is concerned, has its three states. In the period between falling asleep and awaking people are not always in the same condition any more than they are during the period of waking consciousness. A person is awake when thinking or feeling or willing; consciousness can also function in three conditions during sleep. Imaginative consciousness is only able to behold the cosmic formative forces if we have first acquired consciousness and knowledge of them. In sleep we all live within these formative forces of the cosmos, within the cosmic thoughts; just as man is immersed when he jumps into water, so is everyone immersed, in sleep, in the formative forces of the cosmos.

Besides this life within the formative forces of the cosmos there are two other conditions of the life of sleep, just as in waking life the human being not only thinks, but feels and wills. Thinking, the possession of thoughts, corresponds in sleep to the life of the cosmic formative forces. This means that, when we become conscious in the lightest sleep, we are living in the formative forces of the cosmos. It is as though we were swimming through the cosmos from one end to the other, floating through thoughts—thoughts which are, however, forces. In this lightest sleep we float through the thought-forces of the cosmos. But there is also a deeper sleep—a sleep from which nothing can be brought into the waking life of the day unless we have practised special exercises of the soul. A person can bring back something into the waking life through the dream only from the lightest sleep, but, as I have already said, these dream-pictures are not authoritative, for the same dream can be clothed in the most varied pictures. In very light sleep we can always dream, that is, we can always bring something over into consciousness; we can feel that we have had at least some experiences in sleep. This is, however, only the case with the very lightest kind of sleep. Of deeper sleep nothing can be known until we can enter it with Inspirational consciousness, and then we become aware of more than is described in Occult Science. In that work I have, of course, described something of what sounds forth from Inspirational consciousness, but let us make it quite clear—and this is a matter which can only be explained through Anthroposophy—in what way the human being experiences this transition from light sleep to that sleep from which no dreams can be brought back into the ordinary conscious life.

When sleep is so light that dreams can be brought back into ordinary life, then one who is able to look into these worlds perceives the surging, weaving thought-pictures, the cosmic Imaginations which reveal cosmic mysteries showing that human beings indeed belong to a cosmic world just as they belong to the world in which they live consciously from awakening to falling asleep. For what I have described in Occult Science is not as though one merely painted something on a surface, but everything is in perpetual movement, in perpetual activity. At a definite moment, however, pictures begin to appear in this world through which human beings pass in light sleep, though they know nothing of it. The pictures become distinct; their light is enhanced; they reveal certain realities lying behind them. The pictures fade away again, and nothing remains in the consciousness but a kind of feeling that they have died down. Then they rise up again, and in this alternation of activity and withdrawal, something appears which can be called the harmony of the spheres, cosmic music. Thus cosmic music does not reveal itself only as melody and harmony but as the deeds and activities of those beings who dwell in the spiritual world, as the deeds of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, and so on.

The spiritual beings who guide and direct the world out of the spirit are seen, moving as it were through the surging sea of pictures. It is the world that is perceived through Inspiration, the second world. Let me call it the revelations of spiritual cosmic beings. And this world of the revelation of spiritual cosmic beings is the second element of sleep, as feeling is the second element of waking consciousness. Thus during sleep not only does the human being enter the realm of cosmic thoughts, but within these flowing cosmic thoughts there are revealed the deeds of cosmic beings who belong to the spiritual world.

In addition to these two conditions of sleep there is yet a third of which human beings have as a rule no sort of awareness. They usually know that they can sleep lightly, and they know also that dreams emerge from this light sleep. They know that there is a dreamless sleep. But the utmost that they can know of this third condition of sleep is that on awakening they may be conscious of the fact that, during sleep, they had been faced with some difficulty, with something which they must conquer in the first hours after awaking. I am sure that many of you are familiar with this feeling in the morning, where one knows that one has not slept quite in the ordinary way, but that something was there which has left a certain sense of difficulty, that will take some time to overcome when one regains consciousness in the morning. This is an indication of that third condition of sleep, the content of which can be apprehended only through Intuition. It is a condition which is of great significance to the human being.

When they are in the lightest sleep human beings are still actually concerned with a great deal that belongs to the experiences of waking consciousness. In a certain sense they still participate in their breathing processes; they also participate, although not from within but from without, in the blood circulation and the other processes of the body. In the second condition of sleep they do not actually participate in the processes of their bodily life; they are concerned with a world that is common both to the body and to the soul. Some element connected with the body plays over into the soul, just as something passes over from the light into the plant when it is developing in the light of day. But when they are in the third condition of sleep, there is something within them which—if I may so express it—has become mineral, for in this state the salts of the body are especially strongly deposited. During this third state of sleep a very strong storing up of salts takes place in the physical body—with their souls human beings live in the inner being of the mineral world.

Now let us imagine that the following experiment may be made. You lie down in bed and fall into a light sleep from which dreams may emerge into ordinary consciousness. You pass over into a deeper sleep from which no dreams proceed, but in which the soul is still connected with the physical body. You then enter into a sleep in which strong accumulations of salts take place in the physical body. The soul can have no relation to what is thus taking place in the body. However, if you had placed beside your bed a mountain crystal, it would be possible for you to enter with your soul right into the inner being of the crystal; you would perceive it from within outwards. This is not possible either in the first or in the second condition of sleep. In the first state of sleep, the content of which can enter into the dream, you would, had you dreamed of the crystal, still perceive it as some kind of crystal—it would certainly be a shadowy experience, but something of the nature of a crystal would be there. In the second state of sleep the crystal would be experienced in a less definite sense; and if you could then still dream—that is not possible in the ordinary way but we will imagine it to be so—then you would have the experience that the crystal becomes indefinite and forms itself into a kind of sphere or ellipsoid, and then recedes again. But if you could dream in the deepest sleep—that is, if you could bring into it the consciousness of Intuition—then out of this deepest sleep, this third condition of sleep, you would so experience the crystal that it would seem as though inwardly you followed these lines of form to the apex, and back again. You would experience the inner being of the crystal; you would be living within it. And so also in the case of other minerals. Not only would you experience the form, but also the inner forces. In short, the third condition of sleep is one which lifts human beings wholly out of their bodies and places them within the spiritual world. In this third stage of sleep we live with the essential being of the spiritual world itself. That is, we stand within the essence, within the being, of Angeloi, Archangeloi and of all those beings whom we otherwise perceive outwardly, in their manifestations. Between waking and sleeping we see with our sense consciousness, as it were, the external manifestations of the Gods in nature. During sleep we enter either the world of pictures, in the first condition, or into the world of manifestation, the revelation of spiritual beings, in the second condition. And when we reach the third condition we live within the divine spiritual beings themselves.

Thus, just as in our waking consciousness we live the life of thinking, feeling and willing, so during sleep we either flow with the cosmic thoughts, or out of these cosmic thoughts the deeds of divine spiritual beings are revealed, or these spiritual beings so take us up into themselves that we rest within them with our souls. Just as thoughts and ideas are for the waking consciousness the clearest and most definite things of all, while feeling is darker and really a kind of dreaming, and willing the condition of the greatest insensibility—as it were a kind of sleep—so we have these three degrees of the sleeping consciousness. We have the sleep in which ordinary consciousness experiences the dream and a higher clairvoyant consciousness the cosmic thoughts; we have the second state of sleep which for the ordinary consciousness remains hidden, but so appears to the consciousness of Inspiration that everywhere the deeds of divine, spiritual beings are revealed; and we have the third state of sleep, which to intuitional consciousness is life within the divine, spiritual beings themselves. This can be expressed by saying that we dive down, for instance, into the inner being of the minerals. This third state of sleep has, however, yet another element of great significance for the human being.

In the second stage of sleep, as I have said, we find in the surging pictures, alternately appearing and disappearing, the cosmic being of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and so on. But we find ourselves as well. We find ourselves as beings of soul; not, however, as we now are, but as we were before birth, before conception. We learn to know how we have lived between death and a new birth. This belongs to this second world. And every time we pass through dreamless sleep, we live in this same world in which we lived before we descended into our physical body. But when we pass over into the third condition of sleep and are able to awake there, when the consciousness of Intuition awakes, then we experience our destiny—our karma. We know then why certain capacities are ours in this life as the results of a previous one. We know why in this life we have been led into connection with this or that personality; we learn to know our destiny, our karma. We can learn to know this destiny—and I speak now from another point of view—only when we are able to penetrate into the inner being of the minerals. If we are able to see the crystal not only from without but from within—naturally we must not break it up, for that would still be to see it only outwardly, but we must feel fully within it, in the way I have described—when we thus see the crystal from within, we can understand why this or that blow of destiny has befallen us in life. Take any kind of crystal—take an ordinary salt-cube. We look at it from without. That is how it is perceived in ordinary consciousness. Life then remains impenetrable. But if we are able to penetrate within it—the size in space has nothing to do with it—when we look at it from within, looking around in every direction, we are in that world in which we can understand our destiny. We live in this world every night when we pass into the third condition of sleep.

Before the Mystery of Golgotha, in the period of evolution before the appearance of Christ on Earth, human beings—we ourselves in earlier incarnations—entered very often into this third condition of sleep. But before they sank down into this sleep their Angel appeared and raised them out of it again. This is the significant thing: we can always raise ourselves out of the first state, and out of the second state of sleep, but not out of the third. Before the appearance of Christ on Earth we must have died in this third condition of sleep if Angels, or some other beings, had not raised us out of it. Since the appearance of Christ, the Christ-force has been united with the Earth. Every time that we must awaken out of this third state of sleep, the Christ-force which came to be united with the Earth through the Mystery of Golgotha must come to our aid. The human being can enter into the inner being of the crystal but cannot emerge again without the Christ-Force. When we gaze behind the veils of existence, we see the significance of the Christ Impulse for the earthly life. Once again, then, I emphasise that the human being could enter into the crystal, but could not emerge again.

After the appearance of Christ on Earth, after the Mystery of Golgotha, these things were strongly felt in certain regions, for example in Central Europe, where there was still a vivid, ancient, pagan consciousness but where, nevertheless, the Christ revelation was known. It was realised that many people had died because they had fallen into this deep sleep, and that they need not have died had Christ come to their aid. This was felt, for instance, with regard to Charlemagne and Frederick Barbarossa. In spite of the fact that so far as the outer physical world was concerned Frederick Barbarossa was drowned, this feeling was there, and it was very definitely there with regard to Charlemagne.

What happened to such a soul according to the consciousness of the Middle Ages? It passed into the interior of the crystal, thence into the mountain, and there it must wait until Christ should come to raise it out of its deep sleep. All such legends were connected with this consciousness. The deep connection of the Christ Impulse with the Earth since the Mystery of Golgotha has brought it about that the world of Angeloi, Archangeloi and other spiritual beings is still able to raise human beings from this deep sleep; otherwise, when they sank into this third condition of sleep, they could not be brought back out of it. This is connected with the Christ-force itself, not with belief in the Christ-force. No matter whether a man belongs to this or that religious confession, what Christ accomplished on Earth was an objective fact, and what I am here describing as an objective fact is wholly independent of belief. I will speak of the significance of belief on another occasion, but what I am now stating is an objective fact having nothing to do with belief.

How did these things come about? Into the spiritual world itself there entered a different destiny, a destiny which I will describe in the following way. Human beings here in the physical world are born and they die; the characteristic of the divine, spiritual beings who belong to the higher hierarchies is that they are not born, neither do they die, but only undergo a transformation. Christ, Who until the time of the Mystery of Golgotha lived with the other divine, spiritual beings, resolved to know death, to descend to Earth, to become man, and within the nature of man to pass through death, thereafter to return to consciousness through the Resurrection. In the divine-spiritual world it was an event of the deepest significance that a God should experience death. We can thus say that, in the history of the evolution of the Earth, there came about the mighty event that God became man, and that through this His power manifests as I have described. The God Who became man has such power in earthly life that He is able to raise our souls out of the interior of the crystal when they have passed into it. When we speak of Christ we are speaking of the cosmic Being, the God Who became man. What, then, would constitute the antitype? The antitype would be the man who has become god. This would not, however, be an absolutely good god but, just as Christ descended into the world of men and took death upon Himself, that is, assumed a human form in order to be able to participate in human destiny, so we are led to the opposite pole—to the man who, having freed himself from death, having liberated himself from human bodily conditions, within earthly conditions becomes a god. Such a man would then cease to be mortal. He would wander about the Earth—not, of course, under the same conditions as an ordinary mortal human being who must pass from birth to death, and from death to a new birth. A man who had thus become a god would exist on Earth as a man who had unlawfully become god-like. As the Christ is a God Who has lawfully become man, we must seek His antitype in the man who has become god, who, mortal no longer, has unlawfully assumed the god-nature. Just as in the Christian tradition we have in Christ Jesus the God Who has become man in righteousness, so are we also directed to Ahasueris, the man who has become god in unrighteousness, who has laid aside the mortality of human nature. We have the polar antithesis of Christ Jesus in Ahasueris. That is the deeper foundation, the deeper significance of the Ahasueris legend. This legend narrates something that is a reality, speaking of a man who wanders over the Earth. The figure of Ahasueris is actually there, wandering over the Earth from people to people. This Ahasueris figure exists—the man who has unlawfully become god.

If we wish to gain knowledge of historical truth we must turn our attention to such matters; we should observe how beings and forces from the super-sensible world work down into the physical world; how Christ came from the spiritual world into the physical world; and further how again the sensible world works back into the super-sensible. We must recognise in Ahasueris a real cosmic force, a real cosmic being. A consciousness of this wandering of Ahasueris has always existed, though of course he can be perceived only with clairvoyant vision and not with physical eyes. The legends of Ahasueris have a true objective foundation. We cannot understand human life if we only observe it externally, as it is described in history books.

Since the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ has dwelt in our inner being. Just as when we look inwards with quickened sight we can perceive Him there, so also when we look at human life and the eye of vision is opened there appears this figure of Ahasueris—and this is the case in most of those in whom clairvoyance arises, as it may happen unawares to the person who steps across the threshold of consciousness. People may not perhaps always recognise him; he may be taken for something different. It is nevertheless possible for Ahasueris to appear to us, as it is also possible when we look into our inner being for the Christ-figure to shine forth.

These things belong to World Mysteries which now, in this age when many Mysteries are destined to be revealed, must be made known.

I have been speaking to you about the secrets connected with the mummy and with cult and rites, indicating how the mummy enshrined secrets of antiquity before the Mystery of Golgotha, whereas cult and ceremonial rites in their more modern forms enshrine secrets whose full significance will be revealed only in the future. Today and tomorrow I want to add something to what has already been said and to begin with I will give you a picture in the form of a kind of narrative.

If you had been able to participate in many a scene in the Mysteries during a certain epoch of Egyptian development, in times when the custom of the mummification of bodies was at its height, you would have experienced something like the following. The Priest-Instructor in the Mysteries would have tried, first, to explain to his pupils that in the human head all the mysteries of the world lie concealed, in a very special sense. He would have bidden them regard the earth, the dwelling-place of man, as a mirror, a reflection of the whole cosmos. In very truth, everything that exists in the cosmos is also to be found in the earth itself. Looking upwards to the world of stars, we see the moon as our nearest neighbour among the heavenly bodies. Think of the earth and the moon circling around the earth.¹ We can picture the course taken by the moon as it moves around the earth and all that lies between the earth and the orbit of the moon. Those who rightly understand how to interpret what they find when they dig down into the earth, will say: What is present in the environment is mirrored, and condensed, in an outermost layer of the earth itself.

And now take another planet, which together with the earth, circles round the Sun. We can picture this planet, Venus, and its path. This sphere is filled with delicate, aeriform, etheric substance. Again a lower layer in the earth must be pictured as a reflection of what is outside in the cosmos. Proceeding in this way we have the whole earth as a mirror image of the universe, remembering that what exists out yonder in a state of extremely delicate, ethereal volatility is condensed and still further condensed when it is found in the earth's strata. Thus at the centre of the earth, the outermost periphery of the universe would be condensed into a single point.

In the epoch to which I am now referring, the Initiate of Egypt spoke to his pupils of those things I have very briefly outlined. But the Initiate also said to his pupils: To understand the interaction between the cosmos and its mirror image, the earth, let us study the human head. The human head is formed in the mother's body through the combined working of the whole universe and the earth. But—so the Initiate would have said to his pupils—no observation of the human head can, in itself, enable us to understand its real nature, for the head in itself does not reveal its secrets. It contains innumerable secrets and mysteries but they remain concealed.

The human head is active from the earliest period of germination in the body of the mother until death but it does not contain within itself the effects of its own activity. The mystery of the human head is that it is infinitely active, but the effects of its activities are to be found in the other parts of the organism, not in the head itself.

An Egyptian Initiate would have spoken to his pupils just as I am speaking to you now, except that he would, of course, have used the forms of expression current in those days.

Diagrams were sketched on the blackboard, of circles one inside each other, the smallest indicating the earth in the centre and the larger circles the paths around the earth of the moon and other planets with their interpenetrating spheres

He would have made the following intelligible to his pupils. When the human eye looks at a colour, the perception of the colour gives rise to a change in the brain. What is thus produced in the human eye, with the resulting change in the brain is, in truth, a deed of the outer world. The processes that take place in the brain itself are deeds of the outer world. But the brain itself does something. When the brain receives a colour-impression from outside and a nerve-process arises inwardly as a result, the brain brings about something in the astral body and Ego. The actual effect of this, however, manifests in the other parts of the organism, not in the brain itself. Whereas the working of the external world results in a change in the brain, the brain, for its part, works, for example, upon the heart or upon some other organ of the human body. You can only perceive what the human head does when you know exactly what happens in the human physical body—so would the Initiate have spoken to his pupils.

The Egyptians had knowledge of these things, but because the possibilities that had existed in still earlier times were no longer at their disposal, the Initiates were obliged to adopt methods different from those used by the Initiates of ancient Persia or ancient India. The Initiates of ancient India let their pupils carry out exercises of Yoga, made them breathe in a particular way; and by transforming the breathing process into a sensory process the pupils acquired knowledge of the human physical body. And how did they acquire it?

We know that when man breathes in, the breath-impulse passes through the lungs into the whole of the body, through the spinal canal into the brain. In the brain, the breath-impulse combines with the other processes there, and then recoils. It was this recoil that the pupil of Yoga observed. The breath-impulse passes first into the lungs, through the spinal canal into the brain, and there expands; then it recoils and passes through the different organs, into the chest, and so on. Observing the recoil of the breath downwards into the organism, the pupil of Yoga was able to watch what the brain was doing in the chest, in the abdominal organs and so on. In the recoil through the spinal cord and the expansion through the whole body, the pupil of Yoga was able to observe what the head brings about in the organism. Such was the art connected with the breath, in times when the breathing process was made into a sensory process, when through observation of the breathing, a human being could answer for himself the question: How does my head work in my organism?

I told you in the last lecture that at a certain stage of the Egyptian epoch, this art had been lost and the Egyptian Initiates were obliged to resort to other means. The Initiates of Egypt led their pupils to the mummies, taught them to mummify the human organism, taught them, through observation of what was there presented to them, something that had once been learned by inner means, through contemplation of the breathing process. But I told you, too, that although the pupils of the Egyptian Initiates were no longer capable of following these spiritual processes, which are revealed as the deeds performed by the brain in the human organism—and that was the point of importance—nevertheless the Initiates were helped, as they spoke to their pupils, by the spiritual Moon-Beings. These spiritual Beings who would otherwise have wandered homeless about the earth, found dwelling places in the mummies. These were the Beings who could be observed, whose speech was still understood in that period of ancient Egyptian development and through whom the first science of nature was imparted. What the pupil of Yoga was able to perceive inwardly, through cultivation of the breathing process—these things were now taught somewhat in the following way. The Initiates would say to their pupils: The human head is involved in a constant process of dying. It is really dying all the time, and every night the organism must make efforts to counteract this dying process in the head. But what the head does during this dying process between birth and death results in the influx of new life into the other organs of the body, so that inasmuch as the forces of these other organs—not their substance, of course, but their forces—are sent on into the future, during the period between death and a new birth they become head, the head of the next earthly incarnation. But the Initiates impressed upon their pupils the necessity of understanding what is contained in the actual forms of the organs, and it was for this reason that such scrupulous care was given to the preservation of the mummies. By way of the forms in the mummy, the Moon-Spirits were able to reveal the secrets of the organs, their connection with the human head, and how they bear within them those forces of germination by means of which they become head in the next earthly life. Such was the teaching given by the Initiates of Egypt to their pupils, by means of the mummy.

At a certain period, then, it became necessary to teach in an external way what had once been inner teaching in the days when the Yoga philosophy and religion were at their prime. This, indeed, was the great transition that took place from the culture of ancient India and ancient Persia to that of Egypt: what had once been a teaching by inner means was now taught by external means.

The teaching given by the Initiates of Egypt was brought to a majestic climax when they said to their pupils: And now steep yourselves in the plastic quality of the forms lying before you in the mummy. Here you have very faint indications of that which during the life of man on earth is perpetually passing away, namely, the inner components of the human head. But you have before you in great clarity and precision the forms of the rest of the human organism. Contemplation of the mummy will not help you to study the life-processes, or the perceptive processes; but the plastic quality of the forms of the inner organs of the human body, the heart, the lungs, the kidneys, the stomach, and so forth—all this you can study from the mummy. Try to picture the following. During life, the breath is drawn back into the head and then streams out into the organism. In this breath there is a plastic force, which has the tendency to shape the breath into the form of a mummy. The breath, in its drive from the head towards the body, has the tendency towards mummy-formation. And it is only because the body works against this impulse and brings about out-breathing, that this “nascent” mummy is transformed back again. Thus what is seen streaming from the human head into the other part of the organism, taking shape there as the breath passes onwards, is a form like the mummy, a form that takes shape rapidly. In that the breath is breathed out, it dissolves again. All that remains of it is a form of appearance of the etheric body, which is almost always there, notably during waking life. Observation of the etheric body gives the feeling that from the head outwards the etheric body is trying all the time to form itself into a mummy and is in turn dissolved into a kind of resemblance with the human physical organisation. The inner, plastic force of the human etheric body tends to make it assume the form of a mummy, and then to dissolve this form again so that finally the etheric body resembles the physical organism. This was taught as an apotheosis of all the manifold teachings given by the Initiates of ancient Egypt to their pupils with the help of those super-sensible, elementary Beings whom we may call the Moon-Spirits.

The Egyptian Initiates directed the attention of their pupils especially to the past, to the inner experiences of human beings in very ancient times. This, in truth, was the essence of Egyptian culture, which for us today is so fraught with riddles. Sphinxes, pyramids, mummies—they are all enigmas. But these enigmas are unveiled to spiritual science when we know that the sphinxes represent forms that were actually visible to men in the time of Atlantis, and when we remember that the teachings concerning the mummy given by the Egyptian Initiates to their pupils were an echo of the Yoga teaching imparted, for example, by Initiates of ancient India to their pupils. It was not difficult for an Initiate of ancient India to give such teaching because in those remote times the slightest impetus would enable a man to perceive within a human physical organism this momentary birth of the ether-mummy and its retransformation.

It is deeply interesting to contemplate how these mysteries were unveiled in the Egyptian centres of instruction where such intimate connections were thus established with death. Through the methods adopted in Egypt, death preserved forms, which, during life, are hidden from observation but of which there must be knowledge if the being of man is to be truly understood.

The mummies were displayed before the eyes of the ancient Egyptians and I have told you that there is something analogous for human beings who have lived since the Mystery of Golgotha. For them, cults and rites in many forms have been preserved. I told you that at the time when men needed such forms, they began to “mummify” ancient cults and rites. In its first, faint beginnings, this custom arose in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., but it comes more and more to the fore with the passage of time. In occult and other Brotherhoods, rituals are studied and enacted, but there is never anything essentially new in them. Ancient forms, ancient rituals, are preserved. Indeed those whose task it is to preserve these rites and ceremonies, who have to lead them, lay great stress upon the fact that the ceremonies and customs date back to very ancient times, that they have been preserved from remote antiquity. But we never find that the ceremonies or the effects produced by the rituals are really understood.

To “understand” such rites and ceremonies—what does this really mean? What does it mean to understand the nature of acts performed in rites and ceremonies? To answer this question we must go back to the times, say, of ancient India and ancient Persia and try to discover how ceremonies and rites were understood then. A man today is aware of a difference when, let us say, he touches a rose made of papier-mâché and when he touches a real rose. He is also aware of the difference, through his sense of smell, when he is near a rose. He is aware of the difference and says that the papier-mâché rose is a dead object whereas the rose picked from the rosebush is alive. In very early times, dating back to four or five thousand years before Christ, a man with true perception of the world seeing someone working with a machine or tool, say for cutting wood, would have called this a “dead” process; for even with the eye of spirit he would have seen not the physical substance but a kind of dead, shadow-image. But in ritualistic and ceremonial enactments he saw Spiritual Beings from the surrounding elementary world approaching and pervading all the forms and actions of the rite. He beheld spiritual reality in these enactments.

If you were to ask people today whether they have ever seen Spiritual Beings weaving and streaming through rituals and ceremonies in Churches or Lodges, you would find that this is never the case. In these ritualistic enactments today there is no more spiritual life than there was life in the Egyptian mummy of the human being who had been mummified. But inasmuch as these rituals were preserved, as the form of the human body was preserved in the Egyptian mummy, inasmuch as human enactments and rites were preserved by tradition—“mummified”, as it were—something was preserved that can and will be wakened into life when men have discovered how to bring into all their deeds the power that streams from the Mystery of Golgotha.

Men today have very little understanding of how to draw into their actions the power of the Mystery of Golgotha. Through the centuries, however, there were always individuals here and there who had some conception—even if not so clearly as in earlier times—of how the spiritual impulse that can live in the human being may be guided into all his actions, and of how the human being himself can be an intermediary between the Spirit and what comes to pass through him in the outer world. The right impulse must, of course, be at work before this can happen. Think of a man like Paracelsus. He was one of those isolated individuals who had an inkling, at least, that the spiritual must so live among men that it streams out from them into their actions. There is a great difference between man's mode of life today and what Paracelsus, for example, desired. Today people make a sharp distinction between certain domains of their life. For instance, they practise medicine, but according to materialistic conceptions. A doctor today may, of course, also be a religious man or woman in the modern sense; but the two domains are separated. Medicine is practised on the basis of materialistic principles and people seek what their souls need in an entirely separate sphere of religion—into which, as a result, a highly egoistical element finds its way. People only turn to religion when they want to know what is to become of them after death or how what they do tallies with what a God would be able to make of their deeds. Paracelsus had a very different attitude. He wanted to be a man of piety and religion as a doctor. He wanted each medical, each therapeutic deed also to be a religious deed. He regarded what he did with a sick man as the union of an external, human deed with a religious act. To Paracelsus, healing was still a sacred enactment and it was his constant ideal to make it so. His contemporaries had little understanding of this and today there is even less. It makes one's heart ache to hear the tradition which still persists in Salzburg, that Paracelsus was a drunkard and that returning to his house late one night in a state of intoxication, he met his death by falling over a rock and breaking his skull. If the real truth were told, one would, of course, have to point to the work of his enemies. Paracelsus' drunkenness was less responsible for his broken skull than were people who then proceeded to spread the fairy-tale about his habits.

Customs today are less violent in such matters—less violent but not so very different. A time will come when a deeper conception of the cult and of all ceremonial enactments will take root in men. And then the true teachers will be able to reveal to their pupils something similar to what was revealed by the Initiates of Egypt with the help of the mummy. The Egyptian Initiate was able to make his pupils realise that they could behold in the mummy something, which in still earlier times, became actual experience through transformation of the breathing process into a sensory process. And so, when the cult can once again be truly understood, those who possess this understanding will be able to make clear to their pupils that enactments in sacred cults and rites have an immeasurably greater significance for the cosmos than deeds performed by men in the external world with mechanical tools or the like. Tools, as you know, also play a part in cult and ritual. When true ceremonial, true ritualistic enactments are again established in place of what is customary today, Initiates will be able to say to their pupils: An enactment in cult or rite is a call to the spiritual Powers of the universe who through the deeds of men should be able to unite themselves with the earth. Such an enactment, performed according to a true rite, is different from an act of a purely technical nature. An act that is purely technical or mechanical, however, does bring something about, for with machines many things can be made and used in life. Clothes, for instance, are made with a sewing machine. The clothes are worn and eventually wear out. This is what happens to the products of machines. But it is not so with sacred enactments. I told you in the last lecture that provided a man has the requisite faculty and the true conception of sacred enactments, he can come into contact with spiritual Beings who are as closely connected with the earth as the Spirits who spoke to the Egyptians out of the mummies were connected with the moon. Through machines, through external technical devices, man comes into contact with the physical nature-forces of the earth. Through the sacred enactments of cult and ritual he comes into contact with the elementary-spiritual Powers of the earth, with those Powers who point the way to the future.

And so in times to come an Initiate will be able to say to his pupils: When you participate truly in a sacred enactment of cult or ritual, you are engaged in something of which the materialist says that it has no reality, or, if he is a cynic, he will say that it is all child's play. Nevertheless the enactments of a true rite contain spiritual power. The elementary spiritual Beings, who are evoked when such a rite is enacted, have need of the rite because from it they draw nourishment and forces of growth.

A time will come when the earth will no longer exist. Everything that is around our physical senses, everything that is present in the kingdoms of minerals, plants, animals, in air and clouds, even the radiance of the stars ... all this will pass away and, as I have described in An Outline Of Occult Science, the earth will prepare to pass over to the Jupiter embodiment. This future Jupiter planet will be a subsequent incarnation of the earth just as our own future earthly life will be a reincarnation of our present existence, save that the periods of time involved are immeasurably longer. Of the substance present today in minerals, plants, animals, in wind and clouds, not a single particle will remain in that distant future. The processes set up by machines and technical devices will have performed their task—and they too will have become things of the past. But within what was once earth, within what was once external, technical civilisation, something different will have been prepared.

Think of the earth and within it the different processes of nature and plant life. Machines are there, with all that they bring about on the earth; animals and the physical bodies of men move over the earth ... All this will pass away. But on this earth, in future time, sacred rites will be enacted out of a true understanding of the spiritual world. Through these rites and sacred enactments, elementary spiritual Beings are called down. As I have said, a time will come when the material substance in minerals, plants, animals, clouds, the forces working in wind and weather and also, of course, all the accoutrements used in rites and ceremonies, will pass away, will be dissipated in the universe. But the spiritual Beings who have been called down into the sphere of the rites and sacred enactments—these will remain when the earth approaches its end. They will remain, in a state of more perfect development, within the earth, just as in autumn the seed of next year's plant is concealed within the present plant; just as the dry, withered leaves fall away from the plant, so the substance in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms will disintegrate in the universe, but the perfected elementary Beings will be there, living on into the Jupiter existence as a seed of the future.

And so once again an Initiate will be able to bring the teaching given to his pupils to a grand climax. He will be able to say: “Just as the Initiate of Egypt, standing before the mummy, was able to explain to his pupils all the mysteries of the human head and therewith all the mysteries of the earth and the cosmos around the earth, I am able to explain to you how the earth will arise from its destruction—rise again through the spiritual Beings who develop onwards to the future in cults and rites enacted with true understanding.”

In the evolution of our epoch this conception has a glorious beginning. It can be pictured as follows. Human beings satisfied their hunger and thirst by what lay on the tables before them. But there came the Being Who dwelt in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, Who gathered His closest disciples around Him and said: “Here is bread, here is wine. Do not now look upon what your outer eyes see in bread and wine, upon what your tongue can taste and your physical body digest. All that is earthly bears within it the seeds of decay. But if you have within you the true impulse you can permeate earthly substance with the Spirit of the earth. For then it is no longer bread, nor is it wine, but something that can live in the inmost depths of man himself, something that lives and has its being in his body and that he can spiritualise and that will be carried over into the future when everything on the earth has passed away.” Christ entered into the body of Jesus of Nazareth and in his whole being, Jesus of Nazareth was spiritualised. He could point to bread and wine, saying: “This is not the true form of bread and wine. Their true form is what indwells the human being—this is My Body, this is My Blood.” And the words receive their full significance from those other words of Christ: “Heaven and earth will pass away but My Words will not pass away.”

I have said many times: The kingdom of plants, of animals, of minerals, all that lives in wind and storm, in clouds—even the radiance of the stars—will be dispersed and scattered; not one particle will remain. But what man prepares spiritually—this will remain.

In earlier times of the evolution of humanity it was known that words contain Spirit. The modern view is that when we speak, movement is brought into the air through the speech-organs and these movements then beat upon the drum of the ear [(Trommelfell, drum of the ear, so-called because the modern view is that the movements of the air, “drum” or beat upon the membrane.)], the nerves begin to move, and there the process ends. In earlier times it was known that words enshrine the movements of elementary Spirits, that forces in words spoken in sacred ritual, for example, stream into the external action and that the Spirit living in man unites with this external enactment. Thereby the elementary Spirits who are developing onwards to the future enter, in actual presence, into the sphere of the sacred rite. Men who understand these things can realise what the “word” signified in olden times. Today it means little more than “noise and smoke”, and Goethe was justified when he used the expression Schall und Rauch. But in days of yore the “word” signified the indwelling Spirit, not the abstract, conceptual properties, but the spiritual reality inherent in the word. In the word there is much that is spiritual. Christ indicates that the life with which man imbues the word is contained in what comes to pass in sacred enactments of rite and cult, namely, a process whereby elementary Spirits are borne on-wards to the fulfilment of their existence, and He said:

“Heaven and earth will pass away, but My Words will not pass away.”

And now think of the beginning of St. John's Gospel: “In the Beginning was the Logos, the Word ...” The Logos is the Christ. What, then, are the Bread and the Wine in the service of Holy Communion? The Bread and the Wine are the Body and Blood of the Logos. And as we have heard, the Logos relinquishes what is transient, seizes what is in the becoming, prepares what is to come.

Thus we can point to the Mystery of Golgotha as a glorious climax, just as teaching in days of old culminated in the revelation of the ether-body assuming the shape of a mummy and then immediately changing into a form resembling that of the human physical body. But I have emphasised over and over again that man will have to re-establish his connection with the spiritual world if the earth is to attain its goal. Just as the predecessors of the Egyptians, perceiving the breath and its expansion in the organism, inwardly experienced a nascent mummy-formation and its immediate re-transformation, so, in the future, men must perceive in the out-breathing process, in the passing of the out-breathed air into cosmic space, the communication to cosmic space of what takes shape within the human organism, the spiritualisation of the environment through the human being himself. The ancient Egyptians said: The mummy represents a form which the human being strives inwardly and spiritually to assume with every indrawn breath. Initiates of the future will say: Every out-breathing is a manifestation of man's striving to become a cosmos, a whole world. Contemplation of how the inbreathed air surges down from the head into the organism—this brings understanding of the human being. Contemplation of how the indrawn air is breathed out again by man into the world—this can bring understanding of the cosmos. Understanding of the cosmos will be born when Imaginative Knowledge is able to span the world; with Imaginative Knowledge we can also recognise what the human being himself sends forth into the external world with his out-breathing. It is what he is preparing for the future.

Thus what man does in the course of history and what comes to pass in the cosmos are interwoven, intermingled. Without realisation of this there can be no understanding of the world, for history must be studied in its cosmic aspect and historical happenings must reveal to us the workings of the cosmos.

Also known as: The Ego as Experience of Consciousness, lecture 4 of 5, or Pythagoras, Galileo and Goethe. Lecture 10 of 11 from the lecture series: Human Evolution, Cosmic Soul, Cosmic Spirit.

The views which have to be developed in anthroposophical Spiritual Science in order to comprehend man and the world are more easily understood if we study the changes that have taken place in the mental outlook of man through the centuries. If we tell people to-day that in order really to know something about the nature of man, quite a different outlook is necessary from that to which they are accustomed, their first reaction will be one of astonishment and, for the moment, the shock will make them put aside all such knowledge. They feel that one thing at least remains constant, namely, man's spiritual or mental attitude to the things of the world. This is very evident in the outlook of many teachers of history at the present time. They declare that, so far as his mental attitude is concerned, man has not fundamentally changed throughout history and that if this were otherwise there could really be no history at all. They argue that in order to write history it is essential to take the present mental attitude as the starting-point; if one were obliged to look back to an age when human beings were quite differently constituted in their life of soul, it would be impossible to understand them. One would not understand how they spoke or what they did. Historical thought, therefore, could not comprise any such period. From this the modern historian infers that human beings must always have possessed fundamentally the same frame of mind, the same mental outlook as they possess to-day.—Otherwise there could be no history.

This is obviously a very convenient point of view. For if in the course of historic evolution man's life of soul has changed, we must make our ideas plastic and form quite a different conception of former epochs of history from that to which we are accustomed to-day.

There is a very significant example of a man who found it inwardly and spiritually impossible to share in the mental attitude of his contemporaries and who was forced to make such a change in his whole outlook. This significant example—and I mention his name to-day merely by way of example—is Goethe.

As a young man Goethe necessarily grew up in the outlook of his contemporaries and in the way in which they regarded the world and the affairs of human beings. But he really did not feel at home in this world of thought. There was something turbulent about the young Goethe, but it was a turbulence of a special kind. We need only look at the poems he composed in his youth and we shall find that there was always a kind of inner opposition to what his contemporaries were thinking about the world and about life.

But at the same time there is something else in Goethe—a kind of appeal to what lives in Nature, saying something more enduring and conveying much more than the opinions of those around him could convey. Goethe appeals to the revelations of Nature rather than to the revelations of the human mind. And this was the real temper of his soul even when he was still a child, when he was studying at Leipzig, Strassburg and Frankfurt, and for the first period of his life at Weimar.

Think of him as a child with all the religious convictions of his contemporaries around him. He himself relates—and I have often drawn attention to this beautiful episode in Goethe's early life—how as a boy of seven he built an altar by taking a music-stand and laying upon it specimens of minerals from his father's collection; how he placed a taper on the top, lighting it by using a burning-glass to catch the rays of the sun, in order, as he says later—for at seven years he would not, of course, have spoken in this way—to bring an offering to the great God of Nature.

We see him growing beyond what those around him have to say, coming into a closer union with Nature, in whose arms he first of all seeks refuge. Read the works written by Goethe in his youth and you will find that they reveal just this attitude of mind. Then a great longing to go to Italy seizes him and his whole outlook changes in a most remarkable way.

We shall never understand Goethe unless we bear in mind the overwhelming change that came upon him in Italy. In letters to friends at Weimar he speaks of the works of art which conjure up before his soul the whole way in which the Greeks worked. He says: “I suspect that the Greeks proceeded according to those laws by which Nature herself proceeds, and of which I am on the track.”—At last Goethe is satisfied with an environment, an artistic environment enfilled with ideas much closer to Nature than those around him in his youth. And we see how in the course of his Italian journey the idea of metamorphosis arises from this mood of soul, how in Italy Goethe begins to see the transformation of leaf into petal in such a way that the thought of metamorphosis in the whole of Nature flashes up within him.

It is only now that Goethe finds a world in which his soul really feels at home. And, if we study all that he produced after that time, both as a poet and a scientist, it is borne in upon us that he was now living in a world of thought not easily intelligible to his contemporaries, nor indeed to the man of to-day.

Those who embark upon a study of Goethe equipped with the modern scholarship acquired in every kind of educational institution from the Elementary School to the University, and with habitual thought and outlook, will never understand him. For an inner change of mental outlook is essential if we are to realise what Goethe really had in his mind when, in Italy, he re-wrote Iphigenia in Greek metre, after having first composed it in the mood of the Germanic North. Nor is it possible to understand Goethe's whole attitude to Faust until we realise the fundamental nature of the change that had taken place.

After he had been to Italy, Goethe really hated the first version of Faust which he had written earlier. After that journey he would never have been able to write the passage where Faust turns away from the

... heavenly forces rising and descending,
Their golden urns reciprocally lending,

where he turns his back upon the macrocosm, crying: “Thou, Spirit of the Earth art nearer to me.” After the year 1790 Goethe would never have written such words. After 1790, when he set to work again upon his drama, the Spirit of the Earth is no longer ‘nearer’ to him; he then describes the macrocosm, in the Prologue in Heaven, turning in the very direction from which, in his younger days he had turned away. When he speaks in suitable language of heavenly forces ascending and descending with their golden urns, he does not inwardly say: “Thou Spirit of the Earth art nearer,” but he says: Not until I rise above the earthly to the heavenly, not until I cease to cleave to the Spirit of the Earth can I understand Man.—And many other passages can be read in the same sense. Take, for instance, that wonderful treatise written in the year 1790, on the Metamorphosis of the Plants (Versuch, die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erkennen). We shall have to admit that before his journey to Italy Goethe could never have had at his command a language which seems to converse with the very growth and unfolding life of the plants. And this is an eloquent indication of the place of Goethe's soul in the whole sweep of evolution. Goethe felt a stranger to the thought of his time the moment he was obliged inwardly to ‘digest’ the result of contemporary scientific education. He was always striving for a different kind of thinking, a different way of approaching the world, and he found it when he felt that he had brought to life within him the attitude of the Greeks to Nature, to the World, to Man.

The modern physicist rejects Goethe because he lives in the very world which was so alien to Goethe in his youth. But, when all is said and done, it is more honest to reject than to express hollow agreement. Goethe could never fully find his way into the view of the world which had grown up since the fifteenth century. In his youth he was opposed to it, and after his Italian journey he let it pass, because he had gained something else from his intimacy with Greek culture.

What, then, is it that has permeated man's conception of the world and his view of life since the fifteenth century? It is, in reality, the thought of Galileo. This kind of thought tries to make the world and the things of the world comprehensible through measure, number and weight. And it simply was not in Goethe to build up a conception of the world based upon the principles of measure, number and weight.

That, however, is only one side of the picture. There is a certain correlative to what arises in man when he views the world according to measure, number and weight. It is the abstract concept—mere intellectualism. The whole process is quite evident: The application of the principles of measure, number and weight in the study of external Nature since about the middle of the fifteenth century runs parallel with the development of intellectualism—the bent towards abstract thinking, the tendency of thought to work chiefly in the element of reason. It is really only since the fifteenth century that our thinking has been so influenced by our partiality for mathematics, for geometry, for mechanics.

Goethe did not feel at home either with the principles of measure, number and weight as applied to the world, or with purely intellectualistic thought.

The world towards which he turned knew little, fundamentally speaking, of measure, number and weight. Students of Pythagorean thought will easily be misled into the belief that the world was viewed then just as we view it to-day. But the characteristic difference is that in Pythagorean thought, measure, number and weight are used as pictures—pictures which are applied to the cosmos and in close relation always with the being of man. They are not yet separated from man. And this very fact indicates that their application in Pythagorean thought was not at all the same as in the kind of thought that has developed since the middle of the fifteenth century. Anyone who really studies the writings of a man like John Scotus Erigena in the ninth century will find no trace of similarity with our method of constructing a world out of chemical and physical phenomena and theorising about the beginning and ending of the world on the basis of what we have learnt by measuring, counting and weighing. In the thought of John Scotus Erigena, the outer world is not so widely separate from man, nor man from the outer world. Man lives in closer union with the outer world and is less bent upon the search for objectivity than he is to-day. We can see quite clearly how all that unfolded in Greek culture since the age of Pythagoras manifested in later centuries and above all we can see it in a man like John Scotus Erigena. During this era the human soul lived in a world of absolutely different conceptions, and it was precisely for these conceptions that Goethe was driven to seek by a fundamental urge connected with the deeper foundations of his life of Soul.

We can have no clear idea of what this really means unless we consider another historical fact to which little attention is paid to-day. In my book Ratsel der Philosophie I have spoken of this historical fact in one setting and will approach it to-day from a different angle.

We men of modern times must learn to make a clear distinction between concept and word. Not to make this distinction between what lives in abstract reason and what lives in the word can only pervert our clarity of consciousness. Abstract reason is, after all, a universal principle, universal and human. The word lives in the several national tongues. It is not difficult to distinguish there between what lives in the idea or concept, and in the word.

We shall not succeed in understanding such historical records of Greek culture as still remain extant, if we imagine that the Greeks made the same distinction as we make between the concept and the word. The Greeks made no sharp distinction between concept or idea, and word. When they were speaking it seemed to them that the idea lived upon the wings of the words. They believed that the concept was carried into the word itself. And their thinking was not abstract and intellectualistic as our thinking is to-day. Something like the sound of the word—although it was inaudible—passed through their souls, sounding inaudibly within them. The word—not by any means the abstract concept—was imbued with life. Everything was different in an age when it would have been considered altogether unnatural to educate the minds of the young as we educate them to-day. It is characteristic of our civilisation—although we seldom give any thought to the matter—that a large majority of our boys and girls between the ages of ten and eighteen are engaged in absorbing Latin and Greek—dead languages. Can you imagine a young Greek being expected to learn the Egyptian or Chaldean languages in the same way? Such a thing is absolutely unthinkable! The Greek not only lived in his speech with his thinking, but to him speaking was thinking. Thinking was incarnate in speech itself. This may be said by some to have been a limitation, but it is a fact nevertheless. And a true understanding of the legacy that has come to us from Greece can only consist in a realisation of this intimate union between the concept or idea, and the word. The word lived in the soul of the Greek as an inward, inaudible sound.

When the human soul is constituted in this way, it is quite impossible to observe the world after the manner of Galileo, that is to say, in terms of measure, number and weight. Measure, number and weight simply are not there, they do not enter into the picture. As an external symptom only, it is significant that the physics, for example, taught to nearly every child to-day would have been regarded as miracle by the Greeks. Many of the experiments we explain to-day in terms of measure, number and weight would have been looked upon as pure magic in those days. Any history of physics tells us as much. The Greek did not enter into what we call ‘inorganic Nature’ in the way we do to-day. The very nature of his soul made this impossible because he did not pass on to abstract thoughts as we have done ever since the time of Galileo.

To live in the word as the Greeks lived in the word meant that instead of making calculations based on the results of experiments, they observed the changes and transformations taking place unceasingly in the life of Nature. Their attention was turned not to the world of minerals but chiefly to the world of the plants. Just as there is a certain affinity between abstract thought and the comprehension of the mineral world, so there is an affinity between the Greek attitude to the word and the comprehension of growth, of life, of constant change in living beings. When we conceive of a beginning and an ending of a mineral Earth to-day and build up our hypotheses, these hypotheses are an image of what we have measured, counted, weighed. We evolve a Kant-Laplace theory, or we conceive of the entropy of the Earth. All these things are abstractions, derived from what we have measured, counted and weighed.

And now, by way of contrast, look at the Greek cosmogonies. One feels that the ideas here are nourished and fed by the very way in which the vegetation shoots forth in spring, by the way it dies in autumn—growing up and then vanishing. Just as we construct a world-system out of our concepts and observations of the material world, so did the Greeks construct a world-system from observation of all that is revealed in vegetation. In short, it was from the world of the living that their myths and their cosmogonies originated.

The arrogant scientist of modern times will say: ‘Yes, but that was all childish. We are fortunate in having got beyond it. We have made such splendid progress.’ And he will look upon all that can be obtained by measuring, counting and weighing as something absolute. But those who are less prejudiced will say: Our way of viewing the world has developed out of the Greek way of looking at the world. The Greeks formed a picture of the world by contemplating the realm of the living. We have intellectualism—which is also a factor in the education of the human race—but out of our way of viewing the world, based as it is on the principles of measure, number and weight, another must unfold.

When Schiller had conquered his former dislike of Goethe and had become closely acquainted with him, he wrote a characteristic and significant letter in which he said: Had you been born as a Greek, or even only as an Italian, the world for which you are really seeking would have been about you from early youth.—I am not quoting literally but only according to the sense. Schiller perceived how strongly Goethe's soul longed for Greece. Goethe himself is an example of the change that can be wrought in a mind by entering into the spirit of Greece with understanding. Goethe's attitude to the thought of Greece was quite different from his attitude to the period since the fifteenth century, and this is the point in which we are more interested to-day. In our age, men live in the intellect and, their knowledge of the world is derived, for the most part, from the intellect; the phenomena of the world are measured, numbered and weighed. But this age of ours was preceded by another, when the intellect was far less such that the word was alive within him; he heard the word inwardly as ‘soundless’ tone. Just as an idea or a concept arises within our minds to-day, so, in those times, the word lived as inward sound. And because the content of the soul was itself living, men were able to understand the living world outside.

We can, however, go still further back than this. Spiritual Science must come to our aid here, for ordinary history can tell us nothing. Any history written with psychological insight will bring home to our minds the radical difference between the mental attitude of the Greeks and our own, the nature of the human soul before, say, the eighth century B.C. outer history can tell us nothing. Such documents as exist are very scanty and are not really understood. Among these documents we have Iliad and the Odyssey but they, as a rule, are not considered from this point of view. In still earlier times the life of soul was of a nature of which certain men, here and there, have had some inkling. Herder was one who expressed his views on the subject very forcibly but he did not ever work them out scientifically. In short, the period when men lived in the word was preceded by another, when they lived in a world of pictures. In what sense can speech, for example, and the inner activity of soul revealed in speech, be said to live in a world of pictures? Man lives in pictures when the main factor is not so much the content of the sound, or the nature of the sound, but the rhythm, the shaping of the sound—in short the poetic element which we to-day regard as something quite independent of speech itself. The poet of modern times has to give language artistic form before true poetry can come into being. But there was an age in the remote past when it was perfectly natural to make speech poetic, when speech and the evolving of theory were not so widely separated as they were later on, and when a short syllable following a long, two short syllables following a long, or series of short syllables repeated one after the other, really meant something. World-mysteries were revealed in this poetic form of speech, mysteries which cannot be revealed in the same fulness when the content of the sound is the most important factor.

Even to-day there are still a few who feel that speech has proceeded from this origin and it is worthy of note that in spite of all the confusing elements born of modern scholarship such men have divined the existence of something which I am trying to explain to you in the light of Spiritual Science. Benedetto Croce was one who spoke in a most charming way of this poetic, artistic element of speech in pre-historic or practically pre-historic times, before speech assumed the character of prose.

Three epochs, therefore, stand out before us.—The epoch beginning with Galileo, in the fifteenth century is an age of inner intellectual activity and the world outside is viewed in terms of measure, number and weight. The second and earlier epoch is that for which Goethe longed and to which his whole inner life was directed, after his Italian journey. This was the age when word and concept were still one, when instead of intellectuality man unfolded an inwardly quickened life of soul, and in the outer world observed, all that lives in constant metamorphosis and change. And we also look further back to a third epoch when the soul of man lived in an element by which the sounds of speech themselves were formed and moulded. But a faculty of soul functioning with quickened instinct in a realm lying behind the sounds of speech perceives something else in the outer world. As I have already said, history can tell us little of these things and the historian can only surmise. But anthroposophical Spiritual Science can understand thoroughly what is meant, namely, the Imaginative element of speech, the instinctively Imaginative element which precedes the word. And when he possesses this faculty of instinctive Imagination man can perceive in outer Nature something higher than he can perceive through the medium of word or idea.

We know that even to-day, when it has become thoroughly decadent, oriental civilisation points to former conditions of life in its heyday. We realise this when, for example, we study the Vedas or the Vedanta philosophy. Moreover we know that this age, too, was preceded by others still more ancient. The soul of the oriental is still pervaded by something like an ethereal element, an element that is quite foreign to the Western mind and which, as soon as we attempt to express it in a word, is no longer quite the same. Something has remained which our word ‘compassion’ (Mitleid) can only very poorly express, however deeply Schopenhauer may have felt about it. This compassion, this love for and in all beings—in the form in which it still exists in the East—points to a past age when it was an experience of infinitely greater intensity, when it signified a pouring of the soul's life into the life of feeling of other sentient beings. There is every justification for saying that the oriental word for ‘compassion’ signifies a fundamental element in the life of soul as it was in the remote past, an element which expresses itself in an inward sharing in the experiences of another, having a life of its own, manifesting not only in a process of metamorphosis as in the plant, not only in a process of coming-into-being and passing away, but as an actual experience in the soul.

This inward sharing in the experiences of another is only possible when man rises beyond the idea, beyond the sound as such, beyond the meaning of the word, to the world where speech itself is shaped and moulded by Imagination. Man can have a living experience of the plant-world around him when the word is as full of life as it was among the Greeks. He shares in the life of feeling of other beings when he experiences not only the world of the living but the sentient life of other beings and when he is inwardly sensitive not only to speech but to the artistic element at work in the shaping of speech.

That is why it is so wonderful to find reference in certain mythological poems to this primeval phenomenon in the life of the soul. It is related in connection with Siegfried, for example, that there was a moment when he understood the voice of the birds—who do not utter words but only bring forth a consequence of sound. That which in the song of birds ripples along the surface like the bubbling of a spring of inner life, is also present in everything that has life. But it is precisely this element which imprisons the living in an interior chamber of the soul and in which we cannot share when we are merely listening to a word that is uttered. For when we listen to words, we are hearing merely what the head of another being is experiencing. But when we inwardly grasp what it is that flows on from syllable to syllable, from word to word, from sentence to sentence in the imaginative shaping of speech, we grasp that which actually lives in the heart and mind of another. As we listen to the words uttered by another human being, we can form an opinion about his capabilities and faculties; but if our ears are sensitive to the sound of his words, to the rhythm of his words, to the moulding of his words, then we are hearing an expression of his whole being. And in the same way, when we rise to a sphere where we understand the process wherein sound itself is moulded and shaped—although it is a process empty alike of concept and of word, unheard and simply experienced inwardly—we experience that from which feeling itself arises. When we thus begin to realise the nature of an entirely different life of soul in an age when audible speech was accompanied by living experience of rhythm, measure and melody, we are led to an epoch more ancient than that of Greece. It was an epoch when the mind of man was not only capable of grasping the process of metamorphosis in the world of the living, but of experiencing the sentient life connected with the animal creation and of beholding in direct vision the world of sentient being.

If we study the civilised people in the age which stretches back from the eighth century B.C. to about the beginning of the third millennium B.C., we find a life of soul filled with Imaginative instinct, prone by its very nature to experience the sentient life of all beings.

Modern scholarship, with its limited outlook, tells us that the ancients were wont to personify the phenomena of Nature. In other words, a highly intellectual element is attributed to the human soul in olden times and, the comparison often drawn is that a child who knocks himself against the corner of a table will strike the table because he personifies it, thinks of it as being alive.

Those who imagine that a child personifies the table as a living being which he then strikes, have never really gazed into the soul of a child. For a child sees the table just exactly as we see it, but he does not yet distinguish between the table and a living thing. Nor did the ancients personify the phenomena of Nature in this sense; they lived in the element by which speech is shaped and moulded and were thus able to experience the sentient life of other beings.

This, then, has been the way in which the souls of men have developed during the period beginning about the third millennium B.C. and lasting until our own time: from super-speech, through speech, to the age of intellectuality; from the period of experience of the life of feeling in other beings, through the age of sharing in the processes of growth and ‘becoming’ in the outer world, to the time when attention is concentrated on the principles of measure, number and weight. Only when we picture this process quite clearly shall we be able to realise that in order to penetrate into the nature of things in an age when we try to probe everything with the conscious mind, we must deliberately adjust ourselves to an entirely new way of viewing the world around us. Those who imagine that the constitution of the human soul has never fundamentally changed but has remained constant through the ages, regard it as something absolute, and think that man would lose himself irretrievably if the essential nature of his soul were in any way to undergo change. But those who perceive that changes in the constitution of the soul belong to the natural course of evolution will the more easily realise that it is necessary for us to transform our attitude of soul if we are to penetrate into the nature of things, into the being of man and into the nature of the relation of man to the world in a way fitted to the age in which we are living.