The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Outer Manifestations of Spiritual Beings in the Elements. Their connection with Man. Cosmic partitions. The Myth of Osiris.

In our last lecture we spoke of various Spiritual Beings who supplement the different Kingdoms of nature that surround us in the physical world. We learnt that minerals and plants have an ego as well as an astral body; and our Spiritual view was enlarged to include a plenitude of realities besides those that our physical eyes can see and that can be comprehended by means of our physical intellect. We learnt, further, that high Spiritual Beings take part in man's evolution on earth; and that as regards individual men a yet higher grade of being takes a hand in this.

Spiritual Science maintains that each separate human being is complete ruler over his inner world, the world of his deeds, and of his will, between birth and death; but we know that the essential inner being of man has passed through many incarnations, and that in his present normal development man is incapable of working beyond one incarnation. Higher powers must co-operate to give the directing force necessary which is able to work, not only between birth and death, but also beyond death, from one incarnation to another. In Christian esotericism these Spiritual Beings are called Angels, and in Anthroposophical parlance Spirits of Twilight; they may also in accordance with Rosicrucian occultism be called the Sons of Life—all these designations will become clearer to you later. We also heard how communities of men—races and peoples—are guided by an order of Spirits called Archangels, or Fire Spirits; and, lastly, how that which goes beyond the limits of a community of people—that which finds expression in the “Spirit of the Age,” or Zeitgeist—is guided by the Archai, also called Spirits of Personality or Original Forces, or, in Theosophical parlance, Asuras. Spiritual Beings are at work everywhere in the world, and we must realize that three more kingdoms have to be added to those immediately around us. We will now try to give some idea of how it is with the more external manifestations of these Beings.

When we consider the earth from the ordinary physical standpoint we see it is made up of what we call earth, water, air, and fire. These are the four primary conditions of external matter. That to which Spiritual Science gives the name of “earth” is called “solid”; everything fluid (not only water but quicksilver, for instance) is called “water”; everything in the shape of gas, “air”; everything that can be perceived as having any degree of warmth is thought of as permeated with a finer substance, this we call “substantial warmth.”

Now the Spiritual Beings of whom we have spoken live in these various material elements, as if in external bodies. To anyone able to observe the world with clairvoyant vision that which is known as the fluidic element, especially water, is not only inhabited by the Beings we know as aquatic creatures, such as fish, but, in spite of the ever-changing substance, in spite of the fact that no solid form endures in this watery element, Spiritual Beings live in it, and are actually embodied in it in continually changing forms, although it is not possible to distinguish them with external vision. In this element live the Beings whom we have described as Angels, or Spirits of Twilight. Their physical body is in a form not represented by any solid, clearly defined corporation; and when old myths and legends tell of such water-beings it is no phantasy, but is entirely in accordance with reality.

Further, in that which we know as “air,” and particularly in our air, those Beings live whom we called Archangels. It is no fairy tale when in streaming currents of air, in the rushing storm, we see the bodily manifestation of this Spiritual Kingdom. (When I said that Angelic Beings dwelt in water it is preferably that form of water which permeates the air as watery vapour—fugitive and fleeting and dispersed in separate atoms, but in which clairvoyant vision sees the embodiment of Angels.)

In that which we know as warmth we have the embodiment of Beings known as the Spirits of Personality or Archai. As man is made up of these four elements: earth, water, air, and fire, he has mingled within him not only the four elements, but also the Beings we have just named; they fill his body to a certain extent, they pass in and out of his physical body just as material substances do.

The series of Beings connected with man is not exhausted with those I have mentioned. Still higher Beings have to do with the earth, the universe, and man, Beings who are at a higher stage even than the Spirits of Personality. There are Beings, for example, who stream towards us in the light for light to us is a still finer condition than warmth. Wherever there is anything that sends forth light we recognize in this light the garment of exalted Beings, those to whom Christian esotericism gives the name of Exusiai, or Powers, or Spirits of Form. It is they who give form to everything around us. Wherever things are seen with a distinct form this is due to the activity of these Spirits.

We now see that what is active in the evolution of our earth as the “Spirits of the different Ages, or Zeitgeists,” is controlled by the Spirits of Personality. The task of the Spirits of Form is still higher. We shall best understand what this is if we reflect that from the beginning of human evolution, that is, from the time when man experienced his first incarnation, the “Zeitgeist” has continually changed, that from among the many Spirits of Personality different ones have been the directors of succeeding ages; but beyond all that is accomplished by the “Zeitgeist” something else is active which goes through the whole of' earthly humanity. Since the mission of mankind first began on earth, Spiritual Beings have taken part in work upon humanity, and it is they we have to thank for the fact that we can be active as human beings. As if from a higher kingdom, the Spirits of Form have ruled from the beginning of the earth over that which appeared as the Spirits of Personality in the Zeitgeist; as Archangels in separate communities; and as Angels in regard to individual men; they are the principal guides and directors of all these Spiritual Beings. These Spirits of Form have the task of working on the earth as a whole, theirs is a planetary activity. Therefore when we go beyond the “Zeitgeist” to the Spirit of the whole of humanity we encounter the Spirits of Form.

Now you are aware that our earth, as a planet, is under the law of re-embodiment, just as man is. Previous to its present embodiment our earth was what is called the ancient Moon. What we now regard as the mission of the earth did not then exist. The mission of the Moon was different; each planetary condition has its own mission to fulfil within the mighty whole; nothing is repeated, everything is under the law of evolution. During that incarnation of the earth which we call Ancient Moon certain Beings had a duty similar to that of the Spirits of Form on the earth, and these are called, according to Christian esotericism, Spirits of Motion, or Virtues, or Dynamis.

If we go back still further in evolution we arrive at a planetary condition of our earth which preceded that of the Ancient Moon; this is, the Ancient Sun condition, which as you are aware has nothing to do with the globe we now see in the heavens as the sun. A very exalted principle ruled upon the Ancient Sun, as the Spirits of Form rule upon the earth, and as the Spirits of Motion ruled upon the Moon, this principle is named in Christian esotericism the hierarchy of the Spirits of Wisdom, called also Kyriotes, or Dominions. These Beings were in command during the Sun condition. We now come to a still earlier planetary condition, that of ancient Saturn and the Beings who at that time superintended the guidance of the world we call the Thrones, or Spirits of Will.

Thus we pass to greater and ever greater grades of' Spiritual Beings, to Beings who are not merely directors of something that changes—like the “Zeitgeist”—but who are concerned with the mission of planetary conditions that change only from planet to planet such as the Thrones, the Spirits of Motion, and the Spirits of Form. All these Hierarchies are continually in some sort of connection with us, although not in such close, directly perceptible connection as the lower Hierarchies. We will try by an example to show how these work into our earthly evolution, but in order to do this it will be necessary first to consider the evolution of the Angels, Archangels, and Archai.

These Beings are all greater than the man of today, but in the next incarnation of the Earth, which we call the Jupiter condition, he will be as great as the Angels are now; and he will continually expand to ever greater degrees of perfection. This is also the case as regards the evolution of the other Beings; they were not always what they are now, they also have passed through lower stages of development.

Take for example the Angels. In earlier times these passed through their human stage as we are now doing on earth; this was on the Ancient Moon, and it was because of the work they carried out upon themselves at that time that they have become the higher Beings they are now. In the same way Archangels passed through their human stage on the Ancient Sun; at that time they were Beings like us; today they have advanced two stages above us. The Archai had their human stage upon Ancient Saturn. They were one stage higher than the Beings who passed through their humanity on the Sun, and about three stages higher than man is today. But those Beings whom we call the Spirits of Form, whom we look up to and reverence as very exalted Beings, passed through their human stage in a past that it is impossible for us to conceive of. When the embodiment of the earth first began, when the earth was Saturn, they had already left their human evolution behind them.

What exaltation must fill our souls when we look in thought up to these Beings! But even they are under the law of evolution, and although on Saturn they were greater than the humanity of today, they rose through ever higher and higher stages of development during the Sun and Moon periods, and on to the time of the Earth, till at last they have attained to such a degree of expansion and have so large a field of activity that they no longer have need of a planet in order, on it, to find the substances through which they can exist.

Other Beings have need of our earth in a certain way; the Angels have need of water, the Archangels of air, and the Spirits of Personality of fire; but the Spirits of Form no longer require our planetary conditions, hence it was necessary for them, when our earth began its development, to find another dwelling-place, and that was why they separated from it. It was no merely mechanical splitting asunder of matter, but heavenly bodies separated off from each other in order to provide a dwelling place for Spiritual Beings.

Spirits of Form tore from the earth its finer substances; in this way the sun originated and now sends its light down to the earth from outside. In the sunlight the spiritual nature of the Spirits of Form streams down to us, hence I said that light is the garment of these Spirits. When we see the bright light of the sun streaming down to us we see in it the garment of these Spirits who send their guiding and directing forces to the earth from the sun, thus controlling the mission of the earth.

We have to think of the Ancient Moon as a heavenly body similar to our earth, that towards the end passed through a spiritualizing process. That which had been split asunder was blended once more, and converted into an undifferentiated condition. It then passed through a kind of cosmic sleep after which there emerged from the womb of the cosmos that nebulous etheric sphere which is the re-birth of the Ancient Moon. For us this is no material mass, but within this globe dwell all those mighty Beings whom we have designated as the Spirits of Motion, of Form, etc. Only the germ of man dwelt in this globe, as yet he had no ego; but all those Spiritual Beings who already had a certain degree of development behind them were intimately connected with this nebula.

How does the materialistic hypothesis explain the rise of the solar system from out this nebulous mass? There is an experiment frequently made in schools to demonstrate the course of this development. A small quantity of oil is placed in the middle of a heavier liquid and rotated by some simple mechanical device. It can then be observed how this globule becomes oblate, how drops break from it, how these form again into globes and circle round the larger globule; by this means we see, in small, how something resembling a planetary system originates through rotation. This acts most suggestively. Why should we not imagine that the same thing took place with the world? We can see demonstrated before us how, through rotation, the planetary system originates, we have it before our eyes. Only one thing is forgotten! Sometimes it is good to forget this one thing, but not in this case; here one has forgotten oneself! In this experiment, if there is no person there to rotate the axis no planetary system can be produced. If one thought rightly and logically one would have to suppose a gigantic human being in cosmic space who set the axis in motion like a mighty spit! Now it is obvious that there is no giant in space; but something else is there, the nebula is not merely matter, it is inspired and permeated by the Beings we have already mentioned who have certain requirements and aspirations.

One kind of these Beings animated one kind of' matter, and others another, and it was these who, when a certain degree of maturity had been reached, undertook to bring about separation, so that the higher beings went forth with the sun, and those who had need of earthly materials and forces remained behind upon the earth. Within this seething primeval body all these Spiritual Beings were active and they gradually formed that which today we know as our planetary system.

There were some, for example, who had not quite attained the goal which was that of the Spirits of Form; they were backward in their development. These Beings had progressed too far to make of the earth their dwelling-place, but were not sufficiently mature to go along with the finer substances to the sun. There were two principal classes of these Beings, and we shall later become acquainted with their effect upon the earth. For in the same way that the perfected and matured Powers shone in the sunlight upon the earth as Spirits of Form, and guided it from the sun, so did these intermediate Beings also direct the earth, but from a smaller horizon as it were, which was, however, an exalted one compared with the human standpoint. It was in this way that Venus and Mercury originated between the sun and the earth; these are inhabited by beings who are at an intermediate stage. The other planets of our system have separated off in the same way through other Beings having need of them as a field of activity.

Now let us again call to mind the time (in the Earthly period) when the sun went forth with its Beings; the earth remaining behind with all its potentialities, present humanity among them, who had not then reached their present stage. There were also other Beings belonging to the animal and vegetable kingdoms that had already gone through a certain amount of development in the previous embodiments of the earth, and these now reappeared germinally.

Let us to begin with consider man alone. Previous to this, when the sun was still one with the earth, mighty forces which proceeded from exalted sun beings were united with the earth, and worked upon man from within it. At first man was just as he came from the Old Moon, he had only just evolved from the seed, as one might say, and was to begin with furnished only with a physical, etheric, and astral body. The physical body was not so dense as it is now, it was more etheric and finer, and the ego was not yet formed.

Now, through the sun shining upon the earth from outside, and the sun-beings also working on it from outside, conditions on earth became completely changed. You can think of it in this way: as long as the earth was bound up with the sun, exalted Beings (who later went forth with it) were hampered in their own development, hence also in their powers, and power to govern—by the gross forces of the earth. But now that they had become free they could continue their evolution at a quite different rate from before, when they had to carry the very heavy weight of the earth mass with them. They freed themselves from the earth as regards their own evolution, and thus gained power to work on man more strongly from outside. Evolution would have been enormously accelerated through this, and human life would have been brought to an issue with extreme rapidity, if something else had not taken place. Man was unable to proceed at this rate of development, therefore from the totality of Spirits who existed previously, one, with his hosts, separated from the rest, and remained united with the earth.

The task of this Spirit of Form was to hold back and limit that which the sun forces had accomplished with their enormous acceleration, so that these sun Spirits did not work alone. If this Spirit of Form had remained connected with the earth and continued to work there, the whole earth would have grown stiff and hard, his influence would have been too powerful; therefore he took the grossest materials and forces and led them out of the earth; that which he thus led out of the earth constitutes our present moon. So this Spirit which had undertaken the duty of retarding and holding back the too-rapid development of humanity was now united with the moon.

Evolution went on the earth-beings and the moon-beings had separated. At this time the earth-beings came principally under the influence of two forces, one proceeding from the sun, the other from the moon. If man had come merely under the influence of the sun forces he would soon have grown old, almost as soon as he was born; whereas, under the influence of the moon alone he would have stiffened, become hard, and mummified. He could only develop rightly through the sun and the moon forces being balanced; he was placed upon the earth and, in a spiritual sense, beings and forces acted on him from outside in order that he might pass through his present evolution.

We have seen how man is led from incarnation to incarnation by the Beings we call Angels; but these Angels have no independence in the vast cosmos, they have higher directors who are the dwellers on the sun. Under the sole influence of these Sun Spirits all man's development would have been compressed into one incarnation; whereas under the influence of the moon alone nothing at all would have taken place. Through the co-operation of these two sets of Beings, that which gives man form he receives from the moon forces, that which destroys form and leads the eternal part of him through his various incarnations he receives from the sun. Thus if we do but consider it all spiritually we see that everything in the world has its appointed task.

We shall now consider for a short time somewhat more concretely what took place at that time upon the earth. We know that when man came over from the ancient Moon he possessed only his physical body, etheric body, and astral body. At the time of the separation of the sun the physical body had not progressed far enough for the sense organs to be able to perceive external objects. These had existed indeed from the time of Saturn, but man could not perceive external objects by them. Upon the ancient Moon man possessed organs which evoked pictures within him. The position at that time was approximately as follows. Imagine that one human being approached another, he could not have perceived the other's external form, but a kind of dream picture would rise within him; and by the form and colour of the picture he knew that an enemy drew near, and that he must flee from him. This was picture consciousness, and had a real relationship to the soul qualities of the Beings in a man's vicinity.

Objective consciousness only came to man gradually on earth. Though the sun as heavenly body was outside the earth, man could not at first see it, he perceived it only in pictures through an inner light. It is true that he did see in a certain sense, in a spiritually psychic way, the beneficial activities sent down to him by the Spirits of the Sun—he perceived these radiating in auric pictures, but they had nothing to do with present sense perception. Thus there was a time when the sun forces sent their light to man, although he could not see the external sun.

The separation of the moon from the earth took place somewhat later, and it was only at the stage of the moon's withdrawal that man was capable of acquiring the very first rudiments of an ego-consciousness, he only then began to feel himself as a separate being; with this came also the power to perceive the first faint loom of physical objects. You can easily understand that sight is connected with ego-consciousness, for as long as one cannot perceive an outer world one is not an ego. Therefore the first flash of ego-consciousness coincided with the first opening of man's eyes to external objects. This was connected also with the going forth of the moon. Previously, when the moon was still one with the earth, it directed the forces of growth of the individual between birth and death—it does so still, but now from outside. But in order that the life of man should not be shut in between birth and death, other forces had to approach him from outside; these were the sun forces. A continual interaction between the moon forces working from within, and the sun forces working from without, was associated with earthly development.

Try to picture vividly and exactly what happened next. So long as the sun was outside, but the moon still within the earth, man perceived the beneficial effect of the sun forces in inward pictures; he sensed the virtue of the sun forces, for these were always associated with the moon forces within the earth-body, and had an effect upon man's constitution although he could not see them. Then came the time when the moon also went forth from the earth. Man's senses were opened, and because of this he lost the power to perceive the soul and spirit part of the sun forces. Imagine the moment when Spiritual perception disappeared and the first beginnings of actual sight with an outer view of the sun began, although in fact man could not yet see the sun, for the earth was covered with dense vapour. As against his former dim clairvoyant perception, man was now able—if only gradually—to see the sun externally, although it was veiled by the density of the atmosphere. The beneficent effects of the sun were now withdrawn from man because of the advance in his development.

When the ancient Egyptian priests remembered this condition they gave the name of Osiris to the forces of the sun, those pure rays which man had perceived at one time through his dim clairvoyance. He now perceived Osiris no longer, and because of the cloudy envelope surrounding the earth external perception of the sun was not yet possible; what man had previously seen was dead. “Typhon the opposer had killed Osiris,” they said, and the forces which were active between birth and death, and as moon had left the earth, now sought that ancient Osiris with longing.

Slowly and gradually the mist receded—it had endured for very, very long periods, even down to the latter part of the Atlantean epoch; men now began to see the sun, but not as previously when all mankind had a common consciousness, the rays of the sun now fell on each individual eye when men gazed on the sun: “the dismembered Osiris.”

We are here concerned with a mighty cosmic event and when we were incarnated as ancient Egyptians we recognized a repetition of this cosmic event. The wise Egyptian priests had this in mind, and they described it pictorially as follows they said, “At the time the moon and the sun went forth from the earth man remained in the middle, balanced between the solar and lunar forces.” Up to that time there had been no sexual reproduction, there was what might be called virginal reproduction. The forces which ruled our earth passed over from the sign of the Virgin, through the Balance, into the sign of the Scorpion. Therefore the priests of Egypt said: “When the sun was in the sign of the Scorpion, and the earth in the Balance, his rays acted like a sting, stinging the sense organs to activity; thus Osiris was slain.” The emergence of external objectivity is the sting of the Scorpion, and came as something new; it was in contradistinction to the old virginal reproduction.

Then began the search, the longing of humanity for its ancient power, for the vision of Osiris.

We must not look merely for astronomical facts in such a myth as the myth of Osiris, but we must see in it the result of the deep clairvoyant insight of the wise priests of ancient Egypt. They embodied in this myth what they knew concerning the evolution of earth and man.

Actual facts concerning the higher Spiritual Worlds lie at the foundation of all myths, and today we have shown how such facts form the basis of the myth of Osiris.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

If we would deepen our thoughts at this time in a manner suitable for the present age, this will best be done in the way indicated yesterday, namely, by looking back over the process of human evolution in order to recognize from the spiritual guidance vouchsafed to mankind hitherto, what tasks devolve upon men today. It must not, of course, be forgotten that the point of salient importance in the Christmas thought is that in the night just beginning the Light of Christ shone into the evolution of humanity at the point of time when through this Event, through this integration, as it were, of the Mystery of Golgotha into earthly life, meaning was given to man's life on Earth, and therewith to the Earth herself.

Yesterday I spoke to you of how in the times before the Mystery of Golgotha an important rôle was played by the festivals that were celebrated in the Mysteries at Midsummer, when man, together with the Earth, opens his being to the Cosmos and when his soul can enter into union with Powers belonging to realms beyond the Earth. We heard how among certain peoples the leaders of the Mysteries, following the path along which, at Midsummer, at our St. John's tide, the human soul can be led into the divine-spiritual worlds, offered up their thoughts and feelings to the divine-spiritual Powers. They did this because they realized that whatever revealed itself to them in the course of the year was exposed to the temptations of the Luciferic powers unless at Midsummer, when the Earth spreads wide her wings into the cosmic expanse, these thoughts were felt to be Grace bestowed by the divine-spiritual Beings.

I went on to show how the evolutionary process brought it about that for a certain section of mankind, the Midwinter festival quite naturally replaced the Midsummer festival. Even in our present vapid Christmas thoughts something is still left of this Midwinter festival. The birth of the Saviour in the Midwinter night is either celebrated in religious communities, or, because a man feels that he must again find the way to the light of the Spirit, he celebrates Christmas in the stillness of his own heart, conscious that at this time of the year he is closest to the Earth and her life when he is alone with himself. For the Earth too, at this time, is shut off from the Cosmos; enveloped in her raiment of snow she lives in cosmic space as a being indrawn and isolated.

Christmas thoughts played a part even in the times when among certain peoples the Midsummer festival was still of paramount importance, but in the pre-Christian era the meaning of the Christmas thought was not the same as it is today. At that time the sublime Sun Spirit still belonged to the Cosmos, had not yet come down to the Earth. The whole condition of the human soul at Midwinter, when together with the Earth man felt himself to be in a kind of cosmic isolation, was different from what it is today. And we learn to know what this condition was if we turn our attention to certain Mysteries that were celebrated mainly in the South in times long, long before the Mystery of Golgotha. Initiation in those Mysteries was conferred upon candidates in the old way, the Initiation-Science of that day was imparted to them. And among certain ancient peoples this Initiation-Science consisted in the candidate learning to read the Book of the World—I do not mean anything that is conveyed by dead letters written on paper, but what the Beings of the universe themselves communicate. Those who have insight into the secrets of the Cosmos know that everything growing and thriving on the Earth is an image of what shines down from the stars out of the cosmic expanse.

A man who learnt this cosmic reading as we today learn the far simpler kind of reading by means of dead letters, knew that he must see in every plant a sign revealing to him something of the secrets of the Universe, and that when he let his gaze survey the world of plants or animals, this survey was itself a form of reading. And it was in such a way that the Initiates of certain ancient Mysteries taught their pupils. They did not read to them out of a book but communicated to them what they experienced under the inspiration of the so-called Year-God concerning the secrets of the course of the year and their significance for human life.

It was in this way that an ancient wisdom related world-beings and world-happenings to what concerned the life of man. When the sages of old communicated such things to their pupils, they were inspired by divine-spiritual Beings such as the Year-God.

Who was this Year-God who belonged to the rank of the Primal Powers, or Archai, in the Hierarchies? Who was this Year-God? He was a Being to whom certain of those who were versed in Initiation-Science lifted their hearts and in so doing were endowed by him with the power and inner light enabling them to read one thing from the budding plants in Spring, another from the ripening of the early fruits in Summer, another when the leaves redden in Autumn and the fruits ripen, and yet another when the trees glitter under the snowflakes and the Earth with her rocks is covered with a veil of snow. This ‘reading’ lasted for a whole year—through Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter; and in this reading the secrets of Man himself were unveiled in the intercourse between teachers and pupils. And then the cycle of the year began anew.

Some idea of what these ancient Initiates taught to their pupils under the inspiration of the Year-God may be conveyed in the following way. The attention of the pupils was drawn, first of all, to what is revealed in Spring, when the snow is over and the Sun is gaining strength, when the first buds of the plants are appearing and the forces of the Earth are being renewed. The pupils were made aware of how a plant growing in the meadows and a plant growing in the shade of the trees in a forest, speak differently of the secrets of the universe. They were made aware of how in the various plants the warmth and light of the Sun speak differently from the cosmic expanse in the round or serrated leaves.

And what could be revealed in this way under the influence and inspiration of the Year-God through the the letters budding forth from the Earth herself, unveiled to the pupils of the teachers in the Mysteries, in the manner of that time, secrets of the physical body of man.

The teachers pointed to the physical productiveness of the Earth, to the force of the Earth shooting into the plant. At every single place on the Earth to which the pupil's attention was directed, there was a different ‘letter.’ These letters—which were living plant-beings, or living animal forms—were then combined as we today combine single letters into words. In sharing thus in the life of Spring, man was reading in Nature. The Initiations bestowed by the Year-God consisted in this reading. And when Spring came to an end, at about the time of the month of May, man had the impression: Now I understand how out of the womb of the universe the human physical body takes shape and is formed.

Then came the Summer. The same letters and words of the great cosmic Logos were used, but it was pointed out to the pupils how under the Sun's rays which stream differently now, under its light and warmth which now work in a different way, the letters change their forms, how the first buds, which had spoken of the secrets of the human physical body, open themselves to the Sun in the blossoms. These many-colored blossoms were now letters used by the pupil; each blossom made him feel how the Sun's ray lovingly kisses the plant-forces springing up from the Earth. And in the wonderfully delicate and tender process of the cosmic forces weaving over the Earth-forces in the blossoming plants, he read the words which conveyed to him how the Earth strives outwards into the cosmic expanse. Man lived in union with the Earth as she opened herself to the Cosmos, to the distant stars, lived with the Earth herself in the infinitudes.

What lay hidden in these infinitudes revealed itself to man as he gazed at the letters which were the blossoming plants. He read out of these letters what the conditions of life had been for the human being who has descended from the spiritual worlds to physical existence on the Earth; how he had gathered together etheric substance from every quarter of the heavens to form his own etheric body. Man was thus able to read the secrets enshrined in this etheric body from everything that was now coming to pass again between the Earth and the Cosmos. The signs of the Cosmic Word are inscribed upon the very surface of the Earth when the plants blossom and particular forms of life become manifest in the animal world at the time of Midsummer.

When Autumn approached, men saw how the letters of the Cosmic Word were again changing. At this time the warmth and light of the Sun are withdrawing and the plants are obliged to have recourse to what the Sun itself has conveyed to the Earth during Summer; in return, the Earth breathes out the blossoming life she has received during Summer but at the same time develops within herself the ripening fruit which brings the cycle of plant-life to completion, inasmuch as the plant bears within it the seed, the forces of germination. Again man was able to unveil what the Cosmic Word inscribes on the surface of the Earth herself in the ripening plants; again he was able to unriddle what the forms taken by animal life in the Autumn can reveal. He read very deep secrets of the universe in the flight of birds, in all the changes that take place in the lower animals and in the insect world as Autumn approaches. The way in which the insect world becomes silent and seeks refuge in the Earth, the changes of form it undergoes—all this conveyed to him that in Autumn the Earth is in process of withdrawing into herself, communing with herself.

This was brought to expression in certain festivals that were celebrated in the latter half of September and have still left traces in country districts in the form of the Michaelmas festival. Through these festivals man reminded himself that when all the paths in the Earth which led out into the Cosmos have failed, he must unite himself with something that is not bound up with the happenings of the physical and etheric worlds, he must turn his soul to the spiritual content of the Cosmos. And even in the kind of festival that is now celebrated at Michaelmas, there is still a reminiscence of humanity turning to that Spirit of the Hierarchies who will lead men in a spiritual way when external guidance through the Stars and through the Sun has lost its power.

Through everything that man read in this way in the Autumn—a reading that was also contemplation—he steeped himself in the secrets of the human astral body. Autumn was the season when those who were initiated and inspired by the Year-God read with him the secrets of the human astral body and contemplated them under his inspiration. It was at this Autumn season that the Initiates said to their pupils: “Hold fast to the Being who stands before the Face of the Sun! (The name Micha-el is still reminiscent of this.) Think of this Being, for you will need the power when you have passed through the gate of death into the supersensible worlds, when you have to go through again whatever has remained in your astral being from Earth-existence.” Secrets of the human astral body were thus drawn from what revealed itself not only in the ripening, but also in the withering plants, and in the insects creeping away into the Earth. Man already knew that if they wished to make the astral body worthy of true manhood, their gaze must be turned to the spiritual worlds. It was for this reason that the souls of those who were candidates for Initiation were directed to the Being whom we can commemorate under the name of Micha-el.

But then came the season at the middle of which is our present Christmas. This was the time when those who were inspired and initiated by the Year-God pointed out to their pupils the mysteries that are revealed when water covers the Earth in the beautiful forms of snowflakes. The reading which in Autumn had already become reflection and contemplation, now became inner, active life; what in earlier seasons of the year had been observation, running parallel with the outer physical world, now became inner spiritual effort and activity. Life was deepened inwardly. Man knew that he can only comprehend the deepest essence of his Ego when he listens to the secrets projected by the Cosmic Word, the Cosmic Logos, into everything that takes place in Nature at the time when the Earth is swathed in her mantle of snow and when life around and on the Earth is contracted by cold. It was incumbent upon those who were initiated and inspired by the Year-God to learn to understand his writing from the indications that were given in the season of Winter. Their observation was sharpened so that it could follow the processes at work in the seeds which had been laid into the Earth, and how the insects hibernate within the closely contracting forces of the Earth. Man's gaze was led from physical light into physical darkness.

There were certain Mysteries where the pupils were told: “Now you must gaze at the Midnight Sun! You must behold the Sun through the Earth. If the eyes of your soul are filled with the power which can follow the plants and the lower animals into the Earth, then the Earth herself will become transparent to your inmost soul.” It is at the time when the Earth's forces are most contracted that man can eventually see through the Earth and behold the Sun as the Midnight Sun, for the Earth is now inwardly spiritualized; whereas at Midsummer, he beholds the Sun with his physical senses when he turns his gaze from the Earth to the Cosmos. To behold the Sun at the Midnight Hour in a deep Winter night was something which the pupils of the Initiates of the Year-God must learn. And it was their duty to communicate the secrets revealed to them by the Midnight Sun to those who were faithful followers of the Mysteries but could not themselves become Initiates or actual pupils of the Mysteries.

And more and more it came about in those ancient times that when the Initiates pointed to the Sun at the Midnight Hour in the depth of Winter, they were obliged to make known to their pupils that man on Earth feels his Ego deserted and forsaken in a certain way. The festival of Midwinter became for those possessed of the greatest knowledge more and more a festival of sadness and mourning through which it was to be brought home to man that within earthly existence he cannot find the way to his Ego, that he must learn from what is to be read in the signs written by the Logos on the Earth in Midwinter, how he with his Ego had been forsaken by the Cosmos. For it was the Earth alone of which he was aware at this time, and that for which the Ego yearns—the power of the Sun—was covered by the Earth. The Sun did indeed appear at the Midnight Hour, but man felt that the strength which would enable him to reach the Sun-Being was continually waning. At the same time, the very fact that man was made aware in this way of the loneliness of the human Ego in the Cosmos, was the prophetic indication that the Sun Being would come to the Earth, would in the course of evolution permeate the being of man, would appear in order to heal a humanity ailing on account of its loneliness in the Cosmos.

Thus even in those ancient times, intimation was given of what was to come in the evolution of man, whereby the Winter festival of sorrow and mourning would be changed—especially among the people of the South—to a festival of inner joy through the appearance of Christ upon Earth. And when this revelation descended from the Cosmos into earthly existence, those who announced the Event declared how to all men on Earth the message had gone forth that the ancient festival of mourning was now transformed into a festival of rejoicing. In the inmost depths of the Shepherds' hearts, where their dreams were woven, the words resounded: “The Godhead is revealing Himself in the Heights of the Cosmos, and peace will spring forth on Earth in men who are of good will.” Such was the proclamation in the hearts of simple Shepherds.

And at the other pole, to those who were the most deeply imbued with magical knowledge, there could come from the surviving relics of ancient Star Wisdom, the message of the entry of the Cosmic Spirit into earthly matter.

Today, when we speak of the Christmas Mystery, we must think of all that is experienced through it against the background of the ancient festival of mourning; we must think of how there has entered into the course of human evolution the power by which man can wrest himself free from everything that fetters him to the Earth. We must be able to formulate the Christmas thought in such a way that we say to ourselves: The inspirations of the Year-God which revealed to the old Initiates how in the depths of Winter the Earth withdraws from the Universe and enters into a time of self-contemplation—those inspirations are still true; man can still understand how the secret of the human Ego is connected with this secret of the year. But out of his human insight, out of his discerning feeling, out of the wisdom of his heart, he can surround himself with pictures of Christ Jesus entering into the life of men on Earth, can learn to experience in all its depths the thought of the Holy Night.

But he will only be able to experience it truly if he also has the will to follow the Christ as He reveals Himself through all the ages. The task of the Initiates of the ancient Initiation-Science was to unveil the mysteries of human nature through a profound understanding of the course of the year. We too must understand what the year reveals but we must also be able to penetrate into the inner nature of Man. And when we do this, anthroposophical Spiritual Science shows us how the letters which are written in heart and lungs, in the brain and in every part of the human organism, unveil the secrets of the Cosmos, just as those secrets were unveiled to men inspired by the Year-God in the letters of the Logos which they read in the budding plants, in the animals, and their manner of life on the Earth. We in our time must learn to look into the inner being of Man—which must become for us a script from which we read the course of human evolution, and then devote ourselves to understanding the meaning and purpose of that evolution. Through deepened vision we must unite ourselves with the spiritual forces that weave through the evolution of humanity. And because this evolution is forever advancing, we must experience the Mystery of Golgotha, the Mystery of the Holy Night, anew in every epoch. We must realize the full depth of meaning contained in words spoken by the Spirit who sought out for Himself the body that was born in Bethlehem on Christmas night: “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the days of Earth.” We must also have a spiritual ear for the perpetual revelation of the Logos through the being of Man himself. Humanity must learn to listen to the inspirations of this God of mankind, who is Christ Himself, as men learned long ago to listen to the inspirations of the Year-God.

Humanity will then not confine itself to contemplation of what is transmitted in the Bible concerning the spiritual sojourn on Earth of Christ Jesus, but will understand that ever since then, Christ has united Himself with man in earthly life, and that He reveals Himself perpetually to those who are willing to listen. Humanity in our time will then learn to understand that just as the Christmas festival once followed the Michael festival of Autumn, so the Michael-revelation which began at a time in the Autumn in the last third of the 19th century, should be followed by a sacred Christmas festival through which men will come to understand the spirit-birth needed along their path on Earth, in order that the spiritualized Earth may eventually be able to pass into future forms and conditions of existence. We are now living in an age when there should not merely be a yearly Michaelmas festival followed by a yearly Christmas festival, but when we should understand in the depths of our souls, out of our own human nature, the Michael-revelation of the last third of the 19th century, and then seek for the path leading to the true Christmas festival—when with increasing knowledge of the Spirit we shall be permeated by that same spirit.

Then we shall understand the words in the Gospel: “I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.” Humanity is so constituted that it is capable of bearing more and more of Christ's teaching. Humanity is not intended only to listen to those who want to hinder progress, who point to what was once written down in barren letters concerning the Mystery of Golgotha, and who do not want the power of that Mystery to reveal itself to men as a living reality through the ages. Today is not the time to listen to those who would like to remain at a standstill in the Springtime of the world, which reveals outer physical nature in its brightest glory, but cannot reveal the Spiritual. Today is the time when the path must be found from the Michael festival to the Midwinter festival, when there should come to pass a Sunrise of the Spirit. We shall never find this path if in the evolution of man on the Earth we surrender to the illusion that there is light in external life, in external civilization, in external culture today; we must realize that in those spheres there is darkness. But in this darkness we must seek for the light which it was Christ's will to bring into the world through Jesus.

Let us then follow, with the same devotion with which the Shepherds and the Magi from the East sought the way to the Manger on that Christmas night—with the same devotion let us follow the signs which can be read in the being of man himself, in letters that are still indistinct, but will become clearer and clearer. Then it will be granted to us to celebrate anew the Christ Mystery of the Holy Night ... but only if we have the will to seek in the darkness for the light.

Today we often call by the name of ‘science,’ not that which explains the world but which instead of bringing light, sheds darkness and obscurity. These darknesses must reach out and take hold of the light!

If men do but try with depth and tenderness of feeling and with strongest power of will to find in the darkness the light of the Spirit, then that light will shine as did the Stars of heaven when the birth of Jesus was announced to the Shepherds and the Magi.

We must learn to place the Christmas thought into the historic evolution of humanity. We have not to wait for a new Messiah, for a new Christ. Much has been revealed to humanity through Nature—which in the course of the last few centuries has been leading men deep into the darkness of matter—and we must wait for what can now be revealed to humanity through understanding of the ever-living Christ Jesus.

We must not fasten the Christmas thought in a conventional yearly festival, but make it fluid and radiant, so that it will shine for us as did the Star at Bethlehem.

It was of this Light, this radiant Star, that I wished to speak to you, my dear friends, on this Christmas Eve. I would like to have done something to ensure that with the will that is inspired in you by anthroposophical Spiritual Science, you will unite that other will to follow the Star which in very truth shines forth to man all through the Holy Night. In deep and intimate stillness to permeate oneself with this Light—that is the deepest and truest Christmas consecration for our time. Everything else is in reality no more than an outward sign for this true Christmas feeling which we can carry over from this Christmas evening to Christmas morning tomorrow. Then this Holy Night can be for us not merely a symbol but a symbol that can become a living force. And we shall also be mindful of how deeply we ought to unite with the spiritual striving that in all good men leads on into the future, and at the same time is the true Christmas striving—the striving towards that Spirit who willed to incarnate in the body born in Bethlehem on the historic Christmas Night.

Perhaps it would be good today to reflect on spiritual-scientific questions that could serve one or the other when it comes to defending spiritual science externally. For precisely when we meet for the first time in a place where, so to speak, a kind of beginning or starting point of the spiritual-scientific movement is to be considered, it is quite good to bring to mind some of the moral questions that often arise for us, , especially when we ourselves are already working in this or that branch and then stand before people who come to us without any knowledge of spiritual science and want to know something that could perhaps lead them to a conviction or at least to an attitude towards spiritual science.

In this case, spiritual science must refer to transcendental, spiritual experience. And just as the message of the spiritual scientific world view is brought to us today, it is a narrative, a narrative of what the spiritual researcher — by making his soul an instrument to research in the spiritual world — can reveal and which has the same certainty for him as the fact that roses or tables and chairs exist for our external perception, that is, an immediate certainty of perception.

But what does that matter to us, who do not have such direct certitude of vision? the others might ask. For us it can only lead to our believing what the spiritual researcher says. Now I have always emphasized that this is not the case. It is true that the things of the higher world can only be known by penetrating into them; but if they are then only logically presented, it is such that everyone can grasp them if he applies his reason in the right way, so that he can say to himself: 'Everything that is said here agrees more with the facts than anything that is said by another philosophy'. We can therefore calmly apply our reason and find that from the logic that underlies things, the matter can already be grasped. It is not so easy, but it does come about that even the non-seeing person can form a well-founded conviction.

Of course, what can be said to outsiders will not be enough for the actual proofs. But if we take certain things that anyone can know and compare them with what the spiritual researcher says, then we can basically get quite far. Let us take just one very elementary spiritual truth: the truth that a person consists of four parts: the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and that which we call the I. Of these four members, the outer world only knows the physical body, and of course everyone is free to deny that there is such a thing as an ether body or an astral body or the I.

One can say: Everyone speaks of the ego; but it is still refuted. The ego is like a kind of flame that is consumed by the fuel of the physical body like a wick. — This is how they wanted to refute the philosopher Bergson, who refers to the persistence of the ego.

But we can see how the ego survives individual perceptions. Every day shows this, since every night the ego is extinguished and cannot be experienced as something that continues uninterruptedly.

One could accept that these supersensible elements can be denied; but there is one thing that a person cannot deny, namely, that he perceives three kinds of inner experiences within himself. One is that he experiences representations in his soul. For everyone knows that when he looks at an object and then turns around and still has the impression of it, he has experienced a representation. The second thing that a person experiences, and which he must distinguish from his perceptions, are the emotions: pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, sympathy and antipathy. And there is a third thing that a person cannot deny: that he has impulses of will.

Let us take the world of imagination: a person can form an idea by letting the world of perceptions take effect on him. He can also form ideas by reading a novel, because a person also has ideas when he reads something. You all know that a person sometimes has it hard and sometimes not so hard in terms of his ideas. The images that a person instinctively likes to indulge in have a different effect than those that they indulge in with distaste or that cause them difficulties. You all know that a difficult calculation has a different effect on the way you think than a novel does. We notice that we become tired from the life of images when it takes effort on our part. This can be all the less doubted since it is a means to fall asleep more easily. It is not necessarily images that particularly irritate us, nor those that worry us, but rather those that are difficult for us. In any case, every person can experience this in themselves: falling asleep relatively easily when they immerse themselves in a world of images before falling asleep, bound by a sense of duty.

Let us now take the emotions. Lust and sorrow, joy and pain, worry, grief and the like are something that can, under certain circumstances, cause us external difficulties at such moments. A person who is severely affected by his emotions will find it difficult to fall asleep. Even joyful experiences will prevent him from falling asleep peacefully.

If you pay attention to such things, you will soon notice that emotions are a greater hindrance than perceptions when going to sleep, and especially emotions that are related to the most intense interests of the ego. If a person is anticipating a particular event, they often won't sleep for weeks. Just try it: an event that is bound to occur with a certain degree of certainty, for example the appearance of a comet – if you are not an astronomer who has an ego interest in it – will keep you awake quite well. Not the astronomer, because he has calculated and is waiting anxiously to see if his calculation is correct.

Now we can look at these emotions from another perspective. We can, in a certain respect, associate sleep with the clairvoyant side of a person. The state of sleep is such that the person is unconscious. Clairvoyance is only: sleep permeated by spiritual light, conscious sleep, if we may define it in this way. It should therefore be favorable for clairvoyant states when one is free of all emotional upheaval, and unfavorable when one is filled with it. This can be confirmed by many things that can also be known externally, for example, in the case of Nostradamus, who in the 16th century was an important clairvoyant of the kind that he had prophetic clairvoyance, so that even pure historians cannot doubt that events that he brought into verse were fulfilled and that, when compared, show that he made quite wonderful statements. Even the historian Kemmerich has recognized this because it cannot be denied. Kemmerich himself says that he had set himself completely different tasks: he only wanted to provide evidence that health conditions for humans have improved since the 16th century. And then he came to deal with Nostradamus.

When we follow Nostradamus, it is interesting to consider his life circumstances. He was a person who possessed such clairvoyant powers that were based on disposition, so that they were found in the whole family. But in his case they came up in a special way because he was a devoted, wonderful doctor. He did great things, especially during a plague epidemic in Provence. But then it was said that he was a secret Calvinist. This harmed him so much that he had no choice but to give up his medical practice. You have to understand what that means! The powers are in the personality after all! Physicists find that when forces dissolve in nature somewhere, they are utilized elsewhere. - Only in spiritual areas, people do not want to know anything about it. If a person develops such powers in his profession, then such beneficially developed as this as a doctor, so must such forces, which are released, manifest themselves elsewhere. And they all turned into clairvoyant powers in Nostradamus, because he had a certain original clairvoyance, as did Paracelsus.

Now, look: Nostradamus describes quite nicely how he came to foresee future events. He had a laboratory. But it was not a laboratory like chemists have. It was a room, a room next to his apartment, with a glass roof. From there he observed the course of the stars, letting the transformation of the constellations affect his soul. And then the things came to him that he could say about the future. It arose as an intuition. It leaped out of his mind. But in order for such things to come to him, he had to be completely free of worry and care and agitation of mind. There we have an example of how, in clairvoyance, just as in healthy sleep, there must be an absence of agitation of mind.

Now let us go further and inquire about the connection between a person and their will impulses, insofar as these will impulses have a connection with the moral. Let us again consider the moment of falling asleep. This is an important moment for a person, because, as spiritual science tells us, this is when they pass over into the astral world.

Let us consider the moral impulses in this moment of falling asleep. In order to observe these, one must pay great attention to such processes. Those people who are so careful make the following experience: So the moment of falling asleep approaches. While before the eye had seen clearly, now the outlines of the objects become more and more indefinite. Something like fog covers them. It is as if the person feels cut off from their surroundings. There is also a change in the physical body in relation to a certain something: one can no longer move the limbs. They can no longer follow a force that they used to follow. Furthermore, the person notices that they feel as if certain things, which must be described as impulses of the will, are being brought to mind all by themselves. The things he has made appear before him as a unity, things he has made in such a way that he does not have to reproach himself. And he feels an immense bliss over everything he has done well. Through good spirits, people are protected from the bad things appearing before their soul. Of course, feeling bliss over the good that has been done cannot occur if no good has been done. But then, people are generally not so bad as to do nothing good.

The person who is paying attention senses how something arises like a thought that remains dark and yet distinct before the soul: Oh, if only this moment could be held on to, oh, if only it could always remain like this! Then a jolt occurs and consciousness is gone.

While good impulses evoke bliss and promote falling asleep, bad impulses hinder it even more than emotions. A person falls asleep with great difficulty over pangs of conscience. Under certain circumstances, will impulses are an even worse hindrance than emotions to enter the spiritual world into which we are to enter. The life of imagination makes it relatively easy, the emotions are already more difficult, and remorse about actions for which we can reproach ourselves is the least likely to let us enter the spiritual world.

Usually, the images, that is, our images, keep watch; as we let the images of the day pass before us, we usually fall asleep quite well. But when sensations are added, they are a less good guard; we fall asleep less well under arousal. But what most guards our sleep, so that we best enter devachan, are the volitions, the volitions that have led us to moral deeds. When in our retrospective view we come to a point that fills us with satisfaction, with moral satisfaction about a good deed in which our will impulse has been expressed, then the moment of bliss is there that carries us over into devachan.

If we pay attention to what spiritual science has to say, we will find that there is already agreement between these observations and what has been found through clairvoyance. For spiritual science tells us: Man belongs to the astral world with his etheric body. Because he belongs to the astral world with his etheric body, he lives in his perceptions as in something that is not inherent in the physical world. The physical world gives us perceptions. But we have to turn away from them, and then we are left with something else: ideas. These are already supersensuous. Man has these ideas because the forces of the astral world reach into his etheric body, so that man stands in a certain connection with the astral world through his ideas. Secondly, spiritual science tells us that emotions are something that is not only connected to the astral world, but also to a higher one; for human beings also have emotions in connection with the lower devachan. Thirdly, spiritual science and all occultism teaches that through the moral work of the will impulses, the human being is connected to the higher devachan world, the world of the so-called formless devachan.

Thus, in man, these three types of soul life indicate three ways of connecting with the higher worlds. Compare what is experienced in ordinary life with what spiritual science says. It is in agreement. Imaginations do not hinder falling asleep, because we have to enter the astral world through them. On the other hand, in order to enter the world of Devachan, we must have such emotions that allow us to enter a higher spiritual world. We cannot fall asleep through such emotions, which make us toss and turn on our bed. The world of moral will impulses signifies our connection with the higher world of Devachan. We will not be allowed to enter there if we do not have such volitional impulses that we do not have to reproach ourselves for. So we cannot really sleep if we have pangs of conscience. We are locked out there. And the bliss we feel when we do a good deed is an outward sign that we are allowed to enter the devachan world. No wonder that people experience this as a bliss in which they would always like to live. They feel so close to the higher devachan world that they would like to remain there. Unless a person is clairvoyant, he cannot imagine these highest states other than as the feeling of falling asleep, which occurs as bliss and moral sensation.

Thus we can show man: You have a soul life within you. What you imagine manifests itself in such a way that it brings you into connection with a higher world, and in such a way that it makes it easiest for you to enter the higher world; it is related to the astral. What the human being lives out in this way is like a shadow of the higher world. Emotions separate us more, because through them the human being is connected to the lower devachan world; will impulses, on the other hand, separate us even more, because they are connected to the higher devachan world.

The whole thing is, however, still connected with other facts: what is most effective after death in Kamaloka are the emotions and moral impulses. Ideas about the sensory world die off, only those of the supernatural can be taken along by the person. On the other hand, our emotions haunt us after death and remain. Because they are what keep us in Kamaloka for a certain amount of time. For example, a person who is very bad would not be able to enter Devachan at all through his remorse between death and a new birth, but would have to reincarnate without it. Without moral impulses he would not be able to ascend to the higher devachan world; he would have to return and make up for it in a short time. Since he had no good emotions, even the lower devachan is closed to him.

Thus we can compare and show that we can gain an insight into the facts of ordinary life, of the ordinary life of the soul, if we explain them in terms of spiritual science.

I would like to tie in with what has just been said another fact that will seem important to you if you turn your spiritual gaze to the fact of the doctrine of reincarnation, of repeated earthly lives. If we incarnate repeatedly on earth, it must have a certain purpose. After all, evolution would serve no purpose if we did not experience something through it! What is the point of reincarnation? Through the facts of spiritual insight, we come to see how very different human life is in different ages. Let us think back to ancient times, when people spoke Greek or Latin and did what was customary at the time! What is required today: that children be sent to school, only came about late. While today we see an illiterate person as an uneducated person, this was not the case in the past. Otherwise, our statistics would have to call Wolfram von Eschenbach, for example, an uneducated person. Something else that is not considered education today was different in ancient Rome, for example: every Roman citizen – even those who plowed their fields – knew exactly the content of the Twelve Tables and much else that was related to the organization of the civil state. The Romans did not need to run to the lawyer for every little thing. – That is one example. If these great differences were known, people would no longer ask why we have to keep reincarnating as children; surely it is not necessary! No, it is not! Each time we return, civilization has changed so much that we have to learn something new. So, we were born in completely different circumstances, and it is absolutely necessary to keep coming back until the Earth has reached its goal.

Now we can best distinguish what a person can become in the successive cultures if we know that the various qualities that have been listed today as an inner soul life gradually develop in the outer culture. In our time, it is characteristic that of the impulses listed, the greatest value is placed on the imagination. We live in a culture of the imagination. The intellect is being developed. In Greek and Roman culture, people did not think so much, but they perceived more than people do today. Something funny, but at the same time something great, is contained in what Hebbel, the playwright, wrote in his notebook: Let us assume that Plato was reborn; then he would become a high school student and would have to read Plato in the Greek language, and the high school teacher is terribly dissatisfied because he does not understand Plato and beats him. - That is what Hebbel wanted to dramatize. Well, on the one hand it is quite comical, but on the other hand it is quite understandable. Because it is true that today the high school teacher represents much more than even the great philosopher Plato in his time. It is just that today, in a certain sense, one looks at the world shortsightedly. Today's farmer thinks more than the Greek philosopher thought. In contrast, in those days the perceptive faculty was much more developed. Man was connected with all of nature. Perception was then the same as what we now call imagination. Today, perception is no longer learned, only by those who undergo training. It is quite possible for someone to get far in what he learns in the laboratory, and yet be very inexperienced outside, unable to tell the difference between wheat and rye. So we can say that people today have a lot of imagination, but in those days they were trained in perception. Thus we can distinguish between two epochs: one of perception and one of imagination. Then a third will follow, through which the movements of the soul will be developed, which today only take place on the side. A person who begins to undergo a certain development must indeed already anticipate what general human culture is to become in later times. He must therefore foster the movements of the soul. It may easily happen that someone begins to develop their emotions towards higher worlds and then, in contact with other people, has the culture of ideas. Then he will observe that one time the right thing is felt, another time the wrong thing. A purely intellectual person will accept what is right and reject what is wrong on logical grounds. It will take a long time before a higher cultural level is reached in which one will feel a sense of pleasure in the face of what is right and a sense of displeasure in the face of what is wrong. This then gives one certainty about true and false being; for what is required is not just a conception of true and false being. We do not need long to prove a matter, for we grasp it in a moment. Today we must prove, develop. Then it will no longer be necessary to prove, but to please. Therefore, when we incarnate again, a soul culture will follow the culture of perception of the Greeks and the culture of imagination of our time. Then another culture will follow in relation to the impulses; then the will impulses will undergo a great education. Those people who will incarnate then will pursue, so to speak, a Socratic ideal. If that were not the case, a person, no matter how clever he is, could be an ideal scoundrel; it would be in vain that Hamlet wrote on his tablet that one can smile and smile and smile and yet be an out-and-out scoundrel.

The era of emotional upheaval is followed by an era of pronounced morality. As occult research shows, this will present itself in a very special way. Let us assume that people become ever wiser and wiser. One can become wise in the way of today's way of thinking. One can even use one's wisdom to stage evil deeds. But strangely enough, in the epoch after next, this will happen: the evil of the impulses of the will will have a paralyzing effect on intellectuality! This will be the peculiarity of the moralistic cultural epoch: immorality will have the power to kill intellectuality. A person in this epoch must therefore develop in such a way that he must follow his intellectuality with his morality. We can therefore say: We have the Greco-Roman culture as a time of the culture of perception, ours as a time of the intellectual. Then comes the time of the culture of feeling and after that the time of the actual morality.

Now it is interesting to observe how an important impulse affects people in these successive cultural epochs. Here we have to refer back to what was said before, that the faculty of perception connects us with the physical, the faculty of imagination with the astral, the emotions with the lower devachan and morality with the higher devachan.

Thus, if an impulse were to reach a person in Greek and Roman times, the person was schooled to perceive particularly what approached from outside. Therefore, the impulse of the Christ event enters the world as an external perception. Now we live in the culture of ideas. Therefore, our cultural epoch will achieve its goal by knowing Christ as something that is perceived from the astral world as an inner idea. He will manifest himself as an etheric form from the astral world. In the next epoch, in the time of the emotions, the human being will particularly express his emotions in order to see the Christ astral. And then in the morality epoch, the Christ will reveal Himself as the highest that man can experience: as an I that shines forth from the upper devachan world.

Thus, the perception of the Christ will also develop further. In his ideas, in his imaginations, man will now perceive the Christ in a natural way.

Thus we see from these representations that man can find a certain agreement between what spiritual science says and what happens in the world, provided that man brings something to it.

These are points that can be touched upon for a local association to answer some of the numerous questions through which man can approach the spiritual world.

Let's imagine that we are in the world into which the Apocalypticer wants to translate men during the next earthly period. He describes his visions of the breaking in of spiritual worlds and of how they will take possession of earthly human beings. He precedes this by three stages which we must become familiar with; three stages,—in a certain sense each of these represents something which must fall before mankind will become worthy and capable of obtaining the spiritual world in a pure form for their working, thinking and feeling.

The first stage is the fall of Babylon; we will call it this to begin with. The second stage is the fall of the beast and his companion the false prophet who spreads the teaching of the beast. The third stage is the fall of the divine counter powers which are usually called Satan. These three stages become quite objective and real in connection with the spiritual perception of future human evolution.

A great deal concerning human evolution will be decided in our century, and one has good reason to direct the eye of one's soul upon these three falls'. For they will break in upon us in a certain form; they will occur after the first appearance of Christ on earth in his etheric body, which is really his second appearance upon earth. And mankind will have to prepare itself and make itself strong enough in order to go through this threefold fall of the adversaries of the Christ impulse without endangering their soul development. We shouldn't forget how precise the Apocalypticer really is, for each time such a fall occurs he lets an angel come down from the spiritual worlds, and we notice something which can give someone who hasn't acquired a spiritual conception of the world a rather strange feeling. He lets the angel who comes down rejoice about the great suffering and terrible things which accompany this terrible fall, and it will be necessary for us to understand this rejoicing. But before we do that let's take a look at the three stages of the fall of the powers who oppose the Christ.

First comes what is called the fall of Babylon. Here we can place the sum of all the errors which men and mankind can fall into through their human nature before our souls. Everything which tends to drag human beings down below the spiritual level at which they really belong is included in what the Apocalypticer calls the Babylonian temptation.

Man is really only a human being—although of course he has to acquire this humanness first, and he can't just have it at every moment in his evolution—man is only truly human if there is a complete harmony between the material and spiritual principles in him, that is, if the material doesn't play up into emotions which are not controlled by the spiritual. This is the important thing and we must understand it quite well, for even the Apocalypticer could not speak the way he does if he assumed that passions, desires and everything which comes from the will sphere was quite unjustified right from the beginning. To say that this is unjustified—this ascetic striving in a false sense—also arises from the sphere of passions and desires, for someone who doesn't feel strong enough to permeate his passions from the spiritual side in such a way, that he places them in the service of good world evolution is indulgencing his weak emotions. He wants the good evolution, but he wants to impoverish it in this way and he wants to indulge his weakness. For the Apocalypticer it's not a question of tearing out emotions or of tearing out passions and desires, it's a question of their not remaining uncontrolled by the spiritual world.

Babylon is the city in which a falling away from spirituality through passions held sway in an almost stereotyped way at a certain period in its mystery development, and everything which represents emotions in human life, which remain out of control on a smaller or larger scale is summarized by this city. Here we should translate the strong, coarse expressions which were used at that time (they weren't coarse then) into our language. The people in ancient times didn't form abstract concepts, they always referred to concrete things, always pointed to something characteristic and looked at concrete things. And so the Apocalypticer speaks of Babylon. Why of Babylon?

Really deep mysteries existed in Babylon or in the mystery centers of Babylon in which one could be initiated into the secrets of the super-earthly cosmos, far out into star worlds, and in which one could learn about starry secrets concerning the star worlds and their spiritual content. The earliest priests in ancient Babylon used human powers of clairvoyance and dreams in a way which we would call mediumistic today; this was the case in ancient Babylon. A wonderful, ancient Babylonian teaching developed in this somewhat mediumistic way. However, as one can also see today, mediums—even though they are suited for spiritual mediations, and they are often used in this way, although the process must be controlled by discerning initiates—have very questionable moral characteristics. Mediums become morally degenerate, and because there is a certain discrepancy between what they reveal and what they are, they can eventually no longer distinguish between truth and lies. Here one gets into a region where morality and immorality are no longer distinct.

You must understand how mediums get into this condition. Someone is a medium if his ego and astral body are pulled out of his physical and etheric bodies by an external force, and this was also what happened at the time of the Babylonian priests. However, another power sits in this ego and astral body as soon as they have been pulled out of the medium's physical and etheric body. Depending on whether the initiate who brings this about has good or bad intentions and belongs to the left or the right, this can be a good power or an evil one. Excellent things came to light in this way in ancient Babylonian times, but the problem was with what occurred when the medium returned to his physical body. You see, one cannot get by in the spiritual world with the logic and discrimination between lies and truth which one has in the physical world. It is a complete error to think that one can use the concepts of lies and truth which one rightly uses in the physical world, in the spiritual world. There is nothing there which one could distinguish in such a way. Some of the beings there are good and others are evil. One has to know them through themselves, and in fact, they tell one the kind of being they are. Even the evil ones are truthful in their own way. Of course this is difficult to understand, just as it is difficult to understand what happens in the spiritual world as soon as one enters it. For instance, here in the physical world we say that a straight line is the shortest path between two points. However, in the spiritual world it is the longest distance between two points and every other one is shorter. So that we cannot apply anything which we have to use in the physical world to the spiritual world.

Hence a true initiate must have the right attitude of soul for the spiritual world, but he must also feel fully responsible for the fact that the moment he returns to the physical world he has to work with physical concepts. A medium cannot do this because he doesn't leave his body consciously. When he comes back again his ego and astral body fill the physical and etheric bodies with a line of thought which is no doubt appropriate for the spiritual world, but it corrupts all moral feelings in the physical world. Hence mediums become corrupted, and the corruption with respect to truth and lies then' extends to other forms of corruption. Hence the fact is that Babylon went through this development from the greatest revelations of spiritual worlds to a terrible corruption; first with respect to the principle of spiritual revelation, and then also with respect to human life in general, so that the previous corruption in the spiritual sphere extended to the latter. This spiritual corruption is very powerful; so that someone becomes more immoral if he becomes corrupt after he has gone into spiritual realms than he did before with his ordinary human tendencies. This is why Babylon was considered to be a representative of moral corruption.

The expressions for corruption which we find here are ones which were in common use. The whole of humanity over the entire earth imitated the Babylonians and thereby became a kind of city of Babylon. And this is what the Apocalypticer means. The city of Babylon is to be found among mankind on earth; it exists wherever human beings have succumbed to the Babylonian temptation. It is this human attitude which must fall before that fin—al condition of which the Apocalypticer speaks can come. And if we investigate what is active in the Babylonian corruption, we find that the Ahrimanic principle is active in it everywhere. Ahriman is sitting in men, and he is a power who stands close to them in the whole world, as it were. He is in our emotions, which thereby degenerate. The Ahrimanic and Luciferic principles are opposite poles. The Ahrimanic element is present in what falls here, as for instance when Babylon falls, and it is opposed to the Luciferic element. What kind of an image must the Apocalypticer use when he sees this? The image of jubilating Luciferic, angelic sentiments. We must be aware of this.

It's a big mistake to look upon the worst world conceptions as the best ones, as for instance the idea about the evil principle being down below and the good principle being in everything which comes to meet it from above. This is not the actual state of affairs. The Ahrimanic principle is down below and one has the Luciferic principle above where the angels are rejoicing about the falls. The rejoicing one hears is the voice of Lucifer which accompanies the diving angels, for the actual Christ principle is the balance between the two.

One can only understand something like what the Apocalypticer is presenting if one understands this threefoldedness in the world's makeup in the right way. For anyone with ordinary human feelings it is completely incomprehensible why pure and good spirits would begin to scream for joy when the misery which is described here befalls other beings. This is of course immediately comprehensible if one sees it as the jubilant cries of those who were basically opposed to the creation of the world in which man experiences his spiritual development. They want to keep his whole evolution on a very different spiritual level. They didn't want that connection or marriage of the spirit with matter which took place in earthly existence. So that when what is grasped by Ahriman is eliminated from earthly existence, what they're really feeling in their souls is: we now have the satisfaction that one part of earth-existence will no longer be continued; it is falling during earth evolution he world view which speaks out of the images which the Apocalypticer describes for each fall is wonderfully honest in this respect.

Now the first one, the fall of Babylon, is all the errors men can fall into when they are also influenced by the initiation principle, it is human perversions. When Babylon falls the remaining human aberrations will be eliminated from further world evolution, at a point in time which we will discuss later. To begin with we will place coming events before our soul in a qualitative way.

The second thing is where man is no longer just involved by himself. The beings who fall with Babylon are men; it is human aberration. However, in the case of the fall of the beast and the false prophet who supports the teaching of the beast, what falls is something spiritual and superhuman, and not something human.

Something which is outside of the human kingdom falls, namely, the beast who breaks in upon human communities, and the one who proclaims the teaching of this beast. Hence one is dealing with something which can take possession of' human beings where something superhuman is working directly in men with an evil impulse, and it's not a matter of a weak nature working, as in the case of a medium. We can add the following to make the Imagination even clearer. All those who will participate in the fall of Babylon will have become degenerate through the fact that they tried to do things which their organization couldn't stand; their organization became weak with respect to these things, and therefore they became corrupt. In the fall of Babylon man's organization acts out of weakness. In the fall of the beast and the false prophet it's not as if a medium became corrupt because he got weak, but it's as if the spirit which overpowers the ego and astral body of the medium during hypnosis would then go into his physical and etheric body and make use of the physical body in order to wreak havoc on earth through the human being.

This is exactly the idea which we encounter here in the Apocalypticer. He wants to say that a time will come when we will see human beings walking around on earth who couldn't stand what really, lay in the Christian annunciation who took the Christ into their souls, but who didn't get to the level of the Christ with their etheric and physical bodies, and therefore became corrupt and devoted to other spirits; but they didn't devote themselves to them with full consciousness, so that they became corrupt. These are the first ones, who are included in the fall of Babylon.

The other ones walk around like men, but their fate is that their human ego is not in them, so that one can no longer speak of them as human beings, for they are possessed by the beast and the false prophet. This will come after the fall of Babylon. There will be people walking around on earth who will be demons, for Ahrimanic powers will act in them directly.

Many of the preliminary conditions for all of these things already exist today; one could say that all of this is already present in a germinal form. After all we already have the terrible case where Ahriman appeared amongst us as an author, perhaps not through a human being entirely, but at least through the temporary weakness of a human being. Nietzsche was a wonderful and brilliant writer, but the Nietzsche individuality was not in him when he wrote the AntiChrist and Ecce Homo. I know this individuality in Nietzsche, and I even described it in my autobiography; but Ahriman becomes a direct author here, and Ahriman is a much more brilliant writer than Nietzsche.

Ahrimanic powers will intervene more and more and Ahrimanic spirits will also use human bodies for other things. A time will come when Christians will have to ask themselves seriously when they meet this or that human being: Is that really a human being or is it a very loose mantle for Ahrimanic spirits? In the future one will have to make this distinction in addition to the other ones one has to make today. This will be the second fall, and the beast and his herald will take possession of human bodies. Thereby these demons will have fallen. So first we have the fall of corrupt human beings and then the fall of certain corrupt spirits, who are close to men. These spirits take a tumble in the second fall.

Then we have the third fall, which is the fall of Satan in the Apocalypse. Here we have a very high being who does a different kind of work than the one which can be done on earth. The beast and the false prophet are powers who lead mankind astray; they want to steer men in the wrong direction in a moral and intellectual respect. However, the power which is meant in the fall of Satan wants something quite different. It wants to throw the whole earth off its course, and not just mankind. Seen from a human, earthly standpoint, this power is a terrible adversary of the Godhead.

One can only ask the following in a hypothetical way, and one can't look at it from the viewpoint of human or earthly evolution, if one doesn't want to commit an intellectual or spiritual sin. If one looks at it from other viewpoints, how does this satanic power in the universe compare with other spirits?

Now Michael has a different standpoint than human beings do, and it's no wonder that his opinion about Satan is quite different from that of men. Human beings tend to be rather abstract, and they think that Satan is an evil power. But he is also a great power from the viewpoints which are important for the earth, a great power that has gone astray. And archangel Michael does not have the rank of Satan, who is at the level of a principality or an archai; Michael is only an archangel. Satan is a very terrifying power from Michael's standpoint and not a despicable one, because he thinks that this power who belongs to the Archai is higher than he is. Except that Michael holds views which are in line with earth evolution.

With respect to everything which is connected with the orbits of the planets, Michael decided a long time ago to travel in the orbits which are prescribed by the sun's existence. Satan is a power who is continually lurking around in our cosmos. There is something sinister about this lurking of Satan. One can perceive this at the moments when one sees a comet shooting through our cosmos, with its different orbit (drawing).

If one draws it according to Copernicus which is not quite correct, although it doesn't make much difference here one has sun, Mercury, Venus, earth, Mars; those are the inner planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune—one can see that such comets have very irregular orbits with respect to these regular orbits. The view that these comets describe long ellipses is nonsense, but we don't have to go into that now. But in any case, the segments of the cometary orbits which lie within our planetary system do not agree with the planetary orbits at all.

And so this Satan lies in wait in order to catch every comet that comes along, and to use its momental inertia so that—when he has collected enough comets—he can throw the planets out of their orbits, and the earth with them. This situation exists in the universe; Satanic powers are continually lying in wait so that they can transform the entire planetary system. Thereby this planetary system would be taken away from the divine, spiritual powers in whose footsteps men should be walking, and it would be taken into quite different directions of world evolution. This intention is a terrible mistake from Michael's point of view, but an intention about which Michael would have to say: I couldn't even do it, for it would be impossible for a being who is in the archangel class to do something like that. Only beings who are in the archai class might have enough forces to carry out something along these lines. Michael—who decided to move in the sun's orbit a long time ago, and who therefore (in the sense of the Ptolemaic system) has become what is known in occultism as an archangel of the rotation of time for the planets and has decided to remain entirely within the orbital periods.

The angels had to decide to remain in these scheduled orbits at some point. In a certain epoch of Atlantean evolution the gods descended into the mystery centers, and one could really perceive that the hosts of archangels which include Oriphiel, Anael, Zachariel and so on, resolved to move within the prescribed planetary orbits. So this came about at a certain time.

However, the mighty hosts which are led by Satan have not made this decision up to the present time and they're still trying to use every cometary orbit in order to give a different configuration to the entire planetary system. Here one is dealing with an adversary of Christ who not only wants to corrupt individual human beings, and who doesn't just want to corrupt groups of human beings like the beast and the false prophet, but we have to do with Satan and his hosts and with direct attacks upon the earth's connection with the planetary system, as it were. This will have to be the third fall. In both of these last two falls we again have the rejoicing of the Luciferic kind of spiritual beings.

One must foresee these things. For the first stage, the Babylonian stage, will have straying human beings who have drawn an aberration into themselves through their physical constitution, so that there is no hope that anything particularly good will become of these walking human bodies over which the ego and astral body have entirely lost control. These bodies must be given up for lost although perhaps not the ego and astral body which belong to them. The former will then go on as such along the karmic paths of humanity. At a particular point in time we see certain men walking around in their bodies, who are men who have succumbed to the Babylonian temptation and whose bodies and what is in them fall out of evolution: the fall of Babylon.

The second thing is that human beings will walk around—one will be able to see this—of whom one will have to say that Ahrimanic power's, are living in them. Here Ahriman is acting directly; this is the beast; the fall of the beast and of the false prophet of the beast, who is a superhuman being and not a man.

The third thing is that one will notice that something about the laws of nature is becoming unexplainable. This will be the greatest and most important experience that people will be able to have, when they notice that something is becoming unexplainable about natural laws and that phenomena are not taking place in accordance with the laws of nature. It will often happen that one will have something which is not merely an erroneous calculation, but is calculated correctly, let's say that a planet should be in a certain place, but it doesn't get there.

Satan will make some first successful attempts to bring disorder into the planetary system. Mankind will have to develop a very strong spirituality in order to counteract this. For the disorder that can be brought about in this way will and can only be harmonized through the strong spirituality of human beings. These are the things which we can foresee today if we place future stages of human and earth evolution before our soul. This is what we see again when the Apocalypticer speaks to us. You should try to feel your way into this coincidence with what can really be gained from Anthroposophy or can gradually be disclosed through Anthroposophy.

For one will be able to speak of comets and one can already speak about them today to the effect that Satan is lying in wait for them in the cosmos, and that he wants to use their orbits to replace cosmos with chaos. For if you take what can be gained through Anthroposophic understanding into yourself and you can discover it again in the Apocalypse, there is something important about this rediscovery. A kind of soul encounter with the Apocalypse and therewith the Apocalypticer himself is present in this; that is important,—thereby with the Apocalypticer himself. For this will be very important, that the priest who is living into the future should increasingly get the longing to meet the Apocalypticer who looked into the future in this way after the Mystery of Golgotha,—the Apocalypticer at any time, regardless of whether he is living on earth or not.

For priests must get the feeling that the help that can come from John, the creator of the Apocalypse, to the one who wants to work in a Christian way that this help is an extremely important one, and one that one needs. However, we will only really be able to accompany John the Apocalypticer if we approach the Apocalypse with the attitude of soul that I described. Then John becomes our ally, and after all he is closely connected with Christ Jesus, he was initiated by Christ Jesus himself, he is an initiate of Christ Jesus. Therefore, he is an important ally. It is tremendously important to come to the Christ through him.

It is really true that a real understanding of the Apocalypse leads deep down into the region where one has the greatest imaginable prospects of meeting John and then the Christ himself. There is a deep truth connected with this and a truth which one can hope will have a very deep aftereffect upon your thinking and feeling, for it is a real priests' truth, that is, a truth which draws a priest into the spiritual realm in a legitimate way. We will continue with this tomorrow.

We have over and over again laid stress on the fact that Anthroposophy is no new thing brought to humanity only in our own times. It is particularly interesting that certain individuals not far behind us in time may be reckoned among those who may be described as Anthroposophists. Besides Herder, Jean Paul, Novalis and Lessing—Goethe steps forth as one of the most prominent. Many will object to this statement, because not much Anthroposophy can be traced in his well-known works. At the time of Goethe it was not possible to give out esoteric truths to all the world. Only in small circles, such for instance as that of the Rosicrucians, could the higher truths be promulgated. Nobody was admitted into this society without proper preparation: but those who belonged to it gave various hints as to its existence, and this Goethe did in many different parts of his works. Only a man filled with the wisdom of Anthroposophy can read Goethe aright. It is impossible for instance rightly to understand “Faust” without this help. The “Fairy Tale” is Goethe's Apocalypse, his Revelations and in its symbolical presentation the profoundest secrets are concealed. We can only understand when we have the key to it, that in this Fairy Tale Goethe revealed his Anthroposophical conception of the world. Schiller asked Goethe to work with him on a magazine called “die Horen” to which Schiller had contributed an article “On the aesthetic education of the human race”. In this the question was put:—“How can a man living in the every-day world preach the highest ideals, and establish communion between the super-sensible and that which belongs to the world of sense?” In a wonderfully impressive way he found words to point out that which to him seemed the bridge leading from the world of sense to the super-sensible world.

Goethe, however, declared that it would be impossible to him to speak of the highest questions of existence in philosophical terms, but that he would do so in a great picture. He then contributed the Fairy Tale, in which he tried to answer his question in his own way, and sent it to the Magazine, “Die Horen”.

Elsewhere too Goethe expressed himself in an absolutely Anthroposophical sense. In his earlier youth he had already concealed his conceptions in Faust. Between his student years in Leipzig and his stay in Strassburg, Goethe received an Initiation at the hands of a man who was himself deeply initiated into the secrets of the Rosicrucians. From that time on, Goethe spoke a mystical Anthroposophical language.

In the first part of Faust there is a remarkable sentence which comes under the introductory notices. It is: “The Sage speaks”. At this time Goethe already had the Anthroposophical idea that there are beings among us to-day who are further on in evolution than man, and form a ladder between him and the super-earthly spheres, although they too are incarnated in bodies.

They have attained to a knowledge reaching far beyond what can be understood by the senses. The passage is as follows:

“The Spirit world is not locked;
Thy mind is closed.
Thy heart is dead!
Up, Disciple, bathe, and cleanse.
Thy earthly breast in Morning-Redness.”

When you become acquainted with Jacob Boehme you find one of the sources (Dawn of the moving Redness, the astral world) from which Goethe created his world of Theosophy. There is much in Goethe which we can only understand when we take it in this sense. In the poem “The Divine”, Goethe speaks of the law which we call Karma, and also speaks of exalted beings:

“Nach ewigen ehern'n
Grossen Gesetzen
Müssen wir alle
Unser's Daseins
Kreise Vollenden.
Heil den unbekannten
Höheren Wesen
Die wir ahnen.”

In accordance with mighty iron laws
We must all accomplish the cycles of our being—
Hail to the unknown higher Beings
Whom we divine!

Volume 2, Page 67 – 68.

Anyone who wants a verbal proof of Goethe's Anthroposophical line of thought, need only read the poem which, under the title “God and the World” is called “Howard's memory”.

When Goethe spoke intimately to those who were in the same Lodge, he spoke of the ideal Divine Beings, which are ahead of man and shone forth to him as a prototype. What he wrote in the poem “Symbolum” for instance was intended for a small circle:

“Doch rufen von drüben
Die Stimmen der Geister
Die Stimmen der Meister.”

The voices of spirits,
The voice of the Masters,
Call from above.

He here speaks openly of the Masters, for he is speaking intimately to his brethren of the Lodge. But he leads us furthest of all in his Fairy Tale of the “Green Serpent and the Beautiful Lily”. Therein we find represented the three kingdoms in which man lives, the physical, the soul-world or Astral world, and the Spirit-world. The symbol of the astral or soul-world is the water. By water Goethe always symbolised the soul, as in his poem “Fate and the Soul”. Book 11, Page 46.

He was also acquainted with the Spiritual realms in which man lives between two incarnations, between death and re-birth; that is Devachan, the Kingdom of the Gods. Man is ceaselessly striving to reach this kingdom. The Alchemists took the chemical processes as the striving after this Spiritual kingdom. They called it “the Lily”, “the realm of the Lily”. And man they called “the Lion” who fights for the kingdom, and the Lily is the bride of the Lion. Goethe indicated this in his Faust, when he says:

“Then a red Lion with the Lily wedded,
A wooer bold.”

Therein Goethe speaks of the marriage of man with the spirit. (“in tepid bath”, the bath of the soul. The soul, the water, the red Lion, man) In the Fairy Tale Goethe also represents the three kingdoms. The kingdom of the senses—as the one shore; the kingdom of the soul—as the river, and Devachan (the Spiritual Realm) as that shore on which is to be found the garden of the beautiful Lily, which to the Alchemists is the symbol of Devachan. The whole relation of man to the three kingdoms is symbolised in this beautiful story. We came across from the kingdom of the Spirit and are striving, to get back there.

Goethe had the Will of the Wisps brought across by the Ferryman from the kingdom of the spirit to that of sense. The Ferryman can bring anyone across, but he may not take them back. We come across by no will of our own, but we cannot get back again in that way. We must ourselves find the way back into the Spiritual realm.

The Will of the Wisps take gold as nourishment, they eat it, and it permeates their bodies. But at the same time they throw it from them on all sides. They wish to throw it to the Ferryman as payment, he says however, that a River cannot bear gold, it would make it surge up wildly. Gold always signifies wisdom. The Will of the Wisps are those who seek after wisdom, yet do not mingle it with their nature, but give it away again undigested. The River is the Soul-life; the totality of human instincts, desires and passions. When wisdom is introduced into that, the soul is thrown out into a state of disturbance. Goethe always pointed out that a man must first undergo Catharsis (purification) before he can take in wisdom. For if wisdom is brought into the uncleansed passions, they become fanatical; and a man then remains the slave of his lower ego. The ascent from Kama to Mana is dangerous, unless at the same time the lower ego is sacrificed. With reference to this Goethe says in his “Westöstlichen Divan”, Book 4, Page 17

A man must be prepared to sacrifice himself. The Will of the Wisps are still in Ahamkara, the slaves of the lower Ego. This wisdom cannot endure. The soul-life must be purified slowly and must ascend slowly.

The Will of the Wisps scatter their gold about in the meadow. There they meet with the Serpent who devours it and unites itself with it. The Serpent has the strength not to fill its Ego with pride, not to allow it to become self-seeking, not to raise itself up in pride to an upright position, but to pursue its way in a horizontal position and to move into the clefts of the Earth and there attain perfection gradually.

A Temple is represented, which is to be found in the clefts of the earth.

The Serpent had already passed in and out of this, and had sensed that mysterious beings are to be found therein. And now comes the Old Man with the Lamp. The Serpent, through the gold it had swallowed, has become luminous, and the Temple is illuminated by its radiance. The lamp of the Old Man has the property of only shining where light is, and it then shines with a very peculiar light. Thus, on the one hand there is the Serpent, luminous through the gold, and on the other the Old Man with the Lamp, which is also a light. Through this two-fold illumination every thing in the Temple becomes visible. In the four corners are four kings; a golden, a silver, a bronze king and one composed of a mixture of them all. Till now they could not be seen by the Serpent, he could only find them by the sense of touch; but they now become visible through their own light. They are the three higher principles of man, and the four lower principles. The bronze king is Atma—the divine Ego; the silver king is Buddhi—the love whereby all men can understand one another, and the golden king is Manas, the Wisdom that radiates out into the world and can take in the radiating Wisdom. When man has acquired Wisdom in a selfless way, he can then see things in their true nature, without the veil of Maya. The three higher principles of man now become visible to the Serpent. The golden king is Manas, for gold always signifies Manas. The four lower principles of man are symbolically represented by the fourth king, who is composed of mixtures. Atma, Buddhi and Manas are drawn into the spheres of Phenomena, but in a state of disharmony. Only when this is purified can something develop which could not live where there was a lack of harmony.

The Temple is the Sanctuary of Initiation, the Mystery school which can only be entered by those who themselves bring light, when they also are selfless like the Serpent. The Temple was one day to be revealed, and to raise itself above the river. That is the kingdom of the future, towards which we are striving, the secret places of learning must be brought up into the light of day. Everything which is man must struggle upwards, must become harmonious, must strive after the higher principles. That which was formerly taught in the Mysteries must become an open secret. The wanderers are to cross the river, must pass from the world of sense to the super-sensible world and vice versa. All mankind shall be united in harmony. The Old Man with the Lamp represents man who can today attain knowledge without climbing to the apex of wisdom, namely to the forces of piety of mind and of faith. Faith requires light from without, if it is really to lead to the higher Mysteries. The Serpent and the Old Man with the Lamp have the forces of the Spirit, which already shines in those who are to lead in the future. Even to-day anyone who feels these forces is aware of this, through certain secrets. The Old Man says he knows three secrets. But the strangest thing is said of the fourth secret. The Serpent whimpers something into his ear, whereupon the Old Man calls out, “The time has come when a great number of people shall understand which is the right road. The Serpent has proclaimed that it is ready to sacrifice itself. It has reached the point of recognising that man must die, in order to become.” (‘Denn so lang du das nicht hast, dieses stirb and werde’) (As long as thou hast not, this ‘dying and becoming’!)

To become”, in order in the fullest sense of the word “to be”; that man can only accomplish through love, devotion and sacrifice. The Serpent is ready for this. This will be made manifest, when man is ready for this sacrifice, then the Temple will be raised above the river.

The Will of the Wisps were not able to pay their debt; they had to promise the Ferryman to settle it later. The river received three of the fruits of the Earth; three cabbages, three onions and three artichokes. The Will of the Wisps go to the Wife of the Old Man and there they behave in a very curious manner; they licked the gold off the walls. They wanted to stuff themselves with wisdom in order to be able to give it forth again. Mops eats the gold and dies; for everything living must die of it; he cannot take in the truth and transmute it as does the Serpent, and therefore it is death-giving. The Old Woman had to promise the Will of the Wisps to settle their debts with the Ferryman. When the Old Man with the Lamp comes home he sees what has occurred. He tells the Old Woman she must keep her promise, but must also carry the dead Mops to the beautiful Lily, for she can bring all dead things to life. The Old Woman goes with her basket to the Ferryman:—on the way she has two remarkable experiences. She meets the great Giant, whose peculiarity is that in the evening he throws his shadow across the River so that the wanderer can pass over on it. Besides this the way is also passable when at the noonday hour the Serpent ramps across the river. The Giant can make a bridge across, but when the Sun is at its highest point, the Serpent can do so too; when through the radiant Sun of knowledge man raises his Ego to the Divine. In the sacred moments of life, at the moments of the complete blotting out of self, man unites himself with the Godhead.

The Giant is the rude physical development along which man must necessarily pass. In so doing he also reaches the yonder realm, but only in the twilight, when his consciousness is blotted out. That however is a dangerous path, which is followed by those who develop psychic forces and go into states of trance. This crossing of the bridge is accomplished in the twilight of trance. Schiller also wrote on one occasion about the Shadow of the Giant: “These are the dark powers which lead man across the Threshold.”

When the Old Woman passes him by, the giant takes from her one cabbage, one onion, and one artichoke, so that she only retained a part of that with which she was to pay the debt of the Will of the Wisps. The three-fold number is thus no longer complete. That which we require and which we must weave into our soul-life is taken from us by the twilight forces. There is danger in yielding oneself to such forces. The lower forces must be purified by the soul-forces, the body itself can only ascend when the soul completely absorbs it. Everything which encloses an inner kernel as in a shell, is a symbol for the sheaths of man. Indian allegory describes these sheaths as the petals of the lotus flower. The physical nature of man must be purified in its shell. We must pay our debts, and yield our lower principle to the soul-life. We have expressed the paying of this debt by saying that payment must be made to the river. That is the whole course of Karma. As the payment of the Old Woman was insufficient, she had to plunge her hand into the river; after that she could only feel her hand, but could no longer see it. That which in man's external, physical appearance, that which is visible in him, is the body. That must be purified by the Soul-life. This means that if man cannot pay with the plant-nature, he remains in debt. Then the actual bodily nature of man becomes invisible; because the Old Woman was not able to pay her debt she becomes invisible. The Ego can only be seen in the light of day, when purified by the soul-life;—“Oh, my hand, the loveliest part of me” The very part of man which distinguishes him from the animals. That which as spirit shines through him—becomes invisible if it is not purified by his Karma.

The beautiful youth who strove after the kingdom of the Lily (Spirituality) was crippled by her.

Goethe by this meant the ancient Wisdom, for which man must be prepared and purified and have undergone Katharsis, so that he should no longer reach Wisdom through sin but might take into himself the higher Spirituality. The youth had not been prepared by Katharsis. Every living thing which is not yet mature, is killed by the Lily. All the dead that have passed through “Stirb und Werde”, “Dying and Becoming”, are brought to life again by the Lily. Now Goethe says that one who has attained freedom within himself, is ripe for freedom. Jacob Boehme too says that man must develop himself out of his lower principle. He who does not do this before he dies, is destroyed at death. Man must first mature and be purified, before he can enter the kingdom of the Spirit (The Lily). In the old Mysteries a man had to go through various stages of purification before he could become a Mystic. The Youth too had first to pass through these stages, and he is guided through them by the Lily. The Serpent signifies development. We see the Lily gathering those together who are seeking the new way, all those who are striving after the Spiritual. But the Temple must first be lifted up above the river. They all move towards the River, the Will of the Wisps are in front and they open the door. The self-seeking Wisdom is the bridge to the selfless Wisdom. Wisdom leads a man through self to selflessness. The Serpent sacrificed itself. And now we understand the meaning of love, it is a Sacrifice of the lower self for the good of humanity, of complete brotherhood. The whole company moves towards the Temple, which rises above the river. The youth is brought to life again. He is furnished with Atma, Buddhi, Manas; Atma, in the form of the Bronze King, appears before him and gives him a sword. This represents the higher will, and is not connected with the lower will. Atma is so to work in man that the sword shall be on his left and the right hand free, till then man works separately;—the War of all against all. But when man is purified, peace comes instead of war. Only when man is purified will peace take the place of War; the sword will then be worn on the left side, for defence only, leaving the right hand free for well-doing.

The second King signifies that which at one time was known as the second principle. Buddhi (Piety, the mood in which a man turns in faith to the highest). Silver in the symbol of piety. The second King says “Feed my sheep”, for here we are concerned with the force of the spirit. The radiance here is that of Beauty. Goethe connected with art a feeling of religious reverence. He saw in it the manifestation of the Divine of the kingdom; the beautiful radiance, the realm of piety. The Bronze King signifies strength without the lower principles, the Silver King signifies peace, and the Golden King Wisdom. He says “Recognise the highest” The youth is the four principled man, who is developing his higher principles. The four lower ones are crippled by the spirit until they have undergone the purifying development; after that the three higher principles work together harmoniously in Man. He then becomes strong and able, and may mate with the Lily. That is the union between the soul and the spirit of man. The soul is always represented as something feminine in man. The Mystery of the eternal and immortal is here represented. “The eternal feminine draws us along”. Goethe makes use of the same image in his story, in the union of the Youth with the beautiful Lily. Now the sacrificed human self and all living, pass over the bridge that arches across the river. Wanderers go to and fro and all the kingdoms are now united in beautiful harmony. The Old Woman grows young, and the Old Man with the Lamp is rejuvenated; old age has passed away and everything has become new.

The Ferryman's little hut has been gilded over, and is now preserved as a sort of Altar in the Temple. What man formerly took over unconsciously, he now takes over in full consciousness. The king of many parts has collapsed. The Will of the Wisps lick the gold out of him, for that is still connected with the lower. The Giant now indicates the time. What formerly were the sense-principles (which can only lead into the shadows) which lead man across in the hour of twilight and belong to the things of sense, to nature-conditions, now points to the even and regular course of time. As long as man has not developed the three higher principles, the past and the future are in conflict. The giant then works inharmoniously. Now, through these ideal conditions, time is in harmony. Thought permanently strengthens that which was wavering, and makes it steady.

“Was im schwankende Erscheinung lebt
Befestigt mil dauernden Gedanken”.

What lives in transient phenomena
Is justified by lasting thoughts.

Faust, Prologue in Heaven.

That which in the Pythagorean schools was called the “Rhythm of the Universe”, “The Music of the Spheres”, of the planets, rhythmically revolving around the Sun, is brought about by the accomplishment of Divine Thought. To the mystic a planet was a Being of a higher order. Thus Goethe too says:

Die Sonne tönt nach Alter Weise,
In Bruder-Sphären Wettgesand,
Und ihre vorgeschriebene Reise
Vollendet sie mit Donnergang.

The sun rings forth in ancient fashion
In the spheres of his brother-singers.
He accomplishes his allotted journey
‘Midst resounding claps of thunder.

That man indeed has the capacity of developing to the highest Divine, Goethe says in the words; “Wär nicht das Auge sonnenhaft, Die Sonne könnt es nicht erblicken; wohnt nicht in uns des Gottes eigene Kraft, Wie könnt uns Göttliches entzücken?”

If the eye were not fashioned for the sunlight
It could not gaze upon the Sun!
If there were not in us the very force of God
How could we be charmed by the Divine?

We have come to the point in our studies where we heard that the human being who is descending from spiritual regions is clothed in an etheric body and has, for a brief moment, a pre-vision of the life that is awaiting him on earth. We have heard of the abnormalities and conditions to which this may give rise. Before proceeding, we will answer a question which may seem of importance to one who turns his spiritual gaze to Devacha: In what sense is there community of life among human beings between death and a new birth? For there is community of life, not only among men on the physical earth but also in the higher worlds. Just as the activities of human beings in the spirit-realm reach down into the physical world, so all the relationships and connections that are established between men on the earth stretch up into the spiritual world.

We will take a concrete example of this, namely the relationship between mother and child. Is there a relationship between them which endures? There is indeed and moreover a much more intimate, much firmer relationship than can ever be established here on earth. Mother-love, to begin with, is a kind of natural-instinct, it has something of an animal-like character. As the child grows up this relationship becomes a moral, ethical spiritual one. When mother and child learn to think together, when they share experiences in common, natural instinct with draws more and more into the background; it has merely provided the opportunity for the forging of that beautiful bond of union which is present in the very highest sense in the mother's love for the child and the child's love for the mother. The mutual understanding and love which unfolds here continues on into the regions of the spiritual world, even although, as the result of the one dying earlier, the other seems for a time to be separated from the dead. After this period has passed, the link that was on earth is equally vital and intimate. The two are together, only all the purely natural, animal instincts must have been outlived. The feelings and thoughts which weave between one soul and another on earth are not hindered in yonder world by the encasements that exist here. Devachan actually assumes a particular appearance and structure as a result of the relationships that are woven here on earth.

Let us take another example. Friendships and affinities are born from the kinship of souls; they continue on into Devachan, and from them the social connections for the next life develop. By establishing connections with souls here, we are therefore working at the form which Devachan receives. We have all of us worked in this way if bonds of love were forged between us and other men; thereby we create something that has significance not only for the earth but which also shapes conditions in Devachan. What happens here as the fruit of love, of friendship, of mutual inner understanding—all these things are building stones of temples in the spiritual region above and men who have this certainty cannot but be inspired by the knowledge that when, here on earth, bonds are forged from soul to soul, this is the foundation of an eternal “Becoming.”

Let us suppose for a moment that on some other physical planet there were beings incapable of mutual sympathy, incapable of forming bonds of love among one another. Such beings would have a very barren Devachan. Only a planet where bonds of love are forged between one being and another can have a Devachan rich in content and variety. A being who is already in Devachan and whose presence, it is true, cannot be experienced by ordinary men, has, according to his stage of development, greater or less consciousness of communion with those who have remained behind on the earth. There are, indeed, means whereby consciousness of these bonds of communion can be intensified. If we send thoughts of love-but not of egotistic love-to the Dead, we strengthen the feeling of community with them.

It is a mistake to assume that the consciousness of the human being in Devachan is dim or shadowy. This is not the case. The degree of consciousness once attained by a man can never be lost, in spite of darkenings which occur during certain periods of transition. The human being in Devachan has, through his spiritual organs, clear consciousness of what is happening in the sphere of the earth. Occultism reveals that the human being in the spiritual world lives together with what is taking place on the earth.

Thus we see that life in Devachan, if viewed in its reality, loses every element of comfortlessness; that the human being, when he ceases to regard it from his earthly, egotistical standpoint, can experience it as a condition of infinite blessedness—even apart from the fact that all freedom from the physical body, freedom from the lower nature in which he is enclosed here, brings with it a feeling of intense relief. The fact that these encasements have fallen away—this in itself brings a feeling of beatitude. Devachan is thus a time of expansion and expression in all directions; there is a richness and an absence of restriction that are never experienced on the earth.

We have heard that on his descent to a new birth, man is clothed with a new etheric body by Beings of a rank similar to that of the Folk-Spirits. This etheric body is not perfectly adapted to the reincarnating human being; still less perfectly adapted is the physical sheath he receives. We will now speak, in broad outline, of the incorporation of the human being into the physical world. Much of the subject baffles any attempt at outer description.

We have heard that in accordance with his qualities, the human being clothes himself with an astral body. Through what is contained in this astral body he is attracted to certain human beings on the earth; through the etheric body, he is drawn to the folk and to the family in the wider sense, into which he is to be reborn. According to the way and manner in which he has developed his astral body, he is drawn to the mother; the essence, the substance, the Organisation of the astral body draws him to the mother. The ego draws him to the father. The ego was present even in ages of remote antiquity, when the soul descended for the first time from the bosom of the Godhead into an earthly body. This ego has developed through many incarnations; the ego, the “I,” of one human being is distinct from the ego of another and at the present stage of evolution gives rise to the force of attraction to the father. The etheric body attracts the human being to the folk, to the family; the astral body attracts him particularly to the mother; the “I” to the father. The whole descent to the new incarnation is guided in accordance with these principles.

It may happen that the astral body is attracted to a mother but that the ego is not attracted to the corresponding father; in such a case the wandering continues until suitable parents are found.

In the present phase of evolution, the “I” represents the element of will, the impulse of perceptivity. In the astral body lie the qualities of phantasy or imagination, of thinking. The latter qualities, therefore, are transmitted by the mother, the former by the father. The individuality who is approaching incarnation, seeks out through his unconscious forces the parents who are to provide the physical body.

What has here been described takes place, in essentials, by about the third week after conception. True, this being who consists of “I,” astral body and etheric body is, from the moment of conception onwards, near the mother who bears within her the fertilised germ-cell; but it works in upon the germ-cell from outside. At about the third week the astral and etheric bodies take hold, as it were, of the germ-cell and now begin to participate in the work on the embryo; up to that time the development of the physical body proceeds without the influence of the astral body and etheric body. From then onwards these bodies participate in the development of the embryo and themselves influence the further elaboration of the human-germ. Therefore what was said about the etheric body holds good still more for the physical body and complete suitability is even less easy to obtain here. These significant facts shed light upon a great deal that happens in the world.

Up to this point we have been speaking of the normal evolution of the average man of modern times; what has been said does not altogether hold good of a man in whom occult development began in a previous incarnation. The higher the stage to which he attained, the earlier does he begin to work upon his own physical body in order to make it more suitable for the mission he has to fulfil on the earth. The later he takes command of the physical germ, the less control he will have over the physical body. The most highly developed Individualities, those who are the guides and leaders of the spiritual life of the earth take command already at the time of conception. Nothing takes place without their collaboration; they direct their physical body right up to the time of their death and begin to prepare the new body directly the first impetus for this is given.

The substances of which the physical body is composed are perpetually changing; after about seven years, every particle has been renewed. The substance is exchanged but the form endures. Between birth and death the substances of the physical body must continually be born anew; they are the ever-changing element. What we develop in such a way that death has no power over it, is preserved and builds up a new organism.

The Initiate performs consciously, between death and a new birth, what the average human being performs unconsciously between birth and death; the Initiate consciously builds up his new physical body. For him, therefore, birth amounts to no more than an outstanding event in his existence. He exchanges the substances only once, but then fundamentally. Hence there is considerable similarity of stature and form in such Individualities from one incarnation to another, whereas in those who are but little developed there is no similarity of form whatever in their successive incarnations. The higher the development of a man, the greater is the similarity in two successive incarnations; this is clearly perceptible to clairvoyant sight. There is a definite phrase for indicating this higher stage of development; it is said that such a man is not born in a different body, any more than it is said of the average human being that he receives a new body every seven years. Of a Master it is said: he is born in the same body; he uses it for hundreds, even thousands of years. This is the case with the vast majority of leading Individualities. An exception is formed by certain Masters who have their own special mission; with them the physical body remains, so that death does not occur for them at all. These are the Masters whose task it is to watch over and bring about the transition from one race to another.

Two other questions arise at this point, namely, that of the duration of the sojourn in the spiritual worlds, and that of the sex in consecutive incarnations.

Occult investigation reveals that the human being returns to incarnation within an average period of from 1,000 to 1,300 years. The reason for this is that the human being may find the face of the earth changed on his return and therefore be able to have new experiences. The changes on the earth are closely connected with certain constellations of the stars. This is a most significant fact. At the beginning of spring the sun rises in a certain zodiacal constellation. The sun began to rise in the constellation of Aries (the Ram) 800 years before Christ; before that epoch it rose in the adjacent constellation of Taurus (the Bull). About 2,600 years are required for the passage through one constellation. The circuit through the whole twelve constellations is known in occultism as a Cosmic Year.

The peoples of antiquity were deeply sensible of what is connected with this passage through the zodiac. With feelings of awe and reverence they said: When the sun rises in spring, nature is renewed after her winter repose; nature is awakened from deep sleep by the divine rays of the vernal sun. And they connected this young, fresh power of spring with the constellation from which the sun was shining. They said: This constellation is the bestower of the sun with its new vigour, it is the bestower of the new, divinely creative power. And so the Lamb was regarded as the benefactor of humanity by men who lived in an epoch now lying 2,000 years behind us. All the sagas and legends concerning the Lamb originated in that age. Conceptions of the Godhead were associated with this symbol. During the early centuries of our era, the Redeemer Himself, Christ Jesus, was depicted by the symbol of the Cross and underneath it the Lamb. Not until; the sixth century A.D. was the Redeemer portrayed on the Cross.

This is the origin, too, of the well-known myth of Jason and the quest of the Golden Fleece.

In the epoch preceding 800 B.C. the sun was passing through the constellation of Taurus; in Egypt we find the veneration of Apis the Bull, in Persia the veneration of the Mithras Bull. Earlier still, the sun was passing through the constellation of Gemini, the Twins; in Indian and Germanic mythology we find definite indication of the Twins; the twin goats drawing the chariot of the God Donar are a last remnant of this. Then, finally, we come back to the epoch of Cancer which brings us near to the time of the Atlantean Flood. An ancient culture passed away and a new culture arose. This was designated by a particular occult sign, the vortex, which is the symbol of Cancer and to be found in every calendar.

Thus the peoples have always had a clear consciousness of the fact that what proceeds in the heavens runs parallel with the changes taking place on the earth beneath. When the sun has completed its passage through one constellation, the face of the earth has changed to such an extent that it is profitable for the human being to enter a new life. For this reason the time of reincarnation depends upon the progress of the vernal equinox. The period required by the sun for its passage through one zodiacal constellation is the period within which the human being is twice incarnated, once as a man and once as a woman. The experiences in a male and a female organism are so fundamentally different for spiritual life that the human being incarnates once as a woman and once as a man into the same conditions of the earth. This makes an average of 1,000 to 1,300 years between two incarnations.

Here we have the answer to the question concerning the sex. As a rule, the sex alternates. This rule, however, is often broken, so that sometimes there are three to five, but never more than seven consecutive incarnations in the same sex. To say that seven consecutive incarnations in the same sex are the rule, contradicts all occult experience.

Before we begin to study the karma of the individual human being, one fundamental fact must be borne in mind. There is a common karma, karma that is not determined by the single individual although it is adjusted in the course of his incarnations. Here is a concrete example:—

When in the Middle Ages the Huns poured over from Asia into the countries of Europe and caused alarming wars, this too had spiritual significance. The Huns were the last surviving remnants of ancient Atlantean peoples; they were in an advanced stage of decadence which expressed itself in a certain process of decay in their astral and etheric bodies. These products of decay found good soil in the fear and the terror caused among the peoples. The result was that these products of decay were inoculated into the astral bodies of the peoples and in a later generation this was carried over into the physical body. The skin absorbed the astral elements and the outcome was a disease prevalent in the Middle Ages, namely, leprosy. An ordinary doctor would, of course, attribute leprosy to physical causes. I have no wish to dispute what such doctors say but their line of reasoning is as follows:—In a fight, one man wounds another with a knife; he had harboured an old feeling of revenge against him. One person will say that the cause of the wound was the feeling of revenge, another that the knife was the cause.—Both are right. The knife was the final physical cause but behind it there is the spiritual cause. Those who seek for spiritual causes will always admit the validity of physical causes.

We see that historical events have a significant effect upon whole generations and we learn how, even in fundamental conditions of health, improvements extending over long periods of time can be brought about.

As a result of technical progress in recent centuries there developed among the European peoples an industrial proletariat, and together with it, untold racial and class hatred. This has its seat in the astral body and comes to physical expression as pulmonary tuberculosis. This knowledge is yielded by occult investigation. It is often not within our power to help the individual among those who are subject to general karma of this kind. We are often compelled, with aching hearts, to see an individual suffering without being able to make him well or, happy because he is connected with the general karma. Only by working for the improvement of the common karma can we also help the individual. It should not be our aim to promote the well being of the single, egoistic self, but to work in such a way that we serve the well being of humanity as a whole.

Another example, directly connected with topical events, is the following—Occult observations have revealed that among the astral beings who participated in the various battles of the Russian-Japanese war, there were dead Russians, working against their own people. This was due to the fact that during recent times in the development of the Russian people, many noble idealists perished in the dungeon or on the scaffold. They were men of high ideals, but they were not so far developed as to be able to forgive. They died with feelings of bitter revenge against those who had been the cause of their death. These feelings of revenge were lived out in their Kamaloca period, for only in Kamaloca is this possible. From the astral plane after their death, they filled the souls of the Japanese soldiers with hatred and revenge against the people to whom they themselves had belonged. Had they already been in Devachan they would have said: I forgive my enemies! For in Devachan, with the clouds of hatred and revenge confronting them from without, they would have realised how terrible and how unworthy such feelings are.—Thus occult investigation reveals that whole peoples stand under the influence of their forefathers.

The idealistic strivings of modern times cannot attain their goals because they are willing to work only with physical means on the physical plane. So, for example, the Society for the Promotion of Peace, which sets out to bring about peace by physical methods alone. Not until we learn how to influence the astral plane too can we recognise the right methods; not until then can we work in such a way that when the human being is born again he will find a world in which he can labour fruitfully.

The riddle of our existence is as old as thinking humanity itself, and not only has it been posed at all times, but also among all peoples. But there are also moments in every single human life when we look up to something higher, something mysterious. In particular, one big question is posed again and again by thinking humanity, namely, the question of the meaning and significance of our existence. In fact, one could say that all other riddles ultimately boil down to this one question about the meaning of the universe. And deep down inside every single person lies the emotional desire to receive an answer to this question. But it is not only our ignorance of such lofty things as the movement of the stars or the origin of our existence that drives us to ask questions; often, more mundane things do so to an even greater extent; indeed, there are times in life when everything becomes a mystery , why we are afflicted with sorrow and pain, why we are born into a lower class, while others are born into the most favorable conditions of life, why we suffer while others do not, although we lead a seemingly blameless life. Yes, it is especially difficult for us to understand that we are deprived of the necessities of life, although our fellow human beings have seemingly entered into existence with just as few merits and are now richly blessed with the most diverse goods.

In addition to the big existential questions, however, there are still questions in life, the solutions to which should not only satisfy our minds and ingenuity, but should also pour into our hearts like comfort and reassurance, filling our souls with a harmonious mood that truly understands life. Of course, not only the mind should have a say in the objective solution of the existential questions. For according to the monistic world view, which assumes that both spirit and mind flow from the same source of existence, both also demand consideration.

There have always been great epochs in the development of mankind when the attempts to solve the questions of existence have brought peace to troubled souls. Religions, in their own way, provide such solutions to the big questions; but they mainly take into account only one side of the human being, that is, they satisfy more only the mind, but not the reasoning intellect as well.

For some time now, something has been emerging in our culture that seems like a conflict between those religious solutions that were sacred to many people and meant truth to them, and what science teaches.

Even children are confronted with such questions in a worrying way. They are introduced to the teachings of the origin and destiny of man in great religious images, but at the same time they also absorb the teachings of popular science, they hear about the development of man and all living things through purely natural forces.

The consequences that arise for a young soul can be of two kinds: either such a person becomes dulled to all higher things, enthusiasm for the questions of the meaning of life and existence fades away, or he takes the side of science and deliberately begins to trample on religious truths from his supposedly superior point of view.

There have been many attempts to resolve this conflict. Almost every day brings us new evidence of how people here and there are striving to shed light on the riddles of existence, even if these personal attempts do not directly promote scientific insight.

But another attempt at a solution has been gaining ground with ever greater force in recent decades. Although it has crept quietly and modestly into our culture, it has already brought peace and quiet to thousands upon thousands of minds. What distinguishes this approach from all others is that it does not apply only to the narrow confines of a single nation, but rather its followers are scattered across the globe, belonging to the most diverse nations and religions.

This attempt to solve the riddle of existence has been made by spiritual science. It tells us: Man perceives the world of the senses around us, but that is not all, as material science believes, for which everything that lies beyond sensory perception is transcendental.

For spiritual science, the human being is a creature in the process of development. The word development seems so familiar to us; how could it not, being the magic word of a large range of recent scientific fields. However, spiritual science takes this word in a different sense than natural science does.

If our senses have limits to our knowledge, it is because we have developed to a certain point. Where we are in our development is the limit of our knowledge. But we can develop further and higher with the necessary seriousness and inner clarity. Our senses are not complete from the beginning either; they are the products of long periods of development. The eye, this marvelously complicated organ, has been conjured out of the most primitive beginning, similar to the ear, which may have originally been nothing more than a simple static apparatus.

Similarly, abilities can still develop in the human soul that can then reveal to us what is still hidden today under impenetrable veils. This spiritual vision may be just as great an experience for a person as physical vision is for a blind person. For the blind man there is only a world of touch and sounds around him. The world of light and colors do exist in themselves, but he does not perceive any of them, so for him they are nothing. It is the same with the spiritual organs of perception. Those who lack the ability to perceive in this higher way perceive nothing of these higher worlds. However, this does not mean that there can be no development and rebirth of the soul, that one can go beyond the limits of the ordinary mind and see new worlds around oneself. In this sense, spiritual science seeks to solve the questions of existence and the riddles of the world.

For some, of course, what spiritual science has to say seems ridiculous because there is absolutely no convincing evidence for them, the undeveloped. But for those who work with these things, the matter is different. It is, moreover, a well-known fact that many things that have subsequently moved people deeply were ridiculed and scorned when they first appeared.

From this point of view, let us now discuss the great mystery of existence, which is about the nature of man, during life and after death, which thus asks about the fate of the soul.

For spiritual science, the study of the human being is much more difficult than it is for material science to study the human being, whom it merely knows. It sees the whole of man's being in his mere physical body. For spiritual science, on the other hand, this corporeality of man is only part of his entire being. The physical body is the part of man that can be perceived by our senses. It is constructed from the seemingly lifeless material of the nature around us. However, spiritual science knows other higher elements of human nature in addition to this physical body.

From the mid-nineteenth century until the last third of the twentieth century, anyone who dared to talk about such things was considered a fool. Today, however, opinions and views on this subject have changed somewhat. At the beginning of the nineteenth and at the end of the eighteenth century, people still spoke of a life force, which was understood to be something quite different from something that exists according to purely mechanical laws.

In the purely materialistic theory, however, it was thought that life meant merely a suitable interaction of physical forces.

Today, there are again some researchers who, on the basis of facts, have come to the conclusion that there is more to human life than just physical matter and forces. In earlier centuries and millennia, such things were researched by the secret sciences. There is a significant amount of literature about these secret researches, where one can find more detailed information.

The second link of the human being is called the life or etheric body. This is not to be understood as something like a structure consisting of that hypothetical physical ether, but the correct view of it can be gained through the following consideration: a crystal can exist in itself through its physical and chemical forces; for a living being, however, these alone are no longer sufficient. As soon as life has left it, the individual parts of the physical body disintegrate because they are composed of an impossible mixture. What now holds them together is precisely the life body. This is the vehicle of growth and reproduction.

The third link is the astral body, the carrier of desire and suffering, of joy and pain, of passion and instinct. It encompasses the lower soul life of the human being, as well as the lower imaginative life of everyday life.

The fourth aspect of the human being is the I, which distinguishes humans from all other earthly creatures. The etheric body is shared with plants and animals, the astral body only with the animal world. The fourth aspect, on the other hand, is, as I said, not shared with any other earthly creature. More deeply-oriented natures have always felt this I as something very special. “I” is now a very strange name, which one could not say like any other name of an object, but everyone can only say “I” to themselves. This name can never reach our ears from the outside if it is to be a designation of ourselves.

All deeper religions, and these are those based on spiritual science, know that when the soul utters that name “I”, then, as it were, God speaks in it. That is why this name was already called the unpronounceable name of God in Hebrew antiquity, which can only sound in the innermost soul. Jean Paul recounts in his biography that sublime moment of his own birth of the ego; at that moment he looked into the holy of holies of his being.

Every occult school since the most ancient times has held that man consists of at least these four elements, which work and weave together. From this point of view, the threads will also reveal themselves to us, through which we can come closer to solving the mystery of human existence.

Only the cultivated and highly developed human being can become aware of these four elements. The “savage” and the average European differ only in that the former unconditionally follows his instincts and passions, while the latter knows that they must not be followed. The I has begun to purify the astral body in the latter. Here, therefore, the astral body is divided into a part influenced by the I and one that is given over to desires.

But the I works not only on the astral body, but also on the etheric or life body. All earthly impressions that pass by quickly are changes in the etheric body for spiritual research. He who has brought about profound and lasting changes in his etheric body, for example, has improved his memory, has achieved a great deal. The greatest impulses for working in the etheric body are artistic and religious perceptions, for they most essentially ennoble the etheric body. On an even higher level, there is even a transformation of the physical body.

The differences between these individual stages only become really clear when we consider sleep and death. The former can be described as the younger brother of the latter.

Notion of the nature of sleep: During sleep, changes occur in the human being. When asleep, only the physical body and the etheric body of the sleeper lie in bed; however, the astral body and the ego are loosened. Instincts, desires and passions, feelings and sensations sink down into unconscious darkness during sleep. All qualities that are carried by the etheric body are active or at least present in a sleeping person. How can we understand the nature of the dying person and the dead? The difference between sleep and death lies in the fact that in sleep the I and the astral body are lifted out of the physical body, while in death the etheric body also separates from the physical body, leaving the latter behind as a dead corpse, which chemically represents an impossible mixture.

However, it does happen that shortly after death, the etheric and physical bodies remain together. In such moments, the whole of life between birth and death stands before consciousness like a great image.

Some people are able to describe such moments in their lives, especially if they have once been in great danger. Here, in a brief moment, what applies to all people after death occurs. Only through the physical body is the narrowness of consciousness formed. The etheric body is the carrier of memory, which is precisely what is restricted and limited in the physical body. In that moment, however, memory expands wonderfully.

The etheric body then detaches itself from the physical body as a second corpse gradually dies, only to completely dissolve in its sphere after some time. But the essence of his life remains in the human being. This essence lives and works in him and consists of the memory tableau of life. He takes this with him on his journey after life. Then the moment also arrives when those parts of the astral body dissolve that have not been processed by the ego.

Now comes a fact that can be proved just as logically as any biological law, but which few people think about properly and thoroughly, namely that the human, immortal individuality, consisting of the ego and the life essence, finds a new opportunity to enter this earthly life. The spiritual research of all times and also today's theosophy teach reincarnation.

The essence that lives in a person today has often been on earth before and will return again and again, although not always in the same external form.

Every person has the opportunity and the strength to develop through the work of their own self. This results in a refinement of the etheric body and an increase in the life essence as abilities and innate qualities. The more often a person has gone through such a life and the better they have applied such a life, the more noble their powers and aspirations will become.

Spiritual science leads man beyond spiritual superstition, while all materialistic science tends to lead to superstition because it strives to explain the imperfect from the imperfect. More and more we should strive to take as much as possible of the imperishable with us into the superphysical realm.

The ego core goes through many lives of man and rises ever higher to God. Originally, the soul also comes from divinity. Comparison with the bee that returns to the beehive laden with honey: [The old Greek wisdom says in reference to this, the human soul resembles a bee that flies out to collect honey. It flies out of the bosom of the deity and gathers the honey of experience in life, which it then carries back to the deity.] Thus, the causes of our current existence lie in previous states of existence. Ultimately, there is no suffering that is not karmically balanced before the end of the last life.

From such points of view, strength and consolation for life arise! Thus one can endure pain because one has the consciousness that a balance will take place sooner or later. One's deeds are no longer fruitless, but they all have their importance and meaning.

Karma is the name given to activities that have been transformed into fixed qualities. This law prevails throughout nature.

From such perspectives, the riddles of existence are revealed. The solutions are also answers for the mind. This is how we feel the great truths, which lead us from the transitory to the immortal, to the eternal!

Dear friends!

In keeping with the promise we made at the Christmas Conference to provide updates on the work of the Medical Section at the Goetheanum, we are sending this first newsletter to those associated with us in the field of medicine. It is inspired by the attitude that united us during the medical courses in the New Year. It would like to convey to each word something of the feelings for suffering humanity, from which not only devotion to the art of healing must arise, but also its real power.

It was in ancient times
There lived in the initiate's soul
The powerful thought that every man is sick
By nature.
And education was regarded
As the healing process,
Which, as the child matured,
At the same time brought health
For life's completed humanity.

It is good to let such powerful thoughts, gained from the contemplation of ancient instinctive wisdom, come before our soul when we want to prepare our soul in the right inner contemplation to grasp the healing effects.

Let us not forget that the healing process must be given a soul, since it must not only turn to a body but also to a soul. The more young doctors grasp such thoughts, the more that which the thoughtful doctor longs for when he perceives the limitations of the current state of his art will flow into medical life, and the patient will experience it as a blessing during the healing process.

Dear friends, you who were here in January, you accepted with open hearts what was offered to you with such good will. We will never forget how this shone in your eyes and how it was conveyed in your warm words. Our thoughts were with you, and today, for the first time, they are turning to you in response to the questions you have raised.

We are sending the following to individual addresses and ask those who receive direct mail from us to ensure that it is forwarded to the addresses we have provided.

Goetheanum, March 11, 1924.

Questions and Answers.

I. In response to a question about the difficulties that aspiring doctors today face in studying both conventional medicine and medical courses in the anthroposophical movement, we can only reply that it is precisely our intention, by communicating these circulars, to overcome these difficulties over time. The meditation referred to in the letter as supplementary is available from Dr. Ita Wegman for those who need it.

II. Regarding study at the Goetheanum.

Practical study should, of course, be provided for wherever possible, but we ask for patience in this regard. We will indicate in these newsletters the time from which registrations will be possible.

III. Regarding the request for the presentation of certain topics for co-workers in the Medical Section [of the School of Spiritual Science], we note that we would like to work in this direction. However, it will be more effective to discuss such topics in individual correspondence rather than in this newsletter. But here, too, we ask for a little patience; we will come ever closer to achieving our goals, but we can only proceed step by step.

We would also like to add that in the future, therapeutic questions that are asked for very specific cases will not be answered in the newsletter. We naturally welcome general therapeutic questions that arise in relation to the medical courses that have taken place, as well as questions that relate to physiological and anatomical problems, to the study, and to the physician's human and moral attitude.

IV. For those individuals who have asked us whether they can come here in the near future to participate in the work of the college, or who – after passing their exams, for example – have a desire to do so, we note that three to five further lectures are to be held immediately after the Easter lectures from April 19-22, in which those concerned can initially receive guidelines for their further work.

Topic: The nature of man and world orientation with regard to education and healing, as well as the particularly important human tasks in this area.

V. The establishment of home pharmacies with our remedies would of course be desirable, but cannot be implemented for the time being, as the law only allows homeopathic remedies to be dispensed by the city doctors themselves. Once we are in the same position as these homeopathic physicians (i.e. in terms of legal recognition), we will be able to do the same. For the time being, we have to be content with distributing the remedies through pharmacies.

VI. In answer to the question of whether information about the mode of action of the remedy should be given to the patient, it can be said that the effect is indeed impaired if the knowledge of it is absorbed in thought. However, the impairment is less severe if the thoughts are only intellectual, more severe if they are pictorial, and most severe if the patient is able to follow the entire course of the healing process within himself. But this should neither prevent the patient from being given any desired information about the mode of action nor prevent a knowing patient from being cured. For what is lost through knowledge can be fully regained if the patient develops reverence for the healing methods. Care must be taken to communicate this.

VII. Questions about the type of injections.

Injections should generally be made under the skin. Only if the patient does not respond to repeated attempts should intravenous injections be given, in highly potentized doses. In this case, the effect of the first injection must be awaited.

VIII. In a letter, reference is made to two lines, one running in the direction of the spine and the other running down from the head, indicating the hyoid bone, mandibular arch, thyroid cartilage, and lateral part of the ribs. And the question is what the significance of this line direction is. The latter line corresponds to what is formed out of the most solid substances in the animal through the astral body. In the human being, this line is brought in that direction by the upright posture, in which it forms an oblique angle with the vertical. This is oriented by the ego organization, in such a way that in the course of the spinal vertebrae the earthly ego appears, so to speak, hypertrophically; the forming ego, which then remains after death, hypertrophically orients the cartilaginous part of the ribs and the breastbone. Because in such spiritual beings as Lucifer the human aspect is skipped, both the dorsal column and the cartilaginous part of the ribs with the breastbone must be omitted. Therefore, the questioner has a pointed chest and lateral rib tendencies in the Lucifer sculpture.

IX. Regarding a question about the cavities of the head and their significance, we have the following to say: The physical and etheric parts of the head are arranged in such a way that in certain places the physical, in other places the etheric predominates; in these places the cavities show themselves. They are the actual thought-carriers, while the physically full places are the carriers of life in the head and the suppressors of thought life. If their activity is too strong, fainting or hallucinations and the like occur.

X. Regarding the question of medial predisposition.

A person's mediumistic disposition is based on the incomplete engagement of the astral body and the ego in the abdominal and limb tract of the etheric and physical body in a trance state. As a result, the limbs and the abdomen are connected to the etheric and astral environment in an irregular manner, so to speak, as sensory organs. This results in spiritual perceptions; however, at the same time, the moral and conventional impulses that normally act through these organs are eliminated, just as they are eliminated by the ordinary sense organs. The eye sees blue, but not slander. It is extremely difficult to physically heal mediums. It could only be brought about by highly potentized tobacco injections into the part of a sensory organ, for example, into the interior of the Eustachian tube or into the cornea of the eye, which is of course very dangerous. A psychic healing requires that the healer has a stronger will than the medium except for the trance and that he can work through wax suggestion.

XI. Regarding the question whether an abortion performed to save the mother's life encroaches upon the mother's karma and the child's karma, it must be said that although both karmas are quickly steered in a different direction, they soon return to their own course in the corresponding direction, so that from this point of view it can hardly be said that karma has been encroached upon. On the other hand, there is a strong intervention in the karma of the person taking the action. And this person must ask himself whether he consciously wants to take upon himself what brings him into karmic connections that would not have existed without the intervention.

But questions of this kind cannot be answered in general terms, but depend on the specifics of the case, just as in many cases, even in purely mental cultural life, an intervention in karma means and can lead to deep, tragic life conflicts.

XII. A question regarding cod liver oil.

Cod-liver oil can be avoided if the causes of the corresponding ailment are diagnosed and the remedies we have indicated are used:

Waldon I: vegetable protein, vegetable fat.
Waldon II: vegetable protein, vegetable fat, silicic acid iron.
Waldon III: vegetable protein, vegetable fat, silicic acid iron and Calcarea carbonica.

XII. For injuries that have come into contact with the ground, Belladonna 30D together with Hyoscyamus 15D will be of use, even if only a single injection is given.

XIV. Regarding the case of a 35-year-old diabetic. For this diabetic, the rosemary cure would undoubtedly be the best. It could be supported by adding silica in the 10th decimal.

XV. A question about the treatment of ringing in the ears. For ringing in the ears, poppy juice to 6 decimal places is generally recommended. If the personality can muster sufficient strength to convert passive surrender to the buzzing into active imagination, as if one were causing it oneself, improvement can be brought about after some time. The ringing in the ears is due to a weakening of the astral body in relation to the etheric body in the bladder area.

XVI. Case of brain fever with after-effects.

We should try to inject the 38-year-old patient, who is not responding to the remedies used, with the consequences of the flu, with Fliegenschwamm D 30 and ensure that he is in a confidently cheerful mood after the injection.

Rudolf Steiner
Dr. I. Wegman

[ 1 ] When the work of Michael at the present time is approached through spiritual experience, it becomes possible, from the spiritual-scientific point of view, to obtain light on the cosmic nature of Freedom.

[ 2 ] This does not refer to my Philosophy of Freedom (or ‘Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,’) which is based on the purely human faculties of cognition, where these are operative in the field of the spirit. In order to follow the thought of this book, it is not yet necessary to join company with the beings of other worlds. But it may be said that the Philosophy of Freedom prepares the way for the understanding of the freedom which, in spiritual connection with Michael, can then be experienced. [ 3 ] And this is as follows.

[ 4 ] If freedom is to be a living reality in human action, then that which is accomplished in the light of it must be completely independent of man's physical and etheric organisation. There can be no freedom except through the ‘I,’ and the astral body must be able to vibrate in harmony with the free activity of the ‘I,’ so that it may be able to transmit it to the physical and etheric bodies. But this is only one side of the matter. The other side becomes clear in connection with the mission of Michael. For it is also true that what man experiences in freedom must not in any way affect his physical or etheric body. Were this to happen, he would have to lose entirely what he had gained during his evolution under the influence of Divine-Spiritual Being, and Divine-Spiritual Manifestation.

[ 5 ] What man experiences through this his environment which is but the accomplished Work of the Divine and Spiritual, must take effect on his spiritual nature (i.e. his Ego) only. His physical and etheric Organisation must only be affected by that which flows on, in the stream of evolution, not in his outer environment, but within his own being, and which had its origin in the Being and Manifestation of the Divine-Spiritual. But this must not work together with that in the human being which lives in the element of freedom.

[ 6 ] All this is only made possible because Michael carries over from the far past of evolution something that brings man into connection with that Divine-Spiritual reality which in the present day no longer penetrates the physical and etheric Organisation. Through this the foundation is being laid, within the mission of Michael, for a human intercourse with the spiritual world which does not interfere at all with the working of Nature.

[ 7 ] It is inspiring to see how the human being is raised by Michael into the spiritual sphere, whereas the unconscious and subconscious elements which develop beneath the sphere of freedom are uniting ever more strongly with the world of matter.

[ 8 ] Man's position with respect to the world will in the future become more and more incomprehensible to him if he is not prepared to recognise, in addition to his relations to the beings and processes of Nature, such relations as this to the Michael Mission. Our relations to Nature are recognised by looking at them from without; our relations to the spiritual world proceed from something like an inner conversation with Beings to whom we have opened up the way by adopting a spiritual view of the world.

[ 9 ] In order, therefore, for man to realise the impulse of freedom, he must be able to hold at a distance certain influences of Nature which affect his being from the Cosmos. This ‘holding at a distance’ is taking place in the sub-consciousness, when in the consciousness there are the forces which represent the life of the Ego in freedom. For the inward perception of man himself there is the consciousness of his activity in freedom, but for the spiritual Beings connected with man from other spheres of the Universe it is different. The Being from the hierarchy of the Angeloi, who leads human existence from one earthly life to another, sees at once how the matter stands regarding human action in freedom; he sees how man thrusts away from himself cosmic forces which want to form and mould him further—which want to give to his Ego-organisation the necessary physical supports, as they did before the age of Michael.

[ 10 ] Michael, who is a member of the hierarchy of the Archangeloi, receives his impressions with the aid of the Beings of the Angeloi-hierarchy. He devotes himself, in the manner here described, to the task of bringing to man from the spiritual part of the Cosmos forces which can replace those from the realm of Nature which have been suppressed.

[ 11 ] He accomplishes this by bringing his activity into the most perfect accord with the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 12 ] The forces which man requires for the compensation of suppressed impulses of Nature when he acts through freedom, are contained in the activity of Christ within earthly evolution. But man must then really bring his soul into that inner life in union with Christ, of which we have already spoken in these articles on the Michael Mission.

[ 13 ] When a man faces the physical Sun and receives from it warmth and light he knows that he is living in a reality. [ 14 ] In the same way he must live in the presence of Christ, the spiritual Sun, who has joined His life to that of the Earth, and receive actively from Him into his soul that which in the spiritual world corresponds to warmth and light.

[ 15 ] He will feel himself permeated by ‘spiritual warmth’ when he experiences the ‘Christ in me.’ Feeling himself thus permeated he will say to himself: ‘This warmth liberates my human being from bonds of the Cosmos in which it may not remain. For me to gain my freedom the Divine-Spiritual Being of primeval times had to lead me into regions where it could not remain with me, where, however, it gave me Christ, that His forces might bestow upon me as a free human being what the Divine-Spiritual primeval Being once gave me by way of Nature, which was then also the Spirit-way. This warmth leads me back again to the divine sources, whence I came.’

[ 16 ] And in this feeling there will grow together in man, in inner warmth of soul, the experience in and with Christ and the experience of real and true humanity. ‘Christ gives me my humanity’—that will be the fundamental feeling which will well up in the soul and pervade it. When this feeling is once there, another comes: man feels raised by Christ beyond mere earthly existence, he feels one with the starry firmament around the Earth and with all that can be recognised in this firmament as Spiritual and Divine.

[ 17 ] It is the same with the spiritual Light. Man can feel himself fully in his true human nature by becoming aware of himself as a free individual. A certain darkening is however connected with this. The Divine-Spiritual of primeval times no longer shines. The primeval Light appears again in the Light brought by Christ to the human ego. In the life in union with Christ this blissful thought may shine like a sun through the whole soul: ‘The glorious primal Divine Light is here again; it shines, although its light comes not from Nature.’ And man unites himself, while in the present, with the spiritual, cosmic forces of Light belonging to that past when he was not yet a free individual. And in this Light he can find the paths which lead him aright as a human being, when in his soul he unites himself, with understanding, with the Michael Mission.

[ 18 ] Then in the Spirit-warmth man will feel the impulse which so carries him over into his cosmic future, that in this future he will be able to remain true to the original gifts of Divine Spiritual Beings, albeit he has evolved in their worlds to free individuality. And in the Spirit-light he will feel the power which leads him with open eyes and ever higher and wider consciousness to the world in which as a free human being he will find himself again with the Gods of his origin.

[ 19 ] If man wishes to continue in the original existence and keep the primal naive Divine Goodness which held sway in him, and shrinks from the full use of freedom—it leads him, in this present world in which everything tends to develop his freedom, to Lucifer, who wishes the present world to be denied.

[ 20 ] If man devotes himself to present existence and wishes the natural world alone to hold sway (the natural world which is accessible to the present intellect and which is neutral with respect to Goodness), if he wishes to experience the use of freedom in the intellect alone, then in this present world where evolution needs to be continued in deeper regions of the soul, while freedom rules in the upper regions—he will after all be led to Ahriman, who wishes to see the present world transformed into a Cosmos of pure intellectuality.

[ 21 ] Certainty of soul and spirit flourishes in those regions where man feels that in the direction of the outer world his gaze rests spiritually on Michael, and in the direction towards the inner being of the soul on Christ. It is that certainty through which he will be able to traverse the cosmic path upon which he will, without losing his origin, in the future find his true perfection.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 22 ] 118. That action alone can be free in which no process of Nature, either within man or without him, plays an active part.

[ 23 ] 119. But there is also the other pole, the opposite aspect of this truth. Whenever the individuality of man works freely, a Nature-process is suppressed in him. In an unfree action this process of Nature would indeed be present, giving to the human being his cosmically predestined character.

[ 24 ] 120. To the man who with his own life and being really partakes in the present and future stages of World-evolution, this character is not vouchsafed by way of Nature. But it comes to him by way of the Spirit when he unites himself with Michael, whereby he also finds the way to Christ.

Let us recall a number of things that are already quite familiar and use them as a starting point for important considerations. In a sense these will continue the theme I discussed some days ago.

We know that there are four major aspects to the human being and that human beings may be characterized as possessing a physical body, a life body, an astral or sentient body, and an ego. We also know that we can only really understand human beings if we add other aspects to these four. Essentially the first four refer to aspects that are fully developed at the present time. Three more have to be added—the spirit-self, the life-spirit, and the spirit-man. We know, however, that these three aspects of human nature are such that we cannot consider them to be fully developed at the present time. We can merely refer to them as future potentials inherent in human beings.

We may say that we now have a physical body and so forth, going as far as the ego, and that in time to come we shall have a spirit-self, a life-spirit and a spirit-man. We know from the anthroposophical literature that is already available that those different aspects of the human being are connected with the whole cosmos and with cosmic evolution. In a sense we relate the physical body to the earliest embodiment of this earth, which we call Ancient Saturn. The life body relates to the Ancient Sun, the astral body to the Ancient Moon, and the principle we call our I or ego relates essentially to the earth as it is at present.

What do we mean when we say that we relate to the ego we bear to the present earth? It means that inherent in the elements of the earth, the forces of the earth that are known to us—or perhaps not known to us—is the principle that activates the ego. Our ego is intimately bound up with the forces of the earth.

If you consider the whole evolution of the human being you will find that human nature as we know it today relates largely to the past—the physical body to a far distant past, to Ancient Saturn, the life body to the time of the Ancient Sun, and so forth, and that our ego is not yet fully developed but in its essential nature relates to the present earth. This immediately suggests that the elements we refer to as spirit-self, life-spirit and spirit-man do not in fact have their basis in the earthly realm. As human beings we have the potential to evolve into spirit-man, life-spirit and spirit-self, and this means that we have something in us that needs to be developed to go beyond this earthly realm; we will have to develop it without taking the earthly realm as our guide. As human beings we are part of this earth and our mission is in the first place to achieve full ego development; to some extent we have already developed it. The forces of the earth, the intrinsic nature of the earth, served as our guide in developing the ego to the extent to which we have now developed it. We shall continue with this development for the rest of Earth evolution, deepening and to some extent enhancing what has developed so far, and for this we shall be indebted to the earth and its forces. Yet we also have to say to ourselves that if we were entirely dependent on the earth and its forces in developing our essential human nature, we would never be able to develop a spirit-man, a life-spirit and a spirit-self. The earth has nothing to give in that respect; it is only able to help us develop the ego. With reference to human nature, therefore, the earth must be seen as something that cannot in itself make us into full human beings. We are on this earth and we have to go beyond it. Anthroposophical literature makes reference to this by showing that our evolution depends on the earth being succeeded by Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan periods. During those periods we will have to achieve full development of the spirit-self, life-spirit- and spirit-man also in outer terms.

At present, however, we are on this earth. We have to develop on this earth. The earth cannot give us everything we need to develop, in order that in future times we may progress to spirit-self, life-spirit and spirit-man. If we had to depend on the earth for everything we have to develop in ourselves we would have to do without spirit-self, life-spirit-and spirit-man.

It is easy to say such things in theory, but it is not enough to put such thoughts forward as mere theories. They will only really touch us as human beings if we allow them to take hold of the whole human being; if we come to feel the whole weight and burden of the riddle which lies in our having to say to ourselves: ‘As human beings we are on this earth. We look around us. None of the many things the earth has to give—its beauty and its ugliness, its pain and suffering—none of the ways in which it can shape our destiny can provide what we need to become full human being.’ There must be a longing in us that goes beyond anything the earth can give. This is something we must feel, something that must bring light and warmth into all the ideals we are capable of holding. We must be able to ask ourselves in all seriousness and very profoundly: ‘What shall we do, seeing that we have only the earth around us, and yet must progress to something for which this earth cannot serve as a guide?’ We must be able to experience, to feel, the full gravity of this question. In a sense we should already be able to say to ourselves that the earth is not enough for our needs, and that as human beings we will have to grow beyond this earthly realm.

Anthroposophy will be only be able to serve human beings rightly if they are able to ask themselves questions like these and really feel it; if they are aware of the gravity of such inner questions of destiny. Being aware of their gravity we can be guided in the right way to return to the Mystery of Golgotha, that has been so much part of the last two talks we have had. We may be guided back to the Mystery of Golgotha and we may be guided to consider again the event that is to happen in this century, during the first half of the 20th century, and will be like a spiritualized Mystery of Golgotha. Whenever the Mystery of Golgotha was discussed it had to be stressed that the Christ is definitely not of the earth and that the Christ entered into an earthly body from spheres beyond this earth—doing so at exactly the right moment, as it were. In the Christ something united with this earth that came from outside, from beyond this earth. If we really experience the Christ we are able to join our own essential nature to this principle from beyond the earth, and in this way gain an energy principle; a principle that will give inner strength, filling us with inner warmth and light. This will take us beyond the earthly realm because it has not itself originated in that realm; because the Christ has come to earth from spheres beyond the earth.

We look with longing to the spheres beyond this earth because we have to say to ourselves: Longing to become complete human beings—to develop the spirit-self, life-spirit and spirit-man which we shall have to develop in the future—we survey the earth and say to ourselves that the earthly realm itself does not contain what we need to develop our own nature and take it beyond the earth. We must turn our eyes away from the earthly realm and look to the principle that has come into the earthly realm from beyond the earth. We must look to the Christ and say to ourselves: The Christ has brought to earth the non-earthly forces that can help us to develop aspects that the earth can never help us to develop. We must take hold, with the whole of our being, of what to begin with is more in form of concepts, of ideas. We must use this to help us recognize the Christ as the One who has come to redeem our humanity. We must come to recognize Him as the spirit who will make it possible that we do not need to stay united with the earthly realm, we might say; that we will not be buried on earth, as it were, for all eternity, with the potential of development beyond this earth remaining undeveloped. When we thus come to see Christ as the One who will redeem our essential human nature, when we are able to see the way this world is made and come to feel there must be something within this earthly realm that will take us beyond it, when we feel that it is He who will lead us to become complete human beings—then we feel the power of Christ within us. And we really must come to realize that we cannot seriously speak of progressive development to spirit-self, life-spirit and spirit-man unless we are aware that there is no point in speaking of these things unless we appeal to the Christ, for the Christ is the principle that can take our evolution beyond anything the earth is able to give.

Basically this is the most important issue at the present time. Many people today, particularly those in the civilized world, want to shape things in a certain way on this earth; they want the whole potential of human beings to be achieved by creating some particular social configuration or other in this earthly life. That, however, can never happen. We shall never be able to evolve a political or economic life of that kind, nor indeed a cultural life of that kind, that would be entirely of this earth and make us into complete human beings. People still believe that such things are possible at the present time. They are making attempts in that direction but fail to realize that there is something in us that can only be taken further by a principle from beyond the earth.

The Christ Jesus first appeared in a physical body at a time the essential nature of which I have already characterized from many different points of view. We are now living in an age where He is to appear again to human beings and in a form that I also spoke of on the last occasion. It is clearly impossible for us to go exhaustively into the renewal of the Mystery of Golgotha, but I want to refer to it again and from a particular point of view.

The scientific element and everything connected with it has grown particularly strong over recent centuries, from the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. In a recent public lecture I called it the ‘science-orientated spirit of the West’. This science-orientated spirit of the West did not initially relate at all to the Christ spirit. If you take an honest, unbiased look at modern science you will find that it has no real relationship to the Christ spirit. The best demonstration of this is the following: As I have said before, Christianity first entered into Earth evolution at a time when remnants of ancient clairvoyance were still persisting, and people grasped it with those remnants of ancient clairvoyance. Christianity then continued as a tradition. It gradually came to be diluted more and more to mental concepts, but it survived as a tradition. Finally it became mere word wisdom, but nevertheless it survived as a tradition. Over the last three or four centuries, however, the scientific spirit appeared on the scene. It also addressed itself to the Gospels. Very many people did and indeed still do today revere the Gospels because they tell the secrets of Golgotha. The science-orientated spirit of the modern age however addressed itself to the Gospels—this was particularly in the 19th century—and found them to contain contradiction upon contradiction. Unable to comprehend, it interpreted the Gospels in its own way. Basically the situation is now that thanks to scientific penetration, the Christ element in the Gospels has dissolved, particularly in the theology of the most recent kind. It is no longer there. If modern theologians say that the Gospels tell us something or other about the Christ they are not being entirely honest, not entirely truthful, or they construe all kinds of conflicting ideas. So we may indeed say that modern scientific thinking has destroyed the spirit of Christianity that consisted of remnants of ancient clairvoyance, and persisted as a tradition based on those remnants of ancient clairvoyance. The reason is that initially the Christ spirit was not present in modern scientific thinking. Science will only be filled with the Christ spirit again when new life comes into it through vision; through the things modern spiritual science is seeking to achieve.

Modern spiritual science wants to be as scientific in its thinking as any other science. The aim is however not to have a dead science but to let it become inner experience, just as we have inner experience of the vital powers we have as human beings. This newly enlivened science will succeed in penetrating to the Christ again.

What form will this enlivened science take? Some things are in preparation now, but I regret to say that they have not attracted much interest. I think I ought to mention that in the early nineties—well, in fact in the late eighties—of the last century I drew attention to a certain connection which exists between the way Schiller developed and the way Goethe developed.⁷⁸ I spoke of Schiller's attempt to solve the riddle of human evolution in his own way, in his letters on aesthetic education. He started with completely abstract ideas. The first was the idea of logical necessity. He said to himself: ‘This logical necessity is compulsive for us human beings. We have to think illogically. Freedom does not exist when logic has to be used to analyze something, for we are then subject to the laws of logic. Freedom does not exist in that case.’ The second idea in Schiller's mind was that human beings have natural needs; this concept encompasses everything that is instinctive and arises from the human capacity to have sensual desires. In this respect, too, human beings are not free but subject to necessity. In a certain way, therefore, human beings are the slaves of the highest intellectual achievement they are capable of, the logical necessity their abstract intellect is able to perceive by the process of reasoning. On the other hand, natural needs, human instincts, also rule and enslave human beings. It is possible, however, to find a middle position between logical thinking and instinctive feelings. Schiller felt that this middle state came to realization above all in the work of creative artists and in aesthetic pleasures. When we look at something beautiful or create something beautiful we are not thinking logically, yet our thoughts are at a spiritual level. We link ideas, but in doing so we do not pursue the logical connection but rather consider aesthetic appearance. On the other hand art seeks to make everything it brings to revelation visual, apparent to the senses. The object of natural necessity, of our instincts are also visual and apparent to the senses. Schiller therefore concluded that art and aesthetic pleasures are on the one hand suppressing logic to some extent, so that it can no longer enslave us but in a way merges into the things over which we gain personal mastery, overcoming them. On the other hand art raises the instinctive element to the sphere of the spirit, or in other words art enables us to feel that the instinctive element is also spiritual. It enables us to make logic the object of personal experience. Schiller wanted to make this condition generally applicable to human beings, saying that when they were in this condition human beings were not enslaved by a higher principle, nor by a lower one, but were indeed free. He wanted it to be the power that also ruled society—social life where people met face to face. People would then find that good things were also pleasing and that they could follow their instincts because they had purified them and made them spiritual, so that they could no longer drag them down. Human beings would then also share a social life that would give rise to a free social society. Schiller therefore considered three human conditions, albeit in an abstract way: the condition of ordinary physical needs, the condition of logical necessity, and the free condition of aesthetic experience.

Schiller developed this view of life in the early 1890s. He put it all into his letters on aesthetic education which he then presented to Goethe. Goethe was quite a different type of human being from Schiller. He felt: ‘This man Schiller is trying to solve a certain riddle, the riddle of the essential human nature, of human evolution and human freedom.’ Goethe was a more complex and profound character, however, and for him the issue could not be simply resolved by taking three abstractions and construing the whole essence of human evolution from them. Instead, the ‘tale’ of the green Snake and the beautiful Lily shone forth in his mind. Something like twenty different figures represented the potential capacities of the human soul, and the relations between them reflected human evolution. Schiller attempted to build everything up on the basis of three abstract ideas. Goethe's way was to create a picture composed of twenty Imaginations. The two men understood each other in a way. What exactly was it that they had done? Schiller used a scientific approach in writing his letters on aesthetic education. He really proceeded in exactly the scientific spirit that later became the scientific spirit of the 19th century. He did not go as far as that 19th century scientific spirit, however. He still remained at a personal level, as it were. 19th century science completely excluded the personal aspect and took pride in being entirely impersonal. The more impersonal knowledge can be made, the closer scientists feel they are to this ideal. 19th century scientists said, and present-day scientists still say: ‘We know this and we know that about one thing or another. We know it in a way that is the same for every individual, so that there is no personal element in it.’ Knowledge excludes the personal element to such an extent that modern people are only satisfied with their science once it has been coffined in the tombs we must come to recognize as the ‘giant's tombs’ of the life of the mind and spirit of today, i.e. in libraries, those tombs of the modern mind and spirit. Dead knowledge is stored in libraries, and we go there when we need some bone or other that we want to include in a dissertation or in a book. Those tombs are the true ideals of the modern scientific spirit. People walk about among all the highly objective knowledge stored there, but their personal interest is somewhere else; it is definitely not in there.

Schiller did not go as far as that in his letters on aesthetic education. He stayed at the personal level. He wanted personal enthusiasm, personal engagement, for every idea he developed. This is important. His letters on aesthetic education are certainly abstract, yet there is still the breath of an individual spirit in them. Knowledge was still felt to be connected with one's personal individuality. Schiller's abstract ideas therefore still had a personal element in them. He did not yet allow ideas to leave that realm and enter into a totally objective and impersonal, inhuman sphere. He did however go as far as the development of abstract ideas. Goethe did not find it possible to form such abstract ideas. He continued to use images, but he was very careful about this. He lived in an age.when spiritual science could not yet be established. He felt some hesitation about sharply defining the images he presented in his 'tale' of the green Snake and the beautiful Lily. He was hinting that he was really concerned with a social life of the future. This comes clearly to expression in the conclusion of the ‘tale’ of the green snake and the beautiful Lily. Goethe did not want to go as far as hard and fast definitions. He did not say that social life should have three aspects, like the three aspects represented by the Golden King as the king of wisdom, the Silver King as the king of outward show—of a life setter please note omission of semblance, political life—and the Brazen king who might represent life in the material sphere, in the economic sphere. Goethe also represented the centralized state in the figure of the King of Mixed Metals who collapsed in a heap. He did not, however, get to the point of making sharp definitions. It was not a time when such delicate fairytale figures could be converted into solid characterizations of social life. I think you will agree that Goethe's figures were subtle fairytale figures. The time had not yet come when ideas that were still half fantasy and half living in Imaginations could be applied to outer life.

Years ago the idea came up of putting on a play in Munich and the intention was to present the creative potential of the essential values to be found in Goethe's ‘tale’ of the green snake and the beautiful Lily on the stage. This proved impossible. The whole thing had to be made much more real. The outcome was the mystery play The Portal of Initiation. It is more than obvious that in Goethe's day the time had not yet come when things which had to be presented in subtle fairy-tale images could be transformed into the real characters that appear in The Portal of Initiation. When The Portal of Initiation was being written the time had indeed come when one would soon be able to carry these things out into life. It was not enough, therefore, merely to interpret the Golden King, the Silver King, the Brazen King and the King of Mixed Metals. It had to be shown that the social life of today, where the centralized state is supposed to encompass everything, must smash itself to pieces, and that clear distinction must be made between the life of mind and spirit (Golden King), the political element (Silver King) and the economic aspect (Brazen King). My book Towards Social Renewal is Goetheanistic, if properly understood, but it represents the Goetheanism of the 20th century.

What I am saying is that Goethe and Schiller were able to reach a certain point in their day and age, Schiller in developing abstract ideas in his letters on aesthetic education, and Goethe in his images. Goethe could get pretty nasty when other people tried to interpret his images. He had the feeling that the time had not yet come to transform these images into concrete forms that would apply to life. This shows very clearly that Schiller's and Goethe's time was not the time when the modern scientific spirit could be allowed to become inhuman and objective; it still had to be kept at a personal level. We will have to return to that level, and we can only do so with the help of spiritual science. Spiritual science must guide us to find the reality of what Schiller attempted to express in abstract ideas in his letters on aesthetic education and what Goethe, trying to solve the same riddle, hinted at in his ‘tale’ of the green Snake and the beautiful Lily.

The scientific spirit has to become personal again. The earth cannot help us with this. Science itself has to become Christ filled. By bringing the Christ idea into science we create the first beginnings for an evolution of the spirit-self.

Let us be clear about this: The earth has encouraged us to develop the ego. In its decline it will still be encouraging us to develop the ego yet further. This earth is something we shall have to leave behind in order to continue evolution on Jupiter and so on. We cannot connect the concept of ourselves as complete human beings with this earth. We have to take our human beingness back from the earth, as it were. If we were to develop only the earth-related science towards which Schiller and Goethe did not want to go—Schiller by keeping his abstract ideas personal, Goethe by not going beyond half-developed Imaginations—if we were to take our cues only from the ingredients of the earth, we could never develop the spirit-self. All we could develop would be a dead science. We would therefore be adding more and more to the field strewn with corpses to be found in our libraries, in our books, where everything human is excluded. We would walk about among these 'thought-corpses', they would cast their spell upon us, and we would thus live up to Ahriman's ideal. One of the things Ahriman wants for us is that we produce lots of libraries, storing lots of dead knowledge all around us. The ancient Egyptians walked among their tombs, even the early Christians walked about among dead bodies, and Ahriman wants us to do the same. He wants human nature to slide back more and more into mere instinct, into egotistical instincts, and he wants all the thoughts we are able to muster to be stored in libraries. It is possible to imagine that a time will come when a young gentleman or even a young lady, aged somewhere around twenty or twenty-three, cannot think of a way of progressing in the world of the Silver King—in external terms we call that taking one's doctor's degree. Little rises from below in the human being; if one wanted to write a doctorate thesis on what arises out of one's human nature—I am of course assuming that a time may come when Ahriman has won the day!—such a thesis would be rejected as being subjective and personal. The young person would therefore visit libraries, taking up one book after another and probably basing his or her choice on catalogues listing all references to one particular key word. A new key word would mean taking out yet another book. The whole thing would then be put together to make a thesis. Only the outer physical individual would actually be involved in all this, however. The young man or woman would be sitting at a desk piled with books. Personal involvement would consist in getting hungry when one has been at it for a few hours, and this hunger would be felt to be something that effects one personally. Personal involvement might also come in because one had human relationships with certain commitments that would have to be met when they came to mind after those few hours. The books would then be shut and all personal connection with them would cease. The thesis made up from what one has found in various books would then be yet another book, a small one or a large tome; it would go to join the others on the library shelves and wait for someone to come and use it. I am not sure if this stage has already been reached somewhere today, but if Ahriman's ideal ever comes to realization that is exactly how it will be. It would be a terrible situation. Human individuality would wither away in such a terrible objective, non-human and impersonal situation.

To combat this, knowledge has to become a personal matter. Libraries should shrink if possible, and people should carry the things that are written in books in their souls. Spirit-self can only develop out of knowledge made personal, and that cannot happen unless people learn about the things that are not of this earth. The earth has passed the mid-point of its evolution. It is dying. Knowledge is dying in our libraries. It is also dying in our books, for they are the coffins of knowledge. We must take this element of knowledge back into our individuality. We must carry it in us. Help will come above all from the renewal of the Mystery of Golgotha. This will help people who have knowledge; it will help the followers of the Golden King.

New life must also come in another sphere, the sphere of rights. Human beings have as little personal connection with the legal system nowadays as they have with the sphere of knowledge. I have presented a small but definite proof of this in a recent public lecture.⁷⁹ I said that the German Empire had free and equal general suffrage. You could not have asked for anything better. But did those voting rights relate to life? Did people cast their votes in a way that was in accord with this franchise? Was there something alive in the configuration of the German Empire that arose because of this franchise? Absolutely not. The franchise was merely written in the Constitution. It was not alive in people's hearts. A time must come when people will no longer need to lay down as an objective Constitution how one human being should relate to another; then living relationships between people will give rise to law that is also alive. What need is there for written constitutions when people have the right feeling for their relationship as one human being to another and when this relationship comes to be a personal matter? In the last three decades of the 19th century human relations grew impersonal, and they have remained impersonal under the strong materialism of the 20th century. The law will only come alive when human beings have the Christ spirit within them.

In the sphere of rights, then, people must become followers of the Silver King. In economic life, on the other hand, they must become followers of the Brazen King. This means no more and no less than that the abstract ideal of brotherhood or companionship must become something real. How can companionship become real? By associating, by truly uniting with the other person, by no longer fighting people with different interests but instead combining those different interests. Associations are the living embodiment of companionship. The life-spirit must be alive in the sphere of rights, and with the Christ spirit brought into economic life, spirit-man will come to life in its first beginnings through associations. The earth, however, yields none of this. Human beings will only come to this if they let the Christ, who is now approaching in the ether, enter into their hearts and minds and souls.

You see, therefore, that the spiritual renewal of the Mystery of Golgotha, as we might call it, relates to what anthroposophical cosmology teaches. We come to see this when we are able to say to ourselves that we have the potential to develop spirit-self, life-spirit and spirit-man. Our thinking has grown so abstract, however, that is seems terribly dry and prosaic to hear that something as sublime and spiritual as the spirit-man, must first of all show itself in associations formed in economic life—in that ‘low’ economic life which has to do with material things. Surely a spiritual scientist cannot refer to economic life without 'lowering' himself? A spiritual scientist has to unite people in conventicles where no one speaks of anything connected with food and drink and one lives entirely in ‘the spirit’, which in fact means in abstract ideas.

The fact is however that when these people have been sitting in their conventicles or sects for long enough and have found their inner gratification they will finally emerge and of course take bread and—well, let us say ‘water’ lest we really offend. As a rule terribly little of all the principles they have established to gratify their souls in those conventicles will find application in life outside.

The true life of the spirit exists only where it is strong enough to overcome material life—and not leave it to one side as something that enslaves and compels us. This is something you really must come to realize.

I think when we come to consider things like these we realize that we must be serious in our approach to present-day life. Yet this seriousness can only come to full realization if we enter into things as deeply as spiritual science enables us to do. You see, the spiritual can only be brought close to human individuals through spiritual science. In a way Schiller and Goethe were the last who could still keep to the personal level, and this was due to something still accessible to them from the past. Schiller did not allow abstract ideas to develop the icy coldness of modern ideas. Goethe kept his Imaginations at a personal level and did not let them break through entirely into outer life.

Today we must go beyond this point. In the rough and tumble of present-day reality we cannot do anything with aesthetic letters—except maybe at aesthetic tea parties—nor with ‘fairy-tales’. At most one might perhaps have beautiful conversations about them in the salons; even in those caricatures of salons that have now become lecture theatres for modern literature and are competing with the old-established professorial chairs. What is needed today is that we break through into life with the things that Goethe and Schiller still kept at the personal level. This will need powerful ideas and on the other hand also powerful Imaginations; a true spiritual understanding of the outer world must arise. To achieve this, we must fill ourselves with the Christ spirit. We will all need to believe in the Christ spirit in its true sense, believe that the Christ principle is something we have to unite with the part in us, as human beings, that will take us beyond this and make us into complete human beings by helping us to develop spirit-self, life-spirit and spirit-man.

All the things we encounter through spiritual science have an inner connection. Seeing through these inner connections we shall be able to see spiritual science in the right light and know that it belongs to the present age. We shall also know that in the present age spiritual science must be made to have a very real influence in all spheres of practical life.

This means, however, that spiritual science must take the whole of life extremely seriously. A true spiritual scientist would feel that it is inner frivolity to fail to be extremely serious, to fail to do more than fashion beautiful abstract ideas that are gratifying to the soul but are in no way able to break through into life.

This is something which has been weighing heavily on spiritual science for more than a year; it has been weighing heavily on those of us who are working here in Stuttgart. This work at Stuttgart has now made it our responsibility to bring spiritual science to bear in the practical life that immediately surrounds us on all sides. Principles that Goethe presented in fairy-tale images of a Golden, a Silver and a Brazen King, and a King of Mixed Metals who collapsed in a heap, must now be brought to bear in life and must become the threefold social order. You will remember that the King of Mixed Metals collapsed in a heap in the tale and certain persons came and licked up all the gold. If you take a good look at the world around us today you will see this phenomenon. In November 1918 Central Europe's King of Mixed Metals collapsed, and don't you see now how the various ministers who have held office since that time, the various leaders, are licking away and will go on licking until they have removed all the gold? Then the whole form of the Mixed King, a form empty of all spirit, will collapse, and people will be horrified. So we really ought to be serious—not about fairy-tale images of a Golden, a Silver, and a Brazen King, but with firm understanding for the three elements of the social organism: the cultural and spiritual element, the element of the political sphere, i.e. the state, and the economic element.

It has to be said, however, that when one comes to speak of these things two thoughts immediately come to mind. One of these I want to talk about today, for the longer we have to go on working like this in Stuttgart the more obvious it becomes that, for the time being at least, it is simply impossible to find time to talk to the friends who have got used to coming and asking my advice in earlier years. For a long time now I have had to put people off, when they wanted to discuss things that it certainly has previously been possible to discuss in private, promising to try again later on. Although my visits have been getting longer and longer, all efforts have had to be concentrated on the great task. I feel it really has to be said that, this time in particular, it has been quite impossible to consider personal requests. This is as painful for me as it is for you and I know that we cannot go on like this in the long run, for that would deprive the Anthroposophical Movement of its foundations. We would be building on shifting grounds in that case.

On the other hand it also has to be realized that people always like to cling to the old ways. Yet we are doing something entirely new in really getting to grips with the Golden, the Silver and the Brazen King, as I would like to call it. It is an extremely serious matter. Spiritual science cannot do such a thing as licking the gold away from the King of Mixed Metals who is collapsing in a heap, and some people take this amiss. I know I am poking around in a hornets' nest, but I shall have to poke around in quite a few hornets' nests, for example by characterizing a person such as Hermann Keyserling⁸⁰ who is simply not telling the truth and is a liar.

Some people say there is too much criticism within the Anthroposophical Movement today. But let me repeat once again what I have said many times before: These people see what we have to do in order to defend ourselves—and they take exception to this. Exception is even taken by people who are sitting in this room and listening to the things that are being said. And they never say a word to give the lie to the people who throw mud at us from the outside—for that would mean becoming argumentative oneself. It is considered unkind for an anthroposophist to call someone a liar, when that is in fact the truth. Yet anyone who wants to tell lies about the Anthroposophical Movement is allowed to fling any kind of lie at us. The journal of our movement for a threefold order is often considered too polemical. You should turn against those whom we are simply forced to argue against; you should have the courage to address your words to them and not to us, for we are simply forced to defend ourselves. But that is a familiar bad habit. It shows that people are more interested in an Anthroposophy that provides self-gratification and not in a serious Anthroposophy that is considering the great problems of the present age.

Now and then it is really necessary to speak very seriously about these things. The things I said with reference to Count Keyserling in my public lecture, for instance, relate not only to the things said about Anthroposophy in that quarter; they relate to the whole inner insincerity of that kind of intellectual life. Read the chapter entitled ‘What we need. What I want’ in his most recent book.⁸¹ It does not say anything about Anthroposophy, but you will find there the whole schematism of unsubstantial ideas that is wholly without content; yet you get stuffed shirts who will say that they get such a lot out of it. That of course is the great evil in our time, that people reject the things that take their substance from the spirit—the living spirit—and want only to have the empty words, mere shells of words.

If people go on wanting things like this they will destroy humanity. The hollow phrases coming from that source—even if they are called the Diary of a Philosopher⁸²—undermine the whole of human culture. What are they, these hollow phrases? They are the phrases one produces if one licks the King of Mixed Metals. You may be fairly brutal in your licking, like some of the socialist leaders today, or you may be wearing elegant patent-leather boots like Count Keyserling—it really makes no difference.

I may be putting these things sharply, but please do not think this reflects an emotional involvement. They are put sharply because it has to be said, unfortunately, that there are some who want to be counted among the anthroposophists but whose hearts are not really in it. They cannot be sufficiently serious, they do not want to be sufficiently serious, they do not want their hearts to be involved. It is not being unkind to speak the truth when it is necessary to do so. But let me ask you if it is kind of anyone, who wants to be one of us, to allow others to sling mud at us and then call us unkind when we have to defend ourselves? It may seem regrettable that we have to use sharp words to defend ourselves, but just because of this you ought to uphold those sharp words and not indulge in feelings and the like and somehow or other start repeating the rubbish literary hacks have been producing—saying that polemics are not justifiable and are unkind.

The difficulty is that within the movement that is to develop as the Anthroposophical Movement we find so few people who are wholeheartedly with us. When it is necessary to achieve the kind of thing that we are supposed to achieve through the Anthroposophical Movement we need many such individuals today. We have found dedicated people in many different fields, above all the Waldorf School teachers in the educational field. We have also found dedicated individuals in some other fields—but it is simply not enough. The number of those who simply do not want to become completely involved is extremely large, right here in our own ranks, and yet we need people to be fully dedicated to our cause. That is why we are making so little progress. As time went on we found again and again that when we really got down to it, many of the people who had put their names down so that they would be able to hear the things that are said within the movement were in a way embarrassed to declare themselves openly for us on the outside. We have heard it said again and again that it would be better not to use the name Anthroposophy in public; that one should leave the name out and 'slip things in here and there' with reference to Anthroposophy. That is the delightful way people who do not want to take Anthroposophy seriously like to put it. So the gentleman, or particularly the lady, intends to ‘slip something in’ here and there by way of Anthroposophy, because she or he feels ashamed to speak openly about Anthroposophy. So they ‘slip things in'! You won't have to be all that valiant, then, and you won't create any awkwardness—just let it slip in’.

Now is not the time to let things slip in, however. It is time to be open and honest and to use words that tell the truth about things. The people who are against us do not let things slip in, they put things bluntly. And it should be considered an outrage by all who have joined our ranks that someone like Count Keyserling has the cheek to say that this spiritual science of ours is materializing the life of the spirit, that it is a physical science of the spirit. We know that this man used sneaky ways to get hold of our lecture courses from a large number of people, in order to find out what is said in them, and all one can say is that in writing the things he is writing today he is quite deliberately writing untruths. We call it lying. Anyone who objects to our saying this is a lover of lies. Anyone who says that we are too argumentative when we are rightly speaking the truth has no feeling for the truth and is a lover of lies. The love of lies should not be our business in the Anthroposophical Movement, for we must love the truth. You must feel the whole weight of these words: to love the truth; not to love lies for the sake of convention, for the sake of a pleasant social life. To be easygoing when it comes to lies is just as bad as loving them. In the immediate future the world will not progress through frivolous indifference where lies are concerned, but only if we freely and openly profess ourselves for the truth. Anthroposophy has to consider serious and sublime spiritual matters, and we have never failed in this. Anyone who says that it is spiritual materialism to speak of Saturn, Sun and Moon when he is free to open my Occult Science and read what it says about Saturn, Sun and Moon, is indeed lying. It does not say anything about making the spirit into something material. People cannot be aware of the true seriousness of the situation if they ask that we use polite untruthful terms to address mud-slinging opponents.

These are the very things that reflect real love. Real love demands enthusiasm for the truth. The world will only progress if we show enthusiasm for the truth.

There are profound spiritual reasons why I have to say these things today, as I am about to leave you again for a while. I am very sorry that I am quite unable to talk to individuals at present, because there simply is not the time. Yesterday the friends of our movement for a threefold order and of the Kommende Tag were again in session until 3 o'clock in the morning, and that is how it goes on, more or less day after day. I regret that many things have to be left aside, things that people have come to love. On the other hand there may be hope after all that, in view of the efforts now being made on a large scale, the Anthroposophical Movement will gain the rightful place in this world that it must gain, because it has the strength and the will to use the truth to move ahead. If we are to work in the truth, then we can do no other today than show untruthfulness up in its true light when it gets as blatant as this.

It has been necessary to remind you of our commitment to the truth. It is most necessary for all of us, dear friends, to let this spirit of longing for the truth fill our hearts and souls and minds. If it is still within the bounds of human capabilities, then this spirit in which we long for the truth will be the only thing that can prevent the barbarism that otherwise must come upon the human race. It will be the only spirit in which we shall make progress in a new culture which will be of the spirit.

• 78. ‘Goethe als Vater einer neuen Aesthetik’ lecture to the Goethe Society in Vienna on 9 November 1888; first published in Vienna in 1889, reprinted in Methodische Grundlagen der Anthroposophie 1884–1901 GA 30 and Kunst und Kunsterkenntnis GA 271. English translation: Goethe as Founder of a New Science of Aesthetics. G. Metaxa tr. Anthroposophical Publishing Co., 1922.
• 79. Stuttgart 16 November 1920, ‘Die Wahrheit der Geisteswissenschaft und die praktischen Lebensforderungen der Gegenwart’ (The truth of spiritual science and the practical requirements of present-day life). To be published in GA 335.
• 80. Keyserling, Hermann, Graf. German philosopher.
• 81. Keyserling, Hermann, Philosophie als Kunst (Philosophy as an art), Darmstadt 1920.
• 82. Keyserling, Hermann, Das Reisetagebuch eines Philosophen (Travel Diary of a Philosopher, 1925), Darmstadt 1919.