The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I have related to you different things concerning the nature of the Hibernian Mysteries, and you saw in the last lecture that the peculiar path of evolution which men pursued on the island of Ireland led them to gain an insight, first of all, into what is possible to the human mind, into what the human mind can experience through its own inner activity. You must now consider how, through all the preparatory exercises which those about to be initiated had to go through, it was possible that as by magic, landscapes as they are usually spread out before human senses were conjured up before these senses. No religious or fanciful hallucinatory impressions were thus given, for that which man was accustomed to look upon appeared before the soul as from behind a veil, concerning which he knew very well something was behind. And it was the same in regard to the gazing into his own inner being in the case of the enchanted vision of the dreamlike summer landscape. The pupil was prepared beforehand to have Imaginations which were connected with that which he otherwise saw with his outer senses. But he really knew when he had these Imaginations that he was about to penetrate further by means of these Imaginations to something quite different.

I have shown you how the pupil penetrated through to the vision of the time before earthly existence, and to the time after earthly existence; by vision forwards to the time after death as far as the middle point between death and a new birth, and by vision backward s into the time which immediately preceded the descent to earth,—again to the middle point between death and a new birth. But something still further happened. Because the pupil had been led further to sink himself deeply into that which he had gone through, and because his soul was strengthened through the vision of the pre-earthly and of the post-earthly life, because he had gained insight into Nature dying and continually being re-born, because of all this he could with yet stronger inner power and energy sink himself into what had happened through the numbness, through his being taken up into world-spaces, through floating out into the blue Ether-distances, and again through what had taken place when he felt himself a personality only within his senses, when he so to speak received nothing through the rest of his whole being as man, but only received anything from existence through the eye, or in the auditory tract, or in the sensation of feeling, etc., when he thus became completely a sense-organ.

The pupil had learned to revive these conditions in himself with strong inner energy, and out of these conditions to allow that to come over him which worked a still further result. When all this was indicated to him, after he had gone through all that which I have described, quite voluntarily and inwardly to bring again before himself the condition of inner numbness, so that he felt, as it were, his own organism as a kind of mineral thing, that is to say, as something quite foreign to him, when he felt his external being, his bodily being, as a thing strange to him, and the soul, as it were, only floating around, ensheathing this mineral thing, then in the condition of consciousness which resulted he received a clear vision of the Moon-existence, which preceded that of the Earth.

You remember how I have described this Moon-existence in my Occult Science, and in many different lectures. That which has there been described arose in the consciousness of the pupil. It was actually present before him. This ancient Moon existence appeared to him as a planetary existence, actually at first only in a watery, in a fluid condition, but not like the water of today, rather I might say as if gelatinous, like something coagulated. And the pupil felt himself within it; he felt himself organized in this half-soft mass, and he felt the organization of the whole planet streaming out from his own organization.

But you must make clear to yourselves the difference between experience at that time and experience today. Today we feel ourselves to some extent bounded by our skin, and we say indeed that as men we are that which is inside the skin. It is of course a mighty mistake, for as soon as we consider that which is in the form of air in the man the foolishness is evident of feeling ourselves limited by the skin. I have often said: the volume of air which is within me was a little while ago not within me, and the volume of air which will soon be in me is outside. So that we only feel ourselves rightly today as men when we do not think ourselves, as regards the air, cut off from the outer world. We are everywhere where the outer air is; in fact there is no difference whether you have now a piece of sugar in your mouth and the next moment in your stomach, where it has gone a certain way, or whether a volume of air is out there this moment and next moment it is in your lungs. The piece of sugar goes its way through the mouth, the air also goes its way through the organs of air and breathing, and he who thinks this does not belong to him, should also think his mouth does not belong to him, but that his body begins with his stomach. So it is really nonsense for the present-day man to think he is contained within the limits of his skin.

But in the Moon-existence there was no possibility of thinking of oneself as enclosed within one's skin. Of such furniture as is around us, towards which we go and of which we take hold, there was none at that time. Everything that was there was a natural product. And if you stretched out such an organ as you had at that time, which may be compared with the finger of today, it was as if one could draw this finger until it disappeared, or an arm till it disappeared; one could make oneself quite thin and many other things. Today when you take hold of a table you do not feel as if the table belonged to you. If a man seized anything then, he simply felt it belonged to him, as the air-volume now belongs to him. So actually man's own organization was felt as only a piece of the whole planet-Moon-existence

All this arose before the consciousness of the Hibernian pupil. He received the impression that the gelatinous fluid was only a condition of the Moon-organization at a particular time. There were certain epochs in the Old Moon-organization when within the gelatinous material something arose which was physically much harder than our hard things today. It was not, however, mineral, as the present day emerald or corundum or diamond is mineral, it was just hard horny material. There was at that time nothing mineral in the present sense of crystallization or the like. That which was hard as a mineral was of a hard horny nature. It has such a structure that one saw it had been formed organically. Today we should not speak of the crystal formation of a cow's horn because we know that a cow's horn is what it is through organic agency. Similarly with deer or the like; all bone matter is the same. Mineral matter is different. But at that time there was a mineral-like substance built up out of organic life.

Those Beings who at that time partly went through their human stage, who have only to accomplish part of their human evolution during the earth-existence, are those individualities of whom I have spoken as the great wise primeval Teachers of humanity on earth, and who today find themselves in a colony on the moon.

All this appeared to the Hibernian pupil during the state of numbness. And when he had experienced all in the suitable manner, that is to say, in the way which seemed suitable to his Initiators, then he was directed to advance again, repeatedly to advance to causing the numbness to melt, to stream out into the Ether-distances, to that point where he could feel: The paths of the Heights bring me out into the distances of the blue Ether, even to the boundaries of space-existence.

Then when he had repeatedly gone through this experience, he felt all which was to be felt from the earth in his movement out towards the Ether-distances. But while he was moving towards the Ether-distances after the Heights had received him, and had brought him near the Ether-distances, he felt that there outside, as if at the boundary of the world of space, something pressed in to him which again permeated him, which we today should call the astral principle, something inwardly experienced, which united itself much more significantly, much more energetically with the human being of that time, though it could not be perceived as clearly as its counterpart can be perceived today. This astral element united itself with the human soul, only in a more energetic, more powerful, more living way than today. It may be compared with the way that a feeling would arise within the human inner being if a man were to expose himself to the in-streaming, refreshingly in-streaming sunlight to such an extent that the sunlight permeated his inner being with a vivifying element, enabling him to feel his organization right into each individual part. For if you only observe a little, you will indeed be able to feel that if you freely expose yourself to the sun, if you let the sun stream through you, but not in such a way that the sun becomes uncomfortable to your inner feeling; but if you expose yourself to the sun so that with a certain pleasure its light and heat pour on to your body and into your organism, then you will feel as if each individual organ felt slightly different from before. You come in fact into a condition in which you could inwardly give a description of yourself.

It is only through lack of power of observation in men today that such things are so little known. If there were not this lack of observation in man at the present day they would actually be able to give at least dreamlike indications of what I have shown you as to inner experience of the in-streaming sunlight. In earlier times the pupil was instructed differently from today concerning the interior of the human organism. Today corpses are dissected and from this study one makes anatomical maps. That does not require much attention, indeed it must be granted that many students do not bring much attention, but it does not demand much. But formerly the pupil was so instructed that he was placed in the sun, and was led to feel his internal parts in reaction to the pleasant in-streaming sunlight. Accordingly he could take note of his liver, stomach, etc. This inner relationship of man with the macrocosm is there if only the conditions are brought about. You may of course be blind, and yet through touch feel the form of an object. And so if one organ in your organism is made sensitive to another through attention to light, you may describe the internal organs so that at least you can get shadow-pictures of them in your consciousness. To a high degree it was implanted in the pupil of the Hibernian Mysteries that by the flowing out into the blue Ether-distance, by the flowing in of the astral light, he would not now pre-eminently feel himself, but he would feel in his consciousness a mighty world, a world of which he now said as follows: I live wholly in an element with other beings. This element is really nothing but Nature-goodness, for I feel streaming into me from all around out of this element (forgive that I use a mode of speech only possible in later times) out of this element in which I swim as a fish in water, but myself also only consisting in quite volatile imponderable elements, I feel how out of this planetary element from all sides comes this pleasant in-streaming. The pupil felt the astral light all around him streaming into him, forming and fashioning him. This element is pure Nature-goodness (thus he might have spoken) for from all around something is being given to me. I am really surrounded by pure goodness. It is goodness, but a Nature-goodness which is all around me. But this Nature-goodness is not only goodness, it is creative goodness. For it is that which at the same time with its powers causes me to exist, gives me form, and sustains me in so far as I swim, hover, move in this element. Thus the impressions which were produced were of a natural-moral character.

To compare with something of the present day we might say: If a man had a rose before him and could smell it and out of inner truthfulness and honesty said: “Divine goodness which is spread out in the whole earth-planet flows also into this rose, and because this rose communicated its essence to my organ of smell I smell the living divine goodness in the planet.” If a man today with inner honesty could say such a thing when inhaling the scent of the rose then he would experience something like a weak shadow of that which formerly, as complete life-element, was experienced by the individual man. And that was the experience of the sun-existence which preceded the Moon-existence. Thus the pupil could experience the Sun-existence and the Moon-existence, which preceded the existence of our earth.

And further, when the pupil had been led to it, to feel himself only in his senses, when he had experienced something like the stripping off of his whole organism, and lived only in the experience in the senses, so that he actually lived in his eye, in his auditory tract, in his whole sense of touch, then he perceived that which I have described in my Occult Science as the Saturn-existence, as the existence where man lived and moved in the heat-element, in the differentiated heat-element. It was as if he did not feel himself as flesh and blood, as bones and nerves, but merely as an organism of heat, of heat amidst other heat, as planetary Saturn-heat; he perceived heat when the outer heat was of a different degree from the inner heat. Moving in heat, living in heat, sensing heat against heat, this was the Saturn-existence.

And this experience was gone through by the pupil when he was drawn into his senses. These senses themselves were not so much differentiated as today. The perception of heat against heat, of life through heat, of life in heat was the most important thing. But there were moments when man, himself a heat-organism, approached another heat-organism or heat-mass, when, through the contact, he felt in himself something like a springing-up of flames; he was now in an element not merely of heat which streams and moves and surges—he was suddenly something like a flaming thing, also something like a moving sensation of taste, taste not only as on the tongue—that organ of course did not exist at that time—but taste which a man feels in himself, but which is kindled by contact with another body which also imparts something of itself. The Saturn-existence had become active in the pupil.

You see, therefore, that in the Hibernian Mysteries the pupil was led into the past existence of our own earth-planet. He learned to know Saturn, Sun, and Moon-existence as the successive metamorphoses of the earth-existence.

And then he was repeatedly stimulated to live through the experience which now led him into his own inner being, first, to experience again what I have described as the sensation of inner pressure, as if he were pressed together by the feeling of his own centre, as if the air in him became condensed, so that, if we would compare the condition with something corresponding to the experience of a man today, we could compare it with the feeling that he could not get his breath out, it pushed and pressed in on him on every side.

That was the first condition, and the pupil again, by external voluntary effort had to re-awaken it in his soul. And if he did this, if he actually came into the dream-condition of which he had earlier been capable, of dreaming in the waking-state of nature-existence as Summer landscape, if he came into this condition, then at a particular moment he had suddenly a quite peculiar experience. If I am to characterize this experience for you I must d o it in a somewhat roundabout way. Think then, as man of the present day, you come into a warm room; you feel the heat; you come out, and if it is 5 or 10 degrees below zero you feel the cold. You feel the difference between heat and cold, but you feel it bodily. You do not unite it with your soul. And as earth-man, when you come into a warm room, you do not always have the feeling: here in this room something has spread itself abroad like a great spirit which encircles me with love. You experience this heat as something bodily pleasant. You do not experience it as something for the soul. It is the same with the cold; you freeze, your body freezes; but you have not the feeling: out there, through particular climatic conditions, demons come in all directions towards you which whisper to you something so frosty that you are also cold in the soul. Physical heat is not at the same time something belonging to the soul, because you do not feel intensely the nature-soul experiences as earth-man with ordinary consciousness. As earth-man you can warm yourself in the friendship, in the love of another human being. You may feel chilled by his frostiness, or perhaps by his commonplace nature, but by such experiences we mean something belonging to the soul. Only think how little the physical earth-man of today is inclined to say when in summer he steps out into the hot sultry air: now the gods love me. Nor how little the man of today is inclined to say when he steps out into the wintry cold: now only those sylphs fly through the air who are frosty and commonplace in the sylph-world. Those are expressions which we do not hear at all today. Now you see, this sensation which I wish to indicate (this is why I said that I had to explain the thing, in a roundabout way), this sensation when the pupil experienced that inner feeling of pressure, resulted as a matter of course. All that he felt as heat he felt at the same time as soul-heat as well as physical heat. This was because with his consciousness he was transported into the Jupiter-existence, which will arise out of the earth-existence. For we shall only become Jupiter-men if we unite physical heat with soul-heat. As Jupiter-men we shall come to this, if we caress in love a human being, or it may be a child, we shall be to that child at the same time an actual pourer-forth of heat.

To pour forth love and heat will not be separated as now, we shall actually come to this that we shall pour forth from our souls into our surroundings the heat we experience.

Not indeed in this earth-world but transported into another world, was the pupil of the Hibernian Mysteries brought to this experience. Hence the Jupiter-existence was present to him, not of course, in physical earth-reality, but in a picture.

And the next advance was that the pupil felt so truly that inner distress of which I spoke yesterday, that he actually experienced the necessity of overcoming his own Ego, because otherwise it may be the source of evil.

If the pupil rightly caused this soul-conception to be present in himself, then something else arose in him. He did not only feel soul-heat and physical heat as one, but that which he felt as one, this soul-physical heat, began to shine. The mystery of the shining of light, of the shining of soul-light, arose for the pupil. Thus he was transported into that future when the earth will be changed into the Venus-planet, into the future Venus-planet.

And now when the pupil felt everything flowing together into his heart which he had experienced earlier, just as I described it to you yesterday, all that he had experienced in his soul, manifested itself at the same time as the experience of the planet. Man has a thought. The thought does not remain within the skin of the man. The thought begins to resound. The thought becomes Word. That which the man lives forms itself into Word. In the Vulcan-planet the Word spreads itself out. Everything in the Vulcan-planet is speaking living Being. Word sounds to Word. Word explains itself by Word. Word speaks to Word. Word learns to understand Word. Man feels himself as the World-understanding Word, as the Word-world understanding Word.

While this was present before the candidate for Initiation in Hibernia, he knew himself to be in the Vulcan existence, in the last metamorphosed condition of the earth-planet.

So you see that the Hibernian Mysteries really belong to those which we are entitled to call in Spiritual Science the Great Mysteries. For that into which the pupils were initiated gave them a survey, an outlook over human pre-earthly and post-earthly life. It gave them at the same time a survey over Cosmic life, into which man is woven, out of which in the course of time he is born. The human being learned thus to know the Microcosm, that is, to know himself, as spirit-soul-bodily Being in connection with the Macrocosm. He learned also to know the coming into being, the weaving, the arising and passing away, and the changing, metamorphosing itself of the Macrocosm. These Hibernian Mysteries were great Mysteries.

And they reached their full flower in the period which preceded the Mystery of Golgotha. But there was this peculiarity in the great Mysteries, that in these great Mysteries the Christ was spoken of as the One who was to come, just as later men spoke of the Christ as of Him who had gone through events in the past. And actually when after the first Initiation, when the pupil leaving the Temple was led before the image of the Christ, they wished to show him: The whole trend of earth-evolution leads towards the Event of Golgotha. At that time it was presented as an Event which was to come.

There was in fact upon this island which was later to go through so many trials, a Centre of the Great Mysteries, a Centre of Christian Mysteries before the Mystery of Golgotha, in which in the right way, the spiritual gaze of a man living before the Mystery of Golgotha was directed towards the Mystery of Golgotha.

And then, when the Mystery of Golgotha took place, when over in Palestine, the wonderful events came to pass which we describe as the experience of Christ Jesus on Golgotha and its surroundings, while these wonderful events came to pass in Palestine, great festivals were held within the Hibernian Mysteries, and within their community, i.e. by the people who belonged to the Hibernian Mysteries. And that which came to pass in actual fact in Palestine, was portrayed in pictures on the island of Hibernia in ways a hundred-fold, though the picture was as a memory of the past. They experienced in pictures the Mystery of Golgotha contemporaneously on the island of Hibernia, while the Mystery of Golgotha came to pass historically, in Palestine. When later, in temples and churches, the Mystery of Golgotha was experienced pictorially, was shown in pictures to the people, then these were pictures which recalled something which had taken place on the earth, which were drawn out of the ordinary consciousness as a kind of historic memory. These pictures existed on the island of Hibernia before they could be produced from historic memory of the past, but as they only could be produced out of the Spirit itself. On the island of Hibernia that was spiritually seen which took place before the bodily eye in Palestine, at the beginning of our era. And so, on the island of Hibernia, humanity actually experienced the Mystery of Golgotha spiritually. And this indicates the greatness of all that went forth later from the island of Hibernia, for the rest of the civilized world, but which vanished in later time.

I beg you now to notice the following. He who studies only external history will find much that is splendid, beautiful, that lifts up the heart, that illumines the mind, when he looks back historically into the ancient world of the East, when he looks back historically into ancient Greece, into ancient Rome. He may experience many things of this kind if he goes on, let us say, to the time of Charles the Great, and through the Middle Ages. But just notice how meager historical records were in that age, a couple of centuries after the rise of Christianity and approximately to the ninth or tenth post-Christian centuries. Examine historical works yourselves. In all the older genuine historical works you will find everywhere only short accounts, very little material for these centuries.—Then the material begins to be set out more fully. Certainly later historians who are, as it were, ashamed for the sake of their profession to disperse their material so badly, because they cannot relate what they do not know, invent all sorts of fancy constructions which are now placed in these centuries. But that is all nonsense. If you honestly represent external history it is somewhat thin as regards historical records during that period when ancient Rome fell, and when devastating swarms of migratory peoples took place, which were really not so fearfully striking outwardly as men of today represent them, which were indeed only striking compared with the quiet of earlier and later times. For if you only consider today, or perhaps in the time before the War had counted how many people journeyed from Russia, let us say, to Switzerland each year, you would find they were more in number than during the times of the migrations of peoples through these same regions of Europe. All these things are relative. So that if we would speak in the style which the historians lavish upon the migrations of the peoples, we should have to say: up to the time of the late War the whole of Europe was in continual migration. The emigration to America was infinitely greater than the streams of the peoples' migrations. We do not make this clear to ourselves. Historic records are meager during the time that is called the period of migration of peoples, and in the period which followed that migration. Very little is known about this period. Very little can be described of what took place in this neighbourhood, for example, or in France, or in Germany. But this was the very time when the echoes of that which was seen in the Hibernian Mysteries spread over Europe, even though only in a weak echo, the very time when the effects, the impulses of the great Hibernian Mysteries streamed into civilization.

And now two great streams met, one stream of which we may say—for all that I am saying now is simply a relation of facts, not in any way letting fall a shadow of sympathy or antipathy but simply describing actual history—two streams met, one which in a roundabout way came from the East through Greece and Rome. This movement which took into account the endowment or talents more and more breaking in upon humanity, depending merely on the power of reason and the senses, occupied itself with that which existed as historic memory of externally visible, externally experienced events. From Palestine the news spread through Greece and Rome, which was taken up by men into their religious life, the news of what had taken place in the physical-sense World through the God Christ.

This reckoned upon the human understanding, which by this time was dependent upon what today we call the ordinary consciousness bound up with the reason and the senses. This stream spread in the most magnificent way. But it finally overwhelmed that stream which came over from the West, from Hibernia, which as a last echo of the ancient instinctive earth-wisdom relied on the ancient treasures of wisdom of humanity, which were now to be illuminated by the new consciousness. Something spread over Europe from Hibernia which did not take into account illumination with the wisdom founded on sense perception, or proofs which could demonstrate that which had taken place historically. But cults, wisdom teachings as Hibernian cults, Hibernian wisdom teachings spread abroad which were based on illumination from the Spiritual world, from the Spiritual world even at the identical time when as in the case of the Mystery of Golgotha, the event was taking place in physical reality on another spot of earth. The physical reality of Palestine was seen spiritually in Hibernia.

But that which was based only on physical reality over-shadowed that which came from the spiritual exaltation of men, from the spiritual deepening of the inner nature of man, from the spiritual permeation of the soul of man. And gradually out of a necessity, of which I have often spoken from other points of view, gradually that which appealed to the sense-physical existence gained the upper hand over that which derived from spiritual insight. The news of the Redeemer living on earth in a physical body, gained the upper hand over the wonderful imaginative pictures which came over from Hibernia and which could be presented in cults, over the magnificent imaginative pictures which announced the Redeemer as a spiritual Being, and which paid no attention in the presentation of their cult, in their descriptions, to the fact that it was also a historic event. For least of all were they able to take this fact into consideration in the period when it was not yet a historic event, for the rites were already instituted before the Mystery of Golgotha.

And the time dawned when men more and more were only to be reached through that which was to be seen physically, when men, one might say, naturally came to this, that things were no longer accepted as true which were not founded on physical sight. Thus wisdom which came over from Hibernia was no longer grasped in its reality. And the art which came from Hibernia could no longer be felt in its Cosmic truth. Thus there arose more and more not a Hibernian knowledge, but a knowledge which only had to do with the external sense world, not a Hibernian art, but an art—and even Rafael's art is no other—an art which needed the physical-sense world as model, whereas the Hibernian art was founded on the direct representation of the spiritual, and all that belongs to the spirit.

Thus a time came when in a certain sense, a veil of darkness was drawn over the spiritual life, in which men boasted about reason and the senses only, and founded philosophies which showed in some way how reason and the senses could approach existence, or truth, or attain to truth.

Then there came about that amazing fact that men were no longer accessible to spiritual influences. And where could it be seen more clearly, I would say, how the consciousness of men was no longer accessible to spiritual influences, than in that which was given to men—the way in which the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz was given to mankind. I explained this some time ago in the periodical Die Drei, Vols. 3, 4, 5, 1927. There I called attention to the remarkable thing which happened regarding the Chemical Wedding. Valentine Andreae is the physical writer of this Chemical Wedding. This Chemical Wedding was written down in the year just before the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War. But no one who knows the biography of Valentine Andreae would not doubt that Valentine Andreae, who became later an orthodox pastor, and wrote other books full of unction, wrote the Chemical Wedding. It is pure nonsense to believe that Valentine Andreae wrote the Chemical Wedding. Just compare the Chemical Wedding, or The Organisation of the World, or the other writings of Valentine Andreae—physically it was the same personality—with the greasy unctuousness, fat oiliness of that which Pastor Valentine Andreae, who only bears the same name, wrote in his later life. It is a most noteworthy phenomenon. Here is a young man who has scarcely completed his school education, who writes down such things as the Organisation of the World, as the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz, and we have to exert ourselves to fathom the inner meaning of these writings. He himself understands nothing of it, for he shows us that later. He becomes an unctuous pastor. It is the same man! And we only need to examine this phenomenon to find it a reasonable explanation which I have given, that the Chemical Wedding was not written by a human being, or only in so far written by a human being as Napoleon's secretary, constantly full of anxiety, wrote his letters. But Napoleon was always a man who stood on his feet, with his legs firmly on the ground, was in fact a physical personality. He who wrote the Chemical Wedding was not a physical personality. He made use of this secretary, who later became the oily pastor, Valentine Andreae.

Think of this wonderful event, just preceding the Thirty Years' War—a young man, quite a young man, lends his hand to a spiritual Being, who writes down such a thing as the Chemical Wedding. And that which comes to light in this case only, in a particular example often happened at that time. Only things are not so well known or preserved. That which above all was important for mankind at that time was given to men in such a way that they were unable to grasp it with their reason. This was the spirituality flowing forth, which still revealed itself to men, which men themselves could set down, but could no longer experience.

Thus in those days when mere empty pages filled the history books, in that time humanity lived, I would say, in two streams, in one stream which proceeds from the physical world below, when men more and more only believe in that which reason and the senses say to them, but above, continually, there is to be found a spiritual revelation made manifest through men, but not understood by men. And to the most characteristic examples of this spiritual revelation belonged such things as the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz.

But all this revelation went in spite of everything through human heads, even though these human heads did not understand it. It went through human heads, became feebler and distorted. Fine poetry, grand poetry became such murmuring and babbling as the verses in the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz often are. Nevertheless, they are revelations of something magnificent, mighty macrocosmic images, mighty experiences majestically arising, between man and the macrocosm. If one reads the Chemical Wedding with the insight of today, one learns to understand these images of the Chemical Wedding; they explain themselves, for they are coloured by the brain through which they have passed, and behind them the grandiose element appears.

Such things are a proof that that which men once experienced has continued to live on in the sub-conscious. It was so undoubtedly in the first period of the devastating Thirty Years' War. In the first half of the 17th century there flowed in that which was great, majestic spiritual truth. Only the Mystics preserve the impress made by it on the mind. But the real substance, the spiritual substance is quite lost. Reason above all conquers, reason prepares the age of freedom. Today we look back over these things, we gaze back on the Hibernian Mysteries I would say, with a truly deepened inner soul-life, for they are in very truth the last great Mysteries, those last great Mysteries through which human and cosmic secrets could express themselves. And when today we search into these secrets again, then do these Hibernian Mysteries appear to us truly great.

But we cannot really fathom them if we have not first searched into these matters in an independent way. And even when we have investigated them in an independent way, something peculiar arises. If in the Akashic Record one approaches the images of these Hibernian Mysteries, then one experiences something which works in a repelling way. It is as if one were held back by some force, as if one could not approach with the soul. And the nearer one approaches, the more does that obscure itself towards which one would hasten in soul, and one passes into a state of soul-bewilderment. One has to work through this soul-bewilderment. One can do nothing else than vivify in oneself that which one already knows of as resembling it, that which has been achieved and discovered by oneself. And one realizes why that is so. We see that indeed these Hibernian Mysteries were indeed the last echo of an old wisdom given to mankind by the Divine Spiritual Powers, which, however, in the age when the Hibernian Mysteries sank down into the shadow-life were at the same time spiritually surrounded with a thick rampart, so that the human being cannot passively penetrate them, cannot passively gaze into them, so that he cannot approach them unless he has awakened in himself spiritual activity, and has thus become in the right way a man of modern times. I would say, the approach to the Hibernian Mysteries was closed at that time so that men are not able to approach the Mysteries in the old way, so that they are compelled to experience in the activity of their own consciousness that which in the epoch of freedom must be found inwardly by man. No longer through a historical nor even through a clairvoyant historical vision of ancient, marvelously great secrets, may he reach these secrets, but he may enter this path only through his own inner activity.

Herewith it is most markedly indicated in regard to the Mysteries of Hibernia, that a new age begins in the epoch in which these Mysteries sink into the shadow-land; but they may be seen even today in their whole glory and majesty by the soul-being who is sustained by inner freedom. For through real inner activity we can approach them, we can conquer that which beats us back, a desire to bewilder us, which for the soul obstructs that which down to these latest times revealed itself to the candidates of the great ancient Mysteries of the former wisdom, instinctive indeed, but none the less a high spiritual wisdom, which once poured itself over humanity on the earth as a primal force of the soul. The most beautiful, the most significant memorials in later times to the primal wisdom of men, to the primal grace of the Divine Spiritual Beings, which reveals itself in the primal conditions of humanity, the most beautiful soul-spiritual memorials of this time are those images which can unveil themselves to us when we direct our gaze to the Mysteries of Hibernia.

I would like to start by talking about the principle of development, which I already hinted at yesterday. I said: If we follow the metamorphosis of forces within a developmental series, we first come from the simple into the complicated. So I want to draw a simple [it is drawn]; then a next more complicated one would perhaps be this; then we would come to a third, to a fourth, which would be like this (Fig. 105). Now we might have four stages of development of the same thing.

Now the next one could be somewhat more complicated than the previous form. We would then perhaps get this [fifth] form. But this would not come out, instead this other form will develop. What I have drawn with the thick line, that would then perhaps be visible on the outside. And if it were a real form in nature, one would then progress from this to this form. And yet it is only in the etheric that development continues in such a way that the more complicated forms, which I have indicated with the dots, emerge, while the physical, the externally visible, that which reveals itself again, perhaps simplifies itself again.

The next forms would then perhaps be such that the ethereal forms would be these [sixth]. But it is not this ethereal form that comes to the fore, but rather what remains visible on the outside is this [the thick line], which in turn is a simplification, an essential simplification, so that if you just consider physical development, you go from a stage of 1-2-3-4 in complication, then in simplification. This is also really the principle of development in nature.

For example, we can see how, let us say, the eyes of certain lower animal beings – considered physically and externally – are more complicated than the human eye. Certain lower animals have blood vessel-like organs, a “sword-shaped process” and a “fan” in their eyes. These are also disappearing, and the human eye is relatively simpler in its outward form, but the etheric body has a more complicated form. We can only grasp the principle of evolution correctly if we present it in this way. The principle of development is correctly captured in the evolution of the columns, capitals, architraves and bases that you were shown yesterday.

If you want to understand our building, you also have to bear in mind that the entire treatment is appropriately designed for the new architectural style in terms of character. It is the case, for example, that even the artistic treatment of the wall is different from the way walls were treated in earlier architectural styles: the wall was always conceived as the boundary of the space that one wanted to close off. Here at the Goetheanum, the wall is conceived in such a way that it actually overcomes itself. This is physically achieved in our windows. Our windows, in so far as they are the main windows of the auditorium, are etched out of single-colored glass panes. It is then the case that the artistic works are actually only created by the sunlight shining through. So the processing of the window panes is a preparation, and the whole impression is created by the interrelationship between what has been worked on the pane and the sunlight shining through. In the windows, in particular, what has otherwise been striven for in the entire building has been physically achieved, whether through the design of the columns, the carving on the walls, or the painting: the wall virtually dissolves. So that when you look at the wall, you don't have the feeling that the space is closed off, but that you have the feeling that you are being led out into the cosmos through the wall. With the windows, you must have this feeling physically, because you lead directly, I would say, to the effect of light on the outside, purely through the physical design of the panes; but with the other wall designs, this has also been attempted artistically.

This will give you an idea of how a new stylization of building forms has been striven for here, down to the last detail, how the formal language of our building is to be a new one, so to speak. It is understandable that philistinism cannot immediately comprehend this new design language, my dear friends. Now, it is important that we first show you some of what has been achieved with painting. First of all, I will show you the painting of the small dome, because I only have pictures of it here for now.

Let us look at what our revered friends actually saw. By visualizing this now in non-colored images, we must immediately point out that the essential thing about the painting of the small dome is not the motifs, but the bringing out of the motifs from the colors. There lies, I might say, the very beginning of what painting of the future will have to bring. Man will indeed have to understand more and more that in the details of nature, in essence, there is always something essential. For example, when you immerse yourself in a color, or in a color combination, it is not just this color combination that is present, but the color itself is something alive, something that works out of itself, and it is possible to educate oneself, for example, to live with the color blue. You will then get the feeling that the blue color gives you the impression of the designed, the moving, that which moves or is formed in space. So if you approach it in a creative way, you will get something that you draw out of the blue. The red or yellow gives you the impression that it wants to reveal itself, come towards you, talk to you. While the blue glides past you, the red gives you the impression that it comes towards you.

In this way, being with a color, but especially with many colors, can be invigorated. And all these things actually are in the work of nature. And only someone who educates himself in this immersion in the elements of nature can understand this. Therefore, it is somewhat striking when, let us say, in the current, indeed, in itself quite justified new striving for art, things come across that actually show that one has come out of imitating nature and, isn't it true, into something that one is actually striving for new artistic things in the inartistic. When we see that all manner of expressionist and futurist and so forth things are put together in any old way, or put together differently, what appears in nature in a certain way, then very often – not always, of course – there is something very unjustified in such a combination. For example, someone who forms a human eye cannot help but place the second eye in the right place if they do not merely see, but if they know how to live intimately with the creative forces of nature. This is because the eye is not something in itself, but only exists with the second eye. But one only comes to the inner essential creation of nature when one can live with the entities of nature, for example with colors.

And now, look, how could it not be possible to create from color itself? I just want to know when someone says: I am not interested in something created according to the model, but I am interested in applying the colors, I just want to know why then the form should not emerge from this pure application of the colors as the creature of the color. We have to get away from the model again. We have to get away from being tied to the naturalistic. Art has worked on that long enough. But we have to be able to develop an interest in seeing a light surface simply as a color spot and seeing a dark surface as a color spot. I would like to know how, when you simply have a light and a dark surface in an arrangement [it is drawn], how you could not feel a face turned in this direction, surrounded by hair growth here (Fig. 105).

Everything can be brought out of the color combination. Just as everything can be brought out of the treatment of the surface, of the treatment of the form in sculpture. In contrast to color, if painting wants to work with color, the line, the drawing, is actually an untruth. Because, you see, the horizon is not really and truly present as a line. That is not true at all. It is not a horizon line. What is real is the blue sky, and below it perhaps something shaped by nature, and that borders on each other. It is the contact of two colored surfaces. Whoever draws the line is lying. Whoever paints two colored surfaces, which of course must then have a border, is telling the truth. And it is with things like this that one begins to get used to the truth. Because we, wanting to be naturalistic, have lied so much artistically, that is why we also have the plight that so many lies are currently being told in the other world contexts.

Just think what, let us say, for example, the drama has achieved. Drama, at the end of the 19th century, in the culmination of materialism, began to be materialistic as well. There were people sitting in the auditorium watching dramatic performances of Arno Holz or Gerhart Hauptmann and so on, and now they didn't have something dramatic in the old Shakespearean, Schillerian or Goethean sense, where great series of events that are far apart are summarized, but a back house, a front house, or something like that, which was to be recreated in a very naturalistic way. The people should not talk about anything other than what is usually talked about in three hours. What kind of naturalism is that? It is the naturalism that, just like today's natural science, only takes into account the extra-human, which also, in the artistic, only takes into account the extra-human: can it be seen? If you wanted to be a model for a drama, you would have to remove the third wall so that everyone could see inside; then you could see what happens in three hours and recreate it from the stage.

These things are of course not taken into account at all in the age of naturalism, and one does not find the possibility of really placing the human being back into the whole natural and cosmic context. But this must also happen in art. It is understandable that art has long adhered to the model; but now the time has passed when art can adhere to the model. Art must grow together with the creative forces of nature and work out of the creative forces of nature. For what is the point of recreating nature in a naturalistic way? Whatever is created in a naturalistic way can never be achieved by nature. Every smallest achievement that is made out of something that is not there in the senses can be more significant than anything that appears to be so perfectly created in nature. If you want something realistic, you can say that you are sticking to nature itself. And in addition, in many areas naturalism was even somewhat extraordinarily frivolous. One thinks of Hauptmann's “Weavers”: the well-fed people sat down in the theater to overlook the whole series of scenes in Hauptmann's “Weavers”. This was called “social art”, bringing the misery of life into the theater, something frivolous, a frivolous cultural phenomenon. So we have to turn to the supersensible again. Today, people find it difficult to decide to enter the supersensible in art. But it will not become light in humanity if we do not decide on something like this in all areas.

Because the small cupola room is painted, the motifs are only the novellistic, not even the truly pictorial, artistic. But you have seen the thing itself, and so you might remember, especially in the pictures that I can show here, what you saw. It is perhaps even interesting to note how what is on the dome wall there cannot be reproduced if you only have the motif. But the motif itself, if you have it, must show that there is something incomplete about it. A motif that only appears in black and white is simply not satisfactory, because you have to be able to say what is missing. There must be something missing, because what is actually supposed to be depicted is areas of color, not black and white, and not lines, while what will appear to us is the novellistic element, the thought, which basically does not belong at all.

What you see here is what meets you from the small dome when you enter it. A child, emerging from the indeterminate material forms, flying towards the medieval figure, which has been captured by capturing a kind of Faust figure. It should be captured in a certain sense, the initiation of the Middle Ages. After humanity had gone through the most diverse forms of initiation, this initiation of the Middle Ages came about with all its tragedy.

It is indeed the case that, according to the spiritual conditions of this stage of human development, the human being cannot rise to an understanding of the living unless the realization of death stands beside it. To see through the connection between life and death is what leads, ultimately, from the Middle Ages to our own day, and through it to true knowledge.

In the next picture you see here that which lies further to the east: this medieval initiate himself, who comes to his realization out of reflection, out of turning away from the world. But precisely if we want to experience this turning away from the world, we must experience it by acquiring an understanding of the forces of death that are out there in the whole world. And these forces of death are intimately related to our powers of consciousness. The same thing that confronts us in the human skeleton, that, my dear friends, that is the external image of death, at the same time expresses in external physical form what lives in our nervous system when we experience the reflective consciousness of modern times.

The consciousness of the early Middle Ages and especially the ancient consciousness were such that they did not depend on the human being dying in every moment of their waking lives in order to think. But in return, human beings were filled with images and imaginations in their consciousness, even if they were atavistic. Intellectualism has only developed since the middle of the 15th century. It has developed because our head organs have assumed a formation that, when it takes hold of the whole person, continually leads to death. A battle between life and death is constantly taking place in the human being. The head wants to die. This is prevented by the life forces that continually surge up from the rest of the organization.

This dying of the head, to which we owe our intellectual consciousness, is what should also be expressed through all the colors and everything that has been brought out of the color in this form. This is the only place where the letter, the written word, appears within our entire structure, and rightly so, because it is only in this time that the I, the I-thought of humanity, has become so abstract that it can be pointed to with letters. The I-thought will only be able to be borne more and more by the fact that this I is indeed filled with the Christ. That is why medieval mysticism had the task of developing the Pauline word through a whole series of sermons and reflections such as those of Johannes Tauler and Meister Eckhart. It is fixed for all eternity within the medieval language, which developed in the German-speaking areas after the modern era, that the I: written out, the initials of Christ Jesus: ICH;

For the reasons I have just explained, you see Death beneath the Faust figure; this Death comes from forces that work from the center of the Earth towards us and combine only with the Mercury forces that work from the cosmos towards the Earth. The sight of the Faust-like figure with Death below him would be unbearable if the counter-image were not created in his perception, in the child flying towards Faust and the ego.

The next picture shows us the Greek personality as she lives under the initiation, a more feminine figure, since in fact the Greek initiation spoke more to the feminine. In general, in Greek high culture, the content of the initiation had to be gained by the initiate acquiring what female figures, who to a certain extent intervened in the flow that comes to man from the cosmos, what could be gained from such female figures: The Pythian priestesses in Greece are intimately connected with the whole structure of the Greek initiation. So that then such things appear as these heads, for example, which are worked purely from form.

This already invites us not to ask in the abstract sense: What does something like this mean? This question is an unartistic one when posed in abstract form. At this point, one must look at what color is there and how, according to the principle that I have just explained here, the shapes themselves emerge from the experience of the colors. Everything that belongs to this figure has actually come about in the end through the perception of the colors.

The next picture: you have a larger area to see here, here is the flying child seen earlier; here the small dome connects to the large dome; then this figure of the medieval initiator, and here is death. And here is the figure you just saw, above it the inspiring figure, an Apollo-like figure. Unfortunately, the picture is very imperfect. And at the top there is still the higher inspirer.

In these pictures, there is always what is initiated as a personality. Above it, there is the figure that sinks the imaginations into the personality to be initiated, and above it, there is the figure of a higher hierarchical order that sinks the inspirations into it. So here you have the inspiring figure, which is above the Faust-like figure.

The next picture is unfortunately very unclear. This is the inspiring figure that is above the Greek initiator. If you imagine the one you saw earlier, with the three heads on the shoulder, then this is the figure above it, the one who lets the imaginations flow into the lower figure, and above that the inspirer of the heads of the inspirer. Here is the head of the inspirer, and below that would be this Athena-like figure, who inspires and is inspired and imagined.

And here you have the two figures. The figure at the bottom is that which sends the imaginations down into the Egyptian initiates, and the other figure is that which allows the inspirations to flow into them. And as we move forward, we come to the representation of Egyptian initiation.

So the next picture is the Egyptian initiates; above him are the two figures that have just been seen here.

And so we come to the older Persian-Germanic initiation. This Persian-Germanic initiation is still effective in our time, but it has, as it were, something enclosed within it, the medieval initiation mentioned earlier, that is, the one characterized in the first figure. The medieval initiation is, as it were, shorter, and this one encompasses the whole long period. What matters in it is that the duality in the world - the bright, Luciferic, the dark, Ahrimanic - be seen through in its entire effect on the world. Here you have on the one hand the dark, Ahrimanic: the small head is in fact Ahriman, the other is his shadow, which he carries with him. On the other side: the Lucifer figure. You can see how this is developed in the sculptural group – you have all seen the group. So you can see how the contrast between the head of Ahriman and the head of Lucifer confronts you. And in the painting, one could also clearly express this mutual relationship between Ahriman and Lucifer.

If you see, for example, how the forward thrust of Lucifer's forehead virtually takes away Ahriman's foreheads, or how Ahriman's foreheads are hardened towards the back, then you see the interplay as it is the organizing force of nature. This then goes down. You see how a kind of centaur shape corresponds to Ahriman – a kind of centaur shape also corresponds to Lucifer – that they are connected to each other, want to be apart and cannot, complement each other in the colors, and below that the Persian-Germanic initiate, who carries the child floating on his hand, pointing out how the future and the hope for the future must be taken up in man by seeing through dualism.

The next image: Ahriman is alone with his shadow. The Ahrimanic is therefore everything in man that works in one direction in man. The human being is so essentially that man constantly strives to keep the balance between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic in him. The Ahrimanic is everything in us that, if we take the matter spiritually, inwardly, strives in us for the sober, prosaic, materialistic, for the philistine, for the bourgeois, for the tantric. That is the Ahrimanic, that which hardens man, that which solidifies man within himself, which prevents him from opening up to the world, which makes him absorbed in his egoism. It is that which draws man to the earth, physiologically speaking, it is that which works in man and by which he would actually be continually exposed to the danger of succumbing to hardening, to sclerosis, to ossification, if it were not for the reciprocal, the Luciferic. He would be constantly in danger of becoming diabetic, for example, or of developing terrible gouty lumps. That is the Ahrimanic. Ahriman suffers greatly from constant gouty lumps, from constant rheumatism, etc. There are things that are physiologically connected with the soul-like philistinism, materialism, bourgeois conformity, and so on, as I characterized it earlier.

This is the Luciferian figure, the complete opposite image. It is the other side of man, that which continually causes man, in his soul, to stray into the mystical and the fantastic, continually causes him, as it were, to be a being that wants to get beyond the human head. All enthusiasm in man is that which is striven for by the forces that are, as such, Luciferian in man.

Now there are two ways in which these contradictions can be present in human nature: One is that man strives to achieve a kind of equilibrium, that is, to facilitate everything that strives within him towards the philistine, the bourgeois, by also developing imagination, by also being able to devote himself to the world, and by also understanding how to bring the artistic into the purely abstract. That is to say, it is possible for a person to achieve such a balance of these two opposing currents that the person becomes one through the two harmoniously blending into each other and becoming one.

But the other is also possible, that the two extremes continue to work in man, so that man does not find a balance in which they flow into one another, but that the two things are active in him. For example, you can meet mystical enthusiasts who ascend to the highest theosophical, symbolic regions, always wanting to rise above their heads, but in ordinary life they are philistines. Loving everything philistine, pedantic, materialistic, tough and so on - yes, tough! - goes quite well with mystical enthusiasm in a person. This, so to speak, obscures the balance deep within the unconscious. There, what is actually a twofold nature comes out in dualism. So in some ways, these two sides can also be present in a person, revealing themselves. One is not a philistine just because one is a dreamer. One can very well be a philistine and a dreamer at the same time. Figure 13 (Fig. 80):

There you see the one who is inspired by the insights of the interaction of the dark and the light world, who must connect what is indicated by the child's hovering.

Here you see that which is already there in a certain way as an initiation principle, but which will only have its task in the future: the way in which the secrets of the upper world can be received in Slavic countries today, a kind of Russian figure that has its own shadow beside it, as so often the Russian invisibly carries its own shadow with it, always has its shadow beside it. What is inspired from above, we will then see more clearly. A centaur figure, something that is already humanly shaped or already superhumanly shaped. There is no need to decide this question, but rather to think in terms of form. In between, as a counter-image, the angelic form. Just as we have Ahriman and Lucifer in the present culture, the Germanic-Persian one, so here, where we go a little further, we have the human form, stuck in the animal, and a superhuman form as its opposite.

You see here above the figure still reminiscent of the animal, so to speak the animal transported into the world of the stars, the animal having become ethereal, which contains within itself the forces of initiation for this future time, when these forces on the other side – these forces, which are more of an Ahrimanic nature – are held in the balance by the superhuman, by the angelic, which approaches this figure from the other side.

Here you have the angelic form together with the animal form, but it is something that is ethereally animal and ethereally superhuman. It is the interaction of the mysteries that work in one form or another that will bring about the initiation for the coming age.

The next picture: Here you have once more, so that you can see more of it, the initiating and the initiated. Thus, an attempt has been made to put together in the dome that which leads to the knowledge of the supersensible from the most diverse human conditions - Egyptian, Greek, medieval, past, future - and from the most diverse temporal conditions. And all of this is worked out of color to such an extent that one can have the impression that the wall is destroying itself, destroying itself with something that actually has no end in the soul, that enters into the spiritual; so that the wall, through its artistic design, cancels itself out.

Here you see the Luciferian figure as it is in the central figure; here is Christ. You will remember that you saw it over there in the building: it is in particular red color, worked out of red and yellow. I wanted to distinguish it from the other colors; so that the whole – if one may say so – the Luciferian experience – is a red-yellow experience, from the burning, phosphorous color, from the hot color, everything that leads people to want to rise above their own heads.

Everything that is otherwise in the dome and in the building in general is as if synthesized in this eastern group, in this Christ-like figure in the center, Lucifer above it, Ahriman below it, which is then completed in the rock group below. The whole mystery of man is there as a mystery: Christ, Lucifer, man, Ahriman, and thus there is a continuation of the building idea, which was found in its various metamorphoses from ancient Greek, Gothic times to our own. The Greek temple, as a dwelling for a god, had only one meaning in that it enclosed the god. One cannot imagine its forms of construction other than as the dwelling of the god. The medieval Gothic cathedral only has a purpose if the community is in it, otherwise it is abandoned. Its walling indicates that it only has a purpose if the community is in it. Inside, there should be that which leads man to self-knowledge, which presents man to himself, what man is: a being that has to seek the Hypomochlion between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic.

In the next picture, you can see below it the Ahrimanic, which is struck by the rays of fire emanating from the arm of the Representative of Humanity - the Christ Jesus. The Ahrimanic is also held fast by the forces of the earth. It is everything that pushes the human being towards the earth, the heaviness of the earth in the human being, just as the Luciferic is that through which the human being wants to move away from the world. The Ahrimanic: the inward brokenness, the inward heavy suffering. The Luciferic: that which leads the human being to stupefaction, to illusion, to hallucination. Here with Ahriman, everything bony, everything hardening. In Lucifer, everything feverish, pleurisy-like, etc., everything that, if developed one-sidedly by the human being, would cause the human being to burn inwardly through his joy and lust and greed and desire. The Ahrimanic: that which freezes within in pain and therefore endures infinite pain when the rays of fire come over its coldness.

The next picture: the head of the Representative of Man, as I believe it can be fully captured in spiritual science. The usual image that one has of Christ - it was actually only in the sixth century that the bearded Christ emerged - the history of Christ portraits is extremely interesting. The Christ portraits emerged from lively discussions about whether Christ was beautiful or ugly. Of course, these discussions took place at a time when there was no longer a living image of Christ. Then the urge to capture Christ in pictures arose at a time when people could no longer depict beauty in the old Greek sense. We have to try to see Christ spiritually. And as far as I believe I can advocate the matter, it is – precisely by transforming the whole into the spiritual, which can only be seen in what has been preserved in the Akasha Chronicle – the figure of the one who really walked in Palestine at the beginning of our era. But this should not be taken as if there were a portrait study, but it can be felt that the representative of humanity is also connected with history in this way. Everything must follow from the artistic intuition itself.

Now I still have a few figures in the next picture: you see the middle group here. Here the Russian initiation, above it the angel, the centaur; then this Golgotha Way, the threefold path, to Christ, to the two thieves or robbers. Here the Ahriman figure, struck by the rays of fire, then the Christ figure, above it Lucifer. Here again the other side: the angel, the centaur figure, thus the initiating one. Below that, in turn, would be the two initiators that belong together.

Here you see the five-part leaf that I mentioned yesterday. Then you see the Germanic-Persian initiation, the Luciferic-Ahrimanic one, and then the Egyptian initiation. But this is already very unclear in this picture. You can still see the Egyptian initiate. An attempt has been made to photograph the object in a variety of ways. It is of course true that photography can only give the motif in the most diverse ways, which is basically not what it is all about.

I would also like to mention that our building, the double-domed structure, is covered with Norwegian slate. Once, when I was on a lecture tour that took me from Kristiania to Bergen, I looked out of the window of the railway carriage and noticed the beautiful Voss slate from the Voss slate quarries. During that journey, I had the idea that it would be a good idea to use this Voss slate to cover our building – an idea that could then be realized. Those who look at the roofs of our building, as they shine, especially under certain effects of the sun in their grayish-blue, will see that this idea was indeed a justified one, to ship this Norwegian slate to the south just enough to cover this building. It does indeed reflect the sun's rays wonderfully, and the rays of light in turn.

Of course, I can only give a brief description of what was attempted in this building. If you combine what I have been able to discuss, because there are pictures, with what you will see in the future, along with many other things, in general and in detail, you will get an idea of how this building should become a hieroglyph, an immediate revelation in the forms and colors of that which lies in the entire anthroposophically oriented world view. It should be presented as a great hieroglyph to the present day. And something would really be done for our time and for the near future if this building could ever be completed. It has been started with a certain devotion to the cause, started at that time especially from those areas that are now confined to world life, that can no longer really contribute because they are completely impoverished in relation to the rest of the world. Events have brought it about that precisely these regions have become impoverished in the face of world events, which first gave rise to this idea of building, and it would actually be good if so much un-chauvinistic, pure humanity could arise in the world that this building could now really be completed on the part of those regions that have suffered less from the horrors of recent years. It should actually be completed.

However, if you look at everything that has been a motivating factor in the last five to six years, and if you see it continuing to have an effect on the winners and the defeated, if you see how nowhere does the realization dawn that a completely new situation must take hold, then there can be little hope that this edifice will ever be completed. But it is, my dear friends, a demand of the time, it is a demand of the future. It is something that should be understood quite differently than one has been inclined to understand it until now. And it would perhaps be the first sign of a manifestation of the will to heal the world if, let us say, an understanding were to awaken from the English, French, and American sides, precisely for the completion of this building. The first impulse came from Central Europe; the rest would have to come from those who were neutral in the last years or from those who were hostile to Central Europe, if there were real understanding.

But it really seems as if souls want to continue sleeping, as if most of them say to themselves: Oh, what's the point of getting involved in something new! Things will only turn out well if we go back to what was more or less the case until 1914. Many people long for that. My dear friends, that will never come back. And those who want that, and who are working to bring it about, those who cannot rise above the idea that something as new must come among us as the architectural styles of this building here are, they are working towards the downfall of humanity. Isn't it actually, I would say, heartbreaking in terms of the culture of humanity and its development, as Dr. Kolisko had to say here a few days ago, as he had to characterize, as it were, how at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century and well into the 19th century, the Goethe culture had emerged, and that this Goethe culture has completely dried up. It had already dried up in Germany by the 1880s.

Perhaps I may allow myself a subjective judgment in these matters, because I myself came to Weimar for the first time in 1889, then in 1890 to the Goethe-Schiller Archive. Yes, my dear friends, there we really were at the burial place of Goetheanism, at the real burial place of Goetheanism. And in that, there was no difference between the various nations of the world. There the German scholar, by cutting syllables, recalled Faust, together with Calvin Thomas, the American scholar, who cut syllables in the same way. People from all over the world worked there. Science had come to the point where it was far away, where it was concerned with Goethe. Truly, everywhere a cutting up of the living Goethean being, terrible, terrible!

In Austria, however, which already carried the seed of destruction within itself, which, through its state-political system, carried the seeds of destruction within itself, there were still a few isolated developers of Goetheanism, as Dr. Kolisko characterized it here in these days. Then, what once existed was finished, covered up! It is up to humanity itself whether the same fate that befell Goetheanism befalls all of European culture and its American offspring. It is hard to believe, but the question for humanity today is: Do you want something new and thus save the white race from barbarism, or do you want the same fate for the entire culture of the white race as for Goetheanism? And rising above this barbarism of the white race, what will the non-white races, namely the Negroes and similar races, bring about what is now the civilized world? ¹ The question today is: How many people are able to face this problem? How many people feel how serious it is today that it is a matter of the existence or non-existence of contemporary civilization?

This building was intended to be nothing less than a living expression of this. It is the continuation of what European culture has achieved, and this continuation should live, not die! But this building does not appeal to an indeterminate fate, to which one might comfortably surrender, but rather appeals to something actively alive. If people want to save European civilization without this active life, without this impulse for salvation, without this will, without this act of freedom, then this culture will not be saved, and will meet the same fate as Goetheanism in Central Europe. Then one might establish large archives and do philology in these large archives about what once was in Europe. But we should not let it come to archives alone; we should let it come to living buildings, both physical and spiritual, which already announce their liveliness through their forms. I would like that to be read from these forms. Because this name, Goetheanum, was longed for by someone, my dear friends, as the final name for this building here, which has already experienced the difference between a mausoleum of Goetheanism and what could be a living organism for the Goethean spirit, but in its further development, now for 1920, in fifty years for 1970, etc.

That is what I wanted to say to you today, following the description of the building.

• 1. See the reference on p. 159.

IN the Building that is to be a home for Spiritual Science, full account must be taken of the evolutionary conditions and necessities of mankind as a whole. And unless this demand is fulfilled, the aim of such a Building will not be achieved. In an undertaking like this we have a deep responsibility to the laws of the spiritual life, the spiritual Powers and the conditions of human evolution of which we have a certain knowledge; and above all we must be mindful of the judgment which future times will pass upon us. In the present cycle of human evolution, this responsibility is altogether different from what it was in times gone by.

Great and mighty creations of art and of culture through the ages have many things to tell us. In a beautiful and impressive lecture this morning, [Lecture by Dr. Ernst Wagner: “Works of Art as Records of the Evolution of Humanity.”] you heard how the creations of art and of culture help us to understand the inner constitution and attitude of the human soul in earlier times.

Now there is a certain reason why the responsibility of those who shared in the creation of ancient works of art, was made easier than it is for us to-day. In ancient times, human beings had at their disposal means of help which are no longer available in our epoch. The Gods let their forces stream into the unconscious or subconscious life of the soul; and in a certain sense it is an illusion to believe that in the brains or souls of the men who built the Pyramids of Egypt, the Temples of Greece and other great monuments, human thoughts alone were responsible for the impulses and aims expressed in the forms, the colours and so on. For in those times the Gods themselves were working through the hands, the heads and the hearts of men.

The Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch already lies in the far past and our age is the first period of time in which the Gods put man's own free, spiritual activity to the test. True, the Gods do not refuse their help, but they vouchsafe it only when by the strength of aspiration developed in the soul through a number of incarnations, men make themselves worthy to receive the forces streaming to them from above. What we ourselves have to create is essentially new — in the sense that we must work with forces differing altogether from those in operation in bygone times. We have to create out of the free activity of our own human souls. The hallmark of our age is consciousness — it is the epoch of the Consciousness Soul, the Spiritual Soul. And if the future is to receive from us such works of culture and of art as. we have received from the past, we must create out of full and clear consciousness, free from any influence arising from the subconscious life. That is why we must open our minds and hearts to thoughts which shed light upon the task ahead of us. Only if we know upon what laws and fundamental spiritual impulses our work must be grounded, only if what we do is in line and harmony with the evolutionary forces operating in mankind as a whole — only then will achievement be within our reach ... And now let us turn to certain fundamental ideas which can make our work fruitful — for what we have to create must be basically, and in its very essence, new.

In a certain sense our intention is to build a Temple which is also to be a place of teaching — as were the ancient Temples of the Mysteries. Buildings erected to enshrine what men have held most sacred have always been known as Temples. You have already heard how the life of the human soul in the different epochs came to expression in the temple-buildings. When with insight and warmth of soul we study these buildings, differences are at once apparent. A very striking example is afforded by the forms of temples belonging to the Second Post-Atlantean epoch of culture. Outwardly, at any rate, very little is left of these temples of the ancient Persian epoch, and their original form can only be dimly pictured or reconstructed from the Akasha Chronicle. Something reminiscent of their forms did indeed find its way into the later temples of the third epoch, into Babylonian-Assyrian architecture and above all into the temples of Asia Minor, but only to the extent that the structure of these later buildings was influenced by the conditions obtaining in that region of the Earth.

What was the most striking and significant feature of this early Art of Building?

Documentary records have little information to give on the subject. But if, assuming that investigation of the Akasha Chronicle itself is not possible, we study the buildings of a later epoch, gleaning from them some idea of what the earlier temples in that part of the world may have been, it will dawn upon us that in these very ancient temples, everything depended upon the facade, upon the impression made by the frontage of the temple upon those who approached its portals. A man who made his way through this facade into the interior of the temple, would have felt: “The facade spoke to me in a secret, mysterious language. In the interior of the temple I find everything that was striving to express itself in the façade.” He would have felt this no matter whether he came as a layman or as one who had to some extent been initiated.

If we now turn from these temples — the character of which can only be dimly surmised by those unable to read the Akasha Chronicle — if we now turn to the temples, the pyramids or other sacred monuments of Egypt, we find something altogether different. Sphinxes and symbolic figures of mystery and grandeur stand before us as we approach an ancient Egyptian Temple; even the obelisks are enigmas. The Sphinx and the Pyramids are riddles — so much so that the German philosopher Hegel spoke of this Art as the “Art of the Riddle.” The upward-rising form of the pyramid in which there is scarcely an aperture, seems to enshrine a mystery; from outside at any rate, a façade is indicated only in the form of a riddle presented to us. In the interior, as well as information on manifold secrets contained in the ancient mystery-scripts or what later took their place, we find indications in the innermost sanctuary, of how the hearts and souls of men were led to the God who dwelt in deep concealment within the temple. The building enshrines the most sacred Mystery — the Mystery of the God. The pyramids, too, are shrines around the holiest secret of humanity, namely. Initiation. These buildings shut themselves off from the outer world, together with the Mystery they contain.

Passing now to the temples of Greece, we find that they retain the basic principle of many Egyptian temples in that we have to think of the Greek Temple as the dwelling place of the Divine-Spiritual; but the outer structure itself indicates a further stage. In its wonderful expression of dynamic power, of inner forces weaving in the forms, it is whole and complete, intrinsically perfect — an Infinitude in itself. The Greek God dwells within the temple. In this building, with its columns which in themselves reveal their function as ‘bearers’ capable of supporting what lies upon them, the God is enshrined in something that is whole and perfect in itself; an infinitude is here embodied, within Earth-existence. This is expressed in the whole form and in every detail of the building.

The idea of the temple as an expression of all that is most precious to man, is embodied in the Christian Temple or Church. Such buildings, erected originally over a grave, indeed over the Grave of the Redeemer, culminate in the spire which tapers upwards to the heights. Here we have before us the expression of an altogether new impulse, whereby Christian architecture is distinguished from that of Greece. The Greek Temple is, in itself, one complete, dynamic whole. The Church of Christendom is quite different. I once said that by its very nature, a temple dedicated to Pallas Athene, to Apollo or to Zeus needs no human being near it or inside it; it stands there in its own self-contained, solitary majesty as the dwelling-place of the God. The Greek Temple is an infinitude in itself in that it is the dwelling-place of the God. And it is really the case that the farther away human beings are from the temple itself, the truer is the effect it makes upon us. Paradoxical as it may seem, this is the conception underlying the Greek Temple. The Church of Christendom is quite different. The call of a Christian church goes out to the hearts and minds of the Faithful; and every one of the forms in the space we enter tells us that it is there to receive the community, the thoughts and aspirations of the congregation. There could hardly have been a truer instinct than that which coined the word Dom for the Temple of Christianity, for Dom expresses a gathering-together, a togetherness of human beings. (Dom is akin to tum, as in Volkstum).

We cannot fail to realise that a Gothic building, with its characteristic forms, is trying to express something that is never as separate and complete in itself as a Greek Temple. Every Gothic form seems to reach out beyond its own boundaries, to express the aspirations and searchings of those within the walls; there is everywhere a kind of urge to break through the enclosing walls and mingle with the universe. The Gothic arch arose, of course, from a deep feeling for the dynamic element; but there is something in all Gothic forms which seems to lead out and beyond; they strive as it were to make themselves permeable. One of the reasons why a Gothic building makes its wonderful impression is that the multi-coloured windows provide such a mysterious and yet such a natural link between the interior space and the all-pervading light. Could there be any sight in the world more radiant and glorious than that of the light weaving through the coloured windows of a Gothic cathedral among the tiny specks of dust? Could any enclosed space make a more majestic impression than this — where even the enclosing walls seem to lead out beyond, where the interior space itself reaches out to the mysteries of infinite space?

From this rapid survey of a lengthy period in the development of temple-architecture, we cannot have failed to realise that its progress is based upon underlying law. But for all that, we still confront a kind of Sphinx. What is really at the root of it? Why has it developed in just this way? Can any explanation be given of those remarkable frontages and facades covered with strange figures of winged animals and winged wheels, of the curious pillars and columns to be found in the region of Asia Minor as the last surviving fragments of the first stage of temple-architecture? These frontages tell us something very remarkable ... exactly the same, in reality, as the experience which arises within the temple itself. Can there be any greater enigma than the forms which are to be seen on fragments preserved in modern museums? What principle underlies it all?

There is an explanation, but it can only be found through insight into the thoughts and aims of those who participated in the building of these temples. This, of course, is a matter in which the help of occultism is indispensable. What is a Temple of Asia Minor, in reality? Does its prototype or model exist anywhere in the world?

The following will indicate what this prototype is, and throw light upon the whole subject. Imagine a human being lying on the ground, in the act of raising his body and his countenance upright. He raises his body upwards from the ground in order that it may come within the sphere of the downstreaming spiritual forces and be united with them. This image will give you an inkling of the inspiration from which the architectural forms of the early temples of Asia Minor were born. All the pillars, capitals and remarkable forms of such temples are a symbolic expression of what we may feel at the sight of a human being raising himself upright — with the movements of his hands, his features, the look on his face, and so on. If with the eyes of the Spirit we are able to look behind this countenance into the inner man, into the microcosm that is an image of the macrocosm, we should find, inasmuch as the countenance expresses the inner man, that the countenance and the inner man are related in just the same way as the facade or frontage of a temple of Asia Minor was related to its interior. A human being in the act of raising himself upright — that is what the early temple of Asia Minor expresses, not as a copy, but as the underlying motif and all that this motif suggests. The spiritual picture given by Anthroposophy of the physical nature of man helps us to realise the sense in which such a temple was an expression of the microcosm, of man. Understanding of the aspiring human being, therefore, sheds light on the fundamental character of that early Art of Building. Man as a physical being has his spiritual counterpart in those remarkable temples of which only fragments and debris have survived. This could be pointed out in every detail, down to the winged wheels and the original forms of all such designs. The Temple Is — Man! rings to us across the ages like a clarion call.

And now let us turn to the temples of Egypt and of Greece. Man can be described not only as a physical being, but also as a being of soul. When we approach man on Earth as a being of soul, all that we perceive in his eyes, his countenance, his gestures, is, to begin with, a riddle as great in every respect as that presented by the Egyptian Temple. It is within man that we find the holy of holies — accessible only to those who can find the way from the outer to the inner. And there, in the innermost sanctuary, a human soul is concealed, just as the God and the secrets of the Mysteries were concealed in the Temples and Pyramids of Egypt.

But the soul is not so deeply concealed in man as to be unable to find expression in his whole bearing and appearance. When the soul truly permeates the body, the body can become the outward expression and manifestation of the soul. The human body is then revealed to us as a work of artistic perfection, permeated by soul, an infinitude complete in itself. And now look for something in the visible world that is as whole and perfect in itself as the physical body of man permeated by soul. In respect of dynamic perfection you will find nothing except the Greek Temple which, in its self-contained perfection, is at the same time the dwelling-place and the expression of the God. And in the sense that man, as microcosm, is soul within a body, so is the temple of Egypt and of Greece, in reality, MAN!

The human being raising himself upright — that is the prototype of the oriental temple. The human being standing on the soil of the Earth, concealing a mysterious world within himself but able to let the forces of this inner world stream perpetually through his being, directing his gaze horizontally forward — that is the Greek Temple. Again the annals of world-history tell us: The Temple is — MAN!

We come now to our own epoch. Its origin is to be found in the fruits of the ancient Hebrew culture and of Christianity, of the Mystery of Golgotha, although, to begin with, the new impulse had to find its way through architectural forms handed down from Egypt and from Greece. But the urge is to break through these forms, to break through their boundaries in such a way that they lead out beyond all enclosed space to the weaving life of the universe. The seeds of whatever comes to pass in the future have been laid down in the past. The temple of the future is foreshadowed, mysteriously, in the past. And as I am speaking of something that is a perpetual riddle in the evolution of humanity, I can hardly do otherwise than speak of the riddle itself in rather enigmatical words.

Constant reference is made to Solomon's Temple. We know that this temple was meant to be an expression of the spiritual realities of human evolution. We hear much of this Temple of Solomon. But a question that leads nowhere — and here lies the enigma — is often put to men living on the physical Earth. It is asked: Has anyone actually seen King Solomon's Temple? Is there anyone who ever saw it, in all its truth and glory? Here indeed there is a riddle! Herodotus traveled in Egypt and the region of Asia Minor only a few centuries after the Temple of Solomon must already have been in existence. From the descriptions of his travels — and they mention matters of far less importance — we know that he must have passed within a few miles of Solomon's Temple, but he did not set eyes upon it. People had not seen this temple! The enigma of it all is that here I have to speak of something that certainly existed — and yet had not been seen. But so it is ... In Nature, too, there is something that may be present and yet not be seen. The comparison is not perfect, however, and to press it any further would lead wide of the mark. Plants are contained within their seeds, but human eyes do not see the plants within the seeds. This comparison, as I say, must not be pressed any further; for anyone who attempted to base an explanation of Solomon's Temple upon it would be speaking quite falsely. In the way I have expressed it, however, the comparison is correct — the comparison between the seed of a plant and the Temple of Solomon.

What is the aim of Solomon's Temple? Its aim is the same as that of the Temple of the Future. The physical human being can be described by Anthroposophy; the human being as the temple of the soul can be described by Psychosophy; and as Spirit, the human being can be described by Pneumatosophy. Can we not then picture man spiritually in the following way: — We envisage a human being lying on the ground and raising himself upright; then we picture him standing before us as a self-contained whole, a self-grounded, independent infinitude, with eyes gazing straight forward; and then we picture a man whose gaze is directed to the heights, who raises his soul to the Spirit and receives the Spirit! To say that the Spirit is spiritual is tautology, but for all that it underlines what is here meant, namely, that the Spirit is the super-sensible reality. Art, however, can work only in the realm of sense, can create forms only in the world of sense. In other words: The spirit that is received into the soul must be able to pour into form. Just as the human being raising himself upright and then the human being consolidated in himself were the prototypes of the ancient temples, so the prototype of the temple of the future must be the human soul into which the Spirit has been received. The mission of our age is to initiate an Art of Building which shall be able to speak with all clarity to the men of future times: The Temple is — Man — the Man who receives the Spirit into his soul! But this Art of Building will differ from all its predecessors. We now come back to what was said at the beginning of the lecture.

With our physical eyes we can actually see a man who is in the act of raising himself upright. But man as a being pervaded by soul must be inwardly felt, inwardly perceived. And this was indeed the case — as you heard this morning when the lecturer so graphically said that the sight of a Greek Temple “makes us feel the very marrow of our bones.” Truly, the Greek Temple lives in us because we are that Temple, in so far as we are each of us a microcosm permeated by soul. The quickening of the soul by the Spirit is an invisible, super-sensible fact ... and yet it must become perceptible in the world of sense if it is to be expressed in Art. No epoch except our own and the epochs to come could give birth to this form of Art. It is for us to make the beginning, although it can be no more than a beginning, an attempt ... rather like the temple which having been once whole and perfect in itself, strove in the Church of Christendom to break through its own walls and make connection with the weaving life of the universe.

What have we to build?

We have to build something that will be the completion of this striving. With the powers that Spiritual Science can awaken in us, we must try to create an interior which in the effects produced by its colours, forms and other features, is a place set apart — and yet, at the same time, is not shut off, inasmuch as wherever we look a challenge seems to come to our eyes and our hearts to penetrate through the walls, so that in the seclusion as it were of a sanctuary, we are at the same time one with the weaving life of the Divine. The temple that belongs truly to the future will have walls — and yet no walls; its interior will have renounced every trace of egoism that may be associated with an enclosed space, and all its colours and forms will give expression to a selfless striving to receive the inpouring forces of the universe.

At the opening of our building in Stuttgart* I tried to indicate what can be achieved in this direction by colours, to what extent colours can be the link with the Spirits of the surrounding world, with the all-pervading spiritual atmosphere. And now let us ask: Where does the super-sensible being of man become externally manifest? When does an indication reach us of the super-sensible reality within physical man? Only when man speaks, when his inner life of soul pours into the word; when the word is the embodiment of wisdom and prayer which — without any element of sentimentality — enshrines world-mysteries and entrusts them to man's keeping. The word that becomes flesh within the human being is the Spirit, the spirituality which is expressing itself in the physical human being. And we shall either create the building we ought to create ... or we shall fail, in which case the task will have to be left to those who come after us. But we shall succeed if, for the first time, we give the interior the most perfect form that is possible to-day — quite apart from the outside appearance of the building. The exterior may or may not be prosaic ... that does not fundamentally matter. The outside appearance is there for the secular world — with which the interior is not concerned. It is the interior that is of importance. And what will this interior be?

* See the lecture: “Die okkulte Gesichtspunkte des Stuttgarter Baues.” Stuttgart, October, 1911.

At every turn our eyes will light upon something that seems to say to us: This interior, with its language of colours and forms, in its whole living reality, is an expression of the deepest spirituality that man can entrust to the sphere of his bodily nature. The mystery of Man as revealed to wisdom and to prayer, and the forms which surround the space, will be one in such a building. And the words sent forth into this space will set their own range and boundaries, so that as they strike upon the walls they will find something to which they are so attuned that what has issued from the human being will resound back into the interior. The dynamic power of the word will go forth from the centre to the periphery and the interior space itself will then re-echo the proclamation and message of the Spirit. This interior will set and maintain its own boundaries and at the same time open itself freely to the spiritual infinitudes.

Such a building could not have existed hitherto, for Spiritual Science alone is capable of creating it. And if Spiritual Science does not do this in our day, future epochs will demand it of us. Just as the Temple of Western Asia, the Temple of Egypt, the Temple of Greece, the Church or Cathedral of Christendom have arisen in the course of the evolution of humanity, so must the place of the Mysteries of Spiritual Science — secluded from the material affairs of the world and open to the spiritual world — be born from the Spirit of man as the work of art of the future.

Nothing that is already in existence can prefigure the ideal structure that ought, one day, to stand before us. Everything, in a certain sense, must be absolutely and in essence new. Naturally, it will arise in a form as yet imperfect, but at least it will be a beginning, leading to higher and higher stages of perfection in the same domain.

How can men of the modern age become mature enough to understand the nature of such a building?

No true art can arise unless it is born from the whole Spirit of an epoch in human evolution. During the second year of my studies at the Technical High School in Vienna, Ferstel, the architect of the Votivkirche there, said something in his Presidential Address which often comes back to me. On the one side his words seemed to me at the time to strike a discordant note, but on the other, to be absolutely characteristic of the times. Ferstel made the strange statement: “Styles of architecture cannot just be found, cannot be invented.” To these words there should really be added: “Styles of architecture are born from the intrinsic character of the peoples.” Up to now, our age has shown no aptitude, as did the men of old, for finding styles of architecture and of building and then placing them before the world. Styles of architecture are “found,” but in the real sense only when they are born from the spirit of an epoch. How can we to-day reach some understanding of the Spirit of our age by which alone the true architecture of the future can be found? ... I shall try now to approach the subject from quite a different angle and point of view.

During the course of our work, I have come across artists in many different domains who feel a kind of fear, a kind of dread of spiritual knowledge, because Spiritual Science tries to open up a certain understanding of works of art and the impulses out of which they were created. It is quite true that efforts are made to interpret sagas, legends, and works of art, too, in the light of Spiritual Science, to explain the impulses underlying them. But so often it happens — and it is very understandable — that an artist recoils from such interpretations because, especially when he is really creative, he feels: ‘When I try to formulate in concepts or ideas something that I feel to be a living work of art, or at least a fertile intuition, I lose all power of originality, I lose everything I want to express — the content as well as the form.’ ... I assure you that little has been said to me through the course of the years with which I have greater sympathy. For if one is at all sensitive to these things, it is only too easy to understand the repulsion that an artist must feel when he finds one of his own works or a work he loves, being analysed and ‘explained.’ That a work of art should be taken in hand by the intellect is a really dreadful thought for the artist who is present, somewhere, in all of us. We seem to be aware of an almost deathlike smell when we have an edition of Goethe's Faust before us ... and there, at the bottom of the pages are the analytical notes of some scholar who may even be writing them as a philosopher, not merely as a philologist! How ought we to regard these things? I will try to make the point clear to you, very briefly, by means of an example.

I have before me the latest edition of the legend of “The Seven Wise Masters,” published this year by Diederichs. It is an old legend of which many different versions exist. Fragments of it are to be found practically all over Europe. It is a remarkable story, beautiful and artistically composed. I am, of course, speaking here of the art of epic poetry, but the same kind of treatment might also be applied to architectural art. I cannot take you through all that is contained, sometimes in rather unpolished phraseology, in this legend of the Seven Wise Masters, but I will give you a skeleton outline of it.

A series of episodes graphically narrated in connection with one main theme, have the following superscription: “Here begins the Book which tells of Pontianus the Emperor, his wife the Empress and his son, the young Prince Diocletian, how the Emperor desired to hang his son on the gallows, and how he is saved by words spoken each day by Seven Wise Masters.”

An Emperor has a wife and by her a son, Diocletian. She dies, and the Emperor takes a second wife. His son Diocletian is his lawful heir; by the second wife he has no son. The time comes for the education of Diocletian. It is announced that this will be entrusted to the most eminent and wisest men in the land, and Seven Wise Masters then come forward to undertake it. The Emperor's second wife longs to have a son of her own in order that her stepson may not succeed his father; but her wish is not fulfilled and she then proceeds to poison the mind of the Emperor against his son; finally she resolves to get rid of the son at all costs. For seven years Diocletian receives instruction from the Seven Wise Masters, amassing a wide range of knowledge — sevenfold knowledge. But in a certain respect he has outgrown the wisdom that the Seven Wise Masters had been able to impart to him. He has, for instance, himself discovered a certain star in the heavens and it is thereby intimated to him that when he returns to his father, he must remain dumb for seven consecutive days, must utter no single word and appear to be a simpleton. But knowing too, that the Empress is intent upon his death, he asks the Seven Wise Masters to save him. And now the following happens, seven times in succession, The son comes home, but the Empress tells the Emperor a story with the object of persuading him to let his son be hanged. The Emperor gives his assent, for the story has convinced and deeply moved him. The son is led out to the gallows in the presence of the Emperor and on the way they come upon the first of the Seven Wise Masters. When the Emperor holds him responsible for his son's stupidity, he — the first of the Masters — asks leave to tell the Emperor a story, and receives permission. “Very well,” says the Wise Man, “but first you must allow your son to come home, for it is my wish that he shall listen to us before he is hanged.” The Emperor acquiesces and when they have returned to their home, the first of the Seven Wise Masters tells his story. This story makes, such an impression upon the Emperor that he allows his son to go free. But the next day the Empress tells the Emperor another story, and again the son is condemned to death. As he is being led to the gallows, the second of the Seven Wise Masters comes forward, begging leave to tell the Emperor a story before the hanging takes place. Again the upshot is that Diocletian still lives. The same happenings repeat themselves seven times over, until the eighth day has come and Diocletian is able to speak. This is the story of how the Emperor's son comes to be saved.

The whole tale and its climax are graphically told. And now, think of it: We take the book and absorb ourselves in it; the graphic, if at times rather crude pictures, cannot fail to delight us; we are carried away by a really masterly portrayal of souls. But such a story immediately makes people call out for an ‘explanation.’ Would it always have been so? No indeed! It is only so in our own age, the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, when the intellect predominates everything. In the days when this story was actually written, nobody would have been asked to ‘explain’ it. But the verdict nowadays is that explanation is necessary ... and so one makes up one's mind to give it. And after all, it is not difficult. The Emperor's first wife has given him a son who is destined to receive teaching from Seven Wise Masters and whose soul has descended from times when men were still endowed with natural powers of clairvoyance. The soul has lost this clairvoyance but the human ‘I’ has remained — and can be instructed by the Seven Wise Masters, who are presented to us in many different forms. As I once said, we have essentially the same theme in the seven daughters of Jethro, the priest of Midian, who came to Moses by the well belonging to their father; he, eventually, became the father-in-law of Moses. In the Middle Ages, too, there are the seven Liberal Arts. The second wife of the Emperor who has no consciousness of the Divine, represents the human soul as it is to-day, when it has lost consciousness of the Divine and is therefore also unable to ‘have a son.’ Diocletian, the son, is instructed in secret by the Seven Wise Masters and must finally be freed by means of the powers he has acquired from these Seven. And so we could continue, giving an absolutely correct interpretation which would certainly be useful to our contemporaries. But what of our artistic sense? I do not know whether what I now have to say will find an echo or not! When we read and absorb such a book and then try to be clever, explaining it quite correctly, in the way demanded by the modern age, we cannot help feeling that we have wronged it, fundamentally wronged it. There is no getting away from the fact that a skeleton of abstract concepts has been substituted for the work of art in all its living reality — whether the explanation is true or false, illuminating or the reverse.

The greatest work of art of all is the world itself — Macrocosm or Microcosm! In olden times the secrets of the world were expressed in pictures, or symbols. We, in our day, bring the intellect, and Spiritual Science too, to bear upon the ancient wisdom which has been the seed of the culture of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch. We do this in order to ‘explain’ the secrets of the world. In comparison with the living reality this is just as abstract and barren as a commentary in comparison with the work of art itself. Although Spiritual Science is necessary, although the times demand it, nevertheless in a certain respect we must feel it to be a skeleton in comparison with the living realities of existence. It is indeed so. When Theosophy keeps only our intellects busy, when with our intellects we draw up tables and coin all kinds of technical expressions, Theosophy is nothing but a skeleton — above all when it is speaking of the living human being. It begins to be a little more bearable when we are able to picture, for instance, the conditions of existence on Saturn, Sun and Moon, the earlier epochs of Earth-evolution or the work of the several Hierarchies. But to say that the human being consists of physical body, ether-body, astral body and Ego — or Manas and Kama-Manas ... this is really dreadful, and it is even more dreadful to have charts and tables of these things. Thinking of the human being in all his majesty, I can scarcely imagine anything more horrible than to be surrounded in a great hall by a number of living people and to have on the blackboard beside one a chart of the seven principles of man! But so, alas, it must be ... and there is no getting away from it. It is not, perhaps, actually necessary to inflict these things upon our eyes — they are anything but pleasing to look at — but we must have them before the eyes of the soul! That is part of the mission of our age. And whatever may be said against these things from the point of view of art, they are, after all, part and parcel of the times in which we live.

But how can we get beyond this? In a certain respect we have to be arid and prosaic Theosophists; we have to strip the world bare of its secrets and drag glorious works of art into the desert of abstract concepts, reiterating all the time that we are “Theosophists!” How can we get out of this dilemma?

There is only one way. We must feel that Theosophy is for us a Cross and a Sacrifice, that in a sense it takes away from us practically all the living substance of world-secrets in the possession of mankind hitherto. And no degree of intensity is too great for words in which I want to bring home to you that for everything that truly lives, in the course of the evolution of mankind and of the Divine World too, Theosophy must, to begin with, be a field of corpses.

But if we realise that pain and suffering are inseparable from Theosophy, in that it brings knowledge of what is greatest and most sublime in the world, if we feel that we have in us one of the divine impulses of its mission — then Theosophy is a corpse which rises out of the grave and celebrates its resurrection. Nobody will rejoice to find the world being stripped of its mysteries; but on the other hand nobody will feel and know the creative power inherent in the mysteries of the world as truly as those who realise that the source of their own creative power flows from Christ, Who having carried the Cross to the ‘Place of Skulls,’ passed through death. This is the Cross in the sphere of knowledge which Theosophy carries in order to experience death and then, from within the grave, to see a new world of life arising. A man who quickens and transforms his very soul — in a way that the intellect can never do — a man who suffers a kind of death in Theosophy, will feel in his own life a source of those impulses in Art which can turn into reality what I have outlined before you to-day.

True spiritual perception is part and parcel of the aim before us — and we believe that the Johannesbau-Verein will help to make this aim understood in the world. I hardly think any other words are needed in order to bring home to you that this Building can be for Anthroposophists one of those things which the heart feels to be a vital necessity in the stream of world-events. For when it comes to the question of whether Anthroposophy will find a wider response in the world to-day, so much more depends upon deed than upon any answer expressed in words or thoughts; very much depends, too, upon everyone contributing, as far as he can, to the aim which has found such splendid understanding on the part of the Johannesbau-Verein and may thus be able to take its real place in the evolution of mankind.

I would like to discuss some more characteristic symbols and signs today, so that we can become clearer and clearer about the actual basic theme of our lectures, which should consist of showing how signs and symbols relate to the astral and spiritual worlds, also called the devachanic world.

We have seen that the symbols and pictures and the numerical and formal relationships really taken from the nature and essence of the higher worlds, when absorbed by the soul, evoke in it real soul forces in the form of perceptions, thoughts, ideas and feelings, which have a formative effect. Yes, we could even see that Noah's Ark was formative for the present physical body of man, and that the Temple of Solomon, when it works in its forms on the people of the present, will have a great significance for the shaping of man in the sixth race. From these statements you can already see that the path taken by the guides of humanity, who are constantly working on the course of human development, is actually similar to that taken by the individual in the elementary secret schools. There, too, we are dealing with a concentration of sensations, thoughts, images, and so on - many other things are added - that are effective and formative for the human being.

In many cases, the various occult currents of the present day are of the opinion that in our time there may be an ascent into the higher worlds by other means than through the application of imaginative and symbolic ideas. And for people of the present day, ascending into the astral world with the help of symbolic signs or other occult means of education is associated with a certain fear, even aversion. If you raise the question: Are such states of fear justified?, then you can say: Yes and no. In a certain respect they are justified; in another respect they are completely out of place, because no one can really go up into the higher worlds without passing through the astral world. It is a mistaken assumption if someone thinks that he can pass through the astral world blindfolded. You must realize, however, that the spiritual world as such has different regions. Man has descended from the spiritual world into the physical world, and he must ascend from the spiritual world back into the spiritual world. What must be avoided is that man, in his development, falls back into earlier states. Man must never fall back into earlier states. Every mediumistic state is a falling back into an earlier state, whereas true secret schooling is an ascent into higher states. Man must ascend through the astral world with full, bright day-consciousness in order to reach the higher regions of the spiritual world. Whatever longings, passions, instincts today's man carries within himself is anchored in the astral body, of which the astral body is the carrier. If a person wants to ascend to higher worlds, he must work with feelings and sensations; there is no other way. But the point is that he should never try to ascend to the higher worlds other than by fully maintaining the achievements of our physical world, that is, never with a damping of consciousness. When we look at mediums, we always find that they are thrown back into an earlier state of consciousness. Their bright day consciousness is dampened down, weakened, and an earlier state of consciousness, which the person has already overcome, is evoked. Anyone who wants to become a clairvoyant in the modern sense must retain their present bright day consciousness and take it with them. He can only do this by passing through the point of “sensuality-free thinking”, and nothing can ever happen when a person passes through sensuality-free thinking. Let us be quite clear about what this means.

Sensual thinking and imagining is anything that starts from the sensual perception of the objects around us. If you form your ideas in such a way that you first look at an object, perceive it, and then keep it in your memory, and your thoughts are such that you are stimulated by such ideas, then you have sensual thinking. This thinking fills by far the greatest part of the soul experiences of the present human being. And when a person examines himself to see how much remains to him when he throws out of his soul all ideas that are caused by sensory perception, then he will first become aware of what content is still there in the soul. When the ideas that were stimulated by external impressions have been removed, then he will grasp what the Greek philosopher Plato meant when he wrote over the entrance to his school, “No one unfamiliar with geometry shall enter.” This means that no one should enter who has not been able to rise to thinking free of sensuality. He did not demand ordinary geometry. Nor is it required today by those who want to ascend to higher worlds. Nor would it be necessary today for intrinsic, objective reasons. But from geometric representations one can form an idea of what thinking is that is free of sensuality. If you put three beans here, add three more beans, and another three beans, then you can learn from this sensual impression that 3 times 3 = 9. The child or primitive man learns it by the fingers. This is sensual thinking. When you no longer need the fingers or the beans, but when you learn the same thing through pure mental contemplation, then it is sensual-free thinking. The child starts learning from a bridge [beans or fingers] and only later rises to sensual-free thinking. If we draw a circle on the blackboard, it is not really a circle; what we draw there is a collection of little chalk mountains. You will not be able to grasp what a real circle is with sensory perception alone. Only the spiritually viewed, inwardly constructed circle is free of sensuality.

The best means for a larger circle of people to arrive at a thinking free of sensuality is today Theosophy, if Theosophy is understood in the sense that the human being learns to detach the images from sensuality. Particularly in those areas that go a little beyond the most elementary, man is led by theosophy to thinking that is free of sensuality. If, for example, you want to understand what the etheric body or the astral body is, you cannot see them externally. That is precisely what theosophy gives you: it describes things that you cannot see externally. Or when we describe the old moon in Theosophy, we create a picture of it, a very drastic one, in fact, in which we combine sensual and supersensible ideas, so that a materialistically minded person would say: He is painting something that is not possible. Yes, in Theosophy one must teach something that is almost impossible for today's conditions and describe the old moon in such a way that there were no such rocks, minerals and stones on it as there are on our earth today. The entire old moon consisted of a living substance that could be compared in density to a kind of spinach puree or cooked salad, a body halfway between minerals and plants, half plant, half mineral. We find something like a semi-vegetable life on the old moon. Minerals as they are today did not yet exist at that time. If you look at today's peat bogs, where there is also a kind of semi-vegetable substance, you would get an outwardly similar picture to the substance of the old moon. Instead of rocks and mountains, you would have found at most something on the old moon that is like the bark of our trees today. Now every naturalist will object that something like that could not exist as a planet. But it is precisely this that is needed, and it is a necessity in order to understand other epochs of development, for the human being to tear his thinking away from what today adheres to the conceptions of ordinary sensory thinking and feeling, and to arrive at a thinking that is free of the senses. Thinking that is free of the senses is not abstract thinking, but very, very real thinking. If we think of the old moon as a kind of large salad with its bark and so on included, then this is “sensual-supersensual” thinking, as Goethe says. By detaching color and form from sensuality and projecting them freely into space, you have gained imaginations through sensual-free thinking. Anyone who regards this as a firm foundation will never be able to stumble when ascending to higher worlds.

Let us make a schematic drawing for ourselves. Some things become unclear due to incorrect symbolic drawing. So, although it is sufficient for understanding certain relationships if the physical plane, the astral plane and the devachan plane are drawn on top of each other, it is more correct to imagine the physical world as a self-contained sphere, where the astral is all around, and the devachanic is around that again. Instead of drawing horizontal layers, it is good to draw it this way (see drawing), because this provides a way to distinguish two areas of the astral plane from each other. If we look into two very specific areas of the astral plane, which we indicate here with arrow 1, we see that in the astral world, what we call the male and the female here on earth are the two opposites of “form” and “life”. Form and life are opposites on the astral plane. Now, if we want to encounter form and life on the astral plane, we will only encounter them if we go in that direction (from the center upwards, see arrow 2). If we go in the other direction (center downwards, see arrow 3), we will by no means encounter the beneficial contrast of form and life, but rather the contrast of “decay” and “disease”. So if we start from the physical world, we encounter the opposite of form and life on the astral plane above; this corresponds to the opposite of decay and disease in the astral world below, i.e. going down below the physical plane. Whenever we go to one side, where we see beneficial properties for the physical world, these correspond on the other side to destructive, harmful influences for the physical world. We now have an opportunity to distinguish between the parts of the astral plane. There are actually two quite different areas of the astral plane that affect the human soul. If we want to form an idea of how these two very different areas affect the soul, we have to imagine that in a human being we have: the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body; and depending on their development, which has been described many times: manas or spirit self, budhi or life spirit, and atma or spiritual man; and in between we have, filled by the I, the soul. So that we can distinguish in a certain respect: body - which actually includes the three bodies -, soul and spirit. Now the three lower members, astral body, ether body and physical body, are reflected in the soul. Insofar as the physical body, ether body and astral body are reflected in their original nature, they introduce lower, downward-pulling qualities into the human soul. But that which is higher is also reflected in man: manas, buddhi, atma, and thus we also have uplifting, purifying elements in the soul. In strict Christianity, people also knew about this twofold way of being reflected in the human soul. One saw that the higher human nature was reflected in the soul, or the lower nature was reflected in the soul. Many sensed this, even if they were not esotericists. That is why it was said: When a person dies, he perceives the reflection of the spiritual world as the collection of laws of Moses; and when the lower nature is reflected in the soul, the devil reads the record of sins to the soul in death.

This means that the soul is presented with all the qualities that adhere to it: That which is reflected from above is held up to it as the tablets of the law of Moses; and that which is reflected from below is described by saying: the devil reads the soul's record of sins to it. If the soul does not take the right path, it can indeed sink into its lower passions; that can happen. But this must not be presented to man as a deterrent.

All imagistic, pictorial representations educate the human being in order to gradually bring him to that point in the development of life where he learns to look more and more into the higher worlds. Pictorial representations, such as the image of the old moon, are a powerful educational tool in this direction. Through such images, the idea of development is introduced to the human being in the right esoteric way. If one only presents dry, abstract concepts to the human being, he remains on the physical plane with his thinking, because ordinary thinking as such never comes from the physical plane. It is indeed a reflection of the Devachan plan; but the thought that the human being entertains is something that belongs to the physical plan, it is only a shadow image of the higher processes. No matter how fine your conceptions may be regarding the process of development, how a being on the first step of existence differentiates itself, descends and envelops itself, these are all only conceptions that give you ideas of the physical plan, but do not help you in your development. Only concepts and ideas that are both sensual and supersensible can gradually help you to really advance one step. First, you have to transform the concepts into images, into imaginations, and then repeat this process over and over again.

If one were to express this process, which was taught, for example, in the Rosicrucian schools, in a dialogue between teacher and student, one could put it like this: - In reality, such a dialogue never took place in this way, but we can present it in this way to show what the student had to go through step by step in long, drawn-out experiences. The teacher said to the student: “Look at the plant and see how it directs its root into the earth, how it grows towards the sun with its stem and blossom, and how it develops its fruit organs. And now imagine the human being in contrast. The human being is poorly compared to the plant when one compares his head with the flower and his reproductive organs with the root of the plant. Even Darwin, the great naturalist, used this comparison correctly by comparing the head of the human being with the root of the plant, so that even for Darwin, the plant is the human being turned upside down. What the plant holds up chastely to the sunbeam, its reproductive organs, man directs to the center of the earth. Thus, in man we have to think of an inversion of the plant, in that he freely directs all the forces that in the plant are directed toward the center of the earth to the sun-filled cosmos, and shamefully directs those organs that the plant holds up chastely to the sunbeam toward the earth. The animal stands in the midst of it.

If we therefore want to draw the real directions of power that exist in the world, we can do so as follows: the true esoteric meaning of the sign of the cross is a sum of forces. One direction of force goes downwards: the plant being is directed by this force. In the human being, it is directed in the opposite direction. The animal has a horizontally aligned spine, and in it this force is manifested as orbiting the earth horizontally. The soul principle ascends from plant existence to animal existence to human existence. And Plato, who so often expressed things that originated in the mysteries, spoke the beautiful sentence: The world soul is crucified on the world body. That is, the world soul passes through the plant, animal and human; it is crucified in the forces of the three realms: plant, animal and human. And if we thus inscribe the cross into the three natural realms, then the cross becomes for us the sign of the direction of development.

Now the teacher said to the student: You have to imagine how the plant stretches its calyx towards the sunbeam, how the fruit organs reach maturity when the plant is kissed by the sunbeam. - The development into a human being happens through the fact that the pure, chaste plant substance is permeated by desires, instincts and passions. In this way man conquers his consciousness, in this way he becomes human by passing through his animal nature. By interweaving the lower nature of desire into the pure plant nature, man has ascended from the dull plant consciousness to the bright consciousness of day.

From this level of present-day man, the teacher pointed the student to a higher level. Just as man has developed from a state similar to that of a plant, so too will he purify his instincts and desires to a higher, chaste level. The teacher showed the student the structures in the physical body of man through which the higher levels of consciousness can be attained and human substance can in turn become a substance similar to that of plants. Every being must use a physical body if it wants to appear on earth. But the body of man will change more and more in the future. We distinguish between a descending and an ascending development with regard to the human organs. Some human organs are in a state of descending development; in the course of time, which admittedly counts in millennia, the human being will discard them. Other organs are in the process of becoming; in the future they will undergo an upward development, for example the human larynx; it is only at the beginning of its development. The human heart will undergo a further upward development, becoming a completely different organ in the future. While other organs have already passed their zenith, becoming detached from human nature and withering away, we have an organ in the heart that is only at the beginning of its development.

We can distinguish between striated and longitudinally striated muscles in the human body; these are voluntary and involuntary muscles. The voluntary muscles of the hand, for example, are striated. The muscles of the intestines, on the other hand, which involuntarily push food forward, are longitudinally striped. The heart is an exception here, and this is a crux for today's physiological and anatomical scientists. The heart belongs to the involuntary muscles, but it has striated musculature. Therefore, our anatomists cannot understand the heart either. They consider all organs to be the same. If we consider the organs spiritually, they may well consist chemically of the same components, but one may be in a descending development and the other in an ascending one. The heart is on the way to becoming a voluntary muscle in the future; its anatomical structure already bears the characteristic features for this. Today, however, it contributes to the effect of emotional experiences on the blood. You can see how, when you feel fear, the blood mass withdraws from the periphery of the body and moves inward, or how, when you feel shame, the blood is driven from the center of the body to the periphery. In the future, in addition to the transformation of the heart, there will also be a transformation of our larynx. Today, the larynx serves to translate my thoughts into words by making the air vibrate. You can pick up and hear my words with your ears; this is caused by the vibrations of the air. The present human larynx is capable of transforming into air vibrations what is going on in the soul. The human body of the future will transform its larynx into a fertilizing organ, and the word, which today only creates in the air, will in the future become creative in our environment. Reproduction will then take place through the larynx, which will create the race of the future.

Just as the teacher pointed out to the student the chaste chalice of the plant, and how he pointed out to the human being who, in descending, has permeated his plant substance with the lower nature of passions, desires and instincts, but But in exchange for this, has acquired his present clear day-consciousness, the teacher showed how the present human being will ascend to higher states of consciousness, and how the future human being will transform the substance, filled with desires, back into pure and chaste organs. The pupil's attention was drawn to the past, present and future. Just as the chalice of the plant extends chastely towards the sun and its fruit organs grow towards the sun, this will be there again on a higher level, where man will offer his larynx as a chalice to the spiritual sunbeam. This spiritual chalice, the transformed organ of speech, was called the Holy Grail. This is a real ideal. The beginning, middle and end of human development: here you see the idea of human development transformed into a picture.

Through the feelings that we develop from these pictures, the forces flow to us that truly open up the higher worlds for us. All this takes place without magic. The images stimulate the feelings that lead the human being into the higher worlds. Feelings and sensations lead the human being into the astral world, just as the will leads him into the devachanic or spiritual world. Thinking corresponds to the physical world, feeling to the astral world, and the purified will to the devachanic world.

If we look at the plant in its original chaste substance, we find green as the color in the life of the plant. The plant is permeated by chlorophyll, by what is called chlorophyll, in those parts where the etheric body is actively alive. The etheric body has a basic law, which is the law of repetition. If only the etheric body were active in the plant, then one and the same form would be repeated again and again; leaf by leaf it sets in. But when the astral body of the earth begins to affect the plant, it completes growth and sets in the flowering. The effect of the etheric body is revealed in the repetition. This principle also applies to human growth. The etheric body shows its influence in the formation of the spinal vertebrae, but this only goes as far as the arching of the cranial vault, where the astral body begins to take effect. We can therefore only influence the etheric body through the principle of repetition. When you think and comprehend, you only affect the astral body. But when you pray or meditate, for example, and repeat the same prayer or meditation every day, you have an effect that extends into the etheric body. The way it is in the cosmos is that the principle of repetition first manifests itself in the deeds of the etheric body, then the principle of closure through the astral body. Where the astral body withdraws, the principle of repetition naturally reappears. This is how your hair and nails grow, because the astral body has withdrawn there. It doesn't hurt when you cut your hair, because pain is an expression of the astral body.

We initially have the pure, chaste plant substance, where the plant, subject only to the law of the ether body, adds leaf after leaf. Now this pure, chaste plant substance is increasingly permeated by what is called kama in theosophy, the realm of instincts and feelings, the realm of desires, right up to the images. And now, in man, that which has developed in him since he had a plant nature is to be overcome again. As man developed, he took in the red blood. The red blood brings about in the human being that which makes him self-conscious. The chlorophyll of the plant, permeated by astral substance and the I, has been transformed into the red blood. If you could permeate the green plant substance with the I and the astral substance, you would get the red blood. Now think of the image of the cross. In the image of the cross you also have something that points to the future of man. Where does man's future lie? He is to regain his plant nature, but connected with the higher level of consciousness that today's man has already gained. The red roses of the Rose Cross signify what has been gained through blood, but also what he had as plant nature and is to have again. This is prefigured in the rose. It has a plant nature, and it also has the red color of blood. The etheric body is active in the green leaves, and the astral body is active in the red blossom, where the closure is; the rose blossom owes its red to the most intense effects of the astral body of the earth.

In the future, the human being's astral body will become free and consciously active from the outside, from outside the physical body, just as the earth's astral body now acts on the rose. Then what is now present as a plant rose at a lower level will appear at a higher level as the human rose. Thus, in the wreath of roses surrounding the black wood of the cross, we actually have a sign of the development of the human being. In the black wood we see what dies; it is an image of what will also die in man. And in the red rose we see what will continue to develop until it becomes that chalice which, like the chalice of a plant towards the sun, holds out towards the spiritual sun-rays. And the rose cross, where the red roses surround the black cross, presents this process to us in an image.

The important thing about the symbols is that we do not merely think them, but that we feel and sense them. For only when we feel that the red rose is saying: that is what you will become one day, that is what the goal of human development represents to us – and when our hearts open and our feelings become pure, then the forces within us are released that lead us up into a higher world. Thus these symbols are workers at our soul. They permeate and interweave our soul; they are the greatest and most effective educators of our human race.

Just as we place images and imaginations before our soul here, so in still higher spheres the inner forces of numbers are placed before man. Man must learn to feel the inner relationships of numbers like spiritual music. One can describe the relationships of the physical body, ether body, astral body and I to one another by attempting to provide images of the relationship between these four aspects of human nature. In doing so, one experiences a kind of imagination. Thus, one can describe the relationship between the physical body and the etheric body by saying: the physical body comes into being because all the forces and substances that are spread out in the mineral kingdom are connected by the etheric body; it would disintegrate if the etheric body did not permeate it; the etheric body is an inner fighter against the disintegration of the physical body. In this way we work our way up to an image of the etheric body.

And if we try to gain a pictorial representation of the astral body, we imagine how it moves out at night and works on the etheric and physical bodies from the outside, by removing the fatigue substances. Let us make this clear to ourselves pictorially. But there is an even higher way of imagining this relationship; here one has to imagine the inner value of certain numbers. You have to recognize that the ratio of 1:3 is something quite different than the ratio of 1:7. This is not irrelevant. With the ratio of 1:3, you have to imagine that the 3 is differentiated within itself, and you have to imagine the interrelations of the individual quantities to the others.

But what is important is the ratio of 1:3:7:12. If you understand the relationship between these numbers as a tone ratio, in that you imagine that a tone makes three vibrations in a certain time, another seven vibrations in the same time, and yet another twelve vibrations, then you have expressed in these numbers the ratio that indicates the ratio of the I, the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body in spiritual music.

I = 1
astral body = 3
etheric body = 7
physical body = 12

There is good reason for this in the existence of the world. If we were to follow the development from the oldest Saturn existence to the present earthly existence, we would soon be able to find how this is rooted in the human existence. The Earth, in its first, in the Saturn embodiment, was surrounded by the twelve signs of the zodiac. They provided the first germinal formation of the physical body. Through the influence of the corresponding signs on the body, this relationship of the number twelve to the individual limbs of the physical body came into being. The seven planets influenced the etheric body. When the Earth was a sun, the other planets were around it, and so the number seven influenced the etheric body. When the Earth was in its lunar embodiment, it was first affected by the Sun. But then, as a result of the Sun and then the Moon separating from the Earth, three bodies emerged from one body, and so the number three was effective in the formation of the astral body. And when the I came down from the higher worlds, this was expressed in the number one. The ratio of 1:3 gives you the ratio of the I to the astral body, to 7 the ratio to the etheric body, and to 12 the ratio to the physical body.

1:3:7:12 thus denotes the ratio of the four elements of human nature, which you must feel inwardly. It is not easy to awaken the sensations that one has to imagine the physical body as the most perfect of the four parts, the etheric body as the less perfect, the astral body even less perfect, and the I as the “baby” among the four members of human nature. We must think of the physical body as being twelve times more perfect than the I, the etheric body as being seven times more perfect, and the astral body as being three times more perfect. These numbers indicate the degrees of perfection for the four aspects of human nature. These numbers are therefore profound symbols for the real conditions.

Occult schools provided instructions for gradually becoming familiar with the numerical values. For example, the significance of the number three was taught by saying: “Let us consider the development of a plant and pay attention to three things.” Let us start with the plant germ. You have an inconspicuous, small plant germ, from which the plant gradually develops. We can depict this in a drawing by letting the plant germ diverge in a radiating manner, up to the leaves, flowers and fruit. Now the germ has become a plant and then the plant germ has become a plant again. What has diverged in the plant to become leaves, flowers and fruit is all wrapped up together in the germ; it has, as it were, slipped into the germ. In a developed plant, everything is revealed in the senses. Then the senses enter into a completely different realm, into the germ. There we have in the germ the senses as small as possible and the spiritual as large as possible.

But a third thing also takes place. While the germ is forming out of the plant and the new plant is developing out of this germ, elemental forces from the environment are continually acting on the plant from the outside. The germ is there, which developed from the plant, and out of it the new plant develops again; but the third comes from the whole surrounding world; and it is this third that changes each plant again a little. The higher a being stands, the more the influence of the third changes it.

Let us now turn again to the human soul and consider how it lives between birth and death. There it spreads out what it has brought with it as the fruits of a previous embodiment. Just as external influences affect unconscious plant life, so man consciously experiences the most diverse influences from outside in the life between birth and death. And everything he experiences there was not yet present in the seed; it is something entirely new, an enrichment, the fruits of which the person takes with him into a later life, into a following incarnation. What was present in the old plant continues to work in the new plant; but in the development of the new plant something else appears that was not present in the old plant.

Thus, in all development, we have three aspects to consider: first, the unfolding from a, as it were, wrapped-up state; we call this development or evolution. Then, what lies in the germ must come into being through the reverse process, the wrapping or involution. These two processes alone, however, do not yet give progress. Only when a being is able to take in influences from outside and process them into inner experiences can something new and progressive come into the world. That is the third thing; it is called creation out of nothing. You are constantly developing what is predisposed in you from the past, constantly taking in something from your environment that you transform into experiences, and then you carry that into a new embodiment. In all life, the trinity of evolution, involution and creation out of nothing is at work. In the case of human beings, we have this creation out of nothing in the work of their consciousness. They experience the processes in their environment and process them into ideas, thoughts and concepts. Dispositions come from previous embodiments, but all progress in life is based on the production of new thoughts and new ideas. The circumstances of the environment are “consumed”, and the inner experiences lead to new thoughts and ideas. Therefore, three is the number of life, it is called the number of creation or of action.

On the other hand, another number is called the number of revelation. You can easily imagine which number is called the number of revelation. If you look at anything in the world, it must always reveal itself in a duality. As we cannot perceive light without darkness, so we always encounter an attenuated or opposite aspect of every real concept. Light and darkness, good and evil, and so on. Duality reigns in all that is revealed. Therefore, the number two is the number of revelation. Opposites are only united in the realm of the occult, which lies beneath the revealed. Therefore, the number one is the number of unity. Evolution and involution are not contradictions, because they would always unfold in the same way without the third - from germ to plant and from plant to germ. Only in connection with the third, creation out of nothing, does the new arise, which is expressed by the number three.

Thus, in the first three numbers you have important symbols of the spiritual world. It should be indicated to you by individual examples how that which is called symbols relates to the higher worlds, and how, for example, symbols such as the Holy Grail or the Rosicrucian in the picture express higher development.

Another beautiful symbol is the image of the mirror. We often call that which surrounds us a mirror of the spiritual, because in truth nothing external shows us anything other than the reflection of spiritual beings. You can observe this yourself in physical life. When you perceive a physical object, what does your eye see? Your eye would not see the object at all if the sun's rays did not fall on it and reflect off the object into your eye. In truth, your eye does not see ordinary objects, but the sunlight reflected from the objects, and that is how an object appears to you in a certain form. In truth, you do not see yourself when you look in the mirror either, because your spiritual part is outside of your physical being. What you see in the mirror is the reflection of the rays that fall on you from the spiritual world. What you see reflects the light of the spirit just as ordinary objects reflect sunlight. The outer body of man is actually the mirror in which his true being is reflected.

In the Atlantean period, man did not see objects outside at all. He knew that he was in a spiritual substance and therefore could see spiritually inwardly. Only in the last third of the Atlantean period did the spiritual light go out, and man only saw the reflected rays of the spiritual light. Imagine looking into a glass pane and being aware of your own spiritual qualities. Now someone applies a mirror substance to the back of the glass pane; as a result, you no longer see your own being in the glass pane, but only the image reflected by the mirror. Man now sees his image; and now the illusion arises for him that what he sees there is his ego. This illusion is wonderfully expressed in the Bible. Man lost Paradise when he became so absorbed in sensuality that he saw himself. Before that Adam and Eve had not “seen”; now “the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked.” And because here an illusion actually occurred, legend attributes the fact of the externalization of objects to the Luciferic principle.

In Eastern Europe there is a folk tale that tells of a monk who wanted to test whether the biblical saying was based on truth: Those who seek will find, and to those who ask, it will be given. He wanted to test whether this was really true, so he prayed for what he wanted to beg for. He wanted nothing more nor less than the king's daughter herself. He proposed to the king's daughter. She told him that she would be his on one condition: he had to bring her an instrument in which she could see herself from top to bottom. This was at a time when there were no mirrors. So he went off searching, and met the devil, who told him the secret of the mirror principle. When he returned with this, he received the princess's hand in marriage; however, he later renounced her. So in order to obtain the mirror, he had to resort to the devil.

In the manifold signs and symbols that have come to us in these lectures, we have been able to see the real meaning of these images. Sensory perception is the content of the physical world. Images and imaginations are the expression of the astral world. Harmony of the spheres, sound of the spheres is the expression of the spiritual world. Those who ascend to this spiritual world perceive its inner spiritual sonority, it penetrates into them. Inspiration is the vital element of the spiritual world, just as imagination is the vital element of the astral world. A truly inspired world is created out of the spirit. IV

My dear friends! Today we will try to bring to a conclusion the things we have been discussing and which are part of our program.

I have given you the annual and monthly moods as a basis for a breviary, and within the annual and monthly moods we must now seek the weekly moods. These weekly moods arise, as I began to indicate yesterday, when we look at how the weekly mood is actually already indicated in the August mood, so that within this August mood we already have the first week within the monthly mood. Just as in a living organism certain limbs have a little more of the whole [organism] and of the other [limbs] than others, so it must also be with what we find out organically as our behavior in relation to the world, and so the August mood would be the mood for meditation for the first week of the month, the September mood for the second week, the October mood for the third week, the November mood for the fourth week. In this way, the weeks intertwine with the months in a corresponding way. It cannot be otherwise, and we must make sure that we go with the months in the weekly arrangements. However, sometimes shifts will have to be made so that we can get the weeks into the course of the year. Then the daily moods follow the weekly moods, and these daily moods, which must follow the weekly moods, lead into the whole context of the world in a different way from the preceding parts of the breviary. I will now read the daily moods slowly, beginning with Saturday: Saturday:

My gaze is directed towards the divine spiritual ground of being
The senses behold the revelation of the essence of Being
The World Spirit rules in the World Matter
The World Spirit weaves in the dead, in the living, in the sentient
The World Spirit creates in man his image of being
The soul reveals the creative power of the spirit
The soul strives for spiritual fulfillment.

Sunday:

The spirit reigns full of light
Into the darkness it shines
The darkness seems to live from the light
The spirit weaves in the darkness, essentially
Darkness is enlivened by light
Light makes darkness good
The light's glow is the good in the darkness.

Monday:

Darkness seizes the received light
It wants to shine, not be illuminated
It takes possession of what it has received
It lets its own light prevail
It should not flow towards the original light
It should be itself
Darkness deceives the light.

Tuesday:

Light-Unity fades
Darkness turns away from the light
Darkness turns against the light
And so darkness is against darkness
As light is darkness deception
As light is darkness evil
As light is darkness destruction.

Where is the light in darkness?
Where does the soul find the spirit?
On Golgotha stands the cross
Christ shines on the cross
He guides through death
He shines in the darkness
He is the light of my soul.

Thursday:

Christ leads souls
From darkness He leads
Light in the Urlicht is His power
Life from death He wrests
Salvation from evil He wrests
Rise from ruin He wrests
To God's All He leads man's self.

Now, as on a higher level, Friday returns to Saturday:

Friday:

With Christ, my will is done
His cosmic goals flow into my will
Christ reigns for the future of the earth
Christ lives in the Father, shining through himself,
revealing through the healing spirit
Christ creates the spiritual goals in the soul
the soul can absorb the essence of Christ
the soul can feel: Christ in me.

The word pervades heaven and earth
It spoke authoritatively to Moses on the mountain
It forms world beings, for the revelation to man
It weaves in the human interior, to the hidden through itself
It shines as the sun from the light into the darkness
It lives in Christ, bright out of the darkness, gentle in the brightness. It comes to earth in Jesus.

Now comes the third week:

I look into the world with a spirit-borne feeling
The spirit feels my nature
The world sinks into darkness
The inner being shines in prayer in the spirit being
The inner being needs a ruler in the darkness of the world
Oh, the spirit takes a level head.

Thursday:

Christ leads souls
From darkness He leads
Light in the Primordial Light is His power
Life from death He wrests
Salvation from evil He wrests
Rise from ruin He wrests
To the All of God He leads the human self.

Or let us take the first Saturday in August:

The spirit of the world of becoming arises
In darkness, light is born
The spirit rests in the being of the senses
The spirit lives in my life.

The first week repeats the same saying in this case:

The spirit of the world of becoming arises
Light is born in darkness
A spirit of spirit rests in the senses
The spirit lives in my life.

Now Saturday:

My gaze is directed towards the divine spiritual ground of being
The senses behold the ground of being's revelation of being
The world spirit reigns in the world's substance
The world spirit weaves in the dead, in the living, in the sentient
The world spirit creates in man an image of its being
Soul reveals the spirit's creative power
Soul strives for spiritual fulfillment.

So it is possible, my dear friends, to use this breviary by arranging it in the appropriate way, and if you use it correctly, you will gradually find the opportunity to learn to preach in pictures; the word can come alive in you. But do not believe that the word can somehow come to life without practice. Only the practice that is in harmony with the ruling intentions of the world, only the practice that we carry out in us in accordance with the intentions of the world of becoming, draws the power of the living word from within us. And it is important that you connect these things, which are intended for pastoral care, with the appropriate trust, with the appropriate faith. The spirit cannot be given to anyone who does not fully believe that he is living in the weaving of the spirit. I ask you to pay particular attention to this, my dear friends, when I now speak about community building and about ordination.

I am now speaking about these matters as they arise from what has been said to me by those who really want to take on the task they have spoken of in all seriousness. I would like to answer the question: How can communities be founded, how can communities be led?

Of course it is not possible to simply stand up with all the things we have now discussed as our goal and now go into church planting in abstracto, but rather the first work must be done as a beginning. Therefore, I can only imagine that it can be done in a favorable sense by first bringing to the people what we consider to be the right thing to do in our whole context. I can therefore only imagine that such participants in these endeavors appear in the most diverse places, who initially simply take up the way in which one must currently work on people, so that they begin by making known what they want, through lectures that clearly reveal the goal that one sets from the outset, in such a way as to be understood. First of all, the necessity of religious renewal must be proclaimed. It must be made clear that such a religious renewal is necessary. For this, of course, one must be truly convinced of the necessity of such a religious renewal. But for that one must also be imbued with the tremendous seriousness of the situation in which present-day humanity finds itself with regard to inner spiritual and religious matters, and in which it also finds itself with regard to external world events, which, after all, are nothing more than a consequence of the fact that humanity has lost sight of the actual spiritual content of the world. If we succeed in showing from today's overall decline the necessity of a new beginning, which must be taken into the hands of individual serious people, if we succeed in explaining the whole situation of the world and the situation of religious and moral life before humanity, then the spirit will be found that works in the sense of such an ascent, and the first members of the community will emerge from those who can hear it first. For those who look impartially at what is today – which, after all, very few people do – there can be no doubt: If you speak in this way, purely lecturing at first, to all those who want to hear it, and if, above all, you find warmth in your words so that people not only believe in your mind but believe in your heart, the number of community members who come to you will not be small in a relatively short time. For there are very many who are seeking today. There are far more today who are seeking than those who can lead, and if a group can be found that can lead, then it will certainly also find those who are seeking.

My dear friends, it is my unshakable conviction that the saga of Dr. Faustus contains a profound truth in the following: In the time when it was still attributed to Dr. Faustus that he had made a pact with the emissaries of hell, Dr. Faustus was seen as the co-inventor of the art of printing. However useful the art of printing has become for modern humanity, its use is, to a certain extent, of the devil, because the art of printing erects a wall between heart and heart in relation to humanity. We must not take such things so much to mean that we should now become radically conservative, radically reactionary, and say that we must work against the art of printing. On the contrary, we must profess a completely different attitude in this regard. We must be clear about the fact that before the art of printing existed, when a pastor had to speak to a congregation from the pulpit, the congregation was entirely dependent on him for an understanding of spiritual matters. We must realize that the power the pastor had to apply in order to speak intimately to his congregation was small in those days and could be small in relation to the power that must be applied today. And I see, my dear friends, that everywhere people would like to hold on to the fact that this power can remain so small. We must be clear: the art of printing must be there. We must realize that everything that the modern world has brought forth must be there. But our strength must increase in order to make good and overcome that which has been done by the world that Christ described as the kingdom on earth into which He had to bring the kingdoms of heaven.

We must not carelessly say: What was expected in the early days of Christianity did not come to pass, so the statement of the millennial kingdom was wrong. It is a lie to accuse the Bible of making an untrue statement. It is not so. Bit by bit, the de-divinized world has emerged, and bit by bit, what could previously be sought through the world must now be sought through the spirit. The art of printing does not prevail in a world that is standing still and becoming more even, but in a world that is perishing and whose decline must be countered by the dawn. If we cannot get used to thinking about these things in sharp images, then we cannot rise to the occasion in which we want to place ourselves, and above all, we cannot come to trust in the workings of the spirit, which we must have. How can we speak of the spirit if we have no trust that the spirit will work with us? How can we speak of the spirit if we only ever weigh up intellectually whether this or that can be right? How can we speak of the spirit if we are not able to connect with the spirit? Whatever echo the world sends back to us, we connect with the spirit to bring about what we recognize as right in its sense. And we cannot work in the spirit if we do not extend this trust to everything we can do in our community. We must stand in the community objectively and judiciously, we must stand in the community knowingly. The modern pastor has basically become a stranger to his community. He goes around in the community without realizing what tragic worlds are taking place among those who pass him by. The pastor needs knowledge of human nature, and he only gains this knowledge by taking an interest in the experiences of his community. There should be nothing that community members do not see in such a way that they have the judgment: when they come to the pastor with it, they will find an open heart, but also wise judgment. We should not let any opportunity pass us by to find out what the laws of the world's phenomena are. We should thoroughly study everything that is going on in the spiritual, legal, political and economic life of the world in order to be able to help people from these three sources of all human development. We should know how to truly be close to the souls we are responsible for. Much will be well if these souls know that we are aware of their weaknesses and concerns, and that we have a proper judgment for them, one that is accompanied by openness of heart.

My dear friends, we must be careful not to become Catholic, but we must have an open heart and goodwill for what must be regarded as human and humanly necessary within the community. Very few people today know what is going on in many people. Very few people know how the people around us are really struggling in their souls today. In recent times, the misery has become so great that those who still live a little in the abstract intellectualism have no faith at all and no insight into the magnitude of this misery. Today, many souls that cannot be opened up because intellectualism has withered away everything we can say to them, everything we can give them, are on the verge of returning to the Roman Catholic Church, which could experience an immense influx. They are therefore close to converting to the Catholic Church because the Catholic Church – albeit in its external and often disastrous way – really did know how to establish with ironclad consistency what souls need apart from intellectualism, for example through confession. ©, I got to know them, these Protestant pastors, who kept saying: What do we do with our preaching, which has become so intellectualistic, if we don't have something like the Catholic priest has in confession? — and who, as pastors, longed for confession. And I have also met brave Catholic priests who, for certain reasons that are not to be discussed here, felt a deep obligation to remain within the Catholic Church, but who were deeply aware of what they owed to their inner selves by lending an ear in confession to those who had deep emotional suffering to report.

Infinite things, my dear friends, are healed in the world by approaching souls in this way, which can be characterized as I have just done. But we will never be able to rediscover the possibility of relating to souls in this way if we are not also aware that we must become fighters for what is happening in the big wide world, that we have to fight for many of the rights of the spiritual ministry on the ground of the spiritual ministry, but that these rights have been taken away from the spiritual ministry in the materialistic world and continue to be taken away. How much, my dear friends, has been taken from the spiritual ministry by the materialism of doctors! People do not think about it, they do not even know. One of the sad phenomena is that the hearing of confessions has passed from the clergy to the psychoanalysts, who carry it out in a materialistic sense. Such phenomena of the time are usually not understood at all in all their depth and significance. As a servant of Christ, fight against the Ahrimanic effects that express themselves in this way in the world, for without doing so you will not be able to work in the individual as the effect of the community must be! Let no opportunity pass by to again furnish proof that there can be a pastoral psychology and pastoral psychiatry! Try to gain knowledge of the world and knowledge of human nature in this sense! Do not believe that the thoughts and aspirations of the pastor can be fulfilled by disputing the correctness of faith and knowledge. My dear friends, so much has happened in this regard that the salvation of millions of souls has been lost. Take these things seriously and consider the situation of the soul in view of what has happened and in view of the need for religious renewal today. Do not regard it as a digression from the task of the pastor as a religious worker to be expected to know what can affect the lungs of a person from the soul. Look at the spread of lung diseases and do not consider this as something that you can only learn from the materialistic medical world. Notice how worries work, brooding over them in solitude, without being able to hear the words of someone who seems wise and capable of judging such things. Listen, I say, hear something of what takes place in the outer illness as a result of the troubles over which one broods in solitude, and sense how much you can do by contemplating the solitude of those who brood over troubles; sense what you can do for the recovery of the outer life. For there are two kinds of lung disease: one is a disease of the lungs as an organ, the other is a disease of breathing, but this breathing cannot take place in the right way if the lungs are not otherwise healthy, and in the diseased lungs are the afflictions that have been brooded over in solitude. Do not consider it an impertinence, one that cannot be addressed to the office of pastor, when one asks what it is that eats away at the human organs that are supposed to refresh the organism. Unhealthy feelings, about which one is uninformed, make the liver sick and make everything that is to be regenerated by the liver and spleen sick. Do not consider it unnecessary to point out that there should be a pastoral physiology again. Consider it a question of your office: What eats away at the air organs? The unsocial feelings of people eat away at the air organs, those feelings that do not allow the potential for love to be expressed in the appropriate way. And by cultivating social feelings and mutual social respect within your community, you will help your community to breathe healthily, insofar as this is to come from the soul. Do not consider it to be outside your office to ask: What has a destructive effect on the blood and its circulation? Try to find out that the destructive effect on the blood and its circulation is caused by the feeling of the futility of existence, by insensitivity to the word that reveals itself from the Divine-Spiritual. If you can see into the mysterious connections between insensitivity to the word that reveals the divine-spiritual and the disturbances in circulation and heart diseases, and if you look at everything that strikes back - the pendulum not only goes there, it also goes here - of a materialistic attitude that comes from a ruined blood circulation and a ruined heart, which comes from this insensitivity to the spirit-filled word. Then you will be able to gauge what the situation of present humanity has actually become, and then you will feel in the right, serious way what religious renewal must actually mean. Then you will also sense something of how healing can be found in the sacred and how one does not need to lose healing in the abstraction of sanctification. It will depend entirely on this spirit, and above all, it will depend on you speaking the truth at every moment to those who belong to your community, for whose souls you are responsible, so that you are not merely administering an office, but speaking the truth.

My dear friends, mistrust is at an all-time high today. Among the forces that have developed most strongly in recent times is the mistrust from person to person, and also the mistrust of man towards his pastor. Only knowledge of human nature can counteract this increasing mistrust. Today, many people are particularly ill in their souls, but very few know anything about the mysterious connections between mental and physical illnesses. Most of the world's leading people are actually embarrassed to stray even a single step from the path of intellectualism. They always ask questions in an intellectual sense; they ask little with the heart. They ask a lot with the mind, but the hearts that want to hear cannot listen to the mind. And so something has happened that is one of the most terrible phenomena of our time.

You will find, my dear friends, that the members of your community who come to you first are many who will show that they do not come merely because there is strength in your words and your actions that attracts the fundamentally human. Rather, many will come who, when you really talk to them intimately, will say: I come to you because everything else I have tried has offered me nothing, but I don't know if you can offer me more than the other things that offered me nothing. — Many will come with precisely this attitude, and they have not developed any sense of the differences between what approaches them. Should it nevertheless be the case that you speak to people more out of the spirit than others have spoken out of the spirit, then you will find how dulled the souls are and how they can no longer even notice the difference today, and you will have to find ways to overcome precisely the dullness of the souls. Especially with regard to people who come to you with true feelings [of longing] for a life in the spirit, but with dull souls, you will not get by with anything other than being able to evoke a clear feeling of the inner intimate truth of what you have to say. Many will say to you: I cannot tell the difference between what I have been offered so far and what you are offering me. You will only get such questions if you want to convince people with intellectual arguments, but you can do without intellectual arguments if you want to enter into intimate contact with your parishioners; you can do without intellectual arguments. Learn to build on completely different arguments. Learn to build on those reasons that flow, for example, from saying: It is best if you believe me no more than you believed the others, if you believe me perhaps even less than you believed the others; I completely dispense to explain to you the matter that I have to discuss with you, with all kinds of reasons; but look and really observe everything with open eyes; see if you can't see that many things are different; and then don't let me judge, but judge for yourself. And if you then also give such people a sense of how you yourself feel about the reasons that may be put forward against your own pastoral care, if you evoke a feeling that you also know the other side and that you do not even have the slightest spark of fanaticism for the cause you represent, then you will be able to build something that you will never be able to achieve through intellectualism, which is the father of fanaticism. I say with full awareness: intellectualism is the father of fanaticism, because in no religious community has there ever been such great fanaticism as among the modern scientific communities. One must only be familiar with the currents that are flowing. One must realize how far removed from admitting the infallibility of the Roman Pope someone may be who invincibly believes in the infallibility of a professor or even in the abstract “modern science”. The faith in these things is so great because one is not even aware that it exists at all, because one takes the faith in it for granted. One does not even notice how one is stuck in a maximum of fanaticism in this area.

But, my dear friends, you will achieve nothing if your enthusiasm for the cause is not great enough to enable you to rise to such concepts, if you yourself still suffer from something that prevents you from see through the full power of this fanaticism and similar fanaticisms that live in the world today, and if you, so to speak, cannot decide to also confront this fanaticism with the spirit of Christ.

Your church planting can only be one that, first of all, starts from the right attitude, but secondly also from a strong attitude. The time when it was possible to believe that half-measures could achieve something is over. The time is over when it was possible to believe that intellectual discussions about world affairs make a difference. We must never forget that we live in the age in which humanity is to be irrevocably given freedom, and that the coming of freedom means that, if work is to be done in the spirit, it must be done from a source and origin; it means that something truly new must come into the world and that [really everything] must be ruthlessly seen and done in the spirit of this newness. Your work would be a passing one if you did not take into account that this attitude is indispensable for this work.

My dear friends, you must awaken in people everywhere the realization that modern man must be pointed to his deepest inner being and that he must draw from this deepest inner being the impulse for what he thinks, feels, wills and does. It is out of the question to think of carrying out this cult in such a way that it is in any way Catholicized. The cult, the fundamental features of which we have indicated, must be practised in such a way that it is felt to be something that really comes from the spiritual world today. It must be perfectly clear that the Catholic Church has been able to achieve such immense power because, in a sense, it is precisely because it is consistent that it can adapt to all manner of contemporary phenomena; and the Catholic Church does not do this in the way that certain newer currents have, which are characteristic of the intellectualism of modern times.

At the beginning of the 1890s, for example, we saw something emerging in Central Europe that was then called the effort to establish a Society for Ethical Culture. The movement started in America and also took hold in Europe. I was at the Goethe-Schiller-Archiv at the time when the most important events took place to establish this society for so-called ethical culture in Europe, and I asked one of the leading personalities at the time [of the Society for Ethical Culture] at the Goethe-Schiller-Archiv: What do you actually want with ethical culture? — I was told: The name itself says it all. — I could only answer: But first you have to understand the meaning of a name. If you asked people what they wanted with ethical culture, you would get a confession of immense weakness, you would get something like the answer: Yes, in relation to religious beliefs, in relation to world views, people differ so much that in the end everyone can have their own world view and everyone their own religion; religion will become more and more a private matter, but you can't live with that, you have to come to an understanding; so let's make ethics free of religious and ideological foundations and spread an ethics that is free of any religious or ideological basis. I always objected: Yes, but there have never been any other ethics than those that have emerged from the foundations of religions and worldviews and that were their consequences. — As a rule, no answer was given to this, because people were so intent on making an abstract extract from all that could be gained from the various religious beliefs, stripping away the religious character and then handing it down as a non-religious ethic, as a mere “ethical culture”. It really does not need to be directed against people when one speaks out sharply against it, and in an essay on the Society for Ethical Culture at the beginning of the nineties, I showed with all severity the impossibility of getting out of this chaos that one has finally gotten into. A fanatic of this ethical culture published a pamphlet against this essay in which he insulted with a matter of course what can actually be thoroughly substantiated. Other people also could not see that the time had come when these things had to be treated with complete seriousness. After I had written this essay, I came to Berlin, visited Herman Grimm, who said: What do you actually want with this fight against ethical culture? Are you going to this meeting? I found that they are all very nice people. — I never doubted that all the people sitting there were very nice people, but I regretted all the more that these nice people had this monstrosity implanted in their souls as if it were something self-evident. Even the leaders in spiritual life could no longer see at all what the seriousness of our situation was and is. This realization of the seriousness of the situation will actually be the most important thing with which you leave here, because everything else can only be of value if you leave here with this most important thing.

And now, so that we can discuss in the afternoon what is on your minds in relation to this, I would like to say a few words about what might be along the same lines as what is in other confessions as regards ordination. I would ask you to bring up the most important things first.

It is difficult, my dear friends, to speak about ordination today, because the times when the ceremonies that served the old ordination still had a meaning are over, and those who want to recognize these ceremonies are no longer in touch with the present day, not since the middle of the 15th century. For a new age has dawned. But those who have immersed themselves in the spirit of this new age have basically abolished the ordination of priests, and they have also abolished it within the denominations. And so today we are faced with the fact that those who have been ordained no longer live in the times, and that those who live in the times perhorrescize the ordination of priests. It cannot work in the same way today as it did in times gone by; it must be thoroughly brought into line with the spirit of our age. If you take this, so to speak, as a basic condition, I may say a few words to you about the ordination itself and its ceremony, as it is revealed to me for the present time. It is important that you really understand that I am, in a sense, communicating something revealed to me by the spirit.

It would be necessary for the transmission of the priestly ministry to take place in the presence of older priests, so that first of all older priests are gathered together, and that then the process of placing the person to be ordained in the overall context in which he is to be placed is begun. If I say that older priests should be present, it is of course extremely difficult to carry out at the beginning, but the beginning must be made in such a way that you, in the sense of what you impose on your central leadership, also order the beginning of such a matter in this sense. Then the things that need to be ordered in this way will also be available to you. Of course, there may not be older priests present at the beginning, but that must become the custom.

Then, first of all, there must be a very solemn presentation of the 14th chapter of the Gospel of John to the person who is to be ordained. I would like to emphasize that simplicity must be the supreme law in the face of such an act. If this act becomes complicated, it cannot be what it should actually be, that it should be on the mind at least once a day of the person who has gone through this act accordingly. The spiritual experience of this act should always precede the recitation of the rosary. If properly cultivated, it can be accomplished in a relatively short time, in my case in one minute. But this can only be done if the whole act is not complicated but has a unified character.

So the 14th chapter of the Gospel of John, which begins with the words: Let not your heart be troubled. Trust in the power that leads you to the divine foundation of the world and that leads you to me. - And which concludes with the words: The world shall see how I love the foundation of the world, and how I act in the sense of the foundation of the world, as is laid upon me. Do likewise, then we can leave this place in peace. — And this should be followed by the introduction to the 11th chapter of the Gospel of John, the resurrection of Lazarus, and so it should affect the person being ordained that he feels through and through from this chapter how the power to resurrect that which is dying lies in the Christ-being. I believe, however, that in order to interpret this chapter in the right way, what I have given in my book “Christianity as a Mystical Fact” as an interpretation of this chapter can still serve.

Once this has been done – I am stating things fully, perhaps they cannot be done in this fullness at the beginning – the application of the garment that I have shown here in the illustration as the one that represents the etheric body would have to be carried out. This is the beginning of the symbolization of the effect of pastoral care.

Now one has to take oil – there is still a lot to be said about the consecration of oil and water, so that you can be quite clear about it – and apply this oil in the appropriate way to the pulses on the arms and – the person to be admitted has to wear sandals – to the corresponding places on the ends of the balls of the feet. With that, the sacramental act has been performed.

By leaving only what happens to the oil in the picture and making it as clear as possible in the picture, so that all bystanders - I say all bystanders, not just those who are to be introduced to pastoral care - can clearly perceive and remembrance of the picture that has been enacted. Only after the picture has been enacted should the words be spoken, and these words should be simple so that they can always stand before the soul in the way I have described:

In the name of Christ, you are authorized
firstly to administer Communion,
secondly to perform the sacrifice of the Mass,
thirdly to administer the sacraments.

After this has been done, the stole and chasuble are to be put on, that is, everything that leads to the astral body, and then there is something else to be done – so that the matter is simple, but it must be succinct – which must be deeply engraved in the soul of the person to be received: one consecrates the host as one does in the sacrifice of the Mass. One hands the host to the one whom one would not have handed to before the anointing with the oil, and afterwards lets him himself perform the consecration of this host and after this consecration perform one's own communion. Then one consecrates the chalice, as one otherwise does in the sacrifice of the Mass, and hands the chalice to the one who is to be received, so that he consecrates it in the same way and, by drinking from it, pronounces the words that have just been expressed as the words of the sacrifice of the Mass, and which he actually speaks for the first time with authority.

After this has been done, my dear friends, the question is asked in a lapidary way:

Do you vow to continue to work in the sense in which this authority was conferred?

And his answer should be:

I vow:

To teach in Christ's name To work in Christ's name To pray in Christ's name To sacrifice in Christ's name.

All those present say:

Yes, so be it, amen.

After this has been done, the headgear that the priest has to wear only during part of the ceremony and that is to be regarded as the thing with which he sets out to teach and with which he leaves teaching and so on, this headgear is handed over by, as it were, doing that which lies in his ego effect as the crowning of the whole ceremony.

Then it would be a matter of having the person preach a sermon on a topic that has been discussed with him at length, in front of those from whom he has received the ordination, as a trial sermon, but also as a solemn investiture into his office. Then the corresponding ceremony would be over.

That, my dear friends, is what I wanted to tell you this morning. I now ask you to prepare for the afternoon everything you might have to say in connection with this or with earlier events, so that we may part as befits our serious time together.

Notes

Those who are familiar with anthroposophical spiritual science are well aware of the numerous objections that our contemporaries have to what is to be presented here. Not only must an expansion of the type of knowledge be sought, but a completely different kind of knowledge, and it is against this kind that the objections arise.

You have the idea of free action, but this freedom does not arise from the organization. You have a sense of freedom that would be a lie, or we would have to go beyond our organization to get to the bottom of freedom. Where do you get with materialistic knowledge? To certain limits. There must be these limits, for example, the idea of matter and force. We need these limits, we need these ideas. But we must come to the point where, when we follow these concepts, we destroy the scientific concepts. We have to place these concepts like stakes, and reality is reflected in them. These concepts are mirrors. Those who want to get behind these concepts with scientific concepts would act like someone who would smash the mirror to find the thing-in-itself behind it.

Once you have experienced this, the question arises: why is it that we set ourselves limits? Man would have to be organized quite differently if he did not set himself these limits as he is between birth and death. A common power should be wrenched out of the soul, and that is the ability to love. Such a being could not love anything that lives in a physical body. The way we have to set limits for ourselves is closely related to our organization.

Because this has always been there, people have come to a different pole. They sought mystical knowledge within themselves. One thinks that one can find within oneself what cannot be found outside through the senses. But there, in one's own inner being, one also comes up against limits. What I have told you about self-awareness becomes denser and denser, but it is also only an image. So there too you reach limits. The futility of ordinary mysticism becomes apparent: you also reach limits. This is because man would not have to have a soul power to come to the image, to the limit, in ordinary mystical contemplation. This is the power of recollection, memory. If one were to break through this barrier, then the ability to remember would cease. One could not remember oneself in the right way, one loses the thread of memory of one's own self.

Outwardly: the ability to love; inwardly: the power of memory, which prevents us from breaking through the barriers to the outside world, to the inside.

Louis Waldstein: “The Subconscious Mind” - barrel organ tones. That which becomes part of the subconscious mind over the years changes over time, and so that which arises in the mystic as an inner vision and beauty is like the transformed tones of the “barrel organ”. Neither ordinary knowledge of nature nor ordinary mysticism can lead to the supersensible. The transformation of these powers of knowledge is necessary to reach the supersensible. One has to search in such a way that the forces through which the boundaries are created are transformed, so that one focuses on these forces and transforms them, so that they no longer create boundaries.

In honest self-knowledge, ask: What happens in the soul when we know nature? There is perception, lively and intense, when we only perceive. When we form ideas, perception is more shadowy. This is connected with the power of memory. What is weakened in the idea produces the power of memory. We always think when we perceive. We must distinguish thinking from remembering and creating ideas. One sharpens thinking for meditation by not allowing thinking to pass over into memory. Thinking that becomes images, that is meditation. Leave out everything that is abstract and never leads into the supersensible. Such thinking, the meditative, leads to memory, to recollection, it leads to imagination. That is not yet knowledge.

If you continue this exercise, you will see images pop up inside you. You then have to develop the strength to suppress these images. Then a significant spiritual experience follows. You become more self-aware. You lie in the dark night, open your eyes, but see nothing in the darkness, hear nothing in the silence. Then, with the self in the night, what you have experienced arises. It is not remembering, but looking back on the experiences that the soul has gone through, which it has descended from the spiritual into the physical. It now experiences the experiences of the soul in the supersensible. The poet says: “Time becomes space.” The events remain in time, time becomes space. One sees the supersensible of one's own soul on this path.

Those who are beginners in this matter experience disappointment in themselves. They cannot remember, that is, they can remember what they once experienced, but it does not come up with the same validity and vividness; on the contrary: there must be no memory of such experiences. The soul must make the same effort, even more than the first time, to have such experiences again and again. One more thing: such experiences come in a flash. Those who deliberate for a long time in everyday life, who dither over a decision for a long time, prepare themselves poorly for such supersensible experiences.

The other pole of the supersensible world is in the time after death. Just as the ability to remember must be weakened for the first pole, so the ability to love must be increased for the second pole.

We want to do something different with what is around us in every moment. Man must transform this will. He must permeate his life with his will. What were you like in your seventeenth or eighteenth year? How did your unconscious will work? One must strive for this, one must take hold of this will, make it conscious. An increased ability to love must come from it. This is how one enters the afterlife.

This is how one arrives at the realization that the human being is rooted in the supersensible. A chasm opens up between outward and inward experiences. The knowledge of the supersensible world can fill this chasm.

The human being is a threefold creature: a head, trunk and limb being.

Stenographic transcription

The subject we are about to discuss, ladies and gentlemen, is one that many consider to be beyond the reach of human knowledge. Not only because of this prejudice, but also because of another circumstance, objections arise mainly against what is to be said, which, from a certain point of view, are still quite understandable today, even if perhaps not justified. In order to approach the supersensible realm, one must strive not only for an expansion of ordinary human cognitive ability, but, based on certain prerequisites, which will be discussed in a moment, one must strive for a completely different kind of knowledge, a completely different way of knowing than one has already become accustomed to today. After all, it is precisely this kind of knowledge that is opposed.

However, dear honored attendees, it turns out that right at the beginning of spiritual scientific research, one must proceed from such a different kind of knowledge in relation to the supersensible. For the actual researcher of the supersensible proceeds from two experiences, not from mere logical considerations, but from two experiences. These experiences tie in with man's yearning for knowledge, with two main inner drives for knowledge, I would say, but which have been pushed very much into the background by official spiritual science in recent decades, so that when we talk about soul science, we can actually see how these two, I would say, root questions of human knowledge have been eradicated.

These two root questions are, firstly, how is the human soul itself rooted in the supersensible? There is, of course, nothing else, dear attendees, than what is called, in a broader sense, the question of immortality. And the second root question of human existence is the question of freedom. When one touches on this question, one immediately realizes that it is truly not just human desires, or the trivial fear of death, that bring man to these questions, but that there may be quite scientific starting points that lead to these profound questions of the human mind and the human urge to explore. The first thing is that actually every human being is pushed to ask himself: What are you actually, what is actually that which you call your self-awareness? If a person then tries to become clear to himself in a somewhat more developed self-knowledge, in a very lively way, what he can actually grasp with self-awareness, then he must say to himself: This self-awareness actually appears to me as a mere thought, and yet, it must be more than a mere thought, what surges up in self-awareness from the depths of the human soul.

A philosophical saying of a very, very brilliant thinker, Descartes, in which this thinker indicates how he became convinced of the certainty of self-awareness as a reality, has become very well known. The saying “I think, therefore I am” has become very well known. And many, many people believe that they can anchor the reality of self-awareness in this saying. But for every human being, dear attendees, this assertion is refuted every day, because no one can deny, when they look at the experiences of the soul with an open mind, that at least for the time between birth and death, what underlies the human self must also be different between falling asleep and waking up, when the person is not thinking. All sleep refutes Descartes' saying “I think, therefore I am”, because I am also when I am not thinking. One must take such objections in their entirety.

But the saying proves something quite different. It proves something truly not to be taken lightly, that however hard one tries to get to the bottom of it with ordinary knowledge, what actually announces itself in one's own self, in the soul self, one cannot get at anything other than thoughts, at a thought image. In ordinary consciousness, one attains nothing for self-awareness other than a mental image. If one goes through all other beings, [one finds]: Only the animals that are closest to humans [...] for them it will very soon turn out that what they experience is based in reality on their organization and the like. Man himself must say to himself in self-observation: precisely what I call the center of my being, I cannot grasp with ordinary consciousness other than as a thought, as a mere image; an image arises, and nothing other than an image. And ordinary consciousness does not yield a reality for this image. Reality must be sought by other means than through ordinary consciousness, through ordinary knowledge. Otherwise there would have to be an image of something, not a reality.

Not in the ideas that I do not have inwardly, dearest present, are all the feelings, all the inner impulses, the yearnings for knowledge, that lead man to seek how, since it cannot be attained in the sensual, the human self is anchored as reality in the supersensible. Not the fear of death alone, not the desire to continue to exist after death or to have a supersensible being, but the realization that there is an image for which one finds no reality in ordinary life, drives man into the supersensible in the face of this question. Otherwise he would have to say to himself: 'An image arises in your soul for which you have no reality'.

The second is what inevitably arises in the consciousness of human action. It is there, but it cannot be explained, no reason for it can be found in the human physical organization. It is the feeling that we have as... [illegible] that we are a free being. Freedom can be derived in theory, it is present in human consciousness, but it never ever reveals itself from the human organization. The human organization only allows us to explain scientifically that everything that flows out of it as an action flows out of necessity. If we have an awareness of freedom with regard to our own actions, then this free awareness cannot come from the sensual-physical reality, and only if one has the courage to make the right admissions about such things can one say to oneself: either you live in something conjured up by your consciousness, with a sense of freedom, which would be a lie, or you have to look for reality outside the physical-sensory reality of your organization, in the supersensible, from which the sense of freedom of your soul arises.

Thus, esteemed attendees, I have presented to you that which drives man not merely out of dark feelings, but out of very scientifically-based considerations to approach the question of the supersensible. The one who then approaches these questions will, from the scientific perspective that is meant here, have to rely on two experiences. They are usually only accepted as cognitive experiences. Spiritual science accepts them as experiences of the whole... [illegible] human being, as such experiences that are undergone by the whole extent of our soul. The first of these experiences is the one that is explained by scientific knowledge. I have already made the following comment here: spiritual science is not at all hostile to natural knowledge, but is perhaps more imbued with the full significance, the full essence of the very fruitful modern natural knowledge. But spiritual science, as it is meant here, does not merely accept this scientific knowledge, as the natural scientist himself does or as those people who want to form a world view out of their scientific appreciation do, but spiritual scientific research must experience with the whole soul: What can scientific knowledge give? Where does scientific knowledge lead?

It turns out, and I am not just saying something that can be logically deduced, but I am characterizing what is experienced by someone who is scientifically asking with his whole soul: Where do you end up with other scientific knowledge? It turns out that every scientific finding must come up against certain limits. These limits must be established through scientific knowledge. Now I could cite many such ideas that must be presented as limiting ideas of scientific knowledge, where one must simply remain at the mental level, one must present them like stakes, like boundary stakes, and say to oneself: Here you simply set these boundary stakes. You must not make the same as ordinary scientific knowledge. In this way, the idea can enter, as can thoughts, with a scientific error. I could certainly cite the atoms straight, other straight, but I need only refer to the most common scientific idea, the idea of substance and force. We need them if we want to recognize scientifically, but we have to put them there.

If we want to understand what we mean by substance and force in the same scientific way that we understand other natural laws, then we would immediately come to the feeling, by having to experience things, that we are destroying scientific knowledge itself. We can no longer maintain what we otherwise assert scientifically. We need this boundary. - Why? Yes, we realize that we put this boundary in front of us, just as we put a mirror in front of us in which we see ourselves, and only by putting this boundary in front of us does it reflect back to us what we have as a scientific idea. If we did not place it, we would have no mirror, and if we were to strive to get at what is called the thing in itself, then our endeavor would be like that of someone who says: My image in the mirror comes to meet me; I want to know what is behind the mirror and conveys the image to me, so I have to smash it so that I can see what is behind it. Thus, anyone who wants to cross the boundary of natural science removes themselves, using the example of the natural sciences themselves. The whole endeavor to get behind the essence of sensual things, with which one... [gap] itself, like the... [gap].

I have only given a brief description, but this is an experience that one must gain, that is gained by the one who again asks himself the question: What must you do scientifically to achieve that supersensible borderline... [illegible] comes to you, that forms the basis for this fruitful modern scientific knowledge? You have to set certain limits for yourself, you have to let them stand, so that the other is penetrable for you. If you have experienced this, dear audience, if you have gone through in your soul what I have just characterized, and I just want to describe and suggest today, that is, speak of experiences, if you have experienced this, then the question arises in the soul: Yes, do we want to, do we have to, if we want to understand the world scientifically, set ourselves limits? And then one comes to the conclusion that man would have to be organized quite differently if he did not set himself such limits. Man would have to be different, then he would no longer be this human being that he has to be for the period between [birth and death]. For it is connected with a very significant power of the soul that we have to set ourselves such limits by observing nature.

Once you understand what is actually going on, what arises in you is something tremendously significant. A certain strength would have to be torn out of our soul if a person were to be so constituted that the knowledge of nature offers him no limits. What would have to be torn out of the soul is the capacity for love. A being that does not come up against limits with knowledge of nature could not have within itself the ability to love anything while living in the physical body. Anyone who sees through the whole of the human being must say to themselves: the part of our being that is directed towards nature must set itself limits because this part of the human being is bound to another part that is able to love. We would not be able to love if we did not have a capacity for knowledge of this kind, which must set itself limits in our experience of nature. The same power in the soul that urges us to set such a mirror boundary, that urges us not to penetrate certain boundaries, is the same power that makes us capable of love. This part is connected to our whole being, to how we are here in the body as human beings, that we have a limited knowledge of nature.

What I have now explained to you is an experience that one can have in the knowledge of nature, but many of our contemporaries have already unconsciously had this experience, it lives in that part of consciousness, and what dawns in dark feelings is not only seen, but it is there, and because it is there in so many people, has always been there for many people, so many people seek to come to the sources of existence in a different way, to come to that which lies beyond the boundary, since supersensible knowledge must come to rest, and then they come to the other pole of human striving. They say to themselves: What we cannot find outside in the sense world, we seek through immersion in our own inner being. And there these people search with the ordinary power of consciousness, with the ordinary power of comprehension and imagination, in short, with the ordinary power of knowledge that they simply have when they are awake, to sink into their inner selves. This is called mystical insight and is understood to mean an immersion in the soul with the ordinary power of life. One thinks that one can find what cannot be found externally in the world of the senses.

And lo and behold, if one is only sincere and honest, which, of course, many mystics are not, then one comes up against a limit with this mystical insight as well. The direct experience [he] yields again: you have to descend into your own interior, but you will find nothing other than always your self, but your self in such a way that you can feel, by seeming to grasp your self, that you do not grasp yourself in your reality, /between the lines:] as I have [dis]cussed. The image becomes denser and denser, but it remains an image, it does not ascend to reality. And in the end you realize that by trying to ascend into the interior in the usual mystical way, you do not arrive at the supernatural, but at the inner sensual, and thus at a limit. And if you are honest, you realize that this comes from the fact that almost always something subjective, something that comes from within yourself, interferes with this contemplation of the inner self, and that you do not grasp something objective, but only flicker through yourself, penetrate into yourself once, so that the self becomes denser and denser. That is the second experience, the futility of ordinary mysticism dawns on you.

This in turn raises the question: where does this limit come from? This limit, you realize it little by little, by trying to gain psychic knowledge through the mystical path. It comes from the fact that man, as he is between birth and death, needs an inner soul strength that he could not have if he could simply dive down into his own self through mystical contemplation. If a person had unlimited knowledge of nature but lacked the ability to love, he would need an additional soul force if he wanted to achieve this through mystical contemplation. Why he wants to... [illegible]? What would have to be missing is something that is usually... [illegible], that is the ability to remember, the ability to remember. By immersing ourselves in our inner selves, we only reach the soul power that reflects back to us the knowledge, events and experiences of our life between birth and death. An inner mirror reflects these experiences back to us. If we were to break through this mirror inwardly, then we would enter the supersensible, but we must not break through it in the ordinary way, otherwise our ability to remember would have to be broken, and what does healthy human life depend on this ability for?

Let us just consider that in those people in whom this ability has been broken, their entire self-confidence does not work. Those who cannot remember the past in their lives more or less lose their way and go astray in life. The pathological [phenomena] in this direction are well known. Outwardly, the human being has to sit in front of himself, unable to transcend what he cannot transcend because of his ability to love. Inwardly, he has to be aware of a boundary to his inner contemplation, because the ability to remember must work within. Therefore, dear attendees, it is that one cannot gain any knowledge of the nature of the human soul through external research of that which is there... [illegible], in our time in the natural scientific observation has acquired such great merit, one has also tried to use memory, natural scientific observation to enter one's own interior.

I would like to mention an example from literature, I could mention hundreds of others, but so that it can be verified, from literature. In the very commendable Wiesbaden [publishing house, the Wiesbaden Collection, in the series] on [marginal questions of] the nervous and mental life, the following was reported in a [writing] about the subconscious self of man by Louis Waldstein. A story is told, a story in which he, the author, expresses himself about the uncertainty of self-knowledge. Waldstein apparently experiences the following: He was walking on a street and passed a bookstore. He looked at the books that were on display. There he found a book about mollusks. Of course, this can interest the scientist, but lo and behold, he is not so much interested in the book about mollusks, but rather he had to smile.

Now just think, a naturalist who sees a new publication about mollusks and has to smile. It is not the slightest reason to smile at such a title. What does Waldstein do? He wants to find out why he laughed, closes his eyes so as not to be disturbed in what he sees, in his thoughts, closes his eyes to see how he came to smile. And then he hears a hurdy-gurdy in the distance; he did not hear it when his eyes were open. The hurdy-gurdy plays the melody that he heard decades ago, but did not even pay attention to because he was interested in other things at the time: the melody that taught him how to dance. At the time, he was more interested in the charms of his partner and the steps he had to take, so he only half listened to what the hurdy-gurdy was playing. So it made only a very weak impression, but now, decades later, when the hurdy-gurdy... [illegible] strikes up the tune again, it makes him smile.

Can it not be seen from this, honored attendees, that there is much down there in our soul that is very much beyond the reach of ordinary life? The subconscious memory is added to the conscious memory. In the course of our ordinary lives and for our ordinary consciousness, we cannot possibly know what experiences we have gone through that are stored in the depths of our souls. And these experiences change in the course of life, and so one can meet some mystic who believes he is being honest and says: From the depths of my soul have arisen ideas about a supersensible world, ideas of glory and grandeur. It need not be anything other than what he heard decades ago, the organ grinder, who only partially gained influence over individuals. Just as Waldstein laughed at the book, what was transformed into the mood of the soul at the time could be transformed after decades in such a way that the most sublime idea emerges from this mood. Man must be so constituted that the experiences he has gone through between birth and now rebound down there. Therefore, the experiences that take place down there, [the mood], are never in any way decisive, but one must always be clear about the fact that what one could bring up from such mystical contemplation are nothing more than the transformed tones of the hurdy-gurdy, and some of what is recorded in mystical depths, about which... [...] is not only the result of the imagination, but the transformed sounds of the hurdy-gurdy, and that leads [...] to the realization that even if one can immerse oneself inwardly with ordinary mysticism, one cannot come to the source of the [inner] human being.

These are starting points, these are experiences that show that neither ordinary knowledge of nature nor ordinary mysticism can penetrate into the inner self. If he, [the person], has these experiences that I have described, then they give him the strength to search in a completely different direction and in a completely different way, because from these experiences the spiritual researcher gains the strength to search in a different way and in a different way, and to do that, on the one hand, courage is needed. Inner soul courage, dear audience, not to stop at all at what the experiences of ordinary consciousness are, the experiences that rightly guide us in everyday life, that rightly guide us in ordinary science , but to transform this consciousness so that dormant powers arise that are effective in a different way than those that want to enter into ordinary natural science and ordinary mysticism.

Not just the use of the ordinary power of knowledge outwardly and inwardly, but the transformation of it, the attainment of a new kind of knowledge is necessary to penetrate into the supersensible life, and precisely the two starting points, which are sure starting points for a supersensible knowledge, thus also have indications of how to search for it. One must search in such a way that one already focuses on those powers, that soul ability, through which the two boundaries are evoked, and that one brings about the transformation of the soul life in such a direction that these two soul powers can no longer give boundaries.

I have described, dear ones present, what the spiritual researcher has to do, how he has to struggle through intimate soul experiences if he wants to achieve this transformation with this faculty of knowledge, in all my writings... [illegible]. There you can read about the individual soul experiences that the researcher of the spirit and soul has to struggle with if he wants to gain knowledge. Today I want to point out, from a very special point of view, the way in which the soul has to gather itself in order to really enter the supersensible, in order to be able to cross the two boundaries that one has experienced in the way I have described. First of all, it is important to ask oneself in honest inner self-knowledge: What actually happens through the soul when it is engaged in the knowledge of nature?

What happens through the soul can be expressed through two abilities. What I am saying now can be explained very thoroughly and deeply scientifically. Of course, because spiritual science is still in its infancy, I have to express the question here in a more popular way: the abilities that a person applies when he turns to nature can be grasped as perceptual abilities. We perceive by turning to nature, and then we receive an impression through it. So we know that when we have perceptions, the perception is vivid, intense, it takes up our full attention, as if the outside world were living in us through the perception. But we also know that when we turn away from the perception and imagine the perceived, that then this imagination of the perception is less vivid, less intense, that it is more shadowy.

Does it make sense in the life of a human being, esteemed attendees, that when we turn away from perception, the imagination becomes more shadowy? Yes, it is connected to the fact that we have memory. If we want to have perception, then we have to restore a connection to the thing that causes the perceptions, we have to live together with the thing in all its liveliness. However, if we have an idea of the thing, this living together is weakened, and that which is weakened is the power that causes the memory. Please take this into account. Because we not only perceive, but also think and imagine in relation to external, sensory reality, we can retain memories.

Now the spiritual researcher must develop a different faculty of imagination, a different faculty of thought, than the ordinary one. This faculty of thought, which he must develop, he can only develop when he becomes aware in real self-knowledge of what perception actually consists of. We never merely perceive, we always think while perceiving, only we do not focus our attention on the thought process, but on perception. And it is precisely this thinking that we develop with perception, and we must distinguish it from the thinking that we develop afterwards from memory, from the thinking that merely presents. And then, when you have come to recognize how you are inside consciousness with your power of thought, then you also come to strengthen thinking itself through practice - and the practice itself is described in the books mentioned - making it lively. You sharpen mere thinking, without taking away its clarity, for meditation.

What is meditation? Meditation is a thinking that does not dissolve into memory, but is so strengthened through inner soul exercise that it proceeds as vividly as only consciousness [perception] otherwise does. Such inwardly content-filled thinking, a becoming-image of thinking, that is meditation. Therefore, it is good to train oneself to... [illegible] that one rejects all abstract thoughts – they do not lead into the supersensible – [but] that one takes up pictorial thoughts that are after-images of external sensory perception,... [illegible].

When you develop this kind of thinking, you have a very strange experience in relation to it, an experience that is extremely surprising at first. If you keep pictorial thinking present in your soul through meditation and practice, you will find that this thinking initially leads to something that cannot immediately become memory. It only leads to a feeling of being strengthened in one's self-awareness, to always powerfully guiding one's own self-awareness to what I have called the imaginative consciousness. This imaginative consciousness does not initially lead to any insight, only to a sharpening of self-awareness. What was previously an image now feels itself within the self-awareness. This... [illegible] has an effect on you... [illegible] by virtue of the fact that you have attained it through pictorial, meditative thinking.

If you continue this exercise for a while, you will experience that at first you see image after image emerging in your soul; as if by itself, the soul becomes capable of letting imagination arise within it. Then you have to gain the ability to suppress this imagination. So you have to develop two abilities in the soul: a thinking that is as vivid as only the outer consciousness is usually, and then again the ability to suppress it. Because often, when you progress in meditation, it is very dependent on the inner soul experience. I will describe this experience of the soul to you more pictorially, because what arises in this field must be described pictorially, since it is experienced through the power of pictorial thinking. If you continue such exercises, which must be intensified, you will gain the power to suppress your imagination and, at first, have nothing but self-awareness steeped in reality. Then, finally, you will be able to compare the state of mind you enter into with lying in the night: you open your eyes; you could see if it were not for the darkness. There is also silence all around, you hear nothing. But while you are lying there in the darkness of the night, the memory of what you experienced during the day comes to mind, and you remember not only that you were the one who experienced it, but also what the ego experienced during the day. One does not merely experience oneself as oneself at night, but the world one experiences. One would like to compare this with... [illegible] experience that [occurs on the path I have described.

If you have done that exercise, [see my] books, [a] sufficient period of time, [you have] brought it to having strengthened self-awareness enough for imagination, and then to have the strength of mind that the imagination in turn is suppressed... [illegible] can, then this, what arises in the state of mind, is not memory, but looking back. Just as in the comparison I made, it was looking back at day experiences, so now it is looking back at the experiences that the soul went through in the spiritual before it descended from the spiritual and united with the bodily existence that it received through the physical marriage of father [and] mother and the two inheritance currents. The soul experiences the intensified self-awareness that arises from imaginative consciousness, but not in the present. Instead, one must go back and experience oneself in the spiritual realm, in prenatal life, and with this experience of oneself, experience the spiritual world. Just as in sleep one experiences through memory what one has experienced during the day, again the self with its surroundings, so one experiences the spiritual, the supersensible of the soul with the supersensible environment, through the soul process that I have just described.

This labor initially eliminates the conscious faculty of memory. The poet expressed this intuitively when he said: Time becomes space. Having soared to such a capacity for knowledge, born out of imagination, one no longer has ordinary memory in this state, but one has a retrospective view of the spiritual experiences in the supersensible world that remain. What one has experienced there remains for spiritual contemplation, as when you are making a path, you look back at the objects you have passed, and there they are, the events remain in time. This is noticed when one learns to look at them in such a supersensible vision. Time becomes ideal space. One sees back into the spiritual state of the soul in prenatal life. In this way one really sees into the supersensible of one's own being through a transformed knowledge.

This must always be emphasized again: on the path of ordinary knowledge, there is no insight into the supersensible; this insight must be acquired in such a way that the soul develops strength, which... [not only] in a completely different... in memory, but to have something that stands as a retrospective faculty. Anyone who is a beginner in the field of supersensible knowledge, who has not undergone enough such training, can, in some cases, very soon come to certain supersensible insights. It is not even... [illegible]. But afterwards he suffers an inner [...] disappointment: that he cannot recall through ordinary memory what he has experienced, that it has passed, and that he has to go through all the events [...] [illegible] two to three times more difficult than the first time. Because he would not remember something, but approach the same mental images of reality; just as we, when we want to have an experience in the sensory world as perception, must approach the thing again, [as we] are not satisfied with memory, so memory is never enough for us for spiritual experiences. We have to do the same event. The beginner has the feeling: I had the experience; it would be a lasting one, but it does not last, it is lost to memory. The experiences of the supersensible world are quite different from those of the sensory world.

I would like to emphasize yet another characteristic of this supersensible experience. It consists in the fact that, while having the experience, one must quickly look up, therefore unfold one's attention, in order to become aware of the experience supernaturally, because it quickly passes by. There are many people who often have unique supernatural experiences, they also have them, but are not attentive because the experience will already be over when they begin to be attentive. These experiences pass by so quickly. Therefore, the training that one must undergo also includes training for presence of mind. The person who, in ordinary life, already acquires presence of mind in the face of certain experiences makes himself suitable to observe the supernatural. The other does not. The one who, on the other hand, mulls over every decision in his mind, wants to do this and that and cannot bring himself to make a quick decision and stick to that decision... [illegible] and to trust his reason, [he] does not learn to force himself to such a state of mind, he prepares himself poorly to observe supersensible experiences.

So far, I have described to you how one can gain an insight into the supersensible world in the prenatal sense. The spiritual researcher cannot, as some philosophers do, simply take the question of immortality as a unified whole with ordinary knowledge and start from there. He must first point to the prenatal life, as I have described, reaching from the supersensible to the roots of the soul before it has been conceived. The other thing, ladies and gentlemen, is that people grasp the other pole of immortality, which actually still interests people today... [illegible]. That is, they grasp the pole that leads beyond death, into the life that a person has as a soul when they have passed through the gate [of death]. [Stenograph breaks off.]

From time immemorial, people have sensed that there is a certain affinity or at least a relationship between the impulses of artistic imagination, artistic creation and enjoyment, and supersensible knowledge. Whoever encounters artistic individuals will realize that there is a widespread fear among creative artists that artistic work could be disturbed by approaching the conscious experience of the supersensible world, from which artistic imagination receives its impulses, as it is striven for in spiritual-scientific supersensible knowledge. On the other hand, it is well known that certain artistic natures, who approach their artistic production with what appears to shine from the supersensible world, experience something like vision within the activity of their creative imagination. Fairytale writers or other artistic individuals who want to deal more with the phenomena from the supersensible world shining into the world of the senses know how the figures appear before their eyes, but are entirely spiritual, so that they have the feeling that they are in contact with these artistic figures, or that these figures are in contact with each other. Insofar as full consciousness is present, through which one can always tear oneself away from what overcomes one in a visionary way, spiritual science can also speak of vision in such a case. It must be said that there are points of contact between artistic creation, artistic imagination and the seeing consciousness that is able to place itself in the spiritual world in a cognizant way. Nevertheless, especially in the face of a spiritual-scientific view such as the one meant here, one feels the need to emphasize that the artist should not allow his originality to be robbed by what is consciously taken in from the spiritual world. In such a view, one overlooks the essential relationship between artistic imagination and the visionary perception of the spiritual world. For what is meant here by this visionary perception is the kind that develops quite independently through mere soul activity, independently of the physical bodily tool. To what extent it is possible for the soul to place itself in the spiritual world free of the body, I cannot explain today. I would just like to say in advance that what arises in terms of kinship and relationships between genuine artistic creation and enjoyment and true, genuine seership is of more interest to anthroposophical spiritual researchers today than the relationship between seership and visionary states, or abnormal states, which, even if attempts are made to describe them as clairvoyance, are nevertheless only related to physical conditions and do not represent solely mental experiences. But to understand this real relationship between artistic imagination and visionary power, it is necessary to look at what, in the strictest sense of the word, separates the two, and that is a very significant one.

Those who create with artistic imagination will not, as is the case with ordinary sensory perception and reflection on what is perceived, comprehend the external sensory world and reproduce it within themselves: they will change it, idealize it, or whatever else one wants to call it. It does not depend on the direction. Whether one conceives realistically or idealistically, whether one is an impressionist or an expressionist, it does not matter, but in everything artistic there is a transformation of what is otherwise recreated by the human being from reality. But what remains alive in artistic creation is what can be called the perception of the external world. The artist adheres to the perception of the external world. What remains in this artistic creation is the image of the ideas that are based on external perception, and what is connected with it in the ability to remember, in the memory. In the artist, everything he has taken in during his life continues to have an effect in the subconscious, and the better that which settled in the soul as an experience continues to have an effect in the soul, the richer the artistic production will be as the personality is directed towards external sensory impressions, the ability to imagine and remember will live in artistic fantasy. This is not the case with the soul life in the vision-gifted personality that penetrates into the spiritual world through supersensible intuition. The essential point is that one can only penetrate into the spiritual world if one can silence both outer sense perception and the faculty of imagination, which runs into memory. Memory, the faculty of perceiving external sense impressions, must be completely silent during supersensible cognition. It is difficult enough to make our contemporaries understand that it is possible for the human soul to achieve such a degree of arousal of its dormant powers, that soul life can still be present in full vividness when the faculty of imagination and perception are suppressed. Therefore, the endeavor for supersensible knowledge, if it is methodically developed, must not be objected that one is dealing with the arbitrary vision only with something reminiscent of the memory, which surges up from the subconscious. The essential thing is that he who, as a spiritual researcher, wants to penetrate into the supersensible world, should learn the method that makes it possible to shut out the memory faculty so completely that his soul lives only in present impressions, into which nothing is mixed from reminiscences arising from the subconscious, so that the soul, with what it presents and experiences, stands in a world that it consciously attempts to penetrate, so that nothing remains unconscious.

When we consider that much mystical, so-called theosophical striving has a yearning for everything that is vague and nebulous, we can understand how what is meant here by seership can be confused with it, even by those who believe they are followers. But that is not the point, but rather what is meant by this seership.

Here we can see how fundamentally different this kind of vision is from artistic creation. Both are based on different states and moods of the soul; but the one who strives for supersensible knowledge in the sense meant here will have special experiences with art.

First of all, a cardinal experience. One cannot be a spiritual researcher from morning till night. Gazing into the spiritual world is tied to a specific time; one knows the beginning and end of the state in which the soul penetrates into the spiritual world. In this state, the soul is able, through its own power, to completely disregard the impressions of the outer senses, so that nothing remains of all the things that the outer senses see as colors and hear as sounds. It is precisely through this gazing into the nothingness that perception of the spiritual world arises. I would like to say: The seer can extinguish everything that comes to him from the outside world, everything that surges up from ordinary memory into mental consciousness, but he cannot extinguish certain impressions that come to him from works of art that really come from the creative imagination, even if he puts himself into this state. I do not mean to say that the seer in such states has the same impressions of the works of art as the non-seer. He has them in non-seer moments. But in seer moments he has the possibility of completely erasing the sensual and the reminiscent with regard to the outside world, but not with regard to a work of art that he encounters.

These are experiences that specify themselves. It turns out that the seer has certain experiences with the individual arts. It is precisely in the details of the effect that words such as “art” lose their usual meaning. From the point of view of supersensible knowledge, the individual arts become realms in themselves. Architecture becomes something different from music, painting and so on. But to get an overview of what seer-like experience is in relation to art, it is necessary to point out that the question suggests itself: if the seer must suppress the effects of the external world and that which belongs to the memory, what remains for him?

Of the three soul activities mentioned in the science of the soul, only two are ever active in the human soul. Imagination and perception are not present, but feeling and willing are, although in a completely different way than in ordinary life. One should not confuse supersensible knowledge with the nebulous, emotional melting into the spiritual world, which must be called mysticism. It must be clearly understood that supersensible knowledge, although it springs from feeling and willing, is something other than feeling and willing. It must be borne in mind that, for seer-knowledge, feeling and willing must fill the soul so completely that the soul is at rest, and that all the other faculties of the human being are also in complete rest. This must occur in a way that is not otherwise possible for the human being through feeling and willing: Feeling and willing must develop entirely inwardly. In the case of seeing, volitional impulses usually develop in revelations to the outside. Dervish-like states and the like are opposed to the knowledge of the spiritual world.

As feeling and willing develop inwardly, a soul activity full of light and sharply contoured springs up from them. A soul activity sprouts up, the formations of thought are similar. The ordinary thought image is something faded. Something objective, but no less imbued with reality than ordinary thinking, sprouts for the seer out of feeling and willing.

The experiences with art in particular can be used to characterize what the seer experiences in detail in his soul abilities. By trying to put himself in the place of the architect in his architectural forms and proportions, in what the architect encloses in his buildings, he feels a kinship with these architectural proportions and harmonies, with that which develops in him, in the seer, as a completely different thinking than the shadowy thinking of ordinary life. One would like to say: the clairvoyant develops a new thinking that is related to nothing so much as to the forms in which the architect thinks and which he fashions. The thinking that rules in ordinary life has nothing to do with true seership. The thinking that rules in seership includes space in its creative experience. The seer knows that with these forms, which are living thought forms, he enters into the supersensible reality behind the sense world, but that he must develop this thinking that lives out in spatial forms. The seer perceives: In all that lives in the harmony of measure and form, will and emotional feeling are active. He learns to recognize the forces of the world in such measure and number relationships through the designs that live in his thinking. Therefore, he feels related in his thinking to what the architect designs. In a certain sense, a new emotional life awakens in him — not that of ordinary consciousness — and he feels akin to what the architect and sculptor create in forms. For supersensible knowledge, a representational intellectuality is born that thinks in spatial forms that curve and shape themselves through their own life. These are thought-forms through which the soul of the seer plunges into spiritual reality; one feels akin to what lives in the forms of the sculptor. One can characterize the seer's thinking and new perception by considering his experiences with architecture and sculpture.

The seer's experiences with music and poetry are quite different. The seer can only develop a relationship to music if he penetrates even further into the sphere I have just described. It is true that this new spiritual intellectuality initially develops out of the feeling and will that are turned inwards. One is able to penetrate into the spiritual world through the experience that one penetrates only through the soul; the soul does not use the physical organization for this. Then comes the next step: one would only penetrate incompletely into the spiritual world if one did not advance to the next level. This consists not only in developing this spiritual intellectuality, but also in becoming aware of one's being outside of the body in the spiritual reality, just as one is aware here of one's existence in the physical world, of one's feet on the ground, of one's grasping at objects and so on. By beginning to know oneself in the spiritual world and to think and feel as I have just said, one comes to develop a new, deep feeling and volition, but a volition in the spiritual world that is not expressed in the sense world. By experiencing this volition, one can only make certain experiences with music and poetry.

It becomes apparent that what is experienced in music in supersensible knowledge is related in particular to the new emotional feeling that is experienced outside the body. Music is experienced differently in the visionary state than in ordinary consciousness: it is experienced in such a way that one feels united with every single note, every melody, living with the soul in the surging, sounding life. The soul is completely united with the tones, the soul is as if poured out into the surging tones. I may well say that there is hardly any other way to get such a precise, such a pictorial view of Aphrodite rising from the sea foam than by considering the way the human soul lives in the element of the musical and rising from it, when it grasps itself in the visionary.

And just as the creatures of the air flutter around Aphrodite as she rises above the sea, approaching her as manifestations of the living in space, so for the seer the musical is joined by the poetic. As he feels himself with his soul as if set apart from the musical element and yet again as if within it, as if identical with it, the poetic element is added to the musical for the seer. He experiences this in an intense form. What he experiences depends on the degree to which he is trained in seership. It is a peculiar thing about poetry. Through language or other means of poetry, the poet expresses what comes to the visionary faculty from poetry. A dramatic person, for example, whom the poet brings to the stage, whom he lets say a few words, is formed from these few words into the complete image of a human personality. That is why, in all that is unreal in poetry, that which is mere empty phrase, that which does not push out of creative power but is made, things seem so unpleasant to the seer: he sees the grotesque caricature in that which is not poetry but still seeks to create something in empty phrases. While the plastic is transformed into spiritual intellectuality, the poetic is transformed into the plastic and the representational, which he must look at. He looks at what is true, what is formed from the true creative laws by which nature creates, and sharply separates this from what is merely created out of human imagination, because one wants to create poetry, even if one is not connected in fantasy with the creative powers of the universe. Such are the experiences in relation to poetry and music.

Supernatural insight experiences painting in a peculiar way. It stands alone for supernatural insight. And because the seer — to use a trivial comparison — is obliged, as the geometrician is obliged to use lines and a compass, to visualize what he could have in mere conception, to make the conception tangible, the seer is also obliged to translate the experience of the spiritual world, what he experiences without form, into a formed, dense world. This happens when he experiences what he experiences in this way in such a way that he transforms it into inner vision, into imagination, and fills it, if I may say so, with soul-material. He does this in such a way that, so to speak, he creates the counterpart to painting in the inner, creative, visionary state. The painter forms his imagination by applying the inner creative powers to sensual perception, which he experiences as he needs them. He comes in from the outside until he transforms what lives in space in such a way that it works in lines, forms, colors. He brings this to the surface of the painterly perception. The seer comes from the opposite direction. He condenses what is in his visionary activity to the point of emotional coloring; he imbues what is otherwise colorless, as if illustrating inwardly with colors, he develops imaginations. One must only imagine in the right way that what the painter brings from one side comes from the opposite side in what the seer creates from within.

To imagine this, read the elementary principles in the last chapters of Goethe's Theory of Colours about the sensual-moral effect of colors, where he says that each color triggers an emotional state. The seer receives this emotional state last, with which he tinges what would otherwise be colorless and formless. When the seer speaks of aura and the like and cites colors in what he sees, one should be aware that he is tinting what he experiences inwardly with these emotional states. When the seer says what he sees is red, he experiences what one otherwise experiences with the red color; the experience is the same as when seeing red, only spiritually.

It is the same thing that the seer sees and that the artist conjures onto the canvas, but seen from different sides. In this way the seer meets the painter. This meeting is a remarkable and significant experience. It reveals painting to be a special characteristic of supersensible knowledge. This is particularly evident in the case of an appearance that must become a special problem for every soul: the incarnate, the color of human flesh, which actually has something equally mysterious and appealing for those who want to penetrate inwardly into such things, allowing one to see deeply into the relationships of nature and spirit. The seer experiences this incarnate in a special way. I would like to draw attention to one particular aspect.

When speaking of clairvoyance, people think that it refers to something that only a few twisted people have, something that is completely outside of life. It is not so. That which is earnest looking is always present in life. We could not stand in life if we were not all clairvoyant for certain things. It is important that the serious seer does not mean something that is outside of life, but that it is only an enhancement of life in certain ways. When are we clairvoyant in our ordinary life? We are clairvoyant in a case that is so little understood today because, from a materialistic point of view, all kinds of craziness have been formed about the way we grasp a foreign ego when we are confronted with a foreign body. There are already people today who say: You only perceive the soul of another human being through a subconscious conclusion. We see the oval of the face, the other human lines, the color of the face, the shape of the eyes. We have become accustomed to finding ourselves face to face with a person when we see something physical like this, so we draw the analogy that whatever is in such a form also contains a person. — It is not so; that is what supersensible knowledge shows. What appears to us in the human form and coloring is a kind of perception, like the perception of color and form in a crystal. The color, form and surface of a crystal present themselves as themselves. The surface and coloring in a human being cancel each other out, making themselves transparent, ideally speaking. The sensory perception of the other person is spiritually extinguished: we perceive the other soul directly. It is an immediate empathy with the other soul, a mysterious and wonderful process in the soul when we stand face to face with another person in our own humanity. There is a real stepping out of the soul, a stepping over to the other. This is a clairvoyance that is present in life always and everywhere. This kind of clairvoyance is intimately connected with the mystery of the incarnate. The seer becomes aware of this when he rises to the most difficult seerical problem: to perceive the incarnate in a seerical way. For the ordinary view, the incarnate has something resting about it; for the seer, it becomes something moved within itself. The seer does not perceive the incarnate as something finished, he perceives it as an intermediate state between two others. When the seer concentrates on the coloring of the person, he perceives a continuous fluctuation between paleness and a kind of blush, which is a higher blush than the ordinary blush, and which for the seer merges into a kind of radiance of warmth. These are the two borderline states between which the coloring of the person oscillates, with the incarnate lying in the middle. For the seer, this becomes a vibrating back and forth. Through the paleness, the seer understands what the person is like inwardly, in their mind and intellect, and through the blush, one recognizes what the person is like as a being of will and impulse, how they are in relation to the external world. What is in the inner character of the person vibrates to a higher degree.

One should not imagine that the path to seeing things spiritually consists of 'developing' oneself and then seeing all people and all things spiritually. The path into the spiritual world is a multifaceted and complicated one. Coming to understand the inner being of another person is the main problem of the experience of incarnation.

Thus you see that the seer has the most diverse experiences with the arts. What is meant here is still somewhat shaded for us by an appearance that is suitable for pointing out the way in which seership stands in life: the relationship of seership to human language.

Language is actually not a unified thing, but something that exists in three different spheres. First, there is a state of language that can be seen as a tool for communication between people and in science. One may call the seer's experience paradoxical, but it is a real one: the seer perceives this use of language as a means of communication and expression for ordinary intellectual science as a kind of demotion of language, even as a debasement of language to something that language is not in its innermost nature. The seer's perception reaches to a different conception. Language is the instrument through which a people lives in community. What lives in language, in the way it is shaped into different forms, in the way sounds are articulated and so on, is, when viewed correctly, artistic. Language as a means of expression of a people is art, and the way language is created is the collective artistic creation of the people who speak that language.

By using language as a means of everyday communication, we degrade it. Anyone with a sense for what lives in language and is revealed in our subconscious knows that the creative aspect of language is akin to the poetic, to art in general. Anyone with an artistic nature has an unpleasant feeling when language is unnecessarily tuned down to the sphere of ordinary communication. Christian Morgenstern had this feeling. He was not anxious to build a bridge between artistry and seership; he did not believe that artistic originality would be lost through the penetration of the intellectual world; he felt that the poetic in him was akin to the plastic and the architectural. He, who expresses what he feels about language by characterizing chatter as an abuse of language, says: “All chatter is based on uncertainty about the meaning and value of the individual word. For the chatterbox language is something vague. But it gives it back to him in abundance: the (vague, the “swimmer.” One must feel what — in order to feel like him — Morgenstern felt as the language-creative: that where language in prose becomes a means of communication, its degradation to a mere purpose takes place.

Thirdly, the experience of the seer with language characterizes what is experienced in the spiritual world. What is seen there is not seen in words, it is not expressed directly in words. Thus, it is difficult to communicate with the outside world in a seerly way, because most people think theoretically and in terms of content in words and cannot imagine a life of the soul that goes beyond words. Therefore, those who experience the spiritual world perceptively feel a certain compulsion to pour into the already formed language that which they experience. But by silencing what otherwise lives in language — the power of imagination and memory — they can awaken in themselves the creative powers of language itself, those creative powers that were active in the development of humanity when language first arose. The seer must place himself in the state of mind when language first arose, must develop the dual activity of inwardly forming spiritual images that he has seen, and immersing himself in the spirit of speech formation so that he can combine the two. It is therefore important to realize that the words of the seer must be understood differently than words usually are. In communicating, the seer must make use of language, but in such a way that he allows what is creatively active in language to arise again, by responding to the formative forces of language. This makes it important that he shapes the spoken word by emphasizing certain things strongly and others less, saying certain things first and others later, or by adding something illustrative. A special technique is necessary for those who want to express spiritual truths in language, when they want to express what lives within them. Therefore, the seer needs to take into account the “how” of how he expresses himself, not just what he says. It is important that he first forms, it depends on how he says things, especially the things about the spiritual world, not just on what he says. Because this is so little taken into account, and because people remember the words by what they otherwise mean, the seer is so difficult to understand. He has a need — this is all only relative — to develop the ability to create language so that he expresses the supersensible through the way he expresses himself. It will become more and more necessary to realize that the important thing is not the content of what is said, but that through the way the seer expresses himself, one has the vivid impression that he is speaking from the spiritual world. Thus, even in ordinary life, language is already an artistic element. The seer also has a special relationship to language.

Now the question arises: What is the basis for such a relationship between the seer and the artist? How is it that basically the seer cannot detach himself from the impression of a work of art? The reason for this is that in the work of art something akin to supersensible knowledge appears, only in a different guise. It is due to the fact that the inner life of man is much more complicated than modern science is able to imagine.

I would like to present this from a different angle, where, however, apparently scientific language is used, and which points to something that must be developed more and more in order to bridge the gap between, on the one hand, the ordinary observation of reality and, on the other hand, the experience in artistic imagination and supersensible knowledge. I will ask: What is it that enables the creative musician to bring forth from his inner being that which lives in his notes? Here we must realize that what is usually called self-knowledge is still abstract. Even what mystics or nebulous theosophists imagine is something very abstract. If one believes that one experiences the divine in one's soul, then this is something very unclear and nebulous before the real, concrete seership. This becomes clear that on the one hand man has his inner experience, his thoughts, feelings, volitional impulses; he can immerse himself in them, call it mysticism, philosophy, science. If one learns to recognize the living, one knows: All this is too thin, even if one tries to condense it inwardly. Even with intense mysticism, one always flutters above reality, does not come close to true reality, only experiences inner images, experiences the effects of reality, and does not experience reality through ordinary contemplation of nature, which faces material processes.

It is true what Dz Bois-Reymond says: that contemplation of nature can never grasp what haunts space. When the natural scientist speaks of matter that exists in space, it does not yield to what we use to grasp reality. For ordinary consciousness, it remains the case that on the one hand we have the inner life, which does not penetrate to reality, and on the other hand we have external reality, which does not yield to the inner life. There is an abyss in between. This abyss, which one must know, is an obstacle to human knowledge. It can only be overcome by developing supersensible vision in the soul, the kind of vision that I have shown today in its relationship to the artistic.

When this vision develops, one enters into an external relationship with oneself and with material reality, which is present as a body. The body becomes something new, it does not remain the brittle, the one that does not surrender to the inner self. The inner self does not remain the one fluttering above reality, but it impregnates itself, permeates itself in its own corporeality with what has material existence in the body. But all material existence contains spiritual existence.

Let us try to visualize this with the help of musical art. While a person is developing musical or other ideas and perceiving them in ordinary consciousness, complicated states are taking place in his physical interior. He knows nothing about them, but they take place. The clairvoyant consciousness penetrates to this inward, complicated, wonderful physical experience. The cerebral fluid, in which the brain is otherwise embedded, pours out into the spinal cord sac when we breathe out, penetrates down, pushes the blood to the lower abdominal veins, and when we breathe in, everything is pushed up. A wonderful rhythm takes place, which accompanies everything we imagine and perceive. This breathing, this plastic art in its rhythm, pushes in and out in the brain. A process takes place that plays a part in human experience. It is something that goes on in the subconscious and of which the soul is aware. Modern physiology and biology are still almost completely ignorant of these things, but this will become a broad science,

In times that can no longer be ours, spiritual life had to be sought in a different way. But the time for seeking spiritual science in the Oriental-Indian way is past; it can be studied afterwards, but the belief that one must go back to Indian methods is completely mistaken. That is not for our time; it would lead humanity astray. Our methods are much more intellectual, but one may see by studying what ancient India was seeking. A large part of the training for higher knowledge in India consisted of a rhythmically ordered breathing process: they wanted to regulate the breathing process. If you compare what they were seeking with what I have just said, you will find that the yoga student wanted to experience within himself what I have described by inwardly feeling the path of breathing. The Indian experienced this by trying to feel the breathing process as it rose and fell.

Our methods are different. Those who follow this with understanding will find that we are no longer to immerse ourselves in the organism in this physical way, but to try to grasp what flows down through the meditative nature of the intellect and what flows up through the exercises of the will, and in this way to try to oppose ourselves to the current with our soul life and to feel it as it flows up and down.

A certain progress in human development depends on this. This is something of which science and everyday consciousness know nothing, but the soul knows it in its depths. What the soul knows and experiences there can, under special circumstances, be brought up into consciousness. It is brought up when the human being is an artist in relation to music. How does this happen? In the ordinary human condition, which one could also call the bourgeois condition, there is a strong connection between the soul and spirit and the physical and bodily. The soul and spirit are strongly tied to the processes just described. If the equilibrium is a labile one, if the soul and spirit are detached, then one is musical or receptive to it through this construction, which is based on inner destiny. The special artistic gift in other fields also depends on this unstable relationship. Those who have this gift are able to bring up what would otherwise only take place down in the soul — in the depths of the soul we are all musical artists. Those who are in a stable equilibrium cannot bring up what takes place there: they are not artists. Those who are in a labile equilibrium — now, as a scientific philistine, one could speak of degeneration — those who are in a labile equilibrium of soul and body, bring up more of what is playing in the inner rhythm, darker or lighter, and shape it through the tone material. If we look at the flow of nerve impulses from bottom to top towards the brain, we first encounter what we characterize as musical. How the optic nerve spreads out in the eye and connects with blood vessels remains in the subconscious. Something is going on that is extinguished when a person is confronted with the external world. When confronted with the external sensory world, the external impression is extinguished. But what takes place between nerve waves and sensory processes has always been a poet; the poet lives in every human being. And it depends on the state of the soul-body balance whether what takes place remains down there or whether it is brought up and poured into poetry.

Let us again consider the radiating process, the wave that strikes downwards, and strikes against the branching of the blood wave: this expresses the placing of our own equilibrium into the equilibrium of our environment. The subconscious experience is particularly strong here, in which the human being moves from the crawling child into upright balance. This is an enormous subconscious experience. The fact that we have this, which is only caricatured in the ape, and which becomes significant for humanity, that the line through the center of the body coincides with the center of gravity, is an enormous inner experience. There one unconsciously experiences the architectural-sculptural relationship. When the downward nerve wave encounters the blood flow, architecture and sculpture are unconsciously experienced, and it is again brought up and shaped to a greater or lesser extent by unstable or stable conditions.

The painting and what is expressed in it is experienced inwardly where nerve and blood waves meet. The artistic process is conscious, but the impulses are unconscious. The visionary consciously immerses himself in what underlies the artistic imagination as an impulse, as an inner experience, which is not characterized in such an abstract way as it is done today, but so concretely that one can find every single phase in the configuration of one's own body. The ancients sensed correctly that, with regard to architecture, every form and every measure is present in one's own self-insertion into the external world. Ancient architecture originates from a different sensing of these proportions than Gothic architecture, but both originate from a sensing of one's own equilibrium with the conditions of the macrocosm. In this way, one recognizes how man, in his own construction, is an image of the macrocosm. That is why the body has been called the temple of the soul. There is much truth in such expressions. Thus we can say that basically the sources from which the artist draws, who is to be taken seriously and has a relationship to reality, are the same sources from which the seer draws, to whom only that which is to remain an impulse in its effect now appears in consciousness, while when the impulse remains in the subconscious, he brings up what is brought to view by the artist.

From this it can be seen that these areas of human experience are strictly separate. Therefore, there is no reason for the anxiety that believes that the artist's originality will be lost through the gift of second sight. The gift of second sight is developed in the same states that can be separated from artistic creation and experience, but the two cannot affect each other if they are properly experienced. On the contrary.

We are at a time when humanity must become more and more aware and conscious, more and more free. That is why the light of art must be poured out by the artist himself, and in this way a bridge will be built between art and vision, which will not interfere with each other.

It is understandable that the artist feels disturbed when art history develops according to the pattern of modern natural science or the rational aesthetics as it is understood today. A knowledge that penetrates real art with vision does not yet exist today; one day artists will not feel disturbed by it, but fertilized by it.

Anyone who works with a microscope knows how to proceed in order to learn how to see. Just as one first penetrates oneself from within with the ability to work properly with a microscope – in this way, the inner view stimulates the outer view, does not hinder it – so will a time come when true seership impregnates and permeates the elementary productive capacity of the artist.

Sometimes, however, what is meant by vision is misunderstood because one thinks of supersensible science and knowledge too much in terms of ordinary sensory science and knowledge. However, people who approach spiritual science sometimes feel disappointed: they do not find convenient answers to their down-to-earth questions, but they do find other worlds that sometimes have much deeper riddles than those in the world of the senses. Through an introduction to spiritual science, new riddles arise that cannot be solved in theory, but promise to dissolve vividly in the process of life and thus create new riddles. If one lives into this higher liveliness, one remains related to art. Hebbel demands conflicts that must remain unresolved, and he finds Grillparzer philistine when, despite all his beauty, he resolves conflicts in a way that only makes sense to someone smarter than his hero. — This is the ultimate goal of true vision: it does not create cheap answers, but rather worldviews that complement the ones we perceive with our senses. Of course, profound artists have already sensed this. In his recently published book “Stufen” (Stages), Morgenstern expresses the idea that anyone who, like the artist, really wants to get to the spiritual must be willing to absorb and unite with what can already be comprehended today, through supersensible knowledge, of the divine-spiritual. He says: “He who only wants to immerse himself in what can be experienced of the Divine-Spiritual today, not penetrating it with knowledge, is like the illiterate person who sleeps all his life with his primer under his pillow.”

This characterizes the point in our culture we are at. If one is able to respond to what is needed in our time, one will, like Morgenstern, have to come to the conclusion: one must not remain illiterate towards clairvoyant knowledge; as an artist, one must seek connections to clairvoyant knowledge. Just as it is significant when the visionary element sheds light on artistic creation, it is equally significant when artistic taste can inspire what, as a form of visionary philistinism, still has nothing artistic and at best something amusing about it. For the true spiritual expert of the future, the bridge that can be built between artistry and vision is more important than any pathological visionary.

Whoever sees through this knows that it will flourish for the good of present and future humanity if more and more spiritual things and spiritual knowledge are sought. The light of vision must shine in art, so that the warmth and grandeur of art may have a fertilizing effect on the breadth and grandeur of the horizon of vision. This is necessary for art, which wants to immerse itself in true existence, as we need it to be able to master the great tasks that must increasingly approach humanity from indeterminate depths.

There is in our culture certainly no document that has intervened so deeply and so intensively in the whole spiritual life as the Bible. One would have to write a history, not of centuries, but of millennia if one wanted to describe the effect of the Bible on humankind. If one completely wanted to refrain from the influence of this document on the mainstream, one would still find something immeasurable in the Bible concerning the influence and the deep effects on the human soul. Certainly, one may say that just our modern time presents exceptionally many things, because one could show that today not only those who stand on the ground of the Bible are deeply influenced by this human document, but also that those who have turned away from the Bible are subject to its influence. For the Bible is really not only a document, although it is it in the most particular measure, because it fulfils the soul with a sum of images about the world and life giving the soul a worldview, but the Bible was, for millennia, an enormous means of education of the souls.

It has meant something not only to the imagination, and means something to it even today, but it is maybe important and more essential what we must regard as an effect on the emotional life, on the ways of thinking. There we must often admit today that the Bible only developed the emotions, the sensations of those who combat the Bible.

But who looks around only a little at the spiritual life of humankind, in particular at that of our western humankind and that which is connected with it, that will note what an immense reversal has taken place concerning the position of humankind or, at least, of a big part of humankind to the Bible.

Those who stand still firmly on the ground of the Bible today could maybe think too little of that to which is pointed with it. They could say, even if there may be some people who turn away from the Bible who state that the Bible can no longer be that for humankind what it was for millennia, it is presumably only a temporary phenomenon. We believe in the Bible; whatever the gentlemen say who believe to stand on the ground of science, it may seem to them fantastic—we rely on the Bible! One could find this judgment among certain personalities very much common, and it is only a matter of course. For someone who is still able to take the happiness, the certainty and the strength of his soul from the Bible cannot put enough in the balance according to his character against those phenomena that exist around him as criticism and refusal of the Bible.

However, such a judgment would be rather careless. It would be even selfish in a certain way, for the human being—if he pronounces such a judgment—says to himself: the Bible gives me this or that; whether it gives the same to other human beings, I do not care about.—Such a human being does not pay attention to the fact that humankind is a whole. What single human beings experience, think and feel at first flows down into the whole humankind and becomes common property.

Somebody who says, I do not want to hear what the critics and the scholars say about the Bible today, I do not care about it judges only for himself. He does not remember whether also his descendants, whether those human beings who follow him can have the chance to gain such a satisfaction from this document if criticism and science are about to take this document away from humankind. The power of the authorities who are involved in the life of this document is big and strong. It means, actually, to act blind and deaf towards that which goes forward round one if one wants to start only from the just characterised point of view of naive faith, undeterred faith. Today one has to hear what can shake the respect and the meaning of this human document with our fellow men. The shock, the radical changes that took place in the course of the last centuries with reference to this document are enormous.

Still a few centuries ago, the Bible was believed to be something that enjoyed unconditional authority; it was believed to be of higher divine origin. This belief, this assumption is shaken long-since and will be shaken more and more by always new reasons. At first, neither our modern science nor the present natural sciences turned against the old view of the Bible. Already more than hundred years ago, the more materialistic way of thinking—we are allowed to use the expression, because we have often explained it here—considered the Bible from the purely external point of view. We speak about the Old Testament first. For centuries, it was believed to be—like the New Testament—an inspiration of higher powers. It was believed to be written out of a consciousness that could rise to a sphere of truth to which the sensuous consciousness could not rise.

The first to shake this belief in the fact that the Bible was written out of a higher human consciousness, that it is due to another authority than to any authority of a human writer was that one said to oneself: if one reads the Bible, it turns out that it is no uniform document. In the eighteenth century, the French doctor Astruc (Jean A., 1684–1766) wrote, one says, the human beings would have written under the influence of higher powers the chapters of the Bible that we call the history of creation by Moses. However, we read the creation story and find that single parts are not in accordance with each other; we find stylistic and objective contradictions. Hence, we must suppose that not a single author, Moses or anybody else, wrote this document, because somebody who describes the conditions successively as a single person would not bring in inner contradictions.

I can only outline all these contradictions: old documents would be taken from different sides and combined by various authors. These were the first objections against the Bible. We want now to characterise the spirit of this kind of opposition against the spiritual origin of the Bible, apart from that how the things happened.

One sees there how immediately in the beginning in tremendous, overpowering pictures the creation is unrolled. In them, the so-called Six-Day Work is told. One tells further on how within this creation the human being originated, how he came to the sin, how he developed from generation to generation. There one notes that in the first parts, in the first verses, a name is chosen for the divine powers, for God, different from the fourth verse of the second chapter on. One sees there that really these two names of the divine alternate, the Elohim and Yahveh or Jehovah. There somebody must ask himself, should an author have called the divine with two different names? Where from this may come? He says to himself that that or those who put together the document finally found old traditions or also old documents which they interlinked and formed a whole from them. The one may come from this tribe, the other from that tribe, and one interlinked them. This one makes itself noticeable. Starting from this one notes, going on, that similar and other contradictions appear.

Thus, one got around to separating and tearing the original documents in different pieces. If today anybody wanted to put together a Bible from the different pieces and fragments from which one thought that it must be composed, if anybody printed with blue letters everything that one counts among one document, with red letters what among a second, with green letters what among a third and so on, then a strange document would originate. However, it has already come about—the so-called Rainbow Bible!

The ancient, venerable document is there, one would like to say, disassembled in the single pieces from which it should be composed. The Bible is, of course, a document of which one believes, however, to be able to prove that it is due not to Moses, but that parts of it originate from this or that clerical council in relatively late time. Other parts of the Bible are put together from legends and myths that one gathered from here and there from religious views of this or that school. What became a whole this way cannot be believed to be something that was brought into history with a raised human consciousness that is able to behold into the spiritual worlds.

However, nobody is allowed to believe that these both talks, which I have to hold today and on Saturday, are intended to lower any way the diligence and the sedulity of the works just only briefly outlined. To somebody who knows the spiritual means that was used to tear the Bible to small pieces and to explain them, the diligence and the sedulity and the skill of the researchers of all these works become apparent. They appear to him as the most tremendous that was maybe performed in science. In relation to the formal, in relation to the industrious research one cannot find anything comparable. If we look closely at the result of this research performed by modern theologists, so just from those, who due to their profession believe to stand on the ground of Christianity, we must say to ourselves, it must cause another relation to the Bible as it was for centuries. If this research comes to fruition, the Bible—many things had to be discussed to reason it in detail—cannot longer exist as the document that comforts and raises the human beings in the saddest problems of life.

Apart from that, numerous human beings have looked around in the fields of scientific research, in geology, in the developmental history of animals and plants, in the history of civilisation, in anthropology and so on. These human beings are hardly able to conceive anything reading the Bible. One has to be also fair in this respect and not position oneself simply on the ground of naive faith and say that this signifies nothing. They are often those who are the most conscientious ones in their feeling of truth, in their thirst for knowledge. They say to themselves, I see that research standing on firm ground has found

That the earth developed throughout geologic periods,
That the earth developed from a mist of higher temperature to the present form,
That the inanimate develops and from this inanimate the living being,
That everything developed from the simple up to the most complex being, the human being,
That the forms of civilisation ascended to the modern complex forms.

Numerous human beings say, if we see which tremendous geological periods were necessary to receive the earth when it had not yet produced amphibians nor mammals, if we survey all that and open ourselves to that, what shall we to do if the Bible tells us that the world was created within six or seven days? We have no use neither for the creation in six or seven days nor for anything else. Which use are we able to make of the Flood, of the miraculous rescue of Noah if we read that Noah brought so many animals in the ark, and so on?—Thus, it happens that some human beings gifted with dignity and serious sense of truth oppose so sharply and vigorously against the Bible based on the modern scientific viewpoint, in so far as it wants to extent to a worldview. All that exists in our worldview. We are not able to deny all that.

However, there the question arises: does one take all things really into consideration that are to be taken into consideration in relation to the Bible if either the first viewpoint, the historical one, or the second, the physical-historical view is asserted? There one has to say that already the third viewpoint exists in relation to the Bible, a viewpoint that develops from that real research method and human viewpoint that is characterised in these talks as the spiritual-scientific or anthroposophic one. We have to deal with this viewpoint in relation to the Bible today and the day after tomorrow. What a viewpoint is this? One often says today, the human being is not allowed to rely on external authority, he has to approach world and life without presuppositions and to investigate truth, and one believes to insult just the Bible if one takes up such a viewpoint. Does one really insult the Bible with it? One can compare the spiritual-scientific or anthroposophic viewpoint to something that happened to humanity concerning something else, even if less significant, some centuries ago. We come to an understanding of the spiritual-scientific viewpoint concerning the Bible the easiest, if we compare it with the radical changes in relation to the view of the earth.

There we see that all schools, the lower and the higher ones, taught about the external nature in the whole Middle Ages following up old writings, indeed, writings of a great personality, of the old Greek philosopher and naturalist Aristotle. Thus, if you could go back with me to the sites of the spiritual life of the older time, you would find that that was not communicated in the old schools and training centres which was found in laboratories, but which was printed in the books by Aristotle. Aristotle was the authority and his books were the Bible of the natural sciences at that time. Where one only communicated and taught what Aristotle had already said about the matters. Now the times came when a new aurora arose concerning the view of nature, the new way of the physical view of Copernicus, Kepler and Galilei and all the others up to now. What was the basic feature of this aurora? While one had taken before Aristotle as a firm starting point, and spoke about nature as he had spoken, now Copernicus, Kepler and Galilei used their own senses of observation and research. They themselves looked at nature and investigated what life could show them. Thus, they wanted to describe and explain nature according to that which they themselves had seen. There they came into conflict with the teachings of Aristotle's strict believers.

It is more than a mere anecdote, it means the deep truth of a process that happened at that time: one tells that a believer of Aristotle was asked to have a look at a corpse and to observe that it is not right that the nerves go out from the heart—as Aristotle teaches—but from the brain. The believer of Aristotle was persuaded to look at this. Then, however, he said, if I look at this, it seems that nature contradicts Aristotle. However, if nature contradicts Aristotle, I do not trust nature but Aristotle.—Natural sciences faced tradition that way. The view of the researcher was rejected in the light of that which was reproduced and repeated as tradition for centuries. If we read Giordano Bruno's writings, we see the opposition against Aristotle out of the new spirit that tells and explains what the human being himself should see.

We look at the whole matter again differently today. We face the immediate scientific observation and Aristotle differently. We know that a lot of that which was read out from him in the Middle Ages was only an ambiguous interpretation of his writings. Aristotle was a researcher out of the spirit of his time who looked immediately into nature and communicated what he was able to say. If we understand Aristotle correctly, if we can defer to what he said, then he does no longer seem to contradict the immediate scientific observation, as he seemed to contradict at that time. Then we can become his admirers again, because just concerning the origin of the nerves from the heart instead of from the brain, it becomes apparent that he meant something else, namely something that is still correct for our time.

In a quite similar way, the spiritual-scientific research faces not only these documents—the writings by Aristotle—but also the western original document, the Bible. What has happened in relation to the observation and investigation of the external nature since the sixteenth century takes place again in relation to the investigation of the spiritual undergrounds of the world. Out of the spirit of that research, I have characterised in the last three talks, how humankind tries to penetrate again into those worlds that are not discernible by the outer senses. However, they are discernible to the higher developed senses of the human being, to the spiritual senses of the human being with which we can behold also in the spiritual world as we can see with the physical senses in the physical world.

It is not necessary to keep on explaining because I have often enough said that the human being is able to develop the forces in himself that he can perceive not only the sensuous things, but that he can perceive a spiritual world between and behind the sensuous, a spiritual world that is much more real than the sensuous world. With good reason, humankind had forgotten the methods of spiritual research for a while. The big progress, the big conquests in the physical world were done because the instruments were perfected in such a way, as it was the case during the last centuries. However, if one thing extends in the human nature, other abilities take a backseat. That is why we see how during the last centuries the scientific methods blossomed for the external physical world of facts. Never were instruments that are more stupendous invented to pick up the secrets of nature and to investigate her principles. The concerning abilities were extended and perfected tremendously, but those abilities have withdrawn with which the human being is able to behold into in the spiritual world. Hence, it is not surprising that the human being was convinced that the spiritual could also be explained from the material existence.

However, we stand before the dawn of an epoch today when humankind becomes aware again that there are still instruments and tools different from those in the physical and physiological laboratory where they are used so excellently. Indeed, we have to do it with an instrument that differs thoroughly from the other. We deal with the basic and original instrument that we have to see in the human being himself. We get to know the human being by the methods of concentration and meditation in the course of the winter. These are other methods that the human being can apply to his soul and by which he gets around to seeing the environment unlike he has seen it before. He can get around to saying to himself: I am like an operated blind-born who could deny the colours and the light of the world before.—However, the moment had now come that he himself could see. Now he could see that something else is behind that which the senses and the mind perceive. Now he sees into the spiritual things; now he does not know, not hypothetically, by speculative philosophy that the sensuous, the material is only like a compression of the spiritual, that that which we see with the senses relates to something spiritual behind it as ice relates to water. The water is thin, the ice is solid, and somebody who is not able to see the water, but can see the ice would say, there is nothing round the ice.—Somebody, who can see only with the senses, states that there is nothing but sensuous processes, nothing but sensuous events everywhere.

However, we must penetrate into this supersensible field, into these supersensible events, and then we can recognise and explain the spiritual. Who has not developed spiritual ears and eyes sees nothing but compression—like the ice in the water—all over the world, as well as the primordial mother of substance, the spiritual in which the sensuous is only embedded does not appear to him. If the geologist shows us how, for example, a human being could sit on a chair in the universe and could watch how the world has developed: the external sensuous view would be as the natural sciences describe it. Spiritual science has to object nothing to that which natural sciences have to say in the positive sense. However, it becomes apparent to someone who is in the right know of the physical science that before the first forming of the physical the spiritual was there. There it becomes apparent how the progress became only possible because the spiritual helped, and that the spirit is mostly involved in the development.

So this spiritual worldview points to the fact that the human being can make himself the instrument of the investigation of the important bases of the world, and, finally, our view gets around to investigating the spiritual original grounds and beginnings independently. Thus, spiritual science stands there, independently of any document. It says, we do not do research in a document first. We do not do research as it was done once, in the books by Aristotle, we do research in the spiritual world. We adapt ourselves in such a way: what you learn as usual school geometry, the Euclidean geometry, was written down in its first beginnings by Euclid, the great mathematician. Today we can accept it as a document and understand it historically. However, who learns geometry at school today, is he still learning after the elementary book of Euclid? One works, learns, and recognises by the things themselves. If one constructs, for example, a triangle, the internal lawfulness appears to the mind out of the thing itself. Then with that which you have gained in such a way, you can move up to Euclid and recognise what he already wrote in his textbook. Thus, the spiritual scientist does also research, regardless of the books, only with his organs how the world has developed. He finds the development of the world, the development of the earth at that time before the earth crystallised in its present form. He investigates the spiritual processes and finds how at a certain point our mind starts in the earthly existence; he shows that the human being appears first and has not developed from subordinated creatures, but that he was first there as a descendant of spiritual beings.

We can go back to former times when still the spiritual primordial grounds existed. We find the human being connected with these spiritual processes, and only later, the lower creatures develop besides the human being. As well as in the development generally certain things remain behind and other advance, the lower also diverted from the higher. The spiritual researcher knows that spiritual organs can be developed by methods that the spiritual researcher is able to show.

Thus, the spiritual research teaches the origin and evolution of the world according to principles which are independent of any document, only out of own principles, as well as one learns mathematics regardless how it has developed in the course of history. In the same way as the researcher has appropriated knowledge of this wisdom, he approaches the Bible. He looks at the Bible. It becomes apparent now, why there are contradictions in the Bible from the viewpoint of the historical-critical biblical studies as well as from the viewpoint of scientific research. Both viewpoints come from one big error that originated from the fact that one thought generally to be supposed to understand the truth of the Bible from the viewpoints of physical-sensuous perception. One thought that it is possible to approach the Bible with such criteria. One did not yet have the research results of the anthroposophic spiritual science.

I want to show with single examples what I have just said. Spiritual science shows us that we come investigating the earthly creation with the methods of geology et cetera only to a certain point, and that then the human development seems to proceed backwards in the uncertain. Why? The sensuous science, may it hope it ever so much, will never be able to pursue the human being back to the origin, because sensuous science can find the sensuous only. However, the mental and spiritual have led the way of the sensuous in the human being. He was soul first and at even former times, he was spirit, then he descended to the earthly existence. Only as far as the physical life is involved in the descent of the human being in the earthly existence, natural sciences can show this course of development.

We cannot investigate the soul life with the usual forces of the sensuous observation. Geology can also be no guide to us. It gives us the investigation of that which remained behind as sense-perceptible matters. It can only say what one would see if anybody sat on a chair in the universe and saw everything that developed on earth. Spiritual science does not defer to this. However, one must have developed spiritual eyes and ears to see the human being as a spiritual being in primeval times. If one does not have these organs, the soul and the spirit of the human being disappear. However, if one has the spiritual eyes, the sensuous disappears, and the spiritual picture originates. One cannot see this, however, in the same way as the sensuous. One must appropriate quite different concepts of knowledge if one wants to go back to such primeval times. What one sees developing there from the human being when it was only a soul does not appear in sensuous concrete perception as the external sensuous world offers it. This appears to us as pictures. Our consciousness becomes a picture consciousness, an imaginative consciousness by the development of the internal forces of the soul. Then the consciousness is filled with pictures. We see in another condition of consciousness, what has happened at that time, now in pictures. Pictorial is that which goes forward inside of the seer.

The rudiment that still exists of the seer's gift is the dream. However, it is chaotic. The vision of the qualified seer also exists in such pictures, but these pictures correspond to reality. It corresponds to the condition as the physical-sensuous human being can make a distinction whether his mental images correspond to reality or are only fantasy. Who wants to stop with the sentence: “The world is my mental image” and “the external things only stimulate the mental image,” to that I might propose that he should have a piece of glowing iron in his nearness and feel how it burns. Then he has to leave it and feel whether the mere mental picture still burns in such a way. There is just something that makes a distinction between the mere mental picture and that perception that is stimulated by the external object. Hence, one is not allowed to say that the seer lives only in the phantasms. He has just so developed in this field that he can make a distinction what is a mere speculative fiction, or what is a picture of the reality of a spiritual-mental world. The pictures become the means of expression of a spiritual-mental world. If the seer looks with supersensible senses back at times, before there are sensuous objects, the true spiritual beings and events present themselves. The spiritual researcher speaks not about forces that are abstractions, but about real beings. As to him, the spiritual phenomena become truth and beings, and the spiritual world becomes populated again by spiritual beings.

Imagine the primeval development of the human being when a force or being intervened in his evolution, in his whole figure that this being or force differs certainly from other beings who have intervened even earlier. We can trace back the spiritual-mental of the human being who is quite supersensible even further; we can trace back it in even higher spheres where we find even higher beings. If the spiritual researcher approaches the beginning of the Bible, it becomes apparent to him that the pictures are exactly given which show the mental-spiritual in the development of the human being, before he has come into the physical life. The spiritual researcher is able to say to himself—if he finds his own imaginations again in the external documents—that he recognises them as truth. If he goes back now to the times when the human being was connected with the even higher spheres, he has to choose another name for these basic beings, and he finds really that the passages which lead the way of the fourth verse of the second chapter have another name of God. It complies exactly with the results of spiritual research that a new name of God appears from the fourth verse of the second chapter on. Thus, we are as spiritual researcher in the same position in which today an expert of geometry is. He can find geometry out of himself, and then he appreciates the work of Euclid who found the same. Thus, we see the development in the marvellous pictures of the Old Testament, and now something extremely strange appears. The text of the Bible becomes light and clear, as it could not become with the scientific critics.

A researcher said: what the elohim did must be due to a side different from that which comes from Yahveh If anyone wants to apply that seriously, it is weird. We want to try it. Imagine this passage in the Bible: “The serpent which was the most cunning of all creatures the LORD God had made asked the woman: Is it true that God has forbidden you to eat from any tree of the garden (Genesis 3:1)?” If you read “God” instead of “Elohim” or “Yahveh,” it is not translated correctly. It is weird. In the original text you read, “The serpent which was the most cunning of all creatures Yahveh had made.” Where you read, “Is it true that God has forbidden you ... you read “Elohim” in the original text. In the translation, the woman keeps on saying “God.” Then in the eighth verse, one says, “The man and the woman heard the voice of the LORD God.” However, you read in the original text, the voice of the Yahveh God.—Thus, we have now put together the story of the serpent, so that it becomes explicable that those who used the names “Yahveh” or “Elohim” meant different beings. According to the opinion of the Bible critics, this comes from different traditions.

The passage “Is it true that God has forbidden you to eat from any tree in the garden?” comes from the Elohim tradition.—You see, the Bible is really so composed of pieces that even in the middle of the sentences the different traditions are taken together.

If you approach the Bible with spiritual-scientific research, then you recognise that this must also be that way. There is talk of the fourth verse of the second chapter that the world creation goes over from the elohim to the Yahveh God. He is that power which unfolds everything that happens then up to the Fall of Man. Spiritual science shows that Yahveh is that God who speaks within the human being in our ego, he is the I-am. This being of the I-am causes everything that is said from the fourth verse of the second chapter on. This being, Yahveh, who intervenes now, is a being who belongs to a former development, but seceded ... (gap in the transcript). Hence, there is talk of the Yahveh God. However, the serpent knows nothing about Yahveh; therefore, it must turn to that which is of its own substance, up to the moment when this takes place which has just to take place by Yahveh. Only in the eighth verse of the third chapter, the name Yahveh appears again.

Thus, you get the consciousness by spiritual research that the Bible is a document in which nothing is accidental. A modern author may ask himself, why should this God not assume another name?—The ancient initiates do not have these stylistic forms of the modern authors. Where exactly and precisely should be spoken, you cannot talk in any stylistic form. What there is written and what there is omitted has its meaning. If the name Yahveh appears and if it is omitted, this means something highly essential. However, you must carry out the principle to read the Bible extremely exactly. Read the Bible if you have it! Read the Six-Day Work. You find the passage, if you keep on reading from the first verse of the second chapter to the Sabbath, “When the LORD God made the earth and the heavens...” One interprets these verses normally as a hint to the preceding, as if the Seven-Day Work had been told and one still said now, the Seven-Day work was made in such a way.—“This is the story of the heavens and of the earth after their creation,” and then, “When the Lord God made the earth and the heavens” (Genesis 2:4).

Who studies the original text, detects the following: The fourth verse of the second chapter does not refer to the preceding, but to the following; even as later—in the chapter after the Fall of Man—“This is the list of Adam's descendants” (Genesis 5:1) refers to the following, to the next generations, to that which originated from Adam. This is said in the same way as: which follows there, “This is the story of the heavens and the earth after their creation” (Genesis 2:4). Here the same Hebrew word is used. Someone who reads exactly knows that the creation of the spiritual world is described from the words “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” to the third verse of the second chapter. Then from the fourth verse of the second chapter on it is said: after the heavens and the earth were created the following is described. It is the most wonderful transition if one understands the matter, from the Six-Day Work to the following. Who gets involved in these matters finds that no better composed book exists than the Bible, in particular its oldest parts. The confidence that one is able to approach the Bible without spiritual research, that one is able to approach it with external documents has dissolved this perfect and harmonious work, so that it seems to be composed of nothing but pieces and fragments.

One also has to follow up on the principle to read the Bible exactly and to have it. One does not have the Bible if one has only the text that suggests what it depends on. One must have the principle to go into the Bible. It is told to us during the fourth day of the Six-Day Work how the sun and moon originate, how the sun and moon cause day and night (Genesis 1:14–18). Already before, however, it was spoken in the Bible of day and night (Genesis 1, 5). One can deduce from that: day and night, which depend on the sun and moon (Genesis 1: 14–18), cannot be meant with “day” and “night,” which do not depend on the sun and moon (Genesis 1: 5). Here one can see a palpable tip where the Bible speaks of the sensuous solar day and the sensuous solar night. These originate due to the rotation of the earth around the sun. However, we can see, where the Bible points beyond this sensuous day to the supersensible, the spiritual.

Those who could investigate the Bible spiritually said always to themselves if anyone has the visionary gift and can find the sense of the Bible in reality, this sense of the Bible must have come also from visionary gift. If we are able—because our soul has put itself in another state of consciousness—to look into the tremendous pictures of the Bible, then we know that the writer must also have been under the inspiration of the spiritual world. We may probably say: the time begins when one should understand more and more that there are four levels to look at the Bible today.

The first level is that of naive faith. It takes the Bible with undeterred certainty and anticipates nothing of the objections that are made against the Bible today.

The second level: these are the clever people, the Bible critics, who find—either by investigating internal contradictions or by the scientific point of view—that the Bible was the primitive legend work of a humankind not yet doing research. They are way beyond the Bible, they do no longer need it, and they attack it from the most different directions and say: it was good for the childish humankind. Now, however, humankind has outgrown the Bible.—These are the clever ones, the freethinkers.

Then there is the third level: the human being outgrows this cleverness. Indeed, the human beings of this level are also freethinkers, but they are way beyond this second point of view; they see symbolic and mythical covers of inner soul experiences in the stories of the Bible—the Old and the New Testaments. You see what the human soul imagines shown in the Bible in symbols in the abstract. Some freethinkers have been forced to this attitude. They had to transform the viewpoint of the freethinker into that of the mythical symbolist.

Then there is the fourth point of view. This is that of spiritual science I have characterised today. The day after tomorrow we follow up on this spiritual-scientific viewpoint. It shows the spiritual facts again in simple descriptions, indeed, in such a way as one can see these spiritual facts in imaginations. These are the facts that are described in the Bible.

Someone who had to leave the naive viewpoint and has become a clever person or maybe a symbolist as researcher may get to the viewpoint on which the spiritual researcher stands, and then he can become able to take the Bible again literally, to take the words literally in a new sense to understand them really.

For centuries, one did not criticise the Bible in reality. The Bible critics have fought against their own imaginary creation, against that which they themselves have made of the Bible. The adversaries of the Bible are such even today; they fight against their own imaginary relation, against that which they believe to understand of it; they do not affect the Bible at all. The Bible can be taken literally, one must only understand the words correctly.

There is a certain tendency today that turns against such a remark: not the letter, the spirit must decide. “The letter kills, the spirit brings back to life,,” and you name it from certain relations of the letters.

I wish we could bring the real Bible letter of the world again as soon as possible. The world would be surprised about the contents of the original text. As something completely new, it will appear to humankind. One is not allowed to peddle the saying around: the letter kills, the spirit brings back to life. It is usually the gentlemen's own spirit that is reflected in the letters (Faust I, v. 578–579). That applies to the symbolist in particular. If he is trivial, he puts something trivial into the symbols; if he is witty, he puts something witty into the symbols. It is with this word like with Goethe's words:

And so long as you don't have it,
this: “Die and be transformed!”
you will only be a gloomy guest
on the dark earth.

These words suggest how the human being should come beyond the sensuous view, generally beyond the usual nature. Who would take these words as an instruction to neglect the physical has ignored that the spirit develops bit by bit from the physical. That also applies to the letter and the spirit. You must have the letter first, then you can decipher it, and then you find which the spirit is. Indeed, the letter kills, but it creates the spirit at its death, and this saying corresponds to the other: who does not have it, this “die and be transformed” remains only a gloomy guest on the dark earth.

I could draw your attention only to the criticism of the Bible and to the viewpoints, which spiritual science takes towards the Bible. From the few indications I have given today, you may guess that by the work of spiritual science something like a recapture of the Bible can take place. Spiritual science shall find wisdom, independently from the Bible. However, spiritual science comes and recognises then what flowed into this Bible, and then one experiences what many have experienced out of spiritual science towards the Bible. Some things could elevate them, but the most do no longer make sense to them. Only with the help of spiritual science, the human beings understand what is said with this or that in the Bible. However, there are still other contestable passages, and one comes to the viewpoint to say, in the Bible are passages that contain deep spiritual truth, but something flowed into it that was integrated as something inorganic.—If you go on, you discover something again, and you notice that it was due to you yourselves that you were not far enough to understand the matter. You reach the point to say to yourselves, where I have believed once that the sense of the Bible cannot be maintained compared with science, there I see now: I understand the one that I have to consider the Bible with trust and admiration; I do just not yet understand the other. However, the time comes when I understand it, and I find the viewpoint where I can look into it.

Spiritual science leads to the right appreciation of the Bible. We have spoken about the beginning of the Bible, about the creation from the spiritual-scientific viewpoint. The biblical studies have to go through a crisis. The investigations of spiritual science are coming up to meet them, and in new figure the old light of the Bible shines again to humankind in the future.

As awakeners of ancient memories, festivals turn our thoughts and feelings to the past. Through what they signify they awaken in us thoughts that link us to all that our souls held holy in distant ages. But other thoughts also are roused through the understanding of the content of these festivals, thoughts which turn our eyes to the future of mankind, which, for us, means the future of our own souls. Feelings are awakened which lend us the enthusiasm to live on into the future, and inspire our wills with strength so to work that we may grow ever more and more adequate for our future tasks.

It is with this backward and forward vision that we become able to describe, in the deeper sense of the word, the nature of the Whitsun festival. What it signifies for Western humanity is put before us in a mighty picture which speaks to the very depths of our soul. It is a picture we all know well. The Founder and Inaugurator of Christianity, after having accomplished the Mystery of Golgotha, dwelt for a time among those who were able to perceive Him, in that bodily form which He assumed after the Mystery of Golgotha. The events which followed that period are brought before our souls in a most significant series of pictures. In a mighty vision, known as the Ascension, His closest disciples visibly beheld the dissolution of that bodily form which He had assumed. Then ten days later there followed what is expressed for us in another picture, speaking powerfully to all hearts which have the will to understand it. The disciples of Christ are gathered together, those who were the first to understand Him. Deep in their hearts they feel the mighty impulse which through Him has entered into the evolution of humanity, and, after the promise given to them of the happenings they were to experience in their very souls, they are waiting in utmost expectation, gathered together in deepest devotion on the Day of Pentecost, the time-honoured festival of their people. First there takes place that which is presented in the picture of the “rushing mighty wind.” Through this their souls are lifted up into higher vision. They are summoned as it were to turn their gaze on what is yet to come to pass, on what will await them when, with the fire-impulse they have received into their hearts, they live on this earth in incarnation after incarnation in the future.

There is next portrayed before us the picture of the “tongues of fire” which descend upon the head of each of the disciples, and here another tremendous vision reveals to them what the future of this Christ Impulse is to be. For gathered together, and beholding in spirit the spiritual world, these men, who were the first to understand the Christ, feel as if they were not speaking to people near to them in space or in time: they feel their hearts borne far, far away, among the different peoples of the earth-sphere, and they feel as if something lives in their hearts which is translatable into all languages, and which can be brought to the understanding of the hearts of all men. In this mighty vision of the future of Christianity which rises before them, these first disciples feel themselves as though surrounded by future disciples out of all the peoples of the earth, and as if they will, one day, have the power to proclaim the Gospel in words that will be understandable, not only to those directly near to them in time and space, but to all who live on the earth as human beings conscious of their destiny. This it was which was born out of the first Christian Pentecostal festival as the inner content of soul and feeling of these earliest disciples of Christ.

Let us now consider the interpretation of these pictures in their deepest esoteric Christian meaning.—The Spirit, also rightly named the Holy Spirit—for so he is—sent his forces down to the earth in the first descent to the earth of Christ Jesus. He next manifested himself when Jesus was baptised by John the Baptist. Now, once again, this same Spirit, in another form, in the form of many single, shining, fiery tongues, descended upon each single individual of the first Christian believers.

We are told about this Holy Spirit at the Whitsun festival in a quite special way, but we must get clear in our minds the meaning of the words “Holy Spirit,” as they are used in the Gospels. In the first place, how was the Spirit usually spoken of in ancient times, the times preceding those of the Gospel? In olden times the Spirit was spoken of in many connections, but in one connection particularly. Through the new knowledge which Spiritual Science gives us, we are enabled to say that when a man passes through birth into his existence between birth and death, the body in which the individuality is incarnated is determined in two ways. Our bodily nature has actually a double function to fulfil: it makes us a human being, but it also makes us members of this or that people, this or that race or family. In the ancient times which preceded Christianity, little as yet was experienced of what can be called world-wide humanity, of that feeling of human fellowship which in ever greater measure has lived in human hearts only since Christianity was proclaimed, and which says to us: Thou art fellow-man with all the human beings of the earth! On the other hand, that feeling was all the stronger which makes each man a member of a particular people or tribe. This indeed is expressed in the age-long religion of the Hindus in their belief that only one who is such through his blood, can be a real Hindu. In many directions—despite exceptions to the principle—this was also firmly held by the old Hebrew people before the coming of Christ. According to their view, a man belonged to his people only because his parents, themselves belonging to it and so blood-related, had placed him into it. But they were also always familiar with another feeling, which was more or less felt by all peoples in olden times, namely, that one was a member of one's family, a member of one's own folk, and nothing more. The further we go back into antiquity the more intense this feeling is, the more the human being feels himself as a member of his folk, and not in any way as a single individual. Gradually, however, there awoke the feeling of oneself as a single human being, a single human, individuality with individual human qualities. Thus these two principles were felt to be present in the outer nature of man: membership of a people, and awareness of oneself as a single personality.

Now the forces inherent in these two principles were ascribed in a different way to the two parents. The principle by virtue of which one belonged more to one's folk, by virtue of which one was related to the general race-community, was ascribed through heredity to the mother. When men felt according to this idea, they said of the mother: “In her the Spirit of the folk holds sway. She was filled with the Spirit of the folk and has passed on to the child the qualities common to her people.” But of the father it was said that he was the bearer and transmitter of the principle which gave rather the individual, personal characteristics of the human being. Thus it could be said when a man came into the world through birth—and this was also the view of the old Hebrew people in pre-Christian times—that he was an individual personality through the forces of his father. The mother, however, through that which was special in her whole nature, was felt to be filled with the Spirit which held sway in the folk, and this she had handed on to the child. Thus it was said of the mother, that the Spirit of the folk dwelt in her, and it was in this connection that the Spirit was spoken of who sent his forces down out of spiritual realms into humanity—that he let his forces stream down into the physical world, into humanity, by way of the mother.

Through the Christ Impulse, however, a new conception had come—a conception which said that this Spirit of which men had previously spoken, this Spirit of the folk, was to be replaced by one which, though certainly related to it, worked at a far higher level, a Spirit which is related to the whole of mankind, as the earlier Spirit had been related to a particular people. This Spirit was to be given to man and to fill him with the power to say: “I feel I belong no longer only to a part of humanity, but to the whole of it; I am a member of the whole of mankind, and will become a member of it ever more and more!” This force, which poured a universal human quality over the whole of mankind, was attributed to “the Holy Spirit.” Thus the Spirit which was expressed in the force which flowed from the folk into the mother was raised from ‘Spirit’ to ‘Holy Spirit.’

The One who was to bring mankind the power to develop this universal human nature ever more and more in earthly life, could dwell—as the first Being of this nature—only in a body bequeathed through the power of the Holy Spirit. This the mother of Jesus received in the Annunciation. In the Gospel of St. Matthew we hear of the consternation of Joseph, of whom it is said that he was a ‘righteous’ man. This word was used in the old sense, and meant that he was one who could only believe that any child of his would be born out of the Spirit of his people. Now he has discovered that the mother of his child is filled, is penetrated through and through (for this is the right meaning of the original word in our language), by the power of a Spirit that was not merely a folk-Spirit, but the Spirit of universal humanity! And he did not feel that he could live with a woman who might one day bear him children, when there dwelt in her the Spirit of humanity as a whole and not the Spirit he held to in his righteousness. Accordingly he wished as it says, to put her away privily. It was only when he also had received a communication out of the spiritual world, that he received the strength to decide to have a son by that woman who was penetrated and filled with the power of this Holy Spirit.

Thus we have seen that this Spirit was creatively at work, first of all in letting its forces stream into human evolution in relation to the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, and again in the mighty act of the Baptism in the Jordan. Thus we now understand what the power of the Holy Spirit is: it is the power which will raise each man ever more and more above all that differentiates and separates him from others, and makes him a member of the whole of humanity on the earth, a power which works as a bond of soul between each and every soul, no matter in what bodies they may be.

It is of this same Holy Spirit that we are now told that at the Whitsun festival it streams, through another revelation, into the individualities of those who first accepted Christianity. In the Baptism by John there stands before us the picture of the Spirit as the dove; now, however, another picture appears, the picture of the fiery tongues. It is in a single dove, a single form, that the Holy Spirit manifests itself in John's Baptism: it is in many single tongues that it manifests itself at the Pentecostal festival. And each of the single tongues brings inspiration to an individual, to each of the individualities of the first disciples of Christianity.

What meaning, then, for our souls, has this Whitsun symbol? After Christ, the bearer of the universal-human Spirit, had completed His work on the earth, after He had suffered the last earthly sheaths of His being to disperse into the universe and His whole sheath-nature had departed as a single entity into the spiritual being of the earth, then, did it first become possible that, in the hearts of those who first understood the Christ Impulse there should arise the power of speaking about the Christ Impulse, of working in the significance of the Christ Impulse. As regards its manifestation in its outer sheaths, the Christ Impulse had vanished at the Ascension into the undivided totality of the spiritual world: ten days later it came forth again out of the hearts of the single individualities of its first followers. And because the same Spirit which had worked in the power of the Christ Impulse now reappeared in multiple forms, the first disciples of Christianity became the bearers and preachers of the Christ message.

Thus at the very beginning of Christian history was set up the powerful sign of this event, which says to us: “Just as the first disciples received each one the Christ Impulse into themselves, just as it was granted to them to receive it in the form of tongues of fire inspiring their own souls, so can you men, all of you, if you bestir yourselves to understand the Christ Impulse, receive its power, individualised, into your own hearts, the power which can develop in you ever more and more, which can become for you ever more and more complete.”—An all-embracing hope can well forth for us out of this sign, which was thus set at the starting-point of Christianity. The more a man perfects himself, the more can he feel that the Holy Spirit speaks out of his own inner being, in the measure that his thinking, feeling and willing are permeated by this Holy Spirit, which through its manifold division is also an individual Spirit in each single human individuality in which it works.

In regard to our future growth therefore, this Holy Spirit is for us men the Spirit of development into free manhood, into the free human soul. The Spirit of freedom holds sway in that Spirit which poured itself out over the first understanders of Christianity in the first Christian Pentecostal festival, the Spirit whose most significant characteristic was indicated by Christ Himself: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free!” Man can become free only in the spirit. So long as he is dependent on that bodily nature in which his spirit dwells, so long does he remain its slave. He can become free, only when he finds himself again in spirit, and from out of the spirit becomes lord over that which is in him. “To become free” presupposes the discovery of oneself as a spirit within oneself. The true spirit in which we can make this discovery is the universal human spirit, which we recognise as the Pentecostal power of the Holy Spirit entering into us, and which we must bring to birth in ourselves and allow to come to manifestation.

Thus the Whitsun symbol is transformed for us into the most powerful of our ideals, the free development of the soul of man into a self-enclosed, free individuality. They had some dim feeling of this who, through inspiration, and not, of course, in clear consciousness, had to do with appointing for the Whitsun festival its special day in the year. This outer ordering is in itself remarkable; for whoever cannot detect an all-ruling wisdom even in the fixing of a festival day understands very little of the world. Let us consider from this point of view the three festivals: Christmas, Easter, and Whitsun. As a Christian festival Christmas falls on a particular day in the year; it has been fixed once and for all for a particular day in December, and every year we celebrate Christmas on the selfsame day. It is otherwise with the Easter festival. Easter is a movable feast, which is determined by the constellations in the heavens; it falls on the first Sunday after the full moon which follows the Spring equinox. For this festival we must direct our gaze into the heights of heaven, where the stars go on their way and proclaim to us the laws of the cosmos. Easter is a movable feast, just as in each human individuality that moment is movable in which, in order to become free from the ordinary human lower nature, there awakens the power of the higher man, with a higher consciousness. Just as in one year Easter falls on this day, in another year on that, so with each man, according to his past and the strength of his endeavour, the moment comes sooner or later in which he becomes aware: “I can find the power in myself to let a higher man arise out of me.”

Christmas, however, is an immovable festival. It is the festival where man has left behind him in the course of the year the waxing and waning of nature, the joy of nature's upwelling, streaming forces. Man now beholds nature in a state of sleep, into which she has carried down within herself the force of the seeds. The world of nature has withdrawn herself, with all the birth-forces within her. When to the external world of sense the revelation of these forces is at its lowest; when the earth herself shows how at a given time her spiritual forces withdraw in order to wait for the coming year; when outer nature is at her most silent; then it is, in the Christmas festival, that man must let the thought rise in him that he may hope that he is not only united with the earthly forces, which now at this Christmas time are silent, but also with forces which are present not only on earth but also in spiritual realms. This hope must rise up in his soul because he has seen the earth as it were sink into sleep; it must well up out of the deepest, inmost part of the soul itself, and then it will become spiritual light, when outer physical nature is at its darkest. Through the symbol of the Christmas festival man must thus remind himself that, in the first place, he is just as much bound with his ego-forces to his earth-body, as that which reveals itself around him is bound to the yearly life of the earth. In keeping with the falling asleep of the earth, which takes place at the same time each year, the Christmas festival is also placed at the same time, so that at that time man shall remember that while he is bound to a body, yet he is not condemned to be united only with this, but may hope to find the power to become a free soul within himself. What we see as the meaning of the Christmas festival will thus remind us, both of our connection with the body and also of our hope to free ourselves from this body.

It depends, however, on our own efforts, whether it is earlier or later that we unfold those powers for which we may hope, and which lead us up again into the spiritual, heavenly world. To this thought the Easter festival must bring us. The Easter festival reminds us that we have not only at our disposal those forces which the body gives us, and which are themselves, of course, divine-spiritual forces, but it also reminds us that as men we can raise ourselves above the earth. Hence it is the Easter festival that speaks to us of that force which sooner or later must be brought to its awakening in us. Easter, as a movable festival, is determined according to the constellations in the heavens. So man must waken the recollection of what he can become, by turning his gaze to the sky so as to see how he can be freed from earthly existence, how he can lift himself above all such existence. In the force which comes to us in this way lies the possibility of inner freedom, of inner release. When we feel inwardly that we can raise ourselves above ourselves, we shall then strive to achieve this ascent in all reality; we shall then have the will to make our inner man free, to pull him clear, as it were, from his bondage to the outer man. We shall, of course, be dwelling in the outer man, but we shall be fully conscious of our inner spiritual power, we shall be conscious of the inner man.

Furthermore, it depends upon this moment, at which, in this inner Easter festival, we grow aware that we can free ourselves, whether we also attain to the Whitsun festival, when we may fill the spirit, which has found itself within itself, with a content that is not of this world, but of the spiritual world. This content comes to us out of the spiritual world, and this alone can make us free. It is the spiritual truth of which Christ said: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free!” It is for this reason that the Whitsun festival is dependent on the Easter festival, because it is a consequence of the Easter festival. Easter is determined according to the heavenly constellations; Whitsun is an event which must follow it as a necessary result, after the lapse of a certain number of weeks.

Thus, even in the way in which the times for these festivals are determined, we see, on deeper reflection, an all-ruling wisdom; we see that these festivals are of necessity placed just where they are in the course of the year, and that each year they bring before us what, as men, we have been and are—and what we can become. When we know how to think of these festivals in this way, then they become for us festivals which unite us with all that is past, and they become an impulse implanted in humanity to carry it forward into the future.

The Whitsun festival in particular, when we understand it in this way, bestows confidence, strength and hope, when we know what we can become in our souls through following those who, as the first to understand the Christ Impulse, made themselves worthy to have the fiery tongues descend upon them. When we understand the Whitsun festival as a festival, not only of that moment, but of the future as well, then there is magically brought before our spiritual eyes the expectancy of receiving the Holy Spirit. But then we must learn to understand this Whitsun festival in its truly Christian sense. We must learn to understand first of all what the mighty tongues, the mighty Whitsun inspiration, said. What was it which sounded forth with trumpet-tones from the ‘rushing mighty wind,’ of which we are told in that picture which is placed before our souls as the Whitsun picture of the first Christian Pentecostal festival? What kind of voices were these which proclaimed in the wondrous music of the spheres: “You have experienced the power of the Christ Impulse, you who are the first to understand. And the power of the Christ in you has become a power of your own souls, in such a way that each one of you, now that the Event of Golgotha has been accomplished, has become able to see the Christ now, in this present time. With such strength has the Christ Impulse worked upon each one of you!”

The Christ Impulse, however, is an impulse of freedom; its true activity does not reveal itself when it takes place outside the human soul. The true working of the Christ Impulse does not appear until it takes place within the individual human soul itself. So it was that those who first understood the Christ felt themselves called through the Whitsun event to proclaim what was in their own souls, what, in the revelation and inspiration of their own souls revealed itself to them as the content of the Christ-teaching. In that they were aware that the Christ Impulse had worked in that holy preparation which they had undergone before the Whitsun festival, they felt themselves called, through the power of the Christ Impulse working within them, to let speak the fiery tongues, the individualised Holy Spirit within them, and to go forth and proclaim the Gospel of Christ. It was not simply what Christ had once said to them that those first disciples recognised as words of Christ, not only those words He had already spoken. They recognised as Christ-words that which comes out of the power of a soul which feels the Christ Impulse within itself. [Cp. I Cor. VII, 25 and 40.]

To this end did the Holy Spirit pour itself in individualised form into each single human soul, so that each one might develop the power, in itself, to feel the Christ Impulse. Then for such a soul the word becomes new: “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” Those, therefore, who are earnestly at pains to experience the Christ Impulse may also feel called on, by what the Christ Impulse arouses in their hearts, to proclaim afresh the word of Christ, even though it may sound forth ever new, ever different in each epoch of mankind. It was not that we might cling to the few words of the Gospels spoken in the first decade of Christianity's foundation, that the Holy Spirit was poured down on men: it was poured forth so that for ever the Gospel of Christ may relate new things and again things ever new. As the souls of men progress from epoch to epoch, from incarnation to incarnation, new things must always be spoken for these human souls. Should these souls, advancing from incarnation to incarnation, be told to accept as the proclamation of Christ only the words which were spoken when they were incarnated in bodies contemporary with the temporal appearance of Christ on the earth? Within the Christ Impulse dwells the power to speak to all men, until the end of the time-cycle of the earth. That this may be, however, there must be added that which makes it possible for the message of Christ to be made known in each age to the ever advancing souls of men, in a way appropriate to them. So when we feel the full strength and power of the Whitsun impulse, we should feel that it is laid on us to listen to the word: “I am with you always, even to the end of the earth's cycle of time!” And when you fill yourselves with the Christ Impulse you can hear continually through all the ages the Word, stirred into life at the founding of Christianity by the Founder Himself, the Word that Christ speaks in every age because He is with men in every age, the Word which all can hear who have the will to hear it.

Thus we understand the power of the Whitsun impulse as that which gives us the right to regard Christianity as something which is ever growing, always bestowing on us new and again ever new revelations. We know that in the Spiritual Science of to-day we are proclaiming the Christ-Word itself, ringing through to us from out of the heavenly choirs, and we say to those who would preserve Christianity only in its original form: “We are those who understand the Christ in truth, for we understand the real meaning of the Whitsun festival!”

Whenever we feel ourselves thus called to bring forth ever new wisdom-teaching out of Christianity, we must bring forth just that wisdom which is fitting for men's souls at that stage of their progressive development from incarnation to incarnation. Christianity is endlessly full, endlessly rich; but this endless fullness and richness was not always available to man in the centuries in which Christianity had first to be proclaimed. What presumption it would be to say, even at the present time, that mankind is now mature enough to understand Christianity in its infinite fullness and its infinite greatness! That alone is true Christian humility which says: The scope of Christian wisdom is without end, but the receptivity of man for this wisdom was at first limited; it will become ever more and more complete.

Let us look at the first Christian centuries, right up to our own day. A great and mighty impulse, the greatest ever given in the earthly evolution of man, was given with the Christ Impulse. This is something of which everyone can become conscious who learns to understand the process of the evolution of the earth. But one thing must not be forgotten: only a small part of what the Christ Impulse contains has been understood up till now. For the past, close on two millennia of Christian development, what was given in esoteric Christianity could be a teaching only for those to whom Christianity was brought, and could not be embodied in outer, exoteric life.

For example, there could not be embodied what can be taught in our present epoch as a Christian truth, namely, the fact of the re-embodiment of mankind, or reincarnation. When we, in Anthroposophy, teach reincarnation to-day, we are fully conscious, in the light of the Whitsun festival, that reincarnation is a Christian truth which can be made known exoterically to-day to a humanity which has become more mature, but which could not be made known to the immature souls of the first Christian centuries. Little is done by attempting to show, by citing single instances, that the thought of reincarnation is also to be found in Christianity. One can discover from those opponents of Spiritual Science who call themselves Christian, how little is known in exoteric Christianity of reincarnation. The only thing they know is that Spiritual Science teaches something or other about reincarnation, and that is enough for them to say it is Indian or Buddhistic. They little know that it is the living Christ, from out of the spiritual world, who is the living teacher of reincarnation to-day. People regard reincarnation, as also the doctrine of karma, as things which up till now have not been able to penetrate into exoteric Christianity. But it is little by little, in one age after another, that the fullness of truth which lies in Christianity has had to be given to mankind. With the Christ Impulse itself, which is not a teaching or a theory, but a real force that has to be experienced in the innermost depths of the soul, with this Impulse itself something is actually imparted to us. What is this? It is just when we bring the Christ Impulse into connection with the teaching of reincarnation that we can understand what is given in it.

We know that a few centuries before Christianity began, another teaching, a formal teaching, was given, for the most part in Eastern lands, namely, the teaching of the Buddha. While the power and the impulse of Christianity were spreading from the Near East into the West, the Far East witnessed a widespread expansion of Buddhism. Of this teaching we know that it contained the doctrine of reincarnation. But in what form? For those who know the facts, Buddhism presents itself as the final product of the teachings and revelations which had preceded it. Accordingly it contained in itself all the greatness of antiquity; it put forward something like a final conclusion of the primeval wisdom of mankind in which was contained the doctrine of reincarnation.

But how did Buddhism clothe this doctrine in its revelations? In such a way that man looks back at the incarnations which he has passed through, and forward to the incarnations which he has still to experience. That man passes through many incarnations is an entirely exoteric teaching in Buddhism. It is quite wrong to speak of an abstract similarity between all religions. In actual truth, mighty and far-reaching differences exist between them, as, for example, between Christianity, which for centuries harboured no thoughts of reincarnation, and exoteric Buddhism, which lived and moved in such thoughts. In this connection it is entirely useless to put together mere abstractions; rather must one recognise the world of reality. It is an utter certainty for Buddhism that man always returns to the earth; the Buddhist, however, looks on this in the following way. He says: “Combat the urge to descend into these incarnations, for thy real task is, as quickly as possible, to free thyself from the thirst to go through them, so as to live in freedom from all earthly incarnation in a spiritual realm!” It is thus that the Buddhist regards the sequence of human incarnations, striving to acquire all the forces he can in order to withdraw from these incarnations as soon as possible. One thing Buddhism has not got—and this is plain in its exoteric teaching. It does not contain anything that can be called an impulse strong enough to grow ever more towards human perfection. That would enable the Buddhist to say: “By all means, let the incarnations come! Through the Christ Impulse we can so shape ourselves that we can extract ever more and more from them. Through the Christ Impulse we possess a force which can give these incarnations an ever loftier content. Permeate Buddhism—or what is found in it of the true doctrine of reincarnation—with the Christ Impulse, and you have a new element which gives the earth a new meaning in the evolution of mankind!”

On the other hand, Christianity has the Christ Impulse, and that as something exoteric. But how has it regarded this Impulse in earlier centuries? Undoubtedly the exoteric Christian sees in it something infinitely perfect, that should live in himself as the great ideal which he himself approaches ever more and more. But how presumptuous it would be for the Christian to think that in a single earthly life he could have enough power to bring to fulfilment the seed which can be kindled into life through the Christ Impulse! How presumptuous it would be for the exoteric Christian to believe that in one life he would be in the position to achieve anything adequate for the unfolding of the Christ Impulse. Accordingly the exoteric Christian says: “We go through the gates of death. Then in the spiritual world we shall have the opportunity to develop further and to unfold the Christ Impulse further in that world.”—And so the exoteric Christian conceives of a spiritual life after death from which there is no return to the earth.

Does, however, an exoteric Christian who believes that an existence in a spiritual world is thus added to the life on earth, understand the Christ Impulse? He does not understand it in the least. For if he did, he would never believe that what the Christ Impulse has to give him can be achieved in a spiritual life beyond death, without any return to the earth. In order that the Deed on Golgotha could take place, in order that this victory over death could be achieved, the Christ Himself had to descend into this life on earth; and this indeed He had to do in order to accomplish something which can be experienced and lived through only on our earth. The Christ came down to earth because the power of the Deed of Golgotha had to work upon men in the physical body.¹ Hence also the Christ-power can work at first only on men in the physical body. What man has received of the power of the Mystery of Golgotha in the physical body, this can then work further, when he goes through the gate of death. But only as much of the Christ Impulse as man has taken into himself in the life between birth and death works on. Man must strive on to the further completion of that which he has already received, when he comes again to the earth, and only in his successive earthly lives to come can he learn to understand all that lives in the Christ Impulse. Never could man understand the Christ Impulse, if he lived only once on the earth. This Impulse, therefore, must lead us through repeated earth-lives, because the earth is the place for the discovery of the meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha.

And so Christianity is only complete when one replaces the assumption that one could live out the Christ Impulse in one incarnation, by the other thought, that only through repeated earthly lives can man so perfect himself that he may live out in himself the Christ Ideal. What he has experienced on earth in connection with it he can then bring up into the spiritual world. But he can only bring as much as he has grasped on the earth of that Impulse, which itself had to be fulfilled on the earth, as the most important event of all earthly happenings. Thus we see that the thought which must next be added to Christianity out of spiritual revelation is the thought of reincarnation, born from out of Christianity itself. When we understand this we shall see what it signifies for us to-day, in the sphere of Spiritual Science, to be conscious that we fashion ourselves out of the Whitsun revelation. It signifies for us that we are right in listening to the revelation, in seeing a renewal of the revelation of that power which was in the “fiery tongues,” which descended upon those who first understood the Christ.

In this way, a great deal of what has been said recently in our Movement can come before us to-day with new meaning. We see the fusion of East and West, of the two mighty revelations of Christianity and Buddhism; we see them flow together in the spiritual. And through the right understanding of the Christian Whitsun thought we can justify the flowing together of these two greatest religions of the earth to-day. But it is not through merely external impulses that we can unite these two revelations; that would be to stop at mere theorising. Anyone trying to take what Christianity and Buddhism have provided up till now and to weld them together into a new religion would not create a new spiritual content for mankind, but only an abstract theory, incapable of warming a single human soul. If this is to happen, new revelations are necessary. And that, for us, is what resounds to-day as the proclamation of spirit-knowledge—audible, it is true, only to such as have matured themselves in spiritual-scientific schooling: “Let the Christ, who is always with us, speak in us.”

We know that we live in an important time of human evolution: that already before the close of this century new forces will develop in the human soul which will lead man to the unfolding of a kind of etheric clairvoyance, whereby, as if through a natural development, there will be renewed for certain human beings the event which Paul experienced at Damascus; and that in this way, for the heightened spiritual powers of man, Christ will return in an etheric garb. Ever more and more souls will share in what Paul experienced at Damascus. Then it will be seen in the world that Spiritual Science is the revelation, heralding a renewed and transformed truth of the Christ Impulse. Only those will understand the new revelation who believe that the fresh stream of the spiritual life into which Christ poured Himself will remain living for all ages to come. Whoever will not believe that, may preach a Christianity which has grown old. But whoever believes in the Whitsun event and understands it, will also bring to mind that what began with the Christian evangel will develop ever farther and farther and will speak to men in ever new tones; that there will always be present the individualised soul-worlds of the Holy Spirit, the fiery tongues, and that in ever-renewed fire and impulse the human soul will be able to live with and live out of the Christ Impulse.

We can believe in the future of Christianity when in very truth we understand the Whitsun thought. And then there comes before us the mighty picture, with a force that works like a force present in the soul itself. Then do we feel the future, as the first understanders felt it under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, if only we are willing to make alive in our souls that which knows nothing of the boundaries separating the different parts of humanity and speaks a language which all souls, all the world over, can understand. We feel the thought of peace, of love, of harmony, which lies in the Whitsun thought. And we feel this Whitsun thought enlivening our Whitsun festival. We feel it to be a surety for our hope of freedom and eternity. Because we feel the individualised spirit awakening in our souls, there awakens in us the most significant element of the spirit: the endlessness of the spiritual. Through sharing in the spiritual, man can become conscious of his immortality and his eternity. And in the Whitsun thought we truly realise the power of those primal words which Initiate after Initiate continued to implant, and which reveal to us the meaning of wisdom and eternity: we feel them as a Whitsun thought, handed on from epoch to epoch, in the words which to-day for the first time sound forth exoterically:

Being is ranged by Being in the widths of Space,
Being follows on Being in the courses of Time,
Remain'st thou in widths of Space, in courses of Time,
Then art thou, 0 man, in the passing world alone.
But above them with power thy soul itself upraises
When, divining or knowing, it beholds what passes not;
Beyond the widths of Space, beyond the courses of Time!

Wesen reiht sich an Wesen in den Raumesweiten,
Wesen folgt auf Wesen in den Zeitenläufen.
Verbleibst du in Raumesweiten und Zeitenläufen,
Bist du, 0 Mensch, allein in Gebiete der Vergänglichkeit.
Über sie aber erhebt deine Seele sich gewaltiglich,
Wenn sie erahnend oder wissend schaut das Unvergängliche
Jenseits der Raumesweiten und jenseits der Zeitenläufe!

• 1. i.e. in and through physical consciousness.

Mementos of time, the Festivals direct our feelings and thoughts to the past. By their own inner significance they awake in us the thoughts which bind us to all that our own souls held sacred in the past. And moreover, the understanding of everything which underlies the Festivals awakes in us thoughts which direct our gaze to the future of mankind, in other words, to the future of our own souls. Feelings are awakened in us which fill us with enthusiasm to fit ourselves to play our part in times to come; our will is fired by ideals which give us strength so to labour that we may be enabled to fulfil more and more perfectly our tasks for the future.

In the deeper sense of the word Whitsuntide may be characterised by a looking in spirit back to the past and yet on towards the future. The significance of the Festival for the nations of the West stands out before us in a stupendous scene, which appeals to the deepest feelings of our nature. The scene is familiar to every one here present. After the accomplishment of the Mystery of Golgotha, the Founder of Christianity lingers awhile among those who are able to see Him in that body which He used after the Mystery, and the further succession of events is placed before our souls in an impressive series of pictures. The body which the Founder of Christianity took after the Mystery of Golgotha, dissolves visibly, and is revealed to His most intimate disciples in the mighty vision known to us as the Ascension and ten days later there follows that which is now to be shown us in a picture, speaking a language which goes to the very hearts of all willing to understand it. The disciples of Christ are assembled; those who first understood Him are gathered together. Profoundly they feel the mighty impulse which has entered through Him into the evolution of mankind and their souls anxiously await the fulfilment of the promise made to them, of events which should be accomplished in their own souls. Gathered together in deep fervour of spirit are these first disciples and followers of the Christ-Impulse on the day, time-honoured in their land, of the Feast of Pentecost. Their souls are raised to a loftier perception; they are called upon, as it were, by a ‘rushing mighty wind,’ to direct their powers of observation to that which should come, to that which awaited them when, reborn again and again with that fiery impulse which they had received into their hearts, they should live on this Earth of ours. Before our souls there rises a picture of the ‘fiery tongues’ as they descend on the head of each disciple and a new and mighty vision appears to those present, in which they see what the future of this impulse will be.

Those first disciples of Christ who were assembled together and who beheld in spirit the spiritual world, felt that they were not addressing only those nearest to themselves within the Emit of space and time. They felt their hearts transported far away to the people scattered over the face of the Earth; they felt that something lived in their hearts translatable into all languages and into the understanding of the hearts of all men. In this mighty vision, in which the future of Christianity is revealed, these earliest disciples saw themselves as if encircled by the future believers out of all the nations of the Earth; it impressed them with the feeling that they would one day have the power to announce the Christian message in words which would be understood, not alone by those nearest to them in space and time, but by all the human beings who would in future work out their destiny on the Earth.

That was the sum of feeling and inner experience which filled the minds of those first followers of Christ on that first Christian Whitsunday. But according to the explanation given in the true esoterically Christian sense and clothed in symbolical language, the Spirit, also called the Holy Ghost, Who lives, and Who poured out His force on Earth at the time when Christ Jesus descended in spirit into the Earth, Who first appeared again at the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist—the same Spirit in another form, in that of many single fiery tongues, descended on the different individualities of the first Christian believers. On Whitsunday, we hear of the Holy Ghost in a special form. Let us call up the meaning of the expression ‘Holy Ghost,’ as it is understood in the Gospels. How in olden times (including pre-Christian times) was the spirit generally described?

In ancient times spirit was mentioned in many connections but especially in one. The view was held, which is now again justified by the knowledge gained through our present Spiritual Science, that when a human being at birth enters upon the existence between birth and death, the body in which this individuality incarnates is determined in a two-fold manner. In reality this body has a double task to perform. As regards our corporality we belong to the whole human race, but we are also more particularly individuals of a certain nation, race or family. In those olden times preceding the proclamation of Christianity, there was but little to be observed of what we may call ‘common humanity,’ there was little of that feeling of belonging to one another which has been gaining ground more and more in the human heart ever since the proclamation of Christianity, the feeling that prompts the words: ‘Thou art man in common with all men on Earth!’ On the other hand, the feeling of the individual that he belonged to a particular nation or family was all the stronger. This feeling is even expressed in the venerable Hindu religion, in the belief that only he can be a true Hindu who is one by community of blood. In many respects, though they had often broken through it, the old Hebrews kept strictly to this principle before the coming of Christ Jesus. In their opinion a man was one of their nation only because his parents, who also belonged to it through blood relationship, had placed him there. But there was something else that invariably made itself felt. In old times and in all nations the individual always felt himself more or less to be the member of a group, the member of an organism which was his nation, and the farther we retreat into the far distant past the more intense do we find the feeling of membership of an organism, of a nation and the rarer becomes the feeling of being a single individual. But gradually the human being learnt also at the same time to be conscious of himself as an individual,—as a separate human being with distinct human qualities of his own. Two principles were felt to be at work in ordinary human life: the attachment to a people, and the individualisation as a separate human being.

Now the forces behind these two principles were variously attributed to the parents. The principle by which the human being belonged to his nation, that which made him a part of the community, was ascribed to heredity on the mother’s side. One in sympathy with these old opinions would say of the mother: The spirit of the people reigns in her; she was filled with the spirit of the people, and has handed on to the child the attributes common to all the members of his nation. Of the father it was said that he was the bearer and transmitter of the principle that tends to confer the individual, personal qualities. When, therefore, a human being was born into the world, it was said—among the old Hebrews of pre-Christian time, for instance—he is a person, an individual, by virtue of the paternal forces, whereas the whole nature of the mother was steeped in the spirit of her people and she has handed that spirit on to her child. It was said of the mother that the national spirit dwelt in her. And in this connection the spirit specially meant was that Spirit who from the spiritual regions directs his forces to mankind, by causing them to flow into the human race in the physical world, by way of the maternal principle.

But now, through the impulse of Christ a new point of view had arisen, namely, a belief that the Spirit formerly reverenced, the National Spirit, should be replaced by one akin to him, indeed, but Whose activity was of a far, far loftier character—a Spirit Who held the same relationship to all mankind as the former Spirit had held to the separate peoples. This Spirit was to be communicated to mankind, and was to fill men with the inward strength which should inspire the thought: 11 no longer feel myself belonging merely to a fraction of humanity, but to the whole of it. I am a member of the whole human race—I shall continue to feel more and more a member of that whole race!’ The force which thus poured out over the whole of mankind the element of common humanity, was ascribed to the Holy Ghost. The Spirit dwelling in the force which communicated itself from the nation to the mother was exalted from ‘Spirit’ to ‘Holy Spirit.’

He Who should bring mankind the power of developing in earthly existence that principle common to all mankind, could only dwell as the First-born in a body inherited by the power of the Holy Ghost; and this power of the Holy Ghost was conceived in the Annunciation, by the mother of Jesus. And in the Gospel of St. Matthew we read of the consternation of Joseph, of whom we are told that he was a pious man. According to the old meaning of the words this would imply that Joseph was one who would consider that, if he ever had a, child, it must be born out of the Spirit of its nation. Joseph now learns that the mother of his child is filled, ‘penetrated’ (for this is the true meaning of the word in our language) by the force of a Spirit, but not merely of a National Spirit (Archangel); she is penetrated by the force of that Spirit Who is the Spirit of universal humanity I And he believes that he can have no fellowship with a woman who bears in her the Spirit of all humanity and not that Spirit in whom he had piously placed his confidence; he does not believe that such a woman could ever be the mother of his children. Therefore, as it is said, he was ‘minded to put her away privily.’ And it was not until he, too, had received from the spiritual world a communication bestowing power on him, that he could make up his mind to have a son of that woman who was penetrated and filled with the power of the Holy Ghost. This Spirit is therefore creatively active, inasmuch as He pours out His forces into the evolution of mankind at the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. And the same Spirit is again active in that stupendous deed, the Baptism of John in the Jordan. Now we understand what is meant by the power of the Holy Ghost. It is the force which will raise man more and more above all that would tend to differentiate and isolate him, to that which makes him a member of the whole of humanity over all the Earth, that force which works like a link binding every soul to every other soul—no matter in what body it may be.

Now we are told of this same Holy Ghost that it is He Who descended, in a new revelation at Whitsuntide, into the individualities of the first confessors of the Christian faith. At the Baptism by John we have the picture of the Spirit in the form of a dove; but now another picture is given in the tongues of fire. It is one dove, a single form, in which the Holy Ghost manifests at the Baptism by John; whereas at Whitsuntide He manifests in many separate tongues! And every one of these tongues is an inspiration for the individual souls for every single individual among the first confessors of Christianity. What then does this Whitsun symbol represent to our souls?

After the Bearer of the universal human spirit had finished His labours on Earth, after the Christ had rendered up His last vestures to be dissolved in the Universe; when the visible form of Christ was dissolved as Unity in the spiritual part of the Earth,—then, for the first time, the possibility was created, that from the hearts of the disciples of the Christ-Impulse should go forth the ability to speak of that Christ-Impulse, to labour in conformity with that Christ- Impulse. Gone is the Christ-Impulse in so far as He had manifested in visible form, into the one and indivisible spiritual world, in the Ascension; ten days later He reappears, bom out of the hearts of every one of these first disciples. The reappearance in manifold form of the same Spirit that had been operative in the force of the Impulse of Christ, made of the first disciples of Christianity the channels and preachers of the Message of Christ, thus placing at the beginning of the Christian evolution the mighty token which proclaims to us the message. As each of the first disciples was privileged individually to receive the Christ-Impulse in the form of fiery tongues, kindling inspiration in his own soul, so can each one of you, if you endeavour to understand the Impulse of Christ, receive this power individually in your hearts. That power can then grow more and more in you and can become more and more perfect. That token that was set up at the beginning of Christianity may become the fountain of a vast hope welling up in us. And as he advances in perfection, the human being can feel that the Holy Ghost speaks from within him in proportion as his thought, feeling and will are penetrated with the Holy Ghost, Who, by cleaving asunder, or multiplying Himself, becomes an individual Spirit in each separate human individuality in whom He works. Thus, as regards our future evolution, the Holy Ghost is for us men the Spirit of development into free men, the freedom of the human soul. The spirit of freedom reigns in that Spirit which was poured out on the first disciples of Christianity, on that first Christian Whitsun Festival—the Spirit Whose most salient quality is indicated by Christ Jesus Himself in the words: ‘Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free 1’ Man can be free only in spirit; so long as he is dependent on that in which his spirit dwells, namely his body, so long is he a slave of that body; he can only be free when he finds himself again in spirit and when, out of that spirit, he becomes master of that which is within him. ‘To be free’ presupposes that we have found the spirit within us. The true spirit, in whom we can find ourselves, is the universal human spirit, which we recognise as the force of the Holy Ghost entering us at Whitsuntide, the spirit to which we must give birth within ourselves and which we must allow to become manifest.

Thus we see the symbol of Whitsuntide transformed into our mightiest ideal of the free unfolding of the human soul to a self-contained, free individual. This was felt more or less dimly even by those who, not impelled by any clear consciousness of their own, but acting on inspiration, were concerned in the fixing of Whitsunday on a definite day in the year. Even this outer institution of the Feast-days is remarkable and no one who is unable to trace the guiding wisdom, even in the fixing of the Festivals, has any real understanding of the world.

Let us take the three Festivals, Christmas, Easter and Whitsuntide. As a Christian Festival Christmas falls on a certain fixed day of the year. It is fixed once for all on that particular day of December; every year we celebrate the Christmas Feast on that same day. Easter is different, it is a ‘movable’ feast, dependent on the constellations in the heavens. Easter falls on the first Sunday after the full moon following the Vernal equinox. In order to determine this, man must turn his gaze heavenward, to the expanse in which the stars follow their course and from the fields of space proclaim to us the laws governing the world. Easter is a movable feast, precisely as in every individual the moment varies which awakens the force of the higher man, endowed with a higher consciousness, to free himself from ordinary, lower human frailty. As in one year Easter falls on one day, the next year on another day, so also in the case of the individual human being—according to his past and the earnestness of his striving—sooner or later the moment will come in which he will be able to say with conviction: ‘I feel that I have the strength to bring forth a higher self from within me!’

Christmas is, however, an immovable feast. At that Festival one can look back over the course of the year, on the blossoming and the decay of Nature, with all the joys of the swelling and bursting forth of Nature’s forces. Then one sees the Earth-life in its state of sleep, into which it has withdrawn its germinal force. External Nature has withdrawn, taking with it all its germinating forces. When the outer world of the senses sees least of the manifestation of these springs of growth, when the Earth itself shows how at a certain period the spiritual forces withdraw, in order that they may gather strength for a new year of life, when physical nature is most silent, at that time of the Christmas Festival man should let the thought of a hope stir within him—the hope that he is not only united with the Earth-forces now lying dormant at Christmastide, but is also united with those other forces, which are never dormant, the forces dwelling in the spiritual regions as well as on Earth. This hope should rise in his soul when he watches the Earth as it were sinking to rest. From the inmost depths of the soul itself this hope will spring; it will be the spiritual light of the soul at the time of deepest gloom outside in physical Nature. Then shall man be reminded by the token of the Christmas Festival that he is for a while bound to his earth-body with the forces of the ego, in the same way as everything in the nature of manifestation around him is bound to the circuit of the Earth during the year. Coinciding with the sleep of the Earth, which every year begins at the same period, is the Christmas Festival when man should call to mind that he is chained to a body, but that he is not condemned to remain bound to that body; that he may cherish the hope that he will find strength to make of himself a free soul. What we recognise as important in the Christmas Festival should thus remind us of our connection with our body and of the heritage which is ours to free ourselves from that body. But it depends on the earnestness of our endeavour whether we bring to fruition sooner or later the forces for which we dare to hope, and which will lead us back again to spiritual worlds, to heavenly places.

The Easter Festival should awaken such thoughts in us. It should remind us that we have not only at our disposal those forces that are ours through our body and which are also divine, spiritual forces; it should remind us besides that as human beings we can rise above the Earth. It is the Easter Festival that reminds us of that force which sooner or later will be awakened within us. The Easter Festival has been instituted as a movable feast, in conformity with the heavenly constellations. Man must arouse in himself the remembrance of what he can become, by raising his eyes to Heaven, in order to find help to free himself from all earthly existence, to raise himself above all earthly life. In the strength we derive in this way lies the possibility of our inner freedom, our inner liberation. When we feel in ourselves the ability to rise above ourselves, we shall be striving verily to attain that elevation. Then shall we desire to make our inner man free from the bonds that chain him to the outer man. Then shall we indeed dwell in the outer man, but we shall be fully conscious of our inner spiritual force, the inner man. On the consciousness that we can liberate ourselves, on the experience of that inward Easter Festival within us, depends the attainment of that other experience, that of Whitsuntide—the penetration of that spirit which has now found itself, with a content, not of this world, but of the spiritual realms. This content from the spiritual worlds can alone make us free. It is the spiritual truth of which Jesus Christ said: ‘Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’ The Festival of Whitsuntide depends on the Easter Festival. It is a consequence of the Easter Festival—that feast determined by the constellations in the heavens; Whitsuntide is, as it were, a necessary consequence, one that must follow the Easter Festival at the end of a certain number of weeks.

On deeper reflection, we thus discover sovereign wisdom even in the fixing of the seasons for those Festivals; we discover that their recurrence precisely in this order in the course of the year is a necessity and that they show us with each new year what we as human beings have been, are, and may yet become. If we are able to reflect on these Festivals in this way, as Festivals uniting us with all the past, they will be to us like an impulse bestowed on humanity, urging us forward. Whitsuntide especially, if we so understand it, arms us with confidence, strength and hope, when we know what our inward growth may be if we become followers of those who, through their understanding of the Christ-Impulse first made themselves worthy of the outpourings of the tongues of fire. The anticipation of the conception of the Holy Ghost enraptures our spiritual gaze when we understand its character as a Festival of the future. But if we would attain this we must learn to understand the true Christian significance of Whitsuntide. Then we must learn to understand the language of those mighty tongues, of the stupendous Pentecostal Inspirations. What were the tones, as of sounding brass, which were heard above the ‘rushing’ of the mighty wind, described in that picture presented to us as that of the first Christian Whit-Sunday? What voices were those which in a wonderful cosmic harmony declared ‘Ye who are the first to understand it, have felt the force of the Christ-Impulse, and the power of Christ has become such a force in your own souls, that, since the Crucifixion on Golgotha, every one of these souls has become able to behold Christ present with you; thus mightily has the Christ- Impulse worked in some among you!’

The Christ-Impulse is one of freedom; its effect, in the truest sense, is not seen in its operation outside the human soul. The true working of the Christ Impulse appears when it is active within the individual human soul itself. Those who were the first to understand Christ felt themselves called by their experience on the Day of Pentecost to announce what they had witnessed, what was revealed to them in the visions and inspirations of their own souls as the content of the doctrine of Christ. Being conscious that the Christ-Impulse had been at work in the holy preparation that they had made before the Whitsuntide Festival, they felt themselves called by the power of the Christ-Impulse working in them, to let the tongues of fire speak through them—the Holy Ghost individualised in themselves—and to go forth and preach the message of Christ. Not merely what Christ had said to them, not alone the words spoken by Him, were recognised by those who understood the significance of the Day of Pentecost; they recognised as the words of Christ those uttered by the power of a soul that feels within it the Impulse of the Christ. For this reason the Holy Ghost pours Himself, as an individualised Spirit, into every single human soul that develops in itself the power to feel the Christ-Impulse. To such a soul the words: ‘I am with you always, even unto the end of the world!’ have a new meaning. Those whose efforts to receive the Christ-Impulse are sincere, may also feel called by the stimulus of that Impulse working in their hearts to proclaim the Word of Christ, however new, however different it may sound in every fresh epoch of humanity. The Holy Spirit was not poured forth so that we might adhere to the few words in the Gospels which were uttered in the first decades after the founding of Christianity, but He was poured forth, so that the message of Christ might always say something new. According as the human souls advance from one epoch to another, and from incarnation to incarnation, a new message must be proclaimed to them. Is it reasonable to suppose that the souls progressing from incarnation to incarnation should always be obliged to listen to the proclamation of Christ in the words which were spoken when those same souls were living in bodies contemporary with the historical appearance of Christ on earth? The power to speak to all men till the end of the Earth-cycle is innate in the Christ-Impulse.

But something else is necessary, in order to make it possible that the message of Christ may be announced in every epoch, in conformity with the advance that has meantime taken place in the human souls. When the whole power and might of the Pentecostal Impulse is borne in upon us, we must feel that it is our bounden duty to give heed to the words: ‘I am with you always unto the end of the Earth-cycle!’ And if we are filled with the Christ-Impulse, we can hear those words, first spoken at the beginning of Christianity by its Founder, sounding through all ages—the words that Christ speaks at all times, because He is always with us—but words audible only for those who desire to hear them.

Thus we comprehend the power of the Whitsuntide Impulse as something that bestows on us the right to regard Christianity as an ever growing organism, ever revealing itself to us in new aspects. And we whose mission it is to proclaim in the Anthroposophy of our day the words of Christ, echoing to us from the heavenly choirs—we say to all who would preserve Christianity in its original form: ‘We are those who truly understand Christ, for we understand the true significance of Whitsuntide!’

When we feel thus called again and again to draw from Christianity new treasures of wisdom, we find in it that wisdom which is needed by the soul, developing from incarnation to incarnation. Christianity is infinite in its fulness and inexhaustible in its riches; but mankind was not ready for the reception of this fulness in the early centuries of its development, when it was necessary to proclaim it for the first time. Even to-day it would be a presumption to say that mankind is now ripe for the understanding of Christianity in its boundless fulness and magnitude! True Christian humility alone consists in the feeling that the extent of Christian wisdom is unlimited, but man’s receptivity for this wisdom, though at first restricted, will become ever more and more complete. Let us glance at the first centuries of Christianity and on up to our own time. A vast and powerful impulse, the greatest that has been given during the evolution of the Earth, was imparted to the world in the Christ-Impulse. Any one can realise this truth who has become acquainted with the fundamental laws governing the evolution of the Earth. But one thing must not be forgotten in this connection, namely, that only a fraction of all that is contained in the Christ-Impulse is as yet understood. In the two thousand years of Christian evolution which have almost elapsed since the coming of Christ, the teachings of esoteric Christianity have been hidden from the world to which Christianity was brought, nor have they yet penetrated into exoteric life. That doctrine, for instance, which can be proclaimed as a Christian truth in the present epoch, the return of the human soul to earth-life, or reincarnation, could not become a part of the Christian teachings at an earlier time. And if we now proclaim reincarnation, we do so in full consciousness, and in the same sense in which we have to-day characterised the Whitsuntide Festival—that reincarnation is a Christian truth which can be communicated to mature souls to-day, even exoterically, but which could not be proclaimed to the still immature souls of the first centuries of Christendom.

It is of little use to point out particular passages to prove that the idea of reincarnation is found in Christianity. We can learn from all the opponents of Anthroposophy who call themselves ‘Christians,’ how little is known of reincarnation in exoteric Christianity. All that is known is that theosophy teaches something called rebirth, and this is quite enough to call forth the assertion: ‘That is an Indian—or Buddhist—doctrine!’ How little do such people know that the living Christ is the living Teacher from the spiritual worlds of reincarnation. They merely think that reincarnation and with it the doctrine of Karma, have not as yet been able to find their way into exoteric Christianity. In fragments, and at different times, mankind has gradually to be prepared for the reception of the fulness of truth contained in Christianity. Together with the Impulse of the Christ, which is no doctrine or theory, but a force that must be experienced in the depths of the soul, we gain something else. What do we gain? It is precisely when we unite the doctrine of reincarnation with the Christ-Impulse that we can understand what it brings us.

We know that only a few centuries before the dawn of Christianity, other, more doctrinal teachings were given in the East:—the teachings of Buddha. While the force and the impulse of Christianity had spread from Asia Minor westwards, the East was the scene of a widespread extension of Buddhism. We know that that religion contains the doctrine of reincarnation. But in what form? For those acquainted with the facts, Buddhism presents itself as the final outcome of teachings and revelations that had gone before. Hence the accumulated greatness of primal ages is contained in Buddhism; yet we see in it the final consequence of the primeval wisdom of humanity, which likewise contained the teaching of reincarnation. What form does reincarnation assume in the revelations of Buddhism? It is presented so that the human being looks back on incarnations through which he has lived—and forward to others still lying before him. The doctrine that the human being passes from life to life is entirely exoteric in Buddhism. Let no one speak in abstract terms of the similarity of all religions; in reality, vast and mighty differences exist, for instance, between Christianity, in which for centuries there was no thought of reincarnation, and exoteric Buddhism, which lived and moved in this doctrine. Instead of bringing together abstractions, we must be willing to admit facts. To the Buddhist it is a positive truth that man returns over and over again to earth-life; but he regards it in a light which urges him to say to himself: ‘Fight against the desire to return to incarnation, for it is your duty to free yourself as soon as possible from the longing for rebirth, and to live in a spiritual realm free from all earthly incarnations.’ Thus the Buddhist recognises the sequence of human lives; but he strives to acquire all possible strength in order to free himself as soon as possible from the necessity for reincarnation. There is something lacking in Buddhism,—its exoteric teaching proves this. It is wanting in something which we may call an impulse strong and vigorous enough to prompt the Buddhist to say: ‘Let me be born again and again if necessary!’ We can so change ourselves through the Christ-Impulse that we are enabled to draw more and more strength from it. Through that Impulse a strength comes to us that makes each incarnation more perfect than the last. Penetrate Buddhism—or the teaching of reincarnation in Buddhism—with the Impulse of Christ, and you have a new element, one which imparts to the Earth a new significance in the evolution of man!

On the other hand we have Christianity. The Christ-Impulse is contained in it indeed, but exoterically. What has this Impulse been to Christians in the past centuries? The exoteric Christian undoubtedly sees in its infinite perfection something to which he looks up as his great ideal and which he approaches ever more and more. But what presumption would it be for the Christian to imagine that in a single life he could somehow gather strength sufficient to bring to fruition the germ that can be stimulated by the Impulse of Christ. What presumption it would be for the exoteric Christian to suppose that he were capable of doing anything adequate to bring the Christ-Impulse to fruition and unfoldment! Such a belief would cause the exoteric Christian to say: ‘We pass through the gates of death; in the spiritual realms the opportunity will be given us of evolving and of bringing to fuller development the Christ-Impulse there.’ And thus the exoteric Christian believes in a spiritual life after death—one from which he does not return to Earth. Does the exoteric Christian who believes in a never-ending spiritual existence following life on Earth, understand the Christ-Impulse? He does not understand it. Did he understand it, he would never believe that, without returning to earth, he could win for himself what the Christ-Impulse has to give him in a spiritual existence following death.

In order that the Deed on Golgotha might be accomplished, in order that the victory over death might be achieved, it was necessary that Christ Himself should descend to Earth-life;—this was necessary in order to fulfil that which could only be fulfilled and experienced on our Earth. For this reason Christ descended to Earth; because the force of that Deed of the Mystery on Golgotha must of necessity influence man in the physical body. If he has received the Impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha while in the physical body, that impulse will continue to work when he has passed through the gates of death. Only as much of the impulse as man has received in his life on Earth, continues to work after death. When he returns again to Earth, he must work out for himself the perfecting of what he has received. Only in the later earth-lives succeeding one another can man learn what is the real nature of the Christ- Impulse. Never could he understand the Christ-Impulse in one life; it must be his guide through repeated earth-lives; because Earth is the place for the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Thus Christianity will be lacking in something till the presumptuous thought that the Christ-Impulse could be exhausted in one life is replaced by that other: that repeated earth-lives are necessary to enable man so to perfect himself that he can give free expansion to the ideal of Christ within him. Then he can carry with him into the spiritual worlds the result of his experiences on Earth. But he can bring with him only as much of that Impulse as he has assimilated while on Earth,—that Impulse, the most important event in the whole history of our Earth, which had to be accomplished on the Earth.

We thus see that the next revelation by which Christianity must be enriched from the spiritual worlds, is the idea of rebirth, evolved out of Christianity itself. When we understand this we shall recognise the importance for us to-day, in the region of Spiritual Science, of the knowledge gained by us as a result of the Whitsuntide revelation. That knowledge confers on us the right to participate in the revelation; it means that we can feel a renewal of the revelation of the force conveyed in the ‘tongues of fire’ that descended on the first disciples of Christ.

We are reminded to-day in a new form, of much of what has been said of late in our movement. It is like the drawing together of East and West, of the two mighty revelations of Christianity and Buddhism. In spirit we can see the fusion of those two streams, and, through a right understanding of the Christian signification of Whitsuntide, we are able to vindicate the fusion of these two greatest of all religions at present on the face of the Earth. But it is not possible to unite two such streams of revelation by mere outer impulses: that would only be theory. Were any one to take what Christianity has given us up to the present time and weld it into a new religion, together with what Buddhism has so far given to the world, he would provide nothing new for the nourishment of the souls of mankind, but merely an abstract theory incapable of inflaming a single human soul. If such an event is to happen, new revelations must come. For us that is the message which has become known as Anthroposophy—a message now indeed audible only to those who have, by an assiduous assimilation of Spiritual Science, prepared themselves to let Christ speak through them—the Christ Who is ever with us. It has been pointed out that the present is a momentous time for the evolution of mankind; that before the close of this century new forces will be developed in the human soul, which will produce in man a kind of etheric clairvoyance, by which, as by a natural development, a repetition of the vision beheld by Paul on his way to Damascus will be experienced by certain persons; so that Christ will reappear clothed with etheric raiment, to those whose spiritual forces have been raised. The vision of Paul at Damascus will become a more and more frequent occurrence. Then the world will become aware of the existence of Anthroposophy, and will see in it the revelation foretold of a new presentment of the truth of the Christ-Impulse. This new revelation will be understood by those alone who believe that the fresh current of spiritual life into which Christ once and for ever poured Himself, will remain a living force for all time to come. Those who will not believe this may continue to proclaim a Christianity that has outlived its time. But they who understand it and believe in the real Whitsuntide outpouring will be able to comprehend that that which began with the Christian Annunciation will grow continually and will speak to mankind again and again in tones that are ever new. They will understand that the individualised outpouring of the Holy Ghost, the ‘fiery tongues,’ will ever be with us and that the human soul will know and bring to fruition the Christ Impulse with constantly renewed ardour and devotion.

We can believe in the future of Christianity when we truly understand the significance of Whitsuntide. And then with a power that works as a force immanent in the soul, the stupendous scene comes before us; then we realise the future as the first apostles realised it, under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost; so that we long to bring to life in our own souls something that knows not the bounds set between the separate fragments of humanity; something that speaks a tongue understood by all the souls on the face of the Earth. We are sensible of the peace, the love and harmony contained in the thoughts of Whitsuntide, and we feel the vivifying power of those thoughts at our Whitsun Festival. We recognise in them a pledge of our hope of freedom and of eternity. As we feel in our souls the awakening of the individualised spirit, the most momentous attribute of spirit—the infinity of the spiritual—is aroused within us. By his participation in the spiritual, man may become aware of his immortality and eternity. In the thought of Whitsuntide we feel most deeply the power of those primeval words, which Initiate after Initiate has implanted in various languages, revealing to us the meaning of Wisdom and Eternity. We feel them as a Whitsuntide thought that has been transmitted from epoch to epoch, in words spoken to-day for the first time exoterically:

‘Wesen reiht sich an Wesen in den Raumesweiten,
Wesen folgt auf Wesen in den Zeitenlaufen.
Verbleibst du in Raumesweiten und Zeitenläufen,
Bist du, O Mensch, allein im Gebiete der Vergänglichkeit.
Über sie aber erhebt deine Seele sich gewaltiglich,
Wenn sie erahnend oder wissend schaut das Unvergängliche
Jenseits der Raumesweiten und jenseits der Zeitenläufe!’

An approximate rendering of the foregoing is:

‘Being is ranged beside Being in the realms of space,
Being follows Being in the cycles of time.
Wouldst thou remain within the limits of space and time,
Then art thou, 0 man, in the realms of the Temporal alone.
But mightily thy soul wings its flight above space and time,
When, dimly foreseeing or knowing, it beholds the Eternal
Beyond the bounds of space and beyond the cycles of time.’