The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Translated by Steiner Online Library

In the course of the evolution of mankind, the different world-religions have placed mighty pictures before humanity. If these pictures are to be fully understood a certain esoteric knowledge is required. In the course of years, such a knowledge, based on Anthroposophy, has been applied to the interpretation of all the four Gospels, in order that their deeper content and meaning may be brought to light.* This content is for the most part in the form of pictures, because pictures refuse to communicate themselves in the narrow, rationalistic way that is possible with concepts and ideas. People think that once a concept has been grasped they have got to the root of everything to which it is relevant. No such opinion is possible in the case of a picture, an imagination. A picture or an imagination works in a living way, like a living being itself. We may have come to know one aspect or another of a living person, but ever and again he will present new aspects to us. We shall not be satisfied, therefore, with definitions purporting to be comprehensive, but we shall endeavour to look for characteristics which contribute to the picture from different angles, giving us increasing knowledge of the person in question.¹

To-day I want to bring two familiar pictures before you, and to describe certain aspects of them.

The first picture is that of the disciples of Christ Jesus on the day of the Ascension. Gazing upwards, they see Christ vanishing in the clouds. The usual conception of this scene is that Christ went up into heaven and so departed from the earth, and that the disciples were then left, as it were, to their own resources. Likewise all earthly humanity, for whose sake Christ fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha, was by the Ascension left to its own resources.

The thought may occur to you that in a certain respect this belies the reality of the Mystery of Golgotha. We ourselves know that through His deed on Golgotha Christ resolved to unite His own Being with the earth, that is to say, from the Mystery of Golgotha onwards to remain forever connected with earth-evolution. The mighty picture of the Ascension might thus seem to be at variance with what esoteric vision of the Mystery of Golgotha reveals concerning Christ's union with the earth and with mankind.

We will try to-day to overcome this seeming contradiction in the light of actual spiritual facts.

The second picture is that of the scene ten days after the Ascension, when tongues of fire descend upon the heads of the assembled disciples and they are moved “to speak with other tongues.” What this actually means is that henceforward the disciples were able to impart the secrets of the Deed on Golgotha to the heart of every human being, irrespective of religion or creed.

Keeping these two pictures before our minds, we shall try to give some indication of their meaning. Anything more than this is not possible.

We know from our study of Anthroposophy, that the evolution of mankind did not begin on the Earth, but that Earth-evolution proper was preceded by a “Moon” evolution, this by a “Sun” evolution, and this again by a “Saturn” evolution, as described in my book An Outline of Occult Science. During the period of the “Saturn” evolution, man developed in his descent from the Spiritual as far as the rudimentary basis of the physical body. In that epoch, however, the physical body was a body of warmth only; that is to say, warmth of varying degrees, forces of warmth, gathered together around the being of soul-and-spirit.

During the “Sun” evolution man acquired an aeriform body, during the “Moon” evolution a kind of fluid, watery body, and a solid, earthy body, in the real sense, only during “Earth” evolution proper.

Let us think, now, particularly of the Earth-evolution. It fulfils its course in seven successive epochs, of which the first three are recapitulations: the first, a recapitulation of the “Saturn” period, the second of the “Sun” period, the third (the Lemurian epoch) of the “Moon” period. Earth-evolution proper really begins with the fourth epoch, that of Atlantis. We are living now in the fifth epoch, which will be followed by the sixth and the seventh.

The mid-point of Earth-evolution falls in the middle of the Atlantean epoch, and so in our present age the Earth has already passed the mid-point of its development. From this you will realise that the Earth is already involved in a declining phase of evolution, and in our time this must always be taken into account. As I have often said, it conforms entirely with the findings even of modern materialistic geology.

In his book The Face of the Earth, Eduard Suess has stated that the soil beneath our feet to-day belongs to an earth that is already dying. During the Atlantean epoch the earth was, so to say, in the middle period of life; it teemed with inner life; it had upon it no such formations as the rocks and stones, which are gradually crumbling away. The mineral element was active in the earthly realm in the way in which it is active to-day in an animal organism, in a state of solution out of which deposits will not form unless the organism is diseased. If the animal organism is healthy it is only the bones that can be said to take their form as deposits. In the bones, however, there is still inner life. The bones are not in the condition of death, they are not, like our mountains and rocks, in process of crumbling into dust. The crumbling of the rocks is evidence that the earth is already involved in a death-process.

As already said, this is now known even to ordinary materialistic geology. Anthroposophy must add to this knowledge the fact that the earth has been involved in this process of decline ever since the middle of the Atlantean epoch. Moreover, in the earth must be included everything that belongs to it: the plants, the animals, and, above all, physical man. Physical man is part and parcel of the earth. In that the earth is involved in a process of decline, so too is the human physical body. Expressed differently, in more esoteric terms, this signifies that by the middle of the Atlantean epoch, everything that was first laid down in a germinal condition in the warmth-body of the “Saturn” evolution had reached completion. The human physical body actually reached completion by the middle of the Atlantean epoch, and since then the path of its evolution has been one of decline.

Evolution does not, of course, proceed with complete uniformity. One race or people enters a phase of evolution earlier or later than another, but, speaking generally, at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha was at hand, the evolution of the physical constitution of man had reached a stage when humanity all over the globe was facing the prospect of finding further incarnation impossible on the earth; in other words, of being unable henceforward to accompany the earth in its declining evolution.

In the Schools of Initiation it was known, and can of course also be known to-day, that at about the time of the Mystery of Golgotha the human physical body had reached a degree of decline where the men who were then in incarnation or who were to be incarnated in the near future, that is, up to about the fourth century A.D., were faced with the danger of leaving an earth that was growing more and more desolate and barren, and of finding no possibility in the future of descending from the world of spirit-and-soul and building a physical body out of materials provided by the physical earth. This danger existed, and the inevitable consequence would have been the failure of man to fulfil his allotted earthly mission. The Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers working in combination had succeeded to the extent that at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, earthly mankind was face to face with the possibility of dying out.

Mankind was rescued from this fate through that which was achieved by the Mystery of Golgotha, whereby the human physical body itself was imbued again with the necessary forces of life and freshness. Men were thereby enabled to continue their further evolution on earth, inasmuch as they could now come down from worlds of spirit-and-soul and find it possible to live in physical bodies. Such was the actual effect of the Mystery of Golgotha.

I have often spoken of this, as for example in the lecture-course given in Carlsruhe under the title From Jesus to Christ.² The greatest hostility was aroused by these lectures because, out of a sense of esoteric duty, certain truths were presented which many people wish to keep concealed. Indeed it can be said that from a certain quarter the hostility to Anthroposophy started from these very lectures.

What I have described, however, is one aspect of the actual effect of the Mystery of Golgotha. This same fact can, of course, be expressed in many different ways. It was expressed differently in that lecture-course, but what I am now describing is the same fact, merely seen from another side. Through the Mystery of Golgotha, the forces promoting the growth and thriving of man's physical body were quickened anew, with the following result.—It was now made possible for man to receive, during his life of sleep, an impulse he would not otherwise have received. The whole evolution of man on earth takes its course, as we know, in the alternation of waking life and sleep-life. In sleep, the physical body and ether-body remain behind; from the time of falling asleep until that of waking, the ego and the astral body make themselves independent of them. During this state of independence in sleep the influence of the Christ-Force takes effect in the ego and the astral body in those men who through the requisite mood and content of their soul-life have made fitting preparation for this condition of sleep. Penetration of these higher bodies by the Christ-Force, therefore, takes place mainly during the state of sleep.

To turn now to the biblical event of the Ascension, we must realise that at that time the disciples had become clairvoyant to a degree at which they were able to behold what is, in truth, a deep secret of earthly evolution. These secrets remain unnoticed by man's everyday consciousness, which is incapable of knowing whether at one point or another in the evolution of humanity something of supreme importance is taking place. There are many such happenings, but the everyday consciousness is unaware of them. The picture of the Ascension actually signifies that at this moment Christ's disciples were able to witness spiritually an event of untold significance, enacted “behind the scenes” as it were of earthly evolution.

What they witnessed revealed to them, as in a picture, the prospect of what would have come about for men had the Mystery of Golgotha not taken place. They beheld as a concrete spiritual happening what would have then befallen, namely, that the physical bodies of men would have so deteriorated that the whole future of humanity would have been endangered. For the consequence of this physical deterioration would have been that the human etheric body would have obeyed the forces of attraction which properly belong to it. The etheric body is being drawn all the time towards the sun, not towards the earth. Our constitution as human beings is such that our physical body has earthly heaviness, gravity, but our etheric body, sun-levity. Had the human physical body become what it must have become if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, the etheric bodies of men would have followed their own urge towards the sun and have left the physical body. The existence of mankind on earth would inevitably have come to an end.

Until the Mystery of Golgotha, Christ's dwelling-place was the sun. Therefore in that the etheric body of man strives towards the sun, it is striving towards the Christ. Now picture to yourselves the scene on the day of the Ascension. In spiritual vision the disciples see Christ Himself rising heavenwards. A vision is conjured before them of how the power, the impulse of Christ unites itself with the etheric nature of man, in its upward striving; of how at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha man was facing the danger of his etheric body being drawn out into the sun like a cloud, but how, in its sunward streaming, it was held together by Christ. This picture must be understood, for in truth it is a warning. Christ is akin to those forces in man which naturally strive towards the sun and away from the earth, and will always do so. But Christ remains in union with the earth. Thus the Christ Impulse holds man securely on the earth.

In this picture of the Ascension, something more is manifest to the disciples. Suppose that the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place and that numbers of men had become clairvoyant to the degree to which the disciples became clairvoyant at this moment. These men would have seen the etheric bodies of certain human beings departing from the earth in the direction of the sun, and they would have come to this conclusion: ‘This is the path man's etheric body is taking. The etheric-earthly element in man is being drawn away into the sun.’ But now, by carrying to its fulfilment the Mystery of Golgotha, Christ has rescued for the earth this sunward-striving etheric body. And thereby is manifest the fact that Christ remains united with mankind on the earth. Thus something else became apparent here, namely that through the Mystery of Golgotha Christ brought to pass within earth-evolution a cosmic event. Christ came down from the heights of spirit, linked Himself with humanity in the man Jesus of Nazareth, fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha, united His evolution with that of the earth. It was a cosmic Deed accomplished for the whole of humanity.

Mark these words: The Deed on Golgotha was fulfilled for all mankind. The eye of clairvoyance can never fail to perceive how, since that Deed, the etheric forces in man, with their urge to escape from the earth, are united with Christ in order that He may keep them in the earth-evolution. This applies to the whole of mankind.

This leads us to another consideration. Suppose that only a handful of human beings had been able to acquire knowledge of these facts that relate to the Mystery of Golgotha, and that a large section of mankind—as is actually the case—had not recognised its significance. If this had come about, the earth would be peopled by a few true believers in Christ and by a large number who do not acknowledge the essential content and meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha. What, then, is to be said of the latter? How are these human beings who do not acknowledge the Mystery of Golgotha related to it?—or, better put, how is the Deed of Christ on Golgotha related to these human beings?

The Deed of Christ on Golgotha is an objective fact; its cosmic significance does not depend upon what men believe about it. An objective fact has, in itself, reality of being. If an oven is hot, it does not become cold because a number of people believe that it is cold.—The Mystery of Golgotha rescues mankind from the decay of the physical body, no matter what men believe or do not believe about it. The Mystery of Golgotha was enacted for the sake of all men, including those who do not believe in it.—That is the cardinal fact to be remembered.

We realise, then, that the Deed on Golgotha was enacted in order that by this means mankind on earth might be quickened to the degree necessary for its rejuvenation. That has come to pass. It has been made possible for men to find on the earth bodies in which they can and will for long ages of future time—be able to incarnate. It is, however, fundamentally as beings of spirit-and-soul that men will pass through existence in these now rejuvenated earthly bodies, and it is as beings of spirit-and-soul that they will be able to appear on the earth again and again.

Now the Christ Impulse, which must have significance for the spiritual nature of man as well as for his bodily nature, can impress itself upon a man's waking state, but it can make no impression on his sleeping state unless this Impulse has been received into his soul. The Mystery of Golgotha, therefore, would have produced its effect in the waking life of men who had no knowledge of it; but it would not, in such circumstances, have affected them in their life of sleep. The inevitable result would have been that while men would have gained the possibility of incarnating time and again on the earth, nevertheless, if they had acquired no knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha, the condition of their sleep would have been such that the connection of their spirit-and-soul nature with Christ must have been lost.

Here you see the difference in the relation to the Mystery of Golgotha of those men who have, so to speak, no desire to know anything about it. Christ performed His Deed for their bodies, in order that earthly life should be made possible for them, just as He performed it for utterly unbelieving non-Christian peoples. But to take effect in man's spirit-and-soul nature, the Christ Impulse must also be able to penetrate into the human soul during the state of sleep. And this is only possible if a man consciously acknowledges the import of the Mystery of Golgotha. The spiritual effect of the Mystery of Golgotha, therefore, can proceed only from a true recognition of its content.

Thus there are two things that mankind must realise: on the one hand that Christ holds back the ether-body in its perpetual urge towards the sun; and on the other, that man's spirit-and-soul nature, his ego and astral body, can receive the Christ Impulse only in the time between falling asleep and waking—and this is only possible when knowledge of this Impulse has been acquired in waking life.

To sum up: the urge of the etheric bodies of men to draw towards the sun is perceived by the disciples in clairvoyant vision. But they also perceive how Christ unites Himself with this urge, restrains it, holds it fast. The mighty scene of the Ascension is that of the rescue of the physical-etheric nature of man by Christ.

The disciples withdraw in deep contemplation. For in their awakened souls is the knowledge that through the Mystery of Golgotha complete provision was made for the physical-etheric nature of mankind as a whole. But what happens, they wonder, to the being of spirit-and-soul? Whence does man acquire the power to receive the Christ Impulse into his nature of spirit-and-soul, into his ego and astral body? The answer is found in the Whitsun festival.

Through the Mystery of Golgotha the Christ Impulse has taken effect on the earth as a reality which is within the comprehension of spiritual cognition alone. No materialistic knowledge, no materialistic science can understand the Mystery of Golgotha. Hence the soul must acquire the power of spiritual cognition, of spiritual perception, of spiritual feeling, in order to be able to understand how, on Golgotha, the Christ Impulse was united with the impulses of the earth.

Christ Jesus fulfilled His Deed on Golgotha to the end that this union might take effect, fulfilled it in such a way that ten days after the event of the Ascension He sent man the possibility of imbuing also his inner nature of spirit-and-soul, his ego and astral body, with the Christ Impulse. The permeation of the human spirit-and-soul with the power to understand the Mystery of Golgotha is the sending of the Holy Spirit. This is the picture of the Whitsun festival, the festival of Pentecost. Christ fulfilled His Deed for all mankind. But to each human individual, in order that he may be able to understand this Deed, Christ sent the Spirit, in order that the individual being of spirit-and-soul may have access to the effects of the Deed that was accomplished for all men in common. Through the Spirit man must learn to experience the Christ Mystery inwardly, in spirit and in soul.

Thus these two pictures stand side by side in the history of the evolution of humanity. That of the Ascension tells us: The Deed on Golgotha was fulfilled for the physical body and the etheric body in the universal human sense. That of Whitsun tells us: The single human being must make this Deed bear fruit in himself by receiving the Holy Spirit. Thereby the Christ Impulse becomes individual in each human being.

And now something else can be added to the picture of the Ascension. Spiritual visions such as came to the disciples on the day of the Ascension always have a bearing upon what man actually experiences in one or another state of consciousness. After death, as you know, the etheric body leaves the human being. He lays aside the physical body at death, retains the etheric body for a few days, and then the etheric body dissolves, is actually united with the sun. This dissolution after death betokens union with the sun-nature streaming through the space in which the earth, too is included. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, man beholds, together with this departing etheric body, the Christ Who has rescued it for earthly existence through the ages of time to come. So that since the Mystery of Golgotha there stands before the soul of every human being who passes through death the Ascension picture which the disciples were able to behold that day in a particular condition of their soul-life.

But for one who makes the Whitsun Mystery, too, part of his being, who allows the Holy Spirit to draw near to him—for such a one this picture after death becomes the source of the greatest consolation he can possibly experience: for now he beholds the Mystery of Golgotha in all its truth and reality. This picture of the Ascension tells him: You can with confidence entrust all your following incarnations to earth-evolution, for through the Mystery of Golgotha Christ has become the Saviour of earth-evolution.—For one who does not penetrate with his ego and astral body—that is to say, does not penetrate with knowledge and with feeling—to the essence of the Mystery of Golgotha, for him this picture is a reproach until such time as he too learns to understand it. After death, the picture is as it were an admonition: Endeavour to acquire for the next earthly life such forces as will enable you to understand the Mystery of Golgotha!—That this picture of the Ascension should, to begin with, be an admonition, is only natural; for in subsequent earthly lives men can endeavour to apply the forces they have been admonished to acquire, and gain understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.

You can now perceive the difference between those who with their inmost forces of faith, knowledge and feeling put their trust in the Mystery of Golgotha, and those who do not. The Mystery of Golgotha was fulfilled for mankind as a whole, in respect of the physical body and etheric body only. The sending of the Holy Spirit, the Whitsun mystery, signifies that the soul and spirit of man can partake of the fruits of the Deed on Golgotha only if he finds wings to bear him to actual understanding of the essence and meaning of that Deed.

But because this essence and meaning can be fully grasped by spiritual knowledge alone, not by material knowledge, it follows that the truth of the Whitsun festival can be grasped only when men realise that the sending of the Holy Spirit is the challenge to humanity more and more to achieve Spirit-knowledge, through which alone the Mystery of Golgotha can be understood.

That it must be understood—this is the challenge of the Whitsun Mystery. That it came to pass for all mankind—this is the revelation given in the Ascension.

And so it can truly be said that Anthroposophy enables us to understand the relation of the Whitsun Mystery to the Ascension revelation. We can feel Anthroposophy to be like a herald bringing illumination to these festivals of Spring, and to its many facets we have added yet another, essentially belonging to it.

This should convey to you the mood-of-soul in which the true feeling for the festivals of the Ascension and of Whitsun can arise. The pictures which such festivals bring before the soul are like living beings: we can approach nearer and nearer to their reality, learn to know them more and more intimately. When once again the year is filled with spiritual understanding of the festival seasons, it will be imbued with cosmic reality, and within earthly existence men will experience cosmic existence.

Whitsun is pre-eminently a festival of flowers. If a man has a true feeling for this Festival he will go out among the buds and blossoms opening under the influence of the sun, under the etheric and astral influences—and he will perceive in the flower-decked earth the earthly image of what flows together in the picture of Christ's Ascension, and the descent of the tongues of fire upon the heads of the disciples which followed later. The heart of man as it opens may be symbolised by the flower opening itself to the sun; and what pours down from the sun, giving the flower the fertilising power it needs, may be symbolised by the tongues of fire descending: upon the heads of the disciples. Anthroposophy can work upon human hearts with the power that streams from an understanding of the festival times and from true contemplation of each festival season; it can help to evoke the mood-of-soul that conforms truly with these days of the Spring festivals.

• 1. See lecture-courses by Rudolf Steiner on each of the four Gospels; also numbers of other published lectures.
• 2. Ten lectures, Oct. 5th—14th, 1911. Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co.

A Mongolian Legend. The Hermaphrodite. Man’s Victory over the Physiognomy of Death; the Skeleton. The Flight of Birds.

The different lectures given on the subject of sagas and myths have shown us that ancient knowledge of the spiritual world is contained in narratives which have survived among the peoples or have spread in some other way through humanity. The spirit of man has preserved in these myths a kind of thinking and feeling which once enabled humanity to possess a far higher form of knowledge than can ever be attained by the intellectual observation that is bound up with the outer senses. But one who has the gift of real discernment can perceive the deep wisdom-truths radiating from these brief legends and narratives.

We know that there was once a great migration from West to East; as certain sections of the Atlantean peoples moved from the West across to the East, they carried with them remembrances of conditions prevailing in old Atlantis and in still earlier times. In those who ponder the indications contained in the legends of these peoples with insight quickened by Spiritual Science, a knowledge of ancient times will begin to dawn and feelings that may well be stirred by these wisdom-truths then find their bearings in the divine World Order. The more closely wisdom approaches intellect, the colder, more devoid of feeling it becomes; the higher it ascends, the warmer, the more full of feeling it becomes.

Is there anyone whose feelings glow with real warmth while he is studying some scientific theory? The theory of physical heredity or adaptation never stirs the feelings. But if someone hears how humanity has lived through the conditions of Saturn-, Sun-, and Moon-existence, through the epochs of Lemuria and Atlantis—if he hears these things and remains inwardly unmoved, then the state of his soul cannot be really healthy. Such narratives strike chords in the very heart of a man whose mind and feelings are open and unbiased. Truths of this nature are contained in the sagas and myths and even if a man does not understand them, he will surely glimpse something of their profundity and wisdom in the feelings which arise in him.

Among the Mongolians in Asia there is a simple tale which has found its way to regions in Europe where Mongolian sagas still survive. It is a short, deeply moving narrative.

There is a mother who has at the top of her head a single eye. She wanders despairingly through the world, for she has lost her only child. On her wanderings she picks up every stone she sees, holds it in front of this eye and then, in utter disappointment, casts it away so that it splits into a thousand fragments. She has realised that this is not her child. Believing that she will find the child in every object, she seizes it, holds it in front of her eye and casts it from her. And so she hurries on, never at rest, always meeting the same experience.

This narrative is nothing else than a remembrance living in the peoples who wandered farthest to the East and who in Atlantis had still known of primeval conditions of our Earth, when men themselves were still able to see into the spiritual worlds. You all know that the bones at the top of a child’s head close only by degrees. In very ancient times there was, at this place in the head, a channel of communication between the human being and the outside world. If one had been able to see this connecting-link, it would have appeared as a body of light at the top of the head, raying outwards into the world.

This organ was not an eye but an instrument of feeling—particularly for warmth—by means of which the human being was able to look out freely into the astral world, to perceive not only bodies but the beings within those bodies around him. This organ has shrivelled away to become the pineal gland, as it is called, now covered by the vault of the skull. But as a heritage of this ancient organ which enabled him to experience the spiritual worlds, man still has something within him today, namely, the longing for those worlds which have been shut away from him by the closed door of his head. This longing in the souls of men finds expression in the religions. Just as in days of yore man saw around him beings aglow with warmth and feeling, so nowadays he sees himself surrounded by physical objects.

Truly it is a moving narrative. The woman, the mother of humanity who has the power of clairvoyance, wanders through the world, seeking for something that will satisfy her longing but she does not find it in any of the outer objects which are disclosed to mankind today through the senses. It is with this profundity that the spirit of man speaks to us in the sagas and myths whose real meaning can only be discovered with the help of Spiritual Science. It might be thought that the story is sufficiently explained by linking it with the remembrance of a condition actually prevailing among mankind, but in reality it is far deeper. With these narratives it is not only a matter of what is said but also of how it is said. They contain something deeper still.

There may seem to be a contradiction in the fact that the woman in whom this organ is preserved perceives and recognises external objects with a single eye, whereas the things of the outer world can be perceived only with the two eyes as they are today. But precisely here lies a deep mystery-truth, only to be fathomed by turning our gaze to the happenings in which humanity has been involved. We shall see how applicable this knowledge is in practical life when it is viewed in the light of Spiritual Science.

When a scientist is examining a human body in the dissecting room or studying physiological processes from outside, he feels that the same approach can be made to every one of the organs; he uses the same instruments when dissecting the heart or the stomach; he thinks that the only matter of real importance is that of the particular chemical constituents of which these organs are composed. He has no inkling whatever that they differ fundamentally, according to the sources of their form and structure. None of these organs would exist if an astral body were not membered into man, and because the nervous system is excreted, as it were, from this inner member, the nerve-substance is, in its very essence, different from other substances. The shapers and architects of the nerve-substance have their life and being in the astral world.

In certain realms there are forces, akin to the human ego, which gave the primary impulse for the formation of the red blood. Ego-beings are the shapers and architects of this red blood. They were working from outside before the Ego was able to come down into man. The animals have not an Ego; they are ‘possessed’ by the red blood. But man attains freedom because he is possessed by his ‘I’, by his own very self. It was necessary that he should take possession of himself in order that he might be able to achieve self-mastery.

In the glandular organs the etheric body is working—that is to say, the beings who are active in etheric space. In order to understand the glands we must be clear about one thing;—if there had been no astral body in man, but only an etheric body, then only such beings as are active in etheric space would have worked on the organs in animal and man; the organs we know as glands could never have arisen but only organs similar to those we find in the plant-kingdom around us, for there too the etheric body is working. Every new and additional principle works upon and transforms whatever is already in existence.

Because the astral body penetrates into man and builds the nerve-system, it also works back upon the ether world and transforms the original plant-organs in such a way that they become glands.

If we go back to the original organs from which the liver or spleen or gall-bladder have been formed, we find something altogether different from what comes to light when these organs are dissected with ordinary scientific instruments. When our knowledge of organs is drawn from the higher worlds and then applied in practice, medical science which can be effective in the real sense, will come into being. This is only in the preparatory stage today but will become reality in the future.

In studying the human body it is particularly important to know that certain organs have assumed their present form at a comparatively late stage, whereas others have existed in their present form since primeval times. The organs which only received their present form at a late stage are destined, in a not far distant future, to decay, to wither and fall away from the human body. Other organs are only now in their initial stage of development. These latter organs are destined in the future for an important role in everything that comes to pass through man. Everything connected with the heart and with the larynx will be a creative force. The heart and larynx are still only at the beginning of their development. They will become organs of reproduction, of procreation. An indication of this can be found in the change of the male voice at puberty. Heart and larynx will be transformed into greater and greater perfection of form and later on will bring forth human beings.

On the other hand the procreative organs as they are at present, are in the dying stage; they will harden more and more and sever themselves from the human body. We only understand man’s body when we know how the dying part is related to the progressive part in its evolution. Man has within himself something that is on the way to death and something that is budding more and more into new life. Occult observation can confirm in the case of each of man’s organs whether it is on the way to death or whether it is in the youthful stage.

Once upon a time the pineal gland was very active and powerful; it has now become an organ of almost no importance. The methods for attaining clairvoyance will again conjure forth a new organ from the present pineal gland. Certain organs are imbued with life again when they have reached the stage of death; others die off entirely, disappear from the physical plane and then arise in a new form. Let us study those organs in man which are most obviously on the descending path leading to death, and those in which young life is unfolding on the upward path. The organs of greatest importance are those in which both death and life are contained. The use to which they are put is, from a certain point of view, of supreme importance.

You are all acquainted with the elementary fact that man consists of physical body, etheric body and astral body; within the astral body is the ‘I’, the Ego. The ‘I’ works, to begin with, upon the astral body, continually transforming one part of it. When the ‘I’ came down from the bosom of the Godhead and began for the first time to work upon the astral body, this astral body was, in point of fact, a gift bestowed upon man. Let us picture man at the moment when the ‘I’ penetrated into him. The physical body, the etheric body were there, and penetrating them, the astral body. Then, from above, the ‘I’ strikes into this body and begins to work in the human being. The part of the astral body that is shaped by the ‘I’ is therefore twofold—one part is also possessed by the animal and another arises in the human being because the ‘I’ has worked upon the astral body. In the animal there has been no such incision of the ‘I’; the astral body of the animal has been formed in a particular way, but by powers outside. Everything that comes from the higher worlds shapes and brings about new transformation in the old organ. It is from this standpoint that we must study the relations between these three bodies.

The physical body is composed of the physical and chemical substances existing in the external world; with these alone, without the other bodies, it would simply be mineral. But the ether body, or life body, permeates it in all directions.

What is the function of the life-body? At every moment it counteracts the destruction of the physical body, fights against this destruction; without the life-body the physical body would succumb to the chemical and physical forces and disintegrate, as indeed it does as soon as the life-body has abandoned it at death. While the two are united during life, the etheric body fights all the time against this disintegrating process.

And what is the function of the astral body? It is very important to study this. In a certain sense the astral body is occupied during waking life—not during sleep—with killing the etheric body all the time, with suppressing the forces unfolded by the etheric body; hence the body becomes exhausted during the day. The astral body is constantly destroying the etheric body. But if this did not happen no consciousness would arise. Consciousness is not possible without the gradual destruction of life. The spiritual activity of life which we are describing, the wonderful, scintillating life in the ether-world and the constant suppression of this rhythm by the astral world—this is what gives rise to consciousness. These processes in the spiritual worlds express themselves in the physical world in the following way:—The moment consciousness shoots into what is merely life, a process of hardening, of ossification, begins in the physical body. The more the soft, organic life-masses are permeated inwardly by hard, bony formations, the nearer does the animal approach to a conscious state. In the molluscs and snails these hardened inner organs do not yet exist; the hard shell is excreted in order that the dim consciousness possessed by these animals may arise. In animals with a higher degree of consciousness, all osseous substance is secreted as a secondary activity; the hard, cartilaginous tissues and bony structure are separated out from soft, gelatinous masses. In the highest animal this process has almost reached its culmination in an organic system that is practically finished and complete.

In man, something special happens:—A new incision takes place which partially transforms the astral body. A new direction is given to the earlier tendency towards ossification. If man had left the astral body unchanged and had worked only in the direction of skeleton-formation, no culture would have been possible on the earth. The part of the astral body which was kept separate, brought about a new tendency, a particular task. The hardening process in the skeleton-formation is governed by the astral body.

How does this tendency make itself manifest? Whereas the former tendency led more and more towards hardening, towards fixing a culminating point for the astral system in evolution, the astral body in man keeps something back, something that has a tendency to soften again. This makes it possible for evolution to advance. If this tendency had been absent, if everything had streamed into the bony system, there would be no progress, no culture. Animal species do not progress; the evolution of the tiger species, the lion species, has reached its culmination and goes no further. Man, however, with the part of the astral body which has been kept separate, is able to take what has hardened back again and new organs, soft and pliable organs, can be formed. This is extraordinarily significant! In the animal there is no such tendency.

Let us think of a living human being, with his tendency towards hardening on the one side and on the other, his tendency to hold something back. We see that these two tendencies separate when the human being reaches the age of seven—the time of the change of teeth. The tendency which culminates in ossification is manifest in the teeth. But the human being keeps back sufficient life-force to enable him to evolve. Up to the seventh year in the life of the human being it is only what belongs to the species, the genus, that can come to expression. At this point he is able to take his place in the cultural progress of the times and the school period begins. These two things are inwardly connected: the hardening tendency which comes to expression in the formation of the teeth and the tendency towards softening where something must be kept back, something that the etheric body—which becomes free at the seventh year—needs for its development. The two are connected.

There are many phenomena between which it is difficult to perceive any connection if they are not observed from the vantage-point of the spiritual investigator. Puerperal fever,¹ as it is called, usually goes together with faulty teeth. The connection between the two tendencies, the tendency to hardening in the teeth and the tendency to carry evolution forward, to give play to the procreative force, becomes evident here; if the one has been impaired, the other is injuriously affected. It is important for these two tendencies to be kept in balance and endeavours must be made to adjust life accordingly. It may happen that the tendency to softening gets the upper hand. For example, workers on the land—whose place in civilisation is essentially different from that of town-dwellers—may be brought into the towns. They would be able to adjust themselves if they and their forefathers had grown up in these conditions; but as things are, there is no harmony, no equilibrium between the hardening and the softening forces of their organism. One of the two will get the upper hand. But if the hardening tendency preponderates, the soft tissues of the organism will begin to harden in a remarkable way. Then when the hardening process becomes unduly strong tuberculosis appears.

As long as animals live in their right environment, no illness of this nature will befall them. But if they are removed from this right environment they too will be prone to this disease in which the hardening tendency preponderates—as for example, in the case with monkeys.

Thus do the spiritual worlds work into our physical world and we can only understand the latter by going back to its spiritual foundations. Just let us reflect how closely everything that has been said is connected with man’s happiness or suffering. Equilibrium in the life of man depends upon his organs having assumed their right form in the evolutionary process at the right time. If an organ remains at an earlier stage, if hardening or softening comes about in the wrong way, a life of unhappiness is the result. Each organ must reach a definite stage in its evolution at a definite time. The development even of those organs in man which are not visible may lag behind or hurry too far ahead. In future times, tuberculosis will no longer be injurious because then certain parts of man’s organism must harden. Diseases that are due to the conditions of civilisation differ from all others.

Do we not hear an echo of this in the tale of the Mongolian woman who vainly seeks her lost child? She has the organ in her head at the wrong time. It brings her woe; never pausing, she hastens through the world and finds nothing that can give her eye satisfaction. She seeks in vain for what belongs to her. What deep wisdom has been woven by the Leaders of humanity into this legend!

Let us now go further and consider man as he is today; he consists of organs on the ascending and descending lines of evolution. Stage by stage the astral body has been membered into him. There was a time when his organs were like plants, of the nature of plants. As the result of the astral body having built the nerve-system, the plant-body took flesh upon itself. This process was only gradual and did not affect all the organs at the same time. If we were to go back to pre-Lemurian times in evolution we should find that the human body still had organs of an entirely plantlike nature.

All the organs in the human body in which the sensual desires work less strongly were the earliest to be transformed into organs of flesh; the organs in which the sensual appetites work most strongly—the sexual organs—were the latest to be so transformed. For long, long ages these organs retained their plant-nature and they will be the first to wither away and pass over into a plantlike existence. It was not until sensual desire had already taken deep root in the human being on his path of descent that the sexual organs were transformed from their plant-nature into organs of flesh. Spiritual Science looks back to a godlike age in remote antiquity when the sexual forces were as yet unknown to man. Such a being could have been seen in the ancient Mysteries—a human being still without sex. At the places where the sexual organs are now situated we should have been able to see in this being creeper-like plant-formations, organs permeated by the etheric body only, untouched as yet by the astral body. Such a being was the figure of the Hermaphrodite in the Mysteries; he appeared in the form which Spiritual Science can confirm as having been a man’s actual form in those remote ages. He has plant organs at the place where the organs of reproduction are situated today and creeper-life plants go out from his loins. We can now understand why among very ancient people and in the Bible legend, the fig-leaf is spoken of. It was not there as a cover but pointed to an ancient, sacred existence when the human being was still plantlike at this place in his organism.

But there is still more to be said. We can observe this overcoming of the hardening tendency in man in yet another way. It is noteworthy that in the occult schools particular account was taken of this. When the ‘I’ of man descended to the Earth from the bosom of the Godhead, it was necessary for this hardening tendency to be overcome. But even before that time there were other creatures in whom this development had already taken place, namely the birds. The birds have an ‘I’ but an ‘I’ that lives much more in the outer external world. Therefore there is something in which they have not shared, something that is important for all human occult development. It is what comes to expression in the development of certain parts of the skeleton, in the development of the bone-marrow. The bones of the birds are hollower than the bones of a human being and the other animals; they have retained a much more ancient condition which man, and the higher animals too, have left behind.

Man sends the forces of the ‘I’ right into the marrow of the bones and a considerable part of his occult development consists in changing the passive relationship in which he stands to his bone-marrow into a conscious one. At the present time he can only work upon what is contained within the bones of the skull, upon his brain, but preparation is being made to enable him to work upon that semi-fluid element which permeates the bones. The fact that the essential force in man penetrated into the very bones, made his present evolution possible; in future time he will acquire the forces to work upon the actual substance in his bones and so to transform his body down to the very bones. First of all he gains dominion over his blood and the blood will then be the instrument whereby he can work right into the bone-substance. The bones are a mineralisation of man’s being. When, down to the very bones, man has gained full mastery over what expresses itself, at the wrong time today, as rickets, then he himself will create his own form; he will transform himself into Atma.² He has then gained the victory over the hardening principle, the principle that leads to death, that which expresses its real physiognomy in the human skeleton. The skeleton is a true image of death.

Man will conquer the physiognomy of death when he controls through the power of the spirit the form he now controls from outside through the mechanical organs of the muscles. His thoughts today penetrate into his bones; later on it will be his feelings—and then he will have gained the victory over the physiognomy of death.

What abundant blessing the sciences will bring to man when they come to know about the hardening and softening processes! That is what is meant by saying that Spiritual Science must be put to practical application in life. If legends like the ancient Mongolian fairy-tale have still survived, the truths it contains will be expressed in a different form. Man will observe the world with different senses and be able to understand many of its riddles—for example, the secret of the flight of the birds will then be unveiled. By miraculous ways they travel hundreds upon hundreds of miles from the cold North to the warm South and then back again in the spring by different routes. I have said that the birds are a species that has remained behind at earlier stages of existence.

Progress on the Earth in the real sense began only when the Moon separated from the Earth; before then, when the two were united and there was only Sun and Earth-Moon, this Earth-Moon moved around the Sun with one side always turned towards it. All living creatures on the Earth moved once around the Moon during one of the Moon’s revolutions in order to receive the forces and influences of the Sun. And in the flight of the birds, something of that journey round the planets has been preserved. The birds split off from the progressive course of the evolution of humanity before the ‘I’, the Ego, came to the Earth. With advancing physical evolution, the sexual element entered into possession of each single body. Previously, the astral body—which is filled with desires and works upon the single bodies—was not present. The desires were previously a cosmic force, streaming from the ancient Sun to the ancient Moon. This was the force which directed those ancient movements around the planets, for it determined the manner in which procreation took place. The circling of the birds around the planet is thus nothing else than a bridal procession. In the birds the sexual element is still in the surrounding world and this cosmic force is the directing power, guiding and leading the migration. It guides the birds from outside, whereas in the other case it has penetrated into the single bodies. These are the same forces which work within the body and lead one human being to another in the different sexes. The sexual force that works in man does not work from within in the case of the birds; it comes to expression in the flight around the planets.

When man has acquired the faculty to be united with the whole cosmos, he will also possess the power to work outwards again into the cosmos. The woman of the Mongolian legend too will then again be present. But those forces of spiritual perception which are an attribute of the single eye in the head and which being unappeased made her cast aside and shatter every created thing—those forces will then permeate man. He will then perceive not merely the outer physical objects, but that which lies behind and expresses itself in them. The now hardened physical body will then again be spiritual; the woman of the Mongolian legend will live again and look out as of yore into the spiritual world. And what she then takes hold of she can press lovingly to her heart; she can find in a world made spiritual that which she can hold in her loving embrace.

The evolution of man is towards ascent into the cosmos. Were man unwilling to share patiently in this evolution, the force, the fluid contained in the eye of the men of ancient time would not stream through his whole being, would not permeate his organs. This force would spend itself and man would wither away from lack of love. But the mission of man is to permeate with love everything that lives upon his planet, to pour his forces into the universal All. There can be no redemption of the individual without the redemption of what lies outside us. Man has to redeem his planet together with himself. There can only be redemption when man pours his forces into the cosmos; he must not only be one who is himself redeemed, but he himself must become a redeemer.

• 1. Puerperal fever is fever caused by uterine infection following childbirth.
• 2. Atma or Atman (anthroposophical term: ‘Spirit Man’) is the highest principle of the human being which is now only in its germinal state and will be fully developed only in the last stage of the cosmic evolution from the Old Saturn to the future Vulcan.

Translated by Dorothy S. Osmond

The importance of Anthroposophy for present and future mankind will only gradually be realised, but insight will come when understanding has been gained of certain things indicated in occult writings though not, as a rule, studied in sufficient depth, Reference could be made to innumerable passages in books on occultism or also in writings on religion in support of what I am referring to here, but I shall mention only this well-known and very significant passage in the New Testament: ‘Unto them that are without, the mysteries are revealed in parables, that seeing they may see and not understand. But unto you’—so says Christ Jesus—‘the mysteries of the kingdoms of heaven shall be revealed in their true form.’¹

The profound significance of such a passage is generally overlooked. What does it really mean? Which are the most important parables in which Christ Jesus speaks to His disciples? They are those which, as a rule, are not considered to be parables at all. What man sees in the kingdoms of Nature around him on the physical plane, he takes to be reality. He looks at an animal or a plant, and pictures to himself that these are realities in the forms in which they appear. But in truth it is not so, for what is actually present as a reality is the spiritual world—that and that alone. And not until we nave recognised the Spiritual in the things around us do we truly know reality.

Everything else that is revealed to us in surrounding nature is tantamount only to a symbol for the spiritual world behind it. Everything to be seen in the kingdoms of mineral, plant, animal, and also in the physical human kingdom, everything that makes an impression upon the sense-organs, upon intellect and intelligence—all these things are nothing but symbols of the Spirit; and only one who learns how to interpret these symbols reaches the reality, the Spirit.

And so as men pass through the world, observing its beings and its happenings, what they perceive are symbols, nothing but symbols. Nature herself addresses man in parables, in symbols. In the Spirit alone there is reality. When the spirit is being spoken of in images taken from Nature, Christ Jesus is explaining processes pertaining to the Spirit. He speaks in a parable of the seed that is sown and undergoes different forms of destiny. (St Mark, IV, 1–9). The process of which He is speaking belongs to the kingdoms of outer Nature—hence it can only be described in the form of a parable. But when Christ Jesus is making clear to His disciples that He is one with the Father of all existence, that he has to live on the earth and suffer death, that within Him is a Christ-power, a Christ-impulse that must pass through death as a force by which courage and consolation can be given to all men through all time to come—then He is speaking of reality, He is speaking of the Spirit.

Knowledge, therefore, can only be genuine when man has succeeded in penetrating behind the mysterious secrets of the world, so that he learns to recognise symbols which indicate spiritual processes. And in truth the soul will be tremendously enriched when man is able to be aware of his relationship with the outside world.

We will consider a particular example.—Going to sleep and waking is an ever-recurring rhythmic experience. Man must experience in rhythmic sequence the flashing up of the normal day-consciousness and its subsequent darkening into the state of sleep. If we now ask, what may be compared in Nature outside with this rhythmic alternation of sleeping and waking in man, many will think of the rhythmic alternation in the growth and withering of plants in the spring and autumn. Man sees the green foliage appearing, the blossoming, the ripening of the fruits, the forming of the seed; then, during the winter, all this seems to be obliterated and to reappear in the spring. It might come naturally to him to compare the processes of his own waking and going to sleep with the budding of the plants in spring and their withering in the autumn. That would, however, be a fallacy, merely an external comparison.

What is it that we actually experience when we go to sleep at night? Our astral body and our Ego emerge from the etheric body and the physical body. If we now look back spiritually upon the physical body and the etheric body we shall perceive that their activity at night and by day is entirely different. During the day, through our normal consciousness, we wear out our physical and etheric bodies through acts of will, through feeling and through thinking; fatigue is evidence that we have worn out our physical and etheric bodies. In fact our daily life is a process of ruining and wearing out our physical and etheric bodies, and they are most thoroughly worn out in the evening. With clairvoyant sight we shall perceive that during sleep the physical body and the etheric body begin to manifest a plantlike activity. The worn-out nervous system and etheric body begin as it were to bud and blossom at the moment of going to sleep and within the human being something takes place that may be compared with what happens in the spring, when everything buds and sprouts. The moment of going to sleep must be compared with the spring and the deeper our sleep the more do our physical and etheric bodies pass over into a condition of budding, sprouting life. It is then spring and summer within us, and as the moment of waking approaches it is autumn; consciousness lights up, clear day-consciousness. The summer-like condition is brought to its close and, during the course of the day, desolation resembling that of Nature during winter, when the Earth's activity has died away, is brought about in our physical and etheric bodies.

Thus going to sleep must be compared with the season of spring and waking with that of autumn. The Earth-spirits in the plants liberate themselves in spring from the physical element of the plant world and the spiritual beings connected with the plants sink into a kind of sleeping condition during the summer and are awake during the winter; where there is winter on the Earth, there these spirits permeate the planetary body. Admittedly, it might be said in connection with the Earth that it is not possible to speak of sleeping and waking, because conditions are different in each hemisphere. But the rhythmic movement is such that when the Earth-spirits depart from the north they go towards the south; they permeate the planet in rhythmic alternation. A certain comparison is possible here with what takes place within the human being. Man so easily forgets that he is a whole man. He supposes that thoughts and consciousness reside only in the head, and when the astral body and the Ego are outside, he believes that there is nothing within him that thinks. In reality the lower half of his body is all the more active, only he knows nothing of it. The essential point is to realise that we can actually speak of the Earth-spirits beginning to sleep in the spring, that they withdraw from the body of the Earth where it is spring and summer ... Similarly, a vegetative life unfolds in the human being while he is asleep. And in the winter, when the Earth-spirits stream in again, the seeds remain hidden and the Earth-spirits wake; they are then united with the Earth. Thus we may say: When we stand on the Earth in summer we have around us physical Nature; everything buds and blossoms and lower elemental spirits are active on the Earth. Divine life, divine consciousness, penetrate into the Earth in wintertime, not in summertime.

True spiritual science helps us to recognise this because it is able to penetrate into these things with clear, clairvoyant consciousness. Man can say, if only he is capable of feeling it: spring—and summer—forces which cause outer Nature to bud and blossom call forth the lower elemental beings out of the Earth, whereas the highest Spirits who are connected with the Earth have withdrawn from it. And in the middle of the summer the lower elemental spirits, driven forth by the power of the Sun, celebrate a kind of ecstasy of their lower forces.

Then comes wintertime; the warmth and light of the Sun decrease, and with the approach of winter the highest divine forces unite with the part of the Earth on which we live. In winter the Earth feels as though enwrapped in the Beings with whom we are connected in the depths of our nature. We may then feel reverence which takes the form of a prayer to these sublime Beings, to the divine Powers who have been allied to man from the primal beginning.

It is the mission of Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy to teach us to know and understand what is living in our environment. And this it will do, with all clarity. We know that men once possessed this knowledge, although in the form of dreamlike, clairvoyant consciousness; what we reacquire to-day was once primordial wisdom revealed to mankind through dreamlike clairvoyance.

Is there external evidence too for what has been said to-day? Yes, there is. In far past ages men knew well that in the summer season the lower elemental spirits rise up and reach a state of ecstasy at midsummer, that the activity of outer physical life is then at its highest point. Hence the middle of the summer was chosen as the right time for festivals that were intended to be intimations of man's physical connection with Nature. With their ancient clairvoyance men knew that the greatest intensity of physical life, the ecstasy of physical life, is reached when the human being surrenders himself at midsummer to the splendour and glory of outer physical Nature. And it was also known that the approach of winter means an awakening of the divine forces, a union of the divine forces with the body of the Earth. For this reason ancient consciousness placed in midwinter the festival that was meant to betoken man's feeling of union with what is intimately related to the most divine forces of his own soul; it was the festival of the divine Being who would one day become the Spirit of the Earth. This festival could not take place in the summer; it was celebrated in December as the Christmas festival, the festival of the Spirit. The festival of physical Nature, the St John's festival, was celebrated in the summer; Christmas, the festival of the highest Spirits, belongs to the season of winter.

When we realise what intimate messages the festivals have for us, we feel united with the whole spiritual evolution of mankind. What men have established in this way reveals the knowledge they have possessed and the fruits of this knowledge. The external physical light of the Sun, the physical forces of the Heavens, come down to the Earth in the spring. This descent of the physical light and this withdrawal of the Spirit to the heavenly world just as the Spirit withdraws from man during the night, is wonderfully expressed in the Easter festival, which is determined every year by the constellations. Just as in the spring the forces of Heaven and Earth work together visibly, so was the Easter festival fixed according to the visible positions of heavenly bodies, according to knowledge of the stars.

The suggested introduction of a fixed Easter because material considerations seem to require this, is absolutely characteristic of our age. It amounts to taking away from the Easter festival the very feature that gives it meaning, and this for the sake of material, industrial and commercial interests. A movable Easter may be inconvenient for balancing accounts and be troublesome for certain business arrangements but the very fact of the date of the Easter festival being determined by the constellation in the heavens is an expression of the feeling man has of the inter-working of the earthly and the heavenly in the spring.

And just as these forces work in man when he goes to sleep, so in the autumn, and when he wakes from sleep, a spiritual element is active; but when he goes to sleep, and in the spring, physical and spiritual, heavenly and earthly, work together. In fixing the year's festivals this had naturally to be given physical expression too. Herein lies profound wisdom. It is probable that the commercial, materialistic interests of our time will gain the day and Easter will become a fixed festival. But it would fare ill with knowledge that humanity ought to preserve if men were to forget the essential meaning of such a festival. For this reason it will be incumbent upon the anthroposophical Movement always to celebrate Easter as a movable festival. An Easter festival determined by materialistic principles would then exist by the side of the Easter festival fixed according to spiritual principles; and we shall celebrate this festival truly when we have learnt to regard the external world itself as a symbol.

The coming of spring is a symbol of an event performed by the Spirit—namely, that of going to sleep. In the autumn, Nature withers away and the Spirit wakes. The withering away is no reality; it is a symbol of the fact that the divine forces allied with the Earth are waking. And with their wisdom the men of ancient times placed in the winter season the festivals which indicate the connection with spiritual worlds. Infinitely deep wisdom is everywhere in evidence here, wisdom through which man becomes aware that he lives in the flow of Time, together with spiritual Beings to whom he belongs. And so man will gradually learn to know that he belongs to the Spirit of which external Nature is merely a symbol; more and more he will long to experience his relation to the Spirit, not to its outer symbol.

We know that the great Atlantean catastrophe was followed by the period of ancient sacred Indian culture; then came the ancient Persian and the Egypto-Chaldean-Babylonian epochs of culture, then the fourth, the Graeco-Latin epoch, and we ourselves are living in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. But attention has also been called to another rhythm. The Graeco-Latin epoch stands, as it were, by itself; the fifth epoch is a kind of repetition of the third, the Egypto-Chaldean-Babylonian epoch; the sixth epoch will be a repetition of the Persian, and the seventh a revival and renewal of the spiritual content of ancient Indian culture. Qualities and features of Egypto-Chaldean civilisation therefore come into evidence again in a certain way in our own thinking, feeling and impulses of will. During that third epoch men were destined to unfold and intensify their connection with the world of the stars. Astrology was elaborated and cultivated in the third epoch. Men had direct clairvoyant insight into the mysterious connections between the world of stars and human destiny.

There have been highly spiritual men who felt this inwardly, as though through a resurgence of incarnations in that third epoch. It was like a recollection of what they had achieved in ages of the distant past, when there was direct, intuitive astrological knowledge. This was the case with Tycho de Brahe, the reincarnated Julian the Apostate. [See also Occult History, lecture IV, and Appendix; also Karmic Relationships: Esoteric Studies - Volume IV, Vol. IV, lecture V and VII.] Copernicus too, like Kepler, was an astrologer and attached great value to those mysterious connections through which human destiny can become intelligible.

This is naturally regarded as utter superstition by the ‘enlightened’ mentality of to-day and the attitude of a modern man who prides himself upon possessing it will be that Tycho de Brahe was admittedly a great astronomer and in those days it was excusable that he should also have been an astrologer! Enlightened men of the present age see fit to ‘excuse’ a great deal; for example, they excuse Tycho de Brahe for having astonished the whole world at that time by foretelling the death of the Sultan Soliman. They regard this as an understandable weakness of the great man who made the first map of the heavens. Indeed these enlightened minds even find an excuse for the circumstance that the death of the Sultan Soliman actually occurred within a few days of the date foretold by Tycho de Brahe!

So we see how the ancient Egypto-Chaldean wisdom flashed up again in certain individuals. It is present even now, only we must seek it in a new form, and then anthroposophical study of the symbols and parables to be found in the external world will reveal many secrets. We perceive, for example, that in every plant, if a connecting line is drawn between the points around the stalk where the leaves are attached to it, we get a spiral; it is as if the leaves made their way around the stalk in spirals; and in a plant where the stalk is not rigid it follows this law itself, describing spirals as, for instance, is the case in the bindweed. These are everyday phenomena but no attention is paid to them. Some day, however, these things will again be studied and then the striking discovery will be made that these movements of the leaves depend upon forces that are not to be found on the Earth but work down from the planets; and because the planets describe certain spiral movements in the heavens, their forces actually guide the leaves in spirals around the stalk. The stalk grows vertically and the blossom is the culmination. The spiral lines differ in the various species of plants because there are several planets and their effect upon the plants is different in each case.

A time will come when it will be known, for example, how Venus moves, and what species of plant corresponds to this movement. Such a plant will then rightly be regarded as a mirror image in miniature of the movement described by Venus. Other plants mirror the movement described by Mercury in the spiral line connecting the points at which the leaves are attached to the stalk; others mirror the movement described by Jupiter, others again that described by Saturn. The planets impress their scripts upon the plants of the Earth, and the Sun's force regulates the whole process in such a way that the effect produced by the planets culminates in the blossom. Some day men will study the connection of the spiral growth of the plants with the movements of the planets and then they will feel the kinship of the kingdoms of the Earth with the kingdoms of Heaven.

Everything in the external world is a parable, a symbol; the laws of the growth of plants symbolize the movements of the planets, and these in turn are symbols of something even more sublime—deeds of spiritual Beings in the Cosmos. It will eventually be possible to discover how individual physical entities and beings are connected with the Cosmos. A beginning will be made by studying physical matter, and what grows and thrives on the Earth will be connected with the deeds of spiritual Beings in cosmic space. Men will gain knowledge of how minerals, plants and animals and even human destiny, are connected with deeds in the Cosmos. This knowledge will be gained anew during our present epoch but for a long time yet external science will refuse to adapt itself to such ways of approach and those who busy themselves with astrology will continue to cling to old traditions instead of going to the real sources. That is what ought to happen, but it can only do so if men confront the world with an attitude resulting from the stage of occult development appropriate for the modern age—regarding everything in the external world as signs and symbols.

Signs that had meaning for ancient clairvoyant consciousness have been handed down from olden times without being understood. For example, the sign of Aries was full of meaning and living content to the men of old; the sign did not apply to the constellation of Aries as such but indicated that the Sun or the Moon was standing in a certain relationship to this constellation, enabling certain forces to work in a definite way.

What we call ‘space’ at the present time is nothing but fantasy—it too is a ‘symbol.’ There is no space as such; spiritual forces are working from all directions. This is a difficult concept to grasp but the reality of certain facts can be felt instinctively.—On the morning of 21st March the Sun rises approximately in front of the constellation of Pisces, but this is simply the indication that particular spiritual forces—or Beings, to be more exact—are exercising a definite influence upon the Earth at that time. When we feel how this sign—the Sun in the constellation of Pisces—should be interpreted, we can translate it into terms of imaginative knowledge and speak of its inner significance.

An endeavour has been made to indicate these things in the Calendar which has just appeared. In this Calendar will be found signs that differ from those handed down by tradition, because the latter are no longer suitable for modern consciousness. (See note at end of lecture.) These pictures of the Zodiacal constellations are representations of actual experiences connected with the waking and sleeping of particular spiritual Beings. We have in these pictures a renewal of certain knowledge that needs to be renewed at the present time, because the third post-Atlantean culture-epoch must as it were rise again in the fifth epoch.

One must, of course, begin with a correct computation of time, and this brings me to a matter that will be regarded by those outside our Movement as sheer distortion and lunacy. It will be found that the Calendar indicates the year 1879 [i.e., 1879 years after the birth of Ego-consciousness at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. In many other lectures Dr Steiner indicates the year 1879 as the beginning of the Michael Age.]; this is because it is important for people of the present age to regard the year of the Event of Golgotha as the most momentous of all, as the year which determines how time is to be computed. When on a Friday in April in the year 33 A.D. the Mystery of Golgotha took place, Ego-consciousness in the present sense was actually born. It matters not at all on what part of the Earth a man lives, to which nation, race or religion he belongs. Just as the day of Caesar's death is the same for a Chinese or a European, the fact well known in occult life is that the Mystery of Golgotha took place in the year 33 A.D. The birth of Ego-consciousness is a fact of international significance, having nothing whatever to do with nationality.

It is therefore surprising to read in foreign theosophical periodicals that here we are promoting theosophy in a form patterned entirely in accordance with German culture! No credence whatever should be given to this statement for it gainsays the very essence of our Movement. One is little inclined to enter into or discuss these things and would much prefer to ignore them. But it is a duty and a necessity to call attention to them so that friends may be forearmed when sheer misstatements are made. Unfortunately, however, such misstatements are sometimes believed. It is anything but pleasant to have to speak of these things and it is done only because it is a duty to safeguard mankind against fallacy. If it is insisted that equal rights must be accorded to opinions but the interpretation of this is to distort one opinion and connect a particular region of the earth with it, warning is essential. What really matters is that truth must reign among us as a sacred law.

Our desire was to express in the Calendar the objective fact of the birth of the Ego. We reckon from the Mystery of Golgotha, hence from Easter to Easter, not from one New Year's Day to the next. This has been the cause of further derision and mockery, because it compels us to reckon with years of unequal length. But in what is unequal there is life; in what is uniform and fixed there is the impress of death, and our Calendar is intended to be a creative impulse for life.

There still remains the question: how can all this be a matter of actual experience? The answer to this question will be found in the Calendar itself. As its second part you will find the ‘Calendar of the Soul’ which I myself regard as very important. For each consecutive week I have tried to draw up verses for meditation, the effect of which will enable the soul gradually to discover in itself and in its own experiences the connection with the great cosmic constellations. These formulae for meditation do in all reality lead the soul out of its narrow confines to experience of the heavens. I can assure you that the results of long, long occult investigations are contained in these 52 verses which will enable the soul to find access to happenings in the great universe and thereby to experience the Spirits working in the onward flow of Time. But if you ponder on the texts of the verses in the Calendar you will discern an element of Timelessness, in rhythmic alternation, an element that is experienced inwardly by the human being, the laws of which run parallel to those of Time in the outer world. Mere analogies do not suffice here.

Each one of you will be able to use this Calendar of the Soul every year. In it you will find something that might be described as the finding of the path leading from the human soul to the living Spirit weaving through the Universe.

I have thus tried to justify the deed that has taken the form of the Calendar. It is not to be regarded as a sudden inspiration but as something organically connected with our whole Movement.

• 1. A new edition of the Calendar is in course of preparation and will be published by the Rudolf Steiner Press. The first edition of the Calendar (1912) contained reproductions of sketches made by Imme von Eckardstein according to indications given by Dr Steiner and corresponding to each sign of the Zodiac. Subsequent editions have contained only the verses for the 52 weeks of the year, with a short Foreword by Dr Steiner. The Calendar of the Soul is contained in volume No. 40 of the Complete Centenary Edition of Dr Steiner's works, other contents of this volume being as follows: Planetentanz; Zwölf Stimmungen; Das Lied von der initiation: eine Satire; Wahrsprüche und Widmungen; Credo: Der Einzelne und das All.
  An article by Margot Rössler entitled “Rudelf Steiner's Calendar” appeared in the Spring number of Anthroposophical Quarterly in 1958 (Vol. 3, No. 1) and contains information on Imme von Eckardstein's work.

I have often had to mention here that the science of initiation is required for the forces that are to bring about a reconstruction of declining civilization; that it is necessary to know what can be gained from beyond the threshold of the super-sensible world. One can say that the spiritual evolution of humanity has proceeded from a knowledge and corresponding attitude, feeling and will that were drawn from beyond this threshold. Everything that is discovered when we go back to mankind's primordial treasures of wisdom becomes intelligible when we can trace this original wisdom to the revelations derived from mystery knowledge; when we can assume that, to begin with, sources of knowledge, of feeling and will, were accessible to humanity in its earth evolution that are not accessible by means of the purely human forces known to people today. As evolution progressed, human beings increasingly had to depend an what can be derived from the human being himself. This then is essentially the content of the forces that have been active during recent centuries in the development of civilization.

These forces that have emerged out of man himself up to now have produced a condition of civilization which, if left to its own devices, would inevitably lead to its own downfall. The majority of people today do not believe this as yet. They continue to talk and act automatically in the same old way, rejecting what is drawn from the same spiritual sources from which the ancient mystery wisdom was drawn, but now in a new way, directly through the forces of man himself. We must go quite concretely into what can be disclosed to present-day humanity as a sort of basis for all that is needed in the immediate future in the way of natural science; a knowledge that comprises human ethics, moral philosophy, but also social will. We must therefore go into certain matters that have been discussed here in the past few weeks from any number of viewpoints; today, I shall refer to them again from yet a different point of view.

When we are awake, we are, in the first place, surrounded by the outer sense world, by what produces the impressions made on our eyes, ears, organs of warmth, and on our senses as a whole. The external sense world is spread out around us, and the inner life of most people mainly consists of a further elaboration of the outer impressions. From the other side of the threshold this outer world presents an appearance that differs from the one it exhibits on this side. You know, of course, what humanity has come to in these last centuries by confming itself basically to viewing the world from this side of the threshold. To put it in a word, I would say that mankind has reached the point of looking at itself, so to speak. What man himself beholds we call the threefold man, the head man, the rhythmic man and the limb and metabolic man. Here, we shall indicate diagrammatically the tapestry that spreads round about us (see sketch on p. 3), which in the main constitutes the content of the sensory world. From this side of the threshold people now speculate on what is behind this sense tapestry. They say that behind it molecules, atoms and substances perform all sorts of dances. They give these dances any number of names, but they are convinced that when the human being looks out through his eyes, listens to the outside through his ears, in short, perceives outwardly through his senses, that some sort of material world lies behind it.

From the other side of the threshold, no such world of substance is disclosed. If a person penetrates only a little way into the region beyond the threshold, it is immediately obvious that a certain region of the spiritual world lies behind the tapestry of the senses; meaning, we are essentially dealing with a world of spirit which is located behind this sensory world.

When we take into consideration that the human being consists of the ego, the astral, etheric, and physical bodies, we have to say that when man is awake, meaning, when he is immersed in his organism with his ego and astral body, he has no share in the spirit region behind the tapestry of the senses. In sleep, on the other hand, having drawn his ego and astral body out of his physical organism, man dwells within this (upper) region of the spirit world with his ego and astral body. From the time he falls asleep until he awakens, man participates in the region lying, as it were, behind nature in a spirit-nature world. One could also say that it is the world to which man belongs for this period; a certain part of the spiritual realm is in fact allotted to him for this state of sleep.

Now man also has insight into himself only to a certain degree. He can brood about himself to some extent and then, referring to his soul nature, he speaks of thoughts, feelings and will impulses, but in most instances in a very vague manner. From this inner nature, which remains quite undefined to him, he draws the thoughts that represent memories, but he does not see behind his inner being. Thus, we can say that just as a sort of barrier stands between ourselves and a certain region of the external world, so, too, a barrier can be drawn through which the gaze, turned inward, does not penetrate. If the human being would, however, penetrate into this region that lies in a sense on yonder side of the mirror which reflects his memories, he would not discover what many mystics, affected by illusions, believe. For they assume that all one has to do is brood over one's inner being and the loftiest spiritual insight can be attained. Instead, man discovers there the mysteries of his organization, the secrets of the wondrous structure expressed in the human organism. Were man really to penetrate the barrier, he would not behold the images of a Mechthild of Magdeburg, Meister Eckhdidt or St. Theresa; he would perceive the human organization, something that would appear thoroughly prosaic to certain illusion-prone mystics, but does not seem prosaic to one who possesses the right feeling for the actual mystery of the universe. One is indeed justified in saying that far more wonderful than the images of St. Theresa, Mechthild of Magdeburg, or Johannes Tauler; far more remarkable than these reminiscences forged by the reflections that exist as memories are those saturated with impulses of sensations radiating up from liver, stomach, spieen, and so on; far more wonderful than all that—yes, more remarkable, too, than what has been depicted in archetypal pictures of mankind's evolution through myths, legends and such like—is what establishes itself in the prosaic organs of the human interior. Strange as this sounds, the truth must be grasped at this point. What establishes itself there is, first of all, actual earthly substance, the element, in fact, that constitutes earthly matter. We do not find earthly matter in the outer world; it is found within the human skin. Again, this whole inner structure of man's organs is none other than something that is being pressed in a sense out of another spirit region. It is a spirit region that in a manner of speaking sweats out of itself what is present as organs in the human organism. When man looks into his inner being upon penetrating the tapestry of memories customarily radiating towards him, this organic structure is first discovered, although mystically embellished on occasion. Just as he can penetrate from beyond the threshold through the tapestry of the outer senses, when he looks through this memory tapestry, he then beholds behind this organic structure the other region of the spirit to which he belongs from the time he falls asleep until he awakens. It is a spirit region that man pays no attention to, but it is the one that bestows on him the forces expressed in his limbs.

When we contemplate our senses, we find that forces dwell in them that are mainly those lying behind the tapestry of the senses. Yet they penetrate us through the openings of our senses (see sketch) unbeknown to us, when we observe the world purely from this side of the threshold.

In our organs, too, forces are present that come from that spiritual region (Steiner here referred to the previous diagram), and the forces we possess in our arms and legs are really those that come from that other region of the spirit. Thus, the moment man is observed from the other side of the threshold, he is perceived as the confluence of two spirit domains. What confronts us when we contemplate the human being here in the earthly world is basically only an apparent unity. In fact, man is not a unity at all. He is the confluence of the spiritually active forces from the two regions I have indicated to you. The forces that live in our eyes or in our ears, for example, are of quite another origin than those that develop when we put one foot before the other, or move our arms. One cannot harbor such a concept without realizing that man is embedded, as it were, in the whole cosmos, that owing to his senses he belongs to one particular spirit region of the cosmos and through his limbs to another. Only what lives approximately in the middle—the rhythmic man, the system of the lungs and the heart and all that is connected with it—is actually of earthly origin; it is woven, as it were, out of a kind of world in the middle. Thus, man himself is a threefold being. Without understanding this threefoldness, we cannot comprehend man. I said that this is how the human being appears when we view him from beyond the threshold. We learn to see him as a member of the whole cosmos. One becomes aware through spiritual science how man lives in the whole cosmos and is fashioned out of it. One is then no longer ignorant of the truth that must be perceived, namely, that man's task is not merely comprised of what he accomplishes here on earth; he has tasks to fulfill in the whole of cosmic evolution. He represents an essential factor, to be reckoned with in the whole spiritual cosmic evolution.

Thus, one can say that spiritual science opens our eyes to what man represents as a member of the cosmos. Compared to this, just picture how liliputian the ideas appear that people today think up concerning the human being. Nowadays matters have reached the point where a person will only accept as knowledge something derived from this side of the threshold. He only looks at what is revealed to him between awakening and falling asleep, between birth and death. Moreover, he would like to construe all the tasks that the human being can accomplish here on earth from the concepts and ideas derived from this liliputian comprehension of man. We make no progress this way. We move closer and closer towards total decline precisely because our intellectuals will not venture to construe the tasks in this world by utilizing ideas other than those gained from waking life, from what lies between birth and death. What man accomplishes, however, is of an essentially much vaster scope. This can only be understood when the insights gained by ordinary observation of life are illumined and fructified with those that can be known by means of viewing the world from beyond the threshold. There can be absolutely no improvement in the development of civilization in the world if we do not accept what can be attained for human knowledge, feeling and will from beyond the threshold.

One is moved to say that it is especially painful when one finds that programs concerning life are drawn up today out of all the truncated knowledge, curtailed on all sides, which has been amassed by humanity in the last three to four hundred years. One is really in a strange position in regard to these programs. Religious denominations exist today which, at least textually, trace their faith to earlier ages, to times when ancient mystery knowledge was still alive. Their creed is no longer understood in these religious groups. It is only textual tradition, everything else has been squeezed out like a dry lemon. It is in fact no longer there, though in a certain sense one or the other person can penetrate to an understanding of it, particularly if he presses forward to what is usually prohibited by his church. Then a person can acquire a good deal from the traditional knowledge of the confessions. For instance, if, independent of what is prescribed for him, a Catholic reflects upon the Trinity and the Incarnation, he can arrive at significant insights. Indeed, it would be more sensible in many respects to reflect upon the Trinity or the Creed than to patronize all the movements that emerge today and forge a new creed and knowledge out of the modern truncated torso of learning. For what mankind has accumulated in recent centuries and utilizes today in order to launch into movements that introduce apparent improvements in the world is far short of what has remained from antiquity in tradition, even though it has been deformed by the confessions. It is lamentable to see how all sorts of scholastic or women's movements, fabricated out of the truncated knowledge of the last few centuries, believe that they can stir the world, whereas they only talk around the real questions.

It must be said that all this rests on a certain invincible pride of modern humanity, an arrogance that will learn absolutely nothing. If a person has grown up in a movement, in some party, he generally feels that this party has not yet reached just that particular insight which he, based on his viewpoint in life, has attained on his own, and so he sets about reforming it. It is the regrettable fact of the present day that so much immature nonsense appears as reformatory ideas. Truly fruitful things can only be accomplished if these movements that hope to Shake the world will allow the influx of all that can be investigated beyond the threshold of the sense world. For, you see, there is a certain domain of the spirit out there beyond the tapestry of the sensory world. What purpose does it serve? Just think, this spirit region is the very wörld we are in when we are awake, albeit not consciously, but in reality we are in it with our whole organism; for, as we stand, as we walk, we are within this world, we just do not see it. We continually move through this world, we are in it; we accomplish our actions in it. And when men engage in politics in it, for example, in Bolshevism, then what Bolshevists do not perceive strikes back at mankind. The Bolshevists only wish to construct a world out of what they see, but they are not in the world that they see—they are in the world that lies beyond the tapestry of the sense world. When women's movements appear today and make all sorts of demands, they do this based on what they see, but they make these demands for the world that they do not perceive. It therefore always backfires out of the world we are in, which in reality is there, but is not present in the demands that are raised, because people stand firm against receiving anything from the spiritual world.

This world we live in, this region, naturally has its significance in the great universe. To what purpose then is it there? You see, the world we live in between death and a new birth is a different world from the one existing here behind the sense tapestry. The world we enter between death and a new birth is another domain of the spiritual world. It is mainly the spiritual region where those beings dwell whom we refer to when speaking of the hierarchies of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and so on. Yet this world of the nine hierarchies can only subsist when, through the physical human beingand it can only happen through him—it enters into a certain mutual intercourse with the world that I have described here as the spirit region beyond the domain of the senses.

When you live in a house and wish to have contact with the outer world without actually stepping outside, you must look out of the window. When the gods of the nine hierarchies wish to communicate with this world, they must do so through man. They cannot do it directly, they must do it through man. It is a region of the world that can be contemplated by the gods only by means of human beings. Man must enter the physical world from the world he inhabits between death and rebirth in order to bring about a reciprocal intercourse for the gods with the world evolving here (see sketch below). And for what purpose does this world, developing beyond the sense tapestry, exist? If this world were not there, the physical world would disperse in all directions. It is the world that would be reduced to dust, for it is the world in which only forces of antipathy hold sway. The world beyond the sense tapestry (circle) holds this physical world together. In the physical world, the tendency exists to expand and spread out constantly; this world (circle) holds it together.

The gods, too, however, only come into contact with this centripetally working world through the human being. The reason man has entered the cosmos is so that the world of the gods can come into a relationship, into a perceptive relation and intercourse, with this centripetal world.

Viewed from beyond the threshold, this centripetal world is cold and icy. To experience it is to be affected by something rigidifying, calcifying; yet it is filled with wisdom. It is woven, as it were, out of wisdom-filled thoughts, but it is cold, rigid, evoking chills. This cold, rigid world of forces holds the other (physical) world together. The human being is not organized so that he can sense this centripetal world directly. The person who enters the realm beyond the threshold feels this chill, this cold contraction. This coldness is the sign that one is actually entering with one's ego and astral body into the world which man enters each night, but without consciousness, not experiencing it. It is a sign that you enter consciously when you come into a world that makes you freeze, pervades you luminously with infmitely intensive wisdom, yet makes you freeze. Without this experience of freezing and stiffening to begin with, you cannot sense yourself an the other side of the threshold with your ego and astral body.

This is an experience that can be had and it is, in fact, one that can be gained only through actual experience. Indeed, in accordance with the explanations that you find in my books—Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, and Occult Science, which are sufficient to have these experiences if they are consistently pursued—the region beyond the threshold has to be entered. For it is a region that is as real as the sense realm.

However, if one is familiar with it, when one comprehends that this region (beyond the sensory realm) existsfor one cannot truly understand the physical world without knowledge of the other one—then one realizes something else, namely, why one does go about in it. True, is it not, one cannot go about perpetually freezing and feeling chilled; this is why a boundary has been set up for his ordinary consciousness. One would really pass bad nights if one were consciously to experience the time between falling asleep and waking up. Then why does one go about in it—for, after all, one also goes about in the same world when one is awake—why does one? Man brings into this world of centripetal forces cosmic forces that dwell within his inner being. When we grasp clearly in our mind's eye what it is that lives as forces in man's inner being—we shall speak of it in more detail in the next lecture—it is an element that we can call love, warmth, warmth of soul; the human being carries this soul warmth into the cold domain. This is preeminently his cosmic task. He is the source of warmth for this sphere. If I may so express myself, inasmuch as the gods have created man—to put the matter trivially—they have created the opening for just this region that must hold together for them the world that would otherwise disperse in dust.

This is only one example. Tomorrow we shall hear of others, and particularly those that have to do with the social field so we may realize what mission men's social life on earth has for the whole cosmos. However, this is just one example of how, from beyond the threshold, man is seen to have a task that is not exhausted by what is normally viewed as his task within this (physical) world, but how he has a cosmic mission, how he exists for something, so to speak, that lies within the scope of the great universal plan of the divine spirits. And just as one must realize that man's existence is in fact there in order for something to take place in the universe, so must one be able to see that in everything, even in regard to the most minute achievements of humanity, man is a member of the cosmos. One must realize that everything he does signifies something that surpasses what he can first perceive with his consciousness, and that all he does signifies something in relation to the whole cosmos. By expanding ordinary, small human perceptions, they can be transformed . into cosmic world perceptions. This is of primary importance in spiritual science, and it is what humanity 'needs today.

In the last three to four centuries, the whole of civilized mankind has fallen in a way out of its celestial sphere. It has occupied itself merely with what happens from birth to death and between waking up and falling asleep. The whole of modern life is composed only of this. This life, however, is doomed to death; this life is a gradually dying life. Place into it as many socialistic theories as you like as well as their metamorphoses into so-called actions; they will only hasten the decline. Bring any number of women's movements into this life and do not allow them to be fructified by a new spiritual science, and it will be less and less possible to attain what is actually instinctively desired by means of such feminist movements and the like.

What has to be fructified today must always be grasped at the right end. Oswald Spengler, who wrote a book about the decline of the West, has calculated correctly from actual scientific hypotheses that the decline of the West must definitely take place—that is, if one can only take into consideration the means at Spengler's disposal. In some measure, Oswald Spengler is right. This decline will certainly be forthcoming if an impulse does not come from spiritual science. Of course, he does not admit to such an impulse and therefore, from his standpoint, he is quite correct to write only of the West's decline. Out of this feeling of decline, Spenglerthis theorist of decline—can, nevertheless, make many significant statements. He makes quite pertinent remarks at one point, for instance, about recent philistine, middle-class philosophies, mysticisms, or whatever one wishes to call them, such as vegetarianism, the manner in which discussions about food are ordinarily carried on, especially in those philistine magazines that are usually displayed in vegetarian restaurants. It is a commonplace philistine philosophy, the most philistine imaginable. But why is that? Is it so in the absolute sense? Yes, what is discussed there is naturally philistine in the absolute sense; for during the last three or four centuries people did not perceive the spirit concealed behind these things. People do not talk of the spirit today. Vegetarianism, anti-alcoholism and other fine subjects are all debated from the standpoint of pure materialism. The spirit concealed behind them is not seen. Thus, the (negative) things have actually triumphed. Philistinism has arisen because the people who would like to begin to be spiritual are often really the worst materialists. They absorb the concepts of other materialists and, in some fashion, frame a spiritual system from them.

Now, in this regard, even theoretical constructions are extraordinarily interesting. As most of you know, a certain Leadbeater is active in the Theosophical Society. This Leadbeater has written all sorts of books, and a great number of people were particularly charmed when he wrote something like an occult chemistry; I even met scholars who were most delighted by this occult chemistry. What really happened? This Mr. Leadbeater has become acquainted with the materialistic chemistry of the present with its molecules and atoms. This materialistic chemistry of today with its molecules and atoms describes oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, fron oxide, sodium acetate, and so on, building them up from these molecules and atoms. Out of such atoms, Leadbeater builds up the spiritual worlds, the Spirits and the angels. He creates a spiritualism out of materialism I have seen people who went about nearly enchanted when, among many things, the so-called "permanent atom" once swam around like a drop of fat on the soup of the Theosophical Society—such drops of fat sometimes did swim about, didn't they? This permanent atom—a remarkable thing! The human being dies; returns to earth again. What is it that has here endured? Of course, people could not imagine that the human organism is constituted of forces. It would be an actual impossibility for them to picture how the human limb system organizes itself from' one life to the next, how the head is structured out of the previous incarnation. For in regard to the head and the limbs, these people only conceive of something grossly material which is naturally placed into the grave. They cannot imagine that forces are contained within, and that one is actually referring to these forces when speaking in this way. After all, something must pass over from one life into the next! There is one atom among the millions and billions of atoms; this one atom passes through the spiritual world, then the atoms of the subsequent organism group themselves around this one atom, the permanent atom. It was the delight of theosophical folk to see how this drop of fat, the permanent atom, floated on the water soup of the Theosophical Society—the spiritual water soup, that is.

Truly, these matters were only mentioned in order to show how everything at the present, even something wishing to strive for the spirit, is corroded by the materialistic conceptions of the last three to four centuries; to stress how one must leave these ideas behind in order to arrive at any kind of constructive new direction. It is, however, as I pointed out yesterday: At the present time, there exist forces that are absolutely unwilling to allow anything to arise that can aid humanity in an upward reorganization.

You may ask: Then does humanity desire its downfall? One really cannot assume that people wish the downfall of the whole of civilization. Yet, observation shows that they do, for they continue to live automatically in the old established manner. I will explain to you why they wish that. I need only indicate a single phenomenon and this will give you an explanation. Have you never seen insects flying about in a room where a light was burning and saw how they dived into the flame? Consider such a phenomenon, and then you will have a picture of the mood of modern humanity. One must simply take the phenomena of nature for what they are—symptoms of the activities of forces in the universe. We shall speak more about these things tomorrow as we seek to fmd the bridge to a certain form of social thinking.

In expanding today what we have been discussing in the previous lectures I should like to take up the astronomical aspect of the Easter Festival; and in order to do this it will be necessary to touch upon some of the facts referring to the so-called secret of the Moon.

During all epochs in which people knew of the Mystery wisdom, the secret of the Moon was a familiar concept and was invariably associated with the being of man, in so far as the latter is related to the whole cosmos. We must keep clearly in mind that in his entirety man is related to the whole cosmos, just as he is connected with the Earth as regards his physical body. Now, it is a concomitant of the materialistic age that of the vast cosmos, which expresses its spirituality in the form of the fixed star constellations and the movements of the planets, nothing has remained in human consciousness but the outer appearance of the stars and the computation of their movements (if they are planets) and so forth.

The manner in which astronomy is studied today is the same as it would be if one studied the relative measurements and the outer conditions of movement in the human organism, remaining unaware that a psycho-spiritual element pervades the physical organism and comes to expression in these measurements and conditions of movement.

In the human being a unified psycho-spiritual element manifests itself, held together by the ego. But spiritual observation discloses that the cosmic organism expresses itself, not in a unified psycho-spiritual entity, but in a multiplicity, an immeasurable, limitless multitude of spiritual beings that reveal themselves through the forms of the fixed star constellations, through the movements of the planets, through the light raying forth from the stars, and so on.

Inner man is related to this spiritual multiplicity in the stars as is physical man to Earth substances that can serve as nourishment. And man's closest connection with the universe has to do with what we can call the secret of the Moon.

External observation of the Moon shows it to be in a state of metamorphosis as seen from the Earth. We see the full luminous face, we see it half-illuminated, then one-quarter—and there is also that stage in which it entirely withdraws from outer view, called the stage of new Moon. And then we have again the return to full Moon.

All this is nowadays explained as though the Moon were merely some kind of a body moving about in cosmic space, illuminated by the Sun from different directions and hence presenting various aspects. But that does not exhaust what the Moon means to the Earth, and especially to Earth men. In the case of the Moon in particular we must understand that if we look out at something as readily perceptible in its physical surfaces as, say, the full Moon—that is, something that presents a physical aspect—this aspect embodies something totally different from what is inherent in a new Moon. True, the new Moon cannot achieve direct physical expression on account of correlated cosmic conditions; but we must not conclude that because it does not express itself as a physical phenomenon, it has no effect. When our knowledge of the firmament tells us that it is new Moon, this means that the Moon is present in an invisible but all the more spiritual way than when appearing as full Moon in physical light. So the Moon is present—now wholly physical, now wholly spiritual, and we have the rhythmic alternation of its physical and spiritual expression.

And now, in order to understand the crux of the matter, we must recall a fact with which you are familiar from my Occult Science, an Outline, namely, that at one time the Moon was within the Earth: it was part of the Earth body. It passed out of the Earth and became a satellite, as the term goes. In other words, it split off from the Earth and now circles it. When it was one with the Earth its influences upon human beings were exerted from the Earth.

Naturally, in the time when man existed and developed upon an Earth that still contained the Moon, he was a very different being. When this Moon withdrew, the Earth became poorer by exactly what the Moon represented; and henceforth the lower

part of man was formed and held fast by the other forces—no longer by the Earth-and-Moon forces, but by the former only. On the other hand, the influences that emanated from within the Earth at the time it still contained the Moon now act upon man from without, from the Moon.

We can put it this way: formerly the Moon forces came in contact first with the lower limbs—the feet and legs—and then streamed upward from below; but since the Moon withdrew from the Earth they act in the opposite direction, from the head downward. But this implies that the task of these forces has become a very different one, and the nature of this task comes into evidence in the experiences man has when he descends from the pre-earthly to the earthly life. When he has completed the period between death and a new birth and has absolved all the requirements of soul and spirit demanded during that period, he prepares to descend to Earth, to unite with the bodily-physical principle transmitted to him by his father and mother. But before it is possible for his ego and astral body to unite with the physical body he must provide himself with an etheric body, which he attracts from the surrounding cosmos.

This process has radically changed since the Moon withdrew from the Earth. Before that time man needed forces, when approaching the Earth again, that would enable him to shape the all-pervading ether into the form of an etheric body around his ego and astral body. These forces he drew, as he approached the Earth, from the Moon which was then within it. He still does; but the point is that since the splitting off of the Moon they come to him from outside the Earth. This means that immediately before entering the Earth life he must appeal to the power of the Moon forces—that is, to something cosmic—if he would build his etheric body.

This etheric body must be formed in such a way that it has, as it were, an outer side and an inner side. Let us think of it quite graphically, formed with an outer side and an inner side. When the outer side is being formed the forces of light are needed, for, like other things of substance, the etheric body is fashioned principally out of the flooding light of the cosmos. But sunlight cannot be employed for this purpose: it does not provide the forces that would enable man to build his etheric body. This calls for sunlight that is reflected by the Moon and thereby radically altered; and all the light coming to us from the Moon—in fact, all the light shining from the Moon into the cosmos—contains the forces that enable man to form the outer side of his etheric body when he descends to Earth.

And on the other hand, the forces man needs to form the inner side of his etheric body are the spiritual emanations of the new Moon; so that his ability to form the outer and the inner side is related to this rhythm of the outer light and dark of the Moon.

But all this that the Moon forces achieve for man, as it were, goes back to the fact that the Moon is truly not the mere physical body about which modern science tells us fairy tales, but a body wholly permeated by spirituality, comprising a multiplicity of spiritual beings. I have repeatedly explained that when the Moon withdrew from the Earth, it was not merely physical matter that streamed out into cosmic space: those ancient beings, man's primordial teachers, who lived on the Earth not in physical bodies but in a spiritual form, these passed with the Moon out into the universe and there founded a sort of Moon colony. We have therefore to distinguish between the physico-etheric and the psycho-spiritual constituents of the Moon, remembering that again the latter is not a unity but a multiplicity.

Now, the entire life of this spirituality in the Moon depends upon the manner in which those beings observe cosmic conditions from their point of view, from the point of view of the Moon. Figuratively expressed: the spiritual beings of the Moon direct their gaze primarily to what is of greatest importance for them, to the planets of our orbit; and upon the inferences of these observations depends all that takes place on the Moon, as well as all that contributes to providing man in the right way with the forces needed for forming his etheric body.

Certain of the Mysteries knew this. It was ancient Mystery knowledge in some of the sanctuaries that the constellations and the movements in the planetary system were observed from the Moon, and the actions of the Moon beings determined accordingly. This was expressed by relating, in human consciousness, the Moon with the forces of other planets, the Moon being the point from which are determined those cosmic contexts that are linked with the forming of the human etheric body. This is reflected in the names of the days of the week:

Thus we see how everything pertaining to the point of view of the Moon was brought into relation with all that tended to quicken man's awareness of the planets in connection with reckoning time. And the burden of the admonition given in the old Mysteries was something as follows: Remember, oh man, that before descending to Earth you needed forces engendered in the Moon by the act of the Moon-beings in observing the other planets. For the configuration of your etheric body, when you descended to earthly life, you are indebted to the Moon's share in what is expressed by Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and so forth.

So on the one hand we have the rhythmical passage of the Moon through light and darkness in its course around the Earth, and on the other we find the whole sequence of the planets inscribed in human consciousness. The Mysteries even added the following: Due to the ability of the Moon-beings to behold Mars, the capacity for speech is organized into man's etheric body, and through their observation of Mercury, the capacity for movement is concentrated there.

If we wish to employ these secrets of the Moon as a medium of expression, this can be done in an entirely different form: speech becomes eurythmy. It comes about as follows: if we study the secrets of speech by finding out what the Moon-beings observed when questioning Mars, and then discover what changes these observations undergo when the Moon-beings turn to Mercury, then speech becomes eurythmy. In other words, if we transform the Moon-beings' Mars experiences into their Mercury experiences, the human capacity for speech becomes the capacity for eurythmy. That expresses the matter cosmically.

The current engendering in man the capacity for wisdom derives from the Moon-beings' experiences with Jupiter; what streams through the soul as love and beauty, from Venus; and that which permeates the etheric body with inner soul warmth is gained from the experience acquired by the Moon-beings' observation of Saturn.

There remains that which must be kept away—pushed back, as it were—to prevent its interfering with the formation of the etheric body immediately before the descent to Earth: that which comes from the Sun. From the Sun—or from the observation of the Sun—derive the forces from which man must be protected if he is to become complete in himself through the integration of the etheric body—that is, through protective forces.

It can be said that in this way we learn what occurs on the Moon, and at the same time we learn how the human etheric body is formed and constituted when man descends from the pre-earthly to the earthly existence. Those are the facts connected with the secret of the Moon. Nowadays we can recount such matters, but in certain of the older Mysteries they were not merely narrated but actually experienced. What I shall now write on the blackboard was not only known; it was an inner experience.

By means of initiation into the Mysteries, of which I spoke yesterday, it was possible to get beyond looking outward and listening outward with eyes and ears in the physical vicinity of the Earth. It was possible to become free of the physical body, to keep aloof from it, and to live only in the etheric body; and then the initiate lived with all that has been described. He did not live with the speech formed in the larynx, but with the speech resounding in Mars as cosmic language. He moved in conformity with the way in which Mercury guided the movements in the cosmos: not merely with feet and legs did he move, but in accord with the manner in which Mercury directs the movements of the human being. Nor did he possess that wisdom so laboriously acquired during childhood and early youth—really an unwisdom in the materialistic age—but he lived actually in the wisdom of Jupiter, because he could unite with the Moon-beings who observed Jupiter.

This sort of initiation really meant that the mystic was wholly in the light shining from the Moon. He had left the Earth, no longer a creature of flesh and blood, and lived in moonlight modified by forces from the other planets. During these periods of spiritual observation he simply became a light-being of the Moon—not in a symbolical sense or in any way to be thought of as abstract, but rather, as a man might today go to Basel and back, fully conscious of a reality, knowing he had experienced something real. The mystic was equally conscious of reality when he was led through the initiation ritual to the Moon-beings.

The initiate knew that for the time being he had taken leave of his physical body, that his soul and spirit had passed into the light-sphere of the Moon, and that he had borne a light-body; and because he had been united with the Moon-beings he had looked out into planetary space, truly able to behold what could be revealed in this vast realm.

And what was that? Well, among other things, he observed principally that from the Sun there emanated the forces of beings that must not be allowed to intervene in the building of the human etheric body. The Sun appeared as something that tended to dissolve, destroy the etheric body; hence he knew that forces to be received by the Sun-beings must not proceed from his etheric body, but from his higher principles, from his ego and astral body. Only upon these must the Sun forces be allowed to act. So he knew that for the forming of his etheric body he must not look to the Sun but to the planets, and that he must turn to the Sun for his astral body and especially for his ego and its whole inner strength. The second point, then, that became manifest through this recurring initiation into the secret of the Moon was this, that in what pertained to his etheric body man belonged to the planets; but for the strengthening of his astral body and most of all his ego he must look to the Sun.

This initiation was really of such a nature as to make the mystic one with the moonlight; but it was by means of his own moonlight existence that he looked into the Sun.

And now he reflected as follows: the Sun sends its light to the Moon because this must not be imparted to man directly. The result is moonlight in conjunction with the planetary forces, and out of this the etheric body is formed.—That was the secret known to him who was initiated in this way. He also knew to what extent he bore within him the power of the spiritual Sun: he had seen it, become conscious of it; and this was the stage of initiation at which the initiate became a Christ bearer—that is, a Sun-being bearer, not a Sun-being recipient. Just as the Moon itself, when at full, is a sunlight bearer, so man became a Christ bearer, a christophoros. This initiation leading to the stage of christophoros was thus an absolutely real experience.

Now imagine this actual experience through which the mystic sped away from the Earth, as it were, and ascended as an initiated Earth-man to the light-being; and imagine this inner, human Easter experience of former times transformed into a cosmic festival. In later ages men no longer knew that such things could happen; that man is really able to withdraw from Earth conditions, unite with those of the Moon, and from the Moon behold the Sun. But the memory of it was to be preserved, and this we have in the Easter Festival.

The ability to experience all this did not pass over into the later consciousness that was becoming materialistic; instead it turned into an abstract conception. Men no longer looked inward and said, I can unite with the moonlight. They looked at the Moon, the full Moon, and said, It is not a question of my aspiring upward: it is the Earth that strives to ascend. And when is this effort at its height? When spring begins, when there burst forth from the surface of the Earth all the forces that had lain dormant in seeds and plants under the ground. On the Earth they become plants, but they go further: they stream out into cosmic space.

The old Mysteries employed this image: man can most easily attain to the Moon-Sun initiation and become a christophoros in the season when the inner Earth forces, by means of the stems and leaves of plants, carry out of the ground what then streams forth from the Earth into the cosmos; for then he floats, as it were, on the forces that in spring ray out from the Earth and up to the Moon. But it must be the light of the full Moon.

All this, then, became a memory, but it also became abstract ... It must be the light of the full Moon. ... Subconsciously, no longer with the clear knowledge that this could be a human experience, people imagined that something or other—not man himself—streamed toward the full Moon, the first one after the beginning of spring. And what can this full Moon do now? It beholds the Sun; that is, the first day dedicated to the Sun: the first succeeding Sunday. Just as once a christophoros, from the viewpoint of the Moon, beheld the Sun-being, so now the Moon beholds the Sun—that is, its symbolization in Sunday.

We have the beginning of spring, March 21st, and the forces of the Earth are burgeoning forth into the universe. We must await the proper observer, the full Moon.

March 21st—full Moon—Sunday.

What does the Moon observe? The Sun; and the following Sunday is fixed as Easter Sunday. This is an abstract way of determining the date, surviving from a very real Mystery event that in former times frequently occurred for many men.

That is actually what our present spring Easter Festival has come to be. It represents a Mystery act that has often been performed in spring; but it is not the one I described day before yesterday. The latter led man to a comprehension of the death event. I explained that the idea of resurrection, clarified by something like the Adonis celebration in the fall, really led men to the experience of death, to the spiritual resurrection after about three days; and this process of resurrection really belongs in the autumn, for the reasons I gave.

The process I described today is a different one, performed in other Mysteries for certain initiations—those of the Sun and Moon; and this process confronted the neophyte with life's beginning. So you see, we can look back at a period in which certain Mysteries saw the descent of man from the pre-earthly to the earthly life, while others dwelt on the ascent in the spirit. But in later epochs, when the living substance of man's relation to the cosmic spirit could no longer be discerned, men went so far as simply to combine the autumn Mystery of the ascent with the spring Mystery of the descent into one festival.

Thus the confusion manifesting itself in the course of human evolution is evidence of the gradual effect of materialism: not only has the latter engendered false beliefs, but it has completely confused men's minds concerning an issue that at one period of human events existed, I might say, in a sacred order that caused mankind at the approach of autumn to celebrate a cosmic festival. But this in turn pointed to a Mystery act that evoked the thought: Nature falls into barrenness, it wilts and dies away, and this is like the physical dying of man; but while in Nature only the perishable is seen to be active, there lives in man the eternal, which must now be observed spiritually, disregarding the course of Nature, as the element of resurrection in the spiritual world after death. The spring Mysteries made it clear that Nature is conquered by the spirit, that, in turn, the spirit acts out of the cosmos, and that matter germinates and sprouts from the ground because it is driven by the spirit.

But this was intended to remind men—not of their passing into the spirit through death, but of their origin in the spirit, their descent from the spiritual world. Precisely where Nature begins to ascend, man was to remember his descent into the physical; and where Nature disintegrates, man was to contemplate his ascent, his spiritual resurrection. There is no doubt that such an understanding of man's relation to the cosmos intensified his soul life enormously.

But this varied according to the locality. In olden times some were definitely inclined to be autumn peoples and others rather spring peoples. Among the former were to be found the Adonis Mysteries; among the latter, other Mysteries concerned with what I have set forth today. And only those seekers after wisdom of whom it is correctly reported that, like Pythagoras, they moved about from place to place, from one Mystery to another, only those enjoyed the fullness of human experience. They would pass from a sanctuary where they could participate in the autumn secret, which is really the Sun secret, to one where the spring secret was revealed, the Moon secret. For this reason it was reported again and again of the consummate old initiates that they traveled from one sanctuary to another. It can truly be said of these that they had a certain inner experience of the year and its festivals. An old initiate of that sort could say to himself, I come to a place where the Adonis Festivals are celebrated, and I can witness the cosmic autumn and the rays of the spiritual Sun at the beginning of winter's night; I wander to another, where the Mysteries of spring are observed, and I can behold the secret of the Moon.—Thus he acquired an inner knowledge of all that relates to the whole meaning of the year.

You see, our Easter Festival has really had something saddled on it that is not right. It should really be a spring commemoration of burial; and this commemoration of burial in the spring should at the same time be an incentive to work, such as the more primitive man needed during the summer time: that is what such burial festivals were in their appeal to the human spirit. Easter was a festival of admonition regarding the work of summer, just as the autumn festival of the resurrection of the spiritual world was a festival celebrated in the season when the labor was completed. But it was of the utmost importance for man's soul and spirit that, when his work was finished, he should become aware of and inwardly experience the eternal in himself by contemplating the resurrection in the spiritual world, the days that follow upon death.

In passing, then, from Earth secrets to cosmic secrets, from Earth wisdom to cosmic wisdom, we can come to know what I should like to call the inner structure of the order of the year, as indicated by the festivals. But much of what had been hidden in them has disappeared.

Today I wanted to present this subject to you by considering the conditions of the firmament itself. Tomorrow I shall endeavor, as far as time permits, to penetrate still deeper into it in the light of certain Mystery sanctuaries.

Man perceives the things of the world through his senses but with his ordinary consciousness he does not perceive what takes place within the senses themselves. Were he to do this in everyday life he would not be able to perceive the outer world. The senses must, as it were, renounce themselves if they are to bring to man's cognizance what lies outside the senses in the world immediately surrounding him on Earth. If our ear could speak or our eye could speak, if we could by this means become aware of the processes taking place in those organs, we should not be able to hear what is outwardly audible nor see what is outwardly visible. But it is precisely this that enables man to know the world round about him, in so far as he is an Earth-being; he does not, however, thereby learn to know himself. This presupposes that during the process of acquiring self-knowledge one is able to suspend all cognition of the outer world, so that for a time nothing at all is experienced from the external world.

In Spiritual Science it has always been the endeavor to discover methods through which man may acquire true self-knowledge, and you are aware from the many different lectures I have given, that by this self-knowledge I do not mean the ordinary kind of brooding contemplation of the everyday self; for all that a man experiences thereby is simply a reflex picture of the external world. He learns nothing that is new; he merely gets to know, as it were in a mirror, what he has experienced in the outer physical world. True self-knowledge must, as you know, proceed through methods which silence not only the earthly outer world, but also the everyday soul-content which, as it exists in actual consciousness, is simply a mirror-picture of the outer world. And through the methods described in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, you know that spiritual research advances first to what is called Imaginative Cognition. Whoever advances to this Imaginative Cognition has before him, to begin with, everything from the supersensible world that can clothe itself in the images and pictures of this form of higher knowledge. And when he has acquired the inner faculty of Imaginative vision of the world, he is in a position to follow what takes place in the human sense-organs.

It would not be possible to follow what takes place in the sense-organs if something were to go on there only while the outer world were being perceived through them. When I am seeing an object of the outer world, my eye is still. When I am hearing some sound of the outer world my ear is still. This means that what the ear becomes aware of is not what goes on within the ear itself but what is continuing from the external world into the ear. But if, for example, the ear were only to be active in connection with the external world as long as outer perception were taking place, we should never be able to observe the process that goes on in the ear itself, independently of the outer world. But you all know that a sense-impression has an after-effect in the senses, apart from the fact that the senses always take part even when we are merely thinking actively in our ordinary consciousness.

It is possible to withdraw entirely from the external world in so far as it is a world of color, of sound, of smell, and so forth, and give attention only to what goes on within, or by means of, our sense-organs themselves. When we reach this point we have taken the first step towards acquiring true knowledge of man. To take the simplest example, let us say we want to understand how an impression made upon the eye from outside dies away. A person who has acquired the faculty of Imaginative Cognition is able, because he is perceiving nothing in the external world, to follow this dying away of the sense-impression. That is to say, he is following a process in which the sense-organ as such is involved, although at this moment it is actually not in connection with the external world. Or, let us say, someone can picture vividly to himself something he has seen, realizing how the organ of sight participated in the living thought of the colors, and so on. The same can be done in the case of all the senses. Then such a person actually becomes aware that what takes place within the senses themselves can only be perceived by Imaginative Cognition. A world of Imaginations appears before our soul as if by magic when we live, not in the external world, but in the senses themselves. And then we realize that our senses actually belong to a world other than the one we perceive through them in our Earth-existence. Nobody who is truly in a position, through the acquisition of Imaginative Knowledge, to observe the activity of his own senses, can ever doubt that man, as a being of sense, belongs to the supersensible world.

In the book Occult Science, I have called the world that man learns to know by thus withdrawing his attention from the outer world and living within his own senses, the world of the Angeloi, the Beings who stand one stage higher than man. What is it that actually happens in our senses? We can fathom it if we are able to observe the inner activity of the senses while we are not actually perceiving with them. Just as we can remember an experience that took place years before, although it is no longer present, so, if we are able to observe the senses while they are not engaged in any act of perception, we can acquire knowledge of what happens there. It cannot be called remembrance, for that would convey a fallacious idea; nevertheless, in what we perceive we can at the same time perceive the processes that are engendered in the senses by the outer world through color, sound, smell, taste, touch, and so forth.

In this way we can penetrate into something of which man is otherwise unconscious, namely, the activity of his own senses while the outer world is transmitting its impressions to him. And here we become aware that the breathing process—the inbreathing of the air, the distribution of the air in the human organism, the outbreathing—works in a remarkable way through the whole organism. When we breathe in, the inhaled air passes into the very finest ramifications of the senses, and here the rhythmical breathing comes into contact with what is called in Spiritual Science, the astral body of man. What goes on in the senses depends upon the astral body coming into contact with the rhythmical breathing process. Thus when you hear a tone, it is because in your organ of hearing the astral body can come into contact with the vibrating air. It cannot do this in any other part of the human organism, but only in the senses. The senses are present in man in order that the astral body can contact what arises in the human body through the breath. And this happens not only in the organ of hearing but in every sense-organ; even in the sense of touch or feeling that extends over the whole organism the astral body actually comes in contact with the rhythmical breathing, that is to say, with the action of the air in our organism.

It is precisely when studying these things that we realize how necessary it is to keep in mind that man is not merely a solid structure, but almost 90% a column of water; as the air circulates all the time in the inner processes of his body, he is also an air-organism. And the air-organism, with its weaving life, comes into contact, in the sense-organs, with man's astral body. This takes place in very manifold ways in the sense-organs, but speaking generally it may be said that this meeting is the essential factor in all sensory processes.

To observe how an astral body comes into contact with the air is not possible unless we enter the Imaginative world. With Imaginative Cognition other conditions are perceived in the environment of the Earth where the astral forces come into contact with the air. But within us as human beings, what is of essential importance is that the astral body comes into contact with the breathing process and with what is actually sent by the breathing process through the bodily organism.

Thus we learn to know the weaving activity of the Beings belonging to the hierarchy of the Angeloi. The only true picture we can have of it is that in the unconscious process which takes its course in sense-perception, this world of supersensible Beings is working and weaving, passing in and out, as it were, through the doors of our senses. When we hear and when we see, this is a process that does not take place only through our arbitrary will, but belongs also to the objective world, operating in a sphere where we men are not even present, yet through which we are truly men, men endowed with senses.

You see, when our astral body between waking and falling asleep enters into relation in the sphere of our senses with the air that has now become rhythmical breathing and has therefore changed in character, we learn, so to say, to know the outermost periphery of man. But we learn to know still more of man if we can reach the higher stage of supersensible cognition called Inspiration in the books already mentioned.

At this point we must think of how man is subject to the alternating states of waking and sleeping life. Sense-perception too is subject to alternation. Perceptions would not have the right effect upon our consciousness if we were not able continually to interrupt the process involved. You know from purely external experiences that prolonged surrender to a sense-perception impairs consciousness of it. We must again and again withdraw from a given sense-impression, that is to say, we must alternate between the impression and a condition when we have no impression. For our consciousness to be normal as regards sense-impressions depends upon our being able also to withdraw the senses from the impression that is being made upon them; sense-perception must always be subject to these brief alternating conditions. These alternations also occur in longer periods of our life, for we alternate once in every twenty-four hours between waking and sleeping.

You are aware that when we pass over into the condition of sleep, our astral body and ego leave our physical and etheric bodies. Consequently between going to sleep and waking the astral body enters into relation with the outer world, whereas between waking and going to sleep it is related only to what goes on within the human body. Picture to yourselves these two states, or these two processes: the astral body between waking and going to sleep in connection with what occurs within the human physical and etheric bodies, and the astral body between going to sleep and waking in connection with the outer world, no longer with the physical and etheric bodies of man himself.

The spheres of the senses in us are already almost an outer world—if I may use an expression which, though paradoxical, you will understand. Think, for example, of the human eye. It is like an independent being—naturally I mean this only analogously—but it is truly like an independent being placed there in a cavity in the skull, then continuing further towards the interior with comparative independence. The eye itself, although permeated with life, is remarkably like a physical apparatus. The processes in the eye and the processes in a physical apparatus can be characterized in a remarkably similar way. The soul, it is true, comprises the processes arising in the eye, but, as I have often said, the sense-organs or the spheres of the senses are like gulfs which the outer world extends into us, as it were, and in the spheres of the senses we participate far more in the outer world than we do in the other domains of our organism.

When we turn our attention to some inner organ such as the kidneys, for example, we cannot say that there we share in something external by virtue of experiencing the processes of the organ itself. But in experiencing what goes on in the senses, we experience the outer world at the same time. I beg you to disregard entirely things that may be known to you from treatises on the physiology of the senses and so forth. I am not now referring to any of these things but to the fact that is perfectly accessible to ordinary human understanding, namely, that the process which takes place in the senses can more readily be grasped as something that extends into us from without and in which we participate, than as something we bring about inwardly through our organism. Hence it is also a fact that in the senses our astral body is practically in the outer world. Especially when we have deliberately surrendered ourselves to sense-perceptions of the outer world, our astral body is actually almost entirely submerged in the outer world, though not to the same extent in the case of all the senses. It is completely submerged in the outer world while we sleep. So that from this point of view sleep is a kind of enhancement of surrender of the senses to the outer world. When your eyes are closed, your astral body also withdraws more into the interior of the head; it belongs more to you yourself. When you look out in the normal way, then the astral body draws into the eye and participates in the outer world. If it passes entirely out of your organism, then you go to sleep. Surrender of the senses to the outer world is, in fact, not what is ordinarily supposed, but as regards consciousness is really a stage on the way to going to sleep.

Thus in acts of sense-perception man participates to some extent in the outer world; in sleep he participates in it fully. With Inspiration (knowledge through Inspiration) he can become aware of what is going on in the world in which he is with his astral body between sleeping and waking.

With Inspired Cognition, however, man can become aware of something else, namely the moment of waking. The moment of waking is as it were something that is more intense, more vivid, but may nevertheless be compared with closing the eyes.

When I am standing in front of a color, I surrender my astral body to that in the eye which, as I said, is nearly outside, namely, the process occasioned by a color from the external world making an impression upon my eye. When I close my eyes I draw my astral body back into myself; when I wake, I draw my astral body back from the outer world, from the Cosmos. Often, infinitely often during the waking life of day, in connection with the eyes or the ears, for example, I do the same with my astral body as I do on waking, only then my whole organism is involved as a totality. On waking I draw back my whole astral body. Naturally, this process of drawing back the astral body on waking remains unconscious in the ordinary way, just as the sense-process itself remains unconscious. But if this moment of waking becomes a conscious experience for one who has reached the stage of Inspiration, it is at once evident that this entrance of the astral body takes place in a quite different world from that in which we otherwise live; above all it is very often obvious how difficult it is for the astral body to come back again into the physical and etheric bodies. Hindrances are there.

It can truly be said that one who begins to be aware of this process of the return of the astral body into the physical and etheric bodies experiences spiritual storms and percussions. These spiritual storms show that the astral body is diving down into the physical and etheric bodies but these bodies are not like the descriptions given by anatomists and physiologists, for they too belong to a spiritual world. Both the so-called physical body and the somewhat nebulous etheric body are rooted in a spiritual world. In its real nature the physical body reveals itself as something quite different from the material image presented to the eye or to ordinary science.

This descent of the astral body into the physical and etheric bodies can appear in imagery of infinite variety. Let us say a burning piece of wood drops spluttering into water—that is the simplest, the most abstract analogy for the experience that may arise in one who is just beginning to have knowledge of this process. But then it becomes inwardly real in manifold ways, and is afterwards completely spiritualized inasmuch as what at first can only be compared in its appearance to a raging storm becomes permeated subsequently with harmonious movements, giving the impression that something is speaking, is saying or announcing something.

What is thus announced clothes itself to begin with in pictures of reminiscences from ordinary life; but this changes in course of time and we gradually come to experience a world that is also around us but in which our experiences cannot be called reminiscences of ordinary perceptions, because they are of an entirely different character and because they show us in themselves that this is a different world. It can be perceived that man with his astral body passes out of his environment into the physical and etheric bodies by way of the whole breathing process. The astral body that is active in the senses contacts the delicate ramifications of the breathing process and penetrates into the subtle rhythms in which the breathing process reaches into the sphere of the senses. At the moment of waking the astral body leaves the outer world, enters into the physical and etheric bodies and seizes hold of the breathing process which has been left to itself during the period of sleep. Along the paths of the breathing processes, of the moving breath, the astral body enters into the physical and etheric bodies and spreads out as does the breath itself.

At the moment of waking, ordinary consciousness swiftly obtrudes itself into the perception of the outer world, and quickly unites experience of the breathing process with experience of the organism as a whole. Consciousness at the stage of Inspiration can separate this flow of the astral body along the paths of the breathing rhythm and become aware of the rest of the organic process—although naturally the latter does not take its course on its own. Not only at this moment of waking, but at every moment the movement of the breath in the human organism is of course connected inwardly with the other processes in the organism. But in the higher consciousness of Inspiration the two can be separated. We follow how the astral body, moving along the paths of the rhythmical breathing, enters into the physical body, and then we learn to know something that otherwise remains completely unconscious.

After having experienced all the states of consciousness which accompany this entrance of the astral body and are objective—not subjective—states of feeling, the knowledge comes to us that man, inasmuch as he is not merely a being of sense but also a being of breath, has his roots in the world I have called in Occult Science the world of the Archangeloi. Just as the Beings of the supersensible world standing one stage above man are active in his sense-processes, so are the Beings of the spiritual world standing two stages above him active in his breathing process. They pass in and out, as it were, as he goes to sleep and wakes.

Something of great significance for human life presents itself to us when we observe these processes. If our waking life was not interrupted by sleep, although impressions of the outer world would come to us, these impressions would last only for a short time. We could not develop a lasting power of memory. You know how fleetingly the pictures work in the senses as after-images. Processes activated more deeply in the organism continue to work for a longer time; but the after-effects would not continue for more than a few days if we did not sleep.

What is it that actually goes on in sleep? Here I must remind you of something I said here very recently, describing how during sleep, with his astral body and his ego, man always lives through in backward order what he has experienced in the physical world in the preceding waking period. Let us take a regular waking period and a regular sleeping period—it is however just the same for irregular periods. A man wakes up on a certain morning, busies himself during the day, goes to rest in the evening and sleeps through the night for about a third of the time he has been awake. Between waking and going to sleep he has a series of experiences, daytime experiences. During sleep he actually lives through in backward order what had been experienced during the day. The life of sleep goes backward with greater rapidity, so that only a third of the time is needed.

What has actually happened? If we were to sleep according to the laws of the physical world—I do not now mean the body, for the body sleeps according to those laws as a matter of course—but if in the conditions of existence outside the physical and etheric bodies, in our ego and our astral body, our sleep were governed by the same laws which govern our waking life by day, this movement backwards would not be possible, for we should simply have to go forward with the flow of time. We are subject to altogether different laws when in our astral body and ego we are outside the physical and etheric bodies.

Now think of the following. Today is the 22nd December; this morning was for you, when you woke from sleep, the morning of the 22nd December. Presently you will go to sleep and by the time you wake tomorrow, your experiences in their backward order, will have brought you again to the morning of today, the 22nd December. So you have gone through an inner process in which you have turned back. When you wake tomorrow, the morning of 23rd December, the process will have carried you back to the morning of the 22nd December. You wake up; at the same moment—because now your astral body, contrary to the laws it has been obeying during your sleep, makes the jerk through your body into the ordinary physical world—at the same moment you are compelled in your inmost soul-life to go forward quickly with your ego and astral body to the morning of the 23rd December. You actually pass through this process inwardly.

I want you to grasp in its full significance what I am now going to say. If you have some kind of gas in a closed vessel, you can compress this gas so that it becomes denser. That is a process in Space. But it can be compared—naturally only compared—with what I have just been describing to you. You go back in your astral body and your ego to the morning of December 22nd, and then, when you next wake, you jerk quickly forward to the morning of December 23rd. You impel your soul forward in Time. And through this process your soul-being, your astral body, becomes so condensed within Time, that it carries the impressions of the outer world not only for a short period, but as enduring memory. Just as any gas that is condensed exercises a stronger pressure, has more inner power, so does your astral body acquire the strong power of remembrance, of memory, through this inner condensation in Time.

This gives us an idea of something that otherwise always escapes our consciousness. We are apt to conceive that Time flows on evenly, and that everything taking place in Time also flows on evenly with it. As regards Space we know that whatever is extended in Space can be condensed; its inner power of expansion increases. But what lives in Time, the element of soul, can be condensed too—I am speaking figuratively, of course—and then its inner power increases. And for man, one of these powers is the power of memory.

We actually owe this power of remembrance, of memory, to what happens during our sleep. From the time of going to sleep until waking we are in the world of the Archangeloi, and together with the Beings of that hierarchy we cultivate this power of memory. Just as we cultivate the power of sense-perception and the combining of sense-perceptions together with the Beings of the hierarchy of the Angeloi, so do we cultivate this power of memory, which is a more in ward power, more connected with the centre of our being, in communion with the world of the Archangeloi.

True knowledge of man does not exist in a nebulous, mystic form of brooding introspection; true knowledge of man, with every further step that is taken into the inner life, leads at the same time into higher worlds. We have spoken today of two such steps. If we contemplate the sphere of the senses we are in the sphere of the Angeloi; if we contemplate the sphere of memory, we are in the sphere of the Archangloi. Self-knowledge is at the same time knowledge of the Gods, knowledge of Spirit, because every step that leads into man's inner being leads ipso facto into the spiritual world. And the deeper the penetration within, the higher—to use a paradox—is the ascent into the world of spiritual Beings. Self-knowledge, if it is earnest, is true World-knowledge, namely, knowledge of the spiritual content of the World.

From what has been said you can understand why in ancient times, when certain oriental peoples were striving to acquire an instinctive kind of spiritual vision, the aim was to make the breathing process into a conscious process by means of special breathing exercises. In point of fact, as soon as the breathing process becomes a conscious process, we enter into a spiritual world.

I need not say again today that those ancient practices should not be repeated by modern man with his different constitution, but should be replaced by others which are set forth in the books mentioned. It can however be said with truth in the case of both kinds of knowledge, the knowledge based upon the old, mystical clairvoyance and the knowledge yielded by the exact clairvoyance proper to the modern age, that genuine observation of the processes which take place inwardly in man leads at the same time into the spiritual world.

There are people who say: All this is unspiritual, for the aim is to investigate the senses, the breathing. They call it materialistic self-knowledge in comparison with nebulous mystical experience. But let them try to practice it for once! They will soon discover that genuine knowledge of the sense-process reveals it to be a spiritual process and that to regard it as a material process is sheer illusion. And the same applies to the breathing process. The breathing process is a material process only when seen externally. Seen from within, it is through and through a spiritual process, actually taking its course in a world far higher than the world we perceive through our senses.

I have already shown that the Apocalypse is built up on the number principle—one of the occult principles—from a certain view point. From my explanations about the fundamental rhythmic numbers in the universe and in man earlier today you may have seen how deeply numbers are grounded in the universe, to the extent that they can disclose rhythmical things.

The buildup in accordance with numbers is quite natural with occult revelations which are written in the way that the Apocalypse of John is. According to the modern principle of initiation the visions that the Apocalypticer speaks about arise if one has Imaginations before one and Inspiration speaks into them. Then one sees the Imaginations spread out before one in a pictorial way and Inspirations speak through them. However, when this occurs one has a number principle whereby the number 7 is always the most perfect one for all occultists. This is practically a tenet of occultism: 7 is the most perfect number. The number principle enables one to follow things up. You shouldn't think that this number 7 has much content or that its content is very important for one. But it is of very great importance when one is listening to Inspirations. If one lives in the number seven one can understand Inspirations in many different ways. I will give you an example. Let's suppose someone feels that there are important spiritual backgrounds behind his own age. Of course most people around the world feel the spiritual backgrounds in their own time; this is only natural from a human point of view, but it is rather arbitrary nevertheless. For if I am an observer in 1924, the observation year is 1924, whereas if someone else is an observer in the year 1905, that is the observation year, and so on. However, if I am the observer at any time and I know what I'm observing, and I'm able to go 7 impressions back from any given impression, then according to the laws of the spiritual world whatever makes the seventh impression explains the first one, and the fourteenth one explains both of these. So this is really a methodic principle to find one's way into what something can tell one. Just as one has to know the language which someone is speaking in order to understand him, so the main thing is to be able to live in this number seven.

This is the way one has to look at these things. For this revelation of the number seven is very complicated. All kinds of things in the universe are arranged in accordance with the number seven, and to a lesser extent according to twelve and other numbers. One can follow up the events which explain things from every point through multiples of 7.

We can do this precisely in connection with the fact that we indicate such an important point yesterday, which really seems to be extremely important in our age where Michael is regulating things in the world. We pointed out that John's significant vision of the woman clothed with the sun, the dragon under her feet, giving birth to a little boy will appear to men in a particular form in the near future. Therewith we have gained an extremely important point of departure; and from this point of view an apocalypse, every apocalypse and especially John's Apocalypse is the most impressive if one grasps what one is standing in in this way.

When I tried to interpret the Apocalypse in Nuremberg in 1908 it was an entirely different time in the entire Anthroposophical movement. The main thing then was to interpret Anthroposophy by means of the Apocalypse, as it were. One can interpret a great deal through the Apocalypse, and the events in the world which it was important to mention at that time could already be seen in the Apocalypse. However, as I already mentioned a number of times, you should identify yourselves with the Apocalypse and realize that the Apocalypse describes a large number of events which proceed in accordance with multiples of seven. Since I pointed to the events which are connected with the woman clothed with the sun and the dragon under her feet, you will be able to tell in which Apocalyptic point of time we're living from the point of view of the experiences of the consciousness soul.

My lectures in 1908 dealt more with the evolution of mankind in general, and with the evolution of the astral body, but with respect to the consciousness soul which doesn't run parallel with the other evolutionary processes, but pushes into them we're really living in the age of the trumpet sounds today.

We're standing at the beginning of the development of the consciousness soul, and we only hear the trumpet sounds if this consciousness soul elevates itself to the point where it can have supersensible visions, because people do not interpret what goes on down below in a supersensible way today. The significant thing today is that people accept things indifferently and that they do not interpret them in a supersensible way. In Anthroposophical lectures I have often referred to a particular point in the 19th century in this connection, namely to the beginning of the 1840s. I said that the beginning of the forties is a significant incision into the development of the civilized world, from a spiritual viewpoint. It is the culmination of materialism, as it were. Everything that is connected with materialism was already decided in 1843/44. What happened after this until now is basically only an after effect of this, and everything that happens in the future will also be an after effect. This point in time at the beginning of the forties is really extremely important for what has happened to the civilized population of Europe and its American appendage, for the breaking in of Ahrimanic powers into human affairs was a tremendously intensive one. You can say: yes, but there were even worse events after the years 1843/44. However, this only seems to be the case. You have to remember that Ahriman is smarter than human beings. Ahriman did his most important work in 1843/44, and he arranged things in the way that he does this in accordance with his intelligence. This is the low point in the materialistic path, or the summit, if you prefer. Then men continued to go about their business, and the things they did later on are sometimes seemingly nastier, but they are not as terrible for the totality of human evolution. If one looks at them from a spiritual viewpoint, they are the after effects of what was projected at the beginning of the forties. The sixth angel began to blow his trumpet at the beginning of the forties and he will continue to sound until the events of which I spoke yesterday will begin at the end of the 20th century, when the seventh trumpet will begin to sound.

We are definitely in the midst of the three woes. This is the second woe that civilized humanity is going through in the age of the consciousness soul, which was preceded by the fifth trumpet back to 150 years earlier. And if we follow the trumpets back with respect to the seven-foldness of the consciousness soul, we arrive at a somewhat earlier point in time. The consciousness age begins in 1413 down below here on earth; but things have shifted, and earlier times work into them. The trumpet sounds go back to about the age of the Crusades. In real occult centers one always looked upon this time of the Crusades up to our time as the age of the trumpet sounds, in a certain sense. You will be able to connect the stages which are described in the Apocalypse' with outer events. For instance, when Copernicanism takes hold and when materialism sets in one third of the human beings are killed, that is, they stop developing their full spirituality. And the plague of locusts which is described in the Apocalypse is really very shocking.

Here one comes to something which one doesn't like to talk about, although of course it belongs to the things that priests must deal with. This plague of locusts is with us in a very prominent way from a purely consciousness standpoint. Of course such things should not be discussed when we speak in a theoretical way or when we speak to humanity in general, where cures for sick conditions can always occur. But if it's a question of priestly activities, then of course one must know with whom one is dealing, just as one has to know this for normal humanity.

As a rule, the people who call themselves liberals or democrats are very glad if they can point to evidence that the number of people in a particular region on earth is increasing tremendously. An increase in the population is something which is very much desired, especially by politically minded democratic and liberal people, and also by people who think that they are free thinkers and intellectuals.

Now first of all this is not quite correct, because the statistics are based on errors; people usually look at one part of the earth and they don't realize that the other parts of the earth were more densely populated in previous times than they are today. It is not quite correct; however, on the whole it is correct in the sense that there is a kind of a surplus of human beings who are already appearing in our time who have no egos, who are not really human. This is a terrible truth. They walk around and are not incarnations of an ego; they enter into the physical line of heredity and receive an etheric body and an astral body. In a certain way they are equipped with an Ahrimanic consciousness, and they look human if one doesn't look too closely, but they are not human beings in the full sense of the word.

This is a terrible truth, which is present, it's a truth, and when the Apocalypticer speaks about the plague of locusts during the trumpets epoch he is referring directly to human beings. Here again one can see how good the Apocalypticer's vision is, for such men in their astral body look exactly the way the Apocalypticer describes them—like etheric locusts with human faces. One definitely has to think about such supersensible things in this way, and priests must know about such things. For a priest is a minister. Hence he must also be able to find words for everything that happens in such a soul. They're not always bad souls; they can just be souls who get to the soul stage but are lacking an ego.

One will certainly realize this when one runs into these human beings. A priest has to know this, for after all there is fellowship among men with regard to such matters. People with normal souls suffer through their association with such persons who really go through the world like human locusts. The question can and must arise: How should one behave towards such human beings? It is often very difficult to relate to such people because they feel things deeply, they can feel things very deeply, but one notices that there is no real individuality in them. However, one must of course take care to keep the fact that they have no individualities from them, otherwise insanity will necessarily result. But even though one has to conceal this from them, it's a question of arranging things for such souls—after all they are souls, even though they're not spirits—in such a way that these people can develop in the company of others, that they can make connections with others and go along with them, as it were. These human beings display the nature and essence of human beings fairly closely until their 20th year. The intellectual or mind soul only emerges around age 20, and this makes it possible for the ego to live out its life on earth.

Anyone who says that one shouldn't act in a sympathetic way to such ego-less, individuality-less people, since they won't incarnate again and because they have no individuality—is very much mistaken. He would also have to say that one shouldn't behave in a sympathetic way towards children. One must decide what is really inside such men in each individual case. Sometimes such men contain posthumous souls, that is, posthumous with respect to the actual or normal human souls that arose at a particular time in evolution and which incarnate repeatedly as men. These are souls which remained behind, or they are souls which returned belatedly from other planets, to which almost all human beings went during a certain age. Such souls may be present in such human bodies. Thus we must consciously educate such men like permanent children.

All of this is really secreted in the Apocalypse. And if one takes these ideas in the Apocalypse that are given as Imaginations, they sometimes cut into one's heart in a terrible way. It's really horrible the way he talks about all kinds of suffering that will befall mankind on earth with regard to our age; we can only say that a great deal of this is already here as far as the spiritual aspects go.

Then of course there are mildly grand ideas like the angels who come down with incense and a censer. There's a reference to the smoke of incense. Then our gaze immediately falls upon a great deal which happened at the time of the Crusades. The trumpets go back to the Crusades. What we see in the sphere of the consciousness soul enters the consciousness soul of humanity during the Crusades epoch.

Here one finds that consciousnesses of individual personalities arise during the time of the Crusades and what is connected with this, who really had tremendously strong impressions from their experiences of the spiritual world. Here we really meet what I would like to call geniuses of piety. It's very important for us to realize that we meet geniuses of, religiousness there.

If we go further back, we find that for the consciousness sphere the period between the Mystery of Golgotha and the time of the Crusades and everything that is connected with this is a smaller epoch that corresponds to the opening of the seven seals. One can only understand this completely if one realizes the following. Just think of how many personalities arise during the time of the Crusades who direct almost all of their religiousness into their depths, into their intensity of feeling, into an inner mystical experience. This begins at that time, whereas previously one looked up into the whole universe when one wanted to perceive the divine world; the previous state of affairs also existed in tone-setting places, although there was a continual battle with the stream that proceeded from Rome. They had an understanding for the God who lives, weaves and works in the sensory phenomena to which they looked up. However, at some point everything was more or less directed within. The great geniuses of mysticism appear. Previously one received divine revelations through the perception of the universe; afterwards we have a feeling of the, inner kindling of light which the human heart can feel, so that divine things can be illuminated from within men.

The stages which the Apocalypse describes are also present here. We have the first, quiet, victorious advance, where the spreading out of Christianity depends on the victorious spirit and word, where Christianity spreads out in the sub-depths of the social life at that time. Then we have a second epoch, where the spread of, Christianity takes away a lot of what one could call peace from the world. Christianity participates quite a bit in the wars which take place in a second epoch. Then we see an epoch where a gradual dying out of the inner impulse of Christianity occurs, where Christianity becomes the state religion, which of course is a dying of the real Christian impulse. Then we have the period which corresponds to the fourth seal, when Islam breaks in in the way I described. And so it goes; seal after seal is opened, and then what occurs under the influence of significant religious geniuses and under the influence of the Crusades is something that one can observe if one follows up what really happened more exactly. In this respect all the history books are really a falsification of history.

Up till the Crusades the spread of Christianity in a good sense through the repeated efforts of countless members of monastic orders and also in a more external and bad sense, occurred through the direct inspiration of the Palestinian stories. Of course, the gospels were only referred to by priests and not by laymen, but the things that happened were definitely influenced by what the priests learned from the gospels. The priests had the gospels and the cultic rites; the cult gradually became something that reflected the supersensible world in a sensory way. The priests looked upon the sacrifice in the mass as a direct portal to the supersensible world, and therefore they looked up to the starry heavens less and less for their divine, spiritual inspiration. All of the wonderful prophecies and wisdom which I mentioned this morning in connection with ancient astrology and astrosophy disappeared almost entirely by the time of the Crusades.

During the time of the Crusades we suddenly see people appearing who travelled from east to west. Some of them are coming back from the Crusades, and others who came a little later had taken a deep interest in the secrets of the Orient. A large number of writings were brought from the east that were later lost or destroyed. They were definitely brought, but not many of them survived because people didn't watch their literary possessions as vigilantly then as one does today. However, the cosmic Christianity which they contained was handed down by word of mouth from about the time of the Crusades. People began to develop a deep interest in this at the time of the Crusades.

A kind of 7th seal is opened here. And one could say that things have really changed with regard to people's respect for written things. For instance, it's still uncertain at the moment, but if this Italian professor really did find handwritten things by Livius, you can imagine what a storm the Italian state will kick up in order to acquire them. And yet you wouldn't have to go back too far to get to a time when the state would have been quite indifferent to whether or not this or that had been found. This is something which has only developed rather recently.

I once witnessed a find like this. When I was at the Goethe and Schiller archives we received a letter by Goethe which looked rather odd; it was dirty and terribly torn. To us this was a real crime; that was no way to treat Goethe's letters. We tried to find out what was behind this. And we discovered that the letter had once been in the possession of Kuno Fischer, and he had simply sent Goethe's original letters to the printers with his notes and comments in the margins, without bothering to copy them. It was a bit miraculous that this letter had survived, since one generally doesn't keep manuscripts.

Thus it's not too surprising that the Christianity that was still alive in the Orient, or the orientalism that helped to explain Christianity were spread by the Crusades. What we would call cabalistic truths spread and a few people who might have known much more than Jakob Boehme lived at a time when no one thought that this was strange, whereas during Jakob Boehme's time the fact that someone like him existed created a sensation.

It is the time of the Crusades, where we want to point to what was going on in men's consciousnesses, and not so much to the outer events that are described in history books,—it's the time when the seal age gave way to the trumpet age. People with a little depth to them have always had a feeling about the time of the Crusades which made them say: Ah yes, the trumpet sounds; if I look at the thing from supersensible viewpoints it's really terrible what is going on there with respect to human souls. However, men on earth don't hear the trumpets, even though they're there.

A great many people should be aware of this trumpet period, since we're living at the time of the 6th trumpet, and you know what the most important effects and characteristics of this trumpet are. We're told that a third part of the men are killed, as I mentioned. Of course this doesn't happen all at once. But this killing refers to the absence of an ego in those men who had already been prepared previously through their locust forms.

These are things which force priests to look more deeply into the structure of what actually occurs. After all, priests are supposed to be dealing with supersensible things. We are surrounded by supersensible things in all directions, and what one can observe in human beings through the fact that they have a physical body is only one segment of human life. As soon as we press into the supersensible world we see that people do things of which they are often not aware. It could be that it's in someone's karma to behave in a particular way towards another human being in this earth life; and one can sometimes not know what it does to the other person's life if he goes by him without paying any attention to him. Of course later on karma will exert much more force and the thing will be adjusted; but maybe it could have been adjusted in this lifetime already. Someone who should have had something to do with another human being in this life cannot be moved to do it and he passes him by. One doesn't necessarily have to notice this in outer life on the physical plane. No real objections to this can be made, since the person concerned has done all of his duties, from a conventional outer viewpoint, but perhaps he did something that can strike terribly deep wounds into something which is connected with world evolution. Then one cannot say that one is dealing with super-terrestrial things, but with supersensible things, for supersensible things are constantly happening on earth.

It will be necessary to understand the Apocalypse in a serious way, to the extent that the one whom I called the etheric Christ will make himself visible within humanity. Therefore, it was due to a very healthy feeling which came up out of your deepest sub-consciousness that you wanted to make the Apocalypse into the object of these studies. Perhaps you initially had a different idea about what I can give about the Apocalypse at this time, but that you wanted to hear something about the Apocalypse from me was definitely the voice of the times in your hearts. And one can say that the fact that the need arose in you to understand the Apocalypse shows that you have a certain relationship with John the Apocalypticer, since you priests belong together and have become united in such tendencies. Since this permeation with the spirit of the Apocalypse is very necessary for you, you will not find any contradiction in the fact that one can find various sevenfold epochs, that one can really begin them anywhere and that one then discovers how things proceed; but if one cannot look upon the number principle as the methodic thing one won't find any connections in world evolution at all. Therewith we have really touched upon the productive side of the Apocalypse for our time.

Now we usually find other events sprinkled into the Apocalypse at the places where one set of seven goes over into the next one. that we run into here is very much in need of an explanation. If one only reads the Apocalypse in an external way one might think that there are so and so many numbers of human beings who have the seal of God on their foreheads in a particular epoch, so that they are among the fortunate ones who are rescued, or saved, or, however one wants to put it, whereas the others cannot be saved. This, is something which can be depressing if one reads the Apocalypse in a thoughtful way.

However, one should realize that there is always a difference between racial development and individual development in ancient writings. One should realize that no one felt at all depressed in earlier times when one said that so and so many will be saved in a particular race, whereas the others will be destroyed. No one included himself among these because one thought in a realistic way. It's just like today, where everyone is anxious to have his life insured.

Here one calculates how long one will probably live. Insurance companies don't accept people who will probably die soon because if they insured a lot of people who will soon die, their cash boxes would soon be empty. They want to have people who live a long time and make a lot of payments. Hence one must calculate the insured's probable life expectancy on the basis of past experience through probability calculus, which is a very interesting method of calculation. I have never found that anyone felt that he had to die at the moment he was supposed to according to the no doubt correct methods of the insurance companies. There's no such thing. One doesn't feel obliged to die. And this is based on a reality. As soon as one gets into numbers one is not grasping the stage of spirituality at which a particular human individuality is.

When one says such things, one is touching upon a certain mystery and an occult secret. This is based on the fact that one thinks that if one has 1,2,3,4,5 individualities and one counts them and then uses the number—already in counting them—that this must also be of importance for the spiritual world. But it is not important in the same way. Numbers enter in at the moment when the spiritual world breaks through and becomes manifest. As for instance when it becomes manifest in the world year or in breathing, or wherever the spiritual world breaks through. So that if one ascends to a spiritual consciousness, one needs the number at the boundary or threshold into the spiritual world. One doesn't get further there if one doesn't have a number or something similar to a number. But once on has crossed the threshold and one wants to do something with numbers, nothing fits. Therefore, when an occult writer like the Apocalypticer speaks of racial development which takes place on earth, he can very well say that there are so and so many people in this category—and we will see next time what these numbers mean—but a single human individuality cannot feel that he is affected by this, because these numbers refer to the development of races and not to human individualities. We will go into how all of this is possible the next time.

During the last few weeks, a number of friends from Germany have been with me on a visit to a field of theosophical work abroad—to Helsingfors, in Finland. A visit of this kind to a far-off field of work always brings a realisation of the unity of theosophical life all over the globe and also of its deep roots in the culture of the present day. It meant a great deal to me when our friends in Finland expressed the wish that I should speak to them about the venerable Finnish epic, “Kalewala.”¹ As this wish was conveyed to me some time ago, I was able to occupy myself from the vantage-point of occultism, with this remarkable poem of the Finns—who are themselves, in many respects, a unique people. And this brought to the fore once again, things of which I have spoken on other occasions, here and also elsewhere. A very definite experience comes to us when, independently of everything men have hitherto known concerning the spiritual worlds and have, in their own way, expressed in words, we ourselves strive for deeper insight into those worlds and man's relationship to them, and ask: How are we to understand what is contained in the many folk-traditions that have been preserved through the centuries? How are we to apply to these recorded traditions the knowledge we have acquired concerning the super-sensible world? Although their language differs from that in which they have to be presented today, biblical and other records clearly based upon occult foundations, are expressions, issuing from ancient times and from manifold periods of human evolution, of wisdom and knowledge which it is possible for us to rediscover today. These ancient records present a new aspect and seem to be imbued with a new power when we realise that in and from those same worlds to which we aspire along the path to spiritual knowledge and to Initiation, great revelations have been given to the world in different epochs and in multifarious ways.

We may well feel that the venerable Finnish epic, “Kalewala,” has a special and unique occult significance. My own experience was very vivid and definite. This Finnish epic has been translated into every European language but it differs fundamentally and significantly from all other epic poems; no comparison with any of them is possible.

When my book Theosophy first appeared many years ago, independent observation of the spiritual world had led me to “member” the human soul into three: Sentient Soul, Mind or Intellectual Soul, Consciousness or Spiritual Soul. Knowledge of the threefold soul was acquired purely through occult research and occult observation directed to the spiritual world quite independently of any tradition. Occult research was the only source consulted. And now, because our friends in the Finnish Section desired me to speak of the occult meaning of the Kalewala, it was necessary to make the poem the subject of spiritual investigation.

It has been emphasised repeatedly that human consciousness and the life of soul were not always as they are today. In primeval times of the evolution of mankind our present mode of perception and thinking, our present relationship to the external world, simply did not exist; in those ancient times the human being was endowed with a natural, innate clairvoyance. Turning our gaze to past epochs in the evolutionary process, we come to a period starting about the year 600 B.C. when man's life of soul began to assume the form and character which were subsequently to lead to the much more abstract, scientific mode of thinking; before that time, vestiges and remains of the old clairvoyance, or memories of it at least, persisted among certain peoples for a very long time, among others for not so long. When we look back into the development of the peoples, we find in every case that consciousness as it is at present, developed only by very gradual stages. In very ancient times, normal human consciousness was imbued with a certain form of clairvoyance: and it was during the period of twilight denoting the disappearance of the old clairvoyance and the first beginnings of “modern” consciousness that the National Epics, the Folk-Epics came to birth.

It would, of course, have been absolutely impossible for men of primeval times to know anything about the threefoldness represented by Sentient Soul, Mind Soul, Consciousness Soul. But they possessed genuine clairvoyance, although it was dim and dream-like, lacking the light of intellect and reason in their present form. Before the dawning of the consciousness we know today, there were conditions, midway as it were between our waking and sleeping states, in which living memories arose of entirely different circumstances of life, when the relation of one human being to another was determined, not by anything like consciousness as it is at present, but by the old clairvoyance. And in their great Folk-Epics the peoples depicted the experiences which arose within them during the period when the old clairvoyance was dying away and present-day consciousness was beginning to dawn.

The materialist says that man's life of soul has unfolded, by degrees, out of the material processes in the human organism—out of processes which are also to be found in lower forms of life. Spiritual Science, however, makes it clear that the elements of “soul-life” as they are in the animal would never have been able to give rise to the threefoldness of Sentient Soul, Mind Soul, Consciousness Soul, and that it is far more a matter of this inner trinity of the three “members” of the soul having flowed down from a spiritual world. Therefore when we look into the spiritual world we can speak of three down-flowing streams, with which three Beings in the spiritual worlds are connected, Beings who are the direct Inspirers of the Sentient Soul, the Mind Soul and the Consciousness Soul. We have to think of the Creators of these three manifestations of the life of soul in that super-sensible world with which, in primeval times, human beings were in direct communion.

We know that the moment our consciousness rises into the spiritual world, no matter whether this is the result of deliberate training, as will be the case today, or whether through the old clairvoyance, the human form becomes an “Imagination.” In those olden days, too, the soul attained to a form of Imagination, beholding in pictures the outpouring of the threefold human soul from the spiritual world. The Finnish epic tells of three Heroes. To begin with, these three Beings seem strange and remarkable in the highest degree; they have something superhuman about them and at the same time something that graduates into the genuinely human. But if we examine the matter more closely, and with occult means, it becomes apparent that these three figures, these three Heroes, are the Creators and Inspirers of the threefold powers of the soul in man. The Creator of the Sentient Soul is the figure to whom, in the Kalewala, the name of “Wainamoinen” is given; the Creator of the Mind Soul is “Ilmarinen,” and the Creator of the Consciousness Soul, “Lemminkainen.” And so in the National Epic of this remarkable people we find, in a form of Imagination springing from the original, ancient clairvoyance, what is rediscovered by modern spiritual research. The human being of today has the outer form we see before us, only because the foundations of this threefold life of soul were laid down in the course of evolution on Earth. (I indicated this in the public lectures given in the Berlin Architektenhaus: “The Origin of Man in the Light of Spiritual Science,” and “The Origin of the Animal World in the Light of Spiritual Science.”)²

We must picture to ourselves that there was a time in the process of the Earth's development when neither human beings nor animals were in existence, when all that was present was a kind of undifferentiated “substance”; the beings who first detached themselves were those which have reached the animal stage. When all the animals were there, man was still waiting until other conditions of Earth-existence had set in and because he had waited for these other conditions, he was able to become the recipient of his present form. In other words: while the animals developed their various forms on the Earth, man remained in the spiritual world above; his development began only when the animals had already assumed their destined forms. The foundations of the threefold soul-Sentient Soul, Mind Soul, Consciousness Soul—were laid in man and it was then possible for him to enter Earth-existence in the external form in which he now lives.

With this in mind, we can say: Man, as the created being we know today, sent down the animal kingdom before him and then followed himself, when the Earth-conditions were such that he could bring to manifestation in outer form, the threefold life of soul that had been laid into his being. What does this really mean? Knowledge of these occult truths restores to the traditions of religion, which rest upon occult foundations, their ancient value and meaning. Man received Earth-substance into himself when he was able to recast, to remould it into his present form—a form able to receive the imprint of the threefold life of soul. Thus man elaborated Earth-substance according to the laws of his life of soul, made Earth-substance subject to the plan underlying his life of soul, and became Earth-Man; he fashioned Earth-substance after the model of the threefold, prototypal soul. Think of the Biblical picture of the moulding of the substance of Earth (not the “dust” but the substance of Earth) into Man. We now discern profound meaning in this Biblical conception upon which so much scorn has been poured by modern “enlightenment”—as it is called. For the passage points to the time when the animals, having descended at an earlier period, were already in existence and when, out of Earth-substance, the being who now stands before us as bodily Man, was fashioned, at a later stage, according to the model of the soul.

In the Kalewala it is wonderful to find this process presented, with great imaginative power, as the “forging” of a mysterious instrument called the “Sampo.” The most curious explanations have been given of this mysterious instrument, the “Sampo.” In reality it is the human ether-body, forged by the interworking of the three soul-members—it is the ether-body, the imprint of which is the physical body. All that is necessary here is to give indications, without entering more closely into details. The National Epic of Finland quite obviously derives from the memory of the Finnish people in which clairvoyant perceptions of ancient times had been retained; through these perceptions, some knowledge still persisted of the descent of man as a being of soul—a threefold soul—into the physical body. What is noteworthy in such a matter is that in the old heroic sagas of humanity,we again find the truths and knowledge acquired today of the spiritual worlds. The Kalewala is an example of what is to be found in many ancient records of importance to humanity and is, moreover, one that emerged from oblivion only in the nineteenth century! For it had been entirely forgotten and was compiled during the course of that century from folk-songs extant among the Finnish people.

In the early years of the nineteenth century, nothing had been written down of the Kalewala as we possess it today; the songs were heard from the people, had lived only among them. The simple fact is that in the nineteenth century a certain doctor, realised that the people sang of many interesting things, and set about collecting the songs. Then a compilation was made and they assumed fresh importance. They attracted considerable attention and were translated into all the European languages. Scholars then proceeded to give senseless explanations of them ... but all that really matters is that they are there, having lived among the people.

Approaching the matter with the spiritual knowledge in our possession today, it becomes apparent, if we are willing to recognise it, that in what had survived there among the people and was gathered from among them, there is occult content which can be rediscovered today, just as occult content can be rediscovered in Homer's Iliad, in the Odyssey, in the songs of the Niebelung and elsewhere. Only we must be willing to seek earnestly, not applying anything in the way of allegorical or symbolical interpretation but rather allowing what is actually there to make its own impression upon us. What we ourselves have found in the realm of occultism, shines forth in Imaginations deriving from times of hoary antiquity. But in this case there is something of particular interest, as I myself discovered. When the Kalewala came into my hands, I heard that the closing runes—which make allusion to a connection between the spiritual life of ancient Finland and Christianity—must obviously have been a later addition; for whereas all the rest bears the character of ancient Paganism, the closing runes introduce an essentially Christian element—but very delicately and lightly. And then, strangely enough, I discovered that this belongs fundamentally to the Kalewala, that the poem is inconceivable without these closing runes. This means that in its origin and life among the people, the Kalewala quite naturally culminated in a delicate reference to Christianity—and, it may be added, to the most impersonal, “non-Palestinian” Christianity that it is possible to imagine, hardly recognisable by Christian concepts as they now are! Here, therefore, it is clear that from the same primeval soul there issued something that could not have been born at the same time as Christian culture among the other peoples of Europe: for Christian culture arose long after clairvoyance had been able still to look back to those primeval ages when the threefold soul was “membered” into the human form. And so here, among the Finnish people, we have an indication of the link between the ancient clairvoyance and the influence subsequently brought into play by Christian culture. This is something quite remarkable and unique—perhaps nowhere else to be found on the Earth. It may be that the veneration in which the Kalewala is held in Finland has preserved this epic from the fate that has befallen the Iliad. I do not know if many of you are aware that scholarship first of all hacked the Iliad into fragments and then declared that it was not written by a man bearing the name of “Homer”—indeed that it was not the work of a single writer but was only put together from collected songs, later on. The Kalewala, of course, was actually a compilation, but nevertheless, it forms a complete whole, one coherent whole. Possibly, in the future, a few changes here and there may be necessary, but nevertheless it is complete in itself. And so we have before us here, gathered from the consciousness of the people, a number of occult Imaginations. If we follow the matter in the Akasha-Chronicle, we find that the Kalewala leads back to the ancient and sacred Mysteries of northern Europe, and that the truths it contains were inspired by the Initiates, given forth to the people and instilled into them.

Why have I been telling you these things?

Matters of which we have been hearing for years were also spoken of in Helsingfors and will be spoken of in other parts of Europe too. But the public lecture which I was able to give on the subject of the occult content of the Folk-Epics, with particular reference to the Kalewala, was something new, especially belonging to Finland. (9th April, 1914.) One then realised that the essence of Spiritual Science will more and more make itself felt over the whole Earth. For do we not all feel that with Spiritual Science we are at home in the spiritual life? We are everywhere at home, for Spiritual Science is the light which illumines the path to the Spirit trodden by mankind all over the Earth. It is an overpowering experience to rediscover through Spiritual Science, the real content of this collection of folk-poems which form themselves into one whole. We find how right on into the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, the Folk-Soul became articulate in poetry, still possessing vital memories of the old clairvoyance once possessed by these unique Finnish peoples who to this day retain many customs and arts reminiscent of an ancient form of magic. And then we realise that Spiritual Science alone can lead to an understanding of these things, make them intelligible to us!

One of the many signs of the great spiritual happenings of the near future may be indicated in the following way. Spiritual Science has taken us into the region of an entirely unknown tongue—for the Finnish language differs from all other European languages; externally, one understands nothing of it and it is like being transported into an absolutely strange land. What knowledge does Spiritual Science bring us? How does Spiritual Science enable us to speak with this people who, so far as the last centuries are concerned, have remained remote from the other peoples of Europe? We speak with them about what is holiest and most sacred to them and is now coming to life again so strongly that people are reaching out for the Kalewala and the eyes of the whole world of culture are turning to it. In what is the most sacred possession of a people, we learn to understand the speech of the Folk-Soul!

So, too, it can be the whole world over, when we realise what must be the very root—nerve of theosophical life. We are standing on the threshold of a new disclosure of spiritual truths. Attention has often been drawn to this, above all in my Rosicrucian Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation. Reference is there made to the fact that times are approaching when the souls of men will become more and more open to receive revelations from the spiritual world which will break in upon them as a kind of natural experience. In the course of the next three thousand years, men will gradually “grow into” the spiritual world. Through Spiritual Science, however, we must learn to understand why, and to what extent this will come about.

In the first, very ancient period of the Post-Atlantean era, that of the Holy Rishis of India, culture “flowed” as it were, directly from and was inspired by the human ether-body; in the epoch of ancient Persia, culture was inspired by the Sentient Body, the Astral Body; in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch by the Sentient Soul; in the Graeco-Latin period by the Mind or Intellectual Soul; and in our own epoch by the Consciousness Soul. There will follow a form of culture inspired by the Spirit-Self, and so on. If you keep in your minds a picture of the whole course of Post-Atlantean culture, you will find as it were a descending curve until the time of the Graeco-Latin epoch. It is clearly perceptible, and permits of no denial, that this age represents the lowest point of man's descent to the physical plane; the most characteristic and remarkable feature of the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch is that spiritual life is all interwoven, intertwined, entangled with life on the physical plane. But in that same epoch comes the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha—and necessarily so. You have only to think of what you already know in this connection. There is, however, something else of importance to remember. The actual course of human evolution comes to expression in manifold ways in the life of the individual. In the little book, The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science, it is said that up to the seventh year the development of the physical body is of primary importance: this phase corresponds, in the evolutionary process of mankind as a whole, to the period preceding the Atlantean catastrophe. The period of life between the seventh and the fourteenth years is a recapitulation—although veiled and obscured—of the culture connected with the ether-body which reached its highest glory in the epoch of ancient India. The period from the fourteenth to the twenty-first year of life is a recapitulation of the culture inspired by the astral body, corresponding to the epoch of ancient Persia. The Egypto-Chaldean period is reflected in the life of the individual human being from the twenty-first to the twenty-eighth year; and the Graeco-Latin epoch is reflected in the life of the individual between the twenty-eighth and thirty-fifth years. This is a very important period; for just as at that time Post-Atlantean humanity swung over from a descending to an ascending culture, so there can be a turning-point in the life of the individual between the twenty-eighth and thirty-fifth years. At the middle point of his earthly existence, the individual faces at one and the same time a descending and an ascending curve of life. After the thirty-fifth year he passes as it were into the period of outward decline, into a process of “withering.” In the individual human life at this time there must be something which corresponds with the swing-over from the descending to the ascending curve of culture. That the Mystery of Golgotha took place during this particular period of the life of Christ Jesus, between the twenty-eighth and thirty-fifth years, was not a matter of chance; it could not be otherwise, as those who know anything of these connections will realise. The Mystery of Golgotha could only be enacted during the period of life connected specifically with the development of the Mind Soul. Since the end of the Middle Ages we have passed into the period of the unfolding of the Consciousness Soul. This will last for a very long time; and then will come the period of the evolution of Spirit-Self.

Now in the life of the individual there is something irregular—magnificently irregular—about the appearance or awakening of the “ I,” the Ego. At some future time I will elaborate this but at the moment I can only indicate it. The regular course of things is the development of the physical body up to the seventh year, of the ether-body up to the fourteenth year, and so on, up to the twenty-eighth year. Then, and only then—if conditions took a regular, straight-forward course, would the “ I ” awaken in the Mind Soul; for only then does the external organisation of the human being contain the proper and suitable instrument for the “ I ”. But the “ I ” awakens, actually, at a very early period of childhood, quite independently of the external organisation—at that point of time to which, in later life, the memory reaches back. Why is it that the birth of the “ I ”, instead of occurring between the twenty-eighth and thirty-fifth years in accordance with the development of man's external organisation, actually occurs during the earliest years of childhood? It is because the Luciferic forces have brought about a certain displacement as between the inner and the outer man. The Luciferic forces are connected with “retardation” in time. The “ I ” within us is grounded upon Luciferic forces, upon remembrance of what has remained to us of our experiences in life. Lucifer emancipates the “ I ” which is thus made free and independent of the outer organisation. For a time it was necessary for man to be connected, externally, with something other than his “ I ” alone. To maintain his rightful place it was necessary to form a link with a Being who had lived during the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch, had reached his thirtieth year, and was then inspired by the Christ, by a Power which could not live on the Earth beyond the thirty-third year, but which in the thirty-third year passed through Death. To begin with, it was an external, historical link. What I have often described to you from the one side, I want you now to consider from the inner side. The human being remembers back to the point in his life when consciousness awakens; his remembrance stretches back to the birth of the “ I,” the Ego: for his actual entrance into Earth-existence is shrouded in sleep. Of what precedes the birth of the “ I ” we have to be told by our parents, by our elder brothers and sisters, by our seniors. Just as the memory of the human being now reaches back to the awakening of this Ego—the Luciferic Ego—so, later on, he will see, as in an Imagination, another Ego, another “ I ” before him. This will come about during the next three thousand years as a development of great significance in the evolution of humanity. In the future, man will remember that at a certain point of time in his childhood, the Luciferic “ I ” awakened; and he will also remember back to another point of time, when the “Christ-Ego” appears, in contrast to the Luciferic Ego. Instead of the one point, there will be two. The fact that this will arise as a memory will be the proof that the Christ-Event has not still to take place, but that it has already taken place. In short, just as a man at the present time remembers back to the awakening of the “ I ”, so, in time to come, the Imagination of the second “ I ” will be within his field of remembrance, enabling him to find the way to what we describe as the new Appearance or Manifestation of Christ.

The fact that man is growing onwards to new experiences, spiritual experiences of an entirely new kind, is something that must be understood in the light of Spiritual Science; for naturally, there must be preparation for these experiences. The human soul is moving towards new experiences. That is one thing that must be realised in Spiritual Science. The second is this. These new experiences are of such a nature that they will bring peace, concord and harmony upon the Earth and among men. And it will indeed be so! That is why it is such an overpowering experience to be able to understand the Folk-Spirit in another corner of the Earth. The poetry inspired by the Folk-Spirit is illumined by Spiritual Science—but we must be willing to steep ourselves in what actually springs from this Folk-Spirit, and interpolate nothing else.—That must be the attitude of a spiritual conception of the world.

And now let us face facts.—What is the present position? Men have quarrelled, have fought and shed blood through the ages over religious opinions; but if the root-nerve of Spiritual Science is understood, there will be no more conflict in the future about particular religious opinions. Men's minds will be directed to the spiritual facts themselves, and differences of opinion on the various problems of religion will exist just as they exist in other spheres—but not in such a way as to lead to bloodshed and strife; for it will be recognised that the revelations given to the different peoples point back to vast and mighty wisdom. Men will find the foundation and ground of this wisdom and recognise the truths that are contained in the various religions. The Science of Comparative Religion has done far-reaching work in connection with the several religions and the points of resemblance to be found in them. Splendid results have been achieved—but what, in reality, is the attitude that is almost invariably adopted? The attitude, more or less clearly expressed, is that all the religions are false! The Science of Comparative Religion brings out the errors far more clearly than the truths contained in the religions. Spiritual Science, on the other hand, directs its attention to the truths, to the Initiation-Knowledge which they contain. To what does this lead? What, for instance, will be the attitude of a Christian to a Buddhist? The Christian will realise the sublimity and splendour of the Buddhist system; because Christianity itself will learn to understand Reincarnation and Karma, the Christian will recognise the greatness of this teaching of Buddhism. And he will have knowledge, too, of the existence of certain Individualities in world-evolution who rise from the rank of “Bodhisattva” to that of “Buddha.” The Christian will understand something which spiritual development alone can make clear to him, namely, that in the twenty-ninth year of his life, the son of King Suddhodana became the Buddha. The event could only take place at that particular age, as a study of Spiritual Science will show. These things are connected with what is said in the little book, The Education of the Child. With this knowledge the Christian will also realise that such a Being does not descend again to Earth in a physical body. Christians who are Theosophists, or, if you prefer, Theosophists who are Christians, do not regard these teachings of Buddhism as mythical fables, but, together with the Buddhists believe in the truth that in his twenty-ninth year the Bodhisattva became Buddha and will not return in a physical body. The Christian respects this belief; he believes what the Buddhist believes, is at home on the soil of Buddhism, does not regard it as childish phantasy. He knows that in the royal son of King Suddhodana there dwelt an Individuality who rose to such spiritual heights that he need never again descend into a physical body, but sends his influence in another way into the evolution of humanity. Understanding the truths contained in Buddhism, the Christian will never interfere in the spiritual life of a Buddhist in such a way as to alienate him from his religion.

And what will be the attitude to Christianity of a Buddhist who also happens to be a Theosophist? He will try to grasp what it signified when in a man known as Jesus of Nazareth, in the thirtieth year of his life, the “ I ” was replaced by the Being Whom the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch of culture called the “Christ,” and Who dwelt for three years in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. He will understand what is meant by saying that the “Substance” of Christ which passed through death with Christ Jesus has streamed over human culture; and he will try to understand that this life, from the Baptism by John in the Jordan to the Mystery of Golgotha, represents an event which took place once and once only in the evolution of mankind, and that like the Buddha, He who was once incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth can never again come down to the Earth. The Christian who is also a Theosophist understands that the Bodhisattva, having become Buddha, ascends into the spiritual worlds; the Buddhist who is also a Theosophist recognises those spiritual facts which form the essence of Christian belief, namely, that the Christ-Being descended into the body of Jesus of Nazareth, lived in that body for three years and passed through death; and that thereafter His power streams through the spiritual atmosphere of the Earth. Mutual understanding among the confessions of faith on the Earth and therewith mutual harmony—that is the essence and core of theosophical teaching. If the Christians were to say that an Individuality might appear as the reincarnated Buddha, it would be an absurdity, and the Buddhist peoples would rightly resist any such teaching being disseminated among them. Discord would inevitably arise in communities of Christians if they were informed that the Christ might incarnate again in the flesh. The task of Theosophy is to bring about mutual understanding between the religions on Earth which are founded upon Initiation. When this is understood, Theosophy* will live truly in the hearts of men; there will be no founding of new sects, no proclamations of new, physical prophets, for whom humanity no longer waits in that external sense. People will then learn to understand the Rosicrucian principle which has remained unbroken since the founding of Rosicrucianism, namely, that those who are charged with the task of teaching, may not previously speak to the outer world of their mission. Indeed it is a venerable rule in Rosicrucianism that a teacher of the Rosicrucian Order is never outwardly proclaimed as such by his contemporaries; the fact that he is such a teacher may not be spoken of until a hundred years after his death—not before—because only so can the impersonal element be preserved in a genuine spiritual movement.

Clear understanding of the fact that we are entering upon a phase of development in which the human soul will become more and more aware of the inflow of the Spiritual and thus of the super-sensible Christ-Event of which we may speak prophetically—and a clear realisation that Theosophy must always lead to an understanding of what is sacred and holy to each individual ... these are the two factors which make men true Theosophists within the Theosophical Movement. Indeed a man's very attitude to them can tell us whether he has or has not understood the task of Theosophy in the present age.

• 1. See also: The Connection of the Human Being with the Elemental World. Finland and the Kalewala. Lecture given at Dornach, 1914. Not yet published in English.
• 2. 4th and 18th January, 1912. Not yet published in English.

Before we enlarge upon what will emerge from any further elaboration of the significant image of the Twilight of the Gods, it will be well to establish a firm foundation from which to proceed. For we shall deal with the nature of the Germanic and Scandinavian Folk Soul, and from the results of our investigation describe it in greater detail. We shall discover how the whole spiritual life of Europe works in concert, how the activity of the various Folk Spirits has furthered the development of mankind in the remote past, in the present and will continue to do so in the future. Every single people, even isolated fragments of peoples, have their special contribution to make to this great collective task. You will realize from what has been said that, in certain respects, the task, the mission of educating the ‘I’ through the evolutionary stages of the human being, of shaping it and of gradually developing it, devolved upon the Christian and post Christian cultures of Europe in particular. In primitive times, as we have shown in the case of the Scandinavian and Germanic peoples, the ‘I’ was revealed clairvoyantly to man. According to tradition this ‘I’ was bestowed upon man by an Angelic Being, Donar or Thor, who stands midway between man and the Folk Soul. We have seen that the individual still felt himself to be ego-less, devoid of personality; he looked upon the ‘I’ as a gift from the spiritual world.

In the East, when the ‘I’ really awoke, it was not of course experienced in the same way. There man had already reached subjectively such a high degree of perfection that he did not feel the ‘I’ as something extraneous, but as his own property. At the time when man became ego-conscious in the East, Eastern culture was already so far advanced that it was capable of gradually developing that finely-spun speculation, logic and wisdom which is reflected in Eastern wisdom. The East, therefore, no longer experienced the whole process of receiving the ego as if it were bestowed by a higher spiritual world through the instrumentality of a divine-spiritual Being such as Thor. That was the experience of Europe; hence the European felt this gradual unfolding of the individual ‘I’ as the emergence out of the Group Soul. The Germanic-Scandinavian man still felt himself attached to a Group Soul, to be a member of a closely-knit unit or family, that he belonged to an integrated community. For this reason, nearly a hundred years after Christ, Tacitus could describe the Teutons of Central Europe as apparently belonging to separate tribes and yet as members of an organism, and belonging to the unity of the organism. Thus each individual still felt himself at that time to be a member of the tribal ‘I’. He felt his individual ‘I’ gradually emerging from the tribal ‘I’ and be recognized in the God Thor the bestower of the ‘I’, the God who really endowed him with his individual ‘I’. But at the same time he felt that this God was still united with the collective spirit of the tribe with that which lives in the Group Soul. To this Group Soul was given the name “Sif “. This is the name of the spouse of Thor. Sif is related linguistically to the word Sippe, kinship, although the relationship is veiled or concealed. Occultly, however, Sif signifies the Group Soul of the individual community from which the individual emerges. Sif is the Being who unites herself with the God of the individual ‘I’, with Thor, the bestower of the individual ‘I’. The individual perceives Sif and Thor as the Beings who endowed him with his ‘I’. It was in this way that Nordic man experienced them at a time when the peoples in other regions of Europe had already been given other tasks in preparing man's ego-development.

Each individual people had its appointed task; chief amongst them was that homogeneous group of peoples, that widely distributed folk community whom we know by the name of Celts. It was the responsibility of the ancient Celtic Folk Spirit, who, as we know from earlier lectures, was later given quite different tasks, to educate the still youthful ‘I’ of the peoples of Europe. To this end it was necessary that the Celts themselves should receive an education and instruction which was mediated directly from the higher world. Hence it was entirely appropriate that through their Initiates, the Druid priests, the Celts should transmit to other nations instruction received from higher worlds and which they could not have acquired of themselves.

The whole of European culture is a legacy of the European Mysteries. The progressive Folk Souls are always the leaders of the collective culture of mankind as it unfolds. But at the time when these European Folk Spirits enjoined upon men to act more on their own initiative it was necessary that the Mysteries should gradually withdraw. Hence with the withdrawal of the Celtic element there followed a gradual withdrawal of the Mysteries into more secret places. At the time of the ancient Celts the Mysteries established a much more direct relationship between the spiritual Beings and the people, because the ‘I’ was still attached to the group-soul-life and yet the Celtic element was to bring the gift of the ‘I’ to the other Germanic tribes. Thus in the period preceding the evolution proper of the Northern and Germanic peoples, the Mystery teachings could be given to European civilization only by the ancient Celtic Mysteries. These Mystery teachings allowed just so much to be revealed as was necessary in order to establish a basis for the whole culture of Europe. Now the most diverse Folk Souls and Folk Spirits were able to draw nourishment from this old culture by mingling with the widely diverse racial fragments, national communities and folk elements, and they brought the ‘I’ into ever new situations in order to nurture it, the ‘I’ which was struggling to free itself from its attachment to the group-soul.

After the old Greek culture had to a certain extent reached its high point in the fulfillment of its special mission, we see a totally different aspect of this same mission in the spirit of ancient Rome and its various stages of culture. We have already mentioned that the several post-Atlantean civilizations follow upon one another in strict sequence. If we wish to have an overall picture of the successive stages of post-Atlantean civilization we may summarize them as follows: the old Indian culture worked upon the human etheric body. Hence the remarkable wisdom and clairvoyant insight of the ancient Indian culture, because—after the development of special human capacities—it was a culture reflected in the human etheric body. We may envisage the ancient Indian Culture somewhat as follows:

Between the Atlantean epoch and the later post-Atlantean epoch the Indian Folk Spirit developed to the full his inner soul-forces without developing ego-consciousness. He then returned to his activity in the etheric body. The essential element in the ancient Indian culture is that the ancient Indian was able to return again to the etheric body with his highly developed, highly refined faculties of soul and within that body he developed those marvelously delicate forces the later reflection of which we can still see in the Vedas, and in a still more refined form in the Vedanta philosophy. This was only possible because the Indian Folk Soul had achieved a high degree of development before it was conscious of the ‘I’, and this again at a time when man could perceive by means of the forces of the etheric body.

The Persian Folk Soul had not developed so far; its organ of perception was limited to the sentient body or astral body. The Egypto-Babylonian-Chaldean culture was again different. Here the organ of perception was the Sentient Soul; and the characteristic of the Egypto-Chaldean culture was the ability to work in the Sentient Soul. The Graeco-Latin Folk Spirit was related to the Intellectual or Mind-Soul in which he was active. He himself was only able to work upon this Intellectual Soul because the Intellectual Soul, in its turn, had a kind of psychic counterpart in the etheric body. But the form of cosmogony that now emerged in Greece was, to some extent, less real, less clear-cut; it had less the stamp of reality. Whilst the form of cognition in the ancient Indian culture was directly related to the activity of the etheric body, the Greek culture presented a blurred, pale, lifeless image of reality; as I have already said, it was like the memory of what these people had once experienced, like a memory reflected in their etheric body.

In the other peoples who followed the Greeks we are chiefly concerned with the use of the physical body for the progressive development of the Spiritual Soul (or Consciousness-Soul). Hence the Greek culture was a culture that we can only understand from within, if we realize that in this culture what is important in external experience is that which springs from the inner life of the Greeks. On the other hand, the peoples living more towards the West and the North had, under the guidance of their Folk Souls, to turn increasingly towards the external world, towards the phenomena of the physical plane, and to develop whatsoever has a part to play on that plane. This was the special task of the Northern and Germanic peoples which they alone could fulfil, because they still enjoyed the gift, the supremely important gift of the old clairvoyance which enabled them to see into the spiritual world and to incorporate the primeval spiritual experiences which were still vital in their souls into that which was to be established upon the physical plane.

There was one people who, at its later stage, no longer possessed this gift, who had not undergone such preliminary evolution and who had incarnated suddenly on the physical plane before the birth of the human ‘I’ and was only able therefore to attend to whatsoever furthered the development of this ‘I’ on the physical plane, to whatsoever was necessary for its well-being there under the guidance of its Folk Soul, its Archangel. This was the Roman people. Everything that the Roman people had to accomplish for the collective mission of Europe under the guidance of its Folk Spirit was directed to winning recognition for the ‘I’ of man. Hence the Roman people was able to develop human and social relationships. They were the founders of civil law and jurisprudence which are built up purely on the ‘I’. The relation of human ‘I’ to human ‘I’ was the great question in the mission of the Roman people. The Western peoples whose civilizations grew out of the Roman civilization already possessed more of that which, coming from the Sentient Soul, Intellectual or Mind-Soul and from the Spiritual or Consciousness-Soul itself, fructifies the ‘I’ in some way and projects it outward into the world. Therefore all the mingling of races which external history records and which is found in the Italian and Iberian peninsulas, in France and Great Britain today, was necessary in order to develop the ‘I’ on the physical plane in accordance with the different nuances of the Sentient Soul, the Intellectual Soul and the Spiritual Soul. Such was the great mission of those peoples who gradually developed in the most diverse ways in Western Europe.

All the individual shades of culture, all the particular missions of the peoples of Western Europe can finally be explained by the fact that in the area of the Italian and Iberian peninsulas was to be developed that which could be formed in the ‘I’ through the impulses of the Sentient Soul. If you study the individual folk characters in their positive and negative aspects you will find that the peoples of the Italian and Iberian peninsulas reflect a peculiar fusion of the ‘I’ with the Sentient Soul. You will be able to understand, however, the peculiar characteristics of those peoples who, until recent times, lived on the soil of France, if you study the growth and fusion of the Intellectual Soul with the ‘I’. The great worldwide achievements of a country such as Great Britain can be attributed to the fact that the impulse of the Spiritual Soul has penetrated into the human ‘I’. With the world mission of the British Empire is also associated parliamentary forms of government and the founding of constitutional rights. The union of the Spiritual Soul with the human ego had not yet been realized inwardly. If you recognize how this union between the Spiritual Soul and the ‘I’ that was oriented outwards originated, you will find that the great historical conquests of the inhabitants of that island proceed from this impulse. You will also find that the establishment of parliamentary forms of government at once becomes comprehensible if one realizes that, in consequence of this, an impulse of the Spiritual Soul was to find expression on the plane of world-history.

Thus cultural diversities were a necessity, for the individual peoples had to be guided through the many stages of ego development. If we had sufficient time to enlarge upon these matters we could find examples from history which show the ramifications of these basic forces and how they manifest in the most diverse ways. Thus the peculiar constitution of soul influenced the Western peoples who had not preserved the direct, original memory of the old clairvoyant insight into the spiritual world of former times. In the Germanic and Northern regions in later times, that which proceeded directly from a gradual, continuous evolution of the original clairvoyance with which the Sentient Soul had already been imbued, had to develop in a wholly different way. This accounts for that characteristic trait of inwardness which is only the after-effect of a clairvoyant insight experienced in a former age. The task of the Southern Germanic peoples lay primarily in the domain of the Spiritual Soul. The Graeco-Latin age had to develop the Intellectual Soul (or Mind-Soul). But not only this; it had also to include a wonderful development still working in from prehistoric times and imbued with clairvoyant insight. All this was then poured into the Spiritual Soul of the Central European and Scandinavian peoples and its after-effects lived on as an inner disposition of soul. It was the task of the Southern Germanic peoples to develop first of all what pertains to the inward preparation of the Spiritual Soul, imbuing it with spiritual substance of the old clairvoyance, transposed now on to the physical plane.

The philosophies of Central Europe represented by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel in the nineteenth century seem far removed from the sphere of mythology. Nevertheless they are simply the products of the highest sublimation of the old clairvoyant insight, of the cooperation of the divine-spiritual Beings within the heart of man. Otherwise it would not have been possible for a Hegel to have looked upon his ideas as realities; it would have been impossible for him to make the strange remark, so characteristic of the man, when, in answer to the question, “What is the abstract?” he replied: “The abstract is for instance an individual who fulfils his daily duties—the carpenter, for example.” What is concrete to the purely abstract theorist was therefore abstract to Hegel. What to the purely abstract theorist are mere thoughts, were to him great, mighty architects of the world. Hegel's philosophy is the final, the most highly sublimated expression of the Spiritual Soul and embodies in the form of pure concepts that which Nordic man still saw as sensible-super-sensible, divine spiritual powers associated with the ‘I’. The ‘I’ of Fichte's philosophy was simply the precipitation of what the God Thor had given to the human soul, only viewed from the standpoint of the Spiritual Soul and clothed seemingly in the barest of thoughts, the thought of “I am”, which is the starting-point of Fichte's philosophy. From the gift of the ‘I’ by the God Thor or Donar to the ancient Nordic peoples from the spiritual world, down to this philosophy, evolution follows a straight line. Thor had to prepare this development for the Spiritual Soul in order that this Soul might have the content appropriate for its task which is to turn towards the external world and to work within that world. But this philosophy is aware not only of the external world of crude empiric experience, but finds in the external world the content of the Spiritual Soul itself and regards nature simply as the idea in its other aspect. The mission of the Nordic Germanic peoples in Central Europe is to ensure that this impulse lives on.

Now since all evolution is a continuous process we must ask ourselves what form it takes. When we look back into ancient times we observe a remarkable phenomenon. We have already said that the first manifestations of ancient Indian culture were expressed through the etheric body after the spiritual forces of soul had been adequately developed. There are however other civilizations which have also preserved the old Atlantean culture and carried it over into the post-Atlantean epoch. Whilst, on the one hand, the ancient Indian was able to return to the etheric body with highly developed faculties of soul and out of the forces of this body created his great civilization and lofty spiritual life, we have, on the other hand, a culture which originated in Atlantis and continued to work on in the post-Atlantean epoch, a culture which owes its origin and development to its emphasis upon the other aspect of the consciousness of the etheric body. This is the Chinese culture. If you bear this connection in mind and remember that the Atlantean culture was directly related to what in our earlier lectures we called the “Great Spirit”; you will understand the peculiarities of Chinese culture. This culture was directly connected with the highest stages of world-evolution. But it still works into the bodies of men today and from an entirely different angle. It seems very likely, therefore, that these two civilizations, the two great polarities of the post-Atlantean epoch, will clash at some future time—the Indian which, within certain limits, is capable of development, and the Chinese that isolates itself and remains static, repeating what existed in the old Atlantean epoch. One literally receives an occult, scientific, poetic impression if one follows the evolution of the Chinese Empire, if one thinks of the Great Wall of China which sought to exclude completely everything which originated in primeval times and had been developed in the post-Atlantean epoch. Something like an occult, poetic feeling steals over one if one compares the Wall of China with what had once existed in former times. I can give only the barest indications about these matters. If you compare them with the existing findings of science you will find how extraordinary illuminating they are. Let us consider clairvoyantly the old continent of Atlantis which will be found where the Atlantic Ocean now lies, between Africa and Europe on the one side and America on the other. This continent was encircled by a warm stream which, strange as it may seem, was seen clairvoyantly to flow from the South through Baffin Bay towards the North of Greenland, encircling it. Then, turning eastward, it gradually cooled down. Long before the continents of Russia and Siberia had emerged, it flowed past the Ural mountains, changed course, skirted the Eastern Carpathians, debauched into the region now occupied by the Sahara and finally reached the Atlantic Ocean in the neighbourhood of the Bay of Biscay. Thus it followed a strictly delimited course. Only the last remaining traces of this stream are still extant. This stream is the Gulf Stream which at that time encircled the Atlantean continent. Now you will recall that in their psychic life the Greeks experienced a memory of the spiritual worlds. The picture of Oceanus which is a memory of that Atlantean epoch arose within them. Their picture of the world, their cosmogony, was very near the truth because it was derived from the old Atlantean epoch. The stream that flowed southward via Spitzbergen as a warm current and gradually cooled, etc. followed a strictly delimited course. This circumscribed course was unmistakably echoed in the Chinese culture, a culture circumscribed by the Great Wall and which had been brought over from Atlantis. The Atlantean civilization had as yet no history; hence the Chinese civilization also has preserved an element of the unhistorical. It preserves something of the pre Indian culture, something surviving from old Atlantis.

Let us now describe the further progress of the Germanic and Nordic Folk Spirit. What consequences will ensue when a Folk Spirit so directs his people that the Spirit Self in particular can develop? Let us remember that the etheric body was developed in the ancient Indian epoch, the sentient body in the Persian, the Sentient Soul in the Egypto-Chaldean, the Intellectual Soul (or Mind-Soul) in the Graeco-Latin, the Spiritual Soul (or Consciousness-Soul) in our present epoch which is not yet concluded. The next epoch will see the invasion of the Spiritual Soul by the Spirit Self, so that the Spirit Self shall irradiate the Spiritual Soul. This is the task of the sixth post-Atlantean civilization and must be prepared for gradually. This civilization which must be preeminently a receptive one, for it must reverently await the influx of the Spirit Self into the Spiritual Soul, is being prepared by the peoples of Western Asia and their outposts in Eastern Europe, the Slavonic peoples. The latter with their Folk Souls were the outposts of the coming sixth post-Atlantean epoch for the very good reason that future contingencies must to a certain extent be prepared beforehand, must already be anticipated in order to prepare the ground for future development. It is extremely interesting to study these outposts of a Folk Soul who is preparing himself for future epochs. This accounts for the peculiar character of the Slavonic peoples who are our immediate Eastern neighbours. In the eyes of the Western European their whole culture gives the impression of being in a preparatory stage and in a curious way, through the medium of their outposts, they present that which in spirit is wholly different from any other mythology. We should give a false impression of these Eastern outposts as a future’ civilization if we were to compare them with the culture of the Western European peoples who enjoy a continuous, unbroken tradition which is still rooted in, and has its source in the old clairvoyance. The peculiarity attaching to the souls of these Eastern European peoples is reflected in the whole attitude they have always shown when the question of their relations to the higher worlds arose. In comparison with our ‘mythology’ in Western Europe with its individual deities, their (i.e. the Slavonic peoples) relation to the higher worlds is totally different. What this Slavonic ‘mythology’ presents to us as the direct outpouring of the inner being of the people may be compared to the anthroposophical conception of successive planes or worlds through which we prepare ourselves to understand a higher spiritual culture. We find in the East, for example, the following conception: the West has been moulded by the influence of successive and related cultures. In the East we find, in the first place, a distinct consciousness of a world of the Cosmic Father. Everything that is creatively active in air and fire, in all the elements in and above the Earth, is embodied in the concept of the Heavenly Father, in one seemingly great, all-embracing idea which is at the same time an all-embracing feeling. Just as we think of the Devachanic world as fructifying our Earth, so this Divine world, the world of the Father, draws nigh from the East, fructifying that which is experienced as the Mother, the Spirit of the Earth. We have no other expression and can think of no other way of picturing the whole Spirit of the Earth than in the fertilization of Mother Earth. Instead of individual deities we have then two contrasting worlds. And confronting these two worlds as a third world is that which we feel to be the Blessed Child of these two worlds. This Blessed Child is not an individual being, not an emotional feeling, but something that is the creation of the Heavenly Father and the Earth Mother. The relation of Devachan to the Earth is perceived in this way from the spiritual world. The birth of new life, the coming of springtime, and that which grows and multiplies in the material body is felt as something wholly spiritual; and that which grows and multiplies in the soul is perceived as the world which at the same time is felt to be the Blessed Child of the Heavenly Father and the Earth Mother. Universal as these conceptions are, we find them among the outposts of the Slavonic peoples who have advanced westwards. In no Western European mythology is this conception so universal. In the West we find clearly defined deities; but they are not the same as those which we depict in our spiritual cosmogony; these are more nearly represented by the Heavenly Father, the Earth Mother and the Blessed Child of the East. In the conception of the Blessed Child there is again a world which permeates another world. It is a world that is envisaged as a separate world because it is associated with the physical sun and its light. The Slavonic element also recognizes this Being—though different, of course, in conception and feeling—which we have so often met with in Persian mythology; it recognizes the Sun Being who sheds his blessings upon the other three worlds, so that the destiny of man is woven into creation, into the Earth, through the fertilization of the Earth Mother by the Heavenly Father and through that which the Sun Spirit weaves into both these worlds. A fifth world is that which embraces everything spiritual. The Eastern European feels the spiritual world underlying all the forces of nature and all animate beings. We must think of this as a wholly different sentient response, as associated more perhaps with the phenomena, creations and beings of nature.

We must think of this Slavonic soul as being able to see entities in natural phenomena, to see not only the physical and sensory aspects, but also the astral and spiritual. Hence the Slavonic soul conceived of a vast number of Beings in this strange spiritual world which we can at best compare with the world of the Elves of Light. The spiritual world which is looked upon in Spiritual Science as the fifth world is approximately the world which dawns in the hearts and minds of the peoples of Eastern Europe. Whatever name we attach to it is of no importance; what is of importance are the subtle shades and gradations of feelings of the Slavonic peoples and that the concepts which characterize this fifth plane or spiritual world are to be found in Eastern Europe. In this frame of mind this world of Eastern Europe was preparing for that Spirit which is to pour the Spirit Self into man in anticipation of the epoch when the Spiritual Soul shall be uplifted to receive the Spirit Self in the sixth post Atlantean age which is to succeed our own. We meet with this in a unique manner not only in the creations of the Folk Souls who are as I have just described them, but we find it remarkably anticipated in the diverse manifestations of Eastern Europe and its culture.

It is most interesting to observe bow the Eastern European expresses his natural receptivity to pure Spirit by assimilating Western European culture with great devotion, thus looking forward prophetically to the time when he will be able to unite something even greater with his being. Hence also his limited interest in isolated aspects of this Western European culture. He absorbs what is offered him more in broad outlines, ignoring the details, because he is preparing himself to assimilate that which is to enter mankind as the Spirit Self. It is particularly interesting to see how, under this influence, it has been possible for Eastern Europe to develop a much more advanced conception of the Christ than Western Europe, except in those areas of the West where the conception of the Christ has been introduced by Spiritual Science. Amongst those who do not accept the teachings of Spiritual Science the most advanced conception of Christ is that of the Russian philosopher, Solovieff. His conception of Christ is such that it can only be understood by students of Spiritual Science because he lifts it to ever higher planes and reveals its infinite potentialities, showing that our understanding of Christ today is only a beginning, because the Christ Impulse has only been able to reveal to mankind a fraction of what it holds in store. But if we look at the conception of Christ as presented by Hegel, for example, we find that Hegel understood Him as only the most refined, the most sublimated Spiritual Soul could understand Him. But Solovieff's conception of Christ is very different. He fully recognizes the dual nature of this conception. He rejects the endless theological polemics which in reality rest upon deep misunderstandings, because ordinary conceptions are inadequate for an understanding of the dual nature of Christ, and because they fail to develop in us any realization that the two aspects, the Human and the Divine, must be clearly distinguished. The concept of Christ rests upon a clear realization of what took place when the Christ Spirit entered into the man Jesus of Nazareth who had already developed all the necessary attributes. We must first of all understand the two natures of Christ and the union of both at a higher stage. As long as we have not grasped this duality, we have not understood the Christ in all His fullness. Only that philosophical understanding can achieve this which foresees that man himself will participate in a culture in which his Spiritual Soul will be able to receive the Spirit Self, so that in the sixth epoch of civilization man will feel himself to be a duality in whom the higher nature will curb the lower.

Solovieff carries this duality into his conception of Christ and emphasizes that this conception can be meaningful only if one accepts the existence of a divine and human nature which can only be understood if one recognizes that their cooperation is a reality, that they form not an abstract, but an organic unity. Solovieff already recognizes that we must think of this Being as possessing two centres of will. If you accept the teachings of Spiritual Science concerning the true significance of the Christ Being in their original form which stemmed, not from an imaginary, but from a spiritually real Indian influence, you will then have to think of Christ as having developed in His three bodies the capacities of feeling, thinking and willing. It is a human feeling, thinking and willing into which the Divine feeling, thinking and willing descends. The European man will only assimilate this completely when he has risen to the sixth stage of civilization. This had been prophetically expressed in Solovieff's anticipatory conception of Christ which announces the dawn of a later civilization. This philosophy of Eastern Europe therefore reaches far beyond that of Hegel and Kant, and in the presence of this philosophy one suddenly senses the first stirrings of a later development. It is far in advance because this conception of Christ is felt to be a prophetic anticipation, the dawn of the sixth post-Atlantean civilization. Consequently the whole Christ Being, the whole significance of Christ occupies a central place in philosophy and thus becomes totally different from the Western European conceptions of it. The conception of Christ, in so far as it has been developed outside Spiritual Science and is conceived as a living substance, as a living spiritual entity which shall permeate all social life and social institutions—which is felt as a Personality in whose service man finds himself as ‘man endowed with Spirit Self’—this Christ-Personality is portrayed in a wonderfully concrete manner in Solovieff's various expositions of St. John's Gospel and its opening words. Only if we stand upon the ground of Spiritual Science can we comprehend Solovieff's profound interpretation of the sentence, “In the Beginning was the Word or Logos”, and how differently St. John's Gospel is understood by a philosophy which in a remarkable way anticipates the future.

If, on the one hand, Hegel's philosophy marks a high point, something that is born out of the Spiritual Soul as the highest philosophical achievement, this philosophy of Solovieff, on the other hand, provides the seed in the Spiritual Soul for the philosophy of the Spirit Self which will be incorporated in the sixth cultural epoch. There is perhaps no greater contrast than that eminently Christian conception of the State which hovers as a great ideal before Solovieff as a dream of the future, that Christian conception of the social State which takes everything implicit in that conception in order to present it as an offering to the in-streaming Spirit Self, in order to hold it up as an ideal of the future to be Christianized by the powers of the future—there is indeed no greater contrast than this idea of Solovieff's of a Christian community in which the Christ conception lies wholly in the future and the Divine State of St. Augustine who accepts, it is true, the Christ idea, but whose Divine State is simply the Roman State with Christ incorporated in the Roman idea of the State. What provides the knowledge for the emergent Christianity of the future is the decisive question. In Solovieff's State Christ is the blood which circulates in the body social, and the essential point is that the State is envisaged as a concrete personality so that it will act as a living spiritual entity, but at the same time will fulfil its mission with all the idiosyncrasies of a personality. No other philosophy is so deeply permeated by the Christ idea—the Christ idea which is anticipated in Spiritual Science at a higher level—and yet at the same time has remained so long in the germinal stage. Everything that we find in the East, from the make-up of the people to its philosophy, appears to us as something which contains only the germinal beginning of a future evolution and which, therefore, had also to submit to the special education of the Time Spirit of ancient Greece, the guiding Spirit of exoteric Christianity who was entrusted with the mission of becoming later on the Time Spirit for Europe. The make-up of this people whose task will be to develop the seed of the sixth culture-epoch had from the very beginning to be not only educated, but nursed and nurtured by that Time Spirit. And so we can literally say—and here Father concept and Mother concept lose their dual aspect—that the make-up of the Russian people which is destined to evolve gradually into the Folk Soul, was not only educated, but was nursed and nurtured by that which as we have seen, had been developed out of the old Greek Time Spirit and had then assumed externally another rank.

Thus the various missions are distributed between Western, Central, Northern and Eastern Europe. I wished to give you an indication of these various missions. On the basis of these indications I propose to add further observations and show what the Europe of the future will be like, a future that will ensure that we must form our ideals on the basis of such knowledge. I propose to show how, through this influence, the Germanic and Nordic Folk Spirit is gradually transformed into a Time Spirit.