The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today it will be necessary to come to terms with a number of things that actually can be understood only if one is able to overcome certain prejudices that have long been cultivated and zealously inculcated right up to the present day. Much of what shall be said here today, and further substantiated tomorrow, must be comprehended through raising oneself up to an inner viewing [Anschauung] of the spirit. You must consider that when the results of a scientific investigation of the spirit are met with a demand for proof such as is recognized by contemporary science or jurisprudence, or even contemporary social science—which is so useless in the face of life itself—one does not get very far at all. For the true spiritual scientist must already bear this method of demonstration within himself. He must have schooled himself in the rigorous methods of contemporary science, even of the mathematical sciences. He must know what mode of demonstration is demanded in these circles, and he must suffuse the processes of his whole inner life with this method: therein he builds the foundation for a higher mode of cognition. For this reason it is usually the case that when the demands of normal consciousness are placed before the spiritual scientist, he is thoroughly at home in the field from which the question stems. He has long since anticipated the objections that can be raised. One could even go so far as to say that he is only a spiritual scientist in the true sense of the word—in the sense in which we characterized spiritual science yesterday—to the extent that he has subjected himself to the rigorous discipline of the modern scientific method and knows at least the tenor of modern scientific thought quite well. I must make this one preliminary remark and add one other. If one cannot transcend the manner of demonstration that experimentation has made scientific habit, one shall never attain knowledge that can benefit society. For in a scientific experiment one proceeds—even if one cherishes the illusion that it is otherwise—in such a way that one moves in a certain direction and allows phenomena to confirm what lives within the ideas one has formulated as a natural law, or perhaps mathematically.

Now, when one is required to translate one's knowledge into social judgments, in other words, if the ideas that one has formulated as the natural laws of contemporary anthropology or biology or Darwinism—no matter how “progressive” this Darwinism might be—are to have validity; if one wants to translate them into a social science that can become truly practical, this knowledge obtained through experimentation is totally inadequate. lt is totally inadequate because one cannot simply sit in a laboratory and wait to see what one's ideas call forth when they are applied to society. Thereby thousands upon thousands of people could easily die or starve or be made to suffer in some other way. A great part of the misery in our society has been called forth in just this way. Because they have originated in pure experimentation, our ideas have gradually become too narrow and impoverished to subsist in reality, which they must be able to do if thought is ever to enrich the sphere of practical life. I have already indicated the stance the spiritual scientist must take regarding the two boundaries that arise within cognition—the boundaries at the poles of matter and consciousness—if he is to attain knowledge that can reflect light back into nature and at the same time forward into the social future. I have shown that at the boundary of the material world one must not allow one's thinking to roll on with its own inertia in order to construct mechanistic, atomistic, or molecular world conceptions tending toward the metaphysical but call a halt at the boundary and develop instead something that normally is not yet present as a faculty of cognition. One must develop Inspiration. On the other hand, I have shown you that if one wishes to come to an understanding of consciousness, one must not attempt, as Anglo-American associative psychology does, to penetrate into consciousness with ideas and concepts called forth by the natural world. It must be entirely clear in one's mind that consciousness is constituted such that these ideas culled from the external world can gain no access. We must abandon such ideas and seek rather to enter the realm of Imaginative cognition. In order to achieve self-knowledge we must permeate the concepts and ideas with content, so that they become images. Until the view of man which was born in the West and now has all of civilization in its grasp is transformed into Imaginative cognition, we shall never progress in coming to terms with this second boundary presenting itself to normal human cognition.

At the same time, however, one can say that humanity has evolved from certain stages, now become historical, to the point that requires that it progress to Inspiration on the one hand and Imagination on the other. Whoever is able to perceive what humanity is undergoing at the present, what is just beginning to reveal its first symptoms, knows that forces are rising out of the depths of human evolution that tend toward the proper introduction of Imagination and Inspiration into human evolution.

Inspiration cannot be attained except by exercising a certain faculty of mental representation in the way that I described in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, and shall describe at least in outline in the coming lectures. When one has progressed far enough in a kind of inner self-cultivation, a schooling of the self in a certain form of mental representation [Vorstellen]; when one schools oneself to live within the realm of representations, ideals, and concepts that live within the mind—then one learns what it means to live in Inspiration. For when one exercises consciously the faculty that otherwise “mathematicizes” within us during the first seven years up to the change of teeth (in normal life and in conventional science this occurs unconsciously), when one enters into this “living mathematics,” into this “living mechanics,” it is as though one were to fall asleep, entering not into unconsciousness or nebulous dreams but into a new form of consciousness that I shall begin to describe to you today. One takes up into full consciousness what otherwise works within as the sense of balance, the sense of movement, and the sense of life. It is as though one were to wrest from oneself what otherwise lives within as sensations of balance, movement, and life so that one lives within them with the extended mathematical representations. Tomorrow I shall speak about this at greater length. One passes over into another consciousness, within which one experiences something like a toneless weaving in a cosmic music. I cannot describe it otherwise. One unites with this weaving in a toneless music in a way similar to that by which one makes the physical body one's own through the activity of the ego in childhood. This weaving in a toneless music provides the other, rigorously demonstrable awareness that one is now outside the body with one's soul-spirit. One begins to comprehend that even in normal sleep one's soul-spirit is outside the body. Yet the experience of sleep is not permeated with that which vibrates when leaving the body consciously through one's own initiative, and one experiences initially something like an inner unrest, an inner unrest that exhibits a musical quality when one enters into it with full consciousness. This unrest is gradually elucidated when the musical element one experiences there becomes a kind of wordless revelation of speech from the spiritual cosmos. These matters naturally appear grotesque and paradoxical to these who hear them for the first time. Yet much has arisen in the course of cosmic evolution that first appeared paradoxical and grotesque, and human evolution will not advance if one wishes to pass over these phenomena only half-consciously or unconsciously. Initially one has only a certain experience, an experience of a kind of toneless music. Then out of this experience of toneless music there arises something which, when experienced, enables us to comprehend inwardly a content as meaningful as that which is conveyed to us when we listen outwardly to a man who speaks to us via sensible words. The spiritual world simply begins to speak, and one has only to begin to acquire an experience of this.

Then one comes to experience something at a higher level. One no longer only weaves and lives in a toneless music and no longer merely perceives the speech of the super-sensible spiritual world: one begins to recognize the contours of something that reveals itself within this super-sensible world, the contours of beings. Within this universal spiritual speech that one initially encounters there emerge individual spiritual beings, in the same way that we, listening at a lower level to the speech of another man, crystallize or organize—if I may use such trivial expressions—what reveals itself as his soul and spirit into something substantial. We begin to live within the contemplation and knowledge of a spiritual reality. This realm of the spirit replaces the vacuous, insubstantial, metaphysical world of atoms and molecules: it confronts us as the reality that lies behind the phenomena of the sense world. We no longer stand in the same relation to the boundary of the material world as when we allow conceptualizing to roll on with its own inertia, attempting to carry the kind of thinking developed through interaction with the sense world beyond the boundary. Now we stand in a relationship to this boundary of sense such that the spiritual content of the world suddenly stands revealed there. This is one boundary to cognition.

Ladies and gentlemen, humanity at this point in its evolution is yearning to step out of itself, to step out of the body in this way, and one can see this tendency exemplified quite clearly in certain individuals. Human beings seek to withdraw from their bodies that which the spiritual scientist withdraws with full consciousness. The spiritual scientist withdraws this in a way analogous to the way in which he applies inwardly obtained concepts in a systematic, organized fashion to the natural world. As some of you will know, for some time now a great deal of attention has been paid to a remarkable illness. Psychologists and psychiatrists term this “pathological questioning or doubt” [Grübelsucht; Zweifelsucht]; it would perhaps better be termed “pathological skepticism.” One now encounters innumerable instances of this illness in the most remarkable forms, and it is already necessary that the study of this disease in particular be promoted within the cultural context of our time. This illness manifests itself—you can learn a great deal about it from the psychiatric literature—in these people, from a certain age onward, usually from puberty or the period immediately preceding puberty, no longer being able to relate properly to the external world. When confronted with their experiences in the external world, these people are overcome by an infinite number of questions. There are certain individuals who, though they remain otherwise fully rational, can pursue their duties to a great extent and are fully cognizant of their condition, must begin to pose the most extraordinary questions if they are but slightly withdrawn from what normally binds them to the external world. These questions simply intrude into their life and cannot be brushed aside. They intrude themselves especially strongly in individuals with healthy, or even conspicuously healthy, organizations—in individuals who have an open mind and a certain understanding for the manner in which modern scientific thinking proceeds. They experience modern science in this way, so that they cannot understand at all how such questions arise unconsciously thereby. Such phenomena are evident especially in women, who have less robust natures than men and who also tend to acquire their knowledge of natural science, if they undertake to do so, not so much through the highly disciplined scientific literature but rather through works intended for laymen and dilettanti. For if at this time immediately before puberty, or just when puberty is on the wane, there should occur an intense preoccupation with modern scientific thought in the way I have just described, among such people a high incidence of this disease can be observed. It manifests itself in these people having then to ask: where ever does the sun come from? And no matter how clever the answers one gives them, one question always calls forth another. Where does the human heart come from? Why does it beat? Did I not forget two or three sins at confession? What happened when I took Communion? Did a few crumbs of the Host perhaps fall to the ground? Did I not try to mail a letter somewhere and miss the slot? I could produce a whole litany of such examples for you, and you would see that all this is eminently suited to keeping one uneasy.

Now, when the spiritual scientist comes to consider this matter he feels himself right at home. It is simply a manifestation of the element in which the spiritual scientist resides consciously when he achieves an experience of the toneless musical speech of spiritual beings through Inspiration. Those afflicted with pathological skepticism enter this region unconsciously. They have cultivated nothing that would enable them to comprehend the state into which they enter. The spiritual scientist knows that throughout the entire night, from falling asleep until waking, one lives in an element consisting entirely of such questions, that out of the sleeping state countless questions arise within one. The spiritual scientist knows this condition, because he can experience it consciously. Whoever approaches these matters from the standpoint of normal consciousness and seeks thus to comprehend them will perhaps make attempts at all kinds of rationalistic explanations, but he will not arrive at the truth, because he is unable to comprehend the matter through Inspirative cognition. Such a one sees that there are, for example, people who go to the theater in the evening and on leaving the theater are helpless to resist the countless questions that overcome them: what is this actress's relationship to the outer world? What was that actor doing some previous year? What are the relationships between the individual actors and actresses? How was this or that flat constructed? Which painter is responsible for each? and so on, and so on. For days on end such people are subject to the influence of this pesky questioner within. This is a pathological condition that one begins to understand only by realizing that these people enter a region the spiritual scientist experiences in Inspiration by approaching this realm differently from these afflicted with this pathological condition. Persons in this pathological state enter the same region as the spiritual scientist, but they do not take their egos with them; in a certain sense they lose their egos upon entering this realm. And it is just this ego that is the ordering faculty. It is the ego that is capable of bringing the same kind of order into this world as we are able to bring to our physical environment. The spiritual scientist knows that one lives in this same region between falling asleep and waking. Everyone who returns from the theater actually is deluged by all these questions in the night while he sleeps, but due to the operation of certain laws sleep normally spreads itself out over this interlocutor, so that one has finished with him by the time one awakes again.

In order to perform valid spiritual research, one must bear into this region unimpaired judgment, complete discretion, and the full force of the human ego. Then we do not live in this region in a kind of super-skepticism but rather with just as much self-possession and confidence as in the physical world. And actually all the meditative exercises that I have given in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, are intended in large part to result in a greater ability to enter this region preserving one's ego in full consciousness and in strict inner discipline. The purpose of a large part of the spiritual scientist's initial schooling is to keep him from losing the inner support and discipline of the ego while traversing this path.

The finest example in recent times of a man who entered this region without full preparation is someone whom Dr. Husemann has characterized here in another context. The finest example is Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche is, to be sure, an extraordinary personality. In a certain sense he was not an intellectual at all. He was not your conventional scholar. With the tremendous gifts of genius, however, he grew out of puberty into scientific research; with these tremendous gifts he was able to take in what the contemporary sciences can offer. That, despite having acquired this knowledge, he did not become a scholar of the conventional sort is shown quite simply by the polemics of so exemplary a modern scholar as Wilamowitz, who came out in opposition immediately after the appearance of the young Nietzsche's first publication. Nietzsche had just published his treatise, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, in which there resounds a readiness to undergo initiation, to enter the musical, the Inspirative—even the title reveals his yearning for the realm that I have characterized—but he could not. The possibility did not exist. In Nietzsche's time a conscious spiritual science did not exist, but in giving his work the title, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, he indicated that he wished to come to terms with a phenomenon such as Wagnerian tragedy out of this spirit of music. And he entered further and further into this realm. As I said, Wilamowitz immediately came out in Opposition and wrote his polemics against The Birth of Tragedy, in which he completely rejected from his academic point of view what Nietzsche, unschooled but yearning for knowledge, had written. From the point of view of modern science he was of course completely justified. And actually it is hard to understand how so excellent a thinker as Erwin Rohde could have believed a compromise was possible between this modern philology that Wilamowitz represented and what lived within Nietzsche as a dark striving, as a yearning for initiation, for Inspiration. What Nietzsche had acquired in this manner, had inwardly appropriated, grew out into the other fields of contemporary sciences. It grew into positivism, namely that of the Frenchman, Comte, and the German, Dühring. While cataloguing Nietzsche's library in the 1890s I saw with my own eyes all the marks Nietzsche had so conscientiously made in the margins of Dühring's works, from which he acquired his knowledge of positivism; I held all these books in my own hand. I could enter sympathetically right into the manner in which Nietzsche took positivism up into himself. I could well imagine how he then reverted to an extra-corporeal existence, where he experienced this positivism again without having penetrated into this region sufficiently with his ego. As a result, he produced works such as Human, All Too Human, exhibiting a constant oscillation between an inability to move within the world of Inspiration and a desire to remain there nonetheless. One notices this in the aphoristic progression of Nietzsche's style in these works. Nietzsche strives to bring his ego into this realm, but it tears itself away again and again: thus he produces not a systematic, artistic presentation but only aphorisms. It is just this constant self-interruption in aphorism that reveals the inward soul of this remarkable spirit. And then he rises to encounter that which has provided modern science, the contemporary physical sciences, with their greatest riddles. He rises up to encounter what lives in Darwinism, what lives in the theory of evolution, and attempts to demonstrate how the most complicated organisms have gradually arisen out of the most primitive. He penetrates into this realm, a realm into which I have sought in a modest way to bring inner structure and an inward mobility—you can follow this in the discussion of Haeckel in my book, The Riddles of Philosophy. Nietzsche enters this realm, and there emerges from his soul the notion of a kind of super-evolution [Überevolutionsgedanke]. He follows the course of evolution up to man, where this notion of evolution explodes to create his “super-man.” In following this self-progression of evolving beings he loses the content, because he is unable to obtain the true content through Inspiration: he is confined to the empty idea of “eternal recurrence.”

Only by virtue of the inner integrity of his personality was Nietzsche able to avoid what the pathologist calls “pathological skepticism.” It was something within Nietzsche, a prodigious health that Nietzsche himself sensed underlying his debility, that asserted itself and kept him from falling prey to complete skepticism, leading him rather to contrive what later became the content of his most inspiring words. No wonder, then, that this excursion into the spiritual world, this striving to proceed from music to the inner word, to inner being, culminated in the most unmusical of ideas—that of “the eternal recurrence of the same”—and the empty, merely lyrical “superman.” No wonder that it had to end in the condition that his physician, for example, diagnosed as an “atypical case of paralysis.”

Yes, this man who did not know Nietzsche's inner life, who was incapable of judging it from the standpoint of spiritual science and confronted the images and ideas of Nietzsche's inner life as a mere psychiatrist, without sympathetic understanding—this man found only an abstraction to answer the question posed by the concrete case before him. With regard to all nature du Bois-Reymond had said in 1872: ignorabimus. Confronted with exceptional cases, the psychiatrist says: paralysis, atypical paralysis. Confronted with concrete cases that reveal the essence of present human evolution, the psychiatrist can say only ignorabimus, or ignoramus. This is but a translation of what is clothed in the words “atypical case of paralysis.”

This eventually destroyed Nietzsche's body. It produced the condition that makes Nietzsche such a revealing phenomenon within our contemporary cultural life. This is the other form of the debility appearing in certain highly cultivated individuals, which psychiatrists term pathological doubt or hyper-skepticism. And the phenomenon of Nietzsche—here I must be allowed a personal remark—stood before my eyes the moment that, trembling, I entered his room in Naumburg a few years after his illness. He lay upon the sofa after dinner, staring into space. He recognized nobody around him and stared at one like a complete idiot, but the light of his former genius still gleamed within his eyes.

If one looked at Nietzsche knowing all one could about his world view, about the ideas and images that lived within his soul; if, unlike the mere psychiatrist, one stood before Nietzsche, this ruin of a man, this physical wreck, with this image in one's soul, then one knew: this man strove to view the world revealed by Inspiration. Nothing of this world came forth to him. And the part of him that desired to achieve Inspiration finally extinguished itself: for years the physical organism was filled by a soul-spirit devoid of content.

From such a sight one can learn the whole tragedy of our modern culture, its striving for the spiritual world, its inclination toward that which can proceed from Inspiration. For me—and I do not hesitate in the slightest to introduce a personal remark here—this was one of those moments that can be interpreted in a Goethean manner. Goethe says that nature conceals no secret that she is not willing to reveal in one place or another. No, the entire world contains not a single secret that is not revealed in one place or another. The present stage of human evolution conceals the secret that humanity is giving birth to a striving, an inclination, an impulse that rumbles within the social upheavals our civilization is undergoing—an impulse that seeks to view the spiritual world of Inspiration. And Nietzsche was the one point where nature revealed its open secret, where the striving that exists within humanity as a whole could reveal itself. We must seek this if all those striving for education, seeking within modern science—and this shall be the entire civilized world, for education must become universal—if humanity as a whole is not to lose its ego and civilization fall into barbarism.

That is one great cultural anxiety, one great threat to civilization, which must be faced by anyone who follows the contemporary progress of human evolution and seeks to develop a thinking that can grasp the realities of social life. Similar phenomena assert themselves on the other side as well, on the side of consciousness. And we shall have to study these phenomena on the side of consciousness at least in outline as well. We shall see how these other phenomena arise out of the chaos of contemporary life, phenomena that appear pathologically and have been described by Westphal, Falret, and others. It is no accident that these have been described only just in the most recent decades. On the other side, that of the boundary of consciousness, we encounter the phenomena of claustrophobia, astraphobia, and agoraphobia,⁶ just as we encounter pathological skepticism on the side of matter. And in the same way (we shall discuss this further) in which pathological skepticism must be cured culturally-historically through the cultivation of Inspiration—one of the great talks of contemporary social ethics—we are threatened with the emergence of the phenomena that I shall describe tomorrow: claustrophobia, astraphobia, and agoraphobia. These emerge pathologically and can be overcome through Imagination, which, when civilization has acquired it, shall become a social blessing for all humanity.

• 6. “Astraphobia” = morbid dread of storms; “agoraphobia” = morbid dread of crossing, or being in, open spaces.

The Stages of Evolution of the Human Form The Expulsion of the Animal Beings. The Four Human Types.

We have become acquainted with significant events in the evolution of the human organism. We have followed the organism from its beginning to the point of time when the moon departed from the earth. When we say “point of time”, we are not speaking literally, for these events occupied long periods. From the first moment when the moon began to show signs of withdrawing, until its departure had been completely accomplished, long stretches of time passed and many things occurred in evolution. But we have observed man until about the departure of the moon. We have understood man's form which, as its lower part, approximately from the middle of the trunk to the height of the hips, manifested a configuration not entirely unlike his present shape. This body, although soft, could have been seen with modern eyes, whereas the upper parts were visible only to clairvoyant consciousness. We have already pointed out how something of man's nature at that time has been preserved by myth, religion, and art in the centaur. The various parts of the body, the members that gradually evolved into feet, shanks, knees, thighs, represent the animal forms of our earth at that time. These animal forms, however, remained stuck at certain stages of evolution, beyond which man was able to progress. Let us try to understand this thoroughly.

In the earliest times, when the sun departed, no animal forms had yet appeared. After the sun had left, the highest form of animal was a type that stood at the level of our present fish. When we say that the human feet corresponded to this fish-form, when we look at the feet in connection with fish, what does this mean? It means that the feet were the only part of man that was physically perceptible at the time when certain forms were left behind which swam about like fish in the water-earth. The remaining parts were present only in a finer etheric form. What we have described as the chalice or blossom form, the light-organ, was entirely etheric, an illuminated air-form. Only the lowest part of man was able really to wade through the water-earth like the fish that had remained behind.

Thereafter there were higher animals, which are depicted in the image of the Water-man, the man whose body was visible as high as the shanks. Man has been formed in such a way as to leave behind him, at every stage of his existence, certain animal forms, beyond which he slowly progressed. When the moon began to withdraw, man was so far along that he had given his lower half, his lower nature, a physical shape, whereas the upper half remained entirely pliable. Then, we see taking hold, from the moon, that influence of the moonlight which the Egyptians called Osiris, which can work upon man through the different aspects of the moon. We see how the most important formations of the upper body, i.e., the nerves that bring about the present upper body, are worked into man from the moon. The nerves, going out from the spine, formed the upper body. At first, through the tones that Osiris-Apollo played on the human lyre, the mid-part, the hip-region, comes into form. All that had to remain stuck at this point, beyond which man progressed, appears in later evolution in the forms of the amphibians.

As long as the moon was connected with the earth, it more or less pushed man's evolution down. The fish form was still connected with the sun, which is the reason for the feeling that every healthy person today has toward fish. Think of the pleasure of seeing a beautiful glittering fish, a shining water-animal, and then think of the antipathy one feels toward a frog, toad, or snake, although these stand higher than the fish. The forms of that time appear in their decadence as the present amphibians, but man once had such forms in his lower corporeality. As long as man had only a lower corporeality to the hips, he was a sort of dragon. It was only later, when the upper body assumed solid form, that by use of this he transformed the lower. We may say that the fish reflects the form that man possessed through the forces he received while the sun was still united with the earth. Until the sun departed, man stood at the level of the fish.

Now the great beings, the leaders of evolution, departed as they shaped their sun, to reunite with the earth only at a much later time. One of the Spirits, one who went out with the sun, the highest of the guiding Sun Spirits, was the Christ. We feel a deep reverence when we realize that up to this time man was united with this Being who, as the noblest spirit, once departed from the earth with the sun. One felt that through the form of the fish one could characterize the time of the sun's departure from the earth, and also the forms given through the Christ himself. Earlier, man on earth was united with the sun, and as the latter departed he saw, preserved in the fish-shape, the form that he owed to the sun spirits. As he progressed further, the sun spirits were no longer with him. The Christ departed from the earth when man still had the fish-shape. The initiates of the first Christian period preserved this form. In the Roman catacombs the fish appeared as the symbol of Christ, to remind men of the great cosmic event in evolution when the Christ was still united with them in the earth. Man had progressed to the fish-form when the sun split off, and the first Christians felt a reference to the Man-Christ-form in the fish symbol as something of great profundity. Such a significant sign, which we view as a symbol of an epoch of cosmic evolution, is far removed from the external explanations that are often given. The true symbols refer to higher spiritual realities. They did not merely “mean” something to the early Christians. Such a symbol is a picture of this or that which one can really see in the spiritual world, and no symbol is rightly interpreted unless one can point to what can be seen in the spiritual world in connection with it. All speculation is at most preparatory, and the expression “it means” does not touch the point; for one first really understands the symbol when one shows how a spiritual fact is portrayed in it.

Now let us proceed further with the evolution of humanity. Man took on the most diverse forms, and when he had developed upward to the hip-level he was at his ugliest in his physical form. The shape he then had is preserved in a decadent form in the snake. The time when man had reached the amphibian form, when the moon was still in the earth, is the time of shame and degeneracy in the evolution of mankind. Had the moon not then departed from the earth, the race of men would have succumbed to a horrible fate, failing increasingly into evil forms. Hence the feeling that the naive and unspoiled person has toward the snake, which retains the form that man had at his lowest point, is entirely justified. Precisely the unspoiled soul-attitude, which does not assert that there is nothing ugly in nature, feels a revulsion before the snake, because it is the document of human shame. This is not meant in a moral sense, but points to the lowest stage in human evolution.

Man had now to pass beyond this low point. He could do this only by abandoning the animal form and beginning to condense his spiritual upper part. We have seen that all the nobler parts could develop only through the intervention of the Isis and Osiris forces. In order for the Osiris forces to work in him, in order for the nobler part to develop, something important was necessary. Man's upper part had to find the possibility of bringing the spine out of the horizontal into the vertical. All this occurred through the influence of Isis and Osiris. Man was led from stage to stage by sun and moon, which kept themselves in balance. When half of man had become physical, sun and moon were in balance; therefore the hip region is designated as the Balance. At that time the sun was in the sign of the Balance.

Now we must not imagine—and this must be emphasized—that after the sun had stood in the sign of the Scorpion, and then in the sign of the Balance, the hips immediately developed. This would show the tempo of evolution as proceeding much too rapidly. The sun travels through the whole zodiac in a period of 25,920 years. At one time the sun rose in spring in the Ram, earlier in the sign of the Bull. The vernal point was always moving, going through the sign of the Bull, and so on. About 747 BC the sun again entered into the Ram; in our time it rises in the sign of the Fish. The time during which the sun traverses a sign has some significance, but such a period would not suffice for the change that had to take place in order for man to progress from sexuality under the sign of the Scorpion to the evolving of his hips under the sign of the Balance. We should have a false picture of this, if we thought that it could have occurred in one transit of the sun. The sun goes once through the zodiac, and only after this complete circuit does the forward step occur. In earlier times it had to make the transit oftener before the forward step could take place. Therefore we cannot apply to more ancient epochs the familiar time-reckonings of post-Atlantean times. The sun had first to go completely around—in earlier ages even several times—before evolution could progress a step. For those members that required a stronger molding, the time lasted even longer.

Man rises ever higher through this evolution. The next stage, during which the lower parts of the human trunk were formed, is designated by the sign of the Virgin.

We shall best understand evolution if we make it quite clear that, while man was becoming ever more human, animal beings remained stuck at certain stages. We have already said that man developed lungs, heart, and larynx through the influence of the moon forces. We have also shown to what extent Osiris and Isis participated in this. Now we must be quite clear that the higher organs, such as heart, lungs, larynx, and others, could develop only through the fact that the higher members of man—etheric body, astral body, and also the ego—cooperated in a definite way as the really spiritual members of man. After the point that was reached under the Balance, these higher members cooperated much more than in the preceding epochs. Thus the most manifold forms could appear. For example, the etheric body, or the astral, or the ego, could work especially strongly. It could even happen that the physical body might predominate over the other three members. Through this four human types developed. A number of men appeared who had worked out the physical body especially. Then there were men who had received their stamp from the etheric body, others whose astral nature predominated, and also ego-men, strongly marked ego-men. Each man showed what predominated in him. In the ancient times when these four forms originated, one could meet grotesque shapes, and the clairvoyant discovers what is present in the different types. There are representations, although these are not well known, in which the memory of this has been preserved. For example, those men in whom the physical nature became especially strong and worked on the upper parts, bore the mark of this in their upper part. Something was formed that was entirely suited to the baser form, and through what was thus active there appeared the shape that we see retained in the apocalyptic picture of the Bull, although not the bull of today, which is a decadent form. What was governed principally by the physical body at a certain time, remained stuck at the stage of the bull. This is represented by the bull and all that belongs to this genus, such as cows, oxen and so on. The human group in whom the etheric rather than the physical body was strongly marked, in whom the heart region was especially powerful, is also preserved in the animal kingdom. This stage, beyond which man has progressed, is preserved in the lion. The lion preserves the type that was worked out in the group of men in whom the etheric body was intensely active. The human stage in which the astral body overpowered the physical and etheric is preserved for us, although degenerated, in the mobile bird-kingdom, and is portrayed in the Apocalypse in the picture of the Eagle. The predominating astrality is here repelled; it raised itself from the earth as the race of birds. Where the ego grew strong, a being evolved that should actually be called a union of the three other natures, for the ego harmonizes all three members. In this group the clairvoyant actually has before him what has been preserved in the Sphinx, for the Sphinx has the lion-body, the eagle-wings, something of the bull form—and in the oldest portrayals there was even a reptilian tail, pointing to the ancient reptile form—and then at the front there is the human face, which harmonizes the other parts.

These are the four types. But in the Atlantean time the man-form predominated, as the human shape gradually constructed itself out of the eagle, lion, and bull natures. These transmuted themselves into the full human form, and this gradually transmuted itself into the shape that was present in the middle of Atlantis. Something else occurred through all these events. Four different elements, four forms, merged harmoniously in man. One is present in the physical body, in the bull nature; these are the predominating forces that evolved up to the evolutionary period of the Balance. Then we have the lion nature in the etheric body; in the astral body, in the predominating forces of the astral, the eagle or vulture nature; finally, the predominating forces of the ego, the true human nature. In single beings, one or another of these members had the upper hand. Through this the four types arose. But one could meet still other combinations. For example, the physical, astral, and ego might be equal, while the etheric predominated; that is a particular type of mankind. Then there were beings in whom the etheric, astral, and ego had the upper hand, while the physical was less developed, so that we have men in whom the higher members prevail over the physical body. Those human beings in whom the physical, astral, and ego predominated, are the physical ancestors of the males of today, while those in whom the etheric, astral, and ego predominated, are the physical ancestors of the females of today. The other types disappeared more and more; only these two remained, and evolved into the male and female forms.

How was it possible that gradually just these two forms evolved? This occurred through the differing effects of the working of the Isis and Osiris forces.

We have seen that in the phases of the new moon, when the moon is dark, Isis is characterized, but that Osiris is characterized in the shining phases of the full moon. Isis and Osiris are spiritual beings on the moon, but we find their deeds on the earth. We find them on the earth because it is through these deeds that the human race divided into two sexes. The female ancestors of human beings were formed through the influence of Osiris; the ancestors of men were formed through the workings of Isis. The influence of Isis and Osiris on mankind occurs through the nerve filaments, through the working of which mankind is developed into male and female. In the myth this is shown through Isis's seeking Osiris; the male and the female seek each other on the earth. Over and over again we see that wonderful events of cosmic evolution are hidden in these myths.

When the stage of the Balance had been passed, there gradually evolved in the upper members of the human being the differentiations we describe as male and female. Man remained unisexual much longer than the animals. What had long since occurred in the other animals now for the first time took place in man. There was a time when there was a unified human form, containing nothing of the method of propagation that later developed. During this time the nature of man contained both sexes in one being. “And God created man male-female,” is the way it stands in the Bible, not “Male and female created he them.”¹ He created both in one. It is the worst possible translation when we say, “Male and female created he them.” This has no sense in face of the real facts.

Thus we look into a time when human nature was still a unity, when every person was virginally reproductive. This stage of evolution is portrayed in Egyptian traditions drawn from the vision of the initiates. I have already pointed out that the older representations of Isis were as follows: Isis is suckling Horus; but behind her stands a second Isis with vulture wings, who holds out the Ankh to Horus to indicate that man stems from a time when these types were still separate and that later the other astral being also sank down into man. This second Isis points to how the astral element predominated at one time. What was later united with the human form is here portrayed behind the mother, as the astral form that would have had vulture wings if it had followed only the astrality. But the time when the etheric body predominated is portrayed in a third Isis, lion-headed, behind the others. This threefold Isis is thus presented out of a deep vision.

From this point of view we shall also understand something else. There must have been a period of transition between unisexuality and the division into two sexes; there could have been an interim condition between the virginal propagation in which fructification occurred as a result of the forces living in the earth—which at the same time were fertilizing substances—and the other method of bisexual propagation. This bisexual propagation emerged completely only in the middle of the Atlantean epoch. Earlier there was an intermediate stage. At a certain epoch in this intermediate stage, a change of consciousness took place. Man then required much longer spans of time than today to go through an alternation of consciousness. That was a time in which consciousness was especially strong when, at night, man experienced himself as a spiritual being among his spiritual companions. Day-consciousness, on the other hand, was weak. This condition of consciousness changed in another period, when man's consciousness while in the physical body became strong, while his soul life became weaker upon leaving the physical plane at night.

Now there were times in human evolution in which we must recognize a transitional stage. Man's consciousness for the physical world was still damped down, and it was in this damped-down state that fructification occurred. In the periods of subdued consciousness, when man rose out of the physical world into the spiritual, fructification took place, and man noticed this only through a symbolical dream-act. In tender, noble fashion he felt that fertilization had occurred in his sleep, and in his consciousness there was only a delicate and wonderful dream; for example, that he threw a stone, that the stone fell into the earth, and that a flower rose out of the earth.

It is of special interest that in this time we have also to take into account those who had achieved this stage earlier. When we say that certain beings remained at the Bull stage, others at the Lion, others at the Eagle, and so on, what does this mean? It means that if these beings had been able to wait, if they could have developed their full love for the physical world only at a much later time, they would have become human beings. If the lion had not willed to enter into the earthly sphere too early, it would have become a man; the same is true of the other animals that had split off up till then. Let us repeat it in this way: All that was human at the time when the lion formed itself said either, “No, I will not yet take up the lower substances; I will not go down into physical humanity,” or, “I will go down; I wish what has evolved to come into existence.” Thus we must think of two beings. The one remains above in the etheric realm of the air and only in its earthly parts reaches down to earth, while the other strives to descend completely to the earth. The latter might become a lion; the former became a man. Just as the animals remained fixed at a certain stage, so now certain men remained fixed. It was not the best men who became human too early. The better ones were able to wait; they remained for a long time without descending to the earth and there carrying out the act of fructification consciously. They remained in that state of cognition in which this act of fructification was a dream.

One may say that these men lived in Paradise. We find that the men who descended earliest to earth had especially strongly formed bodies, with crude and brutal countenances; while the men who wished first to mold the nobler parts had a much more human form. What is here described was preserved in a wonderful myth and rite. The rite is mentioned by Tacitus² and is well known as the myth of the goddess Nerthus (Hertha), who descended every year into the sea in a boat. But those who drew the boat had to be killed. Nerthus is thought of (as is often done today) as a phantom of the imagination, as some kind of goddess to whom a cult had been dedicated on some island. It has been believed that the Nerthus shrine could be found in Lake Hertha on Rügen. It was thought that the place where the chariot sank might be found there. This is a remarkable fantasy. The name of Lake Hertha is a new invention. Earlier it was called the Black Lake because of its color, and it never occurred to anyone to call it Lake Hertha and relate it to the goddess.

There are much deeper things in this myth. Nerthus is the transitional stage between the virginal fructification and the later propagation. Nerthus, who dives down into a shadowy consciousness, perceives her immersion in the sea of passion only in a tender, symbolic act; she perceives only a reflection of it. But although the higher humanity still felt things in this way, those who had already descended at that time had lost their original naïveté. They already saw this act; they were lost for the higher human consciousness, and were worthy of death. The memory of this event of primeval times was preserved in rites in countless regions of Europe. A ceremony was carried out at certain times in commemorative festivals. This was the chariot of the Nerthus image, which dived down into the sea of passion, and it was the gruesome custom that those who had to serve, who drew the chariot and could see what went on, had to be slaves and were killed during the rite, as a sign that these were mortals who saw the act. Only the initiated priests could remain present during the ceremony without being harmed. From this example we see that in the time when what is here described was known in certain regions, the Nerthus cult existed. In these regions there was a consciousness that shaped this myth and the rite.

Thus mankind evolved through the most manifold forms, and thus what are real facts were presented in pictures. It has already been said that such pictures should not be regarded as allegories, that their content has a relation to the real facts. Such pictures arose like dreams. So the Osiris myth also was dreamed before the pupil could actually see the facts of human evolution, and only what prepares the way for real seeing is a symbol in the occult sense. A symbol is a description of real events in pictures. In the next lecture we shall discuss the effect of these descriptions.

• 1. Most texts are silent on this question, but the International Critical Commentary (New York, Scribner's,1895), in discussing Genesis I:27, at least shows that others have entertained the male-female hypothesis. See also the curious remarks in the speech of Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium.
• 2. Tacitus's Germania, Section 40, reads in part as follows:
  “On an island of the ocean is a holy grove, and in it a consecrated chariot, covered with robes. A single priest is permitted to touch it. He interprets the presence of the goddess in her shrine, and follows with deep reverence as she rides away drawn by cows. Then come days of rejoicing and all places keep holiday, as many as she thinks worthy to receive and entertain her. They make no war, take no arms; every weapon is put away; peace and quiet are then, and then only, known and loved, until the same priest returns the goddess to her temple, when she has her fill of the society of mortals. After this the chariot and the robes—if you are willing to credit it, the deity in person—are washed in a sequestered lake: slaves are the ministrants and are straightway swallowed by the same lake: hence a mysterious terror and an ignorance full of piety as to what that may be which men behold, only to die.”

The essential purpose of the lectures I have been giving here for some weeks past was to show how through his spiritual life man partakes in what we may call the world of the Stars, just as through his physical life on Earth he partakes in earthly existence, earthly happenings. In the light of the outlook acquired through Anthroposophy we distinguish in man the forces that lie in his physical body and in his etheric or formative-forces body, and those that lie in his Ego and his astral body. You know, of course, that these two sides of his being are separated whenever he sleeps. And now we will think for a short time of a man while he is asleep. On the one side the physical body and the etheric body lie there in a state of unconsciousness; but the Ego and the astral body are also without consciousness.

We may now ask: Are these two unconscious sides of human nature also related during sleep?—We know indeed that in the waking state, where the ordinary consciousness of modern man functions, the two sides are related through thinking, through feeling and through willing. We must therefore picture to ourselves that when the Ego and astral body plunge down, as it were, into the etheric body and the physical body, thinking, feeling, and willing arise from this union.

Now when man is asleep, thinking, feeling, and willing cease. But when we consider his physical body we shall have to say: All the forces which, according to our human observation belong to Earth-existence are active in this physical body. This physical body can be weighed; put it on scales and it will prove to have a certain weight. We can investigate how material processes take their course within it—or at least we can imagine hypothetically that this is possible. We should find in it material processes that are a continuation of those processes to be found outside in Earth-existence; these continue within man's physical body in the process of nutrition. In his physical body we should also find what is achieved through the breathing process. It is only what proceeds from the head-organization of man, all that belongs to the system of senses and nerves, that is either dimmed or plunged in complete darkness during sleep.

If we then pass on to consider the etheric body which permeates the physical, it is by no means so easy to understand how this etheric body works during sleep. Anyone, however, who is already versed to a certain extent in what Spiritual Science has to say about man will realize without difficulty how through his etheric body the human being lives, even while asleep, amid all the conditions of the ether-world and all the etheric forces surrounding existence on Earth. So that we can say: Within the physical body of man while he is asleep, everything that belongs to Earth-existence is active. So too in the etheric body all that belongs to the ether-world enveloping and permeating the Earth is active.

But matters become more difficult when we turn our attention—naturally our soul's attention—to what is now (during sleep) outside the physical and etheric bodies, namely, to the Ego and astral body of man. We cannot possibly accept the idea that this has anything to do with the physical Earth, or with what surrounds and permeates the Earth as ether. As to what takes place during sleep, I indicated it to you in a more descriptive way in the lectures given here a short time ago, and I will outline it today from a different point of view. We can in reality only understand what goes on in the Ego and astral body of man when with the help of Spiritual Science we penetrate into what takes place on and around the Earth over and above the physical and etheric forces and activities.

To begin with, we turn our gaze upon the plant-world. Speaking in the general sense and leaving out of account evergreen trees and the like—we see the plant-world sprouting out of the Earth in spring. We see the plants becoming richer and richer in color, more luxuriant, and then in autumn fading away again. In a certain sense we see them disappear from the Earth when the Earth is covered with snow.

But that is only one aspect of the unfolding of the plant-world. Physical knowledge tells us that this unfolding of the plant-world in spring and its fading towards autumn is connected with the Sun, also that, for example, the green coloring of the plants can be produced only under the influence of sunlight. Physical knowledge, therefore, shows us what comes about in the realm of physical effects; but it does not show us that while all the budding, the blossoming and withering of the plants is going on, spiritual events are also taking place. In reality, just as in the physical human organism there is for example the circulation of the blood, just as etheric processes express themselves in the physical organism as vascular action and so forth, and just as this physical organism is permeated by the soul and spirit, so also the processes of sprouting, greening, blossoming and fading of the plants which we regard as physical processes, are everywhere permeated by workings of the cosmic world of soul and spirit.

Now when we look into the countenance of a man and his glance falls on us, when we see his expression, maybe the flushing of the face, then indeed the eyes of our soul are looking right through the physical to the soul and spirit. Indeed, it cannot be otherwise in our life among our fellow-men. In like manner we must accustom ourselves also to see spirit-and-soul in the physiognomy—if I may call it so—and changing coloring of the plant-world on our Earth.

If we are only willing to recognize the physical, we say that the Sun's warmth and light work upon the plants, forming in them the saps, the chlorophyll and so forth. But if we contemplate all this with spiritual insight, if we take the same attitude to this plant-physiognomy of the Earth as we are accustomed to take to the human physiognomy, then something unveils itself to us that I should like to express with a particular word, because this word actually conveys the reality.

The Sun, of which we say, outwardly speaking, that it sends its light to the Earth, is not merely a radiant globe of gas but infinitely more than that. It sends its rays down to the Earth but whenever we look at the Sun it is the outer side of the rays that we see. The rays have, however, an inner side. If someone were able to look through the Sun's light, to regard the light only as an outer husk and look through to the soul of it, he would behold the Soul-Power, the Soul-Being of the Sun. With ordinary human consciousness we see the Sun as we should see a man who was made of papier-maché. An effigy in which there is nothing but the form, the lifeless form, is of course something different from the human being we actually see before us. In the case of the living human being, we see through this outer form and perceive soul-and-spirit. For ordinary consciousness the Sun is changed as it were into a papier-maché cast. We do not see through its outer husk that is woven of Light.

But if we were able to see through this, we should see the soul-and-spirit essence of the Sun. We can be conscious of its activity just as we are conscious of the physical papier-maché husk of the Sun. From the standpoint of physical knowledge we say: ‘The Sun shines upon the Earth; it sparkles upon the stones, upon the soil. The light is thrown back and thereby we see everything that is mineral. The rays of the Sun penetrate into the plants, making them green, making them bud.’—All that is external. If we see the soul-and-spirit essence of the Sun, we cannot merely say: ‘The sunlight sparkles on the minerals, is reflected, enabling us to see the minerals,’ or, ‘The light and heat of the Sun penetrate into the plants, making them verdant’—but we shall have to say, meaning now the countless spiritual Beings who people the Sun and who constitute its soul and spirit: ‘The Sun dreams and its dreams envelop the Earth and fashion the plants.’

If you picture the surface of the Earth with the physical plants growing from it, coming to blossom, you have there the working of the physical rays of the Sun. But above it is the weaving life of the dream-world of the Sun—a world of pure Imaginations. And one can say: When the mantle of snow melts in the spring, the Sun regains its power, then the Sun-Imaginations weave anew around the Earth. These Imaginations of the Sun are Imaginative forces, playing in upon the world of plants. Now although it is true that this Imaginative world—this Imaginative atmosphere surrounding the Earth—is very specially active from spring until autumn in any given region of the Earth, nevertheless this dreamlike character of the Sun's activity is also present in a certain way during the time of winter. Only during winter the dreams are, as it were, dull and brooding, whereas in summer they are mobile, creative, formative. Now it is in this element in which the Sun-Imaginations unfold that the Ego and astral body of man live and weave when they are outside the physical and etheric bodies.

You will realize from what I have said that sleep in summer is actually quite a different matter from sleep in winter, although in the present state of evolution, man's life and consciousness are so dull and lacking in vitality that these things go unperceived. In earlier times men distinguished very definitely through their feelings between winter-sleep and summer-sleep, and they knew too what meaning winter-sleep and summer-sleep had for them. In those ancient times men knew that of summer-sleep they could say: During the summer the Earth is enveloped by picture-thoughts. And they expressed this by saying: The Upper Gods come down during the summer and hover around the Earth; during the winter the Lower Gods ascend out of the Earth and hover around it.—This Imaginative world, differently constituted in winter and in summer, was conceived as the weaving of the Upper and the Lower Gods. But in those olden times it was also known that man himself, with his Ego and his astral body, lives in this world of weaving Imaginations.

Now the very truths of which I have here spoken, show us, if we ponder them in the light of Spiritual Science, in what connection man stands, even during his earthly existence, with the extra-earthly Universe. You see, in summer—when it is summer in any region of the Earth—the human being during his sleep is always woven around by a sharply contoured world of Cosmic Imaginations. The result is that during the time of summer he is, so to speak, pressed near to the Earth with his soul and spirit. During the time of winter it is different. During winter the contours, the meshes, of the Cosmic Imaginations widen out, as it were. During the summer we live with our Ego and astral body while we are asleep within very clearly defined Imaginations, within manifold figures and forms. During winter the figures around the Earth are wide-meshed and the consequence of this is that whenever autumn begins, that which lives in our Ego and astral body is borne far out into the Universe by night. During summer and its heat, that which lives in our Ego and astral body remains more, so to speak, in the psycho-spiritual atmosphere of the human world. During winter this same content is borne out into the far distances of the Universe. Indeed without speaking figuratively, since one is saying something that is quite real, one can say: that which man cultivates in himself, in his soul, and which through his Ego and astral body he can draw out from his physical and etheric bodies between the times of going to sleep and waking—that stores itself up during the summer and streams out during winter into the wide expanse of the Cosmos.

Now we cannot conceive that we men shut ourselves away, as it were, in earthly existence and that the wide Universe knows nothing of us. It is far from being so. True, at the time of Midsummer man can conceal himself from the Spirits of the Universe, and he may also succeed in harboring reprehensible feelings of evil. The dense net of Imaginations does not let these feelings through; they still remain. And at Christmastime the Gods look in upon the Earth and everything that lives in man's nature is revealed and goes forth with his Ego and astral being. Using a picture which truly represents the facts, we may say: In winter the windows of the Earth open and the Angels and Archangels behold what men actually are on the Earth.

We on Earth have gradually accustomed ourselves in modern civilization to express all that we allow to pass as knowledge in humdrum, dry, unpoetic phrases. The higher Beings are ever poets, therefore we never give a true impression of their nature if we describe it in barren physical words; we must resort to words such as I have just now used: at Christmastime the Earth's windows open and through these windows the Angels and Archangels behold what men's deeds have been the whole year through. The Beings of the higher Hierarchies are poets and artists even in their thinking. The logic we are generally at pains to apply is only an outcome of the Earth's gravity—by which I do not at all imply that it is not highly useful on Earth.

It is what lives in the minds and hearts of men as I have just pictured it, that is of essential interest to these higher Beings; the Angels who look in through the Christmas windows are not interested in the speculations of professors; they overlook them. Nor, to begin with, are they much concerned with a man's thoughts. It is what goes on in his feelings, in his heart, that in its cosmic aspect is connected with the Sun's yearly course. So it is not so much whether we are foolish or clever on Earth that comes before the gaze of the Divine-Spiritual Beings at the time of Christmas, but simply whether we are good or evil men, whether we feel for others or are egoists. That is what is communicated to the cosmic worlds through the course of the yearly seasons.

You may believe that our thoughts remain near the Earth, because I have said that the Angels and Archangels are not concerned with them when they look in through the Christmas windows. They are not concerned with our thoughts because, if I may use a rather prosaic figure of speech, they receive the richer coinage, the more valuable coinage that is minted by the soul-and-spirit of man. And this more valuable coinage is minted by the heart, the feelings, by what a man is worth because of what his heart and feeling contain. For the Cosmos, our thoughts are only the small change, the lesser coinage, and this lesser coinage is spied out by subordinate spiritual beings every night. Whether we are foolish or clever is spied out for the Cosmos every night—not indeed for the very far regions of the Cosmos but only for the regions around the Earth—spied out by beings who are closest to the Earth in its environment and therefore the most subordinate in rank. The daily revolution of the Sun takes place in order to impart to the Cosmos the worth of our thoughts. Thus far do our thoughts extend; they belong merely to the environment of the Earth. The yearly revolution of the Sun takes place in order to carry our heart-nature, our feeling-nature, farther out into the cosmic worlds.

Our will-nature cannot be carried in this way out into the Cosmos, for the cycle of the day is strictly regulated. It runs its course in twenty-four hours. The yearly course of the Sun is strictly regulated too. We perceive the regularity of the daily cycle in the strictly logical sequences of our thoughts. The regularity of the yearly cycle—we perceive the after-effect of this in our heart and soul, in that there are certain feelings which say to one thing that a man does: it is good, and to another: it is bad.

But there is a third faculty in man, namely, the will. True, the will is bound up with feeling, and feeling cannot but say that certain actions are morally good, and others morally not good. But the will can do what is morally good and also what is morally not good. Here, then, there is no strict regularity. The relation of our will to our nature as human beings is not strictly regulated in the sense that thinking and feeling are regulated. We cannot call a bad action good, or a good action bad, nor can we call a logical thought illogical, an illogical thought logical. This is due to the fact that our thoughts stand under the influence of the daily revolution of the Sun, our feelings under the influence of its yearly revolution. The will, however, is left in the hands of humanity itself on Earth. And now a man might say: ‘The most that happens to me is that if I think illogically, my illogical thoughts are carried out every night into the Cosmos and do mischief there—but what does that matter to me? I am not here to bring order into the Cosmos.’—Here on Earth, where his life is lived in illusion, a man might in certain circumstances speak like this, but between death and a new birth he would never do so. For between death and a new birth he himself is in the worlds in which he may have caused mischief through his foolish thoughts; and he must live through all the harm that he has done. So, too, between death and a new birth, he is in those worlds into which his feelings have flowed. But here again he might say on Earth: ‘What lives in my feelings evaporates into the Cosmos; but I leave it to the Gods to deal with any harm that may have been caused there through me. My will, however, is not bound on Earth by any regulation.’—

The materialist who considers that man's life is limited to the time between birth and death, can never conceive that his will has any cosmic significance; neither can he conceive that human thoughts or feelings have any meaning for the Cosmos. But even one who knows quite well that thoughts have a cosmic significance as the result of the daily revolution of the Sun, and feelings through the yearly revolution—even he, when he sees what is accomplished on the Earth by the good or evil will-impulses of man, must turn away from the Cosmos and to human nature itself in order to see how what works in man's will goes out into the Cosmos. For what works in man's will must be borne out into the Cosmos by man himself, and he bears it out when he passes through the gate of death. Therefore it is not through the daily or the yearly cycles but through the gate of death that man carries forth the good or the evil he has brought about here on Earth through his will.

It is a strange relationship that man has to the Cosmos in his life of soul. We say of our thoughts: ‘We have thoughts but they are not subject to our arbitrary will; we must conform to the laws of the Universe when we think, otherwise we shall come into conflict with everything that goes on in the world.’—If a little child is standing in front of me, and I think: That is an old man—I may flatter myself that I have determined the thought, but I am certainly out of touch with the world. Thus in respect of our thoughts we are by no means independent, so little independent that our thoughts are carried out into the Cosmos by the daily cycle of the Sun. Nor are we independent in our life of feelings, for they are carried out through the yearly cycle of the Sun. Thus even during earthly life, that which lives in our head through our thoughts and, through our feelings in our breast, does not live only within us but also partakes in a cosmic existence. That alone which lives in our will we keep with us until our death. Then, when we have laid aside the body, when we have no longer anything to do with earthly forces, we bear it forth with us through the gate of death.

Man passes through the gate of death laden with what has come out of his acts of will. Just as here on Earth he has around him all that lives in minerals, plants, animals and in physical humanity, all that lives in clouds, streams, mountains, stars, in so far as they are externally visible through the light—just as he has all this around him during his existence between birth and death, so he has a world around him when he has laid aside the physical and etheric bodies and has passed through the gate of death. In truth he has around him the very world into which his thoughts have entered every night, into which his feelings have entered with the fulfilment of every yearly cycle ... “That thou hast thought; that thou hast felt.” ... It now seems to him as though the Beings of the Hierarchies were bearing his thoughts and his feelings towards him. They have perceived it all, as I have indicated. His mental life and his feeling-life now stream towards him.

In earthly existence the Sun gives light from morning to evening; it goes down and night sets in. When we have passed through the gate of death, our wisdom rays out towards us as day; through our accumulated acts of folly, the spiritual lights grow dark and dim around us and it becomes night. Here on Earth we have day and night; when we have passed through the gate of death, we have as day and night the results of our wisdom and our foolishness. And what man experiences here on this Earth as spring, summer, autumn and winter in the yearly cycle, as changing temperatures and other sentient experiences, of all this he becomes aware—when he has passed through the gate of death—also as a kind of cycle, although of much longer duration. He experiences the warmth-giving, life-giving quality (life-giving, that is to say, for his spiritual Self) of his good feelings, of his sympathy with goodness; he experiences as icy cold his sympathy with evil, with the immoral. Just as here on Earth we live through the heat of summer and the cold of winter, so do we live after death warmed by our good feelings, chilled by our evil feelings; and we bear the effects of our will through these spiritual years and days. After death we are the product of our moral nature on Earth. And we have an environment that is permeated by our follies and our wisdom, by our sympathies and antipathies for the good.

So that we can say: Just as here on Earth we have the summer air around us giving warmth and life, and as we have the cold and frosty winter air around us, so, after death, we are surrounded by an atmosphere of soul-and-spirit that is warm and life-giving in so far as it is produced through our good feelings, and chilling in so far as it is produced through our evil feelings. Here on Earth, in certain regions at least, the summer and winter temperatures are the same for all of us. In the time after death, each human being has his own atmosphere, engendered by himself. And the most moving experiences after death are connected with the fact that one man lives in icy cold and the other, close beside him, in life-giving warmth.

Such are the experiences that may be undergone after death. And as I described in my book Theosophy, one of the main experiences passed through in the soul-world, is that those human beings who have harbored evil feelings here on Earth, must undergo their hard experiences in the sight of those who developed and harbored good feelings.

It can indeed be said: All that remains concealed to begin with in the inner being of man, discloses itself when he has passed through the gate of death. Sleep too acquires a cosmic significance, likewise our life during wintertime. We sleep every night in order that we may prepare for ourselves the light in which we must live after death. We go through our winter experiences in order to prepare the soul-spiritual warmth into which we enter after death. And into this atmosphere of the spiritual world which we have ourselves prepared we bear the effects of our deeds.

Here on Earth we live, through our physical body, as beings subject to earthly gravity. Through our breathing we live in the surrounding air, and far away we see the stars. When we have passed through the gate of death we are in the world of spirit-and-soul, far removed from the Earth; we are beyond the stars, we see the stars from the other side, look back to the world of stars. Our very being lives in the cosmic thoughts and cosmic forces. We look back upon the stars, no longer seeing them shine, but seeing instead the Hierarchies, the Spiritual Beings who have merely their reflection in the stars.

Thus man on Earth can gain more and more knowledge of what the nature of his life will be when he passes through the gate of death. There are people who say: ‘Why do I need to know all this? I shall surely see it all after death!’—That attitude is just as if a man were to doubt the value of eyesight. For as the Earth's evolution takes its course, man enters more and more into a life in which he must acquire the power to partake in these after-death experiences by grasping them, to begin with in thought, here on the Earth. To shut out knowledge of the spiritual worlds while we are on the Earth is to blind ourselves in soul and spirit after death. A man will enter the spiritual world as a cripple when he passes through the gate of death, if here, in this world, he disdains to learn about the world of spirit, for humanity is evolving towards freedom—towards free spiritual activity. This fact should become clearer and clearer to mankind and should make men realize the urgent necessity of gaining knowledge about the spiritual world.

In our present civilization we need, above all, a new knowledge of Christ. This new Christ knowledge is to be gained increasingly through the effects upon us of the science of the spirit. Much, however, that today bears the official seal of Christianity is antagonistic to this new knowledge. It must come to be realized that a school of unselfishness is needed in our present culture. A renewing of responsibility, a deepening of man's moral life, can come only through a training in unselfishness, and under the conditions of the present age only those can go through this school who have won for themselves an understanding of real, all-pervading selflessness.

We can search through the entire evolution of the world without finding a deeper understanding of selflessness than that offered by Christ's appearance upon earth. To know Christ is to go through the school of unselfishness, and to become acquainted with all those incentives to human development that fall gently into our souls, warming and animating every unselfish inclination within us, arousing it from passive to active soul life.

Under the influence of materialism the natural unselfishness of mankind was lost to an extent that will be fully realized only in the distant future. But by contemplating the Mystery of Golgotha, by permeating our knowledge of it with all our feeling, we may acquire again, with our whole soul-being, an education in selflessness. We may say that what Christ did for earthly evolution was included in the fundamental impulse of selflessness, and what He may become for the conscious development of the human soul is the school of unselfishness. We shall best realize this if we consider the Mystery of Golgotha in its most inclusive connection.

This mystery, as we know it, took place once in the physical evolution of the earth. The Being whom we acknowledge as the Christ clothed Himself once in a human body, in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. But this act was preceded by three preparatory steps. Three times earlier something of a similar nature occurred, not as yet on earth but in the spiritual world, and we have in a sense, three Mysteries of Golgotha that had not yet been fulfilled upon the physical plane. Only the fourth took place in the physical realm, as related in the Gospels and in the Pauline Epistles. This greatest of earthly events was prepared for by three supramundane acts, one taking place in the old Lemurian period and two in the Atlantean. Although these three preparatory events occurred in the supramundane sphere, their power descended to the earth; we shall try to understand the effect of these forces upon human evolution.

In relation to our moral life, our understanding of the world, and in relation to all the activities of our consciousness soul, we must first become selfless. This is a duty of our present culture to the future. Mankind must become more and more selfless; therein lies the future of right living, and of all the deeds of love possible to earthly humanity. Our conscious life is and must be on its way to unselfishness. In a certain connection, essential unselfishness already exists in us, and it would be the greatest misfortune for earthly man if certain sections of his being were as self-seeking as he still is in his moral, intellectual and emotional life. If the same degree of selfishness could take over our senses, it would be a great misfortune because our senses now work in our bodies in a truly unselfish manner.

We have eyes in our body; through these eyes we see, but only because they are selfless and we do not feel them. We see things through them, but the eyes themselves are apart from our perception; it is the same with the other senses. Let us assume that our eyes were self-seeking. What would happen to men? We should approach the color blue, for example, and because our eyes would use up the color immediately within themselves instead of letting it pass through, we should feel a sort of suction in the eyes. If our eyes were as selfish as we are in our moral, intellectual and emotional life, and they wished to experience the effect of red in themselves, we should feel a sharp stab. If our eyes were self- seeking, all our impressions would give us sucking or stabbing pains. We should be painfully conscious that we have eyes. Today, however, humanity is aware of color and light without having to think of the seeing process. The eye is selflessly extinguished during perception. It is the same with the other senses.

In our senses unselfishness reigns, but they would never have reached this unselfishness if Lucifer, even in the old Lemurian age, had been left to his own devices. The spirit who said, as related in the Bible, “Your eyes shall be opened,” made it necessary to transfer man to a sphere of earthly life in which his eyes, if they had developed as they would have done under Lucifer's influence, would have become self-seeking. With every impression—and it would have been the same with the other senses—man would have cried out, “Oh, it stabs me here!” He would not have perceived red in his environment. Or he would have said, “Oh, something sucks in my eyes!” He would not have been aware of the color blue, but would have simply felt the suction. This danger to humanity was averted in the Lemurian age by a Being Who later, through the Mystery of Golgotha, incarnated in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. In this earlier age, however, He ensouled Himself—I cannot say incarnated—in one of the archangels.

While the earth was working through the Lemurian age, a Being living in spiritual heights became manifest—one might say, as a sort of prophecy of John's baptism—in an archangel who offered up his soul powers, and was thus permeated by the Christ. Through this means a force was released that acted within human evolution upon earth. Its effect was a quieting and harmonizing of our senses so that today we can use them and find them selfless. If we, understanding this, have become grateful to the world order, we shall say, looking back to these ancient times, that what makes it possible for us as sensory beings to enjoy without pain all the splendor of surrounding nature is Christ's first sacrifice. By ensouling Himself in an archangel He brought forth the power to avert the danger of the selfish senses in man. That was the first step leading to the Mystery of Golgotha.

The human being will gradually learn to develop this deep, significant and religious feeling when he is confronted with the beauty of nature, when he looks up at the starry heavens and at all that the sun illumines in the animal, mineral and vegetable kingdoms. He will learn to say, “That I am so placed in the world that I can look at it around me, my senses being instruments for the perception of its splendor rather than sources of pain, I owe to Christ's first sacrifice in preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha.” In perspective we see before us a time in which all observation and enjoyment of nature will be permeated by Christ; when men, refreshing themselves in an invigorating springtime, in the warmth of summer, or in any of the other delights of nature, will say to themselves, “In taking up all this beauty into ourselves, we must realize that it is not ourselves, but Christ within our senses Who enables us to experience it.”

In the first period of the Atlantean evolution selfishness tried—this time through Lucifer and Ahriman—to take possession of another part of the human organism; that is, the vital organs. With this in mind, let us consider what is intrinsic in our life-organism. What is its essential nature? You need only think what it is like when injured by organic disease. Then man begins to suffer from the self-seeking of heart, lungs, stomach or other organs, and the time comes when man knows that he has a heart or stomach, knows it by direct experience, because he has a pain. To be ill means that an organ has become selfish and is leading its own independent life within us. In ordinary normal conditions this is not the case. Then the single organs live selflessly within us. Our everyday constitution holds us up securely in the physical world only when we do not feel that we have stomach, lungs, etc., but have them without feeling them, when they do not demand our attention but remain unselfish servants of the body.

On some other occasion and at some other time we shall consider the reason why illness results from the selfishness of our organs. Today we will confine our discussion to normal conditions. Had it depended upon Lucifer and Ahriman, quite a different state would have existed as early as the Atlantean period. Every single human organ would have been self- seeking, and the results most extraordinary. Assume, for example, that the human being looked at a fruit or something else in the outer world that can be eaten, or that stands in some sort of relation to his vital organs. Someday these relations of the outer world with our organs will be the subject of genuine scientific study. If the other sciences allow themselves to be aligned with spiritual science, it will be known that when a human being gathers cherries from a tree and eats them, something enters with the cherries that is related to a particular organ; other fruits are related to other organs.

Everything that enters the human organism is in some way related to it. If Lucifer and Ahriman could have carried out their designs during the Atlantean period, then, when we picked cherries, for example, the related organ would have felt an inordinate greed. The human being would have felt, not the self-seeking organ only, but all the other organs also, striving against it with equal selfishness! Let us take a different case. Suppose something harmful were present, for while certain things in the world are related to humanity in a beneficial way, others affect it injuriously. Suppose someone were to approach a poisonous plant, or anything else harmful to this or that organ; he would then recognize that he was confronting something that gave a burnt out feeling to one of his organs.

Now let us consider not what we eat, but the air surrounding us. Every element of the atmosphere is related to our organs. If we had become what Lucifer and Ahriman intended and had been thrown upon our own resources, we should have been chased about the world by animal desires for what satisfied one organ or another, or by terrible disgust for all that was injurious. Just imagine how we could possibly develop ourselves in this world if we had such physical organs that we were tossed to and fro like a rubber ball, a plaything for every agreeable odor that we would run after, or were forced by nausea to flee from. That this did not happen, that our vital organs were subdued and harmonized resulted from the great event in the first Atlantean epoch when, in supramundane spheres, the second step was taken toward the Mystery of Golgotha. The Christ Being ensouled Himself again in an archangel, and what was accomplished by this deed shone down into the earth's atmosphere. Then that harmonizing and balancing of the vital organs took place that rendered them selfless.

In our connection with the outer world we should be continuously exposed to severe illnesses and we could not be at all healthy but for this second Christ event. We see in perspective for the future that the human being will acquire, when he is able to imbue himself with a true understanding of the spiritual world, a feeling of gratitude toward the spiritual beings upon whom humanity depends. He will say in true piety, “I realize that I am able to exist as a physical man with unselfish organs because not I alone have developed myself in the world, but Christ in me, Who has so conditioned my organs that I can be a man!” Thus we come to learn so to regard all that makes us human, fundamentally and in the most comprehensive sense, that we say, “Not I, but Christ in me.” In His three preparatory steps, taken before the actual Mystery of Golgotha, Christ provided for the complete evolution of humanity.

In the last part of the Atlantean period humanity faced a third danger. Thinking, feeling and willing were threatened with disorder through the entrance of selfishness. What would have been the result of this? Well, the human being would have intended this or that, and followed this or that impulse of will, while his thinking would have impelled him in quite a different direction, and his feeling in still another. It was necessary for human evolution that thinking, feeling and willing should become unselfish members of the united soul. Under the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman they could not have done this. Thought, feeling and will, becoming independently self-seeking, would have rent asunder the harmonious working of the Christ. In consequence, toward the end of the Atlantean evolution, the third Christ event occurred. Once more the Christ Being ensouled Himself in an archangel, and the power thus generated in the spiritual world made possible the harmonization of thinking, feeling and willing. Truly, as the rays of the physical sun must act upon earth to prevent the withering of plant life, so must the Sun Spirit be reflected upon earth from supramundane spheres as I have just explained.

What would have become of the human being without this third Christ event? As if by furies, he would have been seized by his unruly desires, by the activity of his will. He might have gone mad even though his self- seeking reason might have thought with scornful mockery about all that the raging will brought forth. This was averted by the third Christ event when Christ took for the third time the soul of an archangel as an outer vehicle.

Mankind has preserved some memory of how human passion and human thinking were harmonized at this period by forces that descended from supramundane worlds, but the sign of this memory is not rightly understood. St. George who conquers the dragon, or Michael who conquers the dragon, are symbols of the third Christ event, when Christ ensouled Himself in an archangel. It is the dragon, trodden under foot, that has brought thinking, feeling and willing into disorder. All who turn their gaze upon St. George or Michael with the dragon, or some similar episode, perceive, in reality, the third Christ event. The Greeks who in their wonderful mythology made copies of what happened in the spiritual world at the end of the Atlantean age, revered the Sun Spirit as the harmonizer of man's thinking, feeling and willing. “Thou Sun Spirit,” so said those who knew something about it, “Thou hast ensouled Thyself in an etheric spirit form,” for such is the form of those we call archangels today; “Thou has brought thinking, feeling and willing, which might otherwise rage through us in confusion, into order with Thy lyre, sounding upon it harmoniously the tones of the human soul!”

So the Sun Spirit became the guardian of the wild, stormy passions when they, as it sometimes happened, gushed forth in the fumes that rise from within the earth and break through its surface. If a human being should expose himself to them and allow only these vapors to work upon him, then thought, feeling and will would rage madly within him. The Greeks placed the Pythia over those vapors, which, in rising out of the earth, bring the passions into disorder through Lucifer and Ahriman. But Apollo shone upon the Pythia, conquered the unruly passions and she became a sibyl. For the Greeks, Apollo, the Sun Spirit, represented the Christ at the stage of His third sacrifice, and the results of Christ's deed were discerned in the attuning of men's passions under the power of the Pythia, conferred upon her by the god Apollo. In this connection Apollo was to the Greeks what is expressed in the victory of Michael or St. George over the dragon.

We see also the meaning of the extraordinary pronouncement of Justin Martyr, a saying which, since it emanated from him, we must regard as Christian, although many representatives of Christianity today would consider it heretical. Justin said, “Heraclites, Socrates and Plato were also Christians, the only kind of Christians possible before the actual consummation of the Mystery of Golgotha.” Theologians of today no longer realize it but in the first centuries of Christianity the Christian martyrs still knew that the old Greek sages, although they did not use the name of Christ, if asked about Apollo, would have answered out of their Mystery wisdom, “The great Sun Spirit, Who in the future will live as a man on earth, appears to us in Apollo as though ensouled in him in the form of an archangel.”

Then came the fourth, the earthly mystery, that of Golgotha. The same Christ Being Who had ensouled Himself three times in archangelic form incarnated through what we call the Baptism by John in the Jordan in the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

I admit that it may seem strange when I say that this great Being was ensouled three times in an archangelic form, and then incarnated in a human being. It would seem a more orderly progression if between His ensoulment as an archangel and His human incarnation He had taken an angelic form. So it may seem to us. Yet, even though it is claimed that the statements of spiritual science are fictitious, truly it is not so. You may gather this from corroborative evidence. If you ask me how it happens that Christ did not descend from hierarchy to hierarchy and only afterward to man—if you were to ask me that, I could only answer that I do not know, for I never make theoretical combinations. The facts adduced by spiritual research are that Christ chose three times an archangelic form, leaving out the angelic form, and then made use of a human body. I leave it to future research to determine the reason, which I do not yet know, though I do know that it is true.

Then came the fourth step in the Mystery of Golgotha, and this averted another danger, that of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences upon the human ego or I. In the Lemurian age the sense organs would have become disordered through Lucifer; in the first Atlantean period the vital organs were threatened with disorder and disharmony, and in the late Atlantean era the soul organs, the organs that underlie thinking, feeling and willing. In the post-Atlantean period the human ego itself was endangered.

Because the ego or I at this time was to take its place as a living factor in human evolution, an effort was made to establish harmony between this ego and the powers of the cosmos lest it become their plaything. This might have happened. The ego might have so developed that it could not keep a hold upon itself, and had it been delivered to these forces, everything that came from the soul would have been overpowered by all sorts of elemental forces that arise from wind, air or water. They would have driven the human being violently in all directions.

Michelangelo painted it. In the Sibyls he showed what had threatened mankind. With wonderful skill he made them express the human types of those who felt the coming derangement of the ego, so that although all possible wisdom might come forth, human beings could neither manage nor direct it. Look at the way in which Michelangelo has painted the different degrees of derangement in egos given over to elemental beings.

Upon the other side, however, he gives us something else. In the same space he has painted the musing figures of prophecy whose aspect shows the illumination of what preserves the integrity of the ego toward the cosmos. It touches us deeply when we see in the prophets the urgency, the pressure toward the ego and, on the other side, human beings suffering disorder through the ego itself. Then, standing in this space, is the Christ, incarnate in a human body, Who had to bring into order and harmony the ego that was to come into the world.

Yes, the science of the spirit will impress upon us ever more deeply that this human ego, through the fourth Christ event, the Mystery of Golgotha, can come to true unselfishness. The senses have said, “Not I, but Christ in us.” The vital organs have said, “Not I, but Christ in us.” In his moral and intellectual life man must learn to say, “Not I, but Christ in me.” Every step into the spiritual world shows us this.

I wished to explain this today in order that upon another occasion in the near future we may offer certain occult proofs of these facts in order to show that what we call spiritual science will pour itself into our moral and intellectual lives in such a way that human beings may become students of selflessness, that Christ may live within us so that we may feel Him vitally in every word that is uttered in discussions of spiritual science.

One more thing, my dear friends. You know that since 1909 we have been producing our Mystery Dramas in Munich. What we presented on the stage there may be considered good or bad; that is not the present question. What was done there, however, required a certain spiritual power, a power that does not approach the human being simply because of his existence upon earth. Since we can now work in Dornach and carve our different kinds of hard wood, we need muscular strength. We cannot say that we can give this strength to ourselves consciously. It comes from our bodies, from our souls' capacity; it is not under our control. Equally, we have not under our control all that we perform in the spirit and for which we need spiritual power. That is not entirely dependent upon our natural ability, just as what we do physically is not dependent alone upon our talents but also upon the muscular strength of our bodies. We need spiritual powers that are as much outside ourselves as our muscular strength is outside our souls. I know that superficial critics may say, “You are a fool; you believe that spiritual powers come to you from without, whereas they simply rise from your own inner being.” Let them think me a fool; I regard them as belonging to the clever men who cannot distinguish hunger from a piece of bread. I know how spiritual powers from without flow into human beings. The idea that hunger creates the bread that satisfies it—believed only by a crazy man—is as false as that the power of our own soul can create the forces needed for our spiritual activities. These forces must flow into us. Just as we know clearly that our hunger is within us, and that bread comes from without, does one who lives in spiritual worlds know what is within himself and what comes to him from without. Since 1909 I have felt personally, more and more, the spiritual power that came from without whenever there was occasion to develop, in stillness and calm, what was necessary for the Mystery Plays. I knew that a spiritual eye was resting upon what had been accomplished, and I relate this as a direct experience.

In the early days, when we were working at spiritual science in Germany, an acquaintance came to us who accepted with enthusiasm what we were able to give at that time. She accepted what it was possible to give out concerning human evolution, cosmic mysteries, reincarnation and karma, not only with devotion and enthusiasm but added to them a wonderful aesthetic sense. Every experience with this person, whether of teaching or conversation, was steeped in beauty. We were few at that time. We had no need to crowd ourselves into such a room as this, and what we now say to a large audience was then discussed by three people—two others and myself. One of these, the person mentioned above, left us upon the physical plane in 1904, and entered the spiritual world. Such people go through a development after death. When we produced Schuré's reconstruction of the Mystery of Eleusis at our Congress in 1907, no spiritual influence was perceptible. In 1909 it began, and has come more and more frequently since then. I have accurate knowledge that it was the individuality of our friend whom, objectively and because of her originality, we all loved. Removed to the spiritual world, she acted as a guardian angel to all that we accomplished in the combining of the aesthetic and esoteric elements in our Mysteries. We felt well protected, and looked gratefully upward, realizing that what penetrated us and flowed over into our earthly activities was an expression of the watchfulness of a spiritual personality. But then when it came to conversation with this personality—one may call it conversation since there was a certain reciprocal action—she asserted that she found the way to us easier the more we were permeated with the thought of Christ in the evolution of the earth. If I were to put into earthly words what she reiterated, I should say, expressing symbolically, of course, what is quite different in the spiritual world, “I find the way to you so easily because you are finding evermore the way to make spiritual science into an expression of the living Word of Christ.”

The Christ impulse will become for us the living bridge between earthly life and life in superphysical worlds. From the spiritual world Christ three times conditioned for the human being the spiritual constitution that he needed in order to live rightly. Christ intervened three times, making the human sense, life and psychic organs unselfish. It is now man's task to learn unselfishness in his moral and intellectual life through his understanding of the saying, “Not I, but Christ in me.”

The world will recognize that the message of the science of the spirit is the Word of Christ. He said, “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” The mission of the science of the spirit in our age is to open doors to the living Christ. The dead, who know that Christ has found the passage from heaven to earthly activities, unite with the understanding of the living. If the dead, as their nearest protectors, bend to the earthly living, they will find those souls most intensive who are penetrated and spiritualized by the Christ impulse. Christ, as the great Sun Spirit, descended from superphysical worlds through the Mystery of Golgotha in order to find a dwelling in the souls of men. Spiritual science is to be the message, telling how Christ may find that dwelling in human souls. If Christ will find His abode in men's earthly souls, then the Christ power will stream back from the earth's aura into the worlds that He forsook for the salvation of mankind, and the whole cosmos will be permeated through and through by Him.

We can work up gradually to such a deep understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha as this by completely imbuing ourselves with spiritual science. If we thus consider this and, in addition, think of it as a school of unselfishness for the intellectual and moral life of future humanity, we shall realize the necessity of the spiritually scientific proclamation of the Mystery of Golgotha! Then we shall know the meaning of the spiritually scientific impulses that are striving to enter our present life. Then that Christ impulse will penetrate humanity that all men can, indeed, accept, for Christ did not appear to one nation only but, being the great Sun Spirit, He belongs to the whole earth and can enter all human souls, regardless of nation and religion. May many gradually find the way to such an understanding of the Christ impulse and of the Mystery of Golgotha! Then, perhaps, that will appear the most Christian that today is stamped as unchristian and heretical.

If we strive, not for a mere intellectual understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, but for the ability to grasp it with our whole souls, we then need the science of the spirit and, as members of our spiritual stream, we shall belong to those souls who are permitted to know and understand the necessities of mankind now and in the immediate future.

It seems strange to people when spiritual science has something to say about that which is regarded by many with a certain logic as the most material, as the most unspiritual subject: nutrition. There are people who want to indicate their particular idealism, their particular spirituality by saying: oh, we care only about that which is above the questions that are connected with the material life.

Such persons also believe—and in certain respects they may be right—that it is irrelevant to one's spiritual development how the human being satisfies his bodily needs.

The materialistic way of thinking judges differently. A great philosopher of the nineteenth century had a saying that has often been repeated and that causes many who are idealistically minded to shudder. Feuerbach (Ludwig F., 1804-1872) once said: “The human being is what he eats.” Most people understand it in such a way—and the materialistic sense will absolutely agree with it—that the human being is made up of the substances which he supplies to his body, and from this develops not only the course of his bodily life but also that which presents itself in his mind.

If outsiders hear more or less cursorily about spiritual science, they believe that anthroposophists are too concerned with eating, with diet. An outsider cannot understand why the anthroposophists care so much about their diet. It should not be denied that in some anthroposophical circles whose members want to penetrate rather deeply into the spiritual life in an easy way, lack of clarity prevails. Some believe, nevertheless, that they should avoid this or that, should not eat or drink certain things in order to reach certain higher levels of knowledge! This is also a fallacy, like that just characterised view of Feuerbach's saying: “The human being is what he eats.” It is a one-sided view at least.

However, in a certain sense spiritual science can agree with this sentence, only in a rather different way than it is meant by the materialists, differing in two respects. Firstly, we have already stressed on occasion that everything around us is the expression of something spiritual. A mineral, a plant or something in our surroundings is material only with respect to its outer form. As with the limb of a human being, the outer form is the expression, the gesture of the spirit. Something spiritual is behind all material, and this is true of food as well. When we eat we absorb not only what spreads out materially before our eyes, but also that which is spiritual behind it. We come into relation through the material element of the food to the spiritual which is behind it. This is a rather superficial standpoint. However, someone who understands this is able to admit the materialistic sentence in certain respect: “The human being is what he eats.” Only one has to understand that there is a spiritual process within the material process.

This is the only way we can orient ourselves to these questions in the spiritual-scientific sense. If spiritual science puts emphasis on and pursues investigations regarding the nature of the foodstuffs, a unique perspective on the relation of the human being to nature appears. The human being comes into relation with nature because he absorbs the surrounding nature in a certain way and composes himself with that which is in it. The question arises, is the human being not subject to the external forces, because he ingests that which is external, and can he free himself from these forces? Is there any possibility that the human being can become free from the effects of his diet, so that he receives a certain power from and a certain influence on the surroundings? Could it not be that the human being, indeed, could be what he eats, through following a certain diet—and could it not be that by another diet the human being gets rid of the compulsion that is exercised on him by diet? So, the question is asked by spiritual science: how has nutrition to be arranged that the human being gets rid of the compulsion of diet, so that he becomes more and more the master of the processes within himself?

When we put this question to ourselves today, something must be said about the whole position of spiritual science in regard to these questions. This question, also about health, must be understood in such a way that in no way spiritual science argues for any particular point of view. Whoever believes that what is said today is agitating for or against this or that diet has an extremely erroneous view. Today nobody should go away from here with the view that I argued for or against abstinence, vegetarianism, meat diet.

All these questions about dogmas have nothing to do with the innermost feeling of spiritual science. We do not want to agitate, do not command the human being in this or that way; we want to say only how matters are. Then everybody may organise his life, as he wants, according to these overarching principles of existence. Thus, this talk will solely expound what is real in this field. On the other side, I ask you very much to take into consideration that I do not speak for anthroposophic circles in the narrow sense which want to go through a certain development and have to observe special conditions. Today, the question is discussed in the general-human sense. Because of the vast range of the subject, only single things can be taken out, and, above all, everything must be avoided that is connected with general health. We shall hear about this in the next talk.

Today, we deal with nutrition in the narrower sense. That is why the respiratory process is not taken into account. The human being has to take up proteins, carbohydrates, fats and salts in order to maintain the life process of his organism. You know that the human being satisfies the needs of his organism with the so-called mixed diet. He takes the main parts of his diet partly from the animal, partly from the plant realm. There are many more defenders of the mixed diet than of a one-sided diet among our contemporaries. We must ask ourselves, how do the laws of our environment dictate how the human being takes his food to the true forces and needs of the human organism? I speak only about the human being today, not about the animals.

The human being is easily inclined to understand his organism rather materially according to the so-called scientific results of his time. Spiritual science has to substitute this with the laws of the spiritual connections. Even if not always stated explicitly, the method which is adopted is based more or less unconsciously on the idea that the human organism consists more or less only of the physical body, and the sum of the chemical substances in their interaction with each other. One traces these substances back to their individual chemical elements and attempts—after one has recognised how these substances work—to get an idea how they could continue chemically working in the retort which one regards as the human being.

It is not necessary to state that many people are already beyond the view that the human being is only a big retort. It is not a matter of theories, but of the ways of thinking. The true practitioner is not concerned about anybody's thoughts, but about the effects of the thoughts. That is the point. It does not matter so much whether one is an idealist or not, but it is significant for life that one has fertile thoughts which are active in such a way that life prospers and progresses. It is important to bear in mind that spiritual science, even in this direction, has nothing to do with dogma or any belief. Anyone may espouse the most spiritual theories. It is not this which is important, but rather the fact that these thoughts are fertile if he introduces them in life. If one says that he is not a materialist, that he believes in the vital force, even in the spirit, but proceeds in the question of nutrition always as if the human being is a retort, his worldview cannot become fertile. Spiritual science has something to say about these concrete questions only if it itself is able to illuminate the details, and it is able to do so concerning the issues of nutrition and of health.

We must come again to clarity regarding the multi-membered human being. For the spiritual researcher the human being is not only the physical being, which one sees with the eyes, can touch with the hands - this physical body is only one part of the human being. This physical body consists of the same chemical substances that are spread out in nature. However, the human being has higher members. Already the next part of the human being is supersensible, has a higher reality than the physical body. It forms the basis of the physical body; it is the whole life through a fighter against the decay of the physical body. At the moment when the human being goes through the gate of death, the physical body is subject only to its own principles, and then disintegrates. In life, the life body fights against the decay. It gives the substances other directions and forces, other connections than they would have if they followed only their own nature. For the clairvoyant consciousness, this body is as visible as the physical body for the eye. The human being has this life body or etheric body in common with the plant.

We know from other talks that the human being still has a third member of his being, the astral body. What is it? It is the bearer of joy and sorrow, of desires, impulses and passions, of all that we call our inner soul life. All that has its seat in the astral body. It is spiritually discernible, as the physical body for the physical consciousness. The human being has this astral body in common with the animals.

The fourth member is the bearer of the ego, of self-consciousness. The human being is thereby the crown of creation, he towers over the things of the earth, which surround him. Thus, the human being faces us with three invisible members and a visible member. These always work in each other and with each other. They all work on any single member and each single member works on all others. Thus, the physical body—I say once again in parenthesis that all this applies only to the human being—as it faces us, is an expression in all its parts also of the invisible members of human nature. This physical body could not have in itself the members that serve the nutrition, the reproduction, life generally if it did not have the etheric body. All organs that serve nutrition and reproduction, the glands and so on, are the external expressions of the etheric body. They are that which the etheric body creates in the physical body.

Among other things, the nervous system is, in the physical body, the expression of the astral body. Here the astral body is the actor, the creator. We can imagine just as a clock or a machine is constructed by a watchmaker or by a mechanical engineer, the nerves are constructed by the astral body.

The characteristic of the human blood circulation, the blood activity, is the external physical expression of the ego-bearer, the bearer of the self-consciousness. Thus, the human physical body is also four-membered in certain ways. It is an expression of the physical members and of three higher, invisible members. The senses are pure physical; the glands are the expression of the etheric body, the nervous system of the astral body and the blood of the ego.

If we look at the human being in contrast to the plant, the plant faces us as a two-membered being. The plant has a physical body and an etheric body. Now we compare the human being to the plant, while we proceed universally and take the inner, the spiritual, into consideration. We relate the human four-membered organism with the two-membered organism of the plants. In order to support our view we may start from physical, known facts.

We can show how the plant builds up its organism. It builds up its body from inorganic substances. It has the strength to compose its body from single inorganic components in the most wonderful way. We need to see only how the plant is in a special interaction with the respiratory process. The human being inhales oxygen and exhales carbonic acid. The plant can absorb what is useless to the human being. It holds the carbon back for the construction of its organism and returns the oxygen for the most part. However, it requires something that is not regarded by many people as something particular: it needs the sunlight. Without sunlight, it could not build up its organism. The light that flows to us and delights us, that can animate us also emotionally, is at the same time the great assistant of the construction of the plant organism. We see how there a marvel takes place, how the sunlight helps to construct an organic being. What makes our eyes effective helps the plant to construct itself.

The human being also has the astral body beyond the physical one and the etheric body. The plant does not have it. That which helps the sunlight to build up the plants so marvellously is the etheric body. This is turned on one side towards the substances. The human being could not develop his physical organism if he did not do anything that is in certain ways in the opposite way that which the plant does. Already in the respiratory process, the human being does something contrary. The human being already goes through the contrary process. We can say the same concerning the complete nutrition of the human being. We can say, nutrition must take place in such a way that everything that is built up in the plant is destroyed in the human being again. The process in the human being is very peculiar. If it were only the etheric body that built up a physical body, consciousness or soul sensation would never appear. What the etheric body has built up must be destroyed internally over and over again, must be destroyed. Indeed, the etheric body is a fighter against decay, but, nevertheless, always some decay occurs. The astral body causes the decay that keeps the human being from becoming a plant.

The sunlight and the human astral body are two opposite things in certain ways. For one who gets to know the human astral body with clairvoyant consciousness the astral body is an internal spiritual light, invisible to the external eye. A spiritual light body is this astral body. It is the contrast to the external luminous light. Imagine once the sunlight becoming weaker and weaker, until it expires, and let it go even farther to the other side, let it become negative, then you have an inner light. This inner light has the opposite task of the external light that would build up the plant body from inorganic substances. The inner light which initiates the partial destruction, only by which process consciousness is possible, brings the human being to a higher level than the plant, because the process of the plant is transformed into its opposite. Thus, the human being is in a certain contrast to the plant because of his inner light. This is to understand the matter spiritually, and we would see on closer consideration how the destruction caused by the astral body is then continued by the ego. However, today this does not need to occupy us further.

We now take the relationship of the human being to the plant, which becomes so real that the human being takes up his nutrients from the plant. He continues within himself what is for the plant a whole world process. What is built up by the sunlight is destroyed by the astral body, indeed, over and over again, but it thereby integrates the nervous system into the human being and makes the human life a conscious one. Thus, the astral body being a negative light body is the other pole that is opposed to the plant. Something spiritual forms the basis of this process of building up the plant organism; spiritual science shows us more and more how that which appears as light to us is only the external expression of something spiritual.

Something spiritual shines, through the light, perpetually towards us, the light of the spirits shines towards us. What is hidden behind this physical light, but is separated in parts appears also in our astral body. It appears externally in its physical form, astrally in the astral body. The spiritual light works in us internally on the construction of our nervous system. So wonderfully do the plant and the human life work together.

We now examine the human being's relationship with the animal realm as food. Here matters are different. In the animal from which he takes his foodstuffs, the process is already carried out in certain ways. What man takes usually from the plant is partially transformed by the animal, already prepared, Since the animal has an astral body and a nervous system, too. Therefore, the human being takes up something that does not come to him unchanged, but that has already gone through a process that has taken up astral forces. What lives in the animal has already developed astral forces in itself. One could now believe that thereby the human being saves work. However, this thought is not quite correct. Imagine once the following: I build up a house with the help of various pieces of equipment. I take the original equipment. There I can construct the house completely by my original intentions. However, let us assume that three or four other persons have already worked on it bit by bit and now I have to complete it. Does this make my work easier? No, surely not. You read in a widespread literature that work is made easier for the human being if someone has already worked on it. However, human being becomes a more versatile, more independent being just by taking up the original.

Another picture: somebody has a balance with two scale pans. The identical weights keep the balance. On both sides there may be fifty pounds. However, that is not always the case. I can take a balance on which the arms are different lengths. Then we only need half the weight at twice the distance. Here the weight is defined by distance. It depends not only on the amount of the forces but also on the delicacy of the materials in particular. The animal processes the materials in a more imperfect sense. What the human being takes up continues to have an effect by that which the astral body of the animal caused in it, and then the human being has to overcome this first.

However, because an astral body has worked so that a process has already taken place in a sentient being, the human being gets something in his organism that has an effect on his nervous system. This is the basic difference between food from the plant realm and food from the animal realm. The food from the animal realm works in particular on the nervous system and with it on the astral body. In contrast, with plant food the nervous system is left untouched by anything external. Then, however, the human being has also to create everything concerning the nervous system by himself. Thereby only that which originates in him flow through his nerves. He who knows how much in the human organism depends on the nervous system understands what that is. If the human being builds up his nervous system himself, it is fully receptive to that which the human being has to expect of it in relation to the spiritual world. The human being owes to the plant foods the ability to look up at the greater connections of things that raise him above the prejudices that arise from the narrow borders of the personal being. Where the human being regulates life, and thinking freely from the great viewpoints, this he owes to the plant foods. Where the human being lets himself get carried away by rage, antipathy, by prejudices, he owes this to his meat-based food.

I do not agitate for plant foods. On the contrary: the animal food was necessary for the human being and still today it is often necessary because the human being should be firm on earth, should be hemmed in the personal. Everything that brought him to his personal interests is connected with the animal food. The fact that there were human beings who waged wars, who had sympathy and antipathy, sensuous passions for each other originates from the animal food. However, the human being owes to the plant foods that he is not limited to these narrow interests, that he can grasp universal interests. That is why the talents of certain peoples who prefer plant foods are more spiritual, while other people develop more bravery, courage, boldness that are also necessary to life. These qualities are not to be developed without the personal element, and this is not possible without animal food.

We speak about these questions from a general human viewpoint today. However, this brings to our mind that the human being can go in this or that direction, can immerse himself also in his personal interests with the animal food. His sense is thereby clouded concerning the larger overview of existence. One mostly does not see how it is founded in the diet when the human being says: now I do not know how I should do this or that, how has he done it?

This impossibility of surveying these connections comes from the food. Compare this to someone who can see the larger connections. You can look back at the food of these human beings and maybe at the food of the ancestors. A person who has a virginal nervous system given to him by his ancestry is completely different. This person has a different sense of the larger connections. Sometimes, abuses in one life cannot destroy what the ancestors have founded. Even if such a person, descended from peasants, for instance, stirs up what he has in himself, it has only been stimulated by the consumption of meat because he was more sensitive.

Progress is made when the human being, as far as the requirement for protein that is not prepared in the human nature itself, confines himself to the animal foods that are not yet set aglow by passions, such as milk. The plant food will take up more and more room in the human diet.

Concerning single foodstuffs, we can emphasise certain advantages of the vegetable foodstuffs. If the human being gets his protein from vegetable foodstuffs, he has to work harder, but he develops the forces that make his nervous system fresher. A lot of that which humanity would face if the consumption of meat got out of control would be avoided if vegetable foodstuffs would be preferred. We can see in the vegetarian and meat-based food the different effects they have. To illustrate this, we can say the following: look at the physical process under the influence of meat-based food. The red blood cells become heavy, darker; the blood tends to coagulate. Impacts of salts, of phosphates originate easier. If plant food is absorbed, the blood sedimentation is much lower. It becomes possible for the human being not to let the blood take on the darkest colouring. Just thereby is he able to control the coherence of his thoughts from his ego, while heavy blood is an expression of the fact that he is given away slavishly to that which is integrated in his astral body by the animal food. This picture is definitely an external expression of truth. The human being becomes internally stronger by the relation to the plant realm. By meat-based food he integrates something that gradually becomes foreign matter which goes its own way in him. This is avoided if the food consists mostly of plants. If the materials in us go their own ways, they strengthen the forces which cause hysterical, epileptic states. Because the nervous system receives these impregnations from the outside, it becomes susceptible to heterogeneous nervous diseases. Thus, we see how in certain respects “the human being is what he eats.”

In details it would be still even more provable, but through two examples we can show that one must not be one-sided. A one-sided vegetarian may say, we are not allowed to enjoy milk, butter and cheese. However, milk is a product in which the etheric body of the animals is advantageously involved. The astral body is involved in it to the least extent. The human being can live in the first times of his life as a baby only on milk. There everything is contained in it that he needs. With the preparation of milk, the astral body comes into consideration only rudimentarily. If one enjoys milk primarily at later age, if possible only milk, one achieves a particular effect with it. Because the person ingests nothing that is processed externally and can influence his astral body, and because he absorbs something in the milk that is already prepared, he is able to develop particular forces of his etheric body in himself, which can exercise curative effects on the fellow men. The healers who want to have a curative effect on their fellow men have a particular aid in the consumption of milk.

On the other hand, we want to describe the influence of a luxury that is taken from the plant realm, the influence of alcohol. This has a particular significance. It originates only when the real plant process, the effect of the sunlight, has stopped, namely the opposite that the astral body carries out. Then a process begins in the assimilation of alcohol that takes place on a lower level and impairs the human being even more than animal food. The human being brings the substances up to the astral body, gives them a particular structure with the astral body. However, if that which should be brought to the astral body disintegrates in the way as it is the case with the alcohol, then that happens without the astral body, hat which should happen under the influence of the astral body, namely the effect on the ego and the blood. The effect of the alcohol is to take over that which should happen, otherwise, from the free decision of the ego, by the alcohol. In certain respects, it is correct that a person who enjoys alcohol needs less food. He lets the forces of alcohol penetrate the blood. He provides what he himself should do with something external. One can say in certain ways that in such a person the alcohol thinks and feels. Because the human being provides to the alcohol what his ego should be subject to, the human being places himself under the constraint of something external. He gets a material ego. The human being can say, I just feel a stimulation of my ego thereby. Indeed, but now he is not experiencing the ego, but something else with which he has banished his ego. Thus, we could still show by various things how the human being can get around to being more and more what he eats. However, spiritual science also shows us how he is able to become free from the forces of food.

Thus, I wanted only to describe the relation of the human being to his surroundings along general lines today, how he relates to the realms of nature through the processes of nutrition. Who visits this or that talk further on will see that individual questions can also be answered on other occasions. This talk will have shown you that spiritual science is something that has its effect also on the most material needs of life. Spiritual science is something that can be an ideal for the human future. Today one still says often if one sees the substances combining and separating in the human being: it is like in a retort, and one believes that one can find something salutary in it for the human beings. However, a time is coming when someone who does research in the laboratory will also keep in sight what I have said about the light and the astral body. Is not anybody able to make the usual chemical observations if he says to himself, that here the larger elements have an effect on the smallest things which are penetrated by the external physical sunlight, and those which shine up to the spiritual in the human consciousness? One will explore these things in a light that gives us an overview of the whole.

By the spirit, everything is born that is in our surroundings. The spirit is the primal ground of all. If we want to come to truth, the spirit has also to stand with us as we conduct the research. Then we recognise that truth which the human beings need both on the macro cosmic and on the microcosmic scale.

In the course of these lectures I have of late often drawn your attention to the fact that occult truths, though coming from other sources, were always known to a few individuals through all periods of mankind's evolution; but that these persons always took great care that those who had been initiated into occult Mysteries should communicate nothing to those outside who were not initiated. Now we know that such things are still transmitted even when, in the further evolution of ordinary human life, they have lost their significance, and even their justification. Thus, certain truths are even today still strictly guarded by those who know them. We know, however, that certain things simply must be referred to today, they must not remain in secrecy any longer; but like other scientific truths, they too as spiritually scientific truths, must be made accessible to mankind in general.

Now this can only happen with respect to certain elementary things, but as regards these it must happen. Among the things of which we have spoken for a long time, much can certainly be reckoned as belonging to such truths, to such knowledge, as was guarded carefully in many quarters. Nevertheless an endeavor must be made to continue, in the spirit of these lectures, to encounter much which pertains to that which is guarded. Those who today hear these truths simply announced, should recognize in the truths themselves that they should be regarded with a certain great earnestness and reverence. For one of the reasons which make the Initiates afraid to communicate them is the fear of the want of reverence towards these truths in the man of today. Certainly we cannot pay much respect to what the materialistic sense of today regards as truth, nor are those things very much profaned by our not paying respect to them, at least not apparently. But certain things must be treated tenderly and reverentially if they are to be incorporated in the proper manner into the spiritual life of mankind.

To these belongs above all the knowledge about man himself; knowledge which at first seems simple when it approaches our soul, but which is of immensely important productiveness and range. These very considerations which have occupied us of late, and with all more or less culminate in bringing us near to the secret concerned with the connection between life in the physical body and the life between death and rebirth, just these very truths may lead man's observation very, very far, and serve to form a connection with much of a like nature which is intimately connected with the knowledge of man. We will now first of all direct our spiritual sight to these things of which we have already spoken from other points of view; we will today observe such things, but in one direction only, so as to keep to the point of view described in these lectures.

Natural science of modern times has, as we know, brought man very close to the animal. But we have already declared that what really differentiates men from the animal in the real sense of the word, is not taken into consideration at all by this modern natural science. It draws our attention, for instance, to the forms of the bones in man and in the higher animals and finds a great resemblance between them: it finds a great resemblance in construction, in morphology in general. So far it is certainly right, but it makes no reference to the most important thing. This which I have already pointed out once this winter, and indeed in a public lecture, at first presents itself from such a point of view that one can say: “He who with the necessary reverence and depth so approaches the observation of human life as to allow himself to be influenced by the great and important contrast between a man living physically here on the Earth and a human corpse, has set up a mystery before his soul in the impression of the contrast between the living man and a corpse.” What cannot then fail to strike him first of all is that the corpse is claimed by the forces of external Earth-nature, to which it was not subject in the time between conception or birth up to death, and from which it was immune by virtue of the fact that the living soul-element was connected with this combination of substances which confronts us in the corpse. Let us follow in thought what becomes of a corpse, whether disintegrated quickly by cremation or more slowly through decomposition (the two processes are exactly the same and only differ in rapidity). The substances combined materially in man will be dissolved in a more or less short space of time into the collective substance of our Earth; they pass over into it. Man can in fact follow with his ordinary senses and indeed with his ordinary thoughts all that becomes of the component parts of a corpse.

In this respect the spiritually-scientific investigator can go further. He can discover that what is present in the corpse immediately after death gradually passes over into an enormous realm of substance; this process is of course spread over centuries, but it passes into a great enormous realm of substance and dissolves, as it were, into the totality of our visible, outwardly perceptive world.

Now it is interesting to follow up the connection which exists between our Ego-consciousness here in physical life and this disintegrating corpse. Curiously enough the disintegrating corpse and the Ego-consciousness are connected in a certain respect. I say the Ego-consciousness: not of course the real, true Ego, for that passes of course through the portal of death and continues its life between death and rebirth. But what here in physical life floats before man is a picture of the Ego—for he has no consciousness of the Ego, only a picture of it in his consciousness—that is bound to the corpse, and indeed to that combination of substances which is dissolved into the Universe after death. The dissolution of the corpse into the Universe is nothing but the external picture of the collective Ego-consciousness; for in truth our Ego-consciousness belongs to the Universe into which our corpse is dissolved. The reason that between birth and death we maintain the opinion—a strange one for the occultist but a comprehensible and obvious one for ordinary man—that we are here, confined within the boundaries of our skin, is only because the substances in our body are held together between birth and death. It is also because of this cohesion that we believe ourselves to be in this content of space which we fill out with our flesh and blood. This is really absurd, we are not there at all. We are really everywhere; and between sleeping and waking we even try to be where the particles of matter and our body will be after death. Only between our birth and death does this Maya-consciousness come to us, of being within that content of space which is limited by our skin. But that is a Maya-consciousness which is produced in us. And death among many other things also disproves this Maya-consciousness concerning the physical material world. It leads the particles of our corpse where in reality our Ego-consciousness always dwells. This is already a very far-reaching concept.

But now you may ask: What is it then that when we are dead really carries our Ego-consciousness and its external image, the particles of substance of our body, out into the wide world? What forces are these?

There are three of these forces, which we can demonstrate somewhat in the following manner. One of these forces manifest during life in that in the very earliest time of our life we “crawl on all fours” and then we lift ourselves upright. While we are transforming ourselves from the crawling child to the man who walks upright, we are following a certain line of force, within which we place ourselves, and with which we identify ourselves. This line of force, from a spiritually-scientific point of view, is very clearly visible in man. From below runs a line which goes from the center of the Earth into the Universe. In olden times this was described simply by saying that a line goes from the center of the Earth into the Universe, which line differs for each human being, and differs indeed in each epoch, but always goes from the middle of the Earth into the Universe. That is one of the important lines of force in man. The way it works in our physical life only continues as long as this life, for the physical force of gravity of our body equalizes this force. The moment this physical force of gravity no longer works as it does in the living body, the moment the living body becomes a corpse, this line of force from the center of the Earth to the Universe discloses itself as that which chiefly pushes and caries our particles of matter. Of course they are always driven on further by their own weight; but if we were to follow up what becomes of them through a long period of time, we should find that they disburse in the direction of this force, even if this takes centuries to achieve.

The second force which here comes into consideration is one which chiefly comes to expression in human speech. We talk, or least we can talk. There is always a certain impulse in articulate speech. A certain centrifugal force lies in the air we breathe out when we speak. The spiritually-scientific investigator sees this force as slung round the first line. It has essentially a spiral form, twining around the vertical force. This force alters somewhat the pure force of repulsion; it brings it into play. Not only is this active, the third force must also be reckoned with, which proceeds from the following. Whereas speech develops a certain centrifugal force in an outward direction, thought, through which man is distinguished from the animal, works against this force which comes to expression and speech. This constitutes the third force. If we wished to draw at, we might do so in the following manner (see diagram). Through these three forces: the vertical force, the force working in speech and the force working in thought—the particles of a human corpse are slowly and gradually carried out in the Universe.

In opposition to these, of course, works gravity and other forces, such as chemical forces, etc. but these three forces overcome the opposing forces. These three forces, which are held together during physical life when we as men stand on our two feet, are set free at death and to disperse what is here held together in form. In particular what we call the Etheric or Formative-forces Body follows these three forces. Immediately after death—during the first days—what we have often described as the dissolution of the Etheric or Formative-forces Body takes place in advance and also in the direction of these forces. The other process, dispersion of the physical body, is of less importance to the dead man; it is only in so far operative that it fixes the moment of death in his mind, it preserves for him the memory of his earthly Ego. But what is more important is that these forces show him the permanent results of this dissolution of the Etheric or Formative-forces Body. But if there were nothing there but these three forces, the dead man could not know that it is his own form coming forth from him. He would perceive it, but as something foreign to him. Therefore what is important is that he should not only perceive what is disintegrating, but that he should be able to know that it proceeds from him, that it is the remainder of what he held together on Earth within his form. And that leads us to something else.

Here I must refer to something which in our dry, barren, soulless Age is really not treated with necessary reverence, although it is always and everywhere before us. It is something which really works in the physical world as the most mysterious thing of all, which is present in everyone in the physical world, although it's mysterious character is not realized. I refer to the colour of human flesh, as it reveals itself externally in man. You have only to think of the abundant variety expressed in each man we see in the flesh; how these questions differ essentially and every person, in fact we see as many different tints as there are people. He who busied himself with solving the secrets of the flesh-tints, as has already been attempted, will acquire a feeling for what is expressed in the colour of the flesh, in the tints of human skin. Something very mysterious expresses itself in the colour of the complexion. To one who approaches this from a spiritually-scientific point of view, the question: “What is really the meaning of this flesh-colour?” is of very great significance. For this peculiar colouring of the skin depends on two opposing forces; we might say on two counteracting forces of pressure which are active in man and which work against one another in the form. Indeed in a certain sense the Etheric or Formative-forces Body Works with an outward pressure, the Astral body works in opposition with an inward pressure; and this opposition goes on at all points. If the Astral body wishes to contract, to press from without inwards, the Etheric or Formative-forces Body wishes to press from within outwards, to expand; and as a result of these two forces of pressure from without and within, meeting in the human surface, plays a part in what is revealed in the colour of man's flesh-tints. What the etheric and astral bodies have to say to each other is expressed in a mysterious manner in the colour of the skin.

When we look at man, as he is here on the physical plane, we see the colour of his complexion. But this colour would appear differently if one could behold it as seen from within. Seen from within you, an average Central European, would not have a flesh-colored, pinkish color, but greenish blue. This greeny-blue colour shows itself in its after-effects after death. When the body of Formative-forces or etheric body expands in the sense of the three forces already characterized, and the dead man looks upon this image, he sees his flesh-colour as, in a sense, representing the after-effects coming from the other side. He sees it glimmering a greenish blue after death. Besides this there is something in a man's colouring which is essentially different from that which we see when we look at it in physical life from outside. Strictly speaking, this mysterious flesh-coloured is not only individually different in every different person, but it also alters in one and the same being in the course of his life, though only in minute shades of colour. Not only in certain diseased conditions do we sometimes look blooming and sometimes pallid, for those conditions are of course abnormal, but apart from these greater alterations the colour of the skin is continually changing. If this is seen “from the other side,” as the dead man sees it, something else is to be observed besides. It then discloses our entire memory-world, as though painted on tapestry. Thus, speaking pictorially, we must picture this flesh-colored tapestry as a dress, as a very fine garment, but now turned inside out as one turns a dress or a glove. We should then see from the other side what is otherwise turned inwards; of which, because it is turned inwards, we can only become conscious when it comes into the consciousness as memory; not as the content of thought, but as thoughts differing in their aura, vibrating thoughts. We learn to know only the outer life of what we drive down into our subconscious; we here do not learn to know how it glimmers through our skin, but the dead man learns to know this because of the after-effects of the colouring, after death. What a dead man looks back upon the dissolution of the etheric body, he retains it as “memory” behind him; he knows that is himself—“That is I, myself.” The investigations of Spiritual Science show that what in natural sciences is taken less into consideration—the great distinctions between man in the animal, viz., the vertical position, the power of speech; articulated language; the power of thought—these are the forces which after death carry man into the Universe, and the colouring of man's flesh is the physical expression on Earth for what works on after death as a residue of memory. Thus we distribute ourselves into the Universe after death and bear the outer signs of our Cosmic identity in what we show that our physical body here on Earth. Hence the feeling, which we connect with something so mysterious as the flesh-tints, that by reason of such a wonderful thing as the colour of his complexion more than through anything else, man must be a microcosm in relation to the macrocosm; we feel the universal significance of what thus confronts us in man. The basic colouring of a man is of great significance, for that is to some extent the colour of the tapestry upon which his memory appears after death; greenish, greenish-blue for the white races; violet-reddish for the Japanese; and just flesh-coloured for the black races.

These are things intimately and significantly connected with life between death and rebirth, for they prepare the new incarnation. An enormous amount lies in these things. In them lies the determining factor which leads a man to a certain race and so on in his next incarnation. The observation of the spiritual life does not only mean the satisfaction of our curiosity or of an inquisitive desire for knowledge; for life, as lived in the physical world, with all the things which make mysterious impressions on our mind, can only be correctly explained when we observe it in connection with the spiritual one.

Now you can imagine from the things which I have explained from a more or less elementary standpoint and which can be developed further, that an intimate introspection into human nature and its evolution is certainly connected with such a development. People of the present day are specially apt to shrink back from this introspection into human nature and its development. They do not desire it. On the another hand, just such persons as those to whom I have today and at other times called your attention, keep guard over certain occult truths, would like to gain power by having an exclusive possession of such things. This is of extraordinary importance. For there are men, though it may be difficult to believe this today, who in a certain sense, take part in the realisation of the world-plan by trying to understand from their occult sanctuaries, how the evolution of the world can best be realised, and how best to work powerfully upon mankind during the next 30, 40, 50 or 100 years! Nations, which have men among them who thus investigate the process of man's evolution and direct the political life in this sense, are of course in this respect in advance of others which do not enter into such things. These things play a great part in the life of mankind. We live today in an age when it will be necessary for man to pay attention to the fact that such things exist. I only wish to draw your attention to one thing in this direction today.

However calamitous the present events may be, however much, from a purely external, superficial point of view they surpass everything of a like nature since the historical life of mankind has been recorded, they are nevertheless part of a great comprehensive happening, a happening which can only be properly grasped by one who observes it with the necessary reverence and earnestness. Such a thing must be looked in the face. In certain abodes of our earthly humanity a great deal is known about the evolution of humanity. But that part of knowledge which could deliver power into the hands of those who know is very carefully guarded. I do not know to what extent you will believe this; but the things to which I refer are said in a way which leaves each one free to accept as much as he holds worthy of belief. The English-speaking population of today is striving after universal world-domination from certain impulses which we may perhaps go into more particularly at some other time. This is not said from many chauvinistic Central-European feeling, but is the result of quite objective occult investigations, and it would least of all be denied by those members of the Anglo-American population who are in the know. It might be disavowed perhaps, but not denied; but the wise ones wish it on no account to be known to the people. These men are also aware of the following, I shall make apparent to you by probing a little deeper.

In the course of human evolution, as we passed from the third and fourth into the materialism of the fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, many things which formally expressed truths were counted of no value, are really depreciated. If you search the old traditions you find everywhere the profoundest truths clothed in picture-form. Today men tolerate myths, pictures and images as “poetic license.” They tolerate it in Strindberg, for example, because he apparently wishes to give out poetry. But then modestly say that one need not believe it—and we are not supposed to see anything therein expressing the real truth of things. Mythical, pictorial expression is depreciated. Men do not feel that there is anything concealed behind the Imagination. This process will in the course of the Fifth Post-Atlanta epoch of culture extend as far as language, especially among the English-speaking population. Not only are “pictures” counted of no value as a means of expression, but the “word” as such is also depreciated. As today the materialistic consciousness disputes the picture, so in the future it will dispute the word. It will be said: the word is not of itself adapted to express anything at all. Fritz Mauthner has already tried in his “Criticism and Language” to impute to language all the superstitions which exists among mankind. Perhaps he may not have “an appropriate instrument” to work with; but his critical side is an appropriate tool, for he has to work with “unsuitable material”: the German language. There he deceives himself. The English-speaking occultists however have a suitable material in the English language. Its evolutionary impulse is to depreciate the full sense and content of the word then graduate to accept merely its degenerate meaning. Consider how much vagueness of meaning there is in the English language today and how much is merely scamped. Anyone studying English philosophy must notice that the language no longer yields a richness of words, full of content. Study, for example, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer and others; their language gives forth nothing by means of which one can get into the spirit. We can see how big a part language plays when the problem of language is taken up by English-speaking occultists, for this lies in the impulse of the times. Therefore with them it is a question of thinking out means and ways from occult sources to exercise world-dominion without the help of language. That is the great contrast between East and West: the East with its uncommonly living intensity of language—the West with its throwing aside of the inner meaning of language. Here again the Central-European is placed between the two extremes. What takes place there has its symbol in something which is today proclaimed as loudly as possible, but is as untruthful as possible; it is done to cover up the reality, which is to gain the mastery over a realm in which language is losing its power in the process of its own development. This again is not set from any chauvinistic feeling but as the result of the most objective discovery in Spiritual Science.

That is something of which the great incisive catastrophic events of the present time are special features; it must bring about a great world-embracing struggle which must come to expression among mankind on earth in many different forms in the near future. In this respect we cannot think that things will be the same as in other wars; there have also been wars in former times, and peace made, and all went on as before. But this is something we must regard as perpetual. For we can only get reliable ideas concerning the incisive events of the present if we take such things into account. We must make up our minds today no longer to think superficially about certain relationships, but to go into their depths, otherwise there will be no important result from what we try to undertake. It will however be very difficult for the present time to become accustomed to what must flow out in this respect from spiritually-scientific observation. Just recently a mere detail showed me this, in a very ridiculous way; and just because it had a specially timely origin it was the more absurd. I have been recently busy with bringing out a new edition of the “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity;” I was at the time about 32 or 33 years old, so it is really a very long time ago! Such an interval brings many things to the service of the soul. Now in regard to this book I had at that time a great satisfaction, as I set forth in the magazine “Das Reich.” I corresponded much then with Eduard von Hartmann, author of “Philosophy of the Subconscious,” and when he received my “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity” he wrote in his copy some remarks which he then placed at my disposal. I took down his remarks at the time and still have them today. You see, a really amiable motive which aroused my gratitude underlies what I now have to relate.

In the “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity” I began by representing spiritual reality in the form of thought which grasps itself, because one can only attain to an understanding of the spiritual by really learning and really experiencing what first approaches man as the spiritual: the thought which understands itself and is dependent upon itself. But in coming to this result, I was obliged to speak about many things in sentences different from those used by persons speaking from different points of view. Thus on one page I had for instance the sentence: “The idea is an individualized concept, the concept is experienced in the spirit by means of intuition. The idea is an individualized concept and is brought into relation with the object outside through the Ego.” Among the senses through which Eduard von Hartmann drew his pencil at that time was this one, and he had the remark: “This is an unusual form of speech.” You see this was a very amiable objection, but very characteristic; for if we may compare the great with the small, we might cite the following: One Copernicus expressed the thought that the sun does not revolve around the Earth but the Earth around the sun, if someone had written on the margin: “This is an unusual form of speech,” how strange that would have appeared! Of course a form of speech to which one is not accustomed must appear when something new makes its first appearance. But you see how, from a quarter in which one might expect absolute understanding, one is greeted with the words: “That is an unusual form of speech!” If men had never decided to have unusual forms of speech there would be no progress at all, and this not only in the spiritual domain. This is an example, which clearly shows how such things are to be met with. You will find in all directions what the aversion exists towards the use of the language which Spiritual Science employs. The form in which the old world philosophies are presented today is like a worn-out press, it could not even be any longer used by the old-world philosophers themselves; it is so worn out that even the “Old Clothes Shop” would no longer accept the dress! But when it appears as a “world conception” which lives in the inner soul, people do not notice it! One must acquire a feeling for this, but that is part of what men of the present they need in order to understand the times; and the times must be understood.

This is what must ever again be taken to heart, otherwise the individual initiates and those keeping guard over their knowledge for the service of humanity will very easily gain the upper hand. Care must be taken that a certain knowledge is not placed at the service of one part of mankind, but at the service of mankind as a whole. As soon as man does not permeate the best knowledge with this sentiment it will become harmful to mankind.

From Buddha to Christ

Budapest, May 31, 1909

I do not wish to offer you here an observation about the philosophy of religion or a treatise on literary history, nor do I wish to give you a scientific lecture about the subject matter. I simply want to tell you what Spiritual Science or occultism have to say about such great individualities as Buddha and Christ, more precisely what knowledge they can offer from the vantage point of Rosicrucian occultism.

In a lecture intended for more advanced theosophists, I presume you will permit me to speak more intimately of such truths. I shall present to you broad outlines, and I will incorporate certain details into them. Rosicrucian occultism presents one of the great principles of occult theosophical investigation from which spiritual life should flow into our hearts. Even though the goals and ideals of theosophy can also be found outside the Theosophical Society, there is nevertheless a difference in the means employed by anyone seriously trying to struggle for the attainment and right application of knowledge and truth, for occult investigation can and must flow directly into life.

Allow me to illustrate this point with a trivial example. The human soul is like a stove that does not need to be persuaded to heat a room because heating is its function. The stove does this on its own, provided we put wood into it and light it. It could be objected that the appearance of the wood does not suggest to us that it can generate heat, and yet it does precisely that. By putting some firewood, the appearance of which is so different from the stove, into it and lighting it, we bring warmth into our house. Similarly, by getting used to spiritual scientific concepts, we also become accustomed to our ability to make judgments and to orient ourselves freely in this world. It is not our task to preach ideals but rather to provide human souls with the fuel that can generate spiritual wisdom, genuine brotherliness, and true humanity. To realize this is our goal.

What we designate as the Rosicrucian stream arose in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries when the spiritual stream of Christianity was already obscured since it had taken on an external form. At a time when Christianity in the outer world increasingly was taking on an external form and when its true original meaning had faded, Rosicrucianism, received the task to cultivate ancient wisdom and to preserve the treasures of primordial wisdom. In the outside world, wherever people deemed only external forms and hardened dogmas to be important, they abjured and cursed anything that was venerated in the mysteries as the highest and holiest truths. One frequently heard the words: “I curse Skythianos; I curse Boddha; I curse Zarathas.” These are the three names that were venerated in greatest secrecy in the mysteries and in the Rosicrucian mystery schools as sacred names of the masters.

Zarathas is the same individual as Zarathustra—not the Zarathustra known to history, but the exalted individual who founded ancient Persian culture and who was the teacher in the occult schools of that time. Skythianos was a highly developed individual of ancient times. In one of his subsequent incarnations he led the occult schools of Central Asia, and later he also became the teacher of esoteric schools in Europe. Boddha and Buddha are one and the same person.

In order to understand what an initiate felt when he heard these three names and in order to gain some idea of what they could give him, we have to go back in human evolution and examine the character of Rosicrucian occultism more closely. Let us gain an understanding through listening and through looking back into the past. There have always been highly advanced personalities who stood out from the masses and to whom average people looked up in reverence as one would to high ideals. To look up to the individuals who had reached such a lofty stage of wisdom and intellectual power had the effect of animating the average person's moral sense and vital energies. Even today the forces of these lofty spirits flow into our finer bodies.

Let us look back into the past to all the spiritual individualities of whom I want to speak to you, all the way back to the ancient Indian culture. If we went further back in human evolution to the remote age of Atlantis and its end, this would lead us to the event that separates us from an even more ancient epoch of humanity where our souls led lives greatly different from the ones they lead in our present physical bodies. However, rather than dealing in detail with a description of life and culture in those ancient times, let us today be content to illuminate the answer to the question: How was humanity guided in ancient times, and where did the forces that influenced it come from?

When a seer whose spiritual eye is opened so that he knows how to read the fine script of the Akasha Chronicle looks back into the spiritual worlds, he discovers the sites from which the culture and all spiritual life of those times emanated. Our souls can discover the sites where the masters and their disciples assembled in the mystery schools of that time. There were many such Mystery Centers on the ancient Atlantean continent, and they differed from those of today and were given a different name. They were not just churches and not just schools, but rather a combination of both. Those who searched for truth could find both religion and wisdom in the mystery schools; here, religion and wisdom were one. Using a modern word, we can characterize the concept of those cultic centers, the mystery schools, by the term “Atlantean Oracles.” This is the name given to them by the European mystery schools, but originally they were called something entirely different.

In the Atlantean Oracles and their centers of wisdom, spiritual life was differentiated in the same way that external knowledge and the areas of trade and professions are subdivided in external life today. There were various branches of spiritual investigation and occult wisdom in ancient Atlantis, but everything in those times depended on different conditions. Wisdom varied from one oracle to another according to the capacities of the human beings and their external environment. A connection existed between certain human capacities and certain planets, that is, certain mystical occult capacities were connected with special planets. Therefore, on the Atlantean continent we should distinguish between oracles of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

Our present capacities, too, developed out of the cosmos, as did our earth, and they are in each case tied to different planets and their influences. On Atlantis, people who were suited to develop this or that cognitive capacity were chosen from the population and assigned to one of the seven oracles. Of the seven oracles, which were named after the seven planets in ancient Atlantis, the Sun Oracle stood out from all the others, but next to it the Vulcan Oracle prepared itself in secrecy for its future task.

Each of these oracles had emanated from the cosmos according to its capacity, but there was one center in which the capacities of all seven oracles flowed together, and it was here that the wisdom of the seven oracles in Atlantis coalesced. The adepts of this center, of the Holy Sun Oracle, had been initiated into the mystery and service of what we today know as the Sun. We should not forget that the physical sun is only the external expression or physiognomy—the body and garment—of the spiritual life of the exalted Sun-Being.

All of you have heard of the time when the sun separated from the earth, and along with the physical sun those beings abandoned the earthly arena who had advanced through the human state and, therefore, could no longer use the earth for their development. After the moon too had left, the earth was able to realize its destination of becoming the abode of humanity. If the sun alone had influenced the earth, the latter would have gone through such a rapid development that human beings would have become old soon after birth. By contrast, if our earth had been only under the influence of the moon, human beings would have been stiffened and become mummies Development would have been too slow, and their bodies would have reached a state of rigidity and lignification. However, through a wise guiding force, sun and moon maintained a balance in the external influence they exert on the earth; and this enabled earth and human beings to develop at a speed suitable to them. The beings of Mars, Mercury, Venus, and so on, who did not need the forces that had left with the moon and earth for their development, departed with the sun to take up their own abode. Yet they continued to be connected with the earth and sent their beneficial forces down to it in the sunlight.

During the ancient Atlantean epoch, the adepts of the Sun Oracle had been initiated into the deeds of this lofty Sun-Being. The Great Initiate who was the leader of this highest oracle had been initiated in the most comprehensive ways into these mysteries. The entire ancient Atlantean and, as we shall see, also the post-Atlantean culture proceeded from him. The “Manu,” as this leader of the Sun Oracle was called—although the name doesn't really matter all that much—did not choose the main representatives of the post-Atlantean culture from among the so-called scholars and scientists, nor from the clairvoyants and Magi of that time. The people who were endowed with spiritual and psychic knowledge and who in those days were approximately comparable to the scientists and scholars of our time were not considered suitable by him; rather plain people who had begun gradually to lose the clairvoyant faculty were chosen. Our present state of consciousness began to develop only at the end of the Atlantean epoch. That was the time when the old clairvoyant consciousness was waning, gradually giving way to a full consciousness of self, to the ability to address the “I” in oneself. The great Manu gathered about him those who were able to function intellectually, not the clairvoyants and Magi but those who absorbed and developed the rudiments of arithmetic. They were the despised who knew nothing in the opinion of the leading people, and in this they were not unlike the theosophists today. Yet it was they with whom the great Manu journeyed to the sanctuary in Asia from which the postAtlantean culture was to emanate.

Disregarding America for this purpose, let us say that Europe, Asia, and Africa have all been populated by the descendants of the ancient Atlanteans who had moved to these continents under Manu's leadership. This initiate of the Sun Oracle now had to take care that the founding of this post-Atlantean culture and the evolution of its human beings would proceed under the proper influence. From the very beginning he had to take care that everything that was valuable for a future development should be carried forward. This preservation of values from the past is a law of occultism, of spiritual economy, but it is also a law that can only be known through spiritual wisdom.

Now the Great Initiate took something very valuable with him when he journeyed from ancient Atlantis to Europe. To accomplish this, he had—let me put it this way—traveled to and inspected the other oracles. You all know that in the case of ordinary people the etheric body separates from the astral body and the ego soon after death and gradually dissolves in the universal ether. The same happens with the astral body after a certain time, but this law is sometimes broken in the interest of spiritual economy. This is what happened in the case of the etheric bodies of the seven greatest initiates who were the leaders of the ancient Atlantean oracles.

What does it mean when we say we work on ourselves? It means that we purify the etheric body and the astral body. Now, once purified, the spiritualized etheric and astral bodies do not dissolve after death but are preserved in accordance with the law of spiritual economy. In short, it was known in the mysteries how to preserve the valuable etheric and astral bodies developed by the great initiates, but it would lead me too far afield to speak about this in detail. Suffice it to say that these bodies were kept by the preservers of the mystery schools.

It is for this reason that the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle journeyed to the other Atlantean oracles to collect and take with him the seven etheric bodies of the greatest Atlantean initiates. And then he attracted through his wisdom a number of human beings who were to become fit for their coming culture. He taught these humans who were gathered around him so that they became increasingly more capable and pure. What followed may be called an art. After some time had elapsed, it became possible to incorporate the seven more important etheric bodies of the seven greatest initiates of the ancient Atlantean oracles into seven human beings. In regard to their egos, their power of judgment, and so on, they were simple people whose existence had no significance from an external point of view. However, they carried within them the seven most highly developed etheric bodies of the seven most significant initiates. These etheric bodies had streamed into these people, thereby enabling them to exude the great, powerful visions and truths of evolution through inspiration from above. Thus, they were able to speak of all this exalted wisdom.

The Great Initiate sent these seven bearers of wisdom to India where people still had a sense and an understanding of the spiritual and of spiritual worlds. In India human beings still had the feeling and the consciousness of having at one time emanated from a primordial spiritual world and of having been born from the womb of the Godhead. Therefore, the whole physical world appeared to them as maya, as illusion, and they longed to return to this world of the gods, to those divine-spiritual beings with whom they had once lived. To such people the seven bearers of wisdom could speak. They were called the Holy Rishis, and it was they who inaugurated the dawn of our post-Atlantean culture. The people who had preserved for themselves the consciousness of and the longing for the spiritual world with its divine-spiritual beings were thus given the opportunity to learn more about this world and to find the way back to it.

Subsequent ages gave birth to not only peoples who were destined to look into the spiritual worlds, but also to those who wanted to contribute to the founding of a new culture. They were meant to become fond of the physical world and to see it not only as maya or illusion. Rather, they began to understand that this physical world is but the expression or physiognomy of the spiritual world that lies behind it. This was the second epoch, the ancient Persian or Zarathustran culture. Ordinary history records only a relatively late Zarathustra because historians are unaware that it was customary in ancient times for a successor to receive the name of a great leader from the past. I am here referring to the greatest of all Zarathustras, who was one of the most intimate disciples of the Initiate of the Sun Oracle. His task was to find the connection between the physical and the spiritual world. He had to teach his disciples that the physical sphere of the sun is the body of spiritual beings who have their abode on the sun and that this whole physical world should be viewed as the members and limbs of the physical body of divine-spiritual beings. Just as the sun is surrounded by a great aura, so the human being is surrounded by his or her own small aura, which is a microcosmic expression of the sun's great aura. The sun is the body of the Sun Spirit who revealed himself in the Sun Oracle of the ancient Atlantean epoch. Zarathustra beheld this spirit in clairvoyant vision. He also designated the aura of the sun as Sun Spirit, and this is the same being whom he also called Ahura Mazdao. Occultists of later ages called it Ormuzd.

Zarathustra taught his disciples to see Ahura Mazdao in the physical sun and not to be led astray by Ahriman. Ahriman has lived in the physical world since the last third of the Atlantean epoch and attacks the human soul through sense perception, that is to say from the outside. By contrast, Lucifer attacks the soul from within. Zarathustra had to kindle in the hearts of humans the love for the great Sun Spirit, and he did this in powerful words that cannot be adequately rendered in our modern languages. All the magnificent words that you find in the Vedas and Gathas, no matter how beautiful, are but a feeble superficial expression of the great and lofty words originally uttered by Zarathustra. In our language, they can be approximated by the following:

“I wish to speak, now hearken and listen to me, you from near and from afar, who are filled with longing for these words. I want to speak about that which is the highest truth to me in this world and what was revealed to me by the great and mighty Ahura Mazdao. Hearken and listen to me now and mark my words carefully: No longer shall the teacher of falsehoods, the evil one whose lips bore witness to an evil faith, lead you astray for He—the mighty Ahura Mazdao—has manifested himself! Those who do not want to listen to the words as I say them and to the meaning that I give to them will experience evil things when the course of time reaches its end.”

And at other times Zarathustra said this: “So great and mighty is He who revealed Himself to me in the sun that I surrender everything for him. I rejoice in sacrificing to Him the life of my body, the etheric existence of my senses, and the expression of my deeds”—the astral body. Such was the vow that Zarathustra made a long time ago.

Zarathustra had two disciples. To one of them he revealed through spiritual means everything that one can perceive with clairvoyant astral organs. This disciple was reincarnated under the name Hermes, the Egyptian Hermes. To the second disciple he imparted truths that one can know through the clairvoyant etheric body: the wisdom of the Akasha Chronicle. This second disciple was Moses, and you can find the wisdom imparted to him in the Book of Moses of the Old Testament.

When the first disciple was reincarnated as Hermes, he bore within him the astral body of Zarathustra, who had revealed to him not only his teachings, but also his own nature. Such a transfer is possible for what Hermes had received was nothing else but the astral body Zarathustra had sacrificed for him. Hence it was Zarathustra's wisdom that Hermes, the founder of the third post-Atlantean epoch, proclaimed.

The other disciple, to whom Zarathustra had given wisdom through the etheric body, was also born again. When he reincarnated, the etheric body that Zarathustra had sacrificed was woven into him. This disciple was Moses. You can find such facts recorded in religious documents, but in a veiled manner only. Read the story of the birth of Moses. What happened then? The child was placed into an ark of bulrushes which was then put into the water. What does that mean? It means that he was completely cut off from the world. His ego and astral body were not to become manifest until they were permeated by the principle of the etheric body. How can this take place? During the time when Moses lay isolated in the ark on the water, the etheric body that had been woven into him became illuminated. Only then could the astral body and the ego begin to work in him. Are not the powerful images of Genesis, which will occupy humanity for a long time to come, images taken from the Akasha Chronicle? These things cannot be understood without the aid of occultism.

We now come to the fourth epoch of the post-Atlantean culture, to the Graeco-Roman epoch. Up to this point, human beings were developed in such a way that they should learn to love the earth. Yet there were also those who had been the companions of the gods in the Atlantean age, and it is therefore justified to ask what had become of the egos of the great initiates of that time. Atlantean egos had dwelled in a softer and finer body, and for them existence on earth was such that individualities had to go through an incarnation only for the time necessary to maintain the connection between the world's primordial spiritual wisdom and humanity.

The great Buddha is one of the individualities who was actually able to imbue the oriental writings with that deep wisdom and spiritual force that we find in them now. As occultists, we are able to understand the communications relating to him, and we may even take them literally. For example, it is true when we read about him: “At his birth he shone like the bright light of the sun.” We can also take it literally when Buddha says: “I have entered my last incarnation and need not return to earth unless I do it on my own free will.” During the post-Atlantean epoch he also toiled to pass through stages of intellectual insights, and we can understand him when he says that the lines of incarnations and different stages of initiations through which he had passed flashed up before him:

Before me stood the splendor of the forms,
But my intuition was not yet pure!

I saw the Spirits of Insight,
But my intuition was not yet pure!

I saw the site of initiation,
But my intuition was not yet pure!

I was the companion among them:
Now my intuition was pure!

This is Buddha's illumination. He was one of those with whom we live in Rosicrucian theosophy.

We have already named three of the Masters: Zarathas, Skythianos, and Boddha or Buddha, and we can see how the lives of these leading personalities extend into our present time. An occultist can test these findings. In the realm of spiritual economy we not only find what these exalted men left behind; everything else that is of value to humanity is preserved. Take, for example, an individual such as Galileo, who in the sixteenth century achieved such significant results in physics. Galileo had an etheric body that was not allowed to die with him. Far away from the place where Galileo had worked, there lived a man in the middle of the eighteenth century who prepared himself for a great task after two decades of a devotional childhood. Deep in Russia, at the White Sea, lived a man in the plainest circumstances. His name was Michael Lomonosov. Unknown and without means, he hiked to Moscow and subsequently laid the foundations for Russian grammar. Lomonosov bore within him the etheric body of Galileo. And now it happened that a personality, who knew that the etheric body of Galileo had been preserved and who, in fact, had been present when this connection was being investigated occultly, knew nothing about Michael Lomonosov. This is no disgrace since on the physical plane one cannot know everything. But here we see that valuable elements are preserved and the past is connected with the future through the law of spiritual economy. In the Rosicrucian mysteries, too, we encounter the individuality who lived in the body of Buddha on the physical plane. During the Atlantean age, he had lived only as a bodhisattva, but later on he descended into the physical body of Buddha.

Let us now look at the times of Buddha and Zarathustra and observe what souls had to do in the ages between these two spiritual leaders. On the one hand, we have the teachings of Ahura Mazdao, on the other, that side of humanity that increasingly became fond of the earth. Let us envision once again the Indian, Persian, and Chaldean-AssyrianBabylonian times during which the soul gradually lost its connection with the spiritual world. Then, in ancient Greece the soul came to love the earth so deeply that the statement of a famous Greek, “Better to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the world of shadows,” was accepted as truth. During this fourth post-Atlantean, the Graeco-Roman epoch, everything in the external world appeared to be beautiful and charming. The seer may, for example, observe the ruins of the Temple of Paestrum with his physical eye and revel admiringly in the beauty of the temple's form and in the intriguing charm of its lines. However, when he takes his eyes off the temple and looks for a similar substance in the spiritual world, he finds nothing. Everything seems to be blotted out. This is what these souls experienced between death and rebirth. They were isolated within the cold circumference of their individuality, cut off from all spiritual things and longing only for the physical world and all its beauty.

Ahura Mazdao himself, the Leader of the Sun, had to descend to earth to bring light into this icy separateness. He had to become a human being in the physical world in order to help both the living and the dead. He had to be a human among humans! The high and the magnificent that lives in the sun descended to earth and revealed itself in and to humanity. Previously, it had revealed itself in the elements, for example to Moses in the fire of the burning bush and in the lightning on Sinai. The Israelites were to make no graven image of their God. Why? Because no external name can be given to “Me,” the Divine Being; only an entirely different name can express the “I am the I am!” The only possibility of discovering the spirit of the sun's name is to seek it in the human being. That which lives as “I” in human beings is the Christ-Being.

The Jehova revelation precedes the Christ. That was at the time when the Christ-Being could gradually descend to the earth. What had Zarathustra once vowed to the high Sun-Being? What sacrifice did he want to make to him? His body, senses, life, and speech. Zarathustra was reincarnated as a contemporary of the great Buddha. He could then build up the etheric and astral bodies that he had sacrificed. He was reborn as Zarathas or Nazarathos, and he became the teacher of Pythagoras, who himself was reincarnated as one of the three Wise Men of the East and became one of the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth. Zarathustra, who had once sacrificed his etheric and astral bodies, was also able to give up his external sheath to Him whose coming he had once announced. As the Jesus of Nazareth of Western occultism, he could place his physical body at the disposal of the Sun Spirit and was then able to say, “I am the Light of the World!”

The Christ-Being was known in all the mysteries. In ancient India, at the time of the Seven Rishis, the being who represented Christ was called Vishva Karman. Zarathustra named him Ahura Mazdao, and in Egypt he was known as Osiris. The Jewish people called him Jahve or Jehova, and then in the fourth cultural epoch this very same being lived for three years on our physical earth. This is the being who will in the future reunite the sun with the earth. Mystically, the Christ united Himself with the earth when the blood streamed from His wounds at Golgotha. At that time He appears in the aura of the earth, and He has been in it ever since.

Who was the first man to see Christ in the aura of the earth? It was St. Paul, who did more than anyone else for the dissemination of Christianity. What caused Saul to become Paul? Neither the teachings nor the events that took place in Palestine, but the event at Damascus, which was of a super-sensible nature. Before that experience, Paul could not believe that the one who had died so disgracefully on the cross had been the Christ, but as an initiate of the cabala he knew that the Christ would be visible in the aura of the earth once He had appeared on earth. That was the experience of Paul, which transformed him from Saul to Paul. Paul said of himself that he was born prematurely, and the same is also said of the Buddha. This means that such an individuality does not descend too deeply into the physical realm. When Paul became clairvoyant before he came to Damascus, he saw and knew who Christ was.

The Christ was working in Buddha as a bodhisattva, and it was He who was now the planetary spirit of the earth since the event of Golgotha and who could since be found in the physical aura of the earth. Through the Christ-Principle a new light has been kindled in this world and beyond. The body of Jesus of Nazareth—the etheric and astral bodies and the ego of Jesus of Nazareth—exist in many copies in the spiritual world. Such a statement expresses something of great significance, and for a better understanding of it we can draw on nature for a number of enlightening examples. Just think of a grain seed that grows into a stalk and multiplies itself many times in the process. This apparently simple natural process is a parable of the events in the super-sensible world that are governed by certain laws. Many copies of the etheric and astral bodies and of the ego of Jesus of Nazareth exist in order to be incorporated in the preliminary bearers of the Christ-Principle. Everything connected with the Christ-Principle is so momentous that humanity can grasp it only little by little.

St. Augustine, for example, bore within him a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth; and once you know that, you will be able to appreciate his life, his errors, and his accomplishments. His ego and his astral body were left to their own resources, and only in his etheric body did his great mystical gift come to life. St. Francis of Assisi and Thomas Aquinas had copies of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into their souls, and it is this fact that allowed them to be such dynamic teachers. They worked from a sphere in which Christ had once lived.

In some cases external events such as natural catastrophes or similar things enhance this weaving of spiritual bodies into the soul of the recipient. It is said of St. Thomas Aquinas that lightning struck and killed his little sister in the room where he happened to be standing, but spared him. He interpreted this lightning bolt next to him to the effect that elemental forces were necessary to help him take up the copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth. Elisabeth of Thüringen also had an imprint of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth in her soul.

Zarathustra, or Jesus of Nazareth, is one of the three Masters of the Rosicrucians. Many copies of his ego, that is of the ego in which the Christ Spirit Himself had dwelled, can be found in the spiritual world. The copies of the ego of Jesus of Nazareth are waiting for us in the spiritual world to be utilized for the future evolution of humankind. People who endeavor to strive upward to the heights of spiritual wisdom and love are candidates for these copies of the ego of Jesus of Nazareth. They become bearers of Christ, true Christophori. On this earth they shall be heralds of His Second Coming.

We derive strength for our future work from the knowledge of which individualities are behind the missions of important human beings. It is possible to test these facts. Not everyone is able to investigate what goes on behind the curtains of the physical world, but everyone can examine the results of such investigations by looking at the Holy Scriptures written before and after Christ. These facts can illuminate the way to understanding; and if they do, they change within us and become spiritual life blood.

This lecture is included in Volume 207 of the Bibliographic Survey, 1961. It is lecture 1 of 11 from the lecture series: Anthroposophy as Cosmosophy Vol. I. Also known as: At the Center of Man's Being: I, or Fundamental Impulses in the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Times.

If an an oriental sage of early times, who had been initiated into the Mysteries of the ancient East, were to turn his glance towards modern Western civilisation, he might perhaps say to its representatives: “You are living entirely in fear; your whole mood of soul is governed by fear. All that you do, as well as all that you feel, is saturated with fear and its reverberations in the most important moments of life. And since fear is closely related to hatred, so hatred plays a great part in your whole civilisation.”

Let us make this quite clear. I mean a sage of the ancient Eastern civilisation would speak thus if he stood again to-day among Western people with the same standard of education, the same mood of soul, as those of his own ancient time. And he would make it plain that in his time and his country civilisation was founded on a quite different basis. He would probably say: “In my days, fear played no part in civilised life. Whenever we were concerned to promulgate a world-conception and let action and social life spring from it, the main thing was joy—joy which could be enhanced to the point of a complete giving of oneself in love to the world.” That is how he would put it, and in so doing he would indicate (if he were rightly understood) what were from his point of view supremely important constituent factors and impulses of modern civilisation. And if we knew how to listen to him in the right way, we should gain much that we need to know in order to find a starting point for trying to get a grip on modern life.

In fact, an echo of the ancient civilisation still persists in Asia, even though strong European influences have been absorbed into its religious, æsthetic, scientific and social life. This ancient civilisation is in decline, and when the ancient oriental sage says, “Love was the fundamental force of the ancient oriental culture,” then it must certainly be admitted that but little of this love can be traced directly in the present. But one who is able to discern it can perceive even now, in the phenomena of decline of the Asiatic culture, the penetration of this primeval element of joy—delight in the world and love for the world.

In those ancient times there was in the Orient little of what was afterwards required of man when that word resounded which found its most radical expression in the Greek saying, “Know thyself!” This “Know thyself” entered the historical life of man only when the early Greek civilisation set in. The old eastern world-picture, wide-ranging and light-filled, was not yet permeated by this kind of human knowledge; it was in no way orientated towards directing man's glance into his own inner being.

In this respect man is dependent on the circumstances prevailing in his environment. The ancient oriental civilisation was founded under a different influence from the sun's light, and its earthly circumstances were also different from those of Western civilisation. In the ancient East, man's inner glance was captured by all that he experienced in the surrounding world, and he had a special motive for giving over his entire being to it. It was cosmic knowledge that wove in the ancient oriental wisdom, and in the world-conception that owed its origin to this wisdom. Even in the Mysteries themselves—you can infer this from all you have been hearing for many years—in all that lived in the Mysteries of the East there was no fulfilment of the challenge, “Know thyself!” On the contrary—“Turn your gaze outwards towards the world and endeavour to let that approach you which is hidden in the depths of cosmic phenomena!”—that is how the precept of the ancient Oriental civilisation would have been expressed.

The teachers and pupils of the Mysteries were compelled, however, to turn their glance to the inner being of man when the Asiatic civilisation began to spread westwards; as soon, indeed, as Mystery colonies were founded in Egypt and in North Africa. But particularly when the Mysteries began to develop their colonies still further to the west—a special centre was ancient Ireland—then the teachers and pupils of the Mysteries coming over from Asia were faced, by virtue of the geographical features of the West and its entirely different elemental configuration, with the necessity of cultivating self-knowledge and a true inner vision. And simply because these Mystery pupils, when still living in Asia, had acquired knowledge of the outer world and of the spiritual facts and beings lying behind the outer world—simply by the strength of this fact, they were now able to penetrate deeply into all that exists in man's innermost being.

Over there in Asia all this could not have been observed and studied at all. The inward-turning glance would have been paralysed, so to speak. But by means of all that the men of the East brought to the Western Mystery centres, their gaze having long been directed outwards so as to penetrate into the spiritual worlds, they were now enabled to pierce through into man's inner being. And it was only the strongest souls who could endure what they perceived.

We can indeed realise when an impression was produced by this self-knowledge on the teachers and pupils of the Oriental Mysteries if we repeat a precept which was addressed to the pupils over and over again by the teachers who had already cultivated that vision of man's inner being, a precept which was to make clear to them in what mood of soul this self-knowledge was to be approached. The precept I mean is frequently quoted. But in its full weight it was uttered only in the older Mystery colonies of Egypt, North Africa and Ireland as a preparation for the pupil and as a reminder for every Initiate in regard to the experiences of man's inner being. The precept runs thus: “No-one who is not initiated in the sacred Mysteries should learn to know the secrets of man's innermost being; to utter these secrets in the presence of a non-Initiate is inadmissible; for the mouth uttering these secrets then lays the burden of sin upon itself; likewise does the ear burden itself with sin when it hearkens to those secrets.”

Time and again this precept was uttered from out of the inner experience to which a man, prepared by Oriental wisdom, was able to attain when he penetrated, by virtue of the terrestrial configuration of the West, to the knowledge of man. Tradition has preserved this precept, and to-day it is still repeated—without any understanding of its intrinsic nature—in the secret orders and secret societies of the West which, externally, still have a great influence. But it is repeated only from tradition. It is not uttered with the necessary weight, for those who use it do not really know what it signifies. Yet even in our own time this word is used as a kind of motto in the secret societies of the West: “There are secrets concerning man's inner being that can be transmitted to men only within the secret societies; for otherwise the mouth uttering them is sinful, and the ear hearing them is likewise sinful.”

We should be aware that in the course of time many men in Western countries (I am not speaking of Central Europe) learn to know in secret societies what has been handed down as tradition from the researches of the ancient wisdom. It is received without understanding, although as an impulse it often flows into action. In later centuries after about the middle of the 15th century—the human constitution became such as to make it impossible to see these things in their original form; they could be understood only intellectually. Ideas about them could be picked up, but a true experience of them could not be attained, though individuals had some inkling of it.

Such men have sometimes adopted strange forms of outer life, as for instance Bulwer Lytton, the author of “Zanoni.” What he became in his later life can be understood only if one is aware of how he received, to begin with, the tradition of self-knowledge, but how, too, by virtue of his individual constitution, he was also able to penetrate into certain mysteries. Thereby he became estranged from the ordinary ways of life. Precisely in him one can observe what a man's attitude towards life becomes when he admits into his inner experience this different spiritual world; not only into his thoughts, but into his whole soul. Many facts must then be judged by other than conventional standards.

Of course, it was something quite outlandish when Bulwer travelled about, speaking of his inner experiences with a certain emphasis, while a young person who accompanied him played a harp-like instrument, for he needed to have this harp-music in between the passages of his talk. Here and there he appeared in gatherings where everything else went on in a quiet formal, conventional way. He would come on in his rather eccentric garb and sit down, with his harp-maiden seated in front of his knees. He would speak a few sentences; then the harp-maiden would play; then he would continue his talk, and the maiden would play again. Thus something coquettish in a higher sense of the word—one cannot help characterising it in this way at first—was introduced into the conventional world where Philistinism has made such increasing inroads, above all since the middle of the 15th century.

Men have little idea of the degree of Philistinism into which they have grown; they have less and less idea of it just because it comes to seem natural. They see something as reasonable only in so far as it is in line with what is “done.” But things in life are all interconnected, and the dryness and sleepiness of modern times, the relation human beings now have to one another, belongs to the intellectual development of the last few centuries. The two things belong together. A man like Bulwer, of course, did not fit into such a development; one can quite well picture to oneself people of older times travelling about in the world accompanied by a younger person with some pleasant music. One needs only to perceive the distance between one attitude of soul and another; then such a thing will be seen in the right light. But with Bulwer it was because something lit up in him that could no longer exist directly in the immediate present, but appeared only as a tradition in the modern intellectual age.

We must, however, recover the knowledge of man that lived in the Mystery colonies of which I have spoken. The average man to-day is aware of the world around him by means of his sense-perceptions. What he sees, he orders and arranges in his mind. Then he looks also into his own inner being. The sense-perceptions received from outside, the ideas developed therefrom, these ideas as they penetrate within becoming transformed by impulses of feeling and of will, together with all that is reflected into consciousness as memories—here we have what forms the content of the soul, the content of life in which modern man lives and out of which he acts. At most he is led by a false kind of mysticism to ask: “What is there really in my inner being? What does self-knowledge yield?” In raising such questions he wants to find the answers in his ordinary consciousness. But this ordinary consciousness gives him only what originated in external sense-perceptions and has been transformed by feeling and will. One finds only the reflections, the mirror-pictures, of external life, when looking into one's inner being with ordinary consciousness; and although the outer impressions are transformed by feeling and will, man is still unable to tell how feeling and will are actually working. For this reason he often fails to recognise what he perceives in his inner being as a transformed reflection of the outer world, and takes it, perhaps, as a special message from the divine eternal world. But this is not so. What presents itself to the ordinary consciousness of modern man as self-knowledge is only the transformed outer world, which is reflected out of man's inner being into his consciousness.

If man really and truly desired to look into his innermost being, then he would be obliged—I have often used this image—to break the inner mirror. Our inner being is indeed like a mirror. We gaze on the outer world. Here are the outer sense-perceptions. We link conceptions to them. These conceptions are then reflected by our inner being. By looking into our inner being we get only to this mirror within. We perceive what is reflected by the memory-mirror. We are just as unable to penetrate into man's inner being with ordinary consciousness as we are to look behind a mirror without breaking it. This, however, is precisely what was brought about in the preparatory stage of the ancient way of Eastern wisdom so that the teachers and pupils of the Mystery colonies that came to the West could penetrate directly through the memories into the innermost being of man. Out of what they saw they afterwards uttered those words which were meant to convey that one must be well prepared—above all in those ancient times—if one desired to direct one's glance to the inner being of man. For what does one then behold within?

There, one perceives how something of the power which belongs to perception and thought, and is developed in front of the memory-mirror, penetrates below this memory-mirror. Thoughts penetrate below the memory-mirror and work into the human etheric body—into that part of the etheric body which forms the basis of growth, but which is equally the source of the forces of will. As we look out into the sunlit space and survey all that we receive through our sense-perceptions, there radiates into our inner being something which on the one hand becomes memory-ideas, but also trickles through the memory-mirror, permeating it just as the processes of growth, nutrition and so on permeate us.

The thought-forces penetrate first through the etheric body, and the etheric body, permeated in this way by the thought-forces, works in a very special manner on the physical body. Thereupon a complete transformation sets in of that material existence which is within the physical body of man. In the outer world, matter is nowhere completely destroyed. This is why modern philosophy and science speak of the conservation of matter. But this law of the conservation of matter is valid only for the outer world. Within the human being, matter is completely dissolved into nothingness. The very being of matter is destroyed. It is precisely upon this fact that our human nature is based: upon being able to throw back matter into chaos, to destroy matter utterly, within that sphere which lies deeper than memory.

This is what was pointed out to the Mystery pupils who were led from the East into the Mystery colonies of the West, and especially of Ireland. “In your inner nature, below the powers of memory, you bear within you something that works destructively, and without it you would not have developed the power of thought, for you have to develop thought by permeating the etheric body with thought-forces. But an etheric body thus permeated with thought-forces works on the physical body in such a way as to throw its matter into chaos and to destroy it.”

If, therefore, a person ventures into this inner being of man with the same frame of mind with which he penetrates as far as memory, then he enters a realm where the being of man has an impulse to destroy, to blot out, that which exists there in material form. For the purpose of developing our human, thought-filled Ego we all bear within us, below the memory-mirror, a fury of destruction, a fury of dissolution, in respect of matter. There is no human self-knowledge which does not point with every possible emphasis towards this inner human fact.

For this reason, whoever has had to learn of the presence of this centre of destruction in the inner being of man must take an interest in the development of the spirit. With all intensity he must be able to say to himself: Spirit must exist, and for the sake of the maintenance of the spirit matter may be extinguished.

It is only after one has spoken to mankind for many years of the interests connected with spiritual scientific investigation that one can draw attention to what actually exists within man. But to-day we must do so, for otherwise man would consider himself to be something different from what he really is within Western civilisation. Enclosed within him he has a fiery centre of destruction, and in truth the forces of decline can be transformed into forces of ascent only if he becomes conscious of this fact.

What would happen if men should not be led by Spiritual Science to this awareness? In the developments of our time we can see already what would happen. This centre which is isolated in man, and should work only within him, at the one single spot within, where matter is thrown back into chaos, now breaks out and penetrates into human instincts. That is what will happen to Western civilisation; yes, and to the civilisation of the whole Earth. This is evidenced by all the destructive forces appearing to-day—in the East of Europe, for instance. It is a fury of destruction thrust out of the inner being of man into the outer world; and in the future man will be able to find his bearings in regard to what thus penetrates into his instincts only when a true knowledge of the human being once again prevails, when we become aware once more of this human centre of destruction within—a centre, however, which must be there for the sake of the development of human thought. For this strength of thought that man needs in order that he may have a world-conception in keeping with our time—this strength of thought, which must be there in front of the memory-mirror, brings about the continuation of thought into the etheric body. And the etheric body thus permeated by thought works destructively upon the physical body. This centre of destruction within modern Western man is a fact, and knowledge merely draws attention to it. If the centre of destruction is there without any awareness of it, this is much worse than if man takes full cognisance of it, and from this conscious standpoint enters into the development of modern civilisation.

It was fear that seized upon the pupils of these Mystery colonies when they first heard of these secrets. This fear they learnt to know thoroughly. They became thoroughly acquainted with the feeling that a penetration into man's innermost being—not frivolously in the sense of a nebulous mysticism but undertaken in all sincerity—must arouse fear. And this fear felt by the ancient Mystery pupils of the West was overcome only by disclosing to them the whole weight of the facts. Then they were able to conquer by consciousness what arose in them as fear.

When the age of intellectualism set in, this same fear became unconscious, and as unconscious fear it still exists. Under all manner of masks it works into outer life. It belongs, however, to our time to penetrate into man's inner being. “Know thyself” has become a rightful demand. It was by a deliberate calling forth of fear, followed by an overcoming of it, that the Mystery pupils were directed to self-knowledge in the true way.

The age of intellectualism dulled the sight of what lay in man's inner being, but it was unable to do away with the fear. Thus it came about that man was and still is influenced by this unconscious fear to the degree of saying, “There is nothing at all in the human being that transcends birth and death.” He is afraid of penetrating deeper than this life of memory, this ordinary life of thought which maintains its course, after all, only between birth and death. He is afraid to look down into that which is eternal in the human soul, and from out of this fear he postulates the doctrine that there is nothing at all outside this life between birth and death. Modern materialism has arisen out of fear, without men having the slightest idea of this. The modern materialistic world-conception is a product of fear and anxiety (Angst).

So this fear lives on in the outer actions of men, in the social structure, in the course of history since the middle of the 15th century, and especially in the 19th century materialistic world-conception. Why did these men become materialists—why would they admit only the external, that which is given in material existence? Because they feared to descend into the depths of man.

This is what the ancient Oriental sage would have wished to express from out of his knowledge by saying: “You modern Westerners live entirely steeped in fear. You found your social order upon fear; you create your arts out of fear; your materialistic world-conception has been born from fear. You and the successors of those who in my time founded the ancient Oriental world-conception, although they have come into decadence now—you and these men of Asia will never understand one another, because after all with the Asiatic people everything sprang ultimately from love; with you everything originates in fear mixed with hate.”

These are strong words indeed, but I prefer to try to place the facts before you as an utterance from the lips of an Oriental sage. It will perhaps be believed that he could speak in such a manner if he came back, whereas a modern man might be considered mad if he put it all so radically! But from such a radical characterisation of things we can learn what we really must learn to-day for the healthy progress of civilisation. Mankind will have to know again that intelligent thinking, which is the highest attainment of modern times, could not have come into existence if the life of ideas did not arise from a centre of destruction. And this centre must be reckoned with, so that it may be kept safely within and not pass over into our outer instincts and thence turn into a social impulse.

One can really penetrate deeply into the connections of modern life by looking at things in this way. Thus the realm that manifests as a centre of destruction lies within, beyond the memory-mirror. But the life of modern man takes its course between the memory-mirror and the outer sense-perceptions. Just as little as man, when he looks into his inner being, is able to see beyond the memory-mirror, so far is he from being able to pierce through all that is spread out before him as sense-perceptions; he cannot see beyond it. He adds to it a material, atomistic world, which is indeed a fantastic world, because he cannot penetrate through the sense-images.

But man is no stranger to this world beyond the outer sense-images. Every night between falling asleep and awakening he enters this world. When you sleep, you dwell within this world. What you experience there beyond the sense-images is not the atomistic world conjectured by the visionaries of natural science. What lies beyond the sphere of the senses was in fact experienced by the ancient Oriental sage in his Mysteries. It can be experienced only when one has devotion for the world, when one has the desire and the urge to surrender oneself entirely to the world. Love must permeate the act of cognition if one desires to penetrate beyond the sense-perceptions. And it was this love that prevailed especially in the ancient oriental civilisation.

Why must one have this devotion? Because if one sought to pierce beyond the sense-perceptions with one's ordinary human Ego, one might be harmed. The Ego, as experienced in ordinary life, must be given up, if one wants to penetrate beyond the sense-perceptions. How does this Ego originate? It is brought into existence by man's capacity to plunge into the chaos of destruction. This Ego must be tempered and hardened in that realm which lies within man as a centre of destruction. And with this Ego one cannot live on the far side of the outer sense-world.

Let us picture to ourselves the centre of destruction in man's inner being. It extends over the whole human organism. If it were to spread out over the whole world, what would then live in the world through man? Evil. Evil is nothing else but the chaos thrust outside, the chaos which is necessary in man's inner being. And in this necessary chaos, this necessary centre of evil in man, the human Ego must be forged. This human Egohood cannot live beyond the sphere of the human senses in the outer world. That is why the Ego-consciousness disappears in sleep, and when it figures in dreams it is often as though estranged or weakened.

The Ego which is forged in the centre of evil cannot pass beyond the realm of the sense-perceptions. Hence to the ancient oriental sage it was clear that one can go further only by means of devotion and love, by a surrender of the Ego; and that on penetrating fully into this further region one is no longer in a world of Vana, of weaving in the habitual, but rather in the world of Nirvana, where this habitual existence is dissolved.

This interpretation of Nirvana, of the sublimest surrender of the Ego, as it occurs in sleep and as it existed in fully conscious knowledge for the pupils of the ancient oriental civilisation—it is this Nirvana that would be pointed out to you by such an ancient sage as I placed hypothetically before you. And he would say: “With you, since you had to develop Egohood, everything is founded on fear. With us, who had to suppress Egohood, everything was founded on love. With you, there speaks the Ego that desires to assert itself. With us, Nirvana spoke, while the Ego flowed out into the world in love.”

One can formulate these matters in concepts and they are then preserved in a certain sense, but for humanity at large they live in feelings and moods, permeating human existence. And through such feelings they bring about a living difference to-day between the East and the West. In the West, men have a blood, a lymph, that is saturated by an Egohood tempered in the inner centre of evil. In the East men have a blood, a lymph, in which lives an echo of the longing for Nirvana.

Both in the East and in the West these things escape the crude intellectual concepts of our time. Intellectual understanding draws the blood from the living organism, turns it into a preparation, places it under a microscope, looks at it and then forms ideas about it. The ideas thus arrived at are infinitely crude even from the point of view of ordinary experience. That is all one can say about it. Do you think that this method touches the subtly graded differences of the people who sit here next to one another? The microscope, of course, gives only crude ideas about the blood, the lymph. Subtle shades of difference are to be found even among people who have come from the same milieu. But these shades of difference naturally exist much more emphatically between the men of the East and those of the West, although only a crude idea of them can be had by modern thinking.

All this comes to expression in the bodies of the men from Asia, Europe and America, and in their relation to one another in outer social life. With the crude understanding that has been applied in the last few centuries to the investigation of external nature we shall not be able to tackle the demands of modern social life; above all we shall not be able to reach an adjustment between East and West. But this adjustment must be found.

In the late autumn of this year (1921) people will be going to the Washington Conference, and discussions will take place there about matters which were summed up by General Smuts, the Minister of Africa, with his instinctive genius. The evolution of modern humanity, he said, is characterised by the fact that the seed-ground for cultural activities, which has hitherto been in the regions bordering the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, is now moving to the Pacific. The culture of the countries situated round the North Sea has gradually spread throughout the West and will become a world culture. The centre of gravity of this world culture will be transferred from the North Sea to the Pacific.

Mankind stands face to face with this change. But men still talk in such a way that their speech savours of the old crude ideas and nothing essential is reached—although it must be reached if we are really to go ahead. The signs of the times stand with menacing significance before us and their message is: Until now only a limited trust has been needed between men, who in fact were all secretly afraid of one another. Their fear was masked under all sorts of other feelings. But now we need an attitude of soul that will be able to embrace a world civilisation. We need a confidence which will be able to bring into balance the relationship between East and West. Here a significant and necessary perspective opens out. The assumption to-day is that economic problems can be handled quite on their own account—the future position of Japan in the Pacific, or how all the trading peoples on earth may have free access to the Chinese market, and so on. But these problems will not be settled at any conference until men become aware that all economic activities and relations presuppose the trust of one man in another. In future this trust will be attained only in a spiritual way. Outer civilisation will be in need of spiritual deepening.

In the last lecture we spoke of the Spirit which should pervade the forms in our building. From all that has been said you will have gathered that these forms are no more the result of imitation of the external physical world than of mere speculation. Your feeling will have been that the forms have been derived from the spiritual world of which man is an integral part and of which he may hope to become conscious in the development of his knowledge of Spiritual Science. I want to remind you once again of an important fact, of which mention has already been made, namely, that human life runs its course in periods of approximately seven years each, and—as I tried last time to explain to you from spiritual-scientific cosmology—when we observe the whole course of these periods of seven years, we may say that after each period a certain support is added to man's being. When he has passed through seven such periods, therefore, he has reached approximately his fiftieth year, he possesses seven pairs of these ‘life-supports.’

If we were now to imagine ourselves entering the building from the West, in the first two pillars we have the expression of the supports which man has raised in his own being after the first period of seven years has run its course; the second pair of pillars are an expression of the supports he has added after the second period of seven years; and so it goes on, only it must be remembered that in man these supports are intermingled, whereas in the building they have had to be placed one behind the other in space. We may then be permeated with the feeling that when we pass through the building from the West towards the East, all that works upon us from left and right is a revelation of processes in human life itself. This shows us that there are firmly established cosmic laws of which man is a part but which are infinitely deeper than the so-called ‘natural laws’ of the outer physical world, and furthermore that the forms in our building have been evolved from these deep cosmic laws.

To study every detail from this point of view would lead us very far, although it could be done. In the present materialistic epoch, where there is no knowledge of Spiritual Science, there will be little understanding for these deeper laws of ‘being and becoming.’ We may therefore find ourselves faced with the question—and it is a wholly understandable one from the point of view of external knowledge—‘Why are the columns made of different kinds of wood?’ There is no allegorical or symbolical meaning in this, and anyone who raises such a question merely proves that life has afforded him no opportunity for the contemplation of deeper cosmic laws. The only rejoinder we can make is this: ‘Why, then, do you consider it necessary for a violin not to have only A strings?’ A man who wanted to use only A strings on a violin would be in exactly the same position as one who—perhaps quite unconsciously and naïvely—were to ask as the result of superficial knowledge, why our pillars are made of different woods.

We can develop these matters slowly, for we shall often meet together here. We can allow subjects that may prove fruitful to enter gradually into our feelings. To-day, therefore, I only want to speak of one matter that will help to stimulate our perception of what underlies the laws of true aesthetic form, on the one hand in the cosmos, and on the other in the microcosm, in the constitution of man. Before very long, the so-called science of to-day will undergo an overwhelming expansion, and only then will there be understanding of the true and deeper laws of aesthetic form.

In order to evoke a concrete perception of what I have here mentioned in mere abstract words, let us consider the following. I am going to place before you something that corresponds to a cosmological fact, a mighty cosmic fact.

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Now these three heavenly bodies (see diagram) stand in a certain mutual relationship to each other; they reveal their activities to each other and I want to speak of one particular aspect of these activities. To this end I will first divide the Sun diagrammatically as it actually appears to the occult seer when he directs his attention to these things. The Sun is seen divided into a kind of cross, into four chambers. The remarkable thing is that in the first moments of vision we see a kind of streaming current, but closer scrutiny reveals the fact that here we have to do with hosts of beings passing to and fro. We can see such a stream of spiritual beings passing from a certain “chamber” of the Sun to the Earth, penetrating the Earth and vitalising the Earth with solar essence, that is to say, with the spiritual force of the Sun, and thence streaming to their own chamber in the Sun.

This is cosmic reality but one sees still more—one sees migrations of hosts of spiritual beings who are flowing around and through the Moon (see diagram). They proceed from another chamber of the Sun: but they also flow in the other direction and pour through the Moon. Up to this point we are perceiving the activities of the inhabitants of three chambers in the Sun. Another migration or stream arises from the fact that these beings always return to the Sun after having passed through the Moon; thus a double stream has arisen. On the one hand the beings return into the fourth chamber in the Sun after having poured through the Moon, but another stream is formed because certain beings do not take part in the migration to the Moon; before reaching the Moon they turn back again to the Sun. This configuration reveals to us a kind of mirror-image in the cosmos, but we will leave this image out of consideration for the moment. It would be formed by a symmetrical expansion of the figure that is engraved there in the cosmos. This means, in effect, that there is revealed to clairvoyant consciousness a marvellous combination of forms, a figure engraved in the cosmos representing the interplay between the forces of Sun, Moon and Earth.

Now I will draw the diagram rather differently, with the Sun rather turned (Diagram II). The cross must also be turned.

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Now I will draw the diagram again differently (Diagram III). Here I have assumed hypothetically that Ahriman and Lucifer have entered, bringing disorder in their train. I will draw the Sun, Moon and Earth more irregularly and again trace the connections between them. What have I now drawn? Exactly the same thing as in the other diagrams, only somewhat distorted as a result of the intervention of Ahriman and Lucifer. I have now drawn a sketch of the blood circulation in man, a sketch of how the blood flows from the left ventricle of the heart through the body, on the one hand through the brain on the other through the rest of the body, returning as venous blood; you also see the course of the small circulatory stream through the right ventricle and lungs back again to the so-called left auricle.

Thus we can read from the cosmos what man is as a microcosmos, only it must be remembered that Ahriman and Lucifer have approached him.

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If a figure were made of this diagram—that is to say, a figure copied from the cosmos and expressed in some motif—we should have before us a profound cosmic mystery merely in the combination of form. When a certain combination of lines underlies a figure of this kind—where perhaps only a few of these lines are expressed and the others drawn in quite another way—those who have real feeling and not merely intellectual understanding, will perceive a cosmic mystery in the very form itself. They will say to themselves: ‘What is it that this form expresses? I do not actually know, but I feel that it expresses a mystery.’ It is this that inspires our souls and makes our hearts glow when we look at certain forms. We cannot always be conscious of what lies behind them, but our astral body, our subconscious being, contains the mysteries of the cosmos and senses them in the depths just as it contains the secrets of mathematics, as I told you in the previous lecture. When a man says, ‘I feel beauty here, but I cannot explain to myself what it really is,’ something is taking place in his astral body. This he may express by saying that he senses the existence of deep and mysterious secrets of the cosmos which do not take the form of ideas and thoughts but are expressed in a feeling, ‘Ah, how beautiful this form is.’ The reason why he feels this as warmth pouring through his heart and soul is that if he were as conscious in his astral body as he is in his ego he would have a deep knowledge of the cosmos.

These things must teach us to understand how art has gradually developed in human evolution and to realise that true works of art in the Goethean sense are ‘a manifestation of higher laws of nature than the ordinary intellect of man can divine.’ We find an inkling of the truth of these things more especially when we go back to what modern opinion holds to be the “primitive art” of earlier periods of human evolution. This is because in those olden times a certain primitive, atavistic clairvoyance was a common attribute of humanity and because man then created forms from out of this clairvoyance. Many of the forms to be found in primitive art can only be understood when we realise that they were the outcome of this primordial clairvoyant consciousness. Men experienced the content of their astral bodies as living movement, tried to express it in a kind of noble dance, and then converted it from the Dionysian dance into Apollonian design and painting. Such is the origin of certain forms of early art which often seem to us merely primitive, but which in truth have sprung from a deeper understanding of the spiritual world imparted by the clairvoyance of those times.

This, I think, will show you that in the sense of true, genuine art, the easy phrase ‘there can be no disputing about taste’ is wholly incorrect in its ordinary sense. Fundamentally speaking, of course, one can dispute about everything, even about mathematical principles. When one man applies a mathematical principle and gets a different result from another who also applies it, disputes can naturally arise and even become acute, but one of the two has made an error. The error, of course, is not so easy to discover in the case of beauty or art. Nevertheless man can attain to a point of view which convinces him that the forms and laws of true art are firmly established and based upon the deeper laws of cosmic being. Perhaps it may be admitted that the principle ' there is no disputing about taste' only penetrates into life by dint of effort, that it is a conception only to be evolved very gradually. But in the course of his life a man can be convinced of the truth of it when he realises that art is a manifestation of higher laws of nature which without art would never be revealed. Here again I am using Goethe's words. Man can indeed be convinced that art is this manifestation of higher laws of nature about which there can fundamentally be no disputing.

In the light of what now should be living within us, not so much as thought, but as feeling, we must gradually be able to work our way to another perception. What is really happening to us when we delight in forms that are truly artistic? We are passing out of ourselves, penetrating with the soul into something that is real, outside ourselves. Therefore it is not at all unnatural that in a building which belongs to the present and future we should set out in full consciousness to create forms which will help man to conquer the consciousness of merely physical and material actuality and feel himself expanded out into the cosmos through the architecture, sculpture and all that this work of art may contain. Much will have to be done, however, before this feeling will be able to penetrate into every sphere of art and be admitted by modern science. Darwinism, and all that it brought in its train in the nineteenth century, rendered great service to the progress of human knowledge and culture, but it gave rise to many one-sided conceptions, for instance, in the law of so-called “selection” which has been laid down as a universal law, although it only holds good in one connection. The knowledge of this law is very important, but to lay it down as a universal law is the result of distorted, one-sided conceptions. People have been led to think somewhat as follows. They ask, ‘Why is it that the structure of living beings is contrived in accordance with expediency? What is the origin of this?’ The monistic materialist of the present day answers: ‘We are no longer as stupid as our ancestors. We have great intelligence and do not therefore believe that some spiritual being or other has endowed living organisms with this “expedient” structure. It is part of nature that the expedient and the inexpedient (the fit and the unfit) should originally have arisen, concomitantly. These two elements then entered into the struggle for existence where the fit conquered and the unfit was exterminated. The fit passes down through heredity, so that after a certain time it alone remains.’ The ‘fitness’ of the organic structure was thus explained by the law of causality.

This conception is then applied in a special instance. Some creature lives in a certain environment and has this remarkable characteristic, that its colouring is the same as that of its environment. Certain creatures live, let us say, in sand of a particular colour. In such cases observation shows that the creatures take on the colour of the sand. Those who adhere to the theory of selection and expediency say: ‘It is expedient for these creatures to have the colour of their environment, for their enemies do not see them and hence cannot pursue them. They are not destroyed. They have this advantage over other creatures whose colour differs from that of the sand. Once upon a time there were creatures who colours resembled the sand, while others were of every possible hue. But these latter were seen by their foes and destroyed; they were at a disadvantage in the struggle for existence.’ The others, however, who were, by chance of the same colour as the sand, remained, and this quality was transmitted to the following generations. The creatures who were differently coloured died out and those like the sand maintained themselves in the struggle for existence.' This is a highly plausible train of thought and it has dominated the minds of men for decades. In sandy places hosts of these tiny creatures of exactly the same colour as the sand are to be found. According to materialistic, monistic Darwinism they are supposed to have originated as I have described. But actual facts upset the conclusion, for, in spite of it all, as soon as these creatures show themselves they are destroyed by their foes. The whole conception is based upon a chain of argument that does not reckon with the actual facts. All these materialistic speculations and fantasies will one day be replaced by true insight which may indeed seem grotesque and paradoxical to many people but which will explain, for instance, why the polar bear is white and not black or brown. The insight will arise that there is an astral nature, that every animal has an astral body and that soul processes have their seat in this astral body. The greyish coloured creatures in the sand have of course no ego, but they have an astral body, primitive though it may be. An interplay arises between this astral body and the colour of the environment, and the effects produced by this interplay between the greyness, let us say, of the environment, and the astral body, pass into the dimmer consciousness of the astral body and permeate the whole being. It is just as if you were to look around here and say, ‘This is wood, I know that it is wood.’ The creature lives in the sand, its astral body is permeated with the colour of the sand and the consciousness of the colour of the sand' flows through its whole being. It takes on the colour, saturates itself with the colour of the environment which has been consciously absorbed. The colour is of course modified by every struggle arising between the immediate colour of the environment and the direct light of the sun. The influence of the direct light of the sun on the astral body, however, is such that, by way of the soul nature, something that in turn streams out and permeates the the whole being enters into the astral body. In the very colours of birds' feathers and skins of animals man will recognise the deeper effects of the consciousness, which is the result of the interplay between the astral body and the environment. The living being lives and moves in the flowing ocean of colour and identifies itself with this flowing colour essence. The human being also does this below the threshold of his ego, but in a higher sense. Our life, therefore, is bound up with the life of the flowing sea of colour. As human beings we have the advantage of the animals in one thing only. I can now do no more than hint at it. Think, by way of comparison, of certain animals which always swim under water and never come to the surface. They have water in their environment. They adapt themselves to what they take into themselves from the water. Others have to come to the surface and they too adapt themselves to what is above the surface of the water. Instead of the water, think now of a flowing sea of colour and light. All animals live, as it were, under the surface of the sea of colour and light, hence they adjust their outer covering primarily in accordance with this flowing colour and light. Man with his ego consciousness stretches out beyond the sea of colour and light and the very fact that he can do this gives him his ego consciousness. When man's colouring is influenced, as in the different races, the influence is not, in his case, the outcome of colour and light, but of the conditions of warmth and climate. The reason why humming birds in certain regions are decked with such a variety of colours is very different from the reason which causes human beings in the same region to be of a negroid black. The birds have been worked upon by colour conditions, and man by the warmth condition, because, in effect, the human being with his ego rises above the sea of colour and this only works in his astral body. Otherwise—to use a radical and therefore paradoxical expression—if the agricultural labourer who is perpetually surrounded by green had no ego whereby he reaches beyond the sea of colour, he would go about with a greenish skin; and the skin of the city man, living perpetually among grey houses and seldom leaving them, would have a horrible greyish tint—that is to say if primordial forces were at work., Our astral body none the less is immersed in the flowing sea of colour, but all that the astral body absorbs from this sea of colour has taken on a different activity. Our hair is not coloured, nor if we had feathers would they be coloured by what the astral body absorbs; instead of this, we have perceptions and feelings in connection with colour without diffusing the colours through our being. If we were simply to absorb the green or blue or red into our astral body and diffuse them through our being, thus giving ourselves the colouring of the outer world, we should have quite a different relationship to the world of colour than is actually the case. We do not, however, do this. We absorb the colours into our being in a spiritual sense, so that blue, for instance, becomes the expression of rest; red the expression of all that is passionate, fiery. Colour is changed into flowing perception or feeling in man, because he reaches out with his ego beyond the flowing sea of colour. Here is a proof that we float in the colour essence of the cosmos and that even when we are merely contemplating the colours of nature we must try to perceive in the aesthetic sense, to establish standards of beauty. This however implies that we must learn to grow into colours, to live in them as within our own element. One seldom finds this feeling for colour, even among people who think a great deal about art. Take, for instance, Hildebrand, who is an exceedingly good artist and who has written an ingenious book on the subject of artistic forms. We read there that colour alone cannot suffice for the real portrayal of things; there must first be the design, the drawing. This, however, is not correct. Hildebrand thinks that when he has a coloured wall in front of him, he is simply looking at colour, possibly blue or red, whereas if he draws contours or designs upon it he has an expression of something. If a surface is covered with blue or red it does not express anything definite—at least according to Hildebrand. Nor this is not the case. A surface covered with blue produces an impression which may be expressed in the following way. Instead of the area that appears blue, the feeling arises that blue takes one into greater and greater depths, to distances ever more remote, to the Infinite, as it were. The blue colour takes one along with it—on and on. Red seems to fight with one, to approach.

This of course is somewhat radically expressed, but the whole colour scale thus reveals itself as living being. Just as forms with clear contours express something definite, so does colour place before us something quite definite, differentiated. To fathom these things, however, will be the task of future Art—and in what sense? To understand this we will consider the real nature of the spirit of human evolution.

Human evolution proceeded from conditions of primitive, atavistic clairvoyant consciousness. Man gradually worked his way upwards through the different civilisations until, during the Graeco-Latin age, his ego came to birth in the intellectual or mind-soul. We are now living in an age when the ego rises into the consciousness soul (spiritual soul) and has then gradually to rise to Spirit-Self or Manas. In the ages preceding the birth of the ego, of the ego consciousness, art proceeded from direct inspiration which flowed into man from the spiritual world, and all the different forms in art were an expression of this. Suppose a man went out into the on-coming night and looked at the moon. The atavistic clairvoyant consciousness he still possessed gave him the knowledge that here was a revelation of the connection between his brain and the moon, that his lungs breathed in all that the earth's being was communicating to him. The sun had set, but he knew that in the pulsating beat of his heart he bore the sun workings within him. Then man felt—or rather he ‘saw’ it in the atavistic clairvoyance of those ancient times—he felt: ‘Yes indeed there is a connection between earth, sun and moon. Spiritual Beings are hovering up and down between the sun and moon!’

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

(From Goethe's Faust. Scene I.)

... Then came the age in human evolution when this old clairvoyance gradually passed away; man entered into a condition where he could only perceive the external world of sense. Nothing flowed into him from the spiritual world and it became necessary to resort to a different realm. Every artistic impulse lived originally in the moving being of man himself. He tried to imitate or copy what he perceived in the cosmos by expressing through his hands and with his hands the form that he felt to be living in his hands like a cosmic force. At that time he had to translate into form what he expressed in gestures. It did not occur to him to copy or imitate an object in the external sense. All that lived and pulsated within him, flowing and breathing into him from the cosmos, developed into art without any mere imitation, because the inner life surging within him used him as an instrument. He was the instrument guided by the cosmos itself.

This was no longer the case after the old clairvoyant consciousness, which linked man to the cosmos, ceased. Imitative art came into being, for man no longer possessed within himself the power which guided the lines and other factors of art; he no longer felt, I will draw near to the Godhead. ‘There is the Godhead and I will approach.’ When a man felt himself rising to the Godhead he was conscious of the perception of blue, and if he wanted to give expression to this feeling he used the colour blue. But if he was conscious of the approach of an enemy, an alien being bearing down upon him, then he used red. He experienced the flowing sea of colour within himself and there was no need to imitate or copy. This was no longer the case when atavistic connection with the cosmos ceased. Imitative art came into being and attained its summit, so far as sculpture was concerned, in the Graeco-Latin epoch, and so far as painting was concerned, in the age which marked the transition to the fifth Post-Atlantean period. To those who have eyes to see, external history would also be able to prove the truth of these things. Try to think why it is that peoples from Northern and Central Europe who came into contact with Graeco-Latin culture remained so long in a state of barbarism and could not find their way to art. The reason is that these Celtic, Germanic, Slavonic peoples had remained at an earlier stage of evolution than the Graeco-Latin peoples. They had not reached the stage of the full birth of the ego and understood nothing of true imitative art. They came along afterwards with a reinforcing impulse. Hence when we study the art of the Middle Ages we find that the significant elements there are not those of imitative art. The characteristic qualities of mediaeval art are to be found in architecture where man does not imitate but creates out of his inner being. It is only gradually that the imitative element in art entered into the northern peoples.

Nowadays, however, we are living in an epoch when man must again find his way into the spiritual world, when he must pass over from imitative art to a new form of artistic creation, when there must be a true renewal of art. The imitative arts reached their prime in the sculpture of antiquity, in Raphael, Michelangelo and others. Something different hovers before us now—a consciousness that penetrates into the spiritual world and at the same time brings down all that exists in forms and colours in the cosmic ocean flowing spiritually around us. A beginning must be made. Something that is not achieved by imitation and which is all around us must be brought down from the spiritual world. I have already spoken of the extent to which this conception has flowed into certain forms in our building and on another occasion we will speak of the new conception of the art of painting. To-day I only wanted to try to deepen the feelings and perceptions which must be ours if we are really to understand the transition which must come about before the old forms of art can pass over to the new.

I hope that those friends whose unselfish and devoted labours are revealed each day that passes, will work in such a way towards a mastery of the forms which are necessary to our building, that although it be only a primitive beginning, there will none the less be a real beginning of a spiritualised art. I hope that they will find more and enthusiasm, greater and greater joy, in the consciousness that the World-Spirit demands us to help in the task of establishing in human evolution those things which must be established in our own fifth epoch and during the transition into the sixth. If we understand this, we link ourselves with the World-Spirit working in human evolution, of Whom we try to gain knowledge through true Spiritual Science. All the impulses of this Spiritual Science can pass over into artistic feeling, artistic activity and experience of the cosmos. True enthusiasm and devotion are necessary, but they will grow in us if we lovingly rise to the Spirit Who has guided mankind from the beginning of evolution. That Spirit will not forsake us if we dedicate ourselves to Him with upright hearts and in the real sense—if our labours are not a sentimental prayer, but a true one arising from the power flowing into our inner being from the World-Spirit Who is leading us, and if we are filled with the inspiration of the knowledge that we allow the work of our hands and souls to be guided by the power of the Spirit within us.

In this sense, then, let us continue our work.

Yesterday I tried first of all to point out the way which leads the human soul to the observation of the spiritual world hidden directly behind our material physical world; and then to draw attention to two classes or categories of spiritual beings, perceptible to occult vision when the veil of the sense-world has been drawn aside.

These beings are primarily connected with the ripening of everything in the kingdoms of nature; the ripening process comes about because these forces or beings exist. They are only visible to occult vision when it concentrates on the air itself, indeed, on the purest air possible. We have described the second sort of nature-beings by saying that to perceive them we must allow falling water, or water condensed into cloud-formation or something of a like character to work upon us. Now air as free from moisture as possible, played upon by the light and warmth of the sun, must work upon the soul, if we are to visualize in our imagination these meteor-like, flashing, and disappearing beings, which live in air free from moisture, and eagerly drink in the light which permeates the air and which causes them to flash and shine. These beings then sink down into the plant-world, or the animal world, and bring about their ripening and maturity. In the very way we approach these beings we see that they stand in a certain relation to what occultism has always called the elements.

What we described in the last lecture as the first class of such beings, we find when we descend into the depths of the earth and penetrate the solid substance of our planet; our imagination is then confronted with beings of a definite form, and we may call these the nature-spirits of solid substance, or the nature-spirits of Earth. The second category which we then described are to be found in water that collects and disperses; so that we may connect these spiritual beings with what in occultism has always been called the Fluid or Watery Element. In this element they undergo metamorphosis, at the same time doing the work of drawing forth from the earth everything that grows and sprouts. The beings of whom we have just spoken, stand, on the contrary, in connection with the Element of Air, air when it is as free from moisture as possible; so that we may now speak of nature-spirits of earth, of water, and of air. There is a fourth category of such spiritual beings with which occult vision can become familiar. It must wait until a blossom has brought forth fruit and seed, and then observe how the germ gradually grows into a new plant. Only on such an occasion can this be done with ease, otherwise it is difficult to observe this fourth kind of being, for they are the protectors of all the germs, of all the seeds in our kingdoms of nature. As guardians they carry the seed from one generation of plants or other nature-beings, to the next. We can observe that these beings, which are the protectors of the seeds or germs, make it possible that the same beings continually re-appear on our earth, and that these beings are brought into contact with the warmth of our planet—with what from early times had been called the Element of Fire or Heat. That is why the forces of the seed are also connected with a certain degree of heat, a certain temperature. If occult vision observes accurately enough, it describes that the necessary transmutation of the warmth of the environment into such heat as is needed by the seed or germ in order to ripen, the changing of lifeless warmth into a living heat, is provided for by these beings. Hence they can also be called the nature-spirits of Fire, or of Heat. So that, to begin with (more details will be given in the subsequent lectures), we have become acquainted with four categories of nature-spirits, having a certain relation to what are called the elements of earth, water, air, and fire.

It is as though these spiritual beings had their jurisdiction, their territory, in these elements; just as man himself has his in the whole planet. Just as that is his home in the universe, so have these beings their territory in one or other of the elements mentioned. We have already drawn attention to the fact that for our earthly physical world, for the earth as a whole with its various kingdoms of nature, these different beings signify what the etheric body or life-body, signifies for individual man. Only we have said that in man this life-body is a unity, whereas the etheric body of the earth consists of many, many such nature-spirits, which are, moreover, divided into four classes. The living cooperation of these nature-spirits is the etheric or life-body of the earth. Thus it is no unity, but multiplicity, plurality.

If we wish with occult vision to discern this etheric body of the earth, then—as was previously described—we must allow the physical world to influence us morally, thereby drawing aside the veil of the physical world. Then the etheric body of the earth which lies directly behind this veil becomes visible. Now, how is it, when one also draws aside this further veil, described as the etheric body of the earth? We know that behind the etheric body is the astral body, as the third principle of man—that body which is the bearer of our desires, wishes and passions. Thus, if we disregard the higher principles of man's nature, we may say that we have first of all in the human being the physical body, behind this the etheric body, and behind that the astral body. It is just the same in external nature; if we draw aside the physical, we come certainly to a plurality, but this represents the etheric body of the whole earth, with all its kingdoms of nature. Now can we also speak of a sort of astral body of the earth, something which, in relation to the whole earth and to all its kingdoms, corresponds to the astral body of the human being? It is certainly not so easy to penetrate to this astral body of the earth as to the etheric body. We have seen that the etheric body can be reached if we allow the phenomena of the world to work upon us not merely through the sense impressions but morally. If we wish, however, to penetrate further, deeper occult exercises are necessary, such as you will find described in part—in so far as they can be in an open publication—in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and How to Attain It. At a definite point of esoteric or occult development—as you may read there—a man begins to be conscious, even at a time when he is usually unconscious, namely during the time between his falling asleep and waking.

We know that the ordinary unconscious condition, the ordinary sleep-condition of man, is caused by the fact that he leaves his physical and etheric bodies lying in the bed, and draws out the astral body and the rest of what belongs to it; but the normal man is then unconscious. When, however, he devotes himself more and more to those exercises which consist of meditation, concentration, and so on, and further strengthens the slumbering hidden forces of his soul, then he can establish a conscious condition of sleep. Thus when he has drawn his astral body out of his physical and etheric bodies, he is no longer unconscious, but has then around him—not the physical world, not even the world just described, the world of the nature-spirits—but another and still more spiritual world. When the time comes that a man, after he has freed himself from his physical and etheric bodies, feels his consciousness flash up, he then perceives quite a new order of spiritual beings. The next thing which strikes the occult vision thus far trained, is that the new spirits man now perceives have as it were command over the nature-spirits. Let us be quite clear as to how far this is the case. I have told you that those beings which we call the nature-spirits of the water, work especially in the budding and sprouting plant-world. Those which we may call the nature-spirits of the air, play their part in late summer and autumn, when the plants prepare to fade and die. Then these meteor-like air-spirits sink down over the plant-world and saturate themselves, as it were, with the plants, helping them to fade away in their spring and summer forms. The disposition that at one time the spirits of the water, and at another the spirits of the air should work in this or that region of the earth, changes according to the different regions of the earth—in the northern part of the earth it is naturally quite different from what it is in the south. The office of directing, as it were, the suitable nature-spirits to their activities at the right time, is carried out by those spiritual beings which we learn to know when the occult vision is so far trained that, when we have freed ourselves from our physical and etheric bodies, we can still be conscious of our environment. There are spiritual beings, for instance, working in connection with our earth, with our earth-planet, who allot the work of the nature-spirits to the seasons of the year, and thus bring about the alternations of the seasons for the different regions of the earth, by distributing the work of the nature-spirits. These spiritual beings represent what we may call the astral body of the earth, into which man plunges with his own astral body at night when he falls asleep. This astral body, consisting of higher spirits which hover round the earth-planet and permeate it as a spiritual atmosphere, is united with the earth; and into this spirit-atmosphere man's astral body plunges during the night-time.

Now to occult observation there is a great difference of nature-spirits, the spirits of Earth, Water, etc., and those beings which on the other hand, direct these nature-spirits. The nature-spirits are occupied in causing the beings of nature to ripen and fade, in bringing life into the whole planetary earth-sphere. It is different with those spiritual beings which in their totality can be called the astral body of the earth.

We have now, as it were drawn aside the second veil, the veil woven of the nature-spirits. We might say that when we draw aside the first veil, woven of material physical impressions, we come to the etheric body of the earth, to the nature-spirits, and we can then draw aside a second veil and come to the Spirits of the Rotation of Time, who regulate everything subject to rhythmic rotation. Now we know that in our own astral body is embedded what may be called the higher principles of man's nature, which at first we understand as the ego embedded in our astral body. We have already said that our astral body is plunged into the region of the Spirits of the Rotation of Time; that it is immersed in the surging sea, as it were, of these spirits; but as regards the normal consciousness our ego is still more asleep than the astral body. A man who is developing occultly and progressing esoterically becomes aware of this, because in the spiritual world into which he plunges and which consists of the Spirits of the Rotation of Time, he first learns to penetrate into the perceptions of the astral body. In a certain respect this perception is really a dangerous reef in esoteric development, for the astral body of man is, in itself, unity; but everything in the realm of the Spirits of the Rotation of Time is, fundamentally, multiplicity, plurality. And since, in the way described, man is united with and immersed in this plurality, if he is still asleep in his ego and awake in his astral body, he feels as if he were dismembered in the world of the Spirits of the Rotation of Time. That must be avoided in a properly ordered esoteric development. Hence those who are able to give instruction for such development, see that the necessary precautions are taken that the man should not if possible allow his ego to sleep when his astral body is already awake, for he would then lose inner cohesion and would, like Dionysos, be split up into the whole astral world of the earth, consisting of the Spirits of the Rotation of Time. In a regular esoteric development precautions are taken that this should not occur. These consist in care being taken that the student, who through meditation, concentration, or other esoteric exercises is to be stimulated to clairvoyance, should retain two things in the whole sphere of clairvoyant, occult observation. In every esoteric development it is specially important that everything should be so adjusted that two things that man has in ordinary life should not be lost—which he might however very easily lose in esoteric development if not rightly guided. If rightly guided he will not lose them. First, he should not lose the recollection of any of the events of his present incarnation, as ordinarily retained in his memory. The connection with memory must not be destroyed. This connection with memory means very much more in the sphere of occultism than it does in the sphere of ordinary life. In ordinary life we only understand by memory, the power of looking back and not losing consciousness of the important events of one's life. In occultism a right memory means that a man only values with his perceptions and feelings what he has already accomplished in the past, so that he applies no other value to himself or to his deeds than the past deeds themselves entitle. Let us understand this quite correctly, for this is extremely important. If a man in the course of his occult development were suddenly driven to say to himself “I am the reincarnation of this or the other spirit,”—without there being any justification for it through any action of his—then his memory in an occult sense would be interrupted. An important principle in occult development is that of attributing no other merit to oneself, than what comes from one's actions in the physical world in the present incarnation. That is extremely important. Any other merit must only come on the basis of a higher development, which can only be attained if one first of all stands firmly on the ground that one esteems oneself for nothing but what one has accomplished in this incarnation. This is quite natural if we look at the matter objectively; for what we have accomplished in the present incarnation is also the result of earlier incarnations; it is that which Karma has, so far, made out of us. What Karma is still making of us we must first bring about; we must not add that to our value. In short, if we would set a right value on ourselves, we can only do so, at the beginning of esoteric development, if we ascribe merit only to what is inscribed in our memory as our past. That is the one element which we must preserve, if our ego is not to sleep while our astral body is awake.

We shall carry the connection with our ego into the world in which we awaken with our astral body, if we can, as it were, remain awake in our sleep, preserve our consciousness and carry it with us into the condition in which with our astral body we are freed from the physical and etheric bodies. Then, if we awake with our ego, not only do we feel our astral body to be connected with all the spiritual beings we have to-day described as the Spirits of the Rotation of Time belonging to our planet, but we feel in a quite peculiar way, that we actually no longer have a direct relation to the individual who is the bearer of the physical body and etheric body in which we usually live. We feel, so to speak, as if all the qualities of our physical and etheric bodies were taken from us. Then too we feel everything taken from us which can only live externally in any one country of our planet. For that which lives on a particular territory of our planet is connected with the Spirits of the Rotation of Time. Now, however, when we waken with our ego, we feel ourselves not only poured out into the whole world of the Spirits of the Rotation of Time, but we feel ourselves one with the whole undivided spirit of the planet itself; we awaken in the undivided spirit of the planet itself. It is extremely important that we should feel ourselves as belonging to the whole of our planet. For example, when our occult vision is sufficiently awakened, and we are so far advanced that we can awaken our ego and astral body simultaneously, then our common life with the planet so expresses itself that, just as during the waking hours in the sense-world, we can follow the sun as it passes over the heavens from morning till night, so it no longer now disappears when we fall asleep. When we sleep the sun remains connected with us; it does not cease to shine but takes on a special character, so that whilst we are actually asleep during the night, we can still follow the sun. Man is of such a nature that he is connected with the changing conditions of the planet only in so far as he lives in his astral body. When however, he becomes conscious of his ego, he has nothing to do with them. He then becomes conscious of all the conditions which his planet can go through. He then pours himself into the whole substance of the planetary spirit. When I say that a man becomes one with the planetary spirit, that he lives in union with this planetary spirit, you must not suppose that this implies an advanced degree of clairvoyance; this is but a beginning. For when a man awakens in the manner described, he really only experiences the planetary spirit as a whole; whereas it consists of many, many differentiations—of wonderful, separate, spiritual beings—as we shall hear in the following lectures. The different parts of the planetary spirit, the special multiplicities of this spirit, of these he is not yet aware. What he realizes first of all, is the knowledge: “I live in the planetary spirit as though in a sea, which spiritually laves the whole earth planet and itself is the spirit of the whole earth.” One may go through immensely long development in order further and further to experience this unification with the planetary spirit; but to begin with, the experience is as has been described. Just as we say with regard to man: “behind his astral body is his ego ”—so do we say that behind all that we call the totality of the Spirits of the Rotation of Time is hidden the Spirit of the Planet itself, the Planetary Spirit. Whereas the Spirits of the Rotation of Time guide the nature-spirits of the elements in order to call forth the rhythmic change and repetitions in time—the alterations in space of the earth-planet—the Spirit of the Earth has a different task. It has the task of bringing the earth itself into mutual relation with the other heavenly bodies in the environment, to direct it and guide it, so that in the course of time it may come into the right relations to the other heavenly bodies. The Spirit of the Earth is, as it were, the great sense-apparatus of the earth, through which the earth-planet enters into the right relationship with the Cosmos. If I were to sum up the succession of those spiritual beings with whom we on our earth are first of all concerned, and to whom we can find the way through a gradual occult development, I must say:—As the first external veil we have the sense-world, with all its multiplicity, with all we see spread out before our senses and which we can understand with our human mind. Then, behind this sense-world, we have the world of nature-spirits. Behind this world of nature-spirits we have the Spirits of the Rotation of Time, and behind these the Planetary Spirit.

If we still seek a meaning as to the laws of nature in the things of the world perceptible to our senses, we should be able to interpret this meaning as the imprint of the Planetary Spirit in the sense-world. That would be the external Maya. In the first place the sense-world itself is an external Maya, for it is what the etheric body the earth, the substance of the nature-spirits, drives out of itself. A second Maya is what appears to man of the nature-spirits in the forces of nature. A third Maya is that which appears as the laws of nature, coming from the Spirits of the Rotation of Time. A fourth Maya is something which, in spite of its Maya-nature, speaks to the soul of man because, in the perception of the purpose of nature, man at any rate feels himself united with the Spirit of the whole planet, with the Spirit which leads the planet through cosmic space, and gives meaning in fact to the whole planet. In this Maya lies the direct imprint of the Planetary Spirit itself.

Thus we may say that we have to-day ascended to the undivided Spirit of the Planet. If again we wish to compare what we have now discovered for the planet, with man, we may say: “The sense-world corresponds to the physical body of man; the world of nature-spirits to the etheric body, the world of the Spirits of the Rotation of Time to the astral body, and the Planetary Spirit to the ego of man.” Just as the ego of man perceives the physical environment of earth, so does the Planetary Spirit perceive everything in the periphery, and in cosmic space as a whole outside the planet; it adjusts the acts of the planet and also the feelings of the planet, of which we shall speak tomorrow, according to these perceptions of cosmic space. For what a planet does outside in space when it passes on its way in cosmic distances, and what it effects its own body, in the elements of which it consists, that again is the result of the observations of the Planetary with regard to the external world. Just as the individual human soul lives in the world of the earth side by side with other men, and adjusts himself to them, so does the Planetary Spirit live in its planetary body, which is the ground on which we stand; but this Planetary Spirit lives in fellowship with other planetary Spirits, other Spirits of the heavenly bodies.