The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If we examine the human soul, comparing one individual with another, we find the greatest possible variety. In these lectures we have spoken of some typical differences and the reasons for them, relating them to character, temperament, capacities, forces and so on. One significant difference, the difference between positive and negative man, will occupy us today.

At the start, I want to make it clear that this treatment of the subject—which will be fully in keeping with my other lectures—has nothing in common with the superficial but popular descriptions of people as positive and negative. Our account will stand entirely on its own ground.

We might first look round for a kind of clarifying definition of what is meant by a positive or negative person, and thus we might say: In the sense of a true and penetrating teaching concerning human souls, we could designate a positive person as one who, in face of all the impressions pouring in on him from the outer world, is able to maintain the firmness and security of his inner being, at least up to a certain point. Hence he will have clear-cut ideas and concepts, together with certain inclinations and aversions, which outer impressions cannot disturb. Again, his actions follow certain urges and impulses which will not be affected by whatever transient impressions may come to him from daily life.

A negative man, on the other hand, can be described as one who readily submits to changing impressions and is strongly influenced by ideas which come to him from this or that person or group. Hence he is easily impelled to change what he had been thinking or feeling and to take something different into his soul. In his actions he is drawn away from his own impulses by all kinds of influences from other people.

These could be our definitions, roughly speaking. But if we inquire how these deeply rooted characteristics of human nature work out in practice, we shall soon be convinced that we have gained very little from our definitions and that to search for any such convenient labels is fairly useless. For if we try to apply them to real life we have to say: A man of strong passions and impulses, which have carried a certain enduring stamp since childhood, will have allowed all sorts of good and bad examples to pass him by without affecting his habits. He will have formed certain ideas and concepts about this or that and he will stick to them, whatever other facts may be brought before him. Countless obstacles will mount up before he can be convinced of anything different. Such a man would indeed be positive, but it would lead to nothing for him but a dull life, shut off from new impressions, seeing and hearing nothing that could enrich or enlarge his experience.

The other type of man, ready at any time to welcome new impressions and always prepared to correct his ideas if facts go against them, would become—perhaps in a relatively short time—a quite different being. As he goes through successive periods in his life he will seem to be hastening on from one interest to another, so that the character of his life will be quite transformed as time goes on. Compared with the other, “positive” type of man, he will certainly have made more of life—but according to our definition we should have to call him “negative”.

Again, a man of robust character, whose life is governed by custom and routine, might be led by the fashion of the moment to travel in a country richly endowed with art treasures. But he has loaded his soul with so many fixed responses that he passes by one work of art after another, at most consulting his Baedeker to see which are the most important, and finally he goes home with his soul not in the least enriched by all this trailing from gallery to gallery, from landscape to landscape. We would have to call him a very positive man.

By contrast, someone else might follow much the same course of travel, but his character is such that he gives himself up to every picture, loses himself enthusiastically in it, and so it is with the next picture and the next. Thus he passes along with a soul that surrenders to every detail, with the result each impression is wiped out by the next, and he returns home with a kind of chaos in his soul. He is a very negative person, the exact opposite of the other man.

We could go on giving the most varied examples of the two types. We could describe as negative a person who has learnt so much that on every subject his judgment is uncertain; he no longer knows what is true or false and has become a sceptic with regard to life and knowledge. Another man might absorb just as many of the same impressions, but he works on them and knows how to fit them into the whole of his acquired wisdom. He would be a positive man in the best sense of the word.

A child can be tyrannically positive towards grown-ups if it asserts its own inherent nature and tries to reject everything opposed to it. Or a man who has been through many experiences, errors and disappointments may nevertheless surrender to every new impression and may still be easily elated or depressed: compared with the child he will be a negative type. In brief, it is only when we allow the whole of a man's life, to work upon us, not in accordance with any theoretical ideas but in all its variety, and if we use concepts only as an aid in ordering the facts and events of a life, that we can rightly approach these decisive questions concerning positive and negative man. For in discussing the individual peculiarities of human souls we touch on something of the utmost importance. If we did not have to think of man in all his completeness as a living entity, subject to what we call evolution—so often discussed here—these questions would be much simpler.

We see the human soul passing from one stage of evolution to the next, and, if we are speaking in the true sense of spiritual science, we do not picture the life of an individual between birth and death as following always a uniform course. For we know that his life is a sequel to previous lives on earth and the starting-point for later ones. When we observe a human life through its various incarnations, we can readily understand that in one earthly life a man's development may go somewhat slowly, so that he retains the same characteristics and ideas throughout. In another life he will have to catch up with all the more development, leading him to new levels of soul-life. The study of a single life is always in the highest degree insufficient.

Let us now ask how these indications concerning positive and negative types can help us in studying the human soul on the lines laid down in previous lectures. We showed that the soul is by no means a chaotic flux of concepts, feelings and ideas, as it may seem to be at a casual glance. On the contrary, the soul has three members which must be clearly distinguished. The first and lowest of these we called the sentient soul. Its primal form is best seen in men at a relatively low stage of development who are wholly given up to their passions, impulses, wishes and desires and simply pursue every wish, every desire, that arises within them. In men of this type the ego, the self-conscious kernel of the human soul, dwells in a surging sea of passions, desires, sympathies and antipathies, and is subject to every storm that sweeps through the soul. Such a man will follow his inclinations not because he dominates them but because they dominate him, so that he gives way to every inner demand. The ego can scarcely raise itself out of this surge of desires. When the soul develops further, we see more and more clearly how the ego works from a strong central point.

In due course, as evolution proceeds, a higher part of the soul, which exists in everyone, gains a certain predominance over the sentient soul. We have called this higher part the intellectual soul or mind soul. When man ceases to follow every inclination or impulse, then in his soul something emerges which has always been there but can be effective only when the ego begins to control his inclinations and desires and to impose on the ever-changing impressions he receives some kind of coherence in his inner life. Thus when this second member of the soul, the intellectual soul, comes to prevail, it deepens our picture of man.

Next, we spoke of the highest member of the soul, the consciousness soul, where the ego comes to the fore in full strength. Then the inner life turns towards the outer world. Its conceptual images and ideas are no longer there only to control the passions, for at this stage the entire inner life of the soul is guided by the ego, so that it reflects the outer world and gains knowledge of it. When we attain to this knowledge, it is a sign that the consciousness soul has come to dominate the life of the soul. These three soul-members exist in all human beings, but in every case one of them predominates.

The last lectures have shown that the soul can go further in development—must indeed go further even in ordinary life, if we are to be human beings in the true sense of the word. A man whose motives for action derive entirely from external demands, who is impelled to act only by sympathy or antipathy, will make no effort to realise in himself the true quality of human nature. This will be achieved only by someone who raises himself to moral ideas and ideals, derived from the spiritual world, for that is how we enrich the life of the soul with new elements. Man has a “history” only because he can carry into life something which his inner being draws from unknown depths and impresses on the outer world. Similarly, we would never reach a real knowledge of world secrets if we were not able to attach external experiences to ideas. We draw forth these ideas from the spirit in ourselves and bring them to meet the outer world, and it is only by so doing that we can grasp and elucidate the outer world in its true form. Thus we can infuse our inner being with a spiritual element and enrich our soul with experiences that we could never gain from the outer world alone.

As described in the lecture on mysticism, we can rise to a higher form of soul-life by cutting ourselves off for a while from impressions and stimuli from the outer world, by emptying the soul and devoting ourselves—as Meister Eckhart puts it—to the little flame which is usually outshone by the continual experiences of daily life but which can now be kindled into flame. A mystic of this order rises to a soul-life above the ordinary level; he immerses himself in the mysteries of the world by unveiling within himself what the world-mysteries have laid down in his soul. In the next lecture we saw that if a man awaits the future with calm acceptance, and if he looks back over the past in such a way as to feel that dwelling within him is something greater than anything evident in his daily life, he will be impelled to look up in worship to this greater thing that towers above him. We saw that in prayer a man rises inwardly above himself towards something that transcends his ordinary life. And finally, we saw that by real spiritual training, which leads him through the three stages of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, he can grow into a world which is as unknown to ordinary people as the world of light and colours is to the blind. Thus we have seen how the soul can grow beyond the normal level, and so we have gained a glimpse of the development of the soul through the most varied stages.

If we look at people around us, we find that they are at widely different levels of development. One man will show in life that he has the potential for raising his soul to a certain stage and will then be able to carry through the gate of death what he has gained. If we study how people go from stage to stage, we come to the concepts of positive and negative but we cannot now say simply that an individual is positive or negative, for he will exhibit each characteristic at different stages of his progress.

To start with, a man may have the strongest, most headstrong impulses in his sentient soul; he will then be impelled by definite urges, passions and desires, while his ego-centre remains in relative obscurity and he may be hardly aware of it. At that point he is very positive and pursues his life as a positive type. But, if he were to remain in that condition, he would make no progress. In the course of his development he must change from a positive into a negative person, for he has to be open to receive whatever his development requires. If he is not prepared to suppress the positive qualities in his sentient soul, so that new impressions can flow in; if he is unable to raise himself out of the positive qualities given him by nature and to acquire a certain negative capacity to receive new impressions, he will get no further.

Here we touch on something which is necessary for the soul but can also be a source of danger—something which shows very clearly that only an intimate knowledge of the soul can guide us safely through life. The fact is that we cannot progress if we try to avoid certain dangers affecting the life of the soul. And these dangers are always present for a negative person, since he is open to the influx of external impressions and to uniting himself with them. This means that he will take in not only good impressions, but also bad and dangerous ones.

When a very negative person meets another person, he will be easily carried away by hearing all sorts of things that have nothing to do with judgment or reason, and he will be influenced not only by what the other person says but by what he does. He may imitate the other person's actions and examples, to the point even of coming to resemble him quite closely. Such a man may indeed be open to good influences, but he will be in danger of responding to every kind of bad stimulus and making it his own.

If we rise from ordinary life to the level where we can see what spiritual facts and beings are at work in our vicinity, we must say that a man with negative soul-qualities is particularly open to the influence of those intangible, indefinable impressions which are hardly evident in external life. For example, the facts show that a man alone is a quite different being from what he is in a large assembly of others, especially if the assembly is active. When he is alone, he follows his own impulses; even a weak ego will look for the source of its actions in itself. But in a large assembly there is a sort of mass-soul in which all the various urges, desires and judgments of those present flow together. A positive man will not easily surrender to this collective entity, but a negative man will always be influenced by it. Hence we can repeatedly experience the truth of what a dialect poet, Rosegger, has said in a few words. He puts it crudely, but there is more than a grain of truth in what he says:

Oaner is a Mensch,
Zwoa san Leit',
San's mehra, san's Viecher.³⁸

We can often notice that men are wiser alone than they are in company, for then they are almost always subject to the prevailing average mood. Thus a man may go to a meeting without any definite ideas or feelings; then he listens to a speaker who takes up with enthusiasm some point which had previously left him cold. He may be affected not so much by the speaker as by the acclamation won from the audience. This grips him and he goes home quite convinced.

Mass-suggestion of this kind plays an enormous part in life. It illustrates the danger to which a negative soul is exposed, and in particular the danger of sectarianism, for while we might fail to convince an individual of something, it becomes relatively easy to do so if we can bring him under the influence of a sect or group, for here mass suggestion will be at work, spreading from soul to soul. There are great dangers here for persons of a negative type.

We can go further. In earlier lectures we have seen how the soul can raise itself into higher realms of spiritual life. And in my Occult Science³⁹ you will find an account of how the soul must train itself to accomplish this stage-by-stage ascent. In the first place it has to suppress the positive element in itself and open itself to new impressions by putting itself artificially into a negative mood. Otherwise it will make no progress. We have often explained what the spiritual researcher has to do if he wishes to reach the higher levels of existence. He has to bring about, deliberately and consciously, the condition which occurs normally in sleep, when the soul receives no outer stimuli. He has to shut out all external impressions, so that his soul is quite empty. Then he must be able to open his soul to impressions which at first, if he is still a beginner, will be quite new to him, and this means that he has to make himself as negative as possible. And everything in mystical life and knowledge of higher worlds that we call inner vision, inward contemplation, does fundamentally bring about negative moods in the soul. There is no way round that. When a man suppresses all stimuli from the outer world and consciously achieves a condition in which he is entirely sunk in himself and has banished all the positive characteristics that had previously been his, then he is bound to become negative and self-absorbed.

Something similar occurs if we employ an easier external method which cannot of itself lead us to a higher life but can give us some support in our ascent—if for instance we turn from foods which stimulate positive impulses in a sort of animal fashion to a special diet, vegetarian or the like. We cannot bring about our ascent into higher worlds by vegetarianism or by not eating this or that; it would be altogether too easy if we could eat our way up to those heights. Nothing but work on our own souls can get us there. But the work can be made easier if we avoid the hampering influence that particular forms of nourishment can have. Anyone who is trying to lead a higher, more spiritual life can readily convince himself that his forces are enhanced by adopting a certain diet. For if he cuts out the foods which tend to foster the robust and positive elements in himself, he will be brought into a negative condition.

Anyone who stands on the ground of genuine spiritual science, free from charlatanry, will never refuse to recognise the things, including external things, which are in fact connected with endeavours to lead a true spiritual life. But this means that we may be exposed also to bad spiritual influences. When we educate ourselves in spiritual science and eliminate everyday impressions, we open ourselves to the spiritual facts and beings which are always around us. Among them, certainly, will be the good spiritual powers and forces which we first learn to perceive when the appropriate organ has unfolded within us, but we shall be open also to the evil spiritual powers and forces around us just as if we are to hear harmonious musical sounds, we must be open also to discordant ones. If we want to penetrate into the spiritual world, we must be clear that we are liable to encounter the bad side of spiritual experiences. If our approach to the spiritual world were to be entirely negative, we would be threatened by one danger after another.

Let us look away from the spiritual world and consider ordinary life. Why should a vegetarian diet, for example, make us negative? If we become vegetarians because of some popular agitation but without adequate judgment, or as a matter of principle without changing our ways of living and acting, it may under certain conditions have a seriously weakening effect on us in relation to other influences, and particularly perhaps on certain bodily characteristics. But if we have gone over to a life of initiative, involving new tasks that arise not from external life but from a richly developing life of the soul, then it can be immensely useful to take a new line in diet also and to clear away any hindrances that may have arisen from our previous eating habits.

Things have very different effects on different people. Hence the spiritual-scientific researcher always insists on something that has often been emphasised here: he will never impart to anyone the means of rising into higher worlds without making it clear to him that he must not merely cultivate the negative soul-qualities that are necessary for receiving new impressions, nor must be content to develop inner vision and inward concentration, for a life which is to rise to a new level must have a content which is strong enough to fill and sustain it. If we were merely to show someone how he can acquire the strength that will enable him to see into the spiritual world, we should be exposing him to bad spiritual forces of every kind, through the negativity that goes with such endeavours. But if he is willing to learn what the spiritual investigator can tell him about the higher worlds, he will never remain merely negative, for he will possess something which can imbue his soul with positive content at a higher stage. That is why we so often emphasise that the seeker must not only strive for higher levels, but must at the same time give careful study to what spiritual science communicates. That is how the spiritual researcher takes account of the fact that anyone who is to experience new realms has to be receptive, and therefore negative, towards them.

What we have to call forth, when we set out consciously to develop the soul, can be seen in the various people we encounter in ordinary life, for the soul does not go through development only in its present life but has done so in previous lives and is at a definite stage when it enters earth-existence. Just as in our present life we have to proceed from stage to stage, and must acquire negative characteristics on our way to a positive stage, so the same thing may have happened when we last went through the gate of death and entered a new life with positive or negative characteristics. The design which sent us into life with positive qualities will leave us where we are and act as a brake on further development, for positive tendencies produce a clearly-defined character. A negative tendency, on the other hand, does make it possible for us to receive a great deal into our soul-life between death and a new birth, but it also exposes us to all the chance happenings of earthly life, and especially to the impressions made on us by other people. Thus when a man of negative type meets other persons, we can usually see how their characteristics leave their mark upon him. Even he himself, when he comes close to a friend or to someone with whom he has had an affectionate relationship, can feel how he becomes more and more like the other: in cases of marriage or deep friendship even his handwriting may be influenced. Observation will indeed show how in marriage the handwriting of a negative person may come to resemble increasingly that of his or her spouse.

So it is that negative types are susceptible to the influence of other people, especially of those close to them. Hence they are exposed to a certain danger of losing themselves, so that their individual soul life and ego-sense may be extinguished.

The danger for a positive type is that he will not be readily accessible to impressions from other people and will often fail to appreciate their characteristic qualities, so that he passes them all by and may be unable to form a friendship or close association with anyone. Hence he is in danger of his soul becoming hardened and desolate.

We can gain deep insight into life when we consider people in terms of the positive and negative aspects in human beings, and this applies also to the different ways in which they respond to the influence of Nature around them. What then is it that acts on a person when he is influenced by other people or when he absorbs impressions from the outer world?

There is one thing that always imparts a positive character to the soul. For modern man, regardless of his stage of development, it is sound judgment, rational weighing up, clarifying for oneself any situation or relationship that may arise in life. The opposite of this is the loss of healthy judgment, so that impressions are admitted to the soul in such a way that positive qualities are no protection against them. We can even observe that when certain human activities slip down into the unconscious, they often have a stronger effect on other people than when they arise from the conscious exercise of normal judgment.

It is unfortunate, especially in a spiritual-scientific movement, that when facts concerning the spiritual world are given in a strictly logical form, a form well recognised in other spheres of life, people are inclined to evade them; they find it uncongenial that such facts should be presented in a rational sequence of cause and effect. But if these communications are imparted to them in such a way that their judgment is not evoked, they are far more ready to respond. There are even people who are highly mistrustful of information about the spiritual world if it is given in rational terms, but very credulous towards anything they may hear from mediums who seem to be inspired by some unknown power. These mediums, who do not know what they are saying and who say more than they know, attract many more believers than do persons who know exactly what they are saying. How is it possible—we often hear it said—for anyone to tell us about the spiritual world unless he is in at least a half-conscious state and evidently possessed by some other power? This is often taken as a reason for objecting to the conscious communication of facts drawn from the spiritual world. That is why running to mediums is much more popular than paying heed to communications based on sound judgment and set forth in rational terms.

When anything that comes from the spiritual world is thrust down into a region from which consciousness is excluded, there is a danger that it will work on the negative characteristics of the soul, for these characteristics always come to the fore when we are approached by an influence from dark subconscious depths. Close observation shows again and again how a relatively stupid person, thanks to his positive qualities, can have a strong effect on a more intelligent person if the latter is easily impressed by anything that emerges from subconscious obscurity. So we can understand how it happens in life that persons with fine minds are the victims of robust characters whose assertions derive solely from their own impulses and inclinations.

If we take one further step, we shall come to a remarkable fact. Consider a man who not merely belies his own reason now and then but suffers from mental illness and says things that spring from this deranged condition. So long as his illness is not noticed, he may have an uncommonly strong influence on persons of finer nature.

All this belongs to the wisdom of life. We shall not get it right unless we realise that a man with positive qualities may not be open to reason, while a negative type of man will often be subject to irrational influences he cannot keep out. A subtler psychology will have to take account of these things.

Now we will turn from impressions made by individuals on one another and come to impressions received by people from their surroundings. Here, too, we can gain important results in the context of positive and negative.

Let us think, for example, of a researcher who has worked very fruitfully on a special subject and has brought together a large number of relevant facts. By so doing he has accomplished something useful for mankind. But now suppose that he connects these facts with ideas gained from his education and his life up to date or from certain theories and philosophical viewpoints which may give a very one-sided view of the facts. In so far as the concepts and ideas he has inferred from the facts are the outcome of his own reflective thinking, they will have a healthy effect on his soul, for by working out his own philosophy he will have imbued his soul with positive feelings. But now suppose that he meets some followers who have not themselves worked over the facts but have merely heard of them or read them. They will lack the feelings that he evoked in himself through his work in laboratory or study, and their frame of mind may be entirely negative. Hence the same doctrine, even though it be one-sided, can be seen as making the leader of their school positive in his soul, while on the whole throng of followers, who merely repeat the doctrine, it can have an unhealthy, negative effect, making them weaker and weaker.

This is something that runs through the whole history of human culture. Even today we can see how men of an entirely materialistic outlook, which they themselves have worked hard to develop from their own findings, are lively positive characters whom it is a pleasure to meet, but in the case of their followers, who carry in their heads the same basic ideas but have not acquired them by their own efforts, these ideas have an unhealthy, negative, weakening effect. Thus we can say that it makes a great difference if a man achieves a philosophical outlook of his own or if he merely takes it from someone else. The first man will acquire positive qualities; the second, negative qualities.

Thus we see how our attitude to the world can make us both positive and negative. For example, a purely theoretical approach to Nature, especially if it omits everything we can actually see with our eyes, makes us negative. There has to be a theoretical knowledge of Nature. But we must not be blind to the fact that this theoretical knowledge gained by the systematic study of animals, plants and minerals and embodied as laws of Nature in the form of concepts and ideas—works on our negative qualities in such a way as to imprison us in these ideas. On the other hand, if we respond with living appreciation to all that Nature in its grandeur has to offer, positive qualities are called forth in our souls—if for example we take delight in a flower, not pulling it to pieces but responding to its beauty, or if we open ourselves to the morning light when the sun is rising, not testing it in astronomical terms but beholding its glory. For anything we adopt by way of a theoretical conception of the world does not implicate our souls; we allow it to be dictated to us by others. But our whole soul is actively involved when we are delighted or repelled by the phenomena of Nature. The truth of Nature is not concerned with the ego, but that which delights or repels us is; for how we respond to Nature depends on the character of our ego.

Thus we can say: Living participation in Nature develops our positive qualities; theorising about Nature does the reverse. But we must qualify this by repeating that a researcher who is the first to analyse a series of natural phenomena is far more positive than one who merely adopts his findings and learns from them. This distinction should be given attention in wide fields of education. And a relevant fact is that wherever there has been a conscious awareness of the things we have been discussing today, the negative characteristics of the human soul have never been cultivated on their own account. Why did Plato inscribe over the entrance to his school of philosophy the words: “Only those with a knowledge of geometry may enter here”?⁴⁰ It was because geometry and mathematics cannot be accepted on the authority of another person. We have to work through geometry by our own inner efforts and can master it only by a positive activity of our souls. If this were heeded today, many of the philosophical systems that buzz around would not exist. For if anyone realises how much positive work has gone into formulating a system of ideas such as geometry, he will learn to respect the creative activity of the human mind; but anyone who reads Haeckel's Riddle of the Universe,⁴¹ for instance, with no notion of how it was worked out, may quite easily arrive at a new world-outlook, but he will do so out of a purely negative state of soul.

Now in spiritual science, or Anthroposophy, we have something which unconditionally requires a positive response. If someone is told that with the aid of popular modern devices, photographs or lantern-slides, he can see some animal or some natural phenomenon brought before his eyes on the screen, he will watch it quite passively, in a negative frame of mind; he will need no positive qualities and will not even need to think. Or he might be shown a series of pictures illustrating the various phases of a glacier on its way down the mountain it would be just the same. These are just examples of how wide is the appeal of these negative, attitudes today. Anthroposophy is not so simple. Photographs could at most give a symbolical suggestion of some of its ideas. The only way of approach to the spiritual world is through the life of the human soul. Anyone who wishes to penetrate fruitfully into spiritual science must realise that its most important elements are not going to be the subject of a demonstration. He is therefore advised that he must work on and with his soul, so as to bring out its most positive qualities. In fact, spiritual science is in the highest sense competent to cultivate these qualities in the human soul. Herein, too, resides the healthiness of its world-outlook, which makes no claim except to arouse the forces sleeping in the soul. In appealing to the activity inherent in every soul, Anthroposophy calls forth its hidden forces, so that they may permeate all the saps and energies of the body; thus it has a health-giving effect, in the fullest sense, on the whole human being. And because Anthroposophy appeals only to sound reason, which cannot be evoked by mass-suggestion but only through individual understanding, and because it renounces everything that mass-suggestion can evoke, it reckons with the most positive qualities of the human soul.

Thus we have brought together, without embellishment, a number of facts and examples which show how man is placed in the midst of two streams, the positive and the negative. He cannot rise to higher stages unless he leaves a lower positive stage and goes over to a negative, receptive condition, so that his soul acquires new content; he takes this along with him and thus becomes positive once more on a higher level. If we learn how to observe Nature rightly, we can see how world-wisdom arranges things so that man may be led from a positive to a negative phase, and on to a positive phase once more.

From this point of view, it is illuminating to study particular topics—for example, Aristotle's famous definition of the tragic.⁴² A tragedy, he says, brings before us a complete dramatic action which can be expected to evoke fear and pity in the spectators, but in such a way that these emotions undergo a catharsis or purgation. Let us note that man, on coming into existence with his usual egotism, is at first very positive: he hardens himself and shuts himself off from others. But then, if he learns to sympathise with others in their sorrows and feels their joys as his own, he becomes very negative, because he goes out from his ego and participates in the feelings of other people.

We become negative also if we are deeply affected by some undefined fate which seems to hang over another person, by what could happen on the morrow to someone with whom we are in close sympathy. Who has not trembled when someone is hastening towards a deed which will lead him to disaster—a disaster we can foresee but which he, driven by his impulses, is powerless to avert? We are afraid of what may come of it, and this induces in us a negative state of soul, for fear is negative. We would no longer have any real part in life if we were unable to fear for someone who is approaching a perilous future. So it is that fear and sympathy make us negative. In order that we may become positive again, tragedy sets before us a Hero. We sympathise with his deeds, and his fate touches us so nearly that our fates are aroused. At the same time the course of the dramatic action brings the picture of the Hero before us in such a way that our fear and pity are purified; they are transformed from negative feelings into the harmonious contentment bestowed on us by a work of art, and so we are raised once more into the positive mode.

Thus the old Greek philosopher's definition of tragedy shows us how art is an element in life which comes to meet an unavoidably negative state of feeling and transmutes it into a positive condition. Art, in all its realms, leads us to a higher level when we have first to be negative in order to progress from a less developed state.

Beauty, initially, must be seen as that which is intended to come before us in order to help us rise beyond our present stage. Ordinary life is then suffused with the radiance of a higher state of soul, if we have first been raised through art to a higher level.

Thus we see how positive and negative alternate, not only in individuals but in the whole life of man, and we see how this contributes to raising both the individual from one incarnation to the next and humanity as a whole. We could easily show, if there were time, how there have been positive and negative epochs and historical periods. The idea of positive and negative throws light into every sphere of the soul's life and of the life of humanity at large.

It never happens that one man is always negative and another always positive. Each of us has to go through positive and negative conditions at different stages of existence. Only when we see the idea in this light shall we accept it as a truth and therefore as a basis for the practice of living. And our discussion today has confirmed the saying that we have put at the beginning and end of these lectures—the saying by the old Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, who, because he could see so deeply into human life, was called the Obscure: “Never will you find the boundaries of the soul, by whatever paths you search, so all-embracing is the soul's being.”⁴³

Now someone might say: “All study of the soul must then be useless, for if its boundaries can never be discovered, no research can establish them and one could despair of ever knowing anything about them.” Only a negative man could take that line. A positive man would add: “Thank God the life of the soul is so far-ranging that knowledge can never encompass it, for this means that everything we comprehend today we shall be able to surpass tomorrow and thus hasten towards higher levels.” Let us be glad that at every moment the life of the soul makes a mockery of our knowledge. We need an unbounded soul-life, for this limitless perspective gives us hope that we may continually surpass the positive and rise from step to step. It is precisely because the extent of our soul-life is unbounded and unknowable that we can look forward with hope and confidence. Because the boundaries of the soul can never be discovered, the soul is able to go beyond them and rise to higher and ever-higher levels.

• 38. Peter Rosegger, 1843–1918. Styrian writer: “One is a man/Two are people/Any more are cattle”.
• 39. Rudolf Steiner, Occult Science, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1969.
• 40. These words over the entrance to the Platonic Academy can be found neither in Plato nor in any of his Greek and Roman contemporaries. They are first found in commentators on Aristotle in the 6th century AD; thus Elias, Aristotelis Categorias commentaria, ed. A. Busse (Comm. in Arist. Graeca XVIII, pars 1), Berlin 1900, 118.18; and Philoponus Joannes, Aristotelis de Anima Libris commentaria, ed. M. Hayduck (Comm. in Arist. Graeca XV), Berlin 1897, 117.29.
• 41. Ernst Haeckel, 1834–1919. Die Welträtsel Gemeinverständliche Studien über monistische Philosophie, Bonn 1899.
• 42. See Aristotle, Poetics, chapter 6.
• 43. See note 23.

Preliminary remarks

It is to John Henry Mackay's credit that he rescued Max Stirner from oblivion, into which the laziness and cowardice of thought had allowed this bold and free spirit to sink for almost half a century. John Henry Mackay's biography of Stirner, “Max Stirner. Sein Leben und sein Werk” (Berlin 1898, Schuster & Loeffler) and its edition “Max Stirner's Smaller Writings” (ibid.) have been honored in detail in this journal. Mackay has devoted a part of his own life to giving contemporaries and posterity an idea of the personality whose greatness he first recognized. Those who wish to gain an idea of the effort that preceded the publication of Mackay's work should read the introduction to his book on Stirner, in which he recounts the story of his ten-year work (1888-1897). Since he pointed out the great thinker, philosophical and unphilosophical prolific writers have exploited the fruits of his labor, usually without showing where their wisdom came from.

I am pleased to be able to present the following columns to John Henry Mackay, which reproduce an essay by Max Stirner that escaped him despite all the effort he put into it, and which Dr. Heinrich H. Houben found during his preliminary work on a comprehensive study of Gutzkow. The reprint is hereby dedicated to the rediscoverer of Stirner.

The essay is contained in the “Telegraph für Deutschland” (No. 6-8, January 1842), edited by Karl Gutzkow. It appears to be a highly valuable document for the development of this thinker. It is an earlier work by Stirner than the essays reprinted by John Henry Mackay in his edition of the “Smaller Writings” (Berlin 1898, Schuster and Loeffler Publishers). The first work by Stirner that Mackay included in this edition is about “The Untrue Principle in Our Education, or Humanism and Realism”. It appeared in the issues of April 10, 12, 14 and 19, 1842 of the “Rheinische Zeitung”. The present review of Bruno Bauer's “Posaune des jüngsten Gerichts” was thus printed about three months before the first of the Stirner works found by Mackay. It cannot have been written much earlier either, because Bruno Bauer's anonymous book, to which it refers, the “Posaune des jüngsten Gerichts über Hegel den Atheisten und An 374

the Christians» was published in 1841. If you read the two essays in succession, you will notice how quickly Stirner progressed on his intellectual journey, especially in these months. In the January essay, Stirner presents himself as a philosopher who is still deeply steeped in Hegelian ideas; in the April essay, we encounter in every sentence the independent views that were to be fully developed in 1844 in The Ego and Its Own. From Hegelian philosophy, which sees the origin of all being in the general world reason and only recognizes the “I” of the individual human being to the extent that it participates and merges into this eternal reason, Stirner must have progressed in this period to his view of the sovereignty of the “I”, the development of which brought his life's work three years later. A few sentences from the essay quoted here already reveal Stirner's own ideas, as in: “But the security against God had been lost to them in the loss of themselves, and the fear of God took root in their contrite minds. They have found themselves again and conquered the shivers of fear; for they have found the word that henceforth can no longer be destroyed, that is eternal, however much they themselves may still struggle and fight against it, until each one of them becomes aware of it. A truly German man - securus adversus deum - has spoken the liberating word, the self-sufficiency, the autarky of the free man” -; or: ”The German alone and he alone manifests the world-historical calling of radicalism, only he alone is radical and he alone is so - without wrong. No one is as relentless and ruthless as he is; for he does not just overthrow the existing world in order to remain standing himself; he overthrows - himself... For the German, destruction is creation and the crushing of the temporal - his eternity.» Such sentences are proof of Stirner's authorship, which is also confirmed by the fact that the essay, like the four essays republished by Mackay: “On the False Principle of Our Education”, “Art and Religion”, “Königsberger Skizzen von Karl Rosenkranz”, “Einiges Vorläufiges vom Liebesstaat” is signed with “Stirner”. The essay reveals that Stirner, through his criticism of Hegel's All-Mind, has gained the idea of the individual ego by recognizing that only the latter can be attributed to what Hegel has attributed to the former. If Hegel's world reason is allowed to become the human ego, then Hegel's world of ideas becomes Stirner's. This transformation was apparently carried out by Stirner in the first few months of 1842. The essay [reproduced below] justifies regarding these months as the most important period in Stirner's development.

Yesterday we spoke of how preparation was made for that which had to come about for the evolution of humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha. We spoke of the three permeations of a Being of the higher Hierarchies by the Christ, and in the wonderful emergence of the Greek Apollo we found an echo of what had taken place at the end of the Atlantean time, as a far distant prefiguring of the Mystery of Golgotha. Now we have to inquire how the effects of this are manifest in the evolution of mankind. It will first be necessary to say something about the basic characteristics of the world pictures which appeared in post-Atlantean times as the echoes, or after effects, of the threefold Christ-event, for this, as we have seen, reached a certain conclusion at the end of the Atlantean Age.

Let us try to look more deeply into the fundamental characteristics of these world pictures. They arose as after effects in human souls of all that I described yesterday. These post-Atlantean world-pictures are indeed the reflections of the threefold Christ-event in the souls of post-Atlantean mankind. From this point of view we need say only a few words about the first post-Atlantean epoch. We know that in terms of spirituality it was the highest post-Atlantean epoch up to now, but that what the souls of the holy Rishis and their disciples received from it was less penetrated by the Mysteries of which I spoke yesterday.

The first post-Atlantean world-picture to show a direct effect of the threefold Christ-event was that which arose from the Zarathustrian impulse. Now I must here remark in parenthesis that I shall have to introduce words which—because of the way they are used today—have a dry, abstract, even pedantic sound; but, search as one may through the language; there are no other words available. And so I shall want to appeal to your souls to understand by these words something far more spiritual than anything they can signify for the and scholarship of the present time.

From the point of view relevant here I should like to associate the Zarathustrian world-picture with “Chronology”. It looks beyond the two Beings, Ahura Mazdao and Ahriman, to the workings of Time—Zervan Akarana. Not, however, the abstract Time we think of today, but Time viewed as a living, super-personal Being. From this Being proceed the rulers of Time; first of all the Amshaspands, the spiritual Beings who are symbolised in cosmic space by the signs of the Zodiac. Through the number six—or twelve if we reckon in their antipodes—they rule over the Izeds, who rank below them and are 28–31 in number. The Izeds are spirits of a lower kind, servants of the high Time Beings; they regulate the days of the month.

The Zarathustrian consciousness looked at the wonderful harmony which works through forces and is symbolised numerically by all the relations and combinations which result from the interweaving of 28 to 31 with 12. It looked into all that streams into the world and resounds through it, because in the great world-orchestra the instruments sound harmoniously together in these numerical relationships. For the Zarathustrian world-picture this appears as the ordering and harmonising principle in the cosmic order. I want to give only a hint of these relationships. And because in that which creates, and nourishes itself in creating, in that which takes the world-pictures into itself, absorbing them spiritually and carrying them over to higher stages—because the Zarathustrian outlook sees in “Time” something living and super-personal—so, while spiritualising the term, we may call this world-picture “Chronology”, whereby we are led to think at once of the god Kronos, the Regent of Time.

Then we come to the third post-Atlantean epoch. Yesterday I described it as the epoch in which knowledge was kindled in human souls by the forces which shone out from the stars; when the secrets of the world were no longer discerned only through the relations between the Rulers of Time in the super-sensible, for these were becoming manifest in the realm of sense existence. In the courses of the stars, in the signature of their movements in cosmic space, men could now perceive how harmony and melody in cosmic happenings are brought about. This picture of the world I would like to call Astrology. So Chronology is followed by Astrology. And everything that was disclosed by the true, authentic Chronology of Zarathustrianism, and by the true, authentic Astrology of the Egyptian and Chaldean Mysteries—all this was activated by the secret influence which had come into the world though the threefold Christ-event before the Atlantean catastrophe.

And what followed in Greece or in the Graeco-Latin epoch? What I am now going to say applies not only to the Greek and Roman cultures, but also to all the other regions of Europe. Yesterday I tried to illustrate it through a single example, but it holds good, one might say, for all the West. Let us recall how the Greeks reverenced Apollo, the reflection of the Nathan Jesus-child as he had been at the end of the Atlantean time. It was out of the Hyperborean land, from the North, that Apollo came to the Oracle at Delphi. Through the Pythia, in summer, he spoke the most important things that the Greeks wished to hear. In the autumn he returned to his Hyperborean land. We connected this journey of Apollo with the journeys of the sun; but it is the spiritual sun that speaks through Apollo, and the spiritual sun goes away to the north, while the physical sun goes to the south. The myths are seen to be endlessly full of wisdom if they are considered in the light of true occultism. But in revering Apollo the Greeks did not look on the sun as his visible sign in the heavens; Apollo was not a sun god in this sense. For a god symbolised by the external sun the Greeks had Helios; it was he who regulated the course of the sun in the sky. Even if we take only the physical sun into account, we find that its influence on earth-life is not confined to the direct effects of its rays. The sun works in the first place through air and water and water-vapour, and so through the vapours which (as we have seen) rise from the site of the Castalian spring and coil round the neighbouring hillsides like a dragon—the dragon killed by the Greek St. George. The sun works in all the elements, and after it has worked into them, inoculated them, its activity plays out from them on to human beings, through the servants whom we call elemental spirits. In the elements the Sun-Spirit is actively alive, and this is the activity the Greeks saw in their Apollo.

Thus for the Greeks Apollo was a sun god, but not the Helios who drove the chariot of the sun across the heavens and to some extent regulated the times of the day. In Apollo the Greeks saw the sun's activity in the atmosphere, and this activity they addressed as Apollo when they addressed it spiritually. And so it was with many gods and spiritual beings whom we find in the West. I could mention many, but we need point only to Wotan with his wild host, rushing through the storm. What form then did the world-picture—still echoing the threefold Christ-event—take in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch? Again I must make use of a pedantic, dried out word. Astrology was followed by Meteorology. Chronology, Astrology, Meteorology! We have only to bring the “logy” into relation with the Logos.

But while all this was breaking in over the Western world, something else streamed into the whole post-Atlantean civilisation. This too was an after-echo of the threefold Christ-event, but it came from quite another side. And this fourth element, running as though parallel to the Meteorology of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, is something I must again designate with a dry, pedantic word: Geology—but I beg you once more to relate the “logy” to the Logos. Geology, then—where do we encounter it?

The development of the ancient Hebrew civilisation will never reveal its particular secrets unless it is studied as Geology, in our sense of the term. How do we first come upon the ranks of the Elohim, or upon the Jahve-god?¹ We meet him first when he wishes to form into man something taken from the Earth itself. He wishes to clothe with a new covering, an Earth-vesture, the part of man that has come down from earlier times, from Saturn, Sun, Moon. Jahve is precisely the god who forms man out of the Earth—that is, out of the forces and elements of the Earth. Therefore the ancient Hebrew wisdom, since it professed the Jahve-god, had to become Geology. And this teaching about man, that he is formed out of the forces of the Earth, is Geology. Is not the geological character of the ancient Hebrew teaching shown to us at once in the name of the first man, Adam—he who was formed out of earth! That is the significant point that we must keep before us: among other peoples—the peoples with a meteorological world-picture, let us say—the creation of man is spoken of quite differently, with the emphasis on his soul. In the Greek tradition, for example, we see Prometheus engaged in the forming of man. Athene lends her aid and causes a spark from spiritual heights to be united with man. Prometheus forms the soul in the symbolic likeness of a butterfly. The Jahve-god forms man out of earth; and he, the Jahve-god, having become in the course of his evolution the Ruler of Earth, breathes out of his own substance a living soul into man. So Jahve unites himself through his breath with what he has formed out of earth. And he wishes to dwell in his offspring, in his living breath, in Adam and his descendants; those beings whom Jahve considered it his task to clothe in earth. And now to carry this further, let us try to call up before our souls everything we find handed down by the Bible from Hebrew antiquity itself.

We know, and have emphasised, that the Earth develops certain forces. Goethe and Giordano Bruno, among others, compare these forces to those of in-breathing and out-breathing in human beings. The Earth does have forces of in-breathing and out-breathing which bring about ebb and flow, the swelling and sinking of the waters; they are inner Earth-forces, but the same as those which guide the Moon round the Earth. In water-effects we encounter a manifestation of these Earth-forces. In this realm the Bible shows us the Deluge as another important event after the creation of Adam, the ‘man of earth’. And now let us pass on to the time of Moses!

If we look at the doings of Moses in the right light, we find them constantly related to activities of the Earth. Moses goes to the rocks with his rod and makes water gush out. Moses goes up the mountain. Above and below, the mountain is connected with Earth activity. For we must think of this mountain as a volcano, or at least as volcanic. It is not the Sinai generally imagined; the Earth is active in it. The column of fire in which Moses stands is akin to what happens when we bum a piece of paper in the sulphur hills of Italy and smoke comes out. So does fiery smoke, telluric activity, come out of the mountain. And in telluric activity the Jews always saw symbols. In front of them went the pillar of cloud or of fire—telluric activity! We could go deeply into details and everywhere we should find that the spirit of Earth prevails in all that Moses gives out as a revelation of the Jahve-god. What Moses proclaims is Geology!

The profound difference between the Greek and the Hebrew conceptions of the world will never be understood unless it is recognised that the Greek conception belongs to Meteorology, and the Hebrew conception to Geology. The Greeks felt that they were living in the midst of forces pouring in on the Earth from the surrounding Cosmos; pouring into the air and pervading the atmosphere. The Hebrews felt themselves in close relationship to forces rising from the Earth below and bound up with the Earth. Yes, even the sufferings of the Hebrew people come from the desert, where the Earth-forces prevail. Geology dominates the destiny of the Hebrews. Geology, expressed now in the fruitfulness of the Earth, is what draws them, through the reports of their spies, to the Promised Land.²

Paul knew well that this consciousness of a connection with the Earth-spirit is a result of the pre-earthly Christ-event, for he indicates that it was the Christ who led the Jews through the desert and caused water to flow from the rock. And if we were to go on from the Bible to some of the significant Hebrew legends, we should find them permeated with Geology, in the sense meant here. Thus we are told how Jahve, when he was forming man out of earth, sent forth an angel to gather earths of different colours from all parts of the Earth, so that everything belonging to the Earth should be mingled in Adam's bodily vesture. Today we should say that Jahve took great care to place man on the Earth so that in his true being he would be the highest flower, the crown, of earthly creation.

For the Chaldeans, the Egyptians, the Zoroastrians, the Greeks, the Romans and the European peoples of central and northern Europe, the most important part of man was the part that came from the spiritual world. For the Jews, the most important element in man was connected with the Earth and its forces. Jahve felt himself as the god whose spiritual rulership prevailed throughout the Earth.

Thus we can regard as the most important event in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch the emergence of Geology side by side with Meteorology. And a wonderful spiritual reflection of this comes to expression in ancient Hebrew prophecy.

What were these prophets really striving for? Let us try to look into the prophetic souls of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hezekiah, Daniel, Joel, Jonah and Zechariah. If we do this quite impartially, without any preconceptions, we find that they were endeavouring, fundamentally, to bring a particular soul-force into the forefront of the soul and to drive another soul-force down, as it were, into the depths. I have already asked you to notice how, in the paintings by Michelangelo which I described, the prophets are always depicted sitting there as if wrapped in deep thought, inwardly at rest, so that one sees how in the devotion of their souls they are connected through sub-earthly depths with the Eternal. In contrast with them Michelangelo places the Sibyls, who are open to the elemental powers of the Earth. Thus the hair of one Sibyl is blown about by the wind; even her blue mantle billows in the wind, and under the influence of the wind she utters her prophecies. We see another Sibyl seized by inner fire; in the typically assertive gesture of her hand we see the fire, the earthly element. We could look again at these Sibyls one by one and we should find that they live in the midst of the forces which play into their souls from the elemental surroundings of the Earth. These Sibylline forces, which so to speak draw into their souls the spirit of the elements and bring it to expression—these are the forces that the old Jewish Prophets wanted to repress. If you read impartially the whole history of the Jewish Prophets, you will find that the prophet sets himself—and that is the aim of his training—to suppress in himself the Sibylline urge and to prevent it from ever breaking out.

Apollo changed the Sibylline impulse of the Pythia by sinking himself into it and speaking through her. The Prophets wanted to suppress everything Pythian in their souls and to cultivate solely that which works in the clear force of the Ego; the Ego which is bound up with the Earth and belongs to it; the Ego which is the spiritual counterpart of the geological element. How the Eternal reveals itself in the Ego through calm repose, when the Sibylline elements are silent, when all inner turmoil ceases, when only calm prevails and gazes into the grounds of the Eternal—that is what the Jewish Prophets wished to manifest, so that their proclamations could spring from a temper of soul which corresponds in the highest degree with Geology.

Thus the stirring message that sounds forth to us from the Prophets is like an out flowing of the geological element, and even when things turn out quite differently from what has been prophesied, this very fact shows us how closely bound are the Prophets to the element of Geology. A future kingdom which will redeem the existing kingdom while remaining in all appearance an earthly kingdom, a heaven on Earth—that is first of all what the Prophets announce, so closely are they united with Geology.

This geological element in the Prophets flowed on even into the early days of Christianity, since people expected not only the return of the Messiah, but that he would come down from the clouds and found his kingdom on Earth. The distinctive inner character of Jewish culture will be understood only if it is taken in this sense as Geology. This was what the Prophets longed for and inculcated in their pupils—to suppress the Sibylline element, together with everything that leads the soul into unconscious depths, and to make manifest that which lives in the Ego.

The relations of all other peoples to their gods were different from those of the Jews to their Jahve. The other relations were predetermined: they reflected the outcome of the relations of men to the spirits of the higher Hierarchies during the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods. The Jewish people had the task of developing a relationship which belonged specially to the Earth period. But when the Ego wishes to establish a relationship with its god, how does this find expression? Not as inspiration, so that morality springs from the operation of divine forces within the soul, but as commandment. The form of commandment found in the Decalogue is encountered first among the Jews—whatever nonsense learned men may talk about earlier commandments, Hammurabi, and so forth. I cannot go now into the follies of modern scholarship. The commandments that arise when the Ego stands directly over against God and receives from God the rule, the precept, that the Ego must follow out of its own inner will—this kind of commandment is met with first among the Jewish people. And it is here, too, that we first find God entering into a covenant with his people.

The other gods worked with forces which are always connected with subconscious realms of the soul. Let us recall how Apollo worked through the Pythia, and how a person on his way to the Pythia had to prepare himself, so that the god might be able to speak to him. Apollo spoke through the unconscious soul-life of the Pythia. In contrast with this we have the Jahve-god uttering his commandments, making a covenant with his people, speaking directly to the Ego in the soul. And the Prophets immediately wax wrath if something happens which did often happen to the Jewish people—if the influence of heathen peoples gains sway over the Jews. No subconscious forces were to be allowed to influence the Jews; everything had to rest on the alliance with God and the principle of the Law. That was the especial concern of the Prophets. And now let us look back a little, with the aid of occult knowledge, over what we have already tried to illustrate.

Yesterday we came to know about the threefold Christ-event which took place in Lemurian and Atlantean times. We saw how on three occasions the Being who appeared later as the Nathan Jesus-child was permeated by the Christ, but in such a way that he did not incarnate on Earth but remained in spiritual worlds. And when we look back over what happened then, we must say that what was accomplished in Atlantean times flowed over into the East.

For example, Elijah was one of the Prophets—but in what sense is he a Prophet?³ He is a servant of the God Jahve, but in his soul an echo of the threefold Christ-event lives on. In his soul is the knowledge: “As a prophet of Jahve I must above all things proclaim that in Jahve there lives the Christ who will later on fulfil the Mystery of Golgotha; the Christ who poured His enduring influence into the cosmos through His third experience at the end of the Atlantean time.” Elijah proclaimed the Christ-filled Jahve. For the Christ was indeed living in Jahve, the Jahve-god, but as a reflection of Himself. As the moon reflects the sunlight, so did Jahve reflect the Being who then lived as Christ. Christ caused his Being to be reflected from Jahve or the Jahve-god. But a messenger such as Elijah worked in the after-effects of the threefold Christ-event; we might say that Elijah went ahead of the Nathan Jesus-being, who was passing spiritually from West to East in order to find his way into the course of civilisation and then to be born as one of the Jesus-children.

The overflow, as it were, of Meteorology, especially when this came into touch with Geology, was felt by all peoples as a heralding of things to come. And we meet with the remarkable fact that in the region which afterwards became so important for Christianity one of these prefiguring signs occurred. We see how in the most varied places of Asia Minor, and also in Europe, festivals were held which were like foreshadowings of the Mystery of Golgotha. The cults of Attis and Adonis have been correctly noted as having this character. But if we look at these festivals in their true light, we see that the event they prefigure is on the meteorological level. The god who was slain as Adonis, and who rose again, was not thought of as embodied in the flesh. What his worshippers had for a god was primarily an image, a picture; and in fact it was a picture of the angelic Being who in spiritual heights was permeated by the Christ at the close of the Atlantean time and was later born as the Nathan Jesus-child. It was the destiny of the Nathan Jesus-child that was celebrated in the worship of Adonis and Attis.

We can now say that it was part of the karma of world history—you will perhaps look for something more behind these words—that in the place where the Bible with a certain truth locates the birth of the Jesus-child—in Bethlehem—there was a centre of the Adonis cult. Bethlehem was one of the places where Adonis had been worshipped. The Adonis who died and rose, again was often celebrated there, and so was an aura prepared by the calling up of a memory: Once in the spiritual heights there was a Being who then belonged still to the Hierarchy of Angels and was later to come to Earth as the Nathan Jesus-child; a Being who at the end of the Atlantean time had been permeated by the Christ. What had formerly been done for the harmonising of thinking, feeling and willing—this was celebrated at the Adonis festivals. And in Bethlehem, where Adonis festivals had been held, we have also the birthplace of the Nathan Jesus-child. In conjunction, these words sound strange. But when we have sought out the threefold Christ-event, the super-earthly event which on three occasions preceded the Mystery of Golgotha, do we not see the Christ pass over from West to East, to the place where the Mystery of Golgotha was to be fulfilled? Do we not see how He had sent His messenger in Elijah, and do we not know how in his next incarnation the messenger reappeared as John the Baptist? And are we not expressly told of this in a wonderful harmony of words: “He sent his angel before him, to herald his coming?”⁴ That can be said as well of John as of Elijah. Or even better of Elijah, as will be understood by those who remember my saying that Elijah remained in spiritual heights and worked through a representative, so that he himself never went about on Earth. If you reflect on that, the expression, “He sent his angel before him”, is even more appropriate to Elijah than to John. Such messengers were always messengers of the Christ, who was passing from West to East.

And now the Geology of the Jews was to be permeated by the spiritual Being whom we have learnt to see as having a particular activity in relation to the Earth. Geology was to be Christened (durchchristet). The spirit of the Earth was to be experienced in a new way by men; they had to be enabled to free this spirit, in a certain sense, from the Earth. But this was possible only if there came a power which could free the spirit of the Earth from the forces of the Earth. This happened when the Earth's aura was permeated by the power of the Christ and in consequence a change came over the Earth itself. The Christ entered into the forces which the Jahve-god had released and gave them a different character.

From all this, if we look back over it, we can understand why the laurel became a visible symbol of Apollo. For those who bring something of Spiritual Science to the study of the plant kingdom, the laurel has a strong connection with meteorological conditions. It is shaped and built out of Meteorology. Another plant is much more closely bound up with the Earth; is so to speak an expression of Geology. If one really feels how the oil penetrates the olive tree, so that in one's own soul the elemental forces are stirred by the way in which the tree allows a new sprout to be grafted on to it and to flourish there—then one can feel how the olive tree is inwardly penetrated with the oil of Earth. One can feel the earthly element pulsing through the oil.

And now you will remember something I touched on in the second lecture—that Paul was called to build a bridge between Hebrew antiquity and Christianity, between Geology and Christology. As we said, Paul's activity extends through the realm of the olive tree. And if we understand Apollo in the vapours rising from the mountain chasms, and how through the vapours he inspires the Pythia and speaks oracular words concerning human fate, then we can also feel how the elemental forces stream from the olive tree into its environment, and these are forces familiar to the soul of Paul. We can feel it in his words. He immerses himself, as it were, in Geology in order to feel the elemental forces in the aura of the olive tree and to let its aura inspire him in that geographical realm where his work lay.

Nowadays people read these things far too abstractly. They imagine that things said by writers in the past were as abstract, as dependent only on the brain, as are the things often said by modern authors. People do not reflect how not only understanding and reason, but all the forces of the soul, can be connected in a primordial earthly sense with all that gives a certain region its particular stamp. It was the olive tree that gave its stamp to the Pauline region. And when Paul sought to raise the Jewish Geology up to himself, then it was that—inspired by the olive tree—he spoke the most important things concerning the relationship of the Christ-filled man to men who are far from Christ. Let us hear the strange words Paul uses when he wishes to bring the Gentile Christians into relation with the Jews. They are not to be taken abstractly, but as words that rise new-minted from the elemental depths of his soul: Romans XI. 13–24. (From the New English Bible):

“But I have something to say to you Gentiles. I am a missionary to the Gentiles, and as such I give all honour to that ministry when I try to stir emulation in the men of my own race, and so to save some of them. For if their rejection has meant the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance mean? Nothing less than life from the dead! If the first portion of dough is consecrated, so is the whole lump. If the root is consecrated, so are the branches. But if some of the branches have been lopped off, and you, a wild olive, have been grafted in among them, and have come to share the same root and sap as the olive, do not make yourself superior to the branches. If you do so, remember that it is not you who sustain the root: the root sustains you.

“You will say, ‘Branches were lopped off so that I might be grafted in.’ Very well: they were lopped off for lack of faith, and by faith you hold your place. Put away your pride, and be on your guard; for if God did not spare the native branches, no more will he spare you. Observe the kindness and the severity of God—severity to those who fell away, divine kindness to you, if only you remain within its scope; otherwise you too will be cut off, whereas they, if they do not continue faithless, will be grafted in; for it is in God's power to graft them in again. For if you were cut from your native wild olive and against all nature grafted into the cultivated olive, how much more readily will they, the natural olive-branches, be grafted into their native stock!”

Thus wrote he of whom tomorrow we will speak further, showing how he took what he had to say from Jewish Geology and drew a superb picture of the elemental forces which rise up from the Earth and reign in the olive tree.

• 1. On the subject of the creative work performed by Jahve together with the other six Elohim, see Genesis. Secrets of the Bible Story of Creation. Lecture-course given by Dr. Steiner in Munich, August, 1910.
• 2. See Numbers, XIII. 16.
• 3. On the subject of the Prophet Elijah, see the following lecture-courses by Dr. Steiner: The Gospel of St. Mark (lectures III and VI) and The Gospel of St. Luke (lecture VI).
• 4. “Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me.” Malachi, III. 1. “For this is he of whom it is written, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee.” Matthew, XI. 10.

Yesterday we had to speak of the path pursued by man between death and a new birth; and the whole gist of my remarks will have shown you that every night during sleep we must return to the starting-point of our earth-life.

We can indeed gain insight into these significant matters if we realize that on sinking into slumber we do not stand still at the date reached in the course of our earthly existence (as was already explained in the previous lectures), but that we actually go back to our starting-point. Every time, during sleep, we are carried back to our childhood, and even to the state before our childhood, before our arrival on earth. Hence, while we are asleep, our ego and our astral body return to the spiritual world, to the world of our origin which we left in order to become earth men.

At this point of our discourse, it becomes necessary to let pass before our soul in greater detail what the human being undergoes while asleep; undergoes unconsciously, but, nonetheless, most vividly.

The duration of our sleep does not really matter. Although it is difficult for our ordinary consciousness to conceive of the fact that time and space conditions are utterly different in the spiritual world, we must learn to form conceptions of such a kind.

I have already said that the human being, when suddenly awakened after he has fallen asleep and hence lost consciousness, experiences during that brief moment whatever he would have experienced, had his sleep continued for a long time. In measuring the length of our sleep according to its physical duration, we take into account only our physical body and our etheric body. Utterly different time-conditions prevail for that which is undergone by our ego and astral body. Hence the things that I shall presently explain to you are valid for either a long or a short sleep.

When the human personality enters the realm of sleep with his soul, the first state experienced by him—all this takes place in the unconscious, yet with great vividness—engenders a feeling in him of dwelling, as it were, in a general world ether. (In speaking of feeling, I mean an unconscious feeling. It is impossible to express these matters otherwise than by terms used in ordinary conscious life.) The person feels himself, as it were, disseminated into the whole cosmos. We cease to have the definite perceptions, which formerly connected us with all the things surrounding us in our earthly existence. At first, we take part in the general weaving and surging of the cosmos. And this is accompanied by the feeling that our souls have their being in a bottomless element. Hence the soul, while existing in this bottomless element, has an ardent desire for divine support. Thus we experience every evening, when falling asleep, the religious need of having the whole world permeated by an all-encompassing divine-spiritual element. This is our real experience when falling asleep.

Our whole constitution as human beings enables us to transfer this desire for the divine into our waking life. Day in and day out, we are indebted to our nightly experiences for renewing our religious needs.

Thus only a contemplation of our entire being enables us to gain insight into the various life-experiences undergone by us. Fundamentally, we live very thoughtlessly if we take into account only the conscious life passed between morning and evening; for many night experiences are interwoven with this. The human being does not always realize whence he derives his living religious need. He derives it from the general experiences undergone by him every night just after having fallen asleep—and also, although perhaps less intensively, during an afternoon nap.

Then, in our sleep, another stage sets in—all this, as was said before, being passed through unconsciously, but nonetheless vividly. Now it does not seem to the sleeper that his soul is, as it were, disseminated into the general cosmos, but it seems as if the single parts of his entity were divided. Were our experiences to become conscious, we would feel as though we were being disjointed. And, from the bottom of our soul, an unconscious fear rises up. Every night, while asleep, we experience the fear of being divided up into the whole universe.

Now you might say: What does all this matter, as long as we know nothing about it? Well, it matters a great deal. I should like to explain, by means of a comparison, how much it matters.

Suppose that we become frightened in ordinary daily life. We turn pale. The emotion of fear is consciously felt by the soul. A definite change in our organism makes us turn pale. The blood streams back into the body's interior. This is an objective process. We can describe the emotion of fear in connection with an objective process taking place, in daily conscious life, within the physical body. What we experience in our soul is, as it were, a mirrored image reflecting this streaming away of the blood from the body's surface to its inner parts. Thus an objective process corresponds, in the waking state, to the emotion of fear. When we are asleep, a similar objective process, wholly independent of our consciousness, occurs in our astral body.

Anyone able to form imaginative and inspired conceptions will experience this objective process in the astral body as an emotion of fear. The objective element in fear, however, is actually experienced by man every night, because he feels himself being divided into parts inside his soul. And how is he being divided? Every night he is divided among the universe of stars. One part of his soul substance is striving towards Mercury, another part towards Jupiter, and so forth. Yet this process can only be correctly characterized by saying: During ordinary sleep, we do not actually penetrate the worlds of stars, as is the case on the path between death and a new birth. What we really undergo every night is not an actual division among the stars, but only among the counterparts of the stars which we carry within us during our entire earth life. While asleep, we are divided among the counterparts of Mercury, Venus, Moon, Sun, and so forth. Thus we are concerned here not with the original stars themselves, but with their counterparts in us.

This emotion of fear, experienced by us relatively soon after falling asleep, can be removed only from that human being who feels a genuine kinship to the Christ. At this point, we become aware how much the human being needs this kinship with the Christ. In speaking of this kinship, it is necessary to envisage man's evolution on earth. Mankind's evolution on earth can be comprehended only by someone having real insight into the significant turning point brought to human evolution by the Mystery of Golgotha. It is a fact that the human beings before the Mystery of Golgotha were different with regard to soul and spirit from the human beings after the Mystery of Golgotha had occurred on earth. This must be taken into account, if man's soul is to be viewed in its true light.

When the human beings who lived before the Mystery of Golgotha—and these human beings were actually we ourselves in a former life—fell asleep and experienced the fear of which I have just spoken, then the counterpart of the Christ in the world of stars existed for the human beings of that time as much as did the counterparts of the other heavenly bodies. And as the Christ approached the sleeping human being, He came as a helper to dissipate fear, to destroy fear. People of earlier ages, still gifted with instinctive clairvoyance, remembered after awaking, in a dream-like consciousness, that the Christ had been with them in their sleep. Only they did not call Him the Christ. They called Him the Sun-spirit. Yet these people, who lived before the Mystery of Golgotha, avowed from their innermost depth that the great Sun-spirit was also the great guide and helper of the human being, who approached him every night in sleep and relieved him of the fear of being disseminated into the universe. The Christ appeared as a spirit strengthening mankind and consolidating its inner life.

Who binds together man's forces during his life? asked the followers of ancient religions. It is the great Sun-spirit, who firmly binds together man's single elements and combines them into one personality. And this avowal was uttered by the followers of ancient religions, because their consciousness was pervaded by the memory that the Christ approached man every night.

We do not need to be amazed at these things. In those ancient times when the human being was still capable of instinctive clairvoyance, he could look back at significant moments of his life into the period passed through by him before his soul and spirit descended to earth and was clothed in a physical body. Thus it seemed quite natural to the human being that he could look upward into a pre-earthly existence.

But is it not a fact that—as we explained before—every period of sleep carries us back into pre-earthly existence, into an existence preceding the stage before we became a truly conscious child? This question must be answered in the affirmative. And just as human beings knew that they had been together, in their pre-earthly existence, with the exalted Sun-spirit who had given them the strength to pass through death as immortal beings, so they also consciously remembered after every sleep that the exalted Sun-spirit had stood at their side, helping them to become real human beings, integrated personalities.

The human soul, while acquainting itself with the world of planets, passes through this stage during sleep. It is as if the soul were first dispersed among the counterparts of the planets, and then united and held together by the Christ.

Consider that this whole soul-experience during sleep has changed, with regard to the human being, since the Mystery of Golgotha. For the Mystery of Golgotha has originated the unfolding of a vigorous human ego-consciousness. This ego-consciousness, pervading human culture only gradually after the Mystery of Golgotha, became especially apparent after the first third of the fifteenth century. And the same vigorous ego-consciousness, which enables the human being to place himself as a free, fully self-conscious being into the sense world, this same consciousness—as though trying to maintain equilibrium—also darkens his retrospect into pre-earthly existence; darkens his conscious memory of the helping Christ, Who stood at his side during sleep.

It is remarkable that, since the Mystery of Golgotha, human evolution has taken the following course: On the one hand, man acquired a vigorous ego-consciousness in his waking state; on the other hand, utter darkness gradually overlaid that which had formerly radiated out of sleep-consciousness. Therefore human beings are obliged, since the Mystery of Golgotha, to establish a conscious relationship to Christ Jesus while they are awake. They must acquire, in a conscious way, a comprehension of what the Mystery of Golgotha really signifies: That, by means of the Mystery of Golgotha, the exalted Sun-spirit, Christ, descended to earth, became a human being in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, passed through earth-life and death, and, after death, still taught His disciples who were permitted to behold Him in His etheric body after death.

Those personalities who acquire, in the time following the Mystery of Golgotha, a waking consciousness of their kinship with the Christ, and gain a living conception of what took place through the Mystery of Golgotha: to these the possibility will be given of being helped by the Christ impulse, as it is carried from their waking state into their sleep.

This shows us how differently human sleep was constituted before and after the Mystery of Golgotha. Before the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ invariably appeared as Helper while the human being slept. Man could remember even after awaking that the Christ had been with him during his sleep. After the Mystery of Golgotha, however, he would be utterly bereft of the Christ's help, if he were not to establish a conscious relation with the Christ during the day while awake and carry its echo, its after-effect, into his sleep. Only in this way can the Christ help him to maintain his personality while asleep.

What the human being had received unconsciously from the wide heavenly reaches before the Mystery of Golgotha: the help of the Christ, the human soul must now acquire gradually by establishing a conscious relation with the Mystery of Golgotha. This inner soul-responsibility has been laid upon the human being since the Mystery of Golgotha. Thus we are unable to study the nature of human sleep, unless we are able to envisage the immense transformation undergone by human sleep since the Mystery of Golgotha.

When we enter the realm of sleep, our whole world becomes different from that experienced in the waking state. How do we live as physical men while awake? We are confined, through our physical body, by natural laws. The laws working outside in nature are also working within us. That which we recognize as moral responsibilities and impulses, as moral world order, stands like an abstract world amidst the laws of nature. And because present-day natural science takes into account only the waking world, it is completely ignorant of the moral world.

Thus natural science tells us—although hypothetically, yet in conformity with its principles—that the Kant-Laplace primeval fog marked the starting-point of world evolution; and that this world evolution will be terminated through a state of heat which will kill all living things and bury them, as it were, in a huge cosmic cemetery. (These conceptions have been modified, but still prevail among natural scientists.) Natural science, in describing the evolution of the cosmos, begins and ends with a physical state. Here the moral world order appears as a stranger. The human being, however, would not be aware of his dignity, would not even experience himself as a human being, unless he experienced himself as a moral being. But what moral impulses could be found in the Kant-Laplace primeval fog? Here were nothing but physical laws. Will there be moral impulses when the earth shall perish from heat? Then, also, nothing but physical laws will prevail. Thus speaks natural science. And out of the natural process germinate all living things, and out of living things the human soul-element. The human being forms certain conceptions: One should act in a certain way; or one should not act in that way. He experiences a moral world order. But this cannot be nurtured by natural law. To the waking human being, the moral world order appears like a merely abstract world amidst the rigid, massive world of natural laws.

It is entirely different when imaginative, inspirative, and intuitive consciousness passes through that which the human being, between falling asleep and awaking, experiences in his ego and astral body. Here the moral world order appears real, whereas the natural order below appears like something abstract, something dream-like. Although it is difficult to conceive of these things, they are nonetheless true. The whole world has been turned upside down. To the sleeper acquiring clairvoyance in his sleep, the moral world order would seem something real, something secure; and the physical world order of natural laws would seem to sink below, not rise above, the moral world order. And if the sleeper possessed consciousness, he would not place the Kant-Laplace theory at the starting-point of world evolution, and the death through heat at its end. At the starting-point, he would recognize the world of spiritual hierarchies—all the spirit and soul beings who lead man into existence. At the end of world evolution, he would again recognize the spirit and soul beings who extend to man who has passed through the course of evolution a welcome to enter their community. And below, as an illusion, the abstract physical world order would have its welling and streaming existence. If you were gifted with clairvoyance in the very midst between falling asleep and awaking, you would view all the natural laws of which you have learned during the day as a mirage of dreams, dreamed by the earth. And it would be the moral world order which would give you a firm ground. And this moral world order could be experienced by us if we worked our way—after having received the help of the Christ—into the peace of the fixed stars in the firmament, seen by us again, during nightly sleep, in the form of their counterparts. Soaring upward to the fixed stars, to their counterparts, we look down into the physical realm of natural law.

This is the wholly divergent form of the experiences undergone by the human being between falling asleep and awaking, and leading his soul every night into the image of the cosmos. And just as the human being is led at a certain moment between death and a new birth, as I explained yesterday, by the moon forces into earthly existence and is beset by a sort of longing for earthly existence, so is he beset by the longing, after experiencing heavenly existence in his sleep, to immerse himself again into his physical body and etheric body.

While we get accustomed to earth-life after our birth, we live in a sort of sleep and dream state. If we, disregarding our dreams, look back in the morning, after being awake for an hour, to the moment of awaking, our consciousness is halted abruptly and we see behind us the darkness of slumber. It is similar when we look back into our childhood. In our fourth or the fifth year, sometimes earlier, sometimes later, our consciousness comes to a stop. Beyond the last stage that we can still remember lies something which is as deeply immersed in the darkness of the sleep and dream life of early childhood as is the life of the human soul immersed every night in the darkness of sleep. Yet the child is not wholly asleep, but is wrapt in a sort of waking dream. During this waking dream occur the three important phases of human life which I indicated yesterday. As they occur in the sequence characterized by me, we can see in them echoes and after-effects of the life between death and a new birth. First the child learns, out of a life wrapt in dream and sleep, what we call simply learning how to walk.

Something all-encompassing happens when a child learns how to walk, something which appears as a grandiose and overwhelming process to anyone able to perceive how the subtlest parts of the human body are changed at this time. The child, by adapting himself to the relationships of gravity, learns how to attain equilibrium. The child no longer falls down. By unfolding inner forces, he conforms to spatial directions.

What if we had to do all this consciously: overcome the lack of equilibrium that pulled us to the ground, adapt our organism to a firm state of equilibrium with regard to the three spatial directions, and even maintain this state of equilibrium by swinging our legs like pendulums as we learn how to walk? The child, in performing such a grandiose mechanical task, performs it as an echo of what he experienced while dwelling among spirits between death and a new birth. Here we encounter something so comprehensive, so marvelous, that the most eminent engineer, with all his earthly scientific equipment, could not calculate how the child's human forces adapt themselves to the world's spatial connections. What we, as a child, attain unconsciously is the most miraculous unfolding of mathematical-mechanical, physical forces. We call it simply learning how to walk. Yet in this learning how to walk lies an element of utmost grandeur.

Simultaneously, the correct use of arms and hands is attained. And by placing himself, as physical being, within the three spatial directions, the human being receives the foundation for all that is called learning how to talk.

The only thing known to physiology about the connection between man's dynamics of walking and standing and the faculty of speech is the fact that the speech-center of right-handed persons lies in the left portion of the brain. The gestures of the right hand, vigorously executed by means of man's willpower, are led, by some mysterious process, into the interior of the brain whence the faculty of speech is brought to the human being.

More, however, exists than this connection between the right hand and the third convolution at the left, the so-called Broca cerebral convolution. The whole mobility of arms and fingers; the human being's whole ability to move and maintain equilibrium reaches up into the brain, becomes part of the brain, and thence reaches down into the larynx. Language develops out of walking, out of the grasping of objects, out of gestures flowing from the organs of movement.

Anyone viewing these things correctly will know that a child with the tendency to walk on his toes speaks differently from a child walking on his heels; employs different shadings of sound. The organism of speaking develops from the organism of walking and moving. And speech is again a counterpart of that which I described yesterday as the outpouring of revelation upon the human being passing through the stage between death and a new birth. The child, when learning how to speak, does not grasp the words with his thoughts, but alone with his emotions. He lives in the language as if it were an emotional element; and a child of normal development learns conceptual thinking only after acquiring the faculty of speech. A child's thoughts actually develop out of the words. Just as walking and the grasping of objects, the gestures of legs and hands, reach up into the speech organism, so all that lives in the speech organism and is gained through adaptation to the language of the surrounding world, reaches up into the thought-organs. In the third stage, the child learns how to think.

While encompassed by this dream and sleep state, the child passes through three stages: walking, speaking, and thinking. These are the three terrestrial counterparts of that which we experienced between death and a new birth: living contact with the spiritual world, revelation of the spiritual world, and the gathering of the world ether in order to form our etheric body.

The child's development during these three stages can be correctly estimated only by someone observing the adult human being during his sleep. Here we can observe how we, when sleep puts a stop to our thoughts—for our thoughts are silenced by sleep—let our thought-forces be nurtured, between falling asleep and awaking, by those beings known to us as angels, as Angeloi. These beings, approaching us during sleep, nurture our thought-forces while we cannot do so ourselves.

During sleep, the human being also ceases to talk. Only in abnormal cases, which could be explained, does he talk in his sleep. At present, however, we may disregard these things. The normal human being ceases to talk after going to sleep. Would it not be altogether too dreadful, did people keep on chattering while asleep? Hence speech ceases at that time. And what makes us speak is nurtured during the time between falling asleep and awaking by beings belonging to the hierarchy of the Archangeloi.

If we disregard the sleep-walker, who is also in an abnormal condition, human beings are quiet while asleep. They do not walk, they grasp no objects, they do not move. That which pertains to man's waking life as forces which call forth the movements out of his will is nurtured, between going to sleep and awaking, by beings belonging to the hierarchy of the Archai.

By comprehending the manner in which the hierarchical beings above the human kingdom—Angels, Archangels, Archai—approach the ego and astral body, approach the entire human being during sleep, we can also understand how the little child masters the three activities of walking, speaking, and thinking. We recognize how it is the work of the Archai that brings to the little child, as he masters the dynamics of life, as he masters the faculty of walking and handling objects, what the human being has experienced, between death and a new birth, by coming into contact with spirit and soul beings. Now, the counterpart of these experiences comes forth with the learning to walk of the little child. It is the Archai, the primeval powers, who transmit to the child that learns how to walk the counterpart of all the spiritual movements emanating, between death and a new birth, from spirit and soul beings.

And it is the Archangels that transmit what the human being experiences, between death and a new birth, by means of revelation; they are at work when the child masters speech. And the Angels carry down the forces developed by the human being when, out of the whole world ether, he gathered the substance for his etheric body. The angels, bringing down these forces, mold their counterparts within the thought-organs, which are plastically formed in order that the child may learn thinking by means of language.

You must keep in mind that Anthroposophy does more than look at the physical world and say: It is based on something spiritual. This would be much too easy. By such a way of thinking, we could acquire no real conception of the spiritual world. Someone who is determined to repeat in philosophic terms that the physical world rests on a spiritual foundation, would be like a man who when walking across a meadow is told by his companion: Look, this flower is a dandelion, these are daisies, and so forth. The first man, however, might reply: Indeed, I am not interested in these names. Here I see flowers, just flowers in the abstract. Such a person would be like a philosopher who recognizes only the pantheistic-spiritual element, but refuses to discuss the concrete facts, the particular formations of the spiritual.

What we are given by Anthroposophy shows us how the divine spiritual dwells everywhere in life's single formations. We look at the way in which the child passes from the clumsy stage of crawling to that of walking. Looking in admiration and reverence at this grandiose world phenomenon, we see in it the work of the Archai, who are active when the experiences we undergo between death and a new birth are transformed into their earthly shape.

We follow the process through which the child produces speech out of his inner self; we follow the activity of the Archangels; and, when the child begins to think, the activity of the Angels. And all this has a deeply significant, practical side. In our materialistic age, many people have ceased to regard words as something genuinely spiritual. More and more, people use words only for the purpose of naming physical objects in the outer world. Think how many people in the world are unable to form the slightest conception of spiritual things; this is because the words have no spiritual significance for them and are used merely in connection with physical objects.

For many people, speech itself has assumed a materialistic character. It can be used only in connection with physical things. Undeniably, we live within a civilization making language, more and more, into an instrument of materialism. And what will be the consequence?

The consequence will become apparent to us if we look, with regard to language, at the connection between the waking and the sleeping state. While we remain awake during the day, we talk with others. We make the air vibrate. The way in which the air vibrates transmits the soul content which we wish to convey. The soul impulses of our words, however, live in our inner being. Every word corresponds to a soul impulse, which is the more powerful, the more our words are imbued with idealism; the more we are conscious of the spiritual significance contained in our words. Anyone aware of these facts will clearly recognize what lies behind them. Think of a person who uses words in a merely materialistic sense. During the day, he will not differ greatly from others whose words contain an idealistic, spiritual element, who know that words must be given wings by the spirit. At night, however, the human being takes the soul and spirit element of language, together with his ego and astral body, into the spiritual world. He returns again to his spiritual origin.

Those possessing only a materialistic speech cannot establish a connection with the world of the Archangels. Those still possessing an idealistic speech are able to establish this connection with the world of the Archangels.

The tragedy inherent in a civilization whose materialism is expressed even by its language has the consequence that the human being, by letting his language become wholly materialistic, may lose the nightly connection with the world of the Archangels. For the genuine spiritual scientist, there lies indeed something heart-breaking in present-day civilization. People who forget more and more to invest their words with a spiritual content lose their rightful connection with the spiritual world; with the Archangels. And this terrifying fact can be perceived only by someone envisaging the true nature of the sleeping state.

It is impossible to become a real anthroposophist without rising above mere theory. We may remain perfectly indifferent while developing theories on June bugs, earth worms, and cells. Such theories shall certainly break nobody's heart. For the way in which June bugs and earthworms grow out of a cell is not apt to break our heart. But if we acquire anthroposophical knowledge in all its fullness, we look into the depths of man's being, of man's evolution, of man's destiny. Thus our heart will ever be interlinked with this knowledge. The sum of this knowledge will be deposited in the life of our feelings, our emotions. Hence we partake of the whole world's feelings, and also of the whole world's volition.

The essence of Anthroposophy consists in the fact that it grasps not only the human intellect but the whole human being. Thereby it illuminates, with the forces of feeling and sentiment, the destinies of culture and civilization, as well as the destinies of single persons.

We cannot take part genuinely in human experiences on earth, unless looking also at the other side, the spiritual side, as it is unveiled to us through our knowledge of the sleeping state that leads us back into the spiritual world. Thus spiritual science can be truly at one with human life, understood in its spiritual and ultimately its social, religious, and ethical significance.

This spiritual science is to become real science which leads to wisdom. Such life giving science is greatly needed by mankind, lest it fall into deeper and deeper decline, instead of making a new beginning.

I have often pointed out that an ancient wisdom present in mankind can be characterized by the fact that through this ancient wisdom, people were aware that they were citizens of the universe, not merely of the earth. Take a mental look at what is present in the consciousness of thinking humanity today and what is present in the consciousness of those who, from certain scientific backgrounds, reflect on the human being's place in the world. Both are actually the same. For just as the broad masses of people in primeval times on earth thought and felt what was taught in the mysteries, in the mysteries that were the centers of the surrounding culture and civilization, so today people in wide circles absorb what is taught and researched in the profane mysteries of the present, at the universities and colleges. Just as the mysteries of ancient times were related to the beliefs of the general population, so too are the universities of today related to the general public. What the ancient teachers in the mysteries believed about the relationship between man and the sun, between man and the zodiac, was naturally believed by the masses. What the professors of the universities and colleges say and do not say about the relationship between man and the sun, between man and the moon, is believed by the masses. The fact that the entire wisdom about man is exhausted by pointing out that man has gradually developed physically from his animal ancestors is a one-sided, a very, very one-sided truth; it does not exhaust the real facts. But modern people relate to their initiates, to the university professors, as the ancients related to their initiates in the mysteries. There is actually no particular psychological difference between these two relationships. It is just that the ancients knew: All that is in man is connected not only with what develops on earth, but with what is seen by the eye into the space of the stars. That which takes place in man, even physically, is connected with the activity of the sun and the other planets belonging to the solar system.

If you read my “Occult Science in Outline”, you will see that through that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which this “Occult Science” wants to serve, this consciousness of people is to be restored, that the human being not only has a relationship to the earth, but also to extra-terrestrial worlds. It is pointed out that our Earth itself is only a temporary embodiment of that which was there before in its essence as the Moon, as the Sun, as Saturn, and it is pointed out that the human being continues to develop and that these further developmental forms of the human being will be connected with future developmental forms of the Earth planet, with Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan. Thus that which belongs to man is raised up out of the merely earthly. Man's gaze is again directed from the earth to the Cosmos. This is one of the facts which humanity must again become aware of if it is not to degenerate on earth: that man belongs to the Cosmos, that man is connected in his inner being with extra-earthly spheres.

Why is this knowledge necessary? It must be known because self-knowledge is necessary; not the self-knowledge that consists of brooding over one's own dear self, but the knowledge of man as a universal being. This self-knowledge must spread; it must become general and ever more general. For without a grasp of the human being, there will be no support for him, especially no psychological support in the future of human development. But it cannot be a matter of merely brooding a little over the subordinate, chaotic human being; rather, it must be a matter of concretely surveying this inner human being in his structure, just as one does not characterize the outer nature merely by saying: nature, nature, nature! but by pointing out: there are plants, there are animals, and distinguishing the individual species and varieties within the individual plants. In the same way, within the soul of man, one must distinguish above all the individual metamorphoses of this soul life. Now let us characterize these individual metamorphoses of the soul life, I would say, the one side of it. First, there is the metamorphosis of our soul life that is most closely connected with our physical body, that is most dependent on our physical body. It is the soul faculty that we denote by the term memory or the ability to remember. Through memory, we are able to renew the experiences of our individual life. Through memory we are able to draw a thread from a certain moment, which lies two, three, four years or even longer after birth, to the phenomena of the respective present moment, and man would be inwardly ill if this thread were to be torn. I have already explained this several times. If we had to look back on a part of our lives in such a way that we would lose the memory of certain events, the context of our experiences would not be there. And that would mean that we would be ill in our sense of self. But on the other hand, a person will at least be able to know how strongly memory is connected to his physical constitution. One need only remember the fact, which I have often mentioned and which is actually widely known, that when we suffer from insomnia or when we are prevented from sleeping properly by external events, our memory suffers. This and much else that can occur in cases of illness proves how memory depends on the physical constitution.

What we call our intelligence is less dependent on this bodily constitution, and thus more independent of it. However, this intelligence is still very much dependent on the bodily constitution. After all, memory only relates to the individual. We have intelligence in common with other people, at least to a high degree. Of course, one person is more intelligent, the other less so; each usually considers himself the most intelligent; but in general one can say: the fact is that one person is more intelligent, the other less so. But a certain uniformity of human intelligence is emerging. While everyone has their own memory content that no one else can see into, and while this memory content is very individual, the content of intelligence is something more common to humanity. It is simply less bound to the physical constitution of the human being. The physical constitution of the human being is actually only like a mirror to what unfolds as intellectual processes. Anyone who claims that the processes in the human nervous system, in the brain, cause thoughts, is saying no more than someone standing in front of a mirror and saying to themselves, “Miss Scholl, Miss Laval, Dr. Grosheintz,” and saying, “The mirror has produced Miss Scholl, Miss Laval, Dr. Grosheintz.” Just as the mirror relates to the images of the three named individuals, and just as the three named individuals are also outside the mirror and actually have nothing to do with it other than being reflected by the mirror, so too does the intellect have to do with the brain only insofar as it is reflected for our consciousness by the brain; but the processes of the intellect itself are outside the brain. We would know nothing of the processes of the senses if we had no brain. The processes of intelligence would not be reflected in our brain. But these intelligent processes themselves are a being outside the brain, which is only mirrored by the brain.

And then we come to the third faculty of the human being, which is at least to a large extent most independent of our bodily constitution. But people believe it least of all, because they consider it to be most dependent on our bodily constitution. This is the activity of the senses. Take the eye. The eye itself as such has nothing to do with the processes that are the visual processes. The visual processes are much less bound to the tool of the eye than the intelligent processes are to the tool of the brain. What the eye has to do with seeing is something quite different. The processes that occur in our consciousness as the content of seeing have nothing to do with the eye. What happens in the eye merely causes us to be present with our consciousness, with our ego, during the visual processes. Please note this fundamental, but not easily grasped, difference.

Take, for example, a person who has lost both eyes due to some disease. He has not lost the visual process as such, but he has lost the perception of what the visual process is through his ego. His ego knows nothing about it. The ego knows nothing of what the visual process is. It is simply the ego that is excluded from the visual process. What happens can be compared to the following.

Suppose you have three telegraph stations, A, B, C; at each telegraph station you have a telegraph operator. When the man at A telegraphs to €, the man at € can read what is being telegraphed from A to C. There is no question of the Morse apparatus at A producing the content of the telegram. It is only the mediator. The Morse telegraph in C cannot read either, but it mediates. But if apparatus B is switched on in the A-C path, then the man operating B can sit down and listen or read along; he only needs to let the stripe run so he can read along. B is then switched on in the path of the current that conveys the contents of the telegraph. But the content that goes from A to C has nothing to do with the processes that take place in the Morse telegraph at B. They are only perceived because the device is switched on.

Of course, if the apparatus is not switched on, one cannot perceive the processes. It is the same with the human eye. What is going on in the eye has nothing to do with seeing in terms of inner truth. The eye is only switched on to the processes. And because the eye is switched on to the processes, the I can watch the processes of seeing. But the eye is not at all what actually conveys or brings about the content of the visual processes or does something with them. It is only the receiving apparatus for the I. One could say, without running the risk of being thought paradoxical, that the human brain, which today is equipped with a somewhat thick brain, finds the following paradoxical: Our sense organ of sight has nothing to do with seeing, but everything to do with the fact that our I knows about seeing. Sensory organs, as we have them today, that is, the higher sensory organs, are not there for seeing, but rather they are there so that the I can know about seeing. I would even like to write this sentence on the board: Higher sensory organs are not there to mediate sensory processes, but rather so that an I knows about sensory processes.

We have the three so-called higher soul activities: memory, intelligence, and sensory perception and activity. The I is involved in them; it is most strongly involved in the memory with its physical body, less strongly in the intelligence, and least strongly in the sensory activity.

What I have described to you now comes from the following. Memory was not always in man as it is today. It has developed. And what was at the basis of the development of memory was an essential activity of man during the last embodiment on earth, preceding our earth, the old moon time. At that time memory was a kind of unconscious, dream-like imagination. “Dream-like imagination was memory. The fact that our bodily organization on earth has become what it has become is the living dream-like imagination, of which the soul being of man was completely filled during the old moon time, has become what is now our memory.

During the old sun time, when we had no physical body at all as we have now, when we were still those beings that I have described in my “Occult Science”, our intelligence was dormant inspiration. This dormant inspiration then developed further and is now our intelligence. But during the old Saturn, our sensory activity was quite dull intuition. Again, you can find the more precise description in my “Occult Science”. And this dull intuition has developed into our present-day sensory activity.

Now one might ask: Why do people have such a hard time grasping such extraordinarily important truths? And if someone imparts them to them, why do they resist them so much? Yes, you see, there are reasons for this in the nature of things themselves. We have had a vague intuition during the old Saturn time. This has gradually developed further and further and has become our sensory activity. But actually today we can only prove that one sensory activity has developed relatively most perfectly from the disposition of the old Saturn sensory activity, and that is hearing. Hearing had its clearest disposition in the old Saturn sphere. Vision arose somewhat later — you can read about these things in my 'Occult Science' —, mainly during the time of the sun. But from this you can already see that, while the first foundation was laid on the old Saturn time in the form of a dull intuition, later on new sense faculties are constantly being added. On the Sun, new sensory abilities were added that are not yet as developed as those from Saturn. On the Moon, new sensory abilities were added again, and on Earth itself, again. On Earth, the sense of touch was added, which is actually the most imperfect of the senses. If we were to recognize the sense of touch purely, we would still describe it today as a dull intuition in the physical body, a low, dull intuition.

It is similar with the sense of smell. There is something extraordinarily peculiar about it. I would recommend to those of you who like to do such things: pick up a psychology or physiology, especially a psychology, a soul science, as they are written today; they all write about sensory activity. What is written there about the activity of the senses — for the unprejudiced person it applies only to the sense of touch. You may remember what I said in my “Theosophy” about the relationship of the higher senses to the sense of touch, which Goethe also noted. Our learned gentlemen want to describe the senses, but they only describe that part of the senses that has arisen directly on the earth, that has received its first impulse on the earth. This applies, for example, to seeing, as when you strike your fist on the eye, you could almost say literally. Because what is described in the psychology is not seeing, but what is described would arise if you punched yourself in the eye; hence the nice theory that has emerged of the so-called specific sensory energies, which in the case of the eye does not come from seeing, but from the fact that when you strike the eye, you see all kinds of sparks. These learned gentlemen describe something that works like a fist to the eye, quite literally. And they want to understand vision through this.

One understands the activity of the senses only when one regards it in connection with what is no longer there at all: Saturn development, sun development, moon development. One understands human intelligence only when one regards it in connection with that which is no longer there at all: the development of the sun, the moon. One understands memory only when one regards it in connection with that which is no longer there at all: the old development of the moon. And from the earth, one only understands the appropriation of sensory activity, of intelligence, of memory by the I, because the I has only been incorporated into the human being during the time on earth. And the organs that have been formed in the human being during the time on earth are not there at all to convey his higher soul abilities, but to convey that these higher soul abilities reveal themselves in an I. We have eyes for an ego, ears for an ego, a nose for an ego, not a nose for smelling, which would be most correct, because it has been formed during the time on earth; but it is also no longer quite correct, because it will change during the time on earth. But we don't have eyes to see and ears to hear; we have ears so that a self can know something of what is going on in the ear, like a Morse telegraph is switched on here so that someone, not the Morse telegraph itself, can know something of what is being negotiated between A and C. By still saying today that we have eyes to see and ears to hear, and by clothing everything in this kind of language, we are talking about something that has no reality at all. We talk constantly in illusions, we talk in untruths. We do not know what we actually have our whole physical organization for. We do not have it to mediate the higher soul activities, but we have it so that the I can learn something from these higher soul activities. Our whole physical being is an image of the I. And we are constituted as we are because we are an I. In our outer form we are meant to become aware of the outer image of the I. For our body, as we now carry it, we have only received through the earth. And it is unthinkable that what the earth has not given us should be derived from the events of the earth, that the cause of it should be sought in the events of the earth.

Just as we have been able to point out that for our memory activity the old moon development is the decisive factor, because the predispositions were formed in it, and we have been able to point out that for our intelligence the old sun development is the decisive factor, because the first predispositions were formed there, and so on to Saturn activity, we must also point out that these higher soul abilities have something to do today with the beings of the higher hierarchies, and in such a way that our memory activity has something to do with the hierarchy of the Angeloi, our intelligence with the Archangeloi, our sensory activity with the Archai.

And this brings me to an important chapter of spiritual knowledge. Suppose you reflect on memory, on the ability to remember, in human self-knowledge. You say: I turn my inner organ, my soul organ, to the ability to remember. But when you look at it with full consciousness, you have to look at it in such a way that you say to yourself: In this whole activity, in this process of remembering, the Angelos lives and weaves within. Now try to remember something that happened to you yesterday, any event. You have allowed an inner soul process to unfold. In what is unfolding, and in that a yesterday's thought arises in you, a yesterday's experience reveals itself anew to you in memory, an angel is at work in it. And when you reflect intelligently - however, it must be intelligently, that is, with inner activity, not a mere brooding, not what most people call intelligent thinking, which is only the boiling of memories, where people let the memories boil out of their bodies, thinking only begins when one actively grasps the thoughts inwardly - when one develops an inner activity, then an archangel is present. And if you listen and look around, you must say: in my ears, in my eyes, there are the thrones of the archai, the spirits of time. If you ask yourself: where are the spirits of time, the archai, which rule the successive world ages of the earth? Then you should not look for them in completely unknown areas, you should look for them in the sensory organs of people. That is where they are. A decadent time, in terms of the abilities of the soul, sought the gods up there above the blue, which does not actually exist. If man asks: Where then are the spirits of time? — they sit in his eyes, in his ears, there they have their thrones.

This is illuminated from another side, which I once made clear to you by pointing out that in man himself are the localities from which the events of nature are controlled. If you have the formulas recited in certain secret societies and interpret them correctly, you will find that these formulas, handed down from very ancient times, point to truths such as the ones I have now developed before you; that man is the temple for the gods that stand above him, that is, for the beings of the higher hierarchies. He is so in the most literal sense. For if one asks: Where do the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai dwell? - I must say: In the organs of human memory, human intelligence and human sensory activity. Man is, if you speak in a real language, you have to say that, really spirit-filled, that is, filled with spirits. The Church did not want people to realize that, so at the Eighth Ecumenical Council in 869 she forbade knowing or believing anything about the spiritual; she established the dogma that man consists only of body and soul. This human being is a very, very complicated creature, and if, let us say, for example, one were to stand on a distant star and observe the processes of the earth from a different point of view, the mineral kingdom would immediately disappear; it would only appear as a luminous shine. Little of the plant kingdom would be perceived, and not much of the animal kingdom either. From the outside, the individual human beings would not be perceived, but the thrones in the universe would be there and occupied by the angels, archangels and archai. And a being with the necessary ability to see from a distant star would say: The Earth is a body in space that is the dwelling place of archai, archangels and angels. In the language of the gods, this would mean that the earth is the dwelling place of the spirits of time, archangels and angels. In the everyday language of people, this means: Man has sense organs, tools of intelligence and a memory constitution. But humanity is called upon to really get to know man, to seek out the real relationship of this man to the spiritual world.

The pendulum swing of civilization has been different up to now. People have studied the chemical substances that make up food in order to find out what a person absorbs through food. The relationships between the body and the matter of food and so on have been investigated. It has been said: What is out there in the various plants or in the various animals enters the human being; sometimes it is active outside in the cabbage, sometimes in the ox, sometimes it is active inside the human being and constitutes him. — So you see an ox outside, you look at it. Then you see a human being and know that he has eaten the beefsteak that was made from this ox, and you follow the part that the beefsteak that he has eaten, which was still active in the ox outside a number of days ago, plays in the inner workings of the human being; that is the relationship between the physical and the natural world. There one follows how the beefsteak, which was sitting in the ox's loins, is later inwardly active in man.

This has now been sufficiently pursued, and from it a world view has been brewed that has caused the pendulum of the human world view to swing to one side. Now the pendulum must swing to the other side. Now we must know that the soul of man is also related to the spiritual world, to spiritual substances. And what spiritual substances are, archangels, archai, angels, they are within man, as the ox is within man when he eats his beefsteak, in his body. Today's science admits the one, the other it still laughs. But for the further development of humanity, it is necessary that man knows just as much about his relationship to the angel as he knows today about his relationship to the ox or to cabbage – I mean the physical cabbage!

We are at this turning point in time, that there is indeed a need for the development of humanity to turn to what plays out of the spirit into the soul, after we have long enough directed our attention one-sidedly to what plays out of the physical world into the bodily side of man. For the human being who begins to develop today, it is no longer enough to convey certain religious truths to him in a dogmatic and abstract way, as in the confessions of the past. Today's human being has occupied himself with reflecting on the relationship between his earthly body and the spiritual. This earthly body initially only has a relationship to the ego. We will get to know other relationships tomorrow. But that which appears in our earthly body, the constitution for the ability to remember, is related to the hierarchy of the angels. That which is embedded in this earthly body as the constitution for intelligence has relationships to the world of the archangeloi. That which manifests itself in our higher senses, namely that which arises in our higher art, has a relationship to the world of the archai, the spirits of the age. We human beings must become capable of more than just generalizing about the existence of a spiritual world; we must become capable of sensing the concrete relationships between human beings and this spiritual world. We must become capable of sensing how that which echoes within us as hearing is a series of facts that permeate our world and in which the archai are active. We must become capable of grasping that while we are thinking, we dwell in a world that is permeated and permeates the archangeloi; while we are remembering, we dwell in a world that permeates and is permeated by the angeloi; and when we become aware of our self, for which we always most fully use our body, it is a revelation of our self. Only then are we in the world in which man lives and moves. In the Greek mysteries, they still said: If you approach the Guardian of the Threshold, you learn to recognize what is in man in a higher way. This side of the threshold, you only get to know thoughts that remind you of past experiences. On the other side of the threshold, you are surrounded by the beings of the world of the angels. On this side of the threshold one learns to recognize the intelligent being; on the other side of the threshold one perceives how the archangeloi surround one. On this side of the threshold one perceives the external sensory world; on the other side of the threshold one knows how, through our eyes and ears, the spirits of the times enter and leave.

It is necessary to ensure that this awareness is awakened in man, whether he is simply related to the spiritual world by his constitution. But this must be awakened in a concrete way for the individual organs. Man must learn to feel himself in a spiritual world, whereas the world view that has reached its climax today only makes him feel that he lives in a physical world. This feeling that one lives in a physical world would have to dominate man completely if the event of Golgotha had not occurred. That man can develop back to an awareness of his spiritual relationship is due to the mystery of Golgotha. But one must seek out of one's own free inner drive what one owes to the mystery of Golgotha. Christianity presupposes freedom.

What we can know about the relationship between human beings and the spiritual world can actually have a practical effect on us. And the educational principles we want to apply at the Stuttgart Waldorf School are based on the awareness that human beings are more than just a synthesis of external natural processes. Education and teaching should be such that we are aware that within us is not only the baby that is growing physically and that, when it is weaned, gradually absorbs cabbage and oxen, but that is the soul being, in which, little by little, the beings of the higher spiritual world have a share. And by teaching in an educational way, we guide the activity of the beings of the higher hierarchies into the developing child. Man should not just learn to kneel at the altar and pray for his selfishness; man should learn to make a service out of everything he does in the world. Today, it is an urgent task to convey to people that everything they do in the world must be a service to God. But those who do not want to let people partake in these higher tasks of humanity oppose this.

Yesterday, while I was in St. Gallen trying to develop the activity and fruitfulness that can flow from spiritual knowledge in relation to the field of education, I was told that we have now reached the point where the clerical newspapers in St. Gallen have not only not included a text note for this lecture, but have not even accepted an advertisement for it, thus refusing to include an advertisement for it. This opposition is becoming more and more well organized. They understand organization on their side. I only want to make you aware of the fact that resistance to the truth becoming established in the world will become more and more pronounced. I will gradually inform you of these things. I do not want you to remain unaware of this small fact either, so that you may feel that little by little it will not be a task for sleeping souls to stand up for the Christ-Truth, but that it will increasingly become a task for waking souls. Organizations are also needed to be able to deal with the organization on the other side. We will talk about this further tomorrow.

Based on such sentiments as might arise from the discussions which we have actually pursued in our meeting on “General Principles of Teaching,”¹ I should like to mention, in connection with method, an extraordinarily important point, which, moreover, has reference to our discussions on method of yesterday.

You must look on the first school-lesson which you take with your pupils in every class as a lesson of outstanding significance. The influence of this first school-lesson will be far more important in one connection than that of all the other lessons. But the other lessons, too, will have to be employed to make the potential influence of the first lesson fruitful for the whole course of teaching. Let us imagine, without more delay, in concrete terms, how—as you will soon be in a position to become familiar with children coming from all quarters of education, and mis-education, too—we are going to arrange the first school-lesson. Of course here I can only give you general suggestions which you will be able to develop further. The point is that you will not have to act in accordance with certain principles of education which have arisen lately, but you will have to aim at things of real value for the child's development.

You have, then, a group in front of you, of various children. The first thing will be to draw the attention of the children to the reason why they are really there. It is extremely important to address the children somewhat in this way: “So now you have come to school, and I shall tell you why you have come to school.” And now this act of coming to school must be consciously appreciated. “You have come to school because you have to learn something in school. To-day you have no idea of all that you are to learn in school, but you will have to learn very many things here. Why will you have to learn very many things in school? Well, you have already met grown-ups, the big people, and you will have seen that they can do something which you cannot. And you are here so that one day you too will be able to do what the big people can do. Some day you will be able to do what you cannot do yet.” To give the children this complex of idea is extremely important. But this deep-seated idea has still another consequence.

No teaching proceeds in the right course unless it is accompanied by a certain reverence for the previous generation. However much this shade of feeling must remain a nuance of feeling and sentiment, it must nevertheless be cultivated in the children by all possible means: the child must look up with reverence, with respect, to what the older generations have already achieved and what he is to achieve, too, through the school. This looking with a certain respect to the surrounding culture must be inspired in the child from the very first, so that he really sees almost a kind of higher being in the people who have already grown older. Without awakening this sense in teaching and education one cannot get on. But neither can one get on without raising to the level of the soul's consciousness the ideals that are to be realized. Proceed to reflect with the child, then, in the following way, quite without hesitation at the fact that you are, in so doing, looking beyond the child's horizon. It does not matter, you see, if you say a great deal to the child which he will only understand later. The principle that you should only teach the child what he already understands, what he can already form an opinion on, is the principle which has ruined so much in our culture. A very famous educator of a still more famous personality of to-day once boasted that he had educated this person on this principle: he said: “I have educated this young man well, for I have made him form an immediate opinion on everything.” Now very many people to-day are in agreement with this principle of forming opinions about everything and it is not remarkable that you find a very well-known teacher of a still better-known personality wishing to emphasize this principle again in pedagogical books. I have even found it said in a modern pedagogical work referring to this principle: It only remains to desire that such a model education might be given to every German boy and every German girl. You see from this that examples are plentiful among present-day educationists, of how not to behave, for this kind of educating conceals a great tragedy, and this tragedy again is connected with the present world catastrophe.

The point, then, is not that the child should at once form an opinion on everything imaginable, but that between the seventh and fifteenth year he absorbs what he is to absorb, from love for his teacher, from a sense of his authority. Accordingly you must try to continue the already suggested conversation with the child, enlarging on it in the way which best suits you: “Look how grown-ups have books and can read. You cannot read yet, but you will learn to read, and when you have learnt to read you will be able, one day, too, to handle books and to learn from them what the grown-ups learn from these books. Grown-ups can write letters to each other, too; in fact, they can write about all the things in the world. You also will be able to write letters later, for besides learning to read you will learn to write. And besides being able to read and write, the grownups can calculate. You do not know at all yet what calculating is. But you have to be able to calculate in life, when, for instance, you want to buy something to eat, or when you want to buy clothes or make clothes.” We must talk like this to the child, and then tell him: “You will learn to calculate, too.” It is a good thing to draw the child's attention to this fact, and then perhaps, even the next day, to redirect his attention to it, so that we take it through with the child, like other things, by frequent repetition. It is important, then, to make the child fully conscious of what he is doing.

Altogether it is most important for teaching and for education to see that the consciousness—if I may put it like this—is consciously awakened to what otherwise goes on in life through force of habit. On the other hand, it is of no benefit to teaching or to education to introduce all kinds of tricks into teaching, merely for the sake of the “aim” or only the ostensible aim, of the lesson. You find it suggested to-day that the child should come to school equipped with a box of burnt matches, and with these burnt matches—preferably not round, but square, so as not to roll off the steep benches of the school-room—he should be encouraged to make shapes. He is to be encouraged, for instance, to imitate the shapes of a house, and so on, with these matches. “Playing with sticks” is, in fact, a favourite subject quite particularly recommended nowadays for young children. But such a practice, in the face of a real knowledge of life, is like playing at things; it is meaningless for the inner being of the individual to learn things by playing at matches. For whatever playing at matches can lead to, this can only appear to man in later life as child's play. It is unwise to introduce mere trifling into education. On the contrary it is our task to introduce real life-fullness into education; but mere playing about should have no place there. Do not, however, misunderstand me: I do not say that games should not be introduced into education, but only that a game artificially prepared for the purpose of teaching is a mistake in school. As to how games should be incorporated in teaching we shall have much to say later.

But how can we really educate the child from the first, particularly in the forming of his will?

Having thoroughly talked over what I have just explained, that is, what is suited on the one hand to awakening the child's consciousness to the reason for his coming to school, and on the other hand to his developing a certain reverence, a certain respect, for the grown-up, it is important to pass on to something else. It is well to say to him at this point, for instance, “Look at yourself, now. You have two hands, a left hand and a right hand. You have these hands to work with; you can do all kinds of things with these hands.” That is, let us try to awaken the child's consciousness to the nature of man. The child must not only know that he has hands, but he must be conscious that he has hands. Of course you will probably say here: “Obviously he is conscious of having hands.” But there is a difference if while knowing he has hands to work with this thought has never crossed his soul. When you have talked with the child for a time about hands and about working with hands, go on to let him make something or other requiring manual skill. This can sometimes be done in the first lesson. You can say to him: “Watch me do this.” (You draw a straight line, Fig. 1.) “Now do it with your own hand.” Now you can let the children do the same, as slowly as possible, for it will naturally be a slow process if you are going to call the children out one by one and let them do

it on the board and then go back to their places. The right assimilation of teaching in this case is of the greatest importance. After this you can say to the child: “Now I am making this (Fig. 2); now do the same with your hand.” Now each child does this too. When this is finished you say to them: “This line (Fig. 1) is a straight line, and the other (Fig. 2) is a curved line; so now with your hands you have made a straight and a curved line.” You help the children who are clumsy with their hands, but be careful to see that each child from the first performs his task with a certain perfection.

In this way, then, see that you let the children do something by themselves from the first, and see, further, that a performance of this kind is repeated as revision in the following lessons. In the next lesson, then, have a straight line made, then a curved line. Here a subtle distinction comes into play. The greatest value must not first of all be attached to whether the children can make a straight and a curved line from memory. But the second time, as before, you yourself show on the board how a straight line is drawn and let the children make it after you, and the curved line in the same way. But then you must ask: “Peter, what is that?” “A straight line.” “John, what is that?” “A curved line.” You ought to utilize the principle of repetition by letting the child imitate the drawing and, in refraining from telling him what he is doing, let the child say it himself. It is very important to make this fine distinction. You must attach importance to do habitually the proper thing in front of the children, taking your educational impulses right into your own personal habits.

Then you need not be in the least afraid of setting up fairly soon—it is even an especially good plan to do things like this very early with the children—a paint-box with a glass of water by the side. You take a brush and dip it in the water, take some colour and, on a white surface that you have previously pinned on the board with drawing-pins, you apply a small yellow patch. When you have made this small yellow patch, again let every child make his own yellow patch like it. Each child must leave a certain space between his and the other yellow patches so that you end by having so many distinct yellow patches. Then you yourself dip the brush in the blue paint and make, next to the little surface which you painted yellow, directly next to it, a blue patch. Now you let the children make each a blue patch just the same. When about half the children have done this you say: “Now we will do something else; I am going to dip the brush in the green and add a green patch to the other patches.” Now let the other children—avoiding as well as you can making the children jealous of each other—make a green patch in the same way. This will take some time; the children will take it in well, as, in fact, in teaching, all depends on going quite slowly, in quite little steps, from one thing to the next. At this point you should say: “Now I am going to tell you something that you cannot understand properly yet, but that you will understand perfectly some day: what we have done up there, where we put blue next to yellow, is more beautiful than what we did down here, where we have green next to yellow; blue near yellow is more beautiful than green near yellow.” That will linger long in the child's soul. It will often have to be referred to again, to be repeated, but the child himself will turn it over; he will not absorb it with complete indifference but he will learn by and by to understand very well from simple, primitive illustrations how to distinguish in his feeling a beautiful thing from a less beautiful thing.

A similar process can be applied to the teaching of music. Here, too, it is a good plan to start from some single note. There is no need even to tell the child the name of this note, but strike a note in some way or other. Then it is a good plan to let the children themselves strike this note immediately, that is, here, too, to combine it with the element of will. Afterwards you strike a second concordant note and again let a number of children take turns at striking this same concordant note. Then go on to strike a note dissonant with a given note and again let the children do it after you. And now you try, as previously with colour, to awaken in the children a feeling for concord and discord in tones, by talking to them not of “concord” and “discord,” but of “beautiful” and “less beautiful,” by appealing, that is, to feeling. It is with these things, not with letters, that the first lesson should start. This is how we should begin.

Now let us take first the teacher who takes the main morning lessons. He will conduct with the children the conversations I have just described. Perhaps the musical element will have to be separate from these; the children will then be introduced to it at another time. Now it will be well for the music-master to enter into a quite similar conversation with the children, but based more upon music, and also to refer to it frequently, so that the child realizes: This is not only repeated by one teacher, but the other teacher says the same, and we learn the same from both. This should help to give the school a more corporative character. These matters should always be discussed in the weekly staff meeting and so produce a certain unity in the teaching.

Only when you have taught the children manually and aurally like this is the time ripe for passing on to the first elements of reading, and, in fact, particularly to the reading of handwriting. It will have an extraordinarily good effect on the child from the point of view of method to have spoken to him as early as the first lesson about reading, writing, and arithmetic, and how he cannot do these things yet, it is true, but will learn them all in school. This awakens hope, desire, resolve in the child, and he enters through their spontaneous power into a world of feeling, which again incites to the world of will. You can refrain from introducing the child directly to what you intend to teach him later and leave him in a state of expectancy. This has an extremely favourable effect on the development of the will of the growing being.

I should now like, before going into this further, to dissipate a few of those ideas which might perhaps lead you astray. There has been so much sinning in the name of the methods hitherto employed in learning to read and to write, but especially in what is, after all, connected with learning to read and write: with language, with grammar, syntax, etc. There has been so much sinning that there are doubtless few people who do not remember with a kind of horror how they were made to learn grammar or even syntax. This horror is, of course, fully justified. Only it must not therefore be imagined that the learning of grammar as such is useless and that it should be entirely ousted. That would be an utterly false idea. Obviously, if people are going to try to come by the right method by going from one extreme to the other, we shall be hearing it said: “Well, then, let us do away with grammar altogether; let us teach the child to read practically, by putting reading passages before him: let us teach him to read and write without any grammar.” This idea might result from the very horror which many a person still remembers. Yet the learning of grammar is not a useless factor, particularly in our time, for the following reason.

What do we really do when we elevate unconscious speech into grammar, into the knowledge of grammar? We pass with our pupil from unconscious language to the higher plane of a fully conscious approach; we do not in the least wish to teach him grammar pedantically, but we want to elevate into consciousness processes otherwise performed unconsciously. Unconsciously, or half-consciously, in fact, man climbs in life up to the external world in a way corresponding to what he learns in grammar. In grammar, for instance, we learn that there are nouns. Nouns indicate objects, objects which in a sense are enclosed in space. That we encounter such objects in life is not without significance for our life. Through all that is expressed in nouns we become conscious of our independence as human beings. We disassociate ourselves from the outer world in learning to describe things by nouns. When we call a thing “table” or “chair,” we disassociate ourselves from the table or chair. We are here, the table or chair is there. It is quite another matter when we describe things by adjectives. When I say: “The chair is blue,” I define some quality which unites me with the chair. The quality which I perceive unites me with the chair. When I describe an object by a noun I disassociate myself from it; when I define its quality I approach and unite with it again, so that the development of our consciousness in relation to things is reflected in forms of address of which we must become conscious by all means. When I use a verb, “Someone writes,” I do not only associate myself with the individual of whom I use the verb, but I participate in the action of his physical body; I perform it with him, my ego does it with him. My ego joins in the gesture of a physical body when I use a verb. Our listening, particularly to verbs, is in reality always a participation. The most spiritual part of man, in fact, participates, but merely as “tendency.” But only in Eurhythmy is it fully expressed. Eurhythmy gives, besides all else, a form of listening. When someone tells a tale, the listener all the time participates with his ego in the physical life behind the sounds, but suppresses it. The ego performs a constant Eurhythmy, and the Eurhythmy expressed in the physical body is only listening made visible. So you are always engaged in Eurhythmy when you listen, and when you are actually performing Eurhythmy you are only making visible what you leave invisible when you listen. The manifestation of the activity of the listener is, in fact, Eurhythmy. It is nothing in the least arbitrary, but it is in reality the activity of the listening person revealed. People to-day, of course, are inwardly fearfully sluggish, and in listening they inwardly perform at first very bad Eurhythmy. You become better controlled when you really learn to listen. In making this activity normal you elevate it into a real Eurhythmy. People will learn from Eurhythmy to listen rightly, for to-day, of course, they cannot listen properly at all.

I have made curious discoveries while delivering my present lectures.² In the discussions speakers stand up, but you very soon notice from their speeches that they have really not heard the whole lecture at all, not even physically, but that they have only heard parts of it. Particularly in the present age of our human evolution this is of quite especial significance. Someone puts in his spoke, in the discussion, for instance, and says what he has been accustomed to think for decades. You may address a socialistically minded audience, but they really only hear you say what they have heard from their political propagandists for decades; they do not even physically hear the rest. They sometimes naively confess as much in these words: “Dr. Steiner says many beautiful things, but he says nothing new.” People have become so rigid in their listening that they confuse everything that has not been fossilized within them decades ago. People cannot listen, and will become increasingly less able to do so in these times, unless the power of listening is stirred to life afresh by Eurhythmy.

A kind of healing or restoration of the soul's being must take place again. Consequently, it will be particularly important to add the hygiene of the soul to all the materialistic hygienic tendencies of gymnastic training and to all that is exclusively concerned with the physiology and the functions of the body. This can be achieved by having alternate Gymnastics and Eurhythmy. Then, even if Eurhythmy, in the first place, is Art, the hygienic element in it will be of particular benefit, for people will not only learn something artistic in Eurhythmy, but they will learn for the soul what they learn for the body in Gymnastics, and, moreover, there will result a very beautiful interplay of these two forms of expression. The point is really to educate our children so that they take thought again for their surroundings, for their fellow-beings. That, of course, is the foundation of all social life. In these days everyone talks of social impulses, but sheer anti-social tendencies prevail. People will have to learn to respect one another before socialism can begin. They can only do this if they really listen to each other. It is extraordinarily important to direct people's feelings to these matters again, if we are to be educators and teachers.

Now simply this knowledge: by using a noun I dissociate myself from my surroundings, by using an adjective I unite myself with them, and by using a verb I actively merge in them, I participate—this knowledge alone will compel you to speak of “noun,” “adjective,” and “verb” with quite a different inner emphasis from what you would give to these words without this consciousness. All this, however, is only by way of preliminary; it must be developed further. For the moment I only wish to evoke certain ideas whose absence might confuse you.

It is, then, extraordinarily important to know how significant for man is the elevation to consciousness of the structure of our language. But besides this, we must acquire a feeling which has also to a great degree already died out in modern people—a feeling of how wise language really is. It is much cleverer, of course, than all of us. Language—as you will doubtless believe from the outset—has not been built up in its structure by man. For imagine what would have resulted if people had had to sit down together in parliaments to determine the structure of language according to their lights! Something about as clever as our laws! But language is truly cleverer than our State-laws. The structure of language contains the greatest wisdom. And you can learn an extraordinary amount from the way a nation or other group of people expresses itself. If you consciously penetrate into the framework of a language its genius teaches you very much. And to learn how to feel something concrete of the working and active influence of the spirit of language is extraordinarily important. To believe that the genius of a language works at its construction means a great deal. This feeling, too, can be further developed, can be developed into the consciousness: we human beings speak; animals cannot; they have at the most the beginnings of an articulate language. In these times, of course, when people like to confuse everything, we attribute language to ants and bees as well. But in the light of reality that is all nonsense. It is all based on a form of opinion to which I have frequently drawn attention. There are naturalist philosophers to-day who imagine themselves very wise and who say: “Why should not the plants, too, have a life of the will and a life of feeling?” There are, in fact, such things as plants—the so-called insectivorous plants—which, when small creatures fly in their proximity, attract them, and when they have crept inside, close up. Those, then, are beings which apparently use will towards what approaches them. But we cannot claim that such outward signs are really characteristic of will. If such a view is mentioned, I usually say, applying the same logic to my argument: “I know something which waits, too, till a living creature comes near it, then encloses and imprisons it. I refer to the mouse-trap. The very mousetrap could just as well be considered a living creature as the Venus fly-trap (the plant that catches flies).”

We must be profoundly conscious that the power of articulate speech is mere human property. Man must also become conscious of his relation in the world to the other three kingdoms of nature. If he is conscious of this he knows that his ego is essentially bound up with our power to speak, though to-day's speaking has become very abstract. But I should like to remind you of a fact which will inspire you anew with respect for language. When in very olden times, for instance in the Jewish civilization—but it was even more pronounced in still older civilizations—when priests and those who represented a cult or were in charge of it—in the course of their rites and ceremonies came to certain ideas, they interrupted their words and conveyed certain descriptions of higher beings, not through words, but through silence and through the corresponding Eurhythmic gesture—they were silent and then they went on speaking. In this way, for example, the name which already sounds so abstract to us to-day and which expressed in Hebrew, “I am that I am,” was never uttered, but speech was invariably used up to this point, then a sign was made, and only after that was the speaking resumed. Thus was expressed by gesture the “Unutterable and ineffable name of God in man.” Why was this done? Because if this name had been spoken and repeated, as a matter of course, without further ceremony, people would have been stunned by it, so great was their sensitiveness in those days. There were then certain sounds and combinations of sound in speech by which the people of more ancient civilizations could be stunned, so violent was their effect. Something like an actual swoon would have come over people at the utterance and hearing of such words. That is why they spoke of the “ineffable name of God.” It was profoundly significant. And this is seen when it is laid down: Only the priests, and they only on certain occasions may utter such names, because otherwise, at their utterance before those unprepared for them, heaven and earth would collapse. That is, people would have fainted and lost consciousness. That is why a name of this kind was expressed by a gesture. The real essence of language, then, was expressed by a feeling of this kind. But nowadays people chatter thoughtlessly about everything. We can no longer vary our feelings, and those people are very rare who, without sentimentality, feel tears in their eyes, for instance, at certain passages in novels. In fact, this is quite atavistic to-day. The living experience of what lies in the essence of language and the feeling in language has become very dulled.

This experience, among many other things, will have to be revived, and if we revive it we shall be able to feel profoundly how much we owe to the power of speech. We owe much of our ego-sense, of our sense of ourselves as personalities, to nothing less than our language. And it is possible for man to have a feeling as intense as prayer: “I hear language spoken around me; the power of language is flowing into me.” When you have felt the holiness in this call of the language to the ego you will also be able to awaken it in the children. And then, in fact, you will not awaken this ego-sense in children in an egoistic form, but quite differently. For this ego-sense in children can be awakened in two ways. If it is falsely excited it directly stimulates egoism; if it is rightly stirred, it stimulates the will, it is an impulse to selflessness itself, a direct impulse to life with the outer world.

What I have just said is meant to permeate you as educators and teachers. It is left to you to apply it in the teaching of languages. Of how it can be imbued in practice with consciousness, to awaken in the child the conscious feeling of his personality, we shall speak in our next lecture.

• 1. See Lecture IV of the accompanying course referred to in the Preface.
• 2. These were the lectures on the Threefold State.

The contents of the last lecture are most important for our next consideration as well as for a comprehension of karmic connection in general. For this reason, because of its extreme importance, allow me to recapitulate the chief points.

We began by saying that views concerning cures and medicines have in the course of a relatively short time, during the last century, undergone a radical change. We pointed to the fact that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that view was developed which was based entirely upon the theory that for every illness which was given a name, and which it was believed could be strictly defined, some remedy must exist upon earth. And it was firmly believed that by the use of the remedy in question the course of the illness must be influenced. We then pointed out that view prevailed more or less until the nineteenth century, and side by side with this we showed the complete reversal of this opinion which found expression chiefly in the nihilism of the Viennese school, founded by the famous medical man Dietel, and carried on by Skoda and his disciples. We characterised the nihilistic current of thought by saying that it not merely harboured doubts as to the existence of any absolute connection between one remedy or another, one manipulation or another in respect to the treatment of illness and the illness itself, but would no longer concern itself with any such connection. The idea of the so-called ‘self-healing’ penetrated the minds of the young doctors influenced by this school. Skoda himself made the following significant statement to this school: ‘We may be able to diagnose an illness, to explain, and perhaps also to describe it, but remedy for it we have none.’ This point of view originated from the proofs furnished by Dietel to the effect that, given the necessary conditions, an illness such as pneumonia will with temporising treatment take such course as to develop self-healing forces at the end of certain period. By means of statistics he was able to prove that a temporising treatment showed neither fewer cures nor more deaths than the remedies ordinarily in use. At that time the term ‘therapeutic nihilism’ was not without justification, for it is quite true that the doctors of this school were powerless against the patient's conviction that there simply must exist a remedy, a prescription. The patient would not yield, nor would his friends. A remedy had to be prescribed, and the disciples of this school got out of the difficulty by prescribing a thin solution of gum arabic, which according to their opinion would have the same effect as the remedies previously in use. From this we have learnt how the modern scientific world is moving in the direction of what we may call the karmic connections of life. For they had now to find an answer to the question: how is that which we may call ‘self-healing’ brought about? Or better, why does it take place? And why in some cases can there be no self-healing or cure of any kind?

If a whole school led by medical authorities resorts to the introduction of the idea of self-healing, we must arrive at the conclusion that something is invoked in the course of an illness which leads to the conquest of the illness. And this would have induced us to pursue the more secret reasons for the course of the illness. We have attempted to point out how such a karmic connection with the course of an illness may be sought for in the development of humanity. We showed that indeed what we accomplish in our ordinary lives in regard to good or evil deeds, or wise or foolish deeds, what we experience in regard to right or wrong emotions, that all this does not go deeply into the foundation of the human organism. And we have shown the reason why what is subject to the moral, intellectual, or emotional judgement in ordinary life remains at the surface, and is not subject to the law which we could trace in another instance—a law which influences the deeper lying forces of the human organism. We demonstrated that in this way there exists a sort of hindrance preventing immorality from entering into the deeper forces of our organism. And this barrier against the penetration by our acts and thoughts into the deeper forces of our organism, consists in the fact that our deeds and our emotions accomplished between birth and death are accompanied by our conscious concepts. In so far as we accompany an act or any other experience by a conscious concept, so far do we provide a defence against the result of our deeds sinking down into our organism.

We have also pointed out the significance of those experiences that have been irrevocably forgotten. It is no longer possible to bring them back to the life of our conscious perceptions, but those experiences, because the defence of the conception is lacking, penetrate in a definite way into our inner organism and there co-operate with the formative forces of our organism. And we are able to point to those forms of disease which lie nearer the surface, such as neurosis, neurasthenia, and so forth. A light is thrown even upon hysterical conditions. As we said, the cause of such conditions must be sought for in the concepts that have been forgotten, which have fallen out of the complex of consciousness and have sunk down into the inner soul-life where, as a sort of wedge, they assert themselves in the form of disease. We further pointed out the tremendous significance of the period which lies between birth and the time when we first begin to remember our experiences; and our attention was drawn to the fact that what at an earlier stage has been forgotten continues to be active within our living organism, forming, as it were, an alliance with the deeper forces of our organism, and thereby influencing our organism itself. As we see, a complex of conceptions, a number of experiences must sink down into the deeper foundations of our being before they can intervene in our organism. We then pointed out that this sinking down is most thorough when we have passed through the gate of death and are experiencing the further existence between death and re-birth. The quality of all experiences is then transformed into forces which now develop an organising activity, and the feelings which we have experienced during the period between death and re-birth will become part of the plastic forces, the formative forces that take part in the rebuilding of the body when we return into a new life. In these formative forces man now carries within him the result of what at an earlier stage he held within his soul-life, perhaps even in his conscious conceptions. And further we could point to the fact that man with his conscious conceptions permeated by the Ego oscillates between two influences present in the world—between the luciferic and the ahrimanic influences. When owing to the characteristics of our astral body we have done wrong through evil passions, temper, and so forth, we are driven thereto by luciferic forces. Such deeds then take the course we have described, if they are transformed into formative forces, they will be dwelling as causes of luciferic disease within the formative forces, and will lay the foundations of our new body. We have further seen that we are subject also to the ahrimanic forces which affect us more from outside. And again we had to admit, concerning the ahrimanic forces, that they are transformed into formative forces, into forces shaping the newly built organism when man enters existence through birth, and in so far as the ahrimanic influences mingle with the formative forces, so far we may speak of ahrimanic predisposition to disease. We then pointed out in detail how the forces act, that are thus developed. I quoted some radical examples of this activity, because in radical examples the picture is more distinct, more clearly defined. I gave the person who in his previous life had at all times acted in such a way as to produce a weak Ego-consciousness and weak self-reliance, and whose Ego attached little value to itself, becoming absorbed only in generalities and so forth. Such a person will after death develop the tendency to absorb forces that will render him capable of strengthening and perfecting his ego in his further incarnation. As a result of this he will seek conditions that will give him an opportunity of fighting against certain resistances, so that his weak Ego-consciousness may be strengthened through resistance. Such a tendency will lead him to seek an opportunity of contracting cholera, because in this he will face something that offers an opportunity of conquering those resistances, in the conquest of which he will be led in his next incarnation, or even should a cure be effected in this same incarnation, to a stronger Ego-consciousness or to forces which will by way of self-education lead him gradually to a stronger Ego-consciousness. We have further stated that an illness such as malaria affords an opportunity of compensating for the overbearing Ego-consciousness which has been engendered by the soul in an earlier life through its deeds and emotions.

Those of us who took part in our earlier anthroposophical studies will understand such a course. It has always been said that man's Ego finds its physical expression in its blood. Now both of these illnesses which have just been mentioned are connected with blood and the laws of blood. They are so connected that in the case of cholera there is a thickening of the blood which can be regarded as the ‘resistance’ which a weak self-reliance must experience, and by means of which it is trying to develop. We shall also be able to understand that in a case of malaria we are faced with an impoverishment of the blood, and that an over-developed Ego-consciousness needs the opportunity of being led to an impossible extreme. This impoverishment of the blood of an over-developed Ego will find all its efforts ending in annihilation. Naturally these things stand in an intimate relationship to our organism, but if we examine them, we shall find them comprehensible.

The result of all this is that when we are dealing with an organism formed by a soul that has brought with it the tendency to overcome some imperfection in one or another direction, man will tend to become impregnated with a predisposition to a certain illness, but, at the same time he will have the capacity for fighting this illness which is produced for no other reason than to provide the means of a cure. And a cure will be effected when the person, in accordance with his whole karma acquires through the conquest of the illness, such forces as will enable him through the rest of his life to make true progress by means of his work upon the physical plane. In other words, if the stimulating forces are so strong that man is able to acquire upon the physical plane itself those qualities, on account of which the illness broke out, then he will be able to work with that reinforced power which he lacked before, and which he gained from the healing process. But if it is in our karma that we have the desire to mould our organism so that through the conquest of the illness in question it should acquire forces which lead nearer to perfection, and yet because of the complexity of the causes we are forced to leave our organism weak in another direction, then it may be that although the forces we develop and make use of in the healing process strengthen us, they do not do so sufficiently to make us equal to our work upon the physical plane. Then because what we have already gained cannot be used upon the physical plane, it will be made use of when we pass through the gate of death, and we shall try to add to our forces what we could not achieve upon the physical plane. So these forces will mature in the formation of the next body when we return to earth in a new incarnation.

Bearing this in mind one more indication should be given which deals with those forms of illness leading neither to a real cure nor to death but to chronic conditions, to a kind of languishing state. Here we have something of which the knowledge is of the greatest importance for most people. When one has recovered from an illness, the effect sought for has been obtained and in a certain sense the illness has been conquered. But in another sense this may not be the fact. For instance, the trouble which was produced between the etheric body and the physical body has disappeared, but the disharmony between the etheric body and the astral body still exists, and we oscillate between attempts at cure and our inability to effect a cure. In such a case it is of special importance that we should make use of all that we have attained in the way of a real cure. And this is what is very rarely done for it is precisely in the case of those illnesses that become chronic that we find ourselves in a vicious circle. We should find a way out of the difficulty if in such a case we could isolate that part of our organism that has achieved a certain cure, if we could let it live by itself and withdraw from the healthy part the rest which is still in disturbance and disorder on account of what is in the soul. But many things oppose this, and chiefly the fact that when we have had an illness resulting in a chronic condition, we are living all the time under the influence of that condition, and, if I may thus crudely express myself, we can never really completely forget our condition, never really arrive at a withdrawing of that which is not yet healthy, so as to treat it by itself. On the contrary, through thinking continually about the sickly part of our organism, we bring as it were our healthy part into some kind of relationship with the sickness and thus irritate it anew. This is a special process, and in order to make it clearer I should like to explain one of the facts proved by Spiritual Science, that can be seen by clairvoyant consciousness when a person has gone through an illness, and has retained something which may be termed chronic. The same occurs also when there exists no apparent acute illness, but when a chronic disease is developed without any acute state having been specially noticed. In most of these cases it is possible to see that there is an unstable state of balance between the etheric and the physical body, an abnormal oscillation to and fro of the forces, but in spite of which the body still remains alive. This oscillation of forces which appertain to the etheric body and the physical body bring about in the person a continual state of irritation which leads to continuous excitability. Clairvoyant consciousness sees this agitation transmitted to the astral body, and these states of excitability continually force their way into that part of the organism which is partly ill and partly well, thereby creating not a stable but an unstable balance. Through this penetration by astral excitability, the health which would otherwise be much better is in fact greatly impaired. I must beg of you to remember that in this case the astral does not coincide with consciousness, but rather with an excitability of the inner soul, which the patient does not wish to admit even to himself. Because in such cases the barrier of consciousness is lacking, those conditions and passions, emotional crises, continual states of weariness of mind and inner discontent do not always act as do conscious forces, but rather like the organising forces. Seated within our deeper being they continually irritate that part which is half ill and half well. If the patient by means of a strong discipline of the soul could forget his condition for some time at least, he would gain such satisfaction from this, that even from this satisfaction itself he could derive the necessary force to carry on further. If he could forget his state completely and develop the strong will which will help him to say: ‘I will not bother with my condition,’ certain soul forces would thereby become liberated, and if he applied them to something spiritual that would elevate him and satisfy his inner soul, if he liberated the forces that are continuously occupied with the sensation of aches and pains, oppression and so on he would thereby gain great satisfaction. For if we do not live through these feelings, the forces are free and they are at our disposal. Naturally it will not be of much use merely to say we don't want to take notice of these aches and pains, for if we do not put these liberated forces to spiritual use, the former conditions will soon return. If, however, we employ these liberated forces for a spiritual purpose which will absorb the soul, we shall soon discover that we are attaining in a complicated way that which our organism would otherwise have attained without our assistance through the conquest of the illness. Naturally the person in question would have to be aware of filling his soul with something directly connected with his illness or with that which constitutes his illness. For instance, if someone suffering from a weakness of the eyes were to read a great deal so as to avoid thinking of this, he would naturally not arrive at his goal. But it is quite unnecessary to resort to further illustrations. We have all noticed how useful it is when we are slightly indisposed, to be able to forget that indisposition, especially if we gain this forgetfulness by occupying ourselves with something different. Such is a positive and wholesome forgetfulness. This already suggests to us that we are not entirely impotent in face of the karmic effects of those transgressions of our earlier lives which are expressed in the form of illness. We recognise that what is subject to moral, emotional and intellectual judgement during life between birth and death cannot penetrate so deeply during one single life as to become the cause of an organic disease, but that in the period between death and re-birth it may penetrate so deeply into the human essence as to cause disease; then there must also exist a possibility of re-transforming these processes into conscious processes.

The question might be put thus: If illnesses are the karmic results of spiritual or other events called forth or experienced by the soul, if they are the metamorphosis of such causes, might we not then also suppose that the result of the metamorphosis, namely, the illness, might be avoided—or do we learn nothing of this from spiritual facts? Might it not be avoided if we could replace, for the good of our education, the healing processes which are drawn from the organism to combat the disease. Could we not replace these by their spiritual counterpart, their spiritual equivalent? Should we not thus, if we were sufficiently wise, transform illness into a spiritual process and accomplish through our soul forces the self-education that would otherwise be accomplished through illness?

The feasibility of this may be demonstrated by an example. Here again we must insist that only those examples are given which have been investigated by Spiritual Science. They are not hypothetical assertions but actual ‘cases.’ A certain person contracts measles in later life, and we seek for the karmic connection in this case. We find that this case of measles appeared as the karmic effect of occurrences in a preceding life—occurrences that may be thus described: In a preceding life the individuality in question disliked concerning himself with the external world but occupied himself a great deal with himself, though not in the ordinary egotistical sense. He investigated much, meditated much, though not with regard to the facts of the external world, but confined himself to the inner soul life. We meet many people to-day who believe that through self-concentration and through brooding within themselves, they will arrive at the solution of world riddles. The person in question thought he could order his life through inner meditation how to act in one instance or another without accepting any teaching from others. The weakness of the soul resulting from this led to the formation of forces during existence between death and re-birth which exposed the organism comparatively late in life to an attack of measles.

We might now ask: if on the one hand we have the attack of measles which is the physical karmic effect of an earlier life, how is it then with the soul? For the earlier life will also result through karmic action in a certain condition of the soul.

This soul condition will prove itself to be such that the personality in question, during the life in which the attack of measles took place, was again and again subject to self-deception. Thus in the self-deception we must see the psychic karmic result of this earlier life, and in the attack of measles the physical karmic result.

Let us now assume that this personality before developing measles had succeeded in gaining such soul forces that he was no longer exposed to all kinds of self-deception, having completely corrected this failing. In this case the acquired soul force would render the attack of measles quite unnecessary, since the tendencies brought forth in this organism during its formation had been effaced through the stronger soul forces acquired by self-education. If we contemplate life as a whole and examine in detail our experiences, considering them always from this standpoint, we should invariably find that external knowledge will bear out in every detail what has here been stated. And what I have said about a case of measles can lead to an explanation why measles is one of the illnesses of child-hood. For the failings I have mentioned are present in a great many lives and especially in certain periods did they prevail in many lives. When such a personality enters existence he will be anxious to make the corresponding correction as soon as possible. In the period between birth and the general appearance of children's complaints which effect an organic self-education, there can as a rule be no question of any education of the soul.

From this we see that in a certain respect we can really speak of a disease being transformed back into a spiritual process. And it is most significant that when this process has entered the soul as a life principle, it will evoke a viewpoint that has a healing effect upon the soul. We need not be surprised that in our time we are able to influence the soul so little. Anyone regarding our present period from the standpoint of Spiritual Science will understand why so many medical men, so many doctors become materialists. For most people never occupy themselves with anything which has vital force. All the stuff produced today is devoid of vital force for the soul. That is why anyone wishing to work for Spiritual Science feels in this anthroposophical activity something extremely wholesome, for Spiritual Science can again bring to men something which enters the soul so that it is drawn away from what is acting in the physical organism. But we must not confuse what appears at the beginning of such a movement as Anthroposophy with what this movement can be in reality. Things may be brought into the Anthroposophical Movement which prevail in the physical world, for people on becoming Anthroposophists often bring to Anthroposophy exactly the same interests and also all the bad habits which they had outside. There is thus brought in much of the degeneracy of our age, and when some such degeneracy appears in the persons in question, the world says that this is the result of Anthroposophy. That is of course a cheap statement.

If we now see the karmic thread passing from one incarnation to another, we grasp only the one aspect of truth. For anyone beginning to understand this, many questions will arise which will be touched upon in the course of these lectures. First of all we must deal with the question: What difference is there between an illness due to external causes and an illness where the cause lies exclusively in the human organism itself. We are tempted to dispose of the latter illnesses by saying that they come of their own accord without any external provocation. But this is not so. In a certain sense we are justified in saying that illnesses come to us if we have a special disposition for the illness within us. A great many forms of illness, however, we shall be able to trace to external causes; not indeed everything that happens to us, but much that befalls us from outside. If we break a leg for instance, we are obliged to account for it by external causes. We must also include within external causes the effects of the weather, and numerous cases of disease which come to people living in slum dwellings. Here again we envisage a wide field. An experienced person looking on the world will find it easy to explain why the modern trend of the medical faculty is to seek the causes of illness in external influences, and especially in microbes. Of these a witty gentleman (Tröhls-Lund) said not without justice: ‘Today it is said that illnesses are provoked by microbes, just as it was formerly said that they came from God, the devil, and so forth.’ In the thirteenth century it was said that illnesses came from God; in the fifteenth it was said that they came from the devil; later it was said that illnesses came from the humours, today we say that illnesses come from microbes! Such are the views that in the course of time give place to one another.

Thus we speak of external causes of human illness and health. And the man of the present day may easily be tempted to use a word that is fundamentally adapted to bring disorder into the whole of our world-conception. If someone who was previously healthy comes into a district where there is an epidemic of influenza or diphtheria, and then falls ill, the man of today will be inclined to say that the person has become ill because he entered this particular district. It is thus easy to make use of the word ‘chance.’ Today people really speak of ‘chance.’ This word is really disastrous for any world-conception, and as long as we make no attempt to become clear about what is so readily termed ‘chance,’ we shall not be able to deal in any way satisfactorily with the initial stages of the subject: ‘Natural and accidental illnesses of man.’ For this it is essential that we should attempt by way of introduction to throw some light on the word ‘chance.’

Is not chance itself inclined to make us suspicious of the way it is frequently defined to-day? I have already on a previous occasion drawn your attention to the fact that a clever man in the eighteenth century was not entirely wrong when, concerning the reason for the erection of monuments, he made the following statement: ‘If we regard objectively the course of history, we should have to erect by far the greater number of monuments to Chance.’ And if we examine history, we shall make strange discoveries concerning what is concealed behind chance. As I have mentioned before, we owe the telescope to the fact that children once were playing with optical lenses in an optical laboratory. In their play they formed a combination by means of which someone then produced a telescope.

You might also recall the famous lamp in the cathedral of Pisa, which before the time of Galileo was seen by thousands and thousands, oscillating with the same regularity. But it remained for Galileo to find out by experiment how these oscillations coincided with the course of his blood circulation, whereby he discovered the famous laws of the pendulum. Had we not known these, the whole course of our physics, the whole of our culture would have developed on entirely different lines. Let us try to find a meaning in human evolution, and then see whether we should still wish to maintain that only chance was at work when Galileo made this important discovery. Let us consider yet another case.

We are aware what Luther's translation of the Bible means to the civilised countries of Europe. It profoundly influenced religious sentiment and thought and also the development of what we call the German literary language. I simply mention the fact without comment. I insist only on the profound influence which this translation exercised. We must endeavour to see the significance of that education which, during the course of several centuries, came to mankind as a result of Luther's translation of the Bible. Let us endeavour to perceive a meaning in this, and then let us consider the following fact.

Up to a certain period of his life Luther was deeply imbued with the feeling and desire so to order his life as to become a veritable ‘child of God.’ This desire had been brought about by a constant reading of the Bible. The custom prevailed amongst the Augustinian monks of reading preferably the works of the Fathers of the Church, but Luther passed to the spiritual enjoyment of the Bible itself. Thus he was led to this intense feeling of being a ‘child of God,’ and under this influence he fulfilled his duties as teacher of Theology in the first Wittenberg period. The fact that I should now like to emphasise is that Luther had a certain repugnance to acquiring the title of Doctor of Theology, but that, when sitting with an old friend of the Erfurt Augustinian monastery, he was persuaded in the course of a ‘chance’ conversation to try and gain the hat of a Doctor of Theology. For this purpose it was necessary once more to study the Bible. Thus it was the ‘chance’ conversation with his friend which led to a renewed study of the Bible, and to all that resulted from it.

Try to conceive from the point of view of the last centuries the significance of the ‘chance’ that Luther once conversed with that friend and was persuaded to try for the Doctorate of Theology. You will be obliged to see that it would be grotesque to connect this human evolution with a ‘chance’ event.

From what has been said we shall first of all conclude that perhaps after all there is something more in chance than is usually supposed. As a rule we believe chance to be something which cannot be satisfactorily explained either by the laws of nature, or by the laws of life, and that it constitutes a kind of surplus over and above what can be explained. Let us now add to this statement a fact which has helped us to understand so many aspects of life: Man, since he began his earth existence, has been subject to the two forces of the luciferic and ahrimanic principles. These forces and principles continually penetrate into man. While the luciferic forces act more within by influencing the astral body, the ahrimanic forces act rather through the external impressions which he receives. In what we receive from the external world there are contained the ahrimanic forces, and in what arises and acts within the soul in the shape of joy and dejection, desires, and so forth, there are contained the luciferic forces. The luciferic as well as the ahrimanic principles induce us to give way to error. The luciferic principle induces us to deceive ourselves as to our own inner life, to judge our inner life wrongly, to see Maya, illusion within ourselves. If we contemplate life rationally, we shall not find it difficult to discover Maya in our own soul life. Let us consider how very often we persuade ourselves that we have done one thing or another for this or that reason. Generally the reason is quite a different one, and far more profound. It may be found in temper, desire, or passion, but in our superficial consciousness we give quite a different explanation. Especially do we endeavour to deny the presence within our soul of that which the world does not greatly appreciate, and when we are driven to some act from purely egotistical motives, we frequently find ourselves clothing these crude egotistical impulses with a cloak of unselfishness, and explaining why it was necessary for us thus to act. As a rule we are not aware ourselves that we err. When we become aware of it, there generally begins an improvement accompanied by a certain feeling of shame. The worst of it is that for the most we are ignorant that we are driven to something from the depths of our soul, and then we invent a motive for the deed in question. This has also been discovered by modern psychologists. As there exists but little psychological culture today, however, these grotesque indications are brought forward, and interpretations are arrived at which are altogether peculiar. Any true investigator on observing such facts will naturally fathom their true significance and so realise that there are indeed two influences acting together, namely, our consciousness, and that which dwells in the deeper layers beneath the threshold of consciousness. But when the same facts are observed by a materialistic psychologist, he will set to work differently. He will immediately fabricate a theory about the difference between the pretext for our deeds and the real motive. If, for instance, a psychologist discusses the suicides of students which occur so frequently today, he will say that what is quoted as pretext is not the real motive; that the real motive lies far deeper, being found mostly in a misdirected sexual life, and that the real motive is so transformed that it deludes the consciousness for some reason or other.

Often this may be so, but anyone who has the least knowledge of truly profound psychological thought will never from this evolve a general theory. Such a theory could easily be refuted, for if the case really is such that pretext is nothing, and motive everything, this would also apply to the psychologist himself, and we should be forced to say that with him too, what he is telling us and developing as a theory is but a pretext. If we were to search for deeper reasons, perhaps the reasons alleged by him would be found to be of exactly the same nature. If this psychologist had, truly learnt why a reason is impossible that has been based upon the conclusion: ‘All Cretans are liars,’ and that such a judgement is biased if made by the Cretan himself, if he had learnt the reason why this is so, he would also have learnt what an extraordinarily vicious circle is created when in certain domains assertions can be driven back upon oneself. In almost the whole compass of our literature we find very little of truly deep culture. That is why as a rule people hardly notice what they themselves do, and for this reason it will be indispensable for Spiritual Science in every respect to avoid such confusions in logic. Modern philosophers when dealing with Spiritual Science come more than any others to such confusions in logic. Our example is typical of this. We here see the tricks played upon us by the luciferic influences transforming the soul-life into Maya, so that we can pretend to have quite different motives from those really dwelling within us.

We should try to acquire a stricter self-discipline in this respect. Today words are as a rule handled with great facility. A word, however, can lead to great error and confusion. The word has but to have a pleasing sound, and it creates the impression of a charitable deed. Even the pleasant sound of a sentence will betray us into believing that the motive in question is within our soul, while in truth the egotistical principle may be concealed behind it without our being aware of its presence, because we have not the will to arrive at true self-knowledge. Thus we see Lucifer active on the one side. How does Ahriman act on the other?

Ahriman is that principle which intermingles with our perceptions and enters us from outside. Ahriman's activity is strongest when we feel that in this case thought is not sufficient, and that we face a critical moment in our thought life. Thinking is trapped as in a thought maze. Then the ahrimanic principle seizes the occasion to penetrate us as through a rift in the external world. If we pursue the course of world events and the more obvious occurrences, if for instance, we pursue modern physics back to the moment when Galileo was sitting in front of the oscillating church lamp in the Cathedral of Pisa, we can spin a thought-net embracing all these events whereby the matter will be easily explained. Everything will be quite clear, but the moment we arrive at the oscillating church lamp, our thoughts become confused. Here is the window through which the ahrimanic forces penetrate us with the greatest strength, and here our thought refuses to understand the phenomena which might bring reason and understanding into the matter. Here also is what we call ‘chance.’ It is here where Ahriman becomes most dangerous to us. Those phenomena which we call ‘chance’ are the phenomena by which we are most easily deluded by Ahriman.

Thus we shall learn to understand that it is not the nature of facts themselves that induces us to speak of ‘chance,’ but that it depends on ourselves and our own development. Little by little we shall have to educate ourselves to penetrate Maya and illusion, that is to say, we must gain insight into matters where Ahriman's influence is at its strongest. So that just where we have to speak of important causes of illness, and of a light that is to be shed over the course of many an illness, we shall find it necessary to approach phenomena from the following aspect. First of all we shall have to try and understand how far it is by chance that someone should be travelling on the very train on which he may lose his life, or that someone at a definite period should be exposed to disease-germs affecting him from outside, or to some other cause of illness, and if we pursue matters with sharpened understanding, we shall be able to arrive at a truer cognition of the whole meaning for human life of illness and health.

Today we had to show in detail how Lucifer leads to illusions within man, and how Ahriman becomes intertwined with external perceptions and there leads to Maya; that it is a result of Lucifer if we delude ourselves with a false motive, and how the false supposition concerning the world of phenomena—the deception through Ahriman—leads to the belief in chance. These foundations had to be laid to show that karmic events, the results of earlier lives, are active also in those cases where external causes, which seem to be chance, give rise to illnesses.

There is much still to be said about the various manifestations of karma; but as this is our last lecture, and time is necessarily short for so wide a subject, you easily understand that much that could be said, perhaps much of that which is in your minds in the way questions, cannot be dealt with this time. But our anthroposophical movement will continue, and that which in one course of lectures must necessarily remain unanswered, can on another occasion be carried on and explained further.

It will repeatedly have come before your minds that in the law of karma, man experiences something which is so organised that at every moment of our life we can look upon what we have gone through, upon what we have done, thought and felt in the incarnations preceding our own, and we shall always find that our momentary human inner and outer fate may be understood in the light of a ‘Life-account,’ in which on the side we set down all the clever, reasonable and wise experiences, and on the other all that is unreasonable, wicked or ugly. On one side or the other there will be an excess which signifies at any moment of life the destiny of that moment.

Now various questions may arise in this connection, and the first one would be: How is that which human beings do as a society connected with what we call ‘Individual karma?’ We have already touched upon these questions from other aspects. If we look back at any event in history, back, for instance, to the Persian wars, it will be impossible for us to believe that these events—looked at in the first place from the Greek point of view—represent something only to be written in the book of fate of individual men, who upon the physical plane may appear to be the persons most directly interested. Think of all the leaders in the Persian wars, of all the men who sacrificed themselves at that time, of all that was done by individuals—from the leaders down to the separate individuals—in the Greek legions at that time. If we really consider such an event in a reasonable light, could we possibly ascribe what each separate person did at that time solely to the karmic account of that individual? We should find it impossible so to do. For could we imagine that in the events which happen to a whole nation or to a great part of civilised humanity, nothing further occurs than that each separate human individual simply lives out his own karma? This is not possible. We must in the course of historical evolution always proceed from one event to the next, and we shall see that in the evolution of mankind itself both meaning and significance are to be found, but that such events cannot be identical with the particular karma of separate individuals.

We may reflect on an occurrence such as that of the Persian wars, and ask what significance they had in the course of human evolution. In the East a certain brilliant civilisation had developed. But as every light has its shadow, so must we clearly see that this Eastern civilisation was only to be attained by humanity at the cost of certain darker shadowy elements which should have had no place in human evolution. This civilisation had one pronounced shadow-side—the impulse to extend its frontiers by means of physical force. If this desire for aggrandisement had not been there, it is evident that the whole of that Eastern civilisation would not have come into being. The one cannot be thought of without the other. In order that man might evolve further, the Greek civilisation, for instance, had to develop from quite different principles. But the Greek civilisation could not of itself make a direct beginning. It had to obtain certain elements from outside and it borrowed these from the Eastern civilisation. Various legends about heroes who from Greece passed over to the East, do in fact represent how the pupils of certain Greek schools went over to the East and brought back to the Greeks those treasures of Eastern culture which could then be transformed by means of the national Greek talent. But for this it was necessary to eradicate the shadow-side of this culture—the impulse to press forward to the West by means of purely external force. The Roman civilisation which succeeded the Greek, and all that contributed to the evolution of European mankind would not have been possible if the Greeks had not prepared the ground by a further development of the Eastern civilisation—if they had not beaten back the Persians and what pertained to them. Thus that which had been created in Asia was purified by the driving back of the Asiatics.

Many events in the evolution of the world can be considered in this way, and one then obtains a striking picture. If we gave a course of lectures extending over three or four years and during that time gave our thought only to the traditional, historical documents of humanity, we should then see the unfolding of something which we might really call a plan in the evolution of mankind. We could then survey such a plan and say to ourselves, ‘this had to be attained; it had this shadow-side which later had to be cast off; the treasures which had been acquired had to pass over to another, and there be perfected further.’

After the Greeks had carried on the acquired treasures for some little while, the downfall of Greece occurred, and Rome took her place. In this way we should arrive at a plan of human evolution, so that when speaking of this plan we could never fall into the error of saying: ‘How did it come about, for instance, that just Xerxes or Miltiades or Leonidas had this or that individual karma?’ We must consider this individual karma as something which must be determined by and interwoven with the plan of the evolution of mankind. This cannot be understood in any other way; and this, too, is the view of Spiritual Science. But if this is the case, we must say: In this well-planned advance of human evolution we must see something which is a thing by itself, which is continuous in itself, in a similar way to that in which karmic events in individual human lives are connected with each other, and we must further enquire: ‘What relation does such a plan of the whole evolution of mankind bear to the individual karma of man?’ Let us first of all consider what one might call the ‘destiny’ of human evolution itself.

When we look back we see how one civilisation after another arises, and how the evolution of one people follows upon that of another. We see further how one nation after another acquires this or that which is new, how something remains out of the separate national civilisations which is permanent but how just on that account the nations must die out, so that the treasures each separate nation has acquired may be saved for the corresponding later epochs of human evolution. We must, therefore, find quite comprehensible what Spiritual Science has to say, that in the continuous advance of human evolution one can in the first place clearly distinguish two currents. Consider how in the whole course of the evolution of mankind there is what we may look upon as a ‘continuous current,’ within which wave after wave develops, and that which the foregoing wave has acquired is carried over into the next. We can get an idea of this if we look back to the first civilisation of the Post-Atlantean age, and observe the great achievements of ancient India. But if we compare that with the feeble echo of it which is contained in the old Vedas, which are, to be sure, wonderful enough, but which are but a faint reflection of that to which the Rishis attained and of what Spiritual Science relates to us of the great culture of the Indians, we then are compelled to admit that the original greatness of what this people accomplished for mankind had already faded when a beginning was made to preserve this treasure of human culture in those beautiful poetical productions. But that which the Indian culture first gained flowed over into the general course of human evolution and this alone made it possible for that to develop later which again was required by a young people, not by a people already grown old. The Indians had first to be driven back to the southern Peninsula, and then the Zarathustran view of the world evolved in Persia. How sublime was this view of the world when it arose, and how low had it fallen in a comparatively short time in the people who had received it! In Egypt and Chaldea we see the same thing happen. Then we see the passing over of the Eastern wisdom into Greece, and we see the Greeks beat back that which is Eastern on the external physical plane. We then see all that the whole East had acquired taken up into the lap of Greece and interwoven with much that had been acquired in various domains of Europe. Out of this there was created a new culture, which then in various indirect ways became capable of receiving the Christ Impulse and of transplanting it into the West.

We find this continuous stream of civilisation in which we see wave after wave, and each successive wave is both a continuation of the preceding and a new contribution to mankind. But what was the origin of all this? Remember all that each nation experiences in its own culture. Think of the accumulation of emotion and perceptions in countless individuals, of wishes and enthusiasms fostering the impulse of this culture. Think how the individuals were united in the one cultural impulse, so that through countless centuries of human development, one nation after another, developing the successive cultural impulses, each one lived its enthusiasms; but lived too in a sort of illusion. Every one of them believed the particular achievement of that culture to be not transitory but eternal. For that reason only was the devoted work of the separate peoples made possible, because the illusion always survived. Even today the illusion exists; although we are not so absolutely bound by it and do not speak of our culture as necessarily everlasting.

There you have two things necessary to national civilisations, and which are only beginning to change in our own day. For the first domain of human spiritual life in which such illusions cannot persist, is that of Anthroposophy. It would be a grave error for an Anthroposophist to believe that the forms in which our knowledge is now clothed and the train of thought which we are able to give out today from our Anthroposophical thought, feeling and will, are eternal. It would be very short-sighted to suppose that in three thousand years there would still be persons who would speak of the Anthroposophical truths just as we ourselves do today. We know that we are compelled on account of the conditions of our time to impress something of the continuous stream of evolution into present forms of thought and that our successors will express their experiences of these things in completely different forms. Why is this so? Throughout many centuries and many thousands of years of human culture, civilisation imposed on single individuals experiences through which a contribution was made to the collective evolution of the nations. Think of the numberless experiences which were gone through in ancient Greece, and think of what issued from that later as an extract for the whole of humanity! You will then say: There is more in this than merely the individual currents. Many things occur for the sake of this primary current.

So we must observe two things: first, something which must spring up and die away, in order that from its entirety a second thing, which reckoned by quantity is the smallest part, may survive as something lasting. When we realise that in the evolution of mankind since there has been human individual karma, two powers or beings are at work whom we have always found to be active—Lucifer and Ahriman—then only shall we understand the progress of human evolution. For the aim of this evolution is that finally, when the earth shall have attained its goal, those experiences which were gradually embodied in the whole human evolution out of the different civilisations, will bear fruit for every separate individual, quite regardless of what particular destiny he may have had. But we can see this goal only if we look at the evolution of the world in the light of Anthroposophy. For let no man deceive himself. To think of such a goal in the right way, with the full strength of the human individuality, without the merging of the individuality into some nebulous pantheistic unity, but in such a way that the individuality is completely maintained, so that into it flows that which mankind has as a whole acquired—this goal can only be clearly and definitely seen when the soul develops by means of Anthroposophy.

If we glance back at the earlier civilisations, we see that ever since human individualities have incarnated, Lucifer and Ahriman have had a share in the evolution of humanity. Lucifer on his side always seeks to take part in the progressive stream of civilisation by settling down into the human astral bodies, and impregnating them with the Lucifer impulse. Lucifer carries on his existence during the course of the evolution of mankind by working in upon the human astral bodies. Man could never acquire what Lucifer gives him, solely from those powers which bring about the continuous stream of civilisation just described. If you separate this stream of civilisation from the whole progressive course of mankind, then you have as ever increasing wealth that which the normally progressing Spiritual Beings of the Hierarchies cause to be poured down into humanity. We must look up to the Hierarchies and say: Those who go through their normal evolution furnish the earth-civilisation with that which is the lasting possession of humanity, which was, it is true, transformed later, but has nevertheless become a lasting possession. It is just like a tree and the pith within it. And so we obtain a continuous living stream in the progressing civilisations.

Through these powers who are going through a normal evolution on their own account, man would have led his Ego more and more with this progressing enrichment of human evolution. From time to time there would have flowed in that which brings man on further. Man would have filled himself more and more with the gifts of the spiritual world, and at last, when the earth had reached its goal, it stands to reason that man would have possessed within himself everything which was given from the spiritual worlds. But then one thing would not have been possible. Man would not have been able to develop the original, sacred ardour, devotion and enthusiasm arising in one age of civilisation after another. Out of the same soil from which springs every wish and every desire, springs forth also the wish for great ideals, the desire for the happiness of mankind, for the accomplishments of Art in the successive periods of human civilisation. From the same soil whence spring injurious desires leading to evil, springs forth also the striving after the highest which can be accomplished upon earth. And that which enkindles the human soul for the highest good, would not exist if, on the other hand, the same desire might not sink into wickedness and vice. The possibility of this in human evolution is the work of the luciferic spirits. We must not fail to recognise that the luciferic spirits have brought freedom to mankind at the same time as the possibility of evil—free receptivity for that which otherwise would only flow into the human soul.

But we have seen on other occasions, that everything provoked by Lucifer finds its counterpart in Ahriman. We see Lucifer and all his hosts work in that which gave to human evolution the impulse of the Greek civilisation, in the Greek heroes, in the great men and artists of Greece. He penetrates into the astral bodies and enkindles enthusiasm within them for that which they honour as the highest. So that what was to flow into evolution through Greece became at the same time an enthusiasm in the soul of the people. This is precisely Lucifer's realm, because Lucifer owes his power to the Moon-evolution and not the Earth-evolution. He is a challenge to Ahriman, and as Lucifer develops his activity from one age to another, Ahriman joins in and, bit by bit, spoils that which Lucifer has brought about on earth. The evolution of man is a continual action and reaction between Ahriman and Lucifer. If Lucifer were not in humanity, the zeal and fire for the continuous progress of human development would be lacking; if Ahriman were not there, he who in nation after nation destroys again that which comes,—not from the continuous stream, but from the luciferic impulse—then Lucifer would want to perpetuate each civilisation. Here you see Lucifer drawing down his own karma upon himself. This is a necessary consequence of his evolution on the old Moon. And the consequence now is, that he must always chain Ahriman to his heels: Ahriman is the karmic fulfilment of Lucifer.

Thus in the example of the ahrimanic and luciferic beings we get an insight into the karma of the higher beings. There also karma reigns. Karma is everywhere where there are egos. Lucifer and Ahriman naturally have egos and therefore the effects of their deeds can react upon themselves. Many of those secrets will be touched upon in the summer, in the series of lectures on ‘Secrets of the Bible Story of Creation,’ but there is just one thing to which I should now like to draw your attention, showing you the profound importance of each single word in the true occult records.

Have you never thought why it is that in the Bible History of the Creation, at the end of each day of creation comes the sentence: ‘And the Elohim saw the work, and they saw that it was very good!’ That is a significant statement. Why is it there? The sentence itself shows that it refers to a characteristic of the Elohim who evolved in a normal way on the old Moon and whose opponent is Lucifer. It is given as a sort of characteristic belonging to the Elohim that after each day of creation they saw that ‘it was very good.’ It is given for the reason that this was the degree of attainment reached by the Elohim. They could on the Moon only see their work as long as they were performing it, they could not have a subsequent consciousness of it. That they were able subsequently to look back reflectively upon their work, marks a particular stage in the consciousness of the Elohim. This only became possible upon the earth, and their inner character is shown by the fact that the element of will streams out from the being of the Elohim, so that when they saw it they saw that it was very good. Those were the Elohim who had completed their work upon the Moon and who, when they looked at it afterwards on the earth, were able to say: ‘It can remain, it is very good.’ But for that it was necessary that the Moon-evolution should be completed.

Now what of the Lucifer beings, who had not completed their Moon-development? They must also try to look back upon their work when on earth, for instance, to their share in the ardour and enthusiasm of the Greek civilisation. They will then see how, little by little, Ahriman crumbled it away; and they will have to say, because they did not complete it: ‘They saw their day's work, and behold, it was not of the best; it had to be blotted out!’

That is the great disappointment of the luciferic spirits; they are always trying to do their work over again, always trying to swing the pendulum again to the other side, and always they find their work again destroyed by Ahriman. You must think of it as an ebb and flow in the tide of human evolution, a continuous rousing of new forces by beings who are higher than we are ourselves, and the experiencing by them of continual disappointments. That comes into the experience of the luciferic spirits in the earth-evolution. Man had to take up this karma into himself, because only thus could he attain to real freedom which can develop only when man himself gives the highest purpose to his earth Ego. That Ego which man would have had, if at the end of the earth-evolution all goals were given to him, could not in a true sense be free; for from the beginning it was predestined that all the good of the earth-evolution should flow into him. Man could only become free, by adding to the Ego another Ego which is capable of error, which is always swinging backwards and forwards between good and evil, and which still is able to strive again and again after that which is the purpose of the earth-evolution. The lower Ego had to be joined to man through Lucifer, so that the upward struggle of man to the higher Ego should be his own deed. Only thus is ‘free will’ possible to mankind. Free will is something which man may acquire gradually, for he is so situated, that in his life, free will floats before him as an ideal. Does there exist a movement in human evolution when the human will is free? It is never free, because at any moment it may succumb to the luciferic and ahrimanic element; it is not free because every man, when he has passed through the gates of death, in the ascending time of purification—perhaps during several decades—has impressions which are definite and determined. It is the essential part of kamaloca that we should see to what an extent we are still imperfect by reason of our failings in the world, that we should see in detail in what way we have become imperfect. From that issues the decision to reject everything which has made us imperfect. Thus life in kamaloca adds one intention to another, and the conclusion that we make good again everything that we did and thought which lowered us. What we then feel is imprinted into our further life and we enter into existence through birth with that decision and intention thus charged with our own karma. Therefore we cannot speak of free will when we have entered into existence through birth. We can say we are approaching nearer to ‘free will,’ only when we have succeeded in mastering the influences of Lucifer and Ahriman, and we can obtain the mastery over the luciferic and ahrimanic influences, only by means of knowledge. Firstly, through self-knowledge, we make ourselves more and more capable—even in the life between birth and death—of learning to know our weaknesses in all three departments of the soul, in Thought, Feeling and Will. If we constantly strive to yield to no illusion, then that strength grows within our Ego by means of which we are able to resist the luciferic influence; for then we shall realise more and more how much those treasures of mankind are really worth. Secondly, we can obtain this mastery by means of the knowledge of the external world, which must be supplemented by self-knowledge—both must work together. We must unite self-knowledge and the knowledge of the external world with our own being and then we shall be quite clear as to how we stand regarding Lucifer.

It is characteristic of Anthroposophy that through it we are able to throw light upon these questions how far inclinations and emotions, and how far Lucifer and Ahriman play into every human action. What have we done in this course of lectures other than to explain in how many different ways the luciferic and ahrimanic forces work in our lives! In our present age, enlightenment as to the luciferic and ahrimanic forces may begin, and man must be enlightened regarding these if he really wishes to contribute something towards the attainment of the goal of earthly humanity. If you look around you, everywhere where human feeling and human thinking exist, you can see how far removed men still are from a really true enlightenment of the influences of Lucifer and Ahriman and you will find that by far the greater number of people do not wish for such enlightenment. You will see a great part of mankind succumbing to a certain religious egotism, and being overcome by the feeling that above all they should in their own souls attain the greatest degree of well-being. This egotism is such that people are not in the least conscious that the strongest passions may play a part in it. Nowhere does Lucifer play a greater part than when people, driven by their emotions and desires, strive to ascend to the Divine without having had the Divine illuminated by the light of knowledge. Do you not think that Lucifer is frequently involved where people believe they are striving for the highest? But the forms which are striven for in this way will also belong to the disenchantments of Lucifer, and those people whose erroneous desires cause them to believe that they are able to receive this or that form of spiritual culture, who preach over and over again that this Anthroposophy is so bad because it believes in something new, ought to reflect that it does not depend upon human will that Ahriman fastens himself to the heels of Lucifer. That which came about in the course of evolution in the forms of religion will, because Ahriman mingles into them, go under again through Lucifer. The continuous stream of human evolution will alone be preserved.

In a preceding evolution as we know, certain beings sacrificed themselves by retarded development. These beings live out their karma for our sake, so that we may in a normal way express what these beings can bestow on us. Indeed Jehovah originally poured into mankind by means of the Divine Breath, the capacity for absorbing the Ego. If only that Divine Breath had entered which pulsates in the human blood, without that which leads us away from it; if in fact the luciferic as well as the ahrimanic impulse were not at work, man would, it is true, have been able to attain to the actual gift of Jehovah, but he would not have perceived it with a self-conscious freedom.

Today we may indeed look back upon many disappointments of Lucifer, but we can also look forward to a future in which we may learn more and more to understand what the real current of evolution is. Anthroposophy will be the instrument for the understanding of this and will help us to be more conscious of the influences of Lucifer, more able to recognise it within ourselves, and therefore more able to make good use of it consciously; for formerly it worked but as a dim impulse. The same applies of course to ahrimanic influences.

In this regard I may perhaps call attention to the fact that an important period of human evolution is before us, an age in which soul-forces are reversed. It is an age in which certain persons—very few—will develop capacities different from those recognised to-day. For example, the etheric body of man, besides the physical body can be seen only by those who have undergone a methodical training. But even before the middle of the twentieth century there will be people possessed of a natural etheric clairvoyance, who, since mankind has reached the epoch in which this will develop as a natural gift, will perceive the etheric body as permeating the physical body and extending beyond it. Just as man, once able to see into the spiritual world, has descended to the merely physical perception and intellectual comprehension of the external world, so he begins gradually to evolve new and conscious capacities which will be added to the old ones. One of these new capacities I should like to characterise.

There will be people—at first only a few, for only in the course of the next two or three thousand years will these capacities evolve in larger numbers, and these first forerunners will be born before the end of the first half of the twentieth century—who will have an experience something like the following. After taking part in some action they will withdraw from it, and will have before them a picture which arises from the act in question. At first, they will not recognise it; they will not find in it any relation to what they have done. In the end they will see that this picture, which appears to them as a sort of conscious dream-picture, is the counterpart of their own action; it is the picture of the action which must take place, in order that the karmic compensation of the previous action may be brought about.

Thus we are approaching an age in which men will begin to understand karma not only from the teachings and presentations of Spiritual Science, but in which they will begin actually to see karma. Whereas until now karma was to man an obscure impulse, an obscure desire, which could be fulfilled only in the following life, which could only between death and a new birth be transformed into an intention, man will gradually evolve to a conscious perception of the work of Lucifer and its effect. Certainly only those will have this power of etheric clairvoyance who have striven after knowledge and self-knowledge. But even in normal circumstances men will have more and more before them the karmic pictures of their actions. That will carry them on further and further, because they will see what they still owe to the world—what is on the debit side of their karma. What prevents us from being free is that we do not know what we still owe and so we cannot really speak of free will in connection with karma. The expression ‘free will’ itself is incorrect, for man only becomes free through ever-increasing knowledge, through rising higher and higher and growing more and more into the spiritual world. By so doing he fills himself with the contents of the spiritual world, and becomes in greater degree the director of his own will. It is not the will which becomes free, but man who permeates himself with what he can know and see in the spiritualised domain of the world.

Thus do we look upon the deeds and the disappointments of Lucifer and say: In this way, thousands of years ago, the foundations were laid for that on which we stand; for if we did not stand upon those foundations, we should not be able to evolve to freedom. But after we have enlightened ourselves about Lucifer and Ahriman, we can gain a different relation to these powers; we can gather the fruits of what they have done; we can, as it were, take over the work of Lucifer and Ahriman. Then, however, the acts of which Lucifer is the author, and which have always led to disillusions must be transformed into their opposite when they are performed by us. The deeds of Lucifer necessarily roused desires, and led man into that which could result in evil. If we ourselves are to counteract Lucifer, if we are to regulate his affairs in the future, it will only be the love in us which can take the place of the acts of Lucifer: but love will be able to do it.

In the same way when we gradually remove the darkness which we interweave into external substance so that we completely overcome the ahrimanic influence we shall recognise the world as it really is. We shall penetrate to that of which matter really consists—to the nature of Light. At the present day science itself is subject to manifold deceptions as to the nature of light. Many of us believe that we see light with our physical eyes. That is not correct. We do not see light, but only illuminated bodies. We do not see light, but we see through light. All such deceptions will be swept away so that the picture of the world will be transformed; for necessarily under the influence of Ahriman it was interwoven with error, but hence-forward it will be permeated with wisdom. Man, in pressing forward towards the light will himself develop the psychic counterpart of light—which is wisdom.

By this means Love and Wisdom will enter the human soul. Love and Wisdom will become the practical force, the vital impulse which results from Anthroposophy. Wisdom which is the inner counter-part of Light, Wisdom which can unite with Love, and Love when it is permeated with Wisdom; these two will lead us to the understanding of what at present is immersed in external wisdom. If we are to partake in the other side of evolution, and to overcome Lucifer and Ahriman, we must permeate ourselves with Wisdom and Love, for these elements will flow from our own souls as our offering to those who as the luciferic and ahrimanic powers in the first half of the evolution sacrificed themselves to give us what we needed for the attainment of our freedom. But it is indispensable that we should be aware of the following: Because evolution must be, we must accept the civilisations that are the expression of it. We shall gladly and lovingly devote ourselves to an Anthroposophical culture which will not be eternal—nevertheless we shall accept it with enthusiasm, and we shall create with love what was before created under the influence of Lucifer; we shall, too, develop within ourselves a superabundance of love, without which culture after culture could not be developed. We shall not be under the delusion that everything will last for ever, for by our attitude we shall counter-balance Lucifer's disappointments; we repay to Lucifer consciously the services he has done us and by this repayment we redeem him.

That is the other side of the karma of higher beings, that we develop a love which does not remain in mankind alone, but penetrates right into the cosmos. Love will stream into beings who are higher than we are and they will feel it as a sacrifice. This sacrifice will rise to those who once poured their gifts upon us; just as in early days the smoke of sacrifice ascended to the Spirits, when men still had spiritual possessions. At that time men were only able to send up the symbolical smoke of sacrifice, but in the future they will send up streams of love, and out of the sacrifice higher forces will pour down to men which will work, with ever increasing power, in our physical world as forces guided from the spiritual world. Those will be magical forces in the true sense.

Thus human evolution is the working out of human karma and the karma of higher beings. The whole plan of evolution is connected with individual karma. If a higher being or superhuman individuality in the year 1910 did this or that which was carried out on the physical plane by a human being, a contact is established between them. The person is then interwoven into the karma of the higher beings and human karma is fructified by the universal karma of the world.

Consider Miltiades, or some important personality, who played a part in the history of his nation. This part was necessary to the karma of the higher powers and so each man is placed at his post. Into the individual karma is poured part of the karma of humanity which then becomes his own karma as soon as he performs some action connected with it. Thus do we also live and weave into the macrocosm the individual karma of a microcosm.

We have now reached the end of this course of lectures, although not the end of the subject. But that cannot be helped. I may just add a few words more, namely, that I have given this course of lectures on those very human questions which are able to stir the human heart so deeply, and which again are connected with the greatest destiny, even of the higher beings. When I say that I have given this course really from the depths of my soul and am happy that it was possible for once to speak of these things in an anthroposophical circle, among anthroposophical friends, who have come here from all directions in order to devote themselves to these considerations, these words come from the bottom of my heart. Those who will have the opportunity of hearing further courses, will see that much will be answered of what someone may have in his soul in connection with this course. But those also who will not be able to hear the summer courses, will later have the opportunity to discuss something of the sort with me. And so I may again say on this occasion that I have endeavoured to speak of the things which have been discussed in such a way that they should not be mere abstract knowledge, but so that they should pass over into our thought, feeling and will, into our whole life, so that one should be able to see in the Anthroposophists who are out in the world a likeness and picture of that which we may call the deepest Anthroposophical truths. Let us endeavour to bring ourselves completely to this, for only then shall we have an Anthroposophical movement which in our small circle exists for the study of spiritual knowledge. Then, however, this knowledge must—first of all in the circle of our members—become life and soul to us, and as such pass over into the world. And the world will gradually see that it was not in vain that at the turning-point of the twentieth century there were honest and upright Anthroposophists—people who honestly and straightforwardly believed in the might of the spiritual powers. And when they themselves believed in it, they became filled with the force with which to work for it. Faster and faster will civilisation proceed in our lives, if we within ourselves transform that which we hear into life, into action and into deeds—and not by trying to convince other people. The present age is not yet ready for that. Those only will be convinced who come to Anthroposophy out of the deepest impulse of their hearts; the remainder will not be convinced. We have karma in the mental sphere too, it was something called forth by materialism; and we must look upon these defects as that against which Anthroposophy must show itself to be a spiritual power.

Therefore that which we have to give to the world must be given out of the conviction that it is the most important thing. Each one who has transformed Anthroposophy into an inner force of his soul will be a spiritual source of strength. And whosoever will believe in the super-sensible may be absolutely convinced that our Anthroposophical knowledge and convictions work in a spiritual way, that is to say, they spread invisibly into the world if we make ourselves truly into a conscious instrument, filled with the life of Anthroposophy.

My dear Friends,

We have now to give our consideration to the third experience in the super-sensible world,—the consciousness that holds sway there. But before we can do so, we must first take cognisance of something which everyone possesses but which not everyone takes the trouble to observe, namely, the ordinary consciousness of this world, the consciousness which is centred in the fact that man becomes aware of his ego, becomes aware of himself as a self-existent being having knowledge of the objects and beings around him.

This consciousness is an element in our life which we have to examine with particular care and accuracy, when we are considering occultism. For it is true to say that this consciousness, which we may call an ego-consciousness, is for the occultist that element in his life which he is in the greatest danger of losing when he passes over into the super-sensible worlds. A man who wants to penetrate into super-sensible worlds has to exercise extreme caution on this account, since the loss of this ego-consciousness, the cessation and suppression of it, is as dangerous as it is necessary! Here, you see, we have come again to a contradiction, but I have already told you how inevitable contradictions are in this realm.

If you will reflect a little upon the ego-consciousness, you will see that it is really the ground of your existence in yourself through the fact that you have an ego-consciousness, you are in your soul self-contained. When you are not using your senses, then, except when you are asleep, you must always be as it were together with yourself in your consciousness. The consciousness only sinks down into darkness when you fall asleep.

Now it does not require much thought to perceive that what we are accustomed to call the Divine, or the One and undivided Foundation of the Worlds, cannot be counted as forming part of this consciousness, for man loses this consciousness every evening when he goes to sleep and finds content of it again every morning. Everything he has in it in the evening when he falls asleep remains, and he is able on awakening to take up again the threads of his inner life where he dropped them when he fell asleep. It has all stayed as it was; only, man has had no knowledge of himself while he slept. The one Divine Ground of the World that maintains everything must, therefore, maintain also man's consciousness while he sleeps It must keep watch over man's nature, both when he wakes and when he sleeps.

From this it will be evident that man must necessarily think of the Divine Ground of the Worlds as outside the Earth consciousness within which he himself stands. Consequently man cannot by means of his own consciousness have any knowledge whatsoever of the Ground of the Worlds, This has naturally always meant that since with ordinary Earth consciousness man is unable to approach by his own efforts the things that belong to the Foundation of the Worlds, these things have had to come to him by means of what is called “revelation.” Revelations, and particularly the revelations of religion, have always been given to man, for the simple reason that he cannot find them within his own consciousness, in so far as it is the Earth consciousness. If he wants to establish a relationship with the Ground of the Worlds, if he wants to inform himself about the nature and being of the original Ground and Foundation of existence, he must receive a revelation. And revelation has come, as we know, again and again, throughout the evolution of mankind. When we look back into ancient pre-Christian times, we find many great religious teachers,—such, for example, as were called in the language of Buddha, Bodhisattvas; other peoples knew them by other names. These great teachers came among men and communicated to them what men were unable to discover by means of their Earth consciousness.

The question may here be asked: how did these religious teachers obtain knowledge of the things that lie behind human consciousness? You know very well that there has always been in the world what we call “initiation,” and all great religious teachers have had either to undergo initiation, that is to say, ultimately to ascend for themselves an occult path, or to receive teaching from initiates who have ascended the occult path and have come to a comprehension of the Divine, not with their Earth consciousness but with a consciousness that has gone beyond the Earth consciousness.

This was the origin of the religions of olden times. All the communications and revelations that men received in pre-Christian times from great teachers of mankind go back ultimately to such founders of religion,—initiates who had themselves experienced in super-physical conditions what they communicated to mankind. And in consequence the relationship of a religious man to his God is always of such a kind that he conceives of his God as a Being outside his world, a Being who is beyond and of whom he can by special means receive a revelation.

Unless man lifts himself up to initiation, he must necessarily maintain this attitude. He must feel himself to be standing here on Earth, surveying with his consciousness the things of Earth, and receiving from the founders of religion knowledge of the things that are outside the world of the senses and outside the world of the understanding, in a word, outside the world of human consciousness. This is how it has been with all religions, and in a certain respect we may say it is so still. We know, for example, that Buddhism is to be traced back to the great founder Buddha. And whenever the foundation of Buddhism is spoken of, it is always expressly stated that the Buddha attained to initiation and higher vision while under the Bodhi tree, which is only a particular way of expressing the fact that in the twenty-ninth year of his life he became able to look into the spiritual world and to reveal what he saw and learned.

What exactly is revealed is not for us of very great importance. It varied in accordance with man's need and capacity to receive. Take, for example, ancient Greece. In so far as ancient Greece received its religious ideas through the teaching of Pythagoras, we find again here the consciousness that Pythagoras has undergone an initiation and has consequently been able to bring down from spiritual worlds and incorporate into human consciousness what he saw to be right and necessary for the men who were on Earth at that time.

Such then is the relation of the religious man to the spiritual world; nor can we imagine it otherwise. Man and the divine world stand over against one another. Whether in that world man beholds a plurality of Beings or a unity, whether polytheism or monotheism is taught, need not concern us here. The important point is that man finds himself standing over against the divine world, which must be revealed to him.

This is also the reason why theology has made such a point of not allowing place in religious ideas for knowledge man acquires by himself. Such knowledge could only have been attained by undergoing inner development and rising into the spiritual worlds. It would thus imply a penetration into regions which theology—not religion as such, but theology—is most anxious to exclude from having any influence upon the religious conceptions of mankind. Hence the care that is taken in theology to warn man of two wrong paths that are to be avoided. One is the path that leads to theosophy, where man seeks to develop himself upward to his God, when he should only stand over against his God as a man, and the other, so say the theologians, is the path of mysticism,—although theologians themselves not infrequently make little detours into the regions both of theosophy and of mysticism. But religious people, people who are purely and simply religious, are to be distinguished not only from theosophists, but also from mystics; for the mystic too is quite different from the religious man. The religious man is essentially one who stands here on the Earth and establishes a relationship with a God who is outside his consciousness.

Now there are, as you know, other things in the soul of man besides what we have already touched on today. There is in the soul of man the life of thought, that makes use of the instrument of the brain. Inasmuch as man has his ordinary consciousness, he has of course also his brain and his world of thought. Consciousness cannot be there without them. Playing into what we may call human consciousness, we have the thoughts, the experiences man has when he makes use of the instrument of the brain. Religions have consequently always contained thoughts that employ the instrument of the brain, since one who is a revealer, a founder of a religion, can clothe the divine revelations in forms men will understand by making use of the instrument of the brain. Religion can however also be clothed in ideas which make use rather of the instrument of the heart. Any particular religion, therefore, may speak either more to the brain or more to the heart of man. If we make comparison between the various religions of the world, we find that some speak more to the understanding, to those experiences of man which are connected with the brain, while others speak rather to the ideas and feelings of the heart, appeal to the life of inner perception and feeling. This difference can readily be observed in the several religions. All religions have, however, this characteristic in common, that man maintains intact his ego-consciousness, he remains conscious as man. Here on Earth works the ego-consciousness, and upon it from without works what belongs to the nature of the divine super-sensible world.

All this is changed when a man becomes a mystic. For when a man becomes a mystic, then everything connected with ordinary Earth consciousness is thrown to the winds. What is so carefully guarded in religion, so long as it remains religion pure and simple,—namely, that a man stands on his own feet and confronts the divine world in full consciousness—breaks down in mysticism. Mystics, pre-Christian as well as Christian, have always done their best to break down the human consciousness. Their concern has ever been to take the upward path into the super-sensible worlds, that is to say, to come right out of ordinary human Earth consciousness, to transcend it. That is the characteristic of mysticism. It sets out to overcome ordinary consciousness and live its way into a state where self-forgetfulness supervenes. And then, if the mystic can come so far, self-forgetfulness passes on to self-annihilation, self-extinction. Essentially mystical states, raptures, ecstasies have all of them this end in view, to do away with the limitations of Earth consciousness, to grow out beyond them into a higher consciousness.

It is difficult to form a conception of the nature of mysticism because it shows itself in so many different forms. It will be good if at this point we consider some individual examples.

We will imagine that a mystic, in accordance with what I have just explained to you, feels called upon to suppress his ordinary ego-consciousness, to break it down and get beyond it. He will still have left of course the other experiences of the soul, the experiences man has by the use of the brain and the heart. The mystic tries to extinguish his consciousness, but he does not necessarily at the same time extinguish as well the experiences of brain and heart. The way opens here, as you see, for many different shades of mysticism. Let us consider what varieties are possible.

A mystic can have experiences of brain and of heart, while consciousness is extinguished. Then we can say of him that he goes out of himself in ecstasy, but that we recognise from the thoughts and feelings he still has that he has not obliterated what is thought and felt by the use of brain and heart. To discover mystics who can truthfully be reckoned in this category we have to go rather far back in history. We may find them among those who, after the founding of Christianity, endeavoured to rise to the divine Self with the help of the philosophy of Plato,—Neo-Platonists, that is, such as Iamblichus and Plotinus. In this class too, belongs Scotus Erigena, and if one does not hold too strictly to the definition but admits a mystic in whom the brain experiences outweigh the experiences of the heart, then we may include also Master Eckhart, These will then form class A; mystics who still admit experiences of brain and heart.

A second kind of mystic is one who shuts out not his consciousness alone, but in addition his brain experiences, retaining only the ideas and conceptions that are acquired by use of the instrument of the heart. We generally find that mystics of this order have no love for anything that is thought out. They want to exclude thought altogether as well as consciousness. What the heart can achieve,—that is all they will allow themselves to use for their development. Such mystics, although their endeavour is to overcome human consciousness, to go out beyond it in ecstasy, retain nevertheless a connection with their fellows through the fact that they base their relationship with the surrounding world on the experiences of the heart.

Picture to yourselves a mystic of this type,—an ecstatic whose desire and aim is to come out of himself, who loves to be in a state where he is entirely free from himself! Such a mystic will at once reject anything you set out to communicate to him which requires him to use his brain. He will have nothing to do with it. Whether what you have to say concerns the higher worlds or the world of external nature, it makes no difference; he will in either case reply that there is no need to know all that.

A mystic who is in this way connected with his surroundings through the heart alone is able to be of good service to mankind. But since all the experiences of the human soul he lets speak only the experiences of the heart, he will not find easily accessible the complicated ideas that are acquired on the path of occultism; to receive these one does need to do at any rate a little thinking!

It was a mystic of this kind who, when asked whether he would not like to have a Book of Psalms—for he never read the Holy Scriptures—made answer: “If a man once uses a Book of Psalms, he will very soon want a bigger book, and there is no telling what more he will want when he begins to desire after knowledge in the form of thoughts.” The same mystic had no wish to have thoughts even about Nature. He used to say: “Man can know nothing he does not know already.” With this gesture he put all knowledge from him. Here then was a mystic with experiences of the heart alone, belonging to our second category,—class B.

Now in the case of such a mystic you will find there is a kind of economy of his soul forces In so far as he makes no use of his understanding and his power of thought, to that extent his soul forces are, as it were, husbanded. Consciousness also he puts out of use. All this has an interesting result. For when he is in his ecstatic states, with human Earth consciousness shut off, then because he still perceives around him whatever he can see with his eyes and hear with his ears and so on, and yet does not want to comprehend his surroundings, not thinking there is any necessity so to do, such a mystic will have great forces to spare which enable him to feel in the surrounding Nature all the more.

As mystic, one can protect oneself entirely from theology; but Nature surrounds all mystics. A mystic of this kind however will have nothing to do with any knowledge even about Nature. In this way he saves up the forces he would otherwise use in reflecting upon Nature in thought. He rejects all study of the Science of Nature. But the forces of the heart,—these he uses, and they will be able to develop all the more strongly. He will feel through the instrument of the heart all that the Being of Nature can say to him, and he will feel it more powerfully than a man who uses up his soul forces for his intellect and self-consciousness. Consequently we shall expect to find in a mystic of this type a feeling for Nature that is very positive and very concrete. Such a one did in time past clothe his feeling for Nature in the following words, which I will here read to you, that you may see how, for a mystic of this type, life itself becomes a feeling for Nature.

“Oh, Most High, Almighty, Good Lord God, to Thee
belong praise, glory, honour and all blessing.
Praised be my Lord God! and with all His creatures, and
especially our brother the Sun, who brings us the
day and who brings us the light: fair is he, and he
shines with a very great splendour.
O Lord he signifies to us Thee!
Praised be my Lord for our sister the Moon, and for
the Stars, the which He has set clear and lovely in
the heaven.
Praised be my Lord for our brother the wind, and for
air and clouds, calms and all weather, by which
Thou upholdest life and all creatures.
Praised be my Lord for our sister water, who is very
serviceable to us, and humble and precious and clean.
Praised be my Lord for our brother fire, through whom
Thou givest us light in the darkness; and he is
bright and pleasant and very mighty and strong.
Praised be my Lord for our mother the earth, the
which doth sustain us and keep us, and bringeth
forth divers fruits and flowers of many colours, and grass.”

We have here, as you see, a complete exodus of the soul from self-consciousness, a kind of intoxication of the heart. All is feeling. The poem is saturated with something that the eye cannot perceive (for the writer is a mystic) but the soul can feel. Observe however, it is what the soul feels when it does not yet go so far as to enter into the experience of the Divine in Nature. When this also becomes a part of the experience of the soul, then there can arise that feeling for Nature which is so beautifully expressed by Goethe in his Faust:

“Spirit sublime, thou gav'st me, gav'st me all
For which I prayed. Not unto me in vain
Hast thou thy countenance revealed in fire.
Thou gav'st me Nature as a kingdom grand,
With power to feel and to enjoy it.
Thou Not only cold, amazed acquaintance yield'st,
But grantest, that in her profoundest breast
I gaze, as in the bosom of a friend.
The ranks of living creatures thou dost lead
Before me, teaching me to know my brothers
In air and water and the silent wood.”¹

Here we have an echo of the same feeling, and its mystery has been solved. When we look at the figure of Faust, we can see how this experience becomes a part of his soul life.

To return to the hymn quoted above. It is the hymn of a mystic in whom this one aspect of human experience overshadows all others. He stands in such intimate relation to Nature that the Sun is his brother and the Moon his sister; the water too, he calls sister, the fire, brother, and the Earth herself his mother. This is how he feels the spiritual in Nature. You have here a mystic who comes right out beyond ordinary human consciousness, but at the same time retains all those experiences of the soul which are acquired through the instrumentality of the heart. He is a mystic whom you all know well,—Francis of Assisi.

In Saint Francis of Assisi we have a striking example of a mystic of whom we can actually assert that for this one incarnation he rejected all theology and all knowledge whatsoever, even of super-sensible things. On the other hand we find that on this very account he was able to live in extraordinary intimacy with the spirit of Nature. This was indeed an outstanding feature of his life.

In Saint Francis we have no mere vague pantheism of the spirit,—which has always a trace of affectation about it. He does not just sing rapturously of a universal Spirit in Nature; he sings of definite positive feelings that fill his soul when he encounters the beings of Nature,—filial, sisterly, brotherly feelings.

We must now pass on to a third class of mystics, class C. These are mystics who set out to experience ecstasy—that is to say, the loss or the darkening of self-consciousness—and under certain conditions to shut out also the experiences of the soul which make use of the heart, while on the other hand retaining thoughts, or experiences, of the brain. Such men are often not described in ordinary language as mystics at all, since it is generally expected of a mystic that his experiences shall be permeated with feeling. And it is easy to see why. Think of a man who has driven out of his soul-experiences all his personal self-consciousness. This will mean that there is absent in him the very thing that most people find interesting in their fellowmen,—namely, personality. People are interested in each other on account of their personality. Now experiences of the heart have still so much of the personal about them—for example, in Saint Francis of Assisi,—they exercise still such a compelling influence upon what is human in us, that we are kept awake in our consciousness and we go with such a person with interest,—though not, it is true, so readily with our will. And that is also quite right for ordinary life, especially in the present day; we cannot all be like Saint Francis of Assisi! The universality of the heart, when it manifests as it did in Saint Francis, has a powerful influence upon people, even when the essentially personal element is dulled and darkened. This suppression and extinction of consciousness leads on the one hand, in a mystic like Saint Francis, as you know, to a kind of radicalism in life, and on the other hand it restrains people from imitating him even when their interest is aroused. For as a general rule people are not at all anxious to come out of their consciousness, they are afraid they will lose the ground from under their feet.

But now consider how it might be with a mystic who shuts out all personal consciousness and in addition all experiences of the heart. Such a mystic would give to men nothing but pure thoughts,—thoughts and ideas that make use of the brain alone. No one will easily be able to carry on his life in such a condition. A man may be a Saint Francis as much as he likes, for the experiences of the heart can be helpful to mankind in general. But a mystic who suppresses not only his personal ego-consciousness but also his heart experiences and lives in thoughts alone—thoughts that are bound to the brain—will find it necessary to limit his devotion to this path to particular solemn moments of his life. For life always calls one back, again and again, to the personal element on Earth, and anyone who lived in thoughts alone and used only his brain would not be able to perform any ordinary Earth activity. He can, therefore, only occupy himself in this way for quite short periods; no one can ever use the brain exclusively for more than moments at a time. And as for his fellowmen, and his relation to them, they will simply not concern themselves with him, but will all run away from him! For what interests people most of all is personal experiences; and these he suppresses. And the heart experiences, which work so powerfully upon people, these too he renounces. The consequence is, people will steer clear of him altogether, they will not have the least desire to approach him.

The philosopher Hegel is a mystic of this kind in the true sense of the word. What he gives in his philosophy is expressly intended to exclude every personal point of view and also in addition all experiences of the heart. It sets out to be pure contemplation in thought, and we may accordingly take Hegel as an eminent example of a mystic with brain experiences alone. Such a man leads us up into the purest ether heights of thought. Whereas in ordinary life man is accustomed only to have thoughts that are rooted and grounded in personal interest and in self-consciousness, these are the very thoughts that in a philosophical mystic of this kind are forbidden. And he excludes also what makes the spiritual attractive and desirable, namely, its interplay with the experiences of the heart. He devotes himself in majestic resignation to following the course of the experiences of the brain and these alone. Of all that the human soul can experience, there remain to him only thoughts.

This is the very thing of which so many people complain in Hegel; there is nothing to recall the experiences of the heart, everything is put forward solely and entirely in thought pictures. Most people feel they are left desolate and chill, when they find what they themselves love with their heart crystallised out in cold thought. And the consciousness of self, wherein personality is rooted and whereby man stands fast in earth life,—Hegel has it only as a thought. Of course he devotes consideration to the ego, because it is for him the thought of a particularly important experience. This he does. But it remains no more than a thought picture; for him, human personality is not fired with that living and direct quality which springs from self-consciousness.

We have still one more possible kind of mystic. It would be a mystic who shut out all three,—Earth-consciousness, heart experiences, brain experiences. We would then have as class D, mystics who obliterate all Earth experiences of the soul. You can well imagine, such a thing is extraordinarily difficult to accomplish. For an occultist, it is quite a matter of course; we shall go into that more deeply in the coming lectures. An occultist rises to states where he silences all that is connected with the brain as well as with the heart, in so far as these are composed of Earth forces and in so far as they make use of consciousness. A practical occultist who ascends into higher worlds will regard this step as obvious. But at this point the occultist begins to live and experience in the super-sensible world, and during the time that he is shut off from everything in connection with the world that surrounds man on Earth he has around him the higher world. He steps out of [one] thing into another. A mystic on the other hand who shuts out all these three experiences that make use of the instruments of Earth, would enter into nothing that can fill his consciousness. He does not, of course, step into nothingness, for outside our consciousness is, as we know, the divine spiritual super-sensible world. But he does not enter this world as the occultist does, to whom is then revealed the unspoken word and the super-sensible light; no, he suppresses his consciousness, he suppresses all the powers that are in him, and only feels at last, after suppressing all these human experiences, a sense of being united with something, of being within something.

There begins for him an experience that has the impression, after the extinction of consciousness and all Earth experiences, of a marriage with something that is felt and perceived in a kind of intoxication. The mystic unites himself with it in rapture and ecstasy, but he cannot make any communication about it, because it is not experienced in any definite way, he has no concrete impressions of which he can tell.

We shall see, when we go on to speak further of occultism, into what desperate situation a man would come who eradicated all three kinds of experience—experiences of heart and brain and consciousness. He would become a mystic who underwent the so-called mystic union, but was, in the ecstasy, just like a man asleep, united with the Divine in sleep and knowing nothing of it, not even having a feeling that he has been united with the Divine. If the mystic is to retain any degree of living feeling for his union with the Divine he must at any rate wipe out these several personal experiences in succession.

Now, we have an example of such a mystic, a person who actually trod this path and in her writings even went so far as to recommend it to others. First, she strove with all her powers to overcome personal self-consciousness, to suppress it and extinguish it altogether. There were then left still active within her the powers of the heart and of the intellect. The next step was the conquest of the power of the understanding. Last of all, she overcame the powers of the heart. The fact that the powers of the heart remained with her longest accounts for the extraordinary force and intensity with which she experienced the entry into the world that lies beyond consciousness. The three things were overcome in this order; first the consciousness, then the brain experiences, and last of all the experiences of the heart.

It is characteristic that the one who accomplished this feat with remarkable order and regularity was a woman. As you know, these things must be looked at quite objectively; and when speaking with theosophists I need have no fear of being misunderstood when I say that this path comes easier to a woman. For, as we shall come to understand also from other connections, it is a peculiarity of woman's nature that it is less difficult for her to conquer herself, that is to say, to conquer all her soul experiences. The woman whose experience of mysticism followed the path we have described—extinguishing and eliminating one after the other the experiences connected with brain and with heart, and then experiencing a union with the Divine Spirit which was like a marriage, like an embrace—was Saint Theresa.

If you will study the life of Saint Theresa in the light of our considerations today, you will be prepared to admit that it can only be in very exceptional cases that a mystic comes through on this path. It will much more usually happen that the several soul experiences are not overcome in such utter purity and power as was the case with Saint Theresa, but are only partially conquered, so that some portion of them remains.

This gives us, in fact, three more kinds of mystics. We have those who mean to overcome all soul experiences, but in whom the experiences bound to the brain remain unextinguished. Such mystics are as a rule persons who may be described as wise and practical in the best sense of the word, who know their way about in life, because they make good use of their brain, and who, having to a large extent suppressed the personal element, are in their impersonal character sympathetically received by their fellowmen.

Then there are mystics who also try to overcome all their soul experiences, but have only partial success with those of the heart. Mark well the difference between a mystic of this kind and a mystic like Saint Francis of Assisi. Saint Francis of Assisi made no attempt to overcome the experiences of the heart; on the contrary he retained them in full, and the consequence was, he retained them in perfect health. That is what is so grand and majestic about Francis of Assisi; he enlarged his heart to cover his whole soul. I am not speaking of mystics of this kind, who do not endeavour to overcome the experiences of the heart. I am speaking of mystics who make great endeavours, who wrestle with all their might in this direction, but do not succeed.

In the case of these mystics we do not find that same wonderful kind of marriage with the super-sensible and spiritual which we meet with in Saint Theresa. When a mystic has striven to get free of all that is personal and human and earthly and has nevertheless still retained in conspicuous measure the experiences connected with the heart, then something very much of the nature of human limitations interferes in his striving. And it can actually come about that this marriage, this embrace of the Divine and spiritual, becomes very like the feelings and instincts of human love in ordinary life.

Mystics of this kind abound who, so to speak, love their God and their divine world in the same way as man loves in human life. Look through the histories of the saints and the accounts of monks and nuns, and you will find a great number of this type of mystic. They are “in love” with the Madonna with an altogether human passion. She is for them a substitute for a human wife. Or again, you find nuns who are in love with the Christ as their Bridegroom, they have for Him all the feelings of earthly human love. We have here reached a chapter that is very interesting from a psychological point of view—perhaps more interesting than attractive,—religious mystics who strove after what we have described but were not able to reach it because human nature held them back.

We find mystics—such, for example, as Saint Hildegard—who have good and beautiful impulses but who have also a considerable measure of ordinary earthly instinct and desire, and this taints their mystical feelings and perceptions. They come to an experience that is very like an erotic experience, they come into a kind of mystic eroticism, as you will find if you study the history of the mystics. The outpourings of their heart speak of the “Bride of their soul,” or of their passionate love for the “Bridegroom Jesus,” and so on.

We are the more ready to bear with mystics of this kind, if they have preserved quite a good bit of ordinary human consciousness, and are able as it were to stand aside in their human personality and look on at their own mystical experience. For, as they do this and see that they have not really won the victory but have still something very human left in them, a trace of humour and irony will often enter their consciousness. This gives a personal touch to the whole thing, and we do not dislike them so much; we even begin to feel a sympathetic interest in their unattained conquest of the experiences of the heart. Otherwise it repels one; the whole thing savours of pretence and hypocrisy. For the mystic sets out to compensate for the failure to overcome what lives in ordinary human impulses and instincts in a roundabout way, by asceticism.

If, however, this trait of humour and irony is present, if the person in question has moments when he uses his ordinary human consciousness, turns round on himself and tells himself the truth from the ordinary human standpoint, interspersing in this way his mystical moments with moments when he tells himself the hard plain truth, then we can feel a certain sympathy with him—as we do, for example, when we study such a mystic as Mechthild of Magdeburg.

For there is this difference between Mechthild of Magdeburg and mystics who are like her in other respects, that while she too manifests erotic passion for the Divine and Spiritual, and speaks of her Divine Lover in the same terms as men speak of human love, she expresses herself always with a certain touch of humour. She does not use high-flown language, but speaks in such a way that we can always detect a trace of irony in her words. The difference is very marked between such a mystic as Hildegard who has also not succeeded in overcoming the human personal consciousness, and Mechthild of Magdeburg, who feels herself passionately moved as she comes to the boundary of the Divine, but expresses herself with honest truthfulness and does not call that which still contains erotic passion of the heart by the specious name of “religious rapture,” but calls it quite plainly “religious love,” and speaks constantly of her Lover, her divine Bridegroom.

As you see, there are all manner of shades of mysticism! And even now, we have not so much as touched upon the ancient Greek mysticism which you will find described in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact. We shall have to speak of that later. One thing you will have been able to learn from the kinds of mysticism we have studied today; namely, that the endeavour of all mystics is to make their way out beyond ordinary personal ego-consciousness, to eliminate this consciousness, but that in reality, if man is not then to lose the ground from under his feet, another consciousness must emerge. It is of the nature of mysticism to come to the boundary of the spiritual, to experience the Divine and Spiritual like a kind of marriage, but not to enter into the world of the Divine and Spiritual. The mystic divests himself of the consciousness that requires an external object. His endeavour is to rid himself entirely of this consciousness. What the mystic wants is to go out beyond himself. If however a man wants then to experience consciously the unspoken word and the unmanifest light he must obviously experience them in a new and different consciousness. In other words, if the mystic wants to become an occultist, he must not merely undertake the negative striving, but must centre his attention also on the development of a new and higher consciousness, namely, the consciousness without an object of knowledge. We will speak further tomorrow about this higher consciousness into which the occultist has to enter.

• 1. From Bayard Taylor's Translation.

I am very glad to be able to speak here again after a comparatively long absence. Those of you who were present at our meeting in Munich earlier this year¹ or have heard something about my Mystery Play, The Guardian of the Threshold, will have realised what the attitude of the soul must be if an adequate conception is to be acquired of the content of Spiritual Science or, let us say, of Occultism.

A great deal has been said previously about the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings. The aim of The Guardian of the Threshold was to show that the essential nature of these beings can be revealed only by studying them very gradually and from many different aspects. It is not enough to form a simple concept or give an ordinary definition of these beings—popular as such definitions are. My purpose was to show from as many different sides as possible, the part played by these beings in the lives of men. The Play will also have helped you to realise that there must be complete truthfulness and deep seriousness when speaking of the spiritual worlds. This, after all, has been the keynote of the lectures I have given here. It must be emphasised all the more strongly at the present time because there is so little recognition of the seriousness and value of genuine anthroposophical endeavours. If there is one thing that I have tried to emphasise in the lectures given over the years, it is that you should embark upon all your anthroposophical efforts in this spirit of truthfulness and earnestness, and become thoroughly conscious of their significance in world-existence as a whole, in the evolutionary process of humanity and in the spiritual content of our present age. It cannot be emphasised too often that the essence of Anthroposophy cannot be grasped with the help of a few simple concepts or a theory briefly propounded, let alone a programme. The forces of the whole soul must be involved. But life itself is a process of Becoming, of development. Someone might argue that he can hardly be expected to ally himself with an Anthroposophical Movement if he is immediately faced with a demand for self-development and told that he can only hope to penetrate slowly and gradually to the essence of Anthroposophy; he may ask how he can decide to join something for which he can prepare only slowly. The rejoinder to this would be that before a human being can reach the highest stage of development he already has in his heart and in his soul the sense of truth which has led mankind as a whole to strive for such development, and he need only devote himself open-mindedly to this sense of truth, with the will for truth which lies in the depths of his soul unless prejudices have led him astray. He must avoid empty theories and high-sounding programmes. Man is able to sense truth where it genuinely exists. Honest criticism is therefore always possible, even if someone is only at the very beginning of the path of attainment. This, however, does not preclude him from attributing supreme importance to anthroposophical endeavour.

In our present age there are many influences which divert men from the natural feeling for truth that is present in their souls. Over the years it has often been possible to indicate these misleading influences and I need not do it again today. My purpose is to emphasise how necessary it is—even if there is already some knowledge of occult science—to approach and study things again and again from constantly new sides. One example of what I mean is our study of the four Gospels. This autumn I brought these studies to a provisional conclusion with a course of lectures on the Gospel of St. Mark. These studies of the Gospels may be taken as a standard example of the way in which the great truths of existence must be approached from different sides. Each Gospel affords an opportunity to view the Mystery of Golgotha from a different angle, and indeed we cannot begin really to know anything essential about this Mystery until we have studied it from the four different viewpoints presented in the four Gospels.

In what way have our studies over the last ten or twelve years demonstrated this? Those of you who want to be clear about this need only turn to my book Christianity as Mystical Fact, the content of which was first given in the form of lectures, before the foundation of the German Section of the Theosophical Society. Anyone who seriously studies this book will find that it already contained the gist of what I have since said in the course of years, about the Mystery of Golgotha and the four Gospels. Nothing, however, would be more unjustified than to believe that by knowing the contents of that book you would ipso facto have an adequate understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. All the lectures given since the book appeared have been the natural outcome of that original spiritual study; nowhere are they at variance with what was then said. It has furthermore been possible to open up new ways for contemplating the Mystery of Golgotha, thus enabling us to penetrate more and more deeply into its significance. The attempt has been made to substitute direct experience of the spiritual facts for concepts, theories and abstract speculations. And if, in spite of it all, a feeling of a certain lack still exists, this lack is due to something that is inevitable on the physical plane, namely, the time factor. Hence I have always assumed that you would have patience and wait for matters to develop gradually. This is also an indication of how what I have to say to you during this coming winter should be understood.

In the course of years we have spoken a great deal of the life between death and a new birth. The same subject will, however, be dealt with in the forthcoming lectures, the reason being that during this last summer and autumn it has been my task to undertake further spiritual research into this realm and to present an aspect of the subject which could not previously be dealt with. It is only now possible to consider certain matters which bring home the profound moral significance of the super-sensible truths pertaining to this realm. In addition to all other demands to which only very brief reference has been made, there is one which in this vain and arrogant age is a cause of offence to numbers of individuals. But we must not allow it to deter us from the earnestness and respect for truth that are due to our Movement. The demand will continue to be made that by dint of earnest, intimate efforts we shall learn to be receptive to knowledge brought from the spiritual world.

For some years now the relationship of human beings living on the physical plane to the spiritual worlds has changed from what it was through almost the whole of the nineteenth century. Until the last third of that century men had little access to the spiritual worlds; it was necessary for evolution that only little of the content of those worlds should flow into the human soul. But now we are living in an age when the soul need only be receptive and duly prepared and revelations from the spiritual worlds will be able to flow into it. Individual souls will become more and more receptive and, being aware of their task in the present age, they will find this inflow of spiritual knowledge to be a reality. Hence the further demand is made that anthroposophists shall not turn deaf ears to what can make its way into the soul today from the spiritual worlds. Before entering into the main theme of these lectures I want to speak of two characteristics of the spiritual life to which special attention must be paid.

Between death and the new birth a human being experiences the realities of the spiritual world in a very definite way. But he also experiences these realities through Initiation; he experiences them too if his soul is prepared during his life in the physical body in a way that enables him to participate in the spiritual worlds. Hence it is true to say that what takes place between death and the new birth—which is, in fact, existence in the spiritual world—can be revealed through Initiation.

Attention must be paid to two points which emerge from what has often been said here; they are essential not only to experience of the spiritual worlds but also to the right understanding of communications received from these worlds. The difference between conditions in the spiritual world and the physical world has often been emphasised, also the fact that when the soul enters the spiritual world it finds itself in a sphere in which it is essential to become accustomed to a great deal that is the exact opposite of conditions in the physical world. Here is one example: If, on the physical plane, something is to be brought about by us, we have to be active, to use our hands, to move our physical body from one place to another. Activity on our part is necessary if we are to bring about something in the physical world. In the spiritual worlds exactly the opposite holds good. I am speaking always of the present epoch. If something is to happen through us in the spiritual worlds, it must be achieved through our inner calm, our inner tranquillity; in the spiritual worlds the capacity to await events with tranquillity corresponds to busy activity on the physical plane. The less we bestir ourselves on the physical plane, the less we can bring about; the more active we are, the more can happen. In the spiritual world, the calmer our soul can become, the more all inner restlessness can be avoided, the more we shall be able to achieve. It is therefore essential to regard whatever comes to pass as something bestowed upon us by grace, something that comes to us as a blessing because we have deserved it as the fruit of inner tranquillity.

I have often said that anyone possessed of spiritual knowledge is aware that 1899 was a very significant year; it was the end of a period of 5,000 years in human history, the so-called Lesser Kali Yuga. Since that year it has become necessary to allow the spiritual to come to men in a way differing from what was previously usual. I will give you a concrete example. In the early twelfth century, a man named Norbert² founded a religious Order in the West. Before the idea of founding the Order came to him, Norbert was a loose-living man, full of sensuality and worldly impulses. One day something very unusual happened to him; he was struck by lightning. This did not prove fatal, but his whole being was transformed. There are many such examples in history. The inner connection between Norbert's physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego was changed by the force contained in the lightning. It was then that he founded his Order, and although, as in so many other cases, it failed to fulfil the aims of its founder, in many respects it did good at the time. Such ‘chance’ events, as they are called nowadays, have been numerous. But this was not a chance happening; it was an event of world-karma. The man was chosen to perform a task of special importance and to make this possible, particular bodily conditions had to be created. An outer event, an external influence, was necessary.

Since the year 1899 such influences on the souls of men must be purely inner influences, not exerted so definitely from outside. Not that there was an abrupt transition; but since the year 1899, influences exerted on the souls of men must more and more take effect inwardly. You may remember what I once said about Christian Rosenkreutz—that when he wishes to call a human soul to himself, it is a more inward call. Before 1899 such calls were made by means of outer events; since that year they have become more inward. Intercourse between human souls and the higher Hierarchies will become more and more dependent upon inner exertions, and men will have to apply the deepest, most intimate forces of their souls in order to maintain this intercourse with the Beings of the Hierarchies.

What I have just described to you as an incisive point in life on the physical plane has its counterpart in the spiritual world—visibly for one who is a seer—in much that has taken place between the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. At this time there were certain tasks which it was incumbent upon the Beings of the Hierarchies to carry out among themselves, but one particular condition must be noted. The Beings whose task in the spiritual worlds was to bring about the ending of Kali Yuga, needed something from our Earth, something taking place on our Earth. It was necessary that in certain souls who were sufficiently mature there should be knowledge of this change, or at least that such souls should be able to envisage it. For just as man on the physical plane needs a brain in order to develop consciousness, so do the Beings of the Hierarchies need human thoughts in which their deeds are reflected. Thus the world of men is also necessary for the spiritual world; it co-operates with the spiritual world and is an essential factor—but it must co-operate in the right way. Those who were ready previously or are ready now to participate in this activity from the human side, would not have been right then, nor would they be right now, to agitate in the way that is customary on the physical plane for the furtherance of something that is to take place in the spiritual world. We do not help the Spirits of the higher Hierarchies by busy activity on the physical plane, but primarily by having some measure of understanding of what is to happen; then, in restfulness and concentration of soul, we should await a revelation of the spiritual world. What we can contribute is the inner quietude we can achieve, the attitude of soul we can induce in ourselves to await this bestowal of grace.

Thus, paradoxical as it may seem, our activity in the higher worlds depends upon our own inner tranquillity; the calmer we can become, the more will the facts of the spiritual world be able to come to expression through us. Hence it is also necessary, if we are to participate effectively in a spiritual Movement, to be able to develop this mood of tranquillity. And in the Anthroposophical Movement it would be especially desirable for its adherents to endeavour to achieve this inner tranquillity, this consciousness of Grace in their attitude to the spiritual world.

Among the various activities in which man is engaged on the physical plane it is really only in the domain of artistic creation, or where there is a genuine striving for knowledge or for the advancement of a spiritual Movement, that these conditions hold good. An artist will assuredly not create the best work of which his gifts are capable if he is perpetually active and is impatient to make progress. He will produce his best work if he can wait for the moment when Grace is vouchsafed to him and if he can abstain from activity when the spirit is not speaking. And quite certainly no higher knowledge will be attained by one who attempts to formulate it out of concepts already familiar to him. Higher knowledge can be attained only by one who is able to wait quietly, with complete resignation, when confronted by a problem or riddle of existence, and who says to himself: I must wait until the answer comes to me like a flash of light from the spiritual worlds. Again, someone who rushes from one person to another, trying to convince them that some particular spiritual Movement is the only genuine one, will certainly not be setting about this in the right way; he should wait until the souls he approaches have recognised the urge in themselves to seek the truths of the spiritual world. That is how we should respond to any illumination shining down into our physical world; but it is particularly true of everything that man can himself bring about in the spiritual world. It may truly be said that even the most practical accomplishments in that realm depend upon the establishment of a certain state of tranquillity.

I want now to speak of so-called spiritual healing. Here again it is not the movements or manipulations carried out by the healer that are of prime importance; they are necessary, but only as preparation. The aim is to establish a condition of rest, of balance. Whatever is outwardly visible in a case of spiritual healing is only the preparation for what the healer is trying to do; it is the final result that is of importance. In such a case the situation is like weighing something on a pair of scales: first, we put in the one scale what we want to weigh; in the other scale we put a weight and this sets the beam moving to right and left. But it is only when equilibrium has been established that we can read the weight. Something similar is true of actions in the spiritual worlds.

In respect of knowledge, of perception, however, there is a difference. How does perception come about in everyday life on the physical plane? Everyone is aware that with the exception of certain spheres of the physical plane, objects present themselves to us from morning until evening during the waking life of day; from minute to minute new impressions are made upon us. It is in exceptional circumstances only that we, on our side, seek for impressions and do with objects what otherwise they do to us. This, however, is already near to being a searcher for knowledge. Spiritual knowledge is a different matter. We ourselves must set before our soul whatever is to be presented to it. Whereas we must be absolutely quiescent if anything is to come about, to happen through us in the spiritual world, we must be uninterruptedly active if we really desire to understand something in the spiritual world. Connected with this is the fact that many people who would like to be anthroposophists find that the knowledge we are trying to promote here is too baffling for them. Many of them complain: in Anthroposophy one has to be always learning, always pondering, always busy! But without such efforts it is not possible to acquire any understanding of the spiritual worlds. The soul must make strenuous efforts and contemplate everything from many sides. Mental pictures and concepts of the higher worlds must be developed through steady, tranquil work. In the physical world, if we want to have, say, a table, we must acquire it by active effort. But in the spiritual world, if we want to acquire something, we must develop the necessary tranquillity. If anything is to happen, it emerges from the twilight. But when it is a matter of knowing something, we must exert every possible effort to create the necessary Inspirations. If we are to ‘know’ something, effort is essential; the soul must be inwardly active, move from one Imagination to another, one Inspiration to another, one Intuition to another. We must create the whole structure; nothing will come to us that we have not ourselves produced in our search for knowledge. Thus conditions in the spiritual world are exactly the opposite of what holds good in the physical world.

I have had to give this introduction in order that we may agree together, firstly, as to how certain facts are discovered, but secondly, how they can be understood as more is said of them. In these lectures I shall deal less with the life immediately following death—known to us under the name of Kamaloka—the essential aspects of which are already familiar to you. We shall be more concerned to study from somewhat new points of view those periods in the life after death which follow the period of Kamaloka.

First of all it is important to describe the general character of that life. The first stage of higher knowledge is what may be called the ‘Imaginative’ life, or life filled with true, genuine visions. Just as in physical life we are surrounded by the world of colours, sounds, scents, tastes, mental pictures which we form for ourselves by means of our intellect, so in the spiritual world we are surrounded by ‘Imaginations’—which can also be called ‘visions’. But we must realise that these Imaginations or visions, when they are true in the spiritual sense, are not the imagery of dream but realities. Let us take a definite case.

When a human being has passed through the Gate of Death he comes into contact with those who died before him and with whom he was connected in some way during life. During the period between death and the new birth we are actually together with those who belong to us. Just as in the physical world we become aware of objects by seeing their colours, hearing their sounds and so on, in the same way we are surrounded after death, figuratively speaking, by a cloud of visions. Everything around us is vision; we ourselves are vision in that world just as here on Earth we are flesh and bone. But this vision is not a dream; we know that it is reality. When we encounter someone who is dead and with whom we previously had some connection, he too is ‘vision’; he is enveloped in a cloud of visions. But just as on the physical plane we know that the colour ‘red’ comes, let us say, from a red rose, on the spiritual plane we know that the ‘vision’ comes from the spiritual being of someone who passed through the gate of death before us. But here I must draw your attention to a particular aspect, especially as it is experienced by everyone who is living through this period after death. Here on the physical plane it may, for example, be the case that at least as far as we can judge, we ought to have loved some individual but have loved him too little; we have, in fact, deprived him of love or have hurt him in some way. In such circumstances, if we are not stony-hearted, the idea may occur to us that we must make reparation. When this idea comes to us it is possible to compensate for what has happened. On the physical plane we can modify the previously existing relationship but during the period immediately following Kamaloka, we cannot. From the very nature of the encounter we may well be aware that we have hurt the person in some way or deprived him of the love we ought to have shown him; we may also wish to make reparation, but we cannot. During this period all we can do is to continue the relationship which existed between us before death. We perceive what was amiss but for the time being we can do nothing to make amends. In this world of visions which envelops us like a cloud, we cannot alter anything. The relationship we had with an individual who died before us remains. This is often one of the more painful experiences also associated with Initiation. A person experiences much more deeply the significance of his relation to the physical plane than he was able to do with his eyes or his intellect, but for all that he cannot directly change anything. This, in fact, constitutes the pain and martyrdom of spiritual knowledge, in so far as it is self-knowledge and relates to our own life. After death, relationships between individuals remain and continue as they were during earthly life.

When recently this fact presented itself to my spiritual sight with tremendous force, something further occurred to me. During my life I have devoted a great deal of study to the works of Homer and have tried to understand many things contained in these ancient epics. On this particular occasion I was reminded of a certain passage. Homer, by the way, was called by the Greeks the ‘blind’ Homer, thus indicating his spiritual seership. In speaking of the realm through which men journey after death, Homer calls it the ‘realm of the Shades in which no change is possible’. Here once again I realised that we can rightly understand much that is contained in the great masterpieces and revelations of mankind only by drawing upon the very depths of spiritual knowledge. Much of what will lead to an understanding of humanity as a whole must depend upon a new recognition by men of those great ancestors whose souls were radiant with spiritual light. Any sensitive soul will be moved by the recognition that this ancient seer was able to write as he did only because the truth of the spiritual world shone into his soul. Here begins the true reverence for the divine-spiritual forces which stream through the world and especially through the hearts and souls of men. This attitude makes it possible to realise how the progress and development of the world are furthered. A very great deal that is true in the deepest sense is contained in the works of men whose gifts were on a level with those of Homer. But this truth which was once directly revealed to an ancient, dreamlike clairvoyance, has now been lost and must be regained on the path leading to spiritual knowledge.

In order to substantiate still further this example of what has been bestowed upon humanity by creative genius, I will now speak of something else as well. There was a certain truth which I strongly resisted when it first dawned upon me, which seemed to me to be paradoxical, but which through inner necessity I was eventually bound to recognise.

The spiritual investigation on which I was engaged at that time was also connected with the study of certain works of art. Among them was one which I had previously seen and studied although a particular aspect of it had not struck me before. I am speaking now of the Medici tombs in the Chapel designed and built in Florence by Michelangelo. Two members of the Medici family, of whom no more need be said at present, were to be immortalised in statues. But Michelangelo added four so-called ‘allegorical’ figures, named at his suggestion, ‘Morning’ and ‘Evening’, ‘Day’ and ‘Night’. ‘Day’ and ‘Night’ were placed at the foot of one statue; ‘Morning’ and ‘Evening’ at the foot of the other. Even if you have no particularly good photographs of these allegorical figures, you will easily be able to verify what I have to say about them.

We will begin with ‘Night’, the most famous of the four. In guide-books you can read that the postures of the limbs in the recumbent figure of ‘Night’ are unnatural, that no human being could sleep in that position and therefore the figure cannot be a good symbolic presentation of ‘Night’. But now let me say something else. Suppose we are looking at the allegorical figure of ‘Night’ with occult vision. We can then say to ourselves: when a human being is asleep, his Ego and astral body have left the physical and etheric bodies. It is conceivable that someone might visualise a particular posture which most accurately portrays that of the etheric body when the astral body and Ego have left. As we go about during the day our gestures and movements are conditioned by the fact that the astral body and Ego are within the physical and etheric bodies. But at night the astral body and Ego are outside and the etheric body alone is in the physical body. The etheric body then unfolds its own activity and mobility, and thus adopts a certain posture. The impression may well be that there is no more fitting portrayal of the free activity of the etheric body than that achieved by Michelangelo in this figure of ‘Night’. In point of fact, the movement is conveyed with such precision that no more appropriate presentation of the etheric body under such circumstances can be imagined.

Now let us turn to the figure of ‘Day’. Suppose we could induce in a human being a condition in which his astral and etheric bodies were as quiescent as possible and the Ego especially active. No posture could be more fitting for the activity of the Ego than that portrayed by Michelangelo in the figure of ‘Day’. The postures are not allegorical but drawn directly and realistically from life. The artist has succeeded in capturing as it were for earthly eternity the postures which in the evolutionary process most aptly express the activity of the Ego and the activity of the etheric body.

We come now to the other figures. First let us take that of ‘Evening’. If we think of how, in a healthily developed human being, the etheric body emerges and the physical body relaxes—as also happens drastically at death—but if we think, not of actual death but of the emergence of the etheric body, the astral body and the Ego from a man's physical body, we shall find that the posture then assumed by the physical body is accurately portrayed in the figure of ‘Evening’. Again, if we think of the activity of the astral body while there is diminished activity of the etheric body and Ego, we shall find the most precise representation in Michelangelo's figure of ‘Morning’. So on the one side we have the portrayals of the activity of the etheric body and of the Ego (in the figures of ‘Night’ and ‘Day’) and on the other side the portrayals of the physical and astral bodies (in the figures of ‘Evening’ and ‘Morning’).

As already said, at first I resisted this conclusion, but the more carefully one investigates the more one is compelled to accept it. What I have wanted to indicate here is how the artist is inspired by the spiritual world. Admittedly, in the case of Michelangelo the process was more or less unconscious but in spite of that his creations could only have been produced by the radiance of the spiritual world shining into the physical. Occultism does not lead to the destruction of works of art but on the contrary to a much deeper understanding of them; as a result. a great deal of what passes for art today will in the future no longer do so. A number of people may be disappointed but truth will be the gainer! I could well understand the foundation of the legend that has grown up in connection with the most elaborate of these figures. The legend is to the effect that when Michelangelo was alone with the figure of ‘Night’ in the Medici Chapel in Florence, he could make the figure rise up and walk. I will not go further into this, but when we know that this figure gives expression to the ‘life-body’, the significance of the legend is obvious.

The same applies in many cases—in that of Homer, for instance. Homer speaks of the spiritual realm, a realm of the Shades in which there can be no change or alteration. But when we study the conditions prevailing in the period of life following Kamaloka, we begin to have a new understanding of works of a divinely blessed man such as Homer. And a great deal will be similarly enriched through Spiritual Science.

Useful as it may be to indicate these things, they are not of prime importance in actual life. Of prime importance is the fact that mutual relationships are continually being formed between one human being and another. A man's attitude towards another individual will be very different if he detects a spiritual quality in him or thinks of human beings as pictured by a materialistic view of life. The sacred riddle that every human being should be to us can only be this to our feelings and perceptions when we have within our own soul something that is able to throw spiritual light upon the other soul. By deepening our contemplation of cosmic secrets—with which the secrets of human existence are connected—we shall learn to understand the nature of the man standing before us; we shall learn to silence our preconceptions and to feel and recognise the true qualities of the individual in question. The most important light that Spiritual Science can give will be the light it throws upon the human soul. Thereby sound social feelings, also those feelings of love which ought to prevail between human beings, will make their way into the world as a fruit of true spiritual knowledge. We shall recognise that our grasp of spiritual knowledge alone can help this fruit to grow and thrive. When Schopenhauer said: “To preach morality is easy; to establish morality is difficult”, he was giving expression to true insight. After all, it is not so very difficult to discover moral principles, neither is it difficult to preach morality. But to quicken the human soul at the point where spiritual knowledge can germinate and develop into true morality capable of sustaining life—that is what matters. Our attitude to spiritual knowledge can also establish within us the seeds of a truly human morality of the future. The morality of the future will either be built on the foundations of spiritual knowledge—or it will not be built at all!

Love of truth requires that we acknowledge these things; it requires us to deepen our anthroposophical life; and above all to bear in mind what has been said today as an introductory fact, namely, that whereas knowledge demands activity, action in the spiritual world demands of us inner tranquillity, in order that we may prove worthy of Grace. You will now be able to understand that during the period between death and the new birth, when we are confronting another being, we can realise through the activity we then unfold whether we have deprived him of love or done anything to him that we ought not to have done. But, as I have said, during this period we cannot induce the tranquillity of soul that is necessary if the wrong is to be righted. In the lectures this winter I shall be describing the period during which it is actually possible in the natural course of the life between death and the new birth, to establish conditions in which change can be made possible—in other words, when a person's karma can be influenced in a certain way. We must, however, carefully distinguish between the point of time we have just been considering and the later period between death and the new birth when the tasks are different.

It remains to be said that there are certain conditions which will enable a human being to live through his existence after death in a favourable or an unfavourable way. It will be found that the mode of existence of two or more human beings after the period immediately following their life in Kamaloka depends largely upon their moral disposition on Earth. Human beings who displayed good moral qualities on Earth will enjoy favourable conditions during the period immediately following Kamaloka; those who displayed defective morality will experience bad conditions.

I should like to sum up what I have been saying about the life after death in a kind of formula, although as our language is coined for the physical world and not for the spiritual world, it cannot be strictly exact. One can only try to make it as exact as possible. If, then, there has been a good moral quality in our soul, we shall become ‘sociable’ spirits and enjoy companionship with other spirits, with other human beings or with Spirits of the higher Hierarchies. The opposite is the case if a genuine moral quality has been lacking in us; we then become solitary spirits, spirits who find it extremely difficult to move away from the clouds of their visions. To feel thus isolated as a spiritual hermit is an essential cause of suffering after death. On the other hand it is characteristic of the companionship of which I have spoken, to be able to establish the connection with what is necessary for us. It takes a long time after death to live through this sphere which in occultism is called the Mercury-sphere.

The moral tone of the soul is naturally still decisive in the next sphere, the Venus-sphere; but new conditions then begin. In this sphere it is the religious disposition of the soul that is decisive. Individuals with a religious inner life will become sociable beings in the Venus-sphere, quite irrespective of the creed to which they belonged. On the other hand, individuals without any religious feelings are condemned in this sphere to complete spiritual self-absorption. Paradoxical though it may seem, I can only say that individuals with predominantly materialistic views and who scorn religious life, inevitably become spiritual hermits, each one living as it were confined in his own cell. Far from being an ironical comparison, it is true to say: all those who are supporters of ‘monistic religion’—that is to say, the opposite of true religion—will find themselves firmly imprisoned and be quite unable to find one another.

In this way the mistakes and errors committed by the soul in earthly life are corrected. On the physical plane errors are automatically corrected but in the life between death and the new birth, errors and mistakes on Earth. also our thoughts, become facts. In the process of Initiation too, thinking is a real fact and if we were able to perceive it, an erroneous thought would stand there before us, not only in all its ugliness but with all the destructive elements it contains. If people had no more than an inkling that many a thought signifies a destructive reality they would soon turn away from many of the thoughts circulating in Movements intent upon agitation. It is part of the martyrdom endured in the process of Initiation that thoughts gather around us and stand there like solidified, frozen masses, which we cannot in any way dislodge, as long as we are out of the body. If we have formed an erroneous thought and then pass out of the body, the thought is there and we cannot change it. To change it we must go back into the body. True, memory of it remains, but even an Initiate is only able to rectify it when he is in the physical body. Outside the body it stands there like a mountain. Only in this way can he become aware of the seriousness of the realities of life.

This will help you to understand that for certain karmic adjustments a return into the physical body is essential. The mistakes do indeed confront us during the life between death and the new birth; but the errors have to be corrected while we are in the physical body. In this way compensation is made in the subsequent life for what happened in the previous life. But what must be recognised in all its strength and fallaciousness stands there, unchangeable to begin with, as in the case of things in the spiritual world according to Homer. Such knowledge of the spiritual world must penetrate into our souls and become perception and feelings, and as feelings they form the basis for a new conception of life. A monistic Sunday sermon may expound any number of moral principles but as time will show, they will produce very little change, because in the way they are presented the concepts can have a real effect only when we recognise that for a certain period after death whatever is a burden on our karma will confront us as a direct reality. We recognise the burden but it remains as it is; we cannot change it now; all we can do is to recognise and accept the burden fully and deepen our nature accordingly.

The effect of such concepts upon our souls is that they enable us to have the true view of life. And then there will follow all that is necessary to further the progress of life along the paths laid down by those who are the spiritual leaders of mankind; we shall thus move forward towards the goals that are set before man and mankind.

• 1. From 25th to 31st August, 1912, eight lectures were given with the following general title: On Initiation, Eternity and the Passing Moment. On Spiritual Light and Darkness of Life.
• 2. St. Norbert, c. 1085–1134. In 1121 founded the Order of Norbertines. In 1126 he became Archbishop of Magdeburg.