The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Here, the four Platonic Virtues (described in The Republic) are developed in the direction of that comprehensive picture of man's threefold being—the head-system, the rhythmic system, and the metabolic and limb system—of which Steiner gave the first full description in 1917, and which is summed up in the Foundation Stone Meditation in 1923.

Our spiritual science has the task of removing for our consciousness, indeed for our whole inner life, the gulf that exists for our external human consciousness between the physical world, in which man spends the time between birth and death, and the spiritual world in which man spends the other part of the totality of his existence, the time between death and a new birth.

For one who lives in spiritual science with every fibre of his soul, such a saying is familiar, and even self-evident. But one may well say that it becomes particularly holy to us at such a moment as this. Through the grave events of war we have lost within quite a short time a number of our dear friends and members, and are soon to accompany friends upon their last paths on earth. Tomorrow morning at eleven we shall have here in Zürich the cremation of a dear member, Frau Dr Colazza, and we have just heard that our dear friend Fritz Mitscher died this afternoon about five near Davos. With these two members, souls dear to us have left the physical plane; but spiritual science has shown us the way to understand in a much higher sense than we would otherwise be able to achieve that we do not lose such souls, but remain united with them.

There are already a considerable number of souls belonging to us, who have gone through the gate of death since our work in this movement began. And from those sources from which knowledge of the spirit comes to us, it can be said that these souls have become faithful fellow-workers with us in the spiritual world, each according to his powers. With the full responsibility, with which something can be said, which should have a firm foundation in spiritual knowledge, I can say: in them we have won pillars supporting our spiritual movement. Many have passed through the gate of death, working within our spiritual movement, and looking down upon that to which their love is directed. In the period between birth and death they have grown attached to the kind of aspiration which is represented in our circle. They have left behind them in our Society something which is itself upon the path between death and a new birth.

Just as nature around us is a world upon which we look back, we can look back upon our physical life from that moment onwards, which can be compared with man's birth. Immediately after death man passes through a condition which can be compared with the embryonic life, with the life within the maternal body, except that this period in the life after death can be counted in days, and is much shorter than the embryonic life in relation to physical life. Then follows what can be compared to the entry into the physical world, with the drawing of the first breath. This can be called the awakening in the spiritual world; it is a perceiving that the will of the soul which has gone through the gate of death is received by the beings of the higher Hierarchies. Just as a human being physically entering the physical world from his mother's body finds himself able to receive the external air, and as his senses gradually awaken—in the same way there comes the moment after death when the soul feels: that power of will, which during physical life was contained within the limits of the physical body, now flows from me out into the universe. And this soul then feels how this will is really received through the activity of the beings of the next higher hierarchy, the hierarchy of the Angels. That is like drawing the first breath in the spiritual world, and the gradual growth into the spiritual environment; spiritual experience shows us this.

I would like to speak of the destiny of those who have gone from us in the course of the years, leaving the physical plane. I would like to look at those who have become attached to our spiritual movement here, and who look down upon it as something of which they know that it informs human souls while still within the physical body about that condition in which they themselves live. To be able to relate oneself in this way in memory of earthly life is something which even here in the physical world belongs already to the spiritual world. For those who have gone through the gate of death this is something infinitely precious and significant. When, like a tributary into a river, they can flow entirely into that stream which flows up to them from the physical world, taking its source from what they have experienced in our movement—the stream in the thoughts of those linked with them in love or by family ties—then the community is a much closer one than it could otherwise be in our materialistic times, because it is based on spiritual relationships.

We may say: with many a one, who has gone early through the gate of death into the spiritual world, it seems as if he had done this from intimate love to our spiritual movement, in order to help with stronger powers from the spiritual world. Among a considerable number of those who have gone from us there lives in their souls the most wonderfully clear feeling about the need for our spiritual movement. For him who can look into the spiritual world all those who have gone through the gate of death, and now gaze down upon the movement with which they were connected, are like spiritual heralds of our movement. They carry their standards before us, and call to us constantly: we were convinced while we were united with you of the necessity of this movement. But now that we have entered the spiritual world we know that we can help and how we must help at a time in which this movement is necessary.

This is something which those who are left behind on the physical plane will feel more and more, when they have lost people dear to them. For them what has been said can be the deepest comfort, for they have here all that can bring about a still deeper connection between souls when we can no longer be connected in the external realm of manifestation, through physical eyes and physical words.

This spiritual movement, of which we are to become part, has to bring a very great deal. Today I would like to choose out one particular chapter. A time like ours, in which external civilisation, in spite of the last echoes of the old religions, builds entirely upon the materialistic consciousness, can only develop the impulses of the moral life in a way that reckons only with life between birth and death. Among the many things which should come about through our spiritual movement will be a fresh development of the whole moral life of humanity. For men will learn to regard the moral life from a point of view which extends beyond birth and death, and which reckons with the fact that the human soul goes through repeated lives on earth, and that this soul, as we bear it within us between birth and death, has passed through many lives, and can hope for other lives in the future. When we have extended our vision from a single life to a series of successive lives, we shall have a more comprehensive understanding for our existence, and a sounder and more comprehensive understanding of what virtue and morality are.

When we speak of human virtues we can distinguish four of these which we can describe in ordinary language. There is one virtue, as we shall indicate later on, which lives in the depths of the human soul, but of which we should speak as little as possible as we shall see, for reasons that are holy. All other virtues which exist in life, and which together make up morality, can be regarded as special examples of the four virtues which we shall consider, four virtues of which antiquity in particular had much to say.

Plato, the great philosopher of ancient Greece, distinguished these four virtues in particular, because he was able to draw his wisdom from the echoes of the ancient Mysteries. Under the influence of the old Mysteries Plato could distinguish the virtues better than later philosophers and much better than our times, in which knowledge of Mystery wisdom has become so remote and so chaotic.

The first virtue which we must consider, if we speak about morality from a comprehensive knowledge of human nature, is the virtue of wisdom. But this wisdom is to be understood in a rather deeper sense, more related to ethics, than is usually done. Wisdom is not something that comes to man of its own accord; still less can it in the ordinary sense be learned. It is not easy to describe what its meaning for us should be. If we pass through life in such a way that events work upon us, and we learn from them how we could have met this or that more adequately, how we could have used our powers more strongly and effectively—if we are attentive towards everything in life, so that when something meets us a second time in a comparable way we can treat it in a way which shows us we have benefited from the first experience—then we grow in wisdom. If we preserve all through life a mood of being able to learn from life, of being able to regard everything brought to us by nature and our experience, in such a way that we learn from it, not simply accumulating knowledge, but growing inwardly better and richer—then we have gathered wisdom, and what we have experienced has not been worthless for the life of our souls.

Life has been worthless for us if we pass through decades and still judge something that we have experienced in just the same way as we thought about it earlier in our lives. If we pass through life in such a way, we are most remote from wisdom. Karma may have brought it about that in youth we grew angry, and condemned this or that human action. If we retain this quality we have made poor use of our lives. We have used them well, supposing we formed harsh judgments in our youth, if at a later stage of life we do not judge harshly, but with understanding and forgiveness; if we make the effort of wishing to understand. If we have the character that from birth some things aroused furious anger in us, and if when we are old we no longer grow angry as in our youth, but our anger has left us and we have grown gentler—then we have used life in accordance with wisdom. If we were materialists in our youth, but then allowed ourselves to experience what our time could bring us as revelations from the spiritual world, then we have used our life in accordance with wisdom. If we close ourselves to the revelations of the spiritual world we have not used our life in accordance with wisdom.

To be enriched in this way, and to achieve a wider horizon, we can call the use of life in accordance with wisdom. What spiritual science seeks to give us is able to help us in opening ourselves towards life, in order to grow wiser. Wisdom is something which strongly opposes human egoism. Wisdom is something which always reckons with the course of universal events. We let ourselves be instructed by the course of universal events because this liberates us from the narrow judgment made by our ego. Fundamentally, a wise man cannot judge egoistically; for if one learns from the world, and grows in understanding for the world, one allows one's judgment to be corrected by the world; thus wisdom detaches us from narrow and limited vision and brings us into harmony with itself. Much else could be described, in order gradually to form a picture of wisdom. We should not attempt a definition of such ideas, but keep our hearts open, in order to grow wiser, even about wisdom.

Here in the physical world everything which man is to experience in waking life has to use the instruments of external physical and ethereal nature. Between birth and death we are only outside our physical and ethereal body with our soul-being, in so far as this is ego and astral body, during our periods of sleep. In our conscious, waking condition we use as instruments our physical and ethereal bodies. When we fill ourselves with wisdom, when we try in action and thought, in feeling and perception to live in accordance with wisdom, we use those organs of our physical and ethereal bodies which are so to speak the most perfect in our earthly life—those organs which have developed over the longest period, which were prepared by Saturn, Sun and Moon and have come into our lives as a heritage, having reached a certain completion.

I would like to give you from another point of view an idea of what can be understood by more or less perfect organs. Take on the one hand our brain. The brain is not the most perfect organ, but we can still call it more perfect than other organs, for it has needed longer for its evolution. We can compare the brain with our torso, upon which we have our hands. When we intend to do something with our hands, we have the thought: I stretch out my hand, I take the vase, I draw back my hand. What have I done ? I have stretched out not only the physical hand, but also the ethereal and the astral hand, and a part of my ego; the physical hand went with them.

If I only think, clairvoyant consciousness can see how something like spiritual arms stretch out from the head, but the physical brain remains within the skull. Just as my ethereal and astral hand belongs to my physical hand, something ethereal and astral belongs to the brain. The brain cannot follow, but the hands can follow. In a later time the hands will one day be fixed, and we shall only be able to move their astral part. Hands are on the way to become what the brain is already. In earlier times, during the old Sun and Moon periods, what today stretches out from the brain as something that is only spiritual was still accompanied by the physical organ. The skull has now covered it, so that the physical brain is held fast within it during the evolution of the Earth. The brain is an organ which has passed through more stages of evolution. The hands are on the way to become similar to the brain, for the whole man is on the way to become a brain. Thus there are organs which are more perfect, and have evolved into something more self-enclosed, and others which are less perfect. The most perfect organs are used for what we achieve in wisdom. Our ordinary brain is really used only as the instrument for the lowest form of wisdom, earthly cleverness. The more we acquire wisdom, the less we depend upon our cerebrum, the more activity is withdrawn (a thing unknown to external anatomy) to our cerebellum, to that smaller brain enclosed within our skull which looks like a tree. When we have become wise, when we have become wisdom, we find ourselves in fact under a ‘tree,’ which is our cerebellum and which then especially begins to unfold its activity.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

Section of cerebellum, enlarged, showing tree-like structure

Imagine how a man who has become especially wise stretches out the organs of his wisdom mightily, like the branches of a tree. They originate in the cerebellum which remains within the hard covering of the skull; but the spiritual organs stretch far out, and man is under the tree, the Bodhi tree, in spiritual reality.

And so we see too that what we do in wisdom is the most spiritual thing about us, or at least belongs to the most spiritual, for the organs are already at rest. If we do anything with our hands, we must use part of our strength in the movement of the hand. If we form a wise judgment, or decide something wisely, the organs remain at rest, strength is no longer used upon the physical organ. We are there more spiritual; those organs which we use on the physical plane for the development of wisdom are those on which we need to use the least amount of energy—they are in a sense the most perfect.

Thus wisdom is something in the moral life which allows men to experience themselves in a spiritual way. It is connected with this that what man attains in the way of wisdom enables him to reap the greatest harvest from his earlier incarnations. Because we can live in wisdom within the spirit without any effort by the physical organs, we are most able through the life of wisdom to make fruitful what we have won in earlier incarnations for this life, bringing over this wisdom from earlier incarnations.

We have in German a good expression for a man who refuses to become wise. We call him a Philistine.¹ A Philistine is a man who resists the development of wisdom, who wants to remain as he is his whole life through, without altering his opinions. A man who seeks to become wise makes the effort to carry over the work which he has done and stored up in the course of earlier incarnations. The wiser we become, the more we bring over from earlier incarnations into the present, and if we do not wish to become wise, so that we leave barren the wisdom developed in earlier incarnations, there is then one who comes to saw it off: Ahriman.

No-one likes it better than Ahriman that we fail to grow wiser. We have the power to do it. We have gained far, far more in earlier incarnations than we believe; we won far more during the times in which we passed through the old conditions of clairvoyance. Everyone could become much wiser than he does become. No-one has the excuse that he could not bring much over from the past. To become wise means that one develops what has been won in earlier incarnations in such a way that it fills us in this incarnation.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

The Buddha as Tree of Wisdom (sandstone relief from Bharhut, India, c. 2nd. Century B.C.) Indian Museum, Calcutta.

Another virtue can be called—though it is difficult to describe it exactly—the virtue of Courage. It contains the mood which does not remain passive towards life, but is ready to use its strength and activity. It can be said that this virtue comes from the heart. Of one who has this virtue in ordinary life it can be said: he has his heart in the right place. This is a good expression for our condition when we do not withdraw in a timid way from things which life asks from us, but when we are prepared to take ourselves in hand and know how to intervene where it is necessary. When we are inclined to get moving, confidently and bravely, we have this virtue. It is connected with a healthy life of feeling, which develops bravery at the right moment, while its absence brings about cowardice. This virtue can naturally be used in the physical course of life only through specific organs. These organs, to which the physical and ethereal hearts belong, are not so perfect as those which serve wisdom. These organs are on the way to alter, and will indeed become different in the future.

There is a great distinction between the brain and the heart in their relation to cosmic evolution. Suppose that a man goes through the gate of death, and passes through life between death and a new birth. His brain is altogether a work of the Gods. The brain is permeated by forces which leave him altogether when he goes through the gate of death, and for his next life the brain is built up entirely anew, not only materially, but also in its inner forces. That is not the case with the heart. With the heart it is so, that not the physical heart itself, but the forces which are active in the physical heart, remain in existence. These forces withdraw into the astral and into the Ego, and continue in existence between death and a new birth. The same forces, which beat within our hearts, beat again next time in our new incarnation. What works in the brain has gone; that does not appear in the next incarnation. But the forces active in the heart reappear in the next incarnation. If we contemplate the interior of the head we can say: invisible forces are working there, which compose the brain. But when a man has gone through the gate of death these forces are given over to the universe. But if we perceive a human heart-beat, we perceive spiritual forces which are not only present in this incarnation, but will live too in the next incarnation, having passed through death and a new birth.

Popular feeling has had a wonderful inkling of such things. It is because of this that it is so much concerned with the feeling of the heart-beat, not because the physical heart-beat in itself is valued so much, as because we are looking at something much more eternal when we consider a human heart-beat. If we have the virtue of courage, of bravery, we can use for it only a part of certain forces. We must use the other part for the organs which are the instrument for this virtue. They are organs for which we have still to use part of the forces concerned. If we are not courageous, if we let ourselves go and withdraw timidly from life, abandoning ourselves to our own weight, then we cannot bring to life those forces which have to accompany the use of the quality of courage in life.

When we stand in life in a cowardly way, the forces which should fire our hearts remain unused. They are then seed for Lucifer. He takes charge of them, and we lack them in the next life. To be cowardly towards life means to abandon a number of forces to Lucifer; and these are missing for us, when we seek to build up our hearts in our next incarnation. For these hearts should be the organs, the instruments of courage. We come into the world with defective, underdeveloped organs.

The third virtue reckons with the least perfect organs, those which will achieve a form in the future, of which they contain at present only the seed. This virtue can be called Temperance.² One shade of it can be called ‘Moderation.’ We have thus three virtues: Wisdom, Courage, and Temperance.

Now it is possible to be intemperate in the most varied ways. One can be intemperate in excessive eating and drinking; this is its lowest form. Here the soul is absorbed into bodily desire, and we live entirely through our body. But if we take our desire in hand, if we command the body, what it may not do, we are then temperate or moderate. Through such moderation we keep in the right order those forces which ought to help us, in order that we do not abandon the organs concerned to Lucifer in the next incarnation. For we abandon to Lucifer those forces which are expended through giving ourselves up to a life of passion. We do this in the worst way when our passions intoxicate us, and we are content to live in a dreaming, drowsy state.

When we lose our clear consciousness through intemperance we are always abandoning powers to Lucifer. He takes up these powers, and thereby deprives us of the forces which we need for the organs of breathing and digestion. We return with bad organs of breathing and digestion, if we do not practise the virtue of moderation. Those who like to be carried away by their desires, who give themselves up to the life of their passions, are candidates for decadent human beings in the future, for those future human beings who will suffer from all kinds of faults in their physical body.

It can be said that this virtue of Temperance depends upon the least perfect human organs, those organs that are at the beginning of their development and have to be fundamentally transformed. When we consider our organs of digestion and all that is connected with them, they are put in motion by the use of Ego, astral body, ethereal body and physical body. It is different with those organs which are the instruments for Courage. Here our Ego remains more or less outside, and we move freely; only what is astral and ethereal in us is absorbed into the physical. If we go further to the virtues embraced by Wisdom, we retain Ego and astral body in free detachment. For as we become wiser, we develop the organisation of the astral body and achieve control over it. That is the essential thing, that through becoming wise we transform the astral into the Spirit-Self, and only the ethereal accompanies the physical. In the brain only the ethereal accompanies the physical. While during waking life in relation to the rest of the body we are closely connected, at least with our astral nature, with the physical organ, we retain for the brain the condition, which we have in sleep, in the highest degree. Thus we require physical sleep particularly for the brain. For when we are awake we are also outside the brain with our Ego and our astral body, and these have to make the greatest efforts within themselves, without being supported by the external organ.

Thus we find a connection between our human being and the virtues. We can call Wisdom a virtue, which belongs to man as a spiritual being, where with his Ego and his astral body he is freely active, using his physical and ethereal organs only as a kind of basis. We can name Courage as the virtue active where man is only free with his Ego, which is supported by his astral, ethereal and physical bodies. Finally we can speak of Temperance, where the seed contained in our Ego is becoming free; where our Ego is still bound to the astral, ethereal and physical bodies, and yet with our Ego we are beginning to work ourselves free from these bonds.

There is then a virtue which is perhaps the most spiritual of all. This is connected with the whole human being. There is an exercise of the human being which we lose early, which we possess only in the first years of childhood. I have often mentioned this. When we enter the physical plane we do not yet have the attitude which belongs to our human dignity: we crawl, on all fours. I have pointed out that we only achieve the right attitude, the upright position, through our own forces. We develop too through the forces which enter into speech. In the first years of our life we develop the forces which in the main guide us into the position which we have in the world as true men. We do not enter the world in such a way that we already have the right direction in the world. We crawl. But we are set in it rightly, when we direct the head outwards towards the stars. This corresponds to inner forces.

In later life we lose these forces. They no longer appear. There is nothing which enters human life again so radically as learning to walk and stand upright. In relation to standing upright we grow more and more weary. If we begin in the early morning to live with our brain, then when the day is ended we grow tired and need sleep. What makes us upright in childhood, when we are tired, remains tired all through life and grows feeble, and anything comparable to achieving uprightness as children is no longer done by us in later life.

And how do we direct ourselves into life when we learn to speak? Forces of direction work as well when we learn to speak. But the forces which we use in early childhood are not really lost for us in later life. They remain for us, but they are connected with a virtue; with the virtue which is related to rightness and the right, the virtue of all-comprehending Justice, the fourth virtue. The same impulse, which we use as a child when we raise ourselves up from crawling, lives in us if we have the virtue of justice, the fourth that Plato mentions.

Whoever really exercises the virtue of justice puts every thing and every being in its right place, and goes out of himself and into the others. That is what all-comprehending Justice means. To live in Wisdom means to derive the best fruits from the forces we have stored up during earlier incarnations. If we have there to point towards what was imparted to us during earlier incarnations, where we were still permeated by divine forces, with Justice we have to point out still more: we are sprung from the whole universe. We exercise justice by developing those forces which relate us spiritually to the entire universe. Justice is the measure of a man's connection with the divine. In practice Injustice is equivalent to the godless; equivalent to the one who has lost his divine origin; we blaspheme against God, the God from whom we spring, if we do any man injustice.

Thus we have two virtues, Justice and Wisdom, which guide us back to what we were in earlier times, in earlier incarnations in the times when we ourselves were still in the womb of the godhead. And we have two other virtues, Courage and Temperance, which guide us towards later incarnations. We provide all the more forces for these, the less we give to Lucifer. We have seen how what is of the nature of courage and of temperance goes into the organs, and how the organs are prepared thereby for the next incarnation. In the same way moral life extends into the future, when we fill ourselves with spirituality. Two virtues shine out over the past incarnation: Wisdom and Justice. Courage and Temperance shine out over the incarnations to come.

The time will come when men will see clearly that they are throwing themselves into the jaws of Ahriman, when they shut themselves off against justice and wisdom. What was theirs in earlier incarnations, what belonged to the divine world, they would cast over to Lucifer through intemperate or cowardly actions. All that can be seized by Lucifer is taken away from the powers available to us for building up our body in the coming life.

We cannot practise wisdom and justice without becoming selfless, as has been indicated. Only a self-seeking man can be unjust. Only a self-seeking man can be willing to remain unwise. Wisdom and justice lead us out beyond our own Self and make of us members of the whole organism of humanity. Courage and temperance make us in a sense members of the whole organism of humanity; only through experiencing courage and temperance and expressing them in our lives, do we provide for ourselves for the future with a stronger organism to take its place within humanity. We do not then lose what we would otherwise throw to Lucifer. Egoism is of itself transformed into selflessness when it is rightly extended over the whole horizon of life, and man finds his place in the light of the fourth virtue. That is what will be brought by spiritual wisdom for the future of man, and will extend over ethics and the moral life. This will pour into educational method as well. Through understanding wisdom and justice in the sense that I have indicated, the desire to learn all through life will arise. It will be seen that one has to begin learning in the right way when one has already youth behind one—while people think now that they do not need to learn anything more once their youth is past. In this way even the greatest and noblest works of art of the greatest poets are lost. We would understand them best if we took them up again in old age. If people read Goethe's Iphigenia or Schiller's Tell, they usually think: we read that at school already. That is not right; one should not forget that these writings have their best effect if they are read in later life, for then they develop justice and wisdom.

And again the education of children will bring special fruit if the virtue of courage and the virtue of temperance are seen in the right light. Where children are to be educated, these virtues must be regarded in an individual way, by showing the children again and again that they are to take hold of life courageously, and not be afraid or withdraw themselves from all sorts of things; and that they grasp life temperately and moderately, in order gradually to free themselves from their passions. An immense amount can be done for the education of children in this way. In the later course of our study of spiritual science these things will have to be developed in greater detail.

So we see that while otherwise the ethical life only provides laws concerned with life between birth and death, on the external physical plane, the considerations of spiritual science extend to an unlimited horizon. It is the same as with other things in spiritual science. Humanity has had to experience in relation to the science of nature the extension of its horizons. Giordano Bruno showed men that there is not only the earth, but many other worlds in cosmic space. Spiritual science shows men that there is not only earthly life, but many earthly lives. Before Giordano Bruno men believed that there was a fixed boundary up in the sky. Giordano Bruno showed that there is no boundary, that the blue of the sky is not a limit. Spiritual science shows that birth and death are not there, but that we introduce them into life through the limitation of our understanding.

Thus the gulf between the physical and the spiritual can be bridged over. Things which rest upon a spiritual-scientific foundation are like this for those seeking to found a genuine, truthful Monism. Those who often call themselves Monists today manage their Monism very simply. They take one part of the world and make of it a unity by throwing away the other half. True Monism comes about through allowing both halves to have their significant influence upon one another. This comes about through spiritual science. This should not only arise in a significant way for our consciousness, but for the whole of our life. We have to come more and more to the real knowledge, looking out into the world: in all that lives and works around us something super-sensible is present, not only in what is seen by our eyes, but also in what can be perceived by the understanding which is bound to the brain. There are everywhere spiritual forces, behind every phenomenon, behind the phenomenon of the rainbow, behind the movement of the hand, and so on.

If you read the lecture cycle which I held in Leipzig at the turn of the year last year, [Christ and the Spiritual World. The search for the Holy Grail (six lectures, Leipzig, 28th December 1913 – 2nd January 1914), published by the Rudolf Steiner Press.] you will find how the Christ Impulse worked through the Mystery of Golgotha, and how Christ lives in the most important affairs of humanity, not only in human conscious knowledge. For instance, there were quarrels about dogmas. But while men were quarrelling, the Christ Impulse lived on and brought about the necessary events.

Take the figure of the Maid of Orléans. In European history the simple shepherd girl appears. She appeared in a remarkable way; there lived in her soul not only those forces, which are otherwise to be found in human beings, but the Christ Impulse works in this personality, enlivening and sustaining her through its mighty influence. She became a kind of representative of the Christ Impulse itself for her time. This she was only able to do, because the Christ Impulse could enter and live within her.

You know that we celebrate the Christmas Festival in the time when the sun has least power, in the deepest darkness of winter, because we can be convinced that at this time the inner light, the spiritual light, has its greatest power.

Old legends tell us that over Christmas, up to 6th January, people have had special experiences, because at this time the life of the earth, and the inner forces of the earth, are most concentrated. Those who have the right disposition for it, experience then in fact the spiritual forces within the earthly forces. Countless legends describe this. The best time for this covers thirteen days before 6th January.

The Maid of Orléans passed through these thirteen days in a particular condition, in a condition in which the life of her feeling was not yet affected by the external world. It is remarkable that the time during which the Maid of Orleans was carried in her mother's body ended during the Christmas time of the year 1411. She was born, having been carried for the last thirteen days in her mother's body, on 6th January. Before she drew the first breath, before she saw the physical life with physical eyes, she experienced what is earthly during these thirteen days in that sleep, through which man passes before he enters the physical world.

Here I am indicating something immensely significant, which shows how the world is guided from the spiritual; how what happens externally in the physical world is given its direction by the spiritual world; how, through the physical, the spiritual world is flowing.

Thus in our time we must work ever more consciously to remove through spiritual science the gulf between the physical and the spiritual. We do this for one field of our lives, when we become conscious that within our movement the powers of those are at work, who united their soul and body during their earthly life with our movement, and have passed through the gate of death. If we look across to the other bank of the stream, where they are active, feeling ourselves united with them, directing our thoughts towards them—we do this in full consciousness, the consciousness won through spiritual science. We know that we are in the most living connection with those who have gone through the gate of death, and we know that they provide the best powers among us. When we do this, or can think it, we regard life like a field that is to be sown. Between what we ourselves plant, we see plants everywhere springing up, which we could not have grown ourselves. Then we can know: these plants have been put in by those to whom it is granted to be in the world of the spirit, those with whom we feel ourselves connected, those with whom we become united.

Human brotherhood with those as well who no longer bear a physical body—that will be the characteristic sign of this movement and of those who feel themselves as members of this movement, and reckon themselves as belonging to it in the future. Other societies, founded only upon earthly things, will be able to remove many barriers between human beings. The barriers between the living and the dead will more and more be taken away by the movement which unites those men who wish to be united in the sign of spiritual science. We will carry all this in our souls, and keep as an abiding sense this characteristic quality, uniting us with this spiritual movement, which has become dear to us.

• 1. The German and the English meanings of the word are rather different. (Tr.)
• 2. The German word ‘Besonnenheit’ seems impossible to render adequately in English. ‘Temperance’ is widely used for Plato's word σωϕροσύνη) (Tr.)

In the last lecture I tried to point out how by means of the kind of knowledge cultivated by Anthroposophy, man may be seen in his whole nature—consisting of body, soul and Spirit. I tried to show also how an inner knowledge of the conditions of health and disease can only be arrived at when the entire nature of man can be perceived in this way; and how in learning to know the true connections between the things which take place within man and the external processes and conditions of substances in Nature, we also succeed in establishing a connecting link between pathology and therapy.

Our next task will be to explain in detail what was only given in general outline in the first lecture. And for this it will above all be necessary to observe how disintegration is proceeding in the human organism and how, on the other hand, there is a constant process of integration. Man has, to begin with, an external physical organisation which is perceptible by means of the outer senses, and whose manifestations can be comprehended by the reason. Besides this physical body there is also the first super-sensible body of the human being: the etheric, or life-body. These two principles of the constitution of man serve to build up (integrate) the human organisation.

The physical body is continually renewed as it casts off its substance. The etheric body—which contains the forces of growth and of assimilation—is, in the entirety of its constitution, something of which we can gain a conception when we behold the growing and blossoming plant-kingdom in the spring; for the plants, as well as human beings, have an etheric or life-body. In these two members of the human organisation we have a progressive, constructive evolution.

In so far as man is a sentient being, he bears within himself the next member, the astral body. (We need not feel that such terms are objectionable; we should perceive what they reveal to us.) The astral body is essentially the mediator of sensation, the bearer of the inner life of feeling. The astral body contains not only the upbuilding forces but also the forces of destruction. Just as the etheric body makes the being of man bud and sprout, as it were, so all these processes of budding are continually being disintegrated again by the astral body; and just because of this, just because the physical and etheric bodies are continually being disintegrated, there exists in the human organisation an activity of soul and Spirit.

It would be quite a mistake to suppose that the soul and Spirit in man's nature inhere in the upbuilding process and that this process at last reaches a certain point—let us say in the nervous system—where it can become the bearer of soul and Spirit. That is not the case. When eventually (and everything points to this being soon), our very admirable modern scientific research has made further progress, it will become apparent that an anabolic, a constructive process in the nervous system is not the essential thing; it is present in the nervous organisation merely in order that the nerves may, in fact, exist. But the nerve-process is in a continual, though slow state of dissolution; and because it is so, because the physical is always being dissolved, a place is set free for the Spirit and soul.

In a still higher degree is this the case as regards the actual Ego-organisation, by means of which man is raised above all the other beings of Nature surrounding him on the Earth. The Ego-organisation is essentially bound up with katabolism; it is of greatest moment in those parts of the human being that are in a state of disintegration.

So when we look into this wonderful form of the human organism, we see that in every single organ there is construction, integration (whereby the organ ministers to growth and progressive development), and also destruction, whereby it ministers to retrogressive physical development, and by so doing gives foothold for the soul and Spirit. I said in the last lecture that the state of balance between integration and disintegration which is present in a particular way in every human organ, can be disturbed. The upbuilding process can become rampant; in that case we have to do with an unhealthy condition. When we look in this way into the nature of the human being (to begin with I can only state these things rather abstractly; they will be expressed more concretely presently), when we proceed conscientiously, with a sense of scientific responsibility and do not talk in generalisations about the presence of integration and disintegration, but really study each individual organ as conscientiously as we have learnt to do in scientific observations to-day—then we shall be able to penetrate into this condition of balance that is necessary for the single organs and so find it possible to obtain a conception of the human being in health. If in either direction, either with respect to constructive or with respect to destructive processes, the balance of an organ is upset, then we have to do with something that is unhealthy in the human organism.

Now, however, we must discover how this human organism stands in relation to the three kingdoms of Nature in the outer world—the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms—from which we have of course to extract our remedies. When we have studied this inner state of balance in the manner described, we shall see how everything that is present in the three kingdoms of Nature outside man is, in every direction, being overcome within the human organism.

Let us take the simplest example:—the condition of warmth in man. Nothing of the outer conditions of warmth must be carried on unchanged when it is once within the human organism. When we investigate the manifestations of warmth outside in Nature, we know that warmth raises the temperature of things in the outer world. We say that warmth penetrates into things. If we, in our organisation, were to be penetrated in the same way by warmth we should be made ill by it. It is only when, through the forces and quality of our organisation we are able to receive this warmth-process which is being exercised upon us, into our organism and immediately transform it into an inner process, that our organisation is in a state of health. We are harmed by either heat or cold directly we are not in a position to receive it into our organisation and transform it.

In respect of warmth or cold everyone can see this quite easily for himself. Moreover the same holds good for all other Nature processes. Only careful study, sharpened by spiritual perception, can lead to the recognition that every process taking place in Nature is transformed, metamorphosed, when it occurs within the human organism. We are indeed incessantly overcoming what lives in our earthly environment.

If we now consider the whole internal organisation of man we must say that if the inner force of the human being which inwardly transforms the external events and processes that are always working in upon him—for example, when he is taking nourishment—if this force were removed, then all that enters man from outside would work as a foreign process, and in a sense—if I were to express it crudely or trivially—man would be filled with foreign bodies or foreign processes. On the other hand, if the higher members of man's being, the astral body and the Ego-organisation develop excessive strength, then he does not only so transform the outer processes of his environment that enter into him as they should be transformed, but he does so more rampantly. Then there is a speeding-up of the processes which penetrate him. External Nature is driven out beyond the human—becomes in a certain sense, over-spiritualised; and we are faced with a disturbance of the health.

What we have thus indicated as an abstract principle is realty present in every human organ and must be studied individually in the case of them all. Moreover the human being is related in a highly complicated manner, to all the different ways in which he transforms the external processes.

He who strives to get beyond the undisputed testimony of up-to-date anatomy and physiology, who tries to develop his understanding so that he can transform the conception of the human organism yielded by a study of the corpse or pathological conditions, observing them not merely in regard to their “dead” structures but according to their living nature, will find himself faced with endless enigmas of the human organism. For the more exact and the more living our knowledge becomes, the more complicated does it appear. There are, however, certain guiding lines which enable us to find our way through the labyrinth. And if I may be allowed to make a personal observation here, it is that the discovery of such guiding lines was a matter with which I occupied myself for thirty years before I began to speak about it openly—which was about the year 1917. As a comparatively young man, in the early twenties, I asked myself whether there was any possibility of research into this complicated human organisation. Were there certain fundamental principles which would enable one to arrive at a comprehensive understanding? And this led me—(I have just said that the study took me thirty years)—to the fact that one can regard the human organisation from three different aspects: the system of nerves and senses, the rhythmic system, and the metabolic and limb system.

What we can call the organisation of nerves and senses predominates over all the others. It is, moreover, the bearer of all that can be described as the life of concepts. On the other hand, what we describe as the rhythmic organisation is, in a certain respect, self-contained. There is the rhythm of the breath, the rhythm of the circulation, the rhythm manifested in sleeping and waking, and countless other rhythmic processes. It was by making a practical and accurate distinction between the rhythmic organisation and the nerves-and-senses organisation that I first discovered how one could distinguish between the different constituent parts of the human being. I was compelled to ask myself the question—it is now nearly forty years ago, and to-day human hearts are more than ever burdened with baffling physiological problems—I was compelled to ask myself whether on this basis it is really possible to say that the whole inner life of thinking, feeling and willing is bound up with the system of nerves and senses. At the same time I felt that there was a contradiction: how can thinking, feeling and willing be bound up with the nerves and senses? Naturally I cannot go into all this detail to-day, I can only indicate it; but when we come to consider the domain of therapeutics much will be explained. For instance if from the physiological standpoint we carefully and accurately study the effect of music upon the human organisation, if we know the intimate connection that exists between our experience of music and the rhythmic processes within us, if we understand the quality of soul in music itself, and study the measure of our feelings with regard to melody and harmony, we say to ourselves at first that the feeling-life of man is not altogether directly connected with the nervous system; on the contrary, it is experienced in the rhythmic system. It is only when we rise to a higher conception of what we feel at first to be directly connected in musical experience with the rhythmic system that we find that the conception of it is actually carried by the nervous system. Thus we come to the conclusion that the nervous system and the rhythmic system are really inwardly organised as two entirely separate things.

Take modern physiology with all that it has to offer, especially all that it can tell you with regard to the experiences you can have in connection with music. If you study, for instance, such a thing as the human ear as it perceives the different sounds and tones, you will certainly say that audible phenomena (i.e. one particular class of sense-perception), are first of all incorporated into the rhythmic system of man, rise rhythmically to the sense-organisation, rhythmically approach the nervous system and then become a concept created by means of the nervous-system. The rhythmic system is in immediate connection with the nervous system, which is the bearer of thought—but it is the bearer of feeling only in so far as we become aware of our feelings through thoughts and these thoughts are carried by the nervous system. We can proceed in the same way if we apply physiology to the metabolic-limb-system. It may seem strange to connect metabolism and limbs together; but you need only consider how everything that has to do with movement and which belongs to the limb-system, reacts upon the metabolism. The metabolism and the limbs taken together are certainly a uniform whole.

When we investigate these things accurately and not in a confused way, it becomes evident once more that the system of metabolism and limbs is the direct bearer of all manifestations of the human will. Once more, then, it is as follows:—When that which is taking place in the metabolic-limb-system as the bearer of the manifestations of will, works upwards, sends its force up into the rhythmic system, then it passes into the realm of feeling. We unfold our feelings in our will and our will is directly inherent in our metabolic processes—absolutely directly. We experience the will as ‘feeling’ in the rhythmic system, indirectly. And we make thoughts for ourselves about our volitional acts because the metabolic system and rhythmic system drive their forces up into the nervous system.

Thus we have guiding lines for penetrating into the human organisation. For if we first of all perceive what has been given in regard to the nervous system—(to begin with we will leave the rhythmic system lying between the two others)—then we shall find a polar antithesis in every direction: the nervous system and the metabolic system are polarically opposite. As the metabolic-limb-system builds up, so the system of nerves and senses destroys and vice versa. This and many other things demonstrate the polarity. Everything that constitutes the Ego-organisation is intimately bound up with the system of nerves and senses; everything that constitutes the etheric body is intimately bound up with the metabolic and limb system; everything that constitutes the astral body is bound up with the rhythmic system; the physical body permeates the whole, but is continually overcome by the three other members of the human organisation. Only when we observe the human organism in this way can we leam to penetrate into the so-called normal or abnormal processes.

Let us take first the organisation of nerves and senses. But first, so that I may not be misunderstood, I would like to make a short digression. A very sceptical naturalist who had heard in quite a superficial way about these members which I posit as the basis of man's nature, said that I had attempted to distinguish between “head-organisation,” “chest-organisation,” and “abdominal organisation:” thus that I had in a sense located the system of nerves and senses only in the head, the rhythmic organisation in the chest, and the metabolic-limb system in the abdomen. But that is a very unjust statement. For without separating the systems spatially, the nerves and senses may be said to be organised principally in the head, but they are also to be found in the other two systems. The rhythmic system is principally located in the middle organisation; but it again is spread over the whole man; similarly the metabolic organisation. It is not a question of making a spatial separation between the organs, but of understanding their qualitative aspect and what is living in and permeating the single organs.

When we study the system of nerves and senses from this standpoint, we find that it spreads throughout the whole organism. The eye or the ear, for example, are organised in such a way that they pre-eminently contain the nerves and senses, in a lesser degree the rhythmic, and in a still less degree the metabolic system. An organ like the kidney, for instance, does not contain so much of the nerves and senses system as of the rhythmic or metabolic organisation, yet it contains something of all three. We do not understand the human being if we say: here are sense-organs, or there are digestive organs. In reality it is quite different. A sense-organ is only principally sense-organ; every sense-organ is also in a certain way a digestive and a rhythmic organ. The kidneys or the liver are to be understood as being principally assimilatory or excretory organs. In a lesser degree they are organs of nerves and senses. If, then, we study the whole organisation of man with its single organs from the point of view of the system of nerves and senses (in its reality, and not according to the fantastic concepts often formed by physiology), we find that man ‘perceives’ by means of his separate senses—sight, hearing and so on; but we also find that he is entirely permeated by the sense-organisation. The kidney, for instance, is a sense-organ which has a delicate perception of what is taking place in the digestive and excretory processes. The liver too, is—under certain conditions—a sense-organ. The heart is in a high degree an inner sense-organ and can only be understood if it is conceived of as such.

Do not imagine that I have any intention of criticising the science of to-day; I know its worth and my desire is that our view of these things shall be firmly grounded upon it. But we must nevertheless be clear that our science is, at present, not able to penetrate fully and precisely into the being of man. If it could, it would not relate the animal organisation so closely to the human in the way it does in our time. In respect of the life of sense, the animal stands at a lower level than the human organisation. The human nerves and senses organisation is yoked to the Ego-organisation; in the animal it is yoked to the astral body. The sense-life of man is entirely different from that of the animal. When the animal perceives something with its eyes—and this can be shown by a closer study of the structure of the eye—something takes place in the animal which, so to say, goes through the whole of its body. It does not happen like that in man. In man, sense-perception remains far more at the periphery, is concentrated far more on the surface. You can understand from this that there are delicate organisations present in animals which, in the case of the higher species, are only to be found in etheric form. But in certain of the lower animals you find, for instance, the xiphoid process which is also present in higher animals but in their case it is etheric; or you may find the pecten or choroid process in the eye. The way in which these organs are permeated by the blood, shows that the eye shares in the whole organisation of the animal and is the mediator to it of a life in the circumference of its environment. Man, on the other hand, is connected with his system of nerves and senses quite differently and therefore lives, in a far higher sense than the animal, in his outer world, whereas the animal lives more within itself. But everything which is communicated through the higher spiritual members of the human being, which lives itself out through the Ego-organisation by way of the nerves and senses, requires—just because it is present within the domain of the physical body—to receive its material influences from out of the physical world.

Now if we closely study the system of nerves and senses at a time when it is functioning perfectly healthily, we find that its working depends on a certain substance, and on the processes that take place in that substance. Matter is something which is never at rest; it merely represents what is, actually, a ‘process.’ (A crystal of quartz, for instance, is only a self-contained, definitely shaped thing to us because we never perceive that it is a ‘process,’ though indeed it is one which is taking place extremely slowly.) We must penetrate further and further into the human organism and learn to understand its transformative activity. That which enters into the organism as external physical substance has to be taken up by it and overcome, in the way described in the introductory lecture.

Now it is especially interesting that when the system of nerves and senses is in a normal, i.e. a healthy state (which must of course be understood relatively), it is dependent upon a delicate process which takes place under the influence of the silicic acid which enters the organism. Silicic acid, which in the outer realm of Nature forms itself into beautiful quartz-crystals, has this peculiarity: when it penetrates into the human organism it is taken up by the processes of the nerves and senses; so that if we look at the system of nerves and senses with spiritual sight, we see a wonderfully delicate process going on in which silicic acid is active. But if we look at the other side of the question—as when I said that man has senses everywhere—then we shall notice that it is only in the periphery, that is, where the senses are especially concentrated, that the silicic acid process is intensified; when we turn to the more inner parts of the organism, to the lungs, liver or kidneys, it is far less strong, it is ‘thinner’; while in the bones it is again stronger. In this way we discover that man has a remarkable constitution.

We have, so to say, a periphery and a circumference where the senses are concentrated; then we have that which fills out the limbs and which carries the skeleton; between these we have the muscles, the glands and so on.

In that which I have described as the “circumference” and the “centralised,” we have the strongest silicic acid processes; we can follow them into the organs that lie between these two, and there we find that they have their own specific silicic acid processes but weaker than those in the circumference. Thus in respect of the outer parts, where man extends in an outgoing direction from the nerves into the senses, he needs more and more silicic acid; in the centre of his system he requires comparatively little; but where his skeleton lies, at the basis of the motor system, there again he requires more silicic acid. Directly we perceive this fact we recognize the inexactitude of many assertions of modern physiology. (And again let me emphasise that I do not wish to criticise them, but merely to make certain statements.) For instance, if we study the life of the human being according to modern physiology, we are directed to the breathing-process. In certain respects this is a complex process, but—speaking generally—it consists in taking in oxygen out of the air, and breathing out carbonic acid. That is the rhythmical process which is essentially the basis of organic life. We say that oxygen is breathed in, that it goes through certain processes described by physiology, within the organism; that it combines with carbon in the blood, and is then ejected on the breath as carbonic acid. This is perfectly correct according to a purely external method of observation. This process is, however, connected with another. We do not merely breathe in oxygen and combine it with carbon. Primarily, that is done with that portion of the oxygen which is spread over the lower part of the body; that is what we unite with the carbon and breathe out as carbonic acid.

There is another and a more delicate process behind this rhythmical occurrence. That portion of the oxygen which, in the human organisation, rises towards the head and therefore (in the particular sense which was mentioned previously) to the system of nerves and senses, unites itself with the substance we call silica, and forms silicic acid. And whereas in man the important thing for the metabolic system is the production of carbonic acid, so the important thing for the nerves and senses system is the production of silicic acid. The latter is a finer process which we are not able to verify with the coarse instruments at our disposal, though all the means are there by which it can be verified. Thus we have the coarser process on the one hand, and on the other the finer process where the oxygen combines with the silica to form silicic acid, and as such, is secreted inwardly in the human organisation.

Through this secretion of silicic acid the whole organism becomes a sense-organ—more so in the periphery, less so in the separate organs.

If we look at it this way, we can perceive the more delicate intimate structure of the human organism, and see how every organ contains, of necessity, processes related to substances each in its own distinct degree.

If we are now to grasp what health and illness really are, we must understand how these processes take place in any one organ. Suppose we take the kidney, for sake of example. Through some particular condition or other—some symptomatic complication, let us say—our diagnosis leads us to assume that the cause of an illness lies in the kidneys. If we call Spiritual Science to the aid of our diagnosis, we find that the kidney is acting too little as a sense-organ for the surrounding digestive and excretory processes; it is acting too strongly as an organ of metabolism; hence the balance is upset.

In such a case we have above all to ask: how are we to restore to it in a greater degree the character of sense-organ? We can say that because the kidney proves to be an insufficient sense-organ for the digestive and excretory processes, then we must see that it receives the necessary supply of silicic acid.

Now in the anthroposophical sense, there are three ways of administering substances that are required by a healthy human organism. The first is to give the patient a remedy by mouth. But in that case we must be guided by whether the whole digestive organism is so constituted that it can transmit the substances exactly to that spot where they are to be effective. We must know how a substance works—whether on the heart, or the lungs, and so forth, when we administer it by mouth and it passes into the digestive tract. The second way is by injections. By this means we introduce a substance directly into the rhythmic system. There, it works more as a ‘process;’ there, that which in the metabolism is a substantial organisation, is transformed at once into a rhythmic activity and we directly affect the rhythmic system. Or again, we try the third way: we prepare a substance as an ointment to be applied at the right place, or administer it in a bath; in short we apply our remedy in an external form. There are, of course, a great many different methods of doing this.

We have these three ways of applying remedies. But now let us observe the kidneys which our diagnosis reveals as having a diminished capacity as a sense-organ. We have to administer the right kind of silicic acid process. Therefore we have to be attentive, because, in the breathing process as described just now, where the oxygen combines with silica and then disperses silicic acid throughout the body, and because during that process too little silicic acid has reached the kidneys, we must do something which will attract a stronger silicic acid process to them. So we must know how to come to the assistance of the organism which has failed to do this for itself; and for this we must discover what there is externally which is the result of a process such as is wanting in the kidneys. We must search for it. How can we find ways and means to introduce just this silicic acid process into the kidneys?

And now we find that the function of the kidneys, especially as it is a sense-function, is dependent upon the astral body. The astral body is at the basis of the excretory processes and of this particular form of them. Therefore we must stimulate the astral body and moreover in such a way that it will somehow carry the silicic acid process which is administered from outside, to an organ such as the kidney. We need a remedy that, firstly, will stimulate the silicic-acid process, and, secondly, which will stimulate it precisely in the kidneys. If we seek for it in the surrounding plant world, we come upon the plant equisetum arvensæ, the ordinary field “horse-tail.” The peculiar feature of this plant is that it contains a great deal of silicic acid. If we were to give silicic acid alone it would, however, not reach the kidneys. Equisetum also contains sulphurous acid salts. Sulphurous acid salts alone work on the rhythmic system, on the excretory organs and on the kidneys in particular. When they are intimately combined as they are in Equisetum Arvensæ (we can administer it by mouth, or if that is not suitable, in either of the other ways)—then the sulphurous acid salts enable the silicic acid to find its way to the kidneys.

Here we have touched upon a single instance—a pathological condition of the kidneys. We have approached it quite methodically; we have discerned what can supply what is lacking in the kidneys; and we have erected a bridge that can be followed step by step, from pathology to therapy.

Now let us take another case. Suppose we have to do with some disturbance of the digestive system—such as we usually include under the word ‘dyspepsia.’ If we again proceed according to Spiritual Science, we shall discover that here we have to do principally with a faulty and inadequate working of the Ego-organisation. Why is the Ego-organisation not acting strongly enough? That is the question. And we must search somewhere in the functional regions of the human organism for what it is that is causing this weakness of the Ego-organisation. In certain cases we find that the fault lies in the gallbladder secretions. If that is so, then we must come to the assistance of the Ego-organisation (just as we came to the assistance of the kidneys with the equisetum) by administering something which, if it reaches the required spot by being prepared in a certain way, will there strengthen the inadequate working of the Ego-organisation. Thus, even as we find that the silicic acid process (which lies at the root of the nerves-and-senses system) when introduced in the right way to the kidneys enhances their sense-faculty, so we now find that such a process as the gall-bladder secretions (which corresponds primarily with the Ego-organisation) is really connected in quite a special manner (also in relation to other things) with the action of carbon. Now a remarkable thing to be observed is that if we wish to introduce carbon into the organism in the correct way for treating dyspepsia, we find that carbon—(though it is contained in every plant)—is contained in chichorium intybus (chicory) in a form that directly affects the gall-bladder. When we know how to make the correct preparation from chicorium intybus, we can lead it over into the functions of this organ as a certain form of carbon-process, in the same way as is done with regard to the silicic-acid process and the kidneys.

With these simple examples—which are applicable either to slight or in certain circumstances to very severe cases of illness—I have tried to indicate how, by a spiritual-scientific observation of the human organism on the one hand, and on the other of the different natural creations and their respective interchanges with each other, there can be brought about firstly an understanding of the processes of illness, and secondly an understanding of what is required in order to reverse the direction of those processes. Healing becomes thereby a penetrating Art. This is what can be achieved for the art of medicine, the art of Healing, by the kind of scientific research that is called Anthroposophy. There is nothing of the nature of fantasy about it. It is that which will bring research to the point of extreme exactitude with regard to the observation of the whole human being, both physically, psychically and spiritually. The condition of illness in man depends upon the respective activity of the physical, the psychic and the spiritual. And because man's constitution consists of nerves and senses system, rhythmic system, metabolic and limb system, we are enabled also to penetrate into the different processes and their degrees of activity. We learn to know how a sense-function is present in the kidneys as soon as we direct our attention to the essential nature of sense-functions; otherwise, we only seek to discover sense-functions under their cruder aspect as they appear in the senses themselves. Now however, we become able to comprehend illness as such.

I have already said that in the metabolic and limb system processes take place which are the opposite of those that take place in the system of nerves and senses. But it can happen that processes which primarily are also nerves and senses processes, and are, for instance, proper to the nerves of the head where they are ‘normal’—it can happen that these processes can in a certain sense become dislodged by the metabolic and limb system; that through an abnormality of the astral body and Ego-organisation in the metabolic-limb-system something can happen which would be ‘ correct’ or ‘normal’ only if taking place in the system of nerves and senses. That is to say, what is right for one system can be in another system productive of metamorphosis or disease. So that a process which properly belongs, for instance, to the system of nerves and senses makes its appearance in another system, and is then a process of disease. An example of this is found in typhoid fever. Typhoid represents a process which belongs properly to the nervous system. While it should play its part there in the physical organisation, it plays its part as a matter of fact in the region of the metabolic system within the etheric organisation—within the etheric body—works over into the physical body and appears there as typhoid. Here we see into the nature of the onset of illness. Or it can also happen that the dynamic force, or those forces which are active in a sense-organ—(and must be active there in a certain degree in order that a sense-organ as such may arise)—become active somewhere where they should not. That which works in a sense-organ can be in some way or another transformed in its activity elsewhere. Let us take the activity of the ear. Instead of remaining in the system of nerves and senses, it obtrudes itself (and this under circumstances which can also be described) in another place—for example in the metabolic system where this is connected with the rhythmic system. Then there arises, in the wrong place, an abnormal tendency to produce a sense-organ; and this manifests itself as carcinoma—as a cancerous growth. It is only when we can look in this way into the human organism that we can perceive that carcinoma represents a certain tendency, displaced in respect of the systems, to the formation of a sense organ.

When we speak of the fertilisation of medicine through Anthroposophy, it is a question of learning how abnormal conditions in the human organism arise from the fact that what is normal to one system transplants itself into another. And only by perceiving the matter thus is one in a position really to understand the human organism in its healthy and diseased states, and so to make the bridge from pathology to therapy, from observation of the patient to healing the patient.

When these things are represented as a connected whole, it will be seen how nothing that is said from this standpoint can in any way contradict modern medicine. As a first step in this direction I hope that very soon now the book [Fundamentals of Therapy, by Dr. Rudolf Steiner and Dr. Ita Wegman. (Anthroposophical Publishing Co.) Price 7/6.] will be published that has been written by me in collaboration with Dr. Wegman, the Director of the Clinical and Therapeutic Institute at Arlesheim. This book will present what can be given from the spiritual-scientific standpoint, not as a contradiction of modern medicine but as an extension of it. People will then be able to convince themselves that it has nothing to do with the kind of superficiality which is so prevalent to-day. This book will show, in a way that will be justified by modern science, the fruitfulness that can enter into the art of healing by means of spiritual scientific investigation. Precisely when these things can be followed up more and more in detail and with scientific conscientiousness, will those efforts be acknowledged which are being made by such an Institution as the International laboratories of Arlesheim, where a whole range of new remedies is being prepared in accordance with the principles here set forth.

In the third lecture it will be my endeavour to consolidate still further (in so far as that can be done here in a popular manner), what has already been indicated as a rational therapy, by citing certain special cases of illness and the way in which they can be cured. Anyone who can really perceive what is meant will certainly not have any fear that the things stated cannot be subjected to serious test. We know that it will be the same in this as in all other domains of Anthroposophy; to begin with, there will be rebuffs, abuse and criticism by those who do not know it in detail. But those who do learn to know it in detail will stop their abuse. Therefore, in my third lecture I will go more into the particulars which will show that we are not evading modern science but are in full agreement with it, and that we proceed from the desire to enlarge the boundaries of science by spiritual knowledge in the sphere of anthroposophical medicine.

Only when this is understood will the art of healing stand upon its true foundations. For the art of healing concerns man. Man is a being of body, soul and Spirit. A real medicine can therefore only exist when it penetrates into a knowledge which embraces man in respect of all three—in respect of body, soul and Spirit.

One of the most significant mysteries in all occult schools, including that of Dionysius, is the Mystery of Number. None save those who can decipher the secret of Number can read an occult writing. There is always deep meaning behind it, wherever in religious documents numbers are mentioned. In the School of Pythagoras, also the Mystery of Number played an important part. Although it is true that the letter killeth, one must, nevertheless in explaining occult writings, attach a certain value to the letter, otherwise there is danger of explaining into the writing the spirit one wants to have in it. In St. John's Gospel we find various numbers which have a secret significance. In our last lecture we spoke of the three women who stood by the cross; the virgin mother Sophia, Mary, and Mary Magdalene. We will now consider another secret of number.

In the course of His conversation with the woman of Samaria, Christ Jesus said to her: “Thou hast has five husbands; and he whom thou now has is not thy husband.” (John 4:18) And again, in the story of the healing of the man who had been ill for thirty-eight years, the five occurs: the pool of Bethesda had five porches. (John 5:2) We will now look somewhat more closely into the significance of this mystical number five. Let us consider the human being in connection with the evolution of humanity. As we saw in yesterday's lecture, man consists of nine parts, which may, from another point of view, be reduced to seven. These several principles of man gradually unfold in the course of the evolution of man. They are not all developed in the average man of the present day; he has only developed as far as to the Spiritual Soul. The Spirit Self is only just beginning to unfold. Let us go back to the period in human evolution when man learned to say “I” consciously to himself. Before that period there was the old Atlantean epoch, when men still possessed the old dim clairvoyant forces. In the parts of Atlantis corresponding to present-day Ireland there lived a people which had so progressed in evolution that the etheric head and the physical head coincided. This people was at that time the most advanced, and it was destined to become the bearer of the evolution of the future. A very advanced Being led this group towards the East, through present-day Russia to Central Asia, to the region of the present desert of Gobi. There a colony was founded, and from this centre colonists were sent forth in various directions who spread the culture fostered in this centre. This took place about the time when Atlantis was being gradually submerged; present-day Africa and Europe gradually emerged out of the waves.

Another group of Atlanteans travelled towards the West and formed the original population of present-day America, where they were found by the Europeans when America was rediscovered. Another group wandered to the north of Europe. All these groups preserved their clairvoyant remembrances in old sagas, myths and legends. When these sagas and myths are rightly understood they throw light upon much that is still dark in the history of humanity. But we must not go to work pedantically in explaining these sagas and myths; we must know how clairvoyant experiences and the power of phantasy co-operated in a complicated manner to produce these old legends.

During the period when the Ego first shone out in the personality, man lived to a much higher degree in his environment than he did later. He perceived the outlines of the objects and beings around him less clearly than he did their inner qualities and their attitude towards him,—whether they were useful or harmful, friendly or hostile. The more the ego became enclosed within the human personality the more did the clairvoyant capacities diminish while the forms in the outer world, appeared more and more clearly before the physical eyes. If we picture this fact clearly, we can easily comprehend that the entrance of the Ego produced a mighty change. Previously man had not seen his own body; he now began to describe it as his Ego. Towards the end of the Atlantean Epoch Atlantis was a land of cloud, it was covered with dense volumes of mist. There were no alternating periods or rain and sunshine, and there was no phenomenon such as the rainbow; this could only appear after the Atlantean Epoch, when the masses of mist dispersed. This event has remained alive in the folk consciousness as the legend of Wotan, who journeys over the bridge with his he-goats, and in the story of Noah and the Ark.

The memory of the land of mist has been preserved in the northern name, Niffelheim, Nobelheim—home of cloud. And the northern peoples have also preserved the memory of the coming of the Ego into the human personality in the Saga of the Niebelungen. In that saga the Ego is represented by the symbol of gold. The gold was once dissolved in the water; then it condensed into the ring, the treasure of the Nibelungen. The Ego, which had hitherto been distributed over the whole world, condensed into the firm human form. In Wagner's version of this legend we can see very clearly the unconscious perception of the creative artist. Wagner was not fully conscious of what he created in his work, an unconscious knowledge guided him. For example, Wagner may have characterised the Ego awakened to consciousness, by the organ notes which sound throughout the whole overture of the opera, “Rheingold.”

Over in the Far East the first post-Atlantean civilisation arose, a civilisation to which the ancient Vedas still bear witness. The first impulse for this civilisation was given towards the south in the old Indian Civilisation. The reports of this fact are preserved in the old Indian legends and in the religious records, and they can be read by one who is clairvoyant. Many statements that are apparently contradictory prove to contain the deepest truth. The men of this civilisation had preserved clear remembrances of the former old clairvoyance, and they still longed for it, for they looked upon it as a valuable possession which they had lost. They were still so filled with the reality of the spiritual world that they looked upon the physical as maya, illusion. Hence they sought to regain this lost treasure by turning away their gaze from all that is earthly and continually directing it to the spiritual. This is the origin of the Yoga exercises, which seek to lead the pupil into the spiritual world by diminishing the consciousness. They desired to return to the old dreamy state; they sought the path which would lead them back into the Paradise they had lost.

Throughout the whole of the Atlantean Epoch man had only perceived the outer world in dim, unclear outlines; the Atlantean lived chiefly in the spiritual world. To the spiritual investigator the whole of the post-Atlantean Epoch signifies but a gradual conquest of the physical plane. The men of the first post-Atlantean civilisation, the Indian had little feeling for what was outside in physical nature; for the Initiates it was an absolute illusion, and they strove to get away from it and reach the only reality, the spiritual world.

The second was the old Persian civilisation. The Persian was already closer to the outer world than was thg Indian. He learned to distinguish especially between good and evil, represented by the Gods Ormuzd and Ahriman; he strove to unite himself with the former in order to combat the latter. The Earth was for him a place for work, in order to embody the Spirit in physical existence.

The third age of civilisation was the Egyptian-Assyrian-Chaldean-Babylonian, and here, again, man made a further step forward in the conquest of the physical plane. To the Persians the world was physically an undifferentiated field for work; in the Egyptian civilisation man began to apply his knowledge and make it useful. He applied his knowledge of Geometry and divided the land; he directed his gaze to the stars, and laid the foundations of Astronomy.

The fourth was the Greco-Latin age of civilisation. Hitherto man had occupied himself in applying his science to the things of the outer world; he now began to embody his own inner being, his specifically human nature, in matter. His own form reappeared in his works of art, and in his epics and dramas he described his own psychic qualities. The Romans developed the idea of citizenship, and so the State and Jurisprudence arose.

In the fifth age of civilisation, in which we are now living, man has gone still further in the mastery of the outer world. In our age the Spirit has descended most deeply into matter. This descent had to come if humanity was to progress; only when the Spirit has descended fully into matter can its reascent begin. In our age we have a great development of science, and with its aid we can control the various forces of nature. In ancient times, when men ground their corn in a most primitive way between two stones, they did not need to expend much mental power to satisfy their simple needs, but things are quite different now. Think of the immense expenditure of mental effort necessary to satisfy the material needs of the modern man. We have locomotives, steamships, telephones, electric light. An immense amount of mental power has been embodied in matter in these things, but the spiritual interests of men here pass entirely into the background. Thus we see that the whole development of humanity in the post-Atlantean Epoch has signified a descent of the human spirit into matter. But the purpose of this descent is the conquest of matter, this great opponent of the Spirit; for after the deepest descent, an ascent to conscious, spiritual life must now begin.

The course of human history in the post-Atlantean Epoch may be represented by the curved line in the following diagram.

It is the power of Christianity which is to bring about the ascent. The Star of Christianity appeared in the fourth age of civilization, long before the deepest point in the descending curve had been reached. Christ Jesus appeared as the great Personality Who brought to humanity the power which would enable it later to rise to the Spirit. All the former ages of civilisation can also be looked upon as a preparation for Christianity. In the fifth age of civilisation Christianity has to withstand the severest testing, for materialistic thought darkens and hides the spiritual truths of Christianity. In the sixth age Christianity will unite humanity into a great bond of brotherhood, and Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy must be looked upon an the messenger of this coming age, for it is preparing the way for the spiritualising of humanity. The teachings given to mankind in Christianity are so profound, so full of wisdom, that no religion of the future will be able to displace or supplant Christianity. It will be possible for Christianity to adapt itself to all the forms of civilisation in the future.

We must now study another side of the evolution of humanity. The physical body underwent a special development in the Atlantean Epoch, and when Atlantis was submerged beneath the waves man possessed approximately the same form he now has. Then began the development of the more spiritual principles. In the Indian Age the etheric body was especially developed. In that first age of civilisation the Indians were very receptive to the spiritual life, and this was connected with a special development of the etheric body.

We may remark that our present European civilisation is very different from the present Indian and also from the old Indian, and so it is comprehensible that the paths to be followed by the Indian and the European to the spiritual life must be different. The Yoga exercises that are suited to the Indian and helpful to him are unsuitable for the European. The methods of initiation arranged by the Masters are carefully adapted to the stage of development reached by humanity at a particular time, for a method which is excellent at a certain stage, may be positively harmful at another stage. It is not without reason that various religions have appeared in the course of time; although there is a kernel of truth that is common to them all, the various expressions of this truth are conditioned by the differences in the several ages of civilisation. A tree is, from root to flower, a complete whole, and yet the root requires a different food from that needed by the leaves and flowers; so also the humanity of the various ages of civilisation requires a different religion and method of initiation.

In the Persian civilisation the astral body was specially developed. In the Egyptian-Assyrian-Chaldean-Babylonian civilisation the Sentient Soul was developed; in the Graeco-Latin civilisation the Intellectual Soul, and in our own age the Spiritual Soul. In the sixth age the Spirit Self, as yet is only in a germinal condition, will be developed. It needs the mighty power of the Christ Spirit to enable this germ to develop, and true Christianity will only be there when the Spirit Self has been developed. Then humanity prepares itself to receive the Life Spirit. At first but a number of human beings will unfold this force within them; they will, however achieve a wonderful spiritual life. Christianity is now only at the beginning of its development; those who are now preparing to develop the Spirit Self within them will in the next age make this deeper and more spiritual Christianity more and more accessible to humanity.

We see how in the third age, a relatively small body of people, the Hebrews, prepared the conditions which made the appearance of Christ possible; how in the fourth age the power of Christ penetrated into the physical; how in the fifth age humanity sank most deeply into the physical world; now, after humanity has gained the mastery over this physical world, it will gain a still greater power and capacity in the sixth age to receive into itself the spiritual life which the Christ Spirit has brought. Christ appears as the firstborn, the man who is far ahead of his time, who has already reached the stage which the rest of humanity will only reach in the sixth age. The fifth is the most material age in the evolution of humanity.

The Spiritual feelings form the basis of the conditions of the body, and a constitutional disease is the expression of some spiritual aberration. Leprosy, the terrible disease of the Middle Ages, was an expression in the physical of the fear of the Huns which possessed the people of Europe at that time. The Huns were decadent descendants of the Atlanteans. Their physical bodies were still healthy, but their astral bodies were already infected with the substances of decay. Fear and terror form an excellent fostering soil for the decaying substances of the astral plane, hence these decaying substances living in the degenerated descendants of the Atlantean peoples could take root in the astral bodies of the European peoples and from thence they produced leprosy in the physical bodies of later generations.

Everything appears first of all in a spiritual way, and then it expresses itself later in the physical body. The nervousness of the people of the present day is the result of the materialistic frame of mind in our age. The wise Leaders of humanity know that if the high tide of materialism were to continue, great epidemics of nervous diseases would break out, and children would be born with quivering limbs. The Anthroposophical Movement was brought into the world to rescue humanity from the dangers of materialism. One who spreads materialistic thought and feeling among the people is preparing the way for these devastating diseases; and one who combats materialism is fighting for the health of the people
and its power to develop further. The individual can do but little towards his own health, for he is part of the whole body of humanity and draws the substances for his maintenance from the source that is common to all men: One who sees into the laws of human evolution must observe with a bleeding heart how the individual suffers, and how his suffering is but the expression of the spiritual and mental aberration of the whole of humanity. It is the task of Anthroposophy not so much to help the individual but, rather, to give to the whole of humanity the upward swing into the spiritual, and thereby to work for the bodily health of humanity.

In the sixth and seventh ages of civilisation the Spirit Self and the Life Spirit will develop through the power of Christ in those who rely upon Him, and at the same time these will gain healthy thought and feeling. Christianity brings health and healing, for the life force of Christ conquers all disease and death. The human body as a solid body has developed out of liquid substances. The five porches or halls which surround the pool of Bethesda signify the five ages which man has used to penetrate more and more deeply into the body, and in the end he has succumbed entirely to matter. Only after he has passed through these five ages can man be healed. One who has entered into these five halls cannot be healed unless the great Healer, the Christ, approaches him; but when this happens, there takes place what is described in the fifth chapter of St. John's Gospel. Thus the story of the man who had been ill for thirty-eight years is a prophetic announcement of what will take place in the sixth age, when man will no longer need any remedies, because he will be his own healer.

At the beginning of the Post-Atlantean Epoch the power of blood relationship was still very strong. When Christ said: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple,”—these words refer to a stage of human evolution that will be reached in the sixth age. One common Spirit of humanity well then rule, in place of the nation and race spirits. Man will then no longer be the son of his tribe or nation, but the son of humanity, the “son of Man.” Here, again, Christ was the first to bear this name with right (John 3:13-14). He conducted Himself already at that time as men will conduct themselves when they are sons of Man.

This is expressed by Christ going to the Samaritan woman, to one who had nothing to do with the Jews. The element in man which makes his development possible is feminine (passive), as compared with the Spirit, which represents the fertilising, the male (active) principle. The result of this continuous activity of the male element upon the feminine principle is first of all the unfolding of the etheric body, then the astral body, the sentient soul, the intellectual soul and the spiritual soul. The Spirit Self then develops in the spiritual soul. This is indicated in Christ's conversation with the Samaritan woman in the words: “Thou has had five husbands; and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband: in that saidst thou truly.” (John 4:18.) The five husbands which the woman has had, are the five higher principles, which work upon the physical, and the sixth, the Spirit Self is no longer the husband in the old sense. The other five are lower passing stages of evolution, whereas the sixth, the Spirit Self, represents the Divine and Eternal. Thus, in His conversation with the Samaritan woman, we also see an announcement of the coming age by Christ Jesus.

While the five principles need to be purified from outside, the Spirit Self will keep man himself pure. The body of Christ is already filled with purity. He will also purify humanity; for this reason He approaches and purifies the Temple of the Holy Spirit, the body of man, from the lower principles attaching to him, and makes him capable of receiving the Spirit.

The explanations here given must not give rise to the idea that the descriptions in St. John's Gospel are to be looked upon as symbols only. In ancient times names were not given arbitrarily, they were strictly adapted to the person's character. It is true that the three women who stood by the cross of Jesus represented the three souls, the sentient soul the intellectual soul and the spiritual soul; but it is also true that these three persons stood there in the body at the foot of the cross. When we read St. John's. Gospel we look at the symbolical pictures of what will be realised on this Earth in the next age of civilisation; but we also see what actually took place at the beginning of our era. All the historical facts are presented by the wise powers that are guiding humanity as symbols of the future evolution of humanity.

What spiritual science calls the mystery of death faces us in our times so significantly. Everything is in close or more distant interrelation with them. Above all, through spiritual science we receive not only the basic conviction, but the basic knowledge of the world in the physical body and of the world, into which we enter through the gate of death. However, this world is always alive also in the sensory life and surrounds us. It is only not recognizable for the human being engaged in the sensory life, because he does not have the necessary attention for it. If such drastic events flow through the time which demand so manifold sacrifices of the human beings as they surround us now, we must be woven with our whole souls in it. Hence, it is obvious to inform you about some matters by means of spiritual science.

We want to turn our glance to fields of life that show us how humankind has come to something fatefully illogical concerning its surroundings because of the materialistic way of thinking. We hear, for example, in the way usual today the individual nations accusing each another: I have not wanted the war; it is you who has incited it.—The question is legitimate and one can now already answer it—for the facts speak clearly—where the external causes are. But for the spiritual-scientific seer it is different. In this question he has to realise that the war is basically the last phase in the course of events, or at least a later phase of matters that were there already before. One commits a mistake in the judgment also with illness processes where one often still speaks of such, whereas these are already health processes, which must take place to recover. The external processes, which take place to paralyse the illness and to recover, have happened before and are not to be observed. The war also is an apparent illness process. It is an effort of humankind to come beyond certain processes which were there before. The illness lies already before in the really unhealthy relations between the peoples. If anyone investigates the external causes with reason, he ignores the internal ones. In the area where we are crowded together like in a fortress and are surrounded with a ring, it must seem reasonable to especially raise the question which the internal causes are, or of which kind the single cause is by which this encirclement was caused. One speaks of such an encirclement for the last years, for the last decades, but if you look at the great connections, it begins much sooner. It sounds peculiar, but one can give the year 860 A. D.—not 1860, but 860. For such a long time, the process is going on, which finds expression now in a way we can call the most dreadful war of humankind, since it inhabits the earth.

In the deeper interrelation of European history one finds the extremely strange fact that in Central Europe something of spiritual substance was crowded together. If anyone investigates this deeper interrelation, he sees that it was crowded together there for a particular purpose. It concerns not the external determinations of blood or race, but the fact that something like a spiritual substance permeates the world. Something like a snake-shaped ring contracts in Central Europe coming down from the distant north. Two currents of the east and west go to the south and meet forming a ring. From a centre, the Normannic tribes move in the 9th century down who are related by blood to so many things that later exist in Central Europe. But they push their way into the Romance element, which comes from Southern Europe, and flow together with it. In 860, they stand in front of Paris; there the Normans were overpowered by the Romance people. The western France came into being from that. More than the Angles and Saxons could bring to the British islands, the Normans brought back from France to England. In the east, the Normannic people moved down, they got from the north to the Volga and the Black Sea into the Slavic regions. Later the Tartar current coalesces. The Slavic element overpowers the Normans and gives them the Christian religion in its eastern form. They become Slavic as “Ros”—they are called in Finland that way—nothing has remained except the name Russia. This name is of Germanic origin. The name Rurik has the same origin.

About these relations one has rather doubtful views. In the west of Europe many people speak that the French are appointed to resurrect the old Celtic element in a kind of Renaissance. One has the idea that in Central Europe are mainly Teutons and that in the west the Celtic element predominates. However, it is vice versa, in the French population is much more Teutonic blood, in Central Europe is more Celtic blood, this is true. Thus maya stands against truth. Only the inhabitants of the west are completely overpowered by the Romance element. In the east the Norman and with them the Teutonic elements are overpowered by the foreign race element. Still today there a religion prevails that is foreign to the Russian folk-soul.¹ Thus the people in Central Europe are encircled as it were. The Romance element reaches to Constantinople, and on the other side the Slavic Normans reach to Constantinople as well. There we have the snake, the ring.

If we consider that what was crowded together there spiritually, we get the view that it has an especially important task. Yesterday, I have only indicated it, but, nevertheless, I have spoken of the fact that here a certain familiar contact of the folk-soul with the individual soul should take place and just thereby the nicest blossoms are produced with the best relatives. The ego should immediately be seized, not the single members of the soul like in the West, should be immediately living in the ego. From that arises—this would already have to be clear to the exoteric consideration—that in Central Europe basically complete hostility could never hold sway against idealism that always a certain tendency to the spiritual world was there to a high degree. When we began our spiritual movement, karma ordained that we had to act at first in association with the British movement. But externally everything was only a symptom of that what had to happen internally with a certain necessity. If we consider what the theosophical movement represents, from which we had to separate, you will notice that there the cultural life has split in two parts. The external life takes a purely materialistic way, and the spiritual element is coupled to it. They always fall apart.

Compare to that which must be our spiritual life for us. As in the organism the head cannot be thought without body, our spiritual life grows out of the general cultural life. You only need to start with Tauler, Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, then with Herder, Lessing, everywhere we have to develop what should become higher spiritual culture. We cannot couple our spiritual view to anything, we must have it as an organism, must raise it. We have to discover internally that the return of Christ is a spiritual affair. Hence, we cannot make the slightest concession. We are able to look at Christ as a figure only with the spiritual eye, approach Him with the internal experience. In the West that had to be dogmatised and materialised. People could not imagine it differently, as that He would come in the physical body. Hence, the absurd idea to present Christ in the body on the salver.² This happened in connection with what was encircled there.

Hence, the question must touch us objectively: how has the Central European civilisation to relate to the future culture?—Truth is something general, but it is something different how it arises. In the Central European civilisation are the springs for the whole spiritual culture of the future. We have to find the way from the German idealism to the spiritual culture. For that is necessary that here in the centre an ego-culture is founded. You can see that easily on the esoteric field. The human ego has to enkindle itself in the outside world, there only it is awake and realises internally. Thus the ego-culture of Central Europe is aroused from without. You need to look only at the last events, the standardisation of the German being. It is typical that the German empire was founded in 1871 on foreign ground. So many examples could be given that also show in the external events that there is an ego-culture in Central Europe.

It seems reasonable to ask: which meaning do the deaths have for the spiritual world?—Countless human beings go in the prime of life through the gate of death. At first the connection of ego, astral body, etheric body with the physical body is separated. The physical body is handed over apparently to the earth, the etheric body to the etheric world; astral body and ego go on. However, this must strike us: are the etheric bodies of the human beings of normal age going through the gate of death different from those of the young men? As to the physical body one understands this, as to the etheric one will understand it now. The etheric body could still have supplied the physical body for decades, and could have worked on it. It goes with these unused forces through the gate of death, coalesces there with the folk-soul, and the work of the folk-soul will be impregnated in future with the unused forces of these etheric bodies. It is our task to understand that. Human beings will be there who will know: the folk-soul is an active element. Only if one knows that the unused etheric bodies will work as a spiritual force in concrete way in the spiritual world, then one can understand what takes action really. The consciousness of this concrete relationship with the spiritual world will be important. Thereby, namely by creation of such a consciousness of the spiritual world, spiritual science becomes more and more life in the souls and does not only remain doctrine. The human being knows that he is in a spiritual aura as he knows here that the air is in his surroundings. Like he distinguishes clean and dirty air here, he will feel good and bad spirits, experiencing and feeling the spiritual aura.

Only this is the right fruit of spiritual science. We see it if we consider events that are close to us and can teach us. One of them just happened in the place of our construction. In this case it was a child whose etheric body was unused. The forces are there; somebody who beholds them who knows how to behold them sees that they have gone over into the aura of our Dornach construction and live in it. This is an example I am responsible for. The etheric body which belongs with its forces more to the community is really working on. Since that time it tries to do something by means of inspirations nearby the construction. These are supporting forces.

Such matters are obvious to us, we can be taught through them how mysterious the connections are in the spiritual world. Just in the last time we experienced in the karma of our society that dear friends have died off. What I said in the Vienna cycle³ about the life between death and new birth became completely clear just in some of these souls. One of these souls has found so surely the way into our movement when the physical body was already worn-out. Since it was in our movement, it was a being whose soul faced me like through a body that had become bright and transparent as glass. After death the picture of this soul, as it was already before, grew together with that which it presented after. I was not able to help myself to give the obituary which shows that I was so surely together with this soul. The following words made themselves audible for about three days, after death had occurred:

You came to us.
The gentleness of your being
Spoke out of the calm strength of your eyes—
Calmness of your soul
Flowed in the waves
With which your glances
Carried your internal weaving
To things and human beings;—
And the soul penetrated your voice
Which revealed—more through the kind of word
In its eloquent manner—
What was working as a secret
In your lovely soul
Than it was contained in the word;
However, without saying a word
It revealed itself
To the compassionate love of human beings—
This being that told of noble, calm beauty
Of the world-soul's creation
To receptive feeling.

The consciousness is dampened after death, just because a flooding consciousness is there. This happens by the review you have on death first—not in the case of suicide,—as it were a solar point. That belongs to the most beautiful, highest experiences. You resume it there, you say to yourself: there you have lived,—and you orientate yourself that way in the spiritual world.

Our friend was out of the stage of the etheric review, so that I spoke to the present, but not yet conscious being. Then a moment of consciousness occurred as a result of the heat, and she saw the cremation. Time there becomes space.

The events in the physical and spiritual worlds correspond to each other. In such a case, calling does not return like an echo from the spiritual world, but converts itself to an answer, giving the gist, from the not yet conscious soul. By such examples we recognise feeling and feel recognising the spiritual world. The result must be to experience the reality of the spiritual world. It is especially important to get this definite feeling in our time, so that the physical welfare and the mental welfare arise for the whole humankind out of the seriousness of the present. For always the big, significant world events were, also for a superficial knowledge, the clear expression for the fact that there are not only sensory beings, but that the spiritual beings are working into the sensory world.

It is difficult to break through the veil which separates the physical and spiritual worlds. This makes self-knowledge difficult to the greatest possible extent; one imagines that as something too easy. It is sometimes difficult already in the external physical sense. The significant philosopher Ernst Mach⁴—not Ferdinand Maack, otherwise, I would not have spoken of a significant philosopher—gave a grotesque example of it. Mach describes in one of his works that when he was a young man a disagreeable countenance struck him once in a mirror of a shop-window, which he had immediately to recognise as his own to his dismay. He experienced something similar later again. While getting into a bus he saw a man with an ugly face who met him from the other side, and recognised only afterwards that he had seen himself in the mirror. The human being is still even more uncertain about the being or form of the soul. People do not dream of what one has to do to get self-knowledge. In the subsoil of the soul, maya has often large dimensions. A human being has the impulse of cruelty; he lives together with people whom he torments every now and then et cetera. He looks for an external cause for it; he often uses an ingenious gift of invention to veil the structure of his soul. I myself knew somebody who spoke repeatedly how many great sacrifices his activity demanded. But I had to say that it was only a lust of his soul, which he satisfied. When he spoke of sacrifices that way, only egoism stood behind that. Real self-knowledge is only accessible if one advances in spiritual science gradually, in so far as he experiences by himself what is in the world.

There are chatting people in the world who organise chat hours. Apparently, that is even the case when men go to their sundowners. If they are asked, why they chat, people have all kinds of important reasons for that. But if we glide with our hand over velvet or silk, we have a feeling of pleasure. While somebody is chatting, his etheric body knocks perpetually against the air set in motion, and in doing so it is stroked. This is nothing bad. You understand what goes forward with chatting, only if you know that the human being has an etheric body.

Humankind goes towards a time when it must face such matters more and more. Spiritual science must arouse the consciousness for it more and more. Then people who state today in their materialistic mind that everything spiritual is daydreaming will look as if anybody wanted to say where the air is, is nothing at all. Like one discovers that the air is real, humankind will find out that the spirit is something real. If you consider the biggest mystery, Christ's Death and Resurrection, you may believe that Christ, after he has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha, would have worked on humankind particularly by means of teaching. However, what people knew about Christ was the least.

The theologians have quarrelled, but very few understood something right. Only a part of historical events happens in the consciousness. An example of that is the battle between Maxentius and Constantine at the Milvian Bridge on the 28th October 312 A. D., which was decided not by some external circumstances, but by effects of non-physical kind. With an army which was far stronger than that of his adversary Constantine Maxentius had to defend Rome. Questioning the Sibylline Books he got the advice to lead his troops out of Rome and then he would destroy the enemies of Rome that way. He was still encouraged in that by a dream. Also Constantine had a dream that his soldiers should bear banners with the monogram of Christ instead of the old field signs. Thus it happened, and the army of Maxentius, which had been led out of Rome contrary to reason, was defeated by the weaker armed forces of Constantine, and Maxentius himself found his death on the run. The Christ Impulse had here worked in the subconsciousness of the people.

The impulse lives in the subconsciousness, as if ships go on the sea, but the important matters would take place in submarines. An important point in time is again in the 15th century. At that time, the Maid of Orleans intervened in the course of history in such a way that everything that happened later was determined through it. The whole map of Europe would be different, also the spiritual life if the English had won. The Maid was a servant of St. Michael. Schiller was deeply touched by the figure of the Maid of Orleans: “the world likes to blacken the beaming.” Whereas Voltaire vented his rage against her, even Shakespeare could not understand her, Anatole France pressed her down into the materialistic view, all Western people of intellect did not understand her, and Schiller embodied this sublime figure in his drama.

It was necessary that the Maid of Orleans went through a kind of unaware initiation to fulfil her historical mission. It concerned an initiation as it is described to us in the legend of Olaf Åsteson. Such initiations, for which certain karmic conditions were necessary, could take place in the time of the thirteen nights between the 25th December and 6th January. If the external light has the slightest strength, an inner enlightenment is possible. Thus Olaf Åsteson had real spiritual experiences in the sleeping state during thirteen nights, which he then reports before the portal of a church, as it is shown in the Dream Song. Also the Maid of Orleans spent thirteen nights as it were in the sleeping state, namely in the body of her mother. In the last time before birth the human being is especially accessible to unaware influences from the spiritual world. On the 6th January the Maid of Orleans was born. During this day all the inhabitants of her birthplace gathered because something quite unusual was to be felt in the aura of the village. It was the birth of the Maid of Orleans, to whom the Christ Impulse was implanted just before she saw the physical sunlight.

The proper purpose of all our attempts and that what depends on us is to gain a living connection between the physical and spiritual worlds. People will recognise that the time of twilight of this war means a turn of an era. Human beings should know that the souls of those who have sacrificed themselves are working on and that this war has the task to close the materialistic age.

It is necessary that souls are there who send thoughts into the spiritual world like extending arms and bring down the consciousness from the spiritual world, souls conscious of spirit. The more such souls conscious of spirit send their thoughts upwards—a lot depends on the fact that our spiritual atmosphere is penetrated by such thoughts,—the more the fruits which come from the sacrificial deaths can mature. Thus we summarise our consideration in the words:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the grief of the bereaved,
From the nation's sacrifices
Will grow up the fruits of spirit
If souls aware of spirit turn
Their senses to the spirit land.

• 1. From Symptom to Reality, third of nine lectures (Berlin, 1918), volume 185 of Steiner's Collected Works (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1976)
• 2. the Indian boy Krishnamurti was propagated as the reincarnated Christ by Annie Besant, the president of the Theosophical Society (Adyar).
• 3. Inner Nature of Man and Life Between Death and Rebirth, eight lectures (Vienna, 1914), Steiner's Collected Works volume 153
• 4. Ernst Mach (1838–1916), Austrian physicist and philosopher

It will be clear to you from the description of Initiation in the Hibernian Mysteries that the goal was to achieve insight into secrets of cosmic and human existence, for the experiences of which I told you were of very far-reaching importance for a man’s life of soul. Everything that is to lead him into the spiritual world depends upon conquests achieved as the result of crucial inner experiences and upon such a radical strengthening of his powers that in one way or another he succeeds in penetrating into that world.

We heard that in the process of Initiation in Hibernia, the pupil was led before two symbolical statues—but the word ‘symbolical’ must not be misunderstood. I described to you how these statues were constructed and also what feelings and inner experiences were undergone by the pupil while contemplating them.

You will realise, of course, that the direct impression made by such majestic statues under the conditions I described had an infinitely more powerful inner effect than one received from mere descriptions. Hence after the pupil had lived through everything of which I spoke yesterday, the Initiators were able to produce in him echoes, lasting for a considerable time, of what he had experienced from each of the statues. The echoes of his experiences from the female and from the male statues continued to resound for weeks, or periods differing according to the karma of the individual concerned. The pupils were exhorted in the first place to feel in themselves the after-effects of the male statue. The tests of which I spoke yesterday were made in front of both the statues, for their effects were intended to flow together and work on in the pupil’s life of soul. Now, however, the pupil was first instructed to allow the impression from the male statue to echo powerfully within him. I will describe this to you, but naturally one has to use words that are not really suitable for depicting experiences of Initiation and the inner meaning of many things will have to be felt intuitively.

What the pupil experienced to begin with when he gave himself up to the impressions of the male statue, was a kind of numbness, a rigid numbness of the soul which set in with greater and greater intensity the more often he was bidden to let the echo persist; it was a numbness of soul which felt like a bodily numbness as well. In the intervening periods he was able to attend to all the necessities of life; but ever and again Iris soul experienced the echo and the numbness. This numbness caused a change in his consciousness, for it was an actual Initiation which, though not altogether the same as in the older, primeval Mysteries, was nevertheless strongly reminiscent of them. One could not exactly say that the consciousness was dulled, but the pupil had a sensation of which he might have said: This state of consciousness in which I find myself is totally unfamiliar to me. I do not know how to deal with it; I cannot control it.—The pupil felt that in this state his consciousness was entirely filled with the sensation of numbness. Then he felt that what was numb and frozen—namely, he himself—was being taken up into the Cosmic All. He felt as if he were being transported into the wide spaces of the Cosmos. And he could say to himself: The Cosmos is taking me into itself!

And then came a remarkable experience—his consciousness was not extinguished but transformed. When this experience of frozen numbness and of being taken up into the Cosmic All had lasted for a sufficient length of time— and this was ensured by the Initiators—the pupil could say to himself something to this effect: The rays of the Sun and the Stars are drawing me out into the Cosmic All, but nevertheless I remain here, within my own being ... When tins experience had lasted for the necessary length of time, a remarkable vista came before the pupil. Now for the first time he realised the purpose of this state of consciousness which had set in during the numbness. For now, through his various experiences and their echoes, manifold impressions of winter landscapes came to him. Winter landscapes were there in the spirit before him, landscapes in which he saw whirling snowflakes filling the air—as I said, it was all seen in the spirit—or landscapes in which he gazed at forests with snow weighing down the branches of the trees, or similar sights, always reminiscent of what he had seen here or there in his everyday life, and always giving the impression of reality. After he had been transported into the Cosmic All he felt as if his own consciousness was conjuring before him long wanderings in Time through winter landscapes. And during this experience he felt as though he were not actually in his body, but certainly in his sense-organs; he felt that he was living with the whole of his being in his eyes, in his ears, also on the surface of his skin. And then, when his whole sense of feeling and of touch seemed to be spread over his skin, he also felt: I have become like the elastic, but hollow, statue.—He felt an intimate union between his eyes, for instance, and these landscapes. He felt as though in each eye the whole landscape at which he gazed was working, as though his eyes were an inner mirror reflecting everything outside him.

And further, he did not feel himself as a unity, but he felt his Ego, multiplied to the number of his senses, to be twelvefold. And from the feeling that his Ego had become twelvefold, a remarkable experience caused him to say to himself: There is an Ego which looks through my eyes, there is an Ego which works in my sense of thought, in my sense of speech, in my sense of touch, in my sense of life. I am really scattered over the world.—And from this experience there arose an intense longing for union with a Being from the Hierarchy of the Angeloi, in order that from this union, strength and power might be acquired for mastering the splitting of the Ego into the single sense-experiences. And out of all this, the question arose in the Ego itself: Why have I these senses?

The result of these strange experiences was that the pupil now felt that everything connected with the senses and with their continuations inwards towards the inner organism, was related to the actual environment around him on the Earth. The senses belong to the Winter—that is what the pupil felt. This whole life through which he was passing, in which the changing winter landscapes tallied, as I said, with what he had seen in everyday life, but which now appeared before him in great beauty out of the spirit—all these experiences the pupil now gathered together into a fundamental attunement and tenor of his soul—a condition which may be indicated as follows: In my Mystery-winter-wanderings I have experienced what is Past in the Cosmos. The snow and ice in my enchanted winter have revealed to me deathbringing forces and impulses of destruction in the Cosmos. And my numbness on the way to these Mystery-winterwanderings was the intimation that I was to behold those forces in the Cosmos which come over from the Past into the Present but in the Present are dead cosmic forces.

This realisation was what the echo of his experiences with the male statue conveyed to the pupil.

Then he was brought to the point where his experiences with the plastic—not the elastic—statue could echo within him. And now he was not overwhelmed by inner numbness but by inner heat, by a feverish condition of the soul, accompanied at first by bodily symptoms. The pupil was aware of great inner pressure; he felt as though both breath and blood were exerting too great a pressure and he became aware of a deep, inner need. And in this state the second experience he must undergo became clear to him. Born from the need felt by his soul, the realisation that came to him and of which he was intensely conscious, might be clothed in the following words: I bear within me something that my bodily nature demands in ordinary earthly life. This must be overcome. My Earth-Ego must be overcome!

Then, when the experience of this inner fever, this need of soul, this feeling that the earthly Ego must be overcome, had lasted for the necessary length of time, something arose in the pupil of which he knew that it was not the previous, unfamiliar state of consciousness but that it was a state well known to him, namely, the dream consciousness. Whereas from the earlier numbness had come the distinct feeling that he was in a state of consciousness unknown to him in ordinary life, he knew now that his consciousness was a kind of dreaming. He dreamed; but in contrast with his earlier consciousness—although again in harmony with what he had experienced—he had dreams of the most wonderful summer landscapes. But he now knew that these were dreams, dreams which filled him with intense joy or with intense suffering, depending upon whether what came to him from the summer was sad or joyful, but in either case with the intensity of feeling accompanying dreams.

You need only remind yourselves of how a dream can affect you. It first takes the form of pictures but you may wake up from it with a palpitating heart, in heat and fear. The Hibernian pupil interpreted this experience in an elementary, quite natural way, saying to himself: my inner being has brought the summer to my consciousness as a dream; the summer has come to me as a dream.

At the same time the pupil knew that what was in his consciousness, in a state of continual transformation like an enchanted summer, was indicative of impulses leading over to the Future of the Cosmos. But now he did not feel as though he were scattered into his senses and multiplied. On the contrary, he felt inwardly gathered into a unity; he felt held together in his heart. And the culmination, the supreme climax of what he was experiencing was this sense of being held together in his heart, this feeling of inner union with the dream of the summer—not with the summer as outwardly seen. And rightly the pupil said to himself: In what the dream of summer reveals and I experience in my own being, therein lies the Future.

The next experience arising in the pupil was of two conditions the one following the other. He was looking, shall we say, into a landscape of meadows and ponds, and little lakes. Then came a vista of ice and snow which changed into whirling, falling snow, into a mist of falling snowflakes. This mist became more and more evanescent and finally faded into nothingness. And the moment this happened, when he felt himself as it were in empty space, at that moment the summer dreams replaced the winter scenes, and he realised in full consciousness: now Past and Future meet in my own life of soul.

From then onwards the pupil had learnt to say of this outer world as a truth which was to remain with him for all future time: In this world that surrounds us, in this world from which we derive our corporeality, something is perpetually dying. And the snow-crystals of winter are the outer signs of the spirit that is perpetually dying in matter. As human beings we are not yet capable of feeling in all intensity this dying spirit which in external Nature is rightly symbolised in snow and ice, unless Initiation has been achieved. But through Initiation we know that the spirit is all the time dying in matter, announcing this in freezing, benumbed Nature. A void is continually being produced. And out of this void something is born, something resembling, to begin with, the dreams of Nature. And the dreams of Nature contain the seeds of the Cosmic Future. But Cosmic Death and Cosmic Birth would not meet if Man were not there in the middle. For if Man were not there—as I said, I am simply relating to you the experience inwardly undergone by the pupil during the Hibernian Initiation—if Man were not there, the processes revealed through the consciousness born from the feeling of frozen numbness would be an actual Cosmic Death, and no dream would follow, no Future would arise. Saturn, Sun and Moon would be there, but no Jupiter, Venus or Vulcan. In order that the Future of the Cosmos may be joined to the Past, Man must stand between the Past and the Future. This became known to the pupil through the experiences he had undergone.

All these experiences were then summarised by the Initiators. The first condition, that of the state of numbness, when the pupil had felt himself transported into the Cosmic All, was summarised for him by the Initiators in words which I can render to you as follows:

Thou shalt learn in widths of Space,
How in the blue of Ether-distances
World-Existence vanishes
And finds itself again in thee.

These words summarised the feelings that had been experienced.

Then the feelings accompanying the condition brought about by the second statue were summarised as follows:

In the Depths thou shalt unriddle
Out of burning-fevered Evil,
How the Truth itself doth kindle
And through thee its Being foundeth.

You will remember that at the stage of which I spoke at the end of the lecture yesterday, as the pupil was being realised, the words SCIENCE and ART appeared in the place of the two statues. The word Science appeared in the place of the statue which had said: I am Knowledge, but what I am is not real Being. And the word Art stood there in the place of the statue which had said: I am Phantasy, but what I am has no Truth. The pupil had known the terrible heaviness of heart resulting from his soul’s allegiance to something that was not truly Knowledge. For it had become clear to him that the knowledge acquired on Earth consists of ideas only, of pictures only, and lacks real Being. Now he lived through the reverberations of this experience and had come to realise that man himself must find Being for the content of his knowledge by losing himself in Cosmic Space.

Thou shalt learn in widths of Space,
How in the blue of Ether-distances
World-Existence vanishes
And finds itself again in thee.

For this was indeed the feeling. He had stormed into Ether-distances which are bounded by the blue of the infinite expanse and had united himself at last with this expanse. But then it seemed to the pupil that the Earth had become so dissipated in the infinite expanse that it was as though transformed into Nothingness. He had learnt to experience Nothingness by beholding the enchanted winter landscape. And he knew now that it is only Man who can stand firm in the infinite expanse leading to the blue of the Ether-distances.

Through the second experience a man realises that he finds in the depths of his own being what he must overcome, what he must face as the Evil that is rooted and surging within him, the Evil that must be overcome by the impulse of the Good in human nature in order that the world may have a future.

In the Depths thou shalt unriddle
Out of burning-fevered Evil,
How the Truth itself doth kindle
And through thee its Being foundeth.

The pupil had come to know that the tendency of Phantasy is to avoid Truth, to be satisfied with a relation to the world consisting of arbitrary, subjective pictures. But now, from the dreamlike, enchanted summer-experience he had acquired insight which enabled him to say: Whatever rises up in me as creative phantasy I can carry out into the world. Out of my inner being, like the pictures of phantasy, grow the Imaginations of the plants. If I have the pictures of phantasy only, then I am a stranger to what is around me. But if I have Imaginations, there grows out of my own inner self everything that I can then find in this plant, in that plant, in this animal, in that animal, in this man, in that man. Whatever I find in my own being is to be found in something that is outside me. And for everything that confronts me in the external world I can find something that rises up out of the depths of my own life of soul and is connected with it.

This sense of twofold union with the world was an experience which, accompanied by a feeling of inner triumph, came to the pupil as an echo of the experiences connected with the two statues. In this way he had learnt to expand his soul spiritually on the one side into the Cosmos and also to penetrate deeply into a region of his inner being where the forces are not working with the monotony customary in everyday consciousness but where they work as if they were only partly real, pervaded through and through with magical dreams. The pupil had now learnt to balance this intensity of inner impulses with the intensity of external impulses. Out of his experience of the winter landscape and his experience of the summer landscape, enlightenment had come to him concerning external Nature and his own essential Self. And he had become deeply and intimately related to both.

He was then prepared for a recapitulation of all his experiences. In this recapitulation his Initiators put very clearly to him what he must do: You must make a deliberate pause when recapitulating the numbness your soul experienced. You must pause while recapitulating the flight into Cosmic distances and again while recapitulating the experience of feeling dispersed into your senses and multiplied. You must be inwardly clear about each of these conditions and be able to distinguish exactly between them; you must have an etheric, inner experience of each of the three conditions.—And when the pupil, now with full consciousness, called up again before his soul the state of numbness, there appeared before him the experiences he had had before he came down to the Earth out of spiritual worlds, before the earthly conception of his body, when he was drawing together out of the Cosmos the etheric impulses and forces in order to clothe himself with an etheric body. In this way the pupil of the Hibernian Mysteries was led to experience the final stage preceding his descent into a physical body.

He had then to recapitulate and add emphasis to the inner experience of being transported into the Cosmos. This time, in the recapitulation, he no longer felt as though he were being drawn up by the rays of the Sun and Stars but he felt as though something were coming towards him, as though from all sides of the Cosmos the Hierarchies were coming towards him; and he had other experiences as well. And then he became aware of conditions still further back in his pre-earthly life. Next, he had consciously to recapitulate the experience of being poured out into his senses and dispersed in fragments in the world of the senses. This brought him to the middle point of his existence between death and a new birth.

You can see from these indications that the powers enabling the Initiate to penetrate into these hidden worlds—to which, nevertheless, man really belongs—can be attained in the most diverse ways. And from the indications given yesterday and on many occasions you will realise too that vision of the supersensible world was achieved by methods differing widely in the several Mysteries. In later lectures we shall speak of why it was that such differences were considered appropriate, and why a uniform spiritual path was not adopted in all the Mysteries. Today I will merely mention the fact. But the purpose of all these different paths was to unveil the hidden aspects of world-existence and human existence which have been indicated again and again in our present studies as well as in other lectures and writings.

It was made clear to the pupil of the Hibernian Mysteries that he must also recapitulate inwardly and in his life of feeling the other conditions he had experienced as aftereffects of the second statue; each condition was to be evoked in full consciousness. He carried out these instructions, and in recapitulating the state I described yesterday as a kind of need of soul, he felt what would be the soul’s experience after death.

Then came the vision of outer Nature as revealed in summer landscapes, but this was a dream. When he recapitulated this experience and now consciously distinguished it from the other, knowledge came to him of the further course of his life after death. And when he was able to make the experience of being held together in his heart vividly alive in his consciousness, his vision extended back as far as the middle point of existence between death and rebirth. Then the Initiator could say to him:

Learn to perceive in spirit
Winter-existence,
And thou shalt behold
he pre-earthly life.

Learn to dream in spirit
Summer-existence,
And thou shalt experience
The post-earthly life.

Please notice carefully the words I have used, for in the relation between ‘beholding’ the pre-earthly and ‘experiencing’ the post-earthly lies the difference between the two experiences undergone by the candidate for Initiation in the Mysteries of Hibernia.

The place of this Initiation in the whole historical setting of human evolution, its significance in the evolutionary process and in what way a deeper meaning was indicated when at that stage of Initiation which I described yesterday, something like a vision of the Christ came to the pupil of the Hibernian Mysteries—of these things I shall speak tomorrow.

Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, its Value for the Human Being and its Relationship to Art and Religion

Dear attendees,Yesterday I took the liberty of speaking during the lecture about one of the most recent critics of the anthroposophical world view, about the book by the licentiate of theology Kurt Leese, who, as I said yesterday, strangely enough, speaks about anthroposophy from beginning to end, but explicitly says that he retains the term “theosophy” in order to accommodate the general consciousness, but that he always means Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophical direction.

Now, today, I would like to start with something that, to a certain extent, is one of the results of Kurt Leese's investigations into anthroposophy. After this man, who, as I also remarked yesterday, has read pretty much everything of mine that has been published, after he has illuminated anthroposophy and what belongs to it from his point of view, he comes to record a strange sentence on one of the last pages of his book. I will read this sentence first:

What is all the talk about the worship of knowledge, about the riddles of life and their solutions, what is all the soaring of knowledge into primeval depths and primeval heights, if the Theosophist...

— that is, the anthroposophist —

... is unable to say why it is better to be an ego than a non-ego, and why, then, seven world ages are so important for the becoming and the perfection of this ego!?

Now one could initially believe that the man means that only the anthroposophist does not know how to say why it is better to be an ego than a non-ego, but actually it is clear from the following that he means something completely different, that he actually believes that no one can somehow figure out why it is better to be an ego than a non-ego. Because he goes on to say:

In the face of such mysteries of the world and life, even the theosophist...

- that is, the anthroposophist —

... nothing more than a positivist who no longer explains, fathoms, solves, but who accepts the ethical-individualistic fate of Western-Christian cultural development as a matter of course that can no longer be justified because he simply cannot escape it.

This, ladies and gentlemen, actually means nothing less than the following: No one really knows how to say anything about the great question of life: Why is it not just as good to be a non-I as an I? And since the author of this book obviously concedes that one should simply take it for granted that one is an I, without brooding over it, he thinks that anthroposophy has nothing to say about it either.

Now, let us recall some of what emerged from what was said yesterday, and then allow me to add, in more of a lecture format, some of what you can find in the already extensive literature on anthroposophy.

As a human being grows up, emerging from unconsciousness into ever greater consciousness, awakening, as it were, from childlike slumber and dreams to a more conscious life, he feels confronted by the world. It is fair to say that this confrontation with the world is initially one that presents a truly human mind, a humanly spiritualized mind, with riddles, the solutions to which must be sought from within. As the human being grows up, the riddles of the world itself are revealed to him. At first, he feels, one may say, in a very vague way, as an ego. He feels, so to speak, this I as an inner point of life, to which everything he can experience flows, from which he also knows that everything he can do flows out. But he comes to realize, and he must gradually come to realize, that this is precisely the great question of life: How does this I relate to the whole environment that presents us with such a vast number of life and world riddles? This question, “How does the I relate to the whole human environment?” basically contains everything else that is there in the way of life and world riddles.

Now one can say that in a certain way, something of the relationship between the I and the environment is already evident in ordinary existence, in that this I grows together with the environment in a certain way. We develop from childhood on, which does not just show itself at some later age in the form of us awakening to full self-awareness, but we develop, above all, our inner life through memory, which was characterized in its significance yesterday, that connects our experiences, that allows our life to appear to us as a whole when we look back to the point in time up to which we can remember. We can say that by holding still and looking back on our lives, we feel our selves connected to all our experiences. We have gone through these experiences, we have taken them into our ideas, into our thoughts, we have experienced joy and suffering through them, we have experienced happiness and pain through them, we have been inspired to do this or that in our actions, which then flowed out of our strength into the strength of life. But when we stand still and look back, we also feel connected to what our experiences were in this form, and we cannot say that there is a moment in our lives when we are not fundamentally what we have been left with in our memories of our experiences, of the suffering and joy that we experienced in these experiences, the happiness and pain that we experienced in these experiences, the satisfaction or dissatisfaction that came to us from the fact that we were able to accomplish this or that from these experiences. We are what we have experienced. It becomes pathological when this thread of thought of memory breaks somewhere in a person. In medical literature, cases are well described where such pathological conditions occur, where a person's coherent awareness of memory for this or that breaks down and he feels, as it were, hollowed out, no longer able to fully experience his being.

You see, here life presents itself to us first as an expansion of our ego over that which our existence has brought us since our birth; life presents itself as an inward growing together of our ego with that which has come to us. Yesterday I showed how the human being awakens his supersensible nature by unfolding that which can be developed in him beyond the ordinary powers of knowledge and perception into the supersensible worlds, and thereby comes to an even broader overview of the world. And yesterday I was able to hint at some of the results of the anthroposophical world view. I was able to say that by rising to imaginative knowledge, the human being first comes to perceive his life not only towards birth as a sea from which individual memories emerge, but as a life panorama, as a large tableau, so that he can see the lasting in this earthly life. But I was also able to point out how, through a further development of the supersensible faculty of knowledge, man comes to the contemplation of that which goes beyond birth and death, that which is eternal in him, that which thus connects him with a world that is more comprehensive than that which he can experience between birth and death. And I then showed how this knowledge can continue to ascend to the contemplation of repeated earthly lives. There we have already seen how this I now grows beyond the ordinary contemplation of the I, how the I, which otherwise feels connected in ordinary life with the life events flowing to it, how this I expands its consciousness to include a broader world.

If you now add to what I was able to hint at yesterday the anthroposophical literature, you will see that by developing this cognitive faculty it is also possible to grasp the connection of the I with the whole rest of the cosmos. One may scoff at what Anthroposophy has to say about worlds and world transformations, as indicated, for example, in my “Occult Science”, but only someone who cannot put himself in the method by which such things are found can actually scoff. The essential point of today's reflection, however, is that anthroposophy finds nothing in the cosmos but what is connected with the nature of the I. The essential point is that anthroposophy teaches us to look at the whole cosmos, to see the whole cosmos in such a way that the I is connected in some way with everything in this cosmos, with this whole macrocosm as a microcosm, in the same way that in ordinary life the I is connected with its experiences. One is tempted to say that anthroposophy succeeds in expanding what is otherwise only a 'small' memory in our experiences into a world memory, into a world overview. Thus, through anthroposophical knowledge, we feel expanded, standing within the whole universe, the whole cosmos, we feel the I in its consciousness expanded beyond this cosmos, we feel this cosmos itself as spiritual and the I spiritually connected to this spiritual cosmos.

Those who cannot feel how such an expansion of consciousness affects what a person can actually long for in the world cannot judge the value of anthroposophical world knowledge for the human being either. What Anthroposophy can give, and what these ideas can then be for the perception of the world soul, for the longings of the human soul, must be inwardly experienced by each individual. And this can be experienced in such a way that it is felt as the solution to precisely this fundamental riddle: How does the I, which initially exists only vaguely like a point within us, how does this I relate to the world as a whole? How does that which we ourselves are for our consciousness confront us from the entire world?

The fact that, as this line of inquiry shows, no one can really say why it is better to be an I than a not-I, is answered by showing that such a question is not really posed correctly. What we want is not to answer this question from some abstract point of view, but what we really want is something that belongs directly to life, to growth, to the whole development of the human being. One could just as well ask: Why does a child want to become a great person, an adult? It becomes an adult. But it is not self-evident that one becomes an adult; rather, one must develop that which belongs to the adult. The child has consciousness within it, as it were, asleep; the adult expands consciousness over himself. The person who awakens to consciousness expands consciousness, this I, throughout the spiritual cosmos. In this way, the human being grows into the world in a way that is in keeping with nature. For his feeling, this gives rise to the question of the value of the I, because this value of the I is felt in relation to the value of the world. And anyone who does not want to know about what is far removed from the world and about world development will never be able to develop a true feeling for his ego, because this ego is rich within; it emerges from the whole content of the world. And only if one has a feeling for what is far removed from the world and for world development can one also feel from these what the ego has as its deepest longings. But one must have an inwardly fresh and courageous mind in order not to find it too uncomfortable, so to speak, to send one's mind into world distances and into world developments, so that one can have the rich, inward perception of the I and thus also of the value of the I. And it is a remarkable question that Leese asks: Why are seven world ages necessary to develop this I? If you look at the development of these seven world epochs, you will find everywhere how they contain forces that are connected with the development of human egos. You will find that you are grasped by the world, you feel, you grasp, you also find the forces for your actions from what will arise from the consciousness of your connection with the cosmos.

My dear audience, it is very strange when people judge everything that is to be recognized through anthroposophy, as they must judge it according to what they already have, when they do not engage with it, and then, having basically understood nothing of anthroposophy, say: Yes, what is it worth? What does it explain to you? What is not understood does not explain anything, but that is the fault of those who do not want to understand. But those who are open to what the anthroposophical worldview can be, who enter into the far reaches and the vast expanses of the world with their soul and their spirit, will find a complete answer. In the course of these contemplations, he finds a full answer to the riddle of the value of the human ego, for the whole world answers him. But nothing but the whole world is suitable to answer the question about the value of the I, and anyone who does not want this answer from the whole world will always come to a speech like this critic of anthroposophy, who says: What use can all this be to us, since it does not decide the question of why it is better to be an I than a non-I. But what is expressed here with a certain generality is then expressed in detail when such critics as Leese approach the specific tasks of anthroposophical science. For example, within anthroposophical science it must be said that when the human being observes that which, as it were, holds together as a reality, that which appears in thoughts, feelings and will impulses, anthroposophy speaks of the the carrier of thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will, regardless of whether or not it calls this carrier of the soul the astral body - as I said, words are not important, no special value need be placed on them. Now the same critic, the licentiate Kurt Leese, comes along and says: Why is it necessary, when one is already observing and describing the soul, the thoughts, the feelings, the impulses of the will, why is it necessary to assume a special vehicle?

Now, at this point, the complete inability of the approach that leads out of ordinary life into the truly supersensible life of the soul to follow what is going on becomes apparent. First of all, taken in the abstract, it can seem rather superfluous whether I stop at describing the life of thoughts, feelings and will, or whether I also speak of a vehicle. But one never comes to a real essential insight into what lives in the soul if one does not pass from what merely appears as thought, feeling, will, to the carrier. For, my dear audience, as I was able to show yesterday, when the soul becomes aware of its supersensible abilities, it becomes aware of what it is in those times when it is otherwise in an unconscious state between falling asleep and waking up. And the one who becomes a spiritual researcher experiences how this soul relates to the bodily life just as it otherwise relates during sleep, except that now it is not unconscious but conscious. Thoughts, feelings and will can only be observed during waking life; from falling asleep to waking up, no one can observe this except as after-images, often distorted images of the imaginative life in dreams; no one can observe what is of the soul without the spiritual-scientific. One comes to the reality of the soul precisely by observing the soul in the states where it stands out from ordinary thinking, feeling and willing. If one remains within the ordinary thinking, feeling and willing, one does not grasp the essence of the soul. What then is meant when the anthroposophist says that one passes from imagining, feeling and willing to a “medium”? It means that the anthroposophist wants to suggest that we free ourselves from what never sheds light on the nature of the soul, that we should make an effort to grasp what life of the soul is.

And so it shows here what I mentioned yesterday, when such a critic says as a result: Anthroposophy is actually annoying and ill-tempered. He finds it annoying and ill-tempered because it makes a certain demand of him at every moment. He is supposed to go beyond what he has in his thinking and soul habits of ordinary life – he does not like that, he perceives it as an unreasonable demand that should not be made of him. And so he says: Why are you talking to me about a 'vehicle'? If he were to make this effort and speak of this vehicle, then he would find the way into the spiritual world.

You see, what at first appears to be mere mental games — something like the combination of thinking, feeling and willing in the bearer of this thinking, feeling and willing — is something that wants to achieve something real, that wants to provide an impetus for the development of the higher abilities of human nature, through which the essence of the human being is recognized. Thus, even what appears to be a mere intellectual game in the anthroposophical world view is actually meant as something very real for the value of human life. But another passage from this same book shows even more what the value of anthroposophical world view for the present and future life of science is to consist of; I will speak first of the life of world view and science.

In the appendix to my book Von Seelenrätseln (Mysteries of the Soul), I pointed out that for several years I have been speaking about how the human soul is actually connected to the human body. I have pointed out that it can really be seen that our thinking, our feeling and our willing are connected with three different aspects of the human being: that our thinking is connected with the actual nervous activity, but that what we develop as feeling is not is not directly but only indirectly connected with this nervous activity, what we develop as feeling is directly connected with the rhythmic activity, especially with the rhythmic activity in breathing and blood circulation, but that our will activity is connected with the metabolism. I only mention this here in a reporting way. I stated in my book “Mysteries of the Soul” that I had only been studying this subject for thirty years before I dared to publicly express the results of my research. It is commonly believed that the entire life of the soul is connected with the nervous system. The new aspect of this view is precisely that in reality the three aspects of the life of the soul are connected with three different activities of the human organization. Now, however, I was obliged to set something apart in this presentation that is completely foreign to today's habits of thought. In order for me to make myself understood about what is actually meant here, I would like to preface the following.

You see, today, especially in the field of philosophy, one often has a very negative judgment about what is presented in the development of spiritual life as medieval scholasticism. Despite the fact that anthroposophy and my own personality are attacked in the most nonsensical way by certain church authorities, this cannot prevent me from saying what can be said about a certain field, purely objectively, even if this field is linked, or at least seems to be linked today, to current church life. Those who are able to really delve into the blossoming of medieval scholasticism, namely the heyday of this scholasticism, the time of Albertus Magnus, of Thomas Aquinas, know that this scholasticism - it is so little recognized today - that this scholasticism has one thing that basically made it greater than any period in the development of human thought to date. It developed in those who belonged to it a gift for subtle thought development, for the finest dissection of thought. And this gift, which was developed in the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries, as an ability for the finest development of thought, would be very useful to us today, especially in the pursuit of science. For if, for example, a philosopher like Wundt had had a real inner understanding of the fine distinctions of scholasticism, his investigations would have produced different results from those which they have produced. For only a thinking that really has the will to enter into the finest distinctions, only such thinking can also delve into the foundations of reality, for this reality is complicated, and with a rough thinking one does not enter into reality. When one has to throw light on one or other of these subjects from the standpoint of spiritual science, one is obliged to arrive at such fine distinctions of thought.

And so I was obliged to say in my book “Von Seelenrätseln” (Soul Mysteries) in order to characterize what underlies the threefold human being, the nerve-sense human being, the human being with the rhythmic organization, the human being with the metabolic organization: One cannot get along with this threefold human being if one imagines, for example, that these three parts are arranged spatially next to each other, the head at the top, the circulation human being in the middle, and then the metabolism human being at the bottom. I have shown how even in the nerve there is rhythm and metabolism, but that in the case of the activity of imagination in the nerve, rhythm and metabolism are not taken into account, but another activity, whereas in the case of the activity of feeling or of the activity of the will, rhythm and metabolism in the nerve are also taken into account. I had to make the subtle distinction that what one has to highlight, so to speak, in order to understand the human being, one sees interwoven in outer reality. A man like Kurt Leese reads through this and finds it to be a tour de force of thinking. And precisely because he finds it to be a tour de force of thinking, he says: It is precisely at such a point that anthroposophy becomes annoying and intolerable.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, the value of the anthroposophical world view will consist precisely in the fact that it cultivates not only clear but also highly discriminating thinking, thinking that reaches into the finest structures of reality. People do not want that; they become angry and ill-tempered, and that is why they say: Anthroposophy is annoying and unpleasant. But precisely this training of thinking to follow reality, which carries the finest distinctions and which cannot be followed with such coarse thinking as is so beloved in the present day, will be the value of the anthroposophical worldview for modern science and thus for modern man.

What should be cultivated through the anthroposophical worldview – and with this I will find the transition from what comes from anthroposophy for the value of the human being in an intellectual relationship, in a purely scientific respect — that which should be cultivated through the anthroposophical world view, that which really comes to the soul's eye through this anthroposophical world view: that is the transition to the moral. As the I expands more and more in its awareness of the content of the world, as the I feels itself as a member of the cosmos, having grown out of this cosmos, it feels its great responsibility within its world existence. The self knows that the thoughts and feelings that develop within it are part of the entire, immeasurable cosmos; the self learns to be responsible for what goes on within it by recognizing itself as having been born out of the entire cosmos. When one feels this responsibility towards the whole world, then one stops carelessly speaking over what the world is supposed to explain.

Such careless talk comes to mind when a critic like Kurt Leese, for example, says that anthroposophy tries to understand the world as developing, but that it does not take what he now understands by development - and he understands this to mean only the emergence of the later from the earlier — but that it is said of anthroposophy: in the course of development, in addition to what is the emergence of the later from the earlier, there is an inflow of something that comes from a completely different side. To his horror, says Kurt Leese, I would even talk about entities that develop in certain world ages being inoculated, and he particularly criticizes the fact that I say in The Education of the Child that the etheric body of the human being is born at the age of seven, just as the physical body of the human being is born at the time of physical birth. That is not development, he says, because it does not show that the etheric body develops out of the physical body.

Ladies and gentlemen, consider what is actually at issue here. Someone comes along and makes an abstract concept of development – the following must arise from the earlier -, he criticizes that I would not show how the etheric body arises from the physical body. But the etheric body does not do that, it does not arise from the physical body at all! If the person in question were to understand what is being presented, he would realize that the process is much more complicated in the development at hand. But when I now speak of the moral, I must nevertheless point out that for the real natural scientist of today, the development is by no means as simple as Mr. Leese now imagines.

You only need to read the first pages of Oscar Hertwig's book, which is truly leading in this respect, about a correction of Darwin's theory of descent, and you will see that Oscar Hertwig is obliged to include the concepts of natural science: firstly, evolution, the emergence of the later from the earlier; secondly, panspermia, that is, the coming into effect of that which is in space alongside the organism; and thirdly, epigenesis, that is, the emergence of completely new effects. Thus the concept of development in science today is such that it is constantly developing, that is, it itself is in a living development. What appears in anthroposophy as the idea of development is precisely what most conscientiously takes into account the idea of development in science. And people who come from such a side to criticize have simply not gone along with scientific development, but have only taken a few scraps out of it and criticize from these scraps. And they then call what is working with the full science “unscientific” because it does not agree with their prejudiced assumptions, which, however, do not coincide with the full science. In this respect, anthroposophy will have a great educational effect on a person's inner conscience and lack of prejudice. It will release forces in people that are particularly lacking in people today. Therefore, this spiritual-scientific worldview can find the courage to intervene directly in practical life, because it wants to develop a way of thinking and a whole human behavior that can be immersed in practical life.

We wanted to show this in the most diverse fields, for example in the field of education, in the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which was founded by Emil Molt and established by me. It has existed for more than a year. In this Waldorf School in Stuttgart, it is shown how the anthroposophical worldview wants to have a practical effect on pedagogy and didactics. This Waldorf School is truly not about raising children in anthroposophy – the Waldorf School does not want to be a school of a particular worldview – but rather about the fact that anthroposophical spiritual science, because it is directly immersed in reality, can be pedagogically skillfully applied so that the pedagogical as such is created by spiritual science in a certain way as a pedagogical-didactic art. And in this respect, without wishing to boast, the first school year at this Waldorf School has already achieved something that can be talked about. Above all, we do not have the usual system of reporting at the Waldorf School. In some classes we had quite a large number of pupils last year, but nevertheless we do not need the strange relationship between teachers and pupils that arises from the fact that the teacher wants to find out, let's say, among twenty, thirty, fifty pupils, whether one or the other deserves an “almost sufficient”, “half almost satisfactory” and the like in this or that subject. We were able to avoid all of this, which was reduced to an abstract scheme. Instead, I would like to emphasize this: at the end of the previous school year, we were able to give each child a report card in which the child found something very remarkable: a life saying that was completely and utterly felt for the child's soul, spirit, and physical organization. Even in classes with fifty or more pupils, teachers were able to find a way of penetrating and immersing themselves in the individuality of the pupils so that they could write a core saying of life in the report that was completely individual and appropriate for the individual child. This report should not be a dead piece of paper on which one assesses this or that individual with “almost satisfactory”, but it should be something that the child remembers with a certain strength because it contains something that, when it works in his soul, can become life in him. I just wanted to emphasize this point. I could also speak of much that has been attempted, especially in practical application of anthroposophical spiritual science in the didactics of this Waldorf school.

Now, I have often mentioned here how anthroposophical spiritual science at a certain point in time found itself compelled to draw the social consequences from what emerges from its practical thinking. These social conclusions were first drawn in my book 'The Core Points of the Social Question'. They are now being drawn for practical institutions. People today complain a lot about these practical institutions because they have no idea how the apparent practice, which lives in a world of illusions, has led precisely into today's crisis, and how a real practice of life must flow out of a renewal of all thinking. It could actually be amusing if it were not distressing on the other hand, when today the schoolmasters of practice come and remind us that you cannot manage with idealism and belief in the future. They do not know that this economic activity is really not about idealism and faith in the future, but about direct practical intervention with a way of thinking that is more practical than that which the last decades have been able to produce. Through that which, in connection with real life, brings about a life-based grasp of this reality, it will be practically confirmed what Anthroposophy is, because reality is spirit through and through. And if we want to master reality in practice, we must connect with the spirit of that reality. We will succumb to illusions if we do not want to immerse ourselves in the spirit of reality. Therefore, anthroposophy will have to reveal itself in its value for people by making the spirit effective in practical life.

But the central question of life – and it is this that makes anthroposophy particularly relevant to human life – is the big question: how are the moral impulses of the human being, how is what the human being builds up inwardly in the moral world connected to the world of external reality? Let us look at what modern world view has produced: a universe conceived in such a way that at the origin there is a planetary nebula from which suns and planets have formed through circular motion. In the course of time, I would say purely mechanical events arose from this, agglomerations, which then developed into the human being, into the impulse of morality in the human being, which is felt by the human soul as the most valuable thing. But then our gaze is directed to the physical end of the world, when, as it were, what has come together sinks back into a frozen state, when a world grave will stand, and what man has developed within himself in his valuable moral ideals will be buried in this world grave.

One need only visualize this image to see how this modern world view has been unable to bring about harmony between what man feels to be most valuable within himself, his morality, and what surrounds him in the external world and what he seeks to understand in a mechanical-materialistic way. We have only to look back at what I was able to say yesterday, even if only in the most general terms, to see how anthroposophy builds a bridge between what is spread out in space and the world of morality within. There we grasp ourselves first on earth, so that we learn to recognize ourselves in the course of our awakening as the physical-sensual human being, born out of the physical-sensual universe; within us we unfold our supersensible will. Yesterday I showed how this supersensible will contains precisely that which is not accessible to ordinary sense perception, which only becomes accessible when the soul frees itself from the body and experiences the will outside the body. In this will we have something that is thoroughly spiritual. But at the same time this will contains as a power that which constitutes our moral will, our moral feeling, our moral ideal and which remains in the future. We know that in this future our own existence develops in such a way that our body falls away from us, that the elements of this physical body initially disperse into the physical world, but that, as I indicated yesterday, what is contained only as spiritual desire in the will passes through the time that lies between death and a new birth; this builds a new physical body in the future. We see into the future and see our physical body arising again, but out of the spiritual.

If you then turn to the rest of the anthroposophical literature, you will find that this also applies to the worlds. We look at the external worlds, we see light and color in them, we hear sounds in the external world, we hear a whole range of sounds in the external world; we see the three realms of nature. We look at the past in spirit, we see spiritual beings in the past in spirit. We know that what is physical here now has been formed out of spirit. But this physical of the present, this present beauty of the earth, carries spiritual in its lap, and when it will once have solidified as physical, then the spiritual will emerge from it. But the spiritual now only exists in that which is volitional. Future worlds will be built from present morality, just as the present physical world is built from the moral forces of past beings. We see that which shines towards us as stars, that which appears to us as the sun, as the results of that which was once moral. We see in what is moral now the germ of what will shine as worlds in the future, what will appear as worlds to the beings that will inhabit these worlds in the future. By looking at the moral with the insights that only arise when one develops the supersensible powers of the soul, a bridge is built between the moral and the physical. This bridge cannot be built if we look at the world only through the lens of today's natural science: in that case, the world falls apart into the world of mechanical-materialistic events and the world of morality, which then dissolves into illusions, whereas in the anthroposophical worldview, the moral contains the germ of the cosmic, and in this way that which we can call responsibility grows. We know that the outcome of our moral deeds and impulses is not due to some arbitrary assessment of guilt, but is rooted in the laws of the world themselves. And if we look at the starry worlds that affect our eyes, we recognize in them the physical consequence of moral impulses from the distant past. We feel that we are not only in a physical world with moral illusions, we feel that we are in a world of physical and moral realities, where the physical is the metamorphosis of the moral, and the moral is the metamorphosis of the physical.

This, esteemed attendees, gives strength to the human being by steeling his sense of responsibility by placing him with his ego in the whole world. Thus, by opening our view into the spiritual and by showing the physical in connection with the moral in relation to the spiritual, this anthroposophical spiritual science can meet the deepest needs of the present day in the field of art. Anthroposophical spiritual science wanted to achieve this in the field of art, as far as possible at the beginning of its existence. In my four mystery plays, entitled 'The Portal of Initiation', 'The Soul's Trial', 'The Guardian of the Threshold' and 'The Awakening of the Soul', I myself have tried to show how one can artistically embody, from a spiritual-scientific world view, what arises from supersensible observation. And in our Goetheanum outside, everything that this Goetheanum presents - in terms of its external architecture, in terms of its sculptural and painterly design - is shaped from this spiritual-scientific perspective.

Do we not see in the artistic development of the last generations how art longs for new impulses? Today, we need only look back to the time of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Dürer to see how that ancient conception of art, which strove upwards out of the physical-sensual, had indeed developed to the greatest heights, to depict the physical-sensual in such a way that the physical-sensual reveals the spiritual. One need only think of how human figures are first depicted in the Sistine Madonna, surrounded by the natural world, but how the spirit that embodied this image conjures up spiritual secrets from what it could see with its senses, and how it elevates the sensual so that this sensuality can reveal spiritual secrets to man.

In an age of scientific thinking and scientific research, we have ceased to have the intuitive perceptions that a Raphael or a Michelangelo had, in that they conjured up from the sensual-physical reality that which appeared like a reflection of the spiritual from this physical-sensual reality. Thus we see that in the naturalistic age, art also wanted to become naturalistic. But what is naturalistic art supposed to achieve if it does not unconsciously contain some idealistic factor? Do we still need to somehow transfer what nature presents to us outside onto the canvas or otherwise embody it, for example in drama? Can we really depict the secrets that nature holds in a naturalistic way? No, we cannot. Anyone who has traveled throughout Italy and been exposed to even the most beautiful and greatest works of art and then comes from Italy, let's say, to the top of the Rigi and watches a sunrise, knows immediately that what speaks out of nature is greater than what any painter, any sculptor, any artist could gain from nature. Only when artists, like Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo, could not stop at nature, but conjure up the spiritual from the physical and sensual, is this artistic endeavor justified. But precisely those artists who are perhaps to be taken most seriously in the present have within them the deepest yearning for a new source of art. They feel that the impulse has been exhausted, which consisted of conjuring up the spiritual out of the physical-sensual. When we look back to ancient times of human cultural development - wherever the human gaze looked, it saw the spiritual in natural things, the nymph of the spring in the spring, the spirits of the air in the air. Thus it is a final, I would say a certain human ascent, when now the artists have conjured up a spiritual out of the physical-sensual existence.

Today we stand at a point in the development of the world where the longings of the most serious artistic natures of the present point to the fact that new sources must be opened for the artistic. And so the opposite must enter into the development of human civilization today. The old artists have demystified the spiritual from the physical-sensuous. The spiritual must be revealed by looking at the spiritual world, as anthroposophical spiritual science intends. But just as the artist, if he has artistic feeling, is compelled to reveal the spiritual in the physical-sensuous, so the man who beholds the spiritual has, if he has artistic feeling, the direct, naive need to shape the spiritual into forms, to translate the spiritual into material. The old school of art idealized the sensual; the new school of art will realize the spiritual. This will not be a creation in symbolism. Those who find only one single symbol in it are slandering the Dornach building. There is no symbol in it, but what is directly contemplated is poured out into forms. Everything should work in artistic forms. Those who speak of the symbolism of the Dornach building only show by doing so that they have not really grasped the characteristic style expressed in the way the whole artistic aspect of this building is managed. They have not seen have seen how the artistic spirit of nature herself was sought to be joined with the creative spirit of nature herself in the artistic work of this Dornach building, and then to express oneself artistically in forms towards which this spirit strives.

What was idealizing in the development of art in ancient times will be realizing when it is based on such a spiritual view as is meant by the anthroposophical world view. And this artistry will be naive in the best Goethean sense. As the spiritual researcher looks into the universe, he senses the secrets of existence, and he deeply feels what Goethe expressed from his artistic vision: “When nature begins to reveal her manifest secrets to someone, that person feels a deep longing for her most worthy revelator, art. He to whom the world reveals its secrets in the mind cannot leave these secrets in the mind as they are, just as a child cannot remain at the age of three or five; it must grow older. What is seen in the spirit wants to take shape. What art creates out of spiritual vision is not didactic, it is not symbolic, it is not in straw-like allegories, it is a real standing within life. And this standing within the spirit brings the human ego together with the whole cosmos. Today I have pointed out how those forces in man that lead to his actual human existence are feelings of responsibility towards the world, I could also say feelings of responsibility towards social existence. And I could list many other ways in which these feelings are aroused, by developing those ideas that initially lead the human being into worlds far away and worlds wide, that present him with all the development that the world must undergo in order to reach the summit, the summit of the self. Those who take such ideas into themselves, by incorporating them into their souls, do not merely absorb cold ideas; they take in something that seizes the feeling and the will, something that warms the feeling with that which flows out of the immeasurable greatness of the world. From these ideas, they take what each individual action that they perform places under the responsibility of the world's wisdom-filled guidance. Summarizing all this, one can only say: religious sentiment flows from what is handed down in anthroposophical spiritual science as images, as ideas, from all of this.

From the outset, spiritual science did not want to be something that would stand alongside any religion as a modern religion, especially not alongside Christianity. From the very beginning, it was asserted within anthroposophically oriented spiritual science that Christianity is the religion that encompasses all others, and that for anthroposophy it is important to explain the mystery of Golgotha in the sense in which it is necessary for modern humanity. But through Anthroposophy nothing religious should be placed beside it, other than what is the meaning of the earth itself, coming from the Mystery of Golgotha. Only those who, in a spiritually tyrannical way, want the world-wide mystery of Golgotha to be interpreted in only one sense - namely, their own - can defame anthroposophically oriented spiritual science as something that would be detrimental to Christianity.

But is it not necessary, my dear attendees, that although not in the essence of the mystery of Golgotha, new elements are included in the understanding of Christianity? One looks at the way in which the knowledge and the realization of this Christianity has developed in the course of the 19th century. One need only look back to earlier centuries. Those who can look at history not only in the abstract, but also with feeling, know that Christ Jesus was regarded as something that poured out of higher, supersensible worlds into the physical, sensual world. A connection between the spiritual world and the physical world has been established through the mystery of Golgotha. In older times, this mystery of Golgotha was understood according to the cognitive abilities of those older times. But as the modern age dawned, with its scientific advances, the old understanding gradually became impossible for those who conscientiously want to take the progress of humanity seriously. And so we have witnessed the strange spectacle of precisely the most advanced theologians of the 19th century having lost the Christ as a supersensible being and having arrived at the mere description of the simple man from Nazareth; because of naturalistic thinking, they could not see the Christ in Jesus. For the most modern theology, Jesus became an outstanding human being, perhaps the most outstanding, but that something took place in Jesus through Christ that cannot be grasped merely with the senses has been shown in the entire theological development of the modern age. We need a path back to spiritual science in order to spiritually comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha and the Christ-secret.

What natural science has taken from Christianity for those who conscientiously want to take in this natural science, spiritual science will give back to Christianity for those who need an understanding of this Christianity from the depths of their soul. Just as little as all the progress of natural science could take away from man of the post-Christian era the mystery of Golgotha, just as little will spiritual-scientific progress be able to take away from man that which, out of the religious mood, but illuminated by spiritual-scientific ideas in accordance with the demands of the new time, flows to the divine, to that which is also given through Christ. The modern human being needs a spiritual view as the basis for his art and for his religion. Those who have lost the Christ through modern science have lost him because modern science was not initially a spiritual science. And I would like to remind those who today often slanderously claim that Anthroposophy wants to deliver something detrimental to Christianity: Is it courageous to say, in the face of the greatness of the Mystery of Golgotha, which towers above all other earthly forces and events, that those who seriously endeavor to understand this Mystery of Golgotha, in accordance with this or that science, in accordance with the progress of humanity, are anti-Christian? Is it courageous?

No! Again and again, I see before me that Catholic theology professor, who was my friend in the 1880s and 1890s, who, as a professor of Christian philosophy at a theological faculty, gave a speech about Galileo that fully lived up to Galileo by said at the time: No progress in science should be challenged by those who want to be truly Christian, because in truth everything that science can find of worldly secrets only serves to make people more aware of the magnitude of the wonders of divine guidance in the world, not less. Those are fainthearted who believe that Christianity can be shaken by any scientific progress. No, my dear audience, spiritual science knows: Even if millions of insights come in physical or spiritual fields, the event that gives meaning to the earth will stand in ever greater splendor precisely before spiritual-scientific contemplation.

But here it can also be seen how little impartiality there is in the world today. While one should understand - and if one were impartial, would also understand - that the spiritual-scientific world view is what certain people need in order to be led today to the mystery of Golgotha, anthroposophy, the spiritual-scientific world view, is being slandered. But perhaps this is only because there is too little religion in those who want to take on religion. Should it not be the case that one recognizes in particular the religiousness of the soul mood by the fruits, by the way the people concerned appear in life? Should there not be some phenomena today that show in the most intense way how an elevation, how an internalization of the religious mood is also necessary? Let me give just one small example.

Among the many recent refutations of anthroposophy, there is one in which there is a sentence to which I would like to draw your attention here. I will read it out loud:

Because the consciousness of the mind is lacking, ...

— namely, among anthroposophists, one might think.

... in theosophy there is also no savior of sinners. Despite all the praise and despite the exaltation of Christ to the “Sun-I”, Dr. Steiner's Christ is a completely alien personality to us. Here, too, a certain pantheistic tendency is disconcerting. Anthroposophy starts from the human being, and its goal is the ideal human being.

I have just shown how all of anthroposophy strives for the opposite; but the author of this brochure continues:

This and God apparently coincide. A nine-meter-high statue of the ideal human being is currently being carved in Dornach: with “Luciferian” features at the top and animalistic features at the bottom.

Now, my dear attendees, what is being carved out of wood in Dornach has been seen not by hundreds but by thousands of people. The one who has seen that something is being formed that has 'Luciferic traits above and animal features below' — I cannot do other than recall to the one who has seen this the anecdote that contains an instruction on how someone who comes home in the evening can tell whether he is drunk or sober. The advice was to go to bed and put a hat on the bed. If he sees the hat once, he can consider himself sober; if he sees it twice, he can consider himself drunk. Now, the person who sees the hat twice reminds me of the person who sees that something is being chiseled in Dornach - in reality it is carved out of wood -; the person sees something that is not there at all, because at the top is a completely human face, nothing of Luciferic features, a purely human face, below, there is nothing done at all yet, there is still a block of wood, there will also come human features, but below, there is nothing done at all yet. And then someone comes along who does not say that someone told him this – then one might believe that someone has told a tale – no, someone comes along who claims this as strict truth: a nine-meter-high statue of the ideal human being is currently being carved in Dornach, with Luciferic features at the top and animalistic features at the bottom. Thousands of people have seen that this is an objective untruth, and that it is not even just an objective untruth, but that it is one of the most incredible, idiotic distortions of what is intended. And, my dear attendees, what is more:

“This ideal human being...”, Steiner said to the observers present, “...must necessarily be the true image of Christ.”

Not one of the thousands of onlookers who were there will be able to say that I ever said these words. There are enough witnesses here in this hall who know that I have always said nothing but, carefully weighing my words, that the one I am forming here appears to me, according to spiritual vision, as the one who walked in Palestine. I cannot describe him any differently than he appears to me. I do not force this view on anyone. - Never, ladies and gentlemen, has it been said that what is here in quotation marks: “[...] must necessarily be the true image of Christ”.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, this is how one approaches the truth - that must be said. The name of the author of this brochure is preceded by the ominous “D.”, which stands for Doctor of Theology. So apparently, here too, as everywhere else, something like this arises from religious sentiments of the present time. Is there not a need for a renewal of people's religious sentiment when something like this can arise from religious teaching today? Can anyone seeking a spark of truth in such a work find such an example of objective untruth?

Oh, my dear assembled guests, what is leading to the fight against the anthroposophical worldview must be sought where one perhaps does not want to seek it: in the comfortable habits of thought and feeling of the present. I must say, quite apart from how one feels about the fact that the attack is directed against one's own cause, it can hurt, really hurt, when books are written today that are inspired by such a sense of truth. We need an increase of the sense of truth, of the sense of truth, and with it precisely an increase of the religious sense of people today.

And finally, my dear attendees:

Are people of such a nature allowed to claim that anthroposophists indulge in illusions?

Well, no one will find such an illusion in me. Above, one will find a human head, which has absolutely nothing of Lucifer, which is preserved from everything Luciferian; below, a block of wood that has not yet been worked at all. Anyone who looks at this with such an illusion that they see Luciferic features at the top and animal features at the bottom, anyone who can indulge in these illusions, should truly not ascribe to the anthroposophically oriented spiritual scientists a tendency towards illusions. The illusions may lie precisely with those who, out of these very comfortable illusions, would like to fight anthroposophy today.

Ultimately, everything that arises from such foundations is ultimately connected with what has been drawn upon as the materialistic view of the world. And we must go beyond this materialistic view. No matter how imperfectly anthroposophically oriented spiritual science may be today, it only wants to be a beginning, but a beginning that has within it the germination of vigorous further work in the fields of science, art and religion, a vigorous continuation that will be able to bring to people, precisely in these three fields, that which is demanded from the deepest longings of the human soul in the present, which will be demanded more and more in the future, and which ultimately also underlies the core of the burning social question. We must enter into true reality. The materialistically conceived realities that have formed the content of the world views of the last centuries and especially decades are not the true realities.

The true realities must be sought in ways such as those that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science at least attempts; however imperfect it may still be today; for the reality in which man wants to immerse himself when he wants to create something real, he does not find it if he only strives materially, if he does not strive spiritually. But he strives spiritually only when he does not allow a spirit hostile to human knowledge to be placed at the boundaries of so-called knowledge of nature, which says: No entry to the spiritual worlds. No, when he courageously fights his way out of his own strength to see the true inscription at the boundaries of knowledge of nature. This true inscription comes from the spirit to which man actually belongs, and it reads: Welcome the entry into the spiritual world at the boundaries of the knowledge of nature. For it is true, as it sounds from an important work of poetry to him who does not want to see the spiritual depth of the world: Your heart is closed, your mind is dead. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants nothing more than to find those counsels for the human soul and spirit that will lead to the heart being opened and the mind being enlivened, because through the closed heart, through the dead mind, we only enter into the material world. We can only enter into true reality through the spirit, when the mind is illuminated by the light of the spirit, when the heart opens to the true love of the world that comes from spiritual knowledge, and which brings the I into connection with the whole whole universe and thus brings together the human spirit in cognition, feeling and will in right responsibility, in right love for the universe with the whole of being in the universe - in cognition, in the life of the beautiful, in social life.

For a gradual acquisition of that science which we designate as spiritual science, it is necessary that we should have the good will of filling out the thoughts and thought-connections which are indicated almost in the form of a plan with real ideas relating to those things which can at first only be given in a more general outline. We say that the human being consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, Ego, etc. This is quite correct, to begin with, for it is necessary that we should orient ourselves with the aid of encompassing schematic ideas. But if we wish to continue in the acquisition of spiritual science, we must penetrate more accurately into everything which has thus been given in a schematic form. We already possess quite a considerable number of lecture-cycles, which are read particularly within the more restricted circle connected with our Society; but these cycles of lectures still contain relatively little of what should be known to humanity in a near future, at least to a certain number of people! This would be most desirable. To begin with, we say: We designate as man’s physical body his external appearance, which can be perceived through the physical senses and which can be observed with the aid of that science that is linked up with the intellect, with experiments and observations. We know that the etheric body lies at the foundation of the physical body. Let us, first of all, cast our spiritual eye upon these two members of human nature.

Spiritual science as such, needs to say least of all (of course, this is at first only apparently the case) about the physical body, for the physical body is the only thing which the ordinary science, dealing with the physical world, is willing to contemplate with the aid of its methods. But although the physical body may at first seem to be what natural science considers, it to be, its true significance and its position within the universe can only be recognised if the higher members of the human organisation are also borne in mind.

You will undoubtedly recollect that man’s physical body, in the form in which it envelops him here upon the. earth, could only arise during the Earth-epoch, but it received its first foundation during the ancient Saturn-epoch. During the Sun, Moon and Earth epochs, it then underwent a constant transformation. It was gradually transformed under the influence of the processes which were taking place: it was transformed through the fact that the etheric body was incorporated with it. When the physical body passed on from the Saturn epoch to a new epoch, it had to change, for it became permeated with the etheric body. And it also had to change when it became permeated with the astral body upon the Moon. Not only has the astral body been added to the physical body, but the physical body has been transformed through the fact that the etheric body penetrated into it, as it were, during the Sun-epoch and the astral body during the. Moon-epoch, whereas the Ego is gradually developing in every direction here, upon the Earth; of course, it develops first of all within the astral body, then within the etheric body, but then also within the physical body.

If we now pass on from the human being to the cosmos, we only need to remember what is contained in our lecture-cycles. We must remember, in this case, that just as the first foundation of the physical body has been made possible through the outpouring, as we may call it, of the Spirits of the Will or the Thrones, so the transformation during the Sun-epoch became possible through the Spirits of Wisdom, and the transformation during, the Moon-epoch through the Spirits of Movement. The transformation during the Earth-epoch, that is to say, the change entailed through the fact that an Ego now dwells within the physical body, has been made possible through the Spirits of Form, This is a most significant fact, which we must bear in mind. When we encounter man’s physical body upon the Earth, we must think of it as being endowed with an Ego, and since it is endowed with an Ego, we must bear in mind that it has received a certain form, the form which is most appropriate to it. During the Moon epoch, it has merely received the inner movement which was most adapted to it. The form which was most suited to it, is a gift of the Spirits of Form, and is in keeping with the fact that an Ego had to be Implanted in it.

We may thus say: Our earthly body, which has a physical form, has been formed in such a way as to become a bearer of the Ego. Together with the Ego, the Spirits of Form gave the human physical body the form which it now has and which is in keeping with the fact that it is the bearer of an Ego. The beings that belong to the other kingdoms of Nature, have received their forms later. If you read the more intimate descriptions of the Moon-epoch,¹ you will find that they describe all the other beings in such a manner that it is not possible to say that also these beings had their forms at that time. They are described with a certain mobility. Bear in mind, for instance, the description contained in my Occult Science.

Also the other kingdoms of Nature have received their stable forms through the Spirits of Form, during the Earth-epoch. Let us now contemplate the animal kingdom. Also the animal kingdom has its definite forms. It has acquired these forms only during the Earth. epoch. But think of the great difference between the forms of the animal kingdom and of the kingdom of man! If we cast our gaze over the surface of the earth, we may indeed find certain differences among men, but these differences belong to another field of study. We also come across certain differences in the external human form. All the interesting peoples which the West Europeans now lead into the field against Central Europe of course present a different aspect from the European populations! Differences can of course be perceived when we cast our gaze over the surface of the earth and study the form of various individual human beings. The colour of the skin must, for instance, be considered in connection with the bodily form. But if you compare the differentiations which exist in regard to the human being with the great differentiations which exist in regard to the various animal species, you will have to admit: The various species of animals differ far more from one another than the human beings. In comparison to the various animal species we can speak of an individual human species; in the human kingdom, however, we cannot find such a great difference as may be found, for instance, between a lion and a nightingale. If there would be such a great difference in the kingdom of man as that between a lion and a nightingale, we would not hear even such peculiar observations that it is not possible to notice the differences which exist among human beings. The fact to be borne in mind is that the animals show infinitely greater differences than the human being, within his own general human species.

Although the things which I have just now explained to you are undoubtedly right, they are only right within certain limits, if we consider them from the aspect of spiritual science. The following fact should be looked upon as a truth: In your thoughts and, in your observation, add the etheric body to man’s physical body and imagine that a certain experiment is to be made; in reality, of course, this experiment cannot be made. Imagine the following experiment and that you see it being enacted; imagine that the whole physical body of man can be separated from him, detached from him scientifically, piece by piece and that before we begin to detach the physical body from the human being we are in the position to invoke the Spirits of the higher hierarchies—to send an invocation to the Spirits of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai. We would have to utter this invocation in such a way that its request would be granted, namely, that the Spirits of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai might withdraw from the human being and cease; to influence his etheric body. We would, therefore—we cannot say, excoriate—but we would have to take away from the human being everything pertaining to his physical body and then we would have to ask the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai to withdraw their influences, so that man’s etheric body may be left entirely to its own resources, and may no longer be influenced by anything else. For the etheric body is subjected to certain influences; it is inserted in the physical body and the physical body has its own solid form, to which the etheric body must adapt itself. If you take a very soft piece of rubber and put it into a glass, it will adapt itself to the form of the glass and will no longer maintain its own form. But if you take it out of the glass, it will bound back into its own form. In a similar way, the etheric body must adapt itself to the physical body, without a form of its own. Consequently, if we draw away the physical body, we eliminate the forces to which the etheric body had to adapt itself; however, it would not immediately take on its own form, owing to the fact that the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai still work upon it, but we have asked them to withdraw, so that the etheric body can now obey its own forces to the fullest extent. In that case, the etheric body would take on its own elasticity. And this would be visible; we would see the etheric body jumping out. And what would occur?—You would have before you the whole animal kingdom! The etheric body would split up into portions, and these would show in their fundamental types the forms of the whole animal kingdom. In other words: etherically, the human being carries about within him the whole animal kingdom, which is simply held together by the form of his physical body and by the activity of the Beings of the above-named hierarchies. It is unquestionably true that the human being bears within him, as a disposition, the whole animal kingdom. From this standpoint, the animal kingdom differs from man only through the fact that every animal-species has assumed a form of its own, which it has developed independently into a physical shape. Consequently, the animal kingdom is the expanded etheric body of man,

A strange fact should be borne in mind. At the turn of the 18th and of the 19th century, something special arose within the world-conception of Europe, and we may observe this, for instance, more in detail in the case of Oken. From the standpoint of his time, the scientist Oken could not as yet speak of etheric bodies; indeed, he was far from doing so. But in his books we may find the following peculiar statement: “The animal kingdom is the human being, expanded.” This means that in his fantasy he had caught, a glimpse of the truth. It rose up on his spiritual horizon at a time when the great ideas of the Central European world-conception had developed. Indeed, this truth even rose up on Schelling’s horizon, and this same statement can also be found in Schelling’s books. Those who were unable to penetrate into such a lofty idea, which could not, of course, be developed fully, those who were unable to penetrate into such a great idea, went through a terrible time. We should think of Oken in such a way, that the things which he could not as yet grasp clearly, nevertheless lived within his soul as a marvellous conception, so that he could feel the single parts of the human being really consist of animal forms. He even had the courage to express this, but this courage very much annoyed the learned Philistines. Just think that Oken conceived the following idea: What is the tongue?—Well, he said that the tongue is a cuttlefish. Of course, the things which I have just explained to you lay at the foundation of this statement ... but just imagine what the learned Philistines thought about it! If we wish to grasp the development of man’s spiritual life we must become broad-minded and we must realise that things which may apparently sound like nonsense may bear within them a great truth. Oken subdivided the human being as follows: The tongue is a cuttlefish, other organs are something else. After all, it was merely the exact repetition of a truth which existed in a very ancient conception of man and which brought into evidence the fundamental types, subdividing the human being in accordance with the four fundamental animal types: Lion, eagle, angel and calf.

Thus we may say: Things are not as easy as they appear to be, for in reality, the human being bears within his etheric body the whole animal kingdom. As a philosopher might express himself, he bears it within him as a disposition.

Now you should bear in mind the following fact: If the things which I have just now described to you would not take place, if in addition to the fact that the physical body holds together the whole animal kingdom, the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai would not exercise their influence, then the process explained above would necessarily take place, when the human being lays aside the physical body and passes through the portal of death; namely, the etheric body would, in that case, jump out elastically into the world when the astral body and the Ego have abandoned it, and a whole etheric animal kingdom would rise out of the etheric body. But in reality, this does not take place; this animal kingdom does not rise out of the human being, for the etheric body detaches itself in an entirely different form; it detaches itself and becomes incorporated with the universal ether and interweaves with it.²

What lies before us in that case? The fact that the Beings of the hierarchies of the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai work upon our etheric body and do not allow it to reach the point of splitting up into the animal kingdom. What does really take place?—You see, I would like to describe these things by drawing in a comparison. Here upon the earth we human beings work. We build machines, for instance, machines made of wood or of iron. Wood and iron are our fundamental materials. We use them to construct machines. The way in which these materials are put together is our own work, but wood and even iron are raw materials which we take from the earth. We take them from a kingdom which lies below our human kingdom.

If you now imagine that the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai live above us, you will also realise that these Beings do not exist in the universe simply in order to have a perpetual holiday. They have their work, tasks which they must fulfil. What do they really do? They, too, must use a material for their work, just as we use wood and iron which we take from the earth, and they, too, will work upon this material. Our etheric bodies are the material used by the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai. For the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai, our etheric bodies have the same value that the wood and iron which we take from the earth have for us, when we use them to build machines. The Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai work upon our etheric bodies, and when we walk about upon the earth and harbour, as it were, the thought (if we have such thought at all!) that we carry about within us our etheric body, believing that we carry it about as something that belongs to us in the same way in which the lungs that we carry about within us belong to us—then the whole essence of the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai is active around us and works out forms for the spiritual world, forms that are needed there, just as machines are needed here upon the earth. They work out what is needed in the spiritual world. What aids these spiritual beings in their work?

You see, throughout our life we think; we think, from the moment that we attain the capacity of thinking up to the moment of death. Our thinking consists therein that it weaves and lives in our etheric body. Yet, while we live within our physical body, we believe that only the things we mould in the shape of thoughts belong to us. But what we thus possess in the shape of thoughts, what we thus form and mould within our thoughts is, as it were, only the inner aspect of our whole thought-life. From outside, the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai work upon our thoughts, particularly in regard to our etheric body. As human beings, it is not at all unnecessary that we should think. Our thoughts are necessary not only for the physical earth, but also for the cosmos. For what we transform within our etheric body through our thinking, is employed during our earthly life as a material which is used in accordance with higher standpoints. While we pass through the world as thinking human beings, the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai work upon our thoughts, so that after our death something may arise that can be incorporated with the whole ether of the universe. When our astral body and our Ego lay aside our etheric body, they sew into the cosmos the wool of our etheric body, that has arisen essentially through our manner of thinking.

As human beings, we do not only live for ourselves; we also live for the whole universe. We know that Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan will follow our Earth. But all this must be prepared; it must be interwoven with the universe as forces. This entails work. It forms part of this work, for instance, that the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai carry it on in accordance with our thoughts. (Stupid thoughts are not the same kind of material as clever thoughts). Coarsely speaking, the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai work upon these etheric machines in accordance with the material that we supply to them, and these “machines” then exist, in order that the evolution of the universe may continue. When our etheric body is handed over to the cosmos after our death, this kind of work is therefore handed over at the same time to the Beings of the three, above-mentioned hierarchies.

Let us now contemplate from a similar standpoint man’s astral body. We always contemplate things from different standpoints, so that we always obtain other connections with the surrounding kingdoms, and those who cannot read (an encompassing view of things is needed in order to be able to read) may discover many contradictions in our descriptions, but this is only due to the fact that they ignore the standpoints from which these things are viewed.

You see, our astral body is connected with the earthly surroundings in a similar way as our etheric body. From the standpoint just indicated, our etheric body is the whole ANIMAL KINGDOM. Our astral body is, instead, the whole VEGETABLE KINGDOM. In exactly the same way in which I spoke to you of the etheric body in connection with the animal kingdom, I would now have to speak to you of the astral body in connection with the vegetable kingdom. All the vegetable forms of our earth are contained in the astral body. And again, we find that if nothing else were to occur, if the Beings of the higher Hierarchies would not work upon our astral body, if during the time between death and a new birth, when we live backwards through our life, nothing would occur except the fact that the astral body is discarded, then the astral body would appear as the whole vegetable kingdom outside in the world. Indeed, this would even take on the form of a sphere, it would follow its own elasticity. The astral body would really take on the form of a sphere; but it cannot do this because during our life between birth and death the Spirits of Form have been working upon our astral body, also the Spirits of Movement, the Spirits of Wisdom, and even the Spirits of the Will. When after years or decades we have lived backwards through our earthly life and have thus gradually freed the astral body from its connection with earthly existence, then the astral body will contain the results of a work, results that the Spirits of Form, the Spirits of Movement, the Spirits of Wisdom and the Spirits of the Will require in order to incorporate something with the cosmos, namely, to incorporate with it, what they MUST incorporate with it. Of course, what thus becomes incorporated with the cosmos is to our own profit; for this must be contained in the cosmos. However, this becomes inwoven with the cosmos in a manner that differs from the process described above.

When we discard our etheric body, this becomes inwoven, I might say, with the universal ether of the cosmos. But what appears now, as a woof woven out of our astral body as a result of the work of the Spirits of Form, the Spirits of Movement, the Spirits of Wisdom and of the Thrones, cooperates with our Ego that is passing through its time between death and a new birth and contains forces which must be active, in order that we may once more enter a new incarnation. Many things are needed in order that we may enter a new incarnation! Many things, indeed! To-day, the ordinary science of the physical world really knows quite a lot about the structure of the skull and of the human brain; such a lot, that many people find it is too much to learn all these things! It is undoubtedly a lot. But suppose that all the knowledge which is acquired through external science were to be considered from a particular standpoint ... from the standpoint that the _skull containing that wonderful structure of the brain has actually arisen, that it could really be formed in its minutest details, whereas if all this had to be formed with the aid of our ordinary external science, very little indeed could be achieved!

Here we face a significant mystery, a mystery that obtuse men (the sort of men whom we can really designate as obtuse) think to cope with so easily by saying: “Well, the human being simply arises! In the course of the generations, it so happened that human bodies develop spontaneously within the bodies of mothers. This is quite spontaneous.” Indeed, the arguments adopted by such people can be grasped ... but let me show you, with the aid of a comparison, how clever they really are!

For instance, you may take for granted that here in Munich there are certain Beings able to perceive many things, but unable to perceive man, and thus unable to see his activities. It is quite possible, to imagine this! But those Beings who cannot see man, nor his activities, may, for instance, be able to see—a clock. They would, therefore, know that there are clocks and also how they are made. They would not, however, see the man who makes the clock; they would only see how a clock arises from its single parts. They would perhaps see the different kinds of pincers taking hold of the clock’s parts, but they would see them gripping, as it were, out of the air. What a conception would these Beings have of a clock? They would not say: “In Munich there are clock-makers”, but they would say: “Clock-makers do not exist; the clocks arise spontaneously, of their own accord, for we can see how they form themselves.” This is the manner of thinking adopted by people who take for granted that things that gradually develop in a physical way must arise quite spontaneously! However, everything that arises is the result of actions fulfilled by spiritual Beings belonging to the higher Hierarchies. Indeed, the human being does not arise spontaneously, merely through the interchanging influence of father and mother and through what develops within the mother’s body, but the whole cosmos participates in his development.

Particularly the external world, as far as its highest regions, cooperates in the formation of the human head. It participates less in what is attached to the head, and participates in a particular way in the development of the human head. In a not too distant future, even ordinary science will learn to think differently in embryology concerning all the organs and also concerning the human head. It will discover that the other organs depend very strongly upon hereditary qualities, whereas the formation of the head depends upon them only very slightly. The form of the head is simply pushed together after the formation of the other organs. The whole cosmos participates in the forming of the head and the influences of the cosmos penetrate into the mother’s body. Those who do not see these forces ... well, also a farmer does not see the forces that are active in a magnet, but this does not prove the non-existence of these forces. What exists in the human head, has been worked out, as it were, in connection with all that the human being has received from the Spirits of Form, the Spirits of Movement and the Thrones, with what he bears along within his Ego, carrying it over into the time between death and a new birth, as a mighty spherical form. What is thus elaborated is gigantic; it is a sphere and within this sphere everything is worked out.³.

Imagine a gigantic sphere, upon whose surface is engraved, as upon a globe, everything that must be worked into it in accordance with what the human being handed over, to begin with, to the universal cosmos through his etheric body, through the extract of his etheric body; this forms, as it were, something that is copied on to the surface of the sphere. We then work into it what should be engraved upon it in accordance with what we have brought along with us through the work done upon our astral body. And then comes the time—it begins with that moment designated by me as the world’s midnight hour—when the sphere gradually grows smaller and finally this sphere, upon which, the higher Spirits work, becomes quite small, it grows smaller and smaller, until it unites with the human germ conceived within the mother’s body. This, above all, gives rise to the form of the head. The gradual development of the form of the head is the result of centuries of work on the part of the higher Hierarchies.

Just imagine how man’s feelings in regard to his relationship with the world could be deepened if he would be aware of his position within the whole cosmic connections! The human being who carries his head upon his shoulders should learn to think in all humility, without any pride and arrogance, that human wisdom and all that may be found in it, contains very little indeed of what is required for the forming of the head bestowed upon the human being! Man bears within him everything that is contained in the cosmos. If we consider things from this standpoint, spiritual science acquires an immense value through, the fact that it becomes the point of departure for certain feelings, that may, indeed, endanger souls filled with pride and arrogance.

In my second Mystery Play I have alluded to this fact, in the scene where Capesius, conversing with Benedictus, feels the approach of truths telling him that the deeds of gods are needed in order to give rise to man. Truths of this kind may increase the vanity of many, who may at first be disposed to vanity. They may attribute enormous importance to themselves. Yet it would be far more reasonable to foster the feeling showing us how little of all that wisdom which gave rise to the human being really exists within our own consciousness! Of course, we may snare the opinion of those who say: “Of what use is it to know all these things? We can quite well do without this knowledge. Indeed, we can live quite comfortably without knowing, all these, things” ... Yet a great error is contained in the belief that we can quite well do without this knowledge! For, in reality, we cannot live without it. Indeed, at the present time we easily yield to the erroneous belief that we can lead quite a decent life without having a knowledge of the spiritual world; that is to say, that we can breakfast, etc., and do many things in between ... Undoubtedly, it is very easy to believe this at the present time; nevertheless, such a belief is not based upon truth. We should gradually be brought to the point of feeling that such beliefs are not based upon truth. For this reason, I mention a subject such as that of Planck. I mention Planck, that strange man, who lived for many years an extremely lonely life at Ulm and was not even offered a chair at the university of Tübingen, because nobody really understood his true value and significance; the significance of a man concerning whom obtuse persons would certainly say: “Towards the end of his life, he grew so nervous that he said all manner of things that sounded like megalomania.” Well, obtuse men may argue like that. But even someone who had not to endure the sufferings that Planck had to endure, would have grown nervous through the way in which his fellow men treated him, and he would also have uttered the words which may be found in Planck’s introduction to his “Philosophy of Nature and of Mankind”, the words of an ancient Roman: “Ungrateful country of mine! You shall not even have my bones!” I am quoting these words purposely; they were uttered in 1889, the year of Planck’s death, and they really convey exactly what we tried to explain just now.

The reality could be perceived by a man with idealistic conceptions, because the forces that develop within us when we are able to think in this manner, are, at the same time, the most practical thing in the world. The most practical thing is not at all as imagined by those who believe that they really are in touch with the most practical things in life; this can only be explained through the brutality with which they face life’s practical aspects. When I advance such examples, I only advance them in order to show you that all those human forces which are also needed in practical life, can give rise to clear thoughts filled with insight, only if the soul is fertilized by spiritual scientific truths.

Is it possible to-day that people actually believe that human life on earth is possible, without the slightest idea of spiritual scientific truths? Why do people believe such things?—Because they are so terribly short-sighted! If they were not so short-sighted, it would be possible to prove, even in an entirely external way, how mistaken are those who say: “Well, people simply believe that they need not concern themselves with a spiritual world. They are born without doing anything towards this, and they grow ...” Of course, some kind of education must be offered to man. Modern pedagogy is so extremely clever, that it sets up clever principles, reaching the gigantic heights of Forster’s pedagogy! And then we gradually become mature men, who concern themselves with the problem of what we should do, in order to give others something to eat and to drink.

Yet it was not always so within the human race. It is not so long ago that the present conditions arose, inducing men to believe that they can live upon the earth without possessing any spiritual knowledge. External proofs may be advanced, in support of this.

Let me advance one of these proofs. Probably, if we had time to spare (but here in Munich, people do not have much time), we might even come across a similar proof here in Munich. At the Museum of Art, in Hamburg we recently discovered a proof that may be advanced externally. It results from the following fact:

Let us bear in mind that great symbol at the beginning of the Old Testament: Adam and Eve’s Temptation, what is known to us as the Luciferic temptation. Let us think of this. When a modern painter paints this (his standpoint is quite an indifferent matter; it is all the same whether he is a realistic or an idealistic painter, an expressionist, impressionist, or futurist), he thinks that the reality can be conveyed best of all if he paints Adam and Eve in a more or less ugly way; between them, he will paint the Tree of Paradise and upon it the Serpent, with a real serpent’s head, as large as the Tree. Can this be termed realistic, in the true meaning of the word? I do not think so. Leaving aside the present assumption, it is impossible to believe that the archetypal mother Eve could have been so stupid as to be tempted by a real serpent. Imagine, a real serpent creeping through the green grass should have caught mother Eve! Even the present serpent can only be looked upon as a symbol of something else. Let us recall the thoughts that should really be connected with the Luciferic temptation. The serpent is Lucifer. It can only symbolize Lucifer. The fact that this being remained behind upon the Moon-stage of development, is connected with the Luciferic principle. It is therefore impossible to see Lucifer through physical eyes, for these have only developed upon the earth. Lucifer can only be perceived through the inner eye, and so he cannot resemble an earthly serpent that can be seen through our ordinary earthly eyes. Lucifer should be imagined as spiritual science is able to represent him. Imagine now that man carries upon him his head, as the most perfectly formed member of his body. Attached to it (it suffices if you study a skeleton) is the remaining organism; the spine is attached to the head. Everything that has, later on, developed physically, was formed in advance. If we go back into evolution, if we were to perceive Lucifer through our inner power of vision, we would see him in the form which he had upon the Moon, when he was preparing the earthly human head, a human head that was not so dense and solid as the present one, for it was inwardly mobile, manifold in its forms, and attached to it was a human spine, a spinal cord, that may be imagined in the form of a serpent’s body. Lucifer would, therefore, have to be painted with a countenance as expressive as possible, and attached to it, a serpent’s body, but one that resembles the archetypal human spine. This would be a kind of picture of Lucifer.

At the Museum in Hamburg there is a picture by Master Bertram representing a Story, of the Creation, and there the Paradise-symbol is represented in such a way that Lucifer is portrayed as described, exactly in accordance with spiritual science. In the 13th and 14th century, Master Bertram therefore painted Lucifer correctly, in a spiritual-scientific sense. This can be seen; it is a historical fact. We have frequently spoken of the ancient atavistic clairvoyance. What Master Bertram painted, shows that up to the 13th and 14th century it was possible to paint Lucifer correctly, in accordance with an ancient spiritual science. It can therefore be proved, it can be proved externally, that the human beings have become, so abandoned by the spirit as they are now, only a few centuries ago. This can be proved, and you will be able to discover such proofs.

In other words: What the obtuse people of to-day consider as the everlasting human nature ... the fact that they look out into the world through their eyes and then combine the things they see through their intellect, has become a human soul-quality only a few centuries ago. Before that time, man was aware of his connection with the spiritual world. This has faded. But we can learn to know that even in the 13th and 14th century people were still able to paint in such a way that this was in keeping with the ancient spiritual science. It is important to bear in mind such a fact. It shows us that the ancient spiritual science had to vanish for the sake of the development of human freedom, for in the 5th post-atlantean epoch arose something that has often been described: namely, the, consciousness-soul had to develop and consequently the old spiritual science had to recede. But it must be brought back again.

In regard to what constitutes the spirit of invention, the creative spirit, humanity still lives to-day upon the old inheritance in every sphere, upon the old inheritance that entered human evolution with the ancient spiritual science. When someone has a new idea to-day and invents something quite new, he does this because the ancient spiritual science still continues to be active. But in less than a hundred, in less than fifty years time, every kind of invention, every creative kind of thought shall have disappeared; it shall have disappeared even in the mechanical sphere, unless spiritual science influences humanity in a fruitful way. Spiritual science must begin to penetrate livingly into the development of the human race, for otherwise, the human race must grow barren.

In the sphere of art, this, fact is more or less evident to-day. In art it is strongly evident that the human beings are, as it were, abandoned by the spirit, seeing that they can only weave into their works of art what they find as a model, outside, in Nature; thus the inner fertilization on the part of the spirit is completely lacking.

These facts stand on one side. They show us how necessary it is for the human being to become aware of the fact that he is connected, as a whole human being, with Beings belonging to the higher kingdoms. We may think of people—some still exist to-day—who do not know that air exists. For them, space is empty. At least this fact does not reach their consciousness. After all, the physical body cannot be thought of without the environing air—for what would we be with our physical body without any air! We imagine that the physical body is closed up, because it is enveloped in its skin,—but here is the air outside the body: we breathe it in, and now it is inside us; we breathe it out, and then it is outside. Does not the air belong to the physical body in the same way as the muscles? Do you not have within you what is outside, and outside what is within? In the same way in which we are connected with the air in regard to our physical body, so we are connected, in regard to our soul-element, with the Beings that weave through the world as Spirits of Form, Spirits of Movement and Thrones; through our astral body we are united with the Beings who weave through the world as spiritual Hierarchies; they are incessantly active in us, just as the air is active within our physical body. If we know this, we have the right kind of consciousness of man’s being.

This is one aspect of the matter. But then there is still another aspect. Now I wish to awaken in you a conception of these things, by contemplating them from several aspects, as it is necessary to-day.

Read, for instance, (I might also indicate another example) Dostojevski’s “Karamasov Brothers”. Four characters appear, among others, in this book: the four sons of the old Karamasov, Ivan, Dmitri, Aljosha, Smerdiakov. It is very strange to see what an influence this novel of Dostojevski had, particularly in Europe. I would have to say many things if I wished to explain the whole way in which such things rise out of human life and pass through a soul such as that of Dostojevski where they develop into a work such as his “Brothers Karamasov”. Let me only say this: In spite of the greatest admiration which we may have for the penetrating psychological art (this is the name given to it by many modern people, because they know so little what psychology really is!), in spite of the penetrating insight of Dostojevski’s psychological art, also in spite of his fine and penetrating observation of life, those who have really reached the point of taking up spiritual-scientific conceptions not only in such a way as to say, man consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego, but so that they are filled with what may be experienced in connection with these members of human nature—those who strive to build up feelings in the way in which we endeavour to do it, will have an uncomfortable feeling when they read the frequently chaotic descriptions of the Karamasov brothers. For this book contains many things that may indeed be designated as fine observations of life, if we simply bear in mind an external, superficial observation of life ... for instance the fact that the eldest brother is the son of another mother and has an entirely different character than that of his two younger brothers; the fourth son is again the offspring of another mother (the old Karamasov is namely a thorough scoundrel!), whereas the third son has a most peculiar mother. One does not know if he is really the son of the old Karamasov ... But I do not intend to tell you the story of the book. Indeed, if we also bear in mind the aspect, who were the mothers, we may feel throughout: there is something behind all that! In fact, this is so, for a Central-European writer would not describe things in that way; he would describe things far more consciously and thus he would not bring into his description so many sub-conscious factors; as is the case with Dostojevski, he constructs more, and since he only brings into his book what he more or less knows, his book will not contain such a wealth of things as that of Dostojevski, who takes the things he writes from LIFE.

Life contains more than that which rises up in the consciousness of the human soul. Towards all these things we feel that in the case of Dostojevski we have before us an extremely chaotic mind, rendered chaotic through his epilepsy; but, in spite of this, many things passed through his entirely diseased soul, things which could pass through it, because human nature is, in our time, inclined, as it were, to reveal certain Things. We may then come to the following result: If we have acquired the right kind of feeling, the right kind of idea in regard to what is meant by physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego, we shall find in the four Karamasov brothers four human beings who can only be understood in the right way if we say to ourselves: In one of them, we have before us a human being in whom the physical body is specially active; in the other one, a human being in whom the etheric body is particularly active; in the third one, a human being in whom the astral body is more active; and in the fourth one, a human being in whom the Ego is more active. It is indeed so: If you take the Karamasov brothers and study them from an inner aspect, you will be able to say that, in accordance with. the present cycle of human evolution, and in a case where everything is active in such a way that the poet is influenced and stimulated to describe things more from out his sub-consciousness, the various members of human nature are active so that in one brother one particular member has the upper hand, and in another one, another member; the four brothers therefore appear like the drawn-out image of humanity. In Dmitri we find that the Ego is preponderant; in Aljosha, the astral body; in Ivan, the etheric body; and in Smerdiakov, the physical body. Though at first this may seem strange, it is nevertheless so, from the standpoint of reality.

You see, here we have the strange case of a poet who produces chiefly from out his sub-conscious depths and even has a chaotic soul life owing to his epilepsy, but who is nevertheless pushed towards the reality and whose astral body, that is to say, his sub-consciousness, becomes connected with what weaves and lives in the world.

We may well believe that the experience of standing beneath the gallows and. being unexpectedly pardoned at the last minute (Dostojevski’s comrades have already been hung, while Dostojevski himself is facing the moment of being hung), is not an indifferent experience; indeed, such an experience awakens in a human soul altogether different feelings than those of a soul that has never passed through a similar experience. This is a fact that should be borne in mind. But all this shows us that at the present time, in particular, a soul of Dostojevski’s kind could be influenced by the real facts in such a manner that his soul felt induced to describe throughout his book, in a chaotic way, these four brothers, who possess the qualities just described, whom we can only understand if we know this and if we are able to feel it. In that case, we shall understand why the brother in whom the etheric body predominates and the one in whom the astral body predominates, must be the sons of a mother afflicted with hysterical fits. If we know this, the details in particular become wonderfully transparent. This reveals the tendency of our time within the sphere of a nation inclined to offer (I have already explained this to you), as it were, those blood qualities which must become united with the Central European qualities. We can grasp what is taking place, also in the case of men in whom these events are still inwoven unconsciously; but we can grasp this only if we understand spiritual science.

Even though it may seem stupid, let me nevertheless say that the world is deep, and that it is not such a simple matter to gain some knowledge in regard to it, nor to judge it; it is not so simple a matter as imagined by those who lead the usual kind of life. The human beings pass through life in a dream or in a state of intoxication. Yet great things are preparing and it is not so easy to attract people’s, attention to these things.

Through your Karma you belong to those who are gradually penetrating into these things; you have been listening to them for many years and have thus gradually become familiar with them, acquiring an idea of all that lies concealed beneath the surface of life. But in regard to outsiders:—we may sometimes allude to such things in their presence and the very people may be sitting there, who belong to the clever set and believe, above all, that the person who speaks in a spiritual-Scientific manner and mentions this or that thing to them, does not really know anything beyond what he is saying. They have not the slightest idea that this knowledge must be drawn out of an all-encompassing knowledge, one that can really be proved in every detail and that becomes interesting just when it can be substantiated through details.

That many things in human evolution must change, can be seen therein that I have put before you two facts: I have shown you, on the one hand, what is connected with the human being, but on the other hand, I have also shown you the way in which we should contemplate the events that are now taking place. If someone who knows nothing of microscopy looks through a microscope, he will see nothing whatever. In a similar way, nothing whatever can be discerned when we contemplate human experience. Nothing whatever can be discerned in the experiences of the East during the 19th century; nothing can be seen in a Dostojevski, who wrote the book, “The Brothers Karamasov”, a book that indicates a sub-earthly element. In the East, in the Russian East, people have become aware of this, for a certain attitude towards life has been designated, as “Karamasovshchina”. It is difficult to explain this word; it is a far more qualitative concept than, for instance, the word “Strizitum” (a word in Austrian dialect, indicating a loose, half rascally, half good-fellow attitude towards life). “Karamasovshchina” is a far more concrete thing. We may come across this in life itself and even in art, and in order to perceive what is taking place, it is easy to realise that when we contemplate things, it is necessary to have in our soul’s background a knowledge that can only come from spiritual science.

Even the external processes rising up before us at the present time in particular, reveal this necessity; if we only look upon life thoughtfully, they reveal the necessity to which I allude and which I illuminated from two aspects. For instance, a very distressing phenomenon of the present is the following one:—General opinions existed long before the war. Certain people were considered to be prominent in this or in that sphere. There was no reason to object to this because they really achieved extraordinary things in the meaning of modern civilisation. Then war broke out. These prominent people expressed their views, they wrote letters. It is almost incredible what nonsense these prominent men wrote! For instance, Krapotkin, who enjoyed a great reputation in England. But read the letters written by him at the beginning of the war! He was looked upon as a broad-minded free-thinker, yet how stupid were the letters he wrote!

These are weighty facts. Indeed, I might say: Particularly now that humanity is facing such a sudden and powerful situation, we can see how little their thoughts are capable of grasping something that does not, for once, break in upon mankind in accordance with an ordinary, easy programme. From their own standpoint, the ordinary Philistines are better off than others, for they judge things in accordance with their views. But how do these views generally arise? At the present time, people despise authority and have their own views! Yet their opinions are merely based upon the fact that they have forgotten where they have read them! These are the “individual opinions”, that are simply characterised through the fact that they have been read or heard somewhere. All these things show that particularly the so deeply incisive events of the present contain something that must become a distinctive mark of humanity: namely, the fact that many, many things in spiritual life must change completely; human beings must make up their mind not to pass through life in the same way as the materialists, who merely dream of the world ... Of course, they think that the others are dreaming, nevertheless it is THEY who really dream, for they have never really woken up properly. Spiritual life must indeed change, and this fact must penetrate into the consciousness of those who wish to become united in their heart with the true life-essence of the spiritual-scientific world-conception.

Earnest words had to be said at this meeting, simply because to-day things present such an aspect that every opportunity must be used which may, perhaps, not always be available. It is difficult to travel about, at present.

It is therefore necessary to discuss these earnest things. They are also connected with questions discussed on previous occasions, questions that may be considered in connection with those of to-day. I explained that our etheric body is not something that may be designated as the bearer of our thoughts; it does not simply evaporate: no, the etheric body does not evaporate ... it becomes inwoven with the world-ether. When, however, as is the case at present, hundreds and thousands of deaths prevent human beings from carrying their etheric bodies through several decades, as would be the case normally, when these etheric bodies are handed over to the spiritual world, then something arises which I have frequently described: They remain here, with that part of the etheric body which may still have been used, and this will be found ABOVE. But its INFLUENCE in the future will depend upon the constitution of the souls BELOW. Strength for a spiritual progress will in future be found by those souls below who say to themselves: Many men have passed through the sacrifice of death and if we grow conscious of the forces contained in what they leave behind, then a spiritual growth will be possible. Souls must be there who are open to the comprehension of the spiritual world. In that case, the forces existing through the death-sacrifices can become fruitful for the earth. Otherwise, they must fall a prey to Ahriman. It need not NECESSARILY arise that these forces become fruitful for the earth ... for this will depend either upon the greatest possible number of souls that are inclined to unite in their feelings with what has arisen spiritually through the death-sacrifices; it will depend upon the possibility of utilising this later on, or else it will depend upon whether this will fall a prey to Ahriman. Meditate this thought, for then it will acquire significance and you will be able to feel the words with which I once more wish to conclude my lecture:

Aus dem Mut der Kämpfer,
Aus dem Blut der Schlachten,
Aus dem Leid Verlassener,
Aus des Volkes Opfertaten:
Wird erwachsen Geistesfrucht,
Lenken Seelen geistbewusst
Ihren Sinn ins Geisterreich.

(TRANSLATION)

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the suffering of the abandoned,
From the nation's deeds of sacrifice,
Shall spring forth a Spirit-fruit,
If souls, in spirit-consciousness,
Lead their heart and mind into the Spirit-realm.

• 1. See The Akasha Chronicals
• 2. Compare: Inner Being of Man and Life Between Death and a New Birth
• 3. “MACROCOSM AND MICROCOSM”

In this course of lectures I hope to be able to give you a survey of some important truths of Spiritual Science from one particular aspect. It is perhaps only towards the end of the course that you will be able to see how the threads all hang together. In the two lectures just given I dwelt a good deal upon the Mystery of Eleusis and upon Greek mythology, and I shall still often have occasion to refer to the performances we have seen. But I also have another purpose, which you will recognise at the end of the course. I want this evening to bring home to you from another direction how Spiritual Science in our day is aspiring towards that mighty archetypal wisdom of which we have caught a glimpse, how it throws light upon those great figures and images and upon the tidings of the Mysteries which have come down to us from ancient Greece. If we are to grasp the whole mission of Spiritual Science today we shall have to recognise that many concepts and ideas which obtain today have to be changed. Contemporary humanity is often very short-sighted, it scarcely gives a thought to anything beyond the immediate future. To evoke a feeling that we must change our very manner of thinking if we are to enter deeply into the mission of Spiritual Science—that is why I draw attention to the completely different view of the world and of life, and of the relation of man to the spiritual world, held by the Greeks. For in all this the Greek attitude of heart and soul was very different from that of modern man.

Let me begin today by mentioning just one thing. There is a concept, an idea, very familiar to you all, an idea which not only finds common expression in the vocabulary of all languages, but which has also tended to take on a certain scientific connotation. It is the word NATURE. When the word ‘nature’ is used in any context it at once arouses in modern man a whole number of ideas. We think of nature as the opposite of soul or spirit. Now what the man of today means by ‘nature’ simply did not exist for Greek thought. You have to eliminate altogether what you mean today by the term ‘nature’ if you wish to enter into the thought of ancient Greece. The contrast between nature and spirit which we today experience was unknown to the Greeks. When the Greek directed his eye to the processes which took place in wood and meadow, in sun and moon, in the world of the stars, he did not yet experience a natural existence devoid of spirit, but everything which happened in the world was as much the deed of spiritual Beings as for us a movement of our hand is an expression of our own soul-activity. When we move our hand from left to right, we know that a mental activity lies behind this movement, and we do not talk of an opposition between the mere movement of the hand and our will, but we know that the movement of the hand and our will, as an impulse of movement, constitute a unity. We still feel the unity when we make a gesture which our mind directs. But when we direct our gaze upon the course of sun and moon, when we become aware of the currents of air in the wind, then we no longer see in these things, as the Greeks did, the outer gestures, the moving hand so to say, of divine-spiritual Beings, but we see something outside us which we study according to abstract laws, mathematical-mechanical laws. Such a nature—a nature which is calculated according to purely external mathematical-mechanical laws, a nature which is not simply the physiognomy of divine-spiritual activity—was unknown to the Greeks. We shall hear how the concept ‘nature’ as understood by modern man gradually came to birth.

Thus in those ancient times Spirit and Nature were in full harmony with one another. Consequently what we today call a wonder, a miracle, did not bear its present interpretation. Putting aside all finer shades of difference, today we should call it a miracle if we were to perceive an event in the outer world which could not be explained by natural laws already known or of the same kind as those already known, but which presupposed a direct intervention of the spirit. If a man were to perceive directly a spiritual event which he could not understand and could not explain according to the strict laws of mathematics and mechanics, he would say it was miraculous. The ancient Greek could not use the term ‘miraculous’ in this sense, for to him it was obvious that everything which takes place in Nature is effected by Spirit; he did not discriminate between the daily happenings in the ordering of Nature and rarer events. The one kind occurred only rarely, the other kind was habitual, but for him spiritual creation, divine-spiritual activity, entered into every natural event. You see how these concepts have changed. For the intervention of the spirit in events on the physical plane to be regarded as miraculous is essentially a feature of our own time. It is peculiar to our modern way of looking at things to draw a sharp line between what we believe to be governed by natural law and what we have to recognise as a direct intervention of spiritual worlds.

I have spoken to you of the harmonising of two streams of culture which I may call the Demeter-Persephone stream and the Agamemnon-Iphigenia stream. It is the mission of Spiritual Science to unite these two streams. We cannot emphasise too strongly how necessary it is for humanity to learn to feel again that the spiritual is active in everyday events as well as in rarer occurrences. But this requires a clear recognition that there are two currents in human experience. Men must be quite clear that there are things which form part of a system of nature, things which follow the laws accepted today by the physicist, the chemist, the physiologist, the biologist, while on the other hand there are also other occurrences which can be accepted as facts, just as the facts which follow the physicalmathematical-chemical laws, but which cannot be explained unless one recognises the reality of a spiritual movement and life behind the physical plane.

The whole conflict caused in the human soul by this opposition between Nature and Spirit, and at the same time the longing to resolve it, is discharged in my Rosicrucian Drama The Portal of Initiation in the soul of Strader. There we see how such an event as Theodora's vision, an event outside the ordinary processes of nature, affects someone who is accustomed only to accept as valid phenomena which can be explained by the laws of physics and chemistry ... Strader's character and his inner experiences illustrate how such an event acts upon the heart as an ordeal of the soul. This scene epitomises the sense of conflict which finds expression in countless modern souls. People like Strader are very numerous today. To such people it is a necessity to inquire into the characteristics of the regular, normal course of natural events, events which can be explained by physical, chemical or biological laws; on the other hand it is also necessary that such souls should be brought to recognise other events, events which also take place on the physical plane, but which are classed as miracles by the purely materialistic mind, and hence brushed aside as impossibilities and not recognised for what they are.

Thus we can say that today there is a longing to reconcile the opposition between nature and spirit, an opposition which did not yet exist in ancient Greece. And the fact that attempts are made, that societies are established, to examine the activity and nature of laws in the physical world other than purely chemical, physiological, biological laws, is proof that the longing to resolve this opposition is very widely felt. It is part of the mission of our own Spiritual Science to resolve this opposition between spirit and nature. We must set to work out of new sources of spiritual-scientific insight; we must fit ourselves to see again in what is all around us more than meets the eye of the physicist or the chemist or the anatomist or the physiologist. To do this we must start with man himself, who so emphatically demands not only that the chemical and physical laws active in his physical body should be studied, but also that the connection between physical, psychic and spiritual, which for anyone who will look attentively can become visible in an unobtrusive way even to physical eyes, should be investigated.

The man of today no longer experiences what I have so far only been able to put before you as the working of the Demeter or the Persephone forces in the human organism. He no longer experiences the important fact that what is diffused over the whole universe without is also in us. The Greek did experience this. Even if he could not express it in modern terms, he experienced a truth, for example, of which modern theology will only slowly become convinced again—a truth which I will try to bring home to you in the following way. Today you look upwards to the rainbow. So long as it cannot be explained it is as much a wonder of Nature, a wonder of the world, a miracle, as anything else. Amid all that is familiar in everyday life there stands before our eyes the marvellous bow with its seven colours ... we will ignore all the explanations of the physicist, for the physics of the future will have quite different things to say about the rainbow too. We say to ourselves: ‘Our gaze falls upon the rainbow which emerges as if out of the bosom of the surrounding universe; in looking at it we look into the macrocosm, into the great world; the macrocosm gives birth to the rainbow.’ Now let us turn our gaze inwards; within ourselves we can observe that out of a vague, unthinking brooding, there emerge specific thoughts relating to something or other—in other words, thought flashes up within our souls. It is an everyday experience, we have only to see it in the right light. Let us take these two things, the macrocosm which gives birth to the rainbow out of the bosom of the universe, and the other thing, that in ourselves thought is born out of the rest of our soul-life. Those are the two facts of which the wise men of ancient Greece already knew something and which men will come to know again through Spiritual Science. The same forces which cause thoughts to light up in our microcosm call forth the outward rainbow from the bosom of the universe. Just as the Demeter forces from without enter into man and become active within, so outside us in the cosmos those forces are active which form the rainbow out of the ingredients of Nature; there they work spread out in space; within, in the microcosmic world of man, they cause thought to flash up out of the indefinite. Of course ordinary physics has not yet come anywhere near such truths, nevertheless, that is the truth.

Everything that is outside in space is also within us. Today man does not yet recognise the complete harmony which exists between the mysterious forces at work in himself, and the forces active outside in the macrocosm; indeed he probably regards that as a fantastic daydream. The ancient Greek could not say what I say today about these things, because he could not penetrate the matter with intellect, but it lived in his subconscious, he saw it, or felt it clairvoyantly. If today we wish to express in up-to-date phraseology what the Greek felt, we must say that he felt working within him the forces which caused thought to flash up, and felt that they were the same forces which organised the rainbow without. That is what he experienced. And he said to himself: ‘If there are psychic forces within me which cause thought to flash up, what is it that is without? What is the spiritual force in the widths of space, above and below, right and left, before and behind? What is it outspread there in space which causes the rainbow to flash up, causes the sunrise and the sunset, causes the glimmer and the glory of the clouds, just as within me the forces of the soul bring forth thought?’ For the ancient Greek it was a spiritual Being who gave birth out of the universal ether to all these phenomena—to the roseate tints of sunrise and sunset, to the rainbow, to the glimmer and the glory of the clouds, to thunder and lightning. And out of this feeling, which, as I said before, had not become intellectual knowledge, but was elemental feeling, there arose the intuitive perception, ‘That is Zeus!’ One does not get any idea, still less any sense of what the Greek soul experienced as Zeus, if one does not approach this experience and this feeling by way of the spiritual-scientific outlook. Zeus was a Being with a clearly defined form, but one could not get an idea of him without the feeling that the forces which cause thought to light up in us are also at work in what flashes up externally, such as the rainbow and so on. But today in anthroposophical circles, when we look into the human being and try to learn something of the forces which call forth in us thoughts, ideas—the forces which call forth all that flashes up in our consciousness—we say that all this constitutes what we call the astral body. In this way, having the microcosmic substance, the astral body, we can give an answer in terms of Spiritual Science to the question we have just put in a more pictorial way, and we can say that as a microcosm we have in us the astral body ... we can then ask ourselves what corresponds without in the widths of space to the astral body—what fills all space right and left, behind and before, above and below? Just as the astral body extends throughout our microcosm, so is the universal ether, so are the wide expanses of space, permeated with the macrocosmic counterpart of our astral body, and we can also say that what the ancient Greek pictured to himself as Zeus is the macrocosmic counterpart of our astral body. In us we have the astral body, it causes the phenomena of consciousness to light up; without extends the astrality from which, as from the cosmic womb, is born the rainbow, the sunrise, the sunset, thunder and lightning, clouds and snow. The man of today can find no word to cover what the Greek thought of as Zeus, and which is the cosmic counterpart of our astral body.

To continue: Besides what lights up in us momentarily or for a short time as thought, as idea, as feeling, we have our enduring life of soul, with its emotions and passions, with its fluctuating life of feeling, something which is abiding and subject to habit and memory. It is by their permanent soul-life that we recognise individuals. Here we see a man of wild passions, impetuously laying hold of everything in his path; here another who has no interest in the world. That is something quite different from the momentary thought, that is what constitutes the permanent configuration of our inner life, the basis of our happiness, of our destiny. The man of fiery temperament, of strong passions, sympathies and antipathies, may in certain circumstances commit some action which causes him happiness or unhappiness. The forces in us which represent the more enduring qualities, the qualities which turn into memory and habit, must be distinguished from the forces of the astral body—the former are rooted in our ether bodies. You know that from other lectures.

Now if we were to put the matter as a Greek would do, we should ask once more whether there is anything outside in the cosmos which has the same forces as we bear in our habits our passions, our enduring emotive attitudes. And once more the Greek felt the answer, was conscious of the answer without undergoing any intellectual process. He felt that in the ebb and flow of the ocean, in the storms and hurricanes which rage over the earth, the same forces are active as are active in us when lasting emotions, when passion and habit pulsate through our memory. When we are speaking microcosmically they are the forces in us which we cover by the term ‘ether body’, and which bring about our lasting emotions. Macrocosmically speaking they are forces more closely bound up with the earth than the forces of Zeus in the widths of space, they are the forces which determine wind and weather, storm and calm, untroubled and raging seas. In all these phenomena, in storm and tempest, in tumultuous or untroubled seas, in hurricane or doldrums, the modern man sees merely ‘nature’, and present-day meteorology is a purely physical science. For the Greeks there was as yet no such thing as a purely physical science comparable to what we have today in meteorology. To talk of meteorology in such terms he would have thought as senseless as it would be for us to investigate the physical forces which move our muscles when we laugh, if we did not know that in these movements of our muscles psychic forces are involved. To the Greeks all these things were gestures without and around us, gestures of the same spiritual activity that is revealed in us, in the microcosm, as lasting emotion, passion, memory. The ancient Greek was still conscious of a figure who could be reached by clairvoyance, he was still conscious of the ruler, the centre of all these forces in the macrocosm, and spoke of him as Poseidon.

Today we will go on to speak of the physical body, the densest part of the human being. Microcosmically speaking we have to look upon the physical body as composed of all those characteristics of the human being which have not been mentioned as belonging to the other two bodies. Everything in the nature of transitory thought and idea, thought which arises in us and then disappears, belongs to the astral body; every habitual, lasting attitude of mind, everything which is not merely thought in the sense that it leads its own isolated thought-existence in the soul, belongs to the ether body. And for everything which is not merely a sentiment, an attitude of mind, but which passes over into the sphere of will, for everything which results in an impulse to do something, man needs in this life between birth and death the physical body. The physical body is what serves to raise the mere thought or the mere sentiment to an impulse of will, it is the prime mover behind the deed in the physical world. The will-impulses, the soul-forces which lie behind the will, find their expression in the whole outward aspect of the physical body. The physical body is the expression of will-impulses as the astral body is the expression of mere thoughts, and the ether body of enduring sentiments and habits. In order that will can act through man here in the physical world he must have the physical body. In the higher worlds, activity of will is something quite different from what it is in the physical world. Thus, as microcosms, we have in us above all those forces of soul which bring about our will-impulses, impulses which are needed to make good the claim that the ego is the central governing power of the human soul. For without his will man would never attain to an ego-consciousness. Now when the Greek asked himself what it was, outspread in the macrocosm, that corresponded to the forces in us which call forth the will-impulse—the whole world of will—what did he answer? He gave it the name of Pluto. Pluto, as the central ruling power outspread in macrocosmic space, but closely associated with the solid mass of the planet, was for the Greeks the macrocosmic counterpart of the impulses of will which forced the life of Persephone into the depths of the soul.

Anyone who has clairvoyant consciousness, who can see into the real spiritual world, has a self-knowledge which can properly distinguish this threefold nature of his being into astral, etheric and physical bodies. The ancient Greek was really not in a position to examine the microcosm with the precision we apply to it today. Actually it was not until the beginning of our fifth post-Atlantean culture-epoch that man's attention was turned to the microcosm. The ancient Greek was far more conscious of the Pluto, Poseidon and Zeus forces outside him and took it for granted that those forces worked into him.

He lived far more in the macrocosm than in the microcosm. Therein lies the difference between ancient and modern times, that the Greek felt mainly the macrocosm and consequently peopled the world with the gods who were for him its central ruling powers; whereas the modern man thinks more about the microcosm, about man himself, the centre of our own world, and thus seeks more within his own being for the distinguishing features of this threefold world.

We begin to see how it was that, just at the beginning of our fifth post-Atlantean culture-epoch, there arose in all sorts of ways in western esotericism an awareness of the inner activity of the soul-forces, so that physical, etheric and astral bodies were distinguished. Now that occult investigation in this direction is being pursued with greater intensity, many things to which particular individuals in modern times have borne testimony can be confirmed today. For instance, it has been possible recently to confirm experiences which occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as to the ‘clear-tasting’ of one's own being. Just as one can speak of clairvoyance, or clairaudience, so one may speak of clairsipience. This clairsipience can apply to the threefold human being, and I can describe to you the difference between external sensations of taste and the various sensations of taste which a man can have in connection with his own threefold being.

Try to imagine vividly the taste you have when you eat a very tart fruit such as the sloe, which contracts the palate; imagine this wry sensation enhanced so that you are completely permeated by the sensation of bitterness, of astringency, of downright pain; try to imagine yourself from top to bottom, right down to the finger-tips and in every limb, permeated by this astringent taste, then you have the self-knowledge which the occultist calls the self-knowledge of the physical body through the occult sense of taste, the spiritual sense of taste. When self-knowledge works in such a way that man feels himself completely permeated by this astringent taste, the occultist knows that he is experiencing knowledge of his own physical body through the occult sense of taste, for he knows that the astral body and the etheric body are bound to taste quite different, if I may so express it. As astral and etheric man, one has a different taste from what one has as physical man. These things are not said out of the blue, but out of concrete knowledge; they are known to occultists in the same way as the laws of the outside world are familiar to physicists and chemists.

Now take—not exactly the taste you get from sugar or from a sweet—but the delicate etheric sensation of taste, which most men do not experience, but which nevertheless can be experienced in physical life when, for example, you enter into an atmosphere which you enjoy very much—let us say into an avenue of trees or into a wood, where you feel, ‘Ah, how delicious it is here, I should like to be one with the scent of the trees!’ Imagine this kind of experience, which can really grow into a kind of taste, a taste which you can have when you can forget yourself in your own inwardness, when you can feel yourself so united with your surroundings that you would like to taste yourself into those surroundings ... imagine the experience transferred into the spiritual, then you have the clairsipience which the occultist knows when he seeks the self-knowledge which is possible in respect of the human ether body. It comes if one says, ‘I am now eliminating my physical body, I am shutting off everything connected with the will-impulses, I am suppressing the flashing-up of thought, and surrendering myself entirely to my permanent habits, to my sympathies and antipathies.’ When the occultist acquires the taste of this, when as a practising occultist he feels himself in this etheric body of his, then there comes to him a spiritualised form of taste rather like what I have just described as regards the physical world. Thus there is a clear distinction between self-knowledge in respect of the physical and of the etheric bodies.

The astral body can also be recognised by the occultist who has developed these higher faculties. But in this case one can no longer properly speak of a sense of taste. In the case of the astral body the sense of taste is lacking, just as it is in the case of certain physical substances. Knowledge of one's own astral body has to be described in quite different terms. But it is also possible for the practising occultist to eliminate his physical body, to eliminate his ether body, and to relate his self-knowledge solely to his astral body—that is to say, to pay attention only to what his astral body is. The normal man does not do that. The normal man experiences the interworking of physical, etheric and astral. He never has the astral body alone, he cannot experience it because he is incapable of shutting out the physical and etheric bodies. When this does happen to the practising occultist, he certainly gets at first a very unpleasant sensation ... it can only be compared with the sensation which overcomes us in the physical world when there is not enough air, when we have a feeling of breathlessness. When the etheric and physical bodies are suppressed, and self-knowledge is concentrated upon the astral body, there comes a feeling of oppression rather like breathlessness. Hence knowledge of a man's own astral body is first and formost accompanied by fear and anxiety, more so than in the other cases, because it consists basically in being filled through and through with a sense of oppression. It is impossible to perceive the astral body in isolation without becoming filled with dread. That in ordinary life we are not aware of this fear, which is there all the time, arises from the fact that the normal man, when aware of himself, feels a mixture, a harmonious or inharmonious working together of physical, etheric and astral, and not the isolated, separate members of the human being.

Now that you have heard what are the main experiences of the soul in self-knowledge as regards the physical body, which represents the Pluto forces in us, as regards the ether body, which represents the Poseidon forces, and as regards the astral body, which represents the Zeus forces, you may want to know how these forces work together; what is the relationship between the three kinds of force? Well, how do we express relationship between things and events in the physical world? It is very simple. If anyone were to give you a dish containing peas and beans and perhaps lentils all jumbled up together, that would be a mixture. If the quantities of each were not equal, you would have to separate peas, beans and lentils from one another to get the ratio between their quantities. You could say, for example, that their quantities were in the ratio of 1:3:5; in short, when you are dealing with a mixture of things, you have to find out the proportions of the component parts of the mixture. In the same way we can ask what is the ratio of the strength of the forces of the physical body to those of the etheric body, to those of the astral body? How can we express the relative magnitudes of physical, etheric and astral bodies? Is there a numerical formula, or any other formula, which can express their relative strengths? The question of this relationship will enable us to acquire a profound insight, first into the wonders of the world, and then into the ordeals of the soul and into the revelations of the spirit. We will begin to speak about it today; we shall be led further and further into the subject.

The proportions can be expressed. There is something which shows quite exactly the quantities and the strengths of our inner forces in physical, etheric and astral bodies respectively, and the corresponding relationships between them. Let me make a diagram of it for you. For these relationships can only be expressed by means of a geometrical figure. If we ponder deeply this figure we find that it contains—like an occult sign on which we can meditate—all the proportions of size and strength of the forces of physical, etheric and astral bodies respectively. You see that what I am drawing is a pentagram.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

If we look at this pentagram, to begin with, taken at its face value, it is a symbol for the etheric body. But I have already said that the ether body also contains the central forces of both astral and physical bodies; it is from the ether body that all the forces, the ageing and the youth-giving forces emanate. Because the ether body is the centre for all these forces it is possible to show, in this diagram, in this sign and seal of the ether body, what in the human body is the ratio between the strength of the forces of the physical body, the strength of the forces of the etheric body, and the strength of the forces of the astral body respectively.

One arrives at the precise magnitude of these relationships in this way; within the pentagram there is an upside-down pentagon. I will fill it in completely with chalk. That gives us to start with one of the component parts of the pentagram. You get another part of the pentagram if you look at the triangles based on the sides of the pentagon. These I am shading with horizontal lines. Thus the pentagram has been reduced to a central pentagon with its point downwards (blocked out in chalk) and five triangles which I have shaded by means of horizontal lines. If you compare the size of the pentagon with the size of the sum of the five triangles, you can say, ‘as the size of this pentagon is to the size of the sum of the five triangles, so are the forces of the physical body in man to the forces of his etheric body.’ Note well that just as one can say in the case of a mixture of peas, beans and lentils that the quantity of lentils is to the quantity of beans let us say—as three to five, so we can say, ‘the ratio of the strength of the forces in the physical body is to the strength of the forces in the etheric body as the area of the pentagon in the pentagram is to the sum of the areas of the triangles which I have shaded horizontally.’ Now I will draw a pentagon with the point upwards, by circumscribing the pentagram. In this case you must not take only the triangles which complete the figure, but the whole pentagon, including the area of the pentagram—that is to say, including all that I have shaded vertically. Now consider this vertically shaded pentagon around the pentagram.

As is the area of this small downward-pointing pentagon to the area of this vertically shaded upward-pointing pentagon, so is the strength of the forces of the physical body in man to the strength of the forces of his astral body. In short, in this figure you find expressed the reciprocal relationships of the forces of physical, etheric and astral forces in man. It does not all come into human consciousness. The upward-pointing pentagon comprises all the astral forces in man, including those of which he is not yet aware, and which will be perfected as the ego transforms the astral body more and more into Spirit-Self or Manas.

Now you may wonder how these three sheaths are related to the ego. You see, normally developed man today knows very little of the real ego, which I have called the baby, and which is the least developed of the human members. But all the forces of the ego are already in man. If you want to consider the total forces of the ego in relation to the forces of physical, etheric and astral bodies, you need only describe a circle around the whole figure. I don't want to make the diagram too confusing, but if I were to shade the whole area of the circle, the ratio of the size of its area to the size of the area of the upward-pointed pentagon, to the sum of the areas of the horizontally-shaded triangles, to the small downward-pointed pentagon which I have filled in with chalk ... would give the ratio of the forces of the entire ego (represented by the area of the circle) to the forces of the astral body (represented by the area of the large pentagon), to the forces of the ether body (represented by the sum of the horizontally shaded triangles around the small pentagon), to the forces of the physical body (represented by the area of the pentagon filled in with chalk). If you give yourself in meditation to this occult sign and acquire a certain feeling for the proportional relationships of these four different areas, you get an impression of the mutual ratios of physical, etheric, astral and ego. Thus, you must think with the same attentiveness of the large circle and try to grasp it in meditation. Next you must place before you the upward- pointing pentagon, and because it is somewhat smaller than the circle—to the extent of these segments of the circle here—it makes a weaker impression upon you than the circle. And to the extent to which the impression of the pentagon is weaker than the impression of the circle, so are the forces of the astral body weaker than the forces of the ego. And if as a third exercise you place before you the five horizontally shaded triangles (without the middle pentagon) you have a still weaker impression if you are thinking with the same degree of attentiveness. And to the extent to which this impression is weaker than the impression made by the two previous figures, so are the forces of the etheric body weaker than the forces of the astral body or the forces of the ego. And if you place before you the small pentagon, assuming the same degree of attentiveness, you get the weakest impression. If you can acquire a feeling of the relative strengths of these four impressions and can retain them, as we hold together in our thought the notes of a melody—if you can think these four impressions together in proportion to their strengths, then you have the measure of harmony which exists between the forces of ego, astral, ether and physical bodies respectively.

What I have shown you is an occult sign; one can meditate on such signs; I have described more or less how it is done. By thinking of the relative sizes of these areas with an equal attentiveness, one gains an impression of their difference in strength. Then one receives a corresponding impression of the relative strengths of the forces of the four members of the human being. These things are symbols of the true occult script, emanating from the nature of things. To meditate on this script means to read the signs of the great world-wonders, which guide us into the great world-secrets. Thereby we gradually acquire a complete understanding of what is at work in the cosmos as wonders of the world, an understanding of the fact that the spirit pours itself into matter in accordance with definite ratios. I have at the same time evoked in you something of what was really the most elementary exercise of the old Pythagorean schools. A man begins by meditating on the occult signs, makes them real to himself, and then finds that he has seen the truth of the world with its wonders; then he begins to perceive with his spiritual hearing the harmonies and the melodies of the forces of the world. Tomorrow we will go further into this. My main object today has been to place before your souls this occult sign, which will lead us a step further into the nature of man.

Yesterday we tried to follow the evolution of humanity in the universe and also upon the earth. Today I shall only add a few explanations to this, in order to pass over to that which spiritual science is able to say concerning the significance of Christianity and also concerning the Christian initiation. But to begin with please turn your gaze once more to the point of issue of human development.

We have said that when the earth separated from the present Moon, it was enclosed by a kind of primordial ocean, and we explained how the human being then united himself with his soul-spiritual part. We then pursued this course of development as far as the present time, which we characterised as the time of man's deepest descent into matter through the spirit. We recognised that an ascent must once more come, a spiritualisation, and we also spoke of the mission of Theosophy,or Spiritual Science in regard to this course of development.

We already pointed out that the division into two sexes took place in ancient Lemuria. The lower beings upon the Moon were already divided into two sexes, but the human being who lives in each one of you was only at that time divided into two sexes upon entering his bodily form. We must think of these antediluvian times of human evolution; before the separation of mankind into two sexes, male and female, in such a way that what we designate as sex did not exist as yet, or at least, it existed in quite a different form. Now a great deal depends upon our grasping the great significance of the fact explained just now for the whole course of human evolution.

If this division into two sexes had not occurred, if humanity were not to complete its course of development through this cooperation of the male and female principle, the human being would have an entirely different form. The individual element in man comes from the influence of the male principle. Yesterday I explained to you the difference between a group soul and an individual soul. This is quite different among animals. The animal has two sexes even on the astral plane. But the human beings did not have these two sexes on the astral plane before descending like drops into the individualised human bodies, or they had not yet passed, as one might. say, through “the fall into sex”. Had the sexlessness of man continued in the physical world, replacing the two sexes, man could not have become an individual being. The true meaning of human development is that man should become more and more individualised.

If we once more survey the epochs which I described to you yesterday you would see how greatly the human beings resembled one another in regard to their external form. The cooperation of the two sexes gave rise to individual differentiations; these became more and more pronounced the further man advanced into the future. Without the division into sexes the generations would always look alike. We must really say that the fact that man becomes an independent being depends upon the division into two sexes.

In that remote time, and far back in the Atlantean epoch, but even in the post-Atlantean epoch, you find that the law of “marriage among close relatives” prevails, and: that this is only gradually replaced by the law of “marriage among non-relatives” In remote epochs people married within closely related groups, within small tribes. In every nation you will find that it was once considered unusual and wrong to marry someone who belonged to another tribe one's own, and this was everywhere considered an exceptional event.

The further back we go, the more we find that it was looked upon as an ethical law for people to marry within their own tribe; so that blood only mixed with the blood of relatives. We can explain this process best of all by setting out from a comparison which hits the nail on the head, whereas all other comparisons are weak. Let me tell you a little story in this connection.

You know Anzengruber and Rosegger. Rosegger is a writer who described his village characters with great devotion. Also Anzengruber has a good knowledge of his subject. In his drama “Der Meineidbauer,” (The Perjured Farmer) the farmer and peasants whom he portrays really live. We know how plastic these characters are in the “Meineidbauer” and in his, “Parson Of Kirchfeld” and in other plays. Rosegger and Anzengruber one day went for a walk together and Rosegger said: “I know you really never look at farmers; perhaps you could describe them better if you went to see them in the village.” Anzengruber replied: “If I did this, I would probably be quite at a loss. I never learned to know peasants more closely, but I can describe them because my father, my grandfather and all my ancestors were farmers, and I still have this farmer's blood in my veins. I form my characters through the farmer's blood in me, and I do not bother about the rest!”

This is an interesting fact and it indicates what we should bear in mind. Where blood does not mix, as in the case of old tribal communities, or in the case of the Anzengruber family, we find such a marked character as the writer Anzengruber, in his last incarnation. He had inherited the plastic force and he knew how to appreciate it; this plastic force ran through the blood of the generations. This really occurs where the blood only mixes with the blood of relatives. If the blood mixed with alien blood it quenched the soul's plastic forces. Had Anzengruber married, had he married a someone belonging to a different social class his children would no longer have had this plastic force.

In the case of almost every nation still existing to-day we can observe this phenomenon at the beginning; marriages within small circles of blood-relatives were always connected with an extraordinary power of memory. They were connected with a dull, vague clairvoyance people could remember what they had experienced since their birth and they looked upon these experiences as something connected with their personality. Before these marriages between close relatives were replaced by marriages with non-relatives, people could literally remember the experiences of their grandfather and even of distant ancestors; they said “I”, and passed through the experiences of their grandfathers, great-grandfathers, and forefathers. The further back we go the more we find a power of memory reaching far back into the line of the generations.

it is interesting to see that these people: did not feel that they were individual egos when they said “I”, their grandfather was included in in this, and they bore his name, a name which encompassed all. Even as you now adopt a name connecting it with an individual person; so these nations adopted a name reaching far back into the centuries, because birth did not break off the thread of memory. The individual human being had no name, for birth was no special event. All men had one name, as long as the thread of memory remained unbroken.

In the Bible you have a document relating this giving of names: all the discussions about the names of the patriarchs are merely theological discussions! Adam was Adam and became so old because the power of memory was preserved for centuries, and the individual who descended from Adam felt that his Ego was one with that of his ancestor. The blood which thus flowed through the centuries producing such a memory was named “Adam”. So long as memory lasted in the line of the generations and the experiences of the forefathers could be remembered as if they were one's own, one said: “Adam still lives. People did no at all experience themselves as individual physical personalities, but they identified themselves with that which existed spiritually and which united them.

Then the marriages between non-relatives became more and more frequent. The mixing of the blood gradually killed the power of memory which once reached beyond the individual human being. The limitation of memory is a result of these marriages between non-relatives. In the course of human evolution the individual human being gradually grew out of his tribe.The blood in common which flowed through the tribes also contained the common expression for this blood: love. Those who were blood-relatives loved each other. But this love, which we may designate as a primordial love connected with the blood and leading to the development of families gradually died out in the course of time. The love of the past greatly differed from the love which shines towards us as the love of future times. During the Atlantean epoch, this love ruling through the blood prevailed; people who had the same blood in their veins loved one another. But this gradually disappeared; individually, the human beings gradually emancipated themselves from the closer family ties.

This primordial love, which arose when the souls began to descend into physical bodies, thus faces us in a descending,course of development; this love streamed into the human beings at the moment which the Bible describes in the words: “And God breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life and he became a living soul.”

But something else arose at that time. Man became a living soul, and consequently a being who breathed through his lungs. The air which he thus breathed in, produced his red blood. The Ego-nature expressed itself in the red blood. As long as the blood was a common element shared by many, the Ego too was a common Ego. We see this in the Jews, where a whole nation was ruled by a group-soul. But the human beings gradually developed and emancipated themselves from the blood of their relatives. When the first breath of air entered the human being it formed the first foundation of his blood. But long epochs of time passed by before mankind reached the degree of maturity enabling it to influence the blood so that the primordial love could be replaced by a love for mankind as a whole.

Imagine the course of human development as described just now: The primordial love would gradually die out; love among relatives, the love of a mother for her child, and so forth, would have to decrease; the blood has not the power of encompassing the whole of humanity with a tie of love, so that the power of the Ego, the power of selfishness would grow ever more ... An event had therefore to occur which replaced the primordial love with another kind of love, calling into life a spiritual love, and this event is Christianity.

The appearance of Christianity prevented that which would otherwise have taken place: the disintegration of the whole of humanity into single human atoms. The human beings must indeed become more and more independent, for this lies in the development of their blood, but that which was driven apart naturally, must once more be led together spiritually, through a new power which is able to exercise its influence without the love connected with the blood: This new power is Christianity.

The Mystery of Golgotha thus acquires a fundamental significance for the whole evolution of humanity. If we understand this, we also understand the meaning of the words: the Blood of Christ. This is not something which can be experienced or investigated externally, but something which must be considered as a mystical fact. I have therefore entitled my book purposely, “Christianity as Mystical Fact” and not “The Mysticism of Christianity”!

In order to understand the nature of Christ Jesus upon the earth, in order to understand this fundamental significance of Christianity, we must study the preparatory stages which led to Christianity. For they already existed in ancient times. You may really see how an early Christian regarded this by taking a passage of St. Augustine's writings: “What we now call religion has always been the true religion, except, that that which once constituted the true religion is now called the Christian religion.” St. Augustine still knew that Christianity has a foundation: that which once lived in the ancient Mysteries. These very Mysteries are now to be revealed through the theosophical movement. Let me characterize it in a few words.

There were schools which were at the same time churches and centres of art; at the head of these schools stood the leaders of humanity, those who had advanced most in human development. Into these schools were admitted people who were considered to be adapted for a training enabling them to gain an independent conception of the spiritual world which surrounded them. They were carefully prepared; first of all they had to learn the facts of the spiritual world theoretically, more or less in the same way in which we now learn these facts through spiritual science. Then they reached ever higher stages. Theory changed into practice, exoteric into esoteric truths. They received a living instruction in every subject. Strict rules governed the pupil's life, so that he might gradually ascend to the contemplation of the spiritual world. The pupil first learned to know the facts and laws of the spiritual world, and then he had to develop through exercises the organs which enabled him to look into the spiritual world.

Let me now describe to you the final act. You must bear in mind that man's sleep consists in the fact that his astral body goes out of his etheric and physical bodies, whereas death consists in the fact that the physical body remains alone, because the etheric and astral body have left it. Now the leader of the Mysteries, the hierophant, through methods which he applied, prepared the human being in such a way that his physical body lay for three and a half days as if dead, while the etheric body and the other members were outside. This was not sleep, nor death, but a third condition. Everything was prepared in such a way that during these three and a half days the human being could journey into the higher worlds, through the guidance of the hierophant who initiated him, he now learned to know the things which have been described in my preceding lectures. He learned to know this in a direct way, through his own vision; after these three and a half days he was newly born. When he returned, he could remember everything which he had experienced in the spiritual worlds; now he was a living witness to the existence of these worlds. His words acquired a different sound from that which they had before, he had become “Blessed”, and the words could be applied to him: “Blessed are those who see”.

When he returned, he was given new name; he laid aside his old name and as an initiate he continued to use his new name. A strange phenomenon arose when he descended from the spiritual worlds and again took possession of his physical body, when he again began to live in the physical worlds. In the case of every initiate—this was a law—words rose to his lips which can be translated with: “My God, my God, how Thou hast glorified me!”

This could be felt by a human being who had reached this stage. He could say of himself: “Everything which still existed in the form of primordial love, everything which is to be implanted in man through the blood, must be replaced within me by a love which knows no difference between mother, brother, sister and other human beings”. Spiritually, he had abandoned his parents, wife, children, brother and sister, and had become a follower of the Spirit. And people said of him that Christ had come to life within him.

All this had taken place in the concealment of the Mysteries. These men were the witnesses of the spiritual world, and they were also prophets, for they pointed towards a coming event. This event is none other than the Mystery Of Golgotha. What took place with the individual human beings in the Mystery schools, occurred upon the physical plane in Palestine once only, for the whole world.

If you were now able to study the instructions which were given, to the old initiates, you would find that they closed with this experience lasting three and a half days; but never before had this experience been enacted upon the physical plane! A new epoch began with the Mystery of Golgotha. You may therefore say: All initiations were prophetic announcements of that which took place in the Mystery of Golgotha; this event could only take place because an individuality as encompassing as the Ruler of the Sun Spirits was incarnated in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. What took place upon Mount Golgotha, could not have been fulfilled by any human Ego; such as we have it. Such a deed called for an Ego which had already advanced t0 a high stage of development upon the Sun.

In this way we are able to grasp the Divine humanity of Christ Jesus, which modern men so easily reject, because they cannot penetrate into the depths of the spiritual world. If we consider things in the true light, we may therefore perceive that upon Golgotha an event took place which has a significance greatly surpassing that of any other event.

Among modern men, Richard Wagner alone had an inkling of the significance of the blood, I have already explained to you that man's glandular processes are an expression of the etheric body; his nervous processes an expression of the astral body, and the blood an expression of the Ego. I have shown you that if Christ had not appeared, the development of the blood would have led to a greater form of egoism; the Ego would more and more have increased man's selfishness and egoism. The unnecessary blood, man's excess of blood, had to flow out, had to be sacrificed, so that humanity might not completely lose itself in selfishness. The true mystic sees in the blood which flowed out of the Savior's wounds the surplus blood which had to flow out in order that a soul-spiritual brother love might take hold of the whole of mankind.

This is how the spiritual scientist looks upon the blood which streamed down from the Cross; the blood which had to be taken away from humanity in, order that man might rise above material things. The love which was linked by blood ties was therefore replaced by a love which will fully develop in the future; by a love going from one human being to the other. Only in this light is it possible to understand the words of Christ Jesus:—“He that forsaketh not father, mother, brother, sister, wife and child, cannot become my disciple.” These words can only be grasped if we bear in mind that the event upon Golgotha has overcome everything which had once to be strengthened through the kindred blood, through the love of relatives. He who replaced this love by the new, soul-spiritual love, could say that the old form of love had to be relinquished. This is how things are connected.

The appearance of Christ Jesus Himself is a deep mystical fact; and can only be understood if we do not apply to it the standard of natural science. Those who apply natural-scientific standards to the appearance of Christ Jesus, resemble people who see a tear and judge it according to the law of gravity, refusing to see in it an expression of the soul.

Such things can only be understood with the aid of spiritual science. The appearance of Christ Jesus upon the earth differs from that of all other founders of religions. What the others gave was a teaching. In the case of Christ Jesus we can really say: Almost every word which He uttered, has already, been said in the past in one or the other connection. The essential thing in the case of Hermes or of Buddha is the words which they spoke: in Christ Jesus the essential thing is the fact that He existed, that He lived upon the earth, and that the Mystery of Golgotha was enacted.

Those who wish to be Christians in a truly spiritual-scientific meaning, become so through the fact that they believe in the Divinity of Christ-Jesus. The first disciples did not only proclaim: “we are sent out into the world in order to announce His words”, but they were to bear witness to His existence: “We have heard the words themselves and, have placed our hands into His wounds!”

The essential thing is the fact that Christ-Jesus existed. In other religions you may eliminate the founders of these religions and you would not lose much. But if you were to eliminate Christ-Jesus, then Christianity would not be there! This is the difference. People like Darwin, Strauss, Drews, etc. may proclaim as much as they like that all other religions can be rediscovered in Christianity—this is not essential, for the essential point to be borne in mind is the fact that He existed and that He set forth as a fact what the Prophets had foretold. Christianity is therefore no theory, but a working power.

If you were to rise from the earth to another planet, you would not only see the earth, but also the earth's etheric and astral body; you would see the spiritual earth besides the physical one; and if you could dwell on that planet for thousands of years, if you could have dwelt on it even before the appearance of Christ-Jesus, you would have seen how in the spiritual part of the earth the colour of the astral body underwent a change through the fact that Christ-Jesus was there. The earth really underwent a change, and the men who lived after Christ-Jesus, lived upon a transformed earth. For this reason they can overcome the deepest descent of the spirit. Before that time, it was necessary to be raised to the spiritual worlds if one wished to know something about it; but in Christianity the Mystery Itself has descended to the earth. It was there, as a historical event, visible to physical eyes. The Godhead had to descend in order to lead humanity up once more, from the physical world into the spiritual.

This is the description of Christianity which you will find in the purest of Gospels, in the Gospel of St. John. It is not only a poetical work, but a book of life. Only one who has experienced it, knows what the Gospel of St. John really is: and if its reality has been experienced, then everything which I have explained to you to-day can be proclaimed as a self--discovered truth.

Let me now show you briefly how we may attain knowledge of the truths of Christianity.

Among many books, the Gospel of St. John is the one which indicates the methods by which it is possible to fathom the depths of Christianity. Even when Christianity did not as yet exist in its present form, it was already taught in the Mystery-schools; for instance, in the school of Dionysius the Areopagite, a disciple of the Apostle Paul. In ancient times it was usual to designate throughout centuries the nearer of the Mysteries with the same name, so that this person who took over the Mysteries and wrote them down, was given the same name as his predecessor.

Those who immerse themselves into the first words of the Gospel of St. John from the standpoint of esotericism, experience that they become within them a quickening force. But the Gospel of St. John must be applied as it was originally intended to be applied; and we must have the patience to take the first sentences of the Gospel of St. John again and again as a subject of meditation, and to let them pass every morning before our soul. They. will in that case have the power to draw out of our soul deeply hidden forces. But we must of course have a correct translation of these words expressed in German word-characters, they must more or less express what the original text contained. In a translation which is as faithful as possible, let me now show you that the real life of the spirit is indicated in the words of the Gospel of St. John.

“Im Urbeginne war das Wort, und das Wort war bei Gott, and ein Gott war das Wort. Dieses war im Urbeginne bei Gott.

Alles ist durch dasselbe geworden, and ausser durch dieses ist nichts von dem Entstandenen geworden. In diesem war das Leben, and das Leben war das Licht der Menschen. Und das Licht schien in die Finsternis, aber die Finsternis hat es nicht begriffen.

Es ward ein Mensch gesandt von Gott, mit seinem Namen Johannes. Dieser kam zum Zeugnis, auf dass er Zeugnis ablege von dem Licht, auf dass durch ihn alle glauben sollten. Er war nicht das Licht, sondern ein Zeuge des Lichtes; denn das wahre Licht, das alle Menschen erleuchtet, sollte in die Welt kommen.

Es war in der Welt, und die Welt ist durch es geworden, aber die Welt hat es nicht erkannt.

Zu den einzelnen Menschan kam es, bis zu den Ich-Menschen kam es, aber die einzelnen Menschen—die Ich-Menschen—nahmen es nicht auf.

Die es aber aufnahmen, die konnten sich durch es als Gotteskinder offenbaren.—Die seinem Namen vertrauten, sind nicht aus Blut, nicht aus dem Willen des Fleisches and nicht aus menschlichen Willen,—sondern aus Gott geworden. Und das Wort is Fleisch geworden und hat unter uns gewohnen, and wir haben seine Lehre gehöret,—die Lehre von dem einigen Sohne des Vaters, erfüllt von Hingabe und Wahrheit!”

(Translation into English)

“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was a God. This was from the very beginning with God.

All things came into being through Him, and except through Him, was not anything made that was made.

In Him was the life, and the life became the light of men. And the light shone in the darkness, but the darkness did not comprehend it.

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. The same came for a witness to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe. He was not the Light, but a witness for the Light; for the true Light which lighteth every man had to come into the world.

He was in the world, and the world came into being through Him, but the world did not comprehend Him.
To each man He came, even to the Ego-men, but these individual men, these Ego-men, received Him not.

As many as received Him could manifest themselves through Him as children of God. Those who confided in His name are not born of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have heard His teaching, the teaching of the only Son of the Father, filled with devotion and truth.”

I could now tell you many things of how you would have to immerse yourselves in each chapter of St. John's Gospel. Let me only give you one example—how you would have to use the chapters from the thirteenth chapter onward, if you were a true disciple of Christian Initiation. What I am telling you in words, has occurred in fact to render it more comprehensible, I will clothe it in the form of a dialogue, giving you an idea of what took place between teacher and pupil.

The teacher said to his pupil:—You must develop within you a feeling, you must think the following: Transfer yourself into the plant. If it had consciousness such as you have, and if this consciousness enabled it to look down to the stones, it would say: Thou lifeless stone; thou art a lower being than I in rank among the beings of this world; I am higher than thou. But could I exist as a plant, if thou were not there as stone? I draw my nourishment from thee. I could not exist without that which is lower than me.

And if the plant were endowed with feeling it would say: I am indeed higher than the stone, but I bow down humbly towards it, for the stone made it possible for me to live.

Similarly the animal would have to bow down to the plant and say: If thou; O plant, were not there, I could not exist, although I am higher than thee. To thee, a lower being, I owe my existence. Humbly I bow before thee.

Now rise up to the kingdom of man, survey the different human beings, the lowest and the highest,—what would each one have to say, who stands upon a higher rank of development than the others? Even as the plant bends down to the mineral and the animal to the plant; so each human being who stands upon a higher stage must bend down to those upon a lower stage and say; Thou standest upon a lower rank, yet to thee I owe the fact that I can be there!

Now imagine this carried out to the highest stages, reaching as far as Christ-Jesus, and you will have Christ's attitude towards the Apostles with whom He lived. He bent down towards them, even as the plant bends down to the mineral and washed their feet “I owe my life to you, and I bend down to you!”

For a long time the pupil had to pass through a scale of all these feelings. This feeling had to become more and more alive and then he awoke to the first stage of Christian Initiation. This can be felt through an outer and inner symptom: The outer symptom consists therein that the pupil really feels for a time as if the watery element were washing around his feet, and the inner symptom consists in the fact that he himself experiences the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of St. John as an inner vision upon the astral plane.

The teacher then proceeded by telling the pupil: You must experience something else: you must now imagine that bodily and psychical pair and suffering rush towards you from every side; but you must arm yourself against everything so that you can say: However great the pain and suffering which come towards me, I remain upright, I do not allow myself to overthrown! This is called the Scourging. Its outer symptom is that one experiences on the skin's surface pains which are an indication that the soul has reached this stage. And the inner symptom is that one sees oneself upon the astral plane undergoing scourging. But the essential thing is that the soul gains in the form of inner experience.

The third thing which the pupil heard from his teacher was the following: Now you must develop a feeling that you do not only withstand every form of pain coming towards you, but that you remain upright and steady, even when the holiest
within you is cast down into the dust. You must remain so strong, that everyone can tell you, This is worth nothing. But even though people trample on you, you must know its worth, and you must be able to withstand a whole world.—If the pupil reached this stage, he was said to have reached the “Crowning with Thorns”. The outer symptom is to feel a certain pain in the head and the inner one, to see oneself in the situation of the Redeemer with the crown of thorns.

The fourth thing was the following: The teacher told his pupil: You must gain a new connection with your body. You dwell in your body, but you must look upon it as something quite strange, even as the table outside is a strange object for you. You must even learn to say: I am carrying my body through the world. The body must become for you, as alien as other external objects.—This was said to be the experience of the Crucifixion. Even as the Redeemer carried the Cross, so one carried one's body about, as if it were a piece of wood. The outer symptom for the Crucifixion consists in the stigmata. During the meditation the pupil could produce on his hands, feet and on the right side of his breast the signs of Christ's bleeding wounds; red spots on these places reminded him of the Crucifixion wounds. This “blood trial” is an outer symptom showing that one has learned t0 know the inner essence of Christianity. And the inner experience is to see oneself on astral vision hanging upon the Cross.

The fifth stage is what one calls the “Mystical Death”. This can only be described approximately, The Mystical death consists for the pupil in the fact that the whole world appears to him as if it were enveloped in black darkness, as if a black wall stood before him. The whole physical world appears to him as if it were blotted out, as if it had disappeared. This can be experienced. It is a moment revealing everything bad and evil which can exist in the world (in reality, it can only be known through this experience). In order to know life one must also pass through this experience. It is called the “Descent into Hell”, and it is followed by a strange event appearing before one's eyes; that black wall is rent asunder. This is the “Rending Of the Veil of the Temple”. After this one cam look into the spiritual world. This is designated as the “Mystical Death and the Rending of the Veil of the Temple”.

The sixth stage is the “Burial and the Resurrection”, where the pupil learns to experience that in addition to the other feelings, all external objects appear as if they belonged to his body, that the whole world belongs to him. Even as the finger might say: I an only a finger through the fact that I belong to the organism of the hand, so the human being only lives upon the earth through the fact that he belongs to the earth. People can walk about upon the earth, and consequently they think that they are independent. But if we permeate ourselves with the feeling that everything belongs to us, we have the experience designated as the “Burial”. Soul-spiritually we rest in the earth and only after this experience we rise again, spiritually. Only then can we have an understanding of the deed of Christ-Jesus who united death with his own soul; and even as He has once been the Ruler of the Sun, He has now become the Spirit of the Earth. We should take the words of St. John's Gospel literally: “Whoso eateth my bread, treadeth me underfoot.” If you look upon Christ-Jesus as the highest planetary Spirit of the Earth, and the earth as His body, you will understand that you literally tread the body of Christ-Jesus with your feet. And you become united with Him when you experience this sixth stage, of the Burial.

Then comes the seventh stage, the “Ascension”, which cannot be described, for it can only be understood by those who can think without using their brain.

Now I have described to you the process of the Christian Initiation. The pupil acquired thereby what was called the “Eye of Christ”. Everything, around you would be dark if you had no eyes; even as you cannot see the sun without eyes, so you cannot perceive Christ without the Christ-organ. The eye is born through the light for the light. Light is the source of vision. The sun must exist outside as real sun, and you experience this real sun within your eye. It is the same with the spiritual eye. We use empty words when speaking only of the “Christ within”; it is the same thing as speaking of the eye without taking into account the existence of the sun! The capacity to look upon the Christ may be acquired through the exercises indicated above; but the power enabling him to do this, again conies from the historical Christ. Even as the sun is related to the eye, so the Christ is related to the Christ-organ which develops in the human being.

This is not meant as, a. guidance, but as an explanation of facts. We must learn to know what exists in the world. These, lectures aim at showing the deep sources of the truly Christian spirit, and how the Gospel of St. John itself contains the methods of a Christian Initiation, giving in man the eye which enables him to see Christ Himself. But those who wish to announce Him, must in a certain way have lived with Him, not only through faith, but in reality.

Yesterday I spoke of abnormal and pathological approaches to the spiritual world: the path through enrichment of inner understanding, the path of deeper penetration into the world of dream on the one hand, and on the other, the path which sets out to investigate the external manifestations of somnambulists and mediums by methods which are really a travesty of those of natural science. I pointed out that it is essential to follow both these paths and to pursue them purposefully if we are to develop true Initiation-knowledge. Today I propose to examine this problem more closely and to explore those cosmic influences to which man's consciousness and his total being are subject.

It is easy to see that amongst the influences working upon man, apart from those of the Earth, the influences of the Sun and Moon are paramount. Although people as a rule do not pay much attention to this, it is none the less evident today, even to the scientist, that nothing would exist on Earth without solar radiations.

Sun forces conjure plant life out of the Earth. They are essential to all animal life and to the physical and etheric bodies of man. Sun activities are to be found everywhere if we are prepared to look for them; they are vitally necessary to the higher members of man's being. Less attention, however, is paid to the Moon influences. They often survive today in the form of superstitious beliefs, and any precise knowledge about them is frequently distorted by the existence of superstitious notions about such influences. Those who propose to work in the scientific field today feel themselves to be above superstition; in consequence they deny that Moon influences have any significance and refuse to consider them seriously. Now and then, however, not only poets who are aware that the magic of the Moon stimulates their poetic imagination, not only lovers who exchange their tender passion by the light of the Moon, but also sages have a presentiment of the influences of the Moon upon the Earth, each in their different way. And this can prove highly instructive.

In the middle of the nineteenth century there lived in Germany two professors, Schleiden and Gustav Theodor Fechner. Fechner was attracted to a scientific study of the more mysterious workings in man and in the wider kingdom of nature. He collected data and statistical evidence to show that the rainfall over a particular area was related to Full Moon and New Moon and he concluded that rainfall varied with the phases of the Moon. He did not hesitate to defend his point of view against the scientific theories of the day. His colleague at the university, the eminent botanist Professor Schleiden, held a different opinion. He ridiculed the ideas of Fechner and declared that it was nonsense to speak of Moon influences of this kind. Now both professors were married and in the relatively small university town of the day conditions were still patriarchal. At that time it was customary for the wives to collect rainwater because they believed it was ideal for washing linen. Not only the two professors debated the issue, but their wives also tried to get to the bottom of the question. One day Professor Fechner said to his wife: “Professor Schleiden refuses to believe that the phases of the Moon have any influence on the rainfall. I want you to collect the rainwater that falls during one phase of the Moon, and Frau Professor Schleiden to collect the rainwater that falls during the following phase. As Professor Schleiden does not believe that the Moon phases play any part in the matter, there can be no possible objection.” But Frau Professor Schleiden was unwilling to grant to Frau Professor Fechner that phase of the Moon during which, according to her husband, a higher rainfall was impossible! A regular quarrel ensued; university and families took sides.

Now this incident has a scientific basis. When we investigate these influences with the methods of Spiritual Science we find that we can speak of powerful Sun and Moon influences, not merely as a relic of superstitious beliefs, but as a scientific fact. Having stated this, we have virtually exhausted all that modern man in normal consciousness can know on this subject. Modern man lives, so to speak, under the influences of Earth, Sun and Moon, and his consciousness also is fundamentally dependent upon them. For, as I have already pointed out, the external, visible aspect of the stars, Sun and Moon, is not the decisive factor. We have already emphasized that the Moon sphere harbours those Beings who were once the primordial teachers of mankind. The Sun sphere also harbours a vast multitude of spiritual beings. Every star is a colony of beings, just as the Earth is the cosmic colony of humanity. As I have already indicated, man lives today almost exclusively under the influence of Earth, Sun and Moon during the period between birth and death. We must now acquire a more precise knowledge of the spiritual, psychic and physical conditions in which man lives under the influence of Sun and Moon.

Let us consider the two poles of consciousness between which lies the state of dream—the waking consciousness and the emptied consciousness of sleep, of dreamless sleep. If we observe man during sleep when his physical and etheric bodies are detached from his astral body and Ego, we find that between falling asleep and waking he carefully preserves in the astral body and Ego the Sun influences which are withdrawn from the physical and etheric bodies.

From waking to sleeping we experience the Sun externally. We are aware of its effects even when totally blanketed by rain, for we owe our perception of objects around us to the reflected rays of the Sun. During the whole of our waking life we are exposed to the influence of the Sun which illumines objects from without. The moment we pass over into the condition of sleep the Sun begins to shine in our Ego and astral body and we perceive it with our spiritual eyes. Between sleeping and waking the Sun is within us. You are aware that certain minerals when left in a dark room after exposure to irradiation absorb the light and then become luminous. To spiritual perception the Ego and astral body of man follow the same pattern. In the waking state they are to some extent overpowered by the external sunlight. They begin to glow and to shine, since they are now imbued with sunlight between sleeping and waking.

To sum up: in waking life man lives under the influence of the external Sun forces; during sleep he is under the influence of the Sun forces which he now bears within himself until the moment of waking. During sleep we have the Sun within us and only the physical and etheric bodies are left behind. But from the spiritual world during sleep we irradiate from without our physical and etheric bodies with the sunlight stored within us. If we should omit to do this, if we did not irradiate our skin and the innermost recesses of the sense-organs with the sunlight stored within us, then we would soon collapse and die. In fact we provide for the vigour, growth and vitality of our organism by directing the stored-up sunlight from without on to our skin or by assimilating it into the sense-organs.

In effect, therefore, when man's astral body and Ego are outside his physical and etheric bodies during sleep, he first of all irradiates his skin with sunlight and then directs the sunlight through the eyes and ears to the nervous system.

This is the phenomenon of sleep. The Sun shines from the human Ego and astral body, irradiating the skin and penetrating into the human being through the doors of the senses.

Then, irrespective of whether it is New Moon or Full Moon—for the influences are always present, although they change with the phases of the Moon—Moon forces from without invade man's physical and etheric bodies. Thus, in the physical and etheric bodies during sleep we see the workings of the Sun proceeding from the Ego and astral body; in the physical and etheric bodies the workings of the Moon.

We have thus characterized the state of sleep in relation to the Cosmos. During sleep man's inner life is related to the Sun, his external life to the Moon. For, although the astral body and Ego are outside, they are, in reality, his inner being.

In waking life, the situation is reversed. When we are awake, Moon influences permeate our whole inner being, whilst Sun influences invade us from without. In waking life, therefore, Sun influences stream directly into our physical and etheric bodies, and the Ego and astral body within us are subject to the stored-up Moon forces.

During waking life, therefore, the Sun forces stream into our physical and etheric bodies from without and our inner being is permeated with the stored up Moon forces. During sleep the Sun inhabits the astral body and Ego; during waking life, the Moon. In waking life the Sun inhabits the physical and etheric bodies, during sleep, the Moon.

Even when man becomes a night-reveller and by sacrificing sleep invites the next day's hang-over, even then these influences are still present. For although we may choose to ignore nature's laws, the fact remains that things will take their normal course for man by virtue of their inherent inertia, by virtue of the law of cosmic continuity.

If man sleeps by day and wakes by night, the Moon influences are still active within his Ego and astral body during his nocturnal waking life; and the Sun influences also stream into him, but he experiences them as he would normally experience the light shed by street lamps, or dim starlight were he to lie out in the open and look up at the stars. But the Sun forces which man stores up during sleep and the Moon forces which pervade his inner being during waking life are present everywhere. With the physical and etheric bodies the position is reversed.

Man owes his ordinary consciousness between birth and death to this pattern of events. We shall now consider how the situation changes when man attains to higher forms of consciousness. For the relationship of the Initiate to Sun and Moon is progressively modified, and through this change of relationship to the Cosmos man finds his way into the spiritual world.

There is no need for me to describe man's relationship to the world, to the Sun and Moon in normal consciousness; everyone is aware of this when he recalls how man lives in his day consciousness and his night consciousness. The moment man begins to strengthen his inner soul-forces in relation to the normally chaotic dream consciousness, the moment he succeeds in transforming this dream consciousness into an instrument for the apprehension of reality, in that moment he becomes aware that the accumulated Moon forces are present in his Ego during waking life. The moment he actually transforms the dream into reality through Initiation-knowledge, he feels the presence of a second being within him, but he knows that the forces of the Moon sphere live within this second being.

In the early stages of Initiation consciousness man becomes aware that Moon forces are within him and that they always tend to develop within him a second man who is encased within the first man. A conflict now sets in. When the Moon forces begin to be inwardly active in this second man of whom I am speaking, not in waking consciousness, but during sleep, in such a way that this second man is released naturally by these inner Moon forces—when he is set free by the presence of the Moon at night and begins to wake to consciousness in the passive condition of sleep, then this second man concealed within the first, the normal man, seeks to wander around in the light of the Moon and takes the other with him. This is the origin of the somnambulistic condition peculiar to sleep-walkers.

When the Moon is shining outside, it is possible to awaken the second man who then makes contact with magical forces, i.e. anomalous forces which differ in kind from those of nature. He begins to wander around. As a sleep-walker in a diminished state of consciousness he behaves in a way that would be foreign to ordinary consciousness. Instead of lying in bed, as he would normally do, he wanders around and climbs on roofs. He is looking for the sphere which, in reality, he ought to experience outside his physical body. .

When this becomes a conscious inner experience and is directed into normal channels we take the first step in Initiation-consciousness. In this case however, we do not contact the actual external Moon influences; but the Moon forces in our inner being enable the second man to develop his consciousness. We must at all costs prevent this second man from breaking loose. There is always the danger that the second man might break loose, wander phantom-like abroad and stray along false paths. He must be kept under control.

Inner stability and self-control are essential for the acquisition of Initiation-knowledge in order to ensure that this potentially errant second man stays within the body and remains linked to the ordinary, matter-of-fact consciousness associated with the physical body. We must perpetually struggle to prevent this second being, the creation of the strengthened inner Moon nature, from dissociating itself from us. The second being is strongly attracted to everything associated with metabolism, peristalsis, the stomach and other organs, and makes heavy demands upon them.

The first indication, the first experience, of man's dawning Initiation-knowledge is that he follows one of the two paths which have to be traversed—the path that leads through the development, through the conscious realisation of the dream world.

And if he now becomes aware (in the dream state)—and, as I have pointed out, this is a necessary step—he realizes that though it is day without, within himself he bears the night. In the daytime there awakens within him something like an inner night.

When this Initiate-consciousness awakens, the day is still day to the outward eyes and for the external apprehension of things; but in the course of this day the spiritual light of the Moon with its refulgent beams begins to invade and illumine all around—and the spiritual begins to shine.

We know, therefore, that by inner effort man brings the night consciousness into the day consciousness. When this happens in full consciousness, just as other activities are performed consciously during the day, when this vigilant man is able to invoke the night activities of the Moon into the waking experiences of the daytime, then he is on the true path. If he allows anything to enter into him when he is not fully conscious so that out of their own inner momentum the night experiences arise in the day consciousness, then he finds himself on the false path that ultimately leads to mediumism.

The essential point is, therefore, that we must be fully conscious, in full control of experiences. The phenomena and experiences as such are not the decisive factors, but the way in which we respond to them. If the ordinary sleepwalker could develop full consciousness at a time when he is climbing on the roof top, he would at that moment experience an intimation of Initiation. Since he fails to develop this consciousness he falls to the ground when we shout at him to awaken him. If he did not fall, but developed full waking consciousness and could maintain this condition, he would then be an Initiate. The task of Initiation-knowledge is to develop along sound lines, sound in every respect, what is developed in the sleep-walker pathologically.

You will note, then, how a hair's breadth separates the true from the false in the spiritual world. In the physical world there is no difficulty in distinguishing between the true and the false because man can appeal to common sense and practical experience. As soon as he enters the spiritual world, it is exceedingly difficult to establish this distinction; he is wholly dependent on inner control, inner awareness. Furthermore, when man has awakened the night in the day, the moonlight gradually loses its character of external radiance. We experience it less externally; it creates a general feeling of inner well-being. We become aware however of something else. The wonderful glowing light of Mercury illumines this spiritual night-sky. The planet Mercury actually rises in this night that has been wooed into the day; it is not the physical aspect of Mercury, for we realize that we are in the presence of something living. We cannot recognize immediately the living spiritual Beings who are the inhabitants of Mercury, but we have a general impression that, from the way in which Mercury appears to us, we are in touch with a spiritual world.

When the spiritual moonlight becomes a universal life-giving force within us in which we participate, then the spiritual planet Mercury gradually rises in the night consciousness that has been wooed into the day consciousness. Out of this sparkling twilight in which Mercury appears there emerges the Being whom we call the Divine Being Mercury. We have absolute need of him for otherwise confusion will set in. We must first of all find this Being in the spiritual world, the Being whom we know for certain belongs to Mercury. Through our knowledge of this Divine Being (Mercury) we are able to control at will the “second man” who is awakened within us. We no longer need to stumble along undefined paths like the sleep-walker, but we can be led by the hand of Mercury, the messenger of the Gods, along the clearly defined paths that lead into the spiritual world. .

If, then, we wish to find the true paths into the spiritual world we must first undergo certain definite experiences which serve to guide and direct us. The ordinary mystic looks inward. Through introspection he sets up an emotional ferment compounded of God, the universe, angels and devils. At best his introspection leads to normal dream states where it is impossible to tell whether they come from the sexual or the intellectual plane. As a rule the experiences are confused and chaotic. This is the vague and nebulous mysticism which does not illumine the dream, but, as only the Initiate can understand, makes the confusion more confounded.

Such experiences, so instinct with wonder and poetry as described by Catherine of Siena and others, can only be understood by the Initiate, for only he knows what they really experience. Hence, if we pursue our Initiation with the same clear and lucid consciousness with which we calculate, or study geometry, if we penetrate with full consciousness into these things, we are on the right path. Only through the realization that we woo the inner night of the Moon into the external day, do we discover the real spiritual world. Just as no one can deny that the Moon or Mercury rises in the outer world of space, that this is a reality, not a dream delusion, so we find that the spiritual world is equally real and no delusion when we enter it in full consciousness and meet with spiritual Beings, just as we meet with human beings here on Earth. When we seek the spirit without becoming conscious of the nature of the spiritual world we are at all times on a false track. If we remain on Earth and are content to experiment with mediums and their manifestations and do not have direct contact with the spiritual, then we are on the false path. Every activity that fails to awaken consciousness in the spiritual world, that stumbles along blindly and only looks for effects, as superficial occultism for example, is on the false path. Everything which, on penetrating into the spiritual world, immediately experiences this world as a spiritual reality, is on the right path.

And thus an inner, living knowledge of the Moon sphere is the starting-point of the one path of Initiation. And we may say: man's normal experiences in relation to Sun and Moon which are normally experienced in sleep, the Initiate now experiences in waking life. Man becomes aware of the Moon influences as though they were external to him. He woos the night into the day. And instead of the night sky which we normally see studded with stars when we look out into the night, we see first of all the planet Mercury rise up before our inward vision: and if we have followed the instructions described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and have succeeded in developing real Imaginations, then in this Moon sphere during waking life, the world of Imaginations is revealed to us as a reality.

When we enter into the sphere of Mercury influences these Imaginations pass over to the Mercury Beings. We do not now experience mere visions devoid of reality, but we perceive visions as Imaginations. These Imaginations pass over to the beings corresponding to them. Therefore, if we have not advanced far enough along the path of Initiation we may have the vision of an Archangel, but it remains a vision. Only at a further stage does the vision really contact the Archangel and then the real Archangel is revealed within the vision. At an earlier stage, when we experienced the light of the Moon within us, the Archangel was not of necessity there. But now the Archangel has become a reality. Thus we become conscious of the Mercury influences in that our world of visions passes over into a world in which we really perceive the spiritual. I must emphasise constantly that all this can only be achieved in the right way when we are fully conscious.

And then if we pursue our meditations further, strengthen and vitalize our inner being in increasing measure, we attain to the sphere where the Venus influences are added to those of Mercury. Then, when we contact the Venus influences, when Venus rises in this inner night which has been wooed into the day, the visions of the Beings who have appeared in the Imagination pictures, in the images of the true visions, are lost and we face the spiritual world with emptied consciousness. We know that the spiritual Beings are there; we have attained to the Venus sphere where the spiritual Beings dwell. We wait until the Sun sphere draws near to us. The whole process is a preparation for experiencing the Sun a second time. All this takes place during the waking consciousness of day, when we are subject to the influences of the Sun from without. We take the path I have described through Moon, Mercury and Venus. Then the visions vanish. We press on. The entire path was a path leading from Earth, to Moon, to Mercury, Venus and finally to the Sun. We enter into the inner being of the Sun and behold the Sun a second time, spiritually. Its appearance is fleeting and undefined, but we know that we are perceiving it spiritually. We gaze into the inner being of the Sun.

If I may use a crude analogy, it is as if we were to say to ourselves: I see something in the distance, and draw near to it. At first I take it for an inanimate object, take hold of it, whereupon it bites my hand. Now I know that it is not an inanimate object, but a real dog; I realize that it is possessed of inner being.

This crude comparison may draw your attention to the fact that these experiences are rooted in reality. We pass from the Earth through the influences of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, and arrive at the stage where we behold the Sun; we realize that it is a living spiritual Being and that spiritual Beings dwell within it.

In the first place this is the path that can be followed. At every stage along the path it becomes abundantly clear that as the Initiate progresses, he must retain his full consciousness and that he is then on the right path, and that if man, irrespective of the way he leaves his body, loses consciousness and enters into the Cosmos that has become spiritual reality before his spiritual gaze, then he is on the false path. We must have an inner realization of the difference between the true and false paths of inner spiritual perception.

Yesterday I indicated how, in accordance with the demands of the time, various psychic and occult societies, using methods which are a travesty of those of natural science, are attempting to investigate the spiritual world through external phenomena. Please do not misunderstand me. I have no wish to disparage these methods for I know only too well how ardently men desire to know scientifically the real nature of the spiritual world through observation of external phenomena. I only wish to point out how these paths must lead into error and what must be the nature of the true paths. Since we are living today, and must continue to live, in a scientific age, it is perfectly understandable that there should be men who wish to investigate the spiritual world by the direct methods of natural science and who consider other, purely spiritual paths to be unreliable. And they come to the conclusion that there exists, on the one hand, the ordinary world in which men live and fulfil the demands of social life and who think and act in terms of this social life. There is nothing unusual in this. It is the accepted way of life. This is the field of scientific investigation which is concerned with external phenomena, with the phenomena of heat, light, electricity, magnetism and so on.

On the other hand, however, abnormal situations occur in life. Men practise automatic writing; they perform various acts under the influence of hypnosis and suggestion. They suspect that an unknown world is revealed in this way in the ordinary world and they want to interpret these external signs and abnormal phenomena. They want to explain how the thoughts and experiences of someone in New York are communicated telepathically to a friend living in Europe who has a psychic affinity with him, whereas normally the news is transmitted by wireless telegraphy. Phenomena of this kind of which innumerable instances could be cited, are investigated by the statistical methods of natural science. This path cannot lead to any goal or final understanding because man lacks the necessary spiritual orientation which must be sought in the spiritual world itself. All these phenomena, wonderful as they may seem, are seen to be aggregates of unrelated phenomena in the external world. We cannot arrive at any knowledge or understanding of them, we can only record them, regard them as extraordinary and formulate hypotheses about the spiritual world which are meaningless, because the phenomena themselves have their source in the spiritual world and do not betray their real nature. However much we concern ourselves with mediums and scientific facts, the spiritual world is always with us, but it does not reveal its real essence.

In this context I would like to recall the investigations which I mentioned yesterday when I stated that Dr. Wegman and I are now endeavouring to provide an accurate description of these phenomena. This method of investigation, even as the other line of enquiry I have just described which seeks to throw light on the inner life of dreams, cannot dispense with spiritual insight. It proceeds in such a way that the phenomena to be investigated are related directly with their counterpart in the spiritual world itself.

But these phenomena are not associated with the isolated and miraculous events which we encounter in the external world in the manner I have just described. They belong to the realm that is perceived by the person who is trained in medicine, anatomy and physiology when his perception of the external form of a human organ—the lung, the liver, or some other organ—is transformed into an imaginative apprehension of this organ, when he gradually begins to be able to see the human organisation in Imaginations.

This becomes possible therefore when we are able to study the organs of man which normally function after the fashion of the abnormal rather than the normal external phenomena of nature, i.e. when we are in a position to transform our initial human, scientific, anatomical knowledge into spiritual penetration into the human organisation. In the method which I described before, we take our starting-point from the total being of man. The path that starts from the individual human organs which we apprehend and perceive directly through a spiritual anatomy is the path that can lead to true results in contrast to the false approach that seeks to understand external phenomena by statistical methods that are a travesty of natural science. You will appreciate, therefore, that before these matters could be discussed, we needed the co-operation of a medical practitioner trained along these lines. Furthermore you will realize that when a human organ is apprehended spiritually in this way by a person who looks at anatomy from this standpoint, he must harbour no doubts about the goal before him. And now there is disclosed to spiritual perception not an inner man such as I described earlier, but an external, cosmic man, still nebulous of course, but in the form of a mighty, gigantic being—man as he is perceived, not as a totality, but as he appears through an inner spiritual perception of his organs. Because these organs are seen spiritually, not merely the physical man, but the cosmic man stands revealed. Just as formerly the world of night—the Moon-sphere—was wooed into the day, so we now woo into this being—who is not the complete man, but a being who consists of the single organs—the impulses of the Saturn sphere.

Just as at an earlier stage the Moon sphere was charmed into the ordinary waking consciousness, the Saturn sphere is now charmed into the scientific consciousness. We become aware that the forces of Saturn work in a special way in every organ, most strongly in the liver, relatively feebly in the lungs and least of all in the head.

We thus become conscious of the goal which demands of us that we seek the Saturn influences everywhere. Just as in the earlier stages we advanced spiritually through the practice of meditation, so now, through identification with the search for Saturn, for the inner spiritual structure of each organ, we penetrate into the Jupiter sphere and come to recognize that every organ is in effect the terrestrial counterpart of a divine-spiritual Being.

In his organs man bears within him the images of divine-spiritual Beings. The entire Cosmos first appeared as a gigantic Being in the Saturn sphere and the whole man is seen as a gigantic cosmic Being appearing as the sum-total, as the inner-organic, cooperative activity of generations of Gods.

Once again we must pursue this path in full consciousness so that we are activated by forces which are able to support and sustain us in the course of our spiritual experiences. We must bear in mind that all these influences are in the first instance in the embryonic stage, but their appearance is transient. It is indeed easy to recognize their presence, but it is impossible to describe them, to retain a clear impression of them and mould them into mental images if we succumb to the inherent danger, namely, that all that arises in this sphere may immediately disappear from our consciousness, so that we are never in a position to contemplate it.

Now those who are today engaged in psychical research never dream of taking the spiritual into account. They prefer to work experimentally in their own way, by inviting certain individuals for laboratory tests. But spiritual realities cannot be reduced to the human level, especially when the declared intention is to apprehend them by these methods and to arrive gradually at a scientific explanation.

The medical book of which I spoke yesterday can only offer a first, elementary introduction to what will become a fully developed science in the distant future. But to the extent to which these things exist in the spiritual world today and are natural to the Beings who live, not on Earth, but on the Sun—to that extent they can be brought into earthly consciousness in the manner I have described. We should not imagine that we can develop spiritual insight by means of laboratory experiments or the abstract anatomy to be found in text-books. The essential point is that all spiritual matters must be directly experienced by man himself. Why is this so?

We can only hold these realities steady in the light when they are supported and sustained by the forces which arise from the common endeavours of man, by the forces which man derives from earlier incarnations on Earth. When this happens there enters into the world of the Saturn and Jupiter spheres what we may call the Mars sphere. From then onwards these things begin to speak. They are revealed through Inspiration. Then we return to the Sun once more with the consciousness of Inspiration.

This is the other path that is demanded of natural science today and which the Initiates of whom I spoke yesterday would prefer to avoid. They feel ill at ease when they are brought in contact with this path, but none the less it is a path which must be traversed.

The path through the Moon sphere, as you will realize from the present discussions, was admirably suited to the old Initiates and we have remarkable information about this Moon path in H. P. Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine. If we can distinguish fact from fiction, many important truths are to be found in the Secret Doctrine. But this path leads through the sphere of the Lunar-astral light with which H. P. Blavatsky was intimately associated and where an exalted Mercury messenger directed her interpretations. When we follow her disquisitions we realize how she always directed her imagination to the right source. The remarkable thing about Blavatsky is that no sooner does she feel the first promptings of an Imagination than it is immediately realized. Guided by the Mercury messenger, she is led to a secret library. The idea takes shape within her and the Mercury messenger leads her to a book carefully guarded by the Vatican. She reads the book and we find in her writings a variety of information to which she would otherwise not have had access because it had been jealously guarded by the Vatican for centuries! This path is indeed a well trodden path which must be carefully distinguished from everything that is achieved under firm inner control.

The other path takes the course I have described and relies upon the methods of modern natural science which H. P. Blavatsky detested like the plague. This is the path that must be trodden in the manner I have described, in the full realization that it finds its strength and support in the karmic development of the forces of human beings, not so much for the sake of awakening karmic memories, but in order to hold fast to them for the purpose of describing them.

The science of today must be imbued with human values such as I described yesterday, when I referred to my collaborator in this sphere. It is by discussing concrete examples, not through definitions that we can best discover the origin of the true and false paths. In order to conclude this course of lectures I propose tomorrow to add as much information upon this subject as is possible in the short time at our disposal.