The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the course of the two lectures already given, we have become acquainted with certain spiritual beings which occult vision can encounter when it is directed towards the spiritual life of our planet. Today it will be necessary for us to follow another path in order to ascend into the spiritual world, for we can only form a correct conception of the nature of the spiritual beings of which we have spoken, even of the Planetary Spirit itself, when we have observed them from another side. It is always extremely difficult to describe in the words of any language these spiritual beings visible to occult perception, because human languages—at least those of the present day—are only suited to the facts and phenomena of the physical plane. It is therefore only by a description from various aspects that one can hope to arrive at anything approaching what is meant when allusion is made to spiritual beings. It will be necessary for this purpose to begin to-day from the nature of man himself and to make clear certain attributes of human nature, and we can then proceed to describe the higher beings we meet with in the higher worlds. One attribute of human nature shall be brought into very special prominence to-day, and that can be described in the following way. Man is endowed with the possibility of leading an inner life which is quite independent of his external life. This possibility confronts us every hour of our waking life. We know that as regards what we see with our eyes or hear with our ears, we have something in common with all other beings which also use their senses. As man we have a common life with other men, and perhaps also with other beings. Everyone, as we know only too well, has his own special sorrows, his special joys; his troubles and cares, his hopes and ideals; in a sense these form a special kingdom not immediately visible to the physical sight of other men, and this a man carries through the world as an independent inner life. When we are in the same space as another man, we know what he sees with his eyes and hears with his ears. We may even perhaps have an idea of what takes place in his soul by what is expressed, in his face by his gestures, or his speech; but if he wishes to keep his inner life as a special world for himself alone, we can penetrate no further.

Now if we look with occult vision into the world hidden behind the first veil of the external world, we meet there with beings quite differently organized, particularly with respect to these qualities. We meet with beings not able to lead such an independent inner life as man leads. We meet as a first group with those which, when they lead an inner life, are immediately transferred through this inner life into a different state of consciousness from the one they possess in the life they lead in and with the external world. Let us try to understand this. Suppose a man so lived that should he desire to live in his inner being and not to direct his gaze to the external world, he would, simply by means of his Will, immediately have to pass over into another state of consciousness. We know that man, without his will, does pass over into a different state of consciousness in his normal life when he is asleep. We also know that sleep is the result of his astral body and his ego separating from his physical and etheric bodies. Thus we know that something has to take place in a man if he is to pass over into another form of consciousness. For instance, if a man says, “Here before me is a meadow covered with flowers; when I look at it, it gives me joy,” he does not simply on that account enter another state of consciousness; he experiences his joy in the meadow and the flowers together with his association with the outer world. Now those beings which occult vision meets with as the next category in a higher world change their state of consciousness each time they turn their perception and their action from the external world to themselves. Thus, in them there need be no separation between the different principles of their being, they simply bring about in themselves just as they are, by means of their will, another condition of consciousness. Now the perceptions of these beings, of which we are speaking as the next category above man, are not like the perceptions of man. Man perceives, because an external world appears before his senses. He surrenders himself, so to speak, to this external world. These beings do not perceive an external world in the same way as man does with his senses; they perceive it (though this is only a comparison) rather as man perceives when, for instance, he speaks, or makes a movement of the hand, or in any way externalizes his inner being in mimic art; when, in short, he gives expression to his own nature. Thus in a certain sense for these beings of a higher world of whom we are speaking, all their perceptions are at the same time a manifestation of their own being. I want you to bear in mind that when we ascend to the higher category of beings no longer perceptible to man externally, we have before us beings which perceive whenever they manifest, when they express what they themselves are; and they really perceive their own being only as long as they wish to manifest it, as long as in any way they express it outwardly. We might say they are only awake when manifesting themselves. And when of their own will they are not manifesting themselves, not entering into connection with the world around them, another condition of consciousness arises for them—in a certain sense they sleep. Only, their sleep is no unconscious sleep like that of man, it signifies for them a sort of diminution, a sort of loss of their feeling of self. They have their feeling of self so long as they manifest themselves externally, and in a certain sense they lose it when they cease to manifest. They do not sleep then as men sleep, but something arises in their own being like a manifestation of spiritual worlds higher than themselves. Their inner being is then filled by higher spiritual worlds.

Thus, mark well: When man directs his gaze outwards and observes, he lives with the outer world; he loses himself in it. In our planet, for instance, he loses himself in the various kingdoms of nature. But when he diverts his gaze from outside, he enters his own inner being and lives an independent inner life, and he is then free from this external world. When these beings of which we speak as a first category above man, are active externally, they then manifest themselves; they have their feeling of self, their actual self-expression in this manifestation; and when they enter their inner being they do not enter into an independent inner life, as does man, but a life in common with other worlds. Just as man enters such a life when he perceives the external world, so do they perceive other spiritual worlds above them when they look into themselves; they then enter this other condition of consciousness, in which they find themselves filled with other beings higher than themselves. So, as regards man we say that when he loses himself in the external world, he has his perceptions; when he withdraws from the external world, he has his independent inner life. The beings belonging to the next higher category—we call them, speaking generally, the beings of the so-called Third Hierarchy—instead of perception have manifestation, and in this manifestation or revelation they experience themselves. Instead of an inner life, they have the experience of higher spiritual worlds, that is to say, they are filled with Spirit. This is the most essential difference between man and the beings of the next higher category.

We might, by means of a crude comparison from life, define the difference between man and these beings. When a man is in a position of having inner experiences which do not coincide with what he experiences or perceives externally—in the crudest case the result is a lie. In order to make this clearer, we can express a possible peculiarity of man by saying: He is capable of perceiving something and yet of arousing contrary ideas in his inner being and even of giving vent to them externally, although they do not coincide with the perceptions. Through this peculiarity man can contradict the external world by means of an untruth. This is a possibility which—as we shall hear later in the course of these lectures—had to be given to man, in order that he might come to the truth by his own free will. When we consider man as he really is in the world we must, however, fix our attention on this quality, namely, that he can form ideas in his inner life and also externalize them, which do not coincide with his perceptions or with facts. This quality is not a possibility to the beings of the higher category spoken of here, so long as they retain their nature. The possibility of untruth does not exist in the beings of the Third Hierarchy, if they retain their nature. For what would be the result if a being of this Hierarchy wished to lie? Then, in its inner being, it must experience something which it transmitted to the external world differently from the way in which it experienced it. Then, however, the being would no longer be able to perceive this; for everything these beings experience in their inner life is revelation, and it immediately passes over into the external world. These beings must live in a kingdom of absolute truth if they wish to experience themselves at all. Suppose these beings were to lie, that is, had something in their inner being which in their revelation they would so transform that it would no longer coincide with it; they would then not be able to perceive it, for they can only perceive their inner nature. They would, under the impression of an untruth, immediately be stupefied, transferred into a state of consciousness which would be a darkening down, a lessening of their ordinary consciousness, which can only live in the revelation of their inner life. Thus we have above us a class of beings which must of their own nature live in the realm of absolute truth and sincerity. Every deviation from truth would render these beings less conscious. If they are to be observed by occult vision, the occultist must first of all find the right way in which he can meet them. I will try to describe how the occultist can find them.

The first inner experience which one who goes through an occult development must have, is the striving, in a certain sense, to subdue the inner life of ordinary normal consciousness. What we experience in our inner being we describe as our egoistic experience, as that which we wish to have from the world for ourselves alone, so to speak. The more the occultly developing student can bring himself to be passive with regard to what only concerns himself, the nearer he is to the entrance to the higher worlds. Let us take an obvious case. We all know that certain truths, certain things in the world, simply please or do not please us; that certain things affect us sympathetically, or antithetically. Such feelings with regard to the world which we only cherish for our own sake, must, by him who would develop himself occultly, be rooted out of his heart; he must, in a certain sense, be free from all that concerns only himself. This is a truth which is often emphasised, but which, in fact, is more difficult to observe than one usually thinks; for in normal consciousness man has extremely few footholds through which he can become free from himself, and overcome what concerns himself alone. Let us consider for a single moment what it actually means “to be free from oneself.” Probably to become free from what we call usually egoistic impulses is not so difficult; but we must remember that in the one incarnation in which we live, we are born at a certain time and at a certain place; that when we direct our gaze to what surrounds us, our eyes rest upon quite different things from those seen by a man, for instance, who lives in a different part of the world. There must be quite different things in his surroundings to interest him. Thus just because we are born as physically embodied human beings at a certain time and at a certain place, we are surrounded by all sorts of things which call forth our attention, our interest, which actually concern ourselves, and are different for other men. Because we, as men, are differently distributed over our planet, we are, in a certain sense, placed under the necessity of each having his separate interests, his special home upon the earth. In what we are able to learn from our direct environment we can never, therefore, in the highest sense, experience that which sets us free from our special human interests and attractions. Thus, because we are human beings in physical bodies, and in so far as we are such, we cannot possibly through our external perception, reach the portal which leads into a higher world. We must look away from all that our senses can see externally, all that our intellect can connect with the things of the external world, everything that belongs to our own special interests. But now, if we look at what we generally have in our inner being, our sorrows and joys, our worries and cares, our hopes and aims, we shall very soon become aware how dependent our inner world is on what we experience externally; and how, in a certain way, it is coloured by our experiences. Nevertheless, a certain difference exists.

We shall be willing to admit that each one of us carries his own world in his inner being. The fact that the one is born in one part of the earth at one time, and another in another at a different time does in a sense color our inner world; but we also experience something quite different besides, in regard to this inner world. It is certainly our special, in a sense, our differentiated inner world; it bears a certain coloring;—but we can also experience something quite different. If we go from the place where we are accustomed to be active through our senses, to a distant place, and there meet with a man who has had quite different experiences and perceptions from our own, we can nevertheless understand him, because he has passed through certain troubles which we similarly ourselves have passed through; because he can take pleasure, in a certain sense, in the things which please us. Many people have experienced that they may perhaps find it difficult to understand someone they encounter in a distant region or to agree with him about the external world to which they both belong, yet it may be easy to sympathize with one another concerning what the heart feels and longs for. Through our inner world, we human beings are much nearer one another than we are through the external world, and truly there would be little hope of carrying our spiritual science to the whole of humanity, were it not for the consciousness that in the inner being of every man, no matter to what part of the earth he may belong, lives something which can bring him into sympathy with us. Now, however, in order to arrive at something quite free from our own egoistic inner life, we must lay aside even that coloring of inner experience which is still influenced by the external world. That can only be when a man is able to experience something in his own inner being which does not in any way come from the external world; something which corresponds to what we may call inner suggestions, inspirations and which grows and thrives only within the soul itself. He can so transcend the special inner life that he feels something revealed in his inner being which is independent of his special egoistic existence. This is felt by men who assert again and again that over the whole earth-sphere there can be mutual understanding of certain moral ideals, or certain logical ideals which no man can doubt, and which can illuminate every man; for they are imparted to humanity, not by the external world, but by the inner world.

One province—it is, to be sure, but an arid, prosaic province—all men have in common as regards such inner manifestation. It is the province of numbers and their relation; in short, of mathematics, numbers and calculation. The fact that three times three makes nine we can never experience from the external world, it must be revealed to us through our inner being. Hence there is no possibility of disputing this in any part of the globe. Whether a thing is beautiful or ugly can be very greatly disputed all the world over; but if the fact has once been revealed to our inner being that three times three is nine, or that the whole is equal to the sum of its parts, or that a triangle has 180 degrees as the sum of its angles, we know that it is so, because no external world can reveal this, only our own inner being. In dry, prosaic mathematics begins what we may call inspiration. Only as a rule, people do not notice that inspiration begins with dry mathematics, because most people take dry mathematics for something dreadfully tedious, and are therefore not very willing to let anything be revealed to them by this means. Fundamentally, however, the same thing applies to the inner revelation of moral truths. If we have recognized something as right, we say, “This is right and the contrary is wrong, and no external power of the physical plane can make us see that what is revealed to us as right, could be wrong in our inner being.” Moral truths also reveal themselves in the highest sense, through the inner being. If a man directs his spiritual gaze to this possibility of inner manifestation, with feeling and receptivity, he can educate himself in this way. Indeed education through mere mathematics is very good. For instance, if a man constantly devotes himself to the thought: “I may have my own opinion as to whether a thing is good to eat, but someone else may be of a different opinion. That depends upon the freewill of the individual, but mathematics and moral obligations do not depend on such freewill. I know of these that they may reveal something to me which, if I refuse to accept it as true, I prove myself unworthy of humanity.” This recognition of a revelation through the inner being, if accepted as feeling, as inner impulse, is a powerful educative force in the inner life of man, if he devotes himself to it in meditation. If he first of all says to himself, “In the sense-world there is much that can only be decided by freewill; but out of the spirit, things are revealed to me as to which my freewill has nothing to say, and which yet concern me and of which I, as a man, must prove myself worthy;”—if he allows this thought to become ever stronger and stronger, so that he feels overpowered by his own inner being, he grows beyond mere egoism, and a higher self, as we say, gains the upper hand; a higher self which recognises itself as one with the Spirit of the World conquers the ordinary arbitrary self. We must develop something of this sort as a mood if we wish to succeed in reaching the portal which leads into the spiritual worlds. For if we frequently devote ourselves to such moods as have just been described, they will prove fruitful. They prove especially fruitful if we bring them as concretely as possible into our thoughts and especially if we cherish and accept the thoughts which reveal themselves to us as true, and which nevertheless are in contradiction to the external sense-world. Such thoughts may at first be nothing but pictures, but such pictures can be extremely useful for man's occult development.

I will tell you of one such picture. I will show you by such a picture how a man can raise his soul above himself.

Take two glasses, in the one is water, in the other none. The glass with water should he only half-full. Suppose you observe these two glasses in the external world. Now if you pour some of the water from the half-filled into the empty glass, the latter will be partly filled, while the other then has less water in it. If a second time you pour water from the glass which was half-filled into the glass which was at first empty, the first glass will have still less water in it; in short, through the pouring-out there is always less and less water in the glass which was at first half-full of water. That is a true presentation as regards the external physical sense-world.

Now let us form a different conception. By way of experiment, let us form the contrary idea. Imagine yourself again pouring water from the half-filled glass into the empty one. Into this latter there comes water, but you must imagine that in the half-filled glass by means of this pouring out of water there is more instead of less, and that if you poured from it a second time, so that again something passed over into the previously empty glass, There would again be more and not less water left in the glass that was at first half-filled. As the result of the out-pouring, more and more water would be in the first glass. Imagine yourself picturing this idea. Of course everyone who at our present time counts himself among the thoroughly intelligent, would say. “Why, you are picturing an absolute delusion! You imagine that you are pouring out water, and that by so doing more water comes into the glass from which you are pouring!” Of course if one applies this idea to the physical world, then, naturally, it is an absurd idea; but—marvelous to relate—it can be applied to the spiritual world. It can be applied in a singular manner. Suppose a man has a loving heart, and out of this loving heart he performs a loving action to another who needs love. He gives something to that other person; but he does not on that account become emptier when he performs loving actions to another; he receives more, he becomes fuller, he has still more, and if he performs the loving action a second time he will again receive more. One does not become poor, nor empty, by giving love or doing loving actions, on the contrary, one becomes richer, one becomes fuller. One pours forth something into the other person, something which makes one fuller oneself. Now, if we apply our picture (which is impossible, absurd, for the ordinary physical world), if we apply our picture of the two glasses to the outpouring of love, it becomes applicable; we can then grasp it as an image, as a symbol of spiritual facts. Love is so complex a thing that no man should have the arrogance to attempt to define it, to fathom the nature of love. Love is complex; we perceive it, but no definition can express it. But a symbol, a simple symbol—a glass of water which, when it is poured out becomes ever fuller—gives us one quality of the workings of love. If we thus imagine the complexity of loving actions we really do nothing else than what the mathematician does in his dry science. Nowhere is there an actual circle, nowhere an actual triangle, we must only imagine them. If we draw a circle and examine it a little through a microscope, we see nothing but chalk or small specks; it can never have the regularity of a real circle. We must turn to our imagination, our inner life, if we wish to imagine the circle or the triangle or something of that kind. Thus, to imagine something like a spiritual act—such as love, for instance—we must grasp the symbol and hold fast to an attribute. Such pictures are useful for occult development. In them we perceive that we are raised above ordinary ideas, and that if we wish to ascend to the spirit, we must form ideas just the opposite of those applicable to the sense-world. Thus we find that the forming of such symbolical conceptions is a powerful means towards ascending to the spiritual world. You find this treated fully in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and How to Attain It. By this means a man succeeds in recognizing something like a world above him, a world which inspires him, one which he cannot perceive in the external world, but which penetrates him. If he devotes himself more and more to these conceptions, he finally recognizes that in him, in every man, lives some spiritual being higher than he himself, the human being with his egoism in this one incarnation. When we begin to recognizes that there is something above us ordinary human beings, that there is a being guiding us, we have the first form in the ranks of the beings of the Third Hierarchy, those beings we call Angels, or Angeloi. When a man goes out beyond himself in the manner described, he first experiences the working of an Angel-Being in his own being. If we now consider this being independently, so that it has the qualities which have been described as revelation, and spiritual enfilling: if we consider this being which inspires us, as an independent being, we rise to an idea of the beings of the Third Hierarchy, standing immediately above man. We may therefore describe these beings as those which lead, guide, and direct each individual human being.

In this way I have given you a slight description of the way in which man can raise himself to begin with to the first beings above him, so that he can gain an idea of them. Just as each individual, in this way, has his guide, and when we rise above ourselves, above our egoistic interests, occult vision draws our attention to this fact: “Thou hast thy Guide—” so it is now possible to direct our vision to groups of men, to races, and peoples. Such groups of men who belong together have also a guidance, just as individual man has his, in the manner described. These beings, however, who lead whole peoples or races, are even more powerful than the leaders of individual men. In western esotericism, these leaders of peoples or races, who live in the spiritual world, who have revelation as their perception, and spiritual enfilling as their inner life, and who find expression in the actions performed by whole peoples or whole races, are called Archangels or Archangeloi. When a man progresses further in occult development, not only may the Angel who specially leads him be revealed to him, but also the Archangel who leads the common group to which he belongs. And then when our occult development goes still further, we find beings as leaders of humanity who are no longer concerned with individual races and peoples, but are leaders in successive epochs. If the occultly-developed man studies, for instance, the period in which lived the ancient Egyptian or Chaldean, he will see that the whole stamp, the whole character of the period is under a definite leadership. If he then looks with occult vision upon what follows the Egyptian-Chaldean period, and directs it to the age in which Greece and Rome gave the tone to the western intellectual world, he will see that this leadership changes and that above the individual peoples, mightier than the Archangels who are leaders of the peoples, rule Spirits who direct whole groups of peoples connected with each other at a particular time, and that these beings are then relieved after a definite time by other Time-leaders. Just as the individual realms of the Archangeloi who guide contemporary but individual groups of men, are distributed in space, so do we find, if we allow our vision to sweep over passing time, that the different epochs are guided by their definite Spirits of the Age, more powerful than the Archangels and under whom many different peoples stand at the same time. This third category of the Third Hierarchy we call the Spirits of the Age, or Archai in the terminology of western esotericism.

All the beings belonging to these three classes of the Third Hierarchy have the attributes described to-day; they all have what has here been described as manifestation or revelation and being inwardly filled with the Spirit. Occult vision becomes aware of this when it is able to raise itself to these beings. Thus, we may say that when we observe what surrounds man in the spiritual world, and is, as it were, around man as his own individual leader; when we there observe what lives spiritually and rules invisibly, instigating us to impersonal actions and impersonal thinking and feeling, when we see this, we have there first of all the beings of the Third Hierarchy. Occult vision perceives these beings. To the occultist they are realities; but normal consciousness also lives under their, sovereignty, although it does not perceive the Angel, it is under his leadership, even though unconsciously. And so do groups of men stand under their Archangel, as the age and the men of the age stand under the leadership of the Spirit of the Age.

Now these beings of the Third Hierarchy described to-day are found in our nearest spiritual environment. If, however, we went back in the evolution of our planet to a definite point of time, about which we shall learn more in the following lectures, we should find more and more that these beings, who really only live in the process of man's culture are continually bringing forth other beings from themselves. Just as a plant puts forth seed, so do the beings of the Third Hierarchy, which I have just described, bring forth other beings. There is, however, a certain difference between what the plant brings forth as seed—if we may use this comparison—and the beings which separate themselves off from the beings of the Third Hierarchy. When the plant brings forth a seed, it is, in a sense, of as much value as the complete plant; for out of it can again arise a complete plant of the same species. These beings put forth others which are separated from them just as the seed from the plant, they have offspring, so to speak, but they are, in a sense, of a lower order than themselves. They have to be of a lower order because they have other tasks which they can only accomplish if they are of a lower order. The Angels, Archangels, and Spirits of the Age in our spiritual environment, have put forth from themselves certain beings, which descend from the environment of man into the kingdoms of nature; and occult vision teaches us that the beings we learnt about yesterday as the nature-spirits, are detached from the beings of the Third Hierarchy, of whom we have learnt to know to-day. They are offspring, and to them has been allotted other service than service to mankind, namely, service to nature. Indeed, certain offspring of the Archai are the beings we have learnt to know as the nature-spirits of the earth; those separated from the Archangels and sent down into nature, are the nature-spirits of water; and those detached from the Angels we have recognized as the nature-spirits of the air. With the nature-spirits of fire or heat we have still to become acquainted. Thus we see that in a sense, through a division of the beings which represent as the Third Hierarchy our union with the world immediately above us, certain beings are sent down into the kingdoms of the elements, into air, water, earth—into the gaseous, fluid, and solid—in order there to perform service, to work within the elements, and in a sense to function as the lower offspring of the Third Hierarchy—as nature-spirits.

For we want to approach such a creation as the sublime Bhagavad Gita with full understanding it is necessary for us to attune our souls to it, so to say; bring them into that manner of thought and feeling that really lies at the basis of such a work. This is especially true for people who, through their situation and circumstances, are as far removed from this great poem as are the people of the West. It is natural for us to make a contemporary work our own without much difficulty. It is also natural that those who belong to a certain nation should always have an immediate feeling for a work that has sprung directly out of the substance of that nation, even though it might belong to a previous age. The population of the West (not those of southern Asia), however, is altogether remote in sentiment and feeling from the Bhagavad Gita.

If we would approach it then with understanding we must prepare ourselves for the very different mood of soul, the different spirit that pervades it. Such appalling misunderstandings can arise when people imagine they can approach this poem without first working on their own souls. A creation coming over to us from a strange race, from the ninth or tenth century before the foundation of Christianity, cannot be understood as directly by the people of the West as, say, the Kalevala by the Finnish people, or the Homeric poems by the Greeks. If we would enter into the matter further we must once more bring together different materials that can show us the way to enter into the spirit of this wonderful poem.

Here I would above all draw attention to one thing. The summits of spiritual life have at all times been concealed from the wide plain of human intelligence. So it has remained, in a certain sense, right up to our present age. It is true that one of the characteristics of our age, which is only now dawning and which we have somewhat described, will be that certain things hitherto kept secret and really known to but very few will be spread abroad into large circles. That is the reason why you are present here, because our movement is the beginning of this spreading abroad of facts that until now have remained secret from the masses. Perhaps some subconscious reason that brought you to the anthroposophical view of the world and into this spiritual movement came precisely from the feeling that certain secrets must today be poured out into all people. Until our time, however, these facts remained secret not because they were deliberately kept so, but because it lay in the natural course of man's development that they had to remain secret. It is said that the secrets of the old Mysteries were protected from the profane by certain definite, strictly observed rules. Far more than by rule, these secrets were protected by a fundamental characteristic of mankind in olden times, namely, that they simply could not have understood these secrets. This fact was a much more powerful protection than any external rule could be.

This has been, for certain facts, especially the case during the materialistic age. What I am about to say is extreme heresy from the point of view of our time. For example, there is nothing better protected in the regions of Central Europe than Fichte's philosophy. Not that it is kept secret, for his teachings are printed and are read. But they are not understood. They remain secrets. In this way much that will have to enter the general development of mankind will remain occult knowledge though it is published and revealed in the light of day.

Not only in this sense but in a rather different one too, there is a peculiarity of human evolution that is important concerning those ideas we must have in order to understand the Bhagavad Gita. Everything we may call the mood, the mode of feeling, the mental habit of ancient India from which the Gita sprang, was also in its full spirituality accessible to the understanding of only a few. What one age has produced by the activity of a few, remains secret in regard to its real depth, even afterward when it passes over and becomes the property of a whole people. Again, this is a peculiar trait in the evolution of man, which is full of wisdom though it may at first seem paradoxical. Even for the contemporaries of the Bhagavad Gita and for their followers, for the whole race to which this summit of spiritual achievement belongs, and for its posterity, its teaching remained a secret. The people who came later did not know the real depth of this spiritual current. It is true that in the centuries following there grew up a certain religious belief in its teachings, combined with great fervor of feeling, but with this there was no deepening of perception. Neither the contemporaries nor those who followed developed a really penetrating understanding of this poem. In the time between then and now there were only a few who really understood it.

Thus it comes about that in the judgment of posterity what was once present as a strong and special spiritual movement is greatly distorted and falsified. As a rule we cannot find the way to come near to an understanding of some reality by studying the judgments of the descendants of the race that produced it. So, in the deep sentiments and feelings of the people of India today we will not find real understanding for the spiritual tendency that in the deepest sense permeates the Bhagavad Gita. We will find enthusiasm, strong feeling and fervent belief in abundance, but not a deep perception of its meaning. This is especially true of the age just passed, from the fourteenth and fifteenth to the nineteenth century. As a matter of fact, it is most especially true for the people who confess that religion. There is one anecdote that like many others reveals a deep truth—how a great European thinker said on his deathbed, “Only one person understood me, and he misunderstood me.”

It can also be said of this age that has just run its course, that it contained some spiritual substance that represents a great height of achievement but in the widest circles has remained unknown as to its real nature, even to its contemporaries. Here is something to which I would like to draw your attention. Without doubt, among the present people of the East, and of India, some exceptionally clever people can be found. By the whole configuration of their mind and soul, however, they are already far from understanding those feelings poured out in the Bhagavad Gita. Consider how these people receive from Western civilization a way of thought that does not reach to the depths but is merely superficial understanding. This has a twofold result. For one, it is easy for the Eastern peoples, particularly for the descendants of the Bhagavad Gita people, to develop something that may easily make them feel how far behind a superficial Western culture is in relation to what has already been given by their great poem. In effect they still have more ways of approach to the meaning of that poem than to the deeper contents of Western spiritual and intellectual life. Then there are others in India who would gladly be ready to receive such spiritual substance as is contained, let us say, in the works of Solovieff, Hegel and Fichte, to mention a few of many spiritualized thinkers. Many Indian thinkers would like to make these ideas their own.

I once experienced something of this kind. At the beginning of our founding of the German Section in our movement an Indian thinker sent me a dissertation. He sent it to many other Europeans besides. In this he tried to combine what Indian philosophy can give, with important European concepts, such as might be gained in real truth—so he implied—if one entered deeply into Hegel and Fichte. In spite of the person's honest effort the whole essay was of no use whatever. I do not mean to say anything against it, rather I would praise his effort, but the fact is, what this man produced could only appear utter dilettantism to anyone who had access to the real concepts of Fichte and Hegel. There was nothing to be done with the whole thing.

Here we have a person who honestly endeavors to penetrate a later spiritual stream altogether different from his own point of view, but he cannot get through the hindrances that time and evolution put in his way. Nevertheless, when he attempts to penetrate them, untrue and impossible stuff is the result. Later I heard a lecture by another person, who does not know what European spiritual evolution really is, and what its depths contain. He lectured in support of the same Indian thinker. He was a European who had learned the arguments of the Indian thinker and was bringing them forward as spiritual wisdom before his followers. They too of course were ignorant of the fact that they were listening to something which rested on a wrong kind of intellectual basis. For one who could look keenly into what the European gave out, it was simply terrible. If you will forgive the expression, it was enough to give one the creeps. It was one misunderstanding grafted onto another misunderstanding. So difficult is it to comprehend all that the human soul can produce. We must make it our ideal to truly understand all the masterpieces of the human spirit. If we feel this ideal through and through and consider what has just been said, we shall gain a ray of light to show us how difficult of access the Bhagavad Gita really is. Also, we shall realize how untold misunderstandings are possible, and how harmful they can be.

We in the West can well understand how the people of the East can look up to the old creative spirits of earlier times, whose activity flows through the Vedantic philosophy and permeates the Sankhya philosophy with its deep meaning. We can understand how the Eastern man looks up with reverence to that climax of spiritual achievement that appears in Shankaracharya seven or eight centuries after the foundation of Christianity. All this we can realize, but we must think of it in another way also if we want to attain a really deep understanding. To do so we must set up something as a kind of hypothesis, for it has not yet been realized in evolution.

Let us imagine that those who were the creators of that sublime spirituality that permeates the Vedas, the Vedantic literature, and the philosophy of Shankaracharya, were to appear again in our time with the same spiritual faculty, the same keenness of perception they had when they were in the world in that ancient epoch. They would have come in touch with spiritual creations like those of Solovieff, Hegel, and Fichte. What would they have said? We are supposing it does not concern us what the adherents of those ancient philosophies say, but what those spirits themselves would say. I am aware that I am going to say something paradoxical, but we must think of what Schopenhauer once said. “There is no getting away from it, it is the sad fate of truth that it must always become paradoxical in the world. Truth is not able to sit on the throne of error, therefore it sits on the throne of time, and appeals to the guardian angel of time. So great, however, is the spread of that angel's mighty wings that the individual dies within a single beat.” So we must not shrink from the fact that truth must needs appear paradoxical. The following does also, but it is true.

If the poets of the Vedas, the founders of Sankhya philosophy, even Shankaracharya himself, had come again in the nineteenth century and had seen the creations of Solovieff, Hegel and Fichte, all those great men would have said, “What we were striving for back in that era, what we hoped our gift of spiritual vision would reveal to us, these three men have achieved by the very quality and tenor of their minds. We thought we must rise into heights of clairvoyant vision, then on these heights there would appear before us what permeates the souls of these nineteenth century men quite naturally, almost as a matter of course!”

This sounds paradoxical to those Western people who in childlike unconsciousness look to the people of the East, comparing themselves with them, and all the while quite misunderstanding what the West actually contains. A peculiarly grotesque picture. We imagine those founders of Indian philosophy looking up fervently to Fichte and other Western thinkers; and along with them we see a number of people today who do not value the spiritual substance of Europe but grovel in the dust before Shankaracharya and those before him while they themselves are not concerned with the achievements of such as Hegel, Fichte and Solovieff. Why is this so? Only by such an hypothesis can we understand all the facts history presents to us.

We shall understand this if we look up into those times from which the spiritual substance of the Bhagavad Gita flowed. Let us imagine the man of that period somewhat as follows. What appears to a person today in varied ways in his dream-consciousness—the pictorial imagination of dream-life—was in that ancient time the normal content of man's soul, his everyday consciousness. His was a dreamlike, picture consciousness, by no means the same as it was in the Old Moon epoch but much more evolved. This was the condition out of which men's souls were passing on in the descending line of evolution. Still earlier was what we call sleep-consciousness, a state wholly closed to us today, from which a kind of inspiration, dream-like, came to men. It was the state closed to us today during our sleep. As dream-consciousness is for us, so was this sleep-consciousness for those ancient men. It found its way into their normal picture-consciousness much as dream-consciousness does for us, but more rarely. In another respect also it was somewhat different in those times. Our dream-consciousness today generally brings up recollections of our ordinary life. Then, when sleep-consciousness could still penetrate the higher worlds, it gave men recollections of those spiritual worlds. Then gradually this consciousness descended lower and lower.

Anyone who at that time was striving as we do today in our occult education, aimed for something quite different. When we today go through our occult development we are aware that we have gone downhill to our everyday consciousness and are now striving upward. Those seekers were also striving upward, from their everyday dream-consciousness. What was it then that they attained? With all their pains it was something altogether different from what we are trying to attain. If someone had offered those men my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds they would have had no use for it at all. What it contains would have been foolishness for that ancient time; it has sense only for mankind today. Then, everything those men did with their Yoga and the Sankhya was a striving toward a height that we have reached in the most profound works of our time, in those of the three European thinkers I have mentioned. They were striving to grasp the world in ideas and concepts. Therefore, one who really penetrates the matter finds no difference—apart from differences of time, mood, form, and quality of feeling—between our three thinkers and the Vedantic philosophy. At that time the Vedantic philosophy was that to which men were striving upward; today it has come down and is accessible to everyday consciousness.

If we would describe the condition of our souls in this connection we may say to begin with that we have a sleep-consciousness that for us is closed but for the ancient people of India was still permeated by the light of spiritual vision. What we are now striving for lay hidden in the depths of the future for them. I mean what we call Imaginative Knowledge, fully conscious picture-consciousness, permeated by the sense of the ego; fully conscious Imagination as it is described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. So much for the technical point that should be inserted here. In these abstract technicalities lies something far more important, that if the man of today will only vigorously make use of the forces present in his soul, what the men of the Bhagavad Gita era strove for with all their might lies right at his hand. It really does, even if only for a Solovieff, a Fichte or a Hegel. There is something more. What today can be found right at hand was in those ancient times attained by application of all the keenness of vision of Sankhya, and the deep penetration of Yoga. It was attained by effort and pain, by sublime effort to lift the mind.

Now imagine how different the situation is for a man who, for example, lives at the top of a mountain, has his house there and is continually enjoying the magnificent view, from that of a man who has never once seen the view but has to toil upward with trouble and pain from the valley. If you have the view every day you get accustomed to it. It is not in the concepts, in their content, that the achievements of Shankaracharya, of the Vedic poets, and of their successors are different from those of Hegel and Fichte. The difference lies in the fact that Shankaracharya's predecessors were striving upward from the valley to the summit; that it was their keenness of mind in Sankhya philosophy, their deepening of soul in Yoga, that led them there. It was in this work, this overcoming of the soul, that the experience lay. It is the experience, not the content of thought that is important here.

This is the immensely significant thing, something from which we may in a certain sense derive comfort because the European does not value what we can find right at hand. Europeans prefer the form in which it meets them in Vedantic and Sankhya philosophies, because there, without knowing it, they value the great efforts that achieved it. That is the personal side of the matter. It makes a difference whether you find a certain content of thought here or there, or whether you attain it by the severest effort of the soul. It is the soul's work that gives a thing its life. This we must take into account. What was once attained alone by Shankaracharya and by the deep training of Yoga can be found today right at hand, even if only by men like those we have named.

This is not a matter for abstract commentaries. We only need the power to transplant ourselves into the living feelings of that time. Then we begin to understand that the external expressions themselves, the outer forms of the ideas, were experienced quite differently by the men of that era from the way we can experience them. We must study those forms of expression that belong to the feeling, the mood, the mental habit of a human soul in the time of the Gita, who might live through what that great poem contains. We must study it not in an external philological sense, not in order to give academic commentaries, but to show how different is the whole configuration of feeling and idea in that poem from what we have now. Although the conceptual explanation of the world—which today, to use a graphic term, lies below and then lay above—though the content of thought is the same, the form of expression is different. Whoever would stop with the abstract contents of these thoughts may find them easy to understand, but whoever would work his way through to the real, living experience will not find it easy. It will cost him some pains to go this way again and feel with the ancient man of India because it was by this way that such concepts first arose as those that flowed out into the words sattwa, rajas, tamas. I do not attach importance to the ideal concepts these words imply in the Bhagavad Gita, but indeed we today are inclined to take them much too easily, thinking we understand them.

What is it that actually lies in these words? Without a living sympathy with what was felt in them we cannot follow a single line of the poem with the right quality of feeling, particularly in its later sections. At a higher stage, our inability to feel our way into these concepts is something like trying to read a book in a language that is not understood. For such a person there would be no question of seeking out the meaning of concepts in commentaries. He would just set to work to learn the language. So here it is not a matter of interpreting and commenting on the words sattwa, rajas, tamas in an academic way. In them lies the feeling of the whole period of the Gita, something of immense significance because it led men to an understanding of the world and its phenomena. If we would describe the way they were led, we must first free ourselves from many things that are not to be found in such men as Solovieff, Hegel, and Fichte, yet lie in the widespread, fossilized thinking of the West. By sattwa, rajas, tamas is meant a certain kind of living one's way into the different conditions of universal life, in its most varied kingdoms. It would be abstract and wrong to interpret these words simply on the basis of the ancient Indian quality of thought and feeling. It is easier to take them in the true sense of the life of that time but to interpret them as much as possible through our own life. It is better to choose the external contour and coloring of these conceptions freely out of our own experience.

Let us consider the way man experiences nature when he enters intelligently into the three kingdoms that surround him. His mode and quality of knowledge is different in the case of each. I am not trying to make you understand sattwa, rajas and tamas exhaustively. I only want to help you to come a little nearer to an idea of their meaning. When man today approaches the mineral kingdom he feels he can penetrate it and its laws with his thinking, can in a certain sense live together with it. This kind of understanding at the time of the Gita would have been called a sattwa understanding of the mineral kingdom. In the plant kingdom we always encounter an obstacle, namely, that with our present intelligence we cannot penetrate life. The ideal now is to investigate and analyze nature from a physical-chemical standpoint, and to comprehend it in this manner. In fact, some scientists spin their threads of thought so far as to imagine they have come nearer to the idea of life by producing external forms that imitate as closely as possible the appearance of the generative process. This is idle fantasy. In his pursuit of knowledge man does not penetrate the plant kingdom as far as he does the mineral. All he can do is to observe plant life. Now what one can only observe, not enter with intellectual understanding, is rajas-understanding. When we come to the animal kingdom, its form of consciousness escapes our everyday intelligence far more than does the life of a plant. We do not perceive what the animal actually lives and experiences. What man with his science today can understand about the animal kingdom is a tamas-understanding.

We may add something further. We shall never reach an understanding beyond the limits of abstract concepts if we consider only the concepts of science regarding the activity of living beings. Sleep, for example, is not the same for man and animal. Simply to define sleep would be like defining a knife as the same thing whether used for shaving or cutting meat. If we would keep an open mind and approach the concepts of tamas, rajas and sattwa once more from a different aspect we can add something else taken from our present-day life.

Man today nourishes himself with various substances, animal, plant, and mineral. These foods of course have different effects on his constitution. When he eats plants he permeates himself with sattwa conditions. When he tries to understand them they are for him a rajas condition. Nourishment from the assimilation of mineral substance—salts and the like—represents a condition of rajas; that brought about by eating meat represents tamas. Notice that we cannot keep the same order of sequence as if we were starting from an abstract definition. We have to keep our concepts mobile. I have not told you this to inspire horror in those who feel bound to eating meat. In a moment I shall mention another matter where the connection is again different.

Let us imagine that a man is trying to assimilate the outer world, not through ordinary science but by that kind of clairvoyance that is legitimate for our age. Suppose that he now brings the facts and phenomena of the surrounding world into his clairvoyant consciousness. All this will call forth a certain condition in him, just as for ordinary understanding the three kingdoms of nature call forth conditions of sattwa, rajas and tamas. In effect what can enter the purest form of clairvoyant perception corresponding to purified clairvoyance, calls forth the condition of tamas. (I use the word “purified” not in the moral sense.) A man who would truly see spiritual facts objectively, with that clairvoyance that we can attain today, must by this activity bring about in himself the condition of tamas. Then when he returns into the ordinary world where he immediately forgets his clairvoyant knowledge, he feels that with his ordinary mode of knowledge he enters a new condition, a new relation to knowledge, namely, the sattwa condition. Thus, in our present age everyday knowledge is the sattwa condition. In the intermediate stage of belief, of faith that builds on authority, we are in the rajas condition.

Knowledge in the higher worlds brings about the condition of tamas in the souls of men. Knowledge in our everyday environment is the condition of sattwa; while faith, religious belief resting on authority, brings about the condition of rajas. So you see, those whose constitution compels them to eat meat need not be horrified because meat puts them in a condition of tamas because the same condition is brought about by purified clairvoyance. It is that condition of an external thing when by some natural process it is most detached from the spiritual. If we call the spirit “light” then the tamas condition is devoid of light. It is “darkness.” So long as our organism is permeated by the spirit in the normal way we are in the sattwa condition, that of our ordinary perception of the external world. When we are asleep we are in tamas. We have to bring about this condition in sleep in order that our spirit may leave our body and enter the higher spirituality around us. If we would reach the higher worlds—and the Evangelist already tells us what man's darkness is—our human nature must be in the condition of tamas. Since man is in the condition of sattwa, not of tamas, which is darkness, the words of the Evangelist, “The light shineth in darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not,” can be rendered somewhat as follows, “The higher light penetrated as far as man, but he was filled by a natural sattwa that he would not give up.” Thus the higher light could not find entrance because it can only shine in darkness.

If we are seeking knowledge of such living concepts as sattwa, rajas, and tamas, we must get accustomed to not taking them in an absolute sense. They are always, so to say, turning this way and that. For a right concept of the world there is no absolute higher or lower, only in a relative sense. A European professor took objection to this. He translated sattwa as “goodness” and objected to another man who translated it as “light,” though he translated tamas as “darkness.” Such things truly express the source of all misunderstanding. When man is in the condition of tamas—whether by sleep or clairvoyant perception, to take only these two cases—then in effect he is in darkness as far as external man is concerned. So ancient Indian thought was right, yet it could not use a word like “light” in place of the word sattwa. Tamas may always be translated “darkness” but for the external world the sattwa condition could not always be simply interpreted as “light.”

Suppose we are describing light. It is entirely correct to call the light colors—red, orange, yellow—in the sense of Sankhya philosophy the sattwa colors. In this sense too green must be called a rajas color; blue, indigo, violet, tamas colors. One may say effects of light and of clairvoyance in general fall under the concept of sattwa. Under the same concept we must also place, for example, goodness, kindness, loving behavior by man. It is true that light falls under the concept of sattwa, but this concept is broader; light is not really identical with it. Therefore it is wrong to translate sattwa as “light” though it is quite possible to translate tamas as “darkness.” Nor is it correct to say that “light” does not convey the idea of sattwa.

The criticism that the professor made of a man who may have been well aware of this is also not quite justified, for the simple reason that if someone said, “Here is a lion,” nobody would attempt to correct him by saying, “No, here is a beast of prey.” Both are correct. This comparison hits the nail right on the head. As regards external appearance it is correct to associate sattwa with what is full of light, but it is wrong to say sattwa is only of light. It is a more general concept than light, just as beast of prey is more general than lion.

A similar thing is not true of darkness for the reason that in tamas things that in rajas and sattwa are different and specific merge into something more general. After all, a lamb and a lion are two very different creatures. If I would describe them as to their sattwa characters—the form that the natural element of life and force and spirit takes in lambs and lions—I would describe them very differently. But if I would describe them in the condition of tamas the differences do not come into consideration because we have the tamas condition when the lamb or lion is simply lying lazily on the ground. In the sattwa condition lambs and lions are very different, but for cosmic understanding the indolence of both is after all one and the same.

Our power of truly looking into such concepts must therefore adapt to much differentiation. As a matter of fact, these three concepts with the qualities of feeling in them are among the most illuminating things in the whole of Sankhya. In all that Krishna puts before Arjuna, when he presents himself as the founder of the age of self-consciousness, he has to speak in words altogether permeated by those shades of feeling derived from the concepts sattwa, rajas, and tamas. About these three concepts, and what at length leads to a climax in the Bhagavad Gita, we shall speak more fully in the last lecture of this course.

It is a very complicated matter, as you may well imagine, when the Spirits of the different Hierarchies have to coordinate their forces in such a way that the mission of the Earth can be fulfilled and ultimately a state of balance or equilibrium be achieved. You will understand therefore that statements such as those made in our last lecture are valid only in so far as they refer to a definite period in evolution and that the whole picture changes immediately one depicts evolution at another period. Hence in order to arrive at a fuller understanding of these complex problems a particular course of lectures cannot be isolated from the rest.

I shall here draw attention to one point only and what I am about to say is to be taken as footnote or addendum to the lectures on the Spiritual Hierarchies.¹ In creating the harmony or equilibrium of our Earth the whole cooperation of the Hierarchies is involved and we must envisage the Spirits of Will, the Cherubim and Seraphim, which we described yesterday as the highest Hierarchy, as raying outward from the Earth. We must envisage these Beings as originally working inward from the Universe towards the centre of the Earth. Man does not become aware of these forces in the former aspect but only in the latter aspect when they are reflected from the Earth's centre.

You will only be able, therefore, to form a complete picture of the very intimate processes which here take place if you compare what was said in my last lecture with the more detailed information about the Hierarchies in the lecture-course given at Dusseldorf, in which a comprehensive picture was given of the cosmic activity of the three Hierarchies. These things are by no means so simple, and in order to make the mission of the Earth comprehensible we must approach this problem in such a way that we are prepared to accept that the Spirits of these Hierarchies are reflected in the elements of Earth existence. If you bear this in mind then you will also sense the infinite wisdom inherent in a universe of relationships. To a certain extent you will also feel that the field of knowledge must be continually enlarged, that it is unlimited, since things are so complicated that when we imagine we have grasped one point of view we immediately reject it in favour of another which throws light on the problem from a different angle. We can only advance step by step in our knowledge: Nevertheless from the indications given in the last lecture) especially at the close of that lecture, you will have a clearer understanding of the cooperation between the normal and abnormal Spirits of Form, a cooperation which ensures that the population of the Earth should not be limited to a single homogeneous species spread over the whole Earth, but that a diversity of individual races should be possible. In order to achieve that corporate humanity, which is only possible to man in the course of Earth-evolution, it would have been necessary for the normal Spirits of Form to act independently. These are the same spiritual Beings who in Genesis are called the Elohim. In the whole Universe which surrounds the Earth and together with the Earth forms a single whole, we can distinguish seven of these normal Spirits of Form. There are therefore seven Spirits of Form or seven Elohim. If we wish to form a conception of these seven Elohim with their various missions and their task of establishing Harmony or Love as the ultimate mission of the Earth, we must clearly understand that these seven Spirits of Form cooperate in such a way that what we described in Lecture Four as “man in the second third of his life” would become a reality. Thus, if all these seven Spirits of Form could work in accordance with their declared intention, then collectively they would fashion the real Ego-being. But as other spiritual Beings cooperate with them and diversify this uniform humanity, it was found necessary to make special preparations in the Cosmos. If today you wish to find in the Cosmos the sphere of activity of the normal Spirits of Form—those Beings who, as I described yesterday, shine down upon us in the light from our present Cosmos—then you must seek for them in the Sun. You must always look towards the Sun sphere for that cosmic “Lodge”, that community in the Universe, where these Spirits of Form plan to establish the earthly harmony and to fulfil the mission of Earth-evolution. Lest the activity of the abnormal Spirits of Form should provoke too great a disharmony amongst mankind, one of the Spirits had to detach Himself from the community. In reality, therefore, only six Spirits of Form or Elohim work from the Sun; one of these Spirits had to detach Himself lest the simultaneous activity of the abnormal Spirits of Form, who are really Spirits of Movement should disturb the balance or harmony. It was the Spirit who in the Bible, in Genesis, is called Jahve or Jehovah. If you wish to follow His activity in the Universe you must look for it, not in the Sun sphere, but in the Moon sphere at a particular epoch. I have touched upon this in my Occult Science—an Outline from another angle, where I have shown that the Spirits of Form withdraw with the separation of the Sun, but in the special disposition following upon the separation of the Moon, the preliminary conditions were first established for the further evolution of man. For if the Moon had remained united with the Earth the evolution of man could not have taken place. This further evolution of man has only been made possible because one of the Elohim, Jahve, accompanied the separation of the Moon—while the other six Spirits remained in the Sun—and because Jahve cooperated with His six colleagues to counteract the forces of the backward Spirits of Movement.

Now the separation of the Sun was a necessity for the following reasons: after certain older Spirits of Movement who possessed more potent forces than the Spirits of Form—for they stand higher in the rank of the Hierarchies—had decided to remain behind, the normal Spirits of Form were obliged to modify their activity by detaching one of their members, otherwise they would not have been able to establish the balance or harmony necessary for further evolution.

If we wish to have a clear idea of the activities of these normal Spirits of Form it is best to think of them as streaming down to us in the sunlight. If, however, we wish to understand how the abnormal Spirits of Form cooperate with the normal Spirits of Form who are centred in the Sun (for Jahve withdrew towards the Moon sphere solely for the purpose of establishing the equilibrium), then we must imagine that a certain Sun-force, which streams towards us in the normal Spirits of Form is modified by the force that rays down to us from the abnormal Spirits of Form who are really Spirits of Movement. These have their centre in the other five planets, in Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus and Mercury, speaking in terms of the seven heavenly bodies of ancient astronomy.

When you look out into the Cosmos you have now a picture of the distribution of the normal and abnormal Spirits of Form. Six of the normal Spirits of Form are centred in the Sun and one of them, Jahve or Jehovah, from the sphere of the Moon acts as a counterpoise by virtue of this function as Regent and Guide of that sphere. The activities of these Spirits of Form are influenced by the activities proceeding from Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus and Mercury. The forces of the abnormal Spirits stream down upon the Earth are arrested by the Earth and ray outward again from the Earth-centre as was described at the close of the last lecture.

Thus if the Elohim or normal Spirits of Form, operating from the Sun, are active in a particular region of the Earth's surface, then only the normal ‘I’, that which determines man's normal being, his general make-up, would come into existence in that particular region. Now the forces of Mercury, for example, mingle with these forces of the normal Spirits of Form which, but for the state of equilibrium, would “dance” upon the surface of the Earth. Hence in that which here manifests in the potent forces of the Spirits of Form, there dance and vibrate not only the normal forces but also that which intermingles with the normal forces of the Elohim or Spirits of Form, namely that which emanates from the abnormal Spirits of Form who are centred in the several planets. Thus we see that through these abnormal Spirits of Form there are five potential centres of influence where these reflected planetary forces are concentrated and produce in effect what we know as the five Root Races of the Earth.

Let us now look more closely into the centre which, in Lecture Four, we situated in the interior of Africa. If we state that the Negro race was born of the cooperation between the normal Spirits of Form and the abnormal Spirits of Form centred in Mercury) then from an occult standpoint we are perfectly correct in describing the Negro race as the “Mercury race”.

Let us now continue along the line joining the centres or focal points from which the individual races spread outward. We then come to Asia, which is the seat of the “Venus race” or the Malayan race. We then move northward across the wide expanse of Asia and we find the Mongolian race, which is formed by the Mars forces. Then we cross over into Europe and find the Europeans who in their original racial character are “Jupiter men”. If we cross the ocean to America which is the centre where civilizations or races die, we find there dark “Saturn's race”, the original Red Indian race. The American Indian race is the “Saturn race”. Thus if you look into the matter more closely from an occult standpoint you will become aware of the five centres where the planetary forces are concentrated and are manifested in the external world.

With a progressively more definite and concrete conception of this racial distribution you will develop an inner understanding of the racial characteristics peculiar to the peoples spread over the Earth, an understanding of this unique cooperation of the normal and abnormal Spirits of Form. We have thus sketched the picture, as we are able to capture it at a definite moment in time. But what I have said about the different centres on the Earth is again only valid for a specific epoch of evolution. It is valid for the epoch when, at a definite moment of time in the old Atlantean evolution, the peoples began to migrate from a centre in Atlantis and sought the particular centre where they could receive the: training appropriate to their race. Hence in my book Occult Science, I pointed out that in old Atlantis specific Mystery Centres called the Atlantean Oracles were responsible for directing this distribution of peoples over the Earth, so that in effect that state of balance or equilibrium could be achieved which led to the proper distribution of the races. In one such Mystery Oracle the truths of which we are now speaking were always investigated and originally man took his direction entirely from them. In this manner the events on Earth were determined in accordance with these spiritual centres.

The wave of peoples who swept across Africa and crystallized into the Ethiopian race is an expression of an impulse from the Mercury Oracle in which one could clearly observe the cooperation of the normal Spirits of Form (the six Elohim and Jahve or Jehovah) and also the participation of the abnormal Spirits of Form working from the Mercury Centre. The Centre of equilibrium on Earth was selected in accordance with the right astrological conjunction of planetary forces at the various centres and the point of radiation for the race in question was determined thereby.

The formation of the other races was determined in a similar way. In accordance with these determining factors the grand design is drawn up, charting the cosmic influences in relation to peoples, families, etc. It is an image of cosmic activity and reflects the planetary forces which stream down into the Earth, ray outwards from the Earth and determine man's destiny.

Now how do we look upon a member of the Ethiopian race, of the Mercury race? We see him as one who was originally chosen, who was predestined by the Elohim to express the quintessence of the all-human. But from the Mercury Centre the potent influences of the abnormal Spirits of Form intervened and modified the form of man to such an extent that the Ethiopian race arose. And such was the case with each individual race. The migrations of the peoples were specifically directed from the original centre; this is indicated by the line linking the focal points or centres in my diagram a few days ago. You must therefore imagine the Spirits of Form radiating from a centre, which, we must assume, existed at a definite moment of time in old Atlantis. These Spirits of Form rayed down into the Atlantean continent and fashioned it in such a way that the human souls were brought under the dominion of the corresponding abnormal Spirits of Form.

In this way the broad foundations of the races were laid, and when man looks up into the infinite expanse of the Macrocosm he must seek there the forces out of which he was built up. He is fashioned by their spiritual rays reflected from the Earth-centre. And when he looks up to the normal Spirits of Form, the Elohim, he is looking up to that which actually makes him into man. When he looks up to the forces concentrated in the individual planetary Spirits (with the exception of the Sun and Moon) he perceives the forces which determine his membership of a particular race.

Now how do these Race Spirits work in and upon man? They work in a very unique way; they permeate his vital energies, they penetrate even down into his physical body. Now you know that the four fundamental members of man find their impress and are reflected in corresponding parts of the physical body: the ‘I’ finds its impress in the blood, the astral body in the nervous system, the etheric or life-body in the glandular system. Only the physical body is self-sufficient; it is a reflection of its own inner being which for the man of the present is subject to its own fixed laws.

Now those spiritual Beings who are stirring in man and determine his racial character cannot at first work directly into his higher vehicles. They are active first of all in these reflections of the higher vehicles in the physical body. They cannot as yet enter directly into the physical body, but they are active in the three other members, in the blood which is the reflection of the ‘I’; in the nervous system, the reflection of the astral body; and in the glandular system which is the reflection of the etheric body. The Race Spirits, the abnormal Spirits of Form, are active in these three systems, which are part of man's organic system, but are reflections of the higher vehicles.

Thus the physical body of man is determined from within. These various spiritual Beings invade those members of the physical body, which are the preliminary drafts, the suggestions of the higher vehicles. Now where, for instance, does Mercury make his influence felt? Under Mercury, I include all the abnormal Spirits of Form to be found in Mercury. He makes his influence felt by cooperating with others, especially in the glandular system. He is active in the glandular (or lymphatic) system where are manifested the forces born of that preponderance of the Mercury forces which are present in the Ethiopian race. Everything which gives the Ethiopian race its distinctive character stems from the ferment of the Mercury forces in the glandular system of this people. What transforms the undifferentiated universal human from into the distinctive Ethiopian type with his black pigmentation and woolly or frizzy hair is the consequence of their activity.

If you now move over to Asia you will find there likewise the planetary forces of Venus, an abnormal development of the Spirits of Form. By transferring their point of attack principally to what we call the impress of the astral body, these Venus forces work in the nervous system. They work upon the nervous system however in a peculiar way, not directly as Venus spirits. For the nervous system can be worked upon indirectly in two ways. One way is through the respiration. By working especially upon the respiration, these activities of the Venus Spirits are localized in the respiratory and nervous system and give it a definite form. In this indirect way the abnormal Spirits of Form whom we may call Venus Beings work through the respiratory and nervous system in the Malayan race, in the yellowish-brown races found in Southern Asia and in the direction of the Malay Archipelago. Just as the glandular type is found distributed over Ethiopia, so in these regions is found the type of man in whom the abnormal Spirits of Form work upon the nervous system indirectly through the respiratory system. In the nervous system is prepared that which, with special modifications, produces the more or less yellow skinned racial types. The transformation wrought in these races manifests itself more in that part of the nervous system covered by the term ‘solar plexus’—not in the higher or central nervous system therefore, but in that mysterious part of the nervous system which runs in two cords parallel with the spinal medulla and branches out in various directions to form a network. This part of the nervous system therefore which from our point of view is not yet associated with higher mental activity, is worked upon indirectly through the respiratory system. The unconscious organism is deeply stirred by these Venus forces which work in these racial types.

Let us now move northward to the wide Mongolian plains where are largely concentrated those Spirits of Form who work indirectly through the forces of the blood. In this geographical area is prepared in the forces of the blood that which brings about a modification of the human species and determines the basic character of the race. There is however a very peculiar feature attaching to the Mongolian race; the Mars Spirits enter into the blood. But they work in the blood in a specific manner. They are able to counteract the influence of the six Elohim who are centred in the Sun. In the Mongolian race, therefore, they work in opposition to these six Elohim. At the same time they actively oppose the influence of Jahve or Jehovah who has withdrawn His field of action from that of the six Elohim. But apart from this interaction of the Mars Spirits with the six Elohim and Jahve which produces the Mongolian race there is another factor of paramount importance which must be taken into consideration. Just as in the one case, the Mars Spirits in opposition to the six Elohim from the Sun and Jahve from the Moon create the Mongolian race, so in another case, we must assume that the Jahve forces from the Moon sphere meet and cooperate with the Mars Spirits and thus a special kind of modification arises, namely, the Semitic race. Here is the occult explanation for the origin of the Semites. The Semitic people are an example of a modification of collective humanity. Jahve or Jehovah shuts Himself off from the other Elohim and invests this people with a special character by cooperating with the Mars Spirits, in order to bring about a special modification of his people. You will now understand the peculiar character of the Semitic people and its mission. In a profound occult sense the Biblical writer was able to claim that Jahve or Jehovah had made this people his own. If you add to this the fact that Jahve cooperated with the Mars Spirits who worked principally in the blood, you will understand why racial continuity through the blood-stream was of particular importance to the Semitic-Hebrew people and why Jahve describes Himself as the God who is present in the blood of the generations, in the blood of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. When he declared himself to be the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, He proclaimed that He was present in the blood stream of the Patriarchs. Whatsoever works in the blood, whatsoever must be determined through the blood—the cooperation with the Mars Spirits—that is one of the mysteries, which give us a deep insight into the wise guidance of all mankind.

The blood of mankind is thus subject to a twofold influence; two races emerge, the Mongolian race and the Semitic race. This points to the existence of an important polarity in mankind and we must emphasize the immense importance of this polarity if we wish to plumb the depths of the Folk Souls.

We must now turn our attention to the Western centre and trace the way in which dynamic forces of the Spirits and Beings who are centred in Jupiter operate in man. These elect to work directly upon the nervous system via the outer life of the senses. This is the one way. In the other, the planetary forces work into the sympathetic nervous system, entering indirectly into the solar plexus through the respiratory system. Now the Jupiter forces work indirectly through the sense-impressions and from there radiate to those parts of the central nervous system which are situated in the brain and spinal cord. Here is the seat of those forces which determine the particular racial character of those races belonging to the Jupiter humanity. This applies more or less to the Aryans, to the peoples of Asia Minor and Europe whom we regard as members of the Caucasian race. In these peoples the modification of the generic character which stems from the abnormal Spirits of Form is accounted for by the influence upon the senses of the abnormal Spirits whom we may describe as Jupiter Spirits. The Caucasians therefore are determined through the senses.

Now you will also understand why a people like the Greeks who were consciously under the special influence of Jupiter or Zeus and who felt themselves to be a focal point for the Zeus influence, were predominantly determined by what flows into the nervous system via the senses. The Greeks, of course, were also influenced by the forces of the Elohim, which stream in from the Sun. But the Greeks dedicated everything that acts upon the senses to the service of Jupiter or Zeus and so achieved greatness. To them all external forms, all forms of external life were imbued with deeper meaning. They perceived the spiritual in the physical and hence became the chief exponents of sculpture and architectonic forms. We have here indicated the very special mission of the Greek people who are so preeminently the people of Jupiter or Zeus. Even at the time when) especially under the influence of the new planetary constellation, the cooperation of the Jupiter or Zeus forces with the universal Elohim forces took place, they felt themselves to be the people of Zeus.

All the peoples of South-West Asia, and especially the European peoples are, on the whole, modifications of this Jupiter influence and you can well imagine that as man has many senses, many modifications are possible and that in the formation of the individual peoples within this root race, peoples who were formed by the influence of the senses upon the nervous system, one or other of the senses may predominate. Consequently the various peoples may assume the most diverse forms. According as the eye or the ear or one of the other senses predominates, so will the different peoples respond in this or that way to the particular national tendency within the racial character. In consequence of this they are faced with quite specific tasks. The particular task of the Caucasian race is to find the way to the spirit through the senses, for this race is orientated chiefly towards the sense-world.

Here is disclosed something that introduces us to the deeper secrets of occultism; it shows how, in those peoples who are subject to the Venus forces, the initial steps in development, even in occult development, must be concentrated on the respiratory system. Amongst the peoples living more in the Western Hemisphere, on the other hand, the initial steps must start from an enrichment and a spiritualisation of the life of the senses. This is experienced by those peoples inhabiting countries more towards the West in their stages of higher cognition, in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, in so far as the Jupiter Spirit originally modified the character.

Hence these two geographical centres were always present in human evolution; the one presided over by the Spirits of Venus, the other by those of Jupiter. The Jupiter Spirits in particular were perceived in those Mysteries in which—as those of you will know who attended my lecture-course in Munich last year²—the three Individualities ultimately came together, the three spiritual Beings, Buddha, Zarathustra or Zarathas in his later incarnation, and that great leader of humanity, Skythianos. This is the “Council” or spiritual conference which, under the guidance of One still greater, set itself the task of investigating the mysterious forces which must be developed for the evolution of humanity, forces which originated from that centre initially connected with the Jupiter forces and which was pre-ordained in the chart of the cultural centres already mentioned.

Finally, the abnormal Spirits of Form who have their centre in Saturn work indirectly via all the other systems into the glandular system. In the Saturn race, therefore, in everything to which we must ascribe the Saturn character, we must expect to find the combination of the forces leading to the twilight of mankind, forces which set the seal upon its development and sow the seeds of its ultimate decline. This action and its effect upon the glandular system can be seen in the American Indian race and was the cause of its ultimate extinction. The Saturn influence finally works via all the other systems into the glandular system which secretes the hardest parts of man. This slow decline is characterized by a kind of ossification which is clearly reflected in the external form. If you look at the pictures of the old American Indians the process of ossification described above is evident in the decline of this race. In a race such as this everything pertaining to the forces of the Saturn evolution has become realized in a special manner; then Saturn withdrew into itself, abandoned man to his bony system and thus hastened his decline. One feels something of this truly occult activity if one observes how, in the nineteenth century, a representative of these old American Indians still preserves a memory of that great Atlantean civilization which could not adapt itself to later evolution. There exists a description of a beautiful scene in which a chieftain of this moribund Red Indian race confronts a European colonist. Imagine the conflicting emotions when two such men confront each other, the one representing those who came from Europe, and the other those who, in the earliest ages, at the time of the separation of the races, moved Westward. The Red Indian brought over to the West all that was great in the Atlantean culture. What the Red Indian valued most highly was that he was still able dimly to sense something of the former greatness and majesty of a period which existed in the old Atlantean epoch when the separation of the races had hardly begun, when man could look up to the Sun and perceive the Spirits of Form through a sea of mist. Through an ocean of mist the Atlantean was clairvoyantly aware of the seven Spirits of Form acting in concert. And this cooperative activity was called by the Atlanteans the Great Spirit who revealed himself to man in ancient Atlantis. The Atlantean had not assimilated all that the Venus, Mercury, Mars and Jupiter Spirits brought about in the East, to whom we owe all the civilizations which reached their zenith in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century. The descendant of the brown race did not participate in this development. He held firm to the Great Spirit of the primeval past. He became aware of achievements of the Europeans (who, in a remote past, had also known the Great Spirit) when a piece of paper was laid before him on which were many little symbols, letters, of which he understood nothing. All that was alien to him, for in his soul still dwelt the Great Spirit. The speech he made has been preserved to us and it is noteworthy because it provides evidence of what we have already indicated. It runs somewhat as follows: “Here in the soil, trampled beneath the feet of the conquerors the bones of my brothers lie buried. Why are the feet of our conquerors allowed to desecrate the graves of my brothers? Because they are in possession of that which makes the White Man great. But there is something else which makes the Brown Man great; it is the Great Spirit who speaks to him in the soughing of the wind, in the murmuring of the forest, in the surging of the waves, in the purling of the brook, in thunder and in lightning! That is the Spirit who to us speaks truth. Yes, from the lips of the Great Spirit comes truth. But your spirits here on paper and who express what to you is great, they do not speak the truth.” Thus spoke the Indian chieftain from his point of view. “Redskin is servant of the Great Spirit; Paleface is servant of the spirits who, in black shapes resembling pygmy beings”—he was referring to the letters—“dance on the paper; they do not speak the truth”. This dialogue of historic importance was exchanged between the conqueror and the last of the great chieftains of the Red Indians. Here we have an example of the Saturn forces and their activity and of what follows from the cooperation between Saturn and other Spirits at such a moment as this when two contrasting civilizations meet.

Thus we have seen how here on Earth the birth of universal humanity was prepared by the Elohim or the normal Spirits of Form, how then the five principal races of human evolution detach themselves from the collective body of mankind, from the teaming mass of humanity, and how these five races are related to the guiding Spirits in the Hierarchy of the abnormal Spirits of Form, races whom we must name after the five planets, whereas the normal Spirits of Form are centred in the Sun and in the Moon. From here we shall pass on to something which will be easier to understand, because we shall be able to relate it to something familiar to us, namely, to tribes and peoples.

• 1. This lecture-course was given in Dusseldorf, in April 1909, and was entitled: Spiritual Hierarchies and their Reflection in the physical World. Zodiac, Planets, Cosmos.
• 2. The East in the Light of the West. The Children of Lucifer and the Brothers of Christ. Nine lectures given in Munich, 23rd – 29th August, 1909.

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.

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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).

We will keep to our set programme, and in the group meetings this winter we will work through a series of apparently widely divergent aspects of human health and illness. And later on these various aspects will group themselves into a whole and culminate in an understanding of certain things towards which we will gradually work our way. In the first lecture of this series we made a kind of classification of illness types, and last time we attempted to portray the text of The Ten Commandments. All that goes beyond this text will follow in the course of the coming meetings. Our main concern last week was to acquaint ourselves with the content and the actual trend of the Commandments. Today we want to speak of other aspects that will not appear to be directly connected with the preceding or following talks, for they are a series of aspects the comprehensive meaning of which will not dawn on us until later.

We will start today by looking at an important moment in man's earthly evolution. Those of you who have been working in the anthroposophical movement for some time have long been familiar with it; the others will gradually accustom themselves to this way of thinking.

The moment in human evolution we want to recall lies a long way back. If we go back through post-Atlantean times and then through Atlantean times as far as ancient Lemuria we come to that moment when the division of the sexes took place in the kingdom of man on earth. You know that before this we cannot speak of such a division of the sexes in the human kingdom. I want to emphasise that we are not speaking of the very first appearance altogether of two sexes in earthly evolution or in evolution as a whole, in so far as it comprises the kingdoms that are around us. Phenomena that doubtlessly belong to bisexuality occur earlier. But what we call the human kingdom did not divide into two sexes until Lemurian times. Prior to that the human shape was formed differently, and both sexes were in a way contained within it undifferentiated. We can form an external picture of the transition from dual sexuality to the division into sexes if we visualise how the earlier dual sexed human being gradually developed in such a way that in one group of individuals the characteristics of the one sex, the female, became more pronounced, whilst in the other group the characteristics of the male sex developed more strongly. This was still a long time before the sexes separated, when there was progressive development in one direction or the other, at a time when man still lived in a very insubstantial material body.

We have focused our attention on this moment in time to start with, because we want to enquire into the meaning of the arising of the two sexes. It is only when we have a spiritual scientific basis that we can enquire into such a meaning, for physical evolution receives its meaning from higher worlds. As long as we are in the physical world, if we consider it let us say philosophically, it is somewhat childish to talk of purposes. And Goethe and others were right to make fun of the people who talked of the purposes in nature, as though nature in her wisdom had created cork so that man could make stoppers with it. This is a childish way of looking at things and can only lead to our missing the main point at issue. This view would be similar to thinking of a clock as having little demonic beings behind it wise enough to make the hands go round. In actual fact if we want to know how the clock works we must go to the mind that produced it, namely the clockmaker. And similarly, when we want to understand purpose in our world, we must step beyond the physical world and enter the spiritual. Thus purpose, meaning and goal are words that we can apply to evolution only when we consider them on a spiritual scientific basis. It is in this sense that we ask the question: What is the meaning behind the two sexes gradually developing and then inter-working?

The meaning will become clear to you when you see what we call fructification, the reciprocal influence of the sexes, (as) replacing something else that had previously existed. You must not think that fructification appeared for the first time at the moment when the division into sexes occurred in human evolution. That was not so. We must picture to ourselves that in the times preceding bisexuality this fructification took place in quite a different way. Clairvoyant vision can see that there was a time in mankind's earthly evolution when fructification happened in connection with the intake of food, and those beings which in those early times were male-female received fructifying forces with their food. This food was still of course of a much more delicate nature, and when human beings partook of nourishment in those times there was something else contained in these nourishing fluids which gave these beings the possibility of bringing forth another being of like kind. You must realise, however, that the nourishing fluids taken from the substance of their surroundings did not always contain these fructifying fluids, but only at quite definite times. This depended on the changes that took place, comparable to today's seasonal changes, changes of climate, and so on. The nourishing foods imbibed from the surroundings by these beings of bisexuality had the power of fructification as well at quite definite times.

If with clairvoyant consciousness we look further back still, we find another peculiarity in the propagation of ancient times. What you know (of) today as the difference between the various individualities, which expresses itself in the multiformity of life in our present cycle of humanity, these differences did not exist before the arising of the sexes. A great uniformity was there then. The beings that arose then were similar to one another and to their forefathers. All these beings that were still undivided into two sexes were outwardly very similar, and their characters were more or less the same too. That men were so much alike did not have the disadvantage in those times that it would have at the present time. Just imagine how infinitely dull human life would be if people were to come into the world today with identical appearance and character, and how little could actually happen in human life, as everybody would want to do the same thing as everybody else. But in ancient times this was not the case. When man was still as it were more etheric, more spiritual, and not so firmly embedded in matter, then at birth and on into childhood human beings were really very similar to one another, and the teachers would not have needed to notice whether the one child was a scamp and the other a gentle little being. Although the people were different in character at different times, they were in a certain way all fundamentally alike. Each person, however, did not remain the same throughout his life. Because man was still in a softer, more spiritual body he was much more open to the permanent influences coming from the environment, so that in those ancient times these influences brought about tremendous changes in him. Man became in a certain way individualised because, having a nature as soft as wax, he became more or less an impress of his surroundings. At a quite definite time in his life, which would coincide nowadays with puberty, it became possible for him to let everything that happened in his environment work upon him. The difference between the various times that were comparable to our present day seasons was very great, and it was of great importance to a man whether he lived in one part of the earth or another. If he traveled just a short distance over the earth, that had a great influence on him. If people go on a long journey nowadays, however much they see, they return on the whole the same as when they went away, unless they are very impressionable. This was different in olden times. Everything had the greatest influence on people, and so long as they had a body of soft material they could actually become gradually individualised in the course of life. Then this possibility ceased.

Something further that reveals itself to us is that the earth itself became denser and denser, and to the same extent as the substance, let us say the earthy nature of the earth intensified, this uniformity became harmful. For this gradually reduced mans capacity to change. He became as it were very dense at birth. This is the reason why men nowadays change so little during their life. And this led Schopenhauer to think that men were absolutely incapable of bringing about any basic changes in their character. The reason for this is that men are embodied in such dense substance. They cannot easily work on the substance or change it. If, as once was the case, men could still alter their limbs at will, and make them long or short according to their need, then man would, of course, still be very impressionable. Then he would really be able to take into his individuality the power to change himself Man always has an inner contact with his environment, especially his human environment. To make this quite clear I would like to tell you something that you may not have noticed before but which is nevertheless true.

Imagine you are sitting facing someone and speaking to him. We are referring to ordinary human relationships in the normal course of life and not to someone who is specially deeply schooled in occultism. Two people are sitting together, one talking and the other just listening. It is generally imagined that the one who is listening is doing nothing. But that is not true. In things like this we still see the influence of the environment. It is not noticeable to outer perception, but inwardly it is very clear, in fact striking, that the one who is merely listening is joining in everything the other one is doing.

He even imitates the movements of the vocal cords, and speaks with the speaker. Everything you hear you also say with a gentle movement of the vocal cords and the other speech organs. It makes a great difference whether the speaker has a croaky voice and those are the movements you have to imitate, or whether he has a pleasant voice. In this respect the human being does everything the other person is doing, and as this is really happening all the time, it has a great influence on a man's whole development, though only in this limited respect. If you imagine this last remains of man's participation with his surroundings vastly increased, you get an idea of how the man of ancient times lived and felt with his environment. Man's faculty of imitation, for instance, was developed on a tremendous scale. If one person made a gesture, then everyone else made the same gesture too. Only a few insignificant things in certain particular directions remain of this today, like for instance when one person yawns, other people do too. But remember that in these ancient times it was entirely a question of their having a dim consciousness with which this power of imitation was connected.

Now as the earth and everything upon it became denser and denser man became less and less capable of transforming himself through the influence of his environment. In comparatively late Atlantean times a sunrise, for instance, had a powerfully creative effect upon man, because he was completely open to its influence and underwent sublime inner experiences, which, if they continually recurred, changed him tremendously in the course of his life. This diminished more and more and gradually disappeared altogether the more humanity progressed.

In Lemurian times, before the moon left the earth, mankind was in a dangerous predicament. It was in danger of becoming rigid to the point of mummification. Through the gradual departure of the moon from the evolution of the earth this danger was averted. At the same time as the moon departed, however, the division into sexes took place, and with this division came a new impulse for the individualisation of man. If it had been possible for human beings to propagate without the two sexes, this individualising would not have taken place. The present diversity among men is due to the inter-working of the sexes. If there was only the female element, human individuality would be extinguished, and men would all become alike. Through the co-operation of the male element human beings are individual characters from birth. So the significance and meaning of the inter-working of the sexes is to be found in the fact that through the separating off of the male element the individualising of man at birth has replaced the old kind of individualisation. What was achieved in earlier times by the whole surrounding environment was compressed into the inter-working of the sexes, so that individualisation was pushed back to the arising of the physical human being at birth. That is the significance of the inter-working of the two sexes. Individualisation happens by way of the effect of the male sex on the female.

Now this came about at the expense of something else, and when I describe the situation I beg you to take it as applying strictly to human beings, for when we are based on spiritual science we must not assume that what applies to man also applies to animals. Health and illness, in their more delicate aspects, are subject to quite different causes in human beings than in animals. So what is being said applies solely to man, and we will begin by looking at the finer aspects.

Imagine yourself actually there in those ancient times when man was entirely given up to his surroundings, and the surroundings entered into him and on the one hand fructified him with the nourishing juices it offered him, and on the other hand he became individualised through its influence upon him. Now we know when we base ourselves on spiritual science that everything around us which influences us, be it light or sound, heat or cold, hardness or softness or this or that colour, is the revelation, the external expression of something spiritual. And in those ancient times man did not at all perceive external sense impressions, he perceived the spiritual. When he looked up to the sun he did not see the physical ball of the sun but that which is preserved in the Persian religion as ‘Ahura Mazdao, the Great Aura’. The spiritual part, all the spiritual sun beings appeared to him, and it was the same with the air, water and the whole environment. Today when you drink in the beauty of a picture, you can have something that is as it were distilled from it, only in those times it was far richer. If we wanted to speak as they did in those times we would not be able to say: ‘This or that tastes in some particular way’; but we would have to say: ‘This or that spirit does me good!’ This is what it was like when men were eating—an activity quite different from what it is today—and quite different, too, was the time when the forces of fructification were received: it was a phenomenon of the spiritual environment. Spirits overshadowed man and stimulated him to bring forth his kind, and this was also experienced and seen as a spiritual process.

Then little by little it became impossible for men to see the spiritual in their environment. It became more and more veiled from sight, especially during their day consciousness. Little by little men lost sight of the spirit behind things, and they only perceived the external objects which are the outer expression of these. They learnt to forget the spiritual background, and the influence of the spirit grew less and less the denser man's body became. Through this densification man became a more and more independent being and shut himself off from his spiritual surroundings. The further we go back into these ancient times the more spiritually godlike was this influence that came from the surroundings. Human beings were really organised in such a way that they were a likeness of the spiritual beings hovering round them in their environment; images of the gods who in older times were present on earth.

Through the inter-working of the two sexes in particular this was lost more and more, and the spiritual world withdrew from men's sight. Men beheld the sense world more and more clearly. We must picture this situation vividly: Just imagine, in those times man was fructified from the spiritual world of the gods. It was the gods themselves who gave forth their forces and made men like themselves. That is why in those ancient times what we call illness did not exist. There was no inner disposition to illness, and it could not be there because everything that was in man and that worked upon him came from the health giving divine-spiritual cosmos. The divine-spiritual beings are full of health, and in those days they made men in their image. Man was healthy. But the nearer he came to the time when the inter-working of the sexes came about and together with it the withdrawal of the spiritual worlds, and the more independent and individual man became, the more the health of divine-spiritual beings withdrew from him and something else took its place. What happened in reality was that this inter-working of the sexes was accompanied by passions and instincts aroused in the physical world. We must look for this incitement in the physical world after human beings had reached the point when the two sexes were sensually attracted to one another. This was a long time after the sexes already existed. The effect of the sexes one upon the other—even in Atlantean times—happened when physical consciousness was actually asleep, during the night. It was not until the middle of Atlantean times that what we call the attraction of the sexes began, what we might call passionate love; that is, sensual love that mingled with pure super-sensual or platonic love. There would be much more platonic love if sensual love did not enter into it. And whereas everything that formerly helped to form man came from the divine-spiritual environment it now came more from the passions and instincts of the two sexes working one upon the other. The kind of sensual longing that is stimulated by seeing the outer appearance of the opposite sex is bound up with the working together of the two sexes. And therefore something was incorporated into man at birth that is connected with the particular kind of passions and feelings human beings have in physical life. Whilst in earlier times man still received what was in him from the divine-spiritual beings of his surroundings, he now acquired something through the act of fructification which, as an independent, self-contained being, he had taken into himself from the world of the senses.

After human beings had been separated into two sexes they passed on to their descendants what they themselves experienced in the sense world. So we now have two types of human being. These two types live in the physical world and perceive the world through their senses, and this leads them to develop various externally aroused impulses and longings, especially those arising from their own externally stimulated sensual attraction to one another. What now confronts man in an external way has been drawn down into the sphere of the independent human being, and it is no longer in full harmony with the divine-spiritual cosmos. That is imparted to men through the act of fructification, it is implanted into them. And this worldly life of theirs, received not from the world of the gods but from the external side of the divine-spiritual world, is passed on to their offspring through fructification. If a man is bad in this respect, then he passes worse qualities on to his descendants than another person who is good and pure.

And this is the true meaning of ‘original sin’. That is the concept of original sin. Original sin is brought about by man coming to the point of transferring to his offspring his own individual experiences in the physical world. Every time the sexes glow with passion the ingredients of the two sexes combine in the human being who is descending from the astral world. When a human being incarnates he comes down from the Devachanic world and forms his astral sphere in accordance with his particular individuality. Something of what belongs to the astral bodies of his parents—their impulses, passions and desires—combines with this astral sphere so that he thereby shares in the experiences of his forefathers. What descends through the generations in this way, what is actually acquired as human attribute through the generations and is handed down as such, is what we have to understand as the concept of original sin. And now we come to something else: an entirely new impetus entered humanity through the individualisation of man.

In earlier times the divine-spiritual beings—and they were absolutely healthy—made man in their own likeness. But now man, as an independent being, detached himself from the all-embracing harmony of divine-spiritual health. In a certain respect he set himself up in his individualism against the whole of this divine-spiritual environment. Imagine that you have a being developing entirely under the influence of his environment. What he expresses will be the environment. Imagine, though, that he shuts himself off in his skin, then in addition to the characteristics of his environment he has his own characteristics as well. And indeed, with the division into sexes men became individual and developed their own individual characteristics. And there was contradiction between the great divine-spiritual harmony with its health and the individualism of man. And through this individuality continuing to work, through it becoming a really effective factor, the possibility of becoming ill has entered into human evolution. This is the moment when the possibility of illness first occurred in human evolution, for it is bound up with the individualisation of man. When man was still connected with the divine-spiritual world the possibility of illness did not exist. It came about at the same time as individualisation, and that is the same time as the division into sexes. This holds good for human evolution, and you must not apply it in the same way to the animal world.

Illness is indeed a result of these processes I have just described, and you can see that it is really the astral body in particular that is originally influenced in this way. The human being draws the astral body into his organism himself to begin with as he comes down from the Devachanic world, and there it encounters what flows into it through the inter-working of the two sexes. So the astral body is the part of man that shows most clearly the non-divine. The etheric body is more divine, for man does not have so great an influence on that, and the physical body is the most divine of all; it is God's temple, for it is completely withdrawn from man's influence. Whereas in his astral body man seeks all kinds of pleasures and can have all sorts of desires that have a harmful effect on the physical body, even today his physical body is still such a wonderful instrument that it can withstand heart poisons and other harmful influences of the astral body for decades. And so we have to admit that because of all these things that occur in the human astral body it has become the worst part of man. Whoever looks deeper into human nature will find that the deepest causes of illness lie in the astral body and in its bad effects on the etheric body, and by way of the etheric body on the physical body. Now we will understand a number of things that cannot be understood otherwise. I will now speak of ordinary mineral medicaments.

A medicament from the mineral kingdom works in the first place on man's physical body. Now what is the significance of man giving his physical body a mineral medicament? Please note that we are not going to speak of any plant medicaments but purely mineral ones, what is prescribed in the way of metals and salts and so on. Suppose someone takes one or another mineral medicament. Something very remarkable is then seen by clairvoyant consciousness. This clairvoyant consciousness can carry out the following feat—it always has the ability to divert its attention away from something. It is possible to divert the attention from the whole physical body. Then you still see the etheric body, the astral body and the ego aura. You have suggested away the physical body through strongly negative attention. Now if someone has taken a mineral medicament, you can remove everything from your attention and just direct your clairvoyant vision to the mineral or metal that he now has within him. That is, you suggest away everything in him of the nature of bone, muscle, blood and so on, and turn your attention solely to the particular mineral substance that has permeated him. Something very remarkable presents itself to clairvoyant consciousness. This mineral substance has become very thinly diffused and has itself acquired the human form. You have before you a human form, a human phantom consisting of the substance taken in by the man. Supposing the person has taken antimony, you have before you a human form of very finely diffused antimony, and it is the same with every mineral medicament a man takes. You create a new man within you consisting of this mineral substance; you incorporate it. Now let us ask ourselves what the purpose and significance of this is?

The significance is that if you were to leave a man as he is and withhold from him the medicine he really needs, then because of certain bad forces in his astral body the astral body would work on the etheric body and the latter on the physical body and gradually destroy it. You have put a double into the physical body. This works to prevent the physical body obeying the influences of the astral body. Imagine you have a bean plant. If you give it a prop it winds up it and is no longer blown by the wind. This double made out of the incorporated substance is a prop like this for the man. It attaches the physical body to itself and removes it from the influences of the astral and etheric body. In this way you make the human being's physical body independent as it were of his astral and etheric body. This is the effect of a mineral medicament. But you will immediately see the bad side of it, for it has a very serious drawback. Since you withdraw the physical body artificially from its connection with the other bodies you have weakened the influence of the astral and etheric body on the physical body and have made the physical body independent. And the oftener you take such medicines the more the influence of the astral and the etheric body disappears, making the physical body a hardened, independent being, subject to its own laws. Imagine what people are doing who take mineral medicaments of this sort all their lives. A man who has in course of time taken a lot of these mineral medicaments has within him a phantom of all these minerals, a round dozen of them. It is as though the physical body were surrounded by solid walls. And what kind of influence can the astral and etheric body still have on it? Such a person is actually dragging his body around with him and has very little power over it. If a man who has been dosing himself in this way for a long time applies for treatment to someone who wants to treat him psychologically and work especially on his finer bodies, he will discover that he has become more or less unreceptive to psychological influences. For by making his physical body independent in the first place, he has deprived it of the possibility of being affected by anything that might take place in his finer bodies. And this has happened mainly because the human being has so many phantoms in him that are not in harmony, that they pull him hither and thither. If the human being has deprived himself of the possibility of working from out of his soul and spirit, he need not be surprised if spiritual treatment is not very successful either. In cases of psychological treatment, therefore, you should always give consideration to the kind of person the patient is. If he has made his astral or etheric body powerless by making his physical body independent, then it will be very difficult to help such a person by means of spiritual treatment.

So now we understand how mineral substances affect a man. They create doubles in him that preserve his physical body and remove it from the possible harmful effects of his astral or etheric body. Because materialistic medicine is ignorant of man's higher members, almost all our present-day medicine works in the direction of treating the physical body in some way or another only.

We have begun today by looking at the effects of mineral substances. Some time we shall have to speak of the effects of plant forces and animal substances on the human organism, and then we shall go on to those influences or remedies that work from one being to another in a psychic or spiritual way. But you will see that it is essential for our studies for us to acquire once again such concepts as the concept of original sin and understand it correctly. With certain things nowadays people just do not see what lies in front of them and show no understanding for them at all.

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.

Dr. Steiner answers questions from the officials of the Societies on the various Paragraphs of the Statutes.

To a question on Paragraph 11 regarding the admission of individual members who do not wish to join a particular group he answers as follows:

This Paragraph would only come into consideration if it proves entirely impossible to bring these efforts to a satisfactory conclusion. Only then should individuals or groups apply for membership direct to Dornach. Efforts must first be made to join the relevant national Society and only if this fails for some reason would we admit an individual or a group here in Dornach.

Herr Hohlenburg asks what is meant by: ‘Only for those for whom it is quite impossible to find entry to a group.’

Dr. Steiner: The Statutes are phrased in such a way as to include everything in as few words as possible. Perhaps it is necessary to clarify the sentence ‘Only those for whom it is quite impossible to find entry to a group should apply directly to Dornach for membership’ by adding that this refers not only to the group not agreeing to admit the individual but also to the individual finding it inwardly impossible to join the group. Thus for instance a person who is convinced that he cannot thrive in a particular group can, if all efforts fail, become a member in Dornach. Here in Dornach we for our part shall of course endeavour to convince the individual to join a group. When I was writing down this sentence I was thinking not only of external obstacles coming from the group but also of obstacles arising out of an individual's convictions.

Herr Hohlenburg: Are all those who are already members to have their membership confirmed?

Dr. Steiner: This will be desirable if only for the reason that we are having proper membership cards printed to replace the old, not very beautiful membership cards, and every member will enjoy seeing a membership card which is somewhat larger and which commands a certain degree of respect. Therefore it would be good to send a circular to the individual groups letting them know that all the old membership cards can be exchanged for new ones.

Mademoiselle Sauerwein asks: If a number of members in a particular country want to form themselves into a group and elect a new officer who is not an officer of the national group, would they be allowed to do this or not?

Dr. Steiner: Of course nobody can be denied this right. All that can be done is to make efforts to prevent it, but nobody can be denied the right to form groups which would, of course, not be the national group but simply a private group. It would not be possible for it to be the national group because, of course, the national group already exists, does it not? But this cannot be included in the Statutes. The Statutes must contain the principles. But it can be included in By-Laws which we shall still have to elaborate.

Herr Donner wants to ask whether a group which does not want to be affiliated with the national Society in its own country can instead be affiliated with the Society of another country.

Dr. Steiner: In principle this would not be impossible. To exclude this on principle would be too great an infringement of the freedom of the individual members. We cannot exclude this possibility, but we would have to make efforts not to let such a situation arise in which a group in one country joins the Society of another country; if such a group were not to join the national Society, then it would join directly in Dornach. This could come about as a matter of usage. It cannot be excluded on principle. For instance it would not be possible to prevent a group coming into being in France and registering with the German Society. We would not be able to prevent this.

Madame Muntz: Should we make efforts to bring it about that individuals who do not live in Belgium and yet do belong to our group apply for membership in their own countries, or not?

Dr. Steiner: In cases where they have done this from sympathy, this is all right. Cases where those in question have sympathies in a particular direction might as well be allowed to remain. But for the future it would be preferable for this not to happen. We need not take up a pedantic position; there is no need for this, but we do need something that can give us a certain degree of support.

Dr. Unger: There are quite a number of people in South America who are members of the German Society and who have expressed their wish to remain so. Arrangements are, however, being made for a Society to be formed among the different groups. I have been asked to bring to this meeting the need expressed there that a South American Society should be planned. For the moment they wish to remain attached to Germany, and the method of transferring these groups will gradually come about.

Dr. Steiner: The configuration of the Society being what it is, it is of course the case that from the administrative point of view everything will have to be taken into consideration not in a bureaucratic way but in a way that is necessitated by human factors. Take Paragraph 14 of the Statutes: ‘The organ of the Society is Das Goetheanum, which for this purpose is provided with a Supplement containing the official communications of the Society. This enlarged edition of Das Goetheanum will be supplied to members of the Anthroposophical Society only.’ Would you not agree that this implies that if the South American groups belong to Germany they would be supplied with Das Goetheanum not by us here but that it would be sent to them from Germany? Similar situations are still likely to arise. Here we are of the opinion that things should not remain confined to paper. The things that are written in the Members' Supplement are things which every member wants to know as quickly as possible. So I think it would be a good thing for groups which exist outside their national groups to join directly in Dornach so that anthroposophical life can flourish as much as possible without having to make all kinds of detours.

Dr Wachsmuth informs the meeting that the South American Society had written a letter just before Christmas, having heard about the new decisions. He reads a statement from them.

Herr Leinhas: I have had a similar letter. It arrived only a few days ago, and I have been asked for the moment to represent the national Society, which is to have its seat in Rio.

Dr. Zeymans Van Emmichoven:In point 5 mention is made of the three Classes of the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach: ‘Members of the Society will be admitted to the School on their own application.’ I should like to ask whether the national Societies have anything to do with this or whether this is a purely personal matter for each member.

Dr. Steiner: What is contained in point 5 will be a matter for the Goetheanum in Dornach as far as the overall leadership is concerned. Everything that belongs to the configuration of this School of Spiritual Science will have to be taken in hand by the leadership at the Goetheanum in Dornach. Among the things that will have to be dealt with will of course be the matter of making contact not only with officers but also with members who are doing certain work in one place or another. Members of the First, Second and Third Class of the Goetheanum will be everywhere, having been nominated by the Goetheanum. How they are chosen will depend entirely on the individual case, for it will be essentially an esoteric matter, but an esoteric matter which is handled in a modern way. Once things have got going it will become apparent that there will be members in the different national Societies who belong to one of the Classes of the Goetheanum. For these the Goetheanum will nominate their own leadership in the different countries, so that matters are territorially delimited and do not expand boundlessly. This matter, then, will be handled essentially by the leadership at the Goetheanum; I shall describe it in more detail as our Conference progresses. Point 7 also refers to this matter: ‘The organizing of the School of Spiritual Science is, to begin with, the responsibility of Rudolf Steiner, who will appoint his collaborators and his possible successor.’

To begin with, I intend to set up, in addition to the three Classes, Sections which will be in charge of the different fields of research. For example there will be a Section for General Anthroposophy, another for what used to be called in France Belles-Lettres, a Section for Natural Science, for Education, for Art, for the various realms of art. Each Section will have a Section Leader and together these will constitute the leadership of the School of Spiritual Science. The members of the different Classes will be scattered all over the place; they will be members, for their pupilship is their own private affair. This is an independent institution which the national Societies will undertake to protect and guard as a matter of course.

Fräulein Henström: In Sweden, as far as I know, more than a third of the members have not joined a branch. In small villages this is natural, but there are a good many in Stockholm who do not wish to belong to the groups. They believe that they can work more freely if they stand by themselves and study the lectures alone. There are a good many of us who understand how important it is to stand firmly together and that it is therefore necessary for members to get to know one another personally. I think it is quite impossible if members refuse to conform to the groups and I wondered whether some encouragement could not be given from Dornach to bring about an improvement in this direction.

Dr. Steiner: We shall make every effort towards encouraging members in the different countries to join the main groups, which in most countries will mean the national Society. But we do not want to exert any pressure by means of some statute or other. We do not want to exert any pressure from Dornach in any direction, but we shall make every effort to help people understand, so that for instance in Sweden any members who live in an isolated situation, even if they want to remain isolated as far as their way of living is concerned, can nevertheless join the Stockholm Society or the national Society.

Fräulein Henström: I too would not want any compulsion to be brought to bear.

Dr. Steiner: We shall certainly endeavour to bring about an understanding of this matter.

Mr Monges enquires about the point of view and the manner in which the General Secretaries in the different countries are selected and whether this shall be a democratic procedure or what else?

Dr. Steiner: This is a further matter which I would not wish to lay down in any way by means of statutes for the various groups all over the world. I can well imagine, for example, that there are national Societies who will most certainly want to employ democratic procedures. I can also imagine that there will be others who will want to be thoroughly aristocratic in their approach, agreeing with the wishes of a particular individual upon whom they confer the task of nominating the other officers and so on. Thus I rather assume that the, shall I say, somewhat aristocratic method I have adopted with regard to appointing the Vorstand may well be imitated. In some quarters, however, this method may be regarded as highly undesirable, and in those quarters the democratic method could be used. An election is naturally all the easier the smaller the group in question, whereas I consider elections in a gathering as large as ours today to be totally meaningless. It is impossible to nominate and elect anybody in a situation where there is to start with so little mutual recognition. So in this gathering such a procedure would not be possible. But I can well imagine that a democratic institution of some kind might come into being in one place or another. In a general way, however, I do not find this question to be of paramount importance as a matter of principle. If on the one hand the selection is made by means of an election that is thoughtless, then the Societies will not flourish. They will come to nought if someone is simply nominated so that the election may be settled in a hurry, as is the case with political elections. Nothing can come of this in our circles.

The matter will be different, though, if consideration is given to those who have already earned some merit, or done certain work, or if their way of working has been observed. In such cases a majority is likely to come about quite naturally. But if the antecedents are all set for some kind of election, I do not believe that amongst us, since our main concern is for the work, some kind of democracy could prevent this work. In other words, in practice there will be little difference between democracy and aristocracy. We might try this out over the next few days. We could ask whether the Vorstand I have suggested would be elected or not. This would give us a democratic basis, for I do consider their election to be a necessary condition, otherwise I myself would also have to withdraw! Freedom must reign, of course. But, dear friends, I too must have freedom. I cannot allow anything to be imposed on me. Anyone who is expected to carry out a function must have freedom above all else. Is this not so? Thus I rather assume that what I have just said will be born out everywhere, for the most part. Whether democracy or aristocracy is the method, the Society will not look much different.

Mr. Monges: We in America are very political.

Dr. Steiner: If Dornach is permitted to have its say to a certain extent, then everything will work out satisfactorily.

Fräulein Schwarz: It was said some time ago that members of the old Theosophical Society cannot become anthroposophists, that is they cannot belong to the Anthroposophical Society. Will this continue to be the case or not?

Dr. Steiner: Who said that? I certainly never said such a thing! Never. The decision as to whether a person shall be admitted or not has to be taken individually in each case. I have always expressly stated that it matters not a jot whether someone belongs to a carpenters' club, or an insurance company, or a scientific research society, or the Theosophical Society. The only thing that matters is the human being. I have never said that the stamp of membership of any other society presents an obstacle for joining the Anthroposophical Society. Of course there might be individual cases in which membership of the Theosophical Society could present an obstacle. It is naturally questionable whether Mrs Besant³⁹ or Mr Leadbeater,⁴⁰ should they apply for membership of the Anthroposophical Society, would be admitted or not. So the question might arise in individual cases. But as a matter of principle it can have no validity whatsoever; otherwise we would come down to principles which would not be in keeping with a society that is to be formed in the modern style.

The Duke of Cesaro brings up a question regarding the number of votes allotted to members. There was once some unpleasantness in a national section of the old Theosophical Society, for example; and the solution had been to break up the whole group in order to gain more votes. Such things ought no longer to be possible.

Dr. Steiner: As you say, Your Grace, it is desirable that such things should not happen. But on the other hand there are certain difficulties involved in fixing the number of members at the lower end. There you come up against the question: How many members should there be in a group? So far we have had quite a definite view on this. But problems might now arise in this connection: Should we perhaps put everything pertaining to matters of modern usage into Paragraph 3, so that everything esoteric is contained in Paragraph 3, or should we name the number of members a group ought to contain? In the latter case the minimum number would be seven, because only seven can yield a true majority. In the case of three and five there can of course be a seeming majority. But those who understand the nature of the human being know that with a majority of two to one arrived at amongst three members, or of three to two arrived at when there are five members, the one who makes the seeming majority does not count properly. Not until you can have four to three can you arrive at a possible majority, which results if on the one side you have three and on the other side one third more. This then makes a true majority possible. So the minimum number would be seven members. I would not object to including this number here, but I did consider that these Statutes are more likely to be respected in the eyes of the world if we refrain from including things like the number seven. I therefore think, Your Grace, that your suggestion would be better included in the By-Laws, which would mean that in practice this is how the matter would be handled. This is probably the solution for us in this case.

Professor Dr.Maurer: I want to ask whether it might not be possible to curtail the other Paragraph as well, as regards the Classes. Perhaps it would be preferable not to launch this aspect on the public. I rather fear that all kinds of historical and other parallels might once again be dredged up and possibly used against us.

Dr. Steiner: Take Paragraph 5 as it is formulated here and ask yourself whether it could not be applied to any university just as it stands. As it stands it is applicable to any university and cannot possibly cause any offence. Everything else will be a matter of how we handle it.

Professor Dr.Maurer: Yes, I agree it is applicable, but there are other points which are open to attack. Taken in its usual sense it could remind people of something which did exist historically.

Dr. Steiner: Historically it was never the custom to speak of ‘Classes’, only of ‘Degrees’.

Professor Dr.Maurer: Nevertheless people will immediately jump to the wrong conclusion and I merely wanted to prevent the incidence of such mistaken and warped conclusions.

Dr. Steiner: It would be the greatest possible mistake to include anything in our Statutes arising from any conclusion. We cannot avoid having misunderstandings attached to what we do. But anyone interpreting Paragraph 5 wrongly must really want to do so. We cannot prevent this. Paragraph 5 is phrased in such a way that absolutely nobody can say anything other than that in this School of Spiritual Science in Dornach there are three Classes, just as if in Freiburg there were a university with four medical classes, a four-year course. The description in Paragraph 5 accords exactly with the pattern of universities in the outside world, so there is not the smallest opportunity for objection that could be seized with any even seeming justification. The same applies to the way the affairs of the School are conducted. You know that at a university it is the leadership who decide whether a student is ready to move on to the next year or not.

Professor Dr.Maurer: This has not always been the case. In the faculties of philosophy it was never a matter of moving up to the next class; this did not happen at Strasbourg under Professor Windelband⁴¹ or anywhere else for that matter. You simply presented yourself and were accepted. Naturally what you gained from the lectures depended on your abilities. Nowadays I agree that in the interest of the students a certain amount of grading has been introduced. I only wanted to draw attention to this matter because our opponents will immediately point it out.

Dr. Steiner: It is certainly not the case that a medical student who has just arrived at the university will be allowed to attend the special classes on anatomical medicine. There are proper classes for this, are there not. I do not believe that he would be allowed to attend immediately.

Professor Dr.Maurer: No, of course not.

Dr. Steiner: In the case of the philosophical faculty there are good reasons which have come about historically. A justification can certainly always be found for these things. Originally there was no such thing as a philosophical faculty at the universities. The three faculties were those of theology, medicine, and jurisprudence. These three faculties were always graded into classes. The philosophical department was at the basis of all three. First you attended the faculty of philosophy. This is where you started, whether you wanted to study theology, jurisprudence or medicine. Then you moved up from this faculty of philosophy into the different faculties. From then on you moved up in classes. I do not believe that it is any different in other countries. So if you take our Constitution to be the general anthroposophical and philosophical faculty, then advancing on from there you have the three Classes. The set-up is absolutely identical with that of a university. I have taken the utmost care to ensure that it shall be absolutely indisputable. In universities, though, the faculty of philosophy gradually developed into a faculty in its own right. More and more lectures were given till the whole situation degenerated into anarchy and chaos. No one entering the faculty of philosophy has any idea what lectures he ought to attend, indeed he can go to lectures he cannot understand at all. This is a chaotic situation that has arisen at the universities.

What we have written down here corresponds exactly to what was customary at universities, in Vienna for instance, up to the year 1848. This is entirely indisputable. And I believe that this is the case to this day in Paris; and also in Italy there are universities which still conduct matters in this way. At German universities there are certain things which have developed chaotically. But what we have written down here is absolutely indisputable. If we were to do these things without including them in our Statutes—and do them we must, otherwise Paragraph 8 about the lecture cycles would also have to be modified—we would immediately find ourselves in another situation which would not serve our purposes at all. This Paragraph must stand as it is and so must Paragraph 8. Of course we can consider requests for changes regarding details, but a complete suppression of the School with its three Classes would not be acceptable.

Professor Dr. Maurer: I quite see that it will be necessary to move up Class by Class. I was merely concerned that it might give our opponents something on which they could seize.

Dr. Steiner: The only change that could be considered would be to say: ‘The Anthroposophical Society sees the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach as the centre for its activity. The School will be composed of three classes after the manner of other universities.’ If you wish to include this we can certainly do so.

Baroness de Renzis: Should the report on our work in Italy and the direction it is taking be given now, or are we to discuss the Statutes only?

Dr. Steiner: I would request you to speak tomorrow about the work in Italy.

Baroness de Renzis wishes to ask a question about the direction the work is taking in general.

Dr. Steiner: I would ask you to give your report tomorrow.

Baroness de Renzis: Ought we to announce the anthroposophical character of any undertaking or initiative arising out of our Movement from the start, thus provoking the danger of having it rejected, or should we endeavour to disseminate an anthroposophical understanding within public opinion without throwing down the challenge of it being judged and rejected? It is necessary to decide this so that we know what is to determine the attitude of our groups in the future.

Dr. Steiner: It is of course not the word ‘Anthroposophy’ itself that matters but there are other things that do matter. Take the following example. Medicine is a case in point. It is today not possible to take medicine beyond the point it has now reached, which is not far enough, without starting to speak of the etheric body of the human being, and also of the astral body and the ego-organization, for it is here that the real causes of illness lie. So it is necessary simply to place before the world the substance of what Anthroposophy contains. We have gained some extremely instructive experience in this matter. Frau Dr Wegman has run courses with me in London, Vienna and The Hague.⁴² One of these took place at Dr Zeylmans' Dutch institute. I have given lectures to doctors in which I spoke quite directly of anthroposophical matters. At appropriate moments I have spoken about the astral body, the etheric body and so on. In doing this it is barely relevant what terminology is used. In some instances one feels it is more appropriate to name the etheric body and in others it is better to use different words in describing it. For example when you want to speak of the etheric body you can say: The effects on the physical substances which come not from the centre of the earth but from the periphery of the universe. Only those who have not fully come to grips with their subject matter are tied to a specific terminology, is this not so? We have found that when we speak in this way people can make something of what we say. They know that this is something new making its appearance in the world. If you avoid speaking clearly, all people can say is: Well, here is another opinion about the effect of this or that medicament on the human organism; it has been held before and was then replaced by another; now here is yet another opinion. They cannot distinguish whether a clinical report or a clinical dissertation comes from some external source or from us. But if we want to bring what can really lead us to the centre of the illness, then we cannot avoid speaking about the etheric body and so on, even if we use different terminology. Then people know what is what. We go furthest when we act in this way. It is not in the first instance a matter of the actual name of Anthroposophy; what matters is nowhere to shy away from whatever is necessary to explain something properly. If you try to dress Anthroposophy up in ‘this is what the parson says too’, then people have no idea what you are getting at. I myself once proved this point. I gave a course of twelve lectures in Vienna⁴³ ranging over every aspect of Anthroposophy including its practical applications. If you read this cycle today you will not find a single mention of the word Anthroposophy. It is perfectly possible for there to be occasions when it is inappropriate to use the word Anthroposophy. This is for sure. For me what matters is the actual subject itself, the spirit of the subject. You have no idea how many well-meaning people have come to me saying: People dread the expression ‘etheric body’; could we not say ‘the functional element in the human organism’? But this is a meaningless expression. To speak of the etheric body you have to distinguish between the physical body in which all the forces are related to gravity, the mechanical pull of gravity, and the etheric body in which all the forces can be related to the periphery, to all that is ever in weaving movement. This is the difference. The ‘functional element in the human organism’ refers to the function and not to this fundamental contrast. So these well-meant suggestions that come, often from outsiders, cannot be taken into account.

Baroness de Renzis: Is it sufficient to speak of the ‘essence’ of things?

Dr. Steiner: It is not necessary to throw the actual word ‘Anthroposophy’ at people, but if asked whether you are an anthroposophist it would be quite a good thing if you did not say: No!

We shall continue this meeting tomorrow. We must try to make sure that we have enough breathing space during this Conference.

• 39. Annie Besant, 1847–1933. From 1907, following the death of the Founder-President H. S. Olcott, President of the Theosophical Society.
• 40. Charles Webster Leadbeater, 1847–1934. Influential colleague of Annie Besant. Inspired the founding of the order ‘Star of the East’.
• 41. Wilhelm Windelband, 1848–1915. Philosopher, 1882–1903 professor in Strasbourg.
• 42. See lectures in London on 2 and 3 September, Vienna on 2 October and The Hague on 15 and 16 November 1923 in Rudolf Steiner Spiritual Science and the Art of Healing, Anthroposophical Publishing Company, London 1950. GA 319.
• 43. See Rudolf Steiner The Tension between East and West, Hodder & Stoughton, London 1963. GA 83.