The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Translated by Steiner Online Library

We have to go far back in the human striving for a solution of the world riddles if we want to envisage the origin of both ideas that soon force themselves on the human being if he approaches the world riddles in a deeper sense, above all in a spiritual sense: the ideas of bad and good.

The human thinking will always try to rise to the mysterious forces that cause our development from the spiritual world. All the time we notice the attempt in the most different forms to relate the beneficial and progressive forces of life to the destroying forces, the reluctant ones, the impedient ones. However, the human being repeatedly faces the intimate relationship between both forces which exists for the precise observant in spite of the apparently strong contrast. We need to think only of Schiller's words about the fire already mentioned at another opportunity:

Benevolent is the fire's might
If man tames and watches it,
For what he builds, what he creates,
He owes to this heavenly power,
But terrible this heavenly power is,
If she, casting off her shackles,
Strides along on tracks her own
This free daughter of nature.

One could say, in such words lies the question that has to occupy us today and in the next talk. The question has dressed itself in the words hell and heaven at different times. One must not imagine at all that these words appear where they have that superstitious meaning which many followers of these ideas add to them, but also not less many of those who would like to fight against them today without knowing their deeper meaning.

If we look around only briefly, we see our question already arising in the ancient Persian culture where the realms of the good forces, of Ormuzd, and of the bad forces, of Ahriman, are sharply contrasted to each other. If we see how in a strange mental image the hating, the impedient forces mingle into the concealed forces which penetrate the world in the good sense and finally the light power is victorious, we have one of the great pictures before ourselves in which human imagination dresses our problem. From the Greek Tartaros up to the Nordic mythology a realm of the hell faces us; we hear names with which the concept “hell” is connected. It is that region in which all are condemned who did not die an honourable death in the physical world.

A peculiarity can strike us if we remember this legend of the hell. Let us follow it exactly, because one has to say from the start, in the dress of mythology a deeper wisdom is sometimes found than that is which is fathomed with abstractions in our time.

It is strange how the old Nordic mythology derives the present condition of the world from a cold nebulous “Niflheim,” the northern land that was foreign to the sun according to the Germanic idea in ancient time, and from another realm, “Muspelheim,” the warm realm. By the cooperation of both realms, the present condition of the earth originated. From the cold, nebulous Niflheim and not from the warm Muspelheim the most important forces serving now humanity were derived. There have first developed the higher forces underlying the today's culture. However, at the same time,—and this is the strange that touches our question in a miraculous way—it is said to us that Hel who receives the unworthy dead people is exiled by the gods to this nebulous home where those arrive who died of no honourable death. It is strange that the realm and the forces of the rise are brought together with the place and the personality who represents the force of death, of decay.

Approaching our times, we find those taking the mental picture of a world in which the evil is concentrated who want to explain our existence from the depths of the world existence. How magnificently and greatly Dante describes this world immediately at the beginning of his overpowering poem that shows the purification and development of the human being to the higher spiritual worlds! Again, a poet was urged to take these mental pictures to show the forces living in the human soul when Goethe wrote his Faust. Hence, he contrasted that what should lead Faust to the bright powers with the representative of the infernal powers, with Mephistopheles.

You can find many important remarks in Goethe's Faust that describe the peculiar relationship of Faust to Mephisto and of both to the world existence. I would like to mention two of them in this context in which Goethe puts both concepts strangely side by side and in a certain way reminiscent to the Nordic legend. The one quotation is that where Mephistopheles is called “a part of that force which, always willing evil, always produces good.” In a very intimate coherence with the whole world existence, the concepts of good and evil are put there. And another quotation of Goethe should not go unmentioned which on the one side leads us deeply into Goethe's soul, on the other side, however, also rather deeply into our problem; for it deals with the whole relation of the good powers in Faust to that what Mephisto, the evil, wants to attain with him. Very typically, Goethe lets Faust say the words when he should make the pact with Mephisto that determines under which conditions he belongs to Mephisto:

If I should ever say to any moment:
Tarry remain—you are so fair!
Then you may lay your fetters on me,
then I will gladly be destroyed!
Then they can toll the passing bell,
your obligations then be ended—
the clock may stop, its hand may fall,
and time at last for me be over!

(Verses 1699–1706)

“If I should ever say to any moment: Tarry remain—you are so fair!” is an expression by which Goethe makes comprehensible to us that Mephistopheles has not understood it in its entirety. However, Faust knows that he can only fall for the infernal powers if he is placed in the position to say to the moment: “Tarry remain—you are so fair!”

I want to put this at the beginning of our today's consideration because it can show in which direction that is turned what occupies us today, on one side, from the world of legends, on the other side, from a deep human thinking, dressed in a poetic garment. Indeed, those who believe today to be able to build up a whole worldview from some pieced together concepts of the material world, very easily are ready with the concepts hell and heaven. They do not care about what we have put at the head of our consideration now. One simply says, we need only to go back the developmental way of the different religions and childish worldviews. Then we realise that either the peoples or some human beings invented something in their misery that one calls heaven and hell, partly to comfort the peoples for the grief which they suffer on earth, partly to encourage them by the fear of the hell to transform their selfish desires into the good.

Who talks in such a way knows nothing about the real motives by which one introduced such ideas like heaven and hell in the souls and hearts of the human beings.

Today we search an answer to this question not in any accidental observations, in any pictures, judgements and conclusions, but we want to gain mental pictures of what is to be said about this question.

We remember the talk about the topic Man, Woman and Child. We could speak there of the big development of the human being on earth and impart knowledge of various forces which are active in the human evolution. If we survey this human development in the sense of spiritual science, then we take the way up to attain a relationship to it as the spiritual-scientific viewer looks at the growing child approaching us from the first moments of its life and working out its forces and abilities more and more.

Someone who looks with the sight sharpened by spiritual science at this growing human being sees the abilities of the child developing from the rudiments in a lovely way. A materialistically minded science would like to make us believe that that what gradually works its way out so attractively is to be led back to the merely inherited attributes of the parents, grandparents or other ancestors. The word “inheritance” plays a big role concerning this question in this day and time. Often enough I drew your attention to the fact that spiritual science has to play a role which before not too long time—300 years have not yet passed—a great scientist played, the Italian naturalist Francesco Redi (1626–1697). He first pronounced something that is common property of any unprofessional and academic knowledge today. At his time, it was not only an unprofessional faith, but also the faith of all naturalists that from something unliving, from river mud, not only lower animal beings but also earthworms, fish can originate. One believes today that these are only religious prejudices, which prevented the human being to lead back all things to a wholly mechanical world order. However, not only the few worldly scholars who lived at that time supposed that from something unliving life could originate, but also St. Augustine represented this view. You learn from this fact that it did not contradict the piety of St. Augustine at all to represent such a conception.

However, what contradicts such an assumption? A real, in the depths of the world existence going outer and inner observing, physical and not supersensible experience of the things. Physical and not supersensible experiences forced the quotation upon the human beings gradually which then Redi did: life can originate only from life.

In the same position in which in those days the naturalist Redi was—he escaped the destiny of Giordano Bruno (1544–1600, Italian monk and philosopher, burnt at the stake) only by the skin of the teeth—, is the modern spiritual science today. The sentence, which one denies today, is applied to the spiritual realm: the spiritual can originate only from spiritual.—We cannot lead back to physical processes what we see developing first from the dispositions of the embryo. We lead it back to the spiritual as we lead life back to life. Then the spiritual leads us back to a spiritual-mental. If we see this spiritual-mental dressed, as it were, in those attributes connected with the physical or the other covers of the human being, then we only lead this physical back to the entire line of inheritance that colours and shades the spiritual-mental abilities and peculiarities. If one wants to draw our attention repeatedly to the way in which the qualities sum up in the inheritance line gradually which appear then last with a descendant, we are not at all surprised from the viewpoint of spiritual science. It is a matter of course for us that in the bodies in which the spiritual germ appears the attributes of the physical inheritance appear. For, how do we look at this physical inheritance? We choose the following example:

We take a sprout of a plant and plant it in fertile soil with all possible substances that can well supply the plant. Then we plant the same sprout in another soil that contains small quantities of the substances, which the plant needs. The plants carry the qualities of the ground in themselves from which they have arisen. Thus, we see the plant unfolding what is its own deeper origin, we see its sprout, and on the other side that what this sprout developed and unfolded in which it is wrapped what appears as attached and filled from the ground from which the plant has arisen. Thus, the human being has arisen, like the plant from a former plant, from a spiritual-mental of prehistoric time. He has grown on a ground that was prepared in the line of inheritance, and this spiritual-mental germ contains qualities that it brings from the ground of the inheritance line. We are not surprised that the complete process is in such a way and presents itself for the external, physical world viewer in such a way that one can be addicted to the indicated mistakes. If it means, one should observe how in an especially gifted personality the qualities of the ancestors are added up and that a musician is descended from a family of musicians and a mathematician from a family of mathematicians, the spiritual scientist does not at all deny these things or show them in another light.

For spiritual science, the matter is in such a way: there are large periods, within which our spiritual-mental arises repeatedly. We speak in the spiritual research of repeated earth-lives, while we say that our spiritual-mental existence points us back to former lives in which the spiritual germs of the current life were prepared. Everything that we now contain and that we now gain develops in future time and has its effect. This spiritual-mental germ has nothing to do with that what reproduces in the physical line. If the human being enters the existence, this spiritual-mental germ enters the physical body, and the forces that are handed down in the family build up the physical body, which he inhabits. Thus, a duality is really assembled in the human being one of which, the spiritual-mental, goes back to an only spiritual evolution line, while the other, the physical one goes back to the inherited line of evolution. Inheritance and reincarnation are both things, which intermingle here, as it arises from any reasonable consideration.

Nevertheless, one says then, realise that in one ancestor these qualities exist and in another those qualities. At last, these qualities accumulate and become Goethe or Beethoven. The genii normally appear at the end of a long line. Let us consider this sentence once: the genius appears at the end of a line of generations.—It is weird that the genius is led back to inheritance because it has a body that is organised for the genius. If the Bernoullis (famous Swiss family of mathematicians and scientists) become mathematicians repeatedly, it is obvious that they need special bodies. It is not miraculous that if the spiritual-mental germ disappears in an inheritance line, in that what is the ground for the mathematical head, he also brings these qualities. On the other hand, does it surprise one that anybody who dives in the water comes out wet? Thus, it is also natural that if anybody is born out of a family he carries the qualities of the family in himself.

It is something natural that the cited sentence can really mean something completely trivial. However, when would it have to appear that the genius itself is inheritable? If it stood at the beginning and not at the end of a line of generations! If it stands at the end, it is a proof of the fact that just the ingenious qualities are not transmitted! It is already a weird kind of arguing if one says that one realises that the qualities are transmitted, and if one asserts that the genius stands at the end of a line. A healthy logic can only say that the reincarnating genius cannot transmit the spiritual qualities; since, otherwise, it would have to stand at the beginning of the generation line. We come there to two developmental lines, a spiritual one, and a physical one. If one does not accept this, one also does not manage with the healthy logic.

We see a child that went through another life centuries ago developing and using those qualities which present themselves to it now. We see the child entering life that way. How do we see the human being leaving life? We have already pointed to this. Now we want to look at the events that occur if that what has entered the physical existence by birth leaves it again, while it walks through the gate of death. There we must not only consider death, but something that we already mentioned in the last consideration, the alternating states of sleeping and waking, and the alternating states of life and death.

We know from the last consideration that if the human being sinks in the dreamless sleep certain members of his being separate from the real human inside, the innermost being, his essence. We distinguish in such a sleeping human being in the sense of the spiritual science what lies, so to speak, in the bed, from this essence. In the bed lies the physical body that is handed over at death to the earthly elements. However, if the human being lies in the bed, the physical body is not in such a way as it is when it is handed over to the earth. The physical body is there still infiltrated by the etheric body or life body. The physical body lives, the vital functions are maintained, so that in the bed there lie the physical body and the etheric body or life body. However, the bearer of joy and sorrow is lifted out, it is the bearer of any sensory sensation surging up and down during the day like heat and cold, smell and taste, and it is the bearer of the whole life of thought and imaging, starting from the instincts and passions up to the moral ideals. All that sinks in an uncertain darkness with sleep. However, this also appears again in the morning like light streaming inside. It is the light of the consciousness.

We must exactly distinguish something else within that what is lifted out at night from the human body, from the physical one and the etheric one: It is the human self-consciousness and its bearer, the human ego. We call the bearer of joy and sorrow, of instincts and passions, of sensuous sensations surging up and down the astral body, and the bearer of the self-consciousness, the fourth member of the human being, the ego. These both members, the ego-bearer and the bearer of desire and pain, are lifted out during the dreamless sleep from the physical and etheric bodies.

Why can you not perceive in that world? We have found the answer of this question in our talks; because of the present developmental stage of the human being, the ego and the astral body have no organs. The human being perceives his physical environment because he has organs, eyes, and ears. In the morning when the ego and the astral body disappear in the physical body and use these organs the human being perceives the surroundings. We have a four-membered being: a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, and an ego-body.—This is the nature of the alternating states of waking and sleeping.

However, we want to imagine the moment of death now. We can do this, using what such a human being perceives who has applied the methods of initiation and has learnt to use the higher senses slumbering in the human being. In addition, a usual logic can realise this because these facts are portrayed in such a way that they can demonstrate the way of the human being through death. At death, something happens that only happens during the whole life between birth and death in special cases. During the whole life, the etheric body is united with the physical body. Only at death, it separates from it, and thereby the physical body becomes a corpse. Now it follows the merely physical-chemical forces from which it was wrested between birth and death because the etheric body worked in it.

This etheric body is a faithful fighter against the decay of the physical body during the whole life; for the physical body has the chemical and physical forces in itself. This becomes obvious if it is left to its own resources after death: it disintegrates, it is an impossible mixture. The etheric body separates from the physical body and remains together with the astral body and the ego for a while.

This coherence is of big importance. At the moment of death, a comprising painting of his life between birth and death faces the human being. It is, as if an immense panorama of this life which we have experienced stands before our souls. This view, a feeling of extension, of increasing accompanies this reminiscent picture. It is, as if the human being extended and on the inner side the pictures of the past life appeared like in a miraculous panorama.

Where from does this come? It originates because the etheric body is the bearer of memory. As long as it is in the physical body, it is bound to the physical body, and it can only survey what it has experienced in the physical body between birth and death. The physical body is an obstacle. Because the etheric body is an unclouded, pure bearer of memory, the entire past appears in one single picture after death. Some people who were almost drowning or fell off a rock and were close to death remember that the whole life stood before their souls at this moment. I could tell a lot to you, however, I only want to mention what you can read in a book to which I have pointed once. However, the criminal anthropologist Moritz Benedikt (1835–1920, Austrian neurologist), a man who would regard everything that was said here as the biggest nonsense and fantasy—this does not matter—, tells that when he was close to drowning his whole life faced him like a big painting. What happens in such a case? A spontaneous relaxation of the physical body and the etheric body happens which is removed immediately again. The result of this fact is that the commemorative contents of the whole life stand before the human soul for a quite short interval.

Thus, this reminiscent picture stands before the human soul first. Then the time comes in which the etheric body separates from the astral body and from the ego. However, there remains a rest of the etheric body that is connected with the human being, the essence of the last life. Imagine this extract, this life essence in such a way, as if you could summarise the contents of a thick book skilfully on one page, but in such a way that a human being could rebuild the contents of the book. A sort of such a life essence is attached to the human being for all future, after he has removed what he cannot use for his further development. We especially want to notice this. What is attached there to the human being for his future development is the fruit of the last life. Each life constitutes something like a page in the big book of life and all our earth-lives are put down in such a page. They are attached to our being. We take such a fruit from a life with us in all the coming ones. This fruit has a great significance for the further development of the human being.

However, before we can go into the significance of this life essence, we must closer consider the further course of the human being after death. After this life painting was there for a quite short interval, the human being experiences another time after death that we can characterise in the following way. The human being has his ego, his astral body, and the above-mentioned extract.

Let us take one of the usual experiences, the experience of a gourmet who enjoys a tasty dish. By which does the enjoyment come about? Somebody may attribute it only to the physical body. However, this would be absurd. Not the physical body, but the astral body is the bearer of desires, of joy and sorrow. The astral body has the enjoyment, and it develops the desire for the tasty dish. The physical body is an apparatus of physical materials, of physical and chemical forces. It delivers the tools that the astral body can satisfy these desires. This is the relation of the astral body to the physical body in life. The astral body cries for satisfying its desires, and the physical body delivers the tools, the palate, the tongue etc. by which it can satisfy its desires. What does now happen at death? The physical body is cast off and all instruments of satisfaction with it. The astral body, however, is there, and it is easy to realise that this astral body does not break of its hedonism, its desires automatically only because the physical tools are taken from it. The astral body keeps the desire, the addiction after death, although it lacks the physical tools by which it can satisfy it. The astral body develops the desire for tasty dishes etc., but there is no palate. On the other hand, it is, as if a human being suffers from burning thirst in surroundings where no water is far and wide. For no other reason it cannot satisfy the desire after death because it has no organs for it. Thus, it suffers pain because of the desire, until it has eradicated the desire root and branch by non-satisfaction.

This time of purification can appear to any possible degree. We take two human beings, the one is completely merged in the sensuous enjoyments, his life is filled with any possible enjoyment from the morning to the evening which one can have only in the physical world where the tools exist to its satisfaction. He identifies his whole inside with his physical body. A human being who identifies himself in such way with the physical body will have a more difficult existence after death than someone who already sees through the sensuous things what is spiritual-mental, supersensible. On the other side, take someone who beholds a nice scenery or enjoys a musical work. This human being can realise a manifestation of the spirit in the smallest, most unimportant things. One likes to choose the pleasure of a nice scenery or of a good composition as examples because the matter can be illustrated easier with it. Somebody who hears the riddles of the everlasting in the world rushing in the harmonies and melodies of a composition who can open his soul in a nice scenery to the spiritual harmonies and relations breaks away as a mental-spiritual being already in this life between birth and death from that what is bound to the physical. What shines through the physical, what is felt sounding through the physical is a possession that remains to us and which we have not to purify; for that what drops from us is only the outer garment. Contemplate once in your deepest inside how something makes known itself in the musical work that is purely spiritual. It is concealed in the sensuous manifestations and penetrates it by the means of the sensuous manifestation. That belongs to the spirit, to the soul, from which the human being does not need to break away after death.

Thus, you realise that there are degrees of that what one has to endure, and these degrees are determined by the fact how strongly the human being has identified himself with that what he only can experience and enjoy by his organs in the physical world.

There is now, so to speak, a perspective that needs not to be an immediate reality for the present human being because there is no one with whom the conditions come true to this perspective completely. Nevertheless, it exists. We take a human being who gives his ego completely up to that what only the physical body and its organs in connection with the physical outside world can enjoy and who has no interest in anything that forms the basis as spiritual-mental contents of this sensuous outside world. Briefly, we take a human being who looks only at the earth and identifies himself only with that what forms his body. What will be the result? We can recognise this if we investigate the riddles of the human being even more exactly.

We have to adhere if we want to do this to that what the human being takes as a life essence of his etheric body. What originates from this life essence? From this fruit of the preceding life, the human being builds up his next incarnation, the body of his next life. For that, what the human being develops gradually is a product of inheritance. However, this product of inheritance is elastic in certain way.

The human being cannot be built up only by the attributes of the inheritance, but—as in an elastic corporeality—that works and weaves what he has brought from former lives. Thus, we see the incorporated fruits of the former life and of all former lives in a human being except the inherited attributes. If we ask ourselves, what does this entail if the human being lives from embodiment to embodiment in such a way? Then we can say, it is the way of perfection by the earth-lives. The human being entered his first life with forces that were primitive in relation to the forces that work with the most human beings today. When he entered his first incarnation, he had little mental power by which he could direct the mental to the physical and etheric bodies. Then he enjoyed the fruits of the first life, took the fruit of the first life and the result of it was that the next life could become a more perfect one. Because the human being can add the experiences of the following lives to those of the first life, he creates a more and more perfect, self-contained harmonious earth existence. Any new life appears to us on a higher level. However, you see two forces working into each other. You see, after the human being has passed the gate of death, the life essence, the forces of the former life that are preserved for the future, the forces which can make the human being more and more perfect. Thus, the power of the human being is increased from life to life.

However, when the ego leaves the physical body, you see the forces that chain him repeatedly to the past physical existence. Indeed, after death the human existence consists of advancing and of retarding forces.

Now look once again briefly at these retarding forces about which we have spoken, that from which the human being must break away after death root and branch. If nothing else were added, the human being would be only equipped with the fertile forces of his past life for the future existence. Indeed, the human being breaks away from all that what chains him, so to speak, to the former lives, he breaks away from all desires. However, he cannot break away from one thing. A rest remains. This rest is prepared between birth and death. It is not there when the human being enters life. After he has entered life, he grows into the physical world, and his adhering to the desire of the physical world is something that the human being causes only in the course of this life that he only draws in his being. Now we can form the mental picture that that what the human being draws gradually in his being is something that does not contribute to his further development that would make this further development even impossible if he were exposed solely to these forces. Because he brings that all in his life and because it can be taken up by life, it is the life between birth and death that brings the retarding forces in the human being.

On one side, there is the experience of life that we take as a fruit, and on the other side, it chains us to the physical world that we carry then continuously in ourselves. On the one side, it is that what wants to lift out of the embodiment, on the other side, it brings us repeatedly to this world, until we are so far that we have completely overcome everything that brings us together with the physical world at the end of our existence. Thus, the human being has a power permanently in himself that furthers him, and another that is a retarding one. We see the human existence consisting of advancing and of retarding, hampering forces.

You can see in detail how these advancing and hampering forces affect each other. Take the human eye; it is formed, as Goethe says, “in the light for the light.” If we had no eye, we would not see the light. However, if the light were not there, the eye would also not be. The light has developed the eye. Because the light creates the eye, it inhibits the development and the developmental stream, which has preceded. Because in the distant past the light worked on the human body, this eye was elicited from it. For that purpose, it had to retard the force only that would have been vitality in another direction. After long work of the other forces, the eye will be only ripe to become an organ that furthers the development again. Thus, you see at this example, that the retardations, the hampering forces, are substantially necessary.

Now we see how wonderfully wisely it is established in this human life, while on one side the forward pressing forces of evolution are there, and on the other side the repelling forces. These repelling forces chain the human being to the physical world, which give him the organs in the physical world between birth and death by which he acquires the strength for the progress again. If the hampering forces were not there, the human being would not enter the life between birth and death and would not grow into the covers through which the spiritual-mental appears to him. Now he works by the life that the hampering forces created. Thus, the human being owes the fruits of progress to the hampering forces.

There is a big riddle concealed that in life the progressive forces must co-operate with the hampering ones. Now it can happen that the human being balances the progressive forces and the hampering ones, or that he connects himself completely with the hampering forces that he grows together completely with the forces which are generated only in the physical body as means of progress, however, he regards them not as means, but as an end in itself. In this case, the spiritual-mental of the human being would break away from any progress. It would fall out and the time of kamaloka, the time of purification, which consists of the fact that the human being casts off what connects him in microcosm with the physical world, this time would become something absolute.

This faces us as an extreme. However, because the human being grows never together completely with the sensuous world because he is able to avoid this extreme perspective in his mental, in his inside, he escapes from the extreme. However, if he were in such a way that his interest never stuck to that what shines through as a spiritual-mental—this faces us as a perspective, however, it is not reached in this life—, then it would squeeze in the active forces of life. Then it would become obvious there that the human being would tear out himself from all spiritual-mental because he has grown together with the physical-sensuous world. We assume this case. Now the human being should be placed into the spiritual-mental world after death. He brings nothing for the spiritual-mental world but the invincible tendency to the physical-sensuous world. This reminiscent picture sticks to him and presses like a weight of lead. The human being gets the hardened material, converted into the spiritual, into the spiritual world. He is connected inseparably with the forces that detain and hamper any development and evolution. This is the idea of the infernal existence.

Hence, the time of purification extends in the last perspective to that state where without understanding of the spiritual-mental world the ego has stuck to the wholly physical-sensuous and brings nothing but the understanding of the physical-sensuous. This understanding of the physical-sensuous is the infernal torture in the spiritual even if it also is an infinitely satisfying enjoyment in the sensuous existence. We try to understand the above-mentioned words of Faust now. If the infernal messenger wants to have him, what must be achieved? It must be achieved that Faust does not suck out the germ of further development from the moments of the bodily existence, but that he has to get stuck into it at these moments of the physical existence in such a way that he wants to retain them in his sensuousness. “If I should ever say to any moment: tarry remain—you are so fair!” Then you have me! The human being can make this pact with the infernal powers that he combines with these forces hampering the progress. However, we see at the same time that it was necessary that these hampering forces came into being in the human evolution.

We examine next time what the human being was at that time when he appeared in the physical body for the first time, and where from he brought it. Now we know that the human being consists of progressive and backward forces. If the human being had no hampering forces in those days when he entered the physical body for the first time, he would have remained in that spiritualised form in which he was before the incarnation. Because the hampering organs developed in him, the spirit penetrated the sensuous and could take the fruits of the sensuous, could get rich more and more. The progressive forces are those, which had to create the organs of progress only. They have to hamper a former development, so that a later development becomes possible. Nobody has the right to complain obstacles in life.

The conservative element is a benefit, as long as it is in the service of humanity; it becomes an impediment if it is made an end in itself. The same applies after life. The impediment is, considered in the service of the spirit, the highest bearer of progress. If one regards it, however, as an end in itself or uses it egoistically, then it is the germ of the hell. Thus, that from which all human faculties originate on earth can become an end in itself, a germ of the hell if the human being unites with it at an inopportune moment.

We now understand the Nordic legend. The spiritual germ of the current culture has arisen from Niflheim. It had to go through the old cultures, but it also had to go beyond them, while it took the fruits in the present incarnation. Those human beings who do not use the present incarnation in the spiritual-mental sense condemn themselves to be thrown back to a level which was beneficent in its kind at its time as means of progress but which now hampers. Thus, that which is a means of progress at its time becomes the infernal element if it survives in the human existence. The hell did not always control Niflheim. The good elements of the human being held on Niflheim up to the time when they have developed beyond this stage.

Thus, we really see bad and evil, infernal and heavenly forces working in the human life and flowing out from him as Schiller says it in the cited poem. The beneficent element becomes a consuming, hampering element if it is not used in the right way,—as well as the fire is beneficent if the human being controls it, while it can become “terrible,” if “it, casting off its shackles, strides along on tracks its own.” The infernal powers also appear, if they enter the human life “on tracks their own.”

We understand why the great spirits have thought or felt such deep connections, and thought and felt the same that spiritual science puts before our souls. We have recognised the infernal element as something that is necessary for our life; we will get to know that element even closer next time, which will give us light about the whole. We get to know the bright heaven in the light of true spiritual science. However, already from the today's talk we can see that it is right what Dante (D. Alighieri, ~1265–1321, Italian poet) pronounces in the last line of his song about the hell. Dante just also believed at first to have to look at the strong, hampering forces in life, before he formed a mental picture of those progressive forces in which all welfare and all human development is contained. We will also attain clues for the usual, everyday life if we can balance regression and progress properly. It will become obvious where the hampering forces threaten to become the infernal ones, and where they turn out to be beneficent, while they rise to the advancing powers. Dante describes it if he sees himself beguiled by the infernal powers under the guidance of Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro, 70–19 B.C., Roman poet), then he comes out as a victor over all hampering powers, and the luminous stars appear at the distant firmament to him whose soul “is swollen with pleasure.”

The Gospel of John differs in many respects from the others. Thus, nothing is presented there [in direct] narrative. It always says that one or the other has seen something, that one or the other has been seen. How are we to understand this?

A large part of what is described in the Gospel of John is to be regarded as abstract, inner experiences, as instances of spiritual clairvoyance. When it says, for example, that Nicodemus “came to Jesus by night, this should not be taken literally. It is trivial to interpret it as if he came at night because he was ashamed to come during the day. We are dealing here with an astral experience. Nicodemus went to Jesus in his astral body at night, while his physical body slept, to receive instruction. This event took place not as a physical personality, not with physical steps, but in the astral world; Nicodemus experienced it as a sleeper. He had the conversation that is described to us in the night in the astral. Nicodemus was exceptionally clairvoyant. He was able to travel astrally to Christ Jesus and have that conversation. That which Christ was could therefore take place in a special experience for those who were meant to perceive it.

In this way, through strange experiences, it became clear to many who Jesus actually was. Thus, John the Baptist had also clairvoyantly seen Jesus as the Lamb of God - as the sacrificial animal of God - that is, the ego in man. This ego in the symbol of the lamb had been sacrificed unceasingly in pre-Christian times; in other words, man had to sacrifice his ego in order to do God's will. This I or Lamb of God was now to be transformed through Christ into the Son of Man.

[Using the Nicodemus narrative as a model, we need to understand why, upon the testimony of John the Baptist, it is revealed that Jesus is the Christ, the God of our cosmos. Therefore, the Gospel of John does not tell us that the Spirit descended upon Jesus, nor does it vividly describe the baptism, but rather says that John the Baptist describes his experience in such a way that he saw clairvoyantly how the dove descended. - Otherwise one would not understand why the Gospels seemingly contradict each other if they are not understood to mean that seers describe their spiritual experiences here.]

The gospel of John does not describe the baptism, but only the astral experience of the Baptist, when he, as a seer, saw Jesus inspired by the spirit in the form of a dove. This must be particularly taken into account if one wants to understand the spiritual meaning of this gospel. The Baptist was only clairvoyant at times, he could not look back on his previous incarnations. His mission was to show people that they should now acquire their clear sense of self, because now was the time to do so. But John the Baptist had to pay for this mission by having his own sense of self limited to the time between birth and death. Hence his strange answers to the questions of the Jews. When they asked if he was the Christ, he replied, “I am not.” And when they asked if he was Elijah, he said, “No.” Contrary to these words of his, Jesus solemnly testifies that John the Baptist was the reincarnated Elijah.

What is the source of this contradiction? John did not know people by their past lives, he did not know that he was Elijah returned. To fulfill his mission in the world, he had to sacrifice that dark, half-dreaming clairvoyance through which people in former times were directly connected to the spiritual world and could look back on their past forms of existence. Therefore, true to his mission, he pointed to Jesus as a human being in whom a higher consciousness was already developed and who therefore carried the Heavenly Kingdom within himself and could help people to regain the consciousness they had had before.

In order for the ego to develop, it was necessary for people to concentrate their energies and learn to make the most of their lives on earth and understand its great significance. Therefore, a veil had to fall over the past so that people could no longer see their earthly lives as a small link in a long chain. By the time of the Baptist, however, self-awareness had been fully developed and was now to be developed into an even higher consciousness.

In the Gospel of John, we can follow step by step how Jesus himself rises from direct self-awareness to God-awareness by uniting with and merging into all other living beings. The power of his insight and will comes across to us here as in no other gospel. Significant in this regard are Jesus' words to Nathanael when he is first led to him. Jesus calls him a “true Israelite.” What did he mean by that? To understand this expression, we have to go back to the ancient mysteries for a moment.

For example, if we examine the Persian Mithraic mysteries, we find that the three great stages of initiation were divided into seven degrees. The initiates of the first degree were called the “messengers of the raven” – “raven” corresponds to “messenger”;

- the initiates of the second degree, the 'occult man';
- the initiates of the third degree, the 'soldier';
- the initiates of the fourth degree, the 'lion';
- the initiate of the fifth degree, a 'true Persian';
- the initiate of the sixth degree, the 'solar hero';
- the initiate of the seventh degree, 'father, magician'.

The initiate of the first degree had to learn everything there was to learn; he still had one foot in the outer world. Through his studies in the spiritual world, he could be a messenger between this world and the outer world. That is why it is said of Wotan that he was always accompanied by his ravens.

The initiate of the second degree, the <«occult man», had experiences in the spiritual world through imaginations, but he did not have the right to share his occult experiences with others. In general, the various degrees and the legitimacy of the students were strictly observed. Thus, for example, the occult man had to mature before he was given the opportunity to share with others what he had learned through occult means. Only after he had matured spiritually could he enter the third degree and become a “warrior,” an enunciator, an apostle of the spiritual world.

The initiate of the fourth degree - or of the “Lion” - had to be completely free of all self-assertion; in relation to the truth, he was not allowed to have his own point of view or his own opinion. This view is in complete conflict with what is considered correct in our days, since everyone has to have their point of view and their opinion. Mathematics is currently the only field in which individuals no longer believe that they can assert their own opinions. The initiate of the fourth degree, on the other hand, was never allowed to let his own thoughts and feelings interfere when it came to spiritual truths; because only those who do not have their own opinions can penetrate to the truth, as an old sage says. Considering himself as the instrument of the truth, as the vessel of the truth, he should not speak his own thoughts, but only what he had been taught. His standard should be: What does the truth think about it?

Then he was ready to ascend to a higher degree, the fifth degree. Until then, he had only been an expression of the feelings and thoughts of individual people. The initiate of the fifth degree should embody the spirit and soul of the people. The astral, the etheric and the ego in the individual human being are, so to speak, embedded in the national spirit, which is a concrete individuality, although without an outer physical body. The national spirit gives expression to everything that happens in a single nation, to all its feelings and characteristics – just as Buddha's Nirmanakaya gives its etheric body to various individualities and lives in them. In the Mithras Mysteries, such an initiate was called a “true Persian”. He was, so to speak, a mouthpiece for the entire nation, and those who heard him knew that the national spirit was speaking through him. But when such a high individuality has had all the experiences that he can have through a particular nation, he withdraws from that nation, which then falls into degeneration and decline. The spirit of a nation actually lives a more real life than the individual human being, but it usually speaks only through the whole nation. But if it ever speaks through an individual human being, it is always through someone who is not expressing his or her own individual opinion. The initiate in Palestine was called a “true Israelite” in the fifth degree, like Nathanael.

The initiate of the sixth degree was called a “solar hero” because not only the spirit of a people, but the spirit of an entire solar system spoke through him. He could not deviate from his path any more than the sun itself could, and he was subject to the solar system, to the laws of the solar spirit, just as the initiate of the fifth degree was subject to the laws of the spirit of the people.

Those who had penetrated the farthest came to the father of the solar system. Through them spoke the Father Spirit - the Spirit of the All-Father and they were an expression of his will and his law. There were places where these initiation methods were strictly followed, but even in the time of Jesus much of it had degenerated into empty ceremonies. Therefore, when Jesus said to Nathanael that he was a true “Israelite”, we learn not only that Jesus knew that Nathanael was a fifth-degree initiate, but also that at the time of Jesus there was a temple of initiation in Israel. But to know that Nathanael was an initiate, Jesus himself had to be an even higher initiate, which he also confirms when he says that he had met Nathanael under the fig tree.

What is meant by this statement? The fig tree or buddhi tree is a symbol of the family tree of humanity, whose branches, twigs and leaves are symbols of the individual ethnic groups, families and human souls. To sit under the fig tree means to identify with one's tribe, to feel at one with one's people, and indicates the initiate's position in relation to his people.

On the astral plane, that is, by clairvoyant means, Jesus had seen Nathanael as a fifth-degree initiate, and that is why he said he had seen him under the fig tree. Nathaniel immediately understands that no one other than a high initiate could have known this about him, and that is why he calls Jesus “the Son of God” and “the King of Israel.” But not only was Nathaniel allowed to see the souls of the people afterward, but he also saw angels ascending and descending from heaven. This means that his eyes were opened to the spiritual reasons and all the secrets of the cosmos.

This story thus suggests that there was indeed spiritual knowledge in Israel at the time of Jesus, and that this people had their mysteries, but also that Jesus knew about them and had this spiritual knowledge himself.

But the Gospel of John not only shows us that Jesus knows everything, but also that his will is strong enough to merge with others and work in them. Basically, every human being is a limited and isolated being. It was Christ who gave humanity the first impulse towards spiritual brotherhood. Through this impulse, people were to be brought closer together, and a bond was to be formed between souls that would gradually awaken a sense of belonging between different peoples over the centuries. Before Christ, nothing like this had been possible. Love did exist, but it was in the blood and never extended beyond the family and tribe within which all marital ties were formed. But if self-awareness was to be developed, this point of view had to be abandoned.

The blood ties that had so strongly bound people to tribes and peoples gradually began to dissolve as people increasingly entered into “distant relationships” outside of their tribe and people. As a result of the fragmentation that arose from this, people increasingly fell into unkindness and selfishness. In this case, the history of Rome gives us a typical picture of the prevailing situation. If the Christ had not come at that time and given the world a mighty impulse of spiritual brotherly love, people would have become more and more separated from each other and ultimately quite estranged from each other. With the Christ, however, the world received a new impulse. The blood tie was not to be dissolved, but love for father, mother and brother was no longer to be the only tie between people. Something new had been added, something much higher and more powerful than the old, namely, universal love for one's fellow man, the kinship of souls that unites souls with each other. “He who cannot value spiritual love more than love for father and mother cannot be my disciple.”

But in order for this new impulse of love to flow into and permeate people, it was necessary for Jesus to have the greatest willpower. At the wedding at Cana, he gave proof for the first time of this willpower, which was so strong and so pure that it could, as it were, pass into other people and determine the impressions [of those] who received it. How should we understand this? Let us assume that two people are standing next to each other and one of them drinks a glass of water. If the other person is capable of a strong volitional impulse, he can influence the taste organ of the other person in such a way that the water in his mouth tastes like something completely different, like wine, for example. For our experiences do not depend so much on the material that conveys the impressions, but rather on our way of reacting to the impressions we receive. Thus, wine or water becomes something completely different for us, depending on whether we look at it from a materialistic or a spiritual point of view.

In my book Grundlage einer Erkenntnistheorie (The Foundation of an Epistemology), I thoroughly discuss my thoughts on this question. Behind matter stands the spiritual.

Therefore, if a powerful will imbued with love were to make people taste wine in the water of a well, they would drink this water as willingly as wine. Matter is only a maya – an illusion. The spiritual content that we give to matter is the main thing. In everything that surrounds us, we therefore find not only coarse matter, but also the spirit that is the content of the world. (Changing sensations, that is the content of our world.)

This cannot only be stated by anyone who is clairvoyant, but can also be proven completely logically through theosophy. In the Gospel of John, this spirituality is particularly emphasized. The spirit that works in the God-man Christ Jesus is so strong that it can not only influence other people, but also command their feelings. That is why it is said that Jesus, through his willpower, influenced the water that was poured into the jugs in such a way that it had the same effect on the guests as wine. The guests really felt it – they drank wine. This story shows us what a powerful will, transformed into love, is at work in Christ, for only such a will can shine in others in this way.

It may be said, in a way, that the Gospel of John is full of mystery and can only be fully understood with the help of occult research. For example, it is never mentioned who wrote it, it only speaks of him as a “disciple of the Lord”. Nor does one learn the name of Jesus' mother.

In the story of the wedding at Cana, it is stated that Jesus' mother was there; and she is also mentioned in other places by the name of “Mother of Jesus”. She is never called Mary. If we read the passage about the crucifixion carefully, we see that three women were standing under the cross: Jesus' mother, the sister of his mother, Mary, the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene. So the sister of Jesus' mother was called Mary, and it is hardly credible that two sisters would have the same name.

If we then turn to the Christian mysteries, we do not find 'Mary' as the name of Jesus' mother there either. There she was always called 'Sophia', which means 'wisdom'. There is a mystery behind this fact. At the wedding at Cana, Jesus makes a strange comment to his mother: “Woman,” he says, “what is this that you have brought me?” The usual translation, “Woman, what have I to do with you?” is wrong and directly offensive to the Christian sensibility.

Jesus' words point to a mysterious bond that existed between him and his mother and that he felt strongly at that moment. His mother's words, “Do whatever he tells you,” also suggest a mutual understanding. Just as it takes only a half-hint for two friends to understand each other when there is a secret between them that no one else knows, so it was in Jesus' relationship with his mother.

We have already heard how a change took place in Jesus of Nazareth through baptism. The words that were spoken then, “This is my beloved and faithful Son; in him I am well pleased,” mean in the occult language, which is probably the only language that gives a reasonable explanation of this passage, that the individuality of Christ emerged at that moment in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

At the same time, however, a change also took place in the stepmother of Jesus, the mother of the child Solomon. The father of this child had died early. When the ego of Zarathustra passed into the child Nathan and the child Solomon died, the mother of the child Nathan died shortly afterwards. The mother of the Solomonic child then moved with her children to the father of the Nathanic child and thus became the stepmother of Jesus. At the moment when the individuality of Christ took possession of the body of Jesus, a transformation also occurred in his mother. She was enlightened and radiant through the deceased, spiritualized mother, who entered the Solomonic mother as a spiritual individuality. Thereby she regained her virginity. This mother, who lives without birth, is Sophia.” The

Virgin Mary - is the Sophia of the mysteries, the divine wisdom or the Virgin Mary - Madonna.

This is the mystery of the mother of Jesus. It was this Mother Sophia, the divine wisdom, who was in Cana. Between her and Jesus there was a bond of love, a power of love that could be transferred to others and could influence them. At the basis of this bond between Jesus and his spiritualized mother, his own power of life and will could be transmitted to other people. Consequently, the Madonna is the union of the ego of the Solomon-like mother with the pure and spiritualized etheric and astral body of the Nathan-like mother. The old masters were right when they depicted the Madonna as childlike and absolutely pure, for example, in Michelangelo's Pietà.

[ 1 ] The preceding discussion aimed to throw light on the relationship between knowing one’s essential being and knowing the objective nature of the world. What does it mean for us to become familiar with concepts (Erkenntnis) and to develop and practice science (Wissenschaft)? This was the question to which we sought the answer.

[ 2 ] We have seen that the innermost core of the world plays out in our knowing. The lawful harmony, by which the world-all will be governed, comes into human awareness through appearance. [ 3 ] It is therefore part of man's job to transfer the basic laws of the world, which otherwise govern all existence, but would never come into existence themselves, into the arena of apparent reality. This is the nature of knowing, that it represents the foundation of the world that can never be found in objective reality. Our familiarity with concepts, figuratively speaking, is a constant living into the foundation of the world.

[ 4 ] Such a conviction must also shed light on our practical view of life. [ 5 ] The entire character of one’s lifestyle is determined by moral ideals. These are the ideas we have about our tasks in life, or in other words, what we are supposed to accomplish through our actions.

[ 6 ] Our actions are part of general world events. It is therefore also subject to the general laws of these events. [ 7 ] If an event occurs somewhere in the universe, two things must be distinguished about it: its external course in space and time and its inner lawfulness.

[ 8 ] Awareness of this lawfulness for human activity is only a special case of awareness. The views we have derived about the nature of knowing must therefore also be applicable here. Recognizing oneself as an active personal entity, therefore, means maintaining familiarity (for our actions) with the corresponding laws, namely with moral concepts and ideals. If we have recognized this lawfulness, then our behavior is also our work. Lawfulness is then not something given, lying outside of the object, onto which happenings appear, but as the content of the activity of the object itself. The object in this case is our own self, our “I”, our ego. If our ego has thoroughly infused its essential behavior with real awareness, then it feels at once the master of its behavior. So long as this does not take place, the laws of action appear to us as something alien, they dominate us. What we accomplish is under the pressure they exert on us. Once they have been transformed from such a foreign entity into our very own activity, then this compulsion ceases. The compulsion has become our own nature. The law no longer rules over us, but rather within us over the events emanating from our ego. The realization of an event by means of a law that is external to the person who realizes it is an act of bondage, while the realization of an event by the person who realizes it is an act of freedom. Recognizing the laws of one's actions means being aware of one's freedom. According to our explanations, the process of knowing is the developmental process towards freedom.

[ 9 ] Not all human actions have this character. In many cases we do not have any knowledge of the laws that govern our actions. That part of our activity is the unfree part of our work. Opposite that is the activity in which we fully accept these laws. That is the free arena. Insofar as our life belongs to the free arena, it can only be described as moral. The transformation of the first area into one with the character of the second is the task of every individual’s development, as well as that of whole of mankind.

[ 10 ] The most important problem of all human thinking is this: to understand a person as a self-grounded, free personality.

Rudolf Steiner was awarded a doctorate in Philosophy at the University of Rostock in 1891. To his doctoral dissertation he added a preface and a final chapter,¹ and this was published as Wahrheit und Wissenschaft, now in its 6^th edition (GA3). This is a new English translation of this seminal work, in which he first puts forth a world-view that combines perceptions with concepts, as two sides of a whole.

Wahrheit is cognate with the English word awareness and Wissenschaft with the phrase wising-up-ship. Wahrheit is being aware of the truth of what is in the surrounding world, rather than what we want it to be. Wissenschaft is a more mature activity of seeing perceptions and concepts with clarity and logic, in the sense of "I see what you mean". Seeing comes from the Latin verb scire, the noun form of which is sciēns, and so the title becomes Truth and Science. In translating Wissenschaft as science, however, one must remember that the scientific method can be applied to more than just sense impressions and sensory-derived concepts.

Erkentnistheorie and Wissenschaftslehre occur frequently in the text, and unfortunately both have been translated as epistemology, a Latin-derived term introduced into English philosophy in 1854 by James Frederick Ferrier.² The term epistemology did not exist when Fichte wrote his Wissenschaftslehre in 1794. Steiner chose indigenous words rather than Latin-derived words whenever possible, and expounded on this in his 1919 lectures on the Genius of Language. I have tried to do the same. The stem word of Erkenntnistheorie is to know (in the Scottish dialect to ken), and the prefix er- makes it an inner knowing of concepts and intuitions. In this sense Erkenntnistheorie becomes the Theory of Knowing. Wissenschaftslehre becomes the “Principles of Science” itself, or one might say, the doctrine of scientific awareness.

Another problem arises in translating das Ich as the “I”, which sounds awkward in English and is how Steiner said people refer to their ego after death. We must remember that the ego is that part of a person out of which he can say “I am”. It is not used in the Freudian sense of the conscious self in relation to the unconscious id and the adopted cultural rules of the superego. We share soul-nature with the animals, and the divisions of psychology traditionally are thinking, feeling, and willing. We do not share ego-nature with the animals, for it involves spirit-activities such as art, music, humor, belief, recognition, scientific thinking, technique, laughter, and weeping.

Translating Geist as spirit was clouded over at the Council of Constantinople of 869, which declared that people had only soul, and not spirit. Whether this was due to evil intent ³ or due to limitations of the Latin language ⁴ is unclear, but it resulted in the split of Roman Catholicism (which used Latin) and Eastern Orthodox (which used Greek). For Greek speakers psyche continued to be distinct from pneuma, which persisted in German speakers with the indigenous words Seele and Geist. English speakers still have the indigenous word soul, but must use the word spirit rather than ghost (which has too many psychological associations).

John Riedel MD
3/19/2024

• 1. Martina Maria Sam, Prädikat nicht beantragt Zur Benotung von Rudolf Steiners Promotion, Das Goetheanum 3–4 · 2023, p12-15.
• 2. Ferrier posited, much like Steiner, that one cannot conceive of a thing-in-itself because the synthesis of subject-with-object is the minimum unit of cognition, of knowing. https://iep.utm.edu/ferrier/
• 3. R Steiner, Building Stones for an Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, GA 175, Lecture I, Berlin, March 27th, 1917
• 4. John Bickford Heard, The Tripartate Nature of Man, Chapter 1, 1868.

In these two lectures I should like to speak to you from the point of view of Spiritual Research, on the question so frequently and urgently put: “What is the meaning of life?” If in these two evenings we are to get anywhere near this subject we shall have to create first of all a kind of foundation or basis, on which to construct the edifice of knowledge, and from this deduce the answer in outline.

When we contemplate the things around us, those which exist for our ordinary sense-perception and our ordinary experience, and then turn to our own life, the result is at best the formulation of a question—the presentation of an oppressive, a painful problem. We see how the beings of external nature arise and decay. We can observe every year in spring how the earth, stimulated by the forces of the sun and the universe, bestows on us the plants which sprout and bud and bear fruit through the summer. Towards autumn, we see how they decay and pass away. Some remain indeed throughout the year, some for very many years, for instance, our long-lived trees. But of these also we know that even though in many cases they may outlive us, they also pass away at last, disappear and sink down into that which, in the great world of nature, is the realm of the lifeless. Especially do we know that even in the greatest phenomena of nature there rules this growth and decay: even the continents on which our civilisations develop did not exist in times past, for they have only risen in the course of time, and we know for certain that they will one day pass away.

Thus we see around us growth and decay; we can trace it in the plant kingdom and in the mineral kingdom as well as in the animal kingdom. What is the meaning of it all? Ever an arising, ever a passing away all around us! What is the meaning of this arising and this passing away? When we consider our own life, and see how we have lived through years and decades, we can recognise there also this coming into being and decay. When we call to mind the days of our childhood: they are vanished and only the memory of them remains. This stirs within us anxious questionings about life. The most important thing is that we ourselves have progressed a little through it, that we have become wiser. Usually, however, it is only when we have accomplished something, that we know how it ought to have been done. If we are no longer in a position to do a thing better, we still know how much better it might have been done, so that actually our mistakes become a part of our life; but it is just through our mistakes and errors that we gain our widest experiences.

A question is put to us, and it seems as if that which we can grasp with our senses and our intellect is unable to answer it. That is the position of man to-day; all that surrounds him confronts him with the problem, with the question: “What is the meaning of existence as a whole?” and particularly “Why has man his peculiar position within this existence?”

An extremely interesting legend of Hebrew antiquity tells us that in those old Hebrew times there was a consciousness that this anxious question which we formulated as to the meaning of life, and especially as to the meaning of man, occurs not only to man, but to beings quite other than man. This legend is extremely instructive and runs as follows:—When the Elohim were about to create man after their own image and likeness, the so-called ministering angels, certain spiritual beings of a lower grade than the Elohim themselves, asked Jahve or Jehovah: “Why is man to be made in the image and likeness of God!” Then Jehovah collected—so continues the legend—the animals and the plants which could already spring forth on earth before man was there in his earthly form, and He gathered together the angels also, the so-called ministering angels—those who immediately served Him. To those He showed the animals and plants and asked them what they were called, what were their names? But the Angels did not know the names of the animals and plants. Then man was created, as he was before the Fall. And again Jehovah gathered around him Angels, animals and plants, and in the presence of the Angels he asked man what the animals whom He made to pass by in succession before man’s eyes, were called, what their names were. And behold! Man was able to answer: “This animal has this name, that animal has that, this plant has this name, that plant has that,” Then Jehovah asked man: “And what is thine own name?” And man said: “I must be called Adam.” (Adam is related to Adama, and means: “Out of the earth: earth-being”). Jehovah then asked man: “And what am I myself to be called?” “Thou shalt be called Adonai,” man replied, “Thou art the Lord of all created beings of the earth.” The Angels now began to have an idea of the meaning of man’s existence on the earth. Though religious tradition and religious writings often express the most important riddle of life in the simplest way, there are many difficulties in understanding them, because we have to get behind their simplicity. We must first penetrate into the meaning behind them. If we succeed in this, great wisdom and deep knowledge are revealed. It may well be so with this legend, which we shall just keep in mind for a moment, for these two lectures will give us, in some sort, an answer to the question which it contains.

Now you know that there is a religion which has put the question as to the meaning and value of life by placing it in a wonderful form into the mouth of its own founder. You all know the story of the Buddha, how it tells us that when he left the palace in which he was born, and came face to face with the real facts of life, of which in that incarnation he had as yet learned nothing, he was most profoundly dismayed, and pronounced the judgment: “Life is suffering,” which as we know comprises the four statements: “Birth is suffering—disease is suffering—old age is suffering—death is suffering,” and to which is added “to be united with those we do not love is suffering, to be separated from those we love is suffering, not to be able to attain that to which we aspire is suffering.” We know then that to the adherents of this religion the meaning of life can be summed up by saying: “Life, which is suffering, only acquires a meaning when it is conquered, when it transcends itself.” All the various religions, all philosophies and views of life, are, after all, attempts to answer the question as to the meaning of life. Now, we are not going to approach the question in an abstract, philosophical way. Rather we shall review some of the phenomena of life, some of the facts of life, from the point of view of Spiritual Science, in order to see if a deeper occult view of life furnishes us with something wherewith to approach this question as to the meaning of life. Let us take the matter up again at the point we have already touched—the annual growth and decay in physical nature, the life, growth and decay in the plant world. In Spring we see the plants spring up out of the earth, and that which we see there as germinating, budding life, calls forth our joy and delight. We become aware that the whole of our existence is bound up with the plant world, for without it we could not exist. We feel how that which springs up out of the earth at the approach of Summer is related to our own life. We feel in the Autumn how that which in a certain sense belongs to us, again decays.

It is natural for us to compare with our own life that which we see germinating and decaying. For an external observation based only on what can be perceived by the senses and judged by the intellect, it is very natural to compare the vernal springing up of the plants with, let us say, man’s awakening in the morning; and the withering and decaying of the plant world in Autumn with man’s falling asleep at night. But such a comparison is quite superficial. It would leave out of account the real events with which we can already become acquainted through the elementary truths of occultism. What happens when we fall asleep at night? We have learned that we leave our physical and etheric bodies behind in bed. With our astral body and our ego we withdraw from our physical body and etheric body. During the night, from the moment of our falling asleep to the moment of our waking, we are with our astral body and our ego in a spiritual world. From this spiritual world we draw the forces which we require. Not only our astral body and our ego, but our physical and etheric bodies go through a kind of restorative process during our sleep at night, when the latter lie in bed, separated from the astral body and ego.

When one looks clairvoyantly down from the ego upon the astral, the etheric and physical bodies, one sees what has been destroyed by waking life; one sees that that which finds its expression in fatigue, is present as a destructive process and is made good during the night. The whole conscious life of the daytime is in fact, if we look at it in its connection with human consciousness and in its relation to the physical and etheric bodies, a kind of destructive process as regards the physical and etheric bodies. We always destroy something by it, and the fact that we destroy expresses itself in our fatigue. That which is destroyed is made good again at night.

Now if we look at what happens when we have withdrawn our astral body and our ego out of the etheric and physical bodies, it is as if we had left behind us a devastated field. But in the moment we are out of them, out of the physical and etheric bodies, they begin gradually to restore themselves. It is as if the forces belonging to the physical and etheric bodies begin to bud and blossom, and as if an entire vegetation should arise on the scene of destruction. The further night advances and the longer sleep lasts, the more do the forces in the etheric body bud and blossom. The nearer morning approaches and the more we re-enter our physical and etheric bodies with our astral body, the more a kind of withering or drying up sets in as regards the physical and etheric bodies.

In short, when the ego and the astral body look down from the spiritual world on the physical and etheric bodies, they see at night, at the moment of falling asleep, the same phenomenon which we see in the great world outside, when the plants bud and germinate in Spring. Therefore, to make a real comparison, we must compare our falling asleep and the earlier part of the sleep condition at night with Spring in nature; and the time of our awakening, the time in which the ego and the astral body begin to re-enter the physical and etheric bodies, with Autumn, in external nature. Spring corresponds to our falling asleep and Autumn to our awakening.

But how does the matter stand, when the occult observer, he who really can look into the spiritual world, directs his gaze to external nature and watches what takes place there in the course of the year? That which then presents itself to the occult vision teaches us that we must not compare things in an outward, but in an inward way. Occult observation shows that just as the physical and etheric bodies of man are connected with his astral body and his ego, so is there connected with our earth what we call the spiritual part of the earth. The earth also must be compared with a body, a widespread body. If we consider it only as far as its physical part is concerned, it is just as if we were to consider man with regard to his physical body only. We consider the earth completely when we consider it as the body of spiritual beings, in the same way in which, in the case of man, we consider the spirit as being connected with the body, yet there is a distinction. Man has a single nature controlling his physical and etheric bodies; a single psycho-spiritual nature belongs to that which is his physical human body and etheric human body. But there are a great many spirits belonging to the Earth-body. What in man’s psycho-spiritual nature is a unity, is, as regards that of the earth, a multiplicity. This is the chief distinction. With the exception of this difference everything else is in a certain way analogous. To occult vision is revealed how in the same measure as green plants come forth from the earth in Spring, those spirits whom we call the earth-spirits, withdraw from the earth. Only here again they do not, as is the case with man, absolutely leave the earth; they move round it, they pass in a certain way to the other side of the earth. When it is Summer in one hemisphere it is Winter in the other. In the case of the earth, the spiritual part moves from the northern to the southern hemisphere when Summer is approaching in the north. But that does not alter the fact that to the occult vision of a man who experiences the Spring on any given part of the globe, the spirits leave the earth; he sees how they rise and pass out into the cosmos. He does not see them move to the other side, but he sees them go away, in the same way as he sees the ego and the astral body leave man at the moment of his falling asleep. In the Autumn the earth-spirits approach and re-unite themselves with the earth. During the Winter, when the earth is covered with snow, the earth-spirits are directly united with the earth. In fact something similar then begins for the earth to what is found in man: a kind of self-consciousness. During the Summer the spiritual part of the earth knows nothing of what goes on around it in the universe. But in Winter the spirit of the earth knows what is happening in the universe around, just as man, on waking, knows and beholds what is taking place around him.

The analogy is thus complete, only it is the reverse of that which the outer consciousness draws. It is true that if we wish to go into the question fully, we cannot simply say: “When, in Spring, plants bud and spring from the earth, the earth spirits go away,” for with the budding and sprouting of plants there arise, as if out of the depths, out of the interior of the earth, other and mightier spirits. Therefore the mythologies were right when they distinguished between the higher and the nether gods. When man spoke of the gods who left the earth in Spring and returned in Autumn, he spoke of the higher gods. But there were mightier, older, gods, called by the Greeks the Chthonic gods. These arise in Summer when everything is budding and flourishing, and they descend again when in Winter the real earth spirits unite with the body of the earth.

Now, I should here like to mention that a certain idea, taken from scientific and occult research, is of immense importance for human life. For this shows us that when we consider the individual human being, we have really before us something like an image of the great Earth-being itself. What do we see when we turn towards plants which are beginning to sprout and bud? We see exactly the same as takes place in man when his inner life is active, we see how the one exactly corresponds to the other. How single plants are related to the human body, what their significance is for the human body, can only be recognised when such connections are understood. For it is in fact true that, on close examination, one sees how, when man falls asleep, everything begins to sprout and bud in his physical and etheric bodies: how a whole vegetation springs up in him: how man is in reality a tree or a garden in which plants are growing.

Whoever follows this with occult vision sees that the sprouting and germinating within man corresponds to what is germinating and budding in nature without. Thus you can form an idea of what will be possible when, in the future, Anthroposophy—often considered as foolishness to-day—is applied to life and made fruitful. We have for example, a man who has something wrong in his bodily life-activities. Let us now observe, when he falls asleep, what kind of plants are wanting when his physical and etheric bodies begin to develop their vegetation. When we see that on earth whole species of plants are missing, we know that something must be wrong with the life of the earth. And it is the same with the deficiency of certain plants in the physical and etheric bodies of man. In order to make good the defect we have only to seek on the earth for the plants which are missing in the man in question, and introduce their juices either in the form of diet or medicine and then we shall find the relation between medicine and disease. From this example, we see how Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science will intervene directly in life, but we are only at the beginning of these things.

In what I have just said I have given you, in a comparison drawn from nature, some idea of the composition of man and the connection of his whole being with the environment in which he is placed. We shall now look at the matter from a spiritual point of view. Here I would like to call attention to a matter that is of great importance, namely, that our anthroposophical outlook on life, while letting its gaze range over the evolution of mankind from the point of view of occultism, in order to decipher the meaning of existence, gives no preference to any one special creed, or any one view of life over any other. How often has it been emphasised in our occult movement that we can point to that which our earthly humanity experienced and developed immediately after the great Atlantean catastrophe—the Flood. We passed through, as the first great post-Atlantean civilisation, the sacred civilisation of Ancient India. Here, at Copenhagen, we have already spoken of this old sacred Indian civilisation, and we laid stress upon the fact that it was so lofty, that that which has survived in the Vedas or in written tradition is only an echo of it. It is only in the Akashic Records that we can catch glimpses of the primeval teachings that issued from that time. There we gaze on heights which have not been re-attained.

The later epochs had quite a different mission. We know that a descent has taken place since then, but we know also that there will be again an ascent and that, as already mentioned, Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science has to prepare this ascent. We know that in the seventh post-Atlantean age of civilisation, there will be a kind of renewal of the ancient, holy Indian civilisation. We do not give preference to any religious view or creed, for all are measured with the same measure, in every particular they are described: in each the kernel of truth is sought.

The important thing is that essentials be kept in view. We must not allow ourselves to stray in the consideration of the nature of each separate creed, and if we keep this in mind, in approaching the various points of view, we find one fundamental difference. We find views on life which are of a more oriental nature, and others which have permeated our Western civilisation. Once we make this clear to ourselves, we have something which throws light on the meaning of existence. We then find that the ancients were already in possession of something which we have to regain with difficulty, viz., the doctrine of reincarnation. The oriental stream possessed this as something springing from the profoundest depths of existence. You can still realise how the oriental mind shapes the whole of life from this doctrine, when you look at the relation of the oriental to his Bodhisattvas and his Buddhas. If you keep in view how little it concerns the oriental to select a single figure with this or that definite name, as the ruling power in human evolution, you see at once how he attaches much more importance to tracing the individuality which goes on from life to life. Orientals say that there are such and such a number of Bodhisattvas, high beings who have sprung from men, but who have gradually evolved to a height which we can describe by saying: A Being has passed through many incarnations, and then has become a Bodhisattva, as did Gautama, the son of King Sudhodana. He was Bodhisattva and became Buddha. The name Buddha, however, is given to many, because they passed through many incarnations, became Bodhisattva, and then ascended to the next higher stage, that of Buddhahood. The name Buddha is a generic name. It denotes a degree of human attainment, and has no sense apart from the spiritual being who goes through many incarnations. Brahmanism fully agrees with Buddhism in regarding the individual who goes through the different personalities, rather than the single person. It comes to the same whether the Buddhist says:—“A Bodhisattva is destined to ascend to the highest degree of human attainment, and for this he has to go through many incarnations; but for me the highest is the Buddha.” Or whether the adherent of Brahmanism says: “The Bodhisattvas are indeed highly developed beings, who ascend to Buddhahood, but they are inferior to the Avatars, who are higher spiritual individualities.” You see, consideration of the persisting spiritual entity is what characterises both these oriental points of view.

But now let us turn to the West, and see what is the thing of greatest importance there. In order to enter a little more deeply into this connection, we must consider the ancient Hebrew point of view, where the personal element enters. When we speak of Plato, of Socrates, of Michelangelo, of Charlemagne, or of others, we are always speaking of a person: we place before men the separate life of the personality with all that this personality has done for mankind. In our Western life we do not direct our attention to the life which has gone from personality to personality, for it has been the mission of Western civilisation to direct attention for a time to the single life. When in the East the Buddha is spoken of, it is understood that the designation “Buddha” is an honourable title which may be applied to many personalities. When, on the contrary, the name “Plato” is uttered, we know that this refers only to a single personality. This has been the education of the West.

Let us now turn to our own day. In Western civilisation, mankind has been trained for a time to direct his attention to the personality, but the individual element, the “individuality” has now to be added to the personal element. We stand now at the point where we must reconquer the individual element, but strengthened, vivified, by the contemplation of the personal.

Let us take a definite case. In this connection we look back to the old Hebrew civilisation, which preceded that of the West. Let us turn our attention to the mighty personality of the prophet Elijah. To begin with, we may describe him as a personality. In the West he is seldom regarded in any other way. If we leave aside details and look at the personality from a wider point of view, we see that Elijah was something very important for our evolution. He gives the impression of a forerunner of the Christ-Impulse.

On looking back to the time of Moses, we see how something had been proclaimed to the people; we see that the God in man was proclaimed. “I AM the God Who was, Who is, Who is to come.” He has to be comprehended as in the ego, but among the ancient Hebrews He was comprehended as the Folk-soul of the race. Elijah went beyond Moses, though he did not make clear that the ego dwells in the single human individual as Divinity, for he could not make clear to the people of his time more than the world was then able to receive. While even the Mosaic Culture of the old Hebrews was conscious of the fact that “the Highest lies in the Ego,” and that this Ego found expression in the time of Moses in the Group-Soul of the people, we find Elijah already pointing to the individual human soul. We see a forward leap in evolution. But a further impulse was needed, and again a forerunner appeared, whom we know as the personality of John the Baptist. Once more it was in a significant expression that the quality of John the Baptist as a “Forerunner” found expression. A great occult fact is here indicated that man, as primeval man, once possessed ancient clairvoyance, so that he could look into the spiritual world—into Divine activity—but he gradually approached towards materialism; the vision of the spiritual world was cut off. To this fact John the Baptist alludes when he says: “Change the attitude of your soul; look no longer at what you can gain in the physical world: be watchful, a new impulse is at hand (he means the Christ-Impulse). Therefore I say unto you, seek the spiritual world that is in your midst; there the spiritual element appears with the Christ-Impulse.” Through this saying John the Baptist became a forerunner of the Christ-Impulse.

Now we can direct our gaze to another personality, to the remarkable personality of the painter Raphael. This remarkable personality presents itself to us in an unusual way. In the first place, we need only compare Raphael to—let us say—Titian, a painter of a later period. Whoever has an eye for such things, even if he look at the reproductions, will find the distinction. Look at the pictures of Raphael and at those of Titian! Raphael painted in such a way that he put Christian ideas into his pictures. He painted for the people of Europe as Christians of the West. His pictures are comprehensible to all Christians of the West, and will become so more and more. Take, on the other hand, the later painters. They painted almost exclusively for the Latin race, so that even the schisms of the Church found expression in their pictures.

With which pictures was Raphael most successful? With those in which he was able to demonstrate the impulses that lie in Christianity. He is at his best where he could represent some relationship of the Jesus-Child to the Madonna, where this Christ-relation appears as something that is an impulse to feeling. These are the things which he really painted best. We have for instance, no Crucifixion of his, but we have a Transfiguration. Wherever he can paint the budding and germinating aspect, that which is self-revealing, he paints with joy and there he paints his greatest and best pictures.

It is the same with the impression which his pictures produce. If some day you come to Germany and see the Sistine Madonna in Dresden, you will realise that that work of art—of which it is said that the Germans may rejoice to have such a celebrated picture among them, Yes! that they may even regard it as the flower of the painters’ art—you will realise that this work discloses a mystery of existence.

When Goethe in his time traveled from Leipsic to Dresden, he heard something quite different about the picture of the Madonna. The officials of the Dresden Gallery said something like this to him: “We have also a picture of Raphael’s, but it is nothing particular. It is badly painted. The look of the Child, the whole Child itself, everything to do with the Child, is common. The same with the Madonna. One can only think that she is painted by a dauber. And then these figures down below of which one does not know whether they are meant for children’s heads or angels!” Goethe heard this coarse opinion, so that at first he had no right appreciation of the picture. Everything which we hear about the picture at the present time only came to be understood later on, and the fact that Raphael’s pictures made their triumphal march through the world in reproductions, is a result of this better appreciation. We have only to call to mind what England has done for the reproduction and circulation of these pictures. But what was effected in England by the trouble which has been taken for the reproduction and circulation of Raphael’s pictures, will only be recognised when people have learned to look at the matter from the point of view of spiritual science.

Thus through his pictures, Raphael becomes for us the forerunner of a Christianity which will be cosmopolitan. Protestantism has long regarded the Madonna as specially Catholic; but to-day the Madonna has penetrated everywhere into Protestant countries and we are rising more to the occult interpretation, to a higher inter-denominational Christianity. So it will be more and more. If we may hope for such results as regards interdenominational Christianity, what Raphael has done will also help us in Anthroposophy.

It is remarkable that the above three personalities confront us in this manner: all three have the quality of being forerunners of Christianity. Now let us direct occult observation to these three persons. What does it teach us? It teaches us that the same individuality lived in Elijah, in John the Baptist and in Raphael. However impossible it may seem, it is the same soul which lived in Elijah and in Raphael.

When it is revealed to occult vision—which searches and investigates and does not merely compare in a superficial way—that it is the same soul that is present in Elijah, in John the Baptist and in Raphael, we may ask how it is possible that Raphael the painter becomes the vehicle for the individuality which lived in John the Baptist? One can conceive that this remarkable soul of John the Baptist lived in the forces which were present in Raphael.

Occult research comes in here again, not merely to put forth theories, but to tell us how things actually are in life. How do people write biographies of Raphael to-day? Even the best are so written that they simply state that Raphael was born on Good Friday of the year 1483. It is not for nothing that Raphael was born on a Good Friday. This birth already proclaimed his exceptional position in Christianity and shows that in the deepest and most significant way he was connected with the Christian Mysteries. It was on a Good Friday that Raphael was born. His father was Giovanni Santi. He died when Raphael was eleven years old. At the age of eight years his father sent him as a pupil to a painter, who was, however, not of any special eminence. But if one realises what was in Giovanni Santi, Raphael’s father, one gets a peculiar impression which is further strengthened when the matter is investigated in the Akashic Records. There it appears that there lived in the soul of Giovanni Santi much more than could be expressed in his personality and then we can agree with the duchess, who at his death said: “A man full of light and truth and fervent faith has died.” As occultist, one can say that in him there lived a much greater painter than appeared outwardly. The outer faculties, which depend on the physical and etheric organs, were not developed in Giovanni Santi. That was the original cause why he could not bring the capacities of his soul to full expression; but really a great painter lived in him.

Giovanni Santi died when Raphael was eleven years old. If we now follow what takes place, we see that man certainly loses his body, but that the longings, the aspirations, the impulses of his soul continue to exist, and continue to be active where they are most closely connected.

There will come a time when Anthroposophy will be made fruitful for life, as it can already be made fruitful by those who have grasped it vitally and not merely theoretically. Permit me here to interpolate something before going on with Raphael. What I tell you in the examples I give is not mere speculation; on the contrary, it is always taken from real life. Let us suppose that I had children to educate. Whoever pays attention to the capabilities of children can notice the individual element in every child, but such experiences can only be made by those who educate children. Now if one of the parents of a child dies while the child is still young and the other parent is still living, the following may be noticed: Certain inclinations will show themselves in the child which were not there before and which consequently cannot be explained. But one who has charge of children has to occupy himself with these things. Such a one would do well if he said: “People generally look upon what is in Anthroposophical books as mere folly: I will not take this for granted, but will try whether it is right or not.” Then he will soon be able to say “I find forces at work which were already there and again there are other forces playing into those which were already there.” Let us suppose that the father has passed through the gates of death and there now appears in the child, with some strength, certain qualities which had belonged to the father. If this assumption is made and if the matter is looked upon in this way, the knowledge which comes to us through Anthroposophy is applied to life in a sensible way, and then, as is soon discovered, we find our way in life, whereas before we did not. Thus the person who has gone through the gateway of death, remains united, through his forces, with those with whom he was connected in life. People do not observe things closely enough, otherwise they would see more often that children are quite different before the death of their parents from what they are afterwards. At present there is not enough regard for these things, but the time is coming when they will receive attention.

Giovanni Santi, the father, died when Raphael was eleven years old; he had not been able to attain great perfection as a painter, but powerful imagination was left to him and this was then developed in the soul of Raphael. We do not depreciate Raphael, if, while observing his soul, we say: Giovanni Santi lives on in Raphael, who appears to us as a completed personality, as one incapable of higher attainment because a dead man gives life to his work.

We now realise that in the soul of Raphael are reborn the vigorous forces of John the Baptist and in addition, there live in his soul the forces of Giovanni Santi; that together these two were able to bring to fruition the result which confronts us as Raphael. It is true that to-day we cannot yet speak publicly of such extraordinary things, but in fifty years’ time this may be possible, because evolution is progressing quickly, and the opinions held to-day are rapidly approaching their decline. Whoever accepts such things, sees that in Anthroposophy our task is to regard life everywhere from a new point of view. Just as in the future people will heal in the way to which I have referred, so they will reflect on the strange miracle of life wherein men attract to their assistance, from the spiritual world, the achievements of those who have passed through the gates of death.

I should like to draw your attention to two things, when speaking on the riddles of life; things which so truly can illuminate the meaning of life. One is the fate that has befallen the works of Raphael. Whoever looks to-day at the reproductions of his pictures, does not see what Raphael painted. And if he travels to Dresden or to Rome, he finds them so much spoiled that he can hardly be said to see the pictures of Raphael. It is easy to see what will become of them when we consider the fate of Leonardo da Vinci's “Last Supper,” which is falling more and more into decay. These pictures, in times to come, will fall into dust, and everything which great men have created will disappear. When these things have vanished, we may well ask: “What is the meaning of this creation and decay!” We shall see that really nothing remains of what the single personality has created.

Still another fact I should like to put before you, and that is the following: If when to-day, with Anthroposophy as an instrument, we desire to understand, and must understand, Christianity as an Impulse that works for the future, we have need of certain fundamental ideas through which we know how the Christ-Impulse will continue to work. This we require. And we can point to a development of Christianity for which Anthroposophy is necessary. We can point to a person who presents Anthroposophical truth in special form—namely, that of aphorisms. When we approach him we find much that is significant for Anthroposophy. This person is the German poet Novalis. When we study his writings, we find that he describes the future of Christianity from out of the occult truths it contains. Anthroposophy teaches us that we have here to do with the same individuality as is in Raphael, John the Baptist and Elijah.

We have here again to glance into the further development of Christianity. That is a fact of an occult nature, for no one reaches this result by reasoning. Let us once more put the different pictures together. We have the tragic fact of the destruction of the creations and works of single personalities. Raphael appears and allows his interdenominational Christianity to flow into the souls of men. But we have a foreboding that some day his creations will be destroyed, that his works will fall to dust. Then Novalis appears to take in hand the fulfilment of the task and continue the work he had begun. The idea is no longer now so tragic. We see that just as the personality dissolves in its sheaths, so the work dissolves, but the essential kernel lives on and continues the work it had begun. Here once again it is the individual to which our attention is directed. But because we have kept firmly in mind the Western view of life and therewith the personality, we are able to grasp the full significance of the individuality. Thus we see how important it is that the East directed its attention to the individuality, to the Bodhisattvas, who go through many incarnations; and how important it is that the West first directed its attention to the contemplation of the single personality, in order, later on, to grasp what the individuality is.

Now I think there are many Anthroposophists who will say: “Well, this is something we have just to believe, when Elijah, John the Baptist, Raphael and Novalis are mentioned.” For many the main thing is that they must just believe. It is essentially the same as when from the scientific side some fact is asserted that many people have to believe, such as that this or that spectrum appears when certain metals are examined by spectrum analysis, or when for instance, the nebula in Orion is so examined. Some people have certainly investigated it, but the others, the majority, have to believe. But that is after all not the essential point. The essential point is that Anthroposophy is at the beginning of its development, and will bring souls to the point of examining for themselves such matters as we have discussed to-day. In this respect, Anthroposophy will help forward human evolution very rapidly.

I have put before you a few instances, which I submit as resulting from the occult point of view regarding life. Take only the three points which we have considered and you will see that by knowing in what way life is related to the Spirit of the Earth, the art of healing can be given a new direction and supplied with new impulses; how Raphael can only be understood when not only his personal forces are taken into account, but also those forces which came from his father. The third point is that we can educate children when we know the interplay of forces acting on them. Outwardly people admit that they are surrounded by numberless forces which incessantly influence them, that man is continually influenced by air, the temperature, his surroundings and the other Karmic conditions under which he lives. That these things do not interfere with his freedom everyone knows. They are the factors with which we have to reckon to-day. But that man is continually surrounded by spiritual forces and that these spiritual forces must be investigated is what Anthroposophy has to teach men: they will have to learn to take these forces into account and will have to reckon with them in important cases of health and disease, of education and life. They will have to be mindful of such influences as come from without, from the super-sensible world, when, for instance, some one’s friend dies and he then shares those sympathies and ideas that belonged to him. What has been said does not hold good for children only, but for all ages. It is not at all necessary that people should know with their ordinary consciousness in what way the forces of the super-sensible world are active. Their general frame of mind may show it, even their state of health or illness may show it. And those things which signify the connection of man’s life on the physical plane with the facts of the super-sensible worlds have a still wider bearing.

I should like to put before you a simple fact which will show you the nature of this connection, a fact which is not invented, but has been observed in many cases. A man notices at a certain time that he has feelings which formerly he did not know; that he has sympathies and antipathies which formerly he did not know; that he succeeds easily where before he found difficulties. He cannot explain it. His surroundings cannot explain it to him, nor do the facts of life itself give him any clue. In such a case it can be found, when we observe accurately (it is true that one must have an eye for such things), that now he knows things which he did not know before and does things which he could not do before. If we examine matters further and have had experience of the teachings of Anthroposophy, it may be that we shall hear something like the following from him: “I do not know what to think of myself. I dream of a person whom I have never seen in my life. He comes into my dreams, though I never had anything to do with him.” If we follow the matter up it will be found that till now he had no occasion to occupy himself with this person. But this person had died and now first approaches him in the spiritual world. When he had come near enough to him he appeared to him in a dream which was yet more than a dream. From this person, whom he had not known in life, who, however, after death, gained influence on his life, came the impulses which he had not known before. It is not a question of saying: “It is only a dream.” It is far more a question of what the dream contained. It may be something which, although in the form of a dream, is nearer to reality than the outer consciousness. Does it matter at all whether Edison invents something in a dream or in clear waking consciousness? What matters is whether the invention is true, is useful. So also it does not matter whether an experience takes place in dream-consciousness or in physical consciousness; what is of importance is whether the experience is true or false.

If we now summarise what we are able to understand from what has just been said, we may say “It is clear to us when we learn to apply Anthroposophy, that life appears to us in quite a different light from before.” In this respect people who are very learned in materialistic ways of thought are but children. We can convince ourselves of this at any time. When to-day I came here by train I took up the pamphlet of a German physiologist in its second edition. In it the writer says that we cannot speak of “active attention” in the soul, of directing the attention of the soul to anything, but that everything depends on the functioning of the various ganglia of the brain; and because the tracks have to be made by thoughts, everything depends on how the separate brain cells function. No intensity of the soul intervenes, it depends entirely upon whether this or that connecting thread in our brain has been pulled or not. These learned materialists are really children. When we lay our hands on anything of this kind one cannot help thinking how guileless these people are! In the same pamphlet one finds the statement that lately the centenary of Darwin was celebrated, and that on that occasion, both qualified and unqualified people spoke. The author of the pamphlet thought himself of course quite specially qualified. And then follows the whole brain-cell theory and its application. But how is it with the logic of the matter? When one is used to considering things in accordance with truth and then sees what these great children offer people concerning the meaning of life, the thought occurs to one that after all it comes to the same as if someone should say that it was simply nonsense that a human will had any part in the way the railways intersect the face of Europe! For it is just the same as if at a given time one considered all the engines in their varied parts and functions, and said that these are organised in such and such a way and run in so many directions. But the different roads meet at certain junctions and through them the engines can be turned in any direction. What would occur if this were done would be a great disarrangement of trains on the European railways. Just as little, however, can it be asserted that what takes place in the human brain cells as the life of human thought depends only on the condition of the cells. If such learned people then happen, without previous knowledge, to hear a lecture on Anthroposophy, they look upon that which is said as the most utter nonsense. They are firmly convinced that a human will can never have anything to do with the mode and manner in which the European engines run, but that it depends on how they are heated and driven.

So we see how at the present day we stand confronted by questions regarding the meaning of life. On the one side there is darkness, on the other the spiritual facts press in upon us. If we grasp what has been said to-day we can, with this as a basis, put the question before our soul in the way in which it has to be put in Anthroposophy, namely: What is the meaning of life and existence, and especially of human life and human existence?

In these days when death is so constantly a source of pain, I want to deal with certain aspects of Spiritual Science in connection with the problem of death. Today I shall give a kind of introduction to these problems; tomorrow I shall go more closely into the subject and on Sunday pass over from these problems to more general questions of the artistic conception of Life. This will then lead us back to matters connected with our Building.

Manifold indeed are the connections within which we are placed in life. Just as the life before birth is a preparation for its reflection in this life, so this reflection between birth and death is a preparation for the spiritual life which comes afterwards, between death and a new birth. The more we are able to carry over from this life into the life between death and a new birth, the richer may be the development in that life; for the actual concepts which must be acquired of that life, the concepts of the truths of existence between death and a new birth must be very different from the concepts we must acquire of earthly Maya if we want to understand this Maya. Some of the necessary concepts will be found in the lecture-course given last year in Vienna. (The Inner Life of Man between Death and a New birth.) You will find there what new concepts must be acquired for understanding the other side of man's life which takes its course between death and a new birth. It is often exceedingly difficult to work out the concepts and ideas that are applicable to this other kind of life, and in reading such a lecture-course you will realise that it has been a question of wrestling for terms which in some way give expression to these totally different conditions.

At this time especially when the deaths of very dear Members are occurring in our anthroposophical life, I want to call attention to the following.—

The part played in the life between death and a new birth by the moment of death is different from the part that is played by the moment of birth in our present life between birth and death. The moment of birth is that point which, in ordinary circumstances, is not remembered by the human being. In Ordinary life, birth is not remembered. But the moment of death is the point which leaves behind it the very deepest impression for the whole of life between death and a new birth; it is the point that is remembered most of all; in a certain sense it is always there, but in a quite different form from that in which it is seen from this side of life. From this side of life, death appears to be a dissolution, something in face of which the human being has a ready fear and dread. From the other side, death appears as the light-filled beginning of experience of the Spirit, as that which spreads a sun-radiance over the whole of the subsequent life between death and a new birth; as that which most of all warms the soul through with joy in the life between death and a new birth. The moment of death is something that is looked back upon with a deep sense of blessing. Described in earthly terms: the moment of death, viewed from the other side, is the most joyful, the most enrapturing point in the life between death and a new birth.

If, out of materialism, we have pictured that the human being loses consciousness with death, if we can form no true idea of the continuation of consciousness—(I emphasize this today because the incentive is community with dear ones who have recently gone away from us through death.) if it is difficult to picture that consciousness exists beyond death, if we believe that consciousness is darkened (as appears to be the case after death)—then we must realise: it simply is not true. The truth is that the consciousness is excessively bright and it is only because the human being is still unaccustomed, during the very first period after death, to live within this excessively clear consciousness, that there sets in, to begin with, immediately after death, something like a kind of sleep.

This state of sleep, however, is the very opposite of the state of sleep through which we pass in ordinary life. In ordinary life we sleep because consciousness is dimmed; after death we are, in a certain sense, unconscious because the consciousness is too strong, too forceful; because we live wholly in consciousness. And what we have to do during the first days is to live over into this condition of excessive consciousness. We have to find our bearings and orientation within this condition of superabundant consciousness. When we succeed in so finding our bearings that, as it were, out of the fullness of the cosmic thoughts, we feel: thou wast that ... the moment when, out of the fullness of the cosmic thoughts, we begin to distinguish our past earth-life within this abundance of consciousness, then the moment is experienced of which we can say: we awaken. It may be that we are awakened by an event that has been particularly significant in our earthly life and is also significant in the happenings after our earthly life.

It is, therefore, a process of getting accustomed to the supersensible consciousness, to the consciousness that does not rest upon the foundation and support of the physical world, but that is working and active in itself. This is what we call the “Awakening” after death. This awakening consists in the will stretching out to find its bearings, the will, which as you know and can realise from the lecture-course already mentioned, may unfold strongly after death. I spoke of will that is coloured by feeling, of feeling that is coloured by will: when this life of feeling that is coloured by will stretches out to find its bearings in the supersensible world, when the first sally is made, then the awakening has come.

If we want to think of the experiences that are connected with the problem of death, we must realise, above all, that the real being, the being who rules and weaves within man, is profoundly unknown to him. This true being is not only unknown in respect of the deeper side of a man's own hidden existence, but it is unknown too, in respect of many things that play very significantly indeed into the experiences of everyday life. We must be absolutely clear that even with the most important instruments of knowledge we possess for the physical world—with the senses—we look almost entirely from outside, and that in this looking from outside, what may be called our skin shuts us off from beholding our real, true being. As soon as we begin to judge of our true being, as soon as we try to form a picture of this true being, we are obliged to apply our intellect, our power of forming mental images. In the course of our development within the physical body, however, both these faculties are strongly influenced from the Ahrimanic as well as from the Luciferic side; and the nature of all these influences that are exercised from the Ahrimanic and Luciferic sides upon our intellect, in so far as it is bound to the brain, is such, that they are able in the highest degree to cloud the judgment we form about our own being.

All self-knowledge is really comparable with the extreme case I quoted in the last lecture, of the university professor who himself tells the story of how, in his youth, he crossed the street and suddenly saw coming towards him a young man with a dreadfully unsympathetic face; he tells of the shock he received when he realised that he was seeing himself through two mirrors that were revealing his own physiognomy, as if it were coming towards him. This shows that he had no inkling of his external appearance, which was exceedingly unsympathetic to him: I have told you how he narrates a second similar instance. But really it is no different with what we call our more intimate self-knowledge. Our Ego and astral body which set out on the journey through the worlds when the date of Death has been passed—these members of our being are removed from our sphere of observation during physical life, for when we wake from sleep the Ego and astral body are not revealed to us. They are not revealed to us in their true form but in such a way that they are mirrored by the pictures of the Ego and astral body that are sketched by the etheric body and physical body. Between sleeping and waking we should be able to see our astral being and our Ego in their true form if we were not in the unconscious condition of sleep. The dreams, too, which occur in ordinary life are only faulty interpreters of our real being, because they are, after all, reflections of what goes on in the astral body around the etheric body, and because it is essential, first, to understand the language of dreams if we are to get at their correct meaning. If we understand the language of dreams, we can, certainly, acquire knowledge about our true being from the processes of dream. But in ordinary life we are accustomed simply to accept the pictures presented by the dream. This, however, is no more sensible than if we were simply to follow the signs of printed letters and not really read at all.

Our true being is withdrawn from us during life between birth and death. We must realise here that in our astral body—and in our Ego too—there lie all those feelings and all those stirrings of will which lead us to our actions, to our deeds, but also to our judgments, to our conceptions of things in the world. There, in the depths of our being, there at the seat of our astral body and our true “I”, we have a whole world of emotions, a whole world of feelings, of impulses of will; but what we form in everyday life as our own view of these emotions, impulses of will and feelings, stand mostly—mostly, I say—in a very distant connection with what we truly are, in our innermost being.

Take the following case—It may happen in life that two people live together for a long time and that through the strange forces playing out of the unknown regions of the astral body and Ego of the one person into the astral body and Ego of the other (these forces remain in the hidden regions), the one has in relation to the other a real desire for torment, a kind of need for cruelty. It may be that the one person who has this desire for torment, this need for cruelty, has no inkling whatever of the existence of these emotions in the astral body and Ego; he may build up about the things he does out of this urge to cruelty, a whole number of ideas which explain the actions on quite other grounds. Such a person may tell us that he has done this or that to the other person for one reason or another; these reasons may be very clever and yet they do not express the truth at all. For in ordinary life, what we all-too-often picture as the motives of our own actions, indeed of our own feelings, frequently stands, as I say, in a very, very distant connection with what is really living and weaving in our inner being. It may be that the Luciferic power is actually preventing the person concerned from realising the nature of this urge for cruelty, of these impulses to do all kinds of things to the other person, and that under the influence of this Luciferic power everything he says about the reasons merely spreads a cover over what is actually present in the soul. The reasons we devise in our consciousness may often be cut out for hiding from us, disguising what is actually living and working in the soul. These reasons are too often of a character which indicates a desire for self-justification, for we should find ourselves just as antipathetic as the professor of philosophy of whom I told you. We should not at all like what is in our soul if we had to acknowledge what kind of instincts and emotions are really holding sway. And because we have to protect ourselves from the sight of our own soul-being, we discover, with the help of these reasons, all kinds of things that guarantee us protection, because they deceive us about what is actually the ruling force in the soul. Just as it is true that the external world becomes a Maya to us because of the peculiar character of our faculty to form mental pictures, it is also true that what we have to say about ourselves in ordinary life is, to a very, very great extent, Maya.

Certain instincts and needs of our innermost being in particular mislead us into constantly deceiving ourselves about our own being. Take the case of a person who is terribly vain, who suffers from a form of megalomania. Such people are by no means few in number. This is admitted. If, however, as described above, a mask were not laid over what really is in the soul, it would be much more generally admitted that vanity and megalomania exist in many souls who have not the very slightest inkling that it is so.

Megalomania gives rise to many wishes ... but when I say ‘wishes’, you must understand what I mean.—the wishes do not become conscious, they remain wholly in the depths. Such a person may wish to exercise a controlling influence upon someone else, but because he would have to admit that this desire for control over the other is born of vanity and megalomania, he will not admit it. He then appeals—unconsciously of course,—to those powers of seduction which Lucifer is able to exercise all the time upon the human soul. And under the unconscious influence of Lucifer, such a person never gets to the point of saying to himself: ‘What I have in me, producing the desire for action, is really vanity, megalomania.’ He never says this, but on the contrary, he will often discover, under the influence of Lucifer, a whole system for explaining the feelings of which he is darkly aware but the true character of which he will not admit. He may have certain feelings for some other person but he cannot acknowledge them, because what he really wants is to control this other person and he is unable to do so because this other person, perhaps, will not allow himself to be controlled. Then, under the influence of Lucifer the soul discovers a system, discovers that the other person is planning something malicious; the first person then proceeds to paint a mental picture of the details that are being planned against him; he finally feels that he is being persecuted. The whole system of judgments and ideas is a mask that is there merely for the purpose of covering with a veil what must be prevented from emerging out of the inner life of soul.—It is a real Maya.

In connection with a series of actions, a man once said to me that he had done them out of an iron sense of duty, out of infinite devotion to the cause he represented. I was bound to say to him in reply: “The opinion you have about the motives of your procedure and of your actions is no criterion whatever. Only reality is the criterion, not the opinion one may have. The reality shows that the impulse, the urge to these actions was to gain influence in a certain direction.” I said to the man quite baldly: “Although you believe that you are acting out of an iron sense of duty, you are really acting under the impulse to acquire influence and you misinterpret this way of acting as being selfless, done purely out of a sense of duty. You are not acting out of this motive but because it pleases you to act so, because it brings you certain pleasure—again, therefore, out of a certain inner impulse.”

Our opinion, our mental picture of ourselves may be extremely complicated; it may not resemble in the very remotest degree what is really dominating and weaving in the soul. It may be extremely complicated. You will admit at once that such things must be known when it is a question of living in a world of truth and not in a world of Maya; you will also admit at once that it is necessary now and then to speak of such things in a radical way! The reasons which as genuine, true reasons, drive us to our actions, can only become clear to us slowly and by degrees, when through Spiritual Science, we really have knowledge of the secret connections existing between the human being and the world.

Let us take a definite case,—You will all know that there are people in the world who are called gossips, chatterboxes. If we ask these chatterboxes why they flock together in their cafes or elsewhere and talk, talk, talk, talk (they often talk a great deal more than they can answer for,) we shall hear many reasons why it is necessary for them to discuss this, that or the other. We can get to know people whom we then meet rushing along the street, hurrying somewhere or other in order to arrive quickly ... and when we find out what they are after, we discover that it is nothing but the most futile, useless, silliest chatter. If such people are asked about their reasons, they will give reasons which often sound exceedingly laudable and fine, whereas the most that can be said is that these reasons are well able to conceal the real facts of the case. And now we will consider these “real facts of the case.”

What is happening when we gossip or chatter? (when we speak, it is, of course, the same.) What is happening? Through our organs of breathing and speech we set the air into movements which correspond with the forms of the words. We generate in ourselves those physical waves—and naturally the corresponding ether-waves too, for when we speak something very significant is happening in the etheric body—we generate these waves in the air and ether which corresponds with our words, which give expression to our words. Picture it quite precisely to yourselves: While you are sitting there—no, pardon me, not you!—while a man is chattering with his cup of coffee before him on the table, he is bringing his whole inner organism into movement, that inner organism which corresponds with the form of expression, with the external physical and etheric form of expression of his words. Something is actually welling up and weaving in him; he generates this in himself, but he also is aware of it, he feels it. He feels this self-movement of the physical and etheric bodies because the astral body and the Ego are continually coming up against it. The astral body is continually coming up against the ether-waves and becoming aware of them; and the Ego is continually coming into contact with the physical waves of the air; so that while we are speaking, astral body and Ego are continually contacting something, touching something. in this contact, in this impact, we become aware of our Ego and of our astral body, and the most agreeable sensation the human being can have is that of self-enjoyment. when the astral body and the Ego contact the etheric body and the physical body in this way, the process is similar to what happens on a small scale when a child licks a sweet—for the pleasurable sensation in licking the sweet consists in the fact that the astral body is coming into contact with what is happening in the physical body, and the human being becomes aware of himself in this way. He becomes aware of himself, has self-enjoyment in this process. Those who sit down at a table in a cafe in order to gossip and chatter for an hour or two, simply hurry there to find self-enjoyment. It is self-enjoyment that is being sought in such cases.

We cannot become aware of these things if we do not know that man's being is fourfold and that all the four members are involved in every activity in the external world.

There are other, different examples. From the example of chattering we have seen how the human being has the urge to self-enjoyment caused by the impact of his astral body and Ego upon the etheric body and the physical body. But he also, frequently feels the need for his astral body merely to contact the etheric body, just the etheric body. In order that the astral body may contact the etheric body, this etheric body must produce movement, it must produce inner activity. These processes go on even more in the subconsciousness than do other processes. There is an impulse in the human being, of which he is not conscious, to make an impact with his astral body upon his etheric body. This impulse lives itself out in very curious ways. We find that certain young men—and in recent times young ladies too—simply cannot rest until what they write is printed. People sometimes find it exceedingly pleasant to see their writings in print, but it is pleasant chiefly because they succumb to the worst possible illusion, namely, to the illusion that what is printed is also read: It is by no means always the case that writings are read when they are printed, but it is at least believed that they are, and this is an exceedingly pleasant sensation. Many young men and, as I say, many young ladies too, simply cannot bear it, they are constantly on edge ... until their writings are printed. What does this mean?

It means this,—When writings are printed and actually read—which happens in the rarest cases today—when writings are printed, our thoughts pass over into other human beings, live on in other human souls. These thoughts live in the etheric bodies of the other human beings. But in us the idea takes root: ‘The thought you yourself had in your etheric body is now living out there in the world.’ We have the feeling that out there in the world our own thoughts are living. If the thoughts are really living in the world, if they are actually present there—in other words, if our printed writings are also read—then this exercises an influence upon our own etheric body and we impact what is living out there in the world. Inasmuch as it is living in our own etheric body, an impact takes place with our own astral body. This is quite a different impact from when we merely impact our own thoughts; the human being is not always strong enough to do this, because these thoughts must be called forth from the inner being by dint of energy. But when the thoughts are living in the world, when we can have the consciousness that our own thoughts are living out there in the world, then our astral body—to the best of our belief at least—comes into contact with a part of ourselves that is living in the outside world. This is the supreme self-enjoyment. But this form of self-enjoyment lies at the basis of all seeking for fame, all seeking for recognition, all seeking for authority in the world. At the root of this impulse for self-enjoyment there lies nothing else than a need to impact with our astral body objective thoughts of our etheric body, and in the impact to become aware of ourselves. You see what a complicated process between astral body and etheric body lies at the root of things that play a certain role in the outer world.

Naturally these things are not said for the purpose of making moral judgments into scarecrow. They are not of this nature at all, for everything that has been mentioned belongs to the category of characteristics that are quite normal in life. When we speak, it is absolutely natural that there should be self-enjoyment—even when speaking does not consist in gossiping. It is quite natural too that when we allow something to be printed, not out of thirst for fame but because we feel it a duty to say something to the world,—that then too we impact the thoughts of our etheric body; in such a case the same process is at work. We must not draw the conclusion that these processes are always to be shunned, always to be regarded as something lacking in morality,—for I simply mean them to be taken in a symbolic sense. If the human being were to flee from everything that presses in upon him from the side of Lucifer and Ahriman, he would have to come out of his skin as soon as he realised it—I mean this symbolically too: Lucifer and Ahriman exercise no other forces upon us than those that are justified, normal forces in human life; only it is the case that Lucifer and Ahriman put them into operation in the wrong place. I have said this in different lecture-courses.

If you think of all these things you will perceive the infinite variety and complexity of those threads in life which play over from human soul to human soul and again outwards from the human soul into the world. How infinitely complicated it all is but at the same time you will realise how little, how very little real knowledge the human being derives from what he perceives and pictures concerning his relations to other human beings and to the world. The picture we have of ourselves is only a tiny fragment drawn from what we experience. And this picture, to begin with, is Maya. Only when we make Spiritual Science into an actual asset of life, not into mere theory, do we really get behind Maya and reach some enlightenment upon what is actually going on within us. But things do not change by our possessing a tiny and mostly untrue fragment of the web in which we are involved in relation to the world; the things are as they are. All these hidden forces, this hidden web from soul to soul, from the human being to the various agents of the world—it is all there, and every minute of sleeping and waking life it is playing into the human soul. You will be able to judge from this how much has to be done in order to reach a true knowledge of the being of man.

Studies of this kind have to do with those shades of feeling which are requisite for a true experience of what belongs, not to earthly incarnation, but to eternity. For by unfolding such shades of feeling we become aware of the basis of the conflicts which appear in life. These conflicts that are brought by life and rightly become subjects for treatment in literature and the other arts, are due to the fact that there is an unknown, hidden ocean of will in which we are swimming in life, and that only a tiny fragment—mostly distorted at that—comes into our consciousness. But we cannot live in accordance with this tiny fragment; we must live with our whole soul in accordance with the great and manifold ramifications which exist in life. And this brings the conflicts. How can the tiny fragment that is also in many cases distorted, how can this tiny fragment come into a true relationship to human life, how can it really understand what is actually going on in human life: Because it is incapable of this, the human being inevitably comes into conflict with life. But where reality is in play, there too is truth. Reality does not direct itself according to the pictures we take of it. And the moment there is opportunity for it reality pitilessly corrects the Maya of our ideas. And this kind of corrective which reality bestows upon the Maya of our ideas, supplies most significant material for treatment in art, in poetry.

In pursuance of the line of thought contained in this lecture, I want now to start from a point that is connected with a work of art; in the lecture tomorrow we shall pass on to a study of the life between death and a new birth, and then on Sunday to a theme dealing with art in connection with our building. I do not want to start from a work of art chosen at random but from something that gives a very concrete picture of what I shall present to you as knowledge of the reality of the spiritual life. The reason for choosing this particular example is that, for once, reality has been hit upon in a certain small, but excellent piece of writing. An occultist alone is able to judge about the reality, but in this small work we see how when the human being as a clairvoyant tries to penetrate into the deeper problems of life, he simply cannot avoid touching the occult sides of life, he cannot avoid touching those depths which send their waves up into the life we often pierce so shallowly with the Maya of our thoughts. What I regard as important from the point of view of art and of occultism really occurs only at the end of a tale of which I want to speak merely as an example. Therefore I shall merely give a brief outline of the tale and read the concluding passage only. It is not a question of speaking merely of a piece of literature but of speaking of this particular work, because here for once a writer has presented something that might actually happen, in absolute accordance with true occult laws.

As the tale was written in the sixties of the 19th century, you will gather from what I say, how what we speak of as Spiritual Science has really always been prepared for and reflected in a certain way in human consciousness. Unconsciously, at least, in many a soul there has been reflected what must enter into the culture of the Earth and become more fully conscious through Spiritual Science. It may be that such a soul actually knew something about this, but the time was not ripe for voicing this knowledge in a form other than the unpretentious form of literature. At the present day people are much more ready to condone the introduction of occult truths in the form of stories or poems ... in the age of materialism they are much more ready to condone this than they will condone somebody who comes out with the direct truth and declares that such things are realities. If people can say to themselves: “Well, after all, this is only romance,” they will often accept it. The tale that was written in the sixties of last century is more or less as follows.—

It is written as if one of the characters were narrating it himself; it is a “first person” story, as we say. This character tells of his acquaintance with Mlle. de Gaussin in Paris (which is the scene of the tale). He tells how at a certain period he paid daily visits to the house of this Mlle. de Gaussin who is a much-feted singer; he gets to know all kinds of people who are admirers of the lady of the house—among them a man who is practically always to be found in Mlle.de Gaussin's salon. The narrator perceives that the feelings of this other man for her are more than mere friendship, and he also realises that these feelings are not reciprocated by the singer. Everything that happens results in a conflict.—There is a man who ardently loves the singer; his love is not returned, but he is not actually rejected; in reality he is brought nearer and nearer to her, but as a result of this he becomes more and more restless and inwardly shaken.

The narrator of the story (it is, as I say a ‘first person’ tale), notices all this. He is friendly with the other, and as he (the narrator) is engaged and is to be married during the next few weeks, it is quite natural, as the other man is also friendly with him, that there is no question of jealousy. One day the narrator has it all out with the other man whose eyes are then opened and he feels bound to have a talk with the singer. The result of this talk is that he goes no more to the house—but, although he has promised not to think about the lady any more, and to forget her, he is incapable of seriously turning his mind to other things, of getting rid of his inner restlessness; the thoughts that were there during his friendship with the lady keep on returning. He leaves the town and lives away for a time. During this period the narrator of the story has married and has been obliged to go on a journey. On this journey he meets the other man in a hotel, in a pitiful state. The other man tells him how he has left Paris and how he tried for a time to live alone; how he went for a ride one day outside his estate and had the ill-luck to come across the lady with her traveling company who were also away from Paris; how all his feelings came to life again and how he now goes about with two revolvers in order one day to put an end to his life.

The narrator still has kindly feelings towards the other man and invites him to his new home, hoping to get him to think of other things. The man accepts the invitation which is just the thing to provide him with a sympathetic milieu as a guest; but he simply cannot get hold of himself, he gets more and more depressed, and finally reaches the point where he has resolved to commit suicide. The two friends have a talk together and the narrator succeeds in getting the other to promise that he will defer his intention. The narrator says that he himself has to go away and because he does not want to say: ‘wait until I come back’—fearing that the other might not wait but might shoot himself in the meantime—he gets the other to make him a solemn promise. He says: “Look after my wife until I get back.”

When the other man has given the promise, the narrator goes off to Paris with the idea of asking the singer to come to the country and do something to make the situation less miserable. He reaches Paris and travels back with the singer to the country. They get to the hedge around the narrator's country estate. At this moment the narrator notices that a man who had been standing at the hedge, has run back. As they approach, there is a shot. The other man had kept his promise, had faithfully looked after the wife, but had sent a peasant to keep watch at the hedge. The peasant signals: ‘Now he is coming’—and then the man shoots himself. The narrator brings the singer into the house—and from this point I will read you the words themselves.¹

“We reached the chateau in the evening. When I got to the park, a peasant who was waiting for us ran with lightning speed towards the house, and hardly had we got half-way up the avenue, than a shot rang out. So set was I upon the success of my project that the meaning of this shot never entered my head. Amazement was not long to be withheld from me; we went on; nobody came out; the driver cracked his whip and I sprang out, Mlle. de Gaussin after me. The first thing we heard was a scream from my wife's maid who came towards us deathly white, with the cry: ‘He has shot himself dead’. We hurried to the Marquess' room which was full of people; I sent them all out, shut the door and stood with Manon de Gaussin beside the young man's body which lay on the ground. She stared at it for some minutes, then gave a scream and sank to the ground on her knees beside the body. She did not faint. She took his hands, laid hers on his forehead (the wound was in the middle of the chest), looked at me, then at him, and suddenly began to sing in a loud voice. This filled me with dread; I thought she had lost her reason.

Meanwhile one of my agents who knew a little about first-aid and was accustomed to render simple medical assistance, had arrived. I shall never forget the fear that came over his face when he saw the dead Marquess and the singer beside him. She was now silent, stood up, looked at me a long time and left the room. I followed to find out what she might want. She said: ‘I must have a room in which I am quite alone.’ I led her to the first good room, sent to fetch her maid and hurried to my wife. I heard to my relief that she had gone for a walk; I went to meet her and told her what had happened. As we had often talked about the Marquess and had anticipated the possibility of an end like this, she was less shocked than troubled. I led her back to the chateau and proceeded to give orders about the Marquess. The body had been placed on the bed and his servant was sitting by it, weeping bitterly. He said: ‘My master told me that he must not shoot himself until you had returned. This reassured me. Then he arranged secretly with the man John that he should wait for the carriage. The man did this and had hardly run back with the news that the carriage had entered the park than my master stood up, made a mark in the book he was reading, put his hand in his pocket, gave John a coin, took the pistol from the table and went into the other room; the moment he had closed the door behind him, he was dead.’

I began to reproach myself. Perhaps I might have been able to save him if I had acted more quickly. If Manon de Gaussin had arrived at the right moment this tragedy might, possibly, have been avoided. And I also thought: Perhaps providence has wished to protect him from something that would have been still worse, if the singer had decided to marry him, as I believe she would have done,—although she told me only afterwards that the disastrous consequences of such a step would have been unendurable and would simply have brought misery.

I went to Manon de Gaussin. She was calm and collected. There was nothing very unusual about her. She talked to me about the Marquess's frame of mind and his natural disposition towards such a sad ending of his life. So calm and collected was she that I felt the inner shock must have been very great, and I feared the reaction. I introduced her to my wife; we dined together and then retired.

The next morning I was struck by the change that had come over her. She said she felt well, but there was something so strained about her appearance, and in herself she seemed so broken, that her statement belied itself. She talked about leaving soon and asked if she might be given a different room for that night. This was arranged; we spent the day quietly and she only went to bed when all arrangements for her departure had been completed.

The next day she did not come down to breakfast. her maid asked me to go to her mistress in her room. She received me with a faint smile and was so pale and hollow-eyed that I could not conceal my amazement.

‘Dear friend,” she said, “You find me looking ill and don't want to say so?’

‘Don't you think that is natural?’

‘Yes, you are always full of feeling, reserved. But no secrecy helps now. I feel death within me.’

‘Dearest friend!’—I cried out in dismay.

‘I feel death; for two nights now I have seen the Marquess—awake—coming here—he is drawing me to him!’

I looked at her attentively. There was no over-strain in her eyes, nothing maniacal in her voice.

She went on: ‘When I saw him lying there in his blood, the feeling that I was the cause of this tragedy became so strong in me that I cried out because I could bear it no longer. It was as though something were shouting with unbelievable strength into my ears: “You are guilty: You have killed him!” In order not to hear this voice I began to sing louder and louder, but yet I did not deafen the voice. I heard it unceasingly. During the night I could not sleep, I lay and looked at the shadows cast by the furniture in the light of the lamp. Then the door sprang open. A narrow, dark streak appeared. Through this streak the Marquess entered, as it were through a thread of cloud as thin as paper; his eyes were closed, he hovered or came slowly towards me, stood beside the bed, as corporeal as you, and with closed eyes. I did not want to look at him but he forced me to do so; I was compelled to turn my eyes towards him. Then he suddenly opened his and looked at me. I could not bear it, and I lost consciousness. Last night it was the same. I can bear it no longer. I feel that he is sucking the life out of me with his eyes.’

I tried with all the arguments of physics, philosophy and religion to get her to dismiss the phenomenon from her mind. She remained resolute ... ‘I am determined to go away,’—she said. ‘Perhaps his shade is fettered only to this house.’ I opposed this. I could not allow her to travel alone and I could not leave my wife who was expecting her confinement. I therefore proposed to Manon de Gaussin that she should move into my agent's house and I promised to watch by her bed the next night. She finally let herself be persuaded into this, got up and walked around the room like a wraith.

In the evening when she had gone to bed, her maid called me to her. I put a table with night-lights near the bed, with a screen around it, and after talking to her for a little, began to read a book. She seemed to be sleeping; the lights burnt badly. I cleaned them, drank some wine and water and looked at the door. Suddenly—it was made of wood and was not firm—it sprang open; the catch may not have been working. I was about to go over softly and shut it noiselessly when, turning to Manon de Gaussin, I saw her sitting upright in bed with staring eyes. She stretched out her arms towards mine and pointed straight in front of her with her finger:

‘There he comes!’

There was absolutely nothing to be seen.

‘Where?’ I said.

I released myself from her and went to the corner.

‘Here?’

‘Come,’ she screamed, ‘he is standing in front of you!’

With one leap I was by her side.

‘Hold my eyes closed, I cannot bear it he is standing there, he is touching your knee!’

I pressed both her hands over her eyes. She breathed with effort, but there was nothing to be seen.

After a while she took her hands away. ‘I must see if he is still there’, she said softly.

‘Dear friend there is nothing here,’ I answered, and released her. She looked around.

‘He has gone away again: O, if he comes once again it will be better for him. We will slip through the doors together.’

This idea made me shudder. She lay back and declared that the next day she would certainly go away into a convent. I tried to talk her out of this.

‘Go to Paris,’ I said—‘You will forget there.’

She interrupted me.—‘I have deserved it; I have also deserved that you should make such a proposal to me. That I shall never forget! Him perhaps I shall forget, if he ceases to torment me, but my guilt—that is fast smelted!’

‘Your guilt amounts to nothing,’ I said. ‘That he loved you was destiny; the fact that you did not love him was not in your power to change. That you were able to believe you had cured him was only too natural in his deranged state.’

‘O’ she cried, ‘can a mother who lets her child fall into the water ever console herself? Do you think that guilt is only constituted by evil intent? If it were so, could one not wash away all regret with the thought of higher necessity? If God makes us guilty, it is also his will that we shall bear the consequences. It has been decreed that I shall hear these chains rattling to all eternity.’

I had soon exhausted my arguments. She left the chateau, and I did not accompany her. The birth of a son tore me away from all dark thoughts. I gave a feast in honour of this joyful event; the christening, and care for my wife took up my time so completely that everyone will understand why I did not make enquires about the unhappy, beautiful creature of whom, however, I thought from time to time. One day I received a packet from Paris. It had been addressed to me in the care of my business manager. It contained a little case and a letter, both sealed. I opened the letter first; there were only a few lines.

Dearest friend:

When you receive this I shall be dead. I knew that the Marquess would call me to him. Although he came no more to disturb my nights, I had some thing in my soul that took the place of him. Tell your wife that I have no pleasanter memory than that of her kindness to me. Guard your son from people like me. Give me a quiet little corner for the photograph enclosed. You need not break the seal. I do not want to destroy it; it must not fall into wrong hands. If you do look at it, think that perchance, even I had a heart

Manon de Gaussin.

I opened the case and the face of the unhappy girl who had announced her death to me in advance streamed out with all the magic she had possessed in the days of her prime. Tears started into my eyes and I thought of all the happy hours I had spent in her house.

Here we have a true description of the etheric body of a dead man appearing to someone else. It is an absolutely true description. Immediately after the death, Manon de Gaussin saw the wandering etheric body of the dead man. I simply wanted to show you how this phenomenon is treated in a story written in the sixties of last century. It is the phenomenon of the appearance of the etheric body of a dead man, and it can teach us about the secret, hidden relationships that may hold sway between human beings. We will pass on tomorrow to further studies. Try to feel how behind what existed in Manon de Gaussin's consciousness as a fragment of Maya, a wide realm was playing, and how out of this wide realm, in the hours she lived through directly after the Marquess' death, a phenomenon appeared to her in the form of a meeting with the etheric body of the dead man.

Truly, the etheric body is more intimately connected with the manifold circumstances in which we are interwoven within the universe than the pictures we bear in our self-knowledge and in our consciousness.

• 1. “Tales” by Herman Grimm: “The Singer.”

When a subject such as our present one is discussed from the standpoint of spiritual science, this is not done by basing the facts upon some document or other exposition come into being in the course of human development, and by then illuminating the facts in question on the authority of such a document. That is not the way of spiritual science. On the contrary, entirely independent of all documents, spiritual science investigates what has occurred in human evolution; and only then—after the spiritual scientist has completed his research by means independent of any documents, and knows how to describe what he has found—only then is the document in question examined with a view of discovering whether it agrees with what had first been disclosed without reference to any tradition whatever. So all the statements made in these lectures concerning the course of this or that event are by no means to be taken as merely deriving from the Bible, from one of the four Gospels, but rather as the conclusions arrived at by spiritual research independent of the Gospels. But no opportunity will be missed to show that everything the spiritual scientist can fathom and observe is to be found in the Gospels, particularly in the Gospel of St. John.

We have a curious utterance by the great mystic Jacob Boehme which puzzles all who are not in touch with spiritual science. Jacob Boehme once drew attention to his way of discussing past epochs in human evolution—say, the figure of Adam—as though they had been within the scope of his own experiences, and he said: “Many might ask, Were you then present when Adam walked the earth?” And Jacob Boehme answers unequivocally: “Yes, I was present.” Now, that is a noteworthy statement; for actually, spiritual science is in a position really to observe with the eyes of the spirit whatever has occurred, be it ever so far back; and in these introductory remarks I should like to touch briefly upon the reason for this.

Everything that happens in the physical sensorial world has, of course, its counterpart in the spiritual world. When a hand moves there is present not only what your eye sees as a moving hand, but behind this moving hand, this visible image of the hand, there are, for example, my thought and my will: the hand is to move. In short, a spiritual element underlies it all. But while the visible image, the sense impression of the hand motion, passes, its spiritual counterpart remains inscribed in the spiritual world and always leaves a trace; so if our spiritual eyes are opened we can trace all things that have happened in the world by the imprints left by their spiritual counterparts. Nothing can occur in the world without leaving such traces.

Suppose the spiritual scientist gazes back to Charlemagne, or to the time of Rome, or to Greek Antiquity: everything that took place there has been preserved in the spiritual world as imprints of its spiritual prototypes, and can be seen there. This seeing is called reading the akashic record. There exists this living script which the spiritual eye can see; and when the spiritual scientist describes the events of Palestine or the observation of Zarathustra he is not describing what is found in the Bible or in the Gathas, but what he himself is able to read in the akashic record. Only then does he investigate whether the disclosures of the akashic record are to be found in the documents as well—in our case, the Gospels.

The attitude, therefore, of spiritual research toward documents is wholly unhampered; and for this very reason spiritual research will be the true judge of what documents have to tell. But when we find the same information in the documents as we were able to glean from the akashic record we infer first, that the documents are true, and second, that someone must have written them who was also able to read in the akashic record. Many religious and other documents of the human race are retrieved by spiritual science in this way.—What has just been said shall now be clarified by the study of a special chapter in human evolution, the Gospel of St. John, and its relation to the other Gospels. But you must not imagine that the akashic record, the spiritual history which lies open like a book before the seer's eyes, resembles any script of the ordinary world. It is a living kind of script, and we will try to understand this through what is to follow.

Suppose the seer gazes back in time—say, to the time of Caesar. Caesar did certain deeds, and in so far as they occurred on the physical plane his contemporaries witnessed them. But they all left their traces in the akashic record; and when the seer looks back he sees them as spiritual shadow-pictures or prototypes.—Call to mind again the movement of the hand: as a seer you do not perceive the picture this presents to the eye, but you will always see the intention to move the hand, the invisible forces that move it. In the same way is to be seen everything that went on in Caesar's thoughts, be it certain steps he intended to take or some battle he planned. Everything seen by his contemporaries originated in the impulses of his will and was executed by the invisible forces underlying the sense images. But the latter really appear in the akashic record as the Caesar who moved and had his being, as the spiritual image of Caesar.

Here someone inexperienced in such matters might object: Your tales are nothing but day-dreams—you know from your history what Caesar did, and now your mighty imagination makes you believe you are seeing all sorts of invisible akashic pictures.—But those who have experience in these things know that the less familiar one is with such events through outer history, the easier it is to read in the akashic record; for outer history and a knowledge of it are actually confusing for the seer. When we have reached a certain age we are hampered by various aspects of our education connected with the age in which we live. In the same way the seer, equipped with the education provided by his epoch, arrives at the point when he can give birth to his clairvoyant ego. He has studied history; he has learned how things are handed down in geology, biology, archeology, and the history of culture. All this actually interferes with his vision and may bias him in his reading of the akashic record; for in outer history one can by no means expect to find the same objectivity and certainty that are to be achieved in deciphering the akashic record.

Consider for a moment what it is that causes this or that event to become what is called history: it may be that certain documents have been preserved relating to some events, while others—and perhaps the most important ones—have been lost. An example will show how unreliable all history can be. Among a number of poems Goethe had planned but did not finish—and for the deeper student these constitute a beautiful supplement to the great and glorious finished works he left us—there is the fragment of a poem on Nausicaa. There exist only a few sketches in which Goethe had noted how he intended to deal with this poem. He often worked that way, jotting down a few sentences of which frequently but little is preserved. That was the case with the Nausicaa. Now, there were two men who endeavored to complete this work, both of them research men: Scherer, the literary historian, and Herman Grimm. But Herman Grimm was not only a researcher but an imaginative thinker—the man who wrote The Life of Michelangelo and the Goethe. Herman Grimm went about the task by trying to find his way into Goethe's spirit, and he asked himself: Goethe being what he was, how would he have conceived of a figure like the Nausicaa of the Odyssey?—Whereupon, with a certain disregard of that historical document, he created a Nausicaa in the spirit of Goethe. Scherer on the other hand, who always sought what was to be found among the documents in black and white, argued that a Nausicaa begun by Goethe must be completed purely on the basis of the material available; and he, too, tried to construct a Nausicaa, but exclusively out of what these scraps of paper had to offer. Of this procedure Herman Grimm remarked: What if Goethe's servant used some of these scraps of paper—perhaps just the ones containing something very important—for Iighting the fire? Have we any guarantee that the surviving scraps of paper are of any value at all compared with those that may have been used for lighting the fire?

All history based on documents may be analogous to this illustration, and indeed it often is. When building on documents we must never lose sight of the possibility that just the most important ones may have perished. Indeed, what passes for history is nothing more nor less than a fable convenue. But when the seer is hampered by this convention and at the same time sees everything quite differently in the akashic record, it is difficult for him to have faith in the akashic picture; and the public will voice its resentment when he tells a different story out of the akashic record. Hence one who is experienced in these things likes best to speak of ancient times of which there exist no documents, of the remote stages in the evolution of our earth. There are no documents relating to those epochs; and that is where the akashic record reports most faithfully, because the seer is not confused by outer history.—You will be able to gather from these remarks that it could never occur to anyone familiar with these matters that the pictures provided by the akashic record might be an echo of what is already known to him from outer history.

If we now search the akashic record for the great event to which we alluded yesterday, we find the following salient points. The whole human race, in as far as it lives on the earth, is descended from a divine realm, from a divine-spiritual existence. It can be stated that before any possibility existed for a physical eye to see human bodies, for a hand to touch human bodies, man was present as a spiritual being; and in the earliest ages he existed as a part of the divine-spiritual beings: the Gods are the ancestors of men, so to speak, and men the descendants of the Gods. The Gods had need of men as their issue, because without them they would have been unable to descend, as it were, into the sensorial physical world. In that remote time the Gods had their being in other worlds, acting from without upon man who gradually evolved upon the earth.

And now men had to overcome, step by step, the obstacles placed in their path by their earth life. What is the nature of these obstacles? The aspect of evolution essential for mankind was the need for the Gods to remain spiritual, while men, as their descendants, became physical. All the obstacles presented specifically by physical existence had to be surmounted by man, who possessed spirit only as the inner phase of the physical, and who as an outer being had become physical. It was within the confines of material existence that he had to develop; and it was in this way that he progressed upward step by step, steadily maturing until he should become increasingly able to turn to the Gods in whom he had his genesis. A descent from the Gods, and then a turning back to them, in order to reach and re-unite with them, that is man's path through life on earth. But if this evolution was to come about, certain human individualities always had to develop more rapidly than the rest, to hurry on ahead in order to become their leaders and teachers. Such men, then, have their being in humanity's midst and find their way back to the Gods, as it were, in advance of others. We can picture it in this way: In a given epoch men have attained to a certain degree of maturity in their development. They may have the premonition of a return to the Gods, but they have a long way to go before achieving it. Every man has within him a spark of the divine, but in the leaders it is always brighter: they are closer to that divine principle to which man must ultimately attain again. And this that dwells in the leaders of mankind is perceived, by those whose eyes have been opened to the spirit, as their essence and chief attribute.

Let us suppose some great leader of mankind confronted another man, not his equal but above the average. The latter feels vividly that the other is a great leader, permeated to a high degree by the spirituality to which other men must eventually attain. How would such a man describe this leader? He might say: Before me stands a man, a man in a physical body like everyone else; but his physical body is negligible, it need not be taken into account. When, however, I observe him with the eye of the spirit, I see united with him a mighty spiritual being, a divine-spiritual being which predominates to such an extent that my whole attention is focussed on it—not on what appears as body which he has in common with others.

To spiritual sight, then, there appears in a leader of mankind something which in its nature towers above the rest of humanity, and which must be described in quite a different way: the description must be of what the spiritual eye sees. Nowadays public men whose word is law would undoubtedly be amused at the idea of such surpassing leaders of mankind: we already have the spectacle of various erudite scientists regarding the shining lights of humanity as psychiatric cases. Such a leader would only be recognized as such by those whose spiritual vision had been sharpened; but these would indeed know that he was neither a fool nor a visionary, nor simply a very gifted person, as the more benevolent might designate him, but rather, that he was among the greatest figures of human life in the spiritual sense.

That is the way it would be today; but in the past it was a different matter, even in the none too remote past. Human consciousness, as we know, has undergone various metamorphoses, and formerly all men were endowed with a dim, shadowy clairvoyance. Even at the time when Christ lived on earth clairvoyance was still developed to a certain degree, and in earlier centuries even more so, though it was but a shadow of the clairvoyance common in the Atlantean and the first post-Atlantean epochs. It disappeared only gradually. But a few isolated individuals still had it, and even today there are natural clairvoyants whose dim higher vision enables them to distinguish the spiritual nature of men.

Let us turn to the time in which Buddha appeared to the ancient Indian people. Conditions were very different at that time. Today the appearance of a Buddha, especially in Europe, would arouse no particular respect. But in those old days it was a different matter, for there were very many who could discern the true nature of the event, namely, that this Buddha birth meant a great deal more than does an ordinary birth. In oriental writings, especially in those treating the subject with the deepest understanding, the birth of Buddha is described in the grand manner, as one might put it. It is related that Queen Maya was “the image of the Great Mother”, and that it was foretold she would bring a mighty being into the world. This being was then born prematurely—a very common means of launching an outstanding being in the world, because thereby the human being in which the higher spiritual being is to incarnate is less closely amalgamated with matter than when the child is carried the full time of gestation. It is then further related in the notable records of the Orient that at the moment of birth Buddha was enlightened, that he opened his eyes at once and directed his gaze to the four points of the compass, to the north, south, east, and west. We are told that he then took seven steps, and that the marks of these steps are engraved in the ground he trod. It is further recorded that he spoke at once, and the words he spoke were these: “This is the life in which I shall rise from Bodhisattva to Buddha, the last incarnation I shall have to pass through on this earth!”

Strange as such a communication may appear to the materialistic-minded man of today, and impossible as it is to interpret offhand from a materialistic viewpoint, it is nevertheless the truth for one who is able to see things with the eye of the spirit; and at that time there still existed men who, by means of natural clairvoyance, could discern spiritually what it was that was born with Buddha. Those are strange excerpts I have quoted from the oriental writings: nowadays they are called legends and myths. But he who understands these things knows that something of spiritual truth is hidden therein; and events such as the Buddha birth have significance not only for the intimate circle of the personality in question but for the world as well, for they radiate spiritual forces, as it were. And those who lived at a time when the world was more receptive to spiritual forces perceived that at the birth of Buddha spiritual forces were actually rayed forth.

It would be a trivial question to ask: Why does that sort of thing not still occur today? As a matter of fact, it does happen; only it requires a seer to perceive it. It is not enough that there should be one to radiate these forces: there must also be someone there to receive them. When people were more spiritual than they are today they were also more receptive to such radiations. So again a profound truth underlies the story that healing and reconciling forces were at work when Buddha was born. It is not a legend but a report based on deep truths which tells us that when Buddha came into the world, those who had previously hated each other were now united in love, those who had quarreled now met with expressions of mutual esteem, and so forth.

To one who surveys the development of mankind with the eye of the seer this does not appear as it does to the historian—a level path, at most overtopped a bit here and there by figures accepted as historical. Men will not admit that spiritual peaks and mountains exist—that is more than they can bear. But the seer knows that there are lofty heights and mountains towering above the path of the rest of mankind: these are the leaders of humanity. Now, upon what is such leadership built? Upon having gradually passed through the stages leading to life in the spiritual world. One of these stages we pointed out yesterday as the most important one: the birth of the higher ego, the spiritual ego; and we said that this was preceded and followed by other stages. It is evident that what we designate the Christ event is the mightiest peak in the range of human evolution, and that a long preparation was indispensible before the Christ Being could incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth.

In order to understand this preparation we must visualize the same phenomenon on a smaller scale. Let us suppose a man starts on the path to spiritual cognition in any one of his incarnations—that is, he carries out some of the exercises (to be described later) which render the soul more and more spiritual, more receptive to what is spiritual, and guide it toward the moment when it bears the higher, imperishable ego that can see into the spiritual world. Many experiences are passed through before that moment arrives. One must not imagine that anything pertaining to the spirit can be hurried: everything of the sort must be absolved with patience and perseverance. Let us suppose, then, that someone starts a training of this kind. His aim is the birth of the higher ego, but he only succeeds in reaching a certain preliminary stage. Then he dies; and in due time he is born again. Here one of two things can happen: either he can feel the urge to seek a teacher who will show him how he can rapidly repeat what he had previously passed through and attain to the higher stages, or else, for one reason or another, he does not take this way. In the latter case, as well, the unfolding of his life will often be different from that of the lives of other men. The life of one who has trodden the path of enlightenment at all will quite of itself provide something resembling effects of the stage he had already reached in his previous incarnation. He will have experiences of a different nature, and the impression of these on him will be different from that received by other men. Then he will attain anew, by means of these experiences, to what he had previously achieved through his efforts. In his former incarnation he had to strive actively from step to step; but now that life brings him as a recurrence, so to speak, what he had once acquired through effort, this approaches him from without, as it were; and it may be that he will experience the results of his previous incarnations in quite a different form.

Thus it may happen that even in his childhood some experience can make upon his soul an impression of such a nature as to re-engender the forces he had acquired in his previous life. Suppose such a man had attained to a certain degree of wisdom in a given incarnation. He is then born again as a child, like everyone else. But at the age of seven or eight he has some painful experience, and the consequence is that all the wisdom he had once acquired comes to the fore again: he is back at the stage he had reached before, and thence can advance to the next one. Now we will suppose further that he endeavors to proceed another few steps, and dies again. In his next incarnation the same thing can happen again: once more some outer experience can put him to the test, as it were, again revealing first, what he had achieved in his next to the last incarnation, and then, in his last one. And now he can climb another step.

You will see from this that only by taking account of such events can we understand the life of one who had already passed through certain stages of development. There is one stage, for instance, that is soon reached by serious striving along the path of enlightenment: the stage of the so-called Wanderer, of him who has outgrown the prejudices of his immediate surroundings and has cast off the fetters imposed by his environment. This need not make him irreverent: we can become all the more reverent; but he must be free of the prejudices of his immediate surroundings. Let us assume that this man dies at a stage in which he has already worked his way through to a modicum of freedom and independence. When he is born again it can happen that comparatively early in his life some experience will re-awaken this feeling of freedom and independence in him. As a rule, this is the result of losing his father or someone else to whom he is closely bound; or it might be a consequence of his father's reprehensible behavior toward him—he might have cast him out, or something of the sort. All this is faithfully reported in the legends of the various peoples, for in matters of this kind the folk myths and legends are really wiser than is modern science. Among the legends you will often find the type in which the child is cast out, is found by shepherds, nourished and brought up by them, and later restored to his station (Chiron, Romulus and Remus). The fact that their own home plays them false serves to re-awaken in them the fruits of former incarnations. The legend of the casting out of Oedipus is in this category, too. You will now understand that the more advanced a man is—whether at the stage when his higher ego is born or even farther—the richer in experience his life must be if he is to be capable of a new experience, one he had not yet had.

He who was destined to embody in Himself the mighty Being we call the Christ could naturally not assume this mission at any random age: he had first to mature very gradually. No ordinary man could undertake this mission: it had to be one who in the course of many lives had attained to lofty degrees of initiation. What was here demanded is faithfully told us in the akashic record. This relates how a certain individuality had striven upward throughout many lives step by step to high degrees of initiation. Then this individuality was born again, and in this earthly embodiment passed first through preparatory experiences. But in this embodiment there lived an individuality who had already passed through high stages of initiation, an initiate destined in a later period of his life to receive into himself the Individuality of the Christ. And the first experiences of this initiate are repetitions of his former degrees of initiation, whereby all the previous achievements of his soul are re-evoked.

Now, we know that the human being consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego. But we also know that in the course of human life only the physical body is born at physical birth, and that up to the seventh year the etheric body is still enclosed in a sort of etheric maternal sheath which is then discarded, at the time of the change of teeth, in the same way as is the physical maternal sheath when the physical body is born into the outer physical world. Similarly, at puberty, an astral sheath is thrown off and the astral body is born. And approximately in the twenty-first year the ego is born, but again only gradually.

Having considered the birth of the physical body, of the etheric body in the seventh year, and of the astral body in the fourteenth or fifteenth year, we must similarly take into account a birth of the sentient soul, the intellectual soul, and the consciousness soul; and the ages at which these births occur are approximately the twenty-first, the twenty-eighth, and the thirty-fifth year respectively. From this it is evident that the Christ Being could not incarnate in a man of this earth, could not find room in such a man, before the intellectual soul was completely born: the Christ Being could not embody in the initiate into whom He was born before this initiate had reached his twenty-eighth year. Spiritual science confirms this. It was between the twenty-eighth and thirty-fifth years that the Christ Being entered the individuality who walked the earth as a great initiate, and who gradually, in the light and radiance of this great Being, unfolded all that otherwise man develops without this radiance, this light; namely, the etheric body, the astral body, the sentient soul, and the intellectual soul. Thus we can say that up to this age we see before us in him who was called to be the Christ bearer a lofty initiate who gradually passed through the experiences that finally evoked all he had undergone in previous incarnations—the sum of his conquests in the spiritual world. Only then could he say, Now I am here; now will I sacrifice all that I have. I no longer desire an independent ego, but will make of myself the bearer of the Christ: henceforth He shall dwell in me, shall fill me completely.

All four Gospels stress this moment when the Christ incorporated in a personality of this earth. However much they may differ in other respects, they all point to this event of the Christ slipping into the great initiate, as it were: the Baptism by John. In that moment, so clearly defined by the author of the John Gospel when he says that the Spirit descended in the form of a dove and united with Jesus of Nazareth, in that moment occurred the birth of Christ: as a new and higher Ego the Christ is born in the soul of Jesus of Nazareth. And the other ego, that of a great initiate, had now attained to the lofty plane on which it was ripe for this event.

And Who was it that was to be born in the Being of Jesus of Nazareth? This was indicated yesterday: the God Who was there from the beginning, Who had remained aloof in the spiritual world, so to speak, leaving mankind to its evolution. He it was Who descended and incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth. Can we find this indicated by the writer of the John Gospel? We need only take the words of the Gospel very seriously; and with this in mind let us read the beginning of the Old Testament:

In the (primordial) beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

Let us visualize the situation: The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Below, the earth with its kingdoms as the issue of the divine Spirit; and among these one individual evolves to the point of being able to take into himself this Spirit that moved upon the face of the waters. What does the author of the John Gospel say? He tells us that John the Baptist recognized the Being spoken of in the Old Testament. He says:

I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode upon him.

He knew that upon whomsoever the Spirit should descend was He that was to come: the Christ. There you have the beginning of world evolution: the Spirit moving upon the face of the waters; and there you have John who baptized with water, and the Spirit that in the beginning moved upon the face of the waters and now descends into the individuality of Jesus of Nazareth. It would be impossible to connect in a more grandiose way the event of Palestine with that other event, told at the beginning of the same document whose continuation is the Gospel.

But in other ways as well we find the John Gospel linked with this oldest of documents. The writer effects this by pointing out that with Jesus of Nazareth is merged the same principle that from the beginning worked creatively at all earth evolution. We know that the opening words of the Gospel of St. John read:

In the beginning was the Word (or Logos), and the Word (or Logos) was with God, and a God was the Word (or Logos).

What is this Logos, and in what sense was it with God? Let us turn to the beginning of the Old Testament, to the passage presenting this Spirit of whom it is written:

And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And the divine Spirit said, Let there be light: and there was light.

Let us keep that in mind and express it somewhat differently; let us listen to the divine Spirit intoning the creative Word through the world. What is this Word? In the beginning was the Logos, and the divine Spirit called out, and what the Spirit called out came to pass. That means that in the Word there was life; for had there been no life in it, nothing could have come to pass. And what was it that came to pass? We are told:

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

Turn back here to the John Gospel:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and a God was the Word.

Now the Word had streamed into matter, where it became the outer form of the Godhead, as it were.

In it was life; and the life was the light of men.

In this way the author links his Gospel to that oldest of documents, the Book of Genesis. He refers to the same divine Spirit, only in different words. Then he makes it clear that this is the divine Spirit Who appears in Jesus of Nazareth. All four Evangelists agree that with the Baptism by John the Christ was born in Jesus of Nazareth, and that for the consummation of this event Jesus of Nazareth had needed comprehensive preparation. We must understand that everything previously told us concerning the life of Jesus of Nazareth is nothing but the sum of experiences portraying his ascent into the higher worlds during previous incarnations: the gradual preparation of everything embraced in his astral body, etheric body, and physical body for the eventual reception of the Christ.

The Evangelist who wrote the Gospel of St. Luke even says, somewhat paradigmatically, that Jesus of Nazareth had prepared himself in every respect for this great event, the birth of Christ in him. The individual experiences that led him upward to the Christ event will be discussed tomorrow. Today I shall merely point out that the author of the Luke Gospel told us in a single sentence that he who received the Christ into himself had indeed prepared himself in the previous years: that his astral body had achieved the virtue, nobility and wisdom indispensable for the birth of the Christ in him; and furthermore, that he had brought his etheric body to such a degree of maturity, and had developed such pliancy and beauty in his physical body, that the Christ could dwell in him.—One need only understand the Gospel aright. Take the second Chapter of Luke, verse 52. True, the wording of this verse in most of the Bible translations will not tell you what I just said. There it says:

And Jesus increased in wisdom and age¹, and in favor with God and man.

It would still make sense if such a man as the writer of the Luke Gospel had related of Jesus of Nazareth that he increased in wisdom; but when he reports as a solemn fact that he increased in age—well, that is not clear on its face, for it is a circumstance calling for no special emphasis. That it is nevertheless mentioned suggests that something more must be involved. Let us examine the verse in question in the original text:

Kai Jesous proekopten en to Sophia, kai helekia kai chariti Para theo kai anthropois.

As a matter of fact, here is what this means: “He increased in wisdom” signifies that he developed his astral body; and anyone who knows what the Greek mind associated with the word helekia can tell you that the term refers to the development of the etheric body, whereby wisdom gradually becomes skill. As you know, the astral body develops the qualities called upon for individual occasions: we understand something once and for all. The etheric body, on the other hand, shapes what it develops into habits, inclinations, and capabilities. This occurs by means of constant repetition. Wisdom becomes a habit: it is practised because it has become second nature. So what this "increase in age" means is an increase in maturity: just as the astral body has grown in wisdom, so the etheric body has increased in pure habits in the realm of goodness, nobility, and beauty. And the third quality that increased in Jesus of Nazareth, charis, really means that which manifests itself and becomes visible as beauty. No other translations are right. In translating this verse we must indicate that Jesus gained in gracious beauty; in other words, that his physical body, too, grew in beauty and nobility.

And Jesus increased in wisdom (in his astral body), in maturity of disposition (in his etheric body), and in gracious beauty (in his physical body), in a way manifest to God and man.

There you have the delineation given by St. Luke. Clearly, he knew that he who was to receive the Christ into himself had first to develop the threefold sheath—physical body, etheric body, and astral body—to its highest capacity.

In this way we shall learn how one can rediscover in the Gospels what spiritual science tells us independent of them. For this reason spiritual science constitutes a cultural current capable of recapturing the religious documents; and this recapture will not remain a mere milestone in human knowledge and cognition, but will stand as a conquest of soul and mind in the realm of feeling and sentience. And that is precisely the sort of understanding we need if we are to grasp the intervention of the Christ in the evolution of humanity.

• 1. In Luther's translation “age” is the word that corresponds to the “stature” of our King James version. It is retained here in order to avoid altering the term adhered to by Dr. Steiner.

A study of the genealogy of Jesus as it is given in the Gospel of St. Luke will show that what the writer wished to convey is in accordance with the statements made in the previous lecture. We saw that in the same way as a Divine Power (Kraftwesenheit) was to permeate the etheric and physical bodies of the Solomon Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel, so also was a Divine Power to permeate the astral body and Ego (or the vehicle of the Ego) of the personality we know as the Nathan Jesus of St. Luke's Gospel. It is clearly indicated in the latter Gospel that this Divine Power flows down through all the successive generations, in an unbroken line, from that stage in the existence of the Earth when man had not as yet descended for the first time into a physical incarnation. The ancestry of Jesus is traced back through the generations to God. Adam is named as the Son of God. 'This means that in order to find the Divine Principle within the astral body and the Ego of the Nathan Jesus we must look to that pristine state of existence experienced by man before he descended into physical incarnation on the Earth, while he still lived in the divine-spiritual realms and can truly be called a Godlike being. To this period, when man's divine nature was as yet unaffected by Luciferic influences, the Gospel of St. Luke traces back the lineage of the Jesus of whom it tells. All anthroposophical investigation indicates that this period was in the Lemurian Age.

In those Mystery schools where the pupils were trained for the Initiation characterized yesterday as the attainment of knowledge of the great secrets of the Cosmos, the aim was to lead man out of and beyond everything earthly and beyond what he had himself come to be as the result of earthly influences. He was to be taught what vista of the Universe can be revealed to him when he deliberately refrains from using the instruments of cognition he has possessed since the time of the Luciferic influence. The first great question for the pupils of these Mysteries was this: What vista of the Universe lies before clairvoyant vision when a man frees himself from perceptions given through the physical anti etheric bodies and from all the surrounding earthly influences? Such freedom had been man's natural state before he first entered earthly incarnation and became the ‘earthly Adam’—speaking now in the Biblical sense and particularly that of the Gospel of St. Luke. Thus we can see that there are two conditions only in which man can rightly be regarded as a divine-spiritual being: one is that conferred through the lofty Initiation attained in the Great Mysteries; the other is that which was present at an elementary stage of human existence and cannot be fulfilled at any optional Earth-period. It obtained before the descent of the Divine Man in the Lemurian epoch into the 'man of the Earth', as the Bible describes him; for ‘Adam’ signifies ‘earth-man’, that is to say, a being whose nature is no longer purely spiritual but is now clothed in the elements of the earth, of the ‘dust’.¹

It may cause surprise that only 77 generations or stages of hereditary are enumerated in the Gospel of St. Luke. In the Gospel of St. Matthew too it may well cause even more surprise that only 42 generations are mentioned from Abraham to Christ, when a simple calculation will show that the number of years usually reckoned to one generation, multiplied by 42, would not reach back to Abraham. To be accurate, such calculation would have to take account of the fact that in the Patriarchal Age before Solomon and David, longer periods Were reckoned to a generation—and rightly so—than was the case later on. To get the historical dates even approximately correct WC must not reckon to three generations—for example, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—what would now be an average number of years; about 215 years would have to be allowed for the three generations. This is also confirmed by occult investigation. The fact that the period of a generation in those early times was longer than it is to-day holds good even more emphatically for the generations from Adam to Abraham. In respect of the lineage from Abraham onwards it will be obvious to everyone that a single generation was once of longer duration, for it is at an advanced age that heirs are born to the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Just as it is usual now to reckon 33 years to a generation, so those who compiled the Gospel of St. Matthew were right in assigning 75 to 8o years, and even more, to one generation. It must be emphasized that back to Abraham, this Gospel is referring to individuals. The names of Abraham's predecessors given in the Gospel of St. Luke, however, do not refer to single individuals. In this case it is essential to remember something that is a fact, although it may seem incredible to materialistic minds.

What we to-day call our memory, our recollective consciousness of the unchanging identity of our inmost being, goes back in the normal way only into the early years of our childhood. If a man of the present time follows his life back into the past, he will find that memories cease at some point. One person will remember more of childhood, another less; but in any case memory to-day is limited to the one personal life, and indeed does not even embrace the whole of that life back to the day of birth. If we realise what the soul-faculties and characteristics of man's consciousness were in ancient times, recalling that in past epochs of evolution a certain clairvoyant state of consciousness was normal, it will not surprise us to find that in periods not far distant, consciousness was connected with memory to an altogether different extent than was the case later on.

Before the epoch of Abraham, man's whole constitution of soul was different from what it subsequently came to be, and this applies above all to the power of memory. During the still earlier epoch of Atlantis, the difference in this power was far greater still. A man did not, as he does to-day, remember the experiences of his own personal life only, but his memory extended through his own birth and beyond that to what his father, grandfather and other ancestors had experienced. Memory was something that flowed in the blood through a series of generations and only later came to be limited to a single period and to the single life.

Now the connotations of a name in ancient times were not such as arc associated with a name to-day. Indeed, the giving of names in ancient times is a subject that would now require very special study, for what modern philology has to say about it is often sheer nonsense. In the past it would have been impossible to conceive that names could be attached to beings or things in the purely external way that is customary nowadays. A name was once a reality connected essentially with the being who received it, and it was intended to express in sound or tone the inner nature of that being. The name was meant to be an echo of the being in the tone. (Our modern age has no inkling whatever of what this implies; if it had, books such as Fritz Mauthner's Kritik der Sprache could never have been written. This book contains a masterly review of modern research, of all scholarly treatises recently written on the subject of language, but makes no mention of its intrinsic character in antiquity.) In those times when the faculty of memory was different, a name did not apply merely to an individual human being in his personal lifetime but extended to all that was strung together through the memory; therefore the same name was in use as long as this retrospective experience endured. The name ‘Noah’, for example, did not signify a single individual; it signified what, in the first place, an individual remembered of his own life and then, beyond his birth, of the life of his father, of his grandfather and so on, as long as the thread of memory continued. The same name was used for the succession of individuals whom the thread of memory connected. Therefore names such as ‘Adam’, ‘Seth’, ‘Enoch’, comprised as many personalities as were united through memory. Thus when it is said that the name of some individual belonging to times of antiquity was ‘Enoch’, we may understand it to mean that a new thread of memory has come into existence in an individual who was the son of someone bearing a different name; the memory of the former individual did not carry back into that of his predecessors. The new thread of memory is not severed, however, with the death of the first individual to bear the name of 'Enoch' but continues through the generations until again a new thread of memory appears, and, with it, a new name which will be•;used until the new thread is broken. Thus when ‘Adam’ is referred to, the one name designates several successive personalities in the sequence of generations.

It is in this sense that names are used in the genealogical table in St. Luke's Gospel. The intention of the writer is to convey to us that the divine-spiritual Power that entered into the Ego (Ego-bearer) and into the astral body of the Nathan Jesus must be traced back to the stage when man first descended into earthly incarnation. In St. Luke's Gospel, there-fore, we find, firstly, the names of single individualities and then, after we reach the name of Abraham, we come to the epoch when memory embraces the longer period and several individualities are included under one name, combined as it were into one Ego by the memory.

It will now be easier for you to realise that the 77 names enumerated in St. Luke's Gospel extend over very long periods, actually reaching back to the time when the Being we may denote as the divine-spiritual entity in man was incarnated for the first time in a human physical body. The other aspect presented in the Gospel is this.—One who in passing through the 77 stages in the Great Mysteries had succeeded in purifying his soul from everything absorbed by humanity in Earth-existence, attained the state that is possible to-day only when a man is free of his physical body and can live entirely in the astral body and Ego. He is able, then, to pour his being over the whole surrounding Cosmos from which the Earth itself arose. Such was the aim of the Initiation in these Mysteries. A man had then reached the level of the Divine-Spiritual Power which drew into the astral body and Ego-bearer of the Nathan Jesus.

The Nathan Jesus was to exemplify that which man receives, not from earthly but from heavenly conditions of existence. Hence the Gospel of St. Luke describes the Divine-Spiritual Power by which the astral body and Ego of the Nathan Jesus had been permeated. The Gospel of St. Matthew describes the Divine-Spiritual Power through which the inner organ for the Jahve-consciousness had been brought into existence in Abraham; and this same Power was working in the physical body and etheric body through 42 generations, constituting a line of heredity.

These were the teachings—especially those in St. Matthew's Gospel concerning the derivation of the blood of Jesus of Nazareth—which were cultivated and studied in the communities of the Therapeutae and the Essenes, among whom Jeschu ben Pandira worked to prepare for the coming of Christ Jesus. It was his mission to prepare at least a few, by imparting to them the knowledge that at the end of a definite period of time, namely 42 generations after Abraham, the development achieved by the Hebrew people would make it possible for the Zarathustra-Individuality to incarnate in a branch of the lineage of Abraham in the Solomon line of the House of David. This was a teaching given in advance. Not only was it taught at that time in the Schools of the Essenes but there were pupils in those Schools who had lived through the 42 stages in actual experience and were therefore themselves able to behold in clairvoyant vision the nature of the Being who was descending through the 42 stages. Knowledge of this was to be given to the world through appropriate teachings and it was the task of the Essenes to ensure that among a few human beings at least, there would be understanding of what the coming of Christ would be for the Earth.

We have already heard of events connected with the history of that human Individuality who incarnated in the specially prepared blood of which the Gospel of St. Matthew speaks. The wisdom which in very early times this great Teacher—known by the name of Zarathustra or Zoroaster—had imparted in the East, fitted him for the later incarnation. He was, as we know, the inaugurator of the Hermetic culture of Egypt, inasmuch as to this end he had given up his astral body, then to be borne by Hermes. He had also given up his etheric body, which was preserved for Moses. As the creator of the Mosaic civilization, Moses bore within him the etheric body of Zarathustra. Zarathustra himself incarnated later on in other astral and etheric bodies. Of particular interest to us is his incarnation as Zarathas or Nazarathos in ancient Chaldea in the sixth century B.C., where the Chaldean sages were his pupils and where the wisest among the pupils of the occult schools of the Hebrews at the time of the Babylonian captivity came into contact with him. The pupils of the Chaldean occult schools were then occupied throughout the following six centuries with the traditions, rites and cults originating with Zarathustra in the personality of Zarathas or Nazarathos. All the generations of pupils—Chaldean, Babylonian, Assyrian and so on—who were living in those regions of Asia, deeply revered the name of this great Master. They waited with longing for his next incarnation, for they knew that after six hundred years he would come again. The secret of his coming was known to them and was like a beacon light shining in from the future.

And as the time approached when the blood would be suitably prepared for the new incarnation of Zarathustra, the three envoys, the three wise Magi, set out from the East; they knew that the revered name of Zarathustra himself would lead them as a Star to the place where his new incarnation was to take place. It was the Being of the great Teacher himself who as the ‘Star’ led the three Magi to the birthplace of the Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel.—Ordinary philology itself will confirm that the word ‘Star’ was used in ancient times to denote human individuality. It is not only spiritual research which from its own sources tells us more clearly than anything else that the three Magi at that time were led by Zoroaster, the ‘Golden Star’, to the place where he was to reincarnate, but it follows from the very use of the word ‘Star’ for human Individualities of lofty development that the Star by which the Wise Men were guided was Zarathustra himself.

Thus six hundred years before the Christian era the Magi of the East had come into contact with the Individuality who subsequently incarnated as the Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel. Now Zarathustra himself led them to Palestine and they followed in his track. For it was the Star of Zarathustra moving towards Palestine that guided the Magi along their way from the Chaldean Mysteries in the East, to Palestine, where Zarathustra was about to incarnate.

This secret of the coming incarnation of Zarathustra, of Zarathas or Nazarathos, was known in the Mysteries of Chaldea. But the secret of the blood of the Hebrew people which was that when the time was ripe it would be suitable for the new bodily constitution of Zarathustra—this was a teaching of the Essenes, who in their Mysteries were trans-ported in soul through the 42 Stages.

Thus there were, to begin with, two groups who knew something about the secret of the Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel: the Chaldean Initiates, who possessed knowledge relating to the Individuality of Zarathustra and his coming incarnation in Hebrew blood, and the sect of the Essenes, which was concerned with another aspect of the physical constitution, of the blood of the coming Being. In the Schools of the Essenes, teaching had been given for rather more than a hundred years on the approaching advent of the Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel, in whose being would be found, wholly fulfilled, not only those conditions of which I have already spoken, but others too which can be characterized as follows.—

In these Schools a pupil underwent a lengthy period of training for the purpose of achieving, by exercises and other methods, the purification of soul necessary to him before he was led through the 42 stages in order to behold the secrets of the etheric body and the physical body. But it was known in these communities that the Being for whom they were preparing would descend from the heights already possessing those qualities which were a prerequisite for development of the faculties capable of perceiving these secrets.

The system employed by the Essenes for the purification of the soul was, in effect, a continuation of the ancient Nazarite discipline.² This form of occult training had existed in Judaism from times immemorial. Long before the advent of the Therapeutae and the Essenes, certain Hebrews had dedicated themselves to it, adopting very special methods for the furtherance of development in soul and body. First and foremost, the Nazarites subjected themselves to a diet that in a certain respect is still useful to-day if anyone desires to make more rapid progress in soul-development than is otherwise possible. They abstained altogether from eating flesh and drinking wine. This made conditions easier for them because the eating of flesh may actually retard development in one who is seeking for the spirit. It is the case—though this is not intended as propaganda for vegetarianism—that abstinence from meat-eating makes everything easier; it is possible to develop greater inner resistance to obstacles, greater strength for the overcoming of hindrances arising from the physical and etheric bodies, and a greater power of endurance. Naturally, this is not due entirely to abstinence from meat-eating but first and foremost to the fact that such a man is strengthening his soul. The avoidance of meat as food merely brings about a change in the physical body; but if the element from the side of the soul is absent and does not permeate the body as it should, there is no particular purpose in abstaining from the eating of flesh.

These practices of the Nazarites were continued, but in a much stricter form, by the Essenes who also resorted to quite other usages of which I spoke to you yesterday and the day before. Above all, however, they practised the very strictest abstinence from meat-eating, with the result that they learnt, comparatively speaking more quickly, to expand their memory beyond 42 generations and to gaze into the secrets of the Akashic Chronicle. They became what may be called a ‘sprout’ or a ‘shoot’ on a branch, on a tree, or on a plant—a sprout that endured through many generations. They were not detached from the tree of humanity but were conscious of the branches uniting them with it. In a certain respect they were different from men who severed themselves from the tribal stock and whose memory was limited to the life of the single personality. The name given to the former individuals in the communities of the Essenes too, was a word meaning ‘a living branch’, in contrast to a severed branch. They were men who felt themselves integrated in the line of generations, in no way severed from the tree of humanity. The pupils who cultivated particularly this trend in Essenism and who had passed through the 42 stages in their own experience were called ‘Netzers’.

Jeschu ben Pandira, of whom I spoke yesterday as the great Teacher in the communities of the Essenes—he is a figure fairly well known to occultists—had a faithful and particularly close disciple from this class of Netzers. Jeschu ben Pandira had five pupils or disciples, each of whom took over a special branch of his general teaching and continued to develop it. The names of these five pupils were: Mathai, Nakai, the third was given the name Netzer because he came especially from that class, then Boni and Thona. These five pupils of Jeschu ben Pandira who himself suffered martyrdom on account of alleged blasphemy and heresy, a hundred years B.C., propagated his teachings in five different sections. Spiritual-scientific investigation finds that after the death of Jeschu ben Pandira the teaching relating to the preparation of the blood for him who was to be the Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel was propagated especially by Mathai. The teaching concerning the inner qualities and nature of the soul—a teaching connected with the old Nazarite but also with Netzerism in its later form—was continued by Netzer, the other great pupil of Jeschu ben Pandira. Netzer was specially chosen to be the founder of a little colony. There were many such colonies in Palestine, a particular branch of Essenism being cultivated in each of them. The cultivation of Netzerism, the special concern of the pupil Netzer, was to be the primary aim in the colony which led a secluded existence and which then, in the Bible, received the name ‘Nazareth’. There, in Nazareth—Netzereth—an Essene colony was established by Netzer, the pupil of Jeschu ben Pandira. Those whose lives were dedicated to the ancient Nazarite order lived there in fairly strict seclusion. Hence after the happenings of which I have still to speak, after the flight to Egypt and the return, nothing was more natural than that the Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel should be brought into the atmosphere of Netzerism. This is indicated in St. Matthew's Gospel where it is said that after the return from Egypt, Jesus was taken to the little city of Nazareth, ‘that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets: He shall be called a Nazarene’. There have been many different interpretations of these words because none of the translators knew what was really meant—namely that here there was a colony of Essenes where the early years of Jesus' life were to be spent.

Before going into other details and into the relationship with the Jesus of St. Luke's Gospel, we will now speak in broad outline of certain matters connected with the life of the Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel.

Everything presented in the early chapters of St. Matthew's Gospel derives from the secrets taught by Jeschu ben Pandira among the Essenes and subsequently propagated by his pupil Mathai. All the processes with which these teachings were concerned had to do with the preparation of the physical body and etheric body of the Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel, although needless to say it was also a matter of influences being exercised upon the astral body too through the 42 generations. But if we say that during the first 14 generations it was the physical body that comes into consideration, during the second 14 generations the etheric body and during the third 14 generations—since the Babylonian captivity—the astral body, it must nevertheless be held firmly in mind that what was rightly prepared in this way for Zarathustra could be fully used by this great Individuality only in so far as it belonged to physical body and etheric body.

And now remind yourselves of the development of an individual human being: from birth until about the seventh year it is paramountly the physical body that is in process of development, during the next seven years, from the second dentition until puberty, the etheric body; and only then does the free development of the astral body begin. In the case of the physical and etheric bodies prepared for Zarathustra through the generations beginning with Abraham, this process of development was to reach culmination and into these bodies Zarathustra was to descend in the new incarnation. But when the development of the etheric body had reached its conclusion, what had been prepared for him was no longer adequate and he had now to proceed to the development of the astral body.

To this end there now took place a wonderful, awe-inspiring happening, without some understanding of which it is impossible to grasp the depths of the great Mystery of Christ Jesus. During boyhood the Zarathustra-Individuality evolved in the physical body and etheric body of the Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel until the twelfth year. In the case of this Individuality and also on account of the climate, the point of development occurring in our regions at the age of 14 to 15 fell somewhat earlier. By the twelfth year everything that could possibly be attained in the suitably prepared physical and etheric bodies of the Solomon lineage had actually been attained. And then the Zarathustra-Individuality forsook the bodies to which the Gospel of St. Matthew is primarily referring and passed over into the Jesus of the Gospel of St. Luke. From the Lecture-Course on the latter Gospel we know the explanation of the story of the 12-year-old Jesus in the Temple. When the parents of Jesus were suddenly unable to understand him because he had so completely changed, what had happened was that there had passed into him the Zarathustra-Individuality who had lived until then in the physical and etheric bodies of the Solomon Jesus.—Such things do occur in life, difficult though it is for materialistic thought to give credence to them. The fact that an Individuality passes out of one body into another does actually occur, and this was the case when the Zarathustra-Individuality left the original body and passed into the Jesus of St. Luke's Gospel in whom the astral body and Ego-vehicle had been specially prepared.

From the twelfth year onwards, therefore, Zarathustra was able to continue his development in the astral body and Ego-vehicle of the Nathan Jesus. This is magnificently presented to us in the Gospel of St. Luke, in the passage referring to the astounding scene where the 12-year-old Jesus is sitting among the learned Rabbis and saying things that sound utterly strange. How could Jesus of the Nathan line be capable of this? The explanation is that at that moment the Zarathustra-Individuality had passed into him. Until the twelfth year Zarathustra had not spoken out of the boy who had been brought to Jerusalem at that time and the change of character was therefore so great that the parents did not recognize the boy when they found him sitting among the learned scribes.

Thus we have to do with two sets of parents, both named ‘Joseph' and Mary’—common names at that time—and with two boys, each named Jesus. But to infer anything from the names ‘Joseph' and 'Mary’ as names are understood to-day would be at variance with the findings of all genuine investigation. The genealogy given in St. Matthew's Gospel is that of the one child—Jesus of the Solomon line of the House of David. And St. Luke's Gospel tells of the other child—Jesus of the Nathan line—who is the son of different parents altogether. The two boys grew up in close proximity to each other until they were twelve; years old. This can be read in the Gospels; what they relate is everywhere correct. But as long as it was desired that people should not learn the truth or the people themselves did not want to hear it, the Gospels were withheld from them. It is only a matter of understanding what the Gospels say—for they speak truly.

Jesus of the Nathan line grew up with a deeply inward nature. He had little aptitude for acquiring external wisdom and assimilating facts of ordinary knowledge. But the depths of his soul were fathomless and he had a boundless capacity for love, because in his etheric body was contained the power that streamed down from the time when man had not yet entered into earthly incarnation, when he was still leading a Divine existence. This Divine existence manifested in this boy in the form of an infinite capacity for love. It was therefore natural that he should have been ill-adapted for everything acquired by men in the coursh of incarnations through the instrumentality of the physical body, while on the other hand an untold warmth of love pervaded his inner life. To those who knew of it, one episode in particular was a sign of the boy's inner faculties. A faculty that otherwise can be awakened in the human being only by outer stimuli, functioned from the beginning in the case of the Jesus of St. Luke's Gospel; directly after his birth he spoke certain words that were intelligible to those around him.³ In respect of all inward qualities he was infinitely great; unskilled, however, in respect of whatever can be acquired through the generations of mankind on the Earth.

What wonder that the parents were amazed in the Temple when suddenly there was before them a boy who, having grown up in this body, was now filled with a wisdom otherwise attainable by external means only. This sudden, radical change was possible because at that moment the Zarathustra-Individuality passed over from the Solomon Jesus into the Jesus of the Nathan line. It was Zarathustra (or Zarathas) who was now speaking out of the boy at the time described to us, when his parents were searching for him in the Temple.

Zarathustra had naturally acquired all the faculties it is possible to acquire by using the instruments of the physical body and the etheric body. He had necessarily to choose the lineage from Solomon, for in the bodily constitution produced by this blood there were strong, highly developed forces. From this bodily constitution he drew whatever he could make part of his own being and now united it with the deep inwardness made manifest in the nature of the Jesus of St. Luke's Gospel and deriving from an age before man's earthly incarnations began.

Thus two streams became one. There was now one Being. In the Gospel our attention is specially called to the following.—Not only did the parents notice a startling change, detecting something they could not possibly have expected, but this change also showed itself outwardly. When the boy Jesus had been found by his parents among the scribes in the Temple, it is specifically said: ‘And he went with them and came to Nazareth... And Jesus increased in physical stature, in the noblest habits, and in wisdom.’ Why are these particular attributes mentioned? It was because they could be part of his nature in a very special sense now that the Zarathustra-Individuality was in him.—I must call particular attention here to the fact that the words referring to the three attributes in certain translations of the Bible are sometimes as follows: And Jesus increased in wisdom and age and in favour with God and man.' Do we really need a Gospel to tell us that age increases in a boy of twelve? Weizsäcker's translation is: ‘And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favour with God and man.’ But this does not convey the real meaning. The real meaning is that in the Nathan Jesus-boy there was now a different Individuality—one whose nature was not, as had previously been the case, purely inward, but who, having developed hitherto in a perfected physical body, was able to make himself manifest in the external physical stature as well. Furthermore, habits that are acquired from life and develop in the etheric body as their special province, had previously been absent from the nature of the Nathan Jesus. His capacity for love was so great that it could be the foundation on which to build; but this capacity was a spontaneous reality and could not imprint itself into habits acquired from life. Now, however, the other Individuality was present, having in his own nature the powers resulting from mature development of the physical and etheric bodies, and in these conditions it was possible for habits to come to visible expression and be impressed into the etheric body. That was the second attribute. The third increase ‘in wisdom’ 'in the ordinary sense of the word is easier to understand. Jesus of St. Luke's Gospel was not ‘wise’; he was capable of infinite, supreme love. The increase in wisdom was due to the presence in him of the Zarathustra-Individuality.

In speaking about the Gospel of St. Luke I referred to the fact that it is quite possible for a human being from whom the Individuality has departed and who has then only the three sheaths—physical, etheric and astral—to go on living for a time, But he of whom the early chapters of St. Matthew's Gospel speaks—Jesus of the Solomon line—wasted away and died, comparatively soon after his twelfth year. At first, then, there were two boys; then the two became one.

In very ancient records there are often remarkable utterances which cannot be understood unless the relevant facts are known. Later on we will go into the more intimate aspect of the union of the two boys; at the moment I will refer only to the following .—

In the so-called ‘Gospel of the Egyptians’ there is a passage which already in the early centuries of our era was regarded as extremely heretical, because Christian circles either did not want to hear the truth or did not want the truth to come to light. Something was nevertheless preserved in an apocryphal writing where it is said in effect that salvation (the Kingdom) will come to the world when the Two become One and the Outer becomes as the Inner. This sentence exactly expresses the occult reality of which I have told you. Salvation depends upon the Two becoming One. And the Two became One in very truth when in the twelfth year of his life the Zarathustra-Individuality passed over into the Nathan Jesus and qualities that at first had been entirely inward became outward. The inwardness of soul in the Jesus of St. Luke's Gospel was profound beyond all telling. But this quality manifested outwardly too whwn the Zarathustra-Individuality, whose development had proceeded in the physical and etheric bodies of the Solomon Jesus, permeated that inwardness with the forces engendered by his contact with those bodies. An impulse of such power then pervaded the physical and etheric bodies of the Nathan Jesus from within that the outer could become an expression of the inner—of the inner nature as it had been before the Zarathustra-Individuality had passed into the Jesus of St. Luke's Gospel.—The Two had become One.⁴

We have now followed Zarathustra from his birth as the Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel to his twelfth year, when he left his original body and passed into the bodily constitution of the Nathan Jesus; this he now developed to such a lofty stage that he was able, later on, to offer it as his own three sheaths into which the Being we call Christ might be received.

• 1. I Cor. XV, 47. ‘The first man is of the earth, earthy...’
• 2. The ‘law of the Nazarite’ is found in Numbers VI, 1-21. A recent study of this subject from exoteric sources will be found in Matthew Black, The Scrolls and Christian Origins (Nelson, 1961).
• 3. See The first Gospel of the Infancy of Jesus Christ, Chapter I, 1-3. (From the Apocryphal New Testament, published in London. 1820, editied by William Hone.) See also the Koran. Chapter XIX.
• 4. The passage concerning the Two becoming One occurs in the Gospel of the Egyptians and also in the Second Epistle of Clement where it is followed by the reference to the outer becoming as the inner.

First of all, my dear friends, I want to say that I am very glad we are meeting here at this branch of the Anthroposophical Society today. I remember with great pleasure our meeting last year, and my greeting at the beginning of this lecture is as sincere and heartfelt as that memory.¹

Today I want to talk about a subject closely connected with the core of our anthroposophical movement. All the results of our spiritual movement are based on research that may be called clairvoyant. While I have often emphasized that our heart, mind, and feelings are primarily affected by anthroposophical truths, we cannot ignore that these truths depend on clairvoyant research, which is an expression of a soul condition different from that of everyday life. It appears to lead us away from the things that seem so important to us in daily life, but in reality, clairvoyant research leads us right into the heart of truly human life.

Today, I do not want to speak about the paths to clairvoyant research since I have already described them in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment.² Rather, I would like to characterize the condition and mood of soul that develops as a consequence of this research.

Indeed we must bear in mind that if we follow the paths to clairvoyant research, we will feel completely different from our usual self. What happens to our soul when it becomes clairvoyant can be compared with our dreams, which are like surrogate clairvoyance. When we dream, we live in a world of images, which contains nothing of what we call “the sensation of touching an object outside us.” In our dreams there is usually nothing we can compare with normal ego consciousness. If any aspect of our ego does appear in our dreams, it seems to be separate from us, almost like another being outside us. We face our ego like a separate entity. Thus, we can speak of a doubling of the ego. However, in dreams we perceive only the part of ourselves that has separated, not the subjective ego. All statements apparently contradicting what I have just said can be traced to the fact that most people know of their dreams only from memory, and cannot remember that in the actual dream the subjective ego was extinguished.

The images of clairvoyant research resemble dreams because in both the sense of touch and the subjective ego are absent. A clairvoyant recalling his or her experiences must feel that the clairvoyant reality is permeable and, unlike physical objects, offers no resistance to touch. In the physical world we have ego awareness because we know: I am here, the object is outside me. However, in clairvoyant perception we are inside the object, not separated from what we perceive. Consequently, the individual objects are not fixed and distinct as physical ones, but are in continuous movement and transformation. Objects in the physical world are fixed because we can touch them and because they offer us boundaries, which objects of clairvoyant perception do not have. The same thing that causes our ego to fuse with the objects of clairvoyant perception also forces us to be very careful when we encounter what we call in the physical world another ego, another human being.

Let us first look at what happens when we encounter a person who has died through our clairvoyant faculties. Such an encounter can come about when the figure of the deceased approaches us in clairvoyant perception like a very vivid dream image, looking every bit as we remember the person looked in life. However, this is not the usual type of such encounters, but a rare exception.

Another possibility is that we clairvoyantly perceive a dead person who has taken on the form of either a living or another dead individual, and thus does not appear in his own form. The appearance of the deceased, then, is of very little relevance in identifying him. Perhaps we were particularly fond of another dead person or have a particularly close friendship with a living one; the deceased approaching us can then take on the form of either of those other individuals. In other words, we lack all the usual means of identifying the ego and appearance of a person in the physical world. It will help us find our way to remember that the appearance or form is not at all important; a being is meeting us in one form or another, and we need to note what this being does. If we take our time and carefully observe the image before us, we will realize that, based on everything we know about the individual in question, this person could not act the way he does in the clairvoyant sphere; his actions are totally out of character. We will often encounter a contradiction between the person appearing to us and his actions.

If we allow our feelings to accompany these actions, ignoring the individual's appearance, we will get a sense in the depths of our soul telling us what being we are actually dealing with. Let me repeat that we are guided by a feeling that rises up from the depths of our soul, for that is very important. The individual's appearance in the clairvoyant sphere seems to resemble a physical figure but can be as different from the being really present as the signs for the word “house” are from the actual house. Since we can read, we do not concentrate on the signs that make up the word “house” and do not describe the shape of the letters, but instead we get right to the concept “house.” In the same way, we learn in true clairvoyance to move from the figure we perceive to the actual being. That is why we speak of reading the occult script, in the true sense of the word. That is, we move inwardly and actively from the vision to the reality it expresses just as written words express a reality.

How can we develop this ability to go beyond the appearance, the immediate vision? We do so, above all, by looking at new ideas and concepts we will need if we want to understand the clairvoyant sphere—new, that is, in contrast to the ideas we use in the physical world.

In the physical world we look at an object or a being and say, quite rightly, I perceive that being, that object. We perceive the plant, mineral, and animal kingdoms, the realm of physical human beings, as well as clouds, mountains, rivers, stars, sun, and moon. The feeling expressed in the words “I perceive” undergoes a transformation when we enter the clairvoyant sphere.

Let me try to explain this with an analogy, though it may sound simplistic. If you were a plant, how would you relate to people perceiving you? If this plant had consciousness and could speak, it would have to say: People look at me, I am perceived by them. Of course, we say: I perceive the plant, but at its level of consciousness, the plant would have to say that it was perceived by human beings. It is this feeling of being perceived, being looked at, we must acquire in relation to the beings of the clairvoyant sphere. For example, concerning the beings of the first hierarchy, the angels, we must be aware that strictly speaking it is not correct to say “I perceive an angel,” but we have to say “I feel an angel perceiving me.”

Based on our Copernican world view, we know full well that the sun does not move. Nevertheless, we say that it rises and moves across the sky, thus contradicting our better knowledge. Similarly, in everyday language we can say that we see an angel. But that is not the truth. We would actually have to say that we feel ourselves seen or perceived by an angel. If we said we experience the being of an angel or of a dead person and can feel it, we would speak the truth from the clairvoyant point of view.

Perhaps an example from clairvoyant observation will help you understand this. More than ten years ago, at the beginning of our work with spiritual science, a dear friend of ours worked with us for a short time.³ This individual possessed not only enthusiasm for what we could give her in the early stages of spiritual science, but also a profound artistic sensitivity and understanding. One could not help but love this person, a love that may well be described as objective because of her qualities. Having worked with us for a relatively short time and having learned a great deal about the results of spiritual science, she left the physical world. There is no need to go into the next four or five years after her death, so let me get directly to what happened after that. In 1909, we presented our mystery plays in Munich, preceded, to our great delight, by Children of Lucifer by our highly respected friend Edouard Schuré.⁴ Whatever you may think about the way the plays were produced then and later, we had to present them the way we did. The circumstances under which we had to work on the performances were such that we needed an impulse from the spiritual world, an impulse that also included the artistic aspect we wanted to incorporate. Now, I can assure you that even at that time, in 1909, and even more so in later years, I always felt a specific spiritual impulse as I was working on the arrangements for the performances.

You see, when we have work to do in the physical world, we need not only intellect and skills but also the strength of our muscles. Our muscles objectively help us; they are given to us, unlike the intellectual capacities we ourselves dwell in. Now, in dealing with matters of the spirit we need forces from the spiritual world to combine with our own, just as we need the strength of our muscles for physical action. In the case I mentioned, the impulse from the individual who had left the physical world in 1904 entered more and more into our artistic work on the Munich plays. To describe what happened, I would have to say the impulses from this individual came down from the spirit plane and flowed into my intentions, into my work. She was the patron of our work.

We develop the right feelings toward the dead if we become aware that their spiritual gaze—if I may use that expression—and their powers focus on us; they look at us, act in us, and add to our strength.

To experience such a spiritual fact in the right way, we need to develop a very specific type of selflessness and a capacity for love. That is why I stressed that one could love that person objectively, as it were, because of her qualities; one had to love her because she was as she was. A subjective love, a love arising out of personal needs, can easily be egotistical and can potentially keep us from finding the right relationship to such a dead individual. The difference between the right love, the selfless love we have for such a person, and selfish love becomes perfectly obvious in clairvoyant experience.

Let us assume such a person would want to help us after her death, but we cannot develop true selfless love for her. Her spiritual gaze, her spiritual will streaming toward us would then be like a burning sensation, causing a piercing, burning feeling in our soul. If we can feel and maintain a selfless love, this stream, her spiritual gaze as it were, flows into our soul like a feeling of warm mildness and pours itself into our thoughts, imagination, feeling, and willing. It is out of this feeling that we recognize who the dead person is and not on the basis of his or her appearance, because the dead may manifest in the guise of a person we feel close to at the moment. The form in which the beings of the higher world appear to us—and after death we are all beings of a higher, spiritual world—depends on our subjective nature, on what we habitually see, think, and feel. The reality is what we feel for the being manifest before us, how we receive what comes to us from this being. Regardless of what Joan of Arc said about the appearance of the higher beings in her visions, the occultist who is able to investigate these things knows that it was always the genius of the French nation who stood behind them.⁵

I described how we can feel the gaze of spiritual beings resting upon us and their will flowing into our souls. To learn this is analogous to learning to read on the physical plane. Those who merely want to describe their visions would be like people describing the shape of the letters on a page rather than their meaning. This shows you how easy it is to have preconceived notions about the experiences in the spiritual realm. Naturally, it seems most obvious to attach great importance to the description of what the vision looked like. However, what really matters is what lies behind the veil of perception and is expressed in the images of the vision.

Thus, in the course of occult development, the soul immerses itself in specific moods and inner states different from those of our everyday life. We have entered the world of the hierarchy of angels and the hierarchy, or we could also say hierarchies, of the dead as soon as our occult exercises have brought us to the stage where the sense of touch characteristic of the physical world no longer exists, and where a person's appearance is no longer characteristic of the I concerned. Then our thinking changes and we no longer have thoughts in the sense we have them here in the physical world. In that world, every thought takes on the form of an elemental being. In the physical world, our thoughts can agree or contradict each other. In this other world we enter, thoughts encounter other thoughts as real beings, either loving or hating each other. We begin to feel our way into a world of many thought beings. And in those living thought beings, we really feel what we usually call “life.” Here life and thinking are united, whereas they are completely separate in the physical world.

When we speak on the physical plane and tell our thoughts to someone, we have the feeling that our thoughts come from our soul, that we have to remember them at this particular moment. Speaking as a true occultist and not someone who just tells his experiences from memory, we will feel that our thoughts arise as living beings. We must be glad if we are blessed at the right moment with the approach of a thought as a real being.

When you express your thoughts in the physical world, for example, as a lecturer, you will find it easier to give a talk for the thirtieth time than you did the first time. If, however, you speak as an occultist, thoughts always have to approach you and then depart again. Just as someone paying you the thirtieth visit had to make his way to you thirty times, the living thought we express for the thirtieth time has to come to us thirty times as it did the first time; our memory is of absolutely no use here.

If you express an idea on the physical level and someone is sitting in a corner thinking, “I don't like that nonsense, I hate it,” you will not be particularly bothered by it. You have prepared your ideas and present them regardless of the positive or negative thoughts of someone in the audience. But if as an esotericist you let thoughts approach you, they could be delayed and kept away by someone who hates them or who hates the speaker. And the forces blocking that thought must be overcome because we are dealing with living beings and not merely with abstract ideas.

These two examples show that as soon as we enter the sphere of clairvoyance, we are immersed in living and weaving thoughts. It is as if these thoughts are no longer subjective and as if you yourself are no longer within yourself, as if you are living outside in the wide world. When you are in this world of living and weaving thoughts, you are in the hierarchy of angels. And just as our physical world is everywhere filled with air, the world of the hierarchy of angels is filled with the mild warmth I spoke about earlier that the beings of this hierarchy pour out. When our inner development has brought us to the stage where we can live in this spiritual atmosphere of streaming mildness, we feel the spiritual eyes of the hierarchy of angels resting on our souls.

Now, in our earthly life, we have certain ideals and think about them abstractly. As we think of them, we feel obligated to pursue these ideals. In the clairvoyant sphere, however, there are no abstract ideals. There ideals are living beings of the hierarchy of angels and flow through spiritual space, looking at us with warmth.

In the physical world, we may have ideals, know them well, and yet we may not do anything to apply them. Our emotions, and perhaps passions, can tempt us to shirk them. However, if we knowingly ignore an ideal in the clairvoyant sphere, we feel the spiritual gaze of a being of the hierarchy of angels directed at us with reproach, and this reproach burns. In the spiritual world, ignoring an ideal is thus a reality, and a being of the hierarchy of angels reproaches us. Their gaze makes us feel the reproach; it is the reproach we feel.

You see, learning to develop a real feeling for ideals is one way of entering the world of the hierarchy of angels. Limiting our consciousness to the physical plane may lead us to think that nothing will happen if we are too lazy to act on our ideals. However, we can learn to feel that if we do not act on an ideal, then, regardless of other consequences, the world becomes different from what it would have been had we followed our ideal. We are on the way to the hierarchy of angels when we begin to see that not acting on our ideals is something real, and when we can transform this insight into a genuine feeling. Transforming and vitalizing our feelings allows our souls to grow into the higher worlds.

Through continued esoteric training, we can rise to an even higher level, that of the hierarchy of archangels. If we ignore the angels, we feel reproach. With the archangels we feel reproach as well as a real effect on our being. The strength and power of the archangels works through our I when we live in their world.

For example, a few months ago we lost a very dear friend when he left the physical plane. A profound poet, he had quickly found his way into the anthroposophical world view in the last five years, and the feelings it evoked in him are beautifully reflected in his recent poetry.⁶ From the time he joined us, and even before that, he had been struggling with an infirm and deteriorating body. The more his body deteriorated, the more his soul was filled with poetry that reflected our world view. Only a short time has elapsed since his death, and so one cannot yet say that this individual possesses a clearly existing consciousness. Nevertheless, the first stages of his development in the existence after death can be seen. The astral body, now separated from the physical and living in the spiritual world, reveals the most wonderful tableaux of cosmic development as we understand it in spiritual science. Having left the deteriorated physical body, the astral body has become so illuminated, comparatively speaking, that it can present the clairvoyant observer with a complete picture of cosmic evolution.

Let me use an analogy to explain what I mean. We can love nature and admire it, and still appreciate a beautiful painting that recreates what we have seen in nature. Similarly, we can be uplifted when what we have seen in the clairvoyant sphere lights up again, as a cosmic painting, so to speak, in an astral body of a person who has died. The astral body of our departed friend reveals after death what it absorbed, at first unconsciously but later also consciously, in the course of his anthroposophical development when the beings of the hierarchy of archangels worked actively on the poetical transformation of his anthroposophical thoughts and ideas.

Our progress in our esoteric development can be called mystical, because it is initially the inner progress of the soul. We transform our ordinary personality and gradually reach a new state. This step-by-step growth of the soul is mystical progress because at first it is experienced inwardly. As soon as we can perceive the mildness looking down from the spiritual world, we are objectively in the world of the angels, which reveals itself to us. And as soon as we can recognize that real forces of strength and power enter into us, we are in the realm of the archangels. With each stage of inner mystical progress we have to enter another world.

However, if we fail to develop selflessness and reach the stage of living in the world of the angels while remaining selfish and unloving, then we carry the self intended for the physical world into their realm. Instead of feeling the mild gaze and will of the angels upon us, we feel that other spiritual powers are able to ascend through us. Instead of gazing at us from outside, they have been released by us, shall we say, from their underworld while we were raised to a higher world. Instead of being overshadowed, or rather illuminated, by the world of the angels, we experience the luciferic beings that emerge from us.

Then, if we reach the stage of mystical development allowing us to enter the world of the archangels—without, however, having first developed the wish to receive by grace the influences of the spiritual world, we carry our self up into their realm. As a result, instead of being strengthened and imbued with the power of the archangels, the beings of the ahrimanic world emerge from us and surround us.

At first glance, the idea that the world of Lucifer appears in the realm of the angels and the world of Ahriman in that of the archangels seems terrible. However, there is really nothing awful about this. Lucifer and Ahriman are in any case higher beings than we are. Lucifer can be described as an archangel left behind at an earlier stage of evolution, Ahriman as a spirit of personality also left behind at an earlier stage. The terrible thing is not that we encounter Lucifer and Ahriman, but that we encounter them without recognizing them for who they are. Encountering Lucifer in the world of the angels really means encountering the spirit of beauty, the spirit of freedom. But the all-important thing is that we recognize Lucifer and his hosts as soon as we enter the world of the angels. The same is true of Ahriman in the realm of the archangels. Lucifer and Ahriman unleashed in the higher worlds is terrible only if we do not recognize them as we release them, because then they control us without our knowledge. It is important that we face them consciously.

When we have advanced in our mystical development to the level of living in the world of the angels and want to continue there with really fruitful occultism, we have to look for Lucifer as soon as we expect the spiritual gaze of the angels to rest on us. Lucifer must be present—and if we cannot find him, he is within us. But it is very important that Lucifer is outside us in this realm, so that we can face him.

These facts about Lucifer and Ahriman, angels and archangels, explain the nature of revelation in the higher worlds. From our viewpoint in the physical world, we are easily led to believe that Lucifer and Ahriman are evil powers. But when we enter the higher world, this no longer has any meaning. In the clairvoyant sphere, Lucifer and Ahriman have to be present just as much as the angels and archangels. However, we do not perceive them the same way. We identify the angels and archangels not by their appearance, but we know the angels by the mildness that flows from them into us, and recognize the archangels by allowing their strength and power to flow into our feeling and will. Lucifer and Ahriman appear to us as figures, merely transposed into the spiritual world; we cannot touch them, but we can approach them as spiritual projections of the physical world. Clearly, it is important that we learn in our mystical clairvoyant development to see forms in the higher world and to be aware that we are seen, that a higher will focuses on us.

You see, higher development does not consist merely in acquiring clairvoyant faculties, but in developing a certain state of soul, a certain attitude or relationship to the beings of the higher world. This new attitude and state of soul must be developed hand in hand with the training of our clairvoyant faculties. In other words, we must learn not only to see in the spiritual world but also to read in it. Reading is not meant here in the narrow sense of a simple learning process, but as something we acquire through transforming our feelings and sensations. It is important to keep in mind that a split of our personality occurs when clairvoyance begins, and we reach a revelation of the higher worlds. Our earthly personality is left behind, and a new one is acquired on ascending into a higher world. And just as the beings of the higher hierarchies look at us in the higher world, so we perceive our own ordinary personality from a higher perspective. Our higher self discards the lower one and observes it. So, to make valid statements about the higher worlds we had better wait until we are able to say: That is you; the person you see in your clairvoyant vision is yourself. “That is you” on the higher level corresponds to “this is I” on the physical one.

Now remember when you were eight or thirteen or fifteen years old and try to reconstruct from your memory a small part of your life at that time. Try to recall as vividly as possible your thinking in those years. Then concentrate on your current feelings about the girl or boy you were at eight, thirteen, or fifteen. As soon as we move from the physical level to the higher world, the present moment we live in now becomes a memory of the kind we have just recalled. We look back at our current existence on the physical level and at what we may still become during the remainder of our physical life in the same way you look back to your experiences at eight, thirteen, or fifteen from your vantage point in the present moment.

Everything we consider part of ourselves on the physical level, such as our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and actions, becomes a memory as soon as we enter the higher world. We look down at the physical world and become a memory to ourselves when we live in the higher world. We have to keep our experiences in the higher worlds separate from those in the physical realm, just as we distinguish between our present situation and an earlier one. Imagine a person who is forty years old and vividly remembers the feelings and abilities he or she had as an eight-year-old boy or girl. For instance, the person might be reading a book now, at the age of forty, and all of a sudden he or she begins to relate to the book as an eight-year-old would. That would be a confusion of the two attitudes, the two states of soul, and is analogous to what happens when we confuse our state of soul on the physical level with what is required in the higher worlds.

Of course, this has nothing to do with the fact that every unbiased person can understand what I say about the higher worlds; in other words, we do not merely have to believe these descriptions, but we can understand them if we approach them without preconceived ideas. People may object that we cannot describe the higher worlds with concepts, thoughts, and ideas from the physical world because the former are completely different from the latter. This objection makes as much sense as saying that we cannot give people an idea of what we mean by writing h-o-u-s-e; for them to understand that concept, we have to bring them a house.

We talk about physical facts and objects by means totally independent of the object or fact. So we can also describe phenomena of the spiritual world with what we understand on the physical plane. However, we cannot understand the higher worlds with our everyday concepts and ideas, but need to acquire others and expand our thinking. People who honestly tell us about the higher world must also extend our concepts beyond our everyday life; they must give us concepts that are new and different and yet comprehensible on the physical plane.

People find it difficult to understand genuine spiritual science and serious esotericism because they are so reluctant to expand their concepts. They want to understand the higher world and its revelations with the ideas they already have and don't want to create new ones. When people in our materialistic age hear lectures on the spiritual world, they believe all too easily that the esoteric world can be understood simply by looking at it. They think the shapes there may be slightly more delicate and more nebulous than in the physical world, but similar nevertheless. It may seem inconvenient to some that the serious occultist is expected to do more than merely follow instructions on how to see angels. A change in thinking is necessary, and the concept “angel” must include that we are perceived by them, that their spiritual gaze is focused on us.

Mystical development, or ascending to the higher worlds, cannot be separated from enriching and giving greater scope to our ideas, feelings, and soul impulses. To understand the higher worlds, we must not let our life of ideas remain as impoverished as it is on the physical plane.

To provide esoteric help for this enrichment, we are constructing our modest building in Dornach in a completely new style. That building is, of course, nowhere near the ideal, but it is a humble beginning. After all, we have only limited means at our disposal, despite the fact that our friends have done everything within their power for this project.

The spiritual impulses behind the building styles that developed in the third, the fourth, and in the current fifth post-Atlantean epoch included the task of guiding humanity to knowledge of the physical world. For example, Egyptian architecture initiated this development with its succinct geometrical forms. Greco-Roman architecture is like a marriage of soul and spirit with etheric and physical body. Here soul and spirit on the one hand and etheric body and physical body on the other connect in a state of complete equilibrium. The rising, pointed arches of the Gothic style are the first architectural attempt to rise again from the physical into the spiritual world.

If anthroposophy is to be represented in a building the next step must be to bring to life the living and weaving thought patterns themselves, flowing, and pouring into space. Then we will see in physical form what Imagination and Inspiration reveal directly of the spiritual world. That is why the forms of the Dornach building are such that it is pointless to ask in materialist fashion what they symbolize and what their shapes stand for. They have to be taken on their own merit, since they are nothing more than immediate spiritual experiences poured out into spatial forms. We have attempted to transform everything that can be seen and experienced in the spirit into artistic form. So if people ask what a form stands for, they have misunderstood the building; for every form signifies only itself, just as our hands or head stand only for themselves and nothing else. Such a question also indicates a complete misunderstanding of our position in regard to occultism. We will be glad to leave behind the old theosophical nonsense of examining every fairy tale, every figure, and every myth for what it signifies and symbolizes.

All our forms really exist in the spiritual world and therefore express only themselves and nothing else. They are not symbols, but spiritual realities. You will not find a single pentagram throughout the building, no form of a pentagram, nothing to make you wonder what this or that form means. At most, there is one place where subtle forms could be interpreted as a pentagram, but so can every five-petaled flower. People may ask what our fourteen pillars mean, which are not shaped as pentagrams, but are five-sided for aesthetic reasons. They may wonder what the pillars supporting the cupolas mean besides representing spatial relations perceptible in the spiritual world. In reply we can only point out how materialistic our age is when even spiritual intentions must be clothed in materialist garments.

Our building will be understood if people stop asking what it symbolizes and instead think about what it is. They will understand our building when they realize it is better not to use any of the usual terms and the old verbal images to help our materialist age comprehend it. Spiritual science can at most be a synthesis of religions; unlike the ancient religions, it does not build temples, but rather a structure that expresses its innermost nature. This building can only be understood gradually, and only if we do not apply old words to this new development.

We know only too well that we can realize our intentions in Dornach only in the most modest, rudimentary way. But I ask only that you make a real effort to understand this humble beginning from the perspective and significance of our spiritual science. Try to understand what this simple beginning, paid for with considerable sacrifices, is aiming at. Any other attitude would be most disheartening.

Enough grand words and pompous phrases have been bandied about in the so-called occult movement. All we want is that even if our way of expressing things no longer exists fifty years from now, people will still say of our movement that it endeavored with every fiber to be totally sincere and honest. And the more modestly and simply, but thus perhaps the more objectively, we discuss what we wish to do, the better we serve our cause. Every word that is superfluous or returns to the old, convenient concepts does untold damage to what we are striving to achieve—please excuse me for saying this—honestly. If people understand us in this way, then perhaps the mood will arise that we need if we are really, in December at the earliest, to inaugurate our modest building without pomp and fuss.⁷ The mood we need will be there only if we concentrate on our goals, even if we do not create a stir in our materialist age.

Please accept these words in the spirit of the serious intentions of our movement. They must fill our souls if this spiritual impulse is really to take root in our age. There is a real need for an honest spiritual movement that truly promotes the mystical life of the soul and allows revelations of the higher worlds to flow into this materialist age. Only when our friends understand this purpose and attitude of our spiritual movement, then and only then shall we be able to fulfill the task given us by the wise, guiding individualities in the spiritual world.

Based on what I have tried to explain today, I will speak to you the day after tomorrow about the progress in our understanding of Christ through the ages and about the position of our movement concerning the Christ.⁸

• 1. See Rudolf Steiner, Die Welt des Geistes und ihr Hereinragen in das physische Dasein, Vol. 150 in the Collected Works, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1972), lecture of May 5, 1913. There are no transcripts of the lectures of May 4 and 9, 1913, in Paris.
• 2. Rudolf Steiner, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, repr., (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press 1986).
• 3. Steiner here refers to the actress Maria von Strauch-Spettini, 1847–1904. See Lecture Two, note 7.
• 4. Edouard Schuré, French writer. His play Children of Lucifer was performed in German in Munich on August 22, 1909, under Rudolf Steiner's direction. See Steiner The East in the Light of the West and Schuré, Children of Lucifer, both in one volume, (Blauvelt NY: Spiritual Science Library, 1986).
• 5. Joan of Arc, 1412–1431, French national heroine and saint.
• 6. Morgenstern, see Lecture Two, note 8.
• 7. Due to complications and delays caused by World War I (1914–1918), the building neared completion only in 1920. The inauguration ceremony never took place because of the fire that destroyed the Goetheanum. A “provisional inauguration” took place on September 26, 1920, on the eve of the first event held in the building, the “first anthroposophical academic course,” which lasted from September 27 to October 16, 1920.
• 8. Rudolf Steiner, Vorstufen zum Mysterium von Golgotha, Vol. 152 in the Collected Works, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1964), Lecture of May 27, 1914.